‘The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott’, by Luke Fowler. Contributors Tom Steele and Owen Hatherley; published by Film and Video Umbrella, The Hepworth Wakefield and Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 2013, 80 pages, £7.50
This short booklet accompanies Luke Fowler’s film of the historian EP Thompson as a champion of workers’ education. The booklet contains the essay ‘EP Thompson, the WEA and Radical Workers’ Education in Yorkshire’ by Tom Steele. Steele’s essay covers ‘The WEA and University Education for Workers and George Thompson – Rebellion in Yorkshire’. The WEA had its origin in 1903 as the Association to Promote the Higher Education of Working Men set up by Albert Mansbridge.
Steele writes about an important figure in WEA history, a George Thompson (no relation to EP), a carpenter and WEA Yorkshire District Secretary from 1914-45 who was supported by Arthur Greenwood, Labour Party politician who would later hold Cabinet positions in MacDonald’s and Attlee’s Labour governments. George Thompson believed ‘the aim of workers’ education should be to enable the student to raise not rise out of his class. The education he received was not intended for personal advancement but as trust for the good of others, and workers’ education was not to de-class the student but to deepen his understanding of class solidarity’ (JFC Harrison). However in Steele’s essay we can see the reformism of the WEA. The WEA Yorkshire District Commemoration Souvenir (1935) by Arthur Greenwood ‘could list no fewer than 350 past and present members of WEA classes currently holding public office, from the parish council to the House of Commons.’ Steele confirms that ‘the function of trade union education was to prepare organised labour for a role in government.’
It is with grim irony that ‘the more open form of class-sensitive cultural studies’ such as Culture and Society (1958) by Raymond Williams, The Uses of Literacy (1957) by Richard Hoggart, and The Making of the English Working Class (1962) by EP Thompson appeared at ‘the pivotal historical moment when Thompson’s digging into the historical origins of the working-class, and making a compelling narrative of its world-historical success in becoming a ‘class for itself’, tragically occurs just when working-class self-belief seems to be waning, and the WEA nationally had all but given up on the working-class.’
It is instructive to recall George Thompson who wrote in A Socialist’s View of the WEA: ‘Workers will only achieve emancipation when they are capable of thinking out issues for themselves and have the capacity and sufficient tolerance to achieve the ends collectively.’
Steve Clayton
No comments:
Post a Comment