Materialism: an Introduction

The first concept everyone should explore when starting down the path of political education is "materialism". Let's break down materialism by: 1) defining it, 2) contrasting it with other approaches to analysis, 3) understanding what Marx did with it, 4) identifying its pitfalls.

Defining It

Essentially, materialism is about how everything in the world rests on some concrete foundation. Whether we are talking about: the subatomic particles that make up atoms, the history of colonialism that built up capitalism, or the active members that make up an organization, we are talking about the concrete materials that constitute the basis for our world.

Put another way, materialism is about looking at the facts on the ground and basing our next steps or analysis on those concrete facts. It is impossible to make an informed decision without starting here.

Contrasting It

In contrast to a materialist analysis of the world, we find "idealism".

The idealist approach is usually confused for meaning "optimistic". But for our purposes, "idealist" refers to analysis or actions based on rootless ideas rather than facts on the ground. Let's look at a few examples.

Data - In our current era, data is prized. There are entire careers built around data science. Of course, data is important for understanding the world. But it can also be misleading if it isn't grounded in material reality.

For example, consider the concept of membership in an all-volunteer organization. A volunteer organization is dependent on its volunteers to make proposals, arrive at decisions, and carry out activities. For a volunteer group to succeed, it has to know who it can depend on to participate. In other words, the members are the lifeblood.

If members are the lifeblood, then how do we identify them? Many organizations count members based on who is willing to pay dues. Dues-paying is essential for a volunteer organization, but if this is the only data that is used to determine the size of an organization, it can be misleading. Many people will pay dues to an organization they like in order to support it, but that does not mean that those same dues-payers are willing, or able, to participate in the life of a group.

A better metric for understanding an organization's membership is to see who among those dues-payers are active. How many are showing up to actions and regularly attending meetings? This is data grounded in reality.

The difference between an abstract and concrete understanding of membership can create certain issues. For example, it can lead to tension and disagreement about how to determine quorum at meetings. Quorum based on 3000 members on a spreadsheet requires a higher threshold for attendance than a quorum based on 300-400 members that are routinely mobilized. These interpretations have consequences when major decisions are being made determining the direction of the organization.

Complex Planning - Having a well thought-out plan is essential to get work done. But just like data, a plan is only as useful as its connection to material reality.

For example, different organizations involved in electoral work have tried to create frameworks for discipline and co-governance regarding the elected officials that they endorse. They hope to level-out the power dynamics between electeds and endorsing organizations. By nature, the power imbalance creates difficulties in building systems of accountability. But that imbalance can't be planned away.

What if these plans are drawn up without their electeds? Without having a conversation with the elected, the planners might not realize that "their elected" actually requires endorsements from various organizations to accumulate the attention, volunteers, and donations to win a race. It won't make sense for them to arbitrarily prioritize the demands of one endorsing organization over all others. Trying to generate a plan for co-governance and accountability without involving them guarantees failure.

For any plan to succeed, it has to involve all the stakeholders and consider the broader political ecosystem the plan will operate in. Otherwise, it is just an interesting idea divorced from reality.

Common Sense - As Marx pointed out in The German Ideology, "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." In practice, this means that "common sense" is usually skewed in the interests of the ruling class. Worse, common sense ideas are less likely to be scrutinized, which means large sections of society will believe them without verifying their validity.

Take for example the "common sense" views regarding crime and policing. It is taken for granted that crime can be reduced primarily, or exclusively, by the police. But concrete analysis of the police consistently reveals that this is not the case. The title of a November 2022 Reuters article by Hassan Kanu summed up all the evidence perfectly: "Police are not primarily crime fighters". Of course, it only takes a moment to consider that, by definition, the police only show up after a crime has taken place. The more you analyze it, the clearer it becomes that the police do not stop crime but instead offer revenge. However, their clearance rates are so low that even this promise is broken.

Who benefits from this rootless and unquestioned common sense? The ruling class that can manipulate people's fears to justify funneling money away from social services and into armed occupations of our cities via the police. Common sense is only useful when it is critically scrutinized for its validity. A concrete analysis of harm and public safety reveals the need for more social services, higher wages, democratic control over the workplace, public housing, and an end to all forms of intersecting oppresion.

What Marx Did

Marx took the concept of materialism and applied it to history and the development of human societies. It is worth quoting Engels at length:

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.

If subatomic particles lay the foundations of atoms, and colonialism lays the foundations of capitalism, then food, shelter, clothing, and how people produce them, forms the material basis of human society. As Engels went on to elaborate in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Marx's application of materialism to history and human society became known as "historical materialism".

The approach to understanding society then formed the basis for understanding capitalism, how it differed from previous forms of class society, and why capitalism was uniquely capable of ending all class societies by producing the revolutionary working class. The nature of class society, capitalism, and the working class will be covered more in future articles.

Pitfalls

While materialism is essential, it can become mechanical.

For materialism to be effective, it has to be balanced out with dialectics, which are the contradictory and fluctuating aspects of life. For example, during Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, analysis among socialists was divided about how to relate to it.

Many people presented a material analysis demonstrating that Sanders was strong on many "bread and butter" issues, but weaker on issues of anti-racism and anti-imperialism. Still others rightly observed that Sanders had little chance of winning, and that even if he did, he would face a Congress and ruling class so stacked against him that he would either become a lame duck or have to sell out.

While these were often accurate criticisms, they missed the reality that, for all his shortcomings, Sanders had inspired thousands of people into action. A strictly materialist analysis led many into a mechanical dead-end. Meanwhile, socialists who recognized the opportunity of meeting and organizing Sanders supporters seized the moment.

A similar dynamic unfolded in Chicago regarding how some socialists related to Brandon Johnson's 2023 mayoral campaign. While many socialists eagerly supported Brandon, others repeated different versions of the same arguments against supporting Sanders, but applied them to Johnson. They highlighted some political inadequacy and/or the dangers of winning with a City Council and ruling class lined up against him. But again, while many of these analysis were technically correct, this strict materialism missed the dynamism that Johnson inspired in Chicago's political ecosystem. The ecosystem used that inspiration to take Johnson from having less than 3% name recognition to becoming the mayor of the third largest city in the US.

Failing to combine dialectics with materialism can cause people to miss potential opportunities for victories, recruitment, and building relationships.

Conclusion

Materialism is about understanding that everything in this universe is rooted in something concrete. We have to internalize this concept to apply it to everything: evolution, physics, and political analysis.

The foundation for all political education requires a materialist analysis. If we fail to take in the reality of the world around us, we risk: building organizations based on spreadsheets instead of active members, making plans without the people we're trying to collaborate with, or giving in to ruling class common sense instead of shredding it apart and building a working class common sense of our own.

But materialism can also be twisted into a "mechanical materialism" if it doesn't take into account the dialectical contradictions and surprises in real life. Some contradictions can be detrimental, but others can be organizing opportunities to build up our forces today for the revolution tomorrow.

In the next article, we'll go deeper into dialectics