UC Berkeley

Although Shaw’s biographers always acknowledge his debt to Marx, intellectual historians always seem to belittle this debt. This gap can be closed by placing Shaw's Marxism in its contemporary context - Shaw shared most of the Marxist beliefs of the members of the Social Democratic Federation. A study of Shaw's Marxism shows that he was not an anarchist, that secularism played an important role in his thought, and that George's intellectual influence was not as great as is normally thought. Shaw rejected Marxism when he turned to Jevonian economics but even then much of his Marxism remained in tact and divided him from other leading Fabians.