Looking Backwards

[Paul Cockshott]

I have been reading Edward Bellamy's book 'Looking backwards 2000-1887' published in 1888.
Reading it I realise what an important book it must have been in the socialist movement and how much the 20th century view of socialism derives from Bellamy as much as from Marx.
Its influence is clearly there in the sorts of ideas Lenin put forward in Imperialism, and it must have influenced Beveridge and Atlee in establishing the welfare state.

Consider the following passage : "In your day,[Pg 90] men were bound to lay up goods and money against coming failure of the means of support and for their children. This necessity made parsimony a virtue. But now it would have no such laudable object, and, having lost its utility, it has ceased to be regarded as a virtue. No man any more has any care for the morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave."

That phrase 'from the cradle to the grave' became the defining idea of the welfare state from the 40s to the 60s. I am not sure who introduced it into popular political discourse. It clearly comes from Bellamy, but was it a standard utterance on socialist platforms in the first half of the 20th century.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The problem with Bellamy is that he didn't tie it to sovereign socioeconomic governments, i.e., "All jurisdiction over regular socioeconomic politics shall be materially transferred to sovereign socioeconomic governments directly representative of ordinary people – separate from structures responsible for high politics, security politics, and all other related state politics."

[Paul Cockshott]

what is interesting in Bellamy is the vision of the future not the utopian idea of how to get there.

[Red Commissar]

One thing that was interesting, to me at least, was that Bellamy's utopian socialist convention of the world did not shy away from the centralization of the means of production and distribution of goods, but embraced it wholesale. A lot of them tried to imagine isolated communities from one another and local type arrangements, but in his arrangement one gets the idea of an interlocking, efficient system.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I'll write more on my impressions of the book when I have more time, but it is well-worth reading and "utopia" or "total lack of contemporary Utopian thought" has been an slow-burning obsession of mine since I read that book a few years ago.

But just on the importance of Bellamy to the early socialist movement, it was Eugene Debs' favorite book (and according to myth, he didn't really read much Marx or theory) and widely popular when it was published around the time of the first "great Depression" in the late nineteenth century.