Materialism of Marxism I support
I view everything in the world of politics and everything in its orbit through the lens of historical materialism and dialectal materialism (like here, here and below)
I have either (1) A Max Stirner-esque critique of dogma and ideological thinking as a distinct phenomenon in favor of "critical self-theory" at individual and communal levels. Or (2) A Bouvier-esque critique of there being no inherent meaning to life, yet that we're forced to grapple with the physical and environmental drives we were raised with, to figure out how we want to engage with our fellow man/woman from there. Or (3) Some entirely different foundation.
Marxist Materialism is essentially the "science of textbook socialism". It's a goggle to observe the condition of the person (or a town, or a trade, etc) as the effect of complex real world relations and historical choices and social structure, and not merely this or that foregone conclusion rooted in metaphysical idealism about what is falsely said to be a God’s plan , or a Great Person Theory of persons being in whatever position they want to be in.
I think it is futile , hollow and a waste to establish safe spaces and to rename campus buildings at colleges. Simply establishing safe spaces and renaming campus buildings does nothing to overthrow capitalism . We have to overthrow Capitalism and the sooner the better (from my private blog sphere)
So to use an easy to grasp modern day analogy, a rightoid pundit may say that homelessness is a choice and the result of some sort of moral failing in the soul of a person. While a person with a marxist materialist view like me would say that homelessness is the result of a specific set of observable policy decisions and material conditions that were created by the inherent tensions that are found in a capitalist hierarchical class based social structure.
“You’re sitting in a seminar room, you’ve got a professor who’s written a million books, surrounded by 20 students from San Francisco, New York, mostly, all pontificating about how to help poor people in America.” Their solutions, Jivani says, reflected the atomized enclaves they came from: “Yale’s approach is that judges, senators, policymakers can save the world. They completely omit the role of family, community and culture in people’s lives.”
Any political view in my blog spheres that seems to have an idealist, essentialist , non Marxist economic materialistic take on it, despite me not saying so in that post, is in my eyes rooted in economics and I do see said view through the lens of historical materialism and dialectal materialism (like here, here and below).
The Kantianism I am writing about below is Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead not regular Kantianism (in an alternate history where Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead not regular Kantianism was regular Kantianism and where the regular Kantianism of our reality never existed)
So Post Kantianism as I write below can be viewed as a Remodernist form of Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (and ultimately a POST form of regular Kantianism)
So why do I have views that seem idealist but are still materialist even though I give no signal I am still viewing them through a Marxist materialist lens? Because that type of Marxist materialism I use for that type of view is in fact a type of idealism itself (but descended from a Marxist, Nietzsche alternative form of Post Kantian idealism instead of a F Hegel/orthodox form of Post Kantianist idealism) which is basically Humanist Marxian + Left Nietzschism
Like if I support a materialism or materialism adjacent that comes from this type of hypothetical future Marxism (like basically an updated view of materialism to analyze said view which makes my view appear to be idealist/essentialism) from a Humanist Marxist perspective of Orthodox Marxist inspired Leszek Kolakowski
and fuse that with the Left Nietzcheism (i.e Marxist-Nietzchke Post Kantianist idealism) that is pretty much Orthodox Marxist materialism/dialectal materialism adjacent, even if it appears a tad idealistic
I do support Dark Mutualism which means I support Kantian Anarchism (as in Mutualist Anarchism) inspired Marxism that links Immanuel Kant to Karl Marx AND Mutualism to Karl Marx
so maybe if I really go too far in the idealist direction instead of the materialist direction, I still might be using a minimum of materialism like the independence of reality with regard to.https://altexploit.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/slavoj-zizek-the-sublime-object-of-ideology-second-edition-the-essential-zizek-2009.pdf but I do so with the Slavo Zizek type of Hegel Marxist in me (as can be seen especially in my Hegel inspired views throughout my blog spheres)
Anyway a big reason that I am generally fine and a-ok with regular idpol is the following: Idpol may not be rooted in materialist analyses but how people feel about themselves is ultimately a part of them. People have vices they can't control and they shouldn't be marginalized because of it
I support the civil liberties that are derived from Enlightenment liberalism. I support this video from Slavoj Zizek titled "Defend the Enlightenment"
For example I believe Slavo Žižek wrongly spews Anti-Trans Rhetoric - "[W]hen Slavo Žižek discussed trans-issues in 'Wokeness is Here to Stay' on Compact Magazine, it's as if Žižek has allowed himself to buy into his own kind of big Other and has forgotten Lacan’s central teaching that the big Other does not exist!"
becoming.press/READ-T.. (here). However, I unlike Slavo , I am pro Trans because I follow Lacan above on such cultural issues which I believe that the big other does not exist. So I sound strategic essentialist and 'woke' on Trans issue on this but I still hold some material (Zizek and Hegel like) analysis on this issue (I also do not misuse materialistic analysis so that is another reason I might seem more idealist/essentialist than economic materialist on said view
My Post Kantianism is an alternative to Georg Hegel's Post Kantianism (I run my Post Kantinaism through Frederich Nietzche)
I will bold the connections of F Nietzche's Post Kantianism I support and Marxism which I also support to an extent:
Hegel is a Red Herring
One of the most well-known characterizations of Deleuze is his hatred of Hegel. "What I detested most was Hegelianism." This, imo, is unfortunate. Not necessarily because it is incorrect, but because it is nowhere near as important as it is made out to be.
What makes Deleuze a rival of Hegel in the first place? What puts them in competition?
A battle over Kant's legacy.
From Nietzsche & Philosophy:
Finally, Nietzsche's relation to Kant is like Marx's to Hegel: Nietzsche stands critique on its feet, just as Marx does with the dialectic . But this analogy, far from reconciling Marx and Nietzsche, separates them still further. For the dialectic comes from the original Kantian form of critique . There would have been no need to put the dialectic back on its feet, nor "to do" any form of dialectics if critique itself had not been standing on its head from the start. (p. 89)
Without mincing words, these are among the most important lines Deleuze ever wrote. Could he be any clearer? The dialectic was Kant's problem before it was Hegel's. For Deleuze, Marx didn't go back far enough. The plan and stakes are already spelled out as early as 1962. A decade later, Guattari by his side, Deleuze would program Anti-Oedipus as, very specifically, a strange way of re-constructing Karl Marx through an immanent, materialist, Kantian critique:
In what he termed the critical revolution, Kant intended to discover criteria immanent to understanding so as to distinguish the legitimate and the illegitimate uses of the syntheses of consciousness. In the name of transcendental philosophy (immanence of criteria), he therefore denounced the transcendent use of syntheses such as appeared in metaphysics.
In like fashion we are compelled to say that psychoanalysis has its metaphysics-its name is Oedipus. And that a revolution-this time materialist-can proceed only by way of a critique of Oedipus, by denouncing the illegitimate use of the syntheses of the unconscious as found in Oedipal psychoanalysis, so as to rediscover a transcendental unconscious defined by the immanence of its criteria, and a corresponding practice that we shall call schizoanalysis. (AO pg. 75, emphasis in original).
And so the battle with Hegel is fought almost entirely indirectly, by way of an alternative path in the legacy of post-kantianism that does not run through Hegel at all, but instead through Maimon and then Nietzsche.
If you are interested in the relationship between Deleuze and Hegel, watch Nathan Widder explain it on YouTube. But if you really want to go further with it you should pursue Deleuze's engagement with Kant, about whom he wrote an actual book.
Essays 3-5 in Daniel Smith's Essays on Deleuze are especially instructive on this line.
Levi Bryant's Difference and Givenness opened my own eyes to the importance of Kant in Deleuze's thought generally speaking, in particular his reading of what he calls Deleuze's "hyper-critical turn."
History and Nature in Karl Marx
https://www.jstor.org › stable
by GS Jones · 2017 · Cited by 6 — For if Marx had developed a post-Kantian vision of the role of labour in history and its capacity for self-emancipation - a vision based on reason, spontaneity ...
Or maybe I support this Classical Marxist, Georg Hegel, Post Kantian (Adorno) type of ideology (which is Left Hegel Anarchism/Post Structural Anarchism + Egoism) which makes my Marxist materialist views seem more idealist than they really are (even though they are still Marxist materialist as I explain the links in said link)
So at the end of the day I support 
(https://archive.ph/laJeB )Class Reductionism but at the same time, I also go beyond class reductionism at times as mentioned above
This means I believe our economic situation causes the majority of everything in the world of ideas. I look for materialist causes, effects and solutions (i.e economic ones) over idealist ones. I am a class reductionist
Marxism is a social science, or a system of sociology, and hence deals with societies. Societies are a phenomenon which emerge out of the productive process; a group of people only becomes a society when they are organized in such a way as to direct the labor process (be it on a mutualist, primitive communist basis, a slave society basis, feudal or capitalist basis, etc).
On materialism
Materialism is essentially the "science of socialism". It's a lens to view the condition of a person (or a city, or an industry, etc) as the result of complex real world relationships and historical decisions and social structure, and not just some foregone conclusion based on metaphysical idealism about a god's plan, or a Great Man Theory of people being in whatever position they choose.
So to use a simple modern analogy, a right wing pundit might say homelessness is a choice and a result of some moral failing in the spirit of a person. While a materialist marxist view would be that homelessness is caused by a specific set of observable policy decisions and material conditions created by the inherent tensions in a capitalist hierarchical class-based social structure.
Cultural politics is a superstructural form of liberal politics designed to maintain capitalism by dividing the working classes by race, gender, generation, who you wanna get naked with, whatever. The most pernicious form of cultural politics is identity politics.
On "class is an identity"
Identity requires identification to exist. Class is a material reality. It exists whether you identify with it or not and whether you're even aware it exists or not. If you don't own capital and you work with capital someone else owns and take home less than the full economic value of what you produce you're a proletarian. It doesn't matter if you never heard the world proletarian or even if you live in a society where the concept of class was never discovered and nobody knows what a proletarian or a class is. You're still a proletarian.
That's why we talk about "class consiousness" not "class identity". You can be aware or not aware of the class you're part of but what you identify as has no relevance on your class membership.
On "taking responsibility for privilege"
Ironically the biggest problem with identity politics is that it doesn’t actually go far enough — to take ‘responsibility for privilege’ and ‘lean out’ is not a call to action, but a call to inaction. It means men should have no role in dismantling patriarchy, but should instead perform meaningless penance and performatively praise women in the abstract.
Materialist feminists, like Christine Delphi and Shulamith Firestone, understand that patriarchy is tied to family structure, reproduction, and social institutions like marriage, and that there are concrete measures one can take toward changing these forms. Measures which do not require language policing, or generic denunciations, but which require instead a broad movement with a vision of a transformed social totality, with liberation for all.
Due to the dispossession/powerlessness the demands for an indigenous ethno-state are obviously not real, not material, they are nothing more than empty, impotent moralising; which in the radlib cosmology makes them the highest and most noble of claims – pure, moral and untainted by earthly bonds or details.
Politics as religious transcendence, aestheticised and stripped of practical effect – and utterly useless, except as a kind of self-flagellation you impose on others.
It's taking Marx's "the point is not to interpret, but to change the world" and saying: "nonono, you were right the first time". It's Hegel's revenge.
You can't redistribute wealth on STOLEN land.
Why not? Why should I care about the bourgeois moralist legality of property claims, in a theoretical world where land isn't private property? Why should I care if it's "stolen"? It's there, it exists, we're gonna use it for the benefit of society, no your opinion doesn't matter.
In a completely planned and materialist economy, there would be no need for title, deeds or any of the legal machinery of real estate. You'd simply have 'land', as one resource among many, as part of the process of economic calculation. The 'ancestry' of that land, the 'local history' or the 'rights and claims' to that land -- all such sentimentally would be stripped from it, leaving only the observable chemical and physical properties of the land, which would be the sole determinants of its social utility.
The defining principle of liberalism, including radical liberalism, when it comes to the subject of race and racism, is that racism is autonomous, i.e. it has no antecedant causes. It just springs from nature of its own accord. Hence Ta-Nehisi Coates likening it to an earthquake. It is literally impossible to believe that and be a Marxist, because the whole point of Marxism is historical materialism, and the whole point of materialism is that originary causes must be located in material processes. If you treat racism as autonomous, you are an idealist.
It is not just that class analysis is absent from the conversation, it is actively suppressed, because capitalism (if it even is a problem at all) is merely a component of the real issue: racism (or "white supremacy"). Anyone who tries to locate the problem in class is distracting from that.
This is also obviously why the corporations and brands are so on board with it: it's not a threat to them. If anything, it increases their cultural capital and in turn, their actual capital. Radical action only happens on the level of symbols. You can't do anything about the material forces that are actually responsible for police brutality (spoiler: it isn't racism), but hey, you can paint "BLACK LIVES MATTER" on a road or change the name of a square. Take that, prison-industrial complex! And any of the attempts at formulating an actual material demand are almost funny in how stupid and not thought out they are ("defund the police").
On the discourse
The whole premise of our liberal capitalist society is that problems get passed onto the discourse, our collective enlightenment project where an individual human voice can take a stand and speak truth to power. So where there are injustices in the world, the discourse, our speech, and our self-known moral values can step in to fill the gap. Its all premised on the idea that there is no real opposing class interest or necessity for material, structural changes to the pillars of our society i.e. production, that might require more than moral invocation. Liberal Capitalism: End of history. The system is as good as it gets, we just need brave voices to morally scold the right people into behaving right - which comes out as “critically examine their white privelige and amplify voices of color” or “stop doing ghetto hip hop culture” depending on where on the liberal spectrum you fall and what’s on trend in the spectacle this week. Whatever radical language borrowed from academia these moral invocations contain, whatever latent ethno-nationalist sentiments (“our spaces”) certain readers might balk at, these calls remains feeble, liberal and designed to maintain the status quo.
On nationalism
Nationality isn’t real, material conditions are. Nationality is self-referentially cultural —- one belongs to a nation because one perceives oneself or is perceived to belong there. But material conditions are objective: one is proletarian or bourgeoisie regardless of whether one believes oneself to be. There are clear conditions for being proletarian or bourgeoisie, whereas ethnicities or nationalities are neither sufficiently clear nor consistent. Being “working class” isn’t an identity, it’s a state of being. You can’t just choose not to be working class.
National identities are "real" to the extent they're believed in, sure, but these identities emerge from and are shaped by the underlying material forces at work: that of capitalist production and reproduction.
On intersectionality
Intersectionality is a clumsy metaphor conceptualized in an effort to describe how people can be discriminated against for multiple things simultaneously, in an effort to argue that discrimination laws should account for that.
It has nothing to do with what should be your main concern as a socialist, which is exploitation. Our concern is supposed to be the material needs of the masses, not the interpersonal implicit biases that may casually reside in our subconsciouses that we're either supposed to purge like some kind of sinful inclination, or nurse in favor of fetishized "marginalized groups," which is what most intersectionalists actually advocate for in practice.
Better to just ditch oppression ontology altogether and fight for workers.
What Jackfruitistaken said. Marx was concerned with social structure and historical causality, not accounting for all human ideas. Marx was a historical materialist, Hegel was a historical idealist. Hegel considered historical movement to originate in the unfolding of a collective consciousness, while Marx situated it in the changes in the material conditions of human productive life. Hence, it's really the struggle between classes that's animated history, not some grand pronouncements about human progress and betterment or whatever.
What's wrong with idealism is not that ideas don't have influence or power, but that they're unlikely to take root unless the material conditions for them are amenable. But, we aren't "vulgar Marxists" who think that the economic situation causes everything in the world of ideas. Marxism doesn't imply that the ideas that form the collective consciousness at any given time were somehow causally generated from material conditions. As Marx said, people (as agents with free will) do create the world, but they don't start from circumstances of their own choosing. To use some more modern terminology, you can say that things are "overdetermined" by multiple factors, including material conditions and ideas.
I hope that makes sense. It's been a while since I've thought about these things. I wouldn't worry too much about Engels and dialectical materialism, e.g. Dialectics of Nature. It doesn't make any sense IMO.
other views on it:
What to hegel was the phenomenology of the Spirit, to Marx was the phenomenology of Work. Marx believed the history of human kind was the history of human labour, given our profound connection with said labour. A clear dialect forms when humans are exploited and alienated from their labour by capitalism, a perfect system of exploitation, in which the main byproducts are the social classes (in which one exploits the other) and private property (the main symbol of said explotation). This then forms an extreme polarization of classes which, according to marx, will lead to the destruction of capitalism and the eventual arrival of a communist system, in which through the abolition of private property humans will no longer be alienated from their labour. There is a dialectic, but it's all based around our labour.
This is wrong humans the reason why humans are no will no longer be alienated from their labour in communism is because communism abolishes the value form. This is what Marx says is the biggest problem of capitalism: capital itself. Hence the opening line of capital
The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities”
This is why he says that before in feudal times it was human ruling over humans whereas now it is objects(capital) ruling over subjects(Calling this a defining feature of modernity) . This is where commodity fetishism comes into play.
The conservative view here is that politics is downstream from culture, and the left is really good at "winning the culture." But I don't think this is actually how it works. My view is that economics is at the core and politics, culture, etc. is all downstream from that. The short history is that capital crushed the socialist movement and the trade unions in the 1970s and 1980s. If there is no longer any reason to divide the working class -- pitting different groups within it against each other -- because the working class has been defeated, then the ruling class can grant the political demands of oppressed (becoming previously-oppressed) social formations: women, people of color, LGBTs, etc.
Because why not? There is no objective reason, as far as the market economy is concerned, why it should not do this. Now, I want to stress that these political demands were/are legitimate. But that's the causal, materialist explanation for how economic liberalization creates social liberalization. But I think this creates "right-wing populism" and what you're describing here as a kind of psychosis:
I agree with the analysis that the conservative psychosis comes from the fact that, despite their electoral victories, the broader culture never leans in their direction.
Well, they're trapped in ideology, basically. Remember that before the economic liberalization of the second half of the 20th century, capitalist regimes divided the working class along many different lines, granting political and social benefits to certain groups within it: white men of a conventional Christian background basically. Factory shop floors were segregated with black workers assigned to lower-paying jobs. LGBTs could not be out at work, and if they were out they could not advance in the corporate world. Women were also segregated into jobs that did not pay as well as unionized factory jobs for men, although of course women worked in these places too.
The formerly-dominant groups are now in decline, at least in a relative sense, as capitalism restructures itself. This opens up an opportunity for right-wing populists to divert anger from this onto the signifers of these changes: the various social groups that provoke their resentment. But this doesn't actually do anything to reverse the changes because it's just focused on attacking the signifiers, as the right has no class or material analysis. And if anything, the reaction further binds these targeted groups to the ruling hegemony because the hegemony offers to protect them from the right-wing nationalist and/or populist backlash.
On idealism
Marx was concerned with social structure and historical causality, not accounting for all human ideas. Marx was a historical materialist, Hegel was a historical idealist. Hegel considered historical movement to originate in the unfolding of a collective consciousness, while Marx situated it in the changes in the material conditions of human productive life. Hence, it's really the struggle between classes that's animated history, not some grand pronouncements about human progress and betterment or whatever.
What's wrong with idealism is not that ideas don't have influence or power, but that they're unlikely to take root unless the material conditions for them are amenable. But, we aren't "vulgar Marxists" who think that the economic situation causes everything in the world of ideas. Marxism doesn't imply that the ideas that form the collective consciousness at any given time were somehow causally generated from material conditions. As Marx said, people (as agents with free will) do create the world, but they don't start from circumstances of their own choosing. To use some more modern terminology, you can say that things are "overdetermined" by multiple factors, including material conditions and ideas.
On essentialism
The conflict between "identity politics" and class is pretty simple. You have to believe one is the outgrowth of the other. Either people have fixed identities based on some metaphysical "essence" within their race, ethnicity, sex, etc, and that therefore dictates everything in their lives including their class status (the position held by both far right nazis and, ironically, "woke" liberals). Or you take a materialist view that a person's class is determined by historical trends and the way society is structured, and that their "identity" is largely shaped by that as well. To be black or white or queer, is really just to define yourself along the boundaries of power in the capitalist structure. Irish and Greeks weren't "white" 100 years ago, and some of the staunchest supporters of the Bannon/Trump conception of white nationalism are brown-skinned immigrants. You need a kind of historical materialism to understand any of this shit.
In reality, ideas like race can only be understood as the consequence of historical and material conditions. Which is also why they are infinitely flexible and change from one generation to another. If the current conception of race and "whiteness" are outgrowths of the 15th century transatlantic slave trade and everything that's happened since, then obviously nothing about the race of someone is "essential".
Radical Liberals and postmodernists (generally) view identity categories as epistemologies in themselves, hence queer or black ways of knowing, etc.. Blackness in this view is both monolithic (out there governing over black people) and within each black person. Marxists are not going to win this game because we aren’t playing this game at the core— materialism and identity reductionism can’t be reconciled.
That doesn’t mean we don’t need to adjust and listen to how particular legacies are reflected in our current situations. Nevertheless, liberals take voices and meta narratives as the thing in itself and as the activism itself— what is reflected in discourse and culture is reflected in daily life. Anything that doesn’t fit in this frame becomes class reductionism. We can’t pretend we can lift an Adolph Reed, Cornell west, etc. And expect to trump their frameworks.
I have a bad habit of at times taking Marxist Materialism to its logical conclusion even knowing that it can be alienating to the liberal/lib, radical progressive and modern left cultural sphere. I need to remove pretentiousness in my above critiques
We need socioeconomic egalitarianism, especially in Wages, Healthcare and Education that will help all people, including BIPOC+ and especially African Americans
These type of methods are better than race reductionist methods and are slightly more inclusive than regular class reductionist method socialistic type policies .
See this, this and this for more. I also support using Multi racial working class solidarity, like Down Home North Carolina is doing, as mentioned here (though I will settle for regular class solidarity as I also support regular class solidarity too, just not as much as I support Multi racial working class solidarity which I prefer more) We have to realize that culture war is class warfare. We have to attract multiracial working-class voters to out cause.
This post shows that class reductionism has benefits and may be viable. Class reductionism is more useful for criticizing welfare chauvinist and paternalistic conservative tendencies hijacking social democrats and democratic socialists.
“During the Ronald Reagan neoliberal revolution, union power was dealt a blow from which it has never recovered, and wages have stagnated for decades. Under this pressure, the Left itself has undergone a transformation. In the absence of a powerful workers’ movement, it has remained radical in the sphere of culture and individual freedom, but can offer little more than toothless protests and appeals to noblesse oblige in the sphere of economics.” Andrea Nagle A Left Case Against Open borders
Minority rights and people's individual identities are important, but that shouldn’t be the main focus, Power should go to the people at large, in particular the working people
Capitalism makes people lonely and isolates them. A better system would give people more social opportunities and greater social integration, which would lead to more fulfilling personal lives.
The Aristocrat class/PMC in the US sadly is mostly made up of whites. In the French Revolution the left abolished the Aristocracy, when we abolish all classes and create a classless society, we will luckily abolish the Aristocrat class/PMC and as a consequence with that, all classes removing this aristocracy/PMC of mostly whites
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