Sartre: Soviet Society

‘Socialism in One Country’

Jean-Paul Sartre

I shall concentrate on a single, contemporary example: the emergence in the ussr of the ideological monstrosity of ‘socialism in one country’. A critical investigation will show: 1. that the slogan was a product of conflicts within the leadership; 2. that beyond these conflicts, the slogan represented contradictions and transformations in Soviet society as a whole; 3. that inasmuch as it survived, it produced other verbal forms which supplemented and corrected it—which enriched both knowledge and practice, transcending the monstrosity and changing it into a truth. Obviously we cannot go into the extraordinarily complex conflicts which divided the Soviet leadership after Lenin’s death; still less can we embark on a dialectical interpretation of them. We are simply taking an example, and looking at it not for itself but for the lessons we can learn from it.

I. The Conflicts in the Leadership

Trotsky understood the situation in the ussr in those difficult years as well as Stalin did. He had once believed that there would be revolutions in Germany and other bourgeois democracies, and that the internationalization of workers’ power would rapidly alter the conditions of the problem in Russia; but events had proved him wrong. He knew as well as Stalin that the European workers’ movements were temporarily on the wane. For both of them, the ussr was in mortal danger: alone, surrounded by strong and hostile powers, it had to either make immense sacrifices in order to expand its military and industrial potential, or resign itself to extinction. We need only add that the circumstances determining their earlier activities had made the émigré Trotsky more aware of foreign revolutionary movements, while Stalin—who had practically never left Russia—was more ignorant and suspicious of Europe. However, Stalin did not claim that a communist system could be built in the ussr unless it was at the same time established in the rest of the world.

The ‘Unity’ of Stalin and Trotsky

Thus it appears that the two leaders and the factions they represented might have agreed on a minimum programme, as necessitated by the situation itself. This would have involved starting immediately to build the new society, without for the time being any expectation of help from outside; and sustaining the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses by making them conscious of the direction in which construction would proceed—that is, by offering them a future. The Russian people had to be told both ‘we must survive and we can construct’, and ‘we shall survive by constructing’. But these very simple exigencies did not imply that the construction of a powerful Russia—on the twin basis of industry and arms—would get beyond what might be called a pre-socialist stage. The working class would appropriate the means of labour, and industrialization would be accompanied by a progressive installation of the structures and cadres necessary for the establishment of a truly socialist society when revolutions took place elsewhere in the world. It would, moveover, have been possible for Stalin and Trotsky to agree on another point: poverty cannot be socialized, so—under threat from abroad—it was necessary to enter into the difficult phase of pre-socialist accumulation. And, of course, Trotsky was the first to insist on the necessity of total commitment to a policy of collectivization and industrialization.

The same pressures and objective exigencies were recognized by both men: for both of them, the praxis of the revolution in the ussr had to be both defensive and constructive, and its withdrawal into itself would last as long as the circumstances which imposed it. [1] It was in other fields that conflicts arose. The two men represented two contradictory aspects of the struggle that the revolutionaries had waged in the past against Tsarism. Trotsky, though a remarkable man of action when circumstances required it, was primarily a theorist, an intellectual. Even in action he remained an intellectual, which means that he always favoured a radical course. Such a structure of practice is perfectly valid provided it is adapted to circumstances: otherwise Trotsky would not have been able to organize the army and win the war. The basic factor was emigration. The revolutionaries in exile did not really lose contact with the Russian masses; nevertheless, for a time they had closer links with the Western workers’ parties. The internationalism of the revolutionary movement was simply the reality of their experience; Marxism, both as theory and as practice, presented itself to them in its universality. Universalism and radicalism were, so to speak, the manner in which Trotsky interiorized his exposure to the West and his exile itself—which tended to make him, like other émigrés, into an abstract, universal man. The theory of permanènt revolution was simply a formulation of these interiorized features in terms of the language of Marxism; in this sense, it was genuinely Marxist. The only thing which came from Trotsky—but it was all-important—was the urgent power which these theses acquired in his writings. In a single dialectical movement, the revolution had to drive deeper and deeper, transcending its own objectives (radicalization); it had to spread progressively throughout the world (universalization). Up to 1917, this meant that the proletarian revolution would take place in a highly industrialized European country. So, of course, these ‘Westernized’ revolutionaries were dazed when circumstances led them to take power in an underdeveloped country: they hesitated, and contemplated creating transitional forms, until circumstances forced them to press forward.

Stalin, in contrast, always represented an intermediary between the émigré leaders and the Russian masses. His task was to adapt the instructions of the former to the concrete situation and the actual people who were going to do the work. He was on the side of these people; he knew the Russian masses and, before 1914, did not conceal his somewhat contemptuous mistrust of the émigré circles, almost without exception. The history of his conflicts with them after 1905 throws light on what might be called his practical particularism. For him, the problem was one of carrying out orders with the means at hand; he knew what these means were, and in his opinion the émigrés did not. For him, Marxism was a guide to tactics, rather like Clausewitz’s On War; he had neither the education nor the time to appreciate its theoretical side. Though he admired Lenin, he was horrified when the latter wrote Materialism and Empiriocriticism, regarding it as a waste of time. In this sense, although he talked about the universality of Marxism, he never grasped it. It was incarnated by him in a praxis that was always individualized by the circumstances in which it occurred (Tsarism; rapid industrialization combined with tremendous backwardness in relation to the West; foreign capital; a new proletariat which, though growing in numbers, was still weak; a bourgeoisie which was practically non-existent, or made up of ‘compradors’; the overwhelming numerical superiority of the peasant class; the political power of the landowners). [2] These circumstances had two aspects. On the one hand, they required a constant adaptation of precepts forged in proletarian struggles against capitalists in the Western democracies. On the other hand, to those fighting day in and day out and exploiting them for their own actions they revealed that—contrary to the expectations of the émigrés and contrary to the letter of Marxism—agricultural Russia was ripe for a workers’ Revolution.

What divided the two men, therefore, was the practical schemata through which they perceived particular situations, rather than any abstract principles or even any programme. In each of them, praxis constituted itself as a kind of voluntarism. But Stalin, having been a militant for twenty years, was an opportunist with an iron fist. It was not that he had no precise objectives; but his objectives were already incarnated. The supreme necessity was to preserve what had been done, and this meant that a defensive apparatus had to be built. What he wanted to preserve at all costs was not principles, or the movement of radicalization; it was the incarnations, or, so to speak, the Revolution itself insofar as it was incarnated in this particular country, power, internal and external situation. When he made compromises, it was above all in order to preserve this foundation. In order to save the nation which was building socialism, he was willing to abandon the principle of nationalities. Collectivization? He was to push it forward as circumstances required and in order to ensure that the towns would be fed. Industrialization? He began by holding it back; then, when he realized it was necessary, he tried to promote it at such a rapid pace that the targets of the early plans could not be fulfilled; and he did not hesitate to exact extra work from the workers, either directly by increasing norms, or indirectly by Stakhanovism and the restoration of piece-work. What he hated about Trotsky was not so much the measures he proposed as the whole praxis in the name of which he proposed them. If Stalin initially opposed stepping up industrial production and collectivization when Trotsky advocated them, it was because he understood the total project of their advocate. Trotsky wished to industrialize and collectivize for the sake of an ever-deepening radicalization of revolutionary praxis—at least this was how Stalin saw Trotsky’s intention. What he feared was that the Revolution might fail through trying to remain an abstract dialectic of the universal, just when it was being individualized by its incarnation. [3]

The Conflict between Stalin and Trotsky

Obviously this attitude was never expressed either in these terms or in any other verbal forms. But Stalin saw an absolute difference between practical arrangements or operations proposed by Trotsky, and the very same ones put into practice later by himself. In the first form, they were alarming because they might be a means whereby the Revolution would utilize the concrete situation in the ussr in order to realize itself. In the second form, however, though they led to exactly the same measures, they were reassuring because they arose purely from concrete exigencies. As advocated by Trotsky and the Left, collectivization was a leap in the dark, a practical statement that the only possible defensive strategy was an all-out offensive. Stalin too was hard and aggressive; he too was capable of going on the offensive when necessary. But he was alarmed by such a priori determinations of praxis, the direction of temporalization and future schemata of action, because he saw the situation in terms of what had to be saved, consolidated and developed rather than in terms of what had to be created. [4]

This difference, of course, manifested itself at all levels of practice. That is precisely why analytical reason is completely incapable of understanding the struggle—in which the two protagonists successively, and sometimes simultaneously, adopted similar or closely connected positions while each presented his own as the opposite of the other’s. At least to begin with, Stalin—as a ‘centrist’ and a mediator—exploited the conflict between Left and Right, without attempting to engage in it. The Right too appeared to him abstract in its lack of trust and its opportunist principles. It wished for a respite, a gradual movement towards true socialism. In short, with its simple idea that the seizure of revolutionary power would have to be followed by some kind of evolution, the Right was reproducing the desire which most of the Bolsheviks had shown before the seizure of power: to slow down the tempo of that outrageous Revolution in an underdeveloped country. Stalin did not represent post-revolutionary evolution any more than permanent revolution. He did not radicalize revolutionary praxis as such, because circumstances were against it: for instance, he did not hesitate to widen the spread of wages very greatly, in order to stimulate production through competition. On the other hand, he did radicalize the constructive effort that was required of everyone.

As soon as these two praxes—that of Trotsky, and that of Stalin supported by the Rightists—came into conflict, they gave rise to monstrosities. These monstrosities have a quite specific quality, almost unique to this particular struggle. Each faction was suggesting the same response to the same objective exigency. But behind the similarity of their immediate objectives there lay radical disagreement about more distant objectives, and about the very meaning of revolutionary praxis. The two factions exaggerated the immediate differences between their concrete projects, in order to give immediate expression—a tangible incarnation—to the profound differences between their practical orientations. Thus the majority, strengthened in their resolution by provocations from the minority which they had themselves provoked, attached the following mortgage to their designation of the immediate objective and the means for achieving it: rejection of all motives and long-term objectives which might lead the others to join them. The effectiveness of this manoeuvre was due to the absolute necessity of preserving the unity of the leading bodies despite the current conflicts—in other words, of turning a majority into unanimity. In this way, the minority would waste away, because after each debate it would spend its time suppressing itself. Or else it would have to declare itself openly as an oppositional fraction and—given the acutely dangerous situation—would thereby be identified as splittist and ‘anti-Party’. Thus—as Merleau-Ponty has put it—opposition would define itself as treason.

The struggle was fought out at every level and over every objective; but we are concerned with it only insofar as it produced the slogan ‘socialism in one country’. This formula was a monstrosity because it said more than was necessary. It falsified the specific exigencies of the situation, by giving them a synthetic unity which presented itself as based on long-term objectives and on the future temporalization of praxis as a whole, whereas its true motivation really lay in the present. It was a way of saying ‘let us rely on no one but ourselves’—but it incorporated a verbal formula which, though really a manoeuvre designed to put the minority in an impossible situation, posed as a theoretical assessment of the possibilities of socialism. For the minority to have adopted it would have involved abandoning a priori the idea that the proletariats of the world were in practice interdependent. More profoundly still, it would have involved recognizing that everything (starting most notably with the workers’ movements of central Europe) had to be subordinated to the constructive defence of the ussr. This in turn obviously meant that the Soviet Party had to exercise a veritable dictatorship over the European Communist Parties, using them to mobilize their respective proletariats for the defence of the ussr even if, in national terms, their revolutionary interests did not coincide with the necessities and exigencies of such defensive tactics. In other words, it meant deciding that a national revolutionary offensive by a European proletariat—and ultimately the revolutionary conquest of power—were not necessarily the best ways of defending the Revolution. It meant admitting that socialist revolution could no longer be universal and international once it had ceased to be ideal, once it had achieved incarnation; that as soon as it was incarnated, it was really present in its entirety in the individual country which had made it—and which was continuing it, through the particular tasks imposed by its own structures and by history. But to acknowledge this precisely involved rejecting Westernism, universalism and the assumption that the proletariats of the large industrialized countries had achieved a greater degree of emancipation than the very young proletariat of the ussr and, once they had taken power, would have such economic and technical strength that they would become the true animators of the international revolution. It meant relinquishing internationalism and ‘permanent revolution’.

This was the trap. Both Trotsky and Stalin recognized the exigencies of the situation: about these objective exigencies there could be no disagreement. But by presenting them in the form of a dogma the majority forced Trotsky to choose between giving up his practical principles and rejecting the practical content of the dogma (which, however, he accepted as a response to the temporary exigencies of the situation). Stalin infelicitously formulated what might be called a particularist radicalism in opposition to universalist radicalism. And, of course, this monstrous object was not confined to the level of verbal forms; insofar as it determined propaganda, permanent features of praxis and a particular future, it can be seen as an institution. [5] In fact, it became the matrix for the institutionalization of the Russian Revolution: preservation also involves consolidation and, in social terms, consolidation means stratification.

We shall come back to this point. But in this new object we can already detect the implicit co-existence of Stalinism and Trotskyism. The real relation between the ussr and the Western proletariats, in the more or less distant future, could have been left undecided—for the simple reason that it was, for the Soviet leaders, an object of genuine ignorance. Its dogmatic formulation, however, incorporated the revolutionary internationalism of Trotsky as a rejected position. It is impossible, moreover, for positivist reason to comprehend the presence of Trotsky in a formulation which negates him, because, in their indissoluble synthesis, pre-sense and interior negation represent the individual incarnation of a pluri-dimensional conflict, that is to say its totalization in the object by the two protagonists. [6]

II. The Conflicts in Soviet Society as a Whole

But the conflict itself was a totalization, through the protagonists, of a contradiction in the common praxis of the Party. This contradiction in turn interiorized the real, but less concentrated and more dispersed opposition which was produced and lived by Soviet society itself, as it overthrew outdated institutions. In spite of the integration achieved by the régime, it is obviously impossible to treat Soviet society as an institutional group. [7] It was torn by struggles, by practico-inert divisions, etc, etc. [8] In any case, we have not even begun the investigation of social unity. [9] If there is such a thing, it must obviously be different from the unity of groups. But whatever the specific form of the struggles, armed conflicts, serialities and group relations in a given society, what concerns us here is the totalizing interiorization of this diversity by the party and its leadership, that is to say by the sovereign group. [10]

The Russian Revolution and International Communism

1. Any positivist historian who tried to explain the Stalinist slogan in terms of the internal weakness and isolation of the ussr around 1925–30, and regarded these as passively suffered, would be missing the crucial point. Of course, everyone suffered poverty, they all suffered isolation. But at the same time these conditions were products of revolutionary praxis. Moreover, insofar as they were produced and maintained with a view to being transcended, they represented a moment of this praxis itself. Poverty, the shortage of technicians and cadres, the fact of being surrounded: these were mortal dangers for the Revolution, but they were also the Revolution itself coming into being in a specific situation. The allies would have given aid to a bourgeois democracy which tried to continue the war; as bourgeois, they would have been sympathetic to the overthrow of Tsarism. The Treaty of Brest Litovsk and the Bolshevik seizure of power were acts which in themselves entailed civil war, economic blockade and encirclement—not only as a passive condition, but also as produced by a praxis with long-term objectives. Russia’s poverty in 1924, the lack of cadres, encirclement: this was the progress of the Revolution itself. Lenin knew what he was doing when he took power, as did the Bolshevik Party: their praxis was constituted by having to pass through this needle’s eye in order to pass beyond it.

What was perhaps less frequently mentioned by the Soviet revolutionaries—though they accepted its results—was that the Russian Revolution itself, as a praxis, was to some extent responsible for the decline and disunity of the Western proletariat. It had stimulated numerous abortive uprisings—in Hungary, in Germany and above all in China. A debilitating conflict had arisen everywhere between Social Democracy (which at once betrayed the working class and represented the interests of an ‘élite’ of petty bourgeois and skilled workers) and the new party that identified with the ussr. Finally, a frightened bourgeoisie had reacted with violence and several bourgeois democracies had been transformed into fascist states. In other words, Revolution incarnated in the centre of the world, as a long-term praxis determined by specific material circumstances, could not develop without thereby producing—contrary to its leaders’ project—impotence in foreign proletariats. In this sense, the incarnation of the Revolution directly contradicted its universalization. This situation in its turn—as a practical consequence of the seizure of power—influenced relations between the ussr and foreign proletariats. The contradiction here was due to the fact that the proletarian Revolution in the ussr, instead of being a factor in the liberation and emancipation of the working masses of Europe—as it should have been—was accomplished by reducing them to relative impotence. [*] When interiorized, this contradiction took the form of conflict—the very conflict we have just been describing.

On the one hand, in fact, the revolutionary government was under a practical obligation to give all the help it could to foreign proletariats, even when it could not expect any benefit from doing so. On the other hand, the relative weakness of these proletariats, the strength of the bourgeois régimes and threats of war and economic blockade made the Soviets extremely cautious. Aiding one proletariat in its revolutionary struggle might indeed determine other proletariats to act. But since they were paralysed by their divisions, the only foreseeable result might well be a regroupment of capitalist powers, and war. The ussr could not win such a war in the existing circumstances; in any case, it was bound to impede socialist construction, whatever the final outcome of the fighting. This difficulty would never be resolved: given the relative strengths of the ussr and the bourgeois democracies, it was in fact insoluble. Through countless betrayals, Stalin, in spite of everything, did help the Chinese, the Spanish, etc. as far as he thought possible without producing armed intervention by the West; and the exiled Trotsky himself called on the proletariats of the world to defend the ussr if it was attacked, because—despite everything—the foundations of socialism did exist there.

From this point of view, ‘socialism in one country’ was the fruit of reflection by revolutionary praxis upon the effects and contradictions it had generated. Synthetically, and approaching the dogma via the Bolshevik Party’s interiorization of these contradictory results, it can be seen in its intelligibility as an attempt to lift the mortgage of internationalism, while retaining the ability of the ussr to give assistance to foreign revolutionary parties in accordance with its means and the risks involved. But the bond of reciprocity was consciously broken. If the ussr itself could construct socialism, it did not really need foreign help. And if it still had to intervene—when it could—to help revolutionaries in danger in capitalist countries, that was its mission, its ‘generosity’. In short, the leaders kept their hands free. The slogan theorized the practical necessity.

If the Trotskyist Left had been in power, they would not have adopted it. However—discounting personal factors, which are less important here than in many other cases—their policies towards the European and Asian CP’s would doubtless not have been noticeably different. In any case, it would have been necessary for this praxis to produce its own theoretical justification—in other words, in terms of our earlier discussion, its own idea of itself. [11] Such an idea would not, of course, have been expressed by the slogan ‘socialism in one country’. But it would have contained the same contradiction, though as it were in reverse. It would have begun by affirming radicalization and universalization, but would then have imposed limits on them because of the circumstances. No doubt, such an ‘ideation’ of praxis might be described as closer to reality, more true; but then we have suppressed, for the sake of our argument, the other term of the conflict. In the absence of a radical Left, Stalin too would no doubt have given a more truthful interpretation of the totalizing praxis. Conversely, if we imagine a majority led by Trotsky in conflict with a Stalinist minority, the situation would have obliged Trotsky to formulate his praxis in a provocative way and thus make Stalin and his allies either capitulate or affirm their treason.

The Tsarist Past

2. This conflict involved people, that is to say practical beings, irreducible to ideas and even to common activity (hyper-organism). [12] But they had made themselves into common individuals, so that their particular individuality as free practical organisms was also, as we know, a perpetual transcendence of the inert exigencies of their pledge and the realization of them in each concrete situation. [13] If we go deeper into the circumstances which divided them as common individuals, that is to say as members of an integrated party in which they held positions determined by the group as a whole in the course of past struggles, then the basic situation which sustained and produced these conflicts acquires a historical solidity—as a diachronic totalization of the past by the present. The isolation of the ussr following the Revolution was not solely what we have just seen it to be—the result, both sought and suffered, of a revolutionary praxis (sought insofar as there was a revolution, and a repudiation of bourgeois rule within the foreign countries themselves; suffered insofar as the reactions to this repudiation endangered the Revolution). In short, the isolation of the ussr cannot simply be equated with isolation of the first socialist country amidst all the capitalist powers. If, as Marx at times envisaged, England had been the first country to make a revolution, the result would have been a different socialist isolation, because of England’s insularity, the level of development of industrial technique there and, of course, many other factors. England would have been surrounded differently. Soviet isolation was first and foremost that of a monstrosity: an underdeveloped country moving without any transition from a feudal system to socialist forms of production and property. This immediately refers us to the past, to Tsarism, to the economic structure of the country before 1914 and the foreign investments (which do in fact explain the particularly violent hostility of certain economic and financial groups towards the Soviets). But what lay at the root of these external relations was primarily the economic, and social history of Russia as a whole, seen in terms of its geo-political situation (insofar as this influenced historical transformations and was influenced by them in turn).

We should not worry about introducing a diachronic perspective here, although we have yet to subject it to critical investigation. For we are not trying to adapt it to the synchronic realities, but simply showing how—in a manner yet to be defined—the diachronic perspective constitutes their depth. The important point is that Russia’s relation to Western Europe was lived by the Russian people through a history which produced the Tsarist empire as a gigantic mediation between Asia and Europe, and as a constantly contested synthesis of European and Asian peoples. Sometimes this changing relation moved from positive to negative or conversely. Sometimes it appeared as a variable unity of two contradictory attitudes (insofar as it was produced in Russia and by the Russian people): on the one hand, fascination with foreign techniques, régimes or cultures (which were always more advanced than in the Russian empire) and consequently a constant effort by the ruling classes and the intellectuals to assimilate European achievements; on the other hand, a mistrust and a particularism that were based on the radical differences between the two systems, their respective relations of production and their ‘superstructures’ (meaning above all religious differences).

From this point of view, the conflict we have been taking as an example acquires its own historical depth. A universalist ideology and practice, born in the most highly industrialized parts of Europe and imported by revolutionary intellectual circles at the end of the nineteenth century into a country whose economic and geo-political structure would seem to define it, in the name of Marxism itself, as a peculiarity—in other words, as such a ‘backward’ nation that Marxist practice (the mobilization of the working masses, etc.) apparently could not develop there, at least without extensive modification. For Tsarism, perched on top of a bourgeoisie that was at the beginning of its development, maintained its rule by police methods which only permitted clandestine struggle (that is to say, at first sight, the very opposite of mass action). The Marxist experience, by contrast, was one of open struggle (even if repression sometimes forced organizations to reconstitute themselves clandestinely). It was the experience of a proletariat generated and developed by industrialization, in the context of democracies which formed and evolved under the pressure of this same industrialization. The adaptation of Marxism, therefore, involved its particularization, since it was called upon to guide revolutionary praxis in a feudal country with a negligible proletariat and where almost all the population was involved in agriculture.

The Fate of Russian Marxism

However, as a doctrine and strategy for intellectuals, émigrés and working-class militants, Russian Marxism remained universalist and abstract up to 1917. After the Revolution, it became the foundation of mass culture. It was systematically implanted into the Russian people, in a way that depended both on education (insofar as this was defined by the praxis of the leadership) and on the steady growth of working-class concentrations—in other words, the draining of peasants into the factories. These rough-hewn workers, so hastily created and still so close to country life, transformed Marxism as they absorbed it. It became incarnated as a national and popular culture, while in Europe it was still only the theoretico-practical movement of history. To adopt Hegelian terminology—whose idealism is too blatant to be dangerous—it became the objective spirit of a people. It became a dogma, precisely to the extent that it enabled these mystified peasants to jettison all dogma. It became vulgarized, as it made them more sophisticated. It was alienated in them, as it set them free. [14] It was fossilized, as they transcended and recreated it in each systematic deciphering of their experience. When it became incarnated, its fundamental character as the ‘realization of philosophy’ helped to give it a new preponderance, in everyone’s eyes, as the constantly renewed, lived reality of the Soviet masses.

The universalist Marxism of the West was subordinated, in the name of its own principles, to particularist Marxism—a product distilled by the Russian people and by the Revolution as it entered its constructive phase. This was the first inversion: universality, incarnated and thus particularized, became the truth of the abstract universe. It was for the ussr to comprehend the revolutionary movements of the West, since the Russian Revolution had already achieved power, while they had not. The enormous historical transformation of Russian society transformed Marxism, insofar as it made it the ideology of this transformation—in other words, insofar as praxis endowed it with new features. The universal subordinated to particularity and contained within it, directed and transformed in conformity with the transformations of this particular history: on the theoretical and cultural level, this was already the objective reality of the slogan ‘socialism in one country’. At this level the conflict was very clear. Incarnated as the culture of an underdeveloped country, Marxism as a theoretico-practical ensemble split its unity as a universalist dialectic into two particular universalities. That of the several Western revolutionary movements became an abstract universality, and was denied the right to interpret Soviet history dialectically, as an ordinary historical process. Its specificity was as an abstraction trailing behind the historical and concrete development of incarnated Marxism in theussr, either receiving elucidation from it or illuminating it through research. The specificity of Russian Marxism, meanwhile, was to alienate itself in the history of the ussr precisely to the extent that it became objectified in it. In this sense, the slogan ‘socialism in one country’ was both the definition of this alienated Marxism, the object of history rather than the elucidation of it, and at the same time its first theoretico-practical product, the first determination of that rough-hewn culture.

Of course, this would not have happened if there had been a sequence of revolutions to diversify the incarnations of Marxism, restoring its concrete living universality through new contradictions. Thus the historical and revolutionary isolation of the ussr, the decline of the revolutionary movements, the capitalist encirclement, the particularization of Marxism by the Russian masses, and the liberation of the latter through an alienated Marxism—all of these are specific determinations, each of which expresses all the others. It is at this level that we again encounter the basic determination of Soviet man, readopted as a practical attitude: the nationalism accepted and demanded through socialism, the particularism interiorized as an incarnation of the universal, and the combination of national pride (the people which guides all others) with a clear awareness of technical inferiority (Lenin’s firm insistence on the necessity of learning from American technicians expresses universality in a differently modified form). From this point of view, the result of destroying the ‘leftist’ opposition was not to eliminate the contradiction which produced those particular men, but rather to define Stalinism more and more clearly insofar as it reproduced the contradiction within itself.

In the same way, the exiled Trotsky recreated the abstract universalism of Marxism through Trotskyism. He disincarnated it as a theoretico-practical schema and interpreted the social evolution of the ussr in the light of universal Marxism. But he did not altogether remove the contradiction, and the oscillations and hesitations of his attitude towards the ussr showed that Trotskyism was still incapable of conceiving Soviet society in the process of construction as anything other than a deviation occurring on the basis of a real incarnation. (Even though the bureaucracy was to strip them of their rights, the foundations of socialism had been laid; it is significant that Trotsky used the title ‘The Revolution Betrayed’ for one of his works.)

The Production of ‘Soviet Man’

In this sense, the origins of the conflict between the Third and Fourth Internationals lay in the tension which existed before the First World War between the émigré intellectuals and the militants working in Russia. The internal struggle was born of this tension, and incorporated it, transforming and radicalizing it and giving it its full meaning. Insofar as Stalin and the Stalinist bureaucracy became the instruments of this particularization of the universal in the ussr, Soviet man, as the product of a particularist praxis and of Marxism’s penetration into the masses, recognized himself in his leaders. The European revolutionaries, by contrast—who wished at one and the same time to adopt the Russian Revolution as a crucial historical movement and a universal transformation, and to preserve the autonomy of the European proletariats in the context of an old-style (universalist) International—recognized their practical demands in the activity carried out by Trotsky. Trotskyism was really, to some extent, an attempt by revolutionary Europe to escape from Soviet ascendancy. Indeed, the Trotskyists—the militants who formed the rank and file—were ‘Westerners’. But the contradiction was still not transcended—indeed could not be. For the entire practice of the Fourth International was in fact determined through a conflict between two leading factions of the Soviet Revolution, at first in the ussr, later on both sides of the frontier, but always concerning the Revolution as incarnated.

From this point of view, the slogan ‘socialism in one country’ defines Soviet man, as he was produced and as he produced himself, theoretically and practically, between the two wars. The overdetermination of this object—the marks left on it by both protagonists—became pure determination. In other words, from the point of view of the whole group (the Party and those non-members who fought alongside it in the ussr), the over-signifying gap between the exigencies of praxis and the dogma which defined the practical solution disappeared. It became the simple signification of the way in which this still-traditionalist country, with its illiterate population, absorbed and assimilated at once the overthrow of its ancient traditions; a traditional withdrawal into itself; and the acquisition of new traditions, through the gradual absorption of an internationalist, universalist ideology which helped the peasants sucked into industry to comprehend the transition from rural to factory labour. [15]

The slogan was distorted because it represented, at the level of the leadership conflict, the product of opposed activities. From the point of view of the Party (that is, of all the objective conditions as interiorized by a systematic retotalization), this distortion was in itself a comprehensible practical signification, in all its rough-hewn crudity—and falsity. It represented the reincarnation of Marxism, through men to whose fierce voluntarism and young barbarism it gave expression, simply by the deviations which it received and passed on. This monstrosity, unintelligible as a verbal idea or theoretico-practical principle, was comprehensible as an act of totalization which held together and unified, in that specific moment of action, theory and practice; the universal and the particular; the traditionalist depths of a still alienated history and the movement of cultural liberation; the negative movement of withdrawal and the positive movement of hope. Its individuality as an ideological deviation was that of a totalized totalization, since it expressed and at the same time strengthened revolutionary praxis in the historical individuality of its incarnation, that is to say in the particularity of its objective tasks, both within the community under construction and externally in the practical field.

The Vicissitudes of Praxis

Similarly, the theory of gold as a commodity is comprehensible as the idea of a particular monetary practice at the time of the exploitation of Peruvian mines. [16] This does not mean that the idea is true or obvious or, to return to our example, consonant with the principles of Marxism. It does not even mean that it has any long-term ‘validity’, in the sense of being effective without producing too many counter-finalities. [17] But the historian will comprehend it in a single act of totalization because he will see it not as a scientific statement, but as praxis itself going astray and becoming lost, only to find its way again in the end through its own contradictions, that is to say through conflicts between common individuals. Insofar as the factors which enter into a developing totalization are diverse, each of them must be recognized as a particular expression of this totalization. Thus comprehension will consist in conceiving each factor as a perspective, both objective and individual, on the developing whole; and in totalizing these perspectives in a totalization which is individualized in each of them, and which is a comprehensive but individual synthesis of all these individualizations. Then, of course, it is necessary to give complementary consideration to the slogan (or any similar product) in its development as a process. It was hardened by its long duration (by its past; by the stratifications which it helped to produce and which supported it), deriving its ossified permanence from the inertia of language and the pledged passivity of common individuals. As such it exercised powers, developed its counter-finalities, and helped to create the practico-inert of constructive activity, both in the party and in the new society. We are not yet in a position to deal with this new problem of the relation between the various dialectics and the anti-dialectic: but our investigation will lead us there shortly. [18]

What we have been trying to demonstrate is that, within a group, the meaninglessness of any given product of secret conflicts appears at a level where the product has been constituted not by one action (or by a set of co-ordinated activities organized around a common aim), but by at least two actions, each of which has a tendency to cancel the other, or at least to turn it into a means of destroying the other agent. This, of course, is the level at which practices are produced in their concrete reality: groups of people determining their activities themselves on the basis of the situation. However, these people have been produced as common individuals within the group as a whole; their disputes—as the anti-labour which leads to the product in question—are fought out within a fundamental unity (as leaders of the Bolshevik Party, for instance, compelled once power had been seized to undertake the urgent task of preserving what had been won by constructing the society of the future). [19] As such, they likewise enjoy the support of all common individuals (at the various levels of hierarchical organization) insofar as these constitute the group. In the first phase of struggle, both protagonists enjoy this support simultaneously. This is because every individual is common, through his pledge to maintain the unity of the totalizing group. It is also because the conflict expresses—in the form of a real public contradiction—the implicit and non-thematized contradiction which opposes each individual to himself in his attempt to interiorize the objective difficulties of the common praxis. From this point of view, the group supports the monstrosities to which anti-labour gives birth, by its own common activity. It is the group which finally determines whether they will be viable or stillborn.

When a group supports such a monstrosity—when it adopts it and realizes it in detail through its own praxis—this praxis in itself is inseparable from comprehension. Every common individual and every subgroup supports and nourishes the monstrosity, insofar as it presents itself as the practical and intelligible transcendence of their contradictions. This certainly does not mean that such transcendence is a genuine synthesis and solution of the objective difficulties. However, the monstrosity becomes comprehensible, in and through the contradictions which everyone has interiorized, as their re-exteriorization in an undertaking. For the contradiction is implicit and enveloped in everyone. [20] It occurs as a factor determining comprehension (among other aspects); in other words, as an invisible limitation on freedom and an immediate familiarity with the product.

In the case we have been discussing, this limitation was due to the necessary vulgarization and particularization of Marxism as the first stage of a culture. The particularization and vulgarization of the universal were the contradiction itself, but enveloped, because it at the same time expressed everyone’s level of culture, that is to say their implicit familiarity, never seen or mediated, with themselves. But in this negative framework, incapable at first of seeing the absurdity of the slogan ‘socialism in one country’, they recognized its positive side. Although it is true that the situation did not in the abstract necessarily entail this dogma, and although it was abstractly possible for propaganda to be based on more modest reasons to hope and act, everything changes once one takes into account the concrete individuals who created the new Marxism and who, in the name of the very ideas produced in them by their Marxist education, laid claim to absolute certainty. For them, the negative moment had been transcended. Carrying on the Revolution meant building a new order. As Trotsky said later: ‘the masses needed to breathe’. This means that their simplistic culture prevented them from conceding any positive value to the systematic elimination of all traces of the old order. In their eyes, the old order had already gone.

Hence it was not the situation which required this object, but the men who lived it. But since they created it as they lived it, it would be more accurate to say that the abstract exigencies of the situation became more precise and acquired (often contradictory) significations as they became concrete exigencies through living people. This product became intelligible in terms of the totalizing group insofar as it was acknowledged and supported by common individuals; in other words, insofar as they reproduced it as a response to their own exigencies. This is precisely what the sub-group executing the manoeuvre reckoned upon; it wanted to be borne along in its operation by the participation of all.

There is still, of course, the case where the conflict is taken up by the whole group on its own account, with every common individual belonging to one camp or the other. In such circumstances, that intelligibility as a product tends to disappear. But this means that a split is imminent. In fact, if one of the sub-groups were to restore unity by destroying the other, the group, as we have seen, would have to be a permanent mediator. This precisely presupposes that the essential integrity of the practical community is preserved; it is this integrity which renders the products of anti-labour intelligible. Effectively they become the chosen instruments whereby the group acts upon itself.

III. The Truth of ‘Socialism in One Country’

Although these considerations lead us to the brink of diachronic totalization, one final point must be made. If the monstrosity survived, it was to reorganize itself through common praxis, lose its immediate intelligibility, and be integrated into a new intelligibility. Praxis was to re-establish its practical truth by correcting its own deviations, and the correction originated in the deviations themselves. However, the irreversibility of temporalization ruled out any turning back of the clock. So the correction had to be made through an enriching transcendence, which preserved the deviation at the same time as endowing it with truth, through an often quite complex system of additions, developments, compensations and transmutations.

‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’

The slogan ‘socialism in one country’ originally contained an indeterminacy, due to the considerable ambiguity of the word ‘socialism’. In Marxist writing, in fact, the words ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ were used indifferently to designate a single social order, namely the society which it was the proletariat’s task to create in the future. In this way, the word ‘socialism’ connoted the withering away and disappearance of the state, the elimination of classes, and workers’ ownership of the instruments of labour. However, social democracy also laid claim to the word, though it hoped to achieve a socialist society as the result of a long reformist evolution. Consequently the term ‘socialism’ underwent a slight change and was sometimes used to denote the reformist illusions of social democracy. In this situation, the term ‘communism’ had the advantage of greater precision, denoting the social order in question precisely insofar as it could be achieved only by Revolution. Thus the word ‘socialism’, as used in the familiar slogan, differed from ‘communism’ in being somewhat indeterminate.

But before long this semantic difference became sharper; it became a difference in the structure of the objects denoted, and in the moments of their temporalization. In other words, ‘socialism’ gradually acquired a new meaning. It became what precedes the communist order or, if you like, the transition from capitalism to communism. [*] This transitory order, however, is subsequent to the revolutionary seizure of power. It is characterized by a necessary, fundamental transformation of the relations of production, with society as a whole appropriating the means of production. But the state survives, as the organ through which the proletariat exercises its dictatorship. This, of course, means that classes are not eliminated—far from it. In particular, representatives of the oppressor classes, hidden in the depths of the new society, unite to form counter-revolutionary forces. At a later stage, Stalin would even not hesitate to add that class conflicts are aggravated as socialist achievements grow in number and importance. A régime of this kind, harrassed by enemies without and within, and characterized by a strengthening of the state apparatus just when transformations of property are preparing the way for a gradual erosion of this apparatus, is bound to be rent by contradictions. And in fact the official Marxists did eventually begin to raise the question of the ‘contradictions of socialism’. As the term ‘socialism’ acquired these new uses, under the pressure of circumstances, it changed its meaning, being used to refer more narrowly (but still inadequately) to the particular order which was becoming established in the ussr—and which proclaimed itself to be transitory.

Did this mean simply going back and modifying the notion of ‘socialism’, to the point where it denoted nothing more than what we earlier termed a ‘pre-socialist order’? No: the very construction of the word ‘pre-socialist’ incorporates a serious error of judgement. For in a sense there is only one pre-socialist order, and that is capitalism—simply because it is what comes before. But once the proletarian revolution has occurred, socialism already exists. For its fundamental characteristic is not abundance, nor the total elimination of classes, nor workers’ sovereignty—although these features are indispensable, at least as distant objectives of the essential transformation. It is the suppression of exploitation and oppression or, in positive terms, the collective appropriation of the means of production. Now in spite of the poverty of a country ravaged by war and the ruin of its industrial plant, this appropriation was carried through as soon as the Soviets seized power. Moreover, it was never subsequently put in question—whatever significance one accords to the emergence of a bureaucratic layer appropriating a considerable portion of the surplus. The only real threat to it was that posed to Soviet society as a whole by capitalist encirclement and blockade, and by the activities of the enemy within.

So the order established in the ussr really was socialist. But it was characterized by the practical necessity (a necessity of freedom) of either disappearing or becoming what it was at the cost of enormous and painful effort. That collective appropriation of ruins while under foreign threat was changed progressively, by the labour of all, into common ownership of the most powerful means of production. And if socialism had to be constructed in one country, this was precisely because socialism appeared in the most abstract and impoverished form, in a country whose isolation it both inherited and accentuated. Thus the false formula became true, provided socialism is seen as a praxis-process, building an order based on the fundamental socialization of land and machines, under emergency conditions and through continual sacrifice of everything to the most rapid possible increase in the rate of production. The basic contradiction doubtless lay in the fact that this was simultaneously a rapid conquest, rapidly institutionalized, and an undertaking which spanned several generations. But the emergency conditions and their practical consequences (dirigisme, authoritarian planning, idealistic voluntarism, strengthening of the state apparatus, bureaucracy, terror, etc.) necessarily enter into the definition of this order/undertaking, since it was the latter which brought them about as a result of the terror it provoked in the bourgeois democracies.

What then remained, as a distant objective, as the non-incarnated beyond of day-to-day struggles and of the whole undertaking, was the communist order itself. This is what was still defined abstractly as internationalization of the Revolution, disappearance of the state, abundance and freedom. But in such a theoretical synthesis, socialism was basically homogeneous with communism, since the decisive transformation of social and economic structures had already occurred in the very first years of the Revolution. Socialism thus became simply the mediation between the abstract moment of socialization and the concrete moment of common enjoyment. The consequence was that, in certain historical circumstances, it could be synonymous with hell.

Thus the Stalinist formula began by being false, then became more and more true, and finally, when the situation no longer justified it—that is to say, when the Chinese Revolution and the emergence of the People’s Democracies in central Europe put an end to ‘socialist isolation’, and necessitated a different praxis on the part of the Soviet government—withered away, slipping into a purely honorific role. Of course, the counter-finalities of this transcended praxis had incidentally transformed the ussr: stratifications, practico-inert structures. The particular in- carnation became increasingly particularized through the process of institutionalization. The adaptation of this highly specific reality to the new exigencies was to be long, arduous and embattled. But what was essential had been preserved. The transformations might be violent but they were no longer to be revolutionary. In this way, the monstrous slogan acquired a practical truth, because it really was the idea of that monstrous but inevitable transformation: of that distorted praxis, whose particular distortion was nevertheless the reality (and therefore the truth) of an incarnation which transcended itself in an undertaking which it conditioned at the outset and which remained qualified by it. Thus historical reason, through a double (synchronic and diachronic) totalization, can grasp the product of anti-labour as something which is also—both in the particular moment and throughout the temporalization—the intelligible result of the common unity and of the enveloping totalization.

IV. The Three Phases of Historialization

The relevance of the example we have been considering is limited. In it, struggle appears only as the avatar of an already integrated group. What we have shown, in fact, is that when a synthetic unity already exists (as both effect and condition of a common praxis), internal conflict (as the practical adoption of the counter-finalities secreted by action) is—both in its movement of antagonistic reciprocity and in its objective products—simply an incarnation and a historialization of the global totalization, insofar as the latter also has to totalize its dis-assimilated and waste products. [21] Furthermore, we have emphasized that totalization is not an ideal and transcendent movement, but on the contrary occurs through the discrete activities of individuals on the basis of their common pledge. But this special case of internal discord being preceded and engendered by unity can obviously only be presented as one specification of the historical process, even though it frequently occurs in concrete experience, at all levels of practice—in short, even though it belongs to the proper domain of history, as a condition and consequence of the global evolution of the society where it occurs. Since, moreover, the ensembles whose structures and temporalization the historian has to study always appear (at first sight at least) to lack genuine unity, the intelligibility of social struggles seems extremely difficult to defend. [*]

What has our regressive investigation taught us about ‘societies’, in the strictly historical sense of the term? So far, it has taught us only that they seem to be characterized simultaneously by a unity of immanence and by a multiplicity of exteriority—whether we consider a fifteenth-century Flemish city or ‘France’ from 1789 to 1794. [22] For there is a relation between the city or nation and the set of towns or nations which surround it. Once interiorized, this manifests itself insofar as it is grasped by the multiplicity in question as its objective practical unity. But, of course, it will be pointed out that series extend and ramify throughout society. So the interiorization (unless carried out by a specific group) will be transformed in the milieu of recurrence, into a serial bond of alterity. [23] Similarly, the institutional ensemble—both as such and in the constituted bodies responsible for applying the law—displays a certain sovereign integration of the social plurality. But as we have already seen, the power of the sovereign depends on the impotence of the series. It is as other that the practico-inert individual serves the law and permits himself to be manipulated by forms of other-direction. [24]

What have we really seen? Heterogeneous groups (as heterogeneous in their origins, structures, objects, and rates of temporalization as in the nature, scale, depth and significance of their actions) which at times condition one another more or less directly, at times oppose one another, and at times ignore each other, but all of which are themselves derived from series, or liable to relapse into seriality. Apart from that, the mediation of worked matter always and everywhere, between individuals and even groups (when they are not directly determined in mutual solidarity or reciprocal opposition), creating the passive unity of the practico-inert through the alteration and reification of the immediate bonds of reciprocity between men. [25] In certain cases, as we have seen—particularly when classes enter into struggle, through the mediation of organized groups—the unity of the group is reflected in the inert depths of the collective as a possibility of unity for everyone (as a possibility of transforming one’s other-being into common individuality). But even if the entire class were to destroy its seriality, exploitation, oppression and the struggle against oppression would still be conditioned by a practico-inert split.

In an organized group, the latter can only arise through a praxis which has already taken it over. In ‘societies’, however, the practico-inert is an objective reality which manifests itself independently, in and through the alienation of every praxis; it is individual practice which seems to be taken over and absorbed by inanimate matter. Thus class conflict too appears as a transcendence and taking over of counter-finalities by each class and against the other. But in fact, far from arising from unity, combat groups, parties and unions attempt to realize the unity of one class as a practico-inert seriality against the other. Similarly, the basic (though most abstract and distant) aim of every class organization—the elimination of the other class, or its permanent subjection and constitution as a willing slave, which comes to the same thing—is not, as with an organized group, imposed by the practical necessity of reestablishing unity of action. On the contrary, unity of action is achieved by each class with a view to realizing this aim; and it is the actual split of the practico-inert which produces it, as the only conceivable means of creating a society which rules its own materiality and where man is the permanent mediation between men. Here, in short, two antagonistic unities are created, in opposition both to each other and to a seriality of impotence produced by a practico-inert process. In other words, conflict within the group was a moment of the constituted dialectic. [26]

But how are we to conceive the dialectical intelligibility of this negative reciprocity which establishes itself on the basis of an anti-dialectical break between the constituent dialectic and the constituted dialectic? Is history, at the level of large ensembles, an ambiguous interpenetration of unity and plurality, of dialectic and anti-dialectic, of sense and non-sense? Are there, depending on the circumstances and on the particular ensemble in question, several totalizations related only by co-existence or some other external relation? Is it for the historian alone, in his historical investigation, to determine the directions in which a single praxis-process is resumed and retotalized at various levels, and to define the significant configurations to which a single event gives rise in the most disparate milieux? If we were to accept this thesis, we would be led back, by a détour, to historical neo-positivism. For many modern historians recognize, more or less implicitly, what one might call dialectical sequences within a history which still remains pluralist and analytical.

However, in order to settle the question, we must recall that men make history to the extent that it makes them. In the present case, this means that the practico-inert is produced by the counter-finalities of praxis precisely insofar as serialities of impotence, by making life impossible, give rise to the totalizing unity which transcends them. Thus the movement of historialization has three phases. In the first, a common praxis transforms the society through a totalizing action whose counter-finalities make its results practico-inert. In the second, the anti-social forces of the practico-inert impose a negative unity of self-destruction on the society, by usurping the unifying power of the praxis which produced them. In the third, the detotalized unity retotalizes itself in a common attempt to rediscover the objective by stripping it of counter-finalities. This, however, requires further examination.

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[1] Praxis: the purposive activity of an individual or group.

[2] Incarnation: see introduction, p. 139 above.

[3] Dialectic: the intelligibility of praxis at every level. Dialectical reason, whose object is praxis, is contrasted with positivist or analytical reason, appropriate to the external relations which are the object of the natural sciences.

[4] Temporalization: the unfolding of a praxis.

[5] Institution (or institutional group): a group which develops from a pledged group through the ossification of its structures and the emergence of sovereignty and seriality within it (see footnote 7 below).

[6] Totalization: the constantly developing process of understanding and making history.

[7] Group: an ensemble each of whose members is determined by the others in reciprocity; it is contrasted with a series, each of whose members is determined in alterity by the others.

[8] Practico-inert: matter in which past praxis is incarnated.

[9] Investigation (‘expérience’): the process of understanding History, as corresponding to the historical process itself.

[10] Sovereign group: the governing element in an institution or institutional group.

[*] There are many other factors (technical changes, etc) which may account for this impotence. But it is crucial that these were always regrouped in relation to the Russian Revolution. In France, the progress of industrialization and Malthusianism are sufficient to explain the divisions in the French working class. But the violence of the internal conflicts was due precisely to the fact that what were initially technical and craft divisions meshed with political antagonisms, whose underlying significance was always the difference in attitudes to the Soviet Union. Of course, we are referring here to the Soviet Union in the first phase of the Revolution. Later, the ussr was a direct or indirect cause of such crucially important events as the defeat of Nazism, the triumph of communism in China, or the emergence of the Third World. But these need not be considered here; for although they existed in germ at this time, they had not yet emerged explicitly.

[11] Idea: the meaning of a practico-inert object (cf. Critique of Dialectical Reason, pp. 170–71, 300–306).

[12] Hyper-organism: an organicist concept of common activity that is independent of individual action.

[13] Common individual: member of a group. Pledge: agreement governing the organized distribution of rights and duties among members of a pledged group, which develops from a fused group (a newly formed group, directly opposed to seriality, and unstructured).

[14] Alienation: the condition in which free praxis is taken over and controlled by the other or by the practico-inert.

[15] Signification: a meaning embedded in worked matter (see footnote 25 below).

[16] See Critique of Dialectical Reason, pp. 166 ff.

[17] Counter-finality: the frustration of the objectives of a practice by the practico-inert.

[18] Anti-dialectic: the result of a praxis being turned against itself by the practico-inert.

[19] Anti-labour: see introduction, p. 139 above.

[20] Envelopment: see introduction, pp. 139, 141 above.

[*] Similar distinctions can be found in various authors, even before 1914. But at that time their application was purely logical and philosophical. The terms were distinguished for theoretical purposes. The change came when, in the name of the dogma of ‘socialism in one country’, the distinction between ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ acquired a practical and popular application, being used to denote stages in the evolution of Soviet society.

[21] Historialization: dynamic of multiple totalizations and their resultants into a moving ensemble.

[*] I am only speaking here of national ensembles, since critical investigation must proceed through national histories before tackling the problem of so-called ‘world’ or ‘universal’ history.

[22] See Critique of Dialectical Reason, pp. 345–444.

[23] Recurrence: the alienated unity of members of a series, as opposed to a group. Alterity: a relation of separation, opposed to reciprocity.

[24] Other-direction: the manipulation of a series by a sovereign—an individual (or group) who (or which) manipulates series within an institutional group (cf. Critique of Dialectical Reason, pp. 643-54).

[25] Worked matter: matter in which past praxis is incarnated.

[26] Constituted dialectic: the dialectic of group praxis. Constituent dialectic: the dialectic of individual praxis.