It made me question whether I was right about the utter futility of that revolution. Mieville doesn't have any illusions about how early and how badly the revolution went wrong; what he questions is the inevitability of all that. "It is often said that 'the germ of Stalinism was in Bolshevism from its beginning'," Serge wrote in 1937. And most of us have concluded, partly on the evidence of the Russian revolution, that modern mass societies have to settle for what you might call managed inequality. The social, political and human cost of trying to make old-style absolute equality work is just too high.

Source: Bangkok Post November 01, 2017 21:45 UTC