Earlier this year, I found myself hooked on a Netflix show called The Society, which is at first glance difficult to pick out from the glut of similar YA dystopian fiction on and off screen. Its setting, a town to which a group of high school students return from a school trip, only to find it both deserted and cut off from the outside world, even echoes that of another Netflix series called Between, which featured a quarantined town hit by an epidemic that killed everyone over the age of 22. That show was never renewed after its first season aired in 2016, and I can’t think of a single person who watched it. When I started The Society, I was looking for a distraction, and expected something equally forgettable.
The Society is certainly guilty of some of the genre’s familiar failings: leaps of logic, a reliance on tropes, skin and surfaces that sparkle too much to be believed. But I’m an unabashed lover of both Gossip Girl and Riverdale. To me, some of the genre’s failings are also its unique, absurd delights. And what sets this show apart from so-bad-it’s-good viewing is its genuine interest in, as the title might suggest, the society itself. Rather than glossing over logistics in favor of the more easily dramatized power struggle, The Society connects each with the other. Characters clash over rotating work lists to divide labor, communal ownership of property to conserve water and energy, systems of punishment to maintain order, and the regulation of firearms to curb violence. The characters’ backgrounds—their relative poverty and privilege—inform their attitudes toward the new social order. The kids are just trying to survive, and sometimes to forget that they need to, but the whole project sometimes has the air of utopia, not dystopia. They understand that they cannot recreate the world from which they came, and they aspire to create a new one. In the separatist spirit, they rechristen their town, West Ham becoming New Ham.
Months after watching The Society, I finally picked up The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic 1974 science fiction novel. While The Society shows social institutions at their inception, The Dispossessed begins 170 years into the anarcho-syndicalist project on Anarres, a planet settled by members of a revolutionary group that left the neighboring planet of Urras to form their utopia. Le Guin’s narrator, Shevek, was born into this society, and his instincts and assumptions are grounded in its socialist reality. “Wasn’t it immoral to do work you didn’t enjoy?” Shevek wonders early on in the novel, illuminating the depth of difference between Anarres and my own capitalist world, where work performed without pleasure is so often offered up as an unchallenged moral good. Through the lens of speculative fiction, Le Guin accomplishes what theory cannot often do, imagining the mundane manifestations of the political ideal, imbuing the abstract concept of revolution with emotional and narrative force. As a guest in A-Io, a nation on Urras and an analogue for America, Shevek finds “all the operations of capitalism [i.e. banks] … as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, as unnecessary… rites… where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts.” In another scene, Shevek goes shopping for the first and last time, and his bewilderment at the absence of workers from the marketplace also functions as a partial critique of commodity fetishism:
The strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the million things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Put of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.
By giving us a narrator for whom malls are unimaginable, Le Guin also manages to render them perverse. The characters in The Society may make social critiques, but they also base their decisions on the assumptions of the old, capitalist world, the only one they’ve known. Confronted with a murderer, the kids see imprisonment as the only option; when they realize they don’t have the resources for a perpetual jail cell, they deliver a death sentence. The show doesn’t flinch from the horror of these choices, but like the children, it struggles to imagine an alternative to seemingly necessary evils. In The Dispossessed, because Shevek comes from a world where those evils do not exist, they can be exposed as entirely unnecessary. Le Guin’s critiques are familiar, but Shevek’s total removal from capitalism gives his moral disgust a tragic quality that no inside detractor could claim. Here is a man who never had to watch one person eat while another starves, until he came to a world like our own. Shevek encounters our world with horror—prison seen from a distance, police brutality seen up close—and as a reader, I feel the intense urge to protect him from it.
The attitude towards work in The Dispossessed moved me, too. Le Guin’s fictional philosopher Odo, the founder of the Odonian movement, argues that “the delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole.” On Anarres, people work not for money but for this delight, for pride, for the respect of others. Rather than assuming a negative connotation by default, stripped from the capitalist context, work is synonymous with play. In The Society, too, the teenagers find fulfillment as they step into their needed roles in society: doctor, cook, pastor.
But what makes work needed or not? And what becomes of those who cannot or will not do the kind of work the collective deems necessary? On Anarres, options are limited—voluntary or involuntary hermit status, or a stay at the Asylum, the nature of which Le Guin leaves open-ended, suggesting neither complete benevolence nor obvious danger. In The Society, the character Harry shirks work, first illegally offering to trade the use of his car to get out of the communal jobs he dislikes, then dissolving into substance abuse and addiction, unable to leave his bed. Harry is an entitled formerly-rich kid who resents the socialist policies which require him to share his sprawling house; he’s also clearly depressed and unable to cope with the reality of his situation. In New Ham, he becomes an outcast.
On Anarres, the outcasts are often artists. After hearing about a musician’s career frustrated by the unconventional nature of his music, Shevek’s friend Bedap remarks angrily:
Music isn’t useful. Canal digging is important, you know; music’s mere decoration. The circle has come right back to the most vile kind of profiteering utilitarianism. The complexity, the vitality, the freedom of invention and initiative that was the center of the Odonian ideal, we’ve thrown it all away.
Later, Shevek points out that the Anarresti are afraid to refuse jobs they don’t want, because “the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it,” stifling the individual freedom which Odonian philosophy so prizes. Shevek’s own career as a physicist stalls because of a jealous mentor, proof that despite the lack of official hierarchy, informal power structures still exist in Anarres.
The Dispossessed is subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia,” and Le Guin deliberately gives us a problematic Anarres, burdened by a certain austerity, by social pressure, by political and moral stagnation, by the forms of suffering which are the human birthright and which no society can eradicate. Responding perhaps to stereotypes of socialist revolutionaries as romantics and moral authoritarians, she emphasizes the practical, survivalist ethos of Anarres, and the anti-dogmatic sensibility of Odonian political philosophy. That sensibility, however, has been muddled by the time the novel begins. And as Shevek reveals, “the existence of [Annares] depend[s] on the continuance of a fundamental, unadmitted profit contract” with Urras, which mines Anarres in exchange for allowing its people to exist in peace. Underlying the society of mutual aid is a system of obvious exploitation.
If Anarres fails to create true equality and freedom, it is not because—as some apologists for capitalism would claim—these are naïve ideals or impossible dreams. As Jasper Bernes wrote for Commune in October, Le Guin “doesn’t deploy [ambiguity] to discredit the utopian impulse but rather to allow it to truly flourish, to become credible.” That Anarres is flawed allows us to believe in “a communist society that is, despite everything, already pretty good… a communism that is not only plausible but plausibly improvable.” Le Guin explains:
That the Odonian society on Annares had fallen short of the ideal did not, in [Shevek’s] eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; just the contrary. With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind.
Socialism conceived as a permanent revolution allows us to see a future that socialism conceived as a static system does not. One scene in The Society features the football team sprawled on the grass, discussing with reluctance the possibility of sharing resources instead of raiding the town’s stores. “It’s not like [socialism] worked in China,” one of the boys argues, and the conversation trails off for a moment, most of them not quite sure what happens in China. Then Grizz, the intellectual of the group (and my favorite character), pipes up. “China’s a poor example—the party took complete priority of the workers. In reality, we’ve never seen a true socialist state.” I could debate the meaning of “true” here, but the point remains. The flaws of one attempt at socialism do not guarantee the failure of socialism in all possible forms. And the choice between an immediately perfect society and one doomed to “rescue” by capitalist imperialism is a false one.
Le Guin is clearly aware of lazy critiques of socialism—like the hackneyed statement that it’s good on paper and bad in practice—and the fact that their adherents apply logic inconsistently, seeing suffering as a feature in socialist states and a bug in capitalist ones. Her emphasis on the practicality of Anarres highlights how empty those critiques are. If a capitalist society is no easier to administer than a socialist one, they can be truly evaluated against each other as systems and ideals, rather than one reality played against a pipe dream.
Le Guin readily admits the advantages of A-Io, the capitalist nation on Urras. She has the ambassador from Terra, a neighboring planet, point out that although “it’s full of evils, full of human injustice, greed, folly, waste… it is also full of good, of beauty, vitality, achievement… alive, despite all its evils, with hope.” When Shevek finally sees the suffering, exploitation, poverty, and violence which have been hidden from him on Urras, he is careful to remember that the beauty of Urras coexists with it, each as real as the other, and inextricable from the other. What, then, makes Anarres (anarcho-socialism) worthy of improvement, while Urras (archo-capitalism) must be completely transformed? This, I think, is Le Guin’s answer: people go hungry in both Urras and Anarres, but it is better to go hungry in Anarres, where you are equal and free.
As I read, I was never tempted to abandon Anarres, flawed though it is, because it is also precious. It would be silly to respond to the incomplete fulfillment of an ideal by rejecting that ideal out of hand, yet that is what establishment politics constantly encourages us to do. To instead follow the example of Shevek and Anarres means to accept the condition of striving. And that’s why I love watching dumb kids just doing their best on The Society—even when they do things that are really, really dumb. It’s a love letter to humanity, to trying.
In The Dispossessed, Shevek speaks passionately and sincerely about brotherhood and sisterhood, and his belief in mutual aid, which he describes as the idea “that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand.” Le Guin constructs both Shevek and Anarres powerfully enough that we can believe his lack of cynicism, his real faith in this idea, his commitment to solidarity even as a chronic loner. When he speaks of his quest to “unbuild walls,” and deliver Anarresti freedom to all beings, I am convinced. The Society delivers in more concrete terms the kind of fraternal affection and found family dynamic I love, but the relationships are underdeveloped, the love less earned. Still, both offer a rare warmth—and The Dispossessed, in particular, does so without embarrassment, unguarded against accusations of sentimentality. Shevek lacks the fear Leslie Jamison describes in the essay “In Defense of Saccharin(e),” a fear which seems to plague contemporary political discourse, that “if we say it straight… if we express our sentiments too excessively or too directly, we’ll find we’re nothing but banal.” Le Guin is beyond this insecurity, writing with the confidence that comes from urgency, her tone refreshingly forthright.
The Society, in tone, is less surprising—it is in some ways a conventional show, with the typical YA trappings. But it has surprised me in other ways, and I hope it will surprise me by evading the fashions of cynicism and irony too. Sure, as many will tell you, the world is in crisis. There is something valuable in that urgent expression of despair. But to paraphrase my favorite aphorism, from the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, activism requires not only the pessimism of the intellect—the critical mind—but also the optimism of the will—spurred by morale, faith, hope, and effort. As Walidah Imarisha writes in the foreword to the anthology Octavia’s Brood, political organizing is an exercise in speculative fiction, which requires us to be “brave enough to imagine beyond the boundaries of ‘the real’ and then do the work of sculpting reality from our dreams.” The utopic imagination, present in both The Society and The Dispossessed, is the bulwark we need against futility. If we want a better world, we will have to dream up how to create it. If we want a new world, we will have to know how to let the old one go.
In her acceptance speech for the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2014 National Book Awards, Le Guin made a plea for “the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” In the same speech, she delivered this simple, searing line:
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.
I’m hungry for art that helps me believe that economic inequality, climate change, and refugee crises could someday, if we make the right choices, be only a nasty, warning footnote in our history. It might sound silly to search for this sign in a Netflix teen drama, and sillier still to compare that teen drama to a classic novel of enduring power. But my search has yielded unexpected results, and my love for The Society wasn’t the only one. A month ago, I read A People’s Future of the United States, a speculative fiction anthology which claims this call to imagining a better future as its central project. I was excited to find a collection organized around this topic, particularly one with a title that plays off Howard Zinn’s brilliant classic, and the anthology does boast some excellent writers and stories.
Overall, however, it disappointed me. Too many of the stories feel nearsighted, fixated on the narrow present. One uses a premise broadly echoing the “coastal elites” myth that attributes political polarization to regional, cultural differences rather than meaningful, ethical ones; another offers a benevolent artificial intelligence as the savior of humankind from a surveillance state, raising interesting questions about what drives technology to positive or negative ends, but never actually engaging with them. I wish the authors had instead used the ample evidence available to overturn the stereotypes long promoted by “middle ground” moralism, or the well-documented history which could produce insight into the evolving dynamics of human trust in technology. In their assumption that our current problems are unique, these stories end up denying both our past and our future.
I think it’s important that we produce and promote art with the capacity to escape the present moment, art that is not imprisoned by fear and that therefore frees us from it. In fiction as in life, we must resist the temptation to choose easy questions and answers. I want YA soaps that risk the charges of political radicalism and idealism, just as I want adult science fiction with insights capable of outlasting the Trump presidency. I want the permanent revolution of the Odonians, a revolution that exists in every moment, refusing stagnation or orthodoxy. I want an eternity of questioning, challenging, and seeking freedom; of reaching out the hand, and unbuilding walls.
Navya Muses 