Opponents 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 employment, something typically not unrelated to their uncompromising advocacy of Marxian socialism.
Moses Baritx
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
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,
importing socialist classics from abroad that were
otherwise unavailable to members, such as those
published by the Charles H. Kerr company in Chicago.
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Moses Baritz, from Manchester, a fearsome Party speaker
and one of its most colourful characters, travelled across
the world spreading the socialist message to other
English-speaking countries in North America and the
southern hemisphere, becoming a recognised expert on
classical music, eventually broadcasting on BBC radio and
writing for the Manchester Guardian.
Other autodidacts in the Party had their lifetime
pursuit of knowledge immortalised by the capitalist press:
Gilbert McClatchie (‘Gilmac’) had an impoverished early
upbringing in Ireland before emigrating to Britain and
taking a job as a book-keeper among other things, being
best known for his knowledgeable historical and
philosophical articles in the Socialist Standard and his
writing of Party pamphlets; on his death he was recognised
by the Times for his contribution to political thought. No
less an autodidact was Ted Kersley, who spent part of his
childhood in an orphanage and had little by way of any
formal education, but became an expert art dealer,
featuring in one of the finest radio broadcasts of its kind
called “The Art Trade Runner”. He received the same
accolade from the Times as Gilmac, though on this
occasion his decades of activity as an SPGB propagandist
went curiously unmentioned.
In most respects this autodidactic tradition was just as
apparent among the large number of new members
attracted to the Party in the ‘hungry thirties’, and then the
period during and just after the Second World War, as it
had been among the founder members. The ebullient tyros
who joined the Party at this time were less likely to be in
gainful employment than the Party's founders because of
the effects of the depression, but their thirst for
knowledge was no less. When not scratching around
trying to eke out a living many spent their time
productively elsewhere – in libraries, education classes or
anywhere else that was warm, cheap and lent itself to
mental stimulation. In writing of autodidact and one-time
SPGB member Harold Walsby, the sociologist Peter
Sheppard described this phenomenon well enough:
“Until about the middle of [the twentieth] century
alternative arenas [to the universities] did exist,
sometimes if perhaps briefly eclipsing the universities
in brilliance. Probably the most enduring was that
provided by the little nonconformist groups of the
extreme Left - anarchists, dissident Marxists and
others who were energetically active from about 1880
until the rise of the New Left in the 1950s, a
movement that was, or soon became, firmly located in
the universities. In the 1930s and 1940s, anti-
Establishment politics was located in meeting-halls, in
and around the outdoor speaking-grounds, and in cafes
such as those of the side streets of Soho . . . A world
in which brilliant, down-at-heel intellectuals and
Bohemians mingled with prostitutes and petty crooks,
and which fostered complex and passionate debate
and nurtured polemical powers, [a climate which]
sprang into being for a short but heady time”.
(www.gwiep.net/site/pshwit.html)
Until the 1940s very few Party members had the
opportunity to attend university (disparagingly described
by some in the SPGB as capitalism’s “education factories”).
Frank Evans, who had an economics degree and Hardy,
who was something of a protégé of Professor Edwin
Cannan at the London School of Economics before
eventually becoming chief research officer for the Post
Office workers’ union, were notable exceptions. A handful
of members after the Second World War attended the
London School of Economics and other Higher Education
institutions – mainly as mature students – but from the
1960s and 70s onwards the situation began to change
more noticeably.
Technical progress under capitalism and the growth of
productivity associated with it led to a decline in the
number of unskilled and semi-skilled workers demanded
by the system and a commensurate growth in the demand
for workers with highly developed technical skills, such as
engineers, scientists and researchers. Parallel with this
went the growth of the administrative apparatus of
capitalism – the civil service, local government, the health
service and of course, the education system needed to
produce such workers, all needing developed specialist
talents but also the type of transferable skills supposedly
provided by a university education.
The expansion of Higher Education necessitated by
these developments led to a change in the composition of
the Party’s members that was entirely reflective of the
wider changes in capitalist society. Even then, those with a
developed educational background have typically become
socialists despite their formal education rather than
because of it and many are those who claim to have learnt
more of worth about society inside the SPGB than
outside it.
Perhaps today, the specialisation that characterised the
knowledge of earlier Party members is not as pronounced
as it was in the days when the Party would wheel out a
Fitzgerald, Hardy or Goldstein to lock horns with aspirant
politicians or pious academics on the finer points of
economic theory. Now, the knowledge of members is
probably more eclectic than it was, the product of wider
reading and some advancements in knowledge associated
with the growth of disciplines like computer studies and
environmental science that were previously unheard of.
But the underlying Marxist education of members has still
been largely the product of the desire of individual men
and women to make sense of the world around them,
seeking out a holistic and coherent worldview which is
absent from university curricula. In this, the Party, with its
reliance on formal definitions, the application of logic, and
its evaluation of world events over a century, still has an
important part to play as a repository of knowledge,
experience and analysis of capitalism. This is why, no doubt,
more than one sage has commented that the SPGB has
been “the university of the working class” in this respect,
perhaps now – at least almost as much – as then.
DAP