STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Georgism was a Fabian Policy?
By Joe Jarvis - June 18, 2012

Shaw was heavily influenced by Henry George, an American writer active in the 1880s and popular in England … Among [his] main focuses … was to promote the "social credit ideas of British engineer CH Douglas. Douglas' cause was taken up and popularized by writers from Shaw to Ezra Pound to Aleister Crowley, another frequent contributor. The Social Credit program is frankly rather obtuse, and cloaked in gnostic Christian symbolism. Seeing purchasing power as the single greatest factor in economics, "social crediters" advocate the public distribution of credit to consume the increasing number of goods and services made possible by technology. – DeadeyeBlog

Dominant Social Theme: All these ideas are good ones.

Free-Market Analysis: This is a very interesting article that has been posted around the web but caught our attention because it frankly makes the case that both Georgism and Social Credit – now making a timid comeback – are facilities of Fabianism.

The Fabian Society believed that capitalism was the cause of an inefficient and unjust society, and they wanted to focus and help society move to a socialist system as painlessly as possible. It was responsible for forming part of the foundation for the Labour Party, and today functions primarily as a think tank and is one of 15 socialist societies that are associated with the Labour Party. However, there is no doubt that of these, the Fabian Society is the most influential.

Almost singlehandedly, through its establishment not only of the Labour Party but also of the London School of Economics, the Fabian Society has played a major role in ruining most of Britain's republican institutions.

The Fabian Society's malevolence has spread far beyond Britain, however. Evidently and obviously affiliated with Western central banking families, the Fabian Society's impetus towards authoritarianism is well established now in education, media and politics.

The goal, of course, is one-world government and the Fabians have played their promotional role in achieving this destructive vision. Like Britain's Bloomsbury Group, the Fabians are not merely a philosophical "talking shop." Both groups advanced and implemented fundamentally evil economic methodologies of sociopolitical organization that continue, unfortunately, to play out today.

It is the Deadeye Blog's hypothesis that British elites employed a Fabian Strategy that promoted radical "populism" via economic theories. Here's some more from his article:

Before it became the official magazine of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, The New Age was an influential British "literary" journal. Founded in 1907 by one Alfred Orage, The New Age was in fact funded organized and stewarded by George Bernard Shaw, who had served the same purpose for the British Fabian Society and the London School of Economics. While the magazine contained modern poetry, literature and criticism, much of its attention was directed to debating politics and promoting certain new-age and populist economic ideas.

The Fabian Society – Imperialists clothed as socialist revolutionaries. Many contributors to The New Age, like Shaw and HG Wells, were drawn from the ranks of the Fabian Society. Ostensibly, the Fabian Society was the "Fabian" counterpart to Marxism, promoting the erosion of capitalism through black propaganda rather than through direct attack. In truth, the war of attrition was waged not against capitalism, but against would-be republican nationalists interfering with British designs …

But Social Credit suffers from the fundamental flaw of viewing "production" as an automatic process where the bounty will continue upward and consumers simply lack the credit to partake. The one-time popularity of social credit can be attributed to its focus on interest as the bane of mankind, divorced from any notions of production, trade, employment and other considerations of political economy. Like Georgism, it is a free trade doctrine that focuses on a limited technical feature of the economy …

Distributism like Georgism is basically a feudal policy. By "distributing" power to the lowest possible level, distributism makes political power less effective than corporate power (Wall Street/London). Distributism is kept alive by "traditionalist" Catholics like the otherwise excellent E. Michael Jones of Culture Wars magazine.

While Deadeye's analysis of Georgism and Social Credit as extensions of Fabianism is most interesting, his perspective on US exceptionalism is equally intriguing. He makes the point that US prosperity and greatness were created by 5Ps. These include Protectionism, Prevention, Provision, Production and Proliferation.

The argument here is that the greatness of America was a product of government involvement at levels. Government protected industry via tariffs, prevented exploitation of workers, provided military expansionism for safety's sake, produced public infrastructure and offered a proliferation of prosperity via its control of predatory capitalism.

Deadeye is critical of free-market thinking, yet some of his theories approach perspectives put forth by Patrick Buchanan. Ironically, Buchanan was a close friend of the free-market Austrian economist Murray Rothbard and Anti-war's Justin Raimondo.

From what we can tell, Deadeye's heroes are such staunch state-proponents as "Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt." Also, "Bismarck, De Gaulle, Nasser and many others."

The (real) American System, he writes, "is highly-regulated, industrial capitalism that puts the general welfare of the nation before the profits of Wall Street and London. This is in fact the argument (pro "highly regulated" capitalism) of many non-mainstream critics of modern America including Lyndon LaRouche and former Fulbright Scholar Webster Tarpley.

You can see an article on Webster Tarpley here: "Occupy Wall Street and Webster Tarpley … We're All LaRouch-ites Now."

Deadeye also writes:

As the utopian illusions of libertarianism disintegrate, we must be careful not to be sucked into the quasi-socialist spawn of the Fabian Society. Anything short of the American System is a half-measure or a lie. Your enemy is not big government, Jews, communists or the Catholic church, but "The British Empire" – a transnational system of financial speculation, cartels, war machines and its attendant propaganda and elaboration. We are fighting a war against illusions, lies, provocations and terrorism. The only way to win is to abandon the gambits offered to you by your enemy, and embrace the only tradition that can win.

We found Deadeye's article interesting in large part for his insights into both Georgism and Social Credit as originating with Fabian Society promotions. Obviously, we disagree with him about the idea that prosperity comes from government activism. We believe that the foundations of great empires like America's are to be found in their laissez-faire beginnings.

In fact, most great empires achieve success while they are still disparate – and we've pointed to the Greek city-states, Rome's Seven Hills and Italy's city-states as examples. In the case of many great empires and social movements such as the Renaissance, one finds that the real motivators of prosperity are the ability to move freely from one localized regime to another to escape authoritarianism. The actual formation of empire is a signifier of that society's eventual downfall …

Is centralization of economic effort in large nation states an important plus? To extend the argument, then, further centralization would lead to further success. Using this argument one could perhaps justify world government as the most successful state-oriented and regulating organization of all.

After Thoughts

We certainly disagree with that.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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