The Transformation page, admirably edited by Michael Edwards for the impressive openDemocracy website, kindly published my journalistic effort to promote an idea — I hesitate to call it a philosophy — that came to me while writing the concluding chapters of the book on Big Flame that I’m writing 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 unit of society.
If you want to read a longer and more academic version of this argument, here’s an extract from Chapter 10 of the book that will hopefully come out next year: Max Farrar & Kevin McDonnell, Big Flame: Rethinking Radical Politics, London: Merlin Press (forthcoming) Sensuous materialism from BF book
