Economy

bread_and_roses

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43. Alternatives To How We Live Now: Le Guin Blasts Fear, Greed and the Profit Motive

Thu Jan 1, 2015, 12:49 PM

Jan 2015

I cannot recommend Ursula K. Le Guin highly enough. The two novels mentioned here are mind-bending while being accessible and readable to a general audience, not just sci-fi aficionados. Of particular note for this group in "The Dispossessed" - a fascinating meditation on individualism/communalism, capitalism/communism, and human nature under any system all wrapped in a good story.

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2014/12/30/alternatives-how-we-live-now-le-guin-blasts-fear-greed-and-profit-motive

Alternatives To How We Live Now: Le Guin Blasts Fear, Greed and the Profit Motive

Amidst the best-of-2014 lists seeking to burnish a pretty dark year, we should find a place for the barn-burning speech by 85-year-old novelist Ursula Le Guin at the National Book Awards, where she accepted a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters for her decades of Marxist, feminist, gender-bending, capitalism-smashing science fiction - most notably The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed

... "Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

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