Les Intellectuels devant le socialisme
Intellectuels Before Socialism
Hubert Lagardelle
Hubert Lagardelle — The Intellectuals before Socialism
…And it is precisely because it is connected to this still vaster problem, to which I have alluded, of the evolution of the middle classes, and because this vaster problem concerns France above all — the typical country of the petty bourgeoisie — that the question has taken on here, and under a general form it has assumed nowhere else. You feel clearly — and we shall return at length to this point — that wherever there exists a numerous and organised proletariat, this question could not have appeared with such clarity, because everywhere the socialist movement has been powerful enough to preserve its purity as the educated class sent it new recruits. There have been only particular cases to settle, such as the fixing of salaries attributed to intellectuals in the German party, and the problem has not had to take on the character of a general problem. On the contrary, in France, the slowness of industrial evolution, the weak degree of concentration of the working class, the divisions of the socialist party, the rapid development of the intellectual class, have caused the two movements to meet at a moment when socialism was not ready to undergo without danger the contact of the intellectuals.
You see, then, comrades, in what sense new — because it is total — form the question of the role of intellectuals in socialism poses itself to us. You realise also that our researches, by their very novelty, run the risk of remaining incomplete, and perhaps fruitless. We shall try at least to disengage, if we can, the terms of the problem.
We shall consider first, before the particular situation that concerns France, the general position of the question. I mean that we shall try to determine what is properly to be understood by socialism and by intellectuals, to follow separately the evolution of these two social factors, and to search out the causes and the results of their meeting.
It is necessary to recall briefly the specific characteristics of the socialist movement, in order then to be able to determine the points of contact between socialism and the intellectuals.
One may say that, observed historically, socialism appears as a movement of two degrees: a workers’ movement, at the first degree; a human movement, at the second degree. What is to be understood by this?
It is, at the first degree, a workers’ movement. The proletariat carries the socialist movement, because the proletariat is, before the socialist movement, the product of industrial evolution and of historical development. The future of the working class is indeed confounded with the progress of the economy: there is no other class that is in the direction of history.
The proletariat is also the only class that finds itself in irreducible opposition of interests with capitalist society. All the other suffering classes can — more or less effectively — come to terms with the present social order: it is organically impossible for the working class to have a stable situation and a comfortable place within it. The proletariat, considered as a class, is constitutively condemned, within the framework of the capitalist regime, to retain its double role as a producing class and an exploited class, without possibility of emancipation. Some of its members can individually free themselves: the whole is riveted to the chain. Social transformation alone can liberate it — a transformation that will substitute collective property for individual property in the means of labour. This is the meaning of the class struggle. You recall the words of Marx: it is the bad side of history that makes history. Only the classes oppressed by a given regime can replace it with a superior regime. This is why, in the present society, the proletariat alone is in a permanent state of revolutionary grace.
It is also the only organic force capable of elaborating the new order. If the working class, the class of producers, pursues in the end the common appropriation of the instruments of production — the proposed goal of the socialist movement — in the meantime it prepares itself for its future action. It works and struggles to modify in its favour the existing economic, juridical, and political relations; it organises itself in groupings of a very particular character; and it creates new institutions that are proper to it. The proletariat tends more and more, by this very fact, to differentiate itself from the present regime, and to form a State within the capitalist State, a new world within the bourgeois world. It is because it slowly develops within itself a new organisation, almost independent of the existing organisation and opposed to it; it is because within it there are little by little created superior forms of life, autonomous economic institutions, appropriate and adequate juridical and moral systems — that it makes possible the formation of the socialist order. The working class carries within it the new economic man and the new moral man.
This is the sense in which the workers’ movement is the backbone of the socialist movement. It is historically incumbent upon it to realise the end pursued: it alone has a major interest in it, and it alone is capable of it. It is at once the culmination of history and the future of history.
I have wished to recall that modern socialism is above all a proletarian movement, because this fact is often misunderstood. Socialism is sometimes considered as the product of philosophical or ideological conceptions — or again as the progressive development of State institutions. This is a double error. Let us insist all the more upon this fact, since it is travestied: that socialism ruins the existing systems of ideas and institutions, because it is essentially constituted by a body of ideas, feelings, and institutions that are proper to the working class and that are opposed to everything that exists.
The socialist movement is, at the second degree, a human movement. Socialism is justified not only by historical necessities, but also by moral necessities and obligations. With and through the working class, it will emancipate humanity. The end of classes will be the end of class struggles. By its particular institutions, the proletariat will assure the full development of morality and justice.
And in the meantime, it is, in the present, the authorised representative of civilisation, of culture, the born defender of the weak and the oppressed. The old International had already proclaimed it: its traditions of justice are not dead. In France, you know with what brilliance the majority of socialists, supported by international socialism, intervened in the Dreyfus Affair to protect from the attacks of reaction the conquests of republican democracy and to safeguard the essential rights of the person. In Germany, you have seen with what force the social democracy rose up not long ago to protect the liberty of art and science threatened by the Heinze law, and to prevent, as Jaurès said, the fatherland of Goethe from becoming the fatherland of Attila. In Italy, you have not forgotten with what energy the socialists recalled, by the most tireless of parliamentary obstructions, the ruling bourgeoisie to respect for the constitution, at the same time as they pursued in the country those two scourges, the camorra and the mafia.
It is by such an attitude that socialism draws after it all the consciences that are revolted by the disorder, the ugliness, and the injustice of the capitalist regime: more and more, the working class attracts into its circle of social transformation the healthy elements of the bourgeois order.
It has also with it all the minds that, rising above class interests, observe the socialist orientation of history and the scientific value of our affirmations. All those who have some concern to understand their time, all those who truly wish to do their task as men and to collaborate with the movement of facts, come to socialism, and socialism tears them away from the capitalist world.
What is meant by intellectuals? It is a vague expression, whose content is difficult to specify, because it applies to disparate categories of individuals that do not admit of a common definition. One understands first by this expression all people who have a somewhat developed culture, who have, if you will, received a secondary or higher education, and above all those who exercise the liberal professions: lawyers, judges, doctors, engineers, professors, schoolteachers, functionaries, journalists, writers, etc. — One includes next the art workers, the office employees, etc. — in a word, all those whose practical activity is of a specially cerebral order: it is in this sense that the term intellectual is opposed to the term manual.
You know that this distinction instituted between manual labour and intellectual labour is founded neither physiologically nor always experimentally. In manual labour, all intellectual effort does not disappear — and how many labours called intellectual are scarcely so! But this differentiation is historically given to us by the development of modern production. Marx marked this process: Large-scale mechanical industry, he says, activates the separation between manual labour and the intellectual powers of production, which it transforms into powers of capital over labour. This separation of workers into intellectuals and manuals has, therefore, a social value that imposes itself upon us. And presently we shall find it again, as Sorel has judiciously observed in his Socialist Future of the Syndicates, at the base of the contemporary hierarchy.
You can therefore perceive from now on that the dominant characteristic of the intellectuals is the heterogeneity of the groupings into which they are subdivided. The lawyer and the engineer, the doctor and the professor, the chemist and the journalist have professional interests and not class interests. Kautsky, in the study you know on Socialism and the Liberal Careers, published in French in 1895 by the Devenir social, has very justly made this observation. The intellectuals form very different categories, separate coteries, and are united in these subdivisions only by a sort of corporative bond. And even in each of these categories, the professional interests of individuals are far from being similar. The situation of a poor journalist at 150 or 200 francs a month has nothing in common with the situation of an editor-in-chief at 1,000 or 2,000 francs in monthly salary. You can thus see how inexact it is to speak, in the strictly social sense of the word, of a class of intellectuals. A class is a category of individuals united by more or less homogeneous economic and moral interests. What characterises a class is that the internal solidarity of its members has a permanent basis, at once economic and moral. One can say: the class of landed proprietors, the class of capitalists, the class of proletarians, because these social categories rest upon determinate economic phenomena and constant interests: rent and the increase of rent, profit and the augmentation of profit, wages and the raising of wages. Nothing similar on the side of the intellectuals: they do not form a bloc, and their struggles are not common. They do not constitute a class for themselves, but they exist as a function of the other classes. They attach themselves, they aggregate themselves to them, they sustain their antagonisms, they defend their interests. The intellectuals play only a role of auxiliaries. It is for this reason that they are united by no effective bond of solidarity, but that there exists on the contrary among them, more furiously than in any other class, a jealous competition, a ferocious rivalry, a spirit of intrigue, a race for positions. So it is only by an abuse of words that one says: the class of intellectuals. Sub-class would be more appropriate, or better, outside-class.
This heterogeneity of composition and of interests gives to the class of intellectuals an excessive instability. It is a floating class. It oscillates between the other classes, it is in perpetual swirling, and in this it has indeed all the characteristics of the middle classes. Its members are thrown now toward the proletariat, now toward the bourgeoisie. Their situation is particularly mobile.
How has this class of intellectuals developed? What has been its historical role? What exactly is its present situation? It is to these questions that we must now respond.
I do not need to insist upon the decisive role played by ideology in history. I do not wish to begin again before you a debate that could last a long time. Engels, in his famous letters on historical materialism, insisted upon it sufficiently for all those who today claim more or less to follow Marxism to recognise it fully with him. The ideological systems, insofar as they translate economic and social realities, are a powerful motor of the historical movement. No one contests the influence of the juridical and moral systems that have successively been the work of the monks of the Church in the Middle Ages, of the jurists of the monarchy, of the ideologues of the French Revolution.
The influence of ideology is found everywhere: it is only the condition of the intellectuals that has changed. Aristocratic and privileged formerly, the educated class has seen its independence diminish as the capitalist mode of production has developed. It is easy to follow this evolution.
At the moment when the ascending bourgeoisie is in the process of ruining the old social frameworks, and when it is preparing its political advent, the intellectuals are not attached in society to a special function, but linked to its general development. Having no positive economic interests, finding themselves above and outside social conflicts, separated from the bourgeois class by a crowd of intermediaries, they defend the general interests of society. In the struggle waged against the existing forces, they represent the critical spirit. Their essential role is to ruin the authority that is at the base of the old regime. They surpass by thought the historical moment in which they find themselves, without taking account of the traditional or new forms of appropriation: they have a presentiment of the historical future, and by that alone they find themselves singularly favouring the triumph of the bourgeoisie.
But once the bourgeois class has conquered its situation, antagonisms become accentuated between the newly triumphant class and what we may call the company of intellectuals: the intermediaries that separated them being eliminated by historical evolution, the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals are placed face to face. Relations change, and as the oppositions between capital and labour become accentuated, the intellectual class becomes more and more dependent upon the bourgeois class. Rid of its other preoccupations, the bourgeoisie concentrates entirely upon these class oppositions and seeks to overcome them to its own profit. It had needed the educated class to establish its domination; it needs it to maintain its domination. To a certain extent, it relieves itself of the care of thinking upon this class, and it develops it prodigiously. Technical capacities of all sorts — engineers, chemists, agronomists, etc. — are created in a continuous stream, according to the growing demands of industrial evolution. The State develops, public and private administration grows, teaching is organised, journalism extends: so many causes of a prodigious evocation of intellectual forces, which is soon translated by a veritable overproduction.
This overproduction of capacities brings about a fall in wages: salaries or stipends. The number of the unoccupied, the déclassés, the failures, the starvelings increases unceasingly; competition among them becomes murderous. Then begins to form what is somewhat improperly called the intellectual proletariat. You recall that we noted above that the character of the proletarian is to be fatally bound, by the very conditions of his class, to his precarious and certainly miserable situation, without the possibility of escaping it to settle permanently in bourgeois society. The unoccupied of the intellectual class, for their part, are at first proletarians only in that they are unemployed. What characterises them in this respect and distinguishes them from true proletarians is that they are only momentarily in this situation: at least they have, or can have, the hope of rising again.
It is true that the bourgeois class increases without interruption the production of technical capacities, so that the intellectual proletariat tends more and more to merit its name, because it is formed more and more in the condition of a stable class. The lower strata of the intellectuals descend to a position close to that of the proletarians. Salaries diminish, stipends fall to a level of misery. It is no longer only when they are not working that these intellectuals are proletarians; it is also — more and more — when they are working.
But whence comes this new class, which the economic, political, and administrative demands of social life augment unceasingly? While growing by self-recruitment, it comes above all from the petty bourgeoisie and from peasant milieux. This is a phenomenon that Kautsky has very clearly indicated in the article I recalled to you: A new and very numerous class is being formed, increasing without interruption, and whose growth can, in certain circumstances, compensate for the losses that the decline of small industry and small commerce cause the middle class to suffer. You know how much peasants and petty bourgeois push their sons toward small positions — mediocre but stable. And this cause coming to join the one we have already indicated, you see with what rapidity the class of intellectuals develops.
If we try, therefore, to situate the intellectual class in the system of capitalist production, we realise that it is not linked directly to the division of society into classes, but rather to the system itself, considered in its totality. It is only indirectly, as a result of economic development, that it tends more and more to take its place in the general framework of classes.
This situation has given it a particular psychology. And it is this psychology, common to most intellectuals, that above all permits them to be united in the same category. The educated class, the thinking class, by the sole fact that it receives a privileged education and a superior instruction, easily imagines that it is independent of social conflicts, that it alone represents the general interest of society, that it constitutes an intellectual aristocracy. Most intellectuals more or less despise manual workers and believe themselves without difficulty the most apt to understand everything, the most capable of governing everything, the most worthy of directing everything. Labour to the workers, power to the cultivated! This is how they understand the social hierarchy. Is it not a French publicist, M. Henry Bérenger, who, in a book as symptomatic as it is pretentious — The Intellectual Aristocracy — has put forward the candidacy of the intellectuals for the dictatorship of the world?
They have for them, to some extent, tradition. The State has been until now more or less in their hands. They have governed on behalf of other classes, but they have governed. Public power belongs, in sum, to the professionals of politics. They are formidable parasites, who put the nation under regular exploitation. The example is inviting!
But let us leave provisionally these psychological considerations. We have tried to determine the two terms of the problem we have set ourselves: we know what we understand by socialism and by intellectuals. We know the evolution of these two social factors. How do they meet, and what results from their combination? It is easy to understand how, at a given moment, the intellectuals were going to penetrate into socialism. The double character of our movement — its proletarian character and its character at once idealist and scientific — were the two natural outlets through which they were bound to pass.
A part of the intellectual proletariat has come to the socialist movement because it is proletariat. It is certain that the technicians — engineers, chemists, agronomists — who, on the market, sell at a low price their intellectual labour power, and also who are in direct contact with the industrial milieu and the working class, have been able to arrive, to a certain extent, at feeling the community of interests that attaches them more and more to the proletariat. Class consciousness must awaken in them without difficulty, because practical life, the real conditions of modern production, are the hard school where they are raised. They can recognise themselves as the brothers in misery of manual workers, because their functions in the work of production are of the same order, if not of the same degree, and because it is the same economic mechanism that grinds them both. The same real solidarity binds them in the struggle against the capitalist class and in the pursuit of the common appropriation of the instruments of labour. They form the healthy part of the intellectual proletariat.
Beside them is the rabble of the unemployed graduates, the déclassés, the failures, the disappointed careerists, all those whom bourgeois society has rejected, and who throw themselves toward the new movement because it is full of adventures and the unforeseen, because it is the future, the rising force of tomorrow. These bring with them, bring within them, not the slightest particle of class consciousness: they come to seek in socialism what they could not find elsewhere — positions, places, jobs. They drag through our movement their mentality, little proletarian and little socialist, which they cannot, which they do not try to shed: they have not lost the vast hopes of domination that privileged education, bourgeois instruction, competitive emulation had given rise to in them. Such as the capitalist world has vomited them forth, such also the socialist movement receives them. They are nothing but waste.
If class consciousness or personal interest pushes into socialism the part of the intellectuals that tends to become more and more proletarianised, other motives for action determine other categories of intellectuals to come to the movement of social transformation.
Sentimentalism, pity for the exploited, charity, sympathy, idealism, the feeling or the passion for justice, all the reasons, all the motives of a moral order awaken in the consciousness of many vague sympathies or precise attachments to the socialist proletariat. They wish, without having well understood the real scope of our movement, to give it the strength of their adhesion. In the ranks of the official bourgeoisie, these sympathisers with socialism grow in number every day.
Sport, fashion have also brought recruits to the socialist movement. It is a new, curious movement that carries everyone along: one rushes to it!
The diseased brains, the unrecognised inventors, the discoverers of plans for society, the social pharmacists, the mystics, all those whom the prodigious disorder of our society troubles — all feel themselves more or less attracted toward a movement that is to change the world!
There is on this subject a penetrating page of Engels: in his Contributions to the History of Primitive Christianity, he recalls how much, in this respect, the history of this primitive Christianity presents resemblances with the modern workers’ movement. Allow me to reread it to you: “And just as toward the workers’ party of all countries there flow all the elements having nothing more to hope for from the official world, or who are burnt out there — such as the opponents of vaccination, the vegetarians, the anti-vivisectionists, the partisans of the simples method, the preachers of dissenting congregations whose flocks have taken flight, the authors of new theories on the origin of the world, the unfortunate or failed inventors, the victims of real or imaginary injustices, honest imbeciles and dishonest impostors — so it was among the Christians. All the elements that the process of dissolution of the old world had set free were attracted, one after another, into the circle of attraction of Christianity, the unique element that resisted this dissolution.”
It is thus that the socialist movement carries everything with it — dross and refuse.
But beside these troubled or uncertain elements, the educated class has furnished and furnishes to socialism its purest intellectual forces. Science and the proletariat interpenetrate. The one and the other, by different paths, arrive at the same conclusions. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx had already observed that the proletariat absorbs into itself that part of the bourgeois ideologues who have arrived at the theoretical intelligence of the historical movement. Through scientific thought are found again all the affirmations that have naturally issued from the workers’ movement. The conceptions that the material conditions of life introduce into proletarian consciousnesses are the same as those that observation and research give rise to in scientific minds. The workers, because they suffer from it, the socialist thinkers, because they discover it, arrive at an equally clear perception of modern social evolution.
The value of the adhesion of such intellectual elements to the workers’ movement is undeniable. No doubt the example of Marx, of Engels, of Lassalle is not repeated every day. Yet, following them, numerous and brilliant minds have come to socialism who, though they may not have their amplitude, have at least rendered to socialist thought the most eminent services. The conquest of these elite intellectuals is in a sense the redemption of the danger of careerism.
It goes without saying that these diverse motives and these diverse reasons for adhering to socialism are mingled in reality. An intellectual proletarian may have been determined by scientific motives, and it is possible that personal interest or sentimentalism or fashion or consciousness of historical evolution may meet in the same individual. The differentiation of motives that we have attempted has had the utility of facilitating psychological analysis and of determining more exactly what are the complex elements that the class of intellectuals furnishes to socialism.
These complex elements being given, what role do they play in the organisation and in the direction of the socialist movement? This is the problem we have set ourselves.
It is proper to consider, in order to resolve it, the diverse phases of socialist evolution. According to the moments, according to the degree of force and cohesion of the movement and of the organisation, this role has varied.
Let us take the contemporary socialist movement at the moment when it is being formed, when it is making its first passage from utopia to science, when it is abandoning its aprioristic conceptions to attain to an ever more exact knowledge of the real conditions of historical development. At this initial phase, which we may place before and around 1848, the utopian manner of seeing still strongly subsists. The organisation of the working class is scarcely beginning, the evolution of capitalist society is imperfectly known, and purely ideological constructions dominate the movement. One witnesses this flowering of communist systems; plans for society abound; the imagination of social reformers gives itself free rein. All these theoreticians come from the intellectual class, and although most are men of genius, they nonetheless bring to the working class systems fabricated by them outside of it.
I do not wish to diminish any of these creators of systems, but their common characteristic is that all place themselves at a subjective point of view to reconstruct the world. Their point of view is supra-social. They represent society to themselves as an external object, which it is possible to modify according to a prior plan or to appropriate to a preconceived end.
These socialists who come from the educated class act under diverse impulses. The Saint-Simonians, for example, as Sorel has justly observed, care little for the autonomous development of the working classes. They simply propose a new social hierarchy founded on the supposed superiority of intellectual capacities, which are to furnish the directors and functionaries of the new order of things. Others are simply driven to despair by social inequalities, vow a mortal hatred to the bourgeois regime: they announce the Blanquists. Still others, gentler and more sentimental, recall our present-day Fabians. There are also those who, weary of all authority, revolt, and constitute the precursors of anarchy. But all these members of the intellectual class tend to subordinate to their personal theory the movement of social transformation. It is from outside that communist or other theories come to the working class. The testimony of the former worker and senator Corbon, whatever reservations one may make, is precious on this subject. In his very curious book, The Secret of the People of Paris (1865), he notes this decisive fact that under the July Monarchy, it was from the bourgeoisie that most of the propagators of communism came: “I must observe,” he says, “that all these [communist] tendencies were far from being the fruit of the popular spirit, and that it is very doubtful whether they would have asserted themselves with any energy in the absence of excitations coming from outside. I knew the communist world fairly well; I was able to follow the thread of the idea; I observed closely the work of initiation and propaganda; and I shall be believed when I say that neither the initiators nor the propagandists were of the working class.”
The role of the ideologues in the first phase of the contemporary socialist movement has therefore been to furnish it with systems and theories, which have not been without influence on its development. They have moreover directed against the capitalist regime the most decisive of criticisms. And just as, in the preceding period, their predecessors had battered in breach the principle of authority, and thus prepared the ascension of the bourgeois class, so they have ruined the principle of property, and thus cleared the way upon which the proletariat was to engage itself.
This phase lasted fairly long, but the movement ended by surpassing it — among us, only well after the Commune — and the phase that succeeds it is characterised by the beginning of socialist organisation and of the constitution of a distinct political class party. Socialism becomes a growing force; toward it turn numerous hopes; the intellectual proletariat is in process of formation; and it is then that one observes, throughout the duration of this second phase of an organisation that is seeking itself, at the same time as the coming of precious elements, the invasion of the déclassés of the bourgeoisie into socialism. Political struggle seems specially made for these intellectuals, for all these garrulous and noisy mediocrities, apt to throw dust in the eyes of the masses, capable of handling more or less well a dazzling abstract language, and ready to speak of everything without knowing anything. The penetration of socialists into Parliament, the conquest of municipalities, the creation of party newspapers: so many reasons for intellectuals in quest of a situation to throw themselves en masse into socialism. You know the famous phrase of Marx about all this intellectual proletariat, these “lawyers without briefs, these doctors without patients and without science, these billiard students, these commercial travellers and other business employees, and principally these journalists of the small press.”
The interests of all these intellectuals are thus found in contradiction with the interests of the working class. They need the extension of the political organism, of the machinery of the State, where they can find functions and sinecures. The proletariat, on the contrary, tends to develop its particular economic institutions, and the progress of State socialism, creating at its expense situations for intellectuals, goes in the opposite direction from its evolution.
What favours, moreover, the success of these latter intellectuals is that the movement, in this phase, is divided into rival fractions, at the head of which are found powerful chiefs. These chiefs need a clientele, and it is naturally these déclassé intellectuals who furnish it to them.
It must be said that usually the chiefs are singularly better than the parasites who form their train. Their high personal qualities, the radiance of their action, the power of their speech, their devotion to socialism ordinarily elevate them above the courtiers who make use of them just as much as they serve them.
These chiefs themselves are, not all, but most, intellectuals who wish to bend the movement to their own conception. They recall only rather distantly those we found in the first phase of socialism, for they are closer to the proletariat. But they place themselves little, however, at the point of view of the working class struggling as a class: they consider rather the proletariat as a convenient instrument for arriving at socialism. They do not have of the workers’ movement the conception I expounded to you above, and which results from the autonomous development of the proletarian class. They dream of establishing socialism by a more or less impersonal dictatorship, which would impose by force the particular conception they have of socialism.
You easily realise the result. The socialist movement tends to cut itself in two into contradictory categories of elements, and to reproduce the very subdivision of the classes of bourgeois society: at the top, an aristocracy of leaders, with particular interests and a special mentality; at the bottom, the working class, letting itself be more or less led — or developing itself in isolation in an autonomous fashion.
This opposition appears at first sight, and the consequences it produces are known to you. The leaders are in no way preoccupied with awakening the full consciousness of the proletariat. The theoreticians, who consider that the socialist movement is made to realise their own conception through the intermediary of the proletariat, find it useless to linger over a complete education and organisation of the working class. The mass has only to let itself be led by its chiefs and the conscious minority they have grouped around them: it must have confidence, and its happiness will be made by it, without it, or despite it. As for the simple politicians, they have less doctrinal preoccupations: they do not care to undergo control, wish to depend only on themselves, and are in quest of positions. Well-intentioned or self-interested, contempt for the mass is therefore, most of the time, at the bottom of the action of the intellectuals.
As for the working mass, a part of it accepts, during this second period, this domination by people who impress it by their language and by their audacity. It is Proudhon who, in his Political Capacity of the Working Classes — one of the finest bedside books of the proletariat — observed how difficult it is for the working class to rid itself of respect for so-called capacities: Those who were formerly its masters, he says, who have retained over it the privilege of the professions called liberal — to which it would be time to remove their name — always seem to it to be thirty centimetres taller than other men. That is just it! The skill in handling so-called general ideas — to the point that they no longer mean anything — the few formulas and the vague literary memories that are retailed with emphasis, all this is of a nature to create illusions in minds that have only professional competences limited to their milieu.
But at least what influence does the action of the intellectuals — and I speak of all, the politicians of adventure as well as the respectable theoreticians — exercise upon the working elements fully conscious of the movement? It provokes a reaction against the intellectuals in general, and against political action in particular. This is the origin of manuellism and of anti-parliamentary syndicalism.
Manuellism is the exaggeration of a feeling of legitimate distrust toward unscrupulous careerists or authoritarian chiefs. Its brutal form — exclusion of intellectuals from all representation of the party — is in no way defensible, without any doubt. But it must be admitted that, occurring at a moment of insufficient organisation when one cannot seriously control and lead the intellectuals, it has an incontestable foundation of truth.
The anti-parliamentarism of the syndicalists has the same origin. If it is directed against political action in general, it is because the special form they have before their eyes is defective: it neglects the mass, takes no account of the proletariat, and gives to a handful of men come from other classes, with mentalities in no way working-class and interests opposed to those of the proletariat, the direction of the movement. Here again, the reaction against political action — a reaction that moreover is not special to the working class, for it also occurs in other classes, and for the same reasons of lack of organisation — is evidently exaggerated, but it is well founded.
From all the observations that precede, note well that I do not draw a condemnation of the intellectuals. I do not contest that they are in this second period useful in some way to the movement. I indicate only their psychology and their role in this phase. It is evident, you understand, that if this period were to last too long, the danger would be grave. But happily it announces and produces a superior phase, which we are going to analyse.
To this third phase corresponds the organic form of the socialist movement, such as I tried to describe a few moments ago: an autonomous movement of the working class, arriving at full political and administrative capacity, and developing within itself new economic institutions and new juridical and moral systems.
It is the phase of the unitary organisation of socialism. A single organism encompasses all the most diverse elements. It is a vast collective grouping that leads itself, in the sense that it feels itself master of its destinies, and that it is capable of holding in hand its delegates and its representatives. The working class conducts itself like a free person, receiving its impulse only from itself.
A new phenomenon has occurred: the organised proletariat has drawn from its own milieu the capacities that have slowly been created there. By a sort of selection, the most capable, the most conscious workers have acquired a decisive importance and authority. They counterbalance the influence of the intellectuals and moderate it. These natural representatives of the working class form a new category: the intellectuals of the proletariat.
I do not claim, moreover, that these intellectuals of the proletariat, thus selected, are themselves less to be controlled than the intellectuals of the bourgeoisie. We know that sometimes the workers who emerge above their class have the mentalities of parvenus, and that they too can become despotic and authoritarian chiefs. But I mean simply that the sole fact of their appearance proves a degree of maturity and organisation of the working class sufficient for no sort of chiefs, taken from outside the proletariat or from within the proletariat, to be able to impose themselves upon it.
The division of labour is established naturally within the socialist organism. The intellectuals — theoreticians or politicians — cease to be dangerous and are no longer anything but useful. They have determinate tasks that are more specially proper to them — politics, for example — but they find themselves outside the properly working-class institutions. They are powerless to harm the collective grouping, because the latter would not permit it. It has a consciousness of its interests sufficient to make them respected. Recall what Anseele told us some months ago, in his luminous lecture on Cooperation and Socialism: “In Belgium, we have with us intellectuals full of talent. — Well, these intellectuals full of talent, enthusiasm, and sincere faith can, in our midst, only do good. And if they wished to do harm, the consciousness of the organised working class would prevent them in twenty-four hours’ time.” Everything is there. When there exists an organism capable of holding them in hand, the intellectuals render to socialism the greatest services. In what and how?
Every collective grouping creates a collective consciousness. What is called class consciousness is only the collective consciousness of this grouping with a proletarian base that constitutes the socialist organisation. The defence of interests common and particular to the working class, the protection against any modification imposed from outside upon the nature of the grouping — these are the guarantees that a good class consciousness gives. All the more so since the socialist grouping is or ought to be the most perfect of democratic groupings. It is the mass that has or ought to have the first and the last word. In this organism, the control of representatives or delegates is rigorous. The intellectuals are thus under the strict dependence of the workers’ movement, which they cannot corrupt. Journalists, they are in its pay; deputies, at its service; propagandists, at its orders.
In a solid organisation, consequently, the intellectuals to whom any function whatever falls are only the employees of the party. This is the constant practice of all strongly constituted organisations. See the German social democracy. “The intellectuals in Germany,” says Sorel very justly, “enter the socialist party as employees and not as chiefs.” And Kautsky, in the study I cited to you, cannot conceive otherwise the role of intellectuals in the movement: he observes that they are at the service of the party, and he finds it perfectly useless to pose the question we wish to resolve this evening.
It is thus that there appears in every organised party the role of intellectuals in the socialist party. As much as the working class must remain itself in its own economic institutions and preserve itself from all foreign intrusion, so much can it find in the intellectuals useful functionaries and precious auxiliaries on all the other terrains of its action. If there is danger, in a general way, that the intellectuals should carry their activity and their mentality into purely working-class organisations, if they are incompetent for everything that touches the economic life of the proletariat, at least they are capable of being journalists, propagandists, deputies. They are perfectly prepared for it by their education: it is their trade to write, to speak, to represent something, to put themselves at the service of a party. The whole problem consists, once again, in there being an organisation powerful enough to control and direct them. Their function is to be delegates, spokesmen, phonographs of the wishes and decisions of the proletarian movement. It matters little that their personal interest pushes them: they cannot harm the party, which conducts itself in full consciousness and maturity of class. Quite the contrary: as the party grows and develops, it needs a political, journalistic, etc., personnel always more numerous, and it is in the ranks of the intellectuals that it can find it.
These intellectuals thus employed by the party, how does the party treat them, materially? This has its importance! We are in a democratic, working-class organisation, where the divisions of the bourgeois hierarchy, founded on the false superiority of intellectuals, must not be found again. The general law that tends to be established is that salaries must be neither excessive nor too unequal. The criterion taken by our German comrades, according to Kautsky, is a life of a modest bourgeois. You have not forgotten that the Commune remunerated its functionaries, whatever their rank, in a more or less equal fashion. Its highest salary was 6,000 francs!
And as for the role of theoreticians, played principally by the intellectuals attached to socialism for scientific reasons, it can only be fully exercised within an organic movement of the working masses. What does that mean? It is necessary to specify what in this case we must understand by socialist theory. It cannot be a matter of problems of a purely scientific order, of what the Germans call the questions of doctors. These researches are the proper domain of the intellectuals, and they fall to them alone, in our party as everywhere else. I designate by theory every conception of socialist action, that is to say, of the final goal and of the practical means. I marked just now that, in the periods of beginning or retarded organisation of the socialist proletariat, theory was the result of points of view personal to the theoreticians, and that it had thus only a subjective value. In a strongly constituted mass movement, theory is forced to assume an objective value. It translates the feeling of the masses, it is the resultant of the movement, it is disengaged from the diverse currents of the working class brought into the presence of one another and combined together.
So the role of the theoretician changes singularly. It is no longer a matter of imposing on the proletariat a plan of action conceived outside of it, but of helping it to disengage its own conceptions itself. The work of thought, with its laws and its methods, is the work proper to intellectuals. The faculties of analysis, synthesis, abstraction, generalisation, necessary for all the combinations of the mind, they alone have acquired. Even the intellectuals of the proletariat are unskilled at reducing to general formulas the results of the movement and at specifying the directive lines of socialist action. The proletariat furnishes the elements of theory to the intellectuals, who put it to work. And in what fashion? The socialist agitator informs the working class about its own power, about the conditions of the struggle; he makes the separation between what is accessory and what is essential, eliminates the particular and retains the general. In a word, he seeks the most comprehensive formula of the demands that impose themselves today upon the working class and that economic evolution has determined, and he rejects all those that are not in the direction of the historical movement and of the socialist goal. He furnishes to the proletariat its own doctrine. He does the work of a jurist.
I would not wish to weary you with citations. But let me recall to you that this is how Marx understood the role of the socialist theoretician. You know the resolution of the International, voted under his inspiration at the Geneva Congress: The duty of the International Working Men’s Association consists in putting into relation with one another the spontaneous movements of the working classes; in generalising them and giving them a unity; but not in dictating to them and imposing upon them doctrinary systems of whatever kind. I know, as you may well think, that Marx must not be considered as the law and the prophets. Yet it is curious to know the opinion of a theoretician of this importance on the very role of the theoretician, especially when this conception was sanctioned by the International at its beginnings. For Marx, what matters first of all is the reunion of the diverse elements that compose the working class, the total grouping of the members of the militant proletariat. This unity of organisation once realised, the work of the theoretician is to extract from it the common demands and to synthesise them.
The socialist proletariat therefore needs the intellectuals. They can elaborate with it the best of its thought and contribute to an ever-growing part of its task. But for this the proletariat must be united. Thus are avoided the corruptions and the deviations that never fail to occur every time intellectuals penetrate into an inorganic movement. They bring with them their ambitions, their ideological ways of thinking, their petty-bourgeois and anti-proletarian points of view. In a general class movement, on the contrary, they are absorbed by the mass, instructed by it, transformed by it, assimilated by it.
This is what explains how socialism becomes more and more realist, that is to say, more preoccupied with the real conditions of the struggle, and less hypnotised by the final cataclysm. So long as the intellectuals are the exclusive directors of the movement, we are in the midst of utopia. We go on the contrary toward science, that is to say, toward consciousness of the necessities of practical action, as the influence of the intellectuals of the bourgeois class becomes less personal and as the development of the economic institutions of the working class gives birth to the intellectuals of the proletariat. We have examined the general aspect of our question. But it is in France that the problem has been posed: it is for French socialism that we must now consider it.
The state of the movement in France corresponds to the second phase of socialist evolution such as we have described it. We are still at the period of fractioning and division of our party. It is exact, as has been noted, that the influx of intellectuals into socialism can become a danger. If manuellism has, moreover, disappeared from our movement, anti-parliamentary syndicalism meets with numerous adepts among worker militants.
In what is there peril? The personal points of view of the chiefs of the rival fractions impose themselves still too much upon the mass, which, not being reunited in a collective organism, cannot disengage its common thought. Personalism dominates everything. The socialist movement, under the influence of individualities in struggle, lingers in a sterile crumbling. The famous intellectual proletariat finds in this disorder an element of life. It profits, first, from the absence of all control by the mass and acts in full fantasy. The fractions, in the combat they wage against one another, then risk being forced to accept all sorts of doubtful elements who, although without value or morality, can render them services. It is possible that they may be led to cover these parasitic intellectuals, to conceal the doings of this clientele, for fear of discrediting themselves in compromising divulgations. Socialist division is a premium for the invasion of the party by the contestable elements of the intellectual proletariat.
But what, even more than the fractioning of the socialist party, favours in France the penetration of all sorts of intellectuals into socialism is its essentially political character. The presence of Millerand in the ministry has only unleashed, without any doubt, many latent covetousnesses and contained hopes. Since socialism was growing, many glances had turned toward it, as toward the party of the future. The participation of a socialist in power has given free rein to all ambitions.
On the side of the intellectuals, everything has pushed them to direct themselves toward socialism. The prodigious growth of the educated class, the impossibility of satisfying all the desires awakened, have created a whole world of déclassés and malcontents, avid for positions and impatient for jobs. Nowhere in the world are there so many diplomas and parchments distributed, so many aspirant functionaries, doctors, lawyers, professors, journalists, etc., as in our country. The uncertain situation of the middle classes and the prestige exercised by the so-called liberal positions have provoked, as much as political and economic evolution, this overproduction of intellectuals.
All these intellectuals naturally turn toward politics, which leads to everything. Especially in France, they are predisposed to it. Most have received exclusively the Greco-Latin education, made for men of leisure and not for modern life. They have retained from it a few general ideas and many commonplaces. Products of this purely ideological education, which goes against the necessities of modern production, they remain unusable by practical life. Politics receives them all, and socialism — sharing with the movements of discontent, like anti-Semitism — collects a notable portion of them.
Socialism takes all the more of them as the decomposition of the old democratic parties, especially of the radical party and the radical-socialist party, have singularly encouraged the coming to socialism of the professionals of politics. The wind is toward socialism: who is not a socialist?
Finally, beside the politicking elements, other elements — better but often just as unconscious — are thrown every day more numerous into the socialist movement by the immorality and disorder of bourgeois society. The Dreyfus Affair has made notable recruits for socialism: these are for the most part very pure ideologues who have of social relations only vague or false notions, and who often place themselves at a point of view uniquely idealist. This is without any doubt a profound testimony to the power of attraction of socialism, which thus draws into its circle of action the noblest elements of the intellectual class. But these elements need to be assimilated by the movement, and they would constitute a danger if they could take the first places.
Many among them have tendencies to imagine, in fact, that before their arrival socialism was incomplete. Their haste to build for its use — ad usum Delphini — superior morals, unheard-of philosophies, and new cosmogonies does not seem to know any truce. They must be asked to return from their error as quickly as possible. The proletariat has a fund of inexhaustible riches: it gives much and takes little.
Let the philosophers remain philosophers pure and simple, without becoming socialist philosophers. Let the artists remain artists pure and simple, without becoming socialist artists. Philosophy and art are one thing, and socialism another. The workers’ movement can only welcome with joy the philosophers and artists who come to it, but as socialists, and not as philosophers and artists.
The peril therefore presents itself in three forms that the ill-balanced influence of intellectuals would not fail to make French socialism run: the persistent domination of chiefs dreaming of imposing their system, the invasion of politicians, the corruption of socialist ideas by foreign ideas.
To utilise all the intellectual forces that have come to it, to direct them all toward the socialist order, French socialism must hasten its unity of organisation. So long as it has not concentrated the French proletariat and its diverse tendencies in the same frameworks of life, it will be delivered up, as an easy prey, to all ambitions, the noblest as well as the basest.
It is therefore in the unification of the socialist party that is found the solution of the question we have posed ourselves. The intellectuals will play an effective role in our movement only on the day when the movement incorporates them into itself. Then the theoreticians will be useful and not dangerous, and personal ambitions will be canalised in the interest of the party.
What constitutes the danger today will make the power of socialism. Never has our movement had such need of the living forces of thought; it will be necessary, as the domain of its practical action extends, that it have at its disposal competent specialists who will inform it on all the questions that demand technical knowledge. The intellectual class can furnish it with these specialists, as it already gives it its scientists. For the rest, the proletariat will itself take from within itself the best of its members capable of directing the specifically proletarian action.
But, comrades, while hoping that the unification of our party will soon impose upon the intellectuals who come to take their place in its ranks the role that is proper to them, there is a point upon which the action of groups of socialist students — like the Group of Collectivist Students of Paris — can be brought to bear effectively. It is necessary that the propaganda carried on in university milieux should assume as little as possible the form of an appeal to the interests of the students.
The students have no class interest, as students, that can push them toward socialism. Their interest is to study: they have not yet entered life, and it is only from the day when they will no longer be students that class relations will impose themselves upon them. Then they will forcibly place themselves in the social frameworks: some — among whom perhaps many of today’s poor students — will go to weld themselves to the bourgeoisie; others — among whom perhaps many of today’s rich or comfortable students — will fall into the intellectual proletariat. They have class interests only in the future, not in the present. And these future interests are in truth too uncertain for them to be able, at this moment, to determine in them the problem of conduct.
So that in invoking their interest, it is not their class interest one risks awakening, but their personal interest. And then see what danger! It is to recruit in advance for socialism a whole clique of unscrupulous careerists and adventurers of the worst sort. To say to the students to bring them to socialism that it is their interest that obliges them to it is to tell them that there is a whole series of political, administrative, economic, etc., situations that await them. To develop in this way these premature ambitions is to invite them to desert their studies for politics.
There is a higher and surer propaganda. It is that which consists of giving them the consciousness of historical development, of ruining in their minds the old methods of thinking, of showing them the meeting of the proletariat and science. By this can be conquered the disinterested intelligences, the consciences avid for reason and truth. Recall the declarations of Enrico Ferri at the recent International Congress of Socialist Students and Former Students. You have not forgotten with what vigour he expounded the results of his long experience as a professor. By the simple preparation of minds, by the sole predisposition of consciences, accomplished by a method of teaching purely scientific, socialist conclusions impose themselves of themselves upon the intelligences that wish to apply themselves to the study of social relations.
I know, however, that it is more often by reasons of a moral order or of simple enthusiasm that students are won to socialism. The idealism of their youth pushes them perhaps more at first sight than scientific consciousness. But there is nothing contradictory there. It is necessary to arouse and nourish these impulses of sentimentalism, for they are the preparatory path to reasoned adhesions, the terrain that will bear reasoned convictions. It is the point of departure, which will permit reaching the point of arrival.
This is indeed, moreover, how the last Congress of Socialist Students and Former Students understood socialist propaganda in university milieux, in voting the declaration you remember: “The Congress considers that, while making appeal to the class interests of the future intellectual proletarians, socialist propaganda in university milieux must address itself more particularly to the scientific spirit, to the moral feelings, and to the democratic aspirations of the students.”
If I recall this decision, it is because it translates a happy evolution of the groupings of socialist students. The preceding Congresses made appeal to the supposed class interests of poor students rather than to their conscience and their feelings. It is cause for congratulation that the socialist students of today have recognised the danger of the appeal to interests: it is a comforting presage for the future. May it signify that among the intellectuals who will penetrate tomorrow into the party, they will be numerous who will have of their role a just notion!
Comrades, we have thus sketched the role of intellectuals in socialism. For an inorganic movement, they are a danger: for a unified party, they are a force. Their task consists of serving the proletariat in the slow formation of its autonomous institutions and of its particular systems of ideas. Auxiliaries of the working class, they must subordinate their mentality to its mentality. Strangers in general to the process of production, they can have only a secondary role in the work of emancipation of the proletariat.
As I told you at the beginning, our problem has been very circumscribed. We have had to occupy ourselves only with one face of the general problem of the situation of intellectuals in capitalist society. And we have considered only the socialist intellectuals, and, among them, only those who enter deliberately into action.
You see, there remain to be posed and resolved many other problems. The situation of the intellectual class is imperfectly known, because difficult — or perhaps impossible — to determine. Only the technicians can be utilised by modern production. That is what one can affirm with all certainty. The others do not seem to be destined to exercise in their own right any specific task. In a famous book, which has just been translated into French — The Social Question from the Philosophical Point of View — Professor Ludwig Stein reproaches socialism for not having resolved in a positive fashion the problem of the intellectual proletariat. What is one going to do, he says, with this growing mass of the unemployed of intellectual labour, with this growing reserve army? Who will organise their right to work?
I do not know to what extent socialism can occupy itself with elements so unusable by economic development. What is one to do with the lawyers without places, the doctors without patients, the notaries without practice, the wandering Bohemians of literature and art? In France, it has been proposed to send them to the colonies or to create for their profit State enterprises. Concern has also been taken to modify the teaching programmes in order to create capacities more in conformity with industrial evolution. Professor Stein sees the remedy in the indefinite development of State Socialism, which would permit the distribution without counting of places and functions to the unemployed of the intellectual class!
I do not deny the importance of the problem. But note that the solutions proposed, which would without any doubt satisfy the unemployed intellectuals, go precisely against the workers’ movement, as I have already indicated to you. State socialism is the very contrary of the autonomous development of the proletariat. How will socialism be able to occupy itself with social categories whose interests are so opposed to its own? And is it really for it, which represents the interests of production, to find outlets for unemployed intellectuals? The technicians concern it, but the lawyers?
Not to mention that the artificial division between intellectual labour and manual labour will disappear with the triumph of socialism! The parasites will be eliminated; there will be only workers and productive work.
But this would lead us too far. I have wished in finishing to indicate to you the scope of the problem. It is one of those upon which socialism must pronounce itself. The solution we have tried to give to the partial problem can furnish a first contribution to the solution of the general problem.
And perhaps you will judge that we have arrived at a result, and that we can give as a conclusion to our researches this formula:
In socialism, the intellectuals can serve only in the capacity of employees or jurists.
By exception we are putting this cahier into commerce. We are selling it for one franc. For propaganda we are selling twelve copies for eight francs, twenty copies for twelve francs, fifty copies for twenty-five francs, and a hundred copies for forty francs.
For those of our subscribers who are not yet subscribers to the Mouvement Socialiste, we are happy to reproduce here the upright and just article that Lagardelle published in the Mouvement of the first of January. Whether one accepts or not the conclusion of this article, all the part of historical inventory is unassailable.