Materialism Is Not a Mood

I. The Problem With Materialist Language

There is a recurring problem in parts of contemporary left discourse. People reach for the language of materialism when they want to move politics away from liberal procedure, moral etiquette, and institutional reputation. But they do not always accept the discipline that materialism requires.

The impulse is often understandable. Much of liberal politics really does hide from material reality. It prefers process to outcome, tone to consequence, recognition to provision, and definitional hygiene to the actual conditions under which people live. A politics that insists on looking at bodies, hunger, bombs, housing, poverty, work, policing, sickness, and state violence is therefore right to call itself more material. It is more material than a politics that remains trapped in procedural respectability.

But attention to material reality is not the same as materialist philosophy. A person can look at real suffering and still use categories badly. They can point to hunger, bombs, racism, poverty, policing, or institutional failure, and still treat the words used to describe those things as if they are infinitely flexible. That is where the problem begins.

A materialist politics cannot simply say “material reality” whenever a definition becomes inconvenient. It has to ask whether the category being used actually tracks the mechanism under discussion. If the word does not map onto the structure, the problem is not pedantry. The problem is that the analysis has lost contact with the thing it claims to describe.

This is why arguments about words are not automatically distractions. Sometimes they are distractions. Sometimes definitions are weaponised to protect power from criticism. But sometimes the argument about words is precisely where the material question is being fought. A category that does not track the world will produce a politics that does not understand the world.

The issue is not whether language matters more than reality. It does not. The issue is that language is one of the means through which reality is identified, divided, interpreted, and acted upon.

A materialist politics therefore needs semantic discipline.

II. Attention, Intention, and Discipline

There are at least three different ways someone can be materialist.

The first is materialism by attention. This means looking at concrete conditions rather than remaining inside abstraction. It asks what is happening to bodies, homes, wages, food, services, neighbourhoods, borders, prisons, hospitals, schools, police forces, and workplaces. This kind of materialism is valuable because it pulls politics back toward the conditions of life.

The second is materialism by intention. This means wanting to be on the side of the material against liberal idealism. It is the desire to avoid empty moralism and to talk instead about power, violence, poverty, production, deprivation, and institutions. This too can be valuable, but it is not enough. Intention does not guarantee method.

The third is materialism by discipline. This is the harder form. It does not only ask whether we are looking at material conditions. It asks whether our categories are constrained by them. A materialist by discipline cannot define words however they like. They cannot stretch a term until it gives the desired political result, then dismiss objections as semantics. They must ask what the term tracks, what it rules in, what it rules out, and whether the distinction it draws corresponds to a real mechanism.

This distinction matters because much contemporary left discourse is materialist by attention and sometimes materialist by intention, but not always materialist by discipline. It sees real suffering. It often sees where liberalism is evasive. But it can still use categories in a way that is too loose, too moralised, or too convenient.

That is not a minor philosophical complaint. Categories are instruments. If they are badly made, they misidentify the object. If they misidentify the object, politics acts on the wrong thing.

III. Semantics Is Not the Opposite of Reality

A common move is to say that arguments about definitions are “just semantics”, as if semantics is a kind of word game detached from the world. This is wrong.

Semantics is not the opposite of material reality. Semantics is the question of how words map onto reality. It asks what a term refers to, what distinction it marks, what mechanism it identifies, and what follows from using it rather than another term.

That does not mean definitions are sacred. They are not. Words change. Concepts develop. Political struggle can force revisions in language because old categories fail to name new or previously ignored realities. A materialist should be open to revising definitions where reality demands revision.

But that is not the same as saying that words are infinitely malleable. Sounds are malleable. Pronunciations vary. The same concept can be expressed differently across accents and languages. A northern pronunciation of “Nazi” and a southern English pronunciation of “Nazi” do not create different meanings. The sound can vary while the category remains stable enough to do social and political work.

Words can also change usage over time, but that does not make them arbitrary. A word that can mean anything stops functioning as a word in any politically serious sense. It becomes a floating signal of approval or condemnation. If a category cannot rule anything out, it cannot explain anything.

This is why “you can define things however you want” is not a materialist position. It is relativism with materialist clothing. A materialist can say that definitions must be accountable to reality. A relativist says definitions can be altered according to need, preference, or political convenience.

The materialist position is stricter: Definitions do not create reality, but they must answer to it.

IV. The Nazi Example: Noun, Analogy, and Mechanism

The argument over whether it is legitimate to call Israel “Nazi”, or to compare Israeli actions to Nazi actions, is a useful example. It exposes the difference between semantic discipline and semantic evasion.

A recent exchange between Hasan Piker and Lewis Goodall turned on this distinction. Goodall pressed the objection that Nazi comparisons carry a particular charge because the Nazis sought to exterminate Jews. Piker defended the comparison by pointing to fascism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and apartheid. He also made a broader claim: that Holocaust and genocide scholarship should help people recognise atrocity before it reaches its completed form.

The serious materialist answer is not to collapse one side into the other. There is a real difference between saying that Israel is Nazi and saying that some Israeli state practices are Nazi-like. The first is a classificatory claim. It says that Israel belongs to the historical and ideological category “Nazi”. The second is an analogical claim. It says that certain actions, structures, methods, or moral patterns resemble actions, structures, methods, or moral patterns associated with Nazism.

That distinction is not pedantry. It is a material distinction between category membership and comparison.

Israel is not Nazi in the strict ideological sense. Nazism was a historically specific formation in which antisemitic racial ideology was central. It was not simply “genocidal violence”, “ethnic cleansing”, “fascism”, or “state brutality”, even though those may overlap with things Nazi Germany did. The category “Nazi” names a particular ideological and historical structure.

But it does not follow that every Nazi comparison is antisemitic. A comparison may be crude, inflammatory, excessive, or historically imprecise without being hateful. The question is what is being compared. If someone says “Jews are Nazis”, treats Jews collectively as responsible for Israel, or uses Holocaust inversion to degrade Jews as Jews, that can become antisemitic. But if someone says that a state practice resembles a Nazi practice in a specified way, the comparison has to be assessed by the mechanism being compared.

The defensible position is therefore not that Israel is literally Nazi. It is that particular actions may be described as Nazi-like where the relevant features are specified. The mechanisms someone is trying to name may include ghettoisation, starvation, siege, exterminatory rhetoric, ethnic cleansing, and mass civilian destruction. They may also include the reduction of a population to a disposable enemy category. The comparison may still be contested, but it cannot be dismissed simply because the noun “Nazi” has a strict historical meaning.

At the same time, the strict historical meaning cannot be dismissed as “just semantics”. If the word is being used as a noun, the definitional objection matters. If the word is being used analogically, the speaker should say what is being compared. A materialist does not avoid this distinction. A materialist insists on it, because the distinction protects the reality being described from rhetorical slippage.

The ordinary language case is simple. Imagine you were bullied in the past by someone called Melissa. Later, you start bullying someone else in a similar way. If that person, or someone watching, says, “Alright, Melissa,” or “You are being a real Melissa,” nobody sensible thinks the claim is that you have literally become Melissa. The point is that your conduct resembles the salient conduct associated with Melissa in that context. The more precise version would be, “You are behaving like Melissa,” but ordinary speech often compresses analogy into a temporary noun.

That is what often happens with “Nazi”. It is used as a noun when the underlying function is analogical. This does not make the usage automatically correct, but it does mean the critic has to ask which usage is being made. If the response forces every use of “Nazi” back into strict category membership, it may be a rhetorical device to avoid the analogy. If the speaker refuses any distinction between category and analogy, they are also being evasive.

Both moves fail. The materialist answer is to specify the mechanism.

V. White Privilege and the Problem of the Baseline

The same problem appears in the language of white privilege.

There is a defensible observation underneath the term. BAME people may face racial penalties that white people do not face in the same way: suspicion, exclusion, racist abuse, differential policing, disbelief, assumptions about belonging, and institutional bias. Those mechanisms are real and should be named. A serious socialist politics cannot pretend racism disappears into class.

But “white privilege” is often a bad way of naming that reality because it shifts the baseline. Instead of saying that some people are subjected to racial penalties that should not exist, it says something different. It says that white people are privileged because they are not subjected to those penalties in the same way.

That is a different claim.

If one person is punched in the face and another is not, the second person is better off relative to the first. But it would be strange to say they are privileged by not being punched. The injustice is the punch, not the non-punch. The proper demand is that nobody should be punched, not that the unpunched person should recognise their privilege.

There is an obvious counterpoint. The person who is punched, especially if they are repeatedly targeted for punching, will probably take the problem of punching more seriously than the person who is not punched. The unpunched person may express an opinion about the problem while still underestimating its urgency, because they have not had to live with it as a recurring threat. That is true, and it matters.

But it still does not follow that the best way to describe the difference is privilege. The useful claim is that some people are exposed to a penalty that others do not experience, and that those who do not experience it may therefore misunderstand, minimise, or deprioritise it. That is a serious point. It does not require turning the absence of the penalty into a moral status attached to the person who avoids it.

In fact, the word “privilege” often weakens the argument it is meant to strengthen. The person accused of privilege can deny the description because, in the ordinary sense of the word, they may not be privileged at all. They may be poor, insecure, badly housed, poorly educated, unhealthy, regionally abandoned, and institutionally powerless. Once the discussion becomes an argument over whether they are privileged, the original problem has already been displaced. The racial penalty becomes harder to discuss because the language used to name it is on weaker ground.

The same distinction applies here. If a black person is racially abused and a white person is not, the white person is relatively advantaged in that interaction. But the deeper injustice is the racist abuse, not the white person’s failure to experience it. Calling the absence of that penalty “privilege” turns a wrong done to one person into a moral status attached to another.

That is why the phrase becomes politically ugly, especially from a socialist perspective. A middle-class person of colour telling a poor working-class white person that they are privileged may be trying to name a real racial mechanism. The white person may even be saying something racist, unempathetic, or politically crude. But the form of the exchange still matters. A person with more education, more cultural capital, more institutional access, more economic security, or more social confidence can end up speaking downward to someone with less material power. Race is then treated as if it cancels the class relation visible in the room.

That is not a socialist aesthetic. It is class power laundering itself through anti-racist language.

The better language is more precise. Some institutions impose racial penalties on BAME people that white people are less likely to encounter. That formulation keeps the mechanism visible without pretending that the absence of one injustice is a general privilege. It also allows class, wealth, property, region, health, disability, sex, education, family structure, and institutional exposure to remain in the analysis.

A black millionaire may face racist insult, suspicion, or exclusion in specific contexts, and those harms remain real. But that does not make the black millionaire less privileged overall than a poor white person. The poor white person may still be living with insecure work, bad housing, weak public services, poor health, debt, and no social power. Race matters, but it does not swallow every other variable.

The logical error is straightforward. From the claim that being a person of colour can disadvantage someone, it does not follow that being white advantages someone in general. What follows is narrower: where a specific racial penalty operates against BAME people, white people may be relatively advantaged by not facing that penalty.

That is a real claim, but it is not the same as saying white people are privileged.

The difference matters because concepts discipline conversations. “White privilege” often functions not only as an analytic phrase but as a command. The implied sequence is simple: you are white, therefore privileged; because you are privileged, your objection is suspect; because your objection is suspect, you should quieten down. That is not materialist explanation. It is racialised moral sorting.

A socialist politics should resist that move without denying racism. Racism should be analysed as a mechanism that imposes racial penalties. It should not be inverted into a general claim that privilege is essentialised into whiteness.

VI. Henry Nowak and the Limits of One-Way Categories

The murder of Henry Nowak is a difficult case to discuss for two reasons. The family have asked that it not be turned into a culture-war weapon, and official processes around the police response are still ongoing. The Independent Office for Police Conduct has said that its investigation remains ongoing. That investigation concerns Hampshire and Isle of Wight officers’ contact with Nowak immediately before his death, including the use of handcuffs and first aid. For that reason, the case should not be used to make a settled evidential claim about what was in the minds of the officers at the scene.

But caution should not mean pretending that nothing can be reasoned through. The public facts already show why the case is conceptually difficult. Nowak was falsely accused of a racially aggravated assault while he lay dying. The Police and Crime Commissioner’s statement describes him as having been falsely accused as his attacker stood by denying what he had done. The broadcast discussion of the case also describes the allegation of racism being used by the attacker to distract from the stabbing. It distinguishes that from the stronger claim that Nowak was killed because he was white.

The question is not whether this proves a general system of anti-white policing. It does not. Nor does it disprove institutional racism against BAME communities. One incident cannot overturn a wider pattern. But it also seems too strong to say that the case was simply police incompetence and that race played no role at all.

That claim outruns the evidence in the other direction.

If officers arrive at a scene where a group of lads from one racialised group are standing around an incapacitated lad from another racialised group, the scene already has a racial dimension. If that group then tells officers that the person on the floor acted in a racist way, one conclusion becomes hard to sustain. It is idealistic to assume that the racial allegation and the race of the participants cannot have affected the credibility structure of the scene. Maybe the explanation is mainly incompetence. Maybe it is mainly indifference. Maybe it is poor first-aid response, bad scene control, confusion, or ordinary professional failure. But to say that race had no effect at all is a very strong claim.

The counterfactual exposes the problem. Suppose police arrived to find a group of white working-class lads standing around an incapacitated black or Asian lad on the floor. If the group said that the person on the floor had been the aggressor, would officers treat the group’s account in the same way? Maybe in some cases they would. But it is not obvious, and it is certainly not obvious enough to declare that race could not have mattered in Nowak’s case.

The point is not that whiteness must have disadvantaged him. The point is that the accusation of racism may have altered the way credibility, threat, victimhood, and urgency were read at the scene. If so, the case would not be evidence of systemic anti-white policing. It would be evidence of something narrower and stranger: a race-coded credibility inversion in which a white victim was made legible as the likely racist aggressor.

That is exactly the kind of mechanism that the language of white privilege struggles to describe. If whiteness is treated as a generalised privilege, then a case where whiteness may have contributed to suspicion or disbelief becomes difficult to process. It must either be dismissed as a single incident, folded back into generic incompetence, or redescribed in a way that preserves the concept.

A materialist account should not have to do that. It should be able to say that systemic racism in policing can be real. It should also be able to ask whether a specific race-coded incident involved a local mechanism running in a different direction. Those claims do not contradict each other because they operate at different levels of analysis.

At the systemic level, racialised policing can disproportionately harm black and minority ethnic communities. At the local level, a particular racial allegation can shape how a white victim is read by officers. Both can be true. A category that cannot allow both to be true is not tracking the world. It is protecting itself from the world.

VII. The Common Error

The Nazi example and the white privilege example seem different, but they share a structure.

In the Nazi case, the weak move is to treat a category distinction as if it is only semantics. The material reality is genocide, starvation, siege, or ethnic cleansing; therefore, the exact use of “Nazi” is treated as secondary. But the category distinction still matters because genocide and Nazism are not identical concepts. If the word is being used as an analogy, specify the analogy. If it is being used as a strict noun, the claim fails.

In the white privilege case, the weak move is to treat a relative non-penalty as a general privilege. The material reality is racism; therefore, the absence of racial penalty is redescribed as privilege. But the category distinction still matters because not being harmed in a particular way is not the same as possessing general social advantage.

In both cases, the category is being stretched because the moral pressure is high. The suffering is real, so the word is allowed to expand. The political urgency is real, so the distinction is treated as secondary. The fear is that semantic discipline will weaken the moral force of the claim.

But the opposite is true. Bad categories weaken the claim because they make it easier to attack. They also produce worse politics because they misdescribe the mechanism. If Israel is committing genocide, then genocide is the material category. If particular practices are Nazi-like, then specify the practices. If BAME people face racial penalties, then racial penalty is the material mechanism. If white people do not face those penalties in the same way, call that a non-penalty or a relative advantage in that domain, not a general privilege.

This is not a plea for polite language. It is a demand for disciplined language.

A materialist politics should not be afraid of semantics. It should be afraid of bad semantics. That means words that float away from the mechanisms they claim to name, concepts that absorb every counterexample, and categories that can be stretched until they no longer rule anything out. It also means slogans that discipline people without explaining the structure.

The irony is that many of these moves come from people trying to escape liberalism. They are tired of procedural evasions, institutional reputation management, and definitions used to shut down reality. That frustration is justified. But if the alternative is to treat words as infinitely malleable, then the escape from liberalism has failed. It has returned as relativism with harder language.

Materialism does not mean that reality matters more than words, so words can be loose. It means reality matters so much that words must be made answerable to it.

VIII. What a Materialist Left Should Do Instead

A materialist Left should begin from mechanisms rather than moral sorting.

On racism, that means identifying specific racial penalties rather than converting the absence of those penalties into a general theory of white privilege. It should be possible to say that black and minority ethnic people are disadvantaged by racist treatment in particular institutions. It should also be possible to say this without telling poor white people that their lives are privileged as such.

On Israel and Nazi comparisons, that means distinguishing category membership from analogy. It should be possible to criticise Israeli state violence, discuss genocide, and condemn ethnic cleansing. It should also be possible to make historically charged comparisons where the mechanisms are specified, without pretending that every use of “Nazi” has the same meaning. At the same time, it should be possible to say that the strict noun “Nazi” does not apply without using that fact to shut down all comparison.

On policing, that means refusing both Far Right exploitation and liberal-managerial denial. A case like Henry Nowak’s should not be inflated into proof that white people are systemically oppressed by anti-racist policing. But nor should it be flattened into mere incompetence if the race-coded allegation may have helped structure how the scene was read. A serious politics has to examine the mechanism rather than protect the preferred category.

This is the general rule:

Where a term names a mechanism, specify the mechanism. Where it functions only as moral emphasis, admit that it is rhetoric. Where an analogy is being made, say what corresponds to what. Where a category applies only in certain domains, define the scope. Where a concept creates more confusion than explanation, replace it.

That is not moderation. It is precision.

The Left often sees real material pressure before liberals do. It sees hunger, state violence, racism, poverty, housing, policing, bombs, borders, and labour discipline. That is valuable. But seeing the pressure is not the same as having the right categories for it. Without disciplined categories, materialism becomes a mood: angry at abstraction, impatient with procedure, rightly attentive to suffering, but philosophically loose when the words stop doing the work.

The task is not to choose between words and reality. It is to make words fit reality well enough that politics can act on it.

IX. Conclusion: Words Must Track the World

The problem with parts of contemporary left discourse is not that it cares too much about language. It is that it sometimes cares about language in the wrong way. It treats language as materially powerful when the word helps its politics, then treats objections to the word as mere semantics when the category becomes inconvenient.

That is not materialism. It is selective materialism.

A materialist politics has to accept constraint on its own categories as well as on the categories of its opponents. It cannot say that definitions are weapons when used against it, but instruments of truth when used by it. It cannot say that reality matters while allowing its own words to float free of reality.

Words are not infinitely malleable. They are revisable, contested, historical, and socially produced, but they are not arbitrary. If a word can mean anything, it cannot explain anything. If a category can absorb every counterexample, it has stopped tracking the world. If a term disciplines people more effectively than it identifies mechanisms, it is not analysis but control.

This is why materialism has to be more than attention and more than intention. It has to become discipline. It has to force every category back to the question. What does this word track, what does it rule out, and what part of the material world would have to be different for the claim to change?

Without that discipline, materialism becomes a style. With it, materialism becomes a method.