Amanda Armstrong reads Marx’s famous figuration of the dancing table, situating it historically so that we might glean something new about Capital, Volume I and capital itself: “Capital is a splintered text, pulled apart by the varied strains of materialism that course through its pages: the wooden table figures forth the text’s non-identity with itself.”.

What does it mean to “compare?” Like capital itself, comparison is “simultaneously everywhere and nowhere,” says Ma. In this essay she pursues a method by which the categories and methods of comparison might utilize the same dialectical thinking with which Marx analyzes capital. Mobilizing Marx’s concept of value-formation, Ma describes a mode of analysis that employs the totalizing and systematizing functions of comparison for a critique of global capital.

Justin Raden reviews the Postmodern/Postwar — and After, edited by Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hobarek, and Daniel Worden.