In 1890, on London's first May Day march, the capital was gridlocked from dawn as more than 200,000 dockers, gasworkers, and radicals processed from Victoria Embankment to Hyde Park. At their front was the co-author of the Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels. "I was on platform 4," he recalled, "and could only see part of the crowd, but it was one vast sea of faces, as far as the eye could reach." It was a moment full of socialist promise, but also tinged with sadness at the absence of his old comrade Karl. "What wouldn't I give for Marx to have witnessed this awakening, he who, on this self same English soil, was alive to the minutest symptom!"

When the May Day march assembles at the radical crucible of Clerkenwell Green, it will be lucky to muster a few hundred. Even now – with capitalism in crisis, plants closing, unemployment rising, and a broader, generational rejection of "free-market fundamentalism" – British communism lacks a critical force.

By contrast, the last months have seen a remarkable reawakening of socialist sentiment in mainland Europe, with sales of Das Kapital soaring. And in Japan this week, the Communist party announced that its membership had rocketed to more than 410,000, boosted by a growing popularity among the under-30s.

All of which begs the May Day conundrum: why was there no Marxism in Britain? Both Marx and Engels spent the better part of their lives here, pamphleteering and electioneering, trying to organise the workers and accelerate the revolution. But it was abroad – in Germany, France, Italy and even America – where their ideas gained traction and Marxist parties prospered.

Historians have long emphasised economics and sociology as the insurmountable obstacles. Ross McKibbin has pointed to the lack of collectivism among an English working class employed, for the most part, in small firms, and a service sector with not enough antagonism towards the boss class. Furthermore, there was a traditional radical English hostility towards collectivism and a rich civil society of clubs and institutes not overly seduced by continental communism.

But politics also mattered when it came to the failings of a mass, working-class Marxist party in Britain. The hidden truth is that Engels bears a heavy responsibility. After Marx's death in 1883, "The General", as he was known, was in charge and it wasa disastrous series of decisions on his behalf which crippled UK communism to this day.

Most debilitating was Engels's inability to get on with anyone. He could not forgive Henry Hyndman, the leader of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation, for inspiring G20-style riots in the West End and thereby equating "socialism with looting in the minds of the bourgeois public". The Fabians were even worse: "A dilettante lot of egregiously conceited mutual admirers." Engels invested some hope in William Morris, as a result of a shared enthusiasm for Old Norse mythology. But when Morris flirted with anarchism, Engels expelled him as "a sentimental dreamer pure and simple". And as for poor Keir Hardie – "a cunning, crafty Scot, a Pecksniff and arch-intriguer, but too ­cunning, ­perhaps, and too vain".

Such hostility would have been understandable if Engels had had an ­outstanding candidate to lead the movement. Unfortunately, he anointed Edward Aveling – a brilliant philosopher and the lover of Marx's daughter Eleanor, but someone intensely disliked in socialist circles as a philanderer and thief with an infamously low character. Resentful at Engels's attempts to "foist" the distrusted Aveling "as a leader upon the English Socialist and Labour movement", activists shunned Engels and the Marxist influence over the political direction and ideology of British socialism diminished. Right from its birth, communism was denied an effective political voice in the UK and it has never recovered.

So as today's rally hears from the Cuban ambassador and messages of solidarity from workers' parties across the world, British activists might like to ponder the awkward fact that part of the reason why there is no Marxism in Britain is because Marx and Engels actually lived here.