I’ve been feeling this for a while, and I’m trying to flesh out an idea here. Feedback is appreciated. I’ve been a leftist for a long time, and have studied theory and history in my lazy, hodgepodge way, and while I believe that materialism as the old boys theorized is definitely a useful tool and structure to view events and systems of humanity, it doesn’t have a kinda joi de vivre that I require to really get turned on by something. In my teens I was a lonely atheist, and in college I was a bewildered existentialist/absurdist and over the past decade or so I’ve been I’ve gotten out of straight materialism, starting with Buddhism and moving into reading and practicing stuff out of the western esoteric/occult tradition. I feel that the left has a tangible, essential moral and ethical center, but it hamstrings itself in its articulation by sticking with this materialist/mechanistic view of life and the universe. I want an enchanted left, I want a haunted left. I want a left where we honor our ancestors and speak to them, where we call upon the elements to help us, where we come together to bind our enemies and protect our allies in ritual chaos. Mostly I want a left that isn’t afraid to acknowledge the divine, that calls upon those forces and entities that can’t be seen but only felt. I want a left that can take leaps of faith into an uncertain future because We Have Faith. Faith in a Living, Breathing Something that we are all a part of, and so can act and rest in the knowledge that we aren’t alone in a cold dead universe, but rather vibrant cells in a communal, universal body.
You're not really describing an alternative to the type of materialism leftists are supposed to use. You're just going along with general cosmological dualism. As in ghosts and spirits and all that. Marx & Co were using materialism in the sense of a scientific analysis of history. Surely you're not suggesting that gods or whatever were the great drivers of history?
Before you reinvent the wheel, learn the wheel. Taking on a personal spiritualism is not antithetical to dialectical or historical materialism. And the idea that we drive political change by doing magic rituals or something is crazy.
I think what I’m thinking is that faith, spirituality, whatever ya wanna call it is as human as anything else. And rather than writing off a recognition of the non material in our lives as bougie brainwashed bullshit, we can explore it, discuss it, and lean into it as a strength and virtue.
If you're possibly interested in Norse and Anglo-Saxon traditions try “The Way of Fire & Ice” by Ryan Smith. It's supposed to be the pagan revival stuff but minus the racial motivations that white nationalists like about it. I'm not really against the idea of people believing in the non-material if they want. But a lot of organized religion is brainwashed bullshit. I don't see how any good leftist can draw value from US Protestantism given how it was so tied up in justifying colonialism and early capitalism. It's just something I can't separate. I know the Chapos stan Catholicism pretty hard, but again I find a lot of trouble with that due to history. That's not to say that the Bible itself can't be a source of comfort or whatever. Just that following these institutions is kinda bad to me.
I’ll check it out! I’m a dirty slav so I hearken to a different but similar pantheon