Socialism and the familyWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
Socialism and the family
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Families; Middle class; Socialism
expense-cutting, mercenary making of the present _régime_.
This is, I believe, a temporary and alterable state, contrary to the
essential and permanent spirit of those engaged in constructive work. It
is due very largely to the many misrepresentations and partial
statements of Socialism that have rendered it palatable and assimilable
to the working men and the administrative Socialist. Socialism has been
presented on the one hand as a scheme of expropriation to a clamorous
popular government of working men, far more ignorant and incapable of
management than a shareholders’ meeting, and, on the other, as a scheme
for the encouragement of stupid little municipal authorities of the
contemporary type in impossible business undertakings under the guidance
of fussy, energetic, legal minded and totally unscientific instigators.
Except for the quite recent development of Socialist thought that is now
being embodied in the _New Heptarchy Series_ of the Fabian Society,
scarcely anything has been done to dispel these reasonable dreads. I
should think that from the point of view of Socialist propaganda, the
time is altogether ripe now for a fresh and more vigorous insistence
upon the materially creative aspect of the Vision of Socialism, an
aspect which is after all, much more cardinal and characteristic than
any aspect that has hitherto been presented systematically to the world.
An enormous rebuilding, remaking, and expansion is integral in the
Socialist dream. We want to get the land out of the control of the
private owners among whom it is cut up, we want to get houses,
factories, railways, mines, farms out of the dispersed management of
their proprietors, not in order to secure their present profits and
hinder development, but in order to rearrange these things in a saner
and finer fashion. An immense work of replanning, rebuilding,
redistributing lies in the foreground of the Socialist vista. We
contemplate an enormous clearance of existing things. We want an
unfettered hand to make beautiful and convenient homes, splendid cities,
noiseless great highways, beautiful bridges, clean, swift and splendid
electric railways; we are inspired by a faith in the coming of clean,
wide and simple methods of agricultural production. But it is only now
that Socialism is beginning to be put in these terms. So put it, and the
engineer and the architect and the scientific organizer, agricultural or
industrial—all the best of them, anyhow—will find it correspond
extraordinarily to their way of thinking.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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