CHAPTER XIV EVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM (a) FABIANISM

FABIANISM in Great Britain occupies—with, however, one significant difference—a place which in some respects corresponds to that assigned on the Continent to Bernstein, who will be noted at the close of this section. Bernstein essentially represents a conscious reaction against Marx, a plea for evolutionary as against revolutionary socialism, for patient reform and construction against the violence and the impatience of the Master. But although in substance the Fabians may have kinship with the point of view of Bernstein, there was in their case little or no Marx to react against. For it was true in the 'eighties, as it is true to-day, that—intellectuals apart—Marx has never struck deep root in this country. The dominant influences here are to be found in distant memories of the Chartists, in the pervasive infiltrations of Owenism, in the later somewhat nebulous teaching or preaching of the Christian Socialists; and in the early 'eighties there was, above all, throughout all English-speaking countries, the recent gospel of Henry George, who, in Progress and Poverty, had achieved a worldsuccess. To us of a somewhat later generation the stir which Henry George created is something of a mystery, for indeed he is in some respects a shallow thinker and an impracticable reformer. Yet for a time he had an ubiquitous influence in popularising a somewhat facile application of the Ricardian Law of Rent. If Fabianism may not be described as a reaction against Marx, since there was virtually no English Marxian school to react against, it may not be an undue strain of language to say that the Fabians were largely instrumental in enabling English socialism to by-pass Marx—at least until Marx came riding home on the shoulders of Lenin.¹

The Fabian Society represents a picturesque feature in English social and political life in late Victorian and Edwardian days, and its diverting history has been agreeably chronicled by its secretary, Mr. E. R. Pease. The Fabians, despite their later immersion in sewage, gas, and municipal politics, had, remotely, a somewhat other-worldly, ethical and mystical origin. Thomas Davidson (1840–1900), a wandering scholar of Aberdeen connections, dreaming of ‘a community of superior people withdrawn from the world because of its wickedness,’ visited London in 1883, and lectured on the Vita Nuova, a Fellowship of the New Life: a touch of a foreign language always adds uplift in these matters.¹ The seed planted by Davidson resulted in the formation of an Association, ‘whose ultimate aim shall be the reconstruction of Society in accordance with the highest moral possibilities.’ This was the ‘Fellowship of the New Life,’ of which the ambitious object was declared to be ‘the cultivation of a perfect character in each and all.’ From the loins of this fellowship, remotely after the manner of what a later generation of national health insurance administrators came to know as a ‘separate section,’ there sprang on the 4th January, 1884, the Fabian Society. At the same time they redefined the ultimate aim as being, no longer the reconstruction of society as defined above, but as being to ‘help on’ this reconstruction. It may be that this concession to modesty was bought at the cost of some lucidity of thought, for the purist may perhaps doubt whether, outside the world of hikers, a half-way house can ever be an ultimate aim. Also a collection was made, amounting to 13s, 9d.²

Certain characteristics of Fabianism confront us on the threshold. In the first place, those who think in terms of classes would say that it was essentially a middle-class movement. It was, moreover, not merely middle-class, it was highly intellectual middle-class, free from any infusion of those whose wrongs they were lecturing to right. Fabianism was begotten by highbrows in the drawing-rooms of London. Indeed, not the least curious feature in the earlier days was the wholly disproportionate representation of civil servants, imbued with a natural professional faith in the efficacy and efficiency of higher administration: these were the days when civil servants had leisure, and when the pressure of events had not yet constrained them to develop Section 15 (2) (e) minds. Secondly, the Fabian Society was not, in origin or intention, a socialist society at the outset. So far as its birth and baptismal certificates attest, it sprang from a somewhat vague impulse to moral and ethical regeneration; and it was only as it was borne in upon its members that the desired reconstruction of society was possible only on socialist lines, that they moved to a profession of socialism.³ At the same time, although it is said that the word ‘socialism’ does not occur until the third tract,¹ it is impossible to read the first tract without feeling that it ought to be there.

On all the ordinary human probabilities, it might have been prognosticated in January, 1884, that the Fabian Society would lead the anaemic and phthisical life which is the usual lot of a drawing-room coterie. It was saved, because in some rather mysterious way it attracted to its membership in its early days a number of the most remarkable men of their generation, though doubtless this was only obvious to the eye of faith in the years 1884–1886. The men who made Fabianism were not original members. Pre-eminent among the eminent—so pre-eminent that they may almost be called the Big Four—were Sidney Webb, Bernard Shaw, Sydney Olivier and Graham Wallas. With such capable management and such an all-star cast, any production is guaranteed a long run, and the Fabian Society became something of a cult, even if it aimed at being rather an exclusive cult.

The title chosen by the society was intended to present picturesquely its policy and its point of view; but though we have become so familiar with the word ‘Fabian’ that we scarcely ever stop to ask its meaning, it may be doubted whether the choice was a wholly happy one. Some of the earliest tracts of the Fabian Society bore as a motto what purported to be a quotation in these terms:

Wherefore it may not be gainsaid that the fruit of this man's long taking of counsel—and (by the many so deemed) untimeous delays—was the safeholding for all men, his fellow-citizens, of the Common Weal.

For the right moment you must wait, as FABIUS did most patiently when warring against HANNIBAL, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as FABIUS did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless.²

The quotation appears to be from the works of that versatile author, Anon, who on this occasion was probably a member of the Fabian Society.³ Many studying the Wardour Street quotation have asked when Fabius struck hard; some may even ask when the Fabians have struck hard, or whether the blow is still pending. But apart from the faintly undergraduatish atmosphere which surrounds the whole business, it may be doubted whether the Society was entirely happy in its baptismal name, since mere opportunism, mere postponement, mere delaying tactics can never provide a map of the path to the Kingdom of Heaven. Nor is it just to the Fabian Society themselves to suggest that they have pursued a purely cunctatious policy. But with this reservation, the origin and the title of the Society give a sufficient preliminary indication of the essence of Fabianism. As Mr. Bernard Shaw said in retrospect in the 41st Tract, ‘we were then middle-class all through’; and it is unreasonable to expect a society so constituted to be ardent class-strugglers and revolutionaries. In a sense it may be said that there was no Fabian doctrine, but only a Fabian policy. Primarily, Fabianism is a method of propaganda, designed to disarm middle-class suspicions and insidiously to facilitate the infiltration of socialist ideas, even when not so recognised, so that it would be ‘as easy and matter-of-course for the ordinary respectable Englishman to be a Socialist as to be a Liberal or a Conservative.’¹ For a great part of its history, the Society deliberately restricted its membership, claiming that it was their object to make socialism and not socialists. Their favourite maxim was that of ‘permeation,’ by which was meant that its members were free to join other political parties where they would operate as Fabian ‘cells,’ leavening the lump. It was of the essence of Fabian policy to persuade those whom their permeation reached that they were already half-way on the road to socialism without realising it, and that accordingly they might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. As to what the Fabians meant by socialism, it is perhaps sufficient to say that there never was a Fabian orthodoxy, and the profession of faith exacted from its members enjoyed all the flexibility of interpretation which a tolerant Church grants in the case of a traditional creed. This so-called ‘Basis’ is in some ways a curious document.² It states that the Society ‘works for the transfer to the community of the administration of such industrial capital as can be conveniently managed socially.’ The last of the individualists, holding that no industry could be thus ‘conveniently’ managed, might have subscribed without undue qualms. The ‘Basis’ further indicates the benefits which will flow from these measures, if ‘carried out, without compensation (though not without such relief to expropriated individuals as may seem fit to the community)’; but again it is not so clear as it might be, in fact it is completely silent, on the rather important question of how relief differs from compensation. Yet, though the most picturesque of the Fabians acknowledged that at the outset they raged at everything that was not socialism, ‘without knowing at all clearly what we meant by socialism,’³ and though they may have had their period of comparative wildness, nevertheless in the course of time they evolved a very precise and in some ways rather restricted view of the content of socialism. Increasingly for the Fabians, State activity became the criterion of socialism, and their gospel was summed up in the largest possible extension of State powers, with, however, a needed reminder that the activity of the State may also be manifested in the functionings of the local authorities.

Yet what constitutes the crown of glory of the Fabians, what indeed made them for a generation an indispensable public institution, is that they published tracts, and later much more. Doubtless it took them five years to reach Tract No. 7; but thereafter the floodgates were opened, and the Fabians were ready with a tract on anything. Moreover, though the tracts have the charm of infinite variety, by far the greater number were concerned with horribly concrete questions: municipal pawnshops and slaughterhouses; life in the laundry; the tenant's sanitary catechism; tramways and trusts. The transition from the Rights of Man to the Tenant's Sanitary Catechism is, in its way, symbolical of what Fabianism achieved. The Society became more and more a research laboratory, concerned with the new science of social investigation. They may not have had much faith in the class war, but they believed in the production of an ample supply of controversial ammunition, and in the virtue of keeping it as dry as possible. The cold eye of posterity may look on some of the tracts as rather dud bombs, or Guy Fawkes squibs; but at least the Fabians taught the late Victorian age that on any given question there is much need of digging and delving, much harvesting and gleaning.

It is time to come into closer contact with the Fabians as manifested in some of their more revealing and informative literature. Where Fabian literature begins and ends would be a nice question for discussion; a very considerable section of English literature for a long generation, including much in fields remote from municipal pawnshops, was written by members of the Fabian Society. At one end it would probably be a vain subject of academic research to look for traces of Fabianism in the poetry of Rupert Brooke; at the other extreme, the puritanical and didactic Bernard Shaw has never been able to resist the itch to teach, reprove, correct and instruct, and in consequence his Prefaces, to which he attached Plays, might well be regarded as expositions on particular points of the Fabian way of life. But indeed the Intelligent Woman in a hurry (if, indeed, an intelligent woman ever forgets the dignity of a leisurely carriage) may find all that she requires with regard to Fabianism at its most significant, in relatively small bulk. Apart from Mr. Pease's History of the Fabian Society, there are the Fabian Essays in Socialism, originally published in 1889, and as many of the tracts (especially the earlier ones) as the nearest public library can disgorge.

The Fabian Essays in Socialism has remained a book to be read beyond the generation for whom it was written, though perhaps the later and continuous demand which it has enjoyed may be, in a way, a tribute to its importance as a historical document. Undoubtedly, like everything else with a date, it ‘dates’; and prefaces to subsequent editions, written by its admiring authors, are to a considerable extent taken up with drawing attention to what had been concealed from the eyes of the original essayists. An alarming footnote to the Essays explains that in the year ending April, 1889, upwards of 700 lectures were given by members of the Fabian Society alone. The Fabian Essays are given as a sample of this deluge of oratory; but in the case of such astute salesmen as the Fabians, it is a safe assumption that the sample is drawn from the rosiest and choicest apples on the top of the box. There are in fact eight essays, written by the seven leading Fabians of the time.¹

Taking as a necessary, and almost as a sufficient, guide the Fabian Essays and the earliest tracts, above all Tract No. 70, a Report on Fabian Policy, it is possible to arrive at a more precise statement of Fabian views and intentions. It has been said above that Fabianism was primarily a policy, a question of tactics, rather than a body of doctrine; yet obviously they were not without their doctrinal side. Sir Ernest Barker and Mr. Beer have alike stressed the obligation of Mr. Webb to Mill²—the later Mill of socialist leanings—and though Mr. Shaw rather demurs,³ in one passage Mr. Webb speaks as if socialism in England owes its whole existence to Mill.⁴ Rather oddly it is recorded that the young Fabians read Proudhon as well as Marx.⁵ If they say so, it must be so; but it would be interesting to know what lessons the budding Fabians learned from this most anarchic mind, who boasted that he had never asked the State to do anything for him, and whose pen could drip uninterrupted venom for a page in denunciation of the State as the arch-enemy of mankind. Proudhon and Sidney Webb would indeed be strange bed-fellows.

But indeed the ancestry of Fabianism is sufficiently obvious on the first brush with the Essays and the earlier pamphlets, quite apart from the introspective confessions of the Fabians themselves. The first of the essays (one of two by Mr. Bernard Shaw) is very largely a composition based on two themes: one is a restatement of Henry George, with roots in the Ricardian Theory of Rent, and the other is the Jevonian Theory of Value, based on the conception of diminishing utility.⁶ With the help of the Ricardian Law, the original owner of the land is shown as growing ever fatter and fatter, leaving no opening for the late arrival, who is accordingly forced to sell himself to the lords of the soil. Mr. Shaw plays with the Jevonian technique with all the gusto one devotes to a new toy. With increasing population, the marginal worker becomes valueless; what he gets is merely his keep: ‘for bare subsistence wages you can get as much common labour as you want.’¹ There is no hint here of the possible repercussions of trade unions on the value of workers, who otherwise are little better than superfluous kittens condemned to the bucket, whom you may have if you care to keep them. Indeed, one of the matters on which the Fabians subsequently reproached themselves was that their eyes were at first sealed to the significance and importance of trade unionism. It was a defect for which certain of their number made ample amends later.

Indeed, anyone to-day reading the earlier literature of the Fabians can hardly fail to be impressed by the quite extraordinary importance attached to the Ricardian Law of Rent: it was, of course, the day and the heyday of Henry George, preceding his long crepuscular decline. Moreover, although in theory the Fabians were concerned with every type of rent, not merely with the rent of agricultural land, but extending the terms to cover all differential unearned incomes, again the impression left, and that not merely on a first reading, is that their eyes were on the land. Mr. Shaw proclaimed in the first of his essays that ‘public property in land is the basic economic condition of socialism.’² In the last of his essays he says with more emphasis of the economists that ‘with one law alone—the law of rent—they destroyed the whole series of assumptions upon which private property is based’³; though here, it may be urged, he is not specifically, in terms, referring to the law of agricultural rent. Yet in the seventh tract (for instance) it is the nationalisation of land that is put in the forefront, and it is not without significance that in the ‘Basis,’ that most basic document, the extinction of private property in land takes precedence of place over ‘the transfer to the community of the administration of such industrial capital as can conveniently be managed socially.’ It is difficult to resist the inference that if the earlier Fabians (or the Fabians in their earlier days—which is not quite the same thing) were fascinated by the Law of Rent, it was primarily in its relationship to land, and that fundamentally, after the manner of Henry George, they were land nationalisers.

But, it may be protested, in theory at least the Fabians did not so limit the interpretation of the word ‘rent,’ but were also concerned with other forms of rent—rents of ability and what-not. What, it may be asked, is the Law of Rent, and what is a ‘rent of ability’—an idea which, when they first stumbled across it, the early Fabians were human enough to find amusing? Though the economists have made a mighty song and dance about the Law of Rent, so that it is impossible to write an economic text-book without devoting to it a lengthy chapter, or to deliver a course of lectures without spending at least two on the subject, it is but an obvious deduction from two statements of the obvious, such as might be comprehended even by Mr. Shaw's Intelligent Woman. Looking round the world, it is in the first place obvious that identical commodities are produced at very different costs, whether the commodities be wheat, coal, witches and jumbos, knitted stockings, legal advice or medical attendance. Looking round the market, it is in the second place obvious that substantially identical and indistinguishable commodities are sold at the same price. From these so obvious facts, that things are frequently produced at different costs, and are nevertheless sold at the same price, it is an obvious inference that there must be a surplus (a ‘producer's surplus’) emerging in the case of the commodity produced under more favourable conditions, which someone will be able to collar, and in fact which someone must collar, though of course that someone may be the State. This ‘producer's surplus’ is rent.

So long as we are moving within Ricardian confines, the position is clear, and the theoretical arguments sufficiently cogent. If society, for its sustenance, requires that inferior land should be cultivated, the price of the product must be such that those who cultivate under unfavourable conditions will at least be able to make ends meet; and such, a price will, by hypothesis, yield a surplus to the more fortunate. If the land is worked by the proprietors, the surplus will remain in the pockets of those who are favoured by Nature; if, however, it is a world in which land is leased by owners to those who work it, the ‘producer's surplus’ will be skimmed off by the landlord as the price of the labourer being allowed to work. Moreover—and we are still following in Ricardo's footsteps—the whack thus appropriated by the landlords will go on mounting; for, as population increases and we are forced for our maintenance to cultivate the Bass Rock and the desolate places of Caithness, rent will rise, since rent rests on differential fertility—the significant difference being between the fertility of the land under consideration and the fertility of the worst land that society is compelled to cultivate. As we depress the margin of cultivation to the waste places, we enlarge this difference, and accordingly there are added to rent continual increments, which owe their origin neither to the anxious care of the proprietor nor the sweat of the farmer. As thus stated, there could scarcely be a stronger argument for the nationalisation of rent than is provided by the Ricardian theory. Perhaps it should be added that the argument is more compelling in theory than in practice, firstly, because it is by no means clear how much of ‘rent,’ as understood by the vulgar farmer, if indeed any, is in fact the rent of the economic text-book, the payment for that elusive entity ‘the original and indestructible qualities of the soil’; and secondly, because owing to changes in population growth, in communications and in agricultural science, we are not in fact being driven to cultivate the ever-more-and-more-barren. On the contrary (war times and war conditions apart) the margin of cultivation rather tends to be pulled in. It follows that the argument is in practice stronger with regard to increments of rent in respect of urban sites; but this lies somewhat apart from the Ricardo-George tradition.

But, after the manner of human ingenuity, the thought dawned on some economist in his obscure lair, that if rent is defined as a ‘producer's surplus,’ then agricultural rent does not stand alone. The human mind, heedless of the dangers of als ob, can never resist an analogy. Throughout the whole of life men making similar efforts get very different results. Anyone who cares to use the jargon of the schools may say, if he chooses, that the good, efficient and rapid worker enjoys a rent of ability denied to his more ordinary comrade. An incompetent doctor with a sunny bedside manner may reap a bounteous crop of patients, far in excess of that harvested by his glum and more competent rival; he may even have them as patients for a longer period of time. He enjoys, if not a rent of ability, then at least a rent which springs from his radiant bearing. But all this, if it may seem ingenious to the ingenuous, is but to feed ourselves on words. Equally one might say, if it meant anything, that the hardworking peasant proprietor (or anyone else) derived a rent from a peculiar kink in his character, from the absence of a normal inhibition, preventing him from reducing his exertions to a minimum. If honesty is the best policy (and anyone who reads Fourier may be forgiven for doubting it), the prosperity of the honest man may with equal justice be described as a rent he draws from his honesty. In essence, all this is in effect a procedure that begs the question. Wherever there is a gain in excess of the ordinary, it may with little effort be described as a rent of some kind, and as rents are something which just happen, these gains should if possible be appropriated for the community. Also in the end this nomenclature leads to a perverse view of the whole human problem. Mr. Shaw, in his airy way, defines a rent of ability as ‘the excess of its produce over that of ordinary stupidity.’¹ In any question relating to agriculture, the land least worth cultivating is an ineluctable datum line; but when we begin to play about with rents of ability, it is gradually assumed, as foreshadowed in Mr. Shaw's phrase, that the normal human being, in terms of whom we should think, is a person of ordinary stupidity, very ordinary honesty, and (if possible) more than ordinary aversion to labour; and that anyone who exceeds this marginal and minimal endowment is an exceptional person enjoying a ‘rent’ to which in equity he has no right. There is much to be said for the idea of a ‘quasi-rent,’ as the term was used by Marshall to indicate the differential gain that may temporarily spring from different ‘quality’ in machinery; but it would have been well if refinements of the nature of ‘rents of ability’ had been left undevised.¹

This digression on rent is, it is hoped, less of a digression than it may appear. The early Fabian theory, so far as there was a theory, was so largely based on the ‘Law of Rent’; their practical programme in the early days consisted to so large an extent in the appropriation of rent by the State, that, even at the cost of two pages, it seemed desirable to look at the meaning of rent and its derivatives, and at the dangers that may beset the path.

It is, moreover, of the essence of Fabianism that this process of appropriation and absorption by the State is already far advanced, that it is still making rapid progress and will continue to do so, by entirely constitutional means and without resort to anything remotely resembling violence. ‘Slice after slice’ has already been taken²; and we, of a later generation, can testify that the slices are becoming thicker: as in the nursery tale, we are rapidly moving from ‘Top-off’ to ‘All-gone.’ ‘Step by step’ the process goes on. The transition is gradual and peaceful; it is to a large extent unconscious, directed even by those who imagine that they are free from socialist taint. The distinctive mark of the Fabian Society among rival bodies of socialists was, according to Mr. Shaw, its ‘resolute constitutionalism.’³ At greater length Mr. Webb, already hankering after the inevitability of gradualness, postulated that important organic changes must satisfy four conditions. Somewhat abridged, these conditions are that they must be (i) democratic, acceptable to a majority of the people; (ii) gradual, and thus not causing dislocation; (iii) not regarded as immoral by the mass of the people; and (iv) lastly, in this country at least, constitutional and peaceful.⁴

Two other aspects of this evolutionary process are in a sense linked together. Firstly, the work of socialisation is frequently accomplished by those without the fold, who in their speeches may rail at socialism, yet in their deeds fulfil the observation of Sir William Harcourt (and others) that ‘we are all socialists now.’ Thus Mr. Webb, surveying the progress of State intervention and State control, is able to say that ‘all this has been done by “practical” men, ignorant, that is to say, of any scientific sociology believing socialism to be the most foolish of dreams.’¹

Glad hearts! Without reproach or blot
Who do thy work and know it not.

And in the second place, and just for this reason, Mr. Graham Wallas abandons any idea of finality: ‘... the steady introduction of socialistic institutions by men who reject socialist ideas, all incline us to give up any expectation of a final and perfect reform.’² This is a frequently recurring idea with the earlier Fabians. The movement to socialism is a continuing process: there is no frontier over which we must pass to enter the promised land. It is not going to be the kind of thing to which a date can be assigned. Mrs. Besant puts the point concisely: ‘There will never be a point at which a society crosses from individualism to socialism. The change is ever going forward; and our society is well on the way to socialism.’³

Not merely then will the movement to socialism be accomplished by entirely constitutional means; not merely is it a gradual and almost unperceived transition in a direction rather than towards an end; it is a change which is being furthered by those without the fold, who are unconscious of the distance we have already travelled. Moreover, though for very different reasons from those lying behind the Marxian conclusions, the movement is in its way automatic, ineluctable, designed by Fate. The economic evolution going on, ‘proceeding silently every day,’ is, says Mr. Clarke, ‘practically independent of our individual desires or prejudices.’⁴ The socialist (above all the Fabian socialist) is thus an interpreter rather than a doer. He is engaged (the phrase is Mr. Bland's) in ‘turning instinct into self-conscious reason.’⁵ Primarily then, the Fabians regarded themselves as High Priests of the Zeitgeist, whose function it was to interpret the spirit and justify the tendencies of the times. Their purpose was to provide a philosophy for changes already taking place, not owing to any feeble action of theirs, but because of the changing outlook of M. Tout le Monde.

As to the direction in which we are being driven or lured by the Zeitgeist, whereof the Fabians are the interpreters, it is enough to look round and observe. Already in the preface to the original edition of the Essays it had been stated that the writers shared ‘a common conviction of the necessity of vesting the organization of industry and the material of production in a State identified with the whole people by complete democracy.’ The implication is that in a true democracy the State is a friend of the people; that it is indeed the people, and that it is accordingly impossible to ask the State to do too much for the people. On this side Fabianism becomes to a large extent synonymous with a demand for an indefinite extension of State activity. There is a dreadful passage in Mr. Webb's essay wherein he gloatingly chonicles what the State already does; and to this he forthwith adds a list of the activities and other things which it registers, including playing-card makers, hawkers, dogs and cabs, places of worship and dancing-rooms.¹ And if these things were done in the comparatively green tree of 1889, what is being done in the dry of half a century later? It is assumed, it will be observed, that any kind of State activity is an instalment of socialism and to be welcomed accordingly. It is a matter of gratification that the State maintains its own cow-meadows, and that some of the colonial governments deal in guano, quinine and opium. That State activity or control of any kind is tantamount to socialism is a strangely naive view, against which at least one of the essayists, Mr. Bland, had the courage to protest. It is, he held, not so much what the State does, as the end for which it does it, that provides the crucial test; and greatly daring, he adds a derisory footnote on those who adduce the existence of hawkers’ licences as an instance of the ‘progress of socialism.’² But in the main the naivete of Mr. Webb prevailed over the common sense of Mr. Bland; and State activity of any and every kind became the end of their endeavour. This extension of the State into all the available nooks and crannies of life has, moreover, as a natural corollary the disappearance of the individual. It is not merely the capitalist (who calls for no sympathy) who is being ‘registered, inspected, controlled, and eventually superseded by the community’³; the ultimate aim is that of ‘enrolling every able-bodied man directly in the service of the community.’⁴ The vision is thus that of an ubiquitous State, acting as the universal employer. The transition, moreover, will be facilitated by the growth of Joint Stock Companies, and their consequent easy transfer to the State in the fullness of time. As Mr. Webb remarks, more than a third of the whole business of England is now done by Joint Stock Companies, and their shareholders could be expropriated by the community with no more dislocation than is occasioned by the daily purchase of shares on the Stock Exchange.⁵ Somewhat more picturesquely Mr. Clarke would not seek to undo the work which the capitalists are unconsciously doing for the people (led by Adam Smith's invisible hand?). It is enough to prepare the people ‘to take up the threads when they fall from the weak hands of a useless possessing class.’⁶ Mrs. Besant is equally emphatic: the capitalists are unconsciously paving the way for their own supersession; everything organised as a trust is ripe for appropriation by the community.¹

In one respect this policy of unlimited étatisme calls for a modifying addendum. It is greatly to the honour of the earlier Fabians that they realised, sooner than most, that Westminster and Whitehall do not exhaust the State. There are also the municipalities; and progress to the ultimate heaven of the Fabians’ dreams was as likely to be realised through the action of the local authorities as of the central State. At times indeed Fabianism almost became a doctrine of municipal socialism. The most practicable step to advance the control of the community over essential things was, it was held, for the electors to ‘capture’ the councils. Mr. Webb, calling in aid the example of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain in his Birmingham days, announced a programme of ‘unlimited municipalisation of local public services and a wide extension of corporate activity.’² ‘High rates and a healthy city’ was a phrase which epigrammatically presented the means and the end.

This enthusiasm for local authorities, above all the recently created County Councils on which great hopes were set, misled the Fabians into strange Utopian fancies. Much of Mrs. Besant's essay is taken up with what the County Council might do for the unemployed by the establishment of county farms. At least, they begin as county farms, but they end as Heaven knows what—a cross between one of Fourier's Phalanstères and a complete outfit of Louis Blanc's workshops. And also, after the manner of Louis Blanc, the private producer will go to the wall in this fierce struggle with a more efficient type of enterprise:

After a while the private producers will disappear, not because there will be any law against individualist production, but because it will not pay. No one will care to face the worries, the harassments, the anxieties of individual struggling for livelihood, when ease, freedom, and security can be enjoyed in the communal service.³

Mr. Shaw, it is interesting to note, is also seduced by a similar vision into re-echoing the soothing assurances of Louis Blanc regarding the imminent capitulation of private enterprise:

In the market the competition of those industries with the private concern will be irresistible.⁴

As Mr. Webb subsequently acknowledged, the earlier Fabians had not yet realised that local authorities are essentially associations of consumers, not associations of producers.⁵

This concentration of attention on the administrative machine leads in the Fabians to a glorification of efficiency which at times lives in uneasy harness with their faith in democracy. Democracy, if we be honest with ourselves, does not regard efficiency as the first of virtues; indeed it may be that—at least in Marshall's short period—democracy and efficiency are rivals. Socialism, as explained by Mr. Shaw in one of the numerous prefaces to successive reprints of the Essays, involves the introduction of design, contrivance and coordination; in the past, as he holds, there has been a failure to realise ‘the extent to which the very existence of society depends on the skilled work of administrators and experts.’

While the laudation of efficiency pervades the whole of Fabian literature, explicitly or implicitly, there are two passages which are so instructive and so illuminating that they call for special reference. Mr. Webb, in sentences which have a peculiarly Godwinian flavour, remarks that ‘there is, at any moment, one particular arrangement of social relations which involves the minimum of human misery then and there possible,’ and that such questions as these are a matter for scientific investigation. In the evolution and rivalries of races and nations, what is decisive is no longer the qualities of the individual, but the ‘more valuable social organisation.’ In the Franco-Prussian war (still a fairly recent memory) the French were beaten, he holds, ‘because the German social organism was, for the purposes of the time, superior in efficiency to the French.’ And he continues:

If we desire to hand on to the afterworld our direct influence, and not merely the memory of our excellence, we must take even more care to improve the social organism of which we form part, than to perfect our own individual developments. Or rather, the perfect and fitting development of each individual is not necessarily the utmost and highest cultivation of his own personality, but the filling, in the best possible way, of his humble function in the great social machine.¹

Here, curiously blended together, is the adoration of the machine and the sacrifice of each individual in order that the machine may be yet more efficient. What matters is not the ‘cultivation of personality,’ but the smoothness with which each consents to become a cog in the ‘great social machine.’ Is this the ordered world of Plato? the deceitful harmony of Fascism? the law of the beehive? The Fabians, if they had been called upon to choose between liberty and efficiency, would have had no hesitation in deciding which was the greater good for humanity.

The other passage of great significance in its remoter implications may be found towards the end of an Appendix which Mr. Shaw wrote for later editions of Mr. Pease's History of the Fabian Society. Here Mr. Shaw comments on the anomaly that a hawker may not ply his trade without a licence, whereas (though Mr. Shaw would not use such language) any fool may be sent to Parliament.² And to remedy this defect, the hope is held out that democracy itself will one day demand that only suitable men shall be presented to its choice: it is in effect, and up to a point, the method adopted in the so-called General Elections in Germany under the Hitler regime. It may be suggested that democracy is no longer democracy, if it is forcibly prevented from choosing fools when it feels so inclined. Assuming that democracy, as we know it, means, or may mean, mess and inefficiency, is it possible to save it from itself, except by means which in one way or another will supersede democracy? ‘Without qualified rulers,’ says Mr. Shaw, ‘a socialist State is impossible’: and if the socialist State does not throw up such qualified rulers, what then? Mr. Shaw speaks with the voice of the bureaucratic caste, pursuing efficiency with a single eye, and girding at the obstacles put in its way by foolish people enjoying democratically the right to be foolish.

In conclusion, in supplement of what has already been said, some reference should be made to Fabian Tract No. 70, the Report on Fabian Policy, which appeared without any indication of authorship, but which in Mr. Pease's History is assigned to Mr. Shaw. For the external student of Fabianism it is probably the most interesting of all the Tracts, since here the Fabians, contemplating themselves in their own mirror, report on what they imagine themselves to be. Most of the characteristic features here acknowledged have already been indicated in the foregoing pages; it is unnecessary to refer further to the question of Fabian tactics, toleration, and readiness to compromise in everything except their uncompromising constitutionalism. On this latter point there is, however, a touching expression of faith in the British Constitution, if suitably and slightly amended, which is of some interest:

When the House of Commons is freed from the veto of the House of Lords and thrown open to candidates from all classes by an effective system of Payment of Representatives and a more rational method of election, the British parliamentary system will be, in the opinion of the Fabian Society, a first-rate practical instrument of democratic government.

But a creed should not merely be a confession of faith: it should also renounce whatever devil calls for renunciation. From this point of view, some interest attaches to Fabian ‘repudiations.’ In the first place, they refuse to use the terms ‘bourgeois’ and ‘middle class’ as terms of reproach—and in the circumstances, quite right too: ‘it's an ill bird that files its ain nest.’ This circumspect attitude is, however, not dictated solely by considerations of prudence and self-regard; there is the further restraining thought that hitherto the socialist movement has been ‘inspired, instructed and led’ by members of the bourgeoisie, whatever that may be. It is profoundly true; and therefore, if only out of respect for Marx and Lassalle, it is unwise to rail unduly at the middle classes.

Another repudiation relates to wages. Socialism, it is expressly stated, does not involve the abolition of wages, but merely the establishment of ‘standard allowances for the maintenance of all workers by the community in its own service.’ Even more interesting is the sequel that the Fabian Society ‘resolutely opposes all pretensions to hamper the socialisation of industry with equal wages, equal hours of labour, equal official status, or equal authority for everyone.’ Such conditions—and it is an ominous phrase—would be ‘incompatible with the equality of subordination to the common interest which is fundamental in modern socialism.’ Finally, the Fabians explicitly renounce all schemes for securing to any person or group ‘the entire product of their labour’—and on good grounds; and they also renounce Utopias in South America or elsewhere, all the prolific brood of New Harmonys, Freelands, Icarias, which are somewhat unkindly repudiated as attempts to establish socialism by private enterprise. The individual may be a nuisance, as the Fabian view uniformly seems to imply, and may deserve all the ‘equality of subordination’ that can be ladled out to him; but it may be doubted whether he can be eliminated, or whether in the true sense it is possible to circumvent private enterprise. It is not really a debating point to suggest that ultimately everything worth doing is done by some individual, and is therefore an example of private enterprise. Even an Act of Parliament sprouts originally in one mind; even the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission was effectively the work of one person; even Fabian Tract No. 70 was (as Mr. Pease assures us) written by Mr. Shaw.

Such were the Fabians, most immaculate and least revolutionary of socialists; none were ever less guilty of drinking the wine of violence. In one respect their socialism is the socialism of the simple-minded, signifying, as it does, nothing more than the indefinite extension of State activity, so that the hawker's licence becomes a proof of the progress of socialism, and the existence of a policeman demonstrates that already we are living in a communistic State. On the question of how far the State should go, they were discreetly ambiguous: the path to socialism was a journey, with no assigned destination. They chanted in unison the song of the Pilgrims to Samarkand:

We shall go
Always a little further.

Believing that it was better to travel joyfully than to arrive, they travelled; and being blessed with the jocund companionship of Mr. Shaw, they succeeded in travelling very joyfully indeed. Moreover, the vehicle in which they travelled was a highly respectable hackney stage-coach, licensed by the appropriate authority. In place of barricades, rifles and lamp-posts with dependent ropes, they relied on such prosaic machinery as universal suffrage and the ballot-box. They were the cream of the intelligentsia, and they knew it—‘a body of highly educated people,’ says Mr. Pease, not without satisfaction. Suffering somewhat from the Narcissus complex, they were rather too much given to contemplating themselves. In their missionary zeal for truth or self-advertisement, they were perhaps too apt to winnow with every wind and to go into every way. And perhaps in half-unconscious ways their intellectual top-heaviness reveals itself in a certain aridity. They were more grieved by the world's mess than hurt by the world's wrongs: that the world was run with so little wisdom reflected little credit on the intelligence of Homo sapiens.

Yet the Fabians occupy a place in the history of socialism which is in no way commensurate with any contribution they may have made to socialist doctrine or thought. If their primary purpose was to disarm middle-class suspicion and to make socialism respectable, so that even a churchwarden in his most sober moments need not be ashamed to confess a weakness for socialism, then surely they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They produced a form of socialism which could be eagerly embraced by the undergraduate, enabling him to give his parents (in the 'nineties) that slight shock which it is so wise to administer from time to time, while at the same time it entailed no upheaval in his present mode of life. For so far from Fabianism imposing any ascetic renunciation on its devotees, it rather implied that while it was permissible to hope that one day the evil Babylon would dissolve into the New Jerusalem, nevertheless so long as Babylon remained the old bad, capitalistic, competitive Babylon, it would be foolish not to live as did the Babylonians.¹ In the end the Fabians not merely took the sting out of socialism, but they gave it an allure of its own. Indeed they almost overshot their target. They not merely made socialism respectable; they came near to making it a fashion, so that a profession of socialism (of a kind), so far from being the mark of a rebel, almost became the done thing.

One last point may be suggested. The Fabians largely based their case on the extent to which the State already controlled, managed, ‘interfered,’ deducing therefrom that we were already half-way to socialism. Looking back, we may be tempted to think that, comparatively speaking, they were chronicling the flow of water in the placid Arun, whereas to-day we are witnesses of the Mississippi in flood. How far the acquiescence of the public in the enormous extension of State activity and control has been facilitated by the insidious preaching and permeation of the Fabians is a question which it is easy to ask, but which no wise man will venture to answer.

(b) EDUARD BERNSTEIN AND ‘REVISIONISM’

As a pendent to the foregoing discussion of Fabianism, it may be convenient to include here a reference to the Revisionist movement, which in many respects represents in Germany the same influences working to the same conclusions. In each case there is a planing down of the most obvious and the most untenable protuberances of Marx, who, however, is more consciously disowned in the German movement, for the perfectly valid reason that in pre-Fabian days, Marx, neat and undiluted, had counted for so little in Great Britain. In each case, likewise, there is disbelief in revolution as an effective means of progress, and faith in the slow march of events and in the ‘inevitability of gradualness,’ which perhaps need not be so gradual. We are in each case invited to depose revolution and to enthrone evolution as the goddess who will get us there.

The prime begetter of Revisionism was Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), who presented his views to the world in a cumbrously entitled volume¹ which appeared in English, somewhat abridged and with a more manageable title-page, as Evolutionary Socialism. Bernstein's apparent backslidings had for some time occasioned considerable tumult in the circles affected, and there is incorporated in his volume a letter, written in October, 1898, to the German Social Democratic Party, meeting in Stuttgart, wherein he tersely summarises his doubts, hesitations and disbeliefs. For the ordinary reader this letter is more precious and satisfying than the lengthier statement contained in the Voraussetzungen, which, if truth be told, does not always escape dullness.

The problem confronting Bernstein was that which faces all honest souls brought up in orthodoxy. For it is of the essence of orthodoxy that it is dated, and sooner or later it ceases to be a satisfactory explanation of a world which it has ceased to explain. Reality contradicts faith. In the present case, Marx had provided certain economic theories which could no longer hold water, or anything else; he had analysed society, and society had contradicted his analysis; he had prophesied and fulfilment had lagged. What should the discerning faithful do in these circumstances? Should he cling to the old orthodoxy, and flatter himself that though not really true, it was nevertheless symbolically true, and therefore true enough to be going on with? Should he turn the revelation into a Sorelian myth, and say that, if not true, it ought to be true; and that, though not true, nevertheless it does him good to imagine it to be true? Or should he frankly acknowledge that the inherited creed is no longer in line with apparent reality, and that accordingly it demands restatement and revision? This was the view of Bernstein and the Revisionists: the Marxian doctrines had to be purged of what time had shown to be fallacious. It is significant that Bernstein did not claim that he was disclosing anything new: the justification of his essay was that it acknowledged what had already been disclosed.¹

The letter of October, 1898, to which reference was made above, sets out trenchantly the view that things are not developing on lines foreshadowed by Marx, and that therefore a change of tactics is required. Bernstein acknowledges, as a concession to the Marxian faith, that the theory of the evolution of modern society set forth as far back as the Communist Manifesto was correct, in so far as it characterised general tendencies: it was mistaken, above all, in its estimate of the time that this evolution would take. In the words of the Prophet Daniel,’ the thing was true, but the time appointed was long’—much longer indeed than Marx had indicated. In short, the revolution which was supposed to be at the door was, if anything, visibly receding. There had not developed that acute opposition of classes which was the basis of the argument of the Manifesto:

It is not only useless, it is the greatest folly to attempt to conceal this from ourselves. The number of members of the possessing classes is to-day not smaller but larger. The enormous increase of social wealth is not accompanied by a decreasing number of large capitalists, but by an increasing number of capitalists of all degrees. The middle classes change their character, but they do not disappear from the social scale.²

At the same time Bernstein finds Marx equally at sea in that other prognosis which has generally been regarded as evidence of superior foresight. As he looked round the world, Bernstein saw no evidence that concentration in production was taking place in all its departments with equal thoroughness and at an equal rate. Moreover, if there were concentration, the intermediate and the smaller businesses were not disappearing: ‘trade statistics show an extraordinarily elaborated graduation of enterprises in regard to size. No rung of the ladder is disappearing from it.’³

Meanwhile, on the other side of the picture, an evolution was taking place in the direction of improving the conditions of the workers; and with increasing democratisation, the needs and the opportunities of political catastrophe were correspondingly diminished. The conclusion of the whole matter was therefore that for the present, and for a long time to come, the task of the socialist would be ‘to organise the working classes politically and develop them as a democracy, and to fight for all reforms in the State which are adapted to raise the working classes and transform the State in the direction of democracy.’¹ The vision of a sudden catastrophe and the tactics appropriate on the assumption of an imminent catastrophe thus fade away. A catastrophe would not, indeed, be desirable in the interests of social democracy: ‘a greater security for lasting success lies in a steady advance than in the possibilities offered by a catastrophic crash.’² Such, largely in his own words, is the substance of Bernstein's somewhat epoch-making letter; and in what is, in effect, comment on his own letter, he declares his faith: ‘I strongly believe... in the march forward of the working classes, who step by step must work out their own emancipation.’³ It is an interesting statement and should be compared with the almost identical phraseology of the Fabians. Mr. Sidney Webb and Eduard Bernstein are alike step-by-steppers.

Bernstein's volume is in a sense little more than an elaboration and extension of these and other points, and although of the highest significance as perhaps the earliest critical assessment of Marx from the side of the Marxians, it does not call for any detailed summary or consideration here. Some points may, however, be noted. He repudiates, as had indeed Marx and Engels, the earlier and more extreme statements of the Materialist Conception of History, with its predestinarian implications. In the stage we have reached to-day, he holds that the ideological and ethical factors have greater scope for independent activity than formerly; and it is implicit in this view that there is an increasing power of directing economic evolution.⁴ We may be masters of our fate, and determine where we are going. The Marxian theory of value and of surplus value is criticised because surplus value is therein represented as emerging ‘exclusively in the sphere of production, where it is the industrial wage-earner who produces it.’⁵ Thus, according to Marx, it comes only from ‘living labour.’⁶ On the Bernstein (and more rational) view, surplus value ‘can only be grasped as a concrete fact by thinking of the whole economy of society.’⁷ In any case Bernstein writes as if these subtleties of analysis were immaterial: ‘a scientific basis for socialism or communism cannot be supported on the fact only that the wage-worker does not receive the full value of the product of his work.’⁸ It is a sound point, which, however, strikes at the roots of ‘scientific socialism’: and it may be observed that if the economic basis is discarded, socialism must be founded on moral and ethical considerations.

On distribution and concentration, Bernstein in the main elaborates what is contained in his letter. He must have been one of the first to underline that ‘the most modern and crass form of capitalist concentration—the Trust’—may have in fact quite a different effect on the distribution of wealth than might at first be assumed, inasmuch as it leads to what he calls ‘a splitting up of shares.’¹ In fact, says Bernstein, there is proceeding neither a relative nor an absolute diminution in the number of the possessing classes. So far from society being simplified (into the two extremes foreseen by Marx) there is taking place an increasing differentiation both with regard to incomes and business activities: enterprises of all sizes survive, and there is no development according to a pattern.² Indeed, so far as agriculture is concerned (that perpetual stumbling-block in socialist thought), it is argued that the smaller and medium agricultural holding is increasing everywhere, and that the large and very large holding is decreasing.³ Accordingly, as he suggests, if the collapse of modern society is dependent on the disappearance of the middle classes, and their absorption by the extremes above and below them, then the realisation of the new world, of socialism, ‘is no nearer in England, France or Germany to-day than at any earlier time in the nineteenth century.’⁴ The squeezing out of the intermediate classes is indeed the unhappiest of all the forecasts of the Communist Manifesto; and what was true in the closing decade of last century is still more abundantly true to-day. Society has stubbornly refused to segregate itself in the two pens so assiduously prepared for its reception.

So much for the ‘revision’—the less mealy-mouthed might say the ‘refutation’—of Marx. It contains little that may not now be regarded as the somewhat hackneyed and obvious criticism of a literal Marxism, but, coming as it did in 1898 from among the ranks of the faithful, it was something of a portent. What is perhaps of greater interest is the general view to be found in Bernstein regarding the immediate and the remoter future of society. He lends no support to the view that society is or can be divided into two sharply antagonistic classes. Modern wage-earners, he says—and with overwhelming rightness—are not a homogeneous mass; there is vast differentiation among the many different kinds of workers.⁵ And it follows from this that ‘the feeling of solidarity between groups of workers... is only very moderate in amount.’⁶ Such is his answer to the question of what precisely is meant by this modern proletariat of which so much is spoken. In a sense, he implies, even if he does not so express it, that there is no one ‘working class,’ bound together as a unity by eternal and inexorable Marxian decree. Inferentially also he answers in advance much of the argumentation of the Syndicalists half a generation later. Above these sectional interests, above the trade unions, he sees something wider which he calls the ‘community’; and indeed this point of view leads him to see in the trade unions something potentially antagonistic to the community:

Even the best productive association, so long as it is only an association for sale and exchange, will always stand in latent opposition to the community.... With a productive association which carries on any branch of production or public service on its own account, the community would have the same points of difference as with a capitalist undertaking.¹

Thus trade unions do not necessarily yield socialism; indeed, a trade union is defined as ‘an unsocialistic corporate body.’² Trade unions must accordingly be content to be partners: ‘associations against the community are as little socialism as is the oligarchic government of the State.’³ He is equally unsympathetic with the other main battle-cry of the Guild Socialists that there must be democracy in industry, with control from below: ‘It is simply impossible that the manager should be the employee of those he manages, that he should be dependent for his position on their favour and bad temper.’⁴ Bernstein thus thinks in terms of ‘community’ and ‘partnership’ in this community; and democracy is defined negatively as nothing more than an absence of class government, a form of government where political privileges belong to no one class.⁵ Doubtless Bernstein expresses what in certain quarters would be regarded as an indefensibly old-fashioned view, when he finds the guarantee of this partnership in a universal suffrage, freely and intelligently exercised: ‘The right to vote in a democracy makes its members virtually partners in the community, and this virtual partnership must in the end lead to real partnership.’⁶ The most significant point in all this lies in the emphasis with which Bernstein turns his back on the doctrine that the State is necessarily a class organisation, in which the worker—suffrage or no suffrage—necessarily has no part. The State, for him, represents a partnership in which all should, and will yet, share. The conception of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ which has its roots intertwined with that of the Marxian view of the State as a class organisation is likewise brusquely dismissed: it belongs to a lower civilisation; it is mere ‘political atavism.’⁷ Further, if there is no substance in the contention that the State is a class organisation, the old tag that the ‘proletarian has no fatherland’ must be equally untenable. If once true, it is true no longer, and becomes increasingly void of significance, ‘the more the worker, by the influence of socialism, moves from being a proletarian to a citizen.’ In what sense, indeed, can a fatherland be denied to a worker, ‘whose children the community educates, whose health it protects, whom it secures against injury,’ and much more?¹ Had not a potentially honourable phrase been soiled by all ignoble use, Bernstein might very obviously have been described as a National Socialist.

It will be observed how completely the revision, repudiation or refutation of Marx has brought Bernstein round to an old-fashioned, mid-Victorian liberalism, with faith in democracy, safeguarded by education and the intelligence which is supposed to result from the process of education. Democracy is not merely a condition of socialism; it is exalted until it becomes something more than the means—it is indeed the very substance of socialism.² Nor is this kinship with an earlier liberalism an attitude of mind remaining inarticulate and unconscious. It is part of Bernstein's confession of faith that socialism is the legitimate heir of liberalism, not only in chronological sequence, but also in its spiritual qualities. There is, he says, no truly liberal thought that does not also have its place among the ideas of socialism; the task of socialism is indeed that of organising liberalism.³

Nor does Bernstein, in his adherence to an antiquated liberalism, fail to reveal some of the less lovely aspects of traditional liberalism; and indeed, at the bidding of liberalism, he appears at times to be ready to discard what, rightly or wrongly, are commonly supposed to be ideas dear to the socialist. The liberal, in the era when he flourished, ran the risk of indurating his heart at the behest of laissez faire; he was an individualist, believing that every tub should stand on its own bottom, and that Providence had sent every tub a sufficiently broad bottom for the purpose. Also he distrusted the State, holding that any extension of the State's powers—it is Mill who is speaking—‘should be regarded with unremitting jealousy.’ In both these respects Bernstein is much closer to McCulloch than to Sidney Webb, and it is here that he parts company with the Fabians. The right to work, in its ordinary sense, is, he holds, something that is not in itself even desirable: ‘an absolute right to work would simply result in disorganisation.’⁴ On the general question of maintenance and relief he is equally, and as surprisingly, emphatic:

To demand simply the maintenance of all those without employment out of the State money means to commit to the trough of the State not only everyone who cannot find work but everyone that will not find work.

And he adds, in words that mark the final breach with Sidney Webb: ‘One need really be no anarchist in order to find the eternal heaping of duties on the State too much of a good thing.’¹

Such is Bernstein, a ‘radical’ who had strayed into the cohorts of the Marxians, and whom a liberal conscience (and a sense of reality) drove to a revision of Marx—a task accomplished by the elimination and the extirpation of all the essentially Marxian elements. For him the State represented a universal partnership; all that was required could be obtained by an intelligent use of the ballot-box. And meanwhile the good work was going on: ‘Everywhere there is action for reform, action for social progress, action for the victory of democracy.’² In England (a country worth looking at) no one now dreamed of an imminent victory for socialism by means of a violent revolution; more and more reliance was being placed on work in the municipalities and other self-governing bodies.³ It sounds like a well-bred echo from a distant Fabian drawing-room. Let the good work go on, pursuing methods which have already yielded so much. The appeal to a revolution by force has become a meaningless phrase. In words pointedly critical of the theory implicit in the Marxian tradition, there is something wrong with a ‘doctrine which assumes that progress depends on the deterioration of social conditions.’⁴