In Yuzhakov's plan, not only would the secondary schools remain “class schools”, despite his complaints against them, but the workers and peasants would actually be placed at a financial disadvantage within them, compared to those who would simply pay for education in the modern urban schools. For the latter, tuition fees covered only 28.7% of their costs, 40% of the cost was supplied by the state, with 21.8% coming from donations. But, in Yuzhakov's plan, the full cost of the education provided by the gymnasium farms was to be covered from the proceeds of the labour of the students.
“Mr. Yuzhakov, therefore, has accentuated the class character of the secondary schools as compared with what now exists: according to his “plan,” the rich will pay only 28.7% of the cost of their tuition, while the poor will pay the total cost of theirs, and perform labour service into the bargain!” (p 481)
And, given the conditions of this labour service, the extent to which the plan was not only bourgeois, but even feudal-bourgeois, can be seen. In addition, the plan envisaged the hire of wage-labour over Winter months. By tying the workers to the land, the plan maintained the division between town and country, and its social division of labour.
“Since Mr. Yuzhakov is introducing the planned organisation of social labour, since he is devising a “utopia” for the combination of education and productive labour, the retention of this distinction is absurd, and shows that our author has not the slightest conception of the subject he has undertaken to discuss. Not only did the “teachers” of the present-day disciples criticise this absurdity in their writings, but so did the old utopians, and even our great Russian utopian*.” (* N.G. Cherneyshevsky), (p 481)
The main reason for describing Yuzhakov's utopia as bourgeois, however, was that it was proposed to retain commodity production and exchange, and so production for the market. This was also a feature of the petty-bourgeois proposals of Sismondi and Proudhon; it is a central feature of the AES etc.
“Consequently, social production will be governed by the laws of the market, to which the “gymnasia” will also have to submit! But that is nothing to Mr. Yuzhakov! Where do you get the idea, he will no doubt say, that production will be governed by certain laws of the market? Sheer nonsense! Production will be governed by the orders of the worthy directors of the agricultural schools, and not by the laws of the market. Voila tout.” (p 481)
In other words, a bureaucratic belief in the ability to simply void the existing material conditions by diktat.
“Of the purely bureaucratic structure of Mr. Yuzhakov’s utopian gymnasia we have already spoken. The “Educational Utopia,” it is to be hoped, will do a useful service by showing the Russian reading public the full profundity of the “democracy” of our contemporary Narodniks.” (p 481)
The feudal elements of the plan have already been referenced, in terms of the requirement for labour service, rather than wage labour. And, again, here, Lenin sets out why these kinds of proposals, by the petty-bourgeois socialists, are more reactionary than those of the bourgeoisie itself.
“Had this sort of project been drafted by a consistent bourgeois, it would have contained neither a first nor a second storey, and it would have been far superior to this Narodnik utopia, and far more useful. Labour service is the economic essence of the serf system. In capitalist society, a man who has no means has to sell his labour-power in order to buy the means of subsistence. In feudal society, a man who has no means has to perform labour service in return for the means of subsistence he receives from his lord. Labour service necessarily means that the one who performs it is compelled to work, has fewer rights; it involves what the author of Das Kapital called “ausserökonomischer Zwang” (III, 2, 324).” (p 481-2)
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