Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards

That's surprising because in every one of her stories I've read, there is a stark awareness of racial, social and class differences. She is one of the most aware authors I can think of. She writes about differences between men and women, the rich and the poor, capitalists and socialists, leaders and servants, personal family events and large-scale world events.

I am not American and your comment comes across as very pigeonholing. What other part of the human audience do you wish she'd speak to?

But I think that's my point, although I didn't express it very well. I happen to be reading Ulysses right now - amazing book. But what about Danielle Steel's books? They're also books, right? There's a tremendous range, so I don't think we can have these blanket statements that books are special and that we need protection against companies like Amazon.

Thanks for a great post! I'm a big fan of Le Guins fiction, as well as her commentary and critique of literature as commodity.

Another great (anti-capitalist) novelist who I admire, China Mieville, touched on some similar topics in his keynote speech at the Edimnburgh International Book Festival a few years ago: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/21/china-mieville-...

"But who decides who qualifies as a writer? Does it take one sonnet? Of what quality? Ten novels? 50,000 readers? Ten, but the right readers? God knows we shouldn't trust the state to make that kind of decision. So we should democratise that boisterous debate, as widely and vigorously as possible. It needn't be the mere caprice of taste. Which changes. And people are perfectly capable of judging as relevant and important literature for which they don't personally care. Mistakes will be made, sure, but will they really be worse than the philistine thuggery of the market?

"We couldn't bypass the state with this plan, though. So for the sake of literature, apart from any- and everything else, we'll have to take control of it, invert its priorities, democratise its structures, replace it with a system worth having.

"So an unresentful sense of writers as people among people, and a fidelity to literature, require political and economic transformation. For futures for novels – and everything else. In the context of which futures, who knows what politics, what styles and which contents, what relationships to what reconceived communities, which struggles to express what inexpressibles, what stories and anti-stories we will all strive and honourably fail to write, and maybe even one day succeed? "

> "Capitalism" is a system in which people are allowed to exchange and accumulate goods freely.

That is neither what the term was coined to describe nor what actual historical systems described with the term have been. If you look at both the specific systems the term was coined to refer to and the historical systems it has referred to (and the specific policies, even that haven't been actually implemented, advanced under the banner), I think there are a couple of defensible short rough definitions that apply well in general (though neither matches perfectly with any popular articulation of capitalism, including that by the socialist critics who coined the term -- the first, based on means, is closest to that typically espoused by proponents [though it strips away the fuzzy term "freedom" for the more concrete description underlying the capitalist understanding of freedom] and the latter, based on cui bono intentionality, is more like that typically espoused by critics:

1. "Capitalism" is a feature of a politico-economic system which is exists in a system to the degree to which that system favors fee simple property rights as the basis for allocating power.

2. "Capitalism" is a feature of a politico-economic system which is exists in a system to the degree to which that system seeks measures and maximizes social benefit weighted by the magnitude of the fee simple property holdings of those participating in the system.

> For most of history, "infinitely expanding people wants" was not a thing, at least in terms of material wants.

Economics addresses material wants exclusively, but with a broader view than many people take when informally using the term "material wants". The only situation in which economic scarcity would not exist in the general sense would be if there was no good, service, or change in condition which would improve experienced utility for any person.

Further, with real people rather than the basically omniscient beings modeled by rational choice theory, to have a non-scarcity society in any meaningful sense, you'd need instead for their to be no good, service, etc., which any person would expect, even irrationally to increase their experienced utility.

To be a non-scarcity society with regard to a particular good, service, etc. (or any class of such good, service, etc.), requires the same thing (for either the theoretical and practical interpretations as above), but only within the class of goods, services, etc. of interest.

While there's certainly evidence that there may be a certain level of wealth -- which a number of people in the modern developed world reach or far exceed -- beyond which increasing wealth has no net positive impact on experience utility on average, I don't think there's any evidence that at any point in history there has been an society that is non-scarcity either in the actual sense of no actual capacity for improved utility from increased supply of goods, services, etc., or the practical sense of no expectation of improved utility from such things. There's certainly times where economic growth was not the norm and so expectations didn't expand as rapidly, but infinite wants doesn't mean that expectations are infinite, its that more goods (even in excess of expectations) won't satiate the desire for even more goods on top of that.

> people are more motivated by status and recognition than material wants...

Status and recognition are basically services provided by other people in exchange for something done for those other people -- they are economic goods, even though they may generally be the subject of fairly informal exchanges that are harder to attribute monetary value than more formal (even barter) exchanges.