The panel explores analytical currency of Marxist theorizing for the present and the future in three historical settings: the sex lives and Civil War battles of the Communist League, the Black Marxist critique of American capitalism, and the British and American historiography in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

In their paper “August Willich and the Queer Futures of Communism,” Angela Zimmerman offers a rereading and critique of Marx’s teleological stage theory of revolution by bringing him in conversation with his radical communist contemporary, August Willich, whose queer and revolutionary practice of Communism got eclipsed by twentieth-century Marxist orthodoxies. Zimmerman argues that Willich’s and the rest of the Communist League’s practice of revolutionary immediatism could be as important for the twenty-first century as it was for the nineteenth. The paper draws on Zimmerman’s current book project, a history of the Civil War as an international working-class revolution with roots in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. The next paper "Abolition Is Another Name for Communism" by Justin Leroy examines the ways that Black socialists, Communists, and Marxists in the US framed the relationship between race and capitalism between the 1880s and 1980s. Leroy argues that their insights offer at once more complex and more useful accounts of how race operates in Marxist histories than the existing shorthand account of racial capitalism ("capitalism has always been racial"). Leroy’s presentation draws on his recent publications and research on histories of racial capitalism. Finally, in her “Marx and Many Lives of Marxism,” Anna Krylova interrogates the present-day mainstream critique of the British and American Marxist schools of social history as simplistic and surpassed approaches to the study of history, largely inattentive to questions of cultural representation and mediation. To counter this account, she argues that the kind of Marxist historical theory that was developed by British and American Marxist scholars in the second half of the twentieth century has played a critical even if unacknowledged—that is, latent—role in the making of contemporary historical theory in the U S. Krylova’s paper is based on her current book project, featuring essays accessing of what has happened to the practice of history after the epistemological turmoil of the 1980s-1990s.

The panel’s chair, Jackson Lears, and discussant, Ronald Grigor Suny, have published widely on postwar Marxist social history and its Gramscian school of historical analysis and will offer yet another critical perspective on the long history of Marxism.