Beatrice Webb (1858-1943)

(Early) Democratic socialism (UK and western Europe)

Key Text: The Cooperative Movement in Great Britain (1890)

The inevitability of gradualism

  • Democratic socialist parties campaign peacefully and gradually win the attention and trust of voters

  • The working class will gradually realise they had no vested interest in capitalism

  • Socialist government will be inevitably elected

  • Voters will re elect when they witness the progress being made

  • The continuous effects of democratic socialism would gradually produce a socialist society

  • The benefits of a socialist society will inevitably be clear making the reversal of socialism unlikely

Human Nature

-Capitalism is a ‘a corrupting force for humanity’, causing ‘unnatural’ levels of avarice (greed) and selfishness among people

-This damage to human nature will only be made worse by violent revolution

-Humanity needs to be guided back gradually to its original cooperative conditions

-Revolution ‘guilty of the same problem besetting capitalism-unpredictability’

-Horrors of Russian Revolution and stalinist russia show the damage violent revolution can do

State

-’Inevitability of gradualism’ inevitability of the gradual forming of socialist society due benefits seen with a socialist government

-Effective reform tends to be gradual rather than revolutionary

-Revolution is ‘chaotic inefficient and counter-productive’

-universal suffrage

-existing state can be used to effect gradual transition to socialism

Society

-Capitalism causes ‘crippling poverty and demeaning inequality’ and fosters regressive competition

-Neither paternalism (Limiting liberty for ones own good) or philanthropy (charity) is a sustainable solution for poverty or inequality

-Webb was active in Fabian society an organisation committed to evolutionary socialism.

-Webb’s views on inequality in her Minority Report anticipated the Beveridge report and predated both the agenda of a democratic socialist government and the welfare state in the UK

The economy

-Involved in drafting Clause IV of Labour’s 1918 constitution. Which committed labour to common ownership of the British economy but within the current system

-Capitalist society gradually replaced by one which secures workers with the full fruits of Labour based upon a common ownership of the means of production