Peter’s Blog

One Response to “Float Away to a New Land”

1. Max Says:
   November 5th, 2007 at 7:58 pm

   Mieville is a hell of an author. I assumed he was generically left wing based on his fiction, but after reading this piece (which is littered with old school socialist buzzwords that sound a little dated today — “bourgeois” this, “class warfare” that, “big capital,” ad nauseam) I started to wonder.

   So I Wikipedia’d him to discover that he is a member of the Social Workers Party, which takes a “revolutionary socialist” position. This would make it pretty easy to hurl sneering psychoanalytic insults right back at him, especially given his very “bourgeois” background (take a look at where he studied, right back to the public Oakham School), but I won’t open that can of worms.

   Anyway, of course he’s right that all of these floating utopia projects are bullshit, though it is a little grating to hear a basically avowed Marxist smugly wag his finger about how others could be so deluded by a philosophy that inevitably finds itself wedded to tyranny and other ugly human tendencies. It’s nothing against his radical views per se, just that I’d expect a little more humbleness on the above point given the history of his own political lineage.

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