Part of the Marxist idea of “Praxis” is the “material turn”, the phase where actual changes in real life are implements as part of the cycle of raising critical consciousness. It is part of the breaking apart and rebuilding of society, in other words, the “action” part of Praxis and part and parcel of the eschaton getting immanentized. It’s origin is esoteric in nature deriving from a history of mysticism that can be hard to explain without using its own specialized language and presumptions which beg the question. “Yuri Bezmenov’s Ghost” has previously explained the basis of Marxism and Post-Marxism using plain speak, and does so again here to explain the esotericism of this “material turn”, which is quoted in full below due to the limitations of Twitter/X embeds.
Let’s “plain speak” the material turn. The “material turn” in leftist theory means a change in the revolution toward the concrete, physical, and economic dimensions of social change. This means focusing on production, property, institutions, resources, and inequalities as a means to achieve emancipation and repair societal divisions. This turn is part of an oscillatory pattern rooted in esoteric traditions, where mind (ideal: insight, recognition, philosophy), body (material: tangible structures, nature, tools), and spirit (cultural: communal will, mores, rituals, shared identity) interpenetrate and cycle through history. This framework originates in Western Esotericist ideas that were transmitted through to Hegel (but almost certainly to Descartes and Rousseau), then adapted by Hess and Marx into leftist praxis. All of this structures leftist movements because, well, they slavishly follow their own models. So, it views reality as a unified fabric of correspondences, with history as a drama of withdrawal, rupture, elect-led collective repair, return to wholeness. Here, this is manifest by Descartes’s Cogito (Tzimtzum), Rousseau’s spiritual-cultural turn, and naming of property as the source of rupture/shattering, Hegel’s passive mapping of this pattern, then to the Hess-Feuerbach-Marx material turn, and the application of human agency, or tikkun, on a return to wholeness.
Let’s begin with the esoteric foundation. Hermeticism views reality as one internally linked whole, where the human acts as a microcosm mirroring the macrocosm, so knowledge and action here can touch what lies above. This is why as above, so below extends beyond stars and metals to encompass mind, body, and spirit working as one. Hegel takes this Hermetic vision of a circle connecting God and the world to heart, building his system around it. In Hermetic thought, God’s self-knowledge reaches completion through human recognition, a core idea Glenn Magee identifies as the main link between Hermeticism and Hegel. Human understanding of God becomes God’s understanding of himself, which explains why the world must be embraced rather than shunned.
Kabbalah, particularly the Lurianic stream carried into German thought by early modern Christians, adds the storyline that clarifies why this circle encounters fracture. It follows a sequence of contraction, shattering, and repair. In tzimtzum, the infinite pulls back to create room for finite life. In the breaking of the vessels, light scatters and sparks fall into husks. In tikkun, humans lift and reorder those sparks so the finite can once again reflect the infinite. The Tree of Life maps these connections across levels, with sefirot like Kether, the crown of ideal unity, flowing down through Tiferet, the balance of beauty, to Malkuth, the material kingdom, linked by paths that enable as above, so below transformations. Hegel was familiar with Kabbalah through scholarly works like Brucker’s history and Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala denudata, and he references Lurianic themes such as Adam Kadmon and the sefirot in his lectures. The central Lurianic insight is interrelation, where lower and higher realms influence each other, and human effort in history plays a role in restoration.
With this framework in mind, the modern turns come into focus. Picture mind as the domain of insight and recognition, body as the material order of nature, tools, property, and institutions, and spirit as the realm of will, shared customs, cultus, and the collective vessel that shapes a people. Hermeticism permits lawful movement among these levels. Alchemy provides the mechanics: fixed and volatile elements held together by a mercurial mediator, and a triad of salt, sulphur, and mercury that Hegel interpreted as a genuine ontology (the philosophical study of existence itself). You see this withdrawal, rupture, elect-led collective repair structure right in the lineage of leftist thought.
Descartes sets the stage with a contraction of the field that mirrors a philosophical tzimtzum. The thinking subject pulls away from the extended world to find certainty, opening a cleared space where mind and body stand sharply apart. This is more an analogy than a direct historical tie, but it traces the pattern. A world once seen as a single fabric splits for the sake of method and control, leaving spirit without a clear civic home. We can’t prove Descartes plagiarized tzimtzum, but the resemblance is too much. It’s the same thing.
So Rousseau identifies the rupture in social terms and rekindles the spiritual register. Inequality and property have twisted the natural good, so citizens need to be shaped through moral sentiment, civil religion, and a general will that unites the many as one. This restores spirit as a communal force rather than a mere theological addition. its an ideal turn from Descartes but the material is very much buried in here when in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, he identifies property as a root cause of social inequality and injustice. This is how these turns work, the previous sets up motion for the next turn.
