The Double Nature of American Exceptionalism

1. Internationalism
2. No. 85, March 2026
3. Special Issue, Page IV

From the series Principles of Marxism

Marx investigates the very complex relationship between abstractions and social development and concludes that the most general abstractions arise on the whole only with the most profuse concrete development, when one phenomenon is seen to be common to many, common to all. The abstraction of labour, as labour in general, is very ancient, but is just as modern a category as the relations which give rise to this simple abstraction. When the main activity is commerce, labour overlaps with the idea of making money. The physiocratic system, which sees land as the central source of wealth, instead points to agriculture as the form of labour par excellence (productive labour). Only with Adam Smith was there an immense advance, because he discarded any definiteness of the wealth-producing activity — for him it was labour as such, neither manufacturing, nor mercantile, nor agricultural labour, but all types of labour.

Smith’s conceptual leap lies not only in the generalisation of the concept of labour with respect to the infinite forms of concrete labour, but also in the conception of wealth as past, objectified labour.

It is in America that the concepts of labour in general and wealth in general best correspond to real relationships. The fact that the particular kind of labour is irrelevant corresponds to a form of society in which individuals easily pass from one kind of labour to another and in which labour has become here a means to create wealth in general [...] This state of affairs is most pronounced in the most modern form of bourgeois society, the United States. It is only there that the abstract category ‘labour’ [...] is first seen to be true in practice.

From this observation, Marx deduces that the categories expressed by bourgeois society — the most developed and many-faceted historical organisation of production — simultaneously provide an insight into the structure and the relations of production of all previous forms of society [...]. Some of [their] remains are still dragged along within bourgeois society unassimilated.

Hence the famous connection: The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. [...] Bourgeois economy thus provides a key to that of antiquity [...] One can understand tribute, tithe, etc, if one knows rent. But they must not be treated as identical.

If the more advanced society allows for an understanding of earlier social formations, it is because it is their offspring; in modern history, all more backward modes of production have been broken up and funnelled, through the world market, into the capitalist socio-economic formation. Therefore, the more advanced social formation shows the way to the more backward ones.

This materialistic view of economic evolution was a formidable theoretical weapon for Marxists, who were not seduced at the end of the 19^th century by the particularism of the Russian populists, nor, in the mid-20^th century, by the Stalinist theory of the two markets or the national road to supposed socialism.

This Marxist economic and political vision, which became part of the Bolsheviks’ heritage, inspired the American road as an outlet for the 1905 revolution, as opposed to the Prussian one, i.e., the Jacobin road of accelerated fragmentation of feudal property and thus the rapid formation of a proletariat in Russia.

It became part of the political heritage of the Leninist party in Italy in the form of the American script, around which we structured the study of some of the forms [...] of Italian and European development, a concept effectively reiterated twenty years later by Cervetto: Our work was based on Lenin plus the American script.

Let us return to the American road by way of the essay Bastiat and Carey, the first text in the Grundrisse. We will only take up here Marx’s critique of Henry Charles Carey, the only original economist among the North Americans, anti-Ricardian and anti-communist. Marx examines how the superiority of America’s explosive development in the mid-19^th century is reflected in the economist’s thinking and the contradictions that this superiority encountered and generated when it entered the world market.

Marx describes in a few brilliant strokes the peculiar, natural, and historical characteristics that allowed America to surpass the development of Europe’s productive forces. What emerges is also an exemplary analysis of the historical foundations of social and political psychology. In America, unlike in Europe, bourgeois society is not developing on the basis of feudalism, but [...] it has originated from itself; [...] it does not appear as the surviving product of the development of centuries, but as the point of departure for a new development; [...] the State, in contrast to all previous national forms, was from the start subordinated to bourgeois society, to its production, and could never claim to be an end in itself; [...] bourgeois society itself, combining the productive forces of an old world with the immense natural terrain of a new one, is developing on an unprecedented scale and in unprecedented [conditions of] freedom of movement.

It was only natural that Carey saw American relations of production as eternal, normal relations of social production and intercourse, whereas European and English relations appeared to him to be impeded and restricted [...] by the fetters inherited from feudalism. In his view, this legacy distorted British economic thinking, which had generalised these distortions.

Carey’s criticism boils down to American relations as opposed to English. The handicap of European and English society is ultimately identified by Carey as the influence of the State on bourgeois society. Without State interference, Carey believes, bourgeois relations [...] will in fact always confirm the harmonious laws of bourgeois political economy. Had he investigated further, Marx observes, he would have realised that certain British State influences, such as public debt and taxes, appear [...] by no means as the results of feudalism but rather of its dissolution and suppression, and that in North America the power of the central government grows with the centralisation of capital.

When the comparison between the United States and England — based on their respective social models, products of different historical times and geographical contexts — shifts to a comparison of their relations on the world market, Carey can no longer assert the greater power of North American society and notes that as the dominating power on the world market, England distorts the harmony of economic relations in all the countries of the world. For Carey, England’s striving for industrial monopoly is to blame.

From an enemy of State interference, Carey becomes a protectionist, his Yankee universality transforming into a defence of the specific national development of the United States. He argues that against England, the only defence [...] are protective tariffs — the forcible isolation of the nation from the destructive power of English large-scale industry. Therefore, the State, at the outset branded the only disturber of these ‘economic harmonies’, becomes their last refuge.

Carey wanted to preserve America’s internal superiority by fortifying it with tariffs against the English monopoly. His German contemporary Friedrich List wanted to equip Germany with protective tariffs to overcome its backwardness and enable it to compete on the world market. Old England would have to contend with two rising powers. If Carey’s duplicity evokes a sense of déjà vu with regard to today’s America, a clear distinction must be made between the protectionism of the then rapidly rising American capitalism and the protectionism of today’s US imperialism, which is struggling against its own ageing and the rising power of China.

Marx writes that the harmony of bourgeois relations of production ends with Carey in the total disharmony of these relations just where they appear upon the most magnificent scene, the world market, and in their most magnificent development, as the relations of producing nations. All the relations which to him appear harmonious within particular national boundaries, or also in the abstract form of general relations of bourgeois society [...] appear to him as disharmonious where they show themselves in their most developed form — in their world market form.

These economic harmonies turn out to be ideological representations. The litmus test of bourgeois relations is the world market, which is the most developed form of bourgeois relations. The internal harmonies of the most developed country turn into disharmonies on the world market. Harmony and disharmony coexist in American thought without embarrassment — this is its originality. Having crossed the ocean, English pragmatism became embodied in American exceptionalism.

Translated from the introduction to volume 30 of the Italian edition of Marx and Engels’ works (Marx-Engels - “Opere”), published in Lotta Comunista, June 2023, p. 2.