Marxism and Christianity : Living in a Material World

I'm in the process of retrieving bits of the old Latte Labour from the recesses of the internet.

This was the fifth in a series on Marxism and Christianity. Written late 2010

It's been too long since I wrote something for this series. Tonight, the first of two posts on materialism.

A fairly standard argument for the incompatibility of Marxism and Christianity goes as follows. Marxism is a materialist doctrine. Materialism involves the denial that there are non-material entities. Christianity claims that there are non-material entities. So Marxism is incompatible with Christianity. The argument, which readily generalises to non-Christian religions, finds a home in the mouth of cadre and cardinals alike. The religious opponents of Marxism see the doctrine's materialism as more than enough reason to denounce it as a Godless threat to the faith. Meanwhile, the Marxist who deploys the argument will often enough see its conclusion as obvious. The premise that materialism, in the sense of denial of non-material entities, is true rarely strikes her as something which needs support from argument. In this, at least, she finds company amongst the growing ranks of Dawkinsite skeptics (sic).

Now, if materialism, in the sense in which it mattered to Marx and Marxists, really was the denial of non-material entities, then the argument would be sound. Christianity quite clearly does profess the existence of non-material entities, A good example here is God. Now, there is a growing cottage industry in the denial of this claim: perhaps Christians don't really want to say that God exists, or perhaps she ought not to be conceived of as an entity. I'm afraid I can't make any sense of these claims whatsoever. 'Exists' means exists, and to be an entity just is to exist. I fail to see the wiggle-room. This may be owing to an inadequacy on my part, but I am not going to take this easy route out. If Marxist materialism is of the sort suggested, then Christians have a problem in Marxist eyes. I'm going to suggest that materialism, in the distinctively Marxist manifestation, really shouldn't be understood as a metaphysical claim of the sort proposed. Instead, it is a view about the nature of human history and the agents which inhabit it. And this, I claim, is not incompatible with Christianity.

Here's the thing. Why on earth would someone whose priorities were the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society think it a sine qua non of struggle to disbelieve in non-material entities? Taking Alistair Campbell's advice to Tony Blair, let's leave God out of it for the time being. Suppose I believe, as plenty of philosophers and mathematicians of all religious and political persuasions do, that mathematics describes an objective reality that cannot be described as physical. Never mind, whether or not this belief is correct, or even warranted. In holding it, have I strayed into reaction? It's difficult to see how. Suppose it think that there arepropositions, or meanings, or properties, and that these things do not admit of reduction in the denying materialist's terms. Should I tear up my Party card?

The point is that these beliefs seem utterly irrelevant to my capacity to contribute to social transformation, or to develop a clear view of social reality. Only the most muddled utopian thinks that we will all agree on deep metaphysics come the revolution.

In fact, it's not even clear to me that the denying materialist's position is well-formed. It is only as definite as our understanding of the term "material". Sure we know how to use the word in day-to-day life. Tables and taxis are material; God and numbers, if such there are, aren't. But is that enough? Good old-fashioned materialists were only comfortable believing, more or less, in things they could bump into. Tables and taxis certainly fit the bill. It is far less clear that quarks and photons, superpositions and wave-functions, do. The world as our best science describes it is a strange and mathematicised affair. Borderline cases for standardly understood materiality abound. Suppose that to be material is to have a spatio-temporal location. What then are we to make of spacetime itself? Does this pass the materialist admission test?

All that is really, by the way, interesting though I think it is. It is clear to me that if Marxism were making the kind of materialist claim often attributed to it, it would be both irrelevant and uninteresting. Is there a better account of Marxist materialism to be had?

Part of what Marx's own discussions of materialism involve is a rejection of the inadequate materialisms of his own day. Marx is opposed to vulgar, mechanistic, versions of materialism. He is especially concerned to counter reductive understandings of human agency. In his view human beings, and their capacity to act transformitively in the world, are an irreducible component of material reality. Moreover, that capacity is intrinsically social. As he writes in the Theses on Feuerbach,

The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.

Marx is materialist in that he thinks of human beings, and their struggle for freedom, as an essentially animal, this worldly-affair. He has no time for any view which would diminish this, or locate the motive forces of human history on some transcendent plane. Marx is against vulgar materialism in that he thinks it is an important feature of the world that some of the animal this-worldly things are human beings.

Next time I'll say something about the positive content of Marxist materialism as a philosophy of history. For now, I'll just mention one common enough form of Christianity which certainly is incompatible with materialism as Marx understands it.

This goes as follows: human beings are basically spiritual beings, who are unfortunately trapped for the moment in bodies. The purpose of life is to realise our spiritual nature, and not to get distracted by mundane pursuits. Then, at death, we will go to heaven and be rid of our bodies for eternity.

There are a myriad of reasons to object to this. To start with, what on earth does it mean to speak of me in the absence of my body? The view appears to imply that a body is something I have, whereas it is surely more correct to say that a body is what I am (albeit a body of a particular kind, namely a thinking, acting, one - what the medievals would have called an animated body). Thankfully, the mainstream Christian tradition at its best disowns the problematic view - which sounds more like various gnostic heresies than anything one can find in orthodox creeds. It does so to the extent that it thinks it important to insist on the real humanity of Jesus, to pursue liturgies involving the most mundane things imaginable - water and oil, food, and drink, and to claim that human beings' ultimate post-mortem destiny is bodily. My purpose in these posts is not apologetic, however, so I'll freely acknowledge that Christian reality frequently falls short here. Some, but not all, of many churches' unhealthy obsession with things sexual can be explained by this.  And if Marxist criticism can encourage improvement, that is no bad thing.