Shaw's Controversial Socialism (review)

At long last: a serious, nonpartisan study of George Bernard Shaw's politics. Shaw must have devoted more of his time, energy, and commitment to political thought and action than any other creative writer in English of his era. And yet Shaw's politics are seldom given the sort of steady, intelligent, and unbiased attention that they receive in James Alexander's fine book. For Marxists, Shaw was "a good man fallen among Fabians," in Vladimir Lenin's famous phrase (qtd. in Alexander 65), and he has been fiercely castigated as such. Bertolt Brecht, although an admirer of the playwright, said that the best laugh he ever had was when he learned that Shaw was a socialist. Latter-day Shavian apologists, made especially uneasy by Shaw's 1930s praise for totalitarian dictators, have sought to subsume his political thinking within his broader philosophy. Michael Holroyd's four-volume biography, Bernard Shaw (1988-92), as the individual subtitles indicate, is based on a psychological schema in which Shaw's "pursuit of power" in the middle years of his life was a compensation for the vain "search for love" in his youth, with political frustration eventually leading to "the lure of fantasy" in his later career. Shaw's Controversial Socialism, by contrast, is devoted exclusively to his politics, and is all the more valuable because it is written by a political historian with no parti pris.

The scope of the book is limited, concerned largely with Shaw's engagement with socialism in his politically formative period from 1882 to 1904, though there is a brief final chapter considering the politics of the remaining forty-six years of his long life. Central to Alexander's thesis—and the book does read like the very best sort of rewritten doctoral thesis—is the argument that Shaw's socialism was essentially controversial, lacking a coherent theory because it was always "partial, argumentative or dialectical" and "almost deliberately offensive" (6, 7). It was, Alexander maintains, constituted by the need to differentiate itself both from liberalism and Marxism. So he shows in the opening chapter how Shaw, as he came to develop a political stance in the 1880s, worked with the Fabians on a distinctively non-Marxist economics based on a conflation of a classical Ricardian theory of rent with the neoclassical Jevonian concept of marginal utility. But as Shaw happily admitted in 1894 in response to a critical review of Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), "it has always been my habit to invent my political economy as I go along" (qtd. in Alexander 59). If the socialism of Fabian Essays, which Shaw edited, was designed to avoid commitment to doctrinaire Marxist economics, Shaw's interventions in Fabian debates between 1886 and 1895, examined in chapter 2, had more to do with the political need to deal with liberalism. The issue here was whether to support the liberals when they espoused socialist causes and risk losing an autonomous socialist identity, join forces with the emergent Independent Labour Party (which was not really socialist in spirit), or form a separate socialist party—a task made impossible by the fractious inability of the several left-wing factions to agree. Shaw turned now one way, now another, in this choice of evils but it was always, Alexander argues, in pursuit of a politically practicable but distinctively nonliberal socialism.

Between 1893 and 1904, it was the political impracticality of the European Marxists in the period of the Second International that ultimately made Shaw reject them. Alexander explains in chapter 3 how much more fully than other British socialists Shaw engaged with the continental Marxist tradition, attending both the Zurich congress of 1893 and the London congress of 1896, arguably influencing the thinking of the important German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein. But in the end Shaw became impatient with the fierce theological debates between the rival Marxist parties (caricatured in the squabbling bands of brigands in Man and Superman [1903]) and stood against the global pretentions of pan-European socialism...