User:Carlos Alberto Mota/Marx, Engels, Lenin: a view on education

Marx, Engels, Lenin: a view on education

Introduction

Education is a process of transmission of values and technical skills. This process is made by older people, aiming new generations. Education is important to political power, since all civilizations we know, from ancient Egypt to Classical Greece, Rome and so on. That was not different in the case of Marxism, as political theory. Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) were German philosophers, historians, economists and politicians, who created a major stream of thought with the purpose of transforming society, and whose writings had implications in the field of education. The majority of their books were co-written. However, the term "Marxism" highlights the importance of Karl Marx, within the context of this stream of thought in relation to Friedrich Engels.

Marx earned a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Berlin in 1841. He drew on ideas which he called "utopian socialism", by Saint-Simon, Fourier and Robert Owen. From these ideas he underlined the immorality of bad distribution of wealth, as well as the principle that ownership of the means of production is responsible for the state of injustice in human society. Within this line of thought, Proudhon declares that "property is theft". [1] Marx did not go that far. The ever studious Karl Marx was also well read in the economic theories of Adam Smith (author of key writings in the field of economics, like The Wealth of Nations), and David Ricardo, also an economist, who was interested in the work of Adam Smith and who furthered the development of economics, publishing works including Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. As a student of Hegel’s, Marx reinterprets his dialectics which explained universal development though a three-fold movement, "thesis-antithesis-synthesis". But, whereas Hegel points to God as the culmination of this movement, Marx applies this dialectics to social development: the thesis is the current state of society; the antithesis is the proletariat; the synthesis (conflict resolution/reconciliation) will be a new society, a socialist society, which would reach the communist phase in later movements. From the work of his University colleague Ludwig Feuerbach, he acquired the idea of alienation set out in the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. But whereas for Ludwig Feuerbach alienation (state of consciousness where reality is distorted) comes from religion - "opium of the people" - for Karl Marx it is man’s social setting that determines his consciousness. It is worth pointing out that David Ricardo had already considered that "Social groups or classes have solidarity and their own customs." [2] Karl Marx feels that economic processes determine the entire social evolution of mankind. The economic organization of a society is its foundation, its "infrastructure". Culture in general and specifically the education system depend on it and constitute the "superstructure". It is the private property of the means of production which generates inequality and alienation.

Education for Marxism

Marx considers Education to be part of the incorrect economic system, by being at its service. Capitalism creates a concentration of wealth that reduces those who sell their time to survive - the proletarians – to a state of alienation. For Marx, alienated labour does not fulfil the worker. "One of the key points of the Manuscripts of 1844 is a radical critique of capitalist society centred on the analysis of alienation, whose causal framework is, according to Marx, socio-economic alienation. Marx also believes that private property of the means of production, inseparable from the phenomenon of alienation, is the root of the social and political rivalries which characterize the bourgeois society." [3] [3]SOUSA, Maria Carmelita Homem de, "Os Manuscritos de 1844 de Karl Marx", Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, Faculdade de Filosofia, Braga, Tomo XXXVI-2-1980, pp153-186. Furthermore, for Marx,

"[With the division of labour] As soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape; he is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood." [4] "The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world. Labour does not only create goods; it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces goods. This fact simply indicates that the object which labour produces, its product, stands opposed to it as an alien thing, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour embodied and made objective in a thing. It is the objectification of labour. The realization of labour is its objectification. In the viewpoint of political economy this realization of labour appears as the diminution of the worker, the objectification as the loss of and subservience to the object, and the appropriation as alienation." [5]

Marx and Engels point to division of labour as the cause of social distinctions, above any other issues. Marx and Engels also consider the role of the State to be crucial in the development of a certain type of society.

"As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. The ancient state was, above all, the state of the slave-owners for holding down the slaves, just as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is the instrument for exploiting wage-labour by capital." [6] For Karl Marx, the Education System is not the focus of criticism for technical reasons, but because it is a vehicle for the "dominant ideology", a set of simplified and erroneous ideas that serve the dominant class.

Marx involves considerations on child labour, a reality today in countries of the so called "Third World", which reveal moral concerns with childhood. When writing about the match industry, he says: "Half the workers are children under thirteen, and young persons under eighteen. The manufacture is on account of its unhealthiness and unpleasantness in such bad odour that only the most miserable part of the labouring class, half-starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it, the ragged, half-starved, untaught children. Of the witnesses that Commissioner White examined, 270 were under 18, 50 under 10, 10 only 8, and 5 only 6 years old! A range of the working-day from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night-labour, irregular meal-times, meals for the most part taken in the very workrooms that are pestilent with phosphorus. Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpassed in this manufacture." [7] In the 20th century, the French philosopher and politician from the Communist Party, Louis Althusser, would synthesize this Marxist approach to Education: for Althusser, school becomes what he calls the "ideological State apparatus", which, operating alongside what he calls the "repressive State apparatus", made up of the Armed Forces and the police, the judicial apparatus and the prison system, help to sustain the power of the ruling class. Marx considers Education to be nothing more than a "superstructure" – a product of the "infrastructure" – the economic basis of society. Therefore, in his opinion, it was not particularly important to analyze the pedagogical methods or techniques as those methods and techniques would always be at the service of power. The Education System is a vehicle of alienation in a society where people have a false consciousness of reality. Even so, "In September of 1886, at the 1st International Labour Conference, Marx considers the importance of free, lay education for both sexes, which achieves a connection between education and socially productive labour, and which prepares fully developed members for the communist society." [8]

Marxism would become a strongly influential political stream, furthered (according to many altered) by Vladimir Illich Ulianov (1870-1924) known as Lenin, the Russian leader who seized power and founded the Soviet Union in 1917. Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, was an educator who thought of men like Rousseau and Pestalozzi as "democrats". Lenin marks the advent of "Marxism-Leninism", and it still seems a contradiction that in many countries of the world the Marxist-Leninists fight for improvements in a school which they consider "capitalist", or "bourgeois".

Conclusion:

Today it is frequently said that Karl Marx did not succeed in creating a “new society”, free from alienation and the quest for profit. In reality, countries that claim to be Marxist-Leninist are very few and the original ideology does not exist in practice. However, it is also often said that Marx understood Capitalism very well.

The importance of the Marxist criticism of Education resides in the not entirely objectionable fact that we should consider the limits of Education alone as a factor in social transformation.

REFERENCES

[1]PROUDHON, A Nova Sociedade, Edições Rés, Porto, n.d.

[2]RICARDO, David, Princípios de Economia Política e de Tributação, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, 1978, p.13.

[3]SOUSA, Maria Carmelita Homem de, "Os Manuscritos de 1844 de Karl Marx", Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, Faculdade de Filosofia, Braga, Tomo XXXVI-2-1980, pp153-186.

[4]MARX, Karl e ENGELS, Friedrich, A Ideologia Alemã, Editorial Presença, Lisboa, 1975, Vol I, p.40.

[5]MARX, Karl, Escritos de Juventude, Manuscritos de 1844, Edições 70, Lisboa, 1975, p. 130.

[6]ENGELS, Friedrich, A Origem da Família da Propriedade Privada e do Estado, Editorial Presença, Lisboa, 1974, pp 227-228.

[7]MARX, Karl, O Capital, Delfos, 7ª Edição, Volume I, in Cap. X, "O Dia de Trabalho", Lisboa, n.d, (2 Vols), pp 155-156. [8]MANACORDA, Mario Alighiero, História da Educação, pp 314-315.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

•ENGELS, Friedrich, A Origem da Família da Propriedade Privada e do Estado, Editorial Presença, Lisboa, 1974.

•MANACORDA, Mario Alighiero, História da Educação, Cortez, S. Paulo, 2000.

•MARX, Karl e ENGELS, Friedrich, A Ideologia Alemã, Editorial Presença, Lisboa, 1975, Vol I.

•MARX, Karl, Escritos de Juventude, Manuscritos de 1844, Edições 70, Lisboa, 1975. •MARX, Karl, O Capital, Delfos, 7ª Edição, Volume I, Cap. X, "O Dia de Trabalho", Lisboa, n.d., (2 Vols).

•MOTA, Carlos, Breve História da Educação no Ocidente, Cadernos do Caos, Porto, 2003.

•PROUDHON, A Nova Sociedade, Edições Rés, Porto, n.d.

•RICARDO, David, Princípios de Economia Política e de Tributação, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa, 1978.

•SOUSA, Maria Carmelita Homem de, "Os Manuscritos de 1844 de Karl Marx", Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, Faculdade de Filosofia, Braga, Tomo XXXVI-2-1980, pp153-186.