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.

In the following essay, Jehmlich investigates the problem of labor as it is addressed in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, and examines the novel's influence on subsequent utopian treatments of this problem.

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...