Ernest Belfort Bax (23.7.1854-26.11.1925) was born at Leamington of non-Conformist parents, was a barrister and was an important propagandist and historian. He is important as the first source through which many of the Marxist and materialist ideas of history were disseminated through the English speaking world. Marx noted his efforts with approval in a letter to Sorge. He studied music at the Stuttgart Conservatoire (his nephew was Arnold Bax the composer) and he had been a music critic with Bernard Shaw, whom he knew well and is named as a philosopher by Shaw in the prologue to Major Barbara.
He took part in the foundation of the Social Democratic Federation and collaborated in its organ, Justice, and in the monthly, To-Day, which he first tried to run independently but, owing to lack of funds, had to make over to Hyndman in 1884. He broke with Hyndman at the end of 1884 and together with Morris and Eleanor Marx etc, helped to form the Socialist League, which, however, later fell under anarchist influence. He went back to the SDF in 1889 and stayed with Hyndman thereafter.
After the death of Morris his increasingly eccentric views about feminism came to the fore though he had a high opinion of ‘Fräulein Luxemburg’ as appears in a polemic with Bernstein in Justice in 1896 on the Colonial question where he had an excellent position. Finally, during the First World War he went over to chauvinist positions seeing the main threat to his rather romanticised Republican France in the anti-democratic and aristocratic Junkers of Germany. He mourned Karl Liebknecht and denounced Noske and Scheidmann as reactionaries in his autobiography (1918) and his memorial biography was written by a member of Hyndman’s surviving but tiny rump organisation.
See Letter From Marx to Sorge, 15 December, 1881
Reminiscences and Reflexions of a Mid and late Victorian, Belfort Bax, Allen and Unwin, 1918, reprinted by Kelley (New York 1967)
Robert Arch, E.B. Bax, Thinker and Pioneer, (1927)) Hyndman Literary Committee, Hyndman Club and Institute, 54 Colebroke Row, N1, [24 pages]
Robert Arch was the pseudonym of Archibald Harold Mann Robertson.
Last updated on 6.8.2003