"Look here, brother
Who you jivin' with that cosmic debris?"
-Frank Zappa

One of the benefits of agreeing on materialism as a philosophy is that it saves us the trouble of having to argue about bullshit. When we come to a common understanding that the world exists independently of our consciousness of it and that we are capable of attaining an approximate yet nonetheless objective knowledge of that world through the efforts of our scientific and intellectual labor, there is less room to appeal to the supernatural and/or theological in political discourse. Truth is something that is, in principle, accessible to anyone. We are all discussing the same reality, governed by the same laws that are ultimately discernible to us, and we can ultimately test our claims against the claims made by others in a universally legible way.

This is the appeal of scientific socialism—not some kind of “renewed expression of bourgeois authority” as claimed in a rather strange letter by Rosa Riposto that responds to an article in Jacobin by Megan Day (that actually happens to cite an excellent Cosmonaut article covering similar ground). Day’s article is mostly unobjectionable, if not beyond criticism. A narrative is presented where early utopian socialist flirtation with spirituality and the occult is depicted as a historical curiosity that is corrected by the secularizing force of Marxism’s materialist philosophy, which gave a scientific and rational grounding for socialist politics and allowed the evacuation of irrational mystics as the leaders of different trends in the movement. Now the mystics all belong to the right, hawking their racialist eschatologies and obscurantist vitalist health fads. Perhaps Day is a bit too optimistic in a linear progression towards reason when the Left today isn’t quite so free from its own irrationalism, and social regression in society at large seems to be the norm. Yet Riposto goes as far as to accuse Day of having the tenacity to “deny a tradition of occultism” which apparently constitutes “a denial of historical materialism. It presents political history as a choice between ideological doors.”

How Day denies the tradition of occultism is unclear; her article documents its close connection with the socialist movement. Mentioned is Victoria Woodhull, the spiritual medium and suffragette who led a chapter of the US section of International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), much to Karl Marx’s chagrin. This seeming oddity is connected to a deeper history, going back to the French Saint-Simonians, whose interest in the occult is tied to the romantic character of their anti-capitalist critique. The Utopian socialist critique of capitalism, inspired by the “coldness” and “alienation” of a commercial modernity that pierced all social relations and desacralized all, would naturally give way to the modern occult movement in its quest to reenchant the world. Hence, we have foundational texts of modern occultism written by utopian socialist figures like Alphonse-Louis Constant, whose writings under the pen name Éliphas Lévi were a major influence on “The Beast” Aleister Crowley himself. It is perhaps not coincidental that Constant’s version of socialism supported Napoleon III and the establishment of an autocratic priest caste influenced by the writings of archreactionary Joseph de Maistre; occult knowledge can take you to strange places, especially in politics.

While this narrative of intellectual genealogy is reasonable enough, I would like to offer a sketch of my own understanding of why occultism is no longer the norm in socialist organizations. Hopefully, it will not find itself guilty of the charge of presenting history as merely a series of “choices between ideological doors”. To begin, one must understand that the early utopian period of the socialist movement was primarily organized in sectarian groups around charismatic intellectuals who professed various doctrines of social transformation: Babouvists, Paineites, Owenites, Fourierists, Saint-Simonians, Proudhonists, etc. Arguably, it was this sectarian form of organization around a single charismatic leader that defined the nature of utopian socialism more than any particular ideological tendency. And it is this essentially authoritarian form of organization that lends itself to occultism.

After all, occult knowledge is accessed through the ecstasy of ritual and personal revelation, as it is essentially based on an “aristocratic epistemology” in which only a select few can have access. Those of us unlucky (or perhaps undisciplined enough) to have a revelatory mystical experience will have to rely on the experiences of those who have—we will have to put our trust in the charismatic leader who is either lucky (or perhaps disciplined enough) to have had the experience. It is not hard to see the authoritarian and, therefore, anti-democratic implications of this. It is also not hard to see why occultism would lend itself to a socialist culture that not only saw itself reacting to the alienation of an oncoming capitalist modernity, but also one dominated by sectarian groups united around a charismatic leader.

The rise of Chartism and the organized interventions of Marx and Engels would change this. Arising as a movement from the tradition of organized political parties in the English bourgeois revolution, Chartism was organized around a set of democratic demands for universal suffrage—the People’s Charter. This movement arose in the period of utopian socialism and was, according to Engels years later, “the first national working class movement.” Rather than looking to the esoteric forces of the occult or forming communal settlements, Marx and Engels looked to this entry of the working masses into mass democratic politics as the basis for socialism. Instead of forming a sectarian organization around their teachings, Marx and Engels would instead make the argument that the Communists should become an organized wing in movements like Chartism.^[1]

It was in the context of this development of mass democratic working-class politics that the transition from the occult fixations of the utopian sectarians to the scientific materialism of Marx and Engels makes sense. The connection between democratic and socialist movements and secularism, atheism, and materialism is not some arbitrary incident of history. The possibility of mass democratic politics is premised on the notion that, in principle, all individuals can legibly participate and contest knowledge claims by accessing the same truths and eventually coming to an agreement on them. Scientific socialism was socialism for an age of democratic mass politics because it aimed to base socialism in the type of knowledge claims that could be collectively and transparently assessed, reasoned with, and potentially verified with the experimentation of social practice. A socialism based on occult visions and esoteric knowledge available only to a charismatic leader or through the ecstasy of mystical experience would either be inscrutable or lend itself to authoritarian politics.

Yet socialism doesn’t seem so scientific today, argues Riposto. Rather than exorcising its demons as Day claims we have (citing the exceptions of New Left cults like Jonestown and lingering interest in astrology), the Left is still haunted by its ghosts: “US socialists seem quite content to orient themselves around messianic figures who will deliver them from capitalism,” says Risposto, “the ritualistic fashion in which they 'do the work,' unceasing, and await 'socialism in our lifetime' belies the idea that they are part of a scientific process.” Fair enough. The problems of the sect-form, so prone to the utopian socialism occultism, documented by Day, have not gone away, despite the rise of organizations like the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA). Today, sectarian organizations like the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) hold revisionist lines on the Big Bang theory, while revisionist history around a supposed ancient civilization of Tartaria is popular in the Stalinist American Communist Party (ACP). Scientific socialism is not in great shape, at least in the United States, where most socialists are primarily guided by the slogans they inherit from infographics, tweets, and streamers.

Yet what should our response to the irrationalist and unscientific tendencies in the modern left be? For Marx, Engels, and their followers, it was to develop and propagate a deeper understanding of the inner workings of society in dialogue amongst themselves as Marxists as well as with the scholars of “mainstream” or bourgeois society. Furthermore, it was to propagandize a message of enlightenment and social progress through class struggle by means of building a mass party-movement. It is not clear what Riposto’s is, beyond urging that we cannot “cede the occult to the right” in an age when mass fascist irrationalism runs rampant on social media. Perhaps it is that we can find rational kernels of truths within the reactionary sludge that floods our communications networks and address them, as suggested in the citation of Erica Lagalisse’s Occult Features of Anarchism, in which Lagalisse claims conspiracy theories about the victims of school shootings being crisis actors, while technically not accurate, nonetheless are correct in their suspicion that “the professional class is trying to kill them.” But the professional class is not trying to kill them and the answer to the interest in conspiracy theory among the subaltern is the scientific investigation of ruling class conspiracies, like any other subject of history. Lagalisse’s book argues that we should engage with those derided as “conspiracy theorists” rather than dismiss and “cancel” them for whatever backwards views they may have, which is not something I disagree with at all. Yet how we engage is important: do we search for esoteric truth in the fields of obvious bullshit like reading tea leaves in the hopes that they can be mobilized around some kind of mythical understanding of their existing conditions? Or do we seek to demystify and de-esotericize, to wipe away the bullshit and confusion and come as close to a clear understanding of their existing conditions as possible?

This is where we are presented with “choices between ideological doors” and where I think a philosophical commitment to materialism as opposed to various anti-realisms and idealisms matters. A socialist with a firm commitment to materialism and epistemological realism will not play with the idea of using myths about how “the professional class is out to kill you” to mobilize believers in Sandy Hook conspiracy theories without being incredibly cynical. The ideological choice of materialism—that there is no supernatural telos guiding nature, that nothing exists but matter in motion, that there is nothing about reality that is in principle incomprehensible to human knowledge—certainly forecloses the road of flirtation with the occult as a serious source of human understanding. Yet what we gain in its place is a political culture where, if materialist philosophy is at least hegemonic, we are at least more serious about our standards in what we believe, more rigorous in our thinking about strategy and our visions for social transformation, and less prone to demagoguery.

-Donald Parkinson

1. I owe much of this particular argument to Mike Macnair. See: Mike Macnair, “Programme: Lessons of Erfurt,” Weekly Worker, September 9, 2013, https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/976/programme-lessons-of-erfurt/.

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