“The Politicisation of Culture: Walter Benjamin's Commitment.” Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory (accepted to special issue)

Against the pervasive reception of Walter Benjamin as a ‘melancholic’ cultural theorist removed from political praxis, most prominently cultivated in Perry Anderson’s account of ‘Western Marxism’, this article will reconstruct how not only the theorisation but also the practice of class struggle became the centre of Benjamin’s work from the late-1920s onwards. As a prolific public intellectual, known for his erudite and polemic criticism, Benjamin conceptualised the ways in which journalists, poets, writers, theatre and film makers participated as the cultural proletariat in socialist politics. It was to participate in the already ongoing extension of vanguard politics beyond the state realm, which the party contested, to the entirety of the culture sphere. And Benjamin saw himself as the paradigmatic literary critic in this revolutionary culture-political program. Benjamin established both a theory and a practice of cultural politics that was not to ‘replace’ the class struggle of union and party politics, but to intensify it by extending class politics to artistic and journalistic practices – to what Marx called the ‘weapons of criticism’, the indispensable ‘head of the passion’ of politics.

“Abolition.” Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon 8 (2025), available at: https://www.politicalconcepts.org/abolition-jochen-schmon/ 

This peer-reviewed article provides a first sketch of my dissertation project, but particularly focuses on 18th century abolitionists. I theorize their writings as attempts to translate into the imperial public spheres the political demands articulated in the Caribbean slave revolts—the very sites of European empires that would also become the discursive staging ground of early feminist and radical proletarian movements. In their rejection of slavery as a 'private' or 'economic' matter, this article argues that abolitionists inaugurated the true quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, which made possible radical conceptions of patriarchy and capitalism as different but interrelated forms in which the "tyranny" of slavery exists.

“The Oligarchic Unconscious of Liberal Republicanism.” Constellations 32:2 (June 2025): 232-244; https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12774 (co-authored with Udeepta Chakravarty)

This peer-reviewed article conceptualizes liberal republicanism as the legal-constitutional form of modern oligarchy, paradigmatically crystallized in the debates at the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787. We reconstruct how both Federalists and Anti-Federalists reactivated the decidedly anti-democratic arguments of ancient political thought for a republican "mixed regime," which they perceived as the most effective form of government to protect liberalism's central value: the non-interference in private property rights. More important than the dispute over the issue of federalism, what united the contending makers of the U.S. Constitution was their fierce repression of the anti-oligarchic demands articulated in Shays' Rebellion—the Massachusetts peasant uprising of 1786 that called for an abolition of debt and an equal division of property.