Ernest Belfort Bax

Ernest Bax

Ernest Belfort Bax (born July 23, 1854 in Leamington Spa , Warwickshire , England, † November 26, 1926 in London ) was a British journalist and is considered one of the leading philosophers of British Marxism in the late Victorian era.

Life

He grew up in a non-conformist religious family. He first encountered Marxism while studying philosophy in Germany. He combined Marx's ideas with those of Immanuel Kant , Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann . Since he was particularly interested in researching the possible metaphysical and ethical effects of socialism , he described a "religion of socialism" as a means of overcoming the dichotomy between the personal and the social, but also the cognitive and the emotional. As a staunch atheist who wanted to free workers from what he saw as the moralism of the petty bourgeoisie, he saw this as a way of overcoming organized religion.

Bax moved to Berlin and worked as a journalist for the British newspaper Evening Standard . After his return to England in 1882, he became a member of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), which he left disaffected in 1885 to found the Socialist League with William Morris . After anarchists gained control over these, however, Bax went back to the SDF and became its main theorist and editor of the party newspaper " Justice ". He was against the party's participation in the Labor Representation Committee, the forerunner of the Labor Party , which on his advice left the SDF after a short membership. Even after his time as editor of Justice , Bax was a frequent writer of letters to the editor and often criticized the line of the party and the newspaper.

Marxism

For most of his life Bax believed that while economic conditions were ripe for socialism, that progress was being delayed by the lack of education of the working class. He supported Karl Kautsky towards Eduard Bernstein . However, Kautsky was little interested in what he saw as Bax's utopias and supported Theodore Rothstein's efforts to spread an orthodox Marxism in the SDF.

At first he was very anti-nationalist, but supported the British during World War I. At this point, however, he was less focused on his political work than on his career as a lawyer.

feminism

Bax was a declared anti-feminist . John Shepherd indicates that he Bax and other members of the Social Democratic Federation attributed misogynistic attitude despite feminist efforts within the SDF seemed the organization to dominate.

His views were seen by his comrades as increasingly eccentric. A well-disposed critic of his main work, TE Hulme, scoffed: "He never arrived in the Promised Land , to which his philosophy pointed, because somewhere there in its lovely valleys he saw a woman."

Web links

Literature by and about Ernest Belfort Bax in the catalog of the German National Library
Ernest Belfort Bax in the Marxists Internet Archive

Individual evidence

↑ Mark Brevir: Ernest Belfort Bax: Marxist, Idealist, and Positivist , in: Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 1993), pp. 119-135, ed. University of Pennsylvania Press, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709863
^ John Cowley: The Victorian Encounter with Marx: A Study of Ernest Belfort Bax , IB Tauris, London / New York 1993, ISBN 978-1850436010 (Description: Ernest Belfort Bax was among the most original and gifted of the first generation of Marxists in Victorian England ).
^ Stanley Pierson: Ernest Belfort Bax 1854-1926. The Encounter of Marxism and Late Victorian Culture , in: Journal of British Studies Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 39-60 (1972), Ed. Cambridge University Press
^ John Shepherd: George Lansbury: At the Heart of Old Labor. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2002, p. 39: "As a consequence, within the Federation, this attitude permitted a free reign to the misogyny of Belfort Bax and others. Their views appeared to dominate the organization, despite the pioneering feminism of SDFers Dora Montefiore, Mary Gray, and Rose Jarvis. "

personal data
SURNAME	Bax, Ernest Belfort
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	British socialist journalist
DATE OF BIRTH	July 23, 1854
PLACE OF BIRTH	Leamington Spa , Warwickshire , England
DATE OF DEATH	November 26, 1926
Place of death	London

[1] Mark Brevir: Ernest Belfort Bax: Marxist, Idealist, and Positivist , in: Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 1993), pp. 119-135, ed. University of Pennsylvania Press, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709863

[2] John Cowley: The Victorian Encounter with Marx: A Study of Ernest Belfort Bax , IB Tauris, London / New York 1993, ISBN 978-1850436010 (Description: Ernest Belfort Bax was among the most original and gifted of the first generation of Marxists in Victorian England ).

[3] Stanley Pierson: Ernest Belfort Bax 1854-1926. The Encounter of Marxism and Late Victorian Culture , in: Journal of British Studies Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 39-60 (1972), Ed. Cambridge University Press

[4] John Shepherd: George Lansbury: At the Heart of Old Labor. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2002, p. 39: "As a consequence, within the Federation, this attitude permitted a free reign to the misogyny of Belfort Bax and others. Their views appeared to dominate the organization, despite the pioneering feminism of SDFers Dora Montefiore, Mary Gray, and Rose Jarvis. "