Help from SD anarchists, Wobblies, and the like

If you’re willing to take a book that’s not textbook, and is read for pleasure, then (I’ve mentioned this before :slight_smile: ), The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens.

The bits where he talks about the Wobblies and the like aren’t very long (probably only a couple of pages?), but he’s a good writer, and presents the individuals and their motivations in a positive way. He also talks about the problems of American politics and public administration, again not in a text book manner, which gives a context for the claims of the Wobblies and others.

The book was a bestseller. I think the bit about the Wobblies would be in volume two, which is the less interesting (less autobiographical) part of the book.

This looks promising! Thanks!

Not remotely anarchist - the Federation is pretty all-encompassing as governments go - but from an economic standpoint it sort of applies, to the extent that they’ve pretty much abandoned money and there is no poverty or deprivation on economic grounds.

The Orville follows the same model; it was referred to in a recent episode (the terrible one about the astrology planet).

I reread “Ararat,” the first of Zinna Henderson’s “People” stories last night, and I think the series would interest you and your students. The People have a society that is not anarchy per se, but it seems to have few rules. It deals with the feeling of being others. Although written in the '50’s, it has women as prominent characters, and the stories are upbeat.

“The Ungoverned” by Vernor Vinge: - Chapter 4

I recently re-watched The Omega Glory from TOS, which is the one in which the pseudo-Asian Kohms (Communists) are facing off against the pseudo-Aryan Yangs (Yanks). (This is one of those absurd parallel development plots.) The Kohms initially appear to be the good guys, but it soon becomes apparent that the noble-savage Yangs are the real ones. Of course there is no evidence that the Kohms actually have a communist form of government.

The main political ideal that TOS promoted was democracy. Whenever they encountered an apparently utopian society, it turned out to be due to evil mind control of some kind or else stagnant so it hadn’t evolved for millennia. In either case Kirk and company did their best to disrupt things and return conflict to the society.

I can think of a variety of science fiction that’s either utopian or at least hopeful about the future. Problem is, it’s all novel-length.

If you’re willing to do a chapter or two, consider Becky Chamber’s books. The third book in her series is stand-alone, Record of a Spaceborn Few. It’s not perfectly utopian, but it’s at least as utopian as The Dispossessed. And it’s fairly episodic, so you could pull a chapter from it without too much trouble–perhaps one of the chapters in which the archivist and the alien chat about humanity.

Plus it’s really damn good.

I wouldn’t call Animal Farm “about anarchism” anyway. Orwell was a Socialist for most of his life, and was a revolutionary anarchist for part of it (notably he fell in love with it during his time serving in the Spanish Civil War on the Communist side as a volunteer). By the time he wrote Animal Farm he had cooled on anarchism, but he still expressed at least a few beliefs even as late as the appendices to 1984 that were very similar to the viewpoints of the anarcho-syndicalists he fought with in Spain. And while the book may contain some critique, that wasn’t the primary thread. The common high school reading that it’s somehow a defense of capitalism is… I don’t want to say it’s not a valid reading, but from the lens of authorial intent isn’t strictly correct.

Animal Farm is actually much more of a critique of revolutionary centrally-planned communism, and in specific Bolshevism/the Russian Revolution model (actual Bolshevism, not the Nazi dogwhistle for “the Jews”).

The part people often interpret as “pro-capitalism”, where some animals leave the farm to go to the capitalist farm for better treatment is actually what Orwell considered a pretty sick burn. Namely that the USSR’s approach to Communism was so bad that even Capitalism was more humane. Orwell didn’t really intend for it to be “capitalism is good” so much as “no, really, we know how bad Capitalism is, the USSR is somehow even worse.”

Here’s an Anarchist perspective/mini-biography on Orwell. I think it’s perhaps a bit too eager to interpret Orwell as an anarchist later in his life, but it gives a pretty good overview of some facts about him that I think are often overlooked, especially by entry-level high school/college analysis of his works in the context of his life and the political climate at the time he wrote it.

Anyway, on the topic of recommendations, there’s something a little different. Being largely anti-hierarchy and anti-capitalist (esp. social capitalist). There’s The Rise of Meritocracy which is the book that coined the word “Meritocracy”, and then everyone promptly forgot it was a scathing critique of the concept and began using it in earnest.

More good stuff here. Thanks, Dopers!

I would be careful doing this - I’ve read a lot of stuff that’s supposed to advocate for anarchism, and it all either comes off as ‘hopelessly naive’ or 'that company (or other group) is doing governmental functions just like a government, it just doesn’t call itself one. Vernor Vinge, for example, has what’s supposed to be an anarcho-capitalist enclave in A Fire Upon the Deep, but to me it just looks like a company town. The Ungoverned meanwhile has a collection of independent people who talk proudly about how they’re not a state, and defeat a conquering army by firing cruise missiles at the president of the invading country’s house, which causes the state to give up conquest on the spot, which is silly enough that I’d think was parody except I’m pretty sure it was meant seriously.

I don’t think that Ian M Bank’s culture is actually anarchic though - the humans sort of are, but humans are basically being held in a nature preserve because the minds like having them around and believe in preserving lesser species. And even they’re not anarchic because the minds provide police services. The Minds are post-human intelligences and largely incomprehensible to the reader, but seem to be very definitely in charge of everything people do, and the humans sometimes vote on actions but those just seem to be for show. It’s like ‘If magical beings provided everything you want and prevented other people from hurting you, wouldn’t that anarchic life be great?’ to which the response is ‘yeah, but we don’t have magical beings providing everything we want and protecting us’.

Anarchism doesn’t mean “no government”, it means “without rulers”. So you can still have, say, a council but everybody rotates serving on it, or things are voted on by consensus or many other things.
(Also I’d argue anarcho-capitalism is inherently not anarchist because the presence of money and wealth, and thus wealth disparity necessarily creates a hierarchy with is antithetical to the definition and spirit of anarchism.)

The definition changes depending on who says it, and in some cases (like this) the person immediately contradicts themselves. If there’s a council ruling thing, then the people serving on it are rulers. If there’s a ‘consensus’, then whoever consensuses against you is ruling over you.

It sounds like you’re saying anarchism can’t exist in the real world, as wealth is a function of the existence of valuable things. That’s not really a good basis for opening people’s minds to considering anarchism in the real world. Certainly this means that the culture novels don’t count as portraying an anarchistic society, as there is a definite hierarchy (the minds do not answer to mere humans) and extreme wealth, both in the classic sense of valuable objects (I can’t simply do what I want with an entire oribital) and in the narrower sense that the humans living in the culture end up inventing scarce resources, like invites to parties and performance art.

I’m not really interested in debating anarchism here (or for that matter on GD, as I know how the arguments always go with shifting, contradictory definitions), I’m just pointing out to the OP that I have never seen a novel that is supposed to be a favorable take on anarchism that was seen as actually favorable by people who aren’t already anarchists, and why.