Not only do tens of millions of people around the world hate capitalism and want to see it replaced with communism, but they have felt that way for many generations. 125 years ago, Edward Bellamy wrote the novel Looking Backward, 2000-1887, a powerful and intelligent critique of capitalism, a system that Bellamy considered cruel and wasteful. But Looking Backward also contains a vivid description of some aspects of an egalitarian society that might replace capitalism.

The book begins with the main character, Julian West, who suffers from insomnia, going to sleep under hypnosis in 1887 in Boston in a fortified chamber. A fire destroys his home but not the chamber, and Julian awakes in the year 2000 and discovers that life as he knew it has changed dramatically.

A glimpse of communism
Capitalism’s individual struggle for the means of life (food, clothing, housing) under capitalism has been replaced with a cooperative system that provides everyone — men, women, children — with an equal share of society’s surplus, in the form of a credit card. There is no money. Bellamy envisioned a new society in which the private ownership of the means of production and distribution has been replaced by public ownership.

Every person capable of working is required to do so, but only from the ages of 21 to 45. Upon retirement at 45, people are free to pursue hobbies, further education or travel. Young people are well-educated and encouraged and assisted to find jobs they are most interested in and capable of doing. Harder jobs have shorter hours in society’s “industrial army”.

Every neighborhood in Boston — and every other city and town — has high-quality dining halls, libraries, recreational facilities, theaters, and clothing distribution centers where people can select what they want using catalogs and paying with their credit cards. There is no more poverty and crime has been greatly reduced. The new society has more wealth because it’s eliminated the waste, lack of planning, competition (including needless advertising), and the cost of an extensive state apparatus (including the police and an army that had been used to protect the property of the wealthy, suppress working-class rebellions and deal with crime caused by poverty).

Socialism restores capitalism
Bellamy’s new society is more than socialism. Money has been eliminated and since everyone — those working and those not working; husbands, wives, children — receives a credit card with the same amount, people receive according to the communist principle of “to each according to his needs” rather than the socialist principle of “to each according to his work.” The communists who led the revolutions in Russia and China fought for socialism as a stage leading to communism. But socialism retained features of capitalism such as exploitation through wages, small businesses, and some private ownership of land. Thus socialism led to the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union and China.

Looking Backward was a best-selling novel in the late 19th century, third in popularity after Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom’s Cabin (anti-slavery novel that exposed the viciousness of slavery and helped build the abolitionist movement leading to the Civil War) and Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur. Bellamy clubs sprang up around the country to discuss how to organize to win the changes depicted in the book.
And Bellamy wrote a sequel, Equality, to describe the new communist-type society in greater detail.

Revolution necessary to bury racist capitalism
Looking Backward is very persuasive in its insistence that the new communist-type system is superior to the old dog-eat-dog world of capitalism. Yet the novel does have its imperfections:

• Bellamy was averse to class struggle. So in the novel the new society comes about in the early 20th century when enough people were horrified by the chaos, poverty, violence and misery of capitalism and decided collectively to replace it. A revolution had not been necessary, only the widespread realization that the big corporations needed to be nationalized, money eliminated and each person provided with an equal share of society’s bounty. Bellamy was a believer in gradualism and evolutionary socialism, which the ruling class will never accept — either in 1887 or today.
• The mills in New England, where the novel is situated, were populated largely by immigrant workers, yet immigrants are virtually invisible in the book, and there’s no mention of Black workers trapped in sharecropping plantation system, nor discussions of racism.
• There’s no indication that the new society changed the nature of work. The “industrial army” seems to function the same way it would under capitalism, except that salaries are the same. A doctor and a factory worker receive the same pay, although the latter is likely to be less satisfied with his or her work. The new society has evidently not abolished the division of mental and manual labor, a crucial feature of class societies.
• The novel does show how the new society improves the lot of women, many dependent on their husbands for money. But it does so in an off-putting Victorian manner, with women (through Edith, one of the main characters) portrayed as delicate and feminine, which is a little different from her prototype in the 19th century.
• Bellamy’s egalitarian society, while impressive in many ways, is portrayed as finished, with no suggestion that struggle would be necessary to maintain its egalitarian nature and prevent the rise of a new ruling class. In the novel, on top of the new society sits a paternal central government that competently plans and controls production and distribution. There’s no revolutionary party and no more political struggle, because society is now portrayed as perfect. But every new society is subject to tensions between individuals who subjectively may want more privileges and benefits for themselves and their friends, and the collective that  maintains objectivity and its egalitarian features.

Despite these reservations, Looking Backward is a beautifully written, powerful plea for a new world, a communist world. The novel played a key role in the radicalization of some of the most prominent labor leaders of the day, such as the Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs. It can still play that role in our time.

LOS ANGELES, September 20—”I found the summer project so inspiring! I just wanted to find a way to do that stuff back home in LA too.” This is the sentiment that brought five new young people to our monthly Flores family action against police murder. After nearly three years of activity in the South Central neighborhood, the added burst of new, young energy reinvigorated the struggle.

On November 19, 2019, the LAPD shot and murdered Alex, 34 years old, near South Central Avenue and East 28th Street. Through this antiracist work led by mainly women workers, more people understand the true role of the police in a capitalist society and see PLP as leading the fight against their murders.

Canvass for Alex
The Flores family remains courageous and hasn’t allowed their fight to diminish the two and a half years since Alex Flores was murdered. PLP has worked alongside the family and made it clear that our support is not going anywhere. This strong working class unity has empowered the community to be relentless against police terror.

This month’s action was neighborhood canvassing. In three large groups we went door to door on the blocks where Alex Flores grew up and where his parents still reside. Many knew Alex or heard of his story. Of course, many residents had their own experiences with police harassment, brutality, or murder. This is why we built a concentration in this neighborhood among the most oppressed sections of our class. They have the most to gain from overthrowing this rotten system.

A member of the Flores family has been meeting regularly with a Party club for about a year and has taken more of a leading role in organizing other impacted families in anticapitalist struggles. As we canvassed, she actively gave out CHALLENGE to her neighbors, demonstrating to participants in the mass organization her commitment to getting out Progressive Labor Party's ideas.

What you do counts
Our consistent efforts are starting to bear fruit. At one of the doors we knocked on, a Latin worker recognized CHALLENGE from our monthly events and signed up for a subscription. The young students who attended our summer project organized others in their base to join us in this month’s effort. One of their base members who joined is, in fact, a college student at an east coast campus who happens to be good friends with a base member of a PLP campus leader there as well. Our small effort and modest impact is stretching coast-to-coast! We still have a lot of work to do in the consolidation process with the new people around us, but our future is certainly bright. Power to the working class!

Washington, DC, September 19—Today Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members brought communist politics to a rally of 30 supporters of the Haitian Bridge Alliance at the White House. Protestors declared that nothing has changed since the racist, horrific attack on workers from Haiti, escaping U.S. imperialism, by the U.S. Border Patrol a year ago (see photo). The Biden administration continues to apply Trump-era Title 42 policy to keep immigrants out of the U.S. This racist repressive policy is based on false public health fears of disease that even the CDC has denounced. Another example of how the finance capitalist Big Fascists are just as virulently racist as Trump. The Big Fascists (see glossary on page 6) are more dangerous because they use fake, liberal  rhetoric in attempt to build all-class unity and patriotism  for imperialist war. They do this all while ratcheting up racist attacks on the working class.

PL’ers active in Public Health Awakened joined the event, the first in a week of action calling for the U.S. to follow its own rules and welcome asylum seekers from Haiti.  As we fight alongside our class, it is imperative to point out that the state was created to protect the interest of the ruling class. The very U.S.-led empire that created the conditions for unlivable working conditions in Haiti is the same imperialist empire that is now refusing to provide asylum to the workers whose lives they ruined. Capitalism creates the conditions of misery, and then blame the victim.

Conversations against racism
Protestors were excited to see the articles on Haiti in CHALLENGE. One expressed delight that the paper was in Spanish. A young Black worker used the QRCode to access the newspaper on his phone.Then we joined a conversation with a worker from Telemundo and another speaker who had denounced racism toward Black workers.

The Telemundo worker from the Dominican Republic (DR) described how of bus drivers in his homeland regularly refused to pick up their class sisters and brothers from the neighboring island of Haiti. He shared that he had asked a driver why he did not pick up a young man. The driver replied, “Because he’s Black.” The worker got off the bus in anger and solidarity. Racism is a creature of capitalism, designed by the bosses to divide workers and reap superprofits. It is good for our class to reject all forms of racism, brought on by bosses or members of our own class.

This engagement by PL’ers followed last year’s protest of the racist attacks on Haitian migrants in a letter published in the Washington Post. As a crisis of capitalism and civil war expands in Haiti, there will be more workers and families seeking asylum.

As members of PLP and friends in public health declare, we need multiracial unity and revolution to smash this racist sexist capitalist system!

Washington, DC, September 19—Protests for better healthcare under capitalism continued at the White House as a Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member joined 50 people suffering from Long Covid-19. We demanded that the Biden administration expand research into conditions that follow viral infections such as Covid-19, mono, bird flu, and other infections.

Contrary to liberal president Joe Biden’s false claim, the “pandemic is NOT over.” The marchers called for a federal program like the Ryan White Act for HIV that could provide wrap-around services for students and workers suffering from Long Covid-19 and similar long-term illnesses. The  pandemic is far from over! And racist healthcare for all workers will never be over until capitalism is. We need the working class to rule the world.

Capitalism is always willing to discard disabled workers who they can’t exploit for profit. As Friedrich Engels wrote in 1845, "the class which at present holds social and political control [the bourgeoisie] places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death." The ruling class is fine with the social murder of our class. But we can’t let them get away with murder.

Covid under capitalism remains deadly
Later that day, a PL’er joined others in a listening session with the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education to explain how schools should better provide equal education to students with disabilities. The PLP member has been meeting with friends and fighters with disabilities to make demands around education sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic. These include virtual learning, high quality filtration/ventilation including HEPA filters, masks, and accommodations for students with symptoms. This is what communists would do if we had to manage Covid-19. By removing the profit motive, our class would be able to run society based on needs and commitment.

Covid related illnesses often cause damage to multiple organ systems including the brain, heart, blood vessels, and GI tract. Symptoms include fatigue, headache, cognitive impairment and rashes. Doctors have trouble making a diagnosis and patients thus go undiagnosed. The multiple specialists they then see can make treatment elusive. The waxing and waning of Covid symptoms adds to the confusion. Even exercise can make symptoms worse.

Research from from the World Health Network's Long COVID Symposium (9/15) has found clotting processes and damage to the lining of blood vessels, the persistence of viral particles and metabolic changes including dysautonomia (e.g.. fast heart rate when standing). But more work is needed in this area. The bosses don’t care about supporting these workers and students, thus condemning many to a life of disability and early death.

As we fight for and build a communist society that values all workers and supports their efforts to learn and contribute, we can support people with disabilities and bring them and their particular struggles into the PLP.