Sartre's second century

210 Chapter Fourteen
Although the exposition of Sartre's argument in the Critique may
frequently appear confused, its essential outlines are clear enough. Perry
Anderson summarises them as follows:
The struggle against scarcity generated the division of labour and so the
struggle between classes: therewith man himself became the negation of
man. Violence, incessant oppression and exploitation of all recorded
societies, is thus internalised scarcity. The harsh domination of the natural
world over men and the divided antagonism of their efforts to transform it
to assure their lives typically give rise to serial collectivities—inhuman
ensembles of which each member is alien to each other and himself, and in
which the ends of all are confiscated in the total outcome of their actions.
Such series have always been the predominant form of social coexistence
in every mode of production to date. 20
By contrast, what Sartre terms a "fused group" is typified by a
revolutionary movement in the immediate hour of its victory, when what
up to that point have been serialised ensembles become a genuine
collective united in a common emancipatory endeavour. This state of
affairs is of necessity temporary and ephemeral: following the brief
interval of exaltation, circumstances—embodied in the collapse of
productive and distributive mechanisms, armed counter-revolution, foreign
aggression and similar emergencies—soon compel, if the revolution is to
survive, the establishment of institutionalised leadership, coercive
measures, bureaucracy; the quondam fused group is before long returned
to seriality and the cycle recommences, albeit of course in transformed
circumstances, not as simple repetition—an important point. It is easy
enough to discern equivalent processes at work in circumstances less
dramatic than those of revolutionary success and degeneration.
This account obviously oversimplifies, not only omitting important
elements of Sartre's conceptual apparatus, but also failing to mention the
specific examples he calls upon to sustain his case, most importantly the
French and Russian revolutions. The title of his text is not accidental—this
is a dialectical approach—and Sartre's method is defined as progressiveregressive
in its understanding, from the individual to the collective and
back form the collective to the individual, "the objective movement of
history through the historical individual and the mark made by the
individual on the historical movement". 21 Thus he sets out to rescue
Marxism from the reductionist and mechanistic understanding which
Anderson, Considerations, 86-87.
21 Sartre, in Situations, VII, quoted in Ian Birchall, Sartre against Stalinism, 180.