The Thinking Reed

This is positive material accumulated during centuries and worked out as a result of the practice of many generations, and in it are expressed the most general laws of modern culture. Tradition lives on in present-day scientific methods, in accessible works of art, in language, in history. And sometimes the mightiest and harshest of states proves helpless in the face of it.

The Proletarianization of the Intellectuals

Furthermore, traditions revive when the situation favours this. The seed has to fall on good soil. The critical protest of the intelligentsia is not only due to its special role in the bureaucratic state, where it is at once a necessary part of the system and extraneous and alien to it. This protest is evoked also by social and professional factors.

The political role of the intelligentsia in the USSR (and in the countries of Eastern Europe which have copied the Soviet model) is somewhat specific, so it would be best to begin with this. But it is no secret that Russia is not the only country where, in the last thirty or forty years, the intelligentsia has come into conflict with the state. This conflict has quite profound social roots. There are numerous problems which are the same in all present-day societies, and among them is the problem of the intelligentsia.

In the twentieth century, and especially after the Second World War, a process of proletarianization of the intelligentsia has been observable practically everywhere. Their numbers have sharply increased, but their social status has simultaneously declined even more rapidly. It is noteworthy, though, that this fall in social status has not as a rule been accompanied by a decline in moral authority. On the contrary, this has remained as before and has sometimes even increased. All this created the complex and confused mass of problems which gave rise to the student movement of 1966-68 in the West. ‘Nous n'étions autrefois qu'une petite minorité de futurs privilégiés nécessairement intégrables. Nous sommes maintenant une trop grande “minorité" non assimilable mais gardant le statut de l'ancienne minorité’, wrote the students of the Sorbonne during the youth disturbances in Paris in May-June 1968, ‘ Nous ne sommes plus assurés de devenir des futurs dirigeants.… Nous sommes dorénavant des travailleurs comme les autres.'91 The proletarianization of the intellectual workers, accompanied by the massive increase in their numbers — outstripping, as often happens, the actual needs of economic and academic institutions — placed the Western intelligentsia in the situation of the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century. Tugan-Baranovsky’s prophecy was fulfilled. Furthermore, though, exploitation of the intelligentsia was intensified and its members experienced in person what is meant by alienation of labour, unemployment, and so on. In 1966-68 the student youth in the West discovered that they were ‘in the classic proletarian position’.92 The general situation in the USSR was similar, even though it developed differently. Moreover, these same processes sometimes found more striking expression here.

The traditional intelligentsia belonged to the privileged strata of society. The term ‘bourgeois intelligentsia’ used by Marxists, provided it is not as a term of abuse, defines very precisely the position of that stratum. ‘Workers by brain’ lived on the profits of the bourgeoisie, and thus on the surplus product produced by the workers. This idea calls for some refinement lest the present-day reader, who feels a proper repugnance for the schemas of vulgar sociology, should suspect the author of trying to ‘insult’ Chekhov or Stanislavsky. The intelligentsia was bourgeois (or petty-bourgeois) in the way it got its income. Its world-view, however, could not but be wide rather than narrow. Later, when the intelligentsia’s social position began to change while it still retained many important privileges, this contradiction became especially marked. Sartre describes the situation of the intellectual: