Somehow, today shaped up to be “Fabian
Friday.” It wasn’t planned, it just
turned out that way. It is astonishing,
though, how often we find news articles from Days Gone By that contradict “what
everybody knows,” e.g., the claim
that Father Edward McGlynn, who advocated socialism and was excommunicated for
disobedience in 1887, “never recanted” his socialist views, proving that the
Catholic Church either never condemned socialism or changed its teachings on
private property. According to the New York Times and a large number of
other newspapers, however, Fr. McGlynn recanted on January 19, 1894. And on to other Media Mythbusters:
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| Shaw: Russian communism is Fabian socialism |
• Fascinating Fabian Facts.
While researching possible ties between the New Deal of President
Roosevelt and Fabian socialism to compare it with the proposed Green New Deal
and its roots in democratic socialism, we came across this statement by noted
Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw: “Under [Joseph Stalin] the Soviet government
has turned communism into Fabianism. But
the Communists won’t take our name so we must take theirs. After all, Russian communism is nothing more
than the program the Fabians have been preaching for forty years.” (The
Washington, DC Evening Star, Friday, November 27, 1931, B-11.) Interestingly, the Fabian Society claims to a
socialist organization whose purpose is to advance the principles of democratic
socialism. (Margaret Cole, The Story of Fabian Socialism, 1961;
George Thomson, “The Tindemans Report and the European Future,” Address to the European
Movement, March 1, 1976.) Prominent
members of the Fabian Society include R.H. Tawney, who was on the Executive of
the Society from 1920 to 1933, and John Maynard Keynes’s protégé, E.F. Schumacher, who was a member of the New Fabian
Research Bureau. The coat of arms of the
Fabian Society is the Wolf in Sheep’s clothing, adopted because of their tactic
of infiltrating organizations to turn them socialist without calling it
socialism.
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| Kelso, et al., property and control are the same thing in law. |
• Socialism That is Not Socialism (Except When It Is). In today’s Wall Street Journal, Alan Blinder does an excellent job of
advancing the Fabian program in “Democrats, Stop Pretending to Be Socialists” (A-17). As Blinder argues, today’s democratic
socialists are not really socialists because they are not in favor of total
government ownership — just control.
Interestingly, this was Henry George’s argument (after a fashion) in Progress and Poverty (1879) in which he
pointed out that by taking all the usufruct (“fruits of ownership”) in the form
of all rent and profits on land use as a 100% tax (“the single tax”), the State
could become the universal landlord without actually calling itself so or
taking title. (Progress and Poverty, p. 406.)
Even more interesting, George also claimed that his system was not
socialist, but not because of the separation of ownership and control. Rather, it was because his definition of
socialism only applied to primitive and barbarian societies; an advanced
industrial society was, according to George, ipso facto not socialist, even if the State owned 100% of
everything. Of course, from a legal (and
Just Third Way) perspective, if you take away control or enjoyment of the
fruits (income), you have taken away ownership.
This is a fundamental legal principle.
As Louis Kelso noted, “Property in everyday life, is the right of control.”
(“Karl Marx: The Almost Capitalist,” American Bar Association Journal,
March 1957.) Blinder’s basic error
appears to be that he confuses regulation (a responsibility of the State to
back up private efforts to maintain order and prevent or punish harm) and
control (property).
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| President Roosevelt, concerned for the Little Guy. |
• FDR’s Brain(s) Trust. It
turns out that Samuel Rosenman, who suggested the idea of a “Brains Trust” to
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was influenced by Fabian socialism and the proposals
of Henry George, having been mentored by Stuart Chase, a big fan of both George
and the Fabians. This makes perfect sense,
as George’s book was the inspiration to form the Fabian Society in the 1880s,
at least according to Edward Pease, whose idea it was, as he related in his
book, A History of the Fabian Society
(1925). Raymond Moley, who was an FDR
man until he decided that Roosvelt was undermining the Constitution, confirmed Fabian
influence in his book, After Seven Years:
A Political Analysis of the New Deal (1939). The Brains Trust — soon shorted in the media
to “Brain Trust” — seems to have been inspired by the New Fabian Research Bureau,
on which E.F. Schumacher (author of Small
is Beautiful, 1973, and A Guide for
the Perplexed, 1977, as well as at least one Fabian Tract, Export Policy and Full Employment: Fabian
Research Series No. 77, 1943), a member of the “inner circle” of the Fabian
Society, served.
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| "Uh, exactly HOW did I become a Fabian?" |
• Is Distributism Socialism?
Although the voices claiming that G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc’s “distributism”
(a policy of small distributed private property with a preference for family-owned
farms and artisan-type businesses) is not socialism have been growing much
weaker and fainter in recent years, there are still some holdouts. Some can point to what Chesterton and Belloc
really said and note that much of what today’s distributists advocate actually
bears very little resemblance to what GKC & HB actually said or did. Some simply deny it without explanation. Increasing numbers, however, have found
things they can twist and turn to claim that democratic socialism, distributism,
and even Catholic social teaching are all just different aspects of the same thing. We recall Michael Novak’s claim that what he
meant by “democratic capitalism” is what Chesterton meant by distributism, and
Martin Gardner declaring that what he meant by “democratic socialism” is what
Chesterton meant by distributism. That,
of course, makes everything crystal clear.
Evidently it doesn’t matter what you say, as long as you scream loudly
enough, and attack anyone who disagrees with you.
• Shop online and support CESJ’s work! Did you know that by making
your purchases through the Amazon Smile
program, Amazon will make a contribution to CESJ? Here’s how: First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your Amazon account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.” If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift through. Once you’ve typed (or copied and pasted) “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you will be taken to
the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.
• Blog Readership. We have had visitors from 34 different
countries and 45 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Canada, Australia,
the United Kingdom, and Kenya. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “The
Purpose of Production,” “Thomas
Hobbes on Private Property,” “A
New Vision for Ireland?” “The
Social Justice of . . . Adam Smith???” and “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 10.”
Those are the happenings for this
week, at least those that we know about.
If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a
note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into
the next “issue.” If you have a short
(250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the
blog — do not send them to us to post for you.
All comments are moderated, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#