A Stern Education

The other day, I wrote about an article the AWL had written, about Marx and education. Some of that article talked about education in the wider sense of how, workers are educated, by their experiences under Capitalism. It reminded me of a chance few words I had, in the supermarket, the other week, with an old friend.

The old friend was Geoff Bagnall, General Secretary of the Potters Union. I first met Geoff when I was about 19 or 20. I was a member of ASTMS, working in the Pottery Industry, a shop steward, and already a militant. Geoff was a shop steward for the Pottery Union CATU. I had been elected on to a Negotiating Committee to agree a National "Spheres of Influence Agreement", between ASTMS and CATU. Geoff had been a member of the IMG, but by this time was not a member of any revolutionary group.

We hadn't seen each other for quite a few years when we came across each other the other week. Geoff bemoaned the state of the LP, and also complained that many of his own members stood to the right of the BNP, and he wasn't speaking just about the most backward, rank and file members. I had no reason to doubt what he said.

"Yes, I replied, but whose fault is that? It is not the fault of those workers, is it? It is the fault of people like you and me, people who have gone through the school of Marxism, who knew, or should have known what we had to do, and who failed to do it."

He agreed it was our fault. I take the position that, if kids fail in school, it is not the fault of the kids. It is the fault of the society in which they live, and, in large part, of the teachers and the learning environment in which they are taught. I take the same attitude to the education in Socialism that workers receive. One of the reasons that Marx and Engels favoured the combination of Education for children with paid employment, was precisely for that reason. Its far better for children to learn the lessons, of their class position and interest, if they are able to combine what they see in the workplace, on a daily basis, with an explanation of those things by their fellow workers, on the shop floor, and in the school room. Remember that, when Marx and Engels were writing, even the schooling provided by employers, for children, was done by older workers. That opened up the potential, at least, to struggle for some control over that process, just as they struggled for control over the work process itself. In itself this would be an education for workers.

More than that, workers had already shown that they could set up their own educational organisations, just as they had set up their own Co-operative enterprises, and shops. They had set up the latter because private Capitalism had failed them. Textile factories, in particular, had collapsed, and workers had taken them over. The Truck System, and the drive to make profits by the deliberate corruption of foodstuffs, had led workers to establish the Co-op in order to provide themselves with wholesome products. Not just the Owenites, but also the Chartists set up agricultural Co-operatives like he Chartist Land Co-operative. By creating their own schools - which could be open to adults and children - workers could do the same thing, and for the same reasons in relation to Education. It could be an education in class struggle, free from the control of the bosses or their state.

But, for the last 100 years even those who call themselves Marxists have been happy to allow workers to continue to be brainwashed by the Capitalist "head-fixing industry". At best they have settled for arguing for reforms to it, and within it, just as they have settled for reforms to Capitalism itself, happy to postpone any real alternative, until some glorious day in the future after the revolution, when they have control over that state themselves, and can use it to ensure that events unfold according to their plan rather than risking it to what the workers might decide. This is what Marx meant when he said that his objection to the provision of elementary education by the State did not apply JUST to that provision by the existing state, but by the future state too. Indeed, in every syllable of the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx sets out his similar objection to the idea that the State - even the future state - could simply substitute itself for the self-activity of the class. Yet today's Marxists having collapsed into statism and Welfarism, are even happy to settle for pathetic pleas, to even the Capitalist State, to do just that! They are happy, like First World War generals, to keep sending wave after wave of heroic workers, in each generation, to fight the same battles, simply in order to try to regain the same small pieces of territory on the battlefield of class struggle.

Yet, as I wrote some months ago in my blog Cut & Run, the system of Welfarism, introduced by Capital, via the Tories and Liberals, at the beginning of the twentieth century, reproduced at a State level all of those elements of private Capital that had led workers to seek to develop their own Co-operative alternatives. The system of State pensions, benefits,healthcare and education provided by the Capitalist State Monopoly, and paid for by compulsory deductions from the workers wages in taxes and National Insurance, backed up by the full might of the law, is nothing other than a massive Truck System! Yet, whereas socialists in the 19th Century like Marx, had the good sense to oppose it socialists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, argue for its expansion, argue for workers through it to tie themselves ever closer into the web of Capitalist exploitation, and in the process turn large numbers of the class at its base into nothing more than serfs, dependent upon that State for their very existence - not to mention a considerable number dependent on it for their own employment. The adulteration of food by producers in order to reduce costs, and increase profits, is reproduced - particularly when that state needs to make savings - in the adulteration of education, of health and social care etc. for the very same reasons, and because socialists have built up this huge Capitalist Monopoly, it is able to get away with it, becaus workers have been given no credible alternative, but to put up with what it provides. And what do the leaders propose? That workers ask for more of the same! At best, like the Lassalleans criticised by Marx, they try to hide their shame in making such demands, by adding in for good measure statements about asking the Capitalist State to please give some democratic control over its Monopoly to the working class! Not only do such demands demean those that make them, but as Marx says, demean the class itself, demonstrate its unready to rule if it goes along with such supplication at the feet of he bourgeois state. And such a demand is completely counter to the very fundamental tenets of Marxism. In contrast to reformist, redistributive socialism, which argues that socialism can come about by simply redistributing wealth and power in society, as a result of measures of taxation and democracy introduced by the State, Marxism declares openly the Utopianism of such ideas. Not only is the State not neutral, and therefore, has no reason to bring about such redistribution, whichever Government may be in power, but even if it did, the fundamental basis of wealth and power, and its distribution resides in the ownership of Capiatl, of the means of production, and without changing that, any reforms, will be only that, temporary palliative, withdrawn no sooner than thee needds of Capital accummulation demand it. In a globalised world, where Capital can flow at a second's notice away from anywhere that does not meet that requirement, this is more true today than it was even in Marx's day.

It is little wonder that workers have abandoned such "leaders" and settled for others who, even if they do not offer them such shining victories some time in the future, do not get them killed today. But, the role of the Marxists in educating the class has been abysmal in another sense. We are used to the notion that Capitalism, because of the demands of bourgeois education, because of the pressure of resources on teachers etc., abandons large numbers of failing students in order to concentrate its resources on a small number of more advanced kids. But, what is that, if it is not a perfect description of the attitude of "Leninist" groups, expressed as "Vanguardism". What is worse, is that not only do, at least some of these organisations, disdain the mass of workers - for example, the attitude they took to the LOR workers raising nationalistic demands - because those real workers do not come up to their pre-ordained view of what worekrs should be like, but when it comes to building mass workers organisations, their attitude to even the more advanced workers is little better. In reality, they appear only interested in talking to, and allowing into their organisations people who already agree with them! However, much they complain about the LP excluding the Trade Unions from having a voice, nowadays, the reality is that these organisations would NEVER allow the Trade Unions to simply affiliate to them, and to have the kind of voice they demand for them in the LP. To do so would be to liquidate those organisations, precisely because it would then be the programme of ordinary workers that would be adopted, a programme that would at best be one that reflected a sort of left-centrist reformism, and more likely would be indistinguishable from that of New Labour, which those same Trade Unions, those same mass of workers accept, and vote for now.

In many ways this attitude is worse than a teacher abandoning the less able students to concentrate on a small number of clever kids. Its more like teachers who are more interested in staying in the staff room where they can just have intellectual discussions with other teachers at their own level, rather than have to subject themselves to the ignorance of the students, and try to remedy it. Rather as Marx spoke about the State needing a stern lesson from the workers, so the Marxists seem to need such a stern lesson. Let's hope they are quick learners.