My mistake was honest, but still a mistake, and I also understand how it would have made John annoyed, if not angry, for a bit. So first and foremost I take responsibility and apologize.
To add some context, I was correct that there is a connection between Le Guin and Bookchin. Here is Le Guin providing the foreward to a book by him. And I know that I had heard or read that Le Guin’s book “The Dispossessed” was based on Bookchin. But that is incorrect. So when I wrote “The Horizontal Mambo,” it was a situation of garbage-in, garbage-out. Le Guin’s anarchy in “The Dispossessed” runs on social pressure in a relatively inaccessible (and resource constrained) environment. But that is not what Bookchin advocates.
Stepping back a bit, literature is more about ambiguity, and the playing out of tensions, so it may be the case that the society of Anarres in Le Guin's book might have been the way it was for reasons other than saying "this is the best we can do." From a conversation GPT conversation I had on this:
Le Guin sympathized deeply with anarchism, especially the ecological, decentralized, non-coercive kind espoused by thinkers like Bookchin and Kropotkin. She once called anarchism "the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories." But as a novelist, she was interested less in selling an ideology and more in exploring how it might actually play out—flaws and all.
In that sense, Anarres is not her utopia—it's her thought experiment. It asks: What happens when you try to build a society without centralized power? Can it maintain freedom? What new kinds of pressure emerge?
I still think that pure horizontalism is wrong, both in terms of short-term tactics and long-term strategy, but on the topic of Murray Bookchin, I must admit my ignorance.
