What The Hell America!

Social materialism itself has two components — macro and micro. The macro component is the view that history is governed by technological development. This is the claim that Karl Marx propounded in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and brilliantly elaborated in his classic Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence.

According to Marx, history is governed in lawlike fashion by the progressive development of the productive forces. And social relations adjust functionally to the forward market of productive forces. Ideas and ideology are functionally subordinated to the production relations — the class relations — that are dominant at the time, which in turn are explained by the level of the productive forces. Recently that theory has come under a lot of criticism. I myself have criticized it as being probably implausible, but it was for the longest time taken for granted by Marxists as an instance of materialism.

The second kind of social materialism focuses on the micro level. It is a theory of agential motivation in social interactions. Its foundational claim is that, in some social relations, actors are motivated to pursue their material or economic interests, even if it means setting other commitments aside. The main such circumstance is in economic interactions and political pursuits. And since both of these phenomena are central to class relations, this amounts to the view that class action is foundationally motivated by material interests.

So in trying to explain actors’ choices in economic and political affairs, Marxists rely on the premise that actors are most likely going to pursue courses of action that further their material well-being. In so doing, they might be described as rational agents. Rational action, in this sense, is action undertaken in defense of one’s material interests. Particular courses of action are dictated by actors’ location in the class structure; in other words, the power of the class structure is to make agents rationally pursue courses of action that uphold their material interests.

One can easily see how this premise generates both a political economy of capitalism and a theory of class conflict. In the class structure that defines capitalism, a small group of people are sorted into the position of being capitalist producers, and the vast majority are inserted into the position of being wage laborers. These two positions compel the actors that occupy them to pursue certain courses of action if they are to uphold their material interests. In order to defend their well-being, workers find they have no reasonable alternative to selling their labor power to capitalists. They have the freedom to refuse, of course — there is nobody forcing them to show up at work every day.

It is therefore correct to say, as libertarians do, that the decision to work is freely undertaken by the employee. But even though nobody forces them to work for capitalists, their circumstances do force them to seek employment. Hence, even though no one coerces them to work, they are structurally compelled to do so. It is an action they rationally undertake, since to refuse it would be to court a catastrophic blow to their material well-being.

On the other side, actors who find themselves in the position of capitalists quickly discover that their own material interests are bound up with the economic success of their enterprises. If they wish to remain in their privileged position, they must preserve the viability of their enterprises against their rivals. This quickly translates into an imperative to minimize costs and maximize profits. As long as they operate in competitive markets, capitalist enterprises everywhere are committed in the first instance to cost minimization and profit maximization. This is the course of action they rationally undertake so that they might remain economically viable.

The universally imposed drive to maximize profits, in turn, generates what Marx called capitalism’s “laws of motion.” Micro-level decisions aggregate into macro-level patterns of economic development. Because capitalist employers respond more or less similarly to similar economic situations, it becomes possible to have something like a theory of the economy. Political economy as a social science is possible only because there is consistency in how actors respond to economic conditions. And that consistency is impossible to explain except on the assumption of rationality.

The materialist premise thus generates a theory of capitalist development. But it also underpins Marxist political theory. For even while the defense of material interests brings economic actors together in a predictable pattern of development, it also generates resistance and conflict. The same imperatives that compel employers to hold down costs also compel them to directly undermine the material well-being of their employees.

Employers’ drive to minimize costs while maximally extracting labor cannot but inflict some degree of harm upon their employees. Reducing costs entails holding the line on wages at the lowest level that market conditions will allow; extracting maximal labor typically takes the form of work intensification, which brings physical and psychological harm to employees. But precisely because employees value their material well-being, these actions predictably elicit resistance to employer demands. In whatever way possible, wage laborers seek to reduce the harms that their employer forces upon them in their drive for profits.

In other words, capitalism’s universal drive for profit elicits a universal resistance from the laboring classes. Indeed, universality applies not only to the fact of resistance but even to its content. Workers in the modern era have lived and worked in many different cultural settings. A thoroughgoing culturalism would lead one to predict an incommensurability of the demands they make of their employers. And, as a matter of fact, there is indeed some variability. But what stands out more starkly is the similarity in their core demands across culture and across region, for improvements in wages, hours, work intensity, health provisions, and the like. These demands have been at the heart of every modern labor movement, regardless of ideological and cultural conditions, a fact that is simply incomprehensible in a relativistic framework. ^{Thus, both of these phenomena — the universalization of capitalism’s development imperative and the universal resistance to it on the part of its victims — are impossible to explain except on the assumption of rationality.}

The materialist premise has generated one of the most successful social theories of the modern era. From it also flowed the strategic underpinnings of the most successful political movement of the modern era: the working-class movement, and especially its socialist component. It is no exaggeration to say that the strategic orientation of modern socialism assumed the centrality of material interests. This was particularly evident in three components that define the modern left.

• Political program: First, the materialist theory has been the foundation for socialist strategy. All political programs were based on an analysis of people’s interests. These programs rested on two questions. The first was which group of people comprised the party’s constituency. That constituency, the working class, was not defined by virtue of its attitudes or the values that it held at any particular moment but on an assessment of its objective interests. Political alignments were predicted on the basis of interests, not on attitudes or normative orientations. Indeed, if the attitudes of class members happened to diverge from their interests, it never deterred parties from trying to organize them. The goal was to work with the constituency so that its attitudes could be brought into line with its interests.The second question was which political demands would be attractive to the constituency. The instrument by which the constituency would be brought together as a class was the political program. And the program was a set of demands that organizers took to be attractive to workers precisely because those demands would align with workers’ interests. Cadre were instructed to rely on the program to recruit workers to the cause, not through simple exhortation but on the strength of the program’s promises. The causal direction proceeded thus: The starting point was an analysis of the interests of the social classes; from that flowed the demands embedded in the program; and from that issued the strategy of whom to organize and how to bring them into the party. In other words, parties did not randomly try to recruit people based on the moral attractiveness of their goals. Of course, there was always a moral component to their organizing, and if it happened that certain individuals in other classes found their goals attractive, they might be invited to join the organization. But the prime constituency was always identified on the basis of actors’ interests, not their values. Socialists never walked into corporate boardrooms and tried to convince their members of the moral value of the movement. They directed their energies to workers, because they were convinced that workers’ interests would incline them toward socialist ends, while denizens of the C-suite would line up against them. The analysis of interests thus delimited the range of actors who were viewed as the socialist constituency and, likewise, those viewed as class enemies.
• Democratic engagement: The second consequence of materialism is not often appreciated but is absolutely crucial. If you start with the premise that, in their economic and political life, people are responding rationally to their circumstances, it forces you to treat them with a certain respect. It forces you to operate with a view that if they are doing something that you don’t quite understand, it is reasonable to assume that you have not sufficiently understood the circumstances in which they are operating. What appears to be irrational at first blush might turn out to make a great deal more sense once you have more adequately understood their constraints and their preferences. In other words, instead of concluding that they have been deceived by ideology or are being manipulated or have internalized harmful norms, you should treat them as intelligent people with a basic understanding of their situation. The challenge now falls on you to figure out what about their condition makes a certain choice appealing to them. This is an extremely democratic assumption. And it’s an inoculation against the elitism that runs rampant on so much of the Left today, where working people are routinely castigated as being imbued with false consciousness or self-defeating beliefs.
• Internationalism: Third, materialism was a basis for what we call internationalism. The idea that people everywhere — not just white Europeans or Christians — resist oppression and exploitation depends on the premise that people share certain interests, which in turn issue from a commonality of basic needs. Hence, it isn’t just white people who have similar class interests or just Europeans who are taken to be motivated by economic concerns but anyone who is in the same position in the class structure — white or black, brown or yellow, Hindu or Muslim, Christian or Jewish. This assumption has been the basis for bringing people of all cultures and social backgrounds together to pursue goals that would benefit them, goals that they themselves understood to be of benefit — a world away from the relativism and its result, national tribalism, that engulfs today’s Left.

These were the three central components of left-wing strategy for most of the twentieth century. They remained so because, as long as the movement had a real mass base, organizers found that the materialist assumption generated enormous rewards. Mass parties were able to sink deep roots in the laboring classes around the world on political programs that were remarkably similar. Organizing strategies in a language of universal rights and universal needs could be followed across a bewildering array of cultural and economic settings because they resonated with working people everywhere. Materialist theory guided the most enduring and most successful social movements the world has ever seen.

It is entirely possible, of course, that the success of the movement owed nothing to the guiding framework of the modern left. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that the movement succeeded in spite of the theory and not because of it. Therefore, criticisms such as the ones I will examine below can by no means be dismissed out of hand, especially given the fact that they are popular, even hegemonic, among critical scholars today. Nevertheless, the epochal success of materialist theory on political and organizational fronts should at least be taken as a challenge to those who dismiss it from first principles.

The turn away from materialism and toward culture is perhaps the defining element of radical scholarship during the neoliberal era. The fundamental worry behind the turn has been that, in its explication of how capitalism works, Marxism unduly subordinates or minimizes the role of ideology, discourse, social interpretation, and the like — phenomena that often fall under the umbrella of culture.

These worries bubbled to the surface in Western Europe in the early postwar years, in part led by the Frankfurt School but also by the British New Left. What motivated the criticism was the observation that Marx’s faith in the revolutionary agency of the working class had been proven wrong by historical events. To be sure, in the first third of the century, events seemed to be unfolding in conformity with Marx’s predictions. Starting with the Russian Revolution of 1905 and stretching to the Spanish Civil War, capitalism did appear to be in a revolutionary crisis — the birth of the labor movement was largely coeval with its quite successful assault on the bourgeois state. The working class did very much seem to be capitalism’s “gravedigger,” as Marx had announced in the Communist Manifesto.

But by the first decade after World War II, the revolutionary moment seemed to have passed. In the countries where capitalism was the most advanced, where Marx’s prediction of the system’s overthrow ought to have been borne out, what in fact transpired was the incorporation of the working class into the system and a decline in the revolutionary fervor typical of labor movements in the first three decades of the century. This was an exceptionally disturbing puzzle for the postwar left. And in grappling with it, they came to the conclusion that Marx was correct in insisting that the class structure generates conflict but wrong in ignoring that the working class’s willingness to rebel, its understanding of its situation, and its ability to come together as a class were profoundly mediated by ideology and culture.

The postwar left started with this sociological observation — that in order to understand how class works, analysts had to understand how culture mediates recognition of one’s place in the class structure. To this they added that class structure does not unilaterally and deterministically dictate any particular strategy. And from that they reached the conclusion about agency; namely, that because culture makes economic and political choices unpredictable, it injects a huge degree of indeterminacy into those domains.

For the emerging New Left, the observation that political and economic agency is mediated by ideology slowly led to a wholly new understanding of agency itself at the micro level. Whereas Marxists insisted that the class structure generated predictable and stable choices by economic agents, cultural theory insisted that cultural mediation disrupted any stable relationship between structure and action. And if this was so, then the idea of a class strategy based on stable class interests also fell apart. Social reality was contingent, interests were relative to culture, and politics was not about articulating a set of interests but constructing common identities.

The irony, of course, is that this headlong flight into social constructionism reached its apex right when the inexorable, unrelenting pressure of capitalism was spreading across the world. Even as the remorseless and univocal logic of the system imposed itself on social agents, social theory dove into contingency and locality — just as the obdurate force of capitalist relations was crushing diverse peoples under its weight.

As many commentators have noted, there was a connection between these two phenomena — the social context and the “descent into discourse,” as one early critic described it. It was the theoretical expression of the massive, epochal defeat of popular movements across the world after the 1970s. The embrace of culture expressed a profound pessimism among the intellectual class with respect to political change. But more importantly, it was the theoretical articulation of something real in capitalism. Once the binding force of labor movements had been dissolved, social agents in capitalism embraced whatever organizational and institutional means were available to them to insulate themselves from the brute reality of labor markets. This in turn led to a massive fragmentation of social identities.

The fragmentation, if viewed from the angle of economic location, had a large element of contingency to it. It was that contingency that cultural theorists took to be an anchor of social reality. Instead of seeing it as the result of class forces and new forms of accumulation, they promoted it as a foundational fact about social interaction and thereby a death blow to universalizing or grand narratives.

By the early 2000s, even some of the leading proponents of cultural analysis began to feel a disconnect between the reigning framework in social theory, which promoted culture and contingency, and what was actually happening in the global political economy.

This occurred just as some of the political factors that had driven the turn away from materialist analysis began to change. We are now in what could be the first steps toward a revitalization of global labor movements. If this trend continues — and it’s a big if — I expect that much of the detritus of the preceding years will naturally fall away, including the bland acceptance of the various forms of relativism that it generated. But the fact is that, even though it was greatly debilitating and led to quite flawed theoretical conclusions, the objections raised by the cultural turn have to be engaged and not simply set aside. Every such engagement gives materialists the opportunity to test their own theory and develop it where it is weak.

What I propose to do is address some of the anxieties expressed by the arguments from culture.

Materialists argue that, across a range of social phenomena, actors can be expected to rationally pursue their material interests. Much of the anxiety among critical theorists is over what it means for actors to be rational. I will address three common concerns.

The first is that the characterization of agents as pursuing economic ends reduces all human motivation to the economic kind, whereas in fact we know that human beings value very many ends. Economic matters are one of people’s concerns, but they also love, they also have friendships, moral commitments, aesthetic worries, etc. In short, social actors are multifaceted. Indeed, this is what distinguishes them from animals. The insistence that we put economic concerns at the center of our explanatory agenda does violence to the heterogeneity and diversity of human motivation.

The second concern is that when we say that social agents are concerned with economic ends, we turn them into cold, calculating machines or economic maximizers. It’s not just that they’re concerned with their well-being but are obsessed with getting the most out of every social interaction they enter into. Once again, this seems to do an injustice to the way we relate to each other, to our capacity to see other people as ends and not just as means.

And the third concern, flowing from these first two, is that it’s hard to make sense of all the counterexamples we have in our social lives in which people not only pursue other ends but also pursue all sorts of goals that would appear irrational from the standpoint of this kind of materialism, and therefore the theory does what no scientific theory ought to do, which is to ignore counterexamples and hence become a rigid doctrine.

Are Economic Goals the Only Ones?

Is it the case that a materialist account of agency reduces all motivation to the economic? It is true that materialists may sometimes give this impression, but materialist theory by no means requires it. So how is it possible to avoid reducing all motivation to the economic under a theory built on the premise that workers and capitalists are materially motivated?

It poses no challenge to materialism to allow that people are motivated by all sorts of values and hold many kinds of commitments — moral, aesthetic, religious, and so on. The theory does not have to deny that people have other motivations or goals. The point is that the pursuit of these other ends presupposes a successful pursuit of material ends. If I wish to be a successful artist, I have to first earn a living; in order to pursue my religious ends, I have to keep my body and soul together; to have a successful arrangement in my social affairs, I have to ensure that I have bread and water every day. It is not that we don’t value anything else. It’s that there is no other value that acts as a precondition for satisfying higher-order values.

The economic motivation constitutes the practical precondition for pursuing whatever other motivations actors might have. This has an interesting implication. We pursue all sorts of social interactions every day in our lives — we have friendships, we have love affairs, we go to work every day, we have our political goals. In all of these social interactions, the material preconditions for their pursuit function as a practical constraint. We have to be attentive, to some degree, to the costs they impose on us. Some pursuits will entail a direct cost, and quite immediately so. For example, I might value my free time more than having gainful employment. But even while I may value my free time more highly, if it comes at the expense of being unemployed, reality will quickly dissuade me of pursuing that preference. This is a direct and an immediate cost. But there will be other decisions where I will have a great deal more latitude to act on my preferences.

Again, to build on the previous example, reality will force me to seek out and hold a job even though I much prefer being free to engage in other activities. But no such conflict will impinge on some other pursuits that I hold dear, like, for example, the practice of my religion. Having and holding on to employment may be largely unaffected by my religious beliefs. As long as my religion does not interfere with my pursuit of gainful employment, I am much freer to exercise my preferences in that domain.

Consider a third case. While my religion as a whole does not interfere with my economic pursuits, there may be elements of it that do. For example, it might dictate that I only work two days a week, committing the other five days to express my dedication to the local deity. That particular component of my religious beliefs comes into conflict with the demands of available jobs in my region; no employer will hire me if I insist on only working two days of the week. In this case, my material concerns do not impel me to change my religion in toto, but they will strongly incline me to revise this particular doctrinal component, or to quietly ignore it. So whereas in the first example I am forced to reject my preferences outright, in the second example they are largely untouched, and in the third one I am likely to partially adjust them to my social circumstances.

From this we can generate the following proposition: it is not the case that economic motivation will weigh equally on all social endeavors. Rather, it will register its effect with different degrees of intensity depending on the sphere of activity. Its most profound impact will be in those spheres of our social lives where our choices impinge directly on our material well-being, while in those domains that are not directly implicated in our material reproduction its constraint will be decidedly weaker.

It follows that material motivations will be the most powerful in domains where the economic constraints are the most binding. This, of course, is what we normally refer to as the economy. In matters relating to actors’ economic reproduction, we should expect the assumption of rationality to have the most predictive success. And this is exactly what the class structure most immediately governs. Class relations directly constrain the choices available to actors with regard to their economic reproduction. The livelihood choices available to me issue from my place in the class structure. In other words, my location in the class structure sets the courses of action available to me if I am to reproduce myself.

It is no surprise, then, that when theorizing economic interactions — the way that capitalism works as an economy — the assumption of rationality works best, because the pursuit of our economic interests is what allows us to successfully reproduce ourselves in the class structure. Now, as we move away from examining actors’ economic choices and toward more distal domains — friendships, romantic relations, moral and aesthetic affairs — the economic constraints are likely to be less binding. It is not that they disappear but that their operation leaves room for more variability. This is because they don’t carry immediate consequences for our viability in the way decisions in economic affairs do. Because they don’t directly undermine or promote agents’ well-being, agents’ noneconomic commitments can often have a motivational force that won’t clash with their material security.

Again, this is not to say that these other domains are free of material interests — there is a great deal about moral choices, friendships, and even love that is economically constrained. The point is that the scope for noneconomic valuation is greater here than in economic or even political choices. Thus, materialism is especially effective in the study of political economy and political contestation, even though it still has relevance in other spheres.

From this follows an important conclusion. The reason Marxism puts economic interests at the center of its conception of agency is not because Marxists think agents are always and everywhere economically motivated. Rather, it’s that the theory is primarily concerned with the domain of social existence where economic considerations reign supreme, which is our economic reproduction — how we reproduce ourselves economically — and the power relations that sustain it. Marxism is not a theory of everything. It is a theory of class and class reproduction, and that’s why it is anchored in materialism.

It does, of course, have arguments about how the class structure constrains other spheres of social activity. But it cannot say, nor does it say, that the class structure impinges with equal force on every social sphere. Just how far its impact radiates outward into other domains is an open question, which amounts to something like a research agenda. But whatever its explanatory range might be with respect to these other phenomena, the theory itself does not rest on this additional success. In sum, as other domains impinge on the reproduction of class relations, materialist theory predicts that they will yield to the force of material motivations. But where they do not impinge directly on class reproduction, the theory has much less to say.

For these reasons, it is a mistake to think that the assumption of rationality describes human motivations exhaustively. Humans are motivated by many things, but concerns for material well-being impose limits on the power of other goals.

Does Rationality Entail Hedonism?

It seems plausible to hold that human beings are rational in that they will try to uphold their physical and economic well-being. Now the second concern: Must they be maximizers? Must they be constantly trying to get the most out of every interaction? This is an understandable worry, because not only does it paint a rather objectionable view of human behavior but it flies in the face of our own experience. Our interactions in everyday life are filled with instances of decency and consideration for others. These occur not only in those rarefied other domains I refer to in the previous section but also in economic interactions. Actors demonstrate a regard for other values even in the workplace itself, at the very core of the capitalist economy.

To begin, the assumption of rationality does not have to rest upon maximizing behavior. Economic motivation does not have to take the form of a relentless pursuit of maximal gain from every interaction. Actors merely have to be attentive to the floor for minimal well-being, which they will hesitate to sink below in favor of other commitments. The alternative to maximizing behavior is not altruism but rather what is called satisficing behavior. ^{In other words, the theory only requires that actors resist choices that entail a noticeable reduction in their well-being; it does not require that they seek to maximally advance the latter. It is perfectly consistent with materialism for people to say, “I’m happy with having enough rather than having it all.”}

Of course, there will be situations in which actors are compelled to maximize. To go back to our examples in the previous section, we should expect that in directly economic pursuits there is a greater likelihood of a maximizing strategy being imposed upon us. The most obvious example of this is the capitalist firm, which will predictably be forced to pursue a maximizing strategy even if the managers wish to resist it. Competitive pressures reward maximizing behavior by increasing the revenue stream of firms that abide by it, endowing them with greater investable funds that, in turn, enable them to purchase capital goods, which drive down the unit costs of their products. And this, in turn, enables them to drive out rivals who may have settled on a satisficing strategy.

But even this does not mean that economic interactions compel maximizing behavior as a rule. Workers do not face the same kind of pressures to maximize economic returns that firms do. Whereas firms are disciplined to not fall below a particular rate of return, workers can be forced, or choose, to let their wages fall below the going market rate, because firms have to be economically viable while workers only have to be physically viable. Firms have to weigh each investment against its opportunity cost; hence, they might very well decide to change production lines even when a facility remains operative or to close whole factories even when they are perfectly functional because it makes economic sense. On the other hand, workers can choose to forgo more remunerative employment to pursue other ends. As long as they manage to secure enough income from a particular job, they can choose to maintain it because it leaves them time for other pursuits.

Hence, even with respect to strictly economic considerations, workers sometimes abjure narrowly maximizing behavior. But it is important to note that even while they do so, their physical needs still constitute a floor under which they cannot allow themselves to fall in their pursuit of noneconomic ends. They have to keep body and soul together as they seek to be faithful to their other commitments. For this reason, interestingly, the capitalist economy elicits different kinds of economic motivations from its two key actors, firms and workers. While firms are committed to a brutal maximizing strategy, workers are not impelled by the same remorseless logic.

We can thus conclude that as long as agents can satisfy their basic needs, it’s perfectly consistent with materialism for them to abjure further economic gain in order to pursue different ends. Consequently, we see workers who will give up higher wages or better-paying jobs in favor of employment that allows for other activities. But there will be limits to how far they are willing to go, and this is not just the limit of physical viability. Long before viability comes into question, simple physical hardship is often enough to incline social actors to return to the mundane reality of their material interests. A degree of contingency is therefore entirely consistent with materialist theory, but it is a constrained contingency.

The Problem of Deviations

The preceding argument is meant to reconcile the claims of materialism with some obvious facts about social interaction. But for many theorists it is still not enough, and for apparently good reason. Critics might allow that material considerations play an important role in social interaction. But to say that they constrain social action implies that they enjoy a primacy that is still hard to accommodate to certain facts. One such fact is that even in the kinds of movements and interactions that I have drawn on as evidence of the materialist framework, history is replete with instances of tremendous risk-taking and sacrifice by groups of individuals — labor organizers working in conditions of repression; national liberation fighters taking up arms against impossible odds; civil rights organizers willingly incurring physical attacks; employers accepting lower profits so they might act in accordance with their moral values. These examples are from the very spheres of activity where I have insisted that material considerations are the most binding, yet we find instances of people making tremendous sacrifices for their moral commitments. It is hard to reconcile this with any claim to the primacy of material interests.

The point is not whether counterinstances such as these happen but whether they are typical. In other words, is it routine and expected for people to seek out ends that undermine their well-being, or are such instances outliers? To start, it is important to register that social theory is not a theory of every individual person in society. It is a theory of aggregates. It deals with what we call social facts. These are different from individual facts in that they are not descriptions of how any particular individual behaves but of overarching patterns of behavior. To theorize anything at all, you need to find phenomena that are stable across individual personalities and across specific settings. If any individual counterinstance could be taken to undermine a theory, there would be no theories of anything in the social world, since it is not too difficult to find an instance of just about any kind of behavior. Merely finding counterexamples of a generalization does not invalidate it.

Any test of a theory thus has to distinguish between the typical and the exceptional. And if the confounding event is exceptional — if it is unusual and rare — then it does not itself invalidate a theoretical generalization. It goes instead into a different class of phenomena, of exceptional cases, which are then examined to see what special circumstances might be creating them. These exceptional cases do not invalidate a theory unless they become numerous enough to comprise a social fact of their own.

Consider the case of trade unionism. It is, of course, true that many trade unionists are willing to incur great costs in their efforts to organize their coworkers. But as the organizers themselves realize, the reason their efforts are so arduous and so often fail is precisely because their psychology happens to be unlike that of their peers. While the activists are willing to overlook personal costs in pursuit of their moral passions, the bulk of their coworkers are not. If they were, there obviously would be no need to organize anyone. Workers would coalesce around their moral outrage, regardless of the costs. So, too, some capitalists might decide to accept lower profits owing to an ethical stance. But the very logic of the market tends to weed out such cases. Over time, through a combination of the filtering process and the demonstration effect, their peers quickly learn that the market is not a place for the soft-hearted. And so their moral stance remains an outlier, while the general fact becomes one of employer indifference or moral turpitude.

In sum, counterinstances cannot threaten theoretical generalization until they reach the status of a general phenomenon. But here an obvious proviso has to be observed — namely, the counterinstance has to be a genuine one. It can very well be that cases adduced as threats to the general theory turn out to be quite consistent with it. In many instances, what analysts take to be a departure from rational action is in fact an instance of that very sort. In other words, it is the analyst who is making the error, not the agent whom they are analyzing.

A prominent example of this is the case, routinely brought up in criticisms of materialist theory, of the working-class voter who seems to vote against their interests. How do we make sense of the fact that workers vote in large numbers for parties wedded to their enemies, like the Republican Party in the United States and conservative parties elsewhere? If workers are trying to pursue their material interests, why would they vote for a party that in fact harms those interests? Unlike the example of the ethical capitalist or the self-abnegating organizer, this is not an exceptional counterinstance. It is a legitimate social fact, occurring frequently.

I would suggest that this is not, in reality, a confounding case. Rather than an example of workers acting against their interests, it is an example of workers trying to pursue them. Two points are important here. First, to say that rational actors pursue their interests is not to say that they are always successful in this endeavor. This is a claim about their motivation, not about their success in pursuit of their interests. I can very well undertake an action because I believe it to be in my interest even as its effect is disappointing or runs counter to what I had intended. Such outcomes do not make me irrational; they just make me unsuccessful. However, if I continue to pursue the same action against clear evidence that its effect is not in my favor, I can be accused of irrationality. But that is another matter, and it has to be considered on its own merits. Before we make this latter judgment, we first have to assess whether the action was itself irrational.

In order to judge its rationality, let us return to the basic claim of the materialist stance: people pursue courses of action that they deem consistent with their interests. Now, to assess whether something is in my interests, I make a judgment as to what its effects will be on my well-being. This much we have established already. I will now introduce a further distinction in order to analyze the case of the voting worker. This is the distinction between judgments from direct experience and judgments from external information.

When trying to ascertain whether a course of action will be in my interests, I can sometimes rely on direct experience to render a conclusion. For example, there is a specific cluster of goals at the workplace that I can derive from my direct experience. I know I have certain basic physical and biological needs, like an adequate consumption bundle, a decent amount of sleep, and a reasonably healthy physical condition. From direct experience I know that there are certain arrangements at work that are favorable to these needs. So I have a sense of what a living wage will be, I have an idea of what length of workday will enable me to get enough sleep, and I know what a manageable pace of work is for my physical health.

It is very difficult to fool me about these issues. It would be hard to talk me into a lower wage being good for me or a brutal pace of work being better for my health. The fact that I can immediately test such recommendations against my direct experience makes it easier for me to reject them out of hand. And this is why workers tend to accept the deterioration of these conditions only under duress — under the threat of job loss or after a long labor dispute. In other words, it is hard for me to have a “false consciousness” on this range of issues.

But there is a second kind of information relevant to my interests that does not stem from my direct experience. This is information that comes from an external source — it might require some sort of expert analysis and a collating of different bits of knowledge, much of which I do not have direct access to. So I might understand from experience that I have to hold on to a job if I want to survive in a market economy or that I need higher wages to keep body and soul together. And I also know that government policy affects the availability of jobs. But I do not have direct and immediate knowledge about what sorts of policies best serve such an end. Is it better to have low or high interest rates? Is it better to have free trade or protectionism? While I know from direct experience that having a job is a good thing, I do not know what kinds of policies generate good jobs. There are many intervening elements in the causal chain that connects interest rates to job creation that I do not have the time or the training to understand. For this I have to rely on experts.

When judgments turn on external advice rather than direct experience, there is a much greater potential to be misled, even though I am trying to pursue my interests to the best of my ability. Take the example of medical care. I can know from direct experience that I am in pain. I also know that some sort of medical treatment is necessary to relieve that pain. But in order to know what sort of treatment is appropriate, I have to rely on doctors. Suppose a doctor gives me bad advice because he’s trying to make money for himself, or suppose he is constrained by insurance companies to only offer particular sorts of treatments. I listen to him, but I end up being worse off than I was before. It hardly seems appropriate to charge that I was not pursuing my interests or that I am not aware of my interests. It should be plain enough to see that I am doing so to the best of my ability, but the problem is that this requires information to which I do not have direct access, and I am therefore vulnerable to manipulation.

Voting is subject to the same sorts of manipulation. If it turns out that the experts on whom I rely are media outlets, political leaders, and community leaders that have interests of their own and benefit from misleading me, then it is very likely that, even though I am acting rationally and trying to defend my interests, I might end up giving my vote to somebody who promulgates policies that are suboptimal or even harmful to me. And in the United States, media and political parties are thoroughly captured by economic elites. The information they provide to citizens is overwhelmingly partisan, even though it is presented in a language designed to appear neutral and concerned. It should be no surprise that people end up voting for parties that do not cater to their interests when the information they receive is systematically biased.

The best description of this state of affairs is not that working-class voters are irrational but simply that they are misinformed. As I have argued, being misled or misinformed can, however, indicate irrationality if actors do not change their actions upon observing their effects. To go back to the example of health care, if it turns out that the course of action prescribed to me by my doctor only makes my condition worse, I would indeed be irrational if I continued to pursue it. We can apply the same standard for workers who vote conservative. Surely, after a few instances of making such a choice, we should expect them to alter their judgment.

This is true where a real connection between policy choices and detrimental outcomes can be discerned directly from experience. But if any such judgment has to rely on another round of expert analysis, the expectation that workers change their choices will be unrealistic. And the fact of the matter is that the causal chains that connect policy decisions to economic outcomes are not so evident, even to experts. It is something of a cliché that even though economics claims to be a science, it lacks anything approaching the consensus that one finds in the natural sciences.

It is therefore easy to concoct stories that obscure the connection between policies and their outcomes, since it is easy to find economists or policy experts making diametrically opposed arguments about them. It is a high bar to expect ordinary voters to make consistent judgments about the consequences of their voting choices when there is in fact a degree of indeterminacy between cause and effect, or when that connection requires time and expertise that ordinary voters do not have. Hence, we should not be surprised if they continue down a road that appears self-defeating.

The denigration of material considerations — their dismissal as a vulgar attachment to “things” against an evolved valuation of higher-order pursuits — is one of the most curious developments in Western Marxism since the 1960s. In his early and quite brave defense of materialism in the early ’70s, Sebastiano Timpanaro noted that the sophisticates of Marxist theory were already expressing discomfort at being associated with the doctrine. “Perhaps the sole characteristic common to virtually all contemporary varieties of Western Marxism,” he observed, “is their concern to defend themselves against the accusation of materialism.” He continued,

Gramscian or Togliattian Marxists, Hegelian-Existentialist Marxists, Neo-Positivizing Marxists, Freudian or Structuralist Marxists, despite the profound dissensions which otherwise divide them, are at one in rejecting all suspicion of collusion with “vulgar” or “mechanical” materialism; and they do so with such zeal as to cast out, together with mechanism or vulgarity, materialism tout court.

Timpanaro was a bit premature in his judgment. While the turn to culture was already evident in the ’70s, there was still a healthy and quite influential line of materialist theorizing that lasted at least another decade. But what seemed premature in 1970 was an undeniable fact by 2000. As labor movements and the Left weakened, and as the intelligentsia became ever more isolated from political engagement, the embrace of discourse and ideology at the expense of materialism evolved from one among many strains in radical analysis into virtual orthodoxy.

Challenging that orthodoxy is surely one of the most urgent tasks today on the Left. Toward this end, I have argued that, whatever else it entails, a materialist theory does not require conceiving of agents as being one-dimensional or cold, calculating utility machines. Materialism simply recognizes that the need to secure economic and physical well-being is the central precondition for the pursuit of any other goals. It does not always have to overwhelm other goals, but where they come into conflict, social agents can ignore it only at great cost. Therefore, while particularly committed individuals might choose to accept enormous hardships at the expense of their physical well-being, most people typically will not. They will be more likely to reject choices that call for such sacrifices as the intensity of those sacrifices increases, and they will accommodate themselves to their circumstances’ demands.

On this foundation, a theory of people’s material interests, which has been the source of Marxism’s success as a political theory, can be built. Because people are sensitive to their well-being, those social relations that directly affect its degree and its stability exert a particular influence on people’s choices. The class structure, more than any other social relation, supervenes on these aspects of actors’ considerations. It is no wonder, then, that Marxism, a theory organized around class analysis, has been materialism’s fiercest proponent.

Materialism allows for the fact that people are motivated by very many things. Another virtue of its approach to social agency is that it can explain not only how capitalism has spread across the world into so many different cultures but how it sustains their cultural heterogeneity. It is precisely because people find it possible to preserve those aspects of local culture that do not interfere with economic compulsions while they make adjustments to or reject those aspects that do interfere with them. It’s a practical choice. This gives us a theory of cultural change in addition to a theory of economic reproduction. People reflect on their values and norms and then reproduce only those that are appropriate for their situations, rejecting the ones that interfere with their economic goals and imperatives.

Finally, materialism not only provides a means for universal resistance to capital but a profoundly democratic approach to that resistance. The foundation for any democratic engagement is to treat other people with respect. And this is impossible if you assume that they suffer from cognitive deficiencies, are easily duped, or are simply the products of their culture. For people who do political organizing, it is absolutely essential to approach the task with the view that they are dealing with a conscious, reflexive constituency to whom they have to make a compelling case to resist their overlords in some particular way. And they have to assume people will accept a political strategy on rational grounds, not just through brainwashing or — as is so common among today’s leftists — shaming and cajoling.

These are all points that progressive intellectuals instinctively understood for the better part of the history of the Left. It is entirely predictable that as social theorizing became divorced from social organizing, the more implausible versions of cultural analysis took hold of critical intellectuals. And conversely, it is no surprise that during the decades that left intellectuals were immersed in class organizing, the assumption of materialism was never really questioned. The road back to sanity is no doubt a long one, but, however winding, it leads back to certain foundational elements in social theory. And there is none more important than materialism.