Section II
In this section, a large part of Lenin's argument, against Yuzhakov, revolves around the latter's failure to understand the difference between social estates and classes. So, it is worthwhile summarising this distinction. Classes are objectively determined on the basis of property. As Marx describes, in Capital I, all actual economic relations are relations between different forms of property, and human beings are merely the personification of these different forms of property – land, industrial capital, (productive-capital, commercial capital), fictitious-capital, labour-power – the phenomenal form in which the struggle (class struggle) between these forms of property plays out. As Marx describes, these classes are themselves reproduced as part of the process of social reproduction, in which all of these forms of property take part.
A social estate, by contrast, is not objectively determined on the basis of material conditions, and relationship to property, but on the basis of specific legal and political rights afforded to that group. For example, the clergy are not a class, but do form a social-estate. Within the peasantry, under feudalism, there existed a series of ranks, each providing those within it different rights and freedoms. A system in which social estates become fixed and frozen, membership being closed and preserved by a myriad of laws, customs and taboos is a caste system.
What distinguishes a class society, such as under capitalism, from a society based upon social estates, or a caste system, is precisely formal equality, and rights for all, under the law, or, as in the banner of the French Revolution – Equality, Liberty, Fraternity.
The other aspect that Lenin takes up in this section, against Yuzhakov, is relevant to the ideas of those liberals and social-democrats, today, including those that call themselves Marxists, whose idealism leads them, in practice, to deny the reality of a society divided on the basis of class, and so who talk about “the nation”, or “society”, as though this is one undifferentiated thing. Its most obvious practical manifestation is in their demands to “the state”, as though this is some class neutral body, rather than the state of the ruling class, and its means of control and oppression, used to ensure its continued social dictatorship. The most obvious examples are in relation to demands for nationalisation, demands that the state act in workers' interests at home or, as an imperialist state, the interests of workers and other oppressed classes abroad.
In relation to the distinction between social estate and class, in the context being discussed, an estate school is one reserved for the members of that estate, and its curricula is geared to the interests of that estate. A similar situation exists with faith schools. But, a class school is open to all. Initially, the “open to all”, of course, means open to all who can pay the required fees, and, as Lenin describes, even where no fees are charged, this still requires that families are able to pay for the living costs of their children whilst in education.
The point about class schools, even when they take the form of state schools, is that they have a single curricula for all, and can do that because the state itself is a capitalist state, and the ideology it promotes, via that curricula is the ideology of the bourgeoisie, and the education and training it provides is inherently geared to the needs of capital, and its reproduction. In The Critique of the Gotha Programme, opposing such state education, Marx wrote,
“"Elementary education by the state" is altogether objectionable. Defining by a general law the expenditures on the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc., and, as is done in the United States, supervising the fulfilment of these legal specifications by state inspectors, is a very different thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people! Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school. Particularly, indeed, in the Prusso-German Empire (and one should not take refuge in the rotten subterfuge that one is speaking of a "state of the future"; we have seen how matters stand in this respect) the state has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people.
But the whole program, for all its democratic clang, is tainted through and through by the Lassallean sect's servile belief in the state, or, what is no better, by a democratic belief in miracles; or rather it is a compromise between these two kinds of belief in miracles, both equally remote from socialism.”
Yet, this Lassallean/Fabian, bourgeois statism is, today, the pinnacle of the liberal aspirations of many that call themselves Marxists.
Indeed, as Marx points out, in Capital III, Chapter 17, when capitalism develops to a stage where the private owners of capital withdraw from an active role in production, and become merely lenders of money-capital, their role in production is taken over by a growing army of middle-class bureaucrats and technocrats. The day to day managers, functioning capitalists employed as administrators, designers, production managers, sales and purchasing managers, book-keepers, and accountants etc. All of these are drawn from the ranks of the working-class, and expanding “free” public education provides such an expanding supply of them that their wages often fall below that of the better paid, skilled labourers.
“The commercial worker produces no surplus-value directly. But the price of his labour is determined by the value of his labour-power, hence by its costs of production, while the application of this labour-power, its exertion, expenditure of energy, and wear and tear, is as in the ease of every other wage-labourer by no means limited by its value. His wage, therefore, is not necessarily proportionate to the mass of profit which he helps the capitalist to realise. What he costs the capitalist and what he brings in for him, are two different things. He creates no direct surplus-value, but adds to the capitalist's income by helping him to reduce the cost of realising surplus-value, inasmuch as he performs partly unpaid labour. The commercial worker, in the strict sense of the term, belongs to the better-paid class of wage-workers — to those whose labour is classed as skilled and stands above average labour. Yet the wage tends to fall, even in relation to average labour, with the advance of the capitalist mode of production. This is due partly to the division of labour in the office, implying a one-sided development of the labour capacity, the cost of which does not fall entirely on the capitalist, since the labourer's skill develops by itself through the exercise of his function, and all the more rapidly as division of labour makes it more one-sided. Secondly, because the necessary training, knowledge of commercial practices, languages, etc., is more and more rapidly, easily, universally and cheaply reproduced with the progress of science and public education the more the capitalist mode of production directs teaching methods, etc., towards practical purposes. The universality of public education enables capitalists to recruit such labourers from classes that formerly had no access to such trades and were accustomed to a lower standard of living. Moreover, this increases supply, and hence competition. With few exceptions, the labour-power of these people is therefore devaluated with the progress of capitalist production. Their wage falls, while their labour capacity increases.”
(Capital III, Chapter 17)
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