Epilogue
This Epilogue sets the waning of British socialist anti-political aspiration in the context of the literary career of H. G. Wells, on the one hand, and the coalescence of the Parliamentary Labour Party, on the other. In their respective spheres, both Wells and the Labour Party represent a decisive turn toward a statist—and forthrightly political—conception of socialism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Wells, the new century’s most prolific and influential socialist writing in English, shares with his antecedents an abiding preoccupation with the aesthetic dimension of socialism. In stark contrast to his predecessors, however, he self-consciously subordinates this aesthetic impulse to his overmastering vision of an emerging socialist world state. Concurrently, the fledgling Labour Party became a locus for the longstanding debates about how socialism was to be made and what posture the socialist movement should adopt to Britain’s existing political institutions and traditions. These debates were foreclosed by the party’s adoption of a new constitution and party program in 1918, which were drafted by the Fabian socialist Sidney Webb. The constitution includes the famous Clause IV, which affirms the party’s commitment to the collective ownership of the means of production. Labour’s reorganization effectively confirmed that in Britain, socialism would be pursued via the parliamentary road—and that state socialism would be its ultimate institutional goal. Consequently, 1918 provides a symbolic end to the anti-political tradition Imagining Socialism delineates—and of the socialist century that it surveys.