In July 1914, Vladimir Lenin and his comrade Gregory Zinoviev found themselves as political émigrés “in a god-forsaken little mountain village in Galicia.” Under gathering clouds of war, Zinoviev recalls making a bet with Lenin that the German Social Democratic Party would never support financing a war. Lenin gladly took up this wager in full confidence that European socialist parties, as declared by the Second International, would call for a general strike of the proletariat in the event of war. As Zinoviev recalls, Lenin observed that “no, they [German Socialist Party or SPD ] are not such scoundrels as all that. They will not, of course, fight the war, but they will, to ease their conscience, vote against the credits lest the working class revolts against them.”

This chapter considers Christina Stead as a transnational writer, who travelled across continents and through political contexts. It argues that her work is bound together by a “marine aesthetics” and surveys how this plays out in the key phases of writing life: an early period in London and Paris, a middle period in America, and late period, in Europe, England, and Australia. Stead is a political writer of the twentieth century, but also a formal realist whose works continue to challenge the novel genre today.

In their opposition to American imperialism, radicals pursued many actions. They synchronized protests, helped deserting GIs find safety, strengthened ties with Vietnamese revolutionaries, put the United States on trial for genocide, and even organized international brigades to fight in Vietnam. But at this stage, they prioritized the ideological struggle, which was precisely what Vietnamese officials themselves sought most from their comrades in this part of the world. Indeed, Vietnamese revolutionaries believed that the war would be fought not only in the jungles of Vietnam but on the terrain of ideas. Collaborating closely with Vietnamese communists, radicals in the North Atlantic radicalized the discourse around the war. In fact, by the end of 1967, the general antiwar struggle grew far more radical. Radicals defined the enemy as imperialism, coded their internationalism as anti-imperialism, and revived the Leninist problematic of self-determination. This approach to internationalism became so popular that even those who did not consider themselves radicals adopted some of its core elements. By the late 1960s, anti-imperialism was beating out its many internationalist rivals – such as individualist human rights – to become the dominant way in which activists in the North Atlantic imagined international change.

The expansion of empires in the late nineteenth century prompted leftists to invent a new kind of internationalism targeting what they called “imperialism.” Although there were many ways to combat imperialism, one approach soon came to dominate: the Leninist problematic of the right of nations to self-determination. The ideas that formed the basis of this problematic grew out of highly contingent debates in the twentieth century, but after Lenin’s death in 1924 were codified as the only radical way to change the world on a global scale. It was embraced by millions across the globe, especially by Vietnamese revolutionaries, who soon distinguished themselves as the leading force in the larger anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam. In fact, Vietnam emerged as a kind of test case for the Leninist problematic. It helped Vietnamese revolutionaries score many victories, but the experience of revolution in Vietnam revealed some of Leninism’s core tensions, the most important of which was the contradiction between nation-building on the one hand and universal communist emancipation on the other.

The Amish are an unusual case of a community intensely concerned with maintaining control over how technology shapes its future. Though the community’s old-fashioned ways strike many as perplexing, in the age of AI there are good reasons as to why technology and its regulation should be just about as central to mainstream politics as they are to the way the Amish regulate their affairs. Technology is not neutral, as many still think, but is intensely political. This also means that political philosophy and philosophy of technology should be more closely related than they typically are. Mainstream philosophy of technology has unfolded largely separately from mainstream political philosophy. The primary exception is the Marxist tradition that has long investigated the role of technology in the dialectical unfolding of history as Marx theorizes it. We use the Marxist tradition to identify three senses in which technology is political (the foundational, enframing, and interactive senses) and argue that the Rawlsian tradition also has good reason to recognize versions of these senses. In this era, political philosophy must always also be philosophy of technology.

The paper probes the relationship between the institutional and the material dimensions of the ‘material constitution’. The analysis centres on two readings of that relationship that are offered first by structuralist and then by Hegelian strands of Marxist theory; thereafter it transfers Luhmann’s discussion of ‘semantics and structures’ to constitutional semantics and the ‘underlying’ material structures in order to offer an account of how the improbable dynamic between materiality and constitutionality might be rendered. The ‘materialist turn’ thereby re-orients constitutional thought to the material practices of the political economy and constitutional formation attaches to changing dynamics in the material relations of production and social reproduction.

Marxism has long been criticized for its failure to elaborate a theoretical analysis of war. Prioritising a commercial view of history, Marxism has treated war as either a tool of policy or an anachronistic aberration. However, a more foundational and determinate role for capitalism’s violence has begun to be elaborated by Marxist scholars concerned with the place of accumulation in the history of capitalism. Alliez and Lazzarato, for example, insist that the violence of primitive accumulation subtends all capital relations. Capitalism, they argue, has always depended upon the expropriation of nature and so operates as a form of colonial warfare. This chapter draws on their insights to examine Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Although the novel has been criticized by Marxist theorists for lacking a fully realised class analysis, its narrative of an unnamed Empire’s pitiless campaigns against barbarian forces offers an account of how commerce expropriates lives and land. This chapter argues that the personal ethics of corporeality, truth, and pain developed in the novel cannot be understood outside of this concern with the violent, collective experience of capital accumulation.

Although Mongolian literature features many enslaved characters, slavery as punishment, and slavery as metaphor, the nature of slavery and the identity of the enslaved is rarely mentioned. At the same time, the language of slavery was varied and changed over time in different literary contexts. Focusing on two terms of slavery, boġol and kitad, this essay argues that occupational hierarchies informed the language of slavery in Mongolian from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The terms boġol and kitad originally indicated servants or dependant people but came to mean slave in general. In historical literature, Buddhist didactic texts translated from Tibetan, and epic literature the usage of terms of slavery reflects the multivalent nature of the terminology which defies rigid, formalistic analysis. However, in the twentieth century, Mongolian scholars reinterpreted slavery as it appears in literary texts through the theory of Marxist historical materialism. The Marxist approach compared Mongolian slavery with formalistic Greco-Roman legal definitions of slavery and thus obscured the historical and literary significance of slavery and enslaved characters in the Mongolian literary tradition.

Some of the most celebrated writers of the 1930s generation dabbled with Marxist politics, but later renounced their earlier political commitments. A Cold War critical consensus emerged that saw Communism and its socialist realist theory of art as deadening forces, that were incompatible with good writing. Shifting the focus to some less canonical figures, the chapter sees the relationship between Communism and literature in the 1930s as a more productive one. The chapter focuses on three ‘conversion narratives’, whose protagonists move from false consciousness to political commitment: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair. These novels have complicated relationships to socialist realism. They want to cut through ideological fog and to see ‘reality as it is’ and ‘whither it is moving’ (in Radek’s phrase), but they use modernist literary techniques to this end, and grapple with epistemological doubt. They also complicate the traditional Marxist emphasis on class by putting it into dialogue with gender, sexuality, race, national identity, and rural identity.

Chapter 3 focuses on the poetry of the Iranian Aḥmad Shāmlū and his pioneering imagination of what would eventually come to be called the Third World in his second collection of poetry, The Manifesto, from 1951. Shāmlū’s committed poetry goes beyond Nīmā’s prosodic innovations to reach past the borders of Iran in a bid to build solidarity with, for instance, a Korean soldier fighting against the United Kingdom and United States in the Korean War. The Manifesto, therefore, represents Shāmlū’s attempt to forge a Third World literary network within the Global South that predates later moves in this direction following the Bandung Conference in 1955. However, Shāmlū’s idealism was cut short in 1953 only weeks after the Korean War ended when these same imperial powers staged their coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh on August 15–19. The 1953 coup represents a momentous turning point not just for local politics in the Middle East but also for cultural production. Shāmlū tempered his political engagement following the coup, and the Iranian Left suffered a general malaise from which it never recovered.

This chapter argues that Langston Hughes’s 1930s red poetry posits a proletarian-internationalist notion of authenticity, one that attempts to close the cognitive gap between lived reality, on the one hand, and the latter’s spatial, temporal, and structural determinations, on the other. The chapter maintains that two dominant poetics articulate this authenticity, namely, the Communist Sublime and the Antifascist Grotesque. Although each poetics corresponds to a specific set of concerns of the contemporaneous Communist-led Left, both endeavor to unite a fragmented global proletariat using various thematic and formal strategies. Viewed as heuristics allowing us to link Hughes’s radical poetry to the context of Great Depression–era Communism, the Communist Sublime and the Antifascist Grotesque refute the misconception that authenticity was an exclusive feature of the poet’s Black-vernacular work. They also unveil the hopes and fears that defined Hughes’s literary imagination as the possibility of proletarian revolution gave way to war and Fascism.

This chapter argues that the essay begins the eighteenth century as a bourgeois form and ends it as a radical one. Over the course of the century the form and style of periodical essayists such asRichard Steele, Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, and the Earl of Shaftesbury are taken up by writers with revolutionary politics, such as Jonathan Swift, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean-Paul Marat, and Karl Marx.

My introduction begins with Dorothy Richardson who, in the second volume of Pilgrimage, gives us a scene straight out of Jane Austen, which she then quickly abandons. Richardson’s particular form of modernism, I suggest, requires an engagement with realism in order to foreground its own interests. Using Richardson as a jumping off point, I outline the way modernism’s earliest critics reproduced arguments from the modernists themselves that emphasized their distinction from their realist predecessors. This debate then carried over to the seminal Marxist arguments of the 1930s between Lukács and Adorno, through which the terms modernism and realism hardened into an opposition that is still with us today. This reified divide cannot be simply wished away: we can still meaningfully distinguish works dominated by a realist impulse from those that use modernist’s characteristic disruptions. What we cannot do, I argue, is: (1) array these two movements simplistically via a false divide between form and content; (2) draw a straight line between politics and form. Instead, we must look to the ways in which specific aesthetic techniques combine to produce the form of each particular work of art.

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.

When Marvel Studios released its superhero film Black Panther in 2018, kids across the continent of Africa began to salute one another Wakanda-style. They crossed their arms (in a gesture like the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, who were laid to rest with their arms on their chests) and would end the greeting with the words ‘Wakanda forever’.

Wakanda, of course, is a fictional country. It was created, so the story goes, when a massive meteorite made up of an equally fictional metal, vibranium, crashed into a location somewhere in East Africa. Understanding the value of vibranium, the leaders of Wakanda concealed this rare and valuable energy-giving resource. Many of the best scholars of Wakanda were sent to study abroad and, on their return, their work turned Wakanda into one of the world’s most technologically advanced countries. Although Wakanda appears from the outside to be a poor, developing country, it is actually prosperous beyond belief.

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.