Chapter 14 - Speculative Fiction and Post-Capitalist Speculative Economies: Blueprints and Critiques

Summary

This chapter examines how aspects of post-capitalism have been imagined by speculative fiction, with some emphasis on utopian and dystopian fiction. There are some methodological issues around the best way to read speculative fiction in relation to post-capitalism. One influential distinction is between “blueprint” utopias and “critical” utopias. Blueprint utopias, such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), are held to offer rigidly instrumental plans for reorganizing society. Critical utopias, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), supposedly destabilize deeply-rooted assumptions, freeing readers to explore possible economic forms that appear neither in reality nor fiction. However, this chapter emphasises that the distinction between blueprint and critical utopias is a blurred one. It further suggests that instrumentalizing interpretations of speculative fiction are part of its status as culture, rather than a mere misuse of speculative fiction. Reading speculative fiction critically and creatively, including attention to its instrumentalities, may help to transform what constitutes the field of “the economic” in the first place, and enrich our understanding both of capitalism and its alternatives. However, already existing practices of the more-than-capitalist world often far exceed what speculative fiction has been capable of imagining.