England for All. Dedicated to the Democratic and Working Men's Clubs of Great Britain and Ireland.

[MARX (Karl).] & HYNDMAN (Henry Mayers).

Date d'édition : 1881

A propos de cet article

First edition. 8vo. [iii]-vi, [2], 194 pp., lacking the half title. Original blue embossed cloth, front cover lettered in gilt (extremities rubbed and bumped, faint diagonal abrasion and small white stain to front cover, front and rear free endpapers crudely excised). London, Gilbert & Rivington.  Inscribed by Hyndman 'With the author's compliments' in black ink to the head of the title page.  Arguably the first partial appearance of Das Kapital in Britain, with Chapters Two ('Labour') and Three ('Capital') containing substantial plagiarism from Marx's great work.  The first full English translation of the first volume of Das Kapital was not published until 1887, but various partial translations and summaries had been printed earlier, the majority of which appeared in the United States owing to the strong presence of German migrants in New York and the East Coast who were involved in the First International. The very first of these was printed in 1872 in the form of a broadsheet published by the New York section of the First International containing a single passage on the 'Normal Working Day' from page 201 of Das Kapital. This was followed by a 'popular sketch' of Kapital again published New York, serialised in the periodical The Socialist (renamed Labor Standard during publication) across thirteen instalments between May and August 1876. The Labor Standard then serialised an English translation of Johann Most's abridgement of Kapital, originally published in German in 1873 and revised by Marx and Engels themselves in a second edition published in 1876. Most's abridgement was translated by Otto Weydemeyer and serialised across ten issues of the Labor Standard between December 1877 to March 1878 under the title "Extracts from the 'Capital' of Karl Marx" and published in pamphlet form in New Jersey circa 1878. Despite this relative flurry of English partial translations and abridgements of Kapital published in the United States, the first direct partial translation from Kapital to be published in Britain did not appear until 1883 in the form of two short extracts printed in the magazine To-Day: a Monthly Gathering of Bold Thoughts under the editorship of Ernest Belfort Bax and James Leigh Joynes. The first of the two extracts consisted of several pages from Chapter 23 under the title 'The Serfdom of Work', translated from Joseph Roy's French edition of 1872, and the second contained several sections of Chapter 10 titled 'The Lordship of Wealth', translated from the original German. As such England for All, published two years earlier in 1881, represented the first major presentation to the British public of the ideas contained within Das Kapital and the plagiarism in Chapters Two and Three ensure its status as the first partial appearance of Kapital in Britain.  England for All was written by the British socialist Henry Mayers Hyndman (1842-1921) as the programme for the founding conference of the Democratic Federation, Britain's first ever organised socialist political party, founded by Hyndman in June 1881. "A product of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, a sometime batsman for Sussex County Cricket Club, Hyndman was said to have adopted socialism 'out of spite against the world because he was not included in the Cambridge eleven'. He never shed the trappings of his class, often appearing before left-wing audiences in a frock-coat and silk top hat. His politics, too, were de haut en bas: the proletariat could not be freed by the workers themselves but only by 'those who are born into a different position and are trained to use their faculties in early life'. And yet he convinced himself (if no one else) that he was the reddest and hottest radical in town" (Wheen, p. 370). Hyndman had read Joseph Roy's French translation of Das Kapital in early 1880 and subsequently bombarded Marx with so many extravagant tributes that he eventually felt obliged to meet him. "Although Hyndman claimed that he was 'eager to learn', according t.

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: England for All. Dedicated to the Democratic and Working Men's Clubs of Great Britain and Ireland.
• Date de parution: 1881
• Reliure: Couverture souple
• Édition: Edition originale