I have recently read Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which is a wonderful look into a Solarpunk world. However, an important critique that the book emphasizes is that this new Solarpunk society (or, well, an Anarchist society really) has produced a ‘tyranny of bureaucracy’ and a number of social pressures that stifle individual ambition and that punish those that are different from the norm.
Would you agree that Le Guin’s critique can be useful for the solarpunk movement?
I have attached an analysis of the novel as well.
In the novel, the two most prominent slices of reality that require complementary interpretations are Shevek’s General Temporal Theory and his vision of anarchism on Anarres. Just as he sees Sequency and Simultaneity as complementary, so he sees individual freedom and social responsibility as the complementary manifestations of anarchy. Moreover, Shevek is able to comprehend anarchy in a complementary way only because his view is based on the theory of time that he has developed.
Ha, I just realized that The Dispossessed is a literal example of lunarpunk, since Anarres is the moon of Urras!
Well, Le Guin herself gave it the subtitle ‘an ambiguous utopia’. I think it just makes the whole novel (and the ideas) that much stronger, since it’s not just some masturbatory fantasy about anarchism. She really imagines another type of society, problems and all.
She’s such an important person both for Solarpunk / Lunarpunk and speculative fiction in general as well as Anarchism and related movements
She presents an unfinished anarchist society and its struggle, through the eyes of someone who will try to improve it.
This sounds really interesting, but at the moment it’s flying a few inches over my head. Can you back up and give some context as though I’m not familiar with the subject matter?
In my opinion, without introducing the constraints imposed by the story, asking the question of “will a certain form of anarchism bring bureaucracy or mediocrity?” seems premature.
As far as I remember, the constraints Le Guin imagined were:
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Anarres had gone independent during its settling, and was very resource-poor, the chief activity of its people focused on securing basic necessities
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their tendency of anarchism favoured “governance” by sortitioned committees
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their tendency of dividing labour favoured people changing their place of work and residence, and generally seemed to favour a state of “flow” as opposed to permanence
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their reproductive habits also seemed to favour a succession of different partners as opposed to permanent alliances
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their society had an external threat present: the planet Urras which Anarres orbited was resource-rich and people lived in hierarchies there (some of the hierarchies being capitalist, some communist)
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they were not alone but there existed an interstellar community of sorts, Urras had relations with other civilizations, including one which originated from Earth (and Earth was barely habitable due to human actions)
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their attitude to the host planet was isolationist, widespread communication did not exist, preventing anarchists from discussing the merits of planetary ideologies and earthers from discussing those of lunar anarchists
…for me, the question of “does sortition bring mediocrity?” has popped up several times. On large scale, I advocate sortition as a political system whenever possible (on small scale, informal do-ocracy seems to work up to a certain point where contributions get unbalanced).
The ancient examples (Athens, Florence, etc) do not suggest that sortition will bring mediocrity. However, a sortitioned person does need auxiliary bureaucracy to be effective at their job - one can’t expect Joe Random to get sortitioned into a parliament today (note: Le Guin’s story had no central parliament but many distributed committees) and make good quality decisions tomorrow.
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