Since at least 2016 we have witnessed globally a significant return to the rhetoric of the nation as the horizon of the political imagination. This is true on the Right, which has seen tremendous political gains in some of the world’s largest economies: England, Germany, France, the United States, and Brazil. It is perhaps equally true for the Left where nationalism has become a key rallying point for many workers — a turn that has, no doubt, helped the Right consolidate its power. Against this trend, this collection of essays encourages our readers to think about how inequality, exploitation, and structural violence has gone global.

The issue begins with an essay by Stephen Shapiro and Neil Lazarus, which couples the importance of linguistic theory and translation to Antonio Gramsci’s Marxism to ongoing debates about the world-literary system. They are interested in particular in “the general conceptual affinity” between “combined and uneven development” and Gramsci’s thinking about “the politicized convergence of heterogeneous social groups.” In their view, translatability — or the “political activity that involved pirating, modularization, appropriation, refunctioning, etc.” — rather than mere “translation” is better suited to the expansion of the conditions of possibility within Marxism. “What is required,” they write, “is the translation, not of Balzac into Italian, nor even of Marx into Italian, but of the conditions that underpin French politics, German philosophy and British economics into Italian. Ultimately, then, the translatability of literary or political texts is, or should be, “a matter not of intellectual work, no matter how progressive, but of practical politics.”

Bret Benjamin keeps us squarely in the realm of the political, taking up the 1974 UN Declaration for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) as “a chance to reconsider the 1970s as a decade of transition in which the sharpening developmental aspirations of G77 nations in the global south come into conflict with structural transformations in the accumulation of capital.” Reading the NIEO as the “last gasp” of the Bandung era, Benjamin argues that the “developmentalist demands of the Bandung era run aground on the contemporaneous systemic crisis of capital.” Benjamin then works through and expands the arguments of the Werkritik school to argue the “NIEO ultimately express the contradictions of a transitional moment” before concluding with a gesture towards the way the NIEO might, despite its historical losses, “offer a ready-made political program of South-South radicalism” retooled for a fully enclosed world economic system.

In Malcom Read’s essay we move from the political intersections and interventions into more theoretical ones, “exploring theoretical concepts, namely the ‘ideological unconscious’ and the ‘political unconscious,’” that were “developed along very different, even contrasting lines in, respectively, the work of Juan Carlos Rodríguez and that of Fredric Jameson.” Drawing out the differences between how the two thinkers situate their work in relation to Althusser, Read invites us to take a deep dive into the world of structuralist Marxisms.

Finally, Sourayan Mookerjea proposes a “Post-Western Marxism,” rooted in the insights of social reproduction and decolonization theory with the aim of thinking historically about exploitation as “the domination of inner and outer nature.” As he suggests, “if we are to understand the implications of precarity, unemployment, informality, poverty, dispossession for class politics today,” we need to see “the private appropriation of surplus value...as subalternization.” Class politics, he argues, is never immediately available and is thus “mediated by the accumulated violence of proliferating oppressions.”

Reviews by Sofia Cutler on cosmopolitanisms and Myka Tucker-Abramson on the financial imaginary round out the issue, asking what it means to think of class globally. As Tucker-Abramson suggests, the essays here put a fine point on how “adopting the position that ‘dynamic global interconnection’ and ‘unevenness’ are no longer useful categories of analysis,” as some have done, amounts to an unapologetic refusal to think beyond the dynamics of the nation at a moment when the nation seems poised to become an increasingly counter-revolutionary force.

– Davis Smith-Brecheisen, for the Mediations editors