MATERIALISM

Materialism posits the epistemological primacy of matter over ideas, mind, values, spirit, and other incorporeal phenomena. Philosophical perspectives stressing the fundamental importance of physical conditions and needs have grown more elaborate with the increasing differentiation and autonomy of secular knowledge from religion. Materialists oppose magical, religious, and metaphysical explanations of worldly affairs, criticizing their role as mystifications and socioeconomic or political legitimations. The enduring debate over materialism and idealism (which gives primacy to ideas) centers on the two approaches' relative effectiveness as guides to scientific, technical, and sociopolitical practices. In social science, materialism refers to often tacit metatheories, or heuristic devices, which frame distinctive types of research problems, hypotheses, concepts, and theories stressing the causal force of physical realities on sociocultural matters.

Two contrasting threads of the materialist tradition have divergent consequences for the behavioral and social sciences. Reductionists posit that phenomena are determined strictly by physical causes. Their view that existential knowledge is a reflection of corporeal conditions denies the autonomy of psychological and sociocultural factors and, thus, suggests that the behavioral and social sciences have no distinct content. Nonreductionists hold that psychological and sociocultural phenomena arise from and are dependent upon physical substrata. They also accord "primacy" to physical realities and corporeal impulses, motives, values, representations, and interests, seeing them as basic constraints that "determine," or channel, the direction of human practices. By contrast to reductionists, however, they treat the sociocultural realm as an "emergent," "sui generis," "relatively autonomous" domain having distinct properties, processes, and laws and exerting reciprocal causality with the material realm. Implying inter-penetrating sociocultural and material spheres, they include socially constituted entities and processes (e.g., technology and labor) as prime "material" determinants.

Modern materialism is rooted in ancient Greek conceptions of elementary bodies. Atomistic philosophers held that all existing things are composed of indivisible, ultimate objects of the same material in perpetual motion in empty space. They argued that perceptible objects derive from atoms of various sizes and shapes colliding, getting entangled, and forming different combinations, and that sensations arise from atoms passing through the sense organs and impacting on the soul (also composed of atoms). From the start, materialists considered knowledge to be a "subjective" manifestation of "objective" reality, holding that physical realities ultimately determine individual experiences and sociocultural constructions. However, claims about the scope of this determination varied widely with the degree to which the thinker adhered to reductionist or nonreductionist presuppositions.

Atomistic materialism reemerged as a major cultural force during the Renaissance science revolution. Galileo and Newton again portrayed physical reality as ultimate particles moving in empty space, but their distinction between precisely measurable, primary sensory qualities (i.e., length, width, weight, figure) and nonmathematizable secondary qualities (e.g., color, smell, taste, texture) established a sharp boundary between objective and subjective experience and decisive methodological standard for distinguishing science from metaphysical, aesthetic, or sociocultural thought. The capacity of diverse observers, employing the same experimental techniques, to arrive at similar findings supported materialist claims about the primacy of the physical world and certainty of objective knowledge.

The extraordinary success of Newtonian science contributed greatly to an extensive secularization of knowledge that reduced barriers to materialist approaches in human affairs. For example, Hobbes argued that social actions are also effects of matter in motion; material primacy is manifested in the dominant drive for self-preservation, all-pervasive power struggles, and subsequent need for absolute monarchy. Locke's Newtonian theory of mind held that primary sense qualities reflect external objects and that complex ideas merely combine the simple ones received directly from sense experience. However, Descartes' dualistic vision of a materialist physical world and an autonomous mind blessed with innate ideas of divine origin exemplifies the seventeenth century tendency to provide separate grounds for science, which avert direct subversion of religion. The power of the Roman Catholic Church and its censors, who saw materialism as a subversive force, was already inscribed powerfully in the earlier trial and conviction of Galileo and in his concession to dualism. Even Hobbes left space for spiritual realities. The strong subjectivist currents and subject-object dualism in Western philosophy derived from its earlier religious roots and its lack of autonomy in relation to the Church.

Enlightenment thinkers fashioned a new cultural space for free inquiry and autonomous science, subverting the power of religion and paving the way for modern materialism. La Mettrie, D'Holbach, and Diderot held that all experience has material causes. Idealizing Newtonian mechanics, the philosophes believed that naturalistic explanation of all phenomena would demystify religious and metaphysical superstition, limit the rule of the Church and nobility, and animate scientifically guided social reform. Revolutionary advances in eighteenth-century medicine, chemistry, and biology upheld their faith in materially based rationality, disenchantment, and progress. The later social revolutions against the ancien régime, secularization of political power, and gradual rise of liberal democracy favored the spread of materialist thinking in new social domains.

Manifesting Enlightenment culture, Karl Marx set the agenda for modern materialism. Even today's debates about the topic center on different interpretations of his work. Following Feuerbach, Marx charged that religion and its secular, idealist substitutes (e.g., Hegelian philosophy) are "inverted," or "alienated," projections of human capacities and potentialities. As "natural beings," he argued, people must satisfy their needs by appropriating and shaping physical objects. Although he attacked Hegel's speculative history of "spirit," Marx retained his view that people create themselves and their societies through their labor. Young Marx called for a "true" materialism, or a new science of humanity focusing on "social relationships." He wanted to illuminate ideologically obscured forms of socially structured production and exploitation, which, in his view, constitute the "real history" of "corporeal" human beings.

Divergent strains of Marxian materialism—"dialectical materialism" and "historical material-ism"—are rooted ultimately in tensions between the political and scientific sides of Marx's and Engels' works. The terms were coined after Marx's death and codified into a variety of schematic orthodoxies. Dialectical materialism is a philosophy of nature developed first by Engels, elaborated by Plekhanov and Lenin, and fashioned by Marxist-Leninists into an eschatology of the communist movement. Serving primarily as a political ideology and metalanguage that justified communist states and insurgencies, it did not have much impact on social science outside the communist regimes and movements. By contrast, historical materialism, Marx's main metatheory of social development, has much relevance for sociology. Yet even this approach was stated variously by him, and gave rise to conflicting interpretations. The elder Engels ([1890–1894] 1959, pp. 395–400), who earlier helped Marx frame his theories, berated first-generation "Marxists" for using materialism "as an excuse for not studying history," or as a dogmatic Hegelian "lever for construction," instead of as "a guide to study." Accepting partial responsibility for the later vulgar interpretations, he admitted that Marx and he, in the heat of political battle, often spoke with too much certainty. However, he insisted that Marx and he opposed the idea of all-encompassing, mechanistic causality by narrowly conceived economic factors and that their materialism meant nothing more than that "the production and reproduction of real life" is "the ultimately determining element in history."

Engels implied a problematic split in Marx's thought. On the one hand, Marx sometimes implied, in Hegelian fashion, progressively unfolding stages of history, animated by relentless technological advance and ever more unified classes rationally taking account of material factors, controlling them, and speeding history to an "inevitable" emancipatory conclusion. Such points were warranties for his political program. On the other hand, the scientific side of Marx's work breaks from teleological thinking. His historical materialism stresses empirical inquiry about specific material conditions and practices and their sociocultural consequences among particular groups in finite space and time, and calls for reconstruction of theory and practice in light of the findings. This approach has more affinity for the empirical and secular thrust of the Darwinian revolution than for earlier Enlightenment ideas of progress and science, which implied a new faith or civil religion. After the failed revolutions of 1848 and the rise of the new Napoleonic dictatorship in France, Marx qualified his formerly highly optimistic views about "making history," holding that we do not make it in accord with circumstances or outcomes that we freely choose. This insight was precursory to his mature work on capitalism, which, although retaining certain Hegelian taints, manifested clearly his historical materialism.

Following Adam Smith, Marx held that a specialized division of labor enhances productive powers geometrically. However, by contrast to Smith, he specified that capitalism's exceptional productivity derives expressly from its historically specific forms of complex cooperation, which end the relative isolation of peasants and other independent producers. Marx charged that economists mystify this process by obscuring the fundamental role of labor and portraying capitalist growth as if it were animated by a "fantastic . . . relation between things," rather than by a specific type of "social relation" (Marx [1887] 1967, pp. 71–83). He saw the unequal relationship between capitalists and workers as the "secret" of capitalist accumulation. Treating associated labor and related forms of social organization, extraction, and domination as the decisive "material" forces in human affairs, Marx averted the reductionist physicalism of the early atomists, awkward dualism of the Renaissance thinkers, and mechanistic determinism of the dialectical materialists.

Marx and Engels ([1845–1846] 1964, pp. 31–32) said that the "first premise of all human history" is the production of "the means of subsistence" and a characteristic "mode of life." As productive forces are refined, they held, growing surpluses offer provision beyond subsistence and allow certain individuals and strata to be freed from direct production for other activities, including the creation of fresh technical knowledge and new productive forces. Marx and Engels contended that incremental advances in production generate increasingly elaborate socio-cultural differentiation, class structure, and domination and more universal "class struggles" over the productive forces. In their view, material determination in the "last instance" means that socially structured patterns of production, extraction, and disposition of surplus shape social development. A materialist sociology focuses on these processes and their consequences. The central tenet of historical materialism is that the "base," or "mode of production," determines "superstructure," or "the forms of inter-course." The base is composed of "productive forces," which contribute directly to production for material needs (i.e., natural resources, tools, technical knowledge, labor power, and modes of cooperation), and "property relations," which provide certain "classes" effective control over production and relegate others to direct labor. "Superstructure" is composed of nonproductive types of social intercourse (i.e., noneconomic forms of public organization, private association, and thought), which are determined by and, in turn, maintain, or reproduce, the base.

There is a core technological root to Marx's materialism, but he also implied reciprocal causality between the physical and sociocultural realms. Thus, he was not a reductionist. Although granting productive forces ultimate theoretical primacy, his historical analyses dwelled more on property relations and class dynamics. Moreover, he did not hold that material determination operated with the same intensity throughout society. Rather, he emphasized that its strongest force is exerted in institutions that play a direct role in reproducing the mode of production and that the rest of society and culture has much more autonomy. For example, under capitalism, mainstream public discourses about property rights or free trade are central to ideology, but most music and fiction, as well as Marx's critical writings, bear only the broad imprint of the level and form of productive development. Marx envisioned society as composed of interdependent social structures and cultural forms, implying that each element has a distinct impact on the whole. Yet he still saw the base as the most decisive factor shaping overall society and its internal relations. He treated the productive activities of subordinate producers and surplus extraction by superordinate classes as the most central and obscured processes in social life and the root of the most major institutions, conflicts, and transitions.

In a much-debated argument about the capitalist mode of production, Marx held that the rate of profit would fall under highly mechanized production. He believed that the trend toward automation in heavy industry reduces the proportion of direct laborers to fixed capital, diminishing the ultimate source of capitalist profit and requiring hyperexploitation of remaining workers to pay for vastly increased technical investment. Marx argued that the classes would be compressed into a tiny monopoly stratum of owners and a huge impoverished mass of de-skilled workers and permanently unemployed people. However, he also held that science and technology, having replaced direct labor as the leading productive force, would provide the material basis for proletarian revolution and an emancipated, postcapitalist order (i.e., scientific production and administration, greatly reduced work and material necessity, and uncoerced cooperation). This hopeful scenario about collective agency and planning as replacing blind history, and material determinism as becoming truly "in the last instance," went beyond the scientific thrust of historical materialism and reflected the Hegelian residue in his thought.

By the early twentieth century, pathbreaking ideas about electromagnetic fields, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics relativized space and time, eroded the borders between energy and mass, and fashioned a new relational cosmology that undermined Newtonianism. Similarly, Nietzsche, James, Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein subverted the foundations of modern Western philosophy. Major social changes accompanied the intellectual shifts. A more complex system of classes and subclasses, new types of workplaces, indirect forms of ownership and control, and state intervention altered the structure of capitalism and blurred the line between base and superstructure. Stalinism; fascism; resurgent irrationalism; and persistent racial, ethnic, gender, and religious splits also cried out for new types of theory. In this climate, Marxists tended to drift toward new types of cultural theory or to embrace dialectical materialism, which remained the official ideology of global communism.

In the 1930s, when sociology was being transformed into a professionally specialized discipline in the United States, Talcott Parsons relegated Marx to the status of a footnote in the history of social theory and gave a strong primacy to values and ideas that turned Marx on his head. Parsons's leading role in post–World War II sociology helped harden mainstream opposition to materialism. Claiming that class was no longer a prime basis of association, a determinant of political and cultural beliefs, or a source of major social conflicts, numerous North American sociologists and many thinkers from other liberal democracies argued that materialism did not come to terms with the nascent "postindustrial society." Although certain critics dissented, most mainstream sociologists dismissed materialism as a crude ideology, or simply ignored the approach.

Materialist themes appeared much more prominently in later 1960s social theory, animated, in part, by New Left attacks on functionalism and positivism. Very influential among European theorists, Lewis Althusser's "structuralist" interpretation of Marx radically revised materialism. However, G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History (1978) helped stimulate wider efforts to reconstruct historical materialism (e.g., Anderson 1974a, 1974b; Shaw 1978; McMurtry 1978; Roemer 1982; Bhaskar 1989). Dispensing with overt political facets and overcoming conceptual gaps, the new works were more systematic versions of the original approach. However, they did not have much impact on mainstream sociology.

Materialist theory fell on hard times in a climate where "post-materialist" identity politics were ascendent over labor-centered or class politics, and failed communism and resurgent neoliberalism seemed to doom the socialist "alternative" (Anderson 1983; Antonio 1990). In this climate, a new "cultural sociology" blossomed as part of a broader interdisciplinary turn to "representation" and "discourse." Postmodern arguments about the primacy of culture were often pitched directly against Marxian materialism, which they declared moribund. These new cultural theories tended to shift the focus among "critical sociologists" from "structural determinants" (i.e., production and labor) to "cultural surfaces," especially mass entertainment and other signifiers of mass consumption. Many of these theorists argued that a defining feature of postmodern culture is its increased, or, even, total autonomy from material underpinnings.

Although materialist theory has declined in recent years, historical-comparative and empirical work, manifesting tacit materialism and clear connections to nondoctrinaire forms of Marxism, was well established in North American sociology by the 1980s. It still flourishes among significant subgroups in the discipline. These thinkers do not directly employ the base-superstructure model (which is now associated with dialectical materialism and dogmatic Marxism), but they share historical materialist presuppositions, albeit often fused with other traditions. Recent historical changes are intensifying interest in materialist themes. First, neoliberal globalization and restructuring stimulate heated debates over multinational firms, international finance, socioeconomic dislocations, and related public policy initiatives. Second, the collapse of eastern European communism and global decline of communism raise major questions about socioeconomic reconstruction in postcommunist society and detach materialism from communist politics. Third, new materialist critiques counter claims about the primacy of culture and representation in interdisciplinary theory circles. Historical materialism is a heuristic device that poses problems and hypotheses, and is perhaps best judged on this account. Consider the current "materialist" issues below.

MATERIALIST ANALYSES OF THE NEW PHASE OF CAPITALISM

As in Marx's time, today's materialism arises in a climate of perceived rupture, or the end of the post–World War II socioeconomic system and its distinctive patterns of growth, regulation, and geopolitics. Materialists focus on the shifts in the system of production and their impacts on other aspects of social life, especially on inequality, conflict, and politics.

Globalization and Restructuring. Recent materialist work focuses on the new "flexible" forms of production, network firms, international division of labor, and multinational economic blocs—for example, the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and the European Union (EU). The core debates among these analysts concern the shape, permanence, and consequences of the new global economy and the degree to which it departs from postwar capitalism (i.e., they ask whether a new multinational, or "post-Fordist," phase of capitalism has replaced "Fordism," or simply modified it.) (e.g., Harvey 1989; Harrison 1994; Gordon 1996).

Income and Wealth Inequality. Neoliberal deregulation, free trade, and recommodification of public goods have increased global disparities of wealth, income, jobs, and life chances (Braun 1997; Davis 1992). Inequality is most extreme between the richest and the poorest nations, but it has also grown considerably within societies, including wealthy ones, such as the United States. Materialists debate the scope of economic inequality, its relation to global restructuring, and its consequences.

Class, Labor, and Politics. Materialists also focus on the impact of restructuring and polarizing labor markets on organized labor. For example, they ask: Are new types of unions arising among formerly unorganized low-wage service workers and professional groups? Will transnational labor organizations arise in the emergent economic blocs? Are new fusions of class politics and cultural politics arising?

The State. Materialists raise questions about the impact of capital mobility and new forms of international financial and labor markets on the state's capacity to protect and regulate its various environments and maintain public goods (e.g., health, education, welfare, retirement). They also study the role of the state's police and military arms in the global political economy.

Environmental Issues and Sustainability. Increasing threats of resource depletion, global warming, hazardous waste, and overall environmental destruction, the need for alternative forms of energy and technologies, and the communist regimes' dismal environmental records have stimulated sharp criticism of earlier materialism's "productivism" and inattention to the costs, risks, and limits of growth. They pose questions about sustainable growth and material limits to political aspirations.

Communication and Information Technologies. These industries play a major role in globalization and restructuring and, thus, are a central focus in fresh materialist inquiries.

FOUNDATIONAL ISSUES IN MATERIALIST THEORY

Although certain thinkers (e.g., Wallerstein 1991; Postone 1993; Wood 1995; Wright 1997) have begun reframing materialism in light of the recent historical changes, more fundamental rethinking of the tradition is likely, especially in the two broad areas discussed below.

The Role of Technology. This area has long been a central focus of materialism. In the late nineteenth century, Marx held that science and technical knowledge were already becoming the primary productive force, altering fundamentally the capitalist mode of production and materialist dynamics of all preceding epochs. Certain contemporary theorists argue that information and communication technologies are giving rise to an "informational society" (e.g., Poster 1990; Castells 1996). These thinkers raise basic questions about previous ideas of production, property, labor, organization, and other aspects of earlier materialism, which could lead to a new generation of theories framed around a knowledge-driven logic of material development.

Materialism and Politics. The effort to unify theory and practice, and the consequent fusion of science and politics, generate distinct resources (i.e., they provide a "critical" thrust) as well as major sources of tension (i.e., between science and ideology) in Marxian materialism. As "critical theorists," materialists focus on the contradictions between democratic ideology's claims about freedom, equality, abundance, and participation, on the one hand, and actual conditions of capitalist and state socialist societies, on the other. They claim to illuminate the determinate, historical possibilities for progressive social change (i.e., "emancipatory" structural factors, cultural conditions, and social movements), which favor reconstructing modern societies according to revised versions of their own democratic ideals. However, the failure of proletarian revolution and communism have blurred materialist political aims. Some materialists abandon critical theory completely, fashioning a strictly empirical sociology, while others substitute highly generalized ideals of "discursive" or "radical" democracy and cultural politics for socialism. It is hard to predict the fate of critical theory, but increasing inequalities in wealth, polarizing labor markets, and declining social benefits raise major questions about unmet needs and the material bases of inclusive democratic citizenship. The bankruptcy of soviet-style regimes and the erosion of social democracies make materialist political goals an open question, but the consequent loss of certainty undercuts the tradition's dogmatic side and increases chances for theoretical reconstruction and restored vitality.

references

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Robert J. Antonio