Section III
In the following sections, Lenin turns to a critique of Yuzhakov's actual proposals for universal secondary education, and his claim that, unlike elementary education, this could be provided without cost. The reason he claims this to be the case was seen in Lenin's earlier critique on Gymnasium Farms etc. It is that the education be provided alongside the students working on farms attached to the schools, and, thereby, funding the schools from the income of the farm. Partly in response to Lenin's earlier critique, Yuzhakov, now, not only asserts the “feasibility” of those proposals, but extends them to cover the whole adult population.
Marx had, of course, written about the desirability of combining education with work from an early age. In his program for The First International, he wrote,
“We consider the tendency of modern industry to make children and juvenile persons of both sexes co-operate in the great work of social production, as a progressive, sound and legitimate tendency, although under capital it was distorted into an abomination. In a rational state of society every child whatever, from the age of 9 years, ought to become a productive labourer in the same way that no able-bodied adult person ought to be exempted from the general law of nature, viz.: to work in order to be able to eat, and work not only with the brain but with the hands too...
A gradual and progressive course of mental, gymnastic, and technological training ought to correspond to the classification of the juvenile labourers. The costs of the technological schools ought to be partly met by the sale of their products.
The combination of paid productive labour, mental education bodily exercise and polytechnic training, will raise the working class far above the level of the higher and middle classes.”
But, Marx's proposal has nothing in common with the proposals of Yuzhakov and the Narodniks. Marx's proposal does not seek to tie this education to preserving the link to the land, and pre-capitalist society, but quite the opposite. It takes as read, at least, developed capitalist industrial production, and the cooperative labour, and collective production, it entails. It also, thereby, encompasses all of the freedoms for workers, including the young workers that such capitalist production entails. The reason it is superior is precisely that, alongside the education the young workers obtain, they also obtain the education in class solidarity that comes from an active involvement in production and the labour movement.
Marx, also, had no delusion that such education could be provided “free”, a delusion that petty-bourgeois liberals continue to promote today, and the involvement in production was a means of partly funding such universal education. It is where Marx and his followers diverge from the liberals and social-democrats who purvey the illusion that things can be provided freely, simply as an act of will be a benevolent state, which funds them by “taxation” or from the fruit of the Magic Money Tree. It is what leads such liberals into the welfarist policies that seek to keep everyone in full-time education into their 20's, that sees social security benefits as an adequate alternative to gainful employment, and so on. It has been seen during the pandemic, when the nonsense was purveyed that society could be locked down and labour cease, whilst the state could simply print "money" to hand out, so that everyone could continue consuming all of the goods and services that were no longer being produced!
No comments:
Post a Comment