The End of Everything (Part 3)
How Hamlet, Klara, and Mary Came From the Future: Why John Brown Haunts Our Present
“Easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism: the old saying had grown teeth and was taking on a literal vicious accuracy.” Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (2021)
__________
What isn’t ending? What isn’t on the verge of extinction? It’s a short list of exemptions these days, and we, us human beings, aren’t on it.
Neither are bees, bipartisanship, butterflies, capitalism, childhood, coral reefs, democracy, elephants, empire, facts, families, frogs, gender, glaciers, higher education, (the) humanities, love, male supremacy, manatees, men, morality, (the) middle class, minibars, national borders, Nature, objectivity, patriarchy, religion, science, sex, soil, tigers, whiteness, work—and these species are endangered according to activists, journalists, and writers of every political persuasion.
What the late literary critic Frank Kermode glimpsed in The Sense of an Ending (1967, 1999) is now on display for all to see. When he stood at the heart of the profound changes that convulsed the late-twentieth century, trying to tell us where they might lead, they were still evident yet unknown, measurable but unmapped: he studied their fictional premonitions. By now we know exactly where they led—did I leave anything off that list?—but we don’t know what to do about all these expiration dates.
That is why Hamlet, who brings news from nowhere to the court at Elsinore, and Klara, the omni-competent cyborg who narrates Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, seem so real: they come from a future that is evident yet unknown, habitable but unoccupied, surrounding us and still waiting for us to move in. (On Hamlet and Klara, see Parts 1 and 2 of this review at my Substack column.)
That is also why Mary Murphy and Frank May, the heroes of Kim Stanley Robinson’s new science fiction, The Ministry for the Future, seem so familiar. We know the future—where they live—is upon us.
Ishiguro writes in the first person as an AF, an Artificial Friend, first stationed in the front window of a store waiting to be be bought by Josie, a “genetically edited” teenager who knows she won’t find companionship among her similarly altered peers—like her, they’ve been equipped to succeed in college, and so can think only of their test scores: they need to but can’t be loved by their equals. Klara, the solar-powered AF, is a quiet, thoughtful, meticulous observer of, well, of every damn thing, from the cyborgs and customers in the store or on the street to the human beings she joins once purchased and placed in Josie’s household. Like Hamlet, she accepts everything, and stays suspended in the narrative time of the Others who surround her—as “someone” who’s always thinking but speaks only when spoken to by these beings, she’s the register or receptacle of their profuse utterance.
Robinson writes in so many voices that the reader can’t find a narrative locus, and that, I think, is purposeful. It’s a “de-centered” novel that prosaically enacts what it hopes for, a grass-roots, trans-national, anti-capitalist revolution without a unitary ideology, program, or party. It’s not even a novel, Jonathan Lethem notwithstanding, unless we stretch the definition to accommodate Mikhail Bakhtin’s ultra-elastic specifications in The Dialogic Imagination (trans. 1982)), where just about any prose fiction qualifies. It’s more like notes for a screenplay without the punctuation (EXT., etc.) or stage directions, and there’s no fourth wall to break. Every five chapters or so—there are 106 altogether—Robinson addresses the reader directly in soliloquies, here in the voice of The Market itself, there in the lecture mode of the professor out to explain cryptocurrency or hypothermia.
Like Shakespeare’s resolute moderns, he can’t abide the rules of the present, so he turns to us in the hope that we’ll understand what tomorrow already brings. Like Hamlet, he speaks for himself only when speaking directly to us, his audience, and even then he ventriloquizes as if he’s always outside himself, looking in.
To decipher Robinson’s latest creation—which made the 2021 “10 Best” list of Barack Obama the ex-president, and which is dedicated to Fredric Jameson the Marxist literary critic (!)—it’s worth re-reading Lethem’s blurb on the front cover of The Ministry for the Future: “The best science fiction non-fiction novel I’ve ever read.” I misread this a dozen times before I noticed the ironic insertion, and realized my condescension (see above) was mistaken. Lethem is right—and so, therefore, am I—it’s not quite a novel.
But what, then, is it? And why does the designation matter? It’s fiction, after all, except for the encyclopedic facts listed—yes, just listed, like the lecture notes of a serious student—about climate change, wet-bulb temperatures (where heat and humidity combine to enable or thwart evaporation of perspiration), extinction events, Zurich, mountains, India, the Antarctic, oceans, money, central banking, electricity, cryptocurrency, drones, markets, the distribution of wealth, economic theory, parliamentary political devices, refugee camps, post-modern warfare . . . . These lists take up about a third of the book’s word count, and they are typically topped off with clipped admonitions or oracular instructions. So it reads like a manual, a glossary, a catechism, a concordance, anything but a novel. There’s a story being told here, but unlike almost all other prose fictions, it doesn’t persuade without argument by placing the reader in a world elsewhere, in a setting that is artificial but real—that is, believable and consequential. Instead, it preaches.
Any hack could turn these notes into a film script overnight. The locations are ready-made, the characters are easily cast—Meryl Streep is Mary, Mike Faist (Riff in the new “West Side Story”) is Frank, nobody else matters much except Badim Bahadur, who runs the Ministry’s secret Black Wing, which deploys terrorists, mercenaries, and assassins to do the dirty work of revolution, he’s obviously Dev Patel—and the pitch is “Don’t Look Up” with a happy ending. The camera eye is already rolling.
So, call it a screenplay in progress, a rough draft ready for a table read. Or, as I would prefer, a pamphlet read aloud by candlelight in a tavern crowded with jacklegs from the swamps and pine barrens of New Jersey, it’s December 1776 and they’re listening to Tom Paine’s “Common Sense,” knowing that the fucking Brits have kicked ass over there in Manhattan. There’s nothing in what they’re hearing about how to make a revolution. But when the reader is done, they know what is to be done.
We do, too, when we’re done reading KSR’s masterpiece. The trouble is the how of it, not the why or the what—or the when. Robinson knows that we know why a revolution is needed, and, more or less, what that event entails, because by now the Left and the Right agree that it rhymes with socialism. He also knows that we know it’s already upon us in measurable shapes and sizes.
This history of the future is, then, an anatomy of a revolution in progress.
How does it work, exactly? Plan A is direct action, so to speak, and it’s anything but non-violent. In this scenario, Davos Man—the philanthropic billionaire, the fossil fuel executive, the complicit politician, the complacent passenger on the 757—is the principal target of Badim’s Black Wing, which uses terrorism, the weapon of the weak, to galvanize the grass roots and to convince the world’s leaders that they can no longer shirk their responsibilities to the planet. Only then, after 600 flights are downed in one day, by drones of course, and dozens of oligarchs are abducted or assassinated, can the Ministry for the Future get a hearing from the key players at the UN and the central banks. Only then are the real innovators, the experts who can refreeze the glaciers, reconstruct agriculture from the bottom up, and replace the dollar with cryptocurrency—only then are they equipped to bring the planet back to life.
It’s as if the “old mole” himself, the ghost of John Brown, our original American terrorist, had resurfaced as the herald and the harbinger of revolution, calling on us in the voice of Hamlet’s father to take our revenge on the usurper, the new Slave Power that would protect capitalism—and its faithful attendant, white male supremacy—at all cost, even at the expense of democracy, even unto the expiration of human life itself. [1]
You may balk at my characterization of the Captain, so-called because he led a Free State regiment in “Bloody Kansas,” 1855-56, in what became a murderous rehearsal for the American Civil War. Wasn’t John Brown one of the very few abolitionists who welcomed unconditional equality between white and black men, who “felt, as few white Americans have felt, the bitter tragedy of their lot”? That’s the voice of W.E.B. Du Bois, from his 1909 biography. He went on: wasn’t John Brown “the man who of all Americans has perhaps come nearest to touching the souls of black folk”? Didn’t he refuse any compromise with the slaveholders, and hold anyone who did compromise, including minor territorial officials, accountable for the massive sin of slavery—demonstrating his resolve by executing five of them in silence, by the sword, on the night of May 24, 1856? Wasn’t John Brown the prophet who planned the raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry of October 16, 1859, and went to his death by hanging on December 2 knowing that he had failed to start a slave insurrection but had nonetheless lit the fuse on Civil War? [2]
Well, yes. But the Old Man wasn’t a visionary (he admitted as much while awaiting execution), and he was definitely not a revolutionary. He was of course a radical, if by that we mean someone who can’t see how his ethical principles—in Brown’s case the Declaration’s crucial clause, “all men are created equal”—reside in and flow from the historically determined circumstances he must confront in explaining how to change the world. If by that we mean someone who believes that entanglement in the corruptions and compromises of politics puts his soul at risk. If by that we mean someone for whom the past “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” and so must be exorcised, escaped, and/or repudiated. If by that we mean someone who believes that small cadres of like-minded individuals can “heighten the contradictions” and engage the masses by laying bare the atrocities inherent in, intrinsic to, their way of life. [3]
We all know the type. A lot of us leftists just are the type, and the Right is now run by radicals who believe that their anti-democratic cause is righteous, even God-given—like many an abolitionist or pro-slavery firebrand, they’re out to purge the nation of sin, no matter what the majority might think of their mission.
The revolutionary is a different type. She thinks her ethical principles are legible in actually existing, historically determined circumstances. So she agrees with John Dewey in assuming that “an ‘ought’ which does not root in and flower from the ‘is,’ which is not the fuller realization of the actual state of social relationships, is a mere pious wish that things should be better.” She thinks that the time is out of joint, but that she was born to put it right—that since there’s a usable past she can put to work in the present, there’s no need to escape or repudiate it. She knows that public opinion is the practical embodiment of consent, so she wants to risk her soul in shaping that opinion by persuasion, by political means and for democratic ends. She thinks that small cadres of radicals are necessary but not sufficient to the cause of revolution. [4]
Robinson’s anatomy of revolution as a strictly radical event—as a sudden break or abrupt departure from the past, carried out by people who know better than the rest of us what the future holds—is in keeping with the sensibility of our time, which subsists on a volatile emotional mix of spastic anger and infantile inertia, equal parts of strident rhetoric or strenuous action and helpless, hopeless passivity. It certainly comports with John Brown’s persona as Du Bois depicted it, as the novelists Russell Banks and James McBride have rendered it (Truman Nelson’s fictionalized chronicle of the Kansas jihad would seem an exception to this rule), and as the literary historian John Stauffer has portrayed it. [5]
The Captain had good reason to feel helpless except when he was armed and dangerous. The Slave Power carried the day in the 1850s, from the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which enabled federal slave catchers to coerce assistance from free-state citizens in hunting escapees from bondage; through the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which abrogated the Missouri Compromise of 1821 and opened the entire Louisiana Purchase to slavery; to the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which the Supreme Court announced that neither Congress nor territorial legislatures had the Constitutional right to exclude slavery from the federal lands, as per the Northwest Ordinance, and that persons of African descent could never be citizens of the US. The Lecompton Constitution, the pro-slavery document submitted to Congress in 1858 as the Kansas Territory’s bid for statehood, was the last straw—it was a total fraud, and everyone knew it because correspondents from newspapers around the world covered the election in which 4,908 illegal votes were cast by “border ruffians’ from Missouri. No wonder the Old Man turned to terrorism.
We, too, have good reason to feel helplessly enraged, as the new Slave Power forthrightly declares and realizes its radical intentions—to curtail if not adjourn women’s rights, constitutional and otherwise, and thereby restore patriarchal control of women’s sexuality; to restrict the right to vote, and thereby maintain rule by dark money and its lackeys; to ignore the impending catastrophes caused by global warming, a.k.a. climate change, and thereby to subsidize its source in the consumption of fossil fuels.
Frank May is the embodiment of the John Brown syndrome that comes of this moment—our moment—when the world itself seems to be ending. He’s a very young American who runs a small-town clinic in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. He is the town’s only survivor of an unprecedented heat wave that envelopes all of India in early 2025, during an unusually humid dry season, which kills 20 million people. He speeds his recovery in Scotland by fantasizing about killing CEOs, and when finally sprung he tries to join Kali, the secret cadre of assassins that is making politics as usual impossible in India. He’s turned down, of course, he’s too much the frail white man, so he travels to Zurich, the headquarters of the Ministry, where he accidentally kills a random rich guy and goes into hiding, emerging only long enough to force Mary Murphy to hear from him what Badim has been telling her all along, that peaceful, parliamentary means will never make the revolution required to stop climate change.
By this time, Mary has tacitly agreed with Badim, anyway, because she can’t get a respectful hearing from the powers that be without the Black Wing’s bloody fist in her velvet glove. She’s the liberal “moderate” who stands between the radical (terrorist) tactics urged by Frank or Badim and the conservative, parliamentary principles of the men with the vested interests. In this sense, Mary is Plan B—she embodies the synthesis, the interplay, of radical, liberal, and conservative attitudes or principles that has invariably driven the transformative events we call revolution. In the same sense, Robinson’s anatomy of revolution is almost consistent with the history of such events. They have never been merely or only radical cataclysms; they have always been more complicated, more centrifugal than that, particularly when grasped as ideological formations.
So conceived, the revolution we need is already underway. The Left—broadly defined, encompassing liberals as well as socialists, anarchists, whatever—has won what Antonio Gramsci called the “war of position,” that is, the ideological struggle over civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, workers’ rights, voting rights, human rights, in each case claiming that the rights of persons should or must supersede the rights of property. The Right knows this, which is why it seeks legal refuge in the courts and political sanctuary in the destruction of majority rule. [6]
The Left has meanwhile won the debate on inequality (for which thank you, Occupy Wall Street, David Graeber, Claudia Goldin, Bernie Sanders, Thomas Piketty, et al.), again claiming that the rights of persons—and with them the health of the economy and the body politic—must contain or countermand the rights of property. The redistribution of income and wealth via the tax code and/or government spending is now the majority’s stated preference; so is Medicare For All. The Right knows this, too, which is why it has lavishly funded a jurisprudential counter-revolution (see: the Federalist Society) to fight a rear-guard action against the theoretical and practical consequences of the Left’s (fragile, tentative) triumph.
Framed in these terms, the overthrow of the state—the “war of maneuver,” as Gramsci called the Leninist alternative (or sequel) to the “passive revolution” that the war of position accomplished—becomes an afterthought, a remote possibility rather than the final, inevitable stage of revolution. Heroic armed struggle accordingly becomes the preoccupation of true believers who, like John Brown, assume that continued ideological struggle and political deliberation are wastes of their precious, dwindling time. “Less talk, more action!,” as the Captain himself exclaimed in anticipation of his “irrevocable acts” in Kansas, then in Virginia.
The so-called insurrection of January 6th, 2021 has a similarly desperate feel, because it too was fueled by an inchoate, unspeakable fear and thus anger. But it has detonated nothing—there is no civil war on the horizon. And the revolution in the minds of the people goes on, no matter what the Supreme Court has to say about enumerated Constitutional rights.
The socialism—the future—that is upon us has no party or program or recognized leadership to shape and enunciate it, and that’s an endorsement, not a criticism. It’s more a matter of actually existing social relations, which are, at least in part, a function of expectations or, in other words, the things we carry in our heads. For example, we know that the people “own” the banks because the FDIC, which is funded through our tax dollars, stands as the guarantor of deposits, and that we have thoroughly socialized the risks of lending by means of the Federal Reserve and its fiscal arm in the US Treasury. To “nationalize” the banking system, to make it a public utility subject to democratic scrutiny and management, is to acknowledge practices that are already in place and to codify them at the law. At any rate we don’t have to expropriate any property that is not yet within our proletarian grasp, as per communist manifestos of the past.
We also know that the job market can’t allocate labor time efficiently or even adequately, so that talent, skills, effort, and reward get aligned proportionately and productively. In fact the relation between income and work has begun to seem so arbitrary that we can not only imagine but also observe the detachment of one from the other. Meanwhile, Covid-determined changes in the workplace, including abstention from business as usual in the factory, the warehouse and the office, have amplified trends that were underway before the Great Recession—trends such as job displacement by cybernation (see: Klara and the Sun)—to the point where the future of work is anybody’s guess. The only thing that seems certain is that the labor market is broken, and with it the prospects of capitalism, which is of course predicated on just this, the allocation of resources through the purchase of labor time and the exploitation of labor power. The future is upon us. [7]
“For a while, therefore [as governments dithered], it looked like the great heat wave would be like mass shootings in the US—mourned by all, deplored by all, and then immediately forgotten or superseded by the next one, until they came in a drumbeat and became the new normal. . . . Easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism: the old saying had grown teeth and was taking on a literal, vicious accuracy.” These aren’t the words of a character in The Ministry for the Future. They’re unmediated, straight reporting by the author, as it were. The next paragraph of chapter 6 begins: “But not in India.” There the radicals throw the bums out, using the enforcement arm of Kali to nationalize the power companies, shut down coal-fired plants, build new wind and solar power sources, and even dismantle the caste system. “Lastly though, and this was regretted by many, some more radical portion of this new Indian polity sent a message out to the world: change with us, change now, or suffer the wrath of Kali. No more cheap Indian labor, no more sell-out deals, no deals of any kind, unless changes were made.”
No more capitalism, in short. Terrorism is the cutting edge of the revolution that lets us read for this ending. Without it, nothing follows except another “new normal,” more apathy and complacence on the one hand, more resentment and righteous anger on the other. Again, Robinson’s anatomy lesson fits the sensibility of our time, as does old John Brown’s terrorist itinerary. But neither is sufficient to the task at hand, which is to acknowledge that the choice before us is, finally, socialism or barbarism. For that we will need to pay more attention to the past and spend less time in the future. For now, though, the fictional premonitions of the endings already legible there are scientific enough to serve as guides to the genuine possibilities of the present.
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[1] White male supremacy now bears the same vexed relation to capitalism as the divine right of kings bore to feudalism. Charles I didn’t need the claim to defend royal prerogatives, but he used it, so that a critique of it could be read as a rejection of monarchy and all it represented, including feudal bonds and hierarchies. The assertion of a white male supremacy is not necessarily or intrinsically a defense of capitalism, but the association of the two now established by the defenders of both makes the critique of one a rejection of the other.
[2] W.E.B. Du Bois, John Brown (1909), pp. 7-8, 338-74.
[3] The classic statement is V.I. Lenin, “What Is To Be Done?” (1903), a polemic aimed at Eduard Bernstein’s “revisionist” ideas in Evolutionary Socialism (1899). More recent renditions of the same radical sensibility are Eli Zaretsky, Why America Needs the Left (2014) and Michael Kazin, American Dreamers (2013).
[4] John Dewey, Outlines of a Theory of Ethics (1891; reprint 1969), p. 131. The best explanation of the differences between the radical and the revolutionary is found in an unlikely place, in a book by Martin J. Sklar (my mercurial mentor, occasional friend, and bitter enemy) called The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (1988), pp. 362-63: “The John Browns and Wendell Phillipses, the populists and the Bryanites, the radicals and the fantastic visionaries, have their role to play in preparing the events and the public opinion for the elevation of the Lincolns, and the Roosevelts [see also: Cromwell, Lenin, Castro, Mao, Washington, Madison, and in a different key, Grimke, Addams, Eastman, . . .], to leadership of potentially transformative moments. The great secret divulged by American history is not that America is a conservative country, for all peoples are conservative, according to their prevailing beliefs and customs, most of the time; rather, it is that those revolutions that expand human rights against property rights or other traditional usage, need not, and probably cannot, be simply or mainly radical events. Such revolutions are, in effect, if not in intent, synthesizers of radical, liberal, and conservative trends, heretofore seemingly at loggerheads. They are great synthesizers of change and order, tradition and innovation, resulting in a transformative rendering, a transcendence, or revolution. If revolutions are this reordering of [ethical] principles and [historically determined] traditions, and the establishment and fulfillment of this reordering in institutions, then they are made by a [cross-class] coalition embodying the interplay of radical, liberal, and conservative principles and values, and the true revolutionaries are those most suited to synthetic thought. All great revolutions await their appropriate ‘moderate’ leaders who are neither wholly radical, nor liberal, nor conservative, but who are synthetic in their thought snd appeal. Revolutions need radicals, no less than the other persuasions, but are seldom if ever made by radicals.”
[5]. Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter (1998); James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (2013), and the 2020 Showtime mini-series of that title starring Ethan Hawke; Truman Nelson, The Surveyor (1960) as per Willis McCumber, “The Irrevocable Act,” The Baffler #63 (May 2022); John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men (2002).
[6] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (trans. 1971), pp. 52-120, 210-76.
[7]. James Livingston, “What Now, After Work?” in 3 Parts, here at Substack.