All my life as a lefty, I had to find ways of escaping the poignant question: “Mate, if you don’t like capitalism, what’s the alternative? How could the system work differently? Labor markets, companies, land use, housing, foreign trade — how would it all work if people like you could reshape the world?” And I have to admit that this is a question that most socialists, like myself, whenever we heard it, we run for cover, because it’s a very difficult question to answer. You can’t possibly even begin to imagine that the Soviet Union is a good model for what we need here now. It was a gulag. I would be the first one to end up in the gulag. I always knew that. So it was a question that, for a long time, I avoided by concentrating on criticizing capitalism.
And, you know, now I’m 60, Amy, and I decided that it’s time to put my money where my mouth is. But, you know, sitting down to write a treatise of how would markets work, how would this work and so on, was just too boring to do. So I decided I’m going to write a novel, because, you see, when you have a novel, you have characters. And when you have characters, you can put different ideas — your own ideas, different ideas, because I have conflicting ideas in my head, about how a democratic, socialist, liberal, market society should be like —
— source democracynow.org | Sep 29, 2021