Any history of Marxism in Britain has to deal with the complex personality and ideas of H. M. Hyndman. He was the first protagonist of Marxism, albeit of his own peculiar brand, in this country. His idiosyncratic presence, though, can distort the record of Anglo-Marxism by making it fit the oddly-shaped mould which he and others fashioned at the end of the nineteenth century and after. It is the intention of this essay to re-interpret aspects of the history of Anglo-Marxism not in terms of his personal beliefs, but rather in terms of the development of an institution which attempted to work out the legacy of his Marxism and that of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in the years after his death. The organization in question is the National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC), which started out as a vehicle for the dissemination of Anglo-Marxism and within two decades ended up as part of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), dedicated to forwarding the ideas of the Labourist consensus. In this transformation it is possible to see some of the peculiarities and contradictions which have beset Marxism, English-style, in this century.

The origins of independent working-class education can be traced back to the foundation of the London Mechanics Institute in the 1820s and further back to the activities of the London Corresponding Society at the time of the French Revolution.