Abstract

© Dr M D Magee, Contents Updated: Monday, 13 January 2014

Edmund and Ruth Frow

Edmund Frow was Manchester District Secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering and Foundry Workers’ Union. Ruth Frow was Deputy Head of a secondary school and obtained a Master’s Degree in Education with a thesis on Independent Working Class Education in South East Lancashire.

Plebs League

The 150th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx this week may well turn out to be a more genuinely universal commemoration than that of any other great figure of the past… He forms part of the living universe both of intellectuals and, through the medium of the movements and governments inspired by his ideas and those impelled by the belief in their iniquity, of vast sectors of the world’s population who have barely heard the name of any other philosopher or social scientist… His intellectual stature is recognised, with enthusiasm or reluctance—rarely with indifference—wherever there are people capable of reading books.

Times Literary Supplement, 9 May, 1968

In these terms an editorial comment was made recently on the inadequate publication of Marx’s works in English. While making full allowance for the crocodile character of the tears shed by The Times, that this comment needs to be made is the result of the failure of British Marxists and scholars to press for the full works to be made available. We must surely blame no one but ourselves. The political prejudice in publishing, the high cost of publication and the publisher’s demand for large circulation have all helped to muffle what should have been a roar.

The disastrous May election results showed that there was little understanding on the part of the labour movement of the need for basic social change and an end to the system of capitalism under which we live. The Tory-like policies of the Wilson Government were clearly rejected, allowing the true-blue-Tory policies of the Conservative Party to emerge victorious. If the movement had been armed with the basic knowledge of the principles of Marxist thought, a very different result would have been seen and the Labour abstentions would have been used to force progressive policies on the elected councillors.

Earlier socialists in the period before the first world war and during the 1920s were more far sighted than we appear to be. They took their Marxist education very seriously and spent much “blood, sweat and tears” in mastering the intricacies of economics and historical development. Thousands of working class students enrolled in the classes that were run by the Plebs League and later the National Council of Labour Colleges. In these classes they taught themselves the basic facts of life in a capitalist society and by so doing they armed themselves to play a part in the daily struggles of the workers to better their conditions and change the social order. We may question their approach at times—but we cannot fail to appreciate their intentions.

Plebs League Founded

During the ferment at Ruskin College, Oxford in 1908, when the universities authorities were trying to influence the content of the curriculum and also to obtain control of the college, a League of Plebs was formed by past and present students of the College…

…to make clear the real position of Ruskin College, to point out its weaknesses, to outline its possibilities, to demonstrate its value to the Labour Movement if definitely founded thereon, to stimulate active interest in working class education and to open out propaganda of an educational character from a working class point of view.

Plebs Magazine, I 1909

Ex-Ruskin students began forming education classes up and down the country and in the April of 1909, the dismissal of the socialist principal of the College, Dennis Hird, acted as a spur to the movement. The train of events leading to the Ruskin strike of students which followed Dennis Hird’s dismissal, clearly showed the increasing influence of Marxist ideas in the developing labour movement.

In his history of the Central Labour College, W W Craik said that the students who had arrived at Ruskin in 1908, although “socialists of one shade or another—ILPers, SDFers, Clarionites and one SDPer”—were soon made “aware that the socialism of the second year men was hewn from a more solid and durable stone than ours”. They had been studying the works of Marx and Engels in self-study classes in which it was the practice for each member of the class to be given one of the more difficult passages from Capital to explain to the rest. “Through these classes and the individual study which they involved”, Craik accounted for the knowledge and understanding of the “interrelated forces at work beneath the surface of social life” (The Central Labour College, Lawrence & Wishart, W W Craik), and therefore for their confidence and competence in meeting the confusions and conflicts which developed in the college.

The strike acted as a catalyst and Plebs League classes sprang up in many places. In the North West, Harold Kershaw, a woodworker from Rochdale and Jack Owen an engineer from Hulme, Manchester, were among the students who returned from Oxford and immediately began campaigning to set up classes of worker students who would master the basic principles of Marxist economics (The Burning Question of Education, Plebs League). Noah Ablett, the Welsh miner who later was mainly responsible for writing The Miners’ Next Step said, at the first National Meet of the Plebs, that the time had arrived when “the working class should enter the educational world to work out its own problems for itself”.

Rochdale and District Classes

Harold Kershaw began work in earnest after the first Plebs Meet. At the second Plebs Meet in 1911, he was able to report (Plebs Magazine, 3, 1911) that there were one hundred and fifty students attending the classes which were held seven times a week between October and April. Two of the winter’s students were awarded scholarships to enable them to study full time at the Labour College. This split from Ruskin, after the strike, was first housed in Oxford but soon moved to London. Classes at Rochdale, Bury, Waterfoot and Oldham had already formed themselves into a loose amalgamation calling itself the Rochdale and District Classes.

The Oldham class met on a Thursday evening. There were twenty seven students and they met weekly with the exception of Christmas and New Year Weeks. Frank Jackson, a member of the Associated Society of Engineers, who later moved to London, was the class tutor and they followed the "Economics" outline drawn up by Meredith F Titterington of the Leeds, Halifax and Bradford Stuff Dressers Association.

This outline was published in Rochdale in 1910 or 1911 by the Bury, Oldham, Radcliffe, Rochdale and Waterfoot Branch of the Central Labour College. It covers twenty one lectures for a five shilling fee. The notes for the first lecture will indicate the standard expected:

Lecture I Political Economy: Its Scope, Categories and Schools

1. Scope: production, including distribution and exchange
2. Categories: value, exchange, money, capital, wage, labour, surplus value, profit and rent
3. Schools:
   1. Ancient—Aristotle (Greece) 384-322 BC
   2. Mercantile—Stafford and Locke (England close of 16th century and beginning of 17th century)
   3. Classical—Petty, Smith, Ricardo (England) 1699, 1776, 1821
   4. Physiocrat—Boisquillebert, Sismondi (France) contemporary with Classical School.
   5. Marxian—Marx, 1860 onwards
   6. Utility—J S Mill, Jevons, B&ounl;hmBawerk, Marshall, 1860 and onwards.

• Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx, Preface and Ch 1, 2, 3, 4, of the Appendix
• Plebs Magazine, April, May, June, July, 1909
• Easy Outlines of Economic Science (Ablett)
• Political Arithmetic, Sir William Petty
• Selection of Political Economy, Robertson
• Economics of Socialism, Hyndman, Ch 7
• Wealth of Nations, Analysis, Books 1, 2 and 4, Adam Smith
• Guide to the Study of Political Economy, Cossa, historical part, Ch 1 to 7
• Marxian Economics, Untermann, Ch 13
• Landmarks of Scientific Socialism, Engels, Ch 8, Section 1.

The preamble to the outlines claimed that:

The Rochdale and District Classes form part of a provincial scheme of education, which it is intended to develop throughout the organised Labour Movement, and run in conjunction with the Central Labour College. Together with the College these classes have for their object the training of men and women for the industrial, political and social work of the organised Labour Movement.

Working class organisations were urged to affiliate and “take control of the education of their members”. The class book of the Oldham members (which survives) shows that of the twenty seven students, six were women. More than half the students achieved full attendance and the tenpenny fare of Frank Jackson from Rochdale to Oldham (return) was subscribed each week. There was a twopenny charge for each lecture which began at eight and lasted one and a half hours.

The group which organised the Oldham class was associated with the Social Democratic Party. Some of them later called themselves Anarchist-Communists and were in touch with Sylvia Pankhurst whose paper, The Workers’ Dreadnought, they used to leave in railway carriages together with copies of The Spur and Plebs. When the Communist Party was formed in Oldham at a meeting in the Temperance Hall (Chartist) in 1920, several members of the class were present (Letter from W Mawdesley). George Mearns, a moulder, Alice Smith and Albert Brooks, a railwayman,joined the newly formed Party. George Mawdsley a joiner, Alf Tattersall who worked with him at Platt Brothers, Mr Goodwin, Mr McLean and Jim Tudor did not immediately join. Alice Smith had a successful career. She was sent from the Oldham class to the Central Labour College in 1913 and on her return conducted a highly successful class in “Philosophic Logic”. She wrote articles for the Plebs Magazine from time to time and, after her marriage to J Pratt, wrote an impassioned plea which must have touched a cord in many a student breast (Plebs Magazine, 12, 1920). She admitted to having nearly wept over Joseph Dietzgen’s The Positive Outcome of Philosophy and made a telling case for a simple textbook on the subject, something the average man “can lap up with his Quaker Oats-something he can read (and understand) as he runs”. She prepared an outline for such a textbook which was agreed upon at a text book conference of the Plebs League in 1920. It does not appear to have been published.

Syndicalism

The period which saw the rapid development of classes such as that at Oldham has been characterised as “the Great Unrest”. Events during the period 1911-1914 show the organising power and influence of the Syndicalists. Syndicalism originated in France and spread to the United States of America. It also spread to Britain where its doctrine of the complete supremacy of the trade unions took the form of a series of strikes which were supposed to culminate in a General Strike in 1914. The workers were led to take action because of a considerable fall in real wages. They accepted left-wing leadership because of the failure of their elected representatives to give any convincing opposition to the policies which gave rise to such a situation.

The form which Syndicalism developed in the United States differed from the British form. There, the Syndicalists, under the leadership of Daniel de Leon, advocated a policy of one union to an industry as well as industrial action to secure political demands. Industrial Unionists in this country advocated break-away unions rather than working inside the established structure. Syndicalists and Industrial Unionists joined the Plebs League in the call for “independent working class education”. This stemmed from the understanding that all education was given in the interests of a class in society. If it was given in the interest of the ruling class, it could not be in the interest of the working class. Therefore there was a need for separate education to enable workers to play a part in the class struggle, and the content of such education should lead to an understanding of the need for economic and social change. Obviously the tutor of such classes had to be a worker because only a worker saw the worker’s point of view and the classes had to be self-supporting or supported by the Labour Movement.

Among the active workers in the Independent Working Class Education Movement were several prominent Syndicalists and Industrial Unionists. In the North-West, the most successful in his work for working class education was John Hamilton of Liverpool. During the First World War, he became Organiser of a breakaway union, The Building Workers Industrial Union. This was formed in 1914 largely as a result of the bricklayers’ and masons’ frustration following the unsuccessful strike of the building workers. The Union was short-lived. After the outbreak of the war, many of its members were imprisoned as Conscientious Objectors, conscripted into the army, or in hiding. It ended in 1916 and this gave the IWCE movement one of the best tutors and organisers it ever had. John Hamilton became a class tutor, the secretary of the Liverpool Council for Independent Working Class Education, the secretary of the Liverpool Labour College and later still, the National Chairman of the National Council of Labour Colleges. He also helped in the formation of the Communist Party in Liverpool along with Bessie and Jack Braddock, and, like them, he joined the Labour Party and became a Liverpool Councillor and Alderman.

Plebs League in World War I

During the 1914-1918 war, the classes had a struggle to keep in being. There was considerable confusion in working class ranks. Blatchford of the Clarion and Hyndman of the SDF as well as Christabel and Mrs Pankhurst immediately became supporters of the war and encouraged their followers to participate in the war effort. The pacifists in the Co-operative movement and the Independent Labour Party refused to fight and the Syndicalists who were “anti-patriotic” helped to develop the shop-stewards movement. To add to the confusion, the Trade Union leaders entered into an industrial peace agreement with the Government so that workers were unable to use “normal” channels to obtain redress of their grievances. The workers were subject to long hours and the employers seized every opportunity to whittle away the gains won during the pre-war struggles. Huge profits were made, prices shot up but wages did not rise commensurably.

The dawning realisation that their patriotism was being exploited led to the emergence of a new militant movement. The leadership of the movement rose from the ranks, because, as the Webbs put it, the trade union apparatus was now recognised as a “part of the social machinery of the state”. Many Plebs students became leaders in this movement. Among them were Frank Jackson who had tutored the Oldham class and Tom Mann, Jack Owen and Noah Ablett. On the Clyde, the Scottish Labour College was in the thick of the struggles. John McLean, the organiser of the College was one of the most active leaders and was one of the finest teachers of Marxism the movement has known. Clydeside became a huge tutorial class with sustained discussions in the factories and in the shipyards. There were huge open air meetings and demonstrations where the sale of Marxist literature assumed mass proportions. When the Government took repressive measures against the Workers’ Committee on Clydeside and deported eight of the leading Shop Stewards, the unrest spread to Sheffield, London and Liverpool with the deported Shop Stewards showing the way.

During the war, the Plebs League maintained its structure but had to accommodate itself to the war-time conditions. Rochdale, ever a pioneer in working class activity, organised four lectures on consecutive days on the subject of “An Introduction to Social Science”. These were given by W W Craik. The rest of the course was handed over to local student lecturers. Frank Jackson explains in a report in Plebs that because students were having to work overtime, classes were being held on Sunday mornings instead of Tuesday evenings. Rochdale also offered spare tutors to surrounding classes—a notable achievement at such a time. In 1917, although Harold Kershaw was called to active service, Rochdale was offering lectures on “Industrial History”, “The Materialist Conception of History”, “The Evolution of Species” and “Working Class Philosophy”. These classes were tutored by local students who gave their services. The Manchester Labour College which developed rapidly after the war helped to educate a formidable group of stalwarts, many of whom are still giving yeoman service. Among the names associated with the College were Alf Purcell, Gabriel Cohen, Ben Ainley, Bill Gee, Bonar Thompson, Sam Knight, Jack Munro, Willy Paul and Mick Jenkins. Moses Baritz who once embarrassed Hyndman in a notable encounter, (see Tommy Jackson, Solo Trumpet, page 84) was also active in the College.

Partisan Plebs

A tribute to the effectiveness of the education in such classes was given in the Report of the Industrial Unrest Commissioners for Wales and Monmouthshire in 1917. They advised that the State should provide adult education of a “broad”, “impartial” and “humanistic” character as a “corrective to all methods of study of a purely partisan character undertaken for propagandist objects”. The Commissioners commented:

Of late the workers have both widened and narrowed their outlook. Improvement of status, rises in wages, have all proved ineffective against the more obvious pressure of capitalist economy and the patent gambling in the necessities of life. This has been taken advantage of by teachers and leaders, and out of it has developed a form of class consciousness increasingly powerful and deliberate of purpose.

The workers, as a class, had, they maintained, been exploited and were being taught that as a class they must seek and win freedom. Having pointed out, with commendable insight that the workers asked for and received intensive and partial education lacking the “essential spirituality of education”, they suggested that the Government should provide facilities for the spread of education and of knowledge—“not knowledge in the narrow limited sense of equipment, but knowledge sought in the spirit of truth and pursued for its own ends”. “Plebians” rightly regarded the report as a testimonial to the effectiveness of their methods, and determined to re-double their efforts.

The positive features of Syndicalism were the advocacy of organisation by industry and a realisation of the need for social change. The negative aspects were the rejection of political class struggle and the failure to appreciate the role of the State. A series of articles in The Socialist in 1912 argued the case for and against, and this discussion continued into the postwar period when it was resolved within the ranks of the newly formed Communist Party. The trends of socialist thought were reflected in the content of the Plebs League classes. The violence of the industrial struggles of the “Great Unrest” indicated a need for a trained and disciplined trade union membership. The content of the early classes obviously sought to supply this need. The class struggle was a glaring fact. Few workers could escape participation in it and few would wish to do so because the struggle was to lead to social change and the realisation of socialism in the near future. Strikes were not only to remedy the bread and butter issues but were part of a class move forward. The subjects studied were those that would lead to a deeper understanding of this struggle and enable the student to play a more active part himself and pass his knowledge on to others with a snowball effect. The depth of study expected of the Plebs students is indicated in the “Students Outlines” published in the magazine Plebs in 1916.

This education was for the truly dedicated. It reflected the trends which went to form the Plebs League—the Marxist Socialists of the Social Democratic Federation, the break-away leftists who adopted the American version of Industrial Unionism and the Syndicalists. Taken together they formed a select group of specialised thinkers. But they shared a belief in the efficacy of education and that was the star which guided the growth of the Independent Working Class Education Movement.

The end of the war ushered in a short period of apparent prosperity. Prices rose sharply, but wages also rose. The growing realisation of the importance of the Russian Revolution sent the returning workers into the trade unions, the political parties and the Co-operative Movement. It also sent them into the rapidly expanding Plebs and Labour College classes. The workers in this period were on the offensive. In the General Election of 1918, the Labour Party entered the electoral field as a national party. Although they only gained sixty seats, the defeat of the Independent Liberals gave them the status of an official opposition. In the thirty byelections which took place between the General Election of 1918 and the summer of 1920 there was a decline of 4,500 votes for the Government and an increase of 135,000 for Labour. When in July of 1920, there was a threat of war against the struggling Soviet Union, the working class sprang into action to prevent it.

Postwar Plebs Education

The three years which saw the end of the war and the return of the young men from the prisons and the armed forces to the workshops were teeming with hope and activity. The urgency with which the enlightened young people eagerly grasped the opportunities of learning the fundamentals of the class struggle showed that they were determined to change the old moribund social order. Within the Independent Working Class Education Movement, the “young men in a hurry” wanted to move faster than the entrenched stalwarts of the prewar days were able to go. They found the detailed depth of the Labour College syllabus too cumbersome to acquire the necessary knowledge quickly. They therefore sought to change the content of the classes to bring it into acceptable “modern” terms. They also demanded text books with interpretations of the classical philosophic and economic works.

They had no time to spend years mastering the “in” language. As Alice Pratt confessed during the Textbook discussion she had often wept from selfpity in her struggle to master Joseph Dietzgen. Her sympathy went out to all those who were “taking a first nibble at its pages”. She commented that “one dose of Dietzgen makes the whole world kin”. Apart from the content of the basic courses, subjects were introduced to help the workers to participate in postwar life. J F Horrabin explained at a Conference in Manchester in 1920 that “since this is an age of imperialism, of world development and exploitation, and therefore, of ever-increasing interdependence and interrelation of nations,” it was obviously “impossible intelligently to understand present-day politics” without some knowledge of Geography. He queried whether it was possible to study either Economics or Industrial History without a background of geographical facts.

During the early 1920s the Plebs text books appeared and were discussed in the magazine. The new content called for a different approach to tutorial methods. The long twenty lecture courses was continued but short “crash” courses of six sessions or a weekend were developed. Teaching methods also changed and John Hamilton was a pioneer in the use of visual aids such as lantern slides to help in sugaring the pill of his lectures.

National Council of Labour Colleges

This development was accelerated when, after the lead given by the Amalgamated Union of Building Trades Workers in 1920, many trade unions adopted education schemes in association with the National Council of Labour Colleges. This amalgamation of the classes which sprang up after the war co-ordinated and developed the work which had to some extent been haphazard before. The impetus gained from the formation of the NCLC and the publication of text books carried the movement to what appears to be its peak in 1926. While the NCLC lived on until after the second world war, the numbers of students attending classes steadily declined and the content of the classes conducted was more in line with the “knowledge sought in the spirit of truth and pursued for its own ends”, which had been advocated by the Industrial Unrest Commissioners. It also brought the NCLC in line with other organisations such as the Workers Education Association and removed their basic reason for a separate existence.

There were, of course, other reasons for the changes in the NCLC. The fact that trades unions affiliated and provided the financial backing of the organisation in time blunted the independence of the education. He who pays the piper tends to call the tune. After 1926, the militancy of the trade union movement was temporarily lost in the confusions of Mondism and industrial peace. The boasted Plebs motto “I can promise to be candid, but not impartial” lost its force when the subject being studied had little social significance.

Another factor which militated against the continued development of independent working class education was the attitude of the newly formed Communist Party. The Party criticised the Plebs League treatment of economic and philosophical questions as abstract. They also claimed that there was no such animal as the “non-Party” Marxist. At the time there must have appeared to be a great need for inner Party discussion to resolve the difficulties inherent in setting up a coherent unified organisation from the different strands from which it was formed. Instead of injecting the necessary revolutionary content into the NCLC classes, direct Marxist-Leninist education under the direction of the Party was developed. This expression of the Party’s inexperience helped to weaken and eventually kill the independent working class education movement.

The question which now arises is, can we afford the luxury of a leisurely approach to correcting mistakes which arose in understandable and indeed forgivable circumstances forty years ago? The Municipal Election results and other phenomena such as Powellism would indicate that we cannot. Our working class is amongst the finest in the world. Its history of struggle and conflict is second to none. But an unarmed opponent is easy game to the man with the gun, and the working class without the basic understanding of the laws of social development is unarmed in the face of imperialism and incipient fascism.

The Weapon of Marxism

We can smile at the seriousness with which the stalwarts of the “Great Unrest” period tackled “particular and general commodities”, “exchange value”, “use value”, “preserved value” and “surplus value”. But contrast their understanding of the need for struggle to change society with that inculcated in the TUC’s classes on “Aspects of Industrial Psychology”, “Productivity Agreements” and “Industrial Relations”. Granted, the Communist Party still provides basic Marxist education for the development of Party members and likely recruits. But these are, unfortunately a select few and their provision is not plentiful. Marx Memorial Library makes strenuous efforts to reach out to wider sections of the London population. There may be other valiant assays on the bastions of ignorance which prop up the decaying walls of capitalism, but their influence is local and ineffectual.

The sixty-four thousand dollar question which now arises is how can we take remedial action to place the weapon of Marxism into the hands of the working class who will certainly know how to use it.

We have to look carefully at the content of our text books and see that they are written in language which is suitable for present use. In a television era we cannot expect the majority of people to plough through close written pages of reasoned argumentation and spend precious time discussing abstruse formulations. While avoiding falling into the trap of studying only aspects of theory which are directly relevant to the everyday economic issues we must try to base the studies on meaningful situations. We already have visual aids that can help to interest people in the content of a lecture in the prints and slides that can be hired from the Communist Party, King Street, This needs developing locally so that ideas can be put across in terms of the students’ past.

In addition to text books and visual aids, we can use our rich heritage of song and poetry. The young people have shown what interest there is in different forms of folk art. Why should we leave these to commercial interests to develop? Through the use of films and drama we can get ideas across which would take months of hard study in a Plebs type class. There is no shortage of ideas about how to put Marxism across once we sit down and think about it.

Which brings us to the second major question, how can we reach people who show a marked reluctance to leave the TV. If the Editorial in the Times Literary Supplement is an indication of the interest which is shown in Marxism, there must be many who would be interested in meeting to discuss how to go about it. This should not be under the aegis of the Communist Party which is a political party and not, except in the broadest sense, an educational agency. The object of the discussion or conference should be only to discuss how to enable the maximum number of people to get an introduction to the rudiments of Marxism—not to undertake any political action nor indeed to draw any political conclusions. Each students’ own experience will help him to do that and discussion with others will plant the seeds. Marxism sells itself once the basic idea is grasped. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to live in a Marxist atmosphere, with the basic tools of scientific socialist thought at our disposal, know how the everyday events fall into the pattern of our thought and we have the means, even if we do not always use them, of taking action to help forward the progress of society. If we can find the way to reach out to the working class in terms of education, they will know how to interpret these ideas into political action.

The political situation in this country today is pregnant with possibilities. Whether those possibilities are used to advance the working class along the road to socialism or are left to the ruling class to deprive the workers of hard earned crumbs from the national cake, depends largely on whether we can reach out with the message of Marxism to the people. Obviously we are not in a short time going to reach the masses, but we must find ways of educating Marxists among the ranks of the organised labour movement. It has been done before—it can be done again.

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