The Thinking Reed

there are twenty-five persons with higher-educational diplomas who wear the overalls of manual workers… If we look at this branch of industry as a whole, we find that there are hundreds in a similar situation. Thus, in the enterprises of the Ministry of Non-Ferrous Metallurgy of the Kazakh SSR, last year, 906 specialists with higher education were employed as ordinary manual workers. In the republic’s Ministry of the Meat and Dairy Products Industry there were 169, and in the Ministry of Power Engineering and Electrification no fewer than 584 graduates similarly placed.95

Pravda has reviewed the situation in one republic, Kazakhstan, which is not as highly industralized or rich in institutions of higher education as (for example) Russia, but for this reason the overall situation appears even more dramatic. The newspaper notes a social fact of enormous importance: ‘a number of professions are being depreciated.’96

Thus, in the Soviet Union the process of proletarianizing the intelligentsia, while happening in a different way, has led to the same results as in the West. The statocracy has transformed an entire mass of working people into wage-workers. The ‘free professions’ have ceased to exist. Even those workers in the field of art who have retained a certain degree of independence have been subordinated to particular organizations — the trade-union committee of cultural workers, the ‘creative’ unions, and so on. These organizations frequently stand, in relation to their members, in the role of employers. The narrow specialization of our publishing houses, for example, means that a writer whose work concerns a particular subject becomes, de facto, an unestablished employee of one particular publishing enterprise, since there is nowhere else — or almost nowhere — he can turn to. His independence has become purely formal. Henceforth he is obliged to carry out someone else’s orders and perform tasks set by others. This situation is not, of course, favourable to artistic creativity. The worker in the field of art is consequently placed in a position where he must resist — indeed, cannot refrain from resisting — exploitation if he wants to retain even a fragment of his self-respect and personal independence.

Marc Rakovski, comparing Eastern with Western Europe, came to the general conclusion that in the twentieth century creative activity has been proletarianized:

The times when the so-called ‘free’ intelligentsia formed the greatest part of the intelligentsia have passed. The free intellectual used to have financial resources unconnected with his professional activities, or, if he did not, it was not his labour-power that he sold but the product of his labour… But by the middle of this century the free intelligentsia had become a minority even in the sphere of social science and of humanist culture in the strictest sense. In Soviet-type societies this process has been even more vigorously intense than it has been under capitalism.97