A collection of essays from a revered member of the British Labour Party. What distinguished Cole was his distance from traditional marxist and bureaucratic labour approaches. Neither a Communist nor a Social Democrat (nowadays referred to as a Democratic Socialist a la Bernie Sanders) Cole desired a socialism that centered freedom for workers—an end to capitalist exploitation, workers’ management of production, and an expanding democracy in all realms of social life.
About the Author
G.D.H. Cole (1889–1959) was one of the twentieth century’s outstanding socialist writers and thinkers. From the 1920s until his death he was the pre-eminent Labour intellectual, surpassing Harold Laski and R.H. Tawney in the proliferation of his publications and general omnipresence.
David Goodway taught sociology, history and Victorian studies to mainly adult students from 1969 until the University of Leeds closed its School of Continuing Education in 2005. For thirty years he has written principally on anarchism and libertarian socialism, publishing collections of the writings of Alex Comfort, Herbert Read, ‘Maurice Brinton’, and Nicolas Walter and of the correspondence between John Cowper Powys and Emma Goldman; Talking Anarchy with Colin Ward; as well as Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward. He has recently published The Real History of Chartism (2013) and an edition of George Julian Harney’s late journalism, The Chartists Were Right (2014).
It often amuses me that I have been actively connected with the Fabian Society for so large a part of my life, and that I am today its President. For I have never been, and am not, a Fabian by instinct. l do not like “lingering ways”, or waiting patiently for “the right moment”; and, although I learnt to like the Webbs as well as to respect them, my conception of the essential qualities of a Socialist society has always been very different from theirs. How then did it come about that I joined the Fabian Society during my first week as an undergraduate at Oxford – being then already a member of the ILP – that I sat on its Executive until, in exasperation, I flung the dust of the Society from my feet, and that, having once made this escape, I came back to it and, when I found it again past praying for, instead of making a final exit, joined forces with a number of others to found a new society in its image, to usurp its name, and in the fulness of time to take it over and endow it with a new lease of life – which I hope is not yet turning into a second second childhood?
All this happened because, though I did not like the Fabian attitude, I did admire and believe in the Fabian method. I felt very strongly indeed that British Socialism needed an organization of intelligent people who were in a position to stand, with at any rate part of their minds, away from the immediate· expediencies of party politics and from the acceptance of ready made gospels, and to treat Socialism as a serious intellectual problem, which deserved to be studied in the objectively scholarly way that is sometimes abusively called “academic”, and yet to be studied not in a spirit of aloofness or rejection of practical responsibility, but so as to make the Socialist scholar a practical planner as well. The standards set by the Society in these respects were high; and I believed that the great influence it had been able to exert had been clue mainly to this fact. I wanted to see that tradition continued; and then will to maintain it kept on bringing me back to Fabianism despite my strong disagreement with a great deal in the stamp of doctrine which had been imposed on it mainly by Sidney Webb.
In the days when I joined, in 1908, the Fabian Society emphatically had a doctrine, though not a dogma. It was ardently collectivist, though not dogmatic about the precise form which the
Towards A Libertarian Socialism: Reflections on the British Labour Party and European Working-Class Movements
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Product Description
A collection of essays from a revered member of the British Labour Party. What distinguished Cole was his distance from traditional marxist and bureaucratic labour approaches. Neither a Communist nor a Social Democrat (nowadays referred to as a Democratic Socialist a la Bernie Sanders) Cole desired a socialism that centered freedom for workers—an end to capitalist exploitation, workers’ management of production, and an expanding democracy in all realms of social life.
About the Author
G.D.H. Cole (1889–1959) was one of the twentieth century’s outstanding socialist writers and thinkers. From the 1920s until his death he was the pre-eminent Labour intellectual, surpassing Harold Laski and R.H. Tawney in the proliferation of his publications and general omnipresence.
David Goodway taught sociology, history and Victorian studies to mainly adult students from 1969 until the University of Leeds closed its School of Continuing Education in 2005. For thirty years he has written principally on anarchism and libertarian socialism, publishing collections of the writings of Alex Comfort, Herbert Read, ‘Maurice Brinton’, and Nicolas Walter and of the correspondence between John Cowper Powys and Emma Goldman; Talking Anarchy with Colin Ward; as well as Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward. He has recently published The Real History of Chartism (2013) and an edition of George Julian Harney’s late journalism, The Chartists Were Right (2014).
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
It often amuses me that I have been actively connected with the Fabian Society for so large a part of my life, and that I am today its President. For I have never been, and am not, a Fabian by instinct. l do not like “lingering ways”, or waiting patiently for “the right moment”; and, although I learnt to like the Webbs as well as to respect them, my conception of the essential qualities of a Socialist society has always been very different from theirs. How then did it come about that I joined the Fabian Society during my first week as an undergraduate at Oxford – being then already a member of the ILP – that I sat on its Executive until, in exasperation, I flung the dust of the Society from my feet, and that, having once made this escape, I came back to it and, when I found it again past praying for, instead of making a final exit, joined forces with a number of others to found a new society in its image, to usurp its name, and in the fulness of time to take it over and endow it with a new lease of life – which I hope is not yet turning into a second second childhood?
All this happened because, though I did not like the Fabian attitude, I did admire and believe in the Fabian method. I felt very strongly indeed that British Socialism needed an organization of intelligent people who were in a position to stand, with at any rate part of their minds, away from the immediate· expediencies of party politics and from the acceptance of ready made gospels, and to treat Socialism as a serious intellectual problem, which deserved to be studied in the objectively scholarly way that is sometimes abusively called “academic”, and yet to be studied not in a spirit of aloofness or rejection of practical responsibility, but so as to make the Socialist scholar a practical planner as well. The standards set by the Society in these respects were high; and I believed that the great influence it had been able to exert had been clue mainly to this fact. I wanted to see that tradition continued; and then will to maintain it kept on bringing me back to Fabianism despite my strong disagreement with a great deal in the stamp of doctrine which had been imposed on it mainly by Sidney Webb.
In the days when I joined, in 1908, the Fabian Society emphatically had a doctrine, though not a dogma. It was ardently collectivist, though not dogmatic about the precise form which the
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