The Thinking Reed

results not from a growth in the economic functions of the state in general, but from its concrete socioeconomic nature, or, in other words, from the nature of the ruling class, whose basis is the growing state sector, from the character of its relations with the working classes and with the masses as a whole.43

Finally, statocratic society is a super-alienated society. According to Marx the individual who sells his labour-power, and to whom the process and result of his own labour does not belong, is an alienated personality. In so far as every member of society in the USSR is in the situation of a wage-worker — at least formally — every stratum of the population, including the topmost, is subject to alienation of the personality. The various forms of democratic self-management and initiative which could lead to the elimination of alienation are completely absent. Moreover, owing to the tendency — already mentioned — towards full control, the state, striving to subject people to itself outside as well as within the sphere of production, subjects their personalities to additional alienation, imposing obligatory norms, obligatory ideas, and so on. This leads — apart from anything else — to an incredible flourishing of social hypocrisy, both ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’, with neither the ruling circles nor their subjects able to voice their actual thoughts. Just as Marx wrote:

It is not possible for either [the slave or the ruler] to say what he wants: the slave cannot say that he wants to become a human being, nor can the ruler say that he has no use for human beings in his country. To be silent, therefore, is the only way out.44

One-Dimensional Man and the Politicization of Culture

It is perfectly logical that art and, in general, the whole sphere of culture should prove refractory to the system. Artistic activity assumes free self-expression by the artist. A good novel cannot be written nor a good picture painted, to someone else’s orders. Consequently art, as an unalienated activity, confronts the world of total alienation. Here it is not irrelevant to recall Herbert Marcuse’s books Soviet Marxism and One-Dimensional Man.45 To employ Marcuse’s terminology, the ‘social universal’ of Soviet industrialized society has a tendency to shut itself up in ‘one-dimensional space’, excluding all freedom for the individual. The state’s aim is, precisely, to create a one-dimensional man who can easily be manipulated. However, the manipulators are themselves onedimensional, too, and in Sartre’s words are ‘manipulés par leurs manipulations mêmes’.46 The cultural sphere, though, is less easy than any other to confine to one-dimensional space: on the contrary, new dimensions begin to appear in it as a result of the specific nature of artistic activity, every time external pressure slackens even a little. As soon as a crack is perceived in the system of control, or there is softening of totalitarian authority,47 a struggle spontaneously begins for ‘the recovery of intellectual space’ (to use the excellent expression of the Italian Marxist A.L. De Castris48), when one cultural zone after another is emancipated from ideological control. The bureaucracy then tries to get its own back, tightening once more the screws of censorship. It must be said, though, that it is finding this harder and harder.