Who are the Fabian Society?

An old English story, part-joke and part-apocrypha, tells of a retired American couple who take a vacation to England. Visiting the famous university city of Cambridge, they admire the ancient architecture before walking into the courtyard of one of the famous colleges. Admiring the perfect lawn, the pair spy a grounds-keeper and ask him how such perfect grass is possible. “Well”, the man replies, “you start by ploughing the earth and rolling it perfectly flat, then you select the best grass-seed, sow it in the correct season, and protect it against pigeons”. “Wow”, says the man. “And that’s it?” “Not quite”, the man replies. “Then you have to mow it for 600 years”.

This is a small homily on the virtue of patience, of being able to wait, and we will return to this idea. It’s also an affectionate jibe at America’s relative lack of history, and shows the veneration the British give to aged institutions, the more shrouded in the mists of time, the more venerable. The Fabian Society is not as old as the greensward at a Cambridge college but, as the oldest political think-tank in existence, it has the honorable veneer of the archaic. What is The Fabian Society?

Founded in 1884, the Fabian Society was a loose collective of journalists, civil servants and clerks who met to discuss the introduction of Socialism to Britain. An early collection of essays included a recent convert to social justice, George Bernard Shaw, whose fine debating skills carried him to prominence in the Society, as it did Sydney Webb, an economist who would go on to found the London School of Economics (LSE) and led the Fabian Society in its early incarnation. Prominent Leftists Graham Wallis and Sydney Oliver were also Fabians. Radical and middle-class, the Fabians planned to remodel the world with a more equitable outcome, but not by the means which had led to revolutions across Europe and America in 1641, 1765, and 1789, and would do again in 1917. From the Fabian Society’s own history:

All the contributors were united by their rejection of violent upheaval as a method of change, preferring to use the power of local government and trade unionism to transform society.

Unlike the October Revolutionists or the Jacobins, The Fabian Society did not want to blow up government buildings. They wanted instead to put their people into those buildings to work for the cause.

At first, The Fabian Society attempted to influence both the Conservative and Liberal parties, but met with little success. They required a party of their own, and were in part responsible for the creation of the Labour Party in 1900. To this day, The Fabian Society’s website states that it is an affiliate of the Labour Party. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is a member of the Society, as are half his cabinet. The Fabian Society and the Labour Party are umbilically connected.

Education was, as one might expect, central to the Fabians’ long-term plans, both education at its formative stages and the education of those in later life. The Fabian Society were responsible for founding the notoriously hard-Left London School of Economics (LSE), and also the magazine New Statesman, a mouthpiece for the Socialist Left ever since its founding in 1913. Shaw was heavily involved in both, even designing a famous stained-glass window known as the Fabian Window for the LSE. The bequest from a Fabian in Derby which allowed the LSE to be set up was specifically to be used for “propaganda and other purposes”.

At first, The Fabian Society seemed a bunch of amiable old duffers arguing about Karl Marx as they refilled their pipes and drank sherry, but they were not so anodyne then and they are not now. They are far more than a bunch of Leftist hacks in a smoke-filled room having discussion groups on how to read Robert Tressell’s rite-of-passage Socialist novel, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. They look more like the stuff of political thrillers. The Fabian Society today are what the media has rather pretentiously taken to calling “an existential threat”. Or, rather, their ideas are.

The Fabian Society were actually an offshoot of the Fellowship of the New Life (who also incorporated the Society for Psychical Research), founded in 1883 and active until 1888. Inspired by Emerson and Thoreau (although the affiliation baffles scholars of these two American writers), they sought “the cultivation of a perfect character in each and all”. This already sounds like a sugar-coated version of the Communist ideal: social homogenization, the standardized human, the model worker. Both the Fellowship and the Fabian Society were also dedicated to “pacifism, vegetarianism, and social living”.

Christianity played an important part in the belief system of the early Fabian Society, but not in a devotional sense. Rather, Christianity was seen as the base metal which could be transmuted into Socialism. “Christianity and Socialism are reversible”, wrote Thomas Davidson, founder of the Society. Religious socialism and scientific socialism could work in tandem rather than opposition. They espoused the theories of Henry George, who preached “the right way of social salvation”, and are also associated with Henri de Saint-Simon, whose writings centered on the revision of Christianity in order to uplift society via the application of what is now called “social justice”. Saint-Simon writes;

The whole of society ought to strive toward the amelioration of the moral and physical existence of the poorest class; society ought to organize itself in the way best adapted for obtaining this end. (Saint-Simon, The New Christianity).

Here is the soft underbelly of the Socialist argument; it sees poverty as an unjust affliction rather than an economic consequence reflecting a natural order. Such an order existing outside the Socialist sphere of influence is Kryptonite to the cause because it cannot be altered, and alteration of human nature is the raison d’être of the Socialist enterprise. It has been quoted to death on the political Right, but the Roman poet Horace’s line circa 20BC still resonates; “You can throw nature out with a pitchfork, but she always comes back”. The science-fiction writer, Philip K. Dick, puts it equally bluntly; “Reality is that thing which, if you ignore it, doesn’t go away”. That apparent intractability of the real world does not faze the Fabian Society, who espouse Marx’s edict from beyond the grave (and actually inscribed on his tomb in north London); “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it”. There cannot be many sentences in literary history that have caused so much carnage. But Marxism is associated with violent revolution, which is not the Fabian Society’s way at all. Their method is more evolution than revolution, and they are equipped to play a waiting game rather than storm any Winter Palaces.

The Fabian Society’s name comes from a Roman general of the third century BC, Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, also known as Cunctator; “the delayer” or “he who waits”. Knowing he could not defeat Hannibal’s army in open warfare during the second Punic War, Fabius Maximus instead waged a war of attrition lasting years, and then attacked in one ferocious wave, decimating the Carthaginian army. He is supposed by the Fabian Society to have said (in Latin, obviously); “I wait long, but when I strike, I strike hard”. One of the emblems of the FS is a rather odd, cartoonish tortoise or turtle — a slow-moving animal — with Fabius’s quotation scrolled underneath. But it isn’t the Society’s original emblem, which is even more baffling due to its plain statement of who the FS are. It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, one of the most recognizable similes in the English language, and usually denoting a person who appears to be gentle and beneficent, but is in fact a destructive killer of the very animal he is disguised as. One of the most fascinating aspects of the Fabian Society is that their existence is reminiscent of the game Hunt the Thimble, in which the only rule is that the thimble must be hidden in plain sight. The Fabian Society were always visible, you just had to know where to look.

The amiable, harmlessly intellectual image the Society cultivated, as noted above, was actually a carefully manicured public image, and the Fabian Society were perhaps the first political entity in the United Kingdom fully to grasp the implications of controlling the media and what would nowadays be called “the optics”. Working in collusion with the media, the Fabian Society promoted its image as a small but inconsequential debating society, who met for discussion and were really little more than a Parisian-style literary salon. They were and are very much more than that.

So, with their stated belief in Christianity, albeit it as a rudimentary form of Socialism whose civic structure can be retained to house a new belief system, it is possible to discuss The Fabian Society in theological terms. One might even describe their method as “adaptive theology”. They wished for the Kingdom of God on Earth, and were forthrightly Utopian. As far as they were concerned, however, the Church was effectively finished by the end of the eighteenth century, and although the City of God still needed building, there was no one to build it. Enter Socialism.

The English word “Socialism” is itself a neat piece of packaging. “Communism”, invoking as it does the negative image of a commune, will not do, but Socialism has inbuilt charm. “Social” is almost always a positive term, a “feelgood” word. Agreeable people are said to be sociable, we have social events and social clubs. This doesn’t quite extend to social media, which seems mostly anti-social, but this is an exception. Socialism is also associated with assistance, and British readers will doubtless be familiar with social services in their area (although how much assistance they provide I wouldn’t hazard a guess). But as a piece of linguistic PR, “Socialism” works and doesn’t need further unpacking. Orwell — who hated the Fabians — did some unpacking, saying of Socialism:

The basis of Socialism is humanism. It can co-exist with religious belief, but not with the belief that man is a limited creature who will always misbehave himself if he gets half a chance.

If this was not aimed at The Fabian Society it may as well have been. Without the belief in perfectibility, Socialism doesn’t have an engine room — it just sounds like the sort of stuff Shelley would have said to Byron on a long walk. The Fabian idea is Lenin’s idea, that man’s evolution can be taken away from its natural course and orchestrated, engineered, manipulated and, above all, improved. The implementation of this evolutionary approach owes more to Trotsky, and his idea of “entryism”, whereby an institution is gradually commandeered from within in order to improve it to suit their purposes. Again, it doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Who doesn’t want to improve themselves? It’s why people go back to college, or go to the gym. But everything depends on who gets to define “improvement”.

Once the Fabians knew how to make those improvements, and what it was they wished to create, all they needed was access to the means of production, as with all good revolutions. The overall strategy of the Fabians is to use the apparatus of the state to subvert that state, but slowly, and they had ideological partners in other methodologically allied movements. Gramsci famously wrote of the “long march through the institutions”, echoing Mao’s Long March. Today, Great Britain feels as though it is at the end of the march, and it may be time for a great leap forward, to coin another Maoist maxim. The Frankfurt School were alive to the necessity of control of the institutions, particularly those connected with education, but they were still working on the principle of slowly, slowly, catchee monkey. Sydney Webb wrote the following;

The invisibility [of The Fabian Society] is gradualism; this is where, provided the people are kept occupied, that means busy, debt-enslaved and distracted, societal usurpation can proceed without the masses becoming aware until it is too late and irreversible.

This is the Victorian version of Juvenal’s panem et circenses, bread and entertainment. Webb led the Fabian Society for many years, and married the children’s novelist, Beatrix Potter. An economist and political scientist, Webb’s History of Trade Unionism was translated into Russian by Lenin. You can tell an ideologue by the company he keeps.

Politically speaking, The Fabian Society gained electoral ground, and thus power and influence, between the wars. In 1923, Ramsay MacDonald’s first Labour government had over twenty MPs who were members of the Fabian Society, with five in the Cabinet. One of these was Clement Attlee, who would later become Prime Minister in 1945 when a Labour landslide saw 229 Fabians in the House of Commons. There are 650 seats in Parliament, and this sudden influx of Labour Party Fabians at around a third continued to Blair’s victory in 1997, which saw 200 Fabians take their seats.

Attlee’s government was the great reforming Labour administration, and once again The Fabian Society were directing operations. “Many of the pioneering reforms”, the Society’s history states, “had been first developed in Fabian essays or pamphlets, including a ‘national medical service’ first proposed in a 1911 tract”. The Atlee government did more than just create the NHS. With it came the welfare state, the doomed quest for full employment, a renewed Keynesianism concerning control of the economy, and the Cold War. The Labour Party were now free to move in a Socialist direction, increasingly so, since they expelled their overtly Marxist members in the 1930s. This may have been purely a cosmetic move, an attempt to sanitize the brand in line with Fabian gradualism.

And what of the Fabian Society today? If the Fabian Society are not directing operations in Great Britain, then everything is happening as though they were. They have kinship with more radical Left-wing agitators such as Saul Alinsky and Antonio Gramsci. But they also appreciate the program of Yuri Bezmenov, the Soviet defector who explained the practice of dismantling a society from within, and the anarcho-tyranny of Samuel T. Francis.

Supposing, for the sake of argument, that the Fabians really are the éminences grises of modern Britain. If so, then they have toughened up their game. The key initiatives of DEI, and associated drives to change social norms, are all geared to disrupt White society, specifically White heterosexual men. Racial equality is the most obvious, and the Fabian society is very careful to cover its tracks in the current atmosphere of retrospective racism, undoubtedly connected with eugenics as they were. The disclaimer in their own history is worth quoting in full:

The members of the society were radicals for their time and reflected the age they lived in. Leading members of the society held racist prejudices and opinions which were not in keeping with the society’s commitment to equality for all, either then or now. Fabians engaged in debates on eugenics and were racist towards people of Jewish, black and Asian origin. Views on the role of Empire varied among members, with some supporting rapid decolonization and others seeing the British Empire as a potentially progressive force in the world.

This is a fashionable minor caveat to forgive the founders their antique prejudices.

The promotion of homosexuality, transgenderism, the lowering of educational standards and the “decolonization” of curricula, the facilitation of mass immigration, and the whole anti-meritocratic process of diversity hiring and affirmative action — all these disruptions to society both advance the possibility of the Socialist enterprise and increase insecurity and instability among the citizenry, making them more predisposed to Socialists as saviors. The whole sexual revolution in the 1960s was perfectly suited to their purpose, despite the fact that the noted sexologist, Havelock Ellis, was never fully welcomed into the Society.

The Fabian Society has learned much in its 141-year history, not least that patient methodology will only get you so far before you must turn to active disruption (although still over a long time-scale). They promote what we might call “disruptors”, but in a very specific sense. The dictionary defines “disruptor” as follows:

A person or thing that interrupts an event, activity, or process by causing a disturbance or problem.

The Fabian Society is not a person, and not really a thing, not in the physical sense. But the secondary meaning of “disruptor” gives a far clearer picture of what the Fabian Society are because it is organic:

A thing that interferes with or significantly alters the structure or function of a biological molecule such as a gene or hormone.

The Fabian Society wish to leave the world exactly as they found it — in essence, but genetically modified. They wish to “get inside” the system as a virus — or a vaccine, as they would see it — gets inside the body.

The Fabian Society are still not secretive in and of themselves. But, just as when Victoria was on the throne, they would like you to view them much as their founders wished to be viewed, as a slightly eccentric academic collective whose radical ideas don’t really leave the club or dining-room. They want to be seen as a crusty old political relic, like the Conservative Party’s 1922 Committee (still in existence) One would think that there is nothing wrong with being a political hobbyist as well as a lobbyist, and surely their influence must be fringe at best. The Jewish journalist Stephen Pollard, for example, was a Research Director for the Fabian Society in the 1990s, and finds it laughable to be told that he was working for some secret cabal hell-bent on bringing down the system and starting afresh. But this has the scent of distraction about it. The Fabian Society has never been Skull and Bones or Bohemian Grove, just a “think-tank” or policy consultant, and anyone who thinks otherwise can be safely filed under “conspiracy theorist”.

But Fabian Society members are present and well connected in every walk of British public life. They are judges, high-ranking policemen, civil servants, heads of NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) and Quangos (Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organizations), mayors, the Governor of the Bank of England and, of course, politicians. They have already captured all the tactical vantage points of the British political landscape. Conjunction is not cause and effect, of course, but when the High Court recently ruled that the contentious Bell Hotel in Epping, England, could no longer be used to house asylum seekers, the judge who over-ruled this on appeal was Lord Justice David Bean, Chair of the Fabian Society in 1989 and 1990. Tony Blair, architect of New Labour, is a Fabian. As noted, so is Sir Keir Starmer, the current Prime Minister, whose Trotskyist past as a Pabloite I wrote about here at The Occidental Observer (and who must be praying for his Fabian fellow travelers to help him in his current hour of need). And this is not a White man’s club, and this isn’t the Raj in India. Sadiq — now Sir Sadiq — Khan is a member of the Fabian Society. Muslims, of course, know all about waiting for political power, and have been doing so in Europe for many centuries. And, as their creed is based on a theocratic principle, they, like the Jews, are metaphysically equipped to play the long game.

In fact, if the Fabian Society remind me of any other “organization” it would be Al Qaeda, who are less of an organization and more about organization and its guiding principles. This is not because the Fabian Society fire guns in the air and decapitate hostages on video, or lop off the hands of thieves, or would even want to. The common thread is their lack of centrality. They remind one of Pascal’s description of nature as a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. They are more principle than physical presence. There isn’t really a group called “Al Qaeda”, whose top men are sitting around in a cave in the Hindu Kush, eating boiled goat and King’s rice and muttering “Death to America”. It’s not the organization or the people. It’s the name.

“Al Qaeda” has many meanings in Arabic, including “the protocol”, “the way of doing things”, and “the base-camp”, which seems to describe the central methodology of Fabianism. They may not use back-pack bombs and kitchen knives, but, because they are so well entrenched among the elites, The Fabian Society are equally dangerous. And, given that their mission statement revolves around waiting, it may be that their time has come, and the wait is over.