Envisioning the People's Republic: China and US Marxist Anti-imperialism in the Mid-1970s

Abstract

This essay studies United States Marxist perspectives on China during US radicalism's decline in the mid-1970s. By the late 1960s, China's apparent synthesis of socialist and nationalist traditions inspired US Marxists to theorize a Chinese-led united front against American imperialism. However, China's opening up to the West in 1972 revealed US Marxists’ differing frameworks for understanding socialism and national liberation. Partly because of the confusion that followed, Marxist internationalism soon lost its intellectual weight on the US far left. Using archived Marxist periodicals from 1973 to 1979, I trace how this happened and what it meant for revolutionaries’ opposition to American empire.