Boudin, Louis B.

BOUDIN, LOUIS B. (1874–1952). For a time the foremost Marxist economic theoretician in the United States, Louis B. Boudin (né L. Budianoff) played an ambiguous role in the Socialist and proto-Communist movements, reemerging later as a rare scholar of U.S. legal history. All the while a prominent lawyer and defender of accused Leftists, he may also be considered the earliest important constitutional theorist within the U.S. Left.

Born into a prosperous Jewish family in the Ukraine, Boudin immigrated to the United States in 1891. He quickly began legal studies, entering New York University, gaining a master’s degree from that institution and admittance to the New York bar in 1898. In this period, he was already a major theoretician in Yiddish, writing under his own name in such publications as Di Zukunft and Di Naye Geist on aesthetics and historical materialism. He played a minor role in the Socialist Labor Party, apart from being on the Executive Board of the doomed Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance. He broke with the SLP in1999 and became prominent in the next decade, as a frequent Socialist Party candidate for pubic office in New York state, and delegate to the international Socialist Congresses in 1907 and 1910.

Boudin found himself, however, a perpetual Left dissenter within the Socialist Party, and a contentious theoretician in the Yiddish and English-language press. From his perspective, the naive Socialist Party lacked theoretical rigor and made too many compromises with perceived American reality. His essays on economics in the International Socialist Review (where he was recognized as one of the very few sophisticated theoreticians that the Socialist Party could boast of) grew into his classic, The Theoretical System of Karl Marx in The Light of Recent Criticism (1907). Essentially an “answer” to Ernst Böhm-Bawerk’s contemporary challenge to Marx’s predictions, The Theoretical System placed itself ambivalently upon the key question of the “falling rate of profit.” He offered the suggestion, often repeated later (by Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, among others), that capital used its surplus in war making and rebuilt its profitability during the period following.

Notwithstanding the international repute of The Theoretical System (especially its German edition), Boudin gained little popular recognition among American socialists. He wrote widely for the New York daily Call, the New Review, and Di Zukunft, however. In 1917, he joined with Louis Fraina and Ludwig Lore to launch Class Struggle, a proto-Bolshevik monthly. Yet fixed upon a vision of Marxian precision, he disputed the Socialist Party’s antiwar stance with his own (he also defended radicals arrested on wartime charges); and he viewed the Russian Revolution as an impossible attempt to create socialism under primitive capitalist productive conditions. He therefore stalked out of the 1919 Communist Labor Party convention, separating himself from any section of the fractured Left.

In later years, Boudin shied away from formal political involvement, although he taught at the Communist-led Workers School in the later 1920s and occasionally wrote for New Masses in the middle and late 1930s. By 1940 he had repudiated Communism, while adamantly defending individual Communists’ constitutional rights. For the most part, Boudin shifted to legal activities and to his own scholarship. As a lawyer, he won several important cases for the rights of specific sectors of workers to organize. As an author, he supplied two large volumes of Government by Judiciary (1932), the only thorough-going Marxist historical account of American jurisprudence ever attempted.

Government by Judiciary was in fact a rather Beardian effort to reveal usurpation of democratic prerogatives by a vested, aggressive elite. In his view, the Federalist attempt to graft English common law upon the American system ended in a collision with “the people,” i.e., Jefferson and his mass support, with an accompanying loss of prestige to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Marshall succeeded where his predecessors had failed, however, in turning people’s rights to property rights. Despite a fresh challenge to the courts by popular Jacksonianism, a rising sense of Court prerogative, capped by Chief Justice Taney’s Dred Scott decision, prepared the Court’s later role in overturning democratic decision-making. Never widely read in Left circles, Government by Judiciary remained in use among law students for decades. Boudin himself, largely active in refugee efforts after World War II, was by his death a figure forgotten in the Left but for his family, one of the most prominent in Left law to date. His nephew, Leonard Boudin, defended many leftwing (and other) victims. Leonard’s daughter, Kathy Boudin, convicted of a politically-inspired armed robbery and imprisoned for several decades, emerged a scholar of legal abuses and a teacher at Columbia University. Her son, Chesa Boudin, was elected a District Attorney in San Francisco, after years of work defending the poor.

Buhle, Paul. Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left. London: Verso, 1987.

Louis B. Boudin Papers, 1900-1950. MS #037. Archival Collections. Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Columbia University Libraries. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4079385/