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
The word "property," one must remember, is a slightly evasive word.
Absolute property hardly exists--absolute, that is to say, in the
sense of unlimited right of disposal; almost all property is
incomplete and relative. A man, under our present laws, has no
absolute property even in his own life; he is restrained from suicide
and punished if he attempt it. He may not go offensively filthy nor
indecently clad; there are limits to his free use of his body. The
owner of a house, of land, of a factory is subject to all sorts of
limitations, building regulations for example, and so is the owner of
horse or dog. Nor again is any property exempt from taxation. Even now
property is a limited thing, and it is well to bear that much in mind.
It can be defined as something one may do "what one likes with,"
subject only to this or that specific restriction, and at any time, it
would seem, the State is at least legally entitled to increase the
quantity and modify the nature of the restriction. The extremest
private property is limited to a certain sanity and humanity in its
use.
In that sense every adult now-a-days has private property in his or
her own person, in clothes, in such personal implements as hand-tools,
as a bicycle, as a cricket-bat or golf-sticks. In quite the same sense
would he have it under Socialism so far as these selfsame things go.
The sense of property in such things is almost instinctive; my little
boys of five and three have the keenest sense of _mine_ and (almost,
if not quite so vividly) _thine_ in the matter of toys and garments.
The disposition of modern Socialism is certainly no more to override
these natural tendencies than it is to fly in the face of human nature
in regard to the home. The disposition of modern Socialism is indeed
far more in the direction of confirming and insuring this natural
property. And again modern Socialism has no designs upon the money in
a man's pocket. It is quite true that the earlier and extreme
Socialist theorists did in their communism find no use for money, but
I do not think there are any representative Socialists now who do not
agree that the State must pay and receive in money, that money is
indispensable to human freedom. The featurelessness of money, its
universal convertibility, gives human beings a latitude of choice and
self-expression in its spending that is inconceivable without its use.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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