Activist scholars and revolutionary agents: the counterculture critique

In the two decades preceding the publication of Marxist Perspectives, radical historians forced their way into the academy. By the late 1950s McCarthyism, which had destroyed the careers of multiple radical historians at the beginning of the decade, was on the decline. At the same time, the exposure of Stalin's crimes and the Soviet invasion of Hungary freed radical scholarship from the economistic and deterministic Marxism associated with the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA).Footnote ³⁰ In the short period between 1958 and 1962, dozens of radical historians received their doctorates and started to challenge consensus history. While not all radical historians became Marxists, as Howard Brick notes, as the 1960s progressed a “new American Marxism” emerged.Footnote ³¹

The epicenter for radical history became the University of Wisconsin–Madison, centered around the graduate seminar of William Appleman Williams.Footnote ³² In 1959, a group of Williams's graduate students started the journal Studies on the Left, which quickly became the lead vehicle for the emergent radical history. Led by Martin Sklar, James Weinstein, and later Genovese, the editors, who looked to advance the thesis of “corporate liberalism,” argued that the Old Left's Marxism, characterized as “mechanistic” and centered on celebratory accounts of resistance, had failed to grapple with new forms of capitalist domination or to provide a framework for a new politics.Footnote ³³

Studies presaged many of the future divisions within radical historiography. While in its earliest years it remained an academic journal read by graduate students and junior faculty, the explosion of social movements in the early 1960s forced the editors to reckon with the political implications of scholarship.Footnote ³⁴ After 1964, Studies added Tom Hayden, Norm Fruchter, and Staughton Lynd to their editorial board, figures associated with the New Left. Splits developed between these two factions over their vision for the American left. The older Studies editors emphasized socialism and argued that the counterculture represented a protest movement with no theory of change. In contrast, Hayden argued that socialism alienated too many Americans, Lynd believed there were better American traditions to emphasize, and the younger editors stressed participatory democracy and the relevance of scholarship to political struggle. Weinstein went as far as to accuse Hayden of “redbaiting.”Footnote ³⁵ These tensions were unreconcilable and when Hayden was asked to resign, Fruchter and Lynd quit the journal in solidarity, effectively paving the way for the collapse of Studies in 1967.Footnote ³⁶

Influenced by the civil rights movement and a revival in European Marxism, starting in 1965, radicals began meeting annually at Socialist Scholars Conference (SSC).Footnote ³⁷ Representing the breadth of the emerging radical historiography, the SSC included scholars who had left or been expelled from CPUSA, such as Genovese and Herbert Gutman, figures who remained in the CPUSA such as Herbert Aptheker, counterculture historians including Howard Zinn and Lynd, and prominent black academics such as Harold Cruse and Sterling Stuckey. The historian Ann Lane chaired panels on “women and socialism,” while European Marxists, including Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre, gave papers. The division within Studies over a politically relevant scholarship also plagued the SSC. Warren Susman recalled the frustrations of audience members that his paper did not give specific proposals for fighting fascism. One audience member grabbed the microphone and exclaimed “if this is the way socialist scholars behave, long live the peasants and the workers.”Footnote ³⁸ In 1968, numerous SSC attendees signed a statement calling for the formation of a new socialist party in the United States with an academic journal beside it. The signatures included Genovese, Susman and Jacques Marchand. Ten years later, the three would form the core of Marxist Perspectives, as editor, president of the editorial board, and publisher respectively.

Throughout the mid- to late 1960s, Genovese's scholarship and political worldview were influenced by his reading of Gramsci. While Gramsci challenged the notion that consciousness was a mechanical reflection of the economic base, he also appealed to Genovese because he grappled with trying to build a socialist movement in a developed capitalist country in which there was no revolution in sight. The emphasis on a new party and journal reflected this. In opposition to the counterculture, which believed an imminent revolution in the United States was possible, Genovese envisioned a longer struggle. The first editorial of Marxist Perspectives argued “the struggle itself will be long and hard” but that the main task of Marxist intellectuals in the United States was the “war of position on the cultural front.”Footnote ³⁹ This built from Gramsci's argument that Western socialism would not arrive through a violence revolution, but through a “war of position” in which the intellectual and cultural front would be key to winning the working class to a new worldview.Footnote ⁴⁰ Reflecting this, the journal's original title was Long March, not Marxist Perspectives.Footnote ⁴¹

Counterculture historians emphasized the centrality of politically motivated and “relevant” scholarship to the immediate struggle.Footnote ⁴² Influenced by their firsthand experience in both the civil rights and antiwar movements, they embraced the concept of “history from the bottom up.”Footnote ⁴³ Zinn argued for recapturing the historical moments in which a better world could have been forged, while Lynd went as far as to call oral histories of working-class communities “guerilla history.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In 1963, Lynd stated that it was crucial that scholars develop a “usable past” to organize and inspire the New Left.Footnote ⁴⁵ In Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (1968), Lynd produced a long list of ancestral heroes that the New Left could learn from in the American radical tradition, from Thomas Paine to the abolitionists, that overlapped with elements of Marxist thought. While consensus historians dismissed Intellectual Origins, it also faced a backlash from certain radical historians. Genovese attacked Intellectual Origins as ahistorical and antimaterialist, representing a collection of “carefully selected statements” from Lynd's “favorite radicals.” He concluded that the book was a “travesty of history” based on “moral absolutism.” Genovese argued that what radicals needed was an engagement with class dynamics and social forces, not a “usable past.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Genovese believed that scholarship had political implications. The opening editorial of Marxist Perspectives declared that intellectual work, as Marx had argued, provided an “interpretation of the world” which, when grasped by many, constituted “a powerful voice for change” and was therefore inherently political.Footnote ⁴⁷ But Genovese sought a distinction between, on the one hand, what he considered to be the task of Marxist intellectuals, building a totality of historical knowledge, and, on the other, producing ideologically motivated history. He argued that the latter was ultimately “reactionary politics” and would only end in the “service of a new elite, a new oppressor.”Footnote ⁴⁸

In part, the new American Marxism evolved in response to other developing radical historiography. Both Genovese and Weinstein argued that Lynd's approach divorced history from a coherent Marxist theory. While “history from the bottom up” borrowed from the new British Marxism, particularly Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Genovese stressed that Lynd was only interested in the “glorification of the ‘common man’,” rather than the Thompsonian focus on how radical doctrines were passed into the working class and the complexities of early radical movements.Footnote ⁴⁹ Likewise, in 1970, Weinstein took aim at “history from the bottom up,” arguing that the developing field was not interested in the relationship between exploited groups and the ruling class, leveling criticism that presaged later debates in the new social history.Footnote ⁵⁰ Without exploring social relations, Weinstein argued that Lynd's scholarship worked “entirely within the framework of bourgeois categories.”Footnote ⁵¹ Lasch, who had abandoned liberalism and started to embrace Marxism, wrote to Lynd that “to you the radical tradition is sacred and must not be analyzed, except to murmur approvingly.”Footnote ⁵²

The division over whether scholarship should be used for ideological endeavors escalated in 1969, when counterculture historians ran an opposition candidate for president of the American Historical Association (AHA) for the first time in the organization's history and motioned for the organization to publicly condemn American involvement in Vietnam. Despite opposing the war, Genovese argued ferociously against the motion, believing that it was not the AHA's role to take ideological positions. Siding with conservative and liberal historians, Genovese accused Lynd and his supporters of being “totalitarians” and told the organization's business meeting, where the president was elected, to “put them down, put them down hard, and put them down once and for all.” Resentment against Genovese among many radical historians skyrocketed when the motion was defeated.Footnote ⁵³

While Genovese stressed the Gramscian cultural front, counterculture historians argued that—in the absence of an organized working-class movement in the United States—radicals should embrace students as revolutionary agents. These historians were influenced by Marcuse and C. Wright Mills, particularly the latter's “Letter to the New Left” (1960), which dismissed the proletariat as a revolutionary vehicle in the United States.Footnote ⁵⁴ Genovese was concerned that this approach divorced Marxism from the key component of class struggle. By proposing a cultural revolution predominantly based on students, Genovese charged that the movement “had no theory of society, no theory of social change, and no understanding of the nature and promise of socialism.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Similarly, Lasch argued that a revolution would not “spring spontaneously out of the daily struggles of the movement,” and that the New Left must have a coherent theory of change rather than acting as a protest movement.Footnote ⁵⁶ At one point, Lasch wrote that because of the lack of a theory many of the student radicals would have no difficulty “adjusting themselves” to either capitalism or fascism, before exclaiming that “to build a socialist movement on the student movement is to build on sand.”Footnote ⁵⁷

The division over who constituted the revolutionary vehicle played out in the NYRB in 1970, when Genovese and his wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese called for a national petition campaign against the Vietnam War. They argued that while there was a majority against the war, it could not be turned into political action because of the hostility between the working class and the student movement, stating “no amount of seized buildings could match the effect of thousands of students and professors going door to door to talk to workers and middle-class Americans.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Two months later, the Marxist music historian Frank Kofsky replied, scorning the Genoveses’ revolutionary pessimism, and argued it was “simply incomprehensible” that radicals could support upholding government institutions which were the “instrument of the ruling class.” The Genoveses responded that “any serious American Left must take account of the legitimate respect of the working class for democratic institutions.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In emphasizing the terrain for a longer struggle, Genovese's debt to the Gramscian cultural front remained central.

Neither Genovese nor Lasch started with a complete rejection of the role that the student movement could play in political change. Both had been involved in the student teach-in movement, and Genovese gained national attention in 1965 for voicing support for a Vietcong victory while teaching at Rutgers, causing a national outcry and making his academic status a focal point of the New Jersey gubernatorial election.Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet, as the 1960s evolved, both became increasingly concerned by the student movement's growing criticism of the university. With free-speech confrontations at Berkeley and campus upheavals across the country, the student movement increasingly viewed the university as a seed of corruption linked to corporate power and the military–industrial complex. Further, as Wiener notes, when Lynd was denied tenure at Yale in 1968 and subsequently blacklisted from the historical profession, many radical historians started to share the view that the university was “a place to be confronted” rather than a space for critical scholarship.Footnote ⁶¹ Genovese viewed this criticism as “political suicide,” arguing that the university must remain a depoliticized space.Footnote ⁶² Writing together in the NYRB in 1969, Genovese and Lasch claimed that the left needed to focus on coalition building between the university campuses and the working classes, rather than demanding “courses in guerilla warfare and the crimes of American imperialism.”Footnote ⁶³ In this sense, Genovese and Lasch were closer to consensus historians, such as Richard Hofstadter, who were alienated by the student revolt.

Class reverberated through those demanding immediate revolution and those who envisioned a longer struggle for social transformation. The figures who opposed reconceptualizing students as revolutionaries were predominantly nurtured in the CPUSA or were “red diaper babies.” As Peter Novick notes, these historians were “culturally very straight” and overwhelmingly from the working class.Footnote ⁶⁴ Genovese, a first-generation Italian American whose father was a dockworker, jokingly claimed he was only “half-civilized” because of his origins.Footnote ⁶⁵ In contrast, many student radicals came from comfortable middle-class backgrounds. Genovese argued that these “children of the bourgeois” displayed a “contemptuous rejection” of the working class. He concluded that the student movement believed that workers both had become “an appendage of the ruling class” and settled for “bourgeois comforts.” Referring to himself as a “law-and-order Marxist,” Genovese believed that the rise of a “revolutionary youth culture,” focused on casual dress, rock and roll, obscenities, drugs, and contempt for age, only exacerbated existing class divisions.Footnote ⁶⁶

In the late 1960s, the New Left came crashing down.Footnote ⁶⁷ But the formal collapse of the New Left, epitomized by the disintegration of Students for a Democratic Society, did not end the decade's radical divisions. As Marxist Perspectives began to form in 1976, Foner argued that it was important for Genovese to bridge these divisions. As Foner stated in mid-1976, “what I want to do is break down the gap which has existed between you and some people of my generation who respect your work but have resented your attacks on the student/new left.”Footnote ⁶⁸ A year later, Foner was highlighting that the primary importance of Marxist Perspectives should be the “intellectual development of a whole generation of young scholars, teachers and students” who could eventually serve as a “radical intelligentsia.”Footnote ⁶⁹ However, the bitter divisions amongst radical historians made reconciliation increasingly difficult.

Oppression and power: the new social-history critique

The emerging Marxism in the early 1970s took shape within the new social history, which produced questions over who should be the primary object of historical study. New social history was influenced by both the liberation struggles of the 1960s and the revitalization of British Marxism. The latter had broken from a mechanistic Marxism by centering the “autonomy of culture and ideology in social life,” treating culture as a space of contradiction and contest.Footnote ⁷¹ In the United States, new social history's most contentious debates were on the topic of North American slavery and whether the enslaved maintained their own culture, bringing to the forefront questions of agency, resistance, and the impact of exploitation on cultural formation.

While these debates reverberated across the profession, they were in part shaped by efforts to make the University of Rochester the premier radical history department in the country. Gutman arrived at Rochester in 1967 and attempted to hire Genovese. However, the appointment was blocked by Rochester's administration, who did not want a controversial figure on their staff. Yet after much dissent from the faculty and Gutman resigning his position as department chair in protest, the administration relented.Footnote ⁷² Gutman and Genovese hired Lasch in 1969. In the preceding winter, the three, alongside Susman, began the process of starting a Marxist journal.Footnote ⁷³ Yet the journal immediately faced stumbling blocks because the group disagreed over whether they were creating a historical journal, one with added political commentary, or a vehicle for creating a “new consciousness.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Further, Genovese proposed Fox-Genovese as the journal's editor, an idea opposed by Gutman and Lasch.Footnote ⁷⁵ Gutman argued against the appointment of dozens of organizational secretaries, which he viewed as a “device” for Genovese maintaining “centralized control” while having “democratic tentacles” reaching out of the journal's structure.Footnote ⁷⁶

Department frictions only exacerbated these problems. In late 1970, Gutman, Lasch, and the Europeanists in Rochester's history department called for Genovese's resignation as department chair, claiming that Genovese ran the department as an authoritarian. In contrast, Genovese contended that the fallout resulted from these professors considering themselves “indispensable.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Berlin notes that because the two “shared so much and perhaps because Gutman had risked so much in securing Genovese's appointment,” the relationship became “increasingly acrimonious” and a “near vendetta.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Lasch and Genovese tried to keep the journal idea alive in competing forms but both of their projects were dead by mid-1973.Footnote ⁷⁹ It also drove their relationship apart, with Genovese dismissing Lasch as “one of our very best brains and talents” but a “moral and even intellectual coward.”Footnote ⁸⁰

However, Genovese's rising prominence meant that the ground remained fertile for a Marxist journal. Between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s, Genovese's scholarship reshaped the field of North American slavery. In arguing that the antebellum South constituted a precapitalist mode of production and in focusing on slavery as a system of class exploitation with a racial element, Genovese set off a number of debates that defined the field for decades.Footnote ⁸¹ As Manisha Sinha writes, “more than any other historian of slavery,” Genovese “set the agenda for antebellum southern historiography.”Footnote ⁸²

In the 1960s, Genovese had argued that enslaved society was characterized by docility and backwardness. However, by the early 1970s, he abandoned this characterization and started to challenge Stanley Elkins's “Sambo thesis.”Footnote ⁸³ In 1974, Genovese published Roll, Jordan, Roll, which used Gramsci's theory of hegemony to detail the master–slave dialectic through a relationship based on paternalism while also centering the importance of religion to enslaved culture. It became the first self-defined Marxist work to win the prestigious Bancroft Prize, a clear sign of the growing reputation of Marxism within the American historical profession. Robin Kelley argues that the book was for black history what Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class was for working-class history.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the same year, the liberal historian C. Vann Woodward joked that the Genoveses had established themselves as “Ubermenschen, super-front-page scholars, super-Marxists.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Genovese's Marxism was a clear break with the Old Left analytically and politically. The Washington Post noted that Genovese, alongside Foner, then a young historian at CUNY, had removed the “old insistence on the inevitability of armed class warfare” from their Marxist analysis and rejected Stalinism.Footnote ⁸⁶ Genovese dismissed the Old Left Marxism, which he characterized as a “politically serviceable doctrine” focused on celebratory accounts of resistance. Instead, Genovese emphasized the centrality of Marxism as a tool for understanding historical change, social relations, and class struggle.Footnote ⁸⁷

In the same year that Roll, Jordan, Roll appeared, the economic historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman published Time on the Cross, which also won the Bancroft Prize. The authors used cliometrics to study antebellum slavery. Armed with an array of scientific tools and computers, Fogel and Engerman contended that slavery had been an efficient institution and criticized precapitalist representations of the antebellum South. Time on the Cross argued that historians had exaggerated the cruelty of North American slavery and that the conditions of the enslaved were better than those of many northern industrial workers.Footnote ⁸⁸

Both Genovese's notion of paternalism and Fogel and Engerman's cliometrics faced sustained criticism from Gutman. Inspired by Thompson's work on working-class culture, Gutman helped pioneer the new labor history. Yet, as Ian Tyrrell notes, Gutman was predominantly interested in the beliefs and behaviours of subcultures rather than the Thompsonian idea of class as a “process.”Footnote ⁸⁹ While Roll, Jordan, Roll and Time on the Cross were significantly different, Gutman argued they both portrayed the enslaved as capitulating to the slave owners’ culture. In Slavery and the Numbers Game (1975), developed out of an essay titled “The World Two Cliometricians Made: A Review-Essay of F+E=T/C,” a jab at both Genovese's subtitles and Fogel and Engerman's cliometrics, Gutman noted over twenty-five “essential errors” in Time on the Cross and argued that despite the chi-square tests and multiple regression analysis, the enslaved “did not conform to the patterns of beliefs and behavior emphasized” in the text.Footnote ⁹⁰ Berlin claims that “never in the course of American historiography had a book risen so fast and fallen so quickly.”Footnote ⁹¹

Next Gutman turned to Roll, Jordan, Roll. Dismissing the book as “functionalist,” and too centered on the slave-owner class, Gutman questioned whether a book titled “The World the Steelworkers Made” would begin with an “150-page essay quoting from and explicating Andrew Carnegie's Autobiography.”Footnote ⁹² Further, Gutman protested Genovese's portrayal of the enslaved as pre-political. While Genovese detailed individual acts of resistance, he argued that there was nothing revolutionary about the everyday lives of enslaved people. Gutman's The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1976) detailed a vibrant and resilient slave culture and was a direct response to Genovese. As Gutman wrote to the new social historian George Rawick, “the enslaved are always ‘learning’ from the enslavers, borrowing selectively, etc. BUT there is no ‘dialectic of paternalism.’”Footnote ⁹³

The Genoveses responded together in “The Political Crisis of Social History” (1976). They argued that the search for a revolutionary tradition amongst oppressed groups had “distorted historical principles,” by actively attempting to find class-conscious revolutionary proletariats in a modern sense. Further, the Genoveses contended that when radicals limited their attention to the oppressed, they lost sight of the importance of power. Scholarship, they reasoned, must do more than demonstrate that “the ‘people’ have always resented being abused.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Lasch shared these reservations, writing to Genovese that the uniting theme of the “new sentimental social history” was that oppression was bad but had “no psychological or cultural effects.” Noting that the new American Marxists had spent the majority of the 1960s defending “cultural ‘autonomy’” in order to argue that it was not an automatic reflection of the material base, they now had to point out that culture was not an “autonomous” historical development.Footnote ⁹⁵

The questions raised in the Genovese–Gutman debate were part of a longer struggle to define the contours of a Marxist social history. W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America (1935) argued that enlistment in the Union army of former slaves during the Civil War constituted a “general strike” through the transfer of their labor away from the southern ruling class and toward the Union.Footnote ⁹⁶ Other Marxists took issue with ascribing revolutionary class consciousness to the enslaved and reconceptualizing blacks as the proletariat.Footnote ⁹⁷ Further, a rich literature has developed critiquing Genovese's characterization of the enslaved as pre-political, including younger scholars associated with Marxist Perspectives.Footnote ⁹⁸ In response to Gutman's work, social historians have interrogated the differences between agency and resistance, and linked the social process and the organization of production to the dynamics of power.Footnote ⁹⁹ Yet, while Hobsbawm argued in 1971 that the aim of the new social history should be the creation of the “history of society as a whole,” in reality, as Rodgers points out, by bringing to the forefront a range of previously “invisible” groups, a singular narrative of teleological class formation collapsed.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

In 1977, Genovese made his views more explicit with a review of The Black Family in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). Genovese argued that the text represented a “bare skeleton” argument and attacked the “incredible conclusion” that the slave owners imparted no culture onto the enslaved, noting that Gutman reduced the social relations of production down to the idea of “treatment.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Writing to Marchand, Genovese stated that it was right to “open fire against the left-liberals,” and that the article “piles up the right corpses.”Footnote ¹⁰² The TLS article infuriated Gutman, and in a series of letters after its publication he characterized Genovese as a “wolf and a bad historian” who could “poison serious discourse,” and stated that the article stemmed from The Black Family producing “new evidence” that undermined Genovese's own scholarship.Footnote ¹⁰³ In a letter to Thompson, Gutman claimed that the Genoveses intended to establish themselves as the arbiters of what “is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ radical history.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ While the first editorial of Marxist Perspectives claimed to recognize “many Marxisms,” Genovese viewed Gutman's scholarship as bourgeois and “anti-Marxist,” effectively barring him from the journal's potential base of writers.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

A year before the first issue of Marxist Perspectives, the Genovese–Gutman feud was having repercussions. A frustrated Marchand, who had been assured by Genovese that he would “remain silent” over his criticisms of The Black Family, argued that the TLS article could cause serious problems for the journal's success.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Marchand wrote to Fox-Genovese, imploring her to try and make Genovese understand the damage of a “futile” struggle with Gutman.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Similarly, Foner stated that graduate students had inquired whether they would be accepted in Marxist Perspectives if they were influenced by Gutman's work. Writing to Genovese, Foner noted that the “conflict is injuring the journal by alienating young people, who in their own development, have been influenced by both of you and, whatever his flaws, do not consider Gutman an enemy.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Another potential subscriber wrote that he could not conceive of a Marxist journal without some contribution from Gutman.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Genovese defended himself and claimed that Gutman was waging a “disgusting campaign” against Marxist Perspectives.Footnote ¹¹⁰ But board members continued to raise concerns. Michael Greenberg noted, “your attack on Gutman is hurting the journal,” and warned that other left-wing periodicals were growing increasingly hostile to the project. Greenberg exasperatedly wrote, “it is your dynamism and accomplishment which makes the journal possible, and we will have to live with your acerbic pen.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Greenberg demonstrated both the strengths and underlying limitations of Marxist Perspectives. At its head, the journal boasted the most influential radical historian of his generation. Without Genovese, Marxist Perspectives would never have materialized. But with Genovese's brilliance went his penchant for conflict.

A year before Marxist Perspectives launched, members of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) gathered to elect a new president. The election pitted Genovese against the conservative historian Oscar Handlin. In 1976, whispers surfaced that radical historians planned to abandon Genovese at the election, with Genovese's “primitivistic conceptions of personal loyalty” taking their toll.Footnote ¹¹² The journal Freedomways had labelled Roll, Jordan, Roll a “racist book” in a negative review.Footnote ¹¹³ In a series of letters written in the aftermath, Genovese called historians loosely associated with Freedomways’ sister journal Science & Society “pigs” and “gangsters,” and, when these comments were circulated, the targets responded by denouncing Genovese's “demented frenzy and fascist talk.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

Foner desperately tried to keep the peace. While admitting to Genovese's flaws, he stated that “it would be the worst kind of factionalism for people on the left not to support” Genovese for the OAH presidency.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Foner argued to Genovese that, while his criticisms were valid, his tone and language were losing them vital support: “even if we win, the struggle will have alienated too many people.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ However, Genovese went on the attack and demanded that those considering abandoning him be informed that they would be considered “enemies” if they did not support him for the presidency and that all “political relations” would be broken with these groups. Crucially, Genovese noted, “of greatest importance” in the election was not defeating the conservative and liberal historians, but to “strengthen our position on the left.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Becoming hegemonic among radicals was the primary aim. Genovese won the election, with “most waverers on the Left” supporting his candidacy. However, Foner noted that there were “certain exceptions” who would be named when the “time comes for retribution.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Genovese demonstrated radicals’ ascendency within the discipline, with a Marxist elected president of one of the most influential historical organizations. However, like at the AHA in 1969, the fight exacerbated tensions and did little to unify radical historians.

The debate over women's history: the feminist critique

Marxist Perspectives began publishing in the spring of 1978, but the editorial board clashed in the six months leading up to the first issue on the question of women's history. From the late 1960s onwards, as the feminist movement grew across the country and female enrollment in college spiralled, academic departments began to expand women and gender studies programs, one of the long-marginalized areas of the historical profession.Footnote ¹²⁰ In 1969, the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession was formed at the AHA.Footnote ¹²¹ From just a single program in 1969, seven years later there were 270 women's studies programs and 15,000 courses across the United States. Reviving calls for “relevant” scholarship, but one with a more rigorous theoretical framework, scholars emphasized the “essential duality of feminist scholarship,” in which scholarship would inform both intellectual inquiry and the social movement itself.Footnote ¹²² In both academia and politics, feminists were challenging women's peripheral and subordinate status.

While the lengthiest study of radical history, A. A. M. van der Linden's A Revolt against Liberalism, ignored women's history, the developing field was central to Marxist Perspectives.Footnote ¹²³ In September 1977, at a journal board meeting, labor historian and feminist scholar Alice Kessler-Harris floated the idea of guaranteeing at least one feminist or women's studies article in each issue. As Kessler-Harris argued, it was imperative that the early issues “establish the journal's commitment to issues of concern for women.”Footnote ¹²⁴ The entire board agreed to this proposal and established an informal women's group within the editorial structure to review article submissions on feminist and women's history.Footnote ¹²⁵

For feminist scholars within Marxist Perspectives, it was essential to gain autonomy within the journal's structure. Temma Kaplan, a professor at UCLA and the journal's coordinator for California, stated that the organized women's movement was “suspicious” of Marxist Perspectives and feared that centralized control in the hands of the male editorial hierarchy could label feminist scholars associated with the journal “Genovese's girls.”Footnote ¹²⁶ Addressing these concerns in the build-up to the journal's launch, Genovese wrote, “the struggle for women's rights requires women's leadership; accordingly, I defer to my women comrades” on these issues, before adding the qualifier “if sometimes not altogether happily.”Footnote ¹²⁷

No sooner had the board agreed to Kessler-Harris's proposal than Genovese announced that Lasch would pen an article for the first issue after the two experienced a “mild reconciliation.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Lasch's article, “The Flight from Feeling,” centered on the relationship between the sexes following second-wave feminism. Kessler-Harris stated that she “hated” the idea of Lasch speaking alone on feminism in the opening issue.Footnote ¹²⁹ Similarly, Kaplan argued that she was troubled that the journal's first statement on women would be from a figure “not strongly identified with the active women's movement.”Footnote ¹³⁰ They both agreed that Lasch's article as a stand-alone would be a political disaster, sending out the wrong signal of the journal's purpose and intended audience. Foner also expressed alarm at Lasch's recent writings, such as an exchange in the NYRB where Lasch claimed that the New Left hated competition in sports.Footnote ¹³¹ Foner noted that Lasch seemed “incapable of writing anything without inserting an obligatory paragraph or two flaying the moribund body of the New Left,” which had increasingly alienated younger scholars.Footnote ¹³²

Starting life as a liberal, Lasch's disillusionment with Cold War foreign policy, combined with his rejection of the counterculture as a viable political alternative, pushed him towards Marxism by the end of the 1960s. While Lasch later claimed that he had “no connection” to any of the 1960s social movements and that his politics were formed by reading, his politics also evolved in opposition to these very movements, particularly the student movement and second-wave feminism.Footnote ¹³³ Long interested in women's history, Lasch had collaborated with Genovese on an unpublished book, Beyond the New Left, that was critical of the women's movement.Footnote ¹³⁴ In the discussions around the formation of a third party in the late 1960s, feminist scholars had become increasingly concerned with Lasch's belief that particular functions should be restored to the family.Footnote ¹³⁵

Lasch's conclusion that the new social movements could not provide a realistic political alternative only hardened with the failure of the McGovern campaign in 1972. Throughout the 1970s, Lasch became increasingly influenced by both Freudian psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt school. Haven in a Heartless World (1977) demonstrated Lasch's debt to Freud, but it maintained a materialist analysis, arguing that the changes in modes of production under industrial capitalism had weakened both the family unit and parental authority. Yet Haven received a celebratory review in National Review and hostility on the left.Footnote ¹³⁶ Lasch claimed that it was the left's reaction to Haven that made him realize “how far we had travelled down different paths.”Footnote ¹³⁷

While some within Marxist Perspectives were concerned about Lasch's recent writings, the situation deteriorated dramatically when the women's group received the first draft of Lasch's article. Describing the draft as both “offensive” and a “moan of self-pity,” objections were raised about its theoretical and methodological assumptions, and the group reiterated the potential consequences of its publication. Kessler-Harris claimed that Lasch's arguments were not rooted in class analysis and failed to address how personal relations in the particular form Lasch described took place within an advanced capitalist society.Footnote ¹³⁸

In a detailed page-by-page dissection, Kaplan claimed that the article lacked any historical or class analysis of the problems Lasch was trying to understand. One of Lasch's central conclusions was that Marxist feminists viewed men of their own class as enemies. Kaplan argued that this position was wrong, and that Lasch had failed to distinguish between a “class enemy” and an “opponent.” Lasch's conclusion, that socialism might help this situation, was also viewed as ambiguous. As Kaplan wryly noted, “the parts on socialism are laughable, a true embarrassment for all concerned. If all we can expect from socialism is that we live with sexual tensions more gracefully, why bother?” Kaplan claimed that the article belonged in “From the Other Shore,” alongside conservative anti-Marxist tracts.Footnote ¹³⁹

The tone Lasch directed towards the feminist movement also caused concern. As Kessler-Harris stated, the basic claim of the article was that “feminism caused women to hate men.” Kessler-Harris worried about the article's romanticization and nostalgia for a time when gender relations were significantly better than the present.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Conflict was the outgrowth of changing social relations. As Kaplan laid out, “The rise of working class movements made the relationship between capitalists and laborers more difficult. The relationship between racists and Blacks became more antagonistic with the growth of the Civil Rights movement. It is undoubtedly hard for male chauvinists to like the women's movement.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Of further concern were Lasch's causal arguments. At one point, he linked feminism to drug addiction and suicide.Footnote ¹⁴²

In mid-November 1977, the majority of the women's group of Marxist Perspectives met at the Women's History Conference in Baltimore and discussed the Lasch article. Ann Lane, chair of the American studies program at CUNY, relayed the group's frustrations to the editorial board.Footnote ¹⁴³ Speaking for herself, Kessler-Harris, Kaplan, and Sarah Elbert, Lane argued that they viewed the piece as “profoundly, deeply anti-feminist.” Lane concluded that the article could not run in the first issue, especially without a collective rejoinder, and reiterated that the article's publication would have political consequences as the women's academic community would consider it a “deliberate insult.” The women's group had spent significant time establishing support for the journal, and Lane stressed that these feminist scholars were now under pressure to separate themselves from the project. Highlighting that Lasch's article was accepted for publication before the women's group had read it, Lane pointed towards the double standard in the editorial process. As Lane argued, the journal would not “run a racist article, regardless of the reputation of its author, if black members of the editorial board deemed the article to be insulting and offensive,” or accept an article on Mexico without review from the journal's Latin American specialist.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Just a couple of months before publication, Lane was desperately trying to keep the board together. In one exasperated letter to Kessler-Harris, she stated, “you can't quit. It is important none of us leave but stay and persuade ‘them’ what ‘we’ are all about.” Lane noted that Marxist Perspectives was going to be an influential journal, and it was “essential that our feminism” had a “vehicle for expression” within it. Rather than quit, Lane stated that feminists within Marxist Perspectives should stay and fight for their voices to be heard rather than retreat into a separate sphere. She concluded, “we cannot spend our lives only talking to each other.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ At the same time, Lane wrote separately to Lasch, stating that the article made numerous “unjustified” assumptions and demonstrated a “great deal of straightforward hostility” towards women. Lane pointed out to Lasch that she was on the “conservative wing” of the women's movement, and yet still felt the piece was inappropriate.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

The debate reached crisis point in December. Although the majority of the women's group voted against the article's inclusion, the board's hierarchy accepted Lasch's article with the condition that it undergo a series of revisions. Kaplan resigned in early December, writing to Genovese that “in my short time on the journal, I have rediscovered how firmly rooted in the soil of participatory democracy my politics are,” pointing towards the undemocratic nature of the editorial process.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ For a short period it looked as if there would be more resignations, with Lane writing to Kessler-Harris, “for Christ's sake, don't you be next.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Further, Lasch's article had originally been planned to appear alongside another piece on women's history by Amy Bridges and Heidi Hartmann called “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism.” However, in January 1978, Genovese wrote to the two scholars noting that they should “consider re-doing” the entire piece.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The article would eventually be published separately by Hartmann and was an important contribution in the growing socialist feminist literature, arguing that the sexual division of labor was central to the material basis of women's exploitation.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

In the spring of 1978 Marxist Perspectives sent out its first issue. Despite some revisions, Lasch's article retained its original focus. It linked feminism to suicide, reclusiveness, and drugs, and argued that in the aftermath of second-wave feminism, men no longer treated women as “ladies.” At one point, Lasch wrote that women “who abandon the security of well-defined though restrictive social roles have always exposed themselves to sexual exploitation.” Lasch was highly critical of radical feminists, who, he argued, used the “illusory solidarity of ‘sisterhood’” to stifle debate about the aims of the feminist movement.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Negative responses followed, with one historian bemoaning the article's “methodological poverty,” and suggested that in the future the editors blue-pencil such pieces into “something more defensible and sensible.”Footnote ¹⁵²

Lasch's article emerged as socialist feminists were attempting to challenge both women's peripheral status in Marxist historiography and the liberal and radical feminist interpretation of male patriarchy as the singular explanation of gender oppression. Yet, in focusing on the limitations of Marxist historiography, socialist feminists were not dismissing it. Barbara Ehrenreich, for example, critiqued mechanical Marxists for their strict distinction between base and superstructure and radical feminists for remaining transfixed on the ahistorical “universality of male supremacy.” Ehrenreich argued for viewing capitalism as a “social and cultural totality” that in the search for markets impacted all of social existence.Footnote ¹⁵³ Angela Davis was developing a sophisticated body of scholarship that brought together Marxism, feminism, and antiracism, arguing that it was critical to interrogate the “mutual interpenetration of ostensibly unrelated modes of oppression” that wedded together the subjugation of women and the consolidation of capitalism.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Linda Gordon, who acknowledged a huge debt to Marxism, likewise stressed that what had previously been considered superstructural was fundamental to the “entire social, economic, and political order.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Yet Gordon was also willing to defend the benefits of radical feminist scholarship, arguing in the pages of Marxist Perspectives that radical feminists had produced some of the best recent analyses of capitalism and revolution.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

At the same time, thirty-three prominent feminist academics signed a letter addressing their concerns with the journal. Stating not only that Lasch's article was “unscholarly and insulting,” the signatories were disappointed with the general treatment of feminism within Marxist Perspectives. While Gordon's article represented a step in the right direction, more effort was required on the part of the editorial board to reach out to feminist scholars. Revealingly, both Kaplan and Gordon signed the statement.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In a letter to the journal's women's group, Gordon argued that the letter aimed to “bridge the gap between women boycotting the journal and others supporting it.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Rather than regarding the statement as a potential bridge, Genovese saw it as an attack. In a letter discussing the signatories, he placed “feminists” within quotation marks, questioning their actual commitment to the feminist cause. Similarly, he dismissed the signatories as wanting to be “big frogs in a small factional puddle” rather than having to “swim in the big sea.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Genovese's failure to acknowledge both the gender hierarchy of the “big sea” and the institutional barriers to entry increasingly placed him at odds with this growing avenue of radical scholarship. Revealingly, Genovese regarded Lasch's article as “superb,” believing it “would make feminists happy if they were willing to read past his name.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ That Genovese believed that criticism of Lasch's arguments centered on identity, rather than the quality of scholarship, was not new. In the late 1960s, following the hostile reception by prominent black scholars of William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), Genovese concluded that the academy was splitting along lines of identity rather than ideology.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Rather than a product of Genovese's later conversion to the right, it remained a consistent line in his thought.

In late 1979, Genovese attempted to address the split in writing. In the eighth issue's editorial, Genovese wrote that while the left's response to women's rights had often been “shaky,” it was “hardly a secret that serious theoretical and practical issues” separated Marxist feminists from “bourgeois” feminists.Footnote ¹⁶² This issue included an article by Fox-Genovese titled “The Personal Is Not Political Enough,” in which she argued that sisterhood was an important part of politics but that it was not in itself “a political position,” distancing herself from radical and liberal feminism.Footnote ¹⁶³ Marxist Perspectives demonstrated that feminist scholarship was a growing field and far from monolithic. Socialist feminists attempted to build a materialist analysis of women's oppression, while facing opposition from both Marxist scholars and mainstream feminists. Kessler-Harris and Kaplan criticized Lasch's article not just because of the tone it took towards feminism, but because they believed it was devoid of class analysis. At the same time, the debate brought questions over the role of scholarship in forming political struggle back to the forefront of discussion.

The last days of Marxist Perspectives

Between 1978 and 1980, Genovese received a series of job rejections that grew his paranoia about apparent “enemies.” Genovese was floated for positions at Yale and Harvard, neither of which materialized.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The University of Maryland rejected Genovese in 1980 after a tied faculty vote.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Demoralized by what he considered to be a lack of support from his allies, what Susman referred to as “the cataclysmic battles with the forces of evil that Gene [Genovese] sees always lurking,” Genovese had written in 1976 that he was “weary” of being called a “racist” and that “behind-the-scenes vilification” had “gotten” to him.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ The job rejections, combined with a period of deteriorating health, only increased this dejection.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Moreover, the journal was on weaker financial ground than first anticipated. Requiring numerous donations from wealthy philanthropists to stay afloat, the board approached Cambridge University Press, who, in August 1980, agreed to take over the journal.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ At the same time, the editorial board demanded a more collective approach to the journal's management with the establishment of a coordinating committee. This was to oppose what Foner described as Genovese's “dictatorial” control of the journal.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Genovese ignored the agreement and used the fall editorial to attack academics he considered hostile. As Foner lamented to Genovese, the “obiter dicta against various individuals, groups and publications” will lead to “many of our editors” dissociating “from the editorial if not the journal.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰

Without full control of the journal, Genovese suddenly stepped down and announced that Fox-Genovese would take over as editor. This not only infuriated much of the editorial board but “scared” off Cambridge University Press, who had only undertaken the deal because Genovese was the editor.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Once the deal collapsed, a board member noted that Genovese decided to “liquidate the journal.” He made a “unilateral decision to kill it.”Footnote ¹⁷² Some board members touted keeping the journal alive under the name Marxist Studies, but eventually what remained of the journal merged with Socialist Review.Footnote ¹⁷³

By the early 1990s, the Genoveses had converted to Catholicism and shifted significantly to the right.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Genovese had become disillusioned with the collapse of left-wing political movements, particularly Euro-communism, and in 1994 he scolded the academic left for what he considered to be their ideological support for regimes of “despotism.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Yet Genovese's conservatism was not a wholesale embrace of free-market capitalism and he maintained a healthy skepticism of individualism and consumer culture.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ A sustained opposition to liberalism provided one link in the transition, with Foner writing to Genovese in 1977, “correct me if I'm wrong but I think your position is something like this—Marxists and conservatives have more in common philosophically than Marxists and liberals.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ In the mid-1990s, Genovese helped found the Historical Society, which aimed to provide an alternative to the major historical associations. Genovese argued that the society would oppose the “political correctness” of modern scholarship, mirroring older debates about the politicization of the academy, such as the AHA business meeting in 1969, and the legitimate means by which scholarship could inform a political future.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

The journal was finally published at the end of the 1970s when Marxism had grown in stature and gained intellectual recognition in the American historical profession. Even in its two short years, the pages of Marxist Perspectives were occupied by numerous radical academics who went on to have distinguished careers and published a number of defining articles. Yet the journal's demise reflected the larger tensions in radical historiography over the preceding two decades, as rival factions competed to define the emerging Marxist scholarship. While these radical historiographies all drew from Marx's dictum that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it,” they disagreed over both the means and the legitimate role of scholarship in that struggle.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ As Geoff Eley argues, the historiographical transformations of this era were not a straightforward progression and were “bitterly fought.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Embarking on their final year in print, the editors of Marxist Perspectives called for “inclusive” Marxism.Footnote ¹⁸¹ But this was harder than expected. Reflecting on the 1960s, Genovese stated that “the specific political engagement of the 1960s split the American Left and encouraged a factional split.”Footnote ¹⁸² These issues never really ceased. Moreover, these battles were fought primarily between radical camps, rather than between the left and the right, as radical historians tried to produce a field of scholarship that could shape a left-wing movement within an advanced capitalist country.