Much of the 20th century was taken up by the debate over the proper answer to a single, momentous question. For a free society, what is the ideal government? Is it the government which governs least as favored by avid free-marketeers? Is it the government which governs most as favored by socialists and communists? Or is it perhaps a government that occupies a middle road, adopting elements of each extreme to forge some sort of working, if messy, amalgam? To answer this question, The Dispossessed wraps itself in science fiction, imagining a future world in which these thought experiments can be safely run and conclusions drawn. And though the novel indulges in some of the genre's less pleasant tropes, it is otherwise, justifiably, a classic of utopian fiction.
In a star system not far from the burned-out Earth of the future, a planet and its moon persist in close proximity to one another, each supporting very different societies. On Urras, the planet, abundant natural resources and an endurable climate have catalyzed both industrialization and the rise of nation states. Though capitalism has been the traditional model, recent challenges to its dominance have come from two very different groups. The most dangerous of these is Thu, one of Urras' more powerful nation states, which practices an authoritarian collectivism similar to the Soviet Union of the early 20th century. Its ruling class, claiming the imprimatur of its proletariat, agitates against Io, the capitalist state which claims to be a profiteer's paradise (read the United States).
. The second threat comes from Urras' moon, anarres, a dry and desolate place which, for two centuries, has been devotedly cultivated by anarcho-collectivists fled urras centuries earlier to found a free paradise.
This delicate balance of rival states and opposing ideologies is tipped into chaos when Shevek, a brilliant physicist, from anarres, travels to Urras, claiming to have insights into a grand unified theory that would revolutionize physics and open the door to new and powerful technologies. He is received by Io and put up in prime housing, given servants, a teaching position and access to Io's highly educated intelligentsia. But instead of impressing him, the luxuries of Io's society discomfort Shevek who has only ever known the radical utilitarianism practiced on Anarres. What the people of Io see as the fruits of profit he sees as the sins of exploitation. If he gives his discovery to Io, will they commodify it? Will they turn it into another of their brilliant baubles? And would that not be a betrayal of everything he was raised to believe in, that people are free only when they are able to make their own choices, uncoerced by any ruling class? Shevek must rely on his own wits and wisdom to help him navigate a foreign world and its foreign customs in hopes of arriving at a solution that satisfies his morality and his ethics. For given into the wrong hands, his knowledge could mean the end of everything he knows.
Though The Dispossessed is something of a difficult slog, the extent to which Ms. Le Guin has created an innovative and believable alternative to the polarization of American capitalism and Soviet collectivism marks this work out as something special. Anarres is easily the novel's greatest virtue. For here Ms. Le Guin has dreamed up a kind of non-authoritarian communism, a political system founded on an anarchism quite similar to that imagined by Emma Goldman. While everyone lives free, completely unfettered by rules or obstructions, each member of Anarres' society is taught that their survival hinges upon collective effort. There is no private property; there is only that which belongs to the whole and can be used by everyone. The whole is grown by the collective efforts of all with hording kept in check by the threat of public ridicule.
At first glance, it seems like this might actually be a viable alternative to authoritarian systems, but this strain of anarcho-collectivism has two problems, the first of which Ms. Le Guin has already anticipated. Firstly, humans are, by nature, hierarchical animals and, consequently, they naturally gravitate towards powerful personalities. Not everyone has an equivalent desire to be an individual. Some people want to conform. And where there is conformity there will be someone willing to capitalize on that conformity. This is a problem that plagues anarres. For as much as its society was founded on non-authoritarian freedom, the passage of 200 years has begun to calcify the permanent revolution, allowing authority figures to loom larger and larger, accreting power from the individuals they purport to serve. Secondly, Ms. Le Guin does not convince me that the Anarres model would work anywhere else. In order for her experiment to function, the author had to run it on a desert moon whose proper cultivation required the collective efforts of all its entrapped inhabitants. The people of anarres cannot leave for other opportunities, other lives. The absence of a space program obligates them to work together. This creates a bond among the people of Anarres, a bond with their comrades and the land they work, which helps to re-enforce their ideology. But what if such an experiment was run on Earth, a place where the experiment's participants were constantly being bombarded with capitalistic temptations, where they could leave for capitalism at whim? It seems to me that though ideal in theory, Ms. Le Guin's radical collectivism suffers in practice the same flaw of all anarchist societies, that it is inherently asocietal, that its rabid individualism tears at the communal bonds that create societies, preventing a coherent culture from coalescing.
The Dispossessed is, in many respects, a failure as a piece of entertainment. Stuffiness, long-windedness and a total absence of action plague long stretches of the work. However, as a thought experiment? As an effort to imagine and then actualize an idea of how we might ideally live? It is brilliantly conceived and artfully laid out. This is thoughtful, intellectual fiction. For those seeking entertainment, best look elsewhere. (3/5 Stars)
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