Thanks for a great post! I'm a big fan of Le Guins fiction, as well as her commentary and critique of literature as commodity. Another great (anti-capitalist)

Thanks for a great post! I'm a big fan of Le Guins fiction, as well as her commentary and critique of literature as commodity. Another great (anti-capitalist) novelist who I admire, China Mieville, touched on some similar topics in his keynote speech at the Edimnburgh International Book Festival a few years ago: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/21/china-mieville-the-future-of-the-novel http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/21/china-mieville-... "But who decides who qualifies as a writer? Does it take one sonnet? Of what quality? Ten novels? 50,000 readers? Ten, but the right readers? God knows we shouldn't trust the state to make that kind of decision. So we should democratise that boisterous debate, as widely and vigorously as possible. It needn't be the mere caprice of taste. Which changes. And people are perfectly capable of judging as relevant and important literature for which they don't personally care. Mistakes will be made, sure, but will they really be worse than the philistine thuggery of the market? "We couldn't bypass the state with this plan, though. So for the sake of literature, apart from any- and everything else, we'll have to take control of it, invert its priorities, democratise its structures, replace it with a system worth having. "So an unresentful sense of writers as people among people, and a fidelity to literature, require political and economic transformation. For futures for novels – and everything else. In the context of which futures, who knows what politics, what styles and which contents, what relationships to what reconceived communities, which struggles to express what inexpressibles, what stories and anti-stories we will all strive and honourably fail to write, and maybe even one day succeed? "