Fabian Society
The Fabian Society is a British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of social democracy and democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow.[1][2] The Fabian Society was also historically related to radicalism, a left-wing liberal tradition.[3][4][5]
For other organisations known by the same name, see § Fabianism outside the United Kingdom.Abbreviation
FS
4 January 1884
Unincorporated membership association
"To promote greater equality of power, wealth and opportunity; the value of collective action and public service; an accountable, tolerant and active democracy; citizenship, liberty and human rights; sustainable development; and multilateral international cooperation"
London, England
- 61 Petty France, London, SW1H 9EU
8,000
English
Andrew Harrop
Martin Edobor
Wes Streeting, Catriona Munro
Executive Committee
Young Fabians, Fabian Women's Network, Scottish Fabians, around 60 local Fabian Societies
As one of the founding organisations of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, and as an important influence upon the Labour Party which grew from it, the Fabian Society has had a powerful influence on British politics. Members of the Fabian Society have included political leaders from other countries, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, who adopted Fabian principles as part of their own political ideologies. The Fabian Society founded the London School of Economics in 1895.
Today, the society functions primarily as a think tank and is one of twenty socialist societies affiliated with the Labour Party. Similar societies exist in Australia, in Canada, in New Zealand, and in Sicily.
Influence on the political right[edit]
When founded in 1884 as a parliamentarian organisation, there was no leftist party with which the Fabians could connect. As such, they initially attempted to 'permeate' the Liberals, with some success. The foundation of the Labour Party in 1900 signalled a change in tactics,[61] although Fabian-Liberal links on specific topics such as welfare reform lasted well into the interwar period.[62][63]
More recent studies have examined their impact on the Conservatives, such as the foundation of Ashridge College, explicitly designed in the 1930s to create Conservative Fabians.[64][65][66]
Critiques of the Fabians[edit]
As one of the world's oldest and most prominent think tanks, the Fabians have sometimes fallen under attack, more often from the left than the right.
Most older critiques focused on the Fabians' political organisation efforts and claims to have been influential.
Although H. G. Wells was a member of the Fabian Society from 1903 to 1908, he was a critic of its operations, particularly in his 1905 paper "The Faults of the Fabian", in which he claimed the Society was a middle-class talking shop.[67] He later parodied the society in his 1910 novel The New Machiavelli.[68]
During the First World War, Vladimir Lenin wrote that the Fabians were "social-chauvinists", "undoubtedly the most consummate expression of opportunism and of Liberal-Labour policy". Drawing from Friedrich Engels, Lenin declared the Fabians were "a gang of bourgeois rogues who would demoralise the workers, influence them in a counter-revolutionary spirit".[69]
In the 1920s, Leon Trotsky critiqued the Fabian Society as provincial, boring and unnecessary, particularly to the working class. He wrote that their published works "serve merely to explain to the Fabians themselves why Fabianism exists in the world".[70]
The post-war Communist Party Historians Group was critical of the Fabians, and indeed the post-war consensus, with its strong social-democratic influence. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote his PhD thesis attacking claims from the early Fabians to have been originators of the Labour Party and the post-war consensus. Instead, he argued that the credit should be given to the more autonomous, working-class Independent Labour Party.[71][72]
In more recent years, critiques of the early Fabians have focused on other areas.
In an article published in The Guardian on 14 February 2008 (following the apology offered by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to the "stolen generations"), Geoffrey Robertson criticised Fabian socialists for providing the intellectual justification for the eugenics policy that led to the stolen generations scandal.[73][74] Similar claims have been repeated in The Spectator.[75]
In 2009, making a speech in the United States, the British MP George Galloway (then MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, most recently MP for Rochdale) denounced the Fabian Society for its failure to support the uprising of Easter 1916 in Dublin during which an Irish Republic was proclaimed.[76]
Funding[edit]
The Fabian Society has been rated as "broadly transparent" in its funding by Transparify.[77] In November 2022, the funding transparency website Who Funds You? gave the Fabian Society an A grade, the highest transparency rating (rating goes from A to E).[78]
(1916). A History of the Fabian Society. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
The History of the Fabian Society public domain audiobook at LibriVox
