Fabian Society

WHILE WORKING-CLASS organizations in western Europe, Great Britain, and North America increasingly turned to Marxism in response to growing poverty caused by urbanization and industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, middle-class reformers focused on legislation to achieve social reform. This was most evident in the establishment of the Fabian Society as a non-Marxist strand of British socialism.

Emphasizing “gradualism” and state-sponsored reform, Fabianism reflected the social values of the predominantly middle-class intelligentsia that had been instrumental in its founding. Established in 1884, the Fabian Society included prominent Victorian writers and intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw, Annie Besant, Edward Carpenter, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and H.G. Wells, along with rising political figures such as Ramsay MacDonald.

With its initial meetings held in the drawing rooms of its affluent members, the Fabian Society would struggle to overcome its characterization as an “intellectual debating club.” Although not entirely successful in their efforts to reach the working class, the Fabians had a significant influence on the development of reformist socialism throughout the English-speaking world through their publication of pamphlets, essays, and books on socialism. The Fabians reached out to the working class and urban poor through the publication of penny tracts such as Why Are the Many Poor? (1884) which argued that capitalism lay at the root of industrial poverty without providing a concrete agenda for social reform. Two years later What Socialism Is (1886), the fourth Fabian penny tract, was presented as a debate between anarchist and collectivist socialist ideals.

While this failure to present a coherent political and social vision reflected the ongoing intellectual debate within the Fabian Society, this vacillation also contributed to the Fabians’ difficulty in building a broad-based organization. Throughout the late 19th century, Fabians called for the same broad reforms that were advocated by other middle-class reformers. These included the provision of compulsory free education, the redistribution of unused land to the urban poor, tax reforms that targeted “unearned incomes,” the nationalization (with financial compensation) of key industries in transportation and the resource sector, and the municipalization of essential services such as water supply, gas, and public transportation. This focus on “municipal socialism” was advanced in Fabian pamphlets [Page 338]such as Socialism in England (1890) and it became a mainstay of socialist reform throughout the Western world. Perhaps the most significant of these early works was Sidney Webb's Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), which facilitated the expansion of Fabianism into an international movement with the establishment of Fabian Societies in North America, India, Australia, and New Zealand.

Fabians believed that state-sponsored reform was necessary for the creation of a just society and, as with other Victorian reformers, they perceived this transition not as the result of revolution but as the logical result of continued social advancement. Specifically, Fabians saw this change as occurring through the expansion of existing state functions and the gradual adoption by government of an increasingly influential role in regulation and the provision of social services.

In this sense, the Fabian vision of the future closely paralleled the utopian vision advanced by Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward (1888), and this convergence undoubtedly contributed to the growing popularity of Fabian socialism into the 1890s. Into the 20th century Fabian support was also encouraged through the efforts of popular novelist H.G. Wells, whose The Misery of Boots was published as a Fabian tract in 1905. Gauging their popularity is difficult as local clubs were formed autonomously and full membership rolls are lacking; however, the true influence of Fabianism should not be judged according to membership but through the wider political and social influence of their ideas.

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