Abstract This essay aims to investigate the first attempt in the 1950s to translate and publish Gramsci’s works into French. It reveals the blocking if not the censorship on the part of the major French publishers. If the French Communist Party (PCF) decides to take on the edition, it is with great suspicion regarding a “liberal heresy” fueled by the anti-Stalinist line which comes from Togliatti’s PCI. It is ultimately a clandestine, contraband work undertaken by illustrious French intellectuals, historians such as François Furet and philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, to make a heterodox Marxist known.

Abstract This essay examines the dismantling of native sovereignties to establish postcolonial sovereignty in South Asia, focusing on the 1948 military annexation of Hyderabad. It argues that forming postcolonial states involved both self-determination and the dismantling of other sovereignties. Sovereignty, both as a criterion and an object of cognition, entailed denying self-determination to contested polities and imposing new forms of alienation and subjection. The colonial/anti-colonial genealogy and postcolonial nation narratives foreclosed the politics of territory and obscured the historical nature of territory. By focusing on states that disappeared after 1945, the essay underscores the need to rethink the links between territory, sovereignty, and statehood in the politics of self-determination.

Abstract This article rethinks nineteenth-century Mexican liberalism and abolitionism in relation to contracts of indenture of Black and Indigenous workers from Mexico’s borderland regions of Texas and Yucatán. These contracts reveal practices of unfree labor that blurred the conceptual boundaries between slavery and freedom and the physical boundaries between “slave” and “free” territory. This ambiguity complicates Mexican elites’ creation of an abolitionist politics and culture that presume the linear progress from slavery to free labor. This article situates these contracts within Mexico’s recurring transition to freedom, the longue durée history of colonial New Spain’s attempts to eradicate Spanish colonial Indigenous slavery, which gave rise to documentation that performatively reinterpreted unfree labor as legitimate forms of bondage and exploitation. This widespread dissimulation in the archives of virtual slavery, in which the enslaved person is granted a voice simulating their “consent” to bondage, suggests how these labor forms avoided prominence in the shadow of chattel slavery. This article critically analyzes a corpus of contracts that demonstrates how traffickers negotiated the borders between slavery and “free” contract labor and, in doing so, reveals gaps in the legal borderlands between “slave” and “free” territory. It also examines petitions for freedom that the same Black and Indigenous persons created as they exploited the borderlands’ divergent legal regimes and drew from their own colonial traditions of using the law to pursue justice and liberty. Their words reveal how they improvised their own meanings of freedom that eluded nationalist narratives of abolition and progress.

Abstract The future for left revolutions is commonly framed as either/or: either we resuscitate the old revolutionary dream of seizing the state and means of production to inaugurate a new order or we accept that revolution is inapt for these times. However, neoliberalism modeled another modality of revolution, one that was exceptionally far-reaching yet entailed a different means of state capture and economic and social transformation. This intervention argues that the Left has much to learn from this recent history.

Abstract This essay explores Thomas Müntzer’s polysemous reception in three classic works of Marxist historiography: Friedrich Engels’s Peasant War in Germany (1850), Karl Kautsky’s Forerunners of Modern Socialism (1895), and Ernst Bloch’s Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of the Revolution (1921). All three studies track essentially the same events, but each author renders this past differently in light of their respective understandings of communism’s contemporary challenges. Tracking the character of Müntzer in these accounts allows insight not only into the changing concerns of three successive generations of Marxists, but also into the ever-renewable actuality of history for the present.