FOR hundreds of thousands of young people who were about in Sartre's ideas and writings provided an intellectual basis for a revolutionary commitment and an opening to Marxism.
This is what makes Sartre so radically different from other famous thinkers of the post war period, such as Raymond Aron and even Albert Camus.
1 ney never won anyone to revolutionary action and Marxism. Another Zola?
From a political and historical standpoint Sartre's character is thrilling because of his relationship to politics. He was not a left intellectual', a 'committed writer, fellow traveller, a Romain Rolland of the latter half of the 20th centurv. On the contrary, in his aggressive contradictory way he exemplified the crisis of this century.
What immediately strikes us about Sartre's Dason or bonucs is mar nis commitmeni occurred very late, at the start of the Second World War, but above all during the Liberation of France (1944-5). By this time he was already a star of the arts and philosophy and this warped everything. He tried to shake off the glittering fame he had won from the world of the arts, which gave an added appeal to his political views but he was unable to do so, even after 1968. This paradox dominated character of his commitment.
Furthermore when re-reading biography today it is striking how little impact the catalcvismic events of the '30s had on his intellectual formation. In 1932-33, living in berlin ne wrote vausea. Distractealy ne noted 'Some communists and nazis shoot at each other in the Berlin streets.
He vaguely sypathised with the Popular Front and felt some warmth for the Spanish revolution but these events, turning points in the century, did not captivate his intellectual energy. His writings during the period confirm that All his intellectual power directed towards une construction. philosophy of freedom within which a person's destiny and the individual's possible choices occupied conual positou Sartre's real politics are to be found in Erostrate, in Le Mur, and in the play Les Mouches. classic Sartre's of 1940 ne In une Philostalinism The publication in 1952 of the first part of the famous text Communists and Peace ('an anti-communist is a dog, there is no other way to describe them') fell previous choices and defined him, as a fellow traveller of the French Communist Party (PCF). The paradox of this text is that of Sartre's relationship to politics.
On the one hand it is a long drawn out plea in favour of the 'objective intelligence' of the PCF but at a time when the latter adopted one of its most aberrant, sectarian and isolationist super-Stalinist lines, under the cover of left phraseology, suicidal actions, tions against NATO leader, Ridgway.
As Sartre was to later admit, in this article the magical power of coherence. a totally (PCF = working class, therefore...) and was augmented furious against the Trotskyists.
He pleaded On the other hand, point of the drift of the former "revolutionary' intelligentsia of the Liberation into the camp its height.
within the logic of the , until 1956, pedestal, and and sometimes accompanied by like the famous demonstratual" who words replaces abstract text Lenin, Che Guevara).
and false attacks Sartre's radicalism.
seen from the standmoment to bombers Lullage. praxis, became organic of the Cold War it is a text against the stream. It is a radical in a certain way given the formidable anti-communist campaign which was at Here we touch the limit of Sartre's political thought just as we will again when examining his political evolution after 1968. His commit- ago ment stemmed from indignation and mora. reflex. It is not hampered by nuances or concrete analysis. It remained the commitment of an intellectual, whom fame had elevated to a who, certain occasions, makes a gutt of his person to worthy causes He remained irredemiably outside the Group, Collective, Party, Class or Movement Sartre's situation was counterposed to the figure of 'the organic revolutionary intellecassimilates her/himself to historical process by identitying with the praxis of a group or class (Gramsci, Luxemburg, However, this absence of social roots in gave him an ideologica and political mobility which made him un predictable. Two years after the publication of Communists and Peace, reacting on the spur the smashing of the the greatest cellent anti-Stalinist text, The Ghost of Stalin.
Of course this text contained many illusions: in Gomulka, on the perspective of a popular front in France; but it did analyse correctly the dynamic and the potential of the Budapest Commune. It judged correctly the crisis of Stalinism in the wake of the 20th Con.
Not the Soviet Communist Party and criticised the intervention of the Russian tanks Irom a socialst stanapoli "it is socialism itself that your bullets and shells were splintering'. Sartre thus freed himself from the false alternative of either supporting the Stalinist parties as they are, or falling into the camp of With this text the bell tolled on Sartre's days as a PCF fellow-traveller. The position he took on the Algerian war only deepened the divergence. His opposition to the colonial war has contributed more than anything else to his international fame as an intransigent radical. His hard positions brought forth the hatred of ruling class, ot its pen-pushers and its 'Send Sartre to prison, 'Shoot Sartre'. But here again, behind the undoubted we find a considerable lack ideological clarity Sartre jumped with both feet into the boat of Third Worldism during the '60s. He accepted the idea that the Western working class had been bought off and the gross, theory of violence as the major exorcist of alienation and oppression. In this first moment of revolt it is necessary to kill. To shoot a European is to kill two birds with one stone. It is to suppress at •the same time an oppressor and an oppressed. A dead and a free man remain...' (Preface to The Damned of the Earth by Franz Fanon) Which Marxism?
Underneath his mobile political views a very deep philosophical coherence exists in Sartre. At the beginning of all action, all politics, all history there is the freedom of a person, of a of a consciousness, mingled with the world. If Sartre's Marxism — its most complete form being in the preface to Critique of Dialectical Reason - has propelled so many young people to revolutionary action it is because at the time it was much more full of life than the heavy ideological artillery of Stalinism It threw a bridge between a 'miserable' subjectivity, a state of gelatinous revolt, and a possible revolutionary activity. That is why there were so many 'Sartrians' in the Union of Communist Students during the sixties.
Sartre never pursued his assimilation to Marxism to its conclusion for the simple reason that he would have found it necessary to ques tion the very foundations of his philosophy.
This can be seen clearly after 1968. Shaken to the core by the passivity of so many intellectuals he questioned his own commitment. His response was twofold: a radical rejection of the role of the intellectual as such, and a re evaluation of the relationship between Marx ism and socialism which led him to varieties of libertarianism.
With the maoists There is something poignant in Sartre's ultimate solution. Out of radical conviction he wethout scruples, used him in the service of Maoist traveller. their delirious politics. More than ever Sartre found himself as the decorative trump card for politics elaborated behind his back. At this moment he declared the death of the classical, committed. intellectua He was the supreme caricature of the intellectual, militant among militants, full of ardour • and anonymous ... Nevertheless the work with the Maoists had a rational basis. In the famous 'one is right to revolt', in the propaganda of symbolic actions, of abstract radicalism, there is a whiff of the perfume of Sartrian philosophy of praxis and freedom Beneath the failure of politics reduced to gestures we can see, again, a coherence stubbornly rooted in concepts forged half a century Despite all we have said of the failures of Sartre's politics we will never join the chorus of small-minded Marxists who treat him as a dead dog. Firstly the importance of what remains of him, of his literary and philosophical work, will not lead to accommodations with a society to which he himself was never reconciled.
Secondly under the sinuous line of his politıcal commitment there is a basic questior with which he furiously struggled for decades - what can intellectuals do for the revolution as long as the social and historical conditions giving rise to their existence and reproduction as a particular group prevail?
Making an assessment of the political com mitment of the greatest radical intellectuals of this century and compare it with Sartre. YOu will see that in the midst of the heart-wrenching of the committed intellectual, Sartre was one of Socialist Challenge 8 May 1980