Nevertheless, one can concur with Marcuse when he wrote of ‘the difficulties which the regime creates for itself by constantly teaching and publicizing Marxian ideas’.89 Although in the schools and institutes they still teach, in the guise of Marxism, the dogmatic utopia of ‘state socialism’ and barracks-Communism, that same utopia which Marx constantly combated, they have not yet forbidden people to read The German Ideology, or to study The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, or to become acquainted with Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks — books that are shaping the minds of the intelligentsia in the West.
In general, history has shown that however strange this may be, it is considerably easier to preserve the spiritual property of the past than to destroy it. Shils writes:
Intellectual work is sustained by and transmits a complex tradition which persists through changes in the structure of the intellectual class. One could almost say that if these traditions did not confront the intellectual as an ineluctable inheritance, they could be created anew in each generation by the passionate disposition of the ‘natural’ intellectual to be in contact… with symbols of general scope. They are traditions which are, so to speak, given by the nature of intellectual work. They are the immanent traditions of intellectual performance, the accepted body of rules of procedure, standards of judgement, criteria for the selection of subject matters and problems, modes of presentation, canons for the assessment of excellence, models of previous achievement.. 90
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.
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 intellectuaclass="underline"
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.