Ghosts of Revolution: A Reading* List

Novels, non-fiction, films and games dwelling with revolutionary movements and their afterlives

This summer, I’m preparing to teach a new course, “Ghosts of Revolution,” for upper year undergraduate and graduate students at Lakehead University’s department of English and in its Social Justice Studies program.

Here’s the blurb:

The world of ghosts in which we find ourselves today, with all its inequalities and oppressions, is the result of the vanquishing of innumerable revolutions and revolutionaries. In this course, we take up theory, film, literature, history and social science research to ask questions including:

How do the ghosts of past revolts continue to haunt our present?

How does this haunting express itself differently in diverse cultural contexts?

Why do colonizers insist ghosts aren’t real?

When and why do rebels believe that the dead rise with them to throw off the shackles of oppression?

How have the creative arts represented (or hidden) these traces?

What theories might help us understand what lies in the “wake” (Sharpe)?

How do we settle the debts we owe to those who struggled before us (Benjamin)?

And how might the “hauntology” (Derrida, Fisher) of past struggles generate new “spectres of revolt” (Gilman-Opalsky)?

Let there be no mistake: Today, nothing less than revolutionary change will save humanity and the earth of which we are a part from capitalism. And yet the prospect of revolution, in most places, feels farther away than ever. In many places, the far right and fascism is ascendant. Capitalists and their governments wield terrifying power. Whatever “we” might undertake a revolution, it is by no means clear. So what does or could revolution mean today, when we need it more than ever?

It’s a question, or set of questions, to be debated on the terrain of political theory and discovered in practice, but I have a hunch that we may also need to look to film, fiction, storytelling, games and other media for clues and to discover better questions. To that end, I’ve assembled this course, and thought to share the key cultural texts with you, in case they are of interest.

Most of the texts are recent, but I tend to break my own rules.

What would you include?

Land and Freedom 🎬

Ken Loach’s 1995 moving story of David Carr, a young unemployed Liverpudlian communist, who travels to Spain in 1936 to fight for the Republic in the Civil War against fascism.

The whole film is compelling, but the 14-minute scene (below) in which the POUM militia debate the communalization of property with the villagers they have liberated is a great piece of radical film-making, all the more so because many of the actors are actual villagers representing themselves and their real opinions. (Loach perhaps borrowed this approach from fellow radical UK film-maker Peter Watkins, whose 2000 epic La Commune (Paris, 1871) I would have included on the syllabus, but it’s six hours long!)

I’m looking forward to discussing with the students the place of the International Brigades in the radical memory and history of the 20th century, and also introducing them to some of the debates the film raises, including the way the film represents the Stalinist squelching of anarchism and the question of what it means to fight fascism today. We’ll also be discussing the revolution in Rojava, which has likewise seen thousands of international radicals answer the call of solidarity.

If We Burn 📘

Vincent Bevins’ has given us a remarkable but problematic history of the global cycle of struggles from 2010-20. I value the book and I think my students will appreciate its chronological account of a decade of mass, seemingly leaderless protests accross the global South, which ricochets between Egypt, Brazil (where Bevins was stationed as a journalist), Hong Kong, Ukraine and beyond. He also contextualizes these movements well historically, which the students will appreciate, and he’s attentive to class, which is very welcome.

And yet the book (especially its conclusion) is far too hasty in discarding the politics of horizontalist and prefigurative politics, which it presents unfairly, focusing only on its failures to transmute mass protests into discernible political change. It (wilfully) ignores that the vast majority of theorists and protagonists of these politics would argue that mass protest is only one part of a much broader struggle that also must include other, slower and deeper forms of organizing, including transformation of social life and the building of autonomous institutions. It also conspicuously ignores some of the most important relatively successful examples of revolutionary horizontalism, including the Zapatista and Rojava experiments. And the book glosses over the significant limits of verticalist efforts over the same period (eg. Podemos or Corbyn/Sanders in the Global North).

Still, the book provides a great and accessible starting point for these debates, and I look forward to discussing them with the students, as well as learning how there sympathies and experiences lie, given that most of them came to political consciousness in the Pandemic and the Gaza solidarity movement.

October: The Story of the Russian Revolution 📘

I’ve treasured almost all China Mieville’s phenomenal speculative fiction novels (especially his masterpiece, The City and the City) and learned a lot from his profound essays in Salvage, a quarterly radical journal he helped establish. And as someone who has given some thought to radical storytelling (for my book Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, and as editor of the VAGABONDS series), I was excited to dig into Mieville’s attempt to honour the 1917 Russian Revolution through narrative on the occasion of its centenary.

We take the authors’ hand at the beginning of that fateful year and follow him through the bloody cobblestones of Petersberg, the fug of all-night meetings of the Soviet, the necrotic opulence of Tsar’s doomed palace, the pressure-cooker of Lenin’s sealed train carriage, and the glorious eruptions of collective joy when, in October, the unimaginable revolution comes into full bloom.

I worry that students, however much they might be compelled by Mieville’s cunning and propulsive voice, will nonetheless find the detailed story itself a bit boring, with its massive cast of characters and labyrinth of intrigues. Nonetheless, beyond simply (re)acquainting them with one of the most important revolutions in world history (and continuing our conversations about Leninism and verticalism and its discontents), I want to challenge the students to ask, along with Mieville, what it means to write the revolution and what formal challenges and opportunities await a storyteller who seeks to answer Walter Benjamin’s challenge to articulate the past not merely “the way it really was” but to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”

Mieville is clearly, explicitly and courageously seeking to pay a debt to history and exercise what Benjamin called a “weak Messianic power… to which the past has a claim… that cannot be settled cheaply” by striving tell this story to “fan the spark of hope” in the present in the name of redeeming the dreams of the vanquished and betrayed revolutionaries of the part.

The Battle of Algiers 🎬

I remember watching this film with my father when I was perhaps 10 or 11 and being mesmerized. Little more needs to be said about this majestic Gillo Pontecorvo film of 1966 about the anti-colonial Algerian struggle for independence from France. What we will focus on is the role the film has played for countless generations of revolutionaries since it was released, predominantly as a way to encourage the students to think critically about what has (and has not) changed (for the better and the worse) since the advent of social media. Is a film with the global radical impact of The Battle of Algiers possible today?

The City Always Wins 📕

Filmmaker and essayist Omar Robert Hamilton’s debut 2017 novel is a chronological tale of the Egyptian revolution, following the hope, horror and heartbreak of two lovers and their friends—media-makers and medics—caught between vicious military nationalism and religious fascism, trying to hold a space open for another way.

In addition to allowing us to return to some of the political and sociological themes of the course, we will also be paying close attention to form: the novel’s style is calibrated to the rhythm and energy of a the worlds first major revolution waged, in part, on social media.

But now, almost 15 years later, any optimism that Facebook and Twitter could be media of revolution seems a thing of the past. And while Instagram and Tiktok might allow us to livestream a genocide, can they help muster the popular power to stop it? What would such a power even look like in this day and age?

I’m looking forward to discussing this book in relation to Kristen Ross’s vivid depiction of the bitter (and some sweet) residues of revolutionary optimism in May ‘68 And It’s Afterlives, a book I discovered in graduate school thanks to a class on radical memory with Petra Rethmann, out of which I published one of my first academic articles, “Are Your Children Old Enough to Learn About May ’68?: Recalling the Radical Event, Refracting Utopia, and Commoning Memory.”

Andor 📺

When friends (notably Jamie Woodcock, who has edited a collection about the show) started encouraging me to watch a Disney Star Wars series, I rolled my eyes. But as I’ve told the many people to whom I have recommended Andor since then, this story of outlaws and revolutionaries could almost be set in any genre or world: a Western, a detective novel, a spy thriller - it has elements of all of them.

One of the most inspired series on mainstream television, it was allegedly inspired by the creator’s research into revolutionary history and offers a vivid window into how resistance forms, splits and reforms against a tyrannical empire. Its depictions of both the tribulations of the resistance and the psychology and organization of fascism is surprisingly deep. The first season’s 10th episode, which follows the main character as he helps lead a rebellion against a high-tech imperial prison camp, is incredible.

I look forward to discussing the political economy of Disney and other streaming media empires with the students and debating how much hope we should invest in shows like this… or if they are simply catering to a niche market of people like me… In any case, what is the potential of radical media in an increasingly fragmented and media landscape, where the inscrutable algorithms of a corporate oligopoly determine what we see?

Disco Elysium 🕹️

A few years ago I was in Sweden giving a guest lecture to students from around the world in the first week of an international Masters program that attracted many activists. I was surprised at dinner when young students from Thailand, Egypt, Sweden and Brazil all started bonding excitedly over Disco Elysium, a story-driven video game released in 2019 by an Estonian team. They used it as a common point of reference to have sophisticated discussions about their experiences in and around major struggles in their very different countries.

The game has managed to transcend the familiar limits of its format and genre to approach something like a masterpiece of this new cultural format. You play a crooked police officer in a parallel, steam-punky world, who has nearly killed himself and obliterated his memory with alcohol, embroiled in the investigation of a murder. In a forgotten backward suburb, in the ruins of a thwarted utopian republic, surrounded by powerful corporations and corrupt officials, you rediscover your sordid past and solve a murder.

The wistful, post-revolutionary mood of the game has led many to approach it through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, which has been repurposed by Mark Fisher to speak to the cultural climate of neoliberalism. Does the game simply give expression to this metafeeling, or actually afford us tools for changing it?

One of the most interesting elements of the game is that it allows you to, through decisions, orient your character’s ideology towards communism, liberalism, opportunism or fascism, leading to different story outcomes.

With the students, I look to discussing the political affordances of games as distinct from film and fiction. Does interactivity hold more promise for a project of collective liberation?

I’m especially interested in these questions because they also animate my forthcoming book The Player and the Played: From Gamified Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism and my board game, Billionaires & Guillotines.

Q 📕

“Imagine Game of Thrones, but written by a collective of anarcho-communist troublemakers, and about the rebels of the Protestant Reformation” - that’s my usual elevator pitch for this modern classic of radical letters. The ensemble of Italian known as Luther Blisset (later as Wu Ming) craft a swashbuckling story where a young revolutionary christian who is trying to spread the gospel of the abolition of private property, is pursued throughout Western continental Europe by an agent of the Pope, codenamed Q.

The book emerged from and was a big hit within the alter-globalization movement of my youth, and I remember buying and lending out multiple copies at the time. In spite of the fact it was historical fiction, it’s themes and the Latin slogan it popularized, omnia sunt communa (everything for everyone - see below) resonated.

A few years ago, I got a chance to interview a member of the collective about his non-fiction book The Q in Quonspiracy, where he begins his singularly excellent analysis of the conspiracist imagination from accusations levelled against Wu Ming that they, notorious pranksters, were secretly the brains behind the viral QAnon conspiracy fantasy. They weren’t, but there is evidence to suggest that whoever was behind it read and appreciated Q.

I’m looking forward to discussing with the students the difference between the radical and the reactionary imagination and the dangerous seductions of narrative, something that is also a topic of the novel, where the revolutionary potential of the Reformation to create heaven on earth through the redistribution of wealth and the abolition of privilege is sabotaged from within and without.

We Do Not Part 📕

This is a gorgeous but terrifying story about two friends who investigate the horrific 1948-49 US-backed massacre of tens of thousands of villagers on South Korean’s Jeju island, accused of being communists. The murders were hidden and silence was enforced for decades, with drastic impacts on South Korean society, seen through the prism of the characters. The novel is breathtakingly good, and the translation conveys the complex layered metaphors and sophisticated elegiac mood.

With the students, we will consider the book, by 2024 Nobel laureate Han Kang, in dialogue with what Christina Sharpe, writing about the modes of Black radical thought in the aftermaths of slavery, calls wake work, drawing on the polysemy of that word: “the keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of something, in the line of flight and/or sight, awakening, and consciousness.” Han’s symphonic novel is not about Blackness but does dwell with what it means to be moved by the unseen forces of past injustices.

I hesitated to include this novel, because I think that, for all its many successes, it neglects to pay tribute to the political dreams that animated the Jeju Uprising, instead painting its protagonists largely as victims and survivors. Nonetheless, the potent novel is so stylistically rich I want to read it with the students and discuss this omission (if that’s what it is) with them in greater detail.

The Suicide Museum 📕

This novel, about the legacy of revoltuion in an age of civilizational suicide, is so gripping I devoured it (or it devoured me). It’s author, the Argentine playwrite and novelist Ariel Dorfman came to prominence outside of his adopted country of Chile when he became a key international organizer and spokesperson against the vicious military regime of Augusto Pinochet, which overthrew the democratically-elected government of socialist Salvador Allende in 1973 (with US-backing).

The novel, which blends fact and fiction, begins 10 years after that coup, when the narrator is approached by a reclusive and melancholic plastics magnate who wants to pay him to investigate the question that obsesses the millionaire: did Allende die fighting when Pinochet’s troops stormed the presidential palace, or did he, as the regime claims, turn his gun on himself?

What unfolds from this seemingly innocent question over the course of the novel is a heartwrenching meditation on the afterlives of revolution and counter-revolution. As Naomi Klein among others has shown, Pinochet’s Chile is the birthplace of the political “shock therapy” that used natural and unnatural disaster to impose neoliberal capitalism on the world… a treatment that, by the novel’s publication in 2024 (50 years later), has left the earth at the ecological and humanitarian mercy of an economic system of unfettered greed and pointless competition. Under capitalism’s spell, our species will kill itself, and many others too.

Dorfman is so masterful a writer that these and many other themes are woven with grace, care and beauty, including the legacy of the Holocaust, the role of money in culture and memory, the contemporary politics of the Americas, south to north, and what happens when revolutionaries grow old and when ghosts refuse to go quietly.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing 📕

Canadian novelist Madeleine Thien’s Giller-winning and Booker-shortlisted 2016 epic follows the interwoven lives of two families caught up in China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and the Tienanmen Square movement thirteen years later.

It is in many ways a meditation on the role of the artist (in particular classical musicians) in relationship to revolutionary struggles, and how to keep hope in revolution alive in spite of its (deadly) betrayal. It’s also achingly tender and marvellously subtle, and offers a rare window into a crucial period in Chinese and global history as that nation moved from strident Maoism to capitalist globalization and as the Chinese diaspora continued to negotiate their place in Canada and beyond.

I’m looking forward to learning from the students (several of whom are from mainland China as well as Taiwan and Hong Kong and the diaspora) what they make of this novel and of the place of China in the future.

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 📕

This is an important experiment in which two dedicated movement organizers and theorists sat down to write a novel, made up of fictitious interviews, about a revolutionary struggle to establish a better world in the territories currently known as New York.

It is part of a wave of visionary activist science fiction, written less as a commercial or literary venture and more as an exercise of the radical imagination and as a resource for community building. Other examples include adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha’s collection Octavia’s Brood (2015), and Abolition Science Fiction (2022) edited by Phil Crockett Thomas and The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers which I co-edited in 2024.

I look forward to discussing with the students the role that the act of writing, and writing collectively, has in building solidarity, imagination and capacity for movements.