Scarcity

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Apr 11 07:25:15 PDT 2001



>On Wed, 11 Apr 2001, Yoshie Furuhashi cross-posted:
>
>> ***** Jean-Paul Sartre: Solitary Man in a Hostile Universe
>>
>> from Marxism. For Marx, though ambiguous in many ways, was
>> unambiguous in his rejection of the picture of mankind as divided
>> into individualistic and competing atoms. Marx believed in community
>> or human togetherness as the natural condition of man. All Sartre's
>> talk about pledges and political societies being held together by
>> Terror is the antithesis of Marxism.
>
>Huh? Marx believed no such thing. There's nothing "natural" about human
>beings, or individualism, or scarcity, but there is an objective logic to
>the thing, called natural history. Sartre's scarcity (the violence of
>tool-using societies) is his specific term for natural history. It has its
>peccadilloes and weak points -- among other problems, he doesn't
>distinguish accumulation from trading-flows -- but it's not Hume
>staple-gunned to Hobbes, either.
>
>> not only a question of language, although Sartre's talk of "Liberty"
>> as "Terror" and "Terror" as "Fraternity" might come straight from a
>> speech by Robespierre. It is the basic elements of the theory which
>> belong to pre-Hegelian thought. For Sartre is putting forward a
>> doctrine of social covenant which is virtually identical with that of
>> the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
>
>Hardly. Sartre was a revolutionary thinker and philosopher, who
>was attacking Stalinist orthodoxy from within, as it were (Robespierre as
>a code word for Lenin). Scarcity and the Other are mediated by the
>practico-inert, the Hollywood unconscious of monopoly capitalism; the flip
>side of the power of the Gaze is the demographic opacity of bodies, a.k.a.
>the Third World revolutions Sartre defended so strongly.
>
>-- Dennis

Unlike Maurice Cranston, you present no textual evidence to support your view.

Yoshie



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