The Wind from the East by Wolin Richard

Author:Wolin, Richard [Wolin, Richard]
Language: zho
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-07-07T16:00:00+00:00

POLITICAL MOTIVATIONS

In 1967, a year after Mao had launched the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir undertook a fact-finding trip to China to examine the momentous political transformations firsthand. They came away disappointed. De Beauvoir explains: “Preventing the emergence of a new privileged class, according the masses genuine power, making a complete person out of each individual—I could only support a program phrased in these terms. Still, I could not accord China the same blind confidence that the Soviet Union raised in so many hearts.”40

Far from being opportunistic, Sartre’s Gauche prolétarienne engagement was motivated by revolutionary conviction. From the outset he made it clear that he had not come to the Maoists’ defense on purely civil libertarian grounds. By the same token, he never embraced the Maoist worldview in its entirety. Sartre found the Gauche prolétarienne’s ideological dogmatism off-putting—reminiscent of precisely those aspects of communism that he had previously found difficult to bear. After the Maoists lied to him about a protest at the Sacré Coeur Basilica that had gone awry, thus placing the aged philosopher in harm’s way, he abruptly resigned—only to return to the Maoist fold soon after. He even went on record criticizing La Cause du Peuple’s propagandistic slant, going so far as to claim that the bourgeois press, despite its lies, contained more “truth” than the Gauche prolétarienne’s daily.41

What was it, then, that attracted Sartre to gauchisme in its Maoist incarnation? Above all, Sartre admired the Maoists’ revolutionary ardor. In an era when the European working class remained complacent and lethargic, the GP activists were able to preserve a measure of insurrectionary élan that had otherwise vanished. It was certainly nowhere to be found among the French Communists, whose amalgam of bureaucratic rigidity and parliamentary conformism had generated widespread disillusionment among former allies such as students and intellectuals.

In Sartre’s later political writings, his analysis of “seriality” stressed the need for an external catalyst to bestir the somnambulant and atomized masses. In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre portrayed the dilemma of the “serialized,” or inertia-prone, group via the example of a discrete agglomeration of persons waiting for a bus:

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