Beginning with an account of how Marxism fared in two historical contexts of decolonization (South Africa and India), the chapter then focuses on one recent influential mode of Marxist literary analysis: “world-literature” – with a hyphen – as elaborated the by Warwick Research Collective. How does this approach square with the current push for decolonization? In response to that question, the chapter contrasts WReC with claims from current “decolonial theory” to illustrate differences between their presuppositions. In conclusion, the suggestion is that Marxim’s specific contribution contemporary debates on decolonization might be to question tendencies to reify concepts such as “race,” “culture” or the “West” as metaphysical categories. That contribution, in turn, is best received on the understanding that there are experiential dimensions relating to aesthetics, language, race, gender, sexuality and religion that the Marxist framework is ill-equipped to account for in a non-reductive fashion. Hence, it is perhaps the dialectical method that is the enduring lesson of Marxism – a method that may bracket and then reintroduce the Marxist optic in the unending labour of making sense of the world.