# Holy Crap! H.G. Wells was a totalitarian! **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 10, 2010, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844 "2010-08-10T17:12:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Dorothea\_Book](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/da6949/32.png) [@Dorothea\_Book](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dorothea_Book)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/21 "2010-08-11T03:23:26Z")
Why are you assuming that the novel is prescriptive? It’s fiction after all. Most of Wells’s scientific romances (the conventional name for this genre) express very mixed feelings towards what was being debated and forcasted as “progress.” After all, think about The Time Machine and its prediction of the future. If you want to know what Wells really thought you should read some of his essays. In fact he broke from the Fabians in part because he worried that they were too statist. ---
**Author:** ![DrFidelius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/drfidelius/32/3447_2.png) [@DrFidelius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrFidelius)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 11:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/22 "2010-08-11T11:25:59Z")
Totalitarianism didn’t get a bad name until Hitler and Stalin showed the world how it affects real people. It was a very popular concept among the educated upper-classes prior to WWII. Of course, they envisioned themselves on the top of the heap, benevolently telling the great unwashed how to live their lives. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 1:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/23 "2010-08-11T13:41:48Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > Well read the story for yourself if you haven’t already. The rationalist world state “evolves” up to the point where it’s time to suppress the holdouts, regressives and obstructionists; then it’s unapologetically imposed. And anyone who thinks that that is wrong is simply holding on to primitive, outmoded concepts. :rolleyes: So, there is no actual **down** side. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 2:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/24 "2010-08-11T14:18:51Z")
> [@Dorothea\_Book](#): > > Why are you assuming that the novel is prescriptive? Welles actually promoted just this sort of future in lectures and public arguments. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/25 "2010-08-11T14:21:49Z")
H.G. Wells, visionary though he was, was also notoriously wonky in his views of contemporary politics of his time - prehaps because he was seduced by his own vision of a benevolent world-state, and so willing to overlook the excesses of those who (like Stalin) appeared on the surface at least to be working towards the goals he approved of. He allegedly wrote of Stalin in the _New Statesman_ mag: “I have never met a man more fair, candid, and honest”. Though he later decided that Stalin was ‘too rigid’ to be the leader of his ideal world state. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/26 "2010-08-11T17:56:18Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > H.G. Wells, visionary though he was, was also notoriously wonky in his views of contemporary politics of his time - prehaps because he was seduced by his own vision of a benevolent world-state, and so willing to overlook the excesses of those who (like Stalin) appeared on the surface at least to be working towards the goals he approved of. Welles was not really out of line with the popular Left for most of his life. In fact, he was popular among Progressives precisely for those views. Wonky? Yes - according to us. But not to those of his own time and place. He was far more a man of it than Orwell, and tened to be clear-eyed in precisely those ways Orwell was not. ---
**Author:** ![Dorothea\_Book](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/da6949/32.png) [@Dorothea\_Book](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dorothea_Book)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/27 "2010-08-11T19:43:13Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > > [@Dorothea\_Book](#): > > > > Why are you assuming that the novel is prescriptive? > > Welles actually promoted just this sort of future in lectures and public arguments. No he did not. Or if you think so, provide an example of his _promoting_ a totalitarian future. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/28 "2010-08-11T19:57:34Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > > [@Malthus](#): > > > > H.G. Wells, visionary though he was, was also notoriously wonky in his views of contemporary politics of his time - prehaps because he was seduced by his own vision of a benevolent world-state, and so willing to overlook the excesses of those who (like Stalin) appeared on the surface at least to be working towards the goals he approved of. > > Welles was not really out of line with the popular Left for most of his life. In fact, he was popular among Progressives precisely for those views. Wonky? Yes - according to us. But not to those of his own time and place. He was far more a man of it than Orwell, and tened to be clear-eyed in precisely those ways Orwell was not. I don’t get it. So what if he was not out of line with the left? Claiming Stalin was a good guy is wonky in my book, and if that is “clear-eyed” I think I’d rather side with Orwell. ---
**Author:** ![Dorothea\_Book](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/da6949/32.png) [@Dorothea\_Book](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dorothea_Book)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/29 "2010-08-11T20:05:34Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > > [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > > > Welles was not really out of line with the popular Left for most of his life. In fact, he was popular among Progressives precisely for those views. Wonky? Yes - according to us. But not to those of his own time and place. He was far more a man of it than Orwell, and tened to be clear-eyed in precisely those ways Orwell was not. > > I don’t get it. So what if he was not out of line with the left? Claiming Stalin was a good guy is wonky in my book, and if that is “clear-eyed” I think I’d rather side with Orwell. Where does Welles claim that Stalin was a good guy? Lots of people writing at the beginning of the twentieth century believed in a gradual evolution toward a world state–and Welles believed that internationalist organizations like the League of Nations were a temporary step in that direction (so did Woodrow Wilson of course). As Welles’s own novels make clear “socialism” was a mainstream (though not precisely dominant) political idea during this period. In Britain its ideals were promoted through the Labour Party–the same Labour Party that you have today though, to be sure, that party would now describe itself as social democratic rather than socialist and also, since the Blair years, it is not consistently social democratic either (the latter tradition is considerably stronger in Germany and France). You can certainly say that Welles a) thought of himself as a socialist, b) anticipated the founding of a world state (which he thought would obviate destructive wars like the devastating WWI) and c) promoted both socialist and internationalist forms of politics. But you can’t say that he was a totalitarian because he was highly concerned with individual freedom. And the interesting thing about his fiction–even very prose-ish ficiton like _A Modern Utopian_ is that it tends to portray utopian schemes as at least partly dystopic. Something Welles was highly aware of. These tensions and ironies are what makes his fiction interesting to read. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/30 "2010-08-11T20:21:54Z")
> [@Dorothea\_Book](#): > > Where does Welles claim that Stalin was a good guy? Lots of people writing at the beginning of the twentieth century believed in a gradual evolution toward a world state–and Welles believed that internationalist organizations like the League of Nations were a temporary step in that direction (so did Woodrow Wilson of course). As Welles’s own novels make clear “socialism” was a mainstream (though not precisely dominant) political idea during this period. In Britain its ideals were promoted through the Labour Party–the same Labour Party that you have today though, to be sure, that party would describe itself as social democratic rather than socialist and also, since the Blair years, is not consistently social democratic either (the latter tradition is much stronger in Germany and France). > > You can certainly say that Welles a) thought of himself as a socialist, b) anticipated the founding of a world state (which he thought would obviate destructive wars like the devastating WWI) and c) promoted both socialist and internationalist forms of politics. But you can’t say that he was a totalitarian because he was highly concerned with individual freedom. And the interesting thing about his fiction–even very prose-ish ficiton like _A Modern Utopian_ is that it tends to portray utopian schemes as at least partly dysotpic. Something Welles was highly aware of. These tensions and ironies are makes his fiction interesting to read. I didn’t say Wells was a totalitarian; rather, he was naively willing to overlook the crimes of contemporary totalitarians of his day, such as Stalin, because he mistakenly thought they embodied his utopian ideals, albeit in primitive form. The Wells commentary on Stalin was from an article he wrote in the leftish mag _New Statesman_ in the '30s. He famously visited the Soviet Union, interviewed Stalin, and came away convinced that Stalin was basically a good and much-unjustly-maligned leader, albeit too ‘rigid’ in his thinking. ---
**Author:** ![BrotherCadfael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/31 "2010-08-11T22:18:15Z")
> [@Zakalwe](#): > > Says BrotherCadfael"Y’know, if you’d just watch the season opener of Warehouse 13, you’d have know about H.G. Wells’ evil ways. She’s the Big Hottie of Season 2." > > Fixed that for ya. I can’t argue the point. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2010, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/32 "2010-08-11T23:51:56Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > > [@Dorothea\_Book](#): > > > > Where does Welles claim that Stalin was a good guy? Lots of people writing at the beginning of the twentieth century believed in a gradual evolution toward a world state–and Welles believed that internationalist organizations like the League of Nations were a temporary step in that direction (so did Woodrow Wilson of course). As Welles’s own novels make clear “socialism” was a mainstream (though not precisely dominant) political idea during this period. In Britain its ideals were promoted through the Labour Party–the same Labour Party that you have today though, to be sure, that party would describe itself as social democratic rather than socialist and also, since the Blair years, is not consistently social democratic either (the latter tradition is much stronger in Germany and France). > > > > You can certainly say that Welles a) thought of himself as a socialist, b) anticipated the founding of a world state (which he thought would obviate destructive wars like the devastating WWI) and c) promoted both socialist and internationalist forms of politics. But you can’t say that he was a totalitarian because he was highly concerned with individual freedom. And the interesting thing about his fiction–even very prose-ish ficiton like _A Modern Utopian_ is that it tends to portray utopian schemes as at least partly dysotpic. Something Welles was highly aware of. These tensions and ironies are makes his fiction interesting to read. > > I didn’t say Wells was a totalitarian; rather, he was naively willing to overlook the crimes of contemporary totalitarians of his day, such as Stalin, because he mistakenly thought they embodied his utopian ideals, albeit in primitive form. > > The Wells commentary on Stalin was from an article he wrote in the leftish mag _New Statesman_ in the '30s. He famously visited the Soviet Union, interviewed Stalin, and came away convinced that Stalin was basically a good and much-unjustly-maligned leader, albeit too ‘rigid’ in his thinking. That’s strange, because in **The Shape of Things to Come** , the first section (expounding on history up to to Wells’s day) disparages both Marx and Stalin, while admiring Lenin. It portrays Marxism as an early failed attempt at applying scientific rationalism to sociology and politics, hamstrung by Marx’s vanity, dogmaticism and simplistic antagonism to the bourgoise class, while portraying Stalin as having abandoned the internationalism of the “true” future order. As for gradual social evolution, the novel condemns the notion of historical inevitability, and flatly says that the new order was something that had to be conciously built. That the alternative (the supposedly inevitable collapse of civilization) was something that was all too possible if decisive action wasn’t taken. The novel actually uses the phrase “universal conquest” to describe the ambitions of the World State. Finally, I don’t know what to make of the assertion that the novel is at least partly a tongue in cheek disutopia, and that Wells was playing devil’s advocate in some of things it says. I suppose I would have to compare it with Wells’s non-fiction writings, which is a bit more than I can research at the moment. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2010, 12:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/33 "2010-08-12T00:53:47Z")
Wells wrote in 1920 in [_Russia in the Shadows_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_the_Shadows) (free e-book [here](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602371h.html)),his account of his visit to the new USSR: > [@](#): > > In Russia I must confess my passive objection to Marx has changed to a very active hostility. Wherever we went we encountered busts, portraits, and statues of Marx. About two-thirds of the face of Marx is a beard, a vast solemn woolly uneventful beard that must have made all normal exercise impossible. It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world. It is exactly like _Das Kapital_ in its inane abundance, and the human part of the face looks over it owlishly as it it looked to see how the growth impressed mankind. I found the omnipresent images of that beard more and more irritating. A gnawing desire grew upon me to see Karl Marx shaved. Some day, if I am spared, I will take up shears and a razor against _Das Kapital;_ I will write _The Shaving of Karl Marx._ > > But Marx is for the Marxists merely an image and a symbol, and it is with the Marxist and not with Marx that we are now dealing. Few Marxists have read much of _Das Kapital._ The Marxist is very much the same sort of person in all modern communities, and I will confess that by my temperament and circumstances I have the very warmest sympathy for him. He adopts Marx as his prophet simply because he believes that Marx wrote of the class war, an implacable war of the employed against the employer, and that he prophesied a triumph for the employed person, a dictatorship of the world by the leaders of these liberated employed persons (dictatorship of the proletariat), and a Communist millennium arising out of that dictatorship. Now this doctrine and this prophecy have appealed in every country with extraordinary power to young persons, and particularly to young men of energy and imagination who have found themselves at the outset of life imperfectly educated, ill-equipped, and caught into hopeless wages slavery in our existing economic system. They realise in their own persons the social injustice, the stupid negligence, the colossal incivility of our system; they realise that they are insulted and sacrificed by it; and they devote themselves to break it and emancipate themselves from it. No insidious propaganda is needed to make such rebels; it is the faults of a system that half-educates and then enslaves them which have created the Communist movement wherever industrialism has developed. There would have been Marxists if Marx had never lived. When I was a boy of fourteen I was a complete Marxist, long before I had heard the name of Marx. I had been cut off abruptly from education, caught in a detestable shop, and I was being broken in to a life of mean and dreary toil. I was worked too hard and for such long hours that all thoughts of self-improvement seemed hopeless. I would have set fire to that place if I had not been convinced it was over-insured. I revived the spirit of those bitter days in a conversation I had with Zorin, one of the leaders of the Commune of the North. He is a young man who has come back from unskilled work in America, a very likeable human being and a humorous and very popular speaker in the Petersburg Soviet. He and I exchanged experiences, and I found that the thing that rankled most in his mind about America was the brutal incivility he had encountered when applying for a job as packer in a big dry goods store in New York. We told each other stories of the way our social system wastes and breaks and maddens decent and willing men. Between us was the freemasonry of a common indignation. ---
**Author:** ![crowmanyclouds](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crowmanyclouds/32/19884_2.png) [@crowmanyclouds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/crowmanyclouds)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2010, 1:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/34 "2010-08-12T01:52:22Z")
> [@Chimera](#): > > Goddamned _Horses_! Foisting industrialization off on Humanity so they can throw off their yoke of oppression. Four legs good, two legs baaad! CMC fnord! ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2010, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/35 "2010-08-12T13:32:25Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > > [@Malthus](#): > > > > I didn’t say Wells was a totalitarian; rather, he was naively willing to overlook the crimes of contemporary totalitarians of his day, such as Stalin, because he mistakenly thought they embodied his utopian ideals, albeit in primitive form. > > > > The Wells commentary on Stalin was from an article he wrote in the leftish mag _New Statesman_ in the '30s. He famously visited the Soviet Union, interviewed Stalin, and came away convinced that Stalin was basically a good and much-unjustly-maligned leader, albeit too ‘rigid’ in his thinking. > > That’s strange, because in **The Shape of Things to Come** , the first section (expounding on history up to to Wells’s day) disparages both Marx and Stalin, while admiring Lenin. It portrays Marxism as an early failed attempt at applying scientific rationalism to sociology and politics, hamstrung by Marx’s vanity, dogmaticism and simplistic antagonism to the bourgoise class, while portraying Stalin as having abandoned the internationalism of the “true” future order. > > As for gradual social evolution, the novel condemns the notion of historical inevitability, and flatly says that the new order was something that had to be conciously built. That the alternative (the supposedly inevitable collapse of civilization) was something that was all too possible if decisive action wasn’t taken. The novel actually uses the phrase “universal conquest” to describe the ambitions of the World State. > > Finally, I don’t know what to make of the assertion that the novel is at least partly a tongue in cheek disutopia, and that Wells was playing devil’s advocate in some of things it says. I suppose I would have to compare it with Wells’s non-fiction writings, which is a bit more than I can research at the moment. Wells became disillusioned with Stalin and Russian Communism - not because Stalin was a monsterous, ruthless criminal dictator, or because the Russian style of Communism murdered and “disappeared” millions, but rather because he lost his initial faith that Russian Communism could lead to the future one-world-state that he envisioned and passionately hoped for: he thought that Stalin was ‘too rigid and orthodox’ in his thinking. In short, he was willing to overlook the crimes of a totalitarian like Stalin. What he was not willing to overlook was that Stalin wasn’t really leading the Soviet Union to Wells’ ideal one-world state. Wells (together with other prominent thinkers like G.B. Shaw) was convinced, for example, that there was no famine in the Soviet Union (in spite of what is now recognized as an active attempt to genocide ethnic Ukranians via famine), and actively spread the news that rumours of a famine were anti-Soviet propaganda - documented in this book (unfortunately text unavailable online): [http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/exhibitions/communism/com107.html](http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/exhibitions/communism/com107.html) Together with the aforementioned _New Statesman_ article depicting Stalin as a “good” leader, the impression is that Wells, like so many idealists, was perfectly willing to be ‘willfully blind’ to the crimes of the totalitarians because he shared to an extent the idealism that the totalitarians made use of. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2010, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/36 "2010-08-12T21:53:44Z")
> [@Dorothea\_Book](#): > > > [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > > > Welles actually promoted just this sort of future in lectures and public arguments. > > No he did not. Or if you think so, provide an example of his _promoting_ a totalitarian future. Do recall he was the man who publicly called for _liberal Fascists_. Oh, I’ll gran you he didn’t intend for the future to be mean and cruel. But he did, in point of fact, call for a future of rule by the rationalists. And that, unfortunately, soon turns into the most irrational thing imaginable. There are no human rationalists, and those who believe they are soon turn into something very ugly. And he did mean what he said. He thought of the future as being ruled by men who could see past all tradition and obstacles to usher in a technocratic golden age of perfection, where every problem was defeated by massed power of state rulers armed with slide-rules. It was really Plato’s old dream of the philosopher-King, which never worked out like Plato intended. A Saint and King, sometimes - they udnerstand human wakness and see it in themselves. The problem with philosophers as Kings is that they become mortally tempted to believe in their own wisdom, and mortally desperate to see their grandiose schemes put in place. > [@Malthus](#): > > I don’t get it. So what if he was not out of line with the left? Claiming Stalin was a good guy is wonky in my book, and if that is “clear-eyed” I think I’d rather side with Orwell. Welles was clear-eyed in that he was a man aiming for solutions, even if he didn’t have them. Orwell had nothing to offere but warnings and naysaying. And his vision of socialism was ludicrous, even though it was a fairly mild form of the madness for the day. Orwell barely had an idea of what he wanted, let alone any will to do something to get there. Welles, even if he terribly wrong, at least tried to lay out some ideas of what to do. I think they were both wrong. Both men were prone to utter nonsense, one for nonsense that was unfashionable and one that was fashionable. It would have been frightening to think of someone who combined their best traits, and damn scary to imagine a man who combined their _worst_. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [August 12, 2010, 11:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/37 "2010-08-12T23:31:36Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Do recall he was the man who publicly called for _liberal Fascists_. In those oxymoronic words? > [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > He thought of the future as being ruled by men who could see past all tradition and obstacles to usher in a technocratic golden age of perfection, where every problem was defeated by massed power of state rulers armed with slide-rules. It was really Plato’s old dream of the philosopher-King, which never worked out like Plato intended. Actually, it sounds more like Howard Scott’s dream of [technocracy.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_%28movement%29) [Plato’s Republic would be very different.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=571475) For one thing, it would be entirely static by design, like Sparta. > [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Orwell had nothing to offere but warnings and naysaying. And his vision of socialism was ludicrous, even though it was a fairly mild form of the madness for the day. Orwell barely had an idea of what he wanted, let alone any will to do something to get there. :dubious: From [_The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius_](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part14) (1941): > [@](#): > > Socialism is usually defined as “common ownership of the means of production”. Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does NOT mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it DOES mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships and machinery, are the property of the State. The State is the sole large-scale producer. It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption. At normal times a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there is always a wasted surplus (wheat burned in furnaces, herrings dumped back into the sea etc etc) and always unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in producing all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to making a profit out of it. In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them. Production is only limited by the amount of labour and raw materials. Money, for internal purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful thing and becomes a sort of coupon or ration-ticket, issued in sufficient quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be available at the moment. > > However, it has become clear in the last few years that “common ownership of the means of production” is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class system. Centralised ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. “The State” may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money. > > \ > > I suggest that the following six-point programme is the kind of thing we need. The first three points deal with England’s internal policy, the other three with the Empire and the world: > > 1. Nationalisation of land, mines, railways, banks and major industries. > > 2. Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one. > > 3. Reform of the educational system along democratic lines. > > 4. Immediate Dominion status for India, with power to secede when the war is over. > > 5. Formation of an Imperial General Council, in which the coloured peoples are to be represented. > > 6. Declaration of formal alliance with China, Abyssinia and all other victims of the Fascist powers. > > The general tendency of this programme is unmistakable. It aims quite frankly at turning this war into a revolutionary war and England into a Socialist democracy. I have deliberately included in it nothing that the simplest person could not understand and see the reason for. In the form in which I have put it, it could be printed on the front page of the DAILY MIRROR. But for the purposes of this book a certain amount of amplification is needed. > > 1. NATIONALISATION. One can “nationalise” industry by the stroke of a pen, but the actual process is slow and complicated. What is needed is that the ownership of all major industry shall be formally vested in the State, representing the common people. Once that is done it becomes possible to eliminate the class of mere OWNERS who live not by virtue of anything they produce but by the possession of title-deeds and share certificates. State-ownership implies, therefore, that nobody shall live without working. How sudden a change in the conduct of industry it implies is less certain. In a country like England we cannot rip down the whole structure and build again from the bottom, least of all in time of war. Inevitably the majority of industrial concerns will continue with much the same personnel as before, the one-time owners or managing directors carrying on with their jobs as State employees. There is reason to think that many of the smaller capitalists would actually welcome some such arrangement. The resistance will come from the big capitalists, the bankers, the landlords and the idle rich, roughly speaking the class with over £2,000 a year–and even if one counts in all their dependants there are not more than half a million of these people in England. Nationalisation of agricultural land implies cutting out the landlord and the tithe drawer, but not necessarily interfering with the farmer. It is difficult to imagine any reorganisation of English agriculture that would not retain most of the existing farms as units, at any rate at the beginning. The farmer, when he is competent, will continue as a salaried manager. He is virtually that already, with the added disadvantage of having to make a profit and being permanently in debt to the bank. With certain kinds of petty trading, and even the small-scale ownership of land, the State will probably not interfere at all. It would be a great mistake to start by victimising the smallholder class, for instance. These people are necessary, on the whole they are competent, and the amount of work they do depends on the feeling that they are “their own masters”. But the State will certainly impose an upward limit to the ownership of land (probably fifteen acres at the very most), and will never permit any ownership of land in town areas. > > From the moment that all productive goods have been declared the property of the State, the common people will feel, as they cannot feel now, that the State is THEMSELVES. They will be ready then to endure the sacrifices that are ahead of us, war or no war. And even if the face of England hardly seems to change, on the day that our main industries are formally nationalised the dominance of a single class will have been broken. From then onwards the emphasis will be shifted from ownership to management, from privilege to competence. It is quite possible that State-ownership will in itself bring about less social change than will be forced upon us by the common hardships of war. But it is the necessary first step without which any REAL reconstruction is impossible. > > 1. INCOMES. Limitation of incomes implies the fixing of a minimum wage, which implies a managed internal currency based simply on the amount of consumption goods available. And this again implies a stricter rationing scheme than is now in operation. It is no use at this stage of the world’s history to suggest that all human beings should have EXACTLY equal incomes. It has been shown over and over again that without some kind of money reward there is no incentive to undertake certain jobs. On the other hand the money reward need not be very large. In practice it is impossible that earnings should be limited quite as rigidly as I have suggested. There will always be anomalies and evasions. But there is no reason why ten to one should not be the maximum normal variation. And within those limits some sense of equality is possible. A man with £3 a week and a man with £1,500 a year can feel themselves fellow creatures, which the Duke of Westminster and the sleepers on the Embankment benches cannot. > > 2. EDUCATION. In wartime, educational reform must necessarily be promise rather than performance. At the moment we are not in a position to raise the school-leaving age or increase the teaching staffs of the elementary schools. But there are certain immediate steps that we could take towards a democratic educational system. We could start by abolishing the autonomy of the public schools and the older universities and flooding them with State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability. At present, public-school education is partly a training in class prejudice and partly a sort of tax that the middle classes pay to the upper class in return for the right to enter certain professions. It is true that that state of affairs is altering. The middle classes have begun to rebel against the expensiveness of education, and the war will bankrupt the majority of the public schools if it continues for another year or two. The evacuation is also producing certain minor changes. But there is a danger that some of the older schools, which will be able to weather the financial storm longest, will survive in some form or another as festering centres of snobbery. As for the 10,000 “private” schools that England possesses, the vast majority of them deserve nothing except suppression. They are simply commercial undertakings, and in many cases their educational level is actually lower than that of the elementary schools. They merely exist because of a widespread idea that there is something disgraceful in being educated by the public authorities. The State could quell this idea by declaring itself responsible for all education, even if at the start this were no more than a gesture. We need gestures as well as actions. It is all too obvious that our talk of “defending democracy” is nonsense while it is a mere accident of birth that decides whether a gifted child shall or shall not get the education it deserves. Now, whatever you might think about the workability or the justice of that vision, it is neither ludicrous nor vague. Nor, to return to the OP, totalitarian. (And, no, state socialism is **not** totalitarian-by-definition.) ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2010, 1:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/38 "2010-08-13T13:31:12Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > Welles was clear-eyed in that he was a man aiming for solutions, even if he didn’t have them. Orwell had nothing to offere but warnings and naysaying. And his vision of socialism was ludicrous, even though it was a fairly mild form of the madness for the day. Orwell barely had an idea of what he wanted, let alone any will to do something to get there. Welles, even if he terribly wrong, at least tried to lay out some ideas of what to do. > > I think they were both wrong. Both men were prone to utter nonsense, one for nonsense that was unfashionable and one that was fashionable. It would have been frightening to think of someone who combined their best traits, and damn scary to imagine a man who combined their _worst_. I certainly do not agree with Orwell’s politics in totality (I’m only a “socialist” in the limited sense of believing that the government has a role to play in providing certain social services, not in the ‘state owning the means of production’ sense), but I do not agree that Orwell was nothing but a nay-sayer. Rather, Orwell was a man who did not let his idealism blind him to the realities-on-the-ground. Fighting in the Spanish Civil War beat that sort of idealism right out of him. That, more than anything else, and far more significantly than the differences in their ideals, was the difference between Orwell and Wells. Wells allowed himself to be lead down the path by Stalin because he lacked that sensibility; he was focused on his utopia. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2010, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/39 "2010-08-13T20:38:31Z")
> [@Malthus](#): > > Rather, Orwell was a man who did not let his idealism blind him to the realities-on-the-ground. Fighting in the Spanish Civil War beat that sort of idealism right out of him. It beat some illusions out of him, perhaps; but he remained committed to the same ideals to the end of his life. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2010, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844/40 "2010-08-13T21:06:15Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > > [@Malthus](#): > > > > Rather, Orwell was a man who did not let his idealism blind him to the realities-on-the-ground. Fighting in the Spanish Civil War beat that sort of idealism right out of him. > > It beat some illusions out of him, perhaps; but he remained committed to the same ideals to the end of his life. I wasn’t implying his commitments changed; only that he did not, like so many of his contemporaries (and more to the point like Wells), allow his ideals to wilfully blind him to the crimes of those _professing_ similar ideals. Idealism is often the enemy of common decency; it is to his credit that it was not so in his case. I say that, and I do not share his ideals. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/holy-crap-h-g-wells-was-a-totalitarian/549844.md?page=3)