What’s Left? Contingency vs. orthodoxy in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars (1993)

In Beyond Capitalism (2013), Luke Cooper and Simon Hardy seek to reclaim some good from the recent banking scandal by arguing it has created a new terrain for radical-left schematization. Contending that the recent crisis has acted to productively expose left-wing weakness – by revealing a core fracture between different forms of socialist struggle – the authors call for the creation of some third way which can unite the discontinuities between the overly bureaucratic left with new social protest movements.Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars (1993) offers a powerful response to these debates. This paper situates the novel as a conceptual staring point to consider possible alternatives to the standard confrontation between orthodox-contingent dualisms. Contending that Robinson’s fiction encodes many of these complex theoretical debates into profitable narrative exposures, the text champions a number of conceptual tools for revolutionary praxis. Articulating a series of provocative challenges aimed at the explanatory concepts of Marxism, Robinson’s fiction responds to the current crisis of the left by reinvigorating the blueprint for socialist action. The paper ends by proposing that through recourse to fictional treatments of the future, anti-capitalist movements can begin to consider viable political strategies that resituate protest movements within a Marxist tradition.