Xenia Benivolski curates, writes, and lectures about sound, music, and visual art. She is also a PhD student at the LUCA School of Arts at KU Leuven in Brussels. From 2020 to 2023 she was an editor/curator of You Can’t Trust Music at e-flux.com, a research project connecting sound-based artists, musicians, and writers to explore together how landscape, acoustics, and musical thought contribute to the formation of social and political structures. Her writing appears regularly in Texte Zur Kunst, Frieze, Artforum, e-flux journal, and The Wire.
In 2023, while a guest on The Workers’ Speculative Society, the podcast that accompanied the Worker as Futurist project, German novelist and critic Heike Gessler spoke about the ways her personal life, politics, and creative work have been affected by the collapse of the communist regime and the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic in 1989, when she was a young teenager there.
As a Russian immigrant from a working class background, I related deeply. The communist regime I grew up under in Russia was horrible and corrupt, but at least there was, in theory, some sense of dignified work for the working classes. It’s hard to feel grateful for the gadgets and goods available to us now under capitalism when we know they’re made by impoverished workers. But it is equally difficult to imagine some alternative future based on the Soviet regime, especially today, as nostalgia for it re-emerges as an element of the fascist propaganda of plutocrats. The hardest thing, perhaps, is conceiving of some new third way between state communism and neoliberal capitalism.
In my mind, the tension between the Eastern and Western genres of SF may be a potential space where that third way—or at least some idea of it—could emerge. It’s what initially drew me to the Worker as Futurist project and perhaps the best place for me to start my reflection.
From its inception, SF has been a carrier of covert, critical, and often radical ideas. As a genre, SF has been widespread in Russia since the eighteenth century when it was dubbed научная фантастика [Nauchnaya Fantastika], which translates to “educational fantasy.”
SF’s popularity can be attributed in part to the Soviet obsession with technological advancement. Later on, it became as a radical instrument because it was one of the last remaining covert venues for social criticism as violent state censorship swept through the nation.
Its political dimension has always been undeniable. For example, Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s utopian classic What Is to Be Done? (1863) inspired Lenin’s homonymous 1902 manifesto. Later, in the 1960s, when small fragments of Western culture worked themselves into the cultural prism through black markets and radio waves, the work of the brothers Strugatzki (for example the 1978 novel Noon: 22nd Century) speculated on the existence of other worlds.
In reality, social life under both the Tsar and the USSR was a closed loop of unspeakable control and manipulation. But SF narratives provided a way out through acts of imagination that was as political as it was cathartic. The bulk of the original What’s to Be Done? retells a series of dreams by its protagonist, describing a utopian commune led by a women’s sewing circle. It marks the beginning of a national fantasy, one result of which was the communist ideology of the USSR.
Dreams are often featured in Russian literature as a message delivered from a higher power. We might see dream in this context as a “hidden transcript’’ (Scott 1990) that revealed the truest inclination of the collective body. The dream has often been used as a narrative device, allowing the author to espouse political opinions without taking personal ownership of them and therefore avoiding the risk of punishment. Dostoyevsky’s novels are rife with dreaming, notably The Idiot (1869). Most of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (1967) is told through the dreams and hallucinations of its protagonists. Even Nabokov posthumous published a dream diary, 1961.
I joined the Worker as Futurist project, to explore the intersections between work and imagination in a way that would bring closure to my own speculative notions of futurity and the political nightmare in Russia. I was in Moscow in 2021 when we held our first sessions of the speculative fiction (SF) film club for Amazon workers, shortly before Putin invaded Ukraine.
From the beginning of the project I noticed a stark disconnect between the participating workers’ understanding of their individual and their collective destinies. On our intake forms, the workers we surveyed were deeply pessimistic about the fate of the world. But they were much more optimistic about their own individual futures.
One of my jobs at the project was to lead the recruitment of participants. Looking for applicants on Facebook forums and message boards created by and for Amazon workers, I was struck that workers seemed preoccupied by the company’s extensive repertoire of rewards and micropromotions. Many message board participants had encyclopedic knowledge of hundreds of barely-differentiated positions at Amazon, and kept up-to-date with the corporation’s confusing rules. The main function of many groups was to share tips and tricks that might trigger a series of promotions or bonuses. It felt like a casino or a ponzi scheme. Some workers on these forums would brag about their successful attempts to trick the system by using its multiple loopholes. Others would share behavioral strategies that might also lead to various rewards, such as being named “employee of the month.” Workers were rewarded for completing microsurveys online and using their breaks to play gambling games that earned them fractions of cents, all while carrying motion devices used to train the very machines that would someday replace them.
If their Facebook posts are to be believed, the very same workers who so readily plugged into the addictive, gamified systems were already engaged in other forms of gambling behavior, which indicated to me that Amazon has developed its digitally-driven work culture to include an element of faith, knowing that people from the working classes are more likely to want to believe in miracles.
Capitalism is, among other things, an expansionist economic model, and perhaps this is why narratives and programs for the journey into space fit so neatly within it. Space travel is at once a journey into the inception of the world and towards the beginning and the end of all matter. It entangles concepts of progress, freedom, technological uplift, economic growth, and supremacy. Capitalism supposedly requires a sense of individual sacrifice for the greater good and the wholeness of progress.
According to Mark Nelson (2012), the gamification of work in the industrial setting emerged in the Soviet sphere. It was Lenin who proposed a theory of “socialist competition” to encourage workers to be more productive and to soothe the need for individual expression in a collective environment that can make workers feel like cogs in the machine.
But in America, this gamification strategy additionally tapped into the unresolved paradox of the American dream: the promise that even the lowest ranking worker can become an overnight success if they only work hard or are lucky enough. The hopeless situation is only amplified by the humble and misleading origin tales of American oligarchs: Bezos’s and Steve Jobs’s garages, Elon Musk’s tiny home. Fittingly, characters that no longer see a place for themselves within the grand scheme of the American dreamscape are somewhat ironically belittled as “woke.”
In the West, SF often takes up the task of class struggle. We might think of the classic Metropolis (1927), where disgruntled underground workers keep the world humming above ground, or the more recent Hunger Games (2008), which depicts a world where city dwellers subsist on the cruel and exploitative treatment of people living in abject poverty. In The Matrix (1999), human bodies are pared down to their most basic form of work: their heartbeats produce electricity for an army of unfeeling robots who have inherited a scorched earth.
This makes SF written by workers all the more pertinent. If, in this moment of capitalism, workers are an endless resource supplying the unstoppable machine, sustained by dreaming the American dream, surely collective emancipation lies in their awakening, This, too, is a common Western SF trope. If our filmic dystopias are to be believed, it appears the realm of political imagination has been claimed by a handful of moral parables, ubiquitous in Hollywood films.
When asked, early in the Worker as Futurist process, to describe their perfect fantasy day, many workers still included going to work. In the nine stories published here, dreams and aspirations are often used interchangeably, but almost all of them involve the character being lost in a fantasy, a memory, or waking up from a dream. Several of the stories describe characters trapped in a nightmarish version of the world after Amazon—a world where everything is just another version of work from which there is no escape, even in dreams. The most likely “world after Amazon” will fulfill the dream of Jeff Bezos and a handful of people like him.
I understand the Worker as Futurist project as a way of reaching workers through their dreams. In SF films like Inception (2010), Flatliners (1990), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and even The Matrix, characters regain a truer sense of reality by becoming conscious in the state of dreaming. While their bodies lay motionless, in reality, their inner world stretches infinitely to the horizon. When they wake up, they become aware of other dreamers, and the possibility of a new world.