THE ANATOMY OF FRUSTRATION : VII. THE FRUSTRATION
OF SOCIALISM
By H. G. WELLS
ONE of Steele's most frequent words, used always in a condemnatory sense, in his discussion of human relationships, is " piecemeal." We are always, he says, trying to detach questions from complicating issues and work them out. We make them manageable and calcul- able by making them over-simple. That may be helpful at times, provided we do not mistake aconvenient step in thought for a final and practical conclusion. No doubt there was a certain justification for the classic mathe- matical problem about the logs and the elephant's task, . in which the solver was permitted to " neglect the weight of the elephant," but no practical end was possible until the weight of the elephant was brought in. In our social and .political discussions there are neglected elephants everywhere. We are all .in a state of " flustered dogma- tism " because of the unacknowledged presence of. these exasperating animals.
. This piecemeal habit leads inevitably to a still more objectionable feature of such discussions, " assumptions and implications." He is always denouncing " tacit assumptions " and " unwarranted, =confessed and often unsuspected implications." They are as silly and mis- chievous as the question-begging " reservations " dear to diplomatists. He is very emphatic that we cannot discuss money without a general theory of property, that we cannot discuss property without a general theory of economic organisation, that we cannot discuss economic organisation without a general political; and social ideal, and that we cannot have a general political and social ideal without .a comprehensive conception of human ecology.
" There exists now a general history of our kind in time and space, and a generally acceptable statement of the conditions within which that history has unfolded. All social and political reasoning is useless unless it accepts that history. It is impossible to deal with these questions hopefully and practically until that history is accepted as their framework."
Today we .as a species are thoroughly at cross purposes, mainly because we will not go back to fundamentals, but will persist in beginning anywhere in the air at our own sweet will and so doom ourselves to disagreement. That is.why so much of our discussion about money, for exam- ple, in spite of our realisation of its urgency and impor- tance, seems so infinitely wearisome, futile and silly, and why most of it is saturated with an almost Marxian bad temper and bad manners.
" I assume the world community," says Steele, " sub- ject to general ecological laws. I cannot discuss money and.. property in relation to any more restricted com- munity.. I have massed my reasons for doing that and I cannot see why so many people who deal with finance and economics generally, evade and ignore this necessary foundation assumption. Everybody you trade with or plunder or pay tribute to or even set barriers against is, if only, as. a pressure from outside, in your economic com- munity, and has to be brought into your scheme. It is a pedantic imbecility to ignore that."
You cannot have a property-money system by itself— leading a life of its own—any more than you can have a heart and circulation' leading a life of its own. You cannot begin at the City or the Treasury or the ghetto and its practices, as primary. The circulatory system depends upon all the other organs in the animal to which it belongs and upon the scale and extent of the entire creature. The circulatory system of a crayfish is quite different from that of an oyster or. that of a man. The property-money system of an isolated island or a hidden kingdom can have only the remotest resemblances to that of a wide-trading world-empire. The property-money system of a State striving to realise Communist formulae is necessarily different fundamentally from that of an autocracy or an individualistic democracy. The whole of the parts belong together and are one.
It is, he declareS—and proves it by a vast chapter of quotations—one of the strangest things in the history of Socialism that for the better part of a hundred years Socialists have advoeated the most drastic alterations and limitations of the conventions of property and have refused persistently to face the complications of their problem, due, firstly, to the role of money and monetary manipulation in abstracting and liquidating ownership and bilking the worker through the varying value of his pay, and, secondly, to the impossibility of expropriating private individuals or modifying the current tradition and methods of production and distribution without a concurrent development of a new type and a new morality of administration. Socialism, says Steele, never produced a trustworthy coin for the worker or a " competent receiver " for expropriated capital. The nearest approach to a new money that the Socialist movement ever made in its long hundred years of mentally evasive incubation, was the Labour Notes of Robert Owen—after which it dropped the subject altogether—and the nearest thing to an administrative organisation it ever evolved was the Communist 'Party. This was essentially a revolutionary organisation, a conspiracy, secretive and quasi-criminal. It was more so, Steele thinks, than it need have been. It was an organisation quite unfitted for the candid con- trol of a great modernised community, and to this day the government of the Russian Republics, in spite of the lingering hope and enthusiasm of their first release, is dark and conspiratorial in its character, because of the com- plete inadequacy of the positive conceptions of Marxism. Why did Socialism. never round off and complete its proposals ? Why did it leave these things to go wrong ? It began with a real magnificence. It started with the bravest intimations of a new world order ; it was the inspiring idea, the creative hope of a century. Hundreds of thousands of lively minds made incalculable sacrifices, toiled and risked death in the hope of bringing about Socialism. Until at last that long parturition culminated in the birth of this obdurate Eastern monster without eyes or ears. Why did it happen like that ? asks Steele. Why did Socialism persist in incompleteness and end in an abortion ?
The answer, Steele thinks, lies partly in the exigencies of militant propaganda. Socialism went into action from its beginning ; it was put forward as a complete project long before it had had any chance of maturing. It was rushed into a premature offensive by impatient and shortsighted men. This necessitated vulgarisation and simplification ; complexities had to be ignored and difficulties denied. It had to be made easy for the beginner. It had to be made plausible. It had to produce catchwords and slogans. It had to lock Imp its brains in its campaign. " You stop thinking," Steele throws out, " when you begin the hunt for dis- ciples." And after a time these strategic suppressions, these deliberate avoidances, became sacred, bea= orthodox.
The, impatience of the careerist mingled with time impatience of the wholesale proselytiser in this early fixation of Socialism. Energetic men to whom the normal channels of ambition were denied, wanted to cut a figure in a new revolutionary drive. They perceived the attractiveness of the suggestions of the Socialist -formulae, and they wanted to exploit that attractiveness with an uncomplicated directness. There were to be no poor and no one at a disadvantage. What more need be said in an age of universal suffrage ? To qualify or criticise was enfeeblement of effort, sabotage, downright treachery. It would mean'having to wait. and reconsider instead of getting on. - (I n next week's " Spectator " Mr. Welts appraises, under the heading " Some Socialist Biographies," Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and Lord Snowden.]
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