China Mieville - October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

thank you all so much for coming what I'm going to do is I'm going to read something I'm going to do something I don't normally do which is I'm going to read from the end of the book and that is because unfortunately in this case the question of spoilers is somewhat redundant tragically you know spoiler alert it doesn't go well there is an extent to which this I'm very I'm very honored and grateful to you for coming for so many people coming partly because I'm aware that this book is clearly something of a of a move away from what a lot of people may associate with me because this is a nonfiction book and this is a this is a narrative fiction and my my line about this book is perfectly true is that it is this is not a narrative fiction for leftists it's a narrative fiction for everyone however it is a narrative fiction for everyone written by a leftist and that those politics and that analysis are clearly throughout the book in various ways but they really come out to some extent in the ending because the story of 1917 this epochal year is haunted by ghosts from the future which is what happens and it would be craven and unrealistic not to engage with those and therefore in the epilogue there is a necessarily gestural and brief engagement with some of those some of those issues and what that means is that both in its approach its focused and its its tone its tenor it is somewhat different from the rest of the book nonetheless I'm going to read several short excerpts from that which I've kind of coagulated into one sort of fun 9 minute reading to give you an idea of the haunting I think that is there throughout the rest of the book that strange book what is to be done casts a long shadow in 1902 Lenin named his own seminal tracked on leftist organization after the novel of 40 years previously nikolai chana chefs Keyes story is interested with dream sequences of which the most celebrated is the fourth here the protagonist Vera pavlova journeys from the ancient past to a strange affecting utopian future the hinge point of the book the fulcrum from history to possibility is the fourth dream section 7 and that section in its entirety is two rows of dots something ostentatiously unspoken the transition from injustice to emancipation behind the extended ellipsis readers understood lay revolution with such discretion the author evaded the censor but there is something almost religious too in this unwrite ingush a theist son of a priest a political via negativa a negative way apathetic theology considers God as beyond words as unspeakable here is an apathetic revolution ISM for those who cleave to it a paradox of actually existing revolution is that in its potential for utter reconfiguration it is precisely beyond words a messianic interruption one that emerges from the quotidian unsayable yes but the culmination of everyday exhortations chernyshov skis dots then a one iteration of the strange story of revolution and after that worthlessness in the novel comes an immediate urgent gasp oh my love now I know all your freedom I know that it will come but what will it be like that question from this point in history can only hurt late evening of the 26th of October 1917 Lenin stands at last before the second Congress of Soviets the council's of workers and soldiers convened as the insurrection began he's kept his audience waiting applause rolls over him at last he bends forward and in a hoarse voice speaks his first famous words to the gathering we shall now proceed to construct the socialist order that provokes delight and what of the hated miserable war Congress issues a proclamation to the peoples and governments of all the belligerent nations calls for an immediate negotiation towards democratic peace the war is ended comes a hushed exclamation the war is ended delegates are sobbing they break not into celebratory but funeral song honoring those who have died in the struggle for this moment the war is not yet ended and the order constructed in Russia will be anything but socialist instead the months and years that follow will see the revolution embattled assailed isolated ossified broken we know where this is going purges gulags starvation mass murder there have been a hundred years of crude and a historical bad faith attacks on October without echoing such sneers we must nonetheless interrogate the revolution the old regime was vile and violent Russian liberalism was weak and quick to make common cause with reaction all the same did October lead inexorably to Stalin it is an old question but one still very much alive is the gulag the Telos of 1917 its degradation was not a given was not written in any stars revolutionary Russia was born in battled traduced and conspired against it is soon shattered by famine and bloodied by a civil war of unimaginable barbarism by 1919 it is occupied by American French British Japanese German Serbian and Polish troops the red virus is more exome to the Allies than are their wartime foes Churchill is particularly obsessed with the nameless Beast the foul baboon array of Bolshevism and explicit that it is his greatest enemy as the war ends he proclaims his intention to kill the bolshie to the hum and the revolutions in Europe on which the Russian revolutionaries had States their moves did not come or came but were defeated and to those who count themselves on the side of the change must engage with what followed including the revolutionaries failures and crimes the repeated recasting of terrible necessities as virtues to do otherwise is to fall into apologia special pleading and hagiography and to risk repeating mistakes it is not the 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 for an instant there is a new kind of power fleetingly a shift towards workers control of production and the rights of peasants 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 moves towards national self-determination free and universal education the expansion of literacy a cultural explosion a thirst to learn the mushrooming of the universities and lecture series and adult schools a change in soul as much as in the factory and though those moments are snuffed out reversed and become bleak jokes and memories all too soon it might have been otherwise it might have been different because 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 also build themselves anew it would be absurd to hold up October as a simple lens through which to view the struggles of today but it has been a long century a long dusk of spite and cruelty the excrescence and essence of its time and even remembered Twilight is better than no light at all it would be equally absurd to say that there is nothing we can learn from the revolution to deny that the Somali of October that word means both Twilight and the darkness before dawn to deny that that can be ours and that it need not always be followed by night it is beneath our dignity to be shot down here in the street by switch men one anti revolution politician shouts as his way of calmly blocked by radical sailors on October's night what he meant by switch men says one witness the American journalist John Reid I never discovered there is a probable answer in an unlikely place many years later in his memoir dirt mammoth Shabbos in my mother's Sabbath days the great Lithuanian Yiddish writer Haim grayed records that the area around the switch men's booths along the railroad tracks was the clandestine meeting place for revolutionaries it seems then that the word had become a disdainful epithet for them what or who could be more inimical to all those convinced that there is one ineluctably root of history that Russia was not ready for the revolution if it would ever be than those who take account of the sidings and alternate tracks of history or who even take to them 1917 is a revolution of trains history proceeding 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 the engine stoked by an escaping lenin in disguise eagerly shoveling coal revolutions march said other locomotives of history put the locomotive into top gear Lenin exhorted himself in a private note scant weeks after October keep it on the rails but how to keep it there if there is one true a one-line and your opponents including on the left tell you that it is blocked in 1937 bruno schultz writes of 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 a supernumerary event 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 forest chaps are the points the switches on to hidden tracks through wilder history the question for history is not only who should be driving the engine but where onto such tracks the revolutionaries divert their train with it's contraband cargo unregister Abel supernumerary powering for a horizon as far away as ever and yet careering closer or so it looks like from the liberated train in in Asif Mandelson's words liberties dim light thank you that is the end of October [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Thank You China thank you all for being here again I'm Monica Guzman I'm the co-founder and editor of the ever gray the daily Seattle newsletter and I'm thrilled to be here with China tonight thank you to town hall thank you to all of you I want to get a sense before we get started of who's in the room I heard a lot of cheers for Red May so I think I already know the answer to this question who would consider themselves to be left left left or socialist curious raise your hand at the very least quite a lot of you all right and who is a fan of China's work in weird fiction and is kind of wandering with us rush of things all about okay all right so it's actually pretty even split so that's interesting I'm shorter alienate at least half the audience is that video that's a probable calculus yes I guess so so let's start with with this you're an incredible storyteller I've read your your fiction you can make up stories really quite well this story is not made up but you saw it worthy of really painstaking research and painstaking detail and it's clear that if not just to you important history but also just a good story so tell us why was this story in particular to you so worth telling so something you had to tell well you're right it is as well as everything else it is an extraordinary story and the genesis of this book goes back a few years probably about three years or so we're in a conversation between myself and the editor Sebastien budget of verso book and we decided that there would be well frankly what we thought was going to happen was that there was going to be lots and lots of books telling narrative histories of 1917 because irrespective of your politics it's a incredible epochal year and that this was the centenary coming along and you know we thought that this story was going to be told and we thought that it was important to tell that story in an attempt to kind of negotiate between as you say the simple extraordinary narrative sweep of it the unbelievable in some cases event to do so unabashedly from a kind of political point of view but not reducing it to a polemic so that it's it's also told there's a story for anyone who's interested my line on this with apologies for repetition is that this is not a history for leftists it's a history for anyone but it is a history for anyone by a leftist which is the negotiation of that and you know being very unabashed about that and kind of bringing out those aspects because it is also I think for me and for him and for many people here perhaps a point of great political inspiration as well the coda to this story is that in fact there have been as far as I can find out no other narrative histories of 1917 which is why why do you think that is well I think it's because there has been a pretty successful decades-long ideological project of reactionary forgetting because 1917 is among many other things you know an inspiration for people who want to essentially radically change the status quo and those who are particularly committed to the status quo would therefore you know if they have to they would denigrate it but the best thing they could do is simply encourage everyone to forget about it and you you said earlier that Russia I mean could this conversation be happening in Russia talk to us about how that country looks at its own epochal moment well I mean certainly the conversation is happening in Russia but it's happening on kind of local levels among radical groups and among you know some people who are kind of interested in in the history you know for particular reasons primarily I think political reasons with with some exceptions at an official level know there's a there's a series of very peculiar paradoxes which is that this is again leave aside the politics this is an event which has completely shaped the cultural and geopolitical and domestic political shape of the world we live in so irrespective of your relationship to it one would think that it was kind of worthy of of commemoration the Russian government is for them 1917 is you know is an embarrassment and it is not being officially commemorated at all as far as possible not being mentioned but there is a there is a peculiar paradox about this story just a little anecdote when I was in San Petersburg doing research for the book and I was asking Russian friends and comrades you know if it is if they are put in a position where they have to relate to the revolution if you talk to an apparatchik of Putin and his clique and you say well what do you know just explained 1917 to me what happened in your opinion and they do what would they do and they thought about it and then one of them said well what they'll say is there was a sort of tragic argument there was a sort of you know there was a there was a terrible it was a real shame there was a big tussle and then in the end Russia won and that's the way you negotiate this and that is exactly why Lenin is persona non grata because he was disgusted by Russian chauvinism and that also explains why the same people who are attempting to forget October completely many of them are actually very nostalgic for Stalin because Stalin conversely was a great Russian chauvinist and so you have this peculiar peridot final thing on this there is going to be a massive commemoration next year because that's the centenary of the killing of the Romanovs and the end of the Tsar Putin considers that a very tragic thing that absolutely does need commemoration so many places to go I'll I'll confess to this group I knew next to nothing about the Russian Revolution before I read this book and I'll say that if the narrative is just so well paced you can tell where things get really momentous because your writing becomes this poetic just narrative just force and it just propelled you through marching over ice-covered lakes in the blood and oh my gosh it's just so felt and you had a lot of you had your heroes write Lenin Trotsky Kerensky in a way this chief persuader I I want to ask you about the ending and the narrative itself and for those of you haven't read it or may not be familiar with the revolution it's kind of two revolutions right big event in February that takes the star out of out of power and a big event in October that establishes socialism as the power in society so what I'm quite put what is the what is the gap between how people today for the most part let's say Americans or the world at large remembers this and what you are bringing to the table well first of all I want to in terms of the question of heroes and villains you're absolutely right I do come to this and I say this in the book quite frankly you know I'm part azan I have my hair as I have my villains I've attempted to be open minded and not uncritical so those people who I admire I've certainly attempted not to blur the fact when I think they make you know terrible mistakes or they're wrong whatever also in certain cases people that I didn't know we're going to end up being heroes ended up being heroes so for me for the Russian revolutionary nerds Mariya spirit and over the great leader of the left socialist revolutionaries not nearly as remembered today as she was at a time amazing figure and the final thing I want says Kerensky is an interesting figure you mentioned Kerensky as a hero what I've described him as is a I have a kind of narrative affection for Kerensky filling you in to give him really clear morenski Kerensky world Kerensky he considers himself particularly at the beginning a socialist of some sort on the left and he's associated with ultimately with a party called the socialist revolutionaries who are oriented towards the peasants but essentially he ends up running the provisional government which is the sort of nascent government after the overthrow of the Tsar which is counter posed to the Soviet which is a kind of grassroots democratic organ which exists in oscillation some month the thing about Kerensky for me Kerensky is the most extraordinary figure and politically I am light years away from him and I think that you know ultimately he always made common cause with the most brutal reaction and you know so I am his implacable political foe from the point of view of storytelling I cannot not have affection for him because he's just so extraordinary you can tell the way you write about him genuinely amazing figure and I think can I swear in this venue I don't know what the policy telephone yes all right okay so one of the things about grant like my you know who knows I'm not you know I don't know I'm not I'm not telepathic let alone historically telepathic but my sense of Kerensky is that unlike a lot of people in the kind of cynical Millia I think Kerensky really did believe his own and this is an interesting thing about him he is this very strange man convinced of his own Messiaen ISM that he can kind of bring Russia to salvation and he becomes this kind of tottering clown and some you know wandering around in strange disguises and having kind of histrionics fits and making himself faint with his own speeches and so on and there's a little part of me I can't to the leftists in the room I can't defend this politically but there's a little part of it when I'm reading these anecdotes about frensky or writing them and I'm like oh karinski I got I can't stay mad at you so so telling it as a story is them you end up with peculiar kinds of affection and this does actually dovetail to a certain extent with the question you're asking about the differentiation there is a I mean essentially I think for me it it boils down to one thing because I could talk about this for hours but one thing I think is key for me in terms of the difference between this narrative and the narrative that I touch on in the epilogue which in some ways as I say the tenor is different and it has more of an overt political analysis than the rest of the book but I have you know I do not believe that the degeneration and counter-revolution after 1917 was inevitable and I have my reasons for saying that and in fact and I think that it you know that the Revolution was you know this rupture point of intense inspiration I not only don't mind I welcome serious good faith debates with including right-wing historians conservative historians who were actually prepared to have the debate and the discussion and explain why they do think that the degeneration was inevitable or whatever what I cannot bear is the approach of so many liberals who perform what I think of as analysis by aphorism where they go our revolution so tragic that it always eats its young or something some vacuous nonsense which is completely an evasion of any kind of analysis so what I can't bear is the notion that this is a given that this is essentially a kind of tragic narrative written in the stars that this was always the way so I welcome actually having the debate so what I hope differentiates my approach politically to the revolution to that of if you like the kind of default liberal nostrums is that it actually wants to interrogate the specificities and concrete misses of Russia at that time politically economically and and and actually track out what happened I have much more respect for serious critics than I do for the kind of hand waving tragedians well I'll tell you as a lay reader maybe one of the sad things about reading this narrative about knowing where it ultimately went both in memory and in reality is that there is there was a loss an awful lot about how this all went down in Russia that was so strikingly Democratic it was people peasants people who couldn't read waking up just becoming active and so engaged you wrote at one point about the you know the government officials reading the the writing of people who really couldn't write but we're so trying to communicate what they wanted because they felt around them this incredibly charged moment where we can actually rise up we can actually take power there's hope here and to me it's just the saddest thing that the narrative becomes that's what happens when when when when a society tried this in a really amazing way where so many people just woke up and I told China over email like I can't believe that there was ever a time when 500,000 people could protest in a city like and that could be planned in a couple of days before Facebook like how could that happen but it did this was an incredibly active engaged country and look where it ended up well I think the most moving aspect of this for me is that you have a you know an enormous enormous territory and population because because we're not just talking about Russia we're talking about the Russian Empire which and that I try to bring that in as much as possible we're talking about you know as Ares and Lithuanians and poles and Latvians and and so on and so on like across the Empire and for centuries but particularly in various ways in a kind of defensive way since 1905 when there was an earlier kind of what Trotsky called a dress rehearsal for the revolution what you have is this enormous mass of people and those at the top what they're what they're saying is like you know it is your lot to to not have any power over your own life and and and to want to have power over your unlike you will be punished for that desire and after February which is when the Tsar is overthrown as you say kind of pre Facebook pre Twitter what you have is this explosion of letter-writing this is a year characterized by floods and floods of letters and they are the most moving documents of the revolution you can possibly imagine because as you say you're talking about villages and units at the front and so on of who may be one person in ten or more is actually literate so these are literally commonly written letters where one person is dictate is being dictated to by everyone and they are you know desperate desires for more not like they're writing to any name they've heard of so they like they find like the name of a famous politician and they will write to them and they will sort of say we've heard about a party called the Bolsheviks or the men's race or whatever you could you please send us any information in some cases this is almost like you know writing to Rex Tillerson or something and saying you know what is this international socialist organization I've heard so much about you know like just desperate to get knowledge you know sending tiny sums of money that they've collaborated together to get to get hold of left literature and increasingly as the year goes on through June July and August these utterly wrenching letters which are expressing often in a very religious tone because it's a deeply religious country and this has becomes a vehicle and a way of expressing a whole range of motives this sense of Apocalypse diverted this sense that February was a millennial rupture was a movement towards you know a kind of the kingdom of God a city on the hill and that it has been taken and that there's this kind of desperate reaching for apocalypse for revolution in a way that I find I mean I can barely read them without getting choked up you know so it isn't merely a question of you know these important political things happened that radicals did it is absolutely a question of a southern engagement in you know not just political ideas cultural ideas at a mass level among people who had been denigrated and you know and condescended to for you know decades and centuries so let's talk about hope hope for a minute pull it hope because that also is very present in the book it's the the the Socialists had this hope that there was going to be a global socialist revolution that was going to make their revolution sustainable they also had this hope early in the year that the correct Marana the bourgeoisie right the Liberals would work together with them and that they would hold power for a while before you know the Socialists in the proletariat would really be able to hold power that's a that's a lot of that was a lot of hope I mean as I read that I thought goodness that's a lot of counting on these other things to happen and what we make of just that force of hope in politics well the Socialists in Russia and we're not just talking about the Bolsheviks we're talking about a whole range of different groups were very very split precisely on the question what I mean among themselves as well there was enormous debate in all different directions but what one of the key things they were split on was precisely this question of whether or not you could and should work with the Liberals and I gone I sort of gesture towards this in the reading and in more depth in the book itself in the epilogue which goes into this a bit and indeed the prologue which is essentially the two great wings of Russian Marx's and the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks to put it very crudely and and there are many nuances within these positions I want to be clear about that the Mensheviks essentially said you can't have socialism until you've got properly advanced liberal capitalism we're not yet at a kind of advanced liberal capitalist country we you know the Liberals the bourgeoisie have to take power and we need to be a kind of left voice trying to push this in as progressive a direction as possible whereas the Bolsheviks ultimately not initially but ended up say and not just vote for it's the you know in different ways the left srs as well ended up taking a position where no you know we cannot trust the Liberals we cannot trust the bourgeoisie we have to take power so that was that was one of the key distinctions when you talk about hope I think the metaphor I would use more immediately was was a wager you know that this was especially in the case of the of the revolutionaries themselves who pushed for October that this was a wager this will spread and there will be support so yes there's elements of hope to it but in the best cases it's a calculated gamble based that you know the doing of this will actually change the field of possibility in reality such that we will then be supported for me in fact one of the problems becomes if you like I mean hope is I think hope is that hope is very Yanis faced and this is something that I think the left including today doesn't engage with enough is that hope can be your enemy as much as your as much as your comrade and your ally and for me as an example as a key example in 1924 the Bolshevik Party overturned because the International Revolution didn't happen they saw it all were defeated I should say in some cases they overturned years of theory and said quite abruptly okay we can have socialism in one country now this was a complete vault fast this was an absolute revision of a theory and for me it was an expression of what I call bad hope which was a kind of disavowed panic because the wager hadn't paid off the wage I had it was it was a completely reasonable wager to make it you could easily say that the only thing you could do when it failed what you don't then do is say oh well ok anyway is going to be fine and to be clear my position is that there was no good way out of this situation so what you're looking at is least bad ways out of the situation in my position is that in that situation the least bad situation would have been a kind of rigorous political pessimism where you say in the short and medium term our wager on the international level did not succeed what is the least bad political way we can go from here the moment you start saying you know well because the thing about socialism in one country it's completely unconvincing it has the width of panic about it and what it ended up doing was accelerating terrible curdling tendencies within the politics themselves including the politics of the revolutionaries and you see it as I mentioned in this awful tendency to make a virtue of a necessity terrible things you have to do and then you say well that's socialist culture no it's not it's an expression of rafi and weakness even if you think you had to do it one of the few things that I'm very nervous of making glib analogies I think it's a really bad idea but there are certainly resonances and one of the resonances for me I can talk about this at more length I don't go on too much but just very briefly here I think that certainly the British and American left has been hamstrung by treating hope as a point of principle rather than treating it as a potential end result of rigorous analysis and in fact the notion that you lose people to pessimism I think we've lost more people to bad hope and to failed hope than we've lost to kind of rigorous serious unflinching pessimism I am very politically pessimistic at the moment and I have never felt more politically engaged and energized and I think we have to stop being scared of that give me give me an example of bad hope in action today today um it's probably many well for example you see I mean any time for example when when Theresa May announced the snap election in the UK those of us on the left in Britain have been extremely energized and excited and downright joyful at the the utterly unexpected initially rise of Corbin I mean it's a genuinely game-changing phenomenon and for all the you know comradely arguments we might have about this or that policy and those are very important you know this is game-changing and immediately in the aftermath of the election of the election call there were those on the Left who were sort of saying great this is great one push you know we can win this we can win this and it's like that's not helping because we face an absolute mountain that does not mean that we should be quiescent it doesn't mean that we surrender what it means is the only way we are going to get out of this with our hearts and souls intact is to say let's be very clear about the scale of what faces us now in poisonous and toxic political atmosphere that Corbyn heroically has been pulling against with some success but in the aftermath of you know of the syriza catastrophe in the aftermath of the Scottish independence in the aftermath of brexit in the aftermath of you know of this kind of you know incredible of you Keith and the recrudescence of a you know a really frightening turn to the right it is not about saying that there's no point doing anything it is about saying we are embattled and we fight as if we are embattled because otherwise we are going to be really upset when actually we managed to do something pretty amazing by clinging on right so that's that's one Aquino and as it happened you know Corbin is doing thus far that's a hugely important caveat he's doing better than many of us expected and that's wonderful to be cautious to the point of pessimistic does not mean cutting yourself off from joy in fact it means being able to experience joy because if you go in with a kind of dogged optimism a priori then everything is always a bad surprise if it's not the best possible outcome so that's just one example so so speaking of being embattled right and a hundred years ago in Russia this agitation were clearly in that moment now so I'm just going to break the ice and say the name Donald Trump so now we've said the name and we can start talking about all right all right we're going to do we can just start talking about the moment or in so after your intense research into the Russian Revolution this this times incredible agitation here in Seattle there's just been this renaissance of people who normally would not be involved in politics and really across the country what what lessons does the Russian revolutions teach this moment about how public political agitation works I will say two things and again I want to preface this with this very important caveat which is that I think another thing that I think does not help the left is a kind of reductive analogizing where you know you pick your favorite revolution and you go as then so us you know and IIIi have I have called this the cosplay left you know this notion that you kind of you take a cosplayer you dress up as your favorite revolution we clearly I love it and if it is it is a kind of reenactment it's a kind of it's a kind of game and I think it's I think it's actively unhelpful that is not to say at all that one doesn't learn lessons but the point about is you know learn you know reading the lessons if you like in their contests and then doing a kind of sometimes quite difficult and serious job of kind of mediation and working out you know how how can we learn these lessons what can we not sorry I shouldn't even say that you can see how well-trained I've been in the traditions from which I'm now chasing you know not like how how come you know how do we apply these lessons what are these lessons you know what what can we gain from this I think so that's an important caveat because I don't want to suggest that you can read read off like some kind of master code what I do think I would say I would say there are two there are two things that I think that I took very much in terms of the reading and the research and the writing one is that as a movement as a kind of institution liberalism ultimately will always make peace with reaction now I want to be clear about what I'm saying here what I'm not saying is all liberals are always going to betray you that's not true you know there are very honorable and sincere and you know people whose politics are some way to the right of me but who will absolutely fight and come out on the set you know and that I want to be clear about that what I'm saying is as an organized institution let alone there's a kind of bureaucratic set as a set of sort of bureaucratic organizations and norms you know liberalism is committed ultimately it is more scared of radical change than it is of a status quo so either with tears in its eyes or with a sadistic grin it will ultimately betray the driver radical social change and I want to be I mean I'm using liberalism liberal in a very particular way here you know a very specific way as opposed to kind of radical left and and as opposed to those who are fighting for fundamental social change there is an analogy I've used before it's sorry not an analogy a an analysis here by my friend and salvage co-editor Richard Seymour who I recommend his work very very strongly to anyone who hasn't read it and he said once some years ago that essentially there are two there are two kinds of liberals there are liberals who are liberals because they have fidelity to liberal ideas and there are liberals who are liberals because they have fidelity to the liberal state people who have fidelity to liberal ideas may well become very sincere and important and committed comrades in activism they may be part of a serious movement for change not least because liberalism as an institution will never deliver the ideas that it says it's committed to so they will in fact end up becoming opposed to those systems those who are liberals because they have fidelity to the liberal state will never fight for radical change and will always altom utley make common cause with the enemies of radical change so that was one lesson and the other one I think for me is that history is not a mere kind of endless recursion of the same and I don't just mean radical social change as possible although I do mean that I also mean it in a kind of negative sense one of the things that comes up again and again in the study of Russia in 1917 is as I've mentioned this is very explicit sense of apocalypticism you know and obviously this is partly to do with the war which is going on at the time but not only that the collapse of society the sense that we are in an apocalypse and I think I take that very seriously as a kind of as a diagnostic reading of the world in which you live the fact that right now I among many other people feel more apocalyptic than I have felt in my entire political life I don't think is mere neurosis or frippery I think this is a really really bad moment and I think we need to engage with that very seriously so I think we have time for maybe a couple more minutes all right or should we move on okay so you have created really incredible worlds in your fiction and I love this you once said of middle-earth the creation of junior Tolkien that you find middle-earth to be sociological II unconvincing as a world and in fiction building like world building right this craft of creating an entire universe it's one of the most amazing things I think a writer can do and you've done it over and over so I'm curious if a knack for world building can translate into a knack for sort of observing the world around us so what do you see you out there right now that is sociologically unconvincing that is that is unsustainable that something's got to give and you've said you're highly pessimistic highly motivated highly engaged what's what's going to topple what what do you see is justice just can't hold I wish for all of you that you never have your own priggish swaggering pronouncements from 18 years previously spoken yeah you know it's um you can't do this to an old guy like me this is really embarrassing um um I we all have our Punk moments I don't even disagree with myself I just cringe in terms of its it's a it's a genuinely interesting question as to whether if you approach I mean to put it slightly more widely that that sense of if you approach the world aesthetically with a kind of fantastic ating eye so that you are trying to wit you know anyone who reads or writes or is interested in non realist fiction or art to some degree and in some ways is doing whether that means that you you you have a particular kind of antenna for the kind of the lived the lived fantasies of everyday life that the points of tension and so on my instinct is is probably a very very very hedged yes but I really do want to stress that there are a lot of hedges there's a lot of people and ways of doing that that I don't think that holds for at all in terms of what's unsustainable I mean again where do you start I think one of the things that's one of the reasons for this growing sense of Apocalypse which as I have said I think is a real thing and I'm not merely talking about climate change but I certainly am talking about climate change you know this notion that like you know well you know it was about a few years ago and it'll be bad again and it'll get better and it well what if it doesn't what if actually it just keeps getting worse you know because I do think we have to take that really seriously as frankly the most likely outcome right now and you know a few years ago for example with climate change the left was saying you know we have to fight to stop climate change now my position at the moment is we lost that done right now that does not mean again that what that doesn't mean is turning up your toes you know sitting down never doing anything yet what it means is saying it's happening it's here now it is going to keep happening and what we are now fighting over is whatever is left we're fighting over the ruins and they hope to make the ruins at least ruined as possible and I think we have to be very clear that to that extent apocalypse has already started in terms of political economy one of the reasons we see this accelerating and deeply frightening move towards a kind of increasing circuit of extraordinary and explicit official social sadism in particularly the US but also in Britain and Europe in various ways this you know a fetishism for explicit cruelty is I think partly a result of the fact that since the early 1970s capitalism's ability you know its combined ability and willingness to actually provide reforms have been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking so the point is the point is even if it wanted to which it doesn't but even if it did it that you know there is within the system as it stands the system of neoliberalism there is much less space to provide these and in the absence of that and with the inevitable and we can get into why that is that's a whole bigger argument and you know in the absence of that and with the inevitable you know rage and upset and and dishonor and and indignity that that is going to create what you have to have instead of if you like a social program is an oppression program and there's always been both of those things but what's happening at the moment is the balance between the social program and the oppression program is tipping hard and fast in the direction of the of the oppression program with all of its kind of surplus cruelties and invested viciousness is and this is ultimately unsustainable certainly for anything approaching human dignity and life and I suspect ultimately also for the system itself I suspect ultimately you know neoliberalism I don't think neoliberalism can keep on being neoliberal in the way it is the problem is that doesn't mean that therefore it's all going to get better when it starts getting worse it might just get worse and worse and worse and then just be terrible forever if there's even anyone here which is why this matters and why which is why that kind of perspective of kind of rigorous bleakness shouldn't mustn't and needn't necessarily mean quiescence or surrender john bersia the great great John Berger who was lost to us this year had a phrase that he used when he was talking about Palestine he said what he saw around him was undefeated despair I challenge anyone not to feel despair but that doesn't mean that you're defeated so you're speaking about you know these politics of oppression of these tough moments I think one of the things that is somewhat terrifying or at least gives a lot of Americans at least pause is the ways in which lately governments and what we thought democracy was feel suddenly very vulnerable somewhat fragile and what I'm hearing from you is this mix of sort of pragmatism just accept how awful this all is but undefeated despair like there's a hope there so then what we talked earlier about this that there may not be that many places in the country that are more left and maybe more sort of friendly to the socialist point of view than this one right we have a socialist on the City Council we have someone endorsed by the Socialist Party running for mayor getting a lot of excitement behind our campaign Miquita Oliver so as a city that you know this is Seattle Seattle has a lot of heart it has a lot of action behind it a lot of agitation right now I think the Washington Post called us that the headquarters of the Trump resistance at one point and you can kind of feel the whole city going yeah I know that's pretty awesome what what then would you advise people on the on the left here in Seattle how do you how how do channel that energy in the right ways to take to go somewhere hopeful I can't I mean I I can't talk about the specifics of Seattle I'm not a satellite what I can what I can only say is that and I don't in any way under under under state or underestimate the you know incredible work of you know the as you say you have a socialist on City Council this is a very very important and excellent thing and what I what I would say and I very much I don't think she would disagree with me for a minute I should add is that these institutions you can do excellent work within them but it is not ultimately where fundamental change is going to come from and this dovetails with what I saying earlier about the the institutions of liberalism and the liberal institutions and so I think what I would say is you know ultimately the key thing is is outside an external to those to those to those institutions I do I do not I'm not someone who thinks you know if we can get you know if we can get a load of people kind of voted on then you know to these bodies then that's the best way to fix things I'm delighted if we can get people voted on as a sort of positive symptom of a mass movement that is not part of those institutions and that is pushing you know from below that is pushing on the streets that is pushing in in local organizations and so on so I think my the thing that I would say is you know around the world is that you know just be clear where power comes from and where change comes from change will not come from institutions that are let us be very clear constructed to obstruct change right that's what they're for these are machines to do this and I think one of the things that is very important for radicalism isn't to stop thinking in terms if anyone still does I don't want to parody but to stop thinking in terms of putting the rational argument or you know how this makes more sense because ultimately what we're talking about is a kind of implacable political opposition and my go-to example here is the arguments about the American healthcare system I have heard very many times you know people liberals and people on the left many of whom for many of whom I have great respect and and I don't wish to be you know personally snarky about agonizing and shouting about the fact that the American healthcare system is broken and it doesn't work it isn't broken it works excellently but if you think its job is to shoot your secur sick people then you're kidding yourself you're not willing very basically what I said wrangling it's irrational it's entirely rational its job is to make certain people extremely wealthy right so so you don't so so that is and you're not going to persuade it you're not going to change that by you know you know by all manner of optimistic voting you might change it by a mass of people saying health care is a right this ends now yeah and not necessarily stopping where the institutions and the norms are because you just don't know if those institutions are upholding the very things that I think you kind of do know that the institutions are upholding those things that we all right well I'm very curious to hear what you all what questions you all have for China so I'll hand it off hi everyone I'm Alec I'm your house manager tonight from Town Hall we have mics on either side of the stage so please come up get in a line ask your festering questions but what is a question some people tend to forget it's usually one to two sentences ends with a little inflection so try to keep them in question form tonight you shouldn't you shouldn't give away the inflection trick because that's a way of just making a statement a question yeah my question is about modern Russia I'm going to have to make a statement first which is I think in the States we think glass most and perestroika were great things you know hey Russia's better now but it turned out that there was a massive transfer of wealth from its its colossal natural resources are not controlled by a few and it makes the the 1% and the wealth gap in other parts of the world look puny by comparison do you think how our everyday Russians coping now and do you see kind of do you see it falling apart at the seams um I certainly have no nostalgia for pre perestroika and glasnost Russia I think that rather than I mean to put it very crudely I suppose rather than thinking you know one was good and one was bad or that one was bad and one was good I would say they were both differently forms of bad but the at that moment of kind of you know the the change the the sort of the the sweeping away of that system I think was actually for me quite inspirational I remember when it happened even though I was extremely and as it turned out unfortunately right about the fact that it was not going in a direction that was going to particularly improve things it was just going to make it different a different kind of neoliberal eyes madness and I I don't want to suggest they're identical there's lots of very important differences but I I mean I'm not an expert in Russia I've been to Russia I don't read Russian I don't you know I don't pretend to so I certainly I I don't have a particularly perspicacious view on this all I can tell you is the kind of reports from the people who I knew and know in Russia which is essentially that you know it's not grade I mean you know that one of the things about Putin and this one of the things about Putin is that not nearly he is you know a you know a cruel and an extremely sort of ruthless power player he's also pretty good at it he's very good at what he does which is not the case with I mean treason may for example is a rubbish power player she's really not very good at it you know she's you know so there's you know there's those sort of twin axes of nasty and efficient and I think Putin is nasty and efficient at what he's trying to do and there's no question that you know the the voices could change whether it's you know absolutely sincere liberal change all the way through to radical change are embattled particularly in the latter case the radical voices are very small and embattled they're there they're there and they're doing in many cases you know fantastic work but this is a you know this is this is not I think unfortunately a situation kind of on the brink of on the brink of change I wish I thought it was so Bonica asked about the sort of hope that the Russian revolutionaries had when they were staging their revolution of other countries sort of joining in and so like China had overthrown its Emperor in 1911 the Russia had its revolution the Irish sort of cast out England in 1917 1918 so what do you feel like being a guy with a British accent sort of insulated England from having the working class overthrow its oligarchy at the same time this is the perennial question for the English radical as you know I mean it's kind of it's kind of a joke in the sense that you know there is there is if you go to a meeting in Britain a political meeting and someone talks about you know the English revolution even among kind of committed Reds there's a kind of slightly nervous titter the very idea can sometimes feel absurd I think it's important I mean I this is a huge topic I think very briefly I would say for one thing it is absolutely not the case that you know there have never been serious systemic Lee shaking moments of radicalism in in the UK and and in England which of course not the same thing and even like in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution you know I mean it wasn't italy's ready years it wasn't you know the hungarian soviets but there were mass strikes in england and they really scared the you know the power so it can happen i think that personally i think that the the specific reasons for yeah i mean it's paradoxical in some ways because there are no we do have a social democratic tradition that you on the whole you don't have certainly a mass level in this country for example but i think there is something to be said about analytically for the fact that the you know the the sort of English the English revolution you know predates you know by hundreds of years a lot of the sort of the sort of the ushering in of a new of a new kind of society you know in the 17th century I think actually created a sort of weird kind of compromising situation between the kind of the various ruling powers I mean this is it I could go on for hours and I'm not a specialist so I don't want to do that I think I want to say that I do think that it is it is a glum fact so that faces those of us in Albion that our politics are often fit you know we watch the French and we watch the attack I mean not that things are great in France let's be clear but you see the kind of you know you see the you know the French farmers you know spreading shares all over the roads to know in that's literally what they do with the fertilizer and so on or the mast rights or whatever and you're sitting there going to class seriously you know like we've got nothing you know and we have we have historically pitiful levels of strikes but this again is the question of the the the the relationship between pessimism and and and and being energized because that doesn't you know you know history is not eternal and if I if I genuinely felt there was no point then I would I would give up I think it is a particular result of our particular history and our place in Europe and it is it makes one feel embattled but there are cracks in the carapace from time to time and they're very exciting and that means when we do have our Corbin's the hosannas the excitement that sense of one of our favorite words in Salvage sense of that sense of yearning joy is overwhelming and that's pretty heady stuff first of all I wanna thank you for the certainly all the fiction write all your writing but the fiction writing for them looking at the table here and I look at nearly everything that's actually leading to my question as well during the reading that you gave and thank you there were comments there was raising the question discussing the question of the inevitability of a failure of the October Revolution exchange in the head in the heart for the gloved fist in the jackboot I think one of the fields that's rather intriguing is bio history Napoleon at Waterloo for instance with physical ailments has had Lenin not died at January of 24 leading to the Premiership of Riga cough and the rise of Stalin he was only 53 he had another one would hope at least 10-15 years before to go there for the stewardship if you will or the general general nudging along the proper lines of the October Revolution and not the monstrosity it became under Stalin as a fiction writer what is your speculation right now we go back with the day before we fix the cerebral hemorrhage and let Lenin have an earth yeah but in have an ten years it's a great question I mean I I think I would have a kind of cautious very cautious optimism that certainly things might have been less bad I mean just historically you know in as it sounds like this is a topic you know a fair bit about I mean like you know what's been described as Lenin's final fight you know was precisely against some of these tendencies that he saw arising and he and he says you know you got to take Stalin out of his position as general secretary he stopped you know you didn't trust him and so on and he was ignored and that's you know had he and he still had a great deal of an enormous amount of kind of respect within the party and so on so it's possible he might well have been able to to to operate as a break on some of that particular shape I do want to be cautious about it though for a couple of reasons one is that I you know we must not be hagiographical I mean Lenin was an extraordinary man with an incredible kind of political antenna he could certainly be wrong and we even within his own terms I mean irrespective whether you agree with him on art and I it talked about a couple of those in the book and he was you know from from quite early in his political career you know his own comrades would very often sort of kind of slightly exhaustively sort of say to him you know you're good you're too rude about people you need to stop this you know like he his ruthlessness sometimes alienated people there's a completely reasonable discussion about that you could say actually no under these circumstances it was completely the only thing he could have done and so on and so forth or you could say actually sometimes he was very unhelpful in his kind of unremitting approach you know when he argues firstly apnic off and Colin tie to be expelled from the Bolshevik parties I'm not going to defend that I think that's a glad he was I'm glad he didn't win that you know so I think the key question had to be the International question it had to be what was going to happen internationally now I definitely think Hedlund and lived he would have operated particularly at that point as a break on the worst excesses early on I find it basically impossible to imagine him signing up to socialism in one country for example I may be kidding myself I may be wrong but find that really hard to imagine but there was only this is that this is the least bad option question there's only so much you can do if you really are an embattled state you know trying to forge socialism in the inner sea of capitalist enemies so I'd certainly don't think he could have you know saved socialism what he may have been a useful part of is the kind of steering towards one would hope at least a less bad alternative and I think I think I do cautiously think he would have been foot for precisely these reasons I'm going to interrupt I have never seen so many people in line for questions this is a good thing but we only have time for two more you have additional questions China will be signing right here to your right his left and books are for sale house left stage right over there thank you all for coming I'm sorry I'm sorry that we couldn't do more questions that's partly because I tend to go on in answers I'm sorry about that so but I will be around for a while if people want to ask things or discuss things so please thank you well I have another diction related question um so as as your your own whether your own politics have developed throughout your life and career or just be you know the tides of history to which you apply those politics has changed how does that like bleed into your writing how do you apply developing political analysis to like a you know a fictitional fictional framework that's going to stay on the shelf for the next 20 years or much longer yeah why do I get dispensed with after 20 years I'm really Alan I was thinking about the one that came out in 97 done I there's various different ways in which I can answer this question I mean for one thing I know I I think people worry much too much about you know how do you do fiction politically and so on if you think politically if you approach the world politically I think one of the key things that you should do not to the exclusion of all else but is trust yourself to trust your own subconscious to to do the job that you want to do right the best fiction you can stop worrying about sending a message I'm not suggesting you're saying that but you know that's one thing so I I I do not know the reason for this for what I'm about to tell you so I can only offer it as a kind of anecdote okay but one of for many years you know I like writing fiction um and it's the thing you know that gives me a lot of joy as well as you know paying my rent and so on but I think for a long time I always had a certain degree of a kind of guilt about it I think I think I found it very difficult because politics felt so urgent it always felt like you know to a certain extent you know every piece of fiction you write as a piece of nonfiction political nonfiction you're not writing and I felt I felt a degree of guilt about that one of the paradoxes for me and I don't know why this has happened but I'm very happy about it is that in the last five four to five years as my politics have entered this I think for me very important new phase not only have I felt more engaged with politics not only have I been writing more political nonfiction much of it in Salvage salvage zone please subscribe but I've actually lost that guilt about writing fiction and I feel I what I don't want to suggest is you know writing fiction is an intrinsically political act and that's my activism I don't think that at all but I do think I have somehow made a peace with the fact of that as a kind of you know important kind of cultural expression which I always had intellectually but there was a nugget of anxiety in me which does seem to have dissipated so the thing is I can't answer your question I can only offer an anecdote that you know to puzzle over sorry thank you I guess I get the last one that um well look you you have a question as well right why don't we both ask questions I'll see if I can kind of integrate it and why basically okay one of the themes in many of your books both fiction and nonfiction as well as the 1917 revolution and the modern era is the idea of left unity and what it will actually take in order to get people to rally together around a central concept and I think anyone who spent any time in Marxist discussion groups knows how fuel that can feel like knives do you believe anti capitalism is something we can rally around is kind of a nexus for building left unity and if so what would that look like that's a great question oh I'm not interested in that question too but I wanted to come up here because and I'm really glad thank you for letting me come up here because I noticed there were it was all white male and I said you got to let at least a female of color go up there okay anyways the reason I wanted to come up here is because I understand pessimistic cautiously pessimistic but I happen to be very optimistic and I've been a socialist a member of the freedom socialist party for eighteen years and I've seen a lot of changes in that eighteen years for example I do think the left is going to come more United there's when I started off eighteen years ago you know I was told I didn't see the connections that I that the movements coming together we're all fragmented and it still is to some extent but you're seeing you're starting to see some changes like there's times when I've come and and raised my issues as a woman if oh no that's divisive leave those aside or my issues of a woman of color oh don't bring race there's no such thing as privilege we got to focus on class and at the same time I would go to the race liberation struggles and I said oh don't bring any cap Marxism in here in fact that would erase my identity as a woman of color but I'm starting to see that change people are talking about connections and and so that is my question that is where optimism comes from the bottom and especially when I just made a recent trip to Arizona and my friends and relatives in conservative Arizona thought I was a little bit weird being a Marxist and a socialist a revolutionary and I was shocked when some of them said oh I'm starting to be open to socialism and that's just me from just a rank-and-file selling my newspaper out in the streets and trying to promote the ideas and that's what I see my role as a revolutionary and I think that's where you're going to see the optimism I just want to know what your thoughts in and also on the left unity well thank you those aren't I mean this is going to sound tendentious and like one of those really labored things that that people say but in a way I don't think those questions are so opposed because I mean I'm genuinely very glad that you feel optimistic and I think for me one of the things about pessimism is that the best kind of pessimism is a pessimism that attempts to disprove itself you know if you are pessimistic on the left you are always accused of wallowing in it and enjoying your despair Oh contraire I would be delighted to you know disprove my own person ISM and and and the thing about it also is that you know when we're in these terrible moments it's absolutely true that these you know for me apocalyptic moments are also highly politicizing moments and that does you know lead to the sort of thing you're you're talking about and we are in an incredibly volatile moment and what that means is that you know the oscillation between I what for me is a completely appropriate political pessimism and these you know how can one not feel optimistic when you know you hear these sorts of things or in my terms you know how can one not feel joy that there's not really necessarily a contradiction about that I think I'm very skeptical of optimism as a programmatic position which if what you're saying is I feel optimistic because of what I'm seeing that's a different thing so I hope you're right and I will be you know striving to make my own you know bleak countenance wrong as much as possible and part of that you know it instantly there's absolutely no need for any kind of sectarianism between optimists and pessimists politically we can all you know we can all march together and you can be going we're going to win and I can be going we're going to lose but we know result we're still both going forward you know as long as I'm there you know and and in terms of in terms of the the kind of the question of left unity sir I don't know where the question has gone um it it's really hard honestly to be optimistic about left unity particularly if you are you know for myself I was involved in what felt to me like you know one of the the key moments where there was a genuine potential shift about three and a half years ago and it it degenerated as these things always have because of because of certain kind of embattled nostrums and and senses of kind of for me kind of political self-righteousness I think my glimmer of optimism if you like what I think it would take to really Forge left unity is the frank acknowledgement on the left that it has lacked humility and the frank acknowledgement on the left that the algorithms it has constantly been applying for the last in some cases are breaking down we don't have the answers one of the few not all the answers I'm not suggesting that our politics are all completely wrong but the fact is there has been a phenomenon on the left for a long time which feels very nervous about displaying any kind of kind of analytical weakness like if you don't have an immediate answer you're not going to persuade the working class so any question that comes up you have to immediately explain it never show surprise as a leftist you're never surprised by anything right because you knew that was going to happen because Marxism right and thank God one of the very few good things about for example Trump is you know you can do an archaeology of left arguments over the last you know however many months 18 months or whatever and they start off with all the well-read comrades going will everyone please calm down he's not going to be the candidate will everyone please calm down he's not going to be the president you know the night before you had the same thing from the opposite way with with Corbin this is all great but let's not get too excited because you know the institutions are too strong brexit you had it with brexit you had you know sank what we may be seeing is the death of left know-it-all ISM and that could be a genuine movement towards left unity because one of the key things that has collapsed it in the past is the sense that you disagree with me on this theoretical Nostrum of mine ergo you are a revisionist and we can't work together or if I can't persuade you to my my line of things so anything for me start you know I'm not wildly optimistic about this I think a lot of these habits are very ingrained but the best hope that we do have is by the necessary growth of left humility and the frank acknowledgement of socialist surprise and that is why for me one of the key things to be taken seriously politically in the last year is if you're a socialist and you aren't prepared to hold up your hands and go holy did not see any of this coming then I'm not going to take you politically serious with you all right thank you so so much China thank you for everyone for coming as awesome system thank you you

Channel: KODX Seattle

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Id: VnL2XQVUumw

Length: 77min 30sec (4650 seconds)

Published: Fri May 26 2017