In part 1 of this series we analysed a quote about ‘order’ from a socialist politician in 1923. After establishing its context, we concluded that the quote did not support the ‘lefty trad’ case for the use of strict disciplinary techniques, such as SLANT, in state schools today.
Now we turn to a second quote used to justify those techniques. The argument is as follows: In a socialist society everybody will be expected to work for mutual benefit. However, idleness is a natural part of the human character and requires a sanction. Avoidance of work is “amplified a thousandfold” in schools. Teachers need to impose strong discipline to ‘correct’ adolescents’ reluctance to engage in learning.
Quote 2: Work ethic
The second quote links socialism to a strong work ethic and punitive measures that discourage shirking. It is Article 60 of the 1977 constitution of the Soviet Union:
It is the duty of, and a matter of honour for, every able-bodied citizen of the USSR to work conscientiously in his chosen, socially useful occupation, and strictly to observe labour discipline. Evasion of socially useful work is incompatible with the principles of socialist society.
Sixty years after the revolution that was supposed to herald workers’ control of production, it is strange that citizens have to be reminded that it is their duty and honour to engage in socially useful labour. Indeed, in a 1917 pamphlet Lenin looked forward to a classless society in which “there are no longer any ‘workmen’, nor, on the other hand, are there any longer men who do not work.” All citizens would be involved in planning production in a rational manner after the anarchy and waste of the capitalist market. Planning would lead to a more sophisticated division of labour, higher labour productivity, and the creation of more use values. The new society would not need exhortations to work; citizens would engage enthusiastically in a process that raised the forces of production and, importantly, reduce the time they needed to spend at work.
Comparing the references to ‘work’ in the first and last constitutions of the Soviet Union shines a light on the degeneration of the revolution after the late 1920s. The 1918 constitution grapples with the task of building a new society out of a war-ravaged and divided country; the 1977 constitution confronts economic stagnation and the bureaucracy’s failure to develop dynamic forces of production.
The first Bolshevik constitution (1918) was introduced at a crucial point for the survival of the new state. Workers in the industrial centres – the bulwark of Bolshevik support – constituted only a small fraction of the entire population of Russia (2.5 million out of 140 million in 1918). That number had already decreased by half a million from the previous year. It was to set to decline further when class-conscious workers joined the Red Army as the civil war intensified in the middle of 1918. In this context, the Bolsheviks published the constitution. Work is the focus of Article 18:
The Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic considers work the duty of every citizen of the Republic, and proclaims as its motto: “He shall not eat who does not work.”
In Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, Lenin asserts that the motto is the “fundamental, the first and most important rule” of the soviets. He makes clear that the threat to withhold food from those who do not work has a specific audience:
We must also compel the capitalists to work within the framework of the new state organisation. It is not enough to ‘remove’ the capitalists; we must (after removing the undesirable and incorrigible ‘resisters’) employ them in the service of the new state. This applies both to the capitalists and to the upper section of the bourgeois intellectuals, office employees, etc.
To force their opponents – whether capitalists, experts, or intellectuals – to work for the new state, Lenin continued, the Bolsheviks could control the supply of food through their grain monopoly and bread rationing. The constitution reiterates the expectation that all citizens work if they are to eat.
By the late 1970s the Bolsheviks’ aspirations lay in ruins. Stalin’s takeover and the rise of the bureaucracy had ended all hopes for a communist society. Now the Soviet economy was in crisis. The decline in the rate of return on investments had become critical. The bureaucrats had no way of regulating labour-time and counteracting the fragmentation of production. To meet the centre’s production targets, large enterprises prioritised self-sufficiency over cooperation with other producers. They hoarded resources and workers in an attempt to protect themselves from disturbances in the supply chain and labour market.
The way enterprises met targets compounded the waste in the system. Outside a few incentivised high priority sectors, they were less interested in producing quality use-values than in turning out the quantity of products required in the central plan. Nearly half of Soviet tractors produced in 1981, for example, had mechanical faults before being put into service. A significant portion of products became use-values only when the buyer converted or repaired them. The spontaneous tendency to autarchy as enterprises aimed at self-sufficiency and the absence of a general law that ensured products of labour became use-values were both insuperable problems.
After decades of failed reforms, the bureaucracy’s solution was to blame poor workmanship for the issues. However, workers were as vulnerable to spontaneous forces as the rest of society. Shortages in consumption goods and the shoddiness of those that were available meant workers also had to focus on becoming self-sufficient. The average family spent nearly 2 hours a day queuing in shops. Millions took on additional work – from growing food on small plots of land to setting up as ‘handymen’ who repaired consumer goods. As Füredi says, “It is a measure of the historic bankruptcy of the Soviet social formation that, as a result of its inability to socialise labour, it encouraged the most privatised forms of work” (p. 200).
Absenteeism from the day job and moonlighting grew. Up to 50% of repairs in the cities and 80% in the countryside were carried out in the informal economy. Idleness at work also increased as workers saved their energy for the alternative employment that provided basic necessities. The daily struggle drove workers to consume greater quantities of alcohol at work and home to the extent that society sank “ever deeper into a state of chronic alcohol poisoning.” During the late 1970s alcohol abuse cost an estimated 10 per cent of the national income each year and caused an annual death toll of up to 400,000 people. Alcoholism drove up absenteeism even more and led to higher levels of workplace injuries and damage to machinery. One estimate suggests that, overall, more than a third of work time in the Soviet Union was lost to absenteeism, idleness, or personal affairs.
It is in this context that Article 60 of the 1977 constitution exhorts citizens to observe “labour discipline” and warns that evading work is incompatible with socialism. Unlike the 1918 constitution, these warnings are not aimed at class enemies. Workers now made up a large majority of the population: 80 per cent of those employed worked in industry, construction, transportation, the service sector or on collective farms. Article 60 represents an attack on workers as part of the bureaucratic caste’s desperate attempts to revive its economic system.
Implications for classrooms today
The ‘lefty trad’ blog post invites us to draw a parallel between the duty and honour that work instilled in citizens of the Soviet Union and the similar feelings for work that children can develop if schools employ strict discipline systems. Unfortunately for the argument, the duty and honour envisaged by the framers of the Soviet constitution were not shared by the workers. Moreover, and unsurprisingly, the traditional teaching used in tandem with strict discipline leaves the vast majority of students uninspired.
There is a parallel to draw between workers in the USSR and students in today’s state schools, but not one that advances the ‘lefty trad’ case. Viewing formal jobs as a hindrance to participation in the informal economy, Soviet workers would regularly absent themselves from the workplace. In state schools in England, students are increasingly doing the same – expressing discontent and staying away. In 2023 nearly half of year 9 students disagreed with the statement “I like being in school” in an international survey – double the proportion who had disagreed eight years earlier (Education Uncovered). More children are choosing not to attend at all. In recent years absenteeism has been at historically high levels. More than 170 000 students were deemed ‘severely absent’ in 2023-24 because they missed at least half their lessons (The Guardian). Furthermore, the number of children being home schooled rose to over 110 000 by the end of 2024 – a growth of 40 per cent in two years (BBC news website). Families cited concerns for their children’s mental ill health as the main reason for taking them out of mainstream schooling.
Even if there is a superficial similarity between the attitudes and choices of Soviet workers and school students, the underlying reasons are different. External economic factors pulled workers in the USSR out of enterprises; students’ experiences of education are pushing them out of schools.
A ‘no-excuses’ approach is certainly a factor, but it is only one element of a wider programme. Traditionalists justify a strict behaviour system as necessary for ‘disadvantaged’ students to achieve good exam results (although it is hardly a coincidence that the government uses those same exam results in the school’s attainment and progress measures). The focus on exam success leads to a particular type of ‘work’ in classrooms. Based on traditional models of instruction developed in multi-academy chains, teachers attempt to transmit a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum1 through teacher-led, tightly-structured, and sometimes scripted lessons. Students are expected to SLANT, retrieve information from long-term memory in ritual practice, follow and imitate the teacher’s method, and commit facts to long-term memory during ‘silent classroom’ – and follow the exact same dull routine five or six times a day. In a review of mathematics education published last year, half of secondary lessons comprised 35 to 60 per cent of the time on teacher instruction; and one in ten lessons used over 70 per cent of lesson time on whole class instruction.
The motivation for students to work in classrooms dominated by teacher talk is extrinsic. The punitive sanctions ensure most students resign themselves to the repetitive exercises and limited tasks they are assigned. However, for many students, compliance comes at a cost. After conducting longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork in a US charter school (pioneers of the discipline techniques that ‘lefty trads’ now extol), a researcher reports that constant punishments for infractions had left three eighth-grade girls she met with a negative attitude towards the school and with levels of stress that had led them to seek therapy. Even students who conformed with the school’s demands experienced a lack of autonomy and increased feelings of anxiety, which had a detrimental impact on their learning, motivation, and engagement. Charter schools, the researcher concludes, produce ‘worker-learners’ who monitor themselves for fear of transgressing the rules, hold back from giving their opinions, and defer to authority.
Progressive classrooms are different. At the most obvious level, students’ activity is not called ‘work’. The class might be engaged in an inquiry into an area of the curriculum or a project from which the final products contribute to a wider school or social discussion. Unlike their subservience in traditional classrooms, students have a voice in what and how they learn. Sometimes, when schools are not constrained by a traditional timetable, they might also have a say in when they learn. The opportunity to develop autonomy and act independently is empowering for working-class children, particularly those from deprived, heavily-policed, inner-city areas. Moreover, when students who are normally required to stay quiet and comply are encouraged to learn in ways that challenge stereotypes in lessons and inequality in their communities, they learn about collective power and the state’s forces arrayed against calls for a just society.
In capitalism, work carries negative connotations of daily drudgery, exploitative practices, and low wages; similarly, in the traditional classroom, ‘work’ is tedious, teacher-imposed, and repetitive. Socialists should have no interest in reproducing the social relations of production in schools. Doing so cannot be justified with reference to the USSR. The 1977 constitution was part of an attempt to resurrect a failing bureaucratic system on the backs of workers. Ironically, the outcomes of traditional teaching and strict discipline measures are similar to those of the moribund Soviet economy. Working-class children’s dissatisfaction with and absenteeism from school are on the rise in proportion to the adoption of the traditionalists’ prescription for education. Progressive classrooms point the way for socialists and will be the starting point for the construction of a classless education system – just as they were in the Soviet Union in 1917 when the hope for a communist world was still alive.
Footnotes
- For a discussion of ‘knowledge’ in traditional and progressive approaches to education, read Their knowledge and ours. ↩︎
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