New worlds for old: A plain account of modern socialism

by H. G. Wells

Now reproduction and not production is the more central fact of social life. Women and children and education are things in the background of the Marxist proposal—like a man’s dog, or his private reading, or his pet rabbits. They are in the foreground of modern Socialism. The Social Democrat’s doctrines go little further in this direction than the Liberalism that founded the United States, which ignored women, children and niggers, and made the political unit the adult white man. They were blind to the supreme importance of making the next generation better than the present as the aim and effort of the whole community. Herr Bebel’s book, Woman, is an ample statement of the evils of woman’s lot under the existing régime, but the few pages upon the Future of Woman with which he concludes are eloquent of the jejune insufficiency of the Marxist outlook in this direction. Marriage, which modern Socialism tends more and more to sustain, was to vanish—at least as a law-made bond; women were to count as men so far as the State is concerned….

This disregard of the primary importance of births and upbringing in human affairs and this advocacy of mystical democracy alike contribute to blind the Marxist to the necessity of an educational process and of social discipline and to the more than personal importance of marriage in the Socialist scheme. He can say with a light and confident heart to untrained, ignorant, groping souls: “Destroy the Government; expropriate the rich, establish manhood suffrage, elect delegates strictly pledged—and you will be happy!”

A few modern Marxists stipulate in addition for a Referendum, by which the acts of the elected delegates can be further checked by referring disputed matters to a general vote of all the adults in the community….

§ 4.

My memory, as I write these things of Marxism, carries me to the dusky largeness of a great meeting in Queen’s Hall, and I see again the back of Mr. Hyndman’s head moving quickly, as he receives and answers questions. It was really one of the strangest and most interesting meetings I have ever attended. It was a great rally of the Social Democratic Federation, and the place—floor, galleries and platform—was thick but by no means overcrowded with dingy, earnest people. There was a great display of red badges and red ties, and many white faces, and I was struck by the presence of girls and women with babies. It was more like the Socialist meetings of the popular novel than any I had ever seen before. In the chair that night was Lady Warwick, that remarkable intruder into the class conflict, a blond lady, rather expensively dressed, so far as I could judge, about whom the atmosphere of class consciousness seemed to thicken. Her fair hair, her floriferous hat, told out against the dim multitudinous values of the gathering unquenchably; there were moments when one might have fancied it was simply a gathering of village tradespeople about the lady patroness, and at the end of the proceedings, after the red flag had been waved, after the “Red Flag” had been sung by a choir and damply echoed by the audience, some one moved a vote of thanks to the Countess in terms of familiar respect that completed the illusion.

Mr. Hyndman’s lecture was entitled “In the Rapids of Revolution,” and he had been explaining how inevitable the whole process was, how Russia drove ahead, and Germany and France and America, to the foretold crisis and the foretold millennium. But incidentally he also made a spirited exhortation for effort, for agitation, and he taunted England for lagging in the schemes of fate. Some one amidst the dim multitude discovered an inconsistency in that.

Now the questions were being handed in, written on strips of paper, and at last that listener’s difficulty cropped up.

“What’s this?” said Mr. Hyndman; unfolded the slip and read out: “Why trouble to agitate or work if the Trusts are going to do it all for us?”

The veteran leader of the Social Democratic Federation paused only for a moment.

“Well, we’ve got to get ready for it, you know,” he said, rustling briskly with the folds of the question to follow—and with these words, it seemed to me, that fatalistic Marxism crumbled down to dust.