Fabian Society

In the fall of 1883, Hubert Bland and Edith Nesbit decided to organize a socialist debating group with Edward Pease who was one of their Quaker friends. Frank Podmore and Havelock Ellis joined the group in January, 1884. Podmore thought the group should have a name that expressed their mission. He studied Roman history and found what he thought was the perfect match, suggesting the group be named after the Roman General, Quintus Fabius Maximus who used harassing tactics to weaken the opposition rather than getting involved in pitched battles. The other members liked the concept, and the name Fabian Society evolved from Podmore's vision.

The Fabian society grew quickly. In 1886, the group had 67 members, and the official headquarters was 14 Dean's Yard, Westminster, the home of Frank Podmore. The group published the journal, Today, edited by Edith and Hubert. The group's mission was to reconstruct "society in accordance with the highest moral possibilities." They believed that capitalism was the cause of an inefficient and unjust society, and they wanted to focus and help society move to a socialist system as painlessly as possible.

The Fabian Society rejected the revolutionary socialism of the Social Democratic Federation and adapted a method that they believed would convince the people to change. The Fabians used a factual and rational approach to the socialist point of view. They avoided street brawls and the emotional rhetoric used by the Social Democratic Federation. The Fabian Society became a fact-finding and fact-dispensing group, and Fabian pamphlets contained a plethora of information on various social issues.

In 1889, the Fabian Society published a book that gave a comprehensive account of the organization's beliefs. The book, Fabian Essays, was edited by George Bernard Shaw. Some of the chapters were written by Sydney Webb, Sydney Olivier, Graham Wallas, Annie Besant, Hubert Bland and William Clarke. Fabian Essays sold 27,000 copies in two years.

The success of the book convinced the Fabian Society that they needed someone who could work as an employee full time so in 1890, Edward Pease was named Secretary of the Fabian Society. His duties included attending to correspondence, arranging lecture schedules, keeping the minutes of meetings and managing the Fabian Information Bureau. Pease was also in charge of editing and circulating book-boxes, and wrote for the Fabian News.

In 1890, Henry Hutchinson, from Derby, decided to give the Society £200 a year to produce public lectures. In the first months of 1900, Edward Pease represented the Fabian Society at the meeting of trade unions and socialist groups in London. After an intense debate, the delegates decided to pass a motion that would establish a distinct Labour group in Parliament. The Labour group would have their own whips and they would cooperate with any party that promoted legislation that could help the direct interests of labour.

To accomplish this mission the Conference established a Labour Representation Committee (LRC), which included two members from the Social Democratic Federation, two from the Independent Labour Party, seven trade unionists and one member of the Fabian Society.

The Fabian Society was responsible for forming part of the foundation for the Labour Party, and it subsequently played an important role in the policies of the emerging states that were developing from the decolonization of the British Empire.

Today, the Fabian Society functions primarily as a think tank and is one of 15 socialist societies that are associated with the Labour Party. However, there is no doubt that of these, the Fabian Society is the most influential. Almost singlehandedly, through its establishment not only of the Labour Party but also of the London School of Economics, the Fabian Society has played a major role in ruining most of Britain's republican institutions.

The Fabian Society's malevolence has spread far beyond Britain, however. Evidently and obviously affiliated with Western central banking families, the Fabian Society's impetus towards authoritarianism is well established now in education, media and politics.

The goal, of course, is one-world government and the Fabians have played their promotional role in achieving this destructive vision. Like Britain's Bloomsbury Group, the Fabians are not merely a philosophical "talking shop." Both groups advanced and implemented fundamentally evil economic methodologies of sociopolitical organization that continue, unfortunately, to play out today.

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