This chapter considers politically oriented works by Jacques Stephen Alexis, Edris Saint-Amand, Anthony Lespès, and Jacques Roumain, all communist writer-activists who came of age during the US occupation and were committed to the twinned ideologies of anti-racism and anti-imperialism. Kaussen shows how their Indigenist writings make explicit the connection between literature, Marxism, and the so-called folk, advocating for the embrace of Haiti’s African cultural origins, as expressed through the traditions of the peasantry. Not only do these writers put forward meaningful and incisive critiques of the existing social order, Kaussen observes, but they also present a wide array of imagined alternatives. Her chapter emphasizes the idiosyncrasies of Haitian socialism, noting the points of both intersection and diversion from Franco-European political models.

This chapter introduces students to the rich and controversial legacy of Marxism and one of its major offshoots in the twentieth century, Critical Theory. The chapter is presented in two parts. The first part touches on the historical and intellectual context that ‘created’ Marxism, Marx’s notion of historical materialism and the issue of how Marx’s ideas have been received in IR. The second part concentrates on the two strands of Critical Theory that have emerged within IR: one derived from the so-called Frankfurt School and the other from Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci.

The modern challenges to social and political stability. The presentation of the book’s modest proposal.

This chapter argues that queering concepts of literary type provides an approach for cultivating queer readings in the field of early Asian American literature that do not rely on recourse to a search for timeless queer identities. The chapter provides a prospective inventory of queer types within the field of early Asian American literature through readings across five nation/diaspora formations: the Philippines, Korea, Japan, India, and China, with special and initial focus on queer types in the political novel.

What is an international organization? Intergovernmental agreements often create new institutions such as the United Nations which have independent status and some autonomy. This chapter considers how these organizations come into being and how they are studied by scholars of international politics and law. Depending on how one looks at things, an international organization can appear as an actor in world politics, a place where politics happens, or a resource used by others in political fights. These are the roles of actor, forum, and resource. I examine the main scholarly theories that are often applied to understand the function and effects of international organizations in international relations: realism, liberalism, constructivism, and marxism.

This article unpicks William Morris’s relationship to Marxism and the influence of Marxism on Morris’s social and political thought. It looks at Morris’s political activities in the 1880s and 1890s, including his membership of the Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League and the Hammersmith Socialist Society, as well as his political speeches and journalism. Morris was clearly a socialist and described himself as a communist, had read and was influenced by Marx, and was also an active participant in socialist and Marxist debates both in Britain and Europe. But Marxism did not harden into an orthodoxy until the 1890s and has been contested ever since. It is thus very difficult to distinguish Marxist from other socialists in the period of Morris’s political engagement, as many themes were either shared or cut across this distinction. A key issue has been Morris’s utopianism, in particular News from Nowhere, written for the socialist paper Commonweal in 1890. Morris’s utopian method permeates his political essays: this is how it is, this is how it could/should be. This, perhaps, renders Morris more than Marxist, rather than less, in his insistence on keeping the vision of a better world active as an inspiration to political change.

This chapter traces the waning of utopian literature in the 1970s following the end of Keynesianism and the rise of neoliberalism. It argues that the downturn in the rate of profit related to production, and the resulting turn to economic growth predicated on financial speculation, resulted in a crisis for the utopian imagination and its ability to conceive of utopian alternatives to the present. As a result, the critical utopianism of the long 1960s gave way to a new wave of dystopian writings. Although these dystopias echoed the turn to weak utopianism and cognitive mapping in critical theory by convincingly illustrating the negative effects of neoliberalism on economic growth, income inequality, and the social safety net, they often struggled to imagine anything outside of these worsening conditions. The chapter culminates in a consideration of new utopian writing following the 2008 financial crash that foregrounds the socialization of debt.

This chapter explores the interplay between sex and socialism in the Soviet Union, Cold War Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, and Vietnam. It examines how sex was legislated, represented, and managed by the state, placing this analysis within the context of religious beliefs and cultural mores, Westernization and globalization, and generational change. Considering sexuality as both a procreative and a recreative practice, it demonstrates that concerns about regime consolidation, demographic growth, public health, and popular legitimacy, more so than commitment to gender and sexual equality or personal pleasure, shaped state approaches to sex. Yet while the state instrumentalized sex for the purpose of building socialism, some experts were genuinely devoted to enhancing citizens’ knowledge of sexual health and satisfaction, eschewing ideological concerns. Meanwhile, socialist regimes had to contend with traditional values and religious influences, which were often contrary to the modernizing impulses and progressive policies states hoped to institute, and, as socialism wore on, younger generations who supported liberalizing tendencies. They also had to contend with external forces, such as the opening to Western culture. Thus, state policies and representations of sexuality varied across time and space, affecting individuals in different ways.

The chapter traces attitudes of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Marxists toward paid domestic labor and domestic servants. Discursively connecting domestic service with slavery and serfdom, European and Russian radical thinkers saw it as antimodern. Following this line of thinking, the Bolsheviks emphasized the nonproductive nature of servants’ labor and placed them outside of “the modern proletariat.” Only after the active participation of domestic servants in the First Russian Revolution of 1905 did the party began to engage with what was then the largest female occupational group outside of agriculture. The chapter demonstrates that the Bolsheviks had given little thought to the place of paid domestic labor in the new society, anticipating its disappearance. Yet, it also shows that the key elements of the Bolsheviks’ approach to domestic service were present in their prerevolutionary thinking: ambiguity about the class status of servants, paternalistic attitudes toward them as the most backward members of the proletariat, and, most importantly, the vision of society in which housework was women’s work, whether it was paid or unpaid.

Few historians would associate Nicole Loraux with the great Marxist historians who wrote on classical antiquity. Nevertheless, Loraux implicitly presented herself as such, when, in 1981 and, again, in 1993, she made ideology and the imaginary central notions in her work on the funeral oration. This chapter investigates the complex uses of these two ‘re-invented’ notions in The Invention of Athens. In particular, it situates the career of Nicole Loraux within her rich intellectual milieu and teases out how she broke from it. This encompassed Classical Studies because The Invention of Athens, by moving the object of study to the imaginary, was clearly responding to some Marxist readings of antiquity, such as those of Moses Finley and the Italian School. But this milieu also included the French intellectual scene because Loraux, in fact, was always engaged in a dialogue with philosophers and anthropologists, such as Louis Althusser, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis and Pierre Clastres.

This chapter takes stock of the various definitions and valuations the essay has accrued over the course of the history of American literary theory and criticism. Starting with the historical-materialist criticism of the Great Depression era and moving on to the New Criticism of the 1940s and ’50s, then delving into the myriad structuralisms and poststructuralisms of the Cold War and postcommunist eras, before concluding with contemporary critical trends, it tracks the discipline’s trajectory in the American context, all the while zeroing in on the essay’s shifting position therein. The chapter throws into relief the fundamental dialectic between hermetic formalism and committed social criticism that has shaped literary studies in the United States since its rise early in the twentieth century and teases out the way this perennial vacillation has rendered more or less appealing, and more or less useful, the essay as a form and object of analysis.

Since modern tyrannies tend to be ideological in character, they rely heavily on rhetoric or propaganda. This chapter consists of eight speeches that illustrate different ways that rhetoric has been used to foster tyrannical or immoral and violent policies in modern politics. The speakers include Maximilien Robespierre, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Deng Xiaoping.

Beginning with an account of how Marxism fared in two historical contexts of decolonization (South Africa and India), the chapter then focuses on one recent influential mode of Marxist literary analysis: “world-literature” – with a hyphen – as elaborated the by Warwick Research Collective. How does this approach square with the current push for decolonization? In response to that question, the chapter contrasts WReC with claims from current “decolonial theory” to illustrate differences between their presuppositions. In conclusion, the suggestion is that Marxim’s specific contribution contemporary debates on decolonization might be to question tendencies to reify concepts such as “race,” “culture” or the “West” as metaphysical categories. That contribution, in turn, is best received on the understanding that there are experiential dimensions relating to aesthetics, language, race, gender, sexuality and religion that the Marxist framework is ill-equipped to account for in a non-reductive fashion. Hence, it is perhaps the dialectical method that is the enduring lesson of Marxism – a method that may bracket and then reintroduce the Marxist optic in the unending labour of making sense of the world.