"All I know is that I am not a Marxist", Marx (supposedly) said. This ironic detachment implies an insight: how a political philosophy is put to use will depend on the changing social and political circumstances. Marx' philosophy itself owes its emergence to strands of thoughts and political struggles that had long existed. As such, it escapes authorial control and can be reconstructed as a coherent body of work only after the facts. With this premise as our point of departure, we will look into key texts by Marx to determine, first of all, the place of politics within Marxist thought (drawing on Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, or Chantal Mouffe). We will then discuss pathbreaking rewritings of Marx in the context of anti-colonial struggles and the emergence of various emancipation movements (among others by Michel Foucault, Silvia Frederici, or Frantz Fanon). Finally, we will explore the role of production and labor in Marxist politics: Is Marxism hopelessly productivist or can we formulate a radical critique of labor from its point of view? This class includes a week of asynchronous work and two talks (by Bini Adamczak on queer Marxism and Nikhil Pal Singh on Marxism and race).