Socialism âSince the Dying-out of Owenismâ
The truth is this: during the period of Englandâs industrial monopoly the English working-class have, to a certain extent, shared in the benefits of the monopoly ⌠And that is the reason why, since the dying-out of Owenism, there has been no Socialism in England.1
This was
the view propounded by
Friedrich Engels in an article written for
Commonweal, the recently established newspaper of the Socialist League (SL
), in 1885. In 1892, Engels reproduced the content of that article, in full, in the preface to a new English edition of his youthful account of the consequences of the
âIndustrial Revolutionâ,
The Condition of the Working Class in England. Overall, Engels believed that his journalistic assessment was still apposite. He had, he insisted, âbut little to addâ to the original text.
2 Yet, despite his reticence, Engels did include a qualificationâa qualification, one might add, of no small moment. âNeedless to sayâ, Engels acknowledged,
that today âthere is indeed âSocialism again in Englandâ, and plenty of itâSocialism of all shades: Socialism conscious and unconscious, Socialism prosaic and poetic, Socialism of the working-class and of the middle-class, for verily, that abomination of abominations, Socialism, has not only become respectable, but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causeusesâ.3
Engelsâs proviso was not overstated. By 1892, socialism had indeed re-entered British intellectual and political life in earnest. The Independent Labour Party (ILP) had not yet been formed, but the Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), and the SL, among other socialist groups, were all operative in the decade preceding 1893. The idea of socialism drew other, often high-profile, advocates too: the statesmen, Joseph Chamberlain and Charles Dilke, the Positivist Frederic Harrison, and the novelist and playwright Oscar Wilde, for instance, all spoke sympathetically about it.4
According to Engels, however, neither the âmomentary fashion among bourgeois circles of affecting a mild dilution of Socialismâ, nor even âthe actual progress Socialism has made in England generallyâ, matched in terms of political magnitude âthe revival of the East End of Londonâ.5 What Engels meant by this was the emergence of the âNew Unionismâ. He described it as âone of the greatest and most fruitful facts of this fin de siècleâ.6 The âNew Unionismâ constituted therefore a second, more important, proviso and Engels censured the revolutionary socialists in Britain who ignored it.
The Materialist Conception of History
Engelsâs views were contentious. More often than not they were not echoed by British socialists in the 1880s and 1890s. Yet, despite the partiality of Engelsâs arguments, and the tenuous historical credibility of his claims, these judgements have proven remarkably influential with historians. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the figure of Friedrich Engels casts a very long shadow indeed over the historiography of British socialism. This can be seen in two principal ways.
Firstly, historians have followed Engelsâs periodisation of socialismâs shifting fortunes. More specifically, until only relatively recently the historiography had been dominated by a number of distinguished historians who reproduced Engelsâs very model of interpretation. These historians identified with a method of historical research inaugurated by Karl Marx, which diagnosed âsocial beingâ as the chief determinant of âsocial consciousnessâ. That is to say, they adhered to the so-called materialist conception of history, or historical materialism.7 What that meant in practice was a commitment to four basic beliefs.
First, these historians cleaved to a conception of the âIndustrial Revolutionâ (comparable to that of the French) endowed with the force of a revolutionary eventâthe begetter of the âproletariatâ as Engels had depicted it in Condition of the Working Class.8 Second, the period of history between the decline of Chartism and the ârevivalâ of socialism was seen to necessitate an explanation as the site of a ânon-eventâ, namely the failure of the proletariat to perform the revolutionary role assigned to it in âMarxistâ theory.9 Third, historians maintained Engelsâs distinction between âutopianâ socialism and its âscientificâ Marxian successor.10 And fourth, in addition to the âarrested developmentâ of the practical movement of the working class in Britain, these historians held that indigenous socialist theory was, in consequence, also âabnormallyâ weak.11
This remained the state of play in the historiography of British socialism until the 1980s. During that decade, however, the project of inferring political affinity from social class was increasingly vacated. In its place, historians began to adopt a non-referential conception of language, which eventually led to a new appreciation of the autonomy (or primacy even) of the political as a causal category.12 By the 1990s this new approach dominated. Yet, if the main beliefs informing the work of the historians of the previous generation had been extirpated, a number of minor prejudices remained, continuing to outlive the historiographical tradition that once sustained them. And here, too, the shadow of Engels is discernible.
Engels and British Socialists
Secondly, then, Engels also influenced the historiography of British socialism through his assessments of the ârevivalâsâ foremost personalities and groups. The same historians responsible for advancing Engelsâs methodological assumptions were also culpable of reproducing his distorted evaluations of British socialists. The exponents of non-Marxian socialism were thus discharged as âuninterestingâ and âquite unimportantâ.13 The socialists most sympathetic to Marx were, likewise, condemned as âintellectually negligibleâ.14 This at least was the view advanced by a number of combative young historiansâprincipally Perry Anderson and Tom Nairnâwriting for the New Left Review in the 1960s.15 Other historians associated with a different tradition of âMarxist historiographyâ were, however, more cautious. Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson were less categorical in their disregard of British socialist intellectuals.16 Yet William Morris was the only socialist presumed to identify with the tradition purportedly bequeathed by Marx to receive complete exoneration.17 Moreover, what was given with one hand was taken away with the other; for the historians responsible for the exoneration of Morris were guilty of entrenching even further Engelsâs judgements of the other socialists receptive to Marx.18
Part of the reason for this was political. Indeed, to revisit this section of the historiography, which traversed the period between the formation of the Communist Party Historians Group in 1946 and the...