COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Stokvis Studies in Historical Chronology and Thought
ISSN 0270-5338
Number Eighteen
Copyright © 1998, 2002, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2012 by Darko Suvin
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to the teachers of my formative years at the university or at its margins: Petar Guberina (Zagreb), L. C. Knights (Bristol), Lucien Goldmann (Paris). They are not posed in the volume but presupposed.
The essays would not exist without my lifelong fascination with and learning from Karl Marx and Bert Brecht, who took the best from the German language and tradition, and revolted against the powers ruling their country;
Nor without Nena: all of us exiles and émigrés.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Introduction 2012: The Winter of the World” is published here for the first time. Copyright © 2012 by Darko Suvin.
“On Stance, Agency, and Emotions in Brecht” was originally published in different form in several journals of the 1990s, but appears here in this form for the first time. Copyright © 2012 by Darko Suvin.
“Two Cheers for Essentialism and Totality” was first published in Rethinking Marxism 10.1 (1998). Copyright © 1998, 2012 by Darko Suvin.
“Capitalism Means/Needs War” was first published in Socialism & Democracy 16.2 (2002). Copyright © 2002, 2012 by Darko Suvin.
Brecht’s poem Das Manifest is from: Bertolt Brecht, Werke, Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Band 15: Gedichte 5. © Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1993. My commentary, “Brecht’s Manifesto and Us,” was first published in Socialism & Democracy 16.1 (2002); an abbreviated version of its second part, the commentary on the translation, is available in German at www.linksnet.de/ Copyright © 2002, 2012 by Darko Suvin.
“To Laputa and Back” was presented as a keynote speech to the Italian Anglistic Association; it was first published in shorter form in Atti del Convegno AIA 2003 (2005), and in full in Critical Quarterly 47.1-2 (2005) : 142-64. Copyright © 2005, 2012 by Darko Suvin.
“Immigration in Europe Today” was first published n Critical Quarterly 50.1-2 (2008): 206-33, also in Greek, Italian, German, and Croatian. Copyright © 2008, 2012 by Darko Suvin.
“Brecht and Communism” was first published in Brecht Yearbook 34 (2009). Copyright © 2009, 2012 by Darko Suvin.
“On the Horizons of Epistemology and Science” was first published in Critical Quarterly 52.1 (2010: 68-101). Copyright © 2010, 2012 by Darko Suvin.
“Death into Life: For a Poetics of Anti-Capitalist Alternative” was first published in Socialism & Democracy 26.2 (2012). Copyright © 2012 by Darko Suvin.
“Toward an Economics of Physical and Political Negentropy” was first presented as a paper for the Herakleion 2010 IIPPE Conference, and is available at www.iippe.org/wiki/images/e/ee/CONF_ENV_Suvin.pdf. This is its first appearance in print form. Copyright © 2010, 2012 by Darko Suvin.
“On the Concept of Class” is published here for the first time. Copyright © 2012 by Darko Suvin.
I thank all the editors involved, and especially my helpful colleagues Victor Wallis and Colin MacCabe, for their friendly permission to use these, often more or less changed, texts in this book. My thanks also go to W. F. Haug for the insights arising from the discussions of various Inkrit annual meetings and through the process of German translation for some of them in Das Argument, and to Srećko Horvat for those arising out of Croatian translations of Essays 8 and 9 in Up & Underground (Zagreb). I also owe a great debt of gratitude to many people with whom various drafts were discussed throught the years, the most directly concerned of whom are mentioned in notes to the essays.
INTRODUCTION 2012: THE WINTER OF THE WORLD
If I had a hammer/ I’d hammer in the morning/ I’d hammer in the evening/ All over this land/ I’d hammer out danger/ I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters/ All over this land//...// Well I’ve got a hammer/ And I’ve got a bell/ And I’ve got a song to sing/ All over this land/ It’s the hammer of justice/ It’s the bell of freedom/ It’s the song of love between my brothers and my sisters/ All over this land
The Hammer Song, by Lee Hays and Pete Seeger, 1958
And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God.
Luke, 9.62
1. What Are We At?
Je voy encore du païs au delà, mais d’une vue trouble et en nuage, que je ne puis desmeler. (I still see a country beyond, but uncertainly and darkly, which I cannot recognize.)
Montaigne, Essais I.xxvi
In 1956, in the dead-end of the Cold War, Horkheimer and Adorno embarked on recorded discussions in view of a new version of the Communist Manifesto for the new times (just as Brecht had in 1944 felt the need to renew it for the age of world wars and in hexameter form, see Essay 4). The Cold War was also the culmination of “military Keynesianism” with plentiful funding for social needs of people and an attention to them in capitalist countries in order to forestall the Soviet “communist” enemy. This led the two philosophers to state “that Europe and America are probably the best civilizations history has produced up to now as far as prosperity and justice are concerned. The key point now is to ensure the preservation of those gains. This can be achieved only if we remain ruthlessly critical of this civilization.” While fiercely inimical to “Russian bureaucrats,” they affirmed “a greater right [of the Russian Revolution] as opposed to Western culture. It is the fault of the West that [this] Revolution went the way it did.” (41). My position is the same (though I’d update some terms).
A dozen years later, the great historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote an essay where he foresaw “a combination of social disintegration and economic breakdown...more explosive than anything that occurred between the [World W]ars,” except in Nazi Germany (334). His then offbeat and outrageous forecast has been proved in spades and beyond anybody’s imagination in that generation, certainly including my own. The classical “marxist case against capitalism, that it would not work, and against liberal bourgeois democracy, that it was ceasing to exist, being replaced by fascism” (158), has become embarrassingly clear in the utter cynicism of the stock-market fascists (as one would have to call them) who by now rule the whole world. The stockmarketeers are more elitist than the Nazi variety, but destroy the lives of labouring people and democracy from below if anything more efficiently than Hitler and the Japanese imperialists, with a global reach which those never managed: the number of hungry people has around 2009 reached the record figure of 1,250 million, near to one sixth of the world’s population....
In the half century between Hobsbawm’s lookout and today, capitalism has become more powerful, unified, and speedy than ever before. It has not only found new niches by means of profit-oriented sciences from cybernetics and electronics to genetics and nano-technology (see Essay 8), it has also colonized in capillary ways culture and even naked life—say of the immigrants and other sub-proletarians who are by now a world majority. In the last two decades, capitalism has definitely forsaken its bourgeois industrial roots in favour of financial fantasies creating only shameful mass misery and shameless billionaires. What may be crucial: it has most efficiently used the degeneration of the communist idea in the USSR, and other States claiming to be such, to forestall any mass rethinking on a real Left—today almost nowhere visible on the political map, so that we have to enthuse over Chiapas and Bolivia. This was done by demoralizing, through a mixture of half-truths and lies repeated with Goebbelsian obsession, intellectuals as well as labour or proletarian movements (in the widest sense), cutting