EDUCATION FOR EMANCIPATION :
THE MOVEMENT FOR INDEPENDENT
WORKING CLASS EDUCATION
1908-1928
Anne Phillips and Tim Putnam
"Class prejudice and ignorance of elementary economics has a firmer
grip upon the working class than ever before . . . Unfortunately,
almost the only agency is the Labour Colleges, which are imparting
instruction in false economics ."[1 ]
INTRODUCTION
In the first decades of this century hundreds of thousands of working
class militants developed a critique of capitalism and a conception of a
socialist alternative through the movement for Independent Working
Class Education (IWCE) instigated by the Plebs League . Launched in
1908 by dissident students at Ruskin College, Oxford, the movement grew
in fifteen years to comprise a national network of evening class centres
known as Labour Colleges, a residential college in London, a monthly
journal with a circulation of over 10,000, and an array of correspondence
courses, all organised and funded solely within the working class movement. Most active in the storm centres of industrial militancy, independent
working class education was cited in Royal Commissions as a major
contributing factor to the `disturbances' of the period .[2] What circumstances prompted the rapid development of this extensive network of
self-education? Why did it take the form of a broadly-based class organisation which served the whole movement as a forum for theoretical and
strategic development? How did such a mass educational programme come
to be conducted in largely Marxist terms and what was its practical political
significance?
These questions strike us as of more than antiquarian interest, although
the political world of the movement for independent working class education was a very different one from our own . The startling thing about
EDUCA TION FOR EMANCIPATION
19
this movement is the way that politically active workers created an agency
for the development of socialist ideas as a means of equipping themselves to meet difficult challenges . At a time in which leaders of workers
were the subject of numerous manoeuvres towards political incorporation
- of which initiatives for the 'education' of trade unionists were particularly
blatant-socialist ideas were taken up as an assertion of the independence
of the working class and its claim to a destiny . These ideas were combed
from various sources and developed as a means of analysing the struggles
of the day and forming class strategy . They also became the basis for a
distinctively working class view of the world which could be counterposed
to that offered to the working class through such agencies as the Workers
Educational Association . 'Education for Emancipation' meant the creation
of a proletarian intellectual culture which would allow the working class
to shrug off the distortions of 'public opinion", 'educational uplift, and
'scientific objectivity' .
Today, more than half a century later, the relationship between
socialist ideas and politics is much more complex and indirect . In part, this
is due to the increasing extent to which all areas of life have been drawn
through a process of formal education ; any way of looking at the
world which aspires to more than sub-cultural status must contend with
the academic disciplines which are the ruling bodies of what counts
as 'knowledge' . So omnipresent is this academicization that it can limit our
imagination of the ways in which socialist thought can exist in working
class politics to the idea of theory as expertise, or 'science' . This theoretical/practical division of labour is also shared by contemporary socialdemocratic and Leninist political parties, in which theory serves both as
science to inform intervention and as ideology to polarise opinion . If
'theory' and 'practice' meet in such complex political organisations, it is
in a radically different way than they met in the rise of the IWCE movement, in which militants created an intellectual culture according to their
own requirements . It is therefore equally important to enquire how the
IWCE movement lost a good part of its political vitality and intellectual
autonomy even as it consolidated its national organisation in the interwar period . Can the eclipse of the movement be traced to such decisive
moments as the General Strike and the split of the labour movement into
antagonistic Communist and Labourist wings in the late 1920's, or to more
gradual developments such as the . concentration and centralisation of
union and party power ro the extension and elaboration of formal education? If we see the conditions which undermined the movement as well as
those which encouraged its development, we will be better able to suggest
its pertinence today .
The structure of this paper is to deal with these questions in a modified
chronological order . The first section traces the emergence of the IWCE
movement out of the struggle over the content of workers' education at
Ruskin College and analyses the education it offered workers in the
context of the political crises surrounding the First World War . The second
section investigates the organisation of the movement as it grew to maturity
in the early 1920's, and the tensions which developed over its place in a
working class movement that was changing both industrially and political-
20
CAPITAL & CLASS
ly . In the third section we consider the General Strike as a political crisis
for which the IWCE movement had been preparing, but which brought its
internal contradictions to a head, and in the final section we consider the
effects of the split between Labourism and Communism on the movement
and its decline in the face of increasingly integrated industrial, political
and educational networks of control .
THE EMERGENCE OF THE MOVEMENT
The British labour movement entered a new phase at the very end of
the last century, as a response to intensifying international competition,
accelerating concentration of capitals and the increasingly national scale
and organisation of labour markets . While wages generally lagged behind
a rising cost of living, many workers faced demands for more intense
work and/or technological 'rationalisation' which undercut existing skillbased forms of organisation . While many were demoralised by this manysided 'squeeze', the difficulty of sustaining established methods of organisation provoked fresh thought . Industrially militant workers found that, as
more disputes took on a 'general' and national character, and the Board of
Trade began to intervene directly, workers' control of their own expanding
union organisations became both more important and more difficult .
Further, if the working class was to become both legislatively and administratively involved in the state, then the forms which this relation took
were quickly recognised as crucial in shaping future struggles .[3]
While they did not appear simultaneously to everyone, these were the
problems which confronted the new generation of activists in the first
years of this century . Though the problems were practical and urgent,
they called for study, as they were complex and the means to cope with
their were not generally available . This study involved an analysis of the
economic dynamics which were changing people's lives and how they
could be controlled, and reflection on the objectives and means of the
working class movement in an historical perspective . Because of their angle
of interest, many workers who wanted to study held a deep suspicion of
'expert' advice and educational `uplift' . This suspicion is understandable,
given the motives behind the increased public interest in adult education
for workers at the turn of the century . From this perspective, if the
'leaders of labour' were now to play an important part in public life, as
seemed inevitable, it ought to be a 'responsible' part . The spirit of the new
educational initiative is well captured by the articles by Albert Mansbridge
in the University Extension Journal in 1903 which led to the foundation
of the Workers Educational Association .
"The appeal of the hour to trade unionists and co-operators is that
they make political strokes, promote Bills, register protests, and send
deputations to responsible ministers . The true appeal is that they lift
themselves up through higher knowledge to higher works and higher
pleasures, which, if responded to, will inevitably bring about right and
sound action upon municipal, national, and imperial affairs ; action
brought about without conscious effort-the only effectual action ."
(Mansbridge, in Harrison, 1961, p . 263 .)
EDUCA TION FOR EMANCIPATION
21
This was education for workers which set itself against the very idea
of a working class movement . Its true home was the advanced Christian
Liberalism of late nineteenth Century Oxford dons and divines . The
assumed responsibility of the University for the preparation of the participants in British public life was mobilised by mounting unease about the
direction of labour's evident movement . Consequently, despite widespread
L.E .A. support, W.E .A. programmes had little direct impact on working
class activists before the War .[4] The educational network which workers
organised drew on the publications, activities and organisational forms of
the Clarion movement, the socialist propagandist 'parties', and even the
workingmen's clubs . Socialist propaganda encouraged study to further the
ends of the movement, not as an end in itself or a means to a higher end
divorced from industrial and political reality .[51
However, it is unlikely that the movement for independent working
class education would have emerged had it not been for the educational
initiatives of 'society', which challenged workers to provide their own
course of study as a means to realise the 'society' they desired . How
education for emancipation arose as a derivative reaction against paternalistic interventions can be seen clearly from the early history of Ruskin
College, Oxford, which became the launching point of the Plebs League .
Ruskin College had been founded in 1899 by two American philanthropists
to 'uplift' the working class, and was almost from its inception the scene
of conflicts over the nature of the education offered to its worker-students .
In its early programme, the college offered 18 correspondence courses in
social, economic and political studies and a year long residential course
which included (evolutionary) sociology, political science (philosophy),
(largely Marshallian) economics, ('Whig') English Political and Constitutional History, and Local Government, with Logic, Grammar, Bookkeeping or Arithmetic as options .[6] All these subjects were presented so
as to be 'relevant' to workers, that is, their pertinence was argued in a
general sort of way, and they were intended to have definite moral
and political implications . Many were didactic in the way that suggests
enormous condescension, an impression confirmed by the History tutor's
description of the college in Cornhil/ Magazine as a mission to the 'tidal
multitude and blind' . (Fienstein, 1970) . In part this didacticism sprang
from the problems of developing the reading and writing abilities of the
students, but this often became hopelessly confused with the problems of
initiating workers into the tutors' preconceptions .
The authority of the educators was established by the mechanical
form of the course : students were told to copy, into their notebooks, a set
of topic headings gleaned from lectures or sent through the post, and then
to list under each heading the relevant points from the set text. From
these notes they would construct periodic short essays (700-1000 words)
on general themes, such as "Force and Energy ; note their effects in evolution", and "Is morality, properly speaking, relative?" ; from the highly
directed character of the reading, it is clear that the purpose of these
essays was less to develop analytical capability than to allow self-expression
to mingle with the unfamiliar content . The tutor could then, in commenting on the essays, deal with the prejudices of the student as a lack of
understanding of the subject . The object was to get the student involved in
22
CAPITAL & CLASS
reproducing a prescribed pattern of thought .
By these means the students were being literally indoctrinated with
the views favoured by their tutors, the general tendency of which are
indicated by the set books (Marshall on Economics, Green on English
History, Howell on Trades Unions, Hobhouse on the Labour Movement,
Rowntree on Temperance, Potter on Co-op, Muirhead on Ethics, and
interestingly James on Psychology) and the course outlines . Sociology by
correspondence was organised around an evolutionary scheme which
began with matter and motion and progressed through nature to mind,
society, weeding, competition, union, force, sociability, specialisation and
knowledge, to theology, and the nature of primitive man, while Practical
Sociology was an exposition of neo-Hegelian liberalism, focussed on the
duties of citizenship . Resident students had more room for manoeuvre in
these areas because they were taught by the Principal of the College,
Dennis Hird, who while not a socialist himself, went some way towards
letting the themes of the course flow more from the interests of the
students ; but in other areas of the curriculum, staff seemed to be more
interested in 'sandpapering' the workers' rough edges . As a result, the
mixture of highly directed teaching and groups of students who were
able to reinforce each other's concerns became highly explosive .
When students began to organise over the content of the'course, their
first concern was political economy . The curriculum was supposed to be
free from any particular bias, so they were able to secure some selection
in the course readings . This rapidly got out of control . As one of the
economics tutors later stated to the governors, "The students all with one
voice chose Karl Marx . Karl Marx and nothing but Karl Marx would
please them . Well, you know, this sort of thing could not go on" . (Box 3,
NCLC .) To counter the `dogmatism' of the students a group of staff
proposed recasting the curriculum so as to replace sociology, evolution and
logic with literature, temperance and rhetoric . Hird, who was accused of
`atheism' and `socialism' in the teaching of these subjects, was himself
threatened with dismissal . The most serious accusation against him was
'disorganisation' in the governing of the college which tolerated 'indiscipline', in particular allowing the students to organise their own series of
discussion meetings and to throw them open to the public .
There was more than 'wounded academic dignity' here ; those of the
staff who had built the college endowments up to £265,000 in 1907 by
selling it to private subscribers as the source of "sound economic knowledge and true ideals" saw their whole project threatened by this kind of
activity . Behind them stood Oxford University and the W .E .A ., who had,
in 1907, issued a joint . report on the importance to the nation of educating
the leaders of the working class to a 'wide outlook' and then ensuring that
they did not use that education to rise above their background . However,
it was considered essential that working class organisations, such as trades
unions, were 'not to be the chief source of funds' in the education of their
members and prospective leaders .
By the time that the Governors of Ruskin College had finally decided
to sack the Principal entrusted by the benefactors with its creation, the
students had built the basis of an alternative organisation-the Plebs
EDUCATION FOR EMANCIPATION
23
League-which could begin to carry out Ruskin's original project of
'raising' the working class . Worker/students were indeed to return to 'their
class', as worker/tutors giving evening and Sunday instruction to others
in aspects of socialist theory . Borrowing from DeLeon's Pages from
Roman History the students aimed their efforts at strengthening the plebs
rather than the tribunes of the working class movement . The format of
education shifted to lecture and discussion sessions in which the expertise
of the tutor was more directly subject to the concerns of the students,
and the curriculum altered accordingly . Political Economy became Marx's
critique of political economy and of capitalism ; both evolutionary Sociology and Industrial History demonstrated the productive power of labour
and the possibility of advancing to a society organised around it ; psychology gave way to a materialist theory of 'human brain work' ; while the
history of the labour movement provided the ground for formulating and
evaluating strategy .
When Hird was sacked in early 1909 and the students went on strike
to demand his reinstatement, the importance of the financial control of
workers' education was dramatically underlined . Neither the strikers nor
the workingmen's representatives on the Board of the college could shake
the power of its 'independent' funding, and they were bound to lose . But
by agitating around this dramatic lesson in their localities, the League
members were able to win widespread support for independent working
class education, drawing together especially existing socialists within the
SLP, ILP and SDF (later BSP) . Within a year a workers' Ruskin was set
up under the name of the Central Labour College, the League was publishing a monthly magazine, the Plebs, and local part-time education centres,
called labour colleges, were beginning to appear around the country . The
labour college idea spread beyond the Ruskin activists and became a basis
on which socialist propagandists such as John S . Clarke of the SLP and
John Maclean of the Scottish section of the BSP could work together
in extending socialist ideas to a working class movement in ferment . The
strongest areas of labour college organisation were the same as those which
were the focus of class activity just before and during the First World War :
South Wales, industrial Scotland, Newcastle and Durham, and Lancashire .
The greatest interest in this period was shown by workers involved in
industries at the forefront of struggle : miners, railway workers and dockers, and later engineering workers . It was the traditional male working class
which provided the backbone of the early labour college activity, though
the Plebs journal later drew into the movement individuals from outside
trade union activity - intellectuals such as Raymond Postgate and Maurice
Dobb, and a significant number of husband and wife teams such as freelance journalists, Winifred and J .F . Horrabin, and Eden and Cedar Paul,
who produced a number of works on birth control and socialism .
HOW 'INDEPENDENT' WAS INDEPENDENT WORKING CLASS
EDUCATION?
Why did the idea of independent working class education meet
the needs of the movement at this point? In part, the local labour
24
CAPITAL & CLASS
colleges served as a focal meeting point for activists and politically minded
workers . The rented house or rooms were used for union and party meetings and social activities as well as classes, so the idea of the working class
as a politically awakening class was embodied in the sociology of the movement and was not just a textbook ideal .[7] The College was therefore
also a nerve centre, a place where news and ideas were transferred, at a
rank-and-file level, -from locality to locality, shop to shop, branch to
branch, and party to party . Apart from its obvious utility to organisers,
this open network suited workers who were becoming politically conscious
through disappointment in their own union leaderships who were being led
into national negotiations which could sidestep local claims and bases of
power . In this sense the labour college movement is part-and-parcel of
what is sometimes referred to as 'British Syndicalism' . The term, however,
is misleading, as is 'industrial unionism', as neither convey the struggle to
establish face-to-face democratic control over a process of socialisation of
the labour movement; a better term is 'industrial democracy , as employed
by Plebs activists Noah Ablett, Will Hay, and Will Mainwaring in
The
Miners' Next Step . Much of the working class interest in socialist ideas
which emerged in this period was focussed on the possibility of realising
such a democratic socialisation . The deep suspicion of state initiatives in
working class political education, such as represented by the W .E .A ., had
the same basis . Workers who saw their national leaderships drawn into
Lloyd George-style conciliation were likely to have reservations about
'objective' social knowledge, particularly when offered from the same
source .
Plebs
circulars emblazoned "No compromise with bourgeois
culture!" and cartoons of top-hatted capitalists stuffing the hind pockets
of university lecturers elicited an enthusiastic response .
In the first issue of
Plebs,
Noah Ablett asserts that "such a body of
men, scientifically trained to adapt themselves to the needs of workers,
with a knowledge of the economics of Labour, coupled with the ability
of speech and the pen, would naturally be expected to wield a great influence in their localities" . In what ways did the labour college education
'scientifically train' a new working class leadership? Although the IWCE
movement intended a break with 'bourgeois culture' it remained circumscribed by it in many ways, not least by the shadow of Ruskin . Although
run largely by workers for workers and scouting the notion of 'objective'
social knowledge, the labour college movement maintained both a rather
academic division of 'subjects' and a teaching format which was organised
around the transmission of knowledge . A Labour College guide for tutors
warns against lecturing for more than
45
minutes or an hour, and suggests
pausing for questions at intervals . Lecturing, of course, could be an art
form in itself, and a passive audience was not necessarily uninvolved . But
as a Manchester tutor reports, maintaining interest over a course often
exerted pressure in the direction of fewer, shorter lectures, and more discussion which arose out of questions and opinion on the subject at hand .
Sometimes the content of the course was sufficiently gripping to prod
further enquiry and the extension of similar opportunities to comrades,
but many had a more limited impact . The dependence of the courses on
the constant renewal of militants' interests shaped what was offered, but
EDUCA TION FOR EMANCIPATION
25
the 'independence' of the education from bourgeois control did not free
it from bourgeois forms .
The chief subjects of the Labour College curriculum for part-time
and full-time students alike, were largely derived from the Ruskin offering, though the content was often different . The essential subjects for
which texts were to be commissioned by a special conference in 1920
were Economics, Industrial History, the Science of Understanding, and
Economic Geography, while Trade Union History, Political Theory,
Natural Science and Literature were given subsidiary status . Economics
was usually taught on the basis of Capital with courses ranging from a
six-lecture synopsis to a 24-lecture programme which largely followed
chapter headings in Volumes I and III . A knowledge of the outlines of
Marx's Political Economy was taken for granted by members of the
Labour College movement, although this seems to have had a rather
limited application, at least in the early period . Neither contemporary
developments in the British or world economy nor a confrontation between
Marxist and bourgeois economics received much attention until the midtwenties, with a few exceptions in the pages of Plebs (including a 1920
symposium on "The High Cost of Living" which drew responses from a
wide range of contemporary analysts) . Capital seems to have been used
mostly to defy bourgeois 'common-sense' about economics, to expose
capitalism as an exploitative and historically limited system, and to hold
out the possibility of overcoming its contradictions through the development of a movement for socialism . Similar objectives were pursued by
the courses in Industrial History, which used - though without the specifically Marxist terminology-the notion of modes of production and the
antagonism between forces and relations of production to define the
onset of a new epoch . In this sense, the study of evolution was seen as
crucially important for activists, who could go on to supplementary studies
of Engels and Morgan . The purpose of the 'Science of Understanding' was
to rescue students from 'confused thinking and idealistic or religious
conceptions of the basis of 'mind' and 'thought' . Alghough based on the
works of Joseph Dietzgen, the founder of (a rather monistic) 'dialectical
materialism', the labour college classes in thinking were surprisingly
similar to analytical philosophy . Thinking was seen as a useful activity of
classification and generalisation in which we must constantly guard against
the danger of attributing an independent existence to abstraction .[8]
'Right' and 'wrong' exist only in relation to circumstances and class
position .
It might be thought from the above that the use of Marxism in the
Labour College movement was primarily as an antidote to more orthodox
conceptions. Many writers refer to the 'dull, dogmatic' Marxism of this
period, and attribute to it a fatalistic character which stifled creative
thought .[9] Oddly enought, this was a view shared by Communist Party
writers from their standpoint of scientific Leninism, and the enemies of
IWCE in the W .E .A . who were forever mocking the seedy, dogmatic
ignorance of its worker/intellectuals . We do not know how much of the
eventual demise of the Labour College movement in the face of competition from these two rivals was due to these defects . Contemporaries
26
CAPITAL & CLASS
did not seem to share this view, however, at least during the heyday of
the movement before 1928 .
When several Government Commissions stigmatised the 'narrowness'
of Labour College education in the 1910-20 period, they were only
complimenting the fusion of socialist theory and working class activity .
Far from being a mechanical fatalism which removed the necessity for
political organisation, the analysis of capitalism was used to point the way
between craft sectionalism and acquiescence in Fabian collectivism, or the
'servile state' as it was then known . Classical Marxism taught workers that
the socialisation of labour and capital in the nation-state was irresistible
and could be progressive if matched by the organised power of the working class . This crucial problem was focussed clearly in the Miners' Next
Step at the very outset of the movement and continually re-posed so that
it became the pre-occupation of the most politically active workers . It was
not a revolutionary movement in the Leninist sense, but it was the only
one which held open a possibility of socialism squarely based on the
development of present organs of struggle, and extended the definition of
the arenas of struggle so that class organisation became conceivable. The
successes of this movement were very real, although they were eventually
overcome by more powerful forces, and are still impressive over half a
century later .
The colleges did a great deal to generalise new ideas and experience
and the roundabout presentation of this as subjects of study was always
counter balanced by political evaluation . At the Central Labour College
where 24 full-time students were financed for a residential course by funds
from the N .U .R . and South Wales Miners' Federation, students took a
common course but sat exam papers set by the people who had sent them .
The 1921 Final Exam for SWMF students was :
1.
2.
Should the Triple Alliance be revived?
If not, what would you propose should substitute it, with a view to
efficient unity?
If you think it should be revived what changes of structure and policy
would you advocate in its reconstruction, from the point of view of
effectiveness?
What advantages do you anticipate are likely to accrue to the miners
from the operation of the 1920 Coal Mines Industry Act with respect
to the new system of regulating the relationship between wages and
profits? etc .
Plebs freely mixed exposition, reportage, debate, reviews, letters,
strategy and study guides . The tone was informal and devoid of jargon,
accepting differences of expertise, but aiming to create a common culture
between readers and writers . Discussion of the relevance and presentation
of the content of past issues, as well as theoretical differences, often
appeared in print. For a long time the Central College and the magazine
were the curricular mainstays of the movement, but with the creation of a
National Council of Labour Colleges in 1921, the Plebs League began to
publish a series of textbooks which were soon extended beyond the 'basic
subjects' . The movement's own innovations included Economic Geography,
EDUCA TION FOR EMANCIPATION
27
or Imperialism, which ran through several printings and was adopted as a
textbook in the Soviet Union, and a course on Modern History-Revolutionary Periods which deployed a sophisticated combination of economic
determinism with an evaluation of revolutionary outcomes in terms of
stages of class struggle and lessons for organisation . The movement also
produced a series of short pamphlets on a political-topical basis (Fascism,
Co-ops), innumerable one-off evening lectures on such subjects as "The
future of trades councils ', and "The growth and effects of trusts" and
week-end and summer schools on contemporary issues in the labour
movement .
In these ways the IWCE movement went beyond the didactic and
dogmatic approach to working class education for which it was stigmatised
by its opponents, and offered channels for the circulation of experience,
theoretical development, political debate, curricular innovation and pedagogical experiment . In reality, the contempt in which the NCLC was held
by its detractors, was due to the fact that few of its leading lights were
professional intellectuals-only 2 out of the 10 top texts were written by
graduates, and most by engineers, miners or railwaymen . The failure of
these worker/intellectuals to present their arguments in professionally
fashionable terms led to their being held up to ridicule among 'progressive'
intellectuals, an enmity that was richly returned . More seriously, constant
sniping at the 'low standards' of labour college work in the press hurt the
movement in its competition with the W .E .A . Trade Union Committee for
union affiliations which became intense during the 1920's . It underlined
the labour colleges' dependence on the direction of the working class
movement as a whole and the complex interrelations within that of class
composition and different overlapping forms of organisation . IWCE had
been created by a small group of activists and became part of the infrastructure of the labour movement between 1910 and 1920 . As this movement grew both large and unruly the state intervened massively in adult
education, largely through support for the W .E .A ., competing for influence . The movement itself also consolidated into a small number of
nationally based and professionally run organisations which manoeuvred
anxiously in relation to each other.
THE LABOUR COLLEGES AND THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT
The greatest expansion of the labour college movement occured in the
1920s, in a rhythm which followed closely the lead up to the General
Lectures
Day and Numbers
Strike .
Labour Students Students
weekend attending given to
college
taking
union
correspondence schools
classes
branches
courses
11,993
1922-23
529
etc .
90
1923-24
698
16,909
645
71
5,414
976
1924-25 1,048
25,071
105
6,154
1,125
1925-26 1,234
30,398
1,459
2,702
114
6,506
1,206
1926-27 1,201
31,635
140
7,370 1,018
1927-28 1,102
27,147 2,385
2,404
138
6,688
1,168
1928-29
931
20,520
164
7,656
1,105
1929-30
816
19,275
2,715
(Education for Emancipation, 1930)
C&C 10-C
28
CAPITAL & CLASS
But this period of expansion was also one of increasing tension ; it
became clear that the movement contained within it potentially disparate
elements which could not be held together simply by the broad slogan of
'independent working class education', or by the theoretical unity provided by its brand of Marxism . Political differences which had existed
from the formation of the Plebs League became more focussed, and often
took the form of rivalry between constituent institutions . The problems
were not just those of any expanding organisation ; the working class
politics which had produced a movement for IWCE was itself changing.
With the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920-21,
a 'party of a new type'[10] came into existence-a party which differed
radically from the pre-war socialist groupings, and most dramatically in its
confident identification with an international working class movement,
whose headquarters were in Russia . At the same time, the institutions of
what we now call the 'labour movement' were being forged . The Labour
Party was extending its support to the point where it could seriously claim
to represent labour in parliamentary politics ; the role of the T .U .C . as
national co-ordinator of trade union struggles was being strengthened, such
that in 1926 it could lead (however inadequately) the first general strike .
Communism and labourism were becoming alternatives for working class
militants, thereby forcing on IWCE choices which had hitherto been
unnecessary .
In 1921 the various local labour colleges and class centres which had
been created through the activities of the Plebs League and had existed
as branches of the Central Labour College, were brought together in the
National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC) . The object of the Plebs
League-'To further the interests of Independent Working Class Education as a partisan effort to improve the position of Labour in the present,
and ultimately to assist in the abolition of wage slavery'-involved an
explicit commitment to socialism, while that of the newly formed NCLC
was more circumspect -'the education of the workers from the working
class point of view, through the medium of Colleges, classes and public
lectures ; the co-ordination and extension of this independent working class
educational work ; the issuing of leaflets, syllabuses etc . for the assistance
of class tutors and students' . The NCLC as a national organisation came to
concentrate on national negotiations with trade unions, while the Plebs
League became a propogandist ginger group, giving a space to the NCLC in
the pages of Plebs but with editorial freedom to criticise both the Central
Labour College and the National Council .
Up till 1922 the financing of labour college work had been through
local affiliations of party and trade union branches ; from this period
onwards agreements were made with unions at a national level, with
unions paying an annual contribution for each member of their union
which would then guarantee the members free access to the evening classes
and correspondence courses . The first union to make such an agreement
was AUBTW, the building trades union, which paid 9d . a head for each of
its members and this was soon followed by the affiliation of the union
for workers in distributive trades, NUDAW, which paid 3d . a head . While
these agreements marked a great break-through for the ideas of the labour
EDUCA TION FOR EMANCIPATION
29
college movement, they . brought with them additional pressures . To
convince the unions of the continuing importance of these facilities, class
tutors had to keep records of the attendance in their classes of workers
from the affiliated unions, and propaganda to increase student numbers
had to concentrate particularly on the members of such unions . Moreover,
as the members of unions with national schemes rose and came to include
some of the more traditional craft unions, the initial commitment of the
labour college movement to industrial unionism was inevitably undermined . Courses had to be tailored to some extent to the demands of these
union members if the union congresses were to agree to continuing affiliation -Millar mentions one example of a member of the newly affiliated
union of funeral workers writing to enquire if there would be courses on
embalming[11 ] -and certainly by the late 20s the labour colleges were
offering more evening classes in Chairmanship, Public Speaking, and
Business Meeting Procedure .
In 1922 the TUC decided to take up the issue of workers' education
and develop a nationally co-ordinated scheme . This brought to a focus an
intense competition between the NCLC and the WEA-which had set up in
1919 its own body for trade union work, the Workers' Educational Trade
Union Committee-both of which were brought together in the TUC discussions . The WEA, with its financial subsidies from private individuals
and local councils, could offer cut-rate schemes and the 'advantages' of
university-trained (paid) tutors . Their appeal to the unions was based on
the argument that workers were entitled to the same quality of education
as anyone else-an attack on the self-taught, hence inferior, status of the
labour college tutors . The NCLC response was to point to the political
nature of WEA teaching-a timetable of WEA classes held in Edinburgh
in 1924-5 was marked (at Millar's request) with the political affiliation of
the lecturers ; out of 24 lecturers, 11 were known Conservatives, 3 known
Liberals, and of the remainder, 2 were suspected Conservatives, 2 suspected Liberals and only 1 a suspected Labour Party supporter .[12] The
TUC General Council however, saw these differences as relatively minor ;
they were interested in an amalgamation of Ruskin and the Central Labour
College under trade union financing, and the creation of a network of
regional committees which could co-ordinate the work of the different
educational bodies and force on them some degree of co-operation .
This initiative caused major tensions within the labour college movement . According to the objectives of the movement it should be a great
achievement to get the TUC to accept independent working class
education, and to take financial responsibility for the furthering of its
aims . But a simple takeover by the TUC could well lead ultimately to the
elimination of the Marxist basis of labour college classes, and a takeover
which involved the NCLC on equal terms with WETUC could not even
represent a commitment by the labour movement to the principles of
independent working class education . And yet even this compromise had
to be considered, given the financial problems of the Central Labour
College, and the uncertainty of continued support from the NUR and
SWMF . Moreover, if the TUC were to become more involved in education,
but get swept into the orbit of the WEA, this would entail a long-lasting
30
CAPITAL & CLASS
defeat for the principles of the labour college movement . The negotiations
with the TUC brought to the surface disagreements over the respective
weight of the residential courses over the ever-extending network of
evening classes . The TUC General Council was from the beginning primarily concerned with the future of Ruskin and the Central Labour College ;
this became even more clear in 1925 when the Countess of Sutherland
gave the unions a country lodge, and the discussions narrowed down to
ways of setting this up as the new trade union college .
Within the labour college movement the role of the residential college
had become an issue from the early twenties . For so many of the militants in the movement, working class education was integrally related to
the formation of a strong rank and file, able to control its leadership and
direct the industrial struggle towards a socialist strategy . Why should a
college which offered two-year courses to 24 fortunate trade unionists be
particularly relevant in this perspective? Already in 1921 the annual Plebs
Meet had criticised the Central Labour College for over-involvement in its
full-time educational work, and in 1922 an editorial in Plebs launched
an attack :
'The C/asses are the fundamentally important thing . A residential
college is only important in so far as it is linked up with the classes,
serves their needs and strengthens their hands . At the present time the
London Labour College can do very little in this respect . Why?
Because whenever a plea for help is made by the provincial centres,
the Governors can only reply that the finances allowed by the controlling unions are only sufficient for the work of carrying on the
College itself, and that any 'outside' activity is out of the question .'
(Plebs, September 1922 .)
The publication of such criticisms had brought together the newlyformed NCLC with the London College in an attempt to control the editorial freedom of the Plebs League activists-though the result was an initial victory for the League's freedom of action, in that a Publications Committee was set up with editorial control over such policy pronouncements
but the League was guaranteed 75% of the membership of the committee .
And while the NCLC might join together with the Governors of the
Labour College against the Plebs militants, the issue was one in which the
Central Labour College would eventually be isolated . Throughout the
1920s the residential college was competing with the local labour colleges
for union finance . By 1928 the SWMF and NUR were no longer prepared
to shoulder the burden of support for the London College, and when the
1928 Congress rejected-as too expensive-the proposals for the new trade
union financed college, the London Labour College was finally forced to
close down .
Out of this history of relations with the trade union movement, it is
possible to extract a number of different conceptions of ways in which
'independent working class education' can be said to serve the working
class . The London Labour College provided not only tutors for the evening
classes, but a large proportion of the official leadership of the trade unions
EDUCATION FOR EMANCIPATION
31
and Labour Party-the 1945 Labour Government included as Ministers four
ex-students of the college . Was the role of the movement to provide an
education in the elements of socialism for the future leadership of the
labour movement? Or was it a question of developing through the evening
classes a substantial network of socialist militants who would be active at
all levels in their unions, and capable of pursuing objectives beyond a
narrow craft unionism? Or even further than this, could the labour colleges
see their role in relation not to the labour movement as such but to the
socialist movement-as providing a meeting-place for activists defined not
simply by their different union affiliations but by their membership of the
different socialist parties?
This third vision surfaced more frequently in the activities of the Plebs
League . Until 1927, when the League members voted for complete amalgamation with the NCLC, the Plebs League remained partially autonomous
of the other two institutions of the movement, and jealously guarded their
right to criticise . While the NCLC Executive came to be dominated by
representatives of the various affiliated unions, the editorial board of the
League was elected at the annual conference and was composed of the
main contributors to the journal . As in the early years of the movement,
the activists would be drawn from all the socialist groupings of the British
left, and the structure was one which created a vision of a forum for otherwise divided socialist militants . In the mid-twenties this led the League
into discussions of itself as a potential 'left league'-an initiative which was
agreed in principle at the 1925 Plebs Meet-and as late as 1927 Raymond
Postgate returned to this possibility in a letter sent round to Plebs activists,
suggesting the League as an organisational forum for resolving the differences which threatened to split British socialists ; it could act as a
`socialist league' which, without presenting itself as an alternative party,
could re-unite British socialists within a common forum of debate .
But by the mid-1920s such aspirations were increasingly unrealistic .
Of the various socialist groups which had contributed the early militants of
the League, the BSP and SLP had been involved in the formation of the
CPGB, and the ILP was losing its identity as a clearly socialist group .
Instead of the variety of small, and necessarily propagandist groupings of
the pre-war period, the left was increasingly dominated by the CP, which
aimed to develop itself into a kind of party hitherto unknown in Britain,
which could claim to be the sole representative of the working class movement. This is not to say that the CP refused to work with other socialists
through the network of the labour colleges-on the contrary many (and
prominent) CP members were heavily involved, as tutors, students and as
members of the Plebs editorial board . But some indication of the potential
problems can be seen in the very comradely agreement drawn up by the
CP Training Department in 1923 :
'The Plebs League has for its object the training of workers into classconscious revolutionaries with the definite aim of the abolition of
wage slavery, and the CP takes note of this declaration .
'The object of the Party Training Department is the training of party
candidates in the principles and policy of the party and the methods
32
CAPITAL & CLASS
of its work and organisation . This can only be done by the Party
itself .
'These activities are complementary not antagonistic and neither
organisation will hamper the work of the other in this connection .
'The CP recognises that the Plebs League has, at present, the opportunity of gaining the support of a wider circle of the working class than
a specifically communist Party, therefore whilst reserving at all times
the right to criticise the Plebs League and the NCLC, the CP
recognises the usefulness of the class work of these bodies and will
generally assist .'[] 3]
Here the careful distinction between a party and a broadly based class
organisation, the delineation of the division of labour between them, and
the hint that the division had a merely temporary usefulness since the CP
could not 'at present' gain wide working class support, all suggest the
potential problems if the labour colleges were to diverge from the role
ascribed to them by the Party .
What was becoming clear in the 1920s was that the banner of independent working class education was not enough in the new context of
working class politics ; it could assume different and possibly contradictory
meanings . The London Labour College, the NCLC and the Plebs League
were each becoming associated-though by no means as yet identifiedwith different versions of this 'independence', and as the institutional
structures developed a more formal separation, the political conflicts
appeared as between the organisations . The London College and the NCLC
were in competition with each other for union funds, while the Plebs
League retained a critical distance from the negotiations and expressed
doubts about potential incorporation into existing trade union structures .
The original contributions of the movement as a meeting place for
socialists sat uneasily with the attempts to convince trade union officials
to part with union funds to the labour colleges rather than the WEA, and
were moreover difficult to sustain when so many of the activists who had
formed the basis of the movement were joining the CP . Communist
Party members remained heavily involved in the activities of the Leaguewhich was a source of some anxiety to members of the NCLC executive,
but also of possible conflict for themselves ; the labour college movement
was after all not just a class organisation but one which was avowedly
socialist, even Marxist, and hence liable to come into direct contradiction
with the Communist Party in its dissemination of ideas .
THE GENERAL STRIKE
The General Strike of 1926 had the effect, like most crises, of crystallising tensions which had existed in the IWCE movement for some time
and revealing them as contradictions . There are several signs in the pages of
Plebs from 1924 onwards, of the approach of a major class confrontation .
Imperialism and the History of Revolutions emerged as subjects of study
in their own right, while classics like the 'science of understanding', basic
political economy and the materialist conception of history receded into
EDUCA TION FOR EMANCIPATION
33
the background . More important still, the number of articles devoted to
conjunctural analysis and working class strategy increased considerably,
and a debate on the Miners' next step runs through every issue, including
clear predictions of the Samuel Commission ruse and the problems to be
expected from putting the case of the miners in the hands of the General
Council of the TUC . Not all Plebs or Labour College people approved of
the politicisation of the magazine, and some blamed the 'lowering of
standards' on the increasing influence of the Communist Party, whose
members on the editorial committee started from 1924 to push for the
publication in Plebs of calls to rally round the party in the coming crisis .
But reports from classes round the country showed that it was an
increasing sense of urgency among workers which was responsible for "the
dilution of theory in practice" . The defensive nature of the struggle accentuated the practical-instrumental character of the knowledge required .
There is no question that Plebs provided a great service to militants in
this period by serving as a focal point for the exchange of analysis and
information . The circulation of the journal, which rocketed to more than
10,000 per month during 1925, with untold numbers of second-hand
readers, bears this out . But the crisis also revealed that the Plebs League
was no longer the driving force in the Labour College movement . Longterm institutional manoeuvring over relations with the TUC and WEA on
the one hand, and the Labour and Communist Parties on the other was the
concern of the NCLC Executive, which had firmly established its financial
and administrative control over the colleges . There are few echoes of the
impending crisis in the records of the centre and no plans to mobilise the
colleges to play a directly political role-only a gap in normal business
for the duration of the strike, which was solidly supported, of course, by
all the resources of the movement .[14] The Plebs Meet of September
1925 resolved to push for more current affairs discussions in local colleges,
and asked its executive to consider how to emphasise the 'class struggle'
clause in its objectives and use the NCLC organisation as a basis for 'left
wing' discussions in the Labour movement . Although over 600 people
attended the meet, the League had been unable to develop a branch structure distinct from that of the colleges and really only existed as a
penumbra of the journal .
The Plebs Executive was bound to wait on developments in the NCLC
executive and at the end of 1925 these were completely focussed on
'capturing' the TUC . From that point of view the unleashing of a 'left
wing movement' would play straight into the hands of the WEA, who had
been trying to convince the General Council that the Labour College
movement was a Communist Plot . Sadly, the unity of the earlier movement had disintegrated to such an extent that many in the NCLC organisation, including longstanding Plebs League activists, were apprehensive of a
left-wing movement because they thought it would be open to manipulation by the CP, whose motives and style of operation they mistrusted . In
this context the idea of Labour Colleges as local centres of a 'left wing
movement' in the General Strike period was the last dying spasm of the
Plebs League and the phase of British working class politics in which it had
played such an important part . When the League passed away as a separate
34
CAPITAL & CLASS
body shortly after the strike, the strength of the institutional links
between the NCLC and the national organisation of a clearly socialdemocratic trade union movement and the stark choice, at the political
level, between Labourism and Communism, suddenly seemed obvious .
What was left of the League as the vanguard of socialist education in
the working class movement tore itself apart spectacularly in public controversy over the Plebs book : 'A Worker's History of the Great Strike',
which appeared early in 1927 . A collaborative effort between the veteran
Plebs journalist, editor and cartoonist Horrabin, the enthusiastic young
historian Postgate and the dynamic Ellen Wilkinson, the book drew on the
extensive Labour College network to produce the most comprehensive
account of working class organisation during the strike available at the
time, garnished with the reflection of a special Plebs conference on the
strike held just before the book went to press . A historian's delight, the
Worker's History was a political disaster . An enthusiastic tribute to
workers' capacity for self-organisation with revolutionary overtones was
juxtaposed with criticism of the General Council for failing to lead to victory, and of the miners for failing to compromise on the basis of the
Samuel memorandum .
Rushed to press without full approval of the Plebs executive, the book
was savaged by CP Plebs executive member W . Paul in the Sunday Worker
for 'serving the interest of the General Council, and in the Labour monthly
for failing to see that the "issue was not confusion as to the respective prerogatives of the miners and the TUC, but class oppositions on wage cuts",
issues which came over much more clearly in the Party's analysis of the
strike by Page Arnot .' Lansbury's Labour Weekly was most perceptive in
realising that although the book was not a good analysis of what the strike
was about, it established beyond doubt that the "miners and the left got a
sympathetic but not a revolutionary mass movement" .
This point was generally unpalatable in terms of the political polarisation of the labour movement . The Communist Party could not bear the
idea of a mass movement which was not revolutionary, and redoubled its
efforts to render itself independent of alternative left leaderships by
branding them 'reformist' and 'traitorous' to objective class interest .
Hence a vicious series of exchanges between members of the Plebs executive in the pages of the Sunday Worker which displayed the bankruptcy of
that-or any other-forum for 'left debate' . On the other hand, Millar, the
NCLC General Secretary, and others who also thought that "satisfaction in
sacrifice should not blind us that we (the Trade Union Movement) are
being forced up more and more directly against the state which acts as the
instrument of the capitalist class", saw the strike as a defeat because of the
inflexibility of the miners and the tactical weakness of the leadership as a
whole .[15] Mistrustful of both the CP and of Postgate's idealisation of
rank-and-file activity, Millar saw the strength of the strike in the organisation of hundreds of thousands of officials, and the more difficult responsibilities and problems of the Trade Union movement as calling for an "overhauling and improving of the machinery and intellectual equipment of
officials and rank and file" . While Postgate was calling in Plebs soon after
the strike for a settling of scores with the 'reformist leadership' which had
EDUCA TION FOR EMANCIPATION
35
throttled the strike, the mass movement which he had described was
evaporating . By 1928, the League had ceased to exist as a separate entity,
and Postgate was gone from the editorial board of the magazine, which
was now more concerned with the cultivation of the 'whole person' than
the weeding out of the labour leadership .
THE BREAK AWAY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
In the period before the General Strike, CP educational work had consisted primarily of what was called 'party training' . Group leaders were
recommended to form discussion groups, preferably around a factory cell,
and lead them in discussion of the distinction between the CP and other
parties (particularly the differences with the I LP), the nature of party
work within the factory, the Union movement as a whole, and the Labour
Party, and the necessity for discipline within a specifically communist
Party . The meetings would take the form of question and answer sessions,
and groups would often write in to the Communist Review with examples
of their answers to such questions as 'Why can't the working class work in
harmony with the boss?' ; the correctness of the answer might then be
assessed in the pages of Party Training Notes . Klugmann claims that systematic Party education was being seriously developed from 1922 onwards
(Klugmann, 1976, p . 335) but it is clear that it was the crisis of 1926
which produced an alternative CP educational network-though the process was a lengthy one and never involved a complete withdrawal of CP
activists from labour college work .
The Party alternative to the London Labour College-the Central
School-dates from this period, and almost immediately became a basis for
sharp recriminations against labour college teaching . The London College
was accused of 'barren lecturing' which attracted 'the pedant, the bookworm, the "superior" person', while the Central School offered opportunities for 'personal research, enquiry and mutual interrogation' and
develops 'the proletarian leadership which is essential for victory over
capitalism' (Communist Review, January 1927) . The term which each
organisation came to use to characterise the other was 'dogmatism' . The
CP was seen as dogmatic in its refusal to accept the validity of any position
which was not confirmed by the prevailing Party strategies ; the labour
college activists were seen as dogmatic in their insistence on the finer
points of the law of value in arguments with CP members .
The division of labour which had seemed acceptable in 1923 where
the labour colleges provided an education for 'class-conscious revolutionaries' and the party a training in Leninist principles of organisation, could
no longer be condoned . The labour colleges might use Marx in their
courses, might give lectures on economics which were entirely derived
from Capital, but what kind of 'marxism' was this which failed to assert
the Party as the necessary implication of these studies? In 1928 Tommy
Jackson attacked the new NCLC publication J . S . Clarke's Marxism and
History for its incompetent refutation of the bourgeois caricature of
Marxism as denying the role of ideas in history, and significantly
presented this as evidence not just of 'bad' Marxism but of potential deser-
CAPITAL & CLASS
36
tion of Marxism by the NCLC .[16] The period was approaching when, as
the
Plebs'
response to the review complained, 'Marxism' would become a
term synonymous with 'Communism' .
Theoretically this process required the formulation of a new system
of Marxism-Leninism, in which Marxism would be integrally bound up
within a 'proletarian' world-view, firmly delineated from reformist politics .
Dialectical materialism provided this system . From 1928 onwards the
Party was engaged in systematisation of its own educational work . The
Agit-Prop Department attacked the Party Training Manual for its unauthorised organisation of material-'It includes no discussion of the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism'-and recommended a radical rewriting, such
that the manual would begin with a methodological introduction (historical materialism), followed by a theoretical section (including political
economy and theory of imperialism), a historical section, and finally one
on organisation
(The Communist,
August 1928) . At this stage the CP was
moving towards a complete alternative education, and the process was
boosted by the import from the Soviet Union of its own debates on dialectical materialism . At the end of the NEP in 1927-28, the leadership had
unleashed pent-up resentment against 'bourgeois specialists' among proletarian students and left academics, in a 'cultural revolution' which cleared
the ground for direct Party intervention in education and science . Initially
this had allowed a triumph of the dialectical Deborinites over neo-positivist scientists, but subsequently the authority of Lenin, as the perfect
integration of theory and practice, philosophy and politics, was invoked
by the leadership, and dialectical materialism used to wrest control of
philosophy and thus the sciences from the philosophers .[171
By the 1930s 'dialectical materialism' had arrived, and provided (for
those in the CP who had the patience to study it-and many members continued to see it as irrelevant) a theoretical criterion for distinguishing
reformist from revolutionary politics . Within this framework, labour
college courses could no longer be used eclectically by CP cadres ; reformism was a complete system, as was revolutionary politics . Thus a review
in Labour Monthly in 1930 of a Russian textbook on political economy
could argue :
'should go a long way towards uprooting the travesty of Marxism
which is to be found in the Labour College Movement, and which consists in isolating the economics of Marx from the Marxian system as a
whole, expressing itself in the doctrinaire attitude, the insufferable
pedantry of large numbers who have passed through these classes,
culminating in the most dangerous reformist illusions .'
(Labour
Monthly, April 1930 .)
Ironically, 'dialectics' had long been a staple of the intellectual diet
of labour college students, though not in the all-embracing sense which it
came to assume within the CP . Attacks on dialectics within the pages of
Plebs-as in Eden and Cedar Paul's review of Lenin's Materialism and
Empirio-Criticism
in 1928, where they attacked 'this unhappy term dia-
lectics'-would produce a spate of letters from long-time defenders of
EDUCA TION FOR EMANCIPATION
37
Dietzgen (Plebs, May 1928) . And the Communist Party continued to contain many, like Maurice Dobb, who had regarded dialectics as at best
irrelevant from the early years of his involvement in the Plebs League . In
the 1930s the fellow-traveller who probably attracted more people into
the orbit of the Party than any other, John Strachey, totally ignored these
debates and was quite cavalier about his ignorance of philosophy . So while
'dialectics' was becoming one of the tools whereby CP intellectuals recognised reformist deviations, the arena within which it had most serious discussion among working class militants was still that provided by the labour
colleges . In 1930 for example, labour college students in Wigan were
drawn into debates over whether 'dialectics' demonstrated that Labour
Party candidates should be supported, on the grounds that this would
reveal the inadequacies of a Labour Government under capitalism . Fred
Casey had written a series of lectures on the science of understanding, with
this strategy as one of the conclusions of dialectical method ; an ex-student
of his had given classes based on these lecture notes, but as a member of
the CP, had rejected the political conclusion ; Casey appealed to the local
labour college for the disciplining of the offending tutor .[18] The incident testifies not only to the continuing role of CP activists within the
labour colleges, but to the degree of political debate which even
apparently obscure topics such as dialectical philosophy could provoke
within labour college classes .
The educational styles which characterised the two organisations in
the inter-war years differed quite radically . As the CP evolved its system
of knowledge considered appropriate to communists, the popularised
versions available to working class cadres became more like sets of
principles which the cadres inevitably had to take on trust . As an organisation of militants who already defined themselves as communists, the
Party was not subject to the same pressures to find ways of presenting the
political relevance of material . While the labour colleges had to face the
problems of convincing potentially sceptical students of the importance
of the issues discussed, the CP was less successful in this, partly no doubt,
because they could rely on a prior political commitment . The contrast is
particularly striking in the area of dialectical philosophy . Of the two popular introductions to dialectics produced in the late '30s, David Guest's
Textbook of Dialectical Materialism (from the CP) in 1939 and Edward
Conze's Introduction to Dialectical Materialism (from the NC LC) in 1936,
the version by Conze demonstrates the greater subtlety of the labour
college movement in popularisation . It sets out to demystify the terminology, by presenting the 'maxims' in common-sense language, and motivates
the issues throughout with concrete examples of how a dialectical
approach would transform political strategy . Guest's book by contrast,
provides a dialectical critique of bourgeois philosophy, and can justify
the political pertinence of the study by little more than an abstract argument from the need for a comprehensive theory . It is hard to see what
political use militants could have made of such material, or of the section
on Dialectical and Historical Materialism in Stalin's History of the CPSU,
which became required reading after its publication in English in 1939,
beyond a broad sense of history progressing through a struggle of oppo-
38
CAPITAL & CLASS
sites and a scepticism about ideals or abstract principles as compared with
proletarian experience . Whereas in labour college classes some attempt had
to be made to demonstrate the political usefulness ; in one case we found
that dialectics was used by a union official to develop a strategy of
response to Taylorist de-skilling-a labour college activist and one-time CP
member, he considered Party education in dialectics greatly inferior to
that which he had received through the labour colleges .
CONCLUSION
The crisis of the general strike, and subsequent elaboration of an alternative CP educational network, did not of itself destroy the labour
colleges . The movement continued to attract large numbers of students,
and indeed after a relative decline from its peak in the year of the general
strike, began with the mass unemployment of the 1930s to expand once
more . And though Plebs and the various CP organs were often engaged in
righteous battle with each other, individual members of the Communist
Party continued to make extensive use of the correspondence courses and
evening classes provided by the labour college movement ; texts which,
according to the journals, provided totally incompatible versions of
Marxism would be read indiscriminately by militants hungry for the knowledge which could liberate them from bourgeois ideology .
But throughout this period, the labour colleges continued to grow
closer to the TUC through the union affiliation schemes, and the range of
courses became progressively more orientated towards the instrumentalities of union education . The process was by no means a simple one as local
labour colleges varied dramatically in the nature of their work . The movement as a whole provided the main platform for the Trotskyist opposition
in the 1930s . The extent of the transformations which were taking place
within the labour college movement did not become fully apparent until
after the second world war, when the correspondence courses became the
main residue of the previous activity . In 1964 the colleges merged with the
TUC, and though the more 'political' courses were sustained for a period
by the left of Labour Party, the remnants of the labour college movements
were ultimately-and ironically-taken over by the WEA . The demand for
'no compromise with bourgeois culture' faded away into social-democracy,
to rise more recently in quite different forms .
The conditions which had made this mass movement for independent
working class education possible were clearly specific to the early decades
of the twentieth century . It arose at a time in which the British state was
explicitly tackling the task of incorporation of the working class, and
before the period in which the Labour Party was sufficiently developed to
present itself as a means whereby workers could take on the state on its
own terms . The situation which faced the working class was not, as it
might have seemed in the late nineteenth century, one in which the bourgeoisie was in disarray and the workers could confidently claim that
'objective' science was on their side ; it was on the contrary a situation in
which the bourgeoisie claimed science to themselves, and the working
class movement had to challenge the supposed objectivites of common
EDUCA TION FOR EMANCIPA TION
39
sense . Without a broadly based and securely understood perspective of
their own, workers might be fooled into accepting the necessities of capitalist society . Hence an assertion of autonomous working class knowledge
was the only sure means to establishing an uncompromised working class
politics .
This gave political impetus to the demand for autonomous working
class knowledge, but equally important was the organisational space which
existed for a 'class organisation' which was explicitly socialist . It is crucial
to an understanding of the formation of this movement that it came into
existence in the decade before the creation of the first Communist parties,
yet during the consolidation of trade unionism at a national level . Labour
colleges would be supported by the affiliations of local union branches
and local branches of the various socialist groups alike ; trade unionism and
socialist politics were not counterposed, even as different levels of activity .
That this was the case is partly attributable to the strength of the politics
of 'syndicalism' or 'industrial democracy' among the early activists, but
then it was clearly no accident that such ideas could have the influence
they did on militants from this period . For a brief space it was possible for
socialists from a variety of political allegiances and party identification to
unite together under the banner of working class autonomy, and create a
forum within which socialist debate could develop .
This forum was limited in many ways, but the political education developed was arguably superior to that offered by its twin heirs : the alter-
native CP programme created in the 1920s and the courses of the labour
colleges themselves as they fell increasingly under the direction of official
trade unionism . The Communist Party shared the Labour College insistence on the need for a specifically working class knowledge, but within
the Party this came to be seen as pre-existent in the writings of its heroes,
while within the labour colleges it was something to be created through
workers' self-education . On the other side, most trade unions-at the
official level-remained unconvinced that education involved class bias,
and were more concerned to learn the 'objective' techniques-chairmanship or business meeting procedure-which would put them on an equal
standing in negotiations with employers . What was striking in the work of
the labour colleges was the capacity for a form of education which took
serious account of the problems of presentation to non-socialist activists,
while avoiding the dangers of a narrow economism in its curriculum . It
remained overshadowed by the model presented by Ruskin, and laid itself
open to the criticism that it encouraged the pursuit of obscure knowledge
for its own sake ; what counteracted these dangers was the firm conviction
that the task was to create working class knowledge, and not to initiate
workers into the mysteries of bourgeois science . The education did not require constant justification in terms of immediate political implications
since the very act of developing a working class perspective was so clearly
a political task in itself .
The decline of the movemen' was closely associated with the split
which occurred throughout Western Europe in the 1920s, when the socialist movement divided itself into opposing paths and 'labourism' and
'communism' emerged as alternatives . We are not however presenting this
40
CAPITAL & CLASS
as yet another tale of Communist Party isolationism and consequent destruction of working class unity . As should be clear, the pressures which
were to undermine the existence of this broad class organisation came
from both the Communist Party and the Labour movement- at ,this stage
through the trade unions rather than the still infant Labour Party-and
cannot be attributed to the mistaken policies of a few socialist leaders .
Certainly it seems that political parties failed to see that part of the conditions of their own existence, not to mention that of a strong working
class movement, is the building of effective class organisations . But the
context of working class politics was changing so dramatically in the interwar years that an alternative policy pursued by the Communist Party
would not by itself have transformed the available political options . In
addition to the requirements of party and union educational strategies,
Plebs was affected by the weakening and even dispersal of many of the
urban communities which the colleges served, by the development of the
educational activities of the BBC, and by the demands of local government
responsibilities on members time . Well before the `people's war', the point
of NCLC independence had been blunted ; the disseminated left culture of
the popular front period was based on left intellectuals drawn from established national channels and not on those nurtured within the alternative
system of the Labour College movement .[19] Though the formation of
this culture involved political choice on the part of the Communist Party,
it was swimming with a very powerful tide .
The conditions which made the movement for independent working
class education will not be re-created, and it would be romantic to simply
present this experience as a lesson in the broader significance of socialist
theory which contemporary British socialism could do well to learn . But
we have long since entered a period in which that political polarisation
which undercut the vitality of the movement has lost much of its significance, not simply because of the realignment which Euro-communism
represents, but more fundamentally because of the vacuum in which all of
those institutions of working class politics now exist . The question is not
whether the Communist Party, Labour Party or TUC can most adequately
claim to represent the working class ; none of these can make out a convincing claim . And while the effect of these developments is not to recreate
the situation which faced the early Plebs activists, the parallels are perhaps
closer than has been the case for many decades .
I - OOTNOTES
The work for this article arose out of a project we embarked on in 1977 with
Jonathan Rec . We were at that time primarily interested in making sense of
the significance which writings on dialectics might have had for socialist militants in the earlier years of the twentieth century, and through this
discovered the Labour College Movement . Our main source for the labour
colleges was /'/ebs, and for the Communist Party, The Communist Review
(Liter the Communist) and Labour Monthly . We were fortunate enough to be
able to interview a number of militants from the period and would like to
thank Lawrence Daly, Dudley Ldwards, Vivien and Leslie Morton, Ray
EDUCA TION FOR EMANCIPATION
41
Watkinson and most particularly, Jock Shanley, for their help, and John
Atkins for sharing his work . None of these should be held responsible for the
views in the article ; Jonathan Ree has been so helpful he must be implicated .
We should also like to thank the CSE Education group for their comments on
an earlier version of the paper . Those interested in further work on the labour
college movement will find a rich source in the archives of the Scottish
National Library, where J . P . M . Millar, national organiser for the NCLC, has
deposited very extensive records of the movement .
Directorate of Intelligence report on revolutionary movements, 1919,
1
quoted in Challinor, 1977a, p . 261 .
2
Eg . in the Report of the Commissioners appointed to enquire into
Industrial Unrest, 1917, Cd . 8668 .
Aspects of this conjuncture are discussed in Holton, 1976, Challinor,
3
1977a, Meacham, 1978, Hinton, 1973 and Wrigley .
4
J . F . C . Harrison, 1961, who admits this, still misleadingly portrays the
WEA as the chief educational focus of the rising labour movement before
the twenties . As we explain, the eventual predominance of the WEA in a
later period was the result of a series of struggles which led to a new
phase in the history of the movement .
Propagandist groups arc discussed in Harrison, 1961, Challinor 1977a &
5
b, Holton 1976 .
The discussion of Ruskin education is chiefly based on Fiensteirl, 1970,
6
Craik, 1964 and Box 3, NCLC papers, Scottish National Library .
Sec for example the records of the Manchester Labour College, Box 71,
7
NCLC papers, Scottish National Library .
For a more detailed discussion of the significance of Dietzgen's ideas in
8
the curriculum of the labour colleges, see Phillips and Putnam, 'The
Scientific Education of the Proletariat in Transition', papers for CSE
Annual Conference, 1978 .
See for example, Challinor, 1977b, postscript .
9
10 'When I first met the work of the CP, what an enormous difference there
was between the old type of political party and the outlook, organisation
and activity of the "party of the new type" .' Maurice Dobb, 1940,
quoted in Dewar, 1976, p . 21 .
11 J . P . M . Millar's notes on B . W . Pashley, Box 20 (1), NCLC papers,
Scottish National Library .
12 Box 21 (1), NCLC papers Scottish National Library .
13 Box 20 (4) NCLC papers, Scottish National Library .
14 The analysis of the NCLC during the General Strike is based on issues of
Plebs from the period, and Boxes 1, 8, 16, NCLC papers, Scottish
National Library .
15 Correspondence and reviews on A Worker's History of the Great Strike,
Box 29, NCLC papers, Scottish National Library .
16 Reviewed by Tommy Jackson, Sunday Worker, 8th January 1928 .
J . P. M . Millar responded with a letter to the Sunday Worker . 19th
February 1928, Plebs February 1928 and March 1928 .
17 Various aspects of this are discussed in S . Fitzpatrick (ed), 1978 .
18 Box 38 (2), Casey papers, NCLC papers, Scottish National Library .
19 How Lancelot Hogben and Hyman Levy, working class scientists who
were associated with the NCLC in the 1920s were integrated into this
culture of left intellectuals is described sensitively in Werskey, 1978 .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Challinor, R ., 1977a, The Origins
Challinor, R ., 1977b, John S.
London .
of British Bolshevism, London .
Clarke, Parliamentarian, Poet, Lion-tamer,
42
CAPITAL & CLASS
Clarke, J . S ., 1928, Marxism and History, NCLC, London .
Coates, K ., (ed), 1974, Democracy in the Mines, London (contains Miners'
Next Step) .
Conze, E ., 1936, Introduction to Dialectical Materialism, NCLC, London .
Craik, W, 1964, The Central Labour College 1909-29, London .
Dewar, H ., 1976, Communist Politics in Britain : The CPGB from its Origins
to the Second World War, London .
Dietzgen, J ., 1917, Philosophical Essays, USA .
Education for Emancipation, 1930, NCLC, London .
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National Library .
Francis, H ., 1976, 'Origin of the South Wales Miners Library', History Workshop,
2.
Guest, D ., 1939, Textbook of Dialectical Materialism, London .
Hamilton, I . W ., 1971, 'The Plebs League and the Labour College Movement'
unpublished MA thesis, University of Warwick .
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Hinton, J ., 1973, The First Shop Stewards' Movement, London .
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I.
F., Postg
Horrabin, J . F . and W ., 1924, Working Class Education, NCLC, London .
Horrabin, J . F ., Postgate, R . and Wilkinson, E ., 1927, A Worker's History of
the Great Strike, NCLC, London .
Jackson, T . A ., 1936, Dialectics, London .
Jackson, T . A ., 1953, Solo Trumphet, London .
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Class Culture, London .
Kendall, W ., 1969, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-21, London .
Klugmann, J ., 1976 (2nd ed .) History of the Communist Party of Great
Britain, Vol . 1, London .
Meachem, S ., 1978, A Life Apart, London .
Simon, B ., 1965, Education and the Labour Movement, 1870-1918, London .
Thompson, P ., 1975, The Edwardian, London .
Werskey, G ., 1978, The Invisible College, London .
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