The Fabian Tradition

By DAVID MARQUAND

The Fabian Society, amid the jeers of the catastrophists, turned its back on the barricades and made up its mind to turn heroic defeat into prosaic success. . . . These tasks we have accom- plished, to the great disgust of our more romantic comrades. Nobody now conceives Socialism

as a destructive insurrection ending, if successful, in millennial absurdities. , —Bernard Shaw, preface to Fabian Essays, 1908 edition.

When the greatest Socialist of that day, William Morris, told the workers that there was no hope for them save in revolution, we said that if that were true then there was no hope at all for them. . . . It is not so certain today as it seemed in the eighties that Morris was not right.

—Bernard Shaw, preface to Fabian Essays, 1930 edition.

The apparently predestined curve of capitalist development has abruptly turned upwards again. The major eapitalisms have unmistakably taken on a new lease of life. True they have had to undergo considerable changes in their social and economic structures to stage this revival. But it has been found that the job can apparently be done by means ot measures which, relative

to revolution, arc very mild. —John Strachey, The Strangled .Cry, 1960.

THESE three quotations can be used to chart the course of the most powerful stream of British Socialist thought in this century. What they show most clearly is that in the fifty-odd years since Shaw wrote the first of them, that stream has taken tine sharp detour and then returned to its original direction. For the early Fabians, as for the pioneers of the Independent Labour Party, revolution was a form of political infantilism which could achieve nothing of value. The high road to Socialism lay through Parliament, and, deviations towards the 'millen- nial absurdities' of the catastrophists could lead only to sanguinary and inglorious violence in which the Socialists themselves would certainly be defeated. Revolution was objectionable, not only because of the force needed to bring it about (Shaw saw nothing wrong in shooting, he wrote, provided the Fabian was 'at the State end of the gun'), but because it was futile and unnecessary.

This complacent faith in the stability of late- Victorian capitalism had already started to crumble by the time Shaw wrote his preface to the 1930 reprint of the Fabian Essays. In the following decade it crumbled still further. The 'inevitability of gradualness' ceased to be a boast and became a sneer; its place as a slogan was taken by 'the inevitability of catastrophe.' Revo- lutionary Socialism remained millennial, but now it was the constitulionalists who seemed absurd. Fabian gradualism had assumed that capitalist' politicians could be manceuvred into Socialism, , almost without realising what was happening: in his 1908 preface Shaw had written of the Fabians providing a parliamentary programme for 'a Prime Minister converted to Socialism as Peel was converted to Free Trade.' The fall of the Labour Government in 1931 suggested thai, on the contrary, it was more probable that Socialist politicians would be manceuvred into abandoning their Socialism.

At the same time, the great depression sug- gested that Marx's economic predictions were right after all, while the rise of fascism sug- gested that his political predictions were coming true in an even more unpleasant fashion than he had envisaged. In his 1908 preface Shaw had warned that the unsuccessful revolutionist 'may expect calumny, perjury, cruelty, judicial and military massacre without mercy.' But he had assumed that these disasters would befall only the unsuccessful revolutionist: at worst the Fabian gradualist could expect nothing more severe than bad reporting in the press. In the Thirties, by contrast, there was good reason to fear that Shaw's catalogue of tribulations would be suffered by all unsuccessful Socialists, whether revolutionary or not. , Now, of course, the wheel has come full circle. The post-war generation has been as un- charitable to the Socialists of the Thirties as the Socialists of the Thirties were to the early Fabians. Gradualism has come back into favour, and the ghost of Sidney Webb walks again in the pages of Anthony Crosland. Keynes has retrospectively vindicated the Fabians' faith in the stability of capitalism, and the shadow of Stalin has made the revolutionary alternative seem even more unattractive to us than it did to them. As Mr. Strachey points out in his long essay on Koestler, Orwell, Chambers and Paster- nak (now republished as the main essay in The Strangled Cry*, the Communists of the Thirties have been proved wrong on two counts. Capi- talism has not collapsed, and the Soviet Union is not a Socialist State. Communist methods have worked, but they have produced only a society no better than, and not even very different from, the mature industrial societies of the West. 'The means,' as Mr. Strachey puts it 'have been terrible, the results commonplace.'

Yet there is an important difference between the gradualism of the early Fabians and that of today—a difference which 'has not yet been adequately explored in Socialist thinking. The early Fabians disagreed with the Marxists about the way in which Socialism would come. They * THE STRANGEED CRY. By John Strachey. (Bodlcy Head, 21s.) did not dispute that its coming was inevitab!e. For them, as for the Marxists, history' pointed in only one direction. Of the original essayists only Hubert Bland seems to have doubted that progress would continue to be as smooth in the future as it had been in the past, and 'even he ended his essay with a peroration quoting: 'It's coming yet for a' that.'

This part, of the Fabian creed is tenable no longer. The experience of the last fifteen years has shown that gradualist methods may work, but it has certainly not shown that they are bound to work. Capitalism has been modified out of all recognition, but it is absurd to claim that it has been transformed. The Welfare States of the West are better societies to live in than their Predecessors of fifty 'years ago; but they are not Socialist societies by any definition that would have been understood by the Socialist pioneers. Even by Shaw's remarkably bloodless definition of 1889 ('the transfer of rent and in- terest to the State, not in one lump sum but in instalments), Social Democracy is still a long way off.

Indeed, the position' for a Socialist is even worse than that. Before Keynes, Socialists could argue with some plausibility that they alone knew how to keep industrial civilisation going, that Socialism was the only alternative to cata- strophe. This argument is no longer plausible. Some Socialists, it is true, have derived a new version of the 'contradictions of capitalism' from the writings of Professor Galbraith. But all that Galbraith has done is to show that capitalism is wasteful, ugly and unjust: he has not shown that it is unworkable. The fact is that capitalism works all too well. Its injustices, though morally repugnant, have not proved sufficiently glaring to lead democratic electorates to demand their removal; and there is no solid evidence to sug- gest that such a demand is bound to be made in future. We know now that Keynes has buried the catastrophic Socialists; and there is a strong possibility that he may have buried the gradu- alists as well.

In these circumstances, the Socialist is forced back on morality. He can no longer say that Socialism must come, but only that it should come. But once political arguments are con- ducted on this plane, a whole new dimension of politics may be opened up. After all, there would be nothing new in such a process. The area covered by political discussion has widened steadily for the last hundred years. In the nine- teenth .century politics was about tariffs and foreign' policy : today half the debates in the House of Commons-arc on subjects which the Victorians would have considered to be non- political. There is no reason why this process should not continue. Mr. Raymond Williams, to take the best-known example, has suggested a number of ways in which the area of political discussion may be widened in future. There are signs in The Strang. Cry that Mr. Strachey Is feeling his way in a similar direction.

The theme of the main essay in the book is what Mr. Strachey calls 'the literature of reac- tion.' Koestler, Chambers and Pasternak, he believes,, have reacted not only against the brutality of Stalinist Communism, but against the CoMmunist assertion that society can be subject to control by human reason. This, for Strachey, is a kind of treachery; and if seems to me that his judgment on it is exactly right: The creativeness of personal relations, of esthetics or of religious experience, is what matters today wherever the economic problem is on the way to solution. . . . In so far as the literature of reaction has been a protest, however frenzied, against a reckless failure to take all that into account, it has been justified. If both in intention and in effect it had stopped there, there would be little in it to criticise. But inevitably it has not stopped there; it has sometimes crossed, intentionally or uninten- tionally, a critical line. On one side of that line are those who point to the unsolved mysteries of social life in order the better to approach their comprehension. On the other side are those who point to the mysteries in order to dissuade us from even attempting to apply reason to society. That is the test. Those who pass this line have deserted, whether they know it or intend it . . . to the enemies of civilised life.

It is in this general direction, it seems to me, that the future of Socialism now lies.