Orwell vs the Fabians: Socialism's Internal War

Before the detail, a framing note. "Orwell vs the Fabians" sounds like a mutual feud between equals, and that overstates it — Orwell was a minor figure on the left through most of the 1930s, and by the time Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four made him famous, Sidney Webb was dead and Beatrice Webb had only a few years left. There's no record of the Webbs or George Bernard Shaw responding to Orwell directly. But this wasn't a one-sided non-relationship either: the Fabian Society itself invited Orwell to lecture in 1941, published him in 1942, and then had a real falling-out with him over how they edited his words — a concrete, documented, personal episode this piece covers in full below, alongside his separate, bitter dispute with the Webb-founded New Statesman. What follows is a genuine argument with a movement Orwell knew from the inside, not a case of two camps that never spoke.

Eric Arthur Blair — George Orwell was a pen name — was born in 1903 and educated at Eton before serving with the Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that soured him on empire and fed his novel Burmese Days. He lived among the poor in Paris and London in the late 1920s and early 1930s, material that became Down and Out in Paris and London, then reported on working-class conditions in the industrial north for The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). He fought for the POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War, was shot through the throat, and narrowly escaped a Stalinist purge of his own faction — the experience that hardened his lifelong hostility to Soviet Communism, recorded in Homage to Catalonia (1938). He wrote Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) before dying of tuberculosis in January 1950, aged 46.

Commissioned by Victor Gollancz's Left Book Club to document industrial poverty, The Road to Wigan Pier splits into two halves. The first is straight reportage on mining conditions in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The second is a long, self-critical essay on Orwell's own middle-class upbringing that turns into an attack on the socialist movement's public image — an attack sharp enough that Gollancz tried to have the second half cut or softened before publication, fearing it would alienate the Left Book Club's own readership.

Orwell's argument was that ordinary working people who stood to benefit most from socialism were often repelled by the people delivering the message: middle-class intellectuals who talked about brotherhood while keeping their own social distance, and a movement that, in his telling, attracted every crank, "fruit-juice drinker" and "sandal-wearer" in England along with the serious reformers. He named names, listing "the Coles, Webbs, Stracheys, etc." among the middle-class socialists whose relationship to the working class he questioned — G.D.H. and Margaret Cole and John Strachey alongside Sidney and Beatrice Webb, all prominent Fabians or Fabian-adjacent figures of the day.

The underlying complaint wasn't really about diet or sandals. It was that a socialism run by and for a particular kind of educated, comfortable reformer — the Fabian type, in effect — would always struggle to win the working-class support it claimed to represent, because the people delivering it hadn't actually closed the class distance they wrote pamphlets about closing.

The New Statesman, founded by the Webbs in 1913, was the magazine Orwell had the longest and most complicated relationship with of any Fabian-linked institution — he contributed 23 essays and reviews to it between 1931 and 1943. That relationship broke down over Spain. Orwell returned from Barcelona in June 1937 with a bullet wound through his throat and firsthand knowledge of the Soviet secret police's suppression of the POUM militia he'd fought alongside. He wired the magazine's editor, Kingsley Martin, offering an eyewitness account; Martin commissioned it, then rejected the finished piece, "Eyewitness in Barcelona," on the grounds that it would cause political trouble by contradicting the Popular Front line that the left had no enemies to its own left. When Martin then asked Orwell to review a different book on Spain instead, he rejected that piece too. Orwell placed the original essay elsewhere, in the New English Weekly, as "Spilling the Spanish Beans," writing that people who ought to know better had let the truth about Spain go unreported for fear it would be used as fascist propaganda.

Orwell later returned to the subject in his own 1941 Fabian Society lecture, telling the audience that the New Statesman was the best place to study the mind of the English left — and then spending roughly ten pages explaining exactly what he thought was wrong with that mind: a left-wing intelligentsia, in his account, that disliked the society it lived in but wouldn't accept the effort or responsibility of actually changing it.

The clearest evidence that Orwell and the Fabian Society knew each other directly, not just by reputation, is that the Society invited him to speak. In November 1941 Orwell delivered "Culture and Democracy" as one lecture in a Fabian series later collected in the 1942 pamphlet Victory or Vested Interest?, alongside a lecture by G.D.H. Cole — the Fabian economist who had co-founded the New Fabian Research Bureau a decade earlier. Orwell's own surviving notes show him arguing that democracy in its current form couldn't survive unchanged, that culture and democracy were bound together, and that both would need active defending against fascism and totalitarianism — territory close to The Lion and the Unicorn, published the same year.

The relationship soured over the printed version. Orwell spoke from notes rather than a script, deliberately keeping a looser, spoken register, and when the Fabian Society published the lecture in 1942 without consulting him on the edits, he was furious to discover his phrasing had been smoothed out and altered throughout. Writing to the Society afterward, he complained that the changes had gone through his entire manuscript and "gives a quite false impression of my written style" — a small episode, but a telling one: even in the one instance where Orwell and the Fabian Society worked together directly, the collaboration ended in a dispute over the Society editing him into something more presentable than he'd actually said.

The manuscript and the correspondence survive and have since been sold at auction as a single lot, catalogued under the title "George Orwell and the Fabian Society" — as concrete a physical record of the relationship covered in this article as exists anywhere.

H.G. Wells had left the Fabian Society in 1908 after his own reform proposals were blocked (see the Fabian Society history above), but he remained, for Orwell, the clearest living symbol of the rationalist, technocratic optimism the Fabian tradition prized: the belief that science, planning, and expert administration would inevitably win out over superstition, nationalism and violence. In his 1941 essay Wells, Hitler and the World State, Orwell argued that this worldview had been overtaken by events. Nazi Germany, he pointed out, had all the machinery Wells wanted — order, planning, state-backed science, steel and concrete and aeroplanes — turned entirely to barbarous ends, concluding that "science is fighting on the side of superstition." Wells, committed to his own optimistic model of history, couldn't process this: the "war-lords and witch-doctors," in Orwell's phrase, were supposed to lose to the common-sense World State, and Wells continued writing as though sheer reasonableness would settle Hitler's fate — a confidence Orwell thought dangerously out of touch with what was actually happening in Europe.

The essay isn't really about Wells personally so much as what Wells represented: a strand of progressive, planning-minded thought — one the Fabian Society had helped establish as a mainstream British intellectual tradition — that Orwell believed had badly underestimated the emotional and irrational forces, nationalism above all, that were actually driving history in the 1930s and 40s.

Orwell's most direct engagement with the intellectual case for expert-led planning came in his 1946 essay Second Thoughts on James Burnham, a response to the American theorist's 1941 book The Managerial Revolution. Burnham's thesis was that capitalism was dying, but socialism wasn't going to replace it — instead, a new class of "managers" (business executives, bureaucrats, technicians, and administrators) would take direct control of a planned, centralised society that was neither capitalist nor genuinely democratic. It's a strikingly close cousin of the Fabian faith in rule by the right kind of expert, minus the democratic consent Fabian doctrine insisted on.

Orwell rejected Burnham's fatalism — his tendency, as Orwell put it, to assume whoever looked like winning in the short term would inevitably keep winning, a habit that had already led Burnham to overrate first Nazi Germany and then Stalin's Russia. But Orwell didn't dismiss the underlying observation. He accepted that the general historical drift had "almost certainly been towards oligarchy" and "an increasing concentration of industrial and financial power" — agreeing with Burnham's diagnosis of where unchecked managerial power was heading, while rejecting Burnham's claim that this drift was unstoppable and beyond democratic control.

Published in 1945 after Orwell struggled to find a publisher willing to print an unflattering allegory of Stalin's Russia while Britain and the USSR were wartime allies, Animal Farmis most directly a satire of the Russian Revolution's degeneration into Stalinist dictatorship — Napoleon the pig standing in for Stalin, Snowball for Trotsky, Squealer for state propaganda, Boxer the carthorse for the betrayed proletariat. But its underlying mechanism is the same one running through the Wells and Burnham essays: a revolution justified in the name of universal equality is captured, gradually and through the manipulation of language rather than open betrayal, by a small class of administrators who conclude they understand the farm's interests better than the other animals do. The pigs don't seize power by force at first — they simply take on more and more administrative responsibility, "for the general good," until the famous final line makes the outcome explicit: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

It's the Webbs' Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? inverted. Where the Webbs looked at a planned society run by an expert administrative class and saw the future working, Orwell looked at the same basic structure — decisions made by the animals judged cleverest, for everyone else's supposed benefit — and wrote its likeliest ending.

Published in 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four draws heavily and explicitly on Burnham's managerial-elite thesis: Oceania is one of three planned, centralised super-states ruled by self-perpetuating elites, exactly the kind of world Burnham had predicted, pushed to its totalitarian extreme. The Party's ideology, Ingsoc — Newspeak for "English Socialism" — has led many readers to treat the novel as a direct attack on Attlee's Labour government or on British socialism generally. That reading doesn't hold up well against the historical record: Orwell remained a self-described democratic socialist and Labour supporter throughout the writing of the book, campaigned for Labour in the 1945 election, and intended Ingsoc as a warning about what any centrally planned society could become if its democratic safeguards failed — a "perversion of English socialism," in the words of Orwell scholar Ben Pimlott, rather than a verdict on socialism itself.

Read alongside the Burnham essay, though, the novel's target comes into focus: a society run by an unaccountable class of planners and administrators who control information, rewrite history, and answer to no one — "a boot stamping on a human face — forever," as the Party interrogator O'Brien puts it. It's not a portrait of the Fabian Society. It is, on the evidence of the essays and the lecture that led up to it, a warning about exactly the kind of concentrated expert power the Fabian model of "permeation" was built to place in the hands of people who believed, sincerely, that they knew best.

Orwell's experience in Spain — watching his own POUM faction purged and slandered by Stalinist propaganda while the Western left largely looked away — made intellectual honesty about the Soviet Union the defining test of his politics for the rest of his life. That makes the parallel with the Fabian Society's own history hard to miss. Sidney and Beatrice Webb visited the USSR in 1932, at the height of the state-engineered famine, and their 1935 book Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? dismissed contemporary reports of famine and mass repression as Western propaganda — the same pattern of well-credentialed observers rationalising Soviet atrocities that Orwell spent his career attacking in others, from the Left Book Club crowd to fellow-travelling journalists.

There's no record of Orwell reviewing the Webbs' book directly, but the connection is thematic rather than circumstantial: the Webbs' technocratic instinct — trust the planners, trust the official statistics, trust that a rationally administered society must be working as advertised — is precisely the instinct Orwell identified, in Burnham and in Wells, as the thing that made intelligent people defend indefensible systems. Historians researching the Webbs' Soviet apologetics have reached a similar conclusion independently: that it was their own technocratic, statist worldview, not naivety alone, that made Stalin's Russia look to them like their lifelong project finally realised.

Orwell's only formal political affiliation was the Independent Labour Party, a smaller, more overtly revolutionary rival to Labour that he joined in 1938, explaining in the essay Why I Joined the I.L.P. that it was the only British party he felt confident wouldn't abandon its socialist principles to prepare for an "imperialist war." He fought alongside ILP members in Spain. He quietly resigned in 1939 when the ILP's leadership opposed British entry into the Second World War, a position he'd come to see as indefensible after the Nazi-Soviet pact.

His fullest statement of his own politics came in the 1941 essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, which called for a distinctly English, democratic form of socialism — rooted in ordinary people's instinctive decency and dislike of dogma, achieved through and not against Britain's existing institutions, and explicitly contrasted with Soviet Communism. It shares the Fabian belief that socialism should arrive through British democratic institutions rather than revolution imported wholesale from abroad — but it's built on faith in the "innate decency" of ordinary people rather than the rule of trained experts, and it has almost nothing to say about the patient civil-service permeation that defined the Fabian method. By the 1945 election Orwell was canvassing for the Labour Party itself, without ever formally rejoining any socialist organisation.

The argument over Orwell's legacy didn't end with his death in 1950 — if anything it's grown since. Both the political left and right claim him today, and both have real material to point to. Writers on the right cite his relentless attacks on left-wing intellectual dishonesty, his anti-totalitarianism, and Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm's status as the twentieth century's two most famous anti-Communist works. Writers on the left cite his lifelong self-identification as a socialist, his anti-imperialism, his anti-capitalism, and the fact that he fought and bled for a Marxist militia in Spain — pointing out that reducing his work to "the Soviet Union bad" strips out the specifically socialist critique of Stalinism it was built from.

Orwell himself addressed this while he was alive. When a Conservative-aligned pro-democracy group approached him for support during the war, he turned them down, writing that he couldn't associate himself with "an essentially Conservative body which claims to defend democracy" while having nothing to say about British imperialism, and adding that he belonged to the left and had to work inside it, whatever his objections to Soviet influence there. He never renounced socialism, never joined a right-wing organisation, and continued voting and campaigning for Labour until his death — the strongest documentary evidence against treating him as a man of the right.

That doesn't settle the argument in the left's favour either, though. Orwell's criticism of left-wing intellectual culture — the Fabian-adjacent technocrats, the Soviet apologists, the New Statesman crowd — was sustained, specific, and personally costly to relationships he might otherwise have kept, which is exactly why it still gets quoted approvingly by people well outside the left today. Both sides are selectively reading a writer who spent his career refusing to fit neatly into either.

Even sympathetic readers of Orwell have pushed back on parts of this. The "cranks and sandal-wearers" passage in The Road to Wigan Pier is often read today as Orwell stereotyping a movement's fringe to make a rhetorical point, rather than engaging with what Fabian-influenced policy was actually delivering at the time — municipal housing, expanded local government, the intellectual groundwork for what became the NHS. Critics have also noted that Orwell's own class background made him an unreliable narrator of working-class attitudes he claimed to be defending, even as he criticised other middle-class socialists for the same distance.

On the technocracy critique, Orwell himself was careful not to claim too much — his Burnham essay explicitly rejects the idea that a managerial takeover was inevitable, and he continued to support state planning and nationalisation as tools, campaigning for the same Labour Party whose 1945 government leaned heavily on Fabian-trained MPs and Fabian policy work to build the welfare state he broadly supported. His argument was narrower than "planning is dangerous" — it was that planning without real democratic accountability, run by people convinced of their own rightness, tends toward the concentration of power rather than its distribution, whoever administers it.

As with the equivalent question about the Fabian Society itself, this isn't something a historical record can settle on its own — it depends on how much weight you put on outcomes versus method. What follows is the strongest version of each case.

The case for the Fabians

The Fabian method produced the NHS, the minimum wage, and the postwar welfare state — durable, broadly popular achievements that Orwell's own preferred vehicle, the Labour Party, delivered using largely Fabian-trained MPs and decades of Fabian policy research. Orwell's warnings about managerial elites and centralised planning, on this view, describe a risk that never actually materialised in Britain: postwar Britain got nationalised industries and a planned welfare state without sliding into anything resembling Oceania, precisely because Fabian gradualism insisted on winning democratic consent at every step, the safeguard Orwell worried about losing.

The case for Orwell

The Fabian Society's own worst historical moment — the Webbs excusing Stalin's famine and terror because a planned society flattered their technocratic worldview — is close to a direct confirmation of exactly what Orwell warned about: that people who trust planners and experts too completely can talk themselves into defending atrocities, so long as the atrocities come wrapped in the right administrative language. On this view, the fact that British Fabian gradualism didn't produce an Oceania doesn't mean the underlying risk wasn't real — it means Britain got lucky with its safeguards holding, not that the instinct Orwell was worried about was wrong.

Both readings can sit on top of the same facts in this article without contradicting them. Whether you find the Fabian record or the Orwellian warning more persuasive probably says more about how much you trust institutions to self-correct than it does about either man's or movement's historical record.