The Thinking Reed

The question of the class essence of the intelligentsia is, as we have seen, not an easy one to answer if we take into account the complex way the intelligentsia is formed. It was not by chance that Gramsci devoted considerable time to examining this problem to which Stalin had given, in two ticks, the answer quoted above — an answer which has since been quoted, with some variations, in all Soviet textbooks. But without going into details we can say that the twentieth century has seen a process of change in the class essence of the intelligentsia: its transformation from a petty-bourgeois to a proletarian stratum. At the same time, naturally — being a particular, distinct stratum — the intelligentsia could not but play an independent role in relation to the class with which it was connected. All this is elementary Marxism. But these were precisely the conclusions Stalin feared to draw: his task was to avoid them at all costs.

The Stalinists referred to a phrase of Lenin’s about the intelligentsia not being an independent force. But in the first place, that does not mean that the intelligentsia has no special political role to play in social life. It has such a role, and Lenin wrote about it in What Is To Be Done? Secondly, Lenin was talking about the intelligentsia at the beginning of our century, which was small. Since the scientific-technological revolution, thanks to the transformation of science into a force of production, the many-millioned intelligentsia of today has become an independent social stratum, capable not only of formulating its aims but often of achieving them.

It was impossible for Stalin not to know this. The first signs of the scientific and technological revolution were already felt at the beginning of the 1950s. Why did he need to say, deliberately, such absurd things? Behind curious theoretical constructions it is not difficult to perceive real political aims. Let us examine his argument:

The intelligentsia has never been a class and never can be a class — it was and remains a stratum, which recruits its members from among all classes of society. In the old days the intelligentsia recruited its members from the ranks of the nobility, of the bourgeoisie, partly from the ranks of the peasantry, and only to a very inconsiderable extent from the ranks of the workers. In our day, under the Soviets, the intelligentsia recruits its members mainly from the ranks of the workers and peasants. But no matter where it may recruit its members, and what character it may bear, the intelligentsia is nevertheless a stratum and not a class.119

We perceive at once that Stalin is consciously devising a theoretical sleight of hand. He replaces the question of the intelligentsia’s role in the social division of labour (that is, of its class essence) with the question of how it is formed. Yet it is well known that every class and every social stratum ‘recruits’ its members from among other classes and social strata. Alongside the hereditary intellectuals there are people who have sprung from the working class, just as alongside the hereditary workers in the factories there are people of peasant origin, and also ruined bourgeois. The conclusion which Stalin was trying hard to avoid was that the Soviet intelligentsia formed part of the proletariat — that alongside the traditional working class, a new proletariat of mental labour had emerged. These now constitute two sections of one and the same class. Why was this conclusion unacceptable to Stalin? Precisely because his aim was to counterpose ‘the intelligentsia’ to ‘the working class’.