Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of George Bernard Shaw

Gareth Griffith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415082815
• eBook ISBN: 9781134802937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Available in paperback for the first time, Gareth Griffith's book provides a comprehensive critical account of the political ideas of one of the most influential commentators of the twentieth century.
With close reference to a range of Shaw's texts, from the Fabian tracts to the plays, Gareth Griffith draws out the central theoretical messages of Shaw's engagement with politics. The first part of the book provides an intellectual biography, while at the same time analysing Shaw's key concerns in relation to his Fabianism, arguments for equality of income and ideas on democracy and education. Part Two looks at those areas which Shaw approached as long-standing historical problems or dramas requiring immediate thought or action; sexual equality, the Irish question, war, fascism and sovietism.
The book is directed to the general reader as well as to specialists. It will be central reading for anyone seeking to understand Shaw's life, and literary and political writings, or the development of political thinking in this century, or the problems and potential inherent in socialism.

Part I

1: SHAW’S FABIANISM

THE COMPLETE OUTSIDER

Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 into a Protestant family in financial decline: he was ‘a downstart and the son of a downstart’; his class was that ephemeral social entity known as ‘the Shabby Genteel, the Poor Relations, the Gentlemen who are no Gentlemen’ (Shaw 1930:viii). It was a seemingly hopeless start to life with the Shaws possessing a good deal of snobbery and little else. The father drank and the mother appeared fonder of an orchestral conductor called George John Vandaleu Lee than of either George Carr or George Bernard Shaw. ‘Sonny’, as his family called him, and his sisters, Agnes and Lucy, inhabited an indifferent world, free of emotional, moral or intellectual substance. Shaw was to say years later that this lack of any strong sentiments or faith left a ‘clear space for positive beliefs’ to invade at some future date. That was the long-term case in its favour. Meanwhile the forgotten boy feasted on dreams. He wandered the art galleries alone. He read his favourite authors, Bunyan, Dickens, Shakespeare and Shelley, exploring the world of the imagination mostly in solitude, or perhaps in the company of his one close friend, Edward McNulty. There was always music, Lee made sure of that; it was Sonny’s first love. Yet, even here there lurked a cruel irony, for it seemed the child, starved of affection, preferred this harmonious universe of abstractions to the bitter complexities of human relationships. It was not that he was dominated by his family, but that he was too free. It was not that he was abused, but that he was ignored. And so he dreamed his dreams imagining that his precocious intellect might somehow set him on the throne of English culture.

The reality was very different. At the age of fifteen he began his working life in an estate agent’s office in an alien world of stifling routine. There he was a success of sorts. At a deeper level, however, the work was killing the soul of the irreverent and rebellious youth. To compound his misery, two years later, in June 1873, his mother and sister Agnes (Lucy was to follow shortly after) left for London in pursuit of the elusive Mr Lee. Their departure left Sonny in the company of an alcoholic father whose only gift to his son seems to have been an ‘extraordinary sense of the ludicrous’ (Shaw 1965a:3).

Sonny was not to remain in Dublin. Early in 1876 he set sail for England in search of fame, fortune and identity. Up to that date the only public manifestation of his genius was an obscure letter attacking the travelling evangelists, Moody and Sankey, published in 1875 in the London weekly, Public Opinion. Undaunted he set out on his quest with nothing to declare but his ambition and his brains.

Shaw was to make London his own. For nearly seven decades he was to drive the Rolls-Royce of Shavian argument through its intellectual world at top speed, thus confirming the reality and power of the downstart's dream, At first, however, the road to success was slow and uneven. Shaw spent six years in London writing without success, experimenting with outlandish notions while living at the expense of his mother's better nature. These were the testing years for the shy and nervous young Irishman with an erratic beard and an even more erratic education, the impoverished rebel constantly excited by revolutionary ideas, the nuisance always at odds with the conventions and institutions of society. What was to be done with this quarrelsome youth? He would not work in the normal way. He spent long hours at public meetings or walking the streets at night constructing visionary plans of social reform. It was not that he lacked enthusiasm; he followed Shelley into vegetarianism, joined such radical debating clubs as the Dialectical and Zetetical Societies, studied the art of public speaking and dabbled in pugilism. But to what end? He had written four novels, all of which had been rejected. Far from being the original intellectual phenomenon of his heart's desire, he was, unhappily, but a typical member of the nineteenth century fraternity of shabby genteel radicalism: rootless and aimless, a repository for half-baked doctrines and ill-conceived projects. Shaw was to describe that young man as the complete outsider in search of a gospel of life that might liberate his genius for argument. Possession of a gospel of some kind was essential if the outsider was to play his unique part in the drama of human emancipation, allowing him to traffic in mockery with the earnestness of a prophet.

By 1880 Shaw had attained the status of an able-bodied pauper in a city teeming with ideas, causes and movements. It was a fortuitous coincidence which landed the argumentative Irish alien at the centre of a maelstrom of argument at a time of acute intellectual upheaval. The 1880s was a period of ‘ideological cluster’, not unlike the 1960s, when the young rebelled against the orthodoxies of their elders by experimenting in a host of alternative doctrines, from socialism to theosophy. Darwinism had caused a generational rift in consciousness and in its wake there followed a wave of radicalism which ‘marked the coming of a great reaction from the smug commercialism and materialism of the mid-Victorian epoch, and a preparation for the new universe of the twentieth century’ (Feuer 1975:87). In addition, the economic depression of 1879 and the mounting evidence of urban and rural poverty aroused the guilty conscience of the middle class, sending the intellectual discontent in the direction of economic and social reform.

Upon this stage there arrived in 1882 the radical American agitator, Henry George, armed with his timely doctrine of land nationalization. What George offerred in Progress and Poverty was a simple solution to the problem of social justice, encapsulated in the argument for the abolition of private property in land, an argument which he expounded with religious zeal. Instead of being the common property of all, the land was owned by a wealthy oligarchy and therein lay the source of injustice, argued George. Working with a theory of rent derived from Ricardo, he denounced landlords as idle sinners living off the unearned increment of the land they owned. He advocated imposing a single tax on the value of the land and using the revenue thus raised to establish a prototype of the welfare state.

George's only London lecture was delivered on 5 September 1882 in the Memorial Hall at a meeting sponsored by the Land Nationalization Society. Shaw was at that meeting and the address he heard fired his imagination. Henry George transformed his intellectual world by opening his eyes to ‘the importance of economics’ (Shaw 1949b:49). Shaw arrived at the Memorial Hall with a batch of discordant radical sentiments, decidedly secularist in content and individualistic in tenor; an enthusiast for Shelley with a reasonable grounding in the fashionable thinkers of the period, Darwin, Herbert Spencer, George Eliot, Tyndall and Huxley. Shaw had read John Stuart Mill, in particular his reflections on the Irish Land question. As the MacKenzies suggest, Shaw's Irish background, the years he spent working in the office of a land agent, made him ripe for Henry George's message that the greed of landlords was the cause of poverty (MacKenzie 1977:37). Shaw left the Memorial Hall convinced of its truth, on the threshold now of possessing a unifying social gospel. In the Autumn of 1882 his world was transformed. Of George, Shaw wrote ‘He struck me dumb and shunted me from barren agnostic controversy to economics’ (Shaw 1949b:58).

His interest in the economic side of the revolutionary argument now awakened, Shaw decided to inquire into the newly-emerging socialist movement as represented by the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), formed in 1881 under the flamboyant leadership of the aristocratic H.M.Hyndman. It was there he learnt of Marx. Conscientious as ever, the rebel read volume one of Capital in the French translation and there found the powerful demonstration of the moral rottenness and practical inadequacy of commercial civilization he had been searching for. Conversion was immediate. Capital, he said, ‘knocked the moral stuffing out of the bourgeoisie’ (Shaw 1972:558). Whereas other political economists treated the wicked nineteenth century as the culmination of human progress, Marx reduced it to but a transitory phase, a mere ‘cloud passing down the wind, changing its shape and fading as it goes’ (Ellis 1930:109). Whatever criticisms Shaw levelled against Marx in later years, he always insisted that it was Marx that made him a socialist: ‘From that hour I was a speaker with a gospel, no longer an apprentice trying to master the art of public speaking’ (Shaw 1949b:58). From that hour he was tireless in preaching: ‘Economics are fundamental in politics: you must begin with the feeding of the individual. Unless you build on that, all your superstructure will be rotten’ (Shaw 1962b:138).

Shaw was a willing convert. Poverty and lack of social standing, his radical temper and compulsive intellectualism, all conspired to impress on him the truth of this most fundamental critique of established values, structures and practices. At a personal level, it showed that the outsider was not to be despised after all. Quite the reverse. Shaw and his kind were the real guardians of public morality, the bearers of the true vision of progress and justice. If they had been rejected by capitalism, it was because of its failing, not theirs (MacKenzie and MacKenzie 1977:40). At last he had found his rightful place among moral and intellectual pioneers, a group of men ‘burning with indignation at very real and very fundamental evils that affected all the world’. Socialism acted on the visionary and moralist elements in Shaw's character, producing a sense of personal salvation through service to a righteous cause. It was the key to the realization of genius and identity. Through socialism, a fusion of public morality and personal identity was achieved, transforming the outsider into an instrument of the Zeitgeist.

SOCIALIST FUNDAMENTALISM

An insight into the nature of Shaw's original socialism is gained through the last of the novels of his nonage, An Unsocial Socialist, written in 1883. As he explained later, it was intended to be ‘only the first chapter of a vast work depicting capitalist society in dissolution, with its downfall as the final grand catastrophe’ (Shaw 1932a:v). Whatever its faults from a literary point of view, the novel retains some interest as a political document, both in terms of Shaw's ideas and because of its reflections on the condition of society and the socialist movement at large. On the latter issue, it showed there was no socialist movement in any serious sense, only what Shaw was later to describe as a few ‘pushing middle-class men and autocratic swells’ (Shaw 1934b:268). As the novel shows, the hardships encountered by the working class in the economic depression of the 1880s had not been translated practically into mass proletarian activism. The socialism of the period was essentially an intellectual affair, a collection of ‘individual minds’ as Engels said, ‘with a hotch-potch of confused sects, remnants of the great movement of the forties, standing behind them and nothing more’ (West 1974:26). Shaw's hero, Sidney Trefusis, was an isolated intellectual of this kind. In many ways he was something of a prototype for Jack Tanner of Man and Superman, a revolutionary member of the idle rich, firm in his hatred of modern English public society which Trefusis described as ‘A canting, lie-loving, fact-hating, scribbling, chattering, wealth-hunting, pleasure-hunting, celebrity-hunting mob, that, having lost the fear of hell and not replaced it by the love of justice, cares for nothing but the lion's share of the wealth wrung by threat of starvation from the hands of the classes that create it’ (Shaw 1932a:67).

Devastating though his critique may be, Trefusis is uncertain as to how that society is to be replaced. His strategy in the first part of the novel is to turn his back on his marriage and position in the world, changing his name to Smilash and his accent and clothes to those of a workman. In pursuit of a more authentic mode of life, he rents a ‘hermit's cave’ deep in the country and takes on odd jobs as a gardener and the like. That Shaw has his hero disappear into rural England and not the industrial North hints at the author's own lack of knowledge of England's industrial heartland and its people. That Trefusis is an isolated figure is only to be expected in the circumstances. The International Association of Labourers, Trefusis mentions, is a distant and unreal organization whose only function in the novel is to reveal the lack of working-class participation in revolutionary politics: ‘Expenditure, four thousand five hundred pounds. Subscriptions received from working men, twenty-two pounds seven and tenpence halfpenny’, the Association's balance sheet reads. As Alick West, writing from a Marxist standpoint, comments, ‘From the millionaire's son comes the respectable round sum; from the workers, the comic half-penny’ (West 1974:27). The hero's mission is clear: to liberate the Manchester labourers who were his father's slaves by persuading them to unite ‘in a vast international association of men pledged to share the world's work justly’. He acknowledges that the mission will not be easy to fulfil, ‘because working-men, like the people called their betters, do not always understand their own interests’. All this Trefusis tells his estranged wife, Henrietta, in an interlude during a prolonged wrangle over their broken marriage. ‘We’, by which he meant the minority of enlightened socialists, ‘must educate the workers out of their folly’, he says, though he admits he is far from confident that his own efforts are ‘really advancing the cause’. Trefusis only knows he has no choice but to tread the path of righteousness.

For Alick West, Shaw's portrayal of the revolutionary suggests the ‘negative individualism’ at the core of his socialism: mankind is to be saved by the individual who sets himself apart from others and not by individuals acting in concert, still less by the operations of larger social and economic forces. Similarly, the MacKenzies argue that the portrait confirms Shaw's opinion of the proletariat as ‘a useless tool for the would-be revolutionary: the world would be changed only by those who had superior brains and organizing skills’ (MacKenzie and MacKenzie 1977:43). Indeed, toward the end of the novel Trefusis says he now only helps those workmen who show some ‘disposition to help themselves’. He also asserts that in creating men of his own kind, rich intellectuals discontented with the prevailing order, capitalism has produced its own gravedigger: ‘our system of organizing industry sometimes hatches the eggs from which its destroyers break’. The destiny of man rests not with the masses, nor with hidden historical forces, but with the rebellious intellectuals.

Pertinent as these comments are, it must be acknowledged that here, as in Man and Superman, the portrait of the would-be revolutionary is underscored by heavy irony. Shaw shares in the dilemmas of his hero and faces the same intellectual tensions. But while he may not have seen a way round them in 1883, he did see through their limitations as strategies of enlightenment. The novel's ultimate strength is that it sets out the contradictions between individualism and collectivism, populism and élitism in such a stark manner. It is not the downfall of capitalism that is depicted so much as the difficulties facing the socialist movement (such as it was) in seeking to translate thought into practice. In that sense, too, the novel is a prototype for Shaw's mature work.

To make too literal a connection between the impoverished Shaw and his wealthy hero is unwise. Nevertheless, Trefusis does seem to express the essence of the young Irishman's socialist faith when he denounces the idleness of the rich and the poverty of the masses in words fired by the power of deep conviction. The contrast between Trefusis's own circumstances and those of the poor aptly demonstrates the hypocrisy of the Victorian ideal of ‘the rewards of abstinence’: the cotton manufacturer's son who had not done a stroke of work in his life was overburdened with wealth, ‘whilst the children of the men who made that wealth are slaving as their fathers slaved, or starving, or in the workhouse, or on the streets, or the devil knows where’. Trefusis had abstained from nothing, while

the workers abstained from meat, drink, fresh air, good clothes, decent lodgings, holidays, money, the society of their families and pretty nearly everything that makes life worth living, which was perhaps the reason why they usually died twenty years or so sooner than people in our circumstances.

(Shaw 1932a:71)

If Shaw was sceptical of the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, he was on this evidence absolute in his condemnation of the condition of their life and the lives of their exploiters: ‘under existing circumstances wealth cannot be enjoyed without dishonour, or foregone without misery,’ he declared in 1884 in his first Fabian publication (Joad 1953:72).

Shaw's approach to socialism was fundamentally ethical in nature. At its root was a critique of the evils of capitalism, in particular of the idleness and poverty endemic in commercial civilization. Hatred of idleness and of poverty was the central motif of his socialism; their eradication, its denouement. Idleness was a sin against society, a denial of duty and of man's creative power. Poverty, according to the famous dictum from Major Barbara, was the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes. In the socialist order there would be no poverty, none of the artificial barriers raised by class society against either material welfare or the development of the human spirit. There could be no argument: socialism's first duty was to secure sufficiency of means for the masses. Financial security would be assured in the new economic order, an order where men would ‘fight for ideas, not for bread and butter at one end and for corrupt domination and stolen luxury at the other’ (Shaw 1971:185).

The critique of poverty was really the common theme uniting the whole of British socialism from Robert Owen to the Fabians, with the entire movement being motivated by a simple and direct abhorrence of want and destitution. The first ever Fabian tract asked, Why Are the Many Poor?. Subsequently the Fabian response was in terms of such policies as the minimum wage and old-age pensions, all dedicated to the politics of welfare which had as its raison dêetre the elimination of poverty.

In his hatred of poverty, Shaw uncovered the roots of an individualist morality of welfare based chiefly on a conception of goodness as happiness. In his hatred of idleness, he unearthed the seeds of the collectivist morality of service. The ideal of the ‘gentleman’, the essence of Shaw's mature political collectivism, was a direct reversal of customary usage of the word: ‘instead of being the detestable parasitic pretention it is at present’, he wrote in 1928, in a socialist society it will ‘at last take on a simple and novel meaning and be brought within the reach of every able-bodied person’. Idleness was without virtue; the idler a symbol of the corruption that must end with the passing of capitalism. Service to community would be the hallmark of the new moral order, an ideal of citizenship founded on a higher conception of life.

Perhaps the exact terminology changed slightly over the years. All the same, the critique of idleness was a constant concern. His first socialist lecture delivered in a workman's club at Woolwich in 1883 was on the subject of Thieves’ and in it Shaw tried to demonstrate ‘that the proprietor of an unearned income inflicted on the community exactly the same injury as a burglar does’ (Shaw 1949b:59). A year later he was arguing ‘that the socialist movement is only the assertion of our lost honesty’, that it is ‘the duty of each member of the State to provide for his or her wants by his or her own labor’. Again, idle shareholders and absentee landlords were castigated as thieves, high-waymen and public nuisances; private property was said to be the root of evil, leading inevitably to corruption and dishonesty. Neither ‘the organization of labor by the State, nor the abolition of competition, nor an equal division of all existing wealth’ were socialism's true goal, its essence being ‘the essential principle of socialism is that men shall honestly labor for those who labor for them, each man replacing what he consumes, none profiting at his fellows’ expense, and all profiting alike by the most economical division of labor....’ (Shaw 1971:2). Behind this statement lay the assumption that socialism's political economy rests on ethical foundations. Shaw explained the connection in an address to the Students’ Union at the London School of Economics in 1906, stating that ‘Every economic problem will be found to rest on a moral problem: you can not get away from it’ (Shaw 1976:6).

In this critique of idleness Shaw drew not so much on Marx as on the indig...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I
• PART II
• PART III
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY