The resurgence of interest in Marx has generated vigorous and sometimes perplexing collisions of theory and politics online. This collection—featuring stimulating exchanges on Marxism, science, and humanism, and on socialism’s relation to liberalism—exemplifies their irreverent energy. It is partisan without being sectarian, learned without being academic.

~ Ray Brassier, author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction

Flowers for Marx delivers an enticing and energetic debate about a number of different practical-theoretical commitments that are available to leftist militants and thinkers today […it is an] agonistic launchpad and toolkit for further theorizing and organizing.

~ J.P. Caron, co-author of Atlas of Experimental Politics

Flowers for Marx demonstrates that digital Marxism is far from the closed homophilic camp of stuffy inward-looking academics long associated with the Marxist tradition […]. Materialism is ready to move beyond the lofty airs and graces of bourgeois academia.

~ Mike Watson, author of The Memeing of Mark Fisher

Flowers for Marx

Edited by Conrad Hamilton, Matthew McManus

Contributors Ben Burgis, Conrad Hamilton, Douglas Lain, Matthew McManus, Eliot Rosenstock, Marion Trejo, Ernesto Vargas

FORTHCOMING Summer 2024

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.  ~ Karl Marx

Since the spectacular collapse of the political aspirations of Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, the Western left has been thrown into a state of uncertainty. Should it continue to pursue a democratic socialist agenda, attempting to transform liberal capitalism from within? Or should it break with this, calling for revolt against a capitalist class unbowed by the movements of the past decade? In Flowers for Marx, six authors associated with Sublation Media address this question by returning to Marx – or rather, by asking which Marx we should return to. Is Marx an inveterate democrat, whose work privileges the dignity of man above all? Or is he – as Louis Althusser once argued – the founder of a new science, incompatible with the shibboleths of liberal-capitalist society? But the book’s authors also go beyond this, by tackling topics ranging from Marxist feminism to the Mexican Desarrollo to the “boss-maxxing” aesthetics of Kamala Harris.

The cover of Flowers for Marx portrays what could be a flower  – or a Tesla coil, discharging into the air like an arc of lightning. Its authors and their essays in this volume grew from the same stem.

About the Editors

Conrad Hamilton is a postdoctoral research fellow at East China Normal University. His PhD thesis, supervised by Catherine Malabou, deals with the relationship between value and agency in the work of Karl Marx. He has published in Jacobin, Sublation Magazine, Cosmonaut Magazine, The Morning Star, Areo, The Philosophical Salon, &&&, and Merion West. He is co-author of Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson (Zer0 Books, 2020). He is also the author of the forthcoming book Marxism contra Subjectivity. 

Matthew McManus is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism (Palgrave, 2020) and The Political Right and Equality (Routledge, 2023), amongst other books. His writing has appeared in Jacobin, Current Affairs, Areo, Liberal Currents, The New Politics, and Quillette, among other outlets.