Where fish walk around on land
- A work of socialist fiction from 1934 foresaw the Attlee government
- Too often, leftists assume away all the difficulties of their ideology
- Democratic socialism is only viable in one’s imagination
The year is 1980, and 44 years have passed since Britain’s socialist revolution. A new generation has grown up, which has no active memories of capitalism, and only a hazy concept of what ‘capitalism’ even was.
This is the premise of the book ‘The First Workers Government‘ by Gilbert Mitchison, published in 1934. An unnamed narrator from that future then looks back upon the bad old days of ‘late capitalism’, and tells the story of how the people’s paradise was built.
It is a weirdly fascinating book. For those of us who do not believe in socialist economics, it reads like a description of a world where fish walk around on land, or where the sun is inhabited. And while the future imagined by Mitchison obviously did not come to pass, the book is nonetheless teeming with policy ideas that are still around today.
I haven’t read the book, so I’ve nothing to offer there, but the whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of the role fiction still plays in current political schemes and systems. Net Zero is based on fiction, much of it less plausible than a novel by Jules Verne or H. G. Wells.
And this is, ultimately, the problem with the book: it simply assumes away all the difficulties which we now know would later afflict actual socialist societies, and which were already afflicting the Soviet Union even at the time. If you simply assume that governments can run an economy efficiently, that this process can be meaningfully democratised, and that there will be no opposition, then yes, you can describe a viable model of democratic socialism. Just like you can describe time travel or encounters with supernatural beings.
Source: https://akhaart.blogspot.com/2025/02/where-fish-walk-around-on-land.html
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