The Plebs Magazine

(1909-1929)

Introduction

The Plebs Magazine represented the most important sustained early 20th century effort to promote the study of Marxism among British workers. It began from a student struggle at Ruskin College, Oxford, an institution founded in 1899 to provide education for working-class men who could not access university. In November 1908, a group of Ruskin students and former students, dissatisfied with its education policy which they viewed as hostile to Marxism, formed The Plebs' League (a name taken from a pamphlet by Daniel De Leon – Two Pages from Roman History). The following year they launched a monthly journal, The Plebs Magazine (later called just Plebs).

With financial support from the South Wales Miners’ Federation and the National Union of Railwaymen a central Labour College and, subsequently, local Labour Colleges were also created. These worked closely with The Plebs Magazine as a cadre training school for the labour movement, one based on Marxism and socialist values. The Plebs Magazine’s conception of education was political. Its expressed aim was “to develop the class consciousness of the workers by propaganda and education, in order to aid them in destroying wage-slavery and to win power.”

Before World War I, The Plebs Magazine was heavily influenced by syndicalism and the philosophical approach to Marxism exemplified by Joseph Dietzgen. After the war, with the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), the journal drew close to the Party. Many of editors in the early 1920s, including Raymond Postgate, Frank and Winifred Horrabin, J.T. Walton Newbold, and Morgan Philips Price, were CPGB members. In March 1923 an arrangement was negotiated between the Executive of The Plebs’ League and the newly established Party Training Department of the Communist Party. It was agreed that the League’s role was “the training of workers into class-conscious revolutionaries” and that of the Party Training Department “the training of Party. . .members in the principles and policy of the Party and the methods of its work and organisation.” This arrangement soon proved unsatisfactory: the CPGB insisting that “working class education can only achieve its object under the leadership of the Party,” while The Plebs Magazine argued that such education could best be provided by a non-sectarian, specifically educational entity, supported by all workers’ industrial and political organisations.

By 1924, the majority of The Plebs Magazine's editors who had been CPGB members had left the party for a variety of reasons and the journal took on a more independent character. Nonetheless, a number of British Communists continued to write for it, including Maurice Dobb, TA Jackson and William Paul. In 1927, The Plebs’ League was absorbed by the National Council of Labour Colleges. The Plebs Magazine, however, continued to appear for many years. Here we offer a complete run of the journal from 1909 to 1929. The Plebs Magazine occasionally produced an annual index for a volume of the journal. In these cases, we have provided a copy of that index as a separate file at the end of the volume.