<What I was actually wondering about is whether there's a a work of fiction or an author which/who embodies Leftist philosophy and aspirations the way Tom Clancy does for the Right, and Ayn Rand does for the Libertarians. I'm drawing a blank. Oh, weak examples of utopian fiction, such as "Ecotopia", come to mind. But nothing that's grabbed people the way Clancy and Rand have. One way to rephrase the question: Any piece of Leftist fiction you particularly despise?

A very interesting question. I can't really think of a work of realistic "Leftist" Utopian fiction at all, much less one I despise.* I hope other posters weigh in on this, but as for me, I don't think it can be easily done. While you can easily come up with hundreds of examples of Leftist or progressive fiction that shows how awful things are under capitalism ("Grapes of Wrath," etc.), I'm not sure you can really make a work of Utopian Leftist fiction.

A little background (sorry):

The foundation of the Leftist philosophy is collectivism, which has largely manifested itself in socialism and communism. And I'm sorry, but that includes National Socialism, which despite desperate attempts to dump it on the right end of the political spectrum, is solid collectivism, with the State as absolute ruler and the elimination of the rights of the individual.

It is a fact that the more a nation orients itself toward the collectivist, (socialism, etc.), the worse off the people in that nation are. The more a nation orients itself toward a system that places individual rights above the collective (capitalism, democracy), the more successful that nation is, and the better off its people are.

This is not philosophy. This is sheer observation of dozens of experiments in government in the past century. Every nation, without a single exception, that has adopted the pure collectivism of the Left has turned into a poverty-stricken totalitarian hellhole. Some nations have managed to avoid this by at least leavening the Marxism with capitalism, and creating a mixed system that is neither fish nor fowl, but at least maintains itself after a fashion. But the nations that are the places where people want to live are the ones where they are free, both politically and economically.

Now, given that, can you imagine a work of fiction that would make this palatable? A work of fiction where people are happy as slaves of the state? Where no one can achieve anything that does not immediately become the property of his neighbors? Sure, you could write something like this, just like an apologist for the old South could write a book where the slaves are happy on the plantation and the Confederate States become a productive, workable society. After all, if you're the author, you can write anything you want and make people react in whatever fantastic way you can imagine. But it wouldn't ring true, and everyone knows it. The characters who would happily dwell under such conditions would not be human.

Ayn Rand wrote stories that confirmed the fact that exceptional people exist, and that they are the ones who drive civilization forward. What happens to an exceptional person in a collectivist novel? A person who stands above the crowd? What happens to such people in real collectivist societies?

*Okay, so Thomas More's "Utopia" describes a classless society, but you don't have to get too far into it to see how it wouldn't work in the real world.