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Ursula Le Guin was an ardent socialist and it comes through in all her writing. I don't understand why the only comments and quotes about her politics are all d

Ursula Le Guin was an ardent socialist and it comes through in all her writing. I don't understand why the only comments and quotes about her politics are all downvoted in this thread. But I guess that's the average Hackernews reader for you... EDIT: the quote is from a speech, which you can hear/see in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9Nf-rsALk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et9Nf-rsALk

dmitriid 9y ago
She also warns how socialism can be easily turned into the power of the few. See The Dispossessed.
- vidarh 9y ago
  Any system can be easily turned into the power of the few. Socialists have warned about that pretty much from the start. Marx warned against reactionary and outright feudal forms of socialism in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, and the argument over the dangers of authority split the First International as early as 1872 when the anarchists around Bakunin thought Marx too was too authoritarian for their liking. Later you had people like Rosa Luxembourg sharply criticizing the Bolsheviks, and the many thousands of Russian socialists and communists that laid down their lives to fight the Bolsheviks even before it became clear just how authoritarian they were to become. The authority vs. anarchy axis is largely separate from the economic system - a number of socialist ideologies have as their explicit goal the destruction of hierarchy and government, and a further number of left libertarian ideologies share right libertarian goals in terms of minimizing the power of government, and others want to use state power to bring about redistribution or fail by bringing in systems that makes abuse too easy (e.g. Leninist party theory is pretty much begging for power hungry people to abuse it), just as you have anything from absolutist monarchists and fascists to right libertarians on the right wing.
- mmustapic 9y ago
  No, she warns about the creation of hierarchies even in a purely anarchist society.
  - ghostcluster 9y ago
    Hierarchies are necessary for complex systems to function. The way that it is used as a boogeyword by ideologues is exhausting.
    - ixtli 9y ago
      I'm not sure why this comment was downvoted. I read it as a valid criticism of anti-state discourse. While I'm amenable to quite a bit of left-libertarian philosophy/ideology, I agree from lived experience that hard problems require complex systems to solve them EVEN IF the solutions themselves are simple!
    - MaysonL 9y ago
      True, but not hierarchies of control over people's lives.
      - ghostcluster 9y ago
        So you don't believe in the legal system?
    - kiliantics 9y ago
      What anarchists are really worried about is "nonconsensual hierarchies". They are definitely necessary sometimes and people will often choose to participate in a hierarchy when they see its usefulness. Anarchists have done this a lot historically, like in the Spanish civil war, there were military hierarchies among the anarchists. The problem in most societies is that a lot of the hierarchies, particularly the very important ones for survival and day to day life, are completely forced upon us.
- auxbuss 9y ago
  No idea why you are being down-voted. Le Guin absolutely spoke of authoritarian socialism. These things are obviously not mutually exclusive.
ixtli 9y ago
I have also found that socialist positions get downvoted here. I'd recommend that people read the works of socialists (Marx, Rosa, etc.) because most of my negative associates came from liberal insinuation I received growing up in the US :) The very word has had a campaign against it for a long time because of the 20th century relations between America and Russia (which, btw, hasn't been anything remotely socialist in a very very long time.)
- MaysonL 9y ago
  And yet there seems to be a fair amount of support here for guaranteed basic income / guaranteed employment.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Basic income is a capitalist solution - a patch to keep the whole thing going. It has long been supported by people on the economic right (e.g. Milton Friedman's negative income tax).
  - ixtli 9y ago
    As the other commenter said: it's a capitalist solution. But as well I find that the concerted effort to paint the word 'socialism' as a bad thing implicitly in america is exactly why the effect you observe happens. I think, from talking at length with lots of people from various places, background, and of various identities that americans are pretty amenable to socialist policy we just have some cultural peculiarities that make it hard to talk about. This is why bernie's platform vs trump's platform get more and more interesting to me as the majority continues to rebel against _how_ trump governs. It shows me that people really do want a progressive populist but there are a lot of bizarre little artifacts in our culture that keeps them from accepting certain concepts at face value. I guess what I'm saying is that socialism needs rebrand AND people need to be encouraged to discover the rich American history of socialism from the union workers in Appalachia that were attacked by our government for striking, to harriet tubman, mlk, and eugene debs.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  > The very word has had a campaign against it for a long time because of the 20th century relations between America and Russia It might also have something to do with the roughly 85-100 million people whose deaths can be directly attributed to policies enacted in support of socialist utopia during the 20th century. Advocates of socialism like to say that they're anarchist, or that they're anti-authoritarian; but enacting socialism inherently requires authoritarian measures, because it is so rarely the will of competent people to receive as little as incompetents. In cases such as the red terror, competence and success are explicitly terrorized and destroyed in service of the goal. Socialism is authoritarian because at least one person, myself, is unwilling to have his tools and life work taken from him, and given to a fool who will squander them just as that fool squandered the opportunity to attain them.
auxbuss 9y ago
Ursula K. Le Guin was an anarchist and Taoist not a socialist[0]; she translated the Tao Te Ching, after all[1]. She was anti-authoritarian, whether libertarian (remembering this term was hijacked), socialist or otherwise. She was pro collaboration. The Dispossessed is an anarchist utopian novel. "I'd put it this way: Dispossessed is an Anarchist utopian novel. Its ideas come from the Pacifist Anarchist tradition: Kropotkin, etc. So did some of the ideas of the so-called counterculture of the sixties and seventies."[2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin#Anarchism_and_Taoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin#Anarchism_an... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin_bibliography#Translations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin_bibliography... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/09/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.ursulakleguin https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/09/sciencefiction...
- jrochkind1 9y ago
  Margaret: You’ve perhaps coined one of my favorite one-line descriptions of what an anarchist is: “One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.” Would you describe yourself as an anarchist? Ursula: I don’t, because I entirely lack the activist element, and so it seems phony or too easy. Like white people who say they are “part Cherokee.” Margaret: I hope you don’t mind that a lot of us claim you, in approximately the same way that we claim Tolstoy. (Who I believe can be quoted as saying “The anarchists are right … in everything except their belief that anarchism can be reached through revolution” although I’ve only read this quote, and not his original essay.) Ursula: Of course I don’t mind! I am touched and feel unworthy. Margaret: What were your first interactions with anarchism? Ursula: When I got the idea for The Dispossessed, the story I sketched out was all wrong, and I had to figure out what it really was about and what it needed. What it needed was first about a year of reading all the Utopias, and then another year or two of reading all the Anarchist writers. That was my main interaction with anarchism. I was lucky: that stuff was hard to come by in the Seventies — shadows of Sacco and Vanzetti! — but there was a very-far-left bookstore here in Portland, and if you got to know him he let you see his fine collection of all the old Anarchist writings, and some of the newer people like Bookchin too. So I got a good education. I felt totally at home with (pacifist, not violent) anarchism, just as I always had with Taoism (they are related, at least by affinity.) It is the only mode of political thinking that I do feel at home with. It also links up more and more interestingly, these days, with behavioral biology and animal psychology (as Kropotkin knew it would.) http://www.anarchogeekreview.com/interview/mythmakers-and-lawbreakers-an-interview-with-ursula-le-guin http://www.anarchogeekreview.com/interview/mythmakers-and-la...

dmitriid 9y ago

She also warns how socialism can be easily turned into the power of the few. See The Dispossessed.

vidarh 9y ago
Any system can be easily turned into the power of the few. Socialists have warned about that pretty much from the start. Marx warned against reactionary and outright feudal forms of socialism in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, and the argument over the dangers of authority split the First International as early as 1872 when the anarchists around Bakunin thought Marx too was too authoritarian for their liking. Later you had people like Rosa Luxembourg sharply criticizing the Bolsheviks, and the many thousands of Russian socialists and communists that laid down their lives to fight the Bolsheviks even before it became clear just how authoritarian they were to become. The authority vs. anarchy axis is largely separate from the economic system - a number of socialist ideologies have as their explicit goal the destruction of hierarchy and government, and a further number of left libertarian ideologies share right libertarian goals in terms of minimizing the power of government, and others want to use state power to bring about redistribution or fail by bringing in systems that makes abuse too easy (e.g. Leninist party theory is pretty much begging for power hungry people to abuse it), just as you have anything from absolutist monarchists and fascists to right libertarians on the right wing.
mmustapic 9y ago
No, she warns about the creation of hierarchies even in a purely anarchist society.
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  Hierarchies are necessary for complex systems to function. The way that it is used as a boogeyword by ideologues is exhausting.
  - ixtli 9y ago
    I'm not sure why this comment was downvoted. I read it as a valid criticism of anti-state discourse. While I'm amenable to quite a bit of left-libertarian philosophy/ideology, I agree from lived experience that hard problems require complex systems to solve them EVEN IF the solutions themselves are simple!
  - MaysonL 9y ago
    True, but not hierarchies of control over people's lives.
    - ghostcluster 9y ago
      So you don't believe in the legal system?
  - kiliantics 9y ago
    What anarchists are really worried about is "nonconsensual hierarchies". They are definitely necessary sometimes and people will often choose to participate in a hierarchy when they see its usefulness. Anarchists have done this a lot historically, like in the Spanish civil war, there were military hierarchies among the anarchists. The problem in most societies is that a lot of the hierarchies, particularly the very important ones for survival and day to day life, are completely forced upon us.
auxbuss 9y ago
No idea why you are being down-voted. Le Guin absolutely spoke of authoritarian socialism. These things are obviously not mutually exclusive.

ixtli 9y ago

I have also found that socialist positions get downvoted here. I'd recommend that people read the works of socialists (Marx, Rosa, etc.) because most of my negative associates came from liberal insinuation I received growing up in the US :) The very word has had a campaign against it for a long time because of the 20th century relations between America and Russia (which, btw, hasn't been anything remotely socialist in a very very long time.)

MaysonL 9y ago
And yet there seems to be a fair amount of support here for guaranteed basic income / guaranteed employment.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Basic income is a capitalist solution - a patch to keep the whole thing going. It has long been supported by people on the economic right (e.g. Milton Friedman's negative income tax).
- ixtli 9y ago
  As the other commenter said: it's a capitalist solution. But as well I find that the concerted effort to paint the word 'socialism' as a bad thing implicitly in america is exactly why the effect you observe happens. I think, from talking at length with lots of people from various places, background, and of various identities that americans are pretty amenable to socialist policy we just have some cultural peculiarities that make it hard to talk about. This is why bernie's platform vs trump's platform get more and more interesting to me as the majority continues to rebel against _how_ trump governs. It shows me that people really do want a progressive populist but there are a lot of bizarre little artifacts in our culture that keeps them from accepting certain concepts at face value. I guess what I'm saying is that socialism needs rebrand AND people need to be encouraged to discover the rich American history of socialism from the union workers in Appalachia that were attacked by our government for striking, to harriet tubman, mlk, and eugene debs.
microcolonel 9y ago
> The very word has had a campaign against it for a long time because of the 20th century relations between America and Russia It might also have something to do with the roughly 85-100 million people whose deaths can be directly attributed to policies enacted in support of socialist utopia during the 20th century. Advocates of socialism like to say that they're anarchist, or that they're anti-authoritarian; but enacting socialism inherently requires authoritarian measures, because it is so rarely the will of competent people to receive as little as incompetents. In cases such as the red terror, competence and success are explicitly terrorized and destroyed in service of the goal. Socialism is authoritarian because at least one person, myself, is unwilling to have his tools and life work taken from him, and given to a fool who will squander them just as that fool squandered the opportunity to attain them.

auxbuss 9y ago

Ursula K. Le Guin was an anarchist and Taoist not a socialist[0]; she translated the Tao Te Ching, after all[1]. She was anti-authoritarian, whether libertarian (remembering this term was hijacked), socialist or otherwise. She was pro collaboration. The Dispossessed is an anarchist utopian novel. "I'd put it this way: Dispossessed is an Anarchist utopian novel. Its ideas come from the Pacifist Anarchist tradition: Kropotkin, etc. So did some of the ideas of the so-called counterculture of the sixties and seventies."[2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin#Anarchism_and_Taoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin#Anarchism_an... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin_bibliography#Translations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin_bibliography... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/09/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.ursulakleguin https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/09/sciencefiction...

jrochkind1 9y ago
Margaret: You’ve perhaps coined one of my favorite one-line descriptions of what an anarchist is: “One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.” Would you describe yourself as an anarchist? Ursula: I don’t, because I entirely lack the activist element, and so it seems phony or too easy. Like white people who say they are “part Cherokee.” Margaret: I hope you don’t mind that a lot of us claim you, in approximately the same way that we claim Tolstoy. (Who I believe can be quoted as saying “The anarchists are right … in everything except their belief that anarchism can be reached through revolution” although I’ve only read this quote, and not his original essay.) Ursula: Of course I don’t mind! I am touched and feel unworthy. Margaret: What were your first interactions with anarchism? Ursula: When I got the idea for The Dispossessed, the story I sketched out was all wrong, and I had to figure out what it really was about and what it needed. What it needed was first about a year of reading all the Utopias, and then another year or two of reading all the Anarchist writers. That was my main interaction with anarchism. I was lucky: that stuff was hard to come by in the Seventies — shadows of Sacco and Vanzetti! — but there was a very-far-left bookstore here in Portland, and if you got to know him he let you see his fine collection of all the old Anarchist writings, and some of the newer people like Bookchin too. So I got a good education. I felt totally at home with (pacifist, not violent) anarchism, just as I always had with Taoism (they are related, at least by affinity.) It is the only mode of political thinking that I do feel at home with. It also links up more and more interestingly, these days, with behavioral biology and animal psychology (as Kropotkin knew it would.) http://www.anarchogeekreview.com/interview/mythmakers-and-lawbreakers-an-interview-with-ursula-le-guin http://www.anarchogeekreview.com/interview/mythmakers-and-la...