Marx and Engels, The British Working Class and the Labour Party

By Bill Hunter - International Socialist League


PART ONE

Although we, along with our fathers and grandfathers, have paid a high price for the Christian socialism, woolly pacifism, wordy radicalism and Fabian reformism that came into the Labour Party from the capitalist class and dominated its leadership, the real history of the Labour Party and the lessons from it are vital for workers today.

Marx and Engels fought consciously for an independent working class political movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century. They played a central role in advocating the breaking of the working class from the capitalist parties. The Marxists represented the essence of the movement of the British workers. The opportunists, the various brands of bourgeois radicals, like the Fabians, who grafted themselves on to it, were hostile to the urge for class independence that created it. In fact, the Fabian Society originally opposed a separate workers’ or labour party, and joined only after it was formed.

Marx and the group around Engels in the 1880s and 1890s, played a central role in the breaking of the working class from the capitalist parties and the building of an independent working class political movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Historians who does not study the development of Marxism as a theory and as a movement in the 19th century, can understand the development of the British working class or indeed that of the world working class. Marxism developed its basic principles in close association with the working class movement and through practical intervention in it.

To look at the greater part of the 19th century in particular, and fail to see it, so to speak, through the eyes of Marx and Engels, is to see only an inexplicable collection of events. It is incontrovertible that only Marx and Engels foretold the major processes in capitalism. Their strength was that, in the nineteenth century they saw the decline of capitalism inside its greatest expansion. They saw the centralisation and concentration of capital in the middle of the greatest apparent strength of free trade, competition and laissez faire. And, above all, after the collapse of Chartism (1832-48, the first and great political party of the working class), they envisaged and fought for the rise of working class political independence.

The National Charter Association
During the nineteenth century the question of political suffrage was an issue of concern and struggle among workers in the growing industrial cities of Britain. At the beginning of the century, the great mass of workers were herded into rapidly expanding towns in appalling, disease ridden, and unhealthy conditions. They had no say either in government or Parliament. The government was a government of great landowners and bankers, with seats in Parliament openly bought and sold.

At the end of the seventeenth century there had been a radical suffrage agitation whose demands for democratic rights gained some wide support. Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man was a best-seller and its supporters, and sellers of it, were persecuted and imprisoned during the state suppression of the 1790s.

When Chartism became an independent working class movement in 1832, that class had already been through three decades of spontaneous outbursts and struggles. It had passed through the bitter experience of betrayal by bourgeois reformers. In the first decades of the century, radical industrial capitalists had united with the working class in a campaign for an extension of parliamentary suffrage. But when they achieved the Reform Act of 1832, which extended the vote among property owners, they deserted their former allies. They used their new parliamentary strength to bring in a Poor Law which set up the hated workhouses, which the poor called Bastilles, and they legislated the persecution of the poor that was to drive ruined artisans and the agricultural dispossessed, into the factories.

The first mass party of the British working class, the National Charter Association[i], was created almost seventy years before the Labour Party. This Chartist party and the Labour Party were formed under decidedly different circumstances. The first came into being when British capitalism was in its youth. When the latter was formed, capitalist society was in decline and decay. In 70 years, capitalism and working class consciousness had gone through great changes.

In the 1830s and 1840s the working class rallied around the demands of the Charter in massive demonstrations and a general strike. Engels wrote in Condition of the Working Class in England in 1848 that these demands for suffrage, “ harmless as they seem are sufficient to overthrow the whole English Constitution, Queen and Lords included” In form the Chartist movement was a movement for political reform; in content it was a class movement against the capitalist order.

Chartism collapsed at the end of the 1840s. Its last big rally was in 1848 on London's Kennington Common. It was the year of European revolutions. The Chartists were in sympathy with the struggle against absolutism in other countries. When the Kennington rally took place the Duke of Wellington, instructed by the Cabinet, prepared as if for a revolutionary uprising. Among other measures, no less than 170,000 special constables were enrolled. After the 1848 demonstration, hundreds of Chartists were arrested, imprisoned and transported.

However, it was the development of British capitalism was the chief reason for the undermining of Chartism. From the end of the l840s to the depression of the middle of the 187Os was the 'Golden Age' of British capitalism. Its products moved freely throughout the world without any real challenge from those of any other nation. Engels wrote at that time that British capitalism was like an 'industrial sun' with all other countries as markets for her manufactured goods, supplying her in return with raw materials and food, and all revolving round her.

All through the decades following the end of Chartism, Marx and Engels worked to encourage any movement of workers to political independence from the capitalist parties. They encountered the problems of developing a working class, which was part of a nation that exploited the whole world. In October 1858, Engels had written to Marx declaring, “the English proletariat is becoming more and more bourgeois”. But the conclusion that was drawn by the two socialist fighters was not to write off this class. Their opinion was that certain historical processes would have to be gone through before the inevitable rise of the class would take place in new forms. But take place it would! In this letter to Marx, Engels added:



One is really driven to believe that the English proletarian movement in its old traditional Chartist form must perish completely before it can develop itself in a new form capable of life. And yet one cannot foresee what this new form will look like.



That there would be a new proletarian movement was not an issue for Engels, despite the working class becoming 'more and more bourgeois'. The only question was: what form would the new moment take? He and Marx made preparation for that movement. From 1864 till 1871 they collaborated with leaders of the British trade unions on the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association (the First International) and sought to influence any step toward class independence.[ii]

This was not a case of Marx just discussing occasionally with a coterie of trade union leaders, in isolation. The General Council of the First International had very real links with the mass of workers in Europe. Its minutes are full of discussions of assistance to workers struggling in Britain and other countries. At a period when British employers frequently attempted to use foreign workers as strike breakers, the General Council had continuous appeals from groups of British workers.[iii]

The Council was linked with trade union branches and the London Trades Council. During this latter half of the l860s it was a 'mighty engine' as Marx called it, with its roots in the British labour movement. By this time, the conservative union leaders were being compelled to demand legal rights for their organisations.[iv] The demand for Parliamentary reform began to take hold again. For these new trade unionists, however, it had not the same content as the demands had for the Chartists - a change of social system.

Nevertheless, it was a move to independent working class action and Marx and Engels were there in the centre of it. The National Reform League, which had been formed by the old Chartist leader, Bronterre O'Brien, in 1849 affiliated to the International Workingmen's Association, and brought in a number of working class leaders who were socialists.

Marx played a major part in developing the campaign of agitation and massive working class demonstrations that resulted in the Reform Act of 1867 that gave the vote to the majority of working class males in the towns.

During this time the organisations of the working class completely changed their nature from those of Chartist times. The old volatile organisations of struggle had gone. They had been intensely political then. In their place came the 'New Model Unions' embracing a minority of workers. They were organised to protect the skilled workers through the control of the supply of labour and with a major purpose in the payment of benefits. They protected their trade with apprenticeship regulations, entrance requirements and high contributions. They were prepared to strike, but the strike was solely a weapon of bargaining. Their motto was 'Defence not Defiance'.

Their leaders sought political assistance to their organisations through an alliance with representatives of the ruling class, in particular the Liberals, although in the 1860s they were compelled, because of legal chains on unions to go into political struggle for the vote. The trade union movement fell back in the 1870s. The leaders had gone to their limits in safeguarding their organisations. In the 1870s they achieved a greater legal protection. After the Reform Act of 1867, the Reform League faded.

Fresh forces of the working class emerged into struggle at the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1880s and beginning of the 1890s there was a great upsurge of workers’ organizations, that became known as the New Unionism.

Before then, with the exception of the miners, the unions embraced only craft skilled workers, who organised about 10 percent of the British labour force. The New Unionism spread to all the main industrial cities, made its biggest and historic victories in the east end of London among women workers, gas workers and dock workers.

The upsurge made great advances in working conditions and in cuts of working hours. The unions, however, soon found the obstacles on their path of advance which were there because of their lack of political representation. It was out of that that there came the growing demand for a party that represented the organised workers. That is how the Labour party was born.

It is significant that a part in preparing that movement was played by the campaign for the legal eight hour day, the very demand which Marx and Engels saw in the middle of the century, as central to working class development.

Marx did not try to impose dogmas on the labour movement. We can trace how he worked consistently to assist the evolution of independent class action by the working class arising from the realities of capitalism. Later after Marx’s death when British capitalism was entering its imperialism stage and the working class was breaking to political independence we can see how Engels assisted the development of masses of workers driven along that road by the circumstances of capitalist society. We can see also the difference between these masters of Marxism starting with the real tasks facing the working class as against the middle class socialists like Hyndman and his friends who led the Social Democratic Federation with the conceptions of a propaganda sect.

The Eight Hour Day
The next movement to independent politics by the British working class was at the end of the century, and it was this that produced the Labour Party. It is significant that a part in preparing that movement was played by the campaign for the legal eight hour day, the very demand which Marx and Engels saw in the middle of the century, as central to working class development! The chapter on 'The Working Day’, in Volume 1 of Marx's Capital (which was published in 1867) brings out the importance of this demand. A reading of this chapter will show how it was rooted historically in the consciousness of Britain's workers, through the long history of struggle in Britain over working hours. Marx relates that from the fourteenth century, that is from around the time of the Black Death, until well into the middle of the eighteenth century, the Labour Statutes in England were designed to increase the working day compulsorily. He writes that,



“The establishment of a normal working day is the outcome of centuries of struggle between capitalist and workers. Centuries must pass ere the 'free' worker under stress of the developed method of capitalist production voluntarily agrees (i.e. is compelled by social conditions) to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for labour, his birthright for a mess of pottage.”



Marx ends his chapter on the working day, by declaring:



For protection against the worm gnawing at their vitals, the workers must put their heads together, and must as a class compel the passing of a law, the erection of an all powerful social barrier, which will compel the workers themselves from entering into a free contract with capital when by the terms of that contract they and their race are condemned to death or sold into slavery. In place of the pompous catalogue of the 'inalienable rights of man', they put forward the modest Magna Carta of a legally limited working day - a charter which shall at length make it clear when the time 'which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins'. What a change in the picture!



The terrible, brutalising, and physically destroying hours worked at this time, is brought out by the example that Marx gives of an engine drivers’ hours. The extract assumes added importance as showing the roots of these workers’ stubborness in protecting their hours in all recent history. Marx quotes Reynolds Newspaper for January 1866. ‘Week after week’, he writes, ‘in this same paper under the sensational headings of ‘fearful and fatal accidents’, ‘appalling tragedies’, etc., we read a long list of fresh railway catastrophes. Concerning these a railwayman working on the North Staffordshire line com­ments:



“Everyone knows the consequences that may occur if the driver and firemen of a locomotive engine are not continually on the look-out. How can that be expected from a man who has been at such work for 29 or 30 hours, exposed to the weather and without rest.” ‘ He then gives a week’s shifts, starting at various times and which amounted in total, to 88 hours and 40 minutes.



Hours of work, particularly among the mass of unorganised and unskilled workers, remained a burning issue throughout the century. Dona Torr in Tom Mann and his Times described hours worked in the 1880s when Tom Mann, a follower of Marx and Engels, wrote his popular pamphlet on 'What a Compulsory Eight Hour Working Day means to the Workers'. Dona Torr writes:



“The majority of skilled men had gained the sixty-hour week by 1860 and the fifty-four hour week by the early 'seventies (though it was not always retained), but the working day for tramwaymen was sixteen hours or more, for railwaymen from sixteen to twenty hours; bakers, chemical workers and gas-stokers worked twelve hour shifts and sometimes more. Among unionists Scottish miners still worked twelve hours; in other mining districts all but the privileged aristocracy, the hewers (whose representatives in Parliament voted against the Miners' Eight Hour Bill in 1888) worked anythng up to eleven hours. Shop assistants under eighteen were granted a seventy-four hour week by the Shop Hours Regulation Act of 1887, which, for lack of inspectors, was never operated. The unpaid overtime of clerical workers, the limitless hours in the sweated home industries (clothing, furnishing, etc) will never be computed.



In his chapter on the working day Marx quotes the resolution carried at the general convention of the National Labour Union held at Baltimore on August 16, 1868. ‘The first and great necessity of the present, to free the labour of this country from capitalistic slavery, is the passing of a law by which 8 hours shall be the normal working day in all states of the American Union. We are resolved to put forward all our strength until this glorious result is attained’

Marx calls the agitation for an eight hour day, the 'first fruit of the Civil War' in America. He describes it, as “a movement which ran with express speed from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.”

In 1884 the convention of the Organised Trades and Labour Unions had passed a resolution that May 1 1886 should be proclaimed a nation-wide workers strike to enforce the eight-hour working day. On that May 1, a Saturday, 350.000 workers from over 11.000 enterprises marched in the streets of US towns: 40.000 in Chicago, 11,000 in Detroit, 25,000 workers headed by a contingent of bakers marched through the centre of New York.

As a result 200,000 workers won the eight hour day, large numbers were given it by their employers to prevent them from joining the strike. There followed, a big increase of trade union membership and demands for independent political action by the working class. Labour parties were formed - the Independent Labour Party in New York and the United Labour Party in Chicago. At the same time, the Geneva Congress of the First International called for the eight hour day, and said that without it, “all further attempts at improvement or emancipation must prove abortive'”

This fight for the eight hour day was an intensely political fight against all the conservatism and sectionalism, against all the capitalist ideology in the trade unions.

It is instructive to mention that in the discussion in the Socialist Alliance the majority used the argument when negotiations for a joint slate with the Campaign Against Tube Privatisation broke down, that the tubeworkers were standing on a single issue: Against Tube Privatisation. Some of us remarked: but what a single issue?

Now, in this issue of the eight hour day in the nineteenth century, this single issue of the demand for a compulsory eight hour day posed the uniting of the whole of the class as a political force against the ruling class, and the leaders of the trade unions stubbornly resisted it. They refused to make the hours of work a political and resisted the uniting of the whole workers’ movement around it. They argued that the issue should be settled by sectional strength and bargaining. They were not concerned with the great mass of workers who were unorganised, and not able to bargain with their skill. They used the Liberal arguments about free relationships without interference between workers and employers.

But just as great economic forces were at work in the 1840s, and which broke up Chartism, so the whole economic base of the 'New Model' unionism was being undermined. The monopoly of British capitalism was breaking up and the “new forces” and new consciousness which Marx and Engels foretold began to emerge in the working class.



The New Upsurge and its Background
Capitalism was developing rapidly in Europe and America. Free competition was giving way to monopoly; free trade and laissez faire to state assistance and to imperialism. The great overproduction crisis of the eighteen seventies spurred forward the epoch of imperialism. Capitalist rulers in a number of countries began dividing up the world for raw materials, areas of investment, and spheres of influence.

Engels wrote to Bebel, the Marxist leader of the German Social Democratic Party, in January 1884 commenting that, “since 1870, American and German competition have been putting an end to British monopoly on the world market”. He continued: “Now we seem, both here and in America, to be standing on the verge of a new crisis which in England has not been preceded by a period of prosperity.” This was the secret of the sudden emergence of a socialist movement in Britain, he told Bebel.

The first new movements were in the formation of socialist groups. Engels commented that, at this time the organised workers in trade unions, remained quite remote from the movement that was “proceeding among ‘educated’ elements of the bourgeoisie.” He added that the people forming these groups “are of varying moral and intellectual value, and it will take some time until they sort themselves out and the thing becomes clarified. But that it will all got to sleep again is hardly likely.”

Engels wrote to Sorge in November 1886, about developments in the USA, where Henry George, the candidate of the New York Independent Labour Party stood in an election for mayor and polled 68.110 voters, a third of the total, beating the Republican, Theodore Roosevelt by almost 8.000. Engels was enthusiastic, although Henry George was a ‘single taxer’, who believed the evils of capitalist production would disappear if ground rent was transformed into a state tax. Engels concluded that,



“The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the organisation of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers’ party. And this step has been taken, far more rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing. That the first programme of this party is confused, and highly deficient, that it has set up the banner of Henry George, these are inevitable evils but also are transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement—no matter in what form so long as it is their own movement—in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves. (Engel’s emphasis).



He added, towards the end of the letter:



“And if there are people at hand there whose minds are theoretically clear, who can tell the consequences of their mistakes beforehand and make it clear to them that every movement which does not keep the destruction of the wages system in view that whole time as its final aim is bound to go astray and fall—then many a piece of nonsense may be avoided and the process considerably shortened.[v]”



The working class, began to move again towards its independence. Writing in February 1885 an article entitled 'England in 1845 and 1885', Engels had this to say:



The truth is this: during the period of England's industrial monopoly the English working class have to a certain extent shared in the benefits of the monopoly. These benefits were very unequally parcelled out among them; the privileged minority pocketed most. But even the great mass had a temporary share now and then. And that is the reason why since the dying out of Owenism there has been no Socialism in England. With the breakdown of that monopoly the English working class will lose that privileged position; it will find itself generally - the privileged and leading minority not excepted - on a level with its fellow workers abroad. And that is the reason why there will be Socialism again in England[vi].



In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a historic movement began among the great mass of down-trodden, poorly paid and exploited men and women in Britain’s industrial towns. There was an upsurge of struggle and union organisation, with the east end of London in the lead.

The Labour Party was born out of this powerful upsurge of the working class. In this respect, the British Labour Party came into being in an entirely different way than other European Social Democratic or Labour Parties. In other European countries, political parties set up the trade unions.

It was the most exploited sections that headed the new awakening of the British working class. Their movement began in the East End of London and spread rapidly throughout the country. In 1888 six hundred match girls at Bryant and Mays struck against intolerable conditions and with widespread support won concessions after a fortnight's strike. In 1889, 800 gas workers in East Ham formed a union with a single aim of demanding an eight hour day. Within a fortnight, there were 3,000 members. By June it had been registered as The National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers of Great Britain and Ireland. (It became the main body forming the General and Municipal Workers Union.) By the end of July it had 20,000 members and it had begun to spread throughout the country. In the next year it reached 100,000. Will Thorne, a member of the SDF, and who was taught to read and write by Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’ daughter, became General Secretary. Eleanor Marx, who helped to form the union was unanimously elected to its Executive at its first conference..

In August 1889, dock labourers in South-West India docks went on strike for sixpence an hour, the abolition of sub-contract and piece work, extra pay for, and a minimum engagement of four hours. So began the famous strike for the dockers' tanner. Within three days, ten thousand dockers were out, supported by the Stevedores Union.. In a week practically all the riverside workers had joined th strike. By this time the 30,000 dockers on strike comprised less than half of the men out. Massive demonstrations and rallies were held during the strike. It had widespread support among the working class In total £30,000 was remitted by telegraph to the Strike Committee from Australia. The Chartists who had been transported or who had emigrated there were taking their revenge.

Two members of the Social Democratic Federation – John Burns and Tom Mann, opposed to the sectarianism of Hyndman and other leaders of the SDF - were prominent leaders of the strike. Eleanor Marx assisted the committee in organising the relief of the strikers, and was a speaker at the mass meetings. 0n Sunday September 1 she spoke to a meeting of 100,000 in Hyde Park. On the advice of Engels, she and her husband - Edward Aveling -had for some time been working in the working men's Radical Club in the East End. She and Aveling had drafted the constitution of the gas workers’ union. She was secretary of the Silvertown Women’s branch. which she formed out of the Silvertown rubber workers’ strike that she led. At the gas workers’ conference she was elected unanimously by acclaim to the Executive Committee, and elected a delegate to the TUC. The old TUC leaders would not allow her to sit as a delegate, declaring she was not a ‘bona-fide worker, as she was registered as a ‘type writer worker’.

Thorne, who in later life became a right wing Labour leader, declared that had she lived, “Eleanor ... would have been a greater woman’s leader than the greatest of contemporary women”[vii].

Inside this new mass ferment of the British working class was Marxist yeast. We are underlining that Marxism was an indispensable part of the movement of the working class to political independence.

--------

[i] The Charter demands were: Universal manhood suffrage; annual parliaments; vote by ballot; payment of MPs and equal electoral districts.

[ii] The International Workingmen’s Association was formed from a meeting of Lon­don trade unionists called in support of workers in Poland

[iii] As one example - Minutes of General Council meeting of October 9,1866 record a deputation from the ‘Hairdressers’ Early Closing Asoociation’. They read: ‘The deputation stated that their trade was engaged in struggle for early dosing on Saturday afternoons. Several middle sized employers were bringing over men from Paris to fill the places of those mn who had been called out of the recalcitrant shops. The deputation prayed the Council use its influence at Paris to frustrate the evil designs of these masters. Carter, Marx and Lawrence spoke in response, pleading the Council to use its best efforts in the direction mentioned.’ The Documents of the First International Vol II

[iv] ‘Between the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1825 and the trade union legis­lation of 1871-5 the existence of trade unions had been allowed, but practically everything they did could be declared illegal under the laws covering conspiracy, contracts etc., and as the unions became more powerful these old laws were increasingly used against them.’ Tom Mann and his Times Dona Torr.

[v]. Correspondence Marx and Engels. Lawrence and Wishart. 1934. Letter 209. 29 November, 1886

[vi] Articles on Britain. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Progress Publishers.1975

[vii] Quoted in Eleanor Marx, Vol 2. Yvonne Kapp.Virago.1976.


------------------------------------


PART TWO


The Great Dock Strike and the Second International.

Engels was filled with boundless enthusiasm for events in Britain. In the same year as the formation the Gasworkers union and the great dockers strike - 1899 - the foundation congress of the Second International took place. It decided to call an international May Day demonstration around the demand, which had been stressed by Marx and Engels - the eight hour day[i].

In London on May 4, 1890 there was a march of 100,000 to Hyde Park in support of the eight hour day in accordance with the International's resolution. The whole demonstration was a triumph of the new union movement and of a movement to politics over the old craft unions represented by the London Trades Council who supported the eight hour day demand, only if it was gained by ”free agreement” and not by legislation.

Engels underlined the historic meaning of the May Day demonstration as the English proletariat again entering the movement of its class. He saw the 'long winter's sleep' of the British working class as being ended at last. In The Fourth of May in London published in the Vienna Arbeiterzeitung,' he wrote:



And I consider this the grandest and most important part of the whole May Day festival, that on 4th of May 1890, the English proletariat, newly wakened from its forty years winter sleep, again entered the movement of its class.



Thorne remarked later, “It was this spirit of the “New Unionism” that made international working class solidarity a reality, and strange to say the historians hardly notice the revolution we created.”[ii] Quoted in Eleanor Marx by Yvonne Kapp.

It was a class movement which naturally linked with the international movement that Engels and Marx had fought for. Engels wrote of the 'new unionists' that,



“ while they are not yet socialists to a man, they insist nevertheless on being led only by socialists. But socialist propaganda had already been going on for years in the East End, where it was above all Mrs E. Marx Aveling and her husband, Edward Avelmg, who had four years earlier discovered the best propaganda field in the "Radical Clubs" consisting almost exclusively of workers, and had worked upon them steadily and, as is evident now, with the best of success. During the dock workers' strike Mrs Aveling was one of three women in charge of the distribution of relief, and this earned them a slanderous statement from Mr. Hyndman, the runaway of Trafalgar Square, who alleged that they had had a weekly three pounds sterling paid to them from the strike fund.'[iii]



The natural movement of the new upsurge in the 1880s was toward international links. It actually showed itself first in the 'old' unions. Despite the resistance of the Parliamentary Committee (the precursor of the General Council) the Trades Union Congress sent delegates to international Congresses in 1883 and 1886. A Congress of 1866 instructed the Parliamentary Committee to summon an international congress in London for the following year. The Parliamentary Committee sabotaged this, but in 1887 they were instructed to proceed with a Congress and could only attempt to place on restrictions intended to exclude delegates from the German Social Democratic Party.

The International Congress was finally held in London in 1888. The Webb’s report - in their History of Trade Unionism represents the view of the leaders and says: “Notwithstanding every precaution, a majority of representatives proved to be of socialist views”.

The Mass Movement and the Socialist groups
There was also the formation of socialist propaganda organisations at this time. At the end of 1892 a 'unity' conference was held at Bradford. Out of this came the Independent Labour Party. The Fabian Society and the Social Democratic Federation were also launched.

Engels was seeking to bring British workers into the International and, in particular, into an alliance with the mass parties of French and German workers. This would have greatly assisted the development of the British working class. It was this that Hyndman fought, and fought viciously. He conducted a campaign to disrupt and sabotage these connections.

First, he sought to undermine the influence of Engels and the group around him. Justice which was Hyndman's paper and his personal property, continually referred to Engels as the 'Great Lama of Regents Park Rd' (Engels lived in Regents Park Rd) and to his group as a 'family clique'.

Engels was denounced as a man, whose personal influence was more baneful than his literary work had been useful to the Socialist movement.

The SDF continued its alliance with the opportunist leaders of the unions in an attempt to prevent the May Day celebration in 1890 - decided on by the Second International Congress. In Engels' article 'May 4 in London’ there is a full account of the struggle over this May Day. There were two demonstrations that day but by far the largest and better organised was brought about by Engels and his group, with the four largest branches of the SDF joining in it, despite their leaders. Engels hailed it as the first international action of the working class.

Next year the demonstration was a united one. A Demonstration Committee had been formed by the 'Legal Eight Hours and International Labour League' and the London Trades Council, where the old trade union leaders had been forced this year to support the demonstration and a resolution calling for the eight hour day.

The demonstration was an enormous success. Estimates of numbers present vary from a quarter to half a million people. The resolution on the eight hour day was carried with acclaim by the crowds surrounding every platform.

The SDF was not a party that had a few sectarian aberrations but on the whole did a useful propaganda job, no, it was a barrier to the development of the working class in the eighties and nineties. Hundreds of workers were repelled by the SDF. Engels, in a letter to Lafargue at the time of the fourteenth conference of the SDF (August 1894), made the following estimates:



'It has 4,500 members. Last year there were 7,000 names on its membership list, so it has lost 2,500. But what of it? asks Hyndman. In, the 14 years of its existence, the SDF has seen a million people pass through its ranks ... Out of one million 999,500 have hopped it, but - 4,500 have stayed!'



The SDF left a legacy in the working class movement of combining academic and abstract 'Marxism' with opportunist practice; of combining dogmas and exceedingly revolutionary phrases with reactionary deeds and reactionary ideas. But it did more than that. Hyndman played a crucial role in assisting the forces opposed to the emergence of a mass party of the British working class under Marxist leadership.

In September 1892, the Glasgow Trade Union Congress carried a resolution, submitted by the Bradford Trades Council declaring the time had come to form a new political party, independent, and pledged to make the conditions of labour the paramount question in British politics.

The decision was a reflection of the class movements that had already taken place and which had resulted. in the birth of the new unions and the expansion of the 'old'. There was already the beginning of a slump in trade. It would hit worst of all the mass of casual labourers and most exploited workers who had burst out into organisation at the end of the eighties.

The Webbs declare: 'The unskilled labourers once more largely fell away from the Trade Union ranks . . . The older unions retained a large part, at any rate, of the two hundred thousand members added to their ranks between 1887 and 1891.'

The Parliamentary Committee did not take any action on the resolution of 1892 on the formation of a labour party, although the upsurge had effected a political development in the 'old' unions. The Times reported that the 'Socialist Party' was supreme in the Trades Union Congress of 1893. It adopted resolutions including nationalisation of the land and other means of production and distribution.

But the conservative trade union leaders resisted. The bureaucracy was strengthened by the slump and the attacks which were mounted- by the employers. The Parliamentary Committee continued to do nothing about the resolutions they disagreed with.

In January 1893, 120 delegates met in Bradford and formed the Independent Labour Party. It had the support of groups of workers in northern England and Scotland. There was big support for independent working class representation in Bradford and other northern towns. In Bradford a strong Labour Union had been formed, after a lock-out in 1890, when the Riot Act was read and troops occupied the streets. The Labour Union already had councillors on Bradford City Council. After the conference, Engels wrote to Sorge (January 18, 1893):



And as the mass of the membership is certainly very good, as the centre of gravity lies in the provinces and not in London, the home of cliques, and as the main point of the programme is ours, Aveling was right to join and accept a seat on the executive.

The fact that here too, people like Keir Hardie, Shaw-Maxwell and others are pursuing all sorts of secondary aims of personal ambition is, of course obvious. But the danger arising from this becomes less according to the degree in which the party itself becomes stronger and gets more of a mass character, and it is already diminished by the necessity of exposing the weakness of the competing sects. Socialism has penetrated the masses in the industrial districts in the last years and I'm counting on these masses to keep the leaders in order.



Engels' optimism was not justified. In the following years there was an ebb in the mass movement, but that was not the decisive thing. The decisive lack, was that of a Marxists able to develop the theoretical firmness to both penetrate the masses and combat opportunism.

In 1892, at the General Election, Keir Hardie had been elected MP for South West Ham, John Burns for Battersea and Havelock Wilson for Middlesborough. All of them had stood as independent labour or socialist candidates. In 1895 all twenty seven of the ILP candidates were defeated. Keir Hardie lost his seat. In that year the old guard of the Trades Union Congress scored a victory. New Standing Orders were decreed, introducing the block vote and excluding Trades Council delegates and any delegate not working at a recognised job or who were not trade union officials (This was the standing order used to block Eleanor Marx). All these measures were meant to reduce the number of socialists at the Congress.

With the complexities and difficulties in these years in the middle of the decade, opportunism moved to the fore. Inability to struggle for theory led some who had fought beside Engels and Eleanor Marx to succumb to opportunist pressure. Hardie headed back to Non-conformism and picked up ethical socialism. He and Tom Mann, like ships without a rudder in face of the problems of this time, joined in the hysteria of the anarchists at the 1895 Congress of the International in attempting to disrupt organised and serious work. Burns began his journey to the right which ended in a seat in a Liberal Cabinet.

In 1897, Tom Mann resigned as national secretary of the ILP. MacDonald, Glasier and Snowden, middle class 'evolutionary' socialists, took over the leadership with Hardie. The ILP developed its characteristic eclectic mixture of ethical, evolutionary socialism, revolutionary socialism, pacifism. Their strength grew with the ebb of that movement.

The employers used the drop in trade for an offensive against the unions. The 1890s saw them developing their organisation. The National Free Labour Association was formed in 1893 - it organised the systematic importation of blackleg labour and supplied strike- breakers.

In 18%, the Engineering Employers' Associations formed a Federation 'to protect and defend the interests of employers against combinations of workmen'. The Employers' Parliamentary Council was established in 1898. These bodies spearheaded an attack on trade union rights established in the seventies. The rights of picketing and of striking were being shattered under a legal barrage in the courts. The famous Taff Vale decisions of 1901 which placed a punitive fine on the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants for a strike, was but the culminating point of this legal offensive. It was the whip of the employers’ attack which brought a new movement.

In all trade unions there was a resurgence of demands for independent political organisation at the end of the decade. At the 1899 TUC, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants moved a successful resolution for the calling of a conference on independent workers' representation in Parliament.

It was on February 27, 1900 that a conference of trade union leaders, and representatives of the Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation and the Fabian Society met in the Memorial Hall, Farringdon St., London and set up the Labour Representative Committee. The Trades Union Conference of 1899 had passed a resolution calling on its Parliamentary Committee to call the conference. The organisation became known as the ‘Labour Party’. The bulk of the delegates were from trade unions with some 400,000 members - being less than half of the membership of the Trades Union Congress at that time. Other delegates were from the Social Democratic Federation (9,000 members), the Independent Labour Party (13,000 members) and the Fabian Society (861 members).

Thus the British working class entered the twentieth century with a historic move towards a mass party independent of the capitalist parties. The SDF moved a resolution that: “The representatives of the working class movement in the House of Commons shall form there a distinct party, based upon the recognition of the class war, and having for its ultimate object the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange . . “

The Independent Labour Party delegates moved an amendment that a “distinct Labour Group” in Parliament should be set up which shall have their own whips and agree upon their policy, which must embrace a readiness to cooperate with any Party which, for the time being, may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interest of Labour . . .

The amendment was carried by 53 votes to 39 with about a fourth of the delegates abstaining!

The conference came into being as a result of the British working class asserting its independence. The opportunist socialists of the ILP attempted to prevent a sharp break with the Liberals.

A Class Break
The Labour Party came together as a coalition of forces. These forces were disparate and not all avowed socialists. Yet we can certainly say its formation justifies Engel’s perspective of a new uprising of the working class in Britain.

It was a decisive break of the working class to class politics. Marx and Engels were convinced that the formation of their own class party was one of the processes the working class must go through on the road of socialist evolution. They put this to their own followers at various times, as Engels did in 1886 to North American Socialists when the huge strike movement for the eight hour day swept over the US. At that time the political movement of the North American working class was in advance of the British.

At the end of the year there were municipal elections in the U.S.A and many newly formed Labour Parties polled big votes and in some cases had candidates elected. The large vote of Henry George in New York City, has already been mentioned. The Labour Parties which sprang up, were influenced by his ideas

Marx and Engels were very critical of these ideas of Henry George, who preached that all ills would disappear with the abolishing of ground rent. Marx wrote to Sorge, one of his collaborators in the United States, in June 1881 declaring “Theoretically the man (Henry George) is very backward.”

Notwithstanding, Engels wrote to Sorge in November 1886



“The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the organisation of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, sol ong as it is a distinct workers' party. And this step has been taken, far more rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing. That the first programme of this party is confused, and highly deficient, that it has set up the banner of Henry George, these are inevitable evils but also are transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement—no matter in what form so long as it is their own movement—in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves. (Engel’s emphasis).



He added, towards the end of the letter:



“And if there are people at hand there whose minds are theoretically clear, who can tell the consequences of their mistakes beforehand and make it clear to them that every movement which does not keep the destruction of the wages system in view that whole time as its final aim is bound to go astray and fall—then many a piece of nonsense may be avoided and the process considerably shortened.[iv]”



In its early years, the Social Democratic Federation, an avowed Marxist organisation, led by Hyndman who combined radicalism, his sectarianism and his opportunism with nationalism, was affiliated to the Labour Party as we have seen. In fact, it was present at its founding meeting in 1900. In 1911 the British Socialist Party was formed by a merger of the Social Democratic Party and other groups. During the First World War a bitter split took place between the internationalists in it, and the patriotic wing led by Hyndman. Hyndman and his supporters left the BSP in 1916, when the internationalists won a majority. The BSP was the biggest of the organisations that, at the end of the war, formed the Communist Party of Great Britain, which became a section of the Third International,

Inside the British Labour Party, there was a class contradiction. Its mass base was in a class that had pushed it up as a political expression, a continuation of the historic struggle of Chartism for a representation of workers in Parliament. But its leadership resisted a break with the Liberal political representatives of Capital.



The Discussion in the Second International.
How to define this Labour Party? This became a question discussed by the Second International when the newly formed party sought affiliation. In October 1908, the request for affiliation came before the International Socialist Bureau, the Executive body of the Second International consisting of representatives of the Socialist Parties of all countries.

From 1905, to the political collapse of the Second International at the beginning of the First World War in 1914, Lenin was a member of the Bureau representing the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Lenin’s report of this meeting is important, interesting and illuminating. not only in relation to the discussion on the British Labour Party but also in relation to other items. It was published in the newspaper Proletary, and appears in Volume 15 of Lenin’s works under the heading, ‘Meeting of the International Socialist Bureau’.

The members of the International Socialist Bureau from Britain represented the Independent Labour Party and the Social Democratic Federation, both members of the International. Bruce Glasier, on behalf of the ILP proposed the recognition of the British Labour Party as an affiliated organisation. The SDF, represented by Hyndman opposed.

Lenin reports Bruce Glasier urging the “enormous significance of thousands of organised workers who were steadily and surely moving towards socialism,” but that, “he was very contemptuous of principles, formulas and catechisms.”

Kautsky, looked upon at that time as the great Marxist theoretician of the German Social Democratic Party, the biggest party in the International, with 70 daily papers, “dissociated himself from this attitude of contempt towards the principles and ultimate aims of socialism, but wholly supported the affiliation of the Labour Party as a party waging the class struggle in practice.”

Kautsky moved a resolution, which accepted the Labour Party into the International, declaring that



“Whereas by previous resolutions of the International Congresses, all organisations adopting the standpoint of the proletarian class struggle and accepting the necessity for political action have been accepted for membership, the International Bureau declares that the British Labour Party is admitted to international Socialist Congresses, because, while not expressly accepting the proletarian class struggle, in practice the Labour Party conducts this struggle, in practice the Labour Party conducts this struggle, and adopts its standpoint, inasmuch as the party is organised independently of the bourgeois parties.



Hyndman demanded that the affiliation be refused until the Labour Party expressly recognised the principle of the class struggle and socialism.

Lenin associated himself with the first part of Kautsky’s resolution. His report goes on:



It was impossible I argued to refuse to admit the Labour Party, i.e., the Parliamentary representation of the trade unions, since Congresses had previously admitted all trade unions whatever, even those which had allowed themselves to be represented by bourgeois parliamentarians. But, I said, the second part of Kautsky’s resolution is wrong, because in practice the Labour Party is not a party really independent of the Liberals, and does not pursue a fully independent class policy.



Lenin proposed an amendment that the end of the resolution, beginning with the word ‘because’ should read:



Because it (the Labour Party) represents the first step on the part of the really proletarian organisations of Britain towards a conscious class policy and towards a socialist workers’ party.



The amendment was not accepted. In his comment Lenin takes up one of the supporters of Hyndman’s position who declared that to admit the Labour Party would be to encourage opportunism which Lenin said was a “glaringly wrong view”.



One need only recall Engel’s letters to Sorge. For a number of years, Engels strongly insisted that the British Social Democrats, led by Hyndman, were committing an error by acting like sectarians, failing to link themselves with the unconscious but class instinct of the trade unions, and by turning Marxism into a “dogma” whereas it should be a “guide to action”.



The Labour Party accepted as a part of the Second International. It was a party of affiliated organisations consisting of trade unions and political organisations. It was not until 1918 that its conference agreed to individual membership and to the famous ‘Clause Four’ of its constitution, expressing the aim of nationalising the means of production.

From its beginning there was a class contradiction inside the British Labour Party. Its mass base was in a class that had pushed it up as a political expression, a break of its trade union organisations with the Liberal party, a continuation of the historic struggle of Chartism for a representation of workers in Parliament. But its leaders adapted to, and transmitted, the ideology of capitalism and carried out capitalist policies. Thus, there was a continuous conflict inside the Party from its beginning, which reflected the class struggle in Britain and internationally. Again and again the mass of the working class sought to express their wishes through the Labour Party and the movement of British workers to any wide and deep struggle was reflected within it.


---------

[i]

[ii] Quoted by Yvonne Kapp

[iii] Expand on Engels reference to Hyndman

[iv]. Correspondence Marx and Engels. Lawrence and Wishart. 1934. Letter 209. 29 November, 1886


 http://www.socialistvoice.org.uk/