Ursula le Guin's The Dispossessed

An odd book. I ran across this in passing on another libertarian/market anarchist blog (can't remember it's name or the author) and the premise sounded good: an anarchist, fed up with his society, decides to grab a ride to the society's homeworld and check out the statists over there. I asked for it as a Christmas gift and recieved it.

It was a quick read and interesting enough that I stuck with it over the literary objections of my other projects at the moment. Someday, I'll fucking finish Democracy in America, Capitalism, and all the others. *sigh*

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

Anyway, the primary thing that struck me about the novel was the way anarchism was portrayed on Anarres. Dial the clock back five or more years and if you had asked what I thought an anarchistic society would ideally look like, I might have answered with some description of the society Dr. Shevek comes from. It's a communistic mutual society where private property is essentially abolished and the biggest insults one can lay at another are exclaimations of "egoist!" and "propertarian!" In a very real sense, it's the endpoint of standard Marxist theory. I wouldn't have been surprised at either the way Odonian society was described or how the peoples on Urras were described. I was a different person philosophically back then.

Today, I read this and I immediately look to see when it was published: 1974. And I think, man how times have changed. I read this now, and I reel at how unjust the system is on Anarres.

But this is a very subtle criticism. The Anarres' Odonian philosophy (we never really get a decent look at source documents or extended teachings) preaches absolute freedom and absolutely no government or law. I can be persuaded to agree with those things. But, it is extremely hostile to money, profit, property, and (as the book reveals later on) individual initiative and private relationships.

Once on Urras, Dr. Shevek becomes more and more disillusioned with the society he experiences. Even though he came there knowing that things would be dramatically different from his home, he didn't expect things to be as abhorrent as they felt. Near the end of his visit, he gives a speech to a large demonstration of striking workers:

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise we made two hundred years ago in this city - the promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give yuo but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not been given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

Immediately after this speech, his points are seemingly vindicated by the arrival of military/police attack helicopters and they proceed to slaughter the striking protestors.

As someone who almost bores himself with his appreciation for individual rights, I deeply sympathized with Shevek as he traversed the Urras world and saw the injust use of force in the societies he encountered. He and I both recoiled at the chains placed on people by government fiat. But my disagreement with him and his ideological heir, Odo, is thus:

Anarres is based on total individual freedom. If you don't want to participate in the way mainstream society works, you can leave and go off to do your own thing. But attempt to "own" anything and they go nuts. Everything is community-based and community-shared. It's superficially close to mutualism, but diverges from it with it's fundamental adherence and admiration for collectivization and the much ballyhooed "common good."

As such, it clashes with my own preferences for private property and the extensive control over that property that ownership entails. In the book, when Shevek and his supporters announce they may send someone off the planet to explore and interact with the peoples on Urras, direct physical threats of violence are levied against them. And in fact, at the very beginning of the book, a person is killed by a thrown stone as Shevek leaves. The stone was thrown from a crowd of people who considered him a traitor to their people and their beliefs.

I doubt I could live in such a society, and that is one of the reasons why Shevek leaves. He becomes aware how rigid his peoples' customs and traditions are. Their social habits become their law and their morality and superceed the principles of freedom.

In that sense, the book was a great read. The Dispossessed stands as a warning to all manner of ideologies...conservative, statist, liberal. It says your society is only as healthy and just as the active axioms of it's existence.

Posted by Drizzten at February 11, 2004 11:28 PM