Referring to the section “Aims of Secondary Education. Class Interests and Class Schools”, Lenin comments.
“The theme, as you see, is of absorbing interest, promising as it does to explain one of the cardinal problems, not only of education, but of social life in general, a problem, moreover, that is the source of one of the major disagreements between the Narodniks and the “disciples.”” (p 462)
By disciples, Lenin means the Russian Marxists.
Lenin begins by agreeing with Yuzhakov that the statement “the school should prepare a man for life” is meaningless, and begs the question what is needed for life, and who needs it?
Yuzhakov says,
“Who needs secondary education?—means: in whose interests, for whose benefit and advantage is education given to secondary-school pupils?” (p 462)
And Lenin responds,
“A splendid formulation of the question, and we would give’ our heartfelt praise to the author if ... if all these preludes did not later prove to be just empty talk:” (p 462)
From here, however, the muddle begins, and it is the same muddle that continues to afflict petty-bourgeois liberals and social-democrats, when they come to consider such matters. Yuzhakov in answering his rhetorical questions says that the education may be to the benefit of the state, the nation or a particular class, or the individual. Lenin notes,
“we have to conclude that a class-divided society is compatible with a non-class state, with a non-class nation, with individuals standing outside of classes.” (p 462)
In other words, we have the same error, founded in the petty-bourgeois ideology and idealism of the Narodnik that appears, today, amongst petty-bourgeois liberals and social-democrats, including those that call themselves Marxists. It is this idea of a nation, society or state, standing outside material reality, outside the fact of class division, and of the state as the state of the ruling class. It is manifest when such liberals demand that this state acts in the interests of the nation or society, by which they mean not the material reality of society and the nation, but their idealised version of it, as some abstract, homogeneous whole, undivided by class antagonisms.
It is seen when they expect such a state to organise education, the health service, or other elements of the welfare state in the interests of workers rather than capital, when they call on this state to nationalise firms or industries, again in workers', or society's interests, rather than of capital, and, even more ludicrously, when they express this hope in terms of pathetic pleas that the state should even hand over control of such capital to the workers. So, the reality of these demands, turns out to be simple liberalism, for the state to intervene for the benefit of capital, as for example it did, when Ted Heath nationalised Rolls Royce, and, as in 2008, when collapsing banks were nationalised by the capitalist state to rescue them.
The same thing is seen when such liberals call on the imperialist state to engage in some military adventure against this or that tyrant, and refuse to admit the inevitability of the fact that, if and whenever it does so, it will be only to further its own interests, even putting in place its own preferred tyrant, and committing at least the same heinous crimes, in its military operations, as those it seeks to overthrow. And, no matter how many times the imperialist state does this, the liberals will continue to demand that it act differently, to abide by their moral imperative, and will continue to be shocked by the fact that it has failed to do so, whilst continuing to argue that it was not inevitable, that some alternative path existed for it to follow.
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