taCity

The late, great American science fiction and anti-capitalist novelist, Ursula K. Le Guin said in 2014 these now oft-quoted words: 

“Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. 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. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” 

In these trying times of planetary climate catastrophe, geopolitical strife, ongoing genocides and the seemingly increasing ubiquity of capitalist realism, clinging to Le Guin’s optimism may seem overly naïve. And given how skilled our capitalist overlords have become at co-opting the very essence of artistic critique, her words seem perhaps laughably utopian. But this quite natural reaction is only so because the profiteers of capitalism have colonised the speculative future before we (as a global multitude of potential revolutionaries) can even imagine it. However, I refuse this fatalism precisely because it is what capitalism’s co-optive juggernaut is fuelled on; indeed the very act of colonising our future requires violently disaggregating the ethical and political from any artistic endeavour. Such a division makes even the most subversive of art sellable (just ask Banksy). Le Guin bemoaned PR and sales departments that rule over authors like a dictatorship, flogging them “like deodorant”. She pleads authors – literary artists – to crave freedom above all. 

We read these ideals of freedom so excitedly in her cosmological narratives that espouse contemporary political themes, unfurling like the very nebulas that inhabit her universes. She takes contemporary norms that feel so rigid in our capitalist realism- and conservativism-riddled world and tears them apart. Not least among these was gender, a central theme in her works. Much like the power of the trans movement today, she challenged the binary notions of male and female, presenting societies where these constructs did not conform to our familiar, terrestrial, and traditional expectations. For example, in her classic The Left Hand of Darkness, she famously introduced the androgynous inhabitants of Gethen, challenging preconceived notions of sexuality and identity. 

Likewise, and in a similar vein to some of those she profoundly influenced (not least China Miéville’s masterpiece Embassytown), Le Guin also delved into the intricate nuances of language and communication. In The Dispossessed, she explored how language shapes our thoughts and societies (something which the film Arrival also explores with beautiful cinematic artistry) and how this can be undone just as easily as it can be constructed.

 

But most of all in her writing, we see that Le Guin was a firm believer in the transformative power of the imagination. Her worlds were not just escapist fantasies; they were thought experiments, inviting readers to question established norms and envision alternative possibilities and revolutionary futures. 

Fisherian Futures

Reading her work alongside her optimism about capitalism’s future demise, I cannot help but lean towards Mark Fisher’s writings before his untimely death, specifically Acid Communism. In this Fisherian worldview (most readily readable in the collection of his K-Punk blog writings), there was a subversive potential to contemporary culture if it can only navigate the alluring, yet dangerous, tentacles of capitalist appropriation. He found the same emancipation that Le Guin did with extra-terrestrial and cosmological speculative fiction, in subcultural creativity – namely movements such as rave, punk, hip-hop, arthouse cinema and even within individual artists (his essay on Joy Division stand out in this respect). For Fisher, the beating heart of any subculture was its potential to serve as catalysts for emancipatory social transformation, albeit on a ‘small’ (personal, local or urban) scale at first, but with the power to reverberate through society. The gatherings and expressions of like-minded subversives, whether through underground music scenes, radical artistic communities, hackers, or cyberpunk collectives, were not isolated phenomena. They were dynamic microcosms where new forms of resistance and resilience took shape. Subcultural spaces, mostly in the Western urban environment (notably around Southeast London where he taught in Goldsmiths) incubated innovative paradigms of thinking, collective identities, and modes of critique. These, he fervently believed, were the building blocks of a new social order. 

But, as I alluded to when opening this essay, looking around at the increasingly fascistic world today, this new social order can seem a distant utopia. The emancipatory vibes of the countercultural milieux that Fisher immersed himself, and indeed the literary concoctions of Le Guin’s worlds, in which the constraints of capitalism are a distant history are so often consumed by the insatiable ‘content-machine’ of cultural capitalism. With its hunger for any new IP to transform into a ‘universe’ that can spawn multiple media, toys, bedsheets and boardgames, the anti- or post-capitalist future yearned for here is pre-emptively colonised by capitalism. Hence why the obvious counter move is to decolonise. 

Decolonise the Future

And there are many people doing just that within the very same artistic frameworks that Le Guin, Fisher and others work(ed) with. Within literature, Octavia E. Butler, a celebrated science fiction writer, is a luminary within the Afrofuturist movement. Her works, such as the Parable series and Kindred meld speculative science fiction and the very real sociopolitics of slavery, enabling readers to explore issues of power, race, and destiny for Black people with alternative, hopeful futures. This act of decolonising a future of capitalist appropriation is one of the key tenants of the Afrofuturism movement. It perhaps most visibly came to the fore with Marvel’s Black Panther, envisioning a world in which Black African people were pioneers of, rather than violently excluded from, world-changing science, technology and art. But beyond the corporatized visions (which some have critiqued as simply ‘Black Capitalism’) there lies a far more subversive potential of Afrofuturist thought: one which rests on a decolonial framework of radical potential to envision Black liberation and alternatives to oppressive structures of white supremacy, fascism and fossil fuel capitalism. Other protagonists include Janelle Monáe, a non-binary contemporary artist-activist (indeed they defy any attempt at categorisation) who merges music, fashion, and visual art, actively seeks to decolonise a capitalist future through proactively performing across, and pushing through these socialised boundaries.

And then there is the evergreen George Clinton and his collective, Parliament-Funkadelic. Since the era of 60s and 70s psychedelic revolution that Fisher championed in Acid Communism, Clinton as his ‘P-Funk’ has carved a distinctive space within music and culture with hybridised subculture of funk, science fiction, and surreal imagery that resonates with decolonial themes. The Mothership, an iconic symbol in his performances (see the final stages of the video above), goes a long way in symbolising the cosmic journey and the possibilities for transcending earthly categories of flimsy socialisation. Parliament-Funkadelic’s music and artistic vision serve to scaffold Fisher’s theories with decolonial tendencies, thereby exemplifying how the fusion of music, sci-fi, art, but most importantly political critique can lead to an emancipatory countercultural movement. 

Capitalism, in all its various guises around the world, continues to wreak havoc on the one hand, and disarm any critical voices on the other. Yet to reiterate Le Guin’s words from those that opened this essay “Resistance and change often begin in art.” Hence, rekindling a politically potent, ethically robust, and radically subversive artistic movement becomes vital work if a more viable, less violent future is to be realised. If we are to act on the revolutionary visions of Le Guin and Fisher (and the cadre of comrades who have come in their wake) whose warnings about the commercialisation and appropriation of subcultural subversion ring as true today as they have done in the previous decades of late capitalism, then decolonising those futures is paramount.