Amazon and the Alien: Corporate Storytelling and Workers’ Science Fiction

In 2023, Max Haiven and his team at the Worker as Futurist project held a series of online workshops to support rank-and-file Amazon workers to write short speculative fiction about The World After Amazon. The resulting stories will be published in September 2024. In this presentation, Haiven reflects on what literary activism might mean in the age of “Amazon capitalism.” Taking inspiration from Marc McGurl’s observation that Amazon has radically transformed the way the world reads and the fate of the novel, this presentation explores the “corporate storytelling” that mobilizes the conventions of science fiction to reconcile key structural contradictions, including those that spark between tech and finance capital. It argues that narrative, genre, and the literary imagination have become increasingly consequential to firms like Amazon and the broader form of capitalism of which it is at the vanguard. What does this mean for workers who, in spite of the techno-utopian rhetoric of such corporations, toil in increasingly dystopian conditions? While we are currently observing a global high tide of trade union and community-led activism against Amazon capitalism, these struggles can benefit from creating spaces and times for the (counter-)speculative imagination. Such approaches can supplement and expand practices of workers’ inquiry that support the theorization of alienation, capitalist change and class composition from the proverbial “shop floor.”

Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and serves as the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination for the Government of Canada. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020), and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization(2018). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL), a workshop for the radical imagination, social justice, and decolonization.