Do we still want the future desired by the past?

Why three socialist utopian novels are still relevant 100 years later.

By the late 1800s, Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto had finally entered the mainstream. His ideas for a new world order free from the perils of capitalism sparked a wave of utopian thinkers who used his concepts to imagine a more beautiful future. 

Edward Bellamy's 1888 novel Looking Backward was the first, imagining a technologically advanced Boston with Amazon-like delivery services, Spotify-like access to music, and credit-card-like access to money. His protagonist is put into a trance only to awaken in the year 2000 and find the techno-futurist world of his dreams! 

“All I can say is, the prospect was such when I went into that long sleep that I should not have been surprised had I looked down from your house-top today on a heap of charred and moss-grown ruins instead of this glorious city,” he says.

Bellamy very much thought the Boston of his day was on its way to becoming a heap of charred ruins. He described the city as “a crowd of people in the rain, each one holding his umbrella over himself and his wife, and giving his neighbors the drippings.” Another author, William Morris called London of the same time, “‘slums;’ that is to say, places of torture for innocent men and women; or worse, stews for rearing and breeding men and women in such degradation that that torture should seem to them mere ordinary and natural life." 

Why were things so bad?

Bellamy describes the problem best. His protagonist Julian West is a man of leisure. “Living in luxury, and occupied only with the pursuit of the pleasures and refinements of life, I derived the means of my support from the labor of others, rendering no sort of service in return,” he says.

How did he come to be so wealthy? “My great-grandfather had accumulated a sum of money on which his descendants had ever since lived,” he says. “The sum, you will naturally infer, must have been very large not to have been exhausted in supporting three generations of idleness. This however, was not the fact.”

His grandfather’s wealth might not have been so large, but it had become so by West’s time because of compounding interest. As he says: “The man who had accomplished this, and it was the end all sought, was said to live on the income of his investments.”

Generations of men lived on the income of their investments, while the rest worked for them. Bellamy uses his famous “allegory of a coach,” to illustrate the effect this had on society, with rich passengers sitting at the top enjoying the scenery at their leisure and saving their seats for their descendants, while the rest pull the carriage along by its ropes, toiling to get it over every log and up every hill by the sweat of their brow.

This created a class divide. As Bellamy describes, there remained “a singular hallucination which those on the top of the coach generally shared, that they were not exactly like their brothers and sisters who pulled at the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belonging to a higher order of beings who might justly expect to be drawn… The strangest thing about the hallucination was that those who had but just climbed up from the ground, before they had outgrown the marks of the rope upon their hands, began to fall under its influence.”

Things got better after Bellamy’s time. In 1935, Franklin Roosevelt legalized unions and installed a 77% tax on income in excess of $1 million per year. Then, in 1938, he passed the Fair Labor Standards Act which prohibited child labor, established a minimum wage, defined a 40-hour work week, and forced time and a half pay for anyone who worked more than 40 hours in a week. The World Wars and an increasing population precipitated an economic boom in the United States and all of those forces combined created, for the first time, a middle class.

That doesn’t mean Bellamy’s criticisms are now invalid. If anything, they are in need of a resurgence. According to Thomas Piketty, the richest 10% in the US owned 40% to 50% of the national income in 1910. This dropped to less than 35% in the 1950s through 1970s, but since 1980 we have reverted to those 1910 numbers and even surpassed them. After a period of decline, wealth inequality in the United States has made a comeback. The Gini coefficient, which measures inequality over time, shows that the US is more unequal in 2022 than it was in 1913. 

These numbers are not the only ones at our disposal—we must also recognize that globalization has driven down prices of the things we use most—like phones and laptops and the internet—and made them more accessible. This has created a level of prosperity that wealth alone cannot measure. As

J.K. Lund

puts it: “You may not have as much money as Jeff Bezos, but the phone in his pocket is probably not much better than yours, nor are the clothes on his back.” 

There can be no doubt that the least wealthy in the US today are still much better off than the least wealthy of Bellamy’s day. 

Yet it is true that the rich and their descendants continue to live off their investments (in the form of real estate, stocks, and bonds), while the rest have a much harder time getting those investments to begin with. Executives are paid in company stock while employees are paid a salary, meaning the former earns wealth that goes up in value while the latter earns wealth that does not. Those with increasing wealth can afford to buy more capital, like more stocks and more homes, while even a well–paid software engineer might struggle to afford their first home.

From where I stand, the obvious answer is to pay more people in stock—make more workers owners, not just those at the top—thus keeping all of the benefits of capitalism while making more of us benefactors of it. Worker cooperatives and employee-owned businesses venture just such a hypothesis, but in Bellamy’s day, Marx’s idea to get rid of private ownership altogether was the most popular one.

His idea was to make the state the owner of capital at first, then have the people take it over later.

In Looking Backward, we see the first part of Marx’s plan. Companies become so large that they become monopolies—that’s when they are taken over by the state. The government then becomes “the one capitalist in place of all other capitalists, the sole employer, the final monopoly.” 

Everyone goes to work the way we might join the military today, serving the terms of their careers between the ages of 24 to 45, with the first three spent as a common laborer and the rest spent according to their interests and abilities. Demand for jobs is managed by time: The more appealing jobs require more weekly hours while the least appealing jobs (like mining) require fewer. 

Payment comes in the form of an annual credit applied to their “credit card” with everyone earning the same salary no matter if they are a waiter or a doctor or are unable to work due to disability. Women are paid the same amount to raise children and pursue their interests. Citizens use their credit to pay the rent for their homes (which are owned by the state), and to purchase products from the local ward, which are Amazon-like warehouses. supplied by the larger warehouse just outside of town. 

The wards are aesthetically beautiful buildings that form the hub of the city. West’s host explains: “What little wealth you had seems almost wholly to have been lavished in private luxury. Nowadays, on the contrary, there is no destination of the surplus wealth so popular as the adornment of the city, which all enjoy in equal degree.”

Bellamy’s case for socialism is a classic one: Put the government in charge of healthcare, education, and the economy; put us to work in it, and pay us an equal wage for it. The result is: “No man any more has any care for the morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.”

We have learned, in the century since, that putting the government in charge of the economy does not have such a result, but that doesn’t make these ideas less valuable. We don’t need to follow Bellamy’s blueprint of “how we achieve it,” to still desire “what he wants to achieve:” A more equitable society, with more opportunity for more people, prosperity that is better shared and allows more people to have more autonomy over their lives. We still desire beautiful buildings and public spaces.

It is in a similar vein that we can appreciate William Morris’ News from Nowhere. The London textile designer didn't care for Bellamy's novel. A friend of Marx’ daughter, and the head of his local socialist club, he preferred a tranquil future with medieval architecture and a world of Etsy-like artisans creating handcrafted goods. He thought industrialization would make the world worse, not better, and he imagined a pastoral paradise where work and education are pursued out of curiosity and leisure and handcrafting the pursued ideal. 

His 1890 novel was in direct response to Bellamy's, with his protagonist William Guest waking up shortly after the year 2000. If Bellamy imagined a textbook socialism in which the state owned the economy, Morris imagined its intended next step, what Marx would have called communism or what today we might call anarchism. There is no government in his world—all decisions are made via consensus. 

When Guest asks how they manage differences of opinion without politics, a wise grandfather-type informs him: “Differences of opinion about real solid things need not, and with us do not, crystallize people into parties permanently hostile to one another, with different theories as to the build of the universe and the progress of time.”

There is certainly no wisdom to be found in a two-party system—we’d be better equipped to have a conversation about the right circumstances under which an abortion should be sought if we didn’t have to imagine our two options are three months after the child is born or not at all. I think we could similarly reach a happy medium on most of the decisions pertinent to our nations and it is only the two-party system that demands we paint things so blankly, and as a result, so wildly. 

Switzerland’s multi-party system in which all parties are represented at the table, not just two, might better achieve Morris’ goals. The country has a Federal Council, rather than a president, with seven individuals representing seven political parties. Seats are allocated based on the percentage of votes they receive in elections, encouraging a broader range of parties to participate—all they need is enough votes. The principle of "collegiality" ensures that members of the Federal Council, regardless of their party, must work together and present unified decisions.

If Morris would achieve that without a government, he also does so without an economy. A world of artisans spend their endless leisure blowing glass, crafting wood, writing books, and giving it all away for free. When Guest tries to pay for a boat ride his host demurs. “I think I know what you mean. You think that I have done you a service; so you feel yourself bound to give me something which I am not to give to a neighbor, unless he has done something special for me; but pardon me for saying… This ferrying and giving people casts about the water is my business, which I would do for anybody.” 

When he later goes “shopping” at the local market, Guest is given an artisanal pipe for free, “carved out of some hard wood very elaborately, and mounted in gold sprinkled with little gems.” Clothing is given to him as he needs it, and food in any quantity. Throughout his journey he meets a bookkeeper, a historian, several homekeepers, and a weaver who moonlights as a mathematician. 

When Guest wonders why anyone would work at all if they didn’t have to, the weaver replies: “It is said that in the early days of our epoch there were a good many people who were hereditarily afflicted with a disease called Idleness because they were the direct descendants of those who in the bad times used to force other people to work for them. However I’m happy to say that all that is gone by now; the disease is either extinct, or exists in such a mild form that a short course of aperient medicine carries it off.”

His host finds the whole conversation rather amusing. “Excuse me neighbors, but I can’t help it. Fancy people not liking to work!—it’s too ridiculous.”

The novel is a bit too optimistic for my preference, as most purely anarchist utopias are. It imagines that without government there would be no war, without private ownership there would be no crime, without consequences people wouldn’t pollute, overuse resources, or otherwise adversely affect their neighbors. Without work or payment people would still quarry stone and build bridges and become doctors, without education everyone would self-teach themselves to do these things. Not needing to work, the population would spend their endless leisure however they choose, and still chip in to harvest hay fields as needed. 

As with Bellamy, if I do not agree with the means, I very much agree with the ends: That we don’t want to give our waking hours over to our work unless that work is something we find meaningful and fulfilling, and that we want more time to devote to our creative hobbies. We can inch closer to his ideal even if we don’t achieve it absolutely. 

In Morris’ youth, a beautiful field by his house was taken out to build a factory that belched smoke, people gave up their every waking hour to work for it, and made a pittance doing it. “All the small country arts of life which once added to the little pleasures of country people were lost,” he says. 

Morris rejected the notion that we should contort ourselves into the kind of person who can do this work, and that we should live a life devoid of pleasure to achieve it. In his utopia, “people found out what they were fit for, and gave up attempting to push themselves into occupations in which they must needs fail.”

Can’t we see the need to do the same today? Every diagnosis of ADD or ADHD, every neuro differential we quantify and medicate for, every self-help podcast and productivity hack we engender ourselves to, what ends are we trying to achieve? That we can effectively work! That we can sit at our computers and stay focused on our tasks, and do a good job at them. We mess with our brain chemistry with pills and efficiency hacks, not to live better—because in many cases we could live well enough without them—but to work better! 

Would we make the same choices if we could work in the way best suited to us? If we could work with our hands or our minds depending on our constitutions? If we had the leisure to create something beautiful, and could contribute to the world in a meaningful way? In developed countries around the world we have a greater diversity of career choices and enjoy more leisure time than those of Morris’ day, why shouldn’t we crave even more still? 

In News from Nowhere, we move away from the mass produced goods to artisanally crafted ones we create ourselves. “A craving for beauty seemed to awaken in men’s minds, and they began rudely and awkwardly to ornament the wares which they made; and when they had once set to work at that, it soon began to grow,” Morris explains. “Thus at last and by slow degrees we got pleasure into our work; then we became conscious of that pleasure, and cultivated it, and took care that we had our fill of it; and then all was gained, and were happy.”

Morris clung to his handcraft even as London industrialized and turned toward mass-produced goods, and this is the work Morris hoped we would one day return to. First, we were gardeners and crafters, then we would industrialize and spend a couple hundred years making money and becoming economically prosperous, all so that we could return to being gardeners and crafters once again. I think that is still a future worth working toward, even if I don’t think we will give up building bridges to do it. 

Twenty-five years later, Charlotte Perkins Gilman thought Morris’ vision might be better achieved with women. A mentee of Bellamy and a friend of Morris’ daughter, her 1915 novel Herland replied directly to both men, imagining a society of women who live in pink chateaus in a biodynamic forest filled with fresh fruit and a tranquil people. There is no ego, and thus no competition necessary for their society. They act as a community working in the best interest of their children and the beautiful world they created for them. 

This is my favorite entry into the utopian canon. Writing at a time when women were not part of the economy at all, Gilman asked what the economy might look like if it had been created and run by women instead of men. She accomplishes this feat with a bit of worldbuilding: After their men all die at war, the women are left isolated in a remote village where, over the course of 2,000 years, they have evolved to reproduce without men. 

When three men set out on an expedition to “discover” the rumored town, they have preconceived notions of what it might look like. “They would fight among themselves. Women always do. We mustn't look to find any sort of order and organization,” the bullish Terry says. He imagines they’ll be weak and defenseless, and proclaims, “I’ll get myself elected king in no time!” 

The more tempered Jeff disagrees. “You’re dead wrong. It will be like a nunnery under an abbess—a peaceful harmonious sisterhood.”

Our narrator Van comes in with no preconceived notions, he is a sociologist, excited to discover a prosperous civilization filled with castles and estates wrapped around beautiful gardens. “It was built mostly of a sort of dull rose-colored stone, with here and there some clear white houses; and it lay abroad among the green groves and gardens like a broken rosary of pink coral,” he explains. 

There is no dirt, no smoke, no noise. Just, “perfect roads, as dustless as a swept floor; the share of endless lines of trees; the ribbon of flowers that unrolled beneath them; and the rich comfortable country that stretched off and away, full of varied charm.”

“It’s too pretty to be true,” they wonder. “Plenty of palaces, but where are the homes?”

The men come to meet the citizens of Herland, and to learn more about their civilization of three million women. The women are just as anxious to learn more about the outside world. “You have the whole world to tell us of, and we have only our little land!” they say. “And there are two of you—the two sexes—to love and help one another. It must be a rich and wonderful world. Tell us—what is the work of the world that men do—which we have not here?”

“Oh everything,” Terry says. “We do not allow our women to work.”

The women are perplexed. What do the women do, they ask, if they do not work?

“Take care of the home—and the children,” Terry answers.

“At the same time?” they wonder.

Gilman lectured throughout the United States on the merits of Edward Bellamy’s socialism, but she was also a respected feminist and suffragist. She thought capitalism an outcropping of men’s ego and believed a society of women would be more collaborative, recognizing that every member contributes equally to it and, in fact, that “women’s work” might even be more important to society than the work of men. 

In her masterpiece work, Women and Economics, she said, “The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses. The labor of horses enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could. The horse is an economic factor in society. But the horse is not economically independent, nor is the woman.”

In Herland, a nation of economically independent women work together for the greater good of their community.

The men don’t understand it.

“No man or woman would work without incentive. Competition is the motor power, you see,” Terry tries to explain.

“It is not with us, so it is hard for us to understand,” the women reply. “Do you mean, for instance, that with you no mother would work for her children without the stimulus of competition?”

“No, he admitted that he did not mean that. Mothers, he supposed, would, of course, work for their children in the home; but the world’s work was different—that had to be done by men, and required the competitive element.”

Why is the “world’s work” different? Why would a mother work for the good of her children, but the father work only for the good of himself? And why does he require competition among his peers to achieve that good? 

The “competitive element” doesn’t exist in Herland. When the land becomes scarce, the men are shocked that the women didn’t start hoarding resources from one another, “neither did they start off on predatory excursions to get more land from somebody else, or to get more food from somebody else, to maintain their struggling mass. Not at all. They sat down in a council together and thought it out.”

Gilman strikes a balance between the structured economy in Bellamy’s work, and the unstructured one in Morris’. Herland’s government is led by their “Land Mother,” the wisest among them, though citizens work together to make decisions. Every citizen undergoes lifelong education to become expert at some highly specialized work—they grow up to become botanists, geographers, astronomers, mathematicians, or physiologists, contributing to the community according to their field of study.

Van concedes: “We boast a good deal of our ‘high level of general intelligence’ and our ‘compulsory public education,’ but in proportion to their opportunities they were far better educated than our people.”

That’s because the most important work in Herland is child rearing and education. The men are beside themselves to learn that this isn’t the mother’s role. 

“You told us about your dentists,” they recant. Should mothers also, “fill their own children’s teeth?”

“Of course not,” Van protests. “But that is a highly specialized craft. Surely the care of babies is open to any woman.”

“We do not think so,” they reply. “Those of us who are the most highly competent fulfill that office.”

The men worry this means the baby is stripped from their mothers at birth and the mother bereaved of her baby.

“Oh no!” the women say. “Not in the least bereaved. It is her baby still—it is with her—she has not lost it. But she is not the only one to care for it. There are others whom she knows to be wiser. She knows it because she has studied as they did, practiced as they did, and honors their real superiority. For the child’s sake, she is glad to have for it this highest care.”

What would our society be like today if childcare was seen as our most important role? If we realized the entire wellbeing of every nation, of the entire world, depended on it? If we realized that every problem we could ever face might be solved by well educated children who grow up to specialize in important tasks that contribute to the wellbeing of our world? 

Well, it would probably look more like the Nordic countries, where childcare and education are seen as the role of the state at large, rather than each individual mother. Where their education starts at a young age, the food they are served at school contributes to the development of their brains, and their teachers, even at pre-school, are highly trained educators with master’s degrees and specialized knowledge relative to their craft—all of it provided free or heavily subsidized. 

The United States still hasn’t realized the importance of children. If we had, we wouldn’t relegate the task to mothers who must drive their children to separate schools at separate times before work because schools no longer have the money to pay for school buses. We wouldn’t feed children chicken nuggets for lunch because schools can’t afford to fuel their brains. And we wouldn’t underpay teachers whose job it is to ensure our future generation grows up capable and equipped to face the challenges of our day. 

We can see the result of this thinking in the men of Herland. They talk about establishing a trade route with the rest of the world, they see economic opportunity to be gained by exploiting that country’s prosperity and personal glory to be achieved from their discovery. When they find a forest that has been replanted so that every tree is fruit-bearing, Terry sees only a forest to be cut down for hardwood. When they discover that the women have a division of labor, and all contribute to the running of their society, he grumbles that there’s no ambition, no wealth and poverty opposition, no warring of nations. Without men, he says there’s no drama, no fun, no real sport, no competition.

But the women are not after their own glory. Cutting down a forest for hardwood would leave their children without food. Personal ambition and wealth would come at the expense and poverty of some of their daughters. The dark grittiness of poverty is not a desired outcome and warring would only mean the loss of their daughters. 

“The children in this country are the one center and focus of all our thoughts,” one woman explained. “Every step of our advance is always considered in its effect on them.”

This has become their guiding North Star, so much so that it has become their religion.

“Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by your foremothers?” the men ask.

“Why, no,” they say. “Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them—and unworthy of the children who must go beyond us… What I cannot understand is why you keep these early religious ideas so long. You have changed all your others, haven’t you?”

Not necessarily. When the men boast that they have hundred-year-old laws, the women are flummoxed. “We have no laws over a hundred years old, and most of them are under twenty.” 

As a result, “their time-sense was not limited to the hopes and ambitions of an individual life,” Van realizes. “Therefore they habitually considered and carried out plans for improvement which might cover centuries.”

He concludes: “As I learned more and more to appreciate what these women had accomplished, the less proud I was of what we, with all our manhood, had done. You see, they had no wars. They had had no kings, and no priests, and no aristocracies. They were sisters, and as they grew, they grew together—not by competition, but by united action.”

These books were formative to me as I considered—with a hundred years more hindsight than their authors had access to—the world we might evolve into from here. 

Today, I do not think socialist control of the economy will provide a desirable outcome, though we can see socialist childcare and education produce incredible results in the Nordic Countries. I do not think a purely anarchist society will result in a peaceful people, though we can create multi-party systems that better represent communities as they do in Switzerland. I do not think we will absolve ourselves of work, even if I think we will have more leisure to do the work that interests us. I do not think capitalism alone will solve inequality, though I think we can better distribute the wealth it generates with cooperatives and employee-owned businesses. 

In the end, I imagine a solution that is not quite socialist, not quite anarchist, and not quite capitalist, but perhaps combines a bit of all three. Working together, our states, our communities, and our economies can create the end result these authors once imagined: A more prosperous world, with beautiful buildings, thriving communities who have autonomy over their own lives, and enjoy abundant leisure time to spend with their families and pursue creative hobbies. 

By looking at what thinkers 100 years ago hoped today might look like, we can see a vision for utopia that, in many ways, has been realized, and in many others can keep us dreaming of the next hundred years.

As Guest says when he wakes up in his own time and place, the problems of the past still alive and pressing, “If others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.”

I hope we keep dreaming.

Sincerely,

Elle Griffin

Thank you so much for reading and dreaming with me. If you enjoy my work please consider supporting it as a paid subscriber. 💖

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