What Marx and Engels Thought About Socialism in the United States

By Rich Lowry

Friday, July 03, 2026

 

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels weren’t right about much, but they made some astute observations about America while trying to explain its resistance to socialism.

 

According to Marx’s theory, as the world’s most advanced capitalist country, and one that was industrializing at a rapid clip, the United States was supposed to be closest to the inevitable socialist revolution.

 

“The country that is more developed industrially shows to the less developed the image of their future,” Marx wrote in Das Kapital.

 

This meant that “Americans will be the first to usher in a Socialist republic,” a leader of the German Social Democrats said in 1907, one of countless such confident predictions.

 

If Polymarket had existed at the time — and socialists had been okay with prediction markets — all the Marxists would have bought “yes” shares on a proletarian revolution in the U.S.

 

But it became pretty clear that this wasn’t happening, at least not on the schedule that the socialists were expecting. So, Marx and Engels had some explaining to do.

 

In his stilted terms, Marx remarked how the mobility of American workers kept a dispossessed class from developing: “The wage-worker of today is tomorrow an independent peasant, or artisan, working for himself. He vanishes from the labor-market, but not into the workhouse.”

 

Engels noted how we never experienced feudalism. Americans, he wrote, “are born conservatives—just because America is so purely bourgeois, so entirely without a feudal past and therefore proud of its purely bourgeois organization.”

 

Then, there was our prosperity.

 

“The native American workingman’s standard of living is considerably higher than even that of the British,” Engels observed, “and that alone suffices to place him in the rear for still some time to come.”

 

Granted, Marx and Engels never met Darializa Avila Chevalier, the socialist congressional candidate in New York City who made favorable references to communism in a since-deleted Twitter account.

 

She represents a socialist movement that is making a serious bid to take over one of the country’s major political parties and that has some chance to nominate one of its own as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2028.

 

If this movement succeeds, it will do it by running against the grain of American tradition and mores.

 

As the late political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset noted in his incisive book, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, left-wing intellectuals long grappled with the question of the failure of socialism in the United States and blamed a cluster of attributes and values that they called “American exceptionalism” (conservatives later adopted the term as a positive descriptor).

 

Lipset and his co-author, Gary Marks, worked through the explanations for the lack of a significant socialist movement, from the difficulty cracking the two-party system, to the ideologically uncompromising nature of the Socialist Party of America in the early 20th century, to the inability of the Socialist Party and labor movement to work together.

 

But they found that America’s distinctive culture, with its emphasis on anti-statism and individualism, was most fundamental to the socialist fizzle. Before the Great Depression, even labor organizations in the United States tended to be anti-statist.

 

This is not to say that there weren’t early-20th-century socialist successes in select cities, especially Milwaukee. The Democratic Socialists of America organization is beginning to duplicate these advances and is in a position to play for bigger stakes, although it will require overcoming inherent resistance in the United States.

 

In the 1930s, the radical socialist Leon Samson wrote of Americanism as “a solemn assent to a handful of final notions—democracy, liberty, opportunity, to all of which the American adheres rationalistically much as a socialist adheres to his socialism—because it does him good, because it gives him work, because, so he thinks, it guarantees him happiness. Americanism has thus served as a substitute for socialism.”

 

Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hope to reverse this dynamic and substitute socialism for Americanism, a project that even Marx and Engels had their doubts about.