Fabian Essays in Socialism

BY G. BERNARD SHAW SIDNEY WEBB WILLIAM CLARKE SYDNEY OLIVIER ANNIE BESANT GRAHAM WALLAS AND HUBERT BLAND
EDITED BY G. BERNARD SHAW
With a new preface for this edition by Mr. Shaw
BOSTON THE BALL PUBLISHING CO. 1911
Copyright, 1908 By George Bernard Shaw
Since 1889 the Socialist movement has been completely transformed throughout Europe; and the result of the transformation may fairly be described as Fabian Socialism. In the eighteen-eighties, when Socialism revived in England for the first time since the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, it was not at first realized that what had really been suppressed for good and all was the romantic revolutionary Liberalism and Radicalism of 1848, to which the Socialists had attached themselves as a matter of course, partly because they were themselves romantic and revolutionary, and partly because both Liberals and Socialists had a common object in Democracy.
Besides this common object the two had a common conception of method in revolution. They were both catastrophists. Liberalism had conquered autocracy and bureaucracy by that method in England and France, and then left industry to make what it could of the new political conditions by the unregulated action of competition between individuals. Briefly, the Liberal plan was to cut off the King’s head, and leave the rest to Nature, which was supposed to gravitate towards economic harmonies when not restrained by tyrannical governments. The Socialists were very far ahead of the Liberals in their appreciation of the preponderant importance of industry, even going so far as to maintain, with Buckle and Marx, that all social institutions whatever were imposed by economic conditions, and that there was fundamentally only one tyranny: the tyranny of Capital. Yet even the Socialists had so far formed their political habits in the Liberal school that they were quite disposed to believe that if you cut off the head of King Capital, you might expect to see things come right more or less spontaneously.