This chapter examines the dialectic of positive and negative utopian tendencies in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy. Critically acclaimed as a landmark series in the British New Weird subgenre, Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004) offer readers rich worldbuilding, blending neo-Victorian steampunk with semi-fascist capitalist oppression. Within the largely negative terrain of Perdido Street Station moments of utopian positivity can nonetheless flourish – most memorably in the inter-species love affair between the scientist protagonist and his insectoid partner. The Scar, which is set on a floating city-state, offers a positive utopian space partly modelled on the social organisation of real-world pirate ships on the eighteenth-century Atlantic. However, it also plays on Ursula Le Guin’s notion of the ‘ambiguous utopia’, with counter-utopian as well as counter-counter-utopian narrative elements. The third novel in the series, Iron Council, sees a transition towards communism, focusing on the political construction of revolutionary utopian ideals. Together, Miéville’s novels present readers with a heady mix of fantastic worldbuilding and Marxist utopian politics, with overt references to the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, and, more recently, the anti-globalisation protests at the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in 1999.

This chapter analyses the utopian possibilities of the British counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Countercultural aesthetics and politics responded to contemporary crises in urban planning, ecological destruction, and fractured identities of nation and class – issues that remain pressing in the twenty-first century. Tracing the origins of post-punk utopianism, the chapter argues that the ambiguity of the British counterculture’s utopian possibilities may be explored via an excavation of its class basis. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, Ernst Bloch, and Herbert Marcuse, the chapter analyses the 1974 BBC TV play Penda’s Fen. It suggests that Penda’s Fen contains conflicting utopian visions, reflecting the differing class factions that comprised the counterculture and anticipated the neoliberal present of twenty-first-century Britain. The chapter concludes by suggesting that this iconic TV play has lessons to teach us in the contemporary moment. Its class politics, which explores homosexual desire between working-class and middle-class characters, offers a utopian image of cross-class solidarity and sexuality set against the backdrop of a mythic vision of Britain.

This chapter asks if there are specifically African varieties of what in the 1990s became known as postcolonialism. Sociologically, academic postcolonialism was a consequence of mobility between the North and the South. Perhaps because of this, it was often received hesitantly in Africa – hence the importance of looking more closely at its localized uptake. Taking Anthony Appiah’s seminal article on postmodernism and postcolonialism as one point of departure, the chapter traces this delicate balance between Africa-focused and outward-oriented thinking in work by David Attwell (South Africa), Inocência Mata (in relation to Angola), and Ana Mafalda Leite (Mozambique), among others. Of importance here is the alternative to Marxist analysis that postcolonialism provided at the time, as well as its critique of nationalism, but also how postcolonialism’s afterlife in Africanist thinking today is registered in the turn to popular and everyday aspects of culture.

The conclusion addresses how to broaden the framework of the three economic enlightenments by examining overlooked or unresolved matters, like the initial conditions of the exchange participants and the role of third parties. Furthermore, it will demonstrate how these three economic enlightenments may face challenges from alternative frameworks rooted in non-Western, Marxist, or feminist perspectives.

This chapter examines Aimé Césaire’s engagement with Marxism from his neglected 1930s writings through his later talks and speeches from the 1950s and 1960s, where he articulates his notion of a “tropical Marxism.” It argues that Césaire takes up and transforms the Marxist concept of alienation to theorize the paralyzing impact of colonialism through assimilation and underdevelopment. This analysis of alienation undergirds the idea of a tropical Marxism, which emphasized the necessity for colonized peoples to integrate Marxism creatively to the particular conditions of their societies. By tracing the theoretical underpinnings of this idea of tropical Marxism through Césaire’s intellectual and political journey first as a student in Paris and then as a representative of Martinique in the French National Assembly, we glean the myriad of ways in which Marxism spoke to the problem of colonialism and therefore constitutes a seminal part of the canon of anticolonial social theory.

This epilogue reflects on the totality of argument of the different chapters of the book, and the common threads uniting them. The epilogue begins by considering what the main epistemic problem of colonialism, heterology, and different ways anticolonial thinkers have attempted to think through this through rethinking premodern thought, Marxism and colonial juridicality. The epilogue also considers questions arising from the colonial presents and concludes by considering how epistemic colonialism may continue to be undone.

This chapter focuses on the role of women teachers and campesinas in the class struggle. Two mass organizations played a critical role in building a combative labor movement: the National Association of Salvadoran Educators and Union of Rural Workers. Women comprised 80 percent of members in the teachers’ association, while significant numbers of campesinas participated in the rural union. By 1975, teachers and peasants joined forces in a revolutionary coalition to overthrow the political and economic system that exploited the entire working class. Many teachers and rural workers joined guerrilla organizations, such as the Popular Liberation Forces, whose cadre helped build mass organizations. Participation in the class struggle led to changes on two fronts. First, it deepened women’s class consciousness and revealed the state’s brutality in crushing the most minimal reforms. Second, the struggle transformed how women saw themselves and their role in changing society. Women confronted sexist expectations that shamed them for working alongside men and prioritizing political participation over domestic work. Fifteen years prior to the outbreak of the revolutionary war in 1980, a multigenerational movement of women had broken with patriarchal tradition. That rupture was fundamental. It facilitated women’s political participation and their increasing militant action that elevated class struggle to unprecedented levels. This gendered history allows us to appreciate what it took to build and sustain the revolutionary mass struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Association of Women of El Salvador, an organization composed of combatants, peasants, and exile, redefined revolution to mean the overthrow of both capitalism and patriarchy. The sites of feminist praxis included guerrilla territories in El Salvador, refugee camps in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and solidarity networks in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the United States. Within the guerrilla territories, AMES members actively participated in community councils, an experiment in popular democracy, and generated a feminist praxis that linked the exigencies of wartime survival to the long-term liberation of women. At the international level, Salvadoran women collaborated with other radical women from Latin America and the United States to push their organizations in more feminist directions.

This chapter engages with an important tradition of Marxist literary criticism – principally via Fredric Jameson – that has insisted on the insufficiencies of the naturalist novel as a vehicle for revolutionary impulses. It takes up Jameson’s claims as a spur to reconsidering the contested politics of Zola’s best-selling strike novel Germinal (1885). The chapter conceives of the strike as a particular vehicle for the idealist imagination that Zola obsessively discredits – casting it as a form of ‘impossibilism’, an epithet applied to the earliest manifestation of French Marxism. Embedded in contemporary schisms on the Left, Zola’s strike novel is shown to negotiate with debates about the ethical and political legitimacy of this weapon of working-class struggle, as well as the figure of the ambitious strike leader. Zola’s critical account of political idealism ultimately entails a set of anxious reflections on the naturalist novel’s own modes of representation, as well as its equivocal sense of political purpose.

Critics misunderstood Lacan’s thought for decades. They interpreted him as a theorist who reduced subjectivity to its social and linguistic determinations. What they missed was his emphasis, following Kant and Hegel, on subjectivity. This is what both Slavoj Žižek and Joan Copjec provide when they burst onto the Lacanian scene in 1989. Their works place the emphasis in Lacan’s theory on the problem of subjectivity insofar as the subject remains irreducible to the social order. They uncover a radical version of Lacan that subsequent theorists pick up in the fields of queer theory, feminism, anti-racism, and Marxism. This version of Lacan remains vibrant to this day with many adherents in many disciplines.

The chapter provides historical and philosophical evidence that Marxist epistemology and historiography of science were largely consistent with the maker’s knowledge tradition that inspired Vico in the eighteenth century. Marxist scholars produced an extraordinary number of historical reconstructions and philosophical analyses resonating with many of the ideas discussed in Chapters 1–3: viz. the conviction that the history of knowledge (as history tout court) is not the history of great geniuses, but the history of collective actions; the belief that consciousness of individual subjects is the product of a given society; the idea that knowledge is more about making and doing than speculating and theorising; the idea that new forms of making and doing, and therefore thinking and imagining, emerge throughout human history and that all knowledge is eminently historical and rooted into specific social relations and material cultures. Scholars as different as Lifshitz or the so-called father of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov; Marxist historians, philosophers, and scientists like Boris Hessen, Nikolai Bukharin, Benjamin Farrington, György Lukács, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and Max Horkheimer (among many others) all subscribed to different versions of praxis epistemology.

Proletarian realism’s aspiration to depict the social totality stresses the causal connections among antagonistically opposed classes in capitalist society, a critical examination of the ideological standpoints accompanying this antagonism, and the working-class struggle for liberation from the yoke of capital. The sense of dialectical possibility informing many works of US proletarian realism – which were largely produced during the Great Depression – reflects the abiding influence of the Bolshevik Revolution. While guided by a sense of the social world as a process in motion, thus “drawing their poetry from the future,” as Marx wrote, works in this genre frequently stress the fetters – material but above all ideological –preventing the proletariat from grasping the social totality in which it is inserted. Proletarian novels deploy a range of techniques, both realist and modernist, to bring to the awareness of the reader historical forces often beyond the ken of individual characters. Realism is thus a matter not just of style and structure but also of epistemology – the text’s aspiration to grasp the social totality is an aspiration toward the truth that will liberate the proletariat from its chains.

This chapter examines the way in which the Holocaust has been brought into conversation with understandings of the modern world, with a strong focus on historical and sociological accounts (though recognizing the place of the Holocaust in postmodern literary and critical theory.) It shows the multiple ways in which concepts of modernization, modernity, and the modern have been deployed, be it to establish the Holocaust’s paradigmatic or normative character, or the reverse. It illustrates the paradoxical character of efforts to highlight the Holocaust’s distinctiveness while harnessing it to a pervasive and generic “modernity.”

This semi-autobiographical essay offers the perspective from the 1970s to the present of a leading historian of Nazi Germany. It shows how a series of paradigms in one way or another obscured the Holocaust, while at the same time underling the importance of the scholarship on the Final Solution that took off in the 1960s. A particular focus of the essay is the debates around fascism and the difficulty of acknowledging the centrality of racism within the fascist model.

This chapter analyzes the ideological roots of social medicine in Latin America, its diffusion through institutional and interpersonal networks, and how they translated into social policy. It argues that Latin American social medicine was a movement with two distinct waves, bridged by a mid-century hiatus. First-wave social medicine – whose protagonists included figures such as Salvador Allende of Chile and Ramón Carrillo in Argentina – had its roots in the scientific hygiene movement, gained strength in the interwar period, and left its imprint on Latin American welfare states by the 1940s. Second-wave social medicine, marked by more explicitly Marxist analytical frameworks, took shape in the early 1970s amidst authoritarian pressures and crystallized institutionally in Latin American Social Medicine Association (ALAMES) (regionally) and Brazilian Association of Collective Health (in Brazil, ABRASCO). A dialectical process links these two waves into a single story: early social medicine demands, once institutionalized in welfare states and the international health-and-development apparatus, led to ineffective bureaucratic routines, which in turn sparked critical reflection, agitation for change, and a new wave of social medicine activism.