Shaw and Economics
By Patrick McKelvey

“The gambling spirit urges man to allow no rival to come between his private individual powers and step-mother Earth, but rather to secure some acres of her and take his chance of getting diamonds instead of cabbages. This is Private Property or Unsocialism.”

Born to a working-class family in 1856 (his father was a grain merchant, his mother a singer), George Bernard Shaw came of age within an intellectual landscape grappling with the devastating effects of capitalism, which emerged simultaneously with the Industrial Revolution. This series of technological innovations (steam power, machine tools, railways, etc.) between the late 1700s and mid-nineteenth century facilitated England’s transition from an agrarian economy to an urban, industrial, manufacturing one. England’s class system, previously characterized by the landed gentry and the servant class, witnessed the rise of a middle class. Meanwhile, working-class laborers toiled for unconscionably long shifts in dangerous environments (such as the whitelead factory Mrs. Warren mentions), only to go home to the inadequate housing their meager incomes could provide. Labor unions were outlawed in England from 1799-1824, but by the late nineteenth century, they accumulated enough clout to make workers’ rights a priority in the national political agenda.

This rapid change also inspired some classics in socialist economic theory whose ideas resonate in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, including Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) and August Bebel’s Women and Socialism (1883). Marx subscribed to the labor theory of value, which insists that the value of a product should equal the amount of labor required to produce it. Capitalism poses a challenge to this theory because employers sold their goods for greater than their labor value; thus the end result of one’s labor was not just a product, but also excess capital. The very success of capitalism, Marx insisted, requires the middle and upper classes who control the means of production (ie, owned a factory), to exploit their employees’ labor for the accumulation of their own personal wealth. Therefore, Marx called for the proletariat to seize the means of production as a means of redistributing wealth. Bebel, a leader of the South German Worker’s Union, was instrumental in both popularizing Marxist theory in Germany and emphasizing gender. In order to successfully thwart the strength of capitalism and reimagine a more equitable social structure, Bebel argued women’s labor and concerns needed to be foregrounded.

Shaw, an avowed socialist, was particularly sensitive to the plight of women in a capitalist society, as is evident not only in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, but also in a later work, the book The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, and various political essays and lectures. He was a member of the Fabian Society (founded 1884), a group of political writers and lecturers dedicated to the gradual permeation of socialist practices into democratic society in England and abroad. They rallied for such socialist measures as the establishment of a minimum wage and universal access to healthcare, social reforms that remain political headlines today. The Fabians were influential in the creation of the Labour Party, which remains the primary leftist political party in the United Kingdom, and the London School of Economics, an institution originally dedicated to researching and combating economic inequality.