This chapter examines how aspects of post-capitalism have been imagined by speculative fiction, with some emphasis on utopian and dystopian fiction. There are some methodological issues around the best way to read speculative fiction in relation to post-capitalism. One influential distinction is between “blueprint” utopias and “critical” utopias. Blueprint utopias, such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), are held to offer rigidly instrumental plans for reorganizing society. Critical utopias, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), supposedly destabilize deeply-rooted assumptions, freeing readers to explore possible economic forms that appear neither in reality nor fiction. However, this chapter emphasises that the distinction between blueprint and critical utopias is a blurred one. It further suggests that instrumentalizing interpretations of speculative fiction are part of its status as culture, rather than a mere misuse of speculative fiction. Reading speculative fiction critically and creatively, including attention to its instrumentalities, may help to transform what constitutes the field of “the economic” in the first place, and enrich our understanding both of capitalism and its alternatives. However, already existing practices of the more-than-capitalist world often far exceed what speculative fiction has been capable of imagining.

The concept of a post-capitalist world implies a world after capitalism, but does not suggest a structure for economic negotiations. Rather than waiting for the fall of capitalism, community economies, as theorized by J.K. Gibson-Graham, suggests that economic exchange encompasses a wide array of activities, places, and engagements, and identifies capitalism as only one of many forms of economy. Following that logic, this chapter is based on a particular understanding of post-capitalism as a series of strategies for socio-economic-ecological negotiations. These strategies engage a politics of language, the subject, and collective action. I consider the question: what does sustainability look like in a post-capitalist world? In answer, I consider how these post-capitalist strategies can enhance the concept of emplaced sustainability. The emplacement framework fosters the concept of emplaced sustainability by relating existing case studies to each other in novel ways. This seemingly simple act furthers a politics of language, which supports the remaking of subjects through interdisciplinary scholarship and can also be extended to collective actions and transdiciplinary engagement.