Class War: A Literary History

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When asked if this novel is a work of “combat literature,” which is Frantz Fanon’s term for writing composed under the force of decolonial insurgency, Robinson suggested why such a literature might be necessary, but also why it alone is not enough. Describing the conflict between independent wheat growers of the San Joaquin Valley in Southern California and the tentacular expansion of the Southern Pacific Railroad company, the narrative begins with a half-ironic invocation of the poetic muse on behalf of a young writer who will come to observe the clash between ranchers and the railroad: RF Kuang’s tremendous alternative history, Babel, is marketed as a work of dark academia, or at least that’s the impression its cover design and publicity signal, but it is so much more than that. Steven’s reasons for shying away from showing the propagandistic and mobilizing role of narrative, I suggest, are twofold. On one hand, it is part of a belief to see narrative as having the ability to inspire class consciousness. This derives from the idea that the manipulation of truth must be fought with facts and not with an equally inspiring story. This belief also understands narrative manipulation as symptomatic of a sort of top-down antidemocratic impulse and clever marketing rather than central to the way change is achieved—by continually shifting the stories we tell ourselves about our conditions and the possibilities for our future. On the other hand, his reasons are also reflective of an understanding of the working class as a class offering “real experience” but nothing more. The working class in this imagination does not generate the literature, slogans, and pamphlets. These works are actually what generate counter-hegemonic ideology. Instead, for him the working class is limited to their role in history as actors in battle.

Steven then launches into a discussion of the relationship between the guerilla army and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which takes place in the fictional town of Macondo in northern Colombia, and Fredric Jameson’s discussion of it. (Interestingly, a group of Italian anarchists in Milan in the 1970s called their social project “Macondo” after Márquez’s novel). Steven offers a superficial explanation of how the novel’s mass of characters resembles the cell system, equating the family’s multiplication with the expansion of a guerilla army. Then, narrowing in on the literary expression of the guerilla army, he turns to the field manual. He defines the field manual as a handbook that “combines anecdotal evidence and personalized illustration with lessons from history, technical information about military operations and weapon manipulation, and the explicitly ideological content of political philosophy and revolutionary propaganda” (emphasis added). If these problems concern the book’s execution of its thesis, rather than the thesis itself, a final issue touches upon Steven’s core argument. I take the point of his insistence that shared economic interests are not enough in themselves to practically motivate political change. And I learned from his historical demonstration of the extent to which earlier generations of revolutionaries saw violent struggle as a means of forming, rather than simply expressing, class feeling. However, I couldn’t help noticing a dramatic break between the historical revolutionary activists Steven surveys, and his own defense of BLM as class war. The Russian, Chinese, and Latin American revolutionaries sought to forge broad coalitions through the experience of struggle. You will find yourself cheering along during the great railroad mutiny, which reimagines the Railway Strike of 1877, and will perhaps know genuine heartbreak when a world of revolt suddenly is frozen out of time. The Flamethrowers

MARK STEVEN, author of Class War: A Literary History, recommends five contemporary novels that convey a vision of liberating combat against the exploiters and the expropriators 

Contemporary literature on class struggle is territorially grounded but internationally expansive. Mark Steven is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. He is author of ‘Class War: A Literary History’, published by Verso Books this year. If environmental crises are a profound violence perpetrated against the global poor, a neoliberal holocaust of the dispossessed, then literary fiction is correct to read climate change as class war. Ours is a world that requires us to know class as something other than cultural identity bound up in the reliable structures of formal labor. This is why so many of today’s movements have been described as undertaken by movements for which class remains the inconspicuous undercurrent adjoined to the differently prominent variables of age, gender, geography, and religion.

The first ever recorded utterance of the phrase “class warfare” is from January 25, 1840, when it appeared in the Chartist newspaper the Northern Star. Chartism was a movement of redress that openly sought political enfranchisement. By the same token, however, the movement also comprised a militant faction for which actual warfare was seen to underwrite more peaceable demands. The invocation of class war came at the end of an article setting out the movement’s positions and demands, which pronounces ritual bloodletting as the outcome of underrepresentation coupled with immiseration. “Good must come to the nation out of this class warfare for pre-eminence,” it reads, “as from a compound of the most deadly poisons a wholesale medicine may be extracted.” No longer a threat, something to be worried about in the future, but alive and deadly, here and now: the class struggle had already erupted into civil war. As the novel thunders toward its almighty, insurrectionary conclusion, the book’s subtitle becomes crucial to knowing what it’s all really about: “Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution.” The Ministry for the Future Focalised to these interpersonal dynamics, this is an elegiac novel about the challenges of sustaining political commitment against the tides of disillusionment: “After she was gone, nothing could be thought of as normal, if there’d ever been such a thing. The sadness never let up: waited beneath my eyelids, watched when I went to school, when I spoke, breathed on my behalf.” The social substance of such an epic is class conflict, and its combat often takes the form of strikes. As one railway driver insists, “they’ve not got a steadier man on the road,” even as his wages are slashed and his employment terminated, precisely because he has always been a scab. “And when the strike came along, I stood by them — stood by the company,” he says: How to Be a Revolutionary by C. A. Davids takes its guidebook title from a list of useful skills its protagonist, Beth, might learn from her radical friend, Kay, a charismatic organiser who might teach her “how to kiss a boy” as readily as “how to apply lessons learned from Communist China to South Africa.” Focalised to these interpersonal dynamics, this is an elegiac novel about the challenges of

Beautifully written and conceived, Class War is a history as absorbing as any nineteenth-century novel. Part literary criticism, part political theory, part polemic, it is also an act of recovery; Steven has written a necessary book.” Barely a day goes by now without class war featuring in one headline or another. For British economist Ann Pettifor, the finance sector’s response to spiraling inflation – raising rents, crushing demand, and disciplining workers – is clear evidence of “their effective preference is for class war over financial stability.” Pettifor’s formulation, which has been republished all throughout the bourgeois press, is just one of many similar usages of this phrase in 2023 alone.

My academic writing has appeared in Modernism/modernity, Textual Practice, SubStance, Screen, Film-Philosophy, Screening the Past, Postmodern Culture, Affirmations, James Joyce Quarterly, and elsewhere. sustaining political commitment against the tides of disillusionment: “After she was gone, nothing could be thought of as normal, if there’d ever been such a thing. The sadness never let up: waited beneath my eyelids, watched when I went to school, when I spoke, breathed on my behalf.” Spending time in Shanghai during the Great Leap Forward, Apartheid-era Cape Town, and the Harlem of Langston Hughes, this novel explores international and intergenerational connections among ageing revolutionaries on three continents, all of whom long for a better world than this one but who are all haunted by defeat. Steeped in left melancholia, this is a narrative that finds its way forward via unflinching commitment to an internationalism that demands acts of practical solidarity with comrades both known and unknown, to those who have gone before and those who will come after. That talk is just what the Trust wants to hear. It ain’t frightened of that. There’s one thing only it does listen to, one thing it is frightened of — the people with dynamite in their hands — six inches of plugged gaspipe. Railroad Rebellion However, Steven’s primary interest is showing how the working class came together as such. His literary trek reinstates workers as subjects who are radicalized by their role in armed struggle and not by the literature and propaganda they write, generate, and circulate. While traversing literature to show instances of class war could be an opportunity to show the working class as capable of creating counter-hegemonic unifying discourse, Steven instead depicts the working class merely as subjects who respond to structural conditions through uprising, and not as thinkers and writers that influence action or as architects of their own political programs. He avoids the crucial moments in which the working class formed new worlds without war.So writes world-systems theorist Giovanni Arrighi and a team of researchers in their global history of political transformation: The unnamed subject here is capital, a dawning empire whose blood-drenched epic is still elusive. “Oh,” he later opines, “to put it all into hexameters; strike the great iron note; sing the vast, terrible song; the song of the People; the forerunners of empire!” American literature has been alive to the historical apposition of social structure and military conquest.

Deeply opposed to any sort of moderation or compromise, which he describes as a bourgeois luxury — “You could do it, too, if your belly was fed, if your property was safe, if your wife had not been murdered, if your children were not starving. Easy enough then to preach law-abiding methods, legal redress, and all such rot” — this “blood-thirsty anarchist” advocates instead for violent action:In The Ministry for the Future, sci-fi legend Kim Stanley Robinson uses an almost Melvillian sense of capaciousness to explore our collective potential to end capitalist accumulation to save the biosphere.