of Stalin,” to explain his move. Spread over three issues of his journal
(November 1956 –January 1957 ), it called for the de-Stalinization of the
PCF while arguing that the Party, nonetheless, remained the best hope
for the proletariat. Besides the exorcism of the ghost of Stalin and the
establishing of common cause with other parties of the Left, Sartre even
included the Socialist Party (SFIO), which, in a not conciliatory interview
inL’Express, at the same time, he described as the party of “those who
torture in Algeria.”^26
There were three other revolutions that drew Sartre’s considerable
attention during these twelve years: the war in Vietnam, especially the
American involvement, which lead him to participate in the Russell
War Crimes Trial; the Algerian War of Independence; and the Cuban
revolution. Each could be considered the fruit of colonialism or neoco-
lonialism and, as such, eliciting the same disgust that we noted the young
Sartre harbored toward colonialism, especially with the French presence
in Algeria, long before he was ever “politicized.” More recently, he
had written that colonialism is a system of impersonal, structural rules
and associated practices. One could apply to it what he remarked about
another system, capitalism: “the meanness is in the system” (CP 183 ).
We shall see that the defining feature of Sartrean existentialism, even
if it is attenuated during his years of fellow-traveling with the PCF, is
a certainirreducibilitythat he reserves for the responsible individual.
Only in theCritique of Dialectical Reasonwill he fashion the social onto-
logy to support that position, but we can safely modify his claim just
mentioned about these social structures and institutions: The meanness
is (not entirely) in the system. Whether it be the “two hundred families”
(NE 415 ) that, in popular opinion, moved their money to Swiss accounts
when the Socialists came to power in 1936 , thereby weakening the
government, or the racist attitudes and practices that sustained the
workings of neocolonialism in 1950 s Algeria, the appeal to system
or “structural necessity,” in Sartre’s view, will not excuse the populace.
As he says or implies in his many essays and interviews on social issues,
“We are all guilty.” Whether it be our lack of concern for the structural
injustices of a corrupt regime in Cuba, our sympathy with the actions
of our national armies in Algeria or Vietnam, our unwillingness to
(^26) Ian Birchall,Sartre against Stalinism(New York: Berghahn. 2004 ), 169.
304 Means and ends: political existentialism