Class War: A Literary History

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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.

Written with verve and ranging across diverse historical settings, Class War traverses industrial battles, guerrilla insurgencies, and anticolonial resistance, as well as large-scale combat operations waged against capitalism’s regimes and its interstate system… An exceptional and impressive work of history.”THIS is the final book in China Mieville’s Bas-Lag trilogy, three sprawling dark fantasy novels all set in what the author describes as “an early industrial capitalist world of a fairly grubby, police statey kind!” 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).

Its protagonist — a young woman from Nevada — becomes a prism through which refracts the modern world-system in a moment of transformative upheaval, as well as gendered perspective from which to re-emphasise the oppression of working women both in the factory and the home. 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.” An impressive overview of revolutionary struggles over the past two centuries which thoroughly rejects reductionist notions of class. Each of the book's 10 chapters focuses on a particular epoch of heightened class warfare - from the Haitian Revolution over 200 years ago, to the Russian Revolution of 1917, to the post-war anti-colonial rebellions of Africa of the 1960s & 70s, and more. It's a literary history because it skillfully examines some of the literature (novels, essays, memoirs & poetry) that emerged from and exemplifies unique aspects of these struggles. It's led to some exciting additions to my to-be-read list. As he knows, this description of BLM — perhaps the most polarizing phenomenon on the Left in recent years — cuts against a powerful critique launched by writers such as Adolph Reed, Cedric Johnson, Walter Benn Michaels, and others. Writing in 2021, Reed argued that BLM, by foregrounding race, represented a giant distraction from class: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 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: Mark Steven is senior lecturer in 20 th and 21 st century literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism (2017) and Splatter Capital (2017). His most recent book is: Class War: a Literary History. Rachel Kushner recontextualizes the belligerence of Italian workers during the infamous Years of Lead.