Revolutionaries (44 page)

It has been argued, therefore, that the intellectuals are today part of a ‘new' working class and in a sense the modern equivalent of that skilled, self-confident, and above all technically indispensable labour aristocracy of ‘intelligent artisans' which was so important in nineteenth-century Britain. It has been argued further, that being essentially salaried experts, their economic fortunes as individuals or as a stratum are not bound up with an economy of private enterprise, whose defects they are in any case well able to judge. Indeed, it has been held that since they are at least as intelligent and well educated as those who take decisions in business, and their work gives them at least as much of a general perspective on the policies of the enterprise and the economy, they are less likely to confine their activities to narrow questions of wages and conditions, more likely to envisage changes in management and policy.

Such arguments, put forward chiefly by French sociologists like Alain Touraine and Serge Mallet, have considerable force. However, they are not arguments for regarding the new ‘labour aristocracy' any more than the old as a revolutionary force. They rather suggest that it is a very effective reformist force, which is revolutionary only in so far as we envisage a gradual, peaceful but fundamental transformation of society. But whether such a transformation is possible, or if it is, can be regarded as a revolution, is of course a crucial question. To this question the ‘new working class' argument suggests what is in effect a neo-Fabian answer, dressed up in marxist terms, which will not be by
any means universally acceptable on the left. In the short run, the best thing is to regard them, like their ancestors the labour aristocracy, as moderate reformists. Their professional interests may perhaps incline them slightly more towards a democratic socialism than towards capitalism, so long as such a socialism does not threaten their relatively favourable situation, and their heart may well often be farther to the left than their professional interests, for most of them are likely to have passed through a student phase. But their basic attitude to social change is, and perhaps must be, that a great deal more can be done within the existing system than revolutionary persons, including their children, imagine. And so far as they themselves are concerned, this is undoubtedly true.

Apart from marginal groups such as those middle-class equivalents of the old handloom weavers whose occupations are being made redundant by technological progress – old-fashioned creative artists, writers, etc. – the major group among intellectuals which appears to reject the
status quo
wholesale is that of the young. These consist largely of those being educated for intellectual jobs, though it is by no means clear what the relationship between their rebelliousness and the educational system is.

Young members of the middle strata have a fairly limited experience of society, though probably today a rather wider one than their parents. Most of this experience – and the younger they are the more of it comes to them in this way – is mediated by the experience of family, of school or college, and of peer groups of people from similar backgrounds. (The concept of a general ‘youth culture' uniting an entire age group across social distinctions is either superficial or commercial or both. Similar costume, hair-styles, forms of entertainment and social customs do not imply similar political behaviour, as student militants seeking to mobilize young workers have often discovered. How far there is in fact a
single
form of ‘youth culture' rather than a
complex of such cultures, still remains an open question.) It does not follow that the criticisms of the middle-class young merely reflect a ‘generation gap', old or new, a rebellion against their elders, or discontent, justified or not, with their educational institutions. It may reflect, as it often has in the past, a genuine critique of society which is to be taken seriously, however incoherently it may be formulated.

The most serious organized form of youth revolutionism is that of the students (which in a number of countries includes secondary school pupils). It is therefore important to assess the character and possibilities of this student revolutionism. Its political functions are, of course, twofold. It exists both as a movement in its own right, i.e. as one of a group of people selected on grounds of age and/or attendance at educational institutions, and as a recruiting ground for the activists and leaders of the adult political world. The first is at present the more obvious, but the second has been historically the more significant. The political significance of the Ecole Normale Supérieure of the Rue d'Ulm at the end of the nineteenth century lies not in the socialist sympathies and Dreyfusard activities of its students at that time, but the subsequent career of
some
of those students, e.g. Jaurés, Léon Blum and Edouard Herriot.
⁹

Two general observations can be usefully made about youth/student movements. The first is the platitudinous but nevertheless significant one that such movements are by their nature impermanent and discontinuous. Being young or a student is the prelude to being adult and earning one's living: it is not a career in itself. Unlike celibacy it is not even a programme which could be carried out with personal effort. It can be prolonged somewhat, though the present fashion for regarding anyone past the early twenties as on the verge of middle age tends to curtail it, but sooner or later it must end. Hence a political youth or student movement is not comparable to movements whose members can remain in them all their lives, like those of workers (most of whom go on being workers until they retire), or women and blacks, all of whom belong to their respective category from birth to death. Since there are always young people and students, there is always scope for movements based on them. Since the proportion of both in the population is today high, they are likely to be at least potentially mass movements. But their turnover of membership is
necessarily
100 per cent within a few years, and the more exclusively such movements define themselves by impermanent criteria, i.e. by how different they are from adults, the harder it is for them to maintain continuity of activity, organization, or perhaps even programme and ideology, as distinct from the continuity of mood or the fact that each new generation faces similar problems. In the past this has rarely been significant for the revolutionary youth, chiefly because their movements have normally regarded themselves as those of adults, often actually refusing to be classified as youth movements, and always aiming at adult status.
¹⁰
The present fashion for separate ‘youth cultures' may have made such movements potentially larger, but also more fluctuating.

Second, there is the specific historic phenomenon of the past fifteen years or so, which have seen a probably unprecedented expansion of higher education in all countries with three consequences: an acute strain on the institutions receiving all these new entrants, unprepared for this influx; a multiplication of first-generation students, i.e. of people entering an entirely new way of life for which no family knowledge or tradition has prepared them; and also, speaking economically, a potential overproduction of intellectuals. For various reasons this virtually uncontrolled expansion is now being slowed down, and the pattern of higher education more or less radically restructured, not least as a result of the explosion of student unrest in the later 1960s. This is also likely to produce various forms of unrest and tension.

The existence of student unrest under these circumstances is not surprising, though the significant fact about it, at least in the industrialized capitalist countries and an important sector of the underdeveloped world, is that it has taken the form of left-wing social-revolutionary (typically anarchizing or marxisant) movements rather than of radical right-wing movements, such as were characteristic of the majority of political students in most of Europe between the wars.
¹¹
It is symptomatic of the crisis of both bourgeois society and the traditional alternatives to it which used to appeal to the disoriented lower middle class (from whom so many of the new students come and to whom they belong) that the characteristic form of student activism should be some kind of ultra-leftism.

This does not, however, guarantee that such student unrest will either remain a serious and permanent, still less an effective revolutionary political force. If the bulk of the new mass of students were to be absorbed into an expanding economy and a stable society, it probably would not. To take an extreme example, the bulk of the sixty thousand or so Peruvian university students (before 1945 there were only some four thousand of them) are the first generation of their families, often provincial Indian or mestizo lower middle class or rich peasants, whose typical ultra-leftism is to some extent a way of coming to terms with a new and disorienting form of life. However, since most of them are still readily absorbed into middle-class jobs, it rarely outlasts graduation. As a current joke has it, they ‘do their compulsory revolutionary service' analogous to compulsory military service. It is too early to judge whether they will produce as large a body of adult political leaders as the small body of the students of the 1920s did for the
APRA
and communist parties, but it seems unlikely.
¹²

On the other hand a large body of students either facing unemployment or a much less desirable employment than they have been led to expect from their degree (or other certificate) are likely to form a permanent discontented mass, readily supporting revolutionary movements (or those of the radical right) and providing both with activists. The declassed intellectual or petty bourgeois has formed the basis of such movements in several countries and at several periods. Governments are keenly aware of this prospect, especially in a period of economic difficulties or crises, but the most obvious solution, to cut down the number of students, is impracticable, partly because the political demand for the expansion of higher education is very powerful, partly because the huge student body could not always easily be absorbed into a stagnant economy. In the United States, for instance, cutting it down drastically might mean little more than transferring some hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, from colleges to an already overstocked labour market. In a sense the system which maintains vast numbers of young people for a few more years outside employment is a modern middle-class equivalent of the Old Poor Law of the early nineteenth century: a concealed system of outdoor relief. Two solutions appear to commend themselves to many governments: to sidetrack the bulk of the ‘surplus' students into various institutions in which they can kill time more or less profitably, reserving the serious business of training the cadres of the economy which actually require higher scientific, technical, vocational, etc. qualifications for separate establishments; and to isolate students from the rest of the possibly dissident population. In this latter task they are not impeded by the bulk of student political activists.

The future of the student movement as a revolutionary force therefore depends largely on the prospects of the capitalist economy. If it were to return to the expansion and prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s, it would probably turn out to be a temporary phenomenon, or perhaps its intermittent manifestations would sooner or later become an accepted part of the social scene, like the non-political forms of juvenile high spirits – boat race night, Guy Fawkes' day, rag days, panty-raids,
canulars
, etc. – in the era of bourgeois stability. If it were to enter a period of long-term difficulties, it might continue to be, at least occasionally, an explosive political force as the past few years have shown – from time to time intervene decisively, if momentarily, in national politics, as in May 1968. In either case, if the proportion of the age group which undergoes some form of higher education is likely to remain much greater than before the 1960s, students as a group will continue to be politically more significant and (especially where the voting age has been lowered to eighteen) more effective than in the past.

We cannot therefore take it for granted that intellectuals, young or old, will be a significant revolutionary force in the developed countries, though we can predict that they will be a significant political force, very probably more or less on the left. But even if they were to be revolutionary
en masse
, they would clearly not be decisive by themselves. Hence we may conclude this essay with a brief discussion of the relations between the movements of intellectuals and those of workers, peasants or other discontented strata.

In most countries the orthodoxy of the left assumes today that the two converge or even merge, formally or informally, in some sort of socialist labour movement. In many cases this is probably so. Both the British Labour Party, the United States Democratic Party (which is socially rather similar in composition) and many socialist and communist parties elsewhere are in effect alliances of workers and intellectuals, plus special discontented groups such as national or other minorities which do not happen to have developed their own separatist movements. This was not always so. Moreover, there are today signs of divergence, which should not be underestimated. On the one hand the ultra-left, largely composed of intellectuals, is often tempted to secede from the mass working-class parties of its countries which it blames for being too moderate or reformist. On the other, the anti-intellectualism of working-class movements, always latent and sometimes overt, has tended to become more intense. Recent studies of Labour Party local organization suggest that as the party branches have increasingly fallen into the hands of devoted militants from the professional strata, the rank-and-file working-class supporters and militants have drifted into political inactivity. Whether the one phenomenon is the cause or consequence of the other, both reinforce one another. Similarly, relations between students and workers are poor in most industrialized countries, and may be deteriorating.