In mainstream textbooks and theoretical narratives, “matter determines consciousness” is widely regarded as a classic proposition of Marxist materialism. However, neither Marx nor Engels ever actually formulated this thesis. Through a re-examination of texts such as The German Ideology, this paper argues that this dogmatic formulation deviates from Marx’s original expression—“life determines consciousness”—and reduces materialism back to a pre-Kantian, mechanically substantialist old materialism. To clear away this theoretical confusion, this paper summarizes Marx’s philosophical revolution as follows: rather than using matter or consciousness as the fundamental substance to answer “which determines which,” it reveals that the categories of “matter” and “consciousness” can obtain their concrete determinations and interrelations only within practice. Outside of practice, the two can neither be compared nor constitute a genuine causal relationship. Based on this methodological position, this paper proposes a reconstruction of relational materialism that takes “practice” as the primary ontology. Its core proposition is: the relations of things (productive relations) formed in the practical activity of human beings transforming the world determine the ideational relations formed in the same practical process. In this reconstruction, practice, as the total activity through which human beings transform the world, directly determines the “relations of things (productive relations)” (i.e., the historical forms of the realization of labor power as a factor), and the relations of things (productive relations), by virtue of their absolute domination over the physical survival rights of human beings as living organisms, directly determine “ideational relations.” This paper further reveals the internal mechanism of this chain of determination—practice’s determination of ideational relations is indirect and must pass through the historical mediation of the relations of things (productive relations). On this basis, the paper analyzes the dialectical regulation and reactionary effect of ideational relations as an “appendage” on the relations of things (productive relations) within practice. While inheriting Lenin’s stratification of “material social relations/ideational social relations,” it critiques the synchronic rupture caused by later dogmatism. Finally, through a theoretical dialogue with the Japanese representative of relational Marxism, Hiromatsu Wataru, this paper delineates the theoretical red line of its reconstruction: relations must take practice as their matrix, and must never slide toward a de-practiced structuralist metaphysics.
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