Revisiting Existential Marxism

Abstract

Alfred Betschart has claimed that the project of existential Marxism is a contradiction in terms, but this argument, even when supported by many experts and quotes from Sartre’s 1975 interview, misses the point of my Boston Review article, “The Philosophy of Our Time.”1 I believe the important argument today is not about whether we can prove that Sartre ever became a full-fledged Marxist, but rather about the political and philosophical possibility, and importance today, of existentialist Marxism. I have come to this over a lifetime of study and political involvement. Alfred saved me from embarrassment by not citing my early work for his argument. As a young new-Left activist and scholar under the influence of Herbert Marcuse, I was much occupied with the issue of Sartre’s Marxism from the mid-1960s until Verso’s publication of my first book, Jean-Paul Sartre Philosophy in the World (1980). Already in 1978, in Western Marxism: A Critical Reader, New Left Review had published, alongside André Gorz’s presentation of The Critique of Dialectical Reason’s contribution to Marxism, my argument that the Critique reveals an unbridgeable distance between Sartre’s key concepts and those of historical materialism. That claim began a thirty-year silent dialogue between Gorz and myself over whether Sartre’s individuals were already social (Gorz’s position), or not yet social (my own). My book traced the entire sweep of Sartre’s career, from his earliest explorations of escape from the difficult world to his passionate but conflicted involvement in it, to his embrace of leftist politics, to his attraction to Marxism but rejection of its orthodox Communist forms, to his acceptance of Marxism as the “philosophy of our time” while rethinking it to accommodate our irreducible human freedom and self-determination, and then to his final break with Communism and the old age-induced abandonment of his radical theoretical projects. I concluded that through his rich and multi-faceted career,