New worlds for old: A plain account of modern socialism

by H. G. Wells

We have got to get ready for it. Indeed, we have to make it—by education and intention and set resolve. Socialism is to be attained not by fate, but by will.

§ 5.

And here, as a sort of Eastern European gloss upon Marxist Socialism, as an extreme and indeed ultimate statement of this marriage of mystical democracy to Socialism, we may say a word of Anarchism. Anarchism carries the administrative laissez faire of Marx to its logical extremity. “If the common, untutored man is right anyhow—why these ballot boxes; why these intermediaries in the shape of law and representative?”

That is the perfectly logical outcome of ignoring administration and reconstruction. The extreme Social-Democrat and the extreme Individualist meet in a doctrine of non-resistance to the forces of Evolution—which in this connection they deify with a capital letter. Organization, control, design, the disciplined will, these are evil, they declare—the evil of life. So you come at the end of the process, if you are active-minded, to the bomb as the instrument of man’s release to unimpeded virtue, and if you are pacific in disposition to the Tolstoyan attitude of passive resistance to all rule and property.

Anarchism, then, is as it were a final perversion of the Socialist stream, a last meandering of Socialist thought, released from vitalizing association with an active creative experience. Anarchism comes when the Socialist repudiation of property is dropped into the circles of thought of men habitually ruled and habitually irresponsible, men limited in action and temperamentally adverse to the toil, to the vexatious rebuffs and insufficiencies, the dusty effort, fatigue, and friction of the practical pursuit of a complex ideal. So that it most flourishes eastwardly, where men, it would seem, are least energetic and constructive, and it explodes or dies on American soil.

Anarchism, with its knife and bomb, is a miscarriage of Socialism, an acephalous birth from that fruitful mother. It is an unnatural offspring, opposed in nature to its parent, for always from the beginning the constructive spirit, the ordering and organizing spirit has been strong among Socialists. It was by a fallacy, an oversight, that laissez faire in politics crept into a movement that was before all things an organized denial of laissez faire in economic and social life….

I write this of the Anarchism that is opposed to contemporary Socialism, the political Anarchism. But there is also another sort of Anarchism, which the student of these schools of thought must keep clear in his mind from this, the Anarchism of Tolstoy and that other brand of William Morris, neither of which waves any flag of black, nor counsels violence; they present that conception of untrammelled and spontaneous rightness and goodness which is, indeed, I hazard, the moral ideal of all rightly-thinking men. It is worth while to define very clearly the relation of this second sort of Anarchism, the nobler Anarchism, to the toiling constructive Socialism which many of us now make our practical guide in life’s activities, to say just where they touch and where they are apart.

Now the ultimate ideal of human intercourse is surely not Socialism at all, but a way of life that is not litigious and not based upon jealously-guarded rights, which is free from property, free from jealousy, and “above the law.” There, there shall not be “marriage or giving in marriage.” The whole mass of Christian teaching points to such an ideal; Paul and Christ turn again and again to the ideal of a world of “just men made perfect,” in which right and beauty come by instinct, in which just laws and regulations are unnecessary and unjust ones impossible. “Turn your attention,” says my friend, the Rev. Stewart Headlam, in his admirable tract on Christian Socialism—

“Turn your attention to that series of teachings of Christ’s which we call parables—comparisons, that is to say, between what Christ saw going on in the every-day world around Him and the Kingdom of Heaven. If by the Kingdom of Heaven in these parables is meant a place up in the clouds, or merely a state in which people will be after death, then I challenge you to get any kind of meaning out of them whatever. But if by the Kingdom of Heaven is meant (as it is clear from other parts of Christ’s teaching is the case) the righteous society to be established upon earth, then they all have a plain and beautiful meaning; a meaning well summed up in that saying so often quoted against us by the sceptic and the atheist, ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you;’ or, in other words, ‘Live,’ Christ said, ‘all of you together, not each of you by himself; live as members of the righteous society which I have come to found upon earth, and then you will be clothed as beautifully as the Eastern lily and fed as surely as the birds.’”

And the Rev. R. J. Campbell, who comes to Socialism by way of Nonconformity, is equally convincing in support of this assertion that the “Kingdom of Heaven” was and is a terrestrial ideal.