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Title: Equal Opportunity in Education Author: Michail Bakunin Date: 1869 Language: en Topics: education Source: Retrieved on February 24th, 2009 from http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/bakunin/bakunin.html.
The first topic for consideration today is this: will it be feasible for
the working masses to know complete emancipation as long as the
education available to those masses continues to be inferior to that
bestowed upon the bourgeois, or, in more general terms, as long as there
exists any class, be it numerous or otherwise, which, by virtue of
birth, is entitled to a superior education and a more complete
instruction? Does not the question answer itself? Is it not self-evident
that of any two persons endowed by nature with roughly equivalent
intelligence, one will have the edge — the one whose mind will have been
broadened by learning and who, having the better grasped the inter-
relationships of natural and social phenomena (what we might term the
laws of nature and of society) will the more readily and more fully
grasp the nature of his surroundings? And that this one will feel, let
us say, a greater liberty and, in practical terms, show a greater
aptitude and capability than his fellow? It is natural that he who knows
more will dominate him who knows less. And were this disparity of
education and education and learning the only one to exist between two
classes, would not all the others swiftly follow until the world of men
itself in its present circumstances, that is, until it was again divided
into a mass of slaves and a tiny number of rulers, the former labouring
away as they do today, to the advantage of the latter?
Now we see why the bourgeois socialists demand only a little education
for the people, a soupcon more than they currently receive; whereas we
socialist democrats demand, on the people’s behalf, complete and
integral education, an education as full as the power of intellect today
permits, So that, henceforth, there may not be any class over the
workers by virtue of superior education and therefore able to dominate
and exploit them. The bourgeois socialists want to see the retention of
the class system each class, they contend, fulfilling a specific social
function; one specialising, say, in learning, and the other in manual
labour. We, on the other hand, seek the final and the utter abolition of
classes; we seek a unification of society and equality of social and
economic provision for every individual on this earth. The bourgeois
socialists, whilst retaining the historic bases of the society of today,
would like to see them become less stark, less harsh and more
prettified. Whereas we should like to see their destruction. From which
it follows that there can be no truce or compromise, let alone any
coalition between the bourgeois socialists and us socialist democrats.
But, I have heard it said and this is the argument most frequently
raised against us and an argument which the dogmatists of every shade
regard as irrefutable — it is impossible that the whole of mankind
should devote itself to learning, for we should all die of starvation.
Consequently while some study others must labour so that they can
produce what we need to live — not just producing for their own needs,
but also for those men who devote themselves exclusively to intellectual
pursuits; aside from expanding the horizons of human knowledge, the
discoveries of these intellectuals improve the condition of all human
beings, without exception, when applied to industry, agriculture and,
generally, to political and social life; agreed? And do not their
artistic creations enhance the lives of every one of us?
No, not at all. And the greatest reproach which we can level against
science and the arts is precisely that they do not distribute their
favours and do not exercise their influence, except upon a tiny fragment
of society, to the exclusion and, thus, to the detriment of the vast
majority. Today one might say of the advances of science and of the
arts, just what has already and so properly been said of the prodigious
progress of industry, trade, credit, and, in a word, of the wealth of
society in the most civilised countries of the modern world. That wealth
is quite exclusive, and the tendency is for it to become more so each
day, as it becomes concentrated into an ever shrinking number of hands,
shunning the lower echelons of the middle class and the petite
bourgeoisie, depressing them into the proletariat, so that the growth of
this wealth is the direct cause behind the growing misery of the
labouring masses. Thus the outcome is that the gulf which yawns between
the privileged, contented minority and millions of workers who earn
their keep by the strength of their arm yawns ever wider and that the
happier the contented — who -exploit the people’s labour become the more
unhappy the workers become. One has only to look at the fabulous
opulence of the aristocratic, financier, commercial and industrial
clique in England and compare it with the miserable condition of the
workers of the same country; one has only to re-read the so naive and
heartrending letter lately penned by an intelligent and upright
goldsmith of London, one Walter Dugan, who has just voluntarily taken
poison along with his wife and their six children, simply as a means of
escape from the degradation’s of poverty and the torments of hunger (1)
— and one will find oneself obliged to concede that the much vaunted
civilisation means, in material terms, to the people, only oppression
and ruination. And the same holds true for the modern advances of
science and the arts. Huge strides, indeed, it is true But the greater
the advances, the more they foster intellectual servitude and thus, in
material terms, foster misery and inferiority as the lot of the people;
for these advances merely widen the gulf which already separates the
people’s level of understanding from the levels of the privileged
classes. From the point of view of natural capacity, the intelligence of
the former is, today, obviously less stunted, less exercised, less
sophisticated and less corrupted by the need to defend unjust interests,
and is, consequently, naturally of greater potency than the brain power
of the bourgeoisie: but, then again, the brain power of the bourgeois
does have at its disposal the complete arsenal of science filled with
weapons that are indeed formidable. It is very often the case that a
highly intelligent worker is obliged to hold his tongue when confronted
by a learned fool who defeats him, not by dint of intellect (of which he
has none) but by dint of his education, an education denied the
workingman but granted the fool because, while the fool was able to
develop his foolishness scientifically in schools, the working man’s
labours were clothing, housing, feeding him and supplying his every
need, his teachers and his books, everything necessary to his education.
Even within the bourgeois class, as we know only too well, the degree of
learning imparted to each individual is not the same. There, too, there
is a scale which is determined, not by the potential of the individual
but by the amount of wealth of the social stratum to which he belongs by
birth; for example, the instruction made available to the children of
the lower petite bourgeoisie, whilst itself scarcely superior to that
which workers manage to obtain for themselves, is next to nothing by
comparison with the education that society makes readily available to
the upper and middle bourgeoisie. What, then, do we find? The petite
bourgeoisie, whose only attachment to the middle class is through a
ridiculous vanity on the one hand, and its dependence upon the big
capitalists on the other, finds itself most often in circumstances even
more miserable and even more humiliating than those which afflict the
proletariat. So when we talk of privileged classes, we never have in
mind this poor petite bourgeoisie which, if it did but have a little
more spirit and gumption, would not delay in joining forces with us to
combat the big and medium bourgeoisie who crush it today no less than
they crush the proletariat. And should society’s current economic trends
continue in the same direction for a further ten years (which we do,
however, regard as impossible) we may yet see the bulk of the medium
bourgeoisie tumble first of all into the current circumstances of the
petite bourgeoisie only to slip a little later into the proletariat — as
a result, of course, of this inevitable concentration of ownership into
an ever smaller number of hands — the ineluctable consequences of which
would be to partition society once and for all into a tiny,
overweaningly opulent, educated, ruling minority and a vast majority of
impoverished, ignorant, enslaved proletarians.
There is one fact which should make an impression upon every person of
conscience, upon all who have at heart a concern for human dignity and
justice; that is, for the liberty of each individual amid and through a
setting of equality for all. That is the fact that all of the
intelligentsia, all of the great applications of science to the purpose
of industry, trade and to the life of society in general have thus far
profited no one, save the privileged classes and the power of the State,
that timeless champion of all political and social iniquity. Never, not
once, have they brought any benefit to the masses of the people. We need
only list the machines and every workingman and honest advocate of the
emancipation of labour would accept the justice of what we say. By what
power do the privileged classes maintain themselves today, with all
their insolent smugness and iniquitous pleasures, in defiance of the all
too legitimate outrage felt by the masses of the people? Is it by some
power inherent in their persons? No — it is solely through the power of
the State, in whose apparatus today their offspring hold, always, every
key position (and even every lower and middle range position) excepting
that of soldier and worker. And in this day and age what is it that
constitutes the principle underlying the power of the State? Why, it is
science. Yes, science — Science of government, science of administration
and financial science; the science of fleecing the flocks of the people
without their bleating too loudly and, when they start to bleat, the
science of urging silence, patience and obedience upon them by means of
a scientifically organised force: the science of deceiving and dividing
the masses of the people and keeping them allays in a salutary ignorance
lest they ever become able, by helping one another and pooling their
efforts, to conjure up a power capable of overturning States; and, above
all, military science with all its tried and tested weaponry, these
formidable instruments of destruction which ‘work wonders’ (2): and
lastly, the science of genius which has conjured up steamships, railways
and telegraphy which, by turning every government into a hundred armed,
a thousand armed Briareos (3), giving it the power to be, act and arrest
everywhere at once — has brought about the most formidable political
centralisation the world has ever witnessed.
Who, then, will deny that, without exception, all of the advances made
by science have thus far brought nothing, save a boosting of the wealth
of the privileged classes and of the power of the State, to the
detriment of the well-being and liberty of the masses of the people, of
the proletariat? But, we will hear the objection, do not the masses of
the people profit by this also? Are they not much more civilised in this
society of ours than they were in the societies of byegone centuries?
We shall reply to that with an observation borrowed from the noted
German socialist, Lassalle. In measuring the progress made by the
working masses, in terms of their political and social emancipation, one
should not compare their intellectual state in this century with what it
may have been in centuries gone by. Instead, one ought to consider
whether, by comparison with some given time, the gap which then existed
between the working masses and the privileged classes having been noted,
the masses have progressed to the same extent as these privileged
classes. For, if the progress made by both has been roughly equivalent,
the intellectual gap which separates the masses from the privileged in
today’s world will be the same as it ever was; but if the proletariat
has progressed further and more rapidly than the privileged, then the
gap must necessarily have narrowed; but if, on the other hand, the
worker’s rate of progress has been slower and, consequently, less than
that of a representative of the ruling classes over the same period,
then that gap will have grown. The gulf which separates them will have
increased and the man of privilege grown more powerful and the worker’s
circumstances more abject, more slave like than at the date one chose as
the point of departure. If the two of us set off from two different
points at the same time and you have a lead of one hundred paces over me
and you move at a rate of sixty paces per minute, and I at only thirty
paces per minute, then after one hour the distance which separates us
will not be just over one hundred paces, but just over one thousand nine
hundred paces.
That example gives a roughly accurate notion of the respective advances
made by the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Thus far the bourgeoisie
has raced along the track of civilisation at a quicker rate than the
proletariat, not because they are intellectually more powerful than the
latter indeed one might properly argue the contrary case — but because
the political and economic organisation of society has been such that,
hitherto, the bourgeoisie alone have enjoyed access to learning and
science has existed only for them, and the proletariat has found itself
doomed to a forced ignorance, so that if the proletariat has,
nevertheless, made progress (and there is no denying it has) then that
progress was made not thanks to society, but rather in spite of it. To
sum up. In society as presently constituted, the advances of science
have been at the root of the relative ignorance of the proletariat, just
as the progress of industry and commerce have been at the root of its
relative impoverishment. Thus, intellectual progress and material
progress have contributed in equal measure towards the exacerbation of
the slavery of the proletariat. Meaning what? Meaning that we have a
duty to reject and resist that bourgeois science, just as we have a duty
to reject and resist bourgeois wealth. And reject and resist them in
this sense — that in destroying the social order which turns it into the
preserve of one or of several classes, we must lay claim to it as the
common inheritance of all the world.
L’Égalité, 31 July 1869
We have shown how, as long as there are two or more degrees of
instruction for the various strata of society, there must, of necessity,
be classes, that is, economic and political privilege for a small number
of the contented and slavery and misery for the lot of the generality of
men.
As members of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA/AIT), we
seek equality and, because we seek it, we must also seek integral
education, the same education for everyone.
But if everyone is schooled who will want to work? we hear someone ask.
Our answer to that is a simple one: everyone must work and everyone must
receive education. To this, it is very often objected that this mixing
of industrial with intellectual labour cannot be, except one or the
other suffer by it. The manual workers will make poor scholars, and the
scholars will never be more than quite pathetic workers. True, in the
society of today where manual labour and intellectual labour are equally
distorted by the quite artificial isolation in which both are kept. But
we are quite persuaded that in the rounded human being, each of these
pursuits, the muscular and the nervous, must be developed in equal
measure and that far from being inimical each must lean upon, enhance
and reinforce the other. The science of the sage will become more
fruitful, more useful and more expansive when the sage is no longer a
stranger to manual labour, and the labours of the workmen, when he is
educated, will be more intelligent and thus more productive than those
of an ignorant workman. From which it follows that, for work’s sake as
much as for the sake of science, there must no longer be this division
into workers and scholars and henceforth there must be only men.
The result of this is that those men who are today, on account of their
superior intellects, caught up in the ivory towers of science and who,
once they have established themselves in this world, yield to the need
for a thoroughly bourgeois position and bend their every invention to
the exclusive use of the privileged class to which they themselves
belong. These men, I say, once they become truly the fellows of
everyone, fellows not just in their imagination nor just in their speech
but in fact, in their work, will just as necessarily convert their
inventions and applications of their learning to the benefit of all, and
especially apply themselves to the task of making work (the basis, the
only real and rightful basis of human society) lighter and more
dignified.
It is quite possible and, indeed, likely that during the period of
fairly lengthy transition which will, naturally, succeed the great
crisis of society, the loftiest sciences will fall considerably below
their current levels. Equally, it is not to be doubted that luxury and
everything constituting the refinements of life will have to disappear
from the social scene for quite a long time and will not be able to
reappear as the exclusive amusements of a few, but will have to return
as ways of dignifying life for everybody, and then only once society has
conquered need in all of us. But would this temporary eclipse of the
lofty sciences be such a misfortune? Whatever science may lose in terms
of sublime elevation, will it not win through the extension of its base?
Doubtless there will be fewer illustrious sages, but at the same time
there will be fewer ignoramuses too. There will be no more of these men
who can touch the skies, but, on the other hand, millions of men who may
be degraded and crushed today will be able to tread the earth as human
beings: no demigods, but no slaves either. Both the slave and the
demigods will achieve human-ness, the one by rising a lot, the other by
stooping a little. Thus no longer will there be a place for deification,
nor for contumely. Everyone will shake hands with his neighbour and,
once reunited, we shall all march with a new spring in our steps,
onwards to new conquests, in the realm of science as in the realm of
life itself.
So, far from having any misgivings about that eclipse of science — which
will be in any case only a fleeting one we ought to call for it with all
our powers since its effect will be to humanise both scholar and manual
labourer and to reconcile science and life. And we are convinced that,
once we have achieved this new foundation, the progress of mankind, in
the realm of science as elsewhere in life, will very quickly outstrip
everything that we have seen and everything we might conjure up in our
imaginations today. But here another question crops up: will every
individual have an equal capacity for absorbing education to the same
degree? Let us imagine a society organised along the most egalitarian
lines, a society in which children will, from birth onwards, start out
with the same circumstances economically, socially and politically,
which is to say the same upkeep, the same education, the same
instruction: among these thousands of tiny individuals will there not be
an infinite variety of enthusiasms, natural inclinations and aptitudes?
Such is the big argument advanced by our adversaries, the bourgeois pure
and simple, and the bourgeois socialists as well. They imagine it to be
unanswerable. So let us try to prove the opposite. Well, to begin with,
by what right do they make their stand for the principle of individual
capabilities? Is there room for the development of capabilities in
society as at present constituted? Can there be room for that
development in a society which continues to have the right of
inheritance as its foundation? Self-evidently not; for, from the moment
that the right of inheritance applies, the career of children will never
be determined by their individual gifts and application: it will be
determined primarily by their economic circumstances, by the wealth or
poverty of their families. Wealthy but empty- headed heirs will receive
a superior education; the most intelligent children of the proletariat
will receive ignorance as their inheritance, just as happens at present.
So, is it not hypocritical, when speaking not only of society as it is
today but even of a reformed society which would still have as its
fundaments private property ownership and the right of inheritance — Is
it not sordid sophistry to talk about individual rights based on
individual capabilities? There is such a lot of talk today of individual
liberty, yet what prevails is not the individual person, nor the
individual in general, but the individual upon whom privilege is
conferred by his social position. Thus what counts is position and
class. Just let one intelligent individual from the ranks of the
bourgeoisie dare to take a stand against the economic privileges of that
respectable class and you will see how much these good bourgeois,
forever prattling about individual liberty today, respect his liberty as
an individual Don’t talk to us about individual abilities! Is it not an
everyday thing for us to see the greatest abilities of working men and
bourgeois forced to give way and even to kowtow before the crass
stupidity of the heirs to the golden calf? Individual liberty — not
privileged liberty but human liberty, and the real potential of
individuals — will only be able to enjoy full expansion in a regime of
complete equality. When there exists an equality of origins for all men
on this earth then, and only then (with safeguards, of course, for the
superior calls of fellowship or solidarity, which is and ever shall
remain the greatest producer of all social phenomena, from human
intelligence to material wealth) only then will one be able to say, with
more reason than one can today, that every individual is a self-made
man. Hence our conclusion is that, if individual talents are to prosper
and no longer be thwarted in bringing forth their full fruits, the first
precondition is that all individual privileges, economic as well as
political, must disappear, which is to say that all class distinctions
must be abolished. That requires that private property rights and the
rights of inheritance must go, and equality must triumph economically,
politically and socially.
But once equality has triumphed and is well established, will there be
no longer any difference in the talents and degree of application of the
various individuals? There will be a difference, not so many as exist
today, perhaps, but there will always be differences. Of that there can
be no doubt. This is a proverbial truth which will probably never cease
to be true — that no tree ever brings forth two leaves that are exactly
identical. How much more will this be true of men, men being much more
complicated creatures than leaves. But such diversity, far from
constituting an affliction is, as the German philosopher Feuerbach has
forcefully noted, one of the assets of mankind. Thanks to it, the human
race is a collective whole wherein each human being complements the rest
and has need of them; so that this infinite variation in human beings is
the very cause and chief basis of their solidarity — an important
argument in favour of equality.
Basically, even in todays society, if one excepts two categories of men
— men of genius and idiots — and provided one abstracts conjured up
artificially through the influence of a thousand social factors such as
education, instruction, economic and political status which create
differences not merely within each social stratum, but in almost every
family unit, one will concede that from the point of view of
intellectual gifts and moral energy the vast majority of men are very
much alike or, at least, are worth about the same — weakness in one
regard being almost always counterbalanced by an equivalent strength in
another, so that it becomes impossible to say whether one man chosen
from this mass is much the superior or the inferior of his neighbour.
The vast majority of men are not identical but equivalent and thus
equal.
Which means that the line of argument pursued by our adversaries is left
with nothing but the geniuses and the idiots.
As we know, idiocy is a psychological and social affliction. Thus, it
should be treated not in the schools but in the hospitals and one is
entitled to expect that a more rational system of social hygiene — above
all, one that cares more for the physical and moral well- being of the
individual than the current system — will some day be introduced and
that together with a new society organised along egalitarian lines it
will eventually eradicate from the surface of the earth this affliction
of idiocy, such a humiliation to the human race. As for the men of
genius, one should note first of all that, happily or unhappily,
according to one’s main point of view, such men have not featured in the
history of mankind except as the extremely rare exceptions to all of the
rules known to us and one cannot organise to cater for exceptions. Even
so, it is our hope that the society of the future will be able to
discover, through a truly practical popular organisation of its
collective assets the means by which to render such geniuses less
necessary, less intimidating and more truly the benefactors of us all.
For we must never lose sight of Voltaire’s great dictum: ‘There is
someone with more wit than the greatest geniuses, and that is everyone’.
So it is merely a question of organising this everyone for the sake of
the fullest liberty rooted in the most complete economic, political and
social equality, and one need no longer fear the dictatorial ambitions
and despotic inclinations of the men of genius.
As for turning out such men of genius through education, one ought to
banish the thought from one’s mind. Moreover, of all the men of genius
we have known thus far, none or almost none ever displayed their genius
while yet in their childhood, nor in their adolescence nor yet in their
early youth. Only in their mature years did they ever reveal themselves
geniuses and several were not recognised as such until after their death
whereas many supposedly great men having had their praises sung while
youths by better men have finished their careers in the most absolute
obscurity. So it is never in the childhood years, nor even in the
adolescent years that one can discern and determine the comparative
excellencies and shortcomings of men, nor the extent of their talents,
nor their inborn aptitudes. All of these things only become obvious and
are governed by the development of the individual person and, just as
there are some natures precocious and some very slow — although the
latter are by no means inferior and, indeed, are often superior — so no
schoolmaster will ever be in a position to specify in advance the career
or nature of the occupations which his charges will choose once they
attain the age when they have the freedom to choose.
From which it follows that society, disregarding any real or imagined
differences in aptitudes or abilities and possessed of no means of
determining these in any event and of no right to allot the future
career of children owes them all, without a single exception, an
absolutely equal education and instruction.
L’Égalité, August 14 1869