Radical Realism and Socialism
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This article came through on my email subscriptions. Outlines neatly some of the things I have been talking about at party meetings and on this forum. Enzo Rossi is one of the ‘radical realism’ bunch. I guess I am too.
“If there’s a single ideal that guides the materialist Left, it isn’t a moral ideal. It is an aspiration to strengthen our grasp of how the world works and how present dynamics limit our imaginations, to improve the position from which we make political choices. This is the sense in which our conception of emancipation is different from the liberal one: rather than striving for the freedom to get whatever we want here and now, we try to create conditions under which our desires are truly our own.”
https://damagemag.com/2025/02/25/socialism-is-not-liberal-moralism-on-steroids/
DJP’s link :”“If there’s a single ideal that guides the materialist Left, it isn’t a moral ideal. It is an aspiration to strengthen our grasp of how the world works…”.
I know DJP won’t welcome my intervention, but the above is nothing to do with Marx’s ‘social productionism’ (or, ‘idealism-materialism’).
Marx argues that we are the producers of our world, and thus we can change our product.
This social activity of course includes notions of ‘morality’. His method of ‘social theory and practice’ requires both plans and activity.
This must of course be a democratically controlled social production.The ‘materialist left’ are the followers of Engels (who misunderstood Marx), Kautsky, Plekhanov and Lenin. This political and ideological trend emerged prior to the foundation of the SPGB, and unfortunately the SPGB doesn’t seem to realise this.
Merely ‘grasping how the world works’ is 18th century materialism, the passivity of which Marx opposed.
When any supporter of this ‘materialist Left’ is asked about ‘democratic conscious activity’, they refuse to accept ‘democracy’, and retain the power to organise the production of our world to an elite. Marx fundamentally opposed this elitism, for example in his Theses on Feuerbach.
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