GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: AN UNSOCIAL SOCIALIST

Shaw was born in Dublin on July 26, 1856. His father was an unsuccessful middle-class businessman; His mother was a good singer who left Dublin and went to live and work in London. Shaw was a very idle student, only interested in literature, music and graphic arts. At school he learned nothing; he learned more outside school than inside it. In 1876 he left Dublin and joined his mother in London. Here he started writing some novels and criticism. His novels were rejected by the publishers, although some appeared serially in propagandist magazines.

The turning point in Shaw's career was his discovery of socialism, the religion in which he found his life's calling.

In 1882, Shaw heard political economist Henry George lecture: his theory was that if government owned the land, while individuals owned their labor, poverty could be alleviated without destroying individual incentive. This made sense to Shaw and he joined the Social Democratic Federation, where he became friend with William Morris, Eleonore Marx. He read Karl Marx, but recognized that Marxism wouldn't be embraced by ordinary workers. In fact he thought that "the middle and the upper classes are the revolutionary element in society; the proletariat is the conservative element." Anyway, Shaw believed that the change to socialism must come gradually.

Shaw also became one of the earliest members of the Fabian Society, a group of middle - class socialists. The Fabian Society believed that society could be rebuilt "in accordance with the highest moral possibilities." However, Shaw's own description of socialism reflects his cold perspective on humanity: "socialism is not charity, nor loving - kindness, nor sympathy with the poor, nor popular philanthropy. but the economist's hatred of waste disorder or the lawyer's hatred of injustice".

Although Shaw professed interest in helping laborers, like many socialists today, he confined his personal relationship to the intellectual and social elite. He was profoundly uncomfortable around ordinary people, preferring words over actions and ideas over human contact when it came to helping the poor.

The one true love of Shaw's life was socialism, but only from a theorical point of view. In fact, Shaw didn't start out to be a playwright. He decided to become one, after he realized the propaganda possibilities of the drama while reading the translation of Ibsen. Ibsen's plays dealt with social and moral problems. He conducted a crusade on behalf of the new drama, where the dramatist was at once ethical and a social reformer. Shaw explains that man is a philistine , an idealist or a Great Man, the rare, Nietzschean leader characterized by great personal force. Greatness, for Shaw, meant power and the men he considered great would include fascists and Stalinists.

Shaw's early attempts to use plays to promote socialism were simply lectures on social and moral problems. But not always his works were positively accepted. For example, Mrs Warren's Profession was banned, as it dealt with the economic basis of modern prostitution. Shaw classified this effort as "an unpleasant play" because it focused on unpleasant ideas for his society. It could have been called "an unsuccesfull play " because he conceived of characters not as flesh - and - blood but as mouthpieces for conflicting political and social points of view.