This chapter examines the dialectic of positive and negative utopian tendencies in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy. Critically acclaimed as a landmark series in the British New Weird subgenre, Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004) offer readers rich worldbuilding, blending neo-Victorian steampunk with semi-fascist capitalist oppression. Within the largely negative terrain of Perdido Street Station moments of utopian positivity can nonetheless flourish – most memorably in the inter-species love affair between the scientist protagonist and his insectoid partner. The Scar, which is set on a floating city-state, offers a positive utopian space partly modelled on the social organisation of real-world pirate ships on the eighteenth-century Atlantic. However, it also plays on Ursula Le Guin’s notion of the ‘ambiguous utopia’, with counter-utopian as well as counter-counter-utopian narrative elements. The third novel in the series, Iron Council, sees a transition towards communism, focusing on the political construction of revolutionary utopian ideals. Together, Miéville’s novels present readers with a heady mix of fantastic worldbuilding and Marxist utopian politics, with overt references to the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, and, more recently, the anti-globalisation protests at the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in 1999.

This chapter explores anti-utopian satire in bestselling British author Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Like the anti-chivalric satire of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, the Discworld books celebrate pragmatism and local knowledge rather than political ideals. The Discworld is alive with vivid utopian impulses, however, the chapter argues that they frequently lack concrete detail. Pratchett is more concerned with constructing a colourful world of humour, heroism, and villainy. The Ankh-Morpork books reflect on the processes of historical change, accelerating a medieval city-state into liberal industrial modernity via an array of fantastically estranged forms. The city itself, however, fails to actualise into a utopian vision of the future. Rather, Pratchett’s fantasy series articulates a deep suspicion of the kind of political radicalism often associated with utopian thinking. Through a close reading of two books in the series, Night Watch (2002) and Making Money (2007), the chapter considers how Pratchett’s fantasy world laments structural violence whilst lampooning utopian remedies to such violence, such as democratic elections, trade unions, industrial action, or new kinds of post-capitalist value.

The new nationalism of the Xi Jinping era, which has brought together political nationalism and cultural nationalism – two largely opposing streams between 1919 and 1989 – has redefined the CPC and the PRC. On paper, the party is a class organization while the PRC is a class dictatorship that sanctions class sovereignty rather than popular sovereignty. Since 2001, the party has been represented as a national party as well as a class organization. Representing the nation entails the promotion of national culture, and a major component of the Chinese Dream is cultural revival. Consequently, the CPC and the PRC are nationalized in a shift from Marxist classism to synthesized Chinese nationalism. Their class identities appear to be at odds with their national identities, but the tension is minimized as the party turns Marxism into an empty signifier and sinicizes it out of existence.

This chapter tracks the importance and resilience of CPC ideology by examining the development of Mao Zedong Thought from his early Communist writings (1927–1940) through to Yan’an Rectification (1942–1945) and then during his reign as Supreme Leader (1949–1976). It then explores Mao Zedong Thought’s importance for the CPC today. CPC leaders since Mao’s death have invoked, and continue to invoke, Mao Zedong Thought for legitimation and to exhibit continuity despite shifts away from the ideology and practice of the Mao era. Mao Zedong Thought thus fulfills a legitimative need rather than a social one; CPC leaders must acknowledge, and often reference, Mao Zedong Thought to project continuity even if the ruptures since Mao’s death have resulted in an un-Maoist Party-state.

Moving between absolutist Prussia, urban bourgeois Leipzig, and late Hanoverian/early Victorian Britain, Felix Mendelssohn experienced and actively engaged with the (cultural) politics of pre-1848 Europe. His correspondence reveals him to have been distinctly inclined towards a reformist, liberal standpoint, yet increasingly sceptical of the political difference he or art could make. Despite remaining in Berlin, Fanny Hensel (as well as their younger sister Rebecka) appears to have greater radical sympathies – this in marked contrast to the conservative politics of her husband Wilhelm Hensel.

When the atrocities of the French Revolution led Romantic authors to test the viability of anti-imperial imaginaries in their poetry, many of them relocated revolution from Europe to so-called Oriental geographies. The cultural and aesthetic distance of exoticized topographies generated a spectacle of revolutionary violence that could be consumed safely in Britain. In the poetic works of Thomas Moore (Lalla Rookh), Felicia Hemans (The Abencerrage), Lord Byron (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Giaour), Percy Shelley (Laon and Cythna), Robert Southey (Thalaba the Destroyer), and Thomas Love Peacock (Ahrimanes), revolutionary struggle is envisaged as an enterprise marked by a cyclical logic that anticipates the return of empire: It is redefined as an inevitable failure to undo oppressive power structures. An ethnoracially demarcated space of fantasy, the Orient allows these poets to experiment with revolutionary narratives in a way that affectively neutralizes the lived trauma of revolution by reducing it to a dehistoricized and yet universalizable configuration. In the Orientalist poetry of Romantics, then, revolution becomes imaginable as an anti-imperial event with the caveat that its present unrealizability is affirmed in its consumption as a culturally and ethnoracially distanced spectacle.

Chapter 6 looks at how money acts both as an element in the moral concretion of the revolution’s moral project – one that here takes the form also of a ‘moral economy’ – but also a prime catalyst for its deterioration in the face of the pervasive condition of moral-cum-material decline Cubans call necesidad, intimating a sense of destitution that is felt to exert itself as an uncontrollable force. The relation between the revolution and what lies beyond it, then, is seen here through the prism of the duality of money as both a qualitative token of value and quantitative scale for commensuration. The former is central to the way pesos (Cuba’s national currency, issued by the revolutionary state) operate as moral concretions of the revolution, marking out the scope of its moral economy. The latter, however, comes into its own with the use of US dollars and locally issued currencies pegged to it, which have become increasingly pervasive in everyday consumption since the 1990s. In its capacity to commensurate all values quantitatively, the dollar rubs out the distinction between the state’s moral economy and the variously licit and informal realms of transaction that have grown alongside it in Cuba. Crucially, in this way, it tends to trump the revolution’s effort to position itself as transcendental condition of possibility for life, encompassing it with its own transcendental scope.

This chapter lays out the central idea of revolution as a world-making, cosmogonic project, charting out the areas of social life in which this can be seen in the experience of revolutionary transformation in Cuba. It sets the coordinates of the relational analysis that the book as a whole proposes as a major intellectual dividend of its anthropological approach to the study of revolutionary politics. Placing its argument in the context of the longstanding debate about the role of social relations as at once the empirical focus and prime heuristic device of anthropological research, including the current literature on ‘relationism’ to which this debate has given rise, the chapter explains how a focus on the shapes of relations can unpack the inner dynamics of revolution as a totalizing social transformation.

This chapter develops a model of the relationship between revolution and person with detailed reference to the life and family histories collected in Havana in the late 1960s by the American anthropologists Oscar and Ruth Lewis and the team of researchers they trained in Cuba. The focus here is on ethnographic material from the Lewis’ volumes pertaining to people’s revolutionary ‘integration’ through participation in state-coordinated mass organizations, and particularly the so-called Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs). Tracking ethnographically the ways and degrees to which the Lewis’ respondents got involved in these neighbourhood level structures, the chapter develops a model of revolutionary personhood that emphasises the duality between ‘role’ and ‘person’. Due to the totalizing way it ensconces itself in every aspect of everyday life, this duality marks out the coordinates for people’s continual acts of comparison and calibration between the two, which becomes the prime format of daily social life in revolutionary Cuba. By the same token, the duality of role and person marks out the limits of the revolution’s transcendentalizing project, whose containing force reaches only as far as its designation of roles via the state’s structures can take it, leaving the remainders of people beyond its scope.

Chapter 4 extends the argument on the ‘duplex’ form of revolutionary personhood by exploring the shapes it takes in people’s relationship with Marxist-Leninist ideology. The analysis draws its material from heated public debates that raged in the Cuban public sphere throughout the 1960s, regarding the merits and demerits of using Soviet and other textbooks (‘manuales’) as the prime tool for bringing the rudiments of communist ideology to the masses. Comparing this with classic anthropological accounts of the power of ritual in bringing transcendent orders to life, the chapter develops an alternative to meaning-based theories of ideology, which focus on questions of its truth-value and legitimating powers, by focusing instead on ideology as a relational form, configuring people in relation to ideological texts and the ideas that they contain. The contrasting positions taken in the controversies over textbooks in Cuba, then, are shown as different ways of configuring the relationship between people and ideas. Duality and how best to negotiate the ruptures it creates, including temporal rifts between the past and the present, will once again be a central theme of this morphological discussion.