Sartre and Marxism

[seventeethdecember2016]

I have read somewhere that Sartre claimed that Existentialism was a form of Marxism. I know little about Sartre, so could anyone give me a quote or a reason why he believed this is?

[Ocean Seal]

I have read somewhere that Sartre claimed that Existentialism was a form of Marxism. I know little about Sartre, so could anyone give me a quote or a reason why he believed this is?
He claimed that existentialism was a humanism in that he said that humans had their own purposes which is kind of what Marx says about alienation if I remember this correctly.

[pluckedflowers]

I can't give you a quote, as I myself only recently learned of Sartre's Marxist leanings, but this (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/sartre1.htm) would probably be a good place to start.

[Red Storm]

I tried to read a book by Sartre on existentialism and transcendence of the soul or something to that effect. I had to quit reading because I needed a dictionary to read it due to the terms he uses. His work is allegedly very good but without a dictionary I felt I was clutching at straws to understand the concepts he was explaining in technical field specific terminology.

[[email protected]]

Read Critique of Dialectical Reason. It's 2 volumes (and a slog).

Personally, I think it's prima facie ridiculous as Existentialism is an Individualism and Marxism is a Collectivism. Your mileage may vary.

IMO, Sartre's brilliant (with the occasional misstep e.g. aforementiond CODR), but for an intro, stick with Nausea, Existentialism as a Humanism or The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone De Beauvoir (his life partner was also a philosopher in the same vein). SDB other books are great too. He writes better literature, she writes better philosophy.

[Deicide]

I tried to read a book by Sartre on existentialism and transcendence of the soul or something to that effect. I had to quit reading because I needed a dictionary to read it due to the terms he uses. His work is allegedly very good but without a dictionary I felt I was clutching at straws to understand the concepts he was explaining in technical field specific terminology.

Well.. that's the whole point of learning is it not? Understanding something new is supposed to be a struggle.

Anyway OP.. Here's Satre's page on MIA http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/index.htm

I. Marxism & Existentialism

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/sartre1.htm

[Tim Finnegan]

Personally, I think it's prima facie ridiculous as Existentialism is an Individualism and Marxism is a Collectivism.
I don't think that's true. Marxism is a theory of history, not a normative political philosophy; it's not an argument that we should do X, Y and Z, but a conception of history that identifies our current historical context as being that of capitalism, and that implicit within capitalism is its negation: communism.

Furthermore, communism, as the revolutionary aufheben of capitalism, represents a transcendence of the bourgeois distinction between the "individual" and the "collective", so to identify it as tending in either direction is to misidentify what it actually is as social force. Communism is both individualist and collectivist, and it is neither, because it represents a departure from the very terms in which such a distinction would be made.

So, no, there's nothing incompatible about existentialism and Marxism as such, however it might happen to conflict with this-or-that tendency.