And fails.
In a nutshell, here's why.
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First, Sartre did find a weak point — rather, the weakest
point — of Marxism 101, with all of its permutations through Lenin, Stalin, Mao
and even revisers like the Frankfurt School.
It’s Hegelian dialectic.
Congrats to Sartre for seeing the main issue that makes
Marxism even more a pseudoscience than most theories of economics, since
Hegelian dialectic and its thesis-synthesis-antithesis is purely a philosophical
idea, and totally unscientific.
BUT! Marxism is not Marxism without Hegelian dialectic. Pull
that out, and you're engaging with non-Marxist Socialist theorizing of some
sort.
Second, while comparing and contrasting Sartre to Camus, and
intertwining them, and saying that Sartre tried to find a third way, Aronson
ignores how late Sartre was to the table on criticizing both Stalin in
particular and Soviet Communism in general.
Third, Marx ignored, or never thought through, larger
economic consumptive problems of capitalism — resource exploitation problems
that aren’t part of Marxism.
Peak Oil — temporarily offset by fracking — is one.
Climate change is a much bigger one, as this Boston Review essay notes in passing.
As far as Aronson's book on Sartre and Camus? Without staking absolutist positions on either side, Camus was in general right to reject the use of violence in social movements. And, per some critical reviews of his book (at that second link in the first paragraph), Aronson reportedly butters his bread clearly for Sartre, and for postmodernism that follows to some degree from him. You lost me there.
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