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PARTISAN REVIEW
division of labor. This is perfectly in line with what we should expect
from the technical backwardness of Russia and from the relative
absence of political bureaucracy in America. Jean-Paul Sartre has
lately protested against the bureaucratization of the writer in France,
where it follows still another pattern. For the French government,
literature is an asset for export, an
industrie du pays,
and particularly
an
industrie de luxe
like millinery, perfume, and champagnes. The
French writer is at least more fortunate in being assimilated to the
handcraftsman, the milliner, rather than to the factory hand of mass
production, though he is exposed to the attendant danger that liter–
ature may be thought of as an elegant confection- which may be
on!'> reason why French writers have lately been trying to escape into
the violence and raw realism of American fiction . Despite the different
national lines, we should expect that the general direction of evolu–
tion will be toward a combination of the Russian and American
situations.
On its productive side a bureaucratization of the writer, this
process functions, in its social relation to the whole class of con–
sumers, as a
cultural exploitation
of the audience. Even the economy
itself of this new exploitation does not seem to tally precisely with the
traditional Marxist analysis in terms of surplus value: for it is really
the audience that is now being exploited, and forms the source of
profits, rather than the surplus value created by the industry's work–
ers. Coal seams give out and oil wells dry up, but the ignorance,
crudity, and sentimentality of the masses represent an unlimited
field of raw material to be worked by Hollywood, which perpetuates
these tastes that it gratifies.
Here quantity has really changed to quality (to borrow the old
metaphor ) , and though this exploitation is continuous with older
popular kitsch of calendar art and "serving girls' novels," in being
carried on as a big business it emerges as a really new historical
phenomenon. In its widest historical frame, what we are now living
through is the interregnum of the masses. Arthur Koestler has already
used this notion of .an historical interregnum- as he develops it, the
interregnum between the present hostile and warring condition of
great "vertical" national states and some future period of unification
through a genuine "horizontal" or international ferment. But if such
a ferment is ever to come, it will have to come from and transform
the masses, and the whole historical condition ought therefore to be
described outright from a class basis. We are living through a period
when the masses have risen to a level where they have been able
