The History of the Fabian Society Part 17

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 MISSION OF THE FABIANS

The object of the Fabian Society is to persuade the English people to make their political const.i.tution 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 Marriage Question, 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 cla.s.s than the three thousand Fabians are of the middle cla.s.s. If the advance of Socialism in England is to be measured by the "making of Socialists," if we are to count members.h.i.+p, 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 ago Keir Hardie founded the Independent Labour Party: he has died since the first draft of this pa.s.sage 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 G.o.d. The religions of the world have been maintained by wors.h.i.+ppers, 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 leaders.h.i.+p. In fact perhaps the last was the strongest.

I do not mean that the founders of the three societies entertained 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 const.i.tuted.

But what of the future of Fabian ideas? In a pa.s.sage 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 the history 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 circ.u.mscribe its infinite variety.[57]

The work of the Fabian Society has been not to make Socialists, but to make Socialism. I think it may be said 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 cla.s.s 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. Compet.i.tion 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 cla.s.s nor the anarchy of compet.i.tion 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 ma.s.s 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 Munic.i.p.al 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 abolis.h.i.+ng poverty, the work of the Fabian Society must ultimately be judged.

FOOTNOTES:

[43] "La Societe Fabienne et le Mouvement socialiste anglais contemporain." By edouard Pfeiffer, Paris, F. Giard and E. Briere, 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 a.s.sert 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 cla.s.s 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 ant.i.thesis 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 1. 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 a.n.a.lysis." 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 pa.s.sage (p. 224) not here quoted.

[55] This should read "incomes."

[56] "Faults of the Fabian," p. 9.

[57] See Appendix I. B.

Appendix I

Memoranda by Bernard Shaw