Surviving the

Neoliberal Maelstrom
A Sartrean Phenomenology of Social Hope

RONALD ARONSON

Abstract: It might seem that Sartre’s thought is no longer relevant

in understanding and combating the maelstrom unleashed by tri-
umphant neoliberalism. But we can still draw inspiration from
Sartre’s hatred of oppression and his project to understand how his
most famous theme of individual self-determination and responsibil-
ity coexists with our social belonging and determination by historical
forces larger than ourselves. Most important today is Sartre’s under-
standing in Critique of Dialectical Reason of how isolated, serial indi-
viduals form into groups to resist oppression, and the ways in which
these groups generate social understandings and collective power.
Keywords: André Gorz, Communist Manifesto, consumer economy,
group in fusion, Margaret Thatcher, Marxism, neoliberalism, serial-
ity, social hope, Tea Party

The world has changed immensely since Sartre died in April 1980.
Within a year Reagan followed Thatcher into power, and together
they ended the post-war consensus of labour and capital that had
marked the ‘Thirty Glorious Years’ of prosperity following World
War Two. Responding to economic crisis after crisis starting with the
Oil Shock of 1973, they presided over a conservative/neoliberal
transformation that sought to reduce the power of labour, and
promoted deindustrializing and offshoring, as well as shrinking the
welfare state, privatizing government services and deregulation,
especially of the financial sector. In terms of social values and com-
mitments it has meant a harsher and more difficult life for the major-
ity and a social acceptance of soaring inequality, with all the moral
coarsening this involves. These changes were accompanied by a

Sartre Studies International Volume 21, Issue 1, 2015: 21-33

doi:10.3167/ssi.2015.210102 ISSN 1357-1559 (Print), ISSN 1558-5476 (Online)
 Ronald Aronson

transformation of once-reformist and socialist parties into bastions of

softer-hearted versions of neoliberalism, but now lacking any alterna-
tive vision of their own.
In 1978 China began its conversion to capitalism, and eleven
years later the Berlin Wall came down, initiating spectacular changes
in Eastern Europe. Shortly afterwards the Soviet Union went out of
existence. Communism, which had occupied so much of Sartre’s
thought, was largely over.
Yet the advent of neoliberalism and the passing of social democ-
racy and communism were accompanied by a remarkable flourishing
of new freedoms due in large part to the movements of the 1960s
and 1970s that Sartre had encouraged and embraced. Resulting
from struggles of racial and ethnic minorities, women and gay peo-
ple, these have had a transformative effect on the advanced societies,
making them more diverse, racially equal, tolerant, multicultural and
feminist – in key ways, more liveable for everyone. These social and
political changes have become intertwined with a kaleidoscopic and
immensely profitable expansion of choices and individual expressive-
ness, combining the old and the new freedoms and amenities into a
massive proliferation of new ‘lifestyles’ (a word of the times)
unknown fifty years ago: the most ordinary people can now combine
tattoos and pornography, the internet and smart phones, coffee
houses and art fairs, t-shirts and jeans, oral sex and divorce, yoga and
foreign travel, Twitter and Facebook, blogs and ‘your comments’ on
everything under the sun and an explosion of passion for gourmet
food and fine wines. Due to our own and others’ efforts, and due to
capitalism’s uncanny capacity to profitably meet and even more to
invent needs, the space in which so many of us move today is far
freer, more inclusive, more international, more interesting and
diverse, and humanly and socially richer than people like ourselves
would have imagined, on their way to a demonstration, forty or fifty
years ago.
It is difficult to separate the freedoms from today’s new technolo-
gies, which were once amazing but have of course now become
necessities of life, and all of these are firmly embedded in the con-
sumer society which has grown to levels never imagined by Sartre.
Some keys to understanding the consumer explosion are presented
by the great Sartrean André Gorz in his Critique of Economic Reason.
The first key is that advanced capitalism is no longer driven by meet-
ing human needs. Since the beginning of the consumer economy in
the golden age of 1945 to 1975, people’s vital needs have become
less and less the driving economic force, and capitalism’s own vital
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 Surviving the Neoliberal Maelstrom: A Sartrean Phenomenology of Social Hope

need to produce and market commodities has more and more be-
come that force. Thus, in order to generate profit and growth, capi-
talism has become a vast, self-sustaining, need-creating machine. In
other words, a point has been reached, according to Gorz, where
consumption is now ‘in the service of production’ which is in the
service of profit and growth. Production no longer has ‘the function
of satisfying existing needs in the most efficient way possible; on the
contrary, it [is] needs which ... increasingly have the function of
enabling production to keep growing’.1 Unlimited growth, fuelled
by constant product development and advertising, means that the
economy, which was once only a sub-system of social life with spe-
cific and necessary tasks to perform, in Gorz’s pregnant formulation,
‘swallows up all areas of social activity’.2
What is the result? Marx and Engels captured the system’s
dynamism in those several unforgettable paragraphs in The Commu-
nist Manifesto that famously climax with: ‘Constant revolutionising
of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,
everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois
epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with
their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are
swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they
can ossify. All that is solid melts into air...’.3 But they anticipated
human intervention – in a future when ‘man is at last compelled to
face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations
with his kind’.4 What if ‘man’ does no such thing? But what if,
especially under consumer capitalism, no oppositional force emerges
to face the ‘real conditions’ of people’s lives? What if that force
never mobilized sufficiently, or never became fully oppositional, or
diminished? Or if it eventually formed parties and movements with
only minimal goals – of controlling capitalism’s worst effects and
protecting its victims – knowing success for a brief time, and then
became defeated and demoralized? In short, what if Marx and
Engels’ description of the problem was correct, but the solution
misfired and capitalism arrogantly went back on the offensive? Then
the maelstrom they described would become the world’s permanent
state instead of being restrained and then mastered, and its domi-
nant ideology would become neoliberalism. Since Sartre’s death the
system’s priorities have powerfully continued to transform our nat-
ural, built, political, social and psychological space through its drive
for profits and growth. This drive increasingly subjects all corners of
existence to a kind of free-market totalitarianism where we meet
commodification at every turn. We live within and are shaped by a
– 23 –
 Ronald Aronson

maelstrom of progress driven by an uncontrolled force of expansion

that sweeps away everything in its path.
All physical and human environments are caught up within its
irresistible power. It increasingly seems as if no relationships, no
spaces, are exempt. Capitalism invades every nook and cranny of our
social, natural and psychological space. Everything is ripe for map-
ping, developing, marketing – from our once most-hidden feelings
to every square inch of what was once the wilderness. To Google
Map a geographic location can yield thrilling results, but it is not
innocent, turning everything into a potential source of profit, plac-
ing every space under surveillance.
In sum, since Sartre’s death we have seen the definitive triumph
of capitalism, the end of the ‘golden age’ when many in the working
class were able to achieve a middle-class standard of living, new free-
doms and equalities, new riches in every direction, new and obscene
inequalities, amazing information and communications technolo-
gies, and the economic system and the market coming to thor-
oughly dominate all else, yet deliberately placed out of control to
the point of threatening the ecosystem – all in the absence of coun-
tervailing social movements except for the evanescent Occupy. Cor-
responding to these features of the post-Sartrean world is the most
curious fact of all to even the most casual reader of Sartre: since
Margaret Thatcher’s rule a crude and primitive version of Sartrean
themes of individual responsibility, freedom and self-determination
has taken over the ideological and cultural stage, especially in the
U.S. and the U.K. For example, how bizarre it is that for three years
after the beginning of the global financial crisis and the Great Reces-
sion, the strongest protest movement in the U.S. was the Tea Party,
ranting about freedom, worshipping the individual and markets, and
demanding more of the same neoliberal policies that created the col-
lapse in the first place. Indeed, among Tea Party bloggers is some-
one who writes about ‘inherent autonomy’ – and signs his articles
with ‘Sartre’.
Sartre and the Tea Party? We should not be too surprised, recall-
ing student discussions of the arguments from Existentialism Is a
Humanism, because Sartre made major contributions to the con-
temporary understanding of the individual’s freedom, responsibility
and self-determination – and amplified these with attention-getting
statements such as ‘the slave in chains is free to break them’.5 How-
ever, the point is that Sartre’s career is relevant to us not as a source
of today’s ideology of near-absolute individual freedom and respon-
sibility, but as its refutation.
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 Surviving the Neoliberal Maelstrom: A Sartrean Phenomenology of Social Hope

In fact, if the central attitudinal and ideological features of the

neoliberal universe are to ignore oppression and inequality, to
encourage individuals to see themselves as isolated from each other,
responsible for their own fate and incapable of acting collectively,
Sartre is one of the last century’s main thinkers to turn to for guid-
ance in resisting this outlook. He provides important guides and
tools for organizing to confront the current capitalist maelstrom: (1)
he expresses fierce hatred of oppression of all sorts; (2) this philoso-
pher of individual freedom goes on to explore our social rootedness
– including many of the multiple ways in which we are conditioned
by forces beyond our control; and (3) most important, he offers
ways to understand how isolated individuals form into groups.
First of all, perhaps more impulse than tool, he provides a starting
point for all social and political analysis and activity with his fierce
hatred of oppression. Pre-dating his idea of freedom itself and ever
deepening to the end of his life, this hostility led him to make mis-
takes, but also propelled him to become one of the century’s great
moralists – very different from but certainly the equal of his onetime
friend Albert Camus. If choice, action and freedom were central to
Sartre, how do we think about individuals, movements and social sys-
tems that would seek to reduce or eliminate this capacity? Hence his
visceral fury towards demeaning attitudes and behaviours; towards
practices, such as torture, that try to reduce another person to the
status of a thing; towards systems that enshrine some people as having
rights over others. Even his early and most apolitical of books, Nau-
sea, conveys that fury – towards both the bourgeoisie of Bouville and
the Corsican guard at the library.
Second, it is Sartre’s very focus on the individual over a lifetime
that enables us to combat current ‘libertarian’ dogma. After all, where
is the free and self-determining individual located? In Being and Noth-
ingness he said that ‘there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a
situation only through freedom ... . There can be a free for-itself only
as engaged in a resisting world. Outside of this engagement the
notions of freedom, of determination, of necessity lose all meaning’.6
One’s situation – indeed, one’s very self – includes one’s class, race,
gender and family, all located in a specific history, and, as he says later,
all the various determinations which one internalizes and re-external-
izes as one’s project. That is why, beginning in 1947, the philosopher
of freedom published his essays under the title of Situations.
The most significant among these ten volumes and several indepen-
dent works explore how people shape themselves in oppressive situa-
tions, sometimes to the point of resistance: ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’,
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 Ronald Aronson

‘Black Orpheus’, ‘Colonialism Is a System’, his essay on torture, his

preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, ‘The Ghost of Stalin’
and ‘Communists and Peace’. This part of his work includes asking
how individuals shape themselves within their family, with all of its
specific historical, economic, social and gender determinations, as in
his biography of Flaubert. One of my favourite and the least noticed
among these writings is his brief preface to the psychiatrists Laing and
Cooper’s Reason and Violence, where he describes neurosis as the
‘path chosen by the organism in order to live an unliveable situation’.7
Taken together, this life’s work of explorations of individual self-deter-
mination within historical, social and family situations constitutes one
of the great intellectual adventures of the twentieth century.
In it the philosopher of individual responsibility takes Marxism on
board, understands racial oppression and colonialism and also takes
Freud on board. Never giving up his individual starting point and
sense of individual self-creation, never falling victim to a mechanistic
determinism, this Sartre is essential for combating the right-wing
myth – the lie, really – of unlimited economic and social freedom.
He stresses the reality of choice and responsibility within situations
over which we have no control, recognizing the force of situations
that limit choice but never eliminate it, not only directing and shap-
ing choice but shaping the tools with which we choose. Because he
too begins with freedom, Sartre helps us answer the libertarians’
decontextualized and primitive ideas of freedom with deeper and
richer understandings that point to the individual’s social situations.
Third, Sartre helps us towards another complex insight we vitally
need today: that the separate individuals produced in the conditions
in which we increasingly live can indeed overcome isolation and
form groups capable of collective action. This will be the heart of the
following discussion: my Sartrean phenomenology of social hope.
In Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre talks about being an
us-object – which he calls ‘seriality’ and I call the phenomenon of
‘usness’ – in socially imposed arrangements in which each of us acts
alongside others but in isolation from them. Waiting for a bus in an
orderly queue is one example; listening to the Top Forty is another.
Engaging in market transactions and relationships would be another.
The state of ‘usness’, of a passive and externally determined collectiv-
ity, is our customary social experience, whose outer limits we reach
in highly charged but still serial moments of national tragedy, sport-
ing events and elections. We were all there in the financial crisis of
autumn 2008 – separated and isolated individuals united, holding
our breath and fearfully watching what would happen. In the
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 Surviving the Neoliberal Maelstrom: A Sartrean Phenomenology of Social Hope

thought-experiment that is the Critique, Sartre points out that this

state of separation and passivity, which he argues is normally charac-
teristic even of the proletariat, may break down under conditions of
threat or need. If the bus does not arrive we may disperse, or we may
form ourselves into a group trying to do something about the situa-
tion. The fusing group begins there. Or it begins with a few workers
grumbling about their working conditions, when one of them sug-
gests that maybe they ‘should do something about it’ and someone
else offers their apartment to hold a meeting to talk further. Or it
begins when someone contacts a group of friends and neighbours
about organizing a community meeting to discuss the impending
war, and then they set a date and reserve a room at the local library
for a meeting. On 13 July 2011 Adbusters issued a call: ‘On Septem-
ber 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan,
set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for
a few months’.8 This was followed of course by weeks of intense
planning by activists and, when the date came, lo, and behold!
Thousands of people took over Zucotti Park in lower Manhattan and
then the movement spread to millions of others acting similarly
around the world.
For over two centuries the constantly assembling, fragmenting
and regathering ‘wes’ of the Left have done similarly, generating,
contributing to and inspired by the hope of creating a better world,
usually in highly specific ways. In the process of participating or
identifying with such a movement, we change by becoming a ‘we’,
both in our being and our perception. This is both an ontological
and an epistemological transformation. Separated and isolated to
start with, we make ourselves members of a larger entity, drawing
power from that, having responsibility towards it and experiencing
ourselves within it. We carry out tasks for the group. Our active, col-
lective stance generates a sense that it is possible to alter social reality
and so recasts situations and relationships that once seemed fixed
and blocked. The very existence of a ‘we’ overcomes the passivity in
isolation in which its members found themselves before they came
together and brought it into being. By contesting existing social
structures and practices, the ‘we’ demands that things be fairer, more
humane, more equal, more democratic. It demands peace, trade
unions, water, shelter, a safe environment. We thus challenge the
dominant system of power, those who benefit from it and those who
control it. In so acting we sense the possibility of things being differ-
ent, and we experience our own power to make it so. Self-empow-
ered, we willingly contest those who have power over us. Solidarity –
– 27 –
 Ronald Aronson

each for each other, all for each and each for all – replaces individual
self-seeking as our social norm. And we draw upon and contribute to
a new current of aspirations and morality. This can eventually
become wider than our own ‘we’; it can be seen to stretch back in
time and shape our present as well as forecasting a better future for
everyone. In creating ourselves as a movement, then, we create a
kind of hope that did not exist: social hope.
This remarkable change in our being is accompanied by a no less
remarkable change in our perception. By becoming collective actors
opposing ourselves to dominant actors, we are keen to find their
weaknesses and resistances as well as our own strengths and the
objective possibilities of winning. The once fixed and frozen field
before us becomes redefined as our practical one, and once we be-
come its active agents our adversaries lose their apparent autonomy,
their quality of givenness. We analyse them in terms of their pur-
poses, strengths and vulnerabilities. The complex historical and social
field is no longer simply an immovable fact of life but now becomes
a series of guides, helps and obstacles. Once viewed individually and
passively, formerly overwhelming forces now become antagonists to
be overcome or circumvented. Once-fixed situations become experi-
enced as fluid and subject to change. This may be a psychological
change, but not only: this change in how we see is also a change in
what we see. We recognize social arrangements, ‘the way things are’,
as humanly created – and look for the ways to change these. My own
horizon now widens well beyond myself – the ‘we’ becomes a locus
of perception and engine of action, becoming an energetic force,
engaged in changing the situation.
To a sceptic with no memory of such an experience or one who is
unable to imagine it, it may sound implausible that the impotence of
scattered individuals can give way to an empowered sense of ‘we’. It
may seem far-fetched that the formerly powerless can generate some-
thing new, social hope, by acting together. In the Critique Sartre
talks about the storming of the Bastille in July 1789. There have
been many other dramatic moments when everything seems to come
together: a collective will, its power and the sense of possibility it
generates. One such moment was the early morning of 5 December
1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, when the buses rolled from black
neighbourhoods to the rest of the city completely empty. The boy-
cott was succeeding – no one got on the bus. Another, less well
known, was the pageant in which Paterson Silk workers themselves
enacted the story of their strike in drama and music before an over-
flow crowd in Madison Square Garden on the evening of 7 June
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 Surviving the Neoliberal Maelstrom: A Sartrean Phenomenology of Social Hope

1913. And yes, many of us can recall the images in 1994, still posted
on YouTube, of newly empowered citizens queuing in long lines to
vote in the first free South African elections.
Inspired by the enormously successful – but still to be completed
– worldwide campaign for nuclear disarmament as well as by Sartre, I
wrote the following many years ago, and it forms the core of my cur-
rent project of social hope.
Acting collectively not only redefines the situation: it does so in ways that
transform the participants themselves, creating and allowing the experi-
ence of a totally different reality. Such a new reality was produced on 12
June 1982 by the nearly one million people who streamed into New York
from all over the United States to demand an end to the threat of nuclear
war. ... [B]y coming together they created new possibilities of perception.
... [T]heir assemblage made possible the collective sharing of a collective
problem: we are being threatened. Normally the isolated individual can-
not experience this. Collective perception, the possibility of collective
experience, reveals our world as ours in a way usually inaccessible to sepa-
rate atoms, no matter how politicised. Those who filled Central Park that
day, awed by their sheer numbers, were able to give voice and hearing to
those layers of their experience and reality which normally remain closed,
lacking appropriate categories of thought and feeling. These collective
modes of experience and perception point to the peculiar reality created
by our assemblage: we, a collective subject.
This we is a subjective-objective force in the world which not only
restructures habits of perception and experience, but … changes the world
itself. Participants on 12 June 1982 could not fail to be struck the
moment they arrived by the superb self-organization of the demonstra-
tion, down to the slightest detail. One’s bus arrived at a pre-designated
location, marshals stood at the subways to tell people which way to go. It
was, indeed, a self-organisation aided by local officials, who seemingly had
no choice but to assist the planners so that the hundreds of thousands
could enter and leave the city smoothly. One had the sense that much of
the business of New York came to a halt that day, allowing the demonstra-
tion to ‘take over’. Could the awareness of their own collective power be
missed by the participants? Certainly this was one reason for their great
good cheer, connected as it was with their perception of how many and
how diverse they were. On this level it was entirely appropriate that the
sense of collectivity may have eclipsed their motivation for being there,
and that for many the mere warmth of community was the strongest
impression they carried home. The warmth with which strangers greeted
each other – moving towards the demonstration, in restaurants around the
city afterwards – was not just that of people sharing a goal. It was the
warmth of a self-activating we[,] aware of their numbers and potential
power, above all of a we sharing a specific goal: the peaceable kingdom.
The widespread sense of joy no doubt sprang from this, the momentary
appearance, among, between and through the demonstrations, of the
peaceable kingdom.9

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 Ronald Aronson

Such electrifying moments capture, in especially striking ways, the

spirit and meaning of a movement. They all contain self-organiza-
tion, solidarity and the ingenuity of ordinary people: however spo-
radically and even momentarily, people live differently, become
different.
The career of Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots shows dramati-
cally another striking feature of social hope generated by such a
movement: it can become contagious, as movements encourage
other movements. It happened in 1848, 1917, 1936 – and, as Sartre
pointed out in the neglected but essential interview with Rosanna
Rossanda, in 1968. ‘Who would have thought’, he said there, ‘that
14,000,000 peasants would be able to resist the greatest industrial
and military power in the world?’10 The example spread to the New
Left in the United States, the U.K. and France and to ‘Socialism
with a Human Face’ in Czechoslovakia. One of its great moments
was during May and June 1968, when the movement, beginning at
the Sorbonne, inspired a strike of ten million workers that paralysed
all of France. Something similar, but different, happened again in
1989 and 2011. Increasingly, people halfway around the earth
strongly affect those who would do something similar here, over-
coming seriality and passivity, generating a sense of ‘we’, crystallizing
the will to act. Inspired by them, we now think that we can do like-
wise and that our situation is as ripe for change as theirs. The Gen-
eral Motors strike in Flint, Michigan in 1936–1937 spurred a wave
of sit-down strikes throughout American industry involving, in the
words of its historian, ‘every conceivable type of worker – kitchen
and laundry workers in the Israel-Zion Hospital in Brooklyn, pencil
makers, janitors, dog-catchers, newspaper pressmen, sailors, tobacco
workers, Woolworth girls, rug weavers, hotel and restaurant employ-
ees, pie bakers, watchmakers, garbage collectors, Western Union
messengers, opticians, and lumbermen’.11
It is clear from our own experience, most recently Occupy, that
the ‘we’ of a movement is not necessarily the spontaneous coming
together of individuals who find themselves at the same place at a
given moment or with the same needs or the same consciousness of
what must be done. It may, in many ways, be the more or less delib-
erate product of a team actively planning for months or years, as with
Greenham Common and the anti-nuclear demonstrations of the
1980s, in 2010 and 2011 in Tahrir Square, or the coming together
of smaller coherent groups at the right moment, such as those
labour activists, most of them socialists and communists, who
together planned that Flint Sit-Down strike at General Motors.
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 Surviving the Neoliberal Maelstrom: A Sartrean Phenomenology of Social Hope

Sartre understood this in his discussions of the Communist Party in

‘The Communists and Peace’.
Each movement I have mentioned is embedded in a patient strug-
gle, belonging to a longer story. The Montgomery Bus Boycott
wore on for thirteen months in 1955–1956 and in any case its vic-
tory only presaged the struggles to come years later; the Paterson
Silk strikers managed to hold out for five months before the strike
collapsed. The anti-nuclear campaign spread and expanded for forty
years before reaching its peak intensity and its very partial victory.
And the great South African moment is rooted in a history that dates
back at least to the beginning of the African National Congress in
1912, its Defiance Campaign in 1952 and its armed struggle, begin-
ning in 1961.
Unity becomes a key theme of such movements because this is
never a given and often has to be forged over time, as well as experi-
enced at seemingly apocalyptic moments, and because the tendency
to fragment is so strong. As Sartre later describes it, ‘Even a fused
group – for instance a factory which is on strike – is continually sub-
jected and weighted down by serialised relations … . The same
worker who finds himself in a fused group at his place of work may
be completely serialised when he is at home or at other moments of
his life’.12 The South African and U.S. Civil Rights struggles went on
for years, each with many leaderships competing, sometimes vio-
lently, movements constantly recomposing and disintegrating, and
would-be leading organizations in constant disagreement, discour-
aged by tactical and strategic mistakes – yet without ever losing a
strong degree of coherence, energy and will. Obviously, then, indi-
viduals and contending groups may have sharply different interests
and perceptions not only of movements’ goals but also of what to do
and how to do it. Despite this, the movements mentioned here did
manage to achieve many of their goals.
I wish I could stop Sartre’s analysis right here. The point about
overcoming impotence and isolation by participating in effective
collectivities is clearly made. These collectivities have changed our
world profoundly. But Sartre, and history, will not allow us a happy
ending. To his credit, Sartre insists on letting the twentieth century
have its way.
He stresses that the ‘we’ that forms in such situations is not some-
thing mystical or magical. Nor is it a hyper-organism, a self-sustain-
ing being moving on its own beyond the individuals who make it up.
He points out that shortly after forming themselves, the members of
a group discover the need to pledge themselves to it in order to sus-
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 Ronald Aronson

tain it beyond that moment. This act of consolidation happens freely

and spontaneously, but the collective decision begins to impose a
weight on the members, including assigning responsibilities for
maintaining the collectivity and sanctions for failing to do so. So
begins the practice and process of the group’s institutionalization. In
thus working on the group itself, a stable leadership will be created,
if it did not already exist, and its members will assert the group’s
imperatives on each other and everyone else. For Sartre, this is the
process through which a revolutionary group passes – for the sake of
its survival becoming an ever-more rigid institution; becoming more
and more oppressive; in the Soviet Union, under conditions of civil
war, encirclement, isolation and profound scarcity, eventually becom-
ing a dictatorship. Stalin’s ascendancy and then Stalinism were the
result of the Bolshevik Revolution trying to survive in that place
under those conditions.13
Accordingly, as Sartre analyses it in the searching Rossanda inter-
view, a ‘we’, this locus of hope, is always a work in progress, and
keeping it unified is as essential as the movement’s outward thrust.
Struggling against a well-organized social system, some form of
counter-organization, perhaps even a party, is needed, but ‘the prob-
lem is to know how to prevent that counter-organisation from dete-
riorating by becoming an institution’.14 It is, he insists, a problem
still to be solved. Perhaps we should leave it there for now: groups
will continue to form, especially insofar as we serialized individuals
find ourselves threatened by the social system that keeps us sepa-
rated. And that is my main point: even under conditions of neoliber-
alism, individuals taught to see themselves as being completely on
their own can and will become movements, can become a force to
change history, have done so and will continue to do so.

RONALD ARONSON is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the His-

tory of Ideas at Wayne State University. His most recent publications,
among many on Sartre, are We Have Only This Life to Live: The
Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975, co-edited and intro-
duced with Adrian van den Hoven, and an article on ‘Marcuse Today’
in the Boston Review.

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 Surviving the Neoliberal Maelstrom: A Sartrean Phenomenology of Social Hope

Notes

1. André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason (London: Verso, 1989), 114.

2. Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, 121. Habermas has something similar in
mind when he talks about the ‘colonization of the lifeworld’ in Theory of Com-
municative Action, Volume 2 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 154.
3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (with an introduction
by AJP Taylor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 83.
4. Ibid., 83.
5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology,
translated by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 550.
6. Ibid., 489.
7. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Preface’ in R.D. Laing and D.G. Cooper, Reason and Violence:
A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy, 1950-1960 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1964), 7.
8. Weblink: https://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/occupywallstreet.
html.
9. Ronald Aronson, The Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope (London: Verso,
1984), 300–301.
10. Jean-Paul Sartre, 'France: Masses, Spontaneity, Party', in Ralph Miliband and
John Saville, The Socialist Register (London: Merlin, 1970), 219.
11. Sidney Fine, Sit-Down (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 331.
12. Sartre, ‘France: Masses, Spontaneity, Party’, 234.
13. See Ronald Aronson, Sartre’s Second Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987).
14. Sartre, ‘France: Masses, Spontaneity, Party’, 241.

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