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I enjoyed reading The Dispossessed, though I have also been known to characterize it as, "A Sci-Fi universe where communism actually works, hence the 'Fi' part.

I enjoyed reading The Dispossessed, though I have also been known to characterize it as, "A Sci-Fi universe where communism actually works, hence the 'Fi' part." However, I've recently read Thomas Sowell's book about the original formulation of Marxian economics and philosophy, and I've come to the conclusion that the technology of the late 21st century might possibly enable a viable communal society through the replacement of the distributed optimization of the market with AI, as Ursula K. LeGuin presaged in The Dispossessed.

autarch 9y ago
But the whole point of the novel is that neither system really works very well! I think you're doing it a disservice to characterize it in that way. She did her best to imagine a communist system that was nearly ideally designed and it still fails in so many ways.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  But the whole point of the novel is that neither system really works very well! I think you're doing it a disservice to characterize it in that way. Given the tremendous increase in the standard of living of so many people, Capitalism does a pretty darn good job. I think in that by grouping it in a pair where "neither system really works very well," you and LeGuin would be "doing it a disservice to characterize it in that way." One major weakness of Capitalism, due in part to Pareto, is the perception of relative disparity. Psychological research indicates that such perception is a basic reality of the human condition. We should regard the bitterness of have-nots as real, even if the have-nots are fabulously well off in a global and historical sense. Any system which is forward thinking should take that into account, or fail to do so at its own peril. (One of Basic Income's biggest problems is that it does nothing to alleviate the problems relative disparity, so plants the seeds for its own political instability.) She did her best to imagine a communist system that was nearly ideally designed and it still fails in so many ways. Any system which isn't perfect is going to fail in innumerable ways, in that countless instances of terrible tragedy and injustice will exist within it, and no system is going to be perfect. Re: Your user name: I once came up with an acronym for a sensor-network Internet thing. BACON: Basic Autarchic Communication/Observation Network.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    > Given the tremendous increase in the standard of living of so many people, Capitalism does a pretty darn good job. I think in that by grouping it in a pair where "neither system really works very well," you and LeGuin would be "doing it a disservice to characterize it in that way." It worth noting that Marx was tremendously excited about capitalism: The first part of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto contains a lot of praise to capitalism - some barbed, some delivered straight. For example: > The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. and: > The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? Socialism was conceived in it's modern form as a direct result of optimism over the rapid growth in productivity brought about by capitalism, and Marx shared that view: He saw capitalism as both absolutely necessary to bring the material wealth that could make redistribution possible, as well as the eventual catalyst for socialist revolution (and in doing so repeatedly warned against trying to push or socialism in poor underdeveloped countries other than as part of a larger wave of revolutions). He also praised capitalism for doing away with a lot of other outmoded aspects of society: to him it was the best so far, and a tremendous step forward for humanity. The idea that wanting socialism necessarily means thinking capitalism is awful needs to die. But neither is there any reason to think that socialism in any form will be perfect either, even if you want socialism. Any given system can have flawed implementations, or outright fail. Marx himself as early as 1845 (in The German Ideology) warned, for example, that socialist revolutions somewhere underdeveloped would be doomed to failure: If you redistribute somewhere where redistribution just makes want common, he said, the old class struggles would just reassert themselves. Anyone who seriously cares about any given system needs to be open to considering how and why it might fail if they want to make it a success. As such, Le Guin stands with people like George Orwell in an important but small tradition of socialist literary writers open to showing the dangers too.
- sampo 9y ago
  > neither system People often miss it, but the planet Urras has many countries and actually two superpowers: A-Io (conservative capitalist parliamentary democracy) but also Thu (a totalitarian socialist regime). A very cold war like setting. A-Io allowed the Odonian rebels (anarchists) to exile to the moon, but their counterparts in Thu we never hear much about. Possibly their fate was more gruesome.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    There should be a sequel where there is a Project where A-Io gives rise to a successor society A-Jo, which doesn't work out, but then gives rise to another successor using the same iterative naming scheme. Then that successor should then switch to a successor naming scheme advancing only the 1st letter, and the whole story series should be directed by Katsuhiko Nishijima.
    - labster 9y ago
      For this terrible pun, I am sending Akagiyama missiles your way.
- kiliantics 9y ago
  Ursula Le Guin was a supporter of libertarian socialist ideals, which are opposed to both capitalist and centralised/authoritarian socialist ideologies. She was a big fan of Murray Bookchin, who came from an anarchist background and founded the ideas of "communalism" and libertarian municipalism.
- mmustapic 9y ago
  > She did her best to imagine a communist system that was nearly ideally designed and it still fails in so many ways. It wasn't a communist system, but an anarchist one. And it didn't fail in so many ways, it's just that life in Anarres was tough. A barren moon with few natural resources. They even had bad harvests and people starved to death.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    A communist system is an anarchist one. The main split between communists and anarchists is over the means of getting there, not over the end-goal; Bakunin and Marx split the First International over differences over how to use or destroy the state, not over the society they wanted in the end.
- jrochkind1 9y ago
  Oh, I think it's pretty obvious which system portrayed in the book anyone sane would prefer to live as part of. They aren't portrayed as equally "not working very well", no? If some people read the book preferring Urras or thinking it's a toss-up, I'd find that curious and be interested in hearing more (do you?), but still doubt that's what Le Guin intended.
sampo 9y ago
> A Sci-Fi universe where communism actually works What about Star Trek?
- stcredzero 9y ago
  In the case of Star Trek, there were many more items of Fi. Then you have Star Wars which really doesn't give a ####.
  - krapp 9y ago
    >Then you have Star Wars which really doesn't give a ####. Star Trek just pretends to, though. Most of its fictional conceits are barely thought out, including its post-scarcity communist utopia. Does the Force really make any less sense than Q? It's all space fantasy.
    - stcredzero 9y ago
      Does PsychoHistory and "The Mule" make any more sense than The Force? In the end, it is all space opry. Our far flung mind children are likely to be stranger than the mind of Homo sapiens is able to imagine.
      - KSteffensen 9y ago
        Psychohistory makes sense as a sort of statistical sociology. Probabilities of society as a whole moving in this or that general direction.
    - vidarh 9y ago
      Most of classical Star Trek (TOS, TNG, Voyager, and large parts of DS9) consists mostly of self-contained morality plays where the sci-fi just provides a setting. Some of those morality plays are related to the science part - notably a lot of the issues around the morality of treatment of Data and holograms. But most of it could be set in any time period. The Sci-Fi setting just made it easier to juxtapose things without running into "but that's not how it was then/there" objections and allowing more extreme contrasts. Enterprise, parts of DS9, Discovery and the new movies have largely done away with that format. It's a very sharp relief.
mercutio2 9y ago
We didn’t really learn much about the communists in the Dispossessed. Most of the novel is about the anarchists. Anarchists generally get along with communists even worse than capitalists do, so I don’t think this distinction is just pedantry.
- bad-joke 9y ago
  As the linked article mentions, The Dispossessed was inspired by the works of Peter Kropotkin, the prominent anarcho-communist.
  - mercutio2 9y ago
    I missed that in the article, thanks! Indeed the anarchism on display in the Dispossessed was very collectivist, I hadn’t realized how directly it was based on Kropotkin. My experience of anarchists is such that I happily group most anarchists together, and place them ideologically far, far away from Stalinists. Are you thinking Kropotkin’s ideals are close enough to communism that I shouldn’t belabor the distinction?
    - vidarh 9y ago
      Plenty of communists are far closer to anarchists than to the Stalinists, and historically plenty of people have applied both labels to themselves. E.g. the founder of (left)-libertarianism was an anarcho-communist (Joseph Déjacque) [1], and among early libertarian socialists, you for example would fine some the earliest leading figures in the Socialist League, which counted Eleanor Marx and Friedrich Engels among their members. > I missed that in the article, thanks! Indeed the anarchism on display in the Dispossessed was very collectivist, I hadn’t realized how directly it was based on Kropotkin. I find that a very curious statement. Kropotkin explicitly criticized the collectivist nature of the anarchism of Proudhon and Bakunin as simply being a different type of wage system that he believed would eventually lead to centralization again, and promoted local self-sufficiency etc. as means to explicitly counter collectivism. Here's an interesting overview of the history of anarchist communism (or communist anarchism) [2] that covers both Kroptkin and Dejacques. Anarchist-communism is specifically in opposition to collectivist tendencies in many anarchist ideologies, and explicitly rejecting anarchist systems that are based on exchange of value or other ways of letting some party assert authority over another's access to goods, just like Marx (e.g. based on Marx mentions in Critique of the Gotha Programme, for example, that set out "higher" forms of socialism as doing away with means of exchange). [1] This is the first use of the term libertarian in a political sense: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-the-human-being-male-and-female https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-t... [2] http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alain-pengam-anarchist-communism#toc2 http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alain-pengam-anarchis...
otempomores 9y ago
The rise in viability also comes through the new knowledge we now have on gamification which may prevent the citizens from gaming the system. RIP Ursula.
arethuza 9y ago
Iain M. Bank's Culture is perhaps my favourite example of a "working" communist society - but it does rely on "magic" technology, engineering of its inhabitants to be nicer and ultimately on god-like AIs to actually run things. Most humans in the stories are effectively pets of the AIs - pets who are very well looked after, and who can leave the Culture if they want (which the vast majority don't - of course) but where they don't really matter. Edit: Personally I would sign up in an instant.
- xenophonf 9y ago
  I seem to remember an interview where Banks described the Culture as "anarchism within, socialism without," but yes, it very much depends on being post-scarcity and transhumanist. I wonder what Banks would have made of "Meditations on Moloch"? I could see the Culture's progenitors using something like that as their manifesto.

autarch 9y ago

But the whole point of the novel is that neither system really works very well! I think you're doing it a disservice to characterize it in that way. She did her best to imagine a communist system that was nearly ideally designed and it still fails in so many ways.

stcredzero 9y ago
But the whole point of the novel is that neither system really works very well! I think you're doing it a disservice to characterize it in that way. Given the tremendous increase in the standard of living of so many people, Capitalism does a pretty darn good job. I think in that by grouping it in a pair where "neither system really works very well," you and LeGuin would be "doing it a disservice to characterize it in that way." One major weakness of Capitalism, due in part to Pareto, is the perception of relative disparity. Psychological research indicates that such perception is a basic reality of the human condition. We should regard the bitterness of have-nots as real, even if the have-nots are fabulously well off in a global and historical sense. Any system which is forward thinking should take that into account, or fail to do so at its own peril. (One of Basic Income's biggest problems is that it does nothing to alleviate the problems relative disparity, so plants the seeds for its own political instability.) She did her best to imagine a communist system that was nearly ideally designed and it still fails in so many ways. Any system which isn't perfect is going to fail in innumerable ways, in that countless instances of terrible tragedy and injustice will exist within it, and no system is going to be perfect. Re: Your user name: I once came up with an acronym for a sensor-network Internet thing. BACON: Basic Autarchic Communication/Observation Network.
- vidarh 9y ago
  > Given the tremendous increase in the standard of living of so many people, Capitalism does a pretty darn good job. I think in that by grouping it in a pair where "neither system really works very well," you and LeGuin would be "doing it a disservice to characterize it in that way." It worth noting that Marx was tremendously excited about capitalism: The first part of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto contains a lot of praise to capitalism - some barbed, some delivered straight. For example: > The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. and: > The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? Socialism was conceived in it's modern form as a direct result of optimism over the rapid growth in productivity brought about by capitalism, and Marx shared that view: He saw capitalism as both absolutely necessary to bring the material wealth that could make redistribution possible, as well as the eventual catalyst for socialist revolution (and in doing so repeatedly warned against trying to push or socialism in poor underdeveloped countries other than as part of a larger wave of revolutions). He also praised capitalism for doing away with a lot of other outmoded aspects of society: to him it was the best so far, and a tremendous step forward for humanity. The idea that wanting socialism necessarily means thinking capitalism is awful needs to die. But neither is there any reason to think that socialism in any form will be perfect either, even if you want socialism. Any given system can have flawed implementations, or outright fail. Marx himself as early as 1845 (in The German Ideology) warned, for example, that socialist revolutions somewhere underdeveloped would be doomed to failure: If you redistribute somewhere where redistribution just makes want common, he said, the old class struggles would just reassert themselves. Anyone who seriously cares about any given system needs to be open to considering how and why it might fail if they want to make it a success. As such, Le Guin stands with people like George Orwell in an important but small tradition of socialist literary writers open to showing the dangers too.
sampo 9y ago
> neither system People often miss it, but the planet Urras has many countries and actually two superpowers: A-Io (conservative capitalist parliamentary democracy) but also Thu (a totalitarian socialist regime). A very cold war like setting. A-Io allowed the Odonian rebels (anarchists) to exile to the moon, but their counterparts in Thu we never hear much about. Possibly their fate was more gruesome.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  There should be a sequel where there is a Project where A-Io gives rise to a successor society A-Jo, which doesn't work out, but then gives rise to another successor using the same iterative naming scheme. Then that successor should then switch to a successor naming scheme advancing only the 1st letter, and the whole story series should be directed by Katsuhiko Nishijima.
  - labster 9y ago
    For this terrible pun, I am sending Akagiyama missiles your way.
kiliantics 9y ago
Ursula Le Guin was a supporter of libertarian socialist ideals, which are opposed to both capitalist and centralised/authoritarian socialist ideologies. She was a big fan of Murray Bookchin, who came from an anarchist background and founded the ideas of "communalism" and libertarian municipalism.
mmustapic 9y ago
> She did her best to imagine a communist system that was nearly ideally designed and it still fails in so many ways. It wasn't a communist system, but an anarchist one. And it didn't fail in so many ways, it's just that life in Anarres was tough. A barren moon with few natural resources. They even had bad harvests and people starved to death.
- vidarh 9y ago
  A communist system is an anarchist one. The main split between communists and anarchists is over the means of getting there, not over the end-goal; Bakunin and Marx split the First International over differences over how to use or destroy the state, not over the society they wanted in the end.
jrochkind1 9y ago
Oh, I think it's pretty obvious which system portrayed in the book anyone sane would prefer to live as part of. They aren't portrayed as equally "not working very well", no? If some people read the book preferring Urras or thinking it's a toss-up, I'd find that curious and be interested in hearing more (do you?), but still doubt that's what Le Guin intended.

sampo 9y ago

> A Sci-Fi universe where communism actually works What about Star Trek?

stcredzero 9y ago
In the case of Star Trek, there were many more items of Fi. Then you have Star Wars which really doesn't give a ####.
- krapp 9y ago
  >Then you have Star Wars which really doesn't give a ####. Star Trek just pretends to, though. Most of its fictional conceits are barely thought out, including its post-scarcity communist utopia. Does the Force really make any less sense than Q? It's all space fantasy.
  - stcredzero 9y ago
    Does PsychoHistory and "The Mule" make any more sense than The Force? In the end, it is all space opry. Our far flung mind children are likely to be stranger than the mind of Homo sapiens is able to imagine.
    - KSteffensen 9y ago
      Psychohistory makes sense as a sort of statistical sociology. Probabilities of society as a whole moving in this or that general direction.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    Most of classical Star Trek (TOS, TNG, Voyager, and large parts of DS9) consists mostly of self-contained morality plays where the sci-fi just provides a setting. Some of those morality plays are related to the science part - notably a lot of the issues around the morality of treatment of Data and holograms. But most of it could be set in any time period. The Sci-Fi setting just made it easier to juxtapose things without running into "but that's not how it was then/there" objections and allowing more extreme contrasts. Enterprise, parts of DS9, Discovery and the new movies have largely done away with that format. It's a very sharp relief.

mercutio2 9y ago

We didn’t really learn much about the communists in the Dispossessed. Most of the novel is about the anarchists. Anarchists generally get along with communists even worse than capitalists do, so I don’t think this distinction is just pedantry.

bad-joke 9y ago
As the linked article mentions, The Dispossessed was inspired by the works of Peter Kropotkin, the prominent anarcho-communist.
- mercutio2 9y ago
  I missed that in the article, thanks! Indeed the anarchism on display in the Dispossessed was very collectivist, I hadn’t realized how directly it was based on Kropotkin. My experience of anarchists is such that I happily group most anarchists together, and place them ideologically far, far away from Stalinists. Are you thinking Kropotkin’s ideals are close enough to communism that I shouldn’t belabor the distinction?
  - vidarh 9y ago
    Plenty of communists are far closer to anarchists than to the Stalinists, and historically plenty of people have applied both labels to themselves. E.g. the founder of (left)-libertarianism was an anarcho-communist (Joseph Déjacque) [1], and among early libertarian socialists, you for example would fine some the earliest leading figures in the Socialist League, which counted Eleanor Marx and Friedrich Engels among their members. > I missed that in the article, thanks! Indeed the anarchism on display in the Dispossessed was very collectivist, I hadn’t realized how directly it was based on Kropotkin. I find that a very curious statement. Kropotkin explicitly criticized the collectivist nature of the anarchism of Proudhon and Bakunin as simply being a different type of wage system that he believed would eventually lead to centralization again, and promoted local self-sufficiency etc. as means to explicitly counter collectivism. Here's an interesting overview of the history of anarchist communism (or communist anarchism) [2] that covers both Kroptkin and Dejacques. Anarchist-communism is specifically in opposition to collectivist tendencies in many anarchist ideologies, and explicitly rejecting anarchist systems that are based on exchange of value or other ways of letting some party assert authority over another's access to goods, just like Marx (e.g. based on Marx mentions in Critique of the Gotha Programme, for example, that set out "higher" forms of socialism as doing away with means of exchange). [1] This is the first use of the term libertarian in a political sense: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-the-human-being-male-and-female https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-t... [2] http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alain-pengam-anarchist-communism#toc2 http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alain-pengam-anarchis...

otempomores 9y ago

The rise in viability also comes through the new knowledge we now have on gamification which may prevent the citizens from gaming the system. RIP Ursula.

arethuza 9y ago

Iain M. Bank's Culture is perhaps my favourite example of a "working" communist society - but it does rely on "magic" technology, engineering of its inhabitants to be nicer and ultimately on god-like AIs to actually run things. Most humans in the stories are effectively pets of the AIs - pets who are very well looked after, and who can leave the Culture if they want (which the vast majority don't - of course) but where they don't really matter. Edit: Personally I would sign up in an instant.

xenophonf 9y ago
I seem to remember an interview where Banks described the Culture as "anarchism within, socialism without," but yes, it very much depends on being post-scarcity and transhumanist. I wonder what Banks would have made of "Meditations on Moloch"? I could see the Culture's progenitors using something like that as their manifesto.