Until March 1884, the members of the Democratic Federation, forerunner of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), worked together in harmony. The new organisation had expected to make rapid headway with existing radical workingmen's organisations but few chose to join the SDF. Early enthusiasm gave way to disappointment and introspection. Personal relationships began to loom large among the small group's leading members. The personal vanity and domineering attitude of the organisation's founder, Henry Hyndman, along with his nationalism and fixation on parliamentary politics, were the leading causes of the internal acrimony.[2]
By the end of 1884, a group of SDF members sought to remove Hyndman from his position as party leader in December Executive Council meetings. A resolution to censure Hyndman passed by a vote of 10 to 8.[3] The anti-Hyndman dissidents handed in their prepared letter of resignation, believing the federation's lack of fraternal cooperation to be irreconcilable.[4] The 10 seceding members of the old SDF Executive Council issued a statement To Socialists in January 1885 explaining their perspective.[5]
Early in 1885, the secessionists established themselves in a new organisation called the Socialist League. Several SDF branches, such as those in East London, Hammersmith, and Leeds, joined the new group. In Scotland the Scottish Land and Labour League severed its connection with the SDF to join the new organisation.[6] Several important individuals in the movement such as author Edward Carpenter and artist Walter Crane also chose to cast their lot with the fledgling Socialist League.
The Commonweal was the official organ of the Socialist League.
In February 1885 the new party established its official journal, a newspaper called Commonweal. This publication was initially published monthly but was soon converted into a weekly.[7] Editor of the publication was William Morris, who paid the paper's operating deficit out of pocket.[8]
Development
The Socialist League was a heterogeneous organisation, including Fabians, Christian Socialists, anarchists, and Marxist revolutionary socialists. While the Marxists tolerated the earnest ethical socialists, the anarchists concerned them, with memories of the role of the anarchist schism in the First International still fresh in their memory. Eleanor Marx was one of the Socialist League leaders who was particularly concerned about the place of the largely non-English anarchists in the new party.[9]
The Socialist League was involved in the fight for the right of free speech in London during 1885 and 1886. Whereas religious organisations such as the Salvation Army were allowed to preach in the streets, the London Metropolitan Police banned the Socialists from similar activities. Members of the Socialist League and their rivals the SDF simply continued to speak and to incur fines, attracting public attention, until the authorities made the decision that their prosecution was counterproductive and stopped their interference. Thereafter, public interest in the street meetings rapidly evaporated.[10]
While the political contributions of the tiny Socialist League were not measurable, it did have a lasting literary impact. The newspaper of the Socialist League, The Commonweal, provided the venue for first publication of a number of original writings, including the serialized novels of William Morris, Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere.[11]
In 1887, the League's membership split ideologically into three factions: anarchists, parliamentary-oriented socialists, and anti-parliamentary socialists.[12]
Anarchist control
Around the middle of this same year, 1887, anarchists began to outnumber socialists in the Socialist League.[13] The 3rd Annual Conference, held in London on 29 May 1887 marked the change, with a majority of the 24 delegates voting in favor of an anarchist-sponsored resolution declaring that "This conference endorses the policy of abstention from parliamentary action, hitherto pursued by the League, and sees no sufficient reason for altering it."[14]Frederick Engels, living in London and a very interested observer in the League's affairs, saw William Morris' role as decisive. Morris, a benefactor of the Commonweal, declared on principle that he would quit if the League took any parliamentary action.[15]
Many of the group's international socialists began to leave. In August 1888, the London branch of the Socialist League, which included Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, seceded in favor of establishing itself as an independent organization, the Bloomsbury Socialist Society.[16] By the end of 1888 many other parliamentary-oriented individuals had exited the Socialist League to return to the SDF, with others who remained hostile to the SDF's parliamentary emphasis choosing to involve themselves in the burgeoning movement for so-called "New Unionism."[13] As the socialist factions left, the anarchist faction solidified its hold on the organisation.
By 1889, the anarchist wing had completely captured the organisation. William Morris was stripped of the editorship of Commonweal in favor of Frank Kitz, an anarchist workman. Morris was left to foot the ongoing operating deficit of the publication, some £4 per week[13] — this at a time when £150 per year was the average annual family income in the kingdom.[17] By the autumn of 1890, Morris had had enough and he, too, withdrew from the Socialist League.
Disestablishment
The anarchist movement had newspapers of its own, including the journals Liberty and Freedom.[18]
Data from International Institute of Social History, "Finding Aid for the Socialist League Archive," supplemented by Kapp, Eleanor Marx: Volume 2, passim and Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 48, passim.
Footnotes
↑ James C. Docherty. Historical dictionary of socialism. The Scarecrow Press Inc. London 1997. pg. 174
Ernest Belfort Bax was an English barrister, journalist, philosopher, men's rights advocate, socialist, and historian.
Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx, sometimes called Eleanor Aveling and known to her family as Tussy, was the English-born youngest daughter of Karl Marx. She was herself a socialist activist who sometimes worked as a literary translator. In March 1898, after discovering that her partner Edward Aveling had secretly married the previous year, she poisoned herself at the age of 43.
Edward Bibbins Aveling was an English comparative anatomist and popular spokesman for Darwinian evolution, atheism and socialism. He was also a playwright and actor.
The Sheffield Socialist Society was an early revolutionary socialist organisation in Sheffield, England.
Henry Hyde Champion was a socialist journalist and activist, regarded as one of the leading spirits behind the formation of the Independent Labour Party. Up to 1893, he lived and worked in Great Britain, moving after that date to Australia.
James MacDonald was a British trade unionist.
Samuel Mainwaring was a Welsh machinist and socialist political activist who was a founding member and key leader of the Socialist League, one of the first socialist political parties in Britain. In his later years, he turned from Marxist socialism to the libertarian socialist doctrine of anarcho-communism. He is best remembered as the father of the term "anarcho-syndicalism".
The Labour Emancipation League was a socialist organisation in London.
Commonweal was a British socialist newspaper founded in 1885 by the newborn Socialist League. Its aims were to spread socialist views and to win over new recruits.
The first meetings of the Second International were held in Paris, beginning on July 14, 1889, on the centenary of the storming of the Bastille. Internecine conflicts within the French socialist movement had prompted the "possibilist" and Marxist factions to hold their own congresses at the same time. The Marxist congress resolved to arrange a second meeting at Zurich, while the Possibilists would arrange one in Brussels. However the Marxist organizing committee would later decide to join the Brussels congress, and the next congress would meet in 1891.
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The British Socialist Party (BSP) was a Marxist political organisation established in Great Britain in 1911. Following a protracted period of factional struggle, in 1916 the party's anti-war forces gained decisive control of the party and saw the defection of its pro-war right wing. After the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia at the end of 1917 and the termination of the First World War the following year, the BSP emerged as an explicitly revolutionary socialist organisation. It negotiated with other radical groups in an effort to establish a unified communist organisation, an effort which culminated in August 1920 with the establishment of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The youth organisation the Young Socialist League was affiliated with the party.
Henry Mayers Hyndman was an English writer, politician and socialist.
The Social Democratic Federation (SDF) was established as Britain's first organised socialist political party by H. M. Hyndman, and had its first meeting on 7 June 1881. Those joining the SDF included William Morris, George Lansbury, James Connolly and Eleanor Marx. However, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx's long-term collaborator, refused to support Hyndman's venture. Many of its early leading members had previously been active in the Manhood Suffrage League.
Utopian socialism is the term often used to describe the first current of modern socialism and socialist thought as exemplified by the work of Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, and Robert Owen. Utopian socialism is often described as the presentation of visions and outlines for imaginary or futuristic ideal societies, with positive ideals being the main reason for moving society in such a direction. Later socialists and critics of utopian socialism viewed utopian socialism as not being grounded in actual material conditions of existing society. These visions of ideal societies competed with revolutionary and social democratic movements.
Frank Kitz was an English anarchist.
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