Global | Local | Two | Hardt

{ the following excerpts are a conversation between a time-traveller from the 19th century and a wise man of Morris' vision of the early 21st century--i guess our time }

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from chapter XIII, Concerning Politics

"How about your relations with foreign nations?"

"... the whole system of rival and contending nations which played so great a part in the 'government' of the world of civilization has disappeared..."

"Does not that make the world duller?... the obliteration of national variety?"

"Nonsense... You will find plenty of variety... How should it add to the variety or dispel the dulness, to coerce families or tribes... into certain artificial and mechanical groups, and call them nations, and stimulate their patriotism...?"

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from chapter XV, On the Lack of Incentive to Labour in a Communist Society

"/All/ work is now pleasurable... even when the actual work is not pleasant... there is conscious sensuous pleasure in the work itself."

"... Can you tell me how you came to this happy condition...?"

"Briefly, by the absence of artificial coercion, and the freedom for every man to do what he can do best..."

{ ... explaining the history of how this change occurred in society... }

"... in the last age of civilization men had got into a vicious circle in the matter of production of wares. They had reached a wonderful facility of production, and in order to make the most of the facility they had gradually created (or allowed to grow, rather) a most elaborate system of buying and selling, which has been called the World-Market; and that World-Market, once set a-going, forced them to go on making more and more of these wares, whether they needed them or not. So that while they could not free themselves from the toil of making real necessaries, they created in a never-ending series sham or artificial necessaries, which became, under the iron rule of the aforesaid World-Market, of equal importance to them with the real necessaries which supported life. By all this they burdened themselves with a prodigious mass of work merely for the sake of keeping their wretched system going."

"... it became impossible for them to look upon labour and its results from any other point of view than one -- to wit, the ceaseless endeavour to expend the least possible amount of labour on any article made, and yet at the same time to make as many articles as possible. To this "cheapening of production," as it was called, everything was sacrificed... the whole community, in fact, was cast into the jaws of this ravening monster, "the cheap production" forced upon it by the World-Market.

"... You know that according to the old saw the beetle gets used to living in dung; and these people, whether they found the dung sweet or not, certainly lived in it."

"... the World-Market grew with what it fed on: the countries within the ring of "civilization" (that is, organized misery) were glutted with the abortions of the market, and force and fraud were used unsparingly to "open up" countries outside that pale... When the civilized World-Market coveted a country not yet in its clutches, some transparent pretext was found... to "create a market" by breaking up whatever traditional society there might be in the doomed country, and by destroying whatever leisure or pleasure he found there. He forced wares on the natives which they did not want, and took their natural products in "exchange," as this new form of robbery was called, and thereby he "created new wants," to supply which (that is, to be allowed to live by their new masters) the hapless, helpless people had to sell themselves into the slavery of hopeless toil so that they might have something wherewith to purchase the nullities of "civilization."