RONALD ARONSON - The Philosophy of Our Time: Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential Marxism
You don't arrest Voltaire: President Charles de Gaulle in May 1968, ordering Sartre to be released after he was arrested for civil disobedience
Nearly forty years after his death in 1980, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is best remembered as the father of existentialism. We are most familiar with him as the theorist of freedom, authenticity, and bad faith in philosophical treatises such as Being and Nothingness (1943) and literary works such as Nausea (1938) and No Exit (1944). But eclipsed in this popular image is an appreciation of the staggering range of his dozens of volumes of published work, especially the fruit of his political activity from the end of World War II until his death - a period marked most notably by a rich and sustained engagement with Marxism.
Nearly forty years after his death in 1980, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is best remembered as the father of existentialism. We are most familiar with him as the theorist of freedom, authenticity, and bad faith in philosophical treatises such as Being and Nothingness (1943) and literary works such as Nausea (1938) and No Exit (1944). But eclipsed in this popular image is an appreciation of the staggering range of his dozens of volumes of published work, especially the fruit of his political activity from the end of World War II until his death - a period marked most notably by a rich and sustained engagement with Marxism.
![](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Beauvoir_Sartre_-_Che_Guevara_-1960_-_Cuba.jpg/220px-Beauvoir_Sartre_-_Che_Guevara_-1960_-_Cuba.jpg)
Sartre and Simone de
Beauvoir with Che Guevara in Cuba, 1960
(wikipeda commons)
Far from being
consigned to the ash heap of history, the mid-century encounter between Marxism
and existentialism remains vital today. As we seek political and philosophical
bearings in this time of renewed calls for a socialist alternative to
capitalism, postwar efforts to bring Marxism and existentialism together have
much to teach us - not only because of the continuing importance of each mode of
thought to political thinking and organizing, but also because their interaction
in Sartre’s work deepens our understanding of how we exercise agency under
conditions we do not control.
Existentialism’s
Marxist Turn: The brilliant
young Sartre began publishing in 1936 at age thirty-one. Over the next decade
he would produce a stream of groundbreaking psychological, philosophical, and
literary works and develop strong working relationships with other formidable
young Parisian intellectuals including Simone de Beauvoir (who would become his
lifelong partner) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Initially he showed little
theoretical interest in either activism or Marxism. Instead he was passionately
attracted to U.S. films and fiction, and he took his theoretical bearings from
the German phenomenological philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.
His works of this time reveal a young thinker determined to find and forge his
own way, to create his own unique approach to the world.
Sartre’s work deepens
our understanding of how we exercise agency under conditions we do not control. Sartre’s early
existentialism - his emphasis on absurdity, freedom, and responsibility - sprang
from an individualism that seemed to leave little room for social analysis, the
importance of history, or collective action. It was not until the mid-1940s
that Sartre began to find his social bearings thanks to two contrary
influences: his new friend Albert Camus, and an encounter with Marxist ideas
and language. Sartre reviewed Camus’s The Stranger and The
Myth of Sisyphus soon after they were published in 1942, and he met
Camus at the dress rehearsal of Sartre’s play The Flies in
Paris in 1943. Shortly thereafter Camus became editor of Combat,
the clandestine newspaper of one of the largest movements of the French
Resistance. After the liberation of France in the summer of 1944, Camus did
battle in his Combat editorials with the Communist Party’s
Marxism. Much of Sartre’s postwar development took shape self-consciously
against these critiques - until a dozen years later he shaped his own
non-Communist existential Marxism.
It was Sartre’s
discovery of political commitment, socialism, and Marxism that enabled him to
move away from the twin impasses immortalized in his precepts “Hell is other
people” (No Exit) and “Man is a useless passion” (Being and
Nothingness). When he entered the world to stay as a political essayist,
dramatist, and social philosopher - as well as an activist - it was in relation to
Marxist movements, societies, and ideas. After the Liberation, talk of
revolution, the existence of the Soviet Union, and the vitality of the massive
French Communist Party (PCF) made it possible for many to believe that, in
however distorted and ugly a manner, a better world was coming into being. Both
politically and philosophically Sartre became preoccupied with Marxism, and he
remained so for three-quarters of his productive life.
A glimpse of this
burgeoning interest in Marxism can be found in Sartre’s French newspaper
articles at the time of his visit to the United States in 1945. It was in these
pieces, unknown in the United States until 2001 and never republished in
French, that he first used Marxist categories to explain U.S. society and its
working class. He stressed that U.S. workers were “not yet proletarians”
because they were “imprisoned” by individualism and enjoyed “apparent
equality.” A few months later came a rather abstract effort in “Materialism and
Revolution” to offer existentialism as an alternative to Stalinist Marxism.
This essay shows no reading of Marx and Engels—that would not come until its
republication in 1949—but it does cite Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical
Materialism (1938).
Sartre’s aim was to replace the
determinism of Soviet Marxism with the human impulse to transform and
create—that is, with freedom—as the basis of revolution. Other signs of a
growing attention to politics were apparent; this essay appeared around the
same time of his call for writers’ political engagement—for a littérature
engagée.
More concrete efforts
to dramatize the problems of revolutionary commitment came in the dramatic
scenario In the Mesh (1946) and the play Dirty
Hands (1948). These were the first years of Sartre’s political
activism: in late 1947 he helped to found the short-lived leftist party Rassemblement
démocratique révolutionnaire (RDR), which advocated a third way
between the ostensibly revolutionary Stalinists of the PCF and the reformist
social democrats of the French Section of the Workers’ International. In this
intense climate of leftist thought and politics, the journal Les Temps
modernes took shape as France’s foremost independent and left-wing
publishing venue, with Sartre as its editorial director and Merleau-Ponty as
its political editor. Alongside Merleau-Ponty, whom he considered his political
mentor, Sartre absorbed the language of Marxism and its ways of understanding
history and society. The communists, meanwhile, went so far as to call
existentialism “a sordid and frivolous philosophy for sick people.” During
these years of growing political engagement Sartre also published two
groundbreaking essays on oppression and resistance: Anti-Semite and
Jew (1946) and Black Orpheus (1948).
Though Sartre took
pains to distinguish existentialism from Stalinist Marxism, potential points of
convergence between Marxist and existentialist thinking were already apparent
in Being and Nothingness. After all, any reading of Marx would
sooner or later have led Sartre to this famous sentence from The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852): “Men make their own history, but
they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected
circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted
from the past.” The point was expressed more philosophically in the third of
Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (1845): “The materialist doctrine
that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore,
changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing,
forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must
himself be educated.” These claims make clear that Marx understood human action
as fundamentally self-determining, even if it takes place in circumstances
often beyond our control. (The elements of orthodox Marxism that offended
Sartre were thus rooted in its Stalinist distortion.)
Sartre’s interest in
this relationship between human agency and historical determinism was
highlighted in the title he gave to his multivolume collection of essays, Situations, the
first volume of which appeared in 1947. Through the concept of “being-in-situation,” Being
and Nothingness had explored at length our inescapable human freedom,
rooted in the capacity of human consciousness to negate or transcend the
“facticity” or givens within which we find ourselves. To say that we are always
“in situation” is to attend to the way our actions are constrained by our
historical and social reality, from our language, environment, and choices to
our class, race, gender, and family upbringing. We are situated, Sartre thus
argued—but we are never wholly determined.
Freedom, for Sartre, has no meaning
outside of concrete situations, however limiting or oppressive they may be. In
seeking to understand the circumstances—the situations—of oppression, Sartre
enters into ever-deeper contact with Marxist approaches to historical and
social structures. The theory of situations had an enormous influence on the
intellectual culture of the day; among other afterlives, it would find
expression in the Situationist International, the organization of social
revolutionaries that helped instigate the student uprisings in 1968.
On clear display
during this period was Sartre’s lifelong intellectual independence: he
everywhere disavowed dogmatism. True to his philosophical spirit, his political
commitments shifted depending on the details of the situation. Though he had
helped found the RDR in explicit opposition to the PCF, he later became a
fellow traveler of the PCF as it came under siege during the Cold War, but when
he did so he was careful to declare that his “agreement with the Communists”
was “on certain precise and limited subjects, reasoning from my principles
and not theirs.” Around the same time, he forcefully and publicly
broke with Camus in 1952, who by then had become bitterly anti-Communist.
The Project of
Existential Marxism
Sartre’s philosophical
engagement with Marxism became more systematic in the late 1950s. He explicitly
declared himself a Marxist in Search for a Method (1957),
affirming that Marxism was the “philosophy of our time.” But he also asserted
that in the hands of “today’s Marxists”—meaning the PCF—it had stopped
developing. Marxism, Sartre argued, needed the kind of rethinking that
existentialism could provide. To return to life Marxism had to replace its
mechanical determinism with an understanding of what Sartre called human praxis:
Men make their history
on the basis of real, prior conditions (among which we would include acquired
characteristics, distortions imposed by the mode of work and of life,
alienation, etc.), but it is the men who make it and not the
prior conditions. Otherwise men would be merely the vehicles of inhuman forces
which through them would govern the social world.
Until Marxism did justice
to the individual, Sartre contended, existentialism would endure as a
semiautonomous body of thought. Here Sartre came into his own as an independent
authority on Marxism, spelling out key themes of a method for grasping both
one’s social being and one’s individual self-determination. His early stress on
freedom remains, but it is now explicitly understood as conditioned by history
and society.
These themes were
developed at greater length in Critique of Dialectical Reason, for
which Search for a Method became the preface. The Critique began
from individual praxis and sought to lay Marxism’s philosophical foundations as
well as to understand why Marxism had become “frozen.” Volume one—The Theory
of Practical Ensembles (1960)—abstractly traces the origins of
group struggle, describing the steps by which individuals band together to form
a revolutionary movement.
Whether this was meant to be an actual historical
process, the general logic of any revolution, or the itinerary a successful
Leninist party must follow was not clear, and Sartre would not live to finish
the second volume, which was published posthumously only in 1985. His next
major work, The Family Idiot, also combined Marxist and
existentialist ideas, demonstrating how a specific individual could be
understood through social determinations. In this multivolume biography, the
first of which was published in 1971, Sartre showed how the novelist Gustave
Flaubert internalized and then “re-exteriorized” social reality in a
characteristically modernist, anti-popular withdrawal from the world. Like
the Critique, it too would remain unfinished.
Taken together, these
works—Search for a Method, the Critique, the biography of
Flaubert, and many of the essays of Situations—elaborate a theory
of existential Marxism. The two -isms were equally important to Sartre. On the
one hand, the infusion of existentialism was meant to counteract Marxism’s
premature aging, its “sclerosis.” His goal was not to “reject Marxism in the
name of a third path or of an idealist humanism, but to reconquer man within
Marxism.” Yet true to his existentialist tenets, he insists on seeing human
action as praxis—always self-determining, always in situation.
Removing eschatology
from Marxist doctrine, Sartre rejects the sense that the riddle of history was
about to be solved, that humanity was undergoing a transformation that would at
last overcome alienation and realize the meaning of human history. In declaring
that “dialectic is not a determinism,” he stressed the subjective dimension of
history and renounced the dream of a utopian transformation that might install
once and for all the Kantian Kingdom of Ends. There was no question, for
Sartre, of adopting the one-way Marxist mechanism whereby “base” determines
“superstructure.” Instead he insisted that history is made by
human beings and that the future is always open, even if constrained. This
stress was meant to correct the abstract and potentially authoritarian cast of
Marxism by affirming that subjective action and agency matter as much as
objective processes to be grasped by theory and science.
Sartre thus abandoned
the Marxist sense of objectivity—inherited from Hegel—that history is composed
of general trends working themselves out through human actors. Economic
structures do not cause human actions but become interiorized and transcended
by humans as they act: “What we call freedom is the irreducibility of the
cultural order to the natural order.” Both politically and as a research
project, existentialist Marxism now had a clear meaning: placed within social
structures that shape and limit them, often oppressing and exploiting them,
humans nevertheless signify, surpass, totalize, and transcend.
Philosophy of Our
Time?
Sartre’s concern for
the relations of free agency and conditioning speak the language of a bygone
era. His arguments now appear to many as old-fashioned or even inscrutable,
responding to pressures—both historical and intellectual—that have long since
faded. With the decline and fall of Communism, the entire Marxist apparatus
crumbled. Not only Sartre’s interlocutors, but his kind of
interlocutors—the “dialectical materialist” establishment—have passed. Even
Sartre himself began to move away from Marxism by the end of his life, partly
because blindness prevented him from finishing his two great Marxist treatises,
the Critique and The Family Idiot. He
also broke with the PCF after it opposed the student uprisings in May 1968; he
lost all faith in the Soviet Union after the invasion of Czechoslovakia later
that year; and he developed a significant relationship with the anti-Marxist
young Maoist revolutionaries who grew out of the student movement.
But as it turns out,
the news of Marxism’s death was greatly exaggerated. Now that capitalism has
ruled the world unchallenged for a generation, Marxist thinking has seen a
popular renewal, increasingly liberated as it has become from the old specters
of McCarthyism and the Cold War. It is Sartre who tells us why: “We cannot go
beyond it because we have not gone beyond the circumstances which engendered
it.” It is because we have not overthrown capitalism that Marxism endures—as
both a philosophical orientation and a political aspiration.
This revival has taken
the form not of working-class movements and parties but of revitalized ways of
thinking critically about capitalism—its ongoing inequalities and crises.
Little wonder that such critique has seen a resurgence after a decade of
late-stage austerity capitalism following the Great Recession. Consciousness
has been growing, especially among younger generations, that there must be
an alternative to capitalism—and that, whatever the specifics, this alternative
goes by the name of socialism. For the first time in decades, avowed socialists
in the United States and United Kingdom have become a real political force,
both locally and nationally. Bernie Sanders put the word “socialism” back into
the discourse of national politics, and the Democratic Socialists of America
has seen its rosters balloon from 7,000 to more than 50,000 since Donald Trump
was elected. Less important than Marx’s specific analyses of the system’s
operations is the fact that it is more and more being looked at holistically,
structurally, and critically.
In this revival,
whether or not a Marxist movement of the working class is in the offing is less
important than the fact that the working class and everyone else—as well as
the environment—are in trouble under capitalism. Along with this feeling has
come a growing appreciation of the basic insight of historical materialism that
Sartre took as given: economic structures and priorities decisively influence
both politics and culture, constraining—if not determining—what is possible.
Even if Marxism is no longer the philosophy of our time, it is destined to
remain a potent source of inspiration for anti-capitalist thinking and
organizing.
If this revival of
Marxism is to succeed, though, it will once again have to go to school with
Sartre—partly because his emphasis on freedom resonates with a distinctively
American political culture skeptical of collectivism, and partly because it
helps us to understand why Marxism failed. Sartre explored that issue
explicitly in the second, unfinished volume of the Critique—how the
Bolshevik Revolution become the grave of revolutionary hope, creating one of
the twentieth-century’s most brutal totalitarian regimes.
As many black intellectuals
have understood, Sartre the existential Marxist is a vital source of
self-understanding and inspiration. In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The
Wretched of the Earth (1961),
Sartre foregrounded the
notion of counter-violence, exploring how the subjects of colonialism could
overcome submission, reject complicity, find a voice, and engage in resistance.
Stokely Carmichael drew on this Sartre in his famous “Black Power” address in
1966. Indeed, it was Sartre’s theory of freedom that undergirded his fierce
partisanship on the side of the oppressed—from Jews in the Holocaust to black
Africans under colonialism and French workers so marginalized and exploited
that they joined the rigid and bureaucratic Communist Party. The other side of
this defense of the oppressed was Sartre’s hatred of oppressors: the
bourgeoisie in Nausea, white Southern aristocrats in the United
States, French practitioners of torture in Algeria, Americans engaging in
genocide in Vietnam, officials of the totalitarian Soviet machine.
What we most stand to
gain from existential Marxism today is a revitalized conception of freedom. As
I describe in my book We: Reviving Social Hope, Sartre helps us to
appreciate how individuals come together to create hope where there was none by
acting collectively. Sartre insists that we can always choose, in each and
every situation—and that even not to choose is a choice. It is in this sense
that Sartre asserts that we are always responsible for ourselves, even as we
are oppressed. As he learns from Marxism to appreciate the weighty burdens of
history and class, Sartre never abandons this hallmark of his thought. Though
he tempers it from abstract and total freedom to concrete and situated freedom
after World War II, he insists that what distinguishes humans from stones is
that we always make something of what is made of us.
It is understandable
that radicals should be divided over this notion of freedom. After all, it asks
that we take responsibility for situations we did not create, and then makes us
responsible for what we do about them. This may be a hard lesson to swallow,
but it serves as a forceful reminder of the undying possibility of active
struggle. Resistance springs from the same power of self-determination as do
submission and apathy, complicity and resignation. If the individual sometimes
yields, complies, accepts much less than half a loaf, at other times she joins
with others and breaks out into the open—redefining identities, recasting
situations, creating revolutions.
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