Here, too, however, is a similarity of approach between Marx and Lenin. Marx says that they would not propose state education, and so on, but in his essay on Political Indifferentism, where he speaks sarcastically to dismiss the ideas of those like Proudhon, he sets out that, if the capitalist state did establish such provision it would be no part of a Marxist perspective to demand that workers boycott them.
““Workers should even less desire that, as happens in the United States of America, the state whose budget is swollen by what is taken from the working class should be obliged to give primary education to the workers' children; for primary education is not complete education. It is better that working men and working women should not be able to read or write or do sums than that they should receive education from a teacher in a school run by the state. It is far better that ignorance and a working day of sixteen hours should debase the working classes than that eternal principles should be violated....
It cannot be denied that if the apostles of political indifferentism were to express themselves with such clarity, the working class would make short shrift of them and would resent being insulted by these doctrinaire bourgeois and displaced gentlemen, who are so stupid or so naive as to attempt to deny to the working class any real means of struggle. For all arms with which to fight must be drawn from society as it is and the fatal conditions of this struggle have the misfortune of not being easily adapted to the idealistic fantasies which these doctors in social science have exalted as divinities, under the names of Freedom, Autonomy, Anarchy. However the working-class movement is today so powerful that these philanthropic sectarians dare not repeat for the economic struggle those great truths which they used incessantly to proclaim on the subject of the political struggle. They are simply too cowardly to apply them any longer to strikes, combinations, single-craft unions, laws on the labour of women and children, on the limitation of the working day etc., etc.”
We want our children educated, we want health and social care and so on. Our preference is that all these things be provided by workers themselves, by a cooperative NHS, cooperative social care, cooperative schools, and so on, but seeking, and continuing to argue for such provision, and setting out the limitations and nature of state provision, does not prevent us from using what the capitalist state provides, any more than we boycott buying food or other commodities from capitalist retailers and producers!
It is simply that we do not propose or give support to such demands and reforms when they are put forward by liberals and social-democrats, rather we point out their limited and bourgeois nature, whilst instead advancing our own demands for worker-owned and controlled production, including in the provision of health and social care, education and so on. We point out, as Marx and Engels did, our hostility to state aid and state socialism, and the reality that demands for such state control to be mollified by associated demands for “workers' control” amount to nothing more than attempts to cover “a sense of shame” by those that propose it. It is worse still when those that raise such demands, and who consider themselves Marxists, describe such state ownership as “public ownership”, which implies that some class neutral “people”, and their class neutral state, is what is being invoked!
So, Engels wrote in opposition to the German SPD's proposal to demand the creation of a National Insurance system, and welfare state, for example, as part of the Erfurt Programme.
“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?”
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