Sartre's Marxism: untenable assertions and equally untenable omissions

It's a pleasure to reach chapter 9 of The Work of Sartre and see Meszaros finally lose patience with his subject.

He quotes Sartre:

....The consciousness of the intolerable character of the system must therefore no longer be sought in the impossibility of satisfying elementary needs but, above all else, in the consciousness of alienation—in other words, in the fact that this life is not worth living and has no meaning, that this mechanism is a deceptive mechanism, that these needs are artificially created, that they are false, that they are exhausting and only serve profit. But to unite the class on this basis is even more difficult. 215

Meszaros then continues:

If we accept at face value this characterization of the "advanced capitalist" order, in that case the task of producing emancipatory consciousness is not only "more difficult" but quite impossible. But the dubious ground on which we can reach such an aprioristic imperatival and pessimistic/ self-defeating conclusion—prescribing from the height of the intellectual's "new theory of needs" the abandonment by the workers of their "acquisitive artificial needs," instantiated by the motor car, and their replacement by the thoroughly abstract postulate which posits for them that "this life is not worth living and has no meaning" (a noble but rather abstract imperatival postulate effectively contradicted in reality by the tangible need of the members of the working class for securing the conditions of their economically sustainable existence)—is both the acceptance of a set of totally untenable assertions and the equally untenable omission of some vital determining features of the actually existing capital system in its historically irreversible structural crisis.

For a start, to talk about "advanced capitalism"—when the capital system as a mode of social metabolic reproduction finds itself in its descending phase of historical development, and therefore is only capitalistically advanced but in no other sense at all, thereby capable of sustaining itself only in an ever more destructive and therefore ultimately also self-destructive way—is extremely problematical. Another assertion: the characterization of the overwhelming majority of humankind —in the category of poverty, including the "blacks and the immigrants," the "elderly" and "on the global scale, the third world"—as belonging to the "marginal zones" (in affinity with Marcuse's "outsiders"), is no less untenable. For in reality it is the "advanced capitalist world" that constitutes the long term totally unsustainable privileged margin of the overall system, with its ruthless "elementary need-denial" to the greater part of the world, and not what is described by Sartre in his Manifesto interview as the "marginal zones." Even with regard to the United States of America the margin of poverty is greatly underrated, at merely 15 percent. Besides, also the characterization of the workers' motor cars as nothing more than purely "artificial needs" which "only serve profit" could not be more one-sided. For, in contrast to many intellectuals, not even the relatively well off particular workers, let alone the members of the class of labor as a whole, have the luxury of finding their place of work next door to their bedroom….

The Work of Sartre by István Mészáros (Monthly Review: 1979 2012)

Jay

6 August 2019