Presented at the Western Political Science Association, March 2013. Full paper.

In this paper I examine Marx’s attitude to the temporality of politics through a recent debate in queer theory on the politics of futurity. Edelman’s polemic No Future rejects futurity and politics with it because, Edelman argues, they are both bound up with a heteronormative logic of ‘reproductive futurism’, which sacrifices the present in the name of a future imagined in the form of a child. In response, Muñoz seeks to reclaim the possibilities of utopian imagination through an idea of ‘queer futurity’, which scrambles the linear, developmental, temporality of reproductive futurism. Through a reading of Marx’s debates with his contemporaries in the First International, and his discussion of the Paris Commune in The Civil War in France, I argue that Marx, like Edelman (and indeed like Muñoz), rejects a future which merely reproduces the present, but, like Muñoz, Marx does not on this ground entirely reject thinking about and imaginatively orienting ourselves towards the future. I conclude by sketching the utopian moments within Marx’s later work that become visible in the light of Muñoz’s analysis.