Bernard Shaw on Politics

George Bernard Shaw, L.W. Conolly, L.W. Conolly

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780795346903
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

A collection of critical writings on politics from the Nobel Prize – winning playwright behind Saint Joan and Man and Superman.

The Critical Shaw: On Politics is a comprehensive selection of renowned Irish playwright and Nobel Laureate Bernard Shaw's opinions on a wide range of political movements, ideologies, and events that helped shape the international landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With unwavering conviction, and in many cases openly courting controversy and calumny, Shaw spoke his mind on the big "-isms" of his time: Socialism, Capitalism, Communism, and Fascism. He championed Socialism in its formative years, he condemned all combatants in the First World War, he berated America's embrace of Capitalism, he praised Russia's choice of Communism, he lauded Stalin, he rejected the notion that Hitler was responsible for the Second World War, and he scorned Democracy. Persistently provocative, sometimes outrageous, always the political iconoclast, Shaw's political convictions—as soapbox orator or world-famous pundit—challenge us to face the political issues and dilemmas of our own time with similar rigor and integrity.

The Critical Shaw series brings together, in five volumes and from a wide range of sources, selections from Bernard Shaw's voluminous writings on topics that exercised him for the whole of his professional career: Literature, Music, Politics, Religion, and Theater. The volumes are edited by leading Shaw scholars, and all include an introduction, a chronology of Shaw's life and works, annotated texts, and a bibliography. The series editor is L.W. Conolly, literary adviser to the Shaw Estate and former president of the International Shaw Society.

Part I: Fabian Socialist

Shaw’s belief in and commitment to social democracy were expressed many times in the early years of his political activism, nearly always under the auspices of the Fabian Society, an organization founded in January 1884 with the objective, through peaceful and democratic means, of transforming Great Britain into a Socialist state. Shaw joined the Fabian Society in September 1884 and quickly became one of its most influential and active members. He took a leading role in defining the goals and strategies of the society and in planning its development into a significant force within the established British political structure. Given the power of the well-entrenched political parties (Liberal and Conservative), divisions within the Fabian Society itself, the influence of other political groups with conflicting agendas (e.g., the Anarchists), and, as Shaw perceived it, the political apathy of the British working class, it proved to be a huge task, but it eventually led to the founding of the Labour Party in 1906 and the election of a Labour Government in 1929.

1. A Manifesto. Fabian Tracts, no. 2. London: The Fabian Society, 1884.

[In the second of the Fabian Society’s famous tracts, Shaw defined its core political principles and objectives.]

The Fabians are associated for the purpose of spreading the following opinions held by them, and discussing their practical consequences.

That, under existing circumstances, wealth cannot be enjoyed without dishonour, or foregone without misery.

That it is the duty of each member of the State to provide for his or her wants by his or her own Labour.

That a life-interest in the Land and Capital of the nation is the birth-right of every individual born within its confines; and that access to this birth-right should not depend upon the will of any private person other than the person seeking it.

That the most striking result of our present system of farming out the national Land and Capital to private individuals has been the division of Society into hostile classes, with large appetites and no dinners at one extreme, and large dinners and no appetites at the other.

That the practice of entrusting the land of the nation to private persons in the hope that they will make the best of it has been discredited by the consistency with which they have made the worst of it; and that the Nationalization of the Land in some form is a public duty.

That the pretensions of Capitalism to encourage Invention, and to distribute its benefits in the fairest way attainable, have been discredited by the experience of the nineteenth century.

That, under the existing system of leaving the National Industry to organize itself, Competition has the effect of rendering adulteration, dishonest dealing, and inhumanity compulsory.

That since Competition among producers admittedly secures to the public the most satisfactory products, the State should compete with all its might in every department of production.

That such restraints upon Free Competition as the penalties for infringing the Postal monopoly, and the withdrawal of workhouse and prison labour from the markets, should be abolished.

That no branch of Industry should be carried on at a profit by the central administration.

That the Public Revenue should be raised by a direct Tax; and that the central administration should have no legal power to hold back for the replenishment of the Public Treasury any portion of the proceeds of the Industries administered by them.

That the State should compete with private individuals—especially with parents—in providing happy homes for children, so that every child may have a refuge from the tyranny or neglect of its natural custodians.

That Men no longer need special political privileges to protect them against Women; and that the sexes should henceforth enjoy equal political rights.

That no individual should enjoy any Privilege in consideration of services rendered to the State by his or her parents or other relations.

That the State should secure a liberal education and an equal share in the National Industry to each of its units.

That the established Government has no more right to call itself the State than the smoke of London has to call itself the weather.

That we had rather face a Civil War than such another century of suffering as the present one has been.

2. The Manifesto of the Fabian Parliamentary League, 1887. [Essays in Fabian Socialism, pp. 139–40]

[At a meeting of the Fabian Society on 17 September 1886, at which Shaw was present, the following motion was debated and passed: “That it is advisable that Socialists should organize themselves as a political party for the purpose of transferring into the hands of the whole working community full control over the soil and the means of production, as well as over the production and distribution of wealth.” The outcome was the formation of the Fabian Parliamentary League. Its manifesto, which Shaw helped draft, was published in 1887.]

The Fabian Parliamentary League is composed of Socialists who believe that Socialism may be most quickly and most surely realized by utilizing the political power already possessed by the people. The progress of the Socialist party in the German Reichstag, in the Legislature of the United States, and in the Paris Municipal Council, not only proves the possibility of a Socialist party in Parliament, but renders it imperative on English Socialists to set energetically about the duty of giving effect in public affairs to the growing influence of Socialist opinion in this country.

The League will endeavor to organize Socialist opinion, and to bring it to bear upon Parliament, municipalities, and other representative bodies; it will, by lectures and publications, seek to deal with the political questions of the day, analysing the ultimate tendencies of measures as well as their immediate effects, and working for or against proposed measures of social reform according as they tend towards, or away from, the Socialist ideal.

The League will take active part in all general and local elections. Until a fitting opportunity arises for putting forward Socialist candidates to form the nucleus of a Socialist party in Parliament, it will confine itself to supporting those candidates who will go furthest in the direction of Socialism. It will not ally itself absolutely with any political party; it will jealously avoid being made use of for party purposes; and it will be guided in its action by the character, record, and pledges of the candidates before the constituencies. In Municipal, School Board, Vestry, and other local elections, the League will, as it finds itself strong enough, run candidates of its own, and by placing trustworthy Socialists on local representative bodies it will endeavor to secure the recognition of the Socialist principle in all the details of local government.

It will be the duty of members of the League, in every borough, to take active part in the public work of their districts; and to this end they should organize themselves into a Branch of the League. They should appoint a secretary to keep lists of all annual and other elections in his district and of all candidates; to attend to the registration of Socialists; to watch the public conduct of all officials, and keep a record thereof for guidance at future elections; to enlist volunteers for special work, and generally to act as a centre of the organization. Individual members should write to their Parliamentary representatives on any Bill on which the League takes action; should take every opportunity of defending and advocating Socialism in their local press; should visit the workhouses of their neighborhood; and should exercise a careful supervision of local funds. By steady work on these and similar lines, Socialists will increase their power in the community, and will before long be able to influence effectively the course of public opinion.

3. From “The Transition to Social Democracy.” An Address at Bath on 7 September 1888 to the Economic Section of the British Association. [Essays in Fabian Socialism, pp. 33–61]

[The Fabian Parliamentary League never became a political force in its own right, in part because it lacked full support from the Fabian Society itself. Many Fabians believed that the necessary compromises involved in the established democratic process undermined its commitment to the basic principles of Socialism. Shaw, however, accepted the need for compromise.]

…Before I recite the steps of the transition, I will, as a matter of form, explain what Social Democracy is, though doubtless nearly all of my hearers are already conversant with it.

What the achievement of Socialism involves economically is the transfer of rent from the class which now appropriates it to the whole people. Rent being that part of the produce which is individually unearned, this is the only equitable method of disposing of it. There is no means of getting rid of economic rent. So long as the fertility of land varies from acre to acre, and the number of persons passing by a shop window per hour varies from street to street, with the result that two farmers or two shopkeepers of exactly equal intelligence and industry will reap unequal returns from their year’s work, so long will it be equitable to take from the richer farmer or shopkeeper the excess over his fellow’s gain which he owes to the bounty of Nature or the advantage of situation, and divide that excess or rent equally between the two. If the pair of farms or shops be left in the hands of a private landlord, he will take the excess, and, instead of dividing it between his two tenants, live on it himself idly at their expense. The economic object of Socialism is not, of course, to equalize farmers and shopkeepers in couples, but to carry out the principle over the whole community by collecting all rents and throwing them into the national treasury. As the private proprietor has no reason for clinging to his property except the legal power to take the rent and spend it on himself—the legal power being in fact what really constitutes him a proprietor—its abrogation would mean his expropriation. The socialization of rent would mean the socialization of the sources of production by the expropriation of the present private proprietors, and the transfer of their property to the entire nation. The transfer, then, is the subject matter of the transition to Socialism, which began some forty-five years ago, as far as any phase of social evolution can be said to begin at all.

It will be at once seen that the valid objections to Socialism consist wholly of practical difficulties. On the ground of abstract justice, Socialism is not only unobjectionable, but sacredly imperative. I am afraid that in the ordinary middle-class opinion Socialism is flagrantly dishonest, but could be established off-hand tomorrow with the help of the guillotine, if there were no police, and the people were wicked enough. In truth, it is as honest as it is inevitable; but all the mobs and guillotines in the world can no more establish it than police coercion can avert it. The first practical difficulty is raised by the idea of the entire people collectively owning land, capital, or anything else. Here is the rent arising out of the people’s industry: here are the pockets of the private proprietors. The problem is to drop the rent, not into those private pockets, but into the people’s pocket. Yes; but where is the people’s pocket? Who is the people? What is the people? Tom we know, and Dick: also Harry; but solely and separately as individuals: as a trinity they have no existence. Who is their trustee, their guardian, their man of business, their manager, their secretary, even their stakeholder? The Socialist is stopped dead at the threshold of practical action by this difficulty until he bethinks himself of the State as the representative and trustee of the people. Now if you will just form a hasty picture of the governments which called themselves States in Ricardo’s day [i.e., British economist David Ricardo, 1772–1823], consisting of rich proprietors legislating either by divine right or by the exclusive suffrage of the poorer proprietors, and filling the executives with the creatures of their patronage and favoritism; if you look beneath their oratorical parliamentary discussions, conducted with all the splendor and decorum of an expensive sham fight; if you consider their class interests, their shameless corruption, and the waste and mismanagement which disgraced all their bungling attempts at practical business of any kind, you will understand why Ricardo, clearly as he saw the economic consequences of private appropriation of rent, never dreamt of State appropriation as a possible alternative. The Socialist of that time did not greatly care: he was only a benevolent Utopian who planned model communities, and occasionally carried them out, with negatively instructive and positively disastrous results. When his successors learned economics from Ricardo, they saw the difficulty quite as plainly as Ricardo’s vulgarizers, the Whig doctrinaires who accepted the incompetence and corruption of States as permanent inherent State qualities, like the acidity of lemons. Not that the Socialists were not doctrinaires too; but outside economics they were pupils of [German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel [1770–1831], whilst the Whigs were pupils of [British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy] Bentham [1748–1832] and [British legal philosopher John] Austin [1790–1859]. Bentham’s was not the school in which men learned to solve problems to which history alone could give the key, or to form conceptions which belonged to the evolutional order. Hegel, on the other hand, expressly taught the conception of the perfect State, if not absolutely perfect, at least practically trustworthy. They contemplated the insolent and inefficient government official of their day without rushing to the conclusion that the State uniform had a magic property of extinguishing all business capacity, integrity, and common civility in the wearer. When State officials obtained their posts by favoritism and patronage, efficiency on their part was an accident, and politeness a condescension. When they retained their posts without any effective responsibility to the public, they naturally defrauded the public by making their posts sinecures, and insulted the public when, by personal inquiry, it made itself troublesome. But every successfully conducted private establishment in the kingdom was an example of the ease with which public ones could be reformed as soon as there was the effective will to find out the way. Make the passing of a sufficient examination an indispensable preliminary to entering the executive; make the executive responsible to the government and the government responsible to the people; and State departments will be provided with all the guarantees for integrity and efficiency that private money-hunting pretends to. Thus the old bugbear of State imbecility did not terrify the Socialist: it only made him a Democrat. But to call himself so simply would have had the effect of classing him with the ordinary destructive politician who is a Democrat without ulterior views for the sake of formal Democracy—one whose notion of Radicalism is the pulling up of aristocratic institutions by the roots—who is, briefly, a sort of Universal Abolitionist. Consequently, we have the distinctive term Social Democrat, indicating the man or woman who desires through Democracy to gather the whole people into the State, so that the State may be trusted with the rent of the country, and finally with the land, the capital, and the organization of the national industry—with all the sources of production, in short, which are now abandoned to the cupidity of irresponsible private individuals.

The benefits of such a change as this are so obvious to all except the existing private proprietors and their parasites, that it is very necessary to insist on the impossibility of effecting it suddenly. The young Socialist is apt to be catastrophic in his views—to plan the revolutionary program as an affair of twenty-four lively hours, with Individualism in full swing on Monday morning, a tidal wave of the insurgent proletariat on Monday afternoon, and Socialism in complete working order on Tuesday. A man who believes that such a happy despatch is possible will naturally think it absurd and even inhuman to stick at bloodshed in bringing it about. He can prove that the continuance of the present system for a year costs more suffering than could be crammed into any Monday afternoon, however sanguinary. This is the phase of conviction in which are delivered those Socialist speeches which make what the newspapers call “good copy,” and which are the only ones they as yet report. Such speeches are encouraged by the hasty opposition they evoke from thoughtless persons, who begin by tacitly admitting that a sudden change is feasible, and go on to protest that it would be wicked. The experienced Social Democrat converts his too ardent follower by first admitting that if the change could be made catastrophically it would be well worth making, and then proceeding to point out that as it would involve a readjustment of productive industry to meet the demand created by an entirely new distribution of purchasing power, it would also involve, in the application of labor and industrial machinery, alterations which no afternoon’s work could effect. You cannot convince any man that it is impossible to tear down a government in a day; but everybody is convinced already that you cannot convert first and third class carriages into second class; rookeries [slums] and palaces into comfortable dwellings; and jewellers and dressmakers into bakers and builders, by merely singing the Marseillaise. No judicious person, however deeply persuaded that the work of the court dressmaker has no true social utility, would greatly care to quarter her idly on the genuinely productive worker pending the preparation of a place for her in their ranks. For although she is to all intents and purposes quartered on them at present, yet she at least escapes the demoralization of idleness. Until her new place is ready, it is better that her patrons should find dressmaking for her hands to do, than that Satan should find mischief. Demolishing a Bastille with seven prisoners in it is one thing: demolishing one with fourteen million prisoners is quite another. I need not enlarge on the point: the necessity for cautious and gradual change must be obvious to everyone here, and could be made obvious to everyone elsewhere if only the catastrophists were courageously and sensibly dealt with in discussion.

What then does a gradual transition to Social Democracy mean specifically? It means the gradual extension of the franchise; and the transfer of rent and interest to the State, not in one lump sum, but by instalments. Looked at in this way, it will at once be seen that we are already far on the road, and are being urged further by many politicians who do not dream that they are touched with Socialism—nay, who would earnestly repudiate the touch as a taint.

[Shaw goes on to review progress in social and political reform throughout the nineteenth century, embedded in legislation such as the 1832 and 1867 Reform Acts, the 1842 Income Tax Act, the 1847 Factory Act, and the 1880 Education Act. He also draws attention to the growing Trade Union movement and its role in “awakening the social conscience” of the work force. As a model of a “socialized” organization working in the national interests rather than the interests of private owners, he cites the British Post Office.]

In the meantime the extraordinary success of the post office, which, according to the teaching of the [influential free trade and laissez faire] Manchester school [of economic thought], should have been a nest of incompetence and jobbery, had not only shown the perfect efficiency of State enterprise when the officials are made responsible to the class interested in its success, but had also proved the enormous convenience and cheapness of socialistic or collectivist charges over those of private enterprise. For example, the Postmaster-General charges a penny for sending a letter weighing an ounce from Kensington to Bayswater [adjacent districts of London]. Private enterprise would send half a pound the same distance for a farthing, and make a handsome profit on it. But the Postmaster-General also sends an ounce letter from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s House [870 miles] for a penny. Private enterprise would probably demand at least a shilling, if not five, for such a service; and there are many places in which private enterprise could not on any terms maintain a post office. Therefore a citizen with ten letters to post saves considerably by the uniform socialistic charge, and quite recognizes the necessity for rigidly protecting the Postmaster’s monopoly.

[Shaw comments on the enthusiasm and naivety of the early Socialist movement, eager for a rapid implementation of radical thinking.]

Numbers of young men, pupils of [John Stuart] Mill [1806–73], [Herbert] Spencer [1820–1903], [Auguste] Comte [1798–1857], and [Charles] Darwin [1809–82], roused by Mr Henry George’s Progress and Poverty [1879], left aside evolution and freethought; took to insurrectionary economics; studied Karl Marx; and were so convinced that Socialism had only to be put clearly before the working classes to concentrate the power of their immense numbers in one irresistible organization, that the Revolution was fixed for 1889—the anniversary of the French Revolution—at latest. I remember being asked satirically and publicly at that time how long I thought it would take to get Socialism into working order if I ha...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• General Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• Bernard Shaw and His Times: A Chronology
• A Note on the Text
• Part I: Fabian Socialist
• Part II: Resolute Socialist, Disillusioned Democrat
• Part III: War and Revolution
• Part IV: Democracy, Communism, Fascism, Capitalism
• Part V: America
• Part VI: The Dictators
• Part VII: Last Thoughts
• Sources and Further Reading
• The Critical Shaw