If you were on Yahoo this week, you saw the photo of “Baby 59,” a Chinese newborn rescued from a sewer pipe. His 22-year-old single mother, a recent migrant from the countryside to the city, isolated and alone, hid her pregnancy and gave birth alone in the community toilet of the apartment building where she lives. When her baby slipped down the toilet, she called the paramedics anonymously, only later revealing her identity.
This kind of story, with its voyeurism and its moral outrage against the mother, is made for the Internet. What Yahoo won’t address, however, is this question: What kind of society condemns a woman to such brutal isolation that she is forced to hide her pregnancy and give birth alone?
We can answer it: capitalist society. Although it calls itself communist, China is capitalist. The Chinese communists fought for socialism which is in essence state capitalism. Although China still calls itself communist, this kind of society has nothing in common with communism.

Communist Society Will Create Cooperation—Not Isolation
In capitalist society, the nuclear family—and sometimes just a pregnant woman alone in an apartment—is the economic unit. We are wage slaves, forced to work for the money we need to pay bills. Capitalism sets us up for individualism, competition, and isolation by the economics of survival.
Communism will do away with wages and money. Free of the coercion of paying the bills, we’ll work to produce what we need as a society. We’ll decide together what to produce and how to distribute it so everyone’s needs are met. We’ll be looking out for our neighbors and co-workers, making sure that their needs are met.
Transforming the economic system will enable us to revolutionize our thinking. Instead of individual or family survival, we will learn to think about a larger human family. We will share each other’s joys and problems as well as sharing in the fruits of our labor.

Capitalism isolates and oppresses women around the world
Capitalist society, with its individualism and resulting isolation, hits women especially hard. Around the world women have the responsibility to deal with pregnancy, childbirth, and child rearing, often alone. In China, peasant women before the revolution were faced with extreme oppression. They worked in the fields until they gave birth, and often saw their children starve to death. Subject to the authority of their fathers and husbands, women were traditionally powerless. But defying that authority, women played an active role in the Chinese revolution, marched with Mao on the Long March, fought for the transformation of peasant villages, and helped lead the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was an attempt by millions of Chinese communist workers and students to kick out of the government the red bourgeoisie, communist leaders who had become capitalists, and to turn China from the socialist path towards true communism. But the left of the Cultural Revolution was defeated. In the
1980s the Chinese bosses appropriated the collective property of the masses. As a result, the capitalists
are enjoying prosperity, and working men and women are faced with extreme exploitation and alienation.
The logic of capitalist competition, especially in a period of worldwide capitalist crisis, is a race to the bottom. More and more workers will face extreme exploitation and murderous conditions. In search of higher profits, US firms which used to produce in China are finding that they can exploit workers even more profitably in Mexico, Central America or Bangladesh, where wages are even lower and exploitation more extreme than in China.
But workers can learn some important lessons from the collapse of the garment factory last month in Bangladesh. The first is that capitalism means death. Extreme exploitation, isolation and war are what capitalism has in store for workers around the world. The second is that workers, women workers in particular, are not doomed to the social isolation of the mother of “Baby 59” in China. Women garment workers in Bangladesh joined with men workers to fight the cops to rescue their fellow workers who were trapped in the factory collapse. This militant concern for their fellow workers is the embryo of the new social relations which will be born with communist revolution.