Fri, 21 Jul at 19:35

R. Malcolm Smuts

5 days ago

It is interesting that Gardiner anticipated Everritt’s argument about the insularity of county communities. Both historians raise issues that not only deserve serious consideration but have received considerable attention since the 1970s. On common sense grounds we might expect that members of a predominantly agricultural society, in which wealth and social position derived primarily from ownership of land, and in which travel was also much slower and more difficult than today, to adopt a localist outlook. And if their participation in governance took place within the framework of a county, and their social alliances also tended to remain county-centered (as Everitt claimed to demonstrate), that would further reinforce their localism. The issue is how far these assumptions were actually true, and to the extent that they were not true, what features of early modern society broke through the insularity? Post 1970s historiography offers a number of answers, beginning with the stress of Clive Holmes and others on the importance of the centralized legal structure of English government, which made it impossible to ignore the political center entirely, and extending to the work of a number of scholars on printed controversy, the circulation and packaging of news, and the putative emergence of a ‘post-reformation public sphere’. We might add other facets of early Stuart society that arguably have not received enough attention: the role of great nobles and their affinities, whose horizons transcended county boundaries; the importance of professional groups like lawyers and clergymen — but arguably also clothiers, sailors and even peddlars, whose work brought them into contact with wider environments; the importance of London and other trading cities as hubs of information and nodal points of wider networks. While acknowledging the undoubted contributions of Gardiner and Everitt, we need to recognize that in important ways the discussion of the issues their work raises has moved on since the 1970s. What we now need to evaluate is how far these newer layers of historiography provide convincing answers to our questions about the reputed insularity of local communities, how they may still be lacking, and what new questions and avenues of research we ought to be pursuing.

Christopher Thompson

5 days ago

This is a very interesting and challenging comment, Malcolm. In the late-1960s, I took the view that a revised account of the Court-Country scheme of analysis was needed. One could look at the Court (a) as the centre of policy making in secular and religious matters (b) as the administrative apparatus stretching out from Westminster to the counties, corporations and localities of England and Wales and (c) as a cultural and social institution. Those who were involved with the Court in one of these senses might have been opposed to it or critical of it in another. It seemed to me then that this might avoid some of the analytical difficulties arising from the work of Trevor-Roper, Stone, Zagorin and others. I still think this approach has some utility. Within local communities, there was a range of responses to the demands of the ‘political Court’ which involved bargaining and negotiation, complaint, conflict and compromise. Conrad Russell was mistaken in supposing that Parliament was alone in its involvement in these relationships between successive monarchs and the Court on the one hand and the Country, including local communities, on the other. As Caroline rule became more authoritarian, opportunities for bargaining and negotiation narrowed by 1640. Clive Holmes, whom I first met in 1966 or 1967, was actually heavily influenced at that time by Everitt’s approach although, by c.1980, he was much more critical. News was clearly conveyed across the country not just by newsletter writers but by other means as well, including oral transmissions as the cases in many Assize Court and Quarter Sessions’ cases show. London as the major urban centre in the country clearly differed in its social composition and reactions to royal policies from many other localities. Obviously, the areas of historical enquiry have altered greatly since 1884 or 1967. But I was surprised to see how far Gardiner almost one hundred and forty years ago had anticipated what Everitt was to claim. These issues need further consideration. (My piece does not seem to have been reproduced as I uploaded it.)

R. Malcolm Smuts

5 days ago

I agree that the court-country thesis needed more careful parsing and analysis. In addition to your comments, which I find persuasive, I’ve also stressed the distinction between the actual court and the court as an image or cultural trope, which figured in contemporary polemic but which also did not correspond to actual conditions in any simple manner. One of the glaring problems with Stone’s account was his failure to make this distinction. I’d also add (and suspect you would agree) that ‘country’ opposition to higher taxation was not perfectly aligned with ‘puritan’ resistance to Laudian innovations and unhappiness with the absence of a more active policy in support of Protestant interests in Europe. If anything, ‘country’ desire for a cheaper and less intrusive court was implicitly at odds with the European ambitions of people like Warwick (and many of the Scottish Covenanters, for that matter). And in terms of personnel, we need to keep reminding ourselves that the groom of the stole and two successive lord chamberlains backed Parliament in 1641-2: the court was as divided as many counties. Indeed the fact that the court was internally divided, with many of its key members convinced that Charles needed to be forced to change course, was crucial to the strategy of the parliamentary leadership in the early months of the Lond Parliament. They did not want to replace the court but hoped instead to take it over, and thereby to hem Charles in to a point at which he would have no choice but to conform to their demands; and for a time they appeared to be succeeding. Seeing the Civil War as the outcome of a binary contest between the king, court and reactionary aristocracy and a gentry, puritan, country opposition leads to all kinds of distortions.

Christopher Thompson

4 days ago

I do agree, particularly on the point you make about the role of the ‘Court’ and the distinction to be made with its image. Hexter made the comment many years ago that opposition to royal policies in the State did not necessarily align with opposition to royal/Laudian policies in the Church. But gaining control of the direction of policies in Church and State could only be done by reducing the role of Charles I to that of a Doge of Venice, something the King would and could never accept. The peerage was by no means reactionary in my view but had benefited from a notable strengthening of its economic position since the 1580s – here I prefer W.R.Emerson’s analysis – a point that Lawrence Stone’s incidental comments in The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 actually appear to support. The recent research on the subject of neutralism and coat-turning in the Civil Wars of the 1640s does confirm your observations.

 R. Malcolm Smuts

4 days ago

I think we are in substantial agreement. Part of the problem in 1641 was that the only way to control Charles was to hem him in completely, isolating him from anyone who might encourage and help carry out an effort to re-assert his total control and punish his enemies. (It’s tempting to compare him to Donald Trump in this way, even if Charles was a far more cultivated man on a personal level). To do that, in turn, required ruthless tactics to eliminate or intimidate strong royalists, including the use or threat of impeachment and the encouragement of crowd actions that implied a physical threat to the safety of the royal family. This in turn provoked a backlash that extended even to some people initially supportive of the Long Parliament’s agenda, while lessening inhibitions against the use of equally ruthless tactics by the king’s partisans. That created a dynamic that corroded, even if it never entirely eliminated, commitment to the rule of law, non-violent forms of governance and civic peace, while empowering men on both sides who were prepared to mobilize and use coercive force. On one level this was a new version of the old problem of how to control an unacceptable king without creating even worse problems and more chaos than his misrule had produced. Parliament’s leaders tried to erect institutional and legal safeguards, in ways that went far beyond any of the baronial rebellions of the Middle Ages. But these failed to prevent a ruthless political contest that ultimately had to be decided by the sword, and that ultimately destroyed the existing system of English governance, including the role of Parliament, producing a military state lacking in any sense of legitimacy beyond a shrinking cohort of its own followers. And then to the attempt to put Humpty Dumpty back together again after 1660.

Christopher Thompson

4 days ago

This is undoubtedly correct. I have some suspicions that the deployment of mob violence against supporters of the King, the Bishops and recalcitrant supporters of the royal regime in London was rather less spontaneous than Manning or later Marxists supposed. Valerie Pearl did not thinks so and there is a body of evidence to show that the ‘great contrivers’ were better acquainted with more radical Londoners than usually supposed. The major figures in the Long Parliament knew, pace Kishlanky, that Charles I was untrustworthy and would not keep to any settlement that might have been reached. In due course, the violence of the Civil Wars and Irish/Scottish imbroglios led to an outcome in which the post-1646 regimes rested in the last resort on force and lacked the degree of consent necessary to consolidate their rule. This problem was never resolved and led in 1660 to the Restoration. The constitutional and religious problems exposed after 1640 took several more decades to resolve.

R. Malcolm Smuts

4 days ago

Yes, the parliamentary grandees sought to use crowd actions and threats of crowd violence as weapons to intimidate the king, queen and others. I strongly suspect they also hoped to ramp up or tramp down religious hostility to the queen to pressure her into pressuring Charles to acquiesce to their demands. But it must have been very hard to keep control of the crowds and religious passions once they had been unleashed. My reading is that some people — especially those involved in the First Army Plot — were initially inclined to advice Charles and HM to compromise but drew back when they concluded that the parliamentary leadership had unleashed mob violence it would be unable to restrain, leaving a royalist counter-strike as the only viable option. U developed this interpretation in my contribution to the collection on Royalists and Royalism edited by Jason McElligott and David Smith with CUP in 2007.

Christopher Thompson

2 days ago

I see the force of this argument and why the members/leaders of the Junto felt it necessary to use force to compel the King to make concessions that would have left him effectively powerless in a revised constitution. Whether they judged that Charles would ever have accepted such a settlement is another issue. Mobs could be mobilised and de-mobilised as some of the work on the French Revolution has shown. Your essay in the McElligott-Smith volume is an impressive analysis – I have been working on its immediate predecessor for some while.

R. Malcolm Smuts

19 hrs ago

I’ll be interested to see what you come up with. Up to a point mobs could be mobilised and demobilised, but they were also capable of taking on a life of their own (like armies), as contemporaries realized. I do wonder how far the ‘revised constitution (a term no one in the seventeenth century would have used) was considered an end in itself, rather than a set of improvised measures to deal with the problem of a wayward king. No doubt a bit of both. I’ve long felt that the traditional historiography on the outbreak of the Civil War over-emphasizes the reasoned pursuit of constitutional measures, while understating the degree to which contemporaries knew they had been drawn into a ruthless and dangerous political contest, in which their lives were often at stake, whose ultimate outcome was very hard to foresee because the measures needed to deal with the immediate crisis risked generating new crises down the road. The constitutionalist view makes the contest seem more polite and principled but also less fraught and exciting than it really was. Russell and Adamson have gone some way to redress the balance.

Christopher Thompson

7 hrs ago

Let me begin by commenting on how well connected the 2nd Earl of Warwick was with the leaders of the radical cause in London. Of its four M.P.s in the 1640s, Cradock and Venn were almost certainly known to him because of his and their role in founding the New England and Massachusetts Bay companies: Samuel Vassall held land of Warwick in south-east Essex and Isaac Pennington was, like Warwick, one of the people who supported Samuel Hartlib. Warwick’s brother-in-law from 1625 to 1645 and associate in the affairs of the Somers Island Company was Owen Rowe. Warwick had owned a house in Hackney until at least 1634 and did own one at Stoke Newington. His shipping interests gave him extensive contacts with the seamen of London before and after 1640. I suspect there are grounds for thinking that Warwick and his allies like Saye and Sele and the 2nd Lord Brooke had the contacts to concert demonstrations in and around Whitehall. All three men had been prepared in principle to support the use of armed resistance to royal authority since 1634 as their contacts with Connecticut and Massachusetts indicated. We can find expressions of deep hostility to royal and ecclesiastical authority in the works of Warwick’s clerical allies like Nathaniel Barnard and Jeremiah Burroughs well before 1640. They were, moreover, careful to cover their tracks in their dealings with Irish and Scottish opponents of the Caroline regime but left just enough traces elsewhere to offer indications of their plans. I am sorry to say that Conrad Russell’s analysis of the pre-1640 schemes of these men is fundamentally implausible and completely untenable. That their lives were on the line after the spring and summer of 1640 was, I would maintain, clear to them and their allies: they were well acquainted with King Charles I’s vindictiveness towards critics and opponents of his rule. As a result, they had to bind him so fast that he could never free himself from the restraints they aimed to impose on him as Pym’s remarks in the Plume Mss indicate.

R. Malcolm Smuts

1 hr ago

I find this entirely persuasive. These connections need more emphasis. Adamson’s book seems to me to do a better job than Russell’s in bringing out the role of the aristocratic opposition to Charles, but I’m sure there is more work to be done in this area. I’ve long thought — and I wonder if you would agree — that someone needs to bridge the perspectives of Adamson’s __Noble Revolt__ and Cressy’s __England on Edge__. I once said this to Cressy and he seemed to agree. Asking whether the revolt against Charles was popular or aristocratic in nature is the wrong question. It was obviously both at once and the challenge is to explain how the two dimensions were integrated. But I would also continue to maintain that no matter how extensive and effective the networks of Warwick and his allies undoubtedly were in mobilizing and steering popular protests, crowd actions were always inevitably difficult to control in the long run, and the process of tying a king’s hands was fraught with all sorts of risks, as earlier English history demonstrated in ways that people like Warwick would have appreciated. As I’m sure you know, Warwick told the Dutch envoys who accompanied William to London for his marriage with Princess Mary that he was too busy trying to prevent the outbreak of civil war to attend on them properly. He knew he was playing with fire, because he had no choice, but that didn’t make his actions any less dangerous. The return of soldiers from European campaigns to fight on both sides of the Bishops’ Wars compounded the problem.

Peter Paccione

4 days ago

It’s my impression that it was common throughout early modern England for people to refer to their counties as “countries.” It wasn’t unique to Kent.

Christopher Thompson

4 days ago

Yes but Everitt’s argument that this put Kent’s interests before those of England was not convincing then or now.

Fortunately, there is surviving evidence on Warwick’s ability to control very large crowds with a propensity to some violence. In the 1628 county election for Essex, about 15,000 freeholders assembled at Chelmsford (according to JohnPory) and returned the candidates Warwick supported despite the efforts of the Privy Council and the J.P.s of the county. If Pory was right about the numbers present, this would have represented about a quarter of all the adult men in Essex. In March, 1640 at the county election again in Chelmsford to the Short Parliament, it was clear a very large number of men were present and that threats of violence were made against the candidate or candidates endorsed by Lord Maynard, Henry Neville of Cressing Temple and probably by Sir Humphrey Mildmay of Danbury. Sir William Masham’s very brief reported comments in the House of Commons suggest that Neville had had the support of the Privy Council and of the magistrates in an attempt to defeat Warwick’s allies. Warwick himself played a key role in managing the outcomes in both cases. It is likely that the supporters of his candidates were mobilised across Essex by his gentry allies, by his and their tenants, sympathetic clergymen and figures in the county’s boroughs. Warwick’s manor of Moulsham Hall was probably the base where these supporters were fed and watered. These outcomes hint at a degree of co-ordination across the county. The petition submitted to the Short Parliament from Essex in April, 1640 may have been signed then: that for Hertfordshire (and just conceivably the summary one from Northamptonshire) is clearly related. Later petitions from Essex to the Long Parliament were presented with a significant number of supporters brining them up. I have had some interesting conversations over the years with John Walter on how Warwick’s control of the county was exercised in the 1640s. It also seems likely to me that Warwick’s mercantile and clerical contacts were brought into play in the petitioning manoeuvres and demonstrations in 1641-1642 in the capital. He was undoubtedly aware of Charles I’s deep antagonism to critics and opponents of his authoritarian rule as the case of Sir John Eliot indicates. That Charles would take revenge if he could must have been obvious to the Junto from the summer of 1640 if not before. They had to tie his hands so firmly that that would never be possible as Pym’s recorded comment in the Plume Ms. notebook suggests. Warwick, Saye and Sele, the 2nd Lord Brooke and their allies in the House of Commons and beyond were at risk of their lives as you rightly state. 

Several decades ago, Alan Everitt argued in his study of the county of Kent that its rulers formed a community of their own, that this community was distinct from that of other counties and that, when its leaders spoke of their ‘country’ they meant Kent rather than England. It was in reaction to the demands of the King and his Privy Council that the community of Kent shaped its political and religious responses and that this form of localism helped to explain the antecedents and outbreak of the English Civil War or Revolution.

There is no doubt about the stimulus that this hypothesis gave to the investigation of county histories across the period. The works of Anthony Fletcher, John Morrill and the late Clive Holmes testify to its impact. In historiographical terms, it was highly significant in the late-1960s and 1970s, even though its influence has now faded.

At that time, I was sceptical partly because this argument did not appear to have medieval antecedents and did not feature in the case of the counties I was then studying. What I had not appreciated was that, in some respects, Everitt’s argument had been anticipated by S.R.Gardiner in his volume on the History of England between 1639 and 1641. He had written there that, in 1639. Both Charles and Wentworth under-estimated the strength of the opposition against their policy too much, to make them even think of recurring to violence. Nor is it at all likely that even those who felt most bitterly against conscious the Government were aware of how strong was their position in the country. In the seventeenth century, when Parliament was not sitting, our ancestors were a divided people. Each county formed a separate community, in which the gentry discussed politics and compared grievances when they met at quarter sessions and assizes.

Between county and country, there was no such bond. No easy and rapid means of communication united York with London, and London with Exeter. No newspapers sped over the land, forming and echoing a national opinion from the Cheviots to the Land’s End. The men who begrudged the payment of ship-money in Buckinghamshire could only learn from uncertain rumour that it was equally unpopular in Essex or in Shropshire. There was therefore little of that mutual confidence which distinguishes an army of veterans from an army of recruits, none of that sense of dependence upon trusted leaders which gives unity of purpose and calm reliance to an eager and expectant nation.

Gardiner’s claim anticipated the arguments that Everitt was to put seven decades later. I am not sure that either was correct. Similar demands were made of each county from the ‘political Court’ at the centre and were the subject of bargaining and negotiation, of compromise and conflict. These common experiences were felt across England and Wales. Newsletter writers like Mede, Pory and Rossingham made them widely known as the testimonies of men like John Rous and Walter Yonge showed. The carriers of goods and people conveyed news more widely than Gardiner appreciated in this passage.

When I was a postgraduate, I was often doubtful about the analysis of the past in the works of previous generations of historians. Since then, I have come to understand how perceptive they often were and that important insights remain to be found in their works. Gardiner and Everitt may not have been precisely right in their conclusions but it is striking how similar their formulations were. I shall go on reading the works of previous historians in the hope of gaining better insights into the lives of early modern people in the future.

16 July, 2023

 “In my chair, I surrendered myself to a world of sound that could only be described as sparkling. It made my head sway, and my breath grew deeper as my legs climbed up that evanescent staircase, each step a sheet of light. They would shimmer to life the second my sole made contact, then fizzle into stardust when I lifted my foot, only to be reborn as yet another step, gently showing me the way.”

All the Lovers in the Night

‘I want to write about real people,’

Mieko Kawakami

“There are just as many memories as there are people, so there’s no correct version of one event. That’s why we need many different kinds of voices and experiences, and by reading those voices, we understand and construct a bigger picture of the world.”

Mieko Kawakami.

“Those Who Fight Most Energetically and Persistently for the New Are Those Who Suffer Most from the Old”

Leon Trotsky

All the Lovers In the Night is Mieko Kawakami’s third novel. The book covers similar ground to her previous books, ” Breasts and Eggs and Heaven. All three books were translated into English by Sam Bett and David Boyd, with Breasts and Eggs having sold over 250,000 copies in thirty countries. Kawakami’s novels have come under sustained criticism from Japanese conservatives,  Shintaro Ishihara, Tokyo’s former governor and a former novelist, called them “unpleasant and intolerable”.

Mieko Kawakami is one of the most important writers to come out of Japan. Kawakami was born in Osaka in 1976. Her family were working class and poor. She was forced to work in a factory at the age of making heaters and electric fans. Later she had a job as a hostess and a singing career, finally becoming a blogger and a poet. She has almost single-handily dragged Japanese literature into the 21st century. She won many awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, in 2008. Haruki Murakami, one of the most important Japanese novelists, praised the writer, saying Kawakami  is “always ceaselessly growing and evolving.” However, Kawakami has not always liked  Murakami’s portrayal of women.[1] In a 2017 interview with Murakami, she opposed his perceived sexism, saying, “I’m talking about the large number of female characters who exist solely to fulfil a sexual function” and “Women are no longer content to shut up,”

All the Lovers in the Night covers the life of a working-class Japanese girl, Fuyuko Irie, a proofreader in Tokyo. Fuyuko is a typical character used by Kawakami, a person who is single, childless, largely a loner and travels through life unnoticed and unloved.

As Fuyuko Irie says, “What I saw in the reflection was myself, in a cardigan and faded jeans, at the age of thirty-four. Just a miserable woman who couldn’t even enjoy herself on a gorgeous day like this, on her own in the city, desperately hugging a bag full to bursting with the kind of things that other people wave off or throw in the trash the first chance they get.”

There is cleverness in how “All the Lovers in the Night” addresses all the changes in the book’s main protagonists. Kawakami never judges her characters and empathises with them/. As Joshua Krook writes, “If there is a core question in Kawakami’s work, it is what the oppressed should do to feel okay with themselves. Most of her stories feature people who are ignored or mistreated by society, with many having psychological problems stemming from their mistreatment. The protagonists cling onto one or two people as lifelines that keep them afloat in the storm.”[2]

Kawakami’s Treatment of Irie’s alcoholism is particularly sensitive. Alcoholism seems to be a major problem in Japanese society. Just typing in Google search engine for alcoholism amongst young Japanese women brings up many articles.

A recent study found that “young Japanese people drink much more alcohol than the global average. In 2020, 73 per cent of men aged 15 to 39 in Japan drank harmful amounts of alcohol compared to 39 per cent of their male peers globally. The difference was even starker for Japanese women: 62 per cent of women aged 15 to 39 years in Japan drank harmful amounts of alcohol in 2020 compared to just 13 per cent of young women globally.”[3]

Kawakami is not shy about discussing subjects barely mentioned in Japanese or, come to that matter, in Western Society, such as social class and gender. Her treatment of sexual violence towards women is one such issue. As Cameron Bassindale writes in his book review, “It reaches a nadir in tone when Kawakami produces a chapter detailing sexual violence which is so visceral and believable it will leave those weak of temperament wondering why they ever picked up this book. That is to say, Kawakami has truly outdone herself, surpassing even her lofty expectations of creating a narrative which is immediate and realistic; this English translation is a gift to anyone wishing to understand life for the modern Japanese woman and the perils and hardships many women face. Of course, no two human experiences are the same, and that point is apparent in the contrast between the female characters in the novel; however, the space between men and women in the book tells the state of gender relations in Japan. It is up to the reader to draw their conclusions.”[4]

Several middle-class reviewers like Mia Levitan have sought to position Kawakami as some “literary feminist icon”. Levitan writes, “ Anti-heroines aching for erasure may point to a broader unease. Kyle Chayka, the author of The Longing For Less (2020), posits that a modern desire for nothingness stems from overstimulation. Or it may be a reaction to “girl-boss” feminism. “Instead of forcing optimism and self-love down our throats . . . I think feminism should acknowledge that being a girl in this world is hard,” suggests Audrey Wollen, the Los Angeles-based artist who became known in 2014 for her “Sad Girl Theory”, which reframes sadness as a form of protest.”

A turn towards feminism cannot solve the problems women face in Kawakami’s books or in real life. The plight of working-class women in Japan or anywhere else is inseparably linked to the plight of the working class.

As Kate Randall correctly points out, “The fight for women’s rights is a social question that must be resolved in the arena of class struggle.As Rosa Luxemburg once explained: “The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”[5]

All the Lovers in the Night is well-written, eminently readable, and sometimes beautiful. Although largely written about womanhood, it is still a great novel, and one looks forward to Kawakami’s future work.

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[1] A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself- https://lithub.com/a-feminist-critique-of-murakami-novels-with-murakami-himself/

[2] https://newintrigue.com/2021/06/18/the-writing-of-mieko-kawakami/

[3] Population-level risks of alcohol consumption by amount, geography, age, sex, and year: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2020- www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00847-9/fulltext

[4] bookmarks.reviews/reviewer/cameron-bassindale/

[5] The condition of working-class women on International Women’s Day=

 “The material premise of communism should be so high a development of the economic powers of man that productive labour, having ceased to be a burden, will not require any goad, and the distribution of life’s goods, existing in continual abundance, will not demand—as it does not now in any well-off family or ‘decent’ boardinghouse—any control except that of education, habit and social opinion”.

Leon Trotsky

‘you gentlemen who think you have a mission

to teach us of the 7 deadly sins

should first sort out the basic food position

then do your preaching that’s where it begins’

(Brecht, Three Penny Opera)

This new edition of Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, which comes with a new translation,should be welcomed.

At the beginning of the 1870s, there were two main socialist parties in Germany. The Social Democratic Workers Party founded by Karl Marx’s collaborator, Wilhelm Liebknecht, at a congress in Eisenach in 1869, and the General German Workers Association was founded by the late Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863.

Marx’s criticism of Lassalle contained in Critique of the Gotha program was not episodic but was profound and had far-reaching significance for the German (and international) workers movement. Marx’s letters to Engels on the subject of Lassalle, and, for that matter, his direct correspondence with Lassalle, retain immense political and theoretical use.

According to a document of the founding of the Socialist Equality Party (Germany), “ the SPD was never a homogeneous party. The unification conference in 1875 in Gotha made numerous concessions to the supporters of Ferdinand Lassalle, who had died in 1864. Marx sharply criticised the Gotha Programme, which he accused of being “tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect’s servile belief in the state”. Lassalle had wanted to establish socialism with the help of the Prussian state, which he regarded as an institution standing above the classes. He had even met secretly with Bismarck in order to exploit the latter’s conflicts with the bourgeoisie in the interests of the working class. Lassalle justified this opportunist “alliance with absolutist and feudal opponents against the bourgeoisie” (Marx) by saying that in relation to the working class, “all other classes are only one reactionary mass”. This ultra-left cliché blurred the difference between the democratic petty bourgeoisie, the liberal bourgeoisie and the feudal reaction. It was also reproduced in the Gotha Programme and was angrily rejected by Marx”.

The Critique of the Gotha Program has, in some radical and academic circles, been seen as the Marxist movement finally showing what the future will look like under socialism. At best, this is a miss reading of the book or, worse, a silly deception.

As the Marxist economist Nick Beams points out, “The development of a socialist society will not occur according to a series of prescriptions and rules laid down by an individual, a political party or a governmental authority. Rather, it will develop based on the activity of the members of society who, for the first time in history, consciously regulate and control their social organisation as part of their daily lives, free from the domination and prescriptions of either the “free market” or a bureaucratic authority standing over and above them. In one of his earliest writings, Marx made clear that “only when man has recognised and organised his powers as social forces, and consequently no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished” (Marx, On the Jewish Question, Collected Works, Volume 3, p. 168).[1]

While this new translation of a Marxist classic is welcomed, it comes with a health warning. The politics of the organisation that produced it, to put it crudely, stink. The Marxist-Humanist Current was founded in the US by the State Capitalist Raya Dunayevskaya. Along with C L R, James Dunayevskaya, disagreed with Leon Trotsky’s definition of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state and its bureaucracy as a caste, not a social class. During his time in the Socialist Workers Party(SWP), James, alongside Raya Dunayevskay, formed the Johnson-Forrest tendency that the Soviet Union represented a new form of “state capitalism” with imperialist tendencies. James exclaimed in his complete and open break with the Fourth International’s perspectives: “Orthodox Trotskyism can find no objective necessity for an imperialist war between Stalinist Russia and American imperialism. It is the only political tendency in the world which cannot recognise that the conflict is a struggle between two powers for world mastery.” [State Capitalism and World Revolution, 1950]. James would desert the SWP over its correct position in the Korean War. Moreover, the outbreak of the Korean War was the major postwar event which put the state capitalists to the test and decisively exposed them as apologists for imperialism within the workers’ movement.

The Marxist Humanist Current has nothing to do with Marxism. It does not see the modern working class as revolutionary and has no interest in building a revolutionary party. The Current concentrates not on the working class but on the petty bourgeoisie.

As Peter Linebaugh states in his afterword, “We are at the edge of the abyss staring into the “ecological rift”’. His answer to mankind’s problems is to rely on a rising among black and brown people, women, indigenous peoples, and the rebels against extinctions that will “become components of ‘the real movement’ that conquers as well as resists: ‘We can pluck the living flower to re-create the commons.’

Ironically, Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, while aimed at the Lassalelans of the 19^th century, could also be a scathing critique of their modern-day counterparts in the Marxist Humanist Current.  

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[1] Some questions and answers on life under socialism-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/05/corr-m30.html

 “Brought up between three cultures and two languages, David Unger has managed to capture with much irony and passion the trials and tribulations of a Jewish family in 1980s Guatemala. The story of three brothers, of the shocks between civilizations that are so in vogue these days, and of the plurality of cultures that coexist in Latin America, Life in the Damn Tropics is a novel that one reads with much perplexity and immense pleasure.”

— Jorge Volpi, author of In Search of Klingsor

“In The Mastermind, David Unger’s compelling antihero reminds us of the effects of privilege and corruption, and how that deadly combo can spill from the public to the private sphere. Unger’s Guillermo Rosensweig is on a hallucinatory journey in which everything seems to go right until it goes terribly, terribly wrong. I couldn’t put this down.”

–Achy Obejas, author of Ruins

1 How did the possibility of translating the new book come about?

In 2016, I published my most recent novel, The Mastermind (New York: Akashic Books), which is based rather loosely on real events that caused an existential crisis in Guatemala and almost brought down a left-of-centre government in 2009. It’s a book that has been translated into ten languages. At the time, I felt that I wanted to give back to my birthplace in a unique way. Over the years, I’ve translated 16 books, so it seemed that I should attempt to re-translate Guatemala’s Nobel prize in literature author Miguel Angel Asturias’s first and most powerful novel. I contacted the Balcell’s Agency which gave me the green light, but due to some copyright issues, I had to wait until 2022 to publish my translation of Mr. President with Penguin Classics.

2. What do you think of the previous translation by Frances Partridge? What problems were involved after the last translation was over fifty years ago? 

Partridge’s translation is mostly workman-like but suffers, as I say in the introduction, with many Anglicisms and a failure to recognize many Guatemaltequismos—particularly Guatemalan words and terms that she didn’t fully understand. Mr. President is a very American novel, one that lends itself to translation in the American vein. Words like “coppers,” “blimey,” and “lorry” are acceptable terms in the English language but are not inviting to North American readers. Further, she didn’t have a clue about certain Guatemalan foods, birds and plants that have entered into the American vernacular through the immigration of nearly 60 million Latin Americans into the U.S. In some ways, she was hopelessly overmatched though I find that she also came through with some lovely descriptions, a la Bloomsbury style.

3 What kind of research, historical or otherwise, was involved?

Keith, I mostly tried to figure out what Asturias was saying and concentrated fully on the Spanish text. The novel is a depiction of the Estrada Cabrera regime (1898-1920) and mixes high and low language. There are surrealist bursts and many indigenous Guatemalan terms. I worked with two Guatemalan writers/friends who helped me decipher some 250 queries that I had. Both love the work of Asturias and were, indeed, helpful. At times, we were all stumped, and I had to make a leap of faith based on what I thought Asturias was getting at. It is an amazing novel that has a very strong narrative push though there are moments of exquisite descriptions. The Spanish version of Mr. President carries a glossary of about 200 words to help readers, but I wanted to create a version that wouldn’t pull the reader out of the novel to consult with this glossary. This was the main purpose of my translation.

4 Could you explain the importance of Mr. President in Latin American literature?

I am not the only one to say it—Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru’s Nobel Prize novelist) and Gerald Martin (Asturias’s most important scholar and the biographer of Garcia Marquez and soon Vargas Llosa)–, but Mr. President is without question the most important Latin American novel of the 20th century. It introduced surrealism and magical realism into writing and, at the same time, portrayed a dictator who poisons all aspects of society—the social fabric, the legal system, friendship and love—in order to maintain his power. The unnamed president of an unnamed country is only interested in his power, his vanity and his machinations. Does it sound familiar? Let’s mention Trump, Ortega and Bolsonaro. It is a novel that is really a rich tapestry of Latin American life, infused with betrayal, violence and abuse.

5 Given the current situation in Guatemala, would you not agree that the book’s release is very prescient?

Definitely, all the reviewers in the Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine, The NY Times, The New York Review of Books express their astonishment about how accurate the novel is in depicting our Latin American reality. Guatemala, in particular, is a dysfunctional country thanks to the “Pacto de corruptos”—the Pact of Corrupt entities—that has a stranglehold on the country. We had primary elections ten days ago, and by surprise, Bernardo Arevalo—the son of what was a brilliant Guatemalan president in the 1940s—made the August 20th runoff. The industrialists, military officers and narco-traffickers are accusing him of being a Communist and that his Semilla Party (Seed Party) wants to destroy capitalism, the Church, marriage, the schools, tortillas, tamales, the volcanoes. Do you get my drift? These megalomaniacs don’t want to give up an ounce of their power. It is disgusting. But I believe that despite these forces of evil, he will succeed. He is a centrist with good values, and, most important, he isn’t corrupt.

6 What are you working on now?

I am at the airport (my flight was delayed) on my way to take part in the Guatemala International Book Fair (FILGUA). There I will present the Spanish version of my children’s book Sleeping With the Lights On (a fictionalized account of the U.S.-directed overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954) and discuss Mr. President with Miguel Angel Asturias’s son. I don’t think I have another novel in me—I don’t have anything new to say—but I will continue to write children’s books and translate. I’ve written four novels and, a collection of short stories, 4 children’s books and translated nearly 20 books from Spanish, and I am happy with what I have done.

About the Author

Guatemalan-born David Unger is an award-winning translator and author. His short stories have appeared in several anthologies and literary journals in the United States and abroad. He has translated thirteen books, among them works by Teresa Cárdenas, Rigoberta Menchú, Ana Maria Machado, Silvia Molina Elena Garro, Bárbara Jacobs and Nicanor Parra’s. He teaches Translation at City College of New York’s graduate M.A. Program and is the U.S. rep of the Guadalajara International Book Fair. He lives in Brooklyn.

BY DAVID UNGER:

Sleeping With the Light On

CHILDRENS, 2020

The Mastermind

NOVEL, 2015

La casita

PICTURE BOOK, 2012

The Price of Escape

NOVEL, 2011

Para mi eres divina

NOVEL, 2011

Ni chicha ni limonada

SHORT STORIES, 2010

Life in the Damn Tropics

NOVEL, 2002

In the process of writing, some authors are often taken in a direction they had not originally intended. This cannot be said about Rebecca F Kuang’s Yellowface. From the first line to the last, Kuang’s targets are clear, and she goes after them with skill and preciseness matched by few authors so young.

Satire as an attack weapon is as old as the hills, and Kuang uses it to deadly effect. Her targets include the publishing industry, plagiarism, literary envy, and the pressures on young writers in the social media age. Most importantly, she defends the writer’s craft or, more precisely, against the racialisation of literature. Kuang said she found the idea that writers should only write about characters of their race “deeply frustrating and pretty illogical”. Kuang believes that that problem is not just confined to the publishing industry but has become a political issue saying that the situation has “spiralled into this really strict and reductive understanding of race”.

Given Kuang’s hostility to reducing complex social, political and economic problems to that of race, you would have thought that several reviewers would have been more careful in clumsily and wrongly saying  this is a novel that tackles “white privilege” and “identity.”

The book is a multi-layered and complex satire on the publishing industry. Kuang openly challenges the idea that only authors of a certain race can write about their race, gender, or sexual orientation. In one part of the book, June is confronted by a Chinese American who believes that only a Chinese person can write about its history. She responds, “I think it’s dangerous to start censoring what authors should and shouldn’t write…I mean, turn what you’re saying around and see how it sounds. Can a Black writer not write a novel with a white protagonist?”

James McDonald elaborates on this point: “Art is always an approximation, never fully successful, but when done well, one that embraces the otherness and the sameness of writer, reader and subject in the act of inquiry and compassion. To rope off subjects from artists is to deny the nature of Art itself and to deny activity that is fundamental to being human. A new form of censorship in publishing has accompanied the rise of identity politics. The new censors are called “sensitivity readers.” Briefly, sensitivity readers function as the “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” inquisitors of the publishing industry, reading manuscripts and hunting for potentially “offensive” or “inaccurate” material. The imposition of upper-middle-class identity politics upon culture is censorious and philistine. But it is also reactionary. The ultimate targets of identity politics and the language of “offence” and “sensitivity” are the working class and its democratic rights. Concepts like “offence” and “sensitivity” are nebulous abstractions and subject to broad, not to say nefarious, interpretation. While today it may be deemed offensive to call someone “fat,” in future we may be told that matters of class, class struggle and socialism are upsetting and offensive.”[1]

The plot of the book is simple and well-crafted. June Hayward is a gifted but unremarkable writer going nowhere fast. Her friend is the beautiful and successful writer Athena Liu. She thinks to herself: “What is it like to be you? What is it like to be so impossibly perfect, to have every good thing in the world?” Unfortunately, Athena chokes on a pandan pancake and dies in front of her friend, who then steals her unfinished book manuscript and publishes it as her own after rewriting it.

Yellowface is Rebecca F Kuang’s fifth novel at the tender age of 27, written in the first-person present tense. It is striking to hear that the Yellowface came about during a Harper Collins to strike with R.F. Kuang as a supporter.

Her previous books were cross-genre. Her Poppy War fantasy trilogy, set in historical China, was followed up by the Sunday Times bestseller Babel last year. Babel is well worth a read.  

Richard Bradbury explains, “At the heart of the book is a simple premise, which becomes a metaphor for the rise and spread of capitalism and colonialism. Translation theory understands that literally translating one word into another language is impossible. It contains translation theory, colonial history, the complicity of higher education institutions with capitalism, a revolutionary upsurge, and more.[2]

Kuang emigrated to the U.S. with her family at the age of four from Guangzhou, China, and grew up in Texas. She has a significant online presence and has also been the subject of intense social media debates, which has, like all good writers, managed to weave these into her novels in one way or another.

As Varika Rastogi writes, “Kuang—in no small part because of the role TikTok has played in her rise to success—is also deeply aware of the Internet being the “realm that the social economy of publishing exists on”, and she deploys this novel as a means to assess how it can both heal and harm projects. A large part of Yellowface takes place in terms of Twitter discourse and Goodreads reviews. By placing us in the shoes of the targets of its vitriol and negativity, the author attempts to make us privy both to the mental impact such harassment can have on a person, as well as to the fact that “allegations get flung left and right, everyone’s reputations are torn down, and when the dust clears, everything remains exactly as it was.” However, if nothing changes, it is also because someone is making a profit.[3]

Yellowface is a superb and intelligent book. Kuang is to be commended for taking to the field of battle in the war against the racialisation of literature and her defence of the basic right of an author to write about whatever they want without fear of their books being burnt or pulped.

About the Author

Kuang has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literature at Yale.

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[1] Race, class and social conflict in the United States- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/06/race-s06.html

[2] Babel is a goldmine of revolutionary politics- https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/babel-is-a-goldmine-of-revolutionary-politics/

[3] Racism, scandal, and the rat race of publishing: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

 “Whatever the merits (or otherwise) of his subsequent work, and notwithstanding in particular the greatness of Blood on the Tracks, it’s upon his sixties songs that Bob Dylan’s reputation ultimately rests: that extraordinary sequence of records which unerringly tracked the tenor of the times as he moved through his various incarnations as raw young folkie, prince of protest, fold-rock innovator, symbolist rocker and country-rock pioneer.”

Andy Gill

“In the dime stores and bus stations, People talk of situations, Read books, repeat quotations, Draw conclusions on the wall. Some speak of the future, My love, she speaks softly. She knows there’s no success like failure and that failure’s no success at all.

Love Minus Zero/No Limit Song by Bob Dylan

“In those days, artistic success was not dollar-driven. It was about having something to say.”

Bobby Neuwirth

“The riot squad they’re restless / They need somewhere to go / As Lady and I look out tonight / From Desolation Row”.

Bob Dylan.

“Of all nations, the United States, with veins full of poetical stuff, most needs poets and will doubtless have both the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common reference as much as their poets shall. “If the time becomes slothful and heavy, he [the poet] knows how to arouse it . . . he can make every word he speaks draw blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation, he never stagnates. Obedience does not master him, he masters it.”

Walt Whitman

It would be a foolish man or woman who would disagree with Andy Gill’s supposition that Bob Dylan’s work from 1962-69 was his best and established him as Rock and Roll’s only genius and Noble Prize winner. The book takes the form of a dictionary of songs in chronological album order, allowing the reader to pick and choose which song they read about. Each album has an introduction by Gill.

Gill looks at every Dylan song on the following albums: Bob Dylan, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’, Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde, The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline.

Gill writes on the recording of Blonde On Blonde, “Given the lyrical malleability […], it’s perhaps best not to try and ascribe too literal an interpretation to ‘Visions Of Joanna,’ which is more of an impressionistic mood anyway. If it doesn’t matter to the writer whether it’s the peddler or the fiddler who speaks to the countess, why should it matter to us? The song remains one of the high points of Dylan’s canon, particularly favoured among hardcore Dylanophiles, possibly because it so perfectly sustains its position on the cusp of poetic semantics, forever teetering on the brink of lucidity yet remaining impervious to strict decipherment.”[1]

The book chronologically covers Dylan’s formative years in small-town Minnesota, his move to New York City, and the folk scene in Greenwich Village. It ends with the controversy surrounding his “electric” conversion up to 1969.

Gill’s book examines Dylan’s controversial early period when he was accused of betraying the folk scene. His move to electric was openly and vocally seen as a betrayal, culminating in the iconic moment from the 1966 tour of England at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. When Dylan plugged in his electric guitar for the second set, a fan shouted, “Judas!” Dylan snarled, “I don’t believe you,” before turning to the band and urging them to “play it fucking loud!”. 

Andy Gill’s Bob Dylan – The Stories Behind The Classic Songs 1962-1969, while well written and at times insightful, is limited when it attempts to place Dylan’s work in a more precise objective context. The period between 1962-69 was an extraordinary political time. Gill does little to examine Dylan’s place in this ferment. Gill does not seem that interested in exploring the relationship between art, artists and social liberation.

As Paul Bond writes, “The folk music scene was regaining ground with the decline of McCarthyism and was seen largely as a product of “the Left.” The idea of music that was able to articulate social and progressive concerns brought many broadly “leftist” artists to folk. Many of the guiding lights of the folk movement, like Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and the editorial circles of such influential magazines as Sing Out! and Broadside, had some affiliation with the Stalinist Communist Party of the USA. The Stalinists took a somewhat proprietorial attitude to the folk scene, but it attracted many songwriters trying to tackle serious social and political subjects in song. They were motivated, as the opening editorial in Broadside (which published many of Dylan’s songs) put it, by the idea that “a good song can only do good.”[2]

He continues, “Dylan’s rejection of what was weakest in the folk scene, which stood in the way of a more complicated way of representing the world, took place under conditions of intensifying political crisis in the United States. He seems to have used the weaknesses of the folk milieu as part of a general move away from tackling social concerns altogether. (Although he has continued to write topical songs since that period.[3]

It remains to be seen if Gill will write on Dylan’s more contemporary work. As David Walsh wrote, “A perusal of Bob Dylan’s lyrics, at least its first half a dozen years or so, reveals a lively imagination at work, and sometimes deep feeling. Dylan can be witty, satirical, insightful, and genuinely outraged at American society’s injustices. The lyrics can convey physical and psychic longing, both for “the beloved” and for recognition by society at large “. As said earlier, Gill is not interested in placing Dylan’s art in a social or political context. He does not seem that interested in Dylan’s later work.

As Matthew Brennan writes of Dylan’s later work, “Cutting himself off from the source of the inspiration for earlier impactful songs, the career ambitions and an unfocused iconoclasm were nearly all that persisted. Except for some of his more moving songs about love and heartache in a later period, evasiveness and vagueness would become Dylan’s guiding principles. The protracted process has led to the current news about the sale of his catalogue. Now very wealthy, Dylan has nothing to say about events that are overtaking the circumstances of his younger days.[4]

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[1] https://davidmarxbookreviews.wordpress.com/2021/04/20/bob-dylan-the-stories-behind-the-classic-songs-1962-1969/

[2] Ceasing to be the voice of a generation Paul Bond-9 November 2005 http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/11/dyla-n09.html-

[3] Ceasing to be the voice of a generation Paul Bond-9 November 2005 www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/11/dyla-n09.html–

[4] Bob Dylan sells his songwriting catalog to Universal for a reported $300 Million- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/16/bobd-d16.html

Peter Apps’s book on the Grenfell Fire is a well-written and empathetic account of the corporate murder of 72 people. The book combines a degree of humanity, terror and technical detail in one book. Apps is a journalist and editor for ‘Inside Housing’ and has s written significant articles on the Grenfell Inquiry on Twitter and in newspapers that few have matched.

The Grenfell Inquiry into the fire has lasted five years and has largely been a whitewashing of events. Apps is heavily critical of the Inquiry but not to the extent that he believes this was an act of social murder. It has been clear from the outset that the ruling elite has covered up the true nature of this crime. Such a cover-up has been compared to the one involving the Hillsborough football stadium disaster in which 97 people died.

The British ruling elite is an expert in denying justice using public inquiries. They are deaf to the demands of the survivors. Yet still, millions of people live in unsafe, dangerous housing. Still, the government even refused to implement all of the limited housing safety measures recommended by Moore-Bick.

As Charles Hixson and Robert Stevens write, “The Inquiry bore witness to endless self-justifications by corporate and government bodies, shamelessly passing the buck for the use of shoddy, dangerous and illegal materials on the refurbishment of the tower even as documents confirmed that residents’ concern about safety was treated with contempt. It has been painfully obvious to everyone since the immediate aftermath of the fire that a small number of individuals are culpable for the mass deaths at Grenfell, including the owners/decision makers at major contractor Rydon, cladding manufacturer Arconic, Irish insulation provider Kingspan, manufacturer of foam insulation, Celotex, the Conservative Party-run Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), and its Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) which managed the tower”.[1]

One of the most important parts of the book is how Apps writes about the night of the fire, as told through the experiences of the people involved. According to one writer: “They put a human context to the tragedy: the lives, loves, challenges, dreams of those who died or whose lives were changed forever by what happened”.

Still, after six years since the fire, nobody has been charged, let alone jailed. As Peter Apps correctly states, “Grenfell can feel like a past story—it’s not. It’s something that needs to be kept in the public eye if we want to see the companies responsible held to account. Grenfell didn’t have to happen. This was a problem people were worried about—adding combustible materials onto the outside of buildings. The book brings together the story about how a tower block in one of the richest parts of the richest cities in the world clad a building in material chemically similar to petrol.”

Apps book shows that The Grenfell Tower Fire resulted from profiting, negligence and a lack of regard for people living in social housing. A raft of construction companies, regulators, the Tory-led council and the government, have blood on their hands.

As the Marxist writer Frederick Engles once wrote, “When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.”[2]

While Apps doesn’t entirely agree with the concept of social murder, his book is well worth the read and would seem to have sold widely and deservedly so.

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[1] UK: Grenfell Tower fire inquiry hearings end with guilty evading justice

8 August 2022-wsws.org

[2] The Conditions of the working class in Britain-Frederick Engels

One of the more reactionary and harmful dictums that seem prevalent in today’s society is that artists should only write about their own skin colour or gender and not choose a subject, show a world or create a character that differs from the artist in skin colour or gender.

According to James McDonald in his excellent article Where is our Zola? “This position, taken up by selfish elements of the upper-middle class, ultimately boils down to a scramble for the limited number of dollars spent on Art, literature and music. “Stay in your lane” is the popularised refrain for this self-serving prescription, which is cravenly obeyed by a disturbing proportion of otherwise reputable artists.

Art is always an approximation, never fully successful, but when done well, one that embraces the otherness and the sameness of writer, reader and subject in the act of inquiry and compassion. To rope off subjects from artists is to deny the nature of Art itself and to deny activity that is fundamental to being human. A new form of censorship in publishing has accompanied the rise of identity politics. The new censors are called “sensitivity readers.” Briefly, sensitivity readers function as the “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” inquisitors of the publishing industry, reading manuscripts and hunting for potentially “offensive” or “inaccurate” material. The imposition of upper-middle-class identity politics upon culture is censorious and philistine. But it is also reactionary. The ultimate targets of identity politics and the language of “offence” and “sensitivity” are the working class and its democratic rights. Concepts like “offence” and “sensitivity” are nebulous abstractions and subject to broad, not to say nefarious, interpretation. While today it may be deemed offensive to call someone “fat,” in future we may be told that matters of class, class struggle and socialism are upsetting and offensive.”

It is rare nowadays for any artist, let alone a writer, to go against the stream on this matter. To her eternal credit, the writer Rebecca F Kuang has opposed the idea that authors should not write about other races or gender. At the recent Hay Festival, Kuang spoke of the ‘weird kind of identity politics in American publishing. It really does not make sense to categorise books this way. Kazuo Ishiguro: you’d never find his books in the sci-fi fantasy section, but The Buried Giant is.” Also at the Hay Festival was the world-renowned author Pat Barker[1] who said she distrusts publishers” ‘fashionable’ efforts to boost diversity.

Kuang is a well-respected and best-selling author of books such as Babel and The Poppy War. Her most recent publication YellowFace” is a biting satire on the publishing industry. Saying of Yellolwface that “If I were a debut writer, I wouldn’t have dared to write this book.

Kuang said she found the idea that writers should only write about characters of their own race “deeply frustrating and pretty illogical”.  Kuang believes that that problem is not just confined to the publishing industry but has become a political issue saying that the situation has “spiralled into this really strict and reductive understanding of race”.

As the Marxist writer Niles Niemuth wrote, “The American ruling class (alongside its European counterparts) is promoting racialist politics and racial division to undermine the class unity of the working class amidst the rise of social inequality to ever greater heights, the eruption of mass protests over police violence and the growth of the class struggle in the US and internationally. The push to present every social problem in the United States as a racial issue is a reflection of the deepening crisis of world capitalism and an effort by the Democrats, the trade unions and the pseudo-left to stave off a united, independent working-class offensive against the capitalist system.”[2]

Kuang recently wrote that “You have to imagine outside of your lived experience – to write truthfully, with compassion”. While it is doubtful that Kuang has read much Marxist material on Art, her comments are perceptive. They should open up a debate about the nature of Art in a capitalist society.

She would do well to take on board the thoughts of one of the most important Marxist writers, A.K. Voronsky, when he asked, “When does the artistic image appear convincing? When we experience a special psychic state of joy, satisfaction, elevated repose, love or sympathy for the author. This psychic state is the aesthetic evaluation of a work of Art. Aesthetic feeling lacks a narrowly utilitarian character; it is disinterested, and in this regard, it is when he writes organically bound up with our general conceptions of the beautiful (although, of course, it is narrower than these concepts). The aesthetic evaluation of a work is the criterion of its truthfulness or falseness. Artistic truth is determined and established precisely through such an evaluation.”[3]

He continues, “There is no need to confuse the artist’s special gift of insight with the desire to strike the reader by producing a beautiful turn of phrase, a special style, or a totally new work of Art. Such a desire usually leads to pretentiousness, deliberate overrefinement, excessive floweriness and artificiality. The work becomes incomprehensible, and the reader, like Turgenev’s deacon, says to himself: “Dark is the water in the clouds,” and “Thus be it beyond our ken.” Many contemporary poets and prose-writers commit this sin, and they confuse the ability of the artist to see what no one else has seen with a desire to astound the reader.”

Kuang does not hold out much hope that the publishing industry will change. If anything, she believes it will get worse. Noises made in 2021 to support change went out the window. She says there was “a lot of chatter, but no substantive support for those authors, no real commitment to diversify lists or the faces of people working on the other side of publishing.”

When the staff at HarperCollins, her publisher, went on strike for better pay and working conditions while her novel was in production – Kuang co-hosted strike rallies for the union. When I asked her about her hopes for the publishing industry and her writing going forward, she answered, “I hope everyone unionises.”It is hoped this militancy is reflected in her future work. I highly recommend Yellowface and all her previous novels.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Barker

[2]Race, class and social conflict in the United States- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/06/race-s06.html

[3] — A. Voronsky, Art as the Cognition of Life