Anarchism and Science Fiction
by Ken Macleod
from Total Liberation Online

It was science fiction that got me interested in Anarchism in the first place. Poul Anderson’s short story ‘The Last of the Deliverers’ turns on a confrontation between the last communist and the last enthusiast for capitalism - two very old men, who end up dead in the river with their hands locked around each other's throats: a microcosm of a world in which the US and the SU and their contending ideologies have long since collapsed. (One down, one to go.) Cheap, small fusion-power plants have made possible a radical decentralisation of population and power into small and in many ways self-sufficient communities, who can nevertheless co-operate on a continental scale to build spaceships. As a late-sixties space age schoolboy I found this vision exciting, and when I talked about it to a friend he said, ‘That sounds like Anarchism.’

So off I went and read all I could find about Anarchism, starting with Giovanni Baldelli’s Social Anarchism, April Carter’s The Political Theory of Anarchism, and the Cohn-Bendits’ Obsolete Communism. They didn’t make me an Anarchist, but they changed my life. By way of retaliation, I’d like to get more Anarchists interested in science fiction, and change theirs.

What I’d like to see is not just more SF informed by Anarchism, butan Anarchist movement and climate of opinion much more informed by SF than it currently is. Cloning, genetic engineering, life-extension, nanotechnology, space exploration and industrialisation, artificial intelligence and so on are moving from science fiction through the science journals to the headlines. If Anarchists refuse to think about such things, others who aren’t so reluctant will shape their use, and with it the future.

Too much Anarchist rhetoric has a nineteenth-century feel - not surprisingly, because that’s when a lot of it was written. It doesn’t have to be like this. One of the most inspiring books I read as a teenager, Breaking In The Future (Zenith Books, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1965) was written by an Anarchist, Tony Gibson. Cannily, it didn’t talk about Anarchism. Its front cover posed the question: ‘Outer space, new nations, automation, population ... How can we use a million years’ experience in the revolutions just ahead?’ If any Anarchist has given an answer half as lively and on the ball since, I’d love to hear about it. The same kind of question is still being asked, and variously answered, in SF.

Science fiction is relevant to Anarchist concerns because, as Peter Neville correctly says (TL, Spring 2001) it ‘allows the examination of alternative worlds, alternative systems, alternative societies and the interplay of new ideas’. But as Richard Alexander, also correctly, points out (TL, Autumn 2001) Neville’s article misses much recent SF of potential interest to Anarchists. So does this one - there’s a lot of it out there.

Academic discussions of Anarchism and SF tend to begin and end with Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a book which has probably put more people off Anarchism than any other. It presents a dour vision of Anarchist Communism: something like a particularly fanatical kibbutz or Spanish Civil War collective. Computers are hand-waved into economic planning, children are discouraged from ‘egoising’ - getting possessive about their toys, or their ideas. The conflicts this induces in Shevek, a brilliant physicist with a few too many ideas of his own, are well presented. In the absence of public debate and in the relentless presence of morality, Shevek has no forum in which to express his dissent, no way to find like-minded individuals with whom he might find common ground; instead, his conflicts become conflicts with other individuals. He is as isolated as any dissident in a totalitarian State.

A much more cheerful vision of a stateless, classless, and moneyless society is presented in Iain Banks’s Culture novels, set in a Galactic society of abundance premised on benevolent artificial intelligences - machines like gods, in which humans live like mice in gliders, or bats in belfries. Life in a Culture Orbital is like a Caribbean cruise, except that the ship contains its own ocean. Those discontented with this lazy life-style are free to depart or - if they’re smart - join in the Machiavellian machinations of Contact Section, which artfully nudges backward planets in the right - or left - direction. Even in their interventions the Culture keeps its scientific cool, selecting certain planets to be left untouched: properly conducted social experiments need control samples. Earth, in case we hadn’t guessed, is one of them.

An equally Communist Anarchy has been imagined by the hard-headed American free-marketeer and engineer James P. Hogan in his Voyage From Yesteryear. His utopia runs on a more immediately feasible technology than the indistinguishable-from-magic machinery of the Culture. It has robots to do the dirty work, but they aren’t conscious robots so we’re not relying on their benevolence, just their tolerances. One has the distinct feeling that Hogan has their blueprints, if not (yet) their programmes, in a big drawer in his desk. What makes the story, however, is the fun Hogan’s heroes have running rings around the State-Capitalist Earthpersons who attempt to repossess them. ‘Take me to your leaderless’ doesn’t quite cut it when you want to re-establish top-down authority.

In this respect Hogan follows Eric Frank Russell’s superficially light-hearted, but fundamentally serious, anti-authoritarian tales in The Great Explosion, in which scores of scattered colonies are being corralled back into Earth’s bureaucratic empire, with mixed success. In the collection’s culminating story, ‘And Then There Were None’, one particular shipload of bureaucrats and their increasingly mutinous crew confront a highly individualistic anarchy whose ‘secret weapon’ of Gandhian disobedience is both operating principle (if co-operation is voluntary, its withdrawal is an effective means of enforcement) and revolutionary strategy.

In the advanced countries an everyday experience of an anarchy which works by co-operation and non-cooperation is the Internet. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash reflects vividly the freewheeling spirit of the Internet’s pioneering years, when mutually hostile ‘online communities’ of researchers, libertarians, Anarchists, labour and human-rights activists, Holocaust revisionists and pornographers found common cause as ‘netizens’ in end runs around all attempts at censorship or regulation. A cynical saying in the geek culture of programming is ‘If you document a bug, it’s a feature’ and Stephenson gleefully takes this attitude to some obvious objections to anarchy: unstable individuals with personal nuclear weapons are dealt with by ... extreme politeness. With Greater Hong Kong as a chain of motorway service areas, the Mafia as pizza delivery franchise, ‘You have a friend in the Family’, and the whites-only enclaves of New South Africa brandishing their bazookas, the anarchy of cyberspace has been mapped onto the dismembered body of the State.

Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep uses the Internet not only as the model for his galactic communications web, aptly called ‘The Net of a Million Lies’, but also for the galactic society of societies, some of which are anarchies and all of which exist in one. For Vinge, an Anarcho-Capitalist with genuinely Anarchist views, anarchy is not so much a programme as a description of the existing state of affairs. We never emerge from the state of nature, and never can. There are in his world lots of statists, but no States, in the sense of authorities whose claim to legitimacy can be upheld or attacked. It’s turtles, all the way down - or pretenders, all the way up.

The suspicion that the State is no more public-spirited than the average corporation or criminal gang has seeped into US culture since the first Kennedy assassination, and spawned numerous conspiracy theories. Robert Shea’s and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy works its way through a succession of them, each of which explodes the previous one by revealing, behind the secret masters, other masters more secret still. Behind the Bilderbergers, Trilateralists and other usual suspects we find the Freemasons, behind them the Illuminati, behind them the Templars, the Cathars, the Gnostics ... by the time the ultimate manipulator of events is exposed as a Lovecraftian monster in the pre-Cambrian epoch, the reader has long since got the point. As Chomsky says, if you want to know the names of the world’s real owners, look at the brand-names all around you.

My own books have been inspired by all of the above, as well as by Anarchist and libertarian literature from ‘left’ and ‘right’. Without Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia I couldn't have written The Star Fraction; without the SPGB’s Socialism as a Practical Alternative and William Morris’s News From Nowhere I couldn’t have written The Cassini Division; without Larry Gambone’s Proudhon and Anarchism I couldn't have written The Sky Road. This diversity of inspiration is as typical of SF as it will, I hope, become of the new and broad libertarian movement we’d all like to see, and indeed of the society it creates. A future without coercion will be the work of many hands, and many minds, and begins now.

Total Liberty website: http://www.ecn.org/freedom/totlib/index.html

-- Dan Clore
mailto:clore@columbia-center.org

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