Although everybody's "wages" are fixed at the same level by a ferocious egalitarian principle, there is something which sounds rather a lot like market mechanisms -- or at least, like a command economy simulating market mechanisms -- mediatized not by money, but by leisure time. You could look at it like this: workers are (in a way) paid different hourly rates, but hours that they work are carefully regulated to ensure that all total incomes are equal:
"The supply of volunteers is always expected to fully equal the demand," replied Dr. Leete. "It is the business of the administration to see that this is the case. The rate of volunteering for each trade is closely watched. If there be a noticeably greater excess of volunteers over men needed in any trade, it is inferred that the trade offers greater attractions than others. On the other hand, if the number of volunteers for a trade tends to drop below the demand, it is inferred that it is thought more arduous. It is the business of the administration to seek constantly to equalize the attractions of the trades, so far as the conditions of labor in them are concerned, so that all trades shall be equally attractive to persons having natural tastes for them. This is done by making the hours of labor in different trades to differ according to their arduousness. The lighter trades, prosecuted under the most agreeable circumstances, have in this way the longest hours, while an arduous trade, such as mining, has very short hours. There is no theory, no a priori rule, by which the respective attractiveness of industries is determined. The administration, in taking burdens off one class of workers and adding them to other classes, simply follows the fluctuations of opinion among the workers themselves as indicated by the rate of volunteering [...]"Bellamy may fudge many of the trickiest questions by tacit appeals to the presumed improved efficiency of more centralized and scientific production, the benign and wise judgments of authority, and to some extent (a lesser extent than William Morris) the sweet tempers and fraternal fellow-feeling of those raised under his system. But we should give him credit for raising those questions in the first place.
"Fraternal fellow-feeling" is probably the right phrase: women are the formal equals of men, but women's emancipation has a strangely afterthought-ish feel to it; there's also a dose of "equal but separate" here, and while Bellamy is classifiable as a feminist, the tedious loveliness, tenderness and trembling of Edith, the only utopian woman Bellamy gives us in any detail, is cause enough to withhold his Ally Pic-Nic Biscuit (7d a pound). (The way she conflates herself with a previous Edith deserves separate discussion).
One interesting question about the economy of Looking Backward is whether it can truly be said to be post-money: it asserts that it is up front, and as it fills in more institutional detail, the assertion is eroded by special cases (literary and artistic production, foreign travel, inheritance, local government) where the value embodied by credit might become transferable, in a funny kind of way, and therefore start to look a bit more like money. At any rate, the final bulwark is the assumption that general prosperity will put an end to the kind of arbitraging and usurious behaviors without which money is not really money.
Bellamy's criticisms of the waste of market competition still have some bite. One especially intriguing example is how his principles play out in education and professional training: no ignominy attaches to dropping out of a course, because people need to try things to find out if they're any good at them, and how could you possibly find out what you're really good at unless you can drop out of something you're not without cost? The real waste would be done by people sticking to careers they're no good at (and don't enjoy). Any serious understanding of the novel has to come to terms in some ways with its enormous popularity in its day. Was it a page-turner? It's worth comparing with William Morris's slightly less economics-focused utopia, which came out around the same time. If I had to live in one of them, I'd go for Morris's any time. But I do appreciate Bellamy's sense that unpleasant necessary work is sort of real. Morris wrote a review of it:
The only safe way of reading a utopia is to consider it as the expression of the temperament of its author. So looked at, Mr. Bellamy's utopia must be still called very interesting, as it is constructed with due economical knowledge, and with much adroitness; and of course his temperament is that of many thousands of people. This temperament may be called the unmixed modern one, unhistoric and unartistic; it makes its owner (if a Socialist) perfectly satisfied with modern civilisation, if only the injustice, misery, and waste of class society could be got rid of; which half-change seems possible to him.(JLW)
