AUT: Ken MacLeod interview

[pmargin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Steve Wright)]

an interview with an interesting sci fi writer, from www.salon.com . . .

                       An engine of anarchy
                       Ken MacLeod talks about his rebellious youth,
                       his political paradoxes and the visionary power
                       of cyberpunk.

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                       By Andrew Leonard

                       July 27, 1999 | Ken MacLeod is the greatest
                       living Trotskyist libertarian cyberpunk
                       science-fiction humorist. It's a safe claim to
                       make, because he is undoubtedly the only such
                       creature. The 44-year-old Scot and former
                       computer programmer imagines futures full of both
                       socialist unions and libertarian enclaves,
                       warring with each other and within themselves.
                       You don't often find communist mercenaries
                       working for capitalist insurance companies in
                       science fiction. In Ken MacLeod's future, such
                       political incongruities are a joyous fact of
                       life. Add your regular cyberpunk ingredients --
                       machine consciousness, post-human trickery, cool
                       gadgets and lots of good drugs and rock 'n' roll
                       -- and you have a heady, rollicking brew.

                       MacLeod's political fiction is no pose. He's a
                       former Communist Party member who has won two
                       Prometheus awards for best libertarian science
                       fiction novel. After his American editor told me
                       that MacLeod was a regular "trenchant"
                       contributor to Internet-based discussion groups,
                       I decided to do some cyberspace stalking. Where
                       does he hang out? The bulk of his contributions
                       are in the Usenet newsgroup
                       "rec.arts.sf.written." No surprise there --
                       r.a.s.w. is one of the oldest watering holes on
                       the Net -- quite a few authors congregate there
                       with their fans, critics and peers. But his next
                       most favored spot is
                       "alt.politics.socialism.trotsky" -- and after
                       that, a little down the list,
                       "talk.politics.libertarianism." One of MacLeod's
                       hobbies, it seems, when he's between books, is
                       plunging into the Internet fray to argue about
                       what Marx and Engels really intended, and to
                       engage in the endless hair-splitting dear to
                       libertarians.

                       Working out a left-wing theory of libertarianism
                       might strike some observers as a headlong dive
                       into a thicket of ultra-thorny contradictions.
                       Can't be done, you might think. And certainly,
                       there are no ultimate answers contained in the
                       four-book arc -- "The Star Fraction," "The Stone
                       Canal," "The Cassini Division" and "The Sky Road"
                       -- that MacLeod has constructed since 1995. But
                       MacLeod's keen intelligence and sharp sense of
                       humor make the journey more than worthwhile --
                       and definitely beg the question: Who is this guy?
                       Where did these politics come from? MacLeod
                       agreed to answer some of these questions via
                       e-mail.

                       Here's a wild guess. The city of Glasgow,
                       Scotland, is famous for boasting a left-wing
                       tradition as proud as that of any city in Europe.
                       So I'll assume you come from a family of Glasgow
                       Trotskyists who worked in the Glasgow shipyards.
                       Your knowledge of left-wing factional infighting
                       is simply too intimate not to be drawn from real
                       life.

                       A. Not at all! My parents were quite conservative
                       and deeply religious Scottish Highlanders.
                       There's a certain amount of radicalism scattered
                       among my relatives that goes all the way back to
                       the crofters' [small farmers] struggles of the
                       19th century and the experience of two world
                       wars. My parents were staunch supporters of the
                       welfare state and equally staunch opponents of
                       socialism. They strongly disapproved of my
                       interest in Trotskyism. Naturally I thought they
                       were terrible reactionaries but this was far from
                       the case. They were of the generation that
                       defeated fascism and established the welfare
                       state -- they never moved forward from that but
                       they never retreated.

                       Anyway, I became a left-winger not through any
                       influence from my family or even the Clydeside
                       [Glasgow shipyards] labor movement but through
                       the same process as a lot of my friends did at
                       high school, via our rather marginal involvement
                       in youth counterculture. It may seem ridiculous
                       that a bunch of teenagers in Greenock, Scotland,
                       should be reading Marcuse and Malcolm X and
                       George Jackson, R.D. Laing and Timothy Leary and
                       of course the so-called underground press and
                       smoking the occasional joint, but that's how it
                       was. The context of Britain in the early '70s,
                       and big struggles like the Upper Clyde
                       Shipbuilders work-in and the war in Ireland, were
                       part of the scene in that we took workers' power
                       for granted. France 1968 wasn't that long ago,
                       Poland 1970 was even more recent, and big strikes
                       were fairly frequent. As one of the characters in
                       "The Star Fraction" says, "I've seen the working
                       class making days into history, and that isn't
                       something you forget."

                       But how did a Trotskyist get interested in
                       libertarianism?

                       A. After I graduated [from Glasgow
                       University] I went as a post-grad
                       to Brunel University in Uxbridge,
                       just outside London, and
                       immediately got stuck into
                       political activity. I joined the
                       International Marxist Group and was
                       involved in a lot of campaigning on
                       all kinds of issues, on campus and
                       off. There were a lot of big
                       struggles in London in the second
                       half of the '70s. I lived in a sort
                       of licensed squat with people from
                       England and Ireland and Kurdistan
                       and life became much more intense.
                       After that I lived in Finsbury Park
                       in North London, and fell out with
                       the International Marxist Group and
                       later joined the Communist Party in
                       the mid-'80s, just as it began to
                       tear itself apart. I have to say I
                       enjoyed being in the Communist
                       Party more than I did being in the
                       Trotskyist groups -- it was much
                       more open, and I think it was there
                       that I lost my fanatical dogmatism.
                       Because meanwhile, I'd been
                       checking out other political ideas,
                       I'd encountered the Libertarian
                       Alliance and it and the debates in
                       the Communist Party and the crisis
                       of the Eastern Bloc stimulated me
                       to think much longer and harder
                       about socialism than I'd ever done
                       before.

                       It wasn't until after I read "The
                       Star Fraction," your first novel,
                       that I'd learned you'd won two
                       awards from the Prometheus Society
                       for best libertarian science fiction novel. I
                       found this pretty amusing because the hero of
                       "The Star Fraction" is Moh Kohn, a communist
                       mercenary who leads the Felix Dzerzhinsky
                       Worker's Defense collective. (Dzerzhinsky was the
                       creator of the Soviet secret police.) Have you
                       actually synthesized some kind of leftist
                       libertarian world-view? Or are you just fooling
                       around?

                       A. I'm not fooling around, but if I've synthesized a
                       leftist libertarian world view I'd be very
                       interested to know what it is! I do in fact agree
                       with a lot of libertarian ideas and positions,
                       like I'm against gun control and the war on some
                       drugs and so forth, and I'm very proud of the two
                       Prometheus awards. I think classical liberalism
                       -- what's now called libertarianism -- and
                       classical Marxism have a lot more in common than
                       many people think. Classical Marxism is very
                       different from Trotskyism or any of the other
                       varieties of Leninism, and I think even they have
                       gone a long way downhill since the '70s. The left
                       is now more associated with repression and
                       regulation than rebellion and liberation.

                       Wouldn't the first difficulty inherent in merging
                       leftism and libertarianism be trying to deal with
                       the tension concerning individual rights and
                       social justice? In "The Star Fraction," your
                       portrayal of a Britain fractured into countless
                       tiny states, each with its own rules, is a
                       libertarian utopia in the sense that all kinds of
                       different approaches to ordering society are
                       possible, but at the same time, life is hell
                       within the confines of many of those mini-states.

                       A. Oh, absolutely, that's part of the point. The
                       politics of "The Star Fraction" -- leaving aside
                       the leftist element -- is really trying to
                       exacerbate a tension within libertarianism
                       itself. If cultural minorities, religions and so
                       on have their own little closed communities,
                       they're oppressive but if they aren't closed, if
                       they're part of the wider society, they are
                       themselves subtly altered. The libertarians
                       aren't really accepting the other world-views and
                       lifestyles as having their own validity, they're
                       quietly banking on the notion that they'll be
                       assimilated. Whether this is a problem is left as
                       an exercise for the reader.

                       Sitting here in front of my computer in Silicon
                       Valley, it's amazing how rarely one even hears
                       the term "working class." Sure, there are huge
                       disparities of wealth, and plenty of temp worker
                       exploitation and all that. But around here,
                       receptionists and secretaries are as likely to
                       have stock in a new start-up company as not. The
                       so-called new economy that everyone talks about
                       here almost tries to pretend that the working
                       class is pass=C8. That's not quite the case in your
                       books, is it?

                       A. I agree with the old Socialist Party of Great
                       Britain argument that anyone who has to work for
                       someone else for a living is a member of the
                       working class. You may have stock options, but
                       could you retire and live off them? If not,
                       you're still in the working class! It's certainly
                       true that there are big areas of overlap, fuzzy
                       boundaries, and Silicon Valley is currently the
                       El Ni=D2o of class mobility in the U.S. ... For the
                       purposes of my stories, I assume that even if a
                       lot of the heavy and dirty work continues to be
                       off-loaded onto machines or onto the so-called
                       third world, we'll continue to see a growing
                       proportion of the population dependent on a wage
                       or salary, supplemented perhaps by
                       self-employment and speculation. Even in "The
                       Star Fraction" there are suggestions that things
                       have moved on a bit -- almost everyone in that
                       book is a bit of a capitalist.

                       [But] the resurgence and the revolutions in my
                       stories are not necessarily working-class even in
                       the most generous sense, and they're certainly
                       not socialist. They're presented in the stories
                       as popular revolts against the New World Order,
                       but which themselves only lead to further social
                       breakdown: "What we thought was the revolution
                       was only a moment in the fall."

                       Your third novel, "The Cassini Division" struck
                       me on first reading as less overtly political
                       than your first two. Your American publisher has
                       said that he thinks that the politics of your
                       earlier novels may be a little too insidery for
                       an American audience. But I'd hate to think you
                       were watering down your politics to broaden your
                       appeal.

                       A. I'd hate to think that, too. "The Cassini
                       Division" is simpler than the other two because
                       it has a less complicated structure and because
                       it doesn't have any bloody Trots! But I hope the
                       conflicts over machine intelligence, morality
                       versus might-is-right, and so on are just as
                       satisfyingly unresolved as the more political
                       conflicts in the other books.

                       American cyberpunks mostly seem to avoid really
                       thinking about politics in any kind of organized
                       way. Bruce Sterling's most recent novel,
                       "Distraction," takes a whack at the topic, but
                       the William Gibsons and the Neal Stephensons
                       offer us societies in which critical thinking
                       about politics seems to me to be absent. The
                       cyberpunk author Pat Cadigan told me a few months
                       ago that one could explain American cyberpunk
                       obsessions from the fact that they were all the
                       same generation of suburban-bred, TV-reared, baby
                       boomers who grew up listening to rock 'n' roll
                       and getting stoned. Marxist revolution doesn't
                       really fit in there, does it?

                       A. You've just named four of the writers I most
                       admire! Bringing in the politics may be partly a
                       British thing ... From the North American
                       cyberpunk side, it's not just how they grew up
                       but what they grew into; what they saw,
                       correctly, as the bleeding edge of what was going
                       on. And it was pretty prescient. They in a sense
                       conjured up the Net and the Web, at least as much
                       as Golden Age science fiction conjured up the
                       space program. Long before I became a programmer,
                       and indeed long before the Internet took off, I
                       noticed that programmers talked like their minds
                       were going into a virtual space, into something
                       in their heads that was like Gibson's cyberspace.
                       And that was just respectable, commercial
                       programmers. The hackers must have sounded much
                       wilder.

                       The point being, they knew they were changing the
                       world, and they were doing an end run around
                       politics, as they thought. Politics did nothing
                       but put obstacles in their way. The hacker ethos
                       was to work around it. The Internet is an engine
                       of anarchy even without anarchists, just because
                       it's there in a state of nature straight out of
                       Locke or even Hobbes, and it works ... As Murray
                       Rothbard is supposed to have said of New York:
                       "We already have the war of all against all, and
                       it works fine!"

                       Looking at William Gibson's more recent fiction,
                       one of the things that struck me is how his
                       villains have changed -- they used to be
                       transnational corporations and evil artificial
                       intelligences, but now it's media itself --
                       tabloid TV, the endless fascination with
                       celebrity. Do you think this is a reflection of
                       the current economic boom in the U.S.? It seems
                       to be hard for science fiction writers,
                       especially out here on the West Coast, to think
                       about the immediate future in the same kind of
                       dystopian, shanty-town, drugs-and-AIDS
                       catastrophe way that was so popular in the late
                       '80s. Instead, the new focus is on the media
                       manipulators who specialize in operating in the
                       new economy.

                       A. Funnily enough, the latest situationist-type
                       rant, "Two Hundred Pharaohs, Five Billion Slaves
                       ...," that I've stumbled across -- massively
                       researched, staggeringly erudite and apparently
                       written by a complete unknown on an office PC --
                       makes the very point that the two aspects,
                       celebrity and poverty, software and sweatshops,
                       are increasingly intertwined by the information
                       industry and the industrialization of
                       information. I haven't checked this, but it
                       credibly claims that 5 percent of the British
                       work force is employed in 24-hour banking/credit
                       telephone call centers -- low-paid, unorganized,
                       and working constantly on keyboards and phones,
                       with a very high level of physical and nervous
                       stress. There's a lot going on there -- the
                       possible link-up between celebrity and
                       surveillance, for example. We'll all be on the
                       telly, but most of us get our 15 minutes of fame
                       on closed-circuit television.

                       Even so, there is a sense of hope running through
                       all your novels, an essentially optimistic belief
                       that, as suggested at the end of your second
                       novel, "The Stone Canal," there are no limits. In
                       some ways, that's the most Marxist thing about
                       your writing -- this idea that progress really
                       exists.

                       A. I do think that progress exists, in fact I can
                       dig up one of my favorite quotes from a Marxist,
                       V. Gordon Childe's conclusion to "What Happened
                       In History":

                       "These hints must suffice. Progress is real if
                       discontinuous. The upward curve resolves itself
                       into a series of troughs and crests. But in these
                       domains that archaeology as well as written
                       history can survey, no trough ever declines to
                       the low level of the preceding one; each crest
                       out-tops its last precursor."
                       salon.com | July 27, 1999

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                       About the writer
                       Andrew Leonard is a senior
                       correspondent for Salon
                       Technology.

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