Engels’ original sin? Mike Macnair reviews 'Marx, Engels and modern British socialism: the political thought of HM Hyndman, EB Bax and William Morris' by Seamus Flaherty British socialism has a history before the founding of the Labour Party in 1900 (or, for that matter, before the 1918 extension of the franchise allowed Labour to break through into double figures in percentage support). This history was one of small groups, single-issue campaigns, fairly weak trade unions and miscellaneous intellectual influencers. It issued out of the heavy defeats of Chartism, and of the European revolutions of 1848. In that sense the history of socialism between the defeat of Chartism and the rise of the Labour Party has some limited similarities to the left politics of our own time - also one of small groups, single-issue campaigns, weak trade unions and so on, and also issuing out of a very serious defeat for left projects: not just the fall of the Soviet bloc, but also the abandonment of the European social democratic compromise, which turns out to have been a temporary geopolitical artefact of the ‘containment’ of communism.