11 November 2008: Belfort Bax and Henry Morton Stanley revisited

Many thanks indeed to a correspondent James Heartfield who was caused me to reconsider some of the language of the piece I wrote below on HM Stanley and his treatment at the hands of the left. James has sent me a link to the relevant passages of Hyndman's autobiography in which he recounts with pleasure his first meetings with Stanley in the 1870s, and his determination to expose Stanley as a murderer, which he did by proroposing a vote of censure upon Stanley at the Royal Geographical Society. There is something equivocal about the passages from Hyndman; this is not a simon-pure incident of socialist virtue. Yet on balance, I'm glad that he saw the problem. And I'm happy to acknowledge that my comments on Hyndman below are not the full story.

16 October 2005: Belfort Bax and Henry Morton Stanley

There is an old canard that all socialists in the era of Classical Marxism (i.e. between about 1883 and about 1917) regarded European imperialism as a something neutral or even to be welcomed. There were some who did: Eduard Bernstein in Germany, H. M. Hyndman in Britain. But many, perhaps the majority, did not. A friend Ted Crawford recently sent me the following two short articles by Belfort Bax, a British Marxist with his own many weaknesses (including a contempt for women's liberation) but one or two strengths. Some further context is required: Stanley, the man who had 'discovered' the Congo for the Belgian King Leopold returned to England, where he was elected with combined Liberal and Conservative backing to the House of Commons. But, as Bax reports, with some satisfaction, Stanley was removed in 1892. The pieces, from the front page of the Social Democratic Federation magazine Justice, also take a notable stab at the SDF's founder Hyndman, who had shown a certain fondness for Stanley. Bax, and probably most SDF branches, were on the other side: