Our introduction is written in three parts. In the first section, we provide an overview of how late twentieth-century Marxist theory understood the development of bourgeoning non-class-based social movements, and grappled with the problem of a capitalism that was simultaneously expanding its reach and declining in profitability. In the second section, we turn to the state of literary study after the 2008 financial crisis. We argue that the aftermath of the economic downturn has altered the coordinates for both the multiculturalism of late twentieth-century literary study, and the forms of Marxist literary criticism that subsisted alongside it. We argue that this situation demands a reading of Marx that goes beyond critiques of commodity fetishism and false consciousness, drawn from the first chapter of Capital, Volume 1, to embrace the whole arc of Marx’s argument in that work. In the final section, we preview the essays collected in the volume.

In the vast and growing scholarship on today’s service sector, the performing arts play a starring role. But the usefulness of performance for explaining how service fits into a capitalist economy is nothing new. Karl Marx, in his critique of political economy, used theater as proof that services could be subsumed to capital. The fact that service work today is increasingly organized along capitalist lines is not evidence that society has entered a kind of post-capitalism. As Marx himself recognized, service under capitalism has always been potentially subject to the law of value. Yet the clarity of Marx’s argument about the economic relation of services like theater to capital has been obscured by the tendency of Marxist cultural theory to either focus on theater’s role in struggles against capital or misgauge theater’s economic proximity to capital. Theater, thus, has become a missed opportunity in Marxist cultural theory for studying a deindustrial society filled with service jobs. Clarifying theater’s economic relation to capital can illuminate the limits capital faces as the jobs its workers do increasingly resemble performance.