The Only Difference Between The Fabians And The Leninsts Was A Lack of Opportunity

I am the cleverest member of the cleverest family of the cleverest class of the cleverest race in the world. 
Beatrice Webb

The big difference between the Leninist Vanguardists and the Fabians under the likes of Beatrice and Sydney Webb is that the Leninists got to exercise power.   The bizarre habit of thought that people who speak English seem to have, being incapable of believing that people who speak English, especially with an upper-class British accent would, given the chance, reproduce every single horror of both Stalinism and Nazism is seen as much in the writings, private and public and many of the public declarations of the Fabians such as the Webbs and its celebrity wing in people like George Bernard Shaw.   As Shaw was, in fact, a public advocate of the mass murder of those he saw as unfit decades before the Nazis put that policy into practice, the Webbs were huge fans of the Leninist and, later, Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, going so far as lying about the existence of the programmed mass starving of the Ukranian people in the 1930s as it was going on, after being given a propaganda tour.  The Ukranian famine, planned by Stalin and his regime was the most proximate and immediate of the 20th century mass murders preceding the mass murders of the Nazis.   The Webbs, like Marxists - minus the rival Trotsyites - in the United States, supported Stalinism through every horror and shame, including the Hitler-Stalin pact.

A fixture of the British upper, ruling class Beatrice Webb kept journals all during her life which provide a good window into the internal thinking behind the phenomenon of upper class, elite "radicalism" and its primary concern, the enforcement of hierarchical power, calling it social good.   As with Lenin's Vanguardism, it is based on assumed intellectual superiority, presented as them knowing what's best in even the brutal treatment of their lessers, in the most massive violation of their rights.   While they might not have openly advocated the proto-Nazi program of mass gassing and cremation that George Bernard Shaw openly advocated as a Fabian celebrity, they never kicked him out of the club for that.   I don't see any reason to doubt that there was a good possibility that the Fabians might have put such a policy in place, Shaw was hardly the only alleged lefty in Britain who said things like that, many of the fans of such science and economics as he based his arguments in said the same thing.   As Marilynne Robinson pointed out in her book,  Mother Country, the habit of meditating on the benefits of genocide were far older in the British upper class, she quotes Thomas Carlyle advocating the extermination of the Irish if they failed to measure up to his standards in 1839, immediately before the potato famine in which the British government exported food out of Ireland as millions were starving.  You can hardly say that Americans were much better as they were in the process of the attempted genocide of the inhabitants of North America.  All speaking English, not German, not Russian.

Elites, no matter what language they speak or what country they come from, have a strong, perhaps irresistible tendency to come up with lines of assertion, turning their brutality towards those they identify as their lessers into some kind of virtue.  Some imaginary future always figures into that, making their sacrifice, their murders or mutilation or oppression, the theft of their work product by the elite into some future benefit bought by the present benefit to that revolutionary or evolutionary elite.  That is one of the reasons that economic disparity is a danger to democracy but replacing it with one in which some academic, intellectual elite replaces an alleged superiority of mind for one of superiority of wealth is no less dangerous.  The program of mass murder put into effect was simply the most developed stage of the eugenics which the "best minds" of many countries presented as science.   I think if the Fabians had ever had the kind of control that Lenin and his successor, Stalin did, they would have started killing people, too.  Especially as they found their enlightened rule opposed.  They, like so many American intellectuals and artists, weren't much bothered when they found out what Stalin was doing.

As ususal, when it's Noam Chomsky who is reciting history, especially when the results fly in the face of conventional wisdom, he's pretty much got the goods on Lenin.  We might part company in that I have become convinced that virtually any sect of Marxism would end up as a pretty grim totalitarian state.   I think any political entity aping the scientistic-materialist ideology of late 19th century science probably would have.  Materialism is always, at best, inimical to democracy and human good based in the assumption of the endowment by GOD of equal rights and equal moral obligations.  I used to think that could happen otherwise, I no longer believe that anything less than that belief, strongly held, will hold human selfishness in check, especially when exercised by those who believe themselves superior and most of all those with the power to enforce their will.