Rescuing Sartre From Anachronistic Individualism

In this updated version, see here, István Mészáros lucidly rescues Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist anthropology from the philosophical hermeneutic watershed of anachronistic individualism. The author critically examines evidence for a complementarity between Sartre's phenomonological ontology with historical-materialism, while paying particular attention to how Sartre's work is largely contributive to the Marxist Humanist attention to forms of social consciousness. What is stressed is that although Sartre rejects the 'dialectics of nature', this is not a total rejection of the dialectical method, since Sartre's attention to issues of morality are squarely placed in a historically-specific social context, specifically with respect to the parameters and social practices of capitalism, whereby, in similar fashion to Marx's concern with the dialectical contradictions between authentic human development and alienation, 'nothingness', or 'free will', is limited by the extent to which the actually existing physical world forces mankind to be subservient to constrained subjectivities, of which meaningful sense of self and dignity are lost in translation.

PS: Note that Mészáros is often considered part of Marxist Humanism, a school that emphasizes Marx's early writings, in particular his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Mészáros most famous book is on Marx's theory of alienation here (and where he applies Marx's theory of alienation to reassessing the socialist alternative, and the conditions for its realization, is here). For the more directly relevant economic aspects of Marx's critique and reconstruction of the surplus approach one only needs to read his Theories of Surplus Value and, obviously, Capital (and the extent to which Piero Sraffa revived Marxist Economic Theory - see here & here ). Mind you, this is not to suggest an epistemological break in Marx's work, as authors like Louis Althusser have propounded. For debates on the supposed structural discontinuity, see here (subscription required) and here.

Globalization: A Fetish of (Post) Modernity

Throughout the enormous literature on ‘globalization’ there is a common theme that worldwide social, political, and economic transformations have contributed to reconfigurations and re-articulations of the world-system. The contention is that due to to recent technological revolutions in communication, media, and transportation, a ‘new international division of labor' has ensued a unique 'global' sociological imagination; the national 'state' as a principle of structuration is unsatisfactory for the social scientist - the 'space of flows' has replaced the 'space of places' (Ruggie, 1993). Dynamic connective configurations beget 'transnational' corporations omnipresent vertically disintegrated and horizontally integrated in an irresistible Gramscian transnational historic bloc of 'neoliberalism'.

This approach downplays the primary force driving globalization, which is financialization - the international transformation of future streams of (profit, dividend, or interest) income into tradeable financial assets.  The systemic power and importance of financial markets, financial motives, financial institutions, and financial élites manifestly delink the national state from perceived social, political, and economic processes. Given US hegemony in the world-system (cf. Fields & Vernengo, 2012),  however, the US Federal Reserve (along with the US Treasury and Wall Street) sets the conditions for financialization, since it acts as a safety valve for mass amounts of international liquidity necessary the transnationalisation of corporate power (Arrighi, 1999: 223).

US monetary policy is the international transmission mechanism for global economic activity. As such, to suggest that methodological nationalism is not befitting, because it blinds social science to the multi-dimensional process of change that has irreversibly transformed the very nature of the social world and the place of states within it, is a ‘just so’ story of prejudgement that overlooks how the world-system operates within a particular institutional setting.

As Bertell Ollman (see here) notes:

"There is also a related tendency to overestimate the speed of change, along with a corresponding tendency to underestimate all that is holding it back. Thus, relatively minor cracks on the surface of capitalist reality are too easily mistaken for gaping chasms on the verge of becoming earthquakes. [...] non-dialectical thinking leads people to be surprised whenever a major change occurs, because they aren't looking for it and don't expect it, because it isn't an internal part of how they conceive of the world at this moment [...]"