A Revolution Betrayed: How Egalitarians Wrecked the British Education System

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Last Friday, HEPI published an alternative review of the same book here, to which Peter Hitchens responded over the weekend here. One of the predictions made by Trotsky was that the USSR would come before a disjuncture: either the toppling of the ruling bureaucracy by means of a political revolution, or capitalist restoration led by the bureaucracy:

The proletarian dictatorship is just a bridge between the bourgeois and the socialist society. In its very essence, therefore, it bears a temporary character. An incidental but very essential task of the state which realizes the dictatorship consists in preparing for its own dissolution. The degree of the realization of this “incidental” task is, to some extent, a measure of its success in the fulfillment of its fundamental mission: the construction of a society without classes and without material contradictions. Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.There are few subjects these days that cause parents more stress than the education of their children. The regime of proletarian dictatorship from its very beginning thus ceases to be a “state” in the old sense of the word – a special apparatus, that is, for holding in subjection the majority of the people. The material power, together with the weapons, goes over directly and immediately into the hands of the workers’ organizations such as the soviets. The state as a bureaucratic apparatus begins to die away the first day of the proletarian dictatorship. Such is the voice of the party program – not voided to this day. Strange: it sounds like a spectral voice from the mausoleum. The book is a wide-ranging critique of the USSR and its rulers, and advocates a new political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist dictatorship and bring about a socialist democracy. It opens by praising the positive economic advances of the USSR since the death of Lenin, citing growth in electrical power, agricultural output, industry, etc. It then proceeds to describe the limits on this economic advance, the nature of the new ruling elite, and predicts the ultimate downfall of the Soviet Union as a result of Stalinist rule. It places an emphasis on a Marxist method of analysis, and makes several key observations and predictions, some of which would only be borne out many decades later. We have thus taken the first step toward understanding the fundamental contradictions between Bolshevik program and Soviet reality. If the state does not die away, but grows more and more despotic, if the plenipotentiaries of the working class become bureaucratized, and the bureaucracy rises above the new society, this is not for some secondary reasons like the psychological relics of the past, etc., but is a result of the iron necessity to give birth to and support a privileged minority so long as it is impossible to guarantee genuine equality.

Canary Wharf has always been an alien presence, and this can give some clue to its origins, growth and probable fall. This is a finished programme of workers' democracy. It is directly aimed against the danger of bureaucracy. This in turn formed the basis of the 1919 Party Programme. In other words, contrary to the calumnies of the enemies of socialism, Soviet Russia in the time of Lenin and Trotsky was the most democratic regime in history. Gradually, all the tasks of running the state to be carried out in turn by the workers: when everybody is a "bureaucrat" in turn, nobody is a bureaucrat. Comprehensive Britain’ has laid waste to our once great universities, fuelled rampant grade inflation, and destroyed, perhaps forever, educational excellence and rigour. It didn’t have to be this way. For a short while, grammar schools offered the best education imaginable by selecting for prepubescent academic ability. This led to unprecedented numbers of working-class children joining the elite. If, in 1956, there had been an expansion of grammar schools to meet the baby bulge then this green and pleasant land would have been preserved and led to the abolition of nearly all private education. Instead, driven by the hypocrisies and bad faith of ‘the left’ and ‘egalitarians’, and the timidity and cowardice of the conservatives, this revolution was trampled under a communist approach to schooling: the comprehensives. No serious person can deny that this egalitarian education was inevitably of much poorer quality and led to spiralling educational inequalities. Where lies the theoretical mistake of the bureaucracy – in the basic premise or the conclusion? In the one and the other. To the first announcement of “complete triumph”, the Left Opposition answered: You must not limit yourself to the socio-juridical form of relations which are unripe, contradictory, in agriculture still very unstable, abstracting from the fundamental criterion: level of the productive forces. Juridical forms themselves have an essentially different social content in dependence upon the height of the technical level. “Law can never be higher than the economic structure and the cultural level conditioned by it.” (Marx) Soviet forms of property on a basis of the most modern achievement of American technique transplanted into all branches of economic life – that would indeed be the first stage of socialism. Soviet forms with a low productivity of labor mean only a transitional regime whose destiny history has not yet finally weighed.

Reviews

Bourgeois law in relation to the distribution of the objects of consumption assumes, of course, inevitably a bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of compelling observance of its norms. It follows (we are still quoting Lenin) that under Communism not only will bourgeois law survive for a certain time, but also even a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie!” Bourgeois law ... is inevitable in the first phase of the communist society, in that form in which it issues after long labor pains from capitalist society. Law can never be higher than the economic structure and the cultural development of society conditioned by that structure.” Perhaps today’s resentment of the independent sector would not exist at the same level if the former options had been preserved. Indeed when Labour returned to government in 1974, they created more private schools than any government since the reign of Edward VI by forcing direct grant schools — a now extinct form of private school which was required to offer one-quarter of places to students whose fees were covered by the state — to become comprehensive or go private.

Discussing the dying away of the state, Lenin wrote that the custom of observing the rules of social life can lose all need of compulsion if there is nothing which provokes indignation, protest and revolt, and thus creates the necessity for repression.” The essence of the matter lies in that if. The present regime in the Soviet Union provokes protest at every step, a protest the more burning in that it is repressed. The bureaucracy is not only a machine of compulsion but also a constant source of provocation. The very existence of a greedy, lying and cynical caste of rulers inevitably creates a hidden indignation. The improvement of the material situation of the workers does not reconcile them with the authorities; on the contrary, by increasing their self-respect and freeing their thought for general problems of politics, it prepares the way for an open conflict with the bureaucracy. Lenin once characterized socialism as “the Soviet power plus electrification.” That epigram, whose one-sidedness was due to the propaganda aims of the moment, assumed at least as a minimum starting point the capitalist level of electrification. At present in the Soviet Union there is 1/ 3 as much electrical energy per head of the population as in the advanced countries. If you take into consideration that the soviets have given place in the meantime to a political machine that is independent of the masses, the Communist International has nothing left but to declare that socialism is bureaucratic power plus 1/ 3 of the capitalist electrification. Such a definition would be photographically accurate, but for socialism it is not quite enough! In a speech to the Stakhanovists in November 1935, Stalin, obedient to the empirical aims of the conference, unexpectedly announced:

Comprehensive schools, according to Eric James, a defender of grammar schools and Vice-Chancellor of York University when Hitchens attended it in the 1970s said that, according to Hitchens, ‘it would also lead to a revolution in learning, the widespread dismantling of the former required knowledge of literature and history, and the dethroning of the old-fashioned elitism of the universities.’ The question we previously raised in the name of the reader: “How could the ruling clique, with its innumerable mistakes, concentrate unlimited power in its hands?”– or, in other words: “How explain the contradiction between the intellectual poverty of the Thermidorians and their material might?”– now permits a more concrete and categorical answer. The Soviet society is not harmonious. What is a sin for one class or stratum is a virtue for another. From the point of view of socialist forms of society, the policy of the bureaucracy is striking in its contradictions and inconsistencies. But the same policy appears very consistent from the standpoint of strengthening the power of the new commanding stratum.