MARXISM
Sartre had decided while in the German prison camp that after the war he would become more politically engaged. His political instincts had always moved him toward the Left and toward socialism.
In postwar France, it was the Communists who laid claim to the title of true socialists. But Sartre had always been suspicious of the French Communist Party, and of Marxism itself. The Party seemed rigid, inquisitional, and intellectually oppressive. Part of Sartre’s annoyance with Marxism was its claim to have the status of a natural science. Science can study abstractions and external relations, but Sartre, as an old phenomenologist, thought that science could not study concrete human relations with their unique combination of subjective, objective, and historical features.
Despite his eventual “conversion” to Marxism, Sartre did not become wholly a Marxist because Marxism had “stopped.” It had become reified (i.e., “thing-ified”) and rigidified in its own nineteenth-century positivistic origins. It had claimed to find inexorable laws of human history; it denied human freedom; it treated social classes as independent things rather than recognizing that they are created by individuals with common interests; it treated society as a macro-organism that runs on its own.
In fact, it was precisely phenomenological existentialism that could free Marxism from its rigidity. Marxism needs supplementing because in its current form it cannot explain how a specific individual of a specific class chooses his or her specific destiny. Marxism will not have an adequate social philosophy until it can explain both the weight of history on the individual and the free practice of individuals on the material and social world—that is to say, until it can explain the interplay of freedom and necessity in human existence.
Sartre sets out to provide this marriage of existentialism and Marxism in his book, Search For A Method (1957), which served as the preface to his two-volume Critique of Dialectical Reason, a work he left (typically) unfinished. The first volume was published in France in 1960, and the incomplete second volume was published in 1986, six years after his death. Even though there he demotes existentialism to a subordinate position to Marxism, he tries to humanize the Marxist dialectic by bringing existential insights to it. If the dialectic has become rigidified, the cure is to rethink the dialectic dialectically—but to think dialectically is to involve the subjectivity of the individual.
THE DIALECTIC
For Georg Hegel (1770-1831), from whom karl Marx (1818-1883) had borrowed the notion, the term “DIALECTIC” was the name of the basic law of Reality. For Hegel, Reality is history, and history is governed by Reason hidden behind the scenes.
In fact Reality is the manifestation of Reason. However, Reason is not static. It moves ahead progressively toward an unseen goal of Unity.
It does so dialectically, that is, in terms of a THESIS (which is positive) that is opposed to but also dependent upon its own opposite called an ANTITHESIS (which is negative). The tension between the thesis and the antithesis ultimately is destructive of the relationship between the two, and out of its ruins emerges an advanced moment, a SYNTHESIS, combining the best features of the old thesis and antithesis.
This synthesis (which is once again positive) becomes a new thesis, spawning its own opposite, a new antithesis; and the process of destruction, creation and progress continues. The Dialectic, then, for Hegel, is a law of history.
But the Dialectic is also the name of the mode of philosophical reasoning that Hegel utilizes and recommends. It is the mode of reasoning that grasps the rationality of human experience and history. It does so by discovering the positive in the negative, unity in plurality, freedom in determinism, totality in particularity. However, dialectical reason cannot affect history; it can only understand it after the fact. In this sense, dialectical reason is individual reasoning that grasps Reason after it has manifested itself.
Marx “stood Hegel on his head.” Human history for Marx was not the history of relationships between ideas, but of material relationships, particularly of relationships between social classes. “The history of the world hitherto,” says the first line of The Communist Manifesto, “is the history of class conflict.”
These social classes relate to each other dialectically being opposed to and dependent on each other at the same time. Ultimately the tension produces revolutionary conditions that overthrow the old social order, and move history closer to the most rational and human society, true communism.
However, history does not work itself out in terms of some abstract mental force called “Reason,” but in terms of concrete material action on the social and natural worlds, what Marx calls “praxis.” Unlike Hegel’s dialectical reason, which can grasp history but not alter it, Marx’s revolutionary praxis creates history.
In a certain sense, Sartre returns to Hegel.
Dialectical reason provides a way of understanding how human beings structure themselves historically, but it does not do so only from the point of view of the exterior of events, as does analytical, mathematical, scientific reasoning; it grasps them from the perspective of the agents themselves by finding the outer in the inner and the inner in the outer. In dialectical reason the subject discovers herself both in her freedom and in the necessity of her fate. She understands that her actions are her own and yet that they are alienated from her.
(“Alienation” was one of the favorite topics of the young Marx, who was interested in the ways one’s labor is snatched away from one by a hostile economic system and turned against one as an alien agent.) In dialectical reasoning she is able to say, “This is what I have done of my own free will, but this is not what I wanted.” Here, as in Hegel, dialectical reason is the realization of a kind of “totalization,” but one, as in Marx, that allows it to become part of revolutionary praxis. Thinking dialectically, for Sartre, does not simply happen after the fact, but is itself the motive for further praxis.
TOTALIZATION
“Totalization,” for Sartre, is both the name of an aspect of dialectical reason and the name of a feature of history. In the latter sense it is the bringing together of apparently disparate acts and events into a synthetic wholeness.
It is the fact that any given moment in a particular history is the summation of that whole history up to that point and expresses it all.
In volume II of the Critique, Sartre develops this idea with the careful analysis of a boxing match staged in Paris sometime in the 1950’s. He will try to show how the individual praxis of each boxer derives from a larger historical totalization and how it adds to that totalization—that is, how it participates in the creation of history while being a product of history. This particular match only makes sense by being related to all other boxing matches everywhere, and in fact to boxing as a whole. It summarizes the whole of boxing by exemplifying its hierarchical structure and either confirming or modifying the particulars of that stracture by producing a champ and a loser.
And because boxing is the public incarnation of social violence, all the spectators are complicitous in it, as well as in the structure of exploitation that it also incarnates. Boxing is a capitalistic enterprise whose laborers are usually recruited from the working class. These young boxers have been formed in a violent world of scarcity, and they are enticed to turn their violence against each other. These exploited workers fight each other because they have not learned to fight their exploiters.
Then how do these two opposing figures unintentionally collaborate to move history ahead? Indeed, how do any two individuals or any two groups unintentionally cooperate to advance history? If there is no God, and there are no Laws of History to direct history and bestow meaning upon it, how can history have a meaning? Or, in Sartre’s language,
It is this question that Sartre apparently was finally unable to answer, and perhaps it was this failure that caused him to abandon the Critique.
But he didn’t fail for lack of trying!
And in his attempt he developed some interesting theories concerning the formation of social groups and the phenomenon of Stalinism in the U.S.S.R. We will finish our overview of Sartre’s work by looking at these.
Sartre’s phenomenological existentialism had adopted the position of Descartes’ COGITO; that is, the perspective on the world from the point of view of the individual subject. Much of Sartre’s earlier work had been an attempt to explain how an “I” was possible. But he had also asked the harder question, how is a “WE” possible?
In Being and Nothingess it was possible only through the objectification by Others. Sartre continues to develop this idea in the Critique.
COLLECTIVES
There are roughly three kinds of “we’s” discussed by Sartre, three kinds of “collectives:” “series,” “groups,” and “the vestiges of groups.”
(A) SERIES
A series is a collective that is created by some fact or force external to it. Sartre’s most well-known case is one he observes as he sits at an outdoor table at the Café Deux Maggots on the Boulevard St. Germain-des-Prés—a line of people waiting for a bus. What unifies them is the need for public transportation, namely, the bus. These people have no other “weness” than this need, and in fact have only a semi-awareness of each other.
Additional examples of seriality are people in different homes listening to the same radio broadcast, or all those people buying the same product in different stores. Their common denominator is an otherness that organizes the series, and in some of these cases the individual member may be totally unaware of the other members of the series. These kinds of collectives can be easily manipulated by the external force that organizes them.
(B) Groups
A genuine group has a common praxis that unites it. There are two kinds of these: the “fused group” and the “sworn group.
THE FUSED GROUP: When in 1789 the Parisian mob vented its rage against the King of France by storming the Bastille—a prison that was a hated symbol of oppression—they created a genuine “we,” but it could last only as long as the passion that united them.
THE SWORN GROUP: A group may have gained its goal by vanquishing an enemy or overcoming an obstacle. But when the enemy or obstacle is gone, what holds them together? An OATH can create this solidarity. However, in taking an oath, I invite the group to punish or kill me if I break the oath, and therefore a new fear is introduced—not one coming in from outside, but fear of the group itself. This “we,” then, is produced through terror.
The third kind of collective is
(C) VESTIGE OF A GROUP.
Here the group has lost its original motive, and the oath no longer has its original meaning. The group has sunk into a form of inertia that holds it together. A political party or a religion that has evolved away from the passion and radical-ness of its messianic origins would be examples.
Praxis is meant to dominate the material world, but it is not uncommon for the relation to be inverted, and then matter becomes alienated from the praxis and dominates it. Each praxis involves both chance and freedom, but it produces an institutional format that becomes what Sartre calls “THE PRACTICO-INERT,” that is, a historical weight that dictates future praxis. This “practico-inert,” then, is meant to eliminate chance from praxis.
(For example, the formats for succession of monarchs and presidents is meant to eliminate the chance of civil war upon the death of national leaders.) But it also ends up limiting freedom, and in fact can enslave the agents of praxis. Furthermore, the “practico-inert” always produces some results that were unintended by the agents of the original praxis, and even ends up changing the agents themselves.
In fact, a massive section of Volume II of the Critique is dedicated to an analysis of Stalin’s rise to power and to addressing the question of whether Stalinism represents historical progress or historical failure. Despite Sartre’s generally sympathetic treatment of Stalin, he is unable to answer that question by the end of his book.)
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND STALINISM
The original Bolshevik Revolution tried to liberate the laboring masses so they could control their own labor. But the world into which the Revolution erupted was dangerous, being an enemy to radical change, and scarcity reigned in Russia. Therefore, before the revolutionary leaders could achieve their goal, the had to create the machinery of productivity. Russia had to be modernized. This meant that a generation of workers would have to be oppressed in the name of their own liberation. Provisional structures to implement this were created (the “practico-inert”), but these hierarchies of power inevitably became absorbed by the leaders who imposed them, changing the leaders, and necessarily diverting the Revolution from its original goals.
(For Sartre, Soviet oppression in the name of future humanity is better than capitalist oppression in the name of profit.) But the leaders themselves fell into subgroups. Stalin feared that the Revolution might fail by becoming too abstract and intellectual. Sartre says that Stalin, unlike Trotsky, lacked the education to appreciate the theoretical aspects of Marxism, but also, unlike Trotsky, who had spent his adult life exiled from Russia, Stalin was close to the Russian masses. Stalin’s successful motto in his opposition to Trotsky was “SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY.” According to Sartre, this slogan was a “monstrosity” that constituted a deviation from the original goals of worldwide revolution, but it triumphed because the Revolution had to deviate or collapse.
It chose the detour of deviation, and “Stalin is the man of this detour.” Stalin was not the only possibility (Sartre never succumbs to “rigidified Marxism’s” claim of historical necessity at the total expense of human freedom), but certain steps needed to be taken, and Stalin could take them better than anyone else.
Stalin made terrible errors—so terrible that Sartre wonders if Stalin really was the man history needed at that moment. Perhaps “the man history needed” simply didn’t exist (just in the same way that such a man did not exist after the French Revolution, when history needed a man of peace, but got Napoleon).
Of course, we know the answer that Sartre could not have known then. We have seen the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and with it the apparent collapse of the Revolution. In fact, ten years after writing Volume II of the Critique, Sartre himself said:
