John endures in America’s collective memory as a zealous and single-minded advocate for abolitionism, dedicating his life to bringing about the destruction of America’s most vile institution. Brown has been described as many things: fanatic, madman, terrorist, martyr, revolutionary, and saint, to name a few. One label rarely applied to Brown, yet perhaps warranted, is “communist.” John Brown’s son, John Brown Jr., a socialist himself, had written of his father:
Father’s favorite theme was that of the Community plan of cooperative industry, in which all should labor for the common good; ‘having all things in common’ as did the disciples of Jesus in his day. This has been, and still is, my Communistic or Socialist faith (Reynolds 2005, 81).
Brown's Provisional Constitution is a testament to the radical nature of his economic vision, which is typically noted in passing but seldom subjected to serious scrutiny in existing scholarship. The constitution would have established a collectivist economic order, with all produced and captured resources flowing into a common pool, and private appropriations of these of goods treated as a criminal act (Brown 1858). Of course, Brown likely had no knowledge of Marxism, and his spiritual worldview was very much at odds with Marxism’s atheist materialism, as well as the later state-centric socialism of the USSR, which was based on rapid industrialization under the personalized dictatorship of Stalin (Brown was critical of industrialization, associating it with social alienation). Still, Brown’s compassion for the poor and the exploited would have put him in close political proximity with abolitionist Marxists had he lived long enough to associate with them. He belonged to a broad socialist tradition in which diverse and evolving conceptions of radical egalitarianism developed as alternative models to the prevailing systems of economic exploitation.
Indeed, according to Julie Husband (2005, 163), Brown’s biographer W. E. B. Du Bois was drawn to the abolitionist’s “socialist impulses”; Du Bois’ framed Brown as a kind of forerunner to the political radicals of his own time. The 1962 republication of his Brown biography added new material explicitly connecting Brown to the twentieth-century socialist states, writing that “one could wish that John Brown could see today the results of the great revolution in Russia; that he could see the new world of Socialism and Communism expanding until it already comprises the majority of mankind” (Du Bois 1926, 299; Stewart 2015). For Du Bois, Brown’s war on slavery was one cycle of revolt within the larger arc of struggle against the capitalist system, which the Soviets had taken to new heights. While Brown had no exposure to Marxism, he was clearly influenced by the communist and socialist trends of his time.
Book of John (Brown)