According to Sartre, seriality is the fundamental type of sociability. Waiting in the queue of a bus exemplifies this kind of social organization, in which each individual is interchangeable for the Other, constituting a plurality in isolation. Seriality is linked to the concept of practical-inert field, which can be defined as the real servitude to the natural and mechanical forces of the anti-social apparatus. The practical-inert field would include all those devices that regulate our behavior outside our will, understood as a set of obligations imposed by existing material conditions. Under this situation, collectives act as a mass whose behavior appears defined by stimulus-response relations imposed from the outside. In this context, freedom is the means chosen by the Other to crush me and transform me into a mere object at his disposal. According to Sartre, all individuals are slaves to the extent that their life is developed in the practical-inert field and to the extent that this field is always conditioned by scarcity.

For the individual who lives in the practical-inert field, his activity is restricted by external impositions, under which subjectivity is reduced to a verdict that obliges me to carry out, freely and through myself, the sentence that society has pronounced on me, and which defines me a priori in my being.

Sartre considers that action constitutes the authenticity of the individual, and only through the autonomous action of the group is it possible to shake the hypnotic lethargy of the stillness that dominates the individuals who inhabit the practical-inert field. According to him, there are only two possible alternatives: either the individuals submit to the course of the world, hiding in their immediate present, or they confront it through collective praxis, accessing a future that extends far beyond their death.

It is through what Sartre calls group-in-fusion that collectives would manage to escape from the practical-inert field. This form of social organization would consist of groups of individuals in a context in which both the relations of authority and the division of labor are diffuse and temporary, and whose unity is only determined by a common praxis. For Sartre, it is through collective action that individuals can project themselves into the future in order to escape from a society that is suffocating them and to confront the violence which emerges from the condition of being an object at the service of the Other’s will. Sartre considers that human freedom, within the group-in-fusion, is the least alienating and the most beneficial, not for the group itself, but for the individuals who make it up. The establishment of groups-in-fusion inaugurates the birth of social freedom, which supposes a qualitative leap, given that for Sartre, it is through collective action that individuals reach the highest degree of freedom, considered as the autonomy of choice.

However, Sartre warns that the desire to unify actions can lead to a bureaucratic and institutional form of organization. According to him, it is necessary to avoid at all costs the displacement from praxis as a unifying vector towards the survival of the collective itself as its purpose. Likewise, he considers indispensable the need for an organizational discipline oriented towards the decentralization of power. Institutionalization would imply the denial of reciprocal relations between individuals, and with it, the first step toward the establishment of authority as an organizing element in the collective dynamics.

References: Remley, W. L. (2018). Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anarchist Philosophy. Bloomsbury Publishing.