ABSTRACT
The Social Democratic Federation, founded in the 1880’s, and the activities of a handful of English Marxists, like H. M. Hyndman, toward the end of the century, provide the very small exception that proves the rule. Karl Marx’s comments on the Gotha Program of the German Social Democratic Party of 1875 reveal a conflict of attitudes: one, a tone of pride at socialism becoming embodied in a real mass party. The defense of Marxian orthodoxy, of the essential correctness of the visibly disproved tenet of the continuous impoverishment of the working class under capitalism, became for the Continental socialists something of a psychological necessity in view of the English experience. The attenuation of anti-industrialism as the basis for socialism—and hence the irrelevance of Marxism under English conditions—is best studied by observing the content and influence of two schools of socialist thought of the generation before 1917: Fabianism and Guild Socialism.
