Our chance to educate the unemployed

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the flesh stripped from their faces.

But its investigation leads through a sequence of events which strip away much of the mystery of life in the middle reaches of the Soviet Bureaucracy.

In his depiction of a living Moscow, with a feeling for its street life and its toilers as well as a willingness to probe beneath the facade of its most obvious institutions, author Martin Cruz Smith establishes a real parallel to the established crime fiction centred in the western countries - of Raymond Chandler, Georges Simenon, Ed McBain and many others.

Indeed too many people in Britain fall victim to the clash between the hysterical Cold War propaganda of the capitalist class on the one hand, and the laughably idealised, stage managed and retouched picture of lite in the Soviet Union offered by Stalinist apologists on the other.

Ordinary

It is all too easy under such pressure to forget that within the vast geographical spread of the USSR tens of millions of ordinary people - workers, peasant farmers, national minority groupings - lead real, ordinary lives like we do, in which the great issues of world politics are as remote from their thoughts as they are on any council estate in Britain.

Even some of the issues they face are the same -though the state machine in the Soviet Union rests not as in Britain upon the defence of private ownership of the banks and means of production, but upon an economy nationalised as a result of the great October Revolution of 1917.

The isolation of that revolution and the economic weaknesses of Tsarist Russia combined to create the basis for the bureaucratisation of the world's first workers' state - a bureaucratisation which has remained to this day an obstacle to the development of the economy, and which means that the Soviet state apparatus exhibits numerous parallels with its capitalist counterparts.

Just as in Britain, for instance:

'A directive goes out to raze workers houses to construct cooperative apartments that workers can't afford, a seeming breach of workers' rights."

But while in Britain the argument for such action is unashamedly in defence of 'free enterprise' and profit, in the Soviet Union the state ideologists offer a different rationalistion. There is no contradiction between workers' interests and the state, because:

"'This is the workers' PARK state. What benefits the state benefits them. By tearing down their houses we protect their rights. (Chapter 1)

Gorky Park does not focus on such exposes: they are simply a part of a rich pattern of convincing detail which forms the background to a complex and gripping plot in which Renko finds himself in progressively deeper and deeper water.

The whole plot gains in credibility in the present period in which the corruption of the top layers of Brezhnev's entourage has come to the surface. Scandals involving diamond smugglers, black marketeers and circus impressarios have filtered through to the outside world quite probably as part of an attempt by various contenders for the succession to discredit Brezhnev's camp followers.

The murder hunt involves the links between the militia and the KGB, the KGB and the Party, the Party and the army, politicians and western businessmen, and the tangled web of corruption, careerism, censorship and silence which holds the whole ical wealth and rugged struggle for human survival in Siberia.

Procreate

It underlines the 'Great Russian' chauvinism which remains such. a marked characteristic of Stalin's heirs in the Kremlin bureaucracy:

'Russians procreate! the article demanded. Fertilise a glorious roe of young Greater Russians lest all the inferior nationalities, the swarthy Turks and Armenians, sly Georgians and jews, traitorous Estonians and Latvians, swarming hordes of ignorant yellow Kazaks, Tartars and Mongols, backward and ungrateful Uzbecks, Ossetians, Corcassians, Kalmuks and Chukchis tip with their upraised organs the necessary population ratio between white, educated Russians and dark ...

[Chapter 2] Corruption But if Cruz Smith appears excessively hard on the Soviet Union in his dissection of its corruption, the USA is not portrayed as any contrasting paradise.

The book is well worth reading. It shows in more graphic than political terms some of the reasons why we as revolutionary socialists, and Soviet workers from their own standpoint, must struggle for political revolution to overtnrow the Kremlin bureaucracy and open up the road to the full development of the gains made in the 1917 RevoluTHE growth of unemployed centres provides an excellent opportunity for working class people to organise their own education courses. A major part of any unemployed centre must be the education of unemployed workers and it is this which I wish to discuss in this article.

Firstly, the effects of unemployment are well known and need not be listed here but we must recognise that unemployment destroys people and it would be arrogant to assume that the unemployed will have the motivation let alone the money to seek state education courses.

Autonomy

Secondly, before considering the style and content of education we must consider who it is we are offering education to. We must not think of the unemployed as disabled in some way to whom we are generously giving assistance to or see them as clients.

The unemployed are workers without • Paid employment. Whilst they are dejected, disillusioned and looking for answers, they are also sick of being patronised.

The working class has a proud history of organising effective education, especially in times of economic depression, the Chartists' classes of 1830s, the Educational Settlements of South Wales in the 1930s and the Socialist Sunday Schools of the 1880s were all marked by their independence and autonomy.

We must also show the relationship between education and the state.

Just as the school system "trains" young workers to fit into the machine of bourgeois society, so state unemployed education is styled to make the unemployed more attractive to employers, it offers qualifications which sharpens the competition for jobs or it provides a harmless pass-time to prevent frustration and unrest.

We must point out the futility and oppressiveness of the "old" education of which Lenin said "ninetenths was useless and one-tenth distorted."

But working class education must differ from bourgeois education more than its teaching of the state and the class structure.

To replace the By BOB TOWERS teacher with the socialist teacher is not enough, just as it is not enough to replace a right-wing parliamentary government with a left wing parliamentary government.

It is the system, the apparatus, the relation between pupil and teacher we must attack and destroy.

The question then arises how do we go about changing this relationship, and how do we go about learning? Our approach to education is democratic, as we support workers' control of industry we also support teacher-pupil control of education.

State education is policed by the feeling of powerlessness. we must bulld education that installs self-confidence and the will to participate, to take responsibility and to take power.

When the working class control their education they too shall control their economic and political development. The teacher is not required, the pupils have taken over. The class room has become a forum.

When education is mentioned people immediately think of books and the pupil as one who collects and assimilates as much knowledge as she or he can gather.

Never can one be further from the truth. To overestimate the rift between books and practical life is difficult to say the least.

However, if we are to advance society, then it may only be advanced on the study of all that history and science has thrown at us.

The principle is to reject all limitations and prejudices that cage us and interpret and relate science and history to class and practicality.

We then see education as a challenge to the old ideas, attitudes and morals. An extension, or vital part previously overlooked, of democracy. An education which studies, probes and analyses, prompting the pupil to act.

How can we practically achieve this now? I see this arising from local education units and groups, working from unemployed centres (the unemployed being a test case for working class education generally) linked to, and financed by, the labour movement, perhaps sharing with the WEA but the resources must be controlled by the unemployed.

I see this as part of the broader struggle for premises for the unemployed, creches and the deieat. oi the 21 hour rule.

Knowledge

To sum up, Lenin said at the Third All Russian Congress of the Young Communist League:

"If you were to ask why the teachings of Marx have been able to win the hearts and minds of millions and tens of millions of the most revolutionary class, you would receive only one answer: it was because Marx based his work on the firm foundation of the human knowledge acquired under capitalism. After making a study of the laws governing the development of human society, Marx realised the inevitability of capitalism developing towards • communism.

"What is most important is that he proved this on the sole basis of a most precise, detailed and profound study of this capitalist society, by fully assimisting all that earlier science had produced. He critically reshaped everything that had been created by human society, without ignoring a sin detail. He reconsiderr- subjected to criticism, verified on the working class movement everything that human thinking had created, •and therefrom formulated conclusions which people hemmed in by bourgeois limitations or bound by bourgeois prejuLenin dices could not draw"