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"The problem of intellectuals who join the struggle of the proletariat is as old as the workers' movement itself. Marx takes note of it in a famous passage of the Communist Manifesto: "In times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour [...] historical movement as a whole".
Theses lines call for a number of comments. To start with, it is generally a portion of petty-bourgeois ideologues, rather than of the bourgeoisie itself, that goes over to the proletariat. The distinction is of great significance. In certain exceptional cases (Friedrich Engels !), individual bourgeois may pass to the side of the proletariat ; but they do not constitute a fraction, however small, of the dominant class. Next, although it is possible to compare such intellectuals with the nobles who rallied to the Third Estate, we should not overlook the fact these are altogether a distinct phenomena. There are two specific reasons for this. First, the enligthened aristocrats of the eighteenth century went over to a class that already occupied positions of economic power, if not actual hegemony, and could provide a whole rang of material and social privileges to its various allies or ideologues. Clearly this is not the case for those intellectuals who side with the proletariat. Second, the extent of the shift has become much greater: whole sections of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia are involved, not just individual "traitors to their class" such as the nobles who rallied to the assembly of the Third Estate in June 1789. It should further be noted that the phenomenon arises not only when the struggle of the proletariat "nears the decisive hour" or when the ruling class is "in dissolution", but also during other stages of the class struggle. As the reacion of intellectuals to the victory of German fascisme illustrates, it may even develop after a defeat of the workers' movement. Finally, "comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole' is dialectically related to a politico-ideological commitment that must be explained in sociological terms. It is often the choice of a proletarian class position that makes it possible for intellectuals to attain such theoritical insight.
Few Marxist thinkers other than Gramsci have tried to explain this phenomenon, even though its extent and importance for the worker's movement have grown in the course of the twentieth century. Certainly Lenin, who was himself an illustrious case in point, stressed the crucial role played by revolutionary intellectuals in the ideological struggle against the bourgeoisie and in the construction of a vanguard party. But he made only a few points that are of help in understanding why such intellectuals side with the proletariat. The present work is, of course, only a partial and extremely limited contribution to a future Marxist sociology of the revolutionary intelligentsia. It seek to explain Lukàcs's political evolution until 1929 within the framework of a study of the radicalized intelligentsia of early-twentieth-century Germany and Hungary -and, in particular, those groups like the Max Weber Circle in Heidelberg and the Budapest "Synday Circle", in which Lukàcs was directly involved. Our twofold aim is to analyse the political ideas of a man often hailed as the greatest twentieth-century Marxist philosopher, and to grasp Lukàcs's ideological evolution as a case of exemplary significance for a sociological understanding of the problem of revolutionary intellectuals.
In studing "the Lukàcs phenomenon", then, we shall employ the method of historical materialism -or, to be more precise, an interpretation of the latter which is largely by Lukàcs's own History and Class Consciousness. We could almost say that this is not only a Marxist study of a Marxist thinker, but a Lukàscian analysis of Lukàcs." (pp.9-10)
"Dialectical understanding of a historical event -whether it be economic, political, or ideological- involves grasping its role within the social totality, within the unity of the historical process. Abstract, isolated "fact" must be dissolved and conceived as moments of this unitary process." (p.11)
"Rather than "explain" Lukàcs's thought by the influence of Weber or Dostoevsky, we shall seek to explain why he was influenced by a particular author at a given stage in his development. For the way in which a doctrine is "received" is itself a social fact to be understood in relation to a concrete historical totality." (p.13)
"What is an intellectual, that indisputably strange being so difficult to classify ? The first obvious point is that the intellectual may be recruited in every class and layer of society ; he may be an aristocrat (Tolstoy), an industrialist (Owen), a professor (Hegel), or a craftsman (Proudhon). Intellectuals are not a class but a social categoy, defined not by their place in the production process, but by their relation to non-economic instances of the social structure. Just as bureaucrats and military men are defined by their relationship to politics, so are intellectuals to be situated in relation to the ideological superstructure. Thus, intellectuals are a social category defined by their ideological role: they are the direct producers of the ideological sphere, the creators of ideologico-cultural products. Their specific space in what we may call the process of ideological production is the place of the immediate producer, as distinct from that of the entrepreneur, administrator, or distributor of cultural goods. Defined in this way, intellectuals comprise such groups as writers, artists, poets, philosophers, scientists, research workers, publicists, theologians, certain kinds of journalist, teacher and student, and so on. They make up the "creative" sector of a broader mass of "intellectual" (as opposed to "manuel") workers -a mass that includes the liberal professions, office workers, technicians, and others. Intellectuals are therefore the section of this mass furthest removed from economic production.
Althought the behaviour of intellectuals is to some extent determined by individual class origin, it is more potently influenced by membership in a common social category. Similarly, except in times of crises, the bureaucrat and the military man behave first of all as members of their respective category.
Being the most distant from the process of material production, the social category of intellectuals enjoys a certain autonomy from classes, which is expressed in its instability and in various shifts and fluctuations. This is why Alfred Weber and Karl Mannheim bestowed upon them the epithet Freischweben, or "free-floating". However, there is no really "neutral" or supra-class intelligentsia -contrary to what Mannheim suggests with his tendancy to make such autonomy absolute. The floating of intellectuals, like that of the hot-air ballons on St John's Night, is a provisional state ; in general, they eventually yield to the law of gravity and are attracted either by one of the great social classes in conflict (the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, sometimes the peasantry) or by the class nearest to themselves : the petty bourgeoisie.
In fact, although the label "petty-bourgeois intellectual" is often employed as a terme of abuse, it contains a large measure of truth. Between the intelligentsia and the petty bourgeoisie there is a relationship of affinity, closeness, or complicity which can be sociologically explained as follows. First, the majority of the intelligenstia is recruited from the petty bourgeoisie, or to be more precise, from the sector of "intellectual workers" as opposed to other members of that class such as small traders and small peasants. We should therefore neither ignore nor overestimate the bond of social origin that undeniably links a major fraction of this social category to the petty bourgeoisie. Second, the intellectual professions of writer, teacher, artist, and other, as well as the means of labour and subsistence offered to intellectuals, have traditionally fallen by their very nature to the petty bourgeoisie, and in particular to members of the liberal professions. (Of course, a minority of intellectuals have nevertheless belonged, by occupation and social position, to the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, and even the working class.)" (pp.15-16)
"In a article written in 1920, Lukàcs argued that the intelligentsia as a social class was not revolutionary, and that intellectuals can become revolutionaries only as individuals. What Lukàcs seemed to forget, however, was that when a veritable mass of individual (intellectuals) become revolutionary, we are dealing no longer with a "personal" case or a psychological matter, but with a social phenomenon requiring a sociological explanation.
Now, it is obvious that Lukàcs was by no means an isolated case. A large part of hiw own circle and a great number of intellectuals of diverse backgrounds joined the Hungarian Communist Party between 1918 and 1919: and as Lukàcs himself recognized in 1969, many more supported Béla Kun's Commune in one way or another [...]
The problem we must confront is this: why do a significant number of intellectuals become radically opposed to capitalism, and why do they end up embracing the workers' movement and the Marxist Weltanschauung ? The causes appear to be very different from those that lead the proletariat toward socialism. For the path of the proletariat involves the direct experience of exploitation, and its principal driving force is of a directly socio-economic order.
How, then, does an intellectual become anti-capitalist ? How does the intelligentsia become radicalized ? What, in particular, were the causes of this phenomenon during Lukàcs's youth ? Two distinct kinds of sociological process must be analysed: that characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie as a whole, and that which is of an ethico-cultural nature and specific to intellectuals. Given the deep affinity between petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, the "mechanisms" whereby the former is radicalized necessarily have repercussions upon the latter. The causes that produce an anti-capitalist mentality within petty bourgeoisie are therfore largely operative upon intellectuals. However, tendencies that become diluted within the class as a whole assume a much more concentrated and intense form in the social category whose social function is precisely ideological elaboration. [...]
I. "The pre-capitalist" character of labour within the petty bourgeoisie. For the artisan, the peasant with a small plot, the member of a liberal profession, or the traditional intellectual, there is no separation between the producer and the product of his labour, between individual and production process, or between the labourer's personality and his creation. The development of capitalism, which begins to split, dissociate, and tear apart this unity, is felt by the petty bourgeois as a process inimical to his way of life, his very mode of being.
II. Proletarianization of the petty bourgeoisie and of intellectuals. This takes various forms: unemployement or under-employment, falling living standars, reduction to the lot of the wage labourers. Freqeuntly, but not necessarily, the fact that the petty bourgeois thus draws objectively closer to the proletarian condition results in a bitter and virulent revolt against a capitalism held responsaible for such brutal "downgrading".
III. Politically, the Jacobinism of the left wing of the petty bourgeoisie -a specific combination of plebeian democracy and romantic moralism (Rousseau)- tend to come into conflict with the ideology and liberal-individualist pratice of the big bourgeoisie. In countries in which the bourgeoisie is playing a revolutionary role, this contradiction is more or less neutralized: the petty bourgeoisie and intellectuals tend to gravitate towards the bourgeoisie, as happened in eighteenth-century France. By contrast, in "bawkward" countries in the nineteenth century (Germany) and twentieth century (Russia), where the bourgeoisie is no longer revolutionary and, fearing the popular masses, capitulates to the monarchy, the feudalists, and the conservatives, petty-bourgeois Jacobinism tends to become radicals and to clash with a bourgeoisie accused of betraying democratic principles. Where the petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia are at the height of a struggle for freedom and democracy, such radicalization may even lead a fraction to break violently with the bourgeoisie and become socialist. Two classifcal exemples are that of Marx and a number of German intellectuals before 1848, and that of the Russian intelligentsia after the rend of the nineteenh century. In Russia between 1917 and 1919, not only the intellectuals but also considrable sections of the urban and, above all, rural petty bourgeoisie gave their support to the Bolsheviks, who seemed the only force capable of realizing the tasks of the democratic revolution." (pp.16-19)
"It remains to examine the specific causes of the anti-capitalist radicalization of intellectuals as intellectuals -that is to say, abstracted from the features they have in common with the petty bourgeoisie. Since intellectuals are defined as a distinct social category by their relation to the ideological superstructure, it is understandable that their evolution towards socialism should pass through certain ethico-cultural and politico-moral mediations.
First, intellectuals, writers, poets, artists, theologians, scientists, and others live in a universe governed by qualitative values: the living and the dead, the beautiful and the ugly, truth and error, good and evil, the just and the unjust, and so on. Thus, many intellectual find themselves, so to speak, naturally, spontaneously, an organically in contradiction with the capitalist universe -one rigorously governed by quantitative values, exchange-values. For an artist, a painting is above all else beautiful, luminous, expressive, or disturbing ; for capitalisme, it is first and foremost an object worth 50 000 francs. Here there is an opposition between two fundamentally heterogenous world ; and between the intellectual and capitalism there is frequently a relation of antipathy, in the old alchemist's sense of "lack of affinity between two substances". The two substances are qualitative and quantitative values ; ethical and aesthetic culture and money. Nor is this a static relationship, for the quantitative universe is constantly expanding, threatening to absorb and denature qualitative values, to dissolve and digest them, to reduce them to their exchange-value. The intellectual tends to resist this constant threat of the transformation of every material or cultural good, every feeling, moral principle, or aesthetic emotion, into a commody-"thing" to be brought to market and sold for a fair price. And to the extent that he resists, he cannot fail to become instinctively anti-capitalist in his vey marrow. Only insofar as he capitulates, accepting the domination of exchange-value over the qualitative values of his ideologico-cultural universe, only to this extent can he be integrated by capitalism. This customary distinction between two types of intellectual sometimes takes the form of a violent break. But, of course, there are also intermediate cases in which an eclectic attempt is made to reconcile the two demands.
(The choice of resistance is clearly expressed in the romantic anticapitalism and ideological counterposition of "culture" and "civilization" that marked the Central European intelligentsia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One the Lukàcs's greatest merits is to have reformulated, in the Marxist terms of the theory of reification, the consused, romantic critique directed by intellectuals against the inexorable process of quantification characteristic of the capitalist mode of production.)
Second, since intellectuals are so far removed from material production, and above all since their very social category is defined by its ideological role, they constitute the group in society for which ideologies and values have the greatest significance and the most crucial weight. Thus, no one 'takes more seriously" than intellectuals the principles, values, and ideals of bourgeois humanism -from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment to classical German idealism. Now, Lukàcs shows that the bourgeoisie, once in power, was forced to act in contradiction with its own ideology, to deny, degrade, and in practice to abandon the values it had never ceased to claim as its own. It is therefore in the name of such humanist principles that the intelligentsia turns against capitalism and the bourgeoisie, in some cases discovering the proletariat as the class capable of genuinely realizing the ideals of freedom, equility and fraternity." (pp.19-20)
"Sometimes, a radical and consistent rejection of capitalism may by itself lead intellectuals to discover Marxism and pass into the ranks of the proletariat. But for a large section, an external event like the 1917 Russian Revolution must first act as a catalyst, crystallizing their diffuse and amorphous anti-capitalism and attracting them to the side of the proletariat." (p.22)
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-Michael Löwy, Georg Lukacs. From Romanticism to Bolshevism, Verso Books, 1979 (traduction de "Pour une sociologie des intellectuels révolutionnaires", publié en France en 1976), 219 pages.
