[1234] Ibid.
[1235] In addition to the Fabian Essays, the principal publications containing an exposition of Fabian ideas are the Fabian Tracts, a collection containing a great number of pamphlets on various subjects; The History of Trade Unionism, by Mr. and Mrs. Webb; Industrial Democracy, particularly chaps. 1 and 2 of the third part, by the same authors; and, finally, Problems of Modern Industry (1898), a collection of lectures and articles, also by Mr. and Mrs. Webb.
[1236] Mr. and Mrs. Webb in their History of Trade Unionism reject “that confident sciolism and prejudice which has led generations of socialists to borrow from Adam Smith and the ‘classic’ economists the erroneous theory that labour is by itself the creator of value without going on to master that impregnable and more difficult law of economic rent which is the very corner-stone of collectivist economy.”
[1237] “The interest with which we are concerned must clearly be a definable quantity of produce.” (The National Dividend and its Distribution, in Problems of Modern Industry, p. 227. We are indebted to this article for the exposition which we have given of the Fabian doctrine.)
[1238] An exposition of the same theory is given in Tract No. 15, English Progress towards Social Democracy: “The individuals or classes who possess social power have at all times, consciously or unconsciously, made use of that power in such a way as to leave to the great majority of their fellows practically nothing beyond the means of subsistence according to the current local standard. The additional product, determined by the relative differences in productive efficiency of the different sites, soils, capitals, and forms of skill above the margin of cultivation, has gone to those exercising control over these valuable but scarce productive factors. This struggle to secure the surplus or ‘economic rent’ is the key to the confused history of European progress, and an underlying, unconscious motive of all revolutions.” Cf. also The Difficulties of Individualism, in Problems of Modern Industry, pp. 237-239.
[1239] Bernard Shaw in his Economic Basis of Socialism, published in the Fabian Essays, makes a very neat distinction between interest properly so called and economic rent.
[1240] Fabian Essays, p. 35.
[1241] Socialism True and False (Tract No. 51).
[1242] What Socialism is (Tract No. 13).
[1243] In his preface to Kurella’s German book, Sozialismus in England (1898), he mentions the fact that the English working class is divided into a number of corporations who are either jealous of or misunderstand one another, but have not what we may properly call a class consciousness (p. 10).