Preamble: What Is Marx to the Process of Fieldwork?

By the summer of 2018, when this project was originally conceived, two hundred years had passed since the birth of Karl Marx. This date has been widely celebrated with talks, conferences, lectures and edited volumes. One of these many exciting projects, titled Karl Marx's Life, Ideas, Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, edited by Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto and Babak Amini (2019), gathers the contributions to a conference held in July 2018 in Patna, India, at the Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI). I first wrote ‘Marx in the sweatshop’ – now a chapter in this collection – as a contribution to that conference. I conceived that paper as a fieldworker's celebration of the Marxian framework – a framework which, combined with feminist insights, has always strongly guided my research experience. As I wrote it, and prepared to fly to Patna, I realised that far more could and should be said about the potential benefits of deploying Marx and Marxian concepts and methods as a guide for today's ‘radical fieldworkers’ – those aspiring at ‘doing’ political economy across the world economy in practice, and committed to social and economic justice. By the time I landed in Patna, the idea of this volume – Marx in the Field – had already taken shape in my imagination, and I had contacted many of the contributors. I am excited that its final outlook looks spectacularly similar to my initial ‘headnote’. As beautifully explained by Michael Taussig (2011), our attention as fieldworkers is often captured by ‘fragments’; by encounters we suddenly experience and which are the outcomes of complex materialist explanations we then need to unpack and carefully analyse. To a certain extent, one could say this project was guided by an ‘imagined fragment’, an encounter between my conscious – unorthodox and feminist – use of Marxian methods of analysis and images from the field experiences that have shaped my concrete training as a social scientist through a continuous process of learning by doing.