My life in books

Wonderfully left-wing publishing house PM Press has been putting out a series called Outspoken Authors which consists of collections of writings by visionary left-leaning writers, most of them writers of sff. I've read and talked a number of these before, including volumes that contained selected works (and an original interview) with people like Ursula Le Guin, Nalo Hopkinson, Kim Stanley Robinson, Terry Bisson and Eleanor Arnason.

My latest read from this series is a collection of essays, poems and other works from Marge Piercy called My Life, My Body. Woven through all the selections is a strong, politically and socially radical consciousness, conjoined with a commitment to feminist analysis, addressing topics ranging from the effects of gentrification on marginalised communities to the enforcement of a white male canon in literature.

Her focus ranges from social justice to literary criticism. Several of the selections here deal, in part or in whole, with the growing problem of homelessness, particularly among women. Others argue passionately against the trend in criticism that demands the separation of politics and art, and devalues literature written from a political consciousness (which, she notes, is often work created by women and marginalised peoples.

In addition to the essays and poems, the volume includes an interesting interview with Piercy conducted by fellow leftist and science fiction writer Terry Bisson.

If you're a fan of Piercy's work, you'll appreciate the pieces collected here immensely. And after that, I heartily recommend that you have a look at other volumes from the Outspoken Writers series.

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin
Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy

Not too long ago, I found myself in the position of trying to describe to a friend some of the ways in which a society based on anarchist philosophy might operate, and in the process of trying to make my own visions of an anarchist’s utopia more concrete, I picked up and re-read the two books on my shelves in which someone else had already done this, and probably far better than I ever could.

LeGuin’s The Dispossessed tells the story of a scientist, Shevek, raised on Anarres, a world settled by the followers of a political philosopher from Anarres’ sister world Urras, who finds himself questioning and rejecting the philosophy of the world in which he grew up. He travels to Urras, thinking to find a better way of life, only to realise how strongly his values have been influenced by the culture of his birth. Ultimately, he decides that the flaws in the culture and philosophy of Anarres are easier to live with – and possible change – than the flaw he finds in the philosophies of Urras.

Ursula Le Guin discusses her novel in an introduction written for “The Day Before the Revolution,” a short story written in memoriam to the anarchist, Paul Goodman:

My novel 'The Dispossessed' is about a small world full of people who call themselves Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn't get into the action - except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.

Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with, not the social Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right, but anarchism as pre- figured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's principal target is the authoritarian state (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.

What is interesting about LeGuin’s exploration of an anarchist utopia is that she allows it to be flawed. No society created by humans will ever truly reach the perfection of a utopia, because humans themselves are not perfect beings. LeGuin, however, shows the reader a flawed anarchist state and a flawed authoritarian state and asks: which is easier to live in, easier to change and improve without bloodshed, provides a better life for more of its citizens?

Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time also presents an anarchist state and an authoritarian state for the reader to consider, although the former is more of a utopia and the latter more of a dystopia than in LeGuin’s book. Piercy’s protagonist, Connie Ramos, is an American Latina living on welfare, who has a “bad history” of standing up for herself and other women against the oppression and violence of men, and is ultimately incarcerated in a mental hospital where she is chosen to be a subject for experimental "mind-control" research. She is also a Receptive, someone who can serve as an focal point for a kind of mental time-traveller and, with the assistance of that traveller, move forward to see the future herself. Or she is mad, and hallucinating everything that she experiences in her encounters with the time-traveller Luciente and the future she sees and commits herself to helping to bring into being in her own time.

Luciente’s future is, like Shevek’s Anarres, a society based on basic anarchist principles, although it is more consciously a feminist utopia as well. Both books explore ways of organising society and making collective decisions about that society without the creation of hierarchical, authoritarian structures, of valuing co-operation and mutual assistance, of sharing labour and eliminating class, and of changing the nature of the family, interpersonal relationships and gender roles.

Both are strong and important visions of what an anarchist society might be like. As such, they are also an inspiration and an invitation for further consideration of how life can be lived without social or political oppression of any group of human beings by any other.