5 Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume II

http://cnc.sagepub.com/Capital & Class

http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/32/2/109The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/030981680809500105

2008 32: 109Capital & ClassAndrew Robinson

, Volume IICritique of Dialectical ReasonJean-Paul Sartre's

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

Conference of Socialist Economists

can be found at:Capital & ClassAdditional services and information for

http://cnc.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://cnc.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/32/2/109.refs.htmlCitations:

What is This?

- Jan 1, 2008Version of Record >>

by Pepe Portillo on July 29, 2014cnc.sagepub.comDownloaded from by Pepe Portillo on July 29, 2014cnc.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://cnc.sagepub.com/

http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/32/2/109

http://www.sagepublications.com

http://www.cseweb.org.uk/

http://cnc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

http://cnc.sagepub.com/subscriptions

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/32/2/109.refs.html

http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/32/2/109.full.pdf

http://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtml



109

This essay will explore Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason,Volume II—hereafter the 'second Critique'—from philosophicaland political angles, concentrating on its relevance to Marxism

and radical theory. Divided into three sections, the essayconcentrates on Sartre’s philosophy, his theory of history, and hiscase study of Stalinism. Each section is divided into an exposition, inwhich Sartre’s theory is set out briefly in his own terms, and ananalysis or critique, in which possible problems with and objectionsto Sartre’s views are laid out and explored.

In terms of Sartre’s work, the second Critique stands in anambiguous position. Sartre wrote it in a period of frenetic activity,‘as a man obsessed, under the greatest strain, helped along bycorydrame [sic] capsules’ (Aronson, : ). Written in the periodfollowing the first Critique, originally published in 1960, and thuslocated in Sartre’s later, more Marxist-inflected period, the bookwas produced at a time in which Sartre was apparently shifting hisresearch interests—a period that began with the play The Prisonerof Altona, and which would culminate in his massive study ofFlaubert, the four-volume l’Idiot de la Famille (Sartre, , , , [–]).

His decision to embark on that project rather than complete thetwo-volume Critique is a mystery. This second volume, published

History, scarcity, praxis … and Stalin?Review essay: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume II

Foreword by Frederic Jameson, translated by Quintin HoareVerso, 2006, 480 pp.ISBN: 1-844-67077-5 (pbk) £20

reviewed by Andrew Robinson

by Pepe Portillo on July 29, 2014cnc.sagepub.comDownloaded from


posthumously, is incomplete, and Sartre's failure or decision not tocomplete and publish it leads to controversy about its positionamong scholars. In a note in the text of the second Critique, Sartre'sclose companion Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre writes that his workdiffered considerably between note and completed form,suggesting that the conclusions of such a work as the secondCritique are provisional at best: ‘more perhaps than for otherphilosophers, the status of his notes remains in doubt’ (p. ).Raymond Aronson (), author of the only English-languageintroduction to the second Critique, reads the text as a culminationof the project Sartre began in Search for a Method ( []) andthe first Critique ( []), and criticises Elkaïm-Sartre’sjudgement as exaggerated (: ). However, Mark Poster haschallenged this reading, claiming that the second Critique 'mightwell be regarded as a nonsequel or failed sequel' (: ).Probably due to this view, Poster largely ignored the text in hisseminal introduction, Sartre's Marxism (), and did not revisethat text after the publication of the second Critique. The book has,however, attracted attention from Raymond Aronson (, ,, , ), Perry Anderson () and Juliette Simont(1981)—nothing like the amount of interest received by the firstCritique, but significant for a text often deemed inconsequential.Sartre claimed that its lack of completion was due to the volume ofresearch that would be required in order for it to be finalised(Aronson : ).

Sartre’s philosophical project in the Critique as a whole—the twovolumes were originally intended as a single project—is largely anattempt to reconcile philosophy (in a Hegelian or Heideggeriansense) with the phenomenological (Husserlian or applied-Marxist)stance of perspective-relativity and a resultant contextualunderstanding of historical events. Aronson () treats Sartre'sCritiques as an extended reply to Sartre’s former mentor, MauriceMerleau-Ponty, who after a period of phenomenological Marxismchallenged the intelligibility of Marxism in his book Adventures ofthe Dialectic (), arguing that history is as much de-totalising astotalising, and that it lacks meaning and direction. Hence Sartreposes the question of how history can be dialectically intelligiblewhen there is no a priori totality to which it can be reduced, andwhen the totalisations performed as a result of agents’ projects areautonomous and contradictory (pp. ‒). In this way, he attempts tocomplete the project of the first Critique by integrating what in thatwork were synchronic structural concepts into a presentation ofhistory as diachronic praxis (Aronson, : ). While this mayseem to be some distance away from most Marxists’ concerns,

110

Capital & Class 95



111

Sartre sees it as relevant for the viability of Marxist theory andpolitics. Thus he claims that the truth or falsity of Marxism hingeson whether or not conflict can be viewed as totalising (p. ). He isdiscussing the intelligibility of history. But for Sartre, intelligibilitydoes not depend on teleology, contradiction or success. History isnot simple, harmonious or ‘an order’, nor does it have a meaning orgoal (pp. ‒).

How, then, does Sartre meet the challenge of rendering historyintelligible? What the reader is left with overall from a reading ofthis text is a dualistic philosophy espousing the intersection ofpraxis and inertia as distinct fields, a set of concepts forinterpreting social relations and concepts, and a flawed, overlysympathetic analysis of Stalinism based on a somewhat limitedapplication of these concepts. These various aspects will be furtherexplored below.

The first part of Sartre’s response to the problem of intelligibility isto formulate a kind of philosophical dualism to reconcile theapparent unitarity of historical events and single societies with theirmultiple bases. This response is also a way of addressing thestructure–agency and free-will-determinism problems in the socialsciences, and Sartre develops an approach that allows both structuralconcerns (such as the impact of production structures) and agencyconcerns (such as the social production of meanings) to be includedin each overall account, and which fuses determinism and free will.The cost of this resolution is the construction of two separatespheres, neither of which is primary and both of which depend onthe other for any productive or creative role.

Sartre’s methodological dualism: Praxis and inertia

The two fields Sartre theorises—‘two absolutes’, as Simont (:) puts it—are the field of praxis, which is also the field ofmeaning, agency, labour and human projects (the projection ofone’s intentionality into the world); and the field of the inert,which is also typified as exteriority, scarcity and materiality. Whilethe former is apparently indefinite and open, the latter limits theresources available for the pursuit of different projects. Sartre callsfor a dual perspective situated in relation to projects and meanings,but also taking account of matter, the practico-inert and being-in-itself (p. ‒).

A critical dualism? Sartre’s philosophy

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume II



Praxis is the primary creative force in history. The labourer isalways sovereign, even when he or she is exploited or enslaved,‘for he has to perform that labour—which means that he wants todo so’ (p. ). ‘[A] totalization in progress is not a totality, and …the elements of the field are discrete realities which producetheir integration against the multiplicity that affects them’ (p.305). There is no essence prior to agency. Rather, essence isproduced by agency (p. ). However, one’s being is constantlyreshaped—often retrospectively—by history: a worker, forinstance, can be reconstructed as obsolete. History forces changesupon people; or if they do not change, it changes theirsignificance so that they ‘[pass] into another social category’ (p.). It is possible to resist this, but only by tragic means: forinstance, through suicide or a last stand one can ‘affirm [one]selfin death as not changing’ (p. ). ‘Man’ cannot have an essencebecause history (the encounter with exteriority) makes ‘him’ existin exteriority (p. ). Necessity is the temporary alienation ofpraxis in a particular field (p. ).

Pitted against praxis is the context of inertia or scarcity. Thecontext of scarcity makes any particular conception of the gooddependent on defence from the other, and locates personal dignityin a Manichean relation (p. ). As a result, the general context ofscarcity is present in each particular conflict or violent act, evenone as obviously mediated as a boxing manoeuvre. ‘An act ofviolence is always all of violence, because it is a re-exteriorizationof interiorized scarcity’ (p. ). All struggle incarnates struggle ingeneral, both in the sense of the condition of scarcity and in thesense of the means (e.g. class struggle) by which scarcity isspecified in a society (p. ). As a result, conflict is intelligiblebecause it expresses a generalised condition of violence. Becauseof conflict, ‘the Other I become for myself springs from therevealed existence of others’ (p. ). McCarthyism, for instance, isanalysed as being a result of an American fear of being renderedthe objects instead of the subjects of history (p. ).

Though radically exterior to the field of human praxis, inertia isknown only through its effects upon and within praxis. The inert(matter, or objectivity) is discovered through the deviation ofpraxis (p. ); thus the proof of its existence is the failure orcounter-productive effects of particular projects. Science emergesin this account as a pragmatic set of tools, a way of understandingexteriority so as to act effectively on it. It is based on a ‘need andsearch for tools’, though in itself it sees only inertia and exteriority(p. ). Its purpose is to determine on which part of inertia oneshould act in order to accomplish one’s aim, by identifying a weak

112

Capital & Class 95



113

or nodal point where action can produce effects (p. ). It is thus‘the theoretical moment of practical action’ (p. ).

History is conceived of as a spiral or circularity—from praxis tothe (inert, material) world and back again—which deviates projectsfrom their course (pp. ‒). The deviation of praxis produces aninertia that becomes the object of a new praxis (p. ). Historythus involves a circular movement from being to praxis and backagain. ‘Men realize themselves by objectifying themselves, and thisobjectification alters them’ (p. ). The materiality of transform-ation overflows meaning (p. ⁾. On the other hand, praxis strugglesagainst its entrapment in alienation, refusing to be limited by it (p.). At one point, Sartre sets out the emergence of alienationschematically: ‘The organization of need <> labour <> practico-inert <> counter-finalities/alienations’ (p. ). This spiral is an‘exhaustive totalization’ (p. ), apparently meaning that itexplains everything in a situation. Thus, as Juliette Simont explains,‘Situated comprehension is at once enveloped and enveloping, andthe totalization of envelopment at once enveloping and enveloped,in an indefinitely revolving spiral where each term expresses thevanishing perspective immanent to the other’ (: ).

Each praxis has unintended and undesired effects due to thedistortion it undergoes in its passage through inert matter. Henceeach praxis has to resolve problems which it has itself engenderedin the world, without being aware of its having done so (p. ). Acommon praxis transforms the world, but this praxis is usurped bythe practico–inert, because this is the field in which it is realised. Anew phase of praxis is then needed to ‘retotalize’ its results, i.e. toadd intentionality back into them (pp. ‒). As Aronson argues,‘this brilliant concept, the practico–inert, points to a socializeddimension of individual activity without conceding the existenceof Society’ (: ⁾. Death is a special kind of exteriority orinertia, which leaves history ‘riddled with holes’ (p. ). It operatesas something akin to a last instance of the primacy of matter,leading Sartre to pessimism over relativism and the possibility ofpraxis being realised (p. ‒).

Analysis: Strengths and weaknesses of Sartre’s dualism

In constructing this philosophy, Sartre seems in some respects to beattempting to provide a Marxist response that addressesconstructivist objections on their own terms. The reason this hasnot been taken up within the debates on Marxism, and on post-structuralism in particular, may be the confusion arising from someof Sartre’s terminology. Thus, for instance, Sartre’s conception of




totality should be differentiated from structuralism, teleology andthe kinds of universalism frequently attacked by post-structuralists. The ‘totality’ in Sartre is simply a term used tosignify whatever happens to occur, while ‘totalisation’ refers towhat is more usually termed ‘a project’—a way of interpreting andacting on the world specific to an agent’s intentionality.

Similarly, ‘transcendence’ does not refer to a moment separatefrom human agency or a privileged moment of analysis: it eitherrefers to qualitative transformation in social relations, or to aspectsexterior to a particular project that impinge upon it. Sartre’sanalysis is radically immanentist in a more usual sense, but with anemphasis on what might be termed material aspects of social life,as well as on perspectives and interpretations.

Whether the response is adequate will depend largely on thereader’s attachments, because in a sense the dualist resolutionreintroduces a transcendent moment in a more traditional sense,and scarcity in particular seems to be accorded a quasi-transcendental status. Certainly, the theory of circularity hasproven to be the most attractive aspect of Sartre’s work to critics(e.g. Simont, 1981); is welcomed by Aronson as ‘a major steptowards overcoming the dualism of consciousness and being,individual and world at the heart of Sartre's thinking’ (: );and has been employed by at least one scholar in empiricalgeographical analysis (Boyle, ). Sartre is speaking to thestructure–agency debate that is widespread in philosophy and thesocial sciences, and which emerges within Marxism in Althusser’scritique of humanist Marxism () and the subsequent critique ofAlthusser from a class-struggle agency perspective by E. P.Thompson (). In this debate, Sartre would clearly be closer tothe agency position than the structure position (with John Lewispartly acting as a foil for Sartre in Althusser’s critique), and the firstCritique came under direct attack from Althusser for its historicism(: ). However, Sartre is also attempting to reconcile the twoapproaches and to move beyond the binary. He is reproached byAronson () for doing so, though Aronson seems to miss thecrucial points—that Sartre is seeking to avoid an organic theory ofsociety, and that his account nevertheless explains socialphenomena through praxis-process and group formation.

One objection that could be raised to the derivation of inertia(materiality) from the failure of praxis is that failure (or ‘deviation’into counterproductive outcomes) does not prove the existence ofan ontologically distinct field. Failure can also be due to acontending praxis, and this leads to certain instances in Sartre’swork in which forms of action become inert from the perspective

114

Capital & Class 95



115

of another, where one praxis treats another as inertia because it hasto overcome it, and so on. Failure shows the existence of otherness(which may be another praxis), but not necessarily of inertia.Similarly, a multiplicity of perspectives problematises Sartre’saccount of science, which assumes the same singularity as hisconception of need. If projects were multiple, then there wouldsimilarly be a multiplicity of ‘sciences’ and practical knowledgesrelating to different aims, perspectives and projects.

The theory also produces ambiguities as to what counts asinertia, and what as praxis. Language, for instance, ‘is perpetuallyserializing and institutional’, tending to escape the individualspeaker, but it is also a praxis since it tends to create a group of co-speakers, a tool that makes itself inert to act on the inert, and amediating element since it can act as the ‘third party’ in a pledgedgroup (p. ). Even this does not limit its possible roles: forinstance, poetry is a ‘play on the materiality of the word’ (p. ),whereas discourse learned from television belongs to the practico-inert as ‘other-direction and senseless discourse’ (p. ). Whileshowing the subtlety and detail of Sartre’s own scholarship, thisambiguity problematises the application of his theoreticalapproach. This is linked to the above issue—that one project’spraxis may be another’s inertia.

Another problem is that the approach is dualistic, relying on aseparation of reality into different fields expressing distinctontologies. This kind of approach is easily dismissed as a type ofeclecticism, and is hardly uncommon among social scientistsseeking to escape theoretical dead ends. The risk is that by sayingeverything—permitting all kinds of variables and explanations—one ends up saying nothing. Sartre, however, goes to extraordinarylengths to develop this type of position into a coherent overallphilosophy that is not simply eclectic, and which has a specificexplanatory power. He consistently seeks to view questions fromevery possible angle so as to specify their construction veryprecisely (for example, boxing as a fight between competing rivals,and also as a rule-bound sport, and also as capitalist big business, andalso as career option for aggressive young men, and also aschannelling of aggression through libidinal investment), and it ishard to find anything missing in these accounts, or to fault them forlack of precision, or for saying nothing (pp. , , ‒, ‒, ). Thedifferent factors are not simply invoked as part of a general schema,but are assigned very specific places in the broader picture. Thissaid, the approach may tend to lose in coherence what it gains incompleteness. Ultimately, this approach leaves it up to the concretehistorian to weigh and balance the importance of different factors




in particular cases—a benefit in terms of avoiding reductivetheoretical schemas, but a difficulty in that authors deploying thesame approach can reach very different conclusions on the relativeimportance of factors. One possible direction in which thisapproach—with its causes which are themselves determined, andinteractions between multiple projects which nevertheless producetotal outcomes—could proceed in response to such problems wouldbe towards a theory of complex or chaotic systems.

Exposition of Sartre’s theory of history

The second way in which Sartre seeks to make history intelligible isto develop a conceptual terminology to express ambiguities andrelations irreducible to existing categories. This distinctiveterminology expresses historical relations that instantiate Sartre’sphilosophy of history. Thus, for instance, an individual as‘incarnation’ of a process is neither determined by it norautonomous from it; neither a ‘determination’ (with mechanicalreduction) nor an ‘interpellation’ or ‘projection’ (with an externalrelation between agent and role). The concept of ‘incarnation’ onlymakes sense in Sartre’s specific analysis, as an instance of a two-wayrelation in which historical processes find expression in anautonomous agent. It reconciles free will and determinism in that afree action ‘incarnates’ the determining variables. The incarnationof a system or situation in an individual both adds to and takes awayfrom the system or situation by means of individual contingencies.For instance, there is never simply an external necessity, but alwaysa necessity constructed relative to a particular project (p. ).Further, the practico-inert is not purely external: the social systemproduces its own practico-inert in forms such as inequality andrepression (p. ). Incarnation is always more and less than what thesituation demands (p. ), because scarcity constructs certain typesof individuals as ‘scarce’, and hence the sovereign as unfit forher/his function (p. ).

Despite conflict between projects, Sartre also sometimesdiscusses an entire historical period as being constructed by asingle praxis. There can be a sovereign project that constructs theentire national field itself so that, to the extent that people areserialised or accept the leader’s project as their own, they becomepart of a single totalisation or project; but on the other hand, therecan also be situations in which several sovereigns negate each

116

Into the jaws of scarcity: History and praxis

Capital & Class 95



117

other’s totalisations of a single field. The state cannot generatesovereignty, however; it simply gives form to it (p. ). Law andstate sovereignty do not really provide social order, because theyrest on scarcity. ‘As we have already noted, however, the sovereign’spower rests on the impotence of the series’ (p. ). State orders areconstructed as universals, applying to a particular category,ignoring individuation; but they always respond to particular socialproblems or conflicts (pp. ‒). The state is constructed as aninner self as well as a social relation, by means of the superego,inner salvation and the idea of the self as ‘saved’ (p. ).

Sartre’s account also oscillates between different levels ofanalysis. At times, Sartre attaches great importance to theindividual characteristics of leaders and other individual figures,straying a long way from what a Marxist approach normallyinvolves. At other times, he emphasises the social construction ofactions and even the social determination of individuals.Furthermore, praxis is always a matter of meanings and projects.Thus Sartre argues that non-singularised totalities such as theproduction structure become singular events only through themediation of projects (p. ). Social phenomena—classes, forinstance—are not totalities. Rather, organisations seek to realiseclass unity out of seriality, as the goal of a praxis (p. ). Thisdoes not, however, mean that classes do not exist or cannotexercise agency. Rather, classes (once formed) are accordedagency in their own right. Thus, for instance, the capitalist class isan agent with its own project, and Sartre criticises (autonomist)Marxists for viewing this class as purely defensive or reactive,rather than as having its own project (p. ). Inertia also has to begiven its pound of flesh in the explanatory matrix, in this case asan explanation for the failure of praxis. A suboptimal orineffectual outcome can always be traced to scarcity, torestrictions in the range of options available, even if this issimply the lack of ‘intellectual tools’ or the operation ofdiscursive constraints (p. ). On the other hand, exterior realitiescan never have a direct impact on praxis. Disturbingly, Sartreargues that knowledge of an immanent ecological catastrophecannot affect the ‘practical field’, which is already overwhelmedby the immediate issues it expresses (p. ). It might be moreaccurate to argue that it would have to have a bearer within thesystem of meanings to be actualised.

One issue of historical explanation that is central to this volumeis an attempt to locate struggle. An instance of struggle, such as aboxing match or a battle, appears as a whole from the outside (pp.‒), but is intelligible only as a ‘praxis-process’, in which




competing praxes determine the outcome (p. ). The process is nota product of agency, but rather, the effect of adversaries mutuallyrobbing each other of their agency (p. ). The totalising force inconflict is twofold: first, the rule-bound relations of particularrelations; and second, and more crucially, the context of scarcity(pp. ‒). This account of struggle implicitly accepts that there isa multiplicity of projects, though this may simply be an expressionof the context of scarcity on Sartre’s account.

Crucial to the explanation of conflict, and even to the broaderconceptual dualism, is a historical account of the emergence ofclass division from material scarcity. The condition of scarcityproduces a situation in which survival emerges as a struggle (p. ).In this context, the primary motive is need, which is a negativemotive—a threat of death, whether direct or indirect (p. ).Capitalism and other exploitative systems only exist because theyhave a basis in survival and need (p. ). ‘The most abstract,autonomous end ultimately derives its content and its urgencyfrom needs’—this being the premise that, for Sartre, defineshistorical materialism (p. ).

Sartre suggests that the duality of matter and praxis emergesfrom a break with regard to ‘peoples without history’, opening upthe possibility that other epistemologies might avoid this dualism;but on the other hand, he also maintains that this break isirreversible (pp. ‒). This viewpoint is not consistentlymaintained: Sartre also views scarcity as a primordial condition,with the ‘battle between tribes’ preceding the dialectic (p. ). Atanother point, however, he portrays ‘Eskimos’ as a fused group (p.). In splitting humans from nature, the break apparently equateshumanity with machines: human labour and activity areinterchangeable with machine functions, and each component of apraxis can be carried out by a labourer or a machine (p. ‒). Adirect link to inorganic matter would allow abundance (p. ). Soin a way, it is the split between matter and humanity that producesscarcity. The universe is indifferent to man’s fate, which is whysurvival is a struggle (p. ).

Analysis of Sartre’s theory of history

As a historical approach, Sartre’s method leads to a back-and-forth flow between the unitarity of the context and themultiplicity of agents or ‘singularities’. The ‘totality’ (the historythat actually happens) is derived from the singularities as aneffect, but then in turn ‘singularises’ as a cause. Its reception bysubjects and their projects is differentiated, so its totality is lost

118

Capital & Class 95



119

the moment it enters the field of meaning. The result is thatsocial and material structures only have effects via systems ofmeaning, but systems of meaning have effects only through socialand material structures. The two terms in effect mediate oneanother.

Sartre does not believe that social processes or specific‘moments’ can be read off from a totality, does not attach causalprimacy to any particular totalisation, and does not identify theresistant force of the practico-inert with any particulartotalisation. I would infer from this that Sartre does not endorsethe idea of determinate totality, and that he rejects the analysesadvanced by structuralist Marxists and by neo-Hegelians.Totalisation has more in common with a Foucauldian discourseor a Wittgensteinian logic than with these kinds of totalism. Thedifferent totalisations or projects arise from a variety of differentsubject-positions (albeit often from positions determined by theexisting social arrangement), and interact contingently andconflictually; further, what emerges never results solely from thetotalisation, but is always also distorted by the inertia of matter.Sartre also insists on the unity of the field—put simply, that asingle world exists at any given moment in time, which is theoutcome of the conflicts and interactions among all thetotalisations; but this single world is rarely the outcome of onesystem, logic or totalisation, and thus does not function as atotality (though a partial exception must be made for the internallogic of a command system such as the USSR, where a singleproject managed contingently to dominate the social field). It isthis unity of the field, as much as it is the driving force of need,that is Sartre’s answer to Merleau-Ponty’s question of howhistory could totalise without an extra-individual totality.1 It hasbeen observed, however, that it may not have answered Merleau-Ponty’s question, in that it provides a socio-spatial rather than ahistorical dialectic (Boyle, : ).

The incompleteness of the text of the second Critique cancause difficulties in interpretation. For instance, the exact meaningof the term ‘incarnation’ is dependent on other concepts that arenot fully developed. Thus, Sartre claims that history produces a setof ‘possibles’—each human singularity as a possible outcome of asituation—and that an incarnation is the actualisation of one ofthese possibles. ‘Thus the enormous singularity that istemporalized by each of us as the history of humanity can neverbe anything other than an incarnation deciding concretelybetween the possibilities it engenders within it’ (p. 41). But thisalmost quantum conception of the construction of individuality




suffers from the fact that the concept of ‘possibles’ was to be havebeen developed in a part of the work that was never written.

There is an ambiguity, in the construction of the concept ofscarcity, as to whether it refers to a material scarcity (not enoughresources for everyone to ‘have enough’, necessitating conflict), orwhether it refers to something more existential—to the fundamentalincompatibility of perspectives, for instance; or to the possibility oftwo perspectives wanting mutually incompatible outcomes; or thepossibility of failure or death as the limit to every project; or thereliance of any project on a passage through otherness (materialityand/or other people) for its completion. Certainly, Sartre’s claim thata shortage of accumulated goods was the reason for the failure ofSoviet socialism (p. ) suggests that Sartre views some kind ofmaterial accumulation as amounting to abundance.

The way in which scarcity is theorised both as an ontologicalfield (identified with inertia and matter) and as a contingenthistorical fact that can be overcome assigns it a theoretical role thatis difficult to entangle. Constructed on the model of classicalphilosophy and ontology, the dualistic model often seems all-encompassing, a general explanation of the relationship betweenpraxis and the world, and thus an unavoidable fact of the humancondition. In the latter case, Sartre’s theory would seem to becomenon-revolutionary, approximating to the existential stances ofauthors such as Heidegger and Lacan. This is an implication Sartreresists. He is determined to leave open the possibility that scarcitycan be overcome, denying that all histories are necessarily based onscarcity and struggle (pp. ‒). There would seem to be both ananalytical claim that this dualistic relationship can be resolvedthrough revolution, by eliminating the condition of scarcity andasserting human control over matter, and an ethical claim that thisresolution is a fundamental good. Sartre proposes that feedback andcriticism are needed in order to rectify the tendency for scarcity todeviate praxis, and this in turn requires an awareness of thecircular process Sartre discusses (p. ).

In spite of this de-essentialising caveat, the thesis of scarcity asthe cause of the ontological split and of various resultingphenomena is problematic as an empirical explanation. On a certain,very minimal (and individual) level, the thesis that scarcity makesmatter dominate praxis makes sense. If there is too little to live on,praxis would necessarily be competitive and adversarial, and thepressure of material need would impact on what people are able todo. While stratified systems such as capitalism and Stalinism inducescarcity in this sense among some of the population by distributivemeans, it is by no means clear that a general condition of too little of

120

Capital & Class 95



121

basic necessities pertains at any period of human history. So if theminimum level of subsistence is met, how does accumulation aid theovercoming of the domination of praxis by inertia? Is it really truethat there is too little to go around, so that people have to competefor scarce resources? It would seem that the world today is producingenough to meet everyone’s basic material needs; indeed, it isquestionable at what point it did not. Thus, actually-existing scarcityis due to distribution, which is the effect of praxis rather thanexteriority; or else must relate to some kind of socially-constructeddemand or personal desires rather than to basic needs. Why, then, isscarcity not overcome?

Certainly, exploitative systems produce and institutionalise asituation in which the exploited and excluded must struggle tosurvive, and in which many do not have enough to meet their basicneeds, so that unmet needs come to dominate life. But there is achicken-and-egg question regarding which comes first: theexploitative system, or the fact of scarcity. An alternativehypothesis thus comes to mind. What if scarcity is not actually anexternal condition but rather a ‘fundamental fantasy’—the horizonof a particular perspective, an epistemological assumption orpsychological disposition that is actualised in the production ofmaterial scarcities? What if the practico-inert is not so much anexternal force as an incarnation of reactive structures within theproject that constructs it? In that case, scarcity as a materialphenomenon would be a product rather than a cause ofexploitation. I have in mind, for instance, Marshall Sahlins’s thesisof ‘primitive abundance’ (), which definitely locates scarcity asa primarily psychological outlook which then actualises itself inthe social forms that reproduce it. In indigenous cosmologies, theseparation between inert (objective) matter and active (subjective)praxis is not usually posited: a kind of immanent, multi-subjectivepraxis is viewed as encompassing the entirety of nature, humanityand the supernatural. This could be interpreted as a rejection ofthe psychological basis of cultures of scarcity through anaffirmation of the world as immanent abundance. Hence thementality of survival—need-as-negativity instead of theaffirmation of life—is a product of the metropolitan epistemologyand the social forms it engenders.

Sartre tries to head off this kind of objection. He provides anaccount of how scarcity as an external condition becomesinteriorised in psychologies that become autonomous, and whichconvert the pursuit of ‘enough’ into a pursuit of ‘more thanenough’. Hence the rich seek to make themselves scarce and tohave more than enough, but the real cause of this according to




Sartre is a primary material scarcity (p. ). Once in place,however, the system of scarcity is self-perpetuating—since it isimpossible to have ‘enough’ without having ‘more than enough’within capitalism, the aspiration for super-abundance fuels furtherscarcity through competition for profit, and capitalists reproducescarcity because it is profitable to do so (p. ). This partialconcession to a rival analysis does not, however, resolve theproblem. If this kind of psychological explanation is to beaccepted for the continuation of an exploitative system, it is hardto see why the additional hypothesis of primordial materialscarcity is necessary to explain the emergence of the system. Theemphasis on need to the exclusion of desire drasticallyoversimplifies motivation, as well as identifying it with a reactive orpreservative pursuit of repetition by a fixed organic being, to theexclusion of immanent becoming. Sartre’s work reads as almostpre-Nietzschean, pre-psychoanalytic in this regard.

Large sections of the second Critique are given over to the historyof Stalinism. The apparent structural role of this discussion is toapply and instantiate the more general theory of history that isdeveloped. However, this material is also of potential interest toscholars of the legacy of the Russian Revolution, the relationshipbetween Western Marxism and the Bolshevik tradition, therelationship between Bolshevism and Stalinism, and the issue ofwhether and in what sense Sartre was a Marxist. This is, therefore,likely to be a major focus of readings in its own right.

Exposition of Sartre’s analysis of Stalinism

Sartre provides a basically humanist definition of the goal ofsocialism—‘socialist man is human because he governs things;every other order is inhuman, to the (variable) extent that thingsgovern men’ (p. ). The USSR is socialist (albeit bureaucraticallydistorted) because of the basic realisation of this relation—collective ownership of the means of production (pp. ‒).Collective management of the economy is taken to allow theconstruction of a self-aware economy that dominates the practico-inert it uses, prevents inert objects from becoming mediationsbetween men, and thus, it is implied, realises the transcendence ofscarcity and the primacy of human praxis. Collective ownership isnecessary, but is ‘only a means’ (p. ).

122

‘Saving what is essential’: Sartre and the history of Stalinism

Capital & Class 95



123

Sartre’s analysis of Stalinism is located in his analysis of groups.Readers of volume I of the Critique will recall that most of it istaken up with a discussion of different types of collective andgroup—seriality, group-in-fusion, pledged group, organised group,institution—which each have a different dynamic, a different kindof social bond, and a different relation between self and other. Thegroup-in-fusion—perhaps the most interesting concept of volumeI—is sadly absent from most of the second volume, with Sartreinstead attributing transformative powers to the already-deviatedform of the pledged group.2

Conflict within pledged and organised groups always amounts toa contradiction within the single praxis the group adopts, and thuswithin the group (pp. ‒). A pledged group is a kind of collectiveindividual, and has a common project it expresses: its inner conflictsare thus expressions of this common project. Even in a case in whichmystifying symbols are the object of conflict, Sartre resorts as usualto a fusion of determinism and free will—the symbols both expressunderlying conflicts and are ‘real’, introducing distinct aspects thatde-energise the conflict and confuse its outcome (pp. ‒). Becauseconflicts arise from real contradictions, they should not be repressedeither by the group or by individuals (pp. ‒). The conflicts oftenlead to ‘monstrous’ outcomes because they are not a realisation of a‘totalization’ (a project or intentionality) but rather, a product of the‘anti-labour’ of two mutually conflictual praxes.

Not only was the Bolshevik/Communist Party a pledged group,but this party tried to turn the whole of Russian society into apledged group via means such as unanimous elections, which madethe population party to the pledge (p. ). The party was itself atotalising of popular demands (the conversion of these demandsinto a project) (p. ). It sought to overcome difference byhomogenising workers and peasants into a single mass (pp. ‒).

This makes Soviet society fundamentally different from class-riven societies in that it is integrated by a single project expressingin some sense the will of all. Thus, for instance, Sartre denies thatsurplus extraction in the USSR was exploitative, because ‘thecollectivity decided … in the interest of all’ how it should beinvested (p. ). Nevertheless, the commonality was basically thatof the rulers with the practical field—the field in which praxisoccurs—exclusive of the workers (p. ). Stalinism brings to theworkers, even to non-political workers, a shifting signification fromthe outside (p. ). The leaders presented the practical field to theworkers as already totalised by the leaders (p. ). Since thenational field is totalised by the sovereign, opposition necessarilytargets this sovereign totalisation, and conflict takes place in ‘the




produced and revealed unity’ of the practical field (pp. ‒). Thissocial unity was created by means of state coercion (p. ).

On this basis, Sartre analyses the Stalin–Trotsky conflict as theresult of insoluble conflicts within Marxism between emphases onuniversality and particularity (the importance of the Soviet caseand the effect on European Marxism), which also expressedconflicts between émigrés and local cadres within the party. TheStalin project expressed particularity, which was an internalisationof necessities in the situation. For instance, working-class weaknesscaused the emergence of a dictatorial form of leadership (p. ).Hence the very same measures can seem different to someone likeStalin, depending on whether he or Trotsky proposed them,because before they were a means to revolutionising, whereas laterthey are purely contingent (p. ‒).

This analysis leads Sartre to attribute Stalinist authoritarianismto necessity. Authoritarianism simply ‘expressed’ a ‘need’ based onthe separation between leaders and masses (p. ), andcentralisation similarly arose out of necessity (p. ). TheBolsheviks had to abandon their principles: the revolution wasdoomed to either disintegrate or deviate, and once it deviated, thedeviation would reproduce itself (p. ). What was lacking in theUSSR, which impeded the realisation of socialism, was a sufficientaccumulation of material goods (p. ) and mass agency—therewas a general lack of culture and agency on the part of the masses(p. ), and the bureaucracy was produced by the masses becauseit was unable to be controlled by them (p. ). The peasantry inparticular was ‘uneducated’, and fell short of revolutionary goals(p. ). They were therefore bearers of ‘underdevelopment’, andthe suppression of poverty required the suppression of the poor(p. ‒). There was also a need to prevent peasants from makingtheir own revolution, indifferent to the urban revolution (p. ).Give or take the excesses (contingencies) that necessarily arisefrom incarnation, Stalin was, except in his last years, what thesituation required (p. ). The peasantry also lacked theintellectual tools to formulate a distinct project of its own.‘Peasant resistance was defeated because it was without principles’,without a fundamental reason to be in opposition, and because itwas ‘outmoded’ and doomed to fail without outside aid (pp. ‒).If Stalinism had had a mass basis, then oppression could have beenavoided, however centralised and authoritarian the system became(p. ).

The inevitability of the rise of Stalinism derives from scarcity.No policy, government or system could give the ability to live ‘asa man’ at the stage reached in Russia (p. ). The main projects of

124

Capital & Class 95



125

the Bolshevik and Stalinist regimes were thus necessary responsesto scarcity. The large-scale forced transformation of peasants intoworkers, for instance, is taken to be ‘emancipation’, even though itis also a ‘terrible effort’ which is not in itself revolutionary (p. ).The leaders simply ‘incarnate the impossibility of any immediateamelioration’ (p. ). Sartre ridicules the alternative explanation,which he ascribes to anti-communists, that the leaders or thebureaucracy had self-interested motives from the start (p. ).

Sartre thus paints a picture of a regime pursuing the highestgoals—seeking, for instance, to produce a working class that wouldemancipate itself; a ‘new man’ [sic] who would in turn constrainthe very leaders who produced him [sic] (p. )—but constantlyfaltering on counter-finalities, the resistance of inertia and the‘anti-dialectic’ corrupting the effects of its own action. Thus, forinstance, while the goal of incentives was certainly notstratification, the latter was at the same time an inevitablestructural effect of the former, turning the former against its owngoals (p. ). Hence ‘bureaucratisation was under no circumstancesthe sovereign’s aim, not even as a means of governing’; it happeneddue to inert materiality, ‘via the medium of the masses’ inertia’(pp. ‒).

Once it existed, the bureaucracy wished to keep workersserialised so as to better be able to manipulate them for commongoals. This was not subjectively an attempt at oppression, butobjectively operated against the emergence of mass agency: itoccurred because the leaders were ‘obliged’ to oppress in order toachieve results (pp. ‒). This oppression was not in principlewrong, because it served the aims of accumulation andproductivity (p. ). It differs from capitalist oppression in that itis for the benefit not of a ruling class, but of the future (p. ).However, a contradiction arises between the bureaucracy’s goal ofmaking itself obsolete and its actual self-assertion (p. ). Sartrealso explains the vicious infighting within the bureaucracy as anoutgrowth of a contradiction between bureaucracy andvoluntarism, action and inertia (p. ).

The Stalinist terror produced a perspectival illusion throughwhich the anti-dialectical resistance of matter to praxis wasmistakenly identified as subjective treason (p. ), with the ‘global’(objective) significance of actions identified as being distorted bypraxis, often at a later moment, as matters of intent (p. ). WhileSartre claims this reading is ‘correct’, he also claims that Stalinismwrongly identifies global significance with significance for thesovereign, attributing to others the bureaucracy’s own rigidity andimmutability (p. ).




The main Stalinist error was to have believed that therevolutionary agent (the leadership) was unaffected by its actionsand their distortions, when in fact people are made by the historythey (in part) make (p. ). Thus, for instance, Stalinist texts wereconstantly becoming other, both from differential reception andconstant rewriting (p. ). In other words, they could not in factengage in the means–ends instrumentalism they attempted: theywould always themselves be produced as other by thecompromises and exigencies they embraced. Stalinism also had acontradictory relationship to racism and anti-Semitism, fusinginto popular racist sentiments and simultaneously seeking tointegrate and exclude Jews. This racist dynamic arose from a fearof autonomous groupings emerging from Jewish and otherminority communities, though this fear also expresses an already-active racism (pp. , ). Despite this, Stalinism contained itsown negation in its praxis, via the ideas of terror as temporary,the withering-away of the state, and working-class power afterthe catch-up (p. ). The result of the Stalinist deviation was thatsocialism became ‘a synonym of Hell’ as its concrete aspects—abundance, freedom, statelessness, internationalism—wereendlessly postponed, the present operating as an interminablemediation between the moment of collective ownership and therealisation of socialist goals (p. ). Nevertheless, ‘the factremains that what was essential had been preserved’ (p. ).

Another criticism is made rather more implicitly. ThoughSartre does not explicitly state this, Stalinism implicitly lacks thecritical realisation of the existence and operation of circularity.Stalinism sought to absorb the practico-inert, and becameparasitic on praxis as a result. ‘One closed upon the other, in orderto dissolve and assimilate it. It succeeded only by the realizationof a generalized cancer. Insofar as the practico-inert (i.e. the anti-dialectic) was used and suffused by the dialectic, praxis (as aconstituted dialectic) was poisoned from within by the anti-dialectic’ (p. ). Thus, it is implied, if Stalin had known Sartre’sphilosophy, the deviation could perhaps have been avoided ormitigated.

First problem: Pledged groups and common praxis

This analysis of Stalinist society is problematic on several levels.Firstly, the assumption that a pledged group has a common praxis

126

Critique of Sartre’s analysis of Stalinism

Capital & Class 95



127

is problematic, because those who take the pledge may havedifferent understandings of its meaning, or may even take it forfunctional reasons. Further, this ‘pledging’ of the coerced is notunique to Stalinism: the same techniques were used in fascistregimes, and there are other kinds of ‘pledge’ associated withrepublican states (pledges of allegiance) and capitalist work(contracts). Sartre would presumably deny all of thesecollectivities the status of pledged groups, but it is hardly clearhow the USSR differs from them in its degree of ‘pledging’.

If some of those coerced into the ‘pledged’ society were notreally carrying out its project as their own, then its distinction fromother kinds of exploitative society is undermined: surplus-extraction is not ‘in the interests of all’ but rather, in the service ofa particular project that is identified with ‘the interests of all’—adescription that could just as easily refer, for instance, to a wareffort or production drive in a capitalist society. And it was, ofcourse, the bureaucratic elite that decided (for instance) how toinvest surplus value. It is an ideological gesture to assert that thecollectivity decided or that the interests served by a decision couldbe separated from the division between those who participated in itand those who did not. It is hard to see how such a gesture could bejustified methodologically in Sartre’s approach, with its recognitionof the multiplicity of projects and the distinction between agencyand serialised inertia.

Second problem: Popular agency

The result of this misunderstanding of the pledge is that workersand peasants in the USSR are denied agency in Sartre’s account:their reduction to ‘inert’ means for or constraints on the activeleadership is taken for granted. Thus, Sartre refers to the Soviet‘masses’ as suffering from a lack of culture and of agency (p. ).This runs counter to evidence emerging in Soviet studies fromauthors such as Fitzpatrick () and Kotkin (), who provideevidence that Stalinist society was both resisted and syncreticallyadapted by agents from the bottom-up. The mistake Sartre makes isto take a different project, and thus a different agency, to be a lack ofagency—a gesture that goes against his phenomenologicalapproach. Hence, the Soviet ‘masses’ are treated as a practico-inertforce that reflects back the leaders’ agency. He even interpretsworkers’ resistance to Stalinism as an instance of a ‘practico-inertrift’ in the common praxis (p. ). Clearly, he would not say thesame of workers in capitalism, and this reification is a reflection ofan underlying bias.




Sartre’s dismissal of peasants in particular is based on a readingof peasant perspectives and practices echoing that of EricHobsbawm’s classic study Primitive Rebels (). This kind ofperspective has been thrown into question by more recentscholarship such as the work of James C. Scott (: ‒, : ),which reveals the existence of a distinct ‘moral economy’, sets oftraditional beliefs and a ‘little tradition’, as well as swathes ofhidden and syncretised discourse that constructed distinctperspectives among peasant rebels. Peasant resistance is also, inmany contexts, highly effective (Scott : ‒). In other words,the denial of the status of agents of praxis to Russian peasants isan arbitrary gesture on Sartre’s part.

Similarly, Sartre far too uncritically endorses the regime’sdemand that urbanised peasants learn to see work as a duty orhonour, rather than as a curse—a claim which, backed by theunfounded assertion that these peasant workers ‘realised’ that revoltwould be counter-revolutionary, is taken to prove the progressivenature of forced urbanisation (p. ). If Sartre’s position is thatwork is an honour because it expresses praxis in the service of aproject, then of course the peasants will resent a work that is forsomeone else’s project and not their own, just as workers resentworking for a capitalist boss. On the other hand, they may wellidentify with their activity in other, less alienated contexts: forcedurbanisation and collectivisation almost certainly increased peasanthostility to work—hostility that was far less visible in villagecommunities. Sartre chooses to see only from the perspective of theelite, and to condemn the peasants for failing to fit into the elite’sproject. He fails also to see from the standpoint of the peasants asagents of a praxis that was violated and crushed beneath theregime’s monolithic dominance; and he thus confuses praxis (of thepeasant) with inertia, and resistance to dominance—to beingsubordinated in another’s project—with opposition to praxis.

Third problem: Taking regime claims at face value

This example of pro-regime bias is not, unfortunately, unique.Sartre is overly prone to take Bolshevik and Stalinist claims at facevalue, assuming that the specific perspectival lens of the rulinggroup expressed actual facts about Soviet society. Take, forinstance, the claim that the Soviet elite really was trying to build aself-determining society that would displace them. This view iscounter to the way the regimes in fact reacted to attempts tocontrol them on the part of the ‘masses’—the Bolshevik responseto Kronstadt, and the Stalinist responses to Vorkuta and to the

128

Capital & Class 95



129

Hungarian uprising hardly suggested that the bureaucracy wassimply filling in for an absent mass agency to which it wouldwillingly yield. Sartre argues that the regime tried to raise the‘culture’ of the masses, and hence did not view them as an object(p. ). Yet this is also true of many regimes, and what Sartre terms‘culture-raising’ could as easily be termed ‘indoctrination’. Hesimply assumes that the ideology of the Stalinist regime has areality (for instance, that the withering-away of the state is a realtendency rather than a myth) that other ideologies do not have.Many of the pseudo-objective categories Sartre introduces in thediscussion also reflect such subjective biases. For example, thedifference between ‘educated’ and ‘uneducated’ peasants seems tocome down to their political conclusions, i.e. whether or not theyaccepted collectivisation (p. ). Sartre’s response to this kind ofobjection (p. ) is a straw-man argument, targeting rational-choice explanations that are certainly problematic, but implyingthat the problems with such approaches extend to any idea ofbureaucratic self-interest. In principle, there is no reason why a‘class’ interest in the bureaucracy should be contradictory with orproblematic in relation to a broader approach which has noproblem asserting such interests of other groups without resortingto rational-choice theory.

It is unclear as to why Sartre applies such a different lens here tothe one he applies, for instance, to capitalist liberals and nationalists.Sartre not only fails to deal with the counter-argument that maybesuch a claim is dishonest, but he also fails to deal with the problemof structural logics built into the bureaucratic mode of thought andaction that make it incompatible with such a goal. Ruling groups donot on the whole dissolve themselves: this is something Sartre wouldrecognise in wider history, but from which he exempts the Sovietelite for unexplained reasons. Of course, we now have the benefit ofhindsight to establish that the ‘new man’ never came, or that ‘he’came in the unexpected form of the anti-regime dissident (who, inthe Czechoslovak and Hungarian revolts, for instance, was distinctlymore likely to be a humanist like Sartre than were the regimeloyalists). In any case, even though the bureaucrats shared Sartre’spassion for socialism, it is not at all clear that they shared hishumanist definition of it. They adhered to a set of beliefs—‘scientific socialism’, the dialectic of nature, the productive forces asan autonomous driving force in history, the possibility of project-neutral scientific knowledge on the part of the leaders—that rundrastically counter to Sartre’s theory. Sartre’s elision of thesetheoretical differences between himself and, say, Stalin reveal anaccount that is incomplete in terms of the subjective dimension.




Similarly, Sartre stops short of evaluating the effectiveness ofwhat he takes to be ‘necessary’ measures in concrete terms. Manyof these measures were counterproductive and devastating, notonly in their human impact but in relation to their declaredpurpose. The collectivisation of agriculture—a means to ensure astable food supply—instead led to famine, as Sartre admits (p. 170);the new factories were notoriously unproductive, turning outshoddy machinery and relying on the black market to meet orders;rational centralised planning became impossible as juniorbureaucrats competed to fabricate figures and cover up failings;attempts to utilise natural forces instead became massive,irreversible ecological disasters. In other words, such means ascentralisation and collectivisation were pursued as necessary inorder to achieve goals that they did not in fact achieve. This againintroduces a subjective dimension missed by Sartre—the questionof why these methods were assumed to work when they did not,and of what particular assumptions and discourses, what gaps inknowledge, enabled such spectacular failures.

The result is a tendency to let elites off the hook for what are atbest acts of conflict with other groups, and often amount torepression against popular classes and movements. For instance,Sartre makes excuses for the suppression of workers’ rights on thebasis of workers’ supposed lack of organisation and awareness (pp.‒). Similarly, he does not critically assess or relativise the goals ofregime action, such as industrialisation, productivity andcollectivisation, and the ways in which these goals required thesuppression of counter-projects that were also expressions of praxis.The general value of these regime goals is taken for granted inSartre’s reading. While Sartre consistently prefers praxis and projectsto their usurpation in inertia, it is unclear as to why this particularproject is assigned a special, universal position. His generous readingof Bolshevik and Stalinist motivations is in stark conflict with hisanalyses of other social agents (from boxing managers to Frenchsettlers in Algeria), which, to be sure, take into account the subjectiveperspectival basis for their actions, but which do not establish theshort-circuit between this perspective and the actual situation, andwhich are often concerned with pinning down the limits of agents’perspectives, the perspective-relativity of their goals, and the socialconstruction of their projects. In other words, Sartre arbitrarilyexcludes the Bolshevik and Stalinist elites from the critical readingthat is at the core of his general approach. The result is certainly notpraise for the Stalinist regime, but it involves a certain identificationwith its project which blinkers Sartre to aspects of the situation andprevents him from performing his usual role as critic.

130

Capital & Class 95



131

Thus, while elsewhere he attributes failure to an intersection ofinternal and external factors, in his analysis of Stalinism he errs onthe side of the external, taking for granted the regime’s claims tohave had no choice or to be acting from necessity for generallyvalid goals. At times (for instance, in the account of the causes ofauthoritarianism), the interplay of praxis and inertia is replaced bya simple determinism—circumstances decided, and the leaders’projects and meanings do not come into the explanation. This goesagainst Sartre’s more general claims, notwithstanding hisrecognition of a surplus over what the situation ‘demanded’ and anintentionality in the Stalinist project.

Fourth problem: Industrial society, non-material values and alienation

Sartre also effectively admits that industrial economics as suchproduces alienation, suggesting that it alienates even a commonproject from workers’ agency, subordinates the worker to externalsovereignty and objectivity, and produces stratification and control(pp. ‒). But this raises questions about the Bolshevik project ona deeper level than Sartre realises. Industrialism was not a deviationdue to circumstances, but a part of what socialism ‘meant’ to theBolsheviks. This goes against Sartre’s humanist definition of thesocialist project: industrial production does not, as Sartre admits,lead to a domination of the practico-inert by praxis, nor to anelimination of mediations of human relations by the practico-inert; and as such, it cannot be socialist in Sartre’s sense. So ifindustrialism produces anti-socialist outcomes as a matter ofcourse, it logically follows that Bolshevism could not realisesocialism. This in turn raises the question of why the Bolsheviksthought it could, as well as the question of where this leaves thesocialist project (which is either rendered impossible, or has to bepursued by an anti- or post-industrial route). If, on the other hand,one wishes to affirm the Bolshevik approach as socialist, thisimplies the rejection of Sartre’s humanist definition of socialism.

Similarly, it is not clear that an emphasis on collective ownershipis consistent with what Sartre takes to be the goal of socialism. Thisis partly because ownership is a formal rather than a social relation:formal ownership does not necessarily give real control, whichwould seem to be necessary for a humanist socialism to operate.This is a broader problem for advocates of the Soviet system (onecould ask, for instance, whether an emphasis on commonownership would render building societies and pension fundsinstances of worker control, and whether claims to eminent




domain would render existing capitalist states ‘socialist’); andclearly in the USSR, de facto control was held by the bureaucracy,with the legal form of collective ownership being no more actuallyoperative than the similar legal guarantee of civil liberties in the1936 USSR Constitution. Indeed, Sartre admits that Stalinismseparated ownership from rule (pp. ‒), and it would seem to berule rather than ownership that is relevant to a humanist Marxism.How can something that is ‘only a means’ (p. ) also be what is‘essential’ before all else (p. )?

In Sartre’s case, there is the additional problem of why collectiveownership is taken to be so fundamental with regard to the purposeof socialism, which is the primacy of praxis over inertia. Why doesthe ownership system in relation to inert matter have any drasticeffect on the extent to which this inert matter mediates socialrelations, or is subjected to the projects of praxis? Sartre’s partialcounter-argument is that collective ownership prevents theemergence of seriality (p. ), yet his discussion of the USSR showsthat this is not the case, since seriality in fact emerged there.Further, if collective ownership is ‘only a means’, how does itsrealisation in a social system identify that system with an end (i.e. associalist)? One could argue, for instance, that violence against thebourgeoisie is a necessary means to socialism, without this at allimplying that all violence against the bourgeoisie is socialist.

The same problem arises with regard to the significanceattached to accumulation, productivity and so on. Even if these arenecessary goals for achieving emancipation, it is not clear how theycan take precedence over its subjective conditions such as freedom,from a phenomenological standpoint—one must have the ability toform a project before one can have an opportunity to realise it.Developing similar ideas to Sartre’s (though not without his ownambiguities regarding Stalinism), Paolo Freire () arrives at theview that the most important aspect of liberation is the capacity to‘name the world’ for oneself, to formulate a project based on one’sown life-experience, and thus to resist submersion in the dominantdiscourse of another (problematising also the desire forhomogeneity that Sartre embraces in Stalinism). This submersionis precisely what occurs via the Stalinist combination of coercion,homogenisation and didactic education. The Stalinist regime choseto pursue economic ‘goods’ at the expense of ‘goods’ that arehuman, existential, psychological, libertarian, relational, ecologicaland so on. While it may not have been possible to pursue all the‘goods’ at once, the choice of the economic as the essential was afeature of the regime’s own perspective—and it is clear that thischoice entailed reactionary positions on many other issues (from

132

Capital & Class 95



133

sexual liberation and the arts to the self-determination of nationalminorities) that were raised in the revolutionary period. Hence, forinstance, faced with the choice between bottom-up self-determination and the primacy of industry due to the large peasantpopulation, the Stalinists prioritised industrialisation, establishingeconomic goals as primary over goals of self-determination. Thechoice made sense on the basis of the regime’s version of Marxism,which was heavily economistic; it makes very little sense if theeconomic is simply one of many necessary means to a broaderliberation that would also be realised in these other spheres.

Thus, many of the regime’s claims that Sartre echoes makesense in terms of the specific conception of socialism adopted bythe Bolsheviks, but cease to make sense when imported into Sartre’sframework. Let us recall that the goal of socialism, for Sartre, isthat praxis should dominate inert matter, the fault of earliersystems being that matter instead dominates humanity and deviatespraxis. Is it logical to assume that the accumulation of largerquantities of matter will have any effect on the qualitative relationbetween matter and praxis? If one worker sitting at a machine isalienated, how will a million workers sitting at machines not beequally so? Rather, the pursuit of accumulated goods may be partof the cycle of alienation itself—the pursuit of satisfactionthrough ‘having’ rather than ‘doing’, the resultant subordination oflife to work, and thus of the worker to the machine, being meansthrough which inert matter dominates praxis.

The emphasis in this essay on Sartre’s theories of ontology, historyand Stalinism is not, of course, to deny that there is more to thetext than these aspects. One could add, for instance, a discussion ofhis view of marriage as a kind of pledged group (pp. ‒); hiscritique of the idea of decision (p. ); and his analysis of anger as‘the sudden exteriorization of a violence constantly suffered andinteriorized’ (p. ). There are multiple possible examples ofinsightful, stimulating or potentially productive asides, case studiesand lines of thought. But these are located within an authorialproject focused on larger questions of the role of history, and it ison these questions that the importance and success (or failure) ofSartre’s project on its own terms is established.

The implicit goal behind the philosophical interest in theintelligibility of history is clear: Sartre, in common with otherMarxist humanists, is seeking to find a path to a future in which

Conclusion: History beyond scarcity?




human beings control our own destiny, instead of being subject torepressive and alienating external forces. In his own terms,therefore, he is seeking a world beyond scarcity, a world in whicheach project can be pursued and to some extent actualised. ButSartre makes too many compromises in his pursuit of this goal,leading him to the endorsement of social systems that reproducethe oppressive relations he opposes. Part of the reason for this isthat his analysis of scarcity is incomplete and flawed: he locates itsolely in relation to need rather than desire, and problematicallyassumes the libidinal economy of scarcity to have its last-instancebasis in a real shortage of resources. This mistake exposes Sartre tothe danger of being drawn into the discourses of those who use thefailings of authoritarian systems as a pretext for their continuation.It blunts his critical sense at a crucial point, leading him to pull hispunches in his analysis of Stalinism, and thus to fail in his aim ofunderstanding the transition to a world beyond scarcity. Hismethodology leaves concrete analyses largely dependent onjudgement calls as to which factors are important, and in the caseof Stalinism, Sartre makes a number of wrong calls.

Certain of the themes in Sartre’s work would later be picked upand deployed by Felix Guattari (), particularly the idea offused (subject) groups, as distinct from pledged and organised(subjugated) groups. Guattari was to strip Sartre’s politics of theirconcessions to political repression, actualising the literal content ofthe pursuit of free praxis in the form of a priority of ‘desiring-production’3 over social production, a rejection of arborescentsocial forms, and a propensity for affinity and molecular formationsas means towards an affirmative power that is not alienated ininertia. Sartre’s work would have been more politically useful hadhe taken these further steps himself, instead of being sidetrackedinto a defence of bureaucratic social regimes.

These weaknesses aside, with the second Critique Sartrenonetheless provides a highly astute theoretical work, useful inaddressing issues of historical analysis and in thinking about howMarxism and constructivism can relate to one another. He providesan unusual, original response to the problems facing WesternMarxists, and elaborates his own variant of Marxist philosophy,which can only enrich the toolboxes of critical researchers.

The author wishes to acknowledge financial support from theLeverhulme Trust through an early career fellowship for theperiod in which this review essay was written.

134

Capital & Class 95

Acknowledgements



135

Althusser, L. () ‘Reply to John Lewis’ in Essays in Self-Criticism (NewLeft Books) pp. ‒.

Althusser, L. () For Marx, trans. B. Brewster (Verso).Anderson, P. () In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (Verso).Aronson, R. () ‘Sartre's turning point: The abandoned Critique de la

raison dialectique, II’ in P. A. Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophy of Jean-PaulSartre (Open Court/Carus) pp. ‒.

Aronson, R. () ‘Sartre and the dialectic: The purposes of Critique, II’,Yale French Studies, no. 68, pp. ‒.

Aronson, R. () ‘Boxing and incarnation in Sartre's second Critique’,Revue Internationale de Philosophie, no. ‒, pp. ‒.

Aronson, R. () Sartre’s Second Critique (University of Chicago Press).Aronson, R. () ‘Sartre's return to ontology: Critique, II, rethinks the

basis of L'Etre Et Le Neant’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. , no. (January–March) pp. ‒.

Boyle, M. () ‘Sartre's circular dialectic and the empires of abstractspace: A history of space and place in Ballymun, Dublin’, Annals of theAssociation of American Geographers, vol. , no. , pp. ‒.

Fitzpatrick, S. () Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in ExtraordinaryTimes (Oxford University Press).

Freire, P. () Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M. Bergson Ramos(Penguin).

Guattari, F. () Molecular Revolution, trans. R. Sheed (Penguin/Puffin).Hobsbawm, E. () Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social

Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester University Press).Kotkin, S. () Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (University

of California Press).Merleau-Ponty, M. () Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. J. J. Bien

(Northwestern University Press).Poster, M. () Sartre’s Marxism (Pluto).Poster, M. () ‘Review of Ronald Aronson's Sartre's Second Critique’,

Journal of Modern History, vol. , no. , September, pp. ‒.Sahlins, M. () Stone Age Economics (Walter de Gruyter).Sartre, J-P. () Search for a Method, trans. H. Barnes (Random House).Sartre, J-P. (, , , [–]) The Family Idiot, four

volumes, trans. C. Cosman (University of Chicago Press).Sartre, J-P. ( [) Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume I, trans. A.

Sheridan-Smith (Verso).Scott, J. C. () The Moral Economy of the Peasant (Yale University Press).Scott, J. C. () Weapons of the Weak (Yale University Press).Simont, J. () ‘The Critique of Dialectical Reason: From need to need,

circularly’, Yale French Studies, no. , pp. -.Thompson, E. P. () The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (Merlin).


References



1 I disagree here with Aronson’s view that need is what separates thedialectical view of praxis-process from the analytical view ‘that eachseparate act is indifferent to each other one’ (: ). Since thesatisfaction of need in a context of scarcity is antagonistic, thepursuit of need by all would no more unify the field than wouldunmotivated actions: actions based on need may be indifferent toothers’ actions based on need. This aspect of the theory alsoproblematises Aronson’s conclusion that Sartre fails to find thetotalisation-without-totaliser he seeks (: ; ). To be sure,Sartre does not reach the stage of discussing totalisation in ‘non-directorial’ societies; but it is not hard to see how the function ofStalin in the USSR could be assumed by a broader, more diffuseprocess of subsumption within capitalism, so that individual praxesare drawn into a single production structure despite themselves inmuch the same way. This results, however, in a historically contingentdominant totalisation and not in a totality to history as such—whichmay be less than Sartre sought.

2 The ‘pledged group’ is sometimes translated as the ‘statutory’ or‘sworn’ group, and ‘group-in-fusion’ as ‘fused group’.

3 In Deleuze’s work, ‘desiring-production’ is the self-propelledproduction of desire at the level of molecular flows. Thesubordination of social production to desiring-production is thedefining feature of the revolutionary project as constructed in Anti-Oedipus. It basically means that social and material relations shouldbe constructed to enable, follow and provide open space for the flowsof desire, rather than forming an external structure that forces desireinto certain paths, or sets walls for it to run up against.

136

Capital & Class 95

Notes



Documents

5 Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume II