Volume 32, Number 1, Spring 2018 • Uneveness Published twice yearly, Mediations is the journal of the Marxist Literary Group. We publish dossiers of translated material on special topics and peer-reviewed general issues, usually in alternation. General inquiries and submissions should be directed to [email protected]. We invite scholarly contributions across disciplines on any topic that engages seriously with the Marxist tradition. Manuscripts received will be taken to be original, unpublished work not under consideration elsewhere. Articles should be submitted electronically in a widely-used format. Manuscripts should not exceed reasonable article length, and should be accompanied by an abstract of up to 300 words, including six keywords. Articles will be published in MLA endnote format, and should be submitted with the author’s name and affiliation on a separate cover page to facilitate blind peer review. 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For archives and further information, visit http://www.mediationsjournal.org Cover image: Public Domain This selection © 2019 by Mediations Mediations 32.1, Fall 2018 Uneveness i Editors’ Note 1 Stephen Shapiro and Neil Lazarus: Translatability, Combined Unevenness, and World Literature in Antonio Gramsci 37 Bret Benjamin: Developmental Aspiration at the End of Accumulation: The New International Economic Order and the Antinomies of the Bandung Era 71 Malcom Read: Explorations of the Political/Ideological Unconscious: Fredric Jameson and Juan Carlos Rodríguez 95 Sourayan Mookerjea: Accumulated Violence, or, the Wars of Exploitation: Notes Toward a Post-Western Marxism Reviews 115 Sofia Cutler: Small and Subaltern Cosmopolitanisms 123 Myka Tucker-Abramson: The Financial Imaginary of the American Middle Class? 135 Contributors “Editors’ Note.” Mediations 32.1 (Fall 2018) i-ii. www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/editors-note-vol-32-no-1 Editors’ Note Since at least 2016 we have witnessed globally a significant return to the rhetoric of the nation as the horizon of the political imagination. This is true on the Right, which has seen tremendous political gains in some of the world’s largest economies: England, Germany, France, the United States, and Brazil. It is perhaps equally true for the Left where nationalism has become a key rallying point for workers — a turn that has, no doubt, helped the Right consolidate its power. Against this trend, this collection of essays encourages our readers to think about how inequality, exploitation, and structural violence has gone global. The issue begins with an essay by Stephen Shapiro and Neil Lazarus, which couples the importance of linguistic theory and translation to Antonio Gramsci’s Marxism to ongoing debates about the world-literary system. They are interested in particular in “the general conceptual affinity” between “combined and uneven development” and Gramsci’s thinking about “the politicized convergence of heterogeneous social groups.” In their view, translatability — or the “political activity that involved pirating, modularization, appropriation, refunctioning, etc.” — rather than mere “translation” is better suited to the expansion of the conditions of possibility within Marxism. “What is required,” they write, “is the translation, not of Balzac into Italian, nor even of Marx into Italian, but of the conditions that underpin French politics, German philosophy and British economics into Italian. Ultimately, then, the translatability of literary or political texts is, or should be, “a matter not of intellectual work, no matter how progressive, but of practical politics.” Bret Benjamin keeps us squarely in the realm of the political, taking up the 1974 UN Declaration for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) as “a chance to reconsider the 1970s as a decade of transition in which the sharpening developmental aspirations of G77 nations in the global south come into conflict with structural transformations in the accumulation of capital.” Reading the NIEO as the “last gasp” of the Bandung era, Benjamin argues that the “developmentalist demands of the Bandung era run aground on the contemporaneous systemic crisis of capital.” Benjamin then works through and expands the arguments of the Werkritik school to argue the “NIEO ultimately express the contradictions of a transitional moment” before concluding with a gesture towards the way the NIEO might, despite its historical losses, “offer a ready-made political program of South-South radicalism” retooled for a fully enclosed world economic system. ii Editors’ Note In Malcom Read’s essay we move from the political intersections and interventions into more theoretical ones, “exploring theoretical concepts, namely the ‘ideological unconscious’ and the ‘political unconscious,’” that were “developed along very different, even contrasting lines in, respectively, the work of Juan Carlos Rodríguez and that of Fredric Jameson.” Drawing out the differences between how the two thinkers situate their work in relation to Althusser, Read invites us to take a deep dive into the world of structuralist Marxisms. Finally, Sourayan Mookerjea proposes a “Post-Western Marxism,” rooted in the insights of social reproduction and decolonization theory with the aim of thinking historically about exploitation as “the domination of inner and outer nature.” As he suggests, “if we are to understand the implications of precarity, unemployment, informality, poverty, dispossession for class politics today,” we need to see “the private appropriation of surplus value...as subalternization.” Class politics, he argues, is never immediately available and is thus “mediated by the accumulated violence of proliferating oppressions.” Reviews by Sofia Cutler on cosmopolitanisms and Myka Tucker-Abramson on the financial imaginary round out the issue, asking what it means to think of class globally. As Tucker-Abramson suggests, the essays here put a fine point on how “adopting the position that ‘dynamic global interconnection’ and ‘unevenness’ are no longer useful categories of analysis,” as some have done, amounts to an unapologetic refusal to think beyond the dynamics of the nation at a moment when the nation seems poised to become an increasingly counter-revolutionary force. Davis Smith-Brecheisen, for the Mediations editors Stephen Shapiro and Neil Lazarus. “Translatability, Combined Unevenness, and World Literature in Antonio Gramsci.” Mediations 32.1 (Fall 2018) 1-36. www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/gramsci-world-literature Translatability, Combined Unevenness, and World Literature in Antonio Gramsci Stephen Shapiro and Neil Lazarus Our research is thus into the history of culture and not literary history; or rather it is into literary history as a part or an aspect of a broader history of culture.1 Gramsci and Uneven Development This paper takes its point of departure from two contemporary research initiatives.2 The first of these is the recent scholarship on the centrality of linguistic theory and the ideas of language and translation to Antonio Gramsci’s Marxism;3 the second is the emergent discussion of world literature under the sign of “combined and uneven development.”4 These initiatives are linked, certainly; but to the best of our knowledge they have not hitherto been brought together in any sustained fashion. We therefore take some steps to link these two initiatives here, believing that what Gramsci has to say about literature, translatability, cultural “interference,” “Southernism,” and so on, including in some of his lesser-known passages, has a great deal to contribute to today’s debates about the world-literary system. Gramsci’s ideas are significantly at odds, for example, with Apter’s argument that increased translation of foreign language texts will in itself generate increased awareness of the various forms of social experience across the globe; it is significantly at odds with Damrosch’s thesis that the movement of texts across borders creates value; and it is significantly at odds with Moretti’s position that takes volume of publication as a reliable marker of the tastes of reading publics. The theory of combined and uneven development originated in the work of Engels and Lenin, but it is associated above all with Trotsky, who — writing in the 1930s, on the basis of his analysis of conditions in Russia in 1905 and China in 1925- 7 — attempted to account for the effects of the imposition of capitalism on cultures and societies hitherto un- or only sectorally capitalized. In these contexts, Trotsky proposed, the imposed capitalist forces of production and class relations tend not to supplant (or are not allowed to supplant) but to be conjoined forcibly with pre-existing 2 Shapiro and Lazarus forces and relations. The outcome is a contradictory “amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms” — an urban proletariat working in technologically advanced industries existing side by side with a rural population engaged in subsistence farming; industrial plants built alongside “villages of wood and straw,”