Marxists

Marxists are presented as political humanists whose definition of human nature is deferred to the classless society of the future. Their importance in the argument lies in this temporal displacement: they claim to serve humanity, yet the humanity they affirm has not arrived, while the actual people of the present are treated as incomplete or expendable in relation to that promised end.

Doctrine and Future Humanity

Marxists and their followers believe that human nature will be formed in a future classless society. This position makes the future, rather than present human experience, the decisive measure of human value. The classless society functions not merely as a political arrangement but as the horizon in which humanity is expected finally to become itself.

Camus therefore treats their humanism as internally accusatory. By rejecting present human beings in the name of the future human being, Marxists turn the living person into an object of judgment. Their doctrine promises liberation, but its standard of judgment is located beyond the limits of current experience, so the person who exists now can be condemned for failing to embody an ideal that has not yet become historical fact.

The Religious Structure of Historical Faith

For Camus, the Marxist claim that humanity will be fulfilled at the end of history is religious in structure. The end of history cannot possess a definable meaning within the limits of human existence; it can only become the object of faith. In this respect, the promised classless society resembles other doctrines that announce a future kingdom and demand present obedience on its behalf.

The comparison does not mean that Marxists simply repeat older theology in vocabulary unchanged. It identifies a shared movement of thought: an uncertain future is transformed into a guaranteed destination, and that destination is then used to authorize judgments and sacrifices in the present. Camus calls this a new mystification, arguing that it is no less powerful than the earlier belief that colonial oppression could be justified by the supposed necessity of saving the souls of infidels.

Present People and Political Accusation

The central consequence of the Marxist position, as Camus describes it, is that it refuses the humanity of those who are alive now. Its humanists become accusers of man because they measure actual persons against a future model of humanity. The contradiction is sharp: a movement that speaks in the name of universal human dignity can treat present human beings as obstacles, deviations, or provisional material for a historical project.

This critique belongs to Camus's wider refusal to replace absent eternal values with an equally absolute historical promise. In the preface to The Myth of Sisyphus, he defines the book's task as confronting suicide without the aid of eternal values and finding, even within nihilism, a means of proceeding beyond it. The Marxist future can therefore be read as one of the forms of compensating certainty that Camus resists: it offers meaning by turning history into a tribunal and its imagined conclusion into redemption.

Relation to the Left and the Politics of Force

Camus distinguishes the Marxists he criticizes from the older left tradition, which he associates with opposition to injustice, obscurantism, and oppression. That tradition understood these phenomena as interdependent. His objection is directed especially at intellectuals who have become fascinated by force and efficacy and who defend obscurantism in the hope that it will produce justice, or national interest in the hope that it will produce liberty.

The resulting political posture appears in different ideological forms but shares the same act of resignation. Some right-wing intellectuals had previously wanted to be realistic nationalists; some left-wing intellectuals now want to be realistic socialists. By treating efficacy as a value in itself, they risk betraying both nationalism and socialism, because the political ideal is emptied out and replaced by technique. The Marxist orientation toward the future thus becomes connected with a broader danger: the claim that historical necessity or practical effectiveness can suspend moral limits.

Historical Necessity versus Human Limits

Camus rejects the idea that history itself supplies a final authorization for action. He also rejects the belief that the future can serve as a reliable substitute for history, since the future is precisely what is not yet known. Against both idealism and a supposedly scientific confidence in historical development, he argues for realism, rule, and order—but not for any rule supplied automatically by a disordered society or by doctrines that proclaim themselves free of all scruples.

The Marxists' significance is therefore less that they are treated as a single political organization than that they embody a problem in modern political thought. Their aspiration to create a classless society may speak in the name of humanity, but its future-centered logic can convert an unverified historical end into a sacred principle. Camus's alternative is to refuse that appeal to a final guarantee and to judge political action by the realities, suffering, and limits of human beings who are present rather than by the imagined perfection of those who may come after them.