Lenin sets out the way the Narodniks attacked the Marxists by claiming that they defended the bourgeoisie. The moral socialists do the same today. Marxists point out the reality that socialism currently does not exist, and so long as that is the case, talking as though it did is simply Utopian and, thereby, reactionary. Similarly, just throwing out ultimatist demands for revolution or socialism now, untethered to any current reality is just revolutionary phrase-mongering. It is equally Utopian and reactionary. Until such time as socialism exists, or at least a revolutionary situation exists, the fact remains that Marxists continue to argue not for “anti-capitalism”, which implies a reactionary holding back, or worse even turning back of capitalist development, but for pushing forward through the actual capitalist development, as the means by which socialism will arise.
As Lenin puts it in Left-wing Childishness,
. . . For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly.
“. . . State-monopoly capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no intermediate rungs”
It is that which leads to the charge against them by the moral socialists that they defend the bourgeoisie, whereas, of course, all they really do is to oppose the Utopian and reactionary position of the moralists.
“You feel that the facts are against you, and so resort to trickery: to those who refute your petty-bourgeois dreams about choosing a path without the bourgeoisie by referring to the domination of the latter as a fact; to those who refute the suitability of your petty, paltry measures against the bourgeoisie by referring to their deep roots in the economic structure of society, to the economic struggle of classes that is the basis of “society” and the “state,” to those who demand of the ideologists of the toiling class that they make a complete break with these elements and exclusively serve those who are “differentiated from life” in bourgeois society—to all these you attribute a desire to defend the bourgeoisie.” (p 388)
Lenin gives a good description of the means by which the individuals that make up the state are naturally drawn from the social layers that form the ruling social class. The question if education is one determined by social status. That remains true today, even in a time of universal, free primary and secondary education, because access into higher education, and particularly those universities that provide the bulk of the general staff of the civil service, judiciary, police force, armed forces and media is highly correlated to family status. But, in Lenin's time, prior even to universal, free primary and secondary education it was even more true.
“He refuses to see that in economic relations the Plusmacherei system has taken shape, a system under which only the “offspring of the people” can have the means and the leisure for education, while the “masses” have “to remain ignorant and work for others”; the direct and immediate consequence is that only members of the former make their way into “society,” and that it is only from this same “society” and from the “offspring” of the people that there can be recruited the District Clerks, Zemstvo agents and so on whom the Narodnik is naïve enough to consider as people standing above economic relations and classes, over them.” (p 392-3)
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