The Thinking Reed

The dominant class attaches no importance to him: all it is willing to acknowledge is the technician of knowledge and the minor functionary of the superstructure. The underprivileged classes cannot engender him since he derives from the specialist in practical truth who in turn is created by the options of the dominant class, which allocates a fraction of surplus value to produce him.93

All this made the situation of the intelligentsia rather complex, and it was beaten right and left — undeservedly, as a rule. The question of the social status of the intellectual in traditional bourgeois society is extremely difficult, for the intelligentsia is heterogeneous. This heterogeneity is also a serious social and psychological problem. The intelligentsia often shows itself dissociated, wavering, and so on. But Gramsci observed, quite rightly, that there is always some stratum or group of the intelligentsia which, to a certain extent, determines the ideas of its whole mass. In the society of the late nineteenth century, that stratum was undoubtedly bourgeois.

We know that the surplus product received by the industrial capitalists is subsequently redistributed among the different strata of the bourgeoisie. A share — a very small one, of course — was also received by the intelligentsia. If we take, for example, the position of an engineer in a nineteenth-century factory — even if he was not the head of the firm — or a professor in a university, we discover without difficulty that they were in a privileged position: that their salaries were much higher than the wages of the ordinary workers, in factory or office. Their privileged position enabled them to appropriate part of the surplus product, even though they themselves did not directly exploit anyone. Finally — and this is the main thing — the intellectual was not, as a rule, obliged to sell labour-power; he or she did not work for wages but kept their independence, controlled their own labour, and their personality was not subjected to alienation. The very concept of a Tree profession’ reflected this independence of the intelligentsia, especially that of the intellectuals working in the humanities and the arts.

All this made people like N. Meshcheryakov see the intellectuals as a variety of the petty bourgeoisie, but that was in the past. In the West, scientific and technological progress has led to a marked increase in the number of intellectuals, transforming them from an elite into a mass and causing intensified competition among them as a result. A consequence of this has been the transformation of a considerable section of the intellectuals into wage-workers — proletarians. And what matters here is not only that their incomes have fallen, but also that the way they get them has changed. In the nineteenth century many intellectuals broke with the bourgeoisie because their mental horizon was considerably wider than the bourgeoisie’s: their very speciality made them think about the interests of humanity and the needs of society as a whole. In the 1960s the intelligentsia found itself objectively in conflict with the bourgeoisie, while possessing — thanks to its specific professional activity — a higher level of consciousness than the traditional working class, so that there now exist theoreticians for that class who can elaborate moral, cultural and political ideas. There emerges what the French socialist Chevènement has called The contradiction of the educated slave’.94 The intellectual still occupies a special place in society, but for this reason he or she feels even more acutely oppression by the ruling class. This has made the left-wing intelligentsia the vanguard of the socialist movement, orientated towards its ultimate aims.

Serious conflicts arise from society’s inability to make use of the knowledge it imparts to intellectual workers. In the West this contradiction takes the form of mass unemployment among graduates and in the Soviet Union, where unemployment is not a problem of the first order (though there are rather a lot of unemployed intellectuals), engineers and specialists of various kinds are very often obliged to work at jobs outside their particular field. ‘In the Porshen factory,’ Pravda reports,