The Intellectuals and Working-Class Socialism.

PART II.

III. It is easy to understand how it is that a section of the intellectuals has moved in the direction of socialism and the working class.

Some have considered that their material interests could only be defended by socialism: these are the poor intellectuals of whom we have spoken. In the front ranks of these are the technicists, engineers, chemists, agricultural experts, etc., who sell their intellectual power on the market at a low price and who in the same way as the laborers find themselves a part of the industrial throng. By way of analogy they have considered their own position as more or less bound up with that of the manual laborers.

After these and of a quite different species come the mass of unemployed diplomats and other former office holders for whom the party in power has no more use and who through bitterness or envy have recklessly thrown themselves into the new movement. As the political influence of parliamentary socialism increases, as it wields a power more effective over the administration of the state, as it conquers municipalities, develops its press, creates a numerous bureaucracy for its inner organization, it thus exercises ever stronger attraction over this portion of the intellectuals.

Since socialism represents the future, the rising strength of tomorrow, they hasten to seek in it what they have not been able to find elsewhere — seats in parliament, sinecures, jobs, they trail after them the mentality due to their bourgeois education, vast hopes of dominance, unrestrained appetites for conquest, a devouring thirst for power. The capitalist world has rejected them, socialism receives them: they are nothing but waste products.

But if discontent or the spirit of adventure may drive into the labor movement that portion of the intellectuals whose position tends to become more and more precarious, there are less definite motives which have their influence over other categories of educated people. Sentimentalism, pity for the exploited, the desire to suppress poverty, etc., awaken in many cultivated people vague tendencies toward socialism. They understand neither its immediate bearing or its ultimate meaning but they offer their recipes, tender their support, contribute their sympathies. Sport

and fashion are still bringing distinguished recruits into socialism. Through a strange snobism the most decadent strata of the capitalist classes give rise to subversive ideas which threaten their nearest interests. There is a whole category of repentent bourgeois who "go over to the people" for the double purpose of disseminating happiness and lightening the burden of their own privileges.

There still remain the system-makers, the professional sociologists, the law-makers for future societies who claim the noble function of conducting socialism along roads that they alone. know. Then there are all the diseased brains, the unrecognized inventors, the social apothecaries, the mystics, all those who are troubled by the prodigious disorder of our society and who all wish to take part in the movement which is to renew the world. Engels has a penetrating passage on these people in which he recalls the resemblances which the history of socialism has on this point to that of primitive Christianity. "And there is this further resemblance," says Engels, "that to the labor party of all countries flock all the elements which have nothing more to hope from the official world or have quarreled with it, such as the opponents of vaccination, the vegetarians, the anti-vivisectionists, homeopathists, preachers of dissenting congregations whose flocks have taken to the woods, authors of new theories of the origin of the world, unhappy inventors who have missed fire, the victims of real or imaginary wrongs in the courts, honest imbeciles and dishonest impostors, it was just so with the Christians. All the elements which the process of dissolution of the ancient world had liberated were drawn one after the other into the sphere of attraction of Christianity, the one element which resisted this dissolution."*)

Even the representatives of traditional socialism have many times pointed out the danger from the intellectuals. It is Engels again who in 1890 indicated the peril in a letter published after his death, "Within the last two or three years a crowd of students, literary men and other young, unclassed bourgeois have streamed into the party; have come just in time to occupy most of the editorial positions in the new journals which are springing up and habitually regard the bourgeois university as a sort of socialist Saint-Cyr which gives them the right to enter the ranks of the party with the title of officer if not general."**

It matters little whether in the particular case he was discussing Engels was right or wrong. The essential point is that his words exactly apply to the crowd of intellectuals who have

Contribution to the History of Primitive Christianity; Devenir Social, 1895, p. 32. ** Le Socialiste, Nov. 24, 1900.

invaded the socialist parties. So true is this that Kautsky in his turn took up, in a study not at all polemical, the thesis of Engels: "He who comes to us" he says, "driven by his personal interests, he who does not come to take part in the class struggle of the proletariat but to find in the proletariat the career and the success which the capitalist class refuses him, such a man is a poor acquisition and he may in certain cases, and especially when he comes from the 'Intelligenz' become dangerous. We can never be too careful to rid our party of the unrecognized geniuses, the bohemians of literature, the scheme builders, the inventors. (inventors of new systems of spelling, new stenographies, etc.) and other similar ambitious elements." *

Even Bebel himself has been somewhat rude toward the professionals of thought. It was in 1903 at the famous Dresden congress where the "Mehring Case" had raised the question of the relation of socialism to the intellectuals. I am well aware that Bebel was considering these young doctors fresh from the German universities whom the democratic revisionism of Bernstein attracted into the party. I pass over the question of deciding whether Bebel's attacks did not in this particular case go beyond the intellectuals whom he was combating to strike a death blow at all liberty of thought without the party. All I am stating is the general opinion which he expressed on the body of literary men considered as a whole, an opinion which is equally good for the intellectuals on his side and on the other side. "And my experience." Bebel explained, "permits me to say to you, test new comrades well but test the intellectuals two or three times. They should not be repulsed. We have need of their intelligence and their knowledge, but precisely because they are intellectuals their first duty is to get information from the proletarians how the masses think who know better than they do what the class struggle of the proletariat means."

IV. These are evidently truths let fall in the fire of battle, but they remain and we are putting them on record. Moreover the attempts made by the socialist parties to rehabilitate the intellectuals do not seem fortunate. In a recent article in the Peuple of Brussels Vandervelde claims that without them socialism would not exist.** According to him a division of labor would be

* Soc. cit. p. 265.

**Le Peuple, Feb. 20, 1907:-The Use of the Intellectuals. Here is the most characteristic passage of this article which The Socialiste, the organ of the united socialist party reproduced in its No. 96:-"The Romans had Vestals to tend the sacred fire. We must also have constant care for tending the sacred fire of the revolution. That is the part of the young, and Anseele will tell us that there are youths fifty years old.

established between thought and action. The workers would furnish the "dough" of socialism and the intellectuals the "yeast". I will think for you; you shall act for me. In other words the proletariat is incapable of finding its own way and has need of bourgeois "leaders".

Let us pass over for the moment, we will return to it later, the question of in what measure socialist systems have been of use to the proletariat. Let us keep simply to the proof on which Vandervelde rests his argument. "What would have been the socialism of the nineteenth century without Marx, without Proudhon, without Robert Owen, without the intellectuals who came into the working class?"

Marx, Proudhon, Owen intellectuals! Great Gods, whither is the confusion of words leading us! Evidently it would be agreeable to the throng of diploma bearers who under the shadow of socialism edge their way into sinecures, capture seats in parliament, concoct schemes, parade and gesticulate, to call themselves the direct descendents of Marx, Proudhon and Owen, and they might well thank Vandervelde for thus coming to their assistance. There is only one trouble. It is that neither Marx nor Proudhon nor Owen were "intellectuals". Indeed they were thinkers with whom the intellectuals found no favor.

Marx harshly expressed his opinion of the intellectuals in his celebrated pamphlet against Bakounine and his friends: "The Alliance of the Social Democracy and the International Workingmen's Association."* He reproaches his adversaries with desiring to put the working masses back again under the tutelage of a new class of professional Intellectuals destined to serve as "interpreters between the revolutionary idea and popular instincts". denounces what seems to him the dictatorship of a general staff

It is perhaps equally the part of the intellectuals. It has often been remarked, generally by way of reproach, that in the socialist congresses many intellectuals showed themselves more radical, more uncompromising, more revolutionary than the workingmen themselves. In this there is nothing strange. The workingmen who suffer directly from capitalists oppression are justly concerned with the immediate reforms which may however little ameliorate their condition. The intellectuals on the contrary who have come into socialism for reasons independent of their immediate inferest are naturally inclined to decide questions upon fundamental principles and to get broad views above particular events.

"It goes without saying that I do not pretend to make a merit out of this idealism of theirs which follows from their privileged position. I am especially careful to avoid exaggerating the importance of the part they play. Without the working class they would be nothing, but in the working class they are the yeast which makes the dough rise." L'Alliance de la Democratic Socialiste et l'Association Internationale des Travailleurs, 1872; V. p. 48-49.

of literary bourgeois exercised over the revolutionary proletariat in the name of the Idea. Bakounine especially had congratulated himself on having found in Italy "a body of young men ardent, energetic, untrammeled and disinterested who had thrown themselves headlong into revolutionary socialism."* It is against these unclassed recruits that Marx rebels: "The pretended sections of the Italian International" he said, "are run by lawyers without clients, doctors without patients and without science, students of billiards, commercial travelers and others employed in business and especially writers on small newspapers. It is by getting hold of official positions in the sections that the Alliancesucceeded in forcing the Italian laborers to pass into the control. of their unclassed allies who in the International might find a career and an object in life."

**

We need not inquire here as our friend Michels does further on, whether Marx's grievances against the Italian allies were well-founded or not. It has nothing to do with the present matter. Not that I wish in any way to echo Marx's attacks against Bakounine or to defend his methods of controversy. In a general way I am in accord with the reservations expressed by Michel on this point, but the important thing to remember is Marx's judgment upon the invasion of the intellectuals into the ranks of the proletariat.

Moreover such an estimation of them is in accord with Marx's general thought. For the Marxian the social transformation can only be the task of a working class arrived at its full capacity; that is to say prepared by its organization and its education to take the place of capitalism. It assumes not only that the capitalist economy has arrived at its highest development but especially that the proletariat has created a complete outfit of institutions and ideas sufficient to establish new ways of living.

Everything reduces itself to the elaboration of these institutions and these original ideas. By their very definition they can only be the antithesis of official society since otherwise they would be merely a bad copy of it. The proletariat must borrow nothing from the bourgeoisie; must imitate none of its modes of existence and must draw everything from its own funds. The rupture between the labor world and the capitalist world is the first condition of the socialism of the class struggle.

What have the intellectuals to do in such an interpretation of the proletarian movement! They represent by the education which they have received and the aim which they pursue the old parasitic and hierarchic society. By penetrating into the labor organizations they will bring to the proletariat those very traditional values

Letter of April 5, 1872.

* Controverse Socialiste, by Robert Michels pp. 284, 285.