Vulgar Materialism

A bourgeois philosophical doctrine that vulgarized materialism, prevalent in Germany and other Western European countries in the 1850s. Its chief representatives were the German Büchner and Vogt, and the Dutch Moleschott.

Vulgar materialism acknowledged the materiality of the world, but it vulgarized and superficialized the materialist world outlook and viewed human spiritual phenomena from a physiological point of view. It held that the brain produced thoughts just like the liver secretes bile. They obliterated the particular essence of consciousness, denied the subjectivity of consciousness, distorted the real relationship between matter and consciousness, conflated matter and consciousness, obliterated the opposition between idealism and materialism, and denied the materialist theory of reflection. As Engels pointed out, vulgar materialists were “vulgarizing pedlars, who dabbled in materialism”. In terms of social politics, they explained social phenomena with biology, holding that ideas depended on the nutrition of food, that human intelligence depended on the abundance of food nutrition, and that class struggle, like “struggle for existence”, was also a matter of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, that the bourgeoisie were the smart “fittest” in society; and also they advocated that ideas can be inherited. Vulgar materialism is essentially the defense of the capitalist system of exploitation against the Marxist doctrine of social revolution.