How will socialism come?

Fabian Socialists believe in "the inevitability of gradualism", and "making haste, slowly". There is an active description of this. In a book titled "Hand and Brain", which is a symposium of socialist essays, George Bernard Shaw explains on page 107 in an essay titled "The Illusions of Socialism"(which starts on page 87)

At the other extremity you have the typical Fabian, who flatly declares that there will be no revolution; that there is no class war; that the wage earners are far more conventional, prejudiced, and "bourgeois" than the middle class; that there is not a single democratically constituted authority in England, including the House of Commons, that would not be much more progressive if it were not restrained by fear of the popular vote; that Karl Marx is no more infallible than Aristotle or Bacon, Ricardo or Buckle, and like them, made mistakes which are now plain to any undergraduate;

that a professed Socialist is neither better nor worse morally than a Liberal or Conservative, nor a working-man than a capitalist; that the working-man can alter the present system if he chooses, whereas the capitalist cannot because the working man will not let him; that it is perverse stupidity to declare in one breath that the working-classes are starved, degraded, and left in ignorance by a system which heaps victuals, education, and refinement on the capitalist, and to assume in the next that the capitalist is a narrow, sordid scoundrel, and the working-man a high minded, enlightened, magnanimous philanthropist; that Socialism will come by prosaic instalments of public regulation and public administration enacted by ordinary parliaments, vestries, municipalities, parish councils, school boards, and the like;

and that not one of these instalments will amount to a revolution. or will occupy a larger place in the political program of its day than a Factory Bill or a County Government Bill now does: all this meaning that the lot of the Socialist is to be one of dogged political drudgery, in conflict, not with the wicked machinations of the capitalist, but with the stupidity, the narrowness, in a word the idiocy (using the word in its precise and original meaning) of all classes, and especially of the class which suffers most by the existing system.

There are a lot of people out there who do not take the Fabians seriously, or Bernard Shaw, or any others who may be like them. Big mistake. Look at where we're at today.

James Madison said:

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

Madison was right. So too, was Ronald Reagan:

Now it doesn't require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed to the -- or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property?

I hope my readers don't get tired of me using this portion of Reagan's "Time for Choosing", because it's just so dead on accurate.

http://tinyurl.com/c43kyqf