Against Technocracy (Part 1) (2026)

From the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a scene in Star Trek: First Contact (1996), where Captain Jean-Luc Picard comments: ‘The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money does not exist in the 24th century…The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity’.

Such sentiments draw on a long tradition of utopian thinking. A common feature of such thinking is the idea of material abundance. Abundance is what renders money obsolete.

In the painting The Land of Cockaigne by the Flemish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1567), a trio of figures is depicted dozing beneath a tree, their tools of the trade lying unused beside them. This is a magical world in which a cooked goose makes itself available on a platter and a roasted pig trots past with a carving knife stuck in its flank. No need to lift a finger to satisfy one´s hunger pangs.

The painting has attracted different interpretations. For some, it represents a moralising critique of the spiritual emptiness associated with sloth and gluttony (‘consumerism’); for others, the wistful dream of a world beyond grinding labour and material deprivation.

The Cockaignian tradition can be traced to the folk utopias of early medieval Europe and even earlier. What is striking about it is the relative lack of emphasis on technology as the means of achieving abundance. Mother Nature, not human ingenuity, was the provider of plenty.

This began to change over time, Bacon´s scientific utopia, The New Atlantis (1627), being an early example. From the mid-18th century, small-scale cottage industries gave way to the factory system. This was the first industrial revolution based on steam power and mechanisation. We have since had a second industrial revolution, commencing in the late 19th century (Fordist mass production and electrification), a third in the late 20th century (automation and digital electronics) and are currently in the throes of a fourth, featuring such cutting-edge innovations as AI, machine learning, the Internet of Things, advanced robotics and biotechnology.

Marx and Engels

When Marx and Engels published their Communist Manifesto in 1848, the Second Industrial Revolution had not yet begun (the first patented electric light bulb was still decades away). They held that socialism depended not only on a majority wanting it and understanding what it entailed, but also on the productive apparatus being sufficiently developed to ensure the reasonable needs of the population could be adequately met.

In the mid-19th century, this was not possible. For this reason, the Manifesto called for the ‘centralisation of all instruments of production in the hands of the State, ie, of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible’. State ownership was thought to be a more effective way of achieving this by capitalising on economies of scale.

However, by the late 19th century, there was a clear shift in their thinking. Thus, their 1872 Preface to the Manifesto stated that, because of the advances of modern industry since 1848, the state capitalist transitional measures they earlier proposed had become ‘antiquated’ and that ‘no special stress’ should be laid on them.

Interestingly, in 1878, we find Engels writing: 

‘The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties – this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here’ (1878, Anti Dühring, Part 3).

New thinking about how to expedite a post-capitalist society was certainly required (and Marx and Engels were moving in this direction), but sadly, many supposed ‘Marxists’ today seem to be trapped in a time warp, their vision limited to nothing more ambitious than the nationalisation of the ‘commanding heights of industry’.

Edward Bellamy

Back then, socialists were not alone in recognising the growing technological potential to supersede the capitalist money-based economy. A foretaste of a non-Marxian technocratic version of this was provided by the American journalist, Edward Bellamy, in his fictional work Looking Backward (1888).

This was an enormously influential book, particularly in America, selling over a million copies shortly after publication. In it, Bellamy described the huge economic benefits that would result from dispensing with money:

‘Another item wherein we save is the disuse of money and the thousand occupations connected with financial operations of all sorts, whereby an army of men was formerly taken away from useful employment’.

However, his vision of a future moneyless society was a statist one, the ‘nation’ being deemed ‘the sole employer and capitalist’ (reminiscent of Lenin’s later description of ‘socialism’). Production was organised under the aegis of a ‘General Council of the Industrial Army’.

There was limited political democracy insofar as the government was elected, with this kind of society enjoying broad support, but practical decision-making itself was generally top-down and paternalistic. Labour would take a compulsory, quasi militaristic form (unlike Marx´s idea of ‘freely associated labour’) with individual consumption being rationed via a credit card scheme.

Bellamy saw this future moneyless society as being technically advanced and exhibiting a high degree of automation. This was not a vision that appealed to everyone, however. William Morris, who likewise wrote about a future moneyless society in News from Nowhere (1890), was critical of Bellamy´s outlook – in particular, its negative depiction of work as a coerced activity requiring extrinsic incentives to motivate individuals to work.

The idea of work being intrinsically undesirable is also implicit in some contemporary representations of a moneyless future. One example is the concept of ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’ (FALC), associated with writers such as Aaron Bastani.

Automation will undoubtedly play an important role in a post-capitalist society, particularly when it comes to work deemed dangerous, dirty or monotonous. However, we would surely not want to eliminate all work and the potentially enormous creative pleasure to be derived from working. It is the terms and conditions under which we currently work that are the problem, not necessarily work itself.

All too often, work is unthinkingly equated with waged employment. These are not the same. In fact, even today under capitalism, most work is performed outside the money sector, not within it (María Ángeles Durán 2012, ‘Unpaid Work in the Global Economy’, Fundación BBVA).

We need work, or labour, as a form of creative self-expression. In hunter-gatherer societies, the distinction between work and play tends to be blurred. Much the same approach to work is found in Marx´s description of a higher phase of communist society in which ‘labour has become not only a means of life, but life’s prime want’ (1875, Critique of the Gotha Programme).

The Technocracy Movement

Bellamy´s futuristic society has been interpreted to represent a proto-technocratic utopia. However, the term ‘technocracy’, denoting governance by technical experts, was only coined somewhat later, in 1919, by an engineer, William Smyth. The basic idea behind this subsequently found expression in the rise of a movement in the 1930s in America (also in Canada and parts of Europe), bearing that name: the ‘Technocracy Movement’.

Though Howard Scott and Marion King Hubbert founded this movement, the individual thought to have first clearly set out the basic principles of technocracy was the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen in 1921, in an article titled ‘Engineers and the Price System’.

Veblen saw technological development as paving the way to the reorganisation of the economy, leading automatically to the gradual disappearance of money. Technological innovation followed its own developmental trajectory. The price mechanism was regarded as simply a wasteful and unnecessary encumbrance on production. It did not so much ‘guide’ technological development as follow it (and profit from it).

Veblen envisaged the decline of business culture and its replacement by a more technically-minded society in which people like scientists and engineers would lead the way. There was, he suggested, a built-in or deep-seated antagonism between the pecuniary values promoted by financiers and businesspeople and the industrial values embraced by the technicians and skilled workers.

The economist J M Keynes later said something similar in his 1930 essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’. Keynes suggested that within a century, technological progress and rising affluence would cause our obsession with money to die out. At the same time, the working week would contract to a mere 15 hours on average.

During the Great Depression, interest in the Technocracy movement grew rapidly, and the movement became quite popular for a brief period (at one point attracting hundreds of thousands of adherents) before going into steep decline following the implementation of Roosevelt´s New Deal reforms that drew support away from the movement.

Among the various ideas it advanced was the suggestion, grounded in Scott´s ‘Energy Theory of Value’, that energy units (joules) should replace money as the unit of accounting in the production and distribution of goods, with citizens being allocated ‘energy certificates’ to regulate consumption. What lay behind this was the belief that the money system was something inherently wasteful and oriented towards the perpetuation of needless scarcity. As one contemporaneous article noted:

‘Technocracy states that price and abundance are incompatible; the greater the abundance, the smaller the price. In a real abundance, there can be no price at all. Only by abandoning the interfering price control and substituting a scientific method of production and distribution can an abundance be achieved’ (Sept 1937, “What is Technocracy”, The Technocrat).

Jeremy Rifkin and Zero Marginal Cost

The claim about increasing abundance brought about by the price-collapsing effect of technological innovation is the stuff of much recent sensationalist speculation. According to Jeremy Rifkin, author of the best-seller The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2015), the ‘emerging Internet of Things is speeding us to an era of nearly free goods and services, precipitating the meteoric rise of a global Collaborative Commons and the eclipse of capitalism’.

However, Rifkin´s thesis is based on a flawed understanding of marginal cost pricing. Even if the marginal cost of producing some item (the cost of producing one additional unit of this item) fell to zero, there are still fixed costs to account for. Information goods, for example, may be ‘non-rivalrous’ in the sense that if I use the internet to do a Google search, it doesn’t prevent you from doing the same. But, internet-based corporations like Google or Meta still have enormous fixed costs to pay for. They still have to generate revenue to cover these costs and realise the huge profits they make in the process.

For the same reason, the prognosis of people like the billionaire, Elon Musk, about AI eliminating all jobs within two decades is fanciful in the extreme. Remarkably, someone who has profited so much from capitalism seems to know very little about how it actually works.

Capitalist production presupposes sufficient ‘effective demand’, such that a business can expect to realise a profit meeting this demand. Without the prospect of profit, even essential needs will remain unmet. To satisfy them, workers depend on paid employment in a capitalist, money-based economy.

How would this be possible if no one had a job? Living labour, not machinery, is the source of capitalist profit. In theory, if all work were automated, the rate of profit would fall to zero, and capitalism would cease to exist.

However, this is not remotely likely to happen. Well before that, Marx’s famous ‘counteracting tendencies to the falling rate of profit’ would kick in. For instance, growing technological unemployment would depress wages, thereby paradoxically making it more profitable once again to employ more labour.

Thus, there are self-correcting mechanisms that pre-empt the sort of scenario that people like Musk have in mind. Indeed, some studies suggest AI will lead not to a reduction but to an increase in jobs overall, with its main impact being to transform the nature of work under capitalism.

We cannot depend on technological innovation alone to transcend capitalism. This is a major weakness of the technocratic paradigm, which we will examine in Part 2.

Robin Cox

Link to Part 2.

Blogger's Note:

Star Trek: First Contact was reviewed in the July 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard.

The Forum: From Capitalism to Handicraft. (1908)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some Open Discussions.

Statements of difficulties, criticisms of our position, contributions upon any question of working-class interest, are invited. Members and non-members of the Party are alike welcome. Correspondents must, however, be as brief as possible, as bright as possible, and as direct as possible to the point.

Dear Sir,

The first of the Kautsky pamphlets published by your Party under the title of “From Handicraft to Capitalism,” treats in a masterly manner with the earlier stages of capitalist development, with the transformation of the sturdy handicraftsman, owning and controlling his own implements of industry, and producing for his own use and enjoyment, into the stunted, anaemic, flat-chested, narrow-gutted wage-slave, tending machinery which, although produced by labour, belongs to the master class, and turning out commodities for the world’s market, being permitted to consume a small fraction of the value of what he produces. Most of us are aware of recent developments in machinery, and can see quite easily the extent to which it is not only rendering it possible for the necessary labour to be performed by women and children instead of by men, but also making it easy to displace human labour, a displacement which is largely responsible for the acuteness of the unemployed question at this moment. Probably the time is not very far distant when such improvements will have been introduced as will make it quite easy for trained monkeys to do very much of the tending, and then—what is to happen to the bulk of the human race may perhaps form the subject of a discussion at a later date.

My object in writing now is to draw attention to a matter upon which I think some of your members as well as others claiming to be Socialists are taking a wrong turning—like the girl in the play. I know that, as a rule, they are wise enough not to be drawn into giving forth schemes or plans as to how this or that will be managed under Socialism, but content themselves with advocating the principle and pointing out that a people intelligent enough to declare the Socialist Republic will also be intelligent enough to settle in their own way any little questions which may seem difficult problems to some folk to-day. But I have sometimes heard it said that under Socialism we shall utilise the most scientific machinery for producing wealth, thus reducing the necessary human labour to the minimum and giving ample leisure to all. Now it occurs to me that there is here just a danger that under Socialism the people may be even greater victims of machine domination than they are to-day, and that all the joy in labour which William Morris so beautifully describes in your pamphlet “Art, Labour, and Socialism” will be conspicuous by its absence. Obviously, if under Socialism the test of the value of an improvement in machinery is to be its utility as a saver of human labour, many machines not now in use, because they are not savers of wages, will be taken advantage of. As no machinery can be run without organisation and strict discipline on the part of those concerned in its manipulation, it would seem that under Socialism there will not only be perpetuated that fetish of punctuality by which the profit mongers very naturally set such store, but that it will be seated upon even a higher throne than now. (The metaphor may be mixed but I think my meaning will be clear.) Now, is this desirable ? Are we to be “the touch the button” automatons which Edward Bellamy’s ”Looking Backward” depicts, or are we to be free men and free women, securing our livelihood in our own way ? Are we to be called to do our turn of machine minding by the shriek of the Government’s hooter, or are we to be allowed to have a “lay in” if we want it, pleasing ourselves as to how, when and where, if at all, we shall delve and spin?

I know, of course, some will say that in view of the leisure for all, possible only under Socialism, the slight restrictions upon individual liberty involved in punctually responding to the Government’s factory bell will be quite bearable and few will be found to grumble. Well, I think I shall be one of the few. After all, what is leisure and what should be employment ? They should both be synonymous terms for enjoyment. I take pleasure in pushing a plane and handling other implements associated with carpentry and cabinet-making. I may take three or four days to make a door which, with the aid of the most up-to-date and scientific machinery which is to be employed under Socialism could be produced, no doubt, in less than an hour. Am I to be compelled to forego the pleasure of producing my door by handicraft so that I may have “leisure” to do something I may be less inclined to ?

In my own particular case I know that when in health I require an outlet for my physical and mental powers. If I feel unfit for say, chopping wood (a favourite pastime of mine, but, of course, a waste of time when wood could be much more easily and expeditiously prepared for tho domestic hearth by machinery), if I don’t feel up to arguing with a Tariff Reformer or a Total Abstainer I know I’m not well, and I am certain I should feel damnably unwell if, under Socialism, I should be compelled to enter the Government factory at a particular time and to assist in producing articles by machinery which, if produced by handicraft would probably be superior in every respect, and which would certainly mean real leisure, that is, enjoyment to the producers.

Under Socialism there will be no parasites. There will, of course, be dependents. But as all the able bodied will be producers and as all useless labour will be avoided, the effort required to satisfy human needs will be so small that very little machinery will be needed. The tendency will be toward the “simple life” in production, in other words, as Society passed from Handicraft to Capitalism, so, in my opinion, it will revert to Handicraft after the transition stage from Capitalism to State Socialism. But I should like to hear the views of some member of the S.P.G.B.

Yours, etc.,

Kendrick Johns

_____________

Reply:

As the great Artemus has very forcefully pointed out, it is unwise to prophecy unless you knew. We do not know the precise form of organisation that will control industry in the Socialist Republic, nor the exact details of the working. We do not know whether the worker then, will be summoned to a factory by a State “hooter” or aroused from his slumbers by a direct electrical current established between the workshop and his bedpost. Not knowing, we do not prophecy. We only hold it highly improbable that the elimination of the conditions governing present day production for profit will leave the worker the slave of the machine. The manipulation of machinery in an atmosphere of comparative industrial liberty may well provide the manipulator with as great a joy as our correspondent can derive from the sight of a door growing slowly to recognisability under his hand—in four days. The machine is often a marvel of ingenuity, a veritable fairy story told in mechanics. Its control may easily be a dear delight. At the same time it is probable that the people of the Commonwealth may prefer a form of production, in special cases, that will allow the character of the worker to express itself more or less adequately in the work of his hand. Generally, however, we do not suppose that the worker then, will be prepared to relinquish the advantages of greater leisure that the machine offers—although he may occupy that leisure in some form of handicraftsmanship. Doubtless the present revolt against machine work is due to the crushing sense of the domination of the machine over the man—an inevitable result of the capitalist mode of production. Given the subserviency of the machine to the requirements of the man, and the whole aspect changes.

However this may be the subject is one we may well leave to the society of the future. A broader, saner view of productive processes and their relation to the life of the community will inevitably result from the removal of the restrictions that at present cramp the soul of the worker, and will reflect itself in the character of the product. It is a pleasing subject for speculation, anyhow, although the question of far greater and more immediate importance to us has to do with the education and organisation of the workers for the control of the means of their own livelihood. As to what they will do after then we do not pretend to have any particular knowledge. Nor is it a matter to worry about. They will doubtless make mistakes, but if they do they will have to bear the result of the error. Out of their experience they may be relied upon to, sooner or later, devise a means of satisfying their own desires within the means of their development. Then, at any rate, they will have the opportunity of profiting to the full from the lessons of their mistakes.

And that is all there is to it.—Ed. S.S.

Puzzle corner (1950)

A Short Story from the June 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our problem this month is adapted from a chapter in Edward Bellamy’s book, “Equality,” entitled, “The parable of the Water Tank.” Through a certain land there flowed a clear and pleasant stream and to this stream the people came to draw their water as and when they desired. There came amongst these people those who suggested that this state of affairs was far from good. They hinted that one day the stream might dry up and, as a precaution against this possibility, they proposed the building of a water tank to hold a reserve supply. This was agreed to by the people and the proposers took charge of the operations and also control of the tank. They arranged, and enforced, a plan whereby the people should draw water from the stream in buckets and pour it into the tank. For this they were to receive one half-penny per bucket. When the people required water they would not go to the stream but to the tank where they would be supplied at the price of one penny per bucket. Those who owned and controlled the tank would be exempt from the need to assist with the filling operations but would have access to the water in store. This arrangement went on until the tank became full, when the owners cried "Halt.” The next day the people came for water with their buckets but the owners asked first for the price of one penny. The people pointed out that as they were not now allowed to put water into the tank because it was full they earned no half-pennies and, in consequence, they had no pennies to pay. But the owners sneered and turned them away without water. To protect the tank and its contents from the thirsty people, the owners engaged men to act as policemen and soldiers, they engaged economists and soothsayers to explain to the people and to pacify them, they engaged clerks and officials to measure the water and keep accounts, they engaged servants and slaves to help them to enjoy the privilege and luxury that their position entailed. They bathed in the water, they drank it, they wasted it, until the level fell. Then they cried out to the people to come with their buckets to the stream to get more water to refill the tank. So the process started over again. ½d. a bucket put in and 1d. a bucket taken out. Soon the tank was again full and the people were once more turned away thirsty because they were not allowed to earn the pennies per two buckets that would entitle them to draw one bucket out. This is the state of affairs now. The stream still flows through the land, the tank is rapidly filling again, and hundreds of people are talking, questioning and seeking a solution to the problem of a land with plenty of water and plenty of thirsty people. There is a solution, a very simple solution. We do not intend to give it here. We think the workers are wide awake enough to see it. At least, those who read the Socialist Standard should be.

W. Waters

William Morris and the treasures of early socialism (2020)

From the World Socialist Party of the United States website

What is the point of studying the history of early socialism? 

Maybe the question itself is rather pointless. After all, nothing really needs to have a point. Enjoyment is enough, especially in a world where so much of the work we do is done under some form of compulsion. 

But I do think that there is a special value in studying the early period of socialist history, prior to the Russian Revolution. I say this because the “common sense” among many socialists in that era is quite different from the way of thinking that has prevailed since then. Above all, the understanding of what socialism itself means changed radically in the subsequent years. 

Going back to the early works of socialists published in the latter half of the nineteenth century can put us in touch with an understanding of socialism that actually seems fresh and new, pointing the way beyond the current impasse of the “socialist” movement. 

Of course, not all the self-proclaimed socialists of the late nineteenth century shared the same view of socialism. In fact, all of the subsequent divisions between radical political tendencies can be found, in embryo, in those early years. But at least the tendencies were still flowing in and out of each other, rather than being purely separate ideologies. Also, socialists at the time still seemed capable of thinking for themselves, rather than finding comfort in inherited dogmas. 

Or am I being too nostalgic? I don’t know.

What I do know, at any rate, is that there is much enjoyment and knowledge and encouragement to be found in the writings and in the life of early socialists, and none more than the great English socialist, William Morris. 

Two essays by Morris in particular — “How We Live and How We Might Live” and “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil” — present a brilliant criticism of life under capitalism and lay out a vision for a fundamentally different way of life — a new society where work is done solely to satisfy human needs and where the act of labor itself is a source of individual fulfillment.

The most widely available work by Morris presenting his view of a new society is, of course, the novel News from Nowhere. So in my brief discussion here of Morris’s socialist ideas, I will mainly look at passages taken from that remarkable work, which describes a socialist society through the eyes of a nineteenth century man, William Guest, who wakes up to find himself in a future world. 

Morris wrote this novel, which was first serialized in the socialist newspaper Commonweal in 1890, as a criticism of Looking Backward, a novel by Edward Bellamy that imagines a future society. In particular, Morris was repelled by how Bellamy focused narrowly on the reduction of labor time through machinery, rather than considering how the experience of labor itself might be transformed from “useful toil” into “useful work.” 

In his 1889 review of Bellamy’s novel, Morris wrote:

  I believe that the ideal of the future does not point to the lessening of men’s energy by the reduction of labour to a minimum, but rather the reduction of pain in labour to a minimum, so small that it will cease to be pain; a dream to humanity which can only be dreamed of till men are even more completely equal than Mr. Bellamy’s utopia would allow them to be, but which will most assuredly come about when men are really equal in condition.

In News from Nowhere, Morris depicts many scenes of how work has become a joyous activity, much like the pleasure that people today take in their personal hobbies—and quite different from the drudgery of our ordinary working days. 

The idea that work could be a source of joy is rather foreign to the view that holds sway among the Left today. There is a focus on securing jobs for the unemployed, increasing wages, and reducing working hours; and rightly so, because those are all necessary under the current system. 

But I think that there is little thought given among socialists of how the entire experience of work and its significance to the individual might be transformed in a post-capitalist world. Usually such speculation is limited to the idea that the rise in productive power has made it possible for us to drastically reduce the working day — once we are freed from the dictatorship of capital and its ceaseless thirst for surplus value. 

Morris explains the qualitative difference that will come once class divisions have dissolved and work’s only aim is to create useful things:

  When class-robbery is abolished, every man will reap the fruits of his labour, every man will have due rest – leisure, that is. Some Socialists might say we need not go any further than this; it is enough that the worker should get the full produce of his work, and that his rest should be abundant. But though the compulsion of man’s tyranny is thus abolished, I yet demand compensation for the compulsion of Nature’s necessity. As long as the work is repulsive it will still be a burden which must be taken up daily, and even so would mar our life, even though the hours of labour were short. What we want to do is to add to our wealth without diminishing our pleasure. Nature will not be finally conquered till our work becomes a part of the pleasure of our lives.

And in News from Nowhere we see vivid examples of how this new relationship of Man to labor is concretely. And Morris also sets forth his views on the topic in a conversation between his character William Guest and an older member of the future society (Hammond) [Chapter 15]:

“Now, this is what I want to ask you about – to wit, how you get people to work when there is no reward of labour, and especially how you get them to work strenuously?” 

“But no reward of labour?” said Hammond, gravely. “The reward of labour is life. Is that not enough?” 

“But no reward for especially good work,” quoth I. 

“Plenty of reward,” said he – “the reward of creation. The wages which God gets, as people might have said time agone. If you are going to be paid for the pleasure of creation, which is what excellence in work means, the next thing we shall hear of will be a bill sent in for the begetting of children.” 

“Well, but,” said I, “the man of the nineteenth century would say there is a natural desire towards the procreation of children, and a natural desire not to work.” 

“Yes, yes,” said he, “I know the ancient platitude, – wholly untrue; indeed, to us quite meaningless. Fourier, whom all men laughed at, understood the matter better.” 

“Why is it meaningless to you?” said I. 

He said: “Because it implies that all work is suffering, and we are so far from thinking that, that, as you may have noticed, whereas we are not short of wealth, there is a kind of fear growing up amongst us that we shall one day be short of work. It is a pleasure which we are afraid of losing, not a pain.”

This emphasis on the qualitative difference between life under capitalism and life in a future society is one of the characteristics of Morris’s understanding of socialism. And I think it is something that socialists today need to bear in mind. Too often socialism is viewed today simply as an improved version of capitalism — with shorter working hours, higher wages, better social welfare, cheaper education, etc. 

The power of Morris’s logical imagination is also apparent in his view of the role of money in a future society; or I should say his view that there would be no role for money in a socialist world. Here, too, is far ahead of, and far more profound than, the average socialist today, who can may imagine a “redistribution of wealth” but can only think of that in terms of “fairer” wages or higher taxes on the rich. In other words, the average socialist cannot fathom a world without money. 

In News from Nowhere, the character William Guest soon discovers that money has no place in the future world in which he has awakened. When a man takes him across the Thames River in a boat, Guest tries to pay him with a coin [Chapter 2]:

“I put my hand in my waistcoat-pocket, and said, “How much?” . . .  

He looked puzzled, and said, “How much? I don’t quite understand what you are asking about. Do you mean the tide? If so, it is close on the turn now.” 

I blushed, and said, stammering, “Please don’t take it amiss if I ask you; I mean no offence: but what ought I to pay you? You see I am a stranger, and don’t know your customs – or your coins.” 

And therewith I took a handful of money out of my pocket, as one does in a foreign country. . . 

He still seemed puzzled, but not at all offended; and he looked at the coins with some curiosity. . . 

Therewith my new friend said thoughtfully: 

“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 neighbour, unless he has done something special for me. I have heard of this kind of thing; but pardon me for saying, that it seems to us a troublesome and roundabout custom; and we don’t know how to manage it. And you see this ferrying and giving people casts about the water is my business, which I would do for anybody; so to take gifts in connection with it would look very queer. Besides, if one person gave me something, then another might, and another, and so on; and I hope you won’t think me rude if I say that I shouldn’t know where to stow away so many mementos of friendship.”

It is not so much a question of “abolishing” money in a socialist society, but that there is really no longer any basis for it to exist. This idea of a money-less society was a common one among the early socialists, but it largely disappeared in the twentieth century. As in so many other cases, the existence of a supposed “socialist society” — the Soviet Union — in which money (and wages) continued to exist, led many socialists to alter their views. The fact should have led them to ponder whether the USSR was in fact a socialist society (or rather some state-centered capitalism), but they were unable to give up their illusions about that country. 

The same is true of views about the “state” in a socialist society. Whereas before it has been assumed that the state would “wither away,” to borrow Marx’s expression, the twentieth century socialists came to view socialism as a society in which the state was at the core of everything to do with production and distribution. 

And this view of socialism as a state-centered society remains the common view of socialism today among both its advocates and its enemies. 

For a different view we can, again, look to News from Nowhere. In it, Morris puts forth his views on the lack of government in another conversation between Guest and Hammond [Chapter 11]:

What kind of a government have you? Has republicanism finally triumphed? or have you come to a mere dictatorship, which some persons in the nineteenth century used to prophesy as the ultimate outcome of democracy? . . .  

Now, dear guest, let me tell you that our present parliament would be hard to house in one place, because the whole people is our parliament.” 

“I don’t understand,” said I. 

“No, I suppose not,” said he. “I must now shock you by telling you that we have no longer anything which you, a native of another planet, would call a government.” 

“I am not so much shocked as you might think,” said I, “as I know something about governments. But tell me, how do you manage, and how have you come to this state of things?” 

Said he: “It is true that we have to make some arrangements about our affairs, concerning which you can ask presently; and it is also true that everybody does not always agree with the details of these arrangements; but, further, it is true that a man no more needs an elaborate system of government, with its army, navy, and police, to force him to give way to the will of the majority of his equals, than he wants a similar machinery to make him understand that his head and a stone wall cannot occupy the same space at the same moment. 

These are just a few examples of how Morris presents a view of a post-capitalist world that challenges some of the common sense of socialists today. On top of this, News from Nowhere contains a brilliant description of the ups and downs and the triumph of a revolutionary movement in the chapter titled “How the Change Came.”

His view of social change in that chapter is quite different from the twentieth century notions of an elite “vanguard party” masterminding a revolution. Rather, Morris emphasizes the importance of the working class arriving at an understanding of the limits of capitalism and the possibility for a radically different society. 

As interest in socialism is on the rise, the time seems ripe to look “backward” to the common sense of Morris and the early socialist movement for hints on our path forward. 

Michael Schauerte

A Gloomy Professor. (1920)

Book Review from the May 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, by Stephen Leacock. London : John Lane, the Bodley Head, Vigo St., W.1. 5s. net.

This book, written by a professor of Political Economy at McGill University, Montreal, is one of the numerous attempts made to explain the "labour unrest" throughout the world, and to propose some remedial measures for it. To be, and remain, a professor at a University necessarily means that one must not put forth ideas or statements that are injurious to the interests of the master class. Should one do so one very quickly loses one's chair, and is forced to seek employment in another direction.

This does not prevent certain guarded criticisms being made, especially when "unrest" reaches a troublesome stage, but the edge of the criticism is always turned in the end against one or two "exceptional" employers while the majority are shown to be virtuous, hard-working, self-sacrificing benefactors of mankind.

Thus the present volume opens with several important admissions on the conditions existing today. On page 14 we are told.

  With all our wealth we are still poor. After a century and a half of labour-saving machinery we work about as hard as ever. With a power over nature multiplied a hundred fold, nature still conquers us. And more than this : There are many scenes in which the machine age seems to leave the great bulk of civilised humanity, the working part of it, worse off instead of better.

This point is further emphasised on page 76 where he says:

  Labour-saving machinery does not of itself save the working world a single hour of toil; it only shifts it from one task to another.

In the third chapter the author attempts to disprove the usual theories on Value and Price. Especially does he object to the views of Adam Smith and Ricardo that the quantity of labour governs value. After referring to the stock illustration of the primitive savage he contends:

  But in the complexity of modern industrial life such a calculation no longer applies; the differences of technical skill, of native ingenuity, and technical preparation become enormous. The hour's work of a common labourer is not the same thing as the hour's work of a watchmaker mending a watch, or of an engineer directing the building of a bridge, or of an architect drawing a plan. There is no way of reducing these hours to a common basis.

The falsity of this statement is proved by everyday experience. Engineers, Architects, trained Technicians, etc., make elaborate and close calculations to show how the time they have to spend in acquiring their special knowledge and training has to be taken into account when their remuneration is being fixed. Directly or indirectly these multiplications are always applied to the unskilled labourers' standard as the basis of the calculation. Thus in the agitation carried on to-day by the school teachers, many of the speakers are taking the dustman or coalman as a basis for their calculation of what the salary of the teacher should be. A striking illustration of this fact is given in places where technical and professional education is partly or wholly supported from the national taxes. This reduces, or in some cases abolishes the fees that were paid formerly by the students, who are then expected to take lower salaries because their training has cost them less. Chemists in Germany were a front rank instance of this.

It is quite true, as Mr. Leacock says later on, that the payments at a given moment are the outcome of "economic strength." But "economic strength" only determines the range of the "fluctuations," it does not fix the line about which these fluctuations take place. That is determined by the cost of production based upon the average unskilled labourer.

Having admitted so much of the evils of the present system the author turns to remedies. Apart from his own nostrums he only refers to one other proposed remedy, namely, Socialism. This is impossible—"Socialism is a beautiful dream, possible only for the angels" (p. 22). Still he objects to the proscribing and persecution of Socialism, and claims that "It will languish and perish in the dry sunlight of open discussion."

But what is the "Socialism" that Mr, Leacock combats? In this second decade of the twentieth century, sixty-one years after the publication of Marx's Critique of Political Economy, "a critic of Socialism, not an ignorant Christian Evidence ranter, or a Tariff Reform charlatan, but a full-blown "professor" of Political Economy, takes as the standard work on Socialism Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward! The laws of social evolution are not even mentioned. The stage of development that present society has reached, and the only alternatives before us are passed over and a philanthropic sentimentalist's dream of a future state of society, with all its details fully worked out, is put up to be shot at, while the scientific analysis of capitalism and the discovery of social laws by Marx, Engels, and Morgan are carefully ignored.

Even then what is the author's main objection to Looking Backward? It is to the elected managers. They, in his opinion, must work as angels. "Now," he says (p. 106) "Let me ask in the name of sanity where are such officials to be found?" And he answers that they cannot be found anywhere.

What, then, is to be done? For evidently something must be done to avert chaos.

  The time has gone by when a man shall starve asking in vain for work; when the listless outcast shall draw his rags shivering about him unheeded of his fellows; when children shall be born in hunger and bred in want and broken in toil with never a chance in life. If nothing else will end these things, fear will do it. The hardest capitalist that ever gripped his property with the iron grasp of legal right, relaxes his grasp a little when he thinks of the possibilities of a social conflagration. (P. 119.)

Mr. Leacock's remedies can hardly be described as heroic. "Work must either be found or must be provided by the State itself," he says, and points to the undeveloped lands of Canada, United States, and Australia as being capable of absorbing the labour of generations. Whether this means compulsory emigration we are not told. It is interesting to note in passing that he says much to discredit the Malthusian doctrine.

  Put into the plainest of prose, then, we are saying that the government of every country ought to supply work and pay for the unemployed, maintenance for the infirm and aged, and education for the children." (P. 130.)

The two great measures to be applied to this end are the establishment of a minimum wage and the shortening of the hours of labour. Even eight hours a day at a mechanical task is considered too long by our author. These measures are to be brought into operation gradually by the combined means of legislation and collective organisation.

It needs but a superficial examination to show that even a rigorous application of these measures would not affect more than the fringe of the subject. Despite the so-called shortage of commodities, General Haig has been appealing in vain to the employers to give work to hundreds of thousands of demobilised men and officers who are unemployed. Gibing at certain of the trade unions is mere clap-trap as these unions point to the number of unemployed already in their ranks. Above all this, however, is the over-riding constant factor of improving machinery and means of production. These grow far faster than the effective demands of the market can absorb their products. Hence, apart from certain times of fluctuation, the number of unemployed is not only maintained, but is bound to increase.

Against this great fact Mr. Leacock's puny measures are as useless as Mrs. Partington's broom against the sea.

And even then, with unconscious humour, our author turns his own arguments against Socialism upon his own case when he says :

  Yet it is clear that a policy of State work and State pay for all who are otherwise unable to find occupation involves appalling difficulties. The opportunity will loom large for the prodigal waste of money for the undertaking of public works of no real utility, and for the subsidising of an army of loafers. (P. 128.)

A terrible outlook, truly! And how can it be met? By the very means that our author declared impossible.

   Clearly enough a certain modicum of public honesty and integrity is essential for such a task; more, undoubtedly, than we have hitherto been able to enlist in the service of the commonwealth. But without it we perish.

Then perish we must, for Mr. Leacock has already stated that such people cannot be found.

The Socialist—a student of social evolution— has no use for either the well-meaning Utopias of the Bellamys or the despair of the Leacocks. He knows that the development of the powers of production, their increasing size and complexity, the steady concentration of the means of life into fewer and fewer hands, with its increasing slavery of the workers, will force the problem before mankind:—Either social ownership of the Means of Life, or Destruction.

The unrest, the rumblings, the strikes, are all signs that the working class are beginning to kick—still blindly, it is true—against the effects of this system. That restlessness, turned into right channels due to the education the conditions give, aided by the propaganda of the Socialist, will ensure that not destruction, but Socialism, will prove the solution of the problem.

Jack Fitzgerald

Aspect: Labour Time Vouchers (1971)

The Aspect column from the May 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

A reader has asked us why the Socialist Party of Great Britain speaks of free access to consumer goods in Socialism rather than of the distribution of consumer goods by the labour-time vouchers mentioned by Marx.

The first to suggest the use of labour-time vouchers instead of money was Robert Owen in 1820. The Owenites stood for a society of co-operative communities. Each community would own its own means and instruments of production and each member of a community would work to produce what had been agreed was needed and in return would be issued with a note certifying for how many hours he had worked; he could then use this note to obtain from the community’s stock of consumer goods any product or products which had taken the same number of hours to produce. Owen believed that this co-operative commonwealth could begin to be introduced under capitalism and in the first half of the 1830s some of his followers established “labour bazaars” on a similar principle: workers brought the products of their labour to the bazaar and received in exchange a labour-note which entitled them to take away from the bazaar any item or items which had taken the same time to produce, after taking into account the costs of the raw materials. These bazaars were failures but the idea of labour-time vouchers (or “labour-money”) appeared in substantially similar forms in France with Proudhon and in Germany with Rodbertus and is one source of currency crank theories.

Those who advocate labour-time vouchers can have two different circumstances for their use in mind. Like Robert Owen, they can advocate their use within the context of co-operative ownership and production for use or, like Proudhon, within the context of private ownership and production for sale. Marx exposed as currency cranks those who wanted labour-time vouchers and buying and selling. Where goods are produced for sale, he pointed out, sooner or later one commodity will emerge as the one which can be exchanged for all the others. This special commodity is of course money and its appearance signifies the end of barter. To perform this role of the medium of exchange the commodity must itself have an exchange value. Money is basically a special commodity, a fact which is obscured by the later evolution of money where almost worthless coins and notes have come to circulate as tokens for the money-commodity. Those who advocate the abolition of money and its replacement by labour-time vouchers while retaining production for sale are thus, said Marx, quite confused; wherever there is production for sale one commodity must become money (see his comments in his Critique of Political Economy on the theories of John Gray).

Within the context of common ownership and production for use, however, labour-time vouchers are quite feasible. Then they are not money at all, but merely a method of sharing out consumer goods. As Marx said of the Owenites’ plan for a co-operative commonwealth:

  Owen’s ‘labour-money’, for instance, is no more ‘money’ than a ticket for the theatre. Owen presupposes directly associated labour, a form of production that is entirely inconsistent with the production of commodities. The certificate of labour is merely evidence of the part taken by the individual in the common labour, and of his right to a certain portion of the common produce destined for consumption (Capital, Vol &, Moscow, 1961, pp. 94-5).

Engels says much the same in his comments in Anti-Dühring on Owen’s labour-notes.

The German Social Democrats of the 1860s and 1870s inherited the idea of distribution according to labour-time from Rodbertus. They envisaged a system where, with the means of production vested in the community, workers would be given a labour-time voucher entitling them to a share of the social product; thus they would, as Lassalle put it, get “the full product of their labour”. This phrase is confused because, if everything produced in a given period is distributed in full for consumption, then nothing would be left over to renew and expand the means of production or to store in the case of emergency. This point was made by Marx in one of his criticisms of the Gotha Programme which was adopted by the German Social Democrats in 1875 when the followers of Lassalle united with the group with which Marx and Engels had been working. In the course of this criticism Marx made his well-known statement about labour-time vouchers in Socialism (“not as it has developed on its own foundations, but . . . just as it emerges from capitalist society”):

  The individual producer . . . receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such and such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds), and with this certificate he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as costs the same amount of labour. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form he receives back in another (Selected Works, Vol II, Moscow, 1958, p. 23).

Supporters of state capitalist Russia have used this passage to try to show that Marx thought that  money — and of course gold does function as the money-commodity in Russia — could exist in Socialism. This is so much nonsense since elsewhere Marx specifically stated that labour-time vouchers were not money (see his comments on Owen quoted earlier):

  The producers may . . . receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time. These vouchers are not money. They do not circulate (Capital, Vol II, Moscow, 1957, p. 358).

Marx nowhere states that labour-time vouchers were the only method of distributing wealth in Socialism; they were only one possible method. [1]  The actual method adopted would depend on the circumstances (Capital, Vol I, pp. 78-9). Alternatives were suggested, as for instance by Edward Bellamy in his Looking Backward written in 1887. He wanted everybody in Socialism to be issued with a credit card entitling them to obtain an equal amount of consumer goods. In any event, later in his criticism of the Gotha Programme Marx made it quite clear that if labour-time vouchers were used in Socialism this would be a temporary measure imposed by the comparatively low level of technology. In time, he saw, when the “springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly” Socialist society could abandon labour-time vouchers (or whatever) and go over to “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” that is, to free access to consumer goods.

In 1875 the then existing level of technology might well have meant that many consumer goods would unavoidably be available only in limited quantities for some years after the establishment of Socialism. But in the hundred years since, technical progress has made it possible for the springs of co-operative wealth to flow more abundantly than Marx could have foreseen so that free distribution—to each according to his needs—can be implemented almost immediately after Socialism has been established.

Potential abundance has made the idea of labour-time vouchers quite outdated.

Notes:

[1] Baran and Sweezy are quite wrong when they write in their Monopoly Capital (Penguin, p. 325) that “Marx emphasised in his Critique of the Gotha Programme that the principle of equivalent exchange must survive in a socialist society for a considerable period as a guide to the efficient allocation and utilization of human and material sources”. For Marx there was no “must” about labour-time vouchers (and so more or less “equivalent exchange”); they were just one way of allocating consumer goods before free access could be introduced.

Social Protest Literature (1999)

Book Review from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Social Protest Literature: An Encyclopaedia of Works, Characters, Author, and Themes. Patricia D. Netzley, ACB-CLIO Inc. 1999.

You will learn a lot from this dog’s dinner of a reference book. Did you know that “monkey-wrenching” in America is a form of environmental sabotage? Or that a character called Teacake, in a black feminist novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, contracted rabies and had to be shot by his wife? You didn’t? Well, you do now.

The trouble with Netzley’s confection is that it is wilfully selective, often tediously trivial—and, frankly, just too American. Of the 343 works cited, no less than 93 percent were published in the US. The British ones include those by or about Dickens, Aldous Huxley, Gilbert Murray, Herbert Read, Shaw and Raymond Williams. Bernard Marx, a character in Huxley’s Brave New World, merits a 200-word discussion. No entry for Karl Marx—only a passing reference to him under communism and socialism. The social reformer Edward Bellamy, with his boring prediction of a nationalised “socialist” America in Looking Backward, gets an enthusiastic 700-word coverage. For William Morris’s much more imaginative News from Nowhere—zilch! The entries for communism and socialism are disappointing. We are told that the principles of communism developed in ancient times, that Marxists split into several factions during and after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and that McCarthy led a crusade against communism. Not a word about what communism actually is as an alternative to capitalism.

Socialism fares only a little better. After being told that it “is an ideology that advocates equality and the abolishment of class structure and capitalism” we learn that “Socialists believe that the people, in the form of the state, should control all property and production of goods”!

Perhaps the main problem with this book is her focus on the word “protest”. It is a weak and even cunning word, exemplified in the protest vote, when you vote for someone you don’t agree with to give someone else a warning. Protest is often ineffective and done from a position of subservience: you protest the price of fish when you ought to be boldly changing the world. Socialists don’t go much on protest—vigorous opposition and constructive imagination are more our style.

Social Protest Literature has some good points. As the blurb says it is beautifully illustrated and would look good on a coffee table. It gives a fair introduction to a wide range of fictional literature on the lives of victims of property society. But don’t expect to find anything useful about how to abolish that society and replace it with socialism.

Stan Parker

Letter From Europe: The French movement for abundance (1980)

The Letter From Europe column from the February 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

In France, before and just after the last world war, a group known as the Mouvement Français pour I’Abondance (MFA) enjoyed some success, to such an extent that its theories are now referred to in most French dictionaries under the word abondance. The key figure in this movement, which still exists today though divided into a number of rival groups, was Jacques Duboin. Born in 1878 he had briefly been a junior Minister and a Radical Deputy in the 1920s. The slump which followed the 1929 Crash, however, set him thinking about economic and social matters and led him to elaborate a “theory of abundance”, first sketched in La Grande Releve des Hommes par la Machine in 1932, and to found a movement which after the war became the MFA.

According to Duboin, the 1930s slump represented the coming of abundance which capitalism, being based on the exchange of goods for profit, could not cope with since only goods which werc scarce had an exchange value and so were exchangeable. Abundance. Duboin taught, kills profits; which explained why capitalism had to try to suppress abundance in order to survive.

To give the flavour of the MFA analysis we translate below some passages from their pamphlets:

   In this regime [capitalism] which rests on exchange, the means of production are private property. Their owners draw a profit from them by selling what is produced at the highest price competition permits. People who possess nothing sell their labour as dearly as competition permits, and get wages, salaries or fees which allow them to buy what they need to live.
   It is clear that such a regime cannot exist with abundance since this suppresses profit. In fact, only products and services which have some value can be sold. But only scarce products keep their value and sell at a profit. Abundant products have no value: they are given and taken; they are not sold . . . It is thus a truism to say that abundance does not exist: it will never exist in the capitalist regime since production is not motivated by the desire to satisfy consumption but by that of realising a profit. When this profit becomes impossible, production stops. It is then said that there is a crisis, even if many consumers lack the bare necessities (Duboin, Economic Distributive de l'Abondance, 1946).          The magnificent scientific achievements of the 20th century have made abundance appear in all the industrialised countries, upsetting their economies from top to bottom, since these can only function with a “scarcity" of products and services. This obviously requires explanation: At the present time money is almost as indispensable to existence as air to the lungs. But money doesn’t fall from heaven; it is production as a whole which distributes it in the form of wages and profits. The pursuit of money being thus at the centre of our concerns, we do not grow corn to have corn, but to have money; for if we don’t gain any money then we don’t sow any more corn. Similarly all other agricultural, commercial and industrial enterprises are only viable to the extent that they succeed in bringing into their tills more money than they pay out. When abundance appears, workers are sacked since there is no more work to give them. But they then don’t buy the products and these, remaining at the charge of the producers. make their profits disappear: he who can't buy ruins him who wants to sell! People then complain about “overproduction", for this is what everything that cannot be sold is called. But chronic overproduction, is that not abundance? So goods are not produced in abundance quite simply because they would not be able to be sold (Bombe “H” ou economie distributive, 1958).

The first paragraph of these extracts contains some serious mistakes; on some points the analysis as a whole comes very near to currency crank theories like Social Credit, and in many ways Duboin can be seen as a French equivalent of Major Douglas. His solution to the problem of distribution, however, was different and more interesting. The exchange economy, said Duboin, must be replaced by an economy in which wealth is no longer produced to be exchanged but is produced instead simply in order to be distributed to human beings to satisfy their needs. This new economic system he variously called l'economie distributive (the distribution economy), le socialisme de I'abondance and le socialisme distributif.

Under this system the means for producing wealth were to cease to be the private property of individuals and to become the common heritage of all the members of society; the wages system was to be replaced by a “social service” in which every able-bodied person would work for a certain period in order to help produce an abundance of wealth; finally, every member of society would be credited, from the cradle to the grave, with a “social income” in the form of a monnaie de consommation (consumption money) which would be equal for those in equal circumstances and which would enable them to draw what they needed from the common store of goods set aside for individual consumption.

We will once again quote from “abundancist" writers to show the extent of their opposition to exchange:

   It should not be necessary to think very deeply to understand that from the moment when production has become the property of society as a whole, the economic process can no longer be carried out by a series of exchanges (which imply individual or group property of the products exchanged) but only by allocation (or distribution) (Pour batir le socialisme. Perspectives Syndicalistes. 1969).
   Socialism . . .  still calls for “the socialisation of the means of production and exchange". For the means of production they are right. But as far as the means of exchange are concerned, they are behind the times and unconsciously play the game of the capitalism they are fighting against by accepting to present the problem in the same terms as it. The real objective to pursue is “the socialisation of the means of production and the replacing of the means of exchange by means of distribution".

(Gustave Rodrigues, Le Droit a la vie, 1936 edition, p.108.)

This “distribution economy” described by Duboin in fact had more in common with the utopia described in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) than with Douglas’ Social Credit. But his proposal for “consumption money” attracted support from the same sort of people as in other countries supported Social Credit. There is however a difference. Major Douglas envisaged giving everybody a “social dividend” within capitalism; Duboin, on the other hand, assumes the abolition of exchange so that “consumption money" is a misnomer, especially as Duboin made it clear that this so-called “money” could only be used once and so would not circulate. Strictly speaking then, it would not be “money”at all but something similar to the “labour-time vouchers” which Marx once envisaged as possibly necessary in a very early stage of socialism. In fact “consumption voucher" would be a better term for what Duboin had in mind.

Any system of vouchers — and this applies to the labour-time vouchers mentioned by Marx as well implies as a counterpart that the goods for distribution have pseudo-prices. Under the labour-time voucher system these pseudo-prices were to be related to the time spent in producing particular goods. Under Duboin’s system they were to depend on how scarce a particular good was, holding out the prospect that, as abundance came more and more to be realised, goods would become “cheaper" and “cheaper", (able to be acquired by smaller and smaller numbers of vouchers) and eventually free. Indeed Duboin proposed that some services such as heating, lighting, transport, telephones and health treatment should be free from the start. Thus, as with Marx, so for Duboin the end to be achieved was the full application of the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”—free access to goods and services according to what the individual person judges he or she needs.

If Marx, writing in 1875, may have had a case for saying that unrestricted free access to goods and services could not have been introduced immediately had socialism been then established, the same cannot be said of Duboin and his followers in the 1930s and certainly not today (Duboin died in 1973, at the age of 95). In fact there is something odd about a group calling itself “the movement for abundance" yet not proposing full free access as something that could be realised very rapidly. As we have pointed out in our comments on labour-time vouchers (see, for instance, Socialist Standard, April 1971), the fantastic development of the means of production in the twentieth century has made any system of rationing, however generous the rations, quite obsolete. This applies to labour-time vouchers as well as Duboin’s “consumption money’’. A consistent “abundancist” today can only be in favour of free access, of goods being freely available for people to take according to need from the abundance which is technologically possible now but which will only becoming socially possible once capitalism has been replaced by socialism.

The MFA is open to criticism on other grounds too. Duboin was an underconsumptionist who greatly exaggerated the impact of mechanisation and automation on employment under capitalism. He just looked at the labour displaced in the final stage of the production process while neglecting the extra labour required at earlier stages to invent and build the new machines. Certainly, the former is greater than the latter — otherwise the new machinery would not be introduced — but as a matter of observed fact productivity in manufacturing industry increases on average at the comparatively slow rate of 2 or 3 per cent a year, and certainly not at the fantastic rates sometimes implied by Duboin. But Duboin was not original in making this mistake, nor in making another in accepting the myth that banks can “create credit" whereas in fact they can do no more than lend what has been deposited with them.

The MFA also argues, sometimes quite vehemently, that its “distribution economy” could be established in just one country, preferably France. The arguments it uses to defend this view show that it has not fully understood what socialism is even if it has understood the need to abolish what it calls “the prices-wages-profits system". As the productive apparatus capable of producing an abundance of wealth is world-wide, it is clear that abundance can only be realised on a world scale and that socialism, the society that will permit its realisation, can only be world-wide too. Indeed at times the picture the MFA paints of what it calls socialism more resembles state capitalism. At one time in fact (when Russia was more popular than it is now) the MFA used to describe Russia as "scarcity socialism", though most French “abundancists" would not. Most French “abundancists" would now agree that the Russian system is a form of state capitalism.

What is interesting in all this is that, virtually unknown to us in the English- speaking world, a group of people in France came to the conclusion that the solution to todays social problems necessarily involves abolishing the exchange economy and the wages-prices-profits system, even if this insight was mixed up with all sorts of confused and incorrect ideas. It once again confirms that the spread of socialist ideas does not depend entirely on our own meagre propaganda effort.

Adam Buick (Luxemburg)

Looking Back on Edward Bellamy (2016)

From the July 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1888 a book by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, was published which had an enormous impact at the time. It could even be said that it marked the take-off of modern socialist ideas in America.

Bellamy was a New England journalist and writer who had travelled widely. His utopian novel is based on the story of a rich young Bostonian, Julian West, who is sent to sleep by mesmerism and does not wake up until the year 2000, by which time a far-reaching economic and social revolution has taken place in America.

As explained to him by his host, Dr Leete, all land and industry is now the collective property of the whole community and run as a public service to supply people’s needs. People no longer work for wages, and money has been abolished. Instead, everybody is required to serve in an industrial army between the ages of 21 and 45 and in return receives an annual credit, which is equal for everyone, in the form of vouchers entitling them to draw a given amount of goods and services from the common store. Differences between the nature of jobs would be taken into account by adjusting the number of hours the people doing them would be expected to work. The functions of government, Dr Leete explains, now reduced essentially to the organisation of production for use are exercised by the general council of the industrial army whose members are elected by those who have retired from industrial service, i.e. by the over-45s.

Bellamy depicted a technologically advanced society, imagining some technological advances that would have taken place between 1888 and 2000, for instance moving pavements, music piped to every house, and goods delivered to homes by pneumatic tubes. Reality (airplanes, motor cars, radio, television, electronic computers, internet, mobile phones, etc) turned out to be much more amazing than anyone in 1888 could have imagined, but this strengthened rather than weakened Bellamy's case.

Although the industrial army aspect is over-painted (and Bellamy himself watered it down in his later writings), all the essential ideas of the socialist movement as it was to develop in America were there: collective ownership of all land and industry on a national scale, production for use not sale or profit, social service instead of working for wages, economic equality, industrial administration replacing political government.

Bellamy himself never referred to himself as a socialist, apparently feeling that the foreign associations of the word would put off American public opinion which he was seeking to convince. He referred to his system variously as 'national co-operation', 'nationalized industrial system' and even as 'public capitalism'. The movement which sprang up on the basis of the ideas expressed in his book was called the 'Nationalist' movement. Nevertheless, his was a powerful indictment of private capitalism and its effects on the propertyless majority which it both created and exploited. Many of those influenced by Bellamy were not afraid to call themselves socialists. In fact they easily moved from his Nationalist movement to Socialism, including Daniel De Leon who joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1890 and became its leading figure till his death in 1914.

The attraction of Bellamy’s book was that it put forward a solution to the social problems, brought about in America by the development of industry under capitalist conditions since the Civil War, and which did not reject industry and industrialisation, but which on the contrary fully accepted them as providing the means to supply plenty for all.

When people like De Leon left the Nationalist movement and became socialists, they did so not because they disagreed with the goal but because they disagreed with Bellamy’s strategy for reaching this goal. Bellamy thought that a 'nationalised industrial system' could come about gradually through the trustification of industry and then the piecemeal nationalisation of these trusts, and steadfastly refused till his death in 1898 to entertain talk about socialism and the class struggle. He got no further than supporting the People’s Party (Populists); in fact most of the Nationalists who did not go over to calling themselves Socialists were absorbed into the Populist movement.

De Leon and the others who broke away over this issue saw Bellamy’s system, which they were not afraid to call socialism, being achieved through the working-class victims of the competitive system organising politically and industrially to dispossess the private capitalists, so making all means of production the common property of the community (or rather of ‘the nation’ as they sometimes revealingly put it). Like Bellamy, they envisaged 'political government' being replaced by 'industrial government', though their conception of this latter was more democratic than Bellamy’s since they envisaged the members of this 'central directing authority' being elected by those working in the various branches of industry, an idea Bellamy had rejected in Looking Backward as being bad for the discipline of his 'industrial army'.

When William Morris reviewed Looking Backward in the Socialist League's paper, Commonweal, on 22 June 1889 he made the point that one of the dangers of socialist utopian novels was that some people would take them as a description of what socialism was going to be like rather than as seeing them as the author's preference as to what he or she would like it to be (a point to remember, as Morris himself made clear, when reading his utopian novel News from Nowhere written precisely to propose an alternative vision of the future to Bellamy's).

In his review Morris criticised the regimentation and centralisation Bellamy depicted and, like other socialists of the time, challenged his view as to how socialism would come about. Above all, he criticised Bellamy's attitude to work. Like many others, Bellamy saw work as something inherently unpleasant which people had to be obliged to do and which society should aim to minimise. Morris's view, on the contrary, was:

'I believe that the ideal of the future does not point to the lessening of men's energy by the reduction of labour to a minimum, but rather to the reduction of pain in labour to a minimum, so small that it will cease to be a pain.'

Morris point is a reasonable one but views similar to Bellamy's still circulate amongst critics in America of capitalism, for instance in the Zeitgeist movement (which wants to automate everything) and Parecon (which is based on the assumption that nobody will work without some form of compensation as an incentive).

This said, Looking Backward was an important work in the development of the socialist idea in America which in turn had an influence in their development in other parts of the English-speaking world including Britain.

Looking Backward can be read online here. 

Bellamy, socialism and utopia

From the Winter 1987-88 issue of the World Socialist

For as long as there has been human oppression there have been dreams of the oppressed. Oppressed people have not usually had access to the means of recording their dreams, so too many of them have been lost. Nor have they had the power to communicate their dreams as widely as the powerful have been free to spread theirs, so all too often such visions of what could be have been relegated to an area outside of "serious politics", derided as the literary yearnings of unimportant masses, or neatly filed away under the heading of "impossibility" — a heading which is made to measure the needs of the ruling class of the day, as Mannheim clearly showed in his book, Ideology and Utopia.

The politics of Utopia begins with the visions of those who see beyond the way life is. Utopia — which derives from the Greek words for good place and no place — is never compatible with the mistaken certainties about how society must always be which all ruling classes in the history of class society have sought to perpetuate. Utopias smash through the barriers of "reality" (our rulers' reality) and project a new form of existence.

Early Utopias reflected naive and physically unrealisable wishes of the oppressed majority. For example, the 14th century poem, The Land of Cockaygne, depicts a world where geese fly around ready-roasted calling out to be eaten. This was no realisable scheme of how society could one day be, but it did reflect the impotent desires of hungry serfs, just as the American folk song. The Big Rock Candy Mountains (originally a Norwegian Utopian song, according to the folk music historian, A.L. Lloyd) tells us something about the dreams of the American hobo when it depicts its land of soda water fountains, lemonade springs, streams of alcohol trickling down the rocks, and lakes of stew and whiskey too which you can paddle all around in your own canoe.

Not all Utopias have been fantasies. Many have constituted genuine critiques of the existing social order. In The Politics of Utopia by Goodwin and Taylor it is contended that we should take what have been labelled as Utopian ideas seriously; instead of pushing them aside to a discarded limbo between political science and mere literary criticism, those interested in politics should find time to recognise the important contribution of "utopian" thought:

Consciousness of the difference between existing reality and a non-existent, but potentially existent, future — a morally desirable future — was one of the most important ingredients of this quest (for the good life). Unless we feel absolutely confident that we have now reached the limits of our capabilities and creativity, that we have advanced to perfection already, to dispense with utopianism would be to renounce a large part of what it is to be a political animal.

Our present rulers, be they avowedly conservative or allegedly radical, do feel confident that with the present social system we have reached our human destination: reform it, perhaps, but scrap it: impossible, it's utopian.

Capitalism, with its big promises of liberty and rewards for hard work and freedom, and the mean reality of what the system has been in experience, has given rise to utopian thought. Never was such thought more expressive than in the decades of disappointment which followed capitalism's hour of glory, the French Revolution. Schemes were drawn up by men who believed that they alone had the blueprint for The New Social Order. These men — Fourier, Owen, St Simon, Babeuf, Weitling — were "utopian socialists". Much of what they dreamed about would not be dismissed by socialists today, either in terms of their political ends, such as the abolition of government and money or their poetical impulse to destroy the pompous claims of property-based civilisation. To be sure, much of what they envisaged seems crazy now — some of it must have done then — but that is the price to be paid for the idealistic act of constructing a blueprint for the future.

MARXISM AND UTOPIA

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels began to construct their theory of revolutionary socialism at a time when to be socialist was regarded as an act of futuristic utopianism. Most socialists in the 1840s were followers of one blueprint or another; in America the Utopias had become more than blueprints and embryonic Utopian socialist communities had sprung up in their thousands.

Marxism (that rather inadequate term which we use to sum up the essential theories of Marx and Engels and those who think in their tradition today) is a materialist theory of history. Its starting point is not based upon the moral imperative of what should be or the ideals of blueprints which start and finish in the realm of human consciousness, but upon the material recognition that in order to transform society we must revolutionise its material (productive) base. We should not be surprised, then, that the advocates of such an outlook would find themselves at odds with the utopians of their day.

The main criticism levelled against utopians by Marx (and, with greater force than in any other work, by Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific) was their lack of a theory of history: Who was going to construct their Utopia? The answer of the Utopians was, We are — we who have had the unique foresight of seeing life as it could be. For Marx and Engels that was the arrogant nonsense of philosophical idealists who imagined that Ideas make History. The working class, which constitutes the majority of humankind, must be the creators of the new social system. If the workers are to create socialism (or communism; Marx and Engels used the words interchangeably) they must want it and desire it. The utopians had no time to wait for the workers to be brought in on the act of their own emancipation. This was a crucial reason for hostility between Marxism and utopianism, just as it is for the battle between modern socialists and the Leninists and other vanguardists who like the Utopians believe that they, as exclusive possessors of the revolutionary ideal, must lead the witless masses to the New Jerusalem — which all too often comes to look something like East Berlin or Gdansk.

Marx and Engels refused to prepare recipes for the cook-shops of the future. The only statements which they could make about what socialism would be like were made upon the materialist basis of what was then possible. Of course, time has rendered some of these projections obsolete, and, as good materialists, Marx and Engels would be the first to admit the outdated nature of some of their comments about socialism which came out of 19th century conditions, but are still advocated religiously and unhistorically by 20th century utopian leftists. For example, the view of Marx that labour vouchers could play a role in the distribution of goods in the early days of socialist society before enough for all could be produced, has been superseded by developments in technology which make the move to a moneyless world society an immediate result of the socialist revolution to come.

So, we can see that the utopian outlook, which we began by praising as the innocent child of oppressed desire, met the wrath of science and became perceived as a hindrance to revolutionary change. In short, it is precisely when "Utopia" becomes practical that Utopians become obstacles to the achievement of the new way of living. We need to dream when we are unfree to act.

BELLAMY'S UTOPIA

Marxism left the task of transforming society to the workers. For historical reasons too complex to enter into here, the workers did not jump to the task. On the contrary, capitalism survived the scientific theory of its destruction, just as it had outlived the utopian desire for the same end. Socialism and Marxism came to be dirty words and those seeking change began to look in new directions.

Edward Bellamy, the son of a strict Baptist Minister and a frighteningly puritanical mother, a journalist of some ability, born in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts on 26 March, 1850, set himself the task of writing a utopian novel which would show the world how different society could be from the rottenness of American capitalism. That he did well depict the absurdity of the capitalist way of organising society is demonstrated by the passage from Looking Backward which we re-publish at the end of this article. That his novel did have an impact is clear from the fact that approximately half a million copies of it were sold in the few years after its publication in 1888. It was, according to Goodwin and Taylor, "probably the most widely read fictional utopia ever written". In addition to being read it was acted upon: the novel gave rise to a Nationalist movement, seeking to put into practice the vision of Bellamy's novel. According to Cyrus F Willard (who was one of the movement's leading figures), the Nationalist Clubs had over 6,000 members and 500,000 "believers''. He wrote that:

We have fifty or more papers and magazines unreservedly advocating Nationalism. (The Nationalist, II, No. 1, December 1889)

The Nationalist movement's principles were based upon those in Bellamy's book and the book was a bestseller, so the obvious question remains, what did it say? The novel tells the story of Julian West, a prosperous resident of Boston, who, unable to fall asleep, has his butler hypnotise him and . . . then, one hundred and thirteen years later when he wakes up, he finds himself in a fundamentally transformed Boston, the social details of which are explained to him by the rather tedious Dr Leete and his daughter, Edith — with whom, of course, Julian falls in love during his trip to utopia. What is Bellamy's utopia like? The following features, supported by some quotations from Bellamy's own summary of the novel in the Dawn of 15 September, 1889, define the new system:

1. The entire nation of the USA has become "a general business partnership, in which every man and woman is an equal partner".
2. All people in the new society are part of the "army of industry" which they must serve in some form between the ages of 21 and 45. The argument is that just as capitalism conscripts labour for destructive purposes in times of war, the new system conscripts labour for peaceful, productive ends. There is, incidentally, a special corps of the "army" for professional people and even one for the disabled.
3. No wages are paid for working, but people receive vouchers (in fact, an elaborate credit card system operates) which allow them to have what they need from the common store. If some fields of work are less attractive than others, then the hours of work are shortened.
4. The feminine corps of the army is "devoted to the lighter classes of occupations".
5. At the age of 45 all people are discharged from the army of labour and are "free to occupy themselves as they will for the remainder of their lives".
6. There is no money (in the old sense) and credit cannot be stored by individuals, so creating economic inequality.
7. There is virtually no crime: "Robbery, theft and fraud of every sort are without a motive in a society where all have abundance, where covetousness is not stimulated by different degrees of luxury, and where equality of resources is annually renewed".
8. Much more wealth is produced than under capitalism because waste is avoided and science is properly used for peace and not war.

These features provide only a rough summary. For example, Bellamy devised an elaborate scheme for electing officers for the national army, giving the vote only to those over the age of 45! We shall not bother ourselves here with the more obviously outlandish features of Bellamy's vision. Its most important contribution to the thinking of the time was its vision of a moneyless, wageless, classless society — although, as will become clear, those conditions were somewhat equivocal in Bellamy's scheme of things. His utopia showed workers a society where life could be different — better, happier. That is what socialists must be doing. The influence of Bellamy upon the American working-class movement was considerable. The foremost Marxian thinker of early 20th century America, Daniel DeLeon, was quite evidently influenced by Bellamy. (Indeed, DeLeon maintained some of Bellamy's non-socialist utopian features within his own vision of socialism even after he ceased to be a Nationalist.)

UNSATISFACTORY DEPICTION OF SOCIALISM

Like all Utopians, Bellamy lacked an historical theory of social transformation. By far the weakest part of his book is that which describes the coming of the new order: it came because people saw that it was a good idea, so they let it be, capitalists collaborating with workers, without any violent resistance, without any political action. Indeed, Bellamy goes out of his way to state that socialists were a counter-productive influence upon the great utopian change. But history does not change like that. The class struggle will not collapse into a utopian act of national goodwill. And Bellamy's utopia was an historical non-starter. The Nationalist movement, which sought to bring about the utopian change simply by the moral preaching of educated persons of goodwill did not take long to fall to pieces, now utterly forgotten except by historians. 

So, the first criticism which socialists must make about Bellamy is that he was utopian, not in the sense of being a visionary (which all revolutionaries are), but in the sense of rejecting a scientific or materialistic idea of change. But it was not only the lack of a means of achieving socialism (and Bellamy refused to call his utopia that in case it might offend Americans) for which socialists criticise Looking Backward. The very depiction of socialism presented is unsatisfactory. The idea of such a change occurring in one country is an impossibility, given the global interdependence of the capitalist system. The state-capitalist sense of the nation being organised as a huge business corporation, with all the people as its conscript employees, does not inspire those of us seeking a truly liberated society. The abolition of the wages system (a quiet common socialist demand in American history) is spoilt by the picture of everyone having to live in a society of credit cards. The sexism of the role of women is unattractive to socialists, as indeed is the potentially eugenicist notion of creating a perfect human race which follows from Bellamy's ideas on marriage. The new social order (and you will need to read the book to get the sense of this) is over-concerned with consumerism, technology and the pleasures of living an ordered existence. That crucial element of socialist vision which is about the unity of work and art, values beyond immediate consumption, and life being more than a process of individual satisfaction, is too often missing from Bellamy's outlook. No wonder that it was William Morris, a socialist who embodied all of those broader notions of what it is to be a revolutionary socialist, who was amongst the first to attack Bellamy's novel. Indeed, it was Morris's disgust at reading Looking Backward which led him to write his infinitely better novel about what socialism might be like: News From Nowhere.

Looking Backward, published a century ago, is a novel worth reading, if only for the kind of penetrating critique of capitalism typified by the extract which follows. His rather less interesting book. Equality, written in 1890 and lacking the literary quality of Bellamy's magnum opus, pursues the same corporatist vision, showing clearly the link (one which is often a source of embarrassment to the state-loving Left) between state-capitalism and fascism as corporatist ideals of economic organisation.

A century after Looking Backward came off the press the oppressed are still entertaining visions of what could be. Those of us who seek to pull from the roots the rottenness of what our rulers say must always be are still derided as utopians. But then, as Thomas Muntzer, the anabaptist revolutionary of the Sixteenth Century, pointed out, history belongs to those of us who "possess the strength to realise the impossible".

Steve Coleman

Edward Bellamy on how people live under capitalism

By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the way people lived together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another, I cannot do better than compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach to which the masses of humanity were harnessed and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was Hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. The seats on top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merit of the straining team.

Naturally such places were in great demand and the competition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to his child after him. By the rule of the coach a man could leave his seat to whom he wished, but on the other hand there were many accidents by which it might at any time be wholly lost. For all that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them and falling to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach, on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one's seat, and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.

But did they think only of themselves? you ask. Was not their very luxury rendered intolerable to them by comparison with the lot of their brothers and sisters in the harness, and the knowledge that their own weight added to their toil. Had they no compassion for fellow beings from whom fortune only distinguished them? Oh, yes; commiseration was frequently expressed by those who rode for those who had to pull the coach, especially when the vehicle came to a bad place in the road, as it was constantly doing, or to a particularly steep hill. At such times, the desperate straining of the team, their agonized leaping and plunging under the pitiless lashing of Hunger, the many who fainted at the rope and were trampled in the mire, made a very distressing spectacle, which often called forth highly creditable displays of feeling on the top of the coach.

At such times the passengers would call down encouragingly to the toilers of the rope, exhorting them to patience, and holding out hopes of possible compensation in another world for the hardness of their lot, while others contributed to buy salves and liniments for the crippled and injured. It was agreed that it was a great pity that the coach should be so hard to pull, and there was a sense of general relief when the specially bad piece of road was over. This relief was not, indeed, wholly on account of the team, for there was always some danger at these bad places of a general overturn in which all would lose their seats.

It must in truth be admitted that the main effect of the spectacle of the misery of the toilers at the rope was to enhance the passengers' sense of the value of their seats upon the coach, and to cause them to hold on to them more desperately than before.

If the passengers could only have felt assured that neither they nor their friends would ever fall from the top, it is probable that, beyond contributing to the funds for liniments and bandages, they would have troubled themselves extremely little about those who dragged the coach.

I am well aware that this will appear to the men and women of the twentieth century an incredible inhumanity, but there are two facts, both very curious, which partly explain it. In the first place, it was firmly and sincerely believed that there was no other way in which Society could get along, except the many pulled at the rope and the few rode, and not only this, but that no very radical improvement even was possible, either in the harness, the coach, the roadway, or the distribution of the toil. It had always been as it was, and it would always be so. It was a pity, but it could not be helped, and philosophy forbade wasting compassion on what was beyond remedy.

The other fact is yet more curious, consisting in 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. This seems unaccountable, but, as I once rode on this very coach and shared that very hallucination, I ought to be believed. 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. As for those whose parents and grandfathers before them had been so fortunate as to keep their seats on the top, the conviction they cherished of the essential difference between their sort of humanity and the common article, was absolute. The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feeling for the sufferings of the mass of men into a distant and philosophical compassion, is obvious. To it I refer as the only extenuation I can offer for the indifference which, at this period, marked my own attitude toward the misery of my brothers.