To Touch the Dust of Anarres

Jonathan Bolton thoughtfully reads Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed” within and against the grain of a half century of criticism.

By Jonathan BoltonFebruary 2, 2025

• Science & Technology

• SF

IN A 1975 LECTURE titled “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” Ursula K. Le Guin summarized the plot of one of her worst stories: “This scientist was escaping from a sort of prison-camp planet, a stellar Gulag, and he gets to the rich comfortable spoiled sister planet, and finally can’t stand it despite a love affair there, and so re-escapes and goes back to the Gulag, sadly but nobly.” Le Guin called this “a really terrible story, one of the worst I have written in thirty years of malpractice.” And yet she reworked it into one of the great American political novels, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, first published in 1974 and now out in a 50th anniversary edition. The book has aged well. In her lecture, Le Guin lamented that the “moral proposition” of The Dispossessed had not been completely dissolved in the “mass of living experience”: “The sound of axes being ground is occasionally audible.” I heard them only faintly, and they grow fainter with each rereading, as the harmonies and disharmonies of Le Guin’s creation become ever more discernible.

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The Dispossessed abandons the idea of a “prison planet” and replaces it with a thought experiment: what would a world run on anarchist principles—with no government, army, laws, or police—look like? When a revolution nearly overthrows one of the countries on the prosperous planet of Urras, the Council of World Governments allows the revolutionaries—followers of an anarchist visionary named Odo—to settle on the moon, “buying them off with a world, before they fatally undermined the authority of law and national sovereignty on Urras.” Over the next 20 years, a million Odonians migrate to the dusty, arid moon, named Anarres, until “the port [i]s closed to immigration and left open only to the freight ships of the Trade Agreement.” Henceforth, Anarres exists in conditions of near-isolation, the Odonians striving to set up a new society without government or state.

The novel proper begins some 150 years later, with the earnest and brilliant physicist Shevek preparing to journey to Urras to conduct, and possibly share, his research on instantaneous communication. A child of Anarres, Shevek is a sincere believer in anarchism—indeed, he knows no other system—but he is also a brilliant thinker who feels stifled by its social pressures. He thinks it is time to reopen communication with Urras. The novel progresses in two threads, told in alternating chapters (a narrative analogue to Shevek’s research on temporal sequentiality and simultaneity): one thread follows Shevek’s life on Anarres from his birth to his departure, at age 38; another follows his stay of roughly a year on Urras, where—a provincial intellectual confronting the imperial metropolis—he conducts research as a visiting professor and compares his anarchist principles with a very “archist,” and materially prosperous, world.

Le Guin’s title discovers a nice pun in the title of one of the great political novels of the 19th century, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Besy (1872)—the title translates as Demons, but in English, it was long known, in Constance Garnett’s translation, as The Possessed. Dostoevsky portrays his amoral Russian revolutionaries as “possessed” by the devils of revolution; they are willing to sacrifice any principle to further a supposedly higher end, one that grows foul and corrupt in their hands. By contrast, Le Guin respects her anarchists, who have been “dispossessed” of the demons of revolution; they are also (the real meaning of the title) frugal, ascetic, and often hungry. Poor, they inhabit a barren planet, but they are rich in the spirit of self-sacrifice and cooperation.

There’s little doubt that Le Guin’s sympathies are on the side of Anarres, and her vision of a functioning anarchist world has inspired several generations of readers. Life on Anarres is built to foster individual autonomy and survives on a spirit of communal self-sacrifice. There are no police or prisons, and hardly any personal property; individuals take and use what they need and conduct themselves as they please. The Anarresti even invent their own language, Pravic, in which it is difficult to express rank or status (there are no terms of respectful address) or personal possession (the singular possessive pronoun is rare, and children, usually raised in communal crèches, learn to say “the mother” rather than “my mother”). Intimate relations are loose and unregulated: “Every domicile had a number of singles, and a couple that wanted to copulate used one of these free singles for a night, or a decad, or as long as they liked.” People form families or not, as they wish. And they are free to move around as they like—a centralized agency distributes and coordinates labor assignments, but it cannot order anyone to do what they don’t want to do; it merely communicates public opinion and tells people where they “stand in the social conscience.”

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One of the inspirations for Le Guin’s vision of Anarres was the Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin (1842–1921), in particular his 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.

A naturalist who spent five years on a military posting in Siberia, Kropotkin was inspired by examples of animals banding together to protect themselves in hostile surroundings. Natural selection didn’t just pit one animal against another for “survival of the fittest”; it also pitted communities of animals against a harsh environment, rewarding those that, through “mutual aid,” came together for protection and strength. Drawing on his observations of animals in the wild, Kropotkin developed a theory of communitarian anarchism, positing that humans could prosper by spontaneously helping each other, without needing to be organized and disciplined by a state. In his 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica article on “Anarchism,” Kropotkin defined it as follows:

a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government—harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption.

These “voluntary associations” would spread until they “substitute[d] themselves for the state in all its functions.” For Kropotkin, anarchism would avoid two great ills—capitalism and tyranny:

[M]an would not be limited in the free exercise of his powers in productive work by a capitalist monopoly, maintained by the state; nor would he be limited in the exercise of his will by a fear of punishment, or by obedience towards individuals or metaphysical entities, which both lead to depression of initiative and servility of mind.

He would neither be exhausted from capitalist labor nor in thrall to a king or a god; he would “obtain the full development of all his faculties, intellectual, artistic and moral.”

Le Guin took inspiration from many different sources in designing her anarchist planet, but she clearly had read her Kropotkin. The phrase “mutual aid” appears seven times in the novel. As Shevek tells a political rally on Urras, “We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association.” But if Kropotkin, in his Siberian wanderings, was inspired by the sight of “a migration of fallow-deer which [he] witnessed on the Amur, and during which scores of thousands of these intelligent animals came together from an immense territory, flying before the coming deep snow, in order to cross the Amur where it is narrowest,” Le Guin invented a planet with hardly any animal life at all—only insects, fish, and settlers, with a few native plant species, scrub-like and bare. In the above passage, Shevek continues: “We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else.”

The novel was subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia,” and critics have proposed many reasons why. To some readers, the extreme scarcity prevailing on Anarres has undermined the force of the thought experiment, allowing Le Guin to conveniently ignore problems resulting from the unequal distribution of excess wealth, something governments have sprung up to enforce or abolish since time immemorial. As Shevek asks, “What is idealistic about social cooperation, mutual aid, when it is the only means of staying alive?” If the Anarresti are so mobile, moving freely from town to town to pursue their own plans, it is partly because they have so few possessions to tie them down.

But plenty of other moments may also undermine our enthusiasm for Anarresti anarchism. The renunciation of state power hasn’t done away with domination and manipulation, just as the nominal equality of the sexes (many women are in positions of power) hasn’t done away with casual sexism. As the novel progresses, Shevek, aided by his rebellious friend Bedap, becomes ever more aware of the restrictions imposed by bureaucratic infighting, the insularity of Anarresti society, and social pressure. Bedap complains about the suffocating force of the latter, saying that the real power structure on Anarres is “the innate cowardice of the average human mind,” which fears to go against its peers. Creativity and initiative are stifled, not by laws and police but by custom and shame: “We’ve let cooperation become obedience.”

The place of art and creativity in Anarresti society is particularly puzzling. Readers of the novel may be forgiven for finding the descriptions of art uninspiring. Its function seems to be pragmatic (“Painting and sculpture served largely as elements of architecture and town planning”), with poetry and storytelling seen as “ephemeral” and “linked with song and dancing.” Music is a “form of social behavior.” In a communal world where “privacy [i]s not functional,” only drama is seen as a self-sufficient art form. We don’t hear a word about those two most solitary of activities: reading novels, and writing them. The only artist-like figure in the novel, a misfit named Tirin, gets in trouble for his subversive plays and is forced to seek “Therapy” at the “Asylum on Segvina Island.” He ends up a “destroyed person,” obsessively writing the same play over and over.

All of this should not send us flying to Urras though. Urras appears at first to be a land of reactionary opulence, where vast wealth and elegance coexist with crushing inequality. Its geopolitical setup is clearly meant to mirror our own. There is A-Io, a capitalist country with a luxuriously consumerist (and alarmingly patriarchal) culture, which critics often compare to Western Europe or the United States. A-Io is locked in an ongoing struggle with a rival power, Thu, which has a distinctly Soviet feel; it is run by a “Central Presidium” and is stifled by censorship. Its dour ambassador Chifoilisk, who refers to Anarres as “your little commune of starving idealists up there in the sky,” entreats Shevek to relocate to Thu so he can “see how real socialism functions.” In the other hemisphere is a third country, Benbili, about which the Iotis seem to know little—it is “underpopulated, poor” and “always having revolutions.” During Shevek’s stay in A-Io, the military dictatorship in Benbili is overthrown. The deposed president Havevert escapes in his “famous armored airplane,” and “the retreating army burn[s] the fields and towns of their people as they [go].” Thu backs the rebels and holds two eastern provinces, while A-Io sends troops to prop up the deposed president. One of Shevek’s colleagues in A-Io says: “The balance of power is kept by this kind of police action.”

Many critics have read this as a more or less transparent image of Cold War geopolitics, culminating in the Vietnam War, and they are surely not wrong. Perhaps the anarchist utopia on Anarres is meant chiefly as an antidote or alternative to our own world, portrayed as hopelessly divided between capitalism and tyranny. But then it comes as something of a surprise when the ambassador from the real Terra shows up late in the novel. She tells Shevek that Earth was nearly destroyed by an ecological catastrophe centuries ago, its population dropping from nine billion to 500 million. She provides a striking outsider’s view of A-Io: “The government here is not despotic. The rich are very rich indeed, but the poor are not so very poor. They are neither enslaved nor starving.” To her ruined planet, Urras seems “the kindliest, most various, most beautiful of all the inhabited worlds.”

All this suggests that there is something more going on in The Dispossessed than the creation of an anarchist utopia as a critical window onto our own world. Here is, indeed, yet another reason that the novel earns its subtitle “an ambiguous utopia.” It is not just that Anarres itself has many dark sides but also that the anarchist ideal, now artificially walled off on a barren world, originally came from Urras and in some sense still belongs to it. Both the Terran ambassador and Shevek speak of Anarres as the “key” to Urras. Shevek’s trip to Urras, with which the novel begins, represents a double destabilization—the inevitable unraveling of Anarres’s splendid isolation, and the dawning realization that Urras itself, “the rich, real, stable present,” faces an uncertain future. The two worlds are interdependent, another fact that renders the Anarresti utopia “ambiguous”—unsustainable on its own, and, somehow, lacking the point of reference that would give it meaning.

This interdependence is only occasionally acknowledged by the novel’s characters. We are told of debates on Anarres in which some want to cut off “profiteering business transactions with warmaking propertarians” on Urras—until cooler heads reply: “It would cost the Urrasti more to dig the ores themselves; therefore they don’t invade us. But if we broke the trade agreement, they would use force.” The Anarrestis’ intellectual isolation is mirrored by their literal vulnerability. Even the citizens of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) were remarkably well-versed in the subtle hypocrisies of warfare, going to war “only for good reasons: to protect their own land, to drive invading armies from the territories of their friends, or to liberate an oppressed people, in the name of humanity, from tyranny and servitude.” But the citizens of Anarres are oddly blunt and defenseless; at the beginning of the novel, a protester hardly knows what to make of an Urrasti crewman’s gun (“She gave the phallic object, which she knew was a weapon, a cold glance”).

Thus, the freighters from Urras that come eight times a year to drop off fossil oils, machine parts, and new fruits or grains—and depart with mercury, copper, aluminum, uranium, tin, and gold—are “a perpetually renewed humiliation” for Anarres, which is effectively “a mining colony.” A few pages later, Shevek reflects that “the existence of his society […] depended on the continuance of a fundamental, unadmitted profit contract. Not a relationship of mutual aid and solidarity, but an exploitative relationship; not organic, but mechanical.” The “unadmitted profit contract” suggests there is more to the ambiguity of Anarres than simply the hardships of life on a barren planet, or the hardening of anarchist freedom into stifling custom.

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Among political novelists, Le Guin stood out for her ability to blend different kinds of politics. She was fascinated by the grand politics of class and revolution—her novels are full of parliamentary factions, court intrigue, diplomats, spies, and rebels. As the Thuvian ambassador tells Shevek, “You have got to understand the powers behind the individuals.” But as a feminist and skilled imaginer of everyday life, she also had a sensitive eye for the mundane power struggles of “the personal is political.” Nor did she ignore the cruel paradoxes and structural violence of imperialism, playing out in both colony and metropole. Through it all, she maintained a keen sense of the pure force of ideas to move back and forth among these three political worlds. The Dispossessed is a running political conversation—full of intrigue and drama, to be sure—in which Shevek is forced to test and develop his anarchist ideals against a range of friendly and hostile interlocutors on both Anarres and Urras. These varied conversations leave no political idea unchallenged, even as Shevek preserves his ever-evolving anarchist ideals.

This sense of tension, where political ideas are constantly brought into conflict and conversation, is embodied in one of the novel’s recurring images, that of the “two moons.” In the second chapter, Shevek, 15 or 16 years old, is lying with his friends on a hilltop, staring up at Urras in the sky:

“I never thought before,” said Tirin unruffled, “of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying ‘Look, there’s the Moon.’ Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth.”

“Where, then, is Truth?” declaimed Bedap, and yawned.

The reply is “declaimed” (presumably with some mixture of teenage irony and pathos) and nicely deflates the question—but the question is nevertheless central to the novel. Years later, speaking to his partner Takver—they are lying in bed and looking out the window at the full moon—Shevek says: “[C]lose up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon.” It’s a fine thought. Nevertheless, the awkwardness of that comma—“is, is”—suggests that it’s not the novel’s final word, but rather another stage in Shevek’s growing political awareness. Both truth and beauty rest somewhere between the clashing ideas of rival worlds. Much later, as he begins to realize that he is being used by the Urrasti government, Shevek sits in his university quarters, “looking with unseeing eyes at the sunlit green landscape out the window.” He is overcome with a yearning “to speak Pravic, to speak to friends, […] to touch the dust of Anarres.” The novel ends before he returns to his moon, but draws us into his yearning for an imperfect, shifting home.