Nick Clegg - "I Agree With Karl" - Part 2

This same concern, that Marx had, in relation to the role of what Max Shachtman called “capitalism's headfixing industry”, in educating workers, was taken up by Marxists in Britain at the turn of the last century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Co-operative education was still important for workers. The bourgeoisie  had undermined workers independent welfare provision, via their Friendly Societies, by the creation of National Insurance schemes and Welfare States, under the control of capital.  They did the same thing with education. Ruskin College was established as the result of a donation from two American bourgeois who had studied at Oxford, Walter and Anne L. Vrooman, in 1899. The workers at the College began to demand control over the curriculum, and were supported by some of the lecturers. The workers wanted courses based on Marx's Capital. Ultimately, the conflict led to students establishing the Plebs League, which split away and developed the Central Labour College, and National Council of Labour Colleges, through which courses were run in many working class districts, often using Co-op facilities. The Plebs asserted no compromise with bourgeois education. Even then the bourgeoisie had its own response, establishing the Workers Educational Association in competition, which offered professional, but bourgeois, lecturers as a means of trying to win the backing of the TUC.

The same concern was expressed, by Engels,  in his Critique Of The Erfurt Programme, over the demand for a Welfare State . Points 8 and 9 of the programme advocated the taking over of various functions by the state. Engels opposed such a demand, because it amounted to “state socialism”, and encouraged workers to have undue faith in the capitalist state.

“8 and 9. Here I want to draw attention to the following: These points demand that the following should be taken over by the state: (1) the bar, (2) medical services, (3)pharmaceutics, dentistry, midwifery, nursing, etc., etc., and later the demand is advanced that workers’ insurance become a state concern. Can all this be entrusted to Mr. von Caprivi? And is it compatible with the rejection of all state socialism, as stated above?”

But, Marx and Engels position must be understood clearly here. They were opposed to calls for such a role by the capitalist state, and instead argued for workers to develop their own, independent provision. That indeed, is why they called for Direct as opposed to Indirect Taxation, not because the former was fairer than the latter, but because the former was more transparent, and thereby enabled workers to see exactly by how much they were being ripped off by the state, and would thereby be more likely to oppose the expansion of its activities at the expense of their own. In the programme he wrote for the First International, therefore, Marx writes,

“Because indirect taxes conceal from an individual what he is paying to the state, whereas a direct tax is undisguised, unsophisticated, and not to be misunderstood by the meanest capacity. Direct taxation prompts therefore every individual to control the governing powers while indirect taxation destroys all tendency to self-government.”

But, whilst they were opposed to calls for the state to take on these activities, rather than that workers should organise themselves to undertake them, that did not mean that they adopted a purist, ultra-left, opposition to such provision, where the capitalist state itself undertook such action. As Marx pointed out in his speech to the First International on education,

“There was a peculiar difficulty connected with this question. On the one hand a change of social circumstances was required to establish a proper system of education, on the other hand a proper system of education was required to bring about a change of social circumstances; we must therefore commence where we were.”

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