JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

16 PoliticsSartre’s massive and complex 1960 work Critique of Dialectical Reasonand its preface Questions of Method are a putative synthesis of existentialismand Marxism.On the face of it, existentialism and Marxism are mutually inconsistentphilosophies. Existentialism entails libertarianism, the doctrine that humanbeings have freedom of choice, but classical Marxism is deterministic. Marxand Engels thought that the economic organisation of a society causallydetermines all other facts about that society. In particular, the ideological‘superstructure’, the laws, religions, social mores and the behaviour ofindividuals, is caused by the ‘infrastructure’ or ‘economic base’.Marxism is also a kind of materialism, but Sartre’s existentialism placesan enormous emphasis on the existence of consciousness. Marxistmaterialism is not the eliminative thesis that everything is only physical.However, it is the thesis that unless there were physical things there couldbe nothing non-physical. In particular, social, abstract and mental changedepends on physical change. Sartre, however, frequently speaks as thougheach person’s consciousness were a quasi-Kantian ‘spontaneity’; arepository of free acts that has no physical prerequisite.Marxism entails a theory of history but existentialism emphasises thelived reality of the present time. Despite the occasional allusions to therevolutions of 1789 and 1848 in Being and Nothingness, Sartre, theexistential phenomenologist, has little to say about history. Marxism, incontrast, includes an account of how one form of socio-economicorganisation supplants another through class-struggle. In The GermanIdeology (1846) Marx and Engels claim that nomadic societies are replacedby settled agriculture over which feudal relations of land tenure areestablished. Feudalism is eventually destroyed by an emergent monied,