And yet, in fact there are alternatives to capitalism in science fiction, and not just in an essentially liberal, post-scarcity Star Trek fashion. The dominant contemporary cultural obsession with dystopian thinking might be occupying a key position within the spectrum of imaginaries, but there are indeed spaces of non-capitalist utopian visions. Ursula Le Guin’s ‘ambiguous utopia’ The Dispossessed (1974) surely is one of the key texts in this regard.13 More specifically, with a focus on the role of corporate power and alternative forms of organising, and also more recently, the work of Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR) offers a perspective that does not preclude the possibility of the cooperative, rather than the corporate and competitive, organisation of production. The theme of corporate power, and socialist and cooperative alternatives, is explored in KSR’s Mars trilogy.14 The scenario KSR depicts at the beginning of the series actually corresponds to the ‘evil mega-corporation’ imaginary: transnational corporations have consolidated into an oligarchy, with many of them having unlimited control over entire countries on Earth. The United Nations has also been captured by corporate interests, and resource depletion and social conflict are the order of the day, eventually resulting in a world war. Against this background, the Mars trilogy sketches the ecological, technological, social and political trajectory of the colonisation of Mars, with its struggles for an alternative social and economic order. There is an interesting ambivalence in this portrayal, as it is the funding through the ‘transnats’ consortium (in conjunction with UNOMA: the United Nations Organization Mars Authority) that has rendered the research and applied organisation of the colonisation of Mars possible in the first place. The transnats’ motive and the settlers’ place therein is clearly spelled out by the aptly named Arkady Bogdanov in Red Mars: ‘[I]n reality, the islands are part of the transnational order. They are paid for, they are never truly free…with the discovery of strategic metals the application has become clear. And so it all comes back, and we have a return of ownership, and prices, and wages. The whole profit system.’ Nonetheless, the early settlers start experimenting with alternative economic relations, such as a ‘gift economy’. Later on in the series, the transnationals have merged into ‘metanationals’, strengthening their hold over what is left of democratic governments and the UN system. Despite the diplomatic efforts of the Martians, the metanats continue their competitive struggles for minerals and other resources, leading to increasingly antagonistic social relations between Terra and Mars.
‘So far, so trope,’ one might think. But this is where the Mars trilogy moves beyond the realism of corporate inevitability that permeates so much of contemporary (science) fiction. At the height of corporate power and all its pathologies, after a large-scale ecological disaster (with the Antarctic ice cap melting, causing global floods), it is through the emergence and continuous engagement with co-operative economic organisation on Mars that the metanats are eventually transformed. The metanat Praxis eventually endorses the ‘economic democratic’ principles that are in place on Mars, including the strong ecological economics foundation that is fundamental to the Martian systemic transformation. It is worth looking at this alternative vision in some detail, as outlined by one of the main characters in Blue Mars (pp. 142–6), both for its critique of corporate capitalism and its depiction of how alternatives can and will emerge. ‘Management,’ Vlad argues, ‘is a real thing, a technical matter. But it can be controlled by labor just as well as by capital. There is no reason why a tiny nobility should own the capital, and everyone else therefore be in service to them. […] The system called capitalist democracy was not really democratic at all. That is why it was able to turn so quickly into the metanational system, in which democracy grew ever weaker and capitalism ever stronger.’ In their struggle for social justice and freedom, the colonists and then inhabitants of Mars have developed a fully fledged cooperative system in which ‘all economic enterprises are to be cooperatives, owned by their workers and by no one else. They hire their management, or manage themselves. Industry guilds and co-op associations will form the larger structures necessary to regulate trade and the market, share capital, and create credit.’
In response to scepticism, KSR has his character anchor this system in a broader historical and theoretical perspective. The system, he says,
is based on models from Terran history, and its various parts have all been tested on both worlds, and have succeeded very well. You don’t know about this…because metanationalism itself steadfastly ignored and denied all alternatives to it. But most of our microeconomy has been in successful operations for centuries in the Mondragon region of Spain. The different parts of the macroeconomy have been used by the pseudo-metanat Praxis, in Switzerland, in India’s state of Kerala, in Bhutan, in Bologna, Italy, and in many other places, including the Martian underground itself.’
Against the rebuttal that cooperatives are simply ‘a planned economy’, KSR presents the essential Polanyian counterpoint that ‘economies are plans. Capitalism planned just as much as this, and metanationalism tried to plan everything. No, an economy is a plan.’ An alternative to capitalism under corporate rule, the Mars trilogy posits, is not only thinkable, it is always already in its nascency.
For readers to whom the colonisation of Mars and the construction of a space elevator is too much science fiction,15 KSR also offers a more accessible, more ‘realistic’ utopian account of an alternative organising beyond the transnational corporation. Pacific Edge (1990), as part of the Orange County trilogy, is an ecological post-capitalist utopia that paints the mundane glory of a future in which social justice and equality are guiding principles also for the organisation of production. In his recent discussion of ‘four futures’, Peter Frase rightly showcases Pacific Edge as an illustration of a socialist utopian vision set in a context of equality and scarcity (in contrast to, for example, the post-scarcity scenario in Star Trek).16 What is important in the context of this chapter is the emphasis KSR puts here on the idea that the legal framework behind corporate power can be contested and transformed to achieve these concrete and, at the same time, utopian objectives. Through continuing, long-term struggle against the domination of transnational companies, citizens have achieved legal control over the role and form of corporations. Where they exist, companies are limited through the number of employees that they have, and hence how big they can grow; natural resources and trade are managed at the local, municipal level under democratic governance. Even so, there are ambiguities in this scenario, as the system is still vulnerable to corporate transgressions, and local cooperative governance – with regard to, say, water management – is shown as tedious and work-intensive. In the historical narrative that complements the story, set in 2065, the path towards the transformation is sketched out; it is reformist and almost weary rather than revolutionary, but follows a clear trajectory towards cooperative organisation. Importantly, there are two broad processes at hand: it is through an engagement with, and transformation of, the existing state apparatus that corporate control is detained through legal measures, while a more interstitial process leads to reformulation of organisation at the local level.
KSR’s emphasis on the cooperative form of organising production and administration is not coincidental; for many observers on the left, workers’ control in various forms of self-management and democratic decision-making on production epitomises the search for alternatives.17 As a counterpoint to the imaginary of the evil corporation, co-operatives constitute social configurations whose potential is worth exploring as science fiction as well as ‘real utopia’. The next section offers a brief outline of the promise and ambiguities of co-operatives vis-à-vis contemporary corporate capitalism.
‘Real Utopias’: Cooperation rather than Corporation
There are many forms that the cooperative organisation of production (and services) can take. A commonly referred to definition is found in the International Co-operative Alliance’s ‘Statement on the Co-operative Identity’, in that ‘a co-o
perative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise’.18 Core principles guiding cooperative organisation, with a strong focus on solidarity, include open and voluntary membership; one member one vote; economic participation; autonomy and independence; education, training and information; cooperation amongst cooperatives; and concern for community. The discussion about the cooperative form had already been taken up by Marx, who recognised their fundamental ambiguity. ‘The co-operative factories run by workers themselves are, within the old form, the first examples of the emergence of a new form, even though they naturally reproduce in all cases, in their present organization, all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce them.’19
Co-operatives replace corporate ownership with a democratic association of workers, through which they essentially become their ‘own’ capitalists. The potential of the cooperative form includes worker self-management rather than external control, and immediate material consequences through the changing redistribution of surplus.20 Examples of worker co-operatives are many throughout history, and they have made crucial contributions to the broader formulation of social struggles and alternatives to concrete capitalist social relations.21 At the same time, they cannot quite escape the competitive pressures of a capitalist market economy, a structural condition that essentially renders them ‘socialist islands in a capitalist sea’, carrying with them contradictions that cannot be resolved in the contemporary global economy. As Sam Gindin reminds us, is it crucial to assess the successes and failures of experiments in worker ownership; his discussion of Mondragon serves as a highly pertinent example of the contradictions inherent in cooperative forms.22 All the more reason for a nuanced reading of co-operatives against the backdrop of discussion of utopian potential. For this, three aspects seem particularly pertinent, as is also clear from the examples in KSR’s fiction: the ‘silo’ effect of co-operatives; their positioning vis-à-vis the state; and their role in broader social struggles.23 With the consolidation of a co-operative, there is a tendency to become an insulated organisation focusing on day-to-day challenges in the face of competitive structures, with an exclusive focus on insiders that can lead to increasing fragmentation of participants. The principle of outreach and cooperation (e.g. with other co-operatives) becomes subordinated to the exigencies of organisational survival. Moreover, co-operatives as such do not challenge institutional and legal arrangements that cement corporate power – i.e. through the state. There is little engagement with, or even confrontation of, the state; the underlying assumption is that the interstitial nature of co-operatives will contribute to a transformation of society through evolutionary change, the ‘hope that such institutions might act as strategic battering rams for reaching socialism’.24 Whether, and how, to contest and resist the state on its own terrain rather than through the social and economic sphere is an essentially political question, of course, but it remains one that characterises the discussion of the potential of co-operatives mainly through its absence. Gindin argues that the lack of perspective on the democratic transformation of the state as part and parcel of economic democratisation could well mean that co-operatives as the ‘“next big idea” will only be the Left’s latest failure’. Somewhat more (cautiously) optimistic, Marcuse sees ‘their main importance, in a perspective looking towards basic social change in a non-capitalist direction, perhaps more [as] what they may say about and teach about the potential of self-management…rather than the actual changes they themselves bring about in what they do’.25 As ‘real utopias’, co-operatives illustrate the contradictions of alternatives, but through their very existence they also engender a further engagement with options that might otherwise be unthinkable.
Concluding Reflections
How we can mobilise and harness these alternative imaginaries for concrete social alternatives hinges not least on the acceptance of ‘capitalist realism’. As Ruth Levitas argues, ‘[T]he usefulness of “real utopias” as institutional models for an alternative future depends on how we read such prefigurative practices, including whether and how we imagine them scaled up.’26 This is also what we see in economic science fictions that deal with alternatives to corporate capitalism, as in the work of KSR discussed above: the narrative form that not only presents a rebuttal of corporate capitalism, but attempts to forge an alternative, however contradictory and fragile that might be. Rather than the corporate dystopia imaginary that has become so ubiquitous and hegemonic, it dares to explore the ambiguities of a utopian vision against specific social structures and political economy. Whether this narrative is one that will ultimately be able to overcome the corporate closure of the future imaginary remains to be seen; it seems unlikely in the current context of popular economic science fictions.27 But this is exactly why it is so crucial to keep contesting the common sense of corporate power in our time; to question the institutional, legal and political basis that upholds the hegemony of the corporate form over all other possible ways of organising. This is not to be achieved through individual heroism or subversive hacktivism; it is only through collective thinking and critical engagement with these alternatives that these futures might come about.
1The Guardian (2016) Study: Big Corporations Dominate List of World’s Top Economic Entities, 12 September, www.theguardian.com/business/2016/sep/12/global-justice-now-study-multinational-businesses-walmart-apple-shell?CMP=share_btn_tw.
2A. Haley (2015) Traveling through Corporate Time: Inevitability and (Anti-) Corporate Narrative Form, New American Notes Online, December, www.nanocrit.com/issues/8-2015/traveling-through-corporate-time-inevitability-and-anti-corporate-narrative-form.
3R. Clare (2014) Fictions Inc.: The Corporation in Postmodern Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
4See ibid. for a good overview.
5F. Jameson (2005) Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso.
6K. Wagner (2016) The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films, 99% Invisible, 2 December, http://99percentinvisible.org/article/architecture-evil-dystopian-megacorps-speculative-fiction.
7Steve Englehart, quoted in R. Boffard (2016) Could an Evil Mega-Corporation Ever Exist in Real Life?, io9, 4 September, http://io9.gizmodo.com/could-an-evil-mega-corporation-ever-exist-in-real-life-1630401831.
8Haley, Traveling through Corporate Time.
9Clare, Fictions Inc.
10R. Levitas (2013) Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 125.
11Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 395.
12M. Fisher (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Ropley, UK: Zero Books, p. 2, emphasis in original.
13Le Guin’s 2014 speech at the National Book Award ceremony is an inspiring example of the importance of utopian thinking in capitalism. ‘Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. […] We live in capitalism; its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.’ The full speech is available at www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-awards-speech.
14Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994) and Blue Mars (1996), all published by Random House.
15Don’t mock the idea of a space elevator. As Arthur C. Clarke reportedly said, it will be built, probably around 50 years after everybody stops laughing.
16P. Frase (2016) Four Futures: Life after Capitalism. London: Verso.
17M. Atzeni (2012) An Introduction to Theoretical Issues, in M. Atzeni (ed.) Alternative Work Organizations: 1–24. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
18
International Co-operative Alliance, Statement on the Co-operative Identity, http://ica.coop/en/whats-co-op/co-operative- identity-values-principles.
19K. Marx (1894 [1981]) Capital, vol. III. London: Pelican Books, p. 571.
20For a more detailed discussion, see, for example, P. Ranis (2016) Cooperatives Confront Capitalism: Challenging the Neoliberal Economy. London: Zed Books; and E. O. Wright (2010) Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso, pp. 234–40.
21I. Ness & D. Azzellini (eds.) (2011) Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present. London: Haymarket.
22S. Gindin (2016) Chasing Utopia, Jacobin, 10 March, www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/workers-control-coops-wright-wolff-alperovitz.
23P. Marcuse (2015) Cooperatives on the Path to Socialism?, Monthly Review, 66(9).
24Gindin, Chasing Utopia.
25Marcuse, Cooperatives on the Path to Socialism?
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