Breaking the spell of Marxism—A French verdict—Origin of Revisionism in Germany—The British School of Socialism—Mr. Ernest Barker's summary—MillversusMarx—The Fabian Method—Making Socialists or making Socialism—The life of propagandist societies—The prospects of Socialist Unity—The future of Fabian ideas—The test of Fabian success.
Breaking the spell of Marxism—A French verdict—Origin of Revisionism in Germany—The British School of Socialism—Mr. Ernest Barker's summary—MillversusMarx—The Fabian Method—Making Socialists or making Socialism—The life of propagandist societies—The prospects of Socialist Unity—The future of Fabian ideas—The test of Fabian success.
The Fabian Society was founded for the purpose of reconstructing Society in accordance with the highest moral possibilities. This is still the most accurate and compendious description of its object and the nature of its work. But the stage of idealism at which more than a very modest instalment of this cosmic process seemed possible within the lifetime of a single institution had passed before the chief Essayists became members, and indeed I cannot recollect that the founders themselves ever imagined that it lay within their own power to reconstruct Society; none of them was really so sanguine or so self-confident as to anticipate so great a result from their efforts, and it will be remembered that the original phrase was altered by the insertion of the words "to help on" when the constitution was actually formulated. Society has not yet been reconstructed, but the Fabians have done something towards its reconstruction, and my history will be incomplete without an attempt to indicate what the Society has alreadyaccomplished and what may be the future of its work.
Its first achievement, as already mentioned, was to break the spell of Marxism in England. Public opinion altogether failed to recognise the greatness of Marx during his lifetime, but every year that passes adds strength to the conviction that the broad principles he promulgated will guide the evolution of society during the present century. Marx demonstrated the moral bankruptcy of commercialism and formulated the demand for the communal ownership and organisation of industry; and it is hardly possible to exaggerate the value of this service to humanity. But no man is great enough to be made into a god; no man, however wise, can see far into the future. Neither Marx himself nor his immediate followers recognised the real basis of his future fame; they thought he was a brilliant and original economist, and a profound student of history. His Theory of Value, his Economic Interpretation of History, seemed to them the incontestible premises which necessarily led to his political conclusions. This misapprehension would not have much mattered had they allowed themselves freedom of thought. Socialism, as first preached to the English people by the Social Democrats, was as narrow, as bigoted, as exclusive as the strictest of Scotch religious sects. "Das Kapital," Vol. I, was its bible; and the thoughts and schemes of English Socialists were to be approved or condemned according as they could or could not be justified by a quoted text.
The Fabian Society freed English Socialism from this intellectual bondage, and freed it sooner and more completely than "Revisionists" have succeeded in doing anywhere else.
Accepting the great principle that the reconstruction of society to be worked for is the ownership and controlof industry by the community, the Fabians refused to regard as articles of faith either the economic and historic analyses which Marx made use of or the political evolution which he predicted.
Socialism in England remained the fantastic creed of a group of fanatics until "Fabian Essays" and the Lancashire Campaign taught the working classes of England, or at any rate their leaders, that Socialism was a living principle which could be applied to existing social and political conditions without a cataclysm either insurrectionary or even political. Revolutionary phraseology, the language of violence, survived, and still survives, just as in ordinary politics we use the metaphors of warfare and pretend that the peaceful polling booth is a battlefield and that our political opponents are hostile armies. But we only wave the red flag in our songs, and we recognise nowadays that the real battles of Socialism are fought in committee rooms at Westminster and in the council chambers of Town Halls.
It was perhaps fortunate that none of the Fabian leaders came within the influence of the extraordinary personality of Karl Marx. Had he lived a few years longer he might have dominated them as he dominated his German followers, and one or two of his English adherents. Then years would have been wasted in the struggle to escape. It was fortunate also that the Fabian Society has never possessed one single outstanding leader, and has always refrained from electing a president or permanent chairman. There never has been a Fabian orthodoxy, because no one was in a position to assert what the true faith was.
Freedom of thought was without doubt obtained for English Socialists by the Fabians. How far the world-wide revolt against Marxian orthodoxy had its origin in England is another and more difficult question.In his study of the Fabian Society[43]M. Édouard Pfeiffer states in the preface that the Society makes this claim, quotes Bernard Shaw as saying to him, "The world has been thoroughly Fabianised in the last twenty-five years," and adds that he is going to examine the accuracy of it. Later he says:—
"Les premiers de tous les Socialistes, les Fabiens out inauguré le mouvement de critique antimarxiste: à une époque oû les dogmes du maître étaient considérés comme intangibles, les Fabiens out prétendu que l'on pouvait se dire socialiste sans jamais avoir lu le Capital ou en en désapprouvant la teneur; par opposition à Marx ils out ressuscité l'esprit de Stuart Mill et sur tous les points ils se sont attaqués à Marx, guerre des classes et materialisme historique, catastrophisme et avant tout la question de la valeur-travail."[44]
This is a French view. Germany is naturally the stronghold of Marxism, and the country where it has proved, up to a point, an unqualified success. Although the Social Democratic Party was founded as an alliance between the followers of Marx and of Lassalle, on terms to which Marx himself violently objected, none the less the leadership of the party fell to those who accepted the teaching of Marx, and on that basis byfar the greatest Socialist Party of the world has been built up. Nowhere else did the ideas of Marx hold such unquestioned supremacy: nowhere else had they such a body of loyal adherents, such a host of teachers and interpreters. Only on the question of agricultural land in the freer political atmosphere of South Germany was there even a breath of dissent. The revolt came from England in the person of Edward Bernstein, who, exiled by Bismarck, took refuge in London, and was for years intimately acquainted with the Fabian Society and its leaders. Soon after his return to Germany he published in 1899 a volume criticising Marxism,[45]and thence grew up the Revisionist movement for free thought in Socialism which has attracted all the younger men, and before the war had virtually, if not actually, obtained control over the Social Democratic Party.
In England, and in Germany through Bernstein, I think the Fabian Society may claim to have led the revolt. Elsewhere the revolt has come rather in deeds than in words. In France, in Italy, and in Belgium and in other European countries, a Socialist Party has grown up which amid greater political opportunities has had to face the actual problems of modern politics. These could not be solved by quotations from a German philosopher, and liberty has been gained by force of circumstances. Nevertheless in many countries, such as Russia and the United States, even now, or at any rate until very recent years, the freedom of action of Socialist parties has been impeded by excessive respect for the opinions of the Founder, and Socialist thought has been sterilised, because it was assumed that Marx had completed the philosophy of Socialism, and the business of Socialists was notto think for themselves, but merely to work for the realisation of his ideas.
But mere freedom was not enough. Something must be put in the place of Marx. His English followers did not notice that he had indicated no method, and devised no political machinery for the transition; or if they noticed it they passed over the omission as a negligible detail. If German Socialism would not suit, English Socialism had to be formulated to take its place. This has been the life-work of the Fabian Society, the working out of the application of the broad principles of Socialism to the industrial and political environment of England. I say England advisedly, because the industrial and political conditions of Scotland are in some degree different, and the application of the principles of Socialism to Ireland has not yet been seriously attempted. But for England "Fabian Essays" and the Fabian Tracts are by general consent the best expositions of the meaning and working of Socialism in the English language.
Marxian Socialism regarded itself as a thing apart. Marx had discovered a panacea for the ills of society: the old was to be cleared away and all things were to become new. In Marx's own thought evolution and revolution were tangled and alternated. The evolutionary side was essential to it; the idea of revolutionary catastrophe is almost an excrescence. But to the Marxians (of whom Marx once observed that he was not one) this excrescence became the whole thing. People were divided into those who advocated the revolution and those who did not. The business of propaganda was to increase the number of adherents of the new at the expense of the supporters of the old.
The Fabians regarded Socialism as a principlealready in part embodied in the constitution of society, gradually extending its influence because it harmonised with the needs and desires of men in countries where the large industry prevails.
Fabian Socialism is in fact an interpretation of the spirit of the times. I have pointed out already that the municipalisation of monopolies, a typically Fabian process, had its origin decades before the Society was founded, and all that the Fabian Society did was to explain its social implications and advocate its wider extension. The same is true of the whole Fabian political policy. Socialism in English politics grew up because of the necessity for State intervention in the complex industrial and social organisation of a Great State. Almost before the evil results of Laissez Faire had culminated Robert Owen was pointing the way to factory legislation, popular education, and the communal care of children. The Ten Hours Act of 1847 was described by Marx himself as "the victory of a principle," that is, of "the political economy of the working class."[46]That victory was frequently repeated in the next thirty years, and collective protection of Labour in the form of Factory Acts, Sanitary Acts, Truck Acts, Employers' Liability Acts, and Trade Board Acts became a recognised part of the policy of both political parties.
Fabian teaching has had more direct influence in promoting the administrative protection of Labour. The Fair Wages policy, now everywhere prevalent in State and Municipal employment, was, as has been already described, if not actually invented, at any rate largely popularised by the Society. It was a working-class demand, and it has been everywhere put forward by organised labour, but its success would have beenslower had the manual workers been left to fight their own battle.
I have said that the work of the Society was the interpretation of an existing movement, the explanation and justification of tendencies which originated in Society at large, and not in societies, Fabian or other. That work is only less valuable than the formulation of new ideas. None of the Fabians would claim to rank beside the great promulgators of new ideas, such as Owen and Marx. But the interpretation of tendencies is necessary if progress is to be sustained and if it is to be unbroken by casual reaction. In an old country like ours, with vast forces of inertia built up by ages of precedents, by a class system which forms a part of the life of the nation, by a distribution of wealth which even yet scarcely yields to the pressure of graduated taxation, legislation is always in arrear of the needs of the times; the social structure is always old-fashioned and out of date, and reform always tends to be late, and even too late, unless there are agitators with the ability to attract public attention calling on the men in power to take action.
But this victory of a principle is not a complete victory of the principles of Socialism. It is a limitation of the power of the capitalist to use his capital as he pleases, and Socialism is much more than a series of social safeguards to the private ownership of capital. Municipal ownership is a further step, but even this will not carry us far because the capital suitable for municipal management on existing lines is but a small fraction of the whole, and because municipal control does not directly affect the amount of capital in the hands of the capitalists who are always expropriated with ample compensation.
We have made some progress along another line. Supertax, death duties, and taxes on unearned increment do a little to diminish the wealth of the few: old age pensions, national insurance, and workmen's compensation do something towards mitigating the poverty of the poor.
But it must be confessed that we have made but little progress along the main road of Socialism. Private ownership of capital and land flourishes almost as vigorously as it did thirty years ago. Its grosser cruelties have been checked, but the thing itself has barely been touched. Time alone will show whether progress is to be along existing lines, whether the power of the owners of capital over the wealth it helps to create and over the lives of the workers whom it enslaves will gradually fade away, as the power of our kings over the Government of our country has faded, the form remaining when the substance has vanished, or whether the community will at last consciously accept the teaching of Socialism, setting itself definitely to put an end to large-scale private capitalism, and undertaking itself the direct control of industry. The intellectual outlook is bright; the principles of Socialism are already accepted by a sensible proportion of the men and women in all classes who take the trouble to think, and if we must admit that but little has yet been done, we may well believe that in the fullness of time our ideas will prevail. The present war is giving the old world a great shake, and an era of precipitated reconstruction may ensue if the opportunity be wisely handled.
The influence of the Fabian Society on political thought is already the theme of doctoral theses by graduates, especially in American universities, butit has not yet found much place in weightier compilation. Indeed so far as I know the only serious attempts in this country to describe its character and estimate its proportions is to be found in an admirable little book by Mr. Ernest Barker of New College, Oxford, entitled "Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present Day."[47]The author, dealing with the early Fabians, points out that "Mill rather than Marx was their starting point," but he infers from this that "they start along the line suggested by Mill with an attack on rent as the 'unearned increment' of land," a curious inaccuracy since our earliest contribution to the theory of Socialism, Tract No. 7, "Capital and Land," was expressly directed to emphasising the comparative unimportance of Land Nationalisation, and nothing in the later work of the Society has been inconsistent with this attitude. Then Mr. Barker goes on: "Fabianism began after 1884 to supply a new philosophy in place of Benthamite Individualism. Of the new gospel of collectivism a German writer[48]has said Webb was the Bentham and Shaw the Mill.[49]Without assigning rôles we may fairly say there is some resemblance between the influence of Benthamism on legislation after 1830 and the influence of Fabianism on legislation since, at any rate, 1906.[50]In either case we have a small circle ofthinkers and investigators in quiet touch with politicians: in either case we have a 'permeation' of general opinion by the ideas of these thinkers and investigators.... It is probable that the historian of the future will emphasise Fabianism in much the same way as the historian of to-day emphasises Benthamism."[51]
Mr. Barker next explains that "Fabianism has its own political creed, if it is a political creed consequential upon an economic doctrine. That economic doctrine advocates the socialisation of rent. But the rents which the Fabians would socialise are not only rents from land. Rent in the sense of unearned increments may be drawn, and is drawn, from other sources. The successful entrepreneur for instance draws a rent of ability from his superior equipment and education. The socialisation of every kind of rent will necessarily arm the State with great funds which it must use.... Shaw can define the two interconnected aims of Fabianism as 'the gradual extension of the franchise and the transfer of rent and interest to the State.'"
As Mr. Barker may not be alone in a slight misinterpretation of Fabian doctrine it may be well to take this opportunity of refuting the error. He says that Fabianism advocates the socialisation of rent, and in confirmation quotes Shaw's words "rentand interest"! That makes all the difference. If the term rent is widened to include all differential unearned incomes, from land, from ability, from opportunity (i.e. special profits), interest includes all non-differentialunearned incomes, and thus the State is to be endowed, not with rents alone, but with all unearned incomes.[52]It is true that the Fabians, throwing over Marx's inaccurate term "surplus value," base their Socialism on the Law of Rent, because, as they allege, this law negatives both equality of income and earnings in proportion to labour, so long as private ownership of land prevails. It is also true that they have directed special attention to the unearned incomes of the "idle" landlord and shareholder, because these are the typical feature of the modern system of distribution, which indeed has come to the front since the time of Marx, and because they furnish the answer to those who contend that wealth is at present distributed approximately in accordance with personal capacity or merit, and tacitly assume that "the rich" are all of them great captains of industry who by enterprise and ability have actually created their vast fortunes.[53]Indeed we might say that we do not mind conceding to our opponents all the wealth "created" by superior brains, if they will let us deal with the unearned incomes which are received independent of the possession of any brains, or any services at all!
But although we regard the case of the capitalist employer as relatively negligible, and although we prefer to concentrate our attack on the least defensible side of the capitalist system—and already the State recognises that unearned incomes should pay a larger proportion in income-tax, that property which passes at death, necessarily to those who have not earned it, should contribute a large quota to the public purse, and that unearned increment on land should in partbelong to the public—that does not mean that we have any tenderness for the entrepreneur. Him we propose to deal with by the favourite Fabian method of municipalisation and nationalisation. We take over his "enterprise," his gasworks and waterworks, his docks and trams, his railways and mines. We secure for the State the profits of management and the future unearned increment, and we compensate him for his capital with interest-bearing securities. We force him in fact to become the idle recipient of unearned income, and then we turn round and upbraid him and tax him heavily precisely because his income is unearned! If there is any special tenderness in this treatment, I should prefer harshness. To me it seems to resemble the policy of the wolf towards the lamb.[54]
I will proceed with quotations from Mr. Barker, because the view of a historian of thought is weightier than anything I could say.
"But collectivism also demands in the second place expert government. It demands the 'aristocracy of talent' of which Carlyle wrote. The control of a State with powers so vast will obviously need an exceptional and exceptionally large aristocracy. Those opponents of Fabianism who desire something more revolutionary than its political 'meliorism' and 'palliatives' accuse it of alliance with bureaucracy. They urge that it relies on bureaucracy to administer social reforms from above; and they conclude that, since any governingclassis anti-democratic, the Fabians who believe in such a class are really anti-democratic. The charge seems, as a matter of fact, difficult to sustain. Fabians from the first felt and urged that the decentralisation of the State was anecessary condition of the realisation of their aim. The municipality and other local units were the natural bodies for administering the new funds and discharging the new duties which the realisation of that aim would create. 'A democratic State,' Shaw wrote, 'cannot become a Social Democratic State unless it has in every centre of population a local governing body as thoroughly democratic in its constitution as the central Parliament.' The House of Commons he felt must develop 'into the central government which will be the organ of federating the municipalities.' Fabianism thus implied no central bureaucracy; what it demanded was partly, indeed, a more efficient and expert central government (and there is plenty of room for that), but primarily an expert local civil service in close touch with and under the control of a really democratic municipal government. It is difficult to say that this is bureaucracy or that it is not desirable. Many men who are not Fabians or Socialists of any kind feel strongly that the breathing of more vigour and interest into local politics, and the creation of a proper local civil service, are the great problems of the future.
"The policy of Fabianism has thus been somewhat as follows. An intellectual circle has sought to permeate all classes, from the top to the bottom, with a common opinion in favour of social control of socially created values. Resolved to permeate all classes, it has not preached class-consciousness; it has worked as much with and through Liberal 'capitalists' as with and through Labour representatives. Resolved gradually to permeate, it has not been revolutionary: it has relied on the slow growth of opinion. Reformist rather than revolutionary, it has explained the impossibility of the sudden 'revolution' of the working classes against capital: it has urged the necessityof a gradual amelioration of social conditions by a gradual assertion of social control over unearned increment.[55]Hence Fabianism has not adopted the somewhat cold attitude of the pure Socialist Party to Trade Unions, but has rather found in their gradual conquest of better wages and better conditions for the workers the line of social advance congenial with its own principles. Again, it has preached that the society which is to exert control must be democratic, if the control is to be, as it must be, self-control: it has taught that such democratic self-control must primarily be exerted in democratic local self-government: it has emphasised the need of reconciling democratic control with expert guidance. While it has never advocated 'direct action' or the avoidance of political activity, while on the contrary, it has advocated the conquest of social reforms on the fields of parliamentary and municipal government, it has not defended the State as it is, but has rather urged the need for a State which is based on democracy tempered by respect for the 'expert.' In this way Socialism of the Fabian type has made representative democracy its creed. It has adopted the sound position that democracy flourishes in that form of state in which people freely produce, thanks to an equality of educational opportunity, and freely choose, thanks to a wide and active suffrage, their own members for their guidance, and, since they have freely produced and chosen them, give them freely and fully the honour of their trust. And thus Socialists like Mr. Sidney Webb and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald have not coquetted with primary democracy, which has always had a magnetic attraction for Socialists. The doctrine that the people itself governs directly through obedient agents—the doctrine of mandate and plebiscite,of referendum and initiative—is not the doctrine of the best English Socialism." Mr. Barker next explains that behind these ideas lies "an organic theory of society," that society is regarded as "an organic unity with a real 'general will' of its own," and after stating that "the development of Liberalism, during the last few years, shows considerable traces of Fabian influence," concludes the subject with the words "Collectivism of the Fabian order was the dominant form of Socialism in England till within the last three of four years." Of the movement of Guild Socialists and others which he deems to have replaced it I shall speak later.
I have ventured to quote from Mr. Barker at some length because his summary of Fabian doctrine seems to me (with the exception noted) to be both correct and excellent, and it is safer to borrow from a writer quite unconnected with the Society an estimate of its place in the history of English political thought, rather than to offer my own necessarily prejudiced opinion of its achievements.
But I must revert again to the Fabian "method." "Make Socialists," said Mr. Wells in "Faults of the Fabian," "and you will achieve Socialism. There is no other way"; and Mr. Wells in his enthusiasm anticipated a society of ten thousand Fabians as the result of a year's propaganda. Will Socialism come through the making of Socialists?
If so, Socialism has made but little progress in England, since the number who profess and call themselves Socialist is still insignificant. The foregoing pages have shown in the words of a student of political thought how Socialism has been made in England in quite another way.
We did not at the time repudiate Mr. Wells' dictum: indeed we adopted his policy, and attempted the making of Socialism on a large scale. No doubt there is a certain ambiguity in the word "Socialists." It may mean members of Socialist societies, or at any rate "unattached Socialists," all those in fact who use the name to describe their political opinions. Or it may merely be another way of stating that the existing form of society can only be altered by the wills of living people, and change will only be in the direction of Socialism, when the wills which are effective for the purpose choose that direction in preference to another.
Mr. Wells himself described as a "fantastic idea" the notion that "the world may be manoeuvred into Socialism without knowing it": that "society is to keep like it is ... and yet Socialism will be soaking through it all, changing without a sign,"[56]and he at any rate meant by his phrase, "make members of Socialist societies."
The older and better Fabian doctrine is set out in the opening paragraphs of Tract 70, the "Report on Fabian Policy" (1896).
The object of the Fabian Society is to persuade the English people to make their political constitution thoroughly democratic and so to socialise their industries as to make the livelihood of the people entirely independent of private capitalism.
The Fabian Society endeavours to pursue its Socialist and Democratic objects with complete singleness of aim. For example:—
It has no distinctive opinions on the MarriageQuestion, Religion, Art, abstract Economics, historic Evolution, Currency, or any other subject than its own special business of practical Democracy and Socialism.
It brings all the pressure and persuasion in its power to bear on existing forces, caring nothing by what name any party calls itself or what principles, Socialist or other, it professes, but having regard solely to the tendency of its actions, supporting those which make for Socialism and Democracy and opposing those which are reactionary.
It does not propose that the practical steps towards Social Democracy should be carried out by itself or by any other specially organised society or party.
It does not ask the English people to join the Fabian Society."
In old days acting on this view of our "mission" we deliberately allowed the Society to remain small. Latterly we tried to expand, and in the main our attempt was an expensive failure. The other Socialist bodies have always used their propaganda primarily for recruiting; and they have sought to enlist the rank and file of the British people. In this they too have substantially failed, and the forty or fifty thousand members of the I.L.P. and B.S.P. are roughly no larger a proportion of the working class than the three thousand Fabians are of the middle class. If the advance of Socialism in England is to be measured by the "making of Socialists," if we are to count membership, to enumerate meetings, to sum up subscriptions, the outlook is gloomy. Thirty-four years ago a group of strong men led by Mr. H.M. Hyndman founded the Democratic Federation, which survives as the British Socialist Party, with Mr. Hyndman still to the fore; the rest have more or less dropped out, and no one has arisen to take their places. Twenty-two years agoKeir Hardie founded the Independent Labour Party: he has died since the first draft of this passage was written, and no one is left who commands such universal affection and respect amongst the members of the Society he created. Of the seven Essayists who virtually founded the Fabian Society only one is still fully in harness, and his working life must necessarily be nearing its term. It may be doubted whether a society for the propagation of ideas has the power to long outlive the inspiration of its founder, unless indeed he is a man of such outstanding personality that his followers treat him as a god. The religions of the world have been maintained by worshippers, and even in our own day the followers of Marx have held together partly because they regard his teachings with the uncritical reverence usually accorded to the prophets of new faiths. But Marxism has survived in Germany chiefly because it has created and inspired a political party, and political parties are of a different order from propagandist societies. Socialism in England has not yet created a political party; for the Labour Party, though entirely Socialist in policy, is not so in name or in creed, and in this matter the form counts rather than the fact.
Europe, as I write in the early days of 1916, is in the melting-pot, and it would be foolish to prophesy either the fate of the nations now at war or, in particular, the future of political parties in Great Britain, and especially of the Labour Party.
But so far as concerns the Fabian Society and the two other Socialist Societies, this much may be said: three factors in the past have kept them apart: differences of temperament; differences of policy; differences of leadership. In fact perhaps the last was the strongest.
I do not mean that the founders of the three societiesentertained mutual antipathies or personal jealousies to the detriment of the movement. I do mean that each group preferred to go its own way, and saw no sufficient advantage in a common path to compensate for the difficulties of selecting it.
In a former chapter I have explained how a movement for a form of Socialist Unity had at last almost achieved success, when a new factor, the European War, interposed. After the war these negotiations will doubtless be resumed, and the three Socialist Societies will find themselves more closely allied than ever before. The differences of policy which have divided them will then be a matter of past history. The differences of temperament matter less and less as the general policy becomes fixed, and in a few years the old leaders from whose disputes the general policy emerged must all have left the stage. The younger men inherit an established platform and know nothing of the old-time quarrels and distrusts. They will come together more easily. If the organised propaganda of Socialism continues—and that perhaps is not a matter of certainty—it seems to me improbable that it will be carried on for long by three separate societies. In some way or other, in England as in so many other countries, a United Socialist organisation will be constituted.
But what of the future of Fabian ideas? In a passage already quoted Mr. Barker indicates that the dominance of "Collectivism of the Fabian order" ceased three or four years ago, and he goes on to indicate that it has been replaced by an anti-state propaganda, taking various forms, Syndicalism, Guild Socialism, and the Distributivism of Mr. Belloc. It is true that Fabianism of the old type is not the last event in thehistory of political thought, but it is still, I venture to think, the dominant principle in political progress. Guild Socialism, whatever its worth, is a later stage. If our railways are to be managed by the Railwaymen's Union, they must first be acquired for the community by Collectivism.
This is not the place to discuss the possibilities of Guild Socialism. After all it is but a form of Socialism, and a first principle of Fabianism has always been free thought. The leading Guild Socialists resigned from the Society: they were not expelled: they attempted to coerce the rest, but no attempt was made to coerce them. Guild Socialism as a scheme for placing production under the management of the producers seems to me to be on the wrong lines. The consumer as a citizen must necessarily decide what is to be produced for his needs. But I do not belong to the generation which will have to settle the matter. The elderly are incompetent judges of new ideas. Fabian doctrine is not stereotyped: the Society consists in the main of young people. The Essayists and their contemporaries have said their say: it remains for the younger people to accept what they choose, and to add whatever is necessary. Those who repudiated the infallibility of Marx will be the last to claim infallibility for themselves. I can only express the hope that as long as the Fabian Society lasts it will be ever open to new ideas, ever conscious that nothing is final, ever aware that the world is enormously complex, and that no single formula will summarise or circumscribe its infinite variety.[57]
The work of the Fabian Society has been not to make Socialists, but to make Socialism. I think it may besaid that the dominant opinion in the Society—at any rate it is my opinion—is that great social changes can only come by consent. The Capitalist system cannot be overthrown by a revolution or by a parliamentary majority. Wage slavery will disappear, as serfdom disappeared, not indeed imperceptibly, for the world is now self-conscious, not even so gradually, for the pace of progress is faster than it was in the Middle Ages, but by a change of heart of the community, by a general recognition, already half realised, that whatever makes for the more equitable distribution of wealth is good; that whatever benefits the working class benefits the nation; that the rich exist only on sufferance, and deserve no more than painless extinction; that the capitalist is a servant of the public, and too often over-paid for the services that he renders.
Again, Socialism succeeds because it is common sense. The anarchy of individual production is already an anachronism. The control of the community over itself extends every day. We demand order, method, regularity, design; the accidents of sickness and misfortune, of old age and bereavement, must be prevented if possible, and if not, mitigated. Of this principle the public is already convinced: it is merely a question of working out the details. But order and forethought is wanted for industry as well as for human life. Competition is bad, and in most respects private monopoly is worse. No one now seriously defends the system of rival traders with their crowds of commercial travellers: of rival tradesmen with their innumerable deliveries in each street; and yet no one advocates the capitalist alternative, the great trust, often concealed and insidious, which monopolises oil or tobacco or diamonds, and makes huge profits for a fortunate; few out of the helplessness of the unorganised consumers.
But neither the idle rich class nor the anarchy of competition is so outstanding an evil as the poverty of the poor. We aim at making the rich poorer chiefly in order to make the poor richer. Our first tract, "Why are the Many Poor?" struck the keynote. In a century of abounding wealth England still has in its midst a hideous mass of poverty which is too appalling to think of. That poverty, we say, is preventible. That poverty was the background of our thoughts when the Society was founded. Perhaps we have done a little to mitigate it: we believe we have done something to make clear the way by which it may ultimately be abolished. We do not constantly talk of it. We write of the advantages of Municipal Electricity, of the powers of Parish Councils, of the objections to the Referendum; but all the while it is that great evil which chiefly moves us, and by our success or our failure in helping on the reconstruction of society for the purpose of abolishing poverty, the work of the Fabian Society must ultimately be judged.
FOOTNOTES:
[43]"La Société Fabienne et le Mouvement socialiste anglais contemporain." By Édouard Pfeiffer, Paris, F. Giard and E. Brière, 1911; an excellent volume but full of errors.
[44]"The Fabians were the first amongst Socialists to start the movement of anti-Marxist criticism. At a period when the dogmas of the Master were regarded as sacred, the Fabians ventured to assert that it was possible to call oneself a Socialist without ever having read 'Das Kapital,' or without accepting its doctrine. In opposition to Marx, they have revived the spirit of J.S. Mill, and they have attacked Marx all along the line—the class war, the economic interpretation of history, the catastrophic method, and above all the theory of value."
[45]Published in English by the Independent Labour Party in 1909 as "Evolutionary Socialism."
[46]Address to the International, 1862, quoted from Spargo's "Karl Marx," p. 266.
[47]Home University Library, Williams and Norgate, 1915, 1s.
[48]M. Beer, "Geschichte des Socialismus in England" (Stuttgart, 1913), p. 462. Mr. Beer devotes seven pages to the Society, which he describes with accuracy, and interprets much as Mr. Barker has done. The book was written at the request of the German Social Democratic Party.
[49]I quote, but do not endorse the opinion that G.B.S. markedly resembles James Mill (Mr. Barker confuses the two Mills). Beer adds "Webb was the thinker, Shaw the fighter." This antithesis is scarcely happy. The collaboration of the two is much too complicated to be summed up in a phrase.
[50]But see chapter VIII for its influence before 1906; and see Appendix I. A. for a much fuller discussion of this subject.
[51]The same idea is expressed by a Canadian Professor:—
"It is necessary to go back to the Philosophical Radicals to find a small group of men who have exercised such a profound influence over English political thought as the little band of social investigators who organised the Fabian Society."
"Socialism: a critical analysis." By O.D. Skelton, Ph.D., Professor of Economic Science, Kingston, Canada. (Constable, 1911.) p. 288.
[52]Mr. Barker erroneously uses the word "increment" for "income" in several places. Unearned increment is quite another thing.
[53]See "Socialism and Superior Brains: a reply to Mr. Mallock," by G.B. Shaw. Fabian Tract 146.
[54]Mr. Barker emphasises the "discrimination advocated by the Fabians" in favour of profits in a later passage (p. 224) not here quoted.
[55]This should read "incomes."
[56]"Faults of the Fabian," p. 9.
[57]See Appendix I. B.
Bernard Shaw has been good enough to write the following memoranda on Chapter XII. For various reasons I prefer to leave that chapter as it stands; but the memoranda have an interest of their own and I therefore print them here.
Mr. Barker's guesses greatly underrate the number of tributaries which enlarged the trickle of Socialist thought into a mighty river. They also shew how quickly waves of thought are forgotten. Far from being the economic apostle of Socialism, Mill, in the days when the Fabian Society took the field, was regarded as the standard authority for solving the social problem by a combination of peasant proprietorship with neo-Malthusianism. The Dialectical Society, which was a centre of the most advanced thought in London until the Fabian Society supplanted it, was founded to advocate the principles of Mill's Essay on Liberty, which was much more the Bible of English Individualism than Das Kapital ever was of English Socialism. As late as 1888 Henry Sidgwick, a follower of Mill, rose indignantly at the meeting of the British Association in Bath, to which I had just read the paper on The Transition to Social-Democracy, which was subsequently published;as one of the Fabian Essays, and declared that I had advocated nationalisation of land; that nationalisation of land was a crime; and that he would not take part in a discussion of a criminal proposal. With that he left the platform, all the more impressively as his apparently mild and judicial temperament made the incident so unexpected that his friends who had not actually witnessed it were with difficulty persuaded that it had really happened. It illustrates the entire failure of Mill up to that date to undo the individualistic teaching of the earlier volumes of his Political Economy by the Socialist conclusions to which his work on the treatise led him at the end. Sidney Webb astonished and confounded our Individualist opponents by citing Mill against them; and it is probably due to Webb more than to any other disciple that it is now generally known that Mill died a Socialist. Webb read Mill and mastered Mill as he seemed to have read and mastered everybody else; but the only other prominent Socialist who can be claimed by Mill as a convert was, rather unexpectedly, William Morris, who said that when he read the passage in which Mill, after admitting that the worst evils of Communism are, compared to the evils of our Commercialism, as dust in the balance, nevertheless condemned Communism, he immediately became a Communist, as Mill had clearly given his verdict against the evidence. Except in these instances we heard nothing of Mill in the Fabian Society. Cairnes's denunciation of the idle consumers of rent and interest was frequently quoted; and Marshall's Economics of Industry was put into our book boxes as a textbook; but the taste for abstract economics was no more general in the Fabian Society than elsewhere. I had in my boyhood read some of Mill's detached essays, including those onconstitutional government and on the Irish land question, as well as the inevitable one on Liberty; but none of these pointed to Socialism; and my attention was first drawn to political economy as the science of social salvation by Henry George's eloquence, and by his Progress and Poverty, which had an enormous circulation in the early eighties, and beyond all question had more to do with the Socialist revival of that period in England than any other book. Before the Fabian Society existed I pressed George's propaganda of Land Nationalisation on a meeting of the Democratic Federation, but was told to read Karl Marx. I was so complete a novice in economics at that time that when I wrote a letter to Justice pointing out a flaw in Marx's reasoning, I regarded my letter merely as a joke, and fully expected that some more expert Socialist economist would refute me easily. Even when the refutation did not arrive I remained so impressed with the literary power and overwhelming documentation of Marx's indictment of nineteenth-century Commercialism and the capitalist system, that I defended him against all comers in and out of season until Philip Wicksteed, the well-known Dante commentator, then a popular Unitarian minister, brought me to a standstill by a criticism of Marx which I did not understand. This was the first appearance in Socialist controversy of the value theory of Jevons, published in 1871. Professor Edgeworth and Mr. Wicksteed, to whom Jevons appealed as a mathematician, were at that time trying to convince the academic world of the importance of Jevons's theory; but I, not being a mathematician, was not easily accessible to their methods of demonstration. I consented to reply to Mr. Wicksteed on the express condition that the editor ofTo-day, in which my reply appeared, should find space for a rejoinder by Mr. Wicksteed. My reply, which was not bad for a fake, and contained the germ of the economic argument for equality of income which I put forward twenty-five years later, elicited only a brief rejoinder; but the upshot was that I put myself into Mr. Wicksteed's hands and became a convinced Jevonian, fascinated by the subtlety of Jevons's theory and the exquisiteness with which it adapted itself to all the cases which had driven previous economists, including Marx, to take refuge in clumsy distinctions between use value, exchange value, labour value, supply and demand value, and the rest of the muddlements of that time.
Accordingly, the abstract economics of the Fabian Essays are, as regards value, the economics of Jevons. As regards rent they are the economics of Ricardo, which I, having thrown myself into the study of abstract economics, had learnt from Ricardo's own works and from De Quincey's Logic of Political Economy. I maintained, as I still do, that the older economists, writing before Socialism had arisen as a possible alternative to Commercialism and a menace to its vested interests, were far more candid in their statements and thorough in their reasoning than their successors, and was fond of citing the references in De Quincey and Austin's Lectures on Jurisprudence to the country gentleman system and the evils of capitalism, as instances of frankness upon which no modern professor dare venture.
The economical and moral identity of capital and interest with land and rent was popularly demonstrated by Olivier in Tract 7 on Capital and Land, and put into strict academic form by Sidney Webb. The point was of importance at a time when the distinction was still so strongly maintained that the Fabian Societywas compelled to exclude Land Nationalizers, both before and after their development into Single Taxers, because they held that though land and rent should be socialized, capital and interest must remain private property.
This really exhausts the history of the Fabian Society as far as abstract economic theory is concerned. Activity in that department was confined to Webb and myself. Later on, Pease's interest in banking and currency led him to contribute some criticism of the schemes of the currency cranks who infest all advanced movements, flourishing the paper money of the Guernsey Market, and to give the Society some positive guidance as to the rapid integration of modern banking. But this was an essay in applied economics. It may be impossible to draw a line between the old abstract deductive economics and the modern historical concrete economics; but the fact remains that though the water may be the same, the tide has turned. A comparison of my exposition of the law of rent in my first Fabian Essay and in my Impossibilities of Anarchism with the Webbs' great Histories of Trade Unionism and of Industrial Democracy will illustrate the difference between the two schools.
The departure was made by Graham Wallas, who, abandoning the deductive construction of intellectual theorems, made an exhaustive study of the Chartist movement. It is greatly to be regretted that these lectures were not effectively published. Their delivery wrought a tremendous disillusion as to the novelty of our ideas and methods of propaganda; much new gospel suddenly appeared to us as stale failure; and we recognized that there had been weak men before Agamemnon, even as far back as in Cromwell's army. The necessity for mastering the history of our own movement and falling into our ordered place in itbecame apparent; and it was in this new frame of mind that the monumental series of works by the Webbs came into existence. Wallas's Life of Francis Place shows his power of reconstructing a popular agitation with a realism which leaves the conventional imaginary version of it punctured and flaccid; and it was by doing the same for the Chartist movement that he left his mark on us.
Of the other Essayists, Olivier had wrestled with the huge Positive Philosophy of Comte, who thus comes in as a Fabian influence. William Clarke was a disciple of Mazzini, and found Emerson, Thoreau, and the Brook Farm enthusiasts congenial to him. Bland, who at last became a professed Catholic, was something of a Coleridgian transcendentalist, though he treated a copy of Bakunin's God and the State to a handsome binding. Mrs. Besant's spiritual history has been written by herself. Wallas brought to bear a wide scholastic culture of the classic type, in which modern writers, though interesting, were not fundamental. The general effect, it will be perceived, is very much wider and more various than that suggested by Mr. Ernest Barker's remark that Mill was our starting point.
It is a curious fact that of the three great propagandist amateurs of political economy, Henry George, Marx, and Ruskin, Ruskin alone seems to have had no effect on the Fabians. Here and there in the Socialist movement workmen turned up who had read Fors Clavigera or Unto This Last; and some of the more well-to-do no doubt had read the first chapter of Munera Pulveris. But Ruskin's name was hardly mentioned in the Fabian Society. My explanation is that, barring Olivier, the Fabians were inveterate Philistines. My efforts to induce them to publish Richard Wagner's Art and Revolution,and, later on, Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man under Socialism, or even to do justice to Morris's News From Nowhere, fell so flat that I doubt whether my colleagues were even conscious of them. Our best excuse must be that as a matter of practical experience English political societies do good work and present a dignified appearance whilst they attend seriously to their proper political business; but, to put it bluntly, they make themselves ridiculous and attract undesirables when they affect art and philosophy. The Arts and Crafts exhibitions, the Anti-Scrape (Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings), and the Art Workers' Guild, under Morris and Crane, kept up a very intimate connection between Art and Socialism; but the maintenance of Fabian friendly relations with them was left mostly to me and Stewart Headlam. The rest kept aloof and consoled themselves with the reflection—if they thought about it at all—that the Utilitarians, though even more Philistine than the Fabians, were astonishingly effective for their numbers.
It must be added that though the tradition that Socialism excludes the established creeds was overthrown by the Fabians, and the claim of the Christian Socialists to rank with the best of us was insisted on faithfully by them, the Fabian leaders did not break the tradition in their own practice. The contention of the Anti-Socialist Union that all Socialists are atheists is no doubt ridiculous in the face of the fact that the intellectual opposition to Socialism has been led exclusively by avowed atheists like Charles Bradlaugh or agnostics like Herbert Spencer, whilst Communism claims Jesus as an exponent; still, if the question be raised as to whether any of the Fabian Essayists attended an established place of worship regularly, the reply must be in the negative. Indeed, they weregenerally preaching themselves on Sundays. To describe them as irreligious in view of their work would be silly; but until Hubert Bland towards the end of his life took refuge in the Catholic Church, and Mrs. Besant devoted herself to Theosophy, no leading Fabian found a refuge for his soul in the temples of any established denomination. I may go further and admit that the first problems the Fabians had to solve were so completely on the materialist plane that the atmosphere inevitably became uncongenial to those whose capacity was wasted and whose sympathies were starved on that plane. Even psychical research, with which Pease and Podmore varied their Fabian activities, tended fatally towards the exposure of alleged psychical phenomena as physical tricks. The work that came to our hands in our first two decades was materialistic work; and it was not until the turn of the century brought us the Suffrage movement and the Wells raid, that the materialistic atmosphere gave way, and the Society began to retain recruits of a kind that it always lost in the earlier years as it lost Mrs. Besant and (virtually) William Clarke. It is certainly perceptibly less hard-headed than it was in its first period.
Here I venture to say, with some confidence, that Mr. Barker is mistaken. That storm has burst on the Fabian Society and has left it just where it was. Guild Socialism, championed by the ablest and most industrious insurgents of the rising generation in the Society, raised its issue with Collectivism only to discover, when the matter, after a long agitation,was finally thrashed out at a conference at Barrow House, that the issue was an imaginary one, and that Collectivism lost nothing by the fullest tenable concessions to the Guild Socialists. A very brief consideration will shew that this was inevitable.
Guild Socialism, in spite of its engaging medieval name, means nothing more picturesque than a claim that under Socialism each industry shall be controlled by its own operators, as the professions are to-day. This by itself would not imply Socialism at all: it would be merely a revival of the medieval guild, or a fresh attempt at the now exploded self-governing workshop of the primitive co-operators. Guild Socialism, with the emphasis on the Socialism, implies that the industries, however completely they may be controlled by their separate staffs, must pool their products. All the Guild Socialists admit this. The Socialist State must therefore include an organ for receiving and distributing the pooled products; and such an organ, representing the citizen not as producer but as consumer, reintroduces the whole machinery of Collectivism. Thus the alleged antithesis between Guild Socialism and Collectivism, under cover of which the one was presented as an alternative to the other, vanished at the first touch of the skilled criticism the Fabians brought to bear on it; and now Mrs. Sidney Webb, who was singled out for attack by the Guild Socialists as the arch Collectivist, is herself conducting an investigation into the existing control of industry by professional organizations, whilst the quondam Guild Socialists are struggling with the difficult question of the proper spheres of the old form of Trade Union now called the craft union, and the new form called the industrial union, in which workers of all crafts and occupations, from clerks and railway porters to locomotive drivers andfitters, are organized in a single union of the entire industry. There is work enough for many years to some of the old Fabian kind in these directions; and this work will irresistibly reunite the disputants instead of perpetuating a quarrel in which, like most of the quarrels which the Society has survived, there was nothing fundamental at issue.
There is work, too, to be done in the old abstract deductive department. It can be seen, throughout the history of the Society, how any attempt to discard the old economic basis of the law of rent immediately produced a recrudescence of Anarchism in one form or another, the latest being Syndicalism and that form of Guild Socialism which was all Guild and no Socialism. But there is still much to be settled by the deductive method. The fundamental question of the proportions in which the national income, when socialized, shall be distributed, was not grappled with until 1914, when I, lecturing on behalf of the Society, delivered my final conclusion that equal distribution is the only solution that will realize the ideals of Socialism, and that it is in fact the economic goal of Socialism. This is not fully accepted as yet in the movement, in which there is still a strong leaven of the old craving for an easy-going system which, beginning with "the socialization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange," will then work out automatically without interference with the citizen's private affairs.
Another subject which has hardly yet been touched, and which also must begin with deductive treatment, is what may be called the democratization of democracy, and its extension from a mere negative and very uncertain check on tyranny to a positive organizing force. No experienced Fabian believes that society can be reconstructed (or rather constructed; for the difficulty is that society is as yet only half rescued fromchaos) by men of the type produced by popular election under existing circumstances, or indeed under any circumstances likely to be achieved before the reconstruction. The fact that a hawker cannot ply his trade without a licence whilst a man may sit in Parliament without any relevant qualifications is a typical and significant anomaly which will certainly not be removed by allowing everybody to be a hawker at will. Sooner or later, unless democracy is to be discarded in a reaction of disgust such as killed it in ancient Athens, democracy itself will demand that only such men should be presented to its choice as have proved themselves qualified for more serious and disinterested work than "stoking up" election meetings to momentary and foolish excitement. Without qualified rulers a Socialist State is impossible; and it must not be forgotten (though the reminder is as old as Plato) that the qualified men may be very reluctant men instead of very ambitious ones.
Here, then, are two very large jobs already in sight to occupy future Fabians. Whether they will call themselves Fabians and begin by joining the Fabian Society is a question which will not be settled by the generation to which I belong.
G.B.S.
The Fabian Society consists of Socialists.
It therefore aims at the reorganisation of Society by the emancipation of Land and Industrial Capital from individual and class ownership, and the vesting of them in the community for the general benefit. In this way only can the natural and acquired advantages of the country be equitably shared by the whole people.
The Society accordingly works for the extinction of private property in Land and of the consequent individual appropriation, in the form of Rent, of the price paid for permission to use the earth, as well as for the advantages of superior soils and sites.
The Society, further, works for the transfer to the community of the administration of such industrial Capital as can conveniently be managed socially. For, owing to the monopoly of the means of production in the past, industrial inventions and the transformation of surplus income into Capital have mainly enriched the proprietary class, the worker being now dependent on that class for leave to earn a living.
If these measures be carried out, without compensation (though not without such relief to expropriated individuals as may seem fit to the community), Rent and Interest will be added to the reward of labour, the idle class now living on the labour of others will necessarily disappear, and practical equality of opportunity will be maintained by the spontaneous action of economic forces with much less interference with personal liberty than the present system entails.
For the attainment of these ends the Fabian Society looks to the spread of Socialist opinions, and the social and political changes consequent thereon,including the establishment of equal citizenship for men and women.[58]It seeks to achieve these ends by the general dissemination of knowledge as to the relation between the individual and Society in its economic, ethical, and political aspects.
FOOTNOTE:
[58]The words in italics were added in 1907. See page 177.
The full term of office is from April to March, and such an entry as 1901-2 usually means one year's office. Membership has been terminated in many cases by resignation, in the great majority by refusal to stand for re-election, in perhaps a dozen cases by defeat, and never by death.
The printing of the author's name in italics signifies that the tract was adopted and probably amended by the Society and that it was issued without the author's name. In the other cases the author's name is given in the tract, and as a rule the tract was approved for publication as a whole: a star to the author's name signifies "not a member of the Society."
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