My book Cosmic Revolutions: Critique and Science in Engels and Marx is under contract with Verso.

Through a new account of the critical theory of Friedrich Engels (and a concomitant rereading of Marx’s work as well), the book rethinks the significance of science, technology, and nature for historical materialism. Amid the social and natural catastrophes of what we tepidly call “climate change” and the economic and political transformations of what we used to call the “information revolution,” it is striking that Engels’s most famous terminological innovation of all—scientific socialism—is today seen more often as an outré slogan than a prescient imperative. But the wager of this book is that if materialist theory today needs Marx, then it needs Engels as well; or, said differently, that if the project of Marxism is still to mean anything at all, it must remain the project of scientific socialism.

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The book is related to several of my journal articles.

Most directly, it builds on “Engels after Frankfurt: Nature and Enlightenment in Critical Theory” (New German Critique, 2023) and “Rifle Theory: Engels and the History of Technology” (Political Theory, 2023). I have also written about the role of similar questions in Marx’s work: “Marx on Slavery and Capital in the American Civil War” (Political Theory, 2025) focuses especially on the significance of ecological and technological questions for his analysis of the Southern plantation economy.

Certain themes of the project will be developed further in my ongoing collaboration with Alicia Steinmetz on the political theory of advertising, which we see as a fundamental technology of contemporary capitalism. Our article “Marx and the Problem of Advertising” (Theory & Event, 2026) is the first product of this work to appear in print.