he asks whether contemporary writers should offer their services to the
Communist Party in order to reach the masses, and responds with an
unqualifiedno. As he explains: “The politics of Stalinist Communism is
incompatible with the decent (honneˆte) exercise of the literary profes-
sion” (Sit ii: 280 ). He goes on to stress the ambiguity of a party
that proclaims revolution while defending its own material interests
and those of the Soviet Union. In effect, it has become “conservative”
and even a “reactionary” entity. Sartre mentions the Party’s vilification
of Nizan as evidence of its tendency to slander rather than openly discuss
the merits of a case. And his appeal to the vested interests of the Party
itself anticipates the reason why he will disassociate himself from it after
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. His reason is captured
in the title of his essay: “The Communists are Afraid of Revolution.”
As he explains elsewhere, “It is not our fault if the PC is no longer a
revolutionary Party” (Sitii: 287 ).
But the problem of means–ends, of morality and politics, continues to
insinuate itself inWhat is Literature?The writer must live the tension
between fact and value, the given and the taken that defines the human
situation as such. Applied to the political realm, this raises the seemingly
irreconcilable opposition between revolutionary action and moral respect
for the individual agent. Given the audience he is addressing, Sartre
proposes a literary commitment that maneuvers between Communist
propaganda and bourgeois neocapitalism, writing directly for the mass
media: the film, which he had been doing even during the occupation,
and the radio, as he would try to do with a series of radio presentations
that the team ofLes Temps Modernesbroadcast on national radio entitled
La Tribune des Temps modernes(The Modern Times Rostrum). The latter
produced nine broadcasts, starting in October of 1947 in its attempt
to promote the “third way” between Gaullism and Communism that
was about to be sketched by the RDR in the following months.
Sartre addresses the means–ends problem clearly toward the conclu-
sion ofWL:
Such is the present paradox of ethics; if I am absorbed in treating a few chosen
persons as absolute ends...if I am bent on fulfilling all my duties towards them,
I shall spend my life doing so; I shall be ledto pass over in silencethe injustices of the
age, the class struggle, colonialism, anti-Semitism, etc., finally, totake advantage
of oppression in order to do good.
(WL 221 , emphasis his)
Political existentialism (1947–1952) 297