What is the state of Marxist literary criticism today? What import does the historical materialist analysis of literature hold in an era where many fledging literary critics’ careers — not to mention literature departments themselves — cling to life, with decades of austerity only quickened and enhanced by the COVID-19 pandemic? After Marx, a wide-ranging collection of Marxist cultural criticism edited by Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon, answers these questions less through evocations of the power of literature than by examining the material conditions that have given rise to the volume itself (and to the recent revival of Marxist literary criticism and Marxism generally). As Lye and Nealon state in their introduction, the fifteen essays of which it is comprised “represent a shift in Marxist literary criticism that has emerged from changes in capitalism itself, from shifts in political resistance to capitalism, and from changes in theoretical approaches to Marx’s writing” (1). This “shift,” further, consists of more than a simple “return” to Marx, or to economic themes and topics more generally, in response to events like the 2008 financial crisis. Rather, the volume, through both its self-theorization and the substance of the essays, makes specific claims for what Marxist literary criticism now is, or should be. To the extent this position can be pithily encapsulated, it involves a ruthless and unapologetic commitment to thinking in terms of totality and a return to the critique of political economy after the exhaustion of post-Marxism. This return to totality is not presented as the call to arms of a theoretical manifesto, however, but as a something already happening: a historically necessary response to the very conditions of capitalism and class structure that Marxism would seek to study.

The editors locate the hinge point for these shifts in capitalism from “roughly from 1965 to 1973,” when, as Robert Brenner claims, capitalism entered what he calls a “long downturn,” “a tendential decline in profitability for capital that has bred, over the decades, a variety of capitalist pushbacks against this decline” (2).1 While the more common neoliberal periodization, as in the work of Wendy Brown and other Foucauldian thinkers, often emphasizes changes in policy, ideas, and outlook, for the editors of and contributors to After Marx, the fundamental issue is that the conditions of capitalist accumulation — the extent to which capital maintains the ability to materially expand and to generate surplus value at rates comparable to before the downturn — have changed. Whatever discursive or ideological shifts followed, such as the remaking of humanity in the image of homo oeconomicus or the disintegration of democracy into discreet constituent elements, were ultimately rooted in these conditions.2

The volume is less an adjudication of Brenner, however, than an examination and demonstration of how this state of affairs calls into question the received knowledge of Marxisms past. Anti-capitalist struggle and critiquecannot return to these Marxisms and do it all over again: the same way that the heyday of earlier economic booms cannot be reproduced by contemporary capitalism, those same era’s strategies are materially irreproducible (which is not to say they do not hold insights for contemporary struggle). This problem is particularly palpable within the academic study of literature, a practice that is largely tied to the career path of the tenure-line literature professor, a path that was financially reliant on an earlier form of the university — fueled by the postwar boom — and that is increasingly foreclosed for the coming generations of literary scholars. As Lye and Nealon note, the “steady decline” of literary studies “has developed a class dimension” as it has become “a shrinking pipeline of social mobility and immigrant professional assimilation” and as humanities classrooms became increasingly populated by community college transfers who could complete humanities degree requirements within two years (10). In her contribution to the volume, Sarah Brouillette further argues that this economic stagnation has reshaped the “cultivation and circulation of writers of English literature” in a way that was “globalized but not democratized,” particularly as smaller publishing houses were consolidated under larger firms (119). Amidst these persisting and intensifying inequalities within the social relations of literary production, consumption, and study, students of English, the editors note, “more often find themselves in unexpected proximity to the standpoint of the wageless” (10). This phenomenon, in turn, has placed theoretical demands on Marxism’s capacity to think in totalizing terms that can reckon with the material reality these students face; proponents of anti-capitalist critique and struggle have thus been compelled to rediscover and recreate their understanding of totality, something After Marx attempts to both theorize and implement.

Lye and Nealon’s account centers on the 1960s — “the last period in which Marxism was still a defining political pole within a range of social movements” — when deindustrialization and the decline of organized labor coincided with a blossoming of social revolutions associated with the New Left, including Second Wave Feminism, environmentalism, Third Worldism, and Black Power (2–3). The challenge of the New Left was how to “conceptualize the interconnections between these forms of struggle, all understood to be global,” yet, historically, this “was to remain an unfinished project” (3). The editors trace the problems this historical juncture (and its unrealized potentiality) created for two then-dominant strains of Marxist thought, represented by Louis Althusser and Theodor W. Adorno. Althusser, they claim, provided the theoretical basis for “the clearest advance in Marxism’s ability to relate divergent political tendencies without subsuming them into one narrative,” through his “anti-dialectical theoretical vocabulary,” which emphasizes structure, relative autonomy, and overdetermination (3). Althusser was embraced by thinkers such as Stuart Hall, who conceived of the relation between race and class in terms of articulation, and by literary and cultural studies in particular, where Althusser’s structuralist Marxism provided a particularly palatable method for reading texts as complex unities that, in Terry Eagleton’s words, can “displace, recast and mutate” significations “according to the relatively autonomous laws of its own aesthetic modes” but always in the terms of, and never in excess of, “the general forms given to it by the structure of its significations.”3 Through this emphasis on structure, Althusserian Marxism sought to avoid what it perceived as a teleological thrust to Hegelian dialectics through “a very present-tense metaphorics of ‘production’” (6).

Adorno represents, for the editors, a commitment a more Hegelian and dialectical Marxism, against Althusser’s structuralism. Adorno’s work, while maintaining an adherence to “a humanist language of possibility and transformation,” had a macroscopic view of “the long unfolding of history” that seemed quite out of step with the anti-Hegelian French thought, “which focused… on the character of politics in the present tense” (6–7). Indeed, Adorno’s personal response to the militant student uprisings of 1968 would seem to confirm that his thought was “ill-equipped to grapple with younger radicals’ resistance to capitalism, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy” (7). Nonetheless, the editors maintain Adorno’s utility for understanding the ultimate cause of this upsurge in radicalism: “a fully developed global capitalism that had reached into every aspect of collective and individual life” (7). In losing a sense of capitalist history through an emphasis on form, the Althusserian vein risked reifying the stultifying structure of capitalism into an inescapable fortress, whereas Adorno, for all his melancholy, maintains a focus on “the intricacies by which individual consciousness tried to wedge open space for itself to breathe” (7).

The distinction between Althusser and Adorno is, in some sense, one of metaphorics: of “competing abstractions of capitalist production,” the spatial mode of Althusserian structuralism and the temporal thrust of Adornian dialectics (8). In so meticulously considering these competing theoretical strands, Lye and Nealon present a view of the Marxist field for which the long downturn would present an irresolvable historical problem. As the material shift of the downturn, already underway during the acme of Althusser’s ideas, became undeniable, his line of thought faced as moment where “structure collided with history” as its emphasis on the (re)production of subjects “was confronted with the problem of a capitalism in which ‘production’ was itself in crisis” (6). Likewise, Adorno’s linear, and at times teleological, narrative of a progressive subsumption of social relations by capital is complicated by an era in which capital’s nominal expansion has been durably paired with declining profitability and a failure to repeat previous expansions of accumulation. As such, Lye and Nealon are less interested in questions of expansion and production than they are in the non-linear process by which capital has negotiated “the capitalist imperative to overcome a tendency toward diminished profits” (8). Examining capital in this way requires a vocabulary that can account for how “the incorporation of ever more people into the ranks of … ‘surplus populations’” has unfolded in dynamic ways that frustrate models of spatial expansion or linear progression, one which allows us to conceive of the process “which has produced both the deindustrialization of the global north and the slumification of the south” (8). As evidenced by the volume’s own contributions, Marxism literary criticism has begun to do just that — as the discipline itself is rendered surplus — through thinking of literary, theoretical, and cultural processes in terms of totality.

The nature of an edited collection might suggest an approach to totality via multiplicity, an aspirational “account of everything.” Under conditions of uneven development — and in the aftermath of the proletariat’s failure, in the twentieth century, to become the “subject-object of history” that Georg Lukács foresaw —I t might be tempting to fracture our sense of totality, to consider “totalities,” “modernisms,” “modernities,” or other plurifications. As After Marx demonstrates, however, for critical work to fully account for these varied, uneven historical conditions it must do so in totalizing terms. The contributors understand that totality comes to bear on every moment, thus offering us constant opportunities to consider the relationship of our objects of study, superstructural as they are, to the real, material conditions of capitalist accumulation. Such a methodology does not involve the decentering of issues of difference but the full comprehension of the centrality of race, gender, and other social abstractions to the mode of production.

We see this from the opening chapters, in which Nikhil Pal Singh and Ikyo Day query how to conceive of racial abstraction within a Marxist analysis that does not merely reduce race to a byproduct of class. Singh surveys the Black radical tradition, as discussed by Cedric Robinson, seeing it as typified by “a certain oscillation between” the idea of racism as a “form of ideological and social violence” continuously produced in parallel with commodity production, and racism as an “integral component” of commodity production itself, “a practical dimension of enforcing wage discipline and extracting surplus value” (24). While the post-Marxist disregard for class would adhere to the former, responses to post-Marxism can, alternatively, turn toward the latter to the point of class essentialism, as in Adolph Reed’s claim (in Singh’s paraphrase) that “the race line … is only significant insofar as it is a class line” (33). Singh finds more complex alternatives to these poles in the work of Stuart Hall, Angela Davis, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Citing the latter’s Golden Gulag as the most important recent text in this tradition, he finds in it a way to think about racism “as a technical and moral infrastructure within capitalist modernity,” one that “lingers in the material ordering of social space” (36). That is, when conceived in terms of the social totality, we do not need to reduce race to a superstructural effect of class but can comprehend it as a profoundly real abstraction having material and infrastructural effects. Similar attention to race’s place in the totality undergirds Day’s analysis, wherein the designation of “Indigenous lands as non-sites of nuclear modernity” renders them integral, not exterior, to the capitalist process (40). A return to Marx’s actual writings on primitive accumulation allows Day to recover its “explicitly nonteleological, nondevelopmentalist principles,” showing how by rendering Indigenous lands into “wastelands” outside capitalist development, capitalism does not violate its core logic of accumulation (46). Rather, this primitive accumulation serves as “a race-making operation and a necessary precondition for the present and future accumulation of capital” (48). Through primitive accumulation, the state creates a racial difference that is only later rendered “ontologically concrete” through the legal definition of Native status (50). So concretized, race renders Native labor exterior to the wage relation, while the wasteland remains “valuable because it is always potentially available to capitalist use and improvement” (51).

The need to think in terms of totality likewise motivates Amy De’Ath’s discussion of Marxist-feminism, which pressures us to focus on reproduction, not merely production, but not in a way that is simply additive. De’Ath is unequivocal that to consider the role of reproduction from a Marxist-feminist perspective “requires thinking from the perspective of a totality, which post-structuralist feminisms, with their emphasis on irreducible difference and particularity, have tended to reject” (226). The concept of real abstraction proves particularly fruitful for De’Ath in her analysis of contemporary Marxist-feminist poetry, allowing for “a feminist literary criticism attuned to the highly ambivalent and dialectical ways in which capitalist subjects might ‘identify,’” without confusing a given subject’s identification as necessarily constituting false consciousness or naïve misrecognition (228). All of these chapters demonstrate that in order to actually understand the particular, we must understand its position in the totality: as Ericka Beckman argues strongly in her analysis of Latin American fiction, capitalism does not gradually progress from one location to another, it is “a single system constituted by centers and peripheries (or metropoles and satellites)” (177).

Of course, the material covered is broad: the contributors examine contemporary film, automation discourse, and the writings of Lu Xun, among other topics. These various geographical locations, historical periods, and theoretical perspectives are not, however, presented in aggregation so as to produce a sort of weak-theoretical conglomerate of approaches to anti-capitalist or leftist critical thought.4 The embrace of self-described weakness, in the name of multiplicity, is ultimately counterrevolutionary, for, as Jameson maintains, “without a conception of the social totality (and the possibility of transforming a whole social system), no properly socialist politics is possible.”5 After Marx, in this sense, is unapologetically “strong” in its commitment to a shared methodology of Marxist critique that emphasizes the social totality and the place of art within it. Art here does not provide metaphors for thinking about the abstract (and even sublime) properties of capitalism; it provides concrete sites of investigation.6 Thus, in “Marxist Ecology and Shakespeare,” Crystal Bartolovich rejects New Materialist work, such as Jane Bennett’s, that looks to physical matter and objects as providing a site of investigation — composed of literal material — more fundamental than the critical object of historical materialism.7 By trying to “grasp things only positively and immediately,” this methodology proves incapable of accounting for the real historical force of social abstraction and mediation through which “relations of inequality and injustice, secured by private property, inhabit every stick and bottle cap” (73, 82). The supposed magic of Prospero’s stick, in The Tempest, turns out not to be the vibrancy of matter, which we must admire from without, but its place in the totality of social relations, in which we are likewise embedded and which we must materially change.

Along similar perspectival lines, Michael Shane Boyle, in “In Service to Capital: Theater and Marxist Cultural Theory,” examines but also rejects the long-standing theoretical debate as to the status of artistic or arts-adjacent labor — specifically performance — as productive or non-productive. Tracing this ongoing debate to misreadings of passages from the Grundrisse in which Marx’s restatements of Adam Smith’s positions have been taken for his own, Boyle maintains, with a properly recovered Marx, that the distinction between productive and unproductive labor is not one of content: “what matters is whether the pianist’s performance or the piano marker’s labor is ‘exchanged with capital’ to make a profit for the capitalist” (220). Boyle, thus, does not try to grasp the nature of performance-as-labor in theory but, instead, examines the actual ways in which theaters and the labor within them have been organized — some of which, it turns out, are along “productive” lines, while others are not. We thus gain a sense of capitalist subsumption not as gradual and progressive but as dynamic, shifting in accordance with the needs of accumulation in different contexts. To grasp these realities, there is no replacement for actual, material investigation; we cannot theorize ourselves to a one-size-fits-all answer. The totality does not offer itself as an object for our investigation but must be itself ascertained through the project of critique.

This focus on totality leads the collection to some uncomfortable insights regarding literary studies, which has itself been rendered, increasingly, surplus to capital’s project of accumulation. In an era of economic boom and thus relative stability or even prosperity for university humanities departments, Marxist literary criticism could propose relatively satisfying answers to the question of what it “did.” On the level of method, it contributed ideology critique and symptomatic reading. On the level of means, it provided the financial stability of the tenure-track career. On the level of purpose, it provided the hope that through multitudinous efforts of education and research, such work might, in the long run, contribute, in some small way, to the revolutionary eventuality (or, at least, give Marxists something to do in the meantime). After the 2008 financial crisis’s decimation of the already declining job market for literature PhDs, and the decimation of the decimated enabled by the all-too-brief “budgetary crises” of the COVID-19 pandemic (during which my PhD-granting institution’s endowment grew by 41.1%), these answers feel less satisfying. The methods seem stale, outmoded, or simply to no longer contribute anything new (how many times can we demonstrate that the postwar novel expresses the limits of its capacity to cognitively map global capitalism?). The individual means once offered by literary study, albeit always in uneven fashion, are less and less historically and materially available. And under conditions of climate change and budgetary squeeze, the discipline’s ability to believe in the revolutionary eventuality, and its own capacity to contribute to that eventuality, is far less stable than it once was. Regardless of how critical the former generations of career-stable Marxist critics were of capitalism, their capacity to believe, with relative confidence, that Marxist literary criticism had such a purpose was itself linked to an historically exceptional period of growth and accumulation, a dependency that cannot be undone by anti-capitalist close-readings alone.

After Marx does not shy away from these ambiguities. In addition to its methodology focus on totality, labor, and material social conditions, the period of the long downturn’s beginnings — during which the previous foundation of literary study began to stagnate, decay, or even collapse — is the explicit focus of several essays, most notably those of Joshua Clover, Sarah Brouillette, and Juliana Spahr. Clover maintains, perhaps more strongly than any other contributor, that we have entered a new stage, not merely the beginnings of a fresh cycle of accumulation (in Giovanni Arrighi’s terms). While others continue to look for new sources of value through which to reignite the accumulation process, Clover maintains that no new hegemon is poised to replace the United States in the way that the United States replaced Great Britain. Under such conditions, the novel cannot reconcile its problematically individual protagonists with the social whole; it rather can “only narrate the impossibility of reconciliation… and then retreat” (113). Rather than continuously run new novels through this interpretative machinery, Clover claims, “we must be emancipated from the idea of the novel as privileged bearer of the problematic of our epoch” (103). Brouillette also focuses on the novel’s decline alongside the “collapse of formal investment in the production of classical liberal democracy’s rational educated citizen” (117). Without the ideological enemy of the Soviet Union, and facing the limits of accumulation Clover describes, the funding of higher education, the arts, and culture are quick to the chopping block — and thus so goes the revolutionary potentiality of turning such liberal democratic education against itself. If we ask “whither literature” of this new reality, however, we must not look for familiar forms from the midcentury, hanging on in decayed and weakened guises, nor even for “literariness” as the critical field has thus far established it. Instead of devoting ourselves to the remnant of the novel, we might turn to “a literature of the nonabsorptive economy” that has “barely been studied,” being produced within the algorithmic marketplace of Amazon and Google, by authors who work not with editors but “consultants who specialize in maximizing audience share” (127). Spahr likewise seeks to move on from midcentury assumptions about literature, specifically to find new models for thinking of the relationship between literature and the state “not based on the Soviet example” (132). Spahr finds that the latter, and its privileging of social realism, as well as the U.S.’s own Cold War propaganda efforts, have limited our capacity to conceive of a literary relationship to the nation-state other than as “a medium built to legitimate” it (141). She calls instead for the study of “moments when the nation-state form is briefly cracked open,” such as the Paris Commune or the anti-colonial movements of the postwar decades (138). For Spahr, and for Jasper Bernes in his contribution, the novel — so tied to the historical development of capitalism itself — proves less fruitful in this regard than the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, Aimé Césaire, or Claude McKay. This trilogy of essays, placed together near the middle of the volume, all suggest quite explicitly that we must rethink our critical relationship to English departments, revolutionary literature (or its possibility), the global literary marketplace, the humanities-educated, literature-reading citizen (as a goal of education), and the novel itself as a form. As capitalism encountered the limits of accumulation, so did the social relations of literary study fracture, in ways that demand new forms and approaches in our contemporary era, in which the pre-1973, GI Bill-funded explanations of the importance of reading, writing, and analysis cannot be treated as givens.

As a whole, After Marx is a step towards producing new answers to these questions of object, of method, of purpose. It is also, however, a document of a relatively specific generation of Marxist literary critics, perhaps the first generation of Marxism’s recent revival and perhaps the last generation to, more often than not, attain relatively stable employment within the university (though the uneven distribution of employment amongst the contributors already shows the fracturing of the professorial career path at play). As a contingently employed academic facing a post-COVID job market, the volume, for me, cannot but summon the thought of the volumes my own critical generation might one day produce but which, as the already limited number of tenure-track jobs further dwindles, will likely never appear. As, increasingly, the most brilliant critics I know drop from the profession, their unrealized book projects haunt the discipline, ghosts that never really lived (other than as speculative sentences in cover letters and research statements). The appearance, one day, of an After-After Marx, seems impossible. However, if there is anything to be learned from After Marx, it is that the way out of this quandary is not lamentation. As a volume aware of the contingent precipice on which its own publication stands, the contributors do not ask us to keep calm and publish on. They ask us, rather, to consider not only how but that Marxist literary criticism — that is, the consideration of culture in historical materialist terms — will continue, whatever we have to say about it, as long as capitalism reigns, albeit perhaps not under the aegis of the university for much longer. If Marxist literary criticism is to truly take on the burden of thinking in terms of totality, such a step might be necessary. It is not a cause for celebration or despair but a reminder that history continues to move, and it does not wait for novels to be published about it. If Marxist literary criticism is to maintain purchase in an era of its supposed obsolescence, it must maintain its focus on the real relations that undergird its own possibility, which continuously offer the formation of solidarity as a task as possible as it is difficult.

1. See also Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (New York: Verso, 2006).
2. See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution(Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2015).
3. Terry Eagleton, “Toward a Science of the Text” in Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader, eds. Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) 326.
4. See Paul Saint-Amour, “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism,” Modernism/modernity, 25, no. 3 (2018): 437–459.
5. Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois Press, 1988) 355. See also Crystal Bartolovich’s contribution to After Marx, in which this declaration is quoted (p. 82).
6. See Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology(New York: Verso, 2008), and much scholarship on postmodernism, including, with respect, Jameson’s.
7. See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things(Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010).