Labour's Utopias by Peter Beilharz

Author:Peter Beilharz [Beilharz, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social Science
ISBN: 9780429834677
Google: kKp-DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-12-07T01:33:56+00:00

But you are socialists! We chalked it on your backs when you weren’t looking!” … [nothing institutional will change, PB] yet socialism will be soaking through it all, changing without a sign of change. It is quite a fantastic idea, this dream of an undisturbed surface, of an ostensibly stagnant order in the world, while really we are burrowing underground, burrowing feverishly underground – quite a novel way of getting there – to the New Jerusalem.176

The Society – the Old Gang – had miraculously managed to convince themselves of the impossible, that evolution, like Marx’s old burrowing mole in The Eighteenth Brumaire, was written into the order of things.

Wells was characteristically scathing as well as witty in his broadside. In half-humour he tells the story of the mouse who ‘permeated’ the cat-strangely, the cat is still alive and well, or seems so, and the mouse cannot be found.177 With equal ease, Wells demands readers to take up their Plutarch: the problem with this man Fabius, was that he never struck at all.178 And strike, they should, and must: for otherwise the Society was simply kidding itself, catnapping while congratulating itself. True to form, the Fabian Society established a Committee of Inquiry to look into the matters raised by Wells’ charges. The Committee, which included Shaw, Sydney Olivier, Maud Pember Reeves and both Wells and Mrs Wells, in turn produced its own document calling for the tightening of the Fabian Basis, replacing the language of political economy with that of a fuller-blooded socialism.179 So Wells, like Cole, took his stand against the Bureaucrats in the party. For Cole, after the First World War, this was a fully authentic stance. For Wells it was more ambivalent: for he ranted and raved yet, as Kumar says, always managed finally to defend a middle-class socialist utopia, whether that of the scientist or that of the shopkeeper.180 Shaw, for his part, would likely have agreed with the desire for fuller blood, without sharing these images of utopia. An idiosyncratic man, he needed his own.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.