Material reality is inescapable. We have to deal with it whether we want to or not.
It is impossible for us to survive without eating. Iron bars can only bend if they are very hot. Water can’t become solid without becoming cold.
Similarly, workers do not control the means of social production. Capitalists do. We must starve, submit or overthrow them. That is also inescapable.
Communist philosophy is called dialectical materialism. Workers must understand both dialectics and materialism in order to make a communist revolution. This article discusses some basics of materialism.
Many people think of materialism as greed, the desire for wealth or consumer commodities beyond any actual need. This is not what materialism means in philosophy.
Materialism is about the nature of reality. It says that material reality is basic. Everything else that is real, like ideas, doctrines, art and scientific theories, are rooted in physical and social material reality.
Materialism has existed since ancient times. A very simple—but wrong—version says that the only things that are real are what can be seen or touched. This is called tangible reality. This view leaves out the fact that the smallest parts of tangible reality, atoms and sub-atomic particles, can’t be seen or touched. But the parts of real things must also be real.
Ancient Greek and Roman materialists had a more developed view. They said that the entire natural world is made up of tiny particles of matter too small to see. This is largely correct. It has been updated by modern science, which also recognizes the interconnection of matter and energy.
The communists Karl Marx and Frederick Engels added a new social and historical dimension to this old materialism. Marx rejected what he called the “abstract materialism of natural science” because “it excludes the historical process” of social development.
Marx’s updated materialism proposed that “All phenomena, whether produced by human hands or by the universal laws of physics, are not to be conceived of as actions of creation but solely as a reordering of matter.”
This new materialism saw societies, and the relationships among people that constitute societies, as material. Not just because people are made of atoms! The structures of society that determine whether people’s basic needs are met, and how, is something material, every bit as much as a rock or the solar system is material.
What does it actually mean to be material? The older materialism said that material things have properties that humans may not know about at all, but are still real. The properties of material things are objective. They are properties of the things themselves, inherent in the things, independent of people’s ideas about them.
The new materialism says the same thing about relationships of social production. Marx and Engels helpfully noted that “definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations.” Observations based on experience, they continued, must bring out, “without any mystification, the connection of the social and political structure with production.”
Garment workers, for example, know from experience that a constant struggle exists between them and the factory owners who exploit them. Red Flag brings out further connections between this class struggle and political structures (capitalist governments).
The old materialism said that some characteristics of material things are necessary. They are unavoidable since they are the result of the laws of nature. How material things change is at least partly determined by laws of nature. All living things eventually die. Iron rusts. Earthquakes happen. Volcanoes erupt. If something is material, it has characteristic, necessary modes of motion and change.
This is also true of capitalism. It has its own laws that “work themselves out with iron necessity,” as Marx wrote. The “social antagonisms” (class contradictions) of capitalism direct its future. Capitalism causes economic crises. Capitalism develops into imperialism and produces giant wars. Capitalism causes harmful climate change and mass pandemics.
Capitalism can never meet the needs of the masses, anymore than you can eat a rock for breakfast. Both are inescapable material realities.
Next article: Criticism with Ideas and Weapons
