In a reaction to the leftward movement of A.J. Muste’s Conference for Progressive Labor Action in the late 1920s, the A.F.L. pulled support from the Brookwood Labor College, one of the premiere workers’ education institutions in the country, at its 1929 convention. Muste’s response, below, shows a political trajectory that would ultimately lead him and the C.P.L.A. to launch the American Workers Party in 1933.

‘Shall Workers Education Perish?’ by A.J. Muste from Labor Age. Vol. 18 No. 1. January, 1929.

Progressives Urged To Accept Challenge

The present administration of the A. F. of L. is hostile to genuine workers’ education. This was demonstrated anew at the recent A. F. of L. convention at New Orleans. The soft pedal was put on any mention of workers’ education, except when Brookwood was “socked on the jaw,” as the A. F. of L. organs themselves put it, and the action of the Executive council in advising affiliated unions to withdraw support from Brookwood was endorsed.

In an editorial in the October number of the American Federationist, the official viewpoint as to the future development of workers’ education was given. This editorial speaks of two kinds of education as needed by the workers, cultural education on the one hand, and trade union education to make the unions and union activities more effective on the other hand. The first editorial proposes to hand over to the Extension Departments of the colleges and universities, believing that they are quite capable of meeting the cultural needs of the workers, and that no special labor classes or colleges are needed to teach the workers history or psychology or literature or general economics. On this suggestion, Professor John Dewey aptly observed that it might be true that the colleges and universities were capable of expanding to meet these needs of the workers, if you put great emphasis on the word “capable,” but that they certainly were not so expanded now, and for that reason labor colleges and classes such as Brookwood, were needed to show the way, and furthermore, that the teaching in many of the colleges and universities was mightily influenced by special interests, including the power trust, as the Federal Trade Commission has brought out, and therefore pretty dangerous stuff to hand out to the workers!

Trade union education, the editorial in the American Federationist goes on to say, must be strictly under the control of the unions, and when an issue arises in this field, it is a trade union issue and has nothing to do with academic freedom. This may sound like an innocent observation to those who do not know about the issues confronting workers’ education at the present time.

Actually, there is dynamite in this suggestion. No question of freedom of teaching and discussion can arise in labor classes? What kind of education is that where there can be no difference of opinion, and therefore no question about freedom to express dissent? This means that somebody is to decide what is to be taught in these trade union classes (the National Civic Federation perhaps?) and that this is to be handed out as the very word of God to the students. How many international unions and other labor bodies will want to intrust their members to such dictation in the field of education? It is indeed a far cry from that day in 1923 when Vice-President Matthew Woll said: “The A. F. of L. welcomes the work of the Workers Education Bureau. It does not seek to control the method of the teaching of the Bureau—This movement is concerned solely with the problem of arousing men to think and presenting to them facts about our industrial system, so that with these materials they may, of their own accord and by their own light, reach those conclusions they believe best calculated to solve the great problems that are confronting our people today.”

Killing Real Education

At the recent A. F. of L. convention, it was decided that a commission be appointed by President Green to appraise the results so far achieved in the field of workers’ education and to suggest a program for the future. A commission that has been voted by a convention which showed no interest whatever in workers’ education, except such interest as was indicated by the lynching of Brookwood, and that is to be under the control of an Educative Council that has the notions about workers’ education indicated in the editorial just cited, will be used for just one purpose, namely, to kill off, if possible, free, genuine, intelligent, working-class education, wherever it exists. This will be true even if the Workers Education Bureau of America is permitted to continue in some fashion to exist. The Executive Board of that Bureau has not had a real meeting in a year. That Executive Board never raised its voice during the months that Brookwood was under attack, though this meant among other things that the President of the Workers Education Bureau, James H. Maurer, and at least three of the Executive members of the Board, also Brookwood directors, were under attack. It is the simple truth to say that the present administration of the A. F. of L., whether it be aware of it or not, is out to kill workers’ education.

Think now of the trade unionists who founded the Workers Education Bureau, founded Brookwood, founded many a labor class and college in all parts of the land. Names that stand out in American labor history come to mind—James Maurer, Fannia Cohn, Abe Lefkowitz, Abe Epstein, John Van Vaerenewyck, John Brophy, Harry Russell, Arthur Gleason (now gone to his rest) and many others. Who were these men and women, and what were they seeking to accomplish through workers’ education?

They belonged to the progressive elements who were at that time influential or even dominant in many city central bodies, some of the state federations, a number of international unions, such as the garment trades, machinists, railroad organizations and miners. They were interested in organizing the masses of workers in the basic industries, in actively combatting the open shop, company union and yellow-dog contract, in exploring the possibilities of building a labor party. They envisaged an ultimate goal for the labor movement, the good life for all men, in a world controlled by the producers. They carried resolutions for the nationalization of railroads, for example, in A. F. of L. conventions. These elements founded the workers’ education movement. They wanted American workers trained for the class struggle, but not indoctrinated with cut and dried theories as to just how the struggle was to be carried on or as to precisely what kind of social order it was to achieve. They wanted the workers to be critical, realistic, intelligent. They wanted the minds of the workers opened and their program being what it was, they could afford to take the risks which that involved.

Hope in Progressives

Many individuals belonging to these groups are still alive. There are many others, especially young people, in the country today, who share their views. As a movement, however, militant progressivism in the American labor movement hardly exists today. There is no space here to enter into the reasons for its decline. We may pass on at once to stating that workers’ education can exist and flourish only if such a militant progressivism, a movement of those elements in the trade unions and other labor bodies who will not and cannot commit themselves either to the present A. F. of L. administration and its policies, or to the Workers (“Communist”) Party and its present policies, exists to back up workers’ education, and to use it as an instrument in its progress. A school or educational system is always in the last analysis a child or instrument of some social group. Workers’ education, Brookwood, all similar enterprises, are the children and the instruments of a militant labor progressivism, or if the expression be preferred, a non-Communist left. Let it be emphasized again that such a progressivism is interested in sound and high educational standards, and will want its educational institutions to be critical expounders of its own policies as well as of the policies of other elements in the labor movement.

One sees such a militant progressivism as has here been alluded to standing for aggressive effort to organize the masses of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the basic industries into industrial unions, with special attention to such groups as women workers, young workers, negro workers, immigrant groups; determined resistance to injunctions and yellow-dog contracts, with recognition of the fact that mass resistance to judgemade law on the picket line is of fundamental importance; active campaigning for social insurance against sickness, old age, unemployment, death; development of genuinely cooperative enterprises under the control of the workers; presentation of the labor movement as not only a business proposition but a great idealistic force, having for its ultimate goal the good life for all men, in a world controlled by the workers; the working out of a realistic, scientific, courageous attitude toward the problem of “union management cooperation vs. class collaboration,” recognizing on the one hand that a trade union is not a revolutionary political party and must make compromises, and on the other hand, that the trade union is primarily a fighting instrument by which the workers may defend their rights, improve their conditions and raise their status, and not a personnel agency for the boss; recognition of Soviet Russia by the United States, opposition to all efforts on the part of reactionaries and imperialists to prevent the Russian people from carrying out their experiment in workers’ control, and resistance also to efforts on the part of such elements to throw a smoke-screen around their own designs and activities by “pinning Communism” on every progressive individual or proposition; rigid opposition to militarism and to imperialistic adventures of the United States; recognition of the international character of capitalism and the consequent need of an international labor movement binding together workers regardless of race, nationality, creed and color, against the forces that are using them as machine fodder and cannon fodder; development of a labor party based on the mass organization of the industrial workers, including farmers and agricultural helpers, whose social and economic status is that of workers, and excluding all exploiting groups and interests; and finally, a workers’ education movement that has for its primary aim not extending to workers the same cultural advantages now enjoyed by other classes, but equipping them for the struggle against the company union, the open shop, the injunction, the labor spy, the struggle to improve their conditions and to gain control of industry.

A Call to Action

If genuine workers’ education can exist only if there be such a militant progressivism in the American labor movement, it is also true that militant progressivism can exist and flourish only if there is a genuine workers’ education movement. There are indications that workers’ education may furnish the field on which the honest militant and progressive elements in the movement may first rally themselves and prepare for a new advance that will lead on surely and perhaps swiftly to organization on the economic, political and cooperative fields. There is bitter resentment in many circles at the attempt to kill Brookwood and similar enterprises, to wrest workers’ education from the ideals of its founders. Let us take advantage immediately of this opportunity, and rally all those who want to see to it that education of the workers, for the workers and by the workers shall not perish in this land.

More clearly, more insistently, more hopefully than ever Brookwood calls: Let workers’ education flourish. Let us accept the challenge of its enemies. Let us rally all friends of genuine workers’ education, education with the union label on it, in a great movement—a movement to reach the masses of the workers, organized and unorganized, to break the chains of ignorance, fear and superstition which bind them, so that they may be free to organize, free to build a better world than the world of big business, of unemployment, of child labor, of yellow-dog contracts, of injunctions, of militarism and imperialism, in which we live today!

Labor Age was a left-labor monthly magazine with origins in Socialist Review, journal of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Published by the Labor Publication Society from 1921-1933 aligned with the League for Industrial Democracy of left-wing trade unionists across industries. During 1929-33 the magazine was affiliated with the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA) led by A. J. Muste. James Maurer, Harry W. Laidler, and Louis Budenz were also writers. The orientation of the magazine was industrial unionism, planning, nationalization, and was illustrated with photos and cartoons. With its stress on worker education, social unionism and rank and file activism, it is one of the essential journals of the radical US labor socialist movement of its time.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/laborage/v28n01-Jan-1929-Labor%20Age.pdf