I’m supposed to be doing important life logistics self care stuff but I saw a book in a used bookstore and decided not to get it and then I saw a video dunking on Sim Kern’s "tankies are calvinists” brainworms and now here I am thinking about the outsized role that speculative fiction has had upon the political landscape.  This is leading me down a rabbit hole of my own thoughts and idk if I’m cooking or if I am cooked (my AC can’t keep up so I’m at least partially cooked.  Heat maketh for odd thoughts) so I’d like some outside perspectives.  I don’t know where I’m going with this but if these disjointed ramblings inspire interesting related thoughts please, let’s chat.

Thread 1: Speculative fiction:

The book I considered picking up today was A Country of Ghosts by Margaret Killjoy, about an anarchist society that fights against colonizers and tries to defend themselves using asymmetrical warfare.  Sounds cool.  It’s short and I perhaps should have picked it up to read, but I ended up not, preferring to read other books (well tbh I’ve been mostly reading Red Sails essays of late).  I can predict that she has them win the fight and that it will be inspirational, given what passing familiarity I have had with her body of work previously — she focuses on uplifting stories, “cool people doing cool stuff”, hope! (¿though might one say “hopium”?).

This reminded me that I’d read Alien Clay by Adrian Czajkowski and while I enjoyed it, I couldn’t help but note that

Which sent a message, likely not what the author intended, that anarchist organizing doesn’t work without some big unreal maguffin to back it up.  But that wasn’t the point, the point was to show how it could work well and explore some cool xenobiology

Brave New World?  Speculative fiction.  1984?  Speculative fiction.  Lord of the Flies?  Fiction.  Fiction, fiction, fiction, ideas must be explored in fiction, and those explorations are as valid as explorations that are not in fiction but are in the realm of real analysis.

Thread 2:  Fleeing from the Horror of Reality into the Comfort of the Dream

Or, denying reality in favor of some hopeful message about how we can solve the unreal problems instead of doing the hard work to understand and grapple with the real problems

Liberals get upset with me for pointing out that the Democrats are genocidal Nazis and I think in some cases it’s because that makes them feel like the problem is too big to solve.  As long as the problem is just with Trump, the problem is solvable or endurable.  But if the problem is both wings of the AmeriKKKan Nazi Party, then it’s too insurmountable.  “Stop fascism in the Fourth Reich?  Better to hope that a pig will sprout wings!  Therefore I need Cuddlefish to be wrong so that I can have hope, therefore she must be wrong.”  Even though my message is not one of hopelessness, but a call to action, a naming of the problem so that the problem can be fought!  They cannot conceive of a way and so turn to fiction and nebulous dreams to comfort them.  Empty platitudes about community, about civil society and norms.  Or perhaps they are upset about the threat to their privileges, their class positions, and so turn to comforting fictions instead.  There are many reasons they turn their backs on reality, but they always do for whatever reason.  They have to, to preserve the fiction.

Anarchists have gotten upset with me for going “hell yeah dude, that sounds awesome!  Let’s look at these ideas of a better future more and delve into how that would work!  What are some historical examples, successes and failures?”  Or worse, when I asked questions about how to solve certain problems, I wasn’t even trying to poke holes in their utopian vision, I was trying to figure out how it would work, but somehow I was bourgeois for not being ok with letting people just die of cancer at age 30.  I’ve tried to really dig in, but their answers are so nebulous and involve a lot of “just-so” magical thinking.  It’ll work out somehow.  Hookworm isn’t real.  We will be greeted as liberators rather than as those bastards who destroyed the systems upon which people rely for survival.  Every small community will figure things out through cooperation so we don’t need to think about what comes next.  Source?  Trust me bro.  Read some poetry.  The dream is beautiful.

The dream is beautiful.  It is, and it’s a dream.  They’re all dreams.  But I try to work in the realm of reality, and reality is a nightmare from which we can never wake.  Instead we must do what we can to fight against what makes it a nightmare, and that is ugly and difficult.  It helps to look at what people have done that have survived for longer than 10 years, which means looking to the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Cuba, China, North Korea, all these countries that we’re not supposed to look at because they’re “authoritarian”.  And it means looking at the ones that didn’t survive long either — rest in power, Comrade Sankara! — to understand why they were able to be defeated and try to avoid similar defeats if possible.

I don’t have a list of those historical examples from Anarchists other than the Zapatistas and Rojava, both of which have heavy asterisks (Zapatistas don’t even call themselves anarchist; Rojava had to make a deal with The Great Satan to win its wars against Daesh and it paid the devil’s price).  The Liberals are even worse, as they give me historical examples which are all brutal genocidal colonialist states whose crimes they either wave away or dismiss as a result of corruption (not venal, but spiritual) that has been purged or will be purged.  The liberals live in a dream too, a dream where AmriKKKa wasn’t evil from the start, where France and Britain were not evil empires.  They reject reality because the dream is so much more soothing.

“Another world is possible”, the dreamers say at these community meetings where people dream and brainstorm other ways of being.  But it’s always abstract, hypothetical, nebulous.  Their zines ask thought-provoking questions without proposing hard answers that can be cross-examined, and perhaps they must never pin down something specific because specifics can be evaluated and scrutinized, and the dream cannot survive scrutiny.

“Another world is possible because it was possible, we had it” said anarchists who recommended to me The Dawn of Everything, and they were silent when I brought up serious critiques I’d read of it which point out its many methodological flaws.

“If you will it, it is no dream” arch-Zionist Theodor Herzl said.  Evola and Nietzsche were both quite taken with the dream of a past that never was.  Is it inherently reactionary to fixate so much on dreams instead of on hard reality?

I think there’s a difference between saying “I think things should be different in these ways, both vague and specific, and I am willing to fight for that and to take steps to achieve those changes even though they may not happen in my lifetime because I may die in the struggle”, which is what I think Marxist-Leninists do, and dreaming of a nebulous future wherein things will just work out if we want it badly enough to figure out the details later.

The union of those threads:

Thread 1, speculative fiction, and thread 2, denial of reality and emphasis on dreams, intersect.  What is speculative fiction but a fictional exploration of dreams?  In a fictional story, anything can go because the author can write it so.  Sherlock Holmes can solve any mystery because the universe is created to allow him to do so, save for when his own genius must be subverted for the sake of the plot.  Margaret Killjoy’s anarchist commune can win the asymmetrical war.  The boys on that island can turn against each other and fall to barbarism rather than what actually happened when boys were stranded at sea.  In all cases they are the argument the author puts forth to defend their views, but then they become examples people can point to as proof of those views, as if fiction is somehow not made up!  And these threads intersect with that Sim Kerns “tankies are calvinists” thread — Sim decries commenters who bring up the very real fact that social democratic politicians keep betraying the socialist part of their base, or that social democracy does not even attempt to acknowledge the problems of imperialism but simply focuses on redistributing the spoils of said imperialism.  Sim retreats into the dream that a better world is possible through elections.  (I think?  The video has actually been taken down before I could watch it so I’ve only seen clips).  I found this comment in a Hexbear thread on their take though, detailing the blurb for a book they wrote: https://hexbear.net/comment/7190533

 In an alternate 2020 timeline, Al Gore won the 2000 election and declared a War on Climate Change rather than a War on Terror. For twenty years, Democrats have controlled all three branches of government, enacting carbon-cutting schemes that never made it to a vote in our world. Green infrastructure projects have transformed U.S. cities into lush paradises (for the wealthy, white neighborhoods, at least), and the Bureau of Carbon Regulation levies carbon taxes on every financial transaction.

English teacher by day, Maddie Ryan spends her nights and weekends as the rhythm guitarist of Bunny Bloodlust, a queer punk band living in a warehouse-turned-venue called “The Lab” in Houston’s Eighth Ward. When Maddie learns that the Eighth Ward is to be sacrificed for a new electromagnetic hyperway out to the wealthy, white suburbs, she joins “Save the Eighth,” a Black-led organizing movement fighting for the neighborhood. At first, she’s only focused on keeping her band together and getting closer to Red, their reckless and enigmatic lead guitarist. But working with Save the Eighth forces Maddie to reckon with the harm she has already done to the neighborhood—both as a resident of the gentrifying Lab and as a white teacher in a predominantly Black school.

When police respond to Save the Eighth protests with violence, the Lab becomes the epicenter of “The Free People’s Village”—an occupation that promises to be the birthplace of an anti-capitalist revolution. As the movement spreads across the U.S., Maddie dreams of a queer, liberated future with Red. But the Village is beset on all sides—by infighting, police brutality, corporate-owned media, and rising ecofascism. Maddie’s found family is increasingly at risk from state violence, and she must decide if she’s willing to sacrifice everything in pursuit of justice.

What on earth.  What the actual fuck.  I cannot express verbally my horror.  Oh wait we have emotes.    This is speculative fiction!  This is a radlib fever dream.  (I do not know Sim Kern’s politics other than that apparently they oppose Iϟϟntreal’s genocide in Palestine, and they hate “tankies”, so I don’t know what to call them but the vibe I get is somewhere in between liberal and anarchist, hence “radlib”).

I keep coming back to this:  when I ask liberals and anarchists to demonstrate their politics, they point to fiction, that is, things that by definition have not happened.  When I ask Communists, they point to history, that is, things that actually happened.  “But history is booooooring”, say consumers of slop.  History is hard.  They turn to the realm of dreams instead.

Dreams can be comforting, and they outcompete bleaker material analysis precisely because they allow people to avoid looking at how fucked things are and how much of an uphill battle we have.

I have to ask then, is there value in writing Communist speculative fiction?  I don’t want to say fiction is inherently reactionary and cede that ground.  I love reading fiction.  I’ve enjoyed writing a few stories, and I have ideas for many more myself.  Or is that counterproductive, because our task is not to lie to people, not to encourage people to stay in the realm of dreams where they can avoid grappling with reality, but to teach people about the real world?

My current partner is the first person I’ve ever dated who was not a big reader when young.  They mostly read nonfiction.  And it got me wondering if perhaps, much as being a “reader” and an “intellectual” is fetishized, there is not just as much value and honor in being fully immersed in the world, in the present, in the here and now, grappling with material reality as it is, enjoying what is to be enjoyed and fighting what is not?

Fuck it I have no idea what I’m saying anymore but I’ve procrastinated long enough.  Time to go read more about heat mitigation so I don’t boil.   I may even do my dishes.