Karl Marx and H.G.Wells

Lately, when I should have been reading tips on baby-wrangling or cleaning the oven, I've been struggling with The World of William Clissold by H.G. Wells.

This was a infuriatingly uneven treatise on how H.G. would like to redesign the world dressed up as a novel with a curmudgeonly protagonist perfectly balanced by the chips on both his shoulders. (Incidentally, I've never understood that expression. My parents used it a lot, confusingly, often when we were having chips for tea. I remember at least once them telling my big brother to "get the chip off his shoulder" in response to some ordinarily petulant statement like "Mary's got more than me" or "why do I have to turn the telly off to have tea?" and we'd both look for the chip we thought had somehow leapt off his plate.)

I'm not just guessing that these are H.G.'s views: he has a overly defensive foreword where he protests far too much that this is FICTION and just because most of his views are consistent with Mr Clissold's doesn't make the book any less of a NOVEL. And Wikipedia says so too, so there.

Basically, William Clissold is a rich scientifically-trained industrialist who doesn't like the way the world is run and wants to rearrange everything so that men like him are put in charge of a world government because they'd manage everything far better than the current crop of politicians. This was set in 1925 so he was upset by the Great War and the Bolshevik revolution and the failure of the League of Nations to achieve anything like a meaningful World Governmnent.

So far so dull. But there were some cute whimsical things in between the megalomania. Mr Clissold was very keen on socalism which he thought had been dreadfully distorted by Karl Marx's idea of history as class struggle (although he spends about 200 pages crticising the landed gentry for mistrusting not just the working classes but clever men like himself).

He thought Marx should have smoked less and taken more exercise, preferably cricket although he acknowledged that this would have been difficult given the length of the Marxian beard, even in an age of great beards.

This made me wonder what the Cricket World Cup would look like now if Marx had started a trend of cricket-playing amongst Communists. After all, Iron Curtain countries would have had a very long time to develop professional state-based training regimes. There's no reason why they would have stopped playing once the walls came down. In any case, I don't think Australia would be doing that well if they had to face China, Russia or Cuba in the Baggy Green. And what would that do to our national identity?