Victorian Studies

British socialism has always been an enigma. How can you call yourself a socialist if you reject the concept of an international revolution? Anarchists and Marxists scoffed at the idea; national socialism was, in their opinion, untenable. But the British soldiered on. If [End Page 536] socialism was to succeed in England and Scotland, it would have to be seen as part of the Anglo-Saxon political tradition. Patriotism could not be discarded. Paul Ward, in his new book Red Flag and Union Jack, discusses this English patriotism and the British left from Henry Hyndman's England for All (1881) to Ramsay MacDonald's first Labour government in 1924.

British socialists in the eighties were especially concerned with identifying their programs as "English" and not "foreign." There was a lot of name-dropping used to indicate this; Wat Tyler, Thomas Spence, Robert Owen, and the Chartists, all of whom opposed capitalism and/or landlordism, were listed as forebears. If any foreign socialist was admired, it was not Karl Marx but Ferdinand Lassalle, who was called a national socialist. Hyndman saw himself as the English Lassalle.

The Fabian Society endorsed a program of democratic socialism; they worked for "gradual, peaceful changes as against revolution" (39). The nineties saw the founding of the Independent Labour Party and their substitution of the word "Britishness" for "Englishness" in discussing the national character of socialism in Britain. The ILP leadership was dominated by Scots Keir Hardie, MacDonald, and John Glasier.

War was the ultimate test for socialists. When they spoke of war in their newspapers or tracts, they usually meant class war, not war between nations. They paid lip service to Marx's idea that workers have no country and talked of international revolution, but when confronted by war involving their country and another, patriotism came to the fore. Socialism was of secondary importance.

The first war the socialists had to deal with was the Boer War. The ILP and Social Democratic Federation were generally opposed to the war in South Africa; the Clarion group and the Fabian Society were divided. Hardie admired the Boers as a pastoral people fighting for freedom, resisting the imperialistic designs of Cecil Rhodes and others. Robert Blatchford, on the other hand, defended Britain's military action. He was a socialist, he said, but he was also an Englishman.

Syndicalism, with an emphasis on the general strike, attracted many trade unionists in the first decades of the twentieth century, but the ILP and Fabian Society rejected it as a foreign doctrine and stayed with their faith in parliament as the way to a democratic socialism.

Having swallowed the bitter pill of imperialism, the British left then had to take a position on the military build-up in response to the "German menace." The socialists were against militarism in theory but, once again, as Edwardian Britain drifted toward the Great War, being British was more important than the Second International.

The second decade of the twentieth century saw two crises that overwhelmed the right and the left--the First World War and the Russian Revolution. No one was prepared for crises of this magnitude. Only a few openly supported the Russian revolution, and only a small number of socialists, notably the ILP, dared to oppose the war. With the invasion of Belgium, Germany was clearly established as the aggressor. Some socialists became super- patriots and racists. Blatchford argued that the Germans were an "insatiable race of savages" and suggested that "something very near to extermination of the German people" would be needed to keep the peace (125). Hardie was called a "German" for opposing the war.

The Russian revolution was partially a product of the war; military failure on the eastern front...