Materialism is a fundamental philosophical and/or political worldview which has been in constant opposition with that of Metaphysics. Notable materialists include Heraclitus, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Nikola Tesla, as well as the tradition of Communism.
When most people hear "materialism", they immediately associate it with ideas of greed, desire, or overemphasizing the value of physical things or "wealth" in the human experience. However, critique on the overemphasis of the value of "material possessions", which often comes from a spiritual place, is an implicit critique of "vulgar" materialism (as Marx called it). The vulgarity is essentially in this type of materialism's completely one-sided view that physical material reality is all which exists or all that matters for us to concern ourselves which scientifically. However, this ignores the realm of human subjectivity and therefore human self-critique; in which it is not "material reality" or "material externality" which concerns our scientific thought, but the realm of thought (viz. Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis) and its unity and conflict, its relationship with our external/material reality.
In attempting to shield pure (vulgar) materialism and accept into their thought while acknowledging the metaphysical realm of thought, the mechanical school was founded by Descartes, who completely estranged his materialist physics from his mathematical metaphysics. For this reason, the materialists of the Cartesian school, or the "anti-metaphysicians", looked to the fresh materialism of John Locke, which had just crossed the river from Britain into France coincidentally. Locke's materialism lent itself to the movement of pragmatism on which the American Revolution for independence was founded, which included Thomas Paine and Jean Jacques Rousseau.
It wasn't until the dialectical school was revitalized in the West by G.F.W. Hegel around the turn of the 19th century that his "rational kernel" of dialectics, inverted "as in a camera-obscura" from idealist (metaphysical) into materialist dialectics-- which takes our thoughts and ideas as conditioning external reality as well as external reality conditioning our thoughts and ideas-- that a proper dialectical critique and grounding of materialism in dialectical being was formed. This laid the foundation for the development of Communism as a tradition rooted in and unifying the traditions of Dialectics, materialism, science, philosophy, economics, politics, and, of course, materialism.