World-systems analyses emerged in the 1970s as attempts to fuse a Marxist-informed critique of developmental economics with historical sociology. They are best known through the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019), but benefit from multiple others who have contributed to and expanded the topics of interest for the world-systems knowledge movement. This chapter highlights some of the main concerns of world-systems and illustrates their relevance for literary and cultural studies of economics, society, the State, and cultural production. World-systems analyses began as alternatives to forms of developmental and stage theories, both Keynesian-oriented economics in the post-war period, and within post-Russian Revolution Marxism. As a moral protest against the capitalist world-system, world-systems analyses also question the theoretical and epistemological frameworks developed within the modern research university.

This chapter considers the difficulty that economics has found in defining labor as a practice separate from its product. Looking first at classical and Marxist economics, it uses feminist economics to highlight the omissions that conventional definitions of labor contain, especially concerning the work of women. By comparing feminist economics with recent novels by women, including Halle Butler’s The New Me (2019), Alice Furse’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (2014), Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate (2014), Hilary Leichter’s Temporary (2020), and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), it argues that contemporary fiction has been attentive to the same omissions. Through a reading of the techniques of literary fiction, including realism and a range of experimental narrative devices, the chapter proposes that the contemporary novel offers kinds of writing that expand our conception of labor. Contemporary fiction contains narratives that highlight the work of social reproduction as a central component of the economies of labor and offer a wider critique of economic categories of value.

In “Romantic Nature,” Mark S. Cladis surveys nature’s role in French, German, British, and North American Romanticism, with particular attention to the ideas of Rousseau, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. Addressing the concept’s ideological baggage, Cladis highlights how Romantic nature has been interpreted in Marxist, new historicist, and ecocritical theory. Analyzing the Romantic nature writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, Cladis demonstrates how Romantic representations of nature tend toward political engagement, challenging forms of institutional oppression such as colonialism and racism. Romantic nature, Cladis argues, isn’t particularly romantic (in a sentimental sense) and is conceptually and ideologically broader than many scholars have assumed.

This chapter proposes a theory of legal instrumentalism – contextually, a more explanatory framework than either Marxist or Confucian legal theories – to explain the function and role of law in Chinese society. This kind of instrumentalism, which differs from the debate over this theory in the Anglo-American tradition, is situated in China’s authoritarian regime, where a primary concern is the maintenance of political stability through strengthening authoritarian legality for the ruler. On this premise, economic development, as well as other social goals – such as efficiency of the government – for which the law can undoubtedly be placed in an instrumental position may become a priority in the ruler’s political agenda. When it comes to dispute resolution, the primary matter of concern is not the achievement of the formalist justice of Western tradition via either a formal or informal process but rather the settlement of disputes for which the law primarily plays a facilitative role as a tool, regardless of what strategies it may use. Instrumentalism of this kind, which is suitable for Chinese society both culturally and historically, shows that law is visible and does matter in China, although it cannot be completely understood through the lens of other legal traditions.

The precarity of the 1930s undergirded major transitions in Arna Bontemps’s waged and writerly labor. The flusher years of the 1920s saw him winning prizes, teaching school, and writing poetry, but the 1930s saw him take a decidedly historical turn, penning historical novels Black Thunder (1936) and Drums at Dusk (1939) and training to be a curator. This tracks alongside broader shifts in African American literature during the decade, both formally, as a bridge to social realism, and politically, through engagement with Marxism. By excavating Bontemps’s archive, this chapter confirms that he was an innovator who repurposed the historical novel to critique racial capitalism. At the same time, he sought to create saleable products and enhance his career. This paradox illuminates how African American literature of the 1930s was generated from the tension between leftist solidarity and the persistent notion of the talented tenth. Ultimately, Bontemps’s work emerges from the nexus of two radical projects: historical preservation and self-preservation, which together enabled the transition from New Negro aesthetics to the protest literature of the 1940s.

This essay offers a genealogy of the term “racial capitalism” as it has been used to reflect upon the promise and limitations of Marxism for understanding racism. The essay departs from Cedric Robinson’s important history and theory of black radicalism, Black Marxism and the Making of the Black Radical Tradition, which first established the provenance of the idea of racial capitalism for scholarly inquiry. It proceeds by outlining a longer intellectual history of Black engagements with coeval determination, and relative strategic importance of, racial domination and economic exploitation for understanding the movements of Black history from slavery to civil rights. Beginning in the New Deal era and extending through the neoliberal era, it traces a line of thinking that extends from W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James in the 1930s, through key writings on Marxism and race by Stuart Hall in the 1970s and 1980s, and culminating in contemporary analyses of the interplay of racism and capitalism in the rise of mass incarceration in the US in work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

The collapse of the Soviet bloc left ambiguous political, intellectual, and aesthetic legacies for the new left formations that gradually emerged in its wake. Following an overview of what constitutes the new left in contemporary Russia, we turn to the reinvention of socialist aesthetics by a number of cultural producers from the mid-2000s onward. Chto Delat (What Is To Be Done?), a collective of artists and philosophers, returned to the unrealized radical potentialities of the early Soviet avant-garde and aimed to cross-pollinate and revitalize that tradition with contemporary Western Marxism. The 2011–12 protests in Russia brought forth a younger, activist generation of artists and poets including Kirill Medvedev, Roman Osminkin, Victoria Lomasko, and Galina Rymbu. Their genre experiments probe, from many angles, the possible aesthetics of a new Russian left populism.

In 1947 and 1948, UNESCO undertook an innovative survey on human rights that was intended to shape the philosophical content of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This short period is interesting for several reasons. First, because the end of the Second World War created liminal conditions in which new institutions, political alignments and moral visions could be forged. Second, because, despite the end of the war, a series of profound conflicts and global challenges remained, including colonialism and global economic inequality. This chapter examines how participants in the UNESCO survey analysed the question of social and economic rights as a response to the challenges of reshaping the post-war world. It focuses on contributions influenced by leftist social and political thought. As will be seen, leftist thinkers were not hostile to the idea of a new declaration of human rights, but the way in which rights were conceptualised in relation to social and economic problems was radically different from the form that socio-economic rights eventually took in the UDHR and in subsequent decades.

Marxist perspectives came to hold much interest from the 1970s, and indeed into the late twentieth century. Two important schools of Marxism were the structural Marxism of Godelier and the ‘land and labour’ Marxism of Meillassoux. Both were decidedly French in inspiration. At the end of the twentieth century there was a new challenge, from anarchism, but this challenge did not particularly materialize.

A historical investigation into Spinozism teaches us at least as much about the interpreters of Spinoza as it does about Spinoza’s thought itself. More than any other philosophy, Spinoza’s has been held up like a mirror to the great currents of thought, providing a particular perspective on them: one can see reflected and revealed in the mirror of Spinozism the inner and outer conflicts and contradictions of Calvinism, Cartesianism, freethinking and libertinism, the Enlightenment, materialism, the Pantheismusstreit, German Idealism, French spiritualism, Marxism, British Idealism, structuralism, and other movements. This chapter provides a condensed overview of the European reception of Spinoza from the seventeenth century until today, in both minor and major thinkers.

One of the individuals Mailer most frequently cited as an influence was writer and Marxist intellectual Jean Malaquais, who he met just after publishing The Naked and the Dead. Malaquais’ influence is perhaps most evident in Mailer’s second novel, Barbary Shore (which, somewhat ironically, Malaquais himself did not care for). As the years went on, Malaquais’ influence waned as Mailer’s own philosophies began to diverge from those of his mentor, though the two remained close, with the exception of a falling out in the 1990s. In fact, in his preface to Malaquais’ novel The Joker, Mailer also wrote that the author “had more influence upon my mind than anyone I ever knew.”

A novelist by trade whose intellectual capaciousness brought him directly into the field of politics, Mailer is somewhat adrift in the general categories of political analysis we are accustomed to in the United States. For him, the Left was either too blindly ideological or too unfocused; the Right only crafted national sensibility by force; and the liberals in the middle had so far created a world without mountains and valleys, a land hard-pressed to accept the existential longings of the modern individual. Instead of situating himself within these categories, Mailer firmly and repeatedly called himself a “Left Conservative.” He even ran for mayor of New York City in 1969 as an advocate of a “Left Conservative” platform. This chapter will work to define Mailer’s position, situating it amongst other political conversations in mid-century America.

Mailer remained skeptical of many forms of technology; he felt technology to be the enemy of critical thinking, growth, and magic. As this chapter acknowledges, his wariness of various technologies informed works such as Of a Fire on the Moon, in which Mailer eerily predicts some of the very criticisms that have become magnified since the advent of the Internet, fearing that “digital computer was not a machine which would force men to think in new ways about the environment” but was instead “plastic brainpower” that might accelerate “the rush to extermination.”

This chapter tells the story of surrealism during the period of decolonization (and neoliberal re-entrenchment) that extends roughly from the end of World War II to the contemporary moment. It traces the overlapping but also discontinuous genealogies according to which anticolonial movements throughout the world – and in particular throughout the Global South – drew upon, rejected, and reinvented surrealist thinking. By studying surrealism as an anticolonial movement, this chapter inverts the common narrative by which it originated in Paris after World War I and “spread” to other countries, whether through the travels of individual European artists and writers, or through groups of second-order adherents. In place of a set of surrealist techniques and adherents disseminated throughout the nether reaches of the colonial world, this chapter explores the ways in which anticolonial thinkers throughout the Global South, particularly in North Africa and throughout the Americas, have built Afro-Caribbean, tricontinental, pan-African, and otherwise trans-Oceanic networks of artistic and political activity through the medium of a surrealist movement rendered plastic through translation.