Pip: "If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others." Philip K. Dick said that, and honestly, it reads less like a warning and more like a dare.
Mara: That line opens a piece by freerein61 that uses Dick's 1968 novel as a lens for thinking about alienation, commodification, and what capitalism does to the idea of being human. That's the territory we're covering today.
Pip: Let's start with the novel itself — and why its central question still has teeth.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Dick, Capitalism, and the Empathy Problem
Mara: The post frames Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as one of the most philosophically ambitious science fiction works of the twentieth century — and its central question is precise: what truly defines being human amid a heavily dehumanised world?
Pip: And Dick's answer isn't comforting. The society that hunts androids for lacking empathy is itself building a world where genuine empathy barely exists.
Mara: The post puts it directly: "Dick's irony lies in the fact that the society which hunts androids for their lack of empathy is itself creating a world where true empathy is absent." The Voigt-Kampff test measures instinctive concern for others' suffering — but the humans administering it are emotionally hollowed out by the same system.
Pip: So the test for humanity is being run by people who are failing it.
Mara: The post connects this to Marx's theory of alienation from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — the worker estranged from their labour, from other people, from their own human potential. Dick's androids, manufactured for exploitation and destroyed when they escape, are described as capitalism's ultimate product.
Mara: The novel's other details carry the same weight. Owning a real animal is a status symbol because most are extinct. Deckard's electric sheep is a source of shame — a private emotional life that feels counterfeit. Mercerism, the communal spiritual practice, turns out to be a televised fabrication.
Pip: Fake religion, fake animals, fake empathy — and the commodity form so embedded in daily life that real and simulated become genuinely indistinguishable.
Mara: The post then turns to the adaptations. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner gets credit for its visual power — Roy Batty's final monologue is called "profoundly impactful" — but the post argues it simplifies Dick's social critique, letting spectacle crowd out the analysis of the Tyrell Corporation as a capitalist entity built on enslaved labour.
Pip: And Blade Runner 2049 fares no better. The post quotes Carlos Delgado's review: "aside from a brief scene in a child labour sweatshop, Villeneuve appears uninterested in depicting the conditions faced by workers, whether human or artificial."
Mara: The conclusion drawn from that review is stark — "bleakness without understanding, the work of artists who perhaps sense an impending social catastrophe but lack the tools to identify its source." That's the post's diagnosis of contemporary dystopian art more broadly.
Pip: An aesthetic of crisis with no theory of the cause.
Mara: The post also examines Dick's 1977 Metz speech, where he explicitly names surveillance states — theocratic, fascist, or capitalist — as systems that must be overthrown. His novels, from A Scanner Darkly to Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, are read as artistic expressions of genuine social contradictions, not mere paranoia.
Mara: But the post draws a firm line. Dick's perception of a falsified, alienating reality is described as extraordinary — and then immediately limited. His answer to what the post calls the "black iron prison" is divine reprogramming, not collective action. Liberation through cosmic intervention, not working-class organisation.
Mara: The post frames this as the characteristic form social despair takes in a petty-bourgeois intellectual cut off from the working class. Dick registered the horror with real sensitivity but displaced the solution into Gnosticism and personal mystical experience. The post's final word on him is generous but clear: his questions — what does it mean to be human when humans are treated as commodities — are practical questions, and Marx approached them from a materialist perspective where Dick could only approach them through a restless artistic sensibility.
Pip: The surveillance state, manufactured consent, the commodification of consciousness — all of it more recognisable now than in 1968. Dick saw it coming; he just couldn't tell you who to organise with.
Mara: The questions Dick posed about alienation and what capitalism does to genuine human connection haven't aged out. They've sharpened.
Pip: Next time — more from A Trumpet of Sedition on the ideas that refuse to stay in the past.
“I heard a traveller from an antique land….” (Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias” (quoted in Kuang 147)
“She learned, in fact, that revolution is always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential”
R F Kuang’s-Babel
“The historical significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian revolution consists in the fact that it is laying the foundations of a culture that is above classes and which will be the first culture that is truly human.”
Leon Trotsky
‘What is art? First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art is not the free play of fantasy, feelings and moods; art is not the expression of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader ‘good feelings.’ Like science, art cognises life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality. However, science analyses, art synthesises; science is abstract, art is concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual nature. Science cognises life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of living, sensual contemplation.’
Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky,
R.F. Kuang’s Babel through a Marxist lens
It takes a brave and gifted writer to play fast and loose with British history and get away with it. However, the writer Rebecca F Kuang, who has a master’s and two PHD’s, manages to pull this off with an erudition that belies her tender years.
R. F. Kuang’s “speculative fiction” is an attack on capitalism, or to be precise, British imperialism. In Babel, she quotes Frantz Fanon: “Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence”.
Of course, Kuang is free to quote whom she pleases, but Fanon is not the most healthy of anti-imperialist writers. Fanon (1925–1961) was a Martinique-born psychiatrist, anti-colonial theorist and participant in Algeria’s war of independence. His major works, most notably The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, combined clinical experience, existential-philosophical reflection and militant polemic to expose the psychic and violent dimensions of colonial domination.
Fanon remains indispensable for understanding the brutality of imperialism, the profound psychological injuries inflicted on colonised peoples, and the legitimating role of national liberation as a political response to colonial oppression. However, his work tends to express an overemphasis on the peasantry and the “national” element. Fanon’s analyses sometimes valorise “the people” and guerrilla insurgency in ways that underplay the historically decisive role of the industrial working class as an emancipatory force.
Kuang was born in China but grew up in the United States. Aged 29, she has already written five books, has a list of impressive book awards and survived graduate work at both Oxford and Cambridge. Kuang’s first three books comprised a trilogy: The Poppy War (2018), The Dragon Republic (2019), and The Burning God (2020). Yellowface was published in 2023, and her latest Katabasis has just been published.[1]
Poppy Trilogy
Kuang’s The Poppy War trilogy is not a moral fable but works as a social document. In Kuang’s world, the countryside supplies labour, food and recruits. Peasants are dispossessed by landowners, corvée, and military levies; they are often the immediate constituency of insurgent movements. Urban workers, miners, artisans and the conscripted soldier class appear as the concentrated sites of industrial labour, political organisation and military potency.
In the novel, local merchants, industrialists tied to foreign capital, and landowning elites who broker deals with imperial powers function as a comprador class—they defend property, seek stability for capital accumulation, and will sell national sovereignty to protect their interests. The novel’s bureaucratic and military apparatus—police, generals, intelligence organs—is an embodiment of the state as an instrument of class rule. They administer repression, manage economic concessions and mediate between imperial interests and local elites.
To her credit, she warns against relying on nationalist elites or petty-bourgeois adventurism to carry out democratic or social reforms. In semi-colonial settings, the proletariat must assert independent leadership—organise urban workers, factory committees, soldiers’ committees, and alliances with the poor peasantry, rather than subordinating itself to comprador regimes.
Despite her tender age, Kuang possesses a verbal brilliance and erudition probably unsurpassed by any novelist of her generation. She has mocked many sacred cows. In Yellowface, she attacks the right-wing MeToo# movement. She hates contemporary identity politics, which typically originates in petty‑bourgeois layers with ambitions inside the cultural and professional hierarchy of capitalism. Kuang came under heavy attack for writing Yellowface. The public dispute over the book’s accusers that an author has appropriated or misrepresented Asian experience cannot be reduced to questions of individual taste or moral purity. It is rooted in the concrete class relations and economic imperatives of the publishing industry.
At the surface level, the row frames itself as an ethical debate about representation. However, its intensity and public amplification are products of a crisis in cultural markets. Publishing has become an arena of intensified competition for scarce positions — advances, awards, media visibility — driven by conglomeration and profit-maximising behaviour. Large publishers, retailers and tech platforms compress cultural diversity into marketable identity niches, while promotional narratives and outrage cycles are monetised. The HarperCollins one‑day strike and workers’ testimonies show how publishing workers face low pay, expanded workloads, and corporate cost‑cutting even as firms seek cultural “brands” to sell; this creates an environment in which status and visibility are disproportionately valuable to authors and gatekeepers alike.
As the dispute over Yellowface shows, a writer does not write under conditions of his/her choosing, and artistic greatness is not something merely willed. Some periods are more favourable to genius than others. I am not saying Kuang is a genius, but the limitations of American intellectual life during the recent epoch will have shaped her. With a fascist gangster in the White House, it will be interesting to see how much she curses and kicks against the confines.
As the brilliant Marxist writer Leon Trotsky once wrote:” If environment expressed itself in novels, European science would not be breaking its head over the question of where the stories of A Thousand and One Nights were made, whether in Egypt, India, or Persia.” To say that man’s environment, including the artist’s, that is, the conditions of his education and life, finds expression in his art also, does not mean to say that such expression has a precise geographic, ethnographic and statistical character. It is not at all surprising that it is difficult to decide whether certain novels were made in Egypt, India or Persia, because the social conditions of these countries have much in common. However, the very fact that European science is “breaking its head” trying to solve this question, as these novels themselves show, indicates that these novels reflect an environment, even if unevenly.
No one can jump beyond himself. Even the ravings of an insane person contain nothing that the sick man had not received before from the outside world. However, it would be an insanity of another order to regard his ravings as the accurate reflection of an external world. Only an experienced and thoughtful psychiatrist who knows the patient’s past will be able to find the reflected and distorted bits of reality in the ravings’ contents. Artistic creation, of course, is not a raving, though it is also a deflection, a changing and a transformation of reality, in accordance with the peculiar laws of art. However fantastic art may be, it cannot have at its disposal any other material except that which is given to it by the world of three dimensions and by the narrower world of class society. Even when the artist creates heaven and hell, he merely transforms the experience of his own life into his phantasmagorias, almost to the point of his landlady’s unpaid bill”.[2]
Babel-Or the Necessity of Violence
Babel is set at 1830s Oxford University. Despite being labelled a historical novel, Kuang is adamant that it has lessons for today’s readers. In an interview, Kuang called her book “ a dark text of academia, saying, “ I love campus novels, dark academia novels. Moreover, I knew that when I finished the Poppy War trilogy, I was going to move on and do something in that genre. That is the setting in which I am most comfortable and familiar. Those are the interpersonal dynamics that I observe and most enjoy writing about—between students and rival students, students and teachers, etc.[3]
Roger Marheine writes “ Kuang pulls no punches in her scathing critique of Oxford professors who are either overt imperial agents of war (e.g. Robin’s father, Professor Lovell), willing dupes of imperial platitudes especially as they practice their daily craft within the very privileged confines of Oxfordian splendor, or specialists blissfully unaware of empire’s greater crimes as they live in academic cocoons and grasp only their own silo of knowledge. One of Oxford’s professors, Jerome Playfair, represents Kuang’s satirical comment on the British gentleman’s code of conduct, as they ruthlessly assert their global dominance.”[4]
Marheine is a pseudo-leftist and, like many on the radical left, echoes the Socialist Worker Party’s sentiment that Kuang’s book is a “goldmine of revolutionary politics.” While I am loath to downplay Kuang’s radical stance, she is not a Marxist, and this is not a socialist work of historical fiction. Some have argued that the book lacked nuance in its treatment of how characters from different marginalised backgrounds intersected with the imperial centre. There is a distinct lack of characters of a working-class background.
However, Rebecca F. Kuang’s fiction (notably The Poppy War trilogy and Babel) offers rich material for Marxist study: imperialism, ethnic division, bureaucracy, mass mobilisation, culture, and the politics of memory recur throughout her work.
Kuang’s critique of knowledge as imperial plunder in Babel does deserve a Marxist class analysis. Kuang’s Babel dramatises how the production, translation and curation of knowledge are woven into imperial accumulation. Her book shows that texts, languages and librarianship become commodities and instruments of state power. The novel makes visible several features of that process that are vital for organising library, academic and translation workers.
The main thread running through the book is that knowledge labour is expropriated and monetised. Kuang has clearly studied this barbaric practice because her book shows how scholarship and translation produce useful intellectual commodities, annotated corpora, glossaries, and archival order are appropriated by imperial institutions for political and economic advantage. The unpaid or underpaid labour of native speakers, archivists and junior scholars supplies content and expertise that enriches metropolitan libraries and universities, while the material rewards (funding, prestige, job security) flow to imperial centres. This mirrors the contemporary university’s transformation into a profit-generating arm of capital, in which millions of dollars in tuition and research funding are extracted. At the same time, adjuncts, librarians and translators remain precarious and low-paid.
Kuang is not overtly a Marxist; she does not mention Marx by name, but she does strive to present a materialist analysis of capitalism and empire. It would be very interesting to review her work in, say, five years to discover the extent to which it reflects the growth of fascist tendencies within world capitalism and how a growing radical working class can tackle this. Adopting a Marxist approach would give her already stunning work an even sharper edge, along with a much wider readership than this great writer has achieved so far.
A Trumpet of Sedition 