THE CRISIS IN COMMUNISM
89
are right subjectively. In so far as there is such a thing as a Marxist
culture-and according to Sartre this is the only possible one today–
it can be fostered, he said, only outside the party, not within its ranks.
Jean-Paul Sartre is mentioned here not because we believe he has
made any worthwhile contributions to political thinking, but because
he is the most famous and the most prominent of the "Mandarins,"
who--whether they were existentialists, Christians, or Progressives–
approved almost everything the Party did, but justified their approval
by arguments different from those supplied by Party intellectuals,
couched in a different terminology. The greatest respect for the Party
strategists and contempt for the Party thinkers were for Sartre, as for
this entire group, compatible. The Party was never fully pleased with
Sartre-he was too complex, too unpredictable. But at a time when
the intellectuals had begun more or less quietly to move away from
Party organizations such as the National Writers' Committee, he was
their only important new recruit. When dozens of writers resigned
from this committee because it refused to take a stand on the doctors'
plot in Moscow and to condemn the anti-Semitic statements made in
connection with it, Sartre thought the moment opportune to have him–
self elected a member of its executive board. Earlier, in his book on
Jean Genet, Sartre had given a long-winded existentialist psychoanalysis
of the "traitor," in which Trotsky, Bukharin, and Rajk figure, in the
most matter-of fact fashion, as historical examples.
In order not to appear to contradict himself in this new role (in
this, peculiarly enough, he imitated the behavior of a character in
Koestler's novel about the future, published four years earlier), he tried
to prevent his play
Les Mains Sales
from being produced at the time
he was playing a star role on the Peace Committee in Vienna. Then
he went to the Soviet Union, where he discovered that the Soviet
citizens were objective in their thinking- not personal, like the decadent
Westerners-and for that reason never criticized governments. This was
evidence, he reported, that they had their minds on science, not on
gossip. This was shortly before the Khrushchev speech. But even after
that speech Sartre broke with the well-known Marxist Pierre Naville,
whom Herve defended against him. Such breaks with friends and collab–
orators have marked the entire history of Sartre's magazine
Les Temps
Modernes-from
the dispute with Rousset, who spoke of Russian forced
labor "at the wrong time," to the break with the philosopher Merleau–
Ponty, who dared to revise the Communist doctrine. After so many
breaks, it only remained for Sartre to break with Communism and his
own interpretation of it, and this he did when, upset by the Hungarian
