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Sartre and Marxism Pietro Chiodi Tram/aud from the Itahan by Kate Soper The Harvester Press 1976 This edition first publish~d in 1976 by th~ Harv~ster Pras Limit~d Publisher: J ohl'l Spiers 2 Stanford Terrace, Hassocks, Sussex 'Sartr~ and Marxism' first publish~d in Italy April 196 J C Giangiacomo Fcltrinclli, Milan. Italy This translation c 1976 Th~ Harvater Prns Ltd The Harvtst~r Prtss Ltd ISBN 0 901 H9 97 X Comput~r Typts~t by Input Typtsttting Ltd. London Print~d in Gr~at Britain by Redwood Burn Limiud, Trowbridg~. Wiltshir~ All rights r~served Contents Translators note vi Preface vii I Existentialism and Marxism 1 2 Existence and project 8 3 The diahtic 26 4 Necessity 39 5 State and society 58 6 Alienation 79 Appendices I Existentialism and Marxism 103 2 The concept of alienation in existentialism 124 N ores to the text 145 Index of names 160 Translator's Note Since Chiodi quotc:s so extensivdy from Sartre's Critique tit fa rasion dialectiqut, (Paris, Gallimard, 1960), I had hoped to use and rc:fer to the English translation of Sartre's work, which is forthcoming from New Lc:ft Books. Unfortunatdy, the English vc:rsion was not available in time:. The: translation from the main body of the Critique is therefore: my own, and references to the French are: cited thus: (p. 000). I have, however, made use of the English translation by Hazd Barnes (The Probltm of Method, (London, 1963) of the Question de methode, which prefaces the Critique. References to this work are cited thus: (p. 000, PM). Kate Soper VI Preface In his autobiographical work. Same says of the time when he wrote La Nallstt, 'I was Roquentin: in him 1 exposed without self-satisfaction the web of my life;' a little further on he says: 'I have changed.' I The war. the Resistance and the post-war social and political conflicts played a decisive role in this process of change. In the same book. Sartre speaks of the ties of solidarity with Others in the following terms: 'I have never recovered that naked awareness without recoil of each individual towards all the others. that waking dream. that obscure awareness of the danger of being a Man until 1940. in the Stalag XII D.' 2 To claim that the 'change' Sartre underwent is that which led him from a philosophy of non-commitment to one of commitment would be wholly correct. But it would be both incorrect and misleading to explain this as the simple displacement of existentialism by Marxism. Incorrect because the Critique de ta raison dialtctiqut contains at least as much existentialism as Marxism and misleading because Same would certainly not agree to making every form of Marxism a philosophy of 'commit ment' and every form of existentialism one of 'non-commitment. On the contrary. he would have us note that the Lukacs, who. in the course of abandoning Stalinist Marxism immediately after the war. branded existen tialism as the 'perpetual carnival of fetishized interiority: is the same as the Lukacs who cast Stalinism in its most definitive mould when he described it as 'idealistic voluntarism,' - that is to say, as terroristic psrudo-praxis. I Only if we take for granted the position adopted by Lukacs in Exislmtialisme au marxisme?, and thus agree to a dogmatic identification of existentialism with a philosophy of non-commitment and of Marxism with one of commitment. can we possibly interpret the confrontation theorised in the Critique between the two as an integration of exi~t.entialisni in Marxism. In reducing existentialism to an 'ideology' the CrttlqUt seems to suggest an interpretation of this kind - while at the same time pointing to the bankruptcy of current Marxism. and committing itself to a restoration of genuine Marxism. VII vw Prtj'act Sanre does not want to revise Marxism, because Marxism is not a matter of 'revising' but of' doing,' - and of' doing' precisely because it has been paralysed since the moment of its birth. In fact, by attempting to go beyond Hegelianism without incorporating those existentialist moments which run parallel to. and are inseparable from it, Marxism has ended up by overcoming idealism in the form of idealism itsdI, and in doing so has ceded place to that monstrosity which Sartre defines as 'materialistic idealism.' So that for Sartre the sole purpose of a meeting between Marxism and existentialism is to make use of the latter as a means to ascend from the 'Marxism of today' towards an authentic Marxism as existantialist realism. We shall have Marxism, let us say. only when its task of inverting the Hegelian dialectic so as to place it upon its feet is fully realised, which means only in the recognition that it has two feet. one of which is existentialism. No progress will be made in overcoming idealism unless both feet are used: it is in this sense that existentialism will 'resolve' itself in Marxism, helping the latter on its way rather than amputating itself from the course of history. Existentialism, in making subjectivity its theme. has issued in a theory of non-commitment; the Marxism of today. in being the theory of commitment, has issued in an anti-subjectivist terrorism. But, as Marx himself conceived it, commitment was to be understood as the historical transformation brought about by a multiplicity of human subjects in the course of, and with a view to, their own de-alienation. Hence the necessity of a meeting between existentialism and Marxism. which will safeguard at one and the same time, both commitment and the 'irreducibility' of the committed. A project of this kind, however. presupposes that the philosophy of our time is still living the crisis of Hegelianism, and that Marxism is still very far from having accomplished the task which Marx entrusted to it, that of being the heir and supercedent of classical Germany philosophy. If a philosophy is to go beyond Hegel in the direction of founding inter-subjectivity in the historical commitment to a transformation of society along humanist lines, it must first settle accounts with the conceptual apparatus employed by Hegel to theorise both subjectivity and history, - and thus in the first instance with the concept of 'dialectical reason' which precisely expresses the location and the modality of the historical realisation of subjectivity. Looked at in this way. the meeting between existentialism and Marxism which Sartre undertakes to effect takes the form of a critique of dialectical reason - a critical re-examination of that dogmatic dialectical reason common to both Hegel's spiritualistic idealism and to the 'materialistic idealism' of pseudo-Marxism. The aim of such a critique is the erection of a Marxist realism whose critical platform is provided by the existentialist problematic, that is to say, by means of a vindication of the finite nature of the protagonist of the dialectic, the Preface ix human being. The issue here is, therefore, the renewal of the critique of historical reaJon, but in a way that will allow us to understand historical reason as dialectical. It follows that any recourse to the epochal relativism of Dilthey's historical reason will be considered incompatible with this in that it does not confer on history that unitary smse which Sartre holds to be inseparable from a theory of commitment of a Marxist type.' (p. 90, PM). The key point in Sartre's critical revision of the dialectic is his altered concept of subjectivity. To that disquieting demand in which the Marx of the Economic and Philosphical Manuscripts of 1844 concentrates his critique of Hegel, as to who is 'the bearer of the dialectic: Sartre replies that it is man conceived existentially as praxis-project. The critique of historical reason must, in consequence, find its true critical basis in existence understood as praxis-project. The dialectic is founded in existence. is concerned with existence, and renders existence comprehensible. This, at any rate, is the underlying thesis of the first volume of the Critique. In the second, as yet unpublished, Sartre proposes to establish 'the profound significance of History' (p. 12 PM), as a direction of development that goes beyond the confrontation of projectS. This is a position peculiarly analogous to that which Heidegger was brought to adopt when, as a sequel to the analysis of the exisential project conducted in the first volume of Being and Time, he proposed in the second volume to atract from this a clarification of the 'meaning' of being. A task which he failed to rea}ju. The Critique is to be seen, then, as an attempt to restore the dialectic to its critical foundations, taking as the point of departure the existentialist concept of the project. But is an undertalUng of this kind possible? It is true that the' concept of the 'dialectic' is sufficiendy equivocal to leave a cmain margin for the riskiest conceptual operations. But in relying upon the conn ex ion between 'dialecticity' and the 'profound significance of History,' Sartre' is assuming dialecticity in its strong sense - in a historic.teleological sense - and looked at in this light his undertaking cannot be judged until the sC'Cond volume of the Critique has appeared. N c:venheless, in that Sartre would have the dialectical meaning of history establishe'd upon the basis of an existential dialectic, and the dialecticity of existence' based in turn upon the 'project' whose theory is developed in the first volume', it is possible in the meantime' to derive some important observations from the analysis of the concept of e'xistence-as-project. Sartre attributes two characteristics to the project as a structure of existe'nce: I) the project is the' relation between subject and object (where 'object' is. taken to include' both the' world of things and Others); 2) the subject.object relation expresses a state of alienation of the subject. In appe'aling to the concept of existence"as-project Same's intention has b(:C'D to abandon the field of absolute' freedom in which he had theorised x Preface existence in Being and Nothingness. in order CO recover the Marxian concept of historical conditioning. But by interpreting the project as the alienating rdationship of subject to object. he has ended up by making that conditioning into a state of alienation (counter to the Marxian principle that conditioning, so far from being a state of alienation. is not a state at all but a constant), Furthermore, he comes to make conditioning - which taken in its Marxian sense should be seen as the constitutive and founding character of the structure of existence in its entirety - a characteristic of only one of the poles (that of subjectivity) which gives the structure of existence its divided character, All that remains of existentialism in this conception of the project as lJ subject.object rdation is the character of meli",inability of the relation itself; this is cenainly an anti· Hegelian doctrine (given that for Hegd the rdation is posited only in order to be removed in the final triumph of the Subject). and it is cmainly Marxian: but Marxian only when placed within the general framework of Marx's reformula'tion of the Hegelian concept of the relation - the principle corollary of which is the denial of the coincidence of the rdation with alienation. For Marx. alienation is a determinate form of the rdation, and not the rdation as such. so that the suppression of alienation does not mean the suppression of the rdation. but its transformation. Here we can trace three rdated but opposing positions: I) the Hegelian. according to which alienation must be suppressed, but since alienation and the rdation coincide, the suppression of alienation necessitates the suppression of the relation; 2) the Marxian, which, in common with the Hegelian position, demands the suppression of alienation (and herein lies the ultimate reason for the revolutionary continuity between Hegelianism and Marxism), but in denying the coincidence of alienation with the relation, accompanies its detnand for the suppression of alienation with the recognition that the rdation cannot be suppressed; 3) the proto.existentialist position. which agrees with the Marxian that the relation cannot be suppressed. but in conserving the Hegelian identification of alienation with the relation. implies as a result that alienation is ineliminable. Scholastic and sclerotic Marxism, the 'Marxism of today,' has retained the original Marxist demand for the elimination of alienation but has sought to satisfy it through devices aimed at the repression of the rdation of multiplicity in the name of an absolute unity - which means. in effeet, on the basis of the H egdian presupposition (which provides the justification for political absolutism) according to which alienation can only be suppressed by ridding the social relationship of alterity of all the existential content which adheres in it. For this reason. Sanre considers the Marxism of today to be an 'idealistic voluntarism' - a form of terrorism operating from H egdian premises. By reinstating the non-suppressible nature of the rdation, he aims in the Critique to restore Marxism to its Preface xi original status. But his starting point in this operation is an existentialism which wants to insist on the ineliminability of the relationship of alterity while remaining witbin the confines of the Hegelian premise that this relationship is identical with alienation (of the subject in the object); therefore, he is not in a position to supercede Hegelianism in a way consistent with Marxism. He is not in a position, that is to say, to specify a level at which it would be possible to suppress a/ienatiDtl while (onserving the relation. In other words. Sartre has not taken into account the fact that the task of replacing dogmatic Marxism. as yet imprisoned in idealism. demands the aid of an existentialism which has in its turn freed itself of idealistic presuppositions and can thus validate its insistance upon the ineliminable nature of the relation without appeal to the idealistic premise of the coincidence between that relation and alienation - in the last analysis this means without an appeal to the interpretation of the existential project as the alienating relation between subject and object. Unless this is done. the confrontation between existentialism and Marxism will serve only to galuani"l,! within Marxism those idealistic presuppositions from which it pretends fo liberate it. thus offering what is, on the best hypothesis, merely an infernal reuision of idealist Marxism, rather than establishing a Marxist realism. The presupposition common to Hegel, to idealist Marxism and to the Sartre of the Critique is based on what can be considered the fundamentallogico-ontologicallocus of every idealism: the interpretation of human reality as the relation of alienation between subject and object. But this locus is the pure and simple expression of the impossibility of Marx's basic assumption: that it is possible to suppress alienation while conserving the relation. The resulting alternatives that emerge within this idealist locus can only acquire, in any instance, a partially Marxist, that is, pre-Marxist import. Ultimately they reduce to two: I) alienation is suppressed by suppressing the relation (the solution of Hegel and of idealist Marxism); or, 2) the relation is preserved by preserving alienation ( the solution of an existentialism still imprisoned in idealism). Sartre's current position represents an attempt to synthesise these two alternatives: to suppress alienation while preserving the relation. Such an attempt is entirely valid, and points to an authentically Marxist supercession of idealism. But Same cannot succeed in his task because he wishes to accomplish it while remaining within the idealist logico-ontologicallocus - a locus, which as we have seen, constitutes the pure and simple impossibility of such a synthesis. It is this locus which Sartre ma~es his own when he interprets the existential project as the subject-object relation. The form that the impossibility of the synthesis between that relation and de-alienation takes for him is that of the 'instantaneity' of de-alienation. This 'instantaneity' in fact, is the temporal determination of a demand which is being insisted upon in conditions of