Article: Ursula K. Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards; "Books aren't just commodities"

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

- Ursula K. Le Guin


Commodification is a symptom of the disease the world is suffering. Commodification is, at its root, Ego run amock, completely unmoored from the ground of the Unconscious, and the Self. This is why the spiritual is so denigrated in the world today. Or, what is considered “spiritual” is often just another attempt by Ego to “get it’s use” out of the world.

Ego is necessary. It is what allows us to survive in the world. It is also what allows us grow spiritually; without a solid ego, we wouldn’t have a boat large enough and strong enough to go out on the deep, turbulent waters of the unconscious and bring back the fish we caught. Ego is one leg, but we need both legs to walk.


Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards: 'Books aren't just commodities' (The Guardian)