ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM

New Worlds For Old: A Plain account of Modern Socialism by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM

ADMINISTRATIVE SOCIALISM

§ 1.

Marx gave to Socialism a theory of world-wide social development, and rescued it altogether from the eccentric and localized associations of its earliest phases; he brought it so near to reality that it could appear as a force in politics, embodied first as the International Association of Working Men, and then as the Social Democratic movement of the continent of Europe that commands to-day over a third of the entire poll of German voters. So much Marx did for Socialism. But if he broadened its application to the world, he narrowed its range to only the economic aspect of life. He arrested for a time the discussion of its biological and moral aspects altogether. He left it an incomplete doctrine of merely economic reconstruction supplemented by mystical democracy, and both its mysticism and incompleteness, while they offered no difficulties to a labouring man ignorant of affairs,  and to that volume I must refer him. The theory of the minimum standard and the minimum wage is explained, moreover, with the utmost lucidity in that Socialist classic, Industrial Democracy, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. It is a theory that must needs be mastered by every intelligent Socialist, but it is well to bear in mind that the method of the minimum wage is no integral part of the general Socialist proposition, and that it still lies open to discussion and modification.

 in which he showed clearly that the character and efficiency and possibilities of a governing body depend almost entirely upon the suitability to its particular function of the size and quality of the constituency it represents and the area it administers. This may be stated with something approaching scientific confidence. A local governing body for too small an area or elected upon an unsound franchise cannot be efficient. But obviously before you can transfer property from private to collective control you must have  These tracts are remarkable if only because they present the first systematic recognition on the part of any organized Socialist body of the fact that a scientific reconstruction of the methods of government constitutes not simply an incidental but a necessary part of the complete Socialist scheme, the first recognition of the widening scope of the Socialist design that makes it again a deliberately constructive project.

It is only an initial recognition, a mere first raid into a great and largely unexplored province of study. This province is in the broadest terms, social psychology. A huge amount of thought, discussion, experiment, is to be done in this field—needs imperatively  to be done before the process of the socialization of economic life can go very far beyond its present attainments. Except for these first admissions, Socialism has concerned itself only with the material reorganization of Society and its social consequences, with economic changes and the reaction of these changes on administrative work; it has either accepted existing intellectual conditions and political institutions as beyond its control or assumed that they will obediently modify as economic and administrative necessity dictates. Declare the Social revolution, we were told in a note of cheery optimism by the Marxist apostles, and political institutions will come like flowers in May! Achieve your expropriation, said the early Fabians, get your network of skilled experts spread over the country, and your political forms, your public opinion, your collective soul will not trouble you.

The student of history knows better. These confident claims ignore the psychological factors in government and human association; they disregard a jungle of difficulties that lie directly in our way. Socialists have to face the facts; firstly, that the political and intellectual institutions of the present time belong to the present condition of things, and that the intellectual methods, machinery and political institutions of the better future must almost inevitably be of a very different type; secondly, that such institutions will not come about  of themselves—which indeed is the old superstition of laissez faire in a new form—but must be thought out, planned and organized just as completely as economic socialization has had to be planned and organized; and thirdly, that so far Socialism has evolved scarcely any generalizations even, that may be made the basis of new intellectual and governmental—as distinguished from administrative—methods. It has preached collective ownership and collective control, and it has only begun to recognize that this implies the necessity of a collective will and new means and methods altogether for the collective mind.

The administrative Socialism which Mr. Webb and the Fabian Society developed upon a modification of the broad generalizations of the Marx phase, is as it were no more than the first courses above those foundations of Socialism. It supplies us with a conception of methods of transition and with a vision of a great and disciplined organization of officials, a scientific bureaucracy appointed by representative bodies of diminishing activity and importance, and coming to be at last the real working control of the Socialist State. But it says nothing of what is above the officials, what drives the officials. It is a palace without living rooms, with nothing but offices; a machine, as yet unprovided with a motor. No doubt we must have that organization of officials if we mean to bring about a Socialist State, but the mind recoils with something  like terror from the conception of a State run and ruled by officials, terminating in officials, with an official as its highest expression. One has a vision of a community with blue-books instead of a literature, and inspectors instead of a conscience. The mystical democracy of the Marxist, though manifestly impossible, had in it something attractive, something humanly and desperately pugnacious and generous, something indeed heroic; the bureaucracy of the Webbite, though far more attainable, is infinitely less inspiring. But that may be because the inspiring elements remain to be stated rather than that these practical constructive projects are in their nature, and incurably, hard and narrow. Instead of a gorgeous flare in the darkness, we have the first cold onset of daylight heralding the sun. If the letter of the teaching of Mr. and Mrs. Webb is bureaucracy, that is certainly not the spirit of their lives.

The earlier Socialists gave Socialism substance, rudis indigestaque moles, but noble stuff; Administrative Socialism gave it a physical structure and nerves, defined its organs and determined its functions; it remains for the Socialist of to-day to realize in this shaping body of the civilized State of the future the breath of life already unconfessedly there, to state in clear terms the reality for which our plans are made, by which alone they can be realized, that is to say, the collective mind of humanity, the soul and moral being of mankind.

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