The Pivot to Materialism

Stalinist Imperatives

In Leninist-Stalinist and Liberal ideology, the general structure of objectivisation and objectification has been identified. Thus far in both cases the analysis has been restricted to a critique of ideology, but it is possible to cross over into the materialist domain by identifying the roots and ends of these ideologies - interpreting them as teleological, or as material necessities defined by material interests.

The need for a fundamental ontology grows with the consequences of political decision-making. If a decision will be highly consequential, a more powerful ideological imperative is required to justify it.

Marx himself never had to personally make a life-or-death decision which would have direct consequences over an entire country. While his writings were powerful, the greatest immediate risk they bore was potential rejection by another philosopher or a workers' organisation.

Emerging from the chaos of the First World War and the Russian Civil War, the decisions made by Soviet leadership would be the difference between life-and-death for millions, and to do nothing would mean the end of the state itself. In this environment, where the stakes are absolute, decision making requires faith in an absolute truth. It should be unsurprising that a leader with Stalin's belief in 'absolute scientific truth' would be the most successful - there was no room for moral or ontological relativism.

The consequence of Stalinist epistemology is that dissent cannot be a simple difference in opinion or priority - it is opposition to truth itself; ontological evil. Someone who disagrees with the objective truth can only be a sinister traitor acting against the absolute interests of the rest of society. This logic justifies repression of the arts and sciences, it justifies purges and mass executions, and the most brutal punishments for dissenters. There can be only one party when there is one absolute truth, and its statements must be absolutely correct.

This can be easily found in Stalin's personal justifications for his more brutal decisions. When describing the left and right opposition, for example:

"For instance, the Rights say, 'It is a mistake to build Dnieprostry', while the 'Lefts' on the contrary say 'What is the good of one Dniesprostoy? Give us a Dniesprostoy every year', it must be admitted that there is some difference between them. Yet either way they would end up with no Dniesprostoy ... If the Trotskyite deviation is a 'Left' deviation, does that not mean the 'Lefts' are more Left than Leninists? No, it does not. Leninism is the most Left tendency in the working-class movement. The 'Lefts' are in fact Rights who mask their Rightness with Left Phrases. 

- Speech Delivered at the Plenum of the C.P.S.U.(B.), 1928 

The message is clear: There is a single truth, to go to the 'left' or 'right' of is simple deviationism, and is objectively incorrect. There was one absolute reality - the reality given by the 'most advanced section of the working class,' the vanguard of party sages.

Perhaps this goes some way towards explaining the absolute collapse of the 1980s-1990s. When the economy faltered in the 80s, it was not just a simple mistake which could be corrected by economic reformulation, it was a breach in reality itself - a crack in the very source of absolute truth on which Soviet rationality was built. When the state collapsed in 1991, there was nothing to take its place because there had been no opposition. There was no alternative model for the Soviet system because the basis of reality collapsed, revealing nothing but an absurd nightmare - the ideological vacuum which first produced mass poverty, corruption, and drug addiction, and later Putinist eclecticism, religious fundamentalism, and ultra-nationalism.

Neoliberal Imperatives

Neoliberal imperatives take on a similar 'monopoly over truth' when taken to their extremes. As discussed, liberal ideologues tend to endow markets with a truth greater than human reason. The material source of this ontology takes on a different, more empirical form than the Stalinist ontology.

The neoliberal philosophy began to dominate politics in the Anglosphere in the 1980s, after a period of economic turmoil; a profitability crisis and crippling strike actions in the energy sector. To preserve capitalism, Reagan, Thatcher, and the early neoliberals had to dramatically shift their countries' economic structures, and they required a radical new philosophy to justify these changes.

By framing market forces as endowed with a morality beyond human intuition, Hayek and the neoliberals justify economic decisions with devastating consequences. Market logic had to have a moral force greater than human rationality because the consequences of market policies were impossible to rationalise.

If the market is the supreme arbiter of moral good, and investment is the ultimate expression of market satisfaction, then courting international capital becomes the ultimate imperative in politics. Privitisations are necessary, regardless of how many millions of lives they ruin, as long as they allow taxes to be lowered and make the country more appealing to investors.

Within the liberal framework, there is one correct answer. This is why Thatcher, whose human rights abuses are too numerous to name, governed for a decade and is remembered relatively fondly whereas Truss, who spooked the market, was immediately removed from power and is regarded as a joke. This is also why every liberal democracy has been moving towards political monopolisation by two or three almost-identical parties. In politics market logic is used to justify itself. Submitting to the market is good because it delivers growth, growth is good because it is the sign of a healthy market. Alternative policies such as Corbyn's, which would undoubtedly damage the market and perhaps result in degrowth, are unthinkable because they use an alternative moral framework. They rationally prioritise human wellbeing over growth and therefore go against nature, against reality itself.

Objectification in Politics

In both Stalinist and Liberal ontology, the final product is the objectified human being. For a Stalinist, the existence of scientific truth as an absolute removes the possibility of human decisions, producing an objectively correct option in every scenario. For a liberal, the same mechanism is enforced by the market, which aggregates subjective desires, quantifies them, and moralises them.

In the Stalinist case, adherence to 'scientific morality' is enforced socially and by the state - institutions such as the NKVD and movements such as the purges punish noncompliance with imprisonment or death.

For the liberals, the same enforcement takes place in different ways for different strata. On the ground, individuals are forced to adhere to market objectives by the vicissitudes of the employment market. Noncompliance is punished by blacklisting, eviction, and starvation - death in any other words. Debts and commitments such as mortgages, student loans, and the need to support a family augment this compulsive objectification.

The structures of liberal institutions are also built to objectify individuals and minimise the space for individual subjectivity. A CEO is objectified by their fiduciary obligation to produce a profit, a politician by their lobbyists and electorate, and even a bourgeois investor is required to always take the most ruthless path to financial returns, or else lose their wealth.