The Free

The Dispossessed… + The Day Before The Revolution…READ HERE

”I started by reading a whole mess of utopias and learning something about pacifism and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance. This led me to the nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. With them I felt a great, immediate affinity. They made sense to me in the way Lao Tzu did. They enabled me to think about war, peace, politics, how we govern one another and ourselves, the value of failure, and the strength of what is weak.

So, when I realised that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be. And I found that its principal character, whom I’d first glimpsed in the original misbegotten story, was alive and well—my guide to Anarres. ^[4]”

EM: The Dispossessed is one of your most well-known works. Was there any novel which explored anarchism so explicitly before then?

UG: I don’t think so. That’s one of the reasons I thought of writing it. I’d been educating myself about pacifist anarchism for a year or more. I started reading the non-violence texts—Ghandi, Martin Luther King and so on—just educating myself about non-violence, and I think that probably led me to Kropotkin and that lot, and I got fascinated. Portland used to have a hundred independent bookstores, and one of them was rather political, and in the back room, if he knew you, he would take you in to see his anarchist stuff.

EM: When would this have been?

UG: When was that book? The early 80s? Late 70s? That store had some wonderful stuff, which at the time was very hard to find. Not so much anymore. And of course I found out about some of the modern anarchist writers. I was excited following that up. And then at the same time I was reading utopias. And there was a utopia for every political thing you could think of, but not for anarchism. Isn’t that odd? Well maybe I should write one. So then I had to re-read and read things to plan how on Earth would you organize an anarchist society, which was a lot of fun, but difficult.

EM: Especially on the scale of a world.

UG: Even a very thinly populated planet, there’s a lot of people to organize.

EM: You said in an essay that a Utopia, with a capital U, should be a practical alternative. That really struck me.

UG: I’d have to think about that. In my own mind I’ve moved on quite far from the utopia of The Dispossessed to the semi-utopia of Always Coming Home, where I did try to make it simply a lifestyle. There was no political basis at all, in the sense of European or large nation politics, therefore people think that I was trying to idolize the American Indians or something.

What I took from the Indians was, essentially, running your lives without a central government and using consensus as the basic mode, which you can’t do in a big society, it’s a matter of numbers. But I wanted to think out what it might be like. I think the lack of politics, for some of the readers, makes them think that it must be primitivist, and it ain’t necessarily so.

EM: It’s been influential in bringing the dialogue into the mainstream.

UG: Yeah. Writing a serious utopian novel that is an anarchist novel. It hadn’t been done, and there were hardly any anarchist texts that weren’t non-fiction, so just having a big fiction work that’s all about anarchists, I think made quite a difference.

EM: Especially with things like gender-neutral pronouns. It’s a conversation that’s been happening for a while, but is getting louder now. It shows how important linguistics is.

UG: Oh gosh yes. When you start looking for languages which have a gender neutral common pronoun, what have you got? Some kinds of Japanese and Finnish… I believe Finnish is gender neutral, which is cool. So translating The Left Hand of Darkness is a cinch for them.

The Dispossessed. Ursula Le Guin’s anarchist utopia…Free Download HERE:

The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed or

Listen to Thye Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin at Audiobooks.com

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed.

Thoughts on The Dispossessed

There are some books that even with my untrained, unskilled and inexperienced eye can detect and confirm are true works of art, mastery in literature. Continue reading “The Dispossessed… + The Day Before The Revolution…READ HERE”

Final Day: Monica and Francisco Trial. ‘Viva Anarchism!’

update March 30

Anarchists Monica and Francisco Sentenced to 12 years in prison

Today March 30, 2016, it was notified to lawyers and companions the judgment of the National Court condemning the anarchists Monica Caballero and Francisco Solar to 5 years in prison on charges of “injury”, plus 7 years for “damage with terrorist purpose “, with a total of 12 years in prison for each They were acquitted of charges of “belonging to a terrorist organization and conspiracy” against the Monastery of Montserrat. Demonstrations will begin today against this ridiculous sentence.

‘We are presented with the challenge of extending the struggle and solidarity, to defend our ties and our ideas, denying that their world is reduced to the four walls that keep them incarcerated.Our jailed comrades will always be present in our struggles and our daily lives.There is no “inside”, nor is there an “outside” only enemies of the state and authority.Death to the state and long live anarchy !.’

Update 1st April: Pepe Galán, Francisco lawyer, says he “totally disagrees with the statement that they are the perpetrators” and thinks that “there is no evidence in this regard.” And he will appeal the verdict.

The good news that they were cleared of being a terrorist organisation and the finding that the supposed terrorist group doesn’t exist should apply equally to all the defendants from the Pandora and Piñata anti anarchist police raids, undermining their future trials!

The defense demands absolution for Monica and Francisco and denounces the “bias of the police investigation and the judicial proceedings”

translated from Diagonal with thanks

summary of Day 1.

The big news was that the police have no firm evidence against Fran and Moni who deny ever visiting Zaragoza! All they have is a video of 2 people leaving a bar, you can’t see their faces but the police claim their ways of walking are similar to those of Fran and Moni. Seriously! That’s the evidence to spend 44 yrs each in jail.

The second big news was that both the judge and prosecutor chosen are extreme right wing zealots famous for their outrageous opinions and judgements. The 3 deciding magistrates (there is no jury) are the same who refused bail for over 2 years, and are openly part of the prosecution. And the police are openly trying to brand Francisco and Monica with leading a grand anarchist insurrection conspiracy, in the hope of getting a green light to attack all anarchists and progressive movements.

On Day 1 every time Fran or Monica mentioned their anarchist beliefs the judge, Ángela Murillo, interrupted to silence them.. we focussed on this bias. But other reporters focussed on their actual words, which turn out to be important, because both implied that as anarchists they are against terrorism as being authoritarian.

Far from wanting to become martyrs promoting an anarchist insurrection they appeared to align themselves with the anarchist majority in Iberia, which recognises that mass public agreement is necessary first. (This could be important in the light of recent events like the ‘Black December’ actions which appear to blur the line between legitimate Direct Action and a return to tactics used a century ago).