Starship Troopers is a critique of fascism, not a support of fascism.

Think of Le Guin’s speculative fiction as theory projects. For example, in the Left Hand of Darkness you wouldn’t say she defends an ideology of hermaphrodism. The Dispossessed is a what if that fits neatly into the gaps of most social theory. The Marxist tradition is famous for thinking about the critical aspects of social development while steadfastly refusing to speculate on exactly what forms those would take. In The Dispossessed, you can easily see someone on Earth looking up at the Moon and wondering “What if we shot all those anarchists at the moon and told them they could build their utopia there?” That she choose anarcho-syndicalism and not fully automated gay luxury space communism could be seen as an “endorsement”, but I think the intense and unsolvable scarcity lends itself a little better to an anarcho-syndicalist story. Also note that there is a concerted effort on her part to also imagine changing language and social relations in a way that, during the time of her writing, was not really supported by MLs in the US, who were quite clear that race and gender were secondary problems that would eventually work themselves out once the class problem has been resolved and that the queer movement was bourgeois corruption of human society. During that time, writing something like The Dispossessed would have required drawing inspiration from outside the predominant manifestation of ML theory in her society.

In short, I just don’t see it like the Randian project of trying to show everyone how Objectivism is correct and how if everyone would just do it we’d live in a perfect society, etc. I don’t see Le Guin’s writing as dogmatic. Instead I see it as curious. That’s what I mean speculative here. It’s a different type of theory work, exploring possibilities, finding and surfacing contradictions, imagining the impacts certain principles would have on the human condition and how it might play out over time. If you haven’t finished it yet, I won’t spoil the ending, but it doesn’t end in a way that says “and they all came to realize that the anarchists were right and society successfully replicated itself using their principles forever and ever.”