New worlds for old: A plain account of modern socialismWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
New worlds for old: A plain account of modern socialism
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Socialism
In the various municipal and State Transit Services, the condition of
affairs would be even closer to a broadened and liberalized version of
things as they are. The conductors and drivers will no doubt wear
uniforms for convenience of recognition, but a uniform will carry with
it no association with the idea of a livery as it does at the present
time. Mostly this service will be run by young men, and each one, like
the private of the democratic French Army, will feel that he has a
marshal's _batôn_ in his knapsack. He will have had a good education;
he will have short hours of duty and leisure for self-improvement or
other pursuits, and if he remains a conductor or driver all his life
he will have only his own unpretending qualities to thank for that. He
will probably remain a conductor if he likes to remain a conductor,
and go elsewhere if he does not. He is not obliged to take that
_batôn_ out and bother with it if he has quiet tastes.
The great organized industries, mining, cotton, iron, building and the
like, would differ chiefly in the permanence of employment and the
systematic evasion of the social hardship caused now-a-days by new
inventions and economies in method. There will exist throughout the
world an organized economic survey, which will continually prepare and
revise estimates of the need of iron, coal, cloth and so forth in the
coming months; the blind speculative production of our own times is
due merely to the dark ignorance in which we work in these matters,
and with such a survey, employment will lose much of the cruel
intermittence it now displays. The men in these great productive
services, quite equally with teachers and railwaymen, will be
permanently employed. They will be no more taken on and turned off by
the day or week than we should take on or turn off an extra policeman,
or depend for our defence upon soldiers casually engaged upon the
battlefield at sixpence an hour. And if by adopting some ingenious
device we dispense suddenly with the labour of hundreds of men, the
Socialist State will send them, not into the casual wards and colonies
as our State does, to become a social burthen there, but into the
technical schools to train for some fresh use of their energies. Taken
all round, of course, these men, even the least enterprising or able,
will be better off than they are now, with a fuller share of the
product of their industry. Many will no doubt remain as they are,
rather through want of ambition than want of push, because under
Socialism life will be tolerable for a poor man. A man who chooses to
do commonplace work and spend his leisure upon chess or billiards, or
in gossip or eccentric studies, or amusing but ineffectual art, will
remain a poor man indeed, but not be made a wretched one. Sheer toil
of a mechanical sort there is little need of in the world now, it
could be speedily dispensed with at a thousand points were human
patience not cheaper than good machinery, but there will still remain
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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