4

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By 1957, Sartre had acquired considerable political experience, and become a confident proponent of a Marxist position. He now went a step further, and from 1957 to 1959 he worked intensively on a major philosophical project, the Critique de la raison dialectique. His stated purpose in writing the Critique was to 'raise one question, and only one: do we now possess the materials for constituting a structural, historical anthropology?'¹ – to ask 'whether there is any such thing as a Truth of humanity (une Verité de l'Homme)''?²

    Why should these questions lead to a critique of dialectical reason – 'critique' in the Kantian sense of determining the nature, conditions, and limits of this form of reason? If a structural, historical anthropology is possible, the dialectic will be its principle of intelligibility; that is, any Truth of humanity will be dialectical. This associates the undertaking with Marxism: for the dialectic is, after all, central to Marxism both as a logical form by which to approach human reality, and as the substance of that reality. Marx had derived the dialectic from Hegel, re-located it in the material word, and used it to explain human history. But he did not explain why history should be dialectical. Sartre's goal, building on the actual theoretical and practical achievements of Marxism and attempting to overcome its current impasse, was to lay a philosophical basis for the dialectic, to found it.

     1. crd, p.9; trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, Critique of Dialectical Reason, I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, (cdr) London 1976, p.822.

     2. crd, p.10; cdr, p.822.

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    The dialectic emerges from, and is itself, human activity. From the very outset the Critique maintains a sharp distinction between the ways in which we understand the human and the physical worlds – between dialectical reason and analytical reason. The dialectic is the only adequate means, Sartre insists, of understanding human reality, from the practical activity of a single individual to the vast course of world history. Furthermore, we do not submit to the dialectic, as a reading of Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism might lead us to believe: if there is a dialectic it is 'no more than ourselves.'³ It is our practical activity, or praxis, that totalizes the world around us, projects a goal on the basis of what has already been achieved, and transcends the practical field towards new ends.

    Thus, in seeking to establish the 'validity and limits' of dialectical reason as the logic of human praxis, Sartre was acting as Marxism's Immanuel Kant. But after all, it was the author of L'Etre et le Néant who now proposed this decisive project within Marxism. Did this mean, as many writers have claimed, that Sartre was trying to reconcile Marxism with existentialism?⁴ The fundamental issue, rather, was lived reality: if any intellectual project of 'reconciliation' was possible it was because experience already united the two modes of thought. Sartre's purpose was to explain human reality, regardless of the label borne by his tools. If his earlier thought lacked a necessary socio-historical dimension which he now drew from Marxism, it was equally the case that Marxism as he encountered it lacked a grasp of the specificity of individual experience, which he now sought to bring to it.

    He had somewhat one-sidedly initiated this philosophical project in 1946 with 'Matérialisme et révolution', and carried it further with the 1952-54 essays on the Communist Party. The object of these writings, philosophically speaking, was to locate subjectivity within history in general and the revolutionary project in particular: to establish the centrality of creative human activity, first against Marxism and offering existentialism as a substitute, but as Sartre developed and deepened 'his understanding of Marxism, he came to accept it as 'the untranscendable philosophy for our time'⁵, and to regard existentialism

     3. crd, p.134; cdr, p.39.

     4. As Fredric Jameson acutely points out in Marxism and Form, Princeton 1971 (p.206), such an approach caricatures and distorts the issue by treating intellectual systems mechanically. One of the best studies of the Critique, this essay elucidates its relationship with L'Etre et le Néant.

     5. crd, p.9; cdr, p.822.

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as a still-necessary ideology within it. Thus he intended 'not to reject Marxism in the name of a third path or of an idealist humanism, but to reconquer man within Marxism',⁶ not to abandon his focus on subjectivity or individual experience, but to comprehend both concrete individual experience and human activity in general within a social and historical framework.

    Thus Sartre posed anew the classical question of social theory: how can we understand both concrete individuals and the social world to which they belong? And can we understand each in terms of the other? That is, in Sartre's terms, how do separate individual acts combine to produce a constituted social world? Sartre never doubted that the multiplicity of individual praxes produced this world. He repeatedly warned against the 'hyper-organicism' which would tear society away from its individual foundations, and make it an autonomous force obeying its own laws and acting upon us. Against this, he proposed to explain social groupings by deconstructing the larger wholes into the multitude of acts which compose them. A third, intimately related question was: how is it that our individual acts do in fact become forces which seem to take on a life on their own? Why is human life in history an inferno of class oppression and class struggle? Attempting to answer this question, Sartre brought two novel emphases to the discussion of social life: the fact of 'scarcity', and the way in which, under conditions of scarcity, our own product became a vast 'practico-inert' field which in turn imposed its power on us.

    The questions posed by Sartre in the Critique are fundamental. Yet it is clear that they are his questions, marked in their very formulation by the problematic governing all his past work. The themes of L'Etre et le Néant recur: the rejection of determinism in the name of free human activity; the individual as the decisive reality; human life as an overwhelming hell. Yet they have evidently been deepened: human freedom is now seen as practical activity; the praxis of each is related to the praxis of all; and the inferno in which we live is one constituted historically, by human acts. The Critique de la raison dialectique is Sartre's greatest contribution to Marxist philosophy and social theory. As such, it is of decisive significance in any study of his development. It is the point at which we can most pointedly ask how fully he accomplished the passage from 'Man is a useless passion' and

     6. qm, p.59; sm, p.83.

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'Hell is other people', and also the point of departure for discussion of his later evolution in the sixties and seventies.

A Badly Written Book

Let us begin by observing Sartre at work in the Critique. In the long passage that follows he begins his analysis of scarcity.

    ' . . . The whole human adventure – at least until today – is a fierce struggle against scarcity. Thus, at all levels of worked and socialized matter we find again at the base of each of its passive actions the original structure of scarcity as first unity coming to matter from men and returning to men through matter. For our part, the contingency of the relation of scarcity does not trouble us: certainly, it is logically possible to conceive, for other organisms and on other planets, a relationship to an environment which would not be scarcity (although we are quite incapable of merely imagining what it might be and, in the hypothesis that other planets would be inhabited, the most likely conjecture is that living beings would suffer from scarcity there as here); and above all, although scarcity might be universal, it varies within a given historical moment. According to considered regions (and certain reasons of these variations are historical – overpopulation, underdevelopment, etc. – therefore are fully intelligible at the interior of history itself, while others – for a given state of technical development – condition history through social structures without being conditioned by it – climate, richness of the subsoil, etc.). But it remains that three quarters of the population of the world are undernourished, after thousands of years of history; thus, in spite of its contingency, scarcity is a fundamental human relation (with nature and with men). In this sense we must say that it makes us these individuals producing this history and who define themselves as men. Without scarcity we can perfectly conceive a dialectical praxis and even labour: nothing would prevent, indeed, the products necessary to the organism from being practically inexhaustible while in spite of everything, a practical operation would be necessary to tear them from the earth. In this hypothesis, the unity of human multiplicities turned upside down by the counter-finality of matter would necessarily subsist: for it is to labour that it is linked as to the original dialectic. But what would disappear is our character as men, that is, since this character is 

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historical, the very singularity of our History. Thus, any man whatsoever today ought to recognize in this fundamental contingency the necessity which (through thousands of years and very directly, even today) imposes on him being exactly who he is. We shall study, in the progressive moment of experience, the problem of contingency in History and we shall see that the problem is above all important in the perspective of a future of man. In the case which occupies me, scarcity appears less and less contingent to the degree that we ourselves engender its new forms as the environment of our life on the base of an original contingency: one can see there, if one wishes, the necessity of our contingency or the contingency of our necessity. It remains that an effort at critique should distinguish this particularized relation from the general relation (that is, independent of any historical determination) of a dialectical and multiple praxis with materiality. However, as scarcity is a determination of this general relation, as it only manifests itself to us through it, it is proper in order to keep from wandering to present scarcity first and to leave the universal relations of the dialectic with the inert to be extricated afterwards. We shall describe the relation of scarcity briefly, for the reason that everything has already been said; in particular historical materialism as interpretation of our history has provided desirable precision on this point. What has not at all been tried, on the contrary, is studying the type of passive action which materiality as such exercises on men and on their history in returning a stolen praxis to them under the form of counter-finality. We shall there further insist: History is more complex than a certain simplistic Marxism believes, and man has to struggle not only against nature, against the social environment which has engendered him, against other men, but also against his own action insofar as it becomes other. This type of primitive alienation expresses itself through other forms of alienation but it is independent of them and on the contrary itself serves permanent anti-praxis as a new and necessary moment of praxis. Without an effort to determine it, historical intelligibility (which is evidence in the complexity of a temporal development) loses an essential moment and is transformed into unintelligibility.'⁷

     7. crd, pp.201-202; cdr, pp.123-25. I have used, my own translation here in order to retain the original sentence and paragraph structure.

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    The first noteworthy feature of this passage is that it is all drawn from one paragraph, seventy-two lines in the original. Its length is typical of the Critique. Let us summarize its content. 1. Scarcity exists as a long-standing and virtually irremediable relationship of humans to nature. 2. It is only a contingent and specific instance of the basic human relationship with nature; but, 3., it is contingent in a special sense, since scarcity leads to our particular history and makes us a specific kind of people. 4. Were scarcity overcome, our labour would still result in 'counter-finality', a 'passive activity' of worked matter reacting against its workers. 5. The Critique will first briefly discuss scarcity, then move on to the basic human relation to nature.

    Here are five fairly comprehensible introductory propositions. Why does Sartre's paragraph appear so dense and require such an effort to decipher? Let us trace its development. In the first two sentences, Sartre makes the point that scarcity has long been a fundamental fact of life. His thought now drifts sideways, in the process stating an integral point- that scarcity, while not built into human life as such, has become a dominant fact of our life. From the phrase, 'for our past' onwards, the paragraph begins to wander, occupies us with alternative views, elaborating them and indicating their peculiar problems. His prose actually breaks down in the sentence which begins 'according to considered regions' and then plunges into a parenthesis from which it never emerges again. At last, Sartre returns in force to his point. ('But it remains that three quarters of the population of the world are undernourished . . . '). Yet here too his thought refuses to move directly forward; again he is conceiving alternatives. This time he returns to the vision of plenty, no longer to show that it is conceivable and thus that scarcity is only contingent, but now for the purpose of arguing that in conditions of plenty, certain problems (about which, at this point in the Critique, we cannot conceivably know) would subsist while our fundamental character as men would disappear. Our fundamental character: the book has not discussed it yet, except in an aside: 'in this sense we must say that [scarcity] makes us these individuals producing this history and who define themselves as men' – an undeveloped but obviously important idea thrown out while another is being developed. Sartre returns again to his original topic ('In the case which occupies us . . . '). Now he presents a new idea, namely that we build the structures of our world on the original contingency of scarcity, in the process mak-

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ing scarcity less contingent. This idea is intriguing, but it is mystified rather than clarified by Sartre's coy and paradoxical suggestion that one may 'see there, if one wishes, the necessity of our contingency or the contingency of our necessity'. He now changes the direction again: it remains--apparently--to raise the question of how to proceed. Yet he returns to the significant idea, suggested five long sentences earlier, that within the universal relations proper to praxis as such, scarcity engenders its specific kind of praxis. He indicates that he will first discuss scarcity, and then praxis in general. A further change of direction then follows; outlining the future course of his analysis, Sartre indicates that he will not say much about scarcity, since Marxism has already illuminated it (a claim he will confound within twenty-five pages) but will later discuss the anti-praxis that simplistic Marxism ignores – this refers forward to an as yet unwritten and unread analysis of the practico-inert, of which the reader can have no inkling. By the end of the paragraph even the most tenacious reader is likely to be lost – the more completely since the next sentence returns to the idea of scarcity.

    Thus, the argument undergoes no fewer than five changes of direction. It does not develop. Rather, it darts back and forth briefly raising a series of related issues, but solving every problem encountered in the same way: by assertion. Instead of patiently developing its ideas, Sartre's prose asserts, obscurely raises questions which threaten the assertion, wanders into parentheses, and then back out to the original point. It is an undisciplined, almost incoherent style of writing in which everything must be said, more or less at once, and never otherwise than by a kind of fiat. These pages are representative of the work as a whole. The Critique contains examples of controlled writing and careful thought – for example, the discussion of the praxis-process of colonialism in Algeria near the end of the book – but by and large it is undisciplined, self-indulgent, confused and confusing.

    Why is the Critique so badly written, so nearly bordering on a kind of intellectual chaos? Simone de Beauvoir has revealed something of Sartre's personal state as he laboured on the book in early 1958. 'It was not a case of writing as he ordinarily did, pausing to think and make corrections, tearing up a page, starting again; for hours at a stretch he raced across sheet after sheet without re-reading them, as though absorbed by ideas that his pen, even at that speed, couldn't

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keep up with; to maintain this pace I could hear him crunching corydrame capsules, of which he managed to get through a tube a day. At the end of the afternoon he would be exhausted; all his powers of concentration would suddenly relax, his gestures would become vague, and quite often he would get his words all mixed up. We spent our evenings in my apartment: as soon as he drank a glass of whiskey the alcohol would go straight to his head. "That's enough," I'd say to him; but for him it was not enough; against my will I would hand him a second glass; then he'd ask for a third; two years before he'd have needed a great deal more; but now he lost control of his movements and his speech very quickly and I would say again: "That's enough." '⁸ The years of the struggle over Algeria were enormously trying for Sartre and de Beauvoir, and, in the latter's words, 'Sartre protected himself by working furiously at his Critique de la raison dialectique.' The disorderly style of the book was, in part, the necessary price of this resort, the visible trace of the stress to which Sartre was subjected as his political hopes for France drained away.

    A further, more radical cause of difficulty was embedded in the Critique itself: not only in the enormous, perhaps overwhelming difficulty of the undertaking – nothing less than to render history intelligible as a human undertaking, even in its most infernal dimensions – but also, and precisely because of this ambition, in the problematic that organized it. Were Sartre's analytic categories adequate to such an undertaking? Or was he attempting to square the circle, to understand social being using concepts that implicitly denied its reality? Could the Critique accomplish its goals, given its own starting points? It is one of the least confident of Sartre's writings, and its stylistic torsions and disorders testified also to the presence of racking and perhaps unresolvable internal tensions.

Praxis and the Adventure of the 'Critique'

Sartre's analysis begins, familiarly, with lone individuals labouring on the world in isolation from each other. Humans labour on the world, a world of scarcity, in order to transform it to meet their needs. In the process they totalize the world before them, elaborate a more or less coherent view of it and determine what it lacks; they then

     8. La Force des choses, p.407; Force of Circumstance, p.385.

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set projects and go beyond the given world, transforming it so that the need is met. This process is dialectics, the principle of the activity and of its intelligibility, the logic of praxis. Sartre repeatedly attacks two distortions of intelligibility: the tendency of Engels and, later, of official Soviet Marxism to raise the dialectic beyond humans and so take it from their hands, and the conviction held by proponents of 'analytical reason' that reality is merely an agglomeration of discrete units whose interrelations are external and secondary. Against the latter Sartre affirms that the world is indeed an internally connected whole-in-the-making; and in opposition to the first, he insists that this dialectic exists only because humans continually create the world.

    At the outset, we perform our praxis alongside each other but in separation, engaged in a common practical field but dominated by the Other. Our basic social state is one of seriality. Sartre describes seriality in its many forms: waiting for a bus, reading the newspaper on the bus, listening to the radio, the 'top ten' records, public opinion, and conformity. Every form of seriality reveals me as a mass man: I alienate myself from my own purposes and, separated from but alongside other people, adopt the conduct that I expect them to adopt. The serial individual acts by himself, but as others would want him to. Standing alongside each other, we only appear to act together: each of us is dominated and radically isolated.

    The dialectic of the group is introduced with Sartre's depiction of how, in an insurrectionary situation such as the storming of the Bastille, separate individuals overcome their seriality and combine under threat to form a fused group. In a radical rupture reminiscent of the for-itself's negation of the in-itself, the literary 'pact of freedoms' between writer and reader, or the pcf's activity in creating a working class, they cease to be passive and isolated and instead become participating members of a group acting towards a common goal. After overcoming the external threat, the group turns inwards to guard against the possible defection of its members, who are always free to leave. The members swear an oath of loyalty and so impose inertia on themselves and try to limit their own freedom. The pressure applied by the group's members to each other leads to a state of terror. They threaten anyone who defects, and cement the loyalty of everyone else. As it seeks to stabilize itself, the group assigns specific functions to individuals. The group becomes an organization, supervising a distribution of tasks to meet the common interest, common danger,

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and common need. Each individual now controls a small corner of the world, but does so for the benefit of the organization and not himself.

    The group still exists to meet the common needs of its members, who still freely decide to join and remain in it. But to preserve itself, it has taken on considerable inertia. Created when its members entrust their freedom to the group, the apparatus for preserving the group becomes a power over them, begins to resist change and solidifies into an institution. An authority establishes itself over the group's members, and then narrows its own base. Individuals relate to the authority by obedience. Those in positions of authority, fearful lest the individuals organize themselves, seek to keep people separated from each other in order to guarantee their obedience and powerlessness. And so we move, inexorably, from the revolution to Stalin, from the collective act of individuals altering history to the collective submission of individuals to their product – all without ever leaving the domain of intentional human activity, the domain of praxis.

Scarcity and Human Relations

All praxis unfolds in a world of scarcity and in a practico-inert field, which together frustrate it. These two categories are fundamental to Sartre's analysis. They drive it forward, impart to it much of its peculiar tone, and, ultimately, lead it astray. In order to understand the Critique it is essential to define and evaluate their precise role,

    Scarcity is a central fact of human history, Sartre maintains. Very simply, 'There is not enough for everybody'. To a person living among others this fact means that 'the consumption of a certain product elsewhere, by others, deprives him here of an opportunity of getting and consuming something of the same kind.'⁹ Where there is not enough food there are too many people. Under conditions of scarcity, 'each person is the inhuman man for all the Others'.

    The Other is a perpetual potential enemy as long as there are too many of us for the available means of sustenance. He may lay claim to what we both need, marking me as expendable in his eyes. Inhumanity does not arise from any 'human nature'; it is interiorized scar-

     9. crd, p.204; cdr, p.128.

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city: 'Nothing – not even wild beasts or microbes – could be more terrifying for man than a species that is intelligent, carnivorous and cruel, which can understand and outwit human intelligence, and whose aim is precisely the destruction of man. This, however, is. obviously our own species as perceived in others by each of its members in the context of scarcity.'¹⁰

    Scarcity need not even be directly involved for the Other to become a terrifying enemy. In a general environment of scarcity there is always someone who does not have enough, someone who is treated as, and therefore becomes, an anti-man. In such a situation, any freedom is a hostile force because it can be my own undoing. 'In other words, it is undeniable that what I attack is man as man, that is, as the free praxis of an organic being. It is man, and nothing else, that I hate in the enemy, that is, in myself as Other; and it is myself that I try to destroy in him, so as to prevent him destroying me in my own body.'¹¹

    For scarcity to have its terrible effect direct violence need not be necessary. 'It merely means that the relations of production are established and pursued in a climate of fear and mutual mistrust by individuals who are always ready to believe that the Other is an anti-human of an alien species.'¹² Apportioned out among members of society, scarcity becomes institutionalized in societies divided into classes. Historical materialism correctly describes this environment: all the structures of social life are determined by the society's mode of production. Even socialism has not discovered how to supersede this fundamental determination of human life, 'except possibly through a long dialectical process of which we cannot yet know the outcome'.¹³ Scarcity, in short, is the principle of negativity in history: 'This provides a foundation for the intelligibility of that accursed aspect of human history, both in its origins and today, in which man constantly sees his action being stolen from him and totally distorted by the milieu in which he inscribes it. It is primarily this tension which, by inflicting profound dangers on everyone in society, by creating diffused violence in everyone, and by producing the possibility for everyone of seeing his best friend approaching him as an alien wild

     10. crd, p.208; cdr, p.132.

     11. crd, p.209; cdr, p.133.

     12. crd, p.221; cdr, p.149.

     13. crd, p.213; cdr, p.139.

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beast, imposes a perpetual statute of extreme urgency on every praxis, at the simplest level, and, whatever its real aim, makes the praxis into an act of aggression against other individuals or groups.'¹⁴

    This passage seems to fulfil Sartre's post-war promise, as presented for example in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? He has not abandoned his earlier sense of an ontological – and inevitable – basis for human struggle; he has however deepened it, and rendered it material and theoretically contingent. Here, as elsewhere in the Critique, Sartre has pressed the original idea beyond its given form and has grasped its social and historical truth. The Other continues to be my enemy, but now for intelligible -- and ultimately suppressible – historical reasons. Andrd Gorz argues that in this conception Sartre has given us the keys to a realistic understanding of the miseries of human history. Gorz's excellent defence of the Critique argues that an activist Marxist thinker might build on it to show how the underlying scarcity, for example, reproduces itself at other social levels and becomes displaced from one society to another. He emphasizes that Sartre's grim analyses point to facts of life which Marxists cannot wish away: famine, violence, 'the reign of necessity'. It is now possible to untangle a history filled with violence, slavery, war, massacres, and genocide by pointing to the ultimate and objective threat every human holds for every other human.¹⁵

    However this terrifying picture is simply wrong: wrong because the Critique shows no sense that humans are also deeply connected for positive reasons. On perhaps the most fundamental level, humans do not encounter each other primarily as threat. We produce our food together, build our houses together. Even in the most alienated and exploitative division of labour, we work collectively, assist each other. As farmers, factory workers, tradespeople, teachers, we produce for each other so that others may produce for us. Sartre's analysis of the class struggle gives the impression that the goal of the capitalist is primarily to destroy his workers, not to exploit their labour-for which their continued survival is necessary. He wholly ignores the fact that even the most exploitative society could not last a single day were it not also co-operative. Above all a society must feed, clothe, and house its members. The society may indeed be unable to produce

     14. crd, p.223; cdr, p.150.

     15. André Gorz, 'Sartre and Marx', New Left Review, 37 (May-June 1966).

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enough for all to live decently, but its scarcity – and how it is distributed – can only be understood in a context which includes existing social means of arranging the common struggle for survival and an existing level of productive capacity. These have required cooperation at every step of their history.

    At root, even the most exploitative societies are contradictory, not merely negative, as Sartre's emphasis would lead us to conclude. In one fashion or another we collectively organize to do the work needed to get our collective living. We may not produce enough, and we may fight over our product. I may succeed in imposing on you a given social form of antagonistic co-operation so that I benefit relatively and you suffer relatively from the scarcity. We then co-operate as I exploit you and you accept your lot or wait to resume the struggle. Helper and threat, you are both the key to my life and the prospect of my death. I depend on you and fear you. Our relationship must be contradictory, at least until the end of scarcity – or its more or less equal distribution – and the end of class society. .

    Scarcity has no meaning prior to social life in history. But, oddly in the author of L'Etre et le Néant who once stressed how different projects can create widely different experiences of a given fact, Sartre fails to explore the historical choice which makes there be scarcity in the first place. Marshall Sahlins's study of 'The Original Affluent Society' describes the consequences of what we might call an original decision to adapt to, rather than struggle against, the limitations of the environment. Hunter-gatherers might live amid peace and leisure, amid a plenty based on the systematic minimization of their needs.¹⁶ Certainly if there was an original state of equality and plenty it must have been based on a similar minimal level of need. Seen in such a light, the creation of new needs reaching beyond the capacities for satisfaction afforded by the material environment can be understood as the 'second' historical act – as described by Marx and Plato. An act simultaneous with the creation of classes – permitting the privileged to corner the limited social wealth and live at a much higher level of satisfaction from the many – and the project of labouring to overcome what is now experienced as scarcity. In this hypothesis, so different from Sartre's, scarcity is a human, rather than a natural fact, or rather a natural fact only in so far as it corresponds to a certain level

     16. Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, Chicago 1972.

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of human development and aspiration. It is a factor at the base of the socio-historical matrix in which, later, facts become what they are.

    This consideration underscores the perversity of Sartre's approach. Needs, and their developments are obviously a fundamentally positive fact of human life and history. They indicate an expansion of the human personality, an enrichment of our possibilities. To be sure, Sartre's very use of the notion of scarcity drew him closer to Marxism and material life. But his understanding of need and matter – as a virtually ineradicable curse lying behind all history – is reminiscent more of the gloom of La Nausée than of Marxism's vision of history as a record both of class domination and of human advancement. The student tracing the roots of the Critique in L'Etre et le Néant will find lack- that privative, negative state of being as such – at the source of scarcity.¹⁷ It is this that lends Sartre's account of the human adventure its characteristic ferocity of tone. Moreover, it is striking that Sartre never speaks of needs being fulfilled, but dwells everywhere on the overwhelming negative force they exert over us. And similarly, throughout the nearly eight hundred manuscript pages of his unpublished second volume, the dialectic which so systematically entraps humans is never shown to lead to their advancement.

    Drawn into the texture of a genuinely social analysis, one which would grant the human adventure its positive as well as its negative side, scarcity could no longer be Sartre's ultimate category. As a dimension of our life, scarcity appears as one decisive factor of a matrix which contains, in the most intimate interconnection, other decisive factors. Co-operative human praxis to create our means of subsistence, and the historically variable forms of appropriation of the means of production, are among these. Another is the rising level of productivity and skills, which shows how far a society has advanced in the struggle to create an apparatus for meeting needs and overcoming scarcity.

    No single fact 'stands behind' or 'conditions' this matrix in which historical development occurs. Yet, as if to preserve its separateness from lived history, Sartre never once shows scarcity entering into the human adventure, in the first volume of the Critique. The dialectic of collective praxis is traced in independence of scarcity and, indeed, of the struggle for material survival itself. It remains an external,

     17. See Jameson, Marxism and Form, pp.232-235.

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ultimate term. But it is not enough to say that there is 'not enough'. Even famine is a 'division' of the social apparatus: a certain social organization with its own history and inertia inhibits the development of productive capacities beyond a subsistence level, arresting praxis, perpetuating scarcity. In this context calamities of nature become defined as particular human calamities. This context, this matrix – and not any single abstracted as isolated factor such as 'scarcity' – is after all, the 'formal condition of history. But Sartre lays down a formal condition which, in the manner of L'Etre et le Néant, is virtually beyond our grasp and foredooms all efforts to outstrip it. Because of it, the Other will threaten us no matter what. Having paid due respect to Marxism and to the contingency of his 'ultimate' fact, Sartre has fallen back on his old bogeys. In the analyst of scarcity we once again meet the philosopher of 'hell is other people'.

    It is, therefore, pertinent to inquire on what order of expiration the first volume of the Critique is founded. It is not intended to be a concrete historical account: this is reserved for Volume II. Nor is it supposed to expound a series of dialectical laws which carry us inevitably from the fused group to the institution: Sartre insists that all such changes are reversible and may vault over intermediate forms. Again, he is not trying to account for societies or society as such: these are made up of a shifting constellation of the groupings that he discusses. Rather, his 'theory of practical ensembles' is meant strictly to shape some keys for later research, notably into the different forms of human collectivity and the main features of the passage from one to the other.

    This at least is his express intention. Sartre's analysis seeks to grasp the underlying conditions and relations which form the basis for all historical development. But we have seen it willy-nilly become a philosophy of history, elaborating various laws and inevitabilities of human life. Sartre's discussion of scarcity (and, as we shall see, his his discussions of the practico-inert and the dialectic of the group) reaches for conclusions which have no place in a study of the 'formal conditions of history'. His error is not that he probes history for its formal conditions, but rather that he uses his findings to explain too much about history and, as it were, too soon.

    Marx also discerned human social activity beneath the finished and frozen products of history: his ontological premiss was that humans create the human world, whose 'laws' and necessities arise from and

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express the forms of their activity. This starting point left everything still to be investigated. The German Ideology in which it was first sketched, was the abandoned preface to a lifetime of study. Sartre, in contrast, wants 'to settle, outside concrete history itself, the incarnations of individual praxis, the formal structural conditions of its alienation, and the abstract conditions which encourage the constitution of a common praxis.'¹⁸ But analyses conducted 'outside' of history yield timeless problems, problems which cannot be solved within history. The starting point becomes the explanation and 'scarcity' leads (back) to the 'hell' of 'other people'.

The Practico-Inert

Unlike 'scarcity', the second key category of the practico-inert does enter and decisively condition Sartre's developing dialectic of social collectivities. This category entails the thesis that, regardless of its intended positive results, our praxis is thwarted or confounded. We become dominated by unintended features of our product, or by our tools. This happens sometimes because our activity itself gets out of hand (as in the case of the Chinese peasants who, each clearing the trees from his own land, together caused massive floods over the countryside) and sometimes because the means we develop to ensure our goals themselves make new demands, which carry us away from our original goals or realize them in a deformed manner – thus the fused group inexorably produces the institution and returns its members to seriality, in the name of cohesion. At other times, the practico-inert is the negative power of our tools. The primitive understands that an arrow or a hatchet is to be feared and revered, seeing in them his 'own power become malignant and turned against him'. He senses that 'in the most adequate and satisfactory tool, there is a hidden violence which is the reverse of its docility'.¹⁹ In modern times our tools most notably come to make demands on us and, indeed, to dominate us. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the creation of large-scale machinery for mass production. Unfortunately such machinery is not merely a tool for human purposes: it also shapes the human beings who are to operate it. A 'new being' is created by a type of worked matter which was originally created by humans struggling

     18. crd, p. 154; cdr, p.66 (translation changed).

     19. crd, p.249, 250 n; cdr, p.183 and n.

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against scarcity. The practico-inert is 'the domination of man by worked matter' in such a way that man becomes 'a product of his product'.²⁰ A positive fact – the use of coal on a large scale, the development of social wealth through industrialization – has a negative result. It creates a working class which must submit itself to the new means of production in order to survive.

    With this fundamental concept, Sartre seeks to render historical materialism intelligible: how is it that we can speak of humans being in some sense determined by the results of their praxis, the forces and relations of production in a given society? It must be emphasized that the practico-inert is the 'first dialectical experience of necessity' in the Critique.²¹ Everything in both volumes points to it as the inevitable outcome of human praxis. Is this so because of the effect of scarcity? We have already seen Sartre argue directly against this suggestion in the lengthy passage quoted above. Does it in some sense spring from oppression or class society? No, for Sartre claims that 'every object, in so far as it exists within a given economic, technical and social complex, will in its turn become exigency through the mode and relations of production, and give rise to other exigencies in other objects.'²² The negative efficacy of the practico-inert is sustained by the fact that all societies rest, finally, on dispersed individuals each transforming nature by himself through his own praxis. In other words, the practico-inert finds 'its fundamental intelligibility in the serial action of men'.²³

    As a member of this series, I am dominated not by the direct results of my own praxis, but by the entire material field which has been created by the work of all. Isolated, 'men realize unwittingly their own unity in the form of antagonistic alterity through the material field where they are dispersed and through the multiplicity of unifying actions which they perform on this field.'²⁴ Our 'unity' is imposed by the material system that we have created as separated individuals--and so beyond all individual control from the outset. Its power is not that of society over the individual: the practico-inert dominates me as matter which has escaped human control. The

     20. crd, p.251; cdr, p.184.

     21. crd, p.282; cdr, p.222.

     22. crd, p.255; cdr, p.189.

     23. crd, p.255; cdr, p.189 (translation changed).

     24. crd, p.280; cdr, pp.220-221.

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material field remains external to me because I did not create it, because it emerged from a hundred or a thousand other individual praxes. Thus it looms over us, demands specific forms of behaviour, creates us as its people. We all bear the same unavailing relationship to it. Alongside each other but separated, we are left facing 'a magical field of quasi-dialectical counter-finality.'²⁵ It is magical not because I control it through arcane devices, but because it comes to have a life of its own.

Human Society and the Practico-Inert

Sartre's example of Chinese peasants deforesting their land sums up his account and at the same time betrays some of its weaknesses: 'uprooting a tree in a field of sorghum becomes deforestation from the point of view of a large plain and of terraces of loess, united by the work of separate men; and deforestation as the real meaning of the individual action of uprooting is simply the negative union of all those who are isolated by the material totality which they have produced.'²⁶ This description is clearly too general and timeless. The Chinese peasants were not the victims of human praxis as such, but of a society which they did not rule and whose rulers refused or were unable to exercise social foresight, and of a low level of material and technical development. Their activity escaped them because no one recognized it as social and needing social control: their problem was of a kind which social struggle and historical development can overcome. Sartre, however, presents a 'pure' practico-inert, just as earlier he presented a 'pure' scarcity: facts are abstracted from a complex social-historical matrix and then re-inserted as independent (and awesome) forces.

    Moreover, Sartre's account of the practico-inert rests on the assumption of individuals working separately but side by side, as if this is a normal work relation. Why the series should be the basic form of collectivity Sartre does not say; nor does he say how people came to be side by side in the first place. He shows no sense of the sociohistorical process leading to their separation, although he acknowledges that such a process must have taken place.

    But above all, Sartre scarcely entertains the possibility that other

     25. crd, p.283; cdr, p.224.

     26. cdr, p.284; cdr, p.225.

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social groupings might organize their relations to the material field differently, and so achieve a different relation to their product. Certainly, in some conditions the fruits of human labour become terrifying weapons. But in others they remain useful tools and means of liberation. The pertinent conditions are social. The 'worked matter' of which Sartre speaks is never a truly independent or quasi-natural force: it is a social reality from the outset. There is no 'worked matter' as such: there is only this apparatus in the life of this society, or its counterparts or alternatives in the life of another.

    A productive apparatus democratically controlled and operated to meet social needs would weigh on us quite differently from one whose components are controlled separately by a few for their own profit. A socialist factory of the future – one in which the workers truly controlled their productive activity and products as part of a wider social apparatus in which they had decision-making powers – would appear quite different from the capitalist work-places of the present. It might, for example, be designed so that workers could gain maximum familiarity with all its processes, as a necessary concomitant of the regular rotation of functions and of workers' planning. It might be spacious, light, and clean. Even in the ideal situation, of course, workers would have to do a job; they would have to perform these tasks, at this moment. Not even the supersession of assembly lines by work crews would abolish the social and technological necessities whose purpose remains to transform nature in order to meet material needs. But if workers controlled the labour-process itself, if they worked fewer hours and freely exchanged functions, if they were assured of a secure level of subsistence and co-operated in socially meaningful work- then at some point the grim rule of necessity might be brought to an end, and the practico-inert subjected decisively to human control. In these conditions, shot through with human vitality, freedom and power, our very sense of work would change.

    Is this prospect a relapse into the 'simplistic Marxism' which Sartre criticizes throughout the Critique? In fact, the more simplistic analysis is his own. Matter, or the simple fact that it is transformed by humans, does not determine the fact or degree of its dominance over us. We are not dominated by 'every object, in so far as it exists within a given economic, technical and social complex'. The character and degree of its dominance over us is determined by the social-historical matrix in

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which objects are created and used. Abstracted from their social matrix – and thus voided of their character as products of a process which could conceivably be reoriented – things do in fact appear overwhelming, and our activity, therefore, futile. After all, in an analysis which ignores material progress, which never mentions the satisfaction of our needs or the development of new needs, but which on the contrary sees matter as dominating us to the exact degree that we transform it, there can be little sense that our praxis has any positive effect. It is no wonder, then, that Sartre makes direct reference to L'Etre et le Néant at the end of his discussion of the practico-inert – and that, seventeen years and supposed worlds of thought later, he now rekindles the vision of the in-itself-for-itself. For after all, it is 'this fundamental relation', the necessity of our creating the practico-inert, 'which explains why, as I have said, man projects himself in the milieu of the in-itself-for-itself.'²⁷ Although Sartre shifts significantly from L'Etre et le Néant in affirming now that 'the foundation of necessity is practice', his optic is otherwise unmodified: there is still man, the for-itself, 'revealing itself initially as inert or, at best practico-inert in the milieu of the in-itself.'²⁸ Whether created by man or simply given, the material world remains for Sartre what it always was – a power over us, a force beyond our control.

    If Sartre omits co-operation and progress when discussing scarcity, his analysis of the practico-inert omits all reference to class. He entirely passes over the process whereby small groups appropriate the products of others through their control of the means of production. Is it surprising, in class societies, that our products come to dominate us? But the Critique shows no interest in property, or in the basic economic dynamics of class interaction. Focused above all on the way our creations become powers over us, it shows little appreciation of the nature and effects of power in human relations. Our creations may display a certain force, a certain resistance, in any society; but any analysis seeking to explain the formal conditions of human history must carefully distinguish this from the fact that until now they have been appropriated by privileged minorities. The alternative to such an analysis – exemplified in the Critique – can only be a gloomy and mystifying ahistorical ontology.

     27. crd, n.1, p.286; cdr, n. 68, p.228.

     28. crd, n. l, p.285; cdr, n. 68, p.227.

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    Separate individuals labour side by side to create an overwhelming world. This vision elevates specific features of advanced capitalist society to the status of universal structures. Conventional discussions about pollution show how a problem stemming from the specific power relations and priorities of a social structure can be mystified, in Sartrean fashion, into a remote and generalized image of human actity run amok. We are told that we should all help to control our waste – government bodies, corporations and private citizens equally. But it is a political problem. The worker cannot control his waste any more than he controls any aspect of the productive process without collective action. Furthermore, it is in the very nature of a capitalist enterprise to be concerned with its own profits at whatever social cost, rather than with social well-being; and capitalism is so structured that there is no social control over the economy. Pollution is also a political problem in that capitalism as a system of power develops an ethic and process of functioning in which no one is responsible. The 'invisible hand' theoretically coordinates the dispersed activities of millions, and so each capitalist does what he must, and what he wants. The social vision of capitalist society is that there is no society but only individuals labouring separately, coordinated magically. This vision is strangely but aptly reproduced – but, not contested – by Sartre's description of the hell of the practico-inert.

The Historical versus the Isolated Individual

Society – and particularly the alienated and contradictory social life of class societies – is the missing term of Sartre's social thought, and the basic problem of the Critique. This work of social theory is so constructed as to make the comprehension of social realities impossible. It is built not on any sense of society at all, but on abstract, isolated individuals. How does this come about?

    'To consider an individual at work is a complete abstraction since in reality labour is as much a relation between men as a relation between man and the material world.'²⁹ These are Sartre's own words, repeated a half-dozen times in the course of the Critique. He even emphasizes that the solitude of the isolated worker can only be produced by a specific historical and social reality.³⁰ He proclaims his in-

     29. crd, p.174; cdr, p.91.

     30. crd, p.178; cdr, p.95.

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tention not to hold the Critique at the level of abstract individuality - it would be 'false and idealist' to do so. However, 'since our starting point is individual praxis, we must carefully follow up every one of those threads of Ariadne which lead from this praxis, to the various forms of human ensembles; and in each case we shall have to determine the structures of these ensembles, their real mode of formation out of their elements, and finally their totalizing action upon the elements which have formed them.'³¹ Individual praxis and the isolated person who performs it are abstractions which Sartre will use as heuristic devices – the immediate and given starting-points of far inquiry which will penetrate far beneath the individual's apparent isolation. Thus he will 'rediscover through deeper and deeper conditionings, the totality of [the individual's] practical bonds with others and, thereby, the structures of the various practical multiplicities and, through their contradictions and struggles, the absolute concrete: historical man.'³²

    But this process is never completed, either in the portion of the Critique Sartre has chosen to publish or in his unfinished second volume. His patently unhistorical, unsocial explanation of historical and social phenomena is at variance with his express commitment to portray the 'absolute concrete historical man'. A look at the construction of the Critique will show why.

    Following two introductory chapters ('The Dogmatic Dialectic and the Critical Dialectic' and 'Critique of Critical Investigation'), Book I begins: 'From Individual Praxis to the Practico-inert'. In these pages, the argument progresses from the 'abstract' individual praxis to the most primary human ensembles: it is here that Sartre locates the basic social relations of the individual, those from which all others spring and to which they return. He first describes individual praxis. Then, in no fewer than four separate stages, the isolated individual encounters others. These stages reveal the peculiar unsocial nature of Sartre's social individual.

    His first step beyond isolated individual praxis is in fact a leap. Beginning with the isolated individual at work on the material field around him, how do we arrive at social groupings? A deeper examination of this individual, which traced the imprint of history and

     31. crd, p.153; cdr, p.65.

     32. crd, p.143; crd, p.52.

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society in all his actions, would open an 'internal' route to sociality. But Sartre simply introduces other individuals. 'From my window I can see a roadmender on the road and a gardener working in a garden. Between them there is a wall with bits of broken glass on top protecting the bourgeois property where the gardener is working. Thus they have no knowledge at all of each other's presence: absorbed as they are in their work, neither of them even bothers to wonder whether there is anybody on the other side. Meanwhile, I can see them without being seen, and my position and this passive view of them at work situates me in relation to them: I am "taking a holiday", in a hotel.'³³ From one individual at work we leap to three individuals at work, separately. But to build social relations simply by multiplying individuals is not to build social relations at all. Three (or a dozen, or a thousand) individuals are not truly social unless links between them appear whose nature and logic is to reveal them in a shared, common activity, as belonging to a reality which is qualitatively different from the sum of its isolated parts. Instead of discovering others in the reality of the lone individual's praxis, Sartre simply places them there. We are already familiar enough with this abstract individual's next two social encounters ('Scarcity and Mode of Production' and 'Worked Matter as the Alienated Objectification of Individual and Collective "Praxis" ') to see that they too cast others and the social life that develops with them in this arbitrary, external, asocial role.

Which Comes First, Individual or Social Praxis?

The Critique sets out to reach social and historical being from premisses that preclude arrival. Its goal, 'historical man', is in contradiction with its basic assumption, the isolated individual. This contradiction explains much of the book's disorder. Side by side with Sartre's repeated references to the abstractness of individual praxis and his proclaimed intention to advance to a more socially and historically concrete level, we find a quite different idea. Individual praxis is his fundamental principle. It is the source of all dialectic, the only ontological reality. The heuristic device turns out to be the substantive core of the analysis.

    Sartre claims that his approach is based on the very nature of the

     33. crd, p.182; cdr, p.100.

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dialectic itself. 'The dialectic, if it exists, can only be the totalization of concrete totalizations effected by a multiplicity of totalizing individualities.'³⁴ No collectivity of individuals can possibly grasp its surrounding material field as a whole, perform an action on it, alter it and so meet human needs – unless each individual can do it. 'The entire historical dialectic rests on individual praxis in so far as it is already dialectical.'³⁵ Hence it is necessary first of all to study the logic of individual labour. Sartre concedes that separated individuals appear as such only 'in a given society, and given a certain level of technical development',³⁶ There is no question, he repeats, but that any relations we study are always specific and historical, so that even between systems of oppression, such as feudalism and capitalism, social relations in the work process differ sharply. However, he continues, 'History determines the content of human relations in its totality, and all these relations, even the briefest and most-private, refer to the whole. But History does not cause there to be human relations in general. The relations which have established themselves between those initially separate objects, men, were not products of problems of the organization and division of labour. On the contrary, the very possibility of a group or society being constituted – around a set of technical problems and a given collection of instruments – depends on the permanent actuality of the human relation (whatever its content) at every moment of History, even between two separate individuals belonging to societies with different systems and entirely ignorant of one another.

    'This is why the habit of skipping the abstract discussion of the human relation and immediately locating ourselves in the world of productive forces, of the mode and relations of production, so dear to Marxism, is in danger of giving unwitting support to the atomism of liberalism and of analytical rationality. This error has been made by several Marxists: individuals, according to them, are a priori neither isolated particles nor directly related activities; it is always up to society to determine which they are through the totality of the movement and the particularity of the conjuncture. But this reply, which is supposed to avoid our "formalism", involves complete formal acceptance of the liberal position; the individualistic bourgeoisie requires just one

     34. crd, p.132; cdr, p.37.

     35. crd, p.165; cdr, p.80.

     36. crd, p.178; cdr, p.95.

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concession: that individuals passively submit to their relations and that these are conditioned in exteriority by all kinds of other forces; and this leaves them free to apply the principle of inertia and positivistic laws of exteriority to human relations. From this point of view it hardly matters whether the individual really lives in isolation, like a cultivator at certain periods, or whether he lives in highly integrated groups: absolute separation consists in the fact that individuals are subject to the historical statute of their relations to others in radical exteriority. In other words – and this amounts to the same thing, though it misleads certain undemanding Marxists – absolute separation is when individuals as products of their own product (and therefore as passive and alienated) institute relations among themselves (on the basis of relations established by earlier generations, of their own constitution and of the forces and requirements of the time).'³⁷

    Sartre's point is that in setting up 'society' as an a priori term we institute an overwhelming conditioning force. This abstraction would make our life appear as something suffered, passively undergone, and submitted to. Bourgeois thinkers expressing their class ideology, and 'undemanding Marxists', develop a social image in which we are incapable of transforming the conditions which have created us. Sartre, for his part, continues to try to dissolve this false abstraction and reach a more basic human dimension: 'this brings us back to our problem in the first part of this book: what does it mean to make History on the basis of earlier conditions? I then said: if we do not distinguish the project, as transcendence, from circumstances, as conditions, we are left with nothing but inert objects, and History vanishes. Similarly, if human relations are a mere product, they are in essence reified and it becomes impossible to understand what their reification really consists in. My formalism, which is inspired by that of Marx, consists simply in recognizing that men make History to precisely the extent that it makes them. This means that relations between men are always the dialectical consequence of their activity to precisely the extent that they arise as a transcendence of dominating and institutionalized human relations. Man exists for man only in given circumstances and social conditions, so every human relation is historical. But historical relations are human in so far as they are

     37. crd, pp.179-180; cdr, p.96-97.

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always given as the immediate dialectical consequence of praxis, that is to say, of the plurality of activities within a single practical field. . . .'³⁸

    But Sartre is mistaken. In order to understand that human activity is fundamentally dialectical and therefore capable of transforming the conditions in which it takes place, we need not believe that we are talking about individual activity. If praxis is individual, it is simultaneously social. Free, transforming, totalizing individual activity which remakes the world is possible only as social activity. Work is not an individual activity that happens, in some circumstances, to be performed alongside other people, but a social activity which members of any society perform, according to their skills, and to arrangements which are always and only social.

    Long before there can be any epistemological encounter between the gardener, the road-mender and the vacationing intellectual, there must be a process of co-operation, no matter how antagonistic, in which they share. The intellectual can observe from his window only because there are people to mend the road, tend gardens, plant and grow food, make beds, build hotels, transport food, build trucks, supply fuel, make kitchen utensils, cut vegetables, cook food. The activity of each in this society implies the activity of all others, whatever their 'formal' relations. It is mystified if it is seen as 'purely' individual praxis. Individuals perform it, to be sure, but as social individuals sharing in a complex and highly organized social praxis. My tools, my place of work, the materials I work on, my very patterns of work – all these dimensions of individual praxis develop only in and for a society at a certain point in history. This is true even of apparently the most idiosyncratic individual activity. For example, the intellectual on vacation who establishes relations between individuals does so as part of a certain philosophical tradition and his leisure depends on a social division of labour which deems it important that certain groups of people are permitted the time to do such things. Strictly speaking there cannot be individual praxis any more than there can be individual reason. Social individuals work with social tools, exercise social skills in a social field, to accomplish a socially defined purpose. The very term, 'the individual', means simultaneously this concrete person and one particular social being – conditioned by and living in history.

     38. crd, p.180; cdr, pp.98-99.

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Social Individuals

It might be objected that this conception renders dialectical activity – free activity, praxis – unintelligible by refusing to cast the individual as somehow prior to society, and serves bourgeois ideology by making the individual appear determined but not determining. What is this strange entity, society, if it is somehow given simultaneously with individual activity, if it is in some sense prior to and beyond any individual activity? And how is it possible to hope to control or transform it if we do not constantly create it? André Gorz has raised these questions in his vigorous defence of Sartre's standpoint: 'if the individual is explicable through the society, but the society is not intelligible through individuals--that is, if the "forces" that act in history are impermeable and radically heterogeneous to organic praxis – then socialism as the socialization of man can never coincide with socialism as the humanization of the social. It cannot come from individuals as their reappropriation by collective praxis of the resultant of individual praxis. It can only come to individuals by the evolution of their society according to its inner logic. The positivist (or transcendental materialist) hypothesis is that the historical process is impermeable to dialectical intelligibility. If so, then socialism, born of an external logic, will also remain external to individuals and will not be a submission of society and history to society and its demands on them; not the "full development" but the negation of individuals, not the transparency of the social for individual praxis, but the opacity of the individual for himself, insofar as his being and his truth have become completely external to him. Thus the social individual is not the individual recognizing himself and achieving himself – his needs, his interests, his certainties – for the profit of the society experienced as the absolute Other, to the point of regarding it as false to see it as other. We know that this conception of socialism prevailed for a long period, that it still has its adherents, that it profoundly affected Marxist philosophy, and that it must therefore be liquidated on this terrain as well.'³⁹

    Gorz has modified Sartre's argument slightly but significantly, in that his individuals are already social. But the argument remains clear: unless individual praxis is seen as the basis of society, society must be

     39. Sartre and Marx', pp.38-39.

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seen as independent of individuals and unchangeable by them. This objection runs into difficulty when we in turn ask what it means to anticipate a society controlled by individuals. What does it mean to speak of 'the humanization of the social' being achieved by 'individuals'? Neither Sartre nor Gorz can possibly have in mind isolated, separated individuals each controlling his or her own sphere of activity. A vision of 'collective praxis' can mean only one thing: individuals collectively controlling the society they create. 'Collectively' – that is, acting together in social groups, deriving their authority from the society as a whole, making group decisions about group goals, with the group controlling, in socially understood terms, the product of its labour. No individual can conceivably submit society and history to his demands unless he is a social individual. For socialism to be possible as the collective control of collective activity it is necessary for the individuals involved first to be living a collective life – however alienated. Socialism makes no sense as the 'reappropriation by collective praxis of the resultant of . . . individual praxis', only as the reappropriation of the resultant of heretofore alienated collective praxis. It means bringing under social control the already socialized process of production – not somehow transforming individual into social production.

    Gorz and Sartre are combating the tendency, within socialist as well as bourgeois thought, to make individuals the passive objects of abstract forces beyond their control. However, it is possible to restore the theoretical possibility of humans' making and controlling history without basing their social life on an unintelligible pre-social individual. A necessary part of this restoration is to transcend the interminable debate over 'the individual' and 'society', not to persist in arguing the abstract claims of one or the other. It is true that no theory has decisively resolved this problem, and true too that Sartre has gone further than most in Question de méthode; but by and large, the Critique falls back on 'the individual'. To correct Sartre therefore, means first of all to insist that there is such an entity as society. Individual and society are alike irreparably abstract if separated: we cannot begin to understand either without simultaneously studying the other as its inner meaning. Everything hinges on whether individuals are seen as fundamentally social beings, in their basic activity, in their possibilities for liberation, indeed in their very individuality itself.

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The Transition to Volume Two

Having followed the dialectic of collective praxis to its hardening in the institution, Sartre caps his discussion with several pages on the cult of personality and Stalin. But the Critique has not yet strictly speaking reached the terrain of history. Its concrete discussions function formally as illustrations in an analysis designed to deconstruct history into 'the set of formal contexts, curves, structures and conditionings which constitute the formal milieu in which the historical concrete must necessarily occur'.⁴⁰ One further structure must be described before the historical concrete is reached, that of class. This in turn can only be understood by means of the categories elucidated so far: scarcity, the practico-inert, praxis, the series, the fused group and the institution. And so to conclude the Critique's first volume and lay the basis for the second, Sartre now turns to describe class in terms which considerably alter and deepen the argument developed in Les Communistes et la paix: 'class manifests itself not only as an institutionalized apparatus, but also as an ensemble (serial or organized) of direct-action groups, and as a collective which receives its statute from the practico-inert field (through and by productive relations with other classes) and which receives its universal schema of practical unification from the groups which constantly form on its surface.'⁴¹ In a far more complex discussion of class than that in the essays on the Communist Party, Sartre takes in history, the praxis-process of exploitation, and the mutual conditioning of the antagonists in struggle. Most notably in his examination of racism and colonization in Algeria, and of the history of the French proletariat, he tries to dissolve 'the ruthless play of economic laws' into human 'praxis absorbed into a process' which indifferently seems to impose itself on everyone. And then, having considered the mutual conditioning of classes by each other, he affirms that class struggle can only be understood dialectically.

     Sartre now poses the question which leads to his second volume and to concrete history: can the class struggle be decoded so as to show how opposing classes form an intelligible part of a larger historical process? He has articulated, in a structural but not yet a historical way, the components of an understanding of history. This

     40. crd, p.637; cdr, p.671.

     41. crd, p.649; cdr, p.685.

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regressive moment must be followed by a progressive one: 'these structures must be left to live freely, to oppose and to co-operate with one another: and the reflexive investigation of this still formal project will be the object of the next volume.'⁴² Impelling the study of the concrete, however, is the 'real problem of history' brought out in Sartre's study of class: how can opposed collectivities, struggling against each other, produce a single history? He will now explore how, failing this, the intelligibility of history must vanish into an infinite multiplicity of praxes, distorting and splintering each other. History is intelligible only if these divergent praxes 'finally appear as partially totalizing and as connected and merged in their very oppositions and diversities by an intelligible totalization from which there is no appeal.'⁴³ In other words, the problem of history is 'the problem of totalization without a totalizer'.

    Volume Two, never finished and never published (except for a brief section extracted and translated by New Left Review) begins with this very question: 'if the plurality of epicentres is the real condition of the opposed intelligibilities (in so far as there is a comprehensive intelligibility in each system and from each praxis), how could there be dialectical intelligibility of the process in course?'⁴⁴ Having premissed the first volume on individual praxis as the key to intelligibility, Sartre reaffirms his unvarying basic assumption. But he now asks of it the most radical question yet: in examining two praxes in conflict he seeks 'to know if as struggle, as objective fact of reciprocal and negative totalization', they possess 'the conditions of dialectical intelligibility'.⁴⁵ What does it mean to speak of a struggle? Sartre consistently refuses to answer this question by giving 'a reality to the verbal unity called society', which would indeed lend meaning to individual praxes, but by rendering them passive and destroying their intelligibility. He seems now to return to his original starting point to interrogate it afresh. The gardener, the roadmender, the intellectual are replaced here by two boxers: instead of arbitrarily juxtaposing individuals, he is now asking what unites them. It is as if he himself were aware of the first volume's limitations, and is now determined once and for all to overcome them by discovering sociality and historicity at the heart of individual praxis.

     42. crd, p.755; cdr, p.818.

     43. crd, p.754; cdr, p.817.

     44. Critique de la raison dialectique, Tome II (unpublished manuscript), p.3. (crd/II).

     45. crd/II p.5.

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Boxers and Sub-groups

Studying two boxers, then (hypothetically) two sub-groups of a larger group, and finally two factions of the cpsu; in the late 1920s, Sartre poses questions which, although rarely asked, are crucial in any perspective: how do individuals, groups or classes in conflict produce, in their very conflict, a larger whole which that conflict particularizes? Do they in some sense 'collaborate in fact on a common work'?⁴⁶ To call their conflict a contradiction is to appeal to a larger unity: 'but to be able to assimilate a battle to a contradiction and the adversaries to terms of a contradiction in course, it is necessary that they can be considered as the transitory determinations of a more ample and more profound group of which their conflict would actualize a present contradiction; inversely it would be necessary that the group totalize and transcend their ruthless struggle towards a new synthetic reunification of its practical field and an internal reorganization of its structures.'⁴⁷ If class struggle is intelligible, we should be able, in totalizing the struggling classes, to 'discover the synthetic unity of a society torn through and through.'⁴⁸

    Thus, the second volume of the Critique poses what is in one sense the unresolved problem of the first, and, in another, the unresolved problem of Marxism itself. 'Is there a unity of the different classes which supports and produces their irreducible conflicts?'⁴⁹ Marxism depends for its truth on an affirmative answer: otherwise 'human history decomposes into a plurality of particular histories.'⁵⁰

    Sartre's first analysis introduces a dimension that was earlier lacking: the boxers are understood in terms of their place in 'the world of boxing', an organized hierarchy present in the evening's programme; in terms of the art of boxing incarnated by the two participants, and in terms of their common acceptance of the rules to be observed. He tacitly acknowledges the abstractness of his isolated individuals, attempting to show that 'boxing as a whole is present at each moment of battle, as sport and as technique with all the human qualities and all the material conditioning (training, conditions of health, etc.) that

     46. crd/II p.14.

     47. crd/II p.12.

     48. crd/II p.19.

     49. crd/II p.20.

     50. crd/II p.20.

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it demands'.⁵¹ He is once again the observer, being entertained by a marginal and casually selected activity. And in studying it, he at first – and very strikingly – ignores the fact that the boxers are fighting for a living. Nevertheless, he goes on to relate the match with the whole of social life, as the 'public incarnation of all conflict'.⁵² More specifically, he discusses the way in which capitalism domesticates the interiorized violence of scarcity into a regulated and profitable unleashing of violence by the oppressed against each other. It pays them to invert violence destined to be returned to their oppressors by releasing it instead against their 'enemy brothers' from the same class and in this way taps and mystifies the violence of those whom it exploits. In boxing, then, the violence of both participants and observers becomes 'the incarnation of their radical impotence, that is, the alienation of their liberating power'.⁵³ However, the formal purpose of this penetrating but unsystematic discussion is not achieved. Sartre tries to describe the two boxers in the ring as incarnating or singularizing the fundamental violence, based on scarcity, at the heart of society. But he establishes his interpretation more by fiat than by close study, and his discussions never lose their disorderly quality. Sartre labours in vain to clarify the notion of incarnation, distinguishing it from the relationship between a symbol and its symbolized reality, and from that of a general concept to its particular instance; but the meaning of the notion never becomes clear, since it tacitly appeals to a social dimension whose intelligibility still remains theoretically in question.

    Sartre soon returns to the problem of the historical unity of a society broken into classes. Before approaching it directly, however, he considers a prior conflict, in which the existence of a larger unity is not an issue: that of sub-groups of a larger group in struggle with each other. His point here, in a discussion wholly lacking in concrete examples, is that competing sub-groups are not merely destructive forces, but rather express the group's larger dialectic at work. Why is an organized group with a common praxis split by two sub-groups opposed to each other in the name of the whole? Because in its praxis a group creates a practico-inert field which in turn imposes 'the practical realization of an impossible coexistence' between two sub-groups

     51. crd/II, pp.25-26.

     52. crd/II, p.30.

     53. crd/II, p.69.

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and their praxes. This is the source of conflict, which 'is the sole real form that a contradiction can take at the heart of a group in action- reciprocally, no conflict is even possible in an integrated community if it is not the actualization by men of an objective contradiction.'⁵⁴ That is, struggle between two sub-groups develops only in so far as it is based on the actual unfolding of the common praxis.

    Sartre is of course talking about a moment in the life of a collectivity which, having begun as a fused group, has solidified itself into an organization but is still unified by a common praxis. In so far as the survival of the group is at stake, such a post-revolutionary moment can lead to violent splits, liquidation of the vanquished sub-group, and denunciation of its members as traitors. For the split, by breaking its unity, threatens the very life of the group. The intelligibility of a 'victory by liquidation' is thus based on the effort of the victors to reunify 'the split unity by the regrouping of organs and individuals according to new common perspectives and under the interiorized pressure of the urgencies and dangers which characterizes the development of the total praxis.''⁵⁵

Socialism in One Country

Sartre selects 'a single, contemporary example: the emergence in the ussr of the ideological monstrosity of "socialism in one country".⁵⁶ With it, he reaches the heart of the second volume, four hundred pages on the Soviet Union, from the conflict within the leadership in the 1920s to Stalin's revival of anti-semitism in the early 1950s. The first part of this long discussion is all designed to make a single point: that the Stalin-Trotsky conflict 'was a totalization, through the protagonists, of a contradiction in the common praxis of the Party'.⁵⁷ It was in some sense inevitable, not accidental; it issued from and incarnated contradictions in which Bolshevik praxis had become enmeshed. Stalin's slogan of 'Socialism in one Country' reunified the party, and then the society, around an impossible and monstrous conception which afterwards became the truth of Soviet development.

     54. crd/II, p.81.

     55. crd/II, pp.122-23.

     56. crd/II, p.148; this section appeared in English in New Left Review, 100 (November 1976-January 1977), (nlr) p.143.

     57. crd/II, p.212; nlr, p.149.

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    The contradiction was that, on the one hand, the realization of socialism in the backward and ravaged Soviet Union depended on revolution elsewhere in Europe, while, on the other, the Bolshevik Revolution split the workers' movement everywhere and drove local bourgeoisies into the arms of fascism. 'The contradiction here was due to the fact that the proletarian Revolution in the ussr, instead of being a factor in the liberation and emancipation of the working masses of Europe – as it should have been – was accomplished by reducing them to relative impotence.'⁵⁸

    The resulting conflict was clear: the revolutionary Soviet government recognized the impossibility of building a genuinely socialist society without the help of more advanced socialist allies. But to act to encourage the creation of those allies under conditions of encirclement, underdevelopment and devastation, and the revolutionary ebb in Europe, was to risk the Bolshevik revolution itself. And yet not to act was to abandon the hope of any but the most hellish socialism. Victorious, the Bolshevik leadership now faced the contradiction engendered by their success, between the torn halves of what had once been a unified revolutionary project: to preserve or to radicalize socialism in Russia. This choice manifested itself in Stalin's Russian particularism and Trotsky's Western universalism, in Stalin's project of turning inwards and Trotsky's espousal of European revolution, in Stalin's caution and Trotsky's ardour, in Stalin's pedantic gearing of Marxist culture to Russian backwardness and Trotsky's brilliance as a Marxist theoretician, in the very reasons why Stalin and Trotsky at different moments advocated similar policies. It was as if the more cultivated, democratic and advanced socialism symbolized by Trotsky was expelled bodily from the Soviet Union and attacked as treason precisely in order that Stalin might adapt the universal concepts of Marxism to the concrete tasks of building this socialism.

    'Socialism in One Country', Stalin's provocative and distorted answer to Trotsky, 'became the simple signification of the way in which this still-traditionalist country, with its illiterate population, absorbed and assimilated at once the overthrow of its ancient traditions; a traditional withdrawal into itself; and the acquisition of new traditions, through the absorption of an internationalist, universalist ideology which helped the peasants sucked into industry to corn-

     58. crd/II, p.214; nlr, p.150.

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prehend the transition from rural to factory labour?⁵⁹ In other words, this unintelligible monstrosity became a praxis, and as such the deformed truth of the revolution. It succeeded because it united 'theory and practice; the universal and the particular; the traditionalist depths of a still alienated history and the movement of cultural liberation; the negative movement of withdrawal and the positive movement of hope.'⁶⁰

    Sartre's analysis augments that of Isaac Deutscher and adds considerably to our understanding of the Stalin-Trotsky conflict. Nevertheless, speaking formally, this is only a secondary goal; he is mainly concerned to demonstrate internal conflict in an already integrated group as 'an incarnation and a historialization' of the group's 'global totalization'.⁶¹ But the significance of the example is limited in as much as the Bolshevik leadership was an already integrated group. What happens when we pass to the plane of history and its shifting multitude of collectivities? Do we find a single internally connected history or 'several totalizations related only by coexistence or some other external relation'?⁶² In order to explore this question more closely, Sartre turns to the development of the Soviet working class during the 1930s, in relation to Bolshevik praxis.

    This is one of the most remarkable passages of the manuscript. Sartre reveals the oppressive features of Soviet development as an intelligible praxis-process – not as brutal madness. He illuminates as few others have done the tragic irony of Soviet history: 'in the historical circumstances of Russian industrialization', the revolutionary praxis of the leadership entailed 'destroying the workers as free practical organisms and as common individuals, to be able to create man from their destruction?⁶³ The discussion proceeds in three stages: first, a study of how revolutionary Bolshevik praxis led to the creation of elites within the working class and the bureaucracy; second, of how the demographic upheaval induced by Bolshevik praxis created a new working class whose control and integration called for yet greater oppression; and third, an examination of how the Bolshevik struggle against backwardness under threat led to forced collectivization and

     59. crd/II, p.226; nlr, p.155.

     60. crd/II, p.228; nlr, p.156.

     61. crd/II, p.240; nlr, p.161.

     62. crd/II, p.246; nlr, p.163.

     63. crd/II, p.317.

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terror, which in turn reduced the Soviet peasantry to a state of impotence and permanent passive resistance.

    How – to dwell briefly on the first analysis – did a revolution committed to equality create a society 'of dignitaries where merit is pompously rewarded'?⁶⁴ 'The goal of the proletarian revolution', Sartre begins, 'is to permit the construction of a society where the worker will have permanent and integral control over the process of production.'⁶⁵ Human control, entailing 'liquidation of the practico-inert as field of human alienation'.⁶⁶ Moreover, in conditions of scarcity and external threat, the revolutionary leadership is forced to vanquish as quickly as possible 'the resistance of things': the first priority must be to develop heavy industry. Soviet voluntarism was a response to the 'absolute necessity' of leaping over stages of development in order to catch up with the menacing West. In such a situation different economic sectors can hardly be left to themselves to determine their own capacities and needs. Centralization combines with voluntarism. 'You should, therefore you can.'⁶⁷ However, 'the very development of industry, to the exact degree that it conforms to the plan, meaning common praxis, reacts on the directing layers to stratify and multiply the organs of direction.'⁶⁸ In calling forth new functions of control and thus sedimenting a Practico-inert organizational structure, industrialization engenders this 'skeleton indispensable to all transcendence but which by itself rigorously limits the possibilities of inventing responses to each situation.'⁶⁹ This necessary, and necessarily inertial, organizational structure in turn defines the goals and limits of the process, so inducing the 'petrifying repercussion of praxis on itself'.⁷⁰ We see this most clearly in the establishment of a salary range contradicting Bolshevik egalitarianism. Bolshevik principles could not be conserved and the Revolution saved at the same time: it is necessary to choose between the shattering of the Revolution and its deviation.'⁷¹

    How was this contradiction lived by the Soviet worker? Originally,

     64. crd/II, p.290.

     65. crd/II, p.265.

     66. crd/II, p.266.

     67. crd/II, p.278.

     68. crd/II, p.278.

     69. crd/II, p.280.

     70. crd/II, p.281.

     71. crd/II, p.281.

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his personal need was straightaway a revolutionary social demand. Now, if left free, he would want less work and higher pay, which in the circumstances are strictly personal needs at variance with the compelling social destiny imposed from without: 'his tasks are fixed on him from statistical givens establishing the demands of the productive apparatus, of armament, of consumption, and it is through the vulgarized summaries of these calculated givens that they are communicated to him.'⁷² How and why have the most emancipated workers been stripped of their rights of control and direction? – 'not by a deliberate operation of the directing organs, but by the growing disproportion between the necessities of the economic combine and their relative ignorance of these problems';⁷³ and because free workers would not treat themselves as factors of production whose minimum needs alone must be met, but would make demands endangering the success of the plan itself.

    But how, then, could the masses be interested in production? Since no 'interest in production' could be built in as an objective condition of labour performed in such circumstances, and could never be generated by simple coercion, the leadership developed Stakhanovism. Lacking the objective conditions for either democratic control or a general rise in living standards, the most productive workers were rewarded by incorporation into a labour elite on the model of the Party and State leadership. The plan engendered the 'man of the plan': a synthesis of individualism (ambition, personal interest, pride) and of total devotion to the common cause, meaning socialism'.⁷⁴ The leadership was in turn modified by its own creation, needing now to justify its right to distribute such honours by awarding itself the highest honorific distinctions. It was unthinkable, Sartre pungently observes, that the agents of such a society could any longer be 'a group of poor revolutionaries without privileges refusing all titles – as was Lenin'.⁷⁵ And so the circle is completed: under conditions of scarcity, the practico-inert field engendered by revolutionary praxis reaches back and imposes a contrary praxis, shaping its people as it does so. ̊Thus praxis develops its own counter-finality: by the in-

     72. crd/II, p.283.

     73. crd/II, p.284.

     74. crd/II, p.289.

     75. crd/II, p.291.

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termediary of the voluntarists it distinguishes and which it raises above the common lot, it transforms its agents into dignitaries. Social stratification becomes both the means imposed to realize economic growth by planning in this underdeveloped country and, as consequence borne by praxis but not intended by it, the practico-inert and anti-socialist result of the pursuit of stimuli in a situation which does not permit interesting the masses in production.'⁷⁶

    In this penetrating example, and in those which follow on the demographic changes and collectivization, Sartre achieves a main goal of the Critique: the intelligibility, rooted in praxis, of the material structures which dominate human action. He sees more deeply and clearly here than anywhere else in the two volumes. Scarcity is placed at the core of his study, and wholly rooted in the material process of producing the means of subsistence. He shows convincingly how human action can turn back on itself to create results the opposite of those it intends, how a 'given' such as the Soviet hierarchy was created to save a revolution committed to abolishing all hierarchy, and how forced collectivization and its accompanying terror have made it impossible to integrate the Soviet peasantry into society down into to the present. In his next, climactic discussion, Sartre goes on to show how Soviet praxis was carried out by the very individual that such a praxis demanded.

Stalin

Was there an alternative to Stalin, and to the bloody policies he pursued? The necessitarian tone of the examples discussed so far betrays the most challenging and disturbing theme of the second volume. In what appears to be a total reversal of Sartre's original conception of freedom, it now often seems as if the situation created by a given praxis inevitably imposed the whole subsequent course of events, including the subsequent praxes.

    In Le Fantôme de Staline Sartre had already sketched an explanation of the cult of Stalin's personality as the only possible embodiment and form of authority in Soviet society in the oppressive conditions of socialist construction.⁷⁷ And in the first volume of the Critique he

     76. crd/II, p.290.

     77. fs, p.218f; ss, pp.49-62.
 

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sketched a dialectic that leads seemingly inexorably from the fused revolutionary group to the sovereign as organ of integration imposing its unity on a series of impotent individuals. His discussion of the institution observes that unquestionably the initial step in the construction of socialism 'could only be the indissoluble aggregation of bureaucracy, of Terror and of the cult of personality'.⁷⁸ But is this 'undeniably' true? Sartre now confronts this issue in a reflection on Stalin's role as sovereign leader of the Soviet state.

    He argues in several places that nothing justifies the assertion that Stalin's were the only possible policies. But is this simply a ritual acknowledgement of historical contingency? As the sovereign responds to the new situations created by its praxis, Sartre nowhere shows any opening for a course different from the one he himself sketches. The intelligibility of even the anti-semitism of Stalin's last years seems to depend on an argument for broad social necessity (as

the 'Iron Curtain' fell against all foreign influences, a native population deeply linked to a western-supported Jewish state became for Stalinist distrust 'the real presence of a core of traitors.'⁷⁹)

     Many non-Stalinist Marxists accept that industrialization and collectivization required coercion. 'Simply they ask themselves if it was not possible to avoid the propaganda lies, purges, police oppression in workers' centres and the terrible repression of the peasant revolts.'⁸⁰ Sartre boldly reformulates this question to explore, in the conditions of the singularizatinn of sovereignty called for by the Soviet praxis process, 'a deformation of praxis by the sovereign'.⁸¹ Since the purges and the Moscow trials do not seem called for by the mere project of industrial growth in an underdeveloped country, they are often ascribed to the individual personality of Stalin. It might be said, for example, that the same results could have been attained with more flexibility, foresight and respect for human life; and further that Stalin, because of his personal idiosyncrasies, exaggerated to appalling excess the need to subordinate human need to the construction of machines. To the degree that Stalin bears responsibility for the purges and the trials, they are explained by chance, or by personal factors extrinsic to the revolutionary project.

     78. crd, p.653; cdr, p.662.

     79. crd/II, p.545.

     80. crd/II, p.426.

     81. crd/II, p.426.

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    In a climactic analysis, Sartre sharply rejects this line of thought as intolerably abstract without, on the other hand, rooting all the specific features of Stalinism in the revolutionary process as such. He now ventures his own solution to the riddle – which dominates historical praxis, the individual or the demands of the situation? The circumstances of the Soviet praxis-process entailed that its organs of sovereignty could subsist and act only by placing power in the hands of one individual. 'But since the regime completely demands a personal sovereign in the name of maximum integration and that he be, at the summit of the pyramid, the living suppression of all multiplicity, when the constructive effort of the ussr implies that' this society . . . find its unity in the biological indissolubility of one individual, it is not even conceivable that this individual could be in himself and in his praxis eliminated as idiosyncrasy on behalf of an abstract objectivity.'⁸² But why was singularized sovereignty vested in this particular individual, Stalin; and not in someone else capable of unifying the construction of a Russian socialism amid the urgencies of the 1930s – some other dogmatic opportunist sufficiently able to adapt Marxism to the unique Russian situation, some other 'militant known by militants', 'inflexible, without nerves, and without imagination', able to both retain the loyalty of the Party and impose surplus labour on workers and peasants? As we pursue the question, it begins to answer itself. But need the Soviet leader have been precisely 'this former Georgian seminarian'?⁸³ Stalin's upbringing interiorized the very qualities demanded by the situation. But if the situation in 1929 demanded the inflexibility of the sovereign, this demand leaves indeterminate the question of the individual origins of this inflexibility.'⁸⁴ Moreover, were there any others available who happened to unite these qualities in themselves? Scarcity, reaching into all sectors of social life, becomes at a time of urgency a 'scarcity of men'. Stalin, then, becoming the man of the specific situation, 'will adapt himself progressively to praxis to the degree that praxis adapts itself to his prefabricated idiosyncrasy; from compromise to compromise, equilibrium will realize itself finally by a transformation of the man and a deviation of the enterprise.'⁸⁵

     82. crd/II, p.432.

     83. crd/II, p.445.

     84. crd/II, p.451.

     85. crd/II, p.452.

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    Stalin is necessarily disadapted to his role, because his personal traits, however apt, emerge not from the situation but from elsewhere. Plekhanov was wrong: the situation does not create the man, but rather calls, and not always successfully, for specific individual traits. Thus his inflexibility 'will present itself also and necessarily as not being exactly the required inflexibility.'⁸⁶ Arising from his childhood, deeply as that may have interiorized fundamental aspects of Russian life, Stalin's inflexibility does not have the building of a new social order as its preordained objective. He can only adapt himself to his tasks more or less completely.

    There is then, a necessary disjuncture between the individual and his historical tasks. In claiming that the function creates the man who exercises it, Pleaknov ignored the profound fact that history individualizes itself in 'its man' who then changes history according to his idiosyncrasy as he carries out its work. The Soviet situation demanded an individual sovereign who incarnated its vital need to draw exclusively on Russian resources, unflinchingly to drain surplus labour from its own citizens, to present Marxism as a crude dogma to semi-literate peasants who had a need to believe. It was Stalin himself who pressed on to the Great Purges and the Moscow Trials, forms of oppression which, if instigated by his eccentricities, soon became absorbed as definitive dimensions of Soviet life. Stalin, not the objective situation, required the 'absurd cultural isolation' into which he led the Soviet Union. The difference in standard of living was so great between Soviet and Western workers as to propose the 'Iron Curtain': 'but it did not demand endless lies about the condition of the European worker.'⁸⁷

    We can imagine a sovereign individual who would have done only and precisely what was necessary rather than, as Stalin did, both more and less – but only imagine. Sartre now reaches the crowning point of his entire analysis, showing the way in which 'accident' – Stalin's idiosyncrasies, his excesses – was necessary to Soviet history: ' . . . doubtless, if the process of planned growth could be directed by an angel, praxis would have the maximum unity joined to the maximum objectivity. The angel would never be blind, nor spiteful, nor brutal: it would be in each case whatever it is necessary to be. But

     86. crd/II, p.452.

     87. crd/II, p.460.

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precisely for this reason, angels are not individuals; they are abstract models of virtue and wisdom. In a situation the real individual, ignorant, worried, fallible, flustered by the brusque urgency of perils, will react (according to his history) at first too softly then, at the point of being overwhelmed, too brutally. These jerks, these accelerations, these brakings, these hairpin turns, these violences which characterize Stalinism, were not all required by the objectives and the demands of socialization. However they were inevitable in so far as this socialization demanded, in its first phase, to be directed by one individual.'⁸⁸

The 'Critique' Goes Astray

After a discussion of Stalin's anti-semitism in the 1950s Sartre turns abruptly to new themes, apparently to deepen his foregoing analyses. He begins a series of ruminations on an 'enveloping totalization' – that is, history. He reflects on the diversion off praxis – the circularity which returns worked matter back on ourselves. He goes so far as to speculate on an enveloping totalization not overwhelmed or diverted by thee practico-inert, and after insisting that the formal structure of circularity would remain unchanged, imagines a directed circularity which would make use of the anticipated diversions to control. them. But what bearing do such fascinating situations have on the purpose of the Critique? The question is worth asking, for in the course of the last two hundred pages of the second volume it becomes clear that Sartre has gone astray. He suddenly raises the question of the 'real being' of the enveloping totalization and, having declared such concerns part of the ontology of history rather than the critique of dilectical reason, pursues them in any case. He begins to speculate in the ontological style of L'Etre et le Néant, and in an unstructured analysis which drastically loses the clarity and penetration of the first three quarters of the manuscript, meditates anew on thee meaning of being-in-itself- now as the in-itself of thee enveloping totalization of history. In the midst of these speculations, the manuscript breaks off.

    Why does the Critique lose its way shortly after Sartre's discussion of the Soviet Union? Moreover, why did it remain unfinished? It is

     88. crd/II, p.435.

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pertinent to recall the purposes of the manuscript, and to ask whether Sartre achieved them. The express objectives of Volume Two were to show dialectical reason at work in the concrete – history itself – and, more substantively, to show how struggling classes created, even in their opposition to each other, a single intelligible history. As certainly as it achieved the first, it did not achieve the second. The Critique approached this objective in showing the peasantry in conflict with the Soviet regime in the 1930s, but in an oblique, even evasive manner. We see the intelligibility of oppositions developing with a single unifying praxis directed by a sovereign individual, but this discussion tells us nothing about class struggle, especially in societies lacking a sovereign praxis of this kind. Again and again we are referred to his analysis of bourgeois society, projected for the second volume, an analysis which we still await as the manuscript breaks off. In some of the most penetrating studies of his entire career, Sartre elicits the intelligibility of certain decisive dimensions of a society organized by a single praxis, but he never begins his account of how a multiplicity of hostile or unrelated praxes cohere. The logic of advanced bourgeois-democratic societies such as his own is left unexplored.

    What these observations suggest is that even at their most penetrating, the analyses of the Critique remain wholly within the preexisting limits of Sartre's thought. If Sartre were to explain class struggle, or bourgeois society, he would truly have squared the circle. He can lucidly explain the circularity of a deliberate single practical project, but without a clear sense of a fundamental sociality coexisting alongside and within individuals, he could not hope to explain any but the most coercive forms of social life. Even here, the necessitarian tone of his analysis leaves him morally too neutral in the face of Stalin's brutality. If Stalin seems so necessary, his crimes so little deserving of outrage, is it perhaps also because, according to Sartre's analysis, only some such individual sovereign can sustain the original project of the fused group? Sartre's dialectic of the group, upon which Volume Two is based, ignores any prior social co-operation, any underlying sociality: it is no wonder then that a sovereign individual is needed to preserve the group's purposes – or that Sartre leaves us so little room to ponder alternatives to Stalin's policies, and makes his bloody idiosyncrasies seem so inevitable. However, my primary concern, in these comments, is less to criticize one of Sartre's great unknown achievements than to ask why he never made it available to

286

the public. One reason is its length. To complete the Critique on the scale originally planned, Sartre would have had to explore every major sector of world history today, and draw them together in the concrete enveloping totalization. After six hundred pages, however, he had only sketched a few key dimensions of a single history: the project as a whole would have run into many volumes. At the same time Sartre did manage to complete most of a project more than twice the length of the Critique, the biography of Flaubert, so the mere prospect of scale is not a sufficient explanation. The more fundamental reason is that because of the limitations of his thought, Sartre lacked the tools for completing the Critique. The premisses of the second volume were those of the first, and we have already seen their analytic limits. In the second volume, he went as far as he could in explaining social phenomena before the contradiction took effect: not within, but after, his compelling discussion of the Soviet Union, as the time came to turn to explain a capitalist society such as his own, without a sovereign dictator yet based on antagonistic co-operation; to show what unites people acting in apparently complete independence of each other in an atomized, pluralistic society. At this point, the analysis lost focus and wandered into ontology. Sartre would never explain the intelligibility of class struggle. The enveloping totalization – the meaning of history – would remain an unsolved puzzle for his social thought, and so too would the society he lived in.