Lenin then provides a table setting out the extent to which, despite the level of capitalist development in Russia, and contrary to the Narodnik claims, estate schools continued to play a significant role. (Table p 467)
Of course, even today, this remains true. The Grammar and Technical Schools, and later the Comprehensive Schools, in which streaming continued, provided capital with its supply of NCO's, but the General Staff of capital continued to receive its specific and dedicated education at Eton, Harrow and so on, and via which they passed into Oxbridge, and the controlling positions within the state, and the boardrooms, their remuneration being in inverse proportion to the labour they were required to perform.
Lenin notes,
“This table shows clearly how incautious Mr. Yuzhakov was when he said that we had immediately and resolutely (??) “renounced social-estate schools.” On the contrary, the social-estate system prevails in our secondary schools to this day, even if 56 per cent of the students in the gymnasia (not to mention the privileged educational establishments for the nobility, etc.) are sons of nobles and officials. Their only serious rival is the urban estates, who now predominate in the modern schools.” (p 467)
The Marxists, Lenin says, actually did oppose the estate schools, but only on the basis of their replacement by class schools, the nature of which they also had no illusion. They supported them for the same reason they supported a free and rapid development of capitalism itself, in Russia, i.e. to speed up the process of a transition to Socialism.
“It goes without saying that we do not by any means intend to claim that the question of superseding the estate schools by class schools, and of improving the latter, is of no importance or concern to those classes that do not and cannot enjoy the advantages of secondary education’ on the contrary, it is not a matter of unconcern to them either, for the estate system lays a particularly heavy burden on them both in life and in school, and the superseding of estate schools by class schools is only one of the links in the general and all-round Europeanisation of Russia. All we want is to show how Mr. Yuzhakov distorted the facts, and that actually his supposedly “broad” point of view is immeasurably inferior even to the bourgeois view on the question.” (p 467-8)
Indeed, this is generally the case in relation to the views of the petty-bourgeois liberals and social-democrats, as against the views of the bourgeoisie itself.
“Incidentally, on the subject of the bourgeois views. Mr. A. Manuilov simply cannot understand why P. B. Struve, who so explicitly revealed the one-sidedness of Schulze-Gäivernitz, nevertheless “propagates his bourgeois ideas” (Russkoye Bogatstvo, No. 11, p. 93). Mr. A. Manuilov’s failure to understand this is solely and exclusively due to his failure to understand the fundamental views not only of the Russian, but of all the West-European “disciples,” and not only of the disciples, but of the teacher as well or perhaps Mr. Manuilov will deny that one of the fundamental views of the “teacher”—-views that run like a scarlet thread through all his theoretical, literary and practical activities—is an ineradicable hatred of those lovers of “broad points of view” who with the help of sugary phrases obscure the class division of modern society? Or that another of his fundamental views is a firm recognition of the progressiveness and preferability of frank and consistent “bourgeois ideas” as compared with the ideas of those Kleinbürger who are so anxious to retard and halt capitalism?” (p 468)
The teacher, here, of course, refers to Marx. And, his position, as with the position outlined by Lenin, is in stark contrast to those that seek to mollify the effects of capitalist development by various forms of welfarism, by attempts at redistribution, and so on, whose actual effects, were they to be implemented could only be to slow down the process of capitalist development, and so the process of it being transcended, and the transition to Socialism being effected.
Far better, Lenin says, to support the class schools, on the basis of an honest admission of their one-sidedness and purpose in promoting the interests of capital than to promote the nonsensical ideas about them representing and abstract “national interest”.
“We are fully aware that it is very, very hard for Russkoye Bogatstvo contributors to understand an argument of this character. That again is due to their failure to understand not only the. “disciples,” but also the “teacher.”
Here, for example, is how one of the “teachers” sought, as far back as 1845, to prove that the English workers gained from the repeal of the Corn Laws. This repeal, he wrote, involves the farmers’ transformation into “Liberals, i.e., conscious bourgeois,” and this growth of class-consciousness on the one side necessarily involves a similar growth of class-consciousness on the other (F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. New York, 1887, p. 179). How is it that you, gentlemen contributors to Russkoye Bogatstvo, just bow and scrape before the “teachers,” but do not expose them for “propagating bourgeois ideas”?” (Note *, p 469)
Of course, today, a similar point could be made to the petty-bourgeois Lexiters.
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