INTELLECTUALS & THE DIVISION OF LABOR--SARTRE ET AL

[Ralph Dumain]

Given severe pressures on my time, I responded to the query for information
on C.L.R. James and intellectuals by uploading my favorite quote from STATE
CAPITALISM AND WORLD REVOLUTION.  If you can understand that quote, you'll
pretty much understand James's thinking.  I will amplify on it in the
future, but just let it sink in for awhile.

Yesterday I finally made it to the library to look up Douglas Kellner's
review of ON A RAISON DE SE REVOLTER by Jean-Paul Sartre, Philippe Gavi, and
Pierre Victor (TELOS, NO. 22, Winter 1974-75, pp. 188-201).  I wonder if
Doug would care to revise his unqualified enthusiastic estimate of Sartre
with the hindsight of over two decades, based on something other than the
loss of revolutionary optimism.

At first glance, Sartre's position would seem exemplary.  We know of his
long detour from left-bourgeois disillusionment, through liberation politics
and his difficult dance with the Communist Party, and now it looks like
Sartre (in 1974) has resolved his earlier contradictions and has his head
screwed on straight at last.  Now Sartre has definitively rejected Stalinism
and its bureaucratic structures, believes in workers' self-management and
direct democracy, and has rejected the concept of the vanguard party.
Furthermore, he has integrated all the new social movements into a
conception of proletarian revolution.  It would seem there is nothing left
to distinguish the Sartre of 1974 from the James of 1947.

There are, however, these disturbing references to Mao.  Sartre's New Left
seems to have a significant Maoist influence within it.  (I'm not very
knowledgeable about Sartre, but I heard he was influenced by Maoism, I heard
some rubbish about the "confraternity of terror", and I concluded he was
just another cold-blooded French intellectual asshole who couldn't be
trusted, but I could be wrong.)  We can now see how '60s radicals were
conned into accepting Mao's pretenses of engaging in an anti-bureaucratic
revolution, abolishing social distinctions, and merging the intellectuals
into the masses.  The Kellner of 1974 shows no signs of suspicion against
any of this, which immediately arouses _my_ suspicion.  The Kellner of today
only criticizes Sartre's notion of intellectuals merging with the masses as
naive.

Returning to 1974: Sartre describes the role of the new intellectual, who is
above all a political person, forsaking the ivory tower of theory for
practice. The revolutionary intellectual must shed all of his class
prejudices and engage in self-criticism.  Kellner even reproduces a fragment
of a remarkable conversation between Sartre and Marcuse, in which Sartre
claims that the workers can now think for themselves, and can produce ideas,
whereas the intellectual has no more privileged role than being able to
polish those ideas.  Marcuse remains skeptical.  Both admit they are
old-time intellectuals, but Sartre is gung-ho on changing this.

Kellner thinks this is a big change, a resolution of Sartre's age-old
contradictions.  It is not, as Aronson claims, the same old Sartre indulging
in "unpolitical works of the mind and a mindless activism."  Sartre and
Kellner re-evaluate Sartre's life-long engagement with the problem of
freedom.  Kellner celebrates Sartre's ultimate recognition that the group
takes precedence over the individual.

I learned long ago to beware middle-class of intellectuals who, out of
guilt,  isolation, and the need to belong, decide to give in at last and
abase themselves by turning against individualism and seeking to lose
themselves in the group.  This is far from the James who used to criticize
the Cannonites' tirades against middle class intellectuals and who
celebrated American individualism.  James recognized this social type of
intellectual and lambasted him back in the 1940s and early '50s as easy prey
for Stalinism.

I don't trust Kellner's evaluation of Sartre at all.  There are many
similarities in Sartre's 1974 positions with those of James, but deep down I
suspect some rather different motivations.  I wonder if the Kellner of 1997
would care to comment.