China Miéville on “October: The Story of the Russian Revolution”

all right thank you all for coming we're going to go ahead and get started so yeah thanks for coming this is probably one of our more exciting events here at verso we'll be passing around event sign up for if anyone's interested in getting on our listserv for events and parties this event will be live streamed to our Facebook and we'll be live tweeting so if you'd like to tweet it out just be sure to tag verso and we'll be sure to see you we have books on sale if you'd like Chyna's book to be signed I'm sorry China but we have them on sale for 20 over there as well as all of our Russian Revolution series books are 50% off we do take card in cash and please help yourself to beer and wine please be 21 so tonight we have China Mieville Canada Mabel China Mabel is a multi award-winning author of many works of fiction and nonfiction his fiction includes the city in the city embassy town the scar this census taker the last days of new Paris among many others he's won the Hugo World Fantasy Award and the arthur c clarke awards his fiction history to me his nonfiction includes both photo Illustrated essay london's overthrow in between equal rights a marxist history of international law he's written for various publications including the New York Times The Guardian conjunctions and Granta and he is currently the founding editor of the quarterly Salvage which you should all subscribe to @ww Salvaggio m-- the New York Times recently commented not that his novels skitter among genres map mag piping elements from science fiction fantasy urban fantasy traditional fairy tales steampunks and horror so perhaps the weirdest thing that maple could do at this point is write about the real world which is what he does in October his new nonfiction about the Russian Revolution in 1917 for tonight's talk we have with us we're thankful to have Barbara Allen and Bhaskar Sankara associate professor of history at LaSalle University - in Philadelphia Barbara Allen has published numerous articles on the history of Russia and the Soviet Union and is the author of Alex Ayyappan o'clock life of the old Bolshevik published by Haymarket books and we have it available on sale also joining us is Bhaskar zoom Clara found the editor of Jacobin magazine he's the editor of several books including ABCs of socialism published by verso and Europe and revolt mapping the new European left published by Haymarket books after the presentations they'll have a discussion then we'll open it to Q&A and afterwards please feel free to say for drinks and discussion yeah and thank you for coming thank you so much for coming I would stand but I think if I do I there's no this mic is too low so my instinct is to stand but so I'm being more formal in my imagination so just one tiny thing I have to say I'm one of the founding editors of Salvage no no I just I I really cannot take the bulk of the credit bulk creditors are as our editor-in-chief Rosie Warren who is here thank you and thank you all so very very much to to Barbara and Basco they couldn't have better into offices I'm really honored so I'm going to I'm going to do a little reading from the book for about 15 minutes but I want to kind of set the scene first which is and I apologize incidentally if anyone's heard me talking about this book before I'm going to repeat myself I only have a certain number of opinions and thoughts I just have to kind of try and recycle them as creatively as I can this book is it's obviously some somewhat unusual for the sort of things that I have mostly written and it had a an unusual etiology in several senses one of them being that that when I was discussing this book with Sebastian budgin my editor we were expecting to be jostling in a crowded marketplace we thought centenary of the Russian Revolution whatever your politics one of the most Epoque one of the VIII epochal event of the 20th century and beyond you know we're going to be fighting for space here so we got to make this as good as possible so there's good news and there's bad news you know the good news is were not fighting for space in terms of narrative histories especially for the new reader the bad users we're not fighting for space with narrative histories for the new reader because of a kind of kind of systematic political forgetting I think now this book the bulk of the book this is a book and that you know a history written by a leftist although it is not a history for leftist necessarily it but I have my heroes I have my villains and particularly in the epilogue I do start to kind of engage somewhat with more of the kind of political issues and the the shadow cast backwards from history across the incredible events of 1917 itself so I'm going to do something I would never do for my fiction readings which is I'm going to read from the ending because tragically in this situation spoilers are a bit redundant spoiler alert it doesn't end well and that also means this is somewhat of a misleading reading because I've chosen several sections to put together for a 15 minute reading and the tone is I think much more elegiac and ruminative than it is in the rest of the book so in many many ways this is a really inappropriate and misleading reading so I hope you will bear with me but it does also address the ghost in the room of October that strange book what is to be done costs a long shadow in 1902 Lenin named his own seminal tracked on leftist organization after the novel of 40 years previously Nicolae Ceausescu's story is interspersed with dream sequences in the most celebrated the protagonist Vera pavlova journeys from the ancient past to a strange affecting utopian future the hinge of the dream the fulcrum from history to possibility consists in its entirety of two rows of dots something ostentatiously unspoken behind that ellipsis lay revolution with such discretion the author evaded the censor but there is something almost religious - in this unright ingush son of a priest a pathetic theology considers God as beyond language and here is an apathetic revolution ISM in its potential for utter reconfiguring revolution is beyond words a messianic interruption but one that emerges from the quotidian unsayable yet the culmination of everyday exhortations oh my love now I know all your freedoms I know that it will come Jonas sheir Sookie has Vera urgently gasp after that word lessness but what will it be like today that question can only hurt lazy evening of the 26th of October 1917 the day after the insurrection Lenin speaks his first famous words to the Congress of Soviets we shall now proceed to construct the socialist order the war has ended comes a hushed exclamation the war is ended delegates sob they break not into celebratory but funeral song honoring those who have died in the struggle for this moment but the war is not yet ended and the order to come will be anything but socialist for a while then in remains bullish about the prospects for international revolution long held to be the only context in which the Russian Revolution might survive Germany is in the throes of upheaval a Soviet government arises in Hungary struggle erupts in Austria Italy sees two red years but instance by instance the wave is quelled the Bolsheviks wake up to their isolation as the situation within their borders too becomes desperate they must fight several counter-revolutionary or white forces backed by foreign powers by 1919 Russian territory is occupied by American and French British Japanese Germans Serbian and Polish troops and socialism is more Aksum to the Americans and British and French than are their wartime foes Churchill is particularly obsessed with the foul boo-boo Larry of Bolshevism as the war ends he declares his intention to kill the ball she kiss the Hun the Allies screw down an embargo against the starving population white forces unleashed butchery burning villages killing tens of thousands of Jews in enthusiastic pogroms performing exemplary torture had they won not Italian but Russian would have given the world the word for fascism Trotsky says these are months and years of unspeakable barbarity and suffering starvation mass deaths the near total collapse of Industry and culture of banditry and cannibalism and the beleaguered regime unleashes its own red terror and its reach and depth expands beyond control some agents of the Cheka the political police seduced by personal power sadism or the degradation of the moment are thugs and murderers others carry out their work with anguish one may feel skeptical even disgusted as an attempt under desperate necessity as an ethical terror a terror as limited as possible but the testimonials of agents tormented at what they believed they had to do are powerful I have spilt so much blood I no longer have any right to live says the drunken and distraught check ahead of Jasinski in 1918 many of the soviet regime's leaders struggle to restrain the degrading tendencies of their own terror of which they are horribly aware but a political and moral rot is without question setting in face would collapse the regime rolls back the desperate militarized control known as war communism from 21 to 27 it encourages some private enterprise and spills and wheeler-dealers make good on speculation and the burgeoning black market the country Labor's through a rubble of Industry agriculture and the working class itself the bureaucratic apparatus is suspended now above the remnants of the class for which it claims to speak then his health is failing struggles in what has been called his final fight against the bureaucratic tendencies the ossification and corruption he sees spreading he grows suspicious of Stalin's personality his place in the Machine insists he be removed from his post his advice is not followed Lenin dies in January 1924 the most ostentatious element of the grotesque death cult that is launched remains in place today his gnarled and ghastly corpse receiving a basin's from its catafalque in 1924 against the protests of Trotsky and others the party performs a Gideon about-face accepting Stalin's claim that in general the victory of socialism is unconditionally possible in one country this is a dramatic reversal of a foundational thesis a shift born of despair as prospects for international support recede but if it is utopian to hope that help is around the corner how much more so is it to wager on the impossible or turkic socialism a hard-headed pessimism would be less damaging than this bad hope its effects are devastating as any vestigial culture of debate and democracy Withers Stalin builds up his own power his own status as most equal of all party activists are hounded to betray each other and confess to preposterous crimes with stentorian declarations they are executed by this counter-revolution against their tradition in that traditions name and with this comes a revival of statism and anti-semitism and nationalism and bleakly reactionary norms and culture sexuality family life Stalinism a police state of paranoia cruelty murder and kitsch after a protracted samake the word means both Twilight and the darkness before dawn a long spell of what the poet Asif Mandelstam remembering the start of 1917 calls liberties dim light what might have been a sunrise becomes a sunset there have been a hundred years of crew a historical ignorant bad-faith and opportunist attacks on october without echoing such sneers we must nonetheless interrogate the revolution the old regime was vile and violent Russian liberalism weak and quick to make common cause with reaction all the same is the gulag the Telos of 1917 that objective strains face the new regime is clear and there are subjective factors two questions we must pose nothing is given but had say the internationalists of other groups not walked out on the night of the revolution a less monolithic and embattled government just might have been an outcome which is not to exonerate the Bolsheviks for their own mistakes or worse in January 1923 Lenin rather startlingly allows us incontrovertible that Russia had not been ready for revolution in 1917 but he wonders pugnaciously whether our people influenced by the hopelessness of its situation could be blamed for flinging itself into a struggle that would offer it at least some chance of securing conditions for the further development of civilization it is not absurd to argue that the ground down of Russia had no choice but to act on the chance that in doing so they might alter their situation but the party's shift after Lenin's death from that plaintive embattled sense that there had been little alternative but to strive in in perfect conditions to the later bad hope of socialism in one country there's a baleful result of recasting necessity as virtue we see a similar curdling tendency in the depiction of war communism as desiderata rather than desperation or a censorship say as an expression of anything other than weakness we see it in the troduce and misrepresentation of opponents those on the side of the revolution must engage with these failures and crimes to do otherwise is to fall into apologia and special pleading hagiography and to risk repeating mistakes it is not for nostalgia sake that the strange story of the first socialist revolution in history deserves celebration the standard of October declares that things changed once and they might do so again it brings for an instant a new kind of power fleetingly a shift towards workers control of production the rights of peasants in Latin to the land equal rights for men and women in work and marriage to divorce maternity support the decriminalization of homosexuality a hundred years ago national self-determination free universal education the expansion of literacy and a cultural explosion a change in the soul as much as in the factory and though those moments are snuffed out become bleak jokes and memories all too soon it might have been otherwise it might have been different for these were only the first and most faltering steps the revolutionaries want a new country in a new world one they cannot see but believe they can build and they believe that in so doing the builders will build themselves anew it would be absurd ridiculous myopia to hold up October as a simple lens through which to view today but it has been a long century a long dusk of spite and cruelty the excrescence and essence of its time Twilight even remembered Twilight is better than no light at all and it would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing we can learn from the revolution to deny that the summary of October can be ours and that it need not always be followed by night the journalist john reed reports the speech of one anti revolution politician to his colleagues it is beneath our dignity to be shot down here in the street by switchman then what he meant by switchman he says I never discovered there is a probable answer in an unlikely place in 1917 the Yiddish writer Haim grade was a young child in Lithuania much later in the glossary to the English translation of his memoirs he describes the switchman booths along the railroad tracks in the vicinity of Vilna before the Revolution of 1917 he says the area around the forest shacks was the clandestine meeting place for the local revolutionaries it seems that the word switchman was an epithet for revolutionaries there was a kind of bleak rigor to the dogmas of many who opposed the revolution including on the left the epochs according to their view must succeed one another perforce like stations along a line and Russia was not ready if it would ever be little wonder such thinkers would scorn the Bolsheviks and others as switch men what could be more inimical to any trace of TV ology than those who take account of the alternate lines of history or who take to them the Revolution of 1917 is a revolution of trains history preceding in screams of cold metal the Tsar's wheeled palace shunted onto sidings forever Lenin's sealed stateless carriage trains Criss crossing Russia heavy with desperate deserters revolutions Marx said are the locomotives of history but the locomotive into top gear Lenin exhausted himself in a private note just weeks after october keep it on the rails but how if there is one true line one way and it is blocked in 1937 bruno schultz ruminates dizzyingly on events that have no place of their own in time the possibility that all the seats within time might have been sold conductor where are you don't let's get excited have you ever heard of parallel streams of time within a two track time yes there are such branch lines of time somewhat illegal and suspect but when like us one is burdened with contraband of supernumerary events that cannot be registered one cannot be too fussy let us try to find at some point of history such a branch line a blind track onto which to shunt these illegal events there is nothing to fear by the forests shacks other points switches onto hidden tracks through wilder history the question is not only who should be driving the engine but where there are those with something to fear and they police these suspect illegal branch lines all the while insisting that they do not exist on two such tracks the revolutionaries divert their train with it's contraband cargo unregister Abel supernumerary powering up for a horizon an edge as far away as ever and yet careering closer or so it looks from the liberated trained in liberties dim light thank [Applause] and thank you all for coming I'm pleased to be here to help celebrate the launch of China's wonderfully engaging narrative of the Russian Revolution in this year its 100th anniversary my comments will relate to anniversaries of the revolution and we'll weave in some of the biography of Alexander swapnika anniversaries of some unsuccessful revolutionary events have been used to press continuing grievances against repressive regimes that was the case with the anniversaries of Bloody Sunday January 9th 1905 in Russia prior to the 1917 revolution when peaceful petitioners marched on bazaars Palace and were mowing down these anniversaries were marked with illegal demonstrations strikes and other protests with the Bolsheviks victory in the Russian Civil War their revolutionary anniversaries over time became celebrations that reinforced the power of the one-party state since the collapse of the USSR Russia's government has found it difficult to deal with the legacy of 1917 it replaced the holiday marking the Bolshevik seizure of power with a day of national unity celebrated a few days earlier and associated with military victories expelling foreign invaders the 100th anniversary of the entire revolutionary year of 1917 is complex for it encompasses events with different meanings for socialist liberals nationalists and conservatives the memory of these events stirs tension as one considers that in coming years we will meet with thee we will meet the 100th anniversaries of Russian Civil War battles massacres and pogroms indeed commemoration of the revolution arises out of the 100th anniversary of the conflagration of World War 1 in 1927 ten years after the Russian Revolution socialist feminist Alexandra Colin ty was Soviet ambassador to Sweden the Norway she found herself assisting her comrade from the former workers opposition Alexander schlock Vika and his negotiations of trade agreements with Scandinavian countries for machinery and metals imports to the USSR as a side note to her businesslike advice to him she reminded him of their romantic stroll in Paris in 1911 when they began an affair that would last into 1916 she remarked that if anyone had told them been that 16 years later they would be corresponding about the quality and price of iron they simply would not have believed it by the later years of the new economic policy revolutionary romanticism seemed to have surrendered to the realities of power in a country desperate for machines and metals to build industry that would help realize the socialist dream Stalin sought to harness the idealism of a new generation to carry out his own revolution in 1928 to 32 but many of the old Bolsheviks who would perish in his great terror in 1936 to 38 self saw Stalin society as a perversion of their dream in the twentieth anniversary year of the revolution 1937 Alexander shot because like many other old Bolsheviks was executed having been convicted falsely of leading an anti-soviet terrorist organization the so-called workers opposition he was cremated and buried in an unmarked grave his memoir histories of the revolutionary movement had been banned already in 1932 and his revolutionary past would be omitted or distorted in Soviet history textbooks for decades to come his personal documents would be sequestered away in secret archives his wife arrested and their children separated and sent to orphanages memory of him was suppressed but not erased however Colin ties survived the terror her diary entries in 1936 and 1938 framing the 20th anniversary year mourned her innocent friends who were being destroyed and expressed trepidation that she too though without guilt might fall a victim for decades revolutionary holidays celebrated in Stalin's role or that of the party without mentioning individuals who had been disgraced then came the release of prisoners from the gulag and the Thal under Nikita Khrushchev in the 50th anniversary year of the Revolution 1967 historian Edward burrows olives book the February 1917 uprising in Petrograd was published in the USSR what a Jolliffe history crested the wave of a thaw in Soviet historiography and he restored Schlacht Macca's memoirs to their place as valuable sources about the Revolutionary Year by the time an english translation of his book was published in 1987 the 70th anniversary year of the Russian Revolution the Soviet Union was gripped by Gorbachev's policies of glossiness to openness and perestroika restructuring which were necessarily accompanied by the political rehabilitation of Stalin's political rivals and reconsideration of the various alternatives within the Russian Communist Party by 1997 the 80th anniversary of the revolution most Russians had abandoned thoughts of alternatives to Stalinism within the communist tradition and instead we're struggling to adapt to the unstable and unpredictable economic conditions of the Yeltsin era yet at the same time the opening of former Soviet archives had allowed both Russian and foreign scholars to explore the events of 1917 in ways not possible before through the eyes of women peasants inhabitants of the provinces minority nationalities and by publishing documents from the history of non Bolshevik parties and so forth now we have reached 100 years since the Russian Revolution of 1917 numerous special conferences and panels are being held to mark the anniversary and books about the revolution have been published new ones some of the topics are old about workers sailors dual power while others explore new themes like gender sexuality and memory some focus on the events in Russia while others look at the revolutions international context and its reverberations not only in Europe but also in European colonies ideological this very as some conference organizers seek lessons from the Russian Revolution for building a more successful revolutionary socialist movement while others hope to discover why the liberal institutions formed during the February revolution failed to take root nationalism remains on the scene as well for one conference looks at 1917 not primarily as the year of a Russian Revolution but as the first year of Ukraine's short-lived statehood not only have conferences been held in books published but numerous museum exhibits around the world are showcasing artifacts from 1917 during this anniversary year for example the state central museum of contemporary history of Russia and Moscow put on display over 1500 rare October 1917 revolution artifacts including handwritten notes by Bolshevik leader of labour Lenin in a window from the iconic Cruiser of order one of the most promising developments during the 100th anniversary year has been the explosion of digitized primary sources about the revolution which are going online Russian archives and libraries are digitizing and posting on their websites copies of 1917 documents newspapers memoirs images and more all of this should enable students of the revolution to draw meaning from it for decades to come for all these developments to have an impact however the revolution must remain alive and engaging in popular culture China may bills book October serves this goal by means of its energetic style vivid characterizations and rapid pace it rekindles the optimistic spirit of the Russian revolutionaries in 1917 before civil war crashed upon the people perhaps this book will help rescue the Russian Revolution from his near disappearance and many current history textbooks and in popular awareness I congratulate him upon the release of his book thank you when a web server so asked me to do this event I was I was hesitant one of the reasons why I was hesitant it was because I don't get out of the house much and I do maybe ten events here a year so basically like 20 percent of the time that I go out to a social event it's too diverse Oh first a loss so so that was one reason but the other one was I think the the Russian Revolution is something where you know I I was very confident my opinions of it after I read like two books then I think now beat up being a socialist for more than a decade and you know we focus a lot in 1917 and the Socialist Movement for for good and bad now like thirty books in I'm you know more uncertain than ever and I feel like maybe I'll regain my confidence but it's going to take 20 more books but but China is definitely you know one that was I was happy to to read in the scripting and engaging now I I think one of the lessons of the the Bolshevik Revolution is that to begin with the old cliche stanza started with the best of intentions and you know that's that's not to kind of recant you know Dante or anything it's actually because the mainline nostalgia fee of the Bolshevik Revolution would deny you know even even that the alternative to Bolshevik rule was in the best scenario some type of dictatorship similar to the right-wing dictatorship you had in what they pull in in the interwar you know period in the worst case it was like China you know alludes to a kind of genocide 'el you know anti-semitic state that I think well actually would been quite a bit worse than Italian fascism you know for one thing there were hundreds of thousands and millions of not just socialists but left social revolutionaries and Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and you could imagine the type of repression it would have taken to actually crush the worker insurgencies that were going on it would be on a scale they would would have been completely unimaginable now you know where did the Bolsheviks go wrong there was a large bit of literature that was devoted to essentially a culturalist answered this question and it boiled down to not just the nature of pre-revolution Russian political culture or institutions but in particular to kind of like certain things about the Slavic character and whatnot of course we reject those explanations out of hand there was a much more common and prevalent view a beauty was embraced not just by cold warriors but by Stalinist as well which was and of course the Stalinist wouldn't often call themselves colonists that we call themselves just Leninist because they were pushing through a view they had in common with these cold warriors which is a continuity between Lenin and Stalin a very neat continuity that I think we should reject but with some some caveats for one thing in these narratives the Bolshevik Party was from the beginning kind of prototype a latarian it was a party that had a conspiratorial as a professional party a party of revolutionaries with a conspiratorial view of the world intent on launching a coup and seizing power and making the rest of the world catch up to their their ideas now in fact the pre-war Bolshevik Party was radically democratic I mean one anecdote that I like is that Lenin had a number of Iskra articles rejected now this is something that's even hard to imagine I'm a member of a very soft and tame kind of Pinker organization the Democratic socialists of America and if I if I even me is like a mid-level cadre in this organization submitted something to our paper and had it rejected you not be happy outraged but Lenin Lenin was not not only you know willing to go along with this not only did he lose many political arguments in his day but in fact he on multiple occasions didn't even have his views aired and the party press now in many ways Bolshevism wasn't a break with European social democracy was an attempt to take the logic of pre-war European social democracy and apply it to Russian conditions you know harsh conditions conditions of illegality and so on and in many ways it was the Bolsheviks to remain true to social democracy even after the mainstream of social democracy had betrayed its ideal by in the main stage going with going along with imperialist war so essentially the right of social democracy you know we don't have to moralize it about it they weren't bad people who betrayed an idea just because of personal opportunism or greed or whatnot there was a certain logic to what the right of pre-war social mah cracy did they saw that the workers movement gained when capitalism was stable and profitable they saw that they gained more ability to win things for these workers as they represented and of course at a mass base they had the bulk at least in Germany of the trade unions behind them and whatnot when they had a certain degree of power and legitimacy and this legitimacy in part came from not just a popular support but from legitimacy within policial all stratas within the state and whatnot and they decided then therefore when capitalism is unstable we stabilized and therefore when you know the national interest is at stake we show that we can prove ourselves to be worthy inheritors of power and the natural instincts this was the logic of the right and it's a logic that again we could disagree with politically but it's coherent the logic of the left was to see this situation essentially call for a break call with for for rupture so in other words if capitalism is prone to crisis and unstable and in the long run there would be all this polls to prevent a kind of break with capitalism when the moment strikes we must take advantage of it otherwise we end up kind of dealing with who knows how many contradictions of capitalism over and over again more we shouldn't forget killed 16 million people the scale the the disaster of the Great War can't be understated to the left of Luxembourg of Lenin and often they're separated literature but but in in kind of reality they were very close and many ways you know Lenin's view on national liberation and so on were actually quite a bit softer and more enlightened than in Luxembourg and I say that only because in a certain type of literature you know Luxembourg and Gramps we are kept as kind of the heroes and Lenin is isolated vilified but in fact they showed far more commonalities and difference the center of social democracy you know my own tradition was in a contradictory place it basically advocated rhetorically for the politics for blood brake a politics of a rupture but in practice were was unable to break with the day-to-day practice of the the right wing of social moccasin but this was the condition before before the Russian Revolution there was no kind of special Leninist kind of professional revolutionary cadre intent on a coup that was violating the norms of European social democracy these debates were very much in line with what were happening elsewhere i justed for one the tactical and strategic genius of Lenin and the Bolsheviks party actually through feeding or other failed and also you know the fact they were operating under the most reactionary regime in in Europe now where I think we can condemn or question the Bolsheviks is not their attempt at October is not there the revolution which did have especially after the August coup a great degree of legitimacy but the fact that even before the start of the civil war they had started to like China as as soon as epilogue in his discussion make a virtue out of necessity the secret police in Russia were started about a month a little bit less than a month and a half before the the start of it the civil war essentially I think a lot of the problems with the Bolsheviks in powers they lack the theory of politics you don't well at the one hand the slogan that help us with them the power was all power to the Soviets the actual Soviets themselves had different overlapping jurisdictions there was all these kind of contradictions in place socialists weren't thinking about what a socialist politics of what jurisprudence would look like under socialism and whatnot and they seemed like trivial things in an opposition it often seems like a trivial thing but they begin to matter very very quickly Lenin himself embraced in the early years a kind of red jackman ISM and it's selling I think that Lenin looked favorably more far more favorably than Luxembourg and Trotsky and others to the to the French revolutionaries then then Marx was traditionally did and this was most telling because of his favourites of things like collective punishment so not only would you be responsible for a crime but your family would as well and this kind of change rhetorically released to collective responsibility for certain social classes so there's a famous quote by one of the deputy comas arse of the of Jeopardy chairs of the Ukrainian secret police at the time in 1918 which goes something like you know we don't judge people based on what they do necessarily so much as their guilt is determined by which total social strata strata they come from and IIIi think I think beyond that though the tragedy the Russian Revolution was also the belief that you know the kind of economic failures and and difficulties in Russia was experiencing was solely due to sabotage to do kind of grain supplies being stolen or because of speculation or manipulation and and whatnot so there was assumption then in the immediate stage of the war is that some type of kind of collective new forms of agriculture mind you they wouldn't be forced collectivization to be voluntary we're naturally out-compete smallholder peasant agriculture now if you find and you could either say this is something kind of more deeply rooted or you could say this is kind of an accident of public particular you know objective conditions of Russia was in that's the smallholder you know peasant agriculture was in fact more efficient either you build your your economic system around it either you adjust for it like the I think certain aspects is an EP did or you have to deal with some level of coercion now that isn't to say of course that Stalin you know with the natural outgrowth of Lenin the accesses of sound is a more extreme Stalinism sought not just the control country's political and economic life but control over the arts culture and things like like that now then you know the real question is where the Bolsheviks wrong to make their revolution were they wrong on the mistakes they made to some degree you could say that Lenin made a virtue of necessity made mistakes but this was the very first experiment at socialist governance socialist democracy was eroded over time but it was still something that even the Bolsheviks during the war communist period were you know referring to if you actually read the books like ABCs of communism there's there's it's filled with caveat saying of course it shouldn't actually be like this of course is the short term necessity and so on you know they were filled with these caveats and and hesitations the crime that Leninism became when it mutated and Stalinist form was that every single other experience of worker led government be it in the third world be in the Eastern Bloc and elsewhere never even started from the starting point of saying we're going to create socialist democracy then maybe things will degenerate as we hit roadblocks it truly took what this system became by the late 1920s and early 1930s as a model for for governance and increasingly and this is something that that should be said against against Lenin increasingly these compromises where we're just saying oh this is your socialism workers control that's just controlled particular workers at a factory council that's not control of a class and we're about class control and whatnot so you know essentially what do we take away from all this I think it's key that we remember a hundred years after the acouple revolution at a time that's going to be filled with recriminations about what the Bolsheviks did wrong what happened wrong was the unseen or on talked about crime of Tsar ISM the lasted for four centuries the crimes have served them that came with a poverty and disorder and the immediate crime of the great war that puts 60 million soldiers into battle that produced arms and weapons at a time when people were starving and the bridge was VA continually said to people there's not enough there's not enough for you live decently is that enough for you to to cap clothes and basic necessities but there's enough to create armaments to kill 16 million people these were the conditions the Bolsheviks made their revolution decide to break from capitalism and it was with the idea that these periodic crises would happen more and more often now where does that leave us today in the West 100 years after now me I'm just a soft left Social Democrat of sorts you know I think in many ways we have a lot to also learn from the experiences of you know Sweden in the 1970s the left-wing of social democracy that encountered certain contradictions of a certain form of socialism and tried to go beyond it and failed but I think one thing we we can learn is that the actual idea that Lenin embarked on when he went to send the station the idea of breaking with capitalism of creating a better world of getting rid of class society and the the suffering amid abundance we had today was correct and in a way we should need to return to Finland station but with more caution and maybe a little bit less hubris and before unluckily you know I think we we have a bit better conditions to do so than they did in the country with math to literacy with working class was maybe like five percent of the population and so on that was where I was going to end it I realize it's pretty bad bad note and on but you should read China's book it's excellent that's it okay yes I think we have like what 25 minutes 20 minutes okay will you give us a wave when we've got time for like one more so if anyone wants to chip in or ask any questions or anything is there going to be a yeah we have to mic yeah so we'll have two mics on each side try to keep your questions two questions you forget yeah Annie will be taking that side and I'll handle over here if you're able to try to come to the front if I call on you if not I can come to you but if I could see some hands that'd be good Andy yes hi thank you for your book I started reading it earlier this week and what I found great about it is that it had a kind of historical narrative style similar to CLR James in the black jacket and where you're immersed in the kind of everyday events and the contours and landscape of a revolution um but what I think is different is the prehistory that's provided and something I kind of wanted to ask about is particularly the role that ethnic and religious minorities played in Marxist organizing and parties particularly Jewish Russians who under the Czarist regime were very much oppressed but then also these of the Marxist reading circles and other forms of organizing were able to be militant and tenacious leaders and then outside of that there's a point in one of the chapters there's some kind of Muslim Congress where Muslim people who are part of the the Soviets and Russia had a Congress in which they demanded and talked about religious oppression and that in one of those conferences there was like 25 percent of it was women and they said if we are granted rights we'll see you soon and I think that's something that's often left out of the history of a militant politically involved in sharp religious minorities both Jewish and Muslim who were participating actively in the Russian and Marxist circles and I wanted to know to what extent others have spoken on that and why why you thought that was the case that they were has such an active role well first of all I to be compared to CLR James is mind-blowing ly wonderful praise so thank you black Jacobins a huge book for me in terms of the to address the ethnicity I mean this is something I think Barbara would know more about than me but it's quite true that the the the ethnic minorities within the Empire were always over represent in the revolutionary movement and you know you had obviously there was the the bunt which was a specifically Jewish party but for the most part within the other parties within the radical parties not by any means just the Bolsheviks minorities were somewhat over-represented and one of the great like most horrifying sort of symbolically horrifying tragedies I think of the of the post of the collapse that came after is the transmission belt whereby those aspects of of Bolshevism about which a certain amount of not stal Joe semi-official nostalgia is allowed in Russia is essentially great Russian chauvinism so around Putin's clique Lenin is persona non grata but there are those who think Stalin because he was kind of a you know a great Russian chauvinist on eclis giving his own background but so yes and in the in the I deliberately again were in conjunction with the editor I deliberately didn't include like the full reading list and the full bibliography in this because it isn't a scholarly book doesn't pretend to be it's a you know a little part of me slightly regret regrets not putting a link and then putting the full bibliography online because I read a lot of books and I want some kudos for this you know so but but there are there is it there is a further reading section and there's a couple of books in that which I think addressed the think that the things you're talking about very directly there's been a series slabber characters have just been putting out of a series of amazing books on the revolution centenary and they deal with this quite a lot the question of you mentioned the the muslim congress number two there was an all-women congress earlier in the year and then there was the muslim soviet and i mean the i was able to find one article on the on the women's congress and this is because of the generosity of scholars like barbara who you know I was kind of crowdsourcing forum for references and I've tried to and that again is included there's a few references to this but there is I think a danger in because of I think in part the kind of crushing wait of decades of this kind of sneering right-wing common sense about the aspirations for emancipation but telling straightforward stories about what happened there is somehow being dewy-eyed you know so you read this that you know these eyewitness testimony of exactly the anecdote you're talking about a young woman activist like soupy I think she was 24 or something you know from this kind of incredibly patriarchal society and this incredibly backward Empire standing up in the middle of this revolutionary year absolutely explicitly fired up by the the overturning of every norm and when this you know what this man is this man is of debating about whether or not we should give rights to women and she stands up in the middle of Congress says you know you don't give them to us we take them and somehow we're at a point where we say that we tell that fact and there's a kind of oh here we go again with the nos doubt it's like no that happened that happened and that cannot be disaggregated from this year so I mean yes that that presence is it is very very vibrant throughout the year and and within the constraints of a necessarily limited book I tried constantly to kind of draw attention to the fact that this was not a Petrograd only phenomenon it certainly wasn't a ethnically Russian only phenomenon so yeah did you have anything you wanted to know okay national identity formation did vary across the Russian Empire and it was stronger among the nationalities of the western part of the Russian Empire poles Finn's Jews you Western Ukrainians and that in Central Asia the reformers were trying to form a pan Turkic identity more so than a Kazakh Uzbek nationality and the liberation of women the emancipation of women was was part of the modernization that when the Bolsheviks began to carry it out was far more abrupt and jarring does in the context of the traditions than perhaps the liberal reformers and pan Turkic reformers had in mind it on our go all right I wanted to know if doing the research for the book and current events in the US and UK and in Russia made you at all think about or reevaluate your ideas about how much words and stated intentions and debate and the sort of lefty intellectual tradition and trust in words really matters especially to the other side yeah that's an incredibly fascinating question and it does touch directly on stuff I've been thinking about although I suspect maybe not quite in the ways that you that you mean although I may be wrong I mean I forgive me if I'm not quite addressing what you're what you're talking about but I think I mean one of one of the things that comes through not just in this story for me but in any reading about any political story any big political events is that getting bogged down in you know what people really thought scare quotes becomes very unhelpful because consciousness is incredibly fluid one can convince oneself of all kinds of things so the idea of like the you know if we can just have a good faith debate at least we're talking the same language kind of thing so on one level it's simply about saying there was literally nothing anyone could say at certain points of this year that their opponents would not find perfidy in and if that's one of the things you're insinuating I completely agree my go-to example about this by the way is the Iraq war there is still a debate among some British liberals about you know well you know Tony Blair genuinely believes that there were weapons of mass destruction right and you know I I think this is profoundly useless way of thinking about it I mean AI you know like in my in my in my sort of more particularly bitter moments I think no he didn't but then a lot of the time I think look you know he's a messianic guy he believes himself to be you know the sort of guiding hand of history is perfectly possible that he convinced himself as the necessity of that belief and then convinced himself it was true I don't give a it's not the point not how you make the judgment that's why the good faith doesn't matter so on that level of like the inability to have because you can't have a good faith argument with someone who is implacably opposed to your political ontology it can't be done what this opens up though is another and it's sort of an adjunct to your question which is what I touched on and there about this idea of an apathetic revolution ISM and there are certain political metaphors that recur for me I don't think that political that metaphors are a sort of a kind of nice to have an also-ran they're just like a kind of a little a little tweak in detail that that are fun like I think as long as you don't mistake them for kind of scientific rigor for me one of the reasons I love metaphors and political metaphors is that they become illuminating they actually helped me understand the world better so to take the example the kind of train metaphor like it was a very organizing metaphor for me all the way through you look at someone this is a point as to Leslie the activist and professor made which you look at someone like Walter Benjamin he's talking about revolution as putting on the brake as like the Train not going any further the fact that you have totally contradictory metaphors doesn't alter the fact that they can both be illuminating for political heuristics and the one that I keep coming back to is apophysis is the unspeakable the unsayable in revolution and it recurred it's not just my invention it recurs throughout this year these like holes in language so I I would go that there's a beautiful metaphor halfway through the year where the Bolsheviks are being completely wrong footed on all side by the kind of pace of events and in a desperate moment at the end of the like in the small hours they pull because they realize the instructions they'd printed on their on their paper no one we're going to pay attention to they didn't want to look stupid so they pulled it so the paper came out with a blank hole in the middle of its front page which is most pregnant metaphor for apophatic revolution ISM I can I can possibly think and for me it's not just a question of the kind of the unsayable between enemies it's a question of the kind of the beyond sable the surplus the beyond language embedded and impregnated in the revolutionary urge itself which is to meet parts not not solely constitutive but absolutely constitutive of that of that apocalyptic tradition in which this unabashedly for me stands and should stand something if I'm just sorry I'm this again when discussing the great difficulties the Bolsheviks of my own face in the early days why is this such little focus on the contribution of the Western imperialists Americans French British in assisting the whites in not overthrowing the Bolsheviks why I believe Isaac Deutsche is one historian that did focus on that as I recall that the contribution the whites with the help of the Americans the Brits they were major force in yo in not assisting or helping the Bolsheviks fail I mean I again I I am I think part of the reason there's a focus on it is because I honestly think it's extremely important I mean I think that you know the the not just financial and you know economically but also sort of ideological and sort of nebulously cultural support for the you know the most vicious aspects of murderous counter-revolution by the Allies was was was extremely important what in in the reading I cut out some of the quotes there are these amazing quotes from from us you know from the Americans from the Brits talking about describing these you know math butchers as quote tolerably severe that's one of my you know when I go to close so I think I think I think that we would underestimated our peril the you know and then you've got the kind of the blockade and so on and so forth so I think for me I think we would underestimated our peril not just the kind of immediate military but kind of global geopolitical cultural constraints at that place however where I I do think sometimes there has been a tradition on the on some of the more Kitsch elements of the radical left to to essentially say that and then end the conversation and to say well you know it because it because of the whites because of the blockout because of the Allies ago revolution failed and that I think I would stand with you know the the sort of dissenting Bolshevik tradition people like Victor Serge who were much more unflinching about saying absolutely of course we start with these you know brutal and conditions not of our choosing however that absolutely does not mean as I was trying to get at anything that we don't also interrogate the things that are done and the the virtues made of necessity that you know under under these conditions so I suppose for me that those those external conditions are the kind of constraining culture but then within that certain aspects of the of the Bolshevik tradition or I shouldn't say the Baltic tradition because as barbers work and other work points out so much their work they would just there were there were dispute Asia's Bolshevik traditions but certainly the kind of if you like the ones that became mainstream had it had a very had a very baleful effect of kind of legitimating what should if exercise only ever be explicitly understood as catastrophic necessities i will say that i think that there's something very unconvincing about all this like one of the tragedies of socialism in one country is to me is how it reads to me like a kind of like an expression of panic like this notion that like we in a week we you know we can actually have surge in one country there's something about the declaration in the in the aftermath of years of saying the exact opposite which is kind of pathetically unconvincing and i think this for me i don't want to be too glib about analogies but i have among other people for a long time being really disgusted and horrified by the the kind of allergy to a kind of facing up to the bleakness of political situations on the left and this is why i talk about that as bad hope that i think that kind of I think there are situations in which you have a really bad there was no good way out in Russia in 924 there was no you know you don't get to save the revolution by making a single choice but the least bad option is to say given that everything is really really bad here's maybe the least bad things we can do and that's not great but it's better than the bad hope than the unconvincing strained panicked optimism but that was expressed i I think hi thank you again so much for that beautiful reading and for the book as a whole um this year in this sort of era with such a fruitful time for science fiction in Russia and for you know across Europe as well and I was curious if in researching this you sort of found any parallels in yourself of a sort of a political or social need for science fiction for fiction in general if you found any parallels in your own work - maybe the Utopia that you brought up in in this one or in any of the climb section that era generated it's an interesting question actually my interest in them in like Russian science fiction and particularly science fiction early on predates this book by many years it's a passing it's an amateur interest I'm not by any mean you know super well-read in it and I don't read Russian so it's all translation but I I do have an interest in it and I think for me I'm probably the worst person to talk about that the relations with the fiction I write but my my sense is that you know one of the kind of shared threads of interest in the science fiction tradition and and and and these events without being too tendentious is precisely this sense of apocalypse and this sense of not just apocalypse but also the the sublime and the sense of that that kind of the glimmer of other nuts much more so than I'm very uninterested in blue prints I'm very uninterested in sort of programmatic utopias you know first we will do this then we will do this I'm very interested in utopias that break down I'm very interested in books that seem to escape control of their own writers so the big example for me would be red star Bogdanov's great Russian well great question mark Russian science fiction novel and the sequel the interesting thing are you found by the way if you you must have read I mean do you like the book sorry I get you we consider you out yeah yeah but that response is actually really appropriate I think I think it's a book that like for me you know you said you like it like because as a sort of depiction of a you know of a utopian socialist society its drab and slightly something kind of weirdly deadening and not very convincing to me and feels politically unhelpful and bad fiction however however however and there are moments of that book that start to get very interesting to me specifically two things come to mind one is the strange genuinely engaged elegiac respect and or with which the thinly veiled Bogdanoff fights naira toriel voice starts starts to describe the radical capitalists in Marx in in Martha's history the kind of the heroic bourgeoisie of your like back when there is this kind of yearning for when you actually had a proper liberalism when you actually had proper bourgeoisie that won't be stunted and you know embittered you know pathetic rat-like figures that that we had in actually existing Russia and something about that weird kind of political nostalgia is that there's a hint of that in something should happen a cough actually said it about a couple of years after the Revolution where he talks about with this kind of angry tone about how the capitalists have rejected the historic role they were given in developing the I can't remember the exact quote that he there's a sense of affronted --mess about them not doing their job sometimes and the other bit in that in that book that I really like is the bit where I come read it for years I'm going to get the details wrong but whether the the character who the main character essentially kind of goes off piste and goes kind of a bit sort of mad and breaks out of this utopian social society because he can't live in it and you can read it you can read that partly as the impossibility of being a socialist political subject in a socialism that you have not either been born to or helped to create you cannot just Punk this is about the kind of unthinkable surplus of radical change or you can think about something really interesting about a utopia that escapes the hands of the of the utopian writer attempting to to create it so so yes I love that tradition but often in a kind of conflict conflictual way what do you think the prospects of the Russian Revolution would have been had Lenin's ideas spread into Europe before the First World War there was there were left currents in social democracy that were beginning to form they weren't organized but they had some influence would it not have made a difference to the outcome had revolutionaries not organized inside social democracy against the growing conservatism that is before World War one I'm going to hand over to Basque on this as the Social Democrat Amin I let me let me sit let me say um there's a difficulty here for me which is that for one thing via the idea of like Lenin's ideas that they were they were a fluid thing and not only were they a thing that changed they particularly changed in the context of the war and therefore it's very hard to think into the you know which what specifically are we talking about if you do a counter factor before the war that's that's a way of thinking like I I'm I'm kind of ducking the question slightly well I mean the short answer is yes I think they would have done but it involves you know the more counterfactuals you posit the harder it gets to be rigorous about that and because I find it very difficult to imagine the Russian Revolution or the particular shape of Russian Bolshevism without the war it's extraordinarily which I think was you know in comparably vital to this story it's very very hard for me I'm so I'm just going to have to kind of hold up my hands and say I don't know yeah I mean I I don't know either I would say I would say that there were left currents I mean especially after you know currents advocating for the general strike and all this discussion around these different tactics but it's easy to go back and say there was a left right and center well at the time it was it was more fluid like Lenin I had you know thought the road to power which I think was written in 1909 by coffee was an excellent book and right now we could reread it replay okay this has the seeds of a lot of his later politics right it was excessively kind of Parliament turistic and I had all these other kind of flaws but they weren't really perceived at the time and so in many ways I think that the but the betrayal of European social democracy came as a tremendous shock to people like Lenin partially because the you know so-called and again it's very hard to kind of separated this neatly but the center of social democracy was perceived by a lot of people who on the left of social democracy to be at least intellectually the left of social democracy yes sure but are but at least until nineteen thirteen and fourteen but again when we look back it seems like there's a tremendous difference between like 1917 and 1918 1919 but I mean imagine you having debates with your comrades or friends like two years ago I mean and kind of extrapolate I mean this is a matter of months of these debates took place and because they didn't have the Internet we have time for about three more questions well the the interesting I for me the interesting part of that question is the phrase the near future you know other opportunities in the near future like next week I doubt but I mean yes I do if I if I didn't I would be you know might might I am I am very politically pessimistic at the moment because I think that the situation is I'm you know I'm 44 years old I do not think I've seen and I've been politically active in certain various ways for 30 years and I don't think I have seen anything like as ugly toxic and frightening a moment so I'm very politically pessimistic and I think that it's important to be pessimistic because you know otherwise you're going to burn yourself out with bad hope that said if I was if you like fundamentally pessimistic if I if I thought that the situation was you know was that things that nothing fundamentally nothing could change that a kind of radical change was impossible then I wouldn't have the politics I have and the the paradox for me is that the more kind of baleful I feel things are and the more point kind of immediately politically pessimistic I feel I also have been more activist and more engaged in the last few years than I have for a long time so and one of the keys about this is that things things change on a dime they change really really fast like two degrees that are constantly Gideon and somehow it's a lesson that we never seem to learn as humans which is that you know think when sometimes things change incredibly quickly so which is why it's very difficult and I think unhelpful to think in terms of well you know given the state of the world at the moment if we get a little bit better a little bit better maybe we'll be due for radical so change in 15 years with it just doesn't work that way it might not change not change not change not change for 20 years and then abruptly change or three years who knows you know what I mean the fundamental question is and I honestly don't know the extent to which this divides you and me I genuinely don't know this the fundamental question is the scale of change not just that you want but that you believe is possible possible not net not likely let's be very clear you know I you know if I was asked to kind of put down money on you know seeing out my life with that you know whether or not there would be fundamental radical social change the ushering and of a different kind of society in my lifetime you know I wouldn't give good odds on that but I don't think it's impossible and and I don't think it's and I think it's what we deserve and therefore you know that there's only really one course left open so so yes I absolutely do and I and I also hold out a hope you know I mean I'm sorry again sorry to be glib you know but we live right now in an epoch not only a terribly but but one of the few good things about this epoch I think is that the era of the political know-it-all is over the algorithms are broken they don't work the last four years you know you I've had this kind of nasty snarky fun looking at all these articles over the last years that are kind of you know from from very smart very well-read often you know leftist commentators saying okay everyone calm down there's absolutely no way Trump can get the president can get the candidacy that does everyone calm down he can't whether they you know and then conversely you know let's not be silly Corbin is not going to be the leader of the Labor Party you know it things are broken like we have to rethink we have to rethink the way we think and one of the things that that's going on at the moment is that you know things are shifting very fast very hard mostly badly but not necessarily Corbin was an amazing thing and no matter what happens because the Trust is against him are really bad but but he has had a serious important and progressive affect on the agenda the political gender in the UK at the moment you know and that it absolutely can be rode back there's nothing complacent about that but yes I do think that can be changed yeah do we disagree on that of course no no fundamentally no no I've never no no I mean no I mean IIIi believe in you know socialism I believe there can be worker control of production what would I you know uh what I do believe is like I'm not a communist right I do believe there will always be a state the state will look a lot different but you know so in other words and and also to some degree I do think that you know not to be a Birkin but I do think that you know sales revolutions have consequences and the tyrannies that could emerge in the aftermath of a sales revolution can be worse than the tyrannies a game before so I would say that we just need to have a theory of politics that says that politics doesn't end when you explore per eight the bush let's be politics continues and that's why we always need free civil society that's why we always need because me and you today right afterwards we could have a few more beers gather the rest of people in this room but we just thought of a monarchist party you know you know capital wouldn't wouldn't necessarily be be threatened I think in such a way you know twenty thirty years into a social society you know I wouldn't mind people starting a party to restore capitalism because I think it would be considered if we're doing our job right the society is functioning and I'm Sur Religulous idea to bring back the law of the desert into a new land of you know abundance you gotta have the last word there you gotta say see us say something we'll say something to the next way okay two more questions so just one right thing hi so I was in a study group about the Russian Revolution a week ago and I was wondering if you guys could take up this question that we didn't really get to so my question is do you think and the Society of you or all three that the degeneration of the Revolution was inevitable given the conditions you know during the after the the Civil War you know the embargo is the 20s and 30s like had there not been an autocratic figure like Stalin who came in do you think Russia like would have been able to kind of solve it to the revolution and make them you know a relatively decent socialist state or was that kind of their ice like was the isolation that they had like did that make it inevitable that they would degenerated to this like autocratic failed socialist state I think honestly I think it's extremely difficult to imagine as I was trying to say like with with the failure of revolution in Europe it becomes and it's not just me thinking this is it's the Bolsheviks and their comrades up to 1924 so so the question how the question in a way is what circle 1924 when you realize that there aren't going to be you know that Germany is not going to become a revolutionary state on what do you do then when I made the point at a different meeting about the bad hope of of socialism in one country that my interlocutor Owen happily pointed out I think quite rightly that there was also a kind of utopianism to some of the sort of to Trotsky's position about you know if you kind of just hang on in there and the revolution in europe will happen you know now that's to be extremely unfair to Trotsky to put it that way but there was certainly nothing you know it was not only not given but extremely unlikely at that point I think I think that I mean I I think basically absent some way of pushing and this wouldn't have been impossible with a different set of politics and international politics that's what's very important here absent some way of trying to kind of push for social change revolutionary social change beyond the borders of Russia I think it I think that the project was was untenable and so the question then becomes if you still want to try for the project how do you do that and that's a much that's a very separate and bigger debate I even however if you if you reach the point where you where you think well we can't it's not going to work internationally and you know there were other you know it what was not inevitable was you know the despotism that grew if you like if you have if you if you end up with a politics of sort of managed political decline you realize that your project is not working and essentially your job is to kind of ameliorate that as best as possible into the least bad possible outcome then I think the least bad possible outcome would have been considerably less bad than the outcome that happened so there's a kind of very very faint but not wholly impossible internationalist gamble and then there's a kind of more pessimistic but less horrendous that actually happened a safe surrender if you like I I guess would be my my thoughts right one more question hi based on a synthesis of the last question and the preceding one do you think there are any particularly applicable comparisons or lessons that the American I guess in particular Left can learn from the Bolshevik Revolution and and how to not doom ourselves and our own movement heading into the future I would say two things I think and and I would talk about Britain to here I mean for me I think there are two because I really I really don't want to do pass analogies like you know I think that's been the absolute bane of a lot of kind of leftism I don't want to do that so there are two kind of slightly more abstract analogies one you know history gets better in history gets worse take apocalypse seriously you know that sense that we are now living in a particularly terrible time you read the letters of 1917 these sense of kind of something shutting something nearly opening then shutting that that's real and I think that takes you you know that that sense of a let's now is it's not you know it is it is it is a non not under meaningful political phenomenon I think more concretely one of the key things that comes up again and again in in the revolution is that Russian liberalism at a time of crisis as an institution as a movement as a group as a as a political ideal will choose reaction rather than change it makes some some of its some of its avatars will do so with a with it with a tear in their eye some of them will do so with a kind of sadistic grin but it will choose reaction including brutal and bloody reaction now I want to be clear there are I think individual there are certainly people for whom that's not true liberals who for whom that's not true I'm not talking about every single liberal I'm talking about as a kind of political current and I think that follows through not just with Russia but to political history in general it is slightly terrifying the extent to which that is the case my friend and comrade and salvage editor Richard Seymour made a remark in passing some years ago which I returned to a lot on this on this topic and he said it was in the context of a general discussion he said there are two kinds of liberals liberals as opposed to leftist two kinds of liberals there are liberals who are liberal because they have fidelity to liberal ideals and there are liberals who are liberals because they have fidelity to the liberal state now some of the former group can be great activists can because one of the things about actually existing liberalism it will never deliver what it says it won't - and therefore Glenn Greenwald Glenn Greenwald does not comment I say this as a huge admirer let me be absolutely clear Glenn Greenwald does not come out of a radical tradition he comes out of a tradition that takes liberal ideals seriously and begins to realize that actually existing liberalism is not delivering them liberals who are fundamentally liberals because they have because their fidelity is to the liberal state will never ever be on the side of change well on that note thank you big thank you to our panelists

Channel: Verso Books

Views: 16,255

Rating: 4.9166665 out of 5

Keywords: October, Russian Revolution, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, China Miéville, China Mieville, 1917, Communism, Russia, Barbara Allen, Barbara C. Allen, Bhaskar Sunkara, Jacobin, Alexander Shlyapnikov

Id: sLBXeRLIDVg

Length: 84min 18sec (5058 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2017