I’ve been feeling this for a while, and I’m trying to flesh out an idea here. Feedback is appreciated. I’ve been a leftist for a long time, and have studied theory and history in my lazy, hodgepodge way, and while I believe that materialism as the old boys theorized is definitely a useful tool and structure to view events and systems of humanity, it doesn’t have a kinda joi de vivre that I require to really get turned on by something. In my teens I was a lonely atheist, and in college I was a bewildered existentialist/absurdist and over the past decade or so I’ve been I’ve gotten out of straight materialism, starting with Buddhism and moving into reading and practicing stuff out of the western esoteric/occult tradition. I feel that the left has a tangible, essential moral and ethical center, but it hamstrings itself in its articulation by sticking with this materialist/mechanistic view of life and the universe. I want an enchanted left, I want a haunted left. I want a left where we honor our ancestors and speak to them, where we call upon the elements to help us, where we come together to bind our enemies and protect our allies in ritual chaos. Mostly I want a left that isn’t afraid to acknowledge the divine, that calls upon those forces and entities that can’t be seen but only felt. I want a left that can take leaps of faith into an uncertain future because We Have Faith. Faith in a Living, Breathing Something that we are all a part of, and so can act and rest in the knowledge that we aren’t alone in a cold dead universe, but rather vibrant cells in a communal, universal body.
we’re not actually magicians, though, as we don’t have actual magic yet. That is the plan of course! We will get there. Right now we have the dialectic, which looks a lot like objective magic when you use it properly!
You can subsume your own “idealisms” with materialist dialectics, and make sure to use Maoism for this and truly understand how the idealistic negation of the negation was finally subsumed by struggle in the associated triplet movements: if you try to use Hegel/orthodox “Marxist” dialectics in anything but your own subjectivity you will fuck up massively, and then a friendly materialist will have to reprogram you again
unfortunately for the Buddhists and other idealists, I was them, I’ve met them, including relationships with the serious Buddhists who actually spent ten years in the Himalayas and went years without speaking. They are “happier more spiritual people”, they do have access to deeper truths, but at the end of the day they’re also calmer, more “enlightened” fascist compradors living “blissfully” damned subjectivities in an objectively brutal system.
You do not live in a monastery, you are not fed rice by servants, you live in air conditioning and traffic and capitalism, so you can’t fully lose yourself in a tranquil idealist subjectivity just yet - it’s too late, it won’t work, and very little of it actually matches our current conditions
the hard truth is that these were (originally) excellent but pre-capitalist ideas for helping people in pre-capitalist societies, and while all religions contain important truths, and their followers really do believe in them, and we’re going to respect them and let them finally topple their own Gods for themselves, they have only parts of the full materialist truth that is available to us
you would greatly enjoy and benefit from critically reading the work of Mariategui
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mariateg/works/7-interpretive-essays/index.htm
I shall check this out too!
Good stuff! It’s a Latin American Marxist foundational classic.
CW: contains insensitivity about world religions
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