I've been listening to this amazing episode by @parismarx and @brianmerchant chatting with @annaleen & Charlie Jane Anders. They talk about a lot of important things like the distorted understanding tech billionaires have of SciFi, but the episode's part I loved most is how Annalee and Charlie push back to the idea that there are no alternative stories: because there are, not just in SciFi, but also in fantasy.
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https://open.spotify.com/episode/1v9rICpkKKmBh26XmjKEZb?si=691412d818944091
I think it stuck with me because, especially with the current fascist turn, I keep reading from leftists of all sorts that we need a story, a better story. And to me, this search for a story is almost becoming the story, and missing the point entirely.
There are tons of stories out there. There have been since I was young. My student last year made a dissertation on U. K. Le Guin as solarpunk. There is an whole world of stories from non-Western indigenous literature.
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And beyond fiction, Schumacher's 'Small is Beautiful' is 52 yrs old, and I read Latouche's book on #Degrowth for the first time in 2012, which already back then seemed to me a both feasible and compelling alternative to our system. I know I'm not the only one, because yrs after, in 2019, speaking with a civil servant working in a council's environmental department,
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they themselves told me that the 'happy degrowth' (as it became known in Italy back in 2010s) where the only ones with a compelling vision and a sounding programme that could actually help in building a post-capitalist ecological society.
So, sorry to break it to you, but no, we don't need a story, because there are tons of story out there. What we need are politicians (or future ones) that will boldly embrace them.
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Progressives that are incapable of seeing beyond this economic system are the actual obstacle to any change. But if Trump is showing us something is that norms and laws aren't unbreakable.
This constant moaning of a 'better story' or a 'new story' is paralysing any progressive change, and, tbh, it's also kind of patronising in its dismissal of all the beauty that artists and scholars are creating in spite of the ugliness and violent repression.
Story are there, let's finally tell them loud.
Alx 🐈