U.T.S. - 2/4/97
This place has many memories.
In 1939 I became an apprentice electrical fitter in the Dept. Road Transport and Tramways. I was fifteen. For the next four years, after working a 44 hours plus, I attended the Tech College here three and four nights a week. No day tech in the bosses time then. We only won that after a long struggle. ['Nights were Made For Love'].
At seventeen I had a problem. I joined the illegal Communist Party. A few hundred yards down George Street from here was Marx House which offered a different sort of education. None of this boring technical shit but a study of real life political issues.
So I wagged one to go to the other.
Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Political Economy, Trade Unions/United Front, State and Revolution, National Question, Women, Youth. You name it, we did it!
Like the early founders of the Party the tutors came, in the main, from the working class. They took these complex questions in the text books and related to them to the everyday issues we all confronted in our daily work on the job and our lives as workers. They themselves were self educated characters from real life.
I was at a three month school with miners, wharfies, seamen, ironworkers, textile, railworkers and others. We came to philosophy. In walks Len Donald, Victorian larriken and our tutor. His students pelted him with rubbish as greeting. 'Right! Settle down,' says Donald. 'Now for the next two weeks you bastards are going to be studying Diabolical and Hysterical Maternalism, whether you like it or not, so let's get cracking'.
The base unit was the Party branch class and you sort of graduated into Section, District, State and National. It was a matter of some honor to be chosen for a National on the say so of your own comrades.
Once I went to ask a meatworker, job leader at the Abbatoir, would he do a three month fulltime school. The Party would pay 'susso' and look after Sophie and the kids. We'd find other spending money for him, meet other expenses etc.
'What', says Frank, 'take money off the Party? I couldn't do that. Compo. I'll drop a finger'. For a slaughterman this meant deliberately doing what was a normal hazard in real life. Severing a tendon of one of his fingers at a joint and of course the the finger 'dropped'. Worth a fair bit of time off it probably wasn't worth a pinch of shit after but such were the extraordinary lengths a 'poorly educated'(sic) worker would be prepared to go to improve his knowledge.
The main aim of all this was to educate the working class. How to change the bourgeois moulded think frame to one where the working class could see and act upon its own initiatives and for a fundamental change in production relations. 'Theory without practice is sterile and practice without theory is blind' as old Karl said.
Comrades were pressured to attend their branch classes. Factory or industry and local fortnightly after work or night classes and weekenders were held, tutored by the more politically advanced workers from the job and by Comrades from the District Centre.
Then, to speak biblicly, tutors begat tutors. Teachers at state and national schools came from the basic units in the first place.
For the workers with little formal education the Party prepared the 'Marxist Glossary'. Like what was this bloody petty bourgeoisie, what in the name of Christ is epistemological, what do you mean by the united front and sectarianism?
The author of this little number was leading Party education cadre, L. Harry Gould. While at a National school I begged a long weekend off to get married and Harry gave me a wedding present, suitably inscribed. It was 'Materialism and Empirio-Criticism' by one Vladimir Illych Lenin.
Both in the circumstances and for itself it was unreadable.
Then but not now. And that is because of the education given to me by a Party that in its great days was led by self educated workers who created such a 'university'. I was one of thousands.
Since Bob made mention of my being at the Chinese Communist Party's Higher School in Beijing in 1957 let me tell you it was no jaunt. Study for six days a week of twelve hours a day for six months. Four months touring the newly developing North East meeting people, job workers/education/artists/peasants and discussing the revolution.
Towards the end we asked Deng Xioping why the P.L.A. hadn't finished the job and taken Hong Kong. His reply, given the moatai taken aboard and a part pissed interpreter, seemed to be that they regarded Honkers as both their throat and their arsehole. A passage to take in what they needed to build the base for Socialism and an orifice to exhaust all the shit.
Seemed fair enough to me.
A few weeks to go and the wheel will have turned. Everyone can choose their own position on that!
Arising from participation in planning an historical mosaic outside Newtown Town Hall which shows us all at the end arms outstretched welcoming the Brave New World as the dawning sun's first beams strike the Newtown Post Office Clock (deceased). How fuckin boring.
There are some documents here re the Mosaic and Party history called Red Belt Days about the forties and fifties.
And a B.L.F. story about this building called the U.T.S. About when Gallagher moved in with the help of the Master Builders and a few scabs. My part in the building of the building and the downfall of the Party. Humorous or pathetic. Please yourself.
Feel free.
This place has many memories.
In 1939 I became an apprentice electrical fitter in the Dept. Road Transport and Tramways. I was fifteen. For the next four years, after working a 44 hours plus, I attended the Tech College here three and four nights a week. No day tech in the bosses time then. We only won that after a long struggle. ['Nights were Made For Love'].
At seventeen I had a problem. I joined the illegal Communist Party. A few hundred yards down George Street from here was Marx House which offered a different sort of education. None of this boring technical shit but a study of real life political issues.
So I wagged one to go to the other.
Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Political Economy, Trade Unions/United Front, State and Revolution, National Question, Women, Youth. You name it, we did it!
Like the early founders of the Party the tutors came, in the main, from the working class. They took these complex questions in the text books and related to them to the everyday issues we all confronted in our daily work on the job and our lives as workers. They themselves were self educated characters from real life.
I was at a three month school with miners, wharfies, seamen, ironworkers, textile, railworkers and others. We came to philosophy. In walks Len Donald, Victorian larriken and our tutor. His students pelted him with rubbish as greeting. 'Right! Settle down,' says Donald. 'Now for the next two weeks you bastards are going to be studying Diabolical and Hysterical Maternalism, whether you like it or not, so let's get cracking'.
The base unit was the Party branch class and you sort of graduated into Section, District, State and National. It was a matter of some honor to be chosen for a National on the say so of your own comrades.
Once I went to ask a meatworker, job leader at the Abbatoir, would he do a three month fulltime school. The Party would pay 'susso' and look after Sophie and the kids. We'd find other spending money for him, meet other expenses etc.
'What', says Frank, 'take money off the Party? I couldn't do that. Compo. I'll drop a finger'. For a slaughterman this meant deliberately doing what was a normal hazard in real life. Severing a tendon of one of his fingers at a joint and of course the the finger 'dropped'. Worth a fair bit of time off it probably wasn't worth a pinch of shit after but such were the extraordinary lengths a 'poorly educated'(sic) worker would be prepared to go to improve his knowledge.
The main aim of all this was to educate the working class. How to change the bourgeois moulded think frame to one where the working class could see and act upon its own initiatives and for a fundamental change in production relations. 'Theory without practice is sterile and practice without theory is blind' as old Karl said.
Comrades were pressured to attend their branch classes. Factory or industry and local fortnightly after work or night classes and weekenders were held, tutored by the more politically advanced workers from the job and by Comrades from the District Centre.
Then, to speak biblicly, tutors begat tutors. Teachers at state and national schools came from the basic units in the first place.
For the workers with little formal education the Party prepared the 'Marxist Glossary'. Like what was this bloody petty bourgeoisie, what in the name of Christ is epistemological, what do you mean by the united front and sectarianism?
The author of this little number was leading Party education cadre, L. Harry Gould. While at a National school I begged a long weekend off to get married and Harry gave me a wedding present, suitably inscribed. It was 'Materialism and Empirio-Criticism' by one Vladimir Illych Lenin.
Both in the circumstances and for itself it was unreadable.
Then but not now. And that is because of the education given to me by a Party that in its great days was led by self educated workers who created such a 'university'. I was one of thousands.
Since Bob made mention of my being at the Chinese Communist Party's Higher School in Beijing in 1957 let me tell you it was no jaunt. Study for six days a week of twelve hours a day for six months. Four months touring the newly developing North East meeting people, job workers/education/artists/peasants and discussing the revolution.
Towards the end we asked Deng Xioping why the P.L.A. hadn't finished the job and taken Hong Kong. His reply, given the moatai taken aboard and a part pissed interpreter, seemed to be that they regarded Honkers as both their throat and their arsehole. A passage to take in what they needed to build the base for Socialism and an orifice to exhaust all the shit.
Seemed fair enough to me.
A few weeks to go and the wheel will have turned. Everyone can choose their own position on that!
Arising from participation in planning an historical mosaic outside Newtown Town Hall which shows us all at the end arms outstretched welcoming the Brave New World as the dawning sun's first beams strike the Newtown Post Office Clock (deceased). How fuckin boring.
There are some documents here re the Mosaic and Party history called Red Belt Days about the forties and fifties.
And a B.L.F. story about this building called the U.T.S. About when Gallagher moved in with the help of the Master Builders and a few scabs. My part in the building of the building and the downfall of the Party. Humorous or pathetic. Please yourself.
Feel free.
