Maybe I'm dumb, maybe I'm silly...I just couldn't understand what materialism means and should mean to individuals like me. People are always angry about it. What do you think it means?
Usually communists are talking about materialism and defining it against idealism in a very 18th century way, or in other words they’re still mechanical materialists and try to avoid the problem of consciousness entirely by just saying everything is both physical matter and part of a determinist chain of causes.
This is not the materialism of Marx, since he was post-Hegelian. Hegel said this type of materialism is an idealism that’s unconscious of the fact that it’s idealism, because it asserts that the world is all matter but doesn’t recognize that this matter is already a concept of a substance that’s been abstracted away from any particular sense experience of the world by not only categorizing objects but assuming that they’re all part of a single category (matter).
What those materialists do is project an externalized conceptual thinking into the world, as if the concepts are just ready-made and all consciousness can do is more or less successfully recognize the preordained state of things. That’s why Hegel thought you had to become an idealist in order to get further in thinking about freedom, since these materialists didn’t have much of a concept of how human beings could also reorganize the world according to their intentions and shape it in the image of their needs, wants etc.
Marx considered himself different to these mechanical materialists and in 1844-1845 was talking about merging this materialism and Hegelian idealism into a new materialism. His concept of it was one which prioritized objective, bodily existence as preceding consciousness, considered human consciousness to be capable of both being influenced by the world and reshaping the world in the profess of labor, and which also didn’t accept Hegel’s concept of the Absolute Subject.
For Marx the difference with idealism was mainly with that rejection of an Absolute Subject, which to oversimplify a lot from Hegel is basically the mind of God. Since God is absolutely independent instead of relative, or more like includes everything within himself, and because God has no object to think about and labor on outside of himself, then God is entirely subject and entirely object at the same time by being the cosmos themselves.
In Hegel’s opinion, and this has a lot of precedent in theology, thought and creation are identical for God, while humanity’s coming to rational self-consciousness by ordering the world according to its needs replicates God’s process of creating the world on a mortal level. So he inherits the materialist idea of human consciousness recognizing the order of the world, but for him this isn’t an unfree process because it’s coming to agreement with the absolutely free creative process of God’s thought, which is the source of the created world.
What Marx does is take away this Absolute Subject where thought and creation can ever be identical, instead he follows from the Epicureans like Lucretius by seeing order as contingently emerging from existence where little contingent events aggregate together to create statistically predictable natural laws. Possibility comes before order, the line from Lucretius Marx liked was “the thing born creates the use.” Basically he was non-teleological and saw human consciousness as inseparable from its animal origins, even if human beings are no longer the same as other animals.
Because of that, he rejected both Hegel’s emphasis on the need for mortal humans to reconcile their subjective freedom with objective fate and necessity (culminating in Hegel’s identification of the state with ethics) as well as the emphasis of his former Young Hegelian associates like Bruno Bauer on subjective freedom and on the drive of human consciousness to destroy the separate, independent existence of natural, objective existence.
Instead Marx thought freedom could only be an actualization of possibilities already present in the world, but also that human beings had power to change their possibilities. His materialism is an outgrowth of his concept of freedom pretty much, and he saw a realistic concept of freedom and unfreedom as the more important aspect of materialism than atheism, which he thought was a conclusion you got from analyzing the history of human consciousness and society but not something that would lead to a free society in itself.
He was an atheist, and considered atheism and irreligion to be important to communism, but because he saw religion as a product of human reconciliation with unfreedom (although, like Hegel, he differentiated between the attitudes typical in different religions according to how developed freedom was in them). This kind of thought isn’t totally foreign to the history of theology. There’s ideas about reconciling with the body as a means to realize freedom and oneness with life in many religious texts, from the Zohar to Teresa de Avila’s Interior Castle to Ibn Arabi’s Bezels of Wisdom.
Personally I’m an atheist, but I think it would be stupid to ignore the history of freedom in religious thought. Dialectic doesn’t just stop at the door, it’s inseparable from the whole of human history. The best Marxists have understood this and not shied away from engaging with theology, even if I think it’s important to avoid doing political theology because then you end up at best being like Mikhail Bakunin or Thomas Hobbes and at worst being like Carl Schmitt or Bruno Bauer.
I also agree with Mariátegui and Che that communism can’t be separated from a certain “religious” feeling and ethic, brought down to earth unlike Christian otherworldliness. This idea goes back to the very beginning of communism as a word and a concept, it was the need for this religious feeling of love for all of life that led Friedrich Hölderlin (who was very close to Hegel as a student) to be one of the first to use “communism” in the sense it means today.
I think it’s perfectly reconcilable with materialism if we think of human beings as animals who can’t overcome their own failed attempts to control nature without recognizing their own animal nature once again. Like Ibn Arabi talks about, human beings don’t overcome their animal limitations without caring for their bodily animal existence, which is what communism would be doing on a social-civilizational scale
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