The work of Raymond Williams has long been a touchstone for literary critics. But New Left Review’s recent re-publication (Nov-Dec 2018) of “The Future of Marxism,” an essay by Williams that drew little notice when it first appeared in a minor literary journal in 1961, affords a new opportunity to explore a crucial aspect of Williams’ thought: his advocacy of a politics of the “persistently human.” To this end, this panel presents a series of critical responses to “The Future of Marxism” that consider how the “persistently human” has fared in the 60 years since the essay’s initial publication.

Characteristically wide-ranging and perceptive, “The Future of Marxism” not only contains vital contributions to Marxist historiography and social and political theory, but also concretely interprets important developments in world history since the Russian Revolution. However, the essay’s greatest utility for contemporary literary critics lies in its definition of “two dimensions of politics”: a “persistently human” dimension of experience and critical intellectual practice, on the one hand, and the mechanical and ersatz dimension of what Williams calls “the robot’s world,” on the other. This “missing text,” as Perry Anderson writes, not only offers a model for conceptualizing the politics of “fixed points” today, but also occasions a reconsideration of Williams’ enduring intellectual and political commitments.

This panel treats Williams’ two dimensions as a highly transposable analytical framework that can critically illuminate various aspects of our current historical moment. From a range of methodological perspectives, the panelists engage the question of what forms a “politics of being human” might take, applying Williams’ conception of the “persistently human” to post-socialist politics, posthumanism, religion, speculative fiction, and U.S. politics.

The first speaker, Paloma Duong, will take as her point of departure a dialogue between the Raymond Williams of “The Future of Marxism” (2018 [1961]) and that of “Beyond Actually Existing Socialism” (1980). Considering the “persistently human” within a global frame, she will reckon with the rise of British Cultural Studies as an academic discipline obliquely engaged with really existing socialisms, and postsocialist critiques of the communist past and the neoliberal present. Arguing that postsocialist and postcolonial studies of culture can no longer afford to remain separate frameworks of analysis, she prompts us to revisit the history of encounters between Cultural Studies and (post)socialisms in the “Second” and “Third” worlds.

Christine D’Auria will critique strategic contemporary leveragings of Cold War memory in U.S. political rhetoric and thought. With an eye to cultivating and sustaining a dynamic, future-oriented politics of the “persistently human,” she will query the possibilities obtained in rigorous historical contextualization, rejecting robotic invocations of McCarthyism in favor of an analytical framework more capable of accounting for the forms that red-baiting and anti-leftism assume today.

Steven Gotzler will reflect upon the historical comparisons Williams’ essay draws between Christianity and Marxism. He will suggest that the principle of “faith” might be understood as a distinctive feature of Williams’ intellectual style, or what David Scott describes as one’s “way of holding views,” rather than their substance in form and content, arguing that “faith” in this sense— as an element of intellectual style—provides an important grounding for Williams’ political convictions as an independent socialist. Tracing postcolonial critiques of Marxist humanism, he will explore the contradictions and disclosures of “faith,” as Williams invokes and enacts it, and probe the limits of the “persistently human” for intellectual practice today.

Robert Kilpatrick will conclude this panel by reading Williams’ essay alongside a recent work of science fiction, Ken MacLeod’s Corporation Wars trilogy (2016-2017). In these novels, MacLeod brings out a critical necessity left implicit in “The Future of Marxism”: the need to resist reified definitions of the “human” and the “robotic” in favor of historicizing these terms in light of immediate political struggle. MacLeod achieves this by asking readers to come to grips with a future in which a group of newly conscious robots assume the qualities of the “persistently human,” while their putatively human counterparts become dehumanized by a suite of posthuman technologies. Read in conjunction with Williams’ argument, MacLeod’s trilogy clarifies how the human is not an essential value, but a shifting political construction that arises out of specific material conflicts.

Paloma Duong is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at MIT. She researches and teaches courses on culture, media, and political philosophy with a focus on 20th and 21st century Latin America. Her work on digital, participatory, and informal media cultures in Cuba has appeared in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and Art Margins. She is currently completing a manuscript titled Portable Postsocialisms: Culture and Media in 21st century Cuba.

Robert Kilpatrick is a PhD candidate in the Literary and Cultural Studies program at Carnegie Mellon University. He is writing a dissertation on representations of the nuclear family in American fiction published since 1990. His additional interests include science fiction and the short story form, and his writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Christine D’Auria is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Boston University, where she has served as a teaching fellow in the departments of history, political science, art history, and gender, women’s and sexuality studies. She is writing a dissertation on the fiction and film work of the post-Depression Hollywood Left, namely those screenwriters eventually called to testify before the House un-American Activities Committee starting in 1947.

Steven Gotzler is a PhD candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. His research explores the intersections of intellectual culture, labor, and literature during the 20th century. He has published in The Los Angeles Review of Books. He serves as a governing board member for the Cultural Studies Association (CSA). His dissertation examines the emergence of radically expanded notions of “culture” at mid-century as they were mobilized and contested in thought and fiction, art and politics.