Is the Fabian Turtle About to Snap?
Socialism was a reaction to the displacements of industrialism. The common people were surely impoverished in feudal times, but since their labor was on the land, the land was always there to support them. Not only economically, but psychologically. To be a serf is still to have a place under the sun. Not so after the Industrial Revolution.
Suddenly, the serf class was turned away from the land and ushered through the doors of the factory. Concentrated in cities, with no connection to real estate or durable community, they lost an existential safety net. They were no longer simply involved in growing food, they were involved in mechanical production. They could be used and thrown away like a cog in a machine. They began to demand justice, not only economic but environmental justice, and a return to more bucolic values.
Socialism is the belief that industry and capitalism more broadly must be governed such that their profits and benefits are fairly shared with all the people they employ. The obvious question becomes: who will govern capitalism? According to popular delusion, the common people (or a majority thereof) are the socialist governors of industry and trade. Hence terms such as “democratic socialist”. Marx in his manifesto of Communism postulated that the common people would directly own all the means of production and therefore equally share in its profits. Communism and socialism in practice have been decidedly less populist. In fact, socialism and communism have historically been dominated by precisely the same classes that control industrial capital. Thus we have wishful canards like “real Communism has never been tried”.
Consider the Fabian Society. According to Wikipedia:
The Fabian Society was named—at the suggestion of Frank Podmore—in honour of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (nicknamed Cunctator, meaning the "Delayer"). His Fabian strategy sought gradual victory against the superior Carthaginian army under the renowned general Hannibal through persistence, harassment, and wearing the enemy down by attrition rather than pitched, climactic battles.
and
According to author Jon Perdue, "The logo of the Fabian Society, a tortoise, represented the group’s predilection for a slow, imperceptible transition to socialism, while its coat of arms, a 'wolf in sheep’s clothing', represented its preferred methodology for achieving its goal." The wolf in sheep's clothing symbolism was later abandoned, due to its obvious negative connotations.
The avowed goal of the Fabians is to achieve the goals of socialism through infiltration and gradation. But they are not exactly peaceniks—they name themselves after a Roman general, they openly style themselves as a wolf in sheep’s skin, and when this symbolism becomes too obvious, they adopt the mascot of a nasty little tortoise, whose motto is “When I Strike, I Strike Hard.”
So my question is: is the Fabian turtle about to snap? Is the haggard wolf about to toss its bloody ovine pelt and rip the enfeebled free market to shreds, thus fulfilling history and instituting Utopia? Why does a movement of the common people require all these elite societies advertising the fact that they are engaged in conspiracy that will ultimately end in violence?
The fact is that the U.S. has been socialist since 1913. Socialism does not necessarily benefit the common people. Think about how a central bank achieves economic equality. It does so by inflating the currency, eventually making all amounts of currency equally worthless. The worth that has been extracted from the currency is typically spent on warfare. The governors of capital form an elite class, and the rest of society is equally impoverished. Neither economic nor environmental justice has been achieved. The symbol of the socialist progressives in the first half of the 20th century was a fasces, a bundle of rods with an axe head in the center, connoting the power of unity but also the lurking promise of violence. This symbolism was of course also adopted by the fascist movement in Europe, who also advertised themselves as socialists and champions of the working man.
Who will be the wolf’s quarry, the turtle’s dinner, the axe head’s final victim?