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LABOR’S
MIND: A HISTORY OF WORKING-CLASS INTELLECTUAL LIFE
By Tobias Higbie
Reviewed by Jim Burns
I never saw my father read a book. He did read a newspaper,
The Daily Herald, which
was pro-Labour in its political leanings, and each Friday there was
Thomson’s Weekly, a
magazine which had been started in the 19th century and was aimed at
the artisan class. It published articles and puzzles, and what I
remember most, a series of short crime stories featuring Inspector
Dandy McLean. They intrigued me because they managed to say
everything within the confines of a single page.
There were a few books in the house, Sunday School prizes and
things like that, but my father never touched them.
I mention this because I think he may have been typical in some ways
of many men of his age and background. Along with his lack of
interest in books, he didn’t have any great devotion to political
ideas or ideals. He voted Labour at election time, and had what
might be called an underdog’s distrust of anyone in authority, which
I suspect extended to union leaders almost as much as to
politicians. He kept clear of policemen and would have nothing to do
with priests. The school of hard knocks (twelve years at sea, jobs
as a steeplejack, docker, labourer) had been his education beyond
the basics the state had provided before the age of fourteen. I
can’t say that he imparted any great pearls of wisdom about life or
anything else to me beyond the observation, as we passed the local
prison, that the really
big criminals weren’t in there. I inherited that notion from him,
along with his misgivings about those with power, and their tendency
to be corrupted by it.
The observations about my father’s life were triggered by reading
Tobias Higbie’s Labor’s Mind:
A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life. Leaving aside the
obvious fact that Higbie is writing about an American situation, and
my father lived in
The people Higbie discusses did have higher aims when they set out
on journeys to improve their minds and use their new-found knowledge
for political purposes. Unlike Jonathan Rose’s
The Intellectual Life of the
British Working Classes (Yale University Press,
They soon turned to books and magazines that could offer them wider
intellectual fields to explore, and to works that laid down policies
and prescriptions for social change and, perhaps, even revolutionary
aims. Higbie is keen to emphasise how so many of those he deals with
wanted to rise with their class and not out of it. This could lead
to problems as, inevitably, their improved educational status
frequently gave them the opportunity to move into areas of
employment and social mobility not often open to most working-class
people. Becoming a
teacher or writer, for example, set one apart from people one may
have grown up with and who had inclined towards traditional
working-class jobs. But the fact of having intellectual interests,
in literature, music, art, could in itself be a barrier that was
likely to set up a distancing from fellow workers and even family
members. I‘m talking in terms of the past, but I wonder if the
situation is very different now?
In saying that I’m not intending to doubt the sincerity of the
people Higbie is concerned to credit with attempting to widen the
scope of working-class life. Reading about how the men and women
whose lives he chronicles struggled to find their way through
to a deeper involvement
in intellectual pursuits, while at the same time participating in
social and political activities designed to benefit other people,
can be very moving. Whatever we may think of the later involvements
of someone like William Z. Foster, who became head of the American
Communist Party, his early adventures, as recounted in
Pages From a Worker’s Life (International
Publishers, New York, 1970),
are a chronicle of hard times on land, and at sea, and the
development of a political consciousness that grew out of direct
experience and not books.
There are other examples of individual lives in Higbie’s book, and
they are well worth reading, but what a lot of it concerns is the
general outline of intellectual activity, as when he refers to the
IWW (the Industrial Workers of the World) as “as much an educational
organisation as a union”, and points to the variety of newspapers it
published, some in languages other than English, and their contents,
which covered “reports from rank and file organisers, commentary on
current events, theoretical debates about unionism, and book
reviews”.
There were also several colleges where activists could pursue their
interest in political theory, practical organising, and cultural
matters which mostly connected with social concerns. Art for art’s
sake was not a priority in these establishments: “There is no one
road to freedom. There are roads to freedom. So workers’ education
will include elementary classes in English, and entertainment for
the crowd. But the road for leaders of the people will be straight
and hard. Only a few thousand out of the millions will take it. It
is different, a new way of life to which the worker is being
called”.
That statement by a radical journalist, and circulated widely in the
labour movement, according to Higbie, might well have summed up how
many activists felt. It might also have raised a few doubts in the
minds of the anarchist-inclined when it referred to “leaders of the
people”. The Wobblies had a term, “pie-card artists”, which
described those who had become “leaders” and union and other
bureaucrats, and no longer earned their bread in the factories and
fields.
Not all working-class education revolved around places like
Brookwood, and there were lessons to be learned in more-spontaneous
and loosely-organised locations.
One thing that occurs to me in connection with the whole question of
“working-class intellectual life” is what frequently appears to be
an assumption that it automatically implies a link to radical
politics. It sometimes does, I agree, but it may not be true in the
majority of cases. We simply don’t hear too much about people who,
in their activities outside their working lives, have a serious
interest in ornithology, Egyptology, and the Peninsular War (I’m
using three examples from my own encounters) but who, though
possibly being kindly and liberal in their attitudes, have no desire
to participate in effecting major changes in the overall structure
of society. They will be criticised by radicals because of this, but
it’s wrong to assume that they don’t have an “intellectual life” of
any kind. But they are not self-satisfied, just not dissatisfied.
Nor do they want to be academics.
There is an interesting short passage in
Labor’s Mind where Higbie
mentions Eric Hoffer, the American longshoreman and philosopher. I
read Hoffer some years ago and was intrigued by the fact that he’d
worked on the
Higbie’s summing up of the current situation refers to a time when
“Universities were one part of a more diffuse field of educational
practice that included popular lectures and home study. It was only
after World War II that modern universities sought to claim the
field of higher education as their exclusive domain”. Prior to that
“Higher education was also a more diffuse and less bureaucratised
social field”, which took in open forums, labour colleges,
university extension programmes, not to mention personal reading
habits, the school of hard knocks, and much more.
I’ve raised some questions with regard to aspects of
Labor’s Mind, but in
general it strikes me as an extremely informative and stimulating
book. For readers outside the
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