Author: sfrarev

---

---

Resisting Colonialist Politics Through Sex-Role Reversal: A Critical Reading of Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild”

Anupom Kumar Hazarika

Octavia E. Butler is known “for stories that trouble rather than reify difference, and unsettle those readers searching for easy answers.” (Pasco et al. 249) To put it succinctly, science fiction, for Butler, becomes a literary vehicle for problematizing binary opposites: colonizer and colonized, human and alien, male and female. In her essay “Defining Butler: Postcolonial Perspectives,” Thelma Shinn Richard says, “Octavia Butler brings postcolonial understanding to bear on the possibilities inherent but unrealized in contemporary America.” (118) Richard draws our attention to Butler’s cultural identity as an African American that is wedded to America’s colonial history.  Being a Black woman writer, Butler makes sure that her science fiction narratives allusively explore the facets of colonialism.

Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction narratives corroborate what Michelle Reid argues in her paper “Postcolonial Science Fiction.” Reid says, “Science fiction doesn’t have to work within, [sic] existing colonial history. We can project a world completely different to our own into other times and spaces that doesn’t have to be subject to the same assumptions or colonial legacies” (Reid). Butler’s literary freedom allows her to weave stories that are allusively linked to empirical world of the reader. Exploiting the elements of science fiction, Butler, in “Bloodchild,” imagines an estranged universe peopled by humans and aliens. The text dramatizes how the male-sexed body is used as a site for implantation of alien eggs, which  Kristen Lillvis  identifies as an instance of the exploitation of the colonial subject. The literary strategy of using the binary of human and alien as a metaphor for the colonizer-colonized dyad corroborates Raffaella Baccolini’s argument that the associations between imagined events outside human history and historical occurrences attribute a paradoxical status to science fiction. (296-297) Butler’s science fiction short story, then, is contingent on the colonial encounter.

Butler’s short story, titled “Bloodchild,” depicts an unusual relationship between a human protagonist and an alien. By “unusual relationship,” I imply an interspecies bond built on affection, trust, and care. Octavia E. Butler herself explains the thematic concerns of her story about aliens in her afterword to the short story. She lays out three different ways of looking at her narrative. She calls it a romance between two distinct beings, a coming-of-age story concerning a boy, and a story about men becoming pregnant. (30) Butler makes the act of approaching the text critically easier for the reader, who can then effortlessly explore the three themes around which she builds the plot. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, Butler does not provide any univocal interpretation of the colonizer-colonized dyad. She, in fact, complicates the line of inclusion/exclusion separating the category of the colonizer from that of the colonized. The line of inclusion/exclusion is challenged by b her characters—Gan (a human) and T’Gatoi (an alien)—who rewrite the notions of gender, kinship, and love.

Before I discuss how T’Gatoi and Gan reconfigure gender norms, it is pertinent to situate their relationship in the colonial context. Results from earlier studies indicate that gender is “a significant historical consideration” (Levine 2) that paves the way for examining how gender shapes both European and non-European configurations of gender. (Ghosh 737; Hassan 1) A significant work that critically looks at the discursive formations of white and non-white masculinity is Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity: The Manly Englishman and the Effeminate Bengali in the Nineteenth Century (1995), where she argues that “the contours of colonial masculinity were shaped in the context of an imperial social formation that included both Britain and India.” (2) Incorporating “the intersection of the imperial with categories of nation, race, class, gender and sexuality” into her line of reasoning, Sinha says that “the politically self-conscious Indians occupied a unique position” within the colonial order of masculinity. (2) Correspondingly, Philippa Levine urges her readers to consider gender as an analytical tool that signifies “‘the multiple and contradictory meanings attached to sexual difference’” and goes on to argue that “an understanding of gender does not stand alone or somehow ‘above’ other factors, such as class and race, also at work.” (2) She says that “it was not uncommon for colonized peoples to be seen by imperialists as weak and unmasculine, because they were colonized, an opinion that already assumed that male weakness and lack of masculinity were central to the process of becoming a colony.” (6) A case in point is middle-class Bengali Hindus who were designated as ‘effeminate babus’ (Sinha 2). Radhika Mohanram’s examples of British and Indian soldiers in Imperial White: Race, Diaspora and the British Empire (2007) bear out the relational link between white masculinity and Indian masculinity. Embodiment becomes the focal point for Mohanram, who says that the darkened body of the colonized Indian man subjugates him “in a hierarchical relation with the British.” (12) The hierarchical relationship between the white and the non-white body constructs the Indian soldier as “superstitious, irrational, giving validity to rumour.” (7) During colonialism in Africa, the universalized idea about masculinity as popularized by the Europeans stood in stark contrast with the multi-faceted nature of African masculinity. (Scott 4) Transgressive gender performances native to African society were targeted by the Europeans, and colonial subjects who did not conform to the gender binary were seen as having a negative influence on Christian society. (Elnaiem)

Postcolonial approaches to masculinity seem to be complemented by the science fiction genre, which has played a vital role in refashioning the sexed body, gender, and sexuality. Feminist interventions in SF make it apparent that SF became a fertile ground to resist gender, sexuality and identity during the 1960s and 1970s. (Thibodeau 263) In In the Chinks in the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988), Sarah Lefanu says, “The stock conventions of science fiction—time travel, alternate worlds, entropy, relativism, the search for a unified female theory—can be used metaphorically and metonymically as powerful ways of exploring the construction of ‘woman’.” (4-5) Lefanu emphasizes how the generic conventions of science fiction can help writers explore how bodies are socially constructed. With regard to the inquiry into liberal humanism, Constance Penley argues that “new pressures from feminism, the politics of race and sexual orientation, and in the dramatic change in the structure of family and the workplace seem to have intensified the symptomatic wish to pose and re-pose the question of difference in a fictional form.” (vii) The non-human in science fiction is a significant literary tool through which science fiction engages with “the question of difference” (Penley vii). Regarding the alien, Amanda Thibodeau argues, “While alien bodies have often represented feared “otherness,” they offer feminist science fiction a rich site for the re-imagining of gender, sexuality, and identity within narratives that challenge the heteronormative implications of “progress” built into space exploration narratives.” (263) Butler’s representation of T’Gatoi exemplifies the point made by Thibodeau. Even though  she does not provide any information regarding how the zone of the aliens is organized along gender lines, she challenges the gender binary via her protagonist T’Gatoi,  who actively participates in the political sphere, which is traditionally perceived as a masculine space in the reader’s empirical world. Gan says, “T’Gatoi was going into her family’s business—politics.” (Butler 8) Her reputation as an efficient negotiator is enhanced as she puts “an end to the final remnants of the earlier system of breaking up Terran families to suit impatient Tlic.” (5) Furthermore, her unceasing endeavour to look after Gan and his family illustrates that she is the primary breadwinner for Gan’s family. Her role as a breadwinner, along with her interest in the public, masculine world, evinces the elasticity of the masculine gender category and allows her to stretch the category of masculinity. Her challenge to masculinity is intertwined with her political intent to reorganize colonial society; therein lies the text’s strongest postcolonial undercurrent. It is apparent that Gan’s and T’Gatoi’s lives are organized according to the tension between the colonizer and the colonized. As Gan says, “Only she [T’Gatoi] and her political faction stood between us and the hordes that did not understand why there was a Preserve.” (5) The Preserve is an area of land where Terrans (humans) are kept. However, love’s transformative possibilities shape their preordained destinies. Textual evidence reveals that T’Gatoi has been a regular visitor to Gan’s house and considers Gan’s house as “her second home” (4). T’Gatoi’s  care for the humans is evident in her aforementioned effort to put “an end to the final remnants of the earlier system of breaking up Terran families to suit impatient Tlic.” (5) T’Gatoi’s apprehension of Gan’s house challenges both the zone of the aliens and the zone of the humans which “are opposed” (Fanon 37) and “follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity.” (38) It attests to the split in the colonial encounter.

Both science fiction and postcolonialism are concerned with bodies. Ashcroft et al. argue that the body “is important for postcolonial studies that reminds us that the discursive practices of imperial power operated on and through people, and it offers a ready corrective to the tendency to abstract ideas from their living context.” (202) Scholars working in the realm of science fiction recognize how bodies represented in SF speak volumes about the discursive control of the body. In his paper “Teaching Postcolonial Science Fiction,” Uppinder Mehan  provides a frame of reference for examining the tropes of science fiction:

Both postcolonial and sf writers have a rich literary tradition of complicating the notion of the body as an unmediated and sovereign entity: postcolonial writing examines the effects on identity when a profound distance is created between self and body by the histories of slavery and conquest which erase the lively and vibrant cultural context necessary for fuller understanding of the native’s body, and by the ‘scientific’ construction of the black or brown as either inferior or superior to but definitely different from the ‘normal’ white body; while sf tales of robots, shape-shifting and humanoid aliens, androids, clones and cyberspace have all contributed to calling into question ‘the natural body’ far earlier than most commentators and critics. (165-166)   In Butler’s imagined world, no human can exercise control over his/her own bodies. The fate of the body is determined by the aliens on some planet. The ritual of implanting alien eggs inside the male body has been an outcome of a meaningful negotiation between the humans and the aliens. To save their species from extinction, male-sexed bodies are used as wombs where the eggs of female aliens are implanted. However, it is self-evident that the colonized man is unable to govern his own body ontologically. Exploitation of the male body testifies to the colonial ideology of disentangling masculinity, as the Europeans understand it, from the body of the colonized man. As stated earlier, T’Gatoi’s representation as an alien is a means to imagine gender differently. Likewise, Gan’s portrayal—which is in correspondence with the colonial subject—becomes a vehicle for complicating the colonized man’s masculinity.  Unlike his brother, who steps back from the ritual and who does not show any keen desire to carry eggs, Gan willfully chooses to risk his life. Even though Gan’s role as a surrogate ‘mother’ may be construed as an instance of emasculation by some readers, Gan’s intention reorients implantation as understood by the aliens. Gan’s decision, no doubt, is predicated on the customary practice endemic to the planet and is affected by his social status as a colonial subject, yet he fervently acknowledges his desire to carry T’Gatoi’s eggs. Gan changes the fate of his sexed body by altering the biological functions assigned to the male body and provides a challenge to colonizing power through his body.

Gan’s conviction that he delights in carrying T’Gatoi’s eggs undermines heterosexuality as understood by the reader. Gan belongs to a society which, I think, is patrilineal as heterosexual men have more sexual freedom than women. For men, copulation has wider implications. They can copulate with women and female aliens. In the text’s imagined colonial context, patrilineal unions give the aliens the incentive to prolong implantation. Sexual copulation between men and women is predicated upon the demand of the aliens. When Gan says that “they [the aliens] usually take men to leave the women free to bear their own young,” Gan’s brother retorts, “To provide the next generation of host animals.” (Butler 21) The fates of both species, which are entwined, rest upon colonized women whose reproductive labour is a form of exploitation, for they have to emotionally detach themselves from their offspring and cannot experience maternal love properly. For instance,  Gan’s mother, carries a troubled expression on her face. Collectively, she and T’Gatoi have been overseeing the stages of Gan’s development: “T’Gatoi liked the idea of choosing an infant and watching and taking part in all phases of development. I’m told I [Gan] was first caged within T’Gatoi’s many limbs within three minutes after my birth.” (8) Lien, Gan’s mother, refuses to consume sterile eggs that can prolong her death, which can be construed as her endeavour to resist the practice of implantation. As Alexander Meireles da Silva argues, “There is a particular reason why human women on the Preserve, like Lien, have an extra sense of power that the males do not have . . . Without human women, the Tlics would be left without hosts for their eggs.” (375) Gan says, “Why else had my mother kept looking at me as though I were going away from her, going where she could not follow?” (Butler 27) Gan’s mother believes that implantation cannot cement the two species emotionally. In fact, narratives about the imposed practice reveal that men and women are destined to become partake in the Tlic system of reproduction: “Back when the Tlic saw us as not much more than convenient, warm-blooded animals, they would pen several of us together, male and female, and feed us only eggs. The way they could be sure of getting another generation of us no matter how we tried to hold out.” (Butler 11) With regard to the representation of the Tlic system of reproduction, Kristen Lillvis, in her paper “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Slavery? The Problem and Promise of Mothering in Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild”,” notes that “The history of Tlic rule and forced Terran reproduction evokes the horrors of slavery, reservation systems, and internment camps, where the nonwhite other is segregated and coerced (through threats, beatings, or alcohol) into a passive or servile position.” (11) What are the implications, then, of Gan’s decision to become a human host? Gan’s disavowal of any heterosexual inclinations towards (human) females can be interpreted as his wish to disentangle himself from his society’s preference for patrilineal unions. Instead of choosing a customary heterosexual relationship that will be beneficial to the aliens since he will be fathering children, Gan decides to carry T’Gatoi’s eggs in order that he can prove his love for the female alien. When T’Gatoi decides to choose his sister Xuan Hoa as a host human, Gan stops her and expresses his will to bear her young.

Lillvis says that “Butler’s mothers invest themselves in caring for their communities” and “work to improve the circumstances of their people by destroying hierarchical power structures and developing more egalitarian societies.” (7) Adding to her argument, I would point out that both T’Gatoi and Gan seek to challenge the social order by refashioning kinship. Through Gan, Butler demonstrates “the physical possibility of pregnancy beyond women” (Lillvis 7) and emphasizes the importance of partnership. Gan views copulation as a means to dismantle the view that humans and aliens are mutually exclusive. He emphasizes that changes in the colonial power structure can be brought forth through concrete examples of partnership. Rather than protecting the Terrans (humans) from seeing the stages of labour and birth, they must be shown when they are “young kids, and shown more than once” (Butler 29). Even though “T’Gatoi possesses the power of the phallus and occupies the father function because of her governmental and social authority as well as her physical superiority, including her phallic stinger . . . and ovipositor,” (Lillvis 11-12) her role as a biological mother is contingent on her trust in Gan to not hate her young. In his study of the influence of African patterns in African-American families, Herbert J. Foster argues that Black families “are not necessarily centered around conjugal unions, the sine qua of the nuclear family.” (231) Herbert J. Foster says “the extensive kinship network” is viewed by them as “a survival mechanism against the destructive and destabilizing impacts of American society on black family life.” (229, 227) The representation of kinship as a thematic concern of “Bloodchild” is further identified by Thelma Shinn Richard, who argues that the text illustrates how kinship beyond biological connections is determined by love. (122) She states that the transformative power of love surpasses the love of power in Butler’s short story. Richard’s claims are of relevance here. A notable aspect of the short story is the love between Gan and T’Gatoi, who do not share any ontological similarities with each other. Gan’s family considers the female alien T’Gatoi to be one of their own family members. In fact, Gan’s mother has decided to give one of her children to T’Gatoi. T’Gatoi, who herself feels kinship with Gan’s family, redefines the ties of kinship by establishing a harmonious relationship between her and Gan’s family. Even though Gan has been T’Gatoi’s primary locus of attention since she began participating in all the phases of human development, her endeavour to bring sterile eggs for the other family members speaks volumes about the role as someone who is concerned about the physical well-being of Gan’s family as a whole. Her gesture of cold-hearted kindness  stands in stark contrast to “the earlier system of breaking up Terran families to suit impatient Tlic.” (Butler 5) It can also be interpreted as an effort to rewrite the notion of blood relation as understood by the aliens. She has been playing the role of a breadwinner for Gan’s family, giving them sterile alien eggs that prolong human life.

So far as the text’s subgeneric context is concerned, Butler’s text has the generic symptoms of the alien invasion subgenre. Humans colonizing other planets or aliens visiting Earth to establish their colonies on Earth is a relatively generic aspect of stories about aliens. (Jones 109) Alien invasion stories depict the subjugation of the powerless. Besides spatial colonization, the invasion of corporality is a thematic essence of science fiction stories about aliens. Movies like Aliens, Independence Day and the more recent Prometheus have popularized the motif of the evil alien and provide compelling evidence for border crossing while dramatizing violent confrontations between humans and aliens.  Credible evidence  of border crossing is Ridley Scott’s film Aliens (1979), which shows how alien organisms kill their human hosts. The other movies also attest to how the human body is host to alien organisms feeding upon it. “Bloodchild” demonstrates similar scenes where female aliens implant their eggs inside the male sexed body:

T’Gatoi found a grub still eating its egg case. The remains of the case were still wired into a blood vessel by their own little tube or hook or whatever. That was the way the grubs were anchored and the way they fed. They took only blood until they were ready to emerge. Then they ate their stretched, elastic egg cases. Then they ate their hosts. (Butler 17)

A scene like this is violent as there is inexorable demand for men who are at the mercy of female aliens and are killed by grubs. It exposes the reader to the fragility of the human body. Even though Butler’s representation of border crossing may seem commonplace, Butler uses border crossing as a means to subtly critique oppressive socio-cultural practices. Let us consider the case of Gan (a human) who decides to become a surrogate mother for T’Gatoi’s unborn alien babies. SF, according to Brian McHale, is “intrinsically ontological” (85) because it concerns bodily transgression which is a central concern of posthumanism. Gan’s corporeality challenges the limits of the male body and fulfills the claims made by critical posthuman theorists who hash over the liberation promised by bodily transgression. “So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities, which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work,” argues Donna J. Haraway drawing upon the figure of the cyborg. (14) Haraway uses the cyborg, which is, of course, itself a familiar SF trope, as a theoretical underpinning and situates it in the context of the digital era. Another theorist of posthumanism, Rosi Braidotti, holds the view that post-anthropocentric practices perpetuated by global capitalism “blur the qualitative lines of demarcation  not only among categories (male/female, black/white, human/animal, dead/alive, centre/margin, etc.), but also within each one of them, the human becomes subsumed into global networks of control and commodification which have taken ‘Life’ as the main target.” (64) In a similar fashion, Butler critiques the classical human/alien and the male/female divides in her short story, yet she differs from posthuman theorists in terms of her strategy. Butler’s tool is the science fiction genre, which, she argues, has “no closed doors.” (“Remembering” 00:03:07-08) The pregnant man, in the text, not only emerges as a science fiction trope but also signals possibilities that may persuade the reader to reframe the non-conflictual category of masculinity.  Gan’s transgression is twofold—first, by using his body as a womb, he rewrites the contours of the male body; second, he remakes the human body by extending its limits. By hosting the eggs of T’Gatoi, Gan’s body bridges the gap between the human and the alien. The convenience of using the body of the colonized man for implantation may be read as an implicit critique of racial segregation that divides colonial society along racial lines. The science fictional representation of Gan’s body is an instance of border crossing/bodily invasion providing a critique of binary opposites: colonizer and colonized, human and alien, male and female without reservation.

In the introduction to The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction (2011), Masood Ashraf Raja and Swaralipi Nandi argue the science fiction is “a staging ground and a launching pad for a radical reconfiguration.” (9) Butler’s text radically reconfigures our conventional approaches towards embodiment, gender, sexuality, and border crossing. Exploiting the human-alien dyad as a metaphor for the binary of colonizer and colonized, Butler dramatizes the plight of Terrans (humans). Butler’s text challenges patriarchal oppression endemic to human society and provides a resolution (pregnant man), which remains essentially speculative. Gan’s pregnancy may be  interpreted as an act of radical autopoiesis. Factors like race and gender playing a part in constructing the non-white male body is critiqued by Butler through her demasculinized male protagonist, who challenges patrilineality and thus abates the subjugation of colonized women while rearranging the relationship between the ruler and the governed. 

WORKS CITED

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts,  3rd ed., Routledge, 2013.

Baccolini, Raffaella. “Science Fiction, Nationalism, and Gender in Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild.” Constructing Identities: Translations, Cultures, Nations, edited by Raffaella Baccolini and Patrick Leech. Bononia University Press, 2008, pp. 295-308.

Bradotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.

Butler, Octavia E. Bloodchild and Other Stories, 2^nd ed., Seven Stories Press, 2005.

Elnaiem, Mohammed. “The “Deviant” African Genders That Colonialism Condemned.” April 29, 2021, Daily JSTOR, https://daily.jstor.org/the-deviant-african-genders-that-colonialism-condemned/. Accessed 12 Sep. 2024.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. Grove Weidenfeld, 1963.

Foster, Herbert J. “African Patterns in the Afro-American Family.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, Dec., 1983, pp. 201-232.

Ghosh, Durba. “Gender and Colonialism: Expansion or Marginalization? The Historical Journal, vol. 47, no. 3, Sep. 2004, pp. 737-755.

Haraway, Donna. Manifestly Haraway. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Hassan, Narin. “Colonialism and Gender.” The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Nancy A. Naples. John Wiley and Sons, 2016,pp. 1-11

Jones, Gwyneth. Deconstructing the Starships: Science, Fiction and Reality. Liverpool University Press, 1999.

Lefanu, Sarah. In The Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction. The Women’s Press, 1988.

Levine, Phillipa. “Introduction.” Gender and Empire, edited by Phillipa Levine. Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 1-13.

Lillvis, Kristen. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Slavery? The Problem and Promise of Mothering in Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild.” MELUS, vol. 39, no. 4, Winter 2014, pp. 7-22.

McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. Routledge, 1992.

Mehan, Uppinder. “Teaching Postcolonial Science Fiction.” Teaching Science Fiction, edited by Andy Sawyer and Peter Wright, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 162-178.

Mohanram, Radhika. Imperial White: Race, Diaspora and the British Empire. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Pasco, John Carlo, et al. “Visionary Medicine: Speculative Fiction, Racial Justice, and Octavia Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’.” Medical Humanities, vol. 42, 2016, pp. 246-251.

Penley, Constance. “Introduction”. Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction, edited by Constance Penley et al. University of Minnesota Press, 1991, pp. vii-xi.

Raja, Masood Ashraf, and Swaralipi Nandi. “Introduction”. The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics, and Science Fiction, edited by Masood Ashraf Raja et al., McFarland & Company, Inc, 2011, pp. 5-14.

Reid, Michelle. “Postcolonial Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Foundation. https://www.sf-foundation.org/postcolonial-science-fiction-dr-mic. Accessed 20 Sep. 2024.

“Remembering Octavia Butler: Black Sci Fi Writer Shares Cautionary Tales in Unearthed 2005 Interview.” YouTube, uploaded by Democracy Now, 23 Feb.2 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0UgiE8vYuI. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Richard, Thelma Shinn. “Defining Kindred: Octavia Butler’s Postcolonial Perspective.” Obsidian III, vol. 6, no. 7, Fall 2005, pp. 118-134.

Scott, Lwando. “African Masculinities.” The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Sexuality Education, edited by Louisa Allen and Mary Lou Rasmussen. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, pp. 1-10.

da Silva, Alexander Meireles. “War of the Worlds: Postcolonial Identities in Afro-American Speculative Fiction.” Letras e Letras, vol. 26, no. 2, 2010, pp. 369-388.

Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and The ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the late nineteenth century. Manchester University Press, 1995.

Thibodeau, Amanda. “Alien Bodies and a Queer Future: Sexual Revision in Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” and James Triptree, Jr.’s “With Delicate Mad Hands.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 39, no. 2, July 2012, pp. 262-282.

Anupom Kumar Hazarika (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Cotton University. He is also a part-time PhD candidate at IIT Guwahati. 

---

---

---

Touring Post-Capitalist Imaginaries after 2008

Jeffrey Barber, Integrative Strategies Forum

Imagining the end of capitalism

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, concerns about global warming, inequality and neofascism encouraged discussions, social campaigns, and publications advancing the discourse of what alternatives exist to the current dominant governance system of capitalism. The phrase “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” repeated so often over recent years, is a challenge to creative writers and producers of speculative future narratives.  This imaginative blind spot is understandable given the half-century dominance of neoliberal capitalism, the decades of Cold War anti-communism hysteria and blacklisting, and the many assumptions regarding the flaws and failures of pre-World War I, Progressive Era utopian fiction.

Rising awareness of climate change, biodiversity loss and authoritarianism as well as racism, sexism and the expanding inequality gap between rich and poor raise the question and challenge, especially in the science fiction domain: How do we imagine future alternatives beyond the conventional tropes of manifest destiny, techno-feudalism and collapse, particularly how an ecologically sustainable and socially just post-capitalist society might plausibly evolve, look and feel like?

The other phrase contributing to this challenge is Margaret Thatcher’s claim “there is no alternative” (TINA). Mark Fisher (2009) named the difficulties embracing both producers and consumers of post-capitalist imaginaries as capitalist realism, “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”

Touring postcapitalist imaginaries

In this paper, we embark on a chronotopic tour of some of the post-capitalist democratic imaginaries published after and influenced by the 2008 financial crisis, observing post-capitalist governance structures and strategies. While Star Trek is one of science fiction’s most well-known post-capitalist imaginaries, having abandoned the money system after the invention of replicator technology, our tour will concentrate on the much smaller set of SF narratives not reliant on such convenient techno-fantasy devices, restricting ourselves mostly to those stories within the realm of current science plausibility (with some exceptions).

Our tour is “chronotopic” in that we explore the spatio-temporal afforances of a series of storyworlds involved in alternative/future history timelines, along with critical speculations and commentaries regarding parallel issues and events in the author’s storywriting timeline. We are less interested in the plot and characters except in how they perceive, reflect, and portray the storyworld and its history. Our tour will focus on five science fiction novels imagining life and governance after capitalism. Admittedly, these reflect the authors’ US and UK-based perspectives.

Post-capitalist destinations

Writers of alternative futures and histories have produced numerous works imagining the end of capitalism, especially those set in postapocalyptic settings, where the remains of the capitalist past are equated with lost civilization. There are also the postcapitalist techno-fantasy storyworlds where advanced technologies have conveniently provided scientifically improbable utopian “solutions” to the earth’s most vexing problems (e.g., Star Trek’s replicator, wormhole travel). The scientifically plausible, if politically and culturally challenging scenarios, in imagining postcapitalist, utopian realist futures, unfortunately claim a disappointingly small share of the commercial flow of future imaginaries in media and popular culture.

We now set off on this tour of postcapitalist imaginaries, covering the overall collective timeline from 2008 to the 2160s, visiting five storyworlds published between 2016 and 2020.

Eminent Domain

We first visit Carl Neville’s Eminent Domain (2020), told through nostalgic and traumatic recollections of the past interlacing cat and mouse chases, interrogations, debates, dreams, and institutional reports. We follow a wide range of characters, from revolutionaries to dictators, security agents to moles, assassins and university students.

Our journey begins in the People’s Republic of Britain (PRB), the Former United Kingdom (FUK), in London across the second week of April in the year 2018. People here are celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Breach and the “trans-European workers accords that established parallel power, integrating unions and institutions all across Europe following the victories of radical socialist governments.” This is a time of partying and reflections on the conclusion of years of struggle by “community-led initiatives and para-state mutualist organizations in both urban and rural areas of the former UK” in the transition to the current democratic socialism of the PRB. The alliance of rebelling networks and organizations eventually integrate into Security and Services Facilitation (SSF). One arm of SSF provides services: education, childcare, localized food and energy production; the other focuses on security.

We first follow Alan Bewes, one of the early visionaries of the Breach, who is quietly murdered in his sleep. Murder is upgraded to political assassination, and SSF assembles a team of veteran SSF agents to investigate.

Alternate timeline

This is not the depressing totalitarian hell of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; more like the hedonistic party culture of Brave New World without the class exploitation and bioengineering in Huxley’s scenario. PRB culture instead more resembles Huxley’s Island, where psychedelic drugs are not designed to numb or brainwash citizens but to enhance their experience and imagination.

In this alternate history of the PRB, neoliberalism, capitalist realism, and Thatcherism failed to take root. Instead, socialism prevailed, not just in the UK but in other countries throughout Europe (the Co-Sphere) as well as the People’s Republics of United Africa and the Middle East. Instead of collapsing, the post-Stalinist Soviet Union managed to establish sufficient technological, political, and economic resilience, assisted by the affordances offered by the sophisticated computer tools necessary for central planning to work effectively. A Russian comrade describes their Pro/Diss system as “a beautiful, sublime, crystalline interlinking of networks and information flows, interfacing with our most advanced AI and robotics to mediate production and distribution on a scale, vaster, faster and more complex than any system before it.”

Market vs. central planning

While neoliberal critics continue to downplay central planning, a number of contemporary left economists point out how, with the rise of Big Data technology, some of the biggest corporations are central planning practitioners, as highlighted by Phillips and Rozworski in The People’s Republic of Walmart (2019). In Eminent Domain history, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, unions amalgamated in a Universal Union in alliance with SSF, the latter being “instrumental in distributing food, re-commoning land for cultivation and dwelllings, infrastructure and logistics support, and ensuring, through mass action, that key industries and facilities became publicly owned.” SSF also played a major role in cooperativization in the capital and investment strike known as the Autarchy.

Taking place in the 1970s, the Autarchy mirrors the IMF bailout and the UK’s Winter of Discontent that took place in our world, a time of austerity, protests, and anger, yet leading to very different political outomes. In Eminent Domain, Margaret Thatcher does not become prime minister or claim “there is no alternative;” nor does the neoliberalism of Hayek and von Mises take hold with its agenda of deregulation, privatization, and glorification of the market. In this history, the British Left was not paralyzed by the pessimism of capitalist realism, but instead enjoys the benefits of the socialist distribution of wealth, healthcare, housing, food, information, and leisure time, not to mention a diversity of recreational pharmaceuticals.

We spend much of our time accompanying a number of SSF members investigating the assassination, which apparently orginated from the new right-wing administration of the United States. The new American president, who resembles a fusion of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, has scuttled the détente between the US and Co-sphere, becoming increasingly antagonistic towards the socialist Co-Sphere of nations, especially targeting the PRB with various sabotage activities. Soviet Russia has its own issues with the PRB, believing it is too democratic internally, creating risks to the Co-Sphere.

Ministry for the Future

In contrast to the alternate history of Eminent Domain, our next destination takes us to a near future, the year 2025. This is the world of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future (2020), published during the Covid pandemic and two months before the January 6^th insurrection at the US Capitol. We first arrive in the Indian province of Uttar Pradesh at the scene of a catastrophic heatwave killing millions: the deadly consequence of denial, disinformation, and deflection of responsibility from the threat of global warming that climate scientists and activists  have been warning of for decades. As so often happens, the consequences fall not on the deniers and those responsible, but on vulnerable populations, some among the least responsible.

We then shift to Zürich, Switzerland, where the new UN Ministry for the Future is officially tasked to deal with the urgent and politically complex problem of climate change. As head of this new UN agency, Mary Murphy works to achieve agreement among national governments, transnational corporations, and other stakeholders. Mary is confronted by the sole survivor of the Uttar Pradesh tragedy, development aid worker Frank May. Frank represents the strident voice of climate desperation, the need to take immediate and radical action against the maddening inertia of government bureaucracies, class privilege, and corruption. Our tour follows the dialogue between these two characters and the range of actions proposed and taken, amplified by a heteroglossia of mystery voices, human and nonhuman (including photons and markets), challenging capitalist realism dogma with an array of sustainability concepts, principles, riddles, and policy tools as well as more violent means involved in the postcapitalist future discourse.

Financing is a major issue, where the priority of corporate profits clash against the costs of effective climate mitigation and adaptation mechanisms. The failure of the market to adequately address climate change, even undermining efforts to deal with it, highlights the inadequacy of the neoliberal ideology still dominating national governments and corporations. As  he Ministry team race against the clock of deepening and irreversible impact, other players seek more immediate, radical actions, such as the geoengineering, hostage taking at the World Economic Forum, bombing of power plants, and targeted assassinations of CEOs.

Rube Goldbergian machine for social change

As Michael Svoboda (2020) observed, technical topics covered in Ministry for the Future include “the history of central banking, modern monetary theory, the Gini index, blockchain technology, Mondragon, carbon taxes, clean energy technologies, Jevon’s Paradox, different forms of geoengineering, population biology, and wildlife corridors.” Altogether, the result of this “Rube Goldbergian machine for social change ultimately delivers the goods: a more equitable social economy and a more stable climate.”

Central planning vs. market

The Ministry’s AI persona, Janus Athena, struggles to explain to us computer illiterate humans the thinking behind the software team’s economic plan. The AI reviews Friedrich Hayek’s argument (and premise of neoliberalism) that markets are the best calculator and distributor of value, addressing Hayek’s claim that planning gets things wrong “because central planning can’t collect and correlate all the relevant information fast enough.” This was a fatal flaw in the Soviet Union’s premature efforts deploying complex central planning aspirations to pre-capitalist modernization “But now, with computers as strong as they’ve gotten, the Red Plenty argument has gotten stronger and stronger, asserting that people now have so much computing power that central planning could work better than the market.”

Another Now

We return to London, this time in the parallel alternate world created by Yanis Varoufakis, an economist, activist, and former Finance Minister of Greece, who wrote Another Now to provide a more entertaining vehicle for the post-capitalist ideas in his 2023 nonfiction book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism. The protagonists of Another Now (an ex-Wall Street investment banker, a radical feminist philosopher, and a mad computer scientist) confront an alternative history which split precisely following the 2008 financial crisis. This split resulted in an apparently thriving socialist UK, where banks and investors, instead of being bailed out at the expense of taxpayers, were held accountable, as public and private investment was redirected into radical community-oriented productivity and needs. In the year 2025, when the Ministry for the Future is launched in Zurich, our three characters secretly converge inside a small computer lab in San Francisco, confronting a physically small but significant tear in the space-time continuum, allowing them to interrogate their parallel selves in a radically different political landscape. This could have been their own history, they realize, given a different set of decisions and actions by the Left and community organizations at the time. Like the PRB, this Other Now rejected neoliberalism, engaging in the collective task to construct an egalitarian, socialist alternative in this parallel London.

This post-2008 socialist society has essentially eliminated poverty and class injustices (although not the “cockroach” of patriarchy). In this world, the affordances and power of digital technology are turned to the benefit of the people, in contrast to our world’s prioritization of profits over people. In the Other Now, community-based networks and campaigns organize strategically to take advantage of the historic opportunity presented by the 2008 financial crisis, steering the offical response away from bailing out the commercial bank and investment sector that caused the problem. Instead, they radically restructure the financial and others institutions and thus the flows and valuation of labor and goods. From the bits of information our protagonists are able to squeeze through the wormhole, they learn various features of the Other Now, including:

…an absence of income and sales taxes; the freedom of workers to move from company to company while taking their personal capital with them; the curtailment of large companies’ market power; universal freedom from poverty, but also from a welfare state demanding that benefit-recipients surrender their dignity at the door of some social security office; a payments system that was free, efficient and which did not empower the few to print money at the expense of the many; a permanent auction for commercial land that exploited market forces to the full in the interests of social housing; an international monetary system that stabilized trade and the flow of money across borders; a welcoming attitude to migrants based on empowering local communities and helping them absorb newcomers.

The new system addresses many societal ills; alas, not persistent sexism and patriarchy.  

Techno-rebels

In the Other Now, new activist communities emerged in response to the possibilities opened up by the financial crisis, including  the Crowdshorters movement. The Crowdshorters “undermined the central banks’ efforts surgically and stylishly,” understanding that “by privatizing everything, capitalism had made itself supremely vulnerable to financial guerilla attacks.” They understood that “the creation of CDOs out of plain debt—a process known hubristically and ironically as securitization—afforded the perfect opportunity for a peaceful grassroots revolution.”

Other techno-rebels include the Solsourcers (Solidarity Sourcing Proxies), who targeted the largest shareholders in the great corporations: pension funds. The Bladerunners were neo-Luddites, adamant that the new technologies “should be utilized in the cause of shared prosperity, not as instruments of neo-feudalism or of a class war by the few against the many.” Their strategies strengthened those of climate activists, teaming up with the Environs “in order to hasten the demise of the fossil fuel industry. Together, they forced panicking governments to introduce stringent limits to pollutants, to reduce net-carbon targets to zero by 2025 and even to limit land-clearing and cement production.” Within three years, the Crowdshorters, the Solsourcers, the Bladerunners and the Environs had formed a highly effective network of targeted activists that the oligarchy-without-frontiers could not withstand.

The International Monetary Project (IMP)

One important institutional mechanism in the Other Now transition was the International Monetary Project (IMP), successor to the International Monetary Fund, which regulated the world’s currency system. The IMP had instituted a market-based, almost fully automated system able to balance out global trade and money flows. In addition, the system “was a mechanism generating money that funded the transition of developing regions to low-carbon energy, green transport, organic agriculture, as well as decent public education and health systems.”

PerCap

The other key transition mechanism, initiated in the US  in 2011 for anyone with a social security number, was a federal account called Personal Capital (PerCap), to which the Fed credited small amounts each month. Graduallly, accounts migrated at different paces for different countries from the commercial banks to the new central bank system. Investment banking gradually melted away after corpo-syndicalist legislation ended tradable shares, leaving the flow of digital money across PerCap accounts as the remaining legal tender.

Once capitalism had died, and markets were freed from private ownership, a different kind of value took over. Instead of judging something’s worth by its exchange value—what it would fetch in return for something else—the Other Now judged worth according to experiential value—the benefits the thing brought to the person who used it. Prices, quantities and monetary profits were no longer the sole masters of society.

New York 2140

In our tour, we move ahead one century, from the 2036 London of Another Now to Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. We find ourselves on Madison Avenue and the Met Life Tower. Modeled after the Campanile in Venice, the building, where much of the story is centered around, is now a co-op, owned and governed by its residents. It is soon to be threatened with absoption by a higher ground investment firm, eager to reap what financial benefits may accrue from the especially flooded remains of buildings, which also served as the humble habitats of the poor and desperate. Our local host/narrator is obviously a New Yorker, choosing to remain the mysterious “citizen” commentator, intermittently helps us with the chronotope of 2140 New York, for example in his brief review of the millions of years of geological change shaping the area, how ice age glaciers shaped the Hudson River Valley and the current shape of Manhattan Island, now flooded with the 50 foot rise of sea-level, submerging much of what we knew as the major neighborhoods, business districts and coastlines making up New York City.

Capitalism still reigns, although greatly weakened by ecological catastrophes, scandals and other pressures. We are nevertheless in the midst of a major ecosocial-political transition. Unlike the global politics of the Ministry for the Future, the politics of New York 2140 are at the city level, where global policies and visions must be played out. Among the operations of local governance in this urban watery landscape of climate adaptation, we attend council meetings of the co-op and building habitat. We visit the office of the Mayor and are introduced to their head of security services, Inspector Gen Octaviasdottir. Inspector Gen takes us on a tour of some legally questionable establishments in less well-lit neighborhoods. Unlike the PRB, recreational drugs here are illegal, but available. Gen is looking for two precocious lefty computer programmers abducted by real estate investment thugs, part of a criminal plot to capture common property in the drowned city.

It is through Charlotte, head of the Householders’ Union, that we begin to see the work of NGO and the public/private hybrid organizations and networks in the background, with the potential to join together in powerful political waves. As these various characters talk and work together, including hedge fund analyst-in-transition Franklin Garr, they manage to outsmart their investment firm opponents.

“I wanted a finance novel that was heavily based on what lessons we learned—or did not learn—from the crash of 2008 and 2009. All science fiction novels are about the future and about the present at the same time,” Robinson explained in a 2019 interview. “It’s about finance, and climate change, and New York as a place, and those particular characters, and what we could do now to influence events to make a better future for the people yet to come. Utopian climate change fiction: the obvious next hot genre.” (Kimon, 2017).       

This story also begins with a criminal investigation.  Not of murder, as in Eminent Domain, but of missing persons. Not assassination but abduction. We are in the midst of a ruthless real estate war of urban development investors in a future flooded New York City. This is not the climate apocalypse of Day After Tomorrow, but the area is definitely altered by the sealevel rise. New York, with its many busy canals and aquatic traffic, has become an American Venice. The novel opens with a conversation between two computer programmers (soon to be abducted) about the nature and value of money, preparing readers with the historical-economic context of the story. Beginning with the provocative line “whoever writes the code creates the value,” explaining that “without our code, there’s no computers, no finance, no banks, no money, no exchange value, no value.” We are told “the problem is capitalism,” noting that “we’ve got good tech, we’ve got a nice planet, we’re fucking it up by way of stupid laws. That’s what capitalism is, a set of stupid laws.”

This conversation about money, value and the destructive nature of late capitalism, is followed by the opportunistic thoughts of real estate investor Franklin, who later experiences his own mental transition as to his own goals and the meaning and impacts of his particular work and knowledge. Franklin is the inventor of the Intertidal Property Pricing Index (IPPI), “which allows investors to price drowned assets. No one knows exactly what half-submerged buildings are worth—the seas could rise again,” but the IPPI “makes it possible to buy derivatives based on underwater mortgages; as a result, a new housing bubble is underway” (Rothman, 2017). The trick is being able to leave before the bubble breaks.

We move to Washington, DC, after Charlotte’s election as Representative of New York State’s Twelfth District.  A new Congress has arrived to consider the call for a new government bailout following what the Citizen described as another “popped bubble, liquidity freeze, credit crunch, big finance going down like the KT asteroid.” We observe the meeting between the Federal Reserve chair and secretary of the treasury and the big banks and investment firms “all massively over-leveraged, all crashing.” They are indeed offered a bailout of four trillion dollars, “on condition that the recipients issue shares to the Treasury equivalent in value to whatever aid they accepted…Treasury would then become their majority shareholder and take over accordingly…Future profits would go to the U.S. Treasury in proportion to the shares it held.”

This time, in the year 2143, the investment banks are nationalized. There is no financial flight, as  similar salvation-by-nationalization offers were being made by the central banks of the European Union, Japan, Indonesia, India and Brazil. According to the Citizen, “the U.S. government would soon be dealing with a healthy budget surplus. Universal health care, free public education through college, a living wage, guaranteed full employment, a year of mandatory national service, all these were not only made law but funded.” In conclusion, “the neoliberal global order was thus overturned right in its own wheelhouse.”

Infomocracy

Our last tour stop is just twenty years later, scrutinizing the future global system of data-driven micro-democracies in Malka Older’s Infomocracy (2016), taking place in the 2160s.

Microdemocracy

Here the previous world of nation states has evolved into a complex system of centenals, political entities of 100,000 citizens, each with the ability to choose their type of government in global elections taking place every ten years, centenals of a particular party collectively united politically while geographically distributed. Rather than a particular type of government being place-based, as with the nation states which evolved during the era of imperialism and colonial empires, historically tending to violently suppress ethnic and other resistance movements, governance models are democratically chosen and enacted across the vast patchwork of local populations. With each election of centenal governments, the most votes establish the Supermajority party, which becomes the hegemonic political force for that decade, until the next election decides whether to anoint a new party Supermajority. The election process is administered by the global fact-checking bureaucracy know as Information, an institutional, peace-keeping structure that evolved from a nonprofit synthesis of the United Nations and internet companies to ensure citizens and organizations have access to undistorted information.

Disinformation

Infomocracy was published in 2016, the year of Donald Trump’s first election to the presidency amid growing attention to the abuse of public data, as embodied in the Cambridge Analytical/Facebook scandal and Russian social media disinformation campaigns (Kaiser, 2019; Wylie, 2019). As of the 2024 US election, the issue of disinformation and access to reliable information sources has only deepened. In an interview (Open Mind, 2019), Malka Older explains how the idea for the book came out of “frustration and annoyance with the way things are in the world today,” citing disinformation campaigns such as the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry in the 2004 election and the focus more on personalities than governing policies.

…for me, the idea that information is a public good that we should think about in much the same way that we think about electricity, that we think about water, is a very powerful one. You know, one of the theories, one of the frameworks for thinking about what’s going with social media and with these corporations now is the idea of surveillance capitalism, that these companies are profiting, not just from the sort of ads that we see immediately but really from taking this agglomeration of data that they learn about us as we use them and selling that….to imagine making data, all data free and public is one way to turn that around.

Corporations

What companies remain have morphed into global political governance parties who also compete for centenal votes in the elections. “PhilipMorris is the big corporate to worry about,” one character advises. Corporate rhetoric, advertising, and lobbying is relentlessly monitored by Information, which in the days of the first election, “was still trying to assert itself, and they jumped all over it, shut it down. The language in the legal precedent is clear and forceful… Diverting, twisting, or otherwise affecting the information received by citizens is illegal for any government.”

Apocalyptic vs. utopian realism

In their review of Ministry for the Future, Monticelli and Frantzen (2024) pose utopian realism as “an antidote to today’s pervasive atmosphere of capitalist realism.” Robinson’s books explore a multiplicity of strategies confronting the threats of climate change and approaches that combine “top-down strategies with grassroots organizing, technological solutions with back-to-nature projects, and ecomodernism with eco-spiritualism.” While these strategies are directed at climate change, they ultimately involve the deeper challenge of changing the socioeconomic system and petropolitics which generated the problem.

At the time of writing, immediately following the 2024 US presidential election, the need to provide ecotopian alternatives, storyworlds and postcapitalist futures, stories of sustainability transitions, strategies and visions has reached a critical stage. Malka Older’s Centenal Trilogy provides a welcoming ambiguity for the reader to fill in the history and changes which led to the world-wide adoption of microdemocracy and acceptance of Information as mediating agency. Older leaves room for readers and other writers to imagine different scenarios as to how a global agency as Information and microdemocracy could evolve.

The details of these five stories overlap in their engagement with the strengths and weaknesses of our capitalist present and past, given the overall timeline between 2008 and 2160. Various climate action strategies identified in Ministry for the Future and New York 2140 can easily be imagined within the other three storyworlds, moving power away from corporate elites to local communities and democratic governance.

Each of the authors struggle with the obstacles of disinformation, propaganda, and surveillance, as studied by Shoshana Zubof (2019), Cory Doctorow (2020) and others. Each of these authors envision creative disruption emerging from these waves of economic crises. However, we have been visiting scenarios where bailouts are tied to meaningful system change. Whereas Older and Robinson imagine the evolution of alternative utopian/dystopian systems, Neville and Varoufakis imagine parallel alternative histories of post-capitalism.

What made the Soviet Union stay united and economically robust in Eminent Domain? Could improvemenets of Big Data controlling central planning have been sufficient to not just survive but thrive? Phillips and Rozworski (2019) suggest this scenario in their book The People’s Republic of Walmart, pointing out how past criticisms of Soviet central planning are now surpassed by the capabilities that came with computerization, systems modeling, and the technological advances in microelectronics and artificial intelligence.What was dismissed as failures of Marxism are now embraced as essential operational norms of multi-national corporations dealing with the complexities of global production, distribution,  consumption data and decision-making. Neville describes his novel’s intention as “an attempt to think against the the onslaught not really of capitalist realism but more of something like ’neoliberal reason’” (Hatherly, 2020).

Our tour ends, looking back on these interchanges between alternate worlds and histories, the exchange between actual and possible realities, allowing us to peruse both, to reflect on what is possible in our own futures. To get to a future we want, we must be able to imagine it first.

WORKS CITED

Bastani, Aaron. Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto. Verso, 2019.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? John Hunt Publishing, 2009.

Hatherley, Owen et al. “Inside the People’s Republic of Britain.” Tribune, 17 Sept. 2020, tribunemag.co.uk/2020/09/inside-the-peoples-republic-of-britain.

Kaiser, Brittany. Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again. HarperCollins, 2019.

Kimon. “More NY2140 interviews and reviews.” May 9, 2017. http://kimstanleyrobinson.info

Monticelli, L., & Frantzen, M. K. “Capitalist Realism is Dead. Long Live Utopian Realism! A Sociological Exegesis of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.” Sociological Review, 2024, doi.org/10.1177/00380261241261452.

Neville, Carl. Eminent Domain. Repeater, 2020.

Older, Malka Ann. Infomocracy. Tom Doherty Assoc Llc, 2016.

Older, Malka. “High-Tech Dystopia and Utopia.” Open Mind, 2017.

Phillips, Leigh, and Michal Rozworski. The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism. Verso, 2019.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry for The Future: A Novel. Orbit, 2020.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. New York 2140. Orbit, 2018.

Svoboda, Michael. “The Ministry for the Future: A novel by Kim Stanley Robinson.” Yale Climate Connections, October 22, 2020.

Varoufakis, Yanis. Another Now: A Novel. Melville House, 2021.

Wylie, Christopher. MINDF*CK: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World. Profile Books, 2020.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Hatchett Book Group, 2019.

Jeffrey Barber is President of Integrative Strategies Forum (ISF), a US nonprofit organization outside Washington, D.C., engaged in research and policy advocacy, promoting public participation, dialogue, and collaboration in developing sustainable production/consumption policy (currently focusing on plastics), systems, and practices. ISF is especially interested in ecocultural projects imagining and building sustainable futures. He is a co-founder of the Global Research Forum on Sustainable Production and Consumption, with a background in media and audience research at SRI International (Stanford Research Institute), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Arbitron Ratings (now part of Nielsen Research), and Peter D. Hart Research Associates.

---