Hank Preiser: Redirecting the Global Market Economy Toward Bellamy's Quest for aJust Society
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By way of review, Figure 1 summarizes the major components of Bellamy’s economic model from his most famous novel, Looking Backward, a model which is further refined and amplified in Equality. In the discussion that follows, some of the factors that promote or impede the implementation of Bellamy’s proposals will be addressed.
Political Equality
Bellamy believed that the democratic ideals embedded in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were the necessary prerequisites to a free and enlightened citizenry. He was convinced that such a participatory society would eventually evolve into a cooperative society by the citizens themselves employing humanitarian democratic methods to promote the general welfare of all--not just the proletariat. Bellamy foresaw an egalitarian society where class distinctions and hatred would disappear. It was this straightforward approach that endeared him to the American psyche and that helped to prevent the Marxist doctrines of dialectic materialism and dictatorship of the proletariat from gaining a foothold in America. Bellamy ardently believed that political equality without economic equality is akin to voluntary bondage. The reverse is also true (as witnessed by totalitarian socialist regimes in the former Soviet Union and The People’s Republic of China) that economic equality without political equality is akin to involuntary bondage.
Over one hundred years have passed since the publication of Bellamy’s Looking Backward, yet the United States is still evolving toward full political equality. After the abolition of slavery, it took more than fifty years to achieve women’s suffrage rights. Twenty-five years later, at the end of World War II, integration of Black persons in the Armed Forces was accomplished in 1948. In 1954, school segregation was declared unconstitutional. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed at the cost of rampant racial strife and civil disobedience. Many new legislative initiatives over the last thirty years have succeeded in moving minorities into the
• Political equality (one person, one vote) must precede economic equality in order for our government to evolve to the next higher step, a democratic cooperative republic…
• Economic equality (one person, one share) is implied in the Declaration of Independence “To establish justice…and promote the general welfare…”
• His economic dictum, “From all equally to all equally.”
• Allow industry, under private capitalism, to evolve to government regulated and ultimately owned monopolies for efficient production and distribution of all goods and services.
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