The Fabian Society () is a British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of social democracy and democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow. It is related to radicalism, a left-wing liberal tradition.
As one of the founding organisations of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, and as an important influence upon the Labour Party which grew from it, the Fabian Society has strongly influenced British politics. Members of the Fabian Society have included political leaders from other countries, such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Lee Kuan Yew, who adopted Fabian principles as part of their own political ideologies. The Fabian Society founded the London School of Economics in 1895.
Today, the society functions primarily as a think tank and is one of twenty socialist societies affiliated with the Labour Party. Similar societies exist in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Italy.
Organisational history
Establishment
The Fabian Society was founded on 4 January 1884 in London as an offshoot of a society founded a year earlier, called The Fellowship of the New Life, which had been a forebear of the British Ethical and humanist movements.Edward R. Pease, A History of the Fabian Society. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1916. Early Fellowship members included the visionary Victorian-era elite, among them the poets Edward Carpenter and John Davidson, the sexologist and eugenicist Havelock Ellis, and the early socialist Edward R. Pease. They wanted to transform society by setting an example of clean simplified living for others to follow. Some members also wanted to become politically involved to aid society's transformation; they set up a separate society, the Fabian Society. All members were free to attend both societies. The Fabian Society additionally advocated renewal of Western European Renaissance ideas and their promulgation throughout the world.
The Fellowship of the New Life was dissolved in 1899,Pease, 1916 but the Fabian Society grew to become a leading academic society in the United Kingdom in the Edwardian era. It was typified by the members of its vanguard Coefficients club. Public meetings of the Society were for many years held at Essex Hall, a popular location just off the Strand in Central London.
The Fabian Society was named—at the suggestion of Frank Podmore—in honour of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (nicknamed Cunctator, meaning the "Delayer"). His Fabian strategy sought gradual victory against the superior Carthaginian army under the renowned general Hannibal through persistence, harassment, and wearing the enemy down by attrition rather than pitched, climactic battles.
An explanatory note appearing on the title page of the group's first pamphlet declared:For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless.Quoted in McBriar, A.M., Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 1884–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966; p. 9.
According to the author Jon Perdue, "The logo of the Fabian Society, a tortoise, represented the group's predilection for a slow, imperceptible transition to socialism, while its coat of arms, a 'wolf in sheep's clothing', represented its preferred methodology for achieving its goal." The wolf in sheep's clothing symbolism was later abandoned, due to its obvious negative connotations. Vanesha Singh, former acting editorial officer at the Fabian Society stated "Though it hasn’t been used for many decades, the original coat of arms was intended to symbolise the society’s rejection of violent revolution in favour of cautious, evolutionary change. The wolf in sheep’s clothing was therefore a metaphor for gradually advancing socialism. Yet, many see it as proof that the Fabians are concealing a dark agenda and ‘deadly intentions’ whilst fronting as an ‘harmless institution’. As one website reads, it is “chillingly clear that the Fabian Society is a devious, subversive organisation".
Its nine founding members were Frank Podmore, Edward R. Pease, William Clarke, Hubert Bland, Percival Chubb, Frederick Keddell, Henry Hyde Champion, E. Nesbit and Rosamund Dale Owen. Havelock Ellis is sometimes also mentioned as a tenth founding member, although there is some question about this.
Organisational growth 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, Charles Marson, Sydney Olivier, Oliver Lodge, Ramsay MacDonald and Emmeline Pankhurst. Bertrand Russell briefly became a member, but resigned after he expressed his belief that the Society's principle of entente (in this case, between 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 studiesSee The Webbs on the Web bibliography of industrial Britain, including alternative co-operative economics that applied to ownership of capital as well as land.
Many Fabians participated in the formation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 and the group's constitution, written by Sidney Webb, borrowed heavily from the founding documents of the Fabian Society. At the meeting that founded the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, the Fabian Society claimed 861 members and sent one delegate.
The years 1903 to 1908 saw a growth in popular interest in the socialist idea in Britain, and the Fabian Society grew accordingly, trebling its membership to nearly 2,500 by the end of the period, half of whom were located in London.Kevin Morgan, Labour Legends and Russian Gold: Bolshevism and the British Left, Part 1. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2006; p. 63. In 1912 a student section was organised called the University Socialist Federation (USF) and by the outbreak of World War I in 1914 this contingent counted its own membership of more than 500.
The Fabian Women's Group was founded on 14th March 1908 to create a stronger link between women's suffrage and socialism. It operated until 1948. Letitia Fairfield was a member and spoke to Brian Harrison about joining the Group, and their lectures and discussions as part of the Suffrage Interviews project, titled Oral evidence on the suffragette and suffragist movements: the Brian Harrison interviews.
Early Fabian views The first Fabian Society pamphletsA full list of Fabian pamphlets is available at the Fabian Society Online Archive advocating tenets of social justice coincided with the zeitgeist of progressive reforms during the early 1900s. 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. Agnes Harben and Henry Devenish Harben were among Fabians advocating women's emancipation and supporting suffrage movements in Britain, and internationally.
The early Fabian Society’s advocacy for social reform was deeply intertwined with the contemporary eugenics movement, which was particularly popular among progressive intellectuals at the time. Rather than a peripheral interest, eugenics provided the 'scientific' basis for the early Fabian vision of a rationally planned society. Leading figures in the early Fabian Society such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells argued that a rationalised socialist state required the 'improvement of the human stock' to ensure social efficiency through the gradual elimination of undesirable elements through compulsory sterilisation and segregation. They were also influenced by the idea that the lowest echelons of society, sometimes termed the 'residuum', "had hereditary defects and would increasingly degenerate."
Sidney Webb wrote in The Difficulties of Individualism (1896) about the problem of the "breeding of degenerate hordes of a demoralized ‘residuum’ unfit for social life". Havelock Ellis, a founding member of the Fabian Society, was a vice-president of the Eugenics Society from 1909–12. He wrote in opposition to the provision of welfare to this 'residuum', since, in his view, the "superficially sympathetic man flings a coin to the beggar; the more deeply sympathetic man builds an almshouse for him so that he need no longer beg; but perhaps the most radically sympathetic of all is the man who arranges that the beggar shall not be born. So it is the question of breed, the production of fine individuals, the elevation of the ideal of quality in human production over that of mere quantity, begins to be seen, not merely as a noble idea in itself, but as the only method by which Socialism can be enabled to continue on its present path."
Fabian socialists were in favour of reforming the foreign policy of the British Empire as a conduit for internationalist reform and were in favour of a capitalist 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 classrooms ... that the future battles of the Empire for commercial prosperity are already being lost".Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought 1895–1914 (New York: Anchor, 1968), p. 63.
In 1900 the Society produced Fabianism and the Empire, the first statement of its views on foreign affairs, drafted by Bernard Shaw and incorporating the suggestions of 150 Fabian members. It was directed against the liberal individualism of those such as John Morley and Sir William Harcourt.Semmel, p. 61. It claimed that the classical liberal political economy was outdated, and that imperialism was the new stage of the international polity. The question was whether Britain would be the centre of a world empire or whether it would lose its colonies and end up as just two islands in the North Atlantic. It expressed support for Britain in the Boer War because small nations, such as the Boers, were anachronisms in the age of empires. Much of the work developing and organising the thinking behind a Fabian post-colonial position on the Empire was done by South African-born Rita Hinden between the 1940s–1960s.
In order to hold onto the Empire, the British needed to fully exploit the trade opportunities secured by war; maintain the British armed forces in a high state of readiness to defend the Empire; and create a citizen army to replace the professional army; the Factory Acts would be amended to extend to 21 the age for half-time employment, so that the thirty hours gained would be used in "a combination of physical exercises, technical education, education in civil citizenship ... and field training in the use of modern weapons".Semmel, p. 62.
The Fabians also favoured the nationalisation of land rent, believing that rents collected by landowners in respect of their land's value were unearned, an idea which drew heavily from the work of the American economist Henry George. George Bernard Shaw wrote "When I was thus swept into the great socialist revival of 1883, I found that 5/6 of those who were swept in with me had been converted by Henry George."
Second generation