Books, TV, Films: summer suggestions

Summer is a time for big projects, for big books, long movies and intense television. Below are projects that Red Flag readers might like to take on. Each is a fine stand-alone project, but I’ve suggested works that complement each other thematically.

I’ve chosen to focus on meditations on the issue of free will and determinacy. How much of history is predetermined and how much can we alter it? What role can any individual play? Are we condemned to float over history like a boat in a storm, or can we help direct that storm? The films, books and television below offer some fascinating opinions.

The classic

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. When first published, the book was a revelation – a massive, sprawling history not only of the emergence of the English working class in the early 19th century, but of that class’s self-making.

Thompson here emphasised the active nature of what has been called “class formation”. A class, he implied, cannot be considered one simply by its place in the economy, but is an active project (complete with its own wide array of political and cultural institutions).

This was an idea much disputed and, from a more theoretical angle, revisited in Thompson’s classic polemic – The Poverty of Theory – with French structuralist Louis Althusser. For those keen to follow the debate to its conclusion, Perry Anderson’s rejoinder to Thompson, Arguments Within English Marxism – a work that finds Anderson ruminating not only on theory but importantly on political strategy – is a fine place to end a survey of the great historian Thompson.

Theory

In recent years high theory has made something of a comeback with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. For my money, Peter Thomas’s The Gramscian Moment is one of the most significant works recently published. Written for the academy, The Gramscian Moment asks a lot of its reader, but it repays careful study.

For a long time, the revolutionary tradition in the Anglophone world has viewed Gramsci through the lens of Perry Anderson’s “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci”. Thomas shows the profound ways in which Anderson led himself off track.

Having cleared the way, Thomas then reconstructs Gramsci’s philosophical and political theory with rare depth, revealing a Gramsci who sought to answer the question: why, during the serious crisis in most of Europe following World War One, was it impossible to repeat the victorious Bolshevik revolution?

Given the book’s scholasticism, readers might want to preface Thomas by reading the recent translation of Coutinho’s Gramsci’s Politics, a fine introduction which covers some of the same ground, though without the same depth or radical edge.

Novel

For more than 20 years, Kim Stanley Robinson has been the centre of leftist science fiction, mostly through his Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars).

What begins with a small group of scientists travelling to Mars to begin a colony quickly develops into a multi-global critique of capitalism and the story of a transition to an ecologically sustainable, socially just society – for want of a better word, socialism.

As multinational corporations destroy Earth, the Mars population struggles to find a better way. Robinson himself is a radical of the ’60s, lives in an environmentally friendly community in California and is one of the soundest critics of the madness of a profit-driven economy.

His entire career has been dedicated – with uneven success – to trying to envision the transition to a better world. But if your taste doesn’t run to science fiction, try out Anna Funder’s searing All That I Am.

Television

The Wire is still the best television from the current “Golden Age”, said to have started with The Sopranos over a decade ago. Part of its genius is the decision for each series to focus on a different institution of Baltimore, one of the US’s neoliberal disaster cities.

So The Wire examines, in five successive seasons: the drug economy in the housing projects; the plight of the blue-collar working class on the Baltimore dockyards; the “political class” involved in the mayoral election; the schooling system; and the print media.

Altogether, the series works as social realism of the type that so excited Georg Lukacs. Each institution and character can be taken as “typical”, as standing in for a larger social force or institution. More interestingly, it is the closest to a structuralist-Marxist television series, almost as if Louis Althusser had found his way to HBO.

The Wire is filled with characters setting out to do things, to make things better, to free themselves, only for the structure as a whole to reassert itself. There is no individual free will here. The Wire’s brilliance lies in it ability to keep you on the edge of your seat despite this very fact.

Classic television

For a more explicitly socialist television series, track down the 1988 BBC classic A Very British Coup (based on the eponymous novel) in which a socialist-labour government comes to power.

Led by the charismatic former miner Harry Perkins and his group of former Trotskyists, feminists and radicals, the government’s radical-reformist program quickly causes a structural crisis of capitalism. The elite and their networks of power quickly strike back at the Perkins government, which quickly finds itself in a death struggle.

Though there is little sense of a socialist movement, the series neatly undercuts its own focus on the upper echelons of government and the notion of an electoral path to socialism. Pay attention to the final radio report just before the final credits in order to get a sense of its real position on political power.

Film

The 1994 Burnt by the Sun is director Nikita Mikhalkov’s film in more ways than one. Mikhalkov also wrote and is the central actor in this brilliant tragedy. Set on a long summer’s holiday in the late 1930s, it depicts the family life of Bolshevik General Kotov, most likely based on the Red Army’s most famous civil war general, Mikhail Tukachevsky.

The Chekhovian hues – the picturesque summer house, the pastoral landscapes – probably stretch the truth, but the film still manages to be a masterpiece of tragic irony.

Its mood is elevated by the delightful relationship of Kotov and his six-year-old daughter (played by Mikhalkov’s own daughter) and at the same time hushed by the arrival of the mysterious Mitya, who lends the film an ominous undercurrent.

The film’s single serious flaw is that it is dedicated to all those “burnt by the sun of revolution”, when it should have been dedicated to those burnt by the sun of counter-revolution.

Biography

Who can go past Isaac Deutscher’s trilogy on Trotsky, The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast? By an extensive margin the best of the Trotsky biographies, these books can be appreciated on several levels. At once works of literary brilliance and immense scholarship, they are also exemplars of Marxist historiography.

To read them is like reading some wondrous fusion of Tolstoy and Marx. Fascinating questions about the determinism of history rise in various iterations: had they acted differently, could Trotsky or others have resisted the rise of Stalinism? Once Stalinism had consolidated, could the Trotskyist movement ever have broken out of its isolation, or was it caught is some historic cul-de-sac? Should individuals retreat to their “watchtower” and wait for the next radical wave, or struggle against the tide even in the face of overwhelming odds?

Inevitably one has disagreements with Deutscher, but each of these questions speaks to our own political situation. It’s unlikely these books will lose relevance in any foreseeable future.

[Rjurik Davidson is associate editor of Overland literary journal and author of a collection of short stories, The Library of Forgotten Books. His debut novel, Unwrapped Sky, will be released in 2014.]