Taking it gradually (1984)

From the April 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Fabian Society is a century old. As a matter of fact, the Fabians have always seemed old — a sort of intellectual remnant from the days when it was fashionable for well-intentioned people of affluence to proclaim the moral desirability of socialism. The Society derives its title from an old Roman General called Fabius Cunctator who believed that the way to win a battle is to defeat the enemy bit by bit. One hundred years after the Fabians came on the political scene the advance to socialism by means of gradualist legislation is so imperceptible that we can safely assume that the Fabian army is not even on the field of battle, let alone close to victory.

The men and women who formed the Fabian Society did not set out to abolish capitalism; their expressed purpose was to persuade the capitalists to act in line with humanitarian principles. So, when Sidney Webb announced his “conversion to socialism”, he explained what he meant by the term in a lecture to the Fabian Society delivered on 14 January. 1886:

I call myself a Socialist because I am desirous to remove from the capitalist the temptation to use his capital for his own exclusive ends.

“We must bring home to the monopolist the sense of his trusteeship” stated Webb in this lecture. Entrusting the minority capitalist class with a monopoly over the means of wealth production and distribution, the aim of Webb and his naive colleagues was to encourage the exploits of wage labour to invest their profits for the good of all. The idea of leaving nothing to trust by placing the productive machinery in the hands of all was never accepted.

Oozing with guilty moralism, the founding Fabians were anxious to bring home to the capitalists "a consciousness of the sin of affluence". It was for this purpose that the Fabian, J B Bright, formed the Ransom Society, which was intended to allow “members of the leisure class to redeem themselves” of the moral crime of privilege by “offering money and personal services . . . to the poor”. Poor old Arnold Toynbee felt so bothered by his affluence that he was impelled to deliver a confession to the working class:

We have neglected you . . .  we have wronged you; we have sinned against you grievously . . . : but if you will forgive us we will serve you . . . we will devote our lives to your service. . .

Similarly, Annie Besant, for whom “socialism” took the form of a religious ethic, wrote to J W Ashman on 13 March, 1887:

In sober truth, I love the poor — those rough, coarse people, who have paid their lives for our culture and refinement, and 1 feel that the devotion to them of my abilities cultivated at their cost is the mere base debt that I owe, for my class, to them. (Her emphasis.)

Some of the Fabians tried to make themselves feel better by giving up their wealth and living in poverty. For example, Edward Pease ceased stockbroking which he said was “immoral”, and became a cabinetmaker in Newcastle. Charlotte Wilson, who was married to a wealthy stockbroker, abandoned her comfortable life for a cottage in Hampstead (which was supposed to look like a rustic peasant dwelling) and devoted her energies to raising poultry.

Of course the Fabians, for all their intellectual pretensions, did not understand the nature of the capitalist system. George Bernard Shaw, in the 1930s who was to regard Stalin's Russian Empire as “socialism”, thought that capitalism did not need to be destroyed because it was about to collapse. Writing in the midst of the Great Depression, Shaw foresaw the self-destruction of capitalism:

Our profits are vanishing, our machinery is standing idle, our workmen are locked out. It pays now to stop the mills and fight and crush the unions when the men strike, no longer for an advance but against a reduction . . . The small capitalists are left stranded by the ebb; the big ones will follow the tide across the water and build their factories where steam power, water power, labour power and transport are now cheaper than in England . . .  As the British capitalists are shut up they will be replaced by villas; the manufacturing districts will become fashionable resorts of capitalists living on the interest of foreign investments; the farms and sheep runs will be cleared for deer forests . . .  a vast proletariat, beginning with a nucleus of those previously employed in the export trades, with their multiplying progeny, will be out of work permanently. (An Unsocial Socialist, pp.214-5. 1930 ed. First published in 1884.)

Like many others who then and since have predicted the collapse of capitalism, with the workers having historical transformation imposed upon them, Shaw’s prediction was quite wrong.

Without working class action based on socialist consciousness, there can be no social transformation. The Fabians, however, regarded majority consciousness as an impossibility and addressed their propaganda to the capitalists. This policy was known as permeation — the assumption being that if the educated and morally superior capitalists could be persuaded of the need to produce for use there would be no requirement for the “rough, coarse people" of Annie Besant’s fantasies to bother their uncultivated minds about establishing a new social order. Like all proposals to change society for the working class, Fabianism displayed a contempt for the potential of workers' intelligence.

The Fabian concept of “socialism" involved no more than state control over capital — state capitalism. Annie Besant explained what she thought socialism meant when she wrote:

The State has interfered with factories and workshops, to fix the hours of labour, to insist on sanitary arrangements, to control the employment of the young. (Why I Am A Socialist, 1886.)

She was clearly unaware that such legislation had been introduced by Lord John Russell's Whig government as early as the 1830s. Far from having anything to do with socialism, state interference in the running of production was simply a means of regulating the efficient robbery of the wage slave class.

In 1887 the Fabians advocated

. . .  a peaceful and expeditious path to Socialism, through such measures as Nationalisation of Railways. Municipaiisation of Ground Rents and of industries connected with local transit, and with supply of gas and water in the towns.

When the Labour Party was formed in 1906, the Fabians gave it their support. seeing it as the best vehicle for the enactment of their “gas and water socialism". Since then the Fabian demands for state capitalist reform have been met: the railways are nationalised and the local transport services are run by the municipal authorities — the statist notion of “socialism” has been tested and found to be no different from capitalism in private hands.

Since 1906 the Fabian Society has existed as an advisory body, trying to influence, the Labour Party to make humanitarian changes to capitalism. It has published hundreds of Fabian tracts, each packed from cover to cover with futile schemes for making the profit system decent. Their peak membership was in the 1940s, when it was felt that, with sufficient intellectual counselling, a Labour government would be able to eradicate the social evils of capitalism. Since then most people, including Labourites, have regarded the Fabians as rather dull and ineffective preachers of palliation, whose open advocacy of “gradualism” is something of an embarrassment after all the years of gradual failure. All sorts of people have been in the Fabian Society: Wilson, Callaghan, Kinnock, Benn, half of all current Labour MPs — even the founders of the SDP were members of the Society, demanding their right to remain until it was decided that only Labour Party reformists were allowed to be members. Even the Mayor of the self-proclaimed “Socialist Republic” of Islington is a card-carrying Fabian, and we must admit that the Town Hall revolutionaries of that borough do seem to have fallen somewhat under the influence of old Fabius. Writing about the Fabians in the Observer (11 March 1984). Roy Hattersley points out that

While the poor bloody infantry of the local Labour parties footslogged from door to door, the Fabians were providing their ideological bullets.

 With politicians like Hattersley as the ideological gunslingers, we are bound to ask who these bullets were aimed at — and who, in practice, they hit.

When the Socialist Party was formed the Fabians were dismissed with the sort of comments that a master chef might pass on someone struggling to open a can of baked beans. Eighty years later the Fabians are still in the business of moving elegant amendments to the Act of Class Monopoly. For socialists, the existence of these moralising do-nothings has been an obstacle to the urgent task which confronts us. It has not escaped our attention that the Latin word Cunctator has a specific definition: the delayer.

Steve Coleman

In The Raw (1991)

The Caught In The Act column from the December 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

IN THE RAW

Our readers will be relieved to learn that the Socialist Standard will not be contributing to the praise, criticism and analysis of the life, times and death of Robert Maxwell - at least not in the style to which we have, over the past few weeks, become accustomed.

Maxwell was - how many times have we read this? - larger than life, which in his ease means that he routinely behaved in an excessively outrageous way. That was the soil in which so many stories about him flourished - like the time when he abruptly sacked a man for smoking outside his office, paying him off at once in cash from his own pocket which both surprised and delighted the man because he wasn't employed by Maxwell anyway. Sacking people was one of Maxwell's things - according to SOGAT secretary Brenda Dean he fired some of that union’s members six times, usually round Xmas to emphasise the point.

He could behave in this way - and then be remembered as a lovable eccentric for it - because he was rich. Most people don't - and can't behave like that because they’re poor. Maxwell was capitalism in the raw, in the sense that he worked on the simple and unavoidable principle that under this social system to have money means to have power.

This raises an interesting question. Why was he a member of the Labour Party, which professes to stand, if not for socialism, at least for capitalism without its rougher edges? The only possible answer is that Maxwell thought the Labour style of running British capitalism was best for his profits; he would certainly not have joined them if he had thought Labour policies were harmful. And why did the Labour Party accept him? Clearly that had a lot to do with his control of a large media empire, particularly the Mirror Group Newspapers and all that implied. What are a few professed political principles worth, compared to support from the Daily Mirror?

Perhaps Maxwell was not so much cynical as crazy. But, confronted with this gross personification of a ruthless, oppressive, murderous social system, how do we assess the response to him? The responses of the media, of the sycophants who feared above all being fired by him, of the Labour leadership who grovelled in the hope of attracting some grubby votes? These too are examples of capitalism in the raw. It is not a pretty sight.

HEROES.

We all know who Neil Kinnock dislikes - Militant, those who remind him of his past as a left-winger and anyone who challenges his fragile hold on the job of leader of the Labour Party. But who does he admire? In a recent issue of The Director he unveiled his choice.

Inevitably, he admires Ancurin Bevan who, apart from being Welsh, turned his back on much of what he had called his principles because he thought that would help him become Foreign Secretary. Kinnock has been doing the same thing ever since he became party leader - except that he has his sights on Number Ten. His next heroes were Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King whose popular reputation as men of unrelenting principles does not mix with Kinnock's, who has abandoned almost everything his erstwhile admirers once thought he stood for in his greed for power.

But Kinnock's headline-snatching choice was a heroine - Annie Besant, who led the famous match girls' strike in 1888. The passage of time has given that strike and Annie Besant a romantic niche in history But if Kinnock were Prime Minister, what would a Labour government think of a similar strike nowadays? Their record in power does not encourage us to believe that they would have been at all sympathetic to the strikers, no matter how appealing their ease.

Kinnock made his choices because, he said, they were united in a fundamental commitment to individual freedom. This is a little rich, coming from the leader of a party whose commitment to individual freedom was less than wholehearted when they were in power. In fact, the interview did little more than confirm his reputation as an unoriginal, shallow and inept contributor to political thought. It reinforced the impression that there is no reason to take anything he says seriously.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Kenneth Baker, genial bungling Home Secretary, is not famous for being uniquely successful in his political career but he has learned the technique of the pre-emptive strike, which he used to deflect the annual bout of Home Secretary-bashing at this year's Tory Party conference on the issue of the so-called joy-riders. Baker did this by declaring that he was about to introduce harsher penalties for those who are caught committing this offence and, to make it more likely that they are caught, by creating a new offence.

Approval for this extended beyond the conference hall; those who wait for the media to warn them that the country is being overwhelmed by a surge of anti-social behaviour are usually in favour of responding with suffer sentences for it. This vengefulness helps to obscure the fact that when politicals are confronted with a problem of any kind they have to appear to be in control and capable of doing something about it. Reality is rather different.

To begin with, "joy-riding" is not new. It has been happening for a long lime, with some help from the car manufacturers' reluctance to make cars more difficult to steal because of the expense involved. Then there is the fact that this government has devoted a lot of energy to Law and Order. They have given the police pay rises above the going rate in order to increase their numbers and are now aiming at recruiting another 1000. They have given the police more powers and they have introduced harder sentences for those convicted of some offences. By rights - or rather by their standards - crime should have responded to these measures by falling rapidly but, in fact, the figures for reported crime continue to climb inexorably, ever upwards.

So no joy-rider with any sense would be impressed by Baker's windy rhetoric. But they might wallow in the notoriety while they can, for while at present they are the bogey everyone loves to hate, by this time next year they may have been superceded by another one, by other demands for action and for the police and the courts to crack down. Whether there will be another Home Secretary to make the same kind of promises as Baker will depend partly on the timing of the next general election - and partly on Baker's well-known talent for survival.

Ivan

The unsung centenary (1988)

From the September 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

In July we were asked to celebrate two anniversaries: 400 years ago the Spanish fleet did not land in Britain and 300 years ago William of Orange did. The Protestant Orange Order of Northern Ireland used the latter opportunity to parade their bigotry, but neither occasion made much difference to workers. Certainly the claim that William was responsible for parliamentary democracy today is risible when a 40 per cent vote produces a 100 majority in the House of Commons and Members of Parliament behave like unruly children.

The BBC celebrated the centenary of the birth of the crime writer Raymond Chandler, but it fell to my local primary school, in their end of term play, to remind us of a centenary which marked a much more important milestone in working-class, and especially women workers' history. The Match Girls dealt with the co-ordinated action by unskilled workers which led to the formation of the first non-craft union.

On 7 July 1888 Annie Beasant printed an article "White Slavery in London" in Link, the Fabian paper of which she was co-editor, describing conditions of work in the Bryant & May match factory in Bromley by Bow in London's East End:

The hour for commencing work is 6.30 in summer and 8 in winter, work concludes at 8pm. Half an hour is allowed for breakfast and an hour for dinner. This long day is performed by young girls, who have to stand the whole time. A typical case is that of a girl of 16, a piece worker, she earns 4s a week . . . The splendid salary of 4s is subject to deductions in the shape of fines: if the feet are dirty, or the ground under the bench is left untidy, a fine of 3d is inflicted; for putting "brunts"—matches that have caught fire during the work—on the bench 1s has been forfeited . . . If a girl leaves 4 or 5 matches on her bench when she goes for a fresh "frame" she is fined 3d, and in some departments a fine of 3d is inflicted for talking. If a girl is late she is shut out for "half a day", that is, for the morning of six hours, and 5d is deducted out of her day's 8d.

There was also a one shilling compulsory "contribution" towards a statue of Gladstone being put up by Bryant, and employees had to take a day's unpaid leave for the unveiling. Ay that time shareholders in the company received a 20 per cent dividend.

When the article appeared Bryant & May tried to get the girls to write and deny its content and the three who had talked to Annie Besant were sacked. When the company dismissed another girl they considered the ringleader, the women in her department, followed by the other 1,400 employed by the company, walked out. A deputation sent to the London Trades Council for support were given £20, offered mediation with the employers and help with drawing up the list of  grievances. When the meeting took place, Bryant & May conceded almost all the girls' demands.

The first meeting of the Union of Women Matchmakers was held on 27 July 1888. Later re-named The Matchmakers Union, it only survived until 1902, but the action taken by the matchgirls in 1888 had considerable immediate and long-term effects on the trade union movement. The formation of other non-craft unions soon followed.

How much has the lot of unskilled workers improved since the Victorian values of Messrs. Bryant & May were challenged a hundred years ago? The clothing sweatshop and other low paid workers of 1988 would tell us: not much. They still try to make ends meet on their meagre wages while employers make heavy profits. Although deductions to erect a statue to the present Prime Minister are not yet compulsory, no doubt "invisible" deductions, reflected in poverty wages, still go to swell the funds of capitalism's parties.

Eva Goodman