This is gonna take a long long time (living between two planets)
Ursula K. le Guin and Anarchism
Casino for Social Medicine, 24 May 2025
Donna Haraway: “Her stories are about ongoingness. She is again and again telling stories that don’t end in apocalypse”
Ruth Wilson Gilmore: 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)
“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)
Combahee River Collective: “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).
The Lathe of Heaven:
“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means” (83).
“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).
“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).
Collective dreaming: Er’ perrhnne, recognizes that being Iahklu’ is “too much for one person to handle alone” (168).
Prefiuguration
Chris Dixon, prefiguration: “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” (Dixon, Another Politics, 84-85).
Zoe Baker: “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).
Myles Horton: “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).
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).
The Dispossessed
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).
Bedap: “Change is freedom, change is life – is anything more basic to Odonian thought than that?” (166).
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