We are faced with an accomplished fact: in Russia, the dictatorship of the proletariat has been proclaimed, and in the name of the proletarian class, an immense task is underway — the transformation of the entire economic and cultural life of the country. And no matter how difficult the first steps of this work may be, no matter how low the coefficient of feasibility of many of our undertakings may sometimes prove to be, and no matter what unexpected social transformations some of them may undergo — the fact remains: this immense task is being carried out in the name of the proletariat.
And yet, upon a more thorough analysis of the social groupings and new formations, the picture that emerges is somewhat different.
The work that is being carried out in the name of the proletariat is, to a significant—indeed, to its greatest—extent, not performed by its hands, nor by its intellect. For as long as education remains not yet universal and the 'diploma qualification' of the working people has not been abolished, the bulk of the organizational work, willingly or unwillingly, is executed by bourgeois hirelings or by rootless intellectuals.
This is generally not considered a great misfortune, for everything is said to occur 'under the control' of the proletariat. Such is the usual logic of superficial observers and of those always busy, always in a hurry, who have no time to reflect deeply on the nature of the phenomena unfolding before their eyes. But social dynamics have their own laws: everything flows, everything changes, and tomorrow is already unlike today. It has already processed new facts of social life in its own way and introduced into the social medium a certain new current, one that in this or that way shifts the configuration of social forces. So what does this ever-flowing and ever-changing day bring us regarding the proletariat’s relationship to the most essential of society’s organizational instruments—science?
The universities have been 'democratized.' Their doors are now wide open to all who wish to enter, and a motley, mixed crowd of the most diverse social elements already fills their lecture halls. The core of this crowd is, of course, still the former bourgeois-intelligentsia academic youth, eager to obtain diplomas and become professionals and craftsmen of science. And within this petty-bourgeois intelligentsia mass, the few proletarian elements who manage to enter—under the conditions of their labor—are entirely drowned out and disappear. And this could not be otherwise; for the only change that has taken place is the opening of university doors to all comers, while the social conditions and opportunities of these would-be students have not changed in the least. For the vast majority, the university remains accessible only to the future professionals and scientific craftsmen. Mere 'freedom' of access guarantees no more real opportunity for the proletariat to enter than 'freedom' to labor guaranteed them employment under the capitalist system. The proletariat, as a class, has no access to higher education. And the isolated 'proletarian universities' springing up here and there—even in the provinces—are, in most cases, nothing more than mere substitutes for the real thing.
And therefore, whatever the prospects may be for future generations, the young generation of the proletariat—on this decisive day in history—has not even begun to approach mastery of the most powerful of all instruments of social organization: science.
Words perish in illusion; facts remain. And the fact that science remains in the hands of its craftsmen—those who emerged from the bourgeoisie—is, in and of itself, far more decisive and real than all the words and illusions about the accessibility of higher education.
There is only one way out of this situation: the organization of independent, class-based centers of science, where proletarian youth would receive higher education as state-sponsored scholarship students—and would not dissolve into the motley mass of bourgeois and rootless elements. The proletariat must create such organizational centers by right as the conquering class and by duty as the organizing class.
And the amount of energy and effectiveness invested in the creation of proletarian universities will be among the key factors that determine a derived quantity—the speed with which we advance toward a higher coefficient of feasibility for our transformative undertakings.
But the creation of independent, class-based centers of scientific thought is only the first step on the path to the proletarianization of science; it is merely the organizational precondition for real work toward that end. Let us suppose that these new universities have been established—what, then, shall we fill them with? What new wine, which we refused to pour into old wineskins, shall we now pour into these 'new wineskins'?
Each stage in the development of science corresponds to the social tasks posed by the social formation of its own era. These tasks of science are ultimately determined by the tasks of the ruling classes. The bourgeois revolution of the preceding social epoch, in the dawn of its days—during the age of the Encyclopedists—produced a number of brilliant theorists who sought above all to overturn the entire worldview of humanity, to transform its conception of social life and of nature. The Encyclopedists were encyclopedists not only in form, but also in substance, for their mission was the revolutionary transformation of the entire system of scientific and social thought. It was a whirlwind that swept away the feudal worldview to its very foundations and created the ideology of the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class. But as the bourgeoisie became the dominant class, 'encyclopedism' gradually withered away. Taking center stage instead was the colossal labor of developing all kinds of specialized technical disciplines. The age of steam and electricity came into its own—but what it brought, in its bourgeois phase, was, along with the sober practicality of the new masters of life, an extreme specialization of thought and a narrowing of intellectual horizons.
The school of natural-historical materialism was, of course, the ideological foundation for all this work, for without such a foundation, the development of applied and technical problems would have been unthinkable. But the primary task of that era was the solution of a vast number of specific technical problems. The later emergence of the school of historical materialism signaled the birth of the ideology of a new class—one that had stepped onto the stage of history: a class that produces value but is deprived of property, and is therefore the bearer of a socialist worldview. What, then, are the tasks that this class sets—or can set—for itself when it takes hold of political power?
The implementation of socialism is, above all, the planned unification and integration of all the individual elements of economic life into one coherent and organized system. All the experience accumulated in separate branches of the economy and technology must be brought together into such a well-structured system—one that takes into account the complex interdependence of each element of economic life upon all others, and which, as a result, determines the most harmonious combination of these elements possible.
The work previously carried out by specialists in relation to individual complex machines, isolated technical systems, and so on, must now be carried out on a universal scale in relation to all the fundamental elements of the economy and technology. If the anarchic economy of capitalism was an economy of fragmented experience and a chaotic combination of a number of autonomous systems, then socialism, by contrast, is an economy of integrated experience and the unification into a single system of all the separate systems created in the various branches of economy and technology.
What kind of preparation is necessary and possible for addressing such a problem? There is no doubt that it can only be resolved through the sustained scientific and practical efforts of an entire generation. And yet, the question of the relative speed of its resolution is, to a significant extent, a question of cultivating a new type of thinking—thinking that had very little chance to develop in a world fragmented by disjointed experience. The higher education of capitalism, taken in its most characteristic manifestations, was a school of specialized thinking, a school for the training of specialists. Of course, it could contain other elements as well, but these were incidental and unstable. The primary task of the university was the production of specialists in this or that science, or in a particular branch of science—specialists who, in practice, were transformed into artisans of their discipline. The ultimate outcome of this specialist-factory were the various technical schools and special institutes—institutions that, in any social system, may be entirely legitimate, provided they function as a supplement to previously acquired broad, general education. However, under the conditions of real existing capitalism, they completely severed their students from everything unrelated to the acquisition of narrowly defined skills and professional tasks.
The kind of thinking shaped in this way, of course, has very little chance of successfully solving the problems of socialist economy and socialist culture. “Specialists” cannot be the builders of socialism, nor even of the transitional forms of life leading toward it, for the nature of their thinking stands in glaring contradiction to the fundamental tasks of socialism. And yet, our institutions responsible for regulating the national economy are precisely staffed by people of fragmented experience and all sorts of more or less narrow specialists.
All too often the problems of the national economy are tackled not on an integral scale, not by tracing the connections and inter‑dependencies among the various facets of economic life, but rather as departmental questions that exist an und für sich—that is, precisely in the way that only people of fragmented experience can deal with them. Exchange, prices, consumption, food supply, wages, transport, industry—each is still treated as a set of separate, mutually independent problems. This is not because we fail to grasp their interdependence, but because we do not yet know how to define and compute it. Such is the legacy of the anarchic capitalist economy and of its higher school. In the present transitional period of history, the national economy appears to us merely as the mechanical sum of a number of discrete magnitudes, and by no means as a complex, organized sum that takes account of the functional dependence of every single magnitude on all the others.
We have not yet reached the stage of a higher mathematics of economic management—we are not even capable of formulating the question in such terms. And the main culprit here is our mode of thinking, which has become accustomed to navigating only within narrowly specialized issues, rigidly isolated from the rest of the world.
The new universities must aim, above all, at cultivating an entirely different type of thinking—a mode of thought suited to people who will be required to grasp and resolve complex, not partial, problems. The actors of the capitalist world were indifferent to the ultimate outcomes, to the social and general consequences of their individual actions and undertakings. For socialists, by contrast, the task of foreseeing such outcomes must stand at the forefront.
In the developed socialist system, the complexity and integrality of human thought will likely be such that even the most broadly educated individuals of our present society will appear, in comparison to these future people, as true savages. And no matter what level of further specialization production and exchange techniques may yet undergo, the ability to synthesize these results and to constantly perceive them not an und für sich, but as part of a powerful whole, will become the distinguishing feature of these future individuals.
And since such a task has been set—since we are attempting to move toward an organized economy—we must first of all correspondingly change the entire spirit of the higher proletarian school. It must educate and train people of integrated experience, and this is achieved, above all, through the programmatic unity of the educational process. The first year of study cannot be divided into separate faculties. It must introduce students into the realm of science, into the domain of understanding the world as a whole. It therefore cannot be confined to any single field of knowledge, but must encompass all the most essential domains: the fundamentals of the natural sciences, social sciences, and mathematics must go hand in hand, as mutually complementary parts of the same grand edifice. The second year, which is in programmatic terms a continuation of the first, introduces a new element: The first year is a year of introduction; the second is a year of initiation into scientific methodology. It is not the results or conclusions of scientific work that are to be presented to the student, but the very methods by which they are obtained. In all domains of scientific thought, the student is given the key to independent inquiry—the methodology of scientific research. Thinking shaped by such educational material will be far removed from fragmentation and narrowness. In the third year, to be sure, the student’s thinking is expected to begin concentrating on more specialized scientific areas. And later, a transition to particular technical disciplines is of course possible. But this gradual shift toward specialized branches of science will no longer destroy the habits of integral thinking formed in the student. Whatever specialized field they may end up working in, their thought will strive not only to master that particular field, but also to understand its role in the overall structure of social life: in the system of technology, economy, and culture. And for the builder of socialism, such an ability must stand at the forefront. Class-based universities of the proletariat, in this way, will create not only a new audience, but also a new educational program.
The new audience is one composed of people engaged in productive labor, of creators of value—not consumers of it, from whom the audience of bourgeois universities has, in the vast majority of cases, consisted until now. For them, science will not be a means of obtaining a diploma or the title of an intellectual laborer, but something else entirely—a method of organizing social labor and developing a new ideology of the class that is building the new society.
The new program is a program for cultivating holistic thinking, which is the most essential element in the creation of the apparatus for the organized economy of the future. The ability to grasp at once the various branches of human experience, to perceive their interconnections and mutual dependencies, and to bring them into a single, coherent, and integrated system—this is the most important educational task pursued by the proletariat’s higher education program.
"But," they will say to us, "the realm of knowledge is almost limitless; it is absolutely impossible to give students—even those coming from the class of productive labor—the opportunity to become acquainted with the totality of scientific experience within the bounds of an ordinary university course: even an entire human lifetime would not suffice for that." This is one of those commonly accepted opinions that everyone takes on faith, and which turn out to be far from always true upon closer examination. If we are speaking of facts and conclusions in their entirety, with all their details, then indeed a whole human life would not be enough not only to become familiar with many scientific disciplines, but perhaps even with just one of them. But the point is not the facts, nor the particular conclusions or results, but the methods of investigation and methods of generalization within a number of specific sciences. And since methods of scientific work are tested within particular fields of scientific knowledge, it is precisely their unity that becomes the summarizing and connecting element—not only facilitating the work, but also giving it coherence and wholeness.
Thus, rejecting all scholasticism and all the conditional and unreal elements of science—which have, until now, played such a prominent role in certain fields—the proletarian university sets itself the task of transmitting the methods of scientific work to the class of productive labor. The proletariat takes into its hands this most precious heritage of the past, which, in its hands, becomes an instrument for the realization of new tasks—tasks which no previous social class has ever set before itself. And once proletarian class-based centers of science are established with such a program and such aims, their continued existence for some time will likely lead to new groupings of scientific forces and to new scientific currents. But what will these new currents consist of?
Here we come close to the question of the so-called 'proletarian science.' This term often provokes not a little mockery and scornful, puzzled shrugging of shoulders. What kind of special proletarian science could there be? Could there really exist a proletarian geometry or a proletarian chemistry? These questions, of course, stem either from a simple unwillingness to reflect on the essence of the matter, or from a desire to foist onto the opponent arguments that are not actually part of their arsenal.
Let the defenders of geometry, chemistry, etc., be at ease. Not a single supporter of proletarian universities or of those new scientific currents that will arise as a result of their existence intends to encroach upon the actual achievements of these respectable sciences. Oxygen and hydrogen, when combined in the proper proportion, will produce water—not carbon dioxide—even in a proletarian university. And a properly formed quadratic equation with two variables will still yield a parabola there, not a straight line.
The question of transforming such sciences is posed on an entirely different plane. A significant number of theorems in elementary geometry were already known in the time of Euclid, but the role they played in applied science—or rather, the extent to which they were utilized in scientific technique—varied greatly across different historical periods, depending on the overall level of technological development in each era. No less varied was their place and their role in shaping the general worldview of people.
And therefore, if one is to use the term “proletarian geometry” — a term that has, until now, been used only by opponents of the proletarian university as a form of mockery — then it can be understood in two directions: 1) the conscious and maximal application of geometric truths in all fields of scientific technology, insofar as the latter sets itself the task of solving the problem of socialist economy, and 2) the conscious and maximal use of geometric analysis for the purpose of developing an integral, harmonious mode of thinking — whereby, of course, geometric thought itself, once liberated from its former isolation, can only benefit greatly in terms of depth and clarity.
Consequently, the task is not to recast old truths in a new guise, but to set a new goal. Even geometry must cease to exist an und für sich; even this concrete and specialized discipline must become part of the vast and coherent whole of the science of socialism. And it is enough to approach even geometry with such a goal in mind to find oneself on an entirely different track: one will have to discard much of the verbal scholasticism still taught to children in schools from this venerable science, and instead emphasize and bring to light the very essence of its methods and techniques.
The first science to pass through the crucible of "proletarianization" was economics. And this work was carried out by Marx and his disciples. The difference between scholastic economics and proletarian economics, of course, cannot be ignored by any of Marx’s followers. New tasks, new methods, a new formulation of the question — all of these were advanced by the ideologist of the proletariat during the era of its first class unifications, and they served, as it were, as heralds of a general revision of scientific tasks and scientific methods.
The bourgeoisie and its ideologists are fully convinced, however, that science — with all its achievements and methods of work — constitutes the property of their class and serves as an instrument of their domination. Classless academic scholars love to speak of the “eternal values” of a non-class science. But in reality, all the immense labor involved in extracting these “eternal values,” even if it was carried out by selfless seekers and researchers, nonetheless took place within a specific socio-historical context — and thus, whether willingly or not, served the social class that organized public life as a whole. And of course, alongside a few disinterested discoverers, there has always been a sufficient number of apologists, defenders, and executors of the ruling class’s will among the ranks of scientists. The anarchic economy could not but be reflected in the fragmentation of scientific thought, for the bourgeoisie — as the organizing class — neither had, nor could have had, the task of creating a planned economy or a unified scientific worldview.
It is difficult to say with precision how close we are at the present moment to the realization of a socialist economy, but the fact remains that we have posed this problem for ourselves — or, more accurately, have been compelled to pose it. The disorganizing process now unfolding on a global scale, says A. Bogdanov in his Questions of Socialism1 , undoubtedly and evidently places before humanity an organizational task on a world scale. How, then, can this “organizational task on a world scale” be solved? Primarily through the realization of two necessary preconditions for its solution: 1) a powerful class organization of the proletariat, and 2) a comprehensive elaboration of the question of how to realize socialism.
The vast majority of sciences, says Bogdanov in the same Questions of Socialism2 , have developed up to now without the slightest connection to the question of a global economic plan. Only two or three among the social sciences have ever raised this question at all, and of these, only economics has dealt with it seriously — though in a far from systematic manner. This situation is entirely understandable if one takes into account by whose hands the sciences were developed and what needs they were meant to satisfy...
And science served the needs of organizations of two basic types: private enterprise and the state. The former is built on individualism, the latter, primarily, on authoritarian relations; both types, therefore, are opposed to and hostile toward the comradely collective.
Thus, before the science of the coming day stands the task of consciously serving a society that is a comradely collective; and before the science of today — the task of setting itself a new goal: a universally scientific solution to the problem of socialism.
Let all the theorems of Euclid and all the laws of physics and chemistry remain unshaken — but physics, chemistry, and mathematics must be drawn into the application of these theorems and laws for the integral resolution of this problem. This is what is meant by the “proletarianization” of science. Of course, the formulation of new tasks necessarily entails a revision of all methods of work.
Such is the pressing task of the present day for socialist thought.
It is clear that this is not the work of a small group of individuals, but of an entire generation.
But the sooner the question is posed and consciously grasped, the sooner the work of the coming generation will begin.
It may, of course, be posed by individual people or groups, but on a social scale it can be posed and understood only insofar as the organizational preconditions for its resolution are created. And these organizational preconditions can only be the proletarian universities, for our old temples of science are hardly likely to be capable of setting themselves such problems, comprehending them, or taking them up for solution. We say hardly, although based on all available evidence we ought simply to say with certainty: they will not be able to pose this question. To be fair, one must leave some room for unforeseen possibilities. But according to the laws of probability, the chances for such unforeseen possibilities are vanishingly small. And therefore, despite all efforts to be precise and to take into account even infinitesimally small magnitudes, we must nonetheless begin with the construction of proletarian universities. There is no other way.
True, the path toward this construction must be paved through a thick layer of distrust and misunderstanding — or, what is even worse, through frivolous understanding and accidental trust. But such is the history of all truly new undertakings — new in spirit and in conception, not merely in form.
The failures of the first attempts and the ridicule heaped upon innovators also have, in a social sense, their useful side: they separate the serious and committed supporters of the new idea from the accidental Mitläufer and from all kinds of careerists and opportunists who inevitably try to latch on to the idea of proletarian culture, just as they do to all new undertakings. In this way, the ranks of supporters may become thinner, but they grow stronger in quality. A cohesive group of people emerges — capable of withstanding the wave of distrust, misunderstanding, and mockery, and of continuing the preparatory work for the realization of the idea in more favorable times.
And when those favorable times do come, all the former opponents will become supporters and declare: “We always said this.”
So it was, so it will be.
So it will be with the idea of proletarian universities as organizational centers for realizing the most essential precondition of socialism — the proletarianization of science.
M. Smit.