Politics
Miéville has previously been a member of the International Socialist Organization (US) and, until 13 March 2013, was also a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP, UK). He stood unsuccessfully for the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in the 2001 general election as a candidate for the Socialist Alliance, gaining 459 votes, equivalent to 1.2%, in Regent's Park and Kensington North, a Labour constituency.
In January 2013, he emerged as a critic of the SWP's leadership and in March resigned over the leadership's handling of rape allegations against a leading SWP member.
In August 2013, Miéville was one of nine signatories (along with veteran film-maker and socialist Ken Loach, academic Gilbert Achcar, General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Kate Hudson, fellow novelist Michael Rosen, and actor Roger Lloyd Pack) of an open letter to The Guardian announcing the foundation of a "new party of the left", to be called Left Unity. The letter, which claimed that Labour policies on austerity and the breaking of ties with trades unions amounted to a "final betrayal of the working-class people it was founded to represent", stated that Left Unity would be launched at a "founding conference" in London on 30 November 2013 and would provide, as an "alternative" to Labour, "a party that is socialist, environmentalist, feminist and opposed to all forms of discrimination".
In 2014, together with Richard Seymour and others, Miéville quit the International Socialist Network, a Left Unity faction, over a dispute concerning the acceptability of sexual "race play" that was prompted by discussion of a controversial art piece owned by Dasha Zhukova.
In 2015, he was announced as one of the founding editors of a "bi-annual journal of revolutionary arts and letters", Salvage. He has been the director of Salvage Publications since 2014.
October, published in 2017, documents the dramatic events of the Russian revolution. Jonathan Steele reviewed it for The Guardian. Steele considers it an ideological though nuanced retelling: "Known as a left-wing activist, [...] Miéville writes with the brio and excitement of an enthusiast who would have wanted the revolution to succeed. But he is primarily interested in the dramatic narrative – the weird facts – of the most turbulent year in Russia's history".
In a letter to Joybrato Mukherjee on 22 April 2024, Miéville rejected his nomination for a DAAD fellowship, citing Mukherjee's role in the cancelling of Jewish-American political theorist Nancy Fraser's Albertus Magnus Professorship at the University of Cologne because Fraser signed a pro-Palestine letter during the Gaza war, and his lack of "faith that the institution will stand against such a shameful program of repression and anti-Palestinian racism."
