Critically Evaluate the Impact of Socialist Organisations and Ideas on the Early Labour Party.

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Critically Evaluate the Impact of Socialist Organisations and Ideas on the Early Labour Party.

Eighteenth century industrialisation created a new class of working people, dependent for survival on the wage they earned for their labour. The conditions they endured and toiled under were often of the harshest imaginable and because of this movements grew, from varying quarters, looking to better their lot. British politics, at the time, was dominated by two sets of people: the Tories, essentially landowners, and the Whigs, liberal industrialists who emphasised personal responsibility and individualism, bound up within a general concession towards human equality. The nineteenth century saw advances towards social change implemented by these parties (the reform acts of 1832 and 1867), but it became clear to some that they could not be relied upon to take things significantly forwards, mainly as it constituted a direct conflict of interests for them to do so.

Early working class upheaval, and resentment, was voiced and organised through the chartist movement; and even before that by the influential utopian socialist Robert Owen. Indeed, Engels said of Owen: "Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself onto the name of Robert Owen."1 Chartism developed in the middle 1830's to address the shortfalls of the first reform act, which failed to extend the franchise in any radical sense. Chartism therefore, had as its main tenant: '...the call for a representative parliament, largely elected by, composed of and annually accountable to working men.'2 Chartists, however, had fizzled out by the late 1840's due to poor leadership, internal disagreements, and Europe being close to revolution in 1948, which somewhat scared the British movement. Chartism still managed to survive until 1958 in Halifax, a strong working class community. The relative prosperity of the 1850s suppressed support for radical social politics somewhat, confining it mostly to small groups of migrant Europeans in the capital, Marx et al. The early 1860's again saw calls for social and electoral reforms, which were eventually granted under the Disraelian government. Now for the first time certain constituencies had a majority of working men as potential voters, and to this ends the first working men, with the support of the London's Working Men's Association, sought positions in parliament in the election of 1968. They were all heavily defeated. After this in 1969 the Labour Representation League, backed by some of the Unions, was formed to promote the working class vote without party influence. The League failed as a consequence of lack of funds; unable to support itself with working class contributions it eventually allied with Gladstone and the liberal party, which in many ways was a coalition of opinion anyway, and would least undermine its aims. This pact led, in 1974, to the first working men in parliament (two miners). There was further enfranchisement in 1884 giving even more workers the vote, though women were still overlooked.

Running parallel to these developments was the emergence of organised labour in the form of the Trade Unions. Initially Trade Unions were only open to skilled workers and craftsmen and they operated as friendly societies, insular and self serving: '...they sought always to come to an agreement with an employer and they kept the members' contributions high to safeguard their friendly benefits.'3 These early Unions were strongly linked to the Liberals and looked down upon non skilled workers. Any militancy within them was tempered by first Liberal, and then Tory, concessions, which were imperative after the reforms of 1867, with the Trades Unions Acts of '71 and 76, granting them legal status and the right to picket, respectively. In 1868 the Trade Union Council was set up, and from this sprung the Parliamentary Committee in 1871, which worked towards some form of labour representation within Parliament. By 1886 there were nine working men in parliament, led by Henry Broadbent. These men owed their positions to the Liberal party, who by agreement didn't field candidates in certain city centre constituencies. Consequently they had little independence, and as Engels commentated were little more then "the tail of the Great Liberal Party."

The 1880s saw the 'socialist revival', a renaissance in, and reassessment of socialist ideals. This resurgence had its roots in the growing disenchantment with the liberals as the sole vehicle for labour reforms, and various other new or rediscovered literatures supporting or pertaining to socialism. In 1879 American Henry George wrote Progress and Poverty, an attack on landlordism, calling for a land tax. Although not an avowed socialist, this book was widely read and supported by a series of tours by George himself, which neatly coincided with a period of severe agricultural recession.

"George was no socialist; but it was an easy transition from the evils of landlordism, through the gospel of land taxation to socialist ideas. It was in this way that Henry George influenced men and women like Bernard Shaw, H. H. Champion, Keir Hardie, H. M. Hyndman and Beatrice Webb, all in their diverse to become important representatives of the socialist movement of the 1880s."4

Other important literature at the time came from Carlyle and Ruskin, who both outlined the ugliness the present system of capitalism was inflicting upon the workers, and the appalling indifference, quite often through ignorance, most employers exhibited towards them. H. Pelling has acknowledged their influence thus:

"It was not without reason that Keir Hardie and many other labour leaders regarded Carlyle and Ruskin as more important in shaping their political views than any more fully versed in the abstractions of economic theory."5
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There was also the success of the German Social Democratic Party in the German Reichstag, polling nearly half a million votes and securing thirteen seats.6 This showed what was possible.

Two main socialist organisations sprang up from this rejuvenation, the first of which was the Social Democratic Federation, founded in 1884 by H. M. Hyndman. Hyndman himself was from the English upper classes, capable of funding the cause, more instinctively Tory in outlook by rights, and consequently disregarded feminist politics: '[he was] quite content to bear the reproach of chauvinism.'7 He drew heavily, though without credit, from ...

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