I was also disappointed by the literary examples Steven chooses to highlight. While the book presents itself as in part a history of class war told through literature, the dullness and pedantry of much of the literature chosen made me wonder what creative writing really adds to his account. However, Steven’s primary interest is showing how the working class came together as such. His literary trek reinstates workers as subjects who are radicalized by their role in armed struggle and not by the literature and propaganda they write, generate, and circulate. While traversing literature to show instances of class war could be an opportunity to show the working class as capable of creating counter-hegemonic unifying discourse, Steven instead depicts the working class merely as subjects who respond to structural conditions through uprising, and not as thinkers and writers that influence action or as architects of their own political programs. He avoids the crucial moments in which the working class formed new worlds without war. My academic writing has appeared in Modernism/modernity, Textual Practice, SubStance, Screen, Film-Philosophy, Screening the Past, Postmodern Culture, Affirmations, James Joyce Quarterly, and elsewhere. The analysis of Class War points out the virtual absence of a social identity in the United States that corresponds to anything like a common economic class interest. Its historical overview suggests that the “material needs of the broad working class” referred to by Reed always require some supplement if they are going to become radically active in political terms. The analysis of Class War points out the virtual absence of a social identity in the United States that corresponds to anything like a common economic class interest.

According to the writer and journalist Louis Adamic, this was a time of material hardship coupled with massively diminished union power: In other words, revolution means to see the exploited class waging war against the economic regime and interstate system that maintains its exploitation, namely capitalism, whose beneficiaries will militarily defend their benefits with everything they have. To speak of class war might therefore be to conjure militancy and solidarity against the present state of things. And in this sense, class war is not just the stuff of political discourse; it emanates from the lived experience of social conditions. This tendency would be carried through to the climax of the movement in the general strikes in St Louis and East St Louis, where for a few days a multiethnic coalition of strikers shut down much of their industry and the cities were controlled by executive strike committees. Comparisons were made with the events that had occurred six years previously in France. “In St. Louis and East St. Louis,” writes Ovetz, “the strike went further as workers across the cities shut down all industry and became renown in the press of the time as America’s ‘Paris Commune.’”

Contribution to discipline

At the same time, it combines that critique with the historical actions of those who fought against such as system, from the Luddites and the Chartists to the dispossessed and enslaved persons on the peripheries of empire, in China and the Caribbean. Class war — the call for violent uprising against oppressive individuals, groups, norms, and structures — performs an alchemical transformation on the complex social fabric, simplifying things, precipitating two sides, two classes, from the welter of relations of domination and exploitation. Thus Steven describes class struggle as a “speech act: a performative utterance that, when said, is also a kind of action.” Class war is “at once a metaphor and a statement of fact.” Class war for Mark Steven isn’t a war between preexisting classes, but a war that creates class. Such language alerts the reader that violence has taken on creative, even mystic qualities. Class war for Steven isn’t a war between preexisting classes, but a war that creates class — that rescues the key conceptual social category of the radical tradition from the political abyss.

Its protagonist — a young woman from Nevada — becomes a prism through which refracts the modern world-system in a moment of transformative upheaval, as well as gendered perspective from which to re-emphasise the oppression of working women both in the factory and the home. 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.” 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.”

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 

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. Anahid Nersessian, author of Keats's Odes: A Lover’s Discourse Written with verve and ranging across diverse historical settings, Class War traverses industrial battles, guerrilla insurgencies, and anticolonial resistance, as well as large-scale combat operations waged against capitalism's regimes and its interstate system… An exceptional and impressive work of history. Able Greenspan, Midwest Book Review Ours will go down as the age of class war. We talk about it all the time, and with mounting urgency amidst the realities of economic crisis, ecological catastrophe, and social declension. Rising inequality and the ever-increasing stakes of our brutal economic divide are constant reminders of this conflict, as is the ongoing wave of strikes, with workers of all kinds demanding higher wages and better conditions. Yet, as his history of class war shows us, this has always been the case. Radical political organizers have always recognized the need to turn theoretical common interests into practical shared struggle. And the catalyst is violence. The visceral experience of war, of terrorism, of riot, of protest, forges new disciplines, new communities — it turns the various social groupings of the oppressed into a class at war with its enemy. Violence motivates class.