THE MARXIST AT No. 477 E. 16th St. (1910)
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At No. 477 East Sixteenth Street lived a Socialist.
He wasn’t your ordinary, run-of-the-mill Socialist, however.
Louis B. Boudin was a Russian-born American Marxist theoretician, writer, politician, and lawyer, who wrote a two volume history of the Supreme Court’s influence on American government as well as his piece de resistance, The Theoretical System of Karl Marx in the Light of Recent Criticism, first published in 1907.
Boudin’s family emigrated to America in June 1891 and settled in New York City. He worked in the garment industry as a shirt maker and as a private tutor. At the same time, Boudin began legal studies, gaining a Master’s Degree from New York University and being admitted to the New York State Bar Association in 1898.
At first, Boudin was a member of the Socialist Labor Party of America. He was also a member of the governing National Executive Board of the party’s trade union affiliate, the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance from 1898 to 1899. Although he left the party for a short period, he returned after the turn of the century, being elected a delegate of the Socialist Party of America of the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart in 1907 and the 1910 Copenhagen Congress of the Second International.
Boudin was frequently a candidate for public office on the Socialist Party ticket. He ran for Judge of the New York Court of Appeals in 1910, 1914 and 1917, and for Chief Judge in 1916. He also ran for Justice of the New York Supreme Court (2nd District) in 1910, 1912, and 1919.
From May 1905 through October 1906, Boudin wrote a series of articles expounding upon Marxism which were published in the Chicago magazine The International Socialist Review. These articles were collected in book form as The Theoretical System of Karl Marx in the Light of Recent Criticism in February 1907.
The book was published and kept in print continuously over the next two decades through several reissue editions. The book, a defense of such orthodox Marxist tenets as the labor theory of value and historical materialism against their critics of the day, established Boudin’s place as one of the foremost American authorities on Marxism among a generation of young political activists.
Boudin was also a founding editor of The Class Struggle, a Marxist theoretical magazine which first saw print in May 1917.
His papers reside at Columbia University in New York City and include the manuscript of an unpublished book, Order Out of Chaos, a study of economic crises.
Boudin purchased No. 477 East 16th Street in 1910 and would live there for a number of years. His house is now up for sale at a price that would certainly repulse him -$3.1M.
(courtesy Wikipedia)
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