JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Politics301merchantile, professional and capital-owning parliamentary class. Thiscapitalist class or bourgeoisie will eventually be overthrown by the proletariator working class whose labour they exploit for profit. After a short but severe‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in which the capitalist class and its state isdestroyed a classless communist society is established. This historicistaccount and the socio-economic models it entails are essential to Marxismbut existentialism contains nothing like it.Marxism is a social theory. Existentialism is an extreme form ofindividualism. If we ask the question ‘who acts?’ existentialism and Marxismprovide radically different answers. For the Marxist it is the group,paradigmatically the socio-economic class, that acts. Individuals only actas members of a class. For the existentialist it is quite the reverse: groupsonly act is so far as their individual members act. The agent is the individualhuman being.If we draw a distinction between self and other, between being a humanbeing, (the one that is), and human beings as observed (all those one isnot), then existentialism is a philosophy of the self. Marxism is a philosophyof the other. Sartre’s existentialism contains a phenomenological obsessionwith what it is like to be someone. Marxism depicts people in the abstractwith an almost Newtonian anonymity. To understand existentialism it isnecessary to think of a human being on the model of oneself. To understandMarxism it is necessary to think of human beings on the model of others.Finally, if despite all his disavowals Sartre’s existentialism is a pessimisticphilosophy, then Marxism is its opposite in this sense too. Even though Marxcriticised nineteenth-century socialists, for example the French anarchistPierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), for what he saw as their unrealisticutopianism, Marxism remains profoundly optimistic. History concludes withthe revolutionary overthrow of exploitation and unfair inequality and itsreplacement with an ideal classless society without the state. Sartre’sexistentialism, on the other hand, includes no political solution to humananxiety in the face of loneliness, freedom and death. Humanity is condemnedto the impossible project of being both in-itself and for-itself. Man wants tobe God, but in Sartre’s existentialism there is no metaphysical heaven andno heaven on earth either.It follows that existentialism is an individualistic libertarian philosophy ofconsciousness, subjectivity and the present which offers mankind nogrounds for political or metaphysical optimism. Marxism, on the other hand,