Permeation and Independent Labor
This chapter discusses George Bernard Shaw's and Sidney Webb's respective political strategies and their roles in inspiring Fabian policy. The Fabians did not share a commitment to permeating other parties in order to promote incremental measures of socialism. For a start, Shaw would have liked an independent socialist party, but for much of the 1880s and 1890s he did not think that such a party was possible. Moreover, insofar as the leading Fabians came to agree on “permeation,” they defined it differently. Shaw thought of permeation in terms of luring Radicals away from the Liberal Party in order to form an independent party to represent workers against capitalists. In contrast, Webb defined permeation in terms of giving expert advice to the political elite. The response of the Fabian Society to the formation of the Independent Labor Party reflected the interplay of these different strategies.