PARTISAN REVIEW
253
The stoical wisdom of the Chamnan, then, is this: there is no
permanent revolution, no way forward for a revolution that seeks
to live, except by eating its own children; for it is precisely they who
constitute the last bridge to the past, and it is they who set the sturdiest
limits on the revolution's future. Sartre's Maoist consciousness under–
stands all this very well: ". . . in the past, the winners have always
thought about stopping. Historians claim revolutionaries never know
where or when to stop. But it is the contrary. They always do stop, so
that the next generation of revolutionaries has felt obliged to go after
the previous generation. It happened four times during the French
Revolution of
1789-94.
Perhaps it would be better if for once a revo-
lutionary movement was ready and willing to go all the way ... of
all the groups within the left today, the undogmatic Maoists ... are
most prepared to do that...."
Maoism is the Marxism that recognizes - or better still, senses
without recognizing - that there is no way forward for the revolution
except through the death of Marxism; that the final limits on the
revolution are those imposed by and built into Marxism itself; that
these limits lay sedimented in the revolutionary intelligentsia, and in
the university system that socially reproduces the intelligentsia. Mao–
ism is the Marxism that was brought to the brink of understanding
that one has to choose: either Marxism or the permanent revolu–
tion - but not both!
One pole from which the crisis of Marxism spreads is the wan–
dering and floundering of the working class; of the proletariat that
surrendered its initiative to self-anointed vanguard parties, that ac–
commodated itself both to the great economic crises of capitalism as
well as to the seductions of capitalist affluence. At the other pole
from which the crisis of Marxism spreads is the decline of the aca–
demic intelligentsia.
The relationship between the intelligentsia and the proletariat is
a relationship between an author and his protagonist; between the
cameraman and the actor; between latent structure and manifest
structure. Or, as Marx once spoke of them, it is a relation between
the head and the heart of the revolution. Together, the proletariat
and intelligentsia once constituted the basic infrastructure of enacted
Marxism.
As
both are in the process of being historically transformed,
the sociological foundations of Marxism itself are crumbling, and the
