Where is the 21st century labor novel?
Thinking aloud about political struggle, anti-ideology and the moral logic of fiction.
Note: I’m in workshop all this week, so this is a series of semi-connected thoughts. Next week will hopefully be more organized, and then we’ll be back to Reading is Writing, movie reviews and, ideally, something new about battle scenes.
One:
Recently I started a line edit to prepare a novel manuscript for the querying process. The book, which I wrote from April 2022 to November 2024, is a noir transposed to late 2010s New England. A crusading journalist searches for a missing man at the instigation of a woman in trouble. Betrayal, love, redemption, defeat follow. But unlike the hardboiled novels of the New Deal and immediate post-war eras, which were about the city as an internal frontier in the United States, my book is about specific political dynamics.
This book is about the role that left-wing movements play in campus life (and death) and how these movements fit into and replicate the libidinal economy of the American University. It’s no secret to readers of this blog that I grew up in the trade union movement and to an extent in the progressive christian traditions. I learned my political morality at the radical, anti-war edges of those social forces. That morality has sustained me through personal and political defeats that would’ve driven lesser men down the reactionary’s easy (lucrative) path. The noir, which I will not name here out of superstition (agents, if you want a left wing murder mystery, I’ve got one), has forced me to confront the question: Where are the great political and labor novels?
Of course, there are some from previous generations: Germinal, Invisible Man, God’s Bits of Wood, GB84, North and South, All the King’s Men, A Place of Greater Safety, The Accursed Kings, Oromay, The Aesthetics of Resistance. And plenty that touch on labor and activism and the weather underground and black power politics. And many more, outside of America.
But where are the novels of political struggle in the 21st century?*
For a society as aesthetically politicized as the US, the works produced in America are anti-political at the level of content (and often form). This is a symptom of America’s ambient cultural fascism: Politics as the duel of symbolic logics, rather than as confrontations between power systems that present themselves in symbolic form.
And I wonder about this because many of the explicitly political novels I’ve seen gassed up in the press are either historical works or works that try to engage with the impact of Social Media and The Internet on individual consciousness. Some few manage to have characters with political opinions—Sally Rooney for instance—yet politics is not, actually, a structuring force there. Still others, many SFF or so-called diasporic works, have a surface level politics which is undermined by an authorial retreat from social questions raised in favor of a narrow individualism.
But missing from such works are the things that actually make politics happen: parties, unions, churches, employers associations, Sheriff’s department gangs, left-wing cliques, real-estate price fixing group chats, homeowners associations, corporate task forces, business improvement district boards, techno-fascist polycules, pension funds and government offices. Because as alienated and individual as American life is/will be in the near future, the political question, as Gabriel Winant puts it, is entirely a question of organization, of social forms with an internal structure, the different meshes of solidarity between people.
If there is one critical question in American society right now it’s not something stupid like: Are young men fucking? Are the Boomers woke? Or is Kanye West our Gabriel D’Annunzio? It is this: how do social formations function in an anti-social world?
Answering that, I think, requires one to look closely at the internal dynamics of those formations. That is where the alienation and fractures of American society become concrete, become personal, become real in a way the novel (that great bourgeois form) can digest.
I had lunch with my professor recently and they were pushing me to employ some of my historical/political knowledge in my fiction work—a difficult task for anyone who wants to remain employed. We discussed how identifying these fracture points is a key method for finding stories, if you think of stories as psychologically acute or humanistic portraits of shifting social tectonics. (I feel the same way about autofiction that Olivier felt about method acting: My boy, why don’t you just act?)
So why are people writing novels about phones and posting and the ennui of lite BDSM and academic slights?
Two:
After I wrote the above section, I went off and read Brandon Taylor’s recent essay: Goku vs. Jesus. Taylor writes that many young writers, possessing an idea that fiction should avoid didacticism, have instead abandoned the idea that fictional characters should have beliefs. This results in stories that “have retreated into a kind of default disaffected “personality” from which issue recognizable observations that fail to cohere into a meaningful whole. That is why there are no more characters in contemporary literary fiction.” Art for art’s sake destroys the art of art, if we want to put it in an ugly manner.
Disaffected “personality” fiction is a radicalization of the Trauma Plot—as diagnosed by Parul Seghal—which itself was an effort to encode the absence of ideology on characters. In Trauma plots, writ large (there are many, many exceptions) the villain is a force external to the individual. This generally means something like the patriarchy, the Catholic Church, the bourgeois family unit, all deeply ideological social structures. Those structures exert their control through violence, often at the level of desire, and the people subjected to that control become less than people, reduced to stunted and blocked individual psyches that must disentangle themselves from the physical reality of ideology in order to become fully developed.
Such works employ a moral logic that diagnoses social violence, but fails to situate its victims socially. Paradoxically, then, the Trauma Plot and its offspring and the whole well of autofiction, take the mimetic reproduction of conscious experience, which Erich Auerbach thought would erode the boundaries between people, and turn it against the possibility of the social world. Trauma is the shadow of violence, which is itself produced by ideological action. In that sort of world, belief in something is a form of violence.
And I have encountered this very worldview nearly everywhere among Liberals and (especially) conservatives in the last decade. It manifests as a cynical, all-about-me delicacy that, in its pragmatic sense, demands social struggles be conducted on a “utilitarian” or non-ideological plane, and in its radical sense condemns as Fascist barbarism any strong belief of any sort. Time and again I have been told that belief, faith, action—of any sort—is inappropriate, dangerous, anti-realistic, anti-feminist, anti-communist, pro-communist, evangelical, atheistic, liberal and, above all, a little cringe.
This is a worldview itself. And it asks for a sterile fiction, a sterile society and a sterile life. I don’t think most good writers adhere to it, some do, but it is the ambient aesthetic belief system of the American educated class, going back at least to the 2016 Democratic Primary—despite, paradoxically, the surge of “resistance” artistic production, nearly all of which was anti-ideological, anti-political and, especially, anti-revolutionary.
Returning to its effect on literature, the ideology of anti-ideology is the structuring principle of those short stories and novels that are superficially introspective, but which possess no novel insight or passion. Anti-ideological fiction is incapable either of a social gaze or of a genuine internal gaze, since it is so terrified of the moral consequences of belief as to preclude strong emotion, and since we are all driven by some perceptual principle that organizes the disparate facts of sense into a coherent picture of the world.
Maybe then, a good anti-ideological fiction would mimetically reproduce psychosis or, at least, thought processes that fail to organize information. But this prediction has not been borne out, because anti-ideological writing is as incapable of recognizing the pain of psychosis as it is the ecstasy of belief. So it remains trapped in an undeveloped middle ground, a marais between the socialist/fascist/communist/religious militants on one flank, and the guerillas of the vast personal interior on the other.
Incapable of gazing into another’s eyes, and terrified of gazing inside themselves, the anti-ideological writers look down to their soft bellies and pale navels.
It is precisely to avoid writing such wretched, clammy things that I reflexively give my characters strong political and religious beliefs, and why the novel I am starting to query takes place in an explicitly left-wing and political social world.
Because the world is structured politically and ideologically, and because those systems of thought arise from material bases and evolve dialectically, I think a fiction of motion, of drama, is necessarily a fiction of politics.
I do not think fiction can save formal politics. That is not its task.
But I think maybe politics can save fiction by reintroducing conflict and drama to a form that seems, at times, to be bleeding white after a great shock.
Three:
Right now, in Los Angeles, large numbers of people have taken the streets against the ICE/National Guard attacks on the city’s undocumented proletariat. This is one of the first large, spontaneous (I’d bet there’s been a long prehistory of organizing, but I’m not Mike Davis so I can’t prove it) acts of militant resistance in the U.S. since the George Floyd rebellion.
Anyone who has worked at all in organized labor knows that immigration policy is a tool of class war, and standing for immigrant workers, especially the undocumented, is the basic moral and political duty of all. Recent American labor struggles have been concentrated in three spheres: 1. Groups of native-born (often) white workers waging a defensive struggle in structurally or politically important industries often with a reactionary political end. 2. Racialized and immigrant workers employed in low-wage, hazardous, but socially necessary, labor waging a radical struggle for workplace power; their structural insecurity makes the question of workplace power existential. 3. Black workers (and women/queer workers in other contexts) waging a political and economic struggle for inclusion in the basic social contract, sometimes with an element of workplace control. These processes overlap, conflict and have, in times past, run in parallel to other major social transformations, but at the shop floor, these are the strains of action in the U.S.
The possibility of social transformation in America comes when those currents are able to align and fight in common inside and outside the workplace. With immigrant workers and youth and even some liberals in the streets against the police, it’s clear what the moment demands of the rest of us: Solidarity with all forms of struggle. Solidarity alone is what transforms disparate, sometimes oppositional movements into formations in the class war.
And it is war. The American government is deploying military force against workers with no formal rights, whose only defense is solidarity.
Do you know which side you’re on?
-30-
*If you say Creation Lake I’ll bite you.