Social:Political materialism

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Short description: Concept in Spanish-language political philosophy

Political materialism (Spanish: materialismo político) is an expression used in Spanish-language political philosophy for any conception that regards the material contents on which a political society is built (territorial, economic and social) as essential rather than merely accidental. In the terminology systematised by the philosopher Gustavo Bueno, it is opposed to political formalism, which would reduce politics to formal relations of power.[1][2] Since 2020 the term has also, and mainly, designated the theoretical proposal of the Spanish political scientist Santiago Armesilla, who uses it for a combination of Karl Marx's historical materialism and Bueno's philosophical materialism, known by the abbreviation "MatPol".[3][4]

History of the term

The expression is documented in Spanish political polemics from the 1830s, in texts from 1833 and 1834, although its coinage cannot be attributed to any particular author. During the 19th century it was used in a non-technical sense, in contexts of ideological controversy.[1]

Its systematic theoretical development came much later and is due to Gustavo Bueno, who made it a category within philosophical materialism.[1] From 2020 onwards, Santiago Armesilla took up the term to name a system that seeks to fuse Marxism with Bueno's philosophy, and it is in this second sense that the expression has spread in the Spanish-speaking world, mainly through books, courses and audiovisual media.[3][5]

Gustavo Bueno's formulation

Political formalism and political materialism

Bueno sets out the distinction between political formalism and political materialism in his Primer ensayo sobre las categorías de las «ciencias políticas» (First essay on the categories of the "political sciences", 1991), whose ontological part devotes a specific section to the question.[2]

In that work he defines political materialism as any conception that holds that the body surrounding the nucleus of a political society is essential to it.[1] For Bueno, the nucleus of a political society is the power that organises it and holds it together, but that nucleus never exists in a vacuum: it is always surrounded by a body made up of a territory, a population, resources and relations with other societies. Formalist conceptions treat that body as a mere external support, interchangeable or accidental; political materialism, by contrast, holds that the body is part of the very essence of the political society and that power cannot be understood apart from it.[2]

The layers of the body of a political society

The distinction rests on Bueno's analysis of the body of political societies, which he structures through a theory of layers. The conjunctive layer comprises the relations among the individuals and groups that make up the society; the basal layer comprises the territory and resources on which that society lives and which it transforms through labour; and the cortical layer comprises the relations of the society with other political societies and with its environment, including defence against them.[2]

The axes of anthropological space

This theory of layers corresponds to the three axes of anthropological space that Bueno uses throughout his work: the circular axis, concerning the relations of human beings among themselves; the radial axis, concerning their relations with nature and things; and the angular axis, concerning their relations with other beings endowed with will (animals and, in a broad sense, other societies acting as subjects).[2]

From this perspective, a formalist conception of politics would attend only to the circular axis, that is, to relations of power and to legal or institutional forms, whereas a materialist conception treats the contents of the radial and angular axes as constitutive.[1]

Branches and layers of power

In the same essay Bueno classifies political power into nine branches, three for each layer. The conjunctive layer has the executive, legislative and judicial powers, that is, the classical separation of powers of the liberal tradition; the basal layer has the managerial, planning and redistributive powers, which deal with the production and distribution of resources; and the cortical layer has the military, federative and diplomatic powers, which deal with relations with other societies.[2] With this classification Bueno seeks to show that the liberal theory of the separation of powers, by confining itself to the conjunctive layer, is an example of political formalism, since it leaves out the economy and international relations, which are equally constitutive of the state.[2]

Natural society and political society

Bueno's political materialism also rests on his distinction between natural societies and political societies. The former are human groups organised by kinship, neighbourhood or custom, which do not need a separate power in order to survive; the latter appear when a power emerges above those societies that is able to coordinate different groups, control a territory and defend it against others. For Bueno, political society does not arise from a contract between individuals, as contractualist theories maintain, but from the need to organise production, the distribution of resources and the defence of a specific territory, so that its origin is material rather than formal.[2] The state would be the most developed form of political society, and its existence is always tied to the appropriation of a territory against other societies, which explains why the angular axis and the cortical layer carry a weight in this theory that they lack in formalist conceptions.[1]

Eutaxia

Another central concept in Bueno's political theory is eutaxia, a term he uses for the good order of a political society, measured by its capacity to endure over time. Against theories that judge a regime by its formal legitimacy (for example, by whether it is democratic), Bueno proposes to evaluate political societies by their eutaxia, that is, by their ability to preserve and reproduce their own body.[2]

Generating and predatory empires

In España frente a Europa (Spain versus Europe, 1999), Bueno applies these concepts to history and distinguishes between predatory empires, which exploit the territories and peoples they dominate without raising them to their own level, and generating empires, which reproduce their own institutions in the incorporated territories and end up generating new political societies. Bueno places the Roman Empire and the Hispanic Monarchy in the second group.[6] This distinction, which takes into account the territory, population and production of the dominated peoples, is an application of political materialism to the philosophy of history.

The generations of the left

In El mito de la izquierda (The myth of the left, 2003), Bueno argues that there is no single "left", but several generations of lefts defined by their relation to the state and by the way they transform its basal layer: the Jacobin, liberal, anarchist, social-democratic, communist and Asian lefts, to which he adds the "undefined" or "extravagant" lefts that do not aim to take over the state.[7] This classification has been taken up by the authors of political materialism to criticise the idea of a "unity of the left".[8]

Santiago Armesilla's political materialism

Origin

Santiago Armesilla (Madrid, 1982), a political scientist with a doctorate in economics from the Complutense University of Madrid, presented political materialism in his book La vuelta del revés de Marx. El materialismo político entretejiendo a Karl Marx y Gustavo Bueno (Turning Marx inside out: political materialism interweaving Karl Marx and Gustavo Bueno, 2020).[3][5] The title alludes to the afterword to the second edition of the first volume of Capital (1873), in which Marx explained that he had set right side up the dialectic of Hegel, which in Hegel was standing on its head.[3]

"Turning Marx inside out"

Gustavo Bueno had in turn proposed to turn Marx inside out on several fundamental points: the idea of matter, dialectics itself, the relation between base and superstructure, the relation between the state and class struggle, the idea of alienation, and the ideas of socialism and communism. According to Bueno, this would make it possible to purge Marxism of the idealism it still carried.[3]

Armesilla argues that if Marx is read through Bueno, comparing the texts of both authors, it turns out that the inversion Bueno proposes had already been carried out, in its fundamental aspects, in the texts of Marx, Engels and other Marxist authors, and that Bueno's contribution consisted mainly in applying his own terminology to ideas already present in them. On this basis Armesilla proposes a "nuclear fusion" of the two systems, historical materialism and philosophical materialism, which would recover the revolutionary core of Marx: that fusion is political materialism.[3]

Aim

According to Mariano Utín, co-author with Armesilla of the textbook for the first course on the subject, the aim of political materialism is a material, plural, concrete, dialectical, historical and political understanding of reality, with a view to its political implementation in a strong sense in a nation-state of civilisational scale, or "generating empire", in order to transform reality radically on the largest possible scale.[4]

Principles

Texts of political materialism summarise its ontological position in the formula "all that is real is material and all that is material is real", and present Marx and Bueno as the two pillars of the system: Marx would provide the critique of political economy and of capitalism, and Bueno a philosophical system able to offer a general map of reality.[9] From philosophical materialism, political materialism inherits ontological pluralism (reality is not reduced to a single kind of matter), the theory of the three kinds of materiality, the theory of categorial closure concerning the sciences, and the distinction between layers and branches of power. From historical materialism it inherits the critique of political economy, the analysis of the commodity and of wage labour, and the goal of abolishing the latter.[3][9]

Unlike classical Marxism–Leninism, political materialism dispenses with dialectical materialism as a general ontology, holding, with Bueno, that its monism is an idealist inheritance. This point has drawn the most criticism from orthodox Marxists.[10]

Political economy

Before formulating political materialism, Armesilla had devoted several books to the critique of conventional economics: Crítica de la microeconomía política (2014), Trabajo, utilidad y verdad (2015), La economía en 100 preguntas (2018) and Breve historia de la economía (2019).[11] In them he discusses the foundations of neoclassical microeconomics from the tradition of Marx's critique of political economy, and this line of work passes into political materialism as one of its components: the economy is not treated as a science separate from politics but as the content of the basal layer of political societies, that is, the part of the life of the state concerned with producing and distributing resources.[3][2]

From this point of view, political materialism holds that capitalism cannot be analysed solely as a system of class relations within one country, because national economies depend on their position relative to other states, on their access to raw materials and markets, and on their military and diplomatic capacity. This is why its authors attach so much importance to the scale of states and to the formation of large blocs.[12][13]

Nation, state and empire

One of the distinctive features of political materialism is the importance it gives to the political nation and the state. Armesilla distinguishes between the nation in the political sense, historically constituted as the subject of sovereignty, and the nation in the ethnic sense, and criticises movements that use the latter to try to break up existing states.[14] In Lenin. El gran error que hizo caer la URSS. Una crítica marxista al derecho de autodeterminación (2024) he argues that the right to self-determination is a legal fiction and an ideological strategy used to legitimise geopolitical intervention, and that its recognition in the Soviet constitution contributed to the dissolution of the USSR.[15]

At the geopolitical level, Armesilla proposes organising the world into "continental platforms", large states or unions of states able to compete with continental-scale powers, an idea he had already formulated in 2008 in the journal El Catoblepas.[12] For the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world, that platform would be Iberofonía, an intercontinental union of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries, which Armesilla develops in Iberofonía y socialismo (2022) and presents as an alternative to Anglo-Germanic capitalism.[13][5]

The lefts and the "red-brown" label

Following Bueno's classification in El mito de la izquierda, Armesilla rejects the idea of a single left and, with it, the "red-brown" (rojipardo) label applied to him by his critics, which he considers a product of the myth of left unity.[8] The newspaper ABC has placed Armesilla among communists who are conservative in defending the nation and the family but radically anti-capitalist in economic matters, and reported the view of publisher Miguel Riera, director of El Viejo Topo, that the label means very little.[16] El Periódico placed the controversy within the so-called "culture war" on the far left in Spain.[17]

Applications

Authors of political materialism have applied it to philosophy, geopolitics, history, economics, anthropology and cultural criticism. Besides his books, Armesilla disseminates these analyses on a YouTube channel bearing his name, where he has interviewed authors such as Pedro Baños, Marcelo Gullo, Juan Manuel de Prada and Diego Ruzzarín.[11] In the field of history, political materialism has been used to criticise the Spanish Black Legend, which Armesilla regards as an ideology aimed at fragmenting Spain and Spanish America.[5]

Teaching and dissemination

The Beatriz Galindo – La Latina Institute, a research and teaching centre directed by Armesilla, develops political materialism as a theoretical framework for research in the humanities and social sciences and offers an expert course on the subject.[11][18] The textbook for the first course is Conceptos fundamentales del materialismo político (2024), written by Armesilla and Mariano Utín.[11]

Politically, political materialism is the doctrinal basis of Vanguardia Española, the Spanish section of the Vanguardias Iberófonas, a movement present in several Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking nations, of which Armesilla is secretary-general.[11][19]

The spread of political materialism has relied largely on the internet. Armesilla's YouTube channel, where he applies the theory to current politics, history and geopolitics, had more than 317,000 subscribers according to his publishers' biographical note.[11] In addition to thematic videos, the channel broadcasts live programmes with guests of different ideological backgrounds, which has helped make the term known outside the academic circles linked to philosophical materialism. Armesilla has also appeared on national television programmes and published articles in the press and in academic journals.[11]

Armesilla's works related to political materialism include El marxismo y la cuestión nacional española (2017), La vuelta del revés de Marx (2020), Iberofonía y socialismo (2022), Conceptos fundamentales del materialismo político (2024), Lenin. El gran error que hizo caer la URSS (2024) and Escritos de juventud (2005-2016) (2025), which collects his early writings.[11][9]

Criticism

Political materialism has been criticised from two directions. From orthodox Marxism–Leninism, a working paper published in 2026 by a researcher linked to the University of Valencia argues that a fusion of historical and philosophical materialism is impossible without dialectical materialism, for three reasons: the opposition between the monism of dialectical materialism and the pluralism of philosophical materialism; the material origin of the abstract in the former versus the timeless character of the objects of the third kind of materiality in the latter; and the contrast between the Marxist criterion of objectivity and the criterion of operativity derived from Bueno.[10] The same paper accuses Armesilla of distorting classical sources, such as Stalin's definition of the nation and some texts by Engels, and concludes that his project does not update Marxism–Leninism but replaces it with Bueno's assumptions, in an exercise of revisionism comparable to that of Eduard Bernstein.[10]

Other sectors of the left have labelled political materialism "red-brown" for combining anti-capitalism with the defence of the nation, the state and the Catholic tradition, a label its supporters reject.[16][17]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 "Materialismo político" (in es). Proyecto Filosofía en español. https://www.filosofia.org/ave/002/b068.htm. 
  2. ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 Bueno, Gustavo (1991) (in es). Primer ensayo sobre las categorías de las «ciencias políticas». Logroño: Cultural Rioja. pp. 271, 307. ISBN 84-87209-35-1. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 Armesilla, Santiago (2020) (in es). La vuelta del revés de Marx. El materialismo político entretejiendo a Karl Marx y Gustavo Bueno. Barcelona: El Viejo Topo. ISBN 978-84-17700-92-8. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Utín, Mariano (2022-06-06). "12.1 Conceptos fundamentales del Materialismo Político (I)" (in es). https://www.larazoncomunista.com/post/12-1-conceptos-fundamentales-del-materialismo-pol%C3%ADtico-i. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Iglesias, María José (2023-11-25). "Santiago Armesilla: 'La leyenda negra es ideología, busca balcanizar España'" (in es). https://www.lne.es/oviedo/2023/11/25/santiago-armesilla-leyenda-negra-ideologia-95070506.html. 
  6. ↑ Bueno, Gustavo (1999) (in es). España frente a Europa. Barcelona: Alba Editorial. ISBN 84-89846-82-4. 
  7. ↑ Bueno, Gustavo (2003) (in es). El mito de la izquierda. Las izquierdas y la derecha. Barcelona: Ediciones B. ISBN 84-666-1226-6. 
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Armesilla, Santiago (2022-06-06). "12.2 El mito de la izquierda rojiparda" (in es). https://www.larazoncomunista.com/post/12-2-el-mito-de-la-izquierda-rojiparda. 
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Armesilla, Santiago (2025) (in es). Escritos de juventud (2005-2016). SND Editores. ISBN 978-84-19764-97-3. https://www.sndeditores.com/media/sndeditores/files/sample-160537.pdf. 
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 "Sin Diamat no hay marxismo: Sobre la imposibilidad filosófica del «materialismo político» de Santiago Armesilla" (in es). 2026-06-25. https://zenodo.org/records/20837705. 
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 "Santiago Armesilla" (in es). https://www.casadellibro.com.co/libros-ebooks/santiago-armesilla/20105486. 
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Armesilla Conde, Santiago Javier (May 2008). "Las plataformas continentales" (in es). El Catoblepas (75): 14. https://www.nodulo.org/ec/2008/n075p14.htm. 
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Armesilla Conde, Santiago (2022) (in es). Iberofonía y socialismo. Málaga: Última Línea. ISBN 978-84-18492-28-0. 
  14. ↑ Riera Montesinos, Miguel; Armesilla Conde, Santiago (December 2017). "Marxismo y cuestión nacional: entrevista a Santiago Armesilla" (in es). El Viejo Topo (359): 19–23. ISSN 0210-2706. https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=6206647. 
  15. ↑ Armesilla, Santiago. "Lenin. El gran error que hizo caer la URSS. Una crítica marxista al derecho de autodeterminación" (in es). https://www.armesilla.org/2023/12/lenin-el-gran-error-que-hizo-caer-la.html. 
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Tercero, Daniel (2023-05-04). "La organización de la feria del libro Literal censura y excluye a El Viejo Topo" (in es). https://www.abc.es/espana/cataluna/organizacion-feria-libro-literal-censura-excluye-viejo-20230504143204-nt.html. 
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Bécares, Roberto (2021-12-27). "Este ex preso fan de Lenin sacude la guerra cultural a la izquierda de la izquierda: rojipardos versus posmodernos" (in es). https://www.elperiodico.com/es/politica/20211227/roberto-vaquero-izquierda-frente-obrero-elecciones-generales-13030564. 
  18. ↑ "Curso de experto universitario en Materialismo Político" (in es). https://www.beatrizgalindo.net/course/curso-de-experto-universitario-en-materialismo-politico. 
  19. ↑ "Iberofonía Socialista" (in es). https://www.vanguardias.org/. 

Category:Materialism Category:Political philosophy



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