The Communist Manifesto, first published in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, clearly gives a voice to the powerless and oppressed in history – namely the slaves in ancient societies, the serfs or peasants under feudalism, and now the working classes under capitalism. They describe the great events of world history as the coming to power of the bourgeoisie, the vast increase in human production and the ‘subjection of Nature’s forces to man’ (Manifesto p85) on a global scale, thus creating the conditions for the next and final great event: the triumph of the working classes or “proletariat”. Marx and Engels promise the industrial proletariat the correct view of history, which puts the powerless and the oppressed at the centre of revolutionary change, and offers human liberation through class struggle. Once communism is achieved there will be no private property, no class system, and no state government.
Ursula Le Guin effectively puts a post-revolutionary society to the test in her fictional world of Anarres, a ‘thriving’ communist anarchist society (Urbanowicz p110), from her novel The Dispossessed. If Marx and Engels offer political salvation to the powerless and oppressed, Le Guin’s novel picks up the story to examine in more detail the conflicts within an imagined classless society.
The conclusions that can be drawn from Le Guin’s novel are already contained within its title. On Anarres, people lack not only possessions but do not fully possess themselves;
