Revolutionaries (45 page)

We cannot therefore take it for granted that a radicalization of workers and students, supposing it were to occur, would automatically produce a single united left movement. It might produce parallel movements, poorly coordinated or even at loggerheads. For the truth is that the analogy between the intellectuals and professionals of today and the ‘labour aristocracy' of the past is valid only up to a point. The old labour aristocrats were manual workers, the new ones are not. The gap between blue collar and white collar is wide, and probably growing wider. The old socialist and labour movements of
the developed countries were built on the hegemony of the manual workers. Some of their leaders might be intellectuals, and they might attract large numbers of intellectuals, but on the whole the terms on which these joined were, that they subordinated themselves to the workers. These terms were realistic, because on the whole the intellectual and professional stratum was not socialist, or too small numerically to form a major part of the labour movement. Today it is large, economically important, active and effective. Indeed it forms the most rapidly growing sector of the trade union movement, at least in Britain. There is both more tension and, from the side of the workers, more resentment.

Where the two wings of the movement converge or merge, as in France in 1968 or perhaps in Italy in 1969, its power is immense. But it can no longer be taken for granted that their confluence is automatic, nor that it will occur spontaneously. Under what circumstances will it occur, if at all? Can this be predicted? Can it be brought about? These are crucial questions, which can merely be raised here. What the role of intellectuals in the class struggle is to be depends largely on the answers. But if such a junction does not take place, the movement of the intellectuals may settle down as one or both of two things: as a powerful and effective reformist pressure group of the new professional strata, of which consumer agitations and environmentalist campaigns are good examples, and as a fluctuating radical youth and student movement, oscillating between brief brush fires and relapses into passivity by the majority, while a small activist minority indulges in frenzied ultra-left gestures. This is the pattern of the student movements since the middle 1960s.

On the other hand it is also unlikely that the workers will make a successful revolution without the intellectuals, still less against them. They may relapse into a narrow movement of those who work with their hands, militant and powerful within
the limits of ‘economism', but incapable of going much beyond the confines of rank-and-file activism. Or they may achieve what seems to be the highest point of ‘spontaneous' proletarian movements, a sort of syndicalism which certainly envisages and seeks to build a new society, but is incapable of achieving its aims. It does not much matter that the isolated impotence of workers or other masses of the labouring poor is of a different kind from that of intellectuals, since the working people by themselves are capable of overthrowing a social order, whereas the intellectuals by themselves are not. If a human society worthy of the name is to be built, both need each other.

¹
Such countries are not necessarily in revolutionary situations, as defined by Lenin or anyone else. Tsarist Russia cried out for social revolution during a long period, but was in revolutionary situations only infrequently.

²
The Holy Family
,
MEGA
, 1/3, pp. 206–7.

³
The function of a revolutionary ideology such as socialism in mass movements is to liberate their members from dependence on such fluctuations in their personal expectations.

⁴
This may be illustrated from the history of South American Indian peasants over the past centuries. Inactive whenever the power structure above them seemed stable and firm, they immediately begin to occupy the communal lands which they never ceased to claim as their own, whenever it seemed to show signs of cracking.

⁵
‘This realization that all attempts to restore capitalism must be wrecked on the rocks of this insoluble contradiction, that the class struggle would end with the common ruin of the contending classes if the revolutionary reconstruction of all society does not succeed, led many a marxist with a knowledge of economics into the camp of the bolsheviks; including myself' (Eugen Varga,
Die wirtschafts-politischen Problems der proletarischen Diktatur
, Vienna, 1921, p. 19). This autobiographical passage from the well-known communist economist illustrates the force of the alternative: revolution or ruin, at that time.

⁶
The crisis of Roman Catholicism is in this respect more significant than that of Protestantism.

⁷
A friend, asked by his students, what the political consequences of the great slump of 1929 had been, answered: ‘First Hitler came to power. Then we lost the war in Spain. Finally we got the second world war and Hitler ruled most of Europe.'

⁸
It may be worth noting that this is the first phase of global revolutionary socialism since 1848 which has not so far established an effective international; for the internationals of the small left-wing sects are too restricted to fulfil this function.

⁹
This is very much more obvious in many underdeveloped countries, where a few numerically quite small student bodies, in domestic or even foreign universities, have provided a very large number of political, including revolutionary, leaders for the adult political world.

¹⁰
The youth sections of left-wing parties have, perhaps for this reason, generally formed relatively small appendages to the much larger adult parties.

¹¹
It is true that some slogans once characteristic of right-wing movements – such as nationalist ones – have been largely annexed by the marxist revolutionary left, but the hegemony of left-wing ideas in the 1960s student movements is nevertheless most striking.

¹²
Out of the eight secretaries of the (Maoist) student federation of the main Peruvian university of San Marcos, since 1960, whose whereabouts could be established, not a single one continued to be active on the left in 1971.

1844 Manuscripts (Marx),
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)

Abyssinian war,
(i)
,
(ii)

Africa,
(i)
,
(ii)
; sub-Saharan,
(iii)
,
(iv)

Age of Extremes
(Hobsbawm),
(i)

Aguilar Fernández, Paloma,
(i)

Albania,
(i)
,
(ii)

Alberti, Rafael Merello,
(i)

Alexandre, Philippe,
(i)

Alfonso XIII, King,
(i)

Algeria,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)
,
(iv)
,
(v)
,
(vi)
,
(vii)
; war,
(viii)
,
(ix)
,
(x)
; Casbah,
(xi)

Alicata, Mario,
(i)

alienation,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)
,
(iv)
,
(v)
,
(vi)
,
(vii)

Alier, J. Martinez,
(i)

Althusser, Louis,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)

American Civil War,
(i)

American revolution,
(i)
,
(ii)

Amsterdam,
(i)

anarchism,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)
,
(iv)
; decline, of,
(v)
; Spanish,
(vi)
,
(vii)
,
(viii)
; neo-anarchism,
(ix)
; Catalan,
(x)
; anarchist tradition,
(xi)

anarchists: Italian,
(i)
,
(ii)
; political refugees as,
(iii)
; Spanish,
(iv)
; sexual morality among,
(v)

anarcho-syndicalism,
(i)
,
(ii)
; and communism,
(iii)
,
(iv)
,
(v)
,
(vi)
; Spanish,
(vii)
,
(viii)
;
see also
syndicalism

Andalusia,
(i)

Andreotti, Giulio,
(i)

Angola,
(i)

Annan, Lord,
(i)

anti-clericalism,
(i)

Anti-Duehring
(Engels),
(i)

anti-semitism,
(i)

APRA,
(i)

Aragon, Louis,
(i)

Aragon,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)
,
(iv)

Arendt, Hannah,
(i)

Argentina,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)
,
(iv)

armed forces, participation in politics,
(i)
,
(ii)

artists,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)
,
(iv)
,
(v)
,
(vi)
,
(vii)

Asia,
(i)
,
(ii)
; south-east,
(iii)

Asturias,
(i)

Atatürk, Kemal,
(i)

Auden, W.H.,
(i)
,
(ii)

Auschwitz,
(i)
,
(ii)

Austria,
(i)
; labour movement,
(ii)
; social democratic party,
(iii)

Austrian Communist Party,
(i)
,
(ii)

Austro-Marxists,
(i)

Avanguardia group,
(i)

Bakunin, Mikhail,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)
; and Marx,
(iv)
,
(v)
,
(vi)
; ideology of,
(vii)
,
(viii)
,
(ix)
; followers of,
(x)

Balibar, E.,
(i)

Baltic States,
(i)

bandits,
(i)

banks,
(i)

Barbato, Nicola,
(i)

Barcelona,
(i)
,
(ii)
; guerrilla actions,
(iii)
; and insurrection,
(iv)
,
(v)
,
(vi)

Barontini, Ilio,
(i)

Basque country,
(i)

Batista, Fulgencio,
(i)
,
(ii)

Bauer, Otto,
(i)

Belgium,
(i)
,
(ii)

Bell, Daniel,
(i)
,
(ii)

Belloc, Hilaire,
(i)

Belmonte de los Caballeros,
(i)

Bengal,
(i)

Berlin,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)
,
(iv)
,
(v)
;
see also
East Berlin; West Berlin

Bernanos, Georges,
(i)

Bernstein, Eduard,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)
,
(iv)

bicycles,
(i)

Birmingham Alliances,
(i)
,
(ii)

Bismarck, Otto von,
(i)

black people,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)
,
(iv)
,
(v)

Blake, William,
(i)

Blanqui, Louis-Auguste,
(i)

Blanquism,
(i)
,
(ii)

Bloc National,
(i)

Bloch, Ernst,
(i)
,
(ii)

Blum, Léon,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)

Blunt, Anthony,
(i)

Boehme, Jacob,
(i)

Bogota,
(i)

Boldrini, Arrigo,
(i)

Bolivia,
(i)

Bolshevik Party,
(i)

bolsheviks,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)
,
(iv)
; and anarchism,
(v)
,
(vi)
,
(vii)
,
(viii)
; and mensheviks,
(ix)
,
(x)

bolshevism,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)
,
(iv)
,
(v)
,
(vi)
; and central European left,
(vii)
,
(viii)
; Korsch's critique of,
(ix)
,
(x)

Bolte, Friedrich,
(i)

bombs,
(i)

Bonapartism,
(i)
,
(ii)

Bordighism,
(i)

Borodin, Mikhail,
(i)

Boulanger, General Georges,
(i)

Brandler, Heinrich,
(ii)

Brazil,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)
,
(iv)
,
(v)

Brazilian Communist Party,
(i)

Brecht, Bertolt,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)

Brenan, Gerald,
(i)

Brezhnev, Leonid,
(i)

Britain,
(i)
,
(ii)
,
(iii)
,
(iv)
; working class,
(v)
,
(vi)
,
(vii)
,
(viii)
,
(ix)
,
(x)
,
(xi)
,
(xii)
,
(xiii)
; role in Comintern strategy,
(xiv)
; interwar and post-1945,
(xv)
; revolutionaries in,
(xvi)
; sympathy for soviets,
(xvii)
; opposition to war,
(xviii)
; labour movement,
(xix)
,
(xx)
,
(xxi)
,
(xxii)
,
(xxiii)
,
(xxiv)
; intellectuals,
(xxv)
,
(xxvi)
,
(xxvii)
; religion,
(xxviii)
; politics,
(xxix)
; archives,
(xxx)
; anarchism,
(xxxi)
; and Spanish Civil War,
(xxxii)
,
(xxxiii)
; and Second World War,
(xxxiv)
; writers,
(xxxv)
; and marxism,
(xxxvi)
,
(xxxvii)
,
(xxxviii)
; road to socialism,
(xxxix)
; revolution of 1640s,
(xl)
; labour aristocracy,
(xli)
,
(xlii)
,
(xliii)
; and military politics,
(xliv)
; students,
(xlv)