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Date: Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 6:28 PM
Subject: [bangla-vision] 21st Century Socialism: Angry Philosophers and the Making of History
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21st Century Socialism: Angry Philosophers and the Making of History
Posted: 08 Jul 2010 07:41 AM PDT
Sartre, Camus and a
Marxism for the 21st Century
By David Schweickart
Ever since Marx, philosophy must lead to action. Otherwise it is irrelevant. . . . Philosophers must be angry, and, in this world, stay angry.
--Jean Paul Sartre (1972)[1]
I. The Quarrel
In 1952 in the August issue of Les Temps Modernes, its editor, Jean Paul Sartre, responded to a letter to the editor:
My dear Camus,
Our friendship has not been easy, but I shall miss it. If today you break it off, doubtless that means it would inevitably have ended some day. Many things brought us together, few separated us. But those few were still too many: friendship, too, tends to become totalitarian; there has to be agreement on everything or a quarrel, and those who don't belong to any party themselves behave like members of imaginary parties. I shall not carp at this: it is as it must be. But, for just this reason, I would have preferred our current disagreement to be over matters of substance and that there should not be a whiff of wounded vanity mingled with it. . . . I did not want to reply to you. Who would I be convincing? Your enemies, certainly, and perhaps my friends. And you--who do you think you are convincing? Your friends and my enemies. To our common enemies, who are legion, we shall both give much cause for laughter. That much is certain.
Unfortunately, you attacked me so deliberately and in such an unpleasant tone that I cannot remain silent without losing face. I shall, therefore, reply: without anger, but, for the first time since I've known you, without mincing my words. A mix of melancholy, conceit and vulnerability on your part has always deterred people from telling you unvarnished truths. The result is that you have fallen prey to a gloomy immoderation that conceals your inner difficulties and which you refer to, I believe, as Mediterranean moderation. Sooner or later, someone would have told you this, so it might as well be me.[2]
Sartre's response did end the friendship. The two men never spoke to one another again.[3]
Camus's letter was in response to a harshly critical review, by Francis Jeanson, of Camus's The Rebel. Camus's letter was not addressed to Jeanson, a junior member of the Les Temps Moderne editorial board, but to "M. Le Directeur," i.e. to Sartre--thus provoking Sartre's reply.
What was the substance of this celebrated "quarrel"? Jeanson himself was a Marxist. Sartre, at that time, did not so self-identify, although he had been moving in that direction. Some months earlier, disgusted by the arrest of the head of the French Communist Party, Jacques Duclos, on the pretext that he had been using carrier pigeons to coordinate the demonstrators in Paris protesting the visit of General Matthew Ridgeway, Sartre had become convinced: An anti-Communist is a dog. Later, recalling that moment, he explains:
An anti-Communist is a dog. I couldn't see any way out of that one, and I never will. . . . After ten years of ruminating, I had come to the breaking point, and needed only that one last straw. In the language of the church, this was my conversion. . . . In the name of those principles which it had inculcated in me, in the name of its humanism and its "humanities," in the name of liberty, equality, fraternity, I swore to the bourgeoisie a hatred which would only die with me.[4]
By contrast, Camus was becoming ever more identified as an anti-Communist, an identification solidified with the publication of The Rebel and its fierce attack on the "rational terrorism" of Marxism.
But what, specifically, was so wrong with The Rebel? Why is it that at Les Temps Moderne, when Sartre asked for a volunteer to review The Rebel, asking that, for the sake of his friendship with Camus, nothing bad be said about it, no one stepped forward. Simone de Beauvoir writes, "none of us could think of anything good" to say about the book. (Finding no takers, Sartre dropped the restrictive condition, and gave the assignment to Jeanson.)[5]
The book purports to chart the course from "metaphysical rebellion" to "historical rebellion," and to explicate the tragic consequences of the latter. Its basic thesis: With the death of God—occasioned by such luminaries as the Marquis de Sade, Baudelaire, Stirner, the Left Hegelians, Nietzsche and Marx, those universal values that might have served to restrain historical rebellion disappeared--hence the excesses of the French Revolution, the "irrational terror" of fascism and the "rational terror" of Marxism. For the latter, its "scientific" certainty that a peaceful, harmonious, glorious future lay in store for humankind entails that no moral scruples should stand in the way of hastening the arrival of that new dawn. The stage is thus set for Stalinism.
What is needed, Camus argues, is a sense of moderation rooted, not in God, but in human nature, a sense of those transcendent values that shine forth in the act of rebellion, values that tend to disappear when rebellion is transformed into revolution.
What's the problem here? Camus, after all, was not a reactionary. In The Rebel, he explicitly endorses "revolutionary trade unionism;" he calls for the immediate suppression of the death penalty; he sees "Scandinavian societies today" as approximately just, and hence worthy of emulation.[6] He doesn't reject all violence, although he does insist it "must be bound, if it cannot be avoided, to a personal responsibility, and to an immediate risk . . . . Authentic acts of rebellion will only consent to take up arms for institutions that limit violence, not for those which codify it."[7]
In his reply to Camus, Sartre doesn't address the specific arguments in The Rebel directly, since he is responding to Camus's attack on him, not to the book. What he offers is an analysis of Camus himself--an unsparing analysis.
Sartre's basic criticism: You have abandoned the struggle to change the world: "When a man sees the present struggles merely as the imbecile duel between equally despicable monsters [rapacious capitalism and equally rapacious Communism], I contend that that man has already left us: he has gone off alone to his corner and is sulking." (151-2)
In particular, what is missing from The Rebel, and from Camus's worldview, is any real sense of class struggle. "When a child dies, you condemn the absurdity of the world, and that deaf, blind God you had created so as to be able to spit in His face. But the child's father, if he is a labourer or unemployed, condemns human beings. . . . [For he knows that] in poor districts the child mortality rate is twice what it is in the wealthy suburbs." (162)
Sartre digs deeper. The root problem, he claims, is Camus's conception of history. "You remain within our great classical tradition, which, since Descartes and with the exception of Pascal, have been entirely hostile to history" (156).
Sartre pays tribute to Camus, then points to a fact he deems critical:
With the coming of war you devoted yourself unreservedly to the Resistance; you fought an austere fight that offered no fame or elevation; the dangers incurred hardly brought one any glory: worse, one ran the risk of being demeaned and debased. . . . And so, your first contact with history assumed for you the aspect of sacrifice (158). . . .
Sartre concludes:
In short, it was not your intention to "make history," as Marx says, but to prevent it from being made. Proof lies in the fact that, after the war, you merely had in mind a return to the status quo ante. . . . After serving your five years with history, you thought you (and the whole of humanity) could return to the despair in which man must find his happiness. (160).
Sartre admits to feeling the pull of this position. "How we loved you in those days. We too were neophytes of history and endured it with repugnance." But that's because we didn't understand "that the war of 1940 was but one mode of historicity--neither more nor less so than the years that preceded it" (160).
But now, appraising the situation differently, Sartre accuses Camus (and perhaps his former self) of avoiding the real struggles of concrete persons, so as to grapple with the metaphysical anguish occasioned by a world in which a supposedly good God lets innocent children die in agony. But, says Sartre, these anguished ruminations are—to people with real problems—"mere aristocratic amusements" (164).
Things are different today. It is no longer a question of defending the status quo, but of changing it. . . . If I thought as you do, that history is a pool full of mud and blood, I would do as you do, I imagine, and look twice before diving in. . . . But suppose you receive the answer Marx would give you: "History does nothing . . . . It is real living men who do everything; history is merely the activity of human beings pursuing their own ends." If this is true, the person who believes he is moving away from history will cease to share his contemporaries' ends, and will be sensible only of the absurdity of human restlessness. But if he rails against that restlessness, he will, against his will, re-enter the historical cycle, for he will involuntarily provide the side that is on the defensive (that is to say, the one whose culture is dying) with arguments for discouraging the other. (169-70)
II. Camus's Criticisms of Marx
Before evaluating Sartre's critique, let us examine more carefully Camus's criticisms of Marx. His critique of Marx himself is far less scathing than his critique of Marxism--that the sublime future it posits justifies employing hideous means for getting there--but he does hold Marx responsible for effects that he possibly did not intend:[8]
Marxists may be critical of Camus, but it must be acknowledged that his lengthy treatment of Marx (some fifty pages) is, on balance, far from harsh. Camus writes:
It has undoubtedly been correct to emphasize the ethical demands that form the basis of the Marxian dream. In must, in all fairness, be said before examining the check to Marxism, that in them lies the real greatness of Marx. The very core of this theory was that work is profoundly dignified and unjustly despised. He rebelled against the degradation of work to the level of a commodity and of the worker to the level of an object. . . . By demanding for the worker real riches, which are not the riches of money but of leisure and creation, he has reclaimed, despite all appearance to the contrary, the dignity of man (208-9).
This encomium is followed by the section of The Rebel entitled "The Failing of the Prophesy." Here Camus looks at concrete material conditions--and finds them at variance with what Marx predicted. "Capital and the proletariat have both been equally unfair to Marx," he writes. He lists the failures (212ff):
1) Economic crises, which should have occurred with increasing frequency, have become, on the contrary, more sporadic: capitalism has learned the secret of planned production.
2) With the introduction of companies in which stock could be held, capital, instead of becoming more concentrated, has given rise to a new category of small shareholders, whose interests are at variance with those of the proletariat.
3) Small enterprises have been, in many cases, destroyed by competition, as Marx foresaw, but the complexity of modern production has generated a multitude of small factories around great enterprises. . . . These small industrialists form an intermediary social layer, which complicates the scheme that Marx imagined.
4) Reforms and trade unions have brought about a rise in the standard of living and an amelioration in working conditions.
5) The proletariat has not increased in numbers indefinitely. The very conditions of industrial production have improved, to a considerable extent, the conditions of the middle class, and even created a new stratum, the technicians.
Camus also charges Marx with ignoring "the phenomenon of the nation in the very century of nationalism. . . . As a means of explaining history, the struggle between nations has proved to be at least as important as the class struggle" (213).
Marx also failed to realize that "poverty and degradation have never ceased to be what they were before Marx's time. . . : factors contributing to servitude and not revolution."
One third of the working class was unemployed in 1933. Bourgeois society was then obliged to provide a means of livelihood for these unemployed, thus bringing about the situation that Marx said was essential for revolution. But it is not a good thing that future revolutionaries should be put into the situation of expecting to be fed by the State. This unnatural habit leads to others which are less good, and which Hitler made into doctrine (214).
These are serious charges—and, let's face it, they are, for the most part, true. Capitalist governments, informed now by Keynesian analysis, have been quick to intervene when recessions break out-- as we have once again just witnessed. Far more people own shares of stock now than was the case in Marx's day (or even Camus')--and thus tend to see their interests as aligned with those of the capitalist class. Small businesses have not disappeared, despite the ever-growing size and scope of now-multinational corporations. Labor unions and social welfare measures, although under attack, have been successful in raising workers' living standards.
It's also true that workers of the world have rallied to their own nations, and slaughtered each other, and that the Great Depression did not, in capitalist countries, lead to socialist revolution, but rather, in Spain, Italy and Germany, to the triumph or consolidation of fascism.
Clearly, Camus's critique, made a half-century ago, is not irrelevant today. But has it, as Camus argues, discredited Marxism?
III. What is Marxism, Anyway?
In his 1960 essay, Search for a Method, intended as an introduction to his never-completed Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre proclaims Marxism to be the philosophy of our time, beyond which we cannot go "as long as man has not gone beyond the historical moment which [it] expresses."
A so-called "going beyond" Marxism will be at worst only a return to pre-Marxism; at best, only a rediscovery of a thought already contained in the philosophy which one believes one has gone beyond.[9]
The living philosophy of an age, in our case Marxism, is, he says, "a totalization of knowledge, a method, a regulative idea, an offensive weapon for a rising class, and a community of language; it is a "vision of the world" which "ferments rotten societies;" it "becomes the culture and sometimes the nature of a whole class" (Search, p. 6).
However, says Sartre, for all its power and promise, Marxism, is in trouble.
Marxism, after drawing us to it as the moon draws the tides, after transforming all our ideas, after liquidating the categories of our bourgeois thought, abruptly left us stranded. It did not satisfy our need to understand. . . . Marxism stopped (21)
He adds:
We must be clear about all this. This sclerosis does not correspond to normal aging. It is produced by a world-wide combination of circumstances of a particular type. Far from being exhausted, Marxism is still very young, still in its infancy. . . . It remains, therefore, the philosophy of our time. We cannot go beyond it because we have not gone beyond the circumstances that engendered it (30).
What Marxism needs, thinks Sartre, is a healthy dose of existentialism. He doesn't say that exactly. He calls existentialism "an ideology," a "parasitical system living on the margin of Knowledge, which at first it opposed, but into which today it seeks to be integrated" (8). But for Sartre, "ideology" is not a pejorative term. "Ideologists," he says, are
those intellectuals who come after the great flowering and who undertake to set the system in order or who use new methods to conquer territory not yet fully explored, those who provide practical applications for the theory and employ it as a tool to destroy and construct (8).
Sartre is, in fact, calling for an existentialist Marxism, a Marxism that gives up its dogmatism, and, above all, its determinism. In a sense his reply to dogmatic Marxists is his reply to Camus eight years earlier,
"Does history have a meaning," you ask? "Does it have a purpose?" In my view it is the question that is meaningless. For history, considered apart from those who makes it, is merely an abstract, static concept . . . The problem is not one of knowing its purpose, but of giving it one. (170)
Let me say at this point, upfront and to be provocative: I think Sartre is right. Marxism is the philosophy of our time, which we cannot go beyond, for "we have not gone beyond the circumstances that engendered it." Those circumstances, in a word: capitalism.
Sartre is also right: a dogmatic Marxism is a dead philosophy. A living Marxism requires supplementation--not only by an existentialist ethic centered on human freedom, but by the theoretical and practical insights of the great liberation movements of the post-war period: feminism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, anti-war, the struggles for gay rights, for the rights of those considered "disabled" and for ecological sanity.
I won't attempt a full-blown defense of Sartre's claim here. But I do want to say more about a living Marxism that incorporates insights from both Sartre and Camus.
Marxism, in my view, has three core components:
¨ A critique of capitalism
¨ A vision of the future (called "communism")
¨ A theory of history (called "historical materialism")
Regarding the critique of capitalism: Frankly, it is hard for me to imagine any decent, intelligent person who examines the facts dispassionately, not concluding that capitalism is a deeply destructive economic system that must be superceded if our species is to flourish. Such a person can (and should) pay tribute to the astonishing accomplishments of capitalism (as did Marx), but s/he would have to acknowledge the validity of Marx's central criticisms:
¨ Unemployment is endemic to capitalism, since capitalism requires a "reserve army of unemployed" to keep employed workers properly disciplined.
¨ Inequality is endemic to capitalism, and it tends to increase over time, since the dynamic of making money with money allows for compounding one's wealth geometrically.
¨ Under capitalism, one has little or no control over conditions of work, despite the importance of meaningful work to human flourishing. The owners of means of production decide the pace of work, the division of labor within the enterprise, the technology to be employed, etc., not those whose well-being is most immediately affected by these decisions.
¨ Under capitalism, citizens lack little democratic, collective control over the deployment of its economic surplus, i.e., its investment priorities, despite the fact that a society's future is shaped in large measure by these decisions.
¨ A capitalist economy is inherently unstable, plagued by crises unimaginable in pre-capitalist times, crises having nothing to do with material conditions--weather or disease or war-- crises overproduction, i.e. of too much stuff relative to consumer purchasing power.
¨ A healthy capitalism requires constant, relentless growth--despite the fact that we live in a world of finite resources.
Regarding Marx's vision of the future: Can we not imagine a world without economic insecurity in which people find satisfaction in their work--a world that has in essence realized the famous slogan: "from each according to ability, to each according to need."? After all, we have the technological capacity to provide for everyone's basic needs. This is an astonishing fact, but it's true. (Lester Brown, for example, has calculated that an equitable distribution of existing grain supplies would allow everyone 400 kilograms per year, "roughly what the Italians eat each year."[10]) It is not unimaginable, is it, that if we applied our enormous inventive genius to humanizing technology and workplace organization so as to make work more meaningful, rather than to squeezing a much work as possible out of as few employees as possible, we could move toward a world in which good work and a decent level of consumption are available to all?
We can go even further. Can we not imagine a world in which we are all "rich in human needs," to use Marx's phrase, a world in which, to be deprived of creativity, love, friendship, beauty, literature, art, music, etc., would be consciously experienced as a serious lack.? Can we not imagine a world in which "the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all."[11]
We must admit, it seems to me, that Marx's vision of a "higher communism" is a worthy goal, the achievement of which is within our technical capacity.
IV. Historical Materialism: A Closer Look
Marx's critique of capitalism remains valid, and his vision of the future a worthy goal. But what about historical materialism? How has Marx's theory of history held up?
Certainly Marx's fundamental insight--that economic factors condition all other aspects of a society is beyond dispute. Can anyone deny that economic factors play a major role in family and kinship structures, gender relations, educational institutions, political formations, ethical values, the role and character of religion, the art, music, literature and other manifestations of higher culture. Marx is surely right, too, that technological changes, motivated by economic considerations, have consequences far beyond the spheres of production and consumption.
If we avoid the crude reductionism of which Sartre is so critical, we all accept this part of historical materialism, don't we? We are all Marxists now, at least to that degree.
But of course historical materialism is more than the mere assertion that economics, and technology and class struggle matter, that these factors have explanatory value. Historical materialism is also a teleology. Marx has taken over from Hegel the conviction that reality is becoming ever more rational, the conviction that history has a direction, and it is a direction that inspires hope.
It can scarcely be denied that it is this aspect of historical materialism--not its explanatory power, but its message of hope--that has fired the imagination of millions.
Here we have a problem. Marx's arguments regarding the deep deficiencies of capitalism have held up rather well. But not his arguments concerning class consciousness. This is serious, for it is a central tenet of historical materialism that ideas alone, however cogent, do not change history. A revolutionary agent is required, a mass of people gripped by new ideas, determined to "make history."
Marx argued that competitive pressures will compel capitalists to do the things that will be their own undoing--bring workers together, educate them, open up to them technologies that better enable them to organize. Do these arguments hold up?
It is certainly the case that the working class today is better educated today than any time in its history. The new technologies, however, have not brought workers into ever tighter proximity with each other. They did for awhile, but that trend has been reversed. The automobile has broken up working class neighborhoods and dispersed workers into the suburbs. Transportation and communication advances have broken up the mega-factories, distributing production facilities not only around the country, but around the globe. The factories that remain have become leaner and meaner, outsourcing and downsizing. Chain-stores and franchising have proletarianized retailing and much other service work, but not by bringing employees into closer proximity to one another. To be sure, the new information technologies have given individuals far easier access to information, and to means of interpersonal communication, but they also encourage fragmentation into distinct groups, many of whose members communicate only with their likeminded peers who feed each others prejudices.
We really don't know, indeed can' t know, how this is all going to play out, particularly if, as seems likely, the global economy is entering a period of prolonged, systemic, high-unemployment stagnation. (Paul Krugman is predicting a "Third Depression," on par with the "Long Depression" following the Panic of 1873 and the "Great Depression" following the Great Crash of 1929—this in an article published just a week ago.[12])
We certainly cannot assert with confidence that the future beyond capitalism, if it comes, will be qualitatively better than capitalism. As Sartre has remarked:
Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism, and the others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. If so, then Fascism will then be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us.[13]
V. What Is To Be Done? Insights from Camus or Sartre?
These are the best of times; these are the worst of times--to be a Marxist. On the one hand, Marx's critique of capitalism is more compelling now than at any time since the Great Depression, the specter of Stalin no longer haunts the Left, and our deep conviction that another, far better world is within our technical capabilities has survived scientific scrutiny. Yet class consciousness among the workers of the world is at least as fragmented as it has ever been. Moreover, the democratic process, our best hope for relatively peaceful social change, is, in the words of journalist James Fallows, "old and broken and dysfunctional and may even be beyond repair."[14] Not good news for Marxists hoping to "win the battle of democracy" (Marx's prescription in the Communist Manifesto). At the same time the prospects for a successful violent revolution by progressive forces are essentially zero, at least in the developed world.
Times are very different now from what they were when Sartre and Camus quarreled. At mid-twentieth century it was by no means obvious that the working classes of Europe were not capable of revolution. The fascist Goliath had been defeated. In France and Italy in particular, the Communist Parties—dominant players in the Resistance--were large and powerful.
Not only did the war foster support for socialism throughout Europe, but revolutionary fervor was running high throughout the Third World. The European colonial empires were collapsing, the Chinese Communist party had triumphed, Vietnamese communists were defeating the French, and --in the "backyard" of the world's most powerful nation—a young Fidel Castro and some comrades were making plans.
Yes, things are very different today. No revolution in sight. Yet Marxism, with its still cogent critique of capitalism and its still feasible ultimate vision, remains, I believe, the horizon of our time. Do Sartre or Camus have anything to offer us today?
Perhaps we should turn to The Plague, Camus's beautiful novel that antedated The Rebel by four years. In his letter to "M. Le Directeur," Camus states what he thinks should be obvious: "If there is an evolution from The Stranger to The Plague, it has gone in the direction of solidarity and participation."
You will recall the story: One day, in Oran, rats begin coming into the open to die, then soon enough, people too are dying—of bubonic plague. Oran is cut off from the outside world. After an initial period of disorientation, various people take on the life-threatening, perhaps hopeless, task of mitigating the plague's effects—quarantining the infected, lancing boils to reduce the pain, disposing of the bodies. Among those so engaged: the young doctor Bernard Rieux, the journalist Raymond Rambert, the traveler Jean Tarrou, the clerk Joseph Grand, and the Jesuit priest Father Paneloux.
Some of these volunteers die, some survive. But while doing their "work," all experience something akin to what Rieux and Tarrou experience the day they take a break from their grueling work and go for a nighttime swim:
Before them the darkness stretched out into infinity. Rieux could feel under his hand the gnarled, weather-worn visage of the rocks, and a strange happiness possessed him.. Turning to Tarrou, he caught a glimpse on his friend's face of the same happiness, a happiness that forgot nothing . . . . [Later] they dressed and started back. Neither said a word, but they were both conscious of being perfectly at one, and the memory of this night would be cherished by them both.[15]
Solidarity and participation. When one is involved with others in struggling against "a plague," moments of meaning and of happiness are possible. But in this struggle there are only temporary victories. These give rise to collective, justifiable jubilation, such as occurred in Oran as the plague retreated, but . . .
Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.
These are the closing lines of the novel.
Thus Camus presents us with a powerful ethical vision, one that is particularly tempting in non-Revolutionary times, when the forces aligned against transformative change of the Marxian sort appear to be omnipotent. Struggle on anyway, Camus seems to say. You can find happiness in solidarity and participation. Take up the cause of "social justice." It matters not whether you win or lose, for in the end there are no permanent victories, nor, for that matter, permanent defeats.
Sartre would object. We know why. Camus's ethical worldview is utterly ahistorical. In his "Reply to Camus," Sartre makes reference to The Plague, which was widely read as an allegory of the Resistance. But in the novel, Sartre observes, the part of the Germans are "played by microbes without anyone realizing the mystification."
What "mystification"? Sartre elaborates:
In this way, a combination of circumstances . . . enabled you to conceal from yourself that man's struggle against Nature is both the cause and effect of another struggle, just as old and even more ruthless: the struggle of man against man (162).
For Sartre, history is indeed a struggle of human beings against nature—against natural calamities, for example, and against the "natural" extinction of our individual lives. We also struggle to learn the secrets of nature, to discover the laws of nature, so that we might use them to our advantage. These struggles give rise to those technological developments that are central to Marx's conception of history.
But there is another, equally primordial struggle. The Communist Manifesto proclaims, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Sartre would say, not only class struggle, but doubtless, history cannot be understood apart from that often ruthless struggle of man against man.
This struggle has a radically different character than the struggle of human beings against nature. To conflate them is a mystification. It is, in a sense, a comforting mystification, for it allows one to think of oneself as part of that larger entity, humanity, battling implacable Nature, proclaiming human dignity in the face of an absurd universe. Solidarity and participation. Us against It. But what if it is Us against Them?
Two issues emerge here: the question of violence and the question of historicity—what it means to see oneself as an historical being.
Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately), the question of revolutionary violence is not the question with which we must grapple today. The question of historicity remains. We are historical beings. In a sense we all know that. We're all historical materialists, in that we know that our identity and our life prospects have been shaped by material circumstances: our race, class, gender, nationality, occupation, etc.
We all agree with Marx on another point:
Men make their own history, but not spontaneously, under conditions they have chosen for themselves; rather on terms immediately existing, given and handed down to them. (18th Brumaire)
But Sartre takes us a step further, going beyond a non-controversial statement of fact to a moral imperative. Men (and women) make history. We all make history. The question is, do we accept the responsibility for this making? We are free beings, so we are responsible. Do we accept this responsibility--or do we withdraw to the sidelines, pretend there is nothing we can do, and watch the spectacle unfold.
If we acknowledge our Sartrean responsibility, then we must ally ourselves with others who are struggling against this injustice and oppression. The Sartrean-Marxist choice involves consciously taking on the project of "making history." When one makes this choice, when one begins to see oneself as involved in the immense project of changing the world, things previously obscure come into focus. One's sense of self changes. History become meaningful. As Sartre puts it:
The person who subscribes to the aims of concrete human beings, will be forced to choose his friends, because, in a society torn apart by civil war, one can neither accept nor reject everyone's aims at the same time. But as soon as he chooses, everything acquires a meaning; he knows why the enemies resist and why he fights. For only in historical action is the understanding of history given. (170).
Sartre is right, is he not? Consider: if you chooses to engage with others in the struggle for human emancipation, your thought is reorganized, your worldview changes. People, events, take on significance that they lacked before. You now read history differently. You see heroes and heroines you hadn't seen before, and villains too. Certain events now stand out as great victories, others as defeats, others still as missed opportunities. This history is now your history, a part of your being.
You also become intensely interested in resistance to oppression, wherever on the globe it occurs. You identify with the resistance; you hate the oppressors. You become intensely interested in "experiments" that may be harbingers of a new world order. The successes or failures of these experiments are experienced by you, not as interesting tidbits in the news, but as triumphs or tragedies affecting you. You now know, in your lived experience, what Marx meant by "species being."
To sum up: one can, it would seem, assume one's Sartrean existentialist responsibilities in two ways, a Camusian way or a Marxian way. One can confront a specific form of injustice, and engage with others in the struggle to do at least something to mitigate it. One hopes for relatively quick success, eager to return to "normal" life, but one is fully aware that victory is never permanent, and that sooner or later, the rats will come out again.
Or, one can engage in the struggle for social justice, feeling oneself to be a participant in an historical project of our species, a project whose goal is to restructure our human institutions so as to make possible a decent, free, meaningful life for everyone on earth. It is a project that, one knows, may or may not succeed.
There is a third option. One may deny that one has any responsibility for the world. One may say, with Henry David Thoreau, "It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong." Though he adds:
If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting on another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.[16]
Might any of these choices be made in "good faith"? Might any be an "authentic" choice? One is reminded of Sartre's account, in his famous lecture, "Existentialism is a Humanism," of the young man, a former pupil, who came to him, torn between going off to England to fight with the Free French, or remaining with his widowed mother, who would be plunged into despair, should he be killed. Since, according to Sartre, there are no higher-order moral principles that would resolve the young man's dilemma, "I had but one reply to make. You are free, therefore choose."
There are, of course, many inauthentic choices one might make, when confronted with the reality of the world in which we live, choices reeking of self-deception, but the Marxist Sartre is still the existentialist Sartre. There is more than one authentic choice one can make. "You are free, therefore choose."
Notes
[1] John Gerassi, Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 178. The quote is from a conversation that took place in April, 1972.
[2] Jean Paul Sartre, "Reply to Albert Camus, Portraits (Situations IV), trans. Chris Turner (London: Seagull, 2009), pp. 123-172. Originally published in Les Temps modernes, 82 (August 1952).
[3]Sartre did write a moving, appreciate eulogy to Camus on the occasion of his death in an automobile accident, January 1960. See Portraits, pp. 173-78.
[4] As quoted by Ronald Aronson in his Camus and Sartre: the Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 128. My account here draws heavily on this splendid book.
[5] Aronson, p. 135
[6] Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Vintage International, 1991) [first published in 1951], pp. 297, 292, 293N
[7] Ibid. p. 292
[8] "It is possible that Marx did not want this," says Camus," "but in this lies his responsibility." (210).
[9] Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (New York: Vintage, 1964), p. 7.
[10] Lester Brown, "Facing the Prospect of Food Scarcity," State of the World 1997 (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 34. Despite the fact that soaring food prices brought the number of undernourished people in the world to a record one billion (the number was 800 million in 1997), it still seems to be the case that we have the resources to feed the planet. See Lester Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (New York: Norton, 2008), especially Chapter Nine, "Feeding Eight Billion Well." See also Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty (New York: Public Affairs, 2009).
[11] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers, 1948), p. 31).
[12] Paul Krugman, "The Third Depression," The New York Times," June 27, 2010.
[13] Jean Paul Sartre, "Existentialism is a Humanism," available at www.marxists.org.
[14] James Fallows,""How America Can Rise Again," The Atlantic, January/February 2010: 38-55. Despite the upbeat title, the article itself is not. "Our only sane choice is to muddle through. As human beings, we ultimately become old and broken and dysfunctional--but in the meantime it makes a difference if we try. Our American republic may prove to be doomed, but it will make a difference if we improvise and strive to make the best of the path through our time--and our children's, and their grandchildren's--rather than succumb."
[15] Albert Camus, The Plague, (New York, Vintage International, 1991), pp. 256-7.
[16] Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience," in Walden and "Civil Disobedience" (New York: New American Library, 1960), p. 227.
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Palash Biswas
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http://nandigramunited-banga.blogspot.com/
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