246
ALVIN W. GOULDNER
This effort is resonated in the West by the antiintellectualism of the
bureaucratized
lumpen
intelligentsia and in the self-hatred of certain
gauchiste
intellectuals.
Jean-Paul Sartre expresses an essentially Maoist view of the in–
tellectual's future when he remarks: "his privileged status is over ...
it is sheer bad faith, hence counterrevolutionary, for the intellectual
to dwell on
his
own problems ... he owes
his
knowledge to [the
masses] and must be with them and in them: he must be dedicated
to work for their problems...." Asked whether the recent publica–
tion of his massive book on Flaubert was not in contradiction to this
very position, Sartre humbly replies, "My book on Flaubert may, in–
deed, be a form of petty-bourgeois escapism...."
Maoism is a Marxism that, according to its self-understanding,
strives to live in the purer morality of ordinary people, rather than
through the theoretical acumen of a privileged elite. In this view,
Mao's closing of the Chinese universities was a kind of sociological
surgery that sought to create a new social order devoid of an academic
intelligentsia. From June, 1966, until about September, 1970, uni–
versities throughout China were closed down and many (some ten
out of 40 in Peking) still remain shut. And not only the universities
but Chinese culture more broadly appears, even in Guillain's sympa–
thetic account, "to be in a state of suspended animation. Literature
has virtually disappeared. . . Painters and sculptors produce endless
versions of the Great Architect. The cinema has almost ground to a
halt and the theater has a repertory of half a dozen plays which are
presented time and again...." The latest foreign book on the
shelves of Peking University's library dates from 1966; and many
municipal libraries, museums, research institutes, and bookstores still
remain closed.
Marxism, however, was in the beginning the creation of a li–
brary-haunting, bookstore browsing, museum-loving - and hence
leisure-possessing - academic intelligentsia of the very sort that Mao–
ism now seeks to excise. It does not matter, of course, that Engels
him–
self had no university training, and it does not matter that Marx
never achieved the professorship that, when young, he had coveted;
for both were Mandarins at heart. They had both assimilated and
embodied the culture of the Western university. Marx was the product
and possessor of a high European culture who knew his Goethe by
