THE INTELLIGENTSIA
267
is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses
his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind....
And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intel–
lectual creations of individual nations become common property. Na–
tional one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more
impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures
there arises a world literature.'
(Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848).
The first paragraph quoted shows Marx and Engels at their best;
in the second they take the fatal short cut from Economy to "Super–
structure": that is culture, art, mass psychology. Marxian society has
a basement-production, and an attic- intellectual production; the
staircase and the lifts are missing.
For it is not as simple as that: the triumphant class creating its ·
own philosophic superstructure to fit its mode of production like a
tailored. suit. The Encyclopa:dia was not commissioned by the Na–
tional Assembly. Whenever a class or group emerged victorious from
its struggles, it found the befitting ideology already waiting for it
like a ready made suit in a department store. Thus Marx found
Hegel, Feuerbach, and Ricardo, Mussolini had only to pick Sorel and
Pareto, Hitler discovered Gobineau, Houston Stuart Chamberlain and
Jung; Stalin revived Machiavelli and Peter the Great. This of course,
is a mixed bag of examples of progressive and regressive movements
which, strictly speaking, should be kept apart. For regressive move–
ments need simply to fall back on superannuated values-not on the
last, but on the last-but-one or last-but-two, to perform a romantic
revival, and derive a lot of pseudo-revolutionary gusto out of this
'revolution
a
rebours.' And there is always a part of the intelligentsia
which, abandoning its aspiration to independent thought and detach–
ing itself from the main body, lends itself to such romantic revivals.
They are the tired and the cynics, the hedonists, the romantic cap–
itulators, who transform their dynamite into Bengal lights, the Juen–
gers, Montherlants, Ezra Pounds.
Discarding these, there still remains the problem of how and why
.the true, emergent, progressive movements in history, those which led
to the Rights of Man and to the founding of the First Workers In–
ternational, those who have no last-but-one precepts to fall back on,
invariably find the right ideology waiting for them as the right mo–
ment. I repeat that I do not believe any more that the economic
process by itself creates its own superstructure. Orthodox Marxism
has never produced the historical evidence for this postulate. Nor,
of course, is it a matter of coincidence. It seems rather that political
