Central to the formation of the League was Noah Ablett, a miner from the Rhondda who was at the core of a group at Ruskin College, Oxford who challenged the lecturers' opposition to Marxism.
In the 1907–8 academic year, Ablett began leading unofficial classes in Marxist political economy which were attended by Ebby Edwards, among others.
Ablett returned to South Wales in 1908, where he began promoting Marxist education through local branches of the Independent Labour Party.
[2] In the first issue of the Plebs, dated February 1909, Ablett contributed an article on the need for Independent Working Class Education.
[1][5] The League had sympathies with De Leonism, primarily represented in Britain by the Socialist Labour Party.