Social change and the intelligentsia

[p032] Social Change and the Intelligentsia By Tom Kemp IN every period of social crisis and tension, when an old form of society is struggling to prolong its existence and the new seems to the faint-hearted to be too long in appearing, perhaps never to be born, or only with repulsive deformations, doctrines of pessimism and cynicism have free rein. We live in such an age, for the much-lauded ‘affluence’ of the past decade or so, which has seen the workers and lower middle classes making reia- tively modest material gains owing to a steady demand for their labour power, cannot disguise the fact that present-day capitalism is unable to harness to constructive social purposes the productive capa- cities of modern technology, nor indeed to develop those capacities as would be possible in a rationally- organised society. The ultimate expression of capi- talist decay is the willingness of those who control the destinies of the system to see the world reduced to radio-active rubble rather than allow further loss of ‘living space’ to the rival world system. Pessimistic ideologies, which deny man’s capacity to create on this earth a social system free of exploitation and alienation, in which man is no longer a wolf to man and human solidarity provides the conditions for the full development of the personality of all, are not mew. They reached consummate expression in the teachings of such ideologues as Burke, de Maistre and the later Hegel at the very moment when the bourgeoisie itself was reaching out for new ways to control man’s environ- ment. Once this class had passed its ascendancy and found itself challenged in its turn by the claims of the working class it turned increasingly to these doctrines, developing them in new terms to justify the maintenance of the status quo. They are recog- nisable today in a wide spectrum of social doctrine ranging from the extremes of John Birchism to the spurious objectivity of various orthodox schools of social science. Of course, the interplay of ideas, in so far as they gain an independence from the clash of classes in the social arena, produces all kinds of mutations, If the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, that does not necessarily mean that in their form they assume an immediately recognisable homogeneity. Indeed, the relative autonomy of ideas ensures that this should not be so. Ideas are produced by indi- viduals, juxtaposed in diverse ways to the various forces, including ideological forces, present in society, thus making possible an immense variety not only in their form but also, within limits, in their content. The ‘ruling class’, itself a stratified entity within which important divisions may exist, does not generate a monolithic body of doctrine but a varied assortment of often warring and apparently unconnected ideas. This very diversity is made a virtue in the prevailing ‘liberalism’ of the bour- geoisie in its rise to power and in its ascendancy; and this diversity, in differing degrees, continues to characterise the capitalist societies of our time. Only under fascism does a unified doctrine, backed by the police power, prevail; but the resort to such methods is by no means a matter of choice on the part of the bourgeoisie—it prefers to have a policeman un- obtrusively at the street-corner, not in the highest posts in the state. But however varied the forms of the prevailing ideas in the relatively more open forms of capitalist society, they do accept as funda- mental the need to preserve the foundations of the system itself and, predominantly, are pessimistic about the prospects of social change except that which, because it must be consistent with these foundations, is slow, piece-meal and implies no change in the distribution of property and power. Pessimism has its degrees, and whether it is open or concealed depends on the individual thinker and reflects the moods of the time which, in turn, are a product of social influences. We may mention as a type the hard-boiled cynic who, despite professions of objectivity or desire for ‘progress’, sides manifestly

[p033] 150 with the powers that be, though making use of the degree of license which the ‘openness’ of bourgeois society may from time to time permit. There is also the disillusioned idealist who may at one time have had the vision of an alternative to the corrupt, self-seeking jungle world of capitalism and even linked his fortunes to the working-class movement but who, buffetted by the cruel winds of the twentieth century, has drawn back dismayed to the safe refuge of conformity. For both such extremes the old adages of conservatism, in a new ideological guise and in modern social science or journalistic jargon, become the wisdom of the age. In their essence they do not differ from the street corner scoffer at a socialist meeting. Their bedrock is that human nature is bad and can’t be changed, that all power corrupts and human improvement is a vain aspira- tion. ' To deal with the challenge of socialist ideas, and that means particularly with Marxism, the bour- geoisie can now call on the services of a host of ex-radicals who have themselves more than a passing acquaintance with Marxist ideas and the workers’ movement. When, in the 1930s the crisis of capital- ism broke surface in a world-wide depression of unprecedented depth and length a wide circle of youthful members of the intelligentsia were drawn into the orbit of Marxism for the first time. The assumptions upon which they had been brought up had already been rudely shaken by the results of the world conflict of 1914-18. The nine- teenth century ideas of liberal capitalism were being undermined and in some countries were in complete collapse. They gave no satisfactory explanation of the. spreading political and economic breakdown of the 1930s... Despite all that has been said about the Yictorianism of. Marx’s thought, its out-datedness, its..lack of relevance to our time, life taught significant numbers of the intelligentsia quite other- wisevin. this period. In fact it was: their introduction to the twentieth century. It gave a more penetrating insight into the processes at work in an age of world wars and economic crisis than all the writing of Marx’s contemporaries or successors. In a way it performed a function which Trotsky had noted in the Czarist Russia of the 1890s. While in the latter case Marxism was ‘the instrument by which the bourgeois intelligentsia cut the Populist umbilical cord and severed itself from its hated past’, in the 1930s it severed the links of many intellectuals with the hypocritical formulas of bourgeois liberalism.! Of. course, is was not the only possible alternative to such doctrines. Marxism could only have this attractive power where it was linked with a working- class movement, and insofar as that movement seemed to be powerful and capable of fulfilling its promise. 1. LD. Trotsky, My Life, p. 128. LABOUR REVIEW—Winter 1963 These were big provisos because in practice this movement was under the domination of leaderships, Social-Democratic or Communist, which by political weakness, bureaucratic methods and betrayals which cannot be specified in detail here, ensured that they were not met. Moreover, since the intelligentsia was recruited from the ranks of the property-owning or middle classes it normally took sides, as least as far as its main contingents were concerned, not with the working class, but with the established order. Thus just as many of the young Russians who embraced Marxism became ‘legal Marxists’ or, in Trotsky’s words, ‘finding that it led to a revolutionary rejection of the whole capitalist system .. . adjudged it an impediment and declared it out of date’ so many of those who were drawn to it in the thirties more oz less rapidly followed a similar evolution.2 In the latter situation, however, a new factor was present which largely accounted for the speed and character of the turn from Marxism. After 1917 the attractive power of the Russian Revolution of 1917 acted with Marxist ideas to draw many of the intelligentsia from their allegiance to the old shib- boleths. It was the degeneration of the Soviet power, in the period of Stalinism, which gave grounds for a return to them. The responsibilities of Stalinism for this evolution were, in many cases, paramount. Not only did it provide an alibi for many of those who perhaps sooner or later would have gravitated back to other intellectual positions, it also drove out of left-wing politics even larger numbers of those who felt that they had been deceived by a false vision. In individual cases the process of disillusionment spread over a long period from the time of the Moscow trials to the aftermath of the 20th Congress.of the CPSU; there were times when , particular events, such. as the Nazi-Soviet pact, precipitated large-scale movements.. We are now, talking mainly of. defections from: the Com- munist parties.and their periphery.. Account must therefore be taken of the unevenness of this process in different countries. For example, in European countries during the Resistance movement many were attracted into the Communist parties even from the youth of the bourgeoisie. The hold of these parties on the working class made the situation different from that in the United States or Britain. And it should not be forgotten that some who were so attracted have. remained to this day, sometimes built into the apparatus of the party, sometimes as closed-mind dogmatists or because of an identifica- tion, still genuinely made, between the working class, Marxist theory and the Communist Party.3 Even those who did not, even for a short time, 2. Ibid. 3. An identification which could reach absurd limits in some of the writings of J. P. Sartre.

[p034] SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE INTELLIGENTSIA reside within the party were influenced by the currents which flowed from it, or from the USSR. A similar process occurred within the non-Stalinist left, though the actual events and controversies which brought about defections were not necessarily the same. For example, in the 1950s, before the 20th Congress, many were impressed by the appareat successes of the Stalinist parties and took it that they could, in the future, carry out successful revolutions in the capitalist countries.4 Those who passed through the Marxist movement, or experienced its influence in some positive fashion, could never be the same, even after their reconcilia- tion with bourgeois thought, as those who had never passed into the ranks of revolt and social criticism. They were marked by their experiences, but also by the theories which they had once believed tn. When they became critics of Marxism, or of the socialist movement in general, their criticism was of a more sophisticated, disabused kind than that of the outsiders. There was a measure of unbalanced hysteria in some of the writings of the ex-communists and the rancour of renegades was pretty widespread.° Some of the more thoughtful, however, of those who had at one time been Marxists produced, at least, theories which broke away from the stodginess of the liberals and the myopia of the conservatives and struck a path to the minds of the generation of capitalism’s crisis. They placed on the agenda real problems. They took up and attacked Marxism from the standpoint of ex-insiders, developing, in particular, questions which they had previously found most perplexing and which, as they probably knew, would strike home most forcibly with their former comrades. Since the war a number of the more talented people of this kind have found a home in universities, research institutes, bodies such as the 4. In this the Pabloites reflected a trend in the petty- bourgeois intelligentsia, especially in France, in the early 1950s. 5. See Deutscher, I., ‘The Ex-Communist’s Conscience’ in Heretics and Renegades. The intelligentsia as A favourite theme of the disillusioned ex-radical is that the establishment of a society free from the exploitation of man by man is a vain utopia: there will always be a ruling class and always be exploita- tion. A rationalisation of this kind was written into a book by James Burnham after he broke with Marxism in 1940: he found the new ruling class in ‘the managers’, an ambiguous term which he never 151 Congress for Cultural Freedom and ‘quality’ maga- zines where they have facilities for turning out a never-ending stream of anti-Marxist work, training more like-minded people and inoculating the intelli- gentsia against the Marxist virus. It is surprising, perhaps, that the job has to be done on such a large scale, so systematically and with such an important commitment of funds. There is no doubt that this is a tribute to the intellectual powers of Marxism and reflects, at the same time, some lack of con- fidence by the beneficiaries of capitalism in the loyalty of those well-paid and highly-trained servants upon whom the efficiency of the system depends so vitally. There is no doubt that even in the pro- perous years of the past decade business and its spokesmen have not trusted the intelligentsia too far. They have not forgotten the breach in the allegiance of so many in the thirties. At least the educated public is now supplied with academic studies of Marxism, socialism and the Soviet Union on a much more considerable scale than before the war. There are more writers who take up what were previously ‘dangerous’ subjects, while turning the argument decidedly into a defence of the status quo. These considerations lead on to the question of the position of the intelligentsia in modern society and in the labour movement. The spotlight is now distinctly on this extremely important social layer, not only in the technically advanced countries, but also, and perhaps more so, in the underdeveloped countries where the educated ‘elite’ stand out more markedly from the mass of poor and _ illiterate peasants. The question is posed, then, of the relationship of the intelligentsia to social change: are the kind of changes which are implied in the socialist movement or in the achievement of national independence in the underdeveloped countries merely the gateway to the rule of a new exploiting class of intellectuals? What is the basis of such theories? What substance do they have and where do they lead? These are some of the problems which have to be taken up in the light of the above analysis. a new ruling class satisfactorily defined.6 He had had many pre- decessors, some of whom had seen the new group of prospective rulers, superseding the ruling class of property owners, in the functional bureaucrats whose 6. J. Burnham, The Managerial Revolution. For a discussion of this type of theory see ‘Class, Caste and State in the Soviet Union’, in LABouR REVIEW, Vol. 7, No. 2.

[p035] 152 rise had accompanied that of the modern state itself. Others had suggested that in the coming society education was the key to power; those already in possession of education, but actually excluded from power, had already designed the operational doctrine which was to prepare the way for their future dominance. total population, these ends had been disguised with great subtlety in the doctrines of socialism and given institutional form in the allegedly working-class socialist parties which they already controlled. It is interesting that a number of references are now to be found in anti-Marxist literature to one such closely worked-out theory of a Polish revolu- tionist of pre-1914 vintage.? Seldom can a work have become so widely known at second-hand, for his book is now virtually unobtainable and has never been produced in English. Trotsky says that this writer, Machajsky, whose works circulated among fellow exiles in Siberia in the early 1900s, began as ‘a critic of Social Democratic opportunism’.8 This was significant. The bureaucratization of the Social Democratic movement, particularly in Germany, repelled many idealist people from socialism at this time. It was the basis for Michels’ influential boox Political Parties which enunciated the ‘iron law of oligarchy’. For some, at least, it led through syndicalism to fascism. For most, just disillusion- ment after attempts to frame an alternative doctrine had failed. More recently Machajsky’s theories have been taken up by Max Nomad and have been referred to by Daniel Bell whose works will now be discussed. Nomad adopts Machajsky’s views, which he sum- marises as follows: ‘the intellectual workers, whether college-bred scions of the middle or lower-middle classes, or self-educated workers, constituted a privileged neo-bourgeois class whose interests were different from those of both the capitalist property- owners and the manual workers. As owners of higher education, a sort of invisible capital, they could command, or aspire to, incomes higher than those of the uneducated strata, ie., the manual workers. Members of that class who were heading the various radical anticapitalist movements were doing so not with a view to the “emancipation of the working class” as they claimed, but for the purpose of using the masses in the intelligentsia’s struggle for a place in the sun: first for political democracy with its job possibilities in the various political and cultural institutions; later for a socialized economy under which the intellectual workers would con- stitute the ruling officeholding and managerial class after expropriating or buying off the capitalists.’9 7. Waclaw Machajsky. 8. L. D. Trotsky, op. cit. 9. M. Nomad, Apostles of Revolution (revised ed. 1961), p. 319. But, since they were a minority in the - LABOUR REVIEW—Winter 1963 With this as a key assumption Nomad proceeds to examine the lives of rebels and revolutionaries and, not surprisingly, finds it to be ‘confirmed’. In fact, perhaps unconsciously, he goes through the record to find such confirmation, rejecting whatever does not fit in with his thesis and interpreting the rest in the light of his guiding theory. Intellectuals who take part in revolutionary movements cannot have any other motive than to prepare the way for a new ruling class made up of people in a similar social category. Workers only want the ‘immediate satis- faction of their material needs’ and that should be the axiomatic basis for judging social change; the division between intellectuals and workers begins there. The inherent ‘economism’ of the workers is represented as being naively sincere, whereas the intellectuals are machiavellians who use _ these aspirations to promote their own interests as the exploiting class of the future. As the result of what, after Pareto, he calls ‘the circulation of' elites’ the ‘underdogs’ may succeed in winning material con- cessions and an improvement in their lot. Funda- mentally, however, the thesis is profoundly pessi- mistic and avowedly so, for Nomad proclaims: ‘I don’t believe there is any hope for the human race.”!0 Nomad takes for granted that the ‘masses’, the ‘workers’ or the ‘underdogs’ exist in history as a more or less undifferentiated and unchanging collection of short-sighted and easily satisfied people governed by narrow material appetites. They are object of history, incapable of making history for themselves and noted for their ‘incompetence’. Con- sequently they can be manipulated by power-seekers who hold out to them the prospect of material benefit; but they will only be the more deceived. The idea that the working class can emancipate itself or can prevent its leaders in the class struggle against capitalism from becoming its future exploiters is ruled out. In fact, in this circular reasoning, appa- rently substantiated by ‘facts’ which are well chosen and interpreted with a deliberate slant, such an idea is deliberately fostered by these prospective exploiters to pave their way to power. All this rests on a series of unstated assumptions about human nature and human behaviour as well as about the functioning of class society. What Nomad and other theorists like him have done is to draw out and develop in an entirely one-sided fashion one apparent tendency, while assuming that nothing else changes. No wonder he sees dialectical materialism as a theo- logical conception, for he is quite unable to see the relationship of things changing and interacting with each other in a continual process of development which always outruns the capacity of theory to describe it. Nomad wishes to impose on history his own pessimistic scheme. We shall say more 10. Ibid., Introduction, p. 19.

[p036] SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE INTELLIGENTSIA later about the derivation of this scheme and its practical effect. First of all the static notions behind his conception must be rejected. The ‘masses’ do change in the course of the historical process, as they are brought into contact with changing technologies, go through historical experiences, organise as a class and rise to a consciousness of their role in society and the possibility of changing society. The working class today, as a product of advanced capitalism, can by no means be seen in the same terms as the raw, newly-emerging proletariat of 200 years ago. Even the new proletarian layers in the less developed countries come into the picture at a historically more advanced stage than their predecessors in Britain and Western Europe centuries ago. Educated in line with the development of the productive forces of modern capitalism, and shown by this that man can control his environment, and has within his grasp the possibility of abolishing classes and exploitation, the modern working class develops an opposition to its position as an exploited class and a confidence in its own strength. True, within a capitalist environment which is permeated by the ideologies of the bourgeoisie, the stress on com- petition, individual advancement and so on, the working class does not by itself attain to socialist consciousness. What it does develop is a greater actual capacity for self-rule which makes it, even more potentially than at the given moment, a force which can change history in a conscious way. These moments of intervention are necessarily rare; the opportunities which they present can only be seized if there is a conscious leadership which has already prepared itself and established close and inseparable links with the class itself. The fact that socialist ideas are brought to the working class from outside has been a ready source of distortion by commentators like Nomad. Of course, the working-class movement can be seen as a springboard whereby what he likes to call the ‘déclassé intelligentsia’ gain influence and power. Experience shows that this is an ever-present danger demonstrated first of all in the big Social-Democratic parties in the hey-day of the Second International. It was from this experience that Michels derived his theory called the ‘iron law of oligarchy’. But con- scious awareness of these dangers can, providing objective conditions permit, provide a safeguard against such degeneration. Such a safeguard cannot be found in organisational forms alone, but must be The End of Daniel Bell shares with Nomad not only an inter- est in the writings of Machajsky, but also a disabused and disillusioned attitude towards politics which, in like manner,. becomes a defence of the status quo 153 bound up with the continuous and active participa- tion of the working class in the life of its organisa- tions. Nomad, and those who follow a similar, less explicit, theory, assume, because of their lack of confidence in the working class, based on a restricted view of human nature, that such participation is impossible. The mass of men, they believe, only want a full feeding-bag, otherwise they can be led by the nose by any charlatan dictator or demagogue who comes along. What is characteristic here is not only the pessimism but the unscientific way in which such a conclusion has been reached. Instead of seeking out the reasons for the bureaucratisation of the German Social-Democracy or of the degenera- tion of the Soviet Union by an examination of the multiplicity of factors which were involved, a simple, single-track explanation is proposed which is then generalised into a statement of universal validity which has no historical value! The fact that Nomad goes back into history to justify his pessimism only produces travesties of history—which is seen exclu- sively as a demonstration of his initial proposition. The practical effect of Nomad’s teaching is that ‘it can’t be done’: the workers cannot rule, capitalism can only be replaced by another form of exploiting society which may be worse; to cultivate one’s garden, platonically protest ‘against all forms of unfreedom and inequality’ and reconcile onself to original sin—that is the only reasonable course. The result is clearly passivity. Passivity of this kind, justified by doctrines of this kind, can only serve the powers that be. It disarms and disorientates those who wish to fight by telling them that it is not worthwhile—and, if they are intellectuals (as most of Nomad’s readers will be), their real motives are self-interested. But if the conclusions are essentially conservative, so are the assumptions and the whole reasoning behind Nomad’s denigration of the revotu- tionaries whose lives and theories he examines. True it is a sophisticated conservatism which surveys, with ostensible sympathy, the efforts to change society; the end is the same—man is a wolf to man, nothing can really be changed. Antipathy to the intellectuals is thrown in for good measure, but even that does not mean that Nomad has real sympathy for the masses. Indeed his attitude towards them is one of contempt. Like other dis- abused intellectual ex-radicals, he blames them, subconsciously, for allowing themselves to be misled and betrayed, and finds an alibi for himself in inaction. Ideology? in effect, if not in intent. His essay, The End of Ideology, has coined a phrase, this time with intent to provide an epitaph for an age: an age in which many intellectuals in the United States and Western

[p037] 154 Europe, were drawn towards Marxism and left-wing politics.}! In sophistication Bell exceeds Nomad. He tells us that he has been through the mill of radical politics since, while at college, he began writing resolutions on ‘the road to power’. Bell’s road eventually lay through the offices of the sumptuous magazine Fortune to a sociology professorship at Columbia University. In the course of it he acquired the ability to turn his knowledge of Marxist theory to good account, ie., to use it strictly as a tool of analysis, to domesticate it to serve the purpose of turning out a knowledgeable article in a style between the journalistic and the academic. He is thus able to take ‘dangerous’ themes and play with daring ideas with a dash of left-over radicalism to add zest, while remaining strictly acceptable so far as the ‘American way’ is concerned. His social criticism is of the mildest, and the ultimate con- clusion must be, as with Nomad, that since ‘utopia’ is unreliable you adopt a course of action which serves the status quo. In his own words his per- spective is ‘anti-ideological but not conservative’; he repudiates what he calls ‘neo-conservatism’ as well as all ‘nineteenth century ideologies’.!2_ The apparent scepticism (‘The claims of doubt are prior to the claims of faith’) which seeks ‘detachment, which guards against being submerged in any causes, or accepting any particular embodiment of community as final’, is belied by many a premise, articulate or not, to be found in his writings. In other words he does not arrive at a position above the melée, independent. of society and the struggle of classes going on within it. He rejects the social crisis, muted as it may be compared with the more intense out- breaks of the 1930s (at any rate in the United States), although in subtle ways. The direct or indirect influence of Marxism upon intellectuals like Bell has been to destroy for ever the naivety of the old-style liberalism. Just as in Russia it prepared, through the ‘legal Marxists’, for a reconciliation with capitalism, so often, in their case, it leads unmis- takeably to an effective reconciliation with society as it is; on different terms, perhaps, but a recon- ciliation nonetheless. 11. D. Bell, The End of Ideology (Collier Books ed., 1961). 12. Ibid., introduction entitled ‘The Restless Vanity’. ‘In the last decade, we have witnessed an exhaustion of of the nineteenth century ideologies, particularly Marxism, as intellectual systems that could claim truth (his emphasis) for their views of the world.” p. 16. First emphasis added: the book stresses at a number of points that particularly Marxism has failed. After all, he is not so opposed to ‘liberalism’ in the nineteenth century sense as is evident in a number of passages— e.g., when he is dealing with the market economy. And he is not averse to rediscovering its ‘verities’-—of eternal validity? LABOUR REVIEW—Winter 1963 The politics of disillusionment has shed the old vision of freedom broadening down from precedent to precedent. It is geared to the vocabulary of alienation, perceptive of class forces and always ready to see the interest behind the idea. It no longer has faith in democracy, except as a des- cription of the political process in some of the advanced capitalist states. Its objections to ‘demo- cracy’ in fact go beyond a criticism of ‘bourgeois democracy’—which, in fact, it is quite ready to accept—to a general scepticism of the possibility of any genuine popular political participation or self- rule.!3 At the same time, Bell and others like him do raise real problems. There is no presumption here to deal with the wide range which they cover, since the purpose is to consider, rather, assumptions and implications of their approach. The usual framework for their ideas is the short article or academic-type study which considers one theme, one aspect of reality or theory. Within this one or a small number of factors tend to be isolated for treatment, rather than seeing them as part of the totality of experience. Take, for example, the history of the Soviet Union in the 1920s which is often taken as a practical demonstration of the accuracy of the predictions of Machajsky, Michels and others.!4 In Bell’s account ‘a truly workers’ society’ steadily becomes the control of the workers by the managers in a society characterised by ‘sharp class divisions between workers and engineers’. To begin with he idealises the starting point, though it is true enough that the working class was in power (but does he really mean this?—if so what about the Bolshevik Party and the Soviets?). In his account of how this situation changed the argument is confined to Russia. Nothing is said about the fact that when writing State and Revolution Lenin was not assuming the indefinite isolation of the revolution in a backward country. Right through the early years of the Soviet regime Lenin expected, and bent his efforts towards, the spread of the Revolution to other, more advanced countries. Much less of general validity can ve 13. The attitude of Marx and Lenin was genuinely democratic, though they exposed the hypocrisy of ‘bourgeois democracy’, its merely formal character. As Lukacs points out, however, there is always a danger ‘of swinging over from a left to a right-wing criticism of bourgeois democracy, i.e., from dissatisfaction with bourgeois democracy to opposition to democracy in general’. The Historical Novel, p. 254. Nomad and Bell, swinging away from acceptance of bourgeois society, lose confidence in the working-class movement (‘democracy in general’) and return in fact to acceptance of bourgeois society. 14. What follows is mainly a critique of the essays ‘The Mood of Three Generations’ and ‘Two Roads from Marx’ from which the quotations are taken. They appear as Part Three of The End of Ideology.

[p038] SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE INTELLIGENTSIA adduced from the Russian experience than is often believed. The successive steps which were taken in the direction of strengthening party control, eliminat- ing factions and destroying the independence of the trade unions represented response to emergencies, retreats which were imposed in large part by the exigencies of the situation.'5 The ripening of a situation in which the bureaucracy could emerge as a privileged stratum, personified by Stalin, is omitted from Bell’s analysis. Fastening on incidents like Kronstadt and the trade union debate, he fails to indicate the real circumstances and mood in which they took place. Nor does he mention the fact that the Left Opposition vigorously opposed the Stalinist degeneration and put forward a programme designed to meet the needs of the situation. It was defeated by the strong objective current flowing against them —and no doubt, in part, by subjective weaknesses. In any case the process of degeneration could not have been arrested solely by measures taken in Russia. It was accompanied by a series of defeats for the international working class (made inevitable, it is true, by the policy imposed by Stalin on the Comintern in line with the necessities of the bureau- cracy). The draconian laws in Soviet industry which ell can so easily denounce were part of the heavy price which the Russian workers and peasants paid for the failure of the international working class movement to follow the path which they had taken under Bolshevik leadership in 1917. In this perspective the kind of analysis which is often made suffers from abstractness and from a quite unwarranted assump- tion that this degeneration followed from the teachings of Marx and Lenin, from Bolshevism, or 15. See P. Broué, ‘Remarques sur Vhistoire du parti bolshevik’ in Arguments, No. 25-26, 1962. ‘There is in the appreciation of historians of the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party a systematic bias towards considering the party as an historical factor absolutely independent of the other fundamental factors in human history. To say that the Stalinist counter-revolution was written into What Is To Be Done?, the Moscow trials in the pro- hibition of factions within the party, is to hold at naught the foreign intervention against the young Soviet republic, the alliance of German Social- Democracy with the General Staff and the capitalist system which was responsible for the World War... . It is to neglect the intervention in history of the con- scious factor in the elementary form of the organisation, to preach renunciation and resignation, condemn struggle and even partial victories.’ Broué rightly calls attention to Rosa Luxemburg’s words in her pamphlet The Russian Revolution which is often wrongly used against the Bolsheviks, in which she says that Lenin and Trotsky had ‘the imperishable merit of having, by taking power, set an example to the world proletariat and posed the problem of the realisation of socialism, taking an enormous step in the final settling of accounts between capital and labour in the entire world’. 155 simply from an attempt to interfere with the course of social evolution. Not being able to analyse the degeneration of Soviet power for what it was, Bell is obliged to ascribe it, in part, to Lenin’s precepts on party organisation—distorting these characteristically in the process. Moreover, he gives the now Stalinised Communist parties of the 1930s and after the credit for being organised after the Leninist model and for still being bent on revolution. For him there was no change in the nature and direction as a result of social forces. What took place appears to have been a result of a wrong ideology, working out one of the ‘roads from Marx’. But when we ask whose ideology it became—in fact deforming Marx—the only answer to be derived from his essays is that it was that of professional revolutionaries, drawn from the intelligentsia, following the path sketched out by Machajsky. Ideology for him is finished because the path taken was a false one and there is no other which can change the world, so we must live in it as it is, suggesting such small changes as may be possible. Not only is Bell providing his own substitute ideology—the old well-tried ideas of reformism and Fabian gradualism—but he does not work through to the basic reasons for Stalinism. He does not investigate the forces which produced it, nor does he see it as the ‘ideology’—in the Marxist sense—of a social layer, the Soviet bureaucracy. Consequently, too, he misinteprets the reasons for the Stalinist successes, especially with sections of the intelli- gentsia, in the thirties and takes the subsequeat failures of Stalinism (in the USA) to be reasons which can explain the inability of the working class to take power.!6 The failure of socialism cannot mean anything but failure to build a movement with this goal. But Stalinism was not such a movement: in fact by its effect on working-class politics, by its policies of downright betrayal from ‘social fascism through the ‘popular front’ to the Nazi-Soviet pact, it prevented the class from grasping its historical opportunities. We must, however, give Bell his due. As a sensi- tive participant and observer he is able to describe 16. In the essay “The Failure of American Socialism’ he plainly identifies the methods and policies of the US Communist Party with Lenin and Bolshevism. He even associates Trotsky with this phase of his argu- ments—because he accepted Lenin’s views on organisa- tion. He says nothing about the Communist opposition to Stalinism in this period. He does not see that the front technique was an aspect of Stalinist degeneration because he still claims that ‘The Communists had not given up their belief in revolution and power... In fact the CPUSA, like all the CPs, held back and derailed the American workers’ movement in its most promising phase.

[p039] 156 what happened to the kind of people he knew most about in this period and after. He can show how they became either corrupted or repelled by their experience with the Communist Party, but he fails completely to explain the significance of what was going on. He does not see the totality of the pictme, but only one or a small number of factors. Thus, in the last analysis his reason for the failure of American socialism, and, indeed, for what he calls ‘the end of ideology’, boils down to a failure on **e part of socialists to come to terms with capitalist society! ‘Living in the world,’ he says, ‘one cannot refuse the responsibility of sharing in the decisions of that society.17 Behind such a proclamation of policy—for such it is—stands a renunciation of any theory of class struggle and an acceptance of that society on the basis of the search for what he calls ‘a shared consensus’. Of course the socialist has social responsibilities. Unless he is avowedly utopian he is not seeking for a millennial leap into a perfect world. He seeks to operate with the material which the old society provides, inescapably involved with all its corruption and rottenness from which he can only keep clear by theoretical clarity and firm attachment to principles, principles not of the abstract moraliser but of one engaged in practical activity to change the social order.!8 He does not wish to share in the decisions of capitalist society. His primary responsibility is towards the working class, taking it as it is with all its variety and weak- ness, shot-through with the influences which fiow into it from the capitalist environment, and striving to make it conscious of itself so that it will be prepared to seize its opportunities when they arise, opportunities which do arise only with great rarity. The intellectuals who joined the Communist parties, or who may be still with them, for all their lip- service to the class struggle did not begin with the working class, nor were they able to establish a genuine relationship with it. Their political life was guided by what they took to be a higher authority— the interests of the USSR, or, more properly, its ruling layer. When the guide lines broke in some sharp turn, or were severed by a slower process of wearing away, they were often left with nothing but a complete reconciliation with the capitalist world which they believed they had rejected. Hence the 17. The End of Ideology, pp. 297-8. Bell’s views here resemble classic Fabianism, but they are also closely related to the modern right-wing revisionism of the Strachey, Crosland type. The latter certainly could endorse practically everything which Bell says: indeed he is more explicit in his willingness to co-operate with managed capitalism. He is the arch-type of the kind of intellectual who is out to manipulate the working class in order to gain political office: a ‘proof’ of the Nomad thesis! 18. Ibid., p. 310. LABOUR REVIEW—Winter 1963 bitterness of the break and the psychological state of the apostate, ready now to equate still, as he had been taught by his party mentors, Stalinism with Bolshevism, Leninism and Marxism. Bell, with ut having shared all that experience, provides a kind of alibi. He checks off the mood of the disillusioned intelligentsia of the thirties and their successors, ine dead souls of the fifties, with evident sympathy and understanding. He rationalises the process by asserting that it arose from scepticism ‘of the rationalistic claim that socialism, by eliminating the economic basis of exploitation, would solve all social questions’.!9 They turn, he says, to ‘anti- rational stoicism’—in reality an eclectic hotch-potch from Freud to ‘neo-orthodox theology’ which has. in turn, been the breeding ground for new doctrines rather than the stifling of all ‘ideology’. And, in America at any rate, they found ‘new virtues in the United States because of its pluralism, the accept- ance of the Welfare State, the spread of educatioa, and the expanding opportunities for intellectual employment’. ‘And,’ he adds, ‘in the growing Cold War, they accepted the fact that Soviet Russia was the principal threat to freedom in the world today.’29 The ravages of Stalinism, not any convictions about the impossibility of building an alternative to capitalism free of exploitation, were at the root of this lamentable capitulation, i.e., freedom to share in the decisions of capitalist society in fantasy alone and to take a slightly better cut from its flesh-pots. This social decadence of a layer of people from which once came significant numbers of potential revolutionaries must not be confused with a failure of socialism or of Marxism. If these are what ‘s meant by ‘ideology’ it is by no means ‘exhausted’ or at an end. A lot could be said about Bell’s use of the term ‘ideology’. One thing which does need saying is the mistake he makes in associating it with ‘channelizing emotional energy’, as a kind of evoker of a life force. Bell seems to have seen Marxism through Bergsonian spectacles. It is a way of putting the life force at the disposal of political action instead of, say, religion or private gratification. Passions not reason govern where ideology is in- volved; now passions are spent, and with them ideology. Bell not merely depicts the change, he provides it with a justification; he is part of the process, not a detached spectator or even a scientific observer. With Bell’s writings the member of the intelligentsia can salve his conscience, calm his nerves and titivate his intellect (that is the secret of Beli’s success as an author)—and find a comfortable 19. See L. D, Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours for a classic exposure of the moralisers who end up by justifying capitalist immorality. 20. Quotations from Bell’s essay ‘The Mood of Three Generations’, op. cit.

[p040] SOCIAL CHANGE AND THE INTELLIGENTSIA nesting place in capitalist society. Bell tells him to forget or ignore all its decay and corruption. He will explain that these are not so bad as he thinks; they may serve a functional purpose—immigrant gangsters are just finding a ladder to climb to acceptance in American society and to make good citizens out of their offspring.24 And while a blank is drawn over this side—even what he likes to call ‘the permanent war economy’ (a term much used by some ‘lefts’, who are in debt to Bell as well as he to they) is spoken of with no disapproval, since it is really the fault of the Russians—he trots out the ‘eternal verities’ of liberalism as though they actually held sway in contemporary America. The members of the intelligentsia of whom Bell speaks, who became politically active in the Stalinist era—which is only now ending—were deeply affected by the crisis of capitalism manifested in economic crash, international tension and war. At the high point of the crisis, or rather when it was most obvious, they came to believe in the need to over- throw capitalism. Misled by Stalinism and Social Democracy, the working class, the only instrument for the performance of this task, was not permitted to carry through actions which might have brought success and were thrown cynically into battles in which they could only be defeated. A protracted crisis of leadership paralysed the class. Ideas were not the dominant factors in either the social crisis of capitalism or in the betrayals of the working- class leaders, although they did play a role. Nor was it the failure of Marxist ideas which brought about the reflux of political activity and struggle; here again objective forces must be correctly appraised. The moods of the intelligentsia were results rather than causes. They moved away from their normal position in the bourgeois camp when the bourgeoisie was becoming discredited and the workers were moving into action. A symmetrically opposite movement occurred as the bourgeoisie re- covered its poise and the working class suffered defeats. Betrayed by its leaders, bewildered by defeats and battered by a series of disheartening experiences, large sections of the working class resumed an ‘economist’ position. They settled for small gains of a mainly material nature and waged the class struggle around sectional and immediate demands. Apparently they were ‘satisfied’; if the existence of a class struggle was admitted at all it looked as though it could be contained within the framework of bourgeois institutions. Moving in the 21. ‘Crime as an American Way of Life. A Queer Ladder of Social Mobility’. op. cit. 157 same direction, though rather more precipitously, intellectuals, nominally concerned with ‘freedom’ and with ‘things of the mind’ began to pass their own guilt back on to the workers. Their-apparent satis- faction with a modest improvement became an argument for reconciliation with the bourgeoisie and also for blaming the workers in open or disguised ways for their apathy, inactivity and acceptance of the society.22, Bell gives this a catchy but false label. For some, however, it has been the occasion for seeking substitutes for working-class action. Echoing the ‘new left’, Bell sees the essential problems as being cultural and not political—‘the problem of radical thought today is to reconsider the relationship of culture to society’.23 No wonder that this trend has been completely unable to grip into the working class which simply knows that this just isn’t. true. As for the substitutes, human ingenuity has provided not a few. For some the substitute is found, paradoxically, in a reconciliation with Stalinism in its Khrushchevian form: the bureaucracy will build the exemplary society and undermine the old until it topples painlessly into a grave prepared by parliamentary majorities. The more romantic find their heroes in the rebel leaders like Castro. Perhaps most members of the intelli- gentsia today, temporarily at peace with their time, do accord with Bell’s picture: ‘acceptance of the Welfare State; the desirability of decentralised power; a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism’.24 Unfortunately for them the crisis of capitalism cannot be halted by clever books. In the age of the bomb the Welfare State becomes the Warfare State in which ‘decentralised power’ gives way to ever-increasing centralisation and militarisa- tion. The ‘mixed economy’ is a polite name for the domination by the monopolies both in the economy and in the state. As for ‘political pluralism’ it becomes no more than a polite fig-leaf to conceal the nakedness of the rule of capital now needing, for its survival, the supersession of the old-style political institutions of ‘bourgeois democracy’ by the strong state of which the Fifth French Republic provides the prototype. Events are confirming the Marxist analysis and point the need for the emergence of working-class parties under Marxist leadership. 22. ‘The irony ... for those who seek “causes” is that the workers, whose grievances were once the driving energy for social change, are more satisfied with the society than the intellectuals,’ ibid., p. 399. 23. Ibid., p. 313. 24. Ibid., p. 397.

[p041] 158 An old chestnut