A review by samdalefox
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

adventurous challenging informative inspiring reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

A masterpiece in every sense of the word. This is the very best of what scifi can be. Le Guin fused 'hard science' and 'soft science' elements with a healthy dose of philosophy, she gave us incising social commentary and yet the book still feels very accessible. I turned down an extraordinary amount of pages, the quotes section for this review will be long!

Of course I was always going to enjoy the anticapitalist leanings of the book, however I think the way the story is presented Le Guin's socio-political views will sucessfully reach a wider audience. The story follows Shevek, who comes from an established anarchist society an Anarres, to the capitalist society on Urras. Through following his personal journey and experiences of both economic cultures, Le Guin effectively highlights the positives and negatives of each system. Usually I dislike books that flip flop between two time periods, here every chapter alternates between the present day Shevek's story, and a chapter from his past on Anarres. I think this was a clever move from le Guin, to more roundly explore the anarchist culture and flesh out what his life there looked like. This is important because as readers we can already identify strongly with Urras, Le Guin is subtlety showing us what a viable alternative society could look like via Annares. Most people who aren't familair with the left think of democratic socialism or centralised communism as the only alternatives to capitalism, I think The Dispossessed's depiction of anarchism is incredibly important for education and imagination purposes.

Major themes are of the book are still relevant to today: profiteering vs the social organism, the possessive vs the collective, harmony and limitations of the environment, egoising vs individualism vs independent thought e.g., 'true' anarchism, gender roles, the role of language in society, the role of art, loyaly vs lonliness, concepts of time, diplomacy, prison abolition, the power of knowledge sharing, the tendancy towards power imbalance and gatekeeping (depicted as 'the wall' throughout the book). Perhaps the biggest one of all I've not seen many other reviews mention is the 'returning'. The books begins and ends with a rocket landing. Throughout the book Shevek contemplates the importance of 'the return'. I wonder through this story, what Ursula Le Guin hoped we as a species would return to?

Overall I felt seen by this book. I felt my views represented, challenged, and explored. I felt an affinity to a great many events described. It's a book I could give to my family and friends and say 'read this to better udnerstand me.' I also feel dispossessed.

Quotes

"Is there really no distinction between men's work and women's work?". "Well no, it seems a very mechanical basis for the division of labour, doesn't it? A person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength - what has the sex to do with that?"

"She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary."

"Suffering is a misunderstanding...A society can only relieve social suffering - unecessary suffering. The rest remains... all of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we'll have known pain for fifty year. And in the end we'll die. That's the condition we're born on... I wonder if it isn't all a misunderstanding - this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain... If instead of running from it one could get through it, go beyond it... It's the self that suffers, and there's a place where the self - ceases... I'm trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins in shared pain."

"It was not that Abbenay was short of power, not with her wind turbines and the earth temperature-differential generators used for heating; but the principle of organic economy was too essential to the functioning of the society for it not to affect ethics and aesthetics profoundly. "Excess is excrement," Odo wrote in the Analogy. "Excrement retained in the body is a poison"."

""Do they expect students not to be anarchists?" he said. "What else can the young be> When you are on the bottom, you must organise from the bottom up!" He had no intention of being administered out of the course - he had fought this kind of battle before - and because he communicated his firmness to the students they held firm."

"They were superbly trained, these students... Their society maintained them in complete freedom from want, distraction, and cares. What they were free to do, however, was another question. Is appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative."

"He had not been sheltered, and had no expectations of shelter, from whaterver cares and responsiblities came to him. He had not been free from anything: only free to do anything."

"He wasn't doing what he came here to do. It was not that they had cut him off, he told himself; it was that - as always - he had cut himself off from them. He was lonely, stifilingly lonely, among all the people he saw every day. The trouble was that he was not in touch - he felt that he had not touched anything, anyone, on Urras all these months."

"The Urrasti had taste, but it seemed to be in conflict with the impulse towards display - conspicuous expense. The natural, aesthetic origin of the desire to won things was concealed and perverted by economic and competitive compulsions, which in turn told on the quality of the things: all they acheived was a kind of mechanical lavishness."

"These Port managers, with their special knowledge and important position, tended to aquire a bureaucratic mentality: they said No automatically."

""What makes Sabul so strong?", "Not a power structure, a government - this isn't Urras, after all!". "No. We have no government, no laws, all right. But as far as I can see, ideas were never controlled by laws and governments, even on Urras. If they had been, how would Odo have worked on hers? How would Odoniansim have become a world movement? The archists tried to stamp it out by force, and failed. You can't crush ideas by surpressing them. You can only crush ideas by ignoring them. By refusing to think - refusing to change. And that's precisely what our society is doing! Sabul uses you where he can, and where he can't, he prevents you from publishing, from teaching, even from working. Right? In other words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn't any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That's the power structure he's part of and knows how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind."

"What drives people crazy is trying to live outside of reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain - you said that! But it's the lies, the evasion of reality, that drive you crazy. It's the lies that make you want to kill yourself."

"What's wrong with pleasure Takver? Why don't you want it?". "Nothing's wrong with it. And I do want it. Only I don't need it. And if I take what I don't need, I'll never get to what I do need." "What is it you need?"...."I need the bond," she said. "The real one. Body and mind and all the years of life. Nothing else. Nothing less."

"He assumed people would be helpful. He trusted them. But Chifolisk's warnings, which he had tried to dismiss, kept returning to him. His own perceptions and instincts reinforced them. Like it or not, he must learn distrust. He must be silent; he must keep his property to himself; he must keep his bargaining power."

"I am thinking like...a damned propertarian. As if deserving meant anything. As if one could earn beauty, or life!."

"But it's true, chronosophy does invovle ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don't see the difference between whta they do now and what will happen because of it. They can't make a pulley or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility...If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly."

"Rationing was strict; labour drafts were imperative. The struggle to grow enough food and to get the food distributed became convulsive, desperate. Yet people were not desperate at all. Odo wrote "A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight in the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and sociality as a whole." There was an undercurrent of joy, in that sense, in Abbenay that summer. There was a lightheartedness at work however hard the work, a readiness to drop all care as soon as what could be done has been done. The old tag of 'solidarity' had come alive again. There is exhiliration in finding that the bond is stronger, after all, that all that tries the bond."

"It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye."

"The dignity and beauty of the room he and Efor were in was as real as the squalor to which Efor was native. To him, a thinking man's job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and connect. It was not an easy job."

"I wonder if you fully understand why they're kept you so well hidden out there at Ieu Eun, Dr Shevek. Why you were never allowed to appear at any meeting open to the public. Why they'll be after you like dogs after a rabbit the moment they find you're gone. It's not just because they want this idea of yours. But because you are an idea. A dangerous one. The idea of anarchism, made flesh. Walking amongst us."

"Justice is not acheived by force. And power is not acheived by passivity. Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice. We cannot be divided on that on the eve of action."

"I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made over two hundred years ago in this city - the promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutal aid between individuals. We have no government but the single single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."

"I don't know if it's right to count people like you count numbers. But then, what do you do? Which ones do you kill?"."The second year I was in Elbow, I was a worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations - just barely enough for that kind of work. People of half time got three-quarter rations. If they were too sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn't get well. You couldn't get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten, hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them. I earned them by making lists of who should starve." The man's light eyes looked ahead into the dry light. "Like you said, I was to count people.". "You quit?". "Yes, I quit. Went to Grand Valley. But somebody else took over the lists at the mills in Elbow. There's always somebody willing to make lists."

""He was too frightened". "Of what? I don't understand." "Of me. Of everybody. Of the social organism, the human race, the brotherhood that rejected him. When a man feels himself alone against all the rest, he might well be frightened.""

"Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it."

""Is that clear enough for you?"."Clear, no; plain, yes. Plain as a fart," said Bedap. "Clarity is a function of thought. You should learn some Odonianism before you speak here.""

"What we're after is to remind ourselves that we didn't come to Anarres for safety, but for freedom. If we all must agree, all work together, we're no better than a machine. If an individual can't work in solidarity with his fellows, it's his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We've been saying, more and more often, you must work with others, we must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not the subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon a revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any kind of end, it will never truly begin."

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