Class War: A Literary History is now available from Verso Books.
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Dominick Knowles: To my mind, one of the most important features of Class War is how it explodes the category of what counts as “literature” to include letters, slogans, field manuals, etc. from various revolutionary movements. Obviously, that kind of re-imagining has been done before in scholarly, popular, and creative texts—I think here of Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery and M. NourbeSe Phillip’s Zong!, among many others–but rarely has that kind of re-imagining been developed within the particular vocabularies of the global class struggle. Why did you choose to frame “literature” in this way? Do you feel there’s a necessary relationship between this conceptual explosion of ‘the literary’ and the very real explosions of revolutionary violence you analyze?
Mark Steven: There are few things about which I have become less sure over time than a concrete definition of literature. Nevertheless, I welcome this question as an encouragement to speculate wildly! When pushed, my sense is that literature is best thought of as the socialization of linguistic matter through creative labor.
Literature is what happens when we attempt to shape and reshape our words into relatively distinct forms. When we make literature, we redouble the mystery, power, and purpose of our collective social substance, language, often revitalizing the stories and narratives that shape the world we all inhabit. And yet, literary creation has often responded to or incorporated all kinds of expressly non-literary stuff. Think of how poets like the modernists Ezra Pound and Charles Reznikoff and Muriel Rukeyser through someone working today like M. NourbeSe Phillip, whom you mention, all incorporate historical documents within poetic verse: these formal innovations explode any rarefied concept of the literary but without approaching anything like social revolution!
So, in terms of a “necessary relationship” between literary innovation and revolutionary violence, I don’t necessarily think there is one. But, when we get to those very real explosions of revolutionary violence, there are certainly consistencies in what seems to be happening within the literary imagination, including a tendency to reformulate language and narrative and character as relative to a class of people, a comradely “we,” which I think we can theorize.
According to the great Fredric Jameson, the task of criticism is to read “a given style,” i.e. the way something is written, “as a projected solution, on the aesthetic or imaginary level, to a genuinely contradictory situation in the concrete world of everyday social life.” What I have been most interested in recently is what happens when this line of thought is taken a few steps further—when that solution isn’t exclusively imaginary or, in other words, ideological.
I guess the question is: what happens when writers and revolutionaries combine energies to radically transform a social situation? What I try to demonstrate across the book is that both writers and revolutionaries tend to learn a whole lot from each other. There’s a chiasmus that repeats, whereby revolutionaries start speaking in a language shaped by poetry and, conversely, poets start writing in a language remade by revolution.
While I populate the book with real instances of when the combustive energies of literature and revolution become one, here it might be worth gesturing toward a different, more philosophical level of analysis. If social revolution is about taking back a world that rightfully belongs to all, and if literature really is about formalizing language, which remains about the closest thing we have to a truly collective means, then perhaps there is a necessary relationship between these two things, revolution and literature, provided we don’t pretend the relationship is anything more than allegorical. As an old friend of mine likes to say, poetry might be communism, but this doesn’t change that fact that only some poems are communist.
DK: In your first chapter on the Haitian Revolution, I love the passage that delves into “the language of slogans” as a “literary micro-narrative” of the fight against slavery and colonialism (Class War, 36). [Ed. note: All in-line parenthetical numbers refer to pages in Class War unless noted otherwise.] You describe Toussaint L’Ouverture’s expert adoption of French Revolutionary slogans in order to weaponize them against French occupation. We’re accustomed, I think, to hearing that word deployed derisively, as a way to critique someone who’s merely “sloganeering” rather than doing substantive political work. Its colloquial use seems to have more to do with the marketing world than class war.
But, as you explain, “the revolutionary slogan, at the levels of medium and content, is one of class war’s prevailing literary forms” (36). The term itself even has warfare inscribed into its etymology, being derived from the Gaelic “sluagh-ghairm,” or “war-cry.” What has made the slogan such an effective rhetorical weapon of the toiling classes? Are there any dangers inherent in the slogan’s compression of radical thought and practice?
MS: It was Rosa Luxemburg who once said the challenge for revolutionaries is to translate slogans into deeds and, specifically, to convert “the old slogan ‘war against war’ into practice.” This is essentially correct, that slogans often serve a debilitating ideological function by substituting for the more difficult labor of organization and the greater dangers of action. Slogans are not the revolution; they’re literature; and while literature is not the revolution either, it can be revolutionary.
As far as revolutionary literatures go, however, the slogan is highly efficacious, serving in the first instance as a medium for revolutionary thought to transition between otherwise disconnected times and places and peoples. You mention the chapter on Haiti, and that’s where we see this in full force, when a revolutionary language finds its way along economic currents between the global north and global south, imperial core and colonial outpost. But, in this transition, we also see a massive disagreement between a liberal and a militant politics, between the performance of sloganeering and real commitment. The practical as well as ideological contradictions between French liberalism and Haitian militancy generate the kinds of brutal irony that historians have come to relish, apparent nowhere more acutely than in moments when loyalist soldiers were conscripted to quash a revolution founded on the very ideology to which they allegedly subscribed.
In one well-documented episode, during the siege of fort Crête-à-Pierrot, the French troops approached only to hear their enemy singing La Marseillaise. In another episode, as retold brilliantly by the historian Julius C. Scott, a battalion of young recruits in La Rochelle were ordered to unstitch the embroidered slogan from their flag and uniforms before departure to Saint-Domingue: “Live Free or Die.” In Scott’s telling, “the general assembled the troops and explained to them the danger which such words posed ‘in a land where all property is based on the enslavement of Negroes, who, if they adopted this slogan themselves, would be driven to massacre their masters and the army which is crossing the sea to bring peace and law to the colony.’”
What this contradiction highlights is not just the gross hypocrisy of the European ruling classes. On an island where property was synonymous with dispossession and enslavement, these words could only be interpreted as a call to annihilate the colonial ruling classes and the system to which they belong. In this way, the contradiction not only points up the potential distance between literature and revolution, but also the need for committed revolutionaries to make the words real, converting slogan into action. I think this is what Rosa was getting at.
DK: In “The Armed Nucleus,” your excellent chapter on the narrative form of the guerrilla field manual, you discuss Che’s criticism of “the defeatist attitude of revolutionaries or pseudo-revolutionaries who remain inactive” in the face of a “professional army.” You extract from this criticism a provisional definition of revolutionary work as “both the product of given conditions and the basis for new conditions,” with the guerrilla fighter positioned as a necessary but insufficient “catalyst” for broader, extra-military social transformations. I have a more specific question about this definition, but first I’d love to hear you elaborate for our readers how these narrative strategies function in texts like Che’s Guerrilla Warfare (1961) and Carlos Marighella’s Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla (1969).
MS: Revolutionaries have long been drawn to guerrilla warfare by the need to wage combat asymmetrically against forces of greater number and technical capacity: to fight both within and against the world of capital is to fight as a partisan. There is something mythic about this dynamic, which naturally lends itself to the literary imagination. This has been true since the Peninsular War of 1808-14 between France and Spain, from which the term “guerrilla” derives its English origins as a translation of the Spanish “guerra” or “war.”
According to Marx, the Spanish resistance to French invasion had achieved something believed impossible—and it’s cool that he reaches for a literary allusion that isn’t David and Goliath! “As Don Quixote had protested with his lance against gunpowder,” writes Marx, “so the guerrillas protested against Napoleon, only with different success.” While the book gestures at how the modes of combat and socialization of the guerrilla cell have lent themselves to Latin American narrative art—finding transformative resonance in the novels of Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar—my real interest for that chapter is the unique literary or narrative form composed by the guerrillas themselves: namely, the field manual.
The field manual is an instructional handbook combining 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. Crucially, it’s a kind of literature designed to be shared—to inspire and educate, to convert the sympathetic comrade into an effective guerrilla, and to keep that guerrilla alive.
While the field manual might not always have the same kind of artistry as, say, a poem by the legendary Ernesto Cardenal, what I am fascinated by are the kinds of metaphor invoked across these works. Specifically, I’m drawn to the formulation I use for the chapter’s title, which is taken from Che Guevara: “It is important to emphasize that guerrilla warfare is a war of the masses, a war of the people. The guerrilla band,” he says, “is an armed nucleus, the fighting vanguard of the people. It draws its great force from the mass of the people themselves.”
The nuclear metaphor—which reappears all throughout revolutionary discourse in Latin America—serves as a local counterforce to the superpower rivalry that defined the Cold War era and the Cuban Missile Crisis, a zero-sum contest beneath which rival armies fought in the wilds of Latin America, where the guerrilla and its people enact something approaching a nuclear fission of revolutionary solidarity. The field manual, and the guerrillas themselves, are meant to be something like the material and ideological catalyst for this process—which is just as much about what you describe as those broader, extra-military social transformations within the working, dispossessed, and dominated people, with and on behalf of whom the guerrillas fight, as it is about combat maneuvers.
DK: My more specific question involves the definition’s “translatability” across time and space. Your chapter focuses on liberation struggles during what we could call the long 1960s, essentially from the 1959 Cuban Revolution to the U.S.-backed coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. The field manuals you discuss were composed in times of great upheaval across the so-called Third World, but also at a moment when an organized radical left had seized (or had threatened to seize) political power through the mass organization of workers and peasants.
In this context, the relationship between the field manuals’ literary “call to arms” and literal class warfare seems relatively clear: such manuals are intended as guides for preserving and expanding the revolution itself, not least by helping its fighters and supporters remain alive. Is it possible to transpose, at least partially, the lessons of these manuals to aid the present struggle, particularly in the U.S. and Europe, where the left remains largely unorganized and mainstream literature is only tenuously politicized? In other words, to borrow Marx’s formula, do the manuals’ narrative strategies only “become” revolutionary under certain conditions, e.g., of guerrilla war?
MS: Yes and yes. This double-affirmative against your two eloquently counterbalanced questions will seem contradictory, but it is a response in keeping with the manuals themselves and their emphasis on more dynamic kinds of adaptation as opposed to straightforward emulation. The revolutionary lessons of the field manual can be and have been successfully translated out of their original context, but this translation is less about replicable military strategy and has more to do with the need for tactical adaptation to a given situation, on the one hand, and the ideological power of something like comradely socialization, on the other.
Of course, the field manuals of Latin America present major practical limitations at the point of translation: they are written not just for the context of guerrilla war, oftentimes against actual dictatorship, but for guerilla war in a densely jungled and mountainous terrain, with a large land-tied peasant population. This is not the kind of thing that will practically translate to an urban center, let alone to the U.S. or Europe—and that’s why so many Latin American guerillas would insist that (in Fidel Castro’s formulation) “the city is the cemetery of the revolutionaries and resources,” a military and political graveyard for their movement.
Perhaps the best-known example of revolutionaries coming up against the problem of translation is the Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, who operated in West Germany during the 1970s. “The urban guerrilla struggle,” they say, is “based on an understanding that there will be no Prussian-style marching orders, which so many so-called revolutionaries are waiting for to lead the people into revolutionary struggle.” Adopting a strategy and rhetoric lifted directly from Latin America, they enacted a campaign of domestic terrorism but, unlike their successful Latin American equivalents, they were not embedded in anything like a mass movement. Keeping these practical limitations in mind, we can clarify what does in fact translate. The lessons, then, which prevail within guerrilla thought and which translate to other contexts are, first, that no single approach to revolution will work everywhere and, second, that if a revolution is to be successful, it needs to demonstrate to the people on whose behalf it is waged that another, better world is both desirable and attainable.
DK: Your last chapter, “The Army of the Wronged,” discusses another literary form specific to class war: the prison narratives written by incarcerated members of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. Building upon Stuart Hall’s famous analytic that race is the modality through which class is lived (paraphrased from Policing the Crisis, 347), you make several compelling arguments, among them that the carceral autobiography, “with its emphasis on lived experience, is the literary mode that bears witness to the formation of class from the standpoint of race” (Ibid. 224). How have Black revolutionaries like Assata Shakur, George Jackson, and Angela Davis sublated the individualized, often solipsistic tendencies of memoir-writing into a collective literature of “the wronged”? Is the violent, racist, and anti-social space of the prison a paradoxical catalyst for this literary radicalization?
MS: Angela Davis is excellent on this. When talking about her own autobiography, written at the age of twenty-eight, she clarifies that it only came to exist through serious deliberation about her hesitancy to personalize or individualize history. The book she envisioned was not the affirmation of a sovereign self but, instead, “a political autobiography that emphasized the people, the events and the forces in my life that propelled me to my present commitment.” And only this kind of book, she reckoned, might serve a revolutionary purpose, as a conduit for solidarity. “There was the possibility that, having read it, more people would understand why so many of us have no alternative but to offer our lives—our bodies, our knowledge, our will—to the cause of our oppressed people” and who might then “be inspired to join our growing community of struggle.” It’s precisely this tendency into which revolutionaries have attempted to write.
While I mostly talk about specifically militant carceral narratives—particularly those by Huey P. Newton and Assata Shakur – the genre or mode has its historic origins in the slave narrative. There, as in today’s prison memoirs, literature maintains a dual purpose. On the one hand, these works, so often written in isolation, proliferate a kind of collective or class consciousness, allowing the isolated individual to project contact with another, which can be ancestral, or contemporaneous, or located somewhere in the future.
In the book I point to an epiphany in the canonical slave narrative of Frederick Douglass, for whom learning to read would double as a formative moment of political education. “The more I read,” he recalled, “the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers,” and from this realization comes the combative rhetoric of class identity and collective antipathy: “I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men.” Notice the pronouns here: the interplay between the singular and collective, as ratified by the antagonistic shift into us and them.
But conversely—and to borrow your excellent formulation—the individualized, often solipsistic tendencies of memoir-writing are entirely the point! The reassertion of humanity in the face of dehumanization, an insistence that this life matters, make autobiography a novelistic form relative to the social meaning of Black Lives Matter. I often find myself thinking about a line from Joseph Andras’s novel Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us, about an Algerian revolutionary awaiting execution. “There is no heart the state can constrain; dreams eat into its reason like acid.”
In giving form to that feeling, in serving as a narrative vessel for heart and for dreams, the autobiographical carceral narrative asserts something like the obstinate irreducibility of the spirit—a vital counterpoint to the sites of death by which it has been ensnared. This is one of the many reasons why prison literacy programs, and initiatives like the book club established by the rapper Noname (who soundtracked a good deal of my writing!), are crucial to revolutionary political work and why they demand our support.
DK: In what I found to be the most evocative phrase in the entire book, you describe class war as “a metaphor that wants to become literal.” What is the metaphorical content of such emancipatory struggles? And is that metaphorical content something to be overcome through literalization, or does the metaphor endure as the literary nucleus of class war?
MS: When class war is invoked in the popular imagination, which happens all the time, it is, as you say, a metaphor that wants to be literal. As a metaphor, the phrase compares the class society we now inhabit to actual warfare: it suggests a world divided into antipathetic camps, each of which is engineering the ruination of the other. If the metaphor is compelling that is because, under capitalism, ours is very much a social system that generates catastrophic amounts of ruination.
But where that metaphor falls short is that it is, obviously and overwhelmingly, one class getting ruined, while the other enjoys the spoils. As Warren Buffet famously said, “there’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” And this is why the metaphor wants to be literal. In its radical formulations, it seeks to recruit and to motivate comrades from a state of grim contradiction into acts of antagonism—to overcome the metaphorical content, namely the ruinous conditions in which so many are forced to live and die, by waging a literal war against the forces responsible for perpetuating the class system. We encounter versions of this invocation all throughout revolutionary history—and it’s very much around these that the book’s chapters arrange their narratives. Mark Fisher said it best in 2007: “A class war is being waged, but only one side is fighting. Choose your side. Choose your weapons.” This is, quite literally, a call to arms.
DK: As we’ve discussed, your bursting open of the category of the literary raises, I think, a whole slew of important questions. But you couple that radical expansion of “literature” with a comparatively narrow definition of “class war,” which emphasizes physical combat against the state, the occupier, the factory, etc. I think it’s a fascinating choice, especially against the perennially irritating discourse around so-called “violent” versus “non-violent” resistance. What motivated you to write a literary history of combat?
MS: And that’s another thing about class war’s metaphorical function: a tendency to remove from the phrase its revolutionary aspiration to, or reactionary objurgation of, literal content! Here I want to say, for the avoidance of a doubt, all kinds of nonviolent resistance and, better still, communist world-creation should be at the heart of any kind of revolutionary politics. We should all be engaged in that oftentimes slow and quite tedious work of materially improving lives and generating the social conditions in which livable futures can be imagined—if, as comrades, we are not doing that, we need to rethink our understanding of commitment.
Now, while I write about this kind of labor only as relative to combat, especially as it occurred to a vast many historical revolutionaries, I really try to make a case for the essentially nonviolent parts of revolution in the book’s postscript. But here’s the thing: the moment resistance is enacted on a scale sufficient to overcome a social system whose beneficiaries enjoy the world precisely because they sit enthroned atop a mountain of dispossession, exploitation, and immiseration, well, that kind of resistance, no matter how originally peaceful, is going to be met with violent force—because those beneficiaries will defend their benefits with everything they have, which is pretty much everything. If we take the idea of class war at all seriously—and as something more than just a slogan—we need to contend with the fact that at some point there is going to be combat.
DK: And how would you respond to the critique that such a focus reifies masculinist ideas about revolution?
MS: I’m sensitive to that critique, and want to answer it in two different, related ways. On one hand, I can’t help wondering if it doesn’t ratify the assumption that revolutionary violence is inherently masculine. As history teaches us, this simply isn’t true. The book abounds with revolutionary women—from Louise Michel through Mother Jones to Assata Shakur—whose lives might help dislodge that myth. And yet, where the critique does stick is that in different times and places, revolution has been undertaken by men in ways that are grimly and grotesquely masculinist, often relegating women to a support role or assuming women will continue with the work of social reproduction while men engage in battlefield heroics.
Many feminists have been acutely sensitive to this dynamic, and of those discussed in the book, I find the work of Italian autonomists especially edifying. “At the end of every people’s revolution,” wrote Carla Lonzi in 1970, “woman, who fought alongside everyone else, finds herself pushed aside with all her problems. Are we going to let history repeat itself?” The American novelist Rachel Kushner is brilliant when describing the gendered contours of this movement, in her fiction but also in her critical work on Nanni Balestrini.
Here it might be worth adding, forcibly, that while sexism is antipathetic to any revolution worth its name, it’s also a massive practical hindrance to efficacious action, in similar ways to how racism has often derailed the momentum of potentially transformative social movements. For these practical as well as ideological reasons, critiquing monolithic ideas of social class and the revolutionary subject became one of my ambitions for the book, and one that really clarified in the process of research and writing. We all know that capitalism secures ruling class power through the manipulation of gendered, racial, and ethnic prejudice. In order to meet that system as an enemy, at a time when the fight against exploitation necessarily commingles with the need to abolish other forms of oppression, exclusion, and injustice, our understanding of class needs to be flexible enough to include intersecting social relations.
DK: Relatedly, near the end of Class War, you complicate your own emphasis on combat—in particular, you address Assata Shakur’s lament that certain “impatient comrades” in the Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army attempted to “substitute military for political strategy,” effectively “mak[ing] a fetish of combat at the expense of solidarity” (236-7). “Armed struggle,” Shakur reminds us, “can never be successful by itself; it must be part of an overall strategy for winning, and the strategy must be political as well as military” (Shakur, qtd. in 237). Incorporating Shakur’s warning into your analysis, you contend the Black Liberation Army was in fact “not an army in any technical sense of the term, but an expression of class war.”
MS: Yes, and I’m really glad you mention this—I want to stress that while combat is important, it is not and never has been everything. It is always flanked, to use a military metaphor, by other forms of social, political, and cultural work, all of which contribute in very real ways to imagining futures, to changing minds, and to growing solidarity. That is what I am getting at when, in the postscript, I insist that class war has always had just as much to do with international solidarity, with embodied diversity, and with a commitment to collective betterment as it has with bullets, bombs, and barricades.
But perhaps it is obvious that I would think this, given my belief that literature has some important role to play within the revolutionary process! In any event, I try to show that this is the case historically, and that the most successful revolutions have been alive to the lived realities of what we might call ideology, neglecting it at their own expense. To share just one example, I have always been deeply moved by the Black Panthers’ creation of the survival program, with its free breakfasts and its community schooling and its healthcare and its different kinds of redistribution and so on.
Huey Newton explains: “We soon discovered that weapons and uniforms set us apart from the community. We were looked upon as an ad hoc military group, acting outside the community fabric and too radical to be part of it. We saw ourselves as the revolutionary ‘vanguard’ and did not fully understand that only the people can create the revolution.” To my ears, this is a lesson for life in general no less than revolution in particular: over the years I have come to take practical as well as intellectual inspiration from this, and firmly believe that in the true spirit of “from each, to each,” we should all be dedicating a whole lot of our time and our labor to community work of this sort. Shakur, who worked in the program, knew it too.
DK: Finally, as someone who knows of your adjacent interests in the proletarian and Objectivist poets like Oppen, Niedecker, Hughes, and McKay—many of whom gave up writing for a time in order to organize in the labor and communist movements—I can’t help but wonder: where do these various proletarian traditions fit into your account of literary militancy?
MS: What I love about those writers is the way they give form to the force of revolutionary commitment, and how they articulate the acute feelings of proletarian experience. While this is material for another project, I want to answer your question on a more personal than theoretical level. As someone now employed to teach literature, including all the poets you mention, I hadn’t encountered much of it until I was an adult. This is in part the result of growing up in a working-class family that didn’t place much value on books because books were never seen as a practical means to obtaining a wage. Lorine Niedecker has an amazing poem about this kind of scenario, called “Poet’s Work.” Everyone should read it.
Now, when I finally did encounter the kinds of writing you describe, it was nothing short of transformative. Reading this stuff was the first time I had encountered an artform that seemed so wholly responsive to the inner lives of working people: to our desires and frustrations, to our exhausted, scattered thoughts, to our many daily triumphs, but also to our molten fucking fury–to a world that was so goddamn moving because it was also mine. This experience, perhaps more so than any one tradition canonized by literary history, underwrites a whole lot of my account, though often silently. Literature has always helped me appreciate class belonging and class antagonism as more than just material circumstance, and I genuinely hope my book can achieve something similar. ♦
Poet’s Work
Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade
I learned
to sit at desk
and condense
No layoff
from this
condensery
Lorine Niedecker, 8 June 1962
Mark Steven teaches literature at the University of Exeter. His other books include Red Modernism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) and Splatter Capital (Repeater Books, 2017).
