Within critical thought, class war is used less as a technical term and more as an affective catalyst, reframing actions and rhetoric through military concepts and language, without offering so much as a program or practical strategy. That is what we encounter most famously with Marx and Engels, when in 1848 they summarized the development of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie: the “fight” between the classes has become so absolute that class struggle (Klassenkampf) modulates into civil war (Bürgerkrieg) and then open revolution. From this perspective, the work of politics is to undertake the transition from one phase to the other, from the grinding brutality of class struggle to the presumably intentional, organized, and openly violent confrontation with the bourgeois and their institutions. A survey of the literature of revolution, Mark Steven’s history of global class war considers work by writers from Byron to Assata Shakur. It feels more crucial than ever to study the work of writers who practiced solidarity, and this book promises to be a vital contribution to the revolutionary canon.”

He was in search of a subject, something magnificent, he did not know exactly what; some vast, tremendous theme, heroic, terrible, to be unrolled in all the thundering progression of hexameters. That was what he dreamed, while things without names — thoughts for which no man had yet invented words, terrible formless shapes, vague figures, colossal, monstrous, distorted — whirled at a gallop through his imagination.Deeply opposed to any sort of moderation or compromise, which he describes as a bourgeois luxury — “You could do it, too, if your belly was fed, if your property was safe, if your wife had not been murdered, if your children were not starving. Easy enough then to preach law-abiding methods, legal redress, and all such rot” — this “blood-thirsty anarchist” advocates instead for violent action: The social substance of such an epic is class conflict, and its combat often takes the form of strikes. As one railway driver insists, “they’ve not got a steadier man on the road,” even as his wages are slashed and his employment terminated, precisely because he has always been a scab. “And when the strike came along, I stood by them — stood by the company,” he says: The “absence of ready-made class categories” ready to do political work is in part a result of the complexity of contemporary capitalism, Steven writes: And in that electrifying moment when protest erupts into riot, when the movement becomes an insurrection, Kushner’s novel highlights the actions of oppressed women, now the agents of revolution: “It was women throwing the firebombs now. Dress shops. A department store. A lingerie boutique. Up the Corso they moved.” How to Be a Revolutionary

Within the history of class war, the relationship between politics and literature has always been mutually reciprocal. From the standpoint of politics, literature enables the transmission of revolutionary thought, military strategy, and ideological messaging across time and space; and, from the standpoint of literature, a politics of class war serves as catalyst for aesthetic transformation – infusing literary forms and modes and genres. The following ten novels are all about class war. Each one epitomizes not only the literature of it time and place, the ways that a novel about England in the 1810s will be very different to one about China in the 1930s or Italy in the 1960s, but also the ways that unique revolutionary movements have reshaped how we read and write literary narratives.

MARK STEVEN, author of Class War: A Literary History, recommends five contemporary novels that convey a vision of liberating combat against the exploiters and the expropriators 

An impressive overview of revolutionary struggles over the past two centuries which thoroughly rejects reductionist notions of class. Each of the book's 10 chapters focuses on a particular epoch of heightened class warfare - from the Haitian Revolution over 200 years ago, to the Russian Revolution of 1917, to the post-war anti-colonial rebellions of Africa of the 1960s & 70s, and more. It's a literary history because it skillfully examines some of the literature (novels, essays, memoirs & poetry) that emerged from and exemplifies unique aspects of these struggles. It's led to some exciting additions to my to-be-read list. In short: capitalists in the United States consolidated their powers in and through war, exploiting political conflict to satisfy an enormous appetite for private profit, acquiring their social form through the battle’s economy and culture. This explains why those same capitalists were so given to narrate their enterprise using the language of military bombast, adopting terms like “captains of industry” and insisting that, for the continual triumph of large-scale industry, “the war of finance is the next war we have to fight.” Tentacles of Capital Focalised to these interpersonal dynamics, this is an elegiac novel about the challenges of sustaining political commitment against the tides of disillusionment: “After she was gone, nothing could be thought of as normal, if there’d ever been such a thing. The sadness never let up: waited beneath my eyelids, watched when I went to school, when I spoke, breathed on my behalf.”

If environmental crises are a profound violence perpetrated against the global poor, a neoliberal holocaust of the dispossessed, then literary fiction is correct to read climate change as class war. Adamic made the same comparison in his history of class violence in America. “The underdog had given capitalism in America its first big scare,” he writes. “The memory of the Paris Commune of six years before was still fresh.” Not just the memory, either; it was the very spirit of 1871, the commitment to solidarity through an expansive mobilization of class, that made the movement powerful. Beautifully written and conceived, Class War is a history as absorbing as any nineteenth-century novel. Part literary criticism, part political theory, part polemic, it is also an act of recovery; Steven has written a necessary book.” This is the final book in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy, three sprawling dark fantasy novels all set in what the author describes as “an early industrial capitalist world of a fairly grubby, police statey kind!” By the time I arrived at book three, I was already infatuated with the unholy city at the heart of the trilogy, with its arcane geography and its nightmare monstrosities, because Miéville’s language does so much to golem the whole thing into feverish existence, with a vocabulary that feels as overgrown and mutant as the city it describes. But this finale is also uniquely captivating in its dramatization of militancy as enacted and experienced by individual characters and the collectives they become. Across a fantastical geography, here a diverse array of magically augmented anti-heroes stands together against industrial expansion, imperial bloodletting, and an increasingly fascist sense of nationhood.I cannot think of a better, more glorious, more imaginative narrative about the meanings of obligations of class solidarity in times of conflict.You will find yourself cheering along during the great railroad mutiny, which reimagines the Railway Strike of 1877, and will perhaps know genuine heartbreak when a world of revolt suddenly is frozen out of time. Another character, who self-identifies as an anarchist, is said to owe his militancy to personal tragedy, for his wife was trampled to death by strikebreakers during the same conflict. “Wait till you’ve seen your wife brought home to you with the face you used to kiss smashed in by a horse’s hoof,” he intones, “killed by the Trust, as it happened to me.”Those who at this point want to hang onto the fantasy that BLM is a radical force either want to save face or preserve a market share or career trajectory. They aren’t allies; they aren’t winnable. They’re class enemies.