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What is ‘useful’ knowledge?

In their 100th Full Marx column, the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY looks at how socialists have grappled with the direction and framing of working-class self-education over the last 200 years

MOST people would agree that all genuine knowledge is potentially useful — though a little knowledge can sometimes be a dangerous thing and, in the wrong company, knowing too much can be positively lethal.

We are bombarded continually with “facts” together with advice: “useful” knowledge — how to get a job, improve your credit rating, save for a deposit on a house. Rarely are we helped to any real understanding of the workings of a society in which poverty is increasing amidst massive wealth for the few.

This 100th Full Marx column is perhaps as good an occasion as any to mark the birth of a movement for workers’ education which started 200 years ago, in Glasgow, Edinburgh and most importantly in London with the establishment of the London Mechanics’ Institute (LMI, later London University’s Birkbeck College) and which spread rapidly throughout Britain as well as in the “new worlds” of Australia and North America.

It initiated a struggle over what knowledges were most useful. For liberal politicians and would-be social reformers, useful knowledge was, essentially, what would enable its recipients to contribute to the dynamics of a growing capitalist economy and at the same time to better themselves — with a job, a wage, a home and (for the men) a vote.

Against this was another version of what its proponents called “really” useful knowledge (in contrast to the “merely useful” knowledge of what eventually came to be the orthodox educational curriculum).

This was focused on collective rather than individual self-help; on the need to understand the workings of the economy and society; and to challenge the status quo and build a different, less exploitative world.

Thomas Hodgskin (who first proposed the establishment of the LMI) was one of its early proponents. In one of his early publications, he observed that the “landlord and the capitalist produce nothing. Capital is the produce of labour, and profit is nothing but a portion of that produce.”

Two centuries later, that captures the essence of Marxist political economy and of the first Full Marx column to be published in the Morning Star.

In August 1823, Hodgskin and a colleague, JC Robertson, launched the Mechanics’ Magazine. Aimed at the literate working class under the slogans “knowledge is power,” and “ours and for us.” This cheap scientific weekly was the first of its kind and was highly successful.

In proposing the establishment of the LMI, it also outlined its mission: to make working men acquainted not only with “the facts of chemistry and of mechanical philosophy” but also “of the creation and distribution of wealth.”

They declared: “The education of a free people, like their property, will always be directed most beneficially for them when it is in their own hands. […] Men had better be without education […] than be educated by their rulers; for then education is but the breaking in of the steer to the yoke.”

The response from the Tory establishment was hostility and outrage. From utilitarian liberals it was accommodation, containment, a determination to control the new institution and what it taught for their own purposes.

As EP Thompson in his The Making of the English Working Class declares: “The early history of the Mechanics’ Institutes, from the formation of the London Institute in 1823 until the 1830s, is a story of ideological conflict. […] The crucial conflicts took place on the questions of control, of financial independence, and if so whether or not the Institutes should debate political economy (and, if so, whose political economy).”

In the end, pragmatism trumped principle: money talked. Hodgskin and Robertson who had initially put forward the initiative for an LMI lacked influence and patronage and were “out-manoeuvred and out-financed.”

In the words of Eric Hobsbawm (who joined Birkbeck College as a young lecturer in 1947 and who was its president from 2002 until his death in 2012): “The original founders were pushed aside” and the Benthamite radicals “took over and diverted” the LMI.

Control “passed to the middle-class supporters whose ideology also dominated the political economy of the syllabus.” That ideology was reflected also in the liberals’ new Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) whose “improving” texts proliferated.

Mechanics’ institutions spread. By the 1850s there were up to a thousand of them (sometimes called literary and scientific institutions) — at least one in every major town in Britain. Most were “under the control of the moneyed classes, and became props of orthodoxy and respectability instead of independent working-class organisations.”

Many of them spawned “auxiliaries” — schools for their members’ children, building societies, friendly (insurance) societies and banks, all aimed at realising for their members the benefits of sobriety, thrift and compliance with the status quo.

The Birkbeck Schools, launched in 1848 as the spectre of communism was haunting Europe, pioneered the teaching of “social economy” as an antidote to Hodgskin’s “political economy.” Their legacy survives in today’s school civics curriculum.

The Birkbeck Building Society and its Bank (later adsorbed into the London and Westminster and then into the Royal Bank of Scotland) were once the largest such in the world.

Like the Penny Bank in the Huddersfield Mechanics Institute (later the Post Office Savings Bank) it offered its investors the prospect of home ownership which — according to Samuel Smiles — makes “men steady, sober, and diligent. It weans them from revolutionary notions, and makes them conservative.”

That’s as true today as it was then. There’s nothing like a mortgage to make you fear losing your job — and your home.

The victory was never complete, however. For a few years after its foundation, Hodgskin continued to lecture at the LMI. His first lectures were published as Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital (under the pseudonym of “a labourer”) as were a second series, entitled Popular Political Economy. Both were widely read.

Marx called Hodgskin “one of the most important modern English economists.” He praised Labour Defended, calling it “this admirable work” and he quoted Popular Political Economy extensively in his notebooks, written between 1857-58 and later edited by Engels as Volume Four of Capital.

Both Marx and Engels were scathing about mechanics’ institutes, Engels declaring that they were useless “organs of the middle classes,” their teachings “uninspired and flabby.”

Their purpose was to teach students “to be subservient to the existing political and social order. All that the worker hears in these schools is one long sermon on respectful and passive obedience in the station of life to which he has been called.”

The issues of control and curriculum in working-class adult education have never gone away. However they are no longer a focus of adult education activists in the way they were during the Ruskin College “strike” of 1909, the inter-war Labour College movement, and the half-century after 1945 when university extra-mural “outreach” and the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) included trade union and industrial studies courses.

Post-16 education today is increasingly narrowly focused on “employability.” Non-vocational adult education (which once provided a forum for political discussion) has collapsed. Most trade union education (including the TUC’s Unionlearn from which the government has withdrawn its support) is concerned primarily with workplace issues and technical skills.

Courses offered by independent bodies such as the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School are more important than ever. Journals such as Education for Tomorrow and Post-16 Educator together with study groups and classes within the trade union and labour movement and those organised by students themselves keep the issues of control and curriculum alive.

The critical issues of collective versus individual models of self-help; of “really useful” versus merely “useful” knowledge; of what working-class education could be like, how to secure it, and how independent it should be (from the state or from other forms of patronage) are still current, two centuries on.

A report of a major conference Rebuilding Labour Movement Education held in January 2023 is available together with a wide range of learning materials at www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk.

Our educational programme includes a wide range of online courses open to all including: Introduction to Marxism; Marxist Economics; Understanding the British State; and British Trade Union History, all starting in the autumn. Other tailor-made courses are provided in collaboration with individual trade unions and other bodies — if you are interested please contact [email protected].

 

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