Class War: A Literary History

We live in an age of class war. Rising inequality and the ever-increasing stakes of our brutal economic divide serve as constant reminders of this conflict. But this is no modern phenomena. Class war has been the foundation of capitalism since its inception, yet its history is often submerged beneath the narratives of progress and enlightenment, a history so often written by its victors. In Class War, Mark Steven traces the history of the concept from the plantations of Haiti to Black Lives Matter, in the process brilliantly weaving together literature and politics to retell the story of those whose struggles have so often been forgotten.

A bracing and lucid work that combines narrative history and literary analysis, Steven moves from the global centres of capitalism to the peripheries, traversing the struggles of working people from the French Revolution to the anticolonial struggles in Asia, Latin America and Africa and beyond. In doing so, Class War charts the making and unmaking of social class through armed insurrection and revolutionary combat while also offering an original and penetrating reading of the literature of revolution, a collection of texts that has done so much to shape our understanding of the class war: from the poetry of Shelley and Keats and the novels of Emile Zola and Jack London, through to Frantz Fanon and Ngugi wa Thiong'o.