(en) Organise! #81 - ?I come to you like the beggar man?? - A review of Ursula Le Guin?s The Dispossessed

When I first sat down to write this review all I could think of saying was along the lines 
of ?The Dispossessed is about two worlds divided by a wall, and what it means to be a 
beggar on either side of this divide. Go read it!? Unfortunately that isn?t much of a 
review, but with that in mind? ---- The Dispossessed is a work of speculative science 
fiction exploring two different societies living in orbit to one another: ---- Urras. The 
Blue-Green world of plenty. A word of class. A word of division. The place where the rich 
are rich and the poor are poor. Where a workers takes the brunt from the bosses wars and 
wants, no matter if the boss claims to be a capitalist or a communist. Our world presented 
to us in another name. ---- Anarres. A moon colony of idealistic anarchists in exile.

Now several generations old, it sits in isolation from the rest of humanity and the worlds 
beyond. Life here is tough and resources are scarce. When crops fail or disaster strikes 
the hardships leave deep scars against the egalitarian psyche. Although the ideals of 
anarchism are spoken of the local conditions are helping the world sleepwalk into 
bureaucratic syndicalism that sacrifices individual will to the collective.

Each is presented in a spiral of oppressive behaviours, each holding the redemptive key to 
the other?s doom. The spirit of Anarres shows what can be achieved if society is reordered 
along the principles of horizontal organisation, free association, solidarity and mutual 
aid. The resources of Urras can break the bane of economic scarcity that is choking 
anarchism to death in the name of collective survival.

The opening of the book presents to us a wall.

The wall keeps one world in. The same wall keeps the other world out. This applies no 
matter which side of the divide you look from and it is this wall ? constructed not of 
stone but of the material conditions of the two societies ? that is examined in great 
detail. Le Guin does not present this in dry terms however. Her deft characterisation of 
Shevek, our ideal anarchist cypher and lead character, is able to explore and reveal to us 
the words as they are lived, rather than simply providing us with dry exposition or simple 
narrator-descriptions which could be read but not felt. Alien planets beyond the entwined 
orbit of Anarres and Urras give brief glimpses, warnings, of other possible futures. Terra 
has been destroyed by self-created environmental catastrophe. Hain shows a disinterested 
world dying in spirit due to a lack of creative passion. The wall that separates and acts 
as the doom of Anarres and Urras is shown to also be the foundation to the downfall of 
these not-so-distant places.

A special note must be made towards the use of of language to convey the morals, 
philosophy, thought and behaviours of the people of Anarres. Their language sets up what 
they can or can?t put into words and communicate and commonly conceive. These altered 
boundaries of consciousness let us understand for ourselves in the way their society 
behaves, and in doing so invites the reader to think in a different way, one that goes 
out-with those presented in the mainstream of our day-to-day lives. In short, it is 
consciousness raising.

Like the anarchist ideals the book so deftly explores, the story itself does not leave us 
with an ending so much as a staging point for our own journey. To use the ideas of the 
books, it comes to you like a beggar man, relying on you for all that it requires and 
leaving you enriched by realising you would be better with nothing but what you carry as 
long as all needs are met. By the end of reading it I was stood at the wall between two 
worlds with the choice over whether I help to dismantle it, and by choosing to do so build 
a greater whole.