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.
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