Fabian Society

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The Fabian Society is a British intellectual socialist movement, whose purpose is to advance the principles of socialism via gradualist and reformist, rather than revolutionary, means. It is best known for its initial ground-breaking work beginning late in the 19th century and continuing up to World War I. The society laid many of the foundations of the Labour Party and subsequently affected the policies of states emerging from the decolonisation of the British Empire, especially India.

Today, the society is a vanguard think tank of the New Labour movement. It is one of 15 socialist societies affiliated to the Labour Party. Similar societies exist in Australia (the Australian Fabian Society), Canada (the Douglas-Coldwell Foundation and in the past the League for Social Reconstruction) and New Zealand.

Contents

History

The group, which favoured gradual change rather than revolutionary change, was named – at the suggestion of Frank Podmore – in honour of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus (nicknamed "Cunctator", meaning "the Delayer"). His Fabian strategy advocated tactics of harassment and attrition rather than head-on battles against the Carthaginian army under the renowned general Hannibal.

The society was founded on 4 January 1884 in London as an offshoot of a society founded in 1883 called The Fellowship of the New Life.[1] Fellowship members included poets Edward Carpenter and John Davidson, sexologist Havelock Ellis and future Fabian secretary, Edward R. Pease. They wanted to transform society by setting an example of clean simplified living for others to follow. But when some members also wanted to become politically involved to aid society's transformation, it was decided that a separate society, The Fabian Society, also be set up. All members were free to attend both societies. The Fabian Society additionally advocated renewal of Western European Renaissance ideas and their promulgation throughout the rest of the world.

The Fellowship of the New Life was dissolved in 1898[2], but the Fabian Society grew to become the preeminent academic society in the United Kingdom in the Edwardian era, typified by the members of its vanguard Coefficients club.

Immediately upon its inception, the Fabian Society began attracting many prominent contemporary figures drawn to its socialist cause, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Hubert Bland, Edith Nesbit, Sydney Olivier, Oliver Lodge, Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, Ramsay MacDonald and Emmeline Pankhurst. Even Bertrand Russell briefly became a member, but resigned after he expressed his belief that the Society's principle of entente (in this case, countries allying themselves against Germany) could lead to war.

At the core of the Fabian Society were Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Together, they wrote numerous studies of industrial Britain, including alternative co-operative economics that applied to ownership of capital as well as land.

The first Fabian Society pamphlets advocating tenets of social justice coincided with the zeitgeist of Liberal reforms during the early 1900s. The Fabian proposals however were considerably more progressive than those that were enacted in the Liberal reform legislation. The Fabians lobbied for the introduction of a minimum wage in 1906, for the creation of a universal health care system in 1911 and for the abolition of hereditary peerages in 1917[3].

Fabian socialists were in favour of an imperialist foreign policy as a conduit for internationalist reform and a welfare state modelled on the Bismarckian German model; they criticised Gladstonian liberalism both for its individualism at home and its internationalism abroad. They favoured a national minimum wage in order to stop British industries compensating for their inefficiency by lowering wages instead of investing in capital equipment; slum clearances and a health service in order for "the breeding of even a moderately Imperial race" which would be more productive and better militarily than the "stunted, anaemic, demoralised denizens...of our great cities"; and a national education system because "it is in the class-rooms that the future battles of the Empire for commercial prosperity are already being lost"[4].

The Fabians also favored the nationalisation of land, believing that rents collected by landowners were unearned, an idea which drew heavily from the work of American economist Henry George.

Many Fabians participated in the formation of the Labour Party in 1900 and the group's constitution, written by Sidney Webb, borrowed heavily from the founding documents of the Fabian Society. At the Labour Party Foundation Conference in 1900, the Fabian Society claimed 861 members and sent one delegate.

In the period between the two World Wars, the "Second Generation" Fabians, including the writers R. H. Tawney, G. D. H. Cole and Harold Laski, continued to be a major influence on social-democratic thought.

It was at this time that many of the future leaders of the Third World were exposed to Fabian thought, most notably India's Jawaharlal Nehru, who subsequently framed economic policy for India on Fabian social-democratic lines. Obafemi Awolowo who later became the premier of Nigeria's defunct Western Region was also a Fabian member in the late 1940s. It was the Fabian ideology that Awolowo used to run the Western Region but was prevented from using it on a national level in Nigeria. It is a little-known fact that the founder of Pakistan, Barrister Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was an avid member of the Fabian Society in the early 1930s. Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of Singapore, stated in his memoirs that his initial political philosophy was strongly influenced by the Fabian Society. However, he later altered his views, believing the Fabian ideal of socialism to be impractical.

Among many current and former Fabian academics are the late political scientist Bernard Crick, the late economists Thomas Balogh and Nicholas Kaldor and the sociologist Peter Townsend.

Legacy

Through the course of the 20th century the group has always been influential in Labour Party circles, with members including Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Anthony Crosland, Richard Crossman, Tony Benn, Harold Wilson and more recently Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The late Ben Pimlott served as its Chairman in the 1990s. (A Pimlott Prize for Political Writing was organised in his memory by the Fabian Society and The Guardian in 2005 and continues annually). The Society is affiliated to the Party as a socialist society. In recent years the Young Fabian group, founded in 1960, has become an important networking and discussion organisation for younger (under 31) Labour Party activists and played a role in the 1994 election of Tony Blair as Labour Leader. Following a period of inactivity, the Scottish Young Fabians were reformed in 2005.

The society's 2004 annual report showed that there were 5,810 individual members (down 70 from the previous year), of whom 1,010 were Young Fabians and 294 institutional subscribers, of which 31 were Constituency Labour Parties, co-operative societies, or trade unions, 190 were libraries, 58 corporate and 15 other—making 6,104 members in total. The society's net assets were £86,057, its total income £486,456 and its total expenditure £475,425. There was an overall surplus for the year of £1,031.

On 21 April 2009 the Society's website stated that it had 6,286 members: "Fabian national membership now stands at a 35 year high: it is over 20% higher than when the Labour Party came to office in May 1997. It is now double what it was when Clement Attlee left office in 1951."

The latest edition of the Dictionary of National Biography (a reference work listing details of famous or significant Britons throughout history) includes 174 Fabians. Four Fabians, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Graham Wallas and George Bernard Shaw founded the London School of Economics with the money left to the Fabian Society by Henry Hutchinson. Supposedly the decision was made at a breakfast party on 4 August 1894. The founders are depicted in the Fabian Window[5] designed by George Bernard Shaw. The window was stolen in 1978 and reappeared at Sotheby's in 2005. It was restored to display in the Shaw Library at the London School of Economics in 2006 at a ceremony over which Tony Blair presided.[6]

Young Fabians

Members aged under 31 years of age are also members of the Young Fabians. This group has its own elected Chair and executive and organizes conferences and events. It also publishes the quarterly magazine Anticipations. The Scottish Young Fabians, a Scottish branch of the group, reformed in 2005.

Influence on Labour government

Since Labour came to office in 1997, the Fabian Society has been a forum for New Labour ideas and for critical approaches from across the party. The most significant Fabian contribution to Labour's policy agenda in government was Ed Balls' 1992 pamphlet, advocating Bank of England independence. Balls had been a Financial Times journalist when he wrote this Fabian pamphlet, before going to work for Gordon Brown. BBC Business Editor Robert Peston, in his book Brown's Britain, calls this an "essential tract" and concludes that Balls "deserves as much credit – probably more – than anyone else for the creation of the modern Bank of England";[7] William Keegan offers a similar analysis of Balls' Fabian pamphlet in his book on Labour's economic policy,[8] which traces in detail the path leading up to this dramatic policy change after Labour's first week in office.

The Fabian Society Tax Commission of 2000 was widely credited[9] with influencing the Labour government's policy and political strategy for its one significant public tax increase: the National Insurance rise to raise £8 billion for National Health Service spending. (The Fabian Commission had in fact called for a directly hypothecated "NHS tax"[10] to cover the full cost of NHS spending, arguing that linking taxation more directly to spending was essential to make tax rise publicly acceptable. The 2001 National Insurance rise was not formally hypothecated, but the government committed itself to using the additional funds for health spending.) Several other recommendations, including a new top rate of income tax, were to the left of government policy and not accepted, though this comprehensive review of UK taxation was influential in economic policy and political circles.[11]

Criticism

Leon Trotsky, a Bolshevik and an influential 20th century revolutionary socialist and former Red Army General, wrote that Fabianism was an attempt to save capitalism from the working class. He wrote that "throughout the whole history of the British Labour movement there has been pressure by the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat through the agency of radicals, intellectuals, drawing-room and church socialists and Owenites who reject the class struggle and advocate the principle of social solidarity, preach collaboration with the bourgeoisie, bridle, enfeeble and politically debase the proletariat".[12]

In the early 1900s some members advocated the ideal of a scientifically planned society and supported eugenics by way of sterilisation. In an article published in The Guardian on 14 February 2008, (following the apology offered by Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd to the "stolen generations") Geoffrey Robertson criticised Fabian socialists for providing the intellectual justification for the eugenics policy that led to the stolen generations scandal.[13]

John Taylor Gatto, a prominent education critic, credits Fabians with much of the constructions that caused the coming into force of the modern conception of forced schooling, and its undercurrent of socialization into prescribed classes as a main function. Gatto puts it thusly: "Even though meritocracy is their reliable cover, social stratification was always the Fabian’s real trump suit.[...]To realize the tremendous task Fabians originally assigned themselves (a significant part of which was given to schooling to perform), we need to reflect again on Darwin’s shattering books, The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), each arguing in its own way that far from being blank slates, children are written upon indelibly by their race of origin, some 'favored' in Darwin’s language, some not. A powerful public relations initiative of recent years has attempted to separate Darwin from 'social Darwinism,' but it cannot be done because Darwin himself is the prototypical social Darwinist. Both books taken together issued a license for liberal upper classes to justify forced schooling. From an evolutionary perspective, schools are the indoctrination phase of a gigantic breeding experiment. Working-class fantasies of 'self-improvement' were dismissed from the start as sentimentality that evolutionary theory had no place for.".[14]

Apologia towards Stalinism

In The Broken Compass, Peter Hitchens identifies the influence of Fabianism as one of the contributing factors to what he sees as the current malaise in British politics, and also describes in detail in the book elements within the 20th century Fabian Society adopting an apologist stance towards some of the most egregious elements of Stalinist Russia.[15]

See also

  • Fabian strategy
  • Gradualism
  • Keir Hardie
  • Labour Research Department           
  • List of UK think tanks
  • Reformism
  • Young Fabians
  • Journals:
    • New Statesman
    • The New Age

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Pease, Edward (1916). A History of the Fabian Society. New York: E.P. DUTTON & COMPANY. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13715/13715.txt. 
  2. ↑ Pease, 1916
  3. ↑ Fabian Society
  4. ↑ Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought 1895-1914 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960), p. 71, p. 73.
  5. ↑ Press release, "A piece of Fabian history unveiled at LSE," London School of Economics & Political Science Archives [1] Last accessed 23 February 2007
  6. ↑ Andrew Walker, "Wit, wisdom and windows", BBC News [2] Last accessed 23 February 2007
  7. ↑ [quoted here; http://www.afsp.msh-paris.fr/archives/congreslyon2005/communications/tr4/wickham.pdf]
  8. ↑ Observer review: The Prudence of Mr Gordon Brown by William Keegan | By genre | guardian.co.uk Books
  9. ↑ Honesty turns out to be the best policy | News | The Observer
  10. ↑ BBC News | UK POLITICS | Think tank calls for NHS tax
  11. ↑ In defence of earmarked taxes - FT 07/12/00
  12. ↑ Writings on Britain, Volume 2, New Park, London 1974, p. 48
  13. ↑ We should say sorry too
  14. ↑ [3]
  15. ↑ Hitchens, Peter (2009). The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way. Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. ISBN 1847064051.  – see conclusion, 'The Broken Compass'

Bibliography

External links