-
50% off China Miéville's October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
In a panoramic sweep, stretching from St Petersburg and Moscow to the remotest villages of a sprawling empire, China Miéville uncovers the catastrophes, intrigues and inspirations of 1917, in all their passion, drama and strangeness.
Get 50% off October, plus everything on our Russian Revolution Reading list, until May 28 at midnight UTC. Click here to activate your discount.
Authors
-
China Miéville
China Miéville is the multi-award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction. His... -
Angela Y. Davis
“Angela Davis taught me that I did not have to tolerate the racism I was suffering in the playground, she told me that I was not alone.’”– Benjamin Zephaniah -
V. I. Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the alias Lenin, was a Russian communist revolutionary,...
-
Arundhati Roy
“The fierceness with which Arundhati Roy loves humanity moves my heart.” – Alice Walker -
Karl Marx
Karl Marx was born in 1818, in the Rhenish city of Trier, the son of a successful lawyer. He...
-
Sheila Rowbotham
“Rowbotham is one of Britain’s most important, if unshowy, feminist thinkers, and a key figure of the second wave.” – Melissa Benn, Guardian
Events
-
May 22, 2017
London, United Kingdom
LIBRARY, Covent Garden
General Intellects
-
May 25, 2017
London, United Kingdom
ICA - Cinema 1
Franco Bifo Berardi: On Futurability
-
May 23, 2017
London, United Kingdom
Libreria Bookshop
Intellect in the Age of The Internet
-
May 25, 2017
London, United Kingdom
The British Library - Knowledge Centre
Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution: Tariq Ali on the Dilemmas of Lenin
-
June 13, 2017
London, United Kingdom
Foyles, Charing Cross Rd
Radical Technologies: Adam Greenfield and Saskia Sassen
Blog
-
The Russian Revolution: A Verso Reading List
"The year 1917 was an epic, a concatenation of adventures, hopes, betrayals, unlikely coincidences, war and intrigue; of bravery and cowardice and foolishness, farce, derring-do, tragedy; of epochal ambitions and change, of glaring lights, steel, shadows; of tracks and trains...
This was Russia’s revolution, certainly, but it belonged and belongs to others, too. It could be ours. If its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them." — China Miéville
One hundred years on from the Russian Revolution we look back at the events that turned the world upside down and how they resonate today with new books from China Miéville and Tariq Ali, and classic texts from the Verso archive, made newly available for the centenary.
All the books on this reading list are 50% off until May 28 at midnight UTC. Click here to activate your discount.
-
Tariq Ali asks "Why Lenin?"
"First things first. Without Lenin there would have been no socialist revolution in 1917. Of this much we can be certain."
In The Dilemmas of Lenin Tariq Ali provides an insightful portrait of Lenin’s deepest preoccupations and underlines the clarity and vigour of his theoretical and political formulations. In this exclusive extract from the Introduction he explains that without Lenin there would not have been a socialist revolution in Russia in 1917.
The Dilemmas of Lenin is 50% off until May 28th as part of our Russian Revolution reading. See all the books on the reading lists here.
-
Debord and Marquez at Fifty
This year sees the Golden Jubilee of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Both are darkly pessimistic texts that speak to our times. They pinpoint the shortcomings of the 1960s generation as much as embody its utopian desires. They transmit a strange optimism, a backdoor sense of hope, and offer another take on what our lives might be.
In this essay Andy Merrifield, author of The Amateur, looks at the importance of these texts on their 50th Anniversary.
-
Lenin's Three Theoretical Arguments About the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
It is the contradictions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as it was beginning to develop in Russia, that form the object of Lenin's analysis and of his arguments. If you forget this fact, you can easily fall into dogmatism and formalism: Leninism can be represented as a finished theory, a closed system — which it has been, for too long, by Communist parties. But if on the other hand you remain content with a superficial view of these contradictions and of their historical causes, if you remain content with the simplistic and false idea according to which you have to "choose" between the standpoint of theory and that of history, real life and practice, if you interpret Lenin's arguments simply as a reflection of ever changing circumstances, less applicable the further away they are in history, then the real causes of these historical contradictions become unintelligible, and our own relation to them becomes invisible. You fall into the domain of subjective fantasy