Fabianism and the Market

The crux of the nineteenth century Fabian ¹ critique of the market lay in its perception of ‘competitive’ capitalism as fundamentally and necessarily monopolistic. First, and most simply, it was monopolistic in the sense that one class had exclusive possession of the means of production, a fact which immediately precluded the existence, in anything but theory, of a freely competitive market economy. As Annie Besant put it, in a public debate with the radical G.W. Foote, in 1887, ‘When you have your competition hampered by absolute proprietorship in the whole of the materials of wealth production on the one side, and on the other a proletariat without property…then your pretence of free competition is a fraud and a hypocrisy.’ ²