In the opening paragraphs of William Morris’s utopian science fiction novel News From Nowhere, readers are confronted with a scene that will be as painfully familiar to many socialists in 2026 as it no doubt was when the work was first published in 1890. After a night of “brisk conversational discussion, as to what would happen on the Morrow of the Revolution,” a man is walking home as his mind echoes with the many excellent arguments that would, no doubt, have floored his interlocutors if he had only been able to remember them earlier.

Fortunately, “this frame of mind he was so used to, that it didn’t last him long.” And so, after a short bout of “disgust with himself for having lost his temper (which he was also well used to),” his thoughts turn to the future socialist society that he and his comrades had just been debating. Unable to shake his post-argument blues, he stumbles toward home with a mounting feeling of desperation, muttering to himself: “If I could but see it! If I could but see it!”

Marxism has been notoriously inhospitable to this sort of wish, with speculation about the details of a future socialist society famously dismissed by Karl Marx as “writing recipes for the cookshops of the future.” But whatever their official views, few socialists will be able to honestly deny that they haven’t sometimes felt the force of the plea repeated by the protagonist of News From Nowhere. If we could but see it!