Since the Fabians are the conspiracy bugaboo of the right, this presents 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. One premise of this information is that the Fabian Society was behind the various Labor movements in Britain and that it concealed elitist, and even capitalist, interests. This is something I can 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 am slowly discovering, global) politics, in seemingly reformist and New Left movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) party, all having sometimes obvious, sometimes less so, ties to the Fabian Society.
According to one online source, the Fabian Society has 7000 members, 80 per cent (5,600) of whom are members of the Labor Party, amounting to about three percent of the general Labor Party membership (about 190,000 in 2010). The Fabian percentage increases dramatically in the higher reaches of the Labor Party. 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” (Shaw, “Educational Reform,” 1889).
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’ (Webb, 1948).” The reliable John Taylor Gatto affirms this view in Underground History of American Education: “As the movement developed, Fabians . . . 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!” 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. Adversarial politics–competition–was a loser’s game. By infiltrating all major media, by continual low-intensity propaganda, by massive changes in group orientations (accomplished through principles developed in the psychological-warfare bureaus of the military), and with the ability, using government intelligence agents and press contacts, to induce a succession of crises, they accomplished that astonishing feat.”
Read more here.
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