INTELLECTUALS & THE DIVISION OF LABOR--SARTRE ET AL

[kellner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu]

Regarding my 1974 review of Sartre that Ralph Dumain criticizes:
It was written at the heat but near the end of an era of revolutionary
optimism -- which burned on for some of us until the mid-1970s -- when it
seemed cool to transcend the classical features of the bourgeois
intellectual to become a new revolutionary intellectual (something similar
is going on today for those who want to be postmodern intellectuals but
this is another story....)
It appeared that Sartre had moved into something new and exciting that
overcame some of the limitations of his previous amalgam of existentialism
and Marxism. In retrospect, Aronson and Ralph are correct that this was
but a momentary episode in Sartre's curious intellectual trajectory, not a
significant transformation, let alone a model-- easy enough to see from
hindsight.
As for Sartre's Maoism, it was but intellectual fashion, to be
ultra-revolutionary, gauchiste, plus gauchiste que gauchiste, etc that
appears quaint and amusing today--though not really Stalinist, Sartre's
Maoism was always anti-party, anti-state, anti-bureaucracy and not that
different from James' Trotskyism in relation to the role of workers...
In retrospect, Marcuse's skepticism to Sartre's ultraMaoism appears
correct from hindsite, but I think this skepticism is typical of the
Frankfurt School which was one of the first to question the classical
Marxian doctrine of the revolutionary nature of the proletariat in state
and monopoly capitalism--a position that James and Dunayevskya 
and other neo-Trotskyists always opposed....
So, yes, my 1974 review of Sartre appears naive from historical
perspective which is why in my more recent article on intellectuals I took
Sartre as representative of a classical conception of the bourgeois albeit
radical intellectual which needed to be rethought and transcended. In
fact, I never really endorsed Sartre's Maoism, I just thought it was an
interesting step in his itinery and indeed still think it is, though it
now appears as a quaint curiousity...
Enough for now,
Doug Kellner

On Tue, 1 Jul 1997, Ralph Dumain wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 

Douglas Kellner, Dept of Philosophy, Univ of Texas, Austin, TX 78712
kellner@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu  fax: 512 471-4806
Web sites: Postmodern theory= http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~kellner/pm/pm.html
Critical theory= http://www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/