Scientific Socialism: Hyndman, Engels, Morley, and Morris

Flaherty, Seamus

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-42339-1_6

Seamus Flaherty²

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Abstract

In a letter to the German socialist politician August Bebel written in August 1883, Engels gave his estimation of the DF, the British organisation led by Hyndman then in its third successive year, the organisation, that is, that Engels had refused to support at its inception two years earlier. Engels counselled Bebel not to let himself ‘be bamboozled into thinking’ that there was ‘a real proletarian movement’ afoot in Britain. However, Engels had revised his assessment of the DF since his prior assessment issued in a letter to Eduard Bernstein the previous year.

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Notes

1.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 47, p. 54.
2.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, p. 251.
3.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 47, p. 54.
4.
Ibid., p. 54.
5.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works. Vol. 46, p. 251. Marx and Engels, Collected Works. Vol. 47, p. 54.
6.
Ibid.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Ibid., pp. 54–55.
9.
Ibid., p. 55.
10.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 47, p. 367.
11.
Hyndman was not responsible, however, for obtaining ‘Tory Gold’ in 1885. For details see John Barnes, ‘Gentleman Crusader: Henry Hyde Champion in the Early Socialist Movement’, History Workshop Journal, 60/1 (2005), pp. 124–125.
12.
George Bernard Shaw, ‘The Fabian Society: What it has done; and How it has done it’, Fabian Tract 41 (1892), p. 6.
13.
W. H. Mallock, ‘England for All’, The Quarterly Review, 156/312 (Oct. 1883), p. 359. Mallock estimated Hyndman’s abilities highly. See Ibid; and D. J. Ford, ‘W. H. Mallock and Socialism in England, 1880–1918’, in Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History, p. 321.
14.
Bristow, ‘The Liberty and Property Defence League and Individualism’, p. 764. For the LPDL see, also, N. Soldon, ‘Laissez-Faire as Dogma: The Liberty and Property Defence League, 1882–1914’, in Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History, pp. 208–233.
15.
Joseph Chamberlain, ‘Work for the New Parliament (at Birmingham, January 5. 1885), in Speeches of the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, M.P. With a Sketch of his Life, ed. Henry W. Lucy (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1885), p. 103.
16.
Ibid., p. 104,
17.
H. M. Hyndman, ‘The Radicals and Socialism’, The Nineteenth Century, 18/105 (Nov. 1885), p. 835.
18.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, p. 367.
19.
For the English Land Nationalization Society see Davidson, Annals of Toil, Vol. 4, pp. 413–419. For the Fellowship of the New Life see Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism, ch. 5; Pierson, Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism, ch. 5; and Bevir, Making of British Socialism, ch. 12. And for the Land Reform Union see Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism, pp. 93–94.
20.
For the dissemination and uptake of anarchist ideas in Britain see John Quail, The Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost History of the British Anarchists (London: Paladin, 1978); and Hermia Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London (London: Croom Helm, 1983).
21.
Hyndman, Record, p. 284. For Marx’s relationship with Lassalle see Stedman Jones, Karl Marx, pp. 437–448.
22.
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 46, p. 165.
23.
Ibid., p. 166.
24.
Hyndman, Historical Basis, pp. 137, 408, 200, 469.
25.
Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism, p. 99. See also Crick, History of the Social Democratic Federation, p. 33.
26.
Hyndman was also familiar with Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, the introduction to which performed such a pivotal role in the subsequent history of ‘Marxism’. Historical Basis, p. 435.
27.
Bevir, Making of British Socialism, p. 78.
28.
Hyndman, Historical Basis, pp. 16, 14.
29.
J. Thompson, ‘The reception of Lujo Brentano’s thought in Britain, 1870–1910’, http://researchinformation.bristol.ac.uk/files/3005621/Brentano%20in%20Britain.pdf, accessed 23 May 2017.
30.
Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 673.
31.
Ibid., p. 668.
32.
Ibid., p. 706.
33.
Hyndman, Historical Basis, p. 24.
34.
Ibid., p. 49. The argument is laid out in full in The Historical Basis in chapters two and three.
35.
Marx , for example, argued, ‘In actual history … conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part’ in the process of primitive accumulation. ‘If money’, he continued, ‘according to Augier, “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’. Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 668, 711–712.
36.
Henry Collins, ‘The Marxism of the Social Democratic Federation’, in Asa Briggs and John Saville (eds.), Essays in Labour History: In Memory of G.D.H. Cole (London: Macmillan, 1960), p. 52. See also Kinna’s remarks, William Morris, pp. 95–96. William J. Baumol, ‘Marx and the Iron Law of Wages’, The American Economic Review, 73/2 (1983), pp. 303–308.
37.
Hyndman, Historical Basis, pp. 116–119. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, [1891] 1972), p. 22.
38.
Hyndman, Historical Basis, pp. 132, 133.
39.
Vernon L. Lidtke, Outlawed Party: Social Democracy in Germany, 1878–1890 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 171–175. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (London: Lawrence & Wishart, [1847] 1956), pp. 8, 12.
40.
Ibid., 12.
41.
Ibid.
42.
Engels portentously described Hyndman as ‘nothing but a caricature of Lassalle’ in a letter to Bernstein in late-1885, a charge he repeated in a letter to Paul Lafargue posted on the same day. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 47, pp. 367, 370. Engels was prompted to address the issue of Marx’s relationship to Rodbertus by a review of Hyndman’s book by Max Schippel in the Neue Zeit. Ibid., p. 163.
43.
Hyndman, Historical Basis, pp. 132–133. Frederick Engels, ‘Preface to the First German Edition’, in Marx, Poverty of Philosophy, pp. 17–18.
44.
Hyndman, Further Reminiscences, p. 254.
45.
Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 50. Hyndman, Historical Basis, p. 138.
46.
Ibid., p. 149.
47.
Ibid., p. 150. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 50.
48.
Hyndman, Historical Basis, p. 204.
49.
Ibid., p. 213. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 241.
50.
Ibid., p. 245.
51.
Ibid., p. 254.
52.
Hyndman, Historical Basis, p. 211.
53.
Ibid., p. 209.
54.
Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 264.
55.
Hyndman, Historical Basis, p. 209.
56.
Ibid., p. 287.
57.
Ibid., pp. 288, 290. On the notion of an ‘aristocracy of labour’, Hyndman took his lead from the old Chartist leader, James Bronterre O’Brien, a figure of immense importance for many members of the DF. Marx, to be sure, expressed similar sentiments privately in moments of exasperation. See Stedman Jones, ‘Pressure from Without’, p. 129. But Lenin, by way of Engels, is usually held responsible for its theorisation. See Kent, ‘Presence and Absence’, p. 449. Hyndman also notably used the language of a ‘revival’ of socialism in his exchange with Herbert Spencer in 1884. Socialism and Slavery: Being an Answer to Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Attack upon the Democratic Federation, Contemporary Review, April, 1884 (London: Modern Press, 1884), p. 3. For the view that O’Brien had anticipated some of the central ideas enunciated by Marx and Engels see Theodore Rothstein, From Chartism to Labourism (New York & London: Garland, 1984). Rothstein, like Hyndman, his long-term opponent in the SDF, also formulated a three-stage model of nineteenth-century working-class politics. By contrast, the Fabians viewed the old trade unions as often democratic and benign. See Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy (London: Longman’s, Green & Co, 1902).
58.
Hyndman, Historical Basis, p. 291.
59.
Ibid., pp. 266, 270.
60.
Bell, ‘Mill on Colonies’, pp. 38–45; Goldman, ‘Fawcett and the Social Science Association’, p. 169.
61.
Hyndman, Historical Basis, p. 214. Henry Fawcett, Manual of Political Economy (London: Macmillan & Co., 1863), pp. 243–244. Taking up the question of syndicalism in the following century, Hyndman argued: ‘That each set of workers in every particular trade should set themselves by strikes, sabotage, ca’ canny, and the rest of it, to render it impossible for the owners to work that trade to a profit, and thus should obtain possession of the whole industry for themselves apart from all the rest of society, is as antisocial and hopeless a proposition as has ever been made’. He also conceded that in any ordinary strike ‘the case of the so-called “blacklegs” is hard’. Further Reminiscences, pp. 459–460, 469.
62.
The university liberals responsible for Essays on Reform registered the biggest shift in perception as to how trade unions were viewed. See, for example, R. H. Hutton’s utterances on the benign nature of trade societies in ‘The Political Character of the Working Classes’, in Essays on Reform (London: Macmillan & Co., 1867), pp. 35–39.
63.
Hyndman, Historical Basis, p. 449.
64.
Hyndman, Further Reminiscences, p. 132. Not only that; Hyndman also echoed Mill in saying that ‘It is scarcely too much to say that the educated middle class of this island is better prepared to accept Socialism even to-day than is the working class’. Ibid., p. 260. ‘For my own part’, Mill wrote, ‘I have no difficulty in admitting that Communism would even now be practicable among the elite of mankind, and may become so among the rest’. Representative Government, p. 245. G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, Vol. 2: Marxism and Anarchism, 1850–1890 (London: Macmillan, 1954), p. 411.
65.
Hyndman, Historical Basis, p. 435, 441. ‘Marx is the Darwin of modern sociology’, he wrote. ‘The utopian Socialist bears the same relationship to the Socialist of science as the able alchemist or astrologer bears to the chemist or the astronomer of the nineteenth century’.
66.
Engels, Socialism, p. 102.
67.
John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan & Co., 1881), pp. 325–326. For Morley more generally see D. A. Hamer, John Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968).
68.
For the dissemination of deterministic views of history in Victorian Britain, much of which was inspired by Thomas Henry Buckle’s pioneering History of Civilization, see Eckhardt Fuchs, ‘English Positivism and German Historicism’, in Benedikt Stuchtey and Peter Wende (eds.), British and German Historiography 1750–1950: Traditions, Perceptions, and Transfers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 229–250.
69.
John Morley, On Compromise (London: Macmillan & Co., [1874] 1898), p. 4.
70.
Justice (Aug. 9, 1884), p. 5.
71.
Justice (Aug. 29, 1889), p. 1.
72.
Morley, On Compromise, p. 259. H. M. Hyndman, ‘Revolution or Reform’, To-day, 2/8 (Aug. 1884), pp. 184–185.
73.
Morley, On Compromise, p. 261.
74.
Ibid., p. 258.
75.
Ibid., p. 256.
76.
Ibid., p. 212.
77.
Ibid.
78.
Ibid.
79.
Ibid., p. 213.
80.
Ibid., p. 217.
81.
Ibid. Morley, for instance, was highly critical of the Carlylean interpretation of history as the work of ‘heroes’. Hamer, John Morley, p. 46.
82.
Hyndman, Historical Basis, p. 201.
83.
Hyndman, Socialism and Slavery, p. 24.
84.
Morley, On Compromise, pp. 28, 209–210.
85.
Collini, Public Moralists, p. 193.
86.
Ernest Belfort Bax, ‘Unscientific Socialism’, in The Religion of Socialism: Being Essays in Modern Socialist Criticism (London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co, 1886), p. 99. Shaw, ‘Shaw on Hyndman and Himself’, p. 287.
87.
Collini, Public Moralists, p. 174.
88.
He wrote to Shaw, after a visit to Henry Salt: ‘I do not want the movement to become a depository of old cranks, humanitarians, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists and anti-vaccinationists, arty-crafties and all the rest of them. We are scientific socialists and have no room for sentimentalists’. Quoted in Robert Skidelsky, ‘The Fabian Ethic’, in Michael Holroyd (ed.), The Genius of Shaw: A Symposium (London: Hodder & Staughton, 1979), p. 116. See Livesey, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism, ch. 1.
89.
Pierson , Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism, p. 64. John Bruce Glasier complained, for example, that there was ‘[h]ardly a ray of idealism in it’. Quoted in Bevir, Making of British Socialism, p. 66. For Morris’s involvement with the DF see Thompson, William Morris, pp. 276–331.
90.
Hyndman, Life to Come.
91.
Thompson, William Morris, p. 308.
92.
William Morris, ‘Art under Plutocracy’ (1883), in The Collected Works of William Morris, Vol. 23: Signs of Change (London: Longmans Green and Company, 1915), p. 164.
93.
Ibid., pp. 164–165.
94.
Ibid., p. 168.
95.
Ibid.
96.
Cole, History of Socialist Thought, p. 417. George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara (London: Penguin, [1905] 1945), p. xi. Perhaps Morris deserves more credit, however. The aesthetic life which he put at the core of his vision of socialism solved one central problem akin to that formulated by Schopenhauer, namely the problem of what people could be expected to do with an excess of spare time; the absence of work would merely result in boredom and conflict. Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘On the Suffering of the World’ (1850), in Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1970), pp. 42–43.
97.
Hyndman, Historical Basis, p. 454.
98.
Ibid., p. 444.
99.
Ibid.
100.
Ibid.
101.
Morris, ‘Art and Plutocracy’, p. 190.
102.
Ibid., p. 191. Needless to say, Morris’s address caused a stir on the occasion. See J. W. Mackail, The Life of William Morris, Vol. 2 (London: Longmans Green and Co, 1899), pp. 117–120.
103.
Hyndman, for example, wrote that Morris ‘doubled our strength at a stroke’. Quoted in Thompson, William Morris, p. 302.

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Flaherty, S. (2020). Scientific Socialism: Hyndman, Engels, Morley, and Morris. In: Marx, Engels and Modern British Socialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42339-1_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42339-1_6
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