Last year, I had posted about Ursula K. Le Guin’s book The Dispossessed. It’s a book that I’ve been haunted by. After reading it, I spent a tremendous amount of time considering the societal differences that she paints within the fiction of the book. In it, there are two planets - one that is run like the exploitive capitalism that we see in the United States today. The other planet, to me, read as an anarchistic society. At the time of reading, I only had a passing familiarity with the ideas that live under the -ism of anarchism. To someone who is raised up in a country and society that seems to like to celebration “freedom”, “liberty”, and - maybe more importantly - doesn’t seem to like to have anyone telling them what to do - I’m surprised that anarchism isn’t louder in social conversations.

I’d struggled with the society that Le Guin painted in the fiction. It appealed to me, but I couldn’t quite understand some things that I felt she was trying to describe in the book. Reading up on the author, I saw that she had once described herself as a “non-authoritarian communalist” which I liked the sound of, but still wasn’t fully sure what that means. State communism of the 20th century certainly had plenty of problems, but had plenty of merit as well (I recommend Kristen R. Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism exploring these differences from a woman’s perspective that is also critical of state communism). And to another degree, I don’t know if I fully have a good conceptualization of what “communism” is - I started Das Kapital and found it Marx to be just as difficult to read as Adam Smith.

However, I finally read a book that I feel fills in some of those blanks that The Dispossessed left for me, and did one of the better jobs of conceptualizing a democracy (author may disagree with using this word in the context of her work) that makes sense to me. As I’m sure I’ve written about once or twice, I have been frustrated for some years after realizing the lie of American democracy. That lie being that it exists. I once sat on a jury and once or twice voted for local bus fare increases - yet I’m told that our government is based on the political philosophy of governance by the consent of the governed (see The Declaration of Independence). I feel that I have no voice in my own governance and when I speak up - I don’t feel I’m heard. The voting booth only allows me to cast a vote for candidates who do not represent my world view, as neither of these United States’ two right-wing political parties have proven that they have people of my economic strata as their primary, or even secondary, concerns.

That book is Heather Marsh’s Binding Chaos. I found its short chapters easy to get through, although I’d recommend anyone who reads it to know that there is a glossary in the back that I wish I would have spent more time referring to, as the author uses terms such as “user groups” to conceptualize intersecting portions of society, and I don’t think I quite got what she was meaning until some way into the book. “Stigmergy” I had to turn to Wikipedia to understand what this meant as well.

From the concluding chapter of her book, just to give you a taste of the concepts that she explores:

For those who read what I have written and think it is a fantastical utopian vision that can never be implemented, look again. Everything in this book exists and has always existed. Stigmergy is the natural path of collaboration that must be constantly regulated and fought with copyrights, patents, secrecy and ownership laws to be avoided. Personalities have been ignored throughout history as masses followed ideas which seemed beautiful and just. An approval economy is the natural economy we use every day and have since the first society. All societies are naturally systems of dependencies, not trade relationships. Epistemic communities have led our systems of knowledge since the first village elders. Each of us belongs to many rings of societies and user groups and each group has their own social contract. Individual rights are natural rights fought for by every mammal.

Although there are some passages I think that I felt that the author painted with too broad of a brush, I believe this may be one of the more thought provoking books I’ve read in recent years and I intend to find time to read her later books as well. I’d recommend this book to anyone regardless of political beliefs, as I truly believe that her thoughts would be intriguing to anyone of any political stripe.