Toward A Critique And Reconstruction Of Historical Materialism:a Re-Explanation Of Sartre’s Practical Dialectics

European Marxist movement encountered an unprecedented predicament around 1960. Theoretically, Marxism became more and more dogmatic. Politically, the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union lost the trust of the intellectuals. Sartre faced the plight of the left-wing cause straight, and tried to find a new way of Marxist theory and political practice. The result of his thinking was Critique of Dialectical Reason. In the book, Sartre attempted to develop practical dialectics to re-understanding some major issues of historical materialism, such as methodology, the totalized history and class struggles. Sartre’s theoretical efforts have so many important theoretical and practical significance.The first chapter of this paper firstly discusses the reason why Sartre is still worthy to be researched. Secondly, I give a brief review on the research status about Sartre’s Critique. Finally, I make a brief introduction of the theoretical goal and the logic of demonstration of Sartre’s Critique.The second chapter focuses on the central question of how Sartre rebuilt the methodology of Historical Materialism with his existentialist practical dialectics. The first thing is to clarify the relationship between being and understanding. In Sartre’s view, being is rooted in physical labor and revolutionary practice, and understanding is also a way of being. Being precedes understanding. Secondly, the history can only be understanded by the dialectical reason which is based on the practice. Dialectical reason has the following characteristics:(1) it is self-applicable and limited; (2) dialectical reason is a generative totalizing process which pays attention to all intermediary levels; (3) it is a process of comprehension instead of intellection. Finally, Sartre advocated the progressive-regressive method to research our society and history. This method is related to the regressive and progressive characteristics of our praxis. Sartre’ method specifically emphasized the bilateral interaction between the individual and the totalized history, and stressed that we should understand history in a synchronic and diachronic dialectical unity.The third and fourth Chapters describe the process of Sartre’s procedure from individual praxis to the totalized history with is regressive method. The third chapter focuses on the process in Sartre’s logic from individual praxis to the totalized totality as materiality. The starting point of the regressive process is the abstract, simple individual praxis, which is a totalization and negation of our circumstances. Moving from the individual praxis, Sartre found the relationship of reciprocity between individual praxis which is intermediated by the substance and third-party. However, this relationship of reciprocity just transcends the distributed individual praxis, it has not achieved a unified practice. The first unified praxis is achieved by the necessity of materiality as a totalized totality (praxis-inert Ⅰ). The negative form of the material condition is scarcity, which offers the possibility for the violent struggles in the real history. Another form of the material unity is worked matter which forced men’s praxis into its own inertia unity by the way of urgency, interest and destiny.The fourth chapter discusses the more complex form of praxis-serial practice in collectives and common praxis in groups. Take this as the foundation, we expound Sartre’s understanding of the totalized history. The category of collective practice cares about how the scattered individual practices create a serial structure (praxis-inert Ⅱ) which opposes the original individual praxis. Sartre found that a spontaneous common praxis becomes possible when the collective members encounters some extreme pressures from the inside and outside, which means a group-in-fusion emerges. Besides, Sartre also talked about some other patterns of common praxis such as the pledged group, organized group and the institution. In some kind of group, Sartre found that people can created actively some inertness (praxis-inert Ⅲ) for transcending the collective inertness. Institutions may fall into rigid (praxis-inert Ⅳ). At last, Sartre discussed history. In his opinion, history is the praxis-process of men who survive in the praxis-inert field. If there is a totalized history, it must be a common praxis of a single group, it must be a totalization without totalizer.The fifth chapter discusses Sartre’s concept of class. Sartre also comprehended the class in his practical dialectics. Firstly, the class is a praxis-inert being, which means that class is a social being as materiality and a collective being in serial structures. Secondly, the class can only be fundamentally understood as praxis. On the one hand, the class is institution, fused group and series at the same time. On the other hand, all the class struggle is a praxis-process. On this basis, Sartre described the history as class struggle processes in a scarce field, and analyzed the class praxis-process in France from 1830s-1930s with his own conceptual tools.In conclusion, I think to a certain extent Sartre’s discussion of the dialectic form of praxis and inert developed historical materialism and offered some helpful categories and ideas for us to understand the history better as well as to criticize capitalism and bureaucracy better. Sartre’s shortcoming is that he put too much emphasis on the opinion that the inert is always constituted by the practice, therefore, he neglected to explore the specific inert structures in depth.