Marxism and science fiction: A celebration of the work of Ursula K. Le Guin

Abstract

In 1973, the newly-established journal Science Fiction Studies published a symposium on 'Marxism and science fiction' in its very first issue. (1) Thirty years later, the newly-established journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory published a similar symposium on 'Marxism and fantasy'. (2) One of the contributors to the earlier symposium, but conspicuous by her absence in the recent one, was Ursula K. Le Guin, who will be seventy-five years old this year. This is a reason for celebration, since it is also thirty years since Le Guin first published one of her best-known works of science fiction, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. (3) This is a remarkable work, contributing not just to the genre of science fiction, but also to the utopian political tradition, as well as to our understanding of the political philosophy of anarchism. While The Dispossessed certainly has a political 'message', it is not just a political pamphlet or tract that presents that message in a straightforward or simplistic way. Le Guin is a creative writer, in the strict sense of the term, and although her politics are certainly important to her, she never allows them to get in the way of her work as an author whose intention is to produce a work of literature: a work of art. As a result, and as the subtitle of the novel suggests, she possesses sensitivity towards the ambiguities and the complexities of human existence to a remarkable degree, especially insofar as questions of ethics are concerned. Ethics are a central concern for Le Guin. This is true in all her writings, including in her so-called 'children's' literature, The Earthsea Quartet novels, (4) which in fact deal with what might legitimately be considered to be 'adult' issues. While avoiding 'moralizing' and preaching simple solutions to serious moral problems, at the same time, in all of her work, Le Guin writes as a 'moralist': as someone who--in the manner of the ancient Greeks, the young Marx and anarchists such as Kropotkin--considers humans as being by nature ethical animals, and who, as a result, has an overriding interest in the ethical dimension of human existence. Le Guin wishes to stimulate and encourage her readers to think in ethical terms even if, in the end, it should transpire that they make substantive ethical judgements that are different from her own. Despite Le Guin's overt commitment to anarchism, the ethical vision that underpins The Dispossessed has a striking affinity with what, in recent times, has come to be known as 'ethical Marxism'. (5) Contrary to contemporary postmodernists, who follow Nietzsche and maintain that--whether we are talking about the natural world or the social world, science or ethics--the only order that there is in the universe is that which human beings themselves impose upon it, Le Guin maintains that in both science and ethics the world is intrinsically an orderly and not a chaotic place. She insists that the order that is to be discerned in the world is not 'one imposed by man or by a personal or humane deity.' On the contrary, there are 'true laws--ethical and aesthetic, as surely as scientific' which 'are not imposed from above by any authority, but exist in things and are to be found--discovered.'(6) This is the attitude of someone who has been strongly influenced by the philosophy of Taoism. (7) But it is also the attitude of someone who is a moral realist and a humanist, who holds views currently unfashionable amongst those who have been influenced by the philosophies of postmodernism and post-structuralism. These remarks indicate Le Guin's commitment to the idea that there is a universally-valid ethical order; a moral law that applies to all human beings; a law that is in some sense 'natural' rather than a purely social 'construction', and which is therefore discovered by human beings rather than made by them. In another of her essays, Le Guin tells us that what underpins her commitment to this ethical vision is the assumption, which she considers to be 'essential,' that 'we' human beings 'are not objects' but 'subjects'. …