The Communists in Italy, France and Spain have banished the phrase “the dictatorship of the proletariat” from their vocabulary. That does not mean that they have abandoned socialism as an intermediate objective of their policy. They continue to fight for socialism; however, they no longer wish to establish it on the classical pattern through the dictatorship of the “proletariat” but rather through an “advanced form of democracy” in which the institutions and procedures of representative democracy, such as parliament and regular general elections and civil rights and freedoms, are respected and even guaranteed.

Karl Marx and the United States is a subject which immediately elicits interest, but also surprise. Interest, because of its contemporary importance; surprise, because Marx and America have appeared so remote from one another. Marx has definitely influenced America, but that will not be the theme of this essay —instead, we will concern ourselves with the role of America in the thought of Marx. The magnitude of this role is illustrated by a statement made in Marx's letter to Abraham Lincoln, written in 1864 on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association:

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that as the American war of independence initiated a new era of the ascendency of the middle-class, so the American Anti-slavery war will do for the working-class.

Within the Marxist theory of history and society, the concept of class consciousness has played a major, though problematic, role. The proper interpretation of this concept, embedded as it is within the complex relational framework of the historical dialectic, has presented a perennial problem to the interpreters of Marx, both the theorists and the activists. For both logical and practical reasons, class consciousness can be seen as the Achilles' heel of the Marxist scheme.

Notoriously history has two principal meanings: the past itself and the historian's presentation of the results of his inquiry into it. When the latter meaning is examined, it is evident that, for all of his stance of common sense and matter-of-factness, the historian encounters his profession's form of the problem of knowledge. How and why does he select his sources? What is the validity or truth of his account? What is the relationship between fact and generalization? Does his avowed or unconscious motivation affect the historian's search, selection and presentation? Does his form of presentation affect his use of facts and his judgment?

Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), modern founding father of critical history and patron saint of devourers of archives, raised these questions and responded to them. His masterly histories of Reformation Germany, Prussia, England, France and the papacy were esteemed as the fruit and vindication of his method. In England and the United States, however, the method was identified with a few slogans and injunctions: history is primarily a study of politics and foreign policy; return to or search out the sources; evaluate them and prize, above all, the sources that present the testimony of participants and eyewitnesses; strive simply to tell things as they actually happened. So to reduce Ranke's position is intellectual primitivism, a primitivism that persisted because attempts to discuss the problem of historical knowledge were ignored or derided as futile.

Operation Intercept was launched along the United States-Mexico border in September of 1969, ostensibly to halt the flow of marijuana, heroin, and dangerous drugs. In reality, however, it was designed not to interdict narcotics but to publicize the new administration's war on crime and force Mexican compliance with Washington's antidrug campaign. With the exception of border residents, the much-heralded operation has been forgotten by most Americans a decade later. But as President Jimmy Carter discovered during his visit in early 1979, Mexicans, and particularly their presidents, have keen memories. Hastily conceived, unilateral programs such as Operation Intercept go far in explaining why.