Mbembe and Williams

This week I am particularly interested in Achille Mbembe's "Necropolitics" and Randall Williams's introduction to The Divided World.

1) Interestingly enough, I believe Mark Driscoll's Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945 takes one of its jumping off points from Mbembe's "Necropolitics." I read Driscoll's book last year in a class on Japanese imperialism, and it's a good example of how to use Mbembe's ideas for something much larger.

In the book, Driscoll wants to "foreground the ways human and nonhuman resources stolen from colonial and domestic peripheries, together with excessive profits jacked from colonized renters and subaltern wage laborers, built Japan's imperial behemoth" (6).
Driscoll cites Mbembe, for example, here:

Reframing Marx's language and transcoding it into the mass cultural discourse of Tokyo in the 1920s, capitalists depend on the mugging grotesque of the living, erotic labor of subaltern and proletarian others for their very existence. Although some of the secondary and tertiary effects of Japan's imperialism could arguably be construed as "modernizing" for those who still accept that idiom, the suffering of colonized subaltern laborers enduring existential states Mbembe (2003) defines as "being-in-pain" was its primary cause. [. . .] So in this book I link dialectically the necro-logic of expropriation--colonial pillage and capitalist profiteering, what I call, following the Japanese sociologist Akagami Yoshitsuge (1931), the grotesque--with the bio-logic of creative, desiring life, what I call, after Minakata and his followers, the erotic. (6-7)

Driscoll does this complicated thing going from biopolitical (subjectivities left to fend for themselves or living labor),  neuropolitics (commodified, dead labor where the subject lives for commodities rather than for life), to necropolitics in very much the Mbembian sense (undead death or subjectivities who are de-ontologized and killed off).

So I think there's a lot we can do with this but i'd like to go over some questions, like what does Mbembe exactly mean in becoming a subject (14)? He says the human becomes a subject "in the struggle and work through which he or she confronts death. [. . .] Becoming subject therefore supposes upholding the work of death" (14).

2) in working with both Mbembe and Williams, there is also the ideas of sovereignty and decolonization movements. Sovereignty, according to Mbembe, is the "power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die" (11). how can sovereignty work with decolonization? the obvious way it works is that decolonized subjects are taking sovereignty and basically power over their bodies/lives back into their own hands. but from there, what? do we run into the problems that mieville brought up with property and enclosures, that the sovereign is the singularity that merely follows in the path of what came before in terms of labor and property?
Richard Falk notes that "human rights progress, while definitely subversive of statist pretensions in certain key aspects, still remained generally compatible with the maintenance of existing geopolitical structures of authority and wealth in the world and, as such, exerted only a marginal influence" and mainly looked "outward to identify abuses in Communist and Third World countries" (qtd. in Williams 16), much less in their own backyard in the Pacific.
so to that end, are sovereignty and decolonization at odds? if they work together as they do in the hawaiian sovereignty movement, can this lead to decolonization and something more?
i feel like there's something more to this but can't tease it out....

3) hey, finally got around to looking up that DEFEND HAWAII thing. This is the website and this is what they say about their products, which are mostly tshirts and apparel with the logo:

Our mission is to DEFEND HAWAII
Hawaii is often referred to as ‘the melting pot’ because our diversity in PEOPLE as well as cultures. When Hawaii is home base, literal location is not a factor. The familiar tread, tying us, is always ALOHA. DEFEND HAWAII simply strives to preserve the notion, to DEFEND the Aloha Spirit, the Hawaii way of life. Wherever you are, you’re PROUD to be from Hawaii, representing the culture and it’s essences.
Our AR-15 Logo is often questioned, but a gun is the strongest symbolized statement for the word DEFEND. The logo is not meant to provoke violence, but rather figuratively suggest protection by the highest means. We’re here to plant the proverbial seed, initiate a positive thought process. To Defend Hawaii, is to Defend Aloha..

death, violence, revolutionary

M-Ponty writes beautifully and there's a seductive quality to his arguments. We return to certain ideas again - one that stays with me is the notion that we are all devoid of innocence, humanity as an essence and humanity as a practice, verb and noun, etc. etc.

There is, however, also something in his text that makes me wary and that's largely because I still have a shaky background in all things revolutionary but I'll try to say why. Perhaps I am not getting the dialectical thrust.

1) I am not sure certain enough has been established for me to be confident in the ability of the proletarian to hand justice, to know the shape of the future that is man for man, that is more close to "humane" than liberalism provides. That is to say, the violence that comes from these practices revolutionary are "better" or "worse" or "less" or "more."It seems to me that he's trying to annul the binaries of good and bad especially in terms of speaking of humane actions but there is an elevated position that is accorded to the revolutionary.

2) It seems to the relation between intention and action is not clear to me. Sometimes only action matters and yet a revolutionary acts because of the idea/intention for a particular world in the present. This presents some difficulty in understanding temporality - present, presentness - "we are not spectators, we are actors in an open history" (92).

In such a situation, I wonder if we are talking about an ebbing and flowing of violence, but never a cessation. Or do I think this way because I cannot see the possibilities that the revolutionary can? Or is it the idea that we have to focus on, not on 'ifs" and "buts"

 There are a few passages I would like to think about in terms of why it is so particular to Marxists.

"The Marxist has recognized the mystification involved in the inner life; he lives in the world and in history..." Decision for a Marxist, "consists in questioning our situation in the world, inserting ourselves in the course of events, in properly understanding and expressing the movement of history outside of which values remain empty word and have no other chance of realization" (21).

"Trorsky, Bukharin and Stalin are all opposed to the liberal ethics because it presupposes a given humanity, whereas they aim at making humanity."

There's a lot more. I do think this is a beautiful text. I wish we could read each page and savor it and argue. I agree with other posts, the meaning of all these terms - liberty, violence, peace, justice, humanity, are gradually fading. And perhaps that is why I am also suspicious of revolutionary, proletarian, possibility...

liberty and revolutionary violence

“We must remember that liberty becomes a false ensign – a “solemn complement” of violence – as soon as it becomes only an idea and we begin to defend liberty instead of free men. It is then claimed that humanity is being preserved despite the miseries of politics; in reality, and at this very moment, one is endorsing a limited politics. It is the essence of liberty to exist only in the practice of liberty, in the inevitably imperfect movement which joins us to others, to the things of the world, to our jobs, mixed with the hazards of our situation… An aggressive liberalism exists which is a dogma and already an ideology of war…In contrast, true liberty takes others as they are, tries to understand even those doctrines which are its negation, and never allows itself to judge before understanding” (xxiv)

When I think of the word liberty, after all of our previous conversations in the course, I am not even sure I know what it means anymore (Similar to the way we’ve seen the word “truth” or “justice” go from something we feel was concrete in our minds, to something completely arbitrary) Here, liberty is defined as having a “false” and a “true” meaning. While Merleau-Ponty claims the false conception of liberty comes from liberalism, I am not sure if the “true” definition of liberty is given to us strictly from his own perspective, or if he is assigns it as inherent to something else. I am not convinced by this “true liberty” he describes. It seems to abstract and somewhat idealist or utopian. Nevertheless, I feel it is an interesting passage to look at.

“For it is certain that neither Bukharin nor Trotsky nor Stalin regarded Terror as intrinsically valuable. Each one imagined he was using it to realize a genuinely human history which had not yet started but which provides the justification for revolutionary  violence. In other words, as Marxists, all three confess that there is a meaning to such violence – that it is possible to understand it, to read into it a rational development and to draw from it a humane future” (97).

I chose to highlight this quote because it seems as though Merleau-Ponty is justifying revolutionary violence as a means to “draw from it a humane future.” I struggled with this throughout the book because I don’t know exactly what he means by revolutionary violence, and I don’t see why anyone would justify the use of temporary violence as a way to bring about change.

The Politics and Antipolitics of Human Rights

At the beginning of the course we discussed the fact that you do not usually find revolutionary language in the language of human rights.  Wendy Brown takes up this point in her article, “Human Rights and Politics of Fatalism,” explaining that human rights activism “presents itself as something of an antipolitics—a pure defense of the innocent and the powerless against power, a pure defense of the individual against immense and potentially cruel or despotic machineries of culture, state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism, patriarchy, and other mobilizations or instantiations of collective power against individuals” (4/453).  She makes a compelling and convincing argument that human rights is not apolitical or antipolitical, but is in fact a thinly veiled politics of neoliberalism.  Under this view, human rights narratives can be seen as propaganda rather than simply humanitarian. 

When Brown explains that “the point is that there is no such thing as mere reduction of suffering or protection from abuse—the nature of the reduction or protection is itself productive of political subjects and political possibilities” (11/460), I take this to mean that the campaign to focus on suffering is in and of itself political and cannot be otherwise. Human rights deals with the distribution of power in society by raising up suffering and abused bodies and setting up binary power relations of the powerless, who are suffering, and the powerful, who have the means to abolish suffering.  Within the paradigm of human rights, the ones to alleviate this suffering are those who believe in individual rights.

The U.S.’s political agenda makes Brown’s point for her -- even more explicitly -- in cases like the CIA’s fake vaccine program that was organized in order to get DNA from Osama bin Laden’s family.  The U.S. is operating on a double standard in which it says that it believes in human rights and purports to be involved in many Middle Eastern countries to improve individual freedoms, but it has used human rights as a shield for its agenda.  They are perverting the mission of human rights by using it as a front for sinister and underhanded political purposes, which undermines the effectiveness of human rights organizations in alleviating mass suffering.  In the minds of many Americans, blaming the CIA for attacks on polio vaccine workers in Pakistan and Nigeria may seem far-fetched, but the case is true, which suggests that the U.S. itself has invited terror on aid organizations by using them for espionage.

Brown argues that human rights "is a politics and it organizes political space, often with the aim of monopolizing it" and it can be seen as a "relatively unchecked globalization of capital, postcolonial political deformations, and superpower imperialism combining to disenfranchise peoples in many parts of the first, second, and third worlds...." (12/461)  The example of the CIA at work in countries where it seeks ideological and political power seems to corroborate the evidence that Brown provides in her article.  

The question I am left with in this specific conversation is one regarding the "other international justice projects" (461/462)  that she believes would be better suited to addressing issues that human rights organizations seeks to address.  Are these other organizations less political or do they simply represent a greater diversity of political interests that would loosen the grip of neoliberalism?  Or is this a more revolutionary stance that she is taking?

“Either one wants to do something, but it is on condition of using violence--or else one respects formal liberty and renounces violence, but one can only do this by renouncing socialism and the classless society . . . The Revolution takes on and directs a violence which bourgeois society tolerates in unemployment and in war and disguises with the name of misfortune. But successful revolutions taken altogether have not spilled as much blood as the empires. All we know is different kinds of violence and we ought to prefer revolutionary violence because it has a future of humanism” (107).

I thought this passage was very interesting. Merleau-Ponty entirely undermines the rationale liberal democracies like America had been using to object to the Revolution and Communism--what they consider the inexcusable violence that was necessitated by the Revolution, and the threat it poses to the bourgeoisie. But Merleau-Ponty points out that liberal bourgeois society is equally--if not more--violent than the Revolution because of its imperialistic endeavors and the inequality caused by its class system. While the violence of the Revolution is temporary--intended to end with the rule of the proletariat, in peace and harmony, the exploitative and violent systems condoned by the bourgeois order are never-ending. He seems to be arguing that revolutionary violence is, in and of itself, actually more humanitarian in the long run than it would be to allow this system of exploitation to continue. It's interesting because his argument, I think, differs from modern human rights discourse, as I understand it. Bob Meister's book argued that human rights discourse tends to think that bodies in pain are the greatest evil possible--but Merleau-Ponty seems to be arguing that a brief period of violence to end oppression and eventually create a more egalitarian society is justifiable. He's placing this revolutionary violence within a much broader historical context, and weighing the potential evils of a brief period of violence against the continued suffering of billions. I think it's an interesting way to think about revolutionary violence. 

So, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, written in 1947. Basically I tried to take from it what I could, since I am not well versed in philosophy or Marxism or communism, especially in the specific contexts that Merleau-Ponty is talking about. I will write down some points below....

1) Merleau-Ponty has created the best in-a-nutshell definition of Marxism:

"In essence Marxism is the idea that history has a meaning--in other words, that it is intelligible and has a direction--that it is moving toward the power of the proletariat, which as the essential factor of production is capable of resolving the contradictions of capitalism, of organizing a humane appropriation of nature, and, as the 'universal class,' able to transcend national and social conflicts as well as the struggle between man and man. To be a Marxist is to believe that economic problems and cultural or human problems are a single problem and the proletariat as history has shaped it holds the solution to that problem." (129-130)

Another good thing on Marxism:

"Marxism had understood that it is inevitable that our understanding of history should be partial since every consciousness is itself historically situated. . . . Marxism discovered . . . a new foundation for historical truth in the spontaneous logic of human existence, in the proletariat's self-recognition and the real development of the revolution. Marxism rested on the profound idea that human perspectives, however relative, are absolute because there is nothing else and no destiny. We grasp the absolute through our total praxis, if not through our knowledge--or, rather, men's mutual praxis is the absolute" (18)

I think this and his later description of how the unification of the proletariat (even though it is an eventual failure) (located on 147) is a really great description of Marxism for the clueless (ie, me), so I appreciate his frank talk about it. 

2) As far as I can tell, Merleau-Ponty has very contextual, specific things he's talking about but every once in a while surfaces and has these tidbits of interest/wisdom that I've latched onto. I focused on some of the History and Terror ones. His talk on History is interesting and useful particularly because he wants to talk about history as subjective and not teleological. He says that the "paradox of history" is that it is " a contingent future... appears here a harsh notion of responsibility, based not on what men intended but what they find they have achieved in light of the event" (42). So the notion of historical contingency--that history or your place in it is related to intersections of things and not free floating is such an integral point. In another section he says "The Terror of History culminates in Revolution and History is Terror because there is contingency. Everyone looks through the facts for his motives and then erects a schematization of the future which cannot be strictly proved" (91), and that "History is Terror because we have to move into it not by any straight line that is always easy to trace, but by taking our bearings at every moment in a general situation which is changing" (94). So from this, I'm taking that Terror is the not knowing of history/future? not quite sure what he means....

Also, his notion of historical responsibility is interesting, if we want to talk about that, and I think can be related to Arendt. 

3) Violence! He has some interesting stuff to say on violence. For instance, "The original violence which is the foundation of all other forms of violence, is that exerted by History when objectified as an incomprehensible Will before which all individual opinions are compounded as equally fragile hypotheses" (19). An objective history is the original violence.... I think I see his point and I can see how powerful it can be, but not sure how this is the originary violence? 

Then, Merleau-Ponty argues that revolution is violence (i think?):

"A revolution, even when founded on a philosophy of history, is a forced revolution and it is violence; correlatively, opposition in the name of humanism can be counterrevolutionary. [. . .] The irony of fate. . . brings to light not just the terror which each man holds for every other man but, above all, that basic Terror in each of us which comes from the awareness of his historical responsibility" (93). 

Bolded for emphasis and interest. So I think this links back to history and the original violence of history, since revolution is fought based on history? 

Yet later, Merleau-Ponty says that "We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence. Inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot" (109). So we're stuck with violence but we wanna avoid these other instances of violence and where does that leave us? 

I'm probably just reading these tidbits and not sticking them contextually but some discussion and clarification on this would be wonderful!

China Mieville's 50 SF & F Socialists should read

Just saw this online: http://books.google.com/books?id=i8ROuvyzBpsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA187#v=onepage&q&f=false

If I had the time, I'd so do this.

This is what he says/the 50 Scifi and Fantasy books he thinks every Socialist should read:

This is not a list of the “best” fantasy or SF. There are huge numbers of superb works not on the list. Those below are chosen not just because of their quality—which though mostly good, is variable—but because the politics they embed (deliberately or not) are of particular interest to socialists. Of course, other works—by the same or other writers—could have been chosen: disagreement and alternative suggestions are welcomed. I change my own mind hour to hour on this anyway.
Iain M. Banks—Use of Weapons (1990)Socialist SF discussing a post-scarcity society. The Culture are “goodies” in narrative and political terms, but here issues of cross-cultural guilt and manipulation complicate the story from being a simplistic utopia.
Edward Bellamy—Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888)A hugely influential, rather bureaucratic egalitarian/naïve communist utopia. Deals very well with the confusion of the “modern” (19^th Century) protagonist in a world he hasn’t helped create (see Bogdanov).
Alexander Bogdanov—The Red Star: A Utopia (1908; trans. 1984)This Bolshevik SF sends a revolutionary to socialist Mars. The book’s been criticized (with some justification) for being proto-Stalinist, but overall it’s been maligned. Deals well with the problem faced by someone trying to adjust to a new society s/he hasn’t helped create (see Bellamy).
Emma Bull & Steven Brust—Freedom & Necessity (1997)Bull is a left-liberal and Brust is a Trotskyist fantasy writer.F&Nis set in the 19th Century of the Chartists and class turmoil. It’s been described as “the first Marxist steampunk” or “a fantasy for Young Hegelians.”
Mikhail Bulgakov—The Master and Margarita (1938; trans. 1967)Astonishing fantasy set in ’30s Moscow, featuring the Devil, Pontius Pilate, The Wandering Jew, and a satire and critique of Stalinist Russia so cutting it is unbelievable that it got past the censors. Utterly brilliant.
Katherine Burdekin (aka “Murray Constantine”)—Swastika Night (1937)An excellent example of the “Hitler Wins” sub-genre of SF. It’s unusual in that it was published by the Left Book Club and it was written while Hitler was in power, so the fear of Nazi future was immediate.
Octavia Butler—Survivor (1978)Black American writer, now discovered by the mainstream after years of acclaim in the SF field.Kindredis her most overtly political novel, the Patternmaster series the most popular. Survivor brilliantly blends genre SF with issues of colonialism and racism.
Julio Cortázar—“House Taken Over” (1963?)A terrifying short story undermining the notion of the house as sanctity and refuge. A subtle destruction of the bourgeois oppositions between public/private and inside/outside.
Philip K. Dick—A Scanner Darkly (1977)Could have picked almost any of his books. Like all of them, this deals with identity, power, and betrayal, here tied in more directly to social structures than in some other works (though see Counter-Clock World and The Man in the High Castle). Incredibly moving.
Thomas Disch—The Priest (1994)Utterly savage work of anti-clericalism. A work of dark fantasy GBH against the Catholic Church (dedicated, among others, to the Pope…)
Gordon Eklund—All Times Possible(1974)Study of alternative worlds, including an examination of hypothetical Left-wing movements in alternative USAs.
Max Ernst—Une Semaine de Bonté (1934)The definitive Surrealist collage novel. A succession of images the reader is involved in decoding. A Whodunwhat, with characters from polite commercial catalogues engaged in a story of little deaths and high adventure.
Claude Farrère—Useless Hands (1920; trans. 1926)Bleak Social Darwinism, and a prototype of “farewell to the working class” arguments. The “useless hands”—workers—revolt is seen as pathetic before inexorable technology. A cold, reactionary, interesting book.
Anatole France—The White Stone (1905; trans. 1910)In part, a rebuttal to the racist “yellow peril” fever of the time—a book about “white peril” and the rise of socialism. Also interesting isThe Revolt of the Angels, which examines now well-worn socialist theme of Lucifer being in the right, rebelling against the despotic God.
Jane Gaskell—Strange Evil(1957)Written when Gaskell was 14, with the flaws that entails. Still, however, extraordinary. A savage fairytale, with fraught sexuality, meditations on Tom Paine and Marx, revolutionary upheaval depicted sympathetically, but without sentimentality; plus the most disturbing baddy in fiction.
Mary Gentle—Rats and Gargoyles (1990)Set in a city that undermines the “feudalism lite” of most genre fantasy. An untypical female protagonist has adventures in a cityscape complete with class struggle, corruption, and racial oppression.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman—“The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)Towering work by this radical thinker. Terrifying short story showing how savage gender oppression can inhere in “caring” relationships just as easily as in more obviously abusive ones. See also her feminist/socialistic utopias “Moving the Mountain” (1911) andHerland(1914).
Lisa Goldstein—The Dream Years (1985)A time-slip oscillating between Paris in the 1920s, during the Surrealist movement, and in 1968, during the Uprising. Uses a popular fantastic mode to examine the relation between Surrealism as the fantastic modepar excellence and revolutionary movements (if nebulously conceived).
Stefan Grabiński—The Dark Domain (1918–22; trans. and collected 1993)Brilliant horror by this Polish writer. Unusually locates the uncanny and threatening within the very symbols of a modernizing industrialism in Poland: trains, electricity, etc. This awareness of the instability of the everyday marks him out from traditional, “nostalgic” ghost story writers.
George Griffith—The Angel of Revolution (1893)Rather dated, but unusual in that its heroes are revolutionary terrorists. Very different from the devious anarchist villains of (e.g.) Chesterton.
Imil Habibi—The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist (1974; trans. 1982)The full title is much longer. Habiby was a member of the Palestinian Community Party, a veteran of the anti-British struggle of the 40s, and a member of the Knesset for several years. This amiable, surreal book is about the life of a Palestinian in Israel (with surreal bits, and aliens).
M. John Harrison—Viriconium Nights (1984)A stunning writer, who expresses the alienation of the modern everyday with terrible force. Fantasy that mercilessly uncovers the alienated nature of the longing for fantastic escape, and show how that fantasy will always remain out of reach. Punishes his readers and characters for their involvement with fantasy. See alsoThe Course of the Heart.
Ursula K. Le Guin—The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)The most overtly political of this anarchist writer’s excellent works. An examination of the relations between a rich, exploitive capitalist world and a poor, nearly barren (though high-tech) communist one.
Jack London—Iron Heel (1907)London’s masterpiece: scholars from a 27th Century socialist world find documents depicting a fascist oligarchy in the US and the revolt of the proletariat. Elsewhere, London’s undoubted socialism is undermined by the most appalling racism.
Ken MacLeod—The Star Fraction (1996)British Trotskyist (of strongly libertarian bent), all of whose (very good) works examine Left politics without sloganeering. The Stone Canal, for example, features arguments about distortions of Marxism. However, The Star Fraction is chosen here as it features Virtual Reality heroes of the left, by name—a roll call of genuine revolutionaries recast in digital form.
Gregory Maguire—Wicked (1995)Brilliant revisionist fantasy about how the winners write history. The loser whose side is here taken is the Wicked Witch of the West, a fighter for emancipatory politics in the despotic empire of Oz.
J. Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon)—Gay Hunter(1934, reissued 1989)By the Marxist writer of the classic work of vernacular Scots literatureA Scots Quair, andSpartacus, the novel that proves that propaganda can be art. This is great science fiction. Bit dewy-eyed about hunter-gatherers perhaps, but superb nonetheless. As an added bonus, it also has a title that sounds amusing today. Check out his short fiction, which includes a lot of SF/Fantasy work.
Michael Moorcock—Hawkmoon (1967–77, reprinted in one edition 1992)Moorcock is an erudite Left-anarchist and a giant of fantasy literature. Almost everything he’s written is of interest, but Hawkmoon is chosen here in honor of Moorcock having said about it: “In a spirit consciously at odds with the jingoism of the day, I chose a German for a hero and the British for villains.” There are also plenty of satirical references and gags about 1960s/70s politics for the reader to decode.
William Morris—News From Nowhere (1888)A socialist (though naively pastoral) utopia, written in response to Bellamy (above), that unusually doesn’t shy away from the hard political question of how we get the desired utopia-proletarian revolution. See alsoThe Well at the World’s Endand his other fantasies.
Toni Morrison—Beloved (1987)It’s well known thatBelovedis a superb book about race and slavery and guilt, but it’s less generally accepted that it’s a fantasy. It is. It’s a ghost story that wouldn’t have half the charge without the fantastic element.
Mervyn Peake—The Gormenghast Novels (1946–59)An austere depiction of dead ritualism and necessary transformation. Don’t believe those who say that the third book is disappointing.
Marge Piercy—Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)A Chicano woman trapped in an asylum makes contact with a messenger from a future utopia, born after a “full feminist revolution”.
Philip Pullman—Northern Lights (1995)Pullman let us down. This book is here because it deals with moral/political complexities with unsentimental respect for its (young adult) readers and characters. Explores freedom and social agency, and the question of using ugly means for emanicipatory ends. It raises the biggest possible questions, and doesn’t patronise us that there are easy answers. The second in the trilogy,The Subtle Knife, is a perfectly good bridging volume… and then in book three,The Amber Spyglass, something goes wrong. It has excellent bits, it is streets ahead of its competition… but there’s sentimentality, a hesitation, a formalism, which lets us down. Ah well.Northern Lightsis still a masterpiece.
Ayn Rand—Atlas Shrugged (1957)Know your enemy. This panoply of portentous Nietzcheanism lite has had a huge influence on American SF. Rand was an obsessive “objectivist” (libertarian pro-capitalist individualist) whose hatred of socialism and any form of “collectivism” is visible in this important an influential—though vile and ponderous—novel.
Mack Reynolds—Lagrange Five (1979)Reynolds was, for 25 years, an activist for the U.S. Socialist Labor Party. His radical perspective on political issues is reflected throughout his work. This book—examining a quasi-utopia without sentimentalism—is only one suggestion. Also of huge interest are Tomorrow Might Be Different (1960) and The Rival Rigelians (1960), which explicitly examine the relation between capitalism and Stalinism.
Keith Roberts—Pavane (1968)These linked stories take place in a present day where Elizabeth I was assassinated and Spain took over Britain. This examines life in a world where a militant feudal Catholicism acts as a fetter on social and productive functions. Though Roberts was no lefty at all, and you could probably power France on the energy from his spinning grave at being included in this list.
Kim Stanley Robinson—The Mars Trilogy (1992–96)Probably the most powerful center of gravity for Leftist SF in the 1990s. A sprawling and thoughtful examination of the variety of social relations feeding into and leading up to revolutionary change. (It’s also got some Gramsci jokes in it.)
Mary Shelley—Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)Not a warning “not to mess with things that should be let alone” (which would be a reactionary anti-rationalist message) but an insistence on the necessity of grappling with forces one unleashes and the fact that there is no “innate” nature to people, but a socially-constructed one.
Lucius Shepard—Life During Wartime (1987)Horrific vision of a future (thinly disguised Vietnam) war. Within the savage examinations of the truth of war and U.S. foreign policy, Shepard also investigates the relation between SF, fantasy, and “magic realism”, and uses their shared mode to look back at reality with passion.
Norman Spinrad—The Iron Dream (1972)A SF novel by Adolf Hitler… Spinrad’s funny, disturbing and savage indictment of the fascist aesthetics in much genre SF and fantasy. What if Hitler had become a pulp SF writer in New York? Not a book about that possibility but a book from it. “By the same author: Triumph of the Will and Lord of the Swastika.” Brave and nasty.
Eugene Sue—The Wandering Jew (1845)Huge book by radical socialist Sue, about the adventures of the family of the Wandering Jew of legend. Symbolic fantasy elements: the Jew is the dispossessed laborer and his partner is downtrodden woman. Marx hated Sue as a writer (not without reason—less, for Sue, is not in more) but hell, it’s an important book.
Michael Swanwick—The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993)Great work that completely destroys the sentimental aspects of genre fantasy. From within the genre—fairies, elves, and all—Swanwick examines the industrial revolution, the Vietnam War, racism and sexism, and the escapist dreams of genre fantasy. A truly great anti-fantasy.
Jonathan Swift—Gulliver’s Travels (1726)Savage attack on hypocrisy and cant that never dilutes its fantasy with its satire: the two elements feed off each other perfectly.
Alexei Tolstoy—Aelita (1922; trans. 1957)Distant relative of the other Tolstoy. The “revised” version is less good, written in the stern environment of Stalinism. A Red Army officer goes to Mars and foments a rebellion of native Martians. Good rousing stuff, but also interesting in terms of “exporting” revolution. See also the superb avant-garde film version from 1924.
Ian Watson—Slow Birds (1985)Left-wing author whose short story collection above includes a cold demolition of Thatcher and Thatcherism. His take on oppression—cognitive and political—informs all his rather austere, cerebral writing.
H.G. Wells—The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)Like a lot of Wells’s work, this is an uneasy mixture of progressive and reactionary notions. It makes for one of the great horror stories of all time. A fraught examination of colonialism, science, eugenics, repression, and religion: a kind of fantasy echo of Shakespeare’sThe Tempest.
E. L. White—“Lukundoo” (1927)One of the most utterly extraordinary (and almost certainly unconscious) expressions of colonial anxiety and guilt in the history of literature.
Oscar Wilde—The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888)Children’s fantasies by this romantic, socialist author. Marked by a sharp lack of sentimentality, a deeply subversive cynicism, which doesn’t blunt their ability to be intensely moving.
Gene Wolfe—The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972)Wolfe is a religious Republican, but his tragico-Catholic perspective leads to a deeply unglamorized and unsanitized awareness of social reality. This book is a very sad and extremely dense, complex meditation on colonialism, identity and oppression.
Yevgeny Zamyatin—We (1920; trans. 1924)A Bolshevik, who earned semi-official unease in the USSR even in the early 1920s, with this unsettling dystopian view of absolute totalitarianism. These days often retrospectively, ahistorically, and misleadingly judged to be a critique of Stalinism.