I didn't finish it. I might have finished it if I hadn't had a really shitty summer where reading books that didn't suck was absolutely vital. I might also have finished it if I hadn't read Days of Rage within six months of trying to read The Dispossessed. As it is, Dispossessed came out the same year as Prairie Fire and two years before Underground:

Which makes The Dispossessed of a piece with the prevailing milieu of spoiled, entitled white brats blowing shit up and quoting Abbie Hoffman while black and Puerto Rican activists were slaughtered wholesale.

I don't have a lot of patience with anarchists. They're either hoodlums who parrot an ideology convenient to their hijinks or academics triangulating around an ideology that invalidates everyone's leadership but their own. The Dispossessed was very much the latter for me, whereby a whole bunch of smart people have a much better idea about how the world should run than those lousy proletariat sonofabitches ever will. I think I have a nostalgic view of the capitalism she was protesting, too - anti-trust was a thing back then and shareholder value had yet to be invented. It's like Le Guin wrote a manifesto about the horrors of capitalism on the hope that some neo-anarchist utopia would spring out of her protests when in fact we were left with shittier capitalism and shittier socialism.

So really, I guess I view the whole thing as an indulgent overextension of Baader-Meinhoff bullshit exactly when everyone should have been consolidating their gains. 'cuz we got Reagan, we got Thatcher and we got Deng Xiaoping as a direct response to the ideas in it.