Fabian fables turn 100

Press, 15 February 1989, Page 20

Fabian fables turn 100

Forget the bicentenary of the French revolution this year. The British (and New Zealanders) have a much more exciting event to celebrate: the centenary of “Essays in Fabian Socialism,” the first manifesto of the Fabian Society, the intellectual wing of the Labour movement.

The founding Fabians insisted that the triumph of socialism was inevitable — indeed that it was already well advanced. Looking around them in 1889, they found that all the main political parties, however bourgeois their hue, were Unconsciously advancing the collectivist cause. As Sidney Webb put it, “The steady increase of government regulation of private enterprise, the growth of municipal administration, and the rapid shifting of the burden of taxation directly to rent and interest mark in treble lines the statesman’s unconscious abandonment of the old Individualism, and our irresistible glide into collectivist Socialism.” If shee were to read this passage, Mrs Thatcher might

The “Essays,” edited by George Bernard Shaw, were written by (among others) Sidney Webb (who drafted the British Labour Party’s 1918 constitution), Graham Wallas (who invented the phrase “the great society,” subsequently put to good use by Lyndon Johnson) and Annie Besant (who pioneered birth control). Even by the standards of cen-tury-old political pamphlets, they make curious reading today.

well give a vigorous nod. Her intellectual guru, Lord Joseph, made much the same point in the mid-1970s when he talked of the “ratchet effect” of socialism. But she would be surprised by the reasons the essayists gave for their impending triumph. Socialism would succeed, they thought, not because it was more humane than capitalism, but because it was more efficient. Capitalism was inefficient because it was anarchic: i.e., mar-ket-regulated. Socialism would be efficient becuse of planning — which meant regulation by intellectuals such as themselves. The increasing complexity of social organisation would call for more direction and co-ordination from above.

(Copyright — ’The Economist’—