Meanwhile, U.S. academics are engaging Marx at a steady clip. Take Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix (2023), which uses Marxist thought to critique the “cultural turn” in social theory and highlight the importance of class structure and the material relations within capitalism. Or consider Princeton University Press’s 2025 English translation—the first in half a century—of Marx’s Kapital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, which presents a “Marx for the twenty-first century.”

“[W]e are living through the fourth Marx boom,” Andrew Hartman notes in Karl Marx in America . “Americans are thinking about Marx to a degree not matched since the 1960s, or perhaps even the 1930s,” two decades notable for their social and political upheavals. Evidence abounds: Trump, Musk, and other members of the MAGA movement routinely decry the “Marxist” infiltration of institutions, while an American (Sen. Bernie Sanders) has become the most famous socialist in the world.

“[W]e are living through the fourth Marx boom,” Andrew Hartman notes in Karl Marx in America. “Americans are thinking about Marx to a degree not matched since the 1960s, or perhaps even the 1930s,” two decades notable for their social and political upheavals. Evidence abounds: Trump, Musk, and other members of the MAGA movement routinely decry the “Marxist” infiltration of institutions, while an American (Sen. Bernie Sanders) has become the most famous socialist in the world.

Meanwhile, U.S. academics are engaging Marx at a steady clip. Take Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix (2023), which uses Marxist thought to critique the “cultural turn” in social t