and directives make it possible for others to dissolve the inertia of the series is a third party. Everyone is a means for the third party to the extent that the third party is the means for the group.
Sartre applies this schema in brilliant analyses of days of rioting or insurrection. He demonstrates the specific workings of serial collectives (the storming of the Bastille). He shows how the intolerable (poverty, fear) brings pressure to bear on inertia. He shows the emergence of fusion (the cry: ‘To the Bastille’). But he does so – and this is worth noting – within the framework of bourgeois revolutions, and especially that of 1789. He refers, that is, to days of rioting in which there is no dialectic with institutional political forces, and in which no people’s party is present in the masses. From that point of view, fusion is a historico-revolutionary concept, and not a political concept.
The discussion of the third type of gathering – the organization – does deal with politics. The matrix of the organization, or the thing that allows it to move from fusion to institution (which is another serial collective), is the oath. The oath appears at the point where the possibility that the group might disperse has been internalized. As everyone is the third party for everyone else, he fears the dispersed solitude that is both the others’ doing and his own doing. It is not enough for reciprocity to be immediate. It requires a stable mediation. It is the oath that allows everyone to commit themselves to remaining the same. The oath gives me a guarantee that the third party will not become the Other; at the same time, I guarantee that I will not become the Other for my third parties. Whatever form it may take, the oath is in fact the group’s internal struggle against the imminence of betrayal. Treason is an inevitable threat because separation is the normal form of sociality. If the series is not to reappear, the group must bring a counter-pressure to bear upon itself in the shape of an essential subjective element. That element is fear of the traitor, within others, but also within me.
That the basis of the organizational process is fear, fear of betrayal, reveals Sartre’s pessimism. The oath is necessarily supported by an atmosphere of terror. Why? Because no one knows whether the other really is afraid enough of being betrayed. In order to equalize the fear, the group must establish a terroristic reciprocity within itself: anyone who betrays the oath will be punished by everyone else. That is the group’s new interiority. Optimism is the terror that goes hand in hand with the advent of fraternity. Given that the group decides its own fate through the oath, everyone is aware of being his own son, and everyone is bound to everyone else by the obligation to supply mutual help. Fraternity is the mode in which everyone experiences, with respect to others, his own birth as an ordinary individual within the group.
The life of the group that is bound by an oath is governed by fraternity-terror. That allows the group to establish the dialectic between practical freedom and the serial; one determines fraternity, whilst the other, which has been internalized by fear, determines the necessary internal oppression of each by all. On this basis, Sartre studies the process that allows us to understand organizations, and then institutions. At each stage, the inertia increases and the memory of fusion fades. Oppression outweighs fraternity. The permanent division of tasks replaces the function of the third-party regulator. The institution brings us back to our starting point: it is a serial collective, and its unity is nothing more than unity in separation. The supreme institution is the state.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this bonding is the way it allows us to breathe new life into the Marxist concept of class. From 1955 onwards, Sartre fought vigorously against a purely objective or purely social definition of class. In his view, a class was a mobile ensemble articulated into series, groups and institutions. At the level of production, the purely objective reality of the working class is a unity in separation, a passive, serial unity. It is governed by the law of division and competition. All working-class resistance or any shop-floor revolt is a local fusion of a series. Even at that level, we have a principle of subjective reciprocity. Sartre analyses it in detail. Discussing go-slows, he demonstrates that they are a sort of dialectical ethics based upon a rejection of serial competition: ‘If a worker says, “I shall avoid doing more than the Others, in order not to require the Others to do more than they can, and in order that I shall not be required to do more than I can by another”, he is already a master of dialectical humanism.’2
If we think of the great working-class slogans of the post-’68 period in France or Italy, such as ‘work at your own pace’, we have to pay tribute to Sartre for having noticed that they have important implications for politics, but also, as he rightly says, for ethics.
A class is therefore a series: that is its social being. A class is in fusion: that is its practical being as a mass. A class is an organization: it works upon itself in the modality of terror-fraternity, which is to a greater or less extent stable and which can take the form of a para-state organization like the big unions. And its concrete history, as historical subjectivity, is the articulated movement of those three dimensions, and never the linear development of one of them. To that extent, Sartre anticipates the necessary distinction between class as social being, and class as historical and political being. Within concrete History, a class exists in the atomized form of the social series, dissolves the series in its revolts, and structures the subject of the revolt against betrayal, or through what Sartre calls the dictatorship of freedom, meaning the fraternal group. It then gives birth to organizations which have a ‘dispassionate’ capacity for fusion, and they finally revert to being institutions that generate a new type of serial: an institutional division that in a sense replicated division through labour.
All these forms of existence coexist and upset one another in the course of a History that is open. The existence of a class fluctuates between seriality and institutions. That is its organic life. We can, however, identify active, or totalizing, forms of circularity: individual praxis on the one hand, and the fused group on the other. We can also identify passive or totalized forms: the series on the one hand, and the institution on the other. In philosophical terms, this means that the movement of history is not homogeneous and is not the product of unitary dialectic. There are moments that are anti-dialectical moments: that of pure matter on the one hand, as opposed to individual praxis. That of the institution, as opposed to the insurrectionary group. Unlike Hegel, Sartre therefore tries to conceptualize a dialectical continuity. Practical freedom is constantly being turned against itself by natural and institutional inertia, even though material products and institutions are products of praxis. The transparency of the free man is absorbed into its opposite, and Sartre calls that opposite the practico-inert. As a result freedom can only perceive itself at very specific moments: that of the dissolution of the series and that of unifying revolt.
This is undeniably the stumbling block for Sartre’s logic. If man is truly human – or in other words capable of reciprocity towards the Other – only during the revolt that dissolves the series, then human unity can exist only in the form of antagonism and violence. The only form of collective activity is the mass movement against social inertia, but that inertia is protected by the adversary and the supreme institution of the state. Passivity is the normal form of sociality. Is history oriented towards a greater liquidation of passivity? That is the meaning of the communist idea. But according to Sartre, serial passivity is a precondition for collective activity. Indeed, men are men only when the series is dissolved. Activity and reciprocity have as their content the destruction of passivity. If the social basis of passivity is restricted, then what existence lies in store for men? According to Sartre, the human is nothing more than the dissolution of the inhuman. The dialectic is conditioned by the anti-dialectic. How can we hope for its stable, or even expanded, advent? One has in fact the feeling that man exists only in flashes, in a savage discontinuity that is, ultimately, always absorbed into inertia and the law of separation. Collective action is the pure moment of revolt. Everything else is an expression of man’s inevitable inhumanity, which is passivity.
It follows that Sartre’s politics is a politics of the mass movement, which means that it is in many respects an infra-politics. It is typical that, when he examines the question of working-class organizations, it is the trade union that serves as an example, rather as though the logic of trade unions was, in his view, the same as that of political parties. Basically, the Subject that Sartre wants to restore to Marxism is a historical subject. It is, if we can put it this way, a mass-subject. The Critique of Dialectical Reason develops