IF we were to have a favorite socialist it might be the silver-tongued playwright and all around-wit, George Bernard Shaw (even though in the attached film clip he blathers-on gleefully in favor of a government that kills the non-productive elements of society). In this article, Shaw muses about how the ideal society would operate - regardless of the flaws inherit in human nature (which Marx also ignored).
" [In such a society] people would have to develop new wants and a new civilization... The practice of wearing clothes would be abolished. They are a great nuisance, very unhealthy and adopted only through vanity. Marriage would go by the board. Marriage is now an economic necessity. In some cases English peers get a living by marrying American heiresses... All this would be replaced by a system whereby the state would register a couple desiring to establish a family. the state would insist that the baby come up to a certain weight and would endow motherhood. Schools would vanish. They are prisons for children masquerading under the name of education. I was locked up in one for many hours, but I never learned anything there..."
Click here to read Shaw on the Titanic disaster...
Click here to read a few Shavian witticisms.
Click here to read GBS on the First World War.
- from Amazon:
