The Word for World is Forest Symposium: Sean MacCracken

Anarres Project

In this presentation from the October 2022 symposium honoring the 50th anniversary of Ursula K. Le Guin's novella, Sean MacCracken examines the way Le Guin depicts the colonialism of her intergalactic federation in the Hainish series and what lessons we might take for our political organizing today. He describes his talk:

In the six-part documentary , Capitalism, David Graeber reflects on the historical question of the colonial world-empire, and why Western Europe was the first to “achieve” it, contending that this is really the wrong question. Many societies, he reflects, such as China, could have done so, though it wouldn’t occur to them to, say, depopulate entire continents in search of gold and silver. Racial capitalism has a forerunner in colonial conquest, itself a form of high-stakes venture capitalism. Though within the wide framework of human possibility such colonial action is in fact the exception rather than the rule.

By what mental sickness is such colonial action permissible and even laudable by some, where it would be abhorrent to others? In the Word for World is Forest, Le Guin imparts one of her bleakest tales in the history of her richly imagined interstellar society, the League of All Worlds, as a remote colonial project brutalizes a planet’s indigenous inhabitants, with tragic results. A recurring theme in Le Guin’s rich anthropology-infused imaginings is that of an unsettling encounter between mutually incommensurate forms of social organization. What my presentation teases out from that theme is the varied channels of communication portrayed in LeGuin’s novella, and some of their explanatory potency for present day work in direction action and dual power movement-building.

Within the intimate scale of political action at a local, municipalist level, I argue that present-day reactionary extremism, toxic masculinity, and violence are as much the product of communication’s lack as they are the product of active recruitment. LeGuin’s lines of communication here serve as fictive symbols for that precarious lack—whether communication by dreams, by radio, or by ansible.