“The Fabian Society has in view the advance of Socialism.”

– Fabian Tract No. 3, 1885

Socialism’s true origin, intent and purpose

Few Britons today are aware of the existence of the Fabian Society and even fewer are familiar with its ideology, aims, influence and power. As its own documents show, the Society has always aimed to establish a Socialist regime controlled by itself.

Contrary to current political mythology (or disinformation) which has it that Socialism was a working-class movement, the fact is that it originated with the liberal capitalist middle classes where the Fabian Society was at home.

The leading elements of liberal capitalism – the big businessmen, industrialists and bankers – who had amassed great wealth on the back of the industrial revolution, aimed to strengthen their position of power and influence by two means: (1) by monopolising finance, economy and politics; and (2) by controlling the growing urban working class.

While the monopolisation of finance, economy and politics could only be achieved by the centralisation of capital, means of production, etc., the working class could only be controlled through organisation and promises of a larger share in resources. These measures formed the core of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). Both authors were middle class and Engels, Marx’s financial supporter, was a wealthy textile industrialist.

The Fabian Society’s links to subversive money interests

The founders, leaders and financial backers of the Fabian Society were closely connected with the same interests:

Hubert Bland, a bank-employee-turned-journalist, worked for the London Sunday Chronicle, a paper owned by newspaper magnate Edward Hulton, formerly of the Liberal Manchester Guardian. Bland was a co-founder of the Fabian Society in 1884 and became a member of its executive and its long-serving treasurer. He also recruited his friend and fellow journalist Bernard Shaw.

Bernard Shaw was working for the London Pall Mall Gazette, where leading Liberal William T. Stead served as editor and Alfred (later Lord) Milner as his assistant. Both Stead and Milner were close to diamond magnate and Rothschild associate Cecil Rhodes and were involved in the formation of the influential secret organisation known as the Milner Group. Having been recruited to the Fabian Society by his friend Bland in 1884, Shaw recruited Annie Besant and his friends Sidney Webb, Sydney Olivier and Graham Wallas in 1885 and 1886.

In addition to political intrigue, the Fabians were also adept at securing a higher social and financial position for themselves.

Shaw’s friend and fellow Fabian Society leader Sidney Webb married Beatrice, daughter of Richard Potter, a wealthy financier with international connections who served as chairman of the Great Western and Grand Trunk Railways of England and Canada. Beatrice was also a close friend of Rothschild associate and Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour.

Shaw himself married Charlotte, daughter of Horace Payne-Townshend, a wealthy Stock Exchange investor. He was employed by millionaire William Waldorf (later Lord) Astor, owner of the Pall Mall Gazette, and became a close friend of the latter’s son (and Milner Group leader) Waldorf and his wife Nancy. Interviews with both Shaw and Webb (probably written by Shaw himself) were published by the Pall Mall and St. James’s Gazettes (Ratiu, 2012).

As Shaw, Webb, Olivier and Wallas became the Fabian Society’s dominant “Big Four,” it becomes clear that the Society was a private organisation run by elements in the employ of media outlets representing liberal capitalist interests. Indeed, the Society’s financial backers included John Passmore Edwards, an associate of textile manufacturer and leader of the Liberal “Manchester School,” Richard Cobden himself. It follows that both Karl Marx and the Fabian Society were bankrolled by industrial interests with links to the left-wing Manchester School and the media world.

These already powerful interests were allies of the Rothschild Group which had close links to the shadowy world of Manchester’s left-wing media, industry and finance: the Rothschilds’ first port of call in England had been Manchester, where the group’s patriarch Nathan Meyer started his career in the textile trade.

The Fabian Society was in close touch with the Rothschilds both directly and through go-betweens like Lord Arthur Balfour. The Balfours were among the chief representatives of Britain’s money power and were involved in the creation of organisations advancing the money power’s interests from the Anglo-American League and the Pilgrims Society to the League of Nations. While his brother was President of the Board of Trade, Arthur Balfour served as President of the Local Government Board and later as Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. While serving in these posts, he conferred on a regular basis with both Lord Rothschild and the Fabian leadership and used his position to advance their agendas.

The Fabian Society has also been close to the Rockefellers who are covert Fabian Socialists. David Rockefeller wrote a sympathetic senior thesis on Fabian Socialism at Harvard and studied left-wing economics at the Fabian Society’s London School of Economics. Not surprisingly, the Rockefellers have funded countless Fabian projects (including the LSE) from the early 1920s (Ratiu, 2012).

The Fabian Society continues to be funded by subversive entities like the European Commission and the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS), an EU-wide operation co-funded by the European Parliament, which works for a Socialist Europe. And it operates in partnership with global companies like Pearson, a long-time Lazard and Rothschild associate (Pearson has been a major stockholder in the Milner Group’s bank Lazard from the early 1900s and co-owns The Economist Group with the Rothschilds).

The Fabian Society, the Labour Party and Fabian control of the working classes

Rothschild, Rockefeller and allied interests were the primary moving force behind liberal (i.e., left-wing) initiatives like “free trade,” “world peace,” “universal brotherhood” and “world organisation,” inexorably leading to the abolition of national sovereignty and the imposition of world government. They were also behind Socialism as a device for bribing and controlling the working class through operations like the Fabian Society and the Milner Group.

That Britain’s working classes “were not going to rush into Socialism” had long been discovered by the Fabian leadership – as Fabian Society Secretary Edward R. Pease candidly admitted. Therefore the first task of the Society was to capture the working classes for its own ends. A step in this direction was the formation of the Independent Labour Party (ILP).

The ILP was founded at a Fabian conference in 1893, was formed of over seventy local Fabian societies and was headed by Fabian Keir Hardie, who had earlier co-founded the Second International with Friedrich Engels. The ILP’s aim of controlling the labour and Socialist movement for its own agenda is evident from Beatrice Webb’s Diary and other Fabian documents (Ratiu, 2012).

Another political organisation serving the same purpose was the Labour Party. Set up in 1900 by Keir Hardie and fellow Socialists, the Labour Party was known as the “Labour Representation Committee” for the first few years of its existence. That it was not representing labour is evident from the middle-class Fabians involved in its formation who included Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb and Edward R. Pease. From inception, Pease, one of the Fabian Society founders, sat on the Labour Party Executive followed by Sidney Webb and others.

The Fabian Society has retained complete control over the Labour Party ever since:

The Labour constitution, manifesto and party policy were all written by various Fabians like Arthur Henderson and Sidney Webb; all Labour governments from 1924 to 1997-2010 have consisted almost exclusively of Fabian Society members; this also applies to Labour Party Prime Ministers, with the sole exception of Ramsay MacDonald (who resigned from the Society in 1900 over disagreements about the Boer War but remained a close collaborator and appointed fellow Fabians to key posts in his governments).

The Fabian Society and its total control of modern society

The Fabians’ drive for total control was not restricted to the working classes. The Society’s declared aim was to capture and control all British citizens “for its profit and their own good” (Fabian News, Sept. 1897). For this purpose and in addition to politics, it set out to control education, culture, economy, the legal system and even medicine and religion.

This was accomplished through a wide range of interconnected organisations, societies and movements:

Education: university societies and schools like the London School of Economics

Culture: the New Age movement, the Central School of Arts and Crafts, the Leeds Arts Club, the Fabian Arts Group and the Stage Society

Economy: the London School of Economics and the Royal Economic Society

Law: the Haldane Society

Medicine: the Socialist Medical League

Religion: the Labour (later Socialist) Church movement, the Christian Socialist Crusade, the Christian Socialist League and the Christian Socialist Movement, etc. (Ratiu, 2012).

The Fabian Society and dictatorship

For all its hypocritical talk about “democracy,” the Fabian Society’s dictatorial intentions were exposed early on through the statements and actions of its leadership. In 1927, Fabian leader Bernard Shaw openly declared that Fabians must get the Socialist movement “out of its old democratic grooves,” that they, as Socialists, had “nothing to do with liberty” and that democracy was “incompatible with Socialism” – as proved by Stalinism, an under-current of Socialism much admired by the Fabian leadership.

The Webbs and the Shaws along with the Astors visited Soviet Russia in the early 1930s and returned full of praise for Stalin and his murderous regime. The Webbs wrote a massive propaganda document for the “achievements” of Russian Communism entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. In 1948, two years before his death, Shaw said that “Stalin is a good Fabian.”

The Fabian Society and World Government

Outside Britain, the Fabian Society’s ultimate goal – which it has pursued through the Labour Party and other front organisations like the Socialist International and the United Nations – has been the establishment of a Socialist World Government (Ratiu, 2012).

The UN was created in 1944 as a successor to the Milner-Fabian League of Nations with the involvement of the Fabian Socialist Rockefellers and their Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and, from inception, was dominated by Socialists with links to the Socialist International like Paul-Henri Spaak, Trygve Lie, Dag Hammarskjold and many others.

The Socialist International itself was created in 1951 by the London Fabian Society as the successor to Karl Marx’s First International. Its main function has been to co-ordinate the Socialist movement worldwide, in particular, with a view to establishing world government and promoting the UN as the central instrument for this:

“The ultimate objective of the parties of the Socialist International is nothing less than world government. As a first step towards it, they seek to strengthen the United Nations so that it may become more and more effective … Membership of the United Nations must be made universal” (“The World Today: The Socialist Perspective,” Declaration of the Socialist International Oslo Conference, 2-4 June 1962).

This was parroted by Socialist parties (and governments) around the world, the British Labour Party at the forefront:

“Labour remained faithful to its long-term belief in the establishment of east-west co-operation as the basis for a strengthened United Nations developing towards world government … For us world government is the final objective and the United Nations the chosen instrument …” (Labour Party manifesto 1964).

The Fabian Society and the Bilderberg Group

It is interesting to note what leading Bilderberg members have had to say about the Group. David Rockefeller writes that “Bilderberg meetings must induce apocalyptic visions of omnipotent international bankers plotting with unscrupulous government officials to impose cunning schemes on an ignorant and unsuspecting world” (Rockefeller, pp. 410-1). Denis Healey writes that “in America they were attacked as a left-wing plot to subvert the United States, in Europe as a capitalist plot to undermine socialism” (Healey, p. 196).

In fact, all of the above statements are correct with the exception of the strange idea – no doubt the product of Socialist misdirection efforts – that the Group’s activities would somehow “undermine Socialism.” The truth of the matter is that the Bilderberg Group has been a Socialist operation from inception: by all accounts, Bilderberg was the brainchild of Polish Socialist Joseph Retinger who was a close collaborator of the Fabian Society.

Based in London, Retinger had been in charge of co-ordinating the foreign ministers of various European governments-in-exile during the war. After the war, he was appointed secretary-general of several organisations promoting Socialist projects like the Independent League for European Co-operation (ILEC) and the European League for Economic Co-operation (ELEC). These organisations were bankrolled by David Astor and associated interests and became the driving force behind the movement for a united Europe (Ratiu, 2012).

The involvement of leading figures from the financial world shows that Bilderberg was indeed the creation of financial interests. Only that these interests were not “capitalist” but Socialist. David Astor, who became a member, was a leader of the pro-Socialist Milner Group. Other leading financiers who attended Bilderberg meetings from the first conference (1954) were long-standing Fabian Socialists David and Nelson Rockefeller; Joseph E. Johnson, chairman of the Rockefellers’ Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and president of the Rockefeller-controlled Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Dean Rusk, CFR director, director of the Rockefeller Foundation, Bilderberg co-chairman and (from 1961) Democrat Secretary of State. The only capitalist of sorts was the Group’s chairman, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. However, he was controlled by Retinger who, as a former member of the intelligence services, held information about Bernhard’s private life (de Villemarest, p. 15) and had clearly chosen him to cover the Socialist trail.

On the political side, too, the Group was dominated by Socialists like Denis Healey and Hugh Gaitskell of the Fabian Society executive committee. Healey was also member and later chairman of the Fabian International Bureau Advisory Committee as well as Chatham House (RIIA) councillor. Their “Conservative” colleague on the Bilderberg steering committee was Reginald (“Reggie”) Maudling, Churchill’s Economic Secretary to the Treasury, who had been a key supporter of Labour’s nationalisation programme. French members included Guy Mollet, Vice-President of the Fabian-controlled Socialist International, leader of the French Section of the Workers’ International (later Socialist) Party (SFIO) who later became Prime Minister of France, and his assistant Jacques Piette of the SFIO executive committee.

The Fabian Society occupied a dominant position on the international Socialist scene not only through its close links to the Rockefellers and other powerful American allies but also thanks to the fact that it was one of the few Socialist organisations in Europe to have remained untouched by German occupation. This unique position enabled it to launch the Socialist International after the war and was clearly reflected within the Bilderberg Group.

Equally clear is the relationship between leading Fabian Socialists and the financial interests involved. While Retinger was in the pay of David Astor as already noted, Healey and Gaitskell enjoyed favours such as foreign excursions paid for by Rockefeller-controlled organisations (the Astors’ long-standing associates), namely the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the CIA. Rothschild interests have not been absent from the Bilderberg steering committee either. They have been strongly represented by figureheads like Sir Evelyn de Rothschild of N. M. Rothschild & Sons, London, and his cousin Edmond de Rothschild, head of the private banking group Edmond de Rothschild Group with branches in Paris and Geneva.

David Rockefeller claims that the Bilderberg Group discusses important issues “without reaching consensus.” Healey, who found Bilderberg conferences “most valuable,” explains that the real value of such meetings is “in the personal contacts outside the conference hall.” Indeed, these contacts lead to other places where consensus is indisputably reached. It was at Bilderberg meetings that David Rockefeller met the chairman of royal Dutch Petroleum, John Loudon, whom he appointed chairman of the Chase Bank International Advisory Committee (IAC) in the late 1960s. Opportunities for reaching consensus are also provided by annual meetings of the Trilateral Commission, another Rothschild-Rockefeller operation which, to Rockefeller’s express pleasure, is a “vigorous and effective collaborator on the world scene” (Rockefeller, p. 418, emphasis added).

The main function of the Bilderberg Group then would seem to be that of a preliminary forum for Trilateral meetings and related events. Yet this is not to say that Bilderberg conferences are mere talk. They have produced projects favoured by the above international financial interests like the 1957 Treaty of Rome which created the European Economic Community (EEC) a.k.a. “Common Market” (Aldrich, p. 216) and remain an important venue where similar projects leading to world government are discussed without the participation or knowledge of the general public.

The Bilderberg Group’s role in the drive for world government has been confirmed by leading Fabian Healey himself, co-founder of both the Socialist International and Bilderberg, who admitted that the group aimed to achieve a “united global governance” (Birrell, 2013).

In light of the above facts, the identity of the objectives of the Fabian Society represented by the Socialist International and parties like Labour, on one hand, and the objectives of international financial interests represented by the UN and Bilderberg, on the other hand, becomes indisputable (Ratiu, 2012).

(This article is based on Chapter 2, “The Fabian Conspiracy,” of The Milner-Fabian Conspiracy by Ioan Ratiu)

See also “The Fabian Society: the masters of subversion unmasked” at http://www.freebritainnow.org

Aldrich, Richard J., “OSS, CIA and European Unity: The American Committee on United Europe, 1948-60,” International History Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, London, Nov. 1995; also in Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 8, No. 1, London, March 1997, pp. 184-227 www2.warwick.ac.uk

Birrell, Ian, “Does a shadowy clique of VIPs, politicians and billionaires (meeting today in Watford) run the world?” Daily Mail, 6 Jun. 2013.

Callaghan, John, The Labour Party and Foreign Policy: A History, Abingdon, Oxon, 2007.

Cole, Margaret, The Story of Fabian Socialism, London, 1961.

De Villemarest, Pierre, Facts & Chronicles Denied To The Public, vol. 2, 2003, English trans. Slough, Berkshire, 2004.

Ferguson, Niall, The House of Rothschild, vol. 2, New York, NY, 2000.

Griffin, G. Edward, The Fearful Master: A Second Look at the United Nations, Belmont, MA, 1964.

Healey, Denis, The Time of My Life, London, 2006.

Holroyd, Michael, Bernard Shaw, vol. 3, London, 1991.

Martin, Rose, Fabian Freeway: High Road to Socialism in the U.S.A., Chicago, IL, 1966.

Pease, Edward, R., History of the Fabian Society: The Origins of English Socialism, New York, NY, 1916.

Pugh, Patricia, Educate, Agitate, Organize: 100 Years of Fabian Socialism, London, 1984.

Quigley, Carroll, The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, San Pedro, CA, 1981.

Ratiu, Ioan, The Milner-Fabian Conspiracy, Richmond, 2012.

Rockefeller, David, Memoirs, New York, NY, 2002.

Weintraub, Stanley, “GBS and the despots,” The Sunday Times, 27 Jul. 2011.