Workers Schools

WORKERS SCHOOLS. Four years after the founding of the US Communist Party, and after some of the initial factional tensions had subsided, the Party began to develop its educational/propaganda program, including a Party press and Party-run schools. In this, the Communist Party was merely continuing similar efforts carried out by the Socialist Party, most notably at the Rand School of Social Science in New York City. Communist Workers Schools sprang up in several cities around the country where there were a sufficient number of militants, especially in New York City, where a Workers School opened on University Place near Union Square in October 1923 and later moved to Party headquarters on East Fourteenth Street.

Its teaching staff and administrators were drawn from the ranks of Party professionals and intellectuals. The New York Workers School’s first codirectors—until the expulsion of the Lovestoneite faction—were Bertram D. Wolfe and Ben Davidson. Afterward, the school was administered by a politically orthodox New York pharmacist named Abraham Markoff, and after Markoff died in the late 1930s the position devolved upon former top Party leader William Weinstone.

The Workers School’s aims were stated in the initial promotional brochure of 1923, and were revised and restated regularly: “The Workers School has been founded for the purpose of advancing true proletarian education, and of training workers for effective leadership in the American Labor Movement.” A year later, the school’s educational aims were spelled out in greater detail, and it is clear that this was intended to be no ivory tower: “Courses [at the Workers School] are designed to give workers that knowledge of revolutionary theory and tactics, and labor history, which is essential for militant activity in the struggle against capitalism.”

Later in the decade when the Party adopted its grim “third period” outlook Workers School publications and courses spelled out the educational implications: “Workers education as given in the Workers School renders permanent the class knowledge of the working class, puts it on a broader and deeper basis and projects it forward as an instrument by means of which the American labor movement might cope more effectively with the growing power of the American ruling class.”

School publications proudly noted that school members, students, faculty, and administrators actively participated in the struggles of the day: “the fight for Sacco and Vanzetti, the Hands-Off-China Campaign, Passaic Relief, etc.” It was obvious that the Workers School and its successors aimed at avoiding “the academic approach.” Political advocacy was a regular component of the pedagogical process. The school’s teaching, as one brochure put it, “is permeated with the live issues of the day, with the practical activity of the American people, with history in the making.” As with the later Jefferson School of Social Science, this was an expression of the Marxian principle of the unity of theory and action; if the evils of capitalism and imperialism were studied in class, it made perfect educational sense to join teacher and fellow students in the next anti-imperialist demonstration, or to march alongside them in the May Day parade.

The school not only trained already signed-up Party members but also functioned as a recruiting mechanism for potential Party activists. The students were mostly working class, many foreign-born, drawn from New York’s factories and shops—especially shoe, jewelry, and food preparation industries, the building trades, retailing, and especially the needle trades. In time, satellite centers would appear in the Bronx, Harlem, Brooklyn, and in New Jersey industrial towns as well.

Except for a few day sessions for workers on the night shift, classes were held in the evenings, after regular working hours. The core course was “Fundamentals of Communism,” which covered such basic concepts as class struggle, dialectic, and the necessity of revolution. The texts were penny pamphlets like Moissaye Olgin’s ABC of Communism, or Lenin’s State and Revolution. In addition there were, once Workers School enrollments had risen into the thousands, a variety of other courses and special lectures, some conducted by top Party leaders, such as Alexander Bittelman (Tactics of the Third International), General Secretary Earl Browder (The Chinese Revolution), Cochairman William Z. Foster (Trade Union Problems), and so on. Harvey O’Connor, Sender Garlin, and Whittaker Chambers taught journalism; historian Arthur Calhoun offered American labor history; Scott Nearing did contemporary Europe; Bertram Wolfe offered a course on “the American Mind”; writer Michael Gold conducted a seminar on “proletarian writing”; and several staff members expounded on aspects of Marxian economic theory. The Workers School, reflecting the Communist Party’s antiracism, developed (under the leadership of writer/teacher Elizabeth Lawson) courses and readings giving an authentic and usable history of black Americans intended both to appeal to Black workers and to combat prejudice among whites.

Teachers’ pay at the Workers School, which came out of tuition fees, was $12 a week for what a later generation would call a “teaching load” of ten to fifteen two-hour classes a week. Student tuition was $3.50 per twelve-session, one-evening-a-week course, payable in installments. Twice-weekly English courses were $6 a term. A special tuition deal was available: any trade union, working-class fraternal organization, or foreign-language association, on payment of $25, could send a representative to take four courses each term for a whole year.

The content of the readings, courses, and lectures was predictably bounded by the standard Party line of the period—whether the “third period” belief in the imminence of revolutionary struggle, or the later Popular Front conceptions of acceptable collaboration with “progressive” sections of the bourgeoisie. The Soviet Union was of course considered the sacred bulwark of progressive forces everywhere, and even a model for an eventual socialist United States, although the impact of this belief on day-to-day Party work has probably been exaggerated in the standard non- and anticommunist literature. In 1943 the Workers School, after two decades of continuous operation, merged with the Party’s Jefferson School of Social Science.

Gettleman, Marvin E. “The New York Workers School, 1923-1944: Communist Education in American Society.” In Brown, Michael E. and Randy Martin, Frank Rosengarten, George Snedeker, eds. New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993, pp. 261-80.

Workers School of New York. Online Guide of California. University of California-Irvine Special Collections. http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf8m3nb598/