So Engels was delighted when, in 1884, Edward Aveling and William Morris split from the SDF to establish a rival Socialist League. He instantly summoned them to Regent's Park Road for a quick tutorial on party management, discipline and propaganda – the result of which was the creation of Morris's elegant journal, Commonweal, and a network of Socialist League branches siphoning off disgruntled SDF members. However, the relationship between Morris and Engels was never going to be easy. The aethereal, ethical, Arts and Crafts Morris rarely disguised his lack of interest in the rational, technical precepts of scientific socialism. ‘To speak frankly, I do not know what Marx's Theory of Value is, and I'm damned if I want to know,’ he explained to one public meeting. ‘It is enough political economy for me to know that the idle rich class is rich and the working-class is poor, and that the rich are rich because they rob the poor.’17 His Utopian tract, News from Nowhere, advocated a revolutionary return to the pre-industrial past with medieval garb, craft guilds, the Houses of Parliament turned into a dung-heap and a London rid of industry - a vision diametrically opposed to Engels's belief that socialism depended on the kind of technological advances and prosperity unleashed by the industrial revolution. Unsurprisingly, Engels was wont initially to dismiss Morris as ‘a very rich but politically inept art lover’, but after the split from the SDF and the discovery of a shared interest in Old Norse mythology the friendship warmed. Not for long: as soon as Morris started to flirt with anarchism, Engels excommunicated him as ‘a sentimental dreamer pure and simple’. Engels feared it would take an exhaustive course of bi-weekly seminars to teach Morris about socialism, ‘but who has the time to do it, and if you drop him for a month, he is sure to lose himself again. And is he worth all that trouble even if one had the time?’18 And so Engels shortsightedly turned his back on potentially the most inspiring and magnetic figures within the British socialist pantheon.
But at least Morris, in his own misguided way, was pulling in the right direction, unlike the Fabians. George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Sydney Olivier, Annie Besant, Frank Podmore and the rest of this consciously intellectual ginger group committed two cardinal sins in Engels's eyes: they dared to criticize Marx's economics and were suspiciously 'eddicated, middle-class types. ‘A dilettante lot of egregiously conceited mutual admirers who soar above such ignorant people as Marx,’ as he petulantly put it to Laura Lafargue.19 And while he was willing to give the Fabian Society some credit for their socialist redirection of the London County Council, he regarded them in the main as an unhelpful wing of the welfarist, Liberal Party whose slowly-slowly strategy of political permeation constituted an exercise in class futility. But such high-handed dismissiveness, along with the abuse meted out to Hyndman and Morris, would have been more credible if Engels had had his own candidate, someone of skill and industry with a popular following, ready to lead the socialist movement. He didn't. In fact, out of a foolishly misplaced sense of loyalty to the Marx clan, Engels decided to back one of the most reviled and distrusted characters in British socialism.
‘I must give you some other news… You must have known, I fancy, for some time that I am very fond of Edward Aveling – and he says he is fond of me – so we are going to “set up” together… I need not say that this resolution has been an easy one for me to arrive at. But I think it is for the best… Do not misjudge us – He is very good – and you must not think too badly of either of us. Engels, as always, is all that is good,’ so Tussy informed her sister, Laura, of her ‘marriage’ to Edward Bibbins Aveling in 1884.20 The fourth son of a Congregationalist minister, Aveling had enjoyed a stellar career as a scientist, with a Fellowship at University College London and lectureship in Comparative Anatomy, until his vocal secularism cost him his tenure. As a result, in the early 1880s he relaunched himself as ‘the people's Darwin’ and used the public platform of the National Secular Society to bring a mass, often working-class audience to atheism and Darwinian philosophy. He then transcribed his lectures and courses into a series of popular, easily understandable penny tracts such as ‘The Student's Darwin’ and ‘Darwin Made Easy’.21 Aveling's subsequent journey towards Marxism began in 1884 after he encountered Hyndman and the SDF through his growing involvement with London school board politics. In the ensuing months Aveling became a gifted, intelligent, industrious and conscientious servant to the socialist cause; unfortunately, he was also a shit. Hyndman thought him ‘a man of very bad character’; Kautsky, ‘an evil creature’; and even the generous Bernstein, ‘a despicable rogue’.22 ‘One of the several models who sat unconsciously for Dubedat,’ George Bernard Shaw recalled of Aveling's role in crafting the unattractive anti-hero for his play The Doctor's Dilemma, that he ‘was morbidly scrupulous as to his religious and political convictions and would have gone to the gallows sooner than recant a syllable of them. But he had absolutely no conscience about money and women.’23 This was obvious in his relations with Tussy with whom he eloped in 1884 despite being still legally wed to a Miss Isabel Campbell Frank, daughter of a highly prosperous poulterer, whom he never officially divorced. For Engels, such bourgeois foibles were of no concern. ‘The fact is that Aveling has a lawful wife whom he cannot get rid of de jure although he has for years been rid of her de facto,’ he briskly explained to the sceptical Bernstein, having blessed the union and given the happy couple £50 for a honeymoon in the Peak District.24 But Aveling did not have nearly so kind a heart as Engels and, in successive years, he would torment Tussy with serial infidelities, humiliate her with a de jure marriage to an actress after Campbell Frank's death in 1892, and ultimately have a knowing hand in her suicide. That said, there was some good in Aveling and, in the early years, he encouraged Tussy in her political activism, supported her writing, and gave her a level of emotional fulfilment which she had been lacking since the death of her father.
In the meantime, both Tussy and Engels had to put up with his accumulating debts and embarrassing financial irregularities. Charles Bradlaugh, Aveling's old boss at the National Secular Society, was the first to accuse him of misappropriating funds following his departure from the organization in 1884. Whilst this allegation could just about be put down to political rivalry, the next set of charges was altogether more damaging. ‘Aveling's Unpaid Labour: The Socialists Are Disgusted and Say So about His Exorbitant Bill’ was the New York Herald splash following the Socialist Labor Party's (SLP) investigation of the near $1,600 expenses Aveling and Tussy had run up during their 1886 US speaking tour. ‘The enterprising socialist lecturers went to study poverty at a first class hotel in Baltimore, and patronized the wine cellar so liberally that their bill for two days amounted to $42,’ the paper went on in a well-sourced demolition job.25 The nub of the case was that Aveling tried to put Tussy's trip through the books when the SLP had agreed to pay only for his expenses. In fact, the allegations and salacious media leaks (which the British press gleefully recycled) pointed to deeper ideological divisions within the US socialist movement fought out over the arrival of the Avelings. And Engels was having none of it. In a trenchant letter to his American translator and prominent SLP apparatchik, Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky, he spoke from the heart when he warned, ‘woe be to the man who, being of bourgeois origin or superior education, goes into the movement and is rash enough to enter into money relations with the working-class element’. He then laid out a line of reasoning which he would maintain over the coming years: ‘I have inherited from Marx the obligation to stand by his children as he would have done himself, and to see, so far as lies in my power, that they are not wronged.’26 Aveling was now a protected member of the family firm, repeatedly shielded by a grievously indulgent Engels. When money went missing or a cheque bounced or a contract was reneged on (as they invariably were), Engels would airily dismiss it as ‘the slapdash literary Bohemian in Aveling’.27 Marx would most likely have cut Aveling free as an embarrassment to the cause, but Engels stuck with him both from clan loyalty and a secret admiration for his rakish, arrogant demeanour. He descr
ibed him affectionately to Sorge as a ‘very talented and serviceable sort of chap and thoroughly honest, but gushing as a flapper, with a perpetual itch to do something silly. Well, I can still recall the time when I was much the same kind of idiot.’28
Above all, Engels endorsed Aveling's ideological outlook and political strategy. Although Aveling did a terrible job of helping Sam Moore with the translation of Das Kapital, Engels respected him as an effective and appropriately scientific popularizer of Marxism for the English market. To Aveling's mind, Marx and Darwin not only shared similar character traits – ‘the physical presence of each was commanding… in moral character the two men were alike… the nature of each was beautiful, kindling affection in, and giving affection to, all that was worthy’ – but also methodology. ‘That which Darwin did for Biology, Marx has done for Economics. Each of them by long and patient observation, experiment, recordal, reflection, arrived at an immense generalisation, – a generalisation the likes of which their particular branch of science had never seen.’ In language that Engels could only have admired, he outlined in ‘The Student's Marx’ the profundity of Marx's scientific breakthrough. ‘Electricity now has its ohms, its farads, its amperes; chemistry had its periodic law; the physiologists are reducing the bodily functions to equations; and the fact that Marx could express many of his generalisations in Political Economy in mathematical terms is so much evidence that he had carried that science further than his predecessors.’29
Equally attractively, there was more to Aveling than just talk. With his background in the street propaganda of the National Secular Society, he got to work with Tussy trying to build up an independent, properly proletarian workers' party beginning in the godless pastures of ‘outcast London’. East of Aldgate Pump, a long way from Primrose Hill, in the alleys and rookeries of Whitechapel, Bethnal Green, Mile End and Hoxton, the hidden poverty of Victorian London lay: a landscape peopled in the popular imagination by a residuum of Jews, dockers, negresses and ‘rough’ ne'er-do-wells who came to be codified in the unnatural crimes of Jack the Ripper. Here was where immorality, drunkenness and dark acts took place; a eugenic bog, rising up from the Hackney marshes, best sealed and written off from the rest of the capital. But to Tussy, the poverty evident on these cold, hungry streets was replete with political promise. It came alive on 13 November 1887 when, once again, the hunger-stricken East End marched on the plutocratic West End and endured a ‘Bloody Sunday’ for their efforts as London's Metropolitan Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, unleashed his troops on William Morris, Annie Besant, John Burns, Edward Carpenter, Tussy, Aveling and others amongst the 100,000 demonstrators. Tussy turned up at Regent's Park Road afterwards, as Engels relayed it to Paul Lafargue, ‘her coat in tatters, her hat crushed and torn by a blow from a staff, having been arrested by bobbies but released on the orders of an inspector’. Although Engels had some tactical criticisms of confronting mounted police in Trafalgar Square (‘being the place most favourable to the government… with barracks close by and with St James's Park – in which to muster reserves of troops – a stone's throw away from the field of battle’), the day's unwarranted violence suddenly energized the East End where for months the socialists had been fruitlessly preaching in radical clubs and pubs.30 What kept the political momentum going was the unexpected, long overdue but very welcome intervention of organized labour.
In spring 1889 Will Thorne, a socialist stoker at the Beckton gasworks, started to unite his fellow workers into a National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers – with a constitution drawn up with the help of Tussy and Aveling – in an attempt to improve the site's appalling terms and conditions. Within four months, the union had some 20,000 members and Thorne had secured a cut in the basic working day from twelve hours to eight. In the tightly knit communities of working-class East London, there was a long tradition of gasworkers doubling as dock labourers, and Thorne's success in winning concessions from the gas works increased the pressure on the reactionary dock corporations to follow suit. In the 1890s ten miles of docklands – from West India Docks to St Katherine's Dock to Millwall Dock to Victoria Dock – stretched along the wide eastern estuary of the Thames employing near 30,000 men in a vast complex of warehouses, wharves, basins and jetties which secured London's status as ‘earth's emporium’. Conditions there were amongst the most brutal in Britain, as the great London chronicler Henry Mayhew discovered one October morning: ‘Then begins the scuffling and scrambling, and stretching forth of countless hands high in the air, to catch the eye of him whose voice may give them work… it is a sight to sadden the most callous, to see thousands of men struggling for only one day's hire, the scuffle being made the fiercer by the knowledge that hundreds out of the number there assembled must be left to idle the day out in want.’31 On 12 August 1889 Ben Tillett, the secretary of the small Tea Operatives' Union, found himself besieged by men insisting he follow Thorne's lead and confront the dock owners. But his demands for an increase in wages from 4d to 6d an hour, with 8d for overtime and a minimum employment period of half a day, were rejected out of hand by dock bosses, who remained confident that the East End's vast reserve army of labour would always undermine worker solidarity. Together with the socialist activists Tom Mann and John Burns (with Aveling and Tussy beavering away in the background), Tillett proved them wrong by founding the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers' Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Not only that, the dock labourers' leaders managed a disciplined, month-long strike of almost 60,000 men and a powerful public relations offensive with open-air meetings in Tower Hill, dignified marches through the City of London, and a well-run relief fund. Whether it was this spectre of politicized labour, or the calming intervention of Cardinal Manning, or the arrival of £30,000 from the Australian dockers, in the end the wharf bosses caved in to Burns's demand for ‘the full round orb of the docker's tanner’.
Reading the reports of the strike in the London papers, Engels was ecstatic. ‘The dock strike has been won. It's the greatest event to have taken place in England since the last Reform Bills and marks the beginning of a complete revolution in the East End,’ he wrote to Karl Kautsky in September 1889.32 ‘Hitherto the East End had been in a state of poverty-stricken stagnation, its hallmark being the apathy of men whose spirit had been broken by hunger, and who had abandoned all hope… Then, last year, there came the victorious strike of the [Bryant & May] match-girls. And now, this gigantic strike of the most demoralized elements of the lot, the dock labourers…’, he told Bernstein.33 This was the point: what was so encouraging about the dock labourers' protest, he explained in the Labour Leader, was that even the lumpenproletariat now appeared ready to rise. ‘If Marx had lived to witness this! If these poor down-trodden men, the dregs of the proletariat, these odds and ends of all trades, fighting every morning at the dock gates for an engagement, if they can combine, and terrify by their resolution the mighty Dock Companies, truly then we need not despair of any section of the working class.’34 The dock labourers' and gasworkers' trade unions were symbolic of a tectonic shift in labour politics: the challenge by a new generation of trade unions, with their belief in class solidarity and socialist ideology, to the guild-like conservatism of the old craft unions. ‘These new trade unions of unskilled men and women are totally different from the old organizations of the working-class aristocracy and cannot fall into the same conservative ways,’ he told Laura before recounting with almost paternal pride Tussy's role in radicalizing the East End.35 These then were Engels's people: not the SDF demagogues or the Fabian beard-strokers, but the East End activists, trade unionists and socialists whom he hoped would form a British socialist workers' party and, as a public signal of approbation, he invited them into his home at Regent's Park Road. ‘Of the English, William Thorne was the most welcome visitor of those outside the family circle,’ remembered Edward Aveling. ‘For him Engels had the very greatest admiration, respect, and affection; of his character, and his value to the movement, the very highest opinion
.’36 Engels also compared John Burns favourably with Oliver Cromwell. They, in turn, honoured Engels, the grand old man of European socialism, with pride of place on their May Day platform.
In the event, leadership of the British labour movement fell not to Aveling, Thorne or Burns, but to the prickly, teetotal, Nonconformist ex-miner Keir Hardie. Hardie was consciously opposed to ‘the State Socialists of the German type’, and his socialism was, in the words of his biographer Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘fundamentally ethical, a vision of justice and equality’ which owed more to the Puritan ‘good old cause’ than Marxian communism. His vehicle was the Independent Labour Party (ILP) which emerged from the Trades Union Congress in the early 1890s and, from the outset, had a far more Liberal–Labour feel to it than any outwardly socialist intent. Nonetheless, it seemed the only credible, national political grouping dedicated to workers' interests and Engels gave it the benefit of the doubt. ‘Since the bulk of its members are undoubtedly first class, since its centre of gravity lies in the provinces rather than in that hive of intrigue, London, and its programme is substantially the same as our own, Aveling did right in joining it and in accepting a position on the Executive,’ Engels told Sorge in January 1893.37 But within only a matter of weeks Aveling had managed to poison Engels's mind against Hardie whom Engels, in turn, started to accuse of demagogic ambitions, collaboration with the Tories, and financial irregularities. By January 1895 Engels had grown impatient of the ILP and was dismissing Hardie as ‘a cunning, crafty Scot, a Pecksniff and arch-intriguer, but too cunning, perhaps, and too vain’.38 Hardie himself was oblivious to this withdrawal of favour and, after Engels's death, wrote warmly of his Regent's Park Road chats and remained adamant that both Engels and Marx would have endorsed the political development of the ILP.39 The truth is that, by this time, Engels was out of touch with much that was going on in British socialism thanks to his continuing dependence on Aveling. It is difficult to overemphasize the widespread distrust, even loathing, which so many in the British socialist camp felt towards Aveling – whom they regarded as an ambitious man on the make with highly immoral personal attributes damaging to their political cause and offensive to their working-class Puritan morality. Resentful at Engels's attempts to ‘foist’ the distrusted and deviant Aveling ‘as a leader upon the English Socialist and Labour movement’, activists started to shun Regent's Park Road, and Engels's personal influence over the political direction and ideology of English socialism markedly diminished.40 ‘Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?’ has been a long-standing academic conundrum and, if by no means the determining reason, Engels's misguided allegiance to Aveling certainly contributed to the lack of a unified Marxist party.41 It was a rare political misjudgement, driven by a characteristic loyalty to the Marx clan.
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