The ‘University of the Working Class’
O
pponents of socialism have periodically attempted to undermine the plausibility of the socialist case by pointing out that some of the pioneers of the socialist movement were not people driven to become revolutionaries through an assessment of their own class interest. Although this argument is of little real import, Engels, William Morris and even Marx have received this kind of treatment, being portrayed – rightly or wrongly – as having been brought up in ‘well-todo’ families with a privileged education to match. This is not a charge that could ever seriously be laid at the door of the men and women who founded the Socialist Party of Great Britain. When the founder members broke away from the Social Democratic Federation in 1904 they were in most respects representative of the rank-and-file of that organisation. Unlike the SDF's figurehead, the wealthy old Etonian Henry Hyndman, the founder members had occupations and formal education typical of the working class of the time. A large number were skilled manual workers, including the core of the Party's most prolific speakers and writers. Jack Fitzgerald, for instance, was a bricklayer who went on to teach others his trade, Jacomb was a printer who – up until the early 1920s – designed and laid-out the Socialist Standard , Watts was a wood carver, while Anderson was a house painter. There were others though, of whom T.A. (‘Tommy’) Jackson was the most notable example, who drifted from job to job and into and out of Moses Baritz employment, something typically not unrelated to their uncompromising advocacy of Marxian socialism. What made these revolutionaries extraordinary was not just their implacable opposition to the poverty and iniquity of capitalism but their attitude to knowledge and to critical analysis. They had the keenest of senses that knowledge was power – or at least potentially so. Having no university education they were largely self-taught, prime examples of what has sometimes been called the working class 'autodidactic' tradition. Macintyre in his A Proletarian Science commented on how members of the SDF, SLP and SPGB were at the forefront of this tradition and of how – through engagement with classic texts on politics, economics, philosophy and anthropology – they searched for an understanding of the grim society around them: “It is noticeable that the intellectual development of our working-class activists began as a process of
Socialist Standard June 2004
individual discovery . . . And in which ever direction their interests lay, these autodidacts exhibited a characteristic intellectual tone: they were great respectors of fact and intellectual authority; earnest, even reverential, in their treatment of the text; and they brooked no short-cuts in the search for knowledge. Alongside this deference to literary authority, one must put the fact that it remained their education, for they defined both the purpose and the boundaries of their intellectual exploration and the books they read assumed significance in this light.” (pp.70-71) Not only did these autodidacts treat their own education with great seriousness and dedication, so, in the same manner, did they seek to transmit this knowledge to others. From the outset the Party spent much time in the training and education of its members, with classes on history, political philosophy and – above all – Marxian economics. Indeed, Fitzgerald was to claim that a key element in his own expulsion from the SDF had been that he had organised economics classes that had been conducted by workingmen like himself rather than by the Federation's leadership. Fitzgerald was among a handful of early members who had attended classes on Marxian economics conducted by Marx's son-in-law, Edward Aveling, a man who had been part of an earlier ‘impossibilist’ revolt against the reformism of the SDF when the ill-fated Socialist League was founded in the 1880s. Attendance at such education classes and immersion in relevant texts was considered a vital part of the education of socialist activists, and we reproduce an example of a typical Party education syllabus after this article. The autodidactic tradition was still visible in the SPGB long after its foundation. As the Party expanded over time so new waves of self-educated workers joined who honed their knowledge of society, together with their ability to dissect concepts and theories, in the Party's education classes. Some of these members were as good examples of the self-educated working class polymath that it is possible to find. Adolf Kohn, who was to become a mainstay of the Party as both speaker and writer until the Second World War, fed his thirst for knowledge (and that of other members) by setting up his own bookselling business,
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