Jacob
Sloan

Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) was perhaps the most well-known and widely read Marxist literary critic of the last 40 years. His passing on September 26 at the age of 90 demands not only remembrances but also a reckoning with the specific kind of Marxist literary criticism Jameson was instrumental in canonizing, especially across the university. In what follows, I return to Jameson’s work – itself fundamental to my own development as a Marxist and a literary critic – in order to con- sider the relationship between mainstream Marxist literary criticism, as much as there can be said to be a mainstream form of it, and Jameson’s practice. By doing so in a comradely but critical way, I hope to carve out some space for discussing not just what Marxist literary criticism tends to look like (because of Jameson) but also what it could or perhaps even ought to look like if we move beyond limited discussions of reading and writing and toward, to use Jameson’s own language, a conception of Marxist literary criticism that takes as its point of departure the attempt to “wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity” in the here and now.1

 Crucially, for Marx, whom Jameson is paraphrasing, the very possibility of this wresting turns on the self-emancipation of the working class and the oppressed from the socio-material conditions that necessitate their exploitation and oppression. Putting it bluntly, perhaps even vulgarly, in his 1864 inaugural address to the Inter- national Workingmen’s Association, Marx writes that “the emancipa- tion of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and mon- opolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule.”

Jameson begins his second book, what Terry Eagleton describes as the “stunning” Marxism and Form (1971),2 with a provocation that itches to be read in the light of Marx’s commitment – real and practical, not just writerly – to self-emancipation:

When the American reader thinks of Marxist literary criticism … it is still the atmosphere of the 1930’s which comes to mind. The burning issues of those days – anti-Nazism, the Popular Front, the relationship between literature and the labor movement, the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, between Marxism and anarchism – generated polemics which we may think back on with nostalgia but which no longer correspond to the conditions of the world today. The criticism practiced then was of a relatively untheoretical, essentially didactic nature, destined more for use in the night school than in the graduate seminar … 3

For anyone who has ever spent any time sifting through literary reviews published in the New Masses, substituting, as they often do, Stalinist orthodoxy for good reading, Jameson’s ground clearing is welcome. So, too, is his insistence, even if given only in the negative, on developing a Marxist literary criticism that “correspond[s] to the conditions of the world today.” And, as Eagleton notes in his obituary for Jameson, the “book’s very title throws down the gauntlet to a dreary lineage of vulgar Marxist criticism.”4

But Jameson’s ground clearing goes well beyond separating wheat from chaff. His dismissal of the night school – here, interestingly, associated not just with Stalinist authoritarianism but also its main anti-Stalinist contender of the period, Trotskyism – and knee-jerk elevation of the graduate seminar (and not, say, the picket line) as the social space in which good, thoughtful Marxism gets done, says a lot about the elitism embedded in Jameson’s conception and practice of Marxist literary criticism. I say this not to damn Jameson, but rather, in a kind of dialectical reversal of his own dialectical reading practices, to chart the ideological limitations of his particular kind of Marxist lit- erary criticism. These limitations are embodied primarily in Jameson’s allergy to the tradition of literary proletarianism, his avoidance throughout his corpus of what we might describe as politically engaged or activist literature, and his conception of narratives as, pri- marily, webs of unconscious manifestations of the political. To diagnose and trace this elitism seems, at first, paradoxical. Jameson wrote not only about high modernist writers but also about pop culture, subject- ing both the high and the low to the same rigorous analyses. There’s something wonderfully democratic and equalitarian about this level- ling. In Jameson’s hands, the hard sci-fi of Phillip K. Dick, the claustro- phobic neo-noir of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, and the pulp of Raymond Chandler are given equal attention, condemned, as they are, to encode the supposedly unportrayable totality of capitalist social relations. To quote Jameson’s essay on Dog Day Afternoon, cultural products, whether high or low, are “revealing symptom[s].”5

However, for a Marxist, Jameson’s inattention to the literature of capitalist exploitation and anti-capitalist organization remains disap- pointing. Jameson’s levelling indexes not only an enviable curiosity about and facility with different kinds of narratives, but, at the same time, a studious avoidance of the real political questions that working-class or proletarian narratives pose. Even when Jameson’s literary criticism does bite the Marxist bullet and deal with intentionally or directly political narratives, it really comes up short. Take, for example, Jameson’s controversial 1986 essay, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.”6 Rather than rehash well- founded and relatively well-known criticisms of an old article, I’d like to critically reassess Jameson’s dismissal, in the essay, of a class- conscious, proletarian novel: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood (1977).7 Far from merely encoding, indexing, or being marked by some abstract conception of the Political (or History or the Real), Ngũgĩ’s novel intentionally attempts to both portray and, by way of its narrative, theorize capitalist exploitation in post-independence Kenya. For Jameson, though, the direct narrative theorization of something like Petals of Blood renders it “impressive but problematical.” Jameson spends one sentence on Ngũgĩ’s novel, only to dismiss it without offer- ing any sort of close reading of its narrative mechanisms. Instead of hearing from Ngũgĩ, an astute critic of Kenyan capitalism, we hear from Jameson: “traditional realism,” like Ngũgĩ’s, “is less effective than the satiric fable.” One Marxist’s opinion is, of course, one Marxist’s opinion. It’s easy enough to put this to bed by saying that Jameson liked what he liked.

As Jaecheol Kim has argued, Jameson’s likes and dislikes in this essay, which are also bound up with a kind of Marxist valuation and an implicit prescription for good Marxist writing and reading, seem to stem from an elitist relation to the literary product, a top-down schema in which it’s the critic and their symptomatic reading, and not the text, at the top. Kim notes that, in Jameson’s essay, this relation between Marxist critic and text takes on the cast of that between the psychoanalyst (the critic) and the analysand (the “third-world” text). Thus, “Jameson’s theory divests the neocolonial national narrative of its own self-interpretive and diagnostic agency by turning the narrative into a psychopathological symptom.”8 Narratives that actively try to theorize the turbulent dynamism of capitalist exploitation, therefore, are necessarily given short shrift. Because they threaten to displace the supposed primacy, and, as Jameson has it, the inevitably higher- order thinking of the critic, they are treated as “problematical.”

And this brings us back to Jameson’s automatic equation of the activist, community-rooted, worker-facing night school with bad theory, or, as he puts it, “vulgar Marxism.” This is bad history.9 It’s also bad Marxism. An analogous argument would be to say that rank-and-file union activity is problematical because it somehow breaks from the top-down pronouncements of the union bureaucrats or party leaders, the only ones who can read the symptoms of the present situation. But perhaps this isn’t fair: Jameson may very well have been on the right side in any number of on-the-ground fights. However, his literary critical praxis fails to take seriously cultural products that take both the lived experience of capitalist exploitation and the possibility of organizing against it as their point of departure. These cultural products do exist, in spite of Jameson’s (and far too many contemporary Marxist literary critics’) selective inattention.

It is telling that, in the “Third World” essay, Jameson both fails to offer a reading of Ngũgĩ’s novel and its supposed failure to articulate capitalist social relations in the Global South and also chooses the fables of the Senegalese proletarian novelist and filmmaker, Ousmane Sembène, without paying any attention to Sembène’s directly political masterpiece, God’s Bits of Wood (1960), a historical novel that chronicles working-class self-activity and self-education during the 1947–48 Dakar-Niger railway strike. Far from some sort of vulgar portrayal of history, Sembène’s novel reimagines the lived experience of the strike in order to limn the difficulties and, more importantly, the radical possibilities that can explode when workers push back against the terms of their exploitation.

God’s Bits seethes with proletarian possibility. Employing a strik- ingly filmic narrative modality, Sembène moves between zooming in on individual characters – involved in, affected by, or resistant to – the strike. But the novel also zooms out, progressively revealing the world in which these characters are enmeshed and in which they make themselves, even if not under the conditions of their own choos- ing. This is a world beset not only by settler colonialism and its attend- ant processes of racialization. It is also one brimming with nascent possibilities. Strikingly, even as Sembène portrays the strike as a struggle at the point of production, God’s Bits moves well beyond the railyard and into the homes of our workers. Perhaps most importantly, Sembène’s novel also seeks to theorize the relationship between class struggle (in its most traditional form, the strike) and gender liberation. As Senegalese rail workers suffer through a protracted strike, capital’s carelessness in relation to social reproduction comes to the fore. And so, too, do the Senegalese women who perform the gendered work of social reproduction. Coming up against a railway company that shuts off their water supply and attempts to starve folks back to work, those performing the work of reproduction step into the fray, making the strike their own.

The strike creates ruptures, the rise of radically new social relations and forms of experimental collectivity. Sembène looks back at this struggle then and makes it live, fictionalizes it, in order to look forward. His novel makes clear that it is neither the French colonizer nor Senegalese bourgeoisie – nor, it must be noted, the ruling classes of other nations – but rather Senegalese proletarians and their allies who can force through true liberation. However, Sembène also refuses to make a single historical event into a one-and-done panacea, leaving those of us who struggle for a humanized world with the realization that there is much to be done, and that what seem to be small struggles against capital can overwhelm their supposed boundaries, pointing the way toward human liberation.

God’s Bits of Wood and Petals of Blood are not the only novels of working-class life that theorize capitalist social relations and radical organization from below. Good proletarian literature is everywhere: We could just as easily turn to Kang Kyŏng-ae’s magisterially intricate From Wŏnso Pond (1934), which theorizes, by way of its narrative move- ment and a sophisticated technique of narrative mirroring, the identity and difference of capitalist exploitation and oppression in the colonial Korean countryside and city during the years of the Japanese occu- pation. However, by assembling a unitary theory of capitalist social relations, especially in relation to gender, Kang develops a theory of gender liberation as dependent on class struggle and of class struggle as dependent on gender liberation.

Jameson’s claim, that capitalism, the totality as we know it, is “unrepresentable” is, to employ Jameson’s own phrase, ultimately a “strategy of containment.”10 And it is one that routes us back to his initial literary-critical preemption. If capitalist social relations are unre- presentable, if they can only be grasped via the symptom, then it is ultimately with the university-based literary critic that power resides. However, the deification of the academic is only one of the weaknesses of Jameson’s method. Contained yet again, Jameson’s Marxist literary criticism returns us always and inevitably to the realm of ideology. If we can only grasp, and if texts can only represent, history by way of the slip or the symptom, then these representations catapult us back to the sign. History, he tells us here, remains an “absent cause,” because it is necessarily outside of language.11

Not entirely wrongheaded, Jameson’s statement articulates a base- line – humans use language to represent the world to ourselves and others, but that world is not reducible to language – only to fetishize it out of all proportion: language, taking the form of narrative, must necessarily fail to represent history, and is therefore only useful to us as a tapestry of symptoms.

An astute dialectician, Jameson’s thought often threatens to rend this conceptual straightjacket from within. But it never quite gets there. A lot of this has to do with Jameson’s relatively uncritical mobilization of Louis Althusser’s distinction between Marxist science and individual or, as Jameson puts it, existential experience, linked only and inevitably by ideology. For Jameson, the gap between the political Imaginary and the political Real can only ever be bridged by way of ideology. And, it seems, all one can do with manifestations of ideology is to articulate the ways in which they are “distinct in different historical situations.”12

But, in spite of statements to the contrary, Jameson’s vision discloses a startlingly vulgar Marxism. Base and superstructure can only be united by way of a kind of ideological relation. Those human beings who write narratives cannot represent the historical conditions that structure their existential reality in any way that attempts diagno- sis. The only real difference between Jameson’s thought and classic base-superstructure models of individual and social experience is that Jameson privileges the superstructure over the economic base, which can only be written about abstractly, known but never rep- resented. It remains unclear how these supposedly distinct acts – representation and knowing – can be decoupled. The only possible relation to narrative is to historicize, which means not merely to situate it in its historical circumstances of production, but rather to read it as unconscious symptom of history.13 This or that moment of history, or this or that mode of production, generates this or that ideological response. What drops out here are the unequal social relations that constitute and are continually reproduced by capitalism. If these can only be grasped abstractly, they can be left to the historian or soci- ologist or economist. However, it is unclear, in Jameson’s formulation, here and throughout his work, how the social or structural and existential interact other than by way of the latter mechanically reflecting the former.14

Thus, Jameson preemptively narrows the possibilities of Marxist literary criticism, which can only intervene, he suggests, by way of symptomatic reading, and of narrative itself, which cannot investi- gate but can only manifest capitalist contradictions at the level of the unconscious. In Jameson’s narrative of Marxist literary criticism, the critic swoops in, a deus ex machina, to tell us what it all means. Perhaps this is why there are so few mentions of narratives of class struggle across his work. To pay attention to these narratives and their attempts to investigate the capitalist mode of production as a dynamic and turbulent totality, producing both identity and differ- ence, would put the lie to many of Jameson’s assumptions about what literary texts and cultural products can intentionally do and have intentionally done.

None of this is to say that symptomatic reading isn’t useful or necessary: It is, of course, even if only to diagnose bullshit. And looking beyond the narrative itself, to history and the reality of the socio-material, in order to understand how texts grow out of and attempt to intervene in this reality is useful and necessary, too. My unease with Jameson’s work isn’t rooted in a misunderstanding of it as too negative, too ruthlessly critical. For all the attention to strategies of containment and the like, Jameson dialectically discloses the “Utopian or transcendent potential … of even the most degraded types of mass culture” throughout his corpus. It is telling, however, that even in these moments that point to thinking (or perhaps even acting) differently, the notion of the text or the cultural product swells to encompass all else. In his pathbreaking “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979), for example, Jameson lays out his “hypothesis”:

that the works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well: they cannot manip- ulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated.15

The inequality produced and reproduced by capitalist social relations obviously demands forms of narrative legitimization. Here, though, Jameson gives cultural products far too much power. What keeps capitalism going is not that cultural products “manipulate” rela- tively passive subjects but that dispossessed proletarians are compelled to offer themselves up for exploitation at the hands of capitalists in order to purchase their means of subsistence on the market. These social relations are not reducible to ideological conditioning.

By lodging the utopian potentiality of texts squarely within their political unconscious, Jameson ultimately confines the utopian itself to the realm of ideology, to the text, sign, or the cultural product. Perhaps this isn’t a bad thing. As Hal Draper notes in “The Two Souls of Socialism,” Marx was critical of “Utopianism,” and developed his thought in opposition to it, because, in all of its various manifestations, it “was elitist and anti-democratic to the core”:

it looked to the prescription of a prefabricated model, the dreaming-up of a plan to be willed into existence. Above all, it was inherently hostile to the very idea of transforming society from below, by the upsetting intervention of freedom-seeking masses, even where it finally accepted recourse to the instrument of a mass movement for pressure upon the Tops. In the socialist movement as it developed before Marx, nowhere did the line of the Socialist Idea intersect the line of Democracy-from-Below.

But Marx and Engels didn’t just sit with symptomatic reading or critique. As Draper explains, Marx’s Marxism “came into being in self-conscious struggle against the advocates of the Educational Dictatorship, the Savior-Dictators, the revolutionary elitists, the communist authoritarians, as well as the philanthropic do-gooders and bourgeois liberals.”16 Marx’s Marxism roots itself, then, in actually existing struggle, in “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”17 Unfortunately, Jameson has very little to say about these “premises now in existence.” If the utopian dimension of the text, once excavated, reveals the human desire to wrest freedom from necessity, this desire remains abstract in Jameson’s work.

There’s a lot to be said for Jameson’s refusal to collapse text into world and world into text. Unlike any number of literary and cultural critics, he never confuses textual activity with on-the-ground praxis. However, Jameson creates a bifurcation between the narrative text and the world. His Marxist literary criticism can intervene but only by way of the critic telling us what to think, by situating the text for us. The narrative text itself is never presented as that which might very well be able to engage deeply and theoretically with capitalist social relations, which themselves might just be representable. But politically radical narrative texts also return us to the socio-material. And they also refuse to collapse text and history, narrative and praxis. However, if texts can never hope to represent the world, we might as well ignore the ones that try to do so from a revolutionary socialist perspective and burrow back into the idea of text as agency.

If class struggle is the project of Marxism and thus of Marxist literary criticism, as it should be, wouldn’t it be more useful to both read closely and privilege those texts that attempt to actively portray and theorize capitalist social relations and the concrete utopian possibility of class struggle from below? These kinds of evaluative questions, once a hallmark of Marxist literary criticism, have been banished, relegated to a past of night schools. And yet, isn’t that also, at least before the adoption of the Popular Front, a past of somewhat effective class struggle?18 At the same time, we can also point to a night school mentality emerging in situations in which struggle not only becomes a viable possibility but, frankly, in moments when it just isn’t ignored or subsumed to the act of academic critique. The argument usually goes something like this: If all texts are, in spite of them- selves or unconsciously or inevitably, as political as all other texts, then we might as well focus on whatever we want. All texts are political, of course. It’s fine to say so, and it’s necessary to read and critique all cultural and narrative products. But there’s ultimately something inadequate about this position. If the task for the Left today is to rebuild the kind of “infrastructures of dissent” and solidarity that once made for militant labor and social movements, perhaps we should devote some amount of time to thinking seriously about texts that use narrative to investigate and make sense of capitalist exploitation and its attendant forms of oppression, on the one hand, and, on the other, that attempt to portray (not just encode) not only the process (and possible success) but also the real obstacles to organizing militancy.19

Jameson didn’t create this state of affairs, of course. (Such a statement would be both stupid and idealist.) We can find intellectual precursors in the work of Frankfurt School theorists like Theodor Adorno.20 And, perhaps more importantly, Jameson was often writing in the face of the collapse of New Left social movements and in the midst of the decades-long decline of the labor movement. It is hard to imagine a militant Marxist literary criticism that focuses on, well, militancy when that option doesn’t seem to be on the table. Over- hanging all of this, too, is the pall of Stalinism. Writers focused on working-class experience, especially in the U.S., were often, in one way or another, associated with an increasingly Stalinized Communist Party. But this doesn’t make them unreadable. And it doesn’t mean that their works inevitably can’t or won’t wrestle with and portray issues of working-class life and militant mobilization that the Left is still trying to understand and navigate. Consider Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children (US 1938/40), especially the revised 1940 edition. Wright wrote the novellas that make up this collection well before his official break with the CP in 1941. But they’re not at all staid propaganda pieces. Indeed, while Wright celebrates the Party’s involvement in organizing the unemployed and its committed anti- racism, these are not lies.21 Similarly, the final two novellas in Wright’s collection, “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star,” articulate the centrality of anti-racism to serious class struggle and revolutionary possibility. “Bright and Morning Star,” stages a con- frontation between the color-blind African American Communist, Johnny Boy, and his Communist mother, Sue, who counsels attention to the material realities of racism. Sue ends up right. Wright seems to sense the Party’s Popular Front-era abandonment of anti-racism, here narratively theorizing an alternative Left-wing politics that insists on the importance of anti-racist organizing. The opening sketch, Wright’s “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” provides a clear material grounding for Wright’s commitment to anti-racism, portraying the moment in which young Richard is run off the job by two white co- workers who see him as underpaid competition.

Not all proletarian novels, even those by U.S. writers, even those produced in some relation to Stalinism, suffer from the vulgar and mechan- ical deployment of “Marxism” that we see in something like Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933), in which the movement of working people is reduced, undialectically, to a near-automatic vitalism. Nor do all proletarian novels uncritically celebrate Stalinism and the Soviet Union like Myra Page’s Moscow Yankee (1935). Often, proletarian novels are committed to portraying the difficulties of working-class experience, including possible failures of organization. And just as often, we can learn serious lessons from novels that pay attention to the dynamics of working-class organizing, even if they were produced by folks who should’ve made different, better political decisions. The same can be said of the economic thought of Henryk Grossman, for instance, which flew in the face of Stalinist orthodoxy and to which Grossman remained committed, even when uncritically supporting and working within Stali- nist organizations.22 It’s also the case that proletarian writers often develop, both politically and narratively: Takiji Kobayashi’s Crab Cannery Ship (Japan, 1929) presents a relatively mechanistic vision of class struggle. Indeed, in trying to fashion a collective protagonist, the novel almost leaps over the very existential mediation (the individual) that Jameson finds so important. Works written only a few years later, however – especially the critique of rural-urban capitalism and primitive accumulation, The Absentee Landlord (1930), and Yasuko (1931), which follows the (self-)education of a young woman worker, with an eye toward the erotic dimensions of organizing and the relationship between capitalist exploitation and gender oppression, provide a kind of unitary theory of capitalist social relations in Japan by way of narratives of working-class individuals attempting to build revolutionary sociality. These novels are old. But there are newer examples. In the face of them, Jameson’s conception of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism, an index of our supposed inability to grasp history, looks far too much like a matter of individual taste, a penchant for a par- ticular type of cultural product read onto the undefined historical period of “late capitalism.”23 Jameson says that in this moment, we are “con- demned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which remains forever out of reach.” But Jameson’s prime example is the work of E.L. Doctorow, not the linked-story novel of African American steelworkers and their families in Western NY that is Connie Porter’s All-Bright Court (1986). Similarly, only two years after the publication of Postmodernism, Leslie Feinberg published hir queer working-class fictional autobiography-cum-historical novel, Stone Butch Blues (US, 1993). Both novels cast a critical eye toward historical progress, Porter tracing the failure to achieve an end to racial oppression to the long collapse of the labor movement into business unionism and Feinberg por- traying the failure of queer liberation up against ongoing capitalist coer- cion. Porter doesn’t give us much of a way forward, but Feinberg’s book concludes with hir protagonist, Jess, after having experienced the schools of picket lines and rank-and-file organizing, bursting forth as a member of the militant minority with an expansive but unitary vision of workplace and class struggle. After encountering and speaking at a queer rally earlier that day, Jess tells Duffy, a former union comrade, the following: “I wanted to tell them how it was in the plants, how when a contract’s almost up management works overtime trying to divide everybody. I didn’t know if they’d get what I meant if I said it took the whole member- ship to win the strike.”24 Jess and Duffy both acknowledge that change is precarious and that the project of building toward it will be a slow process of radical involvement, not just top-down interpretation. Feinberg goes well beyond merely presenting with symptoms. Instead, ze hits us with theory, not just adding the incomplete and ongoing struggle for queer lib- eration to working-class struggle, or vice versa, but pointing to their indis- soluble linkage. So long as capital stands, Stone Butch Blues tells us, it will wreak havoc on queer proletarians.

These two proletarian historical novels recenter the necessity of Left recomposition. But it seems that any number of Marxist literary critics would rather spend their time thinking of other things. For example, in a recent article published by Spectre, Robert T. Tally, Jr. argues that Marxist literary criticism, specifically of the fantasy genre and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, has become particularly urgent. Echoing Jameson on the utopian impulse, Tally argues that “Marxist approaches to Tolkien are all the more necessary today, both to illumi- nate the potentially radical value of his work and to stand athwart the neofascists who wish to arrogate Tolkien to themselves.”25

Such a stance is very much one of the legacies of Jameson’s par- ticular practice of Marxist literary criticism. And it is, to a certain extent, all well and good. However, Tally’s calls for the urgency, even necessity, of Marxist fantasy criticism, particularly in order to “stand athwart the neofascists,” strike me as unsatisfactory and concerningly idealist. Though it may be able to read Tolkien against the grain, dialectically, with an eye toward subsurface radical potentialities, it is beyond unlikely that Marxist (fantasy) criticism will do much of anything up against neofascism. The far right is not going to be persuaded to dislike The Hobbit. And, even if they could be, they would still be a reactionary force that we need to organize against in the material world. On the other hand, (neo)fascism’s (or, perhaps better, the hard-right’s) lifeblood is not Tolkien or their misunderstanding of his work. It is, rather, the profound political crisis in which we find ourselves – a crisis that, as Charlie Post puts it, “flow[s] from the social devastation wrought by the ongoing crisis of capitalism that began with the 2008 global recession, and from the failure of the traditional Left, labor and social movements to pose a social and political alternative.”26

If the task before Marxists is to rebuild the Left as a fighting force and a political alternative, it is far more urgent and necessary for Marxist literary critics to bring the “full force of dialectical criticism” to texts that attempt to grapple with and portray, perhaps even narratively theorize, the real movement on which Marx and Engels were so keen. Rather than thinking of this stance as emerging from a “facile moralism” or an authoritarian, prescriptive, fusty Marxist stance in relation to literature and literary valuation, we should think of it as a kind of literary taskism.27 In this uneven, unguaranteed project of building socialist consciousness, some tasks are more urgent and necessary than others at certain moments.

There is a rich, global literary tradition that emerges from and attempts to portray the on-the-ground, lived experience of class struggle, not at the expense of theory but rather as a narrativized form of it that unites the existential and the structural and, indeed, sees these two poles as co-constitutive. Rather than privileging “the literature of alterity,” then, and spending pages reading it against the grain, Marxist literary critics should return to the literature of class struggle. It still has much to teach us. While texts a little further removed from reality may, in Tally’s Jamesonian formulation, “empower the imagination to think of the world differently,” it bears repeating that Marx was famously averse to “writing recipes … for the cook-shops of the future,” preferring, instead, to grasp that which was emergent in both present and past struggles for a humanized world.28

In thinking about different worlds, Jameson turns largely to science fiction, and Tally turns to fantasy. Both of these turns, however, provide us with little of sense how to actually get to a different world. There have often been attempts to root this turn to alterity in Marx’s theoretical work. Tally does so, arguing that Marx “explored the unreality of the so-called ‘reality’ that obscures the true social relations in societies organized under the capitalist mode of production.” However, there’s a problematic – indeed, I think, politically confused and confusing – conflation going on here. It’s an all too common one when it comes to Marx’s work more generally. Readers of Marx often stop short at Capital, Volume I’s “dancing table.” As Marx writes, relatively early on in the book, when a table “emerges as a commodity … [i]t not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”29 What Marx grasps here is a symptom of capitalist social relations. In this way, the dancing table as dancing table, as alterity, tells us very little. Instead, it throws up a mystery that can only be clarified by way of a lengthy analysis. Marx doesn’t stick with the dancing table but rather pro- ceeds to the lived realities of class struggle, of working days; the pro- duction of surplus value through exploitation that appears, but is not, free; and the originary and ongoing act of primitive accumulation through mass dispossession.

These social relations are largely absent from Jameson’s brand of Marxist literary criticism. On the one hand are the existential manifes- tations of capitalism. On the other, the supposedly unrepresentable totality, often reduced to abstraction.30 But Marx and Engels place a political and theoretical premium on the history and lived experience of class struggle: Communists, they argue, “merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.”31 It is in the warp and weft of this actual historical movement that class consciousness can perhaps develop. But theoretical mediation is central. Lived experience without direction and interpretation collapses into the mere enumeration of facts. The narratives I’ve invoked above, and the ones I’ll turn to by way of conclusion, do this work, theorizing lived experience by portraying it. These cultural products, then, perform the work – at the literary level, which is, indeed, a level far too circumscribed to ever replace on-the-ground action, theory, and education – of a kind of narrative vanguard. They ground themselves in the lived detail of class struggle in order to make sense of it, not just in an abstract way, but rather, to borrow from Himani Bannerji, in a way that does justice to the lived simultaneity of capitalist exploitation and its attendant forms of oppression. Bannerji’s call for a “politics … that conceives social formations as complex, contradictory, and inclusive phenomena of social interaction” are modeled by the best of proletar- ian narratives.32

Feinberg’s Jess is not just queer but also, like most folks, working class, dispossessed and dependent on the wage. Wright’s African American characters, similarly, are not only laborers but also live the realities of socio-material inequality through its racialization. Given that capitalism must necessarily legitimize the inequalities it produces, racial and gender oppression, not to mention other forms of supposedly identity-based oppression, remain crucial, material social relations. As Bannerji puts it, “a trade union cannot properly be said to be an organization for class struggle if it only thinks of class in econ- omic terms without broadening the concept of class to include ‘race’ and gender in its intrinsic formative definition,” and if it does not “make its understanding actionable on this socially composite ground of class.”33 Nor does this stop at the bounds of race and gender in the so-called Global North. As the Palestinian historical novelist Sahar Khalifeh has made clear through her grand historical cycle, and especially in her proletarian masterpiece Wild Thorns (1976), any conception of class struggle that decenters anti-imperialism in favor of some sort of broad alliance, or that leaves the tasks of anti- imperialism to this or that ruling class, is bound to fail.34 Similarly, Khalifeh has articulated throughout her work, and especially in her novel of Palestinian women’s involvement in the First Intifada, Passage to the Plaza (1990) that explosions of resistance can and often do create openings for the emergence of other struggles and radically new forms of agency.

These narratives of class struggle burst from the page, diagnosing the world for what it is and, at the same time, through their accounts of working-class agency, figuring forth actual possibility. The struggles they chronicle are not over and cannot be contained. Even when fictional, they offer us, as all incomplete struggles do, lessons in organizing by treating mass disruptive action and solidarity as real, even if not inevitable or inevitably successful, possibilities. I’m sure Jameson would have agreed with the capacious formulations of class and class struggle that emerge from these novels of working-class life. But he doesn’t deal with them or with anything like them. Perhaps they’re too close to the vulgar ambitions of those contemptible Marxist night schools – namely, developing real revolutionary possibility from below. But this endeavor, the backbone of revolutionary socialist possibility, goes well beyond graduate seminar rooms. Even  for Marxist literary critics, it is a question of the streets and what we do in them.

  1. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 2002), 3. Jameson’s terminology descends from Marx: “Freedom … can only consist in socialized men, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity as its basis.” Karl Marx, Capital, Volume Three, https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/capital/vol3-ch48.htm.
  2. Terry Eagleton, “Fredric Jameson, 1934–2024,” Verso, https://bit.ly/47Pb36C.
  3.  Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: 20th-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Prin- ceton: Princeton UP, 1971), ix.
  4.  Eagleton, “Fredric Jameson
  5. Fredric Jameson, “Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film,” College English 38(8) (1977) 858–859.
  6. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15(1) (1986), 65–88.
  7. See, for example, Aijaz Ahmad’s brilliant “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” Social Text 17(1) (1987) 3–25.

  8. Jaecheol Kim, “Cognitive Cartography in the Neocolonial World: Jameson’s ‘Third- World Literature’ and Ngũgĩ’s Petals of Blood,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 55(2) (2013), 184–206.

  9. Avery Wear and James Boyle, “Worker and Popular Education,” Tempest, June 9, 2021, https://tempestmag.org/2021/06/worker-and-popular-education/.

  10. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 37–38.

  11. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 20. Jameson elaborates, “history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political uncon- scious.” Here, the link between Jameson’s celebrated style, chock full of near endless elaboration or allusion, and his own Marxist reading practice comes to the fore. Pay attention, for instance, to the way in which the obvious (that history that has passed cannot be reexperienced directly but must be textually or narra- tively mediated) morphs into the ground on which Jameson’s method of reading rests: history is only textually available and therefore can only be grasped textually. The  narratives  of  history  transubstantiate,  with  no  friction,  into the “narrativizations” of history “in the political unconscious.” So, text becomes uncon- scious, narrative becomes only an unconscious act, and we hide behind Hegel’s owl of Minerva. God forbid we read the past in order to enter the present, or that we read the present as history in the making so that we may attempt to bend it, as far as possible, to our will. The ground of change becomes the seminar room or the office chair, not the workplace or the anti-imperialist demonstration. It is not just that the academe takes on gargantuan proportions in this conception of class struggle as reading, but also that it creates a self-fulfilling circle. Jameson preempts the very possibility of an outside. There is no struggle here, no lived experience, ongoing or past, but only the residue of the abstract master narrative (whether Jameson denies this or not) of wresting Freedom from Necessity. Everything has the same allegorical meaning. Joseph Conrad the racist scales up to the same struggle, just as does everyone else. But this isn’t how class struggle works. People do grasp history. They do attempt to throw themselves into it. If they didn’t, nothing would ever happen. Because Jameson refuses this structural-agen- tial reality, and the lived experience of capitalist exploitation and the struggle against it, the only way forward is to read texts. And if history is ungraspable anyway, we can just read forever. Thus, Jameson’s textual flourishes proliferate. Qualifiers pile up. Clauses beget clauses. There is no real outside to the text for Jameson, no matter what he says. And so text only ever moves on to more text.

  12. The full bit runs as follows:
    What is affirmed is not that we cannot know the world and its totality in some abstract or "scientific" way. Marxian "science" provides just such a way of knowing and conceptualizing the world abstractly, in the sense in which, for example, Mandel’s great book offers a rich and elaborated knowledge of that global world system, of which it has never been said here that it was unknow- able but merely that it was unrepresentable, which is a very different matter. The Althusserian formula, in other words, designates a gap, a rift, between existential experience and scientific knowledge. Ideology has then the function of somehow inventing a way of articulating those two distinct dimensions with each other. What a historicist view of this definition would want to add is that such coordination, the production of functioning and living ideologies, is distinct in different historical situations, and, above all, that there may be historical situations in which it is not possible at all-and this would seem to be our situation in the current crisis.
    Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991), 53.
  13. Of course, historicizing is, as Jameson has it, one of the most profound acts the Marxist literary critic can perform. However, this historicizing often leads us into relatively mechanistic equations: this form of writing, kind of cultural production, conception of history, idea, or what have you equals or emerges as the symptom of the moment. But the way in which Jameson reads what he describes, across his work and in varied ways, the inability to understand or portray history back onto this or that specific historical moment lets left-wing movements off the hook. Often, it sounds something like those theories of left weakness that blame deindus- trialization, secular stagnation, or capital’s (terminal) exhaustion for the weakness of the labor movement rather than the years of labor-management compromises and bureaucratic business unionism that destroyed it from within. For more on the failures, empirical and conceptual, of these accounts, see the following: Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (London: Verso, 1988); Moody, “Organize. Strike. Organize” Jacobin, May 22, 2018, https://jacobin.com/ 2018/05/riot-strike-riot-joshua-clover-review; Matthew Cole, “Political Choices Undermined the Workers’ Movement, Not Deindustrialization,” Jacobin, November 11, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/11/workers-labor-movement-deindustrializa tion-aaron-benanav-neoliberal-economy.

  14. For a critique of Althusserianism and its adoption of a rigid, vulgar base-superstruc- ture model, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Base and Superstructure,” in Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 2016), 49–75.

  15. Fredric Jameson “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” in Signatures of the Visible

  16. Hal Draper, “The Two Souls of Socialism,” https://www.Marxists.org/archive/ draper/1966/twosouls/3-marx.htm.

  17. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, https://www.Marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm.

  18. Charlie Post, “The Popular Front: Rethinking CPUSA History,” Against the Current63(1) (1996), https://againstthecurrent.org/atc063/p2363/.

  19. Alan Sears, The Next New Left: A History of the Future (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2014), 4–6.

  20. See especially Adorno’s work on Beckett. Theodor Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in Notes to Literature, Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 241–275.

  21. Bryan D. Palmer notes that the “Stalinization of the American Communist move- ment was … a complex process, in which many self-sacrificing, self-identified revo- lutionaries combined honorable acts with repugnant ones.” Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928–38 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2023), xv; See also Michael Goldfield, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: The Pluses and Minuses of the Communist Party,” in The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Oxford UP, 2020) 331–369.

  22. Rick Kuhn, “Economic Crisis, Henryk Grossman and the Responsibility of Social- ists” Historical Materialism 17(2) (2009) 3–34.

  23. Kim Moody, “Capitalism Was Always Like This,” Jacobin, June 2, 2020, https:// jacobin.com/2020/06/moody-benanav-automation-capitalism-employment.

  24. Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (Ithaca: Firebrand, 1993), 299.

  25. Robert T. Tally, Jr., “Tolkien’s Deplorable Cultus: Right-Wing Hobbit Enthusiasts and the Urgency of Marxist Criticism in Fantasy,” Spectre, August 20, 2024, https://spectrejournal.com/tolkiens-deplorable-cultus/.

  26. Charlie Post, “The Far Right Today,” Tempest, April 19, 2023, https://tempestmag. org/2023/04/the-far-right-today/.

  27. I borrow the term from Kim Moody, who borrows it from Lars T. Lih. Moody, “The Rank & File Strategy and the New Socialist Movement,” Spectre, December 20, 2020, https://spectrejournal.com/the-rank-file-strategy-and-the-new-socialist-movement/; Lih, “Why Did Marx Declare the Permanent Revolution?—The Tactical Principles of the Manifesto” Historical Materialism 28(3) (2020) 39–75.

  28. Karl Marx, Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital, Volume One, https://www.Marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm.

  29. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, https://www.Marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ 1867-c1/ch01.htm.

  30. For Jameson, this totality often takes the form of unelaborated abstractions. Take the following two examples: (1) late capitalism, invoked in Postmodernism, but without any rigorous definition of what makes it late or any different from earlier capital- isms; and (2) multinational capitalism, invoked in the “Third-World Literature” essay, but left mostly undefined and looking a lot like that long-debunked vision of a singular, multinational capitalist class working in concert rather than the reality of dynamic and turbulent, often war-like, capitalist competition. The point here isn’t that Jameson doesn’t understand economics, or that he doesn’t under- stand them as I would like him to, but rather that these historical and economic cat- egories are often invoked without being adequately elaborated or, more importantly, backed up by evidence that goes beyond pronouncement.

  31. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, https://www.Marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm.

  32. Bannerji, “Building from Marx: Reflections on ‘Race,’ Gender, and Class,” in The Ideological Condition (Chicago: Haymarket, 2020), 6.