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She also warns how socialism can be easily turned into the power of the few. See The Dispossessed .
No, she warns about the creation of hierarchies even in a purely anarchist society.
I first read “The Dispossessed” in a hospital delivery room while waiting for my first child to be born. The way Le Guin paints an entire life’s dreams and hopes and their external bounds left an indelible impression. There is a birth scene in the book that I remember with as much emotion as the actual birth the same night. On a more general level, “The Dispossessed” is a good example of the paradigm shift that Le Gu…
I first read “The Dispossessed” in a hospital delivery room while waiting for my first child to be born. The way Le Guin paints an entire life’s dreams and hopes and their external bounds left an indelible impression. There is a birth scene in the book that I remember with as much emotion as the actual birth the same night. On a more general level, “The Dispossessed” is a good example of the paradigm shift that Le Gu…
> they get mistreated by the system as often as they get lifted up by it. In the end she makes the explicit point that this is just one possible way of organizing human societies among a nearly infinite set of possibilities Well, the book is subtitled "An Ambiguous Utopia"
When I read that, I thought of Amazon (book selling river) but wasn't sure if 'sold down the river' was some idiom. Searching for it brought me to:
> journalist Lee Sandlin said "the threat of being 'sold down the river' was seen as tantamount to a death sentence." [1]
What an impressive choice of words!
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/01/27/265421504...
I first read “The Dispossessed” in a hospital delivery room while waiting for my first child to be born. The way Le Guin paints an entire life’s dreams and hopes and their external bounds left an indelible impression. There is a birth scene in the book that I remember with as much emotion as the actual birth the same night. On a more general level, “The Dispossessed” is a good example of the paradigm shift that Le Gu…
> they get mistreated by the system as often as they get lifted up by it. In the end she makes the explicit point that this is just one possible way of organizing human societies among a nearly infinite set of possibilities Well, the book is subtitled "An Ambiguous Utopia"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
She also warns how socialism can be easily turned into the power of the few. See The Dispossessed .
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.
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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.
> 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.