Anarchism – Page 12

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”

Show #125 Carrie Reichardt’s Revolutionary Art

First a small gallery of Carrie’s art..

to listen to her INTERVIEW click The Circled A

Mayday demonstration at Bank. People protest against police violence and dress as convicts, prisoners or police. Organised by Space Hijackers. London.

to listen to her INTERVIEW click The Circled A

The Circled A

Carrie Reichardt is a contemporary artist, who works from a mosaic-covered studio in London. A member of the Craftivism movement, she uses murals, ceramics, screen-printing and graphic design in her work. She is a dedicated advocate of the movement and curated one of the few exclusively Craftivist exhibitions in the UK. She talks about the ‘Disobedient Objects’ exhibition at the V&A, Angola 3 and much more!

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Transition Movement explodes into Life: watch film here

In Transition 2.0: A Story of Resilience & Hope in Extraordinary Times

Transition is an idea that has gone viral, a social experiment that is about responding to uncertain times with solutions and optimism. In a world of increasing uncertainty, here is a story of hope, ingenuity and the power of growing vegetables in unexpected places. Continue reading “Transition Movement explodes into Life: watch film here”

Zaragoza Occupiers declare for Anarchism

en Castellano abajo

Statement from the Assembly of the Kike Mur Occupied Social Center (CSO ), in Zaragoza

June , 2015 It is time to do some thinking, to confirm our commitment and to forge ahead.

The Assembly of the squatted social center Kike Mur has been, for over four years, giving life to an abandoned building and putting into practice the assemblyism, horizontality and anti-authoritarian methods.

We believe that it’s now a good idea to make a political definition of the reality we have been creating throughout our history. We have self-organized by way of a free association of people working together and trying to be equal. We decide, we act and we take responsibility for managing the resources.

anarchist book fair.at Kike Mur CSO…

We define ourselves as anarchists. This will not entail any change in the management of the CSO, and in our lives, but fulfills the need to define the attitude with which we organize ourselves and the work we do within this space.

For these reasons,
DEATH TO THE STATE AND LIVE ANARCHY! Continue reading “Zaragoza Occupiers declare for Anarchism”

Dilar Dirik promotes Women’s Revolution in Rojava

The Women’s Revolution in Rojava: Defeating Fascism by Constructing an Alternative Society

by Dilar Dirik

This piece is a book chapter in “A Small Key Can Open A Large Door: The Rojava Revolution” by Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness (Ed.), March 2015 (Combustion Books).The resistance against the Islamic State in Kobanê has woken the world to the cause of Kurdish women. Typical of the media’s myopia, instead of considering the radical implications of women taking up arms in a patriarchal society – especially against a group that systematically rapes and sells women as sex-slaves – even fashion magazines appropriate the struggle of Kurdish women for their own sensationalist purposes today. Continue reading “Dilar Dirik promotes Women’s Revolution in Rojava”