Fabian Socialism 2.0

I remember a discussion question from somewhere at least 50 years ago that went something like this: "Which of the two British dystopian novels, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, seems most prescient of current conditions to you? Explain." I thought this was a good question at the time, but I never could come up with a definite answer, and as I revisit the question today, I'm actually more convinced that the answer is "neither".

Let's look at Brave New World. According to Wikipedia,

Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story's protagonist.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, on the other hand, also per Wikipedia, paints a different picture:

Much of the world is in perpetual war. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, which is led by Big Brother, a dictatorial leader supported by an intense cult of personality manufactured by the Party's Thought Police. The Party engages in omnipresent government surveillance and, through the Ministry of Truth, historical negationism and constant propaganda to persecute individuality and independent thinking.

We might say that Brave New World represents an apotheosis of consumer capitalism, while Nineteen Eighty-Four is a practical outcome of the Marxist-Leninist vision. On one hand, the Marxist-Leninist paradigm collapsed within half a century of Orwell's prediction. On the other, nobody seems especially eager to embrace the ultimate expression of consumerism, despite the widespread availability of plastic surgery and group therapy -- and intelligence-based social hierarchy these days is a joke: the punchline is Kamala Harris.

But both dystopias are aimed in particular at the UK. As best we can observe from an ocean away, the UK has turned into somnething utterly unlike either of the 20th century visions, and at least by some analyses, this was utterly unforeseen:

To analyze the nature and extent of Islamist ideological penetration in Britain, it is important to understand the demographic features of British Islam. Britain did not measure religion until the 2001 Census, and even then one’s religious affiliation was only a voluntary question. Britain did however measure migrants’ countries of origin and from these figures it is thought that the 1991 Muslim population was around 1.25 million. The 2001 Census indicated that 1.6 million people in England and Wales and just over 42,000 in Scotland identified themselves as Muslim. The voluntary nature of the question is likely to have led to a low figure and it is now thought that there are around 2 million.

This whole discussion, however, is sanguline; a quick web search brings up a number of Muslims in the UK closer to 4 million. In general, UK legacy media downplays the idea of conflicts in values between Islam and the UK, but in the current environment, Keir Starmer is actively appeasing Muslim voters on issues like anti-Semitism:

He can't stand up the the Muslims because of the 'rent boys'

Pathetic

Oh, there's the door bell. I assume that's the police

They're a major part of the cover-up, sadly https://t.co/Ca63MBFTcu

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) March 27, 2026

This has brought me to the question of what's become of Fabian socialism, a peculiarly British idea that caught on elsewhere in the late 19th and erly 20th century in response to the idea of world proletarian revolution. A UK study guide gives a succinct explanation of the term:

Fabianism is a socialist movement that advocates for gradual reform and the peaceful transition to socialism rather than revolution. It emphasizes education, moral persuasion, and the use of democratic means to achieve social change, reflecting a belief in the power of reasoned argument and collaboration over violent upheaval.

. . . Fabianism differs from traditional forms of socialism primarily in its commitment to gradual reform rather than revolutionary change. While many socialist movements advocate for immediate and often radical changes to overthrow capitalism, Fabianism promotes a more measured approach, believing that social change can be achieved through education, moral persuasion, and democratic processes. This ideology emphasizes collaboration within existing political structures to create a more equitable society.

The standard definition goes on to give a roll call of relentlessly bourgeois figures connected with the movement: George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Charles Marson, Sydney Olivier, Oliver Lodge, Ramsay MacDonald, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Bertrand Russell, to the point that either consciously or subconsciously, these people recognized what would happen to the bourgeoisie in the event of world proleterian revolution, viz, the gulag, and they were above all intent on saving their own skins.

Thus they concocted a strategy of tempporizing indefinitely with the proletariat, offering cures of one sort or another to social ailments that seldom solved much except to keep the bourgeoisie in place. By the 21st century, as a practical matter, the US solved tbe problem of proletarian revolution, first by containing the Soviet Union, and then by allowing the Marxist-Leninist project to collapse of its own weight. It's worth pointing out that NATO and similar alliances were constructed as part of this containment strategy, but once the Marxist-Leninist model collapsed, they became irrelevant.

The next problem is that once the US strategy co-opted the threat of world proletarian revolition, the whole Fabian idea also collapsed. I think this was at the root of both Reagan Republicanism and Trump populism; the bottom line is that temporizing with radical demands in order to maintain a comfortable bourgeoisie should no longer be necessary. In other words, the whole Labour project has become as irrelevant as the Marxism-Leninism it was intended to supplant.

The response of Labour, it appears, has been to cast about for another group to temporize with, in this case, the Muslims. This isn't going to work; there's a different dynamic, and each temporization will only come off as weakness until the bourgeoisie is dhimmi, relegated to second-class status in return for a tac, otherwise characterizable as reparations. As I think about it, both Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are intensely UK bourgeois views of the social structure, both date from the mid-20th century, and the implicit prescriptions of both for the social compromise are no longer relevant.

I think this is why I could never quite work through the question of which was more prescient; neither was. Neither remotely saw Islam as a potential problem for the UK or the West in general.