Ongoingness

This is gonna take a long long time (living between two planets)
Ursula K. le Guin and Anarchism an interactive talk with Alexis Shotwell
> The struggles of today have no heroes, no beginnings and no ends. They began before any of us were born and will continue many generations into the future, after we and our ikea shelves are compost. What if we adopted Ursula le Guin’s concept of “ongoingness” to let go of our expectations that we will see an end to our political projects and struggles, and began organizing as if we’ll be organizing together forever? What would be different about the way we see ourselves, our work, and each other? Alexis Shotwell will apply several key ideas from le Guin to organizing towards social transformation. Come join us for an evening as we sink into our own dispossession as many of us are living in a very strange space between an anarchist communist possibility and a vengeful capitalist planet right now.> No prior knowledge of The Dispossessed, or any of Ursula LeGuin’s work is necessary. Introduction provided by Cassie Thornton. Discussion moderated by Magdalena J. Härtelova.
Free. In English. (Whisper translations possible upon advanced request to info@casinoooo.org)

We are in the middle of a process that will end, if we don’t change course, with the intense immiseration and destruction of much of the life on Earth. How might we start a new course, begin anew? We only call something a beginning when we pause to look back at it from somewhere along a path or a process. Beginnings imply ends – end points from which we might look back on where we started, but also the purpose or reason that we do something, and the result of something we aim for. Beginnings and ends are stitched together by the process of getting from one to another; it is the duration of activity in the middle that creates a start and a conclusion. This bit in the middle is “process,” the part of what we’re doing that is a “how,” a method. What we’re doing is our means of activity. Why we’re doing it, or the outcome we’re aiming for, is our end. In this chapter, I’m interested in two aspects of attending to means: the idea that what we do and how we do it matters very much, and the idea that there is no point at which the work of social transformation ends. We can have many beginnings, many more processes and “hows,” and, indeed, many ends – but any end will be simply a new beginning in an ongoing process. Thinking about process in relation to collective social movements opens useful horizons for orienting ourselves towards the always-unfinished practice of freedom. I put Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fictional attention to process in conversation with contemporary movements for liberation, asking how her imperfect utopianism might help build practices of ongoingness organized through the idea that “all we have is means.”

In an interview about Le Guin, Donna Haraway said, “Her stories are about ongoingness. She is again and again telling stories that don’t end in apocalypse” (Haraway in Malkin 2014).[1] As I discussed in the previous chapter, story is one important way that we give meaning to our lives. We explain why we do one thing and not another. Story, in fiction or as life, is the site at which we make moral choices, which for Le Guin is simply to say: Story is how we practice freedom, choosing and taking the responsibility of choice, always in collectivities, and without guarantees. It’s how we decide to make a change. Haraway is correct that Le Guin’s stories, again and again, don’t end in apocalypse; they end in continuing, and in imagining worlds in which the world could continue. Many of her books have spiral structures – true journey is return, after all – and feature people who eschew eschatology, or the idea that we will ever come to an end, look back, and sum up how we did. In her work, there is not a point after death at which the Archangel Michael will weigh your soul or Anubis your heart and sum up how well you lived your life. Death will come, but growth and the social world you were part of will continue.

Continuing into an ongoing future instead of apocalypse means that we are unwinding a thread of history, and staying in a relationship with the past that shapes our present. But just as we can tell stories about experiencing abuse that end in life rather than despair, I believe that we can take up our differential inheritances of the past and present and move in directions those inheritances could not imagine. I’m most interested in how we change direction without pretending that it is possible to detach ourselves from the history that has brought us to where we are. It is only from the middle that we take up collective political work on wicked problems – complex problems that do not admit of easy solutions, and which no individual can solve alone. I am thinking here for example of the cascading climate catastrophe, mass extinctions, capitalism, colonialism, mass imprisonment, and the global trend towards authoritarianism. We are in the middle of all of these, and more. It won’t work to try to start again as though all of the history that has constituted the mess we’re in hadn’t happened. Part of that mess comes from legacies of oppression and violence, and part of it comes from the beautiful work of ordinary people working for collective liberation.[2]

This beautiful, everyday resistance work done by ordinary people is everywhere. Take movements against mass imprisonment, police violence, and the rise of the surveillance state for example. Today, abolitionist movements in North America call for defunding the police and refunding social goods such as schools, affordable housing, and health care. They are part of the broader movement for Black lives, which is also connected to movements for migrant and refugee rights and against the existence and enforcement of borders. Abolitionism aims for those possibilities beyond militarism, state governance of the movement of people, and mass imprisonment. As Mariame Kaba and others have framed it, “abolition is the horizon” (Kaba 2021, 96). Abolition is what we aim for, but also it is continually moving out ahead of us – a horizon is what we move toward, but never reach. And yet, we move. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, abolition is “the context and content of struggle, the site where culture recouples with the political; but it is not struggle’s form. To have form we have to organize” (Gilmore 2022, 42). In this chapter, I attend to what it means to think about the horizon that entices us on, and the form of work we do to move organize towards it.

Current abolitionist movements flared up in the wake of increased attention to police murders of Black people in North America in 2020, but they were connected to the constellation of thinking and activism from groups such as Critical Resistance, formed in 1997. The abolitionist movements of the late 90’s were in turn rooted in the work against prisons by imprisoned people in the 1960s. And that work called back to much older global struggles for the abolition of prisons and enslavement. Each iteration of these struggles builds on the work of people who came before, and inherits the complex legacies, affordances, and inspirations of their movements.

Oppression works iteratively, as well. Enslavers in North America responded to the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade by intensifying their extraction of people’s lives for profit; when chattel slavery was abolished, new laws criminalizing not having a place to live – vagrancy – applied to formerly enslaved people who left plantations with no place to go or way to live. When they were arrested and imprisoned, further laws allowing forced labor meant that imprisoned people were mandated to work without pay. Imprisoned people and people institutionalized in disability “sheltered workplaces” remain people to whom laws about minimum wage and work choice do not apply. Pursuing a world without prisons involves not just doing away with the buildings that currently contain people; it involves creating a world in which the social problems that are not solved by shutting people away are solved. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore said, “Abolition is about presence, not absence. It is about building life-affirming institutions” (Gilmore quoted in Davis et al 2022, 51). It is not enough to do away with the deathly institutions that currently organize our world – we need also institutions that help people not just live, but live well. This is one reason that when many of us talk about defunding the police, what we’re actually talking about is re-funding the things that are currently underfunded: schools, parks, recreation programs, child care, mental health support, access to medical care, free time of all kinds.

Gilmore explains the ways that abolition in this life-affirming sense can serve as a counter to carceral logics, which are themselves part of processes: “If unfinished liberation is the still-to-be-achieved work of abolition, then at bottom what is to be abolished isn’t the past or its present ghost, but rather the process of hierarchy, dispossession, and exclusion that congeal in and as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore 2022, 475). Both oppression and liberation are processes, practices; they are unfinished and therefore we can begin again towards horizons unpredicted by our current path. Liberation is unfinished in part because the group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death is the surface manifestation of hierarchy, dispossession, and exclusion. Where it is conceivable that we could do away with a finished history, or lay down the ghosts of enslavement and dispossession, a process is something that has not concluded.

It may seem paradoxical to say that movements intervening in unfinished processes, such as the abolitionist movement today, should set goals. But it is important to articulate our ends, set strategic goals, and to assess whether we are moving toward them. As the Combahee River Collective put it in articulating their politics: “In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the ends justify the means. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving ‘correct’ political goals. As feminists we do not want to mess people over in the name of politics” (Moraga & Anzaldua 1983, 218). If we too don’t want to mess people over in the name of politics, it is perhaps especially important to name beginnings and set endpoints toward which we aim when we’re grappling with complicated collective problems, such as the question of how we might abolish prisons and policing, or save the world. My central argument here is that the how matters, in part because every fight we win or lose is simply the terrain on which we will pursue our next aim. Every beginning is messy, because we’re forever starting from being in the middle of an ongoing process. Every process is imperfect, and surprising, because it involves many others and responds to the ever-changing world. And every end reveals new work to be done. So, how we do things matters, and there is no end to the work. But this turns out to be good news! 

When people do horrible things that they intend to have good outcomes, they say “the ends justify the means.” This encodes many senses of beginnings – a projected destination that can be achieved, a reason for the activity to come, and a good that the doer intends to accomplish. The significance of thinking about means and ends is canonized in ethical theory in philosopher Immanuel Kant’s injunction to never treat others as mere means, but always as ends in themselves. That is to say, we oughtn’t use others for our own purposes or make their goals and life subsidiary to our own. Instead, we ought to relate with others as full and autonomous beings. This sounds easy, maybe. It is not. Because we act always in circumstances that we did not choose, and which we cannot fully know, any relationships we have with others take place on uneven terrains of power.

In her address to the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, “Indian Uncles,” Le Guin reflects this. Her father was an anthropologist who founded the department, and her mother wrote a famous book about Ishi, the survivor of the attempted genocide of his people, the Yahi. Le Guin never knew Ishi, who died of tuberculosis thirteen years before she was born.[3] So she says that while she will disappoint the scholars gathered there in not being able to speak about Ishi, who was foundational to the development of American Anthropology:

The two Indian friends of my father’s that I can say something about, are the Papago Juan Dolores and the Yurok Robert Spott. But here I run into the moral problem we storytellers share with you anthropologists: the exploitation of real people. People should not use other people. My memories of these two Native American friends are hedged with caution and thorned with fear. What, after all, did I or do I understand about them? When I knew them, what did I know about them, about their political or their individual situation? Nothing. Not their people’s history, not their personal history, not their contributions to anthropology – nothing (Le Guin 2004, 14).

I concluded the previous chapter with some worries about how and when we can tell other people’s stories, and resistance to Le Guin’s claim that remembering any story makes it ours. I make this critique of her from inside her own thinking, in some way. She is consistent in the belief she expresses here, that “People should not use other people.” But the consistency of that belief needs to be worked out in practice, and the details of what not using each other means, in the actual word, matter. I like it that Le Guin makes what I consider political mistakes in trying to work through these things, because her work is much more useful to us as a method than as a gospel.

In all her complexity, Ursula K Le Guin is a theorist of means and ends, of process and ongoingness, of continuing without fixed essences.[4] In this chapter I’m reading her work in its anarchist register, but it may be that this attention to process comes primarily perhaps from her life-long study of Taoism. Her stories of ongoingness, stories that do not end in apocalypse, are stories of imperfect utopias.[5] Utopia literally translates as a “no-place,” which is one reason that the utopian William Morris novel I discussed in Chapter 3 is called News from Nowhere. Le Guin writes, “If utopia is a place that does not exist, then surely (as Lao Tzu would say) the way to get there is by the way that is not a way. And in the same vein, the nature of the utopia I am trying to describe is such that if it is to come, it must exist already” (Le Guin 1989, 93). As I’ll explain, this idea that a utopia must somehow already exist if it is to come into being, meshes beautifully with the idea that people should not use other people, and with the idea that means are all we have.

The Lathe of Heaven is known as one of Le Guin’s Taoist novels, featuring a human (George Orr) whose dreams change reality, a manipulative therapist (Dr. Haber), and (eventually) pretty neat aliens. The therapist becomes convinced he can make a better world through shaping the things that George dreams. Dreams, of course, are difficult to manage. As things get more and more involuted with each successive shift in reality, George reflects on the ways Dr Haber is using him, and the ways they together are shaping the world without its consent. He thinks: “The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means” (83). If beginnings are only determined from some way down the road, how do we decide that something is an end? And who has standing to determine the direction of the world? We could here think of Sartre’s argument that when we choose as individuals we are choosing for everyone, and that part of the burden we feel when we confront our own freedom is precisely this understanding. In Dr. Haber’s case, this is literally true – he is choosing for the world. George objects to this, but also to being personally used. He explains of Dr. Haber: “He’s not … not an evil man. He means well. What I object to is his using me as an instrument, as a means – even if his ends are good” (45). A key lesson in the claim that all we have is means is this idea that we ought not use others as instruments for our ends, whether they are good or bad.

In activist work, this approach involves being against instrumentalist organizing, and for what is sometimes thought of as “prefigurative politics.” As Chris Dixon defines it, the term “prefigurative politics” names “activist efforts to manifest and built, to the greatest extent possible, the world we would like to see though our means of fighting in this one. Examples of such efforts include using directly democratic methods of making decisions and building institutions through which people can self-organize to meet popular needs” (Dixon 2014, 83). Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin define the idea of prefiguration as “the deliberate experimental implementation of desired future social relations in the here-and-now” (Raekstad & Gradin 2020, 10, emphasis in original). A prefigurative approach often implies the idea that we should never treat others as means to another end, or use means that are at odds with the ends we aim for. As Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin argues, “[anarchists] recognize our goals cannot be separated from the means used to achieve them. Hence, our practice and the associations we create will reflect the society we seek” (Ervin, 2021, 35). Thus, for example, if we aim to create a world not organized around sexist divisions of labor, we would actively work to not have all of the cleaning, notetaking, and emotional care work in a group done by women – even if they are currently better at these tasks than men in the group.

Dixon’s theorization of the idea begins from the “how” question, but expands it significantly. He writes, “The core idea here is that how we get ourselves to a transformed society (the means) is importantly related to what that transformed society will be (the ends). The means prefigure the ends” (84-85). His expansion of this concept, based on extensive interviews with long-term anti-authoritarian organizers alongside a deep engagement with anarchist theory, is important: Prefiguration is not just how people treat one another, or whether we live countercultural lifestyles, but also whether we are building counter institutions that have the capacity to meet people’s needs such that those institutions replace the role the state currently plays. Further, we can attend to whether we are organizing, which is to say “bringing people together in ways that build their collective power – with a horizontal orientation” (85). These four characteristics of prefiguration, as they’ve manifested in anarchist-inflected social movement spaces, inform how I understand the idea of means as Le Guin is using it.

Zoe Baker’s history of anarchist theories and practice in Europe and the US, Means and Ends, encapsulates another aspect of this approach. In working to change the world, we also transform our own subjectivities. Baker writes:

the reasons anarchist gave for supporting or opposing particular strategies were grounded in a theoretical framework – the theory of practice – which maintained that, as people engage in activity, they simultaneously change the world and themselves. This theoretical framework was the foundation for the anarchist commitment to the unity of means and ends: the means that revolutionaries proposed to achieve social change had to be constituted by format of activity that would develop people into the kinds of individuals who were capable of, and were driven to, (a) overthrow capitalism and the state, and (b) construct and reproduce the end goal of an anarchist society (Baker 2023 10-11).

This tendency frames the unity of means and ends as carrying a politics and a practice. It invites us to change the world – but also to change ourselves so that we become the kinds of beings who can live in the world we collectively make.[6] We become both the means and the ends of that world.

Veteran organizer Myles Horton, who co-founded the activist education centre the Highlander Folk School, reflected in his autobiography: “I think it’s important to understand that the quality of the process you use to get to a place determines the ends, so when you want to build a democratic society, you have to act democratically in every way. If you want love and brotherhood, you got to incorporate them as you go along, because you can’t just expect them to occur in the future without experiencing them before you get there” (Horton 227). There is a key experiential quality to centering the question of how we do things – it is through experiencing the possibility of, for example, genuinely democratic decision making that we might develop confidence that such a thing is possible at all.

This also works at the level of organizations. In the early days of formulating Marxism, under the First International, there were conflicts between what became organized Marxism, lined up with Marx and Engels, and anarchist approaches, mostly oriented around Bakunin’s approach. A key debate circled around the question of whether there needs to be a transitional period in which there is maintained – or increased – governance on the way toward a self-governing collective social arrangement. As Jura Federation’s critique of the First International famously put it in the Sonvilier Circular, “How can we expect an egalitarian and free society to emerge from an authoritarian organization? Impossible. The International, as the embryo of the human society of the future, is required in the here and now to faithfully mirror our principles of freedom and federation and shun any principle leaning towards authority and dictatorship.”[7] The generative paradox here is that while we cannot expect an egalitarian and free society to emerge from a hierarchical and frequently authoritarian one, this world is the only one we have from which to work for freedom. Even though our beginning is fraught, we still might aim to create a free world in which free people can live. Indeed, this is the only way that liberation has ever been pursued.

One solution to the problem of bringing something into being that doesn’t exist yet is to nourish the seeds of that world to come. This might be amplifying the small-scale ways we can treat one another with care and dignity, or it might be the idea of starting with a small group of competent people who agree on a way forward and chart the path for others to follow. Prefigurative approaches often critique the idea that the best way to transform the world is to start with a core organizing committee or vanguard who set a political line or plan and relate with the masses of people necessary to social transformation as fungible, fuel for the revolution. Stereotypically (but also to some extent historically), this approach is connected with Vladimir Lenin’s analogy for how we would set go about building something like a brick wall: Many of us have the skills and capacities to haul brick, to pile things on top of one another. But only some people understand how to correctly set a line to make a structurally sound wall, how to mix mortar and apply it, how to set bricks. Similarly, the analogy goes, in social struggle there is often a small group of people who have trained themselves in political analysis, who have the time and skills to assess how we should proceed to make collective change. Of course, even the most ardent Leninist understands themselves to be doing vanguardist work for the benefit of the people who do not yet clearly understand the political situation. No actual vanguardist I’ve known has expressed that they think they’re smarter or better than an ordinary worker, though they may say that they have a better political education or more time to work on the publication that helps lay out a political program for the masses. The transitional program of even vanguardist groups aims, ultimately, at full governance by the proletariat. And of course conversely even non-vanguardist activist groups that aim to express a prefigurative praxis and not use people instrumentally do themselves end up burning people out, replicating the very patterns they aim to transform, and using means they abjure to try to get to ends they desire. Working for collective transformation is perhaps the most frustrating, near-impossible task we can take up, and there is never a way to do it without messing up.

Like the character George Orr, or Kant, I am committed to the idea of not treating others as mere means to use on the way to an end I set. Specifically in activist work, I think it is vital for us to resist instrumental organizing. I have learned this in many places, but most piercingly in thinking with abolitionist organizing. As Davis et al put it, “an abolitionist lens teaches us that our work is not simply about ‘winning’ specific campaigns but reframing the terrain upon which struggle for freedom happens. Indeed, one of the fundamental precepts of abolition is that winning a campaign is not the only measure of success: how we struggle, how our work enables future struggles, and how we stay clear about what we are fighting for matters” (Davis et al, 2022, 33-34). Later, they write: “How struggle unfolds matters” (66). If “freedom is a constant struggle” (111) and how the struggle unfolds matters, it’s fruitful to attend to the question of this “how.” This idea resonates with Davis’s earlier formulation of liberation as dynamic and ongoing, which I discussed in Chapter 3.

So, let’s think more about process, and in the idea that how we do things matters to what we accomplish. I do not think the ends justify the means, or that we will come to a good conclusion on the basis of consistently sacrificing people, ecologies, or our sense of what it right and good to do. One reason it’s interesting to attend to beginnings is that most people don’t set off to ruthlessly exploit others for their own benefit.

In The Lathe of Heaven, Dr. Haber explicitly sets out to be a force for good. Justifying his use of George Orr’s power to dream new worlds into being, Haber reflects: “A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole” (53). This framing comes eerily close to a formulation Le Guin explores in the novel The Dispossessed, which I discussed in Chapter Four; the idea that the purpose of a society is to allow each individual in it to most fully and beautifully do what they personally can and love to do best. In that work, this is framed as their “cellular function,” and Haber’s conception retains an attention to the importance of interrelationships and the question of how we each have a role in a sociopolitical whole.[8] But a key difference is the idea that what defines us is our influence over other people. Haber’s practice enacts this understanding: he genuinely thinks that the way to make a better world if through his individual force of will. He eradicates racism-as-colorism by having George dream everyone into having always been an identical shade of gray; the instruction to bring peace to Earth takes the form of all the governments of the planet uniting to oppose an alien invasion. This stands in sharp contrast to the idea that what defines us is our relationships with others and the world.

Over the course of the novel, George repeatedly tries to convince Haber that he is making changes that make things worse for everyone, saying: “We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them that way. It just doesn’t work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it” (140). Haber’s hubris and conviction that he’s making a better world only grow. He sees George as weak-willed and feeble. A key point here is that the critique of instrumentality is not just about the ways it is wrong for Dr. Haber to use George as the means towards his personal ends. Rather, Le Guin is naming the idea that we ought not use the world as a means towards our ends. We cannot stand outside of life and try to run it, because we’re part of the world.

The alien invasion George dreamed into being turns out to hold the key to the question of means. The aliens too have people whose dreams can change the world, and so they are concerned for George, because he is dreaming alone. One approaches him and explains that they have a term for his world-changing dreaming – Iahklu’ – and that there is a way to practice this dreaming in a good way. That approach, called Er’ perrhnne, recognizes that being Iahklu’ is “too much for one person to handle alone” (168). People need help from their friends. Er’ perrhnne names a kind of collective dreaming, finding a way to change the world that is with life and the world, not against it, because it recognizes the dreaming, potent self as always a part of a whole. The solution to instrumental dreaming is to dream with others.

Because we’re in the middle of an ongoing stream of life, history, inheritance, we’re also called to recognize ourselves as in the middle of other people’s needs, interests, and ideas. In political work for collective liberation, those of us who benefit from existing systems of oppression can easily fail to perceive how our lives are connected to others. One antidote to this is to take leadership from those most affected by a decision, or to foreground the interests of those historically oppressed by the systems one aims to dismantle. From this stance, if we’re working on issues of imprisonment, we should listen to prisoners. In this approach, there can be an impulse to find the “most oppressed” member of a group and take leadership from them, according epistemic privilege to the people most affected by a political situation. But since everyone experiences multiple vectors of oppression and benefit, and since no one person should bear the burden of dictating the direction of a whole movement, individual epistemic privilege is limited.

Le Guin’s approach in The Lathe of Heaven offers a different approach, consonant with collective social movements. Dreaming with others, working with them in horizontal relationships of practice, puts us in the middle of difficult decisions and complex histories; only from there can we make good collective decisions. So, people will have different access needs – one person may need to stim or chew gum to comfortably be in a space, another may have misophonia or be very easily distracted by movement around them. Similarly, people have different insights into the political stakes of activist decisions, informed by their histories and the social relations they inhabit – one group’s call to build a new jail so their imprisoned family members have access to air conditioning can come up against another group’s campaign to not build any new jails but instead to release imprisoned people. It is only through working together in groups, toward shared goals, that we find ways to argue both for the conditions for dignified lives inside prisons and simultaneously an end to prisons, or that we set up rooms or have noise-modifying headphones on hand so that someone stimming or chewing does not prevent someone else from participating in decision making. This is a form of practicing collective epistemic privilege in making political decisions. Collectivity, with all the messy implications involved in being with others, comes along with means being all we have. This approach offers one example of Le Guin’s solution to the problems of individual heroism and small-group vanguardism in her work generally. Decision making from the middle of history and in the muddle of complex problems can only be meaningfully done with others, not alone. Er’ perrhnne.

Thus, one thing all we have is means names this sense that it matters how we do things. In a collective or revolutionary mode, that “how” includes not only how individuals and groups treat people or the world, but also whether we build the conditions for collective, horizontal decision making. In order to have such decision-making, we’ll need to become people who can participate in making the decisions that shape our lives. And in order to make those decisions carry any weight at all, we’ll need to create institutions and infrastructure that can bear the weight of collective care, everything from water treatment plants to growing food to educating one another to tending people who are sick or dying. The unity of means and ends, in prefigurative mode, involves our interpersonal connections, but also physical and hermeneutic infrastructures for justice.

In The Dispossessed Le Guin renders ongoingness, process, and the idea that the “means are the end” a core part of the Odonian conception of a good society. The subtitle of The Dispossessed came to be “An Ambiguous Utopia,” naming the ways that the anarchist society it depicts is imperfect. Readers encounter anarchism on Anarres nearly two hundred years after the revolution; that far away from the idealistic inauguration of a collective project, what calcifications, diffusions, and corruptions creep in? Le Guin models remarkably plausible failure modes of syndicalist anarchist societies, from the ways people highjack consensus process to how informal hierarchical fixity can become difficult to disrupt precisely to the degree that people claim that there are no hierarchies. As we’ve seen, the novel focuses on a theoretical physicist of temporality, Shevek, and his journey to and from Urras, the propertarian planet Anarres orbits. His journey allows Le Guin to stage a series of conversations about anarchism, mutual aid, and the questions of means and ends. Ultimately Shevek and his friends start a new syndicate called the Syndicate of Initiative, which catalyzes the main events of the novel. So, beginnings are central to this book, but process and the means by which we pursue our ends turn out to be equally important.

Le Guin writes about one of the key characters, Takver,: “…she too was an Odonian, and the separation of means and ends was, to her too, false. For her, as for [Shevek], there was no end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere” (The Dispossessed, 334). Notice here some key aspects of this formulation of process: There is a unity of means and ends, which I’ve framed above as a prefigurative approach to social transformation. As well, there is the sense in which you can go in a promising direction, which requires a criteria and capacity to say what is promising, and why. Finally, there is this sense in which when you set out, you don’t expect to stop – there will not be a point, in a living and collective world, at which the work of building that world together ever stops. Le Guin understands this as the imperative for society to be a permanent revolution. Our work has goals, but it will never be done.

I first began thinking about the idea that our work is never done when I was doing interviews with people who were AIDS activists in the Canadian context in the 80’s and early 90’s. I often think of a four-year campaign to provide access to experimental drugs, especially when they had been approved for use through studies in other countries. Winning the fight to be prescribed drugs through the Emergency Drug Release Program (EDRP) took four years, from 1990-1994. Immediately upon winning it, members of the activist group AIDS ACTION NOW! turned their attention to working on getting practical access to the drugs, since many of the newly-available medications were prohibitively expensive. In the province where I live, Ontario, the program they won in 1995 (the Trillium Drug Program) is still one of the main ways people get access to drugs they need, thanks to the work that AIDS activists did. But that work in turn was grounded in an understanding that there were significant barriers to people accessing social services that would shape their experience of living with HIV and AIDS. The work that AAN! took up to fight for funding for drugs was possible largely because they had always seen the question of pharmaceutical access to be inseparable from the questions of affordable housing, clean needle supply for injection drug users, access to harm reduction supplies of all kinds in prisons, and more. As I learned more about the histories of AIDS activism, there were so many examples of cases like the EDRP and the pivot to create the Trillium program for access to drugs in times of financial need. These are situations where activist work won a major victory, and where those same activists immediately took up the next fight, which they had opened through that win. In that case, they won again. But it was just as often the case that they lost, and had to regroup and try for something else.

After learning this lesson from AIDS activists, I began to perceive it as a pattern in my own activist work, and as I learned about other people’s activism, historical and current. Myles Horton closes his autobiography with a reflection on setting goals that illuminates this point:

Goals are unattainable in the sense that they always grow. My goal for the tree I planted in front of my house is for it to get big enough to shade the house, but that tree is not going to stop growing once it shades my house. It’s going to keep growing bigger regardless of whether I want it to or not. The nature of my visions are to keep on growing beyond my conception. That is why I say it is never completed. I think there always needs to be a struggle. In any situation there will always be something that’s worse, and there will always be something that’s better, so you continually strive to make it better. That will always be so, and that’s good, because there ought to be growth. You die when you stop growing. … even if we had a revolution, the quality of that revolution wouldn’t necessarily be satisfactory, so I’d have to try to make it better (Horton 228)

Just as the tree continues growing past the goal it was planted to fulfill – shading the house – social movements should continue growing and changing past the goals they were created to achieve. They will be passed down to and among others, and change as they take shape with their lives.

It is a good thing that we cannot conceive of what will happen to a vision or goal we set up, because this means that we are neither constraining it to what is currently conceivable nor artificially stunting the possible growth and change we seed. Just as we resist Monsanto creating seeds that require proprietary chemicals to germinate, preventing farmers from saving seed from year to year, activists can resist any impulse to fully master the future. Instead, we can remain open to impossible things becoming possible. The Odonian idea that process is all doesn’t mean that there is never any winning or losing. It means that whether we win or lose, we carry on. As long as we’re part of a living whole, things will be in movement. If we make things better, we’ll still need to tend them, or reach for what could come after that. If we fail in a goal, or lose a fight, that too is the beginning of the next attempt. Every win or loss is a new beginning for the next struggle, and we have no intention of stopping.

A couple of things follow from a process-based approach. The first comes back to a non-instrumental approach to organizing. The second is an appreciation of continual and ongoing change as the basis of a good society, which I’ll discuss below.  From an approach where the ends justify the means, if we treat people badly or burn them out during a certain campaign, and we win our goal, that’s worth it. We may have used up the energy, good will, and sense of connection of some number of activists, but we won! From an approach where means is all we have, and where we’re assuming that even wins are just steps on a path with no final destination, there is profound concern about any organizing based on people burning themselves out. Instead, we ask: How is everyone at the end of each campaign? Are they nourished and more connected to one another? Or exhausted and angry, sometimes more at their fellow activists than at the things they oppose? As Davis et al invite us to consider, we can ask whether our work enables future struggles, and attend to how we stay clear about what we are fighting for. An approach based in process and a sense of continual beginning implies that even losses can leave a group stronger and more energized through the work. Often, though, this doesn’t happen. Orienting toward the work we’re doing as part of a continual messy beginning, perpetually something to begin again, corrects any tendency to use people instrumentally, to despair if we don’t win soon or easily, or to rest on our laurels when we accomplish things.

Including awareness of process in any thinking about social transformation also invites us to understand the ways it matters that we’re always stepping into something that precedes us. In turn, anything we create must continue to change. In The Dispossessed, the spark that moves the narrative is that a group of anarchists have created a new syndicate, the Syndicate of Initiative, which initiates the first direct contact between the anarchists of Anarres and people on Urras, the propertarian planet they fled two hundred years earlier. This is the site for significant conflict on Anarres, and discussions about personal freedom and collective wellbeing – is it selfish and egoizing for the new syndicate to act as they have? When Shevek ultimately leaves Anarres to visit Urras, is he betraying the anarchist cause?

The seed of the Syndicate of Initiative was in conversations between Shevek and his friend and sometimes lover Bedap, who is profoundly critical of how things are run on Anarres in ways that both shock and compel Shevek. He says, passionately, “Change is freedom, change is life – is anything more basic to Odonian thought than that?” (166). This is almost a truism when we think about our personal life: Anyone who is alive is continually and necessarily constantly changing. We are in a dense and continual relationship of mutual transformation with our world in basic biological ways, with every breath we take or bite of food we take. Here Odonian thought asks how we might apply that basic orientation to a collective situation. Just as individuals must continually change or die, so societies must be in a continual process of change.  Le Guin writes, “Bedap had forced [Shevek] to realize that he was, in fact, a revolutionary; but he felt profoundly that he was such by virtue of his upbringing and education as an Odonian and an Anarresti. He could not rebel against his society, because his society, properly conceived, was a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process” (176). Holding to process requires a practice of society as a permanent, ongoing revolution.

For readers familiar with Marxism this reference to “permanent revolution” may call to mind Leon Trotsky’s formulation of the “Permanent Revolution” as a way to account for the possibility of a revolution that did not progress through the stages Marx and Engels suggested would follow one another. As Michael Löwy carefully outlines, while we see this theory of revolutionary stages in Marx and Engels, they also speak of the need for a “uninterrupted revolution” and sometimes “permanent revolution” (Löwy 1981, 8-29).[9] Mao Tse-tung departed from and transformed Trotsky’s concept into the idea of “continuous revolution,” aiming to name the ways that dialectical contradiction is ubiquitous, arises from class struggle (which he posits as remaining a feature of post-revolutionary life), and necessary to the process of social change at the personal and collective levels.[10] Le Guin would likely have encountered these framings as part of participating in political life when she was writing The Dispossessed, but I would argue that the meaning and rendering of what Shevek means in his reflections on the society of Anarres being a permanent revolution fundamentally depart from both Trotsky’s and Mao’s uses of these concepts (which are, again, very different from one another). Although I do not know specific details of what Le Guin was reading, she joins other anarchist thinkers who have articulated the idea that there would not be an end point to any fundamental social transformation.

Take two examples who theorized continual process as central to anarchist society. Gustav Landauer theorises the process of change as an ongoing shift from a what he called a topia to a Utopia. As he wrote in 1907: “not only the state, the estates of the realm, the religious institutions, economic life, intellectual life, schools, arts, or education, but the combination of all of those; a combination that, for a certain period of time, rests in a relative state of authoritative stability. We call this combination – the current state of communality – topia.” For Landauer, the way that any communality changes is through “individual life,” which he frames as “a combination of ambitions that will never reach their goals” (Landuaer, 113).[11] The attempt towards something beyond the topia constitutes a revolutionary break, which is resolved into a new topia. Landauer says, “If we call the topias A, B, C (etc), and the utopias a, b, c (etc), then the history of a community goes from A to a to B to b to C to c to D, and so forth” (114). But, he jokes, this makes it seem as though history starts from the beginning of the alphabet, so perhaps we should instead go with the middle of the alphabet, M, m, and so on. But even then, we would need to decide if history begins with society or the revolutionary idea. The whole enterprise quickly comes to seem futile, because what we have really is all that has happened and all that is occurring. As Landauer sums it up: Geschehen. History has no beginning, and no end. Indeed, because Landauer sees history has necessarily having no end point, there is no beginning; process is all.

Similarly, Elisée Reclus, the anarchist geographer I mentioned in the introduction, attends to the ways that ongoing transformation – revolution – is a continual process with no fixed outcome. He writes, “Everything changes, everything in nature moves as part of an eternal movement. But where there is progress, there can also be regression, and if some evolutions tend toward the growth of life, there are others that incline toward death. To stop is impossible, and it is necessary to move in one direction or another” (Reclus 2013, 139). In the concluding volume of his massive series L’Homme et la Terre, Reclus elaborates a view of progress as emerging from an “infinite entanglement of historical facts” that may seem to be evenly grouped together. But, he writes, “beneath the surface there is a constant movement of action and reason, and the sum of the various conflicting forces can never carry humanity along a straight line” (Reclus 2013, 223). So, looking at the course of history allows us to perceive that before us “lies the infinite network of parallel, diverging, and intersecting roads that other segments of humanity have followed. And throughout this series of epochs stretching out toward an indefinite horizon, we find examples that appeal to our spirit of imitation” (Reclus 2013, 222-223). Le Guin’s work takes up the project of offering examples that can appeal to our spirit of imitation – but this time from the perspective of offering imagined rather than historical worlds. If stopping is impossible, and we take the responsibility of choosing then which directions to go, we can take queer lines in new directions.

In their book on prefigurative politics, Paul Raekstad and Sofa Gradin similarly forward a “process” view of revolution. They distinguish “three main ways in which anti-capitalists think about revolution:” 1) “the one big event view,” a singular event in which people seize state power; 2) “the flash-flash-bang view” – with reference to autonomous marxists and especially John Holloway’s formulation of transformation – as “a series of cracks or ruptures within capitalism and/or the state,” and 3) the “process” view. They define this approach thus:

Here revolution is conceptualised as a process of creating and developing ongoing mass organisations and movements which fight for reforms in the present and aim to replace capitalism and the state with free, equal, and democratic socialist institutions. As such organisations grow, develop, and struggle, they change the powers, drives, and consciousness of their members individually and collectively. Their growth and development and winning of reforms increases their powers and the powers of their members, developing and altering members’ drives and consciousness, making it possible for them to replace capitalism and the state (Raekstad & Gradin 2020, 58).  

Raekstad and Gradin articulate this process-oriented conception of fundamental societal transformation as in some real way requiring a prefigurative politics. If we think about prefiguration in the expanded way Dixon outlines, which is to say as including both transformations to how we live and to the social and material infrastructures of our lives, the we can perceive some of the usefulness of linking the unity of means and ends with a conception of ongoing societal transformation.

Arguing with one of the propertarians on Urras, Shevek says: “We don’t want purity, but complexity, the relationship of cause and effect, means and ends. Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It’s not the answer we are after, but only how to ask questions…” (226). Shevek is of course here a fictional character talking about his passion, physics. In his love for complexity and attention to means and ends, though, I find resources for how we might attune to starting again, and again after that. Being always in a process of change places us as part of multiple ongoing processes, where the means are all we have and we don’t expect to ever stop.

I come back to my own experience of abolitionist organizing, which is always incredibly messy. Ottawa, where I live, is a fairly transient city. Still, there are people here who have been working on various social justice issues for a very long time. Some of them have done work together, dated each other, broken up, and now have an uneasy capacity to be in the same room for a meeting; some people in the activist scene here have assaulted one another. Sometimes older activists have hard-won wisdom about which political work is not worth taking up here; other times we are too cautious and unwilling to re-try something with a different group of people that might work this time. Sometimes newer activists come in with blazing certainties about how things should be different and with very little curiosity about whether they have the skills and information to responsibly make the claims or plans they’re working on. Some of us are jaded and tired, some are inspired and optimistic. Orienting toward every beginning as part of an ongoing process offers something to the complexities of doing activist work here, for sure. But things get more difficult when someone sexually assaults someone else within the activist scene here: All our efforts to live the collective world we want to create, and our aspirations to keep one another safe enough to take audacious political action, and our belief in not giving up on anyone come to a painful point. And it’s here that the commitment to process opens something that allows me and others to keep trying to build the world we want to see in the present, not being sure how, exactly, it will happen, but entertaining the continual possibility that we can move towards it. The commitment to process and the idea that we never finish hooks together with the idea that no one is disposable, no one should be used instrumentally. We don’t stop. We are part of the world and we can work with it, collectively.

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[1] And “ongoingness” is a core term in Haraway’s work as well. As Catriona Sandilands succinctly sums it up: “By ‘ongoingness’, Haraway means the possibility of making life together with others beyond just surviving: not utopia, but not mere existence, either” (Sandilands 2017, 328).

[2] I have benefitted from conversations with Chris Dixon about ordinary people as the main source of transformation; see the concluding chapter of his forthcoming book For the Long Haul.

[3] It was not until 2000 that Maidu, Redding, and Pitt River tribes won the repatriation of Ishi’s brain, which Le Guin’s father had sent to the Smithsonian for its collection.

[4] In the introduction to a collection of her essays, The Language of the Night Ken Liu writes: “For Le Guin, aesthetics is ethics. In order for art to be free, it must be moral, a constant revolution”

[5] Here I am thinking also with Kilian Jörg’s generative work in “Messy Utopianism and the question of war – What does Staying with the trouble mean in relation to war?” in which they engage what they frame as Donna Haraway’s messy utopianism through the example of anarchist SF writer PM (Hans Widmer)’s book Bolo’bolo. As they write: “The book bolo’bolo, first published in 1983, is a weird hybrid of political tractatus and sci-fi utopia. In it, P.M. tries to formulate a radically mutualist anarchist utopia in which all of the planet has been turned into myrads of little islands of autonomy that can develop according to their desires and needs. In this sketch of joyful life under conditions of a “messy utopia” there is no more central power or larger political blocks fighting for predominance. Instead, all peoples of the planet have reorganized in so-called “bolos” – small scale social units of around 100 to 500 inhabitants – that hold full autonomy to develop their particular vision of the good life without any interferences from above” (Jörg forthcoming in World Literature Studies),  

[6] Or, as Dean Spade puts it “By participating in groups in new ways and practicing new ways of being together, we are both building the world we want and becoming the kind of people who could live in such a world together” (Spade 2020, 17).

[7] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-delegates-to-the-congress-of-the-federation-jurassienne-the-sonvilier-circular

[8] There is much to say about how Le Guin’s formulation contrasts with many strands of theorizations of the relationship between the individual and society in political philosophy, from Rawls to Rousseau to Aristotle or Hobbes.

[9] Trotsky built on this strand in their thinking, and defined permanent revolution as “a revolution which welds together the oppressed masses of town and country around the proletariat organized in soviets; as a national revolution that raises the proletariat to power and thereby opens up the possibility of a democratic revolution growing over into the socialist revolution. The permanent revolution is no isolated leap of the proletariat; rather it is the rebuilding of the whole nation under the leadership of the proletariat” (Trotsky). From this seed, the revolution would need to be ongoing until it was international and global. That is, rather than believing that revolutionary process must go through specific stages (a “stagist” conception, exemplified in Stalinism), this conception of ongoingness as Trotsky developed it articulated the possibility of the working class developing revolutionary potential directly from semi-feudalism, creating anti-capitalist and socialist structures of power, and practicing an international socialist society (Löwy, 15).

[10] This is complex, since Mao’s thinking on continuous revolution was arguably one of the leaping-off points for what became the Cultural Revolution; there is not a way to talk about this theory divorced from the ongoing aftermaths of that political program. One of the ways Mao talks about the need for continuous change is in his conception of practice, which he articulates as connected with knowledge and with the capacity to transform the world. (“Knowledge is a matter of science, and no dishonesty or conceit whatsoever is permissible. What is required is definitely the reverse–honesty and modesty. If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the structure and properties of the atom, you must make physical and chemical experiments to change the state of the atom. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience.”) Mao writes:

In social practice, the process of coming into being, developing and passing away is infinite, and so is the process of coming into being, developing and passing away in human knowledge. As man’s practice which changes objective reality in accordance with given ideas, theories, plans or programmes, advances further and further, his knowledge of objective reality likewise becomes deeper and deeper. The movement of change in the world of objective reality is never-ending and so is man’s cognition of truth through practice (Mao, “On Practice” 1937).

Historian John Bryan Starr argues that the ideal as Mao laid it out in the lead-up to the Cultural Revolution centered on this idea of continuous revolution as a matter of ongoing practice, writing: “Practice, in Mao’s view, is not so much a question of the application of theory on a passive and malleable world as it is a question of the dialectical interaction between the theory and an active and malleating world” (Starr 1971, 627). I am interested in this sense in which we could understand the world itself as active, as hammering back on our theories, as part of the expressive work of remaining available to transformation. In Mao’s thinking, that is a necessary part of the ongoing formation of the world. He says, “in accordance with materialist dialectics, contradiction and struggle are perpetual; otherwise, there would be no world” (Mao, “The Origin of Machine Guns and Mortars, Etc 1959). Transformation through ongoing contradiction is built in to Mao’s conception of dialectics, which is to say, the world.

[11] I thank Jesse Cohn for suggesting I read Landauer on process.