Existentialism and Marxism

[ArabRASH]

Now i've read alot of Sartre. I know he was an existentialist, and a marxist. But i fail to see a connection between the two. Not that they go against each other, but I just find them totally unrelated. Is there a part of existentialism that applies to Marxism, which caused Sartre to hail communists, or are they indeed just unrelated?

[Led Zeppelin]

They are not necessarily unrelated, if you care about philosophy.

Here's a good read on it: Marxism & Existentialism (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/critic/sartre1.htm)

[bezdomni]

Sartre's essays "Critique of Dialectical Reason" and "Existentialism is a Humanism" are both really important to modern marxist/existentialist philosophy.

He was a Marxist-Leninist with strong Maoist sympathies, as I've managed to gather. A lot of his plays (Dirty Hands, especially) are very influenced by his politics.

LZ, I don't know if the CWI and IMT have the same line on this question...but one of the things that really drew me away from the IMT was how stupid they are about existentialism.

http://www.newyouth.com/content/view/123/60/#4


Let us take Existentialism. This is one of the emptiest of the modern bourgeois "philosophies" (it goes against the grain to dignify it with the name). Existentialism has its roots in the irrationalist trend of 19th century philosophy, typified by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It has assumed the most varied forms and political colouring. There was a religious trend (Marcel, Jaspers, Berdyayev and Buber) and an atheistic trend (Heidigger, Sartre, Camus). But its most common feature is extreme subjectivism, reflected in its preferred vocabulary: its watchwords - "being-in-the-world", "dread", "care", "being towards death", and the like. It was already anticipated by Edmund Husserl, a German mathematician turned philosopher, whose "phenomenology" was a form of subjective idealism, based on the "individual, personal world, as directly experienced, with the ego at the centre".
Existentialism centres everything on the moment. All that you can achieve is in the moment in which you are living and anything before or after becomes irrelevant. It is an individualistic and extremely pessimistic view of the world, entirely at one with the psychology of the petty bourgeois intellectual. This is the very opposite of Marxism and inevitably leads you away from a class understanding. Thus it becomes irrelevant to study the past, to study overall processes. You must live for the moment and for yourself. This school of thought developed on the basis of the petit-bourgeois of the 1930s, ruined by the economic crisis and crushed between the working class and the big banks and monopolies. Politically and personally disoriented, and lacking any perspective, they had lost any hope in the future. One group of existentialists collaborated with the Nazis (Heidigger) while another for a time came within the orbit of Stalinism (Sartre). In neither case did they lose their essentially petty bourgeois idealist character.


and


Jean-Paul Sartre made an attempt to unite existentialism with "Marxism" (actually, Stalinism) and met with predictable results. One cannot unite oil and water. Sartre's thought cannot be described as a coherent body of philosophical ideas. It is a disorderly mishmash of notions borrowed from different philosophers, particularly Descartes and Hegel. The end result is total incoherence, shot through with a pervading spirit of pessimism and nihilism. For Sartre, the fundamental philosophical experience is nausea, a feeling of disgust at the absurd and incomprehensible nature of being. Everything is resolved into nothingness. This is a caricature of Hegel, who certainly did not think that the world was incomprehensible. In Sartre's writings, Hegelian jargon is used in a way that makes even Hegel's most obscure passages seem models of clarity.
Jean-Paul Sartre represented the "left" wing of existentialism, as opposed to the openly fascist wing. That is to his credit. But he never broke with the mystical idealist basis of existentialism, dwelling on "Being and the threat of Nothingness", "Freedom of Choice", "Duty", and so on. A sense of impending doom, and a feeling of powerlessness and "dread" fill these writings, accompanied by an attempt to seek an alternative on an individual basis. This expressed a certain mood among section of the intellectuals after the first world war in Germany, and then in France. What it indicates is the profound crisis of liberalism, as a result of "the Great War", and the upheavals which followed in its wake. They saw the problems facing society, but could see no alternative.

[Led Zeppelin]

I haven't read anything by the CWI on it, so I don't know if they have the same opinion on it. If they do, I would disagree with them, because that's a pretty stupid take on the matter. A "modern bourgeois philosophy"....that's just idiotic.

Also, the person who wrote that is a douchebag.

[gilhyle]

What Sartre was very much aware of was how his original existentialist perspective left out of account human communality. He was also aware that Marxism was a perspective built on the idea of class and party - communal notions. He attempted in the Critique of Dialectical Reason to build a philosophy of communal agents BY ANALOGY with the individual agent. The whole complex structure is an elaboration of this analogy and stands or fall on it.

Had he been a right wing existentialist (Heidegger wasnt an existentialist but he'll do as an example) he could have built this concept of communality on the basis of the nation.

Few existentialists, however, made any sort of comparable attempt to develop a theory of communal agency. Look for example at Jacques Maritain who might have developed a parrallel idea of the Church as a collective agent but did not.

Look at Karl Jaspers for whom the individual was always of the essence.

THus Sartre tried something quite exceptional within the existentialist movement.

What is the 'link' to Marxism ? Well, it is possible to argue that Sartre's Critique makes sense of Marx's 1844 position. One can argue about that. There are also many other 'clarifications' of the 1844 approach (e.g. Erich Fromm) But if you did accept that Sartre systematised the 1844 position then the criticisms of Sartre would count as criticisms of that much-sentimentally-loved 1844 approach