[In the following essay, Langer contends that Jean Paul Sartre's ideas about the freedom of human spirit supply the philosophical foundation that Marxism seems to lack.]

A recurrent theme in the philosophical literature of the last quarter-century has been the relationship between Sartrean existentialism and Marxism. Much of the discussion has centered on the unorthodox nature of Sartre's Marxism as presented in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, and on the connection between that work and his earlier Being and Nothingness. Thomas Flynn's book Sartre and Marxist Existentialism constitutes one of the most interesting recent contributions to the debate. Flynn contends that “Sartre's is an authentic, though ‘revisionist,’ Marxism” which, in combining “salient features” of existentialism and Marxism, incorporates “the morally responsible individual into the sociohistorical context.”¹ My essay takes issue with Flynn's position on the grounds that Sartre's Marxism as articulated in the Critique of Dialectical Reason is basically at odds with authentic Marxism—whether classical or revisionist. I contend that the lately published second volume of the Critique retains the fundamental features of the first, and hence does not significantly alter the nature of Sartre's Marxism. Despite my disagreement with his interpretation of Sartrean Marxism, Flynn's focus on responsibility² reopens for me the intriguing question of whether Sartrean existentialism can provide the requisite foundation of freedom for Marxism.

My essay argues that Marxism indeed requires a philosophical foundation,³ not because it lacks freedom—as Sartre claimed—but because it presupposes that “free, conscious activity is man's species character” and that “estranged labour estranges the species from man.”⁴ In other words, Marxism, which bases itself on an unclarified conception of freedom, must spell out and clarify its own conception. Accordingly, I will reconsider Sartre's own intricate argument for the freedom of human reality (in Being and Nothingness). That argument seems to supply precisely the kind of philosophical basis that Marxism so sorely lacks—all the more so as Sartre himself anticipates and counters numerous objections. A closer scrutiny, however, reveals flaws that render Sartre's argument ultimately untenable. Yet those flaws are fruitful in disclosing a possible corresponding weakness in Marxism and underlining the need for an adequate phenomenological analysis of freedom. While Sartre's alleged Marxism and his existentialism are unable to provide the necessary philosophical grounding for Marxism, the reconsideration of his position sheds light on what remains to be done if Marxism is ever to have a genuinely firm footing.

At the time he was writing the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre thought this work provided the necessary foundation for Marxism:

It is inside the movement of Marxist thought that we discover a flaw of such a sort that despite itself Marxism tends to eliminate the questioner from his investigation and to make of the questioned the object of an absolute Knowledge. … And to come to the most important point, labor, as man's reproduction of his life, can hold no meaning if its fundamental structure is not to pro-ject. … Existentialism, too, wants to situate man in his class and in the conflicts which oppose him to other classes, starting with the mode and the relations of production. But it can approach this “situation” in terms of existence—that is, of comprehension. It makes itself the questioned and the question as questioner. … Thus the comprehension of existence is presented as the human foundation of Marxist anthropology … the foundation of Marxism, as a historical, structural anthropology, is man himself inasmuch as human existence and the comprehension of the human are inseparable. … Marx's own Marxism, while indicating the dialectical opposition between knowing and being, contained implicitly the demand for an existential foundation for the theory. Furthermore, in order for notions like reification and alienation to assume their full meaning, it would have been necessary for the questioner and the questioned to be made one. … It is necessary that the questioner understand how the questioned—that is, himself—exists his alienation, how he surpasses it and is alienated in this very surpassing.⁵

Fifteen years after the publication of its first volume, however, Sartre himself acknowledged that “the Critique … is not a Marxist work” and that he had been mistaken in regarding existentialism as “only an enclave of Marxism”: “It cannot be an enclave, because of my idea of freedom, and therefore it is ultimately a separate philosophy. I do not at all think that ultimately this philosophy is Marxist. It cannot ignore Marxism. … But now I do not consider it at all a Marxist philosophy.”⁶ At the same time, Sartre noted the lack of freedom that “would be on the same level, a mixture of theory and practice, as Marxism—a philosophy in which theory serves practice, but which takes as its starting point the freedom that seems to me to be missing in Marxist thought.”⁷ Sartre was correct in contending that Marx's own Marxism required a foundation, and in realizing that the Critique of Dialectical Reason “is really non-Marxist.” He erred, however, in maintaining that the Critique “is not opposed to Marxism.”⁸ Before reconsidering whether an appreciation of “the questioner” can supply the requisite foundation of freedom for Marxism, we must note the major factors that disqualify the Critique for that task.

Ronald Aronson points out that it is imperative that the first volume of Sartre's Critique be reconsidered “in light of the project as a whole.”⁹ By the same token, Merleau-Ponty's scathing criticisms of Sartre's pre-1955 philosophy must be recalled in any such reassessment, for Sartre almost certainly had Merleau-Ponty's strictures in mind while writing the Critique. As Flynn noted in “Merleau-Ponty and the Critique of Dialectical Reason,” it is impossible to prove that Sartre was in fact responding to Merleau-Ponty's attack contained in the latter's Adventures of the Dialectic; nevertheless, the nature of the two philosophers' personal relationship and the substance of their respective texts make such a supposition reasonable.¹⁰ Aronson, going beyond Flynn, argues that once one moves “into Sartre's and Merleau-Ponty's intellectual-political universe of the 1950's, it is impossible not to read the Critique as a reply to the challenge of Merleau-Ponty.” As Aronson explains, that challenge is highly complex, for Merleau-Ponty sought to disclose the inadequacies of Sartre's ontology and politics, while himself criticizing Marxism from a “post-Marxist” stance. According to Merleau-Ponty, Marxism was itself fatally flawed philosophically and had in any case been invalidated by history. Aronson points out that in response, Sartre distinguished “dogmatic dialectic” from “critical dialectic” and employed the latter to make comprehensible why praxis had become divorced from theory in Stalinism. Further, Sartre embarked on an inquiry into history as a “totalization without a totalizer.” Not only did Sartre's monumental project remain unfinished, but its very formulations of the dialectic displayed a fundamental dualism. Aronson argues that the actual historical separation of theory from praxis left Sartre without “the basis for thinking his way beyond the dualism at the heart of his thought.” Certainly, as Aronson points out, the problem of the gap between philosophical reflection and active politics is not Sartre's problem alone; and the limitations of his project do not prevent its being a remarkable achievement.¹¹ Yet it does seem to me that the dualism in Sartre's ontology, as it manifests itself in his Critique, precludes the work's fulfilling its intended purpose of providing a philosophical foundation for Marxism. In order to reassess the Critique, it will be useful to recall in some detail a number of Merleau-Ponty's earlier objections.

In Adventures of the Dialectic (French original published 1955), Merleau-Ponty contended that despite appearances to the contrary, Sartre's philosophy lacked any genuine intersubjectivity and interworld and, hence, any genuine appreciation of the real nature of action and history. According to Merleau-Ponty: “In Sartre there is a plurality of subjects but no intersubjectivity”; “there is no hinge, no joint or mediation, between myself and the other”; “there is an encounter rather than a common action because, for Sartre, the social remains the relationship of ‘two individual consciousnesses’ which look at each other”; “commitment in Sartre's sense is the negation of the link between us and the world that it seems to assert; or rather Sartre tries to make a link out of a negation”; for Sartre it is a question of “either him or me.”¹² Merleau-Ponty acknowledged that

Sartre, however, is not unaware of the historical field in which the revolution, and consequently all Marxist politics, is established. The apparent paradox of his work is that he became famous by describing a middle ground … between consciousness and things—the root in Nausea, viscosity or situation in Being and Nothingness, here [The Communists and Peace with A Reply to Claude Lefort] the social world—and that nonetheless his thought is in revolt against this middle ground and finds there only an incentive to transcend it and to begin again ex nihilo this entire disgusting world.¹³

That Sartrean world, alleged Merleau-Ponty, is one in which “whether as a permanent spectacle or as a continued creation, the social is in any case before consciousness and is constituted by them.” Thus, “Sartre's effort to annex history to his philosophy of freedom and of the other” means that, for him, history “is a history of projects”; “history and revolution are nothing but a pact of thought or of wills … it is consciousness which gives meaning.” In Merleau-Ponty's assessment, “what continues to distinguish Sartre from Marxism, even in recent times, is therefore his philosophy of the cogito. Men are mentally attached to history.”¹⁴ In short,

the social can enter [Sartre's] philosophy of the cogito only by way of the alter ego … the other can have the status of a self only by taking it away from me, and I can recover it only by reacting to the magic of the gaze with the countermagic of pure action. … Although the enlarged cogito, the philosophy of For-Others, does not confine itself to the perspective of self on self, it is inside this perspective that it must introduce what puts this position into question. The social never appears openly; it is sometimes a trap, sometimes a task, sometimes a menace, sometimes a promise, sometimes behind us as a self-reproach, sometimes in front of us as a project. In any case, it is never perceived or lived by man except as incompleteness and oppression, or in the obscurity of action. It is the absolute of the subject who remakes himself when he incorporates the point of view of others, which he was dragging along behind him like a hardship. … With Sartre, as with the anarchists, the idea of oppression always dominates that of exploitation.¹⁵

Sartre's insistence on depicting things through “the eyes of the least-favored” tends to obscure the dominance of the idea of oppression over that of exploitation in his philosophy, noted Merleau-Ponty. The latter cautioned that centering on “the gaze of the least-favored … can ground any kind of politics,” and that Sartre effectively subordinates “doing to seeing.”¹⁶ Sartrean philosophy lacks “the landscape of praxis” in which “my tasks are presented to me, not as objects or ends, but as reliefs and configuration,” a world in which action fully “inhabits its field.” Instead, Sartre reduces “history and the social … to a series of instantaneous views”; common action collapses into invention on the part of a few, with complicity on the part of the rest. Sartrean praxis is tantamount to continual intervention in history, rather than being “an activity immanent in the object of history” as stipulated by Marx's Theses on Feuerbach. For Sartre “we are what we contrive to be and, as for everything else, we are as responsible for it as if we had done it”; moreover, our de facto complicity “is always for the worse.”¹⁷

Thus, Sartrean freedom remains fleshless “and tends toward violence”; it initially “presents itself trapped and powerless. … It is as if at each moment everything that has made us, everything from which we benefit, and everything which will result from our life were entered into our account. … To live is to wake up bound like Gulliver at Lilliput.” Since “we are responsible for everything before everyone as if we had done it with our own hands,” “our relationship to a world already there” is violence; and our attempt to break out of “the original trap” will likewise “be violence”—this time, that violence is a matter of “conquest.”¹⁸ History thus understood is devoid of objective meaning—or, rather, “what one calls ‘objective meaning’ is the aspect taken by one of these fundamental choices in the light of another, when the latter succeeds in imposing itself.” History becomes “a melodrama” in which “there is only a single monotonous fight, ended and begun at each moment, with no acquisition, no truces, no areas of abatement.” Society, according to such a view, is rife with “rivalry” and “false fraternity”; it is the leader who confers meaning on the situation and “the path chosen is the only one possible and is a fortiori the best.” The relationship “between the proletarian and the militants, between the militant and his leaders … is literally an identification”; nonetheless, “the workers' unity is always to be remade … they have not many more ties among themselves than with the bourgeoisie, and the problem is to erase by means of the class Other and through struggle the ineffaceable otherness of the individual Other.” By force of will, the militant “molds or manipulates” the proletariat.¹⁹

Merleau-Ponty conceded that Sartre's “analyses have the benefit of helping one understand how backward forms of sociability and the cult of the leader have re-emerged even in communism,” but pointed out that they leave us “far from Marxism.” In fact, “the ‘objective’ critique of capital hardly enters into Sartre's study. Inside an immediate or moral relationship of persons, he deliberately focuses on those that capitalism ruins.” Further, “he never evokes the basic Marxist hope of resolution in true action, that is to say, action fitted to internal relations of the historical situation, which await nothing but action to ‘take,’ to constitute a form in movement.’ In “this substantial action … which, in its culmination, is called revolution,” there is no imposition of “impalpable” meaning on blind being—“there is neither pure authority nor pure obedience.” Such true action is not Sartrean “pure action, which is to say, force.” Merleau-Ponty concluded emphatically that “certainly [Sartre's] philosophy is the opposite of Marx's.”²⁰

Although it was not only the Sartrean denial of an interworld that led Merleau-Ponty to this conclusion—as is evident from the foregoing presentation of his criticisms—the latter's clearest pronouncements regarding that particular issue should be noted:

Marx … thought there were relationships between persons “mediated by things.” … For Marx there was, and for Sartre there is not, a coming-to-be of meaning in institutions. History is no longer for Sartre, as it was for Marx, a mixed milieu, neither things nor persons, where intentions are absorbed and transformed and where they decay but are sometimes also reborn and exacerbated, tied to one another and multiplied through one another; history [for Sartre] is made of criminal intentions or virtuous intentions and, for the rest, of acceptances which have the value of acts.²¹

Merleau-Ponty cautioned that the recent Sartre “has not gotten any closer to Marx” despite his apparent distance “from his [original] dichotomy between things and men.” Unlike for Marx, “for Sartre, the social whole never starts moving by itself, never yields more movement than it has received from ‘inassimilable’ and ‘irreducible’ consciousnesses.” In the Sartrean world, any “escape from equivocalness” can be brought about only “through an absolute initiative” whereby subjects transcend the weight of the social whole.²²

Any endeavor to distill “the ‘essence’ of Marxism” is “perilous” indeed, as Flynn notes;²³ yet Merleau-Ponty's criticisms highlight fundamental features whose absence spells a distortion—rather than a development—of Marx's own Marxism. Already in 1946 Merleau-Ponty had argued that for “authentic Marxism … everything has a meaning. … In the movement of history, man, who has alienated himself for the benefit of his fetishes and has been drained of his very substance, regains possession of himself and of the world.”²⁴ Emphasizing that “for Marx, the vehicle of history and the motivating force of the dialectic … is concrete human intersubjectivity,” Merleau-Ponty had ruled out any definition of the human being as consciousness. He had argued that Marxism recognizes the interior tie between a society's specific “ideological formations” and “the way this society has set up its basic relationship with nature.” For Marxism, “it is a matter of understanding that the bond which attaches man to the world is at the same time his way to freedom.”²⁵

In Adventures of the Dialectic, we must not forget, Merleau-Ponty was saying farewell to Marxism. Nevertheless, he reiterated that a philosophy that despite appearances to the contrary, lacks any genuine interworld and intersubjectivity, is basically at odds with Marxism. As we saw above, the latter's incompatibility with Sartre's philosophy centered on the following features of Sartrean thought: emphasis on oppression rather than exploitation and, hence, relatively little critique of capital; focus on the encounter of rival individual consciousness (moreover, usually the least-favored) whose self-assertion requires a negating transcendence of—or, at best, false fraternity with—the other; reduction of social life and history to projects constituting a melodramatic fight with no real hope of resolution in common action; portrayal of praxis as violent response to initial entrapment and as incessant intervention in history; predominance of invention by a few, with pure compliance and burdensome complicity for the rest; prevalence of spectacle, instantaneous views, and the pact of thought or wills; lack of any agency on the part of the social whole, other than the movement imparted by inassimilable consciousness—in short, lack of that genuinely “mixed milieu” which is history for Marxism.

Does the Critique meet Merleau-Ponty's objections, or does it in fact manifest the same fundamental features that occasioned this sharp attack on Sartre's pre-1955 philosophy? Sartre himself indirectly shed some light on that question in the 1975 interview to which I alluded earlier. When asked whether he had ever abandoned phenomenology, Sartre replied in the negative and added: “I have never thought as a Marxist, not even in the Critique de la raison dialectique.”²⁶ Later in the interview, in response to the question “Can one consider that there is an interworld in your philosophy?” Sartre said: “I admit neither that I have the same philosophy as Merleau-Ponty nor that there is this element of interworld.” He went on to say that the difference between Merleau-Ponty's philosophy and his own had to do with “a fundamental incompatibility” rather than a simple misunderstanding:

I am not much of a continuist; the in-itself, the for-itself, and the intermediary forms … that is enough for me. For Merleau-Ponty, there is a relation to being that is very different, a relation in the very depths of oneself. … I do not see any reason to speak of intersubjectivity once subjectivities are separated. Intersubjectivity assumes a communion that almost reaches a kind of identification, in any case a unity. … I see the separation but I do not see the union.²⁷

In the first volume of his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre argues that from the beginning of history up to the present, humans have found themselves in a situation of scarcity experienced as need. All social structures are rooted in this situation. In a field of scarcity, each individual regards all others as rivals whose presence prevents there being enough for oneself. Compromise is the only feasible solution, given this mutual hostility. Prompted by fear of the others' violence, each agrees to a mutual limitation of freedom and to collaboration—with its accompanying division of labor—aimed at the joint elimination of scarcity. This collaboration requires the dissolution of the “series,” which is an inert, loose aggregate of individuals who all have the same aim but lack any collective purpose. When confronted with an external enemy posing a common danger that the individual as such cannot counter, all members of the series recognize that their only hope for survival lies in common action. This recognition, which transforms each one from serial “Other” into “third party,” signals the formation of the “group-in-fusion,” as all simultaneously direct themselves toward a common project. Each member interiorizes the emerging integration, and the latter spontaneously finds expression in a common praxis. The joint opposition to the perceived enemy takes the form of revolution. As soon as the revolutionary tension abates, however, the newly constituted group is in danger of relapsing into seriality. Further, once the immediate danger from the external foe recedes, the group's members become aware of the potential menace from within their own ranks. To counter this perceived internal threat to the group, the members pledge to limit their own freedom voluntarily, so as to work together instead of destroying one another. To forestall the others' betrayal, each freely consents to the institutionalization of terror, thus authorizing the exercise of violence against anyone (including oneself) who threatens to break the group's paradoxical solidarity. For Sartre, in short, the original situation is one of conflict caused by scarcity: individuals encounter each other as rivals in a field of scarcity, and their apprehension of a common menace leads to the formation of a group whose continuing cohesion after the revolutionary moment rests on the threat of violence against defectors. Individuals can continue to work together only in what increasingly becomes a hierarchical structure reinforced by terror. Since it is unclear whether, and how, scarcity can ever be eliminated, it remains correspondingly unclear whether oppression can ever be overcome.²⁸

We can see already that the basic argument of Critique I retains the traits that rendered Sartre's pre-1955 philosophy incompatible with Marxism. The primacy of scarcity—to be considered in more detail below—mystifies the Marxist contention that a society establishes its fundamental relationship with nature and that exploitation characterizes contemporary social formations. Featuring the encounter of mutually threatening individuals whose fear of each other gives rise to an uneasy pact institutionalizing terror, Sartre's account remains irreconcilable with Marxism. The section on “the third,” which presents one of the most arresting descriptions in Critique I, shows just how firmly Sartre remained committed to his earlier philosophizing despite appearances to the contrary. The situation depicted centers—typically—on looking and provides an instantaneous view of two least-favored individuals. The “concrete historical bond of interiority,” which Sartre intended to reveal through this particular situation, explicitly involves negation—more specifically, mutual robbery and repulsion. Looking down from a window, Sartre sees a road mender and a gardener who are both busily working on either side of a wall and are unaware of each other's presence. It is the passive viewer's need to project himself through the two workers whom his look confronts, in order to distinguish their ends from his own, which prompts him to realize his membership in a particular society. Moreover, the two workers' reality affects him insofar as “it is not [his] reality.” He “[sees] the two people both as objects situated among other objects in the visual field and as prospects of escape” who rob him “of an aspect of the real” and reduce him to “a living object” in turn. Their unity is predicated on reciprocal limitation and deprivation, on “seeing what the Other does not see”; it is the third's perception that mediates “between [the] two molecules.” The “mutual theft,” the “reciprocal negation” of the two manual workers, spells a profound “complicity against” the intellectual spectator. In short, here “the only true bond is negation.”²⁹ As in Being and Nothingness, so in Critique I Sartre insists on the ineradicability of this negation: “it is impossible to exist amongst men without their becoming objects both for me and for them through me, without my being an object for them … the foundation of the human relation as the immediate and perpetual determination of everyone by the Other and by all … is simply praxis.”³⁰

Sartre does, it is true, employ crucial Marxist notions in his description of the mediating third. Thus he notes that the gardener is working on “bourgeois property,” that the observing intellectual rediscovers “class struggles,” that “the worker produces himself through his work,” that praxis always arises “at a definite moment of History and on the basis of determinate relations of production.”³¹ Nevertheless, Sartre's philosophy remains as remote from Marxism as it was at the time Merleau-Ponty penned his incisive criticisms. By then, the latter had himself abandoned Marxism in favor of “a noncommunist left,” convinced as he now was that revolution is inherently doomed to failure, that the Marxist notion of a self-suppressing class precludes self-criticism, and that the idea of a dialectic rooted in “pre-existing relationships such as they are in things” renders Marxism dogmatic and germinates oppressions.³² Sartre, likewise, was to reject the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat; yet, in his case, that dismissal was not to involve a farewell to Marxism—at least, not in his own eyes. On the contrary, as we know, while Merleau-Ponty was definitively taking his leave of it, Sartre was considering himself to be more firmly aligned than ever with Marxism. However, this in no way renders Merleau-Ponty's criticisms invalid. The core of the fundamental incompatibility of Sartre's philosophy with that of Marx lies in the fact that Sartre never managed to let go of his Cartesian premises. In Jean-Paul Sartre—Philosophy in the World, Aronson explains why Sartre's account in the Critique remained so “patently unhistorical [and] unsocial.”³³ The crux of the problem is Sartre's fundamental assumption of “isolated individual praxis,” which precludes his arriving at historical and social reality. Aronson correctly points out that the simple multiplication of separated individuals—as in Sartre's leap from one to three (intellectual, road mender, gardener)—cannot yield social relations. Such an approach distorts individuality and human activity by failing to recognize that any individual can be such only as part of a particular society in which each one's activity implies that of all others. Not surprisingly, the second volume of the Critique similarly fails to show “how a multiplicity of hostile or unrelated praxes cohere … even at their most penetrating, the analyses of the Critique remain wholly within the pre-existing limits of Sartre's thought.”³⁴ Once again, fundamental sociality is conspicuously absent, while rivalry and conflict—everywhere conditioned by scarcity—continue to occupy center stage. Sartre's intriguing description of a boxing match will serve to highlight the extent to which Critique II, like Critique I, is fundamentally at odds with Marxism.

In Critique II as in Critique I, Sartre begins with mutually opposed individual praxes and—unsuccessfully—seeks to show how a plurality of such irreducibly conflicting praxes composes a synthetic unity. The first concrete study in the second volume is particularly significant insofar as it not only sets the tone for the remainder of the work but also provides its clearest expression of those features that Merleau-Ponty, though himself no longer a Marxist, correctly condemned as incompatible with Marx's philosophy. Like the road mender and gardener in the previous volume, the boxers Sartre now depicts belong, typically, to the least-favored segment of society. The physical violence each boxer inflicts on the other is, according to Sartre, their response to the perceived powerlessness of their initial status in society. Sartre points out that the boxers' managers exploit this situation for the sake of profit, and that “boxing is an economic enterprise.”³⁵ He notes that most boxers come from the working class and have experienced “the violence of oppression, of exploitation” all their lives. Having interiorized this violence, they attempt to escape from their oppressive condition by venting their anger in aggression against one of their own class. While a few champions succeed in fleeing their class, most boxers do not significantly improve their situation by agreeing to sell their violence in exchange for wages. This pact means, moreover, that the “liberating power” of these workers becomes alienated in the very marketing of their bodies, for the rules governing boxing ensure that the combatants' explosive violence simultaneously “unleashes and derealizes itself” in becoming a spectacle.³⁶

This appeal to Marxist notions (such as the working class, exploitation, alienation, capital) unfortunately does not signal a Marxist study of boxing, any more than Sartre's use of such notions in his discussion of “the third” indicated genuine compatibility with Marx's philosophy in Critique I. It is true that Sartre places the boxing match within a larger socioeconomic system and emphasizes the boxer's desire to succeed economically (by winning the match, the championship, and thus leaving their socioeconomic class). Nonetheless, oppression still takes precedence over exploitation in Sartre's presentation. As in Critique I, the focus is ultimately on the hostile encounter of individuals whose self-assertion necessitates negating the other—indeed, Sartre stresses that the boxers “find their own life only in the destruction of the other's life,” and that they reproduce the regime's social structure in their conduct.³⁷ Given Sartre's insistence that the boxing match not only retotalizes all matches but also publicly incarnates “all conflict,” we have here the graphic reduction of history and social life to a melodramatic fight. Nor should it be thought that Sartre's reference to workers' “liberating power” and “will to unite against exploitation” indicates any genuine hope of resolving the conflict through joint action. Sartre contends in Critique II, as he did in Critique I, that conflicts—be they “single fights” or “social struggles”—“are all conditioned by scarcity, negation of man by the Earth interiorizing itself as negation of man by man.”³⁸ Describing the universe “as field of scarcity,” Sartre maintains that within this framework relations are “fundamentally antagonistic” and that struggles “represent the very way in which men live scarcity in their perpetual movement to go beyond it.”³⁹ Although he acknowledges that ours is only one history among all possible histories, and that it is impossible to demonstrate a priori “that all possible histories must be conditioned by scarcity,” Sartre claims that any history free of scarcity (whether it be scarcity of products, tools, titles, or humans) “is as unknown to us as that of another species living on another planet.”⁴⁰ These alleged limitations to our knowledge and affirmations effectively dash Marxism's basic hope for a positive human coexistence.

Sartre implicitly equates action with continual intervention in history, by focusing on the two boxers' ferocious effort to break free of the oppressive condition into which both have been born. Their competition for titles constitutes a spectacle which supplies an instantaneous view and involves a pact, of wills. Further, the boxers invent their responses to each other, while the onlookers—who form the vast majority—become accomplices. So total is the spectators' complicity that (according to Sartre) this collective “participates” in the incarnation of violence—and even “produces the boxers.” In observing the boxers' fight, the public simultaneously becomes unified into a group and torn “full of holes” by the bets which “transform each neighbor into an adversary of his neighbor or (if they wager on the same fighter) into brothers-in-arms.”⁴¹ Any such unity is, of course, extremely unstable, and, as in Sartre's earlier work, it is predicated on the rivalry of mutually opposed individuals who remake themselves by a negating transcendence of the Other. Moreover, Sartre continues to insist on the oath taking and fraternity-terror he had described in Critique I. Here, as there, he tries to unify mutually adversarial individual projects; yet he fails to see that his Cartesian starting point still precludes any such unification.⁴² Thus he distorts the positive awareness of social existence that was so essential to Marx's philosophy. The “indissoluble unity of the human and the anti-human,” which Sartre claims exists “even outside all alienation,” is destructive (rather than constitutive) of that “mixed milieu” in which—according to Marx—“nature [exists] … as a bond with man … as the foundation of his own human existence.”⁴³ Unlike for Marx, for Sartre there is no “genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man—[no] true resolution of the strife … between objectification and self-confirmation … between the individual and the species.”⁴⁴ For Marxism, Sartre's Critique is a profound distortion of both our actual and our potential situation.

Earlier, I noted that in both volumes of his Critique Sartre insists that scarcity conditions all conflicts. This insistence on scarcity plays a central part in his distortion of Marxism. Sartre himself readily admitted, when questioned about his overemphasis on scarcity, that this notion “is not Marxist thought. Marx did not think that primitive man or feudal man lived under the rule of scarcity.⁴⁵ In the Critique, Sartre castigates Marx (and Engels) for failing to stress scarcity; yet Marx himself emphatically rejected such emphasis, alleging that “abstract and contradictory notions like scarcity and abundance” are useless for understanding the class struggle.⁴⁶ In fact, for Marxism such notions mystify that struggle by obscuring the exploitation that underlies it. Why, then, does Sartre make scarcity central? I suggest that the answer is to be found in his continuing adherence—appearances to the contrary notwithstanding—to the philosophy of freedom elaborated in Being and Nothingness. There Sartre had argued that the apprehension of lack—the nihilating rupture with plenitude—is constitutive of the very being of human reality. In the Critique, Sartre attempts to annex history to this ontological freedom by recasting lack as scarcity. As William McBride has pointed out, “it would be difficult for readers of the Critique to exaggerate the prominence of its role in Sartre's account.”⁴⁷ Although he was referring to Volume I, McBride's point applies equally to Volume II. The term scarcity is inherently vague, in the Critique Sartre identified the overcoming of alienation with the unqualified elimination of scarcity, and the inherent impossibility of achieving the latter effectively ruled out the attainment of a genuinely socialist society.⁴⁸

Klaus Hartmann, too, has argued persuasively that “Sartre's principle of scarcity merits only dubious theoretical status,” and that “the theory of the Critique deprives itself of acceptable social solutions by dint of its very theoretical foundations; its lack of ultimate affirmativity is a function of these foundations.”⁴⁹ The latter consist of highly abstract principles centering around the notions of scarcity, rivalry, otherness, the third, and the practico-inert. These principles preclude any durable affirmative communion or union and prevent the nonantagonistic nascent group (the “groupe en fusion”) from ever becoming more than a fleeting phenomenon. As Hartmann argued, Sartre moreover submerges “the economic specificity of alienation” in his nexus of negative principles.⁵⁰ Like McBride, Hartmann was commenting on the first volume of the Critique. It is clear, however, that his argument holds for the second volume as well.

Marxism, unlike Sartre's Critique, posits the original situation as one of cooperation rather than confrontation and emphasizes the socio-economic origins of the subsequent historical antagonisms. The division of labor initially occurs quite spontaneously, and it is tribes or families, rather than individuals, who encounter each other on an independent footing. Far from being rooted in an inevitable scarcity and in the very nature of human activity, alienation arises from the fact that some human beings appropriate the means of production, thereby putting themselves in a position to control the others' labor power. The relationship between employer and worker is based on the former's desire to make a profit, rather than any deliberate will to negate the other's freedom. Marxism very carefully distinguishes between alienation and objectification, whereas the Critique implicitly collapses that distinction.⁵¹ In acting to satisfy their needs, so Sartre argues, humans work upon inert matter and initiate a process that strikes back at them as an alien force. Marxism, by contrast, emphasizes that only under conditions of exploitation does humans' objectified activity become an alien force that turns against them. Those conditions can, and must, be eliminated through the abolition of the entire system of production and exchange that brought them into existence. Sartre is unable to offer any such solution to the problem of alienation, given the ineradicability of human need, the de facto existence of others, the apparent inevitability of scarcity, and the inescapable ossification of all revolutionary activity.⁵² No matter how intriguing, Sartre's Critique thus clashes with Marxism and cannot possibly provide its foundation.

The notion of freedom lies at the core of Marxism; yet unfortunately the meaning and status of freedom are not at all clear. Marx himself appealed to “human status and dignity” for labor and the worker, in calling for “universal human emancipation.”⁵³ By “human status and dignity,” Marx seems to mean our “spiritual essence, [our] human being”; and this in turn seems to hinge on the contention that, unlike animals, we do not coincide with our “life-activity” but rather are conscious of it. The human being is thus a being for itself; and only because of this is it “a free being.” What distinguishes it from other species—its “species character”—is therefore “free, conscious activity”:

The whole character of a species—its species character—is contained in the character of its life-activity; and free, conscious activity is man's species character. … The animal is immediately identical with its life-activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life-activity. Man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life-activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life-activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life-activity. It is just because of this that he is a species being. Or rather, it is only because he is a species being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity. Estranged labor reverses this relationship, so that it is just because man is a conscious being that he makes his life-activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence … in degrading spontaneous, free, activity, to a means, estranged labor makes man's species life a means to his physical existence. …

But man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being. That is to say, he is a being for himself. Therefore he is a species being, and has to confirm and manifest himself as such both in his being and in his knowing.⁵⁴

These words were written in 1843-44. Over the next forty years, Marx does not give any argument in support of these claims. In fact, in reiterating the fundamental distinction between humans and animals in Capital, Marx explicitly makes that distinction a presupposition of his critical analysis of capitalist production: “We pre-suppose labor in a form that stamps it as exclusively human.”⁵⁵ Marx notes that whereas “mere” animals operate purely instinctively, humans labor purposively. Thus the latter imagine the product to be made, subordinate their will to the modus operandi for its construction, and by doing so realize a purpose of their own. The more distasteful the task, the closer must be their attention in carrying it out.⁵⁶ Purpose, imagination, will, and attention have to do with consciousness, surely; hence, the crux of Marx's contrast between animals and humans is unchanged. Our very being as humans seems to hinge on the freedom that is constitutive of noncoincidence, that is, consciousness, being for itself—in short, “spontaneous, free, activity.” Ontological freedom thus appears to be Marx's pivotal presupposition in unmasking capitalism and calling for an end to exploitation and alienation.

A presupposition can always be challenged; consequently, Marx's basic assumption concerning the being of humans renders his sustained critique of capitalist society at least somewhat dubious. Ironically, the non-Marxist and earlier Sartre of Being and Nothingness may hold more promise for solving this problem. Sartre's early philosophy could conceivably come to the rescue. The foregoing has, I hope, revealed a rather striking similarity between Marx's claims regarding the “human being” and Sartre's claims in Being and Nothingness. Unlike Marx, however, Sartre provides an intricate argument to support those claims—rather than leaving them simply as presuppositions.

It seems to me that the whole of Being and Nothingness constitutes a detailed argument for humans' “original, ontological freedom.”⁵⁷ Our very ability to question—in the everyday sense of the word—reveals that freedom defines our existence as humans, contends Sartre. The crux of his argument is that all questioning presupposes the noncoincidence of the questioner and the questioned—the detaching, “nihilating withdrawal” that supposes rupture with the causality of self-identical being-in-itself. Questioning is not restricted to the posing of actual questions in our usual sense of the term; rather, it is synonymous with “the being of consciousness qua consciousness.” Moreover, “the ontological foundation of consciousness” is the “ontological act” whereby being-in-itself “deteriorates” into that “presence to itself” which is constitutive of being-for-itself, or “human reality.” The for-itself is the original, perpetual project of noncoincidence; it “is the being which determines itself to exist inasmuch as it cannot coincide with itself.”⁵⁸ This project, this primordial nihilation which is the foundation of “empirical freedom,” is the very being of humans—namely, pure spontaneity. Ontological freedom is simply this “nihilating spontaneity.” To preclude an infinite regress we must recognize the nonsubstantial absoluteness, the “immediate self-consciousness” of human reality. Thus Sartre argues that “man is free because he is not himself but present to himself.”⁵⁹

Paradoxically, the absoluteness of ontological freedom does not entail the elimination of motives, causes, obstacles, and limits. According to Sartre, the for-itself by its very upsurge as freedom structures undifferentiated being-in-itself into a world; and any specific action expresses that fundamental project. To act is to choose, and the for-itself's choice of ends “carves out” objective configurations and brings about the emergence of causes in the world. Motives are merely the apprehension of such causes, inasmuch as this apprehension is nonthetic self-consciousness. Far from being internal or external givens, end, cause, and motive are therefore indissoluble terms of a project—that is, of a particular way of being-in-the-world. Any deliberation is itself part of the primordial project; while any reflective decision is predicated on the fundamental choosing which is nothing but the for-itself's very existence as freedom. The latter's structure rules out caprice because freedom as project, as nihilating spontaneity, precludes instantaneity and lack of restrictions. Nihilation requires that there be something to be nihilated, or surpassed; moreover, if that something were simply created ex nihilo by freedom, the fundamental project—the for-itself as noncoincidence—would collapse. Thus human reality everywhere encounters obstacles it has not created; but those obstacles can reveal their resistance only in the context of a (human) project. Freedom exists solely in a situation; and the latter is such only through freedom. By its very upsurge, freedom confers meaning and value on brute being according to its fundamental choice of itself. This ontological freedom, or “autonomy of choice,” supports empirical freedom—that is, physical, religious, social, political, and economic freedoms. Being and Nothingness, however, concerns itself exclusively with analyzing ontological, rather than empirical, freedom.⁶⁰

Despite its ingenuity, Sartre's analysis is flawed. As Merleau-Ponty points out in the final chapter of his Phenomenology of Perception, the very notion of ontological freedom actually destroys freedom—such freedom is a contradiction in terms. If humans' very being is freedom, then it is impossible to detect its appearance anywhere—for no matter what we feel or do, that primordial freedom remains the same. If “freedom is total and infinite,” as Sartre claims, then it lacks any background of nonfreedom from which to stand out. Consequently, it cannot be anywhere. If “choice and consciousness are one and the same thing,” the notion of choice becomes utterly meaningless. To declare all acts free is effectively to declare none of them free and to do away with the very idea of action. Sartre's contention that humans are “wholly and forever free or … not free at all” presents us with a specious either/or; for to be infinitely and eternally free is to have nothing to choose, nothing to acquire, nothing to do.

The heart of the problem is discernible in Sartre's own stipulation “that the choice, being identical with acting, supposes a commencement of realization in order that the choice may be distinguished from the dream and the wish.” If choice is infinite and omnipresent, it is difficult to see how there can be any such distinction. Further, as Merleau-Ponty notes, there is an unresolved difficulty in the very notion of a global choice of ourselves and our way of being-in-the-world: since that primordial choice is synonymous with our very upsurge in the world, it is perplexing how it can even be considered our choice. Ultimately, such an originating choice spells a fundamental contradiction insofar as choice implies an antecedent commitment, or acquisition. Despite Sartre's insistence on the contrary, freedom cannot be absolute; it must indeed have a “support” and a “springboard.” Human reality must be receptive if there is to be “concrete and actual freedom” at all. There must be—as Merleau-Ponty maintains—a transformatory, prereflective interaction, between “a power of initiative,” that is, a bodily intentionality, and an intersubjective world that solicits favored forms of response without dictating any of them. Sartre's conception of freedom as a nihilating spontaneity masks our primordial bond with the natural and cultural world, our fundamental inherence in prereflective coexistence with other incarnate subjectives who share a particular situation. All of them live through, and modify, that situation. There is thus a dialectical relationship in the emergence of historical events: history offers meanings for humans to take up and carry forward. The historical situation elicits responses—but it is humans who actually respond. Merleau-Ponty reminds us that, as Saint-Exupéry said, we are “but a network of relationships.” It is by assuming those relationships and carrying them forward that we realize our freedom.⁶¹

Earlier I contended that, its centrality notwithstanding, the meaning and status of freedom are by no means clear in Marxism. In light of the foregoing critique, that ambiguity could turn out to be a boon for Marxism. If the latter is in fact claiming ontological status for freedom, then Merleau-Ponty's criticism of Sartrean freedom applies—rendering Marxism likewise fatally flawed. As I indicated, there are passages in Marx's writings that seem to authorize such an interpretation of freedom. A number of other passages, however, suggest an interpretation more in keeping with the notion of freedom that emerges in Merleau-Ponty's own philosophy. Thus, for example, Marx criticizes Feuerbach for pre-supposing “an abstract—isolated—human individual,” and argues instead that “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”⁶² Similarly, in his famous critique of Bruno Bauer's position “on the Jewish question,” Marx challenges the notion of “individual freedom” which “lets every man find in other men not the realization but rather the limitation of his own freedom”:

Far from viewing man here in his species-being, his species-life itself—society—rather appears to be an external framework for the individual, limiting his original independence … the sphere in which man acts as a member of the community is degraded below that in which he acts as a fractional being, and finally man as bourgeois rather than man as citizen is considered to be the proper and authentic man. …

The political revolution dissolves civil life into its constituent elements without revolutionizing these elements themselves and subjecting them to criticism. …

Only when the actual, individual man has taken back into himself the abstract citizen and in his everyday life, his individual work, and his individual relationships has become a species-being, only when he has recognized and organized his own powers as social powers so that social force is no longer separated from him as political power, only then is human emancipation complete.⁶³

Similar passages stressing that freedom has to do with the realization of human potentialities, and that such realization can occur only in and through community with others, are to be found in other early works as well as in Marx's later writings.⁶⁴

If freedom is not synonymous with the being of humans, for Marx—and that is the more plausible interpretation—where does that leave Marxism? I have argued that neither Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason nor Being and Nothingness can provide a philosophical foundation for Marxism. The criticism of the Sartrean conception of freedom would suggest that one might draw on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological philosophy. Yet is it viable to bring the “post-Marxist” Merleau-Ponty to the rescue of Marxism? Even if one were to answer in the affirmative, one would look in vain for a full-fledged phenomenological account of freedom in Merleau-Ponty's writings. The final chapter of the Phenomenology of Perception is explicitly devoted to the topic; yet Merleau-Ponty's treatment is primarily critical and fails to offer more than the barest outline of a positive conception of freedom. Further, not only does the meaning of freedom within history remain quite undeveloped, but it is by no means clear that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology can serve as a fruitful point of departure. Geraldine Finn, for example, has claimed that “phenomenology is especially vulnerable to [feminist] critique because it has assumed that the phenomenology of male-consciousness is tantamount to the phenomenology of consciousness as such.”⁶⁵ It remains to be seen whether Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology can survive such a feminist critique or whether a specifically feminist phenomenology will ultimately need to be developed. Similarly, it remains an open question whether Marxism itself can withstand contemporary feminist critiques. As is well known, a number of feminists have argued that Marxism fails to deal with women's oppression, and that is not philosophically feasible to amend the theory with respect to women—“the exclusion or denigration of women is integral to the system, and to give equal recognition to women destroys the system.”⁶⁶ The question whether Marxism can accommodate contemporary ecological concerns, or whether the domination of nature is integral to it, similarly remains open. In short, it is not certain that marxism can be given a genuinely firm philosophical footing. What does seem certain, however, is that any such footing would need to include an adequate phenomenological analysis of freedom.

Notes

1. Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility (Chicago, 1984), xi, xiii-xiv.

2. The focus on responsibility is not, of course, entirely new. Already in 1957, Leszek Kolakowski sought to combine Sartrean existentialist insights with Marxism in emphasizing that “the essential social engagement is moral” and that “every individual's access to … any … form of political life is a moral act for which he is fully responsible.” From “Responsibility and History,” in Existentialism versus Marxism: Conflicting Views on Humanism, ed. by George Novack (New York, 1966), 292-93. Far from reiterating Kolakowski's moral individualism, however, Flynn explores the notion of responsibility in Sartre's philosophy and argues that Sartre combined existentialist and Marxist features in articulating a satisfactory theory of collective responsibility.

3. An examination of arguments for and against the claim that Marxism requires a philosophical foundation lies beyond the scope of this essay. For a consideration of some recent work on this issue, I refer the reader to Supplementary Volume VII of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Marx and Morality, ed. by Kai Nielsen and Steven C. Patten (Guelph, Ont., 1981).

4. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. by Martin Milligan, ed. by Dirk J. Struik (New York, 1964), 112-13.

5. Search for a Method, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes (New York, 1968), 175-80.

6. “An Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre,” in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. by Paul Arthur Schilpp (LaSalle, Ill., 1981), 20.

7. Ibid., 21.

8. Ibid.

9. Ronald Aronson, “Sartre and the Dialectic: The Purposes of Critique II,” Yale French Studies, no. 68 (1985), 95. Aronson makes the same point in chap. 1 of Sartre's Second Critique (Chicago, 1987).

10. Thomas R. Flynn, “Merleau-Ponty and the Critique of Dialectical Reason,” Hypatia (Boulder, Colo., 1985), 248.

11. Aronson, Sartre's Second Critique, 11-32.

12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. by Joseph Bien (Evanston, Ill., 1973), 205, 142, 152, 193, 200.

13. Ibid., 137-38.

14. Ibid., 158-59, 161.

15. Ibid., 155.

16. Ibid., 147, 194, 168, 153-54, 198.

17. Ibid., 199, 198, 163, 132, 192, 193.

18. Ibid., 196, 161, 193, 163.

19. Ibid., 146-51, 123.

20. Ibid., 151-53, 181, 122, 124.

21. Ibid., 124.

22. Ibid., 139-40.

23. Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism, 173.

24. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Marxism and Philosophy,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. by H. L. Dreyfus and P. A. Dreyfus (Evanston, Ill., 1964), 128.

25. Ibid., 126, 129-30. By 1960, Merleau-Ponty had become convinced that “the Marxist link between philosophy and politics” had ruptured, and that it therefore no longer made “much sense” to ask whether someone was or was not still a Marxist. “Introduction,” Signs, trans. by Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill., 1964), 8-11.

26. “An Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre,” 24.

27. Ibid., 43-44.

28. In “An Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre,” he declared: “In any case, there is a difference between supply and demand that arises from the way man is made, from the fact that man demands more, whereas the supply is limited … need is not an oppression; it is a normal biological characteristic of the living creature, and he creates scarcity. … Scarcity is social to the extent that the desired object is scarce for a given society. But strictly speaking, scarcity is not social. Society comes after scarcity. The latter is an original phenomenon of the relation between man and Nature. Nature does not sufficiently contain the objects that man demands in order that man's life should not include either work, which is struggle against scarcity, or combat,” (ibid., 31-32). When asked whether he saw “a possible end to scarcity,” Sartre replied: “Not at the moment.” He added that socialism “would not lead to the disappearance of scarcity” (32). See also Critique of Dialectical Reason I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. by Alan Sheridan-Smith, ed. by Jonathan Rée (London, 1982), 105, 112-13, 127 ff., 140 ff., 318 ff., 735 ff. In the original French text, the corresponding pages are Critique de la raison dialectique I: Théorie des ensembles pratiques (Paris, 1960), 186, 192, 204 ff., 214 ff., 358 ff., 688 ff.

29. Critique I, 100-106.

30. Ibid., 105-6.

31. Ibid., 100, 101, 103, 106.

32. “Epilogue,” Adventures of the Dialectic, 203-33. See especially 207 ff., 219, 226-27, 231-32.

33. Ronald Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre—Philosophy in the World (London, 1980), 243-92. See especially 263-68. See also Aronson's article “Sartre's Return to Ontology: Critique II Rethinks the Basis of L'Etre et le Néant,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 1 (January-March 1987), 99-116.

34. Ibid., 264, 285, 286.

35. Critique de la raison dialectique II; L'Intelligibilite de l'histoire, ed. by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (Paris, 1985), 45-54. Here and in subsequent quotations from Critique II the English translation is my own. Ronald Aronson's article “On Boxing: ‘Incarnation’ in Critique II” provides a useful summary of this part of Critique II; Revue Internationale de Philosophie 39, nos. 152-53 (1985), 149-79; republished as chap. 3 of Sartre's Second Critique. However, Aronson's interpretation of Sartre's study of the boxing match is more sympathetic to Sartre than is my own view. While the placing of the specific conflict within a larger socioeconomic system can be seen as a step forward for Sartre, the study itself constitutes a singularly clear expression of the very features that render Sartre's philosophy incompatible with Marxism.

36. Ibid., 45, 46, 51-53, 56.

37. Ibid., 46, 57. Sartre says that his aim “cannot be to outline here a historical and dialectical interpretation of boxing” (45); nevertheless, his study of a boxing match is not only limited in scope but antithetical to any genuinely Marxist account of such a match.

38. Ibid., 29, 32, 37, 57, 22.

39. Ibid., 22-23.

40. Ibid., 22, 23, 26, 32, 58, 349, 394-95n.

41. Ibid., 35, 36, 22.

42. Ibid., 76, 106, 61, 71, 194, 239-40, 301.

43. Ibid., 301; Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 137-38.

44. Ibid., 134-35.

45. “An Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre,” 30.

46. Critique I, 144 ff.; and Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow, 1955), 37.

47. William Leon McBride, “Sartre and Marxism,” in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, 621.

48. Ibid., 621-24.

49. Klaus Hartmann, “Sartre's Theory of Ensembles,” in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, 636-37, 648-49.

50. Ibid., 636-41, 649.

51. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 175 ff.; and Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth, 1973), 211 ff., 831-32.

52. See, for example, Critique I, 81-83, 122 ff., 222 ff., 333 ff., 661 ff., 735-48, 804-5, 811-12. Critique II, 21 ff., 58 ff., 76 ff., 106, 131 ff., 198, 248 ff., 298 ff., 349, 364, 394 ff.; Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 106 ff., 137 ff., 170 ff.; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, trans. by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. by Frederick Engels (Moscow, n.d.), I, 76 ff., 340 ff., 667 ff., 686 ff., 702 ff.; Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. and ed. by Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddet (New York, 1967), 144, 272, 281-82.

53. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 118.

54. Ibid., 112-14, 182. I am hyphenating “life-activity” in keeping with 113, line 3, and with the 1959 edition also translated by Martin Milligan (Moscow, 1967).

55. Capital I, 174. Incidentally, I would question Marx's radical dichotomy between humans and animals. Sartre prudently refrained from considering the being of animals; but when asked directly, he stated that “animals have consciousness.” See “An Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre,” 28.

56. Capital I, 173-74.

57. Being and Nothingness, 569, 583.

58. Ibid., 16, 58 ff., 124-26.

59. Ibid., 12 ff., 60, 84, 567 ff.

60. Ibid., 16, 84, 564 ff., 575 ff., 594 ff., 612 ff., 619 ff., 635 ff., 645 ff., 675 ff., 705 ff.

61. Ibid., 60, 473 ff., 534-59, 562-63, 568 ff., 595, 616 ff., 654-80; and Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London, 1962), 434-56. Note that Sartre's emphasis in Being and Nothingness is on separation rather than interconnectedness. The recurrent notions of “rupture,” “wrenching away,” and “conflict” are indicative. Thus he says, for example: “Human-reality is free because … it is perpetually wrenched away from itself and because it has been separated by a nothingness from what it is and from what it will be. … But this power of nihilation cannot be limited to realizing a simple withdrawal in relation to the world. … This means evidently that it is by a pure wrenching away from himself and the world that the worker can posit his suffering as unbearable suffering and consequently can make of it the motive for his revolutionary action. This implies for consciousness the permanent possibility of effecting a rupture with its own past, of wrenching itself away from its past … so as to be able to confer on it the meaning which it has in terms of the project of a meaning which it does not have. … To come into the world as a freedom confronting Others is to come into the world as alienable. If to will oneself free is to choose to be in this world confronting Others, then the one who wills himself such must will also the passion of his freedom. … Thus the Other's freedom confers limits on my situation. …” It is “useless for human-reality to seek to get out of this dilemma: one must either transcend the Other or allow oneself to be transcended by him. The essence of the relations between consciousness is not the Mitsein; it is conflict.”

62. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology and Supplementary Texts, ed. by C. J. Arthur (New York, 1970), VI, 122.

63. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Writings of the Young Marx, 236-41.

64. See, for example, The German Ideology, 83; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 137 ff., 181 ff.; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. by F. Engels (Moscow, 1971), III, 820; Grundrisse, 487 ff.

65. Geraldine Finn, “On the Oppression of Women in Philosophy—Or, Whatever Happened to Objectivity?” in Feminism in Canada: From Pressure to Politics, ed. by Angela Miles and Geraldine Finn (Montreal, 1982), 155.

66. Ibid., 151. See also such works as Mary O'Brien, “Reproducing Marxist Man,” in The Sexism of Social and Political Theory: Women and Reproduction from Plato to Nietzsche (Toronto, 1979); Lydia Sargent, ed., Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston, 1981); Mary O'Brien, “Hegemony and Superstructure: A Feminist Critique of Neo-Marxism,” in Taking Sex into Account: The Policy Consequences of Sexist Research (Ottawa, 1984).