Scarcity

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>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