Showing posts with label Socialist League. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Socialist League. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

The House of Twenty Thousand Books by Sasha Abramsky (New York Review Books 2015)




What Chimen did do, though, was pen a series of memoranda about how he had acquired some of his rarest prizes. He wrote, for example, about how, in the early 1950s, he had managed to buy William Morris’s complete collection of the Socialist League’s journal, The Commonweal, along with the wooden box, with a rexine cover dyed blue and lined with a white felt like material, that Morris himself had constructed to house a 1539 Bible, and in which, ultimately, he kept his copies of the revolutionary paper. The pages of the publication—its words printed in double columns originally on a monthly basis, then later weekly, from 1886 until 1895, and filled with the revolutionary musings of Morris, Marx’s daughter Eleanor, and other radical luminaries of the late-Victorian years—had passed from Morris to his close friend, the typographer Emery Walker; from Walker to his daughter and from her to a poet named Norman Hidson. Chimen eventually bought it from Hidden for £50. And there they stayed, in their Bible box, high on a wooden shelf in the upstairs hallway at 5 Hillway, for more than half a century.

Those pages were some of Chimen’s most treasured possessions, their crinkly texture and age-browned color conjuring images of the cultured, tea-drinking revolutionaries who had made up Morris’s coterie. I imagine that, in many ways, Chimen saw himself in their stories. The front-page manifesto in The Commonweal’s first issue, sold to readers for one penny in February 1886 and signed by the twenty-three founders of the Socialist League, put the mission simply: “We come before you as a body advocating the principles of Revolutionary International Socialism; that is, we seek a change in the basis of Society—a change which would destroy the distinctions of classes and nationalities.” On May Day the following year, the date on which it was announced that the paper would be published weekly, Morris and his friend Ernest Belfort Bax wrote an editorial: “We are but few, as all those who stand by principles must be until inevitable necessity forces the world to practise those principles. We are few, and have our own work to do, which no one but ourselves can do, and every atom of intelligence and energy that there is amongst us will be needed for that work."

Saturday, August 02, 2008

Belfort Bax and the "Ethics of Socialism"

I've decided to repost the Socialist Thinkers Series on the blog via mediafire filesharing service. Same deal as the recently reposted audio lecture, 'The Historical Place of the SPGB'; a lot of the old ZShare links are dead and I much prefer uploading mp3s via mediafire. Less hassle all round.

I won't mess you about with the whole posting one lecture a day on the blog like I did with Hardy's economics lectures. If I've got the talks on the computer, I'll repost them as quickly as I can.

There's no rhyme or reason as to why I've opted to post the Belfort Bax talk first, other than the fact it is the closest talk to hand.

For more background info on Bax and the talk, I've previously blurbed about both over here.


First Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: Belfort Bax and the "Ethics of Socialism"

FILE NAME: 02 Belfort Bax and the Ethics of Socialism Part 1.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~59.47 megabytes

LENGTH:1:04:33

Second Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: Belfort Bax and the "Ethics of Socialism"

FILE NAME: 01 Belfort Bax and the Ethics of Socialism part 2.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~41.88 megabytes

LENGTH: 56:01

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Belfort Bax and the "Ethics of Socialism"

Down to the final three talks in the 1982 'Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made' lecture series. Once again, the speaker/lecturer is Steve Coleman, and this time the socialist thinker under discussion is Ernest Belfort Bax.

Down the years, Bax is someone who has been pretty much written out of the history of the nineteenth century British Socialist Movement.

Whilst Hyndman is always on hand to take on the role of the Victorian villain for the failure of the Marxist Left in Britain for not fully integrating into the wider Labour Movement, and William Morris gets rediscovered every generation via a new biography and/or a new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bax, who was a comparable heavyweight figure in the Social Democratic Federation in the 1880s and was a major player - alongside Morris, Aveling and Eleanor Marx - in the Socialist League split from the SDF in 1885, if he is known at all, is best known these days for his virulent anti-feminism in the latter years of his political life, and his capitulation to British chauvinism at the outbreak of the First World War.

In recent years, Old Skool Trotskyist, Ted Crawford, (Officer Class), has done sterling work in creating a Bax archive on the Marxist Internet Archive which is comparable to many of the better known socialist writers on the website. And more background on Bax is available via Ted's autobiographical sketch on the Marxist Internet Archive website.


First Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: Belfort Bax and the "Ethics of Socialism"

FILE NAME: 02 Belfort Bax and the Ethics of Socialism Part 1.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~59.47 megabytes

LENGTH:1:04:33

Second Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: Belfort Bax and the "Ethics of Socialism"

FILE NAME: 01 Belfort Bax and the Ethics of Socialism part 2.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~41.88 megabytes

LENGTH: 56:01

Further Reading on Ernest Belfort Bax:

  • Bax on the Marxist Internet Archive
  • From the August 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard: Eleanor Marx, Belfort Bax and “the Woman Question”