"We want to make people feel powerful"
The political education programme teaching unionists about the history of workers' struggle - and how they can become part of it.
When I was growing up, I remember my socialist granddad, Ken, giving us frequent, and extremely eloquent, lectures about the problems with capitalism.
He was a working-class kid who had left home at 14 and never finished his education. His politics came from reading the Communist Manifesto while sailing around the world with the merchant navy. But his education came from the labour movement.
Ken worked in logistics and was a member of the TGWU. Eventually, he became a shop steward (though he would never tire of talking to us about the nightmare of dealing with the union bureaucracy).
As he rose up the ranks, he gained a real, material political education. In part, this was a practical training in organising tactics and negotiating strategies. But it also involved more abstract learning about the workings of modern capitalism.
Ken was an extremely intelligent man. If he’d gone to university, he probably would have become an academic (he did eventually get a degree from the Open University, but only once he’d retired).
He didn’t have those opportunities, so he received his education from his fellow workers. But the instruction he received from the labour movement was broad, deep, and extremely rigorous.
This tradition of working class, labour movement education is something that the labour movement seems to have lost in recent years. But today, there are signs that it is finally being revived.
Organize to Win!
The Rosa Luxemberg foundation is delivering a new training programme, Worker’s Power – Organise to Win!, to trade unionists across the UK. I spoke to Deborah Hermans and Joe Beswick about why the programme is so important.
“We have a system which is breaking down and lots of people are looking to alternatives,” Joe answered.
“So why has the rise of the far right not also been mirrored by the rise of a powerful, confident left? Part of the answer, we believe, lies in a lack of political education.”
The issue isn’t a lack of training opportunities within existing unions. Today’s unions are generally pretty good at providing training programmes to help rank and file workers get more involved in union activity.
The issue is a lack of what Joe calls ‘materialist education’, like courses on political economy, or the history of the labour movement.
“While there are some great examples out there, it’s far from widely available,” Joe told me.
“When I first joined a union, when I worked at Morrison’s, I was invited to loads of different courses, but there was nothing like this on offer. There was nowhere where I, as a worker, could find out about how the economy worked from a workers’ perspective. That’s what we wanted to change.”
The course is in part inspired by the success of a nationwide political education programme run in the Communication Workers of America Union. But another source of inspiration is the history of worker education in the UK.
“In the 20th century, the labour movement was a very, very powerful force in society,” said Joe.
“A large part of that came from a network of working class educational institutions. Some of that came from the trade unions. But working-class communities also had libraries and workers education centres.”
As my grandad would have attested, things look very different today.
“For 40 years now, the trade union movement has been decimated, and so have these institutions of working class education” says Joe.
“We’re trying to bring that back.”
Labour vs Capital
So, how does it work?
“We thought it was important to link an analysis of the world with practical organising training,” Deborah told me. “We didn’t want people to feel disempowered and learn how bad things are without coming away with the tools to change them.”
The first thing the course teaches is the last hundred years of economic and political history.
“We try to explain how the economy has changed over time, and what that means for the working class. We want people to understand words like ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘austerity’,” says Deborah.
“At the same time, we also tell the history of the trade union movement. We want them to come away with this idea that the working class is one of the two most powerful players in the world, and that they are part of that.”
The second part is teaching people how to organise on the basis of what they’ve learned.
“We teach people how to have a really good conversation in the workplace,” Deborah explains.
“That could be convincing someone to join the union, but it could also be to convince someone to get involved in a protest or something else.”
When the training is complete, participants collectively develop a plan to put their learnings into practice, and to grow the power and size of the movement.
“They might say ‘I'm going to, in the next six weeks, recruit 10 members’, and then write down the names of the people they’re going to approach.”
The training also focuses on building relationships and helping workers from different backgrounds to understand each other.
“When we reflect back at the end on what we’ve learned from the course and from each other, the atmosphere in the room is often quite emotional and quite powerful – sometimes there are even tears” says Deborah.
“It does create this feeling that everyone has been on this transformative journey together.”
Building Power
The programme started off through a close collaboration with the Bakers’ Union in November 2023. The results were really promising.
“After we'd run four courses with the Bakers’ Union, with maybe 50 to 60 participants in total, those recruited around 300 new members.”
Since then, they’ve provided the training programme ten times to five different unions. They’re hoping to run more than ten courses this year. I asked Joe and Deborah what they’re hoping to achieve moving forward.
“The primary point of this is to make people feel powerful. We want people to think ‘I'm part of this long lineage of history of struggle, which has been very successful in the past.’
“We don’t want to romanticize social democracy, but we also don't want to step away from how impressive it was to go from the start of the 20th century, when the working class in this country were really not treated as human beings, to victories like the NHS.”
In that sense, the course has been very successful.
“One of the participants from the Bakers’ Union got so engaged afterwards that he just spent days going from one Gregg’s to the next. I think he recruited about 50 people.”
“And there was this young factory worker who came to the course. He was quite shy, hadn’t done anything like this before. Within a few months, he ended up being on the national executive of the Bakers’ Union.”
Another really central goal is to recruit people who might otherwise be targets for the far right.
“One of our target audiences isa union member who might be open to lots of the new weird and wacky fascist ideas and conspiracy theories knocking around at the moment,” says Joe.
“We confront this quite head on in the course. We talk about how the primary tool that the ruling class use to divide us nowadays is migrant hate. I think we can honestly say that our course has played a role in insulating people from some of these far right narratives.”
Their priority is now to offer the course to as many unions as possible. Rather than going to the union leadership and trying to offer the course from the top down, they’re focusing on engaging ordinary members to push for the training to be delivered at their union branches.
“Our approach is based on the idea that you don’t remember a lot of the facts that you hear, but you do remember how you felt when you heard them.
“Through the whole course, we try to build up this sense of anger, and then give people the tools to go away and build their trade union membership, to start disputes in their workplace, to feel like they’re part of working class history.”
If you’re a union member and you want to learn more, you can get in touch with Deborah using this email: Deborah.hermanns@rosalux.org
It was the educational endeavours of mid-C19th unions which advocated for universal primary education. They believed that with increased literary among working people, more impactful mobilisation of labour was possible politically. In ways, this was true. But what the early unions didn't envision was how capitalists would shape the curriculum to inoculate children against class consciousness. The myth of meritocracy was born.
This work is vital. And we need to start thinking ahead about how to demand a national curriculum too that is radically democratic & supports the majority to resist oppression by the few.