: Let us not forget that News From Nowhere is a FICTIONAL work, not an examination of social relations as they exist in the real world.But, as a utopian fiction, morris was distinctly trying to examine real world conditions, in contradistinction to the puacity of sociology in Bellamy's work.
: Let us recall that the protagonist of News From Nowhere DOES NOT ACTUALLY DO ANY WORK---itself a comforting 'selling point' to the bourgeois readers the book was written for.
Erm, News From nowhere was first pubnlished in Commonweal, the journal of teh Socialist League, so it was written for workers. That William Guest Doesn't work is because he's a guest, and tehre less than a week - his narrative role is as an alien observer, to mark the differences between the utopian text-world and late-victorian society.
: How easy to 'sell' a socialism where labor is 'ad hoc' and 'voluntary' (hey, if ya don't wanna work, fuck it, William Morris will simply fill his fictional pages with a few more assidious drones). VERY EASY.
When you base your premises of socialism on abundance, and not scaracity, then the compulsion to force everyone to work is lost - idneed, a classic work of socialism is enytitled 'the right to be lazy'- I think thats what we're fighting for, everyone's right to be lazy.
: All production requires labor.
: Socialists must start off with that in mind.
Reckon I've mentiooned buckminster fuller's calculation that we only need two hours work a week, each to do all teh work - perhaps less now tehre's more of us...
