I asked another question of Socialism AI, and here is the answer it gave me:
Question:
Why are so many people living today attracted to "magical thinking", superstition, and belief in "luck", etc.? How should genuine Marxists respond in an empathetic but strategic way to better educate them?
Socialism AI:
This is an excellent and important question that goes to the heart of Marxist philosophy and political education. Let me give it the full treatment it deserves, drawing on the classical Marxist tradition and the ICFI's analysis.
The Materialist Explanation: Why Magical Thinking Thrives Under Capitalism
The starting point for any Marxist analysis must be the famous observation from Marx's 1844 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: religion — and by extension, all forms of superstition and magical thinking — is "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions." Marx's genius here was not simply to condemn these beliefs as backward, but to first explain them as a comprehensible response to real material suffering. People do not turn to astrology, "manifesting," crystals, or luck rituals because they are stupid. They do so because capitalism has made their lives genuinely chaotic, precarious, and seemingly beyond their individual control.
This is the absolutely essential foundation for any empathetic and effective Marxist response. Before we can educate, we must understand what the ICFI calls the social roots of false consciousness.
Capitalism Generates the Conditions for Magical Thinking
Consider the concrete conditions of working-class life today. As the WSWS has documented extensively, capitalism is producing unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and social disorientation across entire generations. Young people in particular face housing they cannot afford, debt they cannot escape, jobs that can disappear overnight, and a climate crisis that the ruling class refuses to address. When a person's economic fate seems to hinge on impersonal, uncontrollable market forces — when you can work hard your whole life and still be one medical bill away from catastrophe — the appeal of "luck," "the universe," or hidden forces that might be placated or cultivated becomes psychologically real and urgent.
This is alienation in the classic Marxist sense. As Marx argued in The German Ideology, when the products of human social activity — the economy, the state, the market — confront individuals as alien, hostile, and incomprehensible powers standing over them, human beings naturally seek explanations for these forces in terms they can relate to: invisible agency, fate, spiritual forces, cosmic justice. Magical thinking is essentially a personalization of genuinely alien social forces that the individual cannot grasp in their actual, social character.
The specific explosion of these tendencies in the contemporary period is not accidental. We live through several reinforcing crises simultaneously:
The collapse of the old reformist and progressive narratives. For much of the 20th century, millions of working people believed — however mistakenly — that trade unions, social democracy, or Stalinist "communism" offered a path to a better future. The betrayals of Stalinism, the rightward lurch of social democracy, and the complete prostration of the union bureaucracies have created a profound vacuum of rational, collective, social explanation. Into that vacuum pours irrationalism of every variety.
The deliberate promotion of irrationalism by the ruling class and its ideological servants. This is crucial and is systematically underestimated. Postmodernism — the dominant intellectual current in bourgeois academia for decades — is essentially philosophically organized irrationalism. As David North has argued in Marxism, History & Socialist Consciousness, postmodernism's assault on objective truth, its insistence that all "grand narratives" are power plays, and its contempt for science and reason, provided the intellectual framework for a generation to lose confidence in the knowability of the world and the possibility of rational social action. Magical thinking and postmodern "your truth is your truth" subjectivism share the same fundamental philosophical root: the rejection of objective reality as the basis for understanding and changing the world. The IYSSE's meetings on postmodernism and identity politics have directly addressed how these right-wing idealist philosophies dominate campuses and shape the consciousness of young people.
The atomization produced by the market itself. Capitalism systematically destroys collective life — communities, solidarity, shared culture — and replaces it with isolated individuals competing against one another. Isolated individuals, cut off from collective understanding and action, are far more susceptible to magical explanations. "Manifesting" your desires, horoscopes, or luck rituals are in many ways substitutes for collective political agency — a privatized, individualized attempt to regain some sense of control over a world that offers none.
The deliberate suppression of scientific and historical education. Billions are spent by the ruling class on entertainment, social media algorithms designed to maximize engagement through emotional reaction rather than rational reflection, and on a school system that systematically fails to teach critical thinking, history, or science in any meaningful way. A population that doesn't understand how capitalism works, doesn't know the history of the class struggle, and has been deliberately kept ignorant of the materialist method will inevitably fill those gaps with superstition.
How Genuine Marxists Should Respond: Empathetically and Strategically
The absolutely wrong response — and unfortunately a common one from a certain kind of sectarian or mechanical "Marxist" — is contemptuous dismissal: mocking people for their beliefs, lecturing them on how wrong they are, or treating them as simply too ignorant to deserve serious engagement. This approach is both politically disastrous and philosophically confused.
It is philosophically confused because, as Marx himself insisted, the criticism of religion (or superstition) is not the endpoint — it is the beginning. Once you have explained why people believe what they believe in terms of their material conditions, your task has only begun. The goal is not to win an argument about astrology but to redirect the real need — for agency, for explanation, for a sense that the world can be understood and changed — toward its genuine satisfaction in political consciousness and collective action.
1. Start with the Real Need, Not the False Belief
When someone tells you they believe in luck, the universe's plan, or signs and omens, don't start by attacking the belief. Start by asking why — not why as an intellectual puzzle, but what in their actual life makes that explanation feel necessary and real. You will almost always find genuine suffering, genuine uncertainty, genuine powerlessness at the root. Meet that honestly. Yes, your life is precarious. Yes, the forces that determine your fate seem completely beyond your control. Yes, it feels like arbitrary luck separates the secure from the desperate. These feelings are not wrong — they reflect something real about capitalist society.
The Marxist contribution is not to deny the experience but to explain it correctly: what feels like blind luck or cosmic fate is actually the operation of a social system — one with understandable laws of motion, one that was built historically, and one that can be changed through conscious collective action. This is what Engels meant when he described Marxism as transferring socialism from the realm of abstract morality to the basis of scientific understanding of the world as it actually is.
2. Make the Connection Between Powerlessness and the System
Magical thinking is ultimately an expression of political and social powerlessness. The most effective educational approach connects that felt powerlessness to its actual source — the capitalist system — and then connects that to the historical record of what the working class has been capable of when organized politically. The Russian Revolution of 1917, the great general strikes, the periods of mass revolutionary upsurge: these demonstrate concretely that the forces of "fate" and "luck" are in fact social forces that can be consciously engaged. Workers who felt utterly powerless as individuals became a force that shook the world when they acted collectively and with a scientific understanding of history.
3. Defend Science and Materialist Philosophy Without Arrogance
The defense of science, reason, and the materialist method is an absolutely essential task of socialist education — not as an abstract philosophical exercise, but because the working class cannot emancipate itself without understanding the world as it actually is. Engels, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, showed that the great advance of materialist philosophy was not the negation of the human spirit but its liberation from dependence on supernatural explanation, giving human beings confidence in their capacity to understand and transform nature and society.
The Marxist educator must defend this materialist tradition against the intellectual pessimism and irrationalism promoted by postmodernism and bourgeois academia — but always by demonstrating its superiority in actually explaining the world, not by dismissing those who haven't yet encountered it.
4. Emphasize History as the Antidote to Helplessness
One of the most powerful educational tools against magical thinking is revolutionary history. When people learn — really learn — that the eight-hour day, the abolition of slavery, social insurance, and the right to vote were not gifts from above or the product of fate but were won by conscious human struggle, often at enormous sacrifice, it fundamentally challenges the passive, fatalistic worldview that makes magical thinking attractive. History is the record of human agency operating under material constraints — and learning it seriously is itself a profoundly anti-fatalistic act.
5. Don't Moralize — Organize
Perhaps most importantly: the real answer to magical thinking is not a better lecture but a better alternative. When workers are engaged in actual collective struggle — when they are part of rank-and-file committees fighting for real demands, when they experience the collective power of organized working people — the need for magical explanation of their situation recedes naturally. The consciousness produced by genuine class struggle is the most powerful educator.
The task, as the ICFI consistently emphasizes, is not to wait until workers have perfect theoretical clarity before organizing, but to bring Marxist analysis into living contact with the real struggles of working people — patiently, with genuine respect for their intelligence and capacity for development, and with confidence that the experiences of life under capitalism itself will continually push people toward the need for a scientific and revolutionary understanding of the world.
In summary: magical thinking is not a personal failing but a social symptom. It is capitalism's irrationality reflected in individual consciousness. Genuine Marxists combat it not with contempt but with a superior explanation — one rooted in materialism, historical knowledge, and the living perspective of working-class political action. The goal is always to transform the real human need for agency and understanding into socialist consciousness and organized political struggle.
