This special issue aims to contribute to this critical discussion by modestly staking out the contours of Marxist literary and cultural criticism in the twenty-first century, with submissions that reflect the extraordinary diversity of current approaches, ranging across the twenty-first-century British and American novel, twentieth-century film, photography, technology, digital capability, post-critique and ‘suspicious’ reading practices. The articles in this issue evidence a collective regenerative effort to reassert the writings of Marx, and Marxist critics, as among the most powerful and productive critiques of global capitalism. The introduction concludes with a short summary of the articles that comprise this collection.