Policy Futures in Education, Volume 2, Numbers 3 & 4, 2004

Marxism and Adult Education in Britain

TOM STEELE
Associate Research Fellow, Universities of Glasgow,
Warwick and Cambridge, United Kingdom
RICHARD TAYLOR
Director of Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning,
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT In British adult education Marxism has been a persistent if marginalised current
that has consistently informed its more radical movements and practitioners. This article
firstly introduces some contested Marxist perspectives on adult education, particularly
around the issues of ideology and incorporation into bourgeois society. Secondly, it
examines the adult educational context, contrasting the themes of middle-class-provided
‘liberal’ adult education and ‘independent’ working-class education. It then focuses on the
trajectories of workers’ education in the twentieth century and the contrasting roles Marxist
education played in the Communist Party and the National Council of Labour Colleges up
to the Second World War. In the post-war period the rebirth of community education in the
1960s and 1970s absorbed more cosmopolitan Marxist influence, such as those of Antonio
Gramsci and Paulo Freire. The article ends by assessing what remains of the Marxist
tradition in the twenty-first century and the authors conclude that in a capitalist system that
remains deeply unequal and globally exploitative, Marxism still offers a valuable framework
of analysis through which adult educators may be able to engage in a dialogue with
emergent social movements.

1. Marxist Perspectives
For Marxists, the overall education system has been seen as an important part of the
superstructure, which has supported and represented ideologically the interests of capital. Marx’s
own formulation – that the State acts essentially as the ‘executive committee of the bourgeoisie’ –
may have been too sweeping a characterisation, even at the time. However, the contention that
the State system is not neutral or objective, but is, at its core, supportive of bourgeois society,
economically, politically and ideologically, has remained one of the defining differences of analysis
between ‘Liberals’ and ‘Marxists’ (Marx & Engels, 1848; Miliband, 1969).
In the nineteenth century, Marxists tended to argue that the main forces of the State system
were coercive, judicial and constitutional: the armed forces, the police and the political and legal
system. With the increasing complexity of twentieth century Western societies, much more
attention was given to cultural control through socialisation processes of various types. And it is
here that education – with perhaps the family, the media and the work environment – has a key
role to play (Miliband, 1969; Althusser, 1971; Gramsci, 1971).
From within the Marxist ‘world view’ – which was, of course, strongly contested by others – the
pervasive false consciousness among the working classes, which characterised all Western societies
and was seen as the key factor in preventing revolutionary consciousness from developing, had to
be contested. Political and industrial mobilisation was clearly the major means of achieving this
(although the endless and divisive debates about what forms this should take have been seen as a
besetting problem for all Western socialist movements).

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But educational provision and its ideological approaches were also of the highest importance.
Through education, children and adults of all social classes, but particularly the working class, were
‘incorporated’ into the existing society and its class-dominated culture. The task of Marxists,
educationally, was to counter this by ensuring that alternative, socialist arguments and analyses
were put forward.
Marxists argue that education has to play this role in capitalist societies, because each generation
has to be socialised into accepting not only particular and ‘appropriate’ economic positions in the
labour market, but also into believing, in Miliband’s words, that they are ‘prisoners, not of a social
system, but of an ineluctable fate’ (Miliband, 1969, p. 241). For the large majority of the population,
educational experience has played, and continues to play, a class-confirming role. This applies as
much to the higher and middle reaches of the social strata as it does to the much larger numbers of
people born into the lower social classes. The system of complex inequalities has to be preserved
for capitalism to function, and education’s role in this process is sociologically as well as
substantively crucial.
Of course, as capitalist structures become rapidly more sophisticated and the process of
production more automated, so the education levels of the workforce need to rise. This carries
with it, as has been well rehearsed by Marxists, an internal contradiction: as the levels of education
and training required by the economy increase, and dissemination of news and opinion through the
media increases similarly, so the population as a whole is certain, ceteris paribus, to become more
and more aware of the irrationality and inequality of the system. (But, of course, other things are
not equal! To pursue this, however, would lead us away from the focus upon adult education.)
This is a key consideration in the context of adult education. For example, trade union
education, which we discuss in more detail later, has been a site of conflict between those who see
its purpose as essentially to improve efficiency and understanding of the necessary processes and
legal environment in the industrial context, and those who see it as a particularly important means
of opening up different and progressive explanatory frameworks for exploring the arguably
oppressive system within which workers and their organisations operate (Holford, 1993;
Fieldhouse, 1996; McIlroy, 1996).
Adult education has been one of the most important areas for Marxist educators, particularly
the organising and teaching of courses and programmes for working-class and other disadvantaged
groups in society. However, Marxists have differed widely over the priorities, content and
approach to be adopted in such provision, and even over its objectives. For some, an orthodox
pedagogy was considered appropriate, even necessary: what needed changing was the curriculum,
the replacement of ‘bourgeois’ approaches with socialist teaching and content. There was little
room here for discussion of alternative positions, for any acknowledgement of ‘difference’ or for
intellectual scepticism. This was not a liberal, Socratic approach: the purpose was essentially
didactic, analogous to a quasi-fundamentalist religious education. Here were the ‘texts’
acknowledged to be ‘correct’: the task was to give the opportunity to working-class students to
engage with them and understand them, and then to move on to political and industrial action
accordingly. This approach, albeit modified on occasion, characterised the ‘bolshevised’
Communist Party (CP) of the 1920s with its Leninist ‘vanguardist’ politics (Millar, 1979; Simon,
1990; Holford, 1993). For others, more liberal and academic in their approach, the task of Marxist
education for adults was seen very differently. The problem with the existing system was that it
pretended to be objective, value-free and thus academic. The fact that many, probably most, of its
adherents and its learners believed it to be so only made the problem worse. Marxist adult
educators of this school tried to introduce a breadth of reading – focusing upon Marxist and other
socialist texts not normally studied in universities, at least in the earlier years of the twentieth
century, let alone in trade unions and other working-class circles. A striking example of this is cited
by Margaret Cohen: the Member of Parliament Ellen Wilkinson, recalling her first contact with the
Labour Colleges, said that although she had taken a degree in history at Manchester University, she
was ‘astonished to discover how little real history I had been taught’ (Cohen, 1990, p. 115, citing
Millar, 1979, p. 264).
What place, though, have Marxist perspectives had in the overall context of British adult
education? As with politics more generally, Marxism has been a relatively minority force in British
adult education, certainly in numerical terms (of learners and tutors), but its importance as a

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countercultural and intellectually powerful influence has been considerable. This is evident from
the historical record of the relationship.

2. The Adult Education Context

Overall, adult education has, since the middle of the twentieth century, been dominated by two
sorts of provision: leisure and recreational courses, usually under the aegis of local education
authorities, colleges of further education or the voluntary sector; and vocational provision across a
wide variety of subjects geared towards perceived labour market needs. This latter emphasis has
increased markedly since the 1980s for a variety of reasons, but not least because of the dominance
of human capital perspectives (Fieldhouse, 1996; Coffield, 1999; Field, 2000; Taylor, 2005).
For our purposes, however, there are two other strands of adult education whose traditions and
practice are of central relevance for discussion of Marxist perspectives. To an extent, these have
been in tension with each other. On the one hand, there has been the provision through the
institutions – universities and colleges – of liberal education (and some vocational programmes) for
adult learners; on the other, there has been a long tradition of ‘independent’ adult education,
generated by and provided for working-class communities themselves. Histories of adult education
note this duality but have tended to emphasise the role of universities, colleges and leading liberal
intellectuals in offering educational opportunities to adult learners, especially working people.
Because these sources tend to be better documented, it can often appear as if adult education has
been primarily a service provided by socially concerned individuals and institutions for those from
the lower orders in society who are crucially in deficit. Thus, Birkbeck and the Mechanics’
Institutes, James Stuart and University Extension, and even Albert Mansbridge and the Workers’
Educational Association (WEA) linked passionate individuals with privately and publicly funded
institutions for the education of adults. Much early nineteenth century adult education was indeed
seen as charitable work, involving, as it did, the health and spiritual welfare of mill workers,
especially women, who were seen to be especially vulnerable. Even Robert Owen’s educational
projects at his New Lanark mills were arguably part of this charitable process. But Owen’s project
also reveals something of the other half of the story: that of popular educational movements which
were often self-help in style and radically political in motivation.
All the above examples should not simply be seen as products of the liberal intellectuals and
institutions nobly giving of themselves to the ‘social problem’ of workers’ welfare, but equally
importantly, as the result of intense upwards pressure from social movements for education. Had it
not been for the demand of Glasgow artisans for technological and political understanding,
Birkbeck may never have pursued the idea of Mechanics’ Institutes. Without the demand of
excluded middle-class women and workers for university education, Stuart might never have
persuaded Cambridge to begin its programme of extension lectures. If workers, newly organised
into trade unions and fired by socialist ideals, had not demanded intensive study of social, political
and economic studies at a high level, Mansbridge may never have persuaded Oxford to support the
WEA. However, the contradictory narrative running through all these collaborations is one of
containment as well as enlightenment. There is a strong case made by Roger Fieldhouse and others
that there was an element of social control in the State’s support for ‘responsible’ adult education
provision. Given the increasing power of the working class and its institutions in the nineteenth
and early twentieth century, it was essential for the State to ensure that these newly powerful
elements were incorporated into the existing social order and its culture (Fieldhouse, 1985, 1996;
McIlroy, 1996). The employers who had funded the Mechanics’ Institutes forbade discussion of
religion and politics – prompting William Cobbett to refuse to support them – and University
Extension increasingly offered series of lectures that had little space for discussion or critical
comment.
From its earliest days Marxism has played the role of the ideological Other in British adult
education, a role closely paralleling its relative marginalisation from the institutionalised British
Labour movement. The demand for Marxist economic theory, on the other hand, was a feature of
the striking adult students at Ruskin College in 1909 and the Scottish Labour College, where John
MacLean regularly lectured to hundreds of workers in Glasgow’s Central Halls around the time of
the First World War (Duncan, 1992, p.115). The formation of the British Communist Party (CPGB)

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in 1920 institutionalised a form of Marxist ideology that immediately attracted the Labour
movement’s dedicated hostility. As we shall see, much of the argument to fund and support some
forms of British adult education was drawn from the need to combat this ideological threat that
might invite Red Revolution, which was linked ever more closely to the perceived interests of the
Soviet Union. The attraction Marxism had for working-class activists was often put down to
brainwashing by politically motivated men. But, in reality, the adoption of Marxism was but the
most recent of a succession of radical political ideologies that reached back at least to the Diggers
and Levellers of the Civil War of the seventeenth century, and perhaps even to the Wycliffean
proto-Protestant revolts of the late Middle Ages. It was part of a deep-rooted English radical
tradition, famously described and celebrated by E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English
Working Class (Thompson, 1963). Marx’s works were only available in English in cheap pamphlet
form at the turn of the century. H.M. Hyndman, founder of the British Social Democratic
Federation, the first British Marxist party formed in the 1880s, read Capital in the French edition
only, the English translation not being available until several years later (Beer, 1953, p. 227;
Macintyre, 1980, p. 67). Marx was then considered as something of a curiosity and Marxism seen as
one of many bizarre continental theories, of little consequence to any but a few enthusiasts.
Marxism, of course, became the dominant ideology of the Left in the twentieth century but, in
contrast to most other developed societies, Marxism did not become a major force in Britain’s
intellectual or political life. The reasons for this are complex and contested, but, as famously argued
by Nairn and Anderson, appear to be connected with the absence of a major totalising sociological
tradition in Britain and the peculiar nature of British labourism (Thompson, 1963; Miliband, 1973,
1983; Nairn, 1961, 1981; Anderson, 1961, 1992). But Marxists have always formed a small,
influential, critical, internal opposition. Pathologically fissiparous and internally quarrelsome,
Marxism in Britain has been split among a wide variety of tendencies.
The two major interwar traditions were located in the Soviet Stalinised orthodoxy of the CP
and its Trotskyite critics. Following the Second World War, a much greater interest was taken in
other forms of European Marxism. Translations of Gramsci appeared in the early 1960s. As early as
the 1930s, academic exiles like Karl Mannheim and Karl Polanyi had introduced a Lukacsian
influenced Hegelian Marxism into adult education circles. Whilst these traditions and functions
continued and developed in various ways – not least in the flowering of Trotskyite and quasi-
Trotskyite movements from the later 1950s through to the 1970s – it was not until the publication
of History and Class Consciousness in 1971 that serious study was undertaken. The Frankfurt School
of critical theory also began to be noticed in academic circles and translations of Horkheimer,
Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse appeared in the late 1960s and 1970s. While this abundance of
publication – the ‘Moment of Theory’ – was intellectually very fertile, its impact on the Labour
movement was slight and remained largely confined to higher education circles.
A partial exception to this was the post-1956 first ‘New Left’, which was, significantly, led by
adult educators and their academic associates: E.P. Thompson, John Saville, Raymond Williams,
Ralph Miliband and others. These academics and Marxist educators were inspirational in the
development of new approaches and new subject frameworks, ‘history from below’, literature and
cultural studies, and more radical politics. This produced a much greater interest in Marxist theory
in Britain than ever before and many student dissidents subsequently sought careers in adult
education and its more radical offshoot, community education.

3. History: workers’ education

Brian Simon locates the decisive change in Labour movement education from the Liberal election
victory of 1906 (Simon, 1974, p. 296). Simon notes how the rapid expansion of cheap, popular
reading material, combined with a dynamic Labour movement experiencing a taste of political
power for the first time, had created educational expectations. The Labour movement’s three main
journals, Labour Leader, Justice and Clarion, the Rational Press Association’s 6d. reprints of secularist
and political texts, fed a new appetite for political learning amongst working people. This was one
of the reasons underlying the creation of the WEA in 1903 and the Oxford Conference of 1908.
Some of the first works of Marxism were also available in cheap translations by Sonnenschein and,
according to contemporary accounts, by socialist pioneers such as Tom Bell, and they were eagerly

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snatched up in the mining villages of central and southern Scotland (Simon, 1974, p. 298). Similarly,
in the valleys of South Wales, the miners established their own libraries in which Marxist
economics figured prominently – and fed the discontent of those who went on to Ruskin College
and were dissatisfied with the ‘imperialist’ economics they found dominant there.
The great difference from institutional adult education provision was that ‘the socialist
movement was now producing its own tutors to guide studies and organise classes or study groups
of the kind fostered by Tom Mann and others from the 1890s’ (Simon, 1974, p. 298). Socialist
workers learned from and taught other workers in self-help groups, which differed little from those
of the corresponding societies of a century earlier, except for the greater availability of texts. This
was the continuation of a tradition of workers’ self-help, which had nourished the mutual
improvement societies and knowledge of Chartism of the nineteenth century but which, at various
times, had been driven underground by the state and clerical forces.
For the whole adult education movement in Britain, education with and for working-class
people and their organisations and communities has been a consistent priority. This reflects the
persistent inequality in Britain’s social structure whereby, inter alia, very large numbers of people
have been effectively excluded from educational opportunity beyond the minimum school leaving
age (Thompson, 1968; Jepson, 1973; Taylor et al, 1985; Fieldhouse, 1996; Jennings, 2002).
This commitment to working-class adult education has had a different level of centrality for
Marxists, however. For virtually all Marxists (at least until the middle years of the twentieth
century) the working class – and particularly workers at the point of production – were seen as the
key agency for achieving socialist change. To enable a socialist political consciousness to become
embedded in the working-class movement and its culture was an educational as well as a political
task – ‘Agitate, Educate, Organise!’ as the old socialist slogan has it.
By the early nineteenth century the working class and its agencies had become, clearly,
important factors in the power structure of society. The State, in its various guises, began to take a
serious interest in workers’ education. Scholars contest whether this resulted from liberal
enlightenment, industrial utilitarianism or, as Marxists consistently argue, a desire for ideological
social control (Harrison, 1961; Jepson, 1973; Steele, 1987; McIlroy, 1996; Fieldhouse, 1996; Jennings,
2002). What is beyond doubt, however, is that for Marxists it was essential to develop independent
working-class education – independent, that is, from state control. To an extent this has been true
for all socialists in the Labour movement. Jack Jones, the former leader of the Transport and
General Workers’ Union, for example, argued that: ‘The striving for clarity of thought and
determination in action to advance working-class interests was bound to emphasise independence
from orthodox “education” offered by the ruling class, which wanted a cheap and servile labour
force’ (Jones, cited in Holford, 1993, p. 7).
Taking this logic further, Brian Simon has argued that there were two conflicting tendencies in
workers’ education in the early twentieth century: ‘independent educational activities, carried out
by and for the working class, and under its own control’, and education via the state, whose
‘“objective” was specifically to influence the thinking of the radical working and artisan classes, to
draw them away from ideologies that led directly to radical or revolutionary conclusions, and to
persuade the workers that their real interest lay in assisting, or co-operating with, the positive and
active development of capitalism’ (Simon, 1990, pp. 16-17). Should, therefore, teaching be ‘based
upon capitalist apologetics or on Marxist analyses’? (Simon, 1990, p. 19).
This Manichaean view of the adult education world is, to say the least, reductive. And anyway,
‘independence’ is a euphemism for control by socialist organisations, with curriculum, reading and
assessment judged on ‘socialist’ criteria. Arguably, workers’ education can be conceptualised as a
spectrum of intermediate perspectives. At one extreme was the State bureaucracy, concerned both
with social control issues and with ‘appropriate’ procedures and the setting of standards attaching
to grant aid and the employers who wanted a skilled but compliant workforce; in the middle were
the WEA and, increasingly through the twentieth century, the university extramural departments;
and on the explicitly socialist Left were the National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC) and, once
the CP had been established in 1920 and had been rapidly ‘bolshevised’, the educational wing of the
CP itself (Macintyre, 1980; Simon, 1990; Duncan, 1992; Holford, 1993; Fieldhouse, 1996).
The NCLC, established in 1921 and building upon a number of successful Labour College
initiatives, was the major focus in the 1920s for explicitly Marxist education provision for working-

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class students, predominantly male trade unionists. Initially funded by the South Wales Union of
Mineworkers and the Railway Workers’ Union, several trade unions subsequently affiliated to the
movement, including the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the Transport and General
Workers’ Union. Growth in the early 1920s was rapid: by 1923 there were 529 classes enrolling
12,000 students; by 1925, 1234 classes enlisting over 30,000 students (Simon, 1990; Holford, 1993).
In his account of the NCLC, J.P.M. Millar, the moving spirit behind the NCLC and its secretary
for the whole of its existence, confirms that the curriculum was confined largely to Marxist analysis
of history, economics and politics, with additional provision in literature, science and philosophy
(Millar, 1979). Even in the early years, however, there were problems. The NCLC was under
constant attack from the WEA, which saw its provision as narrow propaganda rather than
education, and from the State – for obvious reasons! However, the NCLC was also criticised by
working-class activists, who found the courses too abstract and discursive. As John Holford has
commented, many ‘found a life of practical politics – demonstrations, organising the unemployed,
Communist congresses – more worthwhile’ (Holford, 1993, p. 39).
With the cataclysm of the General Strike defeat in 1926, the whole Labour movement was on
the defensive for a decade and more. The CP became a harder-edged, embattled minority
movement which, with its ‘vanguardist’ approach to communist political organisation, was
unwilling to accept what Palme Dutt termed the NCLC’s ‘non-party’ Marxism (Holford, 1993,
p. 61).
At the same time, trade unions retreated into a much more defensive and ‘non-political’
approach to workers’ education. In the last analysis, the NCLC was the creature of the trade
unions, which provided its finance, its students and its contact with workers. John Holford has
pointed out that, just as the WEA is ‘subject to pressure from the State, so the Labour Colleges had
to listen to their own paymasters’ (Holford, 1993, p. 6). By the late 1920s Marxist politics had ceased
to be the central dynamic of both the political and industrial Left of the Labour movement, and the
NCLC adjusted its provision to concentrate on more ‘functionally useful’ subjects (Millar, 1979,
p. 209).
The CP saw the NCLC as being little more than a vehicle for training working-class trade union
leaders to operate efficiently in the immediate interests of their members. In a hostile political
environment, the NCLC represented, at best, an ideology that saw trade unions as defensive
industrial organisations, unrelated to the revolutionary politics necessary for working-class
emancipation. Much has been made of the rivalry between the WEA and the NCLC but, in fact, in
the industrial North there was much cross-pollination by both students and tutors, and, in
Yorkshire at least, the likelihood that the existence of the NCLC actually pulled the WEA towards a
more Marxist-tolerant agenda (Steele, 1987; Rose, 2001).
In 1933 the CP thus established Marx House Schools in London and Manchester (to mark the
fiftieth anniversary of Marx’s death) under the direction of leading CP intellectuals (Robin Page
Arnot became the first principal of Marx House in London. Later, leading communist scientists
became involved: J.D. Bernal, Hyman Levy and J.B.S. Haldane among them.). The initiative met
with moderate success: by 1936, 1533 students were enrolled on courses in Marxist politics,
economics and related topics, as well as programmes in science and the arts. The Manchester
development was different in kind, as it was created and led entirely by autodidacts who had left
school at the minimum age (Cohen, 1990).
In the end, however, the Marx House Schools could not connect with working-class
communities (or, indeed, with Labourite trade union members). It mirrored, as Cohen has argued,
the ‘failure of the CP to displace the Labour Party as the natural party of the Left in Britain’
(Cohen, 1990, p. 150).
Although the demise of the NCLC did not take place formally until 1964 (the Marx House
Schools closed in 1945), Marxist workers’ education was, in effect, defunct long before then. The
Trades Union Congress (TUC), and the State, needed and organised a very different (and much
larger) programme of trade union education, concentrating on the pragmatic and training needs of
the representatives of Labour. This provision was built upon the strong assumption that the task of
trade unions (and, indeed, by implication, the wider Labour movement) was to work within the
capitalist system to achieve efficiency and fair rewards for working-class people. Marxism
continued to be a real force within adult education but, ironically, by the 1960s this was much

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more within the WEA and university extramural departments – and even there, on the whole, in
areas other than trade union education.
A second form of proletarian Marxism was that taught in the Labour Colleges by itinerant
lecturers like Tommy Jackson, who was NCLC organiser for the North East region during the
1920s and 1930s. Rée presents Jackson as a direct inheritor of the tradition of British radicalism and
clear thinking that went back to Tom Paine and Winstanley. Despite being a founder of the CPGB,
Jackson had little sympathy with its dialectical materialism orthodoxy and instead turned to the
philosophy of another European Marxist, Josef Dietzgen. The philosophy of Dietzgenism, which
came to predominate in the NCLC through Jackson, offered militants in contrast ‘opportunities to
think connectedly’ about their lives so that ‘politics became part of world history, and world
history a chapter of cosmology’ (Rée, 1984). Dietzgenism is almost wholly forgotten now, but Rée
sees its embodiment in Jackson’s widely popular text Dialectics: the logic of Marxism and its critics – an
essay in exploration (1936) as having a ‘robust and substantial content’ contrasted with the confused
evasions of the proponents of the ‘official’ dialectical materialism.
For a brief period in the early twentieth century, up to the sharp decline of the Left following
the 1926 General Strike, Marxist workers’ education was a real force in Britain. But the NCLC, its
primary means of articulation, was powerless in the wider developing politics of the 1920s. As
Tsuzuki has argued, the Labour College Marxism was ‘the Marxism of the Second International in
the sense that it was revisionist at heart’ (Tsuzuki, 1983, p. 199). Its Marxism was not that of the
Leninist Party. It was ‘ideologically moored in the pre-1914 world: class struggle was vital to [its]
understanding of society and social change, but so too was a Darwinian view of evolution’
(Holford, 1993, p. 46). As the CP was first ‘bolshevised’ and then became increasingly Stalinist and
secretive, there was little place for Marxist education in any meaningful sense. More importantly,
the industrial as well as the political Labour movement became increasingly dominated by the
pragmatic Right, which was hostile to Marxism – and suspicious even of radical liberal approaches
to adult education (Taylor et al, 1985; McIlroy, 1996; Fieldhouse, 1996). Thus, whilst Marxist
approaches to workers’ education never disappeared – there are many examples of Marxist
influence in trade union teaching throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s – they became a relatively
minor theme in British adult education after 1945.

4. History: Marxist adult education in the institutions

One of the earlier and most famous episodes in the development of the Marxist adult education
that was organised and delivered in colleges and universities is the Ruskin College strike of 1909.
Ruskin College, an independent college in Oxford, was founded in 1899 by two American
philanthropists, Walter Vrooman and Paul Beard, who had been deeply moved by Thomas
Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure. Ruskin College attracted young, eager, socialist students from all
over the country, who were mostly sponsored by their trade unions, but it failed to satisfy the
perceived needs of more militant students like the Welsh miners. The occasion for the strike was
the publication of the report Oxford and Working Class Education (1908) which, amongst other
things, implied that Ruskin should be transformed into a ‘non-partisan’ preparatory college for
university admission rather than remaining a Labour College. Having discovered this potentially
alarming body on its doorstep, Oxford appeared keen to absorb and, if possible, contain its more
radical aspirations (Simon, 1974, p. 318). The response of the Ruskin students, supported by their
Principal Dennis Hird, was to demand their own independent educational organisation in which
Marxist economics would take a central role.
The first outcome was the formation by the students of The Plebs League and The Plebs Magazine
in 1909 in order to forge a more satisfactory connection between the college and the Labour
movement, and to create a degree of independence from the university. The response of the
authorities was equally sharp: Hird was dismissed for ‘failure to maintain discipline’, the students
went on strike and the college was closed. Realising that Oxford was not prepared to tolerate
Ruskin College as a ‘college of labour’, The Plebs League canvassed support among the unions for an
alternative, the outcome of which was the Central Labour College (CLC), as discussed earlier.
Oxford, Cambridge and London were the leading universities involved with adult education in
the early twentieth century. Although the town of Glasgow, through John MacLean and later the

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Scottish Labour College, was a notable centre for Marxist adult education, the university was
initially reluctant to engage and stood aloof when a WEA branch was founded in 1916. This may
have been because, exceptionally, at the turn of the century something like 24% of all Glasgow
male undergraduate students were from working-class families anyway (Anderson, 1983; Smout,
1987, p. 225). Curiously, R.H. Tawney, the founding tutor of the WEA’s three-year tutorial classes
that so transformed adult education in England, was a member of the economics staff from 1908-09
and used to travel from Glasgow at the weekends to his classes in Rochdale and Longton. Apart
from some unsigned leaders for the Glasgow Herald, he left no mark on the town and shortly
returned to England to take up full-time work with the WEA. It was down to his friend from Balliol
College A.D. Lindsay to make the first connections more than 10 years later. Lindsay was, anyway,
a Glaswegian who, at Oxford, had imbibed the Hegelian civic ethic of Benjamin Jowett,
T.H. Green and fellow Glaswegian Edward Caird. He had been inspired by University Extension
and with Tawney in 1909 became a WEA tutor: but he saw his definitive work as being in his
native town. He wrote: ‘I have long thought that my best job would be to get a Glasgow
Professorship, if I could, and give all my energies and time I could spare to WEA work there, with
that enormous new population down the Clyde’ (quoted in Shearer, 1976, p. 10). Lindsay also
lectured on Marxism to adult education classes organised by the WEA and the Independent Labour
Party, which was made even more intriguing by the fact that both organisations were extremely
hostile to Marxism and the success MacLean was having. As Shearer notes, these lectures formed
the basis of his successful textbook Karl Marx’s Capital: an introductory essay that was published in
1925.
Lindsay presented what amounted to two Marxes: the one a revolutionary communist and the
other an evolutionary socialist:
Marx would not have had the historical importance he has had if he had not combined in
himself these two unusually opposed characteristics. His passionate sympathy with the
victims of the revolution made him see the importance and significance of facts which were
hidden from the academically minded economist. The wealth of his learning and his wide
historical vision gave his revolutionary activities a far greater weight than they would
otherwise have had. But the two characteristics did not always combine and, ever since his
death, his professed followers have been disputing which is the true Marx – Marx the
Communist or Marx the evolutionary socialist. (Lindsay, 1925, p. 11)
The rest of Lindsay’s absorbing book makes it clear where he himself stood on the issue, and it
would be fair to say it was not with the revolutionary communist portrayed so energetically to
Clydeside workers by MacLean and his comrades.

Post-1945 European Marxism and the University

The flight of many European Marxist intellectuals to Britain and the USA from Nazi persecution
transformed the social sciences in the period following the war and, for the first time, elements of
Marxist theory found a foothold in British universities. European Marxist traditions were
rediscovered and rapidly put into translation, as noted earlier.
Radical approaches to arts and social studies courses were already enjoying some popularity in
adult education classes between the wars, where the need to make literature, history, philosophy
and art relevant to working-class experience produced many innovative courses in, for example,
the study of international affairs, industrial relations, popular culture and, especially, social history.
Many adult education tutors were able to create a rapport with their students such that their own
experience and understanding became central to the process of enquiry and learning. Tawney had
led the way in this approach in his early tutorial classes. As Wright notes, Tawney claimed to have
received his best education not at a college or university, but as a tutorial classes tutor, where ‘I
underwent, week by week, a series of friendly but effective deflations at the hands of the students
composing them’ (quoted in Wright, 1987, p. 6). The sentiments were echoed again by
E.P. Thompson during his period in the Extramural Department of Leeds University (Thompson,
1968). As we have noted elsewhere:

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This was the moment at which Williams, Thompson, Hoggart and the many other adult
education tutors associated with the development of the interdisciplinary approach to the
arts, involving Marxist sociology, social history, close textual analysis and Leavis’s approach
to literary criticism, which later came to be inscribed into the mainstream as ‘Cultural
Studies’, began their work in earnest. The seminal texts, such as The Making of the English
Working Class, The Uses of Literacy, Culture and Society and The Long Revolution, together with
the scholarly, but less well-known works, like J.F.C. Harrison’s Learning and Living (1961),
were all written over the next ten to fifteen years, while their authors were university adult
educators. It is important to emphasise that these works were not isolated events, but were
nested in a widespread culture of experiment in adult education, which had begun with the
debates over arts and literature teaching in the mid to late 1930s. (Steele, 1997, p. 14)
Only Thompson would claim to have been a Marxist during this period. Williams had briefly been
a Communist Party member as a student in the late 1930s, but Hoggart was and remained
determinedly anti-communist. Thompson’s approach owed a great deal to the Communist Party
Historians’ Group and the new form of social history writing that had begun with G.D.H. Cole, the
Hammonds and A.L. Morton. This was the ‘history from below’ standpoint that emphasised the
experience of the common people or, as Thompson put it, those ‘hidden from history’.
Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) had an enormous impact on the way
history was written and taught in British adult education and, subsequently, in universities.
Thompson was a dissident, humanistic communist, and Thompson, John Saville and others led the
movement for democratic reform of the Party through their journal The Reasoner (later The New
Reasoner), for which they would have been expelled from the CP in 1956 had they not resigned.
Thompson went on to develop a distinctive Marxist politics and historiography; and he also made a
major contribution to the British and European peace movements over the next three decades
(Thompson, 1960, 1978, 1980).
Williams was more circumspect about Marxism and, while he shared a socialist vision common
to most WEA tutors at the time, his approach was derived in large part from the ‘Radical
Tradition’. Gradually, however, he reached an accommodation with Marxism, which was fed by an
understanding of the European traditions and resulted in Marxism and Literature (1977). However,
he also had a strategic vision which viewed the cultural politics of adult education as central to the
creation of the New Left in Britain, of which he and Thompson were among the founders (Kenny,
1995). Williams’ own short-lived journal Politics and Letters and a companion volume called The
Critic were attempts to focus this new radical public. He noted:
Virtually every WEA tutor was a Socialist of one colour or another. We were all doing adult
education ourselves, so we saw the journals as linked to this very hopeful formation with a
national network of connection to the working class movement. If there was a group to
which Politics and Letters referred, it was the adult education tutors and their students.
(Williams, 1979, p. 69)
The New Left offered a socialist alternative to the Labour Party, but distanced itself strongly from
the pro-Soviet and bureaucratised politics of the CP and the Trotskyite groupuscules that attracted
both disillusioned communists and unhappy Labour socialists. Ralph Miliband’s Parliamentary
Socialism (1961) and, later, The State in Capitalist Society (1969) underscored the politics of this new
grouping and his celebrated jousts with Nicos Poulantzas in New Left Review (Newman, 2002) were
telling rearguard actions by the ‘Old’ New Left against the newly imported high theory over the
nature of the capitalist State.
Miliband himself was later active in founding, together with Geoff Hodgson, the authors of this
article and other colleagues in Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield, the Centres for Marxist Education,
which is documented in Michael Newman’s biography (Newman, 2002, pp. 237-248). Although
briefly successful, partly because Miliband could regularly attract an audience of over 100 to his
lectures, the centres closed within three to four years. However, they left a legacy of self-help
groups, especially in feminism, and Capital reading groups, which had some political and academic
impact, particularly in higher and adult education circles.
For adult educators, the most influential European Marxist theorist of these years was probably
Antonio Gramsci. Translations from his Prison Notebooks began to be published from 1971 and his

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emphasis on cultural struggle offered education a privileged role in the way Williams, Thompson
and Hoggart had suggested. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony referred directly back to the early
Marx of The German Ideology and claimed that the ruling class ruled more by the consent of the
subordinate classes to their ideas and values than by direct coercion – although this, of course, was
always the ultimate backup. Constructing the counter-hegemony therefore became the rationale
for many adult educators. His notion of the ‘organic intellectual’ of the working class was also
appealing to those involved in workers’ education, since it contested the traditional construction of
an intellectual class. His belief that even manual work involved the intellect and that all workers
were capable of intellectual development and political understanding chimed with the British
tradition of ‘history from below’. Gramsci’s theorisation of workers’ councils and critique of trade
union consciousness were also developed within trade union education.
In the late 1970s, with funding from the Labour Government, the TUC’s Education
Department through Dave Gee developed day release courses for health and safety representatives,
which laid the promise of an enhanced role for workers’ representatives in the control of the
production process, as opposed to an exclusive concentration upon traditional wage and conditions
bargaining. Although the incoming Conservative Government abruptly ended the funding for the
TUC’s education programme, and closed down much of the traditional industrial sector to boot,
Gramsci’s prestige and influence in adult education remained significant.

Community Education and Freire

In the 1970s, community education became an important means of articulating radical adult
education and linking the academy with the deprived communities in its region. Several influences
were apparent here, but an underlying adherence to a humanistic Marxism was a common factor
to most leading practitioners (Lovett, 1988). Although community education had a long history in
Britain, stretching back to Henry Morris’s community colleges in Cambridgeshire in the 1920s, the
renewed impulse came from a number of directions (Martin, 1996). One of these was the idea of
community development, which had been practised in India and Africa in the post-war period
largely under the auspices of the United Nations and associated non-governmental organisations
(Steele & Taylor, 1995). Although community development could be viewed as another kind of
‘deficit’ educational perspective, it had the virtue of taking the needs of communities themselves
seriously rather than simply imposing ready-made educational packages. Even so, some of the
newly independent nations rejected the paternalism implied and in Tanzania, for example, this led
to its Ruskin-College-educated Marxist President Julius Nyrere introducing the policy of Ujamaa, a
kind of community-based approach to ‘nation building’. Young adult educators from Britain and
America flocked to the newly independent countries of Africa to be involved in these projects and
returned, radicalised, to see how the ideas could be applied to their own inner-city ‘Hearts of
Darkness’.
As Martin (1996) notes, poverty had recently been ‘rediscovered’ in Britain, and a variety of
schemes were introduced by the Labour Government in the 1970s. These were the short-lived
Community Development Projects (CDPs) and the Educational Priority Areas (EPAs). Although
many regarded these projects as little more than an educational band-aid to disguise the lack of
political will for structural economic reform, much innovatory educational work was done and
many bureaucratic feathers were ruffled. It was also a rebuke to the WEA for its post-war
complacency and failure to respond to working-class needs. Tom Lovett’s Adult Education,
Community Development and the Working Class (1975), which documented his work in Liverpool,
became the bible of radical community educators. Lovett, as Martin again notes, linked ‘adult
education with social or cultural action’ and adopted an explicitly Freirean approach of ‘an
examination and exploration of communities in all their complexity, in order to encourage the
embracing of options which improve people’s sense of identity, integrity, security and dignity’
(cited in Martin, 1996, p.128).
Other local projects followed during the 1970s, including Leeds University’s Pioneer Work
(Ward & Taylor, 1986). This was inter-agency work that relied on close ties with the WEA, local
education authority (LEA), social services, the voluntary sector and trade unions. Supported, with
reservations, by the Department of Education and Science (especially after the election of the

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Conservative Government in 1979), Pioneer Work, which was built on previous projects of the
CDPs in West Yorkshire, linked with the LEAs, the voluntary sector in Bradford and Leeds, and the
joint Leeds University/WEA political economy classes organised by Ron Wiener.
A significant theoretical aid in this work was the publication by Penguin of translations of Paulo
Freire’s two major works: Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972b) and Cultural Action for Freedom (1972a).
Freire’s work became a beacon for radical educators in Britain and informed a number of key
projects, for example, the Edinburgh Adult Literacy Project (ALP) (Kirkwood & Kirkwood, 1989).
His approach drew on both Marxist and Christian traditions, particularly the existentialist and
humanist Marxism of Sartre and Fromm, and the radical Christian humanism of Martin Buber. His
attack on what he called ‘banking’ education in favour of a strategy of ‘conscientisation’ literacy
work that drew on the learner’s experience of oppression introduced a new model and a new
political terminology for framing literacy work within poor communities (although a form of
dialogism had been familiar to older WEA classes). Freire’s pedagogical approach, anyway,
probably owed more to John Dewey’s experimental pragmatism than Marxist dialectics, although
his centring on class oppression and commitment to liberation are clearly within the Marxist
spectrum (Smith, 2004).

The Role of Marxism in Adult Education in the Twenty-first Century

Freire is probably the last major educationalist claiming adherence to a Marxist tradition to have
had a wide impact in Britain, and this was 30 years ago – although this says as much about the sorry
state of the academic world of educational studies as it does about the wider territory of the arts
and social sciences. The emergence of postmodernism, post-structuralism, and feminist and post-
colonialist theory has undermined any such simple, clear-cut affiliation and arguably revealed
theoretical problems and omissions in Marxism. And, of course, this has reflected the fundamental
changes in the wider world: the collapse of the Soviet Union and associated Communist Parties,
and the serious deconstruction of democratic socialism in most developed societies. In Britain, the
deindustrialisation, anti-labour legislation and mass unemployment strategies of the Thatcher and
Major years were contributory factors to this intellectual and political climate. There remain strong
Marxist and Marxisant influences upon contemporary British adult education, notably Jürgen
Habermas (Connelly, 1996) and Pierre Bourdieu (Jenkins, 1991). Habermas’s original historical
work constructed the very fruitful idea of the bourgeois ‘public sphere’ and generated wide critical
discussion through which alternative spheres of women and workers began to be articulated, with
obvious implications for adult education. He is congenial to adult educators because he provides a
narrative through which community-based education can be viewed. Bourdieu’s analysis draws on
both Marx and Weber, and reflects on Gramsci’s theory of hegemony in trying to understand the
mechanisms of social reproduction. As one commentator on Bourdieu put it, his contribution has
been systematically to examine the question of ‘how does a social system in which a substantial
section of the population are obviously disadvantaged and exploited survive without its rulers
having to depend on physical coercion for the maintenance of order?’ (Jenkins, 1991)
Marxist influence upon community education in adult education has been complemented since
the 1970s by feminism and feminist theory (Barr, 1999). The emergence of women’s studies in the
late 1960s in WEA classes was intimately allied to the feminist movement and, as such, is a prime
example of a social movement generating and stimulating a whole new curriculum. Sheila
Rowbotham’s WEA classes in women’s history in Hackney and a series of New Opportunities
programmes in most large cities, which were organised by the WEA, universities and education
departments, were the first of a wave of adult classes throughout the 1970s that centred on the
particularity of women’s experience, the construction of patriarchy, the language of subordination
and the problem of masculinity. Adult education woke up to the fact that ‘normal’ relations
between men and women were habitually oppressive, and that education offered many women an
opportunity to reassess their lives and social roles (and future employment). Although feminism
swiftly became as fissiparous as the Trotskyite movement, many feminists still see the Marxist
tradition as a starting place for social analysis (Swindells & Jardine, 1990; Kelly, 2002). An important
criticism – which remains contentious – focused on the centrality of social class in Marxist analysis,
which in some feminists’ view disguises the specificity of women’s oppression within class

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relations. Although high-profile demands for women’s rights now appear sometimes to be under
attack in face of the rearguard actions of conservative, often male-dominated, faith groups, a kind
of masculine emulation by professional women and ‘laddishness’ by young women, everyday
relations between men and women have undergone a profound shift. Undoubtedly, middle-class
women have benefited most from the women’s movement, since trade union demands for equal
pay and conditions have been slower to achieve results and have been pursued with less vigour by
middle-class educators. This, of course, mirrors developments elsewhere in education and in the
wider society. For example, it is middle- and upper-middle-class young women who have been
overwhelmingly the greatest beneficiaries of the rapid expansion of higher education; generally,
many hitherto male-dominated programmes have now been ‘opened up’, to a surprising extent, to
women graduates (e.g. medicine). In adult education there is a continuing refrain from (largely
middle-class) women students about how far they have been able to transform their lives at all
levels through the medium of adult learning.

Conclusion
So, what has been the significance of Marxism within British adult education, and what is the
position in the contemporary context and the medium-term future?
Marxism, though always a minority force, has been a profound influence upon adult education
theory and practice. As with Keynes, in a rather different context, many Marxist approaches have
been absorbed wholly into the culture of the Left – reformist as well as revolutionary – and form
part of the currency of everyday intellectual debate. Numerous examples could be cited: two of the
most obvious are, firstly, the development of new approaches to central academic disciplines
through adult education – ‘history from below’ and cultural studies; and, secondly, the Marxist and
quasi-Marxist perspectives derived through the adult learning experiences of many key individuals
in the Labour movement. Social class as an explanatory category and the concept of class conflict
are still commonly used even by those who denounce them most.
The contemporary picture is, of course, highly complex. Totalising perspectives of all sorts – at
least in the Western world – are discredited, partly because of postmodernist theorising, but also
because of events in the material, political world. Oppositional social movements are widespread,
as are the theoretical analyses underpinning them, but they are fragmented and not as yet capable
of mobilising significant electoral support. Nor, for that matter, are they engaged in revolutionary
activity. In sharp distinction to many earlier movements, there is little contact with conventional
‘adult education’, although self-education is widespread through group-learning forums and
Internet sites. The Freirean methods of the Latin American popular education movements are also
becoming more widely known and emulated (Kane, 2001).
Britain remains a grossly unequal society, in political as well as economic terms; and the
deindustrialisation and virtual destruction of working-class culture, which derived from the Labour
movement and its communities, have severely weakened the links between radical adult education
and the organised working class. An individualistic culture permeates society – working-class as
much as middle-class – and a trivialising and materialistic media is a powerful socialising force. Yet
Marxism and Marxist adult education remain as relevant as ever – arguably more so. Capitalism
depends upon inequality and oppression, nationally and internationally. Marxism is not, as Marx
himself emphasised, a text-based fundamentalism, but a dynamic, responsive, intellectual and social
framework of analysis. For Marxists, some form of ‘socialism’, or whatever new term is used to
describe it, remains the only rational solution to humankind’s predicament. The World Social
Forum and its offshoot the World Educational Forum are already suggesting new forms of social
learning that may well point the way forward. The task for adult educators in the present context
is, through praxis, to find new ways of working with the radical forces now evident in social
movements, in the Labour movement (which is bitterly disillusioned with ‘New Labour’) and in
the impoverished (and often racially oppressed) communities of the working class.

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TOM STEELE is Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, and Associate
Fellow at the Universities of Warwick and Cambridge. He was formerly Reader in the History and
Theory of Adult Education at the University of Glasgow. He has published widely on adult
education and on modernist cultural history in Britain and Europe. His books include: Alfred Orage
and the Leeds Arts Club (Scolar Press, 1990), The Emergence of Cultural Studies (Lawrence & Wishart,
1997) and, with Richard Taylor & Jean Barr, For a Radical Higher Education, After Postmodernism
(Open University Press/Society for Research into Higher Education, 2002). He is currently working
on a study of intellectuals and popular education movements in Europe 1850-1940. Correspondence:
Tom Steele, Department of Adult and Continuing Education, University of Glasgow, St Andrew's
Building, 11 Eldon Street, Glasgow G3 6NH, United Kingdom ([email protected]).

RICHARD TAYLOR is Professor and Director of Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning at
the University of Cambridge. He was previously Professor of Continuing Education at the
University of Leeds, where he had been Head of Department and, subsequently, Dean of the
Faculty of Business, Law, Education and Social Studies. His PhD was on the history and politics of
the British Peace Movement in the 1950s and 1960s and he has published widely in politics and
peace studies. He has published several books on adult education and higher education, and
comparative studies on the politics of post-compulsory education in North America and India. He
was Secretary of the Universities Association for Continuing Education from 1994 to 1998 and has
been Chair of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education since 2001. Correspondence:
Richard Taylor, Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge, Madingley Hall,
Cambridge CB3 8AQ, United Kingdom ([email protected]).

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