Marxism and the New Materialism

Abstract

: Materialism, the idea that nature’s entities are manifestations of single protean thing and that there are thus no supernatural properties of life or mind, has come in and out of fashion in philosophy, but has always been a tenet of Marxism. A recent philosophical initiative, New Materialism, substitutes a “flat ontology” for the Marxist dialectics of nature, simultaneously denying the specificity of living systems and devaluing human agency. A typical stratagem of these philosophers is to separate their initiative from Marxism by misrepresenting the latter.