“The progressive relinquishment of economic or political structures as the central concerns of theory was accompanied by a basic shift in the whole centre of gravity of European Marxism towards philosophy.” (Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism).
When the other stuff doesn’t work, people turn to ideas.
What’s the “other stuff”? The “other stuff” is trying to change the material conditions. Ideas are comfortable, you don’t have to do anything, you just have to say things. There are two ways to change the material conditions. The first one is easier. It’s to “build or sell something people want”1, in other words, it’s to become rich. You change things, you contribute to modifying the sum of goods and services in circulation in the world. It’s still very hard, but it’s easier than the second way. The second way to change the material conditions is to make the world more just. When that happens, it’s largely unplanned, a coincidence. The world got richer, people got out of poverty. Sometimes it’s planned: Gandhi, Mandela. It’s easy to dream up a utopia, which then obviously fails. You become disillusioned, you turn to ideas (which I guess is what happened to Lukács, Marcuse, Sartre…). The same thing can happen to anyone who tries to become rich by selling a product or service. They fail, become disillusioned, take refuge in ideas, rationalizations. The older I get, the less I believe it’s possible to change material conditions on a broad scale. You can change your own circumstances, but altering material conditions in general seems impossible.
Footnotes
Some people build stuff people don’t really want but then use crafty tricks to make it look like they want it. Some people also don’t build anything, but they partake in some way in the system; it looks, in a way, like they build or sell something. You get the idea.↩︎