SOURCE: “Cog-Work: The Organization of Labor in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and in Later Utopian Fiction,” in Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in SF, edited by Richard D. Erlich and Thomas P. Dunn, Greenwood Press, 1983, pp. 27-46.

It is not only mechanized environments—Disneylands of all types and sizes—that threaten to cripple modern man and alienate him from both his fellow man and nature. A more immediate threat, so it seems, is contained in the means and methods by which such artifacts are being made—“advanced machinery” and “progressive” methods of human engineering. These threaten to dehumanize man by totally mechanizing his work.

The problems which arise here are as old as the industrial revolution and have increased rather than diminished since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their discussion should be of particular interest to science fiction writers, for these problems are just the stuff that science fiction is allegedly made of, namely, human problems engendered by technological progress and thus epitomizing the mixed blessings of modern civilization.

In truth, however, there is little explicit extrapolation and discussion of labor problems in science fiction. They are referred to indirectly if at all and, as a rule, greatly simplified or misrepresented; the problems of theoretical labor and flesh-and-blood workers are, in most science fiction, not rationally examined but only emotionally commented upon.¹ One has to turn to the parent genre of science fiction—utopian fiction—to find more comprehensive and unambiguous responses. Though often derided as dully old-fashioned, utopias seem in fact more genuinely contemporary and prophetic in dealing with labor issues than their modern offspring.

The following study examines this contention with reference to two classical nineteenth-century utopias, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888), and William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890); and three more recent texts: B. F. Skinner's Walden Two (1948), Ivan Yefremov's Andromeda (1954), and Aldous Huxley's Island (1962).² I will investigate which aspects of modern working life the individual author thinks most detrimental and what alternatives he suggests; whether or not his diagnosis and therapy reflect attitudes toward work common to his time; and whether it is possible to discern marked shifts of emphasis in turning from older to more recent, from English to American, and from “Western” to “Eastern” utopias.

These questions, of course, cannot be discussed comprehensively. This applies in particular to the question of extra-literary influences, including the large body of theoretical literature which cannot possibly be given full consideration.³ We must rest content with casting a glance at what seems the most important background material in this field, Karl Marx's classical analysis of working conditions in modern industry. A brief outline of Marx's chief axioms and arguments provides the starting point and frame of reference.

With the rise of capitalism—so goes Marx's well-known line of argumentation—work has become more and more dehumanized. It has been reduced to a mere commodity and thus has lost its creative and emancipatory potential. This is due to the profit motive that dominates capitalist economies. To remain competitive, the capitalist employer must keep the costs of production as low as possible. He does so in two ways, by badly paying his workers and by introducing labor-saving machines. This means that the workers are not only exploited and impoverished, but also are degraded to machine operators forced to do dull and unsatisfactory work. The result is frustration and alienation; the only remedy a revolutionary change. Once the number of capitalists has been drastically reduced by a continuous process of concentration, the workers are to disown them, take over the control of the economy and production and thus, eventually, to rehumanize labor.

Of particular relevance here is what Marx says about the manner of work in pre- and post-revolutionary society. In Capital (1887) he gives a very lucid and suggestive description of machine production in capitalist industry, a description that is in part truly prophetic, since it focuses on problems that were to fully materialize only much later.

In manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage. … The lightening of the labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. … The technical subordination of the workmen to the uniform motion of the instruments of labour, and the peculiar composition of the body of workpeople … give rise to a barrack discipline, which is elaborated into a complete system in the factory … dividing the workpeople into operatives and overlookers, into private soldiers and sergeants of an industrial army.⁴

Even more vividly suggestive, though less detailed and concrete, is Marx's description of liberated labor:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming, fisherman, shepherd or critic.⁵

This may sound rather nostalgic and Arcadian. In Capital, however, Marx leaves little doubt that there is to be a continuation, even intensification, of industrial production. As he points out, mechanization is not bad in itself, but has, on the contrary, a revolutionary, liberating potential:

Modern Industry, by its very nature … necessitates variation of labour, fluency of function, universal mobility of the labourer. … It compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of to-day, crippled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the social functions he performs are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers.⁶

Whether this transformation will come more or less automatically or whether it will have to be enforced by the workers is not clearly said here. Nor does Marx specify his contention that, once freed from the fetters of capitalism, mechanized work will cease to be frustrating and alienating and become interesting, satisfactory, and creative instead. There are other unfinished lines in Marx's sketch of the future; for such omissions, however, he cannot and should not be blamed, for he is on foreign ground here, infringing on the domain of the utopian writer. It is in fact the utopian writer's task to imaginatively complement and make tangible what critics such as Marx have only outlined, to colorfully transform sketches of the future into detailed maps of Futuria.⁷

Edward Bellamy's utopian Looking Backward is certainly no fictionalized version of Capital but, nevertheless, shows striking parallels to Marx's analyses: it too is chiefly concerned with contemporary labor problems and arrives at similar insights, at least as far as the anatomy of capitalist economy is concerned.

Freelance writer and amateur economist Bellamy, the son of a clergyman, has his protagonist, Julian West, awake in the Boston of the year 2000 after 113 years of deep sleep. One of the first questions West asks his host, Dr. Leete, is, “What solution, if any, have you found for the labor question?”⁸ He explains that it had been “the Sphinx's riddle of the nineteenth century, and … was threatening to devour society, because the answer was not forthcoming.”⁹ He remembers that there was ruthless competition among innumerable small capitalists, which led to an equally ruthless exploitation of the laborers and meant, furthermore, a shameful waste of labor potential and raw materials. There was a strong trend toward concentration which, as he learns from Dr. Leete, reached its climax at the turn of the century, when the new conglomerations of firms threatened to totally enslave the workers: “They believed that the great corporations were preparing for them the yoke of a baser servitude than had ever been imposed on the race, servitude not to men but to soulless machines incapable of any motive but insatiable greed.”¹⁰ Accordingly the workers organized to resist the trusts and threatened to cripple the whole economy by continuous strikes. What is sketched here seems, in fact, like a scenario based on Marx's theories and predictions. A direct influence is rather improbable, however, and Bellamy seems to have arrived more or less independently at his analysis—by critically reacting to the contemporary American labor scene.¹¹ This scene was very likely to induce such criticism, for it was characterized by a rapid and uncontrolled growth of capitalism and a concomitant process of equally rapid concentration. Both set in after the military triumph of the industrialized North in the Civil War, progressed faster and more unexpectedly than in Europe, and, as a consequence, produced harsher social injustice and fiercer opposition from the workers.¹²

What Bellamy makes Julian West say about the “Sphinx” threatening “to devour society” is thus not an anticipation of things to come, but of fairly close description of the American situation in the late 1880s, and the way people reacted to it.

Bellamy's answer to the “Sphinx's riddle” seems both pleasant and simple. There had to be no class warfare, as Dr. Leete explains; people realized that it was much more beneficial and profitable for both workers and capitalists if they cooperated, and nationalized all industries. The process of concentration had revealed that big trusts were more efficient than small firms, and after the state had become the sole capitalist, this observation was fully verified: production became incomparably more efficient than before the “glorious evolution”; there was also an end to injustice, social inequality, and aggressive competition.

It was this idea of peaceful nationalization that made Looking Backward a best-seller and a cult book—as we would say today—in no time. It was translated into more than a dozen foreign languages and inspired the foundation of hundreds of Bellamy Clubs to promote “nationalism,” as Bellamy's concept was then termed. Bellamy was not only hailed as “the Moses of today” for showing his contemporaries the “promised land,”¹³ he was also compared and found superior to Marx for speaking more simply and effectively to the masses.¹⁴

Marxian critics have, as a rule, adopted a less enthusiastic attitude. They have, in particular, found fault with Bellamy's concept of a nonviolent revolution.¹⁵ Such a revolution does seem un-Marxian, but on the whole this bloodless revolution is both less problematical and less objectionable than the bright post(r)evolutionary alternative that Bellamy presents: life in the America of the future is almost exclusively determined by a centrally directed, rigidly departmentalized economic system. The president and government which nominally still exist have economic tasks only, computing what will be needed and regulating industrial output accordingly. Their work is easy, however: “The machine which they direct [so Julian learns] is indeed a fast one, but so logical in its principles and direct and simple in its workings that it all but runs itself.”¹⁶ The comparison—even equation—with a machine seems very apt indeed, for although Bellamy says very little about actual machinery, his economic system has both the clock-work precision and effectiveness of mechanized production. Its reliability is in particular due to the existence of an “industrial army” in which all future Americans have to serve from age twenty-one to forty-five. They thus learn diligence and discipline and are offered the following enticing prospects:

First comes the unclassified grade of common laborers, men of all work, to which all recruits during their first three years belong. This grade is a sort of school and a very strict one, in which the young men are taught habits of obedience, subordination, and devotion to duty. … [A]ll who have passed through the unclassified grade without serious disgrace have an equal opportunity to choose the life employment they have most liking for. Having selected this, they enter upon it as apprentices. The length of the apprenticeship naturally differs in different occupations. At the end of it the apprentice becomes a full workman, and a member of his trade or guild.¹⁷

And it is then that the actual rat race begins, the competition for the better positions in the military hierarchy. There are periodical “regradings” at which the workers are either promoted or degraded according to their achievements. Those that have done well are publicly rewarded and mentioned in the papers. Needless to say there are various privileges for the higher ranks. “Officers” have, for instance, much more choice with regard to the branch and kind of work they want to go into than do “commoners,” and they need no longer work, but only supervise the lower ranks.

Marx spoke of barrack discipline and a pseudo-military hierarchy in modern industry as well, but denounced them as contemporary evils. That Bellamy should present them as utopian achievements seems very peculiar, indeed. This can be explained partly by the specifically American problems he reacts to in Looking Backward, but must, however, also be blamed on his rather limited critical and prophetic vision.

As has already been pointed out, the intensification of class antagonisms in the 1880s came rather unexpectedly to most Americans and deeply shocked them. They got the impression that both society and the economy were heading toward utter chaos and anarchy. There was thus a widespread yearning for order and stability, a yearning that was evidently shared by Bellamy. It made him shape his brave new militaristic world accordingly and explains the enthusiastic reception it found, particularly in America.

The urgent problem of how to better organize the economy and labor made Bellamy, on the other hand, consider too little the concomitant and even more urgent problem of how to humanize them. Significantly enough, he neither makes his protagonist reflect on the concrete implications of mechanized production in the nineteenth century, nor sends him into a future factory to watch industrial soldiers in action. This is not to say that his reformatory interest and zeal are exclusively focused on questions of economic planning and human engineering. He provides for the individual as well: everyone gets the same amount of credits just for being a person,¹⁸ is consulted before being assigned a job, and is given all kinds of incitements and aids when required to do heavy or nasty work. But the industrial army nevertheless perpetuates competition and inequality and—what is more problematic—it exempts the individual from even the slightest possibility of codetermination. It is only as a consumer that he is granted some participation in the setting up of plans. As a laborer, he has no such rights. Efficiency comes first; it is the economic machinery of the state and its output that are most important, not the actual operators of that machinery. They have got to adapt to it, not vice versa.

Evidently, behind this accentuation lies a concept of labor different from that of Marx: work is considered a necessary evil with which man has to come to terms, not a potential means of self-realization. That Bellamy in fact subscribes to that harsher concept—which is, of course, part of the Puritan heritage¹⁹—is indicated by the following statement made by Dr. Leete:

… the labor we have to render as our part in securing for the nation the means of a comfortable physical existence is by no means regarded as the most important, the most interesting, or the most dignified employment of our powers. We look upon it as a necessary duty to be discharged before we can fully devote ourselves to the higher exercise of our faculties, the intellectual and spiritual enjoyments and pursuits which alone mean life.²⁰

At the age of forty-five, Bellamy's future Americans can fully indulge in such “enjoyments and pursuits,” for it is then that they are discharged from the industrial army to “first really attain … their majority and become enfranchised from discipline and control.”²¹

Instead of a working and a leisure class Bellamy thus has a working and a leisure generation. That is an enticingly simple solution—as enticingly simple and naive indeed as his suggested reforms in the field of industrial production.

It would be unfair, however, to blame Bellamy too severely for his obvious shortsightedness. Even his severest critics have to admit that Bellamy devised his utopia with a genuine compassion for the underprivileged and that he was fully convinced of the practicability of his reform plans. Their problematic implications were, in fact, difficult to foresee at the time. Frederick W. Taylor and the “second industrial revolution” had not yet come nor was there, at least in America, much in the way of a fully developed, centralized bureaucracy. And, last but not least, there was not yet a leisure industry, catering to the idle: mass leisure was not yet a problem, but still a sweet utopian dream.²²

This is not to say that reality had first to give the lie to Bellamy's hypotheses before the weak spots of his cog-work socialism could be detected. They were already evident to some of his more sensitive contemporaries. One of the harshest reviews came from William Morris, the British artist, writer, factory owner, and socialist, best known for his association with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.

Morris' main objection to Bellamy was that his utopia neglected art and individuality and sacrificed people to machinery and to the “machine life” that Morris sees as “the best which Bellamy can imagine for us on all sides; it is not to be wondered at then that his only idea of making labour tolerable is to decrease the amount of it by means of fresh … developments of machinery.”²³ He did not rest content with thus articulating his reservations. A year later he himself presented a utopia in News from Nowhere. In this “utopian romance … of an epoch of rest” (subtitle), it is again labor questions that play the most important part. Also as in Looking Backward, a utopian time traveler visits the bright future and gives a review of the “past” that amounts to a critique of capitalism. Morris does not, however, share Bellamy's belief in a peaceful transition to socialism, but insists—to the satisfaction of Marxist critics²⁴—on the necessity of a bloody revolution. At the same time, and more importantly, he goes much farther than Bellamy in his therapy for the labor problem—and has thereby puzzled rather than delighted orthodox Marxians.

In Morris' future England there is hardly any regimentation of work and only the most inconspicuous remnants of mechanization. For Morris' people of the future have realized—after some initial errors—that it is not enough simply to socialize the means of production and then carry on as before. It became evident that a true emancipation from the old order presupposed a redefinition and reevaluation of human work.

Work had to become meaningful and creative again, not just quantitatively effective. To ensure this, mechanized production was gradually curtailed: “Machine after machine was quietly dropped under the excuse that the machines could not produce works of art, and that works of art were more and more called for.”²⁵ Thus it was possible to concentrate on making well and shaping beautifully whatever objects were needed, and to derive “conscious sensuous pleasure” from creating and using them.²⁶ Since the common goal was the creation of a human, aesthetically pleasant environment, even work that formerly was considered dull and nasty assumed a pleasurable aspect.

The visitor from the nineteenth century encounters, in fact, happy and healthy people only—people who without the least external coercion serve, help, and support their neighbors whenever necessary (thus making civil servants and social workers superfluous). In addition, also voluntarily, they work in the fields or in small workshops, where they make beautiful things for their own pleasure and their neighbors' benefit.

The rediscovery of non-mechanized farm work and handicrafts has made possible a leisurely manner of work and life; it has put an end to—or at least almost made obsolete—the division of labor and, equally important, allowed the development of more satisfactory forms of social organization and communal life than existed in nineteenth-century England. The Futurians live in small, loosely structured and organized communities, practicing, if at all necessary, a form of basic democracy. For there is neither a central government nor large urban areas with a complicated infrastructure. England has been turned once again into “a garden, where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt, with the necessary dwellings, sheds, and workshops scattered up and down the country, all trim and neat and pretty.”²⁷

This is far removed from Bellamy's factory and city civilization indeed. It is also less dryly presented. Morris makes fuller use of the “utopian novel” medium than does Bellamy. He conjures up the beauty, grace, and freshness of the good new life by vivid description and gives his protagonist not only a guided-tour impression of the brave future world but allows him to actually encounter and experience it with his senses.

That Morris passionately rejects what Bellamy, with like passion, dreams of, is undoubtedly due in part to personal reasons, but seems also to reflect national idiosyncrasies. As an artist, craftsman, and employer, Morris had direct experiences in the sphere of industry, experiences that made him more sensitive to the labor situation and to problems of mechanized and standardized production. He took, moreover, an active part in the British socialist movement and thus gained further and deeper insights into the machinations of capitalism. And, last but not least, he was a citizen of the oldest industrial nation, a country that had suffered from the ill effects of industrialization much longer and, since it was more densely populated, suffered much more intensely than the United States. For this reason, there had been a stronger and longer opposition to industrialization in England than in the New World. Morris was not the first to formulate such criticism, nor is his therapy altogether original. That he chooses, as he explicitly says, fourteenth-century England as a prototype for his utopia links him with John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and other nineteenth-century cultural critics who had similar dreams of a preindustrial future.²⁸

Though he has been justly criticized for such regressive nostalgia, it should be noted that Morris does not blindly and radically condemn the use of machines. What has been achieved in Nowhere and is duly celebrated is not a total abolition of machinery, but its strict control. Morris' attitude toward mechanization is more fully explained in “The Society of the Future” (1887), a political lecture to fellow socialists which can be considered the theoretical concomitant of News from Nowhere. “Possibly the few more important machines will be very much improved, and the host of unimportant ones fall into disuse, and as to many or most of them, people will be able to use them or not as they feel inclined.”²⁹

Similarly, Morris does not call for an unqualified return to the past. The late Middle Ages provide important suggestions, but they are not used as a blueprint. And what is thought valuable is not created out of the blue, by a mere act of will, but rather is discovered after a long process of trial and error. The outcome is a collectively shaped, postrevolutionary and—as it seems—truly communist society. Orthodox Marxists who tend automatically to link social and technological progress have naturally been puzzled rather than delighted by Morris' utopian vision and have denounced it as sadly reactionary and regressive.³⁰ Such judgments seem too rash and dogmatic, however. For viewed in the light of “The German Ideology” and other early writings, News from Nowhere is quite in line with Marx's ideas about the future. It can very well be seen as an imaginative embodiment of the “realm of liberty” in which all opposition and tension between hand and brain work, labor and leisure, social and private activities have been suspended: where it is possible “to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.”

Orthodox Marxism or not, News from Nowhere is certainly not a dead classic. According to James Redmond:

[It] points clearly to a crisis in European culture that seems as insoluble today as it seemed to Morris in 1890; for two centuries or so we have been living through a technological revolution of unprecedented scope and violence, so that the trappings of human life have changed much more than in the previous two thousand years, while the essential requirements of the individual personality have remained much the same.³¹

Nevertheless it was Looking Backward rather than News from Nowhere that set the pattern for utopian fiction in the following decades. In America over one hundred utopias were established between 1889 and 1900—most of them strongly influenced by Bellamy.³² And Morris found no immediate followers in England either. H. G. Wells, it is true, had very critically commented upon the effects of technological progress in his early “scientific romances”—notably in The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and The First Men in the Moon (1901)—but he later changed his position and wrote utopian scenarios such as A Modern Utopia (1905) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933) that are similar to Looking Backward in their unqualified opting for progress and efficiency and reveal a functional conception of work as well. It was only after the Russian Revolution on the one hand and the so-called second industrial revolution on the other that such utopias began to appear problematical, in spite of—or rather because of—the fact that each revolution fulfilled part of Bellamy's prophecies: the Russian Revolution actually led to a complete nationalization of all industries; Russia's embryonic capitalist system was replaced by a centrally directed and controlled economy, and the labor force was reorganized in pseudo-military fashion. But the good effects prophecied by Bellamy did not really materialize. There was not much in the way of universal equality and brotherhood, no drastic reduction of working time, and certainly no rich variety of goods made available to everyone (as Bellamy had foreseen for his future America). The goals of efficient production and smooth distribution were, on the other hand, and ironically enough, most perfectly attained in capitalist countries. It was there that “refined” methods of organizing and rationalizing work—as foreseen by both Bellamy and Marx—had been developed in the meantime and proven in fact extremely efficient.³³ But the “second industrial revolution”—and notably its most important constituent, the “Taylorization” of the labor process—did not prove beneficial for laborers; it rather intensified their frustration and alienation.

Thus the actual development of the labor situation in the second decade of the twentieth century seemed to leave little room for optimistic extrapolation. There was no room for Morris' Nowhere, really. But there was no reason for hopefully looking backward to Bellamy either. Bellamy's dream evoked nightmares now—and was treated accordingly, at least in Britain and other European countries. It was here that from now on a continuous line of dystopias—from Yevgeny Zamiatin's We (ca. 1920) to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)—appeared, “negative” or “inverted” utopias that vehemently denounced centralization, mechanization, and regimentation as the chief concomitant evils of industrial (and socialist) progress.

In America, there were no dystopias, but for a long time, as in England, no positive utopias either. It was only after the Second World War that the utopian tradition was revived in both countries—notably in B. F. Skinner's Walden Two and Aldous Huxley's Island. In both utopias the reformation of work is still a major issue and is given almost as much attention as in Looking Backward and News from Nowhere. There are further and more surprising parallels, however; Skinner and Huxley seem to have retained basically the same preferences and prejudices as Bellamy and Morris, for they offer similar or, to be more exact, similarly different solutions.

Thus Walden Two, a utopian colony situated in contemporary America, is like Bellamy's America of the future: a planners' and bureaucrats' rather than a workers' paradise. For in spite of protestations to the contrary, its principal goal is to make work more efficient and productive, not more creative and satisfactory. Frazier, the cicerone and founding father of the colony, accordingly criticizes the waste of talent and energy in capitalist America:

Now [having handled the unemployed] what about those who are actually at work? Are they working to the best advantage? Have they been carefully selected for the work they are doing? Are they making the best use of labor-saving machines and methods? What percentage of the farms in America are mechanized as we are here? Do the workers welcome and improve upon labor-saving devices and methods? How many good workers are free to move on to more productive levels? How much education do workers receive to make them as efficient as possible?³⁴

In Walden Two, a group of planners and managers who at the same time are the government—appointed, not elected—see to it that such deficiencies are avoided or competently counteracted. They decide on the introduction of “labor-saving devices,” compute how many laborers will be needed in each branch of industry and agriculture, and “assign different credit values to different kinds of work, and adjust them from time to time on the basis of demand.”³⁵ By thus canalizing and effectively employing the labor potential they do not aim at a steady increase in production, however. The colonists are, in an economic sense, no-growth fetishists. Their aim is, on the contrary—and here is one of the few points in Walden Two that reflects, even anticipates, topical reform issues³⁶—to consume less than the average American and to avoid overproduction and affluence. When they nevertheless aim at an increase in productivity, it is in order to save labor; that is, to shorten the average working time, which has already been reduced to four hours a day and obviously is to be further curtailed in the future. For, as in Looking Backward, it is the “enjoyments and pursuits” of leisure time that are deemed the really important essence of life. Skinner does not devalue work as much as Bellamy; he attributes to it some internal value at least,³⁷ but he is as forbiddingly autocratic with regard to the workers. They have as little possibility of co-determination as the workers in Looking Backward. In both the political sphere and in questions of labor and economy all decisions are made by experts. Frazier/Skinner has a cynically naive explanation of why this should be so:

In Walden Two no one worries about the government except the few to whom that worry has been assigned. To suggest that everyone should take an interest would seem as fantastic as to suggest that everyone should become familiar with our Diesel engines. Even the constitutional rights of the members are seldom thought about, I’m sure. The only thing that matters is one's day-to-day happiness and a secure future.³⁸

To ensure such day-to-day happiness and to confirm at the same time the social stability of Walden Two, Frazier has devised an educational program that epitomizes his contempt of the individual, a program based on “behavioral engineering.” It is to teach the individual “positive behavior,” and adapt him to the necessities of communal life. This is to be achieved by a system of rather crude and occasionally cruel rewards and punishments and, what seems more problematical, without any previous discussion of what constitutes socially desirable and satisfactory behavior.³⁹ Again it is the experts who alone can decide such questions. They have already “successfully” and atrociously experimented with children; their final aim is to completely control the adults as well. Such habit formation will, among other things, have very significant consequences for the organization of labor: there will no longer be any necessity to indulge in the “extravagance” of “a free choice of jobs”;⁴⁰ people will be so conditioned as to want just the jobs that are available, and they will achieve “immeasurably increased efficiency, because they can stick to a job without suffering the aches and pains which soon beset most of us. They get new horizons, for they are spared the emotions characteristic of frustration and failure.”⁴¹

The methods of behavioral control suggested by Skinner may be more refined than those outlined by Bellamy, but they are definitely more cynical and wicked: as a professional psychologist and twentieth-century man, Skinner knows well what mass manipulation and “benevolent” dictatorship imply. He cannot, one would suppose, brush aside both the evidence of recent history and the warnings of dystopian writers. The truly exasperating thing is that he does, and does so consciously: one visitor to the community compares Walden Two to Brave New World (1932), and Frazier to Hitler, only to have Frazier flatly and stubbornly deny that any such parallels exist. Having thus silenced all objections, Skinner shamelessly presents as utopian what is in fact only a redaction of Brave New World with Mustapha Mond as protagonist.

Skinner's obsession with “behavioral engineering” (his phrase) may be partly due to the moral disorientation of the postwar years and the need for an antidote to it. However, his mania can also be explained as the power fantasy of a frustrated psychologist.⁴² In Walden Two, Skinner obviously stages in an imaginative context what was denied him in reality: a large-scale experiment with human beings as subjects. That he experiments with fictitious instead of real personalities is a blessing for the latter, of course, and a possible defense of his book. Even so, as a fictitious embodiment of a psychological theory Walden Two has serious flaws; the theory is neither convincingly defended nor embodied by Frazier, so that the conversion of Skinner's alter ego, the book's Narrator, comes as rather a surprise. More important, there is no obvious connection between the theoretical superstructure and practical life in the community. The people presented to the visitors as walking examples of utopian bliss seem happy indeed, but for very conventional reasons—not because they have been successfully conditioned, but because they enjoy the simple life and concrete work in a country commune. The communal movement in America seems in fact to have been Skinner's basic inspiration, which he then tried to adapt to his psychological ideas. But he failed to do so convincingly: a small community is simply no adequate testing ground for economic planners and behavioral engineers planning to rule the world—be they real or only fictitious.

Aldous Huxley's utopia has a more exotic setting than Walden Two. Placed on a fictitious Indonesian island called Pala, Island presents a more organic and, above all, more humane model of the good life. Through the cooperation of its native raja and a Scottish doctor, Pala has become a moderately modern state that makes use of Western technology to fight hunger, ignorance, and overpopulation; at the same time, Pala preserves a good many of its time-honored Eastern traditions and so avoids the defects and evils of industrial civilization. Pala is thus a well-balanced blend of “both worlds—the Oriental and the European, the ancient and the modern.”⁴³ The “third alternative” to what the Savage in Brave New World had to choose from, Pala is neither as crude and primitive as the Reservation nor as perversely mechanized and “refined” as the rest of the world. Rather it harbors a decentralized, cooperative society that uses “science and technology … as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for men, not … as though men were to be adapted and enslaved to them.”⁴⁴ As Dr. MacPhail, the cicerone, explains: “Pala's a federation of self-governing units, geographical units, professional units, economic units—so there’s plenty of scope for small-scale initiative and democratic leaders, but no place for any kind of dictator at the head of a centralized government.”⁴⁵

There is also no place or necessity for an excessive division of labor and permanent specialization. Most people work alternately in the fields and forests and the medium-sized, local factories. Asked whether this system works well, Dr. MacPhail outlines the Palanese attitude toward work and efficiency:

It depends what you mean by “well.” It doesn’t result in maximum efficiency. But then in Pala maximum efficiency isn’t the categorial imperative that it is with you. You think first of getting the biggest possible output in the shortest possible time. We think of human beings and their satisfactions. Changing jobs doesn’t make for the biggest output in the fewest days. But most people like it better than doing one kind of job all their lives. If it is a choice between mechanical efficiency and human satisfaction, we choose satisfaction.⁴⁶

Though there are some debatable touches in the Palanese conception of work as well, particularly the view that physical work is good for character training and should therefore be prescribed for every adolescent, Huxley presents on the whole a much more pleasant alternative to contemporary working conditions than does Skinner. It appears the more striking when we compare it to the horrific vision he painted in Brave New World—the vision of innumerable “Bokanovsky Groups” toiling mechanically in fully automated factories.

Huxley had earlier presented a vehement and more straightforward criticism of the dangers inherent in mechanical and industrial progress. In Point Counter Point (1928), one of his early social satires, he denounces “overproduction … more specialization and standardization of work … and diminution of initiative and creativeness” as the most notorious evils.⁴⁷ He does not, however, devise as radical an alternative as he will in Brave New World. What he suggests in the way of a provisional solution is still in the tradition of Bellamy: “The first step [wrote Huxley in 1928] would be to make people live dualistically, in two compartments. In one compartment as industrial workers, in the other as human beings. As idiots and machines for eight hours out of every twenty-four and real human beings for the rest.”⁴⁸ Though not explicitly stated, the next step must necessarily go beyond this “solution”; it must suspend the duality between labor and leisure, machine existence and full human life. The solution found in Island is thus at least indirectly prefigured in a novel written some thirty years earlier. And the ultimate model is, of course, Morris' still older News from Nowhere. That there should be closer parallels between Island and News from Nowhere—and Walden Two and Looking Backward respectively—than between Island and Walden Two can certainly not be accidental.

The existence of such similarities and differences suggests that utopias reflect national idiosyncrasies more clearly and more stubbornly than ordinary literature—that Looking Backward and Walden Two are “typically American” since they call for a pragmatic, quantitative, and technocratic approach to socioeconomic problems, whereas News From Nowhere and Island express the more “genuinely British” (and possibly European) concern with aesthetic and democratic values. The same national idiosyncrasies can be discerned in these books' anti-utopian counterparts and complements: The Time Machine, “The Machine Stops,” Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence (1949).⁴⁹

True and apt as such an interpretation may be with respect to the texts discussed, we should draw no hasty conclusions and undue generalizations without keeping in mind that the American utopian tradition is much richer than the literary utopias may suggest, for it comprises actual utopian experiments as well.⁵⁰ If these were taken into account, the evidence would be much more colorful and varied and would thus discourage any rash generalizations with regard to what is “typically American.” Actually, it is such practical experiments (and this is a further point with which to modify too simplistic an interpretation) rather than sociological theories that seem to have inspired the more recent utopias. I have suggested such an influence already with respect to Skinner; it can also be postulated for Huxley. Both rest content with designing small communities that are fully embedded in the contemporary world rather than being spatially or temporally removed from it. And both of them try to steer clear of either socialism or capitalism and present a “third way,” a good new world that is, above all, a practical alternative to “normal” society. Such modesty and sobriety (and perhaps also naiveté) is something that unites Skinner and Huxley in spite of all other differences. It expresses a common concern with growth fetishism in industry, business, and administration, a concern which, although not altogether new when Walden Two and Island were written, still found critical articulation much later in books like D. L. Meadows and D. H. Meadows' The Limits to Growth (1972), and E. F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful (1973).⁵¹ That Walden Two and Island likewise reflect and anticipate such critical tendencies makes them both modern utopias and indicates that there is a common line of development in British and American utopian fiction in spite of strongly enduring national idiosyncrasies. The utopian imagination in America and England has definitely lost much of its former scope and revolutionary impetus. It has become markedly more domesticated and concretely down-to-earth since the nineteenth century, when Bellamy and Morris designed utopias that were not small-scale at all, but were set in the future and implicitly comprised the whole world.

Such modesty, even resignation, is naturally no constituent of recent Eastern utopias, represented here by the well-known and very popular Andromeda of Ivan Yefremov, a paleontologist by training and one of the leading Russian writers of speculative fiction. Andromeda has no visitor from our world to discover the marvels of utopia. This may not be accidental, for such a visitor is traditionally the medium of topical criticism, which is a delicate issue in Soviet literature indeed. Anyway, the marvels of utopia are directly if a bit clumsily revealed in Andromeda, in lectures given by various characters or by straight description.

Yefremov's good new world is set in the distant future, in an age called the “Era of the Great Ring,” because its dominant characteristic is an interstellar TV network which links an audience of truly cosmic scope. The network is mainly employed, of course, to transmit reports on terrestrial achievements. The peoples of the Earth, so a billionfold audience learns in a historical program, have almost completed a paradigmatic evolution for the better. They have overcome all of the national and, above all, social barriers that still separated them in the Age of Fission (the twentieth century). One nation, they have by a communal effort defeated hunger, poverty, and sickness.

At the beginning of this evolution stood a redefinition and reevaluation of labor. People “realized that all their strength, all the future of mankind, lay in labor, in the correlated efforts of millions of free people.”⁵² And they likewise realized that the ultimate goal could not be “man's gradual liberation from the necessity to work,”⁵³ as had been dreamed by early utopian writers. It became clear that, on the contrary:

man needed to work to the full measure of his strength but his labour had to be creative and in accordance with his natural talents and inclinations, and it had to be varied and changed from time to time. The development of cybernetics, the technique of automatic control, a comprehensive education and the development of intellectual abilities coupled with the finest physical training of each individual, made it possible for a person to change his profession frequently, learn another easily and bring endless variety into his work so that it becomes more and more satisfying.⁵⁴

Yefremov does not specify what working conditions were like before, nor does he in any way make clear what has brought about this change. He has been duly criticized for such vagueness in the Soviet Union and by Marxist critics in other countries,⁵⁵ although his remarks with regard to “liberated” work have naturally been widely acclaimed. In this instance Yefremov remains very close to Marx—closer than he is to Bellamy, whose admiration for discipline he shares but not his conception of work; and closer than he is to Morris as well, because he does not attack machine production.

More interesting than Yefremov's theoretical position, however, is the way he tries to embody it imaginatively. He devises a man-made millenium which fascinates us with its gigantic scope and rational construction. Thanks to the communal efforts of mankind, the face of the Earth has been completely transformed. There has not only been a massive manipulation of the climate (by leveling mountains, melting the polar caps, and so forth), but, more daring still, a systematic and radical “redistribution of Earth's surface into dwelling and industrial zones.”⁵⁶ So that they may enjoy the blessings of a warm and mild climate, most people have been lodged in an “unbroken chain of urban settlements” that lie between “thirty and forty degrees of North and South latitude,” while foodstuffs, timber, and industrial goods are being produced in the adjoining zones.⁵⁷ To save energy and raw materials, there has been a concentration of allied lines of production in the agricultural and industrial belts and, moreover, a marked simplification and standardization of products. There were almost no problems in running the economy once all these changes were completed; one central council of economics suffices to control production for the whole world.

The question remains, of course, whether such a perfect system is, of necessity, bound to stifle rather than encourage individual initiative and creativity; whether it will not in the long run provide the very conditions for alienation and regimentation that dystopian writers have warned against. Yefremov naturally denies that such failure is inherent in utopia, but he fails to make his hypothesis convincing and tangible. His futurians indulge in interesting scientific projects but rarely ever talk about—let alone work a spell in—industrial or agricultural production. When one of the main characters eventually does decide “to work to the full measure of his strength” (to return to the programmatic statement quoted above), only after a considerable amount of red tape is he assigned a job. And what he finds there does not seem “creative and in accordance with his natural talents and inclinations” at all, for he is offered work in a fully automated diamond mine. The work comprises “watching the dials of the sorting machines … and keeping constant watch over the calculating machines that computed the ever-changing resistance of the rock, the pressure and expenditure of water, the depth of the shaft and the expulsion of solid matter.”⁵⁸ Eventually he goes to a submarine titanium mine, to work that seems even less enticing: “He spent his daily tours of duty in semi-dark rooms, packed with indicator dials, where the pump of the air conditioning system could scarcely cope with the overwhelming heat made worse by the increased pressure due to the inevitable leakage of compressed air.”⁵⁹ Brave new work, indeed!

Adolescents, at least, have more interesting tasks. They perform the “twelve labors of Hercules,” hard, challenging pioneer and Boy Scout work like building roads in the mountains or watching out for sharks on a beach. It is work, however, that in a fully mechanized world seems far from necessary, even difficult to create at all. Yefremov does not seem to have been aware of such difficulties and inconsistencies in his work; and this is scarcely surprising, for he was naturally extrapolating from the economic and technological situation of the Soviet Union when he wrote Andromeda, a situation certainly not characterized by affluence and over-automation. Siberia enlarged and projected into distant centuries was thus the natural utopian paradise.

As has become evident, Western utopias also suffer from such limitations. They are likewise dependent on the prejudices and limited aspirations of their times. Nor can they constantly develop new ideas and alternatives with regard to concrete problems like that of work. The theoretical possibilities will soon be exhausted here; what seems possible and necessary is a stronger “fictionalization” of utopian literature, to transform ideas into imaginative experiences and thus make them more tangible. Actually and practically, this means a rapprochement of science fiction and utopia. For science fiction has the more powerful but at the same time more emotionally centered narrative strategies and symbols; utopian fiction the drier but more definitely enlightening methods of discussion and exposition.

Notes

1. SF protagonists rarely engage in any sort of ordinary labor. Even if they have a fairly modest job, their work is, as a rule, presented as most glamorous and stimulating—a compensation devoutly to be wished, not a reflection of actual labor problems. Neither are labor problems sufficiently represented by the image or “icon” of robots. As personified machines, robots are closely linked with the problem field of mechanized labor; still, they are usually dissociated from the factory context and presented as emotionally charged, but rather unspecified, symbols of “mechanization as such.” Though often given full human shape and almost full human faculties, robots are less humanoid workers than mere aliens, to be either befriended or destroyed. The problems that they embody are thus “solved” in a deceptively simple way.

2. I use and quote from the following editions: Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (New York: New American Library, 1960); William Morris, News from Nowhere, ed. James Redmond (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970); B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (1948; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1976 [Quotations reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. from Walden Two by B. F. Skinner. Copyright 1948, renewed 1976 by B. F. Skinner]); Ivan Yefremov, Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale, trans. George Hanna (Russian text 1957; trans. Moscow Foreign Language Publishing House, n.d.); Aldous Huxley, Island (1962; rpt. London: Panther, 1976).

   [Pagination of the 1976 rpt. of Walden Two differs from that of the 1962 Macmillan edition, but not enough to cause serious difficulties. The editors will supply, in parentheses, page citations for the 1963 Bantam edition of Island.]

3. For a useful historical survey, see articles under “work” in Philip P. Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas (1973), and “Arbeit” in the standard German reference Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (RGG). For more recent trends in coping with labor problems, see Russell L. Ackoff, Redesigning the Future: A Systems Approach to Societal Problems (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974), esp. ch. 3.

4. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, 3rd edn. (1887; rpt. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1957), I, ch. 15, 422-23.

5. Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” quoted by Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 231. An English trans. of Marx's text was not available to me.

6. Marx, Capital, I, ch. 15, 493-94.

7. See Avineri, Social and Political Thought, pp. 202-31 and passim.

8. Bellamy, Looking Backward, ch. 5, p. 49.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., p. 52.

11. Hartmut Lück, Fantastik, Science Fiction, Utopie: Das Realismusproblem der utopisch-fantastischen Literatur (Giessen, Germany: Focus Verlag, 1977), p. 193.

12. Robert L. Shurter, The Utopian Novel in America, 1865-1900 (New York: AMS Press, 1973), pp. 51-73.

13. Ibid., p. 169.

14. See Elizabeth Sadler, “One Book's Influence: Edward Bellamy's ‘Looking Backward,’” The New England Quarterly, 17 (1944), 530-55, esp. 539.

15. Lück, Fantastik, p. 202.

16. Bellamy, Looking Backward, ch. 17, p. 128.

17. Ibid., ch. 12, p. 93.

18. There is no money in the America of the future; every citizen has a kind of credit card with which he “pays” until his yearly account is exhausted.

19. See articles cited above, n.3.

20. Bellamy, Looking Backward, ch. 18, p. 136.

21. Ibid., p. 137.

22. A sharp-sighted analysis of problems to come appeared a bit later, however: Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Equally anticipatory is the depiction of the Eloi in H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895).

23. William Morris, The Commonweal (1889), quoted by Redmond, Introd., News from Nowhere, p. xxxvii.

24. See Lück, Fantastik, p. 208.

25. Morris, News from Nowhere, ch. 27, p. 155.

26. Ibid., ch. 15, p. 78.

27. Ibid., ch. 10, p. 61.

28. See Redmond, Introd., News from Nowhere, pp. xxviii-xxxiv.

29. William Morris, “The Society of the Future” (1887), in Political Writings of William Morris, ed. and introd. A. L. Morton (Berlin, GDR: Seven Seas Books, 1973), pp. 188-204, esp. 196. For Morris' concept of work, see also his lecture “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil,” ibid., pp. 86-108.

30. See Lück, Fantastik, pp. 207-08.

31. Redmond, Introd., News from Nowhere, p. xxxviii.

32. See Sadler, “One Book's Influence,” p. 542.

33. See “Arbeit” in RGG (see n.3 above).

34. Skinner, Walden Two, ch. 8, p. 54.

35. Ibid., p. 46. Frazier notes here that “Bellamy suggested the principle [of varying credit units] in Looking Backward.”

36. In his foreword to the 1976 reissue of Walden Two, Skinner discusses the issues of bigness and growth and mentions E. F. Schumacher's book Small is Beautiful (1973).

37. Skinner points out that physical work is good for body and soul and has even his managers and planners do “big-muscle” labor (ch. 8).

38. Skinner, Walden Two, ch. 29, p. 254.

39. For a critical assessment of Skinner's muddled thinking with regard to means and ends, see Ramakrishna Puligandla, Fact and Fiction in B. F. Skinner's Science and Utopia (St. Louis, MO: Warren H. Green, 1974).

40. Skinner, Walden Two, ch. 8, p. 54.

41. Ibid., ch. 14, p. 102.

42. See, for example, B. F. Skinner, Reflections on Behaviorism and Society (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978).

43. Huxley, Island, ch. 8, pp. 150-51 (130).

44. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932; rpt. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1950), Foreword, p. viii. The Foreword bears the copyright date of 1946.

45. Huxley, Island, ch. 9, p. 170 (149).

46. Ibid., pp. 173-74 (151).

47. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (London: Chatto, 1928), ch. 23, pp. 416-17.

48. Ibid., p. 417.

49. See Lyman Tower Sargent, “English and American Utopias: Similarities and Differences,” Journal of General Education, 28 (1976), 16-22.

50. For a useful survey, see Everett Webber, Escape to Utopia: The Communal Movement in America (New York: Hasting House Publishers, 1959).

51. See note 36.

52. Yefremov, Andromeda, ch. 2, p. 60.

53. Ibid., p. 61.

54. Ibid., p. 62.

55. See Lück, Fantastik, p. 308.

56. Yefremov, Andromeda, ch. 2, p. 63.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid., ch. 7, p. 221.

59. Ibid., p. 233.