HG Wells called himself a socialist. He also called himself a "liberal fascist." I want to break down what this means, in terms of the political landscape of Pre-WW2 Europe in which he was speaking and writing about his views on science, the future and class struggle. HG Wells is undoubtedly one of the most influential science fiction writers of the early modern era. But what exactly did he think "socialism" was? And can we parse that in some of his works?
The answer to the second question is yet. And we must do that to answer the first question.
Or, we can take Wells at face value and agree, he believed socialism was "liberal fascism."
I intend to show that Wells himself was a liberal fascist.
Modern readers maybe confused by this term. You are probably "liberalism and fascism are opposed," are you're wrong, but that's not the point of this article. Historically, fascism arises when minority groups, women, and the working class have managed to make certain limited gains within the context of liberal democracy. I use the word liberal in the global sense, not in the sense of the United States political culture. Classical liberalism. After World War 2, fascism became stereotyped as Nazism, but actually the word comes from an ancient Roman symbol of authority and was first used by Mussolini. And he was a fucked up guy, and an opportunist, whose financial advisor gave his name to the term "Ponzi Scheme."). But let's be honest, Mussolini didn't make quite the impression on the UK or the United States as Hitler did.
In a modern reading of this (which maybe valid in context but maybe not entirely explanatory), his "liberal fascism" could be construed of his own, marginally middle consciousness' interpretation of what we might call today "Horseshoe Theory" in political science. His vision was closer to techno-utopianism/utopian technocracy, associated today with neoliberalism and Silicon Valley assholes..
Wells' family precarious lower middle class status shaped his views. He feared his family becoming poorer through circumstance, and he believed capitalism was dehumanizing of the working and the exploiting classes. This is best expressed in the evolutionary split between the Eloi and Morlock species in "The Time Machine." In this sense, Wells did endorse a kind of "liberal socialism" (to use the term broadly) because he believed in uplifting everyone to equal standing to prevent the delicate higher class (and by extension, its values) from being devoured by brutal lower classes. But that "liberal socialism" is a brand of fascism. It's a distortion through a colonialist lens. I do not like to dismiss people as "products of their time." There was no time in human history when we as a neurologically modern species lacked self awareness. People in the late 19th/early 20th century were just as accountable as people today for their moral judgments and their impact on other people.
But my big point here is that in the formative days of socialism and fascism, before WW2, the boundaries were a bit more permeable between "liberal" and "fascist."
But there is still permeability, which is why Wells' statement was so predictive, even today. Authoritarianism maps sell onto liberalism (classic liberalism) and especially neoliberalism. Fascism is a force within liberal democracy, as much as Liberal Democrats, Conservatives, centrists and Libertarians might consider themselves opposed to it.
The only true opposition to fascism is anti-capitalist and anti-technocracy.
was very predictive as well as contextually relevant at the time