Writing SF with Amazon Workers: Introducing the Worker as Futurist Project (Max Haiven)

Amazon, a corporation that is by some estimates the world's largest private employer, has succeeded in part because of a kind of sci-fi storytelling that places the firm at the forefront of capitalism, technology and human achievement. But if it presents a utopian narrative of itself, its workers pay the price, many of them toiling in dystopian conditions to create a profit-driven future that will exclude or exploit them. The Worker as Futurist Project supports rank-and-file Amazon workers to write and publish short, speculative fiction about "the world after Amazon." It is undertaken in solidarity with workers' and communities' struggles around the world against a corporation whose wealth and power, today, rivals or exceeds that of many states. But beyond just fighting back, the Worker as Futurist project aims to reclaim the imagination of what the world might yet be if workers, rather than bosses, got to decide. In this presentation, the project's initiator, Dr. Max Haiven (Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination at Lakehead University) speaks at the 2023 Historical Materialism Conference (London) about the origins, inspirations, goals and progress of the project. In particular, Haiven focuses on the project in the context of methodologies of "workers' inquiry" and militant inquiry more broadly, in which researchers play the role of facilitators creating space and time for an analysis of the changing nature of capitalism to emerge from those who experience its cutting edge directly: workers at firms like Amazon. For more information about the project, visit: https://reimaginingvalue.ca/waf/