![]() This philosophical reorientation culminated in the publication of Critique of Dialectical Reasonin 1960, a materialist study as hermetic as it magisterial. Less known is that during this period Sartre also fundamentally revised his philosophical framework in order to make sense of the multiplicity of political movements then emerging. An intellectual celebrity in the post-war years, and the author of the hugely successful Being and Nothingness, Sartre was known during in the late 1950s and early 1960s for his support of anti-colonial struggles as well as his perhaps questionable defence of the Soviet Union (a position he himself later vehemently criticized). How are we to make sense of our confusing historical moment? Although not fashionable today, there’s much we can gain in these troubling times from studying the work of the philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre. When attempts have been made to do so (with Bernie Sanders in the USA and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, for instance) it often lacks a strong organizational basis in working class communities, forcing them to unite through discourse rather than organic ties. In Britain and elsewhere, politicians nominally representing working people often shun the language of class. But these struggles do not (as yet) translate into a common class politics. Rises in the cost of living are met by strikes for higher wages, but they can also trigger more diffused revolts. Mass resignations and the refusal to work under appalling conditions have dislocated entire sectors of the economy. Were we to do that, what is it that we would see? Confusing times indeed.Īs the political theorists Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have recently argued, today we are witnessing an increasing number of struggles that do not easily translate into a coherent working class politics. ![]() Perhaps sometimes it makes more sense to ‘stay with the trouble’, in Donna Haraway’s admirable formulation. By doing so, however, we can miss those very real events happening in front of our eyes. ![]() Yet, we often have an understandable desire to subject this confusion of political and historical times to a false unity and coherence. This was the task of communist organization which, as The Communist Manifesto proclaimed, has ‘no other interest separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.’ And the name for this political maturity is the proletariat, the figure that for Marx would overturn everything bourgeois society appropriated for itself. ‘The social revolution of the nineteenth century,’ Marx reminds us, ‘cannot draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future.’ Social progress could only come about when the working class becomes conscious of its inherent interests. ![]() Then, in his famous formulation, history occurred twice: ‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’. It was, Marx writes, to the clothing and speech of ancient Rome that the French revolutionaries of 1789 harkened in order to glorify their struggles, while the figures of 1848-1851 could only parody the previous revolution and replay it in a reactionary mode. ![]() Karl Marx opens his justly celebrated account of the French coup of 1851, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,by describing the confusion of historical times produced in revolutionary episodes. ![]()
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