We are approaching the 130th anniversary of the publication of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward. Bellamy had all kinds of bad things to say about capitalism in the book, first released in January 1888. His upper, upper-middle class protagonist Julian West goes to sleep in the year 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000 to find his native Boston and the rest of the world evolved into a wonderfully cooperative paradise. The novel explains of how this happy result came to pass. Then, to his dismay (spoiler alert), at the end of the pedagogical saga West has a nightmare that he has returned to Gilded Age Beantown. All that poverty and misery comes back again, right under his nose.
In shock, West staggers up to his old local highbrow club and gives the Boston Brahmin set a piece of his mind. “Where have you been lately,” one of the clubbies asks, presumably armed with brandy and cigar. “I have been in Golgotha,” West solemnly declares. “I have seen Humanity hanging on a cross! . . . Do you not know that close to your doors a great multitude of men and women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that are one agony from birth to death!” This declaration does not go down well with his colleagues, who ominously move on him until he wakes up again, back in his ideal future, complete with a new fiancee who he has successfully courted in about a week.
There is no question about it, life sucked in Gilded Age Boston if you were poor, or even working class, or sometimes even middle class. Bellamy blamed it all on “individualism,” as opposed to the cooperative Industrial Army approach that he prescribed for the world. But there were things that he liked about capitalism. In this the author shared the same sort of admiration expressed by Karl Marx and others. In Looking Backward, Bellamy suggested that capitalism was transporting the world to the next, and better, place. What society needed now was a moral or scientific apparatus to spread its benefits across the landscape more evenly.
And so West’s tour guide of the future, Doctor Leete, narrates that, after much hand-wringing, society recognized that large syndicates were the best way to go in terms of social organization. They delivered with the greatest level of efficiency and economy. Thus the “epoch of trusts,” Leete explains in Chapter 5, peacefully and rationally wound up as The Great Trust, the “final monopoly in which all previous and lesser monopolies were swallowed up, a monopoly in the profits and economies of which all citizens shared.” In due time, even the most hardened radicals and corporate leaders recognized the intelligence of this course. How rational of them.
In addition, Looking Backward offered a critique of his Gilded Age times surprisingly similar to those offered by the so-called “New Economy” prophets of the 1990s: that what capitalism lacked were mechanisms that could keep track of large scale inventories. “In your day the production and distribution of commodities being without concert or organization, there was no means of knowing just what demand there was for any class of products, or what was the rate of supply,” Leete observes to West in Chapter 22. “Therefore, any enterprise by a private capitalist was always a doubtful experiment.” Multiply these doubtful experiments by a whole nation and you suffered the great depressions of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. The only answer was the kind of centrally managed economic panopticon supplied by Bellamy’s Industrial Army solution.
There’s a whole lot of magical thinking in this text, but that’s an old, often made point. The novel also completely ignores questions of race, even suggesting they had been resolved by the Civil War. Some of my students in my history lecture courses may be interested to know that Looking Backward offered a very early coining of the term “credit card.” I count the phrase twelve times in the digital publication of the novel. Here is the first:
“How is this distribution managed?” I asked.
“On the simplest possible plan,” replied Dr. Leete. “A credit corresponding to his share of the annual product of the nation is given to every citizen on the public books at the beginning of each year, and a credit card issued him with which he procures at the public storehouses, found in every community, whatever he desires whenever he desires it.”
By the way, some years ago, one of my favorite students at UCSC, Lois Roisson, produced wonderful illustrations for the novel, at my request. Enjoy!
