Pip: "God save the Queen, the fascist regime" — not a bad place to start for a site called A Trumpet of Sedition.
Mara: freerein61 has a review up of Matthew Worley's No Future, a major academic history of punk and British political culture, and it covers a lot of ground — the music, the fanzines, the movements, and where the whole thing fell short.
Pip: Let's start with what the book actually does and where the review pushes back.
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No Future: Punk, Politics, and the Limits of Cultural Studies
Mara: Matthew Worley's No Future sets out to be a comprehensive academic history of British punk from 1976 to 1984 — covering the initial explosion, the split into post-punk, Oi!, anarcho-punk, the Two-Tone ska revival, and the Rock Against Racism movement. The review's central question is whether that framework is enough to explain what punk actually was.
Pip: The review grants Worley real credit before it sharpens its knife. His archival work on fanzine culture gets particular attention — tracing publications from Aberdeen to Bristol, from the first issue of Sniffin' Glue through the anarchist zines of the early 1980s, dismantling the London-centric myth that dominates most punk historiography.
Mara: And on Crass specifically, the review notes Worley quotes their sleeve notes from Christ The Album directly: "War is confirmation of the imposed reality in which we exist." That's treated as a genuinely significant political statement, not just lyric sheet decoration.
Pip: Which makes it more pointed when the review argues Worley's whole framework can't answer the question that matters — why did all that social energy not produce a revolutionary movement?
Mara: The diagnosis is precise. Cultural Studies, shaped by Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre, reads youth subcultures as symbolic resistance expressed through style and aesthetics. The review argues this approach consistently sidesteps the connection between those movements and actual class struggle.
Pip: So you get endless nuance about safety pins and mohawks, and not much about the Labour Party bureaucracy quietly absorbing the anger.
Mara: That's the upshot. The review is equally critical of Rock Against Racism and the SWP, arguing they reduced complex working-class grievances to a single-issue moral campaign, and of anarcho-punk's individualist withdrawal — Crass included — as a politics that cannot confront a capitalist state with police and courts behind it.
Pip: The book's own title becomes the sharpest point. The review reads "no future" not as punk's final word but as evidence of a missing revolutionary leadership — the energy was real, the organisations weren't equal to it.
Mara: And the closing argument is direct: the conditions that produced punk — unemployment, imperialist wars, parties offering nothing — haven't been resolved. The question the Sex Pistols posed in 1977 is still open.
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Pip: So Worley did the archival work, and the review says: read it, then go further.
Mara: The raw material is there — the fanzines, the bands, the movements. The framework to explain why it didn't become something more is still the argument worth having.
Pip: A descent into the underworld — and we're not talking about the academic job market, though the novel makes that comparison explicit. freerein61 has been reading R.F. Kuang's new book, and the review turns into something considerably wider than a book review.
Mara: That's right. We're covering Katabasis, Kuang's novel about academic elitism and class, and the post uses it to open up the katabasis tradition across Dante, Zola, and Engels. Let's start with what the novel is actually doing.
Katabasis and the Class Descent
Pip: Katabasis is R.F. Kuang's departure from the colonial framework of Babel toward something more directly focused on class — specifically, the university as a structure that reproduces hierarchy rather than dismantles it. The question the post is asking is whether the novel's metaphor of descent has genuine social content, or whether it stays psychological and individual.
Mara: The post sets up the stakes with a quote from critic Beejay Silcox: "Katabasis is far from perfect. There's a pair of blood-drunk villains who feel like a gory distraction, and a nonsense MacGuffin. Bone creatures clatter through plot holes. Grand mythologies collide and compete. But none of that really matters — especially if you have a score to settle."
Pip: So the imperfections are acknowledged and then set aside, because the novel's real work is settling accounts with a system — the ivory tower as an infernal structure, in the post's phrase, that runs more like a pyramid scheme than a meritocracy.
Mara: The post is specific about how the novel builds that case. Characters like Alice and Peter are described as cannon fodder in a departmental war, spending their best years doing grunt work for senior academics. And financial privilege is named as the real barrier — the protagonists are so absorbed into the system that they believe their lives are literally not worth living without validation from elite institutions.
Pip: Which is where the katabasis frame earns its keep. The post traces the tradition from Dante's Inferno — where the circles of hell encode the class contradictions of late medieval Italy, usurers damned alongside political traitors — through to Engels descending into the cellars of Manchester and Zola sending his characters into the coal mines of Germinal. The underground is consistently the space where the bourgeoisie prefers not to look.
Mara: And the post draws out the reversal built into the trope: the hero who descends returns transformed, carrying knowledge the surface world lacks. As the post puts it, it is precisely from the underworld of capitalist production that the force capable of overthrowing the existing order emerges.
Pip: The post is careful to note that Kuang is not a Marxist — but argues her work gives a Marxist critic exactly the material needed to demonstrate that mythological forms take on different social content in different epochs, rather than being timeless archetypes.
Mara: That's the test the post leaves with the reader: whether Katabasis reaches the depth of great literature that illuminates the real social forces shaping human suffering, or whether its descent stays at the level of individual psychology. The post holds the question open rather than closing it.
Pip: From the underworld of academia to the forces that built it — the class logic runs deeper than any single institution.
Mara: The through-line here is the question of what literary form can actually carry — whether a descent narrative points toward systemic contradiction or stays inside individual experience.
Pip: Dante mapped feudal anxiety. Zola mapped the mines. The question for next time is what the present moment maps onto.
Pip: "If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others." Philip K. Dick said that, and honestly, it reads less like a warning and more like a dare.
Mara: That line opens a piece by freerein61 that uses Dick's 1968 novel as a lens for thinking about alienation, commodification, and what capitalism does to the idea of being human. That's the territory we're covering today.
Pip: Let's start with the novel itself — and why its central question still has teeth.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Dick, Capitalism, and the Empathy Problem
Mara: The post frames Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as one of the most philosophically ambitious science fiction works of the twentieth century — and its central question is precise: what truly defines being human amid a heavily dehumanised world?
Pip: And Dick's answer isn't comforting. The society that hunts androids for lacking empathy is itself building a world where genuine empathy barely exists.
Mara: The post puts it directly: "Dick's irony lies in the fact that the society which hunts androids for their lack of empathy is itself creating a world where true empathy is absent." The Voigt-Kampff test measures instinctive concern for others' suffering — but the humans administering it are emotionally hollowed out by the same system.
Pip: So the test for humanity is being run by people who are failing it.
Mara: The post connects this to Marx's theory of alienation from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — the worker estranged from their labour, from other people, from their own human potential. Dick's androids, manufactured for exploitation and destroyed when they escape, are described as capitalism's ultimate product.
Mara: The novel's other details carry the same weight. Owning a real animal is a status symbol because most are extinct. Deckard's electric sheep is a source of shame — a private emotional life that feels counterfeit. Mercerism, the communal spiritual practice, turns out to be a televised fabrication.
Pip: Fake religion, fake animals, fake empathy — and the commodity form so embedded in daily life that real and simulated become genuinely indistinguishable.
Mara: The post then turns to the adaptations. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner gets credit for its visual power — Roy Batty's final monologue is called "profoundly impactful" — but the post argues it simplifies Dick's social critique, letting spectacle crowd out the analysis of the Tyrell Corporation as a capitalist entity built on enslaved labour.
Pip: And Blade Runner 2049 fares no better. The post quotes Carlos Delgado's review: "aside from a brief scene in a child labour sweatshop, Villeneuve appears uninterested in depicting the conditions faced by workers, whether human or artificial."
Mara: The conclusion drawn from that review is stark — "bleakness without understanding, the work of artists who perhaps sense an impending social catastrophe but lack the tools to identify its source." That's the post's diagnosis of contemporary dystopian art more broadly.
Pip: An aesthetic of crisis with no theory of the cause.
Mara: The post also examines Dick's 1977 Metz speech, where he explicitly names surveillance states — theocratic, fascist, or capitalist — as systems that must be overthrown. His novels, from A Scanner Darkly to Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, are read as artistic expressions of genuine social contradictions, not mere paranoia.
Mara: But the post draws a firm line. Dick's perception of a falsified, alienating reality is described as extraordinary — and then immediately limited. His answer to what the post calls the "black iron prison" is divine reprogramming, not collective action. Liberation through cosmic intervention, not working-class organisation.
Mara: The post frames this as the characteristic form social despair takes in a petty-bourgeois intellectual cut off from the working class. Dick registered the horror with real sensitivity but displaced the solution into Gnosticism and personal mystical experience. The post's final word on him is generous but clear: his questions — what does it mean to be human when humans are treated as commodities — are practical questions, and Marx approached them from a materialist perspective where Dick could only approach them through a restless artistic sensibility.
Pip: The surveillance state, manufactured consent, the commodification of consciousness — all of it more recognisable now than in 1968. Dick saw it coming; he just couldn't tell you who to organise with.
Mara: The questions Dick posed about alienation and what capitalism does to genuine human connection haven't aged out. They've sharpened.
Pip: Next time — more from A Trumpet of Sedition on the ideas that refuse to stay in the past.
“If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others.”
Philip K Dick
Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.
Leon Trotsky- Literature and Revolution
Although Philip K. Dick was not a superman, he certainly pushed his physical and mental limits to elevate both his own consciousness and that of his readers. His 1968 novel, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, is among the most philosophically ambitious science fiction works of the twentieth century. disparity.
This novel embodies Dick’s humanist viewpoint, delving into the key question: what truly defines being human amid a heavily dehumanised world? Set in a post-nuclear-war wasteland where most animals are extinct, and much of humanity lives in off-world colonies, the story explores themes of alienation. Rick Deckard, the bounty hunter tasked with hunting androids, focuses more on character development and the desire for genuine emotions in a world that feels largely synthetic and empty.
The novel’s social commentary is powerful. The androids (Nexus-6 models by Rosen Corporation) act as a form of slave labour created to serve, deprived of rights, and hunted when they escape. Dick clearly compares the androids’ lack of “empathy” with the spiritual numbness capitalism causes in humans. The “empathy boxes” and the shared religious practice of “Mercerism,” which is eventually shown to be fake, symbolise a desperate collective longing for genuine human connection in a world driven by commodification.
The way animals are treated is equally important. In the novel, owning a real, living animal serves as a status symbol in a world filled with death, and Deckard’s shame about his electric sheep reflects how capitalism diminishes all relationships, even the most personal, to their exchange value. This embodies a core Marxist idea: the commodity form becomes so embedded in life that the line between real and simulated dissolves completely.
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, inspired loosely by Dick’s novel, is renowned for its stunning visuals. Its depiction of a rain-soaked Los Angeles filled with neon ads, off-world colony signs, and deteriorating urban splendour has shaped dystopian sci-fi aesthetics over the years. Roy Batty’s final monologue (“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”) remains profoundly impactful.
The film simplifies many of Dick’s social critiques. While it still explores the key existential question about whether replicants are truly human more deeply, it downplays the portrayal of the Tyrell Corporation as a capitalist entity that creates enslaved beings. Elements like the novel’s critique of consumerism, the emotional connection to the electric sheep, and the depiction of a working-class bounty hunter feeling alienated are overshadowed by visual spectacle and personal existential dilemmas. Consequently, the focus becomes more on spectacle, reducing the emphasis on broader social themes.
Carlos Delgado’s review of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 highlights a key critical insight precisely: “A more rigorous artist might have explored the social and psychological implications of ‘synthetic’ beings that have become sophisticated enough to exhibit human traits. They could at least have drawn parallels between the plight of the replicant ‘slaves’ and our current labouring class. However, aside from a brief scene in a child labour sweatshop, Villeneuve appears uninterested in depicting the conditions faced by workers, whether human or artificial.”[1]
The review comes to a harsh conclusion: “This is bleakness without understanding, the work of artists who perhaps sense an impending social catastrophe but lack the tools to identify its source or to raise awareness or protests.” This effectively captures a common aspect of contemporary dystopian art — an aesthetic of crisis that lacks the intellectual framework to recognise capitalism as the cause or the working class as the agent of change.
Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) was a deeply innovative and reflective mind in postwar American science fiction. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he focused not on technological marvels or space tales, but on exploring what it truly means to be human amid systematic social dehumanisation. He authored 44 novels and over 120 short stories before dying of a stroke at 53. His works have inspired numerous major films. Hollywood’s selective embrace of Dick, adapting his plots but often neglecting his deeper social insights, illustrates how capitalist culture can absorb and neutralise art.
What makes Dick’s novel timeless is that it was written amid significant social upheaval in 1968. That year saw the Tet Offensive, the Prague Spring, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, and a global wave of revolutionary fervour. Through fiction, Dick explores whether the dehumanising logic of capitalist society, treating humans as tools, manufacturing desire via advertising, and reducing all worth to exchange value, ultimately turns people into androids.
This is not a mystical question. It connects directly to Marx’s concept of alienation: the worker who sells their labour power becomes estranged from the product of their labour, from fellow workers, from their own human potential. Dick’s “androids” are capitalism’s ultimate product, beings manufactured for exploitation who, in seeking freedom, are destroyed.
This portrays a society profoundly affected by alienation. Genuine emotions, particularly empathy, are now scarce and highly prized. The central mechanism in the novel is that Nexus-6 androids, created by Rosen Corporation for slave labour in the colonies, are indistinguishable from humans through physical tests. They are only identifiable by their absence of spontaneous empathetic responses. The Voigt-Kampff test, which bounty hunter Rick Deckard employs, identifies replicants by measuring whether they instinctively show concern for others’ suffering.
Dick’s irony lies in the fact that the society which hunts androids for their lack of empathy is itself creating a world where true empathy is absent. People connect through “empathy boxes” to participate in Mercerism, a communal spiritual experience later uncovered as a fake, a televised show. Owning a real animal is a mark of status since many animals are extinct; Deckard’s embarrassment over his electric sheep reflects the shame of someone whose emotional life feels inauthentic. The pervasive influence of commodities has so deeply infiltrated human life that genuine feelings are indistinguishable from their artificial counterparts.
This directly relates to Marx’s theory of alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, where the worker is separated from the product of their labour, the act of production, other humans, and ultimately their own human potential. Dick’s androids are not external threats to human civilisation; they are the results of it—manufactured beings designed for exploitation and discard. As they escape their circumstances, they expose the deep flaws and corruption within the society that created them.
A recurring theme throughout Dick’s work is how we can know what’s real. What do we make of experiences that go outside everyday reality, like madness, religion or drugs? Such philosophical questions are handled lightly. Dick delights in paradox and has a characteristic dark humour. Though his writing addresses abstract questions, it is emotionally engaging. He often writes sympathetically about ordinary people trapped in situations they cannot control.
Emmanuel Carrère’s semi-biography shows us the roots of all this in Dick’s own life. An introverted and anxious teenager, troubled by the thought of a twin sister who had died in infancy, Dick began a lifelong involvement with psychiatry aged 14. His first marriage (of five) lasted some six months. He worked in a record shop, fascinated by high culture, and dreamed of becoming a ‘serious non-SF writer.
Dick wasn’t politically active, except for a deep-seated and lasting hatred of Richard Nixon. He mingled with bohemian pseudo-left circles and shared their criticism of 1950s American consumerist and suburban culture, as reflected in his SF stories from that period. It appears that FBI agents provided multiple-choice questionnaires for Dick and his socialist wife to indicate their opinions on Russia. They carefully considered the options, taking into account Dick’s background in psychological testing.
Dick’s portrayal of Nixon’s ousting as a major victory against tyranny, seen as the culmination of “reprogrammed variables,” exposes a significant limitation. Watergate was not a break in the capitalist power structure; it was a manipulation within it, essentially a palace coup by rival factions of the ruling class. Agencies like the CIA and FBI were heavily involved. The system that elevated Nixon, including the national security state, the imperial presidency, and the surveillance networks, remained fully intact and has only grown more powerful since. Ultimately, emphasising Nixon as the embodiment of evil helped reinforce confidence in capitalist institutions by framing their self-correction as a form of democratic accountability.
By the early 1960s, during his third marriage, Dick was producing as much science fiction as he could. The income helped pay his bills and motivated him to write more and earn more. He also took medication for a heart murmur and agoraphobia, along with pills to handle side effects. His novels, such as *The Man in the High Castle* and *The Clans of the Alphane Moon*, started to succeed, but his marriage was falling apart. He saw a vision of a large, menacing robot face in the sky. A compassionate priest thought it was Satan, leading him to become a Christian, though his beliefs were quite unorthodox. In 1964, Dick moved to Berkeley and entered his fourth marriage. He wrote *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep* in 1966, gaining recognition as a counterculture icon. This stable period ended with the disillusionment of the 1960s, especially after Nixon’s re-election in 1968. By 1970, his fourth wife had left, and his home was often filled with drug casualties.
Philip K Dick and Modern Capitalism
Philip K. Dick’s 1977 Metz speech is a notably compelling document that warrants a thoughtful materialist analysis rather than dismissal. As a highly insightful literary figure of the 20th century, Dick’s keen attention to counterfeit realities, surveillance systems, and the core question “what is real?” is profoundly linked to the social context of American capitalism that influenced him.
The speech’s clearest political insight is also its most straightforward: Dick explicitly states that “a state in which the government knows more about you than you know about yourself… is a state which must be overthrown. It may be a theocracy, a fascist corporate state, a reactionary monopolistic capitalism, or centralistic socialism.” This statement offers a genuine insight. His novels—The Man in the High Castle, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly—mirror a deep, visceral horror of authoritarian surveillance, the suppression of individuality by state power, and capitalism’s ongoing falsification of consciousness. These themes are intentional, representing the artistic expression of genuine social contradictions.
His depiction of the “black iron prison”—the oppressive and unavoidable system of control he saw underlying daily American life—aligns closely with the Marxist idea of reification: the process by which capitalism turns human relationships into object-like, alien, and controlling structures that seem natural and everlasting. Dick experienced this, even if he couldn’t articulate it theoretically.
However, this is where the materialist critique becomes crucial. Dick directs his keen perception of a fabricated, alienated reality entirely into an idealist and theological perspective. The answer to the “black iron prison” is not organised revolutionary action by the working class; it is divine reprogramming. The “programmer-reprogrammer” God adjusts variables; chess moves are played against a “dark counter-player”; and liberation is achieved not through collective human effort but via cosmic intervention, experienced mystically by an individual under sodium pentothal.
This is precisely the form that social despair takes in a petty-bourgeois intellectual cut off from the working class. Dick registered the horror of capitalist reality with extraordinary sensitivity. Still, having no connection to the actual social force capable of transforming it, he displaced the solution into metaphysics, Gnosticism, and personal mystical experience. The “orthogonal time” theory is, in a sense, a brilliant literary and philosophical elaboration of the impossibility of imagining social transformation within the framework of isolated individual consciousness.
Dick’s emphasis on simulated or artificial realities, referred to here as a “computer-programmed reality,” demonstrates a keen intuitive grasp of Marx and Engels’ concept of ideology. This process involves the dominant ideas of a given era being presented as inherent, unchangeable, and timeless, reflecting the interests of the ruling class. In Dick’s view, the capitalist system functions as a form of simulation — it portrays its exploitative, historically specific structures as if they are natural aspects of human nature.
However, the Marxist perspective on this insight is entirely different from Dick’s. Marx views the response to false consciousness not as a mystical awakening into a separate realm, but as the development of class consciousness through the concrete struggles of the working class. While Dick describes the “awakening” as a solitary, drug-induced vision, Marx sees it as a social process where the working class becomes aware of its position within the relations of production and collectively works to alter those conditions.
What is Dick’s Enduring Significance
Dick’s work has achieved true artistic significance. It remains relevant because the social realities he predicted—such as the surveillance state, manufactured consent, and the commodification of consciousness—have only grown stronger in 21st-century capitalism. The universe of *A Scanner Darkly, where the government uses addictive products to undermine and control people who act as informants, is now more recognisable in today’s context of social media influence, opioid crises, and widespread surveillance compared to 1977.
The task is to take Dick’s accurate perception of capitalism’s falsified, coercive, and alienating nature and anchor it within the only framework that can both explain and challenge it: Marxist analysis. This approach sees capitalism as a unique historical mode of production that inherently produces these conditions. It views the international working class as the force capable of replacing it with a truly human social order. Dick envisioned a garden world, and Marxism explains how to realise it.
Despite flaws such as an emphasis on individual paranoia over collective social critique, influences from drug culture, and Hollywood adaptations, Philip K. Dick remains a significant literary figure because he genuinely posed questions that capitalism urges all thinkers to consider. What does it mean to be human when humans are treated as commodities? How can we identify genuine emotions in a world overwhelmed by artificial simulation? What defines identity amid widespread alienation? These are practical questions, not mystical ones. Marx approached them from a materialist perspective, whereas Dick addressed them through a restless, troubled artistic sensibility confronting American capitalism at its postwar peak. The aim isn’t just to admire Dick’s dystopias as predictive, but to understand the social forces behind them and develop a political movement to end these conditions.
Andy Durgan’s book, The POUM: Republic, Revolution and Counterrevolution, published by Resistance Books in November 2025, is part of a broader effort to rehabilitate POUM’s centrist politics and downplay the important lessons of the Spanish Revolution. Resistance Books, the publishing wing of the International Socialist Tendency (IST), is largely influenced by the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP). This connection is intentional and influences how Durgan presents the Spanish events of 1936–39.
Durgan is closely linked to Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and has historically contributed to its media publications, including Socialist Worker and its main theoretical journal, International Socialism. He specialises in the Spanish Civil War and is particularly noted for his research on POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). His background includes political activity with the SWP in the UK, academic research on the origins of POUM, and teaching modern history in Spain. Additionally, he served as a historical adviser for Ken Loach’s film Land and Freedom, which illustrates the POUM’s involvement in the Spanish Revolution.
However, as Ann Talbot notes, “Durgan’s conception of the relationship between class and society is derived ultimately from the anti-Marxist conceptions of the sociologist Max Weber, who developed an ahistorical view of society as a series of static ideal types. This approach proved influential for self-declared Marxists such as Louis Althusser, who developed structuralism, a major theoretical influence on the SWP. This theoretical background allows Durgan to adopt Graham’s theory of modernisation without as much as a hiccup. The Spanish Civil War, according to Helen Graham, was one of many European civil wars that reflected differing responses to modernity.[1]
Talbot believes that Durgan’s political affiliation is of minor significance when compared to his political approach, which is deeply rooted in the IST/SWP tradition. The publication of The POUM through Resistance Books in 2025 confirms that the institutional link between Durgan and that tendency remains. The SWP tradition provides the platform, distribution channels, and political support for his revival of POUM centrist views.
Any Marxist writer who has engaged with Durgan’s work has observed that, while he was willing to engage critically with Trotskyism in earlier writings, by 2007, he had fully embraced the Popular Front framework, disguised as “modernisation theory.” As Dave Hyland detailed in a three-part WSWS critique in November 2012, Durgan consistently downplays the role of the PSOE and anarcho-syndicalists in the defeat of the 1934 Asturian uprising, neglects the Stalinist GPU’s campaign of murder against Spain’s revolutionary opposition, and most importantly, fails to address Trotsky’s actual positions on the POUM seriously.[2]
Durgan’s 2025 book on the POUM represents his most sustained effort to rehabilitate that organisation and to counter the Trotskyist critique. The POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) was established in 1935 through the merger of the Communist Left of Spain led by Andreu Nin, a former Left Oppositionist and former secretary of the Red International of Labour Unions, and the Workers and Peasants Bloc, led by Joaquín Maurín. Nin had distanced himself from Trotsky in 1930, refusing to endorse the Fourth International and instead forming an opportunist alliance with Bukharin’s Right Opposition. This was more than a tactical disagreement; it was a profound political mistake with disastrous repercussions.
Trotsky’s assessment of the POUM differs sharply from Durgan’s and, contrary to Durgan’s suggestion, was not a retrospectively harsh judgment. It was a direct political intervention made in the midst of events. In The Class, the Party, and the Leadership, written in 1940 and published on the WSWS, Trotsky wrote:
“To the left of all the other parties in Spain stood the POUM, which undoubtedly embraced revolutionary proletarian elements not previously firmly tied to anarchism. However, it was precisely this party that played a fatal role in the development of the Spanish revolution. It could not become a mass party because, in order to do so, it was first necessary to overthrow the old parties, and it was possible to overthrow them only by an irreconcilable struggle, by a merciless exposure of their bourgeois character. However, the POUM, while criticising the old parties, subordinated itself to them on all fundamental questions. It participated in the “People’s” election bloc; entered the government, which liquidated workers’ committees; engaged in a struggle to reconstitute this governmental coalition; capitulated time and again to the anarchist leadership; conducted, in connection with this, a false trade union policy; took a vacillating and non-revolutionary attitude toward the May 1937 uprising. From the standpoint of determinism in general, it is possible, of course, to recognise that the policy of the POUM was not accidental.
Everything in this world has its cause. However, the series of causes engendering the Centrism of the POUM is by no means a mere reflection of the condition of the Spanish or Catalonian proletariat. Two causalities moved toward each other at an angle, and at a certain moment, they came into hostile conflict. It is possible, by taking into account previous international experience, Moscow’s influence, the impact of several defeats, etc., to explain, politically and psychologically, why the POUM developed into a centrist party. However, this does not alter its centrist character, nor does it alter the fact that a centrist party invariably acts as a brake upon the revolution, must each time smash its own head, and may bring about the collapse of the revolution. It does not alter the fact that the Catalan masses were far more revolutionary than the POUM, which in turn was more revolutionary than its leadership. In these conditions, to unload the responsibility for false policies on the “immaturity” of the masses is to engage in sheer charlatanism frequently resorted to by political bankrupts.”
A significant political distortion in Durgan’s earlier work, which persists in this new book, is the consistent underestimation of Stalin’s role in the GPU in Spain. As Hyland’s 2012 critique observes, Durgan “remains silent about the part played by Stalin’s murderous secret police, the GPU, and its impact on the Spanish workers’ movement.”
This silence is deliberate, aiming to rehabilitate the Popular Front framework by downplaying its realities, including the torture and murder of Andreu Nin, the framing of POUM leaders as “Trotskyite-Fascist” agents of Franco (mirroring Moscow Trials slanders), and the physical elimination of those opposing Stalinist class collaboration. Hyland’s work is further elaborated by Alejandro López’s 2025 lecture writing “The Stalinist bureaucracy intervened to forestall revolution in Spain, launching a murder campaign against anyone even suspected of political links to Trotsky. The machinery of repression built in Moscow and refined in the Comintern was exported to Spain.[3] Ramón Mercader, who would later assassinate Trotsky, was specifically trained in Spain for this purpose. The GPU’s activities in Spain were not an anomaly; rather, they exemplified Stalinism’s core principle: repressive efforts to quash socialist revolution in order to protect the Soviet bureaucracy’s privileges and maintain its diplomatic ties with the so-called “democratic” imperialist powers.
The SWP’s stance on the POUM has gradually shifted to the right, revealing a clear trajectory. Ann Talbot’s two-part WSWS review of Durgan’s 2007 book reports that Britain’s SWP supports the Stalinist perspective on the Spanish Civil War. In his earlier work, especially his 1990 article “The Spanish Trotskyists and the Foundation of the POUM” in Revolutionary History, Durgan and the SWP tradition indulged in what Talbot describes as “hero worship” of the POUM. They idealised its political mistakes while only superficially criticising the Popular Front. The POUM was portrayed as a brave, tragically defeated revolutionary group, martyred by Stalinist repression. This narrative aimed to conceal the POUM’s own significant political role in the revolution’s failure.
Durgan’s new book should be understood within a broader context. It stands as the SWP tradition’s most comprehensive, book-length effort to offer a sympathetic portrayal of the POUM — likely more nuanced than a simple apology, yet still based on the same core political evasions that Marxists have identified over the years. Publishing it via Resistance Books, the IST’s own imprint, is a political statement: it represents the official account of its preferred historical perspective. For workers and young people looking to understand the Spanish Revolution, the key resources are Trotsky’s writings — The Lesson of Spain — A Last Warning (1937) and The Class, the Party, and the Leadership (1940) — along with the WSWS’s historical analyses.
Katabasis, R.F. Kuang’s latest novel, portrays modern class society primarily through the lens of academic elitism and the commodification of knowledge. The new book marks a departure for Kuang, as her previous work, such as Babel, focused on class and colonialism.
Kuang’s previous work should be approached with both caution and admiration. Her earlier novels, the Poppy War trilogy and Babel, drew considerable attention for their engagement with imperialism, colonialism, and historical violence. Babel examines British colonialism and the exploitation of non-Western knowledge through a fantasy lens. These are legitimate and important subjects.
However, a limitation of this kind of literary-political fiction is that it frames oppression primarily through the lens of race and national identity rather than class. The enemy in Babel is, broadly, “the British empire” understood in racial and civilizational terms, rather than capitalism as a world-historical system that generates imperialism regardless of which nation or ethnic group sits at the top.
Katabasis critiques present-day class society, showing the “ivory tower” as a modern class structure that gatekeeps social mobility behind walls of wealth and power. The core of the novel presents the reader with many arguments regarding class in contemporary society. The first one sees academia as a modern class hierarchy. Kuang frames the university system as an “infernal structure” that mirrors a pyramid scheme rather than a meritocracy. Secondly, Characters like Alice and Peter are depicted as “cannon fodder” in a departmental war, spending their best years doing grunt work to further the prestige of senior academics, barriers to Entry.
The novel also critiques how prestigious universities gatekeep their institutions, making success nearly impossible for those without significant “financial privilege”. The protagonists are so indoctrinated into this class system that they believe their lives are literally “not worth living” without validation from an elite institution.
If the Katabasis theme seems familiar, it is because it invokes the classical literary descent into the underworld (as in Dante, Virgil, and Homer). The novel continues Kuang’s interest in dark, morally complex fantasy. It raises many questions, including whether the narrative’s moral framework reduces social evil to individual wickedness or to ethnic or national conflict, or whether it points towards systemic, class-based contradictions. From a literary and political standpoint, does Kuang’s “descent” have any genuine social content, or is it primarily psychological and individual? Great literature, even in fantasy, illuminates the real social forces that shape human suffering the test for the reader is whether Katabasis reaches that depth.
Dante’s Inferno is perhaps the most elaborate katabasis in Western literature, and it is saturated with class content. The organisation of hell explicitly reflects the social and political contradictions of late medieval Italy popes, usurers, and political enemies are placed in their circles with meticulous class logic. The great usurers of Florence sit in the seventh circle; Dante was writing at a moment when merchant capital was beginning to corrode feudal social relations, and his moral geography encodes that anxiety. The sin of usury (lending for profit) damns early capitalists; the sin of betrayal damns political traitors to the feudal order.
Kuang’s book is not just a history book; her katabasis metaphor, used in modern terms, takes on a different path. The world of the labouring poor, the mines, the factories, the slums, was consistently figured in the 19th and 20th centuries as an underworld into which bourgeois observers “descended.” Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England is, in a sense, a social katabasis, a descent into the cellars and rookeries of Manchester to bring back testimony from a world the bourgeoisie preferred not to see. Émile Zola’s Germinal centres on a literal descent into the coal mines; the underground is the space of proletarian labour and, ultimately, of proletarian rebellion.
This is where the class dimension becomes most politically charged. The bourgeoisie imagines itself above ground, in the light of civilisation and culture; the working class is relegated to the depths. But the katabasis trope, when deployed honestly, always carries the seed of a reversal; the hero who goes down returns transformed, with knowledge the surface world lacks. The revolutionary implications are not hard to see: it is precisely from the “underworld” of capitalist production from the mines, the foundries, the assembly lines — that the force capable of overthrowing the existing order emerges.
As Beejay Silcox observes, “Katabasis is far from perfect. There’s a pair of blood-drunk villains who feel like a gory distraction, and a nonsense MacGuffin. Bone creatures clatter through plot holes. Grand mythologies collide and compete. Chunks of the novel read like a Rowan Atkinson sketch. And the 1980s faculty politics look deceptively – or perhaps wearily – like our own (a fascinating companion read would be Helen Garner’s 1995 landmark provocation The First Stone). But none of that really matters – especially if you have a score to settle.”[1]
Katabasis is a complex and contradictory work. Kuang is not a Marxist, yet her work enables a Marxist to explain their approach to mythology. Marxists insist that artistic and mythological forms are not autonomous —they arise from and reflect material and social conditions, even as they develop internally. The katabasis is not merely a timeless archetype (as Jung or Joseph Campbell would have it) within a deeply ahistorical, idealist framework. It is a form that takes on different social content in different epochs, justifying imperial class rule in Virgil, mapping the contradictions of feudal society in Dante, and encoding working-class experience in the naturalist novel.
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
A Trumpet of Sedition 