Florida’s state curriculum now includes expanded lessons on the “horrors of communism.” It teaches students the worn-out ruling-class lies about Cuba, China, Venezuela, and the former Soviet Union, contrasting them with the supposed advantages of the “free market.”
These are the same people who scream and rage about communists “indoctrinating our children.” The irony appears to be lost on them.
Marx and Engels long ago explained that “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” Under capitalism, the education system is another pillar of bourgeois ideological dominance. For the ruling class, the schools are a tool to produce a workforce just educated enough to generate profits, but thoroughly subservient to their system.
Lies about the Soviet Union
Cengage Learning’s World History textbook claims that Marx’s vision of a classless society “remains a figment of his imagination.” The “inefficiency” of the Soviet “command” economy and its “evident weaknesses” supposedly prove this claim.
To these so-called “historians,” the USSR was doomed because “centralized planning discouraged initiative and innovation.” The reality is that, despite the bureaucracy around Stalin, in 1928–37 the Soviet economy grew by 70% because of centralized planning. To name but a few advances, this included the rapid training of doctors and technicians, a doubling of life expectancy, and an increase of 98 million acres in cultivated land.
If the planned economy is so inherently inefficient, how do communism’s detractors explain that Russia became a major world power so rapidly? Or why a formerly backwards peasant country launched a man into space before the US did? How do they explain Soviet innovations such as history’s first satellite, first mobile phone device, first implantable total artificial heart, the art of modern cinema, etc.?
The answer is quite simple. They don’t even attempt to. Instead, they distort and obscure the facts, pour vitriol on anything vaguely socialist, and equate genuine revolutionaries like Lenin and Trotsky with bureaucrats like Stalin.
Lies about capitalist crisis
Contrast this with US capitalism in the 1930s, which was in the midst of the Great Depression. According to Cengage’s US History, designed for the AP exam, the Depression was caused by “reckless management”—a small accident of history.
But communists know the truth: the Great Depression was the result of the crisis of overproduction, an inherent contradiction of capitalism. Food rots while people go hungry, and clothes hang unused while the homeless go cold—because the workers can never buy back all the commodities that they produce.
Millions starved while FDR’s New Deal burned and slaughtered excess crops and livestock to control prices. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath vividly illustrates this: “The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed.”
By the end of 1932, industrial production was down by nearly 50% in the US, with nearly 15 million unemployed by 1933. While the capitalists will cherrypick problems from Soviet history, the horrors of capitalism are chalked up to the mistakes of a few misguided individuals.
Meanwhile, Cengage refers to the USSR’s return to capitalism as “revolutionary.” They don’t mention that capitalist restoration brought with it a 50% drop in GDP in the 1990s, with an equivalent collapse in real wages, and all the other wonders of capitalism: destitution; homelessness; unemployment; rampant alcoholism, drug abuse, and prostitution; and a six-year collapse in life expectancy.
The kids are alright
Millions of young people today see through the lies they are fed in school. Recently, one of our 7th-grade students asked us why communism was so bad if it meant that everyone’s needs are met. Likewise, one of our high schoolers did a history project on the Russian Revolution of 1917 and called the Bolsheviks “brave and resourceful.” The kids are alright!
School under capitalism is nothing more than a propaganda machine. As teachers, we want our schools to tell the truth. It is capitalism that creates hell on earth. Schools will only become centers for genuine learning when the workers and students take history into their own hands and overthrow this system.