Revolutionary Possibility (on China Mieville’s October)

October, China Miéville’s new book, describes the October Revolution as a moment of possibility. In its closing pages, Miéville explains why he wrote the book, despite the revolution’s aftermath:

Those who count themselves on the side of the revolution must engage with these failures and crimes. To do otherwise is to fall into apologia, special pleading, hagiography – and to run the risk of repeating such mistakes. It is not for nostalgia’s 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.

October depicts a pell-mell avalanche of one event crashing down on another, and men and women trying with varying success to guide the collisions — or at least survive them. Miéville’s novels often show people who thought themselves to be acting freely discovering that instead they have been enacting an inexorable logic, which, while not entirely determining their fates, renders many of their actions perverse or irrelevant. Yet there’s also a thread of counter-argument — a skein of moments in which people turn the tables on structure and write their own history.

In his children’s book, Un Lun Dun, when Miéville’s sinister Mr. Speaker orders his words to take Deeba (the protagonist, but pointedly not the heroine) captive, she responds:

“Words don’t always mean what we want them to,” she said. “None of us. Not even you . . . Like . . . if someone shouts ‘Hey you!’ at someone in the street, but someone else turns around. The words misbehaved.”

This is a joke aimed at Althusser’s structuralism — in which ideology “hails” people just as a policeman yells “Hey you there” — but it’s one with teeth. The moments that Miéville is interested in are the moments at which words stop obeying their masters and people find themselves able to forge their own fate collectively. His Marxism is not determinist, but faithful to unexplored possibilities. For Miéville, the moments of possible revolution are not the unfolding of an ineluctable logic of history, but the conceivable escape from this logic into something new and unexpected.

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