One of the amazing things about the Russian Revolution is the insistence on what is both a very, very simple and awe-inspiringly extraordinary claim, which is you can build a system based on need, and not on exploitation and profit. And that is something that is ongoingly an intense revelation and vindication of an intuition that we absolutely need to return to.

Writer China Miéville explains why the story of the Russian Revolution still stirs us a century later - from the parallels and divergences between our sadistic neoliberal era and the hopeless last years of tsarist rule, to the need for today's left to remain agile and open-minded, with one eye on how bad things truly are, and another on how much better they could become.

China is author of October: The Story of the Russian Revolution from Verso.