"Who is Edward Bellamy?", I hear you ask. I would have asked the same until a few weeks ago, when I saw his book, Looking Backward: 2000-1887, in one of our suburb's little street libraries. I was intrigued and brought it home, and I thought I would share it with you before I put it back.
Looking Backward was the culmination of this thinking, his own bid for what this 'better way' might be. Julian West, a wealthy 30-year-old man, falls asleep in 1887 (the year the book was written) and wakes up in 2000. Guided by his rescuer Dr Leete and the doctor's daughter Edith, he is oriented to the Boston in which he has awoken.
The USA in 2000 is a socialist utopia. All the means of production have been nationalised and every man and woman receives an equal allowance, recorded as an entitlement on a credit card. All young people are educated up to the age of 21 and are then enrolled in the 'industrial army' which organises the workers in the various nationalised industries. For the first three years they are rotated through various menial, unskilled roles and then are invited to choose a career which they follow for the rest of their working life. They progress through their careers as far as they are able and then at 46 they retire, and are free to spend the rest of their lives as they choose.
Growing up as he did in the Civil War era, Bellamy was an admirer of the efficient organisation of the military, and the 'industrial army' is very much organised on military lines with various ranks up to the generals of each of its 10 divisions. These generals are elected, not by their subordinates, but by the elders, the alumni or each of the divisions, who also select the President from among their number. Somehow this hierarchical gerontocracy is not oppressive - people have a high degree of freedom and activities like newspapers, the various arts and so forth are created and sustained by free associations of citizens on a subscription basis.
This socialism extends beyond work. People live in comfortable but modest homes (there are neither slums nor mansions) while public infrastrucure is palatial. It includes public dining halls which resemble classy restaurants in which each family has its own dining room, public stores for various necessities and luxuries, and of course concert halls, galleries, public parks and all the accoutrements of a wealthy, cultured society. These are no longer merely the preserve of the rich, because everyone is equal in wealth and education.
In this society, war is a thing of the past and crime is largely likewise - because there is no poverty and no excessive wealth to steal, most of the motivation for crime is gone, although there are still courts to deal with disputes. Since all the wealthy nations, at least, have adopted the same system there is no war and no armies. However, to 21st century ears some aspects are still jarring. For instance, while women are formally equal to men they have a separate industrial army with a different set of rules and only one general to the men's 10, while people with disability are also segregated into their own army. The norms of heterosexual marriage and child-rearing are largely unquestioned and there is no mention of race despite Bellamy's proximity to the Civil War. Environmental sustainability, the number one threat to civilisation in the actual year 2000 doesn't rate a mention.
So, it's a flawed Utopia, but nonetheless it sounds quite nice, certainly better than what we have now. So why didn't it happen, and why do we instead have the world as it is?
***
Of course, the point of a utopia is not really to describe a likely or even possible future. Rather, it is a vehicle to point out the problems of the world in which it is created, and to create imaginative space for people to imagine how it could be better. Hence the call to action near the end of the book. West has a vivid dream in which he wakes up once again in the late 19th Century and walks around Boston. He sees the harried faces of the office workers, the wastage and inefficiency of the multiple shops and banks, the poverty and suffering of the poor part of town. Having spent time in a better world, he is horrified at what he sees and tries vainly to convince others that it needs to change. When he wakes again back in 2000 he is bitterly repentant that when he lived in the 19th century he did nothing to improve the system. It's too late for him, but not for Bellamy's readers!
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| Edward Bellamy |
The hint, perhaps, is in what he thinks is wrong with the system in his day. He thinks it is unjust, but he accepts the notion that in the 19th century there is simply not enough to go around, so that if incomes were more fairly distributed then everyone would be in poverty. The core problem is not the injustice of the system but its inefficiency. He cites a number of problems - the ruthless competition between enterprises which prevents them from combining to build greater productivity, the waste inherent in the alternating pattern of shortages and gluts, the exacerbation of these cycles through the use of credit, the duplication involved in everyone having to do their own domestic labour instead of organising it industrially. In short, the problem is that industrialisation has not gone far enough. In 2000 everything is industrialised to the max.
This means that, like Marx, Bellamy saw the capitalist system as an essential step in the process that led to 2000. The process of nationalisation merely completed what the capitalists had begun. Like Marx, he also saw the organisation of the means of production as fundamental to the organisation of society. Once this was set right, everything else would fall into place - poverty would be eliminated, as would crime, social conflict, warfare, even disease.
Where he differed from Marx was that he doesn't seem to have had a concept of class. He sees the labour movement as part of the problem, or at least as a symptom of it, and sees no role for it in bringing about the transformation. Rather, he seems to see the change as a matter of popular will - it simply made sense to people for it to happen, and was achieved with little conflict or resistance, after which unions, like corporations, withered away.
On the other hand, there is no withering way of the State. Rather than being a tool of the capitalists, as Marx believed, the State for Bellamy is the ultimate expression of popular will. His 2000 is the ultimate vision of 'big government', somehow achieved without repression, conflict or coercion.
***
You might think that this is a mere curiosity. After all who has heard of Bellamy? Yet in his time this book was a sensation. In the 1890s there were over 160 'Bellamy Clubs' in the USA and others elsewhere, dedicated to putting his ideas into practice. These were mainly made up of educated, middle-class people and were a kind of shadow of the Labour movement. They also organised the Nationalist Party ('nationalist' meaning nationalisation rather than patriotism) which in concert with other populist parties made a serious run for president and elected a number of State Governors and legislators.
Like fringe parties and movements everywhere, the major parties took them seriously enough to adopt parts of their platform. In particular, they helped make the idea of public utility ownership mainstream and governments across the US and elsewhere took control of things like power supply, water supply, fire brigades and mass transit.
On the other hand, of course, he was dead wrong about the labour movement. Over the same period, unions and their political representatives made serious gains - fair wages, restricted work hours, safer workplaces, protection for union organising. Even nationalisation, the project that was supposed to see the unions wither away, was achieved with the aid of parties of labour, especially in the wake of World War 2.
Utopia didn't come. We nationalised our utilities, but then we sold them again. We never got to the point of nationalising manufacturing - instead we found ways to prop up (and subsidise) struggling industries. Factory conditions got better, then the capitalists shifted the factories to poor countries where they remain as bad as they ever were.
Of course there were places where nationalisation was tried on a much greater scale, most notably in the USSR and the People's Republic of China. It didn't deliver the universal prosperity that Bellamy hoped for, although capitalist propaganda almost certainly exaggerated its inefficiency and dysfunction. In the end, the Chinese government moved more towards a hybrid socialist/capitalist model while the USSR has fragmented, with its successors mostly descending into crony capitalism. Nor did a hierarchical nationalist system deliver any noticeable political freedoms - we all know about the Cultural Revolution and the gulags - but neither China nor Russia were noticeably democratic before their communist revolutions. How would this dynamic have played out in the US or Western Europe where there is a much more robust democratic ethos?
It's a shame that we forgot Bellamy. Even though his solutions were flawed we can still learn from him. Our system is still absurd and wasteful, and it could still be made better. The nationalisation which he championed, and which was implemented in part by the democratic socialists, did in fact deliver better public services than the supposedly more 'efficient' and 'cost-effective' private sector models we have now.
His call to arms is as fresh as ever. If we walk around our cities with our eyes open, or pay attention to the global picture, we will see plenty of things to alarm us - homelessness, starvation, genocide, climate collapse. Unlike Julian West, we won't magically wake up in 2150 and find that the problem has been solved while we slept. Will we be part of the solution, like Bellamy's anonymous and hazy 20th century reformers? Or will we, like West, live to regret our complicity?
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