Learning to Share: HOW CAN WE LEARN TO LIVE WITHOUT CAPITALISM?

By Barbara G Louise

In an obscure corner of the infinite-multiverse, on an alternate-Earth, in the mid-21st century, the right to vote of millions of Working Class Americans had recently been totally destroyed, freeing the Ruling Class — with the power their money gave them — to dictate the shape of national government. The Rich were afraid that without the vote the worst of the Rabble would revolt, destroying Elitist civilization. So the Rulers prepared to have protestors shot in the streets; rebellious slaves do not deserve to live.
Preparing for an inevitable Anti-Capitalist Revolution, learning to Share, Working Class people organize themselves to grow free-food for the Poor and the Homeless; they create Tent Neighborhoods in public parks for those running from sea-coasts devastated by melting glaciers due to Climate Change; and establish the Anarkhist Army of the Appendix to aid ordinary people in the coming Revolution, as the Rich use violence to keep their money and their social power.
Soon after the COVID pandemic has worn itself out, a special, secret committee in the US Senate — in order to get rid of worthless, excess, unemployed Workers — released mutated, antiviral-resistant Smallpox on a nation which was completely unvaccinated for that devastating disease, since vaccinations for Smallpox ended in 1972 after the disease was eradicated in the USA.
Totally unsupported by a government dedicated only to protecting and enabling the Rich Elites, ordinary working-Americans — desperately seeking to control their own lives, their ailing planet, and their civilization — struggle together onward toward a effective anti-Capitalist Revolution.
How can people prepare for life without Capitalism; how do they struggle for a better future living in Voluntary Socialism?
Can the Revolutionaries of North America survive the violent backlash from those Elites who most Profit from Capitalism?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781663248374

Barbara G Louise

Barbara G Louise was born Barbara Louise Whittum — the first child of white, ‘middle-class’ parents — in November 1943 in Niagara Falls, New York. She has one brother, a retired Marine and a newspaper publisher. After graduating from Riverside High School in Painesville Township, Ohio in 1961, she attended Kent State University, graduating in 1970 with two bachelor degrees, one in Biology, one in general Science. She became a Jew-by-Choice at the age of thirty. Barbara spent her working career as a Registered Medical Technologist: MT (ASCP), beginning in the Pathology Service Laboratory of University Hospitals of Cleveland and then in the Hematology Laboratory of Mt Sinai Medical Center in New York City, before returning to Cleveland at the age of forty-seven. When she retired after a mild stroke in 2000, Barbara began to write the Science Fiction novels she had always wanted to read, about societies without Racism, Homophobia, or Sexism; but being human societies, they have other problems. When the book-in-hand was published, Barbara was 79, living very happily in Cleveland Heights, Ohio with her long-time same-gender Partner and the latest in a long line of well-loved rescue-cats.

Book preview

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LEARNING TO SHARE

HOW CAN WE LEARN TO LIVE WITHOUT CAPITALISM?

Barbara G Louise

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LEARNIN G TO SHARE

HOW CAN WE LEARN TO LIVE WITHOUT CAPITALISM?

Copyright © 2023 Barbara G Louise.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4838-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4837-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022922333

iUniverse rev. date: 06/27/2023

CONTENTS

Introduction

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

in memory of

Tamir Rice

a child growing up in Cleveland, Ohio,

playing in his own yard

murdered by Police

George Floyd

a father, and a well-loved citizen of his community

murdered by Police

Breonna Taylor

a health care worker asleep in her own bed

murdered by Police

and

the many other

innocent, unarmed people in the USA

(or anywhere in the world)

with lots of melanin in their skins

murdered by Police (or the equivalent) for the crime

of not being white

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Learning to Share,

this third book in the Rabble and the Rich® series

is prequeled by The Butterfly Caper and The Secret Experiment.

two novels about diverse people in a Voluntary-Socialist-Commune

attempting a non-violent Revolution, teaching

Socialist values to their children.

This fictional story, the novel-in-hand, is of people

organizing to fight an Anti-Capitalist,

unfortunately-violent Revolution in North America

in an alternate-version of Earth somewhere

in the infinite-Multiverse.

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It continues on in the next novel,

Inhabit the Earth,

the fourth-book in the Rabble and the Rich Quintology,

as the Revolution begins,

and is concluded in The People’s Solidarity of North America

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Revolutionaries must constantly be working to shed centuries of ruling class indoctrination that serves to divide and conquer the vast laboring class. Every form of bigotry and backwardness holds back unity and progress in a revolutionary struggle of all [colours], [ethnicities], [cultures], [abilities], [sizes], sexualities, genders, and sexes to abolish Capitalism and liberate humanity.

~ Leslie Feinberg

Lavender and Red

a long series of articles in Workers World Newspaper

(which many have asked Workers World Party to publish as a book)

INTRODUCTION

"The Storming of the Bastille is the defining moment of world history. It kicks off an era of revolution that continues today. As such, it provides lessons as the UR-revolution.

"The Storming of the Bastille forms a crucial turning point not just for France, but for all of humanity. As the initial spark of the French Revolution, it initiated a period of history that proved collective social action [can] sweep away the vestiges of humanity’s despotic past.

The next three years laid waste to archaic notions of "a place for every man and every man in his place." [Also], the myth of Divine Royal Authority took a bloody good hiding.

Humanity now had compelling evidence that world history could be totally redefined by the [organized] majority."

~ Nicholas Pell

as the 3rd millennium began,

in AlterNet, the alternate InterNet news journal

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Notes by Treedottir-Solley, Historian-Editor:

I was born a citizen of the People’s Solidarity of North America, the PSNA, in the mid-Eastern Division.

My research for this novel of Revolutionary History, about our ancestors’ collective battle more than 200 years ago against the venal forces of Capitalism, has been done while sitting comfortably in the library of my family-home in Cranberry Village in the Cuyahoga District of what used to be the eastern-most mid-western State of Ohio, on the southern shore of what was once Lake Erie.

I imagine it will be hard for our modern youth to understand how the world was constructed more than 200 years ago, after the fall of the Soviet Union, when all the Working Class People of Earth were once again enslaved to Capitalism.

It is nearly impossible for anyone born Free — as we all are in our People’s Solidarity — to fully understand the horror of what it is like to be enslaved economically to the ideals and to the sociopathic-winners of Capitalism. And that is only a pale image of the real chattel-slavery endured by our Black ancestors before the USA’s nineteenth century Civil War finally outlawed chattel-slavery (except of duly-convicted criminals in prison; an atrocity we have subsequently gotten rid of).

Unfortunately, we still have left on this Earth pockets of Capitalist Blight where everyone is enslaved — except those who do not work, the Bourgeoisie — or the Boogees, as we commonly call them — those slothful-people, most of whom are consciously white-supremacists, the Enemies of decency, sanity, and Freedom.

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I do not know how the Revolution was constructed by humans belonging to other cultures elsewhere in the world. In this historical novel, I must restrict myself to the People’s Solidarity of North America and write only what I know.

I hope in the future to read accounts of how we might finally be able to rid ourselves of the last cancerous areas of Capitalism on our planet, and rescue from slavery all the Working Class humans in those Blighted areas.

Here in North America, Blighted means the former state of Texas-and-part-of-Oklahoma-combined calling itself the Texas Free State, as well as most of the counties of North and South Carolina now calling themselves Greater Carolina. Also the combined old USA states of Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, and Mississippi are now the New Confederate Union where —in an atmosphere of extreme white-supremacy and misogyny — melanin-rich skin, homosexuality, abortion-choice, gender-fluidity, and free speech, as in Texas Free State, are capital crimes.

Most Black people — the descendents of those people who were enslaved in chattel-slavery in the USA (considered by many to be the worst condition of Slavery in all of history, anywhere on Earth) before the Civil War— have fled the New Confederate Union, making the new nation entirely white. Who now is doing the work? My guess is members of the Boogees’ alternative source of slave labor: Poor-white-people. Despised because they are Poor; employed at starvation wages because there are no enslaved Black people to force to work for nothing; and worked to death because there are, of course, no honorable retirement options for Prole-Oldsters who, unable to work, would just be a drain on society. Society meaning the rich white Boogees and their privileged offspring.

In what had been western Canada, the Provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Yukon, Saskatchewan, the NorthWest Territories, Nunavut, Manitoba, and including the former USA state of Alaska — despite internal Left-wing objections — the Boogees and their lackeys united themselves under Capitalism and became the Royal Canadian Empire of the West. Then the new government began systematically executing all its Progressive people — all those who were not able to escape — for plottingTreason.

Mexico — due to the extreme poverty of its peoples — was lost to Capitalism, and in its entire joined the PSNA. We consider Mexico to be an especially rich addition to our Solidarity, because Workers — those wonderfully productive human beings — are the shining wealth of Socialism.

Spots of Blight where Capitalism is still being practiced dot every continent on the planet. None of our Revolutions are over, anywhere on Earth.

The Capitalists are particularly upset, we understand, by the loss of Workers in what Texas Free State considers to be its most southern counties, (northern Mexico), south of the Rio Grande. Those anti-Solidarity, super-Conservative forces, aided by far-"right"-wingnuts in the former "right-to-work" areas of Greater Carolina, Texas Free State, and the New Confederate Union, have always felt that the anti-racist, non-misogynist, pro-union, and other Progressive ideals of our People’s Solidarity restrict their so-called "freedom" to violently oppress — for their personal profit — the people and ideas with which they disagree. Real Freedom for All, regardless of colour, gender, religious-beliefs, etc, in a sharing-society of Equals, is anathema to them.

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Most of the history I will be reporting (in the form of fiction) will be about the area where I live and the people who lived here, my ancestors and the ancestors of my dearest friends and neighbors. I hope historians working in non-Capitalist-Blight areas elsewhere in the world will do the same. So that, besides bequeathing Voluntary-Socialism to all our descendents, we can also tell them how it happened to come about that all over the world (except in the Lands of Capitalist-Blight) the People of the Working Class — in the People’s Solidarity of Southern Asia, the People’s Solidarity of Australia and New Zealand, the People’s Solidarity of Central America and the Caribbean, the People’s Solidarity of South America, the People’s Solidarity of Siberia, the People’s Solidarity of All Africa, and the People’s Solidarity of Europe — after many terrible struggles, together with their families, friends, and neighbors, are Free at Last! Like people should be — strong together in Solidarity — sharing all the world.

I hope we can soon look forward to the People’s Solidarity of Earth, the PSE.

~ Heather Treedottir-Solley

Historian and Editor

Autumn, 2265

Cuyahoga District

People’s Solidarity of North America

PROLOGUE

"The common woman is as common as a common loaf of bread, and will rise."

~ Judy Grahn,

Lesbian poet

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DURING THE REVOLUTION

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the Revolutionary Memoir of Sally Solley:

After spending the night with a lover in Cleaveland Hills, I was making a delivery the next morning into Cleaveland proper.

I was stopped at a military checkpoint at the western end of Euclid Heights Boulevard at the top of Cedar hill. There was the usual archaic Army tank blocking both Cleaveland-bound lanes. Several young uniforms were holding automatic weapons. At the end of the twenty-first century, the new US-Combined-Military was not yet using their most modern equipment to stop, search, and harass old white ladies from the suburbs driving to work in Cleaveland on a weekday morning.

Old white lady: that was me — Sally Solley — almost seventy-years-old, gray hair fading to white, decidedly plump around the middle, driving an old, battered, reconditioned 1979 VW Bug, seeming not at all the dangerous revolutionist I fancied myself to be.

I waited in line, appearing calm, fighting down the cold fear-of-discovery I always felt while doing my revolutionary delivery work.

In many ways, I was the perfect courier. Who would suspect that under my back seat, in a refrigerated compartment, I carried enough vat-grown, animal-derived protein to feed two hundred people? People engaged in a General-Strike and Lockout-of-the-Bosses. We were continuing our anti-capitalist Revolution, despite the ‘compromise’ government imposed upon us after the military junta took power.

The new US-Combined-Military soldiers at the checkpoint wore the gold stars of volunteers. Joining the military was the only chance for employment young people had in the Junta’s brave new Capitalist economy.

Even with the damned Draft, in place since just before the disastrous, radioactive end of the Third Mid-East War, the new USCM couldn’t hold enough draftees to police us all. The plutocrats — the Boogees — had not considered, when shortly after the end of the COVID Epidemic, they had let loose Smallpox among us years before — to reduce the number of ‘excess’ Workers — they were also killing-off the soldiers they would someday need to keep the rest of us in line.

Those sleek, combat-uniformed US-Combined-Military soldiers never suspected the dumpy old woman in the antique VW had spent three decades of her life perfecting a way of growing edible, cloned, animal-protein in organic-chemical vats.

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Where’re you headed, Ma’am? The handsome young white man stuck his head in my window and surveyed the empty rear-interior of my little car. His steel helmet was covered with jungle camouflage.

The Cuyahoga Valley Medical Center, I answered, giving him a motherly smile. I’m on my way to work.

ID? he asked. Such was the unfreedom of ordinary citizens when the ‘new’ US government — and its still-privileged capitalist rulers, the ‘Boogees’ (slang for the Bourgeoise, the ultra-rich Capitalist class) — felt itself under attack from homegrown dissent.

The USCM soldier, obviously bored, offered me the ID-reader. I put the little web between my right thumb and forefinger under the scanner, and the machine’s digital-laser-X-ray read my citizen-number, name, age, and employment status off the near-microscopic ID-chip embedded there, all faked by a young electronic genius in the local, anti-capitalist, communist, International Workers-United Party (the IWUP).

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Dwarfed by the automatic weapon she carried, a young-woman USCM-soldier raised the zebra-striped crossbar for me, and I drove into Cleaveland, down Cedar hill, to ‘go to work.’

I made the correct turn, under the guns of the young volunteer soldiers, to drive to the Cuyahoga Valley Medical Center, then past it, out of sight of the soldiers, to Euclid Avenue. I turned left and headed westward. I was going to help feed folks at the on-going Sit-down Strike on the near west side of the Cuyahoga River, at the Cleaveland Steel Works, the first factory in our area where a Revolutionist-Union had Struck the profiteers. It was a classic Workers’-Takeover, Locking-Out the bosses so the Capitalist ‘owners’ could not profit from the factory’s production. The factory was a fortress, built that way to defend the Boogee owners against any Rabble attacking the factory and ‘stealing’ it away from them. They had never considered their own Workers to be a real threat.

The Workers-Management Team at the Steel Works had recently refused to yield their position to the ‘new’ USCM when the ‘compromise’ government had come in.

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In the parking lot of a large church at East 35th and Euclid Avenue, volunteers helped me unload the insulated boxes of vat-protein into a battered RV vehicle belonging to the Bread-Upon-the-Waters Campaign. Other people, younger and more vigorous, would elude the military siege around the Steel Works and bring food to the Strikers. My part—my special contribution to the anti-capitalist Revolution I had long hoped would never be necessary — was over for the day.

I was proud of that contribution. My hidden food boxes contained vat-ostrich meat. I hadn’t yet been able to make my cloned cow-muscle taste like the animal it had come from, so I had switched to ostrich, which tastes very much like beef, but I had to warn Jewish people not to eat my vat-ostrich meat because it wasn’t Kosher. I didn’t understand why it wasn’t Kosher, but I believe People, even in the midst of Revolution, are entitled to practice their religion, however they want, even if I don’t understand it.

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Our Revolution had been a long time coming. Many would say too long.

In my twenties, at the beginning of the twenty-first century—through my Anarkha-Communist college roommate, Zora Heatherstone, and my authoritarian-Communist cousin, Mary Spolling Haddison—I had met people who thought a dedicated anti-capitalist revolution in the USA was absolutely necessary for the survival of the human species. And that saving the Working Class—the best part of the human race —was essential for the survival of our suffering planet Earth.

We rose up in Revolution against our oppressors—as we understood them to be—and then disavowed the ‘moderate’ compromise which had supposedly brought our Revolution to a swift end. Rejecting the idea of a ‘modified’ capitalist economy, heavily authoritarian, we meant to create a real Voluntary-Socialist society backed by a Revolutionary Government based on Workers’ Solidarity. As a devoted disciple of Emma Goldman, and an active Revolutionist, I meant to stand up for Anarkhist ideas of Self-Rule, Mutual Aide, and Horizontal Organization of Society at the Grassroots Level.

Capitalists never give up power willingly, so at that time — the early part of beginning the Revolution — it was the most difficult period of creating a Socialist society.

We did not have and did not need central coercive-control during the Revolution; and I believed, as an Anarkhist, we would also not need central coercive-control after the Revolution. We needed Voluntary-Socialism.

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Beginning the third decade of the twenty-first century, I had started my experimentation with the cultured growth of living bird-and-mammal-derived muscle in vats of organic chemicals, because I enjoyed eating meat but could not bear the bloody killing of all those helpless animals.

I was ready to help feed everyone who had chosen to continue rising-up to take our country away from the so-called ‘moderates’ who had reached a ‘fair’ accommodation with the owners of the banks and the giant corporations. Those powerful Capitalist-institutions had used their massive amounts of money to take command of our ‘democratic’ government at least a generation before the Revolution, and had maneuvered to dominate the so-called ‘new,’ ‘compromise,’ ‘neo-democratic’ government as well.

But most of us continued to struggle for a genuine People’s Control of our world. We all knew by then that there were successful Voluntary-Socialist Communes and ‘incorporated,’ Socialist, small towns all over the North American continent which were serving as living examples that a great diversity of human beings could live happy, civilized, peaceful lives together in Voluntary-Socialism. The ‘right’-Wingnuts had failed to destroy most of those communities, although they were trying.

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My friends in the IWUP knew of my experiments with vat-protein. Before the Revolution — as part of the continent-wide Free Food Movement — people in northeastern Ohio had formed the Food Liberation ‘Core,’ the FLC, (whose logo was a well-chewed apple core). They were joined by enthusiastic volunteers, many of whom were unemployed because their jobs had been outsourced to Asia and the southern USA, where unions were illegal. The Free Food Movement had ‘stolen’ food and had helped to feed and organize Homeless People, Poor people, and the newly-Poor. Their ranks had swelled as the Capitalist economy deteriorated.

By that time, the high-tech, ‘efficient,’ monoculture philosophy of agri-businesses, along with sporadic drought conditions, due to Global Warming, had led to an overpopulation of insecticide-immune agricultural pests and the collapse of grain production all across the North American continent. By saturating local air and water with insecticides, those same agri-businesses had also caused the decimation of our hard-working honeybee population. Such clumsy and arrogant mismanagement of natural resources had resulted in much higher prices for scarce supplies of food, increasing the food-crisis of the Working Class.

An important part of our Revolution was the idea that We-the-People must stop competing with each other for the necessities of life — ‘the savage struggle for a crumb’ — as the great Anarkhist Alexander Berkman once put it. Now, most people had backyard gardens or access to community garden space, and local farmers were supplying us with corn as a basic grain, to substitute for the hard-to-get, extremely expensive wheat products. The Free Food Movement was engaged in intensive gardening of vegetables and fruit, distributing them free to anyone who asked.

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Forty years later, having learned along the way that Revolution was inevitable, I was thrilled it had happened in my lifetime. While I lived, I might be able to influence the post-Revolutionary society of North America to become more Anarkhist: more Free of Coercion, Elitism, and struggle for Privilege.

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I returned home, to the city of Eastern Hills, not needing to fake several yawns, while crossing the border, to convince another group of USCM soldiers—who once again checked my forged ID-chip—I was returning from working the night shift at the Cuyahoga Valley Medical Center in Cleaveland. I had again passed another checkpoint with no trouble, thanks to an electronic-genius Comrade from the IWUP.

I Hate Martial Law.

Inside my building, I had a one-room apartment next to my factory-laboratory. I checked the vats first, making sure all the little motors worked which moved the sterile stirrers ‘exercising’ the cloned animal-derived-meat I was growing.

I fixed myself breakfast. Mixed with the taste of my seasoned vat-bacon, the de-bittered, yeast-grown, lecithin-enriched ‘scrambled eggs’ given me by another artificial-food-grower tasted almost all right.

Since I had been up late the night before exercising a lifetime’s accumulation of lovemaking skills, I retired for a nap. Younger lovers can be exhausting. I was a lucky old dyke.

It had been a long road for me, for most of the twenty-first century so far, coming to finally recognize the misery and justifiable rage of the most-oppressed people in the old Capitalist culture. Since I had been lucky enough—because I was white and had a technical education—to remain ‘middle class,’