Table Of ContentThe Alter-Globalization Movement
and Sartre’s M orality and History
Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone
No war lor petrol.
— Demonstrator’s sign in Karachi, Pakistan, 15 February 2003
An anarchist society is one in which man no longer has power over man but
over things. In today’s societies man is considered as an object, a means, and
wealth as an end. So for the moment it is a matter of constructing groups that
intend to live and think outside of power, and that seek to destroy the idea
of power in each other. These would be communities which have power over
things, but never over men.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, interview dated 1 November 19791
Alongside recent world-historical dates such as 11 September 2001, we would
place 15 February 2003. On that day, around 10 million people—some esti
mates are much higher—demonstrated on the streets of the world’s cities in
opposition to the US war on Iraq, then being merely threatened. The simulta
neity and scale of the event were unique in that no annual international holi
day, such as Ramadan or May Day or Christmas, was being observed. Rather,
the worldwide demonstration was a spontaneous intervention in that normal
flow', carried out in a single day in over 800 cities around the planet. Hailed by
prominent philosophers, February 15 was the largest anti-war demonstration in
history and the first global one.2
Is there anything we can learn from such events, and from Jean-Paul Sartre’s
thought, by inquiring into the pertinence—and limits—of the latter in under
standing today’s movements and February 15 in particular? We doubt Sartre’s
epoch was so dominated by the Cold War as to render him useless. But there
is a risk in attributing a transhistorical foresight to a thinker who wrote for his
Sartre Studies International, Volume 11, Issues 1 & 2, 2005, 265-285
266 I Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone
epoch. As participants in February 15 and in the movements from which it
sprang, we have sought not to “apply” Sartre but to use some of his notions in
framing for ourselves what we are about. Here the danger is misusing texts. YVe
find the unpublished Morality and History most directly useful, but those who
study it will likely improve on our results. If our interpretations are helpful to
others in or outside these movements, we will have avoided the risk of “apply
ing” Sartre. Bur we will note commonalities (and differences) between our two
epochs that allow us to allow him to speak to us.
We offer not so much arguments as hypotheses from an engaged perspec
tive, which will be justified only if they shed more light than confusion. Sartre’s
study of the elements of history in Critique of Dialectical Reason and its unpub
lished ethical sequel, Morality and History, illuminate, and are illuminated by,
the movements that contest today’s global system. From the Critique, we’ll
engage his notions of negative universality as threat of death and the “fus
ing” of “series” into “groups” as response. From Morality and History, we’ll
take “integral humanity” as a goal and standard; it seems to us built into the
global act of February 15 and into the wider movement of which that day was
a moment. After comparing a Sartrean take on February 15 with the famous
Habermas-Derrida appeal inspired by that day, we’ll close with some reciprocal
illuminations between Sartre’s theories and Zapatista practice.
A Period of Fusion
History shows, according to Sartre, that collective praxis ranges between the
extremes of “series” and “groups.” Such ensembles may co-exist in an epoch
or even in a factory.3 The “cool” series is the ground from which partici
pants “fuse” into groups to contest oppression.4 In history’s rare revolutionary
moments, “warm” groups dominate, as they resist the “negative universality”
of broad threats.5 Once such groups vanquish their oppressors, however, they
tend to sink by stages of bureaucratization back into serialiry. A victorious
group will try to preserve its fusion by mutual pledges. Seeking its own sur
vival amidst the overall scarcity typical of history to date, its members’ mutual
pledges harden into hierarchical “institutions” held together by “serialized
terror” (CDR 123, 658). Examples of the latter are Communist parties and
modern business corporations. So long as scarcity' prevails, any groups that
arise may be “pulled” back into seriality (CDR 260, 348, 739). Such forms
then repeat. This cycle can in principle be interrupted by abolishing scarcity.
Sartre’s paradigm of fusion is the response of Paris’s Sr. Antoine quarter on 14
July 1789 to the threat of being massacred as “bandits” by the king’s troops.
Serialized crowds of frightened individuals presented themselves at arsenals to
get weapons. Being mistakenly treated as a purposeful group, they were given
the weapons; to save their lives, they therefore began acting as a group (CDR
355). The rest is history. Our first hypothesis, then, is that since February 15
unfolded according to a more or less Sartrean scenario, the event, in which 10
million participated, could signal a “fusing” of humanity into a global group.
'I be Alter -Globalization Movement I 267
First of all, the day’s demonstration had been assembled to contest global
threats that impose more than one sort of “negative universality.” The protest
had been prepared in movements that since the mid-1990s had opposed cor
porate globalization. The term “corporate globalization” designates policies
that privatize public goods and open markets in virtually all economies to
profitable operations by multi national corporations, on penalty of bad credit
ratings with international financial institutions—all backed, ultimately, by the
US military.6 The February 1S protest was first widely discussed at the Euro
pean Social Forum in Florence in November 2002 (which we participated
in). A mere month before it took place, the event was planned in detail at the
World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Global protests had grown in scale
and trenchancy, from 10,000 at the first World Social Forum in 2001 to over
100,000 in 2003. The movement first called itself “counter globalization” and
then, in 2002, “anti-capitalist.” In effecting fundamental change, however, it
was determined to avoid the mistakes of socialism.
Sartre’s ethical writings of the mid 1960s had this same aim. In Critique of
Dialectical Reason, he noted that sweeping threats impose commonalities on
strangers, occasioning resistance. If this resistance is collective, it points not
merely to replacing the threatener in a new system but to an inclusive solidarity
“beyond all systems,” as Sartre puts it in Morality and History, Version I: The 1964
Rome Dcturtr (38-39/28).7 Resistance alone posits an end that systems themselves
(including socialisms) arc meant to serve. They may therefore be judged suc
cessful or wanting in achieving it. Sartre’s examples of pervasive threats include,
besides Louis XVI’s troops mentioned above, the H-bomb in the 1950s, and the
colonial system that dominated Algeria for a hundred years (74/56). All “total
ize” with a threat of death. The H-bomb, uniting all under a common threat and
imposing a collective will to escape catastrophe, makes “the human species ... no
longer a biological but a historical, social, political term.”8
Humanity is a potential victim in such cases, whereas February 15 estab
lished the possibility of its agency. Corporate globalization had been a necessary
but not sufficient occasion for protest. When the threat of w ar by the US was
added, the combination was outrageous—at least as determined by the upris
ing that day. Corporate globalization had destroyed much local production for
local markets, throwing millions of peasants off the land and into cities already
choked with the unemployed, where public goods, underfunded if not already
sold, could not meet the exploding needs.9 In such a “free market,” to threaten
oil-rich Iraq, with neither authorization nor clear justification, seemed to the
sign-carrier in our epigraph a use of US military dominance to seize a major
natural resource.10 US invasion could then happen almost anywhere, a threat
made credible by the US’s military presence on every continent, encompassing
a global network of 715 military bases, with 254,788 military personnel in 153
countries.11 But as we write, w'hy is the occupation continuing? The war is won,
Saddam is out, the threat is zero, control of oil is bringing no obvious benefits,
costs are mounting daily, torture is bringing ignominy on the US, and Israel is
not obviously safer. Looking at the roughly comparable early years of the Viet
nam war, Sartre had explained it in terms of its “admonitory value” to all others
268 I Hctsy Howman ami Hob Stone
besides the Vietnamese. By analogy, the Iraq war would be a warning that (as
Sartre wrote in 1966) “six percent of mankind hopes to succeed in controlling
the other ninety-four percent at a reasonably low cost in money and effort.'”12
We believe that such an element of sheer threat to the world is among war
goals. Perhaps expecting this kind of replay of Vietnam, multitudes protested
together on 15 February 2003 at the same level as the new threat.
Militarized corporate globalization has met two forms of resistance. The
most media-visible form is that of punctual protests like February 15. These
embrace both solidarity-building gatherings such as World Social Forums and
massive protests held at meeting sites of the architects of globalization: the
World Trade Organization (Seattle 1999), the International Monetary Fund
and World Bank (Washington 2000), the G8 (Genoa 2001), and the World
Economic Forum (Cancun 2003). Less visible bur more pervasive is direct resis
tance to globalization in the form of ongoing struggles by those excluded from
consumption, who are creating new economic structures in order to survive. In
this latter group arc Argentina’s factory occupations and Zapatista communities,
as well as movements defending the environment, spreading cooperatives, and
replacing free trade with fair trade. In 1996, the punctual side of alter-globaliza
tion movements was born from their ongoing-struggle side at the first Zapatista
encuentro, which drew 5,000 to Chiapas, including many foreign supporters.
The second encuentro in 1997 in Spain drew half again as many and gave birth
to Peoples’ Global Action, a major planner of the Seattle 1999 protest.13 On the
protest side, Stephen Gill holds that “new ... forms of global political agency”
were born on February 15.14 Was a global “fusing group” among them?
Before answering, we need to clarify our terms, for Sartrcan “fusion” can
be misunderstood. To say “the people have taken the Bastille” or “the people
opposed the war” implies no melding of subjectivities or fascist hyper-organicism.
“Fusion” is of actions and not agents, and consists of the real convergence of
diverse actions on a single goal (CDR 392-393). It is constituted by “rota
tion” in the crowd of what Sartre calls the “third.” This is the capacity of each
participant to grasp or “totalize” the group she or he also partly constitutes. It
is implicit in jointly realizing common goals, whether in solitude or in the pres
ence of the group. In storming the Bastille, the individual who gives the mot
d'ordre, “turn here,” totalizes the group, whose response is a retotalization.
Each participant is a leader and can count on every other participant to lead.
The remarkably short period between the conception of February 15 and its
execution—a mere two months—indicates a pervasive readiness to act on the
digital equivalent of a Sartrcan mot d’ordre, a solidarity among dispersed and
very different groups based on free choice.
Are we facing a movement or several movements? At social forums, one
finds representatives of coalitions for peace, abolishing sweatshops, spread
ing cooperatives, women’s rights, indigenous rights, protecting rain forests,
reforming corporations, and stopping global warming, to name a few'. Deter
mining whether “it” is one or many and whether its theme is global justice or
alter-globalization reflects an overall problem of description. The problem may
in turn exist because w'e are in a period of fusion, a passage from fragmentation
the Alter-GLibaltzation Movement I 269
to integration, from global series to global group. Various “totalizations” are
afoot. First are those of movements that plan and act together. Regions totalize
and retotalize themselves as in the European Social Forum (Florence, Novem
ber 2002), followed by an Asian Social Forum (Hyderabad, India, January
2003), a Mediterranean Social Forum (Barcelona, March 2003), and a Social
Forum of the Americas (Quito, Ecuador, July 2004). The World Social Forums
and February 15 are global totalizations. “One no, many yeses,” a major slo
gan, betokens the movements’ forward motion even without doctrinal agree
ment or a common political program. But this slogan also raises the question
of whether there is a shared goal.
We have elsewhere argued that while May in France may have been the peak
protest of 1968, that year was characterized by “rotating” uprisings around the
world. F^ach “retotalized” earlier ones in cross-border “fusion” that resisted
repressive systems, East and West, with a new global collective agency,15 despite
the agents of such fusings being separated by distance and culture (CDR 309,
631-632). The protests peaked in the year 1968 when television allowed us
to see contemporary masses in motion across the globe, radically extending
distances over which fusing occurred. One historian recently called 1968 “the
first global year.”16 In 2003, new technologies allowed more coordination over
even vaster distances. Collaborations that in the 1960s took a year are com
pressed by World Social Forums into mere days.17 Compared with 1968, the
“fusion” of February 15 expressed a planet-sized group far more completely
and coherently. And just as the demand for self-management (autogestion)
appeared in France with no preparation, so today’s movements—which char
acterize themselves as social rather than political—have by-passed established
parties and unions to invent alternative economic practices.
As Sartre wrote Morality and History, 40 years before February 15, the world
had witnessed successful insurgencies in China (1949), Cuba (1959), Algeria
(1962), and Vietnam, with the last in progress. It was arguably history’s first
period of consciously global struggles for liberation. We have for two decades
now witnessed new efforts to globalize “from below” against a new order from
above. With important differences, today’s struggles echo and speed up that
first effort. Does Sartre’s “socialist ethics,” aimed at helping insurgents avoid
errors of Soviet socialism, still speak to us?
The persistence of imperialism connects our era with Sartre’s. He saw tran
sitions from colonial imperialism to neo-colonial economic imperialism (i.e.,
without dc jure colonies). Neo colonialism still permeates US economic rela
tions with Latin American countries, Japan’s with several South Asian countries,
and Europe’s with many African countries.M But since the 1980s, a neo-neo
colonial imperialism on a global scale has increasingly overlain its predeces
sor. In it, economic domination of the poor of all nations—including wealthy
ones—is exercised by threats to decapitalize. The threats emanate from global
finance, their local collaborators, and their interlocking support institutions:
IMF, WTO, APFLC, OECD, NAFTA. On top of older methods of armed
extraction and unequal exchange, the new extortion of market-opening con
cessions increases misery as it eases market entry and exit by multi-national
270 I Relay Bowman and Rob Stone
corporations.19 The US military assures undisturbed capital flows by common
consent of the former colonial powers, though some feel it has overplayed this
role since September 11. “Colonialism is a system,” Sartre said famously of
France’s domination of Algeria.20 “Colonialism is a p rax ishe added in 1964
in Morality and History, Version 1(74/56; Sartre’s emphasis). Far from contra
dicting the first, the latter statement points to its foundation. The oppression
of conquest and occupation are practices necessary for an ongoing process of
racist super-exploitation. This “praxis-process” system has two sides, oppression
and exploitation, whose combined operation turn even the purest intentions
of its beneficiaries to opposite effects (CDR 339, 789). The colonial system
had pitted super-exploited indigenous workers against merely exploited French
workers. Our global neo-neo-colonial system maintains subject governments in
debt peonage by force of arms, pitting the super-exploited of the global South
against the merely exploited of the global North, on penalty of capital flight
and unemployment. The latter get patriotic racism and YVal-Marts in compen
sation for military service. The former again get torture as a handmaiden to
occupation. Sartre’s words of 1958 hold for Baghdad of 2005: “The occupy
ing troops are baffled by the silence they themselves have created; the rich
feel hunted down by the uncommunicative poor.... Everybody, everywhere,
is hiding something. They must be made to talk”21 Torture, an ugly cost of
colonial occupation, was to have been rendered morally obsolete by satellites
commanding drone kills anywhere. Bur oppression is a personal relationship.
This is why Abu Ghraib and Fallujah echo El-Biar and Sakiet.22 Today’s equally
destructive and more pervasive system would subject all humans to market
relations as a condition for meeting their needs. Of course, those who forcibly
replace collective production with commercial seriality promise, as a delayed
by-product, a human world in which all needs are met.23 But resistance from
the villages of the world indicates that their residents know better.
What, then, is the relation of the resistant fusing group to humanity? The ques
tion leads us to the normative side of Sartre’s account in Morality and History.
Humanity as a Goal
“ I’hc most spectacular display of public morality the world has ever seen” was
Arundhati Roy’s description of the anti-war anger circling the planet on Feb
ruary 15.24 Sartre helps us grasp what this “public morality” might be. Our
experience of the “unconditional possibility'” of doing acts we consider mor
ally obligatory would be lacking, he contends, were traditional Marxism right
that morality' is a superstructural epiphcnomcnon. On the contrary, morality' is
present, he insists, “at the deepest level of the social structure”—even “when I
pick up a tool” (5/4, 72/54 )25—for the root of morality' is in praxis itself, or,
rather, in the motive for praxis, that is, need (96/75, 139/115). Praxis aims at
meeting human needs, the Critique held. So does the insurrectional or fusing
group, the paradigm of group praxis (CDR 112, 320, 329). Moreover, no fur
ther moral qualification is required, since “need is for itself sufficient reason for
The Altcr-(ilobalization Movement I 271
its satisfaction” (97/78). Our needs arc lived as “unconditionally possible” of
being satisfied. While in fact it may turn out that we cannot satisfy a given need,
it is as “practical agents” that we experience them, meaning that they posit in
us a power to meet them (132/109). The collective development of this power,
as required to secure that end, is “integral humanity.” The phrase names both
this power of all humans acting together and their satisfied needs. Acts linked
only externally by systems—and hence aimed first at mere reproduction of
those systems—cannot meet our needs. For that, “the entire human group” is
needed (113/92, 143/118).26 And absent internal c<x)rdination toward the
goal of integral humanity, the needs of some will certainly notbc met. Yet even
fully organized humanity might not be self-sufficient, for only the possibility of
“integral humanity”—not its certainty—is posited by need. These, then, are the
rudiments of a morality implicit in the experience of need.27
Still, why, Thomas Anderson asks here, must all humans be involved in
meeting all needs? Might not need instead imply a wish by the poor for a new
exploitative system with themselves on top?2'4 First, need is experienced amidst
scarcity, which is “the negative unity of the multiplicity of men” (CDR 127).
Scarcity is a collective fact of indefinite reach: we know there is not enough to
go around, but wc can’t tell if the lack is merely local. The elTort to transcend
scarcity in satisfying need must therefore be collective, and only an all-embrac
ing effort has any chance of succeeding. After all, such a project presumes from
the start the satisfaction of the needs of all of its participants. This “power
over things, never over men” is therefore available only to “the entire human
group.” If the goal is not pervasively shared, the effort will not be inclusive.
Need, then, is not just for food and shelter, nor just for the group as a means of
producing them, but for the group’s unity—that is, food and shelter as got by
humanity’s group praxis, which is therefore both end and means {CDR 672-
673; 118/96, 135/112). Anderson is right to emphasize that in the milieu of
scarcity that has to date characterized human history, renewed inhuman praxis
that takes the Other as enemy is always possible (CDR 804-805). But Moral
ity and History, Version l, adds a key point here that is only touched on by the
Critique: even though “man has never existed (127/106) and is therefore pre
sented as an “impossibility,” this impossibility “can only be deciphered from the
possible” (133/111). In other words, “the permanent and normative possibility
of making man exist illuminates and disqualifies the factual impossibility of his
existing today” (135/112; Sartre’s emphasis). If Sartre is right that our experi
ence of need posits collective self-production or “humanity as autonomy” as its
goal, then the current non-existence of humanity can appear to us only against
the background of humanity as а гсз1 possibility of human history (99/78,
137/114). A failure to attain a goal presumes a prior project of attaining it.
The relation between fusing group (which may not be inclusive) and human
ity as collective autonomy is now clear. The former aims at humanity' but is not
its achievement. Only when the group includes even its former adversaries, and
all participants fix this happy situation in mutual pledges, do we have “the ori
gin of humanity” (CDR 436). Humanity depends on the fusing group, but it is
a theme only of the “pledged group,” whose oath makes us “our own sons [riel,
272 I Betsy Bowman and Bub Stone
our common creation” (CDR 437; Sartre's emphasis). Yet the pledged group
is for Sartre a slight degeneration from pure group praxis. Further degeneration
can be avoided only by constant retotalization» given scarcity's inevitable “pull”
of groups back into series. Can humanity as group praxis perpetuate itself. Need
indicates that it can. But this presumes ending scarcity by solving problems
of production and distribution (158/132). While scarcity' might in principle
be ended without our knowledge, humanity cannot be achieved without our
knowledge, since need allows recognition of the moment when effort coincides
with attainment.29
This humanism of need had not always been Sartre’s approach. In 1946,
near the start of existentialism, Sartre had famously claimed that whatever I do,
“I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning
myself I fashion man.”'11 Such moral projections are recuperated in Morality
and History, Version l, as so many ways of aiming at “integral humanity.” How
ever, by 1956, the very meaning of “humanity'” had changed for Sartre, as Bill
Martin has pointed out.31 Gayatri Spivak has found a presumptuous Enlighten
ment humanism in Sartre’s early claim that “diverse though man’s projects may
be, at least none of them is wholly foreign to me.... Every project, even that
of a Chinese, an Indian, or a Negro, can be understood by a European ... he
may redo in himself the projects of the Chinese, of the Indian or the African....
There is always some way of understanding an idiot, a child, a primitive man or
a foreigner if one has sufficient information.”32 The “humanity” in this passage
does resemble the one that always somehow turns out to be white, male, and
of European descent. But Spivak belabors this Euro-centrism, overlooking the
new meaning “humanity'” has after the Critique, when it becomes the goal of
“the wretched of the earth,” that is, of the victims of European humanism.33
This is the “integral” and “autonomous humanity” of Morality and History,
Version I. It appears as the object of an ethical striving, but only after the “radi
cal conversion” outlined in Being and Nothingness.
The Enlightenment conception of humanity' entailed an essenrialism that
Sartre never accepted. It presumed a universal, rational nature permanently
totalized from without, which is impossible in God’s absence. As of 1956-1957,
the universality of need is constituted (or not) solely by “lateral” totalizations
front within itself. And while Sartre agrees with Kant that humanity' is its own
end, the requirement to act in light of the ideal immanence of “the kingdom of
ends” took precedence for Kant over need. True, need posits “autonomous”
humanity for Sartre only as a possible construction of the historical future, an
unfolding whose, character is in-the-making. But meanwhile humanity does not
and cannot constitute a moral community, ideal or real, so long as subservience
to an exploitative system means some humans’ basic needs are not met. Thus,
for Sartre a “universal morality,” Kantian or other, is simply not possible until
there is “a margin of freedom for all,” which means at leasr global freedom
from hunger.34 To concretize Kant’s moral insight, which Sartre (and argu
ably Marx) never abandons, demanded a dialectical and not merely analytical
world-view. Whereas for Kant morality is a condition for need satisfaction, for
Sartre need satisfaction is a condition for morality. The prevalence of unshared
The Alter-Citohalization Movement I 273
privileges amidst hunger is prima facie evidence that the condition for a puta
tive universal morality to be binding has not been met. For Sartre, humanity
does not exist. Humanity' is nut. Yet the structure of human need makes sense
only if it is possible and realizable, not as a regulative ideal, but in history.3S
“Another world is possible”—the main social forum slogan—expresses much of
this. Emphasis is on the “possible,” which is to say that humanity is neither nec
essary, as traditional Marxism would have it, nor actual, as claimed by defend
ers of the status quo. 'Phis non-metaphysical notion of humanity' as historical
attainment makes Sartre directly pertinent to today’s movements. The events
of 15 February 2003 indicate that such movements also proceed as if humanity
can act together.
Action that internalizes the system aims at “the man of repetition” or human-
ity-as-by-product (93/72-73). Action that resists it aims at a novel humanity.
“It is always possible to refuse the life of a sub-human, and the refusal of this life
is of itself human praxis” (124/102; Sartre’s emphasis). Colonialism, France’s
own liberal capitalism, and today’s neo-neo-colonialism arc all systems. Their
victims and beneficiaries make themselves “sub-human” insofar as they accept
the status of by-products; this is because the repetitive praxis sustaining such
systems aims first at their own reproduction as systems to the exclusion of the
world’s poor (92-93/72-73). By the same token, the sub-human in struggle
against his or her sub-humanity is the positing of the human, for “united,
negating the impossibility of being men, preferring their future as humans to
all life, the colonized in insurrection practically and immediately determine
themselves in light of the unconditional possibility of realizing total humanity'”
(136/113). And if the “apparatus” such insurgents use to combat the system
itself reduces this newly self-created humanity’ to “pure inert means,” as did the
USSR, it defeats its aim (156/130). Movements against corporate globaliza
tion have so far avoided bureaucratization and Stalinism, thanks to constant
self-criticism. And they arc rediscovering Sartre’s insight that revolutionary
praxis generates its own limits. Since humanity' as an end is “the synthetic
unity of the means to it,” choosing means incompatible with that end can “de
nature” it.36 Something like this “socialist morality” seems implicit in today’s
global insurgencies. Their demand for means that “prefigure” their end is like
Sartre’s demand that humanity as an end be partly realized in the means to it, a
point we will return to. Morality and History, Version I, concludes by insisting
that struggle capitulate neither to the oppressive system nor to the potentially
equally anti-human “counter-system” invented to combat it, by integrating the
goal of “the autonomy of praxis” into each step toward it (162/136).
Today’s movements seem to pursue Sartre’s ampliativc notion of humanity
in their practices of uncompletable openness, avoidance of all presumption
of sameness, perpetual reconstitution, and concrete empowerment. But this
brings us to an apparent paradox. Can Sartrcan “humanity” be a real histori
cal goal for such movements if it posits a process whereby we are sub-human
one day and human the next? This consequence is absurd, but it does not
follow. A central aspect of Sartrean humanity can be attained, but only in
pursuing an infinite task.
274 I Betsy Bowman ami Hub Stone
What can be attained is “dissolving] the practico-inert in proportion as it
arises.” Doing so entails the infinite task of humanizing history. “Dissolution”
here is global mastery of alienating circumstances that block “pure common deci
sions” dictated neither by economic structures nor by the state. Such decisions
express a collective autonomy in which “a man can produce his essence freely
starting with his existence.” This attainment partially fulfills the end of integral
humanity. In its absence» racial, gender, class, and other destinies of “alienated
moralities” reduce us to “sub-human” by-products of systems. But Sartre posits
a shift from being products of our product to producing ourselves directly. It
is a pivotal attainment in pursuit of humanity. While this shift may never have
taken place, we know it is possible. “On the basis of need surmounted bur
present, praxis disengages itself as pure production of man by himself through
an ever more rigorous and extensive subjugation of the universe” (142/117).
This “pure morality” of need “perpetually breaks” the system, uniting those
living alienated lives in it with those excluded from it. The lives of the latter arc-
threatened by the system’s normal operation, which constantly diverts human
praxis to anti-human ends. As for the former, alienated group, it “discovers that
lits needs] are not satisfied by the work and initiative of each, but rather that
work serves to maintain and enhance the thing as master of man (for example,
profit). At this moment, the demand [of the alienated) resembles the exigency
[of the excluded]: 1 demand that it be my work which truly reproduces my life.
This entails a solidarity such that the entire human group, struggling against the
division of labor, returns to integral humanity' the entire product of its labor”
(143/118). This “solidarity',” we submit, is the “morale du nous” (the morality
of the us) that Sartre told Benny Levy “would leave nothing standing” in Being
and Nothingness or the Critique}7 Our separate We-experiences, depicted in
Being and Nothingness as merely parallel, may be an inevitable starting point,
but these can be made to converge on humanity as a goal.38 “The fundamental
norm of praxis, or pure future distinguishes itself from alienated moralities by its
radical demand. Need, by positing the reproduction of life by praxis, demands
that humanity be the integral product of humanity" (139/115).
The attainment of such a constant “dissolution” of the practico-inert as it
arises is not at hand. February 15 was not undertaken by humanity, even if for
every demonstrator there were three or more supporters.39 Yet it presented itself
as the first massive response at a global level to a US drive for global dominance.
Sartre had discerned such a drive in the US Vietnam war aim of “showing] that
guerilla warfare does not pay.” This statement by General Westmoreland was
evidently an answer to Che Guevara’s then-recent call for “many Vietnams.”
Sartre concluded: “The group which the United States wants to intimidate and
terrorize by way of the Vietnamese nation is the human group in its entirety.”40
Mirroring Sartre’s alarm 37 years later, but from the opposite side, a writer
for the New York limes described February 15 in this now-famous way: “The
fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstra
tions around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two
superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”41 If
democracy means rule of the people, then February 15 empowers us to imagine
