4 ideas
Engineer Luc Froment arrives in Beauclair, where the Abyss steelworks keeps workers in misery and strikes. With land, an ironworks and capital supplied by the reclusive scientist Jordan, he founds La Crêcherie, a co-operative works with housing, stores and schools for its members. Over a generation the Abyss declines and burns, the town's shops and farms join the co-operative, and Beauclair is rebuilt as a community of associated labor.
The enterprise's surplus is divided in fixed shares among the three contributors Fourier identified: those who work, those who supply capital, and those who supply skill or invention. Workers hold a stake in the returns, so owners, workers and experts stop competing for the same wage-versus-profit margin and begin sharing a common interest in output.
The novel sets Luc's method against the potter Lange's anarchist bombs and against demands for immediate collectivist seizure. Its argument is that a working alternative which pays better and treats people better will drain workers, customers and suppliers from the old order until it collapses by itself.
Work becomes something people choose rather than endure when hours are short, tasks rotate so no one is chained to one repetitive job, and machines take the heaviest toil. In the novel, Jordan's electric furnaces reduce the brute labor of steelmaking and make this reorganization possible. Productivity rises because people now want to work.