Fabian Socialism

The Fabian Society, created in 1884, was a British group of socialist intellectuals that developed the model of socialist politics and governance known ever since as Fabian socialism. This model appropriated aspects of orthodox Marxism but denied the doctrines of immiseration and inevitable capitalist collapse. Instead the Fabians supposed that it would be possible to take over the existing state, to transform it through intellectual and bureaucratic agencies, and to use its powers to gradually usher in a cooperative socioeconomic and political system. At the height of their influence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Fabians opted for working inside the British Labour Party, and they managed to conquer that party's decision-making apparatuses by the time of World War I. In later years, the Fabian Society acted chiefly as a policy think tank that analyzed current policy and social trends, disseminated its theories, and pushed the Labour Party toward goals it had chosen.

The Fabian Society's origins lay in a small discussion group called the Fellowship of the New Life. The middle-class intellectuals and ethicists who formed this late-19th-century group in London wanted to inspire progressive social change by their own example of altruistic ethical living. Some of the group's members wanted to branch out into more proactive political activities, as well, and they set up the parallel Fabian Society for this purpose. Named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius, famous for his strategy of delaying battle until the most advantageous moment imaginable, the group engaged in small-group study of Marxian and philosophical writings. Fairly early, its members concluded that they were out of sympathy with orthodox Marxism and its chief late 19th-century practitioners in Britain, the highly doctrinaire Social Democratic Federation.

Of its early activists, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and Graham Wallas were the most important in formulating Fabian doctrine. All were middle-class intellectuals impelled by a clearly non-Marxian, pragmatic, and ethically inspired vision of gradual social progress. Graham Wallas, sometime professor of political science at the London School of Economics, was typical of their approach when he insisted on replacing the doctrinaire Marxian belief in an eventual, catastrophic revolution with a gradualist, peaceful, and democratic, step-by-step methodology of reforming existing societies. Most of the early Fabians thought that it would be possible to create a cooperative and just socioeconomic system simply by taking over the state and gradually reforming it. Later called (in Sidney Webb's famous phrase) the “inevitability of gradualness,” this core Fabian notion proved influential far beyond the British context in which it was first set out after it was picked up by American progressives and Revisionist socialists in continental Europe.

In Tract 41 of the 1889 Fabian Essays, the novelist George Bernard Shaw sketched the other key to [Page 542]the Fabian approach—permeation. His presuppositional starting point was the low moral and political consciousness of the bulk of the population, from which Shaw concluded that progressive social change could not come through a mass political movement. It was better for a small group of devoted and erudite intellectuals and experts (such as the Fabian Society) to start boring from within existing political parties, to gradually take over these parties and make them and the state's bureaucracy the group's instruments. Central to this Fabian notion was the assumption that as “scientific” investigators of social reality, Fabian Society members possessed incontrovertible and superior knowledge about how best to arrange economic and social governance. This highly elitist doctrine was later elaborated by Sidney Webb in his 1937 Soviet Communism—A New Civilization, which controversially celebrated the communists' central planning as the epitome of expert power.

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