Material politics do not ignore language

On a recurring line of liberal rhetoric meant to shut Marxists up.

As a cheap way to argue that Marxists shouldn’t participate in the discourse or have opinions about what anyone says, this line has long been a favorite gotcha among liberal pundits. As commentary on what Marxists actually believe, however, this has never really made much sense. Do Marxists, in the world of Jamelle Bouie’s imagination, actually believe that language has no relationship with politics?

One can imagine two points of confusion here.

The first has to do with what Marxists mean when we talk about “materialism.” In the discourse at least, liberals often talk as if Marxists believe that only economic phenomena has any kind of causal force in this world: so price changes can create political outcomes, and production rates can create politics outcomes, but other seeemingly relevant forces (like say “language” or “bigotry”) cannot. To be fair one can occasionally find baby socialists talking this way, but in my experience this perspective mostly exists in the imagination of liberals.