Ultrabolshevism

Merleau-Ponty's coinage, in Chapter 5 of *Adventures of the Dialectic* (1955), for Sartre's position in Les Communistes et la paix (1952–54). Ultrabolshevism is Bolshevism without the dialectic: it keeps every Bolshevik demand (pure action, the Party as Order, no minority, no intrinsic control of leaders) while abandoning every Marxist warrant (the dialectic, the philosophy of history, the proletariat as Selbstaufhebung, truth-as-nonfalsity). MP's diagnosis is that if Sartre's defense is right, Sartre is wrong — because Sartre defends communism on grounds that are the refutation of what communism claims about itself.

Key Points

  • The coinage passage: "In The Communists and Peace, then, we will look for the indication of this new phase, which we will call ultrabolshevism, in which communism no longer justifies itself by truth, the philosophy of history, and the dialectic but by their negation" (AD 125).
  • The dual ruin of the dialectic: "The ruin of the dialectic is accomplished openly with Sartre and clandestinely with the communists" (AD 123). Sartre openly abandons the dialectic; the communists abandon it while keeping it as decoration.
  • The subjectivist-objectivist convergence: "The philosophy of pure object and the philosophy of pure subject are equally terroristic, but they agree only about consequences" (AD 122). Lenin's gnosticism and Sartre's cogito arrive at the same Party-monopoly from opposite directions.
  • Pure action (Sartre's term, MP's target): if the Party carries "the least seed of division... any passivity — sluggishness, self-interest, divergent opinions — who then will unify the unifying apparatus?" (Sartre, quoted AD 133). MP's counter: real action requires a line, probabilities, discussion, inertia; pure action is either suicide, murder, or theater.
  • If Sartre is right, Sartre is wrong: "He never asks himself why no communist would dream of writing what he is writing, even though communists do it every day, or why no communist would base his action on repudiation of the dialectic, even though this is the only thing to do if those who are nothing historically are to become men... Ultimately, if Sartre is right, Sartre is wrong" (AD 124).

Details

The Structure of Ultrabolshevism

MP analyzes ultrabolshevism as a system with three interlocking commitments:

  1. The equivocalness of facts (AD 129): "the facts say neither 'yes' nor 'no.'" Facts never refute a decision. The Party is always defensible because its violence is perhaps nothing other than proletarian violence. The "yes" is barely distinguishable from the "no."
  2. The rigid Party (AD 132–36): because facts are equivocal, the Party must be pure action — "pure linking," "an Order which makes order reign and which gives orders" (AD 133). It cannot afford factions, pluralism, minorities. "If there are several organizations, their decisions, even majority decisions, are no more than accidents" (AD 133).
  3. The militant as conversion (AD 130–31): the worker does not decide to be a militant; "action takes hold of him, he will believe: action is in and of itself a kind of confidence" (Sartre, quoted AD 131). Revolutionary will arises ex nihilo from the worker's refusal; it does not emerge from his misery. Conversion replaces motivation.

These three commitments together form the structure of ultrabolshevism: facts never refute, the Party is pure act, the militant is pure will. Each one is the ruin of a Marxist commitment (the materialist dialectic, the internal democracy of the Party, the class as living motive for action). Together they form what MP calls a "systematic mythology" (AD 168).

The Cogito Behind Ultrabolshevism

MP traces ultrabolshevism to the structure of Sartre's philosophy of the cogito. If consciousness is absolute — the "sun from which the world radiates" (AD 223) — then facts have no meaning of their own, only what consciousness gives them; the Other appears as a rival freedom, not a fellow subject; and the social order is never articulated — it is only the magical relationship of mutually-annihilating gazes.

From this it follows that political action cannot have the form of deliberation-in-probability that Marxist and dialectical politics requires. It must be coup de force: a pure decision that creates its own context. Because freedom alone can give meaning, and because facts cannot refute, communism as Sartre defends it is a continual creation out of nothing — justified in principle by the "gaze of the least-favored" (AD 179) but never verified by any outcome.

Why Sartre "Tolerates" No Rivalry

In ultrabolshevism's picture, the proletariat does not exist prior to the Party. Consequently, there is no independent standard against which the Party can be judged. "It is an order in the sense of monastic and professional orders. It has received the sacred trust of a certain inspiration or of a certain honor and administers it with full powers" (AD 133). The Party is "the proletariat in substance because before it there was no proletariat." Its unanimity is not sociologically observed; it is logically required by the definition.

MP's diagnostic: this is the cogito form carried into the political. Where Kant's "I think" must accompany every representation, Sartre's Party must accompany every proletarian action. "If there is only one organization, its decisions being 'the only possible ones,' then that organization is the proletariat itself" (AD 133).

Action Reduced to Showing

Ultrabolshevism ends in theater: "When [pure action] tries to impose itself on things, it suddenly returns to the unreal from which it was born. It becomes... theater" (AD 143). MP's key example: Sartre's description of the May 28 demonstration as "street theater" in which the Parisian population "plays the part 'Parisian population.'" The proletariat shows itself because it cannot act in the Marxist sense — ebb and flow, organization, probability, strategy.

This is the 1955 version of what MP will later call the distinction between the action of unveiling and the action of governing: pure action can unveil (show, gesture, demonstrate), but it cannot govern (organize, incorporate inertia, respond to probability). Sartre, the writer, insists on making governing into unveiling — on treating political action as demonstration. The result is ultrabolshevism as spectacle politics.

The Mandarin Myth

MP names the philosophical shape of ultrabolshevism the "mandarin myth": "unites the phantasm of total knowledge with that of pure action. The mandarin is thought to be present by means of his knowledge wherever there is a problem, and capable of acting immediately from a distance, anywhere, as pure efficient cause, as if what he did occurred in an inert milieu and was not at the same time theater, a manifestation, an object of scandal or of enthusiasm" (AD 201). The spectator consciousness, busy seeing, dreams of an action that would also be ubiquitous. Ultrabolshevism is the political application of this myth — the writer who cannot govern but wants to.

Positions

  • Sartre in Les Communistes et la paix (1952–54) defends communist action by refusing productivity to history and grounding action in pure will + the gaze of the least-favored. Sartre does not call this "ultrabolshevism"; the name is MP's.
  • MP coins the term in AD Ch 5 to name the result: Bolshevism without dialectic, justified by cogito-plus-Other rather than by proletariat-plus-history. "Sartre's reasons are at the other extreme from those of Marxism, and it is because the dialectic has broken down that he defends communist politics" (AD 190).
  • Lefort's Le Marxisme et Sartre (1953) in Les Temps Modernes is Sartre's original interlocutor; Sartre's Réponse à Claude Lefort (1953) is MP's secondary target in Ch 5.
  • Orthodox Marxism-Leninism sees Sartre's position as idealism with a Communist veneer; MP is more precise — it is not idealism but a voluntarism that inherits from the cogito.

Connections

  • is MP's diagnosis of Sartre's politics in 1952–54
  • structurally parallels Lenin's gnosticism (see Ch 3 of AD) — both "terroristic" but from opposite sides (pure object vs. pure subject)
  • is the negation of MP's preferred political form, the new-liberalism of the Epilogue
  • rests on the denial of the interworld — if there are only men and things, the Party as pure act is the only bridge; once the interworld is acknowledged, mediation replaces pure action
  • is figured in the mandarin myth — the writer who cannot govern but must
  • makes visible the distinction between action of unveiling and action of governing
  • is the political registration of the philosophy-of-reflection structure — Cartesian and Kantian cogito carried into politics
  • contrasts with conditioned-freedom — conditioned freedom is MP's counter-picture of agency (freedom by means of motivations, not ex nihilo)

Open Questions

  • Is "ultrabolshevism" a fair name for Sartre's 1952–54 position? Sartre's subsequent Critique de la raison dialectique (1960) explicitly tries to develop a dialectical account of the class-Party relation; whether this is a response to MP's critique or an independent development is debated.
  • Does MP's diagnosis apply to any communism that rests on a philosophy of the cogito, or only to Sartre's specific version? The analysis assumes a cogito-and-Other ontology; communists who work from Hegelo-Marxist ontology may escape the critique.
  • How does ultrabolshevism relate to the "historical-voluntarism" that MP attributes more broadly to Lenin and to the post-1917 Bolshevik Party? The structural parallel (pure action justified by an idea) is drawn explicitly at AD 122; the historical genealogy is not developed.
  • The Epilogue concedes that "perhaps this is the end of ultrabolshevism" (AD 211) in view of post-Stalinist Soviet political openings. Did MP expect the term to be retrospective rather than diagnostic of an ongoing formation?

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1955-adventures-of-the-dialectic — the coinage and the full analysis. Key passages: coinage at p. 125; "ruin of the dialectic" formula at p. 123; "if Sartre is right, Sartre is wrong" at p. 124; pure action as Order at pp. 133–36; equivocalness of facts at pp. 129–30; conversion of the militant at pp. 130–31; mandarin myth at p. 201; "perhaps this is the end of ultrabolshevism" at p. 211.