Class War: A Literary History

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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).

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.” This tendency would be carried through to the climax of the movement in the general strikes in St Louis and East St Louis, where for a few days a multiethnic coalition of strikers shut down much of their industry and the cities were controlled by executive strike committees. Comparisons were made with the events that had occurred six years previously in France. “In St. Louis and East St. Louis,” writes Ovetz, “the strike went further as workers across the cities shut down all industry and became renown in the press of the time as America’s ‘Paris Commune.’”

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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. A manifesto issued by the workers in Westernport, Maryland, on July 20 warned the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad that, if wages were not restored, “the officials will hazard their lives and endanger their property,” and promised the kinds of sabotage pioneered by the Luddites in England: Within the history of class war, the relationship between politics and literature has always been mutually reciprocal. From the standpoint of politics, literature enables the transmission of revolutionary thought, military strategy, and ideological messaging across time and space; and, from the standpoint of literature, a politics of class war serves as catalyst for aesthetic transformation – infusing literary forms and modes and genres. The following ten novels are all about class war. Each one epitomizes not only the literature of it time and place, the ways that a novel about England in the 1810s will be very different to one about China in the 1930s or Italy in the 1960s, but also the ways that unique revolutionary movements have reshaped how we read and write literary narratives. 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 For Marxists like Reed, the instant embrace of BLM by practically every corporation and elite institution didn’t represent the co-option of the movement, but in fact stemmed from its natural fit with the interests of capital. Instead of imagining BLM as a form of class war, radicals needed to “build a mass movement around appealing to the material needs of the broad working-class.” Creating Solidarity

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. I cannot think of a better, more glorious, more imaginative narrative about the meanings of obligations of class solidarity in times of conflict. It is a forceful, decolonial critique of the institutions of higher education and literary attainment and of all their complicities in reproducing class hierarchy and imperial power.By the time I arrived at book three, I was already infatuated with the unholy city at the heart of the trilogy, with its arcane geography and its nightmare monstrosities, because Mieville’s language does so much to golem the whole thing into feverish existence, with a vocabulary that feels as overgrown and mutant as the city it describes. With an intergenerational narrative that moves at the speed of a turbo-charged motorcycle burning across salt flats, The Flamethrowers ranges from the early years of European fascism, through peripheral resource extraction in the jungles of Brazil, into the artworld of 1970s New York, and finally the streets Rome at a time of revolt. In his interpretation of a writer like Márquez, Steven takes the latter — and to my mind, more interesting — path. Too often, however, he takes the former one. As a telling assessment of the kind of literature that dominates much of the book, I’ll just say that the quotations from Stalin’s essays or Mao’s poems never tempted me to seek out those works myself, to see what I had been missing. Forging Coalitions Other well-known revolutionaries would hold to a similar line. For Lenin, thinking about the Paris Commune of 1871, the proletariat “must never forget that in certain conditions the class struggle assumes the form of armed conflict and civil war; there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.” Or for Mao, civil war marks the passage from contradiction into antagonism, or mobilization of masses. In his view, “the contradiction between the exploiting and the exploited classes” has persisted through slave society, feudal society, and into modern capitalism as a “struggle” between the two; “but it is not until the contradiction between the two classes develops to a certain stage that it assumes the form of open antagonism and develops into revolution. The same holds,” he adds, “for the transformation of peace into war in class society.” A survey of the literature of revolution, Mark Steven's history of global class war considers work by writers from Byron to Assata Shakur. It feels more crucial than ever to study the work of writers who practiced solidarity, and this book promises to be a vital contribution to the revolutionary canon. Most Anticipated Books of 2023, Lit Hub