Let the reader be reassured: we have not inflicted upon ourselves the reading of Mr. Sartre’s 800 pages. Nor be indignant: we will not make a critique of this book, which we have not read. And do not think we are mocking him: we have read Sartre’s title, and it is of this title that we will make the critique.

There is much to scandalise the ‘serious’ people. But how! The ‘great modern philosopher’, the ‘left-wing’ thinker, studies (it seems) dialectics, Marxism, man, the proletariat, etc. in 800 densely packed pages, and we content ourselves with the title? Oh, a crime of lèse-philosophie!

Better to confess at once that we have no respect for philosophy, and less so for philosophers. If we critique Sartre’s title, it is only because, in that title, he has already answered the fundamental question, and everything that follows does not change that. What we want to show is precisely that the fundamental philosophical conceptions are not those frighteningly complicated things that can only be explained in large volumes, and which hardly more than a few specialists can understand; what we want to show is precisely that this mountain of learned froth only serves to mask the very simple answer to a very simple question. Not that we attach any particular importance to Sartre’s facts and deeds, even if he writes about Marxism or carries the suitcases of the Algerian F.L.N. But he is a typical representative of today’s bourgeois philosophy, and this study will allow us, by reminding us what dialectical materialism is, to clarify a question that bourgeois thinkers, right-wing or ‘left-wing’, do their best to obscure.

* * *

The question of materialism is in fact at the basis of every theoretical construction. As Engels said ⁽¹⁾, there is but one serious philosophical problem: materialism or idealism? We must therefore see how Sartre responds to this problem, and recall how Marxism responds to it. We shall show at the same time that, in this, it is not a question of a ‘struggle of ideas’ at all, but that philosophical conceptions translate class oppositions and, in their turn, become weapons in the class struggle.

To quickly identify Sartre’s position on this fundamental point, it is better to refer, rather than to the large treatises on philosophy, to an article of art criticism on ‘Calder’s Mobiles’ (in Situations III). Mobiles are sculptures made of articulated pieces and thus susceptible to moving in relation to one another in such a way that the overall configuration changes; and there are different types: those of Calder are made of articulated rods and vanes that a simple current of air sets in motion. Sartre was fascinated by these mobiles because, for him, they represent the embodiment of the ‘philosophical mystery’: the problem of motion. At the sight of these things that move apparently on their own, a mystical terror grips him: It is only an object, and yet it moves! And the philosopher asks himself: surely the mobility of the mobile must come from somewhere: from where? Where does ‘motion, this disease of Being’ come from?

In a few, very simple lines, Sartre provides us with the small key that opens all the doors to his great philosophy: that is, his decidedly idealist position. He does indeed admit that the material world exists (and in this sense he could claim to be a materialist), but he thinks that the being of this material world is a pure being-there: that is, that this world, in itself, is static, immobile, dead, and that it only receives movement, animation, life, from outside, from something else. ‘Sartre’s materialism’ is therefore a false materialism, a material-idealism, and further on we shall show that his dualism is that of all bourgeois philosophy.

For those who think it reckless to condemn Sartre on the basis of such a modest piece of evidence, it will not be difficult to find all the confirmation one wants. Without even opening up Being and Nothingness, in which the aforementioned dualism is developed in a systematic but rather confused manner, one can refer to Materialism and Revolution. Here Sartre, having asked himself what ‘matter’ is for Marxism, and having trawled Engels for the answer: It is the matter of which scientists speak, bursts out laughing: ‘But I said it well, me! Because the matter of which scientists speak is something dead, inert, a mere substratum!’

Error, Mr. Sartre, grave error. If you had read Anti-Dühring instead of flipping through it absent-mindedly, you would have found Engels’ answer: Matter is motion. And this answer was not invented by Engels. It was given 25 centuries ago by the philosopher-physicists of pre-Socratic Greece, the same ones who laid all the foundations of science.

Studying the problem of motion, they showed that it is impossible to understand or represent motion as a succession of positions of rest: that is, that of a body in motion one cannot say: now it is here and now it is there; it is here without being there. In reality, it is nowhere, but passes through, traverses, space continuously. Starting from this observation, they showed that the fundamental aspect of matter is to be motion, and that ‘rest’ (relative) is only an accidental and local aspect. They showed that if one were to suppose matter in itself as motionless, its putting into motion by an ‘external intervention’ would hypothetically escape any description and analysis; but that we can represent and understand the behaviour of matter without supposing a ‘god’ by definition incomprehensible, provided we conceive of matter as something that by its very nature is motion, has always been and always will be motion; in other words, that we must represent matter as itself the cause of its own movement.

In short, they established in a completely general way the principle of dialectical materialism, which Engels summarises as follows: Motion is the mode of existence of matter. Never and nowhere has there been, and nowhere can there be, matter without motion. Matter without motion is just as unthinkable as motion without matter.

* * *

If the Greeks thus succeeded in identifying motion as the fundamental aspect of matter (and, consequently, in demonstrating the discontinuous nature of matter and the continuous nature of space and time), it was neither by chance nor because they were particularly ingenious. These conceptions were inspired in them by social relations and the movement of society, and they were able to demonstrate them through theoretical analysis without being able to verify them through experimental investigation, at the time too rudimentary. This is why the pre-Socratic physicists seem to have pulled everything out of their own head, out of abstract reflection, whereas their teacher in physical principles was historical experience.

Greek society was then coming to the end of a period of profound upheavals, that transitional period between gentile society and slave society, which saw the destruction of non-exploitative social relations based on consanguinity and the development of private property, slave labour, and the State. Whereas Egyptian or Chaldean science was inspired by a stable state in which production technology and social relations changed only very slowly over the millennia, Greek science was influenced by a rapidly moving society. A fundamental aspect of this period, motion drove science toward dialectics.

It is interesting to see how this social movement appeared to Greek society. We have, in this respect, a first-rate testimony: the Greek tragedy, which is not a ‘universal dream’ (it is not in all societies that the son dreams of ‘killing his father and lying with his mother’) but the representation of the destruction of social relations based on the family in the broadest sense. It also shows us how this destruction presents itself: it is felt as an atrocious fact, which no one wants, to which everyone reacts, but which imposes itself as an irresistible fate.

Certainly, witnessing the destruction of a harmonious social form, and the dehumanisation of social relations, was atrocious, all the more so because, despite all resistance, it imposed itself as a destiny, with all the force of a higher mode of production, of the possibility of a rapid increase in human productive forces. Nobody ‘wanted’ it: it sprang from the very development of society. Here, evidently, the theatre could not tell the whole truth: namely that the cause of social movement was in society itself. This movement was too cruel for society to feel responsible for it. Moreover, it could not understand its positive character. Therefore, it made the incomprehensible ‘gods’ responsible for it.

It is here that Heraclitus takes over from Sophocles. What society refused to admit for itself makes its triumphant entry into a field where the question of ‘moral responsibility’ does not arise: physical theory. Matter is motion. Here is the great discovery: matter is itself the cause of motion.

Thus we can say that if, in that epoch, social movement could not yet rise to the consciousness of its own laws, it nevertheless generated the consciousness of the movement of matter, dialectical materialism, which would become the basis of our coherent theoretical representation, extended from matter to human society. Nor is it a coincidence, or the effect of an abstract ‘superiority’, that dialectical materialism was soon submerged by the idealism linked to the name of Plato: it was the triumph and stabilisation of slave society that imposed, even in philosophy of nature, its own structure. For the slave-owner, slaves are pure ‘objects’, ‘things’ that belong to him and are moved by his will, whereas he feels himself as free consciousness and will, which is not determined by anything, but determines all social activity.

The dominant ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class: slavery and, at the same time, the development of commerce and money, abstract and almost immaterial wealth, impose the conception of matter as being set in motion by causes themselves material and abstract, until, faced with the insoluble contradictions implicit in such a conception of the world, one comes to deny (in theory) all reality to matter, in order to make it (always in theory) a mere ‘reflection’ of the Idea.

We cannot here go into the details of the history of philosophy, which, as we have seen, derives from the history of society as a whole, without there being a mechanical and instantaneous coincidence between one and the other. But, before we get to bourgeois philosophy (and Sartre, whom we have not forgotten), we must briefly recall the Middle Ages.

* * *

After the decline and collapse of the Roman Empire, Western Europe undergoes a long period of upheavals and crises: the slave form has been destroyed, ancient Germanic forms crumble, instability and insecurity reign in the countryside, agricultural production declines. Society seeks a new, sufficiently stable form of production: centuries will be needed for it to find it. At the same time, it seeks its own doctrine. And while it will borrow elements from the slave, Judeo-Phoenician, Christian, Germanic, etc. ideologies, the fundamental aspect of its doctrine will be determined by an essential problem: that of stability. The social structure of feudalism, with its ‘fixed’ and strongly hierarchical categories, was a necessity to ensure production, and this social necessity was represented in the most natural way as a transcendent necessity, as the divine will, the theoretical apex of the social pyramid that had given each person a place and put each in their place; a supernatural force that had to guarantee the stability of the social form. Of course, this philosophy of society had to be reflected in the philosophy of nature; the same supernatural force is thought not only to have created the world, but to have given it an immutable and eternal form: from organic matter down to society, from the speck of dust down to celestial bodies, all categories are conceived as immovable, created once and for all and thus destined to exist forever.

Taking up the principle of idealism, the theology of feudal society – scholasticism – at the same time gave it an ‘immobile’ form. Unfortunately for the theologians who were ‘debating the sex of angels’ (i.e. working on the completion of the classification and nomenclature of a supposedly immutable world), society did not remain immobile. As soon as feudalism was established, and the response and development of agricultural production took place, a new relation of production, capitalism, and a new class, the bourgeoisie, began to develop, at first in the form of commercial or usurer’s capital. This ‘parasitic’ and almost marginalised form of feudal society seemed, at first, ancillary and controllable. But it concealed within itself an enormous explosive potential and, first slowly, then ever more rapidly, undermined and destroyed feudal society.

Therefore, the ideology of feudal society, represented by Catholic ideology, soon ceased to be unanimously accepted. Instead of imposing itself naturally on everyone as a faithful reflection of social relations (like Confucianism in China, for example, and the Aztec or Egyptian religions), it became prey to all sorts of ‘heresies’ and only ended up imposing itself thanks to the Inquisition, auto-da-fés, and massacres. But it was not the Devil that animated the heretics: it was the slow but irresistible drive of a new form of production.

This new form of production, this new class, needed its own doctrine, as much in the philosophy of nature as in the philosophy of society. But, contrary to what had happened in previous social forms, the bourgeoisie never managed to construct a coherent theory – no matter whether true or ‘false’ – that would embrace, on the basis of a single principle, all aspects of the world. The doctrine of the bourgeoisie was always, and is, a dualistic and contradictory doctrine. Perhaps somewhat hastily, it can be said that it had to be so: a mode of production that carries within itself its own antithesis cannot but be reflected in an ideology in itself antithetical.

* * *

In what does the dualism of bourgeois thought consist? Schematically, it can be said that it is materialist in philosophy of nature and idealist in philosophy of human society. Of course, these two conceptions cannot coexist peacefully: each one goes its own way; impossible to reconcile in a unitary doctrine, each of them seeks to generalise itself and supplant the other. But this ‘duel of ideas’ has an entirely material arbiter: bourgeois society, the objective necessities of the development and preservation of capitalism. To no avail are efforts of intelligence, penetration, subtlety, cunning: it is the arbiter that decides! And it decides, firstly, that none of these conceptions must supplant the other, because it needs both; secondly, that, according to the imperatives of the moment, it will give preeminence to either this or that.

It needs both. Capitalism needs materialism in the philosophy of nature. It needed it most of all at the beginning of its trajectory, at the time of the transition from commercial or usury capitalism to productive capitalism, a transition that required a rapid development of the productive forces, that is, of domination over nature, and therefore greater knowledge of it and its laws: science. Now, science is materialist or it is nothing: it assumes that the behaviour of nature does not derive from ‘divine decisions’, free and inscrutable, but is predictable, because it is due to properties and laws inherent in nature itself.

Thus, the drive toward the increase in labour productivity imposed the rejection of the Divine Principle in the philosophy of nature: with the development of science, capitalism attacked feudal society on two fronts – it created the technical conditions for the development of its mode of production, and at the same time undermined and ridiculed the divine principle, guardian of the social order. Thus it is in this epoch that the bourgeoisie, then a revolutionary class, pushed further along the path of materialism, which served at the same time its economic needs and its ideological struggle against feudalism. It itself would have liked to present itself as absolutely and exclusively materialist: in reality, despite the attempts by its best theorists (e.g. Diderot), it was not and could not be.

Materialist against feudalism, it became idealist again when the constitution of its social organisation was at stake. The divine principle, which it had expelled from the philosophy of nature, it could not expel from the philosophy of society; at most, it could modify it according to its needs. God no longer existed, but the divine attributes were attributed to all men: the social structure was no longer fixed by God but by the citizens, all endowed with Reason, all free and equal, all capable of deciding freely according to their own, free Ideas. Positing the famous democratic principle, which was supposed to lead to social harmony, to the realm of Reason, claiming to determine the movement of society through the ideas of individuals, by the ‘will of the people’ instead of by the divine will, the bourgeoisie resolutely asserted itself as idealist in the philosophy of society – as idealist as the old theology, albeit in a different form. And it could do no other.

This idealist conception of man and society, far from being an ‘error’ of philosophers, was both a reflection of the relations that capitalism imposes on society and the theoretical foundation of the political organisation, of the State that best met its needs. The famous slogan of the French Revolution: Liberty – Equality – Bentham (Marx completed!) reflects purely and simply the requirements of the mercantile relation: seller and buyer must be free, and exchange must take place at equal values; in this honest and ‘fair’ trade, everyone gains, say the bourgeoisie (Khrushchev and Mao included!); it is the great Brotherhood. Besides, this beautiful freedom is not only of the bourgeois, the free owner of capital; it is also of the proletarian: capitalism has ‘liberated’ the producer from all ties with the land, with the means of production, and with the products, which forces him to sell his only asset, his labour power; to sell it freely and at its value: here is the basis of capitalist exploitation, of wage slavery.

To declare that man, thus chained and subject to capital, is endowed with a free and sovereign Spirit that can determine the movement of society, is the great democratic mystification, the surest guarantee of the bourgeois order. We cannot insist on this point, which, moreover, has been developed in many party texts (see The Democratic Principle); we only wanted to recall that idealism is not an ‘error of reasoning’, but a plain and simple economic, social, and political necessity.

Here, then, is bourgeois philosophy in possession of two contradictory principles. It cannot renounce either one or the other; nor even find a stable compromise between them. We have already seen that, in the pre-revolutionary period of the bourgeoisie, what was emphasised was rather materialism. In the current period of capitalism’s decay, the situation is reversed. The bourgeoisie does indeed seek to continually expand its productive apparatus, and therefore always needs materialist science: but its essential problem now is to maintain political power, to resist the revolutionary assault of the proletariat. And here idealism takes the lead in bourgeois thought, driving materialism even out of the properly scientific field. The phenomenon is not ‘new’; in Anti-Dühring, Engels already noted that the development of the sciences pushed them towards dialectical materialism, the only adequate representation of reality, but that this tendency was countered by bourgeois metaphysical ideology that was socially imposing itself on the minds of scientists. Today, however, this tendency extends further and further, throwing ‘scientists’ into perplexity and confusion, and science, so glorified, into impotence.

In ‘pure philosophy’, the tendency is even sharper, and one measures the whole path travelled backwards by bourgeois thought by comparing a Diderot, who wanted to extend the materialist conception to man, and a Sartre who wants to extend idealism to matter itself. We have thus arrived at the point where we can once again deal with Sartre, not of course with the individual Sartre, who here does not interest us any more than the individual Diderot, but Sartre as an expression, as a spokesman, and as a theoretician, of a class.

We have said that we dispensed with reading the ‘Critique of Dialectical Reason’ because, coming after all we knew about ‘Sartreanism’, this title was eloquent enough. Indeed, it answers the age-old question: where is the dialectic, in the mind or in nature? And, speaking of dialectical ‘reason’, Sartre answers without any doubt that, for him, the dialectic is in the mind of man.

Now, here, one must be careful, because in this respect every notion or idea produced by man – whether it represents an object, a property, or a relation between things – exists only in the spirit! We must therefore understand the true meaning of the question: is the dialectic (or logic, or reason, etc.) a quality of the mind, or a representation of the real properties of the world? This is the real question, and the way to answer it is of paramount importance, for from the moment one has, like Sartre, expelled dialectics from nature and placed it in spirit, one has thereby posited spirit as an absolute and rendered its genesis and behaviour a priori inexplicable. Or, and it is the same thing, matter is posited as immobile by nature: and its setting in motion becomes an unfathomable mystery.

Thus, without having opened Sartre’s book, we already know what it contains: a desperate effort to understand human behaviour after having made it incomprehensible: a desperate effort to reintroduce motion into the universe, at the level of man, after having driven it out at the level of matter. And we know that Sartre cannot achieve this in 800 pages or 800,000.

Why did Sartre, who is no more a fool than anyone else, set himself a problem as insoluble as the squaring of the circle? And why does he persist in creating an insoluble problem about a question that, on the theoretical level, the Greeks have clarified once and for all? In other words, why is this question so important?

Because Sartre, a serious philosopher, is animated by a commendable scrupulousness for coherence, by a desire to arrive at a homogeneous theoretical construction. Unfortunately, the cornerstone, the central pillar of his theory, is the bourgeois idealist conception of man. It is this that Sartre set out to justify: it is simultaneously the point of arrival and the point of departure of his philosophy. It is noteworthy that Sartrean cosmology (if we may say so) starts from man. So much so that one wonders what could have existed before the appearance of the human species and, even more precisely, of the man of bourgeois society. It is a question Sartre has never clearly answered. Nothing, probably: in any case, he doesn’t care. Here again, it is instructive to compare Sartre to another philosopher, an idealist if ever there was one, but author of the first theory on the dynamic formation of the solar system: Kant, to whom Sartre moreover seems to refer. In Kant’s time, the same man could still work in parallel on a ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ and on a theory of the solar system based on dialectical materialism. Today, in its rabid defence against the proletariat, the bourgeoisie increasingly rejects materialism and, if a little dialectic remains, it is an abstract dialectic: the law of the movement of nothing.

It is not, moreover, entirely accurate to say that the Sartrean conception ‘starts’ from man. In fact, it does not come out of it; and for good reason, the attempt to explain the world backwards, going back from man to the ape, so to speak, and to inorganic matter would be too absurd! Thus Sartre simply lumps everything that is not man into the category of the In-Itself, of pure Being, static or dead. And this In-Itself only truly accesses Being because it is perceived by man, because man is conscious of it. As for man, the For-Itself, its appearance is an absolute, caused by nothing outside itself.

* * *

Let the reader be reassured; we have absolutely no intention of going into the details of the Sartrean theory of man. What interests us is the aim of the work, the reason for being of this enormous cerebral labour. It strives to justify the old assertion that man freely determines social form and movement. It is precisely at the moment when the bourgeoisie feels that its freedom is illusory and does nothing but obey the laws of capitalist economy, at the moment when the premonition of social determinism makes it dizzy, it is precisely then that it needs to reassure itself and above all prevent the proletarians from discovering the horrible truth.

Social determinism, here is the enemy! In order to be able to deny it, Mr. Sartre has been forced to expel dialectics from nature, to make matter a motionless and dead substratum, and man a Freedom. And we know, of course, that he refuses to identify the ‘ontological freedom of consciousness’ with freedom in the ordinary sense: but what do philosophical subtleties matter when, in the end, the former only serves to justify the latter? Sartre gave the last word of his philosophy in ‘Materialism and Revolution’ by saying: ‘The revolutionary is he who wants things to change’. And he, who thinks himself a great revolutionary, is indignant that the bourgeoisie recognises his merits by offering him the Nobel Prize!

Perhaps it will be said that workers do not read Sartre’s philosophy. Certainly. But, apart from the fact that Mr. Sartre is a ‘committed’ philosopher who deals with literature, the press, theatre, and cinema, his philosophy penetrates the proletariat through that stratum of petty-bourgeois intellectuals who can sometimes provide useful elements for the proletarian movement, but more often operate there as an agent for the dissemination of bourgeois ideology. For these elements – the ‘barbarists’, the workerists, the libertarians, the spontaneists, the lovers of ‘workers’ management’ and the voluntarists of all sorts – existentialism constitutes (even if they don’t understand much about it) the theoretical justification, the philosophical cover for their action. In spite of the tons of paper soiled by Sartre, this cover is so thin that it would be more accurate to speak of a philosophical bikini that barely covers the horrible nudity of the agents of the bourgeoisie.

The philosophical question: Materialism or idealism? is not an abstract question, a debate between Ideas. It leads today directly to the question: Social determinism or freedom?, which translates the clash between two classes only onto the theoretical plane. So far, we have concerned ourselves chiefly with bourgeois ideology. We have seen how, in parallel with scientific materialism, it launched political idealism, free ‘determination’, against the divine principle, guardian of the feudal form: it was its revolutionary phase. Sacrificing the historical order, we then saw the bourgeoisie in its senile phase desperately erect this ‘free determination’ against the revolutionary onslaught: let us now speak of the proletarian doctrine.

* * *

In spite of some attempts to overcome bourgeois ideology, attempts that were, moreover, repressed with violence (such as the Conspiracy of the Equals), the nascent proletariat began to accept bourgeois principles, seeking only to turn them against the bourgeoisie, to use them for its own ends. In that period, the workers’ movement tended towards a socialism still largely mixed with petty-bourgeois aspirations, but which, above all, presented itself as a Utopia, a beautiful Ideal of social harmony and Justice, rained down from the heavens of Absolutes and destined to impose itself upon Reason by the force of its Virtue. It will take the development of capitalism and thus of the proletariat, and a whole period of struggles of extreme violence, for the proletariat to become aware of the fact that it can achieve nothing as long as it accepts the political philosophy of the bourgeoisie: that precisely the principle of ‘free determination’ and its consequences are the surest guarantee of the domination of capital; and that it must free itself from them.

Then the proletariat understands that Freedom is only a self-interested deception, that social movements are not determined by a free choice but result from forces partly natural but above all social, from forces produced by society itself: that social forms and movements do not derive from an unpredictable arbitrariness – God, People, Man – but obey a social determinism. Then the proletarian doctrine is born. And all that remained was to apply that principle to the examination of the history, past, present and future, of humanity, in order to obtain in conjunction the explanation of all previous social forms, the radical analysis of capitalist society, and the revolutionary programme of the proletariat.

Because, in discovering social determinism, the proletariat likewise discovers that its own movement is not a ‘free aspiration’ toward an ideal State given a priori, but a necessity imposed by history and by the very nature of capitalist society, and that the end and means of its struggle cannot be freely invented by a creative spirit, but are dictated to it by History.

‘All that remained was to apply’, we said. In reality, this represented an enormous task, and the militants who carried it out had to be equipped with the necessary skills and devote all their energies to it. But they were by no means system-creating ‘geniuses’, and their personal qualities or histories do not intervene at all in the content of their work; at most, they would explain why Capital was written by a certain Marx and not by a certain Mayer, which is of no importance whatsoever! These militants knew very well that they were to be nothing but the theorists of a class; that the doctrine formulated by them was the fruit not of their own fertile brain, but of a social impulse; it was the expression of the class consciousness of the proletariat.

By becoming capable of understanding the history of humanity, of realising that it is not ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury’, the proletariat also became capable of going further, of re-establishing the link between the human species and nature. Having found the principle of historical materialism, it discovered that this principle was in perfect concordance with the dialectical materialism already posited by the Greeks and resoundingly confirmed by the development of the sciences. It was thus possible to integrate the view of inorganic and organic nature and that of human society into a unified and coherent doctrine, and to outline the general scheme of universal history.

In this scheme, the appearance of the species is not a Mystery, an act of creation or self-creation, but a product of natural history, of a long process that took place under given conditions in a certain region of the universe. And it is true that we are far from being able to truly analyse the different aspects of this natural history, but there is no longer a problem of principle. Once it is recognised that matter is motion, that dialectics represents the behaviour of matter, the appearance and development of living organisms and their properties naturally poses problems for scientific study, but these are explained without appealing to anything ‘immaterial’: life is not a mysterious thing coming from ‘beyond’ to animate matter, it is the result of a certain organisation of matter. A living organism is a material ensemble organised in a certain way and, as such, acquires ‘new’ properties, properties that are not those of its constituent elements, but derive from their organisation. It is clear that the only way to understand all the properties of living beings, man included, is to understand them as produced by the movement and dynamic organisation of matter. To renounce this principle, and to posit them a priori as inexplicable, is, in the final analysis, to appeal to God in one form or another.

This applies, of course, also to the famous Consciousness, which Sartre takes as an absolute starting point. In reality, consciousness is a product of natural history and, far from exploding abruptly with man, forms of conscious activity are found very early in the animal world. The theologians who debated whether animals had souls, whether the pig of St. Anthony would go with him to heaven, were, after all, less obtuse than modern bourgeois philosophers.

Nature does not proceed continuously but through dialectical leaps, through quantitative changes that cause abrupt qualitative changes; it is impossible to find an ‘absolute’ limit between non-consciousness and consciousness, so complex is the phenomenon. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a difference exists and brings with it new properties. But what thus appears is not Freedom; it is a new form of determinism, at once more agile and richer than mechanical or biochemical determinism, and which presents this particularity that not only the past and present but also the future act as determining causes. An example will enable us to clarify this point.

Very early on in the animal scale, the exchange with the external world splits into two distinct parts: the intake of oxygen and that of other necessary substances. Respiration, which tolerates only very brief interruptions, has also remained in humans a process regulated by an ‘automatic’ mechanism, a process that consciousness can grasp and influence but which normally takes place without conscious intervention. Nutrition, on the other hand, allows for much longer interruptions. While no known animal species can leave (except for a few moments) its respiratory environment, in which oxygen is everywhere and penetrates ‘automatically’ into the organism, the somewhat evolved species have been able to leave their nutritive environment, in which they were immersed in their nourishment, and, as in the Land of Cockaigne, chickens flew into their mouths, already roasted. But, in order to actually be able to leave one’s nutritive environment, it is not enough that food intake can be interrupted; it must also be able to take place anyway. In the nutritive environment, an automatic process can regulate it: but outside, it is no longer so: the animal must be capable of ‘searching’ (and finding!) its food. Such a search, however distant it may be from that of the Holy Grail, implies the existence of ‘conscious’ processes, of a certain knowledge of the world and its laws, of an ability to predict and act according to predictions. Of course, this consciousness is not Mr. Sartre’s Freedom or Nothingness: it is conscious and voluntary activity tending to realise a biological necessity. Here is the first form of productive activity that Marx speaks of, since the mere fact of going in search of one’s own food is already an action. And everyone knows that certain animal species have highly evolved productive activities. It was productive activity, labour, of an animal species, the ape (as Engels recalls), that was one of the factors that produced the human species.

With the human species there appears, to be sure, something new, a qualitative change. But the man who thus appears is the product of natural history. And man actually continues ‘natural history’, even if it is convenient to distinguish in the evolution of the human species the action of non-human factors, called ‘natural’, and that of activity, of human history proper. The man who thus appears on earth is not that ‘fracture in Being’ of which the philosopher speaks. He is simply a species with far greater capacities than the others, and which, driven by the need to secure its own life, will launch itself into productive activity on a much larger scale. But, in reproducing what satisfies its needs, it will produce itself as a producer. It is in this sense that Marx says that man is not a ‘natural species’. This does not mean that he is ‘outside’ nature, nor that something (the soul or one of its modern surrogates) has come to him from ‘beyond nature’; it means that man’s nature is not simply a natural given, but also the product of his productive activity. It is for this reason, moreover, (and not because of a mysterious virtue of the economy in and of itself) that the relations of production, the relations that are established between men in production, determine the totality of social relations ⁽²⁾. Because this activity of man producing man himself is not – Marx insists on this as early as 1844, and herein lies a key to human history – an individual activity, but a collective, a social activity. Man produces socially, and, in so doing, produces social relations and produces himself as a social being: man’s nature is not individual, but social.

Therefore, any theoretical construction that takes the individual as its starting point is completely powerless to explain human facts (even if it does, afterwards, group these individuals together). And it is also why the philosophers of the 18th century had nothing but disappointments in their search for the ‘natural man’ not ‘corrupted by society’. They rushed upon the ‘wild boys’, lost as children in the forest and raised by beasts. Ah, here he is, man in his natural state, they said, now we shall see him! They saw nothing, and so they fell back on the Hurons, believing that fortune would assist them more; but it was a misunderstanding: the Huron was not the ‘natural man’; he was simply, like the famous Persian, the man of another social form. The bourgeois philosophers therefore exploited the legitimate bewilderment of the Huron (plunged from primitive communism into the society of Louis XIV!) to show that there were other possible social forms besides those they wanted to destroy. As for the ‘natural man’, they gave up trying to find him, while preserving him as the theoretical foundation of the ‘Social Contract’.

From this point of view, the great modern philosopher has taken a small step forward, and a leap backward. If he has discovered (!) that the nature of man is not given a priori, the basis of his philosophy is still the individual. But whereas the Encyclopaedists were looking for a Robinson, a real flesh-and-blood individual, he starts from the abstract individual produced by bourgeois society: whereas they intuited a historical development that justified the bourgeois revolution, and tried, albeit in a mystified way, to explain their society through history, he takes as a natural given the man of capitalist society, this man who ‘is’ effectively nothing but ‘labour-power’, the capacity to produce Capital. Sartre’s Consciousness is nothing but the philosophical representation, the mystified reflection, of labour-power, and partakes of its enigmatic nature: where it comes from, mystery; Capital ignores it and wants to ignore it; it is absolutely indeterminate, it ‘is’ nothing but an empty capacity that can be made to work butter as well as steel; and whatever you make it do, it always remains free and available. It is marvellous!

* * *

To conclude from the above that Marxism misunderstands the individual, consciousness, etc., would be totally false. On the contrary, only our doctrine is capable of accounting for this. Far from the individual being the basis of society, it is the very development of society that has produced the individual. Even bourgeois ethnology has had to recognise this fact, long stated by Engels. Certainly, the physical individual has always been the elementary cell of society in the biological, restricted, and immediate sense: but primitive societies knew no ‘individual’ in the sense that this word has today. The man of this society had no distinct and autonomous ‘personality’ and, if in the biological sense it constituted an irreducible term, the real living and indivisible unit was the clan, tribe, or family (to the extent that, cut off from it, the ‘individual’ perished). The very concept of ‘personality’ is of relatively recent appearance, and was only gradually formed through the destruction of primitive communism and the development of private property in class societies.

It is social evolution that has produced the individual, and it is the social movement that will transcend it, not by suppressing it to return to a state of undifferentiated community, but by negating it dialectically: higher communism will not be a return to primitive communism, neither in its grip on nature, nor in the human relations it will create. Today, capitalism deifies the individual in theory, and kills all individuality in practice; capitalist society is like a huge machine for de-individualising and standardising all aspects of human existence, from birth to death. Communist society, and as of today the Party that prefigures it, negates the individual-god, negates his autonomy and sovereignty; but communism, which will integrate the individual into the social body, will at the same time allow the development of individual capacities in all fields. This individual will, evidently, be completely different from the robot-taboo individual of bourgeois society: it will be able to develop its own ‘individuality’, because there will then exist a social unity from which it will be inseparable, because every man will be integrated into this organic whole constituting something other than the sum of the elements that compose it.

Marxist critique has destroyed not the notion of the individual human being, but the idea of the individual as the basis of social facts and history, showing that the indivisible unit that acts in social history is never the biological unit, but always a collective unit, today a class. As for consciousness, we have already seen how Marxism does not ignore it at all. But what we mean by consciousness differs radically from both ‘moral consciousness’ and ‘existentialist consciousness’ in two respects: it is not indeterminate, nor proper to the individual. Sartre did indeed want to affirm that ‘existence precedes essence’, but he refused to see that being precedes consciousness, that it is being that produces consciousness: that it is not Consciousness that exists, but only the fact of being consciously (Bewusstsein ist bewusstes Sein, said Marx). Therefore, consciousness is not an ‘indeterminate Freedom’, but a clearly determined function and expression of the being that produces it.

It is true that it does not obey a mechanical determinism. We have already discussed this, but it is useful to insist on it. We have already mentioned that, in somewhat evolved animals, feeding is a conscious process. Conscious, but not ‘free’. No one has yet been so idealist as to dare to claim that he eats out of a free decision of his will. We know, of course, that we eat because of an objective and inescapable biological necessity. But this biological necessity cannot be fulfilled by a simple automatic process: for it to be fulfilled, the animal (or man) must become conscious of it and voluntarily work towards its fulfilment. He becomes conscious of it through the sensation we call ‘hunger’, and seeks to eat. This search can be more or less simple and, depending on their capabilities, different species survive or not under these or those conditions. (Today, and for us, the search for daily bread is an extremely complicated process). Now on the animal scale, one encounters quite early on species that are not content to look for food the moment hunger grabs them, but that are capable of becoming conscious of this biological necessity in a more general way, of foreseeing their hunger for tomorrow as of today. It is here that determinism begins to get seriously complicated, because the prediction of future need itself becomes a determining factor of activity and may even enter into conflict with the consciousness of immediate need. Thus the peasant will tighten his belt in winter rather than eat the last sack of grain destined for sowing, which therefore will provide him with bread for the following year. If he thus resists biological determinism, if he goes beyond the cries of the stomach, it is not because of a ‘free decision of his consciousness’, but because he is driven by the desire to survive, by the need to eat in its most general aspect. Even at the scale of the individual and of the primordial need, we see that determinism is complex, it is a function of capacities for conscious prediction and action. At the scale of human society, it is evidently much more so; not only because humanity has produced new, human, and no longer ‘natural’, needs; but also because needs, necessities, and laws have appeared that concern human collectivities as a whole. To these needs correspond activities that are themselves collective, whose subject is not an individual, a biochemical molecule, but a human collectivity, a social unit.

* * *

It is understandable that social determinism acts even less automatically than biological determinism, and through a conscious process. In this sense, Marx said that ‘men make their own history’: this does not mean that they freely do as they please, but that social needs can only be realised through the conscious activity of men. Now, when it comes to activities whose subject is collective, the directing consciousness must, too, be collective, i.e. something quite different from a sum of individual consciousnesses, just as a collectivity is something different from the sum of its members. Bourgeois philosophy that starts from the I is incapable of understanding this collective consciousness, and, falling back on the crudest materialism, demands to be shown the brain that secretes this consciousness. But history doesn’t give a damn about bourgeois scholasticism: all human collectivities have produced their consciousness, expressed by a more or less vast but indivisible community, which none of its members alone can replace.

Now, the proletariat, to the great horror of the bourgeoisie, has also produced its class consciousness and its incarnation, the party. It has not produced them ‘freely’, but driven by the objective necessity to act as a class in history ⁽³⁾. This class consciousness is neither free nor mechanically determined by capitalism. In principle, this question has been clarified for more than a century, but we need to return to it again and again in order to demolish bourgeois ideology.

Revolutionary consciousness is not a matter of free choice: a revolutionary is not a man ‘who wants things to change’. Marx and Engels showed that such a consciousness, a mystified consciousness, had been, and had to be, that of the bourgeois revolution: in the struggle against the utopians, they showed that their ‘freedom’ led them precisely to shut themselves up within the capitalist system. Today, ‘free choice’ serves as a counter-revolutionary banner for the senile bourgeoisie; for bourgeois revolutions that are accomplished, well or badly, at the expense of the defeat of the proletariat. It is no coincidence that Sartre rushed to China, to Cuba, and to Algeria! Oh, if only he had been born two centuries earlier!

Revolutionary consciousness is not mechanically determined by capitalism. All the material and ideological weight of bourgeois domination tends, on the contrary, to impose bourgeois ideology on the proletariat, to make it admit that the capitalist form is ‘natural’ and ‘eternal’, at best susceptible to being ‘improved’. And, in periods of relative prosperity, the broad working masses undergo this influence and accept this reformist vision. But capitalism has produced the conditions for communism, and is continually producing communism as an objective historical necessity, as an inescapable social necessity, thereby pushing, whether it wills it or not, dialectically, toward the attainment of revolutionary consciousness. The Party is not composed of an ‘elite of free men’, of supermen who have miraculously escaped social determinism; but it does not suffer the determinism of capitalist society in a static and immediate way. The Party is the proletariat that has become conscious of the laws of history and which, for that very reason, is determined by social determinism in its most general form; it is determined by a social form not yet blossomed but in the process of becoming, by the communism that capitalism in fact generates. Just as the peasant who has assimilated the laws of botany is determined by the future harvest existing potentially within the seeds, the Party is determined by the future that exists potentially within the present.

This is why the faculty of foresight is an essential quality of the revolutionary Party, this is why Marx and Engels insisted on the ‘scientific’ character of our doctrine. By analysing the past and the present, and inferring the future, the proletariat becomes capable of realising this future. It is for this reason that we go to so much trouble to demonstrate that the whole of history, and in particular that of capitalism, confirms point by point the laws emphasised by Marxism; that all the alleged ‘novelties that Marx could not imagine’, have instead been perfectly foreseen by our movement. And just as the peasant is not disheartened by the bad weather that destroys his harvest, so we are not discouraged by the defeats that the proletariat suffers. They only make the solution to the problem more urgent, and the rigour, the intransigent ‘dogmatism’, of our positions all the more necessary.

What would one think of a peasant who sowed on rock because the rain had destroyed his grain? Now this is precisely what those who, after a defeat, abandon their weapons do, and renounce the true strength of the proletariat, the consciousness of historical determinism, in pursuit of a fictitious ‘freedom’.

Today, our strength may seem derisory, just as the little black cloud he sees on the horizon seems derisory to the inexperienced sailor. Tomorrow, in the social storm, it will prove immense.

It will be immense, because, unshakeably bound to our doctrine, we foresee social convulsions and their resolution. Because we tirelessly proclaim what tomorrow will become clear to the masses: the need to radically destroy capitalism through violent revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat led by its Party. Because only the Party of the proletariat, the repository of doctrine and historical experience, can establish the programme of the communist revolution, a programme not freely constructed but necessarily imposed by historical development. Because only our Party is capable of unmasking and fighting all false socialisms, rearguard gems of the bourgeoisie.

This struggle, we must conduct constantly and across the board. It is for this reason that we have dealt with Sartre, manufacturer of philosophical disguises for decrepit opportunists and pseudo-restorers of the revolutionary movement. We preferred to insist on the fundamental questions rather than amuse ourselves with the polemics as vain as they are obscure between Mr. Sartre and the great theorists of false communism, Kanapa, Lefebvre, Casanova and Co. Since these gentlemen seek only to justify (with ‘Marxism’, they say) the bourgeois policy of the national communist parties, and have – but without admitting it – the same idealist position as the ‘adversary’, this fake struggle only serves to conceal the real problem!

Sartre at least has the merit of being sincere, and allows us to arrive sooner at the key question: idealism or materialism? Freedom or social determinism? Bourgeois conservatism or proletarian revolution? Here is the point: here I’ve got you!