Given the centrality of Marxism to Left political imaginaries in modernity, we are interested in its ongoing relevance in different regions of the world. While the last several decades have brought us frequent reflections and debates on the uses and the limitations of various elements of a Marxist analytic, as well as on the relative value of various traditions of Marxism (e.g. Zizek, Hardt and Negri, Traverso, Fraser, Brown), considerably less attention has been paid to the variability of such assessments across geopolitical contexts. Ostensibly generalizing reflections on Marxism today have tended, all too often, to center on Europe and the Global North.

This panel at once hones in on the current political moment -- characterized by financial speculation, the privatization of the remaining commons, the ascendance of new (and old) necropolitical forms of accumulation and governance, and the perennial defeat of Left opposition -- and attempts a more expansive, regionally variegated view of this contemporary moment and the salience of Marxist thought. As Wendy Brown remarks, “an intelligent left today can neither live within nor without Marx’s thought;” how does the form of our ambivalent critical inhabitation change across regional and historical contexts?

Globalized neoliberalism has replicated analogous models of subject formation across the world. In “Being on Brand: Neoliberalism and its Forms of Subjectivation,” Zahid Chaudhary, reflects on the arrival of the figure of the entrepreneur in the Pakistani social imaginary, and on the articulation of this figure with local secular and religious authoritarian tendencies in novels such as How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (Mohsin Hamid) or film such as Zinda Bhaag (Meenu Gaur). Marxism has long insisted on capitalism’s flexible and mobile capacities, its reliance on local differences even as it produces standardized regimes of value from a heterogeneous field of differences. In this paper, Chaudhary explores how competing regimes of value—informal economies, organized crime, and a militarized corporatist state—inflect the itineraries of neoliberal subjectivities in contemporary Pakistani film and literature.

In “‘Stretching Marxism’ Beyond the Global North,” Laura Chrisman explores two lines of approach to Africa: the first through the model of ‘racial capitalism’ associated with the Black diaspora and the legacy of slavery; the second through the model of ‘combined and uneven development.’ Both models produce elisions that are less a theoretical problem than an institutional, disciplinary, semantic, and/or ethnocentric one. Marxism as a mode of critique for analyzing the global operations of capital, its human, cultural, and environmental consequences, has been a critical instrument of African political organizations and cultural producers since the early years of the Communist International. Chrisman’s talk explores ways to reconcile the substantive intellectual contributions of African Marxist and materialist thought with the tendencies outlined above.

Patrick Dove’s contribution, “Una mafia de los pobres: Violence, neo-Primitive Accumulation, and the Question of Ideology Revisited,” addresses the phenomenon of gang violence in Central America. Capitalism has long depended on dispossession and criminalization of alternative ways of life. What is different in the recent proliferation of gang warfare and narco violence south of the U.S. border, Dove suggests, is that death and destruction are no longer the means to an end, but have become a primary mechanism for wealth production. Cartels and gangs have replaced the factory and the office as the paradigmatic space for capitalist production (at least in some parts of the world). What are the implication of this shift for our work as humanists, Dove asks, and more particularly, what is the value of ideology critique in a world where violence no longer feels compelled to cloak itself as the necessary means to a progressive end?

Finally Hang Tu in “The Pathos of the Sinophone Left: Memory and Melancholia in the Postrevolutionary Era” explores leftist pathos as it has manifested in the Chinese and Sinophone literature since the Cultural Revolution. Whereas current discussions of post-Marxism are largely confined to the Euro-American context, this paper explores the manifold literary and intellectual exchanges between the Taiwanese Marxist Chen Yingzhen and the Shanghai-based novelist Wang Anyi to illustrate how left-wing writers come to terms with the ruins of socialist utopia across the Taiwan Strait. In delineating the rifts and affinities between the two writers, Tu examines how their shared melancholia is intertwined with their efforts to confront resignation, guilt, and forgetting in the postrevolutionary era. Rather than dismissing melancholia as a “reactionary” orientation to left-wing politics, Tu considers how leftist melancholia in China is still animated by an emancipatory political promise.