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
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.
The authorities endeavour to submit to themselves the entire life of the Soviet citizen and to supervise everything he does. But cultural creativity, as I have said, is less submissive than anything else to external control. How can one control a poetic image or an actor’s gesture? It is easy to control the worker at the bench, for the production process is regulated and the result known beforehand. But how is one to control the artist before his canvas, if the result of his work is not known in advance even to the artist himself? Adequate criteria and methods of control do not exist for this purpose, and the bureaucratic mentality is incapable of inventing them; this is true not only of art but of all branches of culture. The art critic, the art historian, the culturologist and the philosopher can easily be censored, but here too there are difficulties. The chief complication consists in the fact that the meaning of the part often differs from that of the whole. In cultural creativity the whole not only cannot be regarded as the sum of the parts (such an approach to any problem leads to very defective and inaccurate conclusions), but is also sometimes a negation of those parts. Any current, ‘running’ control has to be a control of parts. Suppression of the whole is a repressive measure which shows that running control has suffered fiasco: it reveals the presence of a conflict and proves that manipulation has failed; that the object of manipulation has escaped from control or has simply refused to submit.
It is natural that the cultural sphere, being ‘remotest from the reality’, the least controllable, and consequently the freest, becomes the last (or first) refuge for opposition to the regime.49 The process of constant politicization of art goes on, as a rule, independently of the will of either the rulers or the ruled. Striving to subject culture to itself, the statocracy intensifies its pressure, imposing obligatory norms, and the result is that a mere attempt to evade this control — to ignore these norms — is seen as a political protest: ‘When independent political opinions are suppressed, it is aesthetic value judgements, abstract problems of philosophy and social theory and the evaluation of the remote historical past which assume political significance.’50
Antonio Gramsci drew, in his Prison Notebooks, the very important conclusion that such processes are to be observed in countries ‘where there is a single, totalitarian, governing party.’ There,
the functions of such a party are no longer directly political but merely technical ones of propaganda and public order, and moral and cultural influence. The political function is indirect. For, even if no other legal parties exist, other parties in fact always do exist and other tendencies which cannot be legally coerced, and, against these, polemics are unleashed, and struggles are fought as in a game of blind man’s buff. In any case, it is certain that in such parties cultural functions predominate, which means that political language becomes jargon. In other words, political questions are disguised as cultural ones, and as such become insoluble.51
In this way the political struggle is shifted to the sphere of art and culture generally, where it becomes ‘chronic’, because for the contradictions to be resolved, real, non-mystified political activity is needed and the intelligentsia finds itself in constant, chronic opposition. There is another aspect to this. A number of concrete problems need to be studied by the social sciences, but owing to the censorship they cannot be studied completely enough. Art then begins to reflect upon these problems — employing, of course, its own specific methods. As a result some very distinctive artistic productions make their appearance, marked by a special analytical approach to the subjects they describe.
Thus the conflict between state and intelligentsia, government and culture, traditional in Russia, is revived at a different level. In this connection it is worth recalling once again Lenin’s thought concerning the incompatibility between culture and bureaucracy. The Stalinist nomenklatura, like the Tsarist government, cannot exist totally without civilization. In order to achieve its aims, in order that the country as a whole may be up to contemporary standards and aspire to the role of superpower, civilization is needed. Needed also, consequently, is an intelligentsia. But once more, as in the case of Tsarist Russia, what the state needs is European enlightenment without European democratic ideas. The conflict between the Stalinist statocracy and the new intellectuals is a continuation of the conflict, historically typical of Russia, between an Asiatic ruling power and a European intelligentsia.