Revolutionaries (43 page)

Anyone who is today in his or her early twenties has lived an entire life in a period when the old system has never looked like breaking down in this way. On the contrary – until quite recently it has flourished economically as never before. It is plainly no longer the kind of liberal capitalism whose death throes we lived through between the wars, but neither, unfortunately is it socialism, and still less Soviet socialism. It has adjusted itself to the existence of a larger and more powerful socialist sector of the world (but one with far greater internal crises than we anticipated); to global political decolonization; to living
permanently with local wars and under the shadow of a nuclear catastrophe. However, until the late 1960s it has been, by and large, a sensational success economically, technologically and – let us make no mistake about this – in the provision of material prosperity (or the hope of it) for the masses. This is the background for the revolutionaries of the 1960s.

This is true even of the revolutionaries in many parts of the Third World. It is true that the intellectual revolutionaries of those countries are like those of my generation inasmuch as they confront problems of mass poverty, oppression and injustice which make any call for patience and gradualism sound almost obscene, and inasmuch as they are convinced that the present system has no solution for the problems of their societies. At all events neo-capitalism and neo-colonialism have not so far solved the problem of underdevelopment, but made it more acute. Nevertheless, if we except some areas where all hope really seems to be running out, such as Bengal, even the poor and underdeveloped countries are today not, on the whole, stagnant or in absolute regression. There may be no hope for them as societies, but there is plenty of hope for their individual members, many of whom, including workers, ex-peasant migrants and even peasants, can now look back on a couple of decades of better living and better prospects. What makes men choose revolution rather than inactivity or reform in the Third World is rarely the immediate or imminent breakdown of the economy or the social order. It is rather (leaving aside such questions as oppression by foreigners or other races) the sheer width of the gap between rich and poor, which is probably growing, and between developed and underdeveloped countries, combined with the demonstrated failure of reformist alternatives. The prospect of medium-term or long-term breakdown also plays a part. Incidentally, the background of change and expansion affects the local intelligentsia personally, in so far as their own individual career prospects are far better than ours
were in my generation. The revolutionism of students in many Third World countries, e.g. in parts of Latin America, is remarkably short-lived for this reason. It hardly outlasts graduation.

However, if the Third World in important ways resembles the interwar world, the flourishing neo-capitalism of the West clearly does not. The revolutionism of the western New Left is the product not of capitalist crisis in any economic sense of that word, but of its opposite. In this sense it is comparable to the rebelliousness and revolutionism of the years just before the first world war with which, I have long thought, it has striking affinities. These similarities may extend even further than appears at first sight. For the rebelliousness of an apparently flourishing pre–1914 western world soon became the revolutionism of the crisis of that world. If, as seems likely, we have once again entered a period of general crisis for capitalism, the movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s may seem in retrospect another prelude, like those of 1907–14.

What lies behind the revival of revolutionism in the 1960s is
first
, technological and social transformation of unparalleled rapidity and depth, and
second
, the discovery that the solution by capitalism of the problem of material scarcity reveals, perhaps even creates, new problems (or in marxist terms ‘contradictions') which are central to the system and possibly to all industrial society. It is not easy to separate the two aspects and most of the new revolutionaries fail to do so, but both are important. On the one hand we have been living through a phase of economic expansion, techno-scientific revolution and the restructuring of the economy which is without precedent, both in creating material wealth and destroying much of the basis and equilibrium of the social order. But though in the past twenty years certain long-range predictions of the mid-nineteenth century for the first time look as though they might be finally coming
true – that capitalism would destroy the European peasantry, traditional religion and the old family structure
⁶
– we ought not to forget that the more modest social earthquakes of the past were, for those who lived through them, equally without precedent. They adjusted to the new situation, and in the past twenty years the enormous increase in wealth, combined with various devices for social management and welfare which were either not available or not used in earlier periods, should have made such adjustment easier. This, at any rate, was the argument of the anti-ideological ideologists of the American 1950s.

On the other hand it has become increasingly clear that we are faced not simply with a problem of human beings adjusting to a particularly dramatic and rapid change within the framework of a functioning system – to something like the problem of mass immigration into the United States between the 1890s and the 1920s – but with central flaws in the system. I am not here concerned with what might be called the macro-economic or macro-political contradictions of the system, which are today being revealed – e.g. the shaky basis of the capitalist international economy or the widening gap between ‘developed' and ‘underdeveloped' world – nor even with the approaching dangers of an unrestricted technology which is on the verge of actually destroying the fabric of the habitable globe or of precipitating demographic cataclysm. The point to note about ‘The Affluent Society' or ‘The New Industrial State' (to use the terms of its most eminent liberal critic) is that until the end of the 1960s capitalism functioned splendidly as an economic mechanism; probably better than any alternative at that time. What seemed to ‘go wrong' in some profound but not easily specifiable sense was the
society
based on capitalist abundance, and nowhere more obviously than in its chief stronghold, the United States. The uneasiness, the disorientation, the signs of desperation multiplied, to be followed and reinforced by that ominipresent ripple of violence, of more oriented riot and rebellion, of mass dropping-out – symptoms of a socially pathological state, which is what American observers think of when they compare the mood of their country to that of the Weimar Republic. Consequently also the fashionable critique of society ceased for a time to be economic and became sociological: its key terms were not poverty, exploitation, or even crisis, but ‘alienation', ‘bureaucratization', etc.

Consequently also the new revolutionism in western countries was confined almost entirely to intellectuals and other marginal middle-class strata (e.g. creative artists), or to the middle-class young who took the achievements of the affluent society for granted and concentrated, quite rightly, on its deficiencies. Leaving aside special minorities like the blacks, whose discontents were simpler, the characteristic revolutionary was a middle-class adolescent (usually a student), and he tended to be distinctly to the left of the labour movements, socialist or communist. Even when the two movements appeared to merge, as in France in May 1968 and in Italy in the ‘hot autumn' of 1969, it was the students who had written off capitalism, the workers who, however militantly, were still working within it.

I have suggested that this phase of the late 1960s may be temporary, like the years before 1914. At the moment it looks as though the western world has not only entered a new phase of techno-scientific capitalism (sometimes misleadingly called ‘post-industrial society'), with a new version of the basic contradictions of capitalism, but more specifically another lengthy period of economic crisis. The revolutionary movements are likely to take place not against a background of ‘economic miracles' but against one of economic difficulties. It is too early to assess the amount and kind of political radicalization this may produce, though worth recalling that during the last analogous
phase the radical right benefited more than the radical left.
⁷
So far the most dramatic symptoms of revolutionary agitation in the industrial countries are still those which took place at the height of the boom, i.e. in 1967–9. If one were to venture a prediction, it would merely be that the combination of
social
disintegration and
economic
breakdown is likely to be more explosive than anything that occurred between the wars in industrial countries, with the possible exception of Germany. But also, that social revolution of the traditional sort is by no means its only, or perhaps even its most likely, outcome.

There is, however, one major difference between the new revolutionism and that of my own generation between the wars. We had, perhaps mistakenly, hope and a concrete model of the alternative society: socialism. Today this faith in the great October revolution and the Soviet Union has largely disappeared – I make this as an observation of fact, not as a judgment – and nothing has replaced it. For though the new revolutionaries are looking for possible models and possible centres of loyalty, neither the small and localized revolutionary regimes – Cuba, North Vietnam, North Korea or whatever – nor even China, have provided an equivalent for what the Soviet Union was in my time.
⁸
What has taken the place of our perspective, is a combination of negative hatred of the existing society and Utopia. Similarly, that immensely powerful form of revolutionary movement, the disciplined mass party, has also lost much of its hold among the new revolutionaries, who appear to operate either in small sects or in unstructured libertarian groups closer to the anarchist than the marxist tradition. All this may be historically inevitable. But it is likely also to produce a much wider gap than in my youth, between revolutionary ferment and effective revolutionary action. I make these points without pleasure, and without the intention of diminishing the new revolutionaries. It is better to have a revolutionary movement than not to have one. This is the one we have got for the moment, and we have to do the best we can with it. The fact remains that it has a great deal to learn or re-learn.

Let me, finally, turn to the question of the role of intellectuals in revolutionary movements, in other words to the questions not why some of them as individuals became revolutionaries, but what their political orientation is likely to be as a stratum of society and what part their activity as such is likely to play. I need hardly say that the two kinds of questions are, or can be, entirely distinct. Marx and Engels were certainly intellectuals, but the number and proportion of German intellectuals who were social democrats was small and probably negligible. My generation of student communists were a small minority of, I would guess, not more than four to five hundred at its maximum out of fifty thousand university students just before the war; in Oxford and Cambridge even the broader socialist clubs were a minority, though not a negligible one. The fact that our tiny minority contained, at times, a remarkably high proportion of the brightest students is not of course insignificant, but does not change the fact that the great majority of west European students before 1939 were not on the left, let alone revolutionary, whereas probably the majority in such countries as Yugoslavia were.

Moreover, even when we can say that intellectuals as a stratum are revolutionary (as is often, perhaps generally, the case for young ones in the Third World), we cannot automatically assimilate their attitude or political behaviour to that of other revolutionary forces. To take an obvious example, students played a leading part in the 1848 revolutions. What
happened to all of these revolutionary liberals in the Bismarckian era? Again, students (including secondary students) were extremely prominent in the Russian revolution of 1905, but, so far as one can tell,
not
in that of 1917. This is not inconsistent with the fact that the leadership of the bolsheviks consisted overwhelmingly of intellectuals, as did that of all other popular parties of opposition. To give a third, and perhaps quite local and transitory example. Students as a body in Britain today probably occupy political positions considerably to the left of workers as a body. But at this moment, when there is a greater militancy and readiness for industrial action among the workers than at any time since the General Strike, student mass political activity is at a lower ebb than probably at any time in the past three years. The two groups are evidently not moved in the same way, in the same direction, by the same forces and motives.

What can we say about intellectuals as a social group in industrial countries today?
First
, that they are today such a social group, which can no longer be simply subsumed as a special variant of the middle classes. They are more numerous, since both the growth of scientific technology and the expansion of the tertiary sector of the economy (including administration and communications) require them in much larger numbers than before. They are technically proletarianized, inasmuch as the bulk of them are no longer ‘free professions' or private entrepreneurs but salaried employees; though this is also true of most of the rest of the middle classes. They are recognizable by specific attitudes, specific consumer demands, specific interests, to which businessmen appeal as such; e.g. reading the
Guardian
rather than the
Daily Telegraph
, and being relatively impervious to the sales appeal of status symbols as against
Which
-type criteria. Politically, the bulk of this stratum (or at least certain types of occupations within it) is probably today left of centre in the western countries, though perhaps no more than that. In Britain the
Guardian-Observer
type of professional classes are on
one side of the political divide, the
Telegraph
-type middle classes on the other. In France during May 1968, the front of the class struggle ran through the centre of the middle classes. In the general strike the research-and-development types, the laboratory and design departments and the communicators tended to come out with the workers, often militantly, whereas the administrators, executives, sales departments, etc. remained on the side of management.