Not long before he was gunned down by the Chicago police in 1969, Fred Hampton, deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party and chair of its Illinois chapter, observed, “You can’t build no revolution with no education.”
Recently, the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) created an Academy for Socialist Education. The academy — which one of us, Steve Fraser, is involved in organizing — is into its second “semester,” offering courses that range from fascism and imperialism to an introduction to political economy and the making of “Trump country.”
Institutions like the academy, as well as less formal undertakings, have featured prominently in the history of many radical movements. Challenging the status quo and imagining new worlds heightens the desire for new knowledge. Indeed, the demand for education of any sort was at one time the cry of working people, when formal schooling was a mark of the privileged. Education was seen as central to emancipation.
Enlightenment and Radicalism
A pamphlet circulated in early worker organizing efforts on “Education and the Workingman” from the 1830s noted that “a large body of human beings are ruined by neglect of education, rendered miserable in the extreme, and incapable of self-government.” Thomas Paine included the right to an education among the essential rights of man. During the 1820s, a mechanics association in Philadelphia established an institution “for the improvement of the mind and intellectual condition of mechanics.” Invariably, free public schools became a prominent demand of the workingmen’s political parties that flourished, briefly, during the Jacksonian era.
Fusing the desire for education with resistance to the new capitalist order marked working-class as well as agrarian populist movements all through the nineteenth century. Curricula embraced an entrée into classical and modern ideas in the social and natural sciences as well as the arts, along with close study and discussion of radical thinkers: Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, among others.
Chicago was host to several Arbeiter-Vereine, or “workers clubs,” made up of immigrant German workers, whose members subscribed to the Communist Manifesto. The clubs maintained substantial libraries and reading rooms and held regular debates and lectures on a wide range of subjects, as well as social functions like picnics and concerts. As an ensemble, they were a key component of a wider artisan culture. It was cosmopolitan and literate — accustomed, for example, to hiring one of their number to read to the rest while they worked. Enlightenment and radical politics were two sides of the same coin.