Marxism And Materialism

I do not subscribe to Marxist political economy theory 100% (because I value the truth and failing that at least some accuracy), and I subscribe to physical materialism 0%. But the idealistic framework of Historical Materialism is a useful lens, nonetheless. It is just not “everything.”

To stake my current understanding and opinions, this essay should suffice.

((This is in case I ever accidentally get voted into government office against my will. I need people to have dirt on me.))

What is Historical Materialism?

Historical materialism (HM) is (roughly speaking) Marxism’s theory of how societies develop through changes in their modes of production and the class struggles tied to them, not a blanket claim that “only matter exists.”

With this definition we immediately see why it is an important framework. After all, we live and die by whatever means of production exists, of any variety.

H.M. can inform a Marxist critique of capitalism , but one can share much of that critique (exploitation, alienation, crisis tendencies) without endorsing historical materialism as a full, deterministic philosophy of history or as a metaphysical position about what ultimately exists.

That stated, one should probably not follow the writings of K. Marx, because it is all bollocks, because actual existing capitalism today is closer to oligarchy and plutocracy, so the dynamics Marx was ranting about just do not apply, and in all honesty probably never applied to any real society (imho, ok? Do not get triggered.)

Heck, so even your friggin’ dumb-dumb Dugganites … they can be generalized marxists too. The Russian orthodox church and their affiliated Russian bratva mafi can be marxists. Some of them are “the best” (as in get a gold medal for it) marxists, since they know quite well how to exploit labour, they are the arch practitioners.

Just So “I know”

My understanding${}^\dagger$ is that in Marx and Engels, “historical materialism” is a theory of history and society, roughly:

• The decisive structuring factor of a society is its mode of production: the forces of production (technology, labour, resources) and the relations of production (property relations, class structure).
• Political institutions, legal systems, dominant ideas, moralities, and religions form a “superstructure” that is shaped, in broad outline, by this economic “base.”
• History proceeds through conflicts between productive forces and existing relations of production, expressed as class struggle (e.g., slave vs. master, serf vs. lord, worker vs. capitalist), leading to transitions between modes of production such as feudalism, capitalism, and (in Marx’s projection) socialism/communism.

${}^\dagger$Which might be little better than LLM slop, but that’s not the Internet scraping fault! I also got most of this off the Internet.

So historical materialism is a methodological and explanatory claim about what primarily drives large‑scale historical change, not a thesis about souls, God, or the ultimate nature of reality as such.

Why H.M. is Not Essential to all Marxist Critique

Well, I just stated that acktual existing capitalism is nothing like what Marx portended to analyze. But lewt’s continue at a geek level of 7.

There are, I think, recognizably Marxist critiques of capitalism that do not presuppose the full apparatus of historical materialism, especially in its more deterministic or “laws of history” versions. Many contemporary Marxian economists and critical theorists, for example, adopt Marx’s analysis of value, exploitation, and crisis, but treat his 19th‑century philosophy of history as revisable or only loosely held.

And heck, even MMT has a Labour Theory of Value. (Government tells you how to get the tax credit.) This is also an example of what I mean be preferring accuracy and truth to ideology. The MMT source of the price level is indisputably true, by definition of the state’s unit of account.

There are also some clear points at which one can decouple a few things.

(1) One can accept that capitalism writ large (within say free market villages or global oligarchy) is based on exploitation of wage labour, systematic extraction of surplus value, and recurrent crises arising from its internal contradictions, without committing to a strict schema of history (primitive communism → slavery → feudalism → capitalism → socialism) as necessary and exhaustive “stages.”

(2) One can also accept Marx’s structural critique of ideology (e.g., how bourgeois law and rights discourse mask real domination) while being agnostic about whether all major ideological forms can be directly read off the economic base in a strong, deterministic way.

(3) My current bender on the Deep State aspect of government bear upon all this too — Marx’s critique is fundamentally and grossly flawed, but as are most “critiques of capitalism” since they almost all ignore the Deep State. Once we have criminogenic overworld and underworld then all bets are off about exploitation through the material means of production. We’ve got exploitation by mere Great Games of the aristocracy.

One might even claim we never got rid of feudalism. That is to say, the superficial form of feudalism certainly disappeared, but the deep society aspects remained, and multiplied. Instead of two or three Princes & Princesses (Lords and Ladies), we now have thousands of them. They even have their global banquets at Davos.

Anyhow, this is all just to say marxism is crud, but a cruddy framework for analysis can still be a useful framework, especially if you can think of no other which fits.

Remember, the bourgeois are not so bad, in modern parlance they’re really just Normies. It takes a fair concerted act of Will to not be a Normie.

This is part of why there are sectarian schools like Western Marxist, neo‑Kantian, and analytical Marxist currents that retain central critical concepts (class, exploitation, fetishism, alienation) yet soften or reject orthodox historical materialism as a universal science of history.

Historical vs. Metaphysical Materialism

I’ve always had a hang-up about the use of the word “Materialism.” I dislike it immensely. A “Material Analysis” completely dehumanizes people, and negates our spiritual impulses towards love, harmony, honesty, compassion and altruism.

It is not because we are starving that we are oppressed. It is because of the anti-spiritual forces arrayed against us that leave us more materially deprived than the wealthy classes that cause our oppression. Materialism is the cause of oppression. A “material analysis” is merely banally recognizing the outcome, but failing to appreciate the root causes. The root causes are anti-spiritual elements, namely greed, lust, avarice, corruption, bestiality, laziness, and so on and so forth.

The spiritual considerations need to be foregrounded, even before we consider the bread on the table. In a deep state run society we simply will not have bread on the table for the poorest until we eliminate the anti-spiritual forces, the crimnogenic elements, which in fact undermine idealistic ideals of wild-eyed rosy-eyed capitalism (labour exploitation with smiles and xmas bonus prezzies).

Here it might help to distinguish three different uses of “materialism”:

1. Metaphysical (ontological) materialism: the thesis that everything that exists is material or physical; there are no irreducible non‑material substances such as souls, angels, or a non‑embodied God.
2. Methodological / explanatory materialism: the research stance that, for a given domain (say, social theory), explanations should prioritize material factors (resources, institutions, practices) over appeals to disembodied ideas or spirits, without taking a stand on ultimate metaphysics.
3. Historical (or dialectical) materialism Marx’s specific claim that material production and class relations are the primary drivers of historical development, operating through contradictions and struggles in the mode of production.

I completely reject as 𖥐𖦪𖠢𖢧𖥣ꛘ𖥕ꚶ𖨚 types 1 and 2. Methodological / explanatory materialism is particularly nonsensical, because it fails to address the root causes of human suffering. The root causes are always spiritual, and the material manifestations are the objective characteristics we get to see as evidence and proof (so are also vital! — to coin an aphorism: there is only one thing more 𖥐𖦪𖠢𖢧𖥣ꛘ𖥕ꚶ𖨚 than materialism, and that is blind idealism.)

Historical materialism belongs primarily in the last two categories: it is a social and historical methodology that foregrounds material practices and economic structures as explanans, not necessarily a universal ontological claim that only matter exists. A number of contemporary commentators (see here and here and here ) explicitly stress that dialectical or historical materialism is not logically tied to metaphysical materialism; a historical materialist could, in principle, be an ontological dualist, idealist, or theist, provided they still treat material social relations and production as primary for explaining history.

The Two Notions Conflated

The conflation happens for several reasons I reckon. One is that Marx and Engels themselves often polemicize against idealism and religion, and later dialectical materialism in official Marxism–Leninism was formulated as a full metaphysical system claiming that the world is purely material and develops through dialectical laws. This encourages reading historical materialism as just an application of a general metaphysical materialism to history.

Another reason is that critics (especially religious critics) often interpret “materialism” straightforwardly as physicalism, and so assume that Marx’s materialism is inherently atheistic and incompatible with any belief in spirit or God, rather than as a priority rule for historical explanation. (I’d be guilty of this conflation myself in the past.)

Against this, some Christian and liberation theologian writers argue that historical materialism need only assert that, in the actual unfolding of social and political history, material needs, labour, and economic structures have some explanatory priority in certain contexts, not that non‑material realities are impossible or illusory.

Spelling this out: I have not read this elsewhere, but the way I would state it would be that it takes considerable spiritual character to resist becoming greedy and selfish when you have been materially deprived. So you material circumstances can cause a decline in better spiritual impulses. Yes? Yes, but I’ve also known it to go completely the other way!!!

Mostly more material abundance makes people more greedy and filthy — filthy in mind and soul. I’d hazard there is a causal relationship there. Obviously through the will of the mind the mental/soul can influence physical reality. But it is a two-way channel. Metaphysical dualism I would say, although I am more inclined towards metaphysical plurality (if you cared to know, perhaps you shouldn’t care)— many grades fo existence.)

((On that last score, I’ve always had an aversion to Monism. It smells like completely pure hygienic fascism to me. Metaphysical fascism. In the early says of Superstring Theory I had a short term fondness for this physicalist fascism of Monism, from the “purity & hygiene” stance. But at heart I was always at least more inclined to Dualism. Dualism is phreakin’ cool — in mathematical physics dualism is all around! The aesthetics are actually more beautiful, less austere.))

Christian and Islamic Marxists

Can we say just as Jesus was a socialist, so was Muhammad? Yes. We can also say Buddha was a socialist, and Krishna, and Moses. The whole damn lot of mystical prophets and revealers of so-called Religion (capital “R” — meaning source of The Good). If for no other reason than all these traditions eschew hatred, violence and dishonesty, and champion justice, mercy, kindness and love for humanity and the planet. If those are not socialist principles too then I have been terribly misled by the entire Internet.

The existence of Christian socialists , Islamic and Christian Marxists, and liberation theologians is a concrete indicator that historical materialism and metaphysical materialism are not identical. Is it even possible to be an Islamic Marxist (see here) though? Of course it is! Even K. Marx warned readers not to accept his philosophy whole clothe and unconditionally.

These thinkers typically accept a version of historical materialism as a hermeneutic for understanding capitalism and oppression: class struggle, the idol of money and so forth, and the structural nature of exploitation become central analytic categories.

Also, these thinkers tend to, from what I can tell, maintain some form of theism or belief in spirit, often reinterpreting doctrines in ways that highlight this‑worldly liberation while occasionally, or in some persons, still affirming a transcendent God or eschaton.

From this perspective, historical materialism is a theory about how history actually moves—through conflicts over material life and social relations—rather than a denial that there could be non‑material realities or that faith is possible. That is precisely the conceptual space in which Christian or Catholic Marxists operate, and it illustrates the distinction you are drawing: one can be a historical materialist in social theory without being a metaphysical materialist in ontology.

The Wrap

In short, atheism is not essential to Marxism. Nor is physical materialism. We need more inclusive languages for critiques of actual existing political economy. Especially we need people to understand the State monetary operations so that we can avoid a whole lot of myth-making, from both the political Left and the political Right, and the Centre, and everywhere else.