The article by André Gorz on Sartre’s contribution to Marxism elucidates one of the most fundamental problems of socialist theory in the 20th century, a problem summed up in a phrase of the final paragraph, ‘the question of the possibility of suppressing the inhuman in human history’. That Sartre’s own answer to this question seems to be ‘probably not’ may be pessimistic, but is not made for that reason less possibly correct, and as Gorz rightly points out, the refusal to face it on such dishonest grounds as the question of Sartre’s ‘idealism’, ‘nihilism’, etc, to ‘. . . . fear that the discoveries we might make will shatter the . . . depths of our own commitment,’ is indeed the negation of Marxism. Sartte’s work is of a quality that deserves the most serious consideration and criticism. If we disagree with this bold thinker it is necessary to fully engage his views, and if he is wrong to be able to say precisely and in great detail why this is so.
Having examined the various relationships and possibilities inherent in the social structures he is investigating and the manner in which they deal with human praxis ‘through the mediation of worked matter’, Sartre appears to conclude that ‘fused groups’ in which ‘each totalises all in the same way in which they totalize him’ can have no permanent endurance, due to ‘scarcity’ and to the demands imposed by the means of production. The ‘group’ will find itself compelled, in order to maintain its formal cohesion, to develop sub-groups, functionaries, co-ordinators with special superior skills, ‘series’, and thereby fall back into an alienated state. Sartre does not, admittedly, dismiss the possibility that this conclusion can be avoided, but he appears very doubtful, and certainly history in our own century adds empirical stiffening to his doubt.