For someone still at such a tender age, Mieko Kawakami is a stunningly good writer. She is a novelist, poet and essayist whose internationally acclaimed works — notably Breasts and Eggs, Heaven, and Paradise — probe gender, class, bodily experience and social alienation in late‑capitalist Japan.
Heaven, an early work on school bullying and the social formation of suffering; then Breasts and Eggs, which raised questions of reproduction, women’s labour, precarity; and Paradise, the moral and existential problems faced by Japanese women. All her previous work has themes of work, family economy, institutional violence, and bodily commodification. These are all acute portrayals of class stratification, gender oppression, marketised bodies and private suffering under neoliberal Japan.
Kawakami exposes how Japanese neoliberal capitalism commodifies bodies, care and intimacy, producing isolation, mental distress and precarious survival strategies. Her work demonstrates how private suffering is socially produced rather than merely individual pathology. She highlights the intersection of gender oppression and class exploitation in everyday life.
While the reader is free to read Kawakami as they like, reading Kawakami through a Marxist lens develops the capacity to see private affliction as a social product and to analyse cultural form as ideology.
Sisters in Yellow is a 2023 novel by Mieko Kawakami, translated into English by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio, and was published in March 2026. The title and the bar’s name (“Lemon”) refer to Hana’s obsession with a feng shui belief that the colour yellow attracts wealth and financial security. Kawakami has described the novel as an exploration of a Breaking Bad-style story without the typical “macho drama.”
It’s a crime-infused story about friendship, betrayal, and survival in 1990s Tokyo, following 15-year-old Hana and her older friend Kimiko as they open a bar called Lemon, which becomes a haven but leads them into a world of crime and desperation. The novel explores themes of poverty, female resilience, and the harsh realities of life on the fringes of society, blending social realism with thriller elements.
Kawakami often portrays the pressures of precarious labour, consumerist culture, and gendered norms. Sisters in Yellow registers social vulnerability through small, intimate details that encode larger class relations. Her book shows everyday scenes of work: casual, piecemeal paid work, and precarious hours. They are material signs of neoliberal precarity. Part‑time shifts, temporary cleaning/retail tasks, work that starts or ends at odd hours, or days lost to cancelled gigs. These concrete markers show labour organised in fragments rather than stable employment. It must be understood that fragmented labour time is not accidental but a mode of disciplining labour power — keeping wages low and workers on call so capital can extract more surplus. This corresponds to the global growth of informal and platform work, where “casual labour” and algorithmic scheduling spread precarious conditions. According to the latest statistics, over 2.1 billion workers are in informal work worldwide.
Kawakami is part of a formidable new generation of Japanese writers. Takiji Kobayashi’s Kanikosen (The Crab-Canning Ship), essays and short stories by proletarian writers, modernists like Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and later novelists who grapple with imperialism and postwar capitalism.
A significant section of modern Japanese literature exposes how culture can conceal and reveal class exploitation, how nationalism and militarism are built into cultural forms. The recent resurgence of proletarian texts shows literature’s capacity to rekindle class consciousness in periods of economic crisis—an opening for political work among youth and precarious layers.
Given that Japanese women have borne the brunt of neoliberalisation, it is not surprising that some of the most important modern Japanese writers are women. Female Japanese literature today often grapples with precarity, social withdrawal (hikikomori), ageing, and the collapse of secure employment—issues central to contemporary class struggle. Japan’s casualised labour market, suicides and social isolation show the objective conditions that many recent novels and short stories dramatise.
Readers interested in the class struggle, gender, and Japanese imperialism are encouraged to read Higuchi Ichiyō, Hayashi Fumiko, Miyamoto Yuriko, Hiratsuka Raichō, and Yosano Akiko. Higuchi Ichiyō — “Takekurabe / Growing Up” (short story). A compassionate, class‑conscious portrayal of poor urban youth and women’s constrained social options under early modern capitalism. A good entry point to Meiji-era class/gender conditions. Hayashi Fumiko — Diary of a Vagabond (Nomad’s Diary) and selected short stories. Hayashi’s work offers vivid, autobiographical glimpses into the itinerant, precarious lives of women in the interwar period and the underside of urban labour markets.
Miyamoto Yuriko — fiction and essays from the 1920s–1940s. Miyamoto was politically engaged with left movements, and her writing expresses proletarian themes and women’s emancipation, and connects with the politics of the day; her work is useful for seeing how committed women writers sought to fuse literary and political struggle. Hiratsuka Raichō — essays and Seitosha (Bluestocking) journal writings. As founder of Japan’s early feminist journal Seito (1911–16), Hiratsuka’s polemics illuminate feminist demands, cultural critique and their tensions with rising national politics—Yosano Akiko — poetry and essays. Yosano’s career illustrates the ambivalence of some feminist-modernist currents that combined emancipation rhetoric with nationalist sentiment; studying her work shows how gender politics can be co‑opted by imperialist ideology.
These writers retain a contemporary resonance and how patriarchy, precarity and imperialist expansion are mutually reinforcing: gender oppression is intensified by capitalist industrialisation and militarism; nationalism and imperialism can co‑opt feminist rhetoric; and working‑class women are often the most exposed to dispossession and colonial violence. Understanding these dynamics strengthens contemporary anti‑imperialist, feminist and socialist practice by identifying the material roots of ideological illusions.
Mieko Kawakami is one of the most important contemporary Japanese writers because her work combines rigorous attention to individual subjectivity with an unflinching portrayal of the social forces that shape and deform everyday life. Mieko Kawakami is important not because she offers tidy political answers, but because her art reveals how capitalism structures pain and possibility. Sisters in Yellow is a book I heartily recommend.
Author
(born 1976) is a celebrated Japanese author, poet, and former singer-songwriter known for her visceral exploration of the female body, economic class, and social ethics. Originally from Osaka, she worked as a factory hand and a bar hostess before gaining national fame as a blogger and eventually a novelist.
There’s a certain advantage to living in a small country like Guatemala, I think. You don’t feel so distant from political reality there. When things happen, they almost seem to unfold on a Shakespearean stage, with the audience so close they can become actors too. This is partly what Joseph Brodsky meant when he wrote that small countries have big politics”.
Francisco Goldman
“As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.”
— Alberto Manguel
“I feel a responsibility, as I get older, to be responsible for what I’ve experienced, to what I’ve lived and been in a position to witness. I realise now that, as a consequence of having lived the life I have, quite apart from the one, as I understand it, lived by most American writers, maybe I now know some things and have some stories to tell that others don’t know about or wouldn’t be able to tell. Maybe there’s an intrinsic value in that lived experience and knowledge, though of course what you do with it is everything.”
Francisco Goldman
The deeper the literature is, and the more it is imbued with the desire to shape life, the more significantly and dynamically it will be able to ‘picture’ life.”
Leon Trotsky
Francisco Goldman is best known as a novelist and reporter whose work centres on Central America and on the moral and human consequences of violence, state terror and corruption. A large part of his work has centred on Guatemala, exile, memory and state violence are common themes of his writing. He is best known for the investigative account The Art of Political Murder, which traces the 1998 assassination of Bishop Juan José Gerardi and the political forces that sought to cover it up. Goldman’s writing blends literary narrative, reportage and personal memoir to render victims’ lives visible — a valuable contribution that nonetheless requires political grounding to explain the class and imperialist forces behind the crimes he documents.
Ariana E. Vigil’s Understanding Francisco Goldman is a highly regarded academic examination of the work of this gifted and important writer. It must be said from the start that this book is long overdue. Goldman was born to a Guatemalan mother and Jewish American father. Goldman’s heritage has shaped his unique perspective and significantly influenced his literary themes.
Goldman documents, with clarity, the human costs of imperialism, military repression, and oligarchic rule. He emphasises the victims—peasants, indigenous communities, journalists and dissidents—and helps break through the complacent narratives of Western media. His moral outrage identifies perpetrators and abuses, but he rarely traces those abuses to the underlying dynamics of capitalist accumulation and imperial rivalry.
What is missing from Goldman’s worldview is an understanding that wars, coups and economic “reforms” are expressions of the fundamental contradiction between social production and private ownership; without that materialist analysis, denunciations risk becoming appeals for better conduct by the same ruling class that profits from repression. Goldman’s solutions tend to expose corruption, strengthen human rights mechanisms, or press for better governance. These remain within the terrain of bourgeois politics and cannot uproot the capitalist interests—both domestic oligarchies and imperial powers—that sustain inequality and violence. While Goldman documents social suffering, he does not generally articulate a strategy centred on independent working-class political organisation.
To Vigil’s credit, she sets Goldman’s work within a broader process: the violent integration of Latin America into global capitalism under structural adjustment, privatisation, and the erosion of state provision. As she explains in this description of her own book: “In Understanding Francisco Goldman, the first book-length study of Goldman’s life and work, I begin with a biographical chapter drawn largely from Goldman’s essays and interviews. The following analytical chapters, one for each of Goldman’s four novels and two works of nonfiction, provide biographical, historical, political, and literary context for each work and explore its major themes. My book examines the influence of literary and political history on the development of Goldman’s characters and themes, as well as his use of multiple literary genres and the role of humour in his work. I underscore that major themes in Goldman’s work—migration, political violence, love, and loss—are explored across nations and time periods, and that they remain significant today. In Understanding Francisco Goldman, I draw connections between the writer’s life and work and demonstrate the appreciation he deserves for his influence, diversity, and breadth. Through his thoughtful, intellectual, transnational writing, Goldman expands the definition of what it means to be American.”[1]
The controversial and radical nature of Goldman’s work is certainly behind the lack of capitalist media coverage of this book. One of the few reviews was by Judith Sierra-Rivera, who perceptively writes: “Ariana E. Vigil has brought us a much-awaited comprehensive study on Francisco Goldman’s writing. Even though critical articles and chapters on specific works or aspects have proliferated in recent years, Understanding Francisco Goldman offers a broad overview of the author’s development, his significance across a variety of literary genres and traditions, and his complex position as a cultural translator in the hemispheric Americas. This is precisely Vigil’s most provocative proposition: “Goldman’s insistence on continuing to publish in and for U.S. venues indicates his commitment to not only translating Latin American issues to a U.S. and global audiences but also underscoring how interconnected these issues are, particularly for U.S. citizens and residents”.
While she follows this line of analysis throughout her presentation of Goldman’s production and in dialogue with other critics, she does so in a widely accessible discourse that serves both literary scholars and other readers. Vigil describes Goldman as “a truly American writer,” referring not only to the US but also to the rest of the North American continent and the Caribbean. She traces his racial and cultural heritage, birth and upbringing, education and career, and travels to help readers understand Goldman’s elusive identity. Although Goldman was born and raised in Boston, his mother is Guatemalan and his father is Jewish-American, which meant he always travelled to Guatemala, spoke English and Spanish, and, most importantly, navigated a complicated heritage. Furthermore, his travels and readings led him to move constantly among different countries on the continent and to eagerly embrace literary influences from a wide range of authors and styles, such as Truman Capote’s New Journalism and Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism”.[2]
Goldman’s investigations teach readers how bourgeois states and imperial powers conceal crimes, how impunity is institutionalised, and how liberal human rights discourse can be recuperated by imperial policy. These lessons are directly relevant to exposing modern wars, occupations and media complicity. However, a serious, disciplined study of a contemporary writer such as Francisco Goldman requires more than literary taste or moral sympathy. It calls for a method that relates aesthetic form to social content, traces ideas to class forces, and connects interpretation to political practice. This is where a Marxist study is necessary. A Marxist understanding is not merely interpretive: it clarifies how culture reproduces or challenges ruling-class interests. When Goldman depicts violence, displacement, or memory, the reader should ask: whose interests are served by particular framings of suffering? Does the narrative naturalise imperialism, or expose its mechanics?
Studying Francisco Goldman’s work should strengthen readers’ historical memory and human empathy while sharpening their class analysis. Francisco Goldman provides indispensable testimony about violence and impunity in Latin America. His work advances conscience and awareness. But to end the cycle he documents, it requires moving beyond humanitarian critique to a revolutionary strategy that uproots the capitalist and imperialist interests that produce repression—building independent working-class political power on an international scale.
Marxism does not reduce art to propaganda, but it insists that art is embedded in social life. As Marx warned against speculative mystification and Trotsky against empty formalism, the aim of any Marxist is a historically concrete, dialectical criticism that strengthens the working class’s understanding and capacity to act. Cultural study—of Goldman or any writer—must therefore be a component of socialist education.
[2] Ariana E. Vigil, Understanding Francisco Goldman (Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2018), 141 pp. Reviewed by Judith Sierra-Rivera,
“I heard a traveller from an antique land….” (Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias” (quoted in Kuang 147)
“She learned, in fact, that revolution is always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential”
R F Kuang’s-Babel
“The historical significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian revolution consists in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture that is above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly human.”
Leon Trotsky
‘What is art? First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings and moods; art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader ‘good feelings.’ Like science, art cognises life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. However, science analyses, art synthesises; science is abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.’
Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky,
R.F. Kuang’s Babel through a Marxist lens
It takes a brave and gifted writer to play fast and loose with British history and get away with it. However, the writer Rebecca F Kuang, who has a master’s and two PHD’s, manages to pull this off with an erudition that belies her tender years.
R. F. Kuang’s “speculative fiction” is an attack on capitalism, or to be precise, British imperialism. In Babel, she quotes Frantz Fanon: “Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence”.
Of course, Kuang is free to quote whom she pleases, but Fanon is not the most healthy of anti-imperialist writers. Fanon (1925–1961) was a Martinique-born psychiatrist, anti-colonial theorist and participant in Algeria’s war of independence. His major works, most notably The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, combined clinical experience, existential-philosophical reflection and militant polemic to expose the psychic and violent dimensions of colonial domination.
Fanon remains indispensable for understanding the brutality of imperialism, the profound psychological injuries inflicted on colonised peoples, and the legitimating role of national liberation as a political response to colonial oppression. However, his work tends to express an overemphasis on the peasantry and the “national” element. Fanon’s analyses sometimes valorise “the people” and guerrilla insurgency in ways that underplay the historically decisive role of the industrial working class as an emancipatory force.
Kuang was born in China but grew up in the United States. Aged 29, she has already written five books, has a list of impressive book awards and survived graduate work at both Oxford and Cambridge. Kuang’s first three books comprised a trilogy: The Poppy War (2018), The Dragon Republic (2019), and The Burning God (2020). Yellowface was published in 2023, and her latest Katabasis has just been published.[1]
Poppy Trilogy
Kuang’s The Poppy War trilogy is not a moral fable but works as a social document. In Kuang’s world, the countryside supplies labour, food and recruits. Peasants are dispossessed by landowners, corvée, and military levies; they are often the immediate constituency of insurgent movements. Urban workers, miners, artisans and the conscripted soldier class appear as the concentrated sites of industrial labour, political organisation and military potency.
In the novel, local merchants, industrialists tied to foreign capital, and landowning elites who broker deals with imperial powers function as a comprador class—they defend property, seek stability for capital accumulation, and will sell national sovereignty to protect their interests. The novel’s bureaucratic and military apparatus—police, generals, intelligence organs—is an embodiment of the state as an instrument of class rule. They administer repression, manage economic concessions and mediate between imperial interests and local elites.
To her credit, she warns against relying on nationalist elites or petty-bourgeois adventurism to carry out democratic or social reforms. In semi-colonial settings, the proletariat must assert independent leadership—organise urban workers, factory committees, soldiers’ committees, and alliances with the poor peasantry, rather than subordinating itself to comprador regimes.
Despite her tender age, Kuang possesses a verbal brilliance and erudition probably unsurpassed by any novelist of her generation. She has mocked many sacred cows. In Yellowface, she attacks the right-wing MeToo# movement. She hates contemporary identity politics, which typically originates in petty‑bourgeois layers with ambitions inside the cultural and professional hierarchy of capitalism. Kuang came under heavy attack for writing Yellowface. The public dispute over the book’s accusers that an author has appropriated or misrepresented Asian experience cannot be reduced to questions of individual taste or moral purity. It is rooted in the concrete class relations and economic imperatives of the publishing industry.
At the surface level, the row frames itself as an ethical debate about representation. However, its intensity and public amplification are products of a crisis in cultural markets. Publishing has become an arena of intensified competition for scarce positions — advances, awards, media visibility — driven by conglomeration and profit-maximising behaviour. Large publishers, retailers and tech platforms compress cultural diversity into marketable identity niches, while promotional narratives and outrage cycles are monetised. The HarperCollins one‑day strike and workers’ testimonies show how publishing workers face low pay, expanded workloads, and corporate cost‑cutting even as firms seek cultural “brands” to sell; this creates an environment in which status and visibility are disproportionately valuable to authors and gatekeepers alike.
As the dispute over Yellowface shows, a writer does not write under conditions of his/her choosing, and artistic greatness is not something merely willed. Some periods are more favourable to genius than others. I am not saying Kuang is a genius, but the limitations of American intellectual life during the recent epoch will have shaped her. With a fascist gangster in the White House, it will be interesting to see how much she curses and kicks against the confines.
As the brilliant Marxist writer Leon Trotsky once wrote:” If environment expressed itself in novels, European science would not be breaking its head over the question of where the stories of A Thousand and One Nights were made, whether in Egypt, India, or Persia.” To say that man’s environment, including the artist’s, that is, the conditions of his education and life, finds expression in his art also, does not mean to say that such expression has a precise geographic, ethnographic and statistical character. It is not at all surprising that it is difficult to decide whether certain novels were made in Egypt, India or Persia, because the social conditions of these countries have much in common. However, the very fact that European science is “breaking its head” trying to solve this question, as these novels themselves show, indicates that these novels reflect an environment, even if unevenly.
No one can jump beyond himself. Even the ravings of an insane person contain nothing that the sick man had not received before from the outside world. However, it would be an insanity of another order to regard his ravings as the accurate reflection of an external world. Only an experienced and thoughtful psychiatrist who knows the patient’s past will be able to find the reflected and distorted bits of reality in the ravings’ contents. Artistic creation, of course, is not a raving, though it is also a deflection, a changing and a transformation of reality, in accordance with the peculiar laws of art. However fantastic art may be, it cannot have at its disposal any other material except that which is given to it by the world of three dimensions and by the narrower world of class society. Even when the artist creates heaven and hell, he merely transforms the experience of his own life into his phantasmagorias, almost to the point of his landlady’s unpaid bill”.[2]
Babel-Or the Necessity of Violence
Babel is set at 1830s Oxford University. Despite being labelled a historical novel, Kuang is adamant that it has lessons for today’s readers. In an interview, Kuang called her book “ a dark text of academia, saying, “ I love campus novels, dark academia novels. Moreover, I knew that when I finished the Poppy War trilogy, I was going to move on and do something in that genre. That is the setting in which I am most comfortable and familiar. Those are the interpersonal dynamics that I observe and most enjoy writing about—between students and rival students, students and teachers, etc.[3]
Roger Marheine writes “ Kuang pulls no punches in her scathing critique of Oxford professors who are either overt imperial agents of war (e.g. Robin’s father, Professor Lovell), willing dupes of imperial platitudes especially as they practice their daily craft within the very privileged confines of Oxfordian splendor, or specialists blissfully unaware of empire’s greater crimes as they live in academic cocoons and grasp only their own silo of knowledge. One of Oxford’s professors, Jerome Playfair, represents Kuang’s satirical comment on the British gentleman’s code of conduct, as they ruthlessly assert their global dominance.”[4]
Marheine is a pseudo-leftist and, like many on the radical left, echoes the Socialist Worker Party’s sentiment that Kuang’s book is a “goldmine of revolutionary politics.” While I am loath to downplay Kuang’s radical stance, she is not a Marxist, and this is not a socialist work of historical fiction. Some have argued that the book lacked nuance in its treatment of how characters from different marginalised backgrounds intersected with the imperial centre. There is a distinct lack of characters of a working-class background.
However, Rebecca F. Kuang’s fiction (notably The Poppy War trilogy and Babel) offers rich material for Marxist study: imperialism, ethnic division, bureaucracy, mass mobilisation, culture, and the politics of memory recur throughout her work.
Kuang’s critique of knowledge as imperial plunder in Babel does deserve a Marxist class analysis. Kuang’s Babel dramatises how the production, translation and curation of knowledge are woven into imperial accumulation. Her book shows that texts, languages and librarianship become commodities and instruments of state power. The novel makes visible several features of that process that are vital for organising library, academic and translation workers.
The main thread running through the book is that knowledge labour is expropriated and monetised. Kuang has clearly studied this barbaric practice because her book shows how scholarship and translation produce useful intellectual commodities, annotated corpora, glossaries, and archival order are appropriated by imperial institutions for political and economic advantage. The unpaid or underpaid labour of native speakers, archivists and junior scholars supplies content and expertise that enriches metropolitan libraries and universities, while the material rewards (funding, prestige, job security) flow to imperial centres. This mirrors the contemporary university’s transformation into a profit-generating arm of capital, in which millions of dollars in tuition and research funding are extracted. At the same time, adjuncts, librarians and translators remain precarious and low-paid.
Kuang is not overtly a Marxist; she does not mention Marx by name, but she does strive to present a materialist analysis of capitalism and empire. It would be very interesting to review her work in, say, five years to discover the extent to which it reflects the growth of fascist tendencies within world capitalism and how a growing radical working class can tackle this. Adopting a Marxist approach would give her already stunning work an even sharper edge, along with a much wider readership than this great writer has achieved so far.
Once a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Czeslaw Milosz
“The relationship between mother and son and mother and daughter is different, because the mother is a mirror in which the daughter sees her future self and the daughter is a mirror in which the mother sees her lost self.”
Is Mother Dead
“What do we do with our despair if our lives are too small to contain it?”
Long Live the Post Horn!
“The relationship of a work of art to reality is uninteresting; the work’s relationship to the truth is crucial; the true value of the work doesn’t lie in its relationship to a so-called reality, but in its effect on the observer.”
― Vigdis Hjorth, Is Mother Dead
Vigdis Hjorth occupies a prominent place among contemporary Scandinavian writers. Her novels examine family conflict, memory, gender and legal institutions through psychologically acute, often fractured stories. Hjorth is extremely well known in her native Norway and throughout Scandinavia. She began writing in the early 1980s. She started writing children’s books and moved on to fiction for adults. She is a prodigious writer with some forty books under her belt. It is a safe bet that if more of her books were translated into English, she would be a far bigger writer. All her English books have been translated by the excellent Charlotte Barslund. Four of her books in English are variations on a story of family rupture and estrangement, with more or less the same cast of characters.
To understand Hjorth and the broader landscape of Scandinavian fiction, the reader must study the political-historical context of Hjorth’s work and examine the social functions performed by literature in a petty‑bourgeois milieu. Hjorth’s fiction often explores the fractures of bourgeois family life, individual trauma and the legal and cultural institutions that sustain property and social standing. On a deeper level, her work shows how “personal” suffering is shaped by class relations—inheritance disputes, cultural capital, gendered social labour, and the moral vocabulary that deflects systemic critique into private pathology.
While you would be hard pushed to describe Hjorth as a left-wing writer, her novels do make an ideal entry point for politicising cultural debate. Her focus on family law, inheritance, trauma and testimony intersects with current social conflicts over housing, social care, gender violence, and access to justice. She reveals how “private” disputes often reproduce material inequalities and legitimise social hierarchies.
Hjorth’s fiction is heavily influenced by other Scandinavian fiction, which also often depicts welfare infrastructures, gender norms and small‑property relations that appear “progressive” yet conceal new forms of commodification, household debt and petty‑bourgeois aspirations. Hjorth, like other Scandinavian writers, both male and female, frequently recycles sets of ideological strategies that hide class antagonisms while channelling popular grievances into non‑class answers.
Perhaps the master of this genre is Soren Kierkegaard, whom Hjorth greatly admires. Kierkegaard is a crucial figure in the genealogy of modern bourgeois ideology: his subjectivism and rejection of reason helped lay philosophical groundwork for existentialism, postmodernism and the anti-scientific tendencies of contemporary ideology. Kierkegaard’s turning away from reason anticipated the modern cult of subjectivity, the delegitimisation of science, and the promotion of personal mysticism as an alternative to collective political solutions. Hjorth has to be very careful not to get too close to him; her writing will take on a very reactionary turn.
In her latest book, Repetition Hjorth goes over familiar ground. As Elaine Blair points out in her critical review, “Hjorth has been returning to this material for more than two decades, offering different perspectives on the constellation of prodigal daughter, ambivalent siblings, convention-bound mother, and tyrannical father. Her novels have spanned different periods of time, some focusing on a limited period of months or years, others pulling back to tell the whole story. It’s as if she’s asking: Where is the story? What is the best way to tell it? In a sense, Hjorth’s narrators did not experience the crucial events of their lives in chronological order. An ordered timeline is true to the abusive father’s perspective (he alone knew what happened and when) but not to that of the daughter, whose experience of abuse, with its repressed and resurfaced memories, defies the schema of linear time. The abuse was happening to her, then it hadn’t happened to her, then it had happened to her, a long time ago.”[1]
Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Repetition, although only 144 pages, is a psychologically acute, formally inventive exploration of memory, trauma and personal alienation. The reader needs to understand it as part of the broader social and historical fabric, and not to study it not only as individual psychology but as a social product whose form and themes are shaped by class relations and institutions.
Hjorth’s Repetition locates trauma and interpersonal breakdown inside the family, legal procedures and therapeutic institutions. Far from being purely personal failures, these institutions appear in the novel as mediators that translate social distress into individual pathology. This depiction is symptomatic of the wider neoliberal transformation of social life in Norway and globally. Under neoliberalism, governments and employers have shifted costs and responsibilities onto households and individuals. In Norway, this has taken the form of tightened welfare provision, market pressures on municipal services and an expansion of private providers alongside public services. Internationally, the same logic prevails: health, social and legal services are re‑organised to be “efficient” for budgets and profitable for providers. At the same time, the working class and small proprietors pick up the bill.
Hjorth’s portrayal of family collapse, court proceedings, and therapy mirrors these transformations: families are expected to absorb economic and emotional strains; the law is increasingly an instrument for adjudicating private disputes in ways that reproduce social inequality; therapy becomes a form of individualised management that treats symptoms rather than social causes.
Why do Hjorth’s novels matter, and what can we learn from them? They are important now because they dramatise the individual consequences of social atomization under neoliberalism: privatised suffering, judicial and therapeutic institutions that individualise social injury, and cultural narratives that valorise personal authenticity over collective remedy.
Notes
A closer look at Kierkegaard-Tom Carter-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/04/kier-a17.html
On 16/03/26, I visited the Socialist Workers Party bookshop, Bookmarks. While looking at the second-hand bookshelves, I noticed a lot of old Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) books, like 10 copies of the Trotskyism Versus Revisionism series 1-6. The bookshop has three large bookshelves of second-hand books. I noticed more books, like Marx’s collected works, Lenin’s collected works and more books by Leon Trotsky.
I felt something was wrong here, so I went to the reception desk and asked if they knew anything about it. I was told that a representative from Vanessa Redgrave had initially offered two storage lockers full of books in early 2025. The SWP told Redgrave that they don’t buy. Redgrave donated the books to the SWP. The books were loaded into a medium-sized van in June or July of 2025. The books were advertised for sale through the SWP’s social media sites.
Given that Healy had a library that spanned over fifty years, one can only imagine how many were donated and what exactly Redgrave kept back. It is not well known that Healy’s secretaries kept a political diary. Excepts can be seen in Corrin Lotz’s somewhat sycophantic biography of Gerry Healy. What documents does Redgrave still hold on to?
Having a further look at the books on the Bookmarks shelves, I notice a significant number with G Healy written inside. Healy spent an inordinate amount of time writing in the books.
Healy clearly annotated his books to engage more deeply with the text, enhance comprehension, and retain information, essentially turning his reading into an active conversation with the author. It serves as a personal record of his thoughts, feelings, and insights, facilitating easier reference later and adding a deeper layer of enjoyment to the reading experience. It means that future historians will not have access to this precious archive.
It is clear that the books donated are not from Redgrave’s library but are, in fact, Healy’s personal library. I know this because six months before the split in the WRP in 1984, Redgrave sold off an enormous amount of her books. I purchased two suitcases full of her books, including the proof copy of One Long Night, with her name inside.Also, there appear to be several books from the WRP library, which I assume were at Clapham. It appears Redgrave must have looted that library. This needs further investigation, but I am pretty sure it is part of, or the whole of, G Healy’s library.
It is clear that Redgrave has no interest in revolutionary politics and by carrying out this act of political and historical vandalism spits on the history of the movement. The books should have been donated to a library or an academic institution such as Warrick University.
“As a vast, solid phalanx, the generations come on; they have the same features, and their pattern is new in the world. All wear the same expression, but it is this which they do not detect in each other. It is the one life which ponders in the philosophers, which drudges in the labourers, which basks in the poets, which dilates in the love of the women. –
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Notebooks”
“The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group.”
Henry James 1879 biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne
‘Is imagination so fanciful that it can invent a memory and then transform it into something we understand as true?’
Eduardo Halfon
“First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings, and moods: art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader good feelings. Like science, art cognises life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. But sciences analyse, art synthesises; science is abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual [i.e., sensory] nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.”
Aleksandr Voronsky
Eduardo Halfon is part of a new generation of Latin American writers who, to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton, have seen further than most because they have stood on the shoulders of giants. These giants are well-known. In a recent interview, Halfon was asked about his earliest influences. “Mostly North American writers, and most of them in the short story tradition. Maybe that’s why I constantly go back to that genre. I’m essentially a short story writer. That’s where I feel most comfortable, or least uncomfortable. My technique or approach in constructing a short story is very much based on the North American tradition, much more so than the Latin American one. I feel much closer to Hemingway and Carver and Cheever, for example, than I do to Borges and Cortázar and García Márquez.[1]
Halfon and others are still paying their debt to these greats, but they are also now striking out on a new road. As Halfon succinctly put it, “ My house, then, is built on two pillars. But a writer must begin by destroying one’s house.
Like their earlier counterparts, these writers have to deal with their respective countries’ violent political pasts. In Halfon’s case, the past is the genocidal campaign by the Guatemalan ruling elite against its Mayan and working-class population. Although Halfon clearly is influenced by Guatemala’s great writers such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Augusto Monterroso and modern day writers such Francisco Goldman and David Unger his work is “intensely autobiographical, migratory and steeped in memory” Halfon’s focus on migration, memory and identity can be read as testimony to the real material dislocations produced by imperialism and capitalist restructuring throughout Latin America.
It is worth noting that every single Guatemalan writer or poet of note has been forced into exile due to the distinct possibility of being murdered by their respective dictators. Halfon noted this in an interview in 2015, “For the past century, Guatemalan writers have been writing and dying in exile. Miguel Ángel Asturias, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967, wrote his books about Guatemala while living in exile, in South America and Europe. He died in Paris and is buried at Père Lachaise. The great short-story writer Augusto Monterroso, after being detained by the military forces of dictator Jorge Ubico, was forced to leave the country in 1944. He fled first to Chile, then to Mexico, where he lived the rest of his life, and where he wrote most of his stories, and where he’s now buried. Luis Cardoza y Aragón, arguably Guatemala’s most important poet of the last century, suffered a similar fate —he was also forced into exile in Mexico in the 1930s, where he wrote his poetry and where he, too, died. Guatemala’s greatest playwright, Carlos Solórzano, fled the country in 1939—first to Germany, then to Mexico—and never returned. The writer Mario Payeras, a guerrilla commander in the 1970s, also wrote while exiled in Mexico, where he suddenly and mysteriously died (his remains were buried in a cemetery in the southwest of the country, but have since vanished). One of the most important Guatemalan novels of the last few decades, El Tiempo Principia en Xibalbá (Time Commences in Xibalbá), was written by the indigenous writer Luis de Lión, who in 1984 was kidnapped by military forces, tortured for twenty days, and then disappeared. His murder wasn’t confirmed until fifteen years later, in 1999, when his name and number appeared in the now infamous “Military Diary”, a haunting military document that secretly listed the fate of all the Guatemalans disappeared by the military forces between August 1983 and March 1985. Luis de Lión, born José Luís de León Díaz, is number 135. His novel was published posthumously, that most extreme of exiles.”[2]
Halfon’s recurring motifs of displacement, cross-border families, and fragmented memory are not merely personal or cultural; they are literary expressions of material processes driven by the global capitalist system. Halfon is not a Marxist, but he clearly uses these literary expressions in much the same way that the great American writer Phillip Roth did in his work to uncover the past and prepare for future struggles. How else would you understand Roth’s extraordinary prescient novel The Plot Against America?
Halfon does not explicitly examine the growth of Fascism in Guatemala. Rather, evocations in his stories are an indirect examination of the expansion of informal, precarious labour, the restructuring of national economies through neoliberal “adjustment,” and the integration of millions into transnational labour markets, all of which create the objective conditions for mass migration and social struggles.
According to the International Labour Organisation, more than 2.1 billion of the world’s 3.6 billion workers now labour in the informal economy. Platform and casual work are central mechanisms of modern labour casualisation These processes force families to fragment, livelihoods to be uprooted, and memories to be reconstituted around loss, survival and mobility, the precise themes of Halfon’s fiction. It has been said of Halfon’s collective work that it seems to flow into a single ongoing novel.
Chris Power points out that Halfon’s “ other recurring themes include Guatemalan history, the Holocaust, questions of Jewish identity, and the nature of violence. The books recycle stories, such as Eduardo’s grandfather’s experience of Auschwitz and subsequent emigration to Guatemala; the family’s relocation to the States; and Eduardo’s own career as a writer. When a novel’s narrator and its author share a name and identity, it naturally prompts questions about what is true and what is invented. But Halfon’s primary concern seems not to be with establishing facts, as a memoirist might, but to rappel as deeply as possible into those crevasses where meaning and truth disappear.”[3]
Before discussing other things, it is worth commenting on the translations of Halfon’s books, which merit a book in themselves. Eduardo Halfon’s fiction—works such as The Polish Boxer, Monastery, and The Lost Boy—explore memory, migration, identity and the tangled legacies of war and displacement. It is important to study the translations seriously and treat them not as incidental “products” but as historical-cultural documents.
For instance, Halfon’s The Polish Boxer was worked on by an international group of five translators who worked in concert with each other to deliver a very good manuscript. These translators understand how translations shape how working people around the world encounter cultures and struggles not their own. Translation determines which voices reach mass audiences and under what political framing.
Halfon and his translators stand on the shoulders of the groundbreaking translator Gregory Rabassa. His translations helped define an international readership’s image of Latin American culture and politics. Understanding these processes exposes the cultural market’s role in commodifying exile, migration, and anti‑imperialist themes and creates a basis for challenging who benefits and who is represented.
Gregory Rabassa’s work, most famously his English translations of Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Clarice Lispector, offers a model for studying translation as both a literary and political activity. It is important to learn from Rabassa methodically. The reader should combine a close technical study of his translations with an analysis of the publishing, class and cultural forces that shape which books circulate internationally.
As Rabassa once wrote, “The translator, we should know, is a writer too. As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because all he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all other essentials have already been provided, so he can sit down and write his ass off.”[4]
Eduardo Halfon’s new book is elliptical, memory-driven and obsessed with names, absence and family traces. Still, it is also a powerful entry point for understanding how imperialism and transnational capital shape private lives. Reading Halfon alongside the history of the United Fruit Company (later Chiquita) provides the reader with a powerful understanding of the Guatemalan civil war, fought from 1960 to 1996, which was triggered by the United States at the behest of the United Fruit Company.
The US oligarchy was the largest landowner in the Central American republic. The United Fruit, in collaboration with the US government, sanctioned and organised alongside the Guatemalan ruling elite and its military, systematic kidnappings and murders that were part of the government’s counter-insurgency campaign saw death squads murder hundreds of thousands of political opponents and Mayan people.
The United Fruit Company was not a benign employer but a transnational corporation whose profits depended on control of land, labour, and transport. In Guatemala and across Central America, UFCO backed oligarchic politics, shaped infrastructure for export agriculture, and collaborated with US state power to secure its property and markets. The company’s role in creating the “banana republic” form, where export interests dominated politics and security, helped produce recurrent repression, dispossession and intervention that set the context for the civil war and ongoing violence.
US imperialism’s hand in Guatemala (1954 coup against Árbenz, long-term support for military regimes and counterinsurgency) turned economic disputes over land and labour into matters of geopolitical strategy. The Guatemalan state served as a repressive instrument of the dominant class. In Guatemala, this meant the security forces acting to defend plantation and export interests against labour organising and land reform.
The successor firms to United Fruit have continued the pattern of corporate power shaping violence and act with impunity. Contemporary cases, such as Chiquita’s payments to Colombian paramilitaries and the company’s light legal consequences, illustrate how transnationals use force and collusion to secure profits and suppress labour, often with the tacit protection of governments.
Eduardo Halfon’s fiction, memory-driven, autobiographical and formally inventive, provides a vital entry point into understanding how class, imperialism and genocide shape subjective experience. To study Halfon in relation to the Guatemalan civil war means reading literature as historical testimony: to connect aesthetic form and private memory with the social forces that produced mass murder, displacement and the long-term campaign of state terror.
Understanding Halfon together with the historical record helps expose the continuing rule of the oligarchy, judicial impunity and US influence, factors central to contemporary struggles over land, indigenous rights and militarisation.
Halfon rarely offers direct economic history; instead, his stories register the aftershocks: absences, silences, disrupted families, migrations and the odd conjunctions of identity that result from capitalist domination. Where Halfon evokes a vanished aunt, a rented house, a childhood street, those private traces map onto structures of class power: plantations that displaced communities, export economies that enclosed common land, and states that protected corporate assets rather than popular needs.
To read Halfon politically is to read the gaps as social symptoms: the inability to name perpetrators, the sense of illegible history, the recurring motif of “not knowing” where a relative went or why a place changed. These are not merely aesthetic devices but the subjective remnant of forced migrations, economic coercion and political terror produced by export capitalism and imperialist intervention.
Like most Guatemalan writers, Halfon learned to write as if his life depended on it. For most readers of his books, it must be hard to understand that writers like Halfon are in constant fear of assassination because of what they write and uncover. A prime example of this is Francisco Goldman. His book The Art of Political Murder nearly got him killed.
In an interview with the Guardian, Halfon recounts feeling paranoid about being followed. My understanding of the political situation in Guatemala is that Halfon is not paranoid. Given Guatemala’s track record of killing writers and journalists who get in their way, it is a real threat, not just paranoia.
It is worth quoting in length from Halfon’s Guardian article. Halfon believes that many things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about.
“ Just after I published my first novel in Guatemala, in 2003, I had a beer with the Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya, who was living there at the time. We met at an old bar called El Establo. As soon as he saw me walk in, he raised his bottle of beer, congratulated me, smiled a crazy man’s smile, and then warned me to leave the country as soon as possible.
Guatemalan writers, and Guatemalans in general, have lived for almost a century now in a climate of fear. If anyone dared to speak out, they either disappeared into exile or disappeared literally. This fear is still prevalent, woven deep into the subconscious of the Guatemalan people, who, over time, have been taught to be silent. To not speak out. To not say or write words that might kill you.
The first consequence of this, of course, is overall silence. Certain things in Guatemala are not spoken or written about. The indigenous genocide in the 1980s. The extreme racism. The overwhelming number of women being murdered. The impossibility of land reform and redistribution of wealth. The close ties between the government and the drug cartels. Although these are all subjects that almost define the country itself, they are discussed and commented on only in whispers or from the outside. But a second and perhaps more dangerous consequence of a culture of silence is a type of self-censorship: when speaking or writing, one mustn’t say anything that puts oneself or one’s family in peril. The censoring becomes automatic, unconscious. Because the danger is very real. Although the days of dictators are now gone, the military is still powerful, and political and military murders are all too common.
It was at a bookstore called Sophos. I was browsing some books on the table when an elderly man came over and introduced himself. He was dressed in a coat and tie. He said he had read my novel and talked for a few minutes about his impressions. He then shook my hand again and, still holding on to it, said it had been a pleasure to meet me, that I should take care, be careful. I asked him carefully about what. He just smiled politely and went on his way. I considered it strange, but didn’t give it much thought. Maybe he was just being nice? Maybe I misinterpreted his greeting (usted cuídese, you take care)? Anyway, I had almost forgotten about it until several weeks later, when I received a phone call. The voice on the phone said I didn’t know him, but that he was calling as a friend to warn me about my enemies.”[5]
Suppose you make the effort to read Halfon’s work; it is a joy. His work opens questions about the culture of migration, the commodification of memory, and the role of literature in representing displacement.
“It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. It is very true that one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to reject or to accept a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But the beauty of Marxism is that it alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why.”
Notes
1. The Purest Form of Writing, the Most Intimate Form of Reading-Eduardo Halfon, in conversation with his translators Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn, with Avinoam Patt, massreview.org/sites/default/files/10_60.3Halfom/index.pdf
The UN Historical Clarification Commission, “Guatemala: Memory of Silence”) and forensic anthropology studies on exhumations.
The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? Francisco Goldman Atlantic Books Paperback – 1 Feb. 2010-
Art as the Cognition of Life: Selected Writings 1911-1936 Paperback – 1 Jan. 1998by Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky (Author), Frederick S. Choate (Translator)
5. Mastermind, by David Unger -AKASHIC BOOKS Paperback – 19 May 2016
About The Author
Eduardo Halfón (born 1971) is a Guatemalan novelist and essayist whose compact, often autobiographical works probe memory, identity, migration, and Jewishness in Latin America and the United States. His books — including titles translated into English such as The Polish Boxer, Monastery, and The Book of Owners — use fragmented narrative, irony and personal testimony to interrogate how individual life is shaped by history, displacement and cultural inheritance. His latest book is Tarantula.
The only time having a cult following is beneficial is when you are actually in a cult…However, being a stand-up comedian with a cult following means that most folks hate your guts.
—Norm Macdonald
“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others”.
Groucho Marx
“ I am humorous, but the law bids me write seriously. I am audacious, but the law commands that my style be modest. [. . . .] The universal modesty of the mind is reason, that universal liberality of thought which reacts to each thing according to the latter’s essential nature.”
Karl Marx
“To live outside the law, you must be honest”.
Bob Dylan
By any stretch of the imagination, Norm Macdonald’s Based on a True Story is not exactly a factual memoir. In fact, I would say there is hardly any factual basis for it, but it is a very funny read. As David Letterman said, “I have read Based on a True Story, and I believe it to be largely bullshit, but it is very, very, very funny!” It is not entirely made up of bullshit, but it is sprinkled with a few truths; however, most events do not hold much water.
Norm Macdonald (1959–2021) was one of the most important voices in late-20th and early-21st-century North American comedy: deadpan delivery, an appetite for subversion, and a tendency to take jokes into uncomfortable territory. For the reader studying Macdonald is not merely cultural nostalgia but an opportunity to sharpen critical tools: to examine how humour reflects class relations, ideological currents, individual psychology and the shifting political landscape of the ruling class and its institutions. It is fair to say that Macdonald stood on the shoulders of a long list of great American comics, including Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor, and George Carlin, to name but a few.
My introduction to Norm Macdonald was through the superb American Comedy The Middle.[1] I was unaware of his history on Saturday Night Live (SNL) or his groundbreaking stand-up comedy. When Macdonald was told he had a cult following, he replied in the book, “I quickly developed a cult following. That sounds pretty good, but the truth is it’s the last thing you want to develop. The only time having a cult following is a great thing is when you are actually in a cult. Then you get to be a cult leader, and life is milk and honey… everyone thinks you are God… you get to lie down with all the ladies from the cult… In a short matter of time, you become drunk with power and begin to lie down with the men, also, not because you want to, but just because you can. Yes, being a cult leader with a cult following is fine work if you can find it. However, being a stand-up comedian with a cult following means that most folks hate your guts.”[2]
Macdonald’s character in The Middle was Uncle Rusty. It is extremely difficult to determine Rusty’s social type. Certainly, he was, in the past, a worker, but he was a bit of a grifter and, at times, represented small-business conservatism, also exhibiting working-class insecurity. Macdonald’s work on The Middle is a masterful example of comedy, both in form and content. His comic timing, silences, and persona were a joy to watch.
Macdonald’s comedy exemplifies the tensions of a semi-petty-bourgeois cultural milieu whose ironic detachment both reflects and reproduces social atomisation. His recurring themes are scepticism of elites and a delight in subverting norms, but often a retreat into cleverness and anecdote. He offers a case study in how cultural forms can register genuine grievances without pointing to collective, class-based solutions.
The Middle sitcom captures the rhythms of precarious, small-town life under late capitalism: juggling low wages, shrinking public services, stalled upward mobility and the cultural weight of respectability politics. The Middle” (the ABC sitcom) and a character like “Uncle Rusty” function, in cultural terms, as a compact social text: they reflect and reproduce the values, anxieties and ideological compromises of a broad layer of American life — the suburban, small town and petty bourgeois milieu often called “middle America.”
Rusty and Macdonald, for that matter, were rebels without a cause. He certainly had an anti-authoritarian air. Rather than adhering to a strict ideology, his comedy and public persona focused on refusing to pander to audiences or authority figures, such as when he mocked the idea of “violent terrorists” respecting velvet ropes during the January 6th Capitol riot.
Through his character Uncle Rusty, Macdonald critiques cultural conservatism and populist resentment: he typically combines sharp jabs of humour aimed at elites with an affirmation of traditional family values, localism, and personal responsibility. This mixture can predispose audiences to see social problems as moral or personal failures rather than systemic contradictions. However, by framing Rusty’s flaws as quirks and resolving them within the family, the show channels potential political anger into private reconciliation and comic relief. This is a common function of mainstream sitcoms in stabilising social relations. At times, the character can expose managerial stupidity or precarity, offering openings for critique. The decisive question is whether those openings are developed into a class explanation or left as individual anecdotes; the show mostly expresses the latter.
As capitalism intensifies precarity, sitcoms like The Middle shape millions of impressions about who is to blame and what can be done. Understanding the show’s pedagogy helps organisers convert diffuse resentment into class consciousness by exposing the gap between individual coping and collective action.
Comedy is not a neutral amusement; it is a social form rooted in class relations and the material conditions that produce ideas, tastes and collective sensibilities. From a Marxist standpoint, comedy must be analysed as part of cultural production: its forms, audiences and effects are shaped by the economic base and the class forces that struggle within a given historical epoch. Historically, comedic forms reflect shifts in class power.
Carnival, farce and satire in pre-capitalist and early-capitalist societies allowed subordinate classes to mock elites—ritualised inversions that temporarily loosened hierarchy. Under capitalist commodity relations, new comic genres emerged (burlesque, stand-up, situation comedy), shaped by urbanisation, wage-labour rhythms, mass media, and the commodification of leisure. The avant-garde and revolutionary epochs produced satire and grotesque comedy that targeted bureaucrats, profiteers, and false consciousness; conversely, periods of reaction saw comedy co-opted to reinforce nationalist, patriarchal, and consumerist norms.
Today, comedy circulates globally through streaming platforms and social media, shaped by corporate algorithms and advertising imperatives. Many comedians occupy precarious economic positions while addressing issues—inequality, racism, surveillance—that concern working people. This contradiction produces both sharp, politically conscious satire and commodified “safe” humour that normalises neoliberal individualism.
The book has an overall tone of melancholy, of sadness, which Norm carried throughout his life. But he also carried an antidote to that in a sharp, rebellious comedy. Both the book and the TV series The Middle are worth reading and watching. Macdonald was a fine exponent of his craft.
“Innocence, Once Lost, Can Never Be Regained. Darkness, Once Gazed Upon, Can Never Be Lost.”
John Milton
“Milton, for example, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast, the writer who delivers hackwork for his publisher is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature. Later on, he sold the product for £5 and, to that extent, became a dealer in a commodity.”
Karl Marx -Economic Works of Karl Marx 1861-1864
What in Me is Dark is a fascinating account of how John Milton’s Paradise Lost influenced a whole coterie of radical and not-so-radical people, ranging from the former Trotskyist C L R James, the black nationalist Malcom X, to the right-wing fanatic Jordan Peterson.
In the book’s introduction, Reade attempts to situate Milton and his Paradise Lost within the context of the English bourgeois revolution. In a recent interview with the British Socialist Workers Party, Reade was asked, “What was John Milton’s relationship with the English Revolution?”
Reade answered, “By the end of the 1630s, Milton believed that the Church of England bishops were a threat to the liberty of protestant English people. This was the bedrock of his radical politics. Religious freedom was very closely connected to the idea of freedom to be a poet. Poets needed to be free, as Milton said in Paradise Lost, he was justifying the ways of god to man. He wrote the poem after the utter defeat of his political cause.”[1]
Reade is not a radical and has a perfunctory understanding of the English Bourgeois revolution. Describing Oliver Cromwell as “ruthless” and the revolution itself as a “failed Revolution”. The SWP did not challenge Reade’s lightness of touch regarding the bourgeois revolution, nor did they ask why Reade ignored the writings of Christopher Hill, whose book on Milton is extremely valuable in understanding the defeat of the revolution and how and why the monarchy was restored so easily without a shot being fired.[2]
A former SWP member, John Rees, offers a better summation of Milton’s importance to the English Revolution: “When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Milton was imprisoned. He narrowly escaped execution and lived to write his deep poetic meditation on the human experience of revolutionary change, Paradise Lost. The essential purpose of this great epic was a meditation on why, if the revolutionary cause was good, it had not triumphed. His prism for viewing this question was the original fall of man, the story of Adam and Eve. Milton concluded that greater enlightenment, education, and culture must make human beings fit to receive the divine providence of revolution. Even in defeat, Milton looked forward to the rebirth of hope. His own role in hastening that day, he wrote, was to “sing unchanged”.[3]
Interpretations of Milton matter because they inform political vocabularies: Milton’s critique of censorship (Areopagitica) and his republican prose can be marshalled for democratic struggles, while other readings can be used to justify hierarchies or cultural conservatism. John Rees’s interpretation should be assessed to see whether it advances working‑class political independence or adapts Milton to reformist or managerial politics. My understanding of Rees’s politics would side with the latter interpretation.
What in Me is Dark is Reade’s first book and emerged from his experiences as a doctoral student at Princeton and as a teacher at a New Jersey prison for five years. Reade is now a professor at Northeastern University, London. His BA and PhD were in English Literature, and he holds an MA in Renaissance Studies.
Paradise Lost has been read and written about by a huge literary and political glitterati, including Blake, Wordsworth, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, all of whom feature in Reade’s book. Reade chooses twelve figures who, in one way or another, have been influenced and moved by a reading of Paradise Lost.
Hannah Arendt
As Nicholas McDowell perceptively points out, “What in Me is Dark mixes psychological speculation of this kind with analysis of the poem’s reception, for which documentary evidence is fragmentary and inconsistent. Some of Reade’s speculations are more convincing than others – the chapter on Hannah Arendt and her relationship with Heidegger strains to make the connection with Milton – but the weight of allusion and reference built up over the course of the book is compelling.”[4]
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a prominent 20th-century political thinker best known for The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem (the “banality of evil”), and The Human Condition. Her distinctions between the public and private, her emphasis on the autonomy of political action, and her analyses of totalitarianism have shaped liberal and conservative debates about politics, rights and mass society.
However, from a classical Marxist viewpoint, Arendt’s ideas must be examined and criticised as products of a particular class milieu and intellectual trajectory, rather than as neutral philosophical truths. Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann focused attention on the bureaucratic and thoughtless character of mass crimes. While agreeing with Arendt’s exposure of bureaucratic complicity, it should be
noted that her moralising explanations detach such crimes from the concrete class politics and state interests that produce them. The tendency to universalise responsibility into moral categories can obscure how ruling classes organise mechanisms of repression to defend property and empire.
The reactionary Jordan Peterson
Reade tends to treat Peterson as an eccentric public intellectual. While Peterson presents himself as an independent intellectual, his role in contemporary politics is class‑based and reactionary. He functions as a mass media conduit for far‑right ideas—individualist ideology, anti‑Marxist polemics and cultural reaction—that buttress the interests of capitalist elites and help demobilise working‑class resistance. Understanding Peterson politically requires analysing the material forces he serves, not treating him as an eccentric public intellectual.
Peterson’s prominence exacerbates two strategic dangers for readers. First, he deepens fragmentation: identity and culture wars obscure objective class interests, making cross‑sector solidarity more difficult. Second, he aids the rise of authoritarian forces that will escalate repression against strikes, refugees, immigrants and left parties.
Peterson treats Milton as a repository of psychological archetypes and moral lessons about responsibility, suffering and the hero’s journey. This emphasises individual moral psychology and universal, trans-historical meanings. Peterson’s psychological universalism obscures the poem’s social roots and repurposes Milton as support for contemporary individualist and conservative politics.
C. L. R. James
Reade calls James “an enabling thinker”. In an interview with Marina Scholtz he writes “It’s all about movement. There’s something about the dialectical tradition, which is all about not remaining stuck in contraries or conflicts, but always trying to find a way to overcome those conflicts. I felt energised when I finished writing about him, which I didn’t feel when I finished writing about Malcolm X, even though he’s my favourite reader of Paradise Lost, and the reader who I think is the most important in the book.”[5]
Reade is correct when he cites James as having a dialectical understanding of Milton. This was more pronounced in his early classical Marxist days than in later life. C. L. R. James reads Milton politically and artistically, and his use of the Marxist method situates Paradise Lost in the social and historical conflicts of the English Revolution and the rise of capitalism.
For James, literary works are not “timeless”: they reflect and refract class conflict and political projects. James’s method shows how culture becomes terrain for struggle over ideas, identity, and historical memory—an approach relevant to present-day battles over curriculum, historical narrative, and class consciousness.
C. L. R. James reads John Milton not primarily as a solitary religious genius but as a political and historical actor whose epic must be understood in the context of the English Revolution and the crisis of seventeenth‑century bourgeois society. For James, literature is social and dialectical: form and drama express fundamental social forces and political conflicts.
James’s understanding is that Paradise Lost is inseparable from Milton’s republican commitments, his experience in the Commonwealth, and the later Restoration defeat of the English Revolution. Milton’s theology and poetic choices, James argues, reflect attempts to reconcile liberty, authority and social hierarchy after revolutionary failure. Satan and the politics of sympathy: James confronts the Romantic tendency to valorise Satan as the proto‑revolutionary hero. He treats Satan’s eloquence and charisma as a political technique—an ideological appeal that can conceal class content. Rather than uncritically celebrating Satan as a liberator, he insists on situating Satan’s rhetoric within material and historical relations.
In another part of Scholtz’s interview with Reade, she asks him How did you first come across Malcolm X’s relationship to Paradise Lost?
Reade replied, “I found out about Malcolm X’s reading of Paradise Lost in quite a strange way. When I was at Princeton, I was in a Spinoza reading group, where we would meet every week to discuss a tiny chunk of Spinoza’s Ethics. Lots of philosophers and historians of philosophy would turn up and spend two or three hours poring over a single paragraph, which was sometimes a bit too much for me because I couldn’t always go there with them. Once, we were talking about Spinoza when a noise outside the philosophy building turned out to be a Black Lives Matter protest. We ended the session and left, and some participants joined the protest. I remember one of the philosophers telling me that Malcolm X had loved Spinoza. I read his autobiography because I was really curious about this fact. While in prison, he taught himself everything about the world and consumed Western history and philosophy. Before he read Paradise Lost, he read Spinoza. Malcolm X is an incredibly original reader. He wants to turn a lot of his reading upside down because he’s figuring out that the world he’s been educated into is not as it seemed, and that historians have whitened everything. So he wants to reverse that process of whitening, and often that involves coming up with quite surprising interpretations. So he’s really interested in Spinoza, because he thinks that he’s a black Jew. When he comes to Paradise Lost, he comes up with his own very original interpretation of it.”[6]
The juxtaposition of Malcolm X and John Milton’s Paradise Lost opens a rich field for inquiry. Reade’s critical study of Malcom X’s relationship with Milton shows how literary and political texts mediate ideas people live by — and how those ideas can either advance or frustrate political understanding of the need for revolutionary transformations.
Reade examines Malcolm X’s life and political evolution, which was the byproduct of a Black working-class experience in the US and internationally. His conversion in prison, the Nation of Islam period, his break with NOI, and his turn towards the working class internationalism (that ultimately led to his assassination) are essential in understanding his fascination with Milton and other literary figures.
It is easy to understand why Malcolm X saw Milton’s Satan as a complex figure — rhetorically heroic yet politically reactionary when read historically. Malcolm’s early rhetorical militancy drew on the image of a proud, self‑defending people.
Reade’s book shows that studying Paradise Lost is not an ivory-tower exercise. In a limited way, Reade’s approach to Paradise Lost is as a historically situated cultural text. He clearly admires Milton’s craft. He interrogates the social forces his epic both expresses and seeks to resolve. A Marxist would combine literary insight with the dialectical method. John Milton’s Paradise Lost should be viewed as a reflection of revolutionary struggle, interpreting the fall of the angels as a failed uprising against an absolute monarch. Ultimately, while Milton was not a Marxist, his focus on radical change, liberty, and the questioning of authority provides rich ground for a materialist and revolutionary analysis.
[1] Paradise Lost inspired generations of radicals-https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/paradise-lost-inspired-generations-of-radicals/
[2] Milton and the English Revolution by Christopher Hill-Verso
[3] John Milton: poetic genius who was at the heart of revolution-https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/john-milton-poetic-genius-who-was-at-the-heart-of-revolution/
[4] Awake, Arise, or Be Forever Fallen What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost-literaryreview.co.uk/awake-arise-or-be-forever-fallen
[5] The Many Readers of Paradise Lost: Orlando Reade in Conversation thelondonmagazine.org/interview-orlando-reade-in-conversation-by-marina-scholtz/
[6] The Many Readers of Paradise Lost: Orlando Reade in Conversation thelondonmagazine.org/interview-orlando-reade-in-conversation-by-marina-scholtz/
“Men of Maize” is a singular, difficult mine that will yield rich ore to those willing to dig for it.
Miguel Ángel Asturias.
“The earth falls dreaming from the stars, but awakens in what once were green mountains, now the barren peaks of Ilóm, where the guarda’s song wails out across the ravines, the hawk swoops headlong, the giant ants march, the dove sighs, and where sleeps, with his mat, his shadow and his woman, he who should hack the eyelids of those who fell the trees, singe the eyelashes of those who burn the forest, and chill the bodies of those who dam the waters of the river that sleeps as it flows and sees nothing until trapped in pools it opens its eyes and sees all with its deep water gaze …
Men of Maize
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“To be radical is to grasp things by the root.”
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1
Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899–1974) is a pivotal figure for anyone who wants to understand Latin American culture and the anti‑imperialist struggle. His fiction and political writing—above all Hombres de maíz (Men of Maize) and El señor presidente (Mr President) combine a literature of the oppressed with a critique of oligarchy, comprador rule and imperialist intervention. Hombres de maíz in particular provides a complex myth‑social account of indigenous life and capitalist dispossession.
Having said that, outside of the work of Gerald Martin and a few others, Miguel Ángel Asturias has been, for a long time, treated by the literary establishment in Latin America and around the world like a “dead dog”, and not content with that, they have continued to pile a further amount of other dead dogs upon his literary reputation.
One of the primary reasons for the cultural abandonment of Asturias has been decades of political and cultural reaction, with dire consequences. The professors, critics and journalists who make up what is called the intelligentsia want no part of Asturias’s sharp critique of both Yankee imperialism and its oligarch friends in Latin America.
There is a hostility amongst these layers to his tireless commitment to social truth, to historical and psychological reality, his building up of his characters’ situations and dilemmas, his engagement with towering questions, including many of the essential facts of class society, critique of Latin American illusions and delusions, his refusal to flatter his readers, all this continues to fly in the face of contemporary academic pettiness and subjectivism, lazy, irrationalist postmodernism and political timidity.
While that dire situation has apparently not changed much, there have been slight but significant recent developments regarding this great writer’s work. David Ungar’s excellent new translation of the 1946 novel El Señor Presidente (Mr President) by Ángel Asturias was published in 2022. While welcoming this critical event, several reviewers bemoaned the “strange lack of interest in the author in the English-speaking world.”[1]
On April 25th 2025, Penguin republished Men of Maize with a translation by Gerald Martin, and in 2026, Verso Publications will release an English translation of “Weekend in Guatemala” by the renowned academic David Lee. The book is an essential collection of stories written in anger after the 1954 CIA-backed overthrow of the Guatemalan government.
Men of Maize, Asturias’s 1949 novel, is considered by many to be his most essential work, yet it remains one of the least understood novels he wrote. Asturias himself said of it as “a singular, difficult mine that will yield rich ore to those willing to dig for it.”
Hector Tober goes so far as to call it “Asturias’s Mayan masterpiece, his Indigenous Ulysses, a deep dive into the forces that made and kept the Maya a subservient caste, and the perpetual resistance that kept Guatemala’s many Mayan cultures alive and resilient. Like most people born in Guatemala, Asturias likely had some Indigenous ancestry, even though his father, a judge, was among the minority of Guatemalans who could trace their Spanish heritage to the seventeenth century. When the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera (later the subject of Asturias’s novel Mr President) sent the future author’s father and family into internal exile in the Maya-centric world of the provincial Alta Verapaz, the young Miguel Ángel fell deeply into the great well of Indigenous culture for the first time.”[2]
Miguel Ángel Asturias and the origins of magical realism
Asturias has long been credited with originating the Magical Realism style of writing. His novel El Señor Presidente (published 1946) prefigures the techniques later associated with Magical Realism. As Rafael Azul points out in his excellent article Gabriel García Márquez: A giant in the literature of the Americas, “Making the experiences of Latin American social struggle, repression, and tyranny the subject of his literary effort was not unique to García Márquez. Mister President (El Señor Presidente), by the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias, who was exiled in Paris, was published in Mexico in 1946. The novel details the assembly line quality of sadistic brutality meted out by an unnamed dictator in an unnamed Central American nation. The novel, a blend of surrealism and naturalism, inaugurated a new style, magical realism, that characterised the later literary boom on the continent. García Márquez became one of its masters. By incorporating fantasy and magic into their narratives, Asturias, García Márquez, and others sought to represent reality, including the reality of human consciousness, in all its facets and complexities. Memories, native myths and fantastic beings are all integrated in the stories. The characters travel back and forth in time, and their memories of the past become activated in the present. The dead intervene in the lives of the living. All this is done not as a means of escaping or masking reality, but as a way of penetrating it.[3]
Any examination of Asturias’s work must situate it in the concrete social and political conditions of Central America—U.S. imperial intervention, oligarchic rule, and the class domination that produced mass dispossession and terror. Asturias wrote amid the rise of authoritarian regimes and open imperial interference in the region. The grotesque continuity of oligarchic power, state terror and foreign corporate influence created a social reality in which everyday life often had the character of a nightmare and the irrational. Magical realism emerges when lived experience itself is surreal: mass violence, dispossession, and ideological mystification produce a popular consciousness that mixes myth, memory, and the uncanny. Asturias’s novels compress these social facts into narrative forms that reveal the social totality behind individual pathology.
Asturias does not merely adorn his prose with “magical” elements for aesthetic effect. His technique fuses myth, surreal episodes and symbolic grotesquerie to expose the law of motion of class rule: how state power, landholding elites and imperial influence reproduce domination. This method both records popular memory and refracts historical processes through mythic forms—an approach that can illuminate social contradictions when read dialectically.
It should be warned against reading Asturias too uncritically. His examination of myths, while important, is no substitute for a concrete examination of social relations. There is, of course, a danger that idealist constructions can hide real social relations. Leon Trotsky insisted that aesthetic form must be abstracted from its social and class roots: the formalist separation of form from content obscures the class forces that shape cultural production. As Trotsky wrote
“It is unquestionably true that economic conditions do not create the need for art. But neither is the need for food made by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. Indeed, one cannot always rely on Marxist principles in deciding whether to accept or reject a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why. It would be childish to think that every class can entirely and fully create its own art from within itself, and, particularly, that the proletariat is capable of creating a new art by means of closed art guilds or circles, or by the Organisation for Proletarian Culture [Proletkult], etc. Generally speaking, the artistic work of man is continuous. Each new rising class places itself on the shoulders of its preceding one. But this continuity is dialectical, that is, it finds itself through internal repulsions and breaks. New artistic needs or demands for new literary and creative points of view are stimulated by economics through the development of a new class, and minor stimuli are supplied by changes in the class’s position under the influence of its growing wealth and cultural power. Artistic creation is always a complicated turning inside out of old forms, under the influence of new stimuli originating outside art. In this large sense of the word, art is a handmaiden. It is not a disembodied element feeding on itself, but a function of social man indissolubly tied to his life and environment.[4]
Asturias’s life work must be read as a socio-historical document, not as an ahistorical ornament. Studying Miguel Ángel Asturias scientifically is not an inward-looking cultural exercise; it is a political weapon to expose the roots of oppression.
Notes
Revisiting Men of Maize: Historical Truths, Literary Distortions, and Asturias in Today’s Guatemala -Elaine Elliott
Tall Tales Made to Order: The Making of Myth in Men of Maize by Miguel Angel Asturias René Prieto: MLN, Vol. 101, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 1986), pp. 354-365
Myth As Time and Word by Ariel Dorfman
Myth and Social Realism in Miguel Angel Asturias-Luis Leal
A Literary Study of Magical Realism in Hombres de Maíz -LIU Lu-yao
[1] See keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2024/07/mr-president-by-miguel-angel-asturias.html
[2] On Asturias’s Men of Maize- August 16, 2024-www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/08/16/on-asturiass-men-of-maize/
Making Space is a beautifully crafted 32-page eBook. It is essentially about a childless couple who take in a mysterious boy in a dark and foreboding short story about the responsibility of parenthood, self-sacrifice, and how we perceive the future. It is also what happens to a person’s soul when they sell it to the devil. Although different from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, there are striking similarities.[1]
R. F. Kuang’s Making Space is part of The Time Traveller’s Passport. It is a collection of stories about memory, identity, and the choices we make in life. New York Times bestselling author John Joseph Adams edited the book. It is a little surprising that Amazon would snare an author of Kuang’s stature. The book is currently only available on Amazon, and a printed version has not been released yet. Review copies appear to be sanctioned by Amazon through NetGalley.[2]
Although the short book genre is new to Kuang, she handles it superbly, serving as a testament to her intellect and experience. The dark and not-unsurprising ending is typical of Kuang. Her main narrative is beautifully crafted, delving into the complexities of human relationships and social responsibilities. However, it is a little disturbing that Kuang makes far too many concessions to the right-wing #MeToo campaign.
I am not saying that Kuang is an ardent supporter of the #MeToo movement. However, her work on Making Space makes it difficult to turn such narrow, selfish concerns of Jess into great, compelling drama.
As the great G. V. Plekhanov wrote, “I know that an artist cannot be held responsible for the statements of their heroes. But very often he, in one way or another, indicates his own attitude to these statements, and we are thus able to judge what his own views are.”
And writing an observation that would not look out of place in today’s world, He writes in the same essay, “in present-day social conditions, the fruits of art for art’s sake are far from delectable. The extreme individualism of the era of bourgeois decay cuts artists off from all sources of genuine inspiration. It renders them completely blind to what is happening in social life, condemning them to sterile preoccupation with personal emotional experiences that are entirely without significance and marked by the fantasies of a morbid imagination. The end product of their preoccupation is something that not only has no relation to beauty of any kind, but which moreover represents an obvious absurdity that can only be defended with the help of a sophistically distorted idealist theory of knowledge.”[3]
While there is nothing wrong with using the internet to publish books or short stories, it does contain certain dangers. Kuang has been accused of using AI to write her books on TikTok. But as one reader succinctly puts it, “Sadly, AI is so common now that talent is suspicious! Would you accuse Sanderson or Stephen King of AI? Or is ‘too articulate’ a critique only reserved for female authors?”.
In defence of Kuang 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 (Yellowface) novel as a means to assess how it can both heal and harm projects. A significant portion of Yellowface is represented through 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”[4]
Making Space is still a superbly written book. Kuang is to be commended for her recent efforts in the field of battle against the racialisation of literature, and her defence of the fundamental right of an author to write about whatever they want without fear of their books being burned or pulped. However, Making Spaces is a dangerous concession to the #MeToo movement. Her new book, Katabasis, which is already a best seller, will be reviewed at a later date.
A Trumpet of Sedition 