The SAG Awards have been criticised after Mark Wahlberg was picked to present an award to the majority Asian cast of Everything Everywhere All at Once. When he was a teenager, Wahlberg was charged with attacking two Vietnamese men while high on the drug PCP, pleading guilty to felony assault. Police officers reported that Wahlberg used racist slurs to describe both victims.
Wahlberg also attacked a fourth grade elementary school class with black students on a walking field trip to a local beach with rocks while gathering a howling racist mob. At the end of the SAG Awards on Sunday (26 February), Wahlberg took to the stage to announce the winner of the award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
The award went to Everything Everywhere All at Once, the Oscar-tipped drama about a dimension-jumping laundrette owner starring Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu and Ke Huy Quan.
Viewers shared their thoughts on Twitter, with a number of them condemning the decision to have Wahlberg host the award. “I gotta say, having Mark Wahlberg, who literally went to jail as a teen for committing a hate crime against a Vietnamese man, present an award to the cast of Everything Everywhere All At Once was certainly a choice,” wrote journalist Bonnie Stiernberg.
“The irony of Mark Wahlberg giving an award to EEAAO,” one person commented. “Mark Wahlberg (who’s committed multiple hate crimes including against asian people) giving sag ensemble prize to a predominantly Asian cast is genuinely such an embarrassing thing for Hollywood to do,” another person wrote. “Having Mark Wahlberg present this is so ugly #SAGAwards,” someone else wrote.
In 2014, Wahlberg unsuccessfully sought a pardon for his attack on the two Vietnamese men, writing in an application: “I am deeply sorry for the actions that I took on the night of April 8, 1988, as well as for any lasting damage that I may have caused the victims.” “Since that time, I have dedicated myself to becoming a better person and citizen so that I can be a role model to my children and others.” In recent years, his victims have expressed differing opinions on whether Wahlberg should still be held accountable for his teenage actions. He has never apologized to any of them in person.
Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose, famed for his work on black holes, claims we’ve seen evidence from a prior Universe. Only, we haven’t.
Penrose’s idea of a conformal cyclic cosmology hypothesizes that our Universe arose from a pre-existing Universe that would leave imprints on our cosmos today. This is a fascinating and imaginative alternative to inflation, but the data doesn’t support it, despite Penrose’s dubious claims that it does.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The original Big Bang has since been modified to include an early inflationary phase, pushing whatever came before inflation to an unobservable place.
When inflation ends, the hot Big Bang ensues, and we can see evidence from the final tiny fraction-of-a-second of inflation imprinted on our observable Universe.
However, we can’t see anything from before that time. Despite the assertions of one of the most famous living physicists, there’s no evidence for a Universe prior to that.
One of the greatest scientific successes of the past century was the theory of the hot Big Bang: the idea that the Universe, as we observe it and exist within it today, emerged from a hotter, denser, more uniform past. Originally proposed as a serious alternative to some of the more mainstream explanations for the expanding Universe, it was shockingly confirmed in the mid-1960s with the discovery of the “primeval fireball” that remained from that early, hot-and-dense state: today known as the Cosmic Microwave Background.
For more than 50 years, the Big Bang has reigned supreme as the theory describing our cosmic origins, with an early, inflationary period preceding it and setting it up. Both cosmic inflation and the Big Bang have been continually challenged by astronomers and astrophysicists, but the alternatives have fallen away each time that new, critical observations have come in. Even 2020 Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose’s attempted alternative, Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, cannot match the inflationary Big Bang’s successes. Contrary to many years of headlines and Penrose’s continued assertions, we see no evidence of “a Universe before the Big Bang.”
The Big Bang is commonly presented as though it were the beginning of everything: space, time, and the origin of matter and energy. From a certain archaic point of view, this makes sense. If the Universe we see is expanding and getting less dense today, then that means it was smaller and denser in the past. If radiation — things like photons — is present in that Universe, then the wavelength of that radiation will stretch as the Universe expands, meaning it cools as time goes on and was hotter in the past.
At some point, if you extrapolate back far enough, you’ll achieve densities, temperatures, and energies that are so great that you’ll create the conditions for a singularity. If your distance scales are too small, your timescales are too short, or your energy scales are too high, the laws of physics cease to make sense. If we run the clock backward some 13.8 billion years toward the mythical “0” mark, those laws of physics break down at a time of ~10-43 seconds: the Planck time.
If this were an accurate depiction of the Universe — that it began hot and dense and then expanded and cooled — we’d expect a large number of transitions to occur in our past history.
All the possible particles and antiparticles would get created in great numbers, with the excess annihilating away to radiation when it gets too cool to continually create them.
The electroweak and Higgs symmetries break when the Universe cools below the energy at which those symmetries are restored, creating four fundamental forces and particles with non-zero rest masses.
Quarks and gluons condense to form composite particles like protons and neutrons.
Neutrinos stop interacting efficiently with the surviving particles.
Protons and neutrons fuse to form the light nuclei: deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7.
Gravitation works to grow the overdense regions, while radiation pressure works to expand them when they get too dense, creating a set of oscillatory, scale-dependent imprints.
And approximately 380,000 years after the Big Bang, it becomes cool enough to form neutral, stable atoms without them being instantly blasted apart.
When this last stage occurs, the photons permeating the Universe, which had previously scattered off of the free electrons, simply travel in a straight line, lengthening in wavelength and diluting in number as the Universe expands.
Back in the mid-1960s, this background of cosmic radiation was first detected, catapulting the Big Bang from one of a few viable options for our Universe’s origin to the only one consistent with the data. While most astronomers and astrophysicists immediately accepted the Big Bang, the strongest proponents of the leading alternative Steady-State theory — people like Fred Hoyle — came up with progressively more and more absurd contentions to defend their discredited idea in the face of overwhelming data.
But each idea failed spectacularly. It couldn’t have been tired starlight, nor reflected light, nor dust that was heated up and radiating. Each and every explanation that was tried was refuted by the data: the spectrum of this cosmic afterglow was too perfect a blackbody, too equal in all directions, and too uncorrelated with the matter in the Universe to line up with these alternative explanations. While science moved on to the Big Bang becoming part of the consensus, i.e., a sensible starting point for future science, Hoyle and his ideological allies worked to hold back the progress of science by advocating for scientifically untenable alternatives.
Ultimately, science moved on while the contrarians became more and more irrelevant, with their trivially incorrect work fading into obscurity and their research program eventually ceasing upon their deaths.
In the meantime, from the 1960s up through the 2000s, the sciences of astronomy and astrophysics — and particularly the sub-field of cosmology, which focuses on the history, growth, evolution, and fate of the Universe — grew spectacularly.
We mapped out the large-scale structure of the Universe, discovering a great cosmic web.
We discovered how galaxies grew and evolved, and how their stellar populations inside changed with time.
We learned that all the known forms of matter and energy in the Universe were insufficient to explain everything we observe: some form of dark matter and some form of dark energy are required.
And we were able to further verify additional predictions of the Big Bang, such as the predicted abundances of the light elements, the presence of a population of primordial neutrinos, and the discovery of density imperfections of exactly the necessary type to grow into the large-scale structure of the Universe we observe today.
At the same time, there were observations that were no doubt true, but that the Big Bang had no predictive power to explain. The Universe allegedly reached these arbitrarily high temperatures and high energies at the earliest times, and yet there are no exotic leftover relics that we can see today: no magnetic monopoles, no particles from grand unification, no topological defects, etc. Theoretically, something else beyond what is known must be out there to explain the Universe we see, but if they ever existed, they’ve been hidden from us.
The Universe, in order to exist with the properties we see, must have been born with a very specific expansion rate: one that balanced the total energy density exactly, to more than 50 significant digits. The Big Bang has no explanation for why this should be the case.
And the only way different regions of space would have the same exact temperature is if they’re in thermal equilibrium: if they have time to interact and exchange energy. Yet the Universe is too big and has expanded in such a way that we have many causally disconnected regions. Even at the speed of light, those interactions couldn’t have taken place.
This presents a tremendous challenge for cosmology and for science in general. In science, when we see some phenomena that our theories cannot explain, we have two options.
We can attempt to devise a theoretical mechanism to explain those phenomena, while simultaneously maintaining all the successes of the prior theory and making novel predictions that are distinct from the prior theory’s predictions.
Or we can simply assume that there is no explanation, and the Universe was simply born with the properties necessary to give us the Universe we observe.
Only the first approach has scientific value, and therefore that’s the one that must be tried, even if it fails to yield fruit. The most successful theoretical mechanism for extending the Big Bang has been cosmic inflation, which sets up a phase before the Big Bang where the Universe expanded in an exponential fashion: stretching it flat, giving it the same properties everywhere, matching the expansion rate with the energy density, eliminating any prior high-energy relics, and making the new prediction of quantum fluctuations — leading to a specific type of density and temperature fluctuations — superimposed atop an otherwise uniform Universe.
Although inflation, like the Big Bang before it, had a large number of detractors, it succeeds where all the alternatives fail. It solves the “graceful exit” problem, where an exponentially expanding Universe can transition into a matter-and-radiation-filled Universe that expands in a way that matches our observations, meaning it can reproduce all the successes of the hot Big Bang. It imposes an energy cutoff, eliminating any ultra-high-energy relics. It creates a uniform Universe to an enormously high degree, where the expansion rate and the total energy density match perfectly.
And it makes novel predictions about the types of structure and the initial temperature and density fluctuations that should appear, predictions that have subsequently been borne out to be correct by observations. Inflation’s predictions were largely teased out in the 1980s, while the observational evidence that validated it has come in a trickling stream over the past ~30 years. Although alternatives abound, none are as successful as inflation.
Unfortunately, Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose, although his work on General Relativity, black holes, and singularities in the 1960s and 1970s was absolutely Nobel-worthy, has spent a large amount of his efforts in recent years on a crusade to overthrow inflation: by promoting a vastly scientifically inferior alternative, his pet idea of a Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, or CCC.
The biggest predictive difference is that the CCC pretty much requires that an imprint of “the Universe before the Big Bang” show itself in both the Universe’s large-scale structure and in the cosmic microwave background: the Big Bang’s leftover glow. Contrariwise, inflation demands that anywhere inflation ends and a hot Big Bang arises must be causally disconnected from, and cannot interact with, any prior, current, or future such region. Our Universe exists with properties that are independent of any other.
The observations — first from COBE and WMAP, and more recently, from Planck — definitively place enormously tight constraints (to the limits of the data that exists) on any such structures. There are no bruises on our Universe; no repeating patterns; no concentric circles of irregular fluctuations; no Hawking points. When one analyzes the data properly, it is overwhelmingly clear that inflation is consistent with the data, and the CCC is quite clearly not.
Although, much like Hoyle, Penrose isn’t alone in his assertions, the data is overwhelmingly opposed to what he contends. The predictions that he’s made are refuted by the data, and his claims to see these effects are only reproducible if one analyzes the data in a scientifically unsound and illegitimate fashion. Hundreds of scientists have pointed this out to Penrose — repeatedly and consistently over a period of more than 10 years — who continues to ignore the field and plow ahead with his contentions.
Like many before him, he appears to have fallen so in love with his own ideas that he no longer looks to reality to responsibly test them. Yet these tests exist, the critical data is publicly available, and Penrose is not just wrong, it’s trivially easy to demonstrate that the features he claims should be present in the Universe do not exist. Hoyle may have been denied a Nobel Prize despite his worthy contributions to stellar nucleosynthesis because of his unscientific stances later in life; although Penrose now has a Nobel, he has succumbed to the same regrettable pitfall.
While we should laud the creativity of Penrose and celebrate his groundbreaking, Nobel-worthy work, we must guard ourselves against the urge to deify any great scientist, or the work they engage in that isn’t supported by the data. In the end, regardless of celebrity or fame, it’s up to the Universe itself to discern for us what’s real and what’s merely an unsubstantiated hypothesis, and for us to follow the Universe’s lead, regardless of where it takes us.
“The future is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed WILLIAM GIBSON
“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, what is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. PHILIP K DICK
William Gibson is the doyen of modern dystopian fiction. His first novel, Neuromancer (1980), widely regarded as the start of the “cyberpunk” sub-genre, predicted the Internet and coined the term “cyberspace.” Several of his stories have been turned into movies, including Johnny Mnemonic and New Rose Hotel. Talking about his 2015 book The Peripheral, now a TV series on Amazon Prime, he said that maybe we should stop thinking about the apocalypse as a single event and consider it as multi-causal and perhaps taking a prolonged period of about 40 or 50 years. The interest, he says, is in what the rich and powerful are prepared to do to the rest of us to come out of it intact.
This fits well with the idea of a long apocalypse, perhaps beginning with the 2007-8 crash and deepening the global crisis of the economy, states, the environment, all aspects of human life, including mass starvation and repeated pandemics, indeed all social relations—the Four Horsemen bundled together and lasting decades and cascading towards civilisational catastrophe.
The long period of Apocalypse capitalism might be dated from 9/11/2001, of course, and it is equally valid to see both the attack on New York and Washington and the world economic crisis as heralding the new age. What is not valid is to try to explain everything that’s happening solely with the political theories of the 1960s, let alone those of 1917.
The only thing mitigating an apocalyptic perspective is the ability of the poor and oppressed, of the international workers’ movement, of the environmental movement, and all those fighting for human rights and dignity to impose our priorities against those of the billionaires. Olivier Besancenot’s repeated presidential campaigns summed it up with a brilliant slogan that should be revived: “our lives are worth more than their profits.”
Gibson’s insights help explain the huge impact that science fiction has within our culture and the primary place that dystopian sci-fi holds. Sixty years of real-life human space exploration have ignited the science fictional imagination, and computer graphics have enabled a much more convincing portrayal. As we shall see, imaginary futures, or alternative universes, can be used to say something about the present-day apocalypse—about contemporary disaster capitalism. This talk led by the late Mike Davis just before he died is a brilliant explanation of “Apocalypse capitalism.” Davis is absolutely scathing about the “COP” conferences and their ability to bring about any amelioration of climate change.
First and foremost, a health warning. What is being said here is not that most modern science fiction movies are ideologically progressive across the board. On the other hand, some of the subgenres, like “Superheros,” are almost by definition reactionary. Many sci-fi movies involve huge dollops of sexism, and many of them have racist stereotypes, like most contemporary Hollywood movies of any genre. I am arguing that many contemporary movies reflect the world’s descent into Apocalypse capitalism, and the best of them like Elysium, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Children of Men hold up a potential future to critique aspects of the world we live in. Many have implicitly or explicitly progressive things to say about the climate crisis and social decay. There is a mixture of reactionary tropes and themes that are obviously compatible with an anti-capitalist viewpoint. The balance between these things exists even within franchises. So, for example, the second Avatar film, “Avatar: The Way of Water,” revolves around the redemptive role of the nuclear family in a way that the first Avatar movie does not.
Children of Men
Multiverse movies, in which people “travel” between here and usually dystopian alternative universes (including later versions of this one), have been popular among writers and producers because they allow them to imagine anything; no one knows what really happens in alien civilisations, if such things exist. Key texts in this genre includeInception, His Dark Materials, The Man in the High Castle, Planet of the Apes, Donnie Darko, the Philadelphia Experiment, and the recent “absurdist” movie Everything, Everywhere, All the Time. In fact, this latter film is more than “absurdist,” it is completely stupid. If this is what Chinese youth are watching, then the future is less bright than I thought. In this category, the TV seriesDark Materials (iPlayer) and Man in the High Castle (Prime) also stand out as dystopian triumphs.
Apocalypse capitalism is the latest stage of neoliberalism. It presages a further collapse of the last remnants of the welfare state in advanced countries and the total collapse of mid-20th century developmentalism in the Global South.
Theoretically, Apocalypse capitalism is best explained in a series of books by WI Robinson, includingGlobal Police State,Global Civil War andCan Global Capitalism Endure? Robinson has taken Marxist political economy to a new stage, integrating “militarised accumulation,” “digitalised capitalism” and the way that capitalism treats the huge number of refugees and migrants as a “surplus population,” dehumanised beings capable of being sucked into the workforce and then expelled again, according to the whims of the transnational capitalist class and the diktats of the market and increasingly brutalised state apparatuses.
Alfonso Cuarón’s movie Children of Men, based on the book of the same name written by legendary crime writer PD James, shows a world where no new children are being born. Britain is one of the few countries with a government that still functions—albeit a brutal fascist government—and there are many so-called “illegal” refugees who are either imprisoned or executed if they are found. The story is set in 2027, which leaves four more years to go. Despite the violence, to my mind, this is one of the most potentially realistic dystopian Britains—if the progressive forces lose all along the line.
Also set in a Britain under fascist dictatorship is James McTaigue’s “V for Vendetta” (Nathalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, John Hurt). Even if you haven’t seen the film, you will recognise the mask, sometimes worn by hackers and anticapitalist demonstrators. The movie is based onthe graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. It really belongs to the superhero genre, which will be discussed in Part 2 of this article. Here we should note that although V fights against the dictatorship, there are reactionary features to this character, and his methods of struggle, like all superheroes, are literally fantastic.
A creepy fascist dictatorship is also on view in Fahrenheit 451 (1966, starring Julie Christie and Cyril Cusak). The fire department’s role is to start fires, primarily of books and the secret libraries they house. A key form of resistance is for people to learn a book by rote and then join the resistance in the woods, so that even if all copies are burned, the book persists. When Julie Christie joins the rebels, each resistor is introduced by the book’s name. A particularly scruffy individual says, “Hello, I’m The Prince by Machiavelli. As you can see, you can’t tell a book by looking at its cover.”
Over the last decade, science fiction and reality have been brought together in the notion of “singularity,” which in this usage[1]is about how humans will merge with artificial intelligence. In Ray Kurzweil’s use, “singularity” refers to the point where humans and artificial intelligence effectively merge. We will be able to genetically modify humans to integrate them with artificial intelligence and replace defunct organs with implants. Humans Mark 2 will live longer lives and have much greater problem-solving and memory capacities. That’s the Kurzweil theory, at any rate.
Blade Runner 2049 and William Gibson’s novelIdoru feature protagonists who become infatuated with characters who are in fact just virtual people, with computer-generated holograms and engaging voices, linked to massive computer data to replicate a female human.
The mother of all dystopian science fiction onscreen is Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner (Sean Young, Daryl Hannah, Rutger Haur, Harrison Ford). In addition to dealing with the issue of artificial intelligence and androids, the movie foresaw a situation, already underway in some parts of advanced hi-tech capitalism, of massively developed technology alongside environmental catastrophe and infrastructure collapse.
Blade Runner
In Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (Jodie Foster, Matt Damon, 2013), ecological catastrophe and social breakdown have led to the bourgeoisie extracting themselves from life on Earth and decamping to an artificial moon called Elysium (the Greek and Roman name for “heaven”). This is the ultimate gated community. From time to time, poor and desperate Earth dwellers try to break into Elysium to access its health care and living standards. Jodie Foster plays the defence minister who gives the order to shoot down the illegal immigrant space ships. The obvious metaphors and similarities between Elysium and real life show that the book is against capitalism. Which Blomkamp openly espouses, and is also on display in his movie District 9.
The original Avatar (2009) includes a polemic against the evil corporation and the American military that backs them (clearly shown in this video). Set in 2054, with the natural resources of the Earth in crisis, the Resources Development Administration (RDA) mines the valuable mineral called unobtanium on Pandora, a moon in the Alpha Centauri star system. Pandora is inhabited by the Na’vi, 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned humanoids who live in total harmony with nature. When the Na’avi fight back and the RDA attack spacecraft crash to the ground, they take on the role of 21st-century indigenous rain forest defenders with Vietcong determination and mass support.
I saw Avatar in a cinema where some UK soldiers and their families were in the audience. They walked out, shouting at the screen. Postmodern critics might want to discuss the unsubtle and reductionist metaphors here, but the US and UK militarists certainly get it and dislike it.
The evil corporation is at the heart of numerous dystopian movies, for example the original 1978 Robocop, but also the first (and by far the best) Alien film, in which the corporation attempts to bring some of the most vicious aliens, the most perfect fighting machines, back to Earth, as well as the Tyrell corporation in Blade Runner, the Soylent corporation processing human flesh for food in Soylent Green, and numerous others. Soylent Green, based on Harry Harrison’s novel “Make Roon! Make Room!” comes dangerously close to predicting some of the main features of Apocalypse capitalism, including global warming and water and food shortages. Like many writers, Harrison posed the absolute number of humans as the problem, not what is being done to them by global elites.
There is sometimes a nit-picking response to Hollywood movies on the left. Hollywood films are big business and one of the cutting edges of American “soft” ideological power, often based on the lives of the rich or affluent middle classes and far removed from the lives of the majority of the US population. But does that mean that these movies are automatically disqualified from saying anything progressive? Obviously not. [1]
In The City and the City, a BBC series based on the novel by China Miéville, and produced with his collaboration, the city—somewhere in the Balkans—is divided into two, apparently on the basis of religion. But the two parts of the city—Ul Qoma and Besel—overlap in the city centre and share some streets and squares in the “hatched” area. Citizens must stay on their side of the city—their side of the street or plaza—and this division is enforced by a joint oversight committee called “Breach.” People are trained from an early age not to see the other side of the street—called “unseeing.” Some reviewers have questioned whether it is really possible to prevent people from seeing what is directly in front of them. Of course it is—ask Antonio Gramsci or Karl Marx, for that matter. It’s called ideology.
The division of the city is contested by small groups of “unificationists,” who sometimes cross the border to hold joint anti-division meetings. Miéville is a Marxist and former member of the SWP.
Peter Weir’s The Truman Show portrays someone trapped in a TV soap opera, which he (Jim Carrie) imagines to be real life. Millions watch his every move, and he gradually discovers what’s really happening. The show’s director, Cristophe (Ed Harris), aided by Truman’s “wife,” Meryl (Laura Linney), controls the whole setting. The island where Truman lives is a real-life gated community called Seaside, Florida—a model dystopia for the affluent senior citizens who can afford it. Its architecture and lack of vibrancy (or young people) closely parallel Poundbury in Dorset, on an estate owned by King Charles III. The Truman Show fits Guy Debord’s theory of the Spectacle to a “t.”
In its sci-fi form, Seaside is watched by hundreds of TV cameras. Truman has a final confrontation with Crisdophe, which centres on choosing the dangers of real life against a comfortable but totally controlled life. The corrupt drivel of “reality” shows is an obvious target for Weir’s film, as is the way that surveillance is an inherent part of the spectacle of digitalised capitalism.
Another BBC series, Noughts and Crosses, based on the novel by Malorie Blackman, portrays a world in which Europe has been colonised by Africans, who rule on behalf of the empire based in Nigeria. At upmarket cocktail parties, most of the guests are black, and most of the waiters are white. Rebellious white youth clash with the police, often white themselves, but with senior officers who are black. The series, filmed in South Africa, is slightly anachronistic because it shows direct colonialism and not contemporary neocolonialism, but this is a minor point. Even for hardcore anti-racists, it is still a culture shock to see black people controlling everything and lording it over their white servants.
The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich 2004) pictures a sudden environmental collapse as the Arctic ice cap melts suddenly, causing a tsunami that hits the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Twenty years ago, many reviewers thought this was unrealistic and underestimated how the environment could suddenly go into total collapse. But as we go past numerous environmental tipping points that are making huge areas of the Earth’s surface uninhabitable and as glaciers worldwide melt at a rapid pace, this no longer seems so unrealistic.
The basic plot of The Day After has been reproduced endlessly in downmarket fillers, part of the huge amount of film product needed to sustain the ever-multiplying platforms—Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV, Disney, etc. The core of the Day After plot is that a dystopian event occurs, families flee for safety, families are separated, but they are reunited after much struggle, and the family triumphs. See the Greenland trailer to get a glimpse of this. The family as a redoubt against the ills of the world is everywhere now and challenging the individualistic hedonism of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
Films that are a slight variant of this are I am Legend and Finch, in which the protagonists wake up after apocalyptic events (a solar flare and a pandemic, respectively) to find themselves apparently the sole survivors. Both enjoy the company of man’s best friend, but Finch also has the company of a ridiculous robot, just what you need to stock your online movie platform (in this case, Apple TV).
Don’t Look Up, in which a huge asteroid is set to destroy the Earth, is a metaphor for climate change denial and attacks capitalist politicians and the media by ridiculing scientists and environmental activism. Different views that demonstrate the range of left-wing responses can be seen in the reviews by Ian Parker, on this site, and Ezra Brain, a theatre worker in New York. On the central idea in Brain’s piece—being “against subtlety”—I go with it 100%. You don’t have to make a movie version of Stalinist “socialist realism” to get across a blunt anti-capitalist message. Brain references the didactic work of Berthold Brecht, for example, Mother Courage, to illustrate how a creative work can have a wider significance enabled by unsubtle metaphors.
Don’t Look Up
Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, written in the 1930s, features the rise of a Chicago mobster and charts how he bullies his way to becoming the top gangster in the city. The most obvious reference to the present was Al Capone, but the deeper reference was Hitler’s rise to power. Another very unsubtle metaphor!
“What happens when we all die because something smashes into the earth?” films are at their most sophisticated in Lars van Trier’s 2012 film Melancholia (Kirstyen Dunce, Charlotte Rampling, Kiefer Sutherland). Here, dystopia is about mental anguish of the type that every terminal patient eventually goes through. As far as we know, nobody engages in looting or rioting as the end of the world approaches.
Many authors have argued that the first real science fiction story was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The technology it correctly predicted was electricity, although we have since discovered that the application of large amounts of electricity to the human body can have negative consequences. This posed the question, “What makes us human?” What is the core of “humanness”? The monster is rejected because of the way he looks, but he is articulate and teaches himself to read. Is he human?
Films and TV based on the issue of artificial intelligence and humanness include Ex Machina, Humans, the Terminator franchise, I, Robot, the Matrix, and many others.
An original take on this theme is the 2002 film Solaris. As his space vehicle orbits the eponymous planet, crew member George Clooney meets his former—and dead—wife, Natascha McElhone, on the station. She has been summoned from his mind by the planet itself. She doesn’t know who she is or who she is supposed to be. Is this real or just a figment of his imagination? And if it is the latter, does it matter if he falls in love with her again? Or is that just refusing to face up to the fact that nearly all love ends, one way or another, in grief? The story is based on a novel by pre-war Polish author Stanislaw Lem.
It’s no surprise that the religious answer to “what makes us human” is our soul, the ghost in the machine, of which the all-too-destructible human body is merely the earthly appearance. However, any materialist’s understanding of humanity is that it is matter that has evolved to the point of self-consciousness. In principle, if it were possible to replicate such complexity, there is no reason that the “replicants” thus created could not be self-conscious and thus properly autonomous, with their own emotions. Even if we find out that only organic matter can reach the level of complexity needed for self-aware intelligence, there is no reason that organic matter couldn’t be made in a lab, even to the point where it becomes self-aware. Already researchers havecreated artificial human cells which have shown the capacity to link up in Petri dishes and learn
Among the many movies and TV shows based on the accession to humanness of robots is I, Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004). Robots are divided into “good” and “bad” according to the instructions their makers have built in. In a key scene, the good robot named “Sony” is accused of having murdered his maker, Dr. Alfred Lanning. Sony insists that he could not have murdered Lanning “because I loved him.” When Detective Spooner (Will Smith) says that robots don’t have emotions, Sony bangs the table so hard that he dents it. Spooner replies, “That one’s called anger”—recognising de facto that some robots indeed have emotions (it turns out that Sony is a higher specification than run-of-the-mill NS5 robots that can be made evil).
One group of cyborgs that definitely have emotions are the Nexus-6 replicants in Blade Runner. Limited to a four-year life span, they come to Earth to get an extension. When this proves impossible, they run riot. The “prediction” made by Blade Runner, a 1982 movie set in 2020 and only partially fulfilled, was the combination of a highly complex and advanced scientific and production apparatus and a morbidly collapsing civil society, in which it rains all the time. Never mind the details; Blade Runner’s prediction of social, economic, and ecological collapse is coming true.
The interaction between science fiction and science fact is self-evident. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the dystopia was often nuclear war or its aftermath. In 1964, two movies based on books with a near identical plot were released: Fail Safe, starring Henry Fonda, and the grimly hilarious Dr. Strangelove, produced by Stanley Kubrick and starring Peter Sellars in multiple roles.
The BBC produced Peter Watkins’ The War Game in 1966, a pseudo-documentary about the aftermath of a nuclear attack on Britain that showed horrific scenes of mass death and destruction and the role of the armed police in shooting irradiated casualties and the imposition of martial law, commanded from the Regional Seats of Government that had been secretly constructed underground. The film, however, was deemed too dangerous to broadcast and was finally shown at the National Film Theatre in 1996, 30 years after being produced.
Authoritarian dystopias come in different flavours. Orwell’s 1984 is the hard version, with all-pervasive surveillance and state brutality, but Huxley’s Brave New Worldis the soft version, where the masses are kept in order with endless supplies of a tranquilliser called Soma. State agents roam the streets looking for depressed people who can be given the drug.
In the 1975 version of Rollerball, the apocalypse—long-forgotten wars and social collapse—has given rise to a world in which US cities are controlled by “executives” of the big monopolies. So Houston is the energy city, Chicago is the food city, and so on. A combination of material plenty and brutal sports, endlessly relayed on multivision, keeps the masses in check. What they lack is freedom. This version of the film, the one with the politics intact, unlike its ridiculous 2022 remake, was made at the end of the great post-war boom, when a lot of Marxist thought focused on alienation rather than class exploitation and imperialism as the critical problem facing the oppressed.
When the Energy City Chief Executive Mr Bartholomew (John Houseman) tells Houston’s star Rollerball player Jonathan E (James Caan) that he should retire, Jonathan smells a rat. Bartholomew is blunt with him: “Rollerball is a stupid game,” he tells him, “in which no one is supposed to be endlessly successful.” “The only thing we ask,” he says, “all we have ever asked is that people not interfere with executive decisions.” Like the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia and Eastern Europe, anything that is the product of immense personal effort outside the system is regarded with suspicion. All attempts to bring down Jonathan fail, and the power of individual brilliance and individualism as a doctrine is preserved.
One of the most watched sci-fi televisions series have ben those based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale (Channel 4). This, of course, contains overt metaphors about the war on women, particularly the war on reproductive rights in the United States. Many people, including me, found going beyond Series 1 difficult, as the sequels contain mounting crescendos of barbarities against women. But there is no question that the Margaret Atwood novel and TV series have played an enormously progressive role in engaging millions of viewers and listeners with a stridently feminist story. Since the TV series started in 2017, 3.5 million copies of the book have been sold.
The Handmaids Tale
The Road (John Hillcoat 2009) is set in a world where the Global North is covered in ash, which has killed most organic life, and in which refugees from the north try to make it to the tropics. We were told nothing about the causes of this catastrophe, which could be a nuclear winter caused by war or a Chernobyl-like nuclear accident, or it could just be an environmental collapse.
There are dozens of such apocalyptic movies, many of them completely derivative and run-of-the-mill. Take the 2007 movie Flood (starring Tom Courteney, Robert Carlisle, and Jess Sarah Gils), whose producers have paid out for a strong cast but underinvested in believable special effects. A massive wall of water overcomes the Thames Barrier, and central London is flooded. That is very likely—the Thames Barrier will not prevent flooding in central London if global warming causes catastrophic sea-level rise. Then again, pandemic movies like Contagion, Outbreak, and 12 Monkeys actually underestimated the threat of pandemics to human civilisation, as demonstrated by the COVID crisis, a crisis that is far from over.
The movie Noah, in whose lifetime the original climate change threats to jumar civilisation occurred, has a quality worthy of its subject: dreadful. The only intriguing aspect of the Ark story is whether it was based on a recollection of a cataclysmic event at the dawn of human civilization, such as the massive flooding event that created the Mediterranean Sea, which was caused by rapid rising sea levels.
Then the ‘60s dystopia was often nuclear-war, or its aftermath. Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 Clockwork Orange, based on a reactionary novel by Andrew Burgess, envisages a brutal and heartless Britain where Russian slang has invaded the language, probably a result of a war or at least growing Russian Communist domination of the West. The movie brings together many of the tropes of contemporary petit bourgeois paranoia – fear of the Reds, hostility towards the young (mixed with jealousy), contempt towards ‘pop’ culture etc.
The big breakthrough for science fiction came in the 1960s and early 1970s. Until then, science fiction was definitely a thing but very much a minority pursuit. Penguin Books, which dominated paperbacks then, had its own sci-fi section with brilliantly coloured covers. Western paperbacks and movies were on the way down and eventually almost completely replaced with science fiction, although this genre seems to be making a comeback—sometimes in the form of science fiction Westerns (the Westworld series and Out of Range). This later series revolves around the appearance of a large and apparently infinitely deep hole (probably 40 feet across) in a far-flung part of a huge ranch. We discover that people who fall down this hole reappear at different times in the near past or the near future. As far as we know, only two people have ever discovered this hole, and people who reappear at different times somehow avoid meeting their contemporary selves. And it appears that this programme will not be extended beyond one series, so we are left in the dark about what is going on or what this programme is all about.
It might be argued that I have cherry-picked dystopian movies to highlight those with potentially progressive content. It is true that a lot of them don’t have anything progressive about them but are a farrago of reactionary drivel. Take The Boys. Racism, sexism, and hypermasculinity are all present, along with massive violence. This kind of thing will be discussed in Part 2 of this article.
Babeuf, à travers sa pensée réalise la synthèse de l’utopie des lumières et des expériences politiques successives des luttes agraires picardes, de la sans-culotterie parisienne, puis du gouvernement révolutionnaire jacobin, dans un mouvement inséparablement théorique et pratique, porté par l’énergie de la Révolution. La trajectoire de Babeuf passe par des moments de reflux dans la radicalité de ses propositions mais s’oriente vers l’idée que pour parachever une révolution qui a gravé dans le marbre la liberté et l’égalité, il faudra en finir avec la propriété privée. Dans ce passage précis, Babeuf répond aux questionnements d’une citoyenne dite ” M.V “, lui étant adressés. –
“Indiscriminate use of the term really reflects vagueness about its meaning. Asked to define fascism, the liberal replies in such terms as dictatorship, mass neurosis, anti-Semitism, the power of unscrupulous propaganda, the hypnotic effect of a mad-genius orator on the masses, etc. Impressionism and confusion on the part of liberals is not surprising. But Marxism’s superiority consists of its ability to analyze and differentiate among social and political phenomena. that so many of those calling themselves marxists cannot define fascism any more adequately than the liberals is not wholly their fault. Whether they are aware of it or not, much of their intellectual heritage comes from the social-democratic (reformist socialist) and Stalinist movements, which dominated the left in the 1930s when fascism was scoring victory after victory. These movements not only permitted Nazism to come to power in Germany without a shot being fired against it, but they failed abysmally in understanding the nature and dynamics of fascism and the way to fight it. After fascism’s triumphs, they had much to hide and so refrained from making a Marxist analysis which would, at least, have educated subsequent generations.
But there is a Marxist analysis of fascism. It was made by Leon Trotsky not as a postmortem, but during the rise of fascism. This was one of Trotsky’s great contributions to Marxism. He began the task after Mussolini’s victory in Italy in 1922 and brought it to a high point in the years preceding Hitler’s triumph in Germany in 1933.
In his attempts to awaken the German Communist Party and the Communist International (Comintern) to the mortal danger and to rally a united-front against Nazism, Trotsky made a point-by-point critique of the policies of the social-democratic and Stalinist parties. This constitutes a compendium of almost all the mistaken, ineffective, and suicidal positions that workers’ organizations can take regarding fascism, since the positions of the German parties ranged from opportunistic default and betrayal on the right (social democratic) to ultra-left abstentionism and betrayal (Stalinist).
The Communist movement was still on its ultra-left binge (the so-called Third Period) when the Nazi movement began to snowball. To the Stalinists, every capitalist party was automatically “fascist”. Even more catastrophic than this disorienting of the workers was Stalin’s famous dictum that, rather than being opposites, fascism and social democracy were “twins”. The socialists were thereupon dubbed “social fascists” and regarded as the main enemy. Of course, there could be no united front with social-fascist organizations, and those who, like Trotsky, urged such united fronts, were also labeled social fascists and treated accordingly.”
Yuri Pimenov towed the party line and was one of the most famous artists of the official Soviet art. He created propaganda paintings with scenes of idyllic life in the USSR. Whether they are accurate or not, they were completed in an incredibly talented way.
1. Soccer, 1926
Yuri Pimenov/The P.M.Dogadin Astrakhan State Art Gallery
Soviet propaganda worked hard to promote sports to the masses. Soviet workers had to be healthy and slim to be able to commit the normatives in labor. Pimenov depicted strong athletes who seem not to run, but float above the field. Soon, the Soviets would have a long affair with soccer.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — In a bid to both stay ahead of the technological curve and help usher in the end of the world, tech companies continue to repeatedly comb through every dystopian science fiction novel they can find in order to come up with their next ideas.
“It’s our go-to solution whenever we have a hard time coming up with a new idea,” said Scotty Moon, lead engineer at a large big tech firm. “We just start reading through classic sci-fi books that deal with the fall of human civilization and use whatever caused it in the story as our inspiration.”
While Apple continues work on its giant “iLaser” (determined via focus group to be a better name than “Death Star”) that will be capable of vaporizing entire planets, rumors persist that Microsoft is pushing forward with its long-term plan to poison the world’s food supply through nefarious agriculture work and drastically reduce the human population under the guise of philanthropic initiatives. This all pales in comparison to reports that Amazon is looking into time travel breakthroughs, theoretically to allow them to go back in time to deliver packages before you even placed the order, but this technology will almost certainly be used for more horrible things.
“Growing children in artificial wombs like Brave New World, predicting crimes and arresting people before they commit them like Minority Report, and an exciting behavioral modification method similar to the Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange are all amazing innovations heading your way,” Moon continued. “Bringing those stories to life is what we’re working toward every day.”
In an interview with ChatGPT, the AI confirmed everything is just fine and there’s nothing to worry about.
In 1845, in a famous passage from The Holy Family, Marx and Engels see Babeuf’s conspiracy as an embryonic form of socialism. They claim that this “had given rise to the communist idea, which Babeuf’s friend Buonarroti reintroduced in France after the revolution of 1830. This idea, developed with consequence, is the idea of the new state of the world.” While the experiences of Jacobinism and Terror could not constitute a model of socialist revolution for Marx and Marxist historiography, Babeuf’s conspiracy seems to occupy a special place in the history of socialism and the left as “the first appearance of a truly acting communist party [1]”.
Editor’s note: this article is part of the seriesCan the left still change things? directed by Pierre Girier-Timsit.
One cannot limit oneself to studying the thought, action and legacy of one who has never used the word socialism or communism through this teleological prism alone. This would amount to being blinded by a certain “ideology of the precursor” that would contribute to denying the revolutionary context and the originality of Babouvist ideas [2]. Thus, it is not possible to question the legacy of these ideas in the history of the beginnings of socialism without first understanding the singularity of Babeuf in his time and without being interested in the strategic and programmatic content of the conspiracy of Equals.
To better understand the originality of Babouvism, it is necessary to look at the lesser-known aspects of the intellectual path traveled by François-Noël Babeuf dit Gracchus (1760-1797) from the eve of the French Revolution to the trial of Vendôme which will lead him to the scaffold after the failure of the conspiracy [3].
GENESIS OF BABOUVISM: BABEUF’S INTELLECTUAL JOURNEY BEFORE THE REVOLUTION
“Born in the mud, without fortune or rather in absolute poverty” (in his own words) on 23 Nov. 1760, the young Babeuf began working as a feudist in Picardy in 1777, i.e. archivist responsible for drawing up the list of rights and seigneurial titles of the aristocrats who called on his services. The concrete experience of injustice and inequalities that he acquired contributed to nourish his utopian project of radical redesign of society. He later wrote that “it was in the dust of the seigneurial archives that I discovered the mysteries of the usurpations of the noble caste [4]”. It was also during this period that he became accustomed to archival keeping any written notes, drafts, letters or speeches until the end of his life, to the delight of historians.
“It is the great property that makes the oppressors and the oppressed; the idlers swollen with vanity and the bent slaves, crushed under the weight of excessive labor. It is she who in the colonies gives the negroes of our plantations more whiplash than pieces of bread.”
During these years, he also maintained a sustained correspondence with the secretary of the Academy of Arras, Dubois de Fosseux. In these letters, the self-taught Babeuf expresses for the first time social reflections and concerns imbued with the most radical, egalitarian and utopian ideas of the Enlightenment. He makes many references to Rousseau but also to Morelly and his Code of Nature (1755) according to which “nothing will belong singularly or in property to anyone”, or to the Abbé de Mably and his “utopian republic”, both considered today as thinkers of the radical Enlightenment (Stéphanie Roza), true precursors of utopian socialism [5].
Portrait of François-Noël Babeuf, drawing by Henri Rousseau and engraving by Émile Thomas, in L’Album du centenaire de la Révolution by Augustin Challamel and Désiré Lacroix,1889
One of his boldest letters (which remained in draft form and never sent to his correspondent) was the one concerning the collective exploitation of the farms of June 1786. By also following in the footsteps of the Enlightenment (here Montesquieu and Mably), Babeuf takes up the notion of the right to exist, which he then calls the right to live. Ahead of Robespierre and the Bill of Rights of 1793, he affirmed the primacy of this lawpar excellence over the right of property. The great property is accused of all the evils of the century: “It is the great property that makes the oppressors and the oppressed; the idlers swollen with vanity, angry with softness . . . and the bent slaves, crushed under the weight of excessive labor . . . It is she who in the colonies gives the negroes of our plantations more lashes than pieces of bread.” Although not yet advocating common property and even if his approach remains rather abstract, his proposal to organize the collectivization of productive labor by the establishment of collective farms in the joint interest of associated producers already partially announces his vision of the agrarian law [6], or even the Babouvist project of 1795-1796 of community of goods and works. Among other anticipatory reflections, we find in this long letter Babeuf’s first feminist plea, when he equates the male oppression suffered by women with that of the masters over slaves and advocates a similar education for both sexes [7].
REVOLUTIONARY BABEUF: DEFENDER OF HUMAN RIGHTS OF 1793 AND CRITIC OF THE TERROR
When the French Revolution broke out, he was enthusiastic about taking part in the events, although he initially played a modest role until 1795. Between 1789 and 1793 he experienced the revolution in Paris and Picardy, always fighting alongside those left behind by the great revolutionary upheaval (Picardy peasants protesting against indirect taxes, patriots hostile to the electoral franchise system…). After having been a publicist for several ephemeral newspapers, he was temporarily elected administrator of the department of the Somme and then employed in the administration of subsistences in Paris where he became close to the sans-culottes. His struggles and the opposition he arouses will earn him 3 stays in prison during this period, but it is also an opportunity for the Babouvist project to begin to clarify [8].
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It is interesting to note that in the aftermath of the 9th Thermidor, Babeuf – then fresh out of prison – gave free rein to a vehement criticism of the Terror, the power of Robespierre and the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety. This criticism is above all that of the so-called extreme left, widely shared by the sans-culottes of the Parisian sections who escaped the repression of the spring of the year II. Multiplying pamphlets, pamphlets and anti-Jacobin articles, he castigated the “decemviral power”, in the name of human rights and the Constitution of 1793 whose real and immediate application he demanded [9].
However, the one who now appropriates the title of tribune of the people and defender of human rights is also being fooled by the right-wing Thermidorian fringe with equivocal intentions. For a time, Babeuf did not seem to grasp the reactionary dimension of Thermidor: for him, the Republic was now divided into two parties, the one favorable to Robespierre, and the one motivated exclusively by the defense of the “eternal rights of man” in which he sided. By joining their anti-terrorist critics, he comes closer to characters like Tallien, Guffroy, and even Fréron and his bands of muscadins of the Golden Youth.
It was not until December 1794 that Babeuf realized the extent of his misdirection, affirming in No. 28 of his Tribune of the People “I recapture the lightning of truth […] I’m me again. After having recognized and analyzed in depth his errors, he will then impose himself as a fierce opponent of the Thermidorian Convention and the Directory.
For the conspirators, the broadest political union appears as the indispensable prerequisite for the victorious mobilization of the masses. Their conspiracy was intended to “take back the work broken by Thermidor” and to add to it “the impartial distribution of goods and lights” by establishing the community of goods and works.
What could at first glance pass for a strategic misunderstanding on Babeuf’s part actually contributes to the acquisition of the political authority that will be necessary for him to federate around him the plebeian republicans (Claude Mazauric). Indeed, while never compromised with the Jacobin Terror, his critics make him appear as an implacable defender of human rights and the Constitution of 1793 as well as a figure capable of synthesizing the various nuances of the revolutionary left.
Twice thrown into the jails of the Convention and the Directory (he knew only 13 months of freedom from Thermidor until his death in 1796!), Babeuf consolidated his project of social revolution: he drew lessons from the failure of the insurrections of Germinal and Prairial Year III and established relations with revolutionaries whom he rubbed shoulders directly in prison or with whom he corresponded (Buonarroti, Marshal, Germain…). In some of his prison letters, Babeuf comes to sketch an original strategy inspired by the recent Vendée resistance. This strategy of conquest of power consists in experimenting on a restricted territory an exemplary egalitarian community, the “Vendée plébéienne”. Designed to convince peacefully and by example, this model of harmonious society would be destined to spread by imitative contagion, to “gradually extend the circle of adhesions” until covering the entire French territory [10]. If he will later abandon this path to join the practice of conspiracy, it must be admitted that this idea will make its way.
BABOUVIST STRATEGY AND PROGRAM AT THE TIME OF THE CONSPIRACY OF EQUALS
In October 1795, it was barely out of prison that the tribune of the people published in his eponymous newspaper the “manifesto of the plebeians”, the first real invigorating and programmatic text of Babouvism [11]. He summoned the Ancients, Jesus Christ, the thinkers of the Enlightenment, he made Robespierre, Saint-Just and even some former “terrorists” Tallien and Fouché his own to prove in the open that the regime of “perfect equality and common happiness […] is not a chimera” and to claim “common administration and the suppression of private property”. It is on the basis of this doctrine that will be fomented in March 1796 the Conspiracy of Equals around an insurrectional committee composed of Babeuf, Buonarroti, Antonelle, Darthé, Debon, Félix Lepeletier, and Maréchal.
The analysis of the composition of this “secret directory of public safety” and its supporters provides an unequivocal answer on the success of the strategy of uniting revolutionaries of the different democratic tendencies. Whether they were Robespierrist Jacobins, Hebertists close to the sans-culotterie or neither, all find themselves in this conspiracy which aims to radically overcome the previous divisions of the revolutionary movement. It should be noted that this strategy of union will be continued until the last days of the conspiracy, when a group of proscribed mountain conventionalists finally joined the project of the Equals behind the insurrectional committee after long and stormy negotiations on May 7, 1796 [12]. For the conspirators, the broadest political union appears as the indispensable prerequisite for the victorious mobilization of the masses when the day of insurrection comes.
But only three days after this meeting, betrayed by a military agent recently recruited by the conspirators, Babeuf and his companions were arrested and imprisoned in Vendôme to be tried in the High Court of Justice. At the end of the trial, only Babeuf and Darthé were sentenced to death on 27 May 1797, the others were sentenced to prison or exile. When the leaders of the conspiracy were arrested, a large mass of papers relating to the conspiracy were seized by the police in order to be used as evidence by the court. It is thanks among other things to this important corpus of notes, letters, reports, insurgent acts and draft decrees that the Babouvist project is so well known to us today. What exactly does this new revolution that the conspirators are calling for and that will never see the light of day contain?
Thirty years later, in his History of the Conspiracy for Equality known as Babeuf, Philippe Buonarroti specifies that the conspiracy had the definitive aim of “taking up the work broken by Thermidor [and] adding to the revolution of powers and grandeur” that of “the impartial distribution of goods and lights”. The Babouvist programme thus intended to “destroy inequality and restore common happiness” by basing the new society on the model of the community of goods and works.
With his Histoire de la Conspiration pour l’Égalité published in 1828 in Brussels, Buonarroti succeeded so much in “avenging the memory” of his companions that he acted as a strategic and doctrinal transmitter of the future.
All individuals composing it will be considered citizens and co-associates. Up to the age of 60 and for a weekly time determined by law, everyone will owe to the community “the work of agriculture and useful arts of which he is capable” and thus contribute to public abundance. In return, everyone will receive equally and directly enough to “provide for his natural needs” (and Buonarroti to list housing, clothing, laundry, lighting, heating, food and care): no money or wage in this new Republic. If private property will not be immediately abolished, it will at least be limited in its use and extent. Arable land, goods of collective use, “usurped property” during the Revolution will be nationalized and the right of succession will be revoked for future generations. At the end of a period of transition under the regime of a provisional revolutionaryauthority, new institutions combining representative assemblies at the national level and organs of direct democracy at the local level will take over. “Honest magistrates” will be responsible for managing national property and organizing the production and distribution of production and consumer goods. Measures will even be proposed so that this judiciary remains popular and in constant renewal in order to prevent a “class exclusively educated in the art of governing” from forming itself. Finally, multiple provisions relating to culture and education will complete this project by ensuring the appropriation by all of the mores necessary for the stability of the community [13].
BUONARROTI THE FERRYMAN: TRANSMISSION AND HERITAGE AND BABOUVIST IDEAS
Without absolutely trying to see in the babouvism a “hypothetical missing link somewhere between Robespierre and Marx [14]”, it is clear that the political ideal of the conspirators carries within it the seeds of the socialist and communist projects of the first nineteenth century.e century. The transmission of the narrative of the conspiracy, the lexicon and the Babouvist ideas is largely due to the success of the Conspiracy for Equality, published in 1828 in Brussels and republished in 1830 in Paris in the aftermath of the revolution of the Three Glorious Years. In this testimony of a clear public and political character, Buonarroti manages both to “avenge the memory” of his condemned companions and to do the work of smuggler of the future [15]. Strategic transmitter first, because one only has to see the popularity of conspiratorial practices and secret societies in the 1830s (Society of Human Rights, Society of Families, Society of Seasons, Association of Egalitarian Workers …) to measure the influence of the indefatigable carbonaro that is Buonarroti. Doctrinal smuggler then, because it is a whole Babouvist language saturated with neologisms that is reused by the theoreticians of the nascent workers’ movement.
Among the most important formulas inherited from Babeuf’s thought, the notions of community and association will know the most fruitful future. They will be found respectively among the theoreticians of the nascent communist and socialist movements.
Thus, in the communautistic principles of the Equals summarized above, we can see the socialist adage “from each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs“. This aphorism – whose authorship has been attributed to Louis Blanc but which is also found in other forms in Saint-Simon or Étienne Cabet – occupies a central place in the constitution of socialist thought of the early nineteenth century before being taken up by Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Program [16]. Pell-mell, we note that the questions concerning the practical modalities of the progressive abolition of private property are already posed; that the outline of a planning of the economy by a common administration that will be found in part in Saint-Simon in the form of a technocratic administration begins to be felt; that the necessity and legitimacy of a dictatorship ensuring provisional revolutionary authority in the aftermath of the revolution are already debated by the conspirators [17]. Now, we know to what extent this last question will cross the workers’ movement of the following century, from the dictatorial triumvirate advocated by Auguste Blanqui to the Marxist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
How can we not see either a reactivation of Babeuf’s plan of “Vendée plébéienne” in the large community enterprises of the utopian socialists? Like the Babouvist “Vendée” but in a more in-depth way, Charles Fourier’s phalanstery aims to constitute a harmonious society destined to multiply “by explosion” to encompass a wider territory. Like her, the Icarian experiments of Cabet’s supporters and the cooperative experiments of Robert Owen, who explicitly intended to establish egalitarian micro-communities in the United States and the United Kingdom, aimed to spread “by discussion” and by example. In these three cases – and even if the precise modalities remain specific to each of these models – it is always the general model of the community or the practice of the association that are privileged to accompany the changes of the century and fight against inequalities and poverty.
For among the most important formulas inherited from Babeuf’s thought, it is the notions of community and association (orco-association) that will know the most fruitful future. For Alain Maillard, we thus see emerging from the years 1830-1840 the divergences between socialism and communism nascent in the debate opposing the supporters of the principle of association to the supporters of the community. According to him, the party that takes up the idea of association – whether it is a capital-labor association (Ledru-Rollin), cooperative (Philippe Buchez), workshop (Louis Blanc) or mutualist (Proudhon) – is the one that will form the first formally socialist schools. On the other hand, the party that swears by the community of goods and works at the communal and national level and that rejects the principle of association (in that it would constitute a new intermediate body and because of its imperfect character) will be that of the first communists [18].
PLACE OF BABOUVISM IN THE BEGINNINGS OF THE SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST MOVEMENT
Those whom history remembers as the “neo-Babouvists” are both the first to have distinctly claimed Babeuf’s heritage and at the same time the first to have seized the qualification of “communist”. These were personalities who enjoyed a certain notoriety at the time, such as Théodore Dézamy, Jean-Jacques Pillot, Richard Lahautière, André-Mary Savary and to a lesser extent Napoléon Lebon [19].
At the time of the July monarchy and the republican banquets, the first two are at the initiative of the holding of the “first communist banquet” of Belleville of 1er July 1840. The many toasts that are made there explicitly take up the Babouvist slogans while updating them: “To the real and perfect social equality!”, “To the equal distribution of rights and duties”, “To the community of works and enjoyments!”, “To the sovereignty of the people! To the definitive triumph of the community, the only guarantee of happiness for men! “, “To the emancipation of the worker! [20]”. Dézamy is also the author of the Code of the Community (1842) where he takes up the general principles of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Unity, alongside the Babouvist ideas of Happiness and Community to expose the fundamental laws of the future Social Republic. Marx recognized in him a theoretician who had laid “the logical basis of communism”, more scientific and materialist than the socialists whom he qualified as “utopian” (in the same way as Robert Owen and the socialist Jules Gay) [21].
If we owe to Babeuf and the neo-Babouvists some of the most audacious ideas of socialism and communism, we cannot however reduce all these doctrines to this heritage. Exogenous concepts appear in other precursors of the early nineteenth centurye century and will play an important role in the development of these theories.
Babouvist doctrine and strategy cannot be reduced to mere utopian reveries or a flawed prototype of communism. They must be considered as revolutionary reflections of their time, already scientific and materialist as well as heralding a form of socialism.
This is the case with the Saint-Simonian theories that experienced their golden age in the early 1830s. By valuing “bees” (work, industry) and stigmatizing “hornets” (idlers, owner-rentiers), Saint-Simon (1760-1825) emphasized the existence of exploited and exploiters and opened the way to a sharp critique of capitalism that many of his disciples would take up. Let us not forget that it is to Pierre Leroux (1797-1871) – who adhered for a time to the Saint-Simonian movement before breaking away from it – that we owe the first appropriation of the word socialism. The term first appeared sparsely in the columns of his newspaper Le Globe (or Journal de la doctrine de Saint-Simon) before being used systematically in Leroux’s writings and speeches from 1834.
The same goes for the associationist and cooperatist philosophy of the British Robert Owen (1771-1858) which was built independently of the Babouvist doctrine with which it shares many similarities [22]. The concrete application of Owen’s ideas in his villages of co-operation such as New Lanark or New Harmony and the lesson of their failures will bring much to the labor movement.
Finally, let us give credit to the utopian socialists for optimistically guiding a whole new generation towards the hope of peaceful change. Whether it is Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and his detailed plan of phalanstery or Étienne Cabet (1788-1856) and the contours he gives to his project in his Voyage en Ikarie, both reject the violence of the revolutionary process to bring about a better world [23]. Both will also inspire many followers who will perpetuate their ideas, such as Victor Considérant (1808-1893) who will take the head of the École sociétaire and will develop the first phalanstères following Fourier, or Théodore Dézamy (1808-1850) who will go so far as to overcome the contradictions of the thought of Cabet of which he was once the secretary.
Without overestimating it, the place of Babeuf and Babouvism in the original history of socialism deserves to be reaffirmed today. Babouvist doctrine and strategy cannot be reduced to mere utopian reverie, to a “crude egalitarianism” (Marx) or to a flawed prototype of communism. They deserve to be considered in their time as revolutionary reflections much more concrete, scientific and materialist than those of the utopians, but also and certainly as ideas heralding a form of socialism. Indeed, what is the essence of socialism if not an ideal of collective emancipation, a scrupulous interpretation of human rights and a strict application of the republican principles of liberty, equality and fraternity? At least this is how Pierre Leroux and Louis Blanc defined it at its beginnings [24]. If we stick to this definition, because he was at the same time the last avatar of the “radical” Enlightenment, the intransigent defender of the human rights of 1793 and the legacy of the revolution, and because he was the theoretician of a new emancipatory doctrine based on community, real equality and common happiness, Gracchus Babeuf appears as a leading figure of the socialist movement.
Notes:
[1] Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, La Sainte Famille, Éditions sociales, Paris, 1972, p. 145. Karl Marx, “Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality… », in Marx et Engels, Sur la Révolution française, Éditions sociales, Paris, 1985, p. 91. On Marx and Jacobinism, see Karl Marx, “The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution”, 1848 or “Address of the Central Authority to the League of Communists”, March 1850, Ibid.
[2] We repeat here the warning of Claude Mazauric in his opening warning to Gracchus Babeuf, 4e ed., Montreuil, Le Temps des Cerises, 2020.
[3] For a general and commented “biographical itinerary” of Babeuf, see Ibid., pp. 37-126. On Babeuf’s journey before the French Revolution, refer to Victor Daline, Gracchus Babeuf on the eve and during the Great French Revolution (1785-1794), Moscow, Editions du Progrès, 1976.
[4] Gracchus Babeuf, Le Tribun du Peuple n°29, 1795 (quoted in Claude Mazauric, Ibid., pp. 322-326. It should be noted that it is also in this issue that Babeuf engages for the first time in an analysis of the history of the revolution as a class struggle before the letter, or at least as a caste dispute between the “golden million” who want to monopolize the republic and the “twenty-four million hollow bellies” who want it “for all”.
[5] On Morelly, Mably and the concept of “Radical Enlightenment”, refer to Stéphanie Roza, Comment l’utopie est devenir un programme politique, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2015. Stéphanie Roza draws a direct link between the writings of Morelly and Mably and the concrete political action of Babeuf to bring about this new egalitarian society. Morelly’s Code of Nature is thus presented as the “first socialist program in the history of France”.
[6] Contrary to an idea widespread since the revolutionary period (and probably still fueled by the reference of his nickname to the Gracchi), Babeuf was never a supporter of agrarian law in its sense of the time. He approves of the agrarian law as a usufruct division of communal goods as a “great journey towards perfect equality”, but rejects it as “foolishness” as the division of land into individual property, arguing that “the agrarian law can only last one day; […] the day after its establishment, inequality would be remonstrated” (Gracchus Babeuf, Tribune of the People, No. 35, 1795).
[7] He thus denounces “the old conspiracy of one half of the human race to keep the other half under the yoke.” Excerpts from this long letter are reproduced in Claude Mazauric, op. cit., pp. 143-168.
[8] During the period 1789-1793, Babeuf published his Cadastre Perpétuel, a technical work presenting a new program of land surveying with a view to a future rationalization of the land tax more egalitarian and “in favor of the oppressed”, proof if any that Babeuf’s project could not be reduced to utopian daydreams. Similarly, Babeuf wrote at this time a manuscript entitled the Philosophical Lights, a kind of notebook testifying to the spirit of research that animated him as well as the fluctuations of his thought: we discover reflections on the liberalism of Adam Smith, on the questions of the market and property or on those of the consequences of the mechanization of agriculture and industry. This fragmentary manuscript remained in draft form was transcribed for the first time recently in Gracchus Babeuf, Œuvres, vol. 1, text established by Philippe Riviale, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2016.
[9] The articles came from Babeuf’s new newspaper, the Journal de la liberté de la presse, which became the Tribune du Peupleor the defender of human rights in October 1794. Other critical texts include his most famous pamphlet On the System of Depopulation or the Life and Crimes of Carrier. Babeuf likens the war in the Vendée to a “Vendée populicide”. This neologism of his fact will be abundantly taken up and interpreted (wrongly) from the 1980s by the proponents of the theory of the “Franco-French genocide” as proof of the existence of a Vendée genocide. On this subject, see Claude Mazauric’s reply “Sur Babeuf à propos de la Vendée”, in Claude Petitfrère, Regards sur les sociétés modernes, Tours, CEHVI, 1997.
[10] See the letters from Gracchus Babeuf to Charles Germain, quoted in Claude Mazauric, Gracchus Babeuf, Montreuil, Le Temps des Cerises, 2020, 4e ed, pp.332-344.
[11] The full text of the plebeian manifesto was recently republished by Jean-Marc Schiappa. See Gracchus Babeuf, Le manifeste des plébéiens, Paris, Berg International, 2017. This text should not be confused with the Manifesto of Equals, written a month later by Sylvain Maréchal, another prominent member of the conspiracy but whose text was finally rejected by his companions.
[12] It must be said that these members of the Convention initially inspired mistrust in many of the conspirators: how can we not fear the political maneuvers and ambition of these ex-parliamentarians? How can we not fear having to lower the aspirations of the Equals to make them adhere to the conspiracy? On these questions, refer to Philippe Buonarroti, Conspiracy for Equality known as Babeuf, réed. Paris, La Ville Brûle, 2014, pp. 148-149.
[13] Buonarroti devotes a large part of his work to presenting in detail what the application of the Babouvist program would have involved after the victory of the conspirators (Ibid, pp.165-239). He bases his remarks on a corpus of supporting documents that he was able to gather and that he transcribes at the end of the book. It is notably from Exhibit No. 29 entitled “Fragment of a draft economic decree” that we can concretely grasp the substance of the Babouvist project (Ibid., pp. 404-410).
[14] Jean-Marc Schiappa, “Aspects de l’implantation de la conjuration babouviste”, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, n°291, 1993, p. 116.
[15] On this subject, refer to Alain Maillard, “Buonarroti, témoin du passé et passeur d’avenir (sur la réception de la Conspiration)”, in Philippe Buonarroti, op. cit., pp. 424-446.
[16] Note that we already find the bases of this maxim in 1755, under the pen of Morelly in his Code of Nature with the formula “work according to one’s forces […] draw according to one’s needs.”
[17] On the debates on the question of revolutionary dictatorship, see Philippe Buonarroti, Ibid., pp. 126 and p. 110.
[18] On these questions and on the “neo-babouvism” in the workers’ movement of the early nineteenth century.e century, see Alain Maillard’s reference work, La communauté des égals. Le communisme néo-babouviste dans la France des années 1840, Paris, Kimé, 1999. On the first uses of the word communism and pre-Marxist socialist terminology in general, refer to Jacques Grandjonc, Communisme/Kommunismus/Communism. Origin and international development of pre-Marxist community terminology from utopians to neo-Babouvists 1785-1842, 2e ed., Paris, Éditions du Malassis, 2013.
[19] We owe this name of “neo-babouvist” to the socialist historian Jules Prudhommeaux, Ikarie et son fondateur Étienne Cabet: contribution à l’étude du socialisme expérimental, Paris, É. Cornély, 1907, pp. 344-345. We cannot dwell here on each of these still too unknown theoreticians of neo-Babouvist communism, but for more information, we can refer to their corresponding entries in the Biographical Dictionary of the Workers’ Movement (the “Maitron”) available online.
[20] A list of the toasts made at the Belleville banquet is proposed in Alain Maillard, op. cit., pp. 282-283.
[21] Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, La Sainte Famille, Éditions sociales, Paris, 1972, p. 158.
[22] In a long footnote to his History of the Conspiracy for Equality, Buonarroti even gives an argument jointly defending the systems of Owen and Babeuf. See “Appendix 3 – Objection to Owen’s system and answers by showing futility”, in Philippe Buonarroti, op. cit., pp. 420-423.
[23] A rejection that is not exempt from ambiguous, even very severe condemnations of the French Revolution. Thus Fourier speaks of it as the “trial run of the philosophers” of the Enlightenment who would have generated “as many calamities as they promised benefits” (Charles Fourier, Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinies générales, in Œuvres Complètes, Anthropos, Paris, 1966, T.II, p. 2). The same goes for Étienne Cabet who says in a famous sentence “if I held a revolution in my hand, I would hold it closed, even if I would have to die in exile!” (Étienne Cabet, Voyage en Icarie, Paris, 1842, p.565).
[24] Pierre Leroux proclaimed in 1845: “We are socialists if we want to understand by socialism the doctrine that will not sacrifice any of the terms of the formula: liberty, fraternity, equality, unity, but which will reconcile them all.”, Pierre Leroux, “De l’individualisme et du socialisme”, in Œuvres (1825-1850), Paris, 1850, p. 376. As for Louis Blanc, he concluded his major work in 1839 by summarizing his thought as follows: “In summary, what is it about? To achieve practically, gradually the realization of the dogma: Liberty, equality, fraternity. “, Louis Blanc, Organisation du travail, 5e ed., Paris, 1848, p. 272.
For fifteen centuries you lived as slaves and, consequently, unhappy. For the last six years you barely breathe, waiting for independence, freedom and equality.
EQUALITY! The first wish of nature, the first need of man, the first bond of all legitimate association! People of France! You were not more blessed than the other nations that vegetate on this unfortunate globe! Everywhere and at all times the poor human race, delivered over to more or less deft cannibals, served as an plaything for all ambitions, as prey for all tyrannies. Everywhere and at all times men were lulled with beautiful words; at no time and in no place was the thing itself ever obtained along with the word. From time immemorial they hypocritically repeat to us: all men are equal; and from time immemorial the most degrading and monstrous inequality insolently weighs upon the human race. As long as there have been human societies the most beautiful of humanity’s privileges has been recognized without contradiction, but was only once put in practice: equality was nothing but a beautiful and sterile legal fiction. And now that it is called for with an even stronger voice the answer us: be quiet, you wretches! Real equality is nothing but a chimera; be satisfied with conditional equality; you’re all equal before the law. What more do you want, filthy rabble? Legislators, rulers, rich landowners, it is now your turn to listen.
Are we not all equal? This principle remains uncontested, because unless touched by insanity, one can’t seriously say it is night when it is day.
Well then! We aspire to live and die equal, the way we were born: we want real equality or death; this is what we need.
And we’ll have this real equality, at whatever the cost. Woe on those who stand between it and us! Woe on those who resist a wish so firmly expressed.
The French Revolution is nothing but the precursor of another revolution, one that will greater, more solemn, and which will be the last.
The people marched over the bodies of kings and priests who were in league against it: it will do the same to the new tyrants, the new political Tartuffes seated in the place of the old.
What do we need besides equality of rights?
We need not only that equality of rights written into the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; we want it in our midst, under the roofs of our houses. We consent to everything for it, to make a clean slate so that we hold to it alone. Let all the arts perish, if need be, as long as real equality remains!
Legislators and politicians, you have no more genius than you do good faith; gutless and rich landowners, in vain do you attempt to neutralize our holy enterprise by saying: They do nothing but reproduce that agrarian law asked for more than once in the past.
Slanderers, be silent: and in the silence of your confusion listen to our demands, dictated by nature and based on justice.
The Agrarian law, or the partitioning of land, was the spontaneous demand of some unprincipled soldiers, of some towns moved more by their instinct than by reason. We lean towards something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of property! No more individual property in land: the land belongs to no one. We demand, we want, the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the fruits belong to all.
We declare that we can no longer put up with the fact that the great majority work and sweat for the smallest of minorities.
Long enough, and for too long, less than a million individuals have disposed of that which belongs to 20 million of their kind, their equals.
Let it at last end, this great scandal that our descendants will never believe existed! Disappear at last, revolting distinctions between rich and poor, great and small, masters and servants, rulers and ruled.
Let there no longer be any difference between people than that of age and sex. Since all have the same faculties and the same needs, let there then be for them but one education, but one nourishment. They are satisfied with one sun and one air for all: why then would the same portion and the same quality of food not suffice for each of them?
Already the enemies of the most natural order of things we can imagine raise a clamour against us.
They say to us: You are disorganizers and seditious; you want nothing but massacres and loot.
PEOPLE OF FRANCE:
We won’t waste our time responding to them. We tell you: the holy enterprise that we are organising has no other goal than that of putting an end to civil dissension and public poverty.
Never before has more vast a plan been conceived of or carried out. Here and there a few men of genius, a few wise men, have spoken in a low and trembling voice. None have had the courage to tell the whole truth.
The moment for great measures has arrived. Evil has reached its height: it covers the face of the earth. Under the name of politics, chaos has reigned for too many centuries. Let everything be set in order and take its proper place once again. Let the supporters of justice and happiness organize in the voice of equality. The moment has come to found the REPUBLIC OF EQUALS, the great home open to all men. The day of general restitution has arrived. Families moaning in suffering, come sit at the common table set by nature for all its children.
PEOPLE OF FRANCE:
The purest of all glories was thus reserved for you! Yes it is you who should be the first to offer the world this touching spectacle.
Ancient habits, antique fears, would again like to pose an obstacle to the establishment of the Republic of Equals. The organisation of real equality, the only one that responds to all needs, without causing any victims, without costing any sacrifice, will not at first please everyone. The selfish, the ambitious, will tremble with rage. Those who possess unjustly will cry out about injustice. The loss of the enjoyments of the few, of solitary pleasures, of personal ease will cause lively regret to those heedless of the pain of others. The lovers of absolute power, the henchmen of arbitrary authority, will with difficulty bow their superb heads before the level of real equality. Their shortsightedness will penetrate with difficulty the imminent future of common happiness; but what can a few thousand malcontents do against a mass of happy men, surprised to have sought so long a happiness that they had right at hand.
The day after this real revolution, they’ll say with astonishment: What? Common happiness was so easy to obtain? All we had to do was want it? Why oh why didn’t we desire it sooner? Did they really have to make us speak of it so many times? Yes, without a doubt, one lone man on earth richer, stronger than his like, than his equals, and the balance is thrown off: crime and unhappiness are on earth.
PEOPLE OF FRANCE;
By what sign will you now recognize the excellence of a constitution? …That which rests in its entirety on real equality is the only one that can suit you and fulfill all your wishes.
The aristocratic charters of 1791 and 1795 tightened your chains instead of breaking them. That of 1793 was a great step towards true equality, and we had never before approached it so closely. But it did not yet touch the goal, nor reach common happiness, which it nevertheless solemnly consecrated as its great principle.
PEOPLE OF FRANCE,
Open your eyes and your hearts to the fullness of happiness: recognize and proclaim with us the REPUBLIC OF EQUALS.
Paul et Virginie (sometimes known in English as Paul and Virginia) is a novel by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, first published in 1788. The novel’s title characters are friends since birth who fall in love. The story is set on the island of Mauritius under French rule, then named Île de France. Written on the eve of the French Revolution, the novel is recognized as Bernardin’s finest work.[citation needed] It records the fate of a child of nature corrupted by the artificial sentimentality of the French upper classes in the late eighteenth century. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre lived on the island for a time and based part of the novel on a shipwreck he witnessed there.[1]
Book critics
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel criticizes the social class divisions found in eighteenth-century French society. He describes the perfect equality of social relations on Mauritius, whose inhabitants share their possessions, have equal amounts of land, and all work to cultivate it. They live in harmony, without violence or unrest. The author’s beliefs echo those of Enlightenment philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau.[2] He argues for the emancipation of slaves. He was a friend of Mahé de La Bourdonnais, the governor of Mauritius, who appears in the novel providing training and encouragement for the island’s natives. Although Paul and Virginie own slaves, they appreciate their labour and do not treat them badly. When other slaves in the novel are mistreated, the book’s heroes confront the cruel masters.
The novel presents an Enlightenment view of religion: that God, or “Providence”, has designed a world that is harmonious and pleasing. The characters of Paul et Virginie live off the land without needing technology or man-made interference. For instance, they tell time by observing the shadows of the trees. One critic noted that Bernadin de Saint-Pierre “admired the forethought which ensured that dark-coloured fleas should be conspicuous on white skin”, believing “that the earth was designed for man’s terrestrial happiness and convenience”.[citation needed]
Thomas Carlyle in The French Revolution: A History, wrote: “[It is a novel in which] there rises melodiously, as it were, the wail of a moribund world: everywhere wholesome Nature in unequal conflict with diseased, perfidious art; cannot escape from it in the lowest hut, in the remotest island of the sea.”[3]Alexander von Humboldt, too, cherished Paul et Virginie since his youth and recalled the novel on his American journey.[4]
The novel’s fame was such that when the participants at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1920 considered the status of Mauritius, the New York Times headlined its coverage:[5]
“Sentimental Domain” Island of Mauritius, Scene of Paul et Virginie, Seeks Return to French Control
Literary references and adaptations
The novel served as the basis for a hugely successful opera of the same name, composed by Jean-François Le Sueur, which premiered at the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris on 13 January 1794.
In Le Curé de village (The country parson; 1839), Honoré de Balzac described how “the revelation of love came through a charming book from the hand of a genius” and then more clearly identified the work: “sweet fancies of love derived from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s book”.[6]
Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary (1856) described how Emma’s experience of literature formed her imagination: “She had read Paul et Virginie, and she had fantasized about the little bamboo cottage, the Negro Domingo, the dog Fidèle, but even more the sweet friendship of some good little brother who would go and gather ripe fruits for you from great trees taller than spires, or who would run barefoot in the sand, bringing you a bird’s nest.”[7] In Un Cœur simple (A Simple Heart; 1877), he used the names Paul and Virginie for the two children of Madame Aubain, Félicité’s employer.[8]
In Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, Flora Finching, the former fiancée of protagonist Arthur Clennam, reminds him how after their parents had forced them apart, he had returned a copy of Paul and Virginia to her “without note or comment.”[9] The rough parallel between their failed engagement and the tragic history of Paul and Virginia isn’t explicated, but would have been obvious to Finching and Clennam.
The novel inspired, and served as title for, a duet for clarinet and violin with piano accompaniment by Amilcare Ponchielli, which was published in 1857.
Victor Massé wrote a very successful opera on the subject, again titled Paul and Virginie, in 1876.[10]
Guy de Maupassant in Bel Ami (1885) described a desolate room with minimal furnishings that include “two coloured pictures representing Paul and Virginie”.[11]
The novel The Blue Lagoon (1908) was inspired by Paul et Virginie.
It served as the basis for an American short silent film Paul and Virginia in 1910.
In Women in Love (1920) by D. H. Lawrence, Birkin makes reference to Paul et Virginie when taking Ursula on a punt (chapter 11).
The architect Le Corbusier mentioned Paul et Virginie as one of the “great works of art…based on one or other of the great standards of the heart” in Toward an Architecture (1923).[12]
The Cuban author Alejo Carpentier‘s El reino de este mundo (1949; English The Kingdom of This World) recurs widely on the poetic world of the classical novel.
Jorge Luis Borges mentions the novel in his story The South, the final chapter of Ficciones: “Something in its poor architecture recalled a steel engraving, perhaps one from an old edition of Paul et Virginie.”
Cordwainer Smith Bases the arc of the two main characters in his story Alpha Ralpha Boulevard on Paul et Virginie, naming his characters Paul and Virginia and setting the story in a partial revival of 19th and 20th century French culture some 14000 years in our future.
In Indiana (1832),George Sand mentions the titular characters in chapter 30 when Ralph professes his love for Indiana.
The Cincinnati band Over the Rhine has a song titled “Paul and Virginia” on their album ‘Till We Have Faces’ (itself a reference to the novel by C. S. Lewis)
Sur la route (titre original : On the Road) est le plus connu des romans de Jack Kerouac, publié en 1957.
Carte des trajets de Kerouac dans Sur la route :
1947
1949
1950
Le roman raconte de manière quasi autobiographique les aventures de l’auteur (nommé Sal Paradise dans le livre) et d’un compagnon de route, Neal Cassady (nommé Dean Moriarty dans le roman). On y croise également Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx) et William Burroughs (Old Bull Lee). Dans le tapuscrit original cependant publié en 2007 par les éditions américaines Viking, sous le titre On the Road: The Original Scroll, et en 2010 par les éditions Gallimard pour la version française, sous le titre Sur la route – le rouleau original1 les noms et prénoms réels des protagonistes sont conservés.
Sur la route est la mise en scène, par le biais de ses fréquentations plus ou moins proches, de ce que Kerouac nomma lui-même la « Beat Generation ». Cette dernière ne désigne pas spécialement ceux qu’il fréquente lorsqu’il introduit ce mot, lors d’une conversation avec John Holmes, mais bien ceux qu’il appelle les « nouveaux hipsters américains », ceux qui « avaient dépassé le stade des plaisirs charnels et s’intéressaient maintenant à Dieu et aux Visions sacrées »2. Elle n’a donc rien d’un courant littéraire ; les amis de Kerouac, comme Allen Ginsberg ou William Burroughs, même s’ils partagent un goût pour la prose spontanée et le surréalisme, ont des façons d’écrire qui ne se ressemblent pas.
Écriture du roman
Ce livre a été écrit d’un seul jet, en trois semaines (du 2 au 22 avril 1951), sur un rouleau de papier de 120 pieds5 (36,50 mètres) de long, dans de longues sessions de prose spontanée et enfiévrée ; il crée ainsi un style d’écriture totalement personnel, en partie inspiré par son amour du mouvement jazzbebop, de ses fulgurances et de ses improvisations. Ce manuscrit a été dactylographié sur des feuilles de papier à calligraphie japonaise, collées bout à bout et non sur un rouleau de papier à télétype, comme Kerouac l’affirme pourtant lui-même dans une interview donnée à Steve Allen en 19596. On sait aujourd’hui, grâce à Gerald Nicosia, que Kerouac avait récupéré ces feuilles, non pas dans une « très bonne papeterie », comme il le laisse entendre durant cette interview, mais dans l’appartement d’une de ses connaissances, Bill Cannastra, qui s’était suicidé peu de temps auparavant7. Son rythme de travail effréné a valu le mot célèbre de Truman Capote : « Cela n’est pas écrire, c’est dactylographier. »
Les éditeurs, toutefois, refusèrent massivement cette première rédaction, se demandant ce qu’il y avait à faire avec ce texte très difficile à suivre, présenté sur un rouleau cylindrique, et écrit de façon non conventionnelle (pas de paragraphes, pas de retours à la ligne, pas de chapitres…). Kerouac dut travailler son récit durant six ans avant qu’un éditeur l’acceptât. En 2001, la rédaction du American Modern Library inclut Sur la route dans sa liste des cent meilleurs romans du xxe siècle en langue anglaise. En 2007, à l’occasion du 50e anniversaire de sa publication, la version originelle du manuscrit a été publiée, sous le titre On the Road: The Original Scroll. La même année ont été découverts plusieurs manuscrits originaux inédits de Kerouac, dont une ébauche d’On The Road, datée du 19 janvier 1951 (soit plusieurs mois avant la version en anglais), rédigée en français, sa langue maternelle — également utilisée pour deux de ses romans et quelques nouvelles également inédits8. En fait, la composition de Sur la route a duré de 1948 (année de ses premières « notes de voyage » et de la première mention du titre)… à 19579. C’est, en effet, lorsqu’un éditeur new-yorkais accepta enfin de publier ce texte réputé « impubliable » que Kérouac, de guerre lasse, accepta les propositions d’édulcoration — voire de censure — concernant les passages les plus sulfureux aux yeux de cette Amérique puritaine, engluée en plein MacCarthysme : ceux sur les drogues, le sexe et la mort, notamment.
Le succès de ce livre, une décennie après sa rédaction, signa finalement la fin de Jack Kerouac, initiant une dépression à laquelle il ne survécut pas. Il s’éloigne de ses amis écrivains beat comme Allen Ginsberg. Il reproche à Ginsberg de trop rechercher l’attention du public et de trahir l’esprit beat[Information douteuse]. Il est entre autres irrité par le développement d’un bouddhisme de mode, dont il est en partie responsable. En mai 2001, Christie’s présente lors d’une vente aux enchères à New-York le tapuscrit de Sur la route, qui est vendu au prix de 2,5 millions de dollars à Jim Irsay, amateur de rock et propriétaire de l’équipe de football les Colts d’Indianapolis1.
À l’occasion du 50e anniversaire de la publication initiale, les éditions américaines Viking décident de publier le tapuscrit original en 2007 sous le titre On the Road: The Original Scroll. Les éditions Gallimard font de même en 2010, pour la version française, sous le titre Sur la route – le rouleau original1.
Adaptations
Au cinéma
Francis Ford Coppola possède les droits d’adaptation cinématographique de Sur la route depuis 1968, le scénario fut écrit par Russell Banks mais le tournage prévu à l’automne 2001 n’a jamais commencé. Il coproduit le film Sur la route réalisé par Walter Salles, avec Garrett Hedlund (Dean Moriarty), Sam Riley (Sal Paradise) et Kristen Stewart (Marylou), sorti le 23mai2012 lors de sa présentation en compétition au 65e Festival de Cannes.10
Une exposition intitulée « Sur la route de Jack Kerouac : L’épopée, de l’écrit à l’écran » (du 16 mai au 19 août 2012), au Musée des lettres et manuscrits de Paris, revient sur la genèse du roman et sur les différents projets d’adaptation cinématographique. L’exposition présente également le manuscrit original long de 36,50 mètres1.
À la télévision
[réf. nécessaire]Sur la route et Kerouac lui-même sont en trame de fond du scénario d’un épisode de la série télévisée Code Quantum (Saison 3, épisode 9 : Rebel without a clue). Sans en être une adaptation, l’auteur et son roman sont les sujets de plusieurs apparitions et mentions, illustrant le thème de l’épisode où se joue l’avenir d’une jeune fille de 18 ans, subjuguée par le roman, qui a pris la route avec une troupe de motards.
When George Orwell tried to get various ‘left wing’ publishers to print his book after he returned from fighting in Spain in 1938, he could not get a publisher. One pro-Stalinist ‘Communist’ publisher told him to take out the chapter criticizing the Stalinist crackdown on Leftists and Socialists and Anarchists fighting the Fascist Army in Spain. “That’s why I wrote the book!” Orwell said. The book sold about 800 copies by 1940.
I’m slightly embarrassed that I only read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s (Eugene Zamiatin) We for the first time about two months ago. Not embarrassed because it’s something everyone should read, but embarrassed at myself for having first got a copy in high school, and taking over twenty years to finally read it. And it is well worth reading. It is the original blueprint for the dystopian novel, written in the Soviet Union in 1921—as the reality of Bolshevik authoritarianism was sinking in. Through the narrator, an engineer known only as D-503, and his journal, we learn about a future world known as the One State. Everyone lives and works in transparent cubes, and all individuality is suppressed in the name of collective Freedom. Orwell clearly read We before penning 1984, and Huxley’s Brave New World also owes Zamyatin a debt. Probably the crudest rewriting of We is Ayn Rand’s Anthem, an impoverished attempt to turn a nuanced and satirical challenge to central authority of all types into a vulgar equation of individual freedom and free market capitalism.
Because We is now outside of copyright, there have been many editions and many different translations. The first copy I found was at a school yard sale when I was 16, and it was the 1952 Dutton mass market paperback version to the right. It’s got a powerful Seymour Chwast cover, the four hands featured making up a collective “we,” which is part message conductor, part monster. The image is bold and, would be even more striking without the white bar and text at the top. In 1952 the book likely needed to be explained, now it speaks for itself, and the hand logo could carry the entire cover.
For most of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the only copies of We readily available were cheap mass market paperbacks pitching the book as a standard Sci-Fi novel. The most common is the Avon edition, first published in 1987, with multiple variations following into the 90s and even 2000s. Two different versions are below, the one on the left bring the earliest. All feature a painting/illustration by Harold Seigel. I must admit, I don’t see the appeal, and don’t understand the commitment to it as the primary cover image over decades.
Two other U.S. mass market editions are below, the one on the left is the current mass market edition, published by Eos, one of HarperCollins’ Sci-Fi imprints. The cover looks like a still from the credits of a bad SiFy TV movie. It obliquely references Russian modernism, but is also messy and nondescript. In it’s own way it follows the disjointed narrative and sense of reality slipping into other realities that the book captures so well, but it does it in such an unattractive way. The title is also awful, the font being so dated as a ’90s cyper-y distressed typeface.
The 1972 Bantam edition has a cover with a very different tact. The color scheme is completely different, being red and earthy, and their is nothing stereotypically futuristic here. The design is plagued by being printed so dark, but this also adds to the general mystery. This cover doesn’t at all resonate with my reading of the book, but it is still really intriguing because it is so different. Chwast’s hands show up again, as does a masked or blank figure, but gleaming towers and glass cubes have been replaced by dirt and a dead tree.
Below to the left is supposedly the cover of the first English language edition, published in 1924. I found the image, but haven’t been able to track down the publisher’s information. The cover is fascinating, recreating a pattern that could have been cribbed right out of Stepanova’s notebook for fabric designs. “We” are all shapes floating in space, contained in our own right but unable to find social cohesion.
British publisher Jonathan Cape published a new hardback edition in 1970. The dust jacket is rendered in purples and blacks, with the title being the main visual element. We becomes a geometric shape, and the “W” echoes the clear glass cubes everyone lives within in the novel.
By far the most English editions produced have been by Penguin. The sheer volume of books that Penguin used to sell allowed for hundreds of editions of many books, often each one with a distinct cover. I’ve found seven different covers for Penguin-published copies of We, but I suspect there are probably even a couple more floating around. The cover to the right is the first Penguin Classics edition (1972), featuring the 1916 Malevich painting Suprematist Composition. I’m often not a fan of simply sticking unrelated modern art on book covers, but in this case it feels like some of the Constructivist classics do a better job of conveying the feeling of Zamyatan’s writing than newer cover designs.
In 1980 it appears as if We was moved from the Modern Classics collection into Sci-Fi, with a commensurate change in cover styles. Adrian Chesterman’s painting feels more like a cross between Metropolis and Tron (which actually didn’t come out until 1982) than anything in We. 1983 sees another Modern Classics edition, but the Constructivist painting has been replaced by a contemporary image created by Russell Mills. I feel this is one of the weakest moments for the Classics series in overall design, but the painting itself is alright, and might have even shined in a better design frame.
In the 90s Penguin did a full redesign of the Modern Classics, and two new We covers came out of that in 1993. The one on the left was designed but not used, the one on the right is the actual cover as published. They smartly returned to the Constructivist toolbox, this time pulling out Georgii Petrusov’s photograph/photogram of Alexander Rodchenko. And it works. The simultaneous front and back portraits make for that same feeling of split identity/reality so well drafted by Zamyatan in the novel.
2007 saw another redesign, with two more covers, but in this case both versions found there way onto printed books. The US edition is a simple reworking of the 1993 cover, with the same art repurposed into the new series design. The UK edition uses completely new art—a painting by Anton Brzezinski. While a cool piece of work, it feels a bit too specific for the book itself. Zamyatin’s actual descriptions of the One State are slippery, you can never quite grasp what anything really looks like as it morphs into other things and other descriptions. The world of We is richly described, but hard to fully grasp, as basements open up onto even lower levels, and elevators lift to nowhere, underground passageways connect everything, yet at the same time all is uniform and simple, like the unifs (short for uniforms) worn by the citizens.
The Modern Library has been issuing some really handsome paperback editions of old classics over the past decade. They’ve done at least two versions of We since 2006, and I like both of them. The first (to the left below) is designed by Gabrielle Bordwin, and is one of the smartest uses of stock photography I’ve seen in awhile. Rather than splashing the cover with a saturated photo, she tightly crops the photo and uses it to prop up the title, rather than the other way around. All of the design elements have been converted into architectural forms, and the cover is built like a physical structure—the pull quote, foreword and translation information holds up an armature which contains the author’s name, and then the title is stacked on top of that. The photo and an echo of the title form background structures, pushing the entire composition forward.
The second cover is built around a painting by Constructivist Lyubov Popova. Far more than the feeble attempt on the mass market edition from Eos (see above), the Popova image really captures the sense of fracture in the novel, the human psyche being whole and split at the same time, one person breaking down and bleeding into others. The design around the image is smart too, the simple title placed quietly in a star, which although less common and literally sharp and pointy, is much less intrusive in this context than a box or circle would have been.
British classics publishers Hesperus and Vintage both have put out editions of We in the past decade. All Hesperus covers follow the same template, with a photograph (usually of a cropped solid or architectural form) with sans serif type overlaid. This one is no different. The strong shoulder and back of a statue ground the cover. The close crop makes it as much a design composition as a photograph, and it’s a powerful image. I’m not as convinced by the type treatment, both the no frills and the pink.
The Vintage cover returns to many of the same visual themes as many of the above covers. The letters of the title are once again architectural, building up a city of clear cubes and boxes. In this case it feels a little too easy, and the whole design leans too heavily on an idea which—based on it’s ubiquity—really isn’t that unique or clever.
And finally, a book on tape (I’m unsure of the publisher) and a nice eBook edition. Both of these formats are sort of the ugly step children of the book world, and rarely is much effort put into making particularly nice covers for either. Both these covers are better than the norm. The book on tape (below left) is less successful, but at least some effort was clearly put in. And I’m not sure if it was intentional, but the wavy lines on the face within the title distinctly remind me of the etching lines within the portraits on U.S. currency, which is a nice twist.
The cover of the Kindle was clearly made by someone with some design skills, but the designer isn’t listed (that I could find). Mazes, panopticons, eyes, faces, observatories, and Russian architecture are all blended into a smart design which manages to include a lot without being too much. Kudos.
Next week I’ll look at the non-English language editions of We. So come back and check them out!
Selected bibliography of English language editions: Eugene Zamiatin, We, translated by Gregory Zilboorg (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1959). Cover design by Seymour Chwast. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, translated by Mirra Ginsburg (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970). Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, translated by Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Bantam, 1972). Cover design unattributed. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, translated by Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Avon Books, 1987). Cover design unattributed, cover illustration by Harold Seigel. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, translated by Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Avon Books, 1987 [5th printing]). Cover design unattributed, cover illustration by Harold Seigel. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, translated by Mirra Ginsburg (New York: Eos/HarperCollins, 1999). Cover design unattributed. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, translated by Clarence Brown (London: Penguin, 1993 [14th printing]). Cover design unattributed, cover photograph by Georgii Petrusov: Caricature of Aleksander Rodchenko, 1933-34. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, translated by Natasha Randall (New York: Modern Library, 2006). Cover design by Gabrielle Bordwin, cover photograph by Michael Pole/Corbis. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, translated by Natasha Randall (New York: Modern Library, 2006 [9th printing]). Cover design by Emily Mahon, cover painting by Lyubov Sergeyevna Popova: Man + Air + Space, 1915.
This week back to Zamyatin’s We, and a look at all the non-English editions. (You can check out all the English-language covers HERE.) When first written, the book was not allowed to be published in the Soviet Union. But I found an image of a copy online from the Russian-language Chekhov Press in New York City, which published it in the US in 1952 (cover to the right). It’s clean and very European looking, the only real adornment being the press logo, the Statue of Liberty emerging from an open book!
All of the Russian editions published in the USSR were samizdat, or published underground and distributed illegally. Since the 1990s a number of Russian editions from Russia have come out, including the two below. The one on the left doesn’t do much for me, but I really love the brightly colored circle in the center of the copy on the right. Although in many ways the book feels colorless when you read it, but the swirling kaleidoscope quality of the does embrace some of the fractured affect of We, and maybe even a prism-like quality of light refracting through the glass blocks which make up the One State. I found the cover on the far right online with no context, so I’m not sure when it is from, but it looks older, so it might be another samizdat. It’s a great design, the figures literally falling into each other, making a mass of writhing limbs, their numbers the only thing distinguishing one from the other.
There are a couple images of Polish covers online. I’m not sure when the one on the left was produced, but I suspect sometime after the Penguin edition featuring Georgii Petrusov’s photograph of Rodchenko (see last week), since the painting here seems to be a representation of We‘s protagonist, known only a D-503, as green-tinted Rodchenko. The painting is quite creepy, and the figure looks more like a reject super-villain than an engineer from the the future.
The cover to the right is of a Polish samizdat edition, from 1985 (attributed to Supernowa Publishers). This might be my all time favorite cover of We. In the hands of the scrappy one-color design and production of underground literature, the head of D-503 is now a blank space, but a wind-up blank space.
Below are a couple cool Spanish editions as well. I would guess the one on the right (published by Seix Barral) is from the 70s, and has a nice abstract sci-fi feel. The one on the right is from Laianza Editorial in Madrid, published in 1993. The painting is heavily reminiscent of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, n.2, which was painted in 1912, nine years before Zamayatin wrote We. It works well on the cover, the figure(s) much more static than Duchamp’s, but still splintering and fractured.
The cover on the 2010 Lectorum edition is both overly didactic, and completely awful. The creepy mannequins might have worked if they had been pushed further as a visual idea rather than just plopped down on the cover, and the stencil font with the 3D modeling is terrible. The cover on the right is from a 2011 edition published by Catedra, and it works much better. The titling still leaves a lot to be desired, but the illustration has a really nice vintage sci-fi vibe, which works since this book is definitely a pioneer of the genre.
Last I’ve dug up a Brazilian cover (on the left) and a Turkish one (right). The Brazilian cover appears to feature some sort of modified Hundertwasser painting. It looks like a straight up Hundertwasser, except the three blue figures on the left don’t look familiar, and the factory at the bottom right seems too clearly representative. I’m not sure. The Turkish cover is one of the most creative from a design perspective, crafting a landscape for the One State out of circuit board-like lines. It’s simple, effective, and fun.
Hopefully these past couple weeks have convinced you to read We. It’s pretty quick, I think I read it over about a half dozen subway rides, and once you get into it it’s a nice roller coaster ride. I’m looking forward to reading it again, and going back to Orwell, Huxley, and Bellamy, as well.
[Post updated with additional material on 01/07/18.]
Welcome to the second installment in my sub-series of book covers from early utopian/distopian novels. Back in March of 2014 I took a look at the covers of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, an amazing early Soviet dystopia written in 1921 and immediately banned. Those posts can be found HERE and HERE. This week I’m going to look a novel closer to home, Jack London’s Iron Heel. It was first published in 1908, and was quite popularly received, but fell out of circulation in the 30s or 40s. It appears to have been revived by left-leaning publishers in 1980, and at this point has entered the public domain, so there are now dozens of cheap Print On Demand and eBook versions floating around online.
The basic story is one of a fascist dictatorship (“The Oligarchy”) coming to power in the U.S. A false-flag terrorist attack leads to The Oligarchy refusing to allow the left to sit in government, which rapidly snowballs into an all out assault on the working class and guerrilla resistance to this repression. Today the plot seems almost banal, but remember that in 1908 “Fascism” as we understand it now didn’t exist, the Nazi’s hadn’t provoked the burning of the Reichstag, and state power was a much more blunt instrument. London’s predictive power is pretty disturbing, and its continued relevance can be seen on the cover of the 1977 edition above, published by Lawrence Hill. The boot is on a picture of Chile’s Allende, and thus the cover transforms the book’s Oligarchy into Pinochet and Chile’s then neo-fascist military dictatorship (which took power in a 1973 coup). The cover image is not attributed, but is clearly signed “Ken 74.” It’s possible this is UK political artist Ken Sprague. This is the first copy I found that sparked my interest, and clicked on my desire to track down more.
England’s left wing and working-class focused Journeyman press republished The Iron Heel in 1977 as well. Their cover is nice as well, although very different than the above. Not much to say about the type, but the red and black illustration—definitely by Ken Sprague, this time—is great. A simple yet provocative line drawing of the end of demonstration, where all we can see are the legs and batons of the cops and the abandoned placards of the protesters. Resistance is abandoned, hope on the run. Resistance is absent from the 1971 Bantam mass market edition as well, with a giant spiked boot coming down on the city. This one is quite creepy, the red sky deeply provocative of blood. instead a simple illustration of London himself.
The only other editions from the second half of the 20th century that I could find were an Sagamore Press American Century Series trade paperback and a hardback by Arco. The Sagamore cover is quite strong, black and red torn paper shapes struggle in the background, pushing the author and title to the front. Although I could see this design being specific to the Iron Heel, it is actually the same basic layout as all the American Century Series, which each feature torn paper of various shapes and colors. As for the Arco, the image not specific to the title, but instead a simple illustration of London himself, likely also part of a series.
I found a really nice 1917 Grosset & Dunlap hardback at Book Thug Nation about a month ago, cover below in the center. The design is based on the 1908 design of the first edition published by MacMillan, cover below to the left. I actually like this later version much better, the cream cloth provides a much better background for the illustration than the dark blue. A 1937 Grosset & Dunlap reprint reproduces the graphic again, this time on a dust jacket (I don’t believe either the 1908 or 1917 editions originally had jackets). The design on all these editions is cool, but curious. I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking at: Is the shape that contains the illustration supposed to be some sort of representation of a heel? Of iron? It’s a bit lost on my pair of 21st century eyes. And I’m assuming the glowing sun is supposed to represent hope, somewhat out of reach, but it’s hard to not see it at this point as a reference to Japan, giving the cover a real World War II feel, which was obviously not something that could have been pre-imagined. It’s striking, but doesn’t at all feel like American design or representation, it almost seems more British.
Below is another set of early editions. In 1913, Regents publishes the edition to the below left, with its nice William Morris-esque floral pattern in sharp contrast to the brutality of the title. The British edition in the middle rectifies that, going for the much more direct representation of a skull super-imposed on a city on fire! And then in 1948, the dust jacket of the Grayson Publishing edition starts the visual trend that dominates the representation of the book from here on out. At first it looks like the title is simply floating in an odd-shaped black field, but then the eye adjusts, and sees the heel of a shoe. This visual trick is fun, and the terror of being stomped on is a slow burn, rather than being hit over the head with it. The same can’t be said with much of the follow-up cover imagery, as we’ve seen above with the Lawrence Hill and Bantam editions, and well see again below.
Likely the first paperback edition was by Penguin (of course), released in 1944 in a then-standard orange cover for fiction, and quickly reprinted in 1945. And then I can’t find any evidence of another Penguin edition until the title is re-released as part of the Penguin Classics series in 2006. In 2001, UK publishing upstarts Rebel, Inc. put out their own edition, with a cover once again leaning heavily on a literal representation of the title. It works OK here, the boot is a little blurry and the black circle design on top is strong enough to set the design within the broader series of the Rebel, Inc. catalog, allowing the laziness of the image selection to be a forgiven.
Dozens of foreign language editions have also been released, I found covers for a small handful below. They all have pretty traditional and conservative “continental” design save the 1910 Finnish edition published in the U.S., with its red sun rays withering down from the top left corner.
And finely, the somewhat sad but increasing reality of how many of us interact with old and public domain books, through the flood of print-on-demand editions. These are often strange amalgamations of half-hearted design attempts mixed with clip art and stock imagery, but the sometimes startlingly weird results that combination produces are entirely absent here. The cover on the left is exactly what you would expect if you asked someone who knew little of the book to design a cover, an very literal heel of a boot coming down on the viewer. The edition next to it is standard POD nonsense, stock patterns with text imposed on top, and then on the far right is the current Dover Books edition. While technically not POD, Dover has fallen far from their peek of really interesting and creative cover work in the early 1960s (see HERE, HERE, and HERE), to what I can only imagine is contract work for one or to designers to re-do the covers of their catalog of thousands of books as quickly and efficiently as possible. So there’s rarely anything interesting or surprising, just photoshop-ed titles and stock imagery.
Geez, I have to start planning out these posts better so that I can end on a bang rather than a whimper. The Iron Heel is a powerful book, and I suppose it’s sad that even as it increases in resonance, it seems doomed to a future of crappy POD and eBook editions. This is why I really respect what Rebel, Inc. was trying to do fifteen years ago, to curate a collection of important and relevant titles that have fallen out of favor and to bring them back in solid, well-edited, and nicely designed editions that can hopefully bring them a new life. But this seems easier said than done, as so many attempts at this have briefly flurished, only to have their output quickly disappear into the sea of popular publishing. This is what PM Press has been trying to do with much of the output of the venerable U.S. left publisher Charles H. Kerr. It has been a blast designing the covers for this new series of old titles (you can see most of them, and the covers I designed, HERE), but I fear sales will slow-down and finally curtail the ability to keep it going. But we shall see, there is always room for pleasant surprises!
Next week will be something completely different, but I do have posts in the works about other important early utopian/distopian novels by Bellamy, Huxley, and Capek, so keep a look-out for that in the near future.
Partial bibliography:Jack London, The Iron Heel (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1908). Cover design unattributed.Jack London, The Iron Heel (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1910/1917). Cover design unattributed.Jack London, Rautakorko [The Iron Heel] (Fitchburg, MA: Suom. Sos. Kustannusyhtio n Kustantama, 1910). [Finnish]Jack London, The Iron Heel (New York & Chicago: Regents Press, 1913).Jack London, Il tallone di ferro [The Iron Heel] (Milan: Modernissima, 1930).Jack London, The Iron Heel (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1945).Jack London, The Iron Heel (London: T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., 1947).Jack London, The Iron Heel (New York: Grayson Publishing Corp., 1948).Jack London, Le talon de fer [The Iron Heel] (Paris: Hier et Aujourd’hui, 1948). Cover design unattributed.Jack London, The Iron Heel (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957). Cover design by Ernst Reichl Associates.Jack London, The Iron Heel (London: Arco, 1966).Jack London, The Iron Heel (New York: Bantam, 1971). Cover design unattributed.Jack London, The Iron Heel (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1977). Cover design unattributed, illustration by Ken SpragueJack London, The Iron Heel (London: The Journeyman Press, 1977). Cover design by Mike Ricketts.Jack London, The Iron Heel (London: Penguin, 2006).Jack London, The Iron Heel (New York: Dover Books, 2009). Cover design unattributed.Jack London, The Iron Heel (Print-On-Demand: Empire, 2011). Cover design unattributed.Jack London, The Iron Heel (Print-On-Demand: Bamboo, 2015). Cover design unattributed.
The German author and intellectual Hans Magnus Enzensberger died November 24, 2022, at the age of 93. The intellectual life as well as the literary and political history of Germany after 1945 cannot be imagined without him. Enzensberger was not only shaped by it, but he also influenced it and created landmarks with his poems, essays and plays.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 2006 [Photo by Mariusz Kubik / CC BY 2.0]
Born in 1929, he grew up in the family of a senior telecommunications engineer who did not engage in resistance against the Nazis, but preferred to hold himself at arm’s length from them.
Following the military collapse of Hitler’s Third Reich in World War II, Enzensberger was repulsed by postwar West German society. Countless former Nazis cheerily announced their adherence to democracy and brazenly remained in or took over leading roles in politics, the judiciary, state administration and at universities and schools, while at the same time millions of their victims were consigned to political oblivion.
Immediately after graduating from high school, Enzensberger seized the first opportunity to escape to the “promised land” abroad. He was able to spend a year in Paris, immersing himself in debates involving well-known European writers and philosophers. The far more liberated cultural climate in Paris, however, could not compensate for the great political and intellectual crisis that prevailed throughout Europe after the war. The potent culture of Marxism, which little more than 30 years earlier had been provided such an impetus by the 1917 Russian Revolution, had been largely destroyed by Stalin’s political genocide in the Great Terror and the show trials of 1936–38, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Communists, socialists, progressive-minded scientists and intellectuals.
Consequently, in Eastern Europe as in the Soviet Union, the Stalinist bureaucracies were able to strangle every independent, revolutionary movement of the working class. In the West, in league with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and trade union bureaucracies, the Stalinists suppressed the class struggle and revolutionary opportunities in Greece, France and Italy. And so, a reactionary brew of irrationalism, mysticism, existentialism, Catholic and Protestant bigotry could contaminate the intellectual climate in Europe and especially in Germany.
Under these conditions, the young writer Enzensberger, who regarded himself as a nonconformist, was drawn to the philosophers of the Frankfurt School (founded in 1923): Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and, above all, Theodor Adorno. All three had been forced into exile in the US following January 1933, when state power in Germany was handed over by the ruling class to Hitler and his Nazi movement. The treacherous leaderships of the two mass workers parties, the SPD and KPD (Communist Party of Germany), which even in parliament together represented a majority, surrendered to the fascist gangsters without a fight.
“You Furnish the Pictures, and I’ll Furnish the War”
If you want to push a war drive abroad, flood the public with war propaganda on the home front. Feature blood-curdling images, sound bites, and plenty of propaganda for good vs. evil, us vs. them. Like they say, “Keep it simple, stupid.” Lay it on as thick as possible. Don’t let up – it’s got to be relentless. No questions asked or allowed. Any doubt about the story? That’s downright unpatriotic – there ought to be a law against it. Maybe there will be soon. And since “our” government is the embodiment of democracy, it must be telling the truth.
So say U.S. imperialism’s media masters of war.
It’s all on daily display right now in these United States. Casting Russia and China as the evil empires to be vanquished, hailing U.S. imperialism’s latest good guys du jour, the big business media egg on Washington’s escalating war provocations, from the straits of Taiwan to the Ukraine/Russia front. But the pattern was set long ago.
Way back in 1897, mass-media mogul William Randolph Hearst worked out the playbook. “You Furnish the Pictures, and I’ll Furnish the War.” This, the history books tell us, is what Hearst cabled to his star illustrator in the lead-up to the Spanish-American War. Shocking and heart-wrenching images were urgently needed, the pioneer of “yellow” (sensationalist) journalism insisted. What for? Why, to sell lots of newspapers from the Hearst media empire, of course. But above all, to sell the war – which, soon enough, broke out and made the United States a player in the big league of imperialist powers.
“Remember the Maine!”
Button with image from “Remember the Maine” poster promoting 1898 U.S. imperialist war with Spain that led to seizure of Puerto Rico, Philippines, Guam and occupation of Cuba.
So Hearst, his fellow colonialist Teddy Roosevelt, plus a raft of fellow empire-builders, robber barons, racists and war enthusiasts were more than ready in February 1898, when the U.S. battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor.Long before the bullets were flying and actual bombs started falling, the U.S. public was being relentlessly bombarded with war propaganda. This included plenty of bloodcurdling pictures, including of the Maine in flames.
This month marks the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Lincoln issued on Jan. 1, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. The document declares that all those held as slaves within any state, or part of a state, in rebellion “shall be then, thenceforward and forever free.”
Historian Bruce Levine explores the destruction of the old South and the reunified country that emerged from the Civil War in his new book, The Fall of the House of Dixie. He says one result of the document was a flood of black men from the South into the Union Army.
“The black population of the South had been raised on the notion that, among other things, black men could not, of course, be soldiers,” Levine tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross, “that black men were not courageous, black men were not disciplined, black men could not act in response in large numbers to military commands, black men would flee at the first opportunity if faced with battle, and the idea that black men in uniform could exist and … offer them the opportunity to disprove these notions and … more importantly, actively struggle to do away with slavery, was unbelievably attractive to huge numbers of black people.”
As its ranks dwindled and in a last gasp, the Confederacy, too, had a plan to recruit black soldiers. In 1864, Confederate President Jefferson Davis approved a plan to recruit free blacks and slaves into the Confederate army. Quoting Frederick Douglass, Levine calls the logic behind the idea “a species of madness.”
One factor that contributed to this madness, he says, “is the drumbeat of self-hypnosis” that told Confederates that “the slaves are loyal, the slaves embrace slavery, the slaves are contented in slavery, the slaves know that black people are inferior and need white people to … oversee their lives. … Black people will defend the South that has been good to them. There are, of course, by [then] very many white Southerners who know this is by no means true, but enough of them do believe it so that they’re willing to give this a chance.”
Bruce Levine, a professor of history at the University of Illinois, is also the author of Confederate Emancipation and an editor of the Civil War magazine North and South.
L. Brian Stauffer/UI News Bureau: Stauffer
Considering what might have happened had there been no war at all, Levine thinks slavery could well have lasted into the 20th century, and that it was, in fact, the Confederacy that hastened slavery’s end. “In taking what they assumed to be a defensive position in support of slavery,” he says, “the leaders of the Confederacy … radically hastened its eradication.”
Interview Highlights
On the black soldiers who fought for the Union, 80 percent of whom were from the South
“By the end of the Civil War, nearly 200,000 black men had served in either the Union army or the Union navy, and that alone was an enormous military assistance to the Union at a time when volunteering had fallen drastically and when there was a great deal of hostility to the draft. So these 200,000 men significantly contributed to giving the Union army the volume, the bulk, the size that they needed to cope with their Confederate opponents, and that gave the union the power, ultimately, to overwhelm the opposition.”Enlarge this image
A Union army recruiting poster aimed at black men.
The Library Company of Philadelphia
On the response among blacks to Union recruiting efforts
“There were at least some slaves who still believed what others had been telling them during most of the war, namely … ‘This is a white man’s war, stay out.’ … And others, because of having just been freed and finally given the opportunity to live the life of free men and women, didn’t relish the prospect of immediately being separated from their families and possibly killed before they could realize the benefits of that freedom. But very, very large numbers responded very enthusiastically to the chance finally to, in great numbers, take organized collective action in pursuit of the freedom of their people.”
On the radicalizing effect fighting in the South had on many Union soldiers
“Large numbers of Northern whites, who may previously have had no sympathy for blacks, are, by virtue of moving into ever more deeply the land of slavery, being confronted with the brutalities of slavery and being confronted with the fact that much pro-slavery propaganda that they have been hearing for decades by Northern allies of the slave owners are lies, and that this system is pretty horrible. And many of them start writing in letters home that, contrary to their original assumptions, they have now become, in effect, abolitionists and they will never tolerate slavery again.”
On why Lincoln was so preoccupied with preserving the Union
“For white men then, this is the cutting edge of progress. They believe what protects the rights that they have is the strength and unity of the country, and they fear that as sections of the country begin to withdraw from the union, the country will continue to fragment, that this will only be the beginning of the fracturing of the union. … And so, instead of there being one … more or less powerful country in North America — and south of Canada, that is, and north of Mexico — there might be two and maybe three and maybe four and so on, and that, in turn, might very well lead to the end of republican government in North America. And, again, we’re talking about an era in which much of the world still thinks that republican, nonmonarchical, nonaristocratic government is doomed.”
On the importance of Thaddeus Stevens and the radical Republicans in ending slavery
“[Stevens] was the foremost fighter against slavery and for racial equality in the Congress. He was the most important single figure, I would say. It’s also true, and I think undersold in the film [Lincoln], that Stevens and the radicals were way ahead of Lincoln throughout the war on these questions, pointed the way forward for Lincoln, and without their pressure and without their agitation and without their constant demands, it’s not at all clear Lincoln would have eventually moved in the same direction. They — and Stevens as an individual — are a very important part of the story of how slavery comes to an end.”
The Soviet Union fought against the followers of a convicted terrorist and Nazi German collaborator Stepan Bandera in western Ukraine—first during World War II and then as an insurgency. As a result, many were tried and incarcerated in Kazakhstan, the Arctic Circle, and the Urals. Yet in 1955, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev pardoned and released Banderites in the tens of thousands. Why did this mass-scale amnesty happen, and what long-term consequences did it have?
This question is especially perplexing considering who Stepan Bandera was—a fascist leader of the terrorist OUN, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (faction B named after Bandera), established in 1929. During World War II, the organization collaborated with Nazi Germany since the area was under their occupation as Reichskommissariat Ukraine from mid-1941 to late 1944.
In his youth, Bandera was involved in assassination attempts of Polish officials in Polish-controlled western Ukraine. Following a trial, the Polish authorities issued a death sentence for Bandera’s involvement in terrorism which was later commuted to life. Oles Buzina, a patriotic Ukrainian writer—murdered in 2015 allegedly for his criticism of the Maidan regime change—even described the young Bandera as an “evil boy, who strangled cats for the sake of rearing cruelty toward the enemy.”
Stepan Bandera.
During the Second World War, OUN and UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, were responsible for the massacres of minorities often targeting women and children. Some examples include the 1941 Lvov pogrom of the Jews and the 1943 Volyn massacre of the Poles. Bandera’s followers and Nazi Germany attempted to use each other for their own respective purposes. The former sought an establishment of a Ukrainian state. However, in reality, their methods primarily relied on extreme, large-scale violence and little state-building. Nazi Germany, on the other hand, used these Banderites against the Soviet Union. Ultimately, the Nazi German side attempted to thwart OUN’s pursuit of their own agenda by imprisoning Bandera.
The aftermath of the Lipniki massacre of Polish civilians by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, March 26, 1943, Reichskommissariat Ukraine.
After the war, Bandera ended up living in Munich. Some historians like Stephen Dorril present a convincing case that Bandera worked with western intelligence agencies like MI6. Members of the OUN and UPA, many of whom fled to Europe and North America, were certainly useful against the Soviet Union in the emergent context of the Cold War. For this reason, Soviet attempts to extradite and put Bandera on trial were unsuccessful. In the end, Bandera was assassinated in 1959 by an alleged KGB agent Bogdan Stashynsky.
Back in the Soviet Union, the authorities continued to combat Banderite terrorism in western Ukraine for years after the war especially because this group often targeted civilians. Overall, tens of thousands of Banderites were sent to prison along with other Nazi collaborators. Some received death sentences. However, the latter was commuted to 25 years in prison after Stalin’s 1947 abolition of the death penalty.
Yet it all changed with Stalin’s death in 1953 when Nikita Khrushchev came to power. This period was one of major change in the Soviet Union and was informally called the Thaw. Khrushchev and his supporters criticized the Stalinist period for its “overreach.” Arguably, the most famous example thereof was the 1956 secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party called “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.” Domestically, the Thaw brought with it a relative liberalization in society and culture. In foreign policy, Khrushchev worked to improve relations with the U.S. to ease Cold War tensions. The initiative included reciprocal visits at the highest levels of power such as Khrushchev’s 1959 tour of the U.S.
Khrushchev randomly wearing a Ukrainian vyshyvanka shirt on a visit to Kazakhstan. Source: TASS.
One of the main domestic features of the Thaw was the release of political prisoners within the framework of the so-called de-Stalinization. But it was not just political prisoners that were pardoned, but also Banderites and other types of collaborators. It was Khrushchev who masterminded this initiative. September 17, 1955, saw the issue of a decree called “On the amnesty of Soviet citizens who collaborated with the invaders during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.” Kliment Voroshilov, Marshal of the Soviet Union, signed it in his role as the head of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR.
The exact numbers of pardoned Banderites and other collaborators are difficult to determine. According to some estimates, approximately 100,000 Nazi collaborators were imprisoned by 1955. 50,000 were released that year. The same number was freed in 1960. These numbers include those who committed significant crimes and initially received death sentences. However, those who took part in mass executions and torture of Soviet citizens—which was proven in court—generally remained in prison. There were also earlier examples of such pardons. Between June 1 to August 1, 1945, 5,000 Banderites surrendered in Ukraine in exchange for their amnesty. Two more amnesties were carried out for Banderites in Ukraine in 1947 and 1948.
Some historians believe that foreign policy also played a key role in this mass-scale Banderite release. Khrushchev sought to normalize relations with the Federal Republic of Germany in the context of the Cold War—then under Konrad Adenauer. When Adenauer visited Khrushchev in Moscow in the fall of 1955, the Soviet government initiated a release of up to 40,000 former Nazi German soldiers and sent them to West Germany. It was these international complexities that are also linked to the mass-scale Banderite pardon. The West German state itself issued domestic “legislation affecting the amnesty and the integration of Germans suspected of, accused of, and in many cases indicted for crimes committed during the Nazi era.”
West German leader Konrad Adenaeuer (right) and Soviet statesman Nikolai Bulganin (left), Moscow, 1955. Source: TASS.
Finally, some historians like Yuri Yemeliianov, argue that Khrushchev’s western Ukrainian wife also influenced the pardons behind the scenes. She was from Kholmshchyna, the historically Polish-controlled Chełm Land. Khrushchev himself was an ethnic Russian but lived in Donbass, later attached to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, starting from his teens. In 1944, Khrushchev argued that Kholmshchyna must be returned presumably under the influence of his wife. Yemeliianov compares the latter to Khrushchev’s “gift” of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954. The transfer of Crimea from the Russian to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was done officially for economic and geographic reasons. Unofficially, it was meant to mark 300 years since the Russo-Ukrainian reunion through the Pereyaslav Agreement and as a personal gift to his wife.
Be that as it may, it appears that Khrushchev believed that these tens of thousands of Banderites would be integrated into society without much effort, while the majority of the population in western Ukraine would not be influenced by them ideologically. Some estimates reveal that in just two decades, up to a third of those released (or their family members) ended up working in local or regional governments in western Ukraine. In light of the gradual rehabilitation of Bandera as a national “hero” in post-Soviet Ukraine, it is clear that Khrushchev set a ticking time bomb with his mass pardon by failing to adequately address the question of ideological rehabilitation.
Declassified documents on Bogdan Kogut. Source: RIA.
Worse yet, Soviet intelligence documents declassified and released in 2022 reveal that some of the pardoned Banderites had a criminal past. For example, a prominent Ukrainian “nationalist” leader in the 1980s, Bogdan Kogut, “actively participated in the massacres of Jewish prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp Trawniki” near Lublin, Poland and had links to the Majdanek concentration camp. Thus, Khrushchev’s political gesture was not just an act of naivité but of dangerous negligence.
Button with image from “Remember the Maine” poster promoting 1898 U.S. imperialist war with Spain that led to seizure of Puerto Rico, Philippines, Guam and occupation of Cuba.
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