News from Nowhere Illustrated Edition ~ Chapter XV
ON THE LACK ON INCENTIVE TO LABOUR IN A COMMUNIST SOCIETY
“Yes,” said I. “I was expecting Dick and Clara to make their appearance any moment: but is there time to ask just one or two questions before they come?”
“Try it, dear neighbour—try it,” said old Hammond. “For the more you ask me the better I am pleased; and at any rate if they do come and find me in the middle of an answer, they must sit quiet and pretend to listen till I come to an end. It won’t hurt them; they will find it quite amusing enough to sit side by side, conscious of their proximity to each other.”
I smiled, as I was bound to, and said: “Good; I will go on talking without noticing them when they come in. Now, this is what I want to ask you about—to wit, how you get people to work when there is no reward of labour, and especially how you get them to work strenuously?”
“No reward of labour?” said Hammond, gravely. “The reward of labour is LIFE. Is that not enough?”
“But no reward for especially good work,” quoth I.
“Plenty of reward,” said he—“the reward of creation. The wages which God gets, as people might have said time agone. If you are going to ask to be paid for the pleasure of creation, which is what excellence in work means, the next thing we shall hear of will be a bill sent in for the begetting of children.”
“Well, but,” said I, “the man of the nineteenth century would say there is a natural desire towards the procreation of children, and a natural desire not to work.”
“Yes, yes,” said he, “I know the ancient platitude,—wholly untrue; indeed, to us quite meaningless. Fourier, whom all men laughed at, understood the matter better.”
“Why is it meaningless to you?” said I.
He said: “Because it implies that all work is suffering, and we are so far from thinking that, that, as you may have noticed, whereas we are not short of wealth, there is a kind of fear growing up amongst us that we shall one day be short of work. It is a pleasure which we are afraid of losing, not a pain.”
“Yes,” said I, “I have noticed that, and I was going to ask you about that also. But in the meantime, what do you positively mean to assert about the pleasurableness of work amongst you?”
“This, that ALL work is now pleasurable; either because of the hope of gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done, which causes pleasurable excitement, even when the actual work is not pleasant; or else because it has grown into a pleasurable HABIT, as in the case with what you may call mechanical work; and lastly (and most of our work is of this kind) because there is conscious sensuous pleasure in the work itself; it is done, that is, by artists.”