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From International Socialist Review, Vol.24 No.1, Winter 1963, p.26.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Story of Fabian Socialism
by Margaret Cole
Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. 1961. 366 pp. $6.50.
The author of this book was the Secretary of the Fabian Society from 1939 to 1953. Her book reads like a collection of all the minutes of all the meetings from ’39 to ’53 – without the deletion of a single detail or the addition of one Marxist idea. Paradoxically, the mood is one of enthusiasm: Mrs. Cole relishes the minutiae of personality and tea parties. This bustling about triviae is symbolic of the Fabian Society as a whole, which is a tremendously busy group intent on forwarding only the lamest of reforms in the slowest possible way. Unfortunately for the English working class, Fabian “gradualness” won the day, and hand in glove with the labor bureaucrats (and for a while, the Stalinists) has been and is the chief force in British Socialism, managing thereby to subvert all revolutionary situations in England to date; e.g., the Shop Stewards Movement of the first world war and the General Strike of 1926.
The Fabian Society began in 1883 as a group of petty bourgeois intellectuals; it is thus the oldest English “socialist” group, a feat accomplished partly by its base in the middle class – after all, the ruling class – and partly by its respectable “evolutionary” rather than revolutionary program. The Fabian Society has been disasterously successful. It helped in the formation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1894, which eventually, with several other groups, became the British Labour Party in 1900. Sidney Webb helped write the constitution of the Labour Party. The Fabians have been either in direct leadership of this party or have controlled it in conjunction with their labor bureaucrat toadies.
There have been four Labour Governments in England; the first, in 1924, lasted only eight months. Dependent on Liberal votes, the Government collapsed when the Liberals defected, mainly on the issue of a loan to the Soviet Union. The second Labour Government was maneuvered into office in 1929 by the ruling class that could see the coming world crisis. The government, under Ramsey MacDonald, subject to many economic pressures, including that of mounting unemployment, simply threw up its hands and quit. The resultant national government, a “coalition” of Conservative, Liberal and Labour parties with MacDonald again as Prime Minister, promptly cut wages and unemployment benefits. The post-World War II Labour governments of 1945-50 and 1950-51 continued the wartime austerity program of food rationing and frozen wages, and used troops to break strikes under the Emergency Powers Act. The loudly touted nationalizations simply took over unprofitable parts of the economy, thereby giving new life to capitalism and a sop to the working class. What, specifically, is Fabian philosophy? In her preface, Margaret Cole notes
“the basic Fabian aims: ... the abolition of poverty, through legislation and administration; ... the communal control of production and social life, and ... the conversion of the British public and ... the British governing class (or ‘caste,’ according to date), by a barrage of facts and informed propaganda ...”
More precisely, Fabianism consists of eclecticism of theory (preferably excluding Marxist theory); gradualism; reformism; working within the capitalist structure; denial of the class war and the state as a “weapon, by consideration of it as a Supreme Court”; denial of imperialism’s need for war as resolution of its economic problems; and conversion of the ruling class by surveys, statistics, facts, and graphs. As Trotsky says, in his demolition of Fabianism in Where Is Britain Going? “The compassion of the rich for poverty has never safeguarded the poor from degradation and misery.” Thus the senti-mentalism of Fabianism – a bourgeois sentimentalism that substitutes for identification with the aims of the working class – is revealed as shallow and potentially dangerous. Dangerous, because, as Trotsky points out, “in struggling against proletarian class-consciousness the reformists are in the last resort the instrument of the ruling class.”
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