In evaluating non-communist authors and their work, communists must pose one critical question: On balance, does the work advance the interests of the international working class? In celebrating Looking Backward, 2000-1887,the wildly popular novel by the 19th-century utopian Edward Bellamy, as “a powerful plea for…a communist world” (10/5/22), CHALLENGE seriously missed the mark.
On its surface, Looking Backward would seem to align with Progressive Labor Party’s vision of communism: an egalitarian society with no money, profit, war, poverty, cops, or lawyers, with all capital controlled by the state. But as the CHALLENGE article concedes, the book has its “imperfections.” There are no Black or Latin or immigrant workers in this imaginary year 2000. There is no anti-racist or anti-sexist struggle—no class struggle of any kind, in fact. A supposedly perfect society has evolved with “absolutely no violence.” In essence, Looking Backward is anti-dialectical and anti-revolutionary. Written 17 years after the communards fought and died on the barricades in Paris, it fosters the dangerous illusion that we can make an omelet without breaking any eggs.
If Bellamy were simply a naïve idealist, it would be one thing. But a close reading of Looking Backward reveals a bitter anti-communist who accepted without question the casual racism and sexism of his day. The main obstacle to the great evolution, we learn, was “the red flag party,” which was “paid by the great monopolies'' to “talk about burning, sacking, and blowing people up” and “head off any real reforms.” Only when parties representing labor were replaced by “the national party,” “the most patriotic of all possible parties,” composed “equally of all classes, of rich and poor,” could the United States move forward “as a family, a vital union, a common life...”
Elsewhere around the globe, the nations of Europe have joined the evolution, and a joint council regulates policy “toward the more backward races, which are gradually being educated up to civilized institutions.” Meanwhile, all women are excluded from all “heavier sorts of work”; the top-down “industrial army” that runs the show is led exclusively by men. Even a seemingly positive development—the liberation of women from marriages driven by financial dependence, to make “matches of pure love”—is poisoned by Bellamy’s racist eugenics: “It means that for the first time in human history the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation.”
Who was Edward Bellamy? He grew up in a family of evangelical Baptist preachers and flag-waving U.S. patriots. (His cousin and close associate, Francis Bellamy, wrote the original U.S. Pledge of Allegiance, which American schoolchildren honored with the “Bellamy salute”—a stiff-armed facsimile of the fascist salute—until 1942.) Though widely viewed as a “Christian socialist,” Edward Bellamy called himself a “nationalist”—hence the hundreds of Nationalist Clubs, inspired by his book, that pushed for state ownership of industry. When he founded a magazine, he named it The New Nation. As Bellamy wrote in an anti-communist, anti-Semitic letter to the literary critic William Dean Howells:
…the word socialist is one I never could well stomach. In the first place it is a foreign word in itself, and equally foreign in all its suggestions. It…suggests the red flag, and with all manner of sexual novelties, and an abusive tone about God and religion, which in this country we at least treat with respect….No such party can or ought to succeed that is not wholly and enthusiastically American and patriotic in spirit and suggestions.
While we’ve learned from Russia and China that socialism leads back to capitalism, that’s not the main issue here. (The error of the two-stage theory of revolution wasn’t obvious in 1887). The problem with Edward Bellamy is that he strips socialism of its class content and ties it instead to the nation. That’s how socialism turns into its opposite—into national socialism, the fascist ideology implemented by Mussolini and then Hitler. As Sylvia Bowman observed in her book Edward Bellamy Abroad:
During the period in which Hitler’s Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterparei was rising to power, some Germans – usually socially inclined but anti-Marxist bourgeois – thought at first that the National-Socialist German Worker’s Party would be a version of the American Nationalist movement as outlined by Bellamy since its program had certain superficial similarities to it. These comparable plans included the Reichsarbeitsdienst, the compulsory labor force which everyone had to join after his education had been complete; the Volkgemeinschaft, the formation of a classless society which combined the arbeitsfront(workers) and the stirne und faust (intellectuals and investors); and the appeal for a unified, patriotic, collectivist society to solve the social problems which existed.
Edward Bellamy had some positive anti-capitalist ideas. He influenced a broad range of advanced thinkers, from Tolstoy to Martin Luther King. But Looking Backward is far from a plea for “a communist world.” Instead of militant class struggle and revolutionary working-class consciousness, it promotes racism, sexism, pacifism, and all-class unity. In this period of rising liberal fascism and looming world war, workers must look forward, not backward—to the fight for a communist future.