The Defection of the Intelligentsia and the Historical Recession of the Labor Movement
The prolonged crisis of the labor movement and the contraction of communist parties in Europe cannot be adequately explained as the outcome of electoral defeats, organizational weaknesses, or external pressures such as globalization and neoliberal restructuring. What is at stake is a deeper and earlier crisis: the rupture of the organic relationship between the working class, revolutionary theory, and the intelligentsia. This crisis is, above all, a theoretical defeat—one that preceded the political defeat and set its limits.
The declassified (2013) CIA research document titled France: Defection of the Leftist Intellectuals, drafted in the early 1980s, is an exceptionally important historical record of this process. Its significance does not lie in the fact that it “confirms” Marxist diagnoses, but in the way it reveals how the class adversary grasped—early and clearly—the strategic importance of theory and intellectuals within the framework of class struggle.
The document was written at a moment when the United States viewed Western Europe as a potential site of destabilization for Atlantic hegemony. François Mitterrand’s election, the participation of communists in the French government, the strength of the Italian Communist Party, and the broader crisis of American prestige after Vietnam all fueled fears of a strategic shift in Europe toward greater autonomy, or even toward rapprochement with the Soviet Union. The question occupying the CIA is not theoretical but thoroughly political: whether a socialist government in France could become a factor of geopolitical rupture.
The document’s answer is strikingly reassuring for the United States. The CIA observes that the French left intelligentsia—historically a decisive factor in radicalization—no longer functions as a carrier of class conflict. On the contrary, for the first time, left-wing intellectuals appear more willing to oppose any form of rapprochement with Moscow and to support a European trajectory firmly within the Western camp.
The document does not attribute this shift to state repression or to electoral defeats, but to a profound ideological realignment that had begun well before Mitterrand came to power.
What it registers is the abandonment of Marxist political economy and of class as the central analytical category. The left intelligentsia no longer sees its role as an organic component of the working class, but as an external critic of political power. Yet this critique does not target the material relations of exploitation; it focuses instead on abstract categories such as “totalitarianism,” “authoritarianism,” and “abuse of power.” In this way, politics is severed from its economic base and transformed into a moral–political discourse emptied of class content.
Marxian theory, however, is not constituted as moral philosophy but as a science of social formations. The concept of class is not an ideological preference but an objective position within relations of production. When that concept is abandoned, politics loses its material object. What the CIA document describes is precisely this theoretical stripping-down: the replacement of analyses of surplus value and exploitation with a discourse on power detached from capitalist social relations.
A pivotal role in this process was played by the so-called “New Philosophers,” with prominent figures such as André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy. Emerging from Maoism and the far Left, they did not limit themselves to a critique of Stalinism; they advanced toward an overall condemnation of Marxism as intrinsically totalitarian. The working class ceases to appear as a subject of emancipation and is recast as a potential threat to democracy. Revolutionary politics is delegitimized in advance—not because of historical failures, but as theoretically and morally unacceptable.
From a Leninist standpoint, this shift constitutes a form of ideological incorporation. Lenin insisted that without an organic linkage between revolutionary theory and the working class, political consciousness inevitably retreats to the level of spontaneity and reproduces the bourgeois horizon. The CIA document records precisely this process: the transformation of the left intelligentsia from an agent of rupture into a mechanism for stabilizing the system.
Althusser’s contribution helps clarify the theoretical dimension of this defeat. The abandonment of the concept of structure and of the relative autonomy of levels leads either to economism—or, as in this case, to ideological moralism. The “critique of totalitarianism” operates as an ideological mechanism that conceals class relations by presenting the state and power as autonomous entities. At the same time, the theory of the ideological state apparatuses makes clear that losing political economy entails losing the capacity to constitute working-class subjects.
Poulantzas’s analysis of the state as the material condensation of class relations of force further illuminates the political consequences of this shift. When the state ceases to be understood as a terrain of class struggle, participation in governmental power appears as a technical or institutional matter. Social-democratic and post-social-democratic Left formations are thus incorporated without a strategy of rupture—helping explain why political defeat followed, rather than preceded, the theoretical disintegration.
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony condenses the overall outcome of this process. The bourgeoisie did not rule merely through repression, but through the organization of consent—detaching intellectuals from the working class and imposing a new political vocabulary in which exploitation disappears. The CIA document registers this moment as a strategic success: the dissolution of the historical bloc that linked class, party, and intelligentsia.
Today’s forms of the European Left are a direct continuation of this trajectory. In France, the Communist Party survives without a hegemonic function, while new radical political forms replace class with vague invocations of “the people.” In Greece, references to class struggle coexist with the absence of a hegemonic strategy, while the governmental Left was fully absorbed into the state. In Italy, the dissolution of the PCI became a template for the path itself: theoretical retreat preceded organizational collapse.
The declassified CIA document functions today as a negative guide. It shows what happens when theory is abandoned and politics is cut loose from its material ground. Reading it is not merely of historical interest; it is a necessary precondition for any serious attempt to reconstruct the labor movement. Without a return to political economy, without the reconstitution of organic intellectuals, and without restoring class as a historical subject, the crisis will not be conjunctural but permanent.
References / Bibliography
Primary source
Central Intelligence Agency. 1982. France: Defection of the Leftist Intellectuals. Confidential Intelligence Assessment. Washington, DC. Declassified and released 2011.
CIA-RDP86S00588R000300380001-5
(Note: For journal use, you may add “Declassified CIA Research Paper” as a subtitle.)
Classic Marxist texts
Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin / New Left Review.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1978. The Marx–Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lenin
Lenin, V. I. 1961. What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Lenin, V. I. 1965. State and Revolution. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Gramsci
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers.
Althusser
Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Althusser, Louis. 1970. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso.
Poulantzas
Poulantzas, Nicos. 1978. State, Power, Socialism. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Verso.
Poulantzas, Nicos. 1973. Political Power and Social Classes. Trans. Timothy O’Hagan. London: New Left Books.
Secondary literature — crisis of communist parties / European Left
Anderson, Perry. 1976. Considerations on Western Marxism. London: Verso.
Badiou, Alain. 2012. The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. London: Verso.
Traverso, Enzo. 2016. Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Indicative in-text citations
(CIA 1982, 3–5) → on the shift of French intellectuals
(Gramsci 1971, 12–13) → on hegemony & organic intellectuals
(Althusser 1971, 127–186) → on ideological state apparatuses
(Poulantzas 1978, 132–150) → on the state as a material condensation of class relations
(Lenin 1961, 375) → on spontaneous vs revolutionary consciousness
text: Aristonikos