FROM 1875 TO 1914

I. ENGLISH DEVELOPMENTS and the SPIRIT Of fABIANISM

THERE is some symbolic significance in these two dates.

1875 saw the birth of the first purely socialist party that was powerful enough to count as a factor in politics.

This momentous event came to pass through the merger of the two German groups—Lassalle’s group and another founded by Bebel and Liebknecht in 1869—into the Social Democratic Party which, though at the time (Gotha program) it made considerable concessions to Lassalle’s creed, 1 eventually embraced Marxism (Erfurt program, 1891) and steadily fought its way to the proud position it held in 1914 when, like all socialist parties, it met the crisis of its fate. 2 Before commenting on the astounding development that brought a Marxist party, without any compromise involving sacrifice of principle, within sight of parliamentary leadership, we shall glance at the course of events in other countries and first at the English socialism of that period which on the surface offers so striking and instructive a contrast to it. Below the surface, there are of course substantially similar social processes and, as parts of them, substantially similar labor movements. The differences between the English and the German cases as to tone, ideology and tactics are easily explained. Ever since the Owenite Grand National Consolidated Trade Union had broken down in 1834 or since chartism had ebbed away, the English labor movement had ceased to elicit any determined hostility. Some of its economic aims were espoused by the liberal and others by the conservative party. 3 The trade union acts of 1871, 1875 and 1876, for instance, were passed without anything that could have stung labor into militancy. Moreover, the battle for

enfranchisement was fought out by non-socialist groups, the masses not having to do much except cheering and booing. In all this, the superior quality of the rank and file of English labor stands out well. So does the superior quality of English political society; after having proved itself able to avoid an analogon to the French Revolution and to eliminate the dangers threatening from dear bread, it then continued to know how to manage social situations of increasing difficulty and how to surrender with some grace—witness the Trades Disputes Act of 1906. 4 In consequence, the English proletariat took longer in becoming “class- conscious” or in getting to the landmark at which Keir Hardie was able to organize the Independent Labour Party (1893). But the rise of the New Unionism 5 eventually heralded a state of things that, barring verbalization, did not differ essentially from the German one. The nature and extent of such difference as there was will stand out most clearly if for a moment we look at the group whose aims and methods express it to perfection, the Fabian Society. Marxists will smile contemptuously at what to them must seem to be a gross exaggeration of the importance of a small group of intellectuals which never wished to be anything else. In reality, the Fabians in England, or the attitudes they embodied, were just as important as were the Marxists in Germany. The Fabians emerged in 1883, and remained for the whole of our period

a small group of bourgeois intellectuals. 6 They hailed from Bentham and Mill and carried on their tradition. They entertained the same generous hopes for humanity as the philosophical radicals had before them. They went forth to work for rational reconstruction and improvement in the same spirit of practical progressivism.

They were careful about their facts which some of them took no end of trouble to collect by means of extensive research, and critical of arguments and measures. But they were quite uncritical as to the fundamentals, cultural and economic, of their aims. These they took for granted which is only another way of saying that, like good Englishmen, they took themselves for granted. They were unable to see the difference between a slum and the House of Lords. Why both of these were obviously “bad things,” that’s common sense, is it not? And greater economic equality or self-government in India or trade unions or free trade were no less obviously “good things,” who could doubt it? All the thinking that was necessary was on how to clean up the bad things and on how to secure the good things; everything else was irritating futility. Single-minded devotion to public service was as much in evidence in all this as was intolerance of other views about individual and national values—in its way quite as pronounced as was that of the Marxists—and an element of petty-bourgeois resentment against everything aristocratic, including beauty. At first there was nothing behind the Fabians. They set out to persuade whoever would, listen. They lectured to working-class and to bourgeois crowds. They pamphleteered ably and extensively.

They recommended or fought particular policies, plans and bills. The most important of all their avenues to influence however was their contact with individual “keymen,” or rather with individuals in the entourage of political, industrial and labor leaders. Their country and their own social and political location in their country offered a unique opportunity for establishing and exploiting such contacts. English political society does not always accept outsiders’ advice but, much more than any other society, it is ready to listen to it.

Some of the Fabians were not simply outsiders. A few were able to avail themselves of connections formed in Oxford and Cambridge students’ unions and common rooms. They were not living, morally speaking, on another planet. Most of them were not straight enemies of the established order. All of them stressed willingness to cooperate much more than hostility. They were not out to found a party and greatly disliked the phraseology of class war and revolution.

Whenever possible they preferred making themselves useful to making themselves a nuisance. And they had something to offer to the parliamentarian or administrator who often welcomed suggestions as to what should be done and how to do it.

A modern cabinet minister can in general find within the walls of his ministry most of the information and suggestions he needs. In particular, he can never suffer from lack of statistics. That was not so in the eighties and nineties. With rare exceptions, civil servants of all ranks knew their routine and little else. Outside of the lines of established policies the parliamentarian in office, still more the parliamentarian out of office, was often hard up for facts and ideas especially in the field of the “new” social problems. A group that had them in stock and was always willing to serve them up, neatly arranged and ready for use from the treasury or any other bench, was sure to have entrée, especially by the backdoor. The civil service accepted this. And not only that: being to a considerable extent in sympathy with at least the immediate aims of the Fabians, it allowed itself to be educated by them. The Fabians in turn also accepted this role of unofficial public servants. In fact, it suited them perfectly. They were not personally ambitious. They liked to serve behind the scene. Action through the bureaucracy whose growth in numbers and in power they foresaw and approved fitted in very well with the general scheme of their democratic state socialism. But how—so Marx would have asked and so the little group of English Marxists (Hyndman’s Democratic Federation, born in 1881) actually did ask—could that kind of achievement ever amount to anything if, indeed, it did not amount to conspiracy with the political exponents of the bourgeois interests? How could it be called socialist at all and, if so, was this not another edition of Utopian socialism (in the Marxist sense defined above)? It is easy to visualize how perfectly nauseating Fabians and Marxists must have been to each other and how heartily they must have despised each other’s illusions, though it was the practice of the Fabians to avoid the discussions of fundamental principles and tactics in which Marxists delighted and to bear with the latter in an attitude of slightly patronizing sympathy. Yet for the detached observer there is no difficulty in answering these questions.

Socialist endeavor of the Fabian type would not have amounted to anything at any other time. But it did amount to much during the three decades preceding 1914, because things and souls were ready for that kind of message and neither for a less nor for a more radical one. Formulation and organization of existing opinion were all that was needed in order to turn possibilities into articulate policy, and this “organizing formulation” the Fabians provided in a most work-manlike manner. They were reformers. The spirit of the times made socialists of them. They were genuine socialists because they aimed at helping in a fundamental reconstruction of society which in the end was to make economic care a public affair. They were voluntarist socialists and therefore they would at any earlier stage have come within the Marxian concept of utopists. But as it was, they had their bearings waiting for them so that the implications of that concept did not fit their case. From their standpoint it would have been nothing short of madness to rouse the bourgeois quarry into awareness of danger by talking about revolutions and class wars. The awakening of class consciousness was precisely what they wanted to avoid, at least at first, since it would have rendered impossible the peaceful but effective spread of their principles throughout the political and administrative organs of bourgeois society. When things had sufficiently matured, they did not hesitate to help the Independent Labour party into existence, to cooperate with (and on) the Labour Representation Committee of 1900, to start the trade unions on their political career, to shape the course of the Progressive party in the London County Council, to preach first municipal and then general socialism—and, eventually, the virtues of the soviet system. No doubt there is a side to all this which it would be easy to make the subject of adverse comment. But, after all, if they never issued a resounding declaration of war more Marxiano and never told the quarry exactly what they were going to do to it, they also never undertook to protect it. Another criticism that might be leveled against the Fabians from the opposite standpoint, viz., that their modus procedendi courted the danger of getting stuck in the outlying defenses of the capitalist system and that it might never lead to the grand pitched battle, fails to take account of their peculiar attitude. On their behalf it can be replied that if, par l’impossible, their attack on the capitalist system succeeded in reforming it sufficiently without killing it, why, that would only be a matter for congratulation. And as to the pitched battle, they answered their revolutionary critics in advance by adopting, with singular felicity, the name of the Roman general who, for all his circumspection, did more than any of his impetuous predecessors had done toward driving Hannibal from Italy.

Thus, though it might be said with truth that, in the matter of class war as in others, Fabianism is the very opposite of Marxism, it might also be held that the Fabians were in a sense better Marxists than Marx was himself. To concentrate on the problems that are within practical politics, to move in step with the evolution of things social, and to let the ultimate goal take care of itself is really more in accord with Marx’s fundamental doctrine than the revolutionary ideology he himself grafted upon it. To have no illusions about an imminent catastrophe of capitalism, to realize that socialization is a slow From 1875 to 1914 325 process which tends to transform the attitudes of all classes of society, even spells superiority in fundamental doctrine.