I almost withdrew my nomination for Four Ways to Forgiveness after rereading it. Not that I don’t love most of this novel—not that freedom isn’t its primary focus; not that the four connecting stories (including the Nebula-winning “Forgiveness Day”) about the liberation of a slave people aren’t dramatic and compelling. It’s just that I got really disturbed by Le Guin for the first time, and one little exchange between two characters was the reason.

“ ‘If you put yourself first, if you won’t cooperate, you bring danger on us all.‘

‘I don’t put myself first—politicians and capitalists do, that. I put freedom first.’ ”

Now I have no problem with the dig against politicians: we are shown politicians that sell their souls to the devil in this novel. But the dig against capitalists seems silly and misplaced, especially when the novel‘s society shows no evidence of capitalists or capitalism—no evil tycoons using the state to hamper competition and enrich themselves unfairly, no Randian egoists building great empires which are actually beneficial to society but still seem evil to leftists.

The remark seemed out of context except as an expression of authorial prejudice. One other mention is made of capitalism and that is a barely redeeming, serving only to underscore my point: A heroine (well that’s something) tells us: “Because I come of a capitalist people. I went to other worlds to see if I could make more money at them. But I came back to the first one. I liked the people there.” As if a capitalist’s only consideration is money. Sigh. Well, it fits the stereotypical capitalist anyway.

Many current and former LFS members might wonder why it took me so long to get upset. Le Guin has always annoyed many free-market libertarians with remarks like these. She is an anarchist of the Bakunin/Proudhon stripe, and her communistic skirts shows. She eschews government, but also is very distrustful of capitalism as it has existed historically, i.e., state-capitalism. in many of her novels, her characters make nasty comments about property and owners. In fact, the bad guys in The Dispossessed were called propertarians. No wonder many LFS’ers got upset. We have as strong a gut-reaction in favor of the words property and capitalism as leftist-anarchists have against them. And yet there is much in Le Guin (and in Bakunin, in particular) to attract freemarketeers.

For instance, look at this digested version of Bakunin’s philosophy from a sympathetic French writer, Daniel Guerin, in his book Anarchism:

“Bakunin pushed the practice of ‘absolute and complete liberty’ very far. I am entitled to dispose of my person as I please, to be idle or active, to live either honestly, by my own labor, or even by shamefully exploiting charity or private confidence. All this on one condition only: That this charity, or confidence, is voluntary and given to me only by individuals who have attained their majority. I even have the right to enter into associations whose objects make them ‘immoral’, or apparently so.”

Did Bakunin make an exception for economic activities, believing since capitalism was somehow detrimental to freedom, it should be forbidden by law? Apparently not, here is direct quote: “Liberty must defend itself only through liberty; to try and restrict it on the specious pretext of defending it is a dangerous contradiction.”

It sometimes seems that the main difference between (a) free-market anarchist and (b) a communist anarchist can only be that each believes that if humans were perfectly educated, if they knew what was best for them, what would make them happiest and most free, they would all choose (b) communalism, or (a) a free market system. [Pick your answer according to your philosophy.] Is the difference between these types of anarchism important? It is only if the individuals in any anarchist society fail to hold to anarchist principle. In other words, allow the people in the society to choose for themselves (and no one else) how they wish to live, and there isn’t a problem.

Naturally, I’d bet that a free market system will win for most people, and there are thousands of reasons but I’ll give just one tiny example. Every leftist— leaning friend that I have used to live in a commune, but now live in a house they own themselves. Why? When asked they hem and haw a lot, but it comes down to: Life is very difficult when nothing is your own, everything belongs to everyone and every decision is made by the collective. In other words, it’s a supreme pain in the ass. What leftists fail to realize is that a strict insistence on property rights helps regular people to be free, to control their lives. Property rights even help the poor (gasp!). The problem with statist versions of capitalism is that property rights are only perfectly protected for a selected few. Become a suspected drug dealer or say no to the IRS and see how well your property rights are defended.

The consequences of LFS members’ attraction/repulsion for Le Guin’s brand of anarchism have been interesting, to say the least. There has probably been more written in Prometheus about Ursula K. Le Guin than about any other novelist. During the ten-year-long battle to get (or to avoid getting depending on your point of view) The Dispossessed into the LFS Hall of Fame, most of the membership seemed to have something to say, for or against, and the sides were fairly evenly divided.

On the pro side were novelist Robert Shea, activist and writer Samuel Edward Konkin III, LFS member Dr. Bonnie Kaplan, and of course, as editor during much of this time (and as a fan of Le Guin’s) I often threw in my three cents without even a pretense of impartiality.

On the con side were Prof. Joseph P. Martino, author of Science Funding: Boondoggle or …, former Prometheus editor Lenda Jackson, LFS member Jim Stumm and many others. A few people quit LFS rather than belong to an organization that would even consider such a novel for a libertarian award.

With this tumultuous background, why did I nominate Four Ways To Forgiveness? Well, consider the following: Le Guin’s latest novel, like The Dispossessed, is set in a solar system where two planets are settled by humanoids and one is a colony of the other. The word “owner” has a particularly nasty meaning in this novel; slavery is perfectly legal and common on both worlds.

There are no physical differences between owner and owned in this system, except that owners have a blue-black skin, and the “owned” are usually dusty-grey. It is instructive for a white American reader to dwell for a time in the minds of dark-skinned fictional characters who are convinced that their lighter-skinned slaves are inferiors, and even more interesting to get under the skin, so to speak, of the slaves who believe in their inferiority, as slaves often do.

In these four stories, freedom is “the one noble thing,” but there are many ways to be unfree. The colony planets slaves revolt and win, much to the owners’ amazement: “The slaves defeated us from beginning to end…Partly because my government didn’t understand that they could.” But the newly-liberated females find that they are not free at all, but slaves of their men.

“A free man’s women are free,” proclaims a chief, but they are not. This injustice radicalizes the women in very interesting and anarchist ways. For instance a group of women fights so that the money that they earn with their labor will no longer be held in trust by tribal leaders, but will be available to them to use as they see fit. Then they use the money to escape to the city. One woman expresses exactly my feelings about “leaders”: “Whether the Ekumen was a true ally or a new set of Owners in disguise, she didn’t know, but she liked to see any chief get down. Werelian Bosses, strutting tribal headmen, or ranting demagogues, let them taste dirt.”

As I said above there are many ways to be unfree, and this book recognizes only some of them, but those it does recognize are very beautifully drawn. “We are a free people now,” says a young chief who believes his wife is his to be dominated. And a woman character answers politely, “I haven’t yet known a free people.” Neither have I, but there’s still hope.

“A group of us women went home talking through the streets, talking aloud. These were my streets now, with their traffic and lights and dangers and life. I was a City women, a free woman. That night I was an owner. I owned the City. I owned the future.”

There's that word “owner” again, this time used in what must be a positive way. And here is my point: can one be free without being an owner, without owning one's work, one's life, one's future? What sense can be made of one's life if the one who lives it doesn't own it? More, how can one own one's life without being able to own the fruits of it—property? And which society would best ensure this ownership, own were the private property of each individual is vigorously defended, or one where property, especially the means of production, is owned by everyone and no one?