By his account, Bellamy began writing Looking Backward as “a cloud-palace for an ideal humanity,” in the escapist tradition of utopian literature. But as he worked out this utopia in his mind, he realized that it pointed the way to “a definite scheme of industrial reorganization.” He began to think of the novel not as a daydream but as an instruction manual for economic revolution. And he found a template for a command economy in the machinery of war: people, material, and production were organized and financed by the state at an enormous scale for aggression and bloodshed. Why couldn’t the same logic be applied to the peacetime purpose of attacking misery and poverty? “Who are the public enemies?,” Dr. Leete asks. “Are they France, England, Germany, or hunger, cold, and nakedness?”
This insight is central to Bellamy’s explanation of how the revolution could be achieved. He argued that modern societies had the productive power to take care of everyone, if only the allocation of resources were directed by a rational and cooperative public administration. Unlike many romantic critics of industrialism, Bellamy did not dismiss factory work as inherently demeaning or exploitative. In his vision of the future, industrial progress is not rolled back but redirected, removed from the sphere of capitalist competition and placed under the management of a democratic order. “Every man,” Dr. Leete says — and every woman, too — “is a member of a vast industrial partnership, as large as the nation, as large as humanity.” Instead of a handful of corporations owned by a few stockholders, the economy is directed by a huge, all-encompassing public corporation, owned by the citizens.
This reconciliation of technical power and a moral economy gave Bellamy’s politics a distinctive bent. Many social critics in the Gilded Age saw monopolies and business trusts as their chief antagonists, but Bellamy had no sentimental attachment to smallholder capitalism. Breaking up the big firms to promote entrepreneurial competition was senseless when you could put the firms under democratic control instead. Similarly, he rejected culturally conservative reformers who looked to an idealized past of medieval villages and bartered handicrafts (an anti-modernist strain of reform that persists today in the neo-traditional aesthetics of New Urbanism and the techno-skepticism of the anti-GMO movement).
Bellamy accepted that the technical and organizational powers of capitalism had permanently reworked society into an interdependent, complicated, mass system. The problem with capitalism was not that it was too big or centralized or impersonal, but that it was, in a way, not big enough. Production and distribution should be controlled not by self-interested owners, but by the larger administrative powers of the state. In Bellamy’s great revolution, the corporations aren’t smashed up; they’re fused together to eliminate the principle of competition and assembled into massive sectoral conglomerates, governed according to how they will best serve the public interest. “The people of the United States concluded to assume their own business,” Dr. Leete calmly explains, “just as one hundred odd years before they had assumed the conduct of their own government.”