In Ursula Le Guin’s novel, The Dispossessed, the planet Anarres is presented as an anarchist society where all property is communal.
I’m confused by this, as my understanding of anarchy is that it is defined as a society devoid of authority by force. Without force, how can there be communal property, particularly for property produced by those who wish to keep it?
I’m only about 15% through the book, so perhaps this will be answered later on (no spoilers, please), but this seeming contradiction is hampering my enjoyment of the novel. Is there an alternate definition of anarchy that is being employed by the author? Something I’m missing?
Anarres is Communist anarchy, not Mad Max anarchy. They’re followers of an economist/philosopher named Odo, who’s that world’s Marx, and after Odo’s death, her followers went to Anarres so that they could practice their society freely (others stayed on Urras and set up the state of Thu, which you’ll run into later in the book if you hadn’t.) But Anarres works because everyone is taught from childhood that private property is wrong and communal property is right, so everyone is inclined to share that belief, and if they don’t really believe that, there’s enough social pressure put on them to make them go along without the actual use of force.
Anyway, this all should become clearer later on in the book. And remember, the subtitle of the novel is “An Ambiguous Utopia”. Anarres isn’t as perfect as it first seems.
The idea behind anarchy was sort of a full participatory democracy where decisions are made by the group and there is no central power. Dennis in Monty Python and the Holy Grail is actually describing a form of it. It sounds silly when you go into the details, but so does the US government.
Unfortunately, there were some anarchist around 1890-1914 who thought the way to bring this into being would be to assassinate government leaders. There was a wave of them (most famous were the assassinations of William McKinley and Franz Ferdinand, but there were quite a few others, not always successful). This discredited the movement entirely and tied the word in with chaos.
To add to Captain Amazing’s explanation, there is nothing stopping Shevek from helping himself to any property he finds. One of his friends, later in the novel, is described as having all sorts of stuff in his room.
I consider The Dispossessed to be one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, so I would beg you not to let yourself be distracted.
But they use force, although not in any organized way. There is a scene where Shevek gets beaten up by another guy, and nobody comes to help him. And there is another scene where there is a famine, and Shevek doesn’t have to do anything, even work. He could just hang around and eat and do nothing, if he wanted. But social pressure and conditioning make him work, even though it separates him from his partner and child for four years.
I envy you the experience of reading this for the first time.
Social engineering. Generations of it. Combine that with a sub-optimal planetary environment and the “group vs individual” equation swings the other way fairly easily.
Le Guin makes a point of showing how eventhe language of the Odonians is structured to reinforce collectivism.
But note that even in this novel, the anarchist system is starting to break down.