JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Politics307country caused the war to fail, and the war resulted only in aggravating and consolidatingthis division.Thus man makes History; this means that he objectifies himself in it and is alienatedin it. In this sense History, which is the proper work of all activity and of all men,appears to men as a foreign force exactly insofar as they do not recognise the meaningof their enterprise (even when locally successful) in the total, objective result. Bymaking a separate peace, the peasants of a certain province won—so far as they wereconcerned. But they weakened their class, and its defeat was to be turned back againstthem when the landholders, sure of their strength, would deny their pledges. Marxismin the nineteenth century is a gigantic attempt not only to make History but to get agrip on it, practically and theoretically, by uniting the workers’ movement and byclarifying the Proletariat’s action through an understanding both of the capitalistprocess and of the workers’ objective reality. At the end of this effort, by the unificationof the exploited and by the progressive reduction of the number of classes in thestruggle, History was finally to have a meaning for man. By becoming conscious ofitself, the Proletariat becomes the subject of History; that is, it must recognize itself inHistory. Even in the everyday struggle the working class must obtain results conformingto the objective aimed at, the consequences of which will at least never be turned backagainst it.We are not at this point yet. There is more than one Proletariat, simply becausethere are national production groups which have developed differently. Not to recognizethe solidarity of these Proletariats would be as absurd as to underestimate theirseparation. It is true that the violent divisions and their theoretical consequences (thedecay of bourgeois ideology, the temporary arrest of Marxism) force our period tomake itself without knowing itself. On the other hand, although we are more than eversubject to these limitations, it is not true that History appears to us as an entirely alienforce. Each day with our hands we make it something other than what we believe weare making it. And History, backfiring, makes us other than we believe ourselves to beor to become. Yet it is less opaque than it was. The Proletariat has discovered andreleased “its secret”; the capitalist movement is conscious of itself, both as the resultof the capitalists’ own self-study and through the research carried on by theoreticiansin the workers’ movement. For each one, the multiplicity of groups, their contradictionsand their separations, appear situated within more profound unifications. Civil war,colonial war, foreign war, are manifested to all, under cover of the usual mythologies,as different and complementary forms of a single class struggle. It is true that themajority of socialist countries do not know themselves; and yet de-Stalinization—asthe example of Poland shows— is also a progress toward the attainment of awareness.