thank you all so much for coming what i'm going to do is i'm going to read something and 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 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  those politics in 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 nine hundred seventeen this  some of those issues and what that means is that both in its approach its focus and 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  d into one sort of nine 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 history to possibility is the fourth dream section seven and that section in its entirety is two rows of dots something ostentatiously unspoken the transition from injustice  for those who cleave to it a paradox of actually existing revolution is that in its potential for reconfiguration it is precisely beyond words a messianic interruption one that emerges from the  unsayable yes but the culmination of every day then one iteration of the strange story of revolution and after that wordlessness in the novel comes an immediate urgent goddess oh my love now i know all your freedom i know that it will come what will it be like that question from this point in history late evening of the twenty sixth of october one nine hundred seventeen lenin stands at last before the second congress of soviets the councils 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 the order constructed in russia will be anything but socialist instead the months and years that follow will see the revolution in battle assailed isolated ossified broken we know where this is going 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 loss of nine hundred seventeen it's degradation was not a given was not written in any stars revolutionary russia and explicit that it is his greatest enemy as the war ends he proclaims his intention to kill the ball she kissed the hand and the revolutions in europe on which the russian revolutionaries had staked 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 sake but the strange story of the first socialist revolution in history deserve 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 persons to the land equal rights for men and women in work and marriage to divorce maternity support the decriminalization of homosexuality hundred years ago moves towards national self determination free and universal education the expansion of literacy a cultural explosion a thirst to learn the mushroom of universities and lecture series an adult schools a change and soul as much as in the factory and those moments of 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 a new 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 lon cruelty the excrescence and essence of its time and even remember 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 discovered there is a probable answer in an unlikely place many years later in his memoir in my mother's sabbath days the great lithuanian yiddish writer famed gr tracks of history or even take to them nine hundred seventeen as a revolution of trains history proceeding in screams of cold metal the saws wheeled palace shunted of the locomotives of history put the locomotive into top gear lennon exhorted himself in a private note scant weeks after october keep it on the rails but how to keep it if there is one true way one line and your opponents including on the left tell you that it is blocked in one thousand thirty seven bruno schulz 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 supernumerary events that cannot be registered one cannot be too fussy let us try to find at some point of history  the question for history is not only who should be driving the engine but where such trucks the revolutionaries divert the train with its contraband cargo on registerable supernumerary powering 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 it's a 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 maze 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 it is kind of wondering what this russia things all about ok all right so it's actually a pretty even split so that's interesting  yes i guess so so let's start with with this you're an incredible story teller 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 it's 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 decided that there would be frankly what we thought was going to happen was that there was going to be lots and lots of books telling narrative histories of nine hundred seventeen because irrespective of your politics it's incredible year and that this was the coming along and you know we thought that the 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 events 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 as a story for anyone who's interested  line on this with apologies for repetition is that this is not a history for leftist 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 on abashed 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 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 nine hundred seventy 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 one hundred seventeen years 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 said earlier that russia i mean could this conversation be happening in russia talk to us about how that country looks at its own pocket 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 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 nine hundred seventeen is you know is an embarrassment and it is not being officially commemorates or tall 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 i was in some petersburg doing research for the book and i was asking russian friends and comrades you know if 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 hootin and his clique and you say well you know explain nine hundred seventeen to me what happened in your opinion and then what will they do and they thought about it and then when i said well what they'll say is there was a sort of tragic argument was disgusted by russian chauvinism and that also explains why the same people who are attempting to forget all togo completely many of them are actually very nostalgic for stalin because stalin conversely was a great russian chauvinist  that you have this peculiar paradox final thing on this there is going to be a massive commemoration next year because that's the century of the killing of the romanovs and the end of the saw and considers that a very 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 it's 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 propels you through marching over ice covered lakes and the blood and all my gosh it's just it's so felt and you had a lot of 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 has the power in society so what quite 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 am partisan i have my heroes i have my villains i've attempted to be open minded and no associated with some of the 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 the sort of nascent government after the 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 couldn't now the way you write about his is yes genuinely amazing figure and i think i can i swear in this venue i don't know what the politics are yes ok so one of the things about brant like my you know who knows i'm not you know i don't i'm not i'm not telepathic let alone historically telepathic but my sense of currency is that unlike a lot of people in the kind of cynical milieu i think currency really did believe his own bullshit and this is an interesting thing about him he has this very strange man convinced of his own messiah and his and that he can kind of bring russia to salvation and he becomes this kind of tottering clown and some you know one during around in strange 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 boils down to one thing because i could talk  inspiration i not only don't mind i welcome serious good faith debates with including right wing historians conservative historians who are actually prepared to have the debate and the discussion and explain why they do think the degeneration was inevitable or whatever what i cannot bear is the approach of so many liberals who perform i think analysis by aphorism where a revolution is so tragic that it always 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 is 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 is that it actually wants to hand waving well i'll tell you as a lay reader maybe one of the saddest things about reading this narrative of that knowing where it ultimately went both in memory and in reality is that there's there was a  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 writing of people who really couldn't write but were so trying to communicate what they wanted because they felt around them  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 i told china over e mail like i can't believe that there was ever a time when five hundred thousand 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 it at 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 an enormous enormous 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 to want to have power over your own life you will be punished for that desi 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 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 le s which are expressing often in a very religious tone because it's a deeply religious country and this is becomes a vehicle and a way of expressing a whole range of motives this sense of apocalypse diverse of the sense that february was a rapture 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 radicals did it is absolutely a question of a sudden engagement in you know not just political i that also is very present in the book it's 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 ho early in the year that the correct me if i'm wrong at the border 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 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 do you make of just that force of hope in politics well the socialist in russia and we're not just talking  we're talking about a whole range of different groups were very very split precisely on the question i mean among themselves as well there was enormous debates in all different directions but one of the key things they were split on was precisely this question of whether or not you very crudely 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 yes a kind of advanced liberal crap this country we have you know the liberals the bush was the have to take no you know we cannot trust the liberals we cannot trust the boys was a 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 best cases it's a count you lated 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 become if you like  i mean hope is i think hope is a hope is very young a space 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 you overturned years of theory and said quite abruptly ok we can have socialism in one country now this was a complete fast this was an absolute revision of the theory and for me it was an expression of wh which was a kind of disavowed panic because the wage i hadn't paid off the wage i had it was it was a completely reasonable wager to make it you could easily say it was the only thing you could do when it failed what you don't then do is say oh well ok anyway it's 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 his 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 pessimis where you say in the short medium term 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 social in one country is completely unconvincing it has the with of panic about it and what it ended up doing was accelerating terrible curdling tendencies within the politics themselves including the policies of the revolutionaries and you see it as i mentioned in this awful tendency to make a virtue of 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 catastrophe and weakness even if you think you had to do it one of the few things that are i'm very nervous of making glib analogies i think it's a really bad 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 a failed hope then we've lost to kind of rigorous serious unflinching pessimism i am very politically pessimistic in the moment and i have never felt more politically engaged and energized and i think we have to stop being scared of gimmee gimmee an example of bad hope in action today you see i mean any time for example when when to reason may announced the snap election in the u k those of us on the left in britain have been extremely energized and 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 clear about the scale of what faces us now in a poisonous and toxic political atmosphere that colvin heroically has been pulling against with some success but in the aftermath of you know of a series of catastrophe in the about saying there's no point doing anything it is about saying we are embattled and we fight as if we are in battle because otherwise we are going to be really upset when actually we manage to do something pretty amazing by clinging on right so that it does want to you know and 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 to joy because if you go in with a kind of dog to ms m a priori then everything is always a bad surprise if it's not the best possible outcome so that's just one example so speaking of being  battled right and one hundred years ago in russia this this agitation were clearly in that moment now so i'm going to break the ice and say the name donald trump so now we've said the name and we can start talking about the other we're going  to we can just start talking about the moment we're in so after your intense research into the russian revolution this this time of 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 revolution teach this moment about how public political agitation works i will say two things and i and 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 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 you know learn reading the lessons if you like in their context and then doing a kind of sometimes quite difficult and serious job of kind of of mediation and working out you know how what how can we learn these lessons what can we not sorry i should even say that you can see how well trained i've been in the traditions from which i'm not chafing you i would say i would say there are two there are two things that i think the i took very much in terms of the reading on the research on the right one is that as a movement as a kind of institution liberalism ultimately will always make peace with reaction and 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 and that's i want to be clear about that what i'm saying is as an organized institution let alone as 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 the status quo so either with tears in its eyes or with a sadistic grin it will ultimately betray the drive for radical social change and i want to be i mean i'm using liberalism liberal in a very particular way you know very specific way as opposed to kind of radical left and as opposed to those who are fighting for 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 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 ultimately 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 is possible although i do mean and i also mean in a kind of negative sense one of the things that comes up again and again in the study of russian one hundred seventeen is as i mentioned this 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 same 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 among many other people feel more apocalyptic than i have felt in my entire political life i don't think neurosis or 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 there right or to remove it ok so you have created really incredible worlds in your fiction and i love this you once s of middle earth the creation of j r tolkien that you find middle earth to be sociologically unconvincing as a world and in fiction building like world building right this craft of creating an entire universe it's one of 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 worldbuilding can translate into a knack for sort of observing the world around us so what do you see out there right now that is sociologically unconvincing that is that is unsustainable that something's gotta give and you've said you're here for your highly pessimistic highly motivated highly engaged what's what's going to topple what do you see is just it's just can't hold and i wish for all of you that you never have your priggish swaggering pronouncements  we all have punk moments i don't even disagree with myself i just cringe  the lived the lived fantasies of everyday life the points of tension and so on my instinct is probably a very very very hedged yes but i really do want to stress that there are a lot of hedges there is a lot of people and ways of doing that i don't know holds for talk in terms of what's on sustainable i mean again where do you start i think one of the things that one of the reasons for this growing sense of apocalypse which i 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 bad a few years ago and it'll be bad again and it'll get better and 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's 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 you know 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 we hope to make the marines as 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 is a fetish ism for explicit cruelty is i think partly a result of the point is even if it wanted to which it doesn't but even if it did it you know there is within the system as it stands the system of near liberalism there is much less space to provide these and in the absence of that and with the 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 near liberalism i don't think near liberalism can keep on being near liberal in the way it is the problem is that doesn't mean that for 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 for ever 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 needn't necessarily or surrender the great great john birger 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 oppression 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 government 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 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 to the socialist point of view than this one right we have socialist on the city council someone indorsed by the socialist party running for mayor getting a lot of excitement behind her campaign  so as a 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 the headquarters of the trump resistance at one point and you could kind of feel the whole city going yeah i know that's pretty awesome what what then would you advise people are on the left here in seattle but how how do you how d 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 doc tells me what i was saying earlier about the  institutions of liberalism in the liberal 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 know 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 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 that's what they're for these  machines to do this and i think one of the things that is very important radicalism is to stop thinking in terms of if anyone still does i don't want to parity but still thinking in terms of putting the rational argument for you know how this makes more sense because ultimately what we're talking about is a kind of implacable political opposition and my goto 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 i don't wish to be personally snarky about agonizing and shouting about the fact that the american health care entirely rational it's job is to make certain people extremely wealthy right so so you don't so so that is you're not going to persuade you're not going to change that by you know  know by all manner of of of optimistic voting you're might change it by a mass of people saying health care is a right this ends now 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 you're institutions are up holding those things up 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 everyone i'm alec i'm your house manager tonight town hall we have my son either side of the stage so please come up get on line ask your festering questions but what is a question some people tender forget it's usually one to two sentences and 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 questions about modern russia i mean i have to make a statement first which is i think in the states we think glasnost and perestroika were great things you know hey russia is better now but it turned out that there was a massive transfer of wealth from its colossal natural resources are not controlled by a few and it makes the the one percent and the wealth gap and other parts of the world look puny back comparison do you think how our everyday russians coping now do you see kind of do you see it falling apart at the seams i certainly have no nostalgia for pere 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 or moments good i would say they were both differently forms of bad but that moment of kind of you know the  the change the sort of 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  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 don't have a particularly perspicacious view on this all i can tell you is the kind of reports efficient what he's trying to do and there's no question that you know the voices for change whether it's you know absolute liberal change all the way through to radical change or in battle to particularly in the latter case the radical voices are very small and impactful that they're there and they're doing in many cases you know fantastic work but this is 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 thank you so