Transitions

Volume 37, No. 1 Fall 2025

Editors' Note

Contributors

A Commodity-Form Theory of Transition: On Reading Capital, Asia, and the Capitalist Epoch in the Rest of the World by Andrew B. Liu

Andrew B. Liu’s keynote address to the Marxist Literary Group’s 2022 Institute on Culture and Society, on reinterpreting Marx’s “capitalist epoch” in the context of global history.

What Was Globalization? The Long Downturn at the End of History by Anna Zalokostas

Anna Zalokostas looks back on the nineties-era concept of “globalization” to evaluate its strengths, limitations, and whether it might offer anything useful to left organizing today.

With the Future Behind Us: The Historical Novel at the End of Development by Benjamin Crais

Benjamin Crais reads Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (2013) as a historical novel, in Lukács’s sense, of deindustrialization and the waning of a historical imaginary.

Mournful Hedonism: An Abject Comportment of National Developmentalism and Neocolonial Financialization in Gloria Guardia’s El último juego (1977) by Josué Chávez

Josué Chávez argues that the modernist-pastiche literary form of Gloria Guardia’s 1977 novel El último juego evokes not only issues of race and gender in Panama but also the country’s major transition in patterns of capital accumulation.

Book Reviews

Totality Beyond Class: The Limits of Value Criticism by Chris Gortmaker and Jake Burchard

Chris Gortmaker and Jake Burchard review Totality Inside Out: Rethinking Crisis and Conflict under Capital, edited by Kevin Floyd, Jen Hedler Phillis, and Sarika Chandra.

A Correct Picture by Davis Smith-Brecheisen

Davis Smith-Brecheisen reviews Todd Cronan’s Red Aesthetics: Rodchenko, Brecht, Eisenstein.