Tom Maguire: Classical Marxist?

The generation of socialists who contributed most towards the construction of the huge trade unions and left-wing parties of the International, were those active in the 1880s as socialism was transformed from a sect into a real force. Many of these writers and activists operated at first almost alone, in some countries illegally, building an organised socialist presence on a town-by-town basis. In Britain, one of the most heroic figures in this generation was Tom Maguire, a journeyman and poet who helped to found the Leeds Socialist League, one of the first socialist societies in northern England. From this starting-point, other groups were established, a Leeds Building Labourers' union, a Leeds branch of the Gasworkers and General Labourers' Union, a Labour Electoral League, and a Leeds branch of the Fabian Society. From the Yorkshire Labour Council, came the call for the first congress of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford. Maguire was a founding member of each of these groups. When he died of pneumonia in 1895, he was just thirty years old.

Tom Maguire's contribution towards Marxist theory was not expressed in learned theses, but in the practical example of how socialists could usefully intervene in elections and strikes. So was Tom Maguire a Marxist? This chapter will address this question directly later. It is enough to mention here that Maguire read Marx, and was influenced by his ideas. Indeed Maguire's interventions in the struggle were sympathetically endorsed (at a distance) by Frederick Engels. But Maguire is probably best understood as the representative of a generation of socialists activists who were only just coming into contact with Marxist theory. Those who began their political careers even just ten years later were necessarily influenced by different books and different experiences. The continuity between Maguire and the others lies first in the clear sense of mission which informed his socialism, and second in the dilemmas thrown up by different tactics, including mass strikes, riots and participation in parliamentary elections.

Tom Maguire's life undermines the idea that all Second International socialists were the same. The phrase Classical Marxism implies a certain conception of socialist history, in which the years 1883-1917 mark a 'Golden Age'. In the original Greek version of this myth, humanity was divided into three periods, the first of Gold, then Bronze, then Iron. At each stage, human beings were less capable of wisdom, more prone to ignorance and strife. Our own times were the most recent and the worst. Yet in our stubborn history, the long-gone Golden Age we have encountered was both fractious and diverse. The revolutionary élan of many of the founders was decidedly limited, while even the ideological cohesion which has been claimed for the movement seems exaggerated. When compared to such luminaries as Eduard Bernstein or Karl Kautsky, Maguire is seen to represent as a different face of the movement, less ideologically sophisticated, but perhaps also more practically-determined than some of the writers that feature elsewhere in this book.

There is a second reason to include Tom Maguire here. Elsewhere I have made the point that the Second International meant different things to people in different countries. The English-speaking nations were of course peculiarly resistant to continental-style Social Democracy. Marxism was dismissed as an over-elaborate, theoretical counterpart to homespun British trade union values. Without accepting such national clichés, we can recognise some more specific, historical differences. One was the failure of the main indigenous Marxist force, the Social Democratic Federation, to build a mass base when it was the only left-wing party in the field. One problem, was that while the British working-class lacked a party, it did not lack politics. There was already a large trade union movement in Britain, with a certain memory of victories and defeats. In Germany, the SPD was able to found trade unions, whose leaders never publicly questioned the hegemony of the party which had founded them. In Britain, the Labour Party would emerge out of the bowels of the TUC. Such a contrast goes a certain way towards explaining the subsequent history of the two movements - but the contrast was not fixed, and its origins needs to be explained in terms of several factors, including the mistakes made by socialists in Maguire's day.

This article will discuss first the events of Tom Maguire's life, then his idea of the relationship between socialists, strikes and elections, his poetry, and his Marxism. Maguire was certainly a socialist, although the exact content of his political beliefs is hard to pin down.

Comets, whose brief lives light up the world

Tom Maguire was born in winter 1864. He later described this late birth as ill fate. Although his friends described him as precocious, his biographers have had a tendency to add an unjust one to his years. In addition, Maguire believed that the cold winter of his birth left him susceptible to infection, 'I hate cold, it is the enemy of life … I have never been able to get over the misfortune of being born in December.' Tom Maguire's family was certainly poor, and their Leeds home crowded. His father was an Irish Catholic, and worked as a polisher. He made sure that his son had a religious education, which would do Tom little good when the Leeds branch of the Socialist League was later hounded by Maguire's co-religionists. Tom Maguire himself would have two trades, he worked as a photographer's assistant and also as a poet. His poems were written for left-wing papers, and several of them were published in a posthumous collection, Machine-room chants. I will quote just one verse here, from Maguire's 'A New Nursery Rhyme'. Like several of his poems, it contained a reference to the cold Yorkshire winters that would eventually be the death of Maguire:

Sing a song of England,

Shuddering with cold

Doomed to slow starvation

By the gods of gold;

See her famished children

Hunger-marked, and mean,

Isn't that a dainty dish

To lay before the Queen?

Maguire was the product of a distinctive Leeds milieu. The woollen districts of the West Riding were still isolated communities, with fixed industries and settled populations. Local papers published stories and poems in Leeds dialect. Meanwhile, the dominant politics of the region were Liberal. The trades council was dominated by skilled unions, whose members naturally identified with Gladstonian Liberalism. Many of the employers were Nonconformists, and chose that party on the basis of their religion. Even the ageing local firebrands whose radical days went back to Chartism, were typically supporters of temperance and thrift. One typical Chartist reunion meeting in Halifax in 1885 ended with a vote of thanks to Mr. Gladstone. Through the 1880s, there was an improvement in trade. But West Riding socialism did not succeed primarily as a result of changing economic circumstances. It was primarily shaped by a distinctive local culture, with experience of Chartism, workers' co-operatives, trade unionism and Nonconformity, where socialists found strong support for such national campaigns as the struggle for the eight-hour day.

Little is known about Tom Maguire's early life, beyond the details of his conversion to socialism. According to the remembrances published after Maguire's death, 'In 1883 he picked up one day a Christian Socialist (edited at that time by Champion and Joynes) from the secular Hall bookstall. That brought him into touch with the literature of the Socialist movement, and before long he was out in the streets of Leeds preaching the "Cause".' The switch to socialism did not please Maguire's family. But their doubts were brushed aside. In 1884, Tom Maguire helped to establish a branch of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in Leeds, under the name of the Socialist Club. The SDF was an extraordinary, diverse body. Its rank and file contained the some of the best working-class activists from the entire history of British socialism. But the leadership of the SDF, including above all the figure of Henry Hyndman, was middle-class and remote from the concerns of ordinary workers. Like a religious sect, the SDF ignored strikes, mocking them as 'palliatives', and preferred instead 'education' as the means to spread socialist ideas among the masses. This criticism is put by Tom Mann, 'Hyndman's bourgeois mentality made it impossible for him to estimate the worth of industrial organization correctly. For many years he attached no importance whatever to the trade-union movement, and his influence told disastrously on others.'

The politics of the Federation encouraged passivity. It is no surprise then that in winter 1884 Maguire left the SDF with three friends to join instead William Morris' Socialist League. This organisation was absolutely dominated by the extraordinary personality of its founder. So in order to understand the style of the League, it is worth saying something about William Morris' personality. Morris was a giant of a man, warm-hearted, tireless and uncommonly talented. He was a poet, novelist and craftsman, a famous artist long before he became a socialist. He was attracted to the left because Hyndman and his allies promised to fight British imperialism. Having become a socialist, Morris found in Marx's theory a critique of the misery and alienation which he observed all around. 'We uphold the purest doctrines of Scientific Socialism', Morris wrote, following the split. But there were tensions in Morris' Marxism. His biographer Edward Thompson has shown that Morris never really decided whether it was worth fighting for reforms under capitalism - he was more amenable than Hyndman to the present-day struggle, but no more certain that reforms could be achieved.

Tom Maguire was invited on to the Provisional Council of the new party. The League was very different to the SDF, less centralised, influenced by a range of disparate views including anarchism. One of Maguire's first contributions was to complain that the Federation had denounced the League, using 'Jesuitical' language - but the League had not bothered to respond! The forces of Classical Marxism were originally best represented Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling, who were in close contact with by Frederick Engels. But Morris' good-humoured disinclination to disagree with anyone, became increasingly frustrating and the Marx-Avelings eventually returned to the SDF fold. Some of the organisational feel of the League can be sensed from the opening lines of William Morris's utopian novel, News from Nowhere, which begins with a typical Socialist League branch meeting:

Up at the League, says a friend, there had been one night a brisk conversational discussion, as to what would happen on the Morrow of the Revolution, finally shading off into a vigorous statement by various friends of their views on the future of the fully-developed new society … there were six persons present, and consequently six sections of the party were represented, four of which had strong but divergent Anarchist opinions…

Initially, the League attempted to recruit through public street-meetings. But the audience was often hostile, and recruits were rare. 'Twice a month', writes Thompson, 'four or five of the branch would mix propaganda and pleasure, tramping through the South Yorkshire coalfield or the Dales, holding meetings and selling literature on the way.' Slowly, such patient educational work bore fruit. By 1886, the members of the Leeds branch of the Socialist League included Fred Corkwell, Bill Allworthy, Friedenson, Tom Paylor, Bill Hill, Matthew Sollit and Alfred Mattison. The group hired rooms in the Clarendon Buildings on Victoria Road. Perhaps under the influence of John Mahon, the organiser of the Socialist League's national Strike Committee, Maguire and his allies turned their back on the idea of spreading ideas through education, and moved towards workplace organising.

The years 1888-90 are remembered today as one of the proudest moments in the history of the British workers' movement. The period since the defeat of the Chartists in 1848 had largely been one of activity - punctuated by a number of brief revolts which failed to spread, including the London building workers' strike of the 1850s, the Hyde Park demonstration of 1866, and the unemployed struggles of the mid-1880s. Previous waves of unskilled union organisation in 1872, 1874, 1884 and 1887 had all foundered, but by 1889 the economy was in boom, and workers exhibited a level of confidence they had not shown previously. The strikes of 1888, including the famous match-girls' strike, encouraged large numbers of unskilled workers to take action in turn. The victorious London dockers' strike of 1889 led to the formation of a permanent general union for the unemployed. The next victory for the 'New Unionism' was the unionisation of the Beckton gas works by Will Thorne's gas workers' union. Within two years, 60,000 had signed up to Thorne's union alone. New Unionism, also led directly to the formation of the ILP, the parent of today's Labour Party.

Such up-beat times provided a raft of new opportunities for socialists to organise. Will Thorne himself was chair of the Canning Town branch of the Social Democratic Federation. Ben Tillett of the dockers' union was a member of the same organisation. Eleanor Marx of the Socialist League was invited onto the executive of the gas workers' union. All over the country, socialists were able to run to the head of the movement. In the summer of 1889, the numbers attending the League's largest out-door meetings rose dramatically, from six hundred to eight hundred, even one thousand people.

From these propaganda meetings, Maguire helped to start a successful building strike in Leeds. At the beginning of July 1899, some labourers who were attending an open-air League meeting asked to discuss their grievances. The speakers encouraged them men to form a union. The following week, 3,000 builders came to Vicar's Croft, to hear Tom Maguire and other members of the League speak. Further meetings were held in the League club-room. A provisional committee decided to strike for 1/2 d. an hour. Another general meeting was held, and the strike passed unanimously. The labourers won their demands. Maguire described their action for the League's paper, Commonweal, 'The resolute attitude of the men from the first, the comparative absence of "scabs", and the successful conducting of the struggle have won the admiration of skilled workmen, whose unions … have never carried through so unanimous and uncompromising a strike.' Soon a number of local trades followed the building labourers into action, including clothing workers. Meanwhile, the success of Gasworkers in London also struck a chord. In November 1889 the city council, which controlled the trade in Leeds, granted the 8-hour day to their workers.

The membership of the Leeds branch of the Socialist League grew rapidly. But the local activists found little practical support in the publications of the League, from London. How should socialists organise, when thy had the ear of thousands? Should they seek an alliance with the skilled trade unionists, whose goal was still to elect Liberals, even though this was the party of the Northern employers? Such papers as Keir Hardie's Miner, and Champion's Labour Elector seemed to speak more closely to the urgent tasks which were at hand. Ben Turner joined the Leeds League, a reporter on the Yorkshire Factory Times. The times were exciting, and no-one in the League had realised how difficult 'exciting' could be.

While the comrades discussed the answers to these questions, conditions outside were changing. The industrial up-turn of 1888-9 soon came to an end. By 1890, the trade boom had paused. Following a period of victories for the union movement in 1888-9, the events of 1890 felt different. That year's dispute were uneven - some led to victory, many to defeat. A number of employers' federations were established to fight against the unions. In January 1890, the Gasworkers Union was threatened with derecognition in Manchester. Workers struck, and lost. Around this time, the union was also defeated in London.

In June 1890, Leeds witnessed its own Gasworkers' strike. The leader of the union Will Thorne later described this moment as 'the worst struggle in my career'. The council brought in scabs, at great expense. Tom Maguire called on all trade unionists to support the strike. On 30 June 1890, he went further, demanding physical support. The very next day, the town broke out in riots. Thorne admitted in his memoirs that the union leadership 'had decided that no blackleg would go into the works without a fight'. Soon ten thousand locals gathered to support the workers. The municipal Gas Committee depended on the support of armed Dragoons from York. John Charlton's history of new unionism quotes one journalist who was living in Leeds in July when the fighting began,

The bridges were crowded with men, who had stormed Holbeck station, made their way down the lines and taken possession of them; and there they massed piles of missiles. In addition, the roofs of the buildings on either side of the road were covered with men who had also provided themselves with ammunition. As [they troops] came within range, the fire was directed with terrific force on them, all who followed. The scene that ensued simply defies description, bricks, stones, "clinkers", iron belts, sticks, etc, were hurled into the air to fall with sickening thuds and crashes upon the blacklegs and their escorts.

After three days of fighting, the municipal Gas Committee was forced to concede. According to one witness, it was Tom Maguire who had provided the crucial leadership to the movement, 'Through the troublous [sic] times of the gas-riots in the summer of 1890, he was, unseen, the general referee and head-centre, and practically I believe planned the whole thing.' At the end of the dispute, Frederick Engels gave Will Thorne a copy of Capital. But as E. P. Thompson suggests, it was Maguire who deserved the honour. The victory of the gas workers strike was Tom Maguire's finest hour.

The victory, when it came, was largely unexpected. By the third day of rioting, the physical force strategy was exhausted. A majority of trade union drew the conclusion that some form of independent labour representation was needed to prevent workers from having to fight in this desperate way again. At the victory parade, George Kinton of the Boot and Shoe Operatives announced that an association was being formed to put up working-class candidates for the council elections in November. Maguire was now to be found courting moderate trade unionists, including Kinton and even John Judge, the vice President of the Trades Council, and a man who had opposed the gas strike.

Ironically, the victorious outcome of the gas riots caused at least as many problems for the Socialist League as it would, if the movement had gone down to defeat. The socialists around Tom Maguire now turned towards an electoral strategy. Meanwhile another faction, including the anarchist H. B. Samuels, came to the opposite conclusion - that the people must be armed. The Leeds Socialist League split. Maguire wrote to fellow West Riding socialist Edward Carpenter that he planned to 'retire into a corner and write poetry'.

The events at Leeds had their parallels across Britain. The great strikes of 1888-9 had give hope to many tens of thousands of workers, and had helped people to see through the appeals of their typically Liberal bosses. But victory was followed, for workers across the country, by a series of bitter hard-fought victories, or most often clear defeats. The movement was a two-stage process, of hope followed by despair. Many activists responded by arguing that the solution was to be found by standing in elections. Socialists like Tom Maguire from Leeds could look just down the road at the events of the Manningham Mill strike which took place in Bradford in winter 1890-1. In December 1890, mill boss Samuel Lister cut wages at his plant by 30 per cent. Workers struck for five months in response, but went down to defeat. The loss of the strike convinced Ben Tillett, formerly a leader of the dockers, that the next step was to seek representation in parliament. Tillett stood for election in Bradford in 1892, and a socialist electoral party the Independent Labour Party (ILP) was established at a national conference held in the city one year on.

In August 1890, a number of Leeds socialists came together to establish a Labour Electoral League. Over the subsequent months, the Socialist League split, between socialist advocates of an electoral strategy, and anarchists calling for tactics of immediate revolt. Maguire was now uncertain of the answers. He briefly joined the Fabian society, a middle-class debating group without much roots in the region. As the news spread of moves afoot to found a new independent labour party, Maguire helped to found a branch in Leeds. A letter informed Edward Carpenter of his decision. 'You will find that this new party lifts its head all over the North. It has caught the people as I imagine the Chartist movement did … Everywhere its bent is Socialist, because Socialists are the only people who have a message for it.' In 1893 Tom Maguire attended the Bradford launching conference of the ILP. Several of the old Leeds Socialist Leaguers were to play a part in the new movement. Indeed they helped to shape the ideology of the new party, which combined elements of pure trade unionism, with ideas borrowed from Marxist socialism. Tom Mann was charged with describing What the ILP is driving at. He suggested that the party's goal was

The establishment of a state of society where living upon unearned income shall be impossible for any but the physically enfeebled; where the total work of the country shall be scientifically regulated and properly apportioned over the total number of able-bodied citizens; where class domination shall be rendered impossible by the full recognition of social, economic and sex equality ...

The above fits perfectly with the following comprehensive and important sentence from Karl Marx: 'The economical subjection of the man of labour to the monopoliser of the means of labour (that is, the source of life), lies at the bottom of the servitude in all its forms, of all misery, mental degradation and political dependence.'

In the industrial sphere, a year of stand-off (1890) was followed by several years of defeats for the workers. Worsening trade meant higher unemployment. The employers' counter-attack continued. In 1891, the shipping employers were able to organise successful anti-union lock-outs in Hull, Newcastle, Sheffield and Glasgow. The dock unions were defeated in every city, except Liverpool. Between 1890 and 1892, the gas workers' union lost half its members. The New Unions were forced backwards. Instead of recruiting large numbers of unskilled workers into general unions, they were compelled to rely on particular groups of workers in semi-skilled trades, such as the London gas workers. In a climate of defeat, the electoral strategy had many advantages. For workers dependent on municipal contracts, the election of more friendly town councillors was one obvious way to defend their jobs. People reduced their goals, to fit in with the new and harsher times.

Tom Maguire's health was destroyed by the poverty which was general in Leeds, and that overwork which was his personal contribution to the movement. By autumn 1894, Maguire could be found most often drinking in the ILP Club, telling anecdotes about his past, like an old-time activist, long past their peak. One of his later poems contains the line, 'You surely couldn't stand to see a fellow peak and die. For a poet's sometimes hungry and he's rather often dry.' In his last months, a terrible sense of coldness intruded both into his verse and even into his private correspondence with friends. Maguire wrote to Bessie Ford in January 1895, 'The poor do not like the cold because they feel it, the sick are the same, the cold touch of the dead repels us even when that body is a friend. Coldness is death.' Aged just thirty, Tom Maguire died at home in March 1895.

Strikes or Elections?

When Tom Maguire reflected on his life, he had a tendency to minimise his own contribution, suggesting that his plan had only ever been to create a small propaganda circle, whose goals may have been extraordinary, but were never likely to be achieved. In his words, 'A few of us, green and tender saplings, started a society, the simple object of which was to nationalise the inherited world. We believed that the object of life was to be happy; the place to be happy, here; the time to be happy, now; and the way to be happy, to make others so - even at the risk of making ourselves intensely miserable.' Yet during the great upturn of New Unionism the Socialist League branch was at the centre of a dozen initiatives, establishing unions of the unskilled in Leeds, Dewsbury, Batley and Huddersfield, recruiting gas stokers, dyers, malsters, curriers, furriers, and textile workers. Such an extraordinary burst of activity could not fail to have consequences. One such was the creation of rivals, not just among the town's employing class, but even within the ranks of organised labour. The existing trade unions were based on craft occupations. The leaders of the skilled trade unions voted Liberal and staffed the Leeds Trades Council. The members of these Amalgamated Societies were typically more moderate than Maguire and his friends. If there was going to be any progress towards socialism in Leeds (let alone Britain or the world), then Maguire and his friends would have to offer some alternative to the working-class Liberal politics which were supported by the existing, moderate trade unions. But how could such an approach be accomplished without playing into the hands of the moderates?

The moment when this dilemma was posed most sharply was summer 1890, in the immediate aftermath of the gas workers strike. E. P. Thompson cites an extraordinary letter which Maguire in July 1890 wrote to Edward Carpenter at Millthorpe, spelling out the reasons for the split in the Leeds branch of the Socialist League. 'There has been such a rumpus raised by a few demented Anarchists here - since the gas-riots - that it has become impossible for us to work together any longer.' Maguire went on to map out the 'two courses', between which Leeds socialists were forced to choose:

Our Anarchist friends, who were conspicuous by their absence in the gas fights, joined issue with us at once, attacked not only the League but ourselves, and finally told the people that no policy should be entertained but physical force. Now, while I believe in the use of physical force when necessary I think that it is midsummer madness to advocate it on a public platform, and it is unlikely, as it would be undesirable, for the people to resort to it until other means had been tried and found wanting. I admit the Labour Electoral move is not at all to be desired, but it seemed the next immediate step to take in order to keep the Labour union militants, and to emphasise the conflict of the workers and the employers.

The language of this letter was not informed by quotes from textual authorities, neither Marxism nor anarchist. But it expresses as well as anything in Bernstein, Kautsky or Lenin, the real dilemmas faced by socialist activists at the head of a retreating mass movement. At a certain point, even the most dynamic of strike-waves will run out of steam, and at that stage, the people who find themselves at the head of the movement, are obliged to offer leadership. The tactics they employ will be informed by strategies which they are likely to have learned, even before the strike movement began. Maguire was no different.

One sadness for Maguire was that the tactic of alliance with the Leeds Trades Council failed to come off. It should not have been such a difficult task. The same plan worked wonders in Bradford, in the aftermath of the Manningham Mills dispute. But the skilled trade unionists of Leeds were unwilling to break with the Liberal Party. The trades council had been in continuous existence for over twenty-five years, and its members had a place within the Liberal hierarchy. E. P. Thompson places some of the blame on the mistakes made by socialists themselves. In 1890, J. L. Mahon returned to Leeds, to take a leading role in the movement. Unfortunately, his methods of organising paid no heed to the local sympathies. Mahon denounced only the Liberals with spite - and was accused of taking Tory Gold as a result. Maguire was glad of the break, but watched from the sidelines as his friend frittered away the few remaining links between the ILP and the trades council. For whatever reason, the first authentic ILP councillor in Maguire's city was elected as late as 1906. Indeed, talking of sadness, if our story is to progress beyond Tom Maguire's death, it is hard to see how he could have looked with joy on Tony Blair's New Labour today.

Maguire's Marxism

Within the Second International, the delegates from Britain were seen to represent a certain trend. They were typically trade unionists, vague in their understanding of socialism. Thus the British Labour Party which emerged out of the experience of new unionism was different from its continental counterparts, in two ways. One contrast was the overwhelming dominance of the trade unions, or to be more specific, the trade union leaders. The other, linked difference was the total dominance within the party of a socialist politics that corresponded - loosely - to the politics of the SPD right in Germany. In the International, the left, right and centre, all played a part. In Britain, the forces of the left (including notably the SDF), were swamped by the right. Even the Independent Labour Party was a very 'right-wing' centre group. The formula used to justify the adherence of the Labour Party to the Second International in 1908, was that 'while not expressly accepting the proletarian class struggle, in practice the Labour Party conducts this struggle, and adopts its standpoint, inasmuch as the Party is organised independently of the bourgeois parties.' The discussion on whether or not to admit the Labour Party took place long after Maguire's death. But there is a similar approach in Frederick Engels' 1892 verdict on New Unionism:

The new unions were founded at a time when the faith in the eternity of the wages system was severely shaken; their founders and promoters were Socialists either consciously or by feeling; the masses whose adhesion gave them strength, were rough, neglected, looked down upon by the working class aristocracy; but they had this immense advantage, that their minds were virgin soil, entirely free from the inherited 'respectable' bourgeois prejudices which hampered the brains of the bettered situated 'old' unionists.

Tom Maguire's practical Marxism was precisely such 'virgin soil', in which a healthy movement could grow. But if Maguire's contribution to socialism was expressed mainly in the building of radical trade unions, then how useful is it to call him as a Marxist?

Within the Leeds Socialist League, Tom Maguire played the role of pacifier. He frequently toned down his political beliefs, to emphasise the common beliefs which were supported across the movements, by trade union activists and revolutionaries alike. In some ways, his role could be compared to that played by the thinkers of the Marxist centre in the SPD. Maguire thought that in the search for the goal of socialism, the different wings of the movement should co-operate, despite their differences. But the position of the centre was not merely one of saying that co-operation was good. It also involved a certain tactical decision, about what was good for the socialist party. Karl Kautsky and his allies argued for struggle, believing that it would tend to minimise the differences within the socialist camp. Indeed Tom Maguire made much the same point, arguing that in the fight for change the differences between socialists would tend to play themselves out.

People call themselves socialists but what they really are is just ordinary men with socialist opinions hung round, they haven't got it inside of them. Mind you, political progress is not made after the fashion of a Corydon-Phyllis dance, jigging along, so to speak, with pipes (or say, cigarettes) in our mouths, through pleasant places, with the sun shining over us. But there's the thing; we get mixed up in disputes among ourselves or about one thing and another, and we can't keep a straight line for the great thing, even if we all of us know what that is.

So one problem with Maguire's socialism is that it was so well-rooted in the tasks of the movement, that there was no space left to consider the final goal to which people were tending. This as we shall see was the sharp point of the debate between Eduard Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg. One criticism of Tom Maguire might be that he didn't even begin to think through the theoretical implications of his practical socialism. But faced with such criticism, Maguire - as ever - had the best response. In one 1892 article, he looked back fondly on the arguments in the Socialist League, before the split.

Some thought we might advantageously limit the scope of our ideal to the five continents, while directing our operations more immediately to our locality. Others were strongly of the opinion that our ideal was too narrow, and they proposed as the object of the society the internationalisation of the known and un-discovered world with a view to the eventual inter-solarisation of the planets … They entirely ignored the locality, to which, for the most part, they were comparative strangers.