[lbo-talk] Boycotting the unorganized?

[Carl Remick]

>From: "Michael Pugliese" <michael098762001 at earthlink.net>
>
>On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 22:40:53 -0500, Eugene Vilensky <evilensky at gmail.com>  
>wrote:
>
>>Bellamy, Looking Backward.  The Industrial Army marches on!
>
>    Sounds like the, "barracks communism, " the young Marx condemned. Athur 
>  Lipow, who has written for New Politics,  
>http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/default.htm , the socialist quarterly, wrote  
>in, "Authoritarian socialism in America; Edward Bellamy and the  
>Nationalist movement. University of California Press, Berkeley. 1982,
>http://www.bolerium.com/cgi-bin/bol48/52656.html "Bellamy's authoritarian  
>socialist views were an historical precursor of totalitarian collectivist  
>ideological currents."

I read Looking Backward many years ago as a teenager, but as I remember the 
mechanistic feel of the story owes more to Bellamy being a poor fiction 
writer than a proto-totalitarian.

While I recall the characters of Looking Backward as clumsily drawn and 
features of Bellamy's society as crudely conceived, I found Bellamy an 
inspiring and compelling writer anyway.  His fundamental notion that all 
citizens should have the same income -- giving them enough disposable income 
to indulge their tastes and talents but not at the expense of others -- hit 
me with tremendous force and has remained a resonant idea in my mind ever 
since.  As I see it, a principle like that points the way to freedom not 
oppression.

Carl