Read more: The dark morality of fairy-tale animal brides

Though there’s currently no socialist movement in the United States comparable to the one that existed in the United Kingdom at the dawn of the 20th century, Bernie Sanders’s unexpectedly popular 2016 presidential campaign helped spark a resurgence of interest in the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist group in the country. The organization reached 50,000 members in September 2018 and includes a crop of young politicians such as the Virginia House of Delegates member Lee Carter and U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Many Millennials, in particular, have lost faith in capitalism, as the economy in the aftermath of the Great Recession has been characterized by enormous inequality, more than $1 trillion of student debt, and a labor market becoming more reliant on gig and low-wage work. While on paper the country has recovered from the downturn, those gains have mostly gone to the topmost income brackets, while the majority of working people continue to contend with stagnant (or even declining) wages and rising costs of living.

The stories in Workers’ Tales were, of course, written in a very different historical and economic context, and more than a few of them—the parable venerating the labor of woodcutters, for instance—haven’t quite managed to transcend it. At the same time, the best of the stories aim broadly to upend the presumption of capitalism as the natural and rightful order of society, and thus feel surprisingly timeless in ways that are, by turns, delightful and depressing.

In one such story, a colony of monkeys gathers a stockpile of nuts and turns to their leaders, the Wise Ones, to determine how best to divide the harvest among the group. After setting aside the bulk of the nuts for themselves, the Wise Ones dole out the remainder among the other monkeys, granting some of them 20 nuts apiece, some 10, some five, and others none at all. When the monkeys that have been allotted 20 nuts complain that the Wise Ones have hoarded far more for themselves, the Wise Ones remind them that they should be grateful for having more than monkeys with only 10—and so on down the line. Finally, when the monkeys with no nuts at all demand a share, the Wise Ones claim they are trying to steal from the others, causing the monkeys with nuts to attack those with nothing. Though racial animus isn’t an explicit part of this story, the Wise Ones’ exhortations to the monkeys in the middle to direct their economic resentment downward rather than upward nevertheless recall the racially inflected bootstrap rhetoric of America’s modern right wing, which frequently castigates “welfare queens” and “illegal immigrants” for ripping off hardworking taxpayers.

Other tales attempt to pull back the curtain on money as nothing more than a social construct. The story “The New Shilling” takes the perspective of an anthropomorphic piece of silver that, perplexed that workers must trade him for their necessities, sermonizes that as money has no inherent value, he would be better off as a button, an item that’s both functional and decorative. Likewise, in the story “A Terrible Crime,” a group of townspeople discovers that a recently deceased wealthy man has been printing counterfeit money and distributing it to the idle rich, who use the money to purchase the townspeople’s labor. First they’re outraged at this forgery; then they begin to wonder what, exactly, distinguishes his money from the “real” kind. “Why, then, curse Forgery without at the same time cursing Rent, Profit, and Interest?” one enlightened citizen asks.