"A Mere Dream Dreamed in a Bad Time" : A Marxist Reading of Utopian and Dystopian Elements in Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home

Sammanfattning: In Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel Always Coming Home, utopian and dystopian elements interact according to patterns inspired by anarchism and Taoism to criticise material excesses and oppressive social structures under capitalism. Via discussions of gender, state power, and forms of social (re)production, this Marxist reading proposes that the novel’s separation of utopia from dystopia hinges on the absence or presence of a state. The reading also suggests that the novel’s utopia is by its own admission a “mere dream” with limited relevance to anti-capitalist politics, and employs the novel’s own term “handmind” to show that the aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of its anti-capitalist sentiments encourage a reconsideration of utopia, to be viewed not as a fixed future product – a good-place – but as a constant process of becoming – a no-place.