Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano is a response to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.  The two books treat the same issues: industrialization, the meaning of work, human inventiveness, and the ability of that inventiveness to find solutions to human problems, the power of machines to improve production, and the ability, or lack thereof, of productiveness to set people free.  The two books see the solution to these problems within the eventual victory of capitalist productivity over everything – but in the way that this will change society, they are diametrically opposed. I found the general theme of the books, and the various ways in which they viewed that theme, to be so resonant with the other non-fiction books I have read this semester that I think it will be instructive for me to place Vonnegut and Bellamy’s themes in categories suggested by those other books.            Starting the semester with Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. I, I was particularly struck with the time and effort Marx put in to describing and understanding the relationship of labor, labor power, and the enhancement of value in the manufacturing process.  Marx was particularly careful to explain how labor was the key component of manufacturing, as it was the transformative act – the act that changed raw materials into materials with “use value” which could be sold on the market for more than the value of the materials themselves.  For Marx, it is the transformation accomplished by labor that creates the added value.  Thus, the chief aim of capitalism is to exploit labor such that the wage paid for labor is in effect less than the value of the product of labor.  In this way, capital can increase itself.  This is one of the first and most important themes of both Bellamy and Vonnegut’s works.

Bellamy starts his book with a discussion by his main character, Julian West, of the “labor problem” as the central social ill of his time.  The vast accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few, who gained it by exploiting the labor of the majority, was leading to strikes, riots, and a general sense that society was headed for a fall.  When he awakes in the year 2000, though, he discovers that this problem has been solved.

Bellamy suggests that the solution to capital’s exploitation of labor is an inevitable part of the development of capitalism, and human society in general.  Julian West’s guide to the twentieth century, Dr. Leete, who revived him after more than a century in a hypnotism-induced trance, looks at the growth of big capital as a process of consolidation at the end of which lies ultimate socialization of the means of production.  Leete explains that the tendency of companies toward reduction of competition ended in a kind of final merger in which all corporations became one, and came to be controlled by the nation.  The answer to the problem of labor, wealth inequity, and class division, is progress, and the ultimate generation of so much wealth that society can afford to share it all.  This is the result of the productivity of the capitalist manufacturing system itself.        Vonnegut, on the other had, sees a similar end in the process of industrialization and capitalism, but is not so sanguine about it.  In his vision, great corporations are able to increase productivity through the use of machines to such an extent that it is less expensive to support the majority of humans without labor than to have them working.  As in Bellamy’s work, the majority of people come to be supported by the state, and as in Bellamy’s book the primary focus of people comes to be not economic, but national and social, but for Vonnegut these are simply subterfuges and methods of substitution for the emptiness people feel when deprived of work and the opportunity to be creative.

Bellamy, writing only 19 years after the publication of Marx’s Capital, Vol. I, imagines the end of class division – a society based on equality, and, to paraphrase Mars’ famous axiom, production from each according to ability and distribution to each according to need.  Bellamy’s future society needs no money, and does not conduct trade.

Vonnegut sees an amplification of the class divisions of the early industrial revolution.  As he sees it, capitalism and industrialism are processes by which humanity devalues itself.  The first industrial revolution, according to Vonnegut, did away with muscle-powered labor.  The second, in an almost perfect reflection of the extension of Marxist thought provided by Harry Braverman, did away with simple, repetitive mental labor – secretaries, clerks, filing assistants, etc.  The third will do away with complex mental tasks – the work of the managers and engineers who populate the book.

Bellamy seems quite aware of the implications of his idea, and takes the time to make it clear that this new utopia belongs to everyone.  He even finds a place for women, with their own system of contribution to the general well-being of society, and for disabled members of society, who have a part to play in the “invalid corps” – as society is organized on the lines of a military, but set against hunger, poverty, and disease, rather than against national enemies in war.  In this military organization of society, the world of women remains separate from that of men, but women are equal, and choose to marry not for economic well-being, but for companionship and love.

Vonnegut’s women are caricatures of corporate wives in the 1950’s, victims and fellow-travelers in the world of corporate politics and ladder-climbing.  Anita, the wife of Paul Proteus, Vonnegut’s main character, clings to her husbands social position, and to the job and corporate ladder that supply him with that position, his prestige, and money that comes with it.  When he has moral misgivings, she leaves him for the next corporate climber rather than try to understand his difficulties.

In keeping with some of the other themes of the monographs I have read this semester, the role of technology in making life better, or worse, for humans – the theme addressed by Thomas Hughes in American Genesis, is a critical one here.  Hughes’ study was overall a look at the pattern of invention, from the independent inventors of the 19th and early 20th century, like Edison, who were creative, and focused on solving problems to make life better, more efficient, and easier for people, through the capitalization and industrialization of invention, which Hughes calls a conservative process, fundamentally setting out to improve existing processes and devices, rather than to solve new problems in radical ways.  The corporatization focuses on the improvement of productivity, both through the use of machines and through the bending of human activity to fit more closely with the way machines work.  Hughes is particularly interested in “Taylorism” or “Scientific Management” – the process introduced by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1920’s designed to make management of the shop floor more centralized, and to make human parts of the manufacturing process a seamless part of the mechanized flow of production.  Of course, Marx also discusses this theme in Capital, and makes it clear that machines are not designed to make life easier for humans, but instead to increase the value gained from the exploitation of human labor by making humans more efficient and less costly.

One of the key ironies in the way both Bellamy and Vonnegut look at this process of making human labor more productive through machines and organization is that while both see this as the key to their differing ideas of the future, they differ greatly in their attitude toward it.  To some degree the difference is the result of the difference in time period that each was writing.  Bellamy, in 1887, was not likely to expect the kind of thinking machine technology that Vonnegut, in 1954, was able to just see over the technological horizon.

Bellamy’s technology still depends on humans to make it go, and so the need for labor is a kind of ever-lasting given.  With no sense of a possible reduction in the need for workers, this growing efficiency through machines and organizations is a way to free humans to become even more human through education in early life, and leisure after early retirement.  For Bellamy, invention is the creative process by which humans solve the problems they face.  The creation and use of machines and systems to minimize labor is not only good, but part of the inevitable progress toward the utopian future he envisions.  In the same way, then, the inventiveness of people is part of the inevitable move toward the single corporate nation.

Vonnegut sees the inventiveness of humans as a kind of wonderful curse, and the end of labor as the destruction of human dignity and purpose.  Where for Bellamy labor is only the means to gain the freedom and resources to pursue real humanizing activities, for Vonnegut, work is the vital human activity.  Work is the source of the creative impulse, and provides the satisfaction one needs, along with a means of providing for the needs of daily life.  In Player Piano, the favorite place of Vonnegut’s main character, Paul Proteus, is the oldest building on the grounds of the Ilium works – once a part of Thomas Edison’s workshop.  Proteus, like the workers at the end of the book who turn to fixing machines after they destroy them, can’t resist the wonder of designing and building machines.  But he comes to understand that this very process leads to humans designing themselves out of existence.

For Bellamy, people in the future will work from age 21 to age 45, when they can retire and enjoy a life a leisure until the end of their days.  In Vonnegut’s book, the majority of workers have been put out of work by machines, and they all long to go back to work – leisure is not the wonderful end it is made out to be – as Dr. Hayward says to the Shah of Bratpuhr, people no longer have to work, so they can spend time in leisure.  When the shah asks what they do with all this time, Hayward says they “live” – but the irony of that statement is made plain by the statements of the others in the scene.  It is clear that with their leisure time, most of them watch television, or otherwise waste their time in meaningless pursuits.   Thomas Hughes’ book American Genesis suggests that the spirit that drove Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla was akin to the optimism in Bellamy’s characters Leese and West.  Harry Braverman’s book Labor and Monopoly Capital has much more sympathy for Vonnegut’s view, as Braverman makes plain early in the book that work is the hidden, but most important, human pursuit.  Work, Braverman says, defines us.  Bellamy wants to rid the world of work as a contributor to self-identity.  Vonnegut wants to show that endless leisure would lead to an endless hole in the self, and in society.

Ultimately, the primary contrast between Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano is the way in which each describes the final evolution of the industrial revolution.  In Looking Backward, this evolution is the result of a constant Darwinian-style struggle of capital – what we might call “evolutionary Marxism,” and its result is progress toward a perfected human society, whereas in Player Piano, Vonnegut describes an evolution of technology.  At each stage of the industrial revolution, a large group of laborers is made obsolete.  The final evolution, which is happening as the book progresses, is the obsolescence of all humans, whose lives are becoming pointless, and completely dependent upon machines.  But, the great irony for Vonnegut is that it is human creativity is what led to the invention of machines – the one thing that separates us from the machines, leads to our making the machines and enslaving ourselves to them.

The question remains, at the end of these two books – is the inventiveness of human-kind likely to make the world a utopia, or a living hell?  Can there be a society without class divisions and great disparities in wealth?  Will class conflict become the primary drag on society, or will it open a new world of experience and equality?  I think reading these two books together is a wonderful way to highlight these questions, and multiple possible perspectives on the economic, social, and technological trends upon which they comment.