Pip: A seventeenth-century lens-grinder gets excommunicated for dangerous ideas, and four centuries later a Trotskyist historiography argues he was right about basically everything — welcome to A Trumpet of Sedition.
Mara: freerein61 has been digging into the long arc of materialist philosophy, tracing how Spinoza's monism connects to Marx, to Trotsky, and to the question of what revolutionary consciousness actually means.
Pip: Let's start with the lineage itself — Spinoza, materialism, and how one excommunicated philosopher ends up as the ontological ground of dialectical materialism.
Spinoza, Materialism, and the Revolutionary Lineage
Mara: The post opens with a provocation: that Spinoza has been celebrated precisely by stripping him of what made him threatening. Contemporary scholarship, even sympathetic scholarship, isolates him from the class antagonisms of his own century.
Pip: The post puts it directly — Spinoza's ideas were "dangerous in his own time, and remain dangerous today," because they undermine every ideological justification for hierarchy, privilege, and clerical authority.
Mara: That danger was biographical before it was philosophical. Spinoza's excommunication at twenty-three for "abominable heresies" wasn't theological squeamishness — it was a mercantile-rabbinic elite protecting its position inside the Dutch Republic's fragile tolerance. His material circumstances and his philosophy were inseparable.
Pip: And the post uses Trotsky's method of concrete analysis of concrete conditions to make that case — you cannot read Spinoza's intellectual defiance apart from the class forces that produced the Dutch Republic.
Mara: The philosophical hinge is his rejection of Cartesian dualism. Where Descartes split reality into mind and matter, Spinoza asserted one substance — Deus sive Natura — and his claim that "the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things" anticipates Marx's insistence that consciousness is a product of material conditions.
Pip: So monism isn't a metaphysical curiosity — it's the move that makes a scientific account of society possible at all.
Mara: The post traces this through the French materialists: La Mettrie, Diderot, d'Holbach absorbed Spinoza's monism and turned it into militant atheism. Plekhanov called present-day materialism "a Spinozism that has become more or less aware of itself." Engels simply said old Spinoza was quite right.
Pip: On freedom and necessity, the post draws a careful parallel: for Spinoza, freedom is not free will but the understanding of necessity; for Trotsky, that understanding becomes collective revolutionary praxis — the working class grasping the laws of history in order to transform them.
Mara: The post also does sharp ideological critique of Roger Scruton, whose conservative reading of Spinoza the post calls "the ideological antithesis of Spinoza's rationalism" — admiring the logical rigour while rejecting the egalitarian implications, turning a revolutionary into a philosopher of aesthetic consolation.
Pip: Domesticating Spinoza, the post argues, mirrors the Stalinist domestication of Marx — detaching revolutionary thought from its materialist foundations.
Mara: The conclusion is that Marxism doesn't supersede Spinoza but completes him: his monism becomes the ground of dialectical materialism, his critique of superstition becomes the critique of ideology, and his defence of democracy becomes the defence of workers' democracy.
Pip: Four centuries on, the lens-grinder is still grinding.
Mara: The thread running through all of this is the question of what it means to complete a thinker rather than merely inherit them.
Pip: Spinoza dissolved dualism; Marx dissolved idealism; Trotsky dissolved fatalism. That's a relay race worth following — more next time.
A Trumpet of Sedition 