Marxism

This chapter surveys the relationship between marxist criticism and cyberpunk, presenting a new critical perspective for understanding the post-2008 crash period of economic financialization. It first examines how marxist critics appraised traditional cyberpunk’s complicity with late capitalism, globalization, and neoliberalism. Following Fredric Jameson’s provocation that cyberpunk represents the “supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself,” many critics argued that although canonical cyberpunk provided “a potent metaphor for the global circulation of capital,” its own status as an artform lacked critical agency. Cyberpunk was either unable to critique postmodern late capitalism by offering an alternative politics, or its focus on digital transcendence rendered it fully complicit with and affirmative of neoliberal values. After clearing the ground of cyberpunk’s modernist opposition to late capitalism, the chapter argues that instead of negation, cyberpunk offers a valuable mediation of global capitalism by focusing on digitalization’s and virtualization’s relation to finance and real subsumption. As such, it interrogates cyberpunk’s totalizing novums as the technological innovations that provide new spatial fixes for capitalism’s contradictions. It concludes by considering how postcolonial cyberpunk takes up traditional cyberpunk tropes and novums in order to map and critique their complicity with global capitalism.