I myself do not really view “What is to be Done?” as a great beginner work for Marxists, since it mentions a lot of obscure philosophers or groups that a modern audience (with their cursory knowledge of Russian history being from the lips of liberals, or worse, conservatives) would hardly know the context of, and I am reading a version that has notes on these people!
That is not to say that it is not an influential or essential work of Lenin (I think it might be up there with “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” and “The State and Revolution” in terms of either factor), but one has to be willing to trudge through Russian names that you will likely never hear again.
What makes that rightist, though?
It alienates children from society.
When children grow up with parents, they are able to observe the world and society through their parents. Children are always observing and learning even when you’re not directly teaching them. When they see their parents go to work and interact with others, they learn that.
When you alienate children from that environment, like the bourgeois private schools in the UK, they are removed from the means of production and thus is more able to accept contradictions between the classes. This is detrimental for a socialist society, where class struggle is intensified after a revolution.
On the parents side, it removes them from parenting. It’s not a question of whether or not they have the right to children, but rather a question of whether or not they understand what goes into taking care of children. Knowledge comes from practice. When you remove the practice, you remove the knowledge.
This knowledge is absolutely crucial because the proletariat has political power, and they need knowledge to make correct decisions.
Lastly, Bukharin was a rightist. He was part of the faction that looked to sabotage the Soviet Union, and was executed for doing so.
Oh, I was not debating or asking what made Bukharin a rightist (I did recall his “ABC’s of Communism” as being a bit “prophetical” and talked a bit too much about the specifics of how socialist society and communist society would operate), and I forgot Bukharin’s anti-Stalin stance; I was merely wondering how separating children from parents was rightist.
I have never thought about alienating children from parents as affecting their perception of the means of production, nor the consequences for socialism that such a thing would entail. On a similar topic, I do not think homeschooling should be legal because it can be an echo chamber of harmful influences that the parent would have full access over.
Oh, for sure. Homeschooling is not great because kids don’t socialize when homeschooled.
I meant that parents should have a right to care for their children, but shouldn’t have an exclusive right to educate their kids.
Left vs right is the diversification of political power vs the concentration of political power. Alienating children from society reduces their class consciousness and has them delegate decision making more towards authority figures, which is more rightist.
Yeah, homeschooling seems to generally be worse for children than outschooling because of those reasons. There is also the fact that I have no idea if the qualifications for homeschooling are as high as those for standard schools (they are probably lower), so they will get lower-quality education that is tinged with the ideological beliefs their parents will have.
Diversification of political power vs the concentration of political power is an interesting way of discriminating the Left and the Right (though I guess they are more vague descriptors due to the fact that the Left and Right serve as umbrella terms for numerous groups which do not share that much in common with one another, yet are still opposed to the other side).
Technically there are standards that are on par for homeschoolers, but a lot of people who homeschool as an excuse to not school their kids just don’t follow them. There’s no enforcement.
Also, educational standards are really lax. When you push kids, they can easily exceed those standards.
Concentration vs diversification of political power is the original definition of left vs right, as it originated in the French Revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left–right_political_spectrum
Weird how conservatives are like: “we are against government authority” unless their government needs to go to war or deport legal citizens with skin colors darker than they like. You would think that such things count as concentration of power.
In this way, sometimes conservatives can take on leftist positions, or it’s how leftist positions are appropriated by the right.
But usually when they take these positions, it’s to dismantle government power in favour of power concentrated in corporations (or in the case of homeschooling, religious institutions), which is arguably an even greater concentration because there are even less restrictions as to what those other institutions are capable of.
When you do an analysis, you have to consider what institutions are in place to replace government institutions, if any.
It could just be hypocrisy and conservatives choosing not to use their brains for anything (half of their brainpower is used to say “but Biden” whenever they cannot argue against an anti-Trump argument). Also yes, what you said is true and has an important implication: A conservative and a communist might superficially share some similar beliefs, but what acts they commit will embody what their actual goals are (which is why horseshoe theory is absurd).
I don’t think parents are the only scope for children to learn and understand class society… … Additionally, the example of bourgeois parents placing their kids in ivory towers is utilized for explicitly bourgeois means of replicating their class, where their children cannot interact with other classes as equals, but certainly as servants. I’m not agreeing with <separating children from family to raised by state> but that’s a very different thing from <bourgeois class reproduction> you gave as an example
Bourgeois class reproduction wouldn’t happen if the children actually saw their parents schedule their lives around going to work and earning money.
Kids understand that people exchange labour for money because they see what their parents do. Hence, they gain an understanding of class. How do you perpetuate an alternative narrative? You separate them from an environment where people are shown to be working. You show them that money is not gained through labour, but rather it just appears when you are able to adhere to an ideal.
The dialectic between the base and the superstructure works on a personal level as well as a societal level.