Published by Lawrence and Wishart in 2015, 176 pages. Paperback (N6889)
Brand New Book
From the rear side cover: He was the founder of the Labour Party; a pioneer trade unionist; a campaigner for women's rights; and the first working man to be elected to Parliament.
From Serfdom to Socialism stands both as the founding document of the Labour Party and as the fullest exposition of Hardie's political thought. Unlike the majority of his works, it deals with core ideas and fundamental principles; and it was a seminal text for the first generation of Labour Party activists.
The book draws together into a coherent and explicitly Socialist whole Hardie's - often disparate - ideas on history, religion, women's rights, and local and national government. The book has been republished to mark the centenary of Hardie's death, and to make once more available a text that can be seen as his political testament. In signalling the arrival of the Labour Party on the national stage, and defining all that it stood for, this book was to change the political landscape of Britain forever. Contents include:
Municipal Socialism
Socialism and the State
Socialism and Christianity
Socialism and the Worker
Socialism and the Woman Question
From Serfdom to Socialism
As James Maxton put it, Keir Hardie was the epitome of Socialism, 'the British expression of a world-wide movement': 'France had her Jaures, Germany her Bebel and Liebknecht, Austria her Victor Adler, Russia her Lenin. Britain produced, and continues to produce, men to carry on the struggle of the poor, but no one who more personifies the spirit of that struggle than the miner from the coalfields of Lanarkshire'.