Advanced Intellectuals and Backward Countries
Labin, Suzanne
Traditionally Marxism has claimed to be a carrier of progress beyond the attainment of capitalism. The argument ran: Capitalism, having reached its summit, is weighed down with internal...
...Hence, the Communist need to pour industry into bureaucratic molds so rigid that there will be no danger that the advance of industry will free the masses...
...But these apparently contradictory arguments are rooted in the same motivation: not love of a doctrine but hatred of the bourgeoisie...
...But one must not believe that their means and goals are fragile because they are merely polemical...
...They are countries that offer a ready market for credos, since people starved for material goods are gluttons for ersatz spiritual goods and consequently for ideologies and prophecies...
...Why then should not this method of analysis be applied to the very people who brandish it so readily...
...It may be painful to us that the Communists succeed, but this should not tempt us to imitate them...
...So the Marxist system has helped us at least to explain the people who exploit it...
...But the Communists have changed all that...
...Not everything in the West, to be sure, tends toward human freedom...
...They know that these regimes will use them as propagators of lies rather than creators of ideals...
...In the same way, the first impulse of the "progressive" Western intellectuals is to believe that in the Communist regimes they will at last be able to play the role of ideological mentor which bourgeois society has refused them...
...and, since power is inaccessible to us, we cannot sustain our enthusiasm with the example of our works...
...Besides, when I speak of infrastructure I mean, in good Marxist parlance, that which promotes the general improvement of the means of production and consequently of popular consumption...
...And this powerful support permits Communism to invent, adjust, and exploit ideologies as no other theocracy has ever done before...
...But the interest which we, free people of the West, have in underdeveloped countries is entirely apart from the fanaticism which ac companies the writings of the "progressive" intellectuals...
...Aside from the small list of current electoral promises devoted to taxes and tomorrows, the Communists place their illusions on the scale of centuries, and secure them there with the asserted necessities of history...
...Let's be fair...
...or the superstructure is not a true reflection and out goes the determinist theory...
...Brilliant ideas founded on lies are called illusions, and the cultivation of illusion is demagoguery, the world's oldest political evil...
...Until recently the heroes of "progressivism"— those who despise the West because it retards the Historical Process—were heart and soul for the muzhik's Russia...
...It is only in the West that the "progressive" phraseology of our Communist intellectuals can endow them with a certain prestige without obliging them to lick boots...
...At this point, the proletariat, matured by long apprenticeship in capitalist techniques, takes over and leads society to new heights...
...TRANSLATED FROM La Revue Socialiste...
...When attempting to vindicate their politics in the West, the "progressive" intellectuals emphasize Historical Process...
...Voltaire knew that the reality which Catherine II covered with a philosophical wig would have had very little room for his diversions...
...Communist demagogues have conscripted science and teleology...
...They believe that the experiments which fascinate them derive from a genuinely advanced aspiration...
...If I were, it would become obvious that one might inspire the other...
...The passion of the "progressive" intellectuals for Russia was born 25 years ago, at a time when the country had nothing but primitive economic structures...
...Notice that this justification implies the strange axiom that advanced countries are not included in the historical process...
...In the spirit of Marx, luxury articles, among which we may certainly include the Sputnik, are of no account in defining an infrastructure...
...This fact might by now have been noticed by the "progressive" intellectuals of the advanced countries if the manias of ideology did not keep them from looking at facts...
...One cannot accept their statements that they hate the bourgeoisie because it exploits the masses, since they themselves revere bureaucracies that exploit the masses a hundred times more...
...Progress does take place in the West because there is freedom, while in the East it is vanishing because dictators hold sway...
...Those who most religiously adhered to this doctrine were never able to take power except in countries where industry was minimal, where there was hardly a bourgeoisie or a proletariat, and where economic and social life were at a very low level...
...Underdeveloped countries are those which have not been educated by a large and active liberal intelligentsia...
...They begin by asserting that the condition of the proletariat must be improved, and this sets rational chords vibrating...
...Because of Communist tyranny, it is the present lot of these countries and their prospect for at least the near future...
...It is a classic twist in the manufacture of Communist ideologies to elevate to the sublime those who are most unfortunate...
...This claim cannot stand up against the facts...
...A true science, sustained by free research and studying man as well as nature, is planting the seeds of a more pro digious harvest than Sputnik can, because here it will benefit individ uals as well as governments...
...all one needs is a heart and a mind...
...And the facts, in Communist countries, are that steel production increases as man's condition deteriorates, that the pitiable unrealized "plans" are enforced by pitiless whips, that Sputnik carries a dog into outer space but man on earth remains in chains...
...But emotion is not the same as devotion, and giving help does not mean that we should deify those we help...
...We are moved by the efforts that some countries are making to rise out of their ancient stagnation...
...The example of Voltaire and Catherine II confirms this law...
...One must therefore conclude that their animosity is aroused by the fact that bourgeois democracy does not give them the political role to which they aspire...
...And for this police formula, the underdeveloped countries lend themselves admirably...
...In underdeveloped countries, the future is as rich in formulas as the past is poor in achievement...
...Then, once in power, since it is no longer a question of the emancipation of the proletariat, they extol their condition, such as it is, and romantic chords begin to vibrate...
...They always reap the fullest harvest of messianic sermons...
...Communists liquidate the bourgeoisie not, as they pretend and too many simpletons believe, because it slows down technological growth, but because, at least in its modern democratic form, the bourgeoisie does allow this expansion to yield the masses some benefit...
...Traditionally Marxism has claimed to be a carrier of progress beyond the attainment of capitalism...
...Living on the crest of civilization's wave, they were passionately concerned with political and technological improvements...
...However, one must introduce into this interpretation an important fact...
...What interests me is one of its more incongruous by-products: the passion of the "advanced" intellectuals for undeveloped countries...
...But lately their horizon has expanded...
...Our century is indeed dominated by a revolution, and its name is industry...
...The larger consequences of this fact do not here concern us...
...They get their illumination from the countries with the fewest light bulbs...
...The truth is that Communist regimes in backward countries do strongly confirm the Marxist hypothesis of a correspondence between governmental forms and economic substrata: I mean that these forms are regressive, that they enslave— they do not liberate—the people...
...Yet the "progressive" intellec tuals are resolutely cold to whatever moves forward and seduced by every thing in regression...
...Therefore, let us hail as our champion the Communist world of Russia and China which promises to apply our theories, and let us try to convince ourselves that they will do it . . . but at a distance...
...The Communists are original only in the enormity with which they endow this evil...
...The elite of the word tries to establish its ascendancy where there is no elite of any other kind...
...Before the irresistible force of industry, no country can long stand still...
...The last point in the argument of the protocommunist intellectuals is the following: Let us say to the western world where we are living that it is decadent, especially since it loves this decadence...
...And—it is noteworthy—as the USSR has grown industrially, the enthusiasm of the "progressives" has been steadily displaced upon China, Indonesia, Syria, where the economic structures are at best those of capitalism a century ago...
...Nor need this mean only China and the USSR, since plenty of other countries in Asia and Africa have made impressive social progress accompanied by somewhat less bloodshed and uproar...
...Classical demagogues merely had the audacity to work upon ignorance and the reality of the present...
...Conclusion: either the Communist superstructure of these countries, as a true reflection, is also primitive and then it becomes necessary to strip away its "progressive" halo...
...What concerns me is the basis for the behavior of the Communist intellectuals...
...As Russia becomes more industrialized, they turn toward China, Burma, Syria and Egypt...
...Let me add that my purpose is not to dissuade anyone from becoming interested in backward countries...
...Now I am not passing judgment on either the bourgeoisie or on hate...
...Thereupon these archangels of progress salute the Communist regimes which managed to establish themselves only in countries with primitive infrastructures...
...The traditional method of Communism is to install technology without extending satisfactions, to unleash science without freeing the mind, to industrialize without liberating...
...And so on, alternately, they pluck the chords of the most contradictory sentiments, and people are duped...
...And the explanation, to sum up, is this: the "progressive'' intellectuals attach themselves not to highly developed regimes but to those regimes which most easily allow them to consider themselves progressive...
...All theocracies—and Communism is one—thrive on words...
...This type of demagoguery, although far more impudent than others, recruits into its service philosophical terminology—a recipe for dazzling and enticing youth...
...A true progressive movement, ani mated by free socialist reformers, is engaged in dignifying labor...
...Yes but . . . Do not these people cite passages from Marx to the effect that ideologues always transpose class interests, all unknowingly and in the rosiest of colors...
...These countries are like voids which the Communist intellectuals can fill...
...Communism is a verbal edifice supported by police terror...
...In the countries that so fascinate our "advanced" intellectuals, backwardness is not merely a relic of the past...
...In fact, only demagoguery gives historical dimension to Communism...
...No human adventure, no social experiment should leave us indifferent...
...I mean it in a rigorous sense...
...Nor do I use the term "counterrevolution" for exotic rhetorical effect...
...The launching of the satellite, though a remarkable achievement, has not changed the lot of the masses of Soviet workers...
...But upon reflection, in their secret hearts, they know that this is not true...
...Precisely because these countries are the most advanced, even in their political structure, they can easily maintain their equanimity in the face of subversive strutting and heroic posturing...
...It is not necessary to take a Communist or "progressivist" position in order to be concerned about these countries...
...It is well to remember that there are still quarters in Moscow without running water or gas, where women carry water from a fountain in the street and cook over charcoal...
...Their deepest purpose is the same as that of all counter-revolutions: to extinguish the individual's conscious participation in his destiny until he is reduced to the level of a thing...
...Marx, Engels and the early socialists focused their attention upon the most highly-developed countries, Eng land, France and America...
...The "progressive" intellectuals justify their fixation upon underdeveloped countries by citing the marvelous future which the historical process reserves to them...
...in the absence of levers of power, we wrest prestige from it...
...And—a final irony—the members of the "progressive" intel ligentsia travel to the antipodes where semi-literates oppress illiter ates, looking for a program and a banner, while it is precisely in the Western nations which they inhabit and daily revile that these might be found...
...That makes it a counter-revolution...
...The contributions of Voltaire's vigorous mind were not approved by an ancient French society stuffed with traditions, but his light was accepted in the faintly illuminated North, where a despot, free from the shackles of an ancient civilization, could smile prettily at his theories...
...Only the Communist dictators have access to Progress or History, and this illusion provides an admirable excuse for all their crimes...
...And here the Communist intellectuals can thrive...
...The industrial surge has the value of a true revolution because it tends considerably to increase the well-being, education, initiative, freedom— in short, the power—of the masses...
...But to pass over this incongruity, let us emphasize the fact that among the "progressive" intellectuals, the cult of the Historical Process springs from the same motives as their infatuation for backward countries: the social eminence which they have failed to attain in their own countries and in the present is projected upon distant countries of the future...
...The argument ran: Capitalism, having reached its summit, is weighed down with internal contradictions...
...To seduce with intoxicating rhetoric and maintain through physical terror—these are the means to its end...
...For it is noteworthy that one never sees any of these "progressive" mountebanks abandon the "decadent" circles of Paris to live in the "inspiring" forums of Peking or Kharkov...
...But industrial revolution, urged on by social reform, elevates the humble and thereby threatens political absolutism...
...Hoisting aloft the flag of historical determinism, they declare that any political superstructure is no more than a reflection of the economic infrastructure...
...The eighteenth century philosophers, for example, be lieved they were bringing enlighten ment, but were actually defending the bourgeoisie...
...The reality has been otherwise...
...The Communist regimes pretend to pull underdeveloped countries out of their rut and to carry them past the stage of capitalism, directly into the most advanced forms of political and social life...
...In reality these regimes serve up traditional despotism with a modern sauce, substituting parties for courts and slogans for bibles...
...Not all the Communist intellectuals look toward Asia be cause it contains the type of country which begins to develop only under a bloody regime...
...When glorifying the events of the East, they talk the language of Power...
...For in the last analysis, their constructions, which with excessive kindness we have called ideologies, are built upon the ruins of truth...
...To ask this question is to suggest the answer: the ideologies of the Communist intelligentsia express the class interest of . . . the Communist intelligentsia...
...Nor does Sputnik dissolve this dilemma...
...but we are moving in that direction...
...The only drawback is that the "progressive" intellectual cooks run the risk of falling into their own pot...
Vol. 6 • July 1959 • No. 3
