- Part One. Independent working-class education & the remaking of people’s history
- Part Two. Communist historical culture & Lindsay’s England
Instructions
Here is a list of the tasks you need to complete this week:
1) In what sense can Starr‘s narrative be described as a “people’s history“? In what sense can it not?
2) In what sense can communist pageantry, and especially Jack Lindsay‘s written “pageant”, be described as a “people’s history“? In what sense can it not?
Here are the links to the Googledocs, as well as the schedule for the conversations for each team:
| TUESDAY GROUP | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 18.20-19.00 | Amandine | Soufiane | Louisa | Maela |
| 19.00-19.40 | Ulysse | Samuel | Clara | |
| 19.40-20.20 | Maya | Jules | Louis |
And here is an estimation of the amount of time it should take you to accomplish those tasks.
| Part I (Listening + Reading) OR Part II (Reading) | 60 min |
| Writing | 30 min |
| Speaking | 40 min |
| Total | 120 min |
PART ONE.
INDEPENDENT WORKING-CLASS EDUCATION
& THE REMAKING OF PEOPLE’S HISTORY
Independent working-class education
The first decades of the 20th century were a time when educational initiatives aimed at the working classes experienced very significant growth. This came, first, from the universities (what was called University extension). It then became a collaboration between universities and trade unions (what was called the Workers’ Educational Association or WEA).
However, radicals and socialists denounced such initiatives as “bourgeois“. In their eyes, this kind of education subtly (or not so subtly) promoted the capitalist order and the world-view of the bourgeoisie.
For this reason, radical and socialist activists tried to establish counter-initiatives: what was soon described as “independent working-class education” (IWCE). In the terms of historian John McIlroy, “IWCE is important as a creative movement from below, a sustained attempt by workers to control their own education in opposition to what they perceived as an externally imposed and hostile state curriculum. IWCE was based on the belief that the state was simply an instrument of the capitalist class. It was thus necessary for education to be controlled by the workers themselves.” (“Independent working-class education”, 1996).
In 1909, the students at Ruskin College (a college for working-class people connected to Oxford University) went on “strike” and decided to found their own institution, the “Central Labour College“.
To learn something about this, listen to this 5-minutes extract from a talk by Colin Waugh, who was himself a teacher at Ruskin College. The full talk is here if you are interested.
NB: Note that Waugh is telling the story “from the IWCE point of view”. Other historians might nuance aspects of his presentation.
Within this Labour College, and similar institutions that flourished before WW1, teaching was very heavily influenced by accounts of Marxist theory.
Such teaching was sometimes described as bottom-up and participatory, and sometimes as narrow and dogmatic. In the terms of John McIlroy: “Some sought to push IWCE in the direction of an alternative cultural formation, and advocated a discussion-based pedagogy. The debates on philosophy demonstrated a desire to develop ‘the science of thinking’. However, IWCE struggled to create a curriculum that went beyond a lecture-based pedagogy focused on the absorption of sacred Marxist texts“.
Mark Starr looks at history
At the CLC, Starr taught a course in Industrial History, which was a huge hit. A reworked version of the course was printed as a pamphlet in 1917 (the same year as Chesterton’s history!). It proved a best-seller, selling about 30,000 copies before 1925.
Read the following extracts from the pamphlet.
A Foreword.
These Outlines would never have been written but for the fact that the writer, in the autumn of 1915, was fortunate to come into contact with the Central Labour College and the Plebs League. Then, for the first time, he saw the need of Independence in Working-Class Education.
There are benefits to be gained by the workers taking up the study of Industrial History from a definite working-class viewpoint.
Before the science of navigation was developed, the compass used, and continents and currents discovered, the early mariners could only sail within sight of the little land they knew. Before a clear knowledge of social science, leading on to a conscious control of social forces, was sought and found, we in the Labour Movement (without disparaging any of the work of our fellows and their leaders in the past) feel that they, too, were forced to sail only in sight of the well-known lands of their limited experience. But when the science of society is developed, when we have the compass of working-class education, and when we have estimated the strength of the currents and mapped out the social world, then, in the same way, we as mariners of the organised Labour ship will be able to launch out across hitherto uncharted oceans and explore new worlds, where the workers will control the conditions of their life, and wage-slavery be but a memory.
The purpose of this book is to aid the rapidly growing working-class movement, which gives fair promise to provide society with a chart and steering skills for future voyages.
Chapter 1. A General Introduction
Industrial History deals with the history of the Labour Process. Therefore we workers, by studying it, learn how, under various systems of society, the Labour Process was carried on. Too long we have been stuffed with ‘drum-and-trumpet history, Royal amours, Court intrigues, the romping of armies over the Continent’, and the like. Shoving aside this superficial shoddy we wish to find out the status and conditions of the workers of other times. And we do this, not because of any love for the antique, but because, wishing to raise our class, we wish to learn how other classes found the road to power; looking backward to understand the present, and in order to march forward.
Which Theory of History? ‘Man makes his own history’, that is agreed; but when we come to discuss ‘how he made or makes it’, then various conflicting theories or explanations are offered.
The Materialist Conception of History. This theory of history shows that the change which preceeds all changes in the superstructure of society, in politics, morals, laws, religions, etc., is a change in the economic foundations of society, ‘the means and methods of wealth production and distribution’. If the reader possesses a copy of Marx’s Critique, he will find, on pp. 11, 12, the basis of this theory stated. The materialist conception of history is that view of history which ascribes the driving power of all social change to the economic development of society in production, and exchange, with its creation of classes and the resulting class struggle. In this explanation of history the mode of production and exchange is taken as the basis of all social relations, and therefore private ownership of land and capital being general in historical times, all history is made up of contests between slave and slave-owner, capitalist and feudal-lord, and wage-slave and capitalist. History, then, is a record of class struggles, and these struggles occur over the ownership of the means of production and distribution.
It is only the workers who dare accept this theory of history, for the evolutionary forces are now on our side.
This theory is the tool which we shall consciously apply in our industrial history studies, and not only will it help us to explain past history, but it will enable us to make it in the future.
Chapter 2. An Introduction to English Industrial History
The Ethnological Classification. The science of Ethnology (which treats of racial diversities and characteristics) has supplied a classification which is based upon technical progress. Lewis H. Morgan and Engels divide up human development thus: (1) Savagery; (2) Barbarism; and (3) Civilisation. In the Lower Stage of Savagery the race was in its gibbering infancy. The Lower Stage of Barbarism was arrived at with the making and use of pottery. Civilisation comes with the discovery of the art of writing.
Chapter 3. From Mark to Manor
Effects of Anglo-Saxon Occupation. When agriculture was carried on by the Teutonic tribes, to which belonged the Anglo-Saxons, a communal system of wealth production existed. A common holding of land was probably at first cultivated and occupied in common by a group of kinsfolk. These tribes had no slaves, and there was no person without land, for they all owned communally the means of production, i.e., the land. There was no class war, because there were no classes; private ownership of the means of production had not begun.
Here we pause; It is of interest to Socialists to know of a time when ‘class struggle’ did not exist; and thus, by tracing the conditions of its birth, we shall be able to understand the conditions under which it will die. There is no need to long for this past community of pauperism: the means of production were crude and undeveloped.
Chapter 4. Feudalism
The Anglo-Saxon Manor. In continued warfare there arose a division of labour between the farmers and the fighters. One part of the community went to fight, the other stayed at home to till the soil. The nominal protector – the fighter – soon became the overlord of the farmer. From a temporary war-chief evolved the hereditary ruler, with his chosen bodyguards. Under the chief lord there would be the lords of each manor, who were now in a position to demand the service and produce of the tillers of the soil upon his domain. Thus what was at first a voluntary arrangement became in time an accepted permanent state of affairs in which the farmer or tiller of the soil was forced into an inferior position.
The Norman Conquest of England. William the Norman carried out the Norman Conquest of 1066. Thus he was able completely to re-organize the land-holding system, and to make himself an absolute overlord.
The Feudal Structure. There is a controversy among historians as to whether or not the feudal system was developed in England before the Norman Conquest in 1066; at any rate, the Norman Conquest made it general, and it lasted in its decay until the 17th century.
Chapter 8. The Fall of Feudalism
The Peasant Revolt of 1381. The peasant’s position was improving. The comparative economic independence of the workers voiced itself in the revolutionary ideas and expressions of the times.
The Revolt was crushed. But in spite of this apparent failure, the peasants were never reduced to the old Feudal bondage again, and a time of prosperity for them, known as the Golden Age, followed. Legislation and coercion are powerless in the face of economic development, and those who attempted to stand still, or move backward, when economic development cried ‘Forward’, were condemned to a futile, hopeless endeavour.
Chapter 10. The creation of the Proletariat
Why does Capitalism need a class which has no other way of living than by the sale of its labour-power? To answer this question we must clearly understand what capital is. Capital is that part of wealth used to create more wealth with a view to profit. It only emerges upon the stage when certain historical developments have occurred: the destruction of the serf and guild relations, and the rise of a class of people, free from all the old regulations and owning only their labour-force. Capitalism thus found it necessary to divorce the labourer from the means of production.
We have no desire to provoke useless regrets. To rhapsodise sentimentally over the sufferings of the early members of our class, to wish things had been otherwise, or to imagine what might have been, is a waste of mental energy.
We shall see in future lessons how in its progress, capitalism developed immense natural resources; solved the problem of production; brought the whole world into kinship; tended to break down all barriers of craft, sex, colour and nationality between the workers; and is gradually educating us up to the point of control of industry.
By strenuous agitation, by education in the social sciences in order to solve the problem of distribution, and by efficient organisation, that time can be hastened when the separation traced above will be annulled, and the labourer will be again the owner and controller of the now highly improved means of production.
Chapter 19. In Conclusion
The geologist told us of the struggle between the elements in the earth’s formation. The biologist showed how individual animals and species struggled with each other. And we passed on to sociology and witnessed a struggle still proceeding.
In this struggle the new class and the old class were engaged, and out of it came the evolution of society. We followed ‘the chain of change’ from tribal communism to slavery, from slavery to feudalism, and then onwards to manufacture and our own industrial system. The evolution of the warrior, the merchant, the guildsman, and of the industrial capitalist, with his inevitable companion the wage-worker, has engaged our attention. We have watched new orders and relations arising out of the old; and have seen that the triumph of each class, as well as its birth, always coincides with the development and progress of material conditions.
The Future. What of it? Will our lessons help us to face it? If they do not, they have failed. The sole object of our studies is to get a knowledge of past events and of theories which truly explain the facts of our working life, and which will guide us in future practice.
The Central Labour College aims at spreading independent working-class education, and upon its curriculum figure the truths arrived at by these two German thinkers, Marx and Engels, who gave themselves so wholeheartedly and wholeheadedly to the workers’ cause.
Vain are the causes of an industrial peace. Like snow upon the mountain side they will vanish before the sun of economic heat. In every country Capitalism begets its gravediggers. In its endeavour to increase its profits it will force the workers to take up a militant attitude upon the industrial, political and educational fields, and progress will be accelerated until the workers of the world will unite and their emancipation be accomplished. To the Day!
Mark Starr,A Worker Looks at History, Plebs League, 1917.
You should now be able to answer the following question:
In what sense can Starr’s narrative be described as a “people’s history“? In what sense can it not?
PART TWO.
COMMUNIST HISTORICAL CULTURE
& LINDSAY’S ENGLAND
The Popular Front and the communist remaking of national history
The foundation of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1920 fundamentally changed the landscape of independent working-class education. Henceforth, this landscape would be fundamentally shaped by the CPGB’s successive cultural strategies. And, through the CPGB, by the Comintern‘s (the Communist International, i.e., the central organ organizing the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Communist Parties worldwide) own successive cultural strategies.
(For those interested in communist history: there is a debate, among historians of the CPGB, about how submissive the CPGB was to the Comintern’s directives. Some say completely, others claim the CPGB had a degree of autonomy – partly because the CPGB was so tiny that the Comintern didn’t really care! This is obviously a very complex question, and I just want you to remain aware that the answer is not clear-cut.)
In the context of this anti-fascist “Popular Front” strategy, British intellectuals on the left felt that their duty was to rewrite English history to show the English people that this history was permeated by heroic struggles for emancipation led by the oppressed and their intellectual allies.
A Communist “pageantitis”? the popular front and pageant fever
In such a context, the CPGB led the way in appropriating a specific cultural form: historical pageantry.
Following on 19th-century medievalism with its tournament and mystery plays, 20th-century historical pageants were mass public performances involving thousands of professional volunteers (and often, exotic animals) re-enacting important scenes from national history.
Between 1900 and 1914, pageants had existed mainly as public initiatives directed at the building of a local, national and/or imperial memory: “a typical English pageant from this time began with an episode depicting Roman times or the early medieval period, contained plenty of medieval scenes, and concluded with Elizabeth I, as symbol of the successful building of the modern English nation“1.
However, during the 1920s, something of a “pageant fever” or “pageantitis” developed2. Pageants could be “staged by large towns and cities, small parishes, schools, churches, youth organisations such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, voluntary bodies including Women’s Institutes, and political organisations“. Thus, pageants were “important channels of popular education as well as entertainment and, although they are sometimes seen as backward-looking and conservative spectacles, pageants could be an effective means of enlisting the past in the service of the present and future“1.
During the second half of the 1930s, working-class pageantry appeared. The CPGB was one of its leading organisers.
“The British working-class pageants of the 1930s were curiously cross-bred between, on the one hand, the resolutely bourgeois civic pageants which had become popular around the turn of the century and remained so still, and, on the other, the new Soviet style of mass-declamations with agit-prop intent. To the extent that they are appropriations of spectacular forms employed by the dominant apparatus of commerce and the state, when and to what extent is such an appropriation able to operate as a ‘counter-discourse‘? When does it merely surrenderto the dominant?3”
The idea was to build an alternative national history, in which militant workers (chartists and trade unionists) were the heroes. Besides recruiting new members and collecting funds, these events were meant as a form of historical education. Such education promoted narratives connecting present anti-capitalist and anti-fascist struggles to past liberal and radical movements – carrying an “image of democratic effort as a constant thread, a voice subdued but never silenced“3.
On the 1st May 1939, the “Pageant of South Wales” was organised, celebrating the centenary of the Chartist Newport Rising (a working-class rising which had been suppressed in blood). Simultaneously staged in three separate locations, it attracted an audience of (an estimated) 20,000 people, amongst which 6000 miners and their families (these numbers were less than expected, which might be attributed to the very bad weather).
The Pageant Master, Andre Van Gyseghem, claimed that “The British working class has a tradition it can be proud of, a tradition of fight after fight successfully fought and won for freedom. In attempting to revive the form of the pageant to express this tradition we are, I think, choosing the only form which can truthfully frame so large a canvass. It is a form which calls for the co-operation of all for the sake of all. It demands crowds and processions and fine, rousing music which stirs the memory and sets the heart pounding.” Or, as Oliver Harris, General Secretary of the miners’ union in South Wales, put it: “We are still a long, long way from the Promised Land; there is much yet to be done before we can create that earthly paradise which we visualise in our daily prayers, but it will encourage the younger generation to continue the struggle for these better conditions when they know and realise the depths from which their fathers struggled in the darker days of old“.
The pageant focused, not on the Newport rising itself (which had been confused and unsuccessful), but on the brutal repression of the main protagonists. It also pointed to a bright future for coal miners.
After the event, the communist Daily Worker related that “Thousands of people from the surrounding Welsh mining villages are gathered … paying homage to the working-class heroes of the past, and pledging themselves to carry on the struggle … The watching crowd is breathless. Resounding cheers are a tribute to the magnificent actors and an expression of the debt we owe to the Chartist pioneers“. The anti-communist Daily Express, on the other hand, wrote that “only a few hundred people came to see the free spectacle“4…
A couple of months later, in July 1939, another big pageant in honour of Chartism was organised, this time in London – “A Pageant of Chartism: Heirs to the Charter“. The 800 performers were mainly young members of the CPGB. The total audience is estimated at 10,000 (likely an overestimation).
The goals of the event were, according to the Communist newspaper Daily Worker, “to unite the ranks of Labour and the people of Britain for the signing of the pact with Russia. For the defence of democracy against Fascism and for the advance to Socialism. To raise £2000 for the National Memorial Fund for British volunteers in Spain. To welcome 1000 new members in the Communist Party. And to pledge to the Labour movement and to the people of London the determination of the Communist Party to advance the struggle of the working-class and of democracy.”
The front cover of the programme was titled: “Chartism – 1839, Communism – 1939“. The story was meant to be that of “100 years of heroism and self-sacrifice“. Into the historical scenes were injected some quotes from Marx. The Chartist movement was presented as a revolutionary movement betrayed by the bourgeoisie. The pageant ended by a 45 minute speech against capitalist war by Harry Pollitt (then General Secretary of the CPGB) playing his younger self. The CPGB was thus presented as Chartism’s natural heir5.
- Angela Bartie and al., “‘History taught in the pageant way’: Education and historical performance in 20th-century Britain”, 2019. ↩︎
- Ayako Yoshino, Pageant Fever: Local History and Consumerism in Edwardian England, 2011. ↩︎
- Mick Wallis, “Pageantry and the Popular Front: Ideological Production in the ‘Thirties”, New Theatre Quarterly, 1994. ↩︎
- Angela Bartie et al., “Pageant of South Wales”, The Redress of the Past, http://www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/pageants/1315/ ↩︎
- Angela Bartie et al., “A Pageant of Chartism: Heirs to the Charter”, The Redress of the Past, http://www.historicalpageants.ac.uk/pageants/1149/ ↩︎
A written “pageant”: Jack Lindsay’s England
Read the following extracts from the book.
ENGLAND, MY ENGLAND, the song says. There is something right about the appeal of the words, or we would feel that response.
There is one meaning of the phrase: the legal meaning, the meaning in terms of the existing state. We are aliens in an England owned by the Duke of Westminster, Lord Swinton, and their like.
But what we love in England has nothing to do with profits and parasites. It is ours – why? Because we know in our bones it is we who have made it; we who have given it its human meaning. Our part in the world of work, however small, links up with the other parts, with the whole world of work that keeps England alive, that stamps upon it the English seal. And the present world of work links up again with all the English past, with everything worthy which has been done by Englishmen, in a perpetual war against the landowners and rich industrialists. How could we even begin to love our country if we failed in gratitude to these our brothers of the dead years ?
That is the theme of this little book. A rapid glance at our brothers in the past, at the struggle which they had to wage unceasingly against the rulers, the legal owners of the land. The rulers want a state, based on violence, which is entirely subservient to their wishes. The working classes, on the other hand, by the very needs of toil, continually form cooperative unions of one kind or another. At the heart of the resistance of Englishmen in each period, there has always been the co-operative and bortherly impulse set against the greed and violence of the ruling classes.
England before the Norman Conquest
A thousand years ago the fight was between the local chieftains and the village group which farmed the land co-operatively. The rulers fought to destroy the rights of the working group, to break up the communal ownership of the soil, and to grab the soil as personal property.
England after the Norman Conquest
When the Normans under William conquered England, the dice were heavily weighted against the peasantry, who were now subject aliens as well as a suppressed class. The Norman lords stole the peasants’ land and attacked the communal life of the villages. It was incomparably the most important fact in the history of those years. So you read nothing about it in the history books at school. It would never do to let the English people know how the land was stolen from them.
The revolt of the English peasants
The tale of the Peasant Revolt is magnificently heartening. We see in it the unconquerable spirit of the English commons; the first full expression of the undaunted courage that rings thenceforth on through the whole of our history.
Again and again the people rise up to challenge the embattled powers of the world – the world of property. Beaten back, and again beaten back, they yet never fail.
Here, then, is the true English tradition, the tradition of stout-hearted men who struck and suffered for the right. Here is the English past of which we are proud. What concerns us here is that long struggle, that forging of the English tradition which we feel in our blood and bones and mind.
There is no half way, no compromise. You belong either to the England of the rebels, or to the England of their slayers. It is by our response to the moments of clear vision, of direct call, that the test of our manhood is made.
You will find people who think that Communism is an un-English idea. Why, if any people can claim such an idea, it is the people of England. No other people’s history shows such a steady and deep demand among the masses for the communist way of life. It is grained into every inch of the tale of our people. But you wouldn’t expect the ruling class to tell you that.
The first modern communists
A man named Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the Diggers during the English Revolution, had realised with new force the basic English tradition that only some form of communism could eliminate discord and enable men to enjoy the fruits of their labour. Winstanley’s books are the first expression of scientific communism; and it is natural that it should be an Englishman, living in the country with the clearest and deepest tradition of Communism among the people, who should be able to claim this proud title.
The political struggle begins anew
As the 18th century drew on, and as the compacting of the working class in industrial formations proceeded, the revolutionary spirit rose again and welded together all the diverse trains of protest.
Chartism
Now we come to the conscious movement which developed out of all these preparations, Chartism. It represented the arrival at political maturity of the working class and its allies in the lower middle classes.
The unions of the Chartist days had aimed at taking over full political power and creating a communistic society. No wonder the newspapers tell you that Communism isn’t English. It’s a bit too much English for the tastes of millionaire newspaper-propertors. That’s all.
Imperialism and the resumed struggle
And there has appeared a Communist Party which resumes the real tradition of hte working class of England, with renewed scientific insight.
We can meet the worst that can happen, if we realise our heritage, if we take up again the great English tradition.
Jack Lindsay, England, My England. A Pageant of the English People, 1938.
You should now be able to answer the following question:
In what sense can communist pageantry, and especially Jack Lindsay’s written “pageant”, be described as a “people’s history“? In what sense can it not?