Although to the readers of Utopian Studies Darko Suvin remains perhaps best known for his criticism of science fiction, much of his recent writing has fallen into the category of Marxist political epistemology. Of note are In Leviathan’s Belly: Essays for a Counter-Revolutionary Time (2012), his analysis of former Yugoslavia in Splendour, Misery, and Potentialities: An X-ray of Socialist Yugoslavia (2017) as well as a number of shorter works on subjects that range from the Russian Revolution to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. For decades, Suvin has also written (about) poetry: he discussed verse already in the 1979 The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre and his poems have appeared in journals, critical volumes, and collections, most recently the Croatoserbian Bijasmo nečija budućnost: bilješke i bjesnila (1983–2022). The ten chronologically ordered essays and the ten nonchronologically ordered poetry sections of Communism, Poetry: Communicating Vessels (Some Insubordinate Essays, 1999–2018) therefore combine Suvin’s (re)current concerns. Most of the texts were previously published but gathering them (and reworking them) here presents the reader with a collection of the author’s leitmotifs of communism and poetry, war and terrorism, SFRY, tribal communism, as well as negativity and death.Two chapters of Communism, Poetry concern war and terrorism. The title of “Capitalism Means/Needs War” is also the chapter’s thesis as it illustrates how capitalism needs war because warfare buttresses its endangered economy: it is profitable for the ruling classes to obtain control over new territories, to dispose of surplus commodities, to stimulate the development of new technologies for murder, surveillance, and exploitation, and to open ways to brutal destruction of the poor who are not useful to capitalism either as producers or as consumers. Moreover, Suvin argues, war is an “allegorical essence” (31) of bourgeois relationships, ever-present in our daily lives not only in the form of outright military dictatorships but also as certain technoscience, competition, and identity politics perverted into hatred of the other since wars strengthen various chauvinisms and fundamentalisms by (re)inventing, actualizing and radicalizing identities behind which hide corporate backers and power-hungry elites who benefit from the mutually-isolating conflicts they generate.“Explorations of Terror, Terrorism, Anti-Terrorism” considers the difference between terrorism and war. The aim of terrorism, it is argued, is not immediate territorial control but altering the enemy’s policy in a way that territorial control becomes possible. Unrestrained by any code of conduct (such as the Geneva or Hague conventions), terrorism pursues power through exemplary killings that strike dread into the civilian population; it influences “through huge bodily harm the collective imagination by transfer contagion: an exasperated form of psychophysical warfare grafted upon techniques of economic and political propaganda in the media and spectacle age” (87). Particularly after 9/11, the methods of terrorism are adopted universally, although only a few practice terrorism in the name of antiterrorism, get access to military technology, and have the power to influence the collective imagination by sending terrorist messages through the media. Those who control the means and meanings of terrorism are the ruling classes of today’s capitalism. However, Suvin does not romanticize counterterrorism and observes that counterterrorism strengthens terrorism: the solution lies in eradicating its economic, political, and psychological causes.It may appear disproportionate that a book on communism and poetry would include an extensive analysis of war and terrorism; however, the two chapters discussed above provide solid grounds for Suvin’s discussion of communism. One may perhaps raise questions regarding the presumed US hegemony and consider the ruling classes more transnational, along the lines of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, but the essays were written between the years 1998 and 2004. Also, the horizons of “Capitalism Means/Needs War” and “Explorations of Terror, Terrorism, Anti-Terrorism” are rather dystopian but the remainder of Communism, Poetry considers utopian possibilities.If utopianism is characterized as a complex interrelationship of utopian theories, attempts to create alternative communities and literary utopias (to recall Lyman Tower Sargent’s classification of utopianism), then another four chapters of Communism, Poetry develop the first “face of utopianism.” As countless critics emphasized, we have the material means for creating a better world and to this end, Suvin cites John McMurtry’s point that poverty, illiteracy, homelessness, and major environmental pollution could be eradicated with only one quarter of the public monies expended in the world on weapons (39). There is nothing mystical about communism when it concerns basic material justice for all. Questions emerge concerning the channels of opposition, specific forms of governance, non-exploitative organization of production, and so on. In this context, critically returning to past revolutionary attempts to construct egalitarian societies and identifying their failures has become important for the left. “In the Shadows of Never-Ending Warfare: Use-Values of Lenin Today,” Suvin addresses the Russian Revolution but his principal focus is former Yugoslavia, in “15 Theses About Communism and Yugoslavia, or the Two-Headed Janus of Emancipation Through the State” and “Communism Can Only Be Radical Plebeian Democracy.” He develops the distinction Karl Marx drew in “On the Jewish Question” between complete emancipation and political/legal emancipation through the state, and translates this dualism into the context of SFRY, which leads him to describe the failure of SFRY as an abandonment of C1 (plebeian communism of social justice, disalienation and emancipation from below) in favor of C2 (official, state emancipation from above). In short, the eventual fencing off C1 and the fossilization of C2, caused by the elites’ hunger for power and self-determination without solidarity, is identified as the cause of former Yugoslavia’s downfall.This is not to argue that Communism, Poetry abandons the state and the party as viable if temporary means of human emancipation. “Political and legal emancipation through the State,” Suvin writes, “is, of course, a big step forward. It is the final step of human emancipation possible in the hitherto existing world-order and macro-framework of States and classes” (123). Until the functions of the state are handled by associations of citizens and producers through various institutions of direct and associative democracy, the state remains necessary. C1 is politically a question of developing “efficient and intertwined forms of both associative and direct democracy, in the interaction of State and the rest of society” (129). (Economically, it is “a matter of developing efficient and intertwined forms of many-sided and pyramidal planning”; philosophically, it involves “resisting all pretences to the One Final Truth” and “Oneness from top down” [129]). At this point, perhaps, in light of the above diagnosis of the fossilization of SFRY, the reader might want to hear more concerning what such a “transitional” state could look like, what mechanisms would guarantee its eventual substitution with civil society and, perhaps crucially, how would this state not obstruct global justice. If communism means overcoming the exploitation not only of the “internal” South but also of the global South, could not the aspiration be a temporary world state? Otherwise how is the state not to remain just about the worst practitioner of sectarian “identity politics,” which, as Suvin writes in another context, may be liberating strictly to the point when “justice is demanded only for one’s own group, regardless of whether this might lead to injustice or even crass humiliation and exploitation, up to genocide, of those defined as enemy Others” (34–35).Nevertheless, the horizons of Communism, Poetry are global and when Suvin moves to discussing the party, they become clearer. In “What Is to Be Done?: A First Step,” he appreciates the various anticapitalist movements of the past decades but doubts their potentials given the laxness of their organization, lack of durability, and composition of largely students and white-collar professionals. Instead, he proposes for the left to emerge as a critical oppositional mass, anticapitalist plebeian civil society in Marx’s original sense, drawing on energies of all those hurt by capitalism—the marginalized, the working classes, the unemployed, the majority of women, and plebeians of the South. Although the convergence and political organization of the world’s proletarians is the most difficult task, in a call-and-response manner reminiscent of Hardt and Negri’s Assembly, Suvin proposes specific means of political organization. Countering common objections to leadership and coordination from a center, his argument crystallizes into a utopian vision of a party, or a group of parties, formulated around a “central red thread”: the demand for global redistribution of wealth. Again, a global party (or an association of parties) is an idea the reader might want to hear more about. It proposes to unite multitudes but questions linger in the background, from issues of representation to the tools for such a massive party’s organization. How to mobilize, channel, and unite the rebellion potential of the world’s exploited and oppressed toward the ruling classes as well the compassion potential among the multitudes themselves in a manner that would not involve only a minority? What existing structures to start with? And (again), how would such an association not become ossified but lead instead toward “the self-government of associated proletarians” (152)? Time for poetry.If the above-mentioned four chapters respond to the dystopian framework of war and terrorism by developing along Marx’s description of communism as the movement that abolishes the present state of things, the remaining four essays in Communism, Poetry circle around Marx’s perhaps more known description of communism as hunting, fishing, rearing cattle, and criticizing without becoming a hunter, fisher, shepherd, or critic. For however metaphorical the latter description is, there is a sense of content, and the remaining chapters of Suvin’s collection speculate about communism as not only an abolishing movement but also a utopian vision. Similarly to “utopia,” the word “communism” has been used in reference to various non-egalitarian and oppressive communities, and the problem is how to maintain the word as a vessel of thought and hope. Although Suvin admits that “origins and root meanings in semantics do not prove much, since meanings change in history,” he proposes that a word has a long-duration nucleus of meanings that “underlie in a semi-conscious way its present uses” (203). Tracing the etymology of “communism” and also considering its three modern variants (Marx’s, Kropotkin’s and Stalin’s), at various points he associates communism with the preservation of humanity and its ecosystem, self-determination, peace, nonalienated labor and sharing. His perhaps most acute description of communism is asAlthough “Power Without Violence: A Lesson from Tribal Communism” is devoted to the “primitive communism” of the Paraguayan Mbya tribe, hereby developing the second, “communitarian,” face of utopianism, Suvin’s vision of communism in these chapters remains for the most part literary and linked to poetry. “What and How Are Poets for in Our Age of Want” suggests that poetry does not have political power, or not political power in the above sense of states and parties; poetry is political and poets may participate in politics but poetry changes nothing directly, even if “it is a kind of prefiguration incarnating elements and aspects of the possible and necessary revolution to come” (207). That poetry is different from politics is evident from Bertolt Brecht’s rewriting and versification of The Communist Manifesto in “Manifesto,” a poem translated and analyzed by Suvin. For “technical readers,” there is an analysis of the poem’s stylistic features; for “substantial readers,” there is a discussion of poetry and “doctrine”; for those who might consider the poem a manifesto, there is the fact that “Manifesto” remains unfinished because Brecht himself was unsure who the readers might be. This is not to disassociate poetry from politics but to ask: “How much, and just where and how, in what parts or aspects, is this poem applicable to the present day? How much can its various passages as well as its overall tone and stance be of use in vitally needed present-day debates?” (67)In the end, poetry’s power and closest link to communism lie in its formulation of counterhegemonic cognition. As Brecht’s “Manifesto,” “poetry is here not only in strong opposition to the stifling superficial babbling of the reigning, totally ideologised doxa of the capitalist media or brainwashed common sense, but its main reason for existing is to be a ‘stumbling block’ for the hegemonic babble” (69). In poetry, the subject is present, rational discourse is never severed from emotion, and counterhegemonic cognition is formed: “This means, literally, that the creative poet is one who doubts the views, opinions, and stances of the reigning lore or common sense, one who swerves from them by infringing old usages and meanings and implicitly or explicitly creates—or at least is groping for, foreboding—new ones” (270). As evidence one may recall slave songs, IWW mobilization poems, love poetry against World War II, or anti-McCarthyism poems. But a more skeptical voice might ask, what about blatantly military, fascist, orthodox religious, nationalist, or anticommunist poetry (not to mention certain politician-poets)? The question would in a sense echo a debate familiar to Utopian Studies readers, concerning Suvin’s definition of science fiction as cognitive estrangement, which links the genre to countenhegemonic cognition (rather than to how it is commonly and commercially defined). Suvin’s argument in Communism, Poetry is eventually less about poetry as counterhegemonic cognition than about counterhegemonic cognition as poetry. Indeed, he proposes that “valid literary cognition [. . .] in narrative, plays, verse, essays, and so on [. . .] but also [. . .] the other visual and auditive arts can in major ways be called poetry” (196).Still, Communism, Poetry focuses on poetry conventionally understood and perhaps most explicitly utopian in the collection are Suvin’s poems themselves. If the pessimism of the war and terrorism essays is countered with forceful but uncertain propositions of political organization, the poems move from angry denunciation to prophetic annunciation. None included here would fit the author’s own definition of utopia but there is hope, usually concentrated in the poems’ concluding lines. In “Mehr Licht,” “We have / Our alternative” (25); in “Reading Cecco’s S’i’ fosse,”“women, learners, lovers, workers, / The insurgent four whales that bear the world, / With robust love may turn it upside down” (111). If imagining communism involves “discerning in our actuality tendencies which point towards it,”1 Suvin’s poems evoke the communist horizon through an affirmation of “compassion, indignation, and love” (27). Compassion (or “critical sympathy”), indignation, and love—both as Eros and as Agape and always as counterpower to death: “To Death Love beats a countermeter” (193).In conclusion, Communism, Poetry is an erudite contribution to many issues that have preoccupied not only Marxist critics but Utopian Studies readers at large. The collection’s central concerns—denunciation of warfare capitalism and envisioning of communism, as a movement and as poetry—have become even more pertinent since the book was published. In developing the three faces of utopianism, its “philosophical (and then scientific and artistic) inquiry is sparked by wonder, without terror” (92), by critique, and by hope.