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Sartre was involved in three great political struggles. It was thanks to them that he became the emblematic figure of the progressive intellectual everyone in the movement mourns today, whilst everyone on the side of reaction denounces him for what they call his mistakes, perversions or crimes. In the 1950s, and in the face of hysterical anti-communism and pro-Americanism, Sartre took the side of the Parti Communiste Français on the grounds that it was the sole expression of the working class. In the 1960s, Sartre supported the anti-imperialist struggle. He opposed the colonial war in Algeria. He discovered the popular power of the peoples of the Third World. In the early 1970s, or after May ’68, Sartre came to understand the reactionary character of the PCF. Together with the Maoists of the day, he took the side of the immigrants, the unskilled factory workers, the miners of the Nord département, and of anti-capitalist and anti-union struggles.

Thirty years of correctness in revolt, well-judged changes of position, and the anger appropriate to them. And all bathed in unchallenged international glory. In terms of our literary history, the only comparison is with Voltaire, the literary prince of the eighteenth century who defended Calas, Sirven and the chevalier de la Barre; Rousseau, the best-selling novelist whose Social Contract was burned; and Victor Hugo, a living historical monument who was almost the only artist and intellectual to protest against the coup d’état of 2 December, and then the repression of the Commune. They are our great national writers. They combine a vast readership, a glorious status, a refusal to bow before anyone, and a freedom of movement in revolt that has never been crushed. They are writers who never surrender.

If there is something enigmatic about Sartre, it is not, as they say today, the fact that he marched side by side with the Stalinists in the 1950s. Quite the contrary: for him, that was the moment of a real conversion. Whilst he did not really have any illusions about the PCF, Sartre realized at that time that the choices facing intellectuals were historically situated. Anyone who claimed to be able to remain neutral had simply chosen to side with the forces of social conservatism. When he said that ‘an anticommunist is a dog’, he was simply recognizing the necessity of political reality. In 1950, it was quite true that an anti-communist had simply abdicated his responsibility and chosen servitude and oppression, both for himself and for others. It was that historical, limited nature of choice that wrested Sartre away from the metaphysics of individual salvation.

We can pinpoint the moment of that conversion – and it was both pure and confused – in his play Lucifer and the Lord. Goetz wanted to be the hero of Good, and then he wanted to be the hero of Evil. But that formal ethics led to disaster in the Germany of the Peasants’ Revolt. Goetz therefore rejoined the peasant army, with one specific task in mind: winning the war. Like Stalin, he ruled that army, which was threatened by divisions amongst the peasants, through terror. These are Goetz’s final words:

I shall make them hate me, because I know no other way of loving them. I shall give them their orders, since I have no other way of being obeyed. I shall remain alone with this empty sky above me, since I have no other way of being among men. There is this war to fight, and I will fight it.¹

From that point onwards, Sartre remained convinced that there was always some war to fight. In 1950, he still thought that being alone was the only way of being among men, and that was a trace of his past. But he was about to change. The important thing is that, in 1950, Sartre became the man of specific commitments, the man of concrete historical conflicts. They were the three great struggles of which I spoke. That is the logic – the profound logic – of Sartre.

The enigmatic thing about Sartre came before that. There was one struggle he missed, and which did not really revolutionize either his practical attitude or his philosophy: the struggle waged by the anti-Nazi Resistance. Sartre came to politics between 1945 and 1950. It was metaphysics and art that initially made him famous. That is because Sartre elaborated his first philosophy in wartime. Being and Nothingness was published in 1943. There is a huge gulf between that philosophy and political commitment. Sartre made the absolute freedom of the Subject central to experience, and that freedom is still strictly a matter of individual consciousness. The relationship with the Other is certainly a given which constitutes that consciousness. But my relationship with the Other is what makes me see myself, through the gaze of the Other, as a shameful thing, as reduced to the being that, because I am free, I am not. The immediate relationship with the Other therefore oscillates between masochism, which allows me to make myself be for the other, and sadism, in which I make the other in order to be me. In both cases, freedom makes a point of becoming limed in being, either because I deny it in myself, or because I deny it in the other. The reversibility that allows freedoms to flee one another means that there is no room for any reciprocity or combative solidarity. The Subject is freedom’s never-ending flight from being, and man is hell for man. From that perspective, no political cause can unite consciousnesses in any collective project. All unification is external: it is a form of being that itself refers to a great Other, to an invisible gaze for which we are things, and we freely accept that we are things. Any collective project can therefore only be passive. Only the individual is an active centre. Even in 1960, Sartre would describe as ‘collective’ a multiplicity of individuals whose unity is a passive synthesis.

And yet from the end of the 1940s onwards, Sartre’s immense effort revolved around just one question: how can activity, the only model for which is the free individual consciousness, be a collective given? How can we escape the idea that any historical and social reality is inevitably passive? The outcome of this effort was the appearance, in 1960, of the Critique of Dialectical Reason.

The paradox is that, in the meantime, things had taken a very different turn. Althusser wanted to restore Marxism’s cutting edge by rejecting Sartre’s entire frame of reference and eliminating all reference to a historical subject. By insisting on the structural character of Marxist analyses. By emphasizing scientificity, which Sartre approached only with circumspection? That was the path that was initially taken by living Marxism, but it was not Sartre’s path. The Maoists of the late 1960s were to combine Marxist rigour with the historical experience of the Cultural Revolution in China. They laid claim to the cutting edge of science as a theoretical equivalent to the cutting edge of rebellion.

But with hindsight, it might also be said that, after May ’68 and perhaps even more so today, political subjectivation appears to be the central item on Marxism’s balance sheet. It takes the form of a twofold question:

What independent revolutionary activity are the masses capable of? Can they, as Maoism puts it, be ‘self-reliant’? What is the relationship between the mass movement and the great inert political institutions of imperialism: parliament and the trade unions?

What political party does the working class need today? What is the essence of the constituted political subject?

Hence the return, if you like to put it that way, to Sartre’s basic concern. Although, to go one step further, we could also say: the Subject that we inevitably talk about today is not the subject of History. The idea of a historical totalization is no longer of any use to us. We are talking about a very specific subject: the political subject. So Sartre’s question is not exactly the right question. All this means that summing up what he was attempting to do is very complex.

First of all, we find in Sartre some astonishing historical and concrete descriptions of social ensembles. He identifies three main types: the series, which is an inert gathering; the group, which is collective freedom and reciprocity; and the organization, which is a serial form that has been internalized by the group.

The series is the collective form of social inertia. What Sartre calls ‘inorganic social beings’. The series is a gathering of men in which every man is alone because he is interchangeable with every other man. Sartre’s initial example is that of a queue at a bus stop: everyone is there for the same reason, but that common interest brings people together externally. That externality is internalized in the form of everyone’s indifference to everyone else: I do not speak to the others, and simply wait in the same way that they wait. In a series men are, if you like, brought together by the object. The unity of the gatherings exists because everyone’s relationship with the object is the same. But that external identity becomes an internal alterity: if the object makes me the same as everyone else, then I am other than myself. As Sartre puts it: ‘Everyone is the same as the Others to the extent that he is Other than himself.’ Ultimately, the law of the series is unity through separation. Sartre extends this formula to all collective activities: working on an assembly line or in local government, listening to the radio – in all these cases, the object produces an undifferentiated unity or a unity based upon separation. Typically, this is a passive synthesis. It is the moment when material production has a retroactive impact upon individual praxes and totalizes them into inertia. The human unity of the series is a unity that is grounded in impotence: being identical with the Other, everyone is external to himself and therefore cut off from free practice. The series is the rule of the Other. At which point, Sartre rediscovers one of Marxism’s great ideas: the impotence of the people is always its internal division, its separation from itself. And it is that that ensures the continued reign of the Other, the reign of the bourgeoisie. There is still a trace of Sartre’s pessimism here because, for him, the series is the archetype of sociality. It is, if we can put it this way, the ordinary structure of the life of the masses.

The emergence of the fused group, which reacts against social inertia, signals, on the other hand, a bid for optimism. It has to be said that there is a certain dialectical obscurity about this. How can men who have been passively brought together in their impotence and separation by large social collectives suddenly call into being an active unity in which they recognize one another? It is worth noting that Sartre, borrowing an expression from Malraux, calls this event an apocalypse. The apocalypse means that the series dissolves into a fused group. The mediation this requires is itself partly external: it is the awareness of its intolerable nature that dissolves the series and creates a new reciprocity. If, for example, the bus we are waiting for in passive indifference does not come along, there will be protests and mutterings. People will start to talk to each other about the inhumanity of their external conditioning. Even at this stage, an element of fusion is already apparent. Unity in separation is practised as an internalized unity: I speak to the Other because he, like me, finds the wait intolerable. What was ‘I am the same as the Other whilst being other than me’ becomes ‘the other is the same as me, and I am no longer my other’. As Sartre says, in the series, unity is created elsewhere, namely in the object. It is a passive unity. In the fused group, the unity is immediately there, within me and in all the others. It is an active unity and a ubiquitous unity. In the series, the Other is everywhere; in the fused group, the Same is everywhere.

It is the ability of everyone to indicate to everyone else their practical unity with everyone else that manifests this new unity. If, for example, someone says ‘Let’s all protest together’, everyone follows his lead because that practical call mediates between each and every one of them. The series really has been dissolved. The person who said that has no institutional or external status. He is the anonymous individual through whom everyone is a possible mediator of the reciprocity of all. He is what Sartre calls the regulatory third party. The regulatory third party is the statute [statut] of anyone who has a practical relationship with the reciprocity of all individual praxes. A fused group is made up of individuals who all, in their turn, become the third party who totalizes the interiority of the fused group in action. The third party is neither a chief nor a leader; anyone whose spontaneous indications and directives make it possible for others to dissolve the inertia of the series is a third party. Everyone is a means for the third party to the extent that the third party is the means for the group.

Sartre applies this schema in brilliant analyses of days of rioting or insurrection. He demonstrates the specific workings of serial collectives (the storming of the Bastille). He shows how the intolerable (poverty, fear) brings pressure to bear on inertia. He shows the emergence of fusion (the cry: ‘To the Bastille’). But he does so – and this is worth noting – within the framework of bourgeois revolutions, and especially that of 1789. He refers, that is, to days of rioting in which there is no dialectic with institutional political forces, and in which no people’s party is present in the masses. From that point of view, fusion is a historico-revolutionary concept, and not a political concept.

The discussion of the third type of gathering – the organization – does deal with politics. The matrix of the organization, or the thing that allows it to move from fusion to institution (which is another serial collective), is the oath. The oath appears at the point where the possibility that the group might disperse has been internalized. As everyone is the third party for everyone else, he fears the dispersed solitude that is both the others’ doing and his own doing. It is not enough for reciprocity to be immediate. It requires a stable mediation. It is the oath that allows everyone to commit themselves to remaining the same. The oath gives me a guarantee that the third party will not become the Other; at the same time, I guarantee that I will not become the Other for my third parties. Whatever form it may take, the oath is in fact the group’s internal struggle against the imminence of betrayal. Treason is an inevitable threat because separation is the normal form of sociality. If the series is not to reappear, the group must bring a counter-pressure to bear upon itself in the shape of an essential subjective element. That element is fear of the traitor, within others, but also within me.

That the basis of the organizational process is fear, fear of betrayal, reveals Sartre’s pessimism. The oath is necessarily supported by an atmosphere of terror. Why? Because no one knows whether the other really is afraid enough of being betrayed. In order to equalize the fear, the group must establish a terroristic reciprocity within itself: anyone who betrays the oath will be punished by everyone else. That is the group’s new interiority. Optimism is the terror that goes hand in hand with the advent of fraternity. Given that the group decides its own fate through the oath, everyone is aware of being his own son, and everyone is bound to everyone else by the obligation to supply mutual help. Fraternity is the mode in which everyone experiences, with respect to others, his own birth as an ordinary individual within the group.

The life of the group that is bound by an oath is governed by fraternity-terror. That allows the group to establish the dialectic between practical freedom and the serial; one determines fraternity, whilst the other, which has been internalized by fear, determines the necessary internal oppression of each by all. On this basis, Sartre studies the process that allows us to understand organizations, and then institutions. At each stage, the inertia increases and the memory of fusion fades. Oppression outweighs fraternity. The permanent division of tasks replaces the function of the third-party regulator. The institution brings us back to our starting point: it is a serial collective, and its unity is nothing more than unity in separation. The supreme institution is the state.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this bonding is the way it allows us to breathe new life into the Marxist concept of class. From 1955 onwards, Sartre fought vigorously against a purely objective or purely social definition of class. In his view, a class was a mobile ensemble articulated into series, groups and institutions. At the level of production, the purely objective reality of the working class is a unity in separation, a passive, serial unity. It is governed by the law of division and competition. All working-class resistance or any shop-floor revolt is a local fusion of a series. Even at that level, we have a principle of subjective reciprocity. Sartre analyses it in detail. Discussing go-slows, he demonstrates that they are a sort of dialectical ethics based upon a rejection of serial competition: ‘If a worker says, “I shall avoid doing more than the Others, in order not to require the Others to do more than they can, and in order that I shall not be required to do more than I can by another”, he is already a master of dialectical humanism.’²

If we think of the great working-class slogans of the post-’68 period in France or Italy, such as ‘work at your own pace’, we have to pay tribute to Sartre for having noticed that they have important implications for politics, but also, as he rightly says, for ethics.

A class is therefore a series: that is its social being. A class is in fusion: that is its practical being as a mass. A class is an organization: it works upon itself in the modality of terror-fraternity, which is to a greater or less extent stable and which can take the form of a para-state organization like the big unions. And its concrete history, as historical subjectivity, is the articulated movement of those three dimensions, and never the linear development of one of them. To that extent, Sartre anticipates the necessary distinction between class as social being, and class as historical and political being. Within concrete History, a class exists in the atomized form of the social series, dissolves the series in its revolts, and structures the subject of the revolt against betrayal, or through what Sartre calls the dictatorship of freedom, meaning the fraternal group. It then gives birth to organizations which have a ‘dispassionate’ capacity for fusion, and they finally revert to being institutions that generate a new type of serial: an institutional division that in a sense replicated division through labour.

All these forms of existence coexist and upset one another in the course of a History that is open. The existence of a class fluctuates between seriality and institutions. That is its organic life. We can, however, identify active, or totalizing, forms of circularity: individual praxis on the one hand, and the fused group on the other. We can also identify passive or totalized forms: the series on the one hand, and the institution on the other. In philosophical terms, this means that the movement of history is not homogeneous and is not the product of unitary dialectic. There are moments that are anti-dialectical moments: that of pure matter on the one hand, as opposed to individual praxis. That of the institution, as opposed to the insurrectionary group. Unlike Hegel, Sartre therefore tries to conceptualize a dialectical continuity. Practical freedom is constantly being turned against itself by natural and institutional inertia, even though material products and institutions are products of praxis. The transparency of the free man is absorbed into its opposite, and Sartre calls that opposite the practico-inert. As a result freedom can only perceive itself at very specific moments: that of the dissolution of the series and that of unifying revolt.

This is undeniably the stumbling block for Sartre’s logic. If man is truly human – or in other words capable of reciprocity towards the Other – only during the revolt that dissolves the series, then human unity can exist only in the form of antagonism and violence. The only form of collective activity is the mass movement against social inertia, but that inertia is protected by the adversary and the supreme institution of the state. Passivity is the normal form of sociality. Is history oriented towards a greater liquidation of passivity? That is the meaning of the communist idea. But according to Sartre, serial passivity is a precondition for collective activity. Indeed, men are men only when the series is dissolved. Activity and reciprocity have as their content the destruction of passivity. If the social basis of passivity is restricted, then what existence lies in store for men? According to Sartre, the human is nothing more than the dissolution of the inhuman. The dialectic is conditioned by the anti-dialectic. How can we hope for its stable, or even expanded, advent? One has in fact the feeling that man exists only in flashes, in a savage discontinuity that is, ultimately, always absorbed into inertia and the law of separation. Collective action is the pure moment of revolt. Everything else is an expression of man’s inevitable inhumanity, which is passivity.

It follows that Sartre’s politics is a politics of the mass movement, which means that it is in many respects an infra-politics. It is typical that, when he examines the question of working-class organizations, it is the trade union that serves as an example, rather as though the logic of trade unions was, in his view, the same as that of political parties. Basically, the Subject that Sartre wants to restore to Marxism is a historical subject. It is, if we can put it this way, a mass-subject. The Critique of Dialectical Reason develops a formidable formal logic to make intelligible the principle that ‘It is the masses who make History.’ What is being conceptualized here is in a sense the historical know-how of the masses. But whilst the masses make history, can they, by the same criteria ‘make’ politics in the same sense?

Sartre clearly believes that the organization is the absolute term of politics and that, from that point of view, we cannot identify History with politics. But he always looks to the masses in order to discover the truly dialectical reason of organizations. In his view, an organization is basically a revolt that has crystallized. It has crystallized because it has been forced to internalize the passivity against which the group rebelled. For Sartre, the political party is still an instrument. It is instrumental passivity in action.

In my own view, the logic of the political Subject or the logic of class do not exist in a continuum with the mass movement. The party is a specific process internal to the masses, but it brings about a particular break: the break known as politics, as communism. The party is therefore something more than an instrument and something other than an instrument. The party integrates homogeneous contributions into its presence within the masses, and they are mainly of an ideological and theoretical nature. The logic of its development is not inscribed solely within the discontinuity of riots. It has a particular continuity, and it is no longer that of the inertia of the institution, but that of the continuity of proletarian politics. And if we are to think the continuity of that politics through to the end, we must take the view that there is more to the masses than the destructive ability to dissolve the series. We have to conclude that mass activity and mass ideas have an internal correctness [justesse] that is simply not there in the fused group. In a word, we have to conclude that, at any given moment, popular ideas and practices are divisible and contradictory, and that collective experience is never simply trapped into the activity/passivity contradiction. We can trust the masses precisely because their ideas also have to do with processes that shift their ground and assert something new that exists outside the activity/passivity contradiction.

Ultimately, Sartre fuses politics and History because history’s sole driving force is the contradiction between transparent individual practice and inert matter. He draws what conclusions he can from that, and many of them are fascinating. But we can also understand why, after ’68, he became the Gauche prolétarienne’s fellow traveller.³ The Gauche prolétarienne had only one slogan: ‘On a raison de se révolter’ [‘It is right to rebel!’]. The Critique of Dialectical Reason supplies the reason why it is right to rebel [‘la raison de cette raison’].

In my own view, the political Subject, which Marxism really does have to theorize anew, never coincides with the subject-in-revolt, even though it presupposes its existence. The fact that the proletariat is active amongst the people is not to be confused with the fact that it is the masses who make History, which is always true. There is within the political subject, and within the process of a new type of political party, a principle of consistency, and it is neither seriality, fusion, the oath nor the institution. It is an irreducible that escapes Sartre’s totalization of practical ensembles. It is a principle that is no longer based upon individual praxis.

There are two Maoist realities whose necessity cannot be demonstrated by Sartre. First, trust in the masses, defined as a permanent principle that refers not only to insurgent violence but also to the communist future. Second, the new-style party, which is the support not only for the revolutionary idea but also for a logic of popular unity that is valid in itself: it is affirmative and creative, and not simply warlike or dissolving.

Sartre still remains one of those who re-awakened Marxism. He urges us to reflect upon politics and History precisely because he develops a purely historical and revolutionary conception of Marxism as far as it can be developed. And we need something political and communist [du politique et du communiste] as well as the historical and the revolutionary. Sartre invites us to look again at the question of the political subject, and to trace the path for a dialectical-materialist philosophy centred on that question. That is why Sartre is not just a great fellow traveller when we act. He is also a great fellow traveller when we think.