Socialists to the Stars
<p>Science fiction, because it deals in extrapolated futures, has a long<br />
tradition of employment as a vehicle for political argument.  More than that,<br />
science fiction encourages politically-minded writers to narratize their<br />
beliefs in ways that can sometime reveal more than the writers intended<br />
about the problems and contradictions in their own theories. </p>
<p>I was powerfully reminded of this fact while reading Ken MacLeod&#8217;s<br />
latest <cite>The Sky Road</cite>.  A reference in the book led me to<br />
think about Iain Banks, and from there I flashed on some recent<br />
analyses of post-9/11 confusion among the European left.  And I<br />
realized that MacLeod and Banks between them inadvertently reveal some<br />
interesting things about socialism in the post-Soviet world.</p>
<p>Ken MacLeod and Iain Banks are two of the most interesting young<br />
writers in science fiction.  Both are rooted in Scotland, and both<br />
manage the peculiar and somewhat arresting trick of writing rather<br />
hard SF from a Marxist political stance. For multiple historical and<br />
structural reasons, the dominant strain in the politics of SF has long<br />
been individualist, anti-authoritarian, even libertarian in tone &#8212;<br />
and this has been most true near the hard-SF heart of the field.<br />
MacLeod and Banks, then, are almost unique in proposing SF narratives<br />
in which socialism has a heroic future &#8212; and in doing so giving us an<br />
SFnal window into how socialists in the post-Soviet world think,<br />
and the unrecognized contradictions in their ideas.</p>
<p>Banks is the less explicit of the two.  His Culture novels<br />
(including <cite>Excession</cite>, <cite>Use of Weapons</cite>,</p>
<p><cite>The Player Of Games</cite>, and <cite>Look To Windward</cite><br />
are wide-screen space operas in which the good guys are a communist<br />
utopia.  In the Culture, there is no money and no want and no markets;<br />
the economy is run by the vast AIs called Culture Minds, who somehow<br />
centrally plan everything so that human beings never have to make<br />
unpleasant scarcity choices.  It&#8217;s Marxist eschatology entire,<br />
with the withering-away of the state sustained by deus ex machina.</p>
<p>But Banks never refers to communism or capitalism or any feature of<br />
present-day politics by name. You get his politics by indirection,<br />
mainly by noticing how he thinks economics and history work.  In his<br />
universe all the non-communist cultures are barbarians waiting to be<br />
assimilated by Culture contact expeditions.  The cat gets let out of<br />
the bag in a historical aside; Banks imagines Earth itself being<br />
subsumed.  Marx&#8217;s dialectical imperative having failed us, Banks is<br />
imaginatively counting on invasion by superior aliens to sweep<br />
capitalism and markets into the dustbin of history.</p>
<p>Banks&#8217;s Culture is not quite the dreary exercise in correct-think<br />
the above description might suggest; in fact, the Culture is a lot of<br />
fun to read about. But there is a black hole at the center of Banks&#8217;s<br />
construction. Leaving aside all the tendentious political questions<br />
about who gets to use force in the Culture, and when, and for what<br />
reasons&#8230;the economics can&#8217;t possibly work. The Culture Minds, if<br />
they existed, would run slap-bang into F. A. Hayek&#8217;s `calculation<br />
problem&#8217;.  In 1936, Hayek showed that a planned economy, deprived of<br />
the demand signals generated by markets, will inevitably malinvest its<br />
way to collapse. The Soviet Union took less than sixty years to act<br />
out Hayek&#8217;s prediction, and in 2002 there is really no better excuse<br />
for an SF writer not understanding this than there would be for<br />
getting the physics of a story gimmick wrong.</p>
<p>If Banks narratizes the fundamentalist version of socialism<br />
(believe and heaven will take you up), MacLeod gives us something<br />
rather weirder and more complex.  Unlike Banks, he is economically<br />
literate.  His characters are staunch old socialists who have figured<br />
out that Marxism is a total crock and the Soviet Union was a doomed,<br />
murderous failure.  In fact MacLeod is an anarchist at heart, and his<br />
futures succumb to the inevitability of markets in the absence of<br />
state control.  And yet, his characters cannot let go of that old-time<br />
religion &#8212; they fetishize posters of Che Guevara and hate<br />
&#8220;imperialism&#8221; and sing the Internationale and get all misty-eyed over<br />
hammer-and-sickle emblems and even obey orders from the shadowy<br />
remnants of the Communist Party.</p>
<p>MacLeod gives us post-Communist Communism, heavy metal irony,<br />
socialist camp &#8212; indeed, one of the two viewpoint characters uses the<br />
latter phrase to describe the &#8220;worker&#8217;s state&#8221; she runs in Central<br />
Asia.  The program is gone, all that&#8217;s left is the attitude and the<br />
conspiracy and the dreary verbal cliches and the resentment.<br />
Including the hatred of capitalism.  The results in MacLeod&#8217;s weiting<br />
sometimes have an appealing gritty contrarianism, but more often just<br />
the morbid fascination of a bad auto accident. One pities his<br />
characters in the way one might pity any gifted obsessive.  In<br />
fact, one pities MacLeod himself.</p>
<p>Banks&#8217;s denial-drenched wish-fantasy.  MacLeod&#8217;s<br />
self-loathing-tinged politics of resentment, intermittently<br />
intelligent but unable to escape the sentimental gravitational pull of<br />
the old Soviet evil.  Voila!  The two poles of the European left after<br />
the fall of the Soviet Union, and especially after 9/11.  Neither one<br />
of them which much sustainability or mass appeal.</p>
<p>Leftist theory has been in a state of accelerating disintegration<br />
ever since &#8220;real existing socialism&#8221; fulfilled the fate Marx predicted<br />
for capitalism by collapsing under the weight of its own<br />
contradictions.  Once the European left could no longer seriously<br />
propose a Marxist program, it had to settle for a defensive<br />
hunker-down around the socialist-inspired institutions of state &#8212; the<br />
dole, national health services, and so forth.  This is why ever since<br />
Margaret Thatcher, most of the dynamism of European political change<br />
within countries has come from the right &#8212; and the European Union,<br />
always an enterprise of the left, may now be in jeopardy under<br />
populist and nationalist pressure.</p>
<p>Pim Fortuyn and Jean-Marie Le Pen (to name the two most ecent<br />
upsetters of the Euroleftist applecart) really had very little in<br />
common except for having been branded &#8220;right-wing&#8221; by left-sympathizing<br />
journalists.  In fact, both their platforms are traditionally left<br />
on economic policy.  What they did have in common is that they were<br />
both shrewd opportunists who stepped into the vacuum created by<br />
the ideological collapse of the traditional left.</p>
<p>Nowhere in either Banks&#8217;s or MacLeod&#8217;s mythologizations of future<br />
socialism is there any hint of an answer for the rising political<br />
problems of the present. The failure of multiculturalism as a strategy<br />
for preventing inter-ethnic and sectarian strife is the one Fortuyn<br />
and Le Pen exploited.  There are others; environmental policy,<br />
information privacy, biotech.  The European left, an increasingly<br />
tired anachronism in a capitalist world, no longer has either the<br />
energy or the intellectual heft to tackle any of these.  The best its<br />
parties can hope for is to do as the British Labor party did; shift<br />
towards centrist pragmatism while making obeisances to left rhetoric<br />
that everyone involved recognizes as increasingly meaningless.</p>
<p>Perhaps it&#8217;s not surprising that both Banks and MacLeod<br />
are creatures of the post-Soviet world.  Their fantasies of<br />
socialism to the stars may be all the Left has left.</p>
<p></p>
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