Terminal Boredom: Stories, Izumi Suzuki, Polly Barton (trans), Sam Bett (trans), David Boyd (trans), Daniel Joseph (trans) (Verso, April 2021)

" Men loom large in many of Suzuki's stories as a potential threat. "Women and Women" is the most extreme example. Men once ruled society "through violence and cunning" but are now relegated to an exclusion zone where their only purpose is to help women conceive.

'There is something wrong with our present society, and I can't stand SF written by people who don't understand that,'

Izumi Suzuki

“In every society the degree of female emancipation (freedom) is the natural measure of emancipation in general.”

Charles Fourier

"The followers of historical materialism reject the existence of a special woman question separate from the general social question of our day. Specific economic factors were behind the subordination of women; natural qualities have been a secondary factor in this process. Only the complete disappearance of these factors, only the evolution of those forces which at some point in the past gave rise to the subjection of women, is able in a fundamental way to influence and change their social position. In other words, women can become truly free and equal only in a world organised along new social and productive lines."

Alexandra Kollontai

The stories collected in Terminal Boredom address many issues currently in vogue. Suzuki's use of classifications, such as gender and identity politics rather than class, is music to the ears of the new #MeToo movement. This petty-bourgeois layer will no doubt receive her book with open arms. The movement must be running out of steam if it decides to resurrect an author who died more than three decades ago.

Rather than being translated by one person, her stories are done by six, Daniel Joseph, David Boyd, Sam Bett, Helen O'Horan, Aiko Masubuchi, and Polly Barton. It is above my pay grade to say whether this works, which seems fine.

Suzuki was active as a writer in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although not a writer of the  "Lost Decade",[1] Suzuki's writing was deeply influenced by the Japan that emerged after the Second World War. As Peter Symonds writes, "The restabilisation of Japanese capitalism after World War II under the US occupation depended on the crushing of the resurgent working class, above all through the betrayals of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP). The post-war constitution drawn up by the American occupiers was designed to appease widespread public hostility to the wartime militarist regime and ensure Japan would not return to war against the US. But the LDP, which ruled Japan almost continuously from 1955 to 2009, never broke from the militarist past and has long harboured ambitions to restore wartime "traditions".[2]

The suppression of the Japanese working class harmed Suzuki's worldview. Rejecting the working class as an agent of revolutionary change, Suziki sought out middle-class forces to bring about change in Japanese society, saying, 'There is something wrong with our present society, and I can't stand SF written by people who don't understand that”.

As Ian MacAllen writes, "Science fiction dystopias are often deployed as a means of examining politics, ideology, or technology, but for Izumi Suzuki, the medium serves as an intimate exploration of anxiety, pain, and sadness. The translated stories collected in Terminal Boredom depend on science fiction dystopias but focus on characters who are broken and seeking their own personal redemption rather than the expected grand narratives about society as a whole. Even though sometimes they are "out of this world" aliens or living in reimagined societies of the future, these are people struggling in the same ways we struggle today."[3]

There is nothing progressive about her worldview. Her short story "Women and Women " is about men confined to a concentration camp and used only for procreation and women's satisfaction. Suzuki has been compared to writers like Phillip K Dick, who, according to James Brookfield, "was a prolific writer who completed 44 novels and roughly 121 short stories before his untimely death from a stroke in 1982 at age 53—was imaginatively gifted in posing large questions. What would people do if the fascists had prevailed? How would society be altered by the eventual development of robots sufficiently advanced to pass as humans? (The latter being the premise of his 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which served as the basis for the 1982 Ridley Scott film Bladerunner). Other stories by Dick were adapted for the films Minority Report (2002) and The Adjustment Bureau (2011).[4] This comparison is a disservice to Dick, who compared Suzuki was a far more intelligent and progressive writer.

While all great writers draw upon personal experiences, Suzuki's work is filled with deep melancholy and sadness, which is hardly surprising given her upbringing. Born in 1949, she took her own life at just thirty-six. She found fame as a model and actress before becoming a writer. she worked with the controversial photographer Nobuyoshi Araki and directors Shūji Terayama and Kōji Wakamatsu. In 1973 she married the jazz saxophonist Kaoru Abe, with whom she had a daughter. Ending in divorce in 1977. Her ex-husband died from an accidental overdose of Bromisoval in 1978. The relationship was stormy, and she cut off one of her toes in front of her husband.

While the Metoo movement has hailed her as one of her own, Suzuki was not completely defined by her sex. Her feminism was a complex phenomenon. As Daniel Joseph writes, “Suzuki's relationship to gender and feminism is complex and nuanced, requiring the twenty-first-century reader to step outside of hard-line contemporary rhetoric. But while a contemporary mode of feminism may not be overtly apparent in her work, Suzuki often spoke out against the unrealistic feminine ideals imposed upon women by male SF authors in the form of beautiful, cookie-cutter female characters. She also dismissed essentialist stereotypes like 'women's intuition' and demanded the right to be a real, flawed human being. Kotani again: 'Suzuki's texts defamiliarise the real world to demolish and reconstruct the "femininity" bound hand and foot by real-world power structures. Her works dismantle the power structures whereby women are marginalised through phrases like "only a woman would…" or "because she is a woman." It is only through this process that one can begin to think about what constitutes "femininity."' But even at her most political, Suzuki is never polemical. She approaches such questions obliquely, attacking imperialism ('Forgotten') and casually dismissing gender as a social construct ('Night Picnic', 1981) while depicting troubled romance and the absurdities of family life. Meaning flows through her stories like music, and despite the obvious complexities of her work, Suzuki described her writing in simple terms: 'I turn my dreams into stories'.”[5]

I cannot bring myself to recommend this book. All one can hope for is that the next book of Suzuki’s work to be published by Verso will be a little better.

  

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades

[2] The revival of Japanese militarism-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/03/pers-a03.html

[3] chireviewofbooks.com/2021/04/21/terminal-bordom-izumi-suzuki/

[4] If Nazism had prevailed: The Amazon series The Man in the High Castle- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/21/high-a21.html

[5] How Izumi Suzuki Broke Science Fiction’s Boys’ Club- https://artreview.com/how-izumi-suzuki-broke-science-fiction-boys-club/

A Useful History of Britain-The Politics of Getting Things Done-Michael Braddick Oxford: University Press, 2021Hardback, 254 pp. ISBN 978-0198848301. £20

 

"But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavour toward better understanding."

― Marc Bloch

Marx "Men make their history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

Karl Marx

"There is an ancient, evolutionary-liberal epigram: Every people gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows that one and the same people may, in the course of a comparatively brief epoch, get very different governments. The secret is this, a people is comprised of hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and, in part, antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore, every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing "maturity" of a "people" but are the product of the struggle between different classes and the different layers within one and the same class, and, finally, the action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, wars and so on."

Leon Trotsky

It is not an understatement to say that Mike Braddick's latest book is not an easy read or, for that matter, easy to review. Written for an academic rather than general audience, Braddick appears to go out of his way to make his History of Britain difficult to read. The book is not set chronologically but jumps all over the place.  

As Simon Jenkins writes, "Braddick's abandonment of chronological narrative and his academic abstractions can be hard to follow. He races back and forth from the Ice Age to gross domestic product and from the Vikings to Covid-19. We return to Stonehenge three times and the Roman empire at least four. Chapter headings such as "Organisational Capacity and the Changing Limits of the Possible" can make it hard to know quite where it is that we have dipped our toes. I like such sweeping generalisations that econometrics is "the new Christianity", though I am not sure where it gets us."

Braddick is a gifted historian, and his work is usually well worth reading, but this book is really hard work. From the first page, it is hard to gauge Braddick's historiography, and the book's title does not help. It appears far too much a concession to an empirical way of thinking and a philosophical outlook uniquely British. I doubt any European historian, male or female, would be caught dead with such a title to their books.

A major disappointment is Braddicks tackling of revolutions. Both bourgeois and proletarian hardly get a mention. The bourgeois revolution of the 17th century, Braddicks speciality, hardly warrants a mention.

Braddick appears to be heavily influenced by the French historian Fernand Braudel[1] who championed the idea of the longue durée. As "Simon Jenkins writes ", Michael Braddick is a true Braudelian. He is a historian not of who, what and when but of how and why. From Stonehenge to Brexit and Danegeld to coronavirus, his concern is for the setting of history, its intellectual and physical environment, and "the capacity of British people to use political power to get things done".[2]

I am sure that Braddick would acknowledge that Braudel had strengths and very deep-seated weaknesses. As the Marxist writer Ann Talbot writes, "If Braudel's approach to history has its strengths, it also has disadvantages. These relate to two areas-historical change and socio-political history. Braudel was a conservative historian who, although living in a country whose name was synonymous with revolution, was averse to change, particularly sudden changes of a revolutionary character. He attempted to develop a form of socio-economic history that did not rely on Marxist concepts and stressed continuity rather than change."[3]

While raising his cap to certain Marxist concepts, Braddick is not Marxist. On page 10, he uses the following quote from Karl Marx "Men make their history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman republic and the Roman empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795. In like manner, a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language. He can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in using the new."[4]

One would like to say that Braddick's use of Marx guides the whole book, but that would be a lie. It is hard to understand why he used the quote in the first place because the historiography of this book is a million miles away from Marxism. While many reviewers have said that Braddick's book opposes previous nationalist readings of British history, it appears to be a "deconstruction", not just of British history but also of the discipline of history itself, as he seems to dispense with many historical concepts that historians have developed in the last three centuries.

 

 

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[1] www.oxfordreference.com

[2] Ideas made us: The resilience, so far, of our political institutions. Aug. 20, 2021

TLS. Times Literary Supplement(Issue 6177-

[3] Europe Between the Oceans by Barry Cunliffe- ww.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/book-o09.html

[4] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte(Braddick uses only part of the quote I reprint it in full)

Some Thoughts on Christopher Hill and the English Revolution: 50 years after TWTUD Conference

To what extent you could describe the conference as a success is hard to say. What is undoubtedly true is that it was a significant historical event drawing many historians of the Early Modern period and general members of the public. The conference was a counterblast at all the revisionist historians who not only attack Hill but believe his writings have no bearing on today's historiography.

It is a regret that more young people did not turn up because Hill certainly had something to say to this generation. His insight into deep insight historical questions would help them navigate some very choppy seas.

It is not within the realm of this short article to review the contents of the conference. While I understand organising it was a logistical nightmare, perhaps given the importance of the subject, it should have been spread over two days. You would not have the embarrassing spectacle of the main speaker being told to cut it short because the hall was only booked till 5 pm. I am sure that the papers presented will end up in a book.

If Penguin, who have the rights to the book TWTUD had any sense, they would re-issue it with a new updated forward. Mike Braddick would be a good choice for an introduction. Braddick, as was mentioned in the meeting, is working on a biography of Christopher Hill. It is quite staggering that this will be the first biography of this great historian.

A personal highlight was finally meeting the superb historian Rachel Hammersley. It is the first time I have been able to offer my condolences over the loss of her husband, the equally magnificent historian John Gurney. As she mentioned to me, John would have been in his element. Before he passed on, Rachel made sure his fantastic paper on Gerrard Winstanley was published. A nice touch would have been for Rachel to read and present the paper at the conference.[1]His death robbed the world of a very good historian who, in my mind, would have gone on to even great things.

It would have been interesting to know John's thoughts on Michael Braddick's assertion that Hill was a dialectical materialist. Perhaps a more pertinent question is the one posed by Ann Talbot her obituary of Christopher Hill[2] Talbot who asks, "What any serious reader interested in history or politics wants to know is, when we read Hill's books are we reading the work of an apologist for the Stalinist bureaucracy or of someone who was genuinely struggling to make a Marxist analysis of an aspect of English history? It has to be said that this is a complex question". 

It is a deep regret that the subject was not mentioned at a conference of this importance. This is hardly surprising given that no orthodox Marxist historian or politician was invited to the conference, let alone asked to give a paper. A Marxist historian may be requested when the sixtieth anniversary of the TWTUD Conference is organised.

 

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[1] Gerrard Winstanley and the Left -John Gurney-Past & Present, Volume 235, Issue 1, May 2017, Pages 179–206,

[2]"These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

Christopher Hill and the English Revolution: 50 Years after The World Tu...

David de Jong, Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties, Boston: Mariner Books, 2022, 400 pages.

"They ravage, they seize by false pretences, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace." 

Tacitus' Agricola

"We must first gain complete power if we want to crush the other side completely,"

Adolf Hitler

"When I recognised the Jew as the leader of the Social Democracy, the scales dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached its conclusion."

(Mein Kampf).

"Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet; Fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism."

From What Is National Socialism? by Leon Trotsky.

The publication of this book could not be more prescient as the possibility that once more German tanks could roll into Russian soil for a second time. A book that examines the bankrolling of the first fascist onslaught against the former Soviet Union, is very timely.

In Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties, published in late May of this year by Dutch financial journalist David de Jong shows that the current German ruling class owes its power and wealth to the Fascists and their billionaire supporters during the rise of the Nazi era.

 

Adolf Hitler at a reception of the laureates of the national awards for science and art in 1938 Germany. To his left stands Ferdinand Porsche, one of the co-founders of the Porsche sports car company. (Ullstein Bild / Getty Images)

De Jong's book differs from previous books on Nazi billionaires in that it examines five oligarch families unfamiliar to the general reader. Also, given that the book's author is still relatively young, he may be forgiven for targeting his book at today's generation who do not know about these Nazi billionaires. Many of whose Nazi past has only recently become public.

The book is a forensic study, densely researched, it took De Jong took four years to research. He carried out archival research throughout Germany, the EU, and the US using various primary sources - diaries, memories, newspapers - and academic studies on the families. The result is a  fast-paced and extremely readable book. De Jong's book stands on the shoulders of other works such as the 1985 work, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, by professor Henry Ashby Turner Jr., whose book has been the standard text on Hitler's early relationships with the German bourgeoisie.

De Jong is no Marxist, but it is hard not to draw the main thrust of his book that these  Nazi Billionaires financed Hitler's dictatorship to prevent a revolutionary uprising of workers in Germany. These billionaires are as much responsible for the mass destruction and mass murder as the Nazi dictatorship. As Ela Maartens and Verena Nees point out, "Most survived the denazification process unscathed—or, as Ferdinand Porsche wrote to a friend, "I was entbräunt [denazified] free of charge." Only a few, like Krupp and Flick, were convicted, albeit released a short time later. Friedrich Flick was convicted at Nuremberg of using forced and slave labour, bankrolling the SS and looting a steel factory. But he was released in 1960 and eventually became the controlling shareholder of Daimler-Benz, then Germany's biggest car manufacturer. Deutsche Bank bought the Flick conglomerate in 1985, turning his descendants into billionaires. Even the old leadership personnel were reinstated despite their Nazi past. The Quandts family also survived denazification unscathed. Günther Quandt was classified as a "Mitläufer" (a passive follower) after one and a half years of captivity in American camps. Like the other Nazi-era corporate patriarchs listed by de Jong, except for Friedrich Flick, he was never brought to trial."[1]

De Jong shows that even before the Nazis came to power, they cultivated a very intimate relationship with the growing number of billionaires who saw the Fascists as a bulwark against the revolutionary movement of the German working class. As early as 1931, they met with Nazi leaders at the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin. August von Finck, son of Wilhelm von Finck, a Bavarian banker, promised over five million Reichsmarks to arm the SA "as a stay against a putsch, which might devolve into civil war."

While many thoughts go through the readers' minds reading this book, one overriding thought is how the hell Germany's richest business dynasties, which made fortunes by supporting Adolf Hitler's Nazi dictatorship eight decades later, are still not being held accountable, let alone punished. German companies, such as  BMW and Porsche, and others that own US brands, such as Krispy Kreme and Pret A-Manger, have blood on their hands.

De Jong states, "What struck me was this is a country that's so cognisant of its history in many ways, but seemingly the most economically powerful actors do not engage with that. That was why I wrote the book, and it's an argument in favour of historical transparency. You have BMW and Porsche, particularly the families that control them, conduct this whitewashing or leaving out of history where they celebrate the business successes of their founders or saviours but leave out the fact that these men committed war crimes."I never got an answer whether it's because they are afraid it would hurt the bottom line or share prices of the companies to be fully transparent about the history or whether it's just because they derive their entire identity from the successes that their fathers and grandfathers had and, by being transparent about them, it's kind of disavowing their own identity. It's probably a combination of both."

From the standpoint of historiography, De jong's book is a rebuff to the current wave of historical revisionism that has taken a very malignant form. Led by the right-wing political commentator and convicted criminal  Dinesh D'Souza, who stupidly wrote that Nazis were called  "National Socialists," that the fascist movement was a left-wing movement and that Adolf Hitler was a product of "statism" gone wrong. Not only does De Jong's book counteract this infantile historiography, his book, while not downplaying politics and ideology, concentrates on the importance of economics in the rise of German Fascism. For a long time, most historiography on the rise of German Fascism has focused on politics and ideology to the detriment of research into the significance of economic issues in the rise to political prominence and power on the part of the National Socialists.

Asa Adam Tooze writes, "The originality of National Socialism was that rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilise the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order. Repeating what Europeans had done across the globe over the previous three centuries, Germany would carve out its imperial hinterland; by one last great land grab in the East, it would create the self-sufficient basis both for domestic affluence and the platform necessary to prevail in the coming superpower competition with the United States... The aggression of Hitler's regime can thus be rationalised as an intelligible response to the tensions stirred up by the uneven development of global capitalism. These tensions are, of course, still with us today."[2]

To Conclude De Jong has performed a vital public service with this book. He states "I think people should be more aware of these histories and history in general, particularly when it comes to consumption and the continuing whitewashing of history by these consumer brands and families that control them.". I heartily recommend this book, and it continues to get a wide readership.

 

Further reading

1.    Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy, and the Return of Fascism in Germany Paperback – March 31, 2019, by Christoph Vandreier

2.    The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany-Leon Trotsky  1st edition-

3.    Paperback (December 31 1971)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] Nazi Billionaires by David de Jong: How Hitler’s financiers are still in business- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/11/02/nazi-n02.html

[2] Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Allen Lane: 2006, 832 pages, now available in German translation