I wanted to get this done and make it a separate post, but as of right now I don't have time to round out the ending, polish it or check the quotes or everything. Hopefully you can still get something out of it.

I’m writing this little blurb to try to start teasing apart a little philosophical knot at the heart of left discourse. The knot is composed of a couple different threads pulling in different directions: material analysis and the Marxist conception of the relations of production as the driver of history; the question of what is to be done; and individual vs. collective action (didn’t get to this point). Let’s dig right in with the first of these.

Marx is a materialist. In this context, that means that his analysis roots the social, political, and economic phenomena in base material reality – in who has access to which goods, who has control over means of production (from land, to factories, to raw materials, to tools), how people go about providing their basic needs, etc. Production especially is central to this analysis, and for Marx, the kind of society you live in on a grand historical scale is a derivative of how the relations of production are structured. Slave, feudal, primitive, or “Asiatic” relations will necessarily mean different kinds of societies.

Marx and his followers contrast his ideas to those of one of his philosophical predecessors, Hegel. Hegel and Marx both used a form of dialectical analysis (note: dialectical methods stretch back long before Hegel), but in the former’s case, his most famous work was more to do with how the Geist – translated as spirit, but in a sense meaning the social mind – comes to know it self through a dialectical process of self-observation spanning throughout history. This process is in stages, much like Marx, but the key difference is that it is driven not by the relations of production on the ground, but by the ideas and understanding developed at each stage. In this context, this perspective is known as idealism. I’d recommend this :stormfront: comment for more on The Phenomenology of Spirit.

Marx thought Hegel had history “turned on its head”, and sought to right the dialectical process by flipping it around back onto its feet and grounding it in material analysis. In order to explain the historical rise and development of capitalism (and by extension, other social transitions in history), he dug into the data and challenged the political economists of the time with his robust model of capital, his descriptions of the wretchedness and social tearing left in its wake, and his account of primitive accumulation.

Now I have to jump back to us for a moment. I think most of us on the left in two thousand and twenty two had a bit of an awakening as we took our first steps into this kind of material analysis sometime in the last couple decades. It’s been kept out of our education system for the most part (except in undergrad philosophy class in my experience) and by and large we grew up with the idea that powerful individuals and powerful ideas changed the world. If our society was a nice place to live, it was because the founders and lots of influential people along the way had the brains to choose democracy and rights over tyranny and corruption. The fall from this naive conception is such a jolt that most of us have become resolute, jaded materialists. Probably in most ways this is a good thing. The world is so lacking in class consciousness that jumping back into mainstream news bubbles still baffles me. But I think there are a few consequences that we need to examine in order to be able to push forward.

If I were to dress it up I would say we’ve been through a process of watching the world go from a place where animated passion remolds the world brighter and softer to one where cold mechanical machines and calculations determine the social swings and regularly spit out brutalities. Here’s a rough analogue: being a high school stoner if you’re lucky, or a Sam Harris fan if you’re not, and stumbling upon the realization that the universe must be deterministic and that you have no free will. I will not get into that debate here and if one of you brings up quantum randomness I will have no choice but to take out my frustration on my landlord. My point is that at first both of these realizations strip us (either as individuals or just humanity in general) of our agency.

But one of the big problems with the free will issue is that all of us stoners have to keep making decisions. The world may be determined, but we can’t calculate out what’s going to happen in our heads and so we’re stuck with continuing to perform our choices. Generally you can find a stable solution here among the incompatible hard determinist, compatiblist, and libertarian positions.

In the case of having a material analysis of the world around you, the contradiction is a bit different. You can still decide to eat a muffin for breakfast instead of oatmeal, if you can afford one, but you can’t decide to double your bank account or quit your job willy-nilly. This makes political action difficult and brings us to the second issue I brought up in my opening paragraph – what is to be done?

What is to be done when the world is governed by the icy steel machine of material relations? If you are going to follow this machine’s tendrils to the very ends, doesn’t it lead right into you and your comrades? If revolution is baked into the march of history, then it would be baked in up to the very second that the first bullet flies. In this case, there’s not much left to do but sit back in your armchair and wait for the glorious spontaneous self-action of the proletariat. Dan Dennett, no friend of our ideas, sums this up neatly:

“Remember Marxism? It used to be a sour sort of fun to tease Marxists about the contradictions in some of their pet ideas. The revolution of the proletariat was inevitable, good Marxists believed, but if so, why were they so eager to enlist us in their cause? If it was going to happen anyway, it was going to happen with or without our help. But of course the inevitability that Marxists believe in is one that depends on the growth of the movement and all its political action. There were Marxists working very hard to bring about the revolution, and it was comforting to them to believe that their success was guaranteed in the long run. “ As we see here, outside of the more extreme left-communists that we stereotype, most of us believe that even if a revolution is determined by the economic conditions that produce it, our bodies, our actions, and our decisions (will you join an org?) are a part of that process. When I first started snooping around socialist spaces on the web, the rallying cry and the answer to almost any single question like, “what is to be done” is “organize.” We do have a role to play and some agency after all.

But it’s important not to let go of the contradiction. We have to admit that when we take a step back from the abyss of an eternally material, locked-in world, in order to make space for us to have a say in that world, we take a tiny step towards what some of us consider to be idealism. I highlight this because I’m not terribly interested in the actual label. I just want to tease out the concepts and their structures here. For starters we have to grant that ideas themselves have at least some power, even material power. The Communist Manifesto is one of the most widely read and influential political documents in the world. Why did Marx write it? Moreover, why didn’t he ask himself this as he swung even more theoretical in his attempt to tackle capital? If the superstructure rests on a base of commodities, factories, money, and land, a book can hardly be more than another soft plank in the superstructure.

It’s best to answer this with Marx’s ideas himself. He was never really the kind of materialist that we feel the need to be today, because his materialism was contrasted with a really heady and intense kind of Hegelian idealism that really isn’t common in our world, where continental philosophy barely surfaces. Most of us, instead, contrast ourselves against liberals and their naive perspective on what power is and where it comes from.

For Marx, one of the main distinctions between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom was that humans plan what they make in advance. First they raise their structures in their imagination, and then in real life, unlike a bee who builds her hive and only then can have some kind of knowledge of it.

He gets even closer to the thorn of the problem when he says that men make their own history, but not under conditions of their choosing. He clearly allows some room for the external conditions, but also some room for the possibility that we have control over the direction of our way of life. He is careful not to fall into the trap of drawing a clear line.

My favourite thought experiment about material reality and social reality goes like this. Imagine you told everyone in the world you could breathe underwater, and somehow managed to convince them it was true. Then you went and jumped in the ocean. You would drown pretty quickly.

Now imagine that you told everyone in the world that you were the king of France, and managed to convince them all. Then you would actually be the king of France. You wouldn’t even need a coronation. The job would be done since all of your subjects, and the rest of the planet, wouldn’t bat an eye when you popped up on the throne.