This introduction presents the symposium on Sam Knafo and Benno Teschke’s article in Historical Materialism, ‘Political Marxism and the Rules of Reproduction of Capitalism: A Historicist Critique’ (2021). It briefly summarises the foundations of Political Marxism, discusses the broader implications of the debate raised by Knafo and Teschke for questions of collective knowledge-production and methods in Marxist historiography, and outlines the seven contributions of the symposium. The introduction concludes by tracing, through the evolution of debates in Political Marxism and the (...) contributions of its protagonists, some of the lineages of Marxist historiography as well as of the history of this journal. (shrink)

How can the world be improved if the people inhabiting it do not believe they can transform it? A belief in such political fatalism is an important obstacle to social transformation, yet underexplored in the contemporary political theory literature. Political fatalism can be understood as a commitment to the belief that human agency cannot effectuate social transformation. In this article, I provide a typology of such political fatalism, considering its two main forms: fatalism of inevitability as the positive version that (...) humans do not have the power to affect positive social change, and fatalism of impossibility as the negative version that human agency does not play a role in avoiding negative social change such as climate catastrophe. Focussing particularly on the more pressing contemporary problem of the fatalism of impossibility, I develop three distinct dimensions along which fatalism has an impact: the cognitive, the affective, and the practical. Finally, I offer solutions, focussing on how to combine interventions on the cognitive, affective, and practical levels: historically sensitive critique, imagination, and a combination of bounded spontaneism and long-term political organisation. (shrink)