thing that really tipped me off that something was missing from my family's “official” history was the Fabian link to my grandfather. And one of the first really shocking discoveries was that two of the schools which my siblings and I had attended also had Fabian affiliations, even though there was no reason to think my grandfather had anything to do with our being sent there. In fact, in all the time I spent with my family, I don't remember ever once hearing anyone mention the Fabian Society.
Yet once I began to follow that lead, I quickly found out that the Fabians are the conspiracy bugaboo of the right. This presented a problem so far as finding reliable information about them, because a great deal of the unofficial history of the Society seems to be confined to websites with axes to grind. Actually, what I was initially looking for was some sort of concrete evidence of sexual abuse in my family history, since all the signs seemed to point that way. The Jimmy Boyle/Kray connection certainly did, and I began to wonder: Did the Fabian octopus share a tentacle or two with that of organized crime and child sexual abuse?
Early Fabians tended to downplay their interest in—or debt to—Karl Marx but there can be little doubt that they were inspired by his work, directly or otherwise. I say directly because Marx lived in London from 1849 up to his death in 1883, and spent countless hours working on his Das Kapital in the reading room of the British Museum (which then housed the British Library collection). George Bernard Shaw was introduced to Marx's work by Henry Hyndman, who discovered The Communist Manifesto in 1864 and formed Britain's first socialist political party, The Social Democratic Federation, in 1881. He was the first author to popularize Marx's works in English and introduced them to Shaw around 1882. The Fellowship of the New Life (which later became the Fabian Society) was founded the following year, in 1883, the year of Marx's death.1
Shaw described Marx's Kapital as
not a treatise on Socialism: it is a jeremiad against the bourgeoisie…. It was addressed to the working classes; but the working man respects the bourgeoisie, and wants to be a bourgeois. Marx never got a hold of him for a moment. It was the revolting sons of the bourgeoisie itself…like myself, bourgeois, who painted the flag red. The professional and penniless younger son classes are the revolutionary element in society: the proletariat is the Conservative element…. Marx made me a Socialist and saved me from becoming a literary man. (1949, pp. 49–50)
The Fellowship of the New Life dissolved in 1898, after which the Fabian Society grew to become a preeminent academic society in the UK. Many Fabians participated in the formation of England's Labour Party in 1900. The party's constitution, written by Sidney Webb, borrowed heavily from the founding documents of the Fabian Society. As seen in the Labour Party Foundation Conference in 1900, the Fabian Society claimed 861 members and sent one delegate. (See World Heritage Encyclopedia, no date given.) The Society grew throughout 1930–1940 over many countries under the British rule, and many future leaders of these countries were influenced by the Fabians during their struggles for independence from the British. These leaders included India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (whose fashion sense—“the Nehru jacket”—influenced the counterculture2), Obafemi Awolowo, who later became the premier of Nigeria's defunct Western Region, and the founder of Pakistan, barrister Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore, had a political philosophy strongly influenced by the Fabian Society. In the twenty-first century, the Fabian Society's influence is felt through Labour Party leaders and former prime ministers of Great Britain, such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
The name Fabian was apparently suggested by the spiritualist Frank Podmore, after the brilliant third century Roman general, Quintus Fabius (Maximus Verrucosus, 303-203 BC). Fabius was made a dictator in 221-217 BC, and, with a small band of fighting guerrillas and superior cunning, successfully defended Rome from Hannibal's mighty Carthaginian army. Fabius's tactics involved “gradualism” and “terrorism,” delaying tactics which were greatly disapproved of by his soldiers and the civilians, and which earned him the name of “the Delayer.” After these tactics triumphed, however, his skill and wisdom was more appreciated.
Moving past the more or less established history of Fabianism, I found a compelling, and damning, description of the Fabian plan as central to the whole “New World Order” millennia-long Conspiracy (big “C”), in an archived essay called “Fabian Influence on Council Developments in New Zealand” (Christian, 2006). One premise of the information was that the Fabian Society was behind the various Labour movements in Britain and that it concealed elitist, and even capitalist, interests. This was something I could vouch for from direct experience, having grown up in a wealthy socialist family (we were called “champagne socialists”) who were above all business people but also actively involved in local (and, I was slowly discovering, global) politics, in seemingly reformist and New Left movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), all having, sometimes obvious sometimes less so, ties to the Fabian Society.
According to another online source (Cassivellaunus, 2013), the Fabian Society has 7000 members, 80 percent (5,600) of whom are members of the Labour Party, amounting to about three percent of the general Labour Party membership (about 190,000 in 2010). The Fabian percentage increases dramatically in the higher reaches of the Labour Party.3 George Bernard Shaw declared the aim of Fabian educational reform as entailing the creation of a minister for education, with “control over the whole educational system, from the elementary school to the University, and over all educational endowments” (S. Webb, 1889, p. 55). This allegedly led to the creation of a wide range of interconnected organizations, societies, and movements. In education, councils like the London County Council, university societies, and schools like the London School of Economics, Imperial College, and London University. In culture, the New Age movement (Annie Besant was a founding Fabian), the Central School of Arts and Crafts, the Leeds Arts Club, the Fabian Arts Group, and the Stage Society. In economics, the LSE again, the Royal Economic Society, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). In law, the Haldane Society (named after Fabian Society member Lord Haldane). In medicine: the Socialist Medical League. In religion, the Labour (later Socialist) Church movement, the Christian Socialist Crusade, the Christian Socialist League, the Christian Socialist Movement. And so on (you get the picture).
Shaw expressed a desire to make the Fabians “the Jesuits of Socialism,” while H. G. Wells (number four on the Fabian executive after Webb, Pease, and Shaw) proposed to turn the whole Society into a ruling order, similar to the “Samurai” in his A Modern Utopia. That the Fabians consciously sought the company, collaboration, and support of the wealthy and powerful is evident from Fabian writings such as Beatrice Webb's Our Partnership, which abound in references to “catching millionaires,” “wire-pulling,” “moving all the forces we have control over,” while at the same time taking care to “appear disinterested” and claiming to be “humble folk whom nobody suspects of power” (B. Webb, 1948, p. 196).
The reliable John Taylor Gatto affirms this view in Underground History of American Education:
As the movement developed, Fabians became aristocratic friends of other social-efficiency vanguards like Taylorism or allies of the Methodist social gospel crowd of liberal Christian religionists busy substituting Works for Faith in one of the most noteworthy religious reversals of all time. Especially, they became friends and advisors of industrialists and financiers, travelers in the same direction. This cross-fertilization occurred naturally, not out of petty motives of profit, but because by Fabian lights evolution had progressed furthest among the international business and banking classes!…Fabian practitioners developed Hegelian principles which they co-taught alongside Morgan bankers and other important financial allies over the first half of the twentieth century. (2006, p. 182)
Gatto trumps and essentially invalidates a large subculture of conspiracy theorists and right-wing, anti-socialist writers, by pointing out:
One insightful Hegelianism was that to push ideas efficiently it was necessary first to co-opt both political Left and political Right.
