Dispossessed Digressions
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Contrasting a world primarily struggling between socialism and capitalism with an anarchist society, The Dispossessed highlights success, absurdity, and failure in them all.
Unlike Walkaway's abundance, the desert world Anarres contains a scarcity bound lifestyle reliant on cooperation. At times survival seemed borderline impossible. The stabilizing production and social pressures, which evolved in those times of strife, are now stagnant and creating a regime of their own. In prosperity they fail those who push in any direction beyond the norms.
Meanwhile in the capitalist establishment, recognizable struggles occur. The rich live in extravagance, and the poor might as well not exist. Except they do, and they are left to suffer.
Systemic flaws of all kinds demand subversion, reform, or eventually revolution.
Initially disorienting, uncomfortable and explicit at times, unstable and thought provoking to the end, I'll be referencing and recognizing aspects of The Dispossessed for the unforeseeable future.
Author: Ursula K. LeGuin
Title: The Dispossessed
ISBN: 006051275X