May Day Books Blog: College Library Browsing #12: Utopia or Dystopia?

“Red Planets – Marxism and Science Fiction” edited by M. Bould & C. Miéville, 2009

While a seemingly unlikely duo, Marxism and science fiction (SF) actually have some similarities. Both pay attention to the future and sometimes pay attention in similar ways – specifically world-building versions of 'utopia,' better uses of technology and science and including class or anti-colonial rebellions against exploitative hierarchies. Not all science fiction fantasizes that capitalism will exist into eternity or retreats into medievalism, permanent dystopia or technical fascination. For good reason dystopia is certainly a favorite subject at present, yet some SF dystopias are answered by a rebellion – like Total Recall, The Matrix or The Handmaid's Tale. “Socialism or barbarism” are both reflected in SF's present output, as they are intrinsically related.

These essays and their subjects, some of which are too abstract or convoluted, cover a range of utopias, rebellions and futurist technology. As the authors note the pure fetishization of 'future' technology is a projection of technology's role under capital. SF literature arose during the rise of capital itself – Jules Verne and H.G. Wells being early positivist examples in the 1800s. Techno-futurism alone is not anti-capitalist or even anti-feudalist, as we can see in Herbert's messianic Dune. Yet there is a reason the genre is called 'science' fiction. That science is sometimes debatable, like the construction of the original Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, or else completely unscientific, but its intent is to create a believable reality without relying on magic.

The editors stand up for SF in its more sophisticated forms against claims it is not real literature or film. Recent examples: Nineteen Eighty-Four; 2001: a Space Odyssey; A Handmaid's Tale; Gravity's Rainbow; Alphaville; Solaris, etc. The founders of SF are Thomas More, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells. SF writers like Edward Bellamy, William Morris, H.G. Wells and Jack London were all socialists and this continues with China Mieville, Ursula Le Guin, K.S. Robinson and others. Even Nemo in Twenty-Thousand Leagues was an anti-colonial rebel. Left theorists like Frederic Jameson, Darko Suvin and Raymond Williams treat SF seriously.

The first essay is on 'anamorphic' (distorted or stretched) images found in SF, similar to Surrealism or in the old painting The Ambassadors by Holbein. The essay is an exercise in academic constipation.

Another analyzes 'utopias' designed by writers like Marge Piercy and Samuel Delany, but in this case Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness (TLHOD) and K.S. Robinson's Blue Mars. The author praises Le Guin for her portrayal of non-commodity music on the utopian / anarchist world of Anarres, as it is now a social product unconnected to intellectual property. Yet he faults her lead character for saying that he has discovered 'his' musical art, using a possessive pronoun, as if art is not always social too. I find this objection absurd, as ideas don't change immediately. He goes on to praise her portrayal of a nearly sexless society in TLHOD as showing how a society can break (almost) completely from capitalist animal spirits. Blue Mars' depicts music, drumming and dance as collective events in a utopian but primitive tribal context, and these same musical methods transported to an urban, post-capitalist environment.

Film is now a haven for SF and this essay investigates the relation between 'deflationary' cynical film noir and 'inflationary' optimistic SF. The SF example The Day the Earth Stood Still (TDTESS) satirizes the 1950s Cold War while 2001 shows the link between the clubs of apes and the spaceships of man. By 'inflationary' the author means something that looks optimistically to the future. Both tendencies are present in Marxism – “the pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will” is one way its framed - or the cruel present and the radiant possibilities of revolution and the future. TDTESS ends with an 'interplanetary cooperative association' – which is nothing like space in the present capitalist context. The author cites Dark City and especially Metropolis as fusions of noir and SF, which shade over into the ruined cities of Alphaville and Blade Runner. Dark City raises a utopian revolution against a ruling class called The Strangers and succeeds, achieving a society not of a nostalgic past, but of the future.

Another essay follows an obscure, apocalyptic film by Wim Wenders Until the End of the World (UTEOTW), concentrating on the issues of anti-colonialism, the impossible goal of 'going off the grid,' scientists' emotional stupidity and technical SF spectacles that demand nothing from the viewer. It considers 2001 a colonial, tech-fascinated film, and praises UTEOTW as one of the most substantial and progressive SF films in its decade.

There is an essay on 'the singularity' in a novel called Accelerando.- i.e. when human functioning becomes dominated by computerized AI, creating a supposed 'post-human' world of merged human-robot 'replicants.' This concept of a 'post-humanist' singularity divorces thought and action from the biological and sensuous reality of being human. The only real 'post-humanism' would be the complete Frankenstein victory of The Matrix or of Terminator's Skynet, not some super-intelligent, non-eating, non-shitting, non-baby humans. Human intelligence involves at least 9 functions and most computers can only master one. The author says 'post-humanism' is part of a techno-utopia. Is becoming a machine the goal of socialism? No, but a goal for those billionaires looking for some kind of eternal life. As humans know, machines break down and that is why there is a whole category of economics called depreciation. One commentator called the Singularity - “the rapture for nerds” and the author finally calls it “a fantasy of finance capital.” Oddly, the 'singularity' borrows from the Big Bang's imagined 'dimensionless singularity.'

Another essay assails Marx for raising human labor above animal labor, then links the idea to a SF book. Marx and other Marxists have always seen a link between the treatment of animals and that of human 'underpeople.' The author wishes to forge a bloc between socialists, environmentalists and animal-rights campaigners – which is already coming about without ignoring 'the animal labor theory of value' or the role of nature in human life.

Another essay focuses on the role of Lukac's 'Augenblick' – the Leninist moment when will or overdetermination push humans to a decisive intervention in history. This is demonstrated in the SF quartet “Fall Revolution” by Ken MacLeod. K.S. Robinson says MacLeod is “writing revolutionary SF,” seemingly from an anarcho-socialist point of view, advocating some kind of permanent revolution.

Another essay highlights Marxist film criticism during the German Weimar Republic, which erroneously denigrated mass entertainment like Fritz Lang in favor of Prolecult work. He approvingly cites a mass SF film that showed a woman getting into a rocket as some kind of progressive instance. Well it might have been … then. The issue of 'the rocket,' which is such a foundational icon in SF, has changed. It is now an extension of capitalist methods into space. Space X rockets blow up on the launch pads and litter Texas. Billionaires pay for tourist flights. Thousands of pieces of space junk float around the earth and on the moon. Government science programs are privatized while the globe is circled by privately-owned communication and government spy satellites. The real money pot is to mine asteroids and the moon; to colonize anything corporations touch. The only big stellar science projects recently have been the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, the latter undermining the theory of the Big Bang. It's a project, oddly, which yields no profit to anyone but provides valuable data about the universe.

A further essay looks at the role of the city in SF from a Left urbanist point of view, a la David Harvey. Some 1950s pulp SF thought 'skyscrapers' were symbols of a classless techno-utopia, when they are really examples of corporate dominance and high real estate prices. This is caught by SF writers like William Gibson in The Gernsback Continuum. The author claims cyberpunk SF and Marxist geography map the modern city in similar contrarian ways.

It gets more theoretical in several essays. One posits Althusser versus Jameson on the independence of science from ideology (Althusser) or its role purely as an ideology (Jameson). He brings in anarchists like Cohn-Bendit, Freudians like Lacan and concludes that post-capitalist, utopian SF visions have to completely break with capitalist ideology, impossible as that may be. Another is a discussion on the differences and similarities between SF and fantasy. Suvin and Jameson contended that fantasy was backward-looking and regressive, anti-modernist, magical, religious and proto-fascist. Raymond Williams contended that both built worlds that sometimes criticized the present capitalist condition. The author cites Tolkien and, though not available in 2009, Game of Thrones. After all Hobbiton is a utopia, though a retro, old-fashioned rural one based on horse-drawn farming. Likewise the anti-royalist Wildlings and Freefolk in GoT, products of the 'primitive' far north, are heroes led by John Snow. In the real world, the two genres have almost merged, as seen by SF awards in the 2000s for Harry Potter, Pan's Labyrinth and the Peter Jackson Tolkien series.

Mieville claims that both genres of SF and fantasy are distinct yet related, though SF is a more progressive, forward-looking genre. He looks at the scientific 'truthiness' of SF and says much of it is nonsense, though some is based on a rational extension of present science. The key is the author's ability to make the reader believe, not its actual or possible reality. Take the 'thropters' in the Dune film – could they work with those heavy, flapping dragonfly wings? They are a visual delight and two were actually built – with thrusters – and did fly. So they are 'real,' just as the fantastic vehicles in “Mad Max: Fury Road” actually worked. Mieville ends by showing how the worship of a “middle-brow utopian bureaucracy” in much tech SF is ideological, just as is praising a 'lumpen-postmodernist irrationalism.' 'Rationalism' has been debased by its deadly applicability to warfare, surveillance and profiteering, so it no longer works as a palliative according to him. Mieville is a former or present member of the British SWP and ends by praising both 'red planets and 'red dragons.'

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Squid Game,” “Blade Runner 2049,” “People's Future of the United States,” “The Heart Goes Last” and “Handmaid's Tale” (both by Atwood); “Red Star” (Bogdanov); “Good News” (Abbey); “Hunger Games,” “Matrix,” “Cloud Atlas,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (Dick); “Planet of the Apes” (3 movies); “The Road” (McCarthy); “The Dispossessed” and “Left Hand of Darkness” (Le Guin); “Fire on the Mountain” (Bisson); “The Ministry for the Future” (K.S. Robinson); “News From Nowhere” (Morris); “World War Z,” “American War, “R.U.R. And the Insect Play” (Capek), “Mad Max – Fury Road,” “Dune – the Movie,” "October - the Story of the Russian Revolution" (Mieville).