Paris Letter

...There are others who publicly broke with their old party...

...For after all," he would think, "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs...

...During a press conference held last January by the Hungarian writer Ignotus, a French surrealist poet (politically Marxist but anti-Stalinist) asked him what was the theoretical platform of the Workers' Councils during the October uprising...

...Hence, we are for the Communist Party, or at least we must facilitate its work by not fighting it...

...I63 THE COARSENESS of the Communist Party's reasoning, the contradictions so often implied in its slogans, are made up for by the frequency of their repetition, by incessant and redundant advertising...

...On the moral-political plane, that means a systematically sectarian or cynical attitude...

...Saint-Just, the first great "active theoretician" of the revolution, asserted two hundred years ago that there could not exist a really free nation as long as slave nations existed elsewhere in the world...

...This euphoric tidal wave meets only with feeble resistance from the few intellectuals who have remained faithful to the Communist Party: their turn now to suffer from bad conscience—all the worse since in the factories more and more workers refuse to vote for Communist delegates and the rank and file militants don't renew their membership cards...

...It seemed that he needed this information in order to know how to interpret the Hungarian events...

...The intelligentsia breathes more easily...

...IN SHORT, we are witnessing the great spring thaw of the French intelligentsia after the long Stalinist winter...

...In Marxist terms, one of those "qualitative leaps" on which history never goes back has taken place...

...But then, suddenly, the Poznan events and the Hungarian uprising appeared to disturb the familiar concepts...

...And no longer will it have to spit on Spinoza to make Lysenko's grains grow...

...As in any inheritance case, there was some trouble, uneasiness and suspicion in settling accounts...

...Of course a danger would arise if Communism's loss of momentum should help reactionary forces, rather than the socialist left—if the socialists were taken unawares by the swiftness of events and still had to search for their bearings...

...Yet this same intellectual knew that he could not live six months under the regime he wished to see established...

...The spring of modern socialism has perhaps been born at Budapest, the day Soviet tanks fired at a people they claimed to have liberated...

...They gladly admitted that if you want liberty you first have to suppress it...

...All he actually does is retard the emancipation of the working class which, like the development of human intelligence, takes place in a historically necessary revolution...

...This bad conscience manifests itself in symptoms of aggression...

...Those Parisian intellectuals who up to then had sounded apologetic for not quite having the courage to be Communists raised their heads and declared they were proud of never having been Communists...

...For again it can visualize the progress of history as a harmoniously continuous curve...

...It won't necessarily have to toss overboard what it had acquired...

...But it was still a family affair...

...even pained...

...On the other hand, all they can offer the new society is this "rotten culture" of theirs, precisely the culture they feel ought to be extinguished...

...In this way, gradually, without even being aware of it, the French intellectuals affected by Communism substituted for a logical postulate a dogmatic imperative: "We hold that freedom of the mind hinges on the liberation of the working class...

...And during the insurrection, this Proletarian must of necessity carry a machine gun in his right hand, and in his left Karl Marx's Complete Works, so that he may consult them at any moment and thus make sure that he is shooting in the direction preordained by History...

...this liberation depends upon the Communist Party which has taken charge of it...

...the logic of despair joins the logic of liberty, for better or worse...

...On the one hand they cannot oppose the foundations of their own cultures without betraying it...

...hence, they are not rational...

...But whatever may happen, one thing is certain: for the intellectuals as well as for a large part of the West European working class, the spell of Soviet-inspired Communism today is broken...

...But the very basis of the system which left so troublesome a heritage was not yet called into doubt...

...For the majority of "leftist" French intellectuals, revolutions are made by Proletarian Supermen who symbolize, in the abstract and forever, Mankind marching toward progress...

...Some people tried to make him understand that these Workers' Councils, busy fighting the Soviet tanks, had other worries than working out a "theoretical platform...

...Moreover, it had been the appeals of the writers that led the Budapest workers to charge Soviet tanks...

...Today French intellectuals on the left have developed this postulate into the notion that no true freedom of thought is possible as long as a whole social group, in this case the working class, is reduced to a state of misery, hence of servitude and alienation which, basically, is the modern form of slavery...

...For long years they abandoned the rational notion of "proof" and thus paid the price for an amazing regression into pragmatic dogmatism...

...The black springtime of international Stalinism was born at Barcelona, the day Franco's tanks silenced a whole people...

...NINETY-NINE PER CENT of the Communist intellectuals are of "bourgeois" origin and owe everything to the culture of a society they would want to see destroyed...

...Hence, whosoever attacks Russia and Communism, even if he is technically right, is wrong in substance...

...But in vain: he failed to understand...

...At the origin of great movements of ideas and opinions we always find a defeated revolution...

...Deafened and besotted by this ever-lasting noise, a certain number of French intellectuals came eventually to accept this leitmotif: "The Communist Party is the only one which effectively defends the working class...

...This made all problems simple...

...Except for some rare "specialist" in anti-Soviet Marxism who felt suspicious and vexed because the others came around to his point of view without giving him credit, most intellectuals felt the impact of the new developments like an electric shock and all at once were suddenly freed from the bad conscience from which they had been suffering...

...Translated by HEDWIG PECHTER...

...With one blow, bad conscience has been supplanted by the Budapest complex...

...The latter has the advantage of being more positive than the former...

...It now became possible to side with the workers without automatically putting up with the monstrous caprices of a party that pretended to be their sole champion...

...But there another motive enters: "bad conscience...

...The publication of Khrushchev's report did, to be sure, evoke deep anxiety among the French Communist intellectuals...

...When you asked a Communist intellectual what he thought of the Moscow trials, the concentration camps, the massive deportations in the USSR, or of those victims the Communists hanged and who now, dead, are made to revoke confessions they made while alive—under this questioning the Communist intellectual would be a bit embarrassed...

...People no longer laugh in your face when in a high-minded salon or at a union meeting you mention the possibility of a humanitarian socialism which, to build a new society, would not need to resort to the archaic procedures of dictatorship, even dictatorship of the proletariat...

...The motives of such a sectarianism or cynicism do not derive from political economy but from psychopathology...

...In saying this he advanced the first postulate of a universal logic of liberty...

...Those who still are, from habit or cowardice, have ceased boasting about it...

...When the Marxoid-existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, on the day following the Budapest events, condemned the Communists in L'Express, this weekly was completely sold out within 48 hours...

...This is why the Communist Party used to fascinate them so (and to a certain degree still does) . In addition, the Party organization, supported by an empire which now reaches from the Indian boundary to a few hundred miles from Paris, has at its disposal means of propaganda and persuasion such as have never been held by any other power in the history of the world...

...For the first time, a whole people rose against the "socialism" of Russia and against the masters it forced upon them...

...For all its naivete and primitivism, this imagery arises from a deep need of our intellect: to establish a logic of liberty and then to concretize it through our acts...

...They are trapped in a futile struggle between the habits they acquired and the duties they chose...

...annoyed that he had to deal with an interviewer of such small understanding...

...That is why, despite the Rajk trial, the gunfire in East Berlin and the publication of Khrushchev's report, the problem of the intellectuals' bad conscience could not be resolved and to this moment has still been playing into the hands of the Communist Party...