"I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks." - Eugene Debs, Labor Organizer and Prisoner
"The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles." - Karl Marx, inventor of sociology
"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things in life." - Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World, a labor union
"From each according to their ability to punch you in the face, to you according to your need to be punched in the face." - Raven Green, author of this blog
I would say that most of the stories I write these days could be called "LaborPunk."
DISCLAIMER: Before you get on my case about branding yet another xPunk subgenre, I am actually using the term correctly to describe an intentionally subversive subgenre with ties to youth culture. LaborPunk is to class struggle what cyberpunk is to technology. I hesitate to apply the "dystopian" or "utopian" labels because I rarely write straight utopians, I don't find them interesting, and I think to shoehorn everything into "dystopia" based on setting obfuscates certain key thematic and story-relevant differences. For example, in "1984," Orwell writes that "If there was hope, it must lie in the proles" (proletariat). This could be considered an early example of a LaborPunk theme. I also don't want to reinforce Horseshoe Theory based purely on setting aesthetics, which are really more superficial in the analysis than the thematic underpinnings of a genre.
I have settled on "LaborPunk" to describe most of my stories because while the settings tend to be gritty and non-utopian, I wouldn't call the stories anti-utopian, and the "dystopian" elements people seem to see in them are actually just elements of our own society, like the way that far-right authoritarianism maps so easily onto the neoliberal hegemony. There are certain things, story-wise, that I don't do, and certain tropes I don't like to use, and the use of these things in a story would disqualify it from being LaborPunk.
So I am going to write a list of rules. If the rules are followed, it is LaborPunk. And if the rules are broken, it is not LaborPunk.
A LaborPunk story must do the following things:
1. LaborPunk must establish that class struggle is inevitable and desirable. The classes must struggle; there can be no peace until social stratification, the wage system, structural poverty and the state's militarized defense of these things is abolished. The story does not have to depict the final abolition. It can merely show that such a way forward is possible, and more desirable than any compromise with the ruling class.
2. LaborPunk must avoid reinforcing Horseshoe Theory . A story that endorses Horseshoe Theory is by definition not LaborPunk, because LaborPunk is far-left, anti-capitalist and anti-fascist. LaborPunk writers must recognize and articulate the difference in value systems between the far-right and the radical left and why the latter is more desirable and sustainable than the former, and also, more desirable and sustainable than the neoliberal hegemony. LaborPunk is not about how an oppressed group becomes just as bad or worse than its oppressor. That is reactionary horseshit and a rejection of calls for social justice. LaborPunk is about building anti-oppressive resistance, not revenge fantasies or role reversals. It is about building a better world, not justifying the one we have.
3. LaborPunk shouldn't go the easy route of writing soul-crushing endings or using Deus Ex Machina. LaborPunk stories cannot rely on Deus Ex Machina because LaborPunk is not bourgeoise "technology will solve all social problems" utopianism. And while it's fine to have characters meet tragic fates because of hubris of selfishness or some other anti-social or predatorial tendency, and of course not every decent character needs to survive, there should be some indication of hope for radical change in the theme of the story. If the story lacks this and concludes with a hands-thrown-in-the-air "humanity is horrible, human nature is unchangeable, what we've got is better than nothing" message, it is definitely not LaborPunk. For all the despair that dark, gritty settings can entail, there needs to be hope. In reality, unlike the land of fiction, totalitarian fascist empires don't last very long. So while a setting can by dystopian, there should be an underlying theme or message in LaborPunk that dystopia cannot last and the human yearning for freedom cannot simply be stamped out so easily from so many by the State.
4. LaborPunk must be both anti-capitalist and anti-fascist. LaborPunk acknowledges and articulates the historical and practical relationship between capitalism and fascism. Anarchist LaborPunk is generally more anti-authoritarian than purely socialist LaborPunk, but because the stories are about class struggle, any story advocating Anarcho-Capitalism is definitely not LaborPunk. Where fascism is addressed, its relationship the neoliberal hegemony should be at the forefront of its depiction. Fascism does not happen in a vacuum. LaborPunk, like the rest of the Left, appreciates context.
5. LaborPunk is not "liberal." It is not about elections of well-meaning, do-good members of the political class who manage to build a government by the people, for the people using good-old-fashioned representative democracy and politicking. It is not about elites. It is not about knights, lords, dukes, kings, queens, space marines, intrepid merchants, executives, generals, presidents, chancellors, the Bourgeois, the aristocracy, religious leadership, the political class, or the "struggling" middle class. These may be peripheral characters or factions and their behavior and legacies maybe important to the backstories of settings and main characters, but at its core, LaborPunk is about working-class people's agency. It should not make use of tropes that reinforce bourgeois society's values or narratives that strip working-class people of our dignity and agency..
6. LaborPunk is primarily anti-elitist and only as dystopian as reality under industrial capitalism already is. Face it, you live in an elitist, neoliberal dystopia. You just don't think it's dystopia because the ruling class has hoodwinked you into voting it repeatedly into power with symbolism and theatre to distract you from the real horror of what industrial capitalism does every day in the name of profit and power. So, while maybe your neighborhood isn't a dystopia, if you live in any big city, you can find one that is. The notion of dystopias as fantastic or gimmicky or ultra-efficiently totalitarian is antithetical to this underlying assumption of LaborPunk. Dystopia need not be fantastic, unrealistically efficient or gimmicky. Dystopia can look like someone else's neighborhood. It's better that it does, because that actually reinforces LaborPunk themes, such as that one person's happy medium between "extreme" policies is what other people call structural poverty. LaborPunk must not send the message that dystopia doesn't already exist somewhere in our own atomized and hierarchical, alienated communities. LaborPunk settings don't need to look like Oceania in "1984" or like Syria today to get the point across. They can look like the nearest ghetto to your own neighborhood, and make that point better. If your dystopia relies not merely on bad social and economic policies and structural poverty, but instead on an ultra-efficient, soul-crushing fascist government, or magic, or mind control technology that oppresses everyone equally without a hierarchy of formal and informal privileges, or any of these other fantastic plot devices that take away the agency of working class people or otherwise obscure class differences, you probably shouldn't call it LaborPunk. If your hero is an exceptional elite who doesn't uplift other people from their class to a similar heroic status, but solves all the problems using their innate superiority or collaborating only in secret with other elite individuals, it is definitely not LaborPunk.
7. The heroes of LaborPunk stories can have flaws, they can do questionable things, they can and should be either human or closely human A.I., but they should not be navel-gazing slackers, erudite bohemian hipsters, "bourgeois bohemians," or "manic pixie dream people." If a character begins a story as one of these archetypes and is important enough to make it to the end, by the end, they should either be an obstructer, an antagonist, or moved closer to a revolutionary, militant ideal based on collaborative planning and action rather than existential angst or aesthetic rebellion. Existential angst can feature in a character's arc, but it needs to be resolved by something like dialectical materialism and personal and political growth for the story to be LaborPunk.
8. LaborPunk is populist literature. It is not about the triumph of high culture or the intellectual elite over the ignorant masses. This is elitism and will not be tolerated in the Proletarian Insurrection that is LaborPunk. That does mean LaborPunk endorses anti-intellectualism of any kind. But intellect must serve the class struggle. Intellect alone is not any kind of determinant of the moral or ethical behavior of an individual or society. LaborPunk is not about elites of any kind. It is about compassion and depth of understanding, nuance, context, all these things, but it must not promote any kind of elitist message or theme. LaborPunk is populist, but a LaborPunk writers needs to distinguish populism, which is desirable, pluralistic, and anti-authoritarian, from vulgar majoritarianism, the authoritarian, anti-pluralist, undesirable thing which most liberals and the bourgeois conflate with populism.
9. LaborPunk does not endorse class reductionism. Sexual orientation, gender, race, and other systems of hierarchical division are part of how capitalism maintains itself, but these struggles must be part of class struggle, not seen as separate from it. Classism exists within marginalized groups as well as between them, and this is exploited by the ruling class to keep groups competing with each other and convinced that their interests conflict with each other's identities and freedoms. LaborPunk must acknowledge and articulate the intersectionality of class struggle with anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-patriarchal struggles.
10. LaborPunk writers should make an effort to pass the Bechdel Test.