Let’s talk about the material analysis.
Materialism is half of the brain-peelingly difficult (or quite simple, depending on who you ask) concept of dialectical materialism, and thus a cornerstone of Marxist theory and practice. Decades of cultural shorthand, including the catchy if false-consciousness-plagued #1 dance hit by Madonna in 1985, has confused us into conflating materialism with something like greed, or gold-digging, or lust for wealth; at other times, it is taken to mean something like skepticism — an extreme distrust of metaphysics or spiritualism. While materialism encompasses both those things, what it truly is, no more and no less, is an analysis of the complex factors that drive history and shape society simply from a material viewpoint: that is, based on the assumption that physical forces in the world create its outcomes.
The materialist analysis is probably, for me at least, the most valuable thing I have taken away from Marxism. It allows you to see the world as it truly is, without the clutter and distraction of claimed philosophies that generally do more to obfuscate than enlighten. It lets you cut the fat of rhetoric, pomp, and moral posturing away from politics so you can get right at the juicy meat of power dynamics. It grants you a perspective that can be taken away from politics and economics (insofar as anything can be separated from those primal drivers of human behavior) and applied to almost anything, allowing you to understand epistemology and to become that most valuable of things, an expert at sniffing out bullshit. Simply taken as a practical matter, you will be amazed at how many useless conversations and arguments you can avoid once you have even a basic grasp of materialism.
Material analysis is what lets you look at the high-minded rhetoric of politicians and philosophers and ask: What does this matter? It is what lets you hear the grand speeches and self-congratulatory debates of opposing politicians and ask: To whom does this accrue benefit? It is what lets you read the ethically pleasing but practically lacking proposals of fellow leftists and ask: How does this build our power? (The intersection of materialism and pragmatism is why I hold Richard Rorty in nearly as much regard as I do good old Marx, but that’s a piece for another day.) Materialism is where the rubber of theory meets the road of praxis. It is where talk ends and action begins.
If you have spent a lot of time around socialists and communists, you have heard that question before. “How does this build our power?” The nature and use of power is at the heart of our historical viewpoint. We don’t care that much about who came up with a bunch of pretty phrases and soul-moistening sermons, but rather what will make us strong. We are less concerned about what is right and proper and decent and more concerned with what will put us in a position to do something about what is not. It is tempting, especially for those of us who are less skittish about the use of violence to achieve our ends, to think that nothing separates this viewpoint from that of our eternal enemy, the fascist; but this is untrue. Fascist power is power for its own sake, violence for the sake of violence, coercion and force untethered from any goal, action qua action. Our view of power is historical, contingent, and directed: We have seen, repeated in all the ways spelled out in the Manifesto and elsewhere, the way one class oppresses and exploits another, and our quest for power is driven by a deeply focused drive to see the working class — those who create the value in the material world, and the greatest mass of mankind — placed in ownership of its own labor.
When you have learned the real repercussions of the material analysis, it is as if a great curtain has been pulled open, letting you see the world for what it truly is. Illusions dissipate like puffs of smoke. The paranoid fantasies of reactionaries who hide like crabs in the sand from largely imaginary fears; the smug moral poses of liberals who maintain exploitative systems while swearing they oppose them; the cartoonish play-acting of would-be radical revolutionaries whose only ammunition is talk; the endless promises of religious leaders who assure us that every injustice will eventually be set right in another world we will never see; the weak gruel of centrists who peddle believing in nothing as the new way of believing in something: All these fade as quickly as rain on the sidewalk when the sun finally comes out.
It isn’t always easy. It can seem like more of a blessing than a curse. The material analysis can serve to show you how weak you and your movement really are; that whatever gains you have made are almost insignificant when compared to the vast array of capitalist power laid before you. You will come to understand that organized politics, especially in America, consists of your hard enemies (conservatives, reactionaries, right-libertarians, and assorted fascists-in-waiting) and your soft enemies (liberals, progressives, centrists, and assorted fascist enablers). You will see that almost all of what passes as news is just capitalist propaganda, and all of what passes for political speech is a fatuous bâtise. And you will learn that so many people who ought to know better — who ought to have found the materialist analysis waiting, like precious metals, beneath all their apparent scraping for the truth — are really just engaging in more attitudinizing, more empty show.
You will also become terribly impatient for something real. You will start to thirst, like a lost soul in an endless desert, for just a taste of something that isn’t bullshit, for someone actually calling something by its real name. Part of the non-stop euphemizing of speech that has taken place in our society over the last century is to protect the guilty from being called out for what they have done, and whether it is cops being the beneficiaries of the passive voice to conceal their taste for racist brutality or billionaires being protected by nice turns of phrase to becloud their role in making the planet poisoned and unlivable, you will be forever frustrated why we can’t just say things are happening when they are obviously happening — indeed, why we will be silenced and punished for stating the very obvious.
But there is an enormous power in the material analysis, none greater than this: Once you stop believing in the lies we all agree on to protect the phantom notion that everything is fine, those lies have much less power over you. One of the great lessons of Adam Curtis’ work — particularly HyperNormalisation, but found throughout his whole oeuvre — is that bad systems can continue to thrive long past the point where their badness should be apparent, and this happens when everyone fails to develop a material analysis, or never had one in the first place. Curtis describes, with terrifying foresight, “a fake version of society…where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real, because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everyone had to play along and pretend that it was real, because no one could imagine any alternative.”
We have seen, in recent days, the consequences of this false vision, and the rise of tyrants and warlords from the ruins of a socialist society that collapsed from within because of negligence and fear just as it was buckling from without because of ideological opposition and ambitious economic imperialism. It is tempting to see Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin as the inheritors of that lack of analysis, as the monsters from the id who arose and devoured because of a system that no longer believed in its own rhetoric and a public too benumbed to do anything about it. It is also all too easy to see them as our own future, when the unsustainable notion of perpetual-growth capitalism finally breaks to pieces under the weight of its own hubris and becomes just more junk strewn around a country made unlivable by its addiction to junk. Who among us today, which power-hungry and calculating bureaucrats and opportunistic big-business sociopaths will step up when the shuddering sound of a society falling apart starts to fade?
Faced with such possibilities, it cannot be overstated how important it is to see things as they are. The ability to see a lie, and once seen, refuse to believe it any longer, is one of the most liberating things there is. No matter what the bosses can do to our bodies, if they cannot make us believe their lies, and if they cannot stop us from calling things by their real names, they cannot stop us from holding always before us the torch of a better world, of, if not a paradise, at least something better than we have — so long as we don’t stop struggling towards it because we can still imagine it, because we will not accept that this, all of this, is the best we can do. That is the power of the material analysis, and its greatest beauty is that is available to everyone, for free.