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,
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
At the same time social pressure on the intelligentsia has increased and this has to a certain extent promoted its consolidation, its development of group-consciousness. Furthermore the intellectuals, feeling that they belong to the oppressed and exploited masses, increasingly claim the right to speak in their name. They enjoy greater access to information (even in the USSR, and other societies of the Soviet type, learned publications offer the reader many facts and ideas which are excluded from popular publications) and consequently are better able to express themselves. This is why, incidentally, oppositions first take shape in the setting of legal culture and only later does the logic of the movement, the barriers of censorship, and the impossibility of saying everything one wants to say impel the intelligentsia to take the path of activity which is ‘illegal’ from the standpoint of the official bureaucrats. ‘Samizdat’ appears, together with underground universities and clandestine seminars. This ‘illegal’ culture98 is always a prolongation and product of legal culture.
It is precisely the pressure exercised by the authorities upon an intellectual in the course of his quite legal professional activity that first evokes his protest. Workers and engineers have to carry out tasks imposed by others, eight hours a day. Their personality is subjected to alienation during their work, and they try to make up for that in their leisure time. The creative process of the scientist or the writer is uninterrupted (purely technical work in the laboratory or at the desk is only part of it). But this being so, if the process in question is subject to control by an exploiting bureaucracy (and control of the result implies control of the process), the writer’s personality is even more alienated than that of the worker, and it is even harder for him to ‘remain himself.
The statocratic master tells the intellectual in advance what is wanted from him, what he must reveal, what he must write about, what he must depict. Consequently — at any rate, so long as he resigns himself to submitting to the will of the ‘boss’ — the intellectual’s activity is determined not by the objective logic of science or art, not by society as a whole, but merely by the administrative job he has to perform. In the post-Stalin period, moreover, this problem has become even more acute for writers than it is for scientists. Marat Cheshkov wrote quite correctly that under statocratic rule, and in general in present-day industrial society, alienation of the product of the intellectual’s labour becomes transformed into direct alienation of his personality.