A brief intervention on Beauchamp and Chibber's "materialism" debate

Beauchamp is confused as usual, but this time it isn't entirely his fault.

Vox’s Zack Beauchamp is coming for the economic materialists once again. You may have noticed that he’s been doing for years, particularly if you read this blog, since I end up responding almost every time. This round, I think, is unusually silly — but Zack isn’t the only person I have a response for.

NYU sociologist Vivek Chibber recently published an explainer in Jacobin titled Materialism Is Essential for Socialist Politics. I agree with Chibber about that broad point, but as you may have gathered from my recent series on The History of Materialism (I,II,III,IV) we do seem to have a basic disagreement over terminology. Whether this amounts to a broader theoretical disagreement is unclear.

Materialism is actually correct

Zack’s latest critique of materialism is relatively new, though I’ve seen it percolating in liberal circles for about two months now. It goes like this: