Living in a Marxist Sci-Fi World: A Phenomenological Analysis of the Power of Science Fiction

The state of our current world has brought about a very active discussion concerning possible alternatives to our current society. In this article, I wish to consider Marx’s idea of communism as a possible alternative, by understanding it as an undetermined concept that only proposes a society witho...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of science fiction and philosophy Vol. 2; pp. 1 - 23
Main Author Matías Graffigna
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Alfredo Mac Laughlin 01.12.2019
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Summary:The state of our current world has brought about a very active discussion concerning possible alternatives to our current society. In this article, I wish to consider Marx’s idea of communism as a possible alternative, by understanding it as an undetermined concept that only proposes a society without classes and private property. The thesis I will defend here is that we can meaningfully think about such an alternative through the means of Science Fiction literature. In particular, I will take Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (2006) as a case study. To clarify this relation between science fiction (SF) literature and communism as a particular case of an alternative society, I will introduce some concepts of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological theory. Thus, I shall argue that in SF we can presentify in bounded phantasy an alternative life-world, so furnishing with content the undetermined idea, and in doing so, strengthen the belief in the possibility of such an alternative society.
ISSN:2573-881X