Where a passion is neither founded on false suppositions, nor chuses means insufficient for the end, the understanding can neither justify nor condemn it. ’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of my finger.

– David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature

Debates about materialist philosophy in Marxism tend to fracture into debates about collections of disparate topics in psychology, sociology, logic, epistemology, and philosophy of science. Jacobin Magazine has published Vivek Chibber’s new article “Materialism is Essential for Socialist Politics” and it serves as a useful introduction for anyone who wants to get a quick rundown of what people disagree about when they talk about materialism. Additionally, the wonderful folks at Cosmonaut published a video responding to it titled “Materialism and the Left & The Irrationalism of MAGA”—the contents of which were the primary motivation for me formulating the problems I have with Chibber’s article. Chibber, as usual, clearly states what he means when he says materialism (and the many of examples of what one could mean when they say they are a materialist). Chibber’s primary interest is the claim that “class action is foundationally motivated by material interests.”

Marxists, I think, will find little to disagree with there until we define the words “class” and “material interests.” One might be inclined to define class as “whatever tax bracket you belong to,” but a Marxists definition is a bit richer. According to Chibber, your class position is relative to the whole class structure of society. This is a “wider” notion than simply “how much money one has.” Chibber’s reflections on these concepts in his book The Class Matrix are quite helpful and clear, and I encourage anyone who agonizes over what economic classes “are” to give it a read.

Where things get a bit more controversial with this article is where Chibber begins to discuss “material interests” and “rationality.” Chibber is careful to distinguish himself from typical partisans of expected utility theory in philosophy and economics. Economic agents are not simply out to maximize their individual expected utility even if heaven should fall. Chibber rightly points out that the architecture of expected utility theory allows for “satisficing” accounts where “good enough” increases in utility are sufficient to satisfy the desires of economic agents. Indeed, Chibber paints a relatively uncontroversial picture of a “normal” person who maintains a lower bound below which their welfare should not drop, but also an upper-bound where additional gains in utility seem superfluous or egregious.

Where, then, could there be a problem? Chibber draws an unwarranted practical conclusion from the above picture of economic agents. I will not do what Chibber warns the reader against—I will not pedantically provide a counterexample to his picture of a rational agent with a clever thought experiment. The way the story is set up in Chibber’s article makes it clear that for him economic actors are, on average, making rational decisions given the information available to them. It should be noted that Chibber is right to say that to make a compelling case against this, we need to do something “other” than merely point out that generalizations have exceptions.

Chibber moves onto the subject that was on everyone’s mind when they opened the article. What do you do with people who act against their own interests? What do you do with irrational people? Conveniently, it seems like irrational people don’t exist, or, if they do, irrationality only occurs in places that aren’t politically salient. According to Chibber, once you take someone’s set of beliefs about the world, society, economics, politics, and what not for granted, the only real thing up for debate is whether that individual is making proper inferences with that information. In short, we can’t call someone irrational for being duped, misled, or manipulated.

So, let’s say you vote Trump because you believe he’s going to bring manufacturing jobs with pensions back to the United States by issuing tariffs and kicking immigrants out of the country. Well, you’d be doing so rationally if you sincerely believed those things would benefit you, of course. Alternatively, let’s say you vote Democrat because you believe “next time will be different,” or we need some breathing room to organize (perhaps you believe it's easier to organize under Democrats than Republicans). Again, I can’t scrutinize you for the beliefs you hold, I could only call you irrational if you make improper inferences with them.

The article is very detailed, but I think anyone familiar with Chibber’s work knows what the subtext is: ‘Stop being annoying woke-scolds, you have to meet people where they are at even if they are vicious racists. We won’t win elections without a coalition with Klan country.’ Of course, I would never endorse being annoying, and Chibber doesn’t endorse coalitions with racists. But it is worth asking, philosophically, where “rationality” begins and ends. What I think is implausible is the idea that the practical “ends” people adopt and the beliefs that they hold, for whatever reason, are beyond the pale of criticism in political and organizing settings. There are good philosophical reasons for this that don’t reduce to “micro-aggressions make people uncomfortable,” they have to do with the philosophical problems associated with his implicit theory of motivation and rationality.

There are a couple of similar ways of stating the theory of practical rationality that is assumed by Chibber (or at least what he seems to be committed to). One is that it's sufficient to be practically rational if one’s beliefs and desires are all consistent. It doesn’t matter what you want per se, just that you aren’t contradicting yourself. The requirement is mere coherence. If a subset of workers we need to court to win an election or organize effectively think that Jews control the media, that immigrants need to be deported, that cops aren’t harsh enough with criminals, and that raising the marginal tax rate on the wealthy stifles innovation—who are we to criticize them for pursuing their interests (not that anyone who believes these things would entertain a labor organizer for a second)?

Of course, I do not mean to attribute the caricature above to Chibber. I don’t think he actually believes this. However, I think if he wants to say that in most or even average instances, everyone is rationally pursuing their interests, then I think he is committed to believing something like this. Why bother going crazy over “the Cultural Turn”? The Cultural Turn folks in essence argued that despite having an interest in organizing, countervailing cultural forces might make you act against those interests. Albeit, I think they weren’t very rigorous philosophically, nor did they provide much empirical support for any of these claims, but the idea rests on a solid intuition. If I raise you on a steady diet of racism and misogyny, you might identify yourself with people who perpetuate it. There is evidence for that claim, it just doesn’t come from Critical Theory.

Chibber is saying that the present issue is that people deny the fundamental fact that people are just rationally pursuing their economic interests when they make political decisions about who to vote for, which organizations to join, etc. I don’t actually think anyone denies this. I think what people deny is that it is “rational” to hold the moral and political ends that MAGA-types and liberals do.

There is a certain amount of special pleading Chibber is doing for these folks. It's almost as if the attitude is, ‘these poor workers can’t be held epistemically or morally responsible for all the Fox News or MSNBC they watch, but it is absolutely wrong for socialists to get worked up about bigotry.’ Of course, I don’t think Chibber thinks this either. But it's hard not to come away with the idea that these individuals are just the passive recipients of right-wing propaganda machines, and that socialists get held to a different standard (maybe because Chibber *does* secretly think the MAGA types are too stupid to be held responsible for what they think). Maybe in a certain sense they are, but this gets to the point I really want to make. It makes no sense strategically or practically to ask people not to discriminate between ends and not to make judgments about the moral compasses of their political interlocutors. It does make sense to ask people not to be annoying about it, but that is different from forcing us all to admit that there’s nothing irrational about all of it.

It is wrong, and irrational, to prefer privatized health insurance systems rather than nationalized, public schemes. It is wrong, and irrational, to put a cop on every street corner. It is wrong, and irrational, to support foreign policy which facilitates genocide and mass death. If we are committed socialists, we must admit that our moral convictions are founded on more than mere sentiment, and that the pursuit of our interests is a more intellectually sophisticated process than deciding whether to cancel my Netflix subscription. Some imperatives that we set for ourselves are categorical. They apply no matter what we want or what’s in our individual interest. Socialists do have a hard task ahead of them—making the socialist project appealing enough to people so they renounce their hatreds and prejudices is a harder task than asking people to resign themselves to them. How do we, as materialists, provide an account of pervasive irrationality? How do you create moral people without moralizing? I don’t have an answer, but Chibber doesn’t think there’s a question.

-Paul Wolf