The above link goes to the Transformation page, edited by Michael Edwards for the impressive openDemocracy website. It’s my journalistic effort to promote an idea I’ve had for promoting a version of Marxism which has, I think, been deeply buried. It came to me in the late 2010s while writing the concluding chapters of the book on Big Flame that I’m producing with Keven McDonnell.
I call it ‘sensuous materialism’. At first I called it ’emotional materialism’ but I thought people would laugh (overtones of excessively excited leftists crying over the class struggle?). I took ‘sensuous’ from Karl Marx’s early philosophical writing where he is breaking with idealism and positing everyday human activity — as humans everywhere make their material and social world — as the fundamental building block of society.
If you want to read a longer and more academic version of this argument, here’s an extract from what was intended as a chapter in the book this book: Max Farrar & Kevin McDonnell, Big Flame — New Movements, New Politics London: Merlin Press (2024). The original manuscript of this book was deemed far too long, so that chapter was dropped. This link provides my initial advocacy of an approach to understanding the contemporary world that I’m calling ‘sensuous materialism’. Max Farrar Sensuous Materialism (short early draft)
