Sartre: pseudo-Marxism, boxing metaphores, and scarcity

In 1980, when Sartre died, George Novack wrote:

….Marxism versus Existentialism

Throughout these years Sartre, the unalloyed existentialist, remained a professed adversary of Marxism. In his 1947 essay on "Materialism and Revolution," he did not spare a single one of its fundamental principles. His indictment rejected its claim to scientific truthfulness, its materialism, its rationalism, its determinism, its dialecti-
cal view of nature, its conception of object-subject relations, and its derivation of social consciousness from social-historical conditions.

Midway in his career Sartre stood forth as the proponent of a pre-Marxian socialist humanism framed in existentialist terms which he offered as the predestined replacement for the false and outmoded teachings of dialectical materialism.

Then, in a dramatic turnabout, Sartre announced in his second major treatise, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, published in 1960, that Marxism was "the ultimate philosophy of our age.'' Frustrated in his previous effort to overthrow the theoretical foundations of scientific socialism by frontal attack, he now sought to undermine them by insisting that his brand of existentialism could supply the ingredients of individuality and subjectivity hitherto lacking in Marxism. He prepared to rescue contemporary Marxism from its bondage to the petrified and institutionalized version peddled by the opportunistic Soviet bureaucracy and its echoers.

It is generally recognized that Sartre's unfinished attempt to remodel dialectical materialism according to existentialist specifications was a failure. Instead of supplementing Marxism with existentialist amendments, as he promised, he virtually liquidated Marxism into the method of existentialism. For example, he construed social evolution as a succession of freely made choices
by the individual, not, as Marx does, as the lawful rise and fall of successive forms and levels of social organization determined by the unfolding of different degrees of humanity's productive powers in its collective struggle with nature for sustenance and development.

In both phases Sartre held fast to his root assumption that the Self is Sovereign in all domains of human endeavor. As Wilfred Desan pointed out in The Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre: "There is no room in the writings of Karl Marx for a self with such an amplitude.'' The extreme subjectivism of the existentialist creed cannot be harmonized with dialectical materialism or blended with it; the two philosophies and methods stand at opposite poles.

The Sartre of the 1960s and 1970s had a different slant on the roles of literature, philosophy, and politics than the Sartre of earlier days. When he published his first novel Nausea and wrote his first brilliant plays, The Flies and No Exit, he was an ambitious young author elaborating the appropriate literary forms for the imaginative projection of his feelings and attitudes and the most vivid representation of his ruling ideas. Moreover, he esteemed the written word in both artistic production and philosophy, not simply as his chosen vehicle of individual expression, but as the most effective way for him
to recreate the world. This he fervently believed.

In Les Mots (The Words), intended as the first volume of his autobiography and published twenty years later when he had become a world-renowned personality, he renounced this notion of the world-transforming function of literature. Without repudiating his previous work or regretting his dedication to a literary vocation, he declared that he had erroneously exalted literary creation into a sacred thing with an absolute value. This was the product of a personal neurosis and the illusion of a middle-class intellectual. Contemporary writing derives its authenticity and importance, he said, from its capacity to deal with the malaises of our time and the pressing problems they pose to humanity….

Would that Istvan Meszaros could pack such class clarity and rhetorical acumen into his own summation!

Still, both Novack and Meszaros clearly respect Sartre's weight and place in intellectual life and 20th century liberation struggles.

But byy the penultimate chapter of The Work of Sartre, Meszaros seems to have had about enough of his petty bourgeois radical subject's confusing non-class metaphors as replacements for the scientific socialism of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

"Boxing"

....Sadly, given the existentialist ontological presuppositions retained by Sartre to the end, even when he calls himself a "marxisant" thinker, it is impossible to find a viable solution to the problems of scarcity in his writings. And that goes not only for the first volume but also for the unfinished—and as we have seen above, within Sartre's conceptual framework on principle unfinish-able—second volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, which was supposed to give a dialectical account of "real history," in contrast to sketching the categorial outlines of "the formal structures of history" in the first.

His discussion of scarcity and its human impact in the second volume of the Critique, presented with the much admired Sartrean graphic intensity through the example of boxing, tends to be in terms of its validity grounded on characteristics of the past and—with regard to the present and the future— confined to individual psychological plausibility despite the author's claims to general validity.

Sartre offers a curiously undialectical "dialectic" of the asserted "inte-riorization" of the contradictory predicament of the generic "scarce man." For what we receive from him in the second volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason is an unsustainable explanation of the depicted relationship, timelessly projected into the future. It is extended to the thorny—and in the existing societal reproductive order absolutely fundamental—issue of the origin of profit, summed up in the Sartrean assertion in this way: "profit springs from the non-sufficiency of satisfaction (worker and wage) and from non-abundance."187

The example of boxing claimed by Sartre to be representative of all struggle is not simply problematical in this respect but quite inappropriate to the characterization of historically determined and capitalistically enforced structural antagonism. The vital difference between the Sartrean representation of the "boxers' struggle" and the real antagonism between capital and labor (for which boxing is also supposed to stand) transpires when we read that

This bout in which the two [boxing] beginners are embroiled, each a victim at once of his own blunders and the other's, has a reality all the more striking in that such domination of the labourers by their labour, by producing their future before the eyes of all (they will vegetate at the foot of the ladder or abandon the profession), causes it to be seen and touched as a signification and as a destiny. . . . But it is a destiny, in so far as this domination of the boxers by boxing is directly grasped as presence of their future misfortune. . . .The social ensemble is incarnated with the multiplicity of its conflicts in such a singular temporalization of negative reciprocity.

. . . In a direct sense, the fight is a public incarnation of every [Sartre's emphasis] conflict. It relates, without any intermediary, to the interhuman tension produced by the interiorization of scarcity.188

However, in actuality the fundamental difference—which arises from a grave social antagonism concerned with two diametrically opposed social metabolic alternatives and not from what could be characterized by the "negative reciprocity of every conflict"—is that labor, as capital's hegemonic alternative, cannot "abandon" the "profession." Its situation is not a profession at all but a structurally determined condition and a necessarily subordinate class position in the societal reproduction process. The particular worker—but not labor as such—can "abandon" this or that "profession" (in the sense of changing a job), but due to his class situation he is at the same time forced into another one. Labor as a social class cannot do anything like "abandoning the profession.

Equally, the "domination of the boxers by boxing" is inapplicable to the condition of labor. Labor is dominated by capital, and not "by labor," in the Sartrean sense of the boxer being "dominated by boxing." The domination of labor is historically most specific, and it is not due to "scarcity" and "technology" in Sartre's sense, let alone to the "interiorization of scarcity." In fact we are concerned here with a non-symmetrical relationship of structurally enforced domination and subordination, quite unlike the symmetrical "struggle between two boxers" who agree to co-operate within a voluntarily accepted set of rules. In the case of labor the "rules" are forced upon the members of the class as a whole (through their structurally enforced domination and subordination), and the—far from voluntarily embraced—"rules" are not forced simply on individual workers but on the class as a whole.

But even if the prevailing rules are not politically forced upon the members of the class, as they are under the conditions of slavery and feudal serfdom, they are forced upon them nevertheless, as economically imposed determinations. Thus the regulatory determinations in question are in the most fundamental sense objectively—materially/reproductively—prevailing rules. Moreover, a significant further qualification is also needed in this respect. For the ultimate guarantor—even if only the ultimate guarantor—of safeguarding the materially/structurally predetermined and enforced rules of commodity society is in fact the capitalist state, with its class-determined legal system and the corresponding law-enforcing apparatus. For

Every form of production creates its own legal relations, form of government, etc. In bringing things which are organically related into an accidental relation, into a merely reflective connection, they [the political economists of the descending phase of capital's historical development] display their crudity and lack of conceptual understanding. All the bourgeois economists are aware of is that production can be carried on better under the modern police than e.g. on the principle of might makes right. They forget only that this principle is also a legal relation, and that the right of the stronger prevails in their 'constitutional republics' as well, only in another form.189

Sartre needs the ahistorical absolutization of scarcity—in the name of "historical intelligibility," of all things—in order to make possible for himself the avoidance of elaborating the categories and structures of real history. He remains anchored to the "formal structures of history" in tune with the existential ontological determination given in his conception even at the time of writing the Critique to "evil as the structure of the Other"—and the Other also "in myself"—engaged in permanent interiorized struggle over scarcity.

Sartre's way of linking together "scarcity," "struggle" and "contradiction" in the modality of insurmountable necessity is also most problematical. For even if in the rather remote past we can identify the necessary linkage between scarcity and struggle, this is not so once rational control of the conditions at stake by the social individuals becomes feasible, in conjunction with sustainable productive advancement. Here, again, the example of the boxers is inapplicable. For we are concerned with different orders and types of rational control: one formally consistent with a voluntarily agreed set of rules devised for the purpose of an—admittedly most lucrative—sport, and the other substantive, from the domain of real history.

To be sure, in the case of the two boxers their "rationality"—i.e. their voluntary/conscious acceptance of the "rules of their profession"—is inseparable from their claimed struggle. But their "struggle" is not a real struggle at all in the sense of the "life or death struggle" over insurmountable scarcity constantly called by that name by Sartre himself. Nor is it even slightly comparable, in its essential character, to the antagonistic confrontation—a very real historic struggle over the contested outcome of the structurally determined antagonism between capital and labor over their incompatible hegemonic historical alternatives. Only a dubious formal analogy can be drawn between such fundamentally different forms of struggle, as the structural antagonism between capital and labor in real history and the consensual ritual of the two boxers even when they fight over a purse of a hundred million dollars.

Sartre can offer us in the case of the two boxers a psychologically plausible picture. Thus he is at his most eloquent when he asserts that "what is certain is that, in every brawl, the deep source is always scarcity . . . the translation of human violence as interiorized scarcity."190 And he proceeds with his graphic characterization of the meaning of the boxing match in the same vein by saying that

The two boxers gather within themselves, and re-exteriorize by the punches they swap, the ensemble of extensions and open or masked struggles that characterize the regime under which we live—and have made us violent even in the least of our desires, even in the gentlest of our caresses. But at the same time, this violence is approved in them.191

In this way the depicted particular boxing contest can be generalized by Sartre as representative of all human violence. This is how it appears in volume 2 of the Critique: "Every boxing match incarnates the whole of boxing as an incarnation of all fundamental violence. . . .An act of violence is always all of violence, because it is a re-exteriorization of interiorized scarcity."192

"Scarcity"

....the possibility of overcoming scarcity by abundance is not denied on principle, but none the less it is ruled out for the foreseeable time ahead of us on the ground that it would require some productively most advanced technological conditions which might perhaps materialize (or not) in the distant future. And there is also a third, positively assertive position about the emerging abundance which states that "the conquest of scarcity is now not only foreseeable but actually foreseen."193

Marcuse's position was much the same as the views just quoted from an essay by the prominent Canadian Marxist thinker, C. B. Macpherson. Marcuse insisted that the "utopian possibilities" which he advocated were "inherent in the technical and technological forces of advanced capitalism" on the basis of which one could "terminate poverty and scarcity within a very foreseeable future."194 He kept on repeating that "technical progress has reached a stage in which reality no longer need be defined by the debilitating competition for social survival and advancement. The more these technical capacities outgrow the framework of exploitation within which they continue to be confined and abused, the more they propel the drives and aspirations of men to a point at which the necessities of life cease to demand the aggressive performance of 'earning a living,' and the 'non-necessary' becomes a vital need."195 And in the same work, written by Marcuse well before sinking into deep pessimism in the last years of his life, he postulated a "biological foundation" to revolutionary change, saying that such a foundation

would have the chance of turning quantitative technical progress into qualitatively different ways of life—precisely because it would be a revolution occurring at a high level of material and intellectual development, one which would enable man to conquer scarcity and poverty. If this idea of a radical transformation is to be more than idle speculation, it must have an objective foundation in the production process of advanced industrial society, in its technical capabilities and their use. For freedom indeed depends largely on technical progress, on the advancement of science.196

This generously well-meaning unreality was written and published by Marcuse more than forty years ago, and we have seen absolutely nothing pointing in the direction of its realization. On the contrary, we have witnessed recently a devastating crisis of "advanced industrial society," with food riots admitted by one of the ideological pillars of the established order— The Economist—to have taken place in no less than thirty five countries, despite all of the significant technical progress undoubtedly accomplished in the past four decades. Not even the slightest attempt has been made for the enduring "conquest of scarcity."

The great weakness of the Marcuse-type projections, shared by C. B. Macpherson and many others, is that the positive results regarding the "actually foreseen conquest of scarcity" are expected to arise from the "propelling force" of technical/technological progress and productive advancement. And that could not happen even in a thousand years, not to mention forty or even a hundred. For technology is not an "independent variable." It is deeply embedded in the most fundamental social determinations, despite all mystification to the contrary,197 as we have seen above on several occasions.

No one can doubt that the sympathy of the people who in this way anticipate the conquest of scarcity is on the side of the "wretched of the earth who fight the affluent monster."198 But their moral discourse cannot even touch the fundamental objective determinations which so successfully perpetuate the denounced plight of the exploited and oppressed, let alone effectively alter them. To expect from productive advancement, arising from "technical progress" in "advanced industrial society," to move humanity in the direction of eliminating scarcity is to ask for the impossible. The same kind of impossibility as expecting that the capitalist should set a limit to his appetite for profit on the ground that he has enough profit already. For the society Marcuse and others talk about is not "advanced industrial" but only capitalistically advanced—and for humanity itself suicidally dangerous—society. It cannot take a single step in the direction of conquering scarcity for as long as it remains under the rule of capital, irrespective of its growing "technical capabilities" and the corresponding degree of improvement in productivity in the future. For two important reasons.

First, because even the greatest technically secured productive advancement can be—and under the conditions now prevailing in our society actually is and must be— dissipated through profitable waste and the channels of destructive production, including the state-legitimated fraudulence of the military/industrial complex, as we have seen before. And second—what happens to be more fundamental here—because of the objective character of the system of capital-accumulation. We should not forget that "capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will" cannot be interested in the conquest of scarcity, and in the corresponding equitable distribution of wealth, for the simple reason that "use-values must never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; . . . The restless never ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at."199 And in that respect, which is inseparable from the absolute imperative of endless capital-expansion and accumulation, the permanent structural impediment is that capital always is—and, this cannot be stressed strongly enough, it always must remain, as a matter of inner systemic determination—insuperably scarce, even when under certain conditions it is contradictorily overproduced.200

SARTRE IS, OF COURSE, NOT IN THE LEAST CONCERNED with the conquest of scarcity and its sustainable replacement by productively generalized abundance. He is firmly negative in that respect, describing the "man of scarcity" as the man who imposes his will and expropriates abundance to himself.201 The existential ontological orientation and coloring of Sartre's characterization of the insuperable conflictual relationship between myself and my adversaries is retained to the very end of the Critique of Dialectical Reason when he writes that "in the field of scarcity an increase in the number or power of my neighbours has the result of increasing the precariousness of my existence. For that power seeks both to produce more (a ceiling though) and to eliminate me. My alteration is suffered, and is what incarnates the transformation in me."202

However, Sartre's way of dealing with the problem of scarcity and abundance—by making scarcity the existential foundation of history, as its "permanent framework produced by scarcity," as well as of historical intelligibility, rather than a (no matter how important) contingent factor in history, capable of being overcome under significantly altered conditions at some point in time—does not solve the very real historical challenge facing us.

In truth, some elementary qualifications are required for a proper characterization of abundance itself which can be legitimately posited in the context of overcoming the historical domination of scarcity. For at a relatively early stage of humanity's historical development the "naturally necessary needs"—which were for our distant ancestors fully in tune with the overwhelming material domination of scarcity—are actually superseded by a much more complex, historically created, set of needs, as we have seen discussed in The Dialectic of Structure and History. To be sure, the productive advancement in question does not represent the end of this burdensome story but, none the less, it means a significant move in the direction of conquering the original domination of human life by scarcity. In this sense:

Luxury is the opposite of naturally necessary. Necessary needs are those of the individual himself reduced to a natural subject. The development of industry suspends this natural necessity as well as this former luxury—in bourgeois society, it is true, it does so only in antithetical form, in that it itself only posits another specific social standard as necessary, opposite luxury.203

Accordingly, consigning scarcity to the past is a long-drawn-out but, despite all obstacles and contradictions, an ongoing historical process. However, precisely because of the antithetical form in which this historical development must be carried on in bourgeois society, the real question for the future is not the utopian institution of unqualified "abundance" but the rational control of the process of productive advancement by the social individuals, feasible only in a socialist reproductive order. Otherwise the historically no longer justifiable domination of scarcity—in the form of perversely wasteful but profitable destructive production in a variety of its capitalistically feasible forms—remains with us indefinitely. In the absence of the required rational self-determination on a societal scale—whose absence under the present conditions happens to be not a fateful existential ontological determination but a question of historically created and historically superable impediment—even the greatest (abstractly postulated) "abundance" would be utterly powerless and futile as an attempt to overcome the domination of scarcity.

Thus we are concerned in this respect with a historically determinate— but not permanently history-determining— social force and impediment to social emancipation which dominated human life for far too long. It is that structural/systemic impediment that must be radically superseded through labor's hegemonic alternative to capital's established mode of social metabolic control according to the Marxian conception of the "new historic form."

Jay

6 August 2019