[...] The term itself conveys loss but no responsibility for that loss.

Indeed, if salvage conjures Robinson Crusoe salvaging from the wreckage enough to survive, those socialists who came of age ‘in the wilderness’, watching the wreckage of the Old Left wash up on the beach, may see, if not a parallel, perhaps an analogy with our own ways of speaking about politics – and thus of shaping it.

Dare we speak, then, of salvage or even of hope? If we would struggle to keep alive – or resurrect – movements and traditions, revolutionary ways of parsing the world, the wisdom of our forebears and ancestors, in what language should we speak of such slippery things? And if our dialects and our minds, our very perceptions, have been colonised and standardised, making our own speech foreign to us? Twenty-first-century Marxists must be nimble if we are to revive our own idiolect: if its grammatical structure remains one shaped by class, its vocabulary must have enough breadth to encompass multiple and intersecting identities and realities, its nouns and pronouns unrestricted by binary gender. Can we lubricate our tongues with our own voices, our working- class dialects and interethnic inventions and personal pidgins, and create a living, intercultural lexicon to deploy against the forces of imperialism and the capitalist death drive? If Marxism is, as Walter Benjamin would have it, a conversation between the living and the dead, what does it mean when the dead outnumber the living? Can our old languages and our new ones speak us forward?

Twenty-first-century Marxists must be nimble if we are to revive our own idiolect