Materialism against Materialism:Taking up Marx’s Break with Reductionism

This text proposes to overcome the wide-spread error of dismissing Marx’s critique of all materialism before him as being reductionist and therefore philosophically and scientifically unacceptable. Instead, it attempts to create a non-reductionist understanding and practice of materialism in philosophy — especially by referring to key contributions by Althusser and Bhaskar and by criticizing the ‘materialist illusion’ of the early Marx — thereby articulating another key element of the ‘finite Marxism’ defended by the author. Frieder Otto Wolf, ‘Materialism against Materialism: Taking up Marx’s Break with Reductionism’, in Materialism and Politics, ed. by Bernardo Bianchi, Emilie Filion-Donato, Marlon Miguel, and Ayşe Yuva, Cultural Inquiry, 20 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2021), pp. 277–92