Sartre's Marxism

[RedSunsZenith]

Can someone please give me a general explanation of Jean-Paul Sartre's Marxism? I plan on reading Search For a Method soon and I would like to go into it with at least somewhat of an idea what his argument will be.

[CHE with an AK]

You should read ...

http://images.betterworldbooks.com/184/Between-Existentialism-and-Marxism-Sartre-Jean-Paul-9781844672073.jpg

... a great book

[Ose]

How does Sartre reconcile existentialism with the materialist basis of Marxism? I haven't yet read either Search for a Method or Critique de la raison dialectique, but I was reading this recently and found it helpful (from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/): (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/)


4.2 Sartre: Existentialism and Marxism

A very different reading, and a very different recommendation, can be found in the work of Sartre. The basis for Sartre's reading of history, and his politics, was laid in that section of Being and Nothingness that describes the birth of the social in the “Look” of the other. In making me an object for his projects, the other alienates me from myself, displaces me from the subject position (the position from which the world is defined in its meaning and value) and constitutes me as something. Concretely, what I am constituted “as” is a function of the other's project and not something that I can make myself be. I am constituted as a “Frenchman” in and through the hostility emanating from that German; I am constituted as a “man” in the resentment of that woman; I am constituted as a “Jew” on the basis of the other's anti-semitism; and so on. This sets up a dimension of my being that I can neither control nor disavow, and my only recourse is to wrench myself away from the other in an attempt to restore myself to the subject-position. For this reason, on Sartre's model, social reality is in perpetual conflict—an Hegelian dialectic in which, for ontological reasons, no state of mutual recognition can ever be achieved. The “we”—the political subject—is always contested, conflicted, unstable.

But this instability does have a certain structure, one which Sartre, steeped in the Marxism of inter-war French thought (Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite), explored in terms of a certain historical materialism. For social relations take place not only between human beings but also within institutions that have developed historically and that enshrine relations of power and domination. Thus the struggle for who will take the subject position is not carried out on equal terms. As Simone de Beauvoir demonstrated in detail in her book, The Second Sex, the historical and institutional place of women is defined in such a way that they are consigned to a kind of permanent “object” status—they are the “second” sex since social norms are defined in male terms. This being so, a woman's struggle to develop self-defining projects is constrained by a permanent institutional “Look” that already defines her as “woman,” whereas a man need not operate under constraints of gender: he feels himself to be simply “human,” pure subjectivity. Employing similar insights in reflection on the situations of ethnic and economic oppression, Sartre sought a way to derive political imperatives in the face of the groundlessness of moral values entailed by his view of the ideality of values.

At first, Sartre argued that there was one value—namely freedom itself—that did have a kind of universal authority. To commit oneself to anything is also always to commit oneself to the value of freedom. In “Existentialism is a Humanism” Sartre tried to establish this by way of a kind of transcendental argument, but he soon gave up that strategy and pursued the more modest one of claiming that the writer must always engage “on the side of freedom.” According to the theory of “engaged literature” expounded in What is Literature?, in creating a literary world the author is always acting either to imagine paths toward overcoming concrete unfreedoms such as racism and capitalist exploitation, or else closing them off. In the latter case, he is contradicting himself, since the very idea of writing presupposes the freedom of the reader, and that means, in principle, the whole of the reading public. Whatever the merits of this argument, it does suggest the political value to which Sartre remained committed throughout his life: the value of freedom as self-making.

This commitment finally led Sartre to hold that existentialism itself was only an “ideological” moment within Marxism, which he termed “the one philosophy of our time which we cannot go beyond” (Sartre 1968:xxxiv). As this statement suggests, Sartre's embrace of Marxism was a function of his sense of history as the factic situation in which the project of self-making takes place. Because existing is self-making (action), philosophy—including existential philosophy—cannot be understood as a disinterested theorizing about timeless essences but is always already a form of engagement, a diagnosis of the past and a projection of norms appropriate to a different future in light of which the present takes on significance. It therefore always arises from the historical-political situation and is a way of intervening in it. Marxism, like existentialism, makes this necessarily practical orientation of philosophy explicit.

From the beginning existentialism saw itself in this activist way (and this provided the basis for the most serious disagreements among French existentialists such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Camus, many of which were fought out in the pages of the journal founded by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Les Temps modernes). But the later Sartre came to hold that a philosophy of self-making could not content itself with highlighting the situation of individual choice; an authentic political identity could only emerge from a theory that situated such choice in a practically oriented analysis of its concrete situation. Thus it appeard to him that the “ideology of existence” was itself merely an alienated form of the deeper analysis of social and historical reality provided by Marx's dialectical approach. In focusing on the most important aspects of the material condition in which the existential project of self-making takes place—namely, economic relations under conditions of scarcity—Marx's critique of capital offered a set of considerations that no “philosophy of freedom” could ignore, considerations that would serve to orient political engagement until such time as “there will exist for everyone a margin of real freedom beyond the production of life” (Sartre 1968:34). Marxism is unsurpassable, therefore, because it is the most lucid theory of our alienated situation of concrete unfreedom, oriented toward the practical-political overcoming of that unfreedom.

Sartre's relation to orthodox Marxism was marked by tension, however, since he held that existing Marxism had abandoned the promise of its dialectical approach to social reality in favor of a dogmatic “apriorism” that subsumed historical reality under a blanket of lifeless abstractions. He thus undertook his Critique of Dialectical Reason to restore the promise of Marxism by reconceiving its concept of praxis in terms of the existential notion of project. What had become a rigid economic determinism would be restored to dialectical fluidity by recalling the existential doctrine of self-making: it is true that man is “made” by history, but at the same time he is making that very history. This attempt to “reconquer man within Marxism” (Sartre 1968:83)—i.e., to develop a method which would preserve the concrete details of human reality as lived experience—was not well received by orthodox Marxists. Sartre's fascination with the details of Flaubert's life, or the life of Baudelaire, smacked too much of “bourgeois idealism.” But we see here how Sartre's politics, like Heidegger's, derived from his concept of history: there are no “iron-clad laws” that make the overthrow of capitalism the inevitable outcome of economic forces; there are only men in situation who make history as they are made by it. Dialectical materialism is the unsurpassable philosophy of those who choose, who commit themselves to, the value of freedom. The political claim that Marxism has on us, then, would rest upon the ideological enclave within it: authentic existence as choice.

Authentic existence thus has an historical, political dimension; all choice will be attentive to history in the sense of contextualizing itself in some temporally narrative understanding of its place. But even here it must be admitted that what makes existence authentic is not the “correctness” of the narrative understanding it adopts. Authenticity does not depend on some particular substantive view of history, some particular theory or empirical story. From this point of view, the substantive “histories” adopted by existential thinkers as different as Heidegger and Sartre should perhaps be read less as scientific accounts, defensible in third-person terms, than as articulations of the historical situation from the perspective of what that situation is taken to demand, given the engaged commitment of their authors. They stand, in other words, less as justifications for their authors' existential and political commitments than as themselves a form of politics: invitations to others to see things as the author sees them, so that the author's commitment to going on a certain way will come to be shared.

[CHE with an AK]

I would have loved to have sat in on these all-night philosophical discussions ...



http://mustreadsoccer.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Beauvoir_Sartre_-_Che_Guevara_-1960_-_Cuba.jpg
Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre and Che Guevara (1960)
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http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lo1hwz9HeX1qg32nio1_500.jpg

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

Can someone please give me a general explanation of Jean-Paul Sartre's Marxism? I plan on reading Search For a Method soon and I would like to go into it with at least somewhat of an idea what his argument will be.

If you're concerned about the length of "Search for a Method" you might want to check out some of Sartre's shorter pieces on Marxism in "Situations," the collection of articles originally published in Les Temps Modernes in the postwar period (there are quite a few volumes issued).

Also, simply because it's a superb read (especially for all you teenagers who "just don't get existential angst, lucky you): his early novel, La Nausee.