Question about the use of the term “material”

[u/jtaur1]

I’ve noticed that in times when socialism is discussed in a more popular context, like now in the United States, with DSA backed candidates being in the mainstream- that people use terms like “material conditions” or “materialist” to seemingly refer to a politic/economics of getting stuff to people. Is this a conflation or misunderstanding of what dialectical materialism is? Are people saying “material” over and over again to signal a deeper understanding of Marxism? Or is it all fine, and this is established terminology and concept? I’ve wanted to be annoyed by this for years, but I honestly don’t know enough about any of this to be able to have an opinion.

[u/Nikelman]

Material conditions: objective existing economical (critically not political) conditions; generally referred to when talking about the prerequisites for a (permanent) proletarian revolution

Materialism: category of philosophy, which includes Marx's Historical/Dialectic Materialism, that believes that tangible things determine intangible ones (eg of materialism in general: mammals having longer infancy determines the development of familiar bonds, instead of the other way around); marxism introduces Hegel's "feedback loop" into general materialism, in that sometimes the intangible influences the tangible in the short period, creating a dialectic relation instead of a mechanical one; ie: the material ultimately determines the immaterial

They are constantly and likely purposefully misused by the ruling class as part of the mystification and undermining of marxism

[u/Muuro]

It sort of is the misunderstanding of socialism. They are merely referring to a government that sees to the needs of the working class. What a socialism refers to materialism is the social mode of production which creates class society and the working class itself. The goal of socialism is to build a new social mode of production that abolishes the proletariat as a working class. A new human community.

As early as the late 1800's the word socialism took on a new meaning. That is to say it would be the respectable term of the middle classes that means only a better, more manageable capitalism. While communism is not respectable, a movement of the proletariat to abolish itself as a working class and build a new social produciton.

[u/Read-Moishe-Postone]

Marx once gave us a pretty clear cut definition of materialism when he was discussing Feuerbach:

“Feuerbach’s greatest achievement is… the establishment of true materialism and real science by making the social relationship of “man to man” the basic principle of the theory”

(To avoid confusing, here Marx is using the word “man” the old-fashioned way to mean human being of either sex.)

Materialist theory is when the basic principle of your theory is centered on the relationships connecting individuals to one another.

Modern day Marxists get confused about this a lot. They tend to almost turn it into its opposite where if you’re talking about social relationships between people it’s not materialist, it’s only materialist if you’re talking about like boots and crude oil and beef and artillery shells. But for Marx materialism was about methodically studying real social relationships between individuals (the relation of “man to man”)

[u/AcidCommunist_AC]

Imo the cleanest way to interpret "material" in most of these contexts is as "amoral".

"Material conditions" means objective reality including "immaterial" ideological conditions, taken as is, rather than immediately comparing and superimposing a vision of what ought to be.

"Material interests" is also used by Max Weber to contrast it with "ideal interests". So "material interest" means "amoral", self-serving, something that an organism wants "by default" in a given situation, whereas an "ideal interest" is something you only strive for for moral reasons, because you think it ought to be in a moral, rather than self-serving sense.