Liu, P. (2023) The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus. Duke University Press.

Petrus Liu’s latest book, The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus (Duke UP, 2023), will be of interest to readers who wish to grapple with capitalism as a ‘moving totality’ (p. 26), an ever-changing process of accumulation and dispossession. For Liu, that analytic work requires a geographic reorientation away from the U.S. and the West. ‘The Beijing Consensus’ names capitalism’s latest mutation and reflects China’s position as the new center of global capitalism in the wake of the post-1989 social and economic upheavals and, more so, after the economic meltdown of 2008. Materialist critique, now and for the past three decades, is debilitated to the extent that it does not center East Asia and use Asian Marxism to retrain the critic’s vision on the contradictions that China reveals–uniquely in this geopolitical moment–about ‘capitalism as a relentless drive to subsume the labor process in the global South’ (p. 24).