G. Edward Griffin - Love/Hate Between Leninists and Fabians

LOVE-HATE BETWEEN FABIANS AND LENINISTS

Fabians and Marxists are in agreement over their mutual goal of collectivism, but
they differ over style and sometimes tactics. When Marxism became fused with Leninism
and made its first conquest in Russia, these differences became the center of debate between
the two groups. Karl Marx said the world was divided into two camps eternally at war with
each other. One was the working class, which he called the proletariat, and the other was the
wealthy class, those who owned the land and the means of production. This class he called
the bourgeoisie.

Fabians were never enthusiastic over this class-conflict view, probably because most
of them were bourgeoisie, but Lenin and Stalin embraced it wholeheartedly. Lenin described
the Communist Party as the “vanguard of the proletariat,” and it became a mechanism for
total and ruthless war against anyone who even remotely could be considered bourgeoisie.
In the final paragraph of The Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote: “The Communists disdain
to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only
through the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” When the Bolsheviks came
to power in Russia, landowners and shopkeepers were slaughtered by the tens of thousands,
a process that continued well into the 1990s and eventually claimed the lives of over 100
million people murdered by their own government.

This brutality offended the sensibilities of the genteel Fabians, especially since most
of them were landowners or shopkeepers. It’s not that Fabians are opposed to force and
violence to accomplish their goals, it’s just that they prefer to use it as a last resort, whereas
the Leninists were running amuck in Russia implementing a plan of deliberate terror and
brutality. Fabians admired the Soviet system because it was based on collectivism but they
were shocked at what they considered to be needless bloodshed. It was a disagreement
primarily over style. When Lenin became the master of Russia, many of the Fabians joined
the Communist Party thinking that it would become the vanguard of world Socialism. They
likely would have stayed there if it hadn’t been for the brutality of the regime.

To understand the love-hate relationship between these two groups we must never
lose sight of the fact that Leninism and Fabianism are merely variants of collectivism. Their
similarities are much greater than their differences. That is why their members often move
from one group to the other – or why some of them are actually members of both groups at
the same time. Leninists and Fabians are usually friendly with each other. They may
disagree intensely over theoretical issues and style, but never over goals.

Margaret Cole was the Chairman of the Fabian Society in 1955 and ‘56. Her father,
G.D.H. Cole, was one of the early leaders of the organization dating back to 1937. In her
book, The Story of Fabian Socialism, she describes the common bond that binds
collectivists together. She says:
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It plainly emerges that the basic similarities were much greater than the
differences, that the basic Fabian aims of the abolition of poverty, through legislation
and administration; of the communal control of production and social life …, were
pursued with unabated energy by people trained in Fabian traditions, whether at the
moment of time they called themselves Fabians or loudly repudiated the name….
The fundamental likeness is attested by the fact that, after the storms produced first
by Syndicalism1 and then by the Russian Revolution in its early days had died down,
those “rebel Fabians” who had not joined the Communist Party … found no mental
difficulty in entering the revived Fabian Society of 1939 –nor did the surviving
faithful find any difficulty with collaborating with them.2

Fabians are, according to their own symbolism, wolves in sheep’s clothing, and that
explains why their style is more effective in countries where parliamentary traditions are
well established and where people expect to have a voice in their own political destiny.
Leninists, on the other hand, tend to be wolves in wolf’s clothing, and their style is more
effective in countries where parliamentary traditions are weak and where people are used to
dictatorships anyway.

In countries where parliamentary traditions are strong, the primary tactic for both of
these groups is to send their agents into the power centers of society to capture control from
the inside. Power centers are those organizations and institutions that represent all the
politically influential segments of society. These include labor unions, political parties,
church organizations, segments of the media, educational institutions, civic organizations,
financial institutions, and industrial corporations, to name just a few. In a moment, I am
going to provide a partial list of members of an organization called the Council on Foreign
Relations, and you will recognize that the power centers these people control are classic
examples of this strategy. The combined influence of all these entities adds up to the total
political power of the nation. To capture control of a nation, all that is required is to control
its power centers, and that has been the strategy of Leninists and Fabians alike.

They may disagree over style; they may compete over which of them will dominant
the coming New World Order, over who will hold the highest positions in the pyramid of
power; they may even send opposing armies into battle to establish territorial preeminence
over portions of the globe, but they never quarrel over goals. Through it all, they are blood
brothers, and they will always unite against their common enemy, which is any opposition
to collectivism. It is impossible to understand what is unfolding in the War on Terrorism
today without being aware of that reality.