Today is brought to you by the letter F:

F stands for Fabian Society. Fabian socialism began in Britain in 1883 and had supporters such as George Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb. The group achieved recognition with the publication of Fabian Essays (1889), with contributions by Shaw, Webb, Annie Besant, and Graham Wallas. The Fabians were opposed to the revolutionary theory of Marxism, holding that social reforms and socialistic “permeation” of existing political institutions would bring about the natural development of socialism. Repudiating the necessity of violent class struggle, they took little notice of trade unionism and other labor movements until Beatrice Potter (who later married Sidney Webb) joined the group. They subsequently helped create (1900) the unified Labour Representation Committee, which evolved into the Labour party. The Labour party adopted their main tenets, and the Fabian Society remains as an affiliated research and publicity agency.

We were discussing the other day how few types of governments or societal structures have been conceived and then implemented by a single person/ group of people/ or in a condensed period of time. Things such as feudalism, monarchy, dictatorships, even democracy all developed over periods of time. I suppose you could claim that democracy was invented and implemented by the Greeks in a relatively short time span, but modern democracy has been developing for hundreds of years (Magna Carta anyone?). Socialism and commuunism were both forms of government that were thought of and implemented in relatively short periods of time, which I think makes them very interesting. (We don't count cults or random experiments of utopia as forms of government, however amusing they may be).