Revolutionaries Read Online Free Page B

of the votes at the Cité Universitaire in 1951 and 26 per cent in 1956.
    Still, whatever the general trend of political sympathy among intellectuals, there can be no doubt of the stormy path of those who actually joined communist parties. This is normallyascribed to the increasing conversion of these parties, following the Soviet lead, into rigidly dogmatic bodies allowing no deviation from an orthodoxy that finished by covering every conceivable aspect of human thought, thus leaving very little scope for the activity from which intellectuals take their names. What is more, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, which preferred to keep its orthodoxy unchanged, communism changed it frequently, profoundly, and unexpectedly in the course of day-by-day politics. The ever-modified
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
was merely the extreme example of a process which inevitably imposed great and often intolerable tensions on communist intellectuals. The unpleasant aspects of life in the USSR also, it is argued, alienated many of them.
    This is only part of the truth. Much of the intellectuals’ difficulty arose from the nature of modern mass politics, the communist party being merely the most logical – and in France the first – expression of a general twentieth-century trend. The active adherent of a modern mass party, like the modern MP , abdicates his judgment in practice, whatever his theoretical reservations or whatever the nominal provision for harmless dissent. Or rather, modern political choice is not a constant process of selecting men or measures, but a single or infrequent choice between packages, in which we buy the disagreeable part of the contents because there is no other way of getting the rest, and in any case because there is no other way to be politically effective. This applies to all parties, though non-communist ones have hitherto generally made things easier for their intellectual adherents by refraining from formal commitments on such subjects as genetics or the composition of symphonies.
    As Mr Caute sensibly points out the French intellectual, in accepting broadly the Third or Fourth Republics has had to do so despite Versailles, the domestic policy of the Bloc National, Morocco, Syria, Indo-China, the regime of Chiappe, unemployment,parliamentary corruption, the abandonment of republican Spain, Munich, McCarthyism, Suez, Algeria.
    Similarly the communist intellectual, in opting for the USSR and his party, did so because on balance the good on his side seemed to outweigh the bad. Not the least of Mr Caute’s merits is to show how, for example in the 1930s, not only hard-shell party militants but sympathizers consciously refrained from criticism of Soviet purges or Spanish republican misdeeds in the interests of the greater cause of anti-fascism. Communists did not often discuss this choice in public. It could be quite explicit in the case of non-members who deliberately opted for the communist side, or against the common adversary, such as Sartre. It may be that not only the proverbial gallic logic but also the background of Roman Catholicism (shared, in different ways, alike by believers and unbelievers) made the idea of adhering to a comprehensive party with mental reservations more readily acceptable in France than in the Britain of a hundred religions and but a single sauce.
    Still, all allowances made, the way of the party intellectual was hard, and most of the actively committed ones had a breaking-point, even those who joined the party in the stalinist period and largely because of its stalinism, i.e. because they welcomed the construction of a totally devoted, disciplined, realistic, anti-romantic army of revolution. Even this Brechtian generation, which deliberately trained itself to approve the harshest decisions in the war for human liberation, was likely – like Brecht himself – to arrive at the point where it questioned not so much the sacrifices as their usefulness and