The Communist Party and the Intellectuals

October 08, 2026

E. Hoernle ¹

Translated from:
Die Internationale
Jahrgang 1
Ausgegeben am 18. August 1919, Heft 11/12
Scanned pdf in Max Stirner Archiv Leipzig pages 169–172

The capitalist economy draws a sharp line between mental and manual labor, between leadership and execution in production. The “intellectuals” or mental workers here form a particular social strata, a strata which economically occupies an intermediate space between the capitalists proper and the mass of the exploited. By their social position and their attitude to life, the intellectuals can be counted as belonging to the possessing class; their economic situation, however, pushes them year after year ever more hopelessly down into the proletariat.

The corrosion which has seized the whole “middle class” in highly developed capitalist society, from whose ranks the intellectuals are largely recruited, has also created more and more pronounced class oppositions. While some develop into parasites, who as pure freeloaders on the social body participate in some form in the labor-free income of the capitalists, the great mass of mental workers must live in “shameful poverty,” providing servile labor for the greater glory of the capitalist economic and social order. One needs only to contrast the existence of the supervisory boards and directors in industry, commerce, finance and insurance to the deplorable fate of the thousands of functionaries, chemists, technicians and employees, or compare the fashionable celebrities of science, literature, art, music, the theater and medicine to those poor devils who often enough with one and the same gift, but with fewer “connections” and more objectivity, practice the same profession.

For the intellectuals also, capitalism has put mass production, division of labor, mechanization of man, and ruthless wage slavery on the agenda. Indeed the economic situation of the mental workers has often, despite the benefits of qualification, slipped below the level of the qualified manual workers, because the rush to the “learned” professions but also to the middling civil service and employee positions out of the petty bourgeois was very great, and the intellectuals always held themselves too good to launch a trade union struggle for their material interests.

The growing economic distress was such that it awakened also among the mental workers the thought of organization, of representation of their economic and political interests. Insofar as capitalism more or less strictly subsumed this or that strata of mental workers within its production process, bringing it into more or less tight connection with the mass of manual workers, the more class consciousness was awakened also among the mental workers and they created class organizations with more or less pronounced class struggle tendencies. It was no accident that the highly qualified technical-industrial functionaries working almost exclusively in large enterprises first situated themselves on the free trade union terrain, while the clerks, not participating in the production process, and more active in medium and small enterprises until recently, trailed after petty bourgeois ideology in their great majority.

Other strata of mental workers, eg, the teachers, were “immunized” against the infection of socialist thought patterns by the state through a careful training regime. In the whole state civil service, there was arranged a refined system of surveillance and subordination, which united with a comfortable view of careers, promotion, title and order, ensured the triumph of the servile spirit over all emotions of human dignity.

In Germany a catastrophe shaking all the living conditions of the mental workers to the depths was required to elicit also in these circles a revolutionary socialist oriented class movement. This catastrophe was the economic and social collapse of Germany in Autumn 1918. This collapse meant for the mass of the mental workers not only increased unemployment, poverty, immiseration, it meant first of all also a monstrous, practically crushing disillusionment. Ideologies naturally played a more decisive role among the intellectuals then among the proletariat of manual laborers. Bourgeois phrases like “people,” “fatherland,” “civil peace,” “community of interests between capital and labor,” “democracy,” the “German cultural mission,” can possibly be capable of temporarily and partially maddening the manual labor proletariat, darkening its class instinct and pushing its revolutionary tendencies into the background. This happened in August 1914. Already during the war itself, the material class situation both in the homeland and probably still more on the front, ensured that the proletarians came to an awareness of the rotten heart of these phrases. It was and remained purely external to the exploited, the subordinated, the menial. The mental workers, on the other hand, in correspondence with their dual position, joined economically with the proletarians and socially with the owners, believed wholeheartedly in the bourgeois and imperialist ideologies. Precisely the best among them, the idealistically inclined, intoxicated by the broadness and liberality of the imperialist world of ideas, strove to give the war, the brutal colonial and expansionist policy of their capitalist rulers, the necessary ethical and cultural justification. Finally, after decades of a petty hunt for profit, after an immersion in the crudely material, the bourgeois seemed to rise to a new dynamism and spiritual heft. Many intellectuals believed they felt the wing beats of a new Renaissance. What did the intellectuals know of the economic laws that also rule imperialism? They saw the emergence already of a new thousand times greater “Hellas,” a “Germanic Hellas” with all the art, all the science, all the exhilaration of the old, but without the brutal reverse side of slavery and naked violence. They believed fervently in a unity of interest between capital and labor, in a class reconciliation at least for the “cultured states,” at the cost certainly of the exploitation and slavery of the savage peoples still lacking capitalist development.

This enthralling image of a future capitalist Renaissance allowed thousands of intellectuals to willingly bear all the sacrifices of war, blinding them to their own progressive impoverishment. The awakening was as sudden as it was terrible. The ideology of imperialism burst like a soap bubble, its gold was fools gold. A mirage had led them into the exterminating swamp, hoaxed by a Fata Morgana. A sense of bankruptcy filled the intellectuals and the entire bourgeoisie. This sense of bankruptcy made November 9^th possible. While the bourgeoisie however, quickly recovered from its shock, and with the healthy drive to rule of a possessing class, went about recovering its lost positions, the petty bourgeois as always hesitantly and discordantly followed the slogans of the bourgeoisie and the hard historical lesson did not fail to leave an impact on the mass of mental workers. Proletarian class consciousness made a breakthrough, the dead zone was overcome. With the bank functionaries, commercial functionaries and retail employees, the proletariat of mental workers joined the proletarian class organizations with growing decisiveness. And the remaining intellectual professions hesitantly followed. Among artists, doctors, teachers etc, the consciousness grew that they belonged to the exploited, and they began to be gripped by an interest in economic questions and socialist problems. Socialization and council thought [Rätegedanke] were placed by the manual workers in the center of not only the political discussion, but practical action as well. The mental workers could not be indifferent; they had to take a position. They could only in a small part, only insofar as they are parasitic, take a hostile position together with the bourgeoisie. They are in a confused condition, in a state of insecure uncertainty and fumbling.

In this situation, it is the task of the revolutionary proletariat, first of all the Communist Party as its vanguard, to come to the aid of the process of development among the mental workers with the entire armory of its political insights and practical experiences. There often exists among the manual workers a strong mistrust towards the “collared proletarians”, against the “academics”. This repulsion is historically explicable. The petty bourgeois estate-arrogance of so many functionaries and employees has not been overcome. Still today, there are loud demands, like special employee councils alongside the workers councils, special premiums for mental labor, compensation according to rank etc. These are the bourgeois eggshells which must be decisively grown out of. The revolutionary proletariat has had bad experiences with the “academics” insofar as a portion of them came to Social Democracy in their day, in order to play a leadership role there, which they did not succeed at in the bourgeois parties, or with the conscious intention of pushing Social Democracy on to the terrain of reform socialism, of “refining” Marxism.

All these things should not lead us to the other extreme, the proclamation of a politics of the “calloused hand”. The fact that one worker stands in the factory, the other in the office or the study is still insufficient ground for the assumption that the factory worker is better trained in recognition of the class situation, the methods and aims of the class struggle, then the mental worker. Socialism owes academics like Lassalle, Marx, Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg infinitely much. The unclear class instinct must be schooled through intensive mental labor, deepened and refined higher in understanding and action.

But on the other hand, the proletariat with its revolutionary schooling, must not allow the basic, decisive character of its struggle to be clouded by the sudden influx of so many elements, unproven in class struggle and still strongly influenced by bourgeois ideology. The mass of political charlatans has become momentarily vast. Their art consists, first of all, of having overhead some critical remarks of revolutionary Marxism, mixed them with bourgeois phrases about culture and reconciliation and to serve this up to the worker as the “extract of all wisdom,” as the final and conflict-free solution of the social problem. We can note here only two such charlataneries, Dr Rudolf Steiner’s gospel of “social three folding,” and the free high schools, worker technical schools, socialist labor communities etc. shooting up like mushrooms from the ground in the well intentioned but completely unclear minds led by the great word. They want to “refine” the proletarian revolution and develop it from a merely economic-political upheaval into a comprehensive cultural movement. They forget only that the economic-political upheaval is not only the precondition, but must be the creator and nursery of the new culture, that the spiritual renewal of man cannot run independently alongside the economic upheaval, but springs from this and flows back into it.

We gladly recognize the good will of such ideologues, who today bravely profess communism where it is still outlawed and prosecuted, but goodwill, bravery and idealistic motives alone do not help us. We must demand from the intellectuals that come to us, that they discard all cultured arrogance, that they seriously and humbly get down to the study of Marxist socialism, grasp historical materialism as a dialectical research method, and so first forge weapon and armor to prevail in practical class struggle. It is only then that they can be honestly committed to the deepening of our struggle, the criticism of our methods, and make pioneering progress. We need no Tollers and Landauers, as honest and enthusiastic as they may be, we need clear headed, decisive champions like Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, Leviné.

The revolutionary class struggle requires the intellectuals, the arsenal of knowledge and understanding, the weapon of trained intellectual labor, the literary and rhetorical skills which the mental workers possess ahead of the manual workers. Communist construction after the seizure of political power by the proletariat cannot be quickly and happily accomplished without the intellectuals. The mental worker is as essential in the production process as the manual worker. Our aim must be to integrate the mental worker in the proletarian class struggle as completely as possible, but not at the cost of the clarity and decisiveness of this class struggle. We appeal to the intellectuals: you bear a powerful responsibility. You more clearly recognize from day to day the bankruptcy of capitalism. You, yourself speak of socialism as the only salvation. Very well, to you first of all falls the responsibility of accelerating the coming of socialism, the birth of the new order, its implementation as easily and painlessly as possible. As cultivated men you are foes of “brute force”. We don’t want to investigate the vintage of this “hostility”. We take it at face value. You accuse Bolshevism thereby. But was not the sabotage of the intellectuals to blame for the severe hardships under which the revolution had to advance? You left the manual workers on their own in the decisive moment, you betrayed them. Your irresponsibility strengthened the “brute force” of the capitalist reactionaries and thus forced the proletariat also to resort to violence. The social revolution comes also in Germany whether you want it or not, it comes because the productive forces today rebel against the existing economic order and burst the bounds of capitalism. It can be retarded but not blocked. It first of all falls to the intellectuals, the mental workers, whether the proletarian revolution comes with all the horrors of civil war, under the thunder of judgment, or if it comes about like a light autumn wind, that jostles the ripe fruit from the tree. The role of the mental worker in production assigns him a decisive significance. The question is if he is up to the historical role assigned to him.