Social Democratic Federation
사회민주연맹 (영국)
Britain’s first socialist party, founded by H. M. Hyndman in 1881. Called at first the Democratic Federation, it took its new name in 1884 on adopting an explicitly socialist programme. William Morris and Eleanor Marx were among its members, and in 1911 it merged with other radical groups into the Marxist British Socialist Party.
In depth
Hyndman read Marx’s Communist Manifesto in French translation in 1880 and founded the Democratic Federation in London. His England for All, circulated among the delegates, paraphrased Capital without credit, so that Marx broke with him and Engels shared the distaste. Renamed the Social Democratic Federation in 1884, the party called for a 48-hour week, the abolition of child labour, free, compulsory and secular education, equality for women and the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange by a democratic state.
Hyndman dominated the party by paying its expenses and the losses of its weekly Justice; executive members who resented him censured him in December 1884 and walked out to found the Socialist League. The socialist Edward Carpenter, who had joined in 1883, left with Morris. The federation sent two members to the founding of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900. After defections of its right and left wings early in the twentieth century it continued from 1911 to 1920 in the British Socialist Party.