The ‘lefty trad’ claim that socialists should promote traditional teaching methods has resurfaced in two posts. The posts advance four interlinked arguments:
1. Socialists support community order, promote a strong social work ethic, and have high expectations of the working class.
2. The same applies “a thousandfold” to children in schools.
3. Teachers achieve order, hard work, and high expectations in schools through traditional methods of behaviour management, such as SLANT. (Progressive methods lead to chaotic classrooms and cannot, therefore, realise socialists’ aims.)
4. Traditional methods allow working-class and disadvantaged students, including those with SEND and the neurodiverse, to thrive. A very small minority will not cope – but there is always another school for them!
In the ‘lefty trad’ posts the link between socialist views on order, work, and expectations and contemporary schooling is based on three isolated quotes. The quotes come from an Austrian socialist, the last constitution of the USSR, and Lenin. The method of extracting a quote from its historical context and applying it to other situations inevitably turns a specific idea into a general principle. To accord a concept (like order, work, or expectation) a universal meaning is a feature of Hegelian idealism rather than Marxist materialism.
We cannot assume statements made at a particular point in the class struggle are relevant many years later in different circumstances. The socialist must examine the background to each quote and, in so doing, situate the abstract concept in its concrete reality. Only then can we determine if the quote has any relevance for schools today. In this post, the first of three, we consider the quote about ‘order’.
Quote 1: Order
Julius Deutsch, a leading member of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria (SDAPÖ), is quoted speaking about order in 1923:
Communal life demands order. If everyone does as he pleases, and if no one shows any consideration for the next man, then eventually everyone will have to suffer and any sense of community will be replaced by the fight of all against all. There is no community without order!
What was Deutsch talking about? There is no citation to the quote and we have not been able to track down the source. However, we do know that the SDAPÖ controlled the Vienna municipal council between 1919 and 1934, during which time the city became known as “Red Vienna”. In 1923 Deutsch co-founded and led the party’s militia – one of many in Austria at the time. It seems likely, then, that Deutsch was referring to military discipline in the context of a militia defending a socialist administration against right-wing paramilitary forces.
However, Deutsch, as a member of the National Assembly between 1920 and 1933, might have had another reason to call for community order. He was closely associated with Austro-Marxism – a current within the SDAPÖ that tried and failed to tread a path between parliamentary reformism and working-class militancy. Forming part of a brief coalition government in the aftermath of the First World War, Austro-Marxists acted to dampen workers’ militancy in favour of pursuing reforms through the National Assembly. They stopped two communist uprisings in 1918 and 1919. In the words of Otto Bauer, a leading theoretician of Austro-Marxism, the party encouraged trades unions and workers’ councils to act as a ‘brakeman’ on Soviet-style revolution.
The ‘order’ Deutsch recommends turns out to be the type in which revolutionary workers restrict (or are disciplined to restrict) their demands to parliamentary reforms. ‘Consideration for the next man’ meant showing faith in bourgeois democracy, whereas an ordered and disciplined Bolshevik cadre intent on taking state power could only lead to ‘the fight of all against all’.
For Marxists, the meaning of ‘order’ is a historical and materialist question. On the organisation of the revolutionary party, for example, the level of order required from the membership varies from one circumstance to the next. As Trotsky explained, the principle of democratic centralism contains the idea of a dialectical relationship between the two sides of organisation:
Democracy and centralism do not at all find themselves in an invariable ratio to one another. Everything depends on the concrete circumstances, on the political situation in the country, on the strength of the party and its experience, on the general level of its members, on the authority the leadership has succeeded in winning. Before a conference, when the problem is one of formulating a political line for the next period, democracy triumphs over centralism.
When the problem is political action, centralism subordinates democracy to itself. Democracy again asserts its rights when the party feels the need to examine critically its own actions. The equilibrium between democracy and centralism establishes itself in the actual struggle, at moments it is violated and then again re-established.1
Members of the revolutionary party are subject to the strongest order when carrying out the decisions of the central commissions, but they are free to enter the democratic discussion that leads to those decisions. The balance of democracy and centralism depends on the material conditions of capitalist production and the nature of the class struggle.
Implications for classrooms today
The original post proposed that adolescence is an unstable age characterised by ‘teenage rebellion’. Students, particularly those from working-class backgrounds, are likely to slouch over desks, pay no attention in lessons except to ridicule their peers, and swear at teachers. Traditional methods, which force students to comply with a minimum standard of social behaviour, guarantee order. And an ordered classroom leads to opportunities for students to share ideas in the knowledge that their peers will listen respectfully.
Can we compare this type of order with that in Deutsch’s quote? Deutsch, we have speculated, could have been talking about ‘order’ in one of two contexts – either military-style order in defence of a ‘red’ city or the order required to reconcile the working-class to limited reforms. In the first, the aim is to safeguard improvements in workers’ living conditions; in the second, the aim is to limit their aspirations and head off proletarian revolt. The first type of order is progressive; the second type is wholly regressive.
There are echoes of the first type of order in contemporary schooling. However, the military-style discipline systems of zero-tolerance academy chains, such as Harris and Mossbourne, are not designed to defend working-class advances; in fact, quite the contrary. Just as new recruits to the forces are ‘broken’ during initial training, so students are publicly humiliated for the smallest infraction of the rules. School leaders using practices such as ‘flattening the grass’ against children reminds us of the parade-ground sergeant major shouting in the face of a new soldier. Corridors are highly regimented with students walking in silent lines between lessons. As the academies are located predominantly in deprived areas, this ’tough love’ is meted out to high proportions of disadvantaged students. Meanwhile those in middle-class areas avoid the bullying and hostility of a boot-camp education. ‘Order’ comes to mean not the defence of hard-won rights, but the suppression of working-class children2.
Deutsch’s second meaning of order – a curb on working-class militancy – has little relevance for schools today, although it has an important role in stabilising capitalist society. In general, school leaders do not impose order to limit the demands of a rebellious student body (although the protests against racist policies at Pimlico Academy in 2021 constitute an inspiring exception). Indeed, highly-rigid discipline measures are likely to cow children into silence and, as one safeguarding report noted, damage their mental health. Students either heed their ‘superiors’ or face punitive measures that can be prolonged and isolating – and end in permanent exclusion. Students are powerless to make suggestions, let alone present a constructive case for reforms to the regime. That self-preservation requires an individual to keep their head down and acquiescence to the status quo has implications for activity outside school. Compliance breeds a passivity and self-reliance that militates against collective anti-capitalist struggle.
Trotsky’s discussion of democratic centralism in the vanguard party offers a dialectical view of ‘order’ that can underpin progressive education. Unlike the traditionalists’ caricature, progressive methods do not lead to chaotic classrooms. The traditionalists confuse ‘messy’ situations in which students take decisions about their learning for a breakdown in order. Rather, the progressive school approaches order in a creative and flexible way. On the one hand, students are given agency and encouraged to question, plan, act, and reflect3; on the other hand, the teacher establishes centralised order when, for example, instruction is appropriate for the whole class. Similarly, the school leader requires an ordered collective to launch a whole-school initiative, but does not demur when students respond critically to the initiative.
Traditional schools use the concept of order to teach working-class students submission and compliance; progressive schools create an ordered environment to teach those students that their ideas and actions can have an impact on the institution and wider community. For socialists who work for the overthrow of capitalist social relations of production, the development of conscious agency is a key aim for state education. Upon such a foundation, workers develop class consciousness when they engage with the revolutionary party’s political programme.
Footnotes
- Trotsky was writing in 1937. Stalinism, characterised by bureaucratisation and subservience to the Soviet Union, had gained control of the ‘official’ communist parties in Europe and the US. Revolutionaries were building new parties to maintain the Bolshevik’s traditions of democratic centralism and internationalism. Trotsky’s article aims to educate new comrades about one part of that tradition. ↩︎
- Ironically, advocates of traditional methods argue that they are defending children’s right to an education. However, the form of education they propose – “the best that has been thought and said” – turns out to be another weapon in the oppression of the working class (as we shall see in the second post in the series). ↩︎
- The original blog post characterises the highest form of learning as “individual self-expression” when a student shares a thoughtful, unpredictable, and unique idea. While this is, indeed, a worthwhile aim, thinking remains at the cognitive level. In the progressive classroom, students have the opportunity to think at the metacognitive level as well. ↩︎
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