By Raven Green
I feel like I have waited all my life for a show like "The Expanse." Before proceeding, I should make the disclaimer that I haven't read the books. But the show is downright Marxist.
Earth under the 23rd century UN is a neoliberal police state, where jobs are scarce, and most of the population seems to be on "basic income" (welfare) and living in tent cities. Jobs are secured by a few through a lottery. High technology exists, alongside widespread poverty.
Mars is wealthy and technologically advanced, but is a fascist society of militaristic terraformers.
The Belt and the outer planets and moons are occupied territory with strong working-class roots. Basically, they are Ireland, and the quasi-anarchistic OPA (Outer Planets Alliance) is the IRA.
This show is not just about colonialism, it's about class conflict in space. And it is awesome. It's the most talked about show on the Late Stage Capitalism subreddit. And it is incredibly "hard" science fiction that maintains human storylines along with an ongoing plot concerning a mysterious, ancient, and disappeared extraterrestial civilization whose technology is still active and trying to colonize us.
Corporations have their own space hardware and are not above experimenting on Belter populations. The Belters themselves have health problems and difficulty tolerating high-gravity environments like Earth due to growing up in space, and these health problems mirror the effects of environment racism on 21st century Earth that I see every day as a social worker. For example, black children in my city are much more likely to be diagnosed with childhood asthma than white children, likely due to the air quality of their neighborhoods.
The Belters are a marginalized and oppressed people fighting for independence. There is a Belter cop who is looked on with suspicion by his own people. The OPA is factionalized and violent but they have a point: Mars and Earth struggle with each other for control of the Belt, without regard for the people who actually live there. They are both imperialistic and colonial powers. Earth is a tinderbox and Mars is on the rise.
This show touched on many relevant Marxist themes. And anarchism relies on the best of Marxism, while discarding the rest.