[Just too much travelling, age and lack of sleep, better now]
I should clarify, what I meant was that in many ways feminism (or so it seemed to me) was distrustful of top-down hierarchies and the concentration of power.
This is a perennial problem on the Left from Leninism to the control freaks in new Labour, but rarely does the Left take any time and trouble to analyse (that’s what I mean by critique) its own failures and how the concentration of power in the hands of a few of its own leaders (and structures) have led to these failures.
2. There was from the mid to late 1900s a concerted working-class educational network, not just individuals choosing to pick up a book, that’s what I meant.
It resulted in the workers educational association and many other things, but these were taken over by the middle classes and became utterly detached from the real working-class existence.
There is a book around this topic, which I have meant to read, Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.