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v. 2 Dec 2016 20:30 slight update 26 Mar 2018; Marx section 24 Aug 2018; Charlotte Shaw (wife of GBS) 23 Dec 2020 [ Main Site ]
Parkinson on Karl Marx (this page, below)
Parkinson on the Webbs (this page, below)
Parkinson on Karl Marx from C. N. Parkinson's 'Left Luggage'
Parkinson seems to have had no idea about Jews and their activities. I recommend readers look at Marx.pdf (2014) by Miles Mathis, revealing that Marx was from wealthy families; his published life was a fake, promoted of course by fellow Jews. Mathis has interesting material on such topics as the town of Triers/Trèves. It's fascinating to see how the fake of Marxism (slogan: 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat') was used by Jews, both as a cover-story for Jews in the USSR, and as controlled opposition, as in the example given by Parkinson, of Harold Wilson of the 'Labour' party.[Back to top of page]
... Karl Marx's worldly failure was complete, his inexperience quite exceptional, and his practical ignorance of the masses no less remarkable than the hatred he felt for people he had never even met. With every conceivable handicap, Marx was arrogantly certain that people would act in ways that he could foresee and achieve the ends that he would approve.
Karl Marx (1818-83) is best understood as a Jew without a country, a professor without a university position and an author without a public. To take these points in order, Marx was of purely Jewish descent on either side, both his grandfathers being rabbis and his mother barely able to speak German. All that was German about Marx was his education at Bonn and Berlin, where he specialized in philosophy, economics and history. A revolutionary from an early age, he was denied the academic career for which he might have seemed destined. Graduating Ph.D. in 1841, he joined the Communist League in 1847, for which he published the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Expelled in turn from France, Germany, Belgium and Austria, he fled to London in 1849 and lived there until his death. Almost any Jew can be stateless, but Marx was peculiarly so, born of alien parents in a frontier region between Germany and France, educated in the Rhineland and in Prussia, a student at Berlin but a graduate of Jena, exiled by the age of twenty-five and resident in London from the age of thirty-two. Nor was this domicile chosen from any love of England or of anything but safety. He knew next to nothing of the English when he died, preferring to live among German exiles, talking German, thinking in German and for preference writing in German. He knew of the toiling masses only from blue books and parliamentary reports. We hear nothing of his travels among the {48} Lancashire cotton mills and as little of his talks with the London poor. There is no record of his visiting the coal-mines, the docks or even a public-house. He was essentially homeless, offering no loyalty and accepting no responsibility. And with his scorn went hatred. He despised and loathed his rivals, quarrelled with his allies and condemned all sympathizers who deviated even by a little from the doctrine he held to be sacred. Karl Marx had no country. He was always, first and foremost, a Jew.
He was also an unemployed professor, a scholar in the German tradition with a first-rate brain, a vast depth of learning and considerable obscurity of thought. Of his intellect and scholarship there can be no doubt at all. He knew many languages and had read widely in many subjects. A very learned man indeed, he was admirably fitted for the life of a German university. Marx's complete absorption in his philosophy, history and economics was quite typical of the sort of professor he should by right have become. That mixture of scholarship, vagueness, poverty and practical inexperience would have graced a chair at Heidelberg or Bonn. But for the death in 1840 of Frederick William III of Prussia, but for the succession of Frederick William IV, a man of strictly orthodox views on religion, Marx might have had an academic career. Barred from this, however, as an atheist, he had no class to teach; no pupils from whom he might have learnt. There is a sense, of course, in which a professor lives apart from the world. But his duties, even in the mid-nineteenth century, involved some contact with other people. The most professorial of German professors would have examinations to set and research to direct, meetings to attend and appointments to keep. Sessions of Senate and Faculty might give him scope for eloquence or intrigue and he would find for himself the need to compromise, concede and persuade. Howbeit painfully and slowly, the professor comes to know something of administration and finance. But this was the practical knowledge which Marx was denied. All the experience he had was in his own home, where his failure was catastrophic for his wife and family. Of his children {49} some died of slow starvation and two committed suicide. Retaining and increasing all his professional learning, he became more purely theoretical than even professors are allowed to be. Of the difficulties of organizing human society he knew practically nothing. There was in fact no human society - no province or city, no school or club - of which he could be said to have been a member. His whole life was bounded by the printed page.
Granted, however, that authorship was his life, he failed to make any impression on the reading public. He had a profound belief in his own genius but it was a belief which few others could be brought to share. How completely he assumed the role of a new Messiah is manifest from the way he lived. On the altar of his genius he sacrificed his own health and comfort, his children's lives, his wife's happiness and another man's career. Making little effort to earn his living, he sponged continually on others. Engels largely supported him out of what he could earn on the Manchester Stock Exchange and Marx accepted this help as no more than his due and too little for his needs. His faith in his own genius would seem to have been immovable. All the more painful, therefore, was his continued obscurity. His reputation as a theoretical revolutionary never spread in his lifetime beyond a narrow revolutionary circle. His articles in German had only the smallest circulation. His American articles were unsigned. In England he was virtually unknown, of little interest even to the police. Das Kapital brought him a few German admirers but was not even translated into English until after his death, volume I in 1887 and the other two volumes in 1907. The original edition occasioned only one short review in the English press, another (by Engels) being rejected by the Fortnightly. Later historians, recording the quarrels among these nineteenth-century revolutionaries, are apt to forget that these protagonists (whatever their later fame) were all then quite unknown. Marx was no more than a shabby refugee living in Soho or Hampstead and working daily at the British Museum; a seedy figure huddled over his books or shuffling home to his wife, his children and his {50} unpaid bills. Marx was certainly was obscure as any, not so much criticized as ignored.
To point the contrast we should remember that his period (1850, say, to 1880) was one during which British literary men were influential as never before or since. The novels of Dickens and Kingsley were indirectly preaching social reform before Marx came to London. Thackeray had earned over £5,000 a year by authorship, and Anthony Trollope (1815-82) made as much or more, yet neither having quite the fame of Alfred Tennyson. It might be asked whether a Jewish author of foreign appearance could hope to do the same. But that was exactly what the novelist Benjamin Disraeli did. Drawing attention to social evils, Disraeli did far more than earn a living. Entering Parliament in 1837, he became Prime Minister in 1868, achieved an earldom in 1876 and died only two years before Marx himself. If Marx resented his poverty and his lack of success (and he clearly resented both), he had before his eyes the examples of men who equally saw and described the evils of industrialism, who attacked established abuses and who brought about actual reforms but who were nevertheless invited to the great houses where they moved almost as equals among the titled, the wealthy, the politically brilliant and famous.
Marx had some cause to be bitter, but his lack of success had another and more important result. He never encountered the criticism of men whose experience he was bound to respect. The professional author clashes privately with his publishers and agents, with people who think that his views as expressed are too extreme or too repetitive. He finds that editors are just as cowardly and obtuse and that sub-editors do their work without reason or wit. He clashes, finally, with the reviewers and with people he meets at the club. 'I don't accept your theory,' says the general, 'and I doubt whether you believe in it yourself.' People, he finds, can be maddeningly argumentative. Worse still, they can turn out to be right. Even when wrong, however, they provoke the author to find the retort that will crush them. In one way and another he comes to realize that opposition serves a purpose, {51} and that his intellectual weapons can rust if he is for too long unopposed. Marx, by comparison, was the prophet on the mountain top. Into a single tremendous task he threw the concentrated energy of a lifetime. He brought to his work an immense learning, a complete selfishness, an impressive intellect and a fanatical devotion. Talking into the void, however, he heard no muttered 'Rubbish!' from the wind that blows on Sinai.
What was Karl Marx's message to mankind? It was enshrined, first of all, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. In that he argued that the history of all hitherto-existing society is the history of class struggles. Last of these was the triumph of the bourgeois class over feudalism. The current struggle is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie has created modern industry for its own profit, but the tendency of this process is at once to impoverish the workers and drive them into alliance with each other. Once so allied, their object must be to overthrow the bourgeois supremacy and seize the industrial machinery for themselves, abolishing nationalism and private property in the process and making themselves the ruling class. Classes and class antagonism will then be abolished. The communists are those destined to lead the workers in their struggle and the workers must take no notice of those who profess any other form of socialism. Communists deplore these other varieties of socialism as calculated to lessen the antagonism between the classes and so postpone the conflict without which the bourgeoisie can never be overthrown. The communists will nevertheless support any revolutionary movement against the existing social order. Their aims cannot be achieved without violence. Let the ruling classes tremble! The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. Working men of all countries, unite!
The revolution which Marx sought to encourage was something he regarded as imminent in 1847. It was not a revolt against large-scale industry, for there was none at the time; least of all in Germany where his revolution was supposed to begin, or in France, where a revolution of sorts did {52} actually occur. In so far as an industrial society existed it was in England. But the English factories, which Marx had not visited, were still in their infancy and there was nothing comparable anywhere else. His exhortation, therefore, to the world's proletariat was addressed to a mere handful of artisans in a mainly agricultural society. Such revolutionary activity as there was did no more than establish Napoleon III in France and Bismarck, eventually, in Germany. Marx came to realize that no revolution was imminent. More than that, The Origin of Species appeared in 1859 and may have suggested to him that evolution is a slow process. From about this time he began a systematic study of economics, hoping to find in this a key to the revolutionary process. He collected material from 1859 to 1865 and began to write his chief work in January 1866. It was finished in April 1867 and printed in August. This was Das Kapital, Vol. I, the work upon which his reputation mainly depends.
Das Kapital, Vol. I, runs to nearly 900 pages (perhaps 400,000 words) in the English version and is far from easy to read. It takes the form of a textbook of economic theory and cannot as such be regarded as anything but obsolete. His theory of value had its vogue at the time but has, of course, been superseded. There remains his Dialectical Materialism and his Theory of History. As a materialist, Marx believed that the only world is that which we perceive with our senses, and that our ideas are only a reflection of that world. Dialectical Materialism is the belief that evolution is a process of conflict, contradiction or struggle between two opposing forces or ideas, their mutual destruction producing a third idea which is different from both. Thus the result of the conflict between private property and the proletariat is the abolition of both property and class. Those who accept this theory believe that the violence of collision is essential if the desired result is to be gained. The belief that any compromise would be fatal might serve as an excuse for Marx's violence of language. The fact is, however, that his hysteria is partly social and partly the effect of his sedentary life. Powerful as a thinker, Marx was personally intolerant and spiteful, {53} morose and treacherous, theoretical and quarrelsome, cowardly and vain.
When we come to consider Marx's theory of history, we have to remember that it dates from 1848, if not indeed from about 1841. He had thus formulated his conclusion before he even began to study the facts. That might be thought a serious criticism but his economic interpretation of history breaks down, in fact, at two other points. In the first place he refused to admit that any other interpretation is possible, his view being the only one. But the absurdity of that is obvious. That ideological and political ideas are influenced by material or economic circumstances we should mostly admit. That they are influenced by nothing else is a ridiculous over-simplification. In the second place, a theory of history must rest, like any other theory, on facts; and the required facts, in Marx's day, were simply not available. His was a theory of economic history based on one incomplete example. Knowing nothing of how the process would end, Marx had little opportunity of knowing how it had even begun. For the systematic study of history began after Marx's time. Cunningham's Growth of English Industry and Commerce did not appear until 1882, and our knowledge of economic history has progressed since then almost as dramatically as our knowledge of physics. Scholarship has thrust backwards into pre-history, forward into the events which have happened since Marx lived, outwards into Oriental and American fields hitherto unknown, and inwards into the history of science, of which we have barely scratched the surface. Whereas we have evidence of civilizations rising and falling over a period of at least 30,000 years, Marx rests his economic theory on an analysis of about 500 years of one civilization; an analysis formulated before the Standard histories had even been written and leading to a conclusion which he had announced before his researches had even begun.
That a supposed textbook of economics should end as the bible of an Asian religion might have come as a surprise to the atheist who wrote it. But our concern is not with Marxism as a creed but with Das Kapital as an influence on {54} socialism. It was to prove, in fact, very influential indeed. For while British socialists might reject 'the bible of the working man' as contrary to the methodism in which they had been brought up, and inconsistent with the liberalism in which they still believed, they did accept two Marxist ideas. They came to believe that all problems are economic problems. They learnt to assume that economic history must be written with a political purpose. So far as Europe is concerned, Marx's triumph was in substituting economic for political thought. 'We are all socialists now,' said Sir William Harcourt in 1889, but there is a sense in which all modern politicians are Marxists. If Mr Harold Wilson and Mr Edward Heath agree with each other about anything it is in supposing (quite wrongly) that their problems are primarily economic. Mr Wilson studied at Oxford and taught Economics at University College. Mr Heath studied at Oxford an imitation of the course pursued by Karl Marx at Bonn. The language used by each is virtually the same, even when their conclusions are different. All is to depend upon prices and incomes, upon bank rate, tariff and rate of exchange. In the days of Gladstone the same problems of finance took second place to problems of general policy and even of religion. Questions merely political are seldom nowadays the subject of debate.
That the current controversy over (say) Britain's possible entry into the Common Market should be an economic debate is due to Karl Marx's influence. The readers of Das Kapital are given to understand that the revolution must come. 'The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point where they prove incompatible with their capitalist husk. This bursts asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.' Up to this point Marx has many stirring things to say. He is the more plausible, moreover, in that he is, so far, an evolutionist. He describes not a static but a fluid situation, being concerned essentially with the laws of change. But evolution, for him, ceases on the day of proletarian triumph. As from that point he becomes a mere utopian or {55} visionary. The proletariat, he explains, being in power and with no opponents left, would find politics so needless that the State would wither away. The abolition of army and church will be the preliminary, merely, to the abolition of everything else. As from this moment Marx has no further advice to give. Specific about all the institutions that are to be abolished, Marx has practically nothing to say about what is to take their place. He says something vaguely about a commune and about universal franchise, leaving his disciples to work out the details for themselves. But why should centuries of development end, as it were, with the blast of the whistle? If capitalism is to fail by reason of its internal contradictions, allowing the proletariat to set up a communist utopia, we can fairly ask what is to happen next. Why should communism not fail in its turn, giving place to dictatorship? What is specially permanent about that regime as opposed to any other? Evolution does not come to a standstill. Nor, if it did, should we know at what point it might be expected to stop. Why should the State wither away? Should we not rather suppose that the nationalization of every industry would give any government the cue to expand and ramify? Granted, however, that the Revolution is to represent finality, we should expect to hear more about the utopia which is to result. But Marx's political ideas end with the lamp-post on which the last capitalist is to be hanged. He loses interest at the point where our excitement should be feverish. If it is to paradise we are journeying, we hear nothing of its glories. If heaven lies ahead we glimpse nothing through the gate.
The clue to Marx's apparent stupidity lies in the period at which he lived. To a man born at Trier in 1818 the idea of modern industry was completely alien. Its development came mostly after his time, leaving him free to suppose that peasants could run factories for themselves. But where Marx was merely ignorant, of necessity, his followers lack the same excuse. They press on, with bloodshed, towards a golden future which they cannot even bother to describe. Like the Old Testament from which its style derives, Das Kapital is based upon revelation, not argument. Marx (like Isaiah) {56} tells us what is going to happen. He does not explain how he comes to be so certain about it, nor why the change has to be regarded as progress. He is weakest of all in psychology, being convinced that capitalists are all inherently wicked and that workers are virtuous by definition. He cannot see that capitalists and workers are the same sort of people with the same sort of motives, the capitalist being the worker of yesterday and the worker the capitalist of tomorrow. He is far less realistic than Herbert Spencer, failing to see that the proletariat of his imagining is as fallible as the communist friends with whom he almost invariably quarrelled. As Herbert Spencer himself pointed out, it is the people who cannot manage their own affairs who feel most confident about ruling the world.
Socialists in Britain are usually eager to explain that their own party is the strongest defence against communism. Says Mr Harold Wilson on this subject:
There are those who believe that the assertion of public responsibility for the means of full employment, social advance, material or spiritual, is a fatal step in the direction of Communism. It is our belief that a socialist approach to Britain's problems so far from being a lurch in the direction of Communism means the fullest flowering of democracy. {The Relevance of British Socialism. London, 1964, p. 108.}He goes on to claim that socialist success has almost eliminated communism in Britain, and that the Labour Party will show the way towards 'a more balanced, satisfied society in which human dignity is accepted as the ultimate aim of economic activity'. He maintains that a system based on unemployment and waste - the system favoured in the United States - must be unstable; so much so as to prove an actual handicap in the struggle against communism. 'It is our task', he concludes, 'to give a lead to the free world in resolving this internal contradiction.' To many these sentiments must seem admirable. To others they may seem vaguely unctuous and smug. But there is most significance, for our present purpose, in the actual choice of words. The object of socialist policy is to gain full employment and social advance. The aim {57} of economic activity is to uphold 'human dignity' (whatever that may mean). To Marxism he is utterly opposed, but he follows Marx in all that he omits. In the process of government - in the actual machine which is to advance along the road to utopia - Wilson shows no interest at all. Like Karl Marx he thinks it enough to throw in a word about democracy, as if that were enough to solve the problem. That the machine has broken down he does not even notice, such is his eagerness to point the way. And, last of all come the few words which say so little and yet reveal so much. 'It is our task to give a lead to the free world in resolving this internal contradiction' The voice may be the voice of Harold Wilson. The words are those of Karl Marx.
From C. N. Parkinson's 'Left Luggage'
Chapter 4, Tangled Webb:
[Back to top of page]
... {60} Beatrice Potter (1858-1943) was the daughter of a financier of Yorkshire and Puritan origin whose very intellectual wife died in 1882. Beatrice (aged 24) had moved in Gloucestershire and London society until then and now became a hostess in her own right. Tiring quickly of this existence, she began to visit the East End slums. Other ladies then did the same, but Beatrice Potter graduated from London to Lancashire, visiting the industrial region from which her mother's family had come. Among her Bacup relatives she learnt of the Co-operative Movement and its close association with methodism. She thought it offered an ideal training for local government—itself a useful defence, she thought, against the 'socialistic tendency of the coming democracy'. By 1884 she had decided to devote her life to sociological research. While Octavia Hill and Canon Barnett were labouring for the good of the poor, Beatrice (who knew these philanthropists well) preferred, like Charles Booth, to collect the facts upon which future policy should be based. She was sufficiently well known to give evidence in 1888 before the House of Lords Select Committee on Sweating. Moving among people who were concerned over social evils, she inevitably met members of the Fabian Society. According to George Bernard Shaw, she considered a number of these as possible husbands, inviting them in turn for weekends at her home near Gloucester. Her choice fell on Sidney Webb (1859-1947), a civil servant in the Colonial Office, and they became engaged in 1891. The marriage took place the following year, when her father's death left her with an independent income of £1,000 a year. Sidney Webb resigned from the Colonial Office, and they went to live at 41, Grosvenor Road. With F. W. Galton as his private secretary, Sidney began to campaign for election to the L.C.C.; a preliminary, it seemed, to his candidature for Parliament. He was already a known socialist, a man of lower-middle-class origin who had risen by competitive examination. Summing up the situation after their engagement, Beatrice wrote:
| We are both of us second-rate minds, but we are curiously combined. I am the investigator and he the executant; between us {61} we have a wide and varied experience of men and affairs. We have also an unearned salary. These are unique circumstances. A considerable work should result if we use our combined talents with consistent purpose. {Mary Agnes Hamilton, Sidney and Beatrice Webb: a study in contemporary biography, London, 1933.} |
They were childless, their first offspring being The Co-operative Movement of Great Britain by Beatrice Potter (1st ed. 1893) and its logical sequel The History of Trade Unionism by Sidney and Beatrice Webb (1894). It was the latter work which made them famous.
In observing that 'the firm of Webb' was unique in its assets, Beatrice was not overstating the case. Descended from nonconformists and liberals, it was her nonconformist conscience which drove her to the Lancashire factories and London slums. Unique already in knowing both (in contrast with Karl Marx who knew neither), she made herself the accepted authority on the Co-operative Movement. She then married a Fabian Civil Servant and candidate for the L.C.C. who helped her to become, with him, the accepted authority on the trade unions. In an exceptional way the Webbs thus united in themselves the elements which were to make the British Labour Party. [Note: Parkinson does not mention Jews as a separate interest group, though some of his remarks, for example in East and West, show he had some awareness. I'm tempted to compare the 'Labour Party' with the NAACP in the USA, a manipulative concern run by Jews with undisclosed aims-RW] More than that, they were aware of their opportunity in being uniquely acceptable to the housewives as consumers, the workmen as producers, the Civil Service as experts and the intellectuals as fellow theorists. His skill on committee was backed by her position in society, her aggressiveness tempered by his modesty. It was no accident that when he finally entered Parliament he was the only intellectual to represent a mining constituency. When they studied the intersecting circles which bounded the groups they could regard as progressive, they saw themselves as uniquely included in all of them. They covered between them the whole movement from the Co-operatives to the T.U.C., from local government to the Civil Service, from Toynbee Hall to the Methodist chapel, from Bernard Shaw to H. G. Wells. To crown the whole they had only to add (as they {62} chose to do) the London School of Economics and the New Statesman.
The London School of Economics dedicated to 'sociological investigation' was founded in 1895, occupying two small hired rooms in John Street, Adelphi. Its move from there to 10 Adelphi Terrace was financed by Mrs Bernard Shaw.
[Note:
Charlotte Shaw seems to have helped fund the New Statesman as well as the LSE. Possibly, it occurs to me, this may have been to keep Jewish moneys behind the scenes.
Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend (1857-1943) is typically described like this: Daughter of Horace Townshend ... A native of County Cork, she was born on January 20th 1857 to wealthy parents. An independent woman, she travelled Europe extensively before arriving in England in 1895. Here she became a member of the socialist Fabian society, of which Shaw was also a member. ... she acted as his advisor, secretary, and agent throughout his life. She frequently proposed topics for his plays... her enthusiastic research into the life of Joan of Arc. ... She taught herself to type and read Shaw's shorthand ... "she amused herself by writing my critical articles at my dictation". The secrecy over money is typical of the Victorian era. Whether feminism, Irish Home Rule, philanthropy, or 'socialism', was her leading motivation, is not known to me. She died in 1943; I don't know whether she had any understanding of Jews and Freemasons and war.
I don't think she had a serious biography written about her.]
When the University of London was reorganized by Haldane and Sidney Webb in 1899-1900, the London School of Economics was made one of its constituent Colleges, with Webb himself as Professor (unpaid) of Public Administration. The objects of this institution were excellent, but its critics felt that the sociological evidence collected there was to prove the case for a socialism which was not so much defended as assumed. Future graduates and members of its teaching staff were to include Graham Wallas, L. T. Hobhouse, Sir William Beveridge, Clement Attlee, Harold Laski, Hugh Dalton, R. H. Tawney, Kingsley Martin and Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders. The New Statesman came much later in the Webbs' career, in 1913, and was originally financed by them, by Ernest (afterwards Lord) Simon, Edward Whitley, H. D. Harben and by George Bernard Shaw. It had, initially, a circulation of 2,500, which rose afterwards to 14,830 in 1931 and which stands now [1967ish] at about 90,000. The name chosen for this weekly was intended to emphasize the solid respectability of socialism. Clifford Sharp was the first editor, Desmond MacCarthy the dramatic critic and Shaw an expected contributor who seldom, in fact, contributed. The actual quality of its contents has fluctuated considerably, its tone being too often tiresome and querulous. It forms, nevertheless, part of the 'considerable work' which was to result, and did result, from the Webbs' partnership. The Labour Party as we know it is largely the work of their hands.
It is important to realize, nevertheless, that their achievement was partly accidental. Believing as they did in socialist planning, they would have been content to see this introduced by the Liberals; or even, for that matter, by the Conservatives. Well known from 1895, the Webbs made a reputation for {63} themselves as wire-pullers, with Haldane as 'a steadfast fellow-conspirator for the public good'. Close association with R. B. Haldane over the University of London Bill brought Sidney much into Liberal Opposition circles. But when the Liberals split over the Boer War, Sidney's friendship with Haldane brought him into the Imperialist camp [Sidney Webb, being a Jew, naturally wanted war with South Africa to secure metals including gold for Jews-RW] as represented by Asquith and Grey; thus gaining the hostility of Harcourt, Morley and Lloyd George. Worse still was his association from 1900 with Rosebery and Balfour; [This is the Balfour of the 'Balfour Declaration' - RW] with the right-wing Liberals and indeed with the Conservatives. The main result was to gain the distrust of the Radicals, like J. Ramsay MacDonald, who began to undermine Sidney's position on the L.C.C. Wrote Beatrice in her diary for 14 March 1903:
| I have been pondering over the question whether I could have done anything to stop the 'slump in Webbs' on the Progressive side. Of course, our attention has been absorbed in getting hold of forces in the enemy's camp, and our frequent coming and going has excited suspicion in our own. They have not the wit to see that, if a Government is in power with an overwhelming majority, it is no use fighting it—at least not unless the other way has proved unavailing. {Diary extracts from Our Partnership, London, 1948} |
What these suspicions might be is fairly indicated by further extracts from the same ingenuous source:
|
Went into dinner with Winston Churchill... Our season ended with a brilliant little dinner here to meet Mr Balfour. ... I placed Charles Booth next to him—I doubt from his manner whether he knew who Charles Booth was—wondered perhaps that a Salvationist should be so agreeably unsettled in his opinions! Bright talk with paradoxes and subtleties, sentiments and allusions, with the personal note emphasised, is what Mr Balfour likes—and what I tried to give him! |
Whether she succeeded must be a matter for surmise. But the Prime Minister had not the slightest interest—as she soon discovered—in the economic and social problems by which she was obsessed. All that her party-giving achieved was a suspicion about her motives. Aware of this distrust, she {64} asked H. G. Wells to account for it. He explained fairly bluntly that Sidney's tactical skill was too obviously 'foxy' and that Beatrice herself was insufficiently radical. She thereupon decided against trying 'to run the show' for at least some years. The sequel is best told in her own words:
|
June 10 [1905].—The Progressives have turned Sidney off the party committee.5
We have slipped into a sort of friendliness with Balfour. He comes in to dinner whenever we ask him. November 23rd.—Appointed to the Royal Commission on the Poor Law.... Yesterday evening we dined with Lord Lucas. ... Mr Balfour was announced.. .. He was looking excited and fagged on the eve of resignation. November 29th.—Yesterday A.J.B. lunched with us, and went afterwards to G.B.S.'s new play Major Barbara. The vanishing Prime Minister was looking particularly calm and happy ... seemed like one with a load lifted off his mind. |
It is not the resigning Prime Minister with whom the rising politician likes to be seen. When Campbell Bannerman took office on December 5th his Cabinet included more talent than any formed since that date. With Grey and Asquith, Haldane and Morley, Lloyd George and Sydney Buxton—with Winston Churchill and Herbert Samuel among the Under-Secretaries—the government was one of extraordinary distinction. The Local Government Board was headed, however, by John Burns and not by Sidney Webb. In the Liberals' landslide victory, moreover, of January 1906, the 377 seats they gained included none for Sidney. Beatrice could busy herself with her Poor Law Minority Report in 1906-9, but the Webbs had lost touch by then with both Liberals and Conservatives. They had turned to the Labour movement, not solely from choice but as the result of failure in another direction. The whole history of British socialism would have been different had Sidney Webb been given office in 1905. He and Beatrice were forced, as it were, into the role for which they were so uniquely fitted. {65}
The turning point, Fred Jowett used to say, was a by-election in the Liberal stronghold of Huddersfield towards the end of 1906, when reports reached London that Mr Russell Williams, the I.L.P. candidate, was likely to win. This was the 'writing on the wall'. Mr Winston Churchill, then embarking on his Left Liberal phase, was sent post-haste to the constituency to announce the Government's intention to introduce Old Age Pensions. The Labour Party had won an important demand, but the Liberals won the election by the margin of 340 votes and regained the initiative. From this point onwards Mr Lloyd George dominated Liberal policy, cleverly manoeuvring Labour into a junior partnership in a half-hearted struggle against the House of Lords. {Fenner Brockway, Socialism over Sixty Years. The Life of Jowett of Bradford (1864-1944). London, 1946, p. 78.}
While the Liberals were thus dragged, struggling, towards socialism, the Labour Party pulled further away from all that is liberal. In this move the leadership came not from the Webbs but from their close friend, Mr George Bernard Shaw. 'I am not a big man,' complained Sidney Webb at one moment of crisis, and the same thought occurred to him as early as 1894 when he admitted as much before the Fabian Society. 'Though we cannot count among our ranks any men of the calibre of Bentham and James Mill... I take it that the work set before us is analogous to theirs.' So indeed it was, but one may question whether the Fabian Society was as weak as he seems to imply. For if Webb was no genius, George Bernard Shaw certainly was. At least on the literary side the Fabians could boast of a giant. He had more influence over them, moreover, than they were always ready to admit. And whereas Webb would have taken office under the Liberals—had he been given the chance—Shaw was more ruthless in every way. An intellectual with little use for the proletariat, {67} Shaw's approach was to the middle class; and it was Liberalism that stood in his way. Granted, moreover, that he was influenced by Webb, it is no less certain that Webb was influenced by him. That Webb was out of favour by 1905 was partly his own fault but partly the result of Shaw's persuasion. The process began with the publication, in November 1893, of the Fabian Society Manifesto. Under the title 'To your Tents, O Israel!' it appeared in the Fortnightly Review, signed jointly by Webb and Shaw, and was reprinted afterwards (1894) as a pamphlet entitled A Plan of Campaign for Labour. In it the joint authors attacked the right wing of the Liberal Party, alleging that its more enlightened members (Asquith, Acland, Rosebery, Ripon and Bryce) had been constantly opposed by the die-hards (Harcourt, Fowler and others) as also by 'the doctrinaire "Manchesterism" and pettish temper of Mr John Morley ... by the ignorance, indifference and inertia of the Whig peers, Lords Spencer and Kimberley, backed by such obsolescent politicians as Mr Shaw-Lefevre and Mr Arnold Morley.' The workers were urged, therefore, to form 'a Trade Union political Party of their own' with at least fifty candidates for Parliament. This they did soon afterwards, as we have seen, with results ultimately fatal to Liberalism.
It was the great tradition of the Fortnightly, founded by Anthony Trollope, that every contribution had to be signed, the editor accepting no responsibility for the contributor's views. In this instance there was a joint signature but all internal evidence points to Shaw as the actual author. The composition is characteristic, more especially where the literary style is allowed to influence the invective. The words chosen—'ignorance, indifference and inertia'—were in the tradition of Jonathan Swift; an author to whom high office was always denied. Coming well enough from Shaw, who had no political ambitions, they were fatal to Sidney Webb. Were he to take office under the Liberals—and as late as 1904 he could see no other possibility—these pettish and obsolescent men would be his colleagues. They not unreasonably decided to do without him; a decision which was to have {68} a significant sequel. But if Shaw was responsible for driving Webb into the Labour Party, he was equally responsible for steering the Fabian Society away from Marxism. Were we to adopt the Marxist terminology (which heaven forbid) we might conclude that Liberalism, the thesis, clashed with Marxism, the antithesis; their mutual destruction producing Socialism, the synthesis. It was Shaw who steered the Labour Party on its central course, avoiding the rocks on either hand. The aims of Liberalism had been mostly achieved by 1895, and Jeremy Bentham had no further message, silent as he was in his glass case at University College, London. Karl Marx had a new gospel to preach, one which involved a workers' rising against the middle class. In Lenin's hands this became a potent influence in the more backward countries, where peasants still formed the bulk of the population. It was wildly inapplicable to an industrialized country in which peasants and artisans would soon be hopelessly outnumbered by the bourgeoisie they were supposed to massacre. And while Shaw had a rather excessive veneration for Karl Marx, he had no poor opinion of himself. The doctrine he preached was essentially his own, therefore, and addressed to the middle class of which he was a member. Unfortunately for his legend, it was also addressed to a country in which Shaw chose to remain (like Marx) a foreigner; to people with whom he was never quite identified.
Shaw's platform was the Fabian Society, a group of left-wing intellectuals who came together in 1884. Elected to membership soon afterwards, Shaw joined the Executive Committee in January 1885. The Society's views were first announced in Fabian Essays in Socialism, published privately in 1889, the frontispiece by Walter Crane and the cover by May Morris. When 2,000 copies had been sold, it went into a shilling edition of 25,000 copies, with an American edition in 1894 and a sixpenny edition in 1908. It had, altogether, a considerable influence. These Essays marked the rejection of Marxism and the acceptance of a socialism which would be built upon existing institutions, existing society and the existing school of economic theory. Socialism is little more {69} than the application of democratic principles to an industrial society. 'Socialism,' (wrote Sidney Webb), 'is the economic side of the democratic ideal', and its aim can be achieved only by democratic means. And while Shaw advocated the formation of a Labour Party he never disdained the tactics of permeation. The Liberal Party was under socialist pressure from 1888, with social reform among its professed objects. The Conservatives' resistance was as feeble. And although it was 1923 before Webb announced the 'inevitability of gradualness', the infiltration was well advanced before he dared call attention to it. In the long run it was mainly the Conservatives who introduced socialism into Britain.
The socialism in which Shaw believed was implicit in most of his plays but is more explicit in Major Barbara (1905); the play in which he singles out poverty as the chief evil of the day.
| ... The universal regard for money is the one sound spot in our social conscience. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honour, generosity and beauty as conspicuously and undeniably as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. {From the Preface of Major Barbara} |
Brusquely discarding the Christian or charitable view of the subject, Shaw thought of the poor (and indeed the whole working class) as a public nuisance to be abolished. Whereas sentimentalists bewailed the fact that the poor were unhappy, Shaw thought they might well be as happy as drunkards or pigs. Making no secret of his dislike he explained that they were a source of infection and dirt and that 'mere poverty will not hurt them half as much as it will hurt their innocent neighbours'. The only remedy, he explained, is to pay every-one the same wage; not because that plan would be particularly fair but because the alternatives are impracticable, anarchical, impossible or absurd. He summed up his views on this subject in 1928, no better summary being published before or since. {cf. The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, London, 1928, pp. 19, 43, 95.} {70} He explained at the same time that Hyndman and Morris had failed in their efforts to convert the working class—of which, for one thing, they knew too little.
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... The Fabian Society succeeded because it addressed itself to its own class in order that it might set about doing the necessary brain work of planning Socialist organization for all classes, meanwhile accepting, instead of trying to supersede, the existing political organization which it intended to permeate with the Socialist conception of human society. The existing form of working-class organization was Trade Unionism. Trade Unionism is not Socialism; it is the Capitalism of the Proletariat.{Ibid.} |
Shaw's influence was considerable but mostly negative. He killed Marxism so far as Britain was concerned. He killed Liberalism as an intellectual force. He killed middle-class humanitarianism as applied to the poor. What was left after the massacre was the Labour Party as inspired by Beatrice and Sidney Webb.
Thrown aside by the Liberals, the Webbs had joined the Labour Party. Their moment of vision may have come in March, 1911, when Beatrice wrote as follows:
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I am not sure that the time may not have arrived for a genuine Socialist Party with a completely worked-out philosophy and a very detailed programme. I am not sure whether we had better not throw ourselves into constructing a party with a religion and an applied science. {Our Partnership. London, 1948, p. 471.} |
This, in effect, was what they did. The task was made the easier in that World War I prepared the way for socialism. Its potential opponents mostly died in action and the restrictions of wartime could be turned into the regimentations of peace. For the Labour leaders (many of them conscientious objectors) the war of 1914-18 was a period of planning. They were ready, therefore, when their opportunity came in 1924. By a fitting coincidence it was at the Webbs' house that the crucial decision was made. {71} ... From the start, Arthur Henderson urged acceptance of office. At a dinner in the Webbs' home, the six top leaders cast the die. Beatrice Webb noted: 'Sidney reports that they have all, except Henderson "cold feet" at the thought of office, though all of them believe that J.R.M. [James Ramsay MacDonald; apparently born James McDonald Ramsay, perhaps changed as Ramsay may have been Jewish-RW] might not refuse.' Snowden's account agrees: Labour, it was felt, 'had no choice' but to accept office, despite all the hazards, for to do otherwise 'would obviously have been regarded as an act of cowardice'. {Richard W. Lyman, The First Labour Government. London, 1957, p. 88.}
Scanning, selection, HTML by Rae West. Marx section 24 Aug 2018. A few corrections and notes 28 Dec 2022.
There are many parallels with the 'Frankfurt School', 'progressive' Jews in Germany whose institution was closed, and who left for the USA. Whether Beatrice Potter was 'Jew-aware' is not known to me; I would guess not. She doesn't seem to have been aware that she was just a small part of the penetration of Britain by Jews.