On materialism

How Marxists actually think about these things.

Photo by Galina Nelyubova on Unsplash

There’s been a whole lot of discourse about materialism over the past couple of days, primarily coming from its liberal critics. I’m not going to spend much time contesting the arguments they’ve been floating since they have generally had very little to do with what Marxists actually believe on the topic, but for the sake of clarification I’d like to lay out my own thoughts about it.

The simplest way to understand Marxist materialism, I would argue, would be to place it in the context of an intellectual tension that emerged during three stages of the Scientific Revolution.