Robert C. Newman

This paper originally began as a presentation to the section on "The Socialist Tradition in Science Fiction" at the Popular Culture Association Convention in Cincinnati, Apri1,1978. As the section title suggests, popular culture and science fiction are beginning to stake out an important area of concern to those of us who want to see basic changes in the structure of our society. (So too for this coming year the section on "Utopian and Dystopian Thought in Science Fiction.") In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that science fiction may prove to be not only a popular vehicle for transmitting socialist and/or utopian thought but also one which really encourages people to think out concretely what their ideals and aspirations involve. This was my impetus in writing the paper originally; I had read Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, taught it several times, and realized-the more I taught it-that it represented an extremely detailed and meticulous analysis of what a future anarchist world would entail, what benefits it might realistically hold, and what problems it might get into. Since then, I've been recommending the book to everyone I can think of; their response has been as enthusiastic as mine. People have been surprised and astonished at the solidity of LeGuin's vision and the complexity of her thinking.

In my original paper, I prefaced my analysis of the novel with what seemed to me scraps of news from the external world relevant to the theme of anarchism. I mentioned a review in The New York Review of Books which asked pointedly why it had happened that, among all the revolutions in recent history calling themselves "socialist," none had actually ended up accomplishing their idealistic goals. The reviewer's answer had been that in no case had the revolution carried through on its promise to turn the power they had gained back to the people in whose name the revolution had been fought. I also pointed to brief examples of what I called anarchist naivete (George Woodcock's statement, for example, about how we are going to move from one economic world to another?" The old motives of profit and self-interest will cease to dominate economic life. Instead, the incentive will be the good of the members of society, without distinction." (Patterns of Anarchy [NY, 1966), p. 41]) and anarchist intransigence (e.g., Raymond Carr's criticism of the Spanish Anarchists on the grounds of their myopia about the actual economic success of the collectives and their intransigence in rejecting mechanisms of elected representation in anti-vote campaigns). (New York Review of Books, October 13, 1977, pp. 22-23) To me all this seemed immediately relevant to the twin themes of LeGuin's novel-the first, that a decentralized, anarchistically oriented society would be superior to a centralized, hierarchically oriented society-the kind we have now, and second, that nevertheless, anarchism itself cannot afford to ignore the critique from within that even an anarchist polity might succumb to the temptations of coerciveness and power-mongering, the urge toward "domination" as LeGuin labels it.

Just as I write, however, a fresh instance of this sort of thing has burst in horrible detail before us-the murders of Congressman Ryan and several newspaper correspondents, the murders and commanded suicides of over 900 members of the Jonestown commune. It is with some diffidence that I bring this up; perhaps it is such an extraordinary event that it has no relevance to anything other than to the particular psychology of Jim Jones himself and of his followers. But deep in my bones I do feel the connection nevertheless. One woman, a survivor, spoke of Jones's combination of "idealism and repression." Jones's commune was apparently described as "socialist" in some respects, yet Jones's 19-year old son characterized his father as "authoritarian." Film clips of an interview with Jones in Redwood City, California several years ago show what seems to be a sensible and genuine man saying that in his colony, racism and sexism no longer existed, class divisions had been banished-as if such traits, socialized into us over years and indeed centuries, could be wiped out at the drop of a work-chart. Another survivor spoke of the suicide rehearsals as long as a year ago, and spoke also of how Jones had at first "ruled" with "love," then later "with fear."

The media so far have categorized The People's Temple as a "religious cult" rather than a utopian commune, a distinction which can best be appreciated in the light of Laurence Veysey's contrasts between two types of communal experiments, the "mystic" and the "anarchist." On the basis of historical research and his own experiences, Veysey says that the mystic commune tends to last a lot longer than the anarchist one but only at the price of authoritarian, charismatic leadership- i.e., exactly that urge toward "domination" which is central to LeGuin's own political analysis:

one of the most omnipresent and disturbing ingredients in radical movements [is] personal magnetism Hero worship, not passion itself, or the impulse towards passionate fellow feeling, is the truly unfortunate element in the legacy of romanticism. Repeatedly in communal settings old and new, it rears its head. The historical record shows that charisma is the persistent enemy of human freedom. The propensity among recent radicals to continue running after 'inspired' leaders in the time-honored way is profoundly discouraging. ...The examples of an authoritarian tendency within the mystical tradition, both past and present...would seem to furnish compelling testimony of their own. One ends up being exceedingly grateful to the anarchistic tradition for having so long provided a partial corrective. [Laurence Veysey, The Communal Experience (NY, 1974), pp. 478479]

Yet even the anarchist commune is not completely free of danger. As Veysey points out, even anarchists are reluctant to look closely at the nature of power and domination within their own groups and often deceive themselves as to the actual leadership going on in the midst of ostensibly leaderless groups. [Veysey, 460-461] For another thing, says Veysey, it is extremely difficult for human beings to maintain an attitude of skepticism toward both the mainstream and radical alternative:

It is truly taxing to maintain an attitude of skepticism towards would-be prophets as well as toward the leadership of the mainstream. However, this skepticism must be combined with the idealistic faith which will permit dropping one's guard toward ordinary fellow men on occasions when the genuine promise of communitas is in the air. This situation, rather than the detached mechanis of alternative economic or political systems, is the most urgent problem which radicals should confront. [Veysey, 179]

For obvious reasons, I find Veysey's comments extremely suggestive in connection with LeGuin's novel. Her scientist hero Shevek in fact eventually does manage to exhibit both that skepticism toward the mainstream and toward the radical alternative, and the novel as a whole bears out Veysey's belief that while anarchism offers a superior political consciousness compared to other communal traditions, it too must deal with the way people seek to dominate others and be dominated by them. LeGuin makes this point herself when she insists that "the revolution" is in the "individual" and exists forward through the individual, not the other way around. LeGuin has clearly chosen her side in the continual conflict between individualist and communitarian tendencies within anarchism, and for my part, I agree with her choice.

Let me address myself now to the novel itself. [All quotations are from The Dispossessed (NY, Avon Books, 1974)] The Dispossessed develops ingeniously by two parallel stories alternating with one another, one on the anarchist world of Anarres, the other on the capitalist world of Urras. (For good measure, LeGuin also depicts the Soviet authoritarianism of Thu and the burned-out world of Terra.) The Anarres story works by flashbacks in the life of the physicist Shevek. We discover that his manner of response to the present events of the story is a function of his past development. In particular, his past reveals him to be someone who asserted his own freedom against even the seemingly necessary coercions of an anarchist utopia: denied the publication of his time theories, Shevek finally decided to take direct action on his own by founding a publishing collective. We see also, in the earlier moments of his development, that the roots of domination are deep in human nature: Shevek got a kick out of putting a friend "in prison."

In the immediate present of the story, Shevek also resists anarchist coercion to carry out a visit to the planet Urras, from which Anarres rebelled some two centuries earlier in the "Odonian" revolution (a feminine charismatic and libertarian leader, Odo). This rebellion is the source of the novel's "dispossessed" title. Shevek insists on making this trip for two reason: he hopes to find a now intellectual atmosphere, perhaps freer and more congenial to his time-physics, and he hopes to lay the groundwork for reconciling the mother planet to its rebellious offspring. Both of these projects go against the general will of the Anarres population; LeGuin ingenious depicts an anarchist mob at the space port, protesting Shevek's departure. Though it is a mob, it is a dis-organized one, with individuals milling about not quite sure how to fit themselves together in any mass protest!

In the future of the story, Shevek ultimately recognizes the futility of his attempt to reconcile Urras and Anarres. In fact, he again finds it necessary to act on his own and take direct action by joining the Urrastian underground, thus betraying his Urrastian hosts and their hospitality. Though he has found both physical opulence and intellectual freedom on Urras, he recognizes that his newly burgeoning ideas about time would become nothing more than a product in the economy of Urras-one more means to exploit people or dominate them. Significantly though, in the process of doing all this, Shevek does make the key discovery about his "time-telephone"-the intellectual atmosphere is freer on Urras; nevertheless, Shevek opts to return to Anarres (through the offices of earth's ambassador) and thence to bestow his idea on all mankind freely, through publication.

Though I've summarized this badly, I'd like to note that LeGuin does a fine job of exhibiting the qualities of life on the two dissimilar worlds, chiefly through Shevek's consciousness. The novel gives us a real sense of what it would be like to live in the world of Anarres, with its limited opportunities but genuine decency, and contrariwise the opulence but heartlessness of life on Urras.

I said I was interested in LeGuin's novel for two reasons. The first is simply that LeGuin suggests the superiority of anarchist theorizing as a guide to reorganizing society because it involves notions of reversing the direction of power in society: instead of organizing hierarchically and competetively, from the "top down," we could have a freer and more egalitarian life if we organized from the "bottom up."

Though LeGuin's hero says this kind of organization was ideally designed to fit in a society of high technological development and stability, thus allowing for easy decentralization, it hasn't actually worked out that way. (The ideal, I think, is Murray Bookchin's notion of Post-Scarcity Anarchism.) In fact, Anarres is a poor planet where goods and raw materials are in very short supply, where life has to be eked out almost desperately. So in a way we have to credit LeGuin for taking the hard road to anarchism: if everyone can have enough through the wonders of easy energy and technological miracles, there really isn't any problem in letting everyone go off on their own. But what LeGuin does take up is the efficacy of anarchism in a scarcity economy. Here she argues that anarchism is superior to any other organizing form because it provides a more decent way to share the limited goods available. The key issue she focuses on is the conflict between (capitalist) efficiency and (anarchist) freedom. As Shevek explains to his Urrastian host's servant, the necessary work on Anarres is shared equally by everyone, which is admittedly not very efficient: everyone has to be trained and then retrained in order to be able to share. But the key value question is this: "You can't tell a man to work on a job that will cripple him or kill him in a few years. Why should he do that?" [p.120]

So in LeGuin's scheme everyone has opted for individual freedom above social efficiency, and is free to do what they want to do, free (hopefully!) also to join with others in voluntary groups to get the work of society done. Here is where LeGuin splits from the mainline socialist tradition to follow the anarcho-communist theories of K ropotkin and Proudhon; i.e., in the world of Anarres, all the means of production and consumption are held in common, there is no property of any sort (hence "order" but not crime), but-unlike the socialist version of things-there is no state either, it too has been abolished. In its place is a syndicalist organization of the economy in which voluntary groups-collectives, labor unions, affinity groups, etc.-own the material wealth of society and administer it through a "Production and Distribution Committee" (the PDC). Here then is "worker control," though as I shall suggest, LeGuin's view of it isn't simple or naive. The PDC is designed only as an administering unit: it isn't supposed to "govern" or possess the authority to order people to do things. It serves as a monitoring and feedback mechanism, surveying "public opinion" and conveying the "social conscience" back to the populace. On the basis of its surveys, it "advises" people on what work needs to be done and how the work is to be shared equally.

Here LeGuin approaches another key problem of the anarchist and socialist traditions, namely how to harmonize individual and social imperatives. For although LeGuin emphasizes individual freedom a great deal, she also sees that humanity must survive as a "social species" (something the Earth Ambassadress tells us Earth failed to do!). Hence individuals will have to "sacrifice" some of their freedom in the name of social survival, though LeGuin also says "sacrifice is not compromise." This becomes the rationale by which the PDC assigns people to various hard tasks and equally the rationale by which almost everyone accepts those tasks.

LeGuin of course touches on some basic questions of motivation here. How will you get people to actually work if no one compels them, and especially, how will you get them to do the shitwork? Here LeGuin's idea of human nature as a partially malleable concept, functioning always in relation to a particular society, comes into play; as Shevek says, when you remove the money-incentive, and when you recognize that paradoxically "coercion" is the least efficient means of obtaining order, you become aware of all sorts of other motivations in human beings:

People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous jobs because they can take pride in doing them, they can -egoize, we call it-show off?-to the weaker ones.... A person likes to do what he is good at doing.... But really, it is the question of means and ends. After all, work is done for the work's sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows this. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one's neighbors. One's own pleasure and the respect of one's fellows. That is all. When that is so, then you see the opinions of the neighbors become a very mighty force. (p. 121)

In terms of British traditions of moral thinking, LeGuin seems to speak for both the Hobbes-Mandeville line of thought (pride and shame as motivations) and Shaftsbury; and I would also see traces of Paul Goodman here-"People like to do things." In any case, this is considerably more complex than the George Woodcock quote I mentioned earlier, where the rational notion of the general good motivates people to give up private interests in the name of public.

But what if someone refuses to cooperate? That happens rarely, Shevek insists. And when it does

Well, he moves on. The others get tired of him, you know. They make fun of him or they get rough with him, beat him up; in a small community they might agree to take his name off the meals listing, so he has to cook and eat all by himself; that is humiliating. So he moves on ....[p. 121]

Here is where LeGuin marks her own sense of anarchism and the nature of her own critique of it. What she's talking about here is power and coercion, and it seems that LeGuin would accept a certain amount of the latter as necessary even in a voluntaristic society. But it is also true that she wants to reduce such coerciveness to the absolute minimum, and to make everyone in such a society vigilant in detecting unnecessary coercion. And this is the second main point I'd like to make: I think one of the really distinctive things LeGuin does is to provide a critique of anarchism, both as to the power-domination urges in people (including "public opinion" and "social conscience") and the corollary, masochism-submission by which many people will accept other people's assertions of power.

The key to her analysis of human nature comes midway in the novel, where Shevek suggests that human beings are driven by the urge to dominate as well as to cooperate:

People discriminated very carefully then between administering things and governing people. They did it so well that we forget that the will to dominance is as central in human beings as the impulse to mutual aid is, and has to be trained in each individual, in each new generation. Nobody's born an Odonian any more than he's born civilized! But we've forgotten that. We don't educate for freedom. Education, the most important activity of social organism, has become rigid, moralistic, authoritarian. Kids learn to parrot Odo's words as if they were laws-the ultimate blasphemy! [p. 135]

In the public area, this urge to dominate translates into the ostensible "administering" committee which is in actuality has come to order people around-administering becomes governing, and the PDC becomes "authoritarian." In the private area, even intellectuals and scientists dominate, "egoize," "propertize," over others, through their use of ideas. This latter is the key, as Shevek eventually realizes when it comes to getting his ideas published through the "administering" of his fellow physicists Sabul: unless Shevek will put Sabul's name on the title page as co-author, Sabul won't allow the printing syndicate to publish Shevek's theories. But it's not even Sabul's external control that is crucial-quite the contrary, it is Shevek's own internalized acceptance of such control, i.e., that Sabul's very permission is neccessary:

The fact is [Shevek says to his wife finally], neither of us made up our mind. Neither of us chose. We let Sabul choose for us. Our own, internalized Sabul-convention, moralism, fear of social ostracism, fear of being different, fear of being free! [p. 266)

The upshot of this recognition is Shevek's decision to set up a printing syndicate of his own, to publish his and other dissident writings suppressed by the PDC.

Shevek's trip to Urras it a similar piece of individual action and rebellion. It also bears out another aspect of LeGuin's analysis, for Urras-even if hierarchical and property-minded-is a place where ideas are exchanged freely [p. 88], and Shevek needs that environment in which to bring his own ideas to fulfillment. Ideas, LeGuin implies, aren't as some Marxists would have it, totally connected to the economic structures of their surrounding society: Anarres has become hidebound in its revolutionary ideas, while Urras preserves at least one aspect of freedom.

Eventually Shevek enunciates a better vision of the individual-social conflict than the de facto situation on Anarres. Partly this involves a reaffirmation of the notion of harmonizing or balancing individual and social claims, instead of allowing the social to dominate completely:

We don't cooperate-we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor's opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. You don't believe me, Tak, but try, just try stepping over the line. just in imagination, and see how you feel. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemns him it. [p. 265]

It is also, more explicitly, a matter of rejecting coercion itself: ...what we're after is to remind ourselves that we didn't come to Anarres for safety; but for freedom. If we must all agree, all work together, we're no better than a machine. If an individual can't work in solidarity with his fellows, it's his duty to work alone. His duty and his right.... We've been saying you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. 'The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere.... If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.' We can't stop here. We must go on. We must take risks. [p. 288-289)

Shevek's notion of the "responsible" individual actually introduces the other significant qualification of the anarchist idea, for ultimately LeGuin says, you are responsible only when you put your individual actions within the context of the past (psychological, social, historical) and the future, and only if, in so doing, you surrender notions of temporal stability or perfection. Explaining why the PDC has become authoritarian, Shevek says that it's not just that the PDC has become so but rather any institution where "expertise" and stability are desired: "stability in fact gives scope to the authoritarian impulse." [p. 136] Despite structures to prevent experts from hanging on and thus dominating other people, it is the case that experts do hang on, do dominate; the non-experts internalize the notion that they aren't capable of running the show or running their own show and so submit to the experts' orders. The counterfoil to such institutional authoritarianism is to recognize how much our desire for stability and efficiency contributes to the spirit of domination. In particular, LeGuin argues for uncertainty as the operating assumption in life-at the least a counterfoil coming out of the legendary "Ainsetain" to Marxist notions that history is a closed book and that any means can be adopted to secure its known, millenial, ending. Ingeniously and appropriately, Shevek makes his own scientific discovery about instantaneous communication (a time telephone) while on the planet Urras and after he drops his own wish for theoretical certainty. [p. 225] The future is not quite known, not quite unknown, though it may be in the way of a self-fulfilling prophecy, for as we wish and desire, so we will actually be.

So LeGuin pays a lot of attention to time, both as an "arrow" emphasizing succession and progress, and as a "circle" emphasizing unity. (Thus Shevek's own life and the novel's own structure, progressive in many dimensions yet also circular in its moral unity.) ...neither pure sequency nor pure unity will explain it. We don't want purity, but complexity, the relationship of cause and effect, means and end... A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics: [p. 182]

Toward the end of the novel, LeGuin summarizes Shevek's thoughts in this way:

It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it. [p. 268)

In this respect, circular time means simply what Johnson meant by situating human acts midway between "memory" and "foresight"-between past actions joined to future hopes and future hopes conditioned by past awareness. In the novel's action, it is also mirrored by the personal story of Shevek and his wife's enduring commitment to each other.

There is a touch of determinism in all this, as Shevek admits; but by opting for "uncertainty" it is possible to see that you can never be deterministically sure about what is going to happen in the future or what happened in the past.

I find it very significant that LeGuin brings this body of ideas about relativity to bear on anarchist-socialist ideas because it makes much richer the anarchist notions of individualism (how can you be literally individual when you have been formed by your past, yout family, your society) and of society (it is not just a given but has roots, is tied to hope, prophecies, and intents). In a crucial way too, the role of time has something circular and simultaneous (an "eternal present") may lead people away from egoizing and domination and towards cooperation: i.e., if what you do now is the way you want the future to be, then you have some opportunity to actually see just what sort of future is involved. LeGuin herself makes these connections by way of the concept of responsibility.

..chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby... the animal, they don't see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can't make a pulley or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility .. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hopes of a real future. [p. 181)

It is this sense of time in all its richness that accounts for LeGuin's use of science-fiction as a form: time in science fiction is an antidote to pessimism and cynicism: by its fictions, even catastrophic ones, it can suggest to us that the future is in our hands, that things are indeterminate, evolving, yet also graspable and wishable:

You don't understand what time is, he said. You say the past is gone, the future is not real, there is no change, no hope. You think Anarres is a future that cannot be reached, as your past cannot be changed. So there is nothing but the present, this Urras, the rich, real, stable, present, the moment now. And you think that is something which can be possessed! You envy it a little. You think it's something you would like to have. But it is not real, you know. It is not stable, not solid-nothing is. Things change, change. You cannot have anything. And least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future. Not only the past but also the future, not only the future but also the past! [p. 280-281]

So there of course is another meaning to the title!

In general, then, LeGuin has taken the basic doctrines of anarchism ? individual freedom, voluntary cooperation, syndicalism-and joined them to an intelligent theory of human nature's urge to dominate as well as to cooperate; she has also coupled both the praise and critique of anarchism to a suggestive interpretation of time and relativity theory. What I think is especially important is the emphasis she places on the potential naivete of anarchist hopefulness: the urge to dominate is intrinsic and must be dealt with in each new generation; it comes in a variety of forms and will not pass merely with the passing of the State. It can be resisted only by becoming aware of how much we desire stability, how easily we internalize the domination of others, and how much we believe that we lack the power to act on our own.

Robert Newman teaches at SUNY/Buffalo.