History of the Fabian Society

Although the Fabian Society itself did not create a complete theory of social welfare, in their social practice, there was a clear expectation that freedom would be achieved through equality among all classes of society, including equal distribution of property, social status and political rights., from practicing the concepts of equality and freedom to the concepts of social cooperation and mutual love among interpersonal relations. This is the earliest and most direct demand of British workers for the welfare state system.

In 1931, the New Fabian Society was founded by G.D.H. Cole, a professor at Oxford University and an activist of the Fabian Society. In 1939, the Society merged with the suspended Fabian Society to form the New Fabian Society, with Cole as its leader. In the early 1940s, the Society established a Colonial Bureau and an International Bureau. In 1963, the two bureaus merged to study colonial and international issues.

The Fabian Society has always been a small-scale social reformist research and propaganda group, with usually only a few hundred members. In 1947, there were 8000 members and more than 120 local branches. It has dropped sharply since the late 1940s. Before and after the First World War, Fabian socialism gradually became the theoretical and policy basis of the Labor Party. Although the number of people in the Fabian Society is small, it has a great impact. Labour MPs in the House of Commons and many Labour leaders are members of the Fabian Society. In 1952, Fei Bianshe published the "New Fabian Essays Collection", trying to point out the way for social reformism under the new situation. Fabian Society compiles regular publications such as Fabian News and Fabian Quarterly.

The ideological and theoretical system of the Fabian Society did not gradually take shape until the end of the 1880s. The Collected Essays on Fabian Socialism, edited by George Bernard Shaw, published in 1889, first focused on expressing the basic views of Fabian socialism. It is believed that socialism is an inevitable trend of social and economic development, but this change can only be achieved bit by bit through the slow and gradual transformation of the psychology of the masses to new principles. The Fabian Society requires that all major fundamental social reforms must be democratic, moral, constitutional, and peaceful. Believing that capitalist society can and is gradually evolving towards socialism through piecemeal reforms, the task of socialists is to try to "infiltrate" their ideas into political parties and social hierarchies, especially influencing the key politicians, government officials, trade union leaders, etc., to convince them of the need for reform. The Fabian Society believes that the evolution from capitalism to socialism is politically the implementation of universal suffrage and parliamentary systems; economically it is the realization of municipal socialism and the organization of cooperatives. Municipal socialism is an important policy proposition of the Fabian Society, which believes that as long as the ownership of the gas industry, the electric industry, the water industry and other public utilities by the municipalities is expanded, and the government's management of private enterprises is strengthened, it is to implement socialism.