On Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:35:48 -0400 Ralph Dumain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > What a useless piece of shit Badiou is. His politics are even more > worthless than his philosophy. > > As for Sartre, there are others on the anti-Stalinist left who bear > a > grudge against him for his erstwhile apologetics for the Communist > Party. Some might wonder what he was doing with Maoist students.
I can answer that as follows: Sartre's involvement with the Maoists came when the Gaullist government in France initiated a crackdown on the Maoists in 1970. Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, who was editor-in-chief of the newspaper, La Cause du peuple - published by the Maoist group Proletarian Left was arrested and his paper seized. He was immediately replaced by a new editor, Michel Le Bris, who was then arrested ten days later. In other words, the French government was most intent on suppressing the Maoist press at that time. Since the government had made it clear that it would arrest anybody who would take charge of the paper, the Maoists decided to turn to Sartre. So on April 28, 1970, Sartre after meeting with a number of leading Maoists including Benny Levy (then known as Pierre Victor) accepted the post of editor-in-chief. Later that year Sartre accepted the same position at several other Maoist papers that were also facing suppression by the French government. In the meantime,the French National Assembly passed legislation restricting demonstrations, which gave the minister of the interior the power to dissolve the Proletarian Left, which he ordered on May 27, 1970. Sartre's acceptance of the post of editor-in-chief with several Maoist papers lent his name, his prestige and indeed his active participation to the campaign against the attempts by the government to suppress the Maoists. For this Sartre was attacked by most of the bourgeois press which charged him with grandstanding and self-promotion, while the Communist paper, L'Humanite, attacked him for endorsing the "vulgar provocations" of the Maoists. Only Le Monde was in any way supportive. When the cases of the two arrested editors of La Cause du peuple was taken to the courts, the decision to outlaw the paper was revoked but the editors were still found guilty of violating the law. That verdict was followed by outbreaks of violent demonstrations. In June, Sartre and his friends founded the Association of the Friends of "La Cause du peuple," with Simone de Beauvoir and Liliane Siegel as fronts. They organized public distributions of the paper in Paris with Sartre, Beauvoir, and many leading intellectuals and journalists publicly hawking the paper. Sartre, no stranger to publicity, made sure that there was a photographer from Gallimard to photograph the whole thing. Sartre was arrested, questioned by the police, then released. Following that incident Sartre who had been called as a witness in the trial of a Maoist leader, Alain Geismar, refused to come to the court. Instead, he harangued the workers at the Renault Billancourt plants where he called upon the workers to support Geismar's cause. Most of the workers ignored his speech. Sartre was widely ridiculed in the French press. Sartre's active involvement with the Maoists continued until 1973. His relations with them were often quite stormy but his involvement did help beat back the government's attempts to suppress or censor the radical press in France. ____________________________________________________________ Scan, remove and block Spyware. Click now! http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/Ioyw6i3mEy9tiVwXHSzjnWhyNGsipNemgEg6SeNpBrKwTFEAuX3h53/ _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
