The Fabulous Fabians

 “This Little Band of Prophets:  The British Fabians” by Anne Fremantle, 1959

Unlike the swarmy and gutless liberal 'intellectuals' of the U.S., the British Fabians actually opposed capitalism, but in their own way.  This is a reflection of the British Labour movement itself, which was always to the left of the conservative U.S. one.  This movement created its own political party, nationalized the railroads, mines and other entities, established socialized medicine and unionized a broad swath of the working-class.  None of this happened in the U.S. even in the heroic days of the 1930s – a period some U.S. leftists can't stop wetting their pants about. The U.S. Labor movement has failed so far because it has not embraced socialism in any form. What happened in the U.K. is much cheerier, at least in the past.

The most well-known Fabians, who were actually not prophets, were:  Sidney & Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Harald Laski, Clement Atlee and others not so well known.  Atlee led a Labour government that was voted in overwhelmingly against the celebrated colonialist reactionary Winston Churchill in 1945, with 41 Fabians elected to office.  The organization started in the late 1880s as a club of young, clever, socialist-minded intellectuals, first led by Shaw.  It was a left version of the arch culturalist Algonquin Club of the U.S..  Absorbing the revolutionary defeats of 1848 and 1871, along with the defeat of the English Chartists, they turned to a gradualist, middle-class style of 'socialism.' They were inspired by Owen, J.S. Mill, utilitarianism and Christian socialism.  As Fremantle puts it, they became the intellectual founders of the welfare-state U.K.  Marx called them “the capitalists' last ditch” - putting a human-face to the profiteering pig.

The Fabians made their original stand against Marxism, revolutionary socialism and British groups like the Socialist League, which Fremantle gleefully repeats.  As she put it, this allowed them entry into the halls of power, work with bourgeois liberals and much influence in the Labour Party.  This is similar to the U.S. where left-liberals enjoy prestige by not directly threatening the system.  The Fabians were nice to the anarchists, but found they could not work with them.  Nor would they agree to an early fusion of the 3 main socialist groups in the U.K., as two were Marxist or to their left.  This was their pattern from then on, as they refused to form a party but considered themselves an 'educational' institution. Their angle was practical and active ‘evolutionary’ socialist guidance within a capitalist context.  Their method - now called entryism - was to 'permeate' various organizations and Parties to get their policies enacted. They based their theory on 'rent' - like Yanis Varoufakis' 'techno-feudalism' or Michael Hudson's 'rent economy' - thinking that rents paid to property owners was the main site of capitalism, not the class struggle and the exploitation of labor through ownership of the means of production.

How has this pig prospered?  Fremantle in 1959 is giddy at the great 1945 success without knowing what was to come in British history – Margaret Thatcher, privatization of rail, mining and more; the smashing of the NUM miner's union, the middle-class and corporate deterioration of the Labour Party, the weakening of the NHS, the vast increase in inequality courtesy of the City and the ethno-nationalist poverty of Brexit.  It seems in the long game the Fabians – oddly named after a Roman general famous for delaying – are now history after a delay.  The course in the U.K. has proved that capital, which is more like the unkillable bad guy in every movie, cannot be fully humanized but instead always counter-attacks.  This should resonate with all kinds of reformers – pacifists, social-democrats, Stalinists, soft Maoists, Euro-Communists, left-liberals, cooperators, mixed economy fans, left Democrats, evolutionary socialists, Popular Frontists, clueless wonders and modern Fabians.  You cannot merely repeat the history of social-democratic successes in Europe, which are now being whittled away, as capitalism is changing.  Capital must be replaced and given the dire future, it has to be.  

William Morris, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Pytor Kropotkin, J. Ramsey McDonald and many others show up in the text. Beatrice Webb’s ‘maiden’ name was “Potter” – giving those little animals she wrote about a decidedly subversive stamp.  Fremantle names the three institutional forces that gave continued life to the Fabians over many, many years – The New Statesman, the Labour Party and the London School of Economics.  They were some of the first to call for a labor party after working with the Liberals. Some leading Fabians had positions in government offices, like the Colonial Office.  They wanted 'socialist civil servants' to populate the government using the latest scientific information.  Their position on international issues is variable.  They originally demanded home rule for Ireland but split on issues like the South African war and others.  Some leaders' 'internationalism' stopped at the British border. The book includes an incredibly detailed list of all Fabian articles, pamphlets, speeches, essays and research papers, along with an index of very short bios of everyone mentioned in the book, running to 22 pages.

This is a clever, quite British history, enjoyable to read, chatty and full of too many facts some of which might be useful or amusing to those who have not lost their sense of humor. It’s actually an intellectual history of types of British leftism and personalities.  Every member of the Fabians gets a description, even if relatively unknown, even if brief.  Fremantle fashions herself a Fabian, so this is her people.  The Fabians prided themselves on their quips, and this book is full of some catty comments and piercing observations.  Come read the story of the parlour pinks who helped conquer state power for a time, until the worm turned.

P.S. - John Oliver takes on post-Thatcher Tories in Little England and what they've done to Fabian Britain:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkAqwHiAR-g

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “News From Nowhere” (Morris); “The Making of the English Working Class” (Thompson, 5 reviews); “The Irish Literary Trail,” “The Peaky Blinders,” "Class Against Class," "Sherwood."  

And I bought it at May Day’s used/cutout section!

Red Frog / June 19, 2024