26
By filling the ranks of the “tertiary sector” of the modern economy, intellectuals turn into a social group with its own interests, the most important of which calls for the increase in the number and prestige of white-collar jobs—an objective best promoted by centralization and bureaucratization. Their interests further require untrammeled freedom of speech, and intellectuals, even while helping put in power regimes which suppress liberties, have always and everywhere opposed restraints on free expression: they often are the first victims of their own triumphs.
Paradoxically, therefore, capitalism and democracy, while enhancing the role of intellectuals, also increase their discontent. Their status in a capitalist society is far beneath that of politicians and businessmen, whom they scorn as amateurs in the art of social management. They envy their wealth, authority, and prestige. In some respects it was easier for intellectuals to accommodate to pre-modern society, in which status was fixed by tradition and law, than to the fluctuating world of capitalism and democracy, in which they feel humiliated by lack of money and status: Ludwig von Mises thought that intellectuals gravitate to anti-capitalist philosophies “in order to render inaudible the inner voice that tells them that their failure is entirely their own fault.”27
As previously pointed out, intellectuals can avoid these humiliations and rise to the top only under one condition: if society becomes “rationalized”—that is, intellectualized—and “reason” replaces the free play of economic and political forces. This means socialism. The main enemy of the socialists, in their peaceful (“Utopian”) as well as violent (revolutionary) guise, has always been “spontaneity,” by which is meant laissez-faire in its economic as well as political manifestations. The call for the abolition of private property in the means of production on behalf of “society,” common to all socialist programs, makes it theoretically possible to rationalize the production of goods and to equalize their distribution. It also happens to place those who claim to know what is “rational”—intellectuals—in a commanding position. As in the case of other class movements, interest and ideology coincide: just as the bourgeoisie’s demands for the abolition of restraints on manufacture and trade in the name of public welfare served its own interests, so the radical intellectuals’ call for the nationalization of manufacture and trade, advanced for the sake of the masses, happens to work to its own advantage.
The anarchist leader, and Marx’s contemporary, Michael Bakunin, was the first to note this coincidence and insist that behind the intellectuals’ yearning for socialism lay ordinary class interests. He opposed Marx’s vision of the socialist state on the grounds that it would result in Communist domination of the masses:
According to Mr. Marx, the people should not only not abolish [the state], but, on the contrary, fortify and strengthen it, and in this form turn it over to the full disposal of their benefactors, guardians, and teachers, the chiefs of the Communist Party—in other words, to Mr. Marx and his friends, who will then proceed to liberate [them] in their own fashion. They will concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people are in need of strong guardianship. They will create a central state bank, which will concentrate in its hands all commercial-industrial, agricultural, and even scientific production. They will divide the mass of the people into two armies, the industrial and the agricultural, under the direct command of state engineers, who will form the new privileged political-scientific class.
28
Another anarchist, the Pole Jan Machajski, depicted socialism as an ideology formulated in the interest of the intelligentsia, “an emergent privileged class,” whose capital consisted of higher education. In a socialist state they would achieve dominance by replacing the old class of capitalists as administrators and experts. “Scientific socialism” promises the “slaves of bourgeois society happiness after they are dead: it guarantees the socialist paradise to their descendants.”*
This was not a message likely to appeal to intellectuals. And so it was no accident that Marx defeated Bakunin and had him expelled from the First International, and that in the modern world anarchism is but a faint shadow of socialism. Historical experience indicates that any movement that questions the ideology and interests of intellectuals dooms itself to defeat, and that any intellectual who challenges his class condemns himself to obscurity.
Socialism is commonly thought of as a theory which aims at a fairer distribution of wealth for the ultimate purpose of creating a free and just society. Indisputably this is the stated program of socialists. But behind this program lurks an even more ambitious goal, which is creating a new type of human being. The underlying premise is the idea of Helvétius that by establishing an environment which makes social behavior a natural instinct, socialism will enable man to realize his potential to the fullest. This, in turn, will make it possible, ultimately, to dispense with the state and the compulsion which is said to be its principal attribute. All socialist doctrines, from the most moderate to the most extreme, assume that human beings are infinitely malleable because their personality is the product of the economic environment: a change in that environment must, therefore, alter them as well as their behavior.
Marx pursued philosophical studies mainly in his youth. When, as a twenty-six-year-old émigré in Paris, he immersed himself in philosophy, he at once grasped the political implications of the ideas of Helvétius and his French contemporaries. In The Holy Family (1844–45), the book which marked his and Engels’s break with idealistic radicalism, he took his philosophical and psychological premises directly from Locke and Helvétius: “The whole development of man …,” he wrote, “depends on education and environment.”
If man draws all his knowledge, sensations, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, the empirical world must be arranged so that in it man experiences and gets used to what is really human.… If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human.
29
This, the locus classicus of Marxist philosophy, justifies a total change in the way society is organized—that is, revolution. According to this way of thinking, which indeed inexorably flows from the philosophical premises formulated by Locke and Helvétius, man and society do not come into existence by a natural process but are “made.” This “radical behaviorism,” as it has been called, inspired Marx in 1845 to coin what is probably his most celebrated aphorism: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.”30 Of course, the moment a thinker begins to conceive his mission to be not “only” observing the world and adapting to it, but changing it, he ceases to be a philosopher and turns into a politician with his own political agenda and interests.
Now, the world can conceivably be “changed” gradually, by means of education and legislation. And such a gradual change is, indeed, what all intellectuals would advocate if their exclusive concern were with improving the human condition, since evolution allows for trial and error, the only proven road to progress. But many of those who want to change the world regard human discontent as something not to be remedied but exploited. Exploitation of resentment, not its satisfaction, has been at the center of socialist politics since the 1840s: it is what distinguished the self-styled “scientific” socialists from their “Utopian” forerunners. This attitude has led to the emergence of what Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu called in 1902, in a remarkably prescient book, the “politics of hatred.” Socialism, he noted, elevates “hatred to the heights of principle,” sharing with its mortal enemies, nationalism and anti-Semitism, the need “chirurgically” to isolate and destroy the alleged enemy.31 Committed radicals fear reform because it deprives them of leverage and establishes the ruling elite more solidly in power: they prefer the most savage repression. The slogan of Russian revolutionaries—“chem khuzhe, tern luchshe” (“the worse, the better”)—spelled out this kind of thinking.
There are, of course, many varieties of socialists,
from the most democratic and humane to the most despotic and cruel, but they differ over means, not ends. In tracing the attitude of Russian and foreign socialists toward the brutal experiments of the Bolsheviks, we will have occasion to see their inconsistencies: revulsion at Bolshevik atrocities combined with admiration for their undeviating commitment to the common cause and support for them whenever they were threatened. As we will show, the Bolsheviks could neither have seized power nor have kept it were it not for the support, active and passive, given them by the democratic, nonviolent socialists.
We have it on the authority of Leon Trotsky that the architects of the October 1917 coup d’état looked far beyond correcting the inequities of capitalism. Describing the future in the early 1920s, he predicted:
Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral reefs, but it will be built consciously, it will be tested by thought, it will be directed and corrected. Having ceased to be spontaneous, life will cease to be stagnant.
Having dismissed all of human history until October 1917 as an era of “stagnancy,” Trotsky proceeded to depict the human being whom the new regime would create:
Man will, at last, begin to harmonize himself in earnest.… He will want to master first the semi-conscious and then also the unconscious processes of his own organism: breathing, the circulation of blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within the necessary limits, will subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiological life will become collectively experimental. The human species, the sluggish
Homo sapiens
, will once again enter the state of radical reconstruction and will become in its own hands the object of the most complex methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training.… Man will make it his goal to master his own emotions, to elevate his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent … to create a higher sociobiological type, a superman, if you will.… Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser, subtler. His body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more melodious. The forms of life will acquire a dynamic theatricality. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, Goethe, Marx. And beyond this ridge, other peaks will emerge.
32
These reflections, not of an adolescent daydreamer but of the organizer of Bolshevik victories in October 1917 and in the Civil War, provide an insight into the psyche of those who made the greatest revolution of modern times. They and those who emulated them aimed at nothing less than reenacting the Sixth Day of Creation and perfecting its flawed product: man was to remake himself “with his own hands.” We can now understand what Nicholas Chernyshevskii, a prominent Russian radical of the 1860s and a major influence on Lenin, had in mind when he defined his “anthropomorphic principle” to mean “Homo homini deus” (“Man is god to man”).
The Russian intelligentsia made its appearance in the 1860s in connection with the Great Reforms of Alexander II. After its humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, the tsarist government decided it had to activate Russian society and involve it more in public life. But society proved difficult to stir: “The country, patiently trained to inertia, lost all power of initiative and when … informed that it was expected to act for itself, to settle its own local affairs, scarcely knew how to respond to the invitation, having lost the habit of action, lost interest in public life, especially in the provinces.”33 This inertia gave Russian intellectuals the opportunity to step forward as spokesmen for society, which in any event had no opportunities to express itself through elections.
Several policies which the government initiated at this time created favorable conditions for the growth of the intelligentsia. Censorship was eased. During the preceding reign of Nicholas I, it had attained a level of mindless severity which made it increasingly difficult to communicate by means of the printed word. Under the new reign, preliminary censorship was abolished and the rules governing publication sufficiently relaxed to permit the spread of the most radical ideas by means of a coded (“Aesopian”) language. The periodical press became the principal vehicle through which opinion-makers in Moscow and St. Petersburg influenced thinking in the provinces. The Russian press in the second half of the nineteenth century had surprising latitude to criticize the authorities: by 1900, most dailies and monthlies upheld oppositional views.
In 1863, universities received autonomy, which made their faculties self-governing. Admission to the institutions of higher learning was opened to commoners, who under Nicholas I had been virtually excluded. They quickly turned into centers of political ferment. A high proportion of the Russian intelligentsia became radicalized during their student years.
The introduction in 1864–1870 of organs of self-government—the zemstva and Municipal Councils—offered intellectuals opportunities for professional public employment. Together with rural schoolteachers, agronomists, physicians, statisticians, and other experts hired by the zemstva, known collectively as the “Third Element,” they formed an active body with a radical, if nonrevolutionary, bent which gave the tsarist bureaucracy cause for much anxiety.34 Professional revolutionaries scorned this kind of work on the grounds that it helped to solidify the existing regime. The elected zemstvo deputies, on the other hand, held liberal or liberal-conservative views.
Lastly, the growth of the Russian economy created a demand for professional specialists of all sorts: lawyers, engineers, scientists, managers. Independent of the government, these experts formed professional associations or “unions” (soiuzy), which were in varying degrees permeated with an anti-autocratic, pro-Western spirit. As we have seen, in 1900–5 these associations played a major role in unleashing revolutionary unrest.
Thus, between 1860 and 1900, one precondition for the emergence of an intelligentsia was met: opportunities emerged for economic independence from the government along with the instruments for the spread of unconventional ideas. Under these favorable conditions, an ideology binding the intelligentsia into a cohesive group was not slow to emerge.
The Russian intelligentsia was prone to the wildest excesses of thought, to bickering and theoretical hair-splitting, but these quarrels should not obscure the fact that its members held a body of philosophical ideas in common. These ideas were in no wise original: in nearly all cases they were adopted from the Enlightenment and brought up to date in the light of modern science. From the eighteenth-century French materialists and their nineteenth-century German followers, Russian intellectuals adopted the “monistic” conception of man as a creature made up exclusively of material substances in which there was no room for a “soul.” Ideas which failed to meet materialist criteria, beginning with God, were treated as figments of the imagination. Applying the utilitarian principle, the usual corollary of materialism, they rejected customs and institutions that did not satisfy the criterion of bringing the “greatest happiness to the greatest number.” The early exponents of this ideology in Russia were called “nihilists,” a term often misunderstood to mean that they believed in nothing; in fact, they had very strong beliefs but held nothing sacred and insisted on the universal validity of materialism and utilitarianism.
Positivism, the doctrine of August Comte, influenced Russian intellectuals in two ways. As a methodology for the study of human society (for which Comte coined the word “sociology”), it reinforced materialism and utilitarianism in that it taught that human behavior follows laws, which, if studied scientifically, make it fully predictable. Mankind can be scientifically managed with the help of the science of society, or sociology, which is to society what physics is to inert matter and energy and biology to living organisms. This proposition gained the status of an axiom in Russian intelligentsia circles from the 1860s onward. Positivism also exerted a more short-lived influence with its theory of progress as the advance of enlightenment, revealed in the gradual displacement of “theological” and “metaphysical” modes of thought by the scientific or “positivistic” one.
Materialism, utilitaria
nism, and positivism became the ideology of the Russian intelligentsia and the test which determined qualifications for membership. No one who believed in God and the immortality of the soul, no matter how otherwise “enlightened” and “progressive,” could lay claim to being an intelligent. Nor was there place in the intelligentsia for those who allowed accident a role in human affairs or believed either in the immutability of “human nature” or in transcendental moral values. Russian intellectual history is replete with examples of intelligenty who, having developed doubts about one or more aspects of this ideology, suffered expulsion from its ranks. The “dry terror” which Cochin found in pre-revolutionary France was much in evidence in pre-revolutionary Russia: here, too, defamation of deviants and outsiders served to preserve group cohesion. Inasmuch as the survival of the intelligentsia depended on its members adhering to an ideological consensus, the consensus was ruthlessly enforced. This made the intelligentsia incapable of adjusting to changing reality, causing Peter Struve to describe it as “perhaps the most conservative breed of human beings in the world.”35
The intelligentsia had tenuous relations with the creators of Russian culture—the novelists, poets, and artists. The latter intensely disliked attempts of political activists to impose restraints on their work. These restraints were much more onerous in their way than the government’s official censorship: for while the government exercised negative censorship, forbidding certain themes, the intelligentsia practiced it in a positive form by demanding that art and literature serve the cause of social progress, as they defined it. Relations between the two groups worsened further in the 1890s when Russia came under the influence of Modernist art and literature with their commitment to “art for art’s sake.” The control that radical intellectuals sought to exercise over culture, to have it serve utilitarian rather than aesthetic goals, had little effect on genuine talent: no Russian writer or artist of distinction submitted to this kind of tyranny. Its main effect was to cut off the intelligentsia from the most vital sources of contemporary culture. Once in a while the simmering conflict became explicit, as when Chekhov confessed to a friend in what for him was an unusual outburst of anger:
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