Abstract

With Sartre we've shared encounters, campaigns and causes: Algeria, Vietnam, the Burgos trials…. At times we've even been in complicity, but we had neither the same politics nor the same history. For the past fifty years, our persistent efforts have been those of the leftist opposition to Stalinism and social democracy. It is probably the only one, in the workers' movement, in which Sartre never participated.

He remained to the end the living contradiction of a time when intellectuals were obliged to choose their function and their side in the class struggle. To choose and to become involved at the very moment when Stalinism was prevailing made them suspect by definition, potential traitors, completely enclosed in the boundary of their bad consciousness, billeted in roles of passive figureheads or official ideologues at the mercy of a brutal dismissal.