Books like these are really carrying the whole SFF team. Really: The Disposssessed is getting toward half a century old, and is still in many ways the first go-to book for speculative fiction and political economy. That's a testament to the great insight and imagination of the novel itself, of course. But it could also be a wee bit of an indictment of what we've all been up to since then.
A huge amount has been written about it, but I haven't come across any attempt at a brief summary of the key economic institutions and practices of Annares. So I've attempted that below. If you think I've bungled something, please let me know!
Money
There is no money on Annares. At all. In post-capitalist science fiction, money often sneaks in the back way. Annares seems to have legit abolished it.
Property
There are no private property rights. All things are held in common.
- "Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it."
- "If you want things you take them from the depository."
So when do embeddings like these cross the line into unacceptable propertarian covetousness? It appears that this line is permanently vague and contested. Compare, for example, Bedap's ambiguous banter around Shevek's apparently excessive attachment to an orange blanket.
Organisations
Annares is filled with organisations, apparently interwoven, overlapping, and nested. It is especially filled with syndicates. Broadly speaking, a syndicate is some non-hierarchical group of workers devoted to some function. Multiple syndicates co-ordinate as a federative.
There is a rough analogy between a firm and a syndicate (e.g. there is "a Southwest miners' syndicate"; at one point Shevek tells Takver he plans to "[g]o to Abbenay with you and start a syndicate, a printing syndicate"), and a rough analogy between a federative and an industry (there is a "Defense Federative" and a "Physics Federation").
- The transport workers "were the largest federative in the Odonian society: self-organized, of course, in regional syndicates coordinated by representatives who met and worked with the local and central PDC."
- "[T]he Ne Theras Federative was the most active of the volunteer groups that managed and protected the rather limited 'scenic' areas of Anarres."
As well as syndicates and federatives, there are block committees and community management committees. I take the distinction to be between urban (block) and rural (community)?
- "I'm on the block sanitation committee"
- "He volunteered for committee work in the Institute domicile management."
- "One day in each decad [ten-day week] the community management committee or the block committee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such work, they make rotating lists."
We can credibly assume that block committees and community management committees are responsible for establishing and communicating their particular demand-mix to PDC. Then PDC makes decisions about how to allocate scarce resources, and relays decisions to syndicates. (This process might well be computer-assisted. Compare the Walrasian auction. Compare also the material balances planning of Gosplan in the USSR).
The supply and demand of labour is a special case. It is predominantly handled by Divlab.
- "It’s not an order, Oiie. He goes to Divlab—the Division of Labor office—and says, I want to do such and such, what have you got? And they tell him where there are jobs."
- "The human/computer network of files in Divlab was set up with admirable efficiency. It did not take the clerk five minutes to get the desired information sorted out from the enormous, continual input and outgo of information concerning every job being done, every position wanted, every workman needed, and the priorities of each of the general economy of the worldwide society."
- "Tirin couldn’t take it. I think it really drove him a bit out of his mind. He felt everybody was against him, after that. He started talking too much—bitter talk. Not irrational, but always critical, always bitter. And he’d talk to anybody that way. Well, he finished at the Institute, qualified as a math instructor, and asked for a posting. He got one. To a road repair crew in Southsetting. He protested it as an error, but the Divlab computers repeated it. So he went."
- "Divlab, the administration of the division of labor, tried to keep couples together, and to reunite them as soon as possible on request; but it could not always be done, especially in urgent levies, nor did anyone expect Divlab to remake whole lists and reprogram computers trying to do it. To survive, to make a go of life, an Anarresti knew he had to be ready to go where he was needed and do the work that needed doing. He grew up knowing labor distribution as a major factor of life, an immediate, permanent social necessity, whereas conjugality was a personal matter, a choice that could be made only within the larger choice."
OK, so any syndicate, block commitee or community management committee, or any organisation really, is going to be non-hierarchical and self-governing (or at least aspire to be). But what procedures or norms does it typically follow? I think The Dispossessed doesn't include many details about this. But I think what we are shown is consistent with the principle that each syndicate or other organisation might have its own particular set of procedures.
These procedures might vary according to locale, history, best practice as exemplified by parallel organisations, etc. Whatever these procedures are, they will seek to constitute a democracy within the context of some particular complex of technical processes: to ensure that everyone is appropriately informed and empowered, and that decisions crystallise in front of the right people at the right time so that power is relatively evenly distributed, while accommodating some functional specialisation and discriminated areas of responsibility.
We can imagine some variety also in how formalised these procedures are, and in the balance between relying on interpretative decision-making based on precedents, documentation, models, etc. vs. decision-making where authority is located in the decision-makers themselves. Expertise counts, but it doesn't count for everything: there also seems to be some championing of variety and fluidity in work roles, and there are well-established norms to keep the disagreeable or dangerous work in constant rotation.
I don't think there is a strong universal commitment to consensus decision-making. I'm pretty sure that voting is a legitimate mechanism for deciding some matters. What do you think?
- "The experts and the old hands are going to manage any crew or syndicate; they know the work best. The work has to get done, after all!
- Then again, expertise doesn't count for everything. Part of a discussion of intrinsically disagreeable / dangerous work, where there is deliberately high worker churn: "'But then the whole personnel must consist of people just learning the job.' 'Yes. It’s not efficient, but what else is to be done? [...]'"
- Organisations may have membership requirements. "Sabul got up again and came close to him. 'Listen. You’re now a member of the Central Institute of Sciences, a Physics syndic, working with me, Sabul. You follow that? Privilege is responsibility. Correct?'"
- "The argument proceeded as before, a rapid hammering of issues. It did not last long. No vote was taken, as usual."
- "Anybody can attend any PDC meeting, and if he’s an interested syndic, he can debate and vote!"
- “Against the recommendation of this council, and the Defense Federative, and a majority vote of the List!”
There is no government on Annares -- or is there? PDC (Production and Distribution Coordination) is the closest thing Annares has to a government. It is also populated via sortition, with strict four-year limits for all officers. The safeguards against PDC disabling their checks and balances seem to be mainly cultural.
There is also a throwaway line which suggests that anyone from a syndicate can attend and vote on matters which directly pertain to that syndicate.
- Shevek and Bedap argue: "'[...] As for PDC, yes, it might become a hierarchy, a power structure, if it weren’t organized to prevent exactly that. Look how it’s set up! Volunteers, selected by lot; a year of training; then four years as a Listing; then out. Nobody could gain power, in the archist sense, in a system like that, with only four years to do it in.' / 'Some stay on longer than four years.' / 'Advisors? They don’t keep the vote.' / 'Votes aren’t important. There are people behind the scenes—' / 'Come on! That’s sheer paranoia! Behind the scenes—how? What scenes? Anybody can attend any PDC meeting, and if he’s an interested syndic, he can debate and vote!'"
- Shevek says: "The network of administration and management is called PDC, Production and Distribution Coordination. They are a coordinating system for all syndicates, federatives, and individuals who do productive work. They do not govern persons; they administer production. They have no authority either to support me or to prevent me."
- "But, as they said in the analogic mode, you can’t have a nervous system without at least a ganglion, and preferably a brain. There had to be a center. The computers that coordinated the administration of things, the division of labor, and the distribution of goods, and the central federatives of most of the work syndicates, were in Abbenay, right from the start. And from the start the Settlers were aware that that unavoidable centralization was a lasting threat, to be countered by lasting vigilance."
Is Divlab part of PDC? I am not sure. I think it is.
Work
Work is unpaid and voluntary, but there is strong social and cultural pressure to work.
Most commentaries on the novel don't seem to pick up on this -- so perhaps I'm misreading it? But there do seem to be at least two different ways you get work. First there are "postings," which are assigned centrally by Divlab (the Division of Labour). Secondly, some work seems to be assigned by local community committees.
- Here Shevek is discussing disagreeable work specifically: "One day in each decad the community management committee or the block committee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such work, they make rotating lists. Then the disagreeable work posting, or dangerous ones like the mercury mines and mills, normally they’re for one half year only."
- Shevek on refusing a posting: "We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice."
- Takver challenges Shevek about this pessimism: "Only since the drought. Before that there wasn’t half so much posting. People just worked up jobs where they wanted them, and joined a syndicate or formed one, and then registered with Divlab. Divlab mostly posted people who preferred to be in General Labor Pool." I find this a little ambiguous? I think "registered" in this context means registering a demand for labour, and I think Takver is saying that Divlab would only draft you into a posting (in normal times) if you'd overtly listed yourself as down for whatever.
- "Even Abbenay [the largest city] kept up the close regional pattern in its 'blocks,' the semiautonomous neighborhoods in which you could get to anyone or anything you needed, on foot."
- "One day in each decad the community management committee or the block committee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such work, they make rotating lists."
Pravic, the constructed language of Annares, supposedly has only one word for 'work' and 'play.' That said, there is a separate word for 'drudgery.'
Also
Still to add: quotations about partnerships, children, family, the Asylum.
(JLW)
