"On Revolution” essays by John Paul Sartre, 1946-1950
I cut some of my teeth early on by reading nearly everything by Sartre, but these essays are new to me. Sartre here styles himself as a “revolutionary philosopher” in solidarity with the working class. But at the same time he rocks the boat quite roughly.
THE FIRST ESSAY - 1949
The first 1949 essay on materialism seems to reflect Sartre's transitioning from existentialism to a socialism of a sort. It is a rejection of what he calls 'materialism' or 'dialectical materialism' or 'historical materialism' as professed by the French Communist Party honchos of 1949. Sartre goes after Engels too when Engels discusses nature, and Lenin when Lenin talks about the base and superstructure. Sartre maintains that the Marxist notion of dialectics or materialism only applies to the class struggle, not to natural phenomena. In a footnote he contends Marx had a far more sophisticated view of materialism, but says no more about that.
I sense a bit of bad faith in this first essay, as Sartre disliked the Stalinism of the French CP and so attacked their mechanical and reductionist view of materialism as 'determinist' – which it probably was. This is really not so much a philosophic dialog, but reflects his dislike of their bureaucratic and crude politics. This is reflected in a concrete discussion of Trotskyism – which he opposed. But unlike the CP intellectuals who labeled Trotskyists as 'police agents' for political reasons - Sartre knew that to be an untrue slander.
In the end Sartre does embrace materialism – not as any absolute truth but as the chosen viewpoint most useful to revolutionary workers. He calls it a useful 'materialist myth' first expounded by people like Epicurus. Calling materialism 'a choice' and 'an act' is an existentialist tactic. Yet dialectics presupposes no 'ultimate truth' is to be found, so his assumption that it claims that is off. History never stops, so neither does social or intellectual development. Sartre understands that a 'materialist myth' has no meaning in a classless society, quite as Marx understood that philosophy disappears upon the advent of proletarian struggle.
Sartre is oddly afraid to declare God non-existent, even though he himself is an atheist. He looks narrowly at scientific work as dealing with isolated 'things,' and compares it with dialectical methods - even in an aside that mostly passes over the question of energy as a form of matter. He styles animal 'nature' as the stronger eating the weaker, implying that cooperation has no place in nature. His discussion of ice turning to water turning to steam is fraught, as he thinks the essence of dialectics is synthesis, not internal conditions. His idea of science is of circular events, when even climate has a linear or spiral development and has always been historical. He also discusses the endless question of the relationship between the economic base and the social or ideological superstructure, alleging the CP honchos thought ideas cannot sometimes have a life of their own. They can.
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| Funeral of JP Sartre attended by 15-20 Thousand in Montparnasse |
The second essay concerns the outlook of the revolutionary who refuses to be co-opted by capital and mostly has no chance of it either. Sartre seeks to replace the revolutionary 'materialist myth' with clear-eyed philosophy, one which denies both materialism and idealism and leaves human choice instead. In this he's a Leninist! Oddly, he discounts that very real material events and experience like exploitation, layoffs, poverty, class violence or war will lead to revolutionary class consciousness. This is because he thinks socialism comes from a standpoint of 'the future,' not the present or past. Why do I feel like these are sophomoric arguments?
He does outline how work provides the worker with an idea that the world can be transformed, just as the worker or cook or farmer or mother transforms natural substances in the process of their labor. As he puts it: “...workers (are) an essential structure of society and the hinge between human beings and nature...”
An aside on an earlier Sartre book Nausea. A central scene in Nausea is a man contemplating the absolute 'otherness' and “Thing In Itself”-ness of a tree. As if the tree was not a process or has internal development, but a 'thing.' Yet trees are planted, grow and die. We now know they talk to other trees through their roots. They provide habitat and shade, eat carbon, provide oxygen and nuts sometimes and interact with their environment. They are not really 'things.' Sartre's idea of materialism is that it involves static things completely isolated from motion, the rest of the world or humans. Things are only affected by forces outside themselves. This is alienated Cartesian dualism to my mind and it infects his idea of materialism in these essays.
In the end, Sartre calls for a universal “revolutionary humanism,” as communism is a humanist goal without classes, oppression or war. At the same time he says the French Communist Party is the revolutionary party. I wonder what he would say now, as internal contradictions transformed that Party even more than its status in 1946.
THIRD ESSAY - 1950
The third essay concerns artists and their conscience. It centers on music and the 1948 socialist-realist “Prague Manifesto” issued by pro-USSR artists. His sole focus here is on classical music in various formats from opera to ballet, like Schonberg. Popular forms of music – jazz, folk, blues, early rock, popular, dance, Romani, international, etc. are almost invisible to him. Sartre does not think music itself can be directly political, which is why the Prague Manifesto advocates styles like Opera which use words. He opposes reducing music to this. Behind this manifesto was Zhdanov, the Soviet culture minister. Sartre believes culture should be 'from the future' and freely transcend both the clutches of the bourgeoisie and their specialists, or the control of the Party bureaucrats. He shows no awareness, however, of the Independent Federation of Revolutionary Art, of Breton, Rivera and others, which had a position similar to this. Nor does he directly advocate revolutionary art, as he is mostly concerned with music. And music only hints at politics by how advanced it is beyond the sound cliches of current society. He sees good music as a transcendence of the present.
This essay is highly speculative and ends with this quote: “Reaction or terror? Art free but abstract, art concrete but encumbered? A mass audience that is uneducated, a specialist listenership, but a bourgeois one?”
While Sartre makes a good attempt at undermining materialism here, subsequent Marxists unconnected to the PCF have done a superior job of illustrating the connections between material social reality and the realm of ideas. Even Gramsci worked this territory. Nevertheless it remains that Sartre was a 'fellow traveler' of the revolutionary movement – not of the PCF so much as the revolutionary movement itself, which was and is bigger than the PCF then and now.
Prior blog posts on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “The Ghost of Stalin” (Sartre); “The French Communist Party versus the Students,” “Thieves of the Wood,” “The Coming Insurrection,” “The Left and Islamic Literalism,” “The Committed,” “Thomas Piketty,” “The Beach Beneath the Street,” “The Permanent Guillotine,” “The Age of Uprising,” “The Merry Month of May,” “Society of the Spectacle,” “Something in the Air,” “The Conspiracy,” “Finks.”
Red Frog
Budapest, Hungary / 11/24/22
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