China Miéville: A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto (2022, Head of Zeus)
320 pages
Published May 12, 2022 by Head of Zeus.
In 1848 a strange political tract was published by two émigrés from Germany. Marx and Engels's apocalyptic vision of an insatiable system that penetrates every corner of the world, reduces every relationship to that of profit, and bursts asunder the old forms of production and of politics, is still a picture of a recognizable world, our world, and the vampiric energy of the system is once again highly contentious.
The Manifesto is a text that shows no sign of fading into antiquarian obscurity. Its ideas animate in different ways the work of writers like Yanis Varoufakis, Adam Tooze, Naomi Klein and the journalist Owen Jones.
China Miéville is not a writer who has been hemmed in by conventional notions of expertise or genre, and this is a strikingly imaginative take on Marx and what his most haunting book has to say to us today.
This is a book haunted by …
In 1848 a strange political tract was published by two émigrés from Germany. Marx and Engels's apocalyptic vision of an insatiable system that penetrates every corner of the world, reduces every relationship to that of profit, and bursts asunder the old forms of production and of politics, is still a picture of a recognizable world, our world, and the vampiric energy of the system is once again highly contentious.
The Manifesto is a text that shows no sign of fading into antiquarian obscurity. Its ideas animate in different ways the work of writers like Yanis Varoufakis, Adam Tooze, Naomi Klein and the journalist Owen Jones.
China Miéville is not a writer who has been hemmed in by conventional notions of expertise or genre, and this is a strikingly imaginative take on Marx and what his most haunting book has to say to us today.
This is a book haunted by ghosts, sorcery and creative destruction.
Weirdly timely. There are so many reasons to question capitalism. And we all “know” communism isn’t better. Can’t work. But why? Why not? I already want to reread this.
