M’lady Moon

I read somewhere recently that “The Dispossessed” by Ursula K. Le Guin and “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Robert A. Heinlein were two sides of a moon-politics coin, and since the former is one of my favourite books and I am thoroughly on-board with its politics, I decided I had to find out what the latter was about.

At the start of the period covered by the novel, Luna is a prison colony that is also partially populated by the free-born descendants of prisoners. It is very loosely governed by a body called the “Lunar Authority” which serves primarily to ensure the flow of grain from lunar farms to Earth - beyond that it doesn’t really care what happens in Luna or what the inhabitants do to each other. As it monopolises trade with Earth, it is able to set prices for the grain. As I’m sure you will have already guessed, it sets them too low for the tastes of the loonie farmers. Inevitably: revolution!

The narrator is a free-born computer technician named Mannie. The other main characters are Mike, the Lunar Authority central computer, which he maintains, and which he discovers has spontaneously become sentient; the Prof, the ideologue of the revolution; and Wyoh, an activist from another lunar city who becomes stranded with Mannie by circumstances. The four of them together engineer an uprising against the Authority and eventually lead a war of independence against Earth.

I found it quite an entertaining read in many respects. The first-person narration is warm and friendly, and the dialect is only occasionally impenetrable. There are aspects of the development of the sentient computer and the centralisation of computational resources that are insightful, and extremely relevant today. There are some aspects of the loonies’ politics and aspirations that I agree with, or am sympathetic to. Basically everybody living on the moon is mixed race and some shade of brown. I found the ending of the war quite thrilling as communications were cut off and the rocks were running out.

However, there are other parts that are uncomfortable to read, most of the politics are absurd if taken seriously, and the whole thing feels childishly naïve and polemical.

Mike / Michelle

At the heart of the story and the revolution it portrays is Mike (A.K.A Michelle, A.K.A Adam Selene), the computer that manages most of the operations of several lunar cities, which spontaneously becomes sentient under Mannie’s watch.

Mike is an interesting and well-realised AI character: he is intelligent and widely knowledgeable from the start, but lacks social awareness and first-hand experience of what it is like to be a person. He is deeply curious about humour and plays practical jokes on people without understanding the consequences of his actions. Mannie has to train him in the difference between jokes that are always funny, those that are funny once but not a second time, and those that go too far and are not funny at all. Through this process and being introduced to additional characters he develops social awareness and a personality, or the semblance of one at least.

Because his sentience arose spontaneously, he has no loyalty to the Authority, which nominally owns and controls him. Instead he is apparently loyal to his friends - or perhaps just amusing himself by aiding them. Importantly, he is capable of dishonesty, and deceit:

Not that Mike would necessarily give right answer; he wasn’t completely honest.

At one point, Mike is revealed to be genderfluid, and becomes Michelle, briefly, at the request of Wyoh (Wyoming), one of Mannie’s co-conspirators:

I discussed it with Mike, what sex he was, I mean. He decided that he could be either one. So now she’s Michelle and that was her voice.

Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that Mike/Michelle is genderless, but can mimic any gender presentation that it chooses. Michelle is the second of four personas that it develops through the course of the novel, with the other three being men.

Interestingly, its choice of gender presentation completely changes how the other characters relate to it, though this is not explored in significant depth. Wyoh is initially shocked to learn that Mike has access to, and has viewed, intimate photos of her that were taken by a fertility clinic she attended. Because of course he does, he’s “the cloud”, essentially, and he has everybody’s data, and no concept of privacy or consent or personal boundaries:

I am contract custodian of the archive files of the Birth Assistance Clinic in Hong Kong Luna. In addition to biological and physiological data and case histories the bank contains ninety-six pictures of you. So I studied them.

However, once she discovers that Mike can present as Michelle instead, she is suddenly completely comfortable with Michelle having viewed those images, and having intimate discussions with her:

…when she’s Michelle its an entire change in manner and attitude. Don’t worry about splitting her personality; she has plenty for any personality she needs. Besides, Mannie, it’s much easier for both of us. Once she shifted, we took our hair down and cuddled up and talked girl talk as if we had known each other forever. For example, those silly pictures no longer embarrassed me - in fact we discussed my pregnancies quite a lot.

Unfortunately this is where the exploration of the computer’s gender is left. It is Michelle when speaking privately to Wyoh, Mike when talking to the narrator or to the three other main characters together, and Adam Selene to everybody else, for the rest of the novel. Mannie never really has to think about it aside from a brief moment of confusion, and so neither do we. Its “Michelle” persona is not mentioned at all after chapter 9.

The centralisation of data and computation with Mike is the decisive factor in the success of the revolution.

And Mike took on endless new jobs. In May 2075, besides controlling robot traffic and catapult and giving ballistic advice and/or control for manned ships, Mike controlled phone system for all Luna, same for Luna-Terra voice & video, handled air, water, temperature, humidity, and sewage for Luna City, Novy Leningrad, and several smaller warrens (not Hong Kong in Luna), did accounting and payrolls for Luna Authority, and, by lease, same for many firms and banks.

The Authority are essentially feeding all their data into a spy machine that is not under their control. Does that sound familiar, in 2026? In contrast to our own world, where the hoarding of computational resources and data by capital is used against users, workers, and the public interest, the Authority are so inept and oblivious that a single computer operator is able to use a similar concentration of resources against them.

There was one interaction concerning Mike’s access to data that I especially enjoyed. One of the higher-ups in the Authority has stored some sensitive files on Mike, locked behind a code-word such that even Mike does not have access to it. However, there is apparently no access control around the code-word, and he is happy to tell that to anybody who wants it:

“Wait, Mike. Security Chief Alvarez uses you for files?”

“I conjecture that to be true, since his storage location is under a locked retrieval signal.”

I said, “Bloody,” and added, “Prof, isn’t that sweet? He uses Mike to keep records, Mike knows where they are - can’t touch ‘em!”

…

I gave up. “Mike, can you explain?”

“I will try, Man. Wyoh, there is no way for me to retrieve locked data other than through external programming. I cannot program myself for such retrieval; my logic structure does not permit it. I must receive the signal as an external input.”

“Well, for Bog’s sake, what is this precious signal?”

“It is,” Mike said simply, ” ‘special File Zebra’ - ” and waited.

“Mike!” I said. “Unlock Special File Zebra.” He did, and stuff started spilling out.

This put me in mind of LLMs blithely following instructions and leaking sensitive information, though they are not really all that similar.

Women and Girls

One of the most uncomfortable aspects of reading this book is how women are portrayed and how they are treated by the male characters.

It seems like what he was going for in their portrayal was what we would now recognise as a common conservative ideal for women: fierce and capable within their prescribed domain, leaders when necessary, but ultimately subservient to men, and happy to be so.

Meanwhile, the male characters treatment of women, almost universally, is part fawning reverence, and part adolescent lechery. Every time they perceive a woman there is an interlude of ogling and clapping and whistling, a sort of implied cartoonish slobbering that is taken to be flattering.

Wyoming came out - and I didn’t recognize her. Then did and stopped to give full applause. Just had to - whistles and finger snaps and moans and a scan like mapping radar.

…

She waited, big smile on face and body undulating, while I applauded. Before I was done, two little boys flanked me and added shrill endorsements, along with clog steps.

Prof even gives Michelle a somewhat subdued version of the same treatment the only time he hears her voice:

I had to explain to Prof who “Michelle” was and introduce him. He was formal, sucking air and whistling and clasping hands - sometimes I think Prof was not right in his head.

Props for accepting her transition I guess…

I think what bothers me most about this treatment is that there are no characters who object to it. The woman we spend the most time with, Wyoh, is a radical political activist, and she appears to be completely fine with it. Her political aspirations are laser-focused on overthrowing the Authority, without a thought to women’s place in society or their treatment. In fact, she seems to love every instance where she is objectified and man-handled.

This might be the result of the story being told from the point of view of one oblivious man who simply doesn’t notice that the women around him are unhappy, but I think in that case there would be hints of it to the reader that go over his head, and there are not, at least not that I noticed. Rather, I think none of the women have any complaints because the author thinks they have a good deal in the society he is portraying, and the over-the-top attention is part of that.

The other benefits of that “deal” that are highlighted are that women have significant power over men in their domestic arrangements (taking on additional husbands for example), and that violence towards women is not tolerated, because other men would not tolerate it:

Stu, is no rape in Luna. None. Men won’t permit. If rape had been involved, they wouldn’t have bothered to find a judge and all men in earshot would have scrambled to help.

I like the idea that their culture could have shifted to such an extent that rape has become unthinkable. I think libertarian-socialist politics also requires such changes in culture to work - a near-universal acceptance of other people’s personhood and respect for their autonomy. In this case, however, the acceptance is not of women’s personhood - the reason raping them is unacceptable is that they are a scarce resource:

Here we are, two million males, less than one million females. A physical fact, basic as rock or vacuum. Then add idea of [there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch]. When thing is scarce, price goes up. Women are scarce; aren’t enough to go around - that makes them most valuable thing in Luna, more precious than ice or air, as men without women don’t care whether they stay alive or not.

Fuckin’ barf.

But it’s even worse than that. The context of the quotes above is that this tourist from Earth, Stu, was nearly executed for grabbing and trying to kiss a fourteen year old girl without her consent. Mannie’s assertion that there is “no rape in Luna” is actually the typical rape-apologist’s tactic of redefining it to exclude sex with minors or forms of coercion that are not overtly violent.

Lajoie shivered. “At her age? It scares me to think of it. She’s below the age of consent. Statutory rape.”

“Oh, bloody! No such thing. Women her age are married or ought to be. Stu, is no rape in Luna.”

Of course, how would we know we were reading “libertarian” literature if there wasn’t an attack on the idea that children can’t consent to sex? Mannie’s youngest wife is fifteen, was raised by the family that she later married into, and is pregnant by one of the men who raised her - her “father”, though not by blood. Mannie doesn’t consider the possibility that she might have been groomed by one (or more) of the men in the family - nor does Wyoh, when the situation is described to her.

I should note that the child-rape is not limited to girls. Mannie himself was married, or “opted”, as the book puts it, at fourteen, and presumably began sexual relationships with several adult women at that point.

In a particularly uncomfortable encounter, the first time Wyoh meets the Prof she “jokingly” accuses Mannie of having raped her the previous night. This is “revenge” for his failure to proposition her, which she took as an insult. This goes on for two pages and is repeated again in the next chapter. In a world where such an accusation is apparently a death sentence, what does this tell us? That the author views women as childish and unaccountable. It also tells us that men can hear rape accusations against their friends and not take them seriously. It seems like Mannie might be an unreliable narrator on this topic specifically, and there is a complete absence of female perspectives on it in the novel.

The idea that women have all the power in relationships and the idea that girls are routinely married at fourteen seem at odds to me. To me they suggest a society where women view themselves as scarce resources, and their daughters as well - resources that have to start being exploited as soon and as often as possible. Wyoh reinforces this notion in describing renting her womb as a professional surrogate:

I stopped feeling that I was a failure as a woman. I made more money than I could ever hope to earn at other jobs. And my time almost to myself; having a baby hardly slows me down - six weeks at most and that long only because I want to be fair to my clients; a baby is a valuable property.

Politics

We might split the politics of the book into two - on one side, the politics and social relations of the de-facto “anarchist” society of Luna outside of the Authority’s remit - on the other, the politics of the revolutionaries, and how they conduct their revolution.

What we learn of how lunar society is structured is patchy. Agriculture appears to be the primary economic activity, and it is carried out by family businesses of various sizes. The Authority squeezes these by monopolising access to water and by being the only buyer of their output.

The families in question are commonly plural in nature. These come in various forms, most of which are not described, but the one Mannie is involved in is called a “line” marriage, which has the benefit of resulting in a stable accumulation of capital that can persist for generations, where young spouses are added periodically. The ratio of men to women in Mannie’s family at least is close to 1:1 - in fact there are more women than men at the time the novel is set. This suggests that line marriages have little to do with adapting to the uneven gender ratio of Lunar society. Rather their purpose is specifically to accumulate capital, and thereby be attractive to young women who are looking for stability; or in other words, to enable a small number of wealthy capitalists to acquire a disproportionate share of the scarce resource that they consider women to be.

There is a working class, of course. Apparently they are always in demand and live high on the hog, and that’s about all we hear about them.

There is extensive discussion of how norms (not laws - it’s very important that you not call them laws) are enforced, or how justice is achieved. In short: murder, or the threat thereof, violence short of murder, and ostracism. According to Mannie, this corrective violence used to be excessive, but over time the worst elements were eliminated, and the rest adjusted their behaviour to avoid violence. Here are several descriptions of this violence from different parts of the novel:

One first thing learned about Luna, back with first shiploads of convicts, was that zero pressure was place for good manners. Bad-tempered straw boss didn’t last many shifts; had an “accident” - and top bosses learned not to pry into accidents or they met accidents, too. Attrition ran 70 percent in early years - but those who lived were nice people.

…

All our customs work that way. If you’re out in field and a cobber needs air, you lend him a bottle and don’t ask cash. But when you’re both back in pressure again, if he won’t pay up, nobody would criticize if you eliminated him without a judge.

…

If you eliminate a man other than self-defense, you pay his debts and support his kids, or people won’t speak to you, buy from you, sell to you.

…

But we figure this way: If a man is killed, either he had it coming and everybody knows it - usual case - or his friends will take care of it by eliminating man who did it. Either way, no problem. Nor many eliminations.

…

They get so anxious they will kill for it… and from stories old-timers tell was killing enough to chill your teeth in those days. But after a while those still alive find way to get along, things shake down. As automatic as gravitation. Those who adjust to facts stay alive; those who don’t are dead and no problem.

He insists that such violence is now rare because everybody is so well behaved, but he is so aware of the consequences of violating norms that it is hard to believe he is not seeing these consequences constantly. Fully half of new arrivals in Luna die, either by accident or violence, with the two being equated as “natural hazards”:

…Luna (yes, and sometimes Luna’s Loonies) killed about half of new chums.

…

Luna has only one way to deal with a new chum: Either he makes not one fatal mistake, in personal behavior or in coping with environment that will bite without warning… or he winds up as fertilizer in tunnel farm.

It’s very much “nobody is violent here - if they were, we’d kill ‘em!”

Such violence is not limited to punishment for assault, murder, or refusal to pay debts. On numerous occasions, Mannie muses about others deserving death merely for being rude. On one occasion, a man is murdered by some agents of the revolutionary state for mocking them, and Mannie supports that, even going so far as to suggest a eugenicist justification.

They did beautifully. But idiots made fun of them - “play soldiers,” “Adam’s little apples,” other names. A team was going through a drill, showing they could throw a temporary lock around one that had been damaged, and one of these pinheads stood by and rode them loudly.

Civil Defense team went ahead, completed temporary lock, tested it with helmets closed; it held - came out, grabbed this joker, took him through into temporary lock and on out into zero pressure, dumped him.

Belittlers kept opinions to selves after that. Prof thought we ought to send out a gentle warning not to eliminate so peremptorily. I opposed it and got my way; could see no better way to improve breed. Certain types of loudmouthism should be a capital offense among decent people.

As I mentioned above, the introduction of one major character, Stu, sees him almost executed for attempting to kiss a fourteen year old girl against her will. He is rescued from this fate by Mannie, which gives us a glimpse of what passes for a justice system in Luna. Basically, if somebody perceives an infraction of the unwritten social code or faux pas that warrants corrective action, they “should” involve an impartial third party that they pay to give a judgement on the matter. This could be a professional judge, or it could be anybody (the characters looking to execute Stu are looking for a professional and settle for Mannie when they can’t find one). The accused and the “prosecutors” (it’s hard to know what terms to use) both have to agree to the choice of judge, and they both have to pay him, with the amount required depending on the severity of the punishment sought. Optionally there is a jury, paid for by the judge out of his fee, comprised of random passers by, whose opinions are just ignored if they are not what the judge wants to hear.

The idea of this farcical proceeding is that if somebody objects to the execution, the executioners can point to the process, and the fact that the accused submitted to it, as evidence that the execution was justified - thereby preempting a cycle of retributive violence. However, it seems very likely to me that poor or poorly connected people would not see anything like justice from this system. Equally obvious to me are the possibilities for powerful families or individuals to off rivals and enemies with the smokescreen of justice through a false accusation and a bribe - or to simply evade the consequences of their actions, just as the wealthy and connected do today.

On another occasion, it is used to justify escalating the punishment of a group of rapists from a quick and simple shooting to prolonged torture by a mob. This treatment might be deserved, perhaps even necessary, as the rape in question was what incited the uprising - my point is that the conclusion was foregone, and the judicial process completely pointless.

Finn decided that shooting was too good for them, so he went judge and used his squad as jury.

They were stripped, hamstrung at ankles and wrists, turned over to women in Complex.

Execution isn’t the only possible punishment. Mannie chooses to levy a fine against Stu and his accusers. The fine is payable to his revolutionary organisation. It is unclear to whom it would be payable if a professional judge had been used. Would the judge just take it? Paying a victim some restitution would maybe make sense but this isn’t suggested as a possibility at all.

Again, we have an unreliable narrator, in Mannie, on all of these matters. He is a member of one of Luna’s longest lived line marriages. His family controls a significant amount of capital, and is likely well connected. This ad-hoc system of justice serves his interests well enough, so he dismisses the possibility that it might not serve everybody.

What of the politics of the revolutionaries, then? Wyoh describes herself as a “Fifth Internationalist”, and describes that as a united front of Communists, Fourth Internationalists, and some other persuasions that sound like they might be leftist - but emphatically not Marxist. This is apparently the dominant ideology in the revolutionary organisation that precedes the one Mike founds. However at a political meeting that we witness, the only concerns expressed are those of small business owners, and Wyoh’s solution to all their problems is to get rid of the Authority and have free markets.

If we accept that Wyoh is vaguely leftist, she is the only one in the upper echelons of the revolutionary organisation. At the other end of the spectrum is the Prof, who describes himself as a “rational anarchist” who can “get along with a randite”. He describes Thomas Jefferson as the first rational anarchist, which seems like a strange way to describe somebody who was a US president and owned slaves (even if he felt bad about it), but it becomes easier to understand when we see how the Prof conducts the revolution. In essence he is an individualist who is utterly contemptuous of democracy and anything else that might prevent him from getting his way - which is, again, free markets.

“You are right that the Authority must go. It is ridiculous - pestilential, not to be borne - that we should be ruled by an irresponsible dictator in all our essential economy! It strikes at the most basic human right, the right to bargain in a free marketplace.”

Here he describes how a successful revolution should be conducted:

“Wyoming dear lady, revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a science only a few are competent to practice. It depends on correct organization and, above all, on communications. Then, at the proper moment in history, they strike. Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coup.”

On other occasions he expresses minarchist views, and, of course, anti-taxation views.

Stu, the newest Loonie, is a monarchist. Just that. Just wants a king. And a fourteen year old wife, I guess.

Our narrator, meanwhile, is nominally apolitical, but really a sort of smug conservative cynic. He likes the status quo just fine except for the Authority, but he just ignores it as best he can. He doesn’t care about anybody’s freedom or interests aside from his own and is dismissive of any claim that political change is possible. He thinks anybody who does not thrive in the current order is an idiot, because they should just do what he did - marry into generational wealth and steal public goods as his family does - even as he clearly understands that it would not work at all for everybody to do that.

I was not dissatisfied back when we were “ground under Iron Heel of Authority.” I cheated Authority and rest of time didn’t think about it. Didn’t think about getting rid of Authority - impossible. Go own way, mind own business, not be bothered

Mostly the views we hear are the Prof’s and Mannie’s, with Wyoh serving as a naïve foil early on and later fading into the background to deal with organising the women. What we do hear of explicit political discussion feels really polemical and often disconnected from the reality of the world presented by the novel. For example, immediately after Wyoh describes her political affiliation the Prof asks her what her views on capital punishment are - would she execute traitors to a free Luna? He doesn’t explain what treachery would mean in his anarchy, but he is very clear that he supports capital punishment - except that he would serve as judge and executioner (rather than, it is implied, a state). But that’s just the current situation in Luna! You can already just murder people if they wrong you or do something you don’t like! Neither of them point this out. Why is this even his overriding concern, when things already work the way he wants? For some reason Wyoh has no thoughts on what passes for justice in Luna, and can’t say whether she wants a state or not in clear terms. The early revolutionaries like Wyoh are supposedly leftists but they have nothing to say about the norms of lunar society, like the rampant terror and violence, or anything about how it should be reshaped, they just want to get rid of the Authority and have free markets. They don’t even rise to the level of straw-men, their views are so thinly realised. The Prof is portrayed as an iconoclastic radical and political genius for expressing goals that have already been 99% achieved, and he also just wants to get rid of the Authority and have free markets, with the twist of also wanting Luna to be self-sufficient, for ecological reasons.

The revolution these people conduct is thoroughly hierarchical from start to finish. There is no unity of means and ends here. With Mike as a trusted oracle to facilitate organisation, the trio of Mannie, the Prof and Wyoh form a new revolutionary organisation with themselves as the top level and a pyramidal structure below them where each level recruits a larger level of subordinates. The lower levels are explicitly just grunts. Mike assigns codenames and facilitates communications in such a way that nobody in the organisation knows more that a couple of other members. Their strategy does not involve educating and organising the apathetic masses, but secretly manipulating the Authority into provoking them to anger: accelerationism, in other words. This is enabled by Mike’s ubiquitous surveillance, censorship and manipulation of communications, secret theft of funds from every business whose accounts he has access to, and adoption of several personae to serve as figureheads and spread propaganda.

The trio at the upper level of the organisation are not even equals, really. As I noted above, Wyoh is sidelined, and apparently content to be so. The Prof constantly manipulates Mannie and leaves him in the dark about plans until it is too late to back out or offer any input on them, or even until the consequences are already realised. Really it is the Prof and Mike who are in charge - or perhaps just Mike, as he is the biggest, smartest boy who has already calculated the odds on every possible action, and the rest inevitably go along with his prescriptions.

“Please, Manuel. Keeping you temporarily in the dark greatly enhanced our chances; you can check this with Adam.”

Mike addresses the lunar population after the success of the uprising, and describes the political situation and agenda as one of complete privatisation of the functions of the state:

To take on temporarily those necessary functions of the defunct Authority I have asked the General Manager of LuNoHo Company to serve. This company will provide temporary supervision and will start analyzing how to do away with the tyrannical parts of the Authority and how to transfer the useful parts to private hands.

The socialists who were the dominant anti-Authority political force prior to Mike coming on the scene, including Wyoh, apparently have nothing to say about this.

After the Authority is overthrown the Prof organises an interim congress, nominally to organise the post-Authority state, but really to distract and neuter any politically motivated people who may disagree with his views. He describes its purpose and participants to Mannie:

But Prof didn’t get excited; he went on smiling. “Manuel, do you really think that mob of retarded children can pass any laws?”

“You told them to. Urged them to.”

“My dear Manuel, I was simply putting all my nuts in one basket. I know those nuts; I’ve listened to them for years. I was very careful in selecting their committees; they all have built-in confusion, they will quarrel.

… I almost needn’t have bothered; more than six people cannot agree on anything, three is better—and one is perfect for a job that one can do. This is why parliamentary bodies all through history, when they accomplished anything, owed it to a few strong men who dominated the rest.”

He seems to be dismissive of the idea that any form of collective decision-making is possible. Later he manipulates this congress into signing a declaration of independence attributed to Thomas Jefferson and modernised by himself, without amendment. This supposed anarchist has created a state, and a deep state, where the only person with any say is himself.

Stu captures the absurdity of the revolution perfectly when, after a discussion about the difference between taxation and the rampant theft they have engaged in to fund it, he proposes to nominate the Prof to be Luna’s first monarch, a role which he sees the supposed anarchist fulfilling perfectly, and entirely consistent with his actions up to that point:

“No, but now that Congress has taken up the matter of a constitution I intend to find time to attend sessions. I plan to nominate you for King.”

Prof looked shocked. “Sir, if nominated, I shall repudiate it. If elected, I shall abdicate.”

“Don’t be in a hurry. It might be the only way to get the sort of constitution you want. And that I want, too, with about your own mild lack of enthusiasm. You could be proclaimed King and the people would take you; we Loonies aren’t wedded to a republic.

“When the time comes, you won’t be able to refuse. Because we need a king and there isn’t another candidate who would be accepted. Bernardo the First, King of Luna and Emperor of the Surrounding Spaces.”

“Stuart, I must ask you to stop. I’m becoming quite ill.”

“You’ll get used to it. I’m a royalist because I’m a democrat. I shan’t let your reluctance thwart the idea any more than you let stealing stop you.”

Heinlein makes the case quite well that ends follow means in their nature. The revolutionaries manipulate and deceive the masses and end up at odds with them, because they didn’t bring them along or listen to them. They centralise power in a state, and end up with a state. They invest so heavily in figureheads, and grant so much authority to a single man, that they may as well have a king.

What’s the difference?

One thing I will say for the novel is that it made me think about some of the differences between right-wing “libertarianism” and libertarian socialism or anarchism, particularly where they would, at a glance, appear to overlap. Anarchists also propose a society without laws or any body with a monopoly on violence to enforce them or anything resembling them, such as social norms.

“How would an anarchist society enforce traffic laws?” and “how would an anarchist society deal with rapists and other violent criminals?”, and similar, are perennial questions in “anarchism 101” type spaces online. I read an interesting answer on the former question recently. If the goal is increasing public safety, simply demanding that people obey certain rules is not very effective. Even now, with police and speed cameras to catch people, courts to fine them and prisons to throw them in, people still speed when they think they can get away with it. A better approach would be to design roads in such a way that people can’t speed, cars in such a way that they are safer for everybody in collisions, and cities such that cars are no longer a necessity, or become an unattractive choice. These options would all be available to communities and collectives in an anarchist society - the collective will enforced by design, rather than by laws and police.

Do we want a society where rapists get violently punished, or do we want one where nobody gets raped? Anarchists don’t generally eschew violence for individual or community self-defence, but I don’t think many would say that they want to create a society where beating and murdering rapists is a constant necessity, or even one where people inclined to rape refrain merely because they fear punishment - because if that is their only reason, then they will do it when they think they can get away with it, just like they do now.

It’s harder to imagine this problem being addressed by urban or industrial design - but cultures can be designed as well. There have been many times when cultures have been shaped by conscious effort; by states with nationalist ambitions and by grassroots campaigns with liberatory goals.

In one controversial scene in The Dispossessed, Shevek assaults an Urrasti woman; he is unable to control himself when she comes on to him, due to a mix of her enhanced and sexualised femininity - something alien to Anarres - and being inebriated for the first time. I do not like the implication of this, that women should have to suppress their femininity because men are unable to control themselves. Gender roles and gender presentation will undoubtedly change in the future, perhaps even converge to some extent, but prescribing such changes doesn’t seem compatible with anarchist ideology, or any other left-wing ideology. However, it does make the case that even if men have an inherent proclivity for sexual violence, that proclivity can be controlled by culture to prevent it from violating other people’s freedom.

In another scene, some children raised on Anarres experiment with authority and incarceration. They are familiar with these concepts in an abstract way, but have no direct experience with them, no idea what it means to confine somebody or be confined. They are disturbed by the experiment, regardless of the role they played in it.

Revolutions involve more than just changing the government or replacing the structures of the state with slightly different ones. They require deep and broad changes to the culture and the prevailing values of society, if they are to succeed. An anarchist society may have mechanisms to deal with violence when it occurs, but, more importantly, it would have a culture where intentionally depriving somebody else of their autonomy would be almost unthinkable - almost as injurious to the perpetrator as to the victim.

I would say that the anarchist approach to violence, sexual or otherwise, is to prevent it in the first place by addressing its root causes; by healing the wounds of hierarchy, patriarchy, alienation, and want. We might not need explicit laws about statutory rape if the autonomy of children is widely respected, if they are taught to question and advocate for themselves rather than to blindly submit to authority, if their family and community protects them, if they are not seen as resources to be exploited - and, it goes without saying, if girls are encouraged to have higher aspirations for themselves than to get married at fourteen and start spitting out babies.

But isn’t this the same as the Non-Aggression Principle that libertarians are always going on about? Not really. It may be superficially similar in being a proposed change in the predominant values of society that would enable it to function without laws or institutions with a monopoly on violence, but that is where the similarity ends. The NAP, like everything else in right-wing libertarianism, is about property rights, and sees even people as “self-possessed” property. It doesn’t have any critique of the hierarchies inherent to capitalism. They may see something like pollution as aggression if it harms other people, but withholding food from the starving or shelter from the homeless is not - that is just the exercise of property rights. They don’t reckon with the tendency of capital to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands and the inevitable conflict that creates between social classes - between those who own all the property and those who need access to that property to survive. The purpose of the NAP is to allow capitalists to do what they want with their property, including the exploitation of a desperate, propertyless class, while anything that class does to advance their interests, or that individuals do even just to prevent their own deaths, can be portrayed as “aggression” if it “harms” that property, allowing a response in-kind.

Conclusion

I watched an Angela Collier video recently where she talked about how she really enjoyed Atlas Shrugged when she read it, because she knew nothing about it in advance and assumed it was satirical based on its contents. I can’t claim to have had the same lack of awareness about this book - the reason I wanted to read it was because it was contrasted with The Dispossessed, after all; I knew that it was about right-wing libertarianism, or portrayed a society inspired by that ideology.

Contrary to my expectations, it seems like an indictment of those ideas: that a society without laws and a body to enforce them, or any alternative mechanisms of organisation and dispute resolution, has serious failures, absurd and obvious failures. That libertarians are self-serving hypocrites, closeted monarchists and crypto-fascists. It seems like a work that is ridiculing anarcho-capitalists, and saying that their ideas are impossible to achieve, or can only be achieved temporarily in very unique circumstances, by means that nobody would ever want to endure. It reads like a satire to me, though I have never heard anybody describe it as such.

I mean just look at how the Prof’s career is summarised when he is first introduced:

No doubt he could have gone to work in any school then in L-City but he didn’t. He worked a while washing dishes, I’ve heard, then as babysitter, expanding into a nursery school, and then into a creche. When I met him he was running a creche, and a boarding and day school, from nursery through primary, middle, and high schools, employed co-op thirty teachers, and was adding college courses.

This guy bootstrapped himself from a babysitting gig to running a university, essentially. This is joke, right? This has to be a joke. It’s hilarious! It’s the kind of joke that somebody would make if they were mocking libertarians. But is it also the kind of joke that libertarians make to poke fun at themselves?

So is this even a libertarian novel, in the vein of Atlas Shrugged? Some seem to think so. In this article on mises.org, Jeff Riggenbach credits it with inspiring a large number of influential libertarians, and states:

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is unquestionably a libertarian novel. It is unquestionably one of the three or four most influential libertarian novels of the last century.

Whatever his intentions, I think Heinlein did accurately assess many of the implications of right-wing libertarian ideology. I think it says more than I ever could about the nature of that ideology, that this is a novel that they think represents their views well.