The Centrality of Class I - Exploitation

(This is part of the Introduction to Marxism series. See here.)

The most important reason that I think the contemporary left could do with more input from Marxism is that the contemporary left doesn't have nearly enough to say about class, whereas Marxism makes class central. Upon hearing this kind of statement people often worry, "What do you mean class is central? Are you saying that gender, race, and sexuality - for example - are any less important?" But that's to misunderstand what's meant by the centrality of class: it isn't that class matters more than gender, race, and so on. And it certainly isn't that class exploitation involves more suffering than sexual or racial oppression, as though some computer programmer in Woking had a better claim to be numbered amongst the wretched of the earth than a Saudi woman. No, the Marxist claim is that understanding class has a certain priority with respect to understanding over non-class oppressions; you understand a society in a particularly intimate way if you understand its class relations. This is important, of course, if you want to change society, and so class exploitation ought to be of interest not least if you want to fight sexism, racism, or homophobia.

The reason Marx thinks this was touched upon in the first post of this series, historical materialism: the way we reproduce ourselves as a species, that is, the way we produce the things we need, constrains the way we can organise society. And class quite simply is the general way we organise production socially, the way a society contains different groups who in different ways own or control the means to produce the things we need. From this it ought to be clear that class, for Marx, is not a matter of accent, or of what kind of sauce you put on your chips, or even of how much money you have. The question is simply: do you own the means to produce things for human need (beyond your own domestic needs)?

Before capitalism and in the early days of capitalism the answer to this question might well have required a little thought: perhaps you might have your own small-holding, but also work the local baron's land, or perhaps you might do piece-work for a local industrialist in your cottage. Under developed capitalism, however, things are much simpler: the vast majority of the population do not own factories, companies, sufficient shares or other accumulated wealth to be able to survive without working (or receiving state benefits in countries where these exist). Nor do they own land, or significant amounts of tools or resources. These people, most of us, the proletariat in Marx's language, must sell our capacity to work to others in order to survive. The bourgeoisie, meanwhile, own the means of production and lay claim to the profits made in their factories, farms, call centres, and computing labs.

Here's the rub: those profits, to which the bourgeoisie lays claim, result from the labour of the proletariat. Capitalism in other words is an exploitative system; to be a proletarian is to be exploited. Now, I have no intention of going into the details of Marx's theory of value and exploitation, mainly because this is an introduction, but also because it is laid out clearly in the first volume of Capital and explained well by David Harvey's free on-line course. Basically, though, the idea is that value is produced by human labour and that profits are surplus value, the value produced by labourers minus the value returned to them in the form of wages (which will need to be enough in the long-run to allow the workers to survive) and that required to keep firms ticking over in terms of plant, machinery, and so on (all of this being produced by another group of workers, working for another capitalist).

This has a number of consequences. Three seem to me particularly important for the current left:

Economic theory. Marx's account of exploitation is the cornerstone of his economic theory. A systematic grasp of economics is not a strong point on the left, and that is a failure of ours. Yet we have our own tradition of economic thought, and we should get better acquainted with it. Michael Roberts' blog is a good place to start.

Immiseration. It needn't be the case that workers are poor, and many are clearly not. There are all sorts of reasons for this. The exploitative nature of capitalist work, however, builds a tendency to make workers as poor as is compatible with them still working into the nature of production. The reason for this is quite simple: value that goes to workers as wages does not go to bosses as profit. Marx's theory allows us to link our proper outrage at sweatshops and zero-hours contracts to the functioning of the system.

Conflict. The fact that value that goes as wages can't go as profits and vice versa means that conflict is built into the capitalism system itself. My interests contradict my bosses' interests, and that is built into the way things are. Class struggle is not something dreamed up by hot-heads or preached by demagogues, it happens in every supermarket, workshop, and college every day of the year. Marxism is not about arguing for class war, it is about recognising that class war is already with us. Once we have done that, the next thing to recognise is that the only way to abolish class war is to win it, to do away with capitalism and with class-based society. I'll say more about how Marx thought that was possible in a later post.

There's a lot more that could and should be said about class and exploitation: what about the sizeable number of public sector workers in contemporary capitalist economies, where do they fit in? What about those members of the working class who are unemployed or undocumented? What about work done illegally? As I said above, though, this is supposed to be an introduction. With that in mind, one further comment - I suggested in the first post that Marx was a therapeutic thinker, whose work is best read as attacking illusions in our self-understanding which prevent us from being politically active or effective on behalf of the working class. One particularly pernicious illusion tells us that our employers provide us with work, that they are somehow doing us a favour by employing us, and that we should be grateful to them (politicians often talk of 'job creators'). Marx turns the picture upside down and the right way up, so that we can see clearly what is the case: it is not us who need the bourgeoisie, they need us. We could produce what the species need without people exploiting our labour for profit. The bourgeoisie could not profit without exploiting us.

If Marx by his writing has stopped one person being grateful to her boss, then his work was worthwhile.

Marxism in Outline

(On the Introduction to Marxism series see here)

It is easier to say what Marxism is not than what it is. It isn't a quasi-religious worldview, promising guidance for every aspect of its adherents' lives. On the contrary, to the extent that Marxism makes demands on those who follow it, it does so as an emergency measure, in the hope that its demands will one day be no longer necessary (there will be no Marxist politics in a society without exploitation). Marxists can and do disagree on matters of philosophy, religion, art, and much else besides: nothing recognisably in the spirit of Karl Marx claims to have all the answers. Nor, and this will upset some Marxism's  more enthusiastic proponents, is Marxism a science in anything like the modern English sense. Whilst Marxism advocates attention to empirical detail, in politics for example and economics, the claims of Marxism itself have the character not of empirically testable scientific propositions but rather of philosophical reminders, drawing our attention to aspects of human life in the world which should be obvious, but for the effects of ideology. 

To borrow language from another great and currently unfashionable philosopher, Wittgenstein, Marxism is a therapy, a way of thinking which helps us to get ourselves untangled from the illusions sown in capitalist society. It is not simply a therapy, of course: Marx wants us to get our ideas right in order that we transform the world and abolish the social relations which give rise to illusions in the first place. In fact, we won't even get our ideas right in the first place unless we're engaged in transforming the world. Thought, Marx reminds us in his Theses on Feuerbach, is a practical affair.

As I see it, Marx's philosophical reminders as they lie scattered throughout his work (which, unlike some, I see as a unity) fall mainly within three areas:

An Account of the Human Person: Human beings are social, rational animals, who find fulfillment through collectively working in a creative fashion. On this basis Marx opposes individualistic accounts of human beings and accounts for which we are basically mental or spiritual beings, without sufficient attention to our material nature. Practically, he opposes capitalism which he believes prevents us from fulfilling our natures (a type of what he calls 'alienation').

Historical Materialism: Because of what human beings are, there are significant material constraints on human activity. In particular, human beings need to be able to reproduce themselves as animals as a precondition for cultural, political, and other economic life. I cannot write Wuthering Heights, or even Donald Trump's Twitter account on an empty stomach, and keeping my stomach full typically requires the efforts of dozens of my fellow human beings. On this basis Marx thinks that understanding the ways in which human beings produce goods, and the social relations which characterise that production, are fundamental to both understanding and transforming human societies.

The Critique of Political Economy: Economics cannot explain its own foundations in its own terms, Once we enquire into these we see that the labouring human being, to which our attention is drawn by Marx's account of the human person, is the source of value under capitalism, which is intrinsically exploitative. Marx's account of capitalism shows it to require human alienation for its ongoing existence, which provides an excellent reason to overthrow it. At the same time the account permits a deeper understanding of the economics of capitalism, and in particular of the crisis-prone nature of the system.

I'll say more about these in the weeks that follow.

New Series on Marxism

"Do something useful", is the advice I'd give someone looking to get more involved in politics and wondering what to do. I've been reviewing my own political commitments and, with a relatively small amount of time on my hands, less than brilliant health, and a capacity to be sometimes not terrible at writing, I've decided to take my own advice and start a series on Marxism on this blog.

Why, sceptics will rightly ask, does this constitute doing something useful? The British left needs more blogposts like British pig farms need more visits from David Cameron. Perhaps. But the British left certainly has a problem with ideas and tradition. There has been a resurgence in participation in left wing politics since Jeremy Corbyn's first campaign. There has not, on the whole, been a revival of interest in socialist ideas, still less in the historical thought of our tradition. 

To the extent that the new generation of activists bring political ideas with them, they are the default US-imported identity politics of present day university campuses. Do not misunderstand me being critical of 'identity politics' here: it is of paramount importance that socialists fight oppression on the basis of gender, race, and sexuality. The problem with the kind of individualistic moralistic finger-wagging which increasingly passes for left-wing politics is that it actively damages this fight, both by making it the preserve of a 'woke' elite and by disentangling it from the politics of class.

Marxism, a collection of doctrines whose central claims I am unfashionable enough to believe to be true, offers an alternative, putting class in a central analytic position and looking forward to a politics of the "immense majority" acting in their own interests. As a tradition which has developed over a century and a half of working class struggle it, as embodied in those activists who understand the world in terms of it, serves as - in the old phrase - the memory of the class.

And we need a memory. I think that many of us on the Labour left have been so impressed and surprised by the new intake that we have, with misplaced modesty, thought that we have nothing to offer them. The enthusiastic Corbynite teenager can teach the retired lifelong activist to send tweets; that activist, we seem to believe, has nothing to offer. On the contrary, ideas and experience will prevent us from making mistakes which could prove fatal for our movement in the next few years.

So, a series on Marxism is my attempt to make some contribution to fill this gap. There will, over the coming months, be seven posts on these themes:

1. Marxism in outline

2. The centrality of class - exploitation

3. The centrality of class - history

4. Marxist politics

5. Marxism, gender and race

6. Marxism and the New Left

7. Marxism and the Labour Party

Take off the tinfoil hat

Sometimes I wish the world was run by a secretive elite. If it was, it would be a lot more interesting than it in fact is. There is a certain romance in believing one is facing down Bond-villains, nestled away in shadowy bunkers, in which they feed disloyal acolytes to crocodiles. This romance is lacking in Michael Gove. In fact not a single one of the British ruling class lives up to the standards of proper archetypical evil. They don't have lairs, they have villas in Tuscany. And not one of them has ever bitten the head off a live chicken. Although at a push Prince Philip has done this to a swan. We are, alas, doomed to mediocre malice in our rulers.

Nor, it has to be said, are this crowd especially secretive. Take the Conservative Party. They stood for election saying that they were going to impose massive cuts and attack trade unions. And having won the election they are proceeding to do just that. They may be bastards, but they are not sneaky bastards by any stretch of the imagination.

Perhaps it is a desire for a bit of excitement that drives 25% per cent of Corbyn supporters to believe that, contrary to fact, the world is run by a secretive elite. Like crazed lefty adrenaline junkies that these comrades of mine clearly are not content with nationalising the railways; they hope that they have to fight the CIA-Zionist-Lizards to do so. I'll come back to the 'Zionist' bit of that, since there's a darker side to all this conspiracy theory stuff.

'Conspiracy theory' - that's right. A striking feature of the 21st century left, which no doubt reflects a wider trend in our society, is the prevalence of so much conspiracy theoretic murk. I challenge you to go to more than a couple of demos without encountering some excitable character in a Guy Fawkes mask talking about the New World Order. If you're lucky, they might hand you a typewritten leaflet all about it. More mainstream, but in perpetual danger of slippage into conspiracy-talk, is the idea that there is an all-pervasive thing called 'the establishment' - the category, popularised by Owen Jones, has all but replaced the older, more nuanced, language of class and the state on much of the broad left. Put 'the establishment' together with an emotive topic like paedophilia, as recent news stories have done, and the crowd go wild - the number of supposed 'revelations' on this topic I've seen shared on left-wing social media is genuinely disturbing. Meanwhile the near-paranoid sense that everything is done with an ulterior motive has led numerous people to know better to support Julian Assange's attempt to avoid rape charges, on the basis that 'they' are out to get him. Indeed, the popularity of Wikileaks on the left -- the project in fact has its origins in the libertarian right -- is largely owing to the desire to know what they are hiding from us.

The striking reality of capitalist society, on contrary, is that everything is done in the open. I'm not denying, of course, the sordid reality of secret police forces and backroom deals. But the basic business of exploitation, the key structural features of the kind of society we inhabit: it's all out there in the open for everyone to see. The world is run for profit and proudly wears that fact on its sleeves, even as CEOs and Prime Ministers alike speak aloud about the need to reduce labour costs. In as much as this world is sustained by illusions, they are remarkably egalitarian illusions. The CEO and the bond trader, just as much as the shop worker and the pensioner, invest markets, currencies, and other creatures of our making, with an agency independent of the humanity that fashioned them. If you like, the system itself produces the illusions. The only secret is that there is nobody pulling the strings: we are not dealing with puppets, but with automata. The upside to this sorry state of affairs is that we are capable of distancing ourselves from it and stating the truth of the matter. As I just did.

That last paragraph is a standard old-fashioned leftist response to conspiracy theory. Why does it no longer convince a good number of people on the left? Partly, I think because, contemporary capitalist societies move at such a dizzying pace that peoples' experience of their lives is utterly disorientated and piecemeal -- the idea that 'They' are behind it all can be oddly comforting in such circumstances: there is an ultimate order and purpose, even if it is hostile. The Lizards are a Calvinist God for an unbelieving age.

Then there's the spectacular own-goal that was postmodernism. More than a generation of left-wingers have been schooled, with varying degrees of success, in the idea that reason, evidence, and the normal criteria by which we, as responsible agents, choose between competing accounts of the world are nothing more than veils worn by power. They are certainly not guides to objective truth, not least because there is no such thing as objective truth. The case for this view, which on the face of it renders any attempt at emancipatory theory and practice self-defeating, has been helped along by the fact that a certain kind of rearguard academic reaction certainly does appeal to Reason to bolster its own dubious interests. The name 'Richard Dawkins' suffices here to gesture in the direction of what I mean.

Then of course there was the decline of Marxism. In part this has to be attributed to the welcome collapse of the vile regimes that claimed it as their creed. But it's not just that: after all, there is a proud tradition of anti-Stalinist Marxism. Partly it's down to postmodernism. But whatever the full reason, one searches in vain on the left for a coherent, rigorously argued, account of the world which explains events and injustices not simply in terms of individual agency, but in terms of a social whole that - far from being shadowy - is amenable to critical scrutiny. Instead we have individual campaigns, united by nothing other than anger, often couched in moralistic terms (the moralism of the contemporary left; that's a whole other blogpost...) It's a volatile brew of raw emotion, indignation and confusion. Rich pickings for conspiracy theory.

This wouldn't matter so much were conspiracy theories not utterly disempowering. If They really are pulling the strings; what can we do? If we are being kept in the dark by networks of baffling complexity, what response is there other than fear? Perhaps the best we can do is search Google, looking for clues, trying to find out about Them. It's an atomised, self-enclosed, self-reinforcing way of 'finding out' about the world, which slides easily into genuine paranoia. Contrast this with the Marxian insistence that we learn about the world through collective engagement with it, seeking to change it and reflecting together on our efforts.

Then there's the anti-Semitism. The Rothschilds, the Zionists, Goldman-Sachs: the cast list in some of the accounts is tediously familiar fare. Living, as we still do, in the aftermath of a capitalist crisis focused in the financial sector, and blamed somewhat simplistically and moralistically on 'the bankers', the ground is fertile for the anti-Jewish tropes that run deep through the Western cultural unconscious to surface. And not nearly enough is being done to stop that.

A crisis of the Euro project

Continuing my thoughts from earlier. First up, here's Costas Lapavitsas on the Varoufakis resignation and much else besides:



He clearly sees no prospect of a satisfactory outcome within the Euro. This seems right. It's worth reflecting on the extent to which what Greece is facing is the product of a crisis of the Eurozone as a monetary framework.

The Euro was always a tall order. Orthodox economic theory speaks of optimal currency areas (OCAs): these being regions within which a single currency would be a good idea. OCAs possess a number of features, none of which are obviously features of the Eurozone. A striking example is labour mobility. Here's how it's supposed to do. Suppose there is, as is the way with capitalist economies, a crisis. Suppose, moreover that this impacts disproportionately or exclusively on one member state economy (we have, as the terminology has it, an asymmetric shock). Unemployment increases within this economy. Unemployed workers from this country then, on the assumption of labour mobility, move to higher performing countries within the OCA, reducing the unemployment and preventing wages from soaring in their new homes. This, along with price and wage adjustments, smoothes out the shock and we all live happily ever after.

The assumption that prices and wages will 'adjust' is, as New Keynesians will not be slow to point out, far from unproblematic. But compared to the assumption that labour is mobile within an currency area like the Eurozone, that is nothing. Think about it: the Eurozone covers a large area and is divided by language and culture. I cannot easily look for work as a teacher in Germany if I only speak Portugese. Nor can I, if I am a lawyer trained in France, go and work in the distinct legal system of Italy. This is before we consider such barriers to labour mobility as attachment to loved ones, friends, communities, and the like, not to mention the human desire for stability of life.

So what happens when these adjusting mechanisms - labour mobility and price/ wage flexibility don't kick in after an asymmetric shock? The government of the state subject to the shock increases spending, as it has to fund unemployment benefits and the like to a greater extent, plus maintain its normal spending on the basis of diminished tax receipts. It borrows. The scene is set for a debt crisis - higher interest rates are needed to attract funding for increasingly risky debt (owed by a government in a currency over which it has no ultimate control), this reduces demand further in the beleagured economy. Meanwhile there's a liquidity flow from the down-at-heel economy to more prosperous countries within the zone, further magnifying the disparities within it.

Now, some of this is true of single currency zones with which we're more familiar, such as the UK economy. An economic event - say, one affecting a particular industry - might have a disproportionate impact in a certain region - say, the north-east of England. Workers in the north-east might, quite reasonably, not feel minded to set up their stall in Surrey in response to increased unemployment in Newcastle. Nor might prices and wages adjust. In this case, however, central government spending can act to cushion the shock - transferring, to some extent redistributing, funds within the UK. In particular, the north-east of England does not accumulate a public spending deficit (although, we should note in passing, the story as regards private debt in the region might be quite different) - the cost is born by the UK state as a unit. And there's the difference with the Eurozone: there is no fiscal union, no pan-Eurozone tax and spend mechanism remotely equivalent to that possessed by states like the UK. In this sense the Eurozone is an incomplete monetary union.

In other words, the Eurozone is structurally set up for something like the Greek debt crisis to occur. The bail out of banks in response to the 2008 crisis was the tipping point and the rest, as they say, is history.

The temptation here is to conclude that the Eurozone is bad for some national economies (like Greece) and good for others (like Germany). It is here that the Marxist tradition in economic thinking sounds a note of caution. Behind the front of the national economy, lurk a horde of competing interests. In particular, European capitalism and nation-state capitalisms are divided on the basis of class. Talk about what is good or bad for 'the economy' ignores that what is good for some classes, or groups within classes, may be bad for others. Hence, incidentally, the banality of the slogan 'austerity isn't working' - it's working fine for some people. This matters, in the present context because it goes some way towards explaining what might otherwise seem inexplicable: how so many interests in Greece were keen to secure a 'Yes' vote given that austerity policies by any reasonable indicator - employment, output, wages, even profits - are not helping 'the economy'. If the alternative is a threat to the rights of property, of the capitalist class' medium-term ability to pursue profit without interference, then  it is in the interests of that class to see austerity pursued. Class power trumps even the bottom line.

Class interest also explains some of the persistence in Greece of Europeanism, attachment to the EU and, in particular, the Euro. It is straightforwardly in the interests of a significant section of the capitalist class, represented in the media and other opinion-forming institutions, to support structures that support policies favourable to it and minimise the costs of transactions within key markets.

But it is not simply the Greek capitalist class or its representatives in the political centre-right who buy into Europeanism. The left, including the Syriza leadership, share that commitment. Here, however, the commitment is to Europeanism as a political project. Europe as imagined on the left is a respository of the humane desire for peace on a continent ravaged by two world wars. It is an internationalist project, Greece's membership in which signifies its having put behind it the years of the colonels and having irreversibly made the transition to democracy. Those British leftists who grapple with the difference in attitudes towards the EU in states with thriving new lefts (Syriza, Podemos) - generally pro-EU - and the UK itself, where the left has traditionally been hostile to EU membership, forget the very different histories of the countries. The dictatorships that blighted southern Europe produced by way of reaction a favourable view of the European project.

There is Europe, the economic project. And Europe, the political idea. In Greece the tension between the two is nearing breaking point.

Recovered Fragments : Marxism and Christianity

Thanks to Sub Speci Aeterni for preserving these. I'm annoyed that I've lost most of this series. Along with my reports on the 2010/11 UK student protests, it was my favourite stuff from the old blog.

....

I think that Marx’s account of alienated religion is correct, and backed by a mountain of empirical evidence. People do invest God with human properties (this, note, is the precisely the opposite of the move made by the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation); people do, moreover, look to some future afterlife for a happiness denied them here and now. God, for many, is a bloke (always a bloke) who behaves pretty much like a passive-aggressive petty dictator and who designed and made the world in much the same sense that Clive Sinclair designed and built the C5. Like the Thatcherite entrepreneur, this deity also has a beard (as Keith Flett will be delighted to learn). He is like us, only bigger. And he will make everything OK in heaven, so bear your poor pay and sexist boss with good grace.....

But, as Jesus might have said were he formed by reading Eagleton rather than Ezekiel, alas also for you New Atheists! This smug crowd are nothing more than the Feuerbachians of our own age, without the nuance. Precisely like Feuerbach they attend to the criticism of religious consciousness at the expense of the criticism of political oppression and economic exploitation. Turning the Marxian explanatory order on its head, they see religious illusion as primarily the cause of these evils, not as an effect of them. Religion, claimed Richard Dawkins shortly after 9/11, strapped the explosives to the bombers. In so doing, he occluded a clear understanding of the social conditions which give rise to fundamentalism, and stands subject to Marx’s critique..........

...if God gives rise to material, extended, temporal things, indeed to space and time themselves, then God cannot herself be one of these things. Or so argues a long tradition of religious thinkers including Maimonides and Aquinas. There is a problem, though. We can only speak and think, and for that matter worship, using concepts developed in our exploration of the material world. It is inevitable that our talk about God is somewhat unsuited to the task – we say God is strong, but we do not mean he can tug a truck, she has no body. “We can know that God exists”, writes Aquinas, “but not what he is”. This conceptual evasiveness is inevitable, but – so this tradition thinks – there is a danger in not taking these second-hand images of the divine with a healthy pinch of salt.

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.