Why was Marx's Materialism ‘Dialectical’ ?

Reid Kotlas

The School of Materialist Research is proud to present its (free) promotional seminars for the month of June, 2021. Reid Kotlas will present his lecture:  “Why was Marx’s Materialism ‘Dialectical’?” on June 15, 2021 at 18:30 CET, as part of a cluster entitled “Strange(r) Dialectics.” This seminar will show how despite the fact that Karl Marx's thought is widely understood to be 'materialist', and as such, a critical rejection of idealism, what is less understood, if recognized at all, is that Marx took up materialism, as he later did socialism and communism, as a symptomatic phenomenon of his historical moment, submitting it to an immanent dialectical critique: grasping the self-contradiction of this phenomenon as indicative of a crisis of society, and hence, of the possibility and necessity of social transformation. This presentation will clarify the sense in which Marx was a critic of materialism, grasping it dialectically as an ideological reflection and hence necessary form of appearance of an ongoing crisis of historical change.

Reid Kotlas is an independent historian of socialism and founding editor of The Socialist Legacy (socialistlegacy.com), an anthology of literature from the historical socialist movement. He is also a member of the Platypus Affiliated Society. His publications can be found at: reidkane.net.

The School of Materialist Research (SMR) is an informal graduate and post-doc level program that offers seminars and workshops that address the materialisms running through contemporary science, philosophy, art, mathematics, design, architecture, and politics. SMR is an international platform, founded by the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje, Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics at TU Wien and the Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy Eindhoven that functions as a global online school combining education, research, and mentorship to advance academic study at the intersection the Social Sciences and Humanities and the STEM sciences. Two more institutions from Europe are expected to join the platform in the upcoming months. The Spring and Summer Sessions are offered for free and open to the public serving as promotional events that illustrate the programmatic commitment and style of work offered by the School for Materialist Research. Some of the confirmed speakers in the Spring/Summer series of seminars include: Paul Cockshott, Greg Michaelson, Ray Brassier, Anne-Françoise Schmid, John Ó Maoilearca, Giuseppe Longo, Agon Hamza, Adam Nocek, Katerina Kolozova, Vera Buhlman, Iris van der Tuin and many many more.