sartre on party

MASSES, SPONTANEITY, PARTY J.-P. Sartre Ma ni festo : During the May events in France, and in the course of the working cl ass struggle o f 1968 generally, movem ents a t t he ba se attack ed the Communist parties not only for their bureau crati c degener - ation or for their reformist options; they also criticized the very notion of the pa rt y as th e political , structure d organizatio n o f the class. When these movements suffered setbacks, a number of leftist groups came to emphasise organization against spontaneity, and advocated a return to pure Leninism. Neither o f these att itu des see ms to us satisfactory. I t see ms to us tha t one ca n only prop erly criticize sponta neity - and this was the lesson o f 1 9 6 8 - i f it i s realiz ed tha t the subjective matu rit y o f the workin g cla ss requires today a new form o f organizatio n, ad apte d to the conditi ons o f stru ggle in th e soci etie s o f adva nced capi tali sm. We should like to focus this conversation on the theoretical bases o f this problem. You have been concerned with this ever si nce the now classic discussion o f 1952 (Co mmu nis ts and Peace ) and the polemic which followed with Lefort and Merleau -Ponty, by way of T h e Ghost o f o f 1956 to th e Critique de la Raison Dialectique. In 1952, you were charged with hyper -subjectivism and you were reproached with a failure to recognize an y existen ce of the working class oth er than in the party. In 1956, it was the reverse accusation that was directed at you, namely that you were guilty of an objectivism which tended to explain Stalinism as the inevitable produ ct o f a parti cular historical situation. In actual fact, it seems to us that both positions had a common basis in the concept of scarcity , in the structural backwardnes s o f the country in which the October Revolution occurred, in the necessities imposed by the fact that the revolution was not ripe an d th at socialism ha d to b e built in a context of primitive accumulation. In this s pe cific situation, you co nsid ere d th at the p art y was bound to superimpose it se lf upon a mass which had not reached t he required level o f consc iousn ess. Do you believ e t ha t this image o f the party - which we shared with you in the fifties- mus t be revised be - cause the situation has changed; or, on the contrary, that it must be revised because the earlier formulations were vitiated by theoretical in - adequacies which have si nce then been more clearly revealed? Sartre : There was certainly inadequacy. But this must be situated historically. In 1952, when I wrote Communists and Peace, the essen

sartre on party

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