Blog post

BOO! It's China Miéville on Marxism and Halloween

Lily Dessau28 October 2016

Image for blog post entitled BOO! It's China Miéville on Marxism and Halloween
In the spirit of Halloween, here's China Miéville celebrating the spooky holiday as a sanctified area of social relief against the wishes of the rural elite. 

China Miéville introduces the quincentenary edition of Thomas More's Utopia, and in 2017 Verso will publish his distinctive narrative take on the events of 1917, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, as part of our celebrations of the centenary of the Russian Revolution. Find out more here.



Miéville takes the opportunity to school those of us 'doing halloween wrong'. He contrasts capitalist and socialist readings of the season of ghosts and ghouls, discusses Hugo Chávez's critique of the holiday, before turning to Gothic Marxism, 'a historical materialism sensitive to the marvellous, to the dark moment of revolt' (Michael Löwy).




China Miéville introduces our five-hundred-year anniversary edition of Thomas More's Utopia, with essays by Ursula K. Le Guin.