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This distinction between the two meanings explains the curious condemnation by Stalinism in the post-war years of the notion of objectivity. To consider the facts in themselves, without reference to the doctrine, was to commit a bourgeois error.
How can one condemn the Soviet Union, since the failure of the Bolshevik enterprise would be the failure of Marxism and therefore of history itself? This is an admirable piece of philosophical double-think, typical of our latter-day intelligentsia. They start with the idea of the recognition of man by man; they then proceed to the Revolution; they attribute to the proletariat, and to it alone, the capacity to bring about the Revolution; they subscribe implicitly to the claim of the Communist Party to be the sole representative of the proletariat; and when, finally, they observe with some
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The great trials of 1936 and 1938 which resulted in the condemnation of Lenin’s old comrades, and which were reproduced in the satellite states after Tito’s defection, appear to many Western observers as the epitome of the Stalinist universe. Comparable to the trials of the Inquisition, they reveal the orthodoxy by highlighting the heresies.
The attitude symbolised by the formula “one law for one’s friends and another for one’s foes”,
That there should be several dimensions open to the would- be interpreter of the past does not mean that understanding is impossible; what it suggests is the richness of reality. In a certain sense, each and every fragment of history is inexhaustible.
But it is doubtful; after all, one never plumbs the mystery even of one’s nearest and dearest.
The adventure of mankind through time has one meaning to the extent that all men are collectively seeking to achieve salvation.
The formulas which the philosophies of history have made fashionable—the mastery of man over Nature, or the reconciliation of mankind—take one back to the original problems of economics and politics.
The reign of plenty is not unthinkable or absurd. Economic progress, such as we have been able to observe it over the past two or three centuries, can be measured, roughly speaking, by increased productivity. In one hour of work a man produces an increasing quantity of goods.
politics have always been based on the notion of the lesser evil, and they will continue to be so as long as men are what they are.
Not that one would wish to conjure up an optimistic vision of a capitalism evolving peacefully towards the highest level of prosperity for all. A system based on private ownership and the market is by its very nature unstable; it involves the risk of slumps and the reactions to crises bring structural changes which are often irreversible.
Anyone who uses force to exclude other countries from legitimate competition is in effect guilty of aggression.
Each generation tends to believe that its own aims are entirely original and unprecedented and that they represent the ultimate aims of humanity.
Ministers of Education and Propaganda were irresistibly tempted to accomplish by decree what, according to their version of historical materialism, should have happened spontaneously. They decided to provoke the literature and the philosophy which, according to the doctrine, should have flowered spontaneously in a budding socialist society.
Once again, the rulers must encourage the recalcitrant species, the ‘engineers of the soul’ will accelerate the unfolding of the dialectic. Education, propaganda, ideological training, campaigns against religion— | every possible means is used in an attempt to model individuals according to the Communist idea of man and his situation on this earth.
Once again, the failure of science prepares the way for despotic action. Ministers, commissars, theorists, interrogators, armed with the Pavlovian method, will try to make men what J:hey would spontaneously be if the official philosophy were true.
Poets, novelists, painters, sculptors and philosophers form j the inner circle: they live by and for the exercise of the intellect. If the value of the activity is taken as the criterion, one would gradually descend the ladder from Balzac to Eugene Sue, from Proust to the authors of ‘human interest’ • stories in the daily papers. Artists who go on producing with- j out developing new ideas or new forms, professors in their chairs, research workers in their laboratories, form the bulk of the community of knowledge and culture. Below them are the journalists of the press and the radio, who
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Even if he has no idea of the consequences of this revolt or of the means of translating it into action, the moral critic feels incapable of not proclaiming it. Finally, there is ideological or historical criticism, which attacks the present society in the name of a society to come, which attributes the injustices which offend the human conscience to the very essence of the present order (capitalism and private ownership are inherently bound to produce exploitation, imperialism and war), and sketches out the blueprint of a radically different order, in which mar» will fulfil his true vocation.
How many intellectuals have come to the revolutionary party via the path of moral indignation, only to connive ultimately at terror and autocracy?
The United States is represented as the embodiment of everything most detested, and then all the resentment and hatred and gall which accumulates in people’s hearts in a time of troubles is heaped on this symbolic figure.
Prosperity, power, the tendency towards uniformity of economic conditions—these results have been achieved by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention, in other words by capitalism, which every well-brought-up intellectual has been taught to despise.
The United States does not persecute its intellectuals enough to enjoy in its turn the turbid attractions of terror; it gives a few of them, temporarily, a prestige and a glory which can compete with that of the film stars or baseball players; but it leaves the majority in the shadows. Persecution is more bearable to the intelligentsia than indifference.
A selfconscious prig, so given to examining all sides of a question that he becomes thoroughly addled while remaining always in the same spot. An anaemic bleeding heart.” This definition summarises the classic accusations raised against the intellectuals. They claim to be more competent than ordinary mortals but in fact they are less so. They are lacking in virility and resolution. By dint of looking at every aspect of a problem they are no longer capable of grasping the essentials and they have become incapable of decision.
The false liberals all stem from a psychopath called Karl Marx; they are interested not in ideals but in material security, they buy votes by means of subsidies and allowances, “in the very same way that precipitated the ruin of Rome, of Constantinople and Great Britain”. They are planners; they believe in their own wisdom, not in that of the man in the street; they are not Communists but they are muddled thinkers and they allowed themselves to be duped by the Stalinists at Yalta and at Potsdam.
Unfortunately, ‘everyone’ nevertheless feels himself to be in the minority, with a vague feeling of guilt for past flirtations with Communism, and a fear of popular opinion which threatens to embrace in the same hostility reds, pinks and pale pinks—Communists, Socialists and New Dealers.
The promotion of a noncapitalist country to the first rank of the great powers has proved by its success the possibility of ‘westernisation without liberty or ‘westernisation against the West’.
That the be-all and end-all of the West is the search for profits; that the religious missions and Christian beliefs are the smoke-screen or the alibi for cynical interests; that finally, the victim of its own materialism, the West must destroy itself by imperialist wars—such an interpretation is partial, misleading and unjust. It nevertheless convinces peoples in revolt against foreign masters.
The formation of the American parties according to regional as much as social considerations made it impossible to christen one Left and the other Right. The party which brought about the emancipation of the slaves was to the Left, but was the defender of the states against the Federal power to the Right? Lincoln’s party was no less left-wing for being allied to the bankers and industrialists of the East.
The Communist revolution is transferable, because it is the work of a single party prepared to use violence; the American revolution is not, because it presupposes the action of innumerable private groups and business undertakings and the individual initiative of free citizens.
the art of the French intellectuals is to ignore and very often to aggravate the real problems of the nation out of an arrogant desire to think for the whole of humanity.
It is nonetheless true that theories taught in universities become, within a few years, truths accepted by ministers or administrators.
Reality is always more conservative than ideology.
It is true that Communism is all the more attractive wherever the throne of God is empty. When the intellectual feels no longei attached either to the community or the religion of his forebears he looks to progressive ideologies to fill the spiritual vacuum.
The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinions merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The Revolution provides him with his opium.
Far from being a development of bourgeois liberalism, Communism is a retrogression. It is difficult to convict it of imposture or anyway to persuade progressivist intellectuals that it is an imposture, because any institutional expression of the democratic ideal is in some sense a betrayal of that ideal.
materialist, become the doctrine of the Chinese intellectuals? The depreciation of the family and the boosting of the Party and the State represent a break with tradition, which only yesterday would have been considered totally impossible. But the Communist Party has nevertheless reconstituted a hierarchy at the summit of which scholars sit enthroned.
As for the absence of the transcendental or the sacred, the Communists do not categorically deny it, but they recall that many societies throughout the centuries have been ignorant of the notion of a divine being without being ignorant of the way of thought and feeling, the obligations and the devotions, which the observer of today regards as religious.
Communism developed from an economic and political doctrine at a time when the spiritual vitality and the authority of the Churches were in decline. Passions which in other times might have expressed themselves in strictly religious beliefs were channelled into political action. Socialism appeared not so much a technique applicable to the management of enterprises or to the functioning of the economy, as a means of curing once and for all the age-old misery of mankind.
Every prophetism condemns what is and sketches an outline of what should or will be; it chooses an individual or a group to cleave a path across the no-man’s land which separates the unworthy present from the radiant future. The classless society which will bring social progress without political revolution is comparable to the dreams of the millennium.
even if the road be horrible, is there another way?
The Christian can never be a genuine Communist, any more than the latter could believe in God or in Christ because the secular religion, inspired by a fundamental atheism, teaches that the destiny of man is completely fulfilled on this earth and in the temporal city. The progressive Christian closes his eyes and his mind to this basic incompatibility.
It was Auguste Comte, perhaps, who formulated more clearly than anyone else the ideas which inspire the search for a rationalist religion to replace Christianity. The essence of these ideas is as follows. Theology and metaphysics are incompatible with positive knowledge. The religions of the past are losing their vitality because science no longer permits one to believe what the Church teaches. Faith will gradually disappear or will decline into superstition. The death of God leaves a void in the human soul; the needs of the heart remain and must be satisfied by a new Christianity. Only the
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One remembers the famous phrase: “a society of true Christians would no longer be a society of men”—which Hitler would have approved.
It harnesses science to its purposes, but in the name of science. It turns Western rationalism upside down, but it continues to pay lip service to it.
The theologians now admit fairly and squarely that the Christian Revelation cannot compete in the realms of astronomy or physics, that the knowledge it contains about these subjects is rudimentary, and expressed in terms accessible to the ' minds of the peoples living at the time of Christ.
They admit no such thing.
Under a Communist regime the intellectuals, sophists rather than philosophers, rule the roost.
Christianity brought its message to the slaves as well as to the kings; it taught that men were equal in the eyes of God in spite of social hierarchies.
Marx called religion the opium of the people. Whether it wants to or not, the Church consolidates the established injustice. It helps men to support and to forget their ills instead of curing them. Obsessed by the hereafter, the believer is indifferent to temporal things.
It will be said that the Communist religion in our time has a quite different meaning from the Christian religion. The Christian opium makes the people passive, the Communist opium incites them to revolt.
Hogwash. Christianity is seen by despots as hostile, radical, and subversive.
The intellectuals of the two nation-empires, the Soviet Union and the United States, are both, though in a very different way, caught up in a system which is identified with the State. Neither counter-ideology nor counter-State offers itself as an alternative.
