Material Violence

In Political theory, material violence has to do with violence that takes a physical form (material form). This is what most people immediately recognize as “violence”: the direct application of force against bodies, property, and the physical conditions of life.

Examples:

1. Police Brutality
2. Terrorism
3. Revolution
4. Military coup
5. Civilian coup
6. War, assault, torture
7. Forced displacement
8. Destroying homes, infrastructure
9. Hunger and medical neglect (when caused by policies that materially harm survival)
10. Economic sanctions that starve populations
11. Environmental destruction that renders land uninhabitable
12. Prison systems and mass incarceration

Characteristics:

1. Immediate and measurable
2. Leaves physical traces (injury, destruction, death)
3. Perpetrator and victim can usually be identified
4. Often triggers legal or military responses
5. Can be spectacular (visible) or slow (structural)

The Distinction Between Spectacular and Structural Violence:

Johan Galtung, the Norwegian sociologist, made an important distinction between direct violence (spectacular acts like war, murder, assault) and structural violence (the slow death caused by poverty, lack of healthcare, preventable disease). Both are material in that they harm bodies, but structural violence has no clear perpetrator. When a child dies of hunger in a world that produces enough food for everyone, that is material violence built into the structure of society itself.

“If people are starving when this is objectively avoidable, then violence is committed.”

Johan Galtung, Violence, Peace, and Peace Research (1969)

Ideological Violence

Ideological Violence has to do with violence that shapes our way of thinking and acting. It operates in the realm of ideas, beliefs, and consciousness. The French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser called this the work of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), which are institutions like schools, churches, media, and family that reproduce the dominant ideology without needing to use force.

Antonio Gramsci referred to this as hegemony: the process by which the ruling class maintains power not through coercion alone, but by making their worldview appear as “common sense.”

Examples:

1. Racial stereotypes
2. Religious extremism teachings
3. Beliefs that some groups “deserve” poverty
4. Misogynistic norms that limit women’s choices
5. Media narratives that blame victims
6. Colonial ideologies that make inequality seem natural
7. Meritocracy myths that blame individuals for systemic failures
8. Nationalism that divides workers across borders
9. “Development” narratives that justify extraction from the Global South
10. The naturalization of wage labor and private property

Characteristics:

1. Invisible but powerful
2. Works by shaping consciousness
3. Removes the “need” for physical force because people internalize the rules
4. Often the foundation that makes material violence appear legitimate
5. Reproduced through education, media, religion, and culture
6. Becomes “common sense,” meaning unquestioned assumptions about how the world works

Frantz Fanon on Colonial Ideology:

Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, showed how colonialism was not just military conquest but a psychological assault. The colonized person internalizes the colonizer’s view of them: as inferior, as savage, as requiring “civilization.” This ideological violence continues long after the colonizers leave, manifesting as colorism, self-hatred, and the adoption of the colonizer’s language and culture as “superior.”

“Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.”

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

How They Relate

Think of it like this:

Ideology prepares the ground; material violence enforces it.

1. Racist ideology → Justifies racist policing
2. Patriarchal ideology → Justifies domestic and reproductive control
3. Class ideology (“some people are worth more”) → Justifies austerity and exploitation
4. Religious ideology → Justifies obedience, suppresses critical thinking, and directs blame away from the real material conditions
5. Colonial ideology → Justifies land theft, resource extraction, and genocide

But the relationship is dialectical, not one-directional. Material conditions also shape ideology:

1. Slavery as a material system → Produced racist ideology to justify it
2. Capitalism as a material system → Produces individualist, meritocratic ideology
3. Patriarchy as a material system of labor division → Produces sexist ideology

The Base-Superstructure Model:

Marx argued that the economic base (the material relations of production) shapes the superstructure (ideology, culture, law, politics). This idea is outlined in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). However, later Marxists like Gramsci and Althusser showed that the superstructure also has relative autonomy, meaning it can reinforce, reproduce, or even transform the base.

Historical Examples

Apartheid South Africa:

• Material Violence: Pass laws, forced removals, police massacres (Sharpeville, Soweto), imprisonment, torture
• Ideological Violence: Bantu Education designed to produce a servile workforce, religious justifications for racial hierarchy, media censorship

Atlantic Slavery:

• Material Violence: The Middle Passage, plantation labor, whippings, lynchings, family separation
• Ideological Violence: Scientific racism, the “Curse of Ham” biblical justification, dehumanizing language (“chattel,” comparisons to animals)

Neoliberalism:

• Material Violence: Structural adjustment programs that gutted healthcare and education, austerity policies, privatization of water and land
• Ideological Violence: “There Is No Alternative” (TINA), bootstrap mythology, blaming the poor for their poverty, framing public goods as “inefficient”

Contemporary Nigeria:

Nigeria presents a compelling case study of how both forms of violence operate through religious frameworks across regional lines.

The North: Islamic Extremism

In Northern Nigeria, both material and ideological violence converge through Islamic extremism:

• Material Violence: Boko Haram insurgency has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions since 2009. Mass kidnappings (Chibok, Dapchi, Kankara), church bombings, attacks on schools, and the destruction of entire villages. Banditry and “herdsmen” attacks on farming communities. Sharia law enforcement including floggings and stonings.

• Ideological Violence: The very name “Boko Haram” (roughly “Western education is forbidden”) reveals the ideological project. A worldview that frames secular education, democracy, and modernity as sinful. Religious justifications for gender subordination and child marriage. The production of a consciousness that accepts poverty as divine will rather than the result of elite plunder and state neglect. The framing of ethnic and religious “others” as enemies deserving of violence.

The material conditions of the North (extreme poverty, lack of infrastructure, mass unemployment, elite corruption) create fertile ground for extremist recruitment. The ideology then redirects legitimate grievances away from class analysis and toward religious war.

The South: Mega Church Christianity

In Southern Nigeria, ideological violence predominates through the prosperity gospel industry:

• Ideological Violence: The mega church phenomenon represents one of the most sophisticated systems of ideological violence in contemporary Africa. Prosperity theology teaches that wealth is a sign of God’s favor and poverty a sign of insufficient faith. This inverts reality: instead of understanding poverty as the product of neocolonial extraction, corruption, and capitalist exploitation, the poor are taught to blame themselves.

Key mechanisms include:

1. Victim blaming: If you are poor, you have not prayed enough, tithed enough, or believed enough
2. Wealth legitimation: The obscene wealth of pastors (private jets, mansions, luxury cars) is presented as evidence of God’s blessing rather than exploitation
3. Political pacification: Congregants are taught to “pray” about injustice rather than organize against it. Revolution is sin; submission is godliness
4. Seed faith exploitation: The poor are encouraged to give their last naira as “seed” that will miraculously multiply, transferring wealth upward to already wealthy pastors
5. Distraction from material conditions: Hours spent in services, vigils, and programs consume time and energy that could go toward political education and organizing

The result is a population that attributes unemployment to “spiritual attacks,” that sees corruption as a prayer problem rather than a structural one, and that waits for divine intervention while material conditions deteriorate. The mega church thus serves the same function as what Marx called religion in general: “the opium of the people,” but updated for neoliberal capitalism with a uniquely extractive financial model.

The Common Thread

Both Northern Islamic extremism and Southern prosperity Christianity share a crucial function: they mystify material conditions. Whether through jihad or through “sowing seeds,” both redirect the consciousness of the exploited away from the true sources of their suffering (capitalism, neocolonialism, elite corruption, IMF/World Bank structural adjustment) and toward religious explanations that either demand violent purification or passive waiting for miracles.

Neither offers what the Nigerian masses actually need: a materialist analysis of their conditions and organized collective action to transform them.

Breaking the Cycle

If ideological violence makes material violence appear legitimate, then counter-hegemonic struggle must operate on both fronts:

1. Material resistance: Strikes, protests, mutual aid, building alternative institutions, armed struggle when necessary
2. Ideological resistance: Education, consciousness-raising, alternative media, reclaiming history, cultural production

Paulo Freire called this conscientização (critical consciousness), which is the process by which the oppressed come to understand the social, political, and economic contradictions of their situation and take action against oppressive elements.

“The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.”

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968)

Revolutionary movements have always understood this dual nature. The Black Panther Party combined armed self-defense with political education and survival programs. Anti-colonial movements combined guerrilla warfare with the cultural reclamation of indigenous languages, histories, and identities.

Conclusion

Material violence hurts the body. Ideological violence shapes the mind so the hurting looks normal.

To challenge oppression, we must see both forms of violence clearly. We must resist the bullets and the beliefs that make the bullets seem justified. We must fight for bread and for the consciousness that recognizes bread as a right, not a privilege.

The task is not merely to redistribute resources within the current system, but to transform the very categories through which we understand the world. As Amilcar Cabral put it, we must build a “new man” and a “new woman” capable of creating a new society.