Revolutionaries (42 page)

Of course it may be claimed that intellectuals cannot be revolutionaries without this subjective consciousness, whereas some other social strata can. When Marx spoke of the workers as a revolutionary class, he meant not simply one which ‘revolts against individual conditions of a hitherto existing society', but ‘against the very “life-production” hitherto existing, the “whole of the activity” on which it is based'. He did not imply that this rejection must be explicit, though he assumed that at a certain stage of historical development it would become so. For him the proletariat was such a class because of the nature of its social existence, and not (except at a rather lower level of the analysis of concrete historical situations) because of its consciousness of this aim. ‘It cannot abolish its own conditions of life without abolishing
all
the inhuman conditions of the life of present-day society which are concentrated in its situation. It is not a matter of what this or that proletarian or even the whole poletariat
imagines
at one time or another to be its goal. It is a matter of
what it is
, and what in accordance with this
being
it will be historically forced to do.'
²
Intellectuals as a stratum are not of this kind. They are revolutionary only in so far as their members individually feel that they ought to or must be. So we must begin by considering what makes people feel this way. Naturally, this discussion cannot be confined merely to intellectuals.

Why do men and women become revolutionaries? In the first instance mostly because they believe that what they want subjectively from life cannot be got without a fundamental change in all society. There is of course that permanent substratum of idealism, or if we prefer the term, utopianism, which is part of all human life and it can become the dominant part for
individuals at certain times, as during adolescence and romantic love, and for societies at the occasional historical moments which correspond to falling and being in love, namely the great moments of liberation and revolution. All men, however cynical, can conceive of a personal life or society which would not be imperfect. All would agree that this would be wonderful. Most men at some time of their lives think that such a life and society are
possible
, and quite a number think that we ought to bring them about. During the great liberations and revolutions most men actually think, briefly or only momentarily, that perfection is being achieved, that the New Jerusalem is being built, the earthly paradise within reach. But most people for most of their adult lives, and most social groups for most of their history, live at a less exalted level of expectation.

It is when the relatively modest expectations of everyday life look as though they cannot be achieved without revolutions, that individuals become revolutionaries. Peace is a modest and negative objective, but during the first world war it was this elementary demand which turned ordinary people objectively and later subjectively into persons dedicated to the immediate overthrow of society, since peace seemed unrealizable without it. Such an assessment of the situation may be mistaken. For instance, it may turn out that British workers can, on the whole, enjoy full employment at a high standard of life for quite a long time without first overthrowing capitalism, a prospect which looked hardly credible forty years ago.
³
But that is another matter. The modest expectations of everyday life are not, of course, purely material. They include all kinds of demands which we make for ourselves or the communities of which we consider ourselves members: respect and self-respect, certain rights, just treatment, and so on. But even these are not utopian
demands for a new, different and perfect life, but envisage the ordinary life we see around us. The demands which make North American blacks into revolutionaries are elementary enough, and most whites can take their fulfilment for granted.

Here again, what forces people towards conscious revolutionism is not the ambition of their objective, but the apparent failure of all alternative ways of attaining it, the closing of all doors against them. If we are locked out of our house, there are normally several possibilities of getting back in, though some imply a hopeful patience. It is only when none of these appear realistic that we think of battering in the door. However, it is worth observing that even so we are unlikely to batter in the door unless we feel that it will give way. Becoming a revolutionary implies not only a measure of despair, but also some hope. The typical alternation of passivity and activism among some notoriously oppressed classes or peoples is thus explained.
⁴

Commitment to revolution thus depends on a mixture of motives: the desire for the ordinary life, behind which, waiting to emerge, is the dream of the really good life; the sense of all gates closing against us, but at the same time the sense of the possibility of bursting them open; the sense of
urgency
, without which appeals to patience and reform or piecemeal improvement do not lose their force. Such motives, mixed in different proportions, may arise in a variety of historic situations, among which we may single out two. There is the relatively specialized case of particular groups within a society, like the Negroes in the United States, for which the gates appear to be shut, whereas they are open, or at least capable of opening, for the rest. There is also the more general and significant case of societies in crisis,
which appear incapable of satisfying the demands of most of their people, whatever they may do, so that – with relatively small exceptions – all groups feel disoriented, frustrated and convinced of the necessity of some fundamental change, not necessarily of the same kind. Tsarist Russia is a classical example: a society in whose future few believed. Most developed countries of the western world normally belonged, for more than a century after 1848, to the first type, but it is possible that since the 1960s several of them may be transferring to the second.

It is worth repeating that I am talking about what makes revolutionaries, not what makes revolutions. Revolutions can be made without many revolutionaries in the sense I am using the word. At the start of the French revolution of 1789, probably few were to be found outside the ranks of the marginal literary
bohême
and (very much more inactively) of educated middle-class intellectuals. There was discontent, militancy, popular ferment, and in the context of an economic and political crisis of the regime this actually led to revolution, whereas otherwise it might have produced no more than considerable but temporary public disorder. But by and large French revolutionaries were made during, by and in the revolution. They did not initially make it.

Let me briefly make another point. Contrary to a view once fashionable among American sociologists and political scientists, people do not normally become revolutionaries because they are individually alienated or deviant, though revolutionary activities undoubtedly attract a lunatic fringe and some of them – especially the less organized and disciplined – may attract personal misfits. The analysis of the membership of communist parties, and even more that of their supporters, show clearly that their members are typically not of this kind, even in quite small parties. It is of course true that certain kinds of people find it easier or more attractive to join revolutionary movements than do others; e.g. the young as distinct from the old, or people transferred out of their traditional
environment, as by emigration; or members of some socially marginal groups. However, these are social categories, not collections of maladjusted individuals. Young Jews who became revolutionary marxists were no more alienated and deviant than other Jews, whether in Zamosc, Wilna or Brooklyn. (It is, by the way, neither established nor even very probable that they were more likely to become revolutionary socialists in emigration than in the old country.) They simply made one choice of several which, for people in their position, was normal.

In my lifetime there have been two periods when numerous intellectuals became revolutionaries, the interwar years and the years since the late 1950s, and more especially since the middle 1960s. I would like to look at both, and attempt to contrast and compare them.

It may be simplest to approach the problem of my own generation through introspection, or if you prefer, autobiography.

A middle-aged and moderate well-established academic can hardly claim to be a revolutionary in any realistic sense, but someone who has regarded himself as a communist for about forty years has at least a long memory to contribute to the discussion. I belong, perhaps as one of its youngest surviving members, to a milieu which is now virtually extinct, the Jewish middle-class culture of central Europe after the first world war. This milieu lived under the triple impact of the collapse of the bourgeois world in 1914, the October revolution and anti-semitism. For most of my older Austrian relatives ordinary life had ended with the assassination in Sarajevo. When they said ‘in peacetime' they meant before 1914, when the lives of ‘people like us' had stretched before them like a wide straight road, predictable even in its unpredictabilities, comfortably certain, boring, from birth through the vicissitudes of school, career,
visits to the opera, summer holidays and family life, to a grave in the Vienna Central Cemetery. After 1914 there was nothing but catastrophe and problematic survival. We lived on borrowed time and knew it. To make long-term plans seemed senseless for people whose world had already crashed twice within ten years (first in the war, later in the Great Inflation). We knew about the October revolution: I speak here of my Austrian relatives, though as a second-generation English citizen I stood at a slight angle to them. It proved that capitalism could and indeed must end, whether we liked it or not. This, you recall, is the mood of that notable and very central European work, Schumpeter's
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
. We could hardly not know about anti-semitism, any more than the most assimilated middle-class blacks can fail to know about racism.

The first political conversation I ever recall took place when I was six in an Alpine sanatorium, between two Jewish mother-type ladies. It dealt with Trotsky. (‘Say what you like, he's a Jewish boy called Bronstein.') The first political event which made an impact on me as such, at the age of ten, was the great riot of 1927, when the Viennese workers burned down the Palace of Justice. The second political event I recall as such, at the age of thirteen, was the German general election of 1930, when the Nazis won 107 seats. We knew what that meant. Shortly after that we moved to Berlin, where I stayed until 1933. Those were the years of the depression. Marx somewhere says that history repeats itself, occurring first as tragedy, then as farce, but there is a more sinister pattern of repetition: first tragedy, then despair. In 1918–23 the bottom had fallen out of the world of central Europe. For a brief period in the middle 1920s it looked as though some sort of tentative hope was possible, then it fell out again. To say that those who had nothing to lose, the unemployed, the disoriented and demoralized middle classes, were desperate, is insufficient. They were ready for anything. Such were the times in which I became political.

What could young Jewish intellectuals have become under such circumstances? Not liberals of any kind, since the world of liberalism (which included social democracy) was precisely what had collapsed. As Jews we were precluded by definition from supporting parties based on confessional allegiance, or on a nationalism which excluded Jews, and in both cases on anti-semitism. We became either communists or some equivalent form of revolutionary marxists, or if we chose our own version of blood-and-soil nationalism, Zionists. But even the great bulk of young intellectual Zionists saw themselves as some sort of revolutionary marxist nationalists. There was virtually no other choice. We did not make a commitment against bourgeois society and capitalism, since it patently seemed to be on its last legs. We simply chose
a
future rather than
no
future, which meant revolution. But it meant revolution not in a negative but in a positive sense: a new world rather than no world. The great October revolution and Soviet Russia proved to us that such a new world was possible, perhaps that it was already functioning. ‘I have seen the future and it works', said Lincoln Steffens. If it was to be the future it
had
to work, so we thought it did.
⁵

We thus became revolutionaries not so much because of our own economic problems, though some of us were poor and most of us faced an uncertain future, but because the old society no longer seemed viable. It had no perspectives. This was also clear to young intellectuals in countries in which the social order was not visibly on the point of collapse, such as Britain. The arguments of John Strachey's
The Coming Struggle for Power
, a significant and very influential product of the slump years, also rested on the alternative: if not socialism, then barbarism. The triumph of Hitler seemed to confirm it. (Conversely, Strachey's conversion to the belief that Keynes had shown capitalism an alternative to collapse, backed no doubt by the economic recovery of the late 1930s, turned him back from a revolutionary into a reformist.) Clearly there were also intellectuals who became revolutionaries because they were proletarianized, hungry and desperate, as perhaps in Poland and certainly in our times among the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie of the Bengal cities, but I am not here concerned with them.

Our motives therefore differed in two crucial respects from those of workers who also became revolutionaries in our sense during this period. In the first place, since few of us came from milieux where marxist or other socialist beliefs had been traditional, our break was normally sharper. (This is perhaps not so true of countries like France, where a nominal revolutionism had always been a youthful bourgeois option.) In the second, the sheer economic desperation which drove so many of, say, the German unemployed into the ranks of the Communist Party in 1930–3, was less decisive. But of course we shared with the workers the sense that the old system was breaking down, the sense of urgency, and the belief that the Soviet revolution was the positive alternative.