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PARTISAN REVIEW
only for what may be one significant way in which it differs from mid–
dle-class idealism. There is never, it seems to me, the same breach
between working-class idealism and working-class realism, as there is
between middle-class idealism and middle-class realism. When Marx
said, "Workers of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your
chains," he may have been offering the working class a false hope. Per–
haps the promise of the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessarily
false-because dictatorship is tyranny, and one cannot set out to tyran–
nize over others without, in the end, becoming the victim of tyranny
oneself. But at least he spoke to the real req J irements of the working
class, to what they couid believe were their real immediate needs. He
did not speak to some high selfless goal.
This is not to say that the working class isn't just as susceptible to
myths as the middle class is. The workers of France and Italy toda}
who are being led by Communists are being led by myths. But the work–
ing class is never, I believe, as susceptible as the middle class is to that
most powerful and destructive myth-the myth of selflessness. Even
where a worker is Communist-led, at least he believes he is being led on
his own behalf.
Parodying Marx, the radical intellectual of the 'thirties used to say,
" Intellectuals of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your
brains"- and probably this was the closest conjunction he ever made
between
his
ideality and his reality. For this was
in
the depression,
when many intellectuals were just as badly off as the proletariat. Brains
weren't buying much. But even in this crisis, the intellectual never
dared speak in his own name. The proletarian spoke in
his
own name,
but the intellectual spoke in the name only of someone with whom he
might temporarily confuse himself but who he was not, could never
be and never would have wished to be-a proletarian.
Today, prosperity is restored, and we contemplate its class
ad–
vantages with a certain composure. But its class guilts still persist.
The windows of the penthouse still open on a prospect of doom. The
landscape, however, is not peopled as it once was. Now it is not miners
and stcel workers and sharecroppers who excite the guilty emotions of the
idealist. It is the depressed peoples of Europe and Asia, the Jews of
Israel, the Negroes, and, most recently, the teeming victims of a rising
American reaction- movie actors and radio writers.
The notion that people who are different from ourselves have a
special virtue goes back, of course, a long way-at least as far as
Rousseau's noble savage. And in the last fifty to a hundred years, it has
taken a new impetus from the breakdown in the religious authority. With
