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What is ‘useful’ knowledge?
In their 100th Full Marx column, the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY looks at how socialists have grappled with the direction and framing of working-class self-education over the last 200 years
The Marx Memorial Library in London
[Creative Commons /Justinc]
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MOST people would agree that all genuine knowledge is potentially useful — though a little knowledge can sometimes be a dangerous thing and, in the wrong company, knowing too much can be positively lethal.
We are bombarded continually with “facts” together with advice: “useful” knowledge — how to get a job, improve your credit rating, save for a deposit on a house. Rarely are we helped to any real understanding of the workings of a society in which poverty is increasing amidst massive wealth for the few.
This 100th Full Marx column is perhaps as good an occasion as any to mark the birth of a movement for workers’ education which started 200 years ago, in Glasgow, Edinburgh and most importantly in London with the establishment of the London Mechanics’ Institute (LMI, later London University’s Birkbeck College) and which spread rapidly throughout Britain as well as in the “new worlds” of Australia and North America.
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