Speculative fiction and international law: The Marxism of China Miéville

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Notes

1. See my articles “Towards a Marxist Urban Sublime: Reading China Miéville's King Rat,” Extrapolation, Winter 2003, pp. 395–408; and “To the Perdido Street Station: The Representation of Revolution in China Miéville's Iron Council,” Extrapolation, Summer 2005, pp. 235–248. See also my review of Miéville's Looking for Jake, forthcoming in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction.

2. By the time these lines reach print, Between Equal Rights should be available in a much cheaper paperback edition from Haymarket Books in the US and Pluto Press in the UK.

3. In addition to Iron Council (2004), the sequence set in the imaginary world of Bas-Lag includes Perdido Street Station (2000), which begins the trilogy, and The Scar (New York: Ballantine, 2002), which continues it.

4. See China Miéville, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), p. 9n. Further references to this text will be given parenthetically by page number.

5. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), pp. 20–21.

6. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, trans. W. Lough (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 81.

7. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Two, trans. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 137.

8. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 344.

9. China Miéville, The Scar, pp. 219–220. Further references to this text will be given parenthetically by page number.

10. For a good account of this instance of Miéville's Marxism, see Steve Shaviro, “Capitalist Monsters,” Historical Materialism, Vol. 10, No. 4, 2002, pp. 281–290.

11. This is a theme I have pursued at some length in The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 2002), especially pp. 3–41.