Depression-era English Marxism recruited intellectuals, not workers.

Evidence

For the most part, then, following the Depression, English Marxism became a creature more of the sons and daughters of the middle and upper-middle classes than of English workers. Massive unemployment in their ranks, the emergence of fascist movements in Europe, a decade of the display of the corruption and incompetence of “bourgeois democracy,” and the spectacular achievements of the Russian Revolution, had worked their magic: Changes in the intellectual life of a nation can often be perceived at an early date among university students. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1221

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: British scientists in the 1930s embraced a Marxist view of science serving ruling-class interests — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 76