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).īellamy’s new society is more than socialism. There is no more poverty and crime has been greatly reduced. Harder jobs have shorter hours in society’s “industrial army”.Įvery 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. Young people are well-educated and encouraged and assisted to find jobs they are most interested in and capable of doing. Upon retirement at 45, people are free to pursue hobbies, further education or travel. Bellamy envisioned a new society in which the private ownership of the means of production and distribution has been replaced by public ownership.Įvery person capable of working is required to do so, but only from the ages of 21 to 45. 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.Ĭapitalism’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. 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. Looking Backward is Bellamy’s vivid description of the egalitarian society that he saw replacing capitalism.

Marx also raised ideas about how a post-capitalist communist society would work, most profoundly from each worker according to ability and to each according to need. It was written at a time of great inequality and great workers’ struggles and also soon after Karl Marx had published his searing analysis of capitalism in the Communist Manifesto.

125 years ago, Edward Bellamy wrote the novel Looking Backward, a powerful and intelligent critique of capitalism, a system that Bellamy considered cruel and wasteful. Not only do tens of millions of people around the world hate capitalism and want to see it replaced with a society run by and for workers, but they have felt that way for many generations.

Looking backward novel