Class War: A Literary History

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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. 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 My thinking is especially alive to questions of how literature and cinema might help us envisage or even engineer a better world than the dumpster fire we now inhabit. Within this frame, I tend to write about how different forms respond to the vicissitudes of modern capitalism, to the practicalities of revolution, and to the possibility of communism. I make no bones about the fact that this research is fueled by political commitment.

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 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:University lecturer Steven states boldly in the introduction that ‘this book is intended as a guide to class war.’ He then paints a wide canvas, writing about revolutions in Haiti, Cuba, Russia, and elsewhere, spanning centuries to prepare us for a class war that, he argues, is already happening.” Steven’s argument that class is formed through war also overlooks the various moments in history in which the working class or the subaltern formed their own world without war. From the most centralist forms of government like Salvador Allende’s to the more anarchist community land movements in Latin America, people formed socialist and communist communities without centering armed combat. These movements were rich in strategic, literary, and discursive material that formed the basis for their projects (and often used violence in defensive measure). Today, movements such as Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST), drawing some of its original ideological basis from the Catholic Church and liberation theology, have created their own robust internal economies and social structures. MST in particular has over 2,000 self-managed schools which they cite as essential to their political project. Moreover, these movements have formed distinct methods of theorizing. As Raul Zibechi explains in Territories in Resistance, in centering pedagogy and growth, they’ve placed “reflection and ongoing evaluation of what is happening at the forefront of activities, to open up spaces of self-reflection.” The “Philosophy workshop” of the Movement of Unemployed Workers and Ronda de Pensamiento Autónomo (Autonomous Thinking Group) are similar groups who turn social movements into laboratories for thought that inspires future action.

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: Rachel Kushner recontextualizes the belligerence of Italian workers during the infamous Years of Lead. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1967 novel A Grain of Wheat is set during a Kenyan village’s preparations for their independence day, Uhuru, held to celebrate the hundreds of thousands of rebels who swore an oath to each other and their cause to overthrow British rule. While this historical novel dramatizes the colonial undevelopment of Africa, or what Walter Rodney famously described as ‘the exploitation of one country by another,’ it also documents the idiomatic and cultural forms of solidarity that flourished in decolonial Africa. Here solidarity finds its living embodiment in Kihika, a revolutionary war hero who was captured and hanged by the British. Providing an explanation of a traditional practice newly radicalized, Kihika insists that to swear the oath is a commitment to solidarity amid conflict. ‘In Kenya’, he says, ‘we want deaths which will change things, that is to say, we want true sacrifice. But first we have to be ready to carry the cross. I die for you, you die for me, we become a sacrifice for one another’.

It’s going to be chaotic and confusing,” he says, “and it’s going to last for as long as anyone alive is still alive. We have to get used to it, and fight effectively. Combat literature might help give us ideas or warn us of ramifications, but it’s the actions in the world that will matter — laws, norms, behaviours.” Across a fantastical geography, here a diverse array of magically augmented anti-heroes stands together against industrial expansion, imperial bloodletting and an increasingly fascist sense of nationhood. 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.