LithoGraphica - User contributions [en]

User:Reversedragon/FirstNineThousand/proposed-4

2026-08-01T13:28:28Z

Reversedragon: Barbarossa - original quote found ; no known pictures of character

<h2 id="section-proposed4">Unsorted Items (page 4) {{editsection|User:Reversedragon/FirstNineThousand/proposed-4}}</h2>
<noinclude>{{HueCSS}}</noinclude><ol class="hue clean reset">

{{li|I=S2/HAS|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Lived experiences clash with and disrupt internal narratives of self [https://psychologyfanatic.com/fragmentation-psychology/] -> incorrect. internal narratives of self are also lived experiences; that has to be the case for existence to actually be experienced and become a {{em|lived experience}}. otherwise we would just go through all of life unconsciously and there would be no lived experiences! lived experiences are today's lived experiences and internal narratives of self are yesterday's lived experiences. so, when lived experience disrupts internal narratives of self, lived experiences are clashing with other lived experiences. not acknowledging that is misleading to the extent of making the statement wrong. 
this sounds like splitting hairs but you really do have to be this precise to be able to say whether statements within post-structuralist and postmodern philosophy are true or false in practice — so much of it relies on trying to distinguish what is reality and what is narrative that you absolutely need an objective definition of which things are lived experiences in order to distinguish which things are "only" narratives. the very frustrating answer is that lived experiences are a subset of narratives but not all narratives are lived experiences, and how you distinguish them is actually to look at many individuals' lived experiences rather than just one. the consensus of lived experiences provides valuable information, but only because those things were lived and not because they were experienced. experience is narrative, life is material reality.

{{li|I=S2/ES|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Social interactions are not empirical facts [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_construction_of_gender#Interactionist_sociology] / social constructionism (generic) -> wait. I thought one definition of empiricism was lived experience. so if you were interacting with another person wouldn't you be having a lived experience, and gathering an empirical observation? it's possible for empirical observations to be biased, so it isn't like an observation being first person and limited and biased is the thing that makes it not empirical. social interactions can also be observed objectively, independent of whether they can be observed empirically. you can try to argue that a social interaction can't really be observed empirically because of 'photon effects' where observing a particle (social atom, human) changes it. but something is being observed empirically either way even if the observation isn't perfect. I don't think you've proved that social interactions aren't material.

{{li|I=S2/MX/IV|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}"Slop" is a slur made up [[E:Societies forget workers are connected|by capitalists]] to try to destroy other corporations by painting the people who work at them as inferior people, thus trying to push them out of the country / Everybodyist prejudice (generic) -> I saw somebody who actually called an attempt at art criticizing other art "slop" and oh my god I am so done 
I'm {{censor|fucking}} tired of people calling literally everything {{i|lang=en|slop}}. for any given thing you can think of, there is somebody who likes it and somebody who calls it slop! literally anything! including things that are good. including things that are educational. shut the {{censor|fuck}} up.

{{li|I=S1/DFy|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}... to defeat the evil magician Stalin?! ({{TTS|lang=ja|ばるばろっさ|title=Barbarossa}}) {{YouTube|hH3TNHKjMPY}} / {{TTS|lang=ja|「スターリン」という邪悪な魔王}} / Communist witches? ok {{YouTube|hH3TNHKjMPY}} -> honestly my only reaction to this is 'is there a picture' 'please don't tell me I can't see it' 
let's see. the Russian cities are girls. arright, that's at least funny. I also can't hate the fact this game apparently taught people that Nazis put Soviet citizens in concentration camps to build walls just like people in their own homeland and that, you know, there are stakes to not defending the Soviet Union, if you go against Stalin the Nazis will really actually get you and put you in a Nazi prison. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH3TNHKjMPY?t=1729] I'll say it again, {{book|Animal Farm}} was in really poor taste. this game... I would let it slide if I could play a deck of only Soviet cities, I'm going to be honest. 
should I make a joke about this game in Auldernet. there are no Nazis there. but given that, the idea of a card game where anime war-machine girls attack Soviet cities is inherently funny if you view it from the other side where Soviet people are getting mad about it and the fact that nobody cares, like it should be depressing but it wraps around to being funny.

{{li|I=S2/MX/IV|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}The problems of women cannot be addressed without an overall party structure changing comprehensively (JRCL 2021) / {{TTS|lang=ja|全体的計画がないと、組織全体に女性の問題を提起することができない}} [https://www.jrcl.jp/assertion/112/] -> this article was more interesting than it seemed like it was going to be. it touches on how women's movements sort of autonomously form out of linked women and that process is separate from the process of forming a workers' movement but not incompatible with it, and you have to keep the separate movement processes from simply overwriting each other.

{{li|I=S1/IV|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}14th World Congress of the Fourth International (JRCL) [https://www.jrcl.jp/assertion/17thcommunique/] -> is this a congress of the ICFI or were any of the other Fourth Internationals there?? I don't understand. but the distinction should be vital. 
okay, actually it says there are groups that come to the meeting of 'the Fourth International' that lost membership?? {{a|https://www.jrcl.jp/assertion/114/|rem-archive-is=https://archive.ph/pSfX5}} I guess that explains part of what's going on. I still don't understand how many of these world congresses there in parallel in any particular period.

{{li|I=S2/STM|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Tectonic plates destroy {{TTS|html=abbr|nuclear|nuclear power}} / Please do not build nuclear power plants in countries that are earthquake zones [https://www.jrcl.jp/assertion/%E6%9C%80%E6%82%AA%E3%81%AE%E5%9C%B0%E9%9C%87%E3%83%BB%E6%B4%A5%E6%B3%A2%E7%81%BD%E5%AE%B3%E3%81%A8%E5%8E%9F%E7%99%BA%E4%BA%8B%E6%95%85%E8%A2%AB%E7%81%BD%E8%80%85%E3%83%BB%E9%81%BF%E9%9B%A3%E6%B0%91/] / Green nuclear energy is a lie (JRCL 2021) / {{TTS|lang=ja|原発は「効率的でグリーンなエネルギー供給源」という支配階級の宣伝は、全くのウソであることが立証された}} -> this was... tragically predictable, wasn't it. I don't know why my mental example of 'nuclear power plants could be dangerous' was always additional Chernobyls happening in Africa or India when honestly the horrifying physical geography of Japan is a better example

{{li|I=S2/LR|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Voter ID gerrymanders voters / UK Conservatives technically gerrymandered voters by introducing a voter ID law that made some people able to be part of a representative's surrounding constituency and locked some people out [https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/elections-and-voting/constituencies/] [https://www.nationalworld.com/news/politics/gerrymandering-meaning-what-is-definition-uk-jacob-rees-mogg-does-define-4143955] [https://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/49845/excerpt/9780521849845_excerpt.pdf] -> hmm! that's an unusual definition of gerrymandering; it's very much like the kind of thing I'd come up with. honestly, I think I like it. it's a bit of a figurative use, but it gets at the fundamental question of how exactly representatives represent anyone in any way and what division of people to what representatives could ever lead to elections that are meaningful. I feel like even when Liberal-republicanism is working reasonably well it asks for this impossible perfect situation of every town being a perfect balance of all parties that currently exist, when that just isn't how towns work; you actually have to redraw the districts every election so they contain half one party and half another, or there isn't even actually an election being had. there's also the problem of people moving around for work and throwing off the balance of districts, which is almost inevitably going to happen faster than new maps happen. it's very hard to separate Liberal-republican elections from people who are demographically and anthropologically part of political parties fighting over the right to control all the representatives for a given county or local-state. that's kind of just what Liberal-republicanism {{em|is}}. in concept the only "boring" way to stop it is to stop treating parties as a subject of elections and just say, yeah, no, parties are regional states now containing several US states or containing several cities and you vote for who leads your party but the group of attached capitalists that wins rules the country. if you did it that specific way people would get so mad, but on the other hand it's about how every blue anarchist already sees things, so they'd be mad because the system was honest instead of lying to people. 
culture, culture, culture, media, war of position, Western-Marxism, slow transition. they could have it if nobody voted for president. they could have it if the top capitalists in a region just picked all the members of parliament and all you did was register as part of your favorite group of capitalists. they believe that labor law and anti-discrimination laws actually protect workers, so like, why do we even need to vote? as it is the people with law degrees do all the work already. if any of this war of position {{censor|bullcrap}} actually worked, then the best and most progressive capitalists and academics could just make all the laws; regular people are too stupid and racist to know anything anyway, so why maintain the fiction that regular people's votes count as much as capitalist and academic votes? {{em|of course}} I'm joking. but I'm a little fascinated at the idea of how this would behave if it existed, just morbidly transfixed on these kinds of scenarios like they were horror movies. what would actually happen if nobody voted. would things be exactly the same? would the Gramscians eventually win? it's been like 150 years of the same parties so I really doubt it. but I have to seriously wonder if voting is even real or it even does anything. did we let Black people vote as a purely symbolic gesture knowing it {{em|looks}} like a standard human right that was maliciously withheld but that it actually does nothing and letting people vote would be a more effective way for everyone to continue being racist? what is voting good for? isn't it the case that only votes that are very local actually do anything, and that as for issues that happen at greater scales we simply want them to be decided once and then never have to decide them again, meaning that most voting is a symptom of a country that is fundamentally unfinished? if you ask me, capitalism is a system where a bunch of anthropological chunks of people viciously fight each other for mutually exclusive existence and then when they Win At Existence they legislate all their culture and beliefs onto the area they've won purely based on their own emotions and preferences and it just goes on over and over again as people continually become convinced they're better than each other at arbitrary things they want to control and then they ferociously try to be the only group of people that can write anything about that thing or make that thing and nobody else. it's a mess. there's no tolerance or understanding or acceptance or "reason" in any of it. it's just, capitalism organizes people into chunks, and they're the smallest unit of human life because they form around either anthropological countable culture, the need to cooperate to obtain food from the world and exist, or the ability to produce one specific thing that is selected on by the surrounding social environment, but they're totally disorganized relative to themselves, so... chunks go smash. that's a silly but hilariously complete 3-word summary of my new interpretation of Marxism.

{{li|I=S2/PT|tradition=LR, IV onto LR|Q=618|Q2=618}}At the time of the Murayama statement, the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan did not acknowledge foreign war victims and only acknowledged Japanese soldiers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murayama_Statement] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Democratic_Party_(Japan)] [https://www.jrcl.jp/criticism_jcp/stalinism/] 

{{li|I=S1/LR|tradition=LR, PT, HAS|Q=618|Q2=618}}1955 System (Japan) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955_System] -> wow. so there's real evidence that Liberal-republicanism just freezes and stops meaningfully generating new parties, if you only look across countries

{{li|I=Z1/HAS|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Soka Gakkai (Japanese karma party) / {{TTS|lang=ja|tts=創価学会|Sōka Gakkai|rem=Souka Gakkai}} (Japanese political party based on Buddhist concepts of karma) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soka_Gakkai] -> so, Japan came up with the 'brilliant' idea that the the alternative to right-Liberalism taking over the whole government or ineffective Communist parties was religion. I've certainly heard that one before. {{i|"I don't believe in fascism or socialism, I believe in Jesus"}}. it went something like that, I don't remember the exact quote. and how effective has it been either time??

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}A Tamagotchi keychain is a complete narrative -> people really don't get what conflicts and narratives are. a conflict, contradiction, opposition, or antagonism is literally so simple it can be embodied in a single Tamagotchi/Digimon keychain. or a game of Pong, honestly. the Tamagotchi is a great example because it is artificially created; we're not getting into the complexities of historical materialism and applying narrative analysis to real life, but it still contains a fundamental antagonism between life and death or life and the external environment which creates a narrative

{{li|I=S1/Fy|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}violet as color of memory / violet as rare and exceptionally memorable plant color [https://ameblo.jp/sakuramitih31/entry-12608195306.html#:~:text=%E6%84%8F%E5%91%B3%E3%83%BB%E3%83%BB%E3%81%9F%E3%81%A0%E4%B8%80%E6%9C%AC%E3%81%AE,%E3%81%A8%E8%A7%A3%E9%87%88%E3%81%95%E3%82%8C%E3%81%A6%E3%81%84%E3%81%BE%E3%81%99%E3%80%82] / violet as rare and memorable furikake brand color [https://community.wanikani.com/t/so-apparently-i-can-use-%E7%B8%81-instead-of-%E7%B4%AB-for-purple/51338/5]

{{li|I=S1/ML|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}time off work submerged back into capital {{a|href=https://must-need-marx.net/2025/10/23/%E8%87%AA%E7%94%B1%E6%99%82%E9%96%93%E3%81%A8%E7%9C%9F%E3%81%AE%E5%AF%8C%E2%80%95%E3%83%9E%E3%83%AB%E3%82%AF%E3%82%B9%E3%81%A8%E3%82%A8%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B2%E3%83%AB%E3%82%B9%E3%81%8B%E3%82%89%E6%96%B0/|rem-archive-today=}} -> I talk about this a whole lot, given how it's like, the only way that a lot of people in the United States can possibly notice capitalism and see the big picture for the first time. nice to see it attested

{{li|I=S2/IV|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Because it was forcibly divided by European empires, the Arab cultural region has Trotskyist country characteristics {{a|href=https://www.jrcl.jp/fourth_inter/%e7%ac%ac%e5%9b%9b%e3%82%a4%e3%83%b3%e3%82%bf%e3%83%bc%e3%83%8a%e3%82%b7%e3%83%a7%e3%83%8a%e3%83%ab%e7%ac%ac11%e5%9b%9e%e4%b8%96%e7%95%8c%e5%a4%a7%e4%bc%9a%e8%ad%b0%e6%a1%88/|rem-research=/JRCL/arab.html|rem-wayback=https://web.archive.org/web/20260721060410/https://research.moraleconomy.au/JRCL/arab.html}} -> okay. I could see that. if you're saying that Palestine is almost a point of improper focus, where if all the Arab countries that want to join together were able to the chances of resisting Israel would be better then, I mean, it has the classic Trotskyist problem of relying on things you don't know will happen but it is actually logical. 
unrelated note: this page glitched the firefox translation feature terribly and left me scrambling to figure out what was wrong with it.

{{li|I=S2/IV|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}The petty bourgeoisie does not tolerate theoretical mistakes / If the revolutionary party ... proves time and again to be incapable of uniting the working class about it, if it vacillates, becomes confused, contradicts itself, then the petty bourgeoisie loses patience and begins to look upon the revolutionary workers as those responsible for its own misery (Trotsky) [https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/fascism-what-it-is-how-to-fight-it-leon-trotsky/06.html]

{{li|I=S1/MN|tradition=MN, ML, IV|Q=618|Q2=618}}a class with radical chains / a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it (Marx 1844, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right) -> oh boy. I am almost positive some people in Western Marxism have interpreted this totally wrong. you have to understand that the concept of "suffering" here means something oddly specific and isn't just any suffering at all, and the reason the statement is interesting is that it's saying that a highly specific form of suffering still applies to everybody. 
let's see... hang on... okay I've got a B-side analogy. is your cat a member of the proletariat??? if you were a Western-Marxist talking about 'worker compression' or 'how Jungian psychoanalysis and repression define the proletariat' you'd be pretty much implying that. Marx isn't implying that.

{{li|I=S1/ES|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}atomic democracy / atomic democracy (unrelated to Baird Boyd book) -> the motif of {{i|human individuals breaking and forming links and creating order in society by making every individual in existence fit into roles or positions of expertise as perfectly as possible in order to not lose them and be kicked out of society}} being considered inherently democratic or a literal form of democratic government, to the point laws and legislatures and constitutions are completely secondary and vestigial to democracy and only {{em|maybe}} elections are considered part of it — although a big enough mob of angry people forcing somebody out of office might be considered more authentic to the system than an election. "atomic" refers to the concept that law and socially-appropriate behavior emerge precisely at the individual and the material effort of the isolated individual.

{{li|I=F2/LR|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}The problem with Twitter is that individuals with disproportionate access to money took it over / Bluesky was created to prevent individuals with disproportionate resources from taking over like Elon Musk did [https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySocial/comments/16efjfw/im_not_tech_savvy_can_someone_explain_this/] -> found a real gem <time datetime="2026-07-20T17:08:38H">today</time>. oh really? that's the problem with Twitter?? that everything would be okay if individuals had an equal amount of capital? this is such an epitome of the way people think now.

{{li|I=F2/LR|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Bluesky locks out Greed / Bluesky gates away Greed / Bluesky was founded so that Greedy people would not control it; founding Bluesky is a method of preventing corporations from being taken over by Elon Musk that has the consequence of corporations not being controlled by Greedy people -> this one is solidly false because Bluesky implemented LLMs. after a while of "observing earth people" you learn that {{i|AI Is Built by GreedyPeople, And GreedyPeople Made LLM Growth Because of Greed}}, and that you are absolutely not allowed to say that statement is false. even though I have no idea what the hell the concept of GreedyPeople actually is. so, because average people will definitely believe both that statement and this one, this statement has to be false.

{{li|I=S1/LR|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}corporation containing one owner that behaves like skilled worker and many employees that behave like bourgeoisie -> this is the kind of situation that made me doubt Marxists' model of classes up to now, particularly the one coming out of the IMT. it's definitely possible for highly skilled workers to proletarianize and become simply someone who focuses on their craft for its own sake as opposed to for empowering an imperialist monarchy or a silent case of global empire of Tories, but meanwhile, a lot of average workers are funnelled into some very selfish thinking by the shapes capitalism puts them into. for someone who's actually thinking logically, it may be easier for a talented virtuoso type of worker that understands the whole overall line of cause and effect from good technique to good product to sales to become a Marxist than it is for the people Marxism is actually supposed to help. and that's so weirdly contradictory. .

{{li|I=S2/HAS/MX|tradition=MX onto HAS|Q=618|Q2=618}}Narrative analysis, when done well, leads up to historical materialism performed on the real world / Narrative analysis should be a Communist (joke phrasing) -> this proposition is almost an emotion and I was really struck with it when watching Howard Blast's literary analysis "lecture". 
I think it genuinely might be true that college is so incapable of actually teaching people things which are predictive in the real world that reading random industry people's tutorials (not grifters that make money selling the tutorials but people that use the tutorials to successfully sell things), and businesses shaming each other for bad technique might actually be the future of education. I can't say I {{em|like}} that outcome exactly, but I do notice patterns whenever they appear in front of me.

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Birth erases knowledge / Birth is loss of knowledge / Every time someone is born, knowledge is lost / Every time people die or simply do not interact with a new generation of people that is born and then more people are born, given that people are born without knowledge, knowledge is lost

{{li|I=S2/Fy|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Good writing makes answers more interesting than questions -> I could not agree with that more. like, that was a criticism I silently had against Undertale without knowing it until recently when Deltarune actually explained things

{{li|I=S2/Fy|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Deltarune is reaching its end because the prophecy has been played through twice, which is longer than expected / Deltarune is a copy of the first round of Deltarune (Howard Blast; sense) {{YouTube|jbLhwmLP9w8}}

{{li|I=S2/ES|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Toby Fox is not a conventional otaku (Howard Blast) -> oh my god. on one hand this is a dumb argument. on the other hand it's beautiful and I love it. this man just pushes so stubbornly at finding some really specific point about what otaku media is, which will surely not actually be all that good, but will probably be at least a little bit interesting. and that's rather funny to me. so please keep going and finish your game, orkastle man. it's probably going to be Something even if I don't know what the thesis of it is.

{{li|I=S1/PT|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Deltarune and petty-bourgeois vision / Undertale and petty-bourgeois vision / Deltarune and the Bucky period / with the videogame industry crashing out and most products being distractionslop -> there is a certain segment of people... that when they talk about Undertale or Deltarune start oozing Toryism. sometimes they ooze it in obvious ways, but this is about them oozing it in subtle ways. 1) the concept that Deltarune or OFF is ruined by having a larger team making heterogeneous contributions, instead of the singular vision of a one-man team 2) the concept that 'the gaming industry went downhill' from when it was smaller projects with smaller budget. very transparent, you almost literally brought classes into the discussion.

{{li|I=S1/PT|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}the Buckyeth century -> the motif of an abstract historical period people imagine where everything was artisan or petty-bourgeois businesses and because everything wasn't Big supposedly everything was better. includes the connotation that the person saying this probably but not certainly thinks gay people ruined media. 
Bucky Katt + mythical past (European fascism) = the Buckyeth century. 
the Buckyeth century + Deltarune = Deltarune and petty-bourgeois vision.

{{li|I=S2/DFy|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Videogames offer freedom from people (Howard Blast) / Video games offer freedom from a country's current historical period -> oh boy. this proposition thinks it's deep but it's not. media from Japan don't really offer any escape from the United States. it's all just the same capitalism in Japan, which is why those "classic console RPGs" were made within Japan. people really don't stop and think about that enough. manga is slightly different because that industry doesn't quite exist in other countries.

{{li|I=S1/DX|tradition=PT, MZ, DX, LR|Q=618|Q2=618}}congress of estates (motif) -> this is a pattern that seems to come over and over in all archaic republics. back in traditional monarchies the congress of estates would be very blatant and exist fairly literally with three estates in it. then when strawberry Marxisms were created, they sort of left some of the features of monarchy in place that Liberal-republicanism would have broken up, and notably invented the congress of estates all over again with New Democracy. New Democracy started out with allowing the nationalist faction and capitalists to exist, and when it ceased to exist "proper" it morphed into having the CPC, the capitalists, and a layer of mediators between the top layer of theorists and capitalists (which is rather blue; I made that sound like capitalist-theorists for a reason) such as the ancient petition system. China is somewhat ruthless on public officials as a group, which is probably how it's stayed stable, but it does very little to them just for being capitalists. in North America, you see a similar thing pop up with the National Labor Relations Board and the layer of labor lawyers. in terms of classes, you may as well be taking that sea of labor lawyers and sending them to the US Congress. 
lawyers are constantly trying to keep things exactly as they are, prosecuting anything that appears to threaten businesses, and sometimes representing unions and trying to get businesses regulated. but in a way, it's always the lawyers that win, because it's always the lawyers that get to decide what the outcomes of all conflicts are and what is going to be recorded in federal and regional law. lawyers think they've tamed all human conflicts, saying, here is gender law and here is race law and here is labor law. but all the conflicts between lawyers where they think they've won or lost are illusory, because all of it is a proxy war that is only carried out by imagined facsimilies of real things. people say that Communism "only works on paper", but Liberal republics somewhat literally live all their history {{em|on paper}} inside the arguments of appointed lawyers. it's very easy for all these arguments to simply be working off hypothetical models of how groups of people interact with each other that are just plain wrong, and when those models and amendments are wrong, laws and amendments will fail to function or be repealed. critical race theory is like 20% of the way to understanding how bad the problem is. yes, laws about race are often working off wrong models, but so is every other law. quite honestly, to get laws that work you need to abolish the entire concept of Idealist law and make laws which are more following the principles of existential materialism; whenever a law doesn't reflect how people really behave, it has to be replaced with one that has a real understanding of social dynamics and how to control them. I think that's the best way to create transitional laws within a workers' state that is attempting to hold its structure long enough to gradually make laws and government irrelevant. all Idealist laws will eventually be pushed back on by material reality, while a truly Materialist law would be followed so well it would hardly ever have to be enforced.

{{li|I=S2/LR|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}International Labour Organization (United Nations) [https://lawslearned.com/history-of-labor-law/#The_Evolution_of_Workers_Rights] / International Labour Review (United Nations; generic) -> whenever I find out about a "labor organization" I haven't heard of I immediately start asking how it's turned its back on workers. seems in this case that was the right call.

{{li|I=S2/MX/IV|tradition=MX onto MX, IV onto MX|Q=618|Q2=618}}Practicing meta-Marxism wrong would lead to Liberal-republicanism -> given that that's what {{em|most}} wrong philosophies lead to these days, including North American Maoism, it's not too far-fetched to guess it would continue to be the case.

{{li|I=S2/STM|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Alzheimer's comes from immune malfunctions crossing the blood-brain barrier [https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/for-years-we-searched-for-alzheimers-in-the-brain-now-researchers-suggest-it-may-begin-elsewhere-6050552] -> a little random, but, hey, this is one of the only good news articles printed in Israel.

{{li|I=S1/HAS|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}religious counterparts of education [https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hinduism/General-nature-of-Hinduism] -> so I knew the area of Vedic religions was vaguely where the narrative of "the elephant" had come from, and I always liked that idea; I brought it up a few times recently. but it took me a while to put together the language for exactly why. Hinduism basically has a general concept of what education is baked into it. it tries to compensate for the fact that all people have different levels of education and study different sets of experiences or observations within different populations or regions and they could all understand some things correctly but the people at greater levels of education may be closer to understanding the whole picture. and the concept is tailored to the religion or cluster of religions and the notion that it is possible to get greater knowledge of "spiritual truths", but you know, taking it away from that context and looking at it on its own, it's a great concept. I honestly think it's pretty good. 
I wish people wouldn't use concepts like this to put subjective experience over the material world and potential alternatives like seeing overall populations as physical objects, but, what can you do. in some ways religion "absorbs" or "co-opts" the concept of education and awareness to spread its own message, like with the notion of Māyā or Christ as the true reality, but in other ways, religion just accidentally describes the general process of education and I can't really be against that. I think to some extent we can "keep" those parts.

{{li|I=S2/IV|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}International Socialist Viewpoint [https://internationalviewpoint.org/Our-International] -> wow, this one is weird. it seems to think that Trotskyism is a composite of a bunch of Stalinisms. like, that there are no unique Trotskyisms alongside them within it. which is not ever what I would have said. 
this page praised Mandel. that means something... that I forgot.

{{li|I=S1/STM|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Dirichlet condition [https://signalprocessingsociety.org/publications-resources/ieee-signal-processing-magazine/2022/09/proper-definitions-dirichlet] -> this is a kind of condition which gives the domain under which the operation applies. I really did not know what this was but hmm, it makes sense because integrals and functions in general have boundaries, I guess the boundaries you can set on Fourier transforms are just more complicated somehow

{{li|I=S2/W|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Now is the time of monsters / The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear (Gramsci ??/1971) / {{TTS|lang=fr|Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres}} (Gustave Massiah) [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci] / The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear and in this contrast (twilight; chiaroscuro; contradiction) the monsters surge [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chiaroscuro#Italian] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/14/the-time-of-monsters-everyone-is-quoting-gramsci-but-what-did-he-actually-say] / Is it gonna break or bend? (Nate Hagens) [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/now-time-monsters-fredo-de-smet-zianf/] / With the right help, the new world will be radically better (sense) [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/now-time-monsters-fredo-de-smet-zianf/] / Yes we can (generic) [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/now-time-monsters-fredo-de-smet-zianf/] / schizophrenic position (position of "new" swatch lost in ocean of "old" swatch) [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/now-time-monsters-fredo-de-smet-zianf/] / Monsters appear between light and darkness (sense) -> I swear this quote is represented in Deltarune either intentionally or semi-accidentally.

{{li|I=S1/W/Ag|tradition=Ag onto W|Q=618|Q2=618}}Gramsci gap / old world, new world, monsters graph [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/now-time-monsters-fredo-de-smet-zianf/] -> I hate how simultaneously true this is and deliberately misused this is. you know what it's doing the second you see that graph. you know exactly what it's doing. you can predict almost the exact statements that will come out of people's mouths if you ask them what the graph means, plus or minus some synonyms: Toryism is on the past side, Menshevism or anarchism or agorism or literally Christian charity is on the future side. you know what's going to come out of their mouths. you know they're not going to say Bolshevism is on the future side. you know what Gramsci meant? you know what Antonio Gramsci thought was on the future side??? 
it probably won't surprise you to know that the article interpreted the graph to be about any time industrial structures replace each other through "creative destruction". there is.... a lot to be said about this some other time. in short: let it be known that every single philosophy ever starts at really small-scale elements and the exact arrangement of people inside small groups of 50-1000 people, and even very large-scale philosophies have to [[E:Lattice model (meta-Marxism)|fight horizontally through these teeny tiny scales]] to ever exist.

{{li|I=S1/LR|tradition=LR, LR onto DX|Q=618|Q2=618}}long march through the institutions (Rudi Dutschke) [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci] -> god the appropriation of both Gramsci and Mao converging on each other to both shore up Liberal-republicanism is unbelievably obnoxious 
it's like, how did Gramsci and Deng both get together after their death to form a Second International more effectively than they formed anything when they were alive

{{li|I=S1/LR|tradition=LR, LR onto DX|Q=618|Q2=618}}To tell the truth is revolutionary (Ferdinand Lassalle) [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci]

{{li|I=S1/LR|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Gramsci was trying to make sense of why Italy could not break through to the beginning of Communist revolution; what he discovered is that the ruling class can rule through the intersection of popular culture, intellectual activity, and civil society (Marzia Maccaferri) [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/14/the-time-of-monsters-everyone-is-quoting-gramsci-but-what-did-he-actually-say] -> thanks, this is vastly closer. it's still just a little wrong but to be fair Gramsci may have made the error there. 
I want you to look really closely at this statement and zoom way in on it with a magnifying glass. popular culture: capitalism. civil society: capitalism. intellectual activity: the only thing that's {{em|sometimes}} not capitalism (thanks Lenin & Stalin), but yet which quickly degenerates into people writing up an appealing product, submitting it to a journal to receive money, and then checking out before they think very hard about whether it's actually true or useful, making it however accidentally into the same thing as capitalism. to everybody but Stalin and Trotsky that statement reads 'the intersection of capitalism, capitalism, and capitalism'. so why don't people notice, and why do they keep getting trapped in the same 'Gramsci trap' they're supposedly trying to get everyone out of? agorism. that's it. that's why. agorists don't believe that agorism is capitalism, so they start making up conspiracy theories about how something else than the nascent capitalism inside agorism is corrupting agorism. it isn't. capitalism doesn't truly begin at capital most of the time but at the belief that "voluntary agreements" don't shear society apart into competing islands. because most capitalism is generated by Idealism, not by the really cold and calculating "Once-ler" capitalists described in Marx. it's not the Once-ler or Chairman Rose that keeps regenerating capitalism. it's... 
let's think of an absolutely killer metaphor so people will actually understand. it's like, a cold war inside capitalism / blue anarchism. it's like... it's not like the Fire Nation in Avatar, which was always a bit malicious. that's incorrect. oh, you know, it's kind of like Discord. like, the principality of friendship doesn't like him, so he becomes more powerful and causes trouble, and refuses to let the Ponies control him, but he ultimately wants to be included, he just wants to have perfect control over how he is linked to society and what he gets to make {{em|everyone else}} do so that {{em|he}} can be integrated into society "perfectly". the more the Ponies try to resist Discord (in his first appearance) Discord is just like, no, I'll get more powerful, you have to bow to me first. because Discord knows they don't like him for how hazardously different he is, so because they'll never accept him he has to defend himself against them, and become more powerful to maintain that defense. yeah, Discord is a weirdly good metaphor for how capitalists actually function.

{{li|I=S2/LR|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Gramsci believed that ruling classes maintain power by shaping society's norms [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/steve-bannon-woke-right-joey-ortega--nxjgc] -> please read over that sentence you wrote again and tell me what's wrong with using that to carry out a proletarian revolution. repeat the phrase "ruling classes". is the proletariat the ruling class?? is it the ruling class when it starts out?? this is the problem. everybody's so stupid about what ideologies and estates are you can see the errors {{em|in plain sight}}.

{{li|I=F2/LR|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Gramsci's model was co-opted by the French New Right ({{TTS|lang=fr|Nouvelle Droite}}) to create Identitarian fascism, a new Tory-to-fascist axis based on cultural identities [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/14/the-time-of-monsters-everyone-is-quoting-gramsci-but-what-did-he-actually-say] -> you've lost the plot. center-Liberalism was co-opted to create Identitarian fascism. they didn't need Gramsci to create it, all they needed was something like queer theory or schizoanalysis to corrupt; the moment you have people clustering into "the LGBT-autistic community" and going on and on and on about community community community the moment you can have a bunch of Tory "communities" cluster together into Identitarian fascism. I genuinely don't think the average center-Liberal actually knows the difference between Gramscianism proper and blue anarchism. which explains why they all mysteriously decided Gramsci was okay when logically they shouldn't have. they very seriously can't tell the difference between Gramsci and agorism and believe Gramsci is an agorist, which leads to all the problems complained about by Gramsci being regenerated over and over again because they don't understand that agorism is capitalism.

{{li|I=S1/LR|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Gramsci's model was co-opted by the French New Right ... / reinterpreting Gramsci's cultural theory for conservative aims [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/steve-bannon-woke-right-joey-ortega--nxjgc] -> I need to pause on this language. how do you know Gramsci's model was "reinterpreted" at all? why can't it just be a descriptive model of how "The Right" gets power in the first place which was used prescriptively? this is the difference between Idealism and Materialism right here. Idealists believe that when a descriptive model is put into use the intentions are cosmically important and depending on the intentions it becomes a completely different model. Materialists believe models have only a limited ability to have agendas and the model didn't change.

{{li|I=S2/LR|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Gramsci believed in co-op theory; he believed in a [[NR:5c/RegenMag/ParallelEconomyWright|slow transition of one kind of industrial structure replacing another kind of industrial structure]] before the political structure would change [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/steve-bannon-woke-right-joey-ortega--nxjgc] -> I'd sooner find this one believable than that Gramsci was a flat-out Idealist that believed culture inherently creates social structures just because culture is special.

{{li|I=S2/LR|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Gramsci believed that citizens enter a social contract with class society / Gramsci believed that societies operate through the consent of the governed -> this is... this is hard to evaluate. I can see one flaw in it already: if this is really what he said then he said that as long as people love capitalism they will absolutely love and be overjoyed to see fascism. which doesn't sound quite right; you see a lot of cognitive dissonance when Toryism gets popular and you see people attempting to separate it from capitalism. so this statement only works if you have a theory of multicapitalism where there are literally two capitalisms and people are able to give their consent to one capitalism but not the other, but both capitalisms still have consequences on everybody.

{{li|I=S2/LR|tradition=LR, W|Q=618|Q2=618}}Monsters are a thought-terminating cliché / Monsters are something exceptional, an inverted miracle that comes out of nowhere with no real explanation; it shuts off the possibility of trying to work out what produced it (Peter Thomas) [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/14/the-time-of-monsters-everyone-is-quoting-gramsci-but-what-did-he-actually-say] -> well, that isn't wrong. it's comically backhandedly-true, probably for reasons the author had no idea about, but at least it isn't wrong.

{{li|I=S2/PT|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}All politics is downstream of culture (Steve Bannon) [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/14/the-time-of-monsters-everyone-is-quoting-gramsci-but-what-did-he-actually-say] / The United States is captured by The Left because of underlying cultural narratives [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/steve-bannon-woke-right-joey-ortega--nxjgc] -> okay, but what are the underlying cultural narratives and what group of social structures were they spat out of? even Western-Marxism has the concept of culture actually having come from somewhere, so you have to actually say {{em|what}} group of structures is demanding consent for itself. 
one part of this that is evident but very unclear is 'The Left in institutions'. so how is that an economic structure in even the broadest sense, and what is it generating narratives {{em|for}}? rarely you see "Black conservatives" and "gay conservatives" so it's not identities. so then what is it? 
point two: the unwanted structure will 'destroy the republic'. how? can he even explain to me how? like, when they try to argue against Bolshevism in the Soviet Union, they can point to something material that's supposedly bad, and it's wrong but at least it's halfway logical. this isn't. 
point three: 'immigration' is one possible unwanted structure. okay, that's at least a real thing. immigrant populations. but it's not the only thing! it's not the one and only thing they don't like that's "ruining" all institutions. 
point four: 'Christian churches' are one possible wanted structure. you have to explain how that's economic. avoiding taxes and replacing them with churches? replacing taxes with charities while "The Left" tries to collect taxes and create government institutions? 
point 4b: 'vaccine mandates'. the CDC is a government institution; blue anarchists telling airlines to give bonuses isn't. 
point 5: 'homesteading'. that is a social structure. that is advocated by like, Proudhonists? 
point 6: 'regulation'. that's just a capitalist point with nothing to hide it. 
point 7: 'food and water contamination'; 'Big Pharma'. ok, that's in total contradiction with 'regulation', but it at least paints a clearer picture of small businesses trying to eradicate big businesses without using regulations. this is the feel I got from Animal Farm 2026.

{{li|I=S2/PT|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}All politics is downstream of culture / strategic understanding of culture as the true battleground -> I'm sorry, an understanding of what.

{{li|I=S2/LR|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}"Make America Healthy Again" seeks to delegitimize liberal governance [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/steve-bannon-woke-right-joey-ortega--nxjgc] -> no. if you have no distinction in your mind between "Liberal-republican" and "liberal", then the whole point of it is to give the United States more liberty and make it more liberal. I may not like the movement but I can't dispute that particular definition. right-Liberals heavily believe liberal means liberty and you won't tell them otherwise, or they'll absolutely laugh at your article and none of them will even consider what you have to say.

{{li|I=S1/LR|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Our Democracy / a shared civic narrative [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/steve-bannon-woke-right-joey-ortega--nxjgc] / national solidarity (generic) / the broader health of the American political psyche / American political identity (generic) / pluralistic society (generic) / pluralism (generic) / inclusive pluralism (generic) / national reconciliation (generic) / to heal fractures in the national body / the political goal of persuasion or compromise (generic) [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/steve-bannon-woke-right-joey-ortega--nxjgc] -> everyone gets used to this stuff but, when you stop and look at it, it's really strange. why does anybody believe this stuff is even possible? what evidence do they have? to me the entire period from the beginning of the Civil War until now would seem like terrible evidence.

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Everything before Marxism is anarchism / All human societies up to the time of monarchies and principalities and before the invention of Marxism have all been anarchisms — every countable island of society between the gaps that separate them, not the state of anhierarchy they exist in — which is why anarchism is so determined to reclaim its "rightful position" as the world's only philosophy, whether through its new tool of Liberal-republicanism or otherwise; this is to imply that anarchisms do not require getting rid of hierarchy or class society to be anarchisms even though getting rid of hierarchy is always their "idealistic dream", and the actual minimum requirements to create an anarchism are that the underlying social structure forms without state intervention and the underlying social structure forms under conditions of self-determination rather than under the intervention of a larger containing society which has swallowed and asserted control over a particular countable culture

{{li|I=S2/Fy|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}microscopic Pokémon [https://www.reddit.com/r/PokeMedia/comments/zei9h5/pokemon_biologists_could_these_kind_of_pokemon/] -> this is really inspired and frankly more interesting than most of what was released in the last three generations of Pokémon

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}world regions ({{int:sitename}} survey) [https://www.guideoftheworld.com/world-region-map.html] [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DVD-Regions_with_key.svg] [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_Bank_region_Natural_Earth_en.png] -> quite honestly the DVD region map is an almost perfect re-division of the continents except for the places it carves out major cities. I feel silly saying that but it's genuinely better and easier than my first attempt to make a world region map "intuitively"

{{li|I=S2/ML|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}The RCP will build and help bring about a victorious revolution in our lifetime (Communist Revolution, 2024) [https://www.etymonline.com/word/cadre] [https://www.marxist.ca/article/what-is-a-marxist-cadre] -> wow! that is a claim. that's nearly testable. it has an almost exact end date, and presumably applies to some specific country? [Canada!] unless it's about a Fourth International. but even then it still has an end date! [2124.] I'm going to hold you to this. I'm going to show this claim to people and see if anyone can make a solid guess whether you'll reach your goal by your end date. we'll make a small window in which part of the claim can empirically be tested. and we are going to see what actually happens. I don't think anybody alive today {{em|can}} have a solid answer to this right this minute but oh boy, this is one of the most testable claims I've seen in a while if you had 100 years, so it's going to be fun to test the first 10 or so. 
they said the phrase "dropped anywhere in the world"... so are they Trotskyists? oh yeah Alan Woods is on there, this is the IMT. 
so, a workers' state has to be created some time before 2106-2124, we won't say it has to survive the whole time because that wasn't promised, but we will say it has to somehow help stop Israel because that is on the program and is one of the most common issues I've seen the North American "Lefts" talk about. and if this organization splits into one that succeeded, we'll say it succeeded. we have a very clear claim here. 
they really buried Alan Woods and the Fourth International into the deeper pages. so... in my mind, that means the workers' state should consist of at least two countries but has no particular minimum number. if the US, Canada, and Mexico all join a single Fourth International with every country in South America and Europe and Australia that's a smashing success, but it's not required for this claim.

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}The error of thinking the bourgeoisie and proletariat are the same body of people dates back to feudal times, because the estate system within France and Germany contained this same lack of distinction -> the moment I caught this that one argument by a lawyer that supposedly nothing could change any more started to look inordinately stupid

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=ES|Q=618|Q2=618}}One of the only times "bourgeois governments" have ever done anything right is when a cluster of capitalists decided having a lot of incompatible disc formats would be a problem and came together to create the CD-ROM standard -> this can potentially be used as a blue-anarchist talking point to argue nothing has gone wrong, but could just as easily be used to explain Marxism and how why the state withers away: if somewhat slowly, decisions simply get {{em|finished}} and then capitalists don't have to keep reinventing them any more, either in industry or in government.

{{li|I=S2/LR|tradition=LR, ES|Q=618|Q2=618}}reaching stages without Marxism / stage reached without Marxism / stage of populational development (societal development; civilizational development) reached without Marxism -> this applies to things like the United States reaching "lower-phase abundance" without it being socialism/communism, and the United States 'abolishing national boundaries' by creating federalism in an (at-the-time) actively-expanding empire.

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=MX|Q=618|Q2=618}}Spain was a mess (1936) [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/09/26/opjp-s26.html] -> so... it sounds like there wasn't even a Gramsci in Spain, it was just one big mess of messy party 1, messy party 2, anarchists, and then George Orwell, and by the time Trotsky gets there it's like 'what is this, what am I even looking at' but he still thinks they can fix it if they'd understand the difference between a united front and a popular front, and, stuff. {{i|Trotsky: no don't mix it up further.}} that is a ridiculous amount of optimism but it's probably better than the alternative, I guess, because despite everything Spain seems to have been in a better position than Germany.

{{li|I=S1/MX|tradition=MX|Q=618|Q2=618}}atomic physics and societies / Marxist molecular democracy ; molecular Marxism (generic) 
this + island of stability = Societies have an island of stability.

{{li|I=S1/STM/GR|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}stellar development / stellar evolution (development of a star from one period containing one arrangement of matter to another period containing another arrangement of matter) / stellar classification ; star classes (generic) -> I don't want to use 'evolution' in the label because of how Kent Hovind famously misunderstood the use of the word as something changing to be the same as biological evolution. funny enough you could describe both speciation and stellar development through dialectical materialism, and 'expose' the word evolution to frequently refer to dialetical transformations. but when I've already boiled down dialectical materialism to {{em|sort of}} be another word for "modern, non-Euclidean, relativistic physics", I'm not going there.

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}The development of societies is comparable to the development of stars / stellar development and societies / Marxist molecular democracy ; molecular Marxism (generic) -> 
depending on the size of a star and density of matter in it, it will undergo transitions into different stages. this to me is very comparable to the concept of creating existential-materialist models of countries. 
a lot better of an analogy than the slightly joking metaphors of Digimon stages or alchemy. you can actually build this comparison seriously by comparing the mathematical processes in exmat to the mathematical processes in physics. 
stellar development + historical materialism = The development of societies is comparable to the development of stars

{{li|I=S2/MX/IV|tradition=MX|Q=618}}Societies have an island of stability -> the claim that in older forms of society it's possible for societies to get too big and crumble apart, but when societies get big enough, as in the United States, China, and somewhat in the USSR, they become stable again. honestly it seems like societies have more of an island of stability than atoms do.

{{li|I=S1/PT|tradition=PT, LR|Q=618}}death will be replaced with money -> logically, this first happened in feudal orders and was only inherited by Liberal-republicanism.

{{li|I=S1/PT|tradition=PT, LR|Q=618}}carnival as emblematic of the depression of living in capitalism

{{li|I=S2/PT|tradition=|Q=618}}Fantasy rulers represent capitalists / The rulers of fantasy worlds are actually capitalists -> if you squint, you see it in surprisingly a {{em|lot}} of works coming out recently. TADC, Deltarune, arguably The Matrix before them, The Wizard of Oz, etc. 
which makes TADC so funny because Gooseworx exploded herself twice over, and nobody talks about the first one in episode 8.

{{li|I=S2/IV|tradition=IV, IV onto DX, IV onto ML|Q=618}}Monocapitalism doesn't physically exist / China is never monocapitalism / China or North Korea is never truly monocapitalism; as long as it is embedded in a global multicapitalism it will always silently be an instance of multicapitalism inasmuch as it is directly part of a larger one -> I feel insane just making orange propositions that are my propositions with no ironic distance in the middle. that doesn't feel right. oh well. I've become convinced that like, capitalism in general is a system of chunk owners, the chunk owners are actually the petty bourgeoisie no matter how big capitalism gets, and all Communist revolutions that happen now will be revolutions against the petty bourgeoisie almost specifically. but that for complicated reasons, China is like one big petty-bourgeois chunk even though it isn't precisely the same thing as the small businesses or [[E:agora (meta-Marxism onto agorism)|agoras]] that characterize the petty bourgeoisie. 
so that's what the deal with the strawberry color is. it's like, a chunk of petty bourgeoisie pretending the bourgeoisie don't exist and they are 'equal' but also tirelessly defending their country. the blue swatch is pro- multicapitalism. the strawberry swatch is different from the blue swatch in that it's temporarily holding off the horrors of the multicapitalist system by artificially creating monocapitalism, yet it can't do that forever. can I just boldly say that the orange swatch actually is the proletariat, at least in industrial countries as opposed to tribal societies? is it time for that? it might be time for that. this is a real turning point in the project. we are going to need several propositions tracing this to be able to audit this decision later but maybe it's time to just make those.



{{li|I=S1/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}{{int:sitename}} and proletarianization -> I firmly believe that the actual structure of enterprises matters way more to setting an example for society than the content of a TV show etc produced by some particular enterprise, simply because projects composed of groups of people themselves operate directly on material reality and there's less room for any errors to creep in; to actually pull off a business or nonprofit's goal you have to really apply Materialism, not just say stuff. 
I don't think saying this undermines my other statements that fiction can be a powerful teaching tool to illustrate Materialism. that's what applies when the content of a Materialist model you put into fiction is already correct. this is how you know {{em|whether}} the content of Materialism is correct.

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}The proletariat is set down into place by either well-conceived large corporate structures ([[E:republic of walmart|republics of walmart]]) or petty-bourgeois territory squabbles dominated by vanity and emotionally-explosive subjective flailing over questions with no answer; the proletariat itself will be discovered beneath all the subjective flailing with genuinely no actual stake in any of the squabbles, having been too tired to even give an answer or participate in them, ready to slot into the structure and see the whole thing completed once all the dumb arguments on the upper level have ended just to have the whole thing complete and functioning; the proletariat will be discovered beneath the realization  that almost every actual decision made to decide what culture is and how political issues are resolved have been unimportant to the proletariat because for one reason or another they have all been sites of petty-bourgeois division into named factions or unnecessarily-plural named ideologies or movements, and at times, even divisions between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism or Trotskyism and Trotskyism have been part of this needless division, while the correct analysis of how to unify as many of these divisions together as feasible was what was advantageous to the proletariat -> 
finally, I have a definition of the proletariat specific to violet Marxism emerging from violet Marxism's general understanding of classes. the proletariat exists as thousands or millions of plural proletariats mainly because the petty bourgeoisie is busy dividing up proletarians and constantly fighting itself. the petty bourgeoisie is one of the most annoying classes in history because it's genuinely capable of having a class rule where within the smallest places it rules it doesn't actually conflate its class territories with one specific person, and it can genuinely rule a territory as a cooperating team of people. this messes up {{em|everyone}}. every single prior historical event has involved specific individuals being conflated with class territories, so when petty bourgeois islands show up, they get super confused and start to think class society has been abolished and they must be the final class, but they're not, because the fact their island is divided from another island and makes decisions separate from others is a class! 
it sounds strange at first but once you've had to live with a world full of newsfeeds where a bunch of independent producers are constantly competing against each other to all make decisions you can't affect and it's easier to come into contact with {{em|them}} than any actual friends or social connections, you start to understand it. {{em|that}} has to be prevented at all costs. people will have to get used to the purpose of labor being to make structures that slot into larger structures and which are specifically to serve everyone {{em|but}} them as opposed to them first, or else human existence will be a bunch of petty squabbles forever. and I am so done with that. I'm even done with anarchists doing that, I'm done with all of it.

{{li|I=S2/MX/JC|tradition=|Q=618}}Kim Il-sung is not North Korea / Kim Jong-il is not North Korea / Kim Jong-un is not North Korea -> this is actually true. it's abused by Liberal-republicans and agorist types all the time for the wrong reasons but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea by itself. yes, North Korea is the overall body of North Koreans. and the reason [[E:Juche-socialism and Dengism are the same thing with no actually meaningful differences|Dengism]] is so weirdly effective is that it actually concerns itself with and obsesses over the whole body of Chinese citizens or North Koreans. so, whether Juche-socialism is actually a good thing or not is really complicated. because on one hand, it is entirely capable of understanding that individual North Koreans are not North Korea itself no matter how popular they are, and that center-wing nationalism in North Korea really is about serving all North Koreans as a people, and absolutely not about serving specific individuals. Juche-socialism is — shocker — a republic. it understands the concept that a republic is an anarchy created by either snapping off the king or bringing together a [[E:conglomerate anarchy|stationary combination of heterogeneous elements]], although the mere concept of that makes both blue and charcoal anarchists mad. all Liberal-republicans and anarchists seem to want to believe Liberal-republicanism or anarchism are special and Dengism could not possibly be equally as good as Liberal-republicanism. and they're just plain wrong. Dengism is almost exactly as good as Liberal-republicanism is, and that absolutely blows a gaping hole in everything they say. it exposes both Liberal-republicanism {{em|and}} blue anarchism as petty-bourgeois nonsense which is all about chauvinism to a little isolated island of people just because it's yours. which, yeah, is one of the most ironic things ever in context — an ideology which is explicitly about center-wing nationalism and national unity has exposed United States chauvinism. this is especially damning for charcoal anarchism because it wants to act like it's above everything and the only way to reach the final stage of world civilization, the only way to bridge all the world's gaps and unite everybody, but like, it can't unite the displaced Native Americans who now love anarchism and North Koreans, it can't unite Black people obsessed with anarchism and North Koreans. so basically all anarchism in the United States is petty-bourgeois nonsense. the easy litmus test for what is and isn't that is whether a particular ideology can unite North Koreans with United States people on their own terms without making any of the decisions outside North Korea. an ideology that can do that is viable, and an ideology that cannot do that is garbage. 
which amusingly suggests that some precise fraction of Trotskyism is legitimate and the rest of it is garbage. I think that's just correct, and I still stand by this statement.

{{li|I=S2/MX/IV|tradition=|Q=618}}North Korea will have Dengism until it turns orange / North Korea will continue to have Juche-socialism in almost the exact form it exists right now until the overall political entity of North Korea merges with other populations and becomes a larger political entity abandoning the independent nation-state; this is to only imply and not state that the correct generic Marxism to be applied to all countries (the correct overall model of historical processes and transitions) is a form of Trotskyism -> I think this more based on the concept that Juche-socialism is bizarrely not incorrect than based on the claim that Trotskyism is correct. North Korea cannot abandon Dengism. it can't stop being isolated from global conflicts and it can't dismantle the central party and leave itself open. but there's one way it can save itself from turning blue or being swallowed by South Korea. and that's to become conscious of the fact that basically all competing islands of people are petty-bourgeois distortions while merging populations together is part of the key to freeing the proletariat. if North Korea were to truly understand that then it could remain stable in basically the form it's in now until the day the proletariat simply casts off the bourgeoisie and the overall 'national fence' layer (maybe even nonviolently??) because it's figured out how to replace them with the proletariat and it no longer needs them. in one sense, the concept of Trotskyism in one country might actually be real? I feel like it would exist for like, no more than a year, before it merges into a greater entity and it has become qualitatively so different from Dengism inside the same country region that the descriptor of "in one country" doesn't feel appropriate any more.

{{li|I=S2/IV|tradition=MX, IV, MZ, DX|Q=618}}Stalin's Marxism is not the one true Leninism / Stalin's Marxism is not the single correct Leninism in the world; it is not the one single thing capable of calling itself Marxism-Leninism -> it was really easy to get me to agree with this much. I mean, sure, by 1950 there were about three possible Marxisms, mainstream Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, and Maoism, and among most of the theorists of any of them it would have been arrogant for any of them to assume their Marxism was the best and only one. it took until at least 1960 or so before there was enough information that it became remotely reasonable to try to pick a best one again.

{{li|I=S1/LLM|tradition=|Q=618}}vector (machine learning) [https://medium.com/@saschametzger/what-are-tokens-vectors-and-embeddings-how-do-you-create-them-e2a3e698e037] -> a vector is somewhat literally an ordered set of numbers describing a word extracted out of a text. each of the numbers will generally describe how close a given token is to other tokens. so, put together, the vectors are something like one big graph. 
one of the evident weaknesses of vector models is they can only describe one kind of relationship between tokens rather than actual different kinds of relationships, such as something being understood as a synonym or an antonym or forming from other things joined together instead of breaking apart into other things. this is where the model of vectors or coordinates actually having different numbered Properties or relations that connect them to things really could have shined. you can take away linguistic ambiguity where a word means two different things for different reasons, or even uses of a word that historically were related but aren't any more, and you might be able to decrease the complexity of the model by not using the same coordinate for so many things and needing all those connections on a given coordinate. this isn't what the brain does but there are some times you probably don't want your model to be like the human brain; the same processes that make it easy to encode information efficiently make it easy to bake prejudice into everything and make it impossible to separate prejudice from a bunch of things that are okay.

{{li|I=S2/ES|tradition=|Q=618}}The dialectic is basically religion (Burnham 1940) [https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/idom/dm/14-burnham.htm] -> oh boy. a claim from Burnham that isn't even weird enough to be funny. Trotsky saying 'this is how people move over to petty bourgeois opportunism' in the middle kind of sums up the entire discussion really.

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}Consequentialist ethics is an oxymoron / Because ethics always must presuppose that it is possible to judge an action as Good or Bad before it has been performed despite the association of a particular action as Good or Bad always being subjective, ethics is always about intentions and cannot actually become a theory of consequences; to try to claim ethics can be "consequentialist" is a contradiction

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}The televised will not be revolution / What has been televised is always emergent from underlying processes, in the form of ideological editing of events that pops out of misunderstanding of the material world or simply in the form of surface consequences of processes that are too large-scale or small-scale to see and only become easily seen at a greatly zoomed-out view, while underlying processes out of sight of yesterday's news are the only place that the future can happen -> less grammatically satisfying but more materially correct.

{{li|I=S1/Fy|tradition=|Q=618}}Tarzan speaks to the monkeys — what about the people that live there? (Learnmore Jonasi) {{YouTube|khmlXzhFfb8}} -> very good point. 
same idea as {{film|Kimba}} having to censor out most of the people and focus on the animals to keep from portraying really ugly racist caricatures that would absolutely be there otherwise (because I think those were in the manga). the stereotypes being pushed out of frame are {{em|a little}} less grating but, you know, Disney had some serious lows at one point so they weren't not there.

{{li|I=S2/Fy|tradition=|Q=618}}Kimba the white lion is an accidental representation of the comprador bourgeoisie -> I don't know why this took so long to hit me. maybe because I still have trouble understanding exactly what the "comprador bourgeoisie" is and how it's any different from the national bourgeoisie. the national bourgeoisie still sold out China to other countries so like, is there even an actual difference?

{{li|I=S2/PT|tradition=|Q=618}}Insulting the quality of song lyrics is a breach of Freedom {{YouTube|khmlXzhFfb8}} {{YouTube|VykhV79QtGA}} -> what the actual {{censor|fuck}}. 
see, lawyers go around thinking that the world actually makes sense and there is some actual reason for laws to exist but then the people who actually vote for laws are like this. the most wilful people you can imagine that think lawsuits exist to make the government teach people arbitrary standards of etiquette, and make the world into a bunch of arbitrary incoherent rules that make no sense whatsoever and pay lawyers to clean up their mess.

{{li|I=S1/ML|tradition=|Q=618}}if morality is real, the bourgeoisie destroyed it / I have never seen a class so deeply demoralised, so incurably debased by selfishness, so corroded within ... as the English bourgeoisie (Engels 1845) [https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch13.htm] -> that's a familiar feeling.

{{li|I=S1/DFy|tradition=|Q=618}}if morality is real, the English bourgeoisie destroyed it -> should. I add this as a subjective theme for FNaF. not the English part, just the bourgeoisie part. although the inclusion of 'English' does make it a much funnier connection

{{li|I=S2/MX/ES|tradition=|Q=618}}small potatoes issue / small-potatoes issue (hyphenated) / small potatoes issue (international) (sense) -> I've said this phrase so many times it should probably be documented just so it doesn't get confusing. 
this motif is blue because a lot of these issues are issues you see wildly, wildly magnified by small owners like they're really important issues. I'm a lot more aware at any given moment of how small-potatoes they really are, but a great number of people are not, so yeah.

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}Capitalism doesn't promote pure Idealism; it specifically promotes eclectic Materialism, a Materialism only containing just enough Materialism to facilitate people manufacturing and selling products and getting paid -> this is one of the big conclusions of the "Twilight Sparkle has (no) Free Will" discussion. capitalism doesn't remove people from Materialism. it makes a small amount of Materialism mandatory. this is why it is that people become super committed to parts of Materialism seemingly out of nowhere in the middle of an otherwise Idealist worldview, and then sometimes try to deny that they actually believe in Materialism.

{{li|I=S2/LR|tradition=|Q=618}}No one will listen to anti-imperialism based on real-world examples, so only fictional examples or entirely hypothetical examples are left / No one will listen to anti-imperialism without metaphors -> this is a really interesting statement because although it's more true in the negative than in the positive, it is kind of technically true. so far nobody will listen to anti-imperialism {{em|with}} metaphors, but definitely nobody will listen to anti-imperialism without them. I think part of the problem is that people assume that "anti-imperialism" can be a coherent argument, when in reality, there may be a lot of other things blocking it, and it might be more effective to try to use fictional examples to teach people Materialism and a bunch of other 'small bricks' that don't at all feel like they're bringing the wall down until suddenly it falls.

{{li|I=S2/MX/A|tradition=|Q=618}}Liberal democracy encourages burglary -> some number of people are easily talked out of stealing from houses if you only stop them and talk to them. but when people are taught that individual will is sovereign or people have the right to not be convinced to think anything like you do, which is almost always the way people act in the United States, everyone will become distrustful about asking for anything nicely, and it logically follows that it's harder to talk burglars into peacefully leaving your house.

{{li|I=S2/LR|tradition=|Q=618}}Filming {{book|Call of the Wild}} with computer-generated dogs squashes The Subject / Jack London's book {{book|Call of the Wild}} features the plot point of reducing dogs to an instrument for human miners, which is to say that any inherent worth of the dogs' lives and freedom is squashed; by creating a live-action film with computer-generated dogs the -> this argument is {{em|interesting}} but... it's really small potatoes. domestic animals become instruments the moment they become owned by humans and regulated by human laws. for that matter, wild animals are subject to human laws too; animals like thylacines are improperly exterminated because humans make everything subject to human laws, and they are claimed to 'commit natural crimes' against farmers. really, that's a pretty good argument for natural law not existing, because if hurting other living things is inherently wrong then there'd be an argument that wiping out thylacines {{em|was}} a form of natural justice. (there might also be some worrying conclusions for Palestinians after all the claims that they've done morally wrong things to Israel.) 
gosh this just really makes me wonder what it would be like if Animal Farm was set in Australia and also for no particular reason the characters were furries. it would make it so much more disturbing that people apparently keep them as slaves. but it would make it way easier to tell the story of Cuba where people constantly deny that the argument is over slave plantations and the Confederacy realistically extended over two whole country regions. we've had this whole argument about trying to delete slavery from history books and yet there's one part of it the Confederacy solidly won that nobody even talks about.

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}Friendship and freedom are fundamentally different things — freedom is typically conceptualized as the capacity to move to a different space within an overall phase space of choices, but this is not the same thing as friendship because friendship is the maintenance of one particular option despite it not being the "optimal" choice, making friendship and freedom contradictory processes assuming an agorist definition of what freedom is -> it's that old problem of "is Twilight Sparkle free if she is forever shaped by her connection with Rainbow Dash". I think the correct answer is that friendship or a strong relationship is its own thing and it is not blue. I don't know what color friendship actually is, I couldn't begin to guess that right now. but I really suspect that the way agorism has colonized social relationships and turned them into markets is an illusion.

{{li|I=F2/W|tradition=|Q=618}}Human demographics are themselves the proletariat; people are the proletariat because they're Black or lesbian while not being White -> no. that's an improperly classless definition of what classes are. (I do think there are [[E:molecularization (meta-Marxism)|proper classless definitions of classes]], but they aren't this.) a human demographic is a somewhat arbitrary group of people {{em|containing classes}}. so you're dangerously close to creating an eclectic Marxism the moment you say this. 
the worst thing is that it's not just Marcuse that says this, I've seen "real" Marxists say this. 
I think one possible cause of this is bourgeois models of reality penetrating deep through society, and in particular the agorist model of society penetrating deep down to the smallest layers, because small capitalist ideology is actually the most popular capitalist ideology now. Animal Farm 2026 literally promoted small businesses in a newspaper! and they thought this would be inspiring as opposed to hilarious in its transparency. yeah, I think there is a pervasive model that on the larger scale societies consist of capitalism but on the smaller scale societies consist of what is claimed to be "community" but what is in fact agorism, and people silently believe that ethnic groups themselves are made of market mechanisms and the breaking down of racist barriers occurs because market mechanisms break them down. this model seems like it would be amenable to Trotskyism because it contains the notion of capitalism inevitably shattering nation-states but it is actually a terrible trap where people will cling onto agorism and then act like it's the very definition of humanity itself and Trotskyists can't come in. honestly. I think agorism needs to be smashed before the world can make any progress. it's inside "Libertarianism". it's the basis of social platforms and all the complaints they bring out about "algorithms". it created Marcuseanism and got everybody mad about civil rights because they began to create a weird loop where talking about progress prevented progress. it might as well be the root of all evil. it's bizarre how often it comes up and

{{li|I=F2/HM/IV|tradition=|Q=618}}Trotskyism is more compatible with moral vanguard theory than Stalin's Marxism / Trotskyism is more compatible with moral vanguard theory than Stalin's Marxism because it presents a picture of the entire industrial world unifying onto a shared body of laws (a Trotskyist socioeconomy and corresponding party structure; a Trotskyist "constitution" enshrining socialist transition), which is conceptually similar to the entire industrial world unifying onto the same shared body of moral values -> I love this statement because logically it should be true. logically speaking there should be no errors here. but historically it absolutely has not been true. nobody who believes in the moral vanguard model has been on board with realizing Trotskyism in their own country, they're always anticommunists, so historically they've been the most likely to tolerate Deng Xiaoping states. there was approximately a decade where you could get them to tolerate Stalin's Marxism specifically because it had a border around it and they would never have to accept it for the rest of time. 
it's quite a contradiction that Habermasians hate Communism, but like, you can get them to be pro- Soviet Union and pro-Stalin on a segregationist line of argument. they don't want to be changed. it's less important for them to expand their own morals and laws over other countries than it is that fundamentally you can't force {{em|them}} to change. so they claim to be about social change but fundamentally what they want is for things to stay the same as long as they subjectively like those things. it's hilariously accurate in unintended ways when agorist types try to frame Freedom as "subjectivity" — oh, really, so you're free when the evaluation of what is good or bad for society is completely subjective? it seems like when they speak of moral truth values they're just using formal logic to launder their preconceptions. how do we know that a purported crime "is" anything? you can say that "colonialism" is bad and that "anti-capitalists are against colonialism" but if you can't define what colonialism is and where it comes from (trust me, there is not a single answer, various different "The Lefts" are still arguing about that) then what does that statement even mean, and how does it have the power to stop anyone from doing anything? what does defining a moral truth value and affixing it to an event that happened actually get you in that context?

{{li|I=F2/HAS|tradition=|Q=618}}Plagiarism is stating the population of England without context / Plagiarism is making a non-obvious statement of fact without providing sources; this is to imply that plagiarism is defined as having a belief which is materially accurate (true) but not justified / Remembering a fact is plagiarism -> this statement sounds okay when you are teaching elementary school but becomes laughably incoherent when you try to apply it to actual adult life for even a second. like, how many everyday spoken conversations do you think contain plagiarism just because you don't have time to look up exactly what book you read or what video you watched? if plagiarism is a matter of morality then people do immoral things every day just by speaking; everyone's daily interactions are hurting authors and academics every second of every day. at a certain point you have to ask if morality is nothing more than people {{i|believing that not having control over other people's lives harms them}}. there's a terrible similarity between this concept of plagiarism and people getting upset they are being harmed because they don't have control over trans people. I don't like ethics. I'm done with it.

{{li|I=S2/HAS|tradition=|Q=618}}Because plagiarism is making a statement of fact without providing sources (sic), any instance of reading a reference book and forgetting what exactly what the title is and where the book came from causes plagiarism; only people with a record of every book they have read within the time they are likely to remember it or who have every book they read accessible in their house can be moral -> now, to be fair, if we weren't talking about the concept of "plagiarism" and were talking about a unified notion of rules of evidence that applies across law and the sciences, I think this would be a reasonable thing to say — a chain of custody makes for better evidence. but it has always been really strange to me that people have seen this as a moral issue and seen the need to conflate rules of evidence with "stealing". isn't it enough to identify information as good-quality or bad-quality information? what's the big deal with trying to put so much control on every student that probably isn't even brought down on some publishing corporations? 
I feel like "stating an unverifiable fact" and "copying sentences out of a book" should be completely separate things. this is, unfortunately, one of the only good things large language models have done: they've been slowly forcing people to get better models of what plagiarism is because when they aren't human and can't be held accountable for anything and thus [[E:Reality is tyrannical|inherently have more rights than humans will ever have]], people are forced to fall back to guides on "how to identify AI" and actually explain materially why plagiarism creates less useful text rather than giving a moral argument about how a machine they cannot control "should have" done things differently. it would be wonderful to have something other than "AI" doing that instead but so far nothing has really succeeded at it.

{{li|I=S2/FS|tradition=|Q=618}}It isn't about gun control, it's about product and business-territory control -> you know. there's a certain section of people that are like, "FOSS basement dwellers" — who attribute great power to change society to individual ability to produce things with technology — but the funny thing is that sometimes those people are correct. usually during the times they're getting upset about the seemingly unstoppable power of corporations. let me tell you, Mike Masnick getting upset about corporations continuing to abuse the 'proprietary economy' was vastly more influential in the overall journey of getting me to Communism than everything anybody says about civil rights or even about unions or workers a lot of the time. I think in some ways Free Software types and this swath of "generic libertarians" is really wired into the concept of business territories and owners and trying to break down the business territories of the "big" or "corporatist" owners. it's comical how although the reasons for it are wrong the conclusions are very close to correct and I would unironically support using a surprisingly large slice of the generic-libertarian content that exists to teach Marxism. it's funny how nothing but the antagonism between all business territories eventually begins to undo capitalism if you give it long enough, while no amount of anarchist ideology ever seems to make much of a difference.

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}At what point is the proletariat created? -> this is not a trivial question because workers can function very differently inside different sociophilosophies. is the proletariat created when people are displaced from business territories? is the proletariat only created when Bolshevism is created? (I forget where I was going with this comment but I suspect I will remember later)

{{li|I=S2/Fy|tradition=|Q=618}}real people fiction / {{abbr|RPF|title=real people fiction}} (fan fiction)

{{li|I=M3/Fy|tradition=|Q=618}}What is the difference between real people fiction and historical fiction? -> a cop-out answer is that historical fiction can be made out of only made-up people but contains real countries or historical periods. but that's not the question I'm asking. I'm asking, if there is at least one real person inside a historical fiction scenario, at what point after that does it become real people fiction? immediately? are there other things required? does it have to consist of more real-people characters among the main cast than fake-people characters? if I write a scenario not as a novel but literally as one of those books used to train lawyers or librarians on example cases, and my scenario contains real people, have I written real people fiction?

{{li|I=S2/Ag|tradition=|Q=618}}Toontown runs on Menshevism / As evidenced by the layout of the interactable game world and the daily use of jellybeans as currency, the Toons that live in Toontown live in a [[E:agorism|market-based society]] built on small businesses which willingly provides houses -> note: come back and add Toontown to 'related' on 9k page for Growing Around, along with childism

{{li|I=S2/A|tradition=|Q=618}}Ted Kaczynski was not an anarchist [https://www.thetedkarchive.com/special/about-this-project] -> I have never heard of this man but okay. there are a lot of anarchist-sounding philosophies that aren't very good so even without much information I believe it's possible.

{{li|I=S2/IV|tradition=|Q=618}}Teamsters obstructed worker organization (2018) / The Teamsters are a group of bureaucrats that negotiate with workers to achieve corporations' demands; this is to imply that workers should consider forming their own internal organizations across bigger sectors of industry instead of trusting them (California, 2018) [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/20/upam-a20.html]

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}Kropotkinism leads to populations of people who produce about $5 an hour and end up getting classified as contractors who have to put all their other revenue into expenses -> anarchists like to complain about how Communism and Liberal capitalism 'overwork people for nothing' while anarchism is about finishing work and doing something enjoyable. but.... I have to wonder. what would happen if Kropotkinism actually kicked off? wouldn't you just have a population of people that earns tiny amounts, has huge expenses, and basically lives just like gig workers? what if the reason anarchism hasn't been more successful is Amazon beat anarchists to creating 'easy work' of the kind anarchists want but just not in the conditions they want? [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/19/jxer-f19.html] it seems to me like anarchism moves really slow and capitalism moves fast, owning entire [[E:agora (meta-Marxism)|market-boxes]] and communities while anarchists are only talking about those things and before they can meaningfully create them.

{{li|I=S2/LLM/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}Community is a hyperstructure -> the claim that "community", mostly as a materialist version of the anarchist model of what "communities" are, is a system that encourages itself to expand further through parts of the system contributing to the overall system. 
I think the description is really apt because you see this perfect 'blockchain quality' where community looks like a shiny wonderful thing you could only want more and more of, but when you get any particular instance of community, such as a newsfeed platform like YouTube or Twitter, the more people add to it the worse it seems to get and the more it turns into this vector for individual capitalists to own an entire "agora" and exploit the whole concept of an economy existing and make money off that, and the more it feels like community itself was a scam from the start. 
Community is a hyperstructure + Hyperstructures are usually harmful = Community is a cancer.

{{li|I=S2/LLM/A|tradition=|Q=618}}Hyperstructures are usually harmful -> this is an anarchist or agorist claim more than it is my claim but I wouldn't totally oppose it.

{{li|I=S1/LLM|tradition=|Q=618}}hyperstructure (snowballing system) [https://medium.com/@onjas_buidl/hyperstructures-in-human-history-5a27f31c28df] -> blockchain fanatics' attempt to describe a generalized kind of system which rewards people for contributing to a cumulative pie in a constructive way. 
honestly? if getting people to comprehend "hyperstructures" could get rid of blockchains themselves then I'd be all for it 
I feel like this concept is almost more of a cautionary tale than a desirable thing to have though. one of their examples is the general concept of money because of course they have to explain how bitcoin is similar to money. but like, the expansion of money through creating more products and the central government giving loans to corporations to speed up the process isn't necessarily a good thing, it often leads to the destruction of the environment as it's consumed to create materials and factories, or the destruction of culture as products obsolete other products just to chase money and get more money added. this is so bad that when they present language as the second example I'm like.... okay, is language secretly a bad thing that is destroying the world and I just didn't know it was? I have to say though, the advent of large language models really vindicates the concept of hyperstructures, if in a bad way. the more AI that people create the more different AIs can train on each other to the extent they can generate any meaningful inferences or conversation data that human testers approve, and then there will be more AI. so, yeah. the concept of hyperstructures was very successful. it was successful at describing something, but it seems like basically everything it describes is an existential threat to humanity, including The Economy, capitalism, blockchain, AI, and possibly language (??). 
this might be one of the clearest pieces of evidence that anarchism is inherently dangerous because it doesn't actually build into itself the capability to model societies spending a while building something and then leveling off in a neat S-curve because they moved on to entirely different things without redoing the same things over and over again such as repeatedly reinventing game consoles or phones. (a thing Marxism could do with some effort because it inherently understands the concept of historical periods and shifts from one period to another.) despite all the surface rhetoric about "infinite growth" recently it only really understands infinite growth because of its core values of always making everything about "community" and "inclusivity" and never saying no to anybody. so naturally a system of modeling growth itself is one of the first things to pop out of it, which claims to have a limit but in practice when it hits the limit just divides in two and continues to make more and more.

{{li|I=S1/STM|tradition=|Q=618}}storing properties of chemical reactions in power sets composed out of smaller sets [https://chemrxiv.org/doi/pdf/10.26434/chemrxiv-2025-368pz] -> um. I don't understand any of this but it's very cool.

{{li|I=M3/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}If Stalin's government putting up positive posters in schools is "a lie", then how do you know that solarpunk is true? -> I won't fault you for making the former claim, but the reason the CPSU would be wrong there is that it's letting people be Idealist instead of understanding the terrifying truth that they might not succeed. so.... if the CPSU posters are wrong, and putting up hopeful slogans is bad because it allows the people spreading the potentially incorrect slogans to gain power over you, then how exactly is solarpunk correct?

{{li|I=S2/MX/A|tradition=|Q=618}}Idealism is invincible / Materialist movements are inherently weaker than Idealist movements in that Idealist movements live forever as long as human beings don't believe in burning books, but Materialist movements die as soon as actual physical organizations are broken up -> there's only one real solution to correct this discrepancy. promote "hypothetical materialism", the new category of philosophies which are spread as disembodied ideas but internally contain only Material Ideas and Materialism. [https://chatonsky.net/ideomaterialism/]

{{li|I=S1/ML|tradition=|Q=618}}Marxist analysis of non-Marxisms / Marxist analysis of non-Marxist philosophies or movements / infra-Marxism (Marxist analysis which is done either wholly inside a specific formulation of Marxism, or wholly inside that specific Marxism while critiquing non-Marxist philosophies, but where the Marxism does not actually give a proper analysis of either itself or other Marxisms; meta-Marxism) -> a large part of the original stated purpose of Marxism before the Trotskyite conspiracy happened.

{{li|I=S2/HAS/ES|tradition=|Q=618}}The Diggers were a proto-Marxist movement because they began with displaced peasants or allied local houses sensing the impending expansion of estates, and sought to build a community without commodity exchange, loosely and metaphorically compared to Eden (Christopher Hill) / {{book|The World Turned Upside Down}} (Hill 1988; generic) [https://abiezercoppe.substack.com/p/john-calvin-a-contradictory-thinker] -> ok, in my mind, I can't remember the difference between this description and the Socialist-Revolutionaries or the Narodniks; this doesn't sound like a movement with a very detailed plan behind it. but this {{em|is}} a very juicy and entertaining claim, so I'll code it. I wouldn't really mind someone calling a cottager movement 'Socialists' or 'anarchists'. but, what is the difference between the Diggers and Peter Kropotkin? can you answer that question? I think you need to go into at least that much depth to properly answer whether they can be "communists".

{{li|I=S2/HAS/ES|tradition=|Q=618}}The faithful are duty bound to obey God alone / Because rulers are sinful creatures like us and will have a propensity to do the wrong thing, they will tend to tyranny, decreeing ungodly laws ... in these cases, the faithful are duty bound to obey God alone (Calvin ??/2009) [https://abiezercoppe.substack.com/p/john-calvin-a-contradictory-thinker] -> that is one killer quote. it's not surprising, given all the {{em|stuff}} in the bible about "powers and principalities" that sounds just like this. but it's definitely mysterious to look at the bible and realize, hey wait, what's all this stuff about never trusting rulers? God doesn't exist, God is one big rationalization. so is Christianity really an anarchism?? I'd argue it is. I'd argue that at least as soon as New Testament Christianity appeared the whole thing was really about pushing the concept that seemed nonsensical at that time of getting rid of all rulers and creating a society based only in social bonds connecting people into a society ("love", "brotherhood", "neighbors"), and Christians had to dress up that concept inside the concept of a worldwide empire just to get anybody to believe it when otherwise it would have seemed unbelievable. 
I'd also argue that by capitulating to the class imagery of their time Christians doomed Christianity and turned it into a tool of empire itself as empire noticed that an ideology about empire was better suited to literally arguing one empire was superior to other empires and deserved to be the one to conquer the world. there's not a lot of difference between Christians and Democrats. Christians: we are all united together as under The King. Romans promptly turn the king into Caesar and argue Christianity promotes somewhat-racist empires that take other nations as slaves. Democrats: we are all united together by voting and a list of civil rights. Capitalists promptly make it mandatory for every minority listed in a civil rights act to support Israel and destroy Palestine, and support products made in Cuba while refusing Cuban products on pain of arrest.

{{li|I=S2/P4|tradition=|Q=618}}An international war will surely clear away all internal contradictions / If there be bad blood in a nation, an honourable foreign war will vent it out (Bacon 1622) [https://abiezercoppe.substack.com/p/john-calvin-a-contradictory-thinker] -> god, he's the 1600s Dugin. that or Dugin's ideas are as old as dirt. you know, one or the other.

{{li|I=S1/ES|tradition=|Q=618}}the revolution betrayed betrayed betrayed -> the motif of Trotskyism getting "betrayed" by the creation of socialism in one country, which then got betrayed by Trotskyism as payback, which then got betrayed by anarchism and critical theory turning the previous two events into evidence against all Marxism.

{{li|I=S1/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}I'll question to the death the reason you said it / I don't agree with what you're defending and I'll question to the death the reasons for anyone ever saying that / I don't agree with what you're defending people saying and I'll question to the death the underlying material reasons for anyone ever saying that -> this isn't meaning to imply the statement absolutely should be suppressed or shouldn't be said as much as purely that there is a big elephant being ignored of asking why it is people say things and what will be gained by defending the statement 
I'll defend to the death your right to say it + meta-theory = this. 
I'll defend to the death your right to say it + demographic Marxist / sectarianism = this.

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}Zohran Mamdani would have done more for the world if he'd bought an illegal Cuban product, showed it off, and gotten arrested than he did by attempting to speak about Israel -> I'm so sick of this new trend of all social contradictions happening in courtrooms between two individuals. I really am. but this would be one way to make the best of it

{{li|I=F2/A|tradition=|Q=618}}They can't arrest all of us -> one of those anarchist sayings that deeply bothers me because of how it's just not true. a country can bring down the law on as many people as it wants to. when it can't arrest everybody, that's when it brings out the tanks and helicopters and just starts shooting them. you should know this. it's already a pretty common talking point to say U.S. people don't revolt against the U.S. because of "the military". if China can bring out the army when there's not enough time for jury trials, and it's already common for cops to shoot petty criminals, what stops the United States from starting an open season on everybody who isn't committed to following all its laws? a bit of Cold War propaganda? do you really think the Great Terror happened for any other reason than that republics are based on laws and when people stop following laws and getting scared by cops they do anything to protect themselves??

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}Nations are bodies of law / Nations are legal codes / A nationality is defined by how well people follow a population's current set of laws, and the less people follow the law, the less they are part of that nationality; this is to imply but not state that the moment people intend to follow no laws at all they are not part of a particular nationality any more -> 
this is one of the only models that can explain either separate wing of Liberal-republicanism and Stalin's Marxism and even a Trotskyist republic equally well: the model that republics begin with written laws and laws are the fundamental Ideas that create "nations of ideas". Tories don't follow center-Liberal laws, center-Liberals call treason. center-Liberals skirt around Tory laws, Tories call treason. Communists don't respect center-Liberal laws, center-Liberals call treason. anarchists or right-Liberals defy Soviet laws, Stalin's government calls treason. Stalin's government defies Trotskyists' desired body of laws, Trotskyists call treason. 
it's all about laws. laws are made by classes, and that's what distinguishes the fundamental character of a body of laws, but actually, all geopolitical conflicts and demographic conflicts deep inside countries start at whether separate groups of people are following each other's internal laws. it's all one big squabble about laws and what laws are inherently good or bad, while that will never have an objective answer because different areas of people hate other people's laws and don't want them. 
this is part of what makes critical-theory so frustrating. as of late it's been picking up talking points that the United States government is totally capable of granting North American tribes rights. but in order to get those "rights" they had to first send people to assimilate to White towns and consent to the overall body of United States laws and agree not to violate any of them, while some of those laws banned the tribal societies they would have been fighting for. it's a bit paradoxical. within the system that boasts all the time about giving people human rights (and also lies to everyone claiming the rights are from birth or 'god-given' despite the fact God doesn't give them to you in Cuba and Cuba requires an invasion to defeat The Regime that's apparently stronger than God himself)

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}Dengism can defeat God (power scaling) / Deng Xiaoping states are stronger than God / If human rights are granted to people by God when they are born, but the United States needs to invade Cuba to ensure that people have God-given rights, then the Cuban government is strong enough to stop God himself; this is to imply that the United States is proportionally stronger than God by two [[E:feat (power scaling)|feats]] because the United States is stronger than the thing that defeated God but is not God / The U.S. can defeat God (sense)

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}There is no difference between morality and "manufacturing consent"; they are the same continuous thing; "manufacturing consent" is precisely an instance of either morality or natural law, and is an example of how Liberal-republicanism abuses these incorrect models of reality to gain power over people that were previously outside its control

{{li|I=Z1/PT|tradition=|Q=618}}Return to the Land (White supremacist movement) {{YouTube|e1iSMbzx_Hg}} -> I have.... a bit of a mild "conspiracy theory". I'm not sure Liberal-republicans are actually opposing this thing for the right reasons. sure, the people inside it sound like fairly bad people, and it doesn't sound like a good place to live. but I feel like this thing is being used as leverage to promote things people otherwise wouldn't support. to show that otherwise-bad things are "necessary". like, compounds full of racists are the new 9/11 — or the old one that probably existed decades before it happened. 
(it really doesn't help that the commentator identified the White supremacist compounds as "terrorist cells". that's a pretty heavy-handed rhetorical term when it comes to giving a particular national government great military power over any city within the entire rest of the world. like, anybody who says the word "terrorist" may as well already be king. Marxist parties are the only halfway exception. but it's still bad.) 
I feel like what's happening is something like, critical theory was one big scam by Liberal-republicanism to convince anarchists to turn against other forms of anarchism — granted, some of which were somewhat harmful, making the deal sound weirdly enticing — so Liberal-republicanism could then turn around and eradicate all anarchism and then be free to take over other countries and conquer the world. just like in those civilization games where you can just build one giant republican country and nuclear war never destroys the world first.

{{li|I=F2/LR|tradition=LR, HM|Q=618}}The purpose of Liberal-republicanism is to transition the world out of racism -> this seems to be the hypothesis advanced by critical theory. that republics actually exist in order to force ethnic groups to be friends. no matter what they've done to each other. this explains how Native American movements have been going mainstream: Liberal-republicanism is having trouble getting people to consent to it any more, so it needs to recruit minorities to advance its agenda of expanding itself over people and telling them what to do under the guise that it's making the world better for minorities. 
...this has to be false, doesn't it? the actual function of the United States has been dividing into two anarchisms that are mortal enemies. no matter how much critical theory says that forcing people to interact and integrate should change consciousness it doesn't seem to happen, and to some degree it only seems to make people more and more resentful and more inclined to kill each other. why it happens is less the presence of ethnic groups together in particular and more the presence of multiple populations that could be politically independent being ruled by "external" political factions that feel like foreign countries. like, it would really seem that Deng Xiaoping Thought has been way more successful than Liberal-republicanism, because having a single unified government actually seems to unify people rather than generating this worsening and worsening cycle of hatred. 
critical theory may be ideology generated directly out of Liberal-republicanism in the most insidious way possible. maybe this is what it's always done. maybe the real foundation of Liberal-republicanism is precisely holding up a set of laws, claiming they're inherently moral, and forcing everyone around, even people who aren't part of the country yet, to obey them or else. that is one of the only good explanations for why Liberal-republicanism has been so eager to back Israel. it doesn't even actually run on morality or care about morality. all it cares about is whether as many people as possible across the world are following an arbitrary set of laws. so the more people think Palestine "isn't following the law", {{em|as it is written}}, the easier it is to justify eliminating Palestine. 
you know. queer rights are a sham. they only exist because people have proved gay people are legal. on this weird metaphysical level where laws already exist before laws actually exist. and that's how laws come to be laws. but it isn't gay people that are oppressed by this Kantian interpretation of laws. it's Palestinians. believing that laws inherently exist and they only need to be approved just legitimizes the structure that makes this illusion possible to believe — global empire. this conception of things shouldn't be true, but when your empire is big enough to bully Cuba it's big enough to make almost anything come true.

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}If history can ever be static, then Donald Trump cannot be the slightest bit Good or Bad / It's impossible to call any historical outcome desirable or undesirable, including all outcomes in politics, without the recognition that history is always in motion from one state to another and it is always mandatory to make decisions on what it will change to / It's impossible to call any historical outcome desirable or undesirable without the recognition history is always in motion -> you cannot say history has ended. not even with a narrow meaning that modes of production have ended. because there is no meaningful distinction between change existing in the form of a change between mode of production and change existing in the form of a country reverting to a global empire that wants to kill people for more land. both are the same kind of change, but reversion to empire cannot be stopped, which is to say that neither kind of change can actually be stopped. the original claim is false because in setting down its basic assumptions it really actually makes a false claim about what change is, which is dangerously false.

{{li|I=S2/MX/A|tradition=|Q=618}}All business owners are terrorists -> abolish copyright and I'll take it back.

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}Until 2020 Marxism has been unable to create genuinely accurate models of Idealist factions or civilizations because of the way their material interests and the processes that create their behavior are inherently separated; Marxist models start in a form of Materialism that basically assumes that everybody already lives in a Materialist civilization similar to Bolshevism where any particular assembled group of people belonging to a class is aware it has class interests as opposed to the people in a faction being completely unaware of that and acting together for completely different reasons; this has made Marxism inherently well suited to turning around and betraying itself with Marxisms attacking other Marxisms, and inherently badly suited to actually understanding the development over time of Liberal-republicanism and anarchism well enough to be able to defeat them

{{li|I=S1/Fy|tradition=|Q=618}}TV times including "central" / 2:30-3:30 central / 9pm-8pm central [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/1mgil6/if_there_are_four_time_zones_why_do_national_tv/] / my daughter asked me to pick her up at 2:30-3:30 central -> I keenly remember this idea being printed in some kind of issue of {{book|Reader's Digest}} or something but I do not remember where I first saw it. a joke about the idea that it's really weird that U.S. TV shows tell you two time zones at once and it would be strange if everyone went around saying that. that's really changed in the age of online streaming where YouTube will just kind of tell you what time something happens in your time zone and a stream might be on at a weird time but you don't have to do any calculations. but for various reasons it's still worth remembering the age of "2:30/3:30 central".

{{li|I=M3/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}How will you obtain unicorn horns? / Anarchists presuppose that envisioning a different future separate from the material elements, structures, and processes of society that already exist is meaningful in and of itself, but if this is the case, they seemingly have no way to actually change anything; if the United States changes the day you find unicorn horns on the ground, but there are none of them in the entire land area of the United States, and you cannot fabricate them, and you cannot teleport them in from another place given that nobody in the United States knows how to do that, how can you possibly find them fast enough for your entire party of people to not simply be driven out of the United States to where the unicorn horns actually are — what do you do? -> trying to get anarchists to think harder about the concept of productive forces and the fact that you always need graph connections between people to actually achieve anything

{{li|I=S1/IV|tradition=|Q=618}}how many of these Trotskyists came from the Third International?? [https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/idom/dm/21-scratch1.htm] -> complaint by Trotsky talking about a U.S. party, I think it was the SWP but I'm not sure. he also mentioned the Second International and some Fisherist-sounding analysis where Shachtman got obsessed with culture and media but wouldn't talk about the structure of society. there was a lot in the letter. it's just mildly funny to me to that "people from the Comintern" would be so identifiable

{{li|I=S2/Ag/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}Non-aggressive activities gain the right to exist only through aggressive activities -> do you see how the concept of a non-aggressive activity "in and of itself" is inherently paradoxical? the paradox falls away if you realize that any particular group of non-aggressive activities is put together [[E:Social-Graph System (meta-Marxism)|on some other totally different definition]], and it labels itself "non-aggressive activities" purely because it is incompatible with something else that then labels it "aggressive activities".

{{li|I=S2/Ag/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}Everyone in the United States is a Libertarian / Despite nearly everyone in the United States who is not a member of the Libertarian movement claiming capital-L Libertarian parties to be different and distinct from them, the Libertarian movement in fact describes the founding principles of {{em|all}} political parties in the United States — agorism — and every other Liberal-republican political party in the United States is in fact a variation of Libertarianism as defined by the Libertarian movement, including some political movements which are not organized into official parties; United States civil rights movements are a Libertarianism because they are defined as the sum of all non-aggressive activities, the Democratic-Republican party of 1791 was a Libertarianism because it opposed the Federalist party of large monolithic businesses clustered around a central government, the Democratic Party is a Libertarianism because it is defined through the concept of people voluntarily joining in non-aggression to continuously vote for a party to supposedly fix their problems and absolutely all political parties that don't directly commit aggression getting to continue existing, the Republican party is a Libertarianism because it is defined through the belief that all small, medium-size, and large corporations can form a locus of non-aggression that is being attacked by other loci of non-aggression; the actual center position in the United States that should be in the middle of a political compass is Libertarianism-agorism [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Party] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic-Republican_Party] -> 
before I found about agorism nothing about Liberal-republicanism made sense, and it all makes a lot more coherent material sense now down to the thing of getting obsessed with finding "the middle" and distinguishing all deviations into new parties as "directional" from the middle or as Extremes, but the more I learn, the more all the inner logic of LiberalRepublicanism-Libertarianism-agorism is utterly horrifying.

{{li|I=S2/Ag/MX|tradition=|Q=618}}If Wario believes in Liberal-republicanism then he must be a Libertarian -> I made it simple for you. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-greatest-thread-in-the-history-of-forums-locked-by-a-moderator-after-12239-pages-of-heated-debate]

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=MX onto Ag|Q=618}}Everything starts out prohibited / Everything always begins prohibited / There is no difference between a republic where everything that is not prohibited is allowed and a republic where everything that is not allowed is prohibited; because all prohibitions emerge from the shape of small-scale social graphs and gaps between them, both models function the same way at that scale, and because government is always generated out of smaller scales of society, both logical models functionally model the exact same physical thing (meta-Marxism onto agorism) -> people usually think there is, but that's based on an error in reasoning thinking that legislators are the people who actually decide what's allowed. when you realize that ordinary people are always the ones who decide what's allowed and even oppressive republics have representatives based on what ordinary people want, you realize that actually, it might be the case that every single republic is based on everything not explicitly allowed being prohibited due to the fact that loci of non-aggression are always created on that basis, and the concept of there being a republic where you can do what you want as long as it isn't prohibited is entirely made up.

{{li|I=S2/MX/LR|Q=618}}Liberal-republicanism is not just a bunch of arbitrary utterances spat out of capitalism, and in fact is an entire intricate historical process of its own consisting of particular material objects in particular arrangements attempting to perform particular transitions from one arrangement to another arrangement, much like the internal operation of Trotskyism cannot be reduced to a bunch of spat-out ideas "from the wrong classes" by Stalin's Marxism, nor can the shape of Stalin's Marxism be reduced to a bunch of spat-out ideas "unrelated to Marxist movements" by Trotskyism; the United States is not special because it is the United States and isn't other countries, nor is Liberal-republicanism special because it is somehow "the only correct system", but instead of that, Liberal-republicanism is merely a specific kind of physical process distinguished from other physical processes which uses human individuals to build larger objects; the inner process within Liberal-republicanism fundamentally operates on the physical rules of a material description of blue anarchism, and not on any physical rules of a material description of Bolshevism / The progression of physical structures within Liberal-republicanism evolves in a fundamentally different way than the progression of physical structures inside Bolshevism (generic)

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Agorism is a segregation machine / Liberal-republicanism is a segregation machine / The progression of physical structures within Liberal-republicanism evolves in a fundamentally different way than the progression of physical structures inside Bolshevism; within Liberal-republicanism the structures that develop are loci of non-aggression inside which the particular list of rather specific things recognized to not be aggressive is strictly required to be tolerated by the entire locus but things not included on the list of non-aggressive things are often considered aggressive and worthy of being pushed out of society even if among things they would be compatible with they are not actually aggressive or dangerous and the locus of non-aggression simply fears them; 
the creation of loci of non-aggression is popularly believed to result in fusion of different loci which will locally take away chunk competition from society and replace it with 'chunk cooperation' or 'chunk summation'; 
in reality, the entire concept of loci of non-aggression is so unstable and arbitrary that it easily creates countably separate loci in perpetual competition that evolve into toxically-linked, hostile, or even murderous societies, and the precise transition that occurs is to split a country like the United States into two or more countable nationalities that are as similar as possible and yet as toxically incompatible as possible, which both still believe themselves to be compatible, and spawn further nationalities as people attempt to assemble into [[E:anarchism|a third locus of non-aggression]] to get away from the existing nationalities' toxic relationship; the system loathes inequality and attacks both billionaires and populational borders for breaking the illusion that society is singular and not made of plural pyramids, but as more and more equality is produced, more and more segregation is produced along the separations between loci, and gaps between loci channel deeper and produce more hatred, fear, and anti-social behavior, paradoxically making people nicer and nicer inside loci but completely unaware and incapable of understanding that other people are nice to each other because other people's trajectory of becoming nice was completely different from theirs; 
loci of non-aggression include: towns, families that have not experienced violent child abuse or the murder of a spouse, clusters of employees and owners that haven't committed horrible abuses against each other yet, clusters of tenants the landlord hasn't [[E:landlord rape incidents|literally committed crimes]] against, individual churches, segregated White towns without any gangs, Black towns without any racists, towns without any homeless camps, tiny satellite cities that produce nothing but are not "menaced" by big cities or taxes, individual local-states that come to accurately or falsely believe they've reduced themselves to one Liberal-republican party and no longer worry about the other, clusters of minority subpopulations, the US Bill of Rights, clusters of religions that believe they only have freedom of religion because they all exist together and none of them stopped existing, the overall US empire as it exists in a state of not having wars on its immediate borders, clusters of First World countries that are friendly toward each other but get together to oppress Third-World countries and even more so any Second-World countries that exist as "aggressives" 
You can't spell community without "out" + ?? = this. escape routes (schizoanalysis) + republic based on transition = this.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Moral vanguard theory is covering up the observation that, as it currently exists inside Liberal-republicanism, agorism is founded on the assumption that all bigotry is fundamentally normal and natural until the day clusters of people end up being compatible with each other rather than toxic to each other and then only after that spontaneously decide hating each other is not okay 
You can't spell community without "out" + ?? = this.

{{li|I=M3/MX|Q=618}}If it's bad to want a utopia then why is anybody allowed to desire an afterlife? -> really think about it. it's very common to criticize utopias in fiction and think "all of them are dystopias"; charcoal anarchists are some of the only people who don't think this way. so why doesn't everyone think that way about the bible? why doesn't everybody realize that if wanting a utopia is "wanting to get something the easy way" or "wanting to get something for nothing" then wanting a god to grant you heaven is literally exactly the same thing? you just have to believe and then you get something for nothing.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}The news is more offensive than {{film|Drawn Together}} / By the 2020s, quotes from Republicans you hear on the news every week are much more upsetting than {{film|Drawn Together}} / The news is more upsetting than {{film|South Park}} -> today I watched a clip from South Park and I swear it just read like a normal cartoon that inexplicably had swear words in it. I am not even joking, I actually mean that. that's how bad the news is at this point. both the headlines and the quotes inside.

{{li|I=S2/LR|Q=618}}The ice bucket challenge was the realization of an abstract Ideal rather than a historical event made of particular material processes [https://archive.is/vLbtf] -> so, {{em|why is it}} that this abstract Ideal was hard to realize again and only had a short reach the second time? does it make any sense to speak of abstract Ideals as something individuals {{em|choose}} to do, or does it not?

{{li|I=S2/MX/IV|Q=618}}Stalin transitioned the {{TTS|USSR|Soviet Union}} backward / Stalin transitioned the Soviet Union backward from Trotskyism to Stalin's Marxism / Stalin took the Soviet Union backward through the stages of history because he did not understand that the Soviet Union was an instance of Trotskyism, Trotskyism is a stage {{em|after}} Stalin's Marxism, and seeking to build Stalin's Marxism while standing on Trotskyism can only result in the reversion of an instance of Trotskyism to a prior physical historical period, destroying Trotskyism; this is to imply but not state that Stalin is a counter-revolutionary just because he failed to understand Trotskyism as a material object and destroyed it -> trying to state what Trotskyists' argument is {{em|clearly}} through the language of meta-Marxism. 
I wish Trotskyists would just admit that the Trotskyite conspiracy happened. because if they did, they could point to this, and they could say, it doesn't matter if Stalin was defending Stalin's Marxism, the problem is Stalin wrecked Trotskyism, and that's why it had to be defended at all costs. Trotsky wrecking Stalin's Marxism is immaterial if Stalin was trying to build a worse version of Marxism over a better version of Marxism. when Liberal-republicans do that, it's counter-revolutionary, so when Stalin does it, it's also counter-revolutionary, no need to even start arguing about The Bureaucracy yet. meta-Marxists, {{em|you}} go build Stalin's Marxism in another country so it doesn't wreck Trotskyism, not the other way around. and I would say, that's a good point actually. maybe Stalin {{em|did}} accidentally transplant a Marxism meant for much more undeveloped countries to the Soviet Union. and maybe it's technically true that Stalin's Marxism vulgarizes really quickly into Dengism if you aren't watching it closely. is Stalin actually a Maoist? are Stalin and Mao actually Dengists? sometimes I just don't know any more.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Kōans are really lightbulb jokes / Kōans become lightbulb jokes / Any philosophical kōan can be turned into a lightbulb joke with the addition of ideological factions -> How many roads must a man walk down? If he's a Liberal-republican, infinite, some of them going in circles. If he's a Communist, a finite number because he knows where he's going.

{{li|I=S2/HAS|Q=618}}How many roads must a man walk down?

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}A debate about gun control is actually a debate over which weapon to use / A debate about gun control is actually a debate about which weapon everyday people should prefer: guns or cops

{{li|I=S2/HAS|tradition=|Q=618}}If ancient Greece was a small civilization where did the slaves come from? -> the Roman empire makes logical sense to me. there were territories at the edge of Rome, it conquered them, it put them into the empire, it took slaves. but Greece had slaves too and where did those come from?

{{li|I=S2/LR|tradition=|Q=618}}Industry divisions thwart Armageddon / When society is divided into Butcher and Bookbinder it cannot divide into Us and Them / If society is divided qualitatively into industries, none of the divisions of people can be Good or Evil, and it must be that they will come to understand each other on a level that is universal -> implied assumption in agorism, and Liberal-republicanism. I think this was solidly falsified the moment humans invented generative AI. there's been a pretty solid consensus building that generative AI just is Evil and when it exists as an industry some industries are Evil, if that didn't already happen with the oil industry. what anarchists really really don't want to understand is that this discovery has horrifying implications for the philosophical foundations of anarchism. if people can be Good or Evil solely based on what their talents are, you can never guarantee that 'the totality of all non-aggressive activities not forbidden by The State' will ever get along rather than fighting each other and erupting into hierarchy or domination purely because people are determined for one decision to be made rather than another decision and to call that decision Good and the other decision Evil. that is the root of a lot of hierarchy if you ask me. but it's also unavoidable, because who's going to persuade anarchists to just tolerate all the stuff that they feel oppresses them? I think it's more realistic to admit that anarchism can contain domination and hierarchy and the claims it doesn't were lies, and just define anarchism around some other concept than Good and Bad — that includes "domination", "hierarchy", "decency", "respect", "disruption", "empathy", morality, ethics, "enchantment" (which turns into ethics in a couple seconds), "prejudices", and "White culture". the one completely nebulous thing they say that I am genuinely unsure whether they can or can't have is Freedom, because that has hundreds of definitions and I'm still not sure I understand what it is. so, yeah, {{em|maybe}} you can get away with defining anarchism as Freedom-ism and basing it on these long treatises of exactly how Freedom works descriptively with no prescriptive statements about it. I might not like it but at least I can't immediately tell you it's a dead theory. 
Industry divisions thwart Armageddon + Pokémon type chart = Arceus.

{{li|I=S1/MX/PT|tradition=|Q=618}}oppressive membership -> the concept of membership in a relationship or group of people being itself an axis of oppression which operates in a somewhat [[E:atomic process (one-step process)|atomic]] way such that it is completely inseparable from concepts of "hierarchy" or "domination" and those things cannot simply be removed without the relationship itself dissolving. 
oppressive membership + anarchism = anarculture. oppressive membership + The Bureaucracy (Trotskyism) / Stalinism (corruption) = political revolution in the USSR (Trotskyism).

{{li|I=S2/ES|tradition=|Q=618}}Anarchism applies to any situation / Anarchism is a series of moral principles that can be applied in any historical situation -> sounds fine on the surface as a descriptive appraisal of anarchism, but gets really interesting when you remember that the Soviet Union and the conflict between Stalin's party and Trotsky's faction is "any situation". 
Anarchism is acting as if you're already free + Machiavellianism (feudal orders) = Anarchism applies to any situation.

{{li|I=S2/MX/W|tradition=|Q=618}}If Fisherism is true, China can overtake Breadtube / If Fisherism is true, then every non-politician in China should ignore Chinese politics and make as many videos about United States politics as possible -> this would be for two reasons. 1) people in China are mostly safe from the U.S. government, so they are less likely to face consequences than people in the United States 2) if "creating media" is really so important to changing societal consciousness then most of China's government and politics is in the United States, so they need to change consciousness in the United States to change their government

{{li|I=S1/HAS|tradition=|Q=618}}shark attacks of 1916 [https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23279012/shark-attack-1916-woodrow-wilson-political-science-achen-bartels-fowler-hall] [https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/did-shark-attacks-eat-into-woodrow-wilsons-votes-in-1916] [https://www.salon.com/2022/07/24/this-denounced-sharks-as-monsters-but-did-they-take-a-bite-out-of-his-voters/]

{{li|I=F2/Fy|Q=618}}All events that happened in 1917 are revolutions / You won't believe what happened in 1917 -> there are some propositions on here that are so serious we need a few really silly ones.
{{li|I=S1/DFy/ML|Q=618}}1917 as year after shark attack / sharks attacked in 1916 — you won't believe what happened in 1917 -> seeing the year "1916" or "1917" in other contexts always catches me a little off guard because I am like, mentally placing the event on a map where it's going on but way over to the other side is Lenin. I understand that other things happened in that year but at a few select moments the autopilot part of my brain absolutely does not and I'm like "...1916?" before I suddenly "wake up".
{{li|I=S1/DFy|Q=618}}comparing Communists to sharks -> I don't know if this item will get much use but it {{em|is}} inevitable.

{{li|I=S1/PT|tradition=|Q=618}}imperial reversal / imperial revolution -> A) the day human beings turned around to oppress predatory animals, and the movie monster was born B) Zionism, Duginism

{{li|I=S2/Fy|tradition=|Q=618}}"Male culture" and "female culture" are more or less the same but "queer culture" and "non-queer culture" are different / In terms of the arts, "male culture" and "female culture" are more or less the same thing in all contexts except among the craziest groups of proto-fascist Tories <s>[I promise to revise that on the Ontology: page]</s>, but "queer culture" and "non-queer culture" are actually different things to a greater extent than "U.S. culture" versus "Japanese culture" or "U.S. culture" versus "British culture"; national population does not affect culture products as greatly as the new and special forms of interaction and description of selves and world that take place within the particular kinds of semi-countable social groups that take part in "queer culture"; this is to imply but not state that "queer culture" carries its own worldview and political faction distinct from Liberal-republican politics -> 
male culture: Digimon Adventure. female culture: MLP gen 4. it's quite obvious what is what with kids' media when you have networks wanting to aim products at apparent differences between boys and girls to try to get more consistent sales, but even when you can point out a 'show for girls' and a 'show for boys' they are not actually that different if they're any good. hence all the bronies, hence that awkward space of women watching anime and trying to ignore the grossly exaggerated female silhouettes because nothing else about the show or game is especially bad. I think you also see this with things aimed at adults but it would be hard to think of an example where you get such a 'nice' region of awkward crossover. {{book|Dragonriders of Pern}} can be argued to be female culture I guess, but it's easy to forget that. then there's like, an argument to be made that {{book|Harry Potter}} is so misogynistic that it's male culture coming out of a woman — if it wasn't enough of an insult to accuse it of being such an 'uncool' book series as to be read by more moms and dads than kids — but it's also just within the range of 'teenage' enough that teenage girls can get obsessed with the male characters. 
so, male culture and female culture are very similar on basic levels. but "queer culture" is something different from either of them. you can really start to identify it the moment you see a furry visual novel with a plot that's "weirdly straight" — where some of the characters are stereotypes, or where the writing is okay but all the characters have totally depressing problems that make you wonder why you're reading a book right now and not just talking to the people around you that are the human equivalent of Twitter feeds, here assuming you also don't like Twitter. when these kinds of things are made "correctly", they have a very different feel. you see people being... idealistic? living in their own world, but not really in an upsetting way. they stop thinking about the outside world where everybody isn't of the same finite cluster of LGBT+ people and the atmosphere becomes very... specific to the people who are there. I want to say "insular" but that's more negative than what I actually mean. 
I think part of what I am saying is that LGBT+ circles tend to generate this consciousness of being a teeny village of people just because they are inherently limited to having only tiny clusters of people available, and because of this they sometimes also start believing that they inherently constitute some kind of "anarchist tribe" that must transition to anarchism because it will never contain enough people to spawn a Liberal-republican nation-state. the way different subpopulations in the United States get so separated really seems to mess with people's heads and cause people to see themselves as entirely separate stateless "nation-states" with separate histories, right down to subconsciously imagining whole trajectories of transition only for their own cluster of people of a particular identity and based on the exact number of people that are in it at the moment. it's funny how identities will take the notion of forms of society comically literally to the point a Marxist would scold them for reading historical materialism too closely, but then they will not even know they're doing it and try to deny that forms of society and social transitions are a thing and just try to tell you everybody needs to transition to anarchism because gay people exist.

{{li|I=S2/MX/IV|tradition=|Q=618}}Orange terrain is solid / Orange terrain is stable / Trotskyism is composed of fine-scale structures that are distinguished by their ability to stop parts of society from being overtaken and taken advantage of by The Bureaucracy; these structures may be referred to as "orange structures", although this only labels one specific function of the structures or process they contribute to and is not meant to be exclusive with the category of them being crimson structures / The dictatorship of the proletariat is an unbroken terrain of connected orange structures -> 
so apparently it's only when you look deep into what Trotskyists are claiming The Bureaucracy is that you finally start to understand what it is they're trying to create. they want one basic thing within any particular region, which is the dictatorship of the proletariat; the concept of international permanent revolution can actually be conceptualized as being emergent from this, because anything that keeps continuously defending outwardly red or orange countries from turning strawberry or blue and does appear in multiple nearby countries can link across the country regions so they can defend each other from encroaching bourgeois factions and form a Second World. this makes a lot more sense. the very first few times I read about Trotskyism I took it as this vaguely Idealist proclamation that things [[E:"I believe that everybody" statement|should have happened]] in other countries [[E:Monty Hall problem|that didn't happen]] and there "just should have" been international permanent revolution. but I now see it was more complicated than that. it's less that Trotskyists were upset Trotsky couldn't go to Germany and turn it orange and more that they were upset that the Third International seemingly refused to create a correct model of what happened in Germany, so they thought they had to tirelessly protect any region that really did have the potential to create a dictatorship of the proletariat, wherever it was, to keep The Bureaucracy from getting into it because the parties allied with Stalin were not safe from getting 'infiltrated' and slowly turning strawberry. the aim of trying to hold down a dictatorship-of-the-proletariat and prevent strawberry Marxisms from forming is respectable, given how many strange things strawberry Marxisms do on their best days ('corporations are productive forces', 'socialism is getting rid of poverty', party-approved listicles) and the few actually-awful things they do on their worst days (pre-emptively thinking rude people are reactionaries just because they're rude, battle between strawberry cops and Maoists buried inside resistances). historically speaking strawberry Marxisms are very similar to blue factions in that they slowly restore this dynamic of the most powerful people generating more power and keeping down the weakest people. I wouldn't blame anyone for acting like strawberry Marxisms simply aren't something to be messed with and are more something you want to stop at the root. as long as the people saying that are at least as Marxist as Stalin; anarchists really need to shut up and read enough stuff to learn how to do violet analysis before say anything on the topic of 'power multiplying'. if anarchists knew as much Marxism as the [[E:International Committee of the Fourth International|ICFI]] I would not be anywhere near as mad at them as I am and I would be more tolerant of proposals to create charcoal terrains that are supposed to serve the same function as orange terrains. I was in the beginning, but.... oh boy when anarchism only seems to generate more stupidity every day without ever getting better you quickly get tired of it

{{li|I=S2/MX/IV|tradition=|Q=618}}Historically, Trotskyism has always been a "poly-" Marxism and there has never been a molecularized definition of Trotskyism (or any definition) which does not expect {{em|the process inside}} a particular country region to spill to the edge of the country effectively enough to end up creating connected blocs or federations of countries; the process of abolishing "owned country territories" and ruling classes along country borders and the process of defeating other versions of Marxism are not necessarily the direct causes of the "poly-" shape as much as consequences of it, and in fact, Trotskyism having a "poly-" shape is easily explained by processes inside each country region individually, namely a molecularized process of forming a dictatorship-of-the-proletariat which if successful joins multiple countries into a single potentially contiguous Second World region

{{li|I=S2/A|tradition=LR, ES, A|Q=618}}Mothers have the power to abolish entire nationalities / When national populations do not base their strategy for development on government welfare programs they inherently treat households as an exploitable resource by making stay-at-home mothers or fathers or other relatives generate and perfect workers that will be exploited by cities to build modernity, therefore if rural parents were to stand up against society they could weaken the power of the oppressive apparatus inside nation-states and all its justifications for either it or a nation-state existing; this is to imply that nation-states are not entitled to calling households citizens just because people do daily activities inside their borders, but also that households are entitled to money from other households in the pool of people a nation-state has assigned them to almost as an apology for having to be part of a nation-state {{YouTube|eotvnm_UDek}} -> this came from an analysis I saw on China. it's clearly from a very Liberal-republican framework, considering the weird fixation on everyone in a country being entitled to all social programs that exist even if the limits on social programs are actually meant to stop urban poverty and stuff like U.S. cities full of homeless camps that ultimately result after too many people move to cities too fast. but the more you look at this statement the weirder it gets. Liberal-republicans will most of the time act like a particular republic existing is only natural and dismantling it would be craziness but at other times they'll act like the entire existence of nationalities is a game to them and everyone can just stop being Chinese at any time if they get tired of it. there is this weird anarchist undercurrent to all Liberal-republicanism which you see vaguely come up in theorists like Rousseau. but when you try to point out that it's there, Liberal-republicanism will generally try to deny it and act like all the people that say taxes are arbitrary constructs or they're 'sovereign citizens' are foreign material and weren't created by glitches in Liberal-republican theory itself. the one time people get bold about it and it becomes the most socially acceptable is when it's applied to other countries than the one people are currently in. tell people that the United States is a made-up game and they get upset and try to argue at you for hours that civil rights court cases that will get repealed tomorrow are objective truth, tell people China is a made-up game that can be broken up or remade from scratch and they'll simply nod.

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=MX onto ES onto DX|Q=618}}China designing Deng Xiaoping Thought to suit the United States is pick-me behavior, and the true anti-pick-me move is for China to go back to Bolshevism -> I am so sick of the terrible contradiction between everyone in the United States saying that 'you shouldn't just be what society wants you to be to be convenient to them' and also acting like the pressure on entire Third World countries to be exactly what First World countries want is okay and normal. either people eventually become obligated to mask for others at some point {{em|as a matter of being ethical}}, or telling China it has to have a socioeconomic structure that the United States stamps as okay is "pick-me behavior", and there is no in-between on that question.

{{li|I=S2/LR|tradition=|Q=618}}China exporting too many products is exacerbating global tensions [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/21/qkaj-f21.html] -> why? why do you believe that? do you think you'll be able to get the people who made China structure itself based on exports because it was their 'free market right' to stop? you're waging a fight between United States capitalists that want to exploit Third World labor and United States capitalists that want to sell products, and for some reason you're waging it in China as if China had anything to do with it. China did what it was told. so at this point you may as well set up a ballot box for Bernie Sanders versus Donald Trump in China and make the president of the United States partly based on what the people of China vote for. because it would make fully as much sense as this.

{{li|I=S2/DX/IV|tradition=|Q=618}}Jiang Zemin's "theory of three represents" declared that the business elite and emerging middle classes were the most advanced representatives of society, and were as much allies of the CPC as workers (ICFI) [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/12/chin-d30.html]

{{li|I=S2/HAS|tradition=|Q=618}}The French first republic lasted until the declaration of the first empire [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_First_Republic] -> that is such an interesting sentence by itself, because it'd make you think that capitalism in France just erupted directly into global empire. I don't think it was that much of a straight line though.

{{li|I=S2/LR|tradition=|Q=618}}Saying Jewish people outside Israel are obligated to support Israel is the real antisemitism -> Jewish people are one thing. Israelis are another. Germans are one thing. Nazis are another. this is not difficult. but for some reason the United States and all of its messaging and paid ads are determined to make this more difficult than it needs to be

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}The major effect of spreading {{book|Settlers}} was to get people very upset about localized Black struggles that immediately affected them but to change nearly nobody's position on Palestine or attempting to use voting to save Palestine

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}There are two major forms of imperialism: annexation (conquest) and primitive accumulation (frontier wars, apartheid states, "settler-colonialism", large-scale chunk competition)

{{li|I=S2/ML|Q=618}}Ordinary people are confused by the fact that different groups of billionaires can believe entirely different things -> on one hand this is a good thing because people are vaguely understanding that being a billionaire pushes people toward particular forms of ideology. but on the other, it isn't good because people aren't understanding the [[E:material idea|concept]] of [[E:material contradiction|material contradictions]].

{{li|I=S2/LR|Q=618}}AI can be a threat, but it can't be useless / Billionaires will casually spread warnings about "the threat" of AI but they will not accept AI being referred to as "slop" -> actually good insight

{{li|I=S2/LR|Q=618}}Identifying Edgeworth's dialectic identifies who you should vote for / So you would vote for the more neo lib candidate instead of the guy who changed his ways? (Liberal-republicanism)

{{li|I=S2/LR|Q=618}}If the Democratic Party was a global empire the world could solve poverty / If you crudely define Socialism as an increasing exercise of "society-ism", then the correct action is to look at poor countries and decide that everyone who isn't currently provided for needs to defect to a different country as fast as possible, which is to say, needs to beg to be actively colonized by the border of a rich country in order to hopefully receive food; the people of Cuba absolutely need to be ruled by the Democratic Party per se, not even their own center-Liberal party / ({{9k|-0Vk8B3cNH8}}) -> it's funny how utterly insane the cluster of commonly-held beliefs U.S. people hold about the overall world sounds if you just say them out loud and combine them into one statement instead of compartmentalizing statements about each part of the world separately.

{{li|I=S2/LR|Q=618}}To get rid of poverty, the United States should annex Greece -> I'm slightly afraid of what propositions would lead here. 
this proposition is a joke. I do not endorse it. 
A poor country means a bad, fake historical period that must be overthrown + debt in Greece = To get rid of poverty, the United States should annex Greece. 
If the Democratic Party was a global empire the world could solve poverty + debt in Greece = this.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Political factions and communities are the same thing — all communities become political factions when the situation demands it, and all political factions are communities
{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}All communities are political factions / All countable cultures or socially-linked groups of people can function as Social-Philosophical Systems given the right situation -> I believed this because it neatly explains why Tories exist. by now, I'm not as eager to believe it, but it's still one of the sharpest replies to Bellegarrigue and easiest ways to start disproving him, so I can't quite let it go. all plurality brought on by social connections, culture, or identity has the potential to become political plurality if one group of people forces itself on another, thus there is no actual distinction between plural communities and plural formal governments. there can be physically plural anarchisms, and they can even have civil wars against each other. the concept of simply getting rid of plurality and getting rid of violence created by plurality by getting rid of The State is impossible.
{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}All political factions are communities / All Social-Philosophical Systems are countable cultures

{{li|I=Z0/PT|tradition=|Q=618}}Black defendant with all-White jury -> there are going to be some interesting combinations out of this one. generally combinations that make Liberal-republicanism look very bad. 
this + Liberal-republicanism is government by the people = Liberal-republicanism is not government by the people.

{{li|I=S2/LR|Q=618}}Liberal-republicanism is government by the people
{{li|I=S2/ML|tradition=ML, IV, A|Q=618}}Liberal-republicanism is not government by the people

{{li|I=S2/STM|tradition=|Q=618|submitter=StackExchange}}If gravity is zero at the center of the earth, then how did iron get there? [https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/165526/if-the-gravity-at-the-center-of-the-earth-is-zero-why-are-heavy-elements-like-i] -> the answer says that part of the "error" here is that gravity is not a flat integer zero, it's a fence of 9.8 m/s^2 vectors pointing to all hemispheres of the planet. so iron can get in but it can't get out. some minerals drift down into the core if heavy elements are not bonded to other elements, but it's not as easy for minerals to drift back up. without being part of one big tectonic plate motion or something I guess.

{{li|I=S2/PT|tradition|Q=618}}Anarchism is everybody ruling everyone all the time {{YouTube|L68a6mIP09E}} -> this is.... not wrong. it came out of somebody who clearly doesn't understand anything but like, it isn't wrong. it's seemingly how a lot of recent anarchism has worked. it's backhandedly true.

{{li|I=S2/A|tradition|Q=618}}Hierarchy is weak {{YouTube|CZ-FRyUZ3ok}} -> okay, but what happens when you break it open leaving an empty gap? is war strong? it must be, because it's completely unreasonable on any terms but its own and pretty hard for a small group of anarchists to stop. anarchists love reaction. they love letting anything that's too violent or dangerous for them to defeat just exist. just read Rothenberg's book where 'fascism' is treated as the only real problem but also practically raised to the level of human nature. but they'll turn around and attack things that are too weak to defend themselves against anarchism in an instant just because those things did a couple things they didn't like. this is my question: what will anarchism to do if something {{em|is anarchism}} but does something anarchism doesn't like? attack it and destroy it like anything else? how can you actually be sure that anarchism is a peaceful philosophy and not just one that will end up fighting itself for the rest of time?

{{li|I=S2/A|tradition=A, W|Q=618}}The United States military is a neutral force within the world because it changes consciousness (anarchism) {{YouTube|LZiT3FgFqA4}} {{YouTube|sMoTWFZjoYA}} / I used to think brown people weren't human — then I went to Iraq and Afghanistan and realized that's wrong {{YouTube|FCJxf9bq1IU}} -> this is the consequence of unchecked Western-Marxism and letting people think Marxism is about actions that ""change consciousness"" rather than digging through the 'consciousness process' to uncover what structures people can be part of to gain better consciousness and how the sharpest people can start arranging [[E:arrangement of proletarians (meta-Marxism)|empowering structures]] that can [[EC:9k/RD/Q618-EconomicProblemsStalin|create]] or [[E:revolutionary lattice period|defend]] those structures regardless of what other people already notice. the difference between Althusser and Stalin is that Althusser lets you go to imperialist war to learn a lesson purely to not be a Dictator and tell you what to think before you actually learn your lesson firsthand.

{{li|I=S1/DFy|Q=618}}I used to think brown people weren't human — then I went to Iraq and Afghanistan and realized that's wrong -> my brain was searching trying to think of what this made me think of and then I suddenly realized what it was. it was the MLP song. "I used to wonder what friendship could be..." that's it. like, that show embodies how Liberal-republicanism thinks of "consciousness", and this is the ultimate result of that overall kind of thinking.

{{li|I=S2/PT|Q=618}}There is nothing wrong with hierarchy -> one of those propositions that's here to be the shocking result of combinations of bad propositions. 
this proposition isn't {{em|obviously}} incorrect, it's somewhat complex actually, but there are enough situations where it's wrong that in this form it would be false.

{{li|I=S2/IV|tradition=IV onto LR, IV onto HM|Q=618}}Habermasian history is not a dialectical form of analysis because it does not understand how contradictory interactions or antagonisms rebuild the greater whole and prevent effective reforms / fundamental aspects of a society cannot simply be removed one at a time ... racism cannot be legislated out of capitalism [https://firebrand.red/2024/03/neither-dogmatism-nor-eclecticism-but-marxist-dialectics/] -> perfectly on the mark. this is what you tell them. 
the one thing you have to look out for, though: schizoanalysts trying to claim that because they included every contradictory minority at once that they've created a model which is 'actually dialectical'.

{{li|I=S2/ML|Q=618}}The human mind cannot become fully conscious of itself until bourgeois society is abolished, which ultimately stamps all non-proletarian philosophy as metaphysical and unscientific (Untermann 1906) [https://www.marxists.org/archive/untermann/1906/04/eclecticism.html]

{{li|I=S2/ML|Q=618}}To the extent the world develops toward proletarian civilization, monist Materialism will extend to a greater portion of mankind, replacing theological religions and metaphysical ethics [https://www.marxists.org/archive/untermann/1906/04/eclecticism.html] -> wow... if that isn't backhandedly true. the more the world slid away from creating proletarian civilization since 1950 almost the exact opposite thing happened.

{{li|I=S2/ES|Q=618}}I like the political doctrine of Marx, but not the materialism or the economics (Hitch 1905) [https://www.marxists.org/archive/untermann/1906/04/eclecticism.html] -> ...what?? 1900s fake Marxisms were really something.

{{li|I=S2/IV|tradition=ML, IV|Q=618}}Oppositions of ideas develop within society as interacting material factions and physical conflicts develop — at approximately the speed the physical conflicts happen (Leigh 2024) [https://firebrand.red/2024/03/neither-dogmatism-nor-eclecticism-but-marxist-dialectics/] -> sometimes I have to remind myself of this because when things suddenly actually start changing it feels like it makes no sense and there was no particular reason for it

{{li|I=S1/MX|Q=618}}second-order anarchism -> the motif of someone who finds almost all forms of anarchism actually observed in the real world too specific and divisive to unite people and rebels against anarchism in order to achieve the greater goal of breaking everybody out of competing factions such as Communism versus anarchism and unifying them. this is the only kind of anarchism you could ever get me to believe.

{{li|I=S2/A|Q=618}}If you achieve degrowth through people of different industries periodically fighting each other and destroying each other's machines, then you've achieved degrowth {{YouTube|vAYgJ9X0xS0}} -> my objection to this isn't a moral one, because I don't believe morality or ethics is real. but I have an aversion to things that don't make any coherent sense. what about this makes sense? when does society know that the goal has been achieved? at what point does the process stop? is it possible for this process to extend into more abstract industries like academia or the arts, and somehow just, end up with people doing everything they can to suppress a paper or something, I don't know? what would people do to suppress pharmaceutical companies over-prescribing drugs? from what I know about anarchists, they draw the line at actually keeping people from receiving anti-depressants and hormones, so they can't stop drug production, even though it's the thing that's sold for money.

{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618}}turtles all the way down (motif)

{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618}}botched neopets TTRPG {{YouTube|lirIV57wI34}} {{YouTube|TIxaATMBnvk}} {{YouTube|iYjUzlyEtkw}} -> it often feels like dumb headlines like these give you more insight into what kinds of class structures exist than an actual economics textbook. 
neopets exists. neopets scouts out contractor corporation. contractor corporation hires further contractors that are new at the task. there are no stable structures here; it's turtles all the way down.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Empire is always regenerating / Primitive accumulation keeps happening / Primitive accumulation is always happening -> otherwise it's hard to explain the Cold War and the way the overall concept has continued on and on more like a freezer that first set itself up and then continually circulated heat out.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Ethics is the shovel dream of primitive accumulation -> think about it. most 'fitting actions' anarchists want you to do require people to have wealth first, or privilege as a whole society over other societies. create pieces of a 'community' for fun? you have to have all the money and privilege to have learned to do it correctly so your output isn't trash, or everyone will make fun of you and maybe call you immoral, potentially including the anarchists. distribute goods to people of questionable origin? you have to be White so you don't get immediately shot, and somebody first had to besiege Third World countries and make them have exactly the right government and level of wealth to both produce well and pay nothing in order for there to be enough abundance to be at the level where anarchists can claim 'distributing it' is the only problem. 
ethics itself is colonial in that without the creation of an empire you can't go on the continuing journey of people becoming 'more and more' ethical. you have to have that slump first where a huge atrocity is committed and then people progressively learn about it and apologize. a world without atrocities genuinely might not need morality or ethics at all. it might be a wholly amoral world. and the fact people are even talking about ethics may signal either that they're defending something awful, or that they aren't as good of people as they believe they are. 
why is it that anarchists always want to imagine everything perfect but it never occurs to them that a world in an original perfect state might not even have ethics.

{{li|I=F2/LR|Q=618}}Plato was the only Greek / Plato was the only person to ever have opinions in ancient Greece (observation on {{film|Chip Chilla}}) {{YouTube|x6IZm3lf50s}} / Aristotle was the only person to ever have opinions in ancient Greece -> good catch! it's rather remarkable how, there were particular classes within ancient Greek society that could be at least vaguely separated out by layer, and almost everybody loves to act like the upper classes were the only class to exist. in reality, it appears that the upper classes and lower classes had different positions on topics like whether Greek gods were real. there was more than one body of ideology in ancient Greece, at least along the division of how educated people were if nothing else, and we don't usually talk about the interactions between those {{em|different}} bodies of ideology.

{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618}}I {{em|know}} the Asriel plot thread is not that good, but everyone likes it. am I wrong or is everybody else right {{YouTube|ECa4_RWtoHY}} -> I couldn't tell you the answer to the question but I do know this is an interesting motif

{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618}}Japanese culture (essence) / Japanese culture as essence of Japaneseness -> I used to think this concept made some sort of sense before I was an adult but now I don't think it makes any sense.
{{li|I=S2/Fy|Q=618}}Distinguishing countries by "culture" others them (Marxism, Trotskyism)
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618}}inherently Black vice -> this is how.
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618}}inherently Black virtue -> this is more how a lot of characterizations of "Japanese culture" or "animist beliefs" work, casually implying that something can both inherently be of a particular "culture" and also be virtuous by having started from that.
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618}}sugar, spice, and everything nice -> Idealism/essentialism in a fairy tale type context.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Poverty does not exist in nature — not in the unique sense which has gotten the label that exists within society
{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Poverty does not exist in nature, because it can only exist {{em|within}} sociality
{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Poverty exists due to greater or lower social bonds
{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Poverty cannot be fixed through Idealism
{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Poverty cannot be fixed through Idealism, because Idealism cannot change the process of which people are socially compatible and develop stronger social bonds creating high-ranking individuals and marginalized individuals

{{li|I=S2/STM|Q=618}}The sun must rise (astronomy) -> I wrote this one down vaguely within context of eucatastrophe and the arguments that it is "realistic".

{{li|I=S2/MW|Q=618}}Never debate Item names / Do not argue about Item names, given that all Items can have multiple aliases or outward sense labels, and you can debate which concepts belong in each numbered entry within Talk pages

{{li|I=S1/MX/HAS|Q=618}}Job as Communist antihero / Job as Communist hero -> think about it. he is told to do something and then he turns away from it and bad things keep happening and he keeps getting these reminders of the thing he was supposed to do, that bad things keep happening if he doesn't start doing. begins to remind me of Trotskyists repeatedly talking about crises and despite the claims the crises will lead to something being a little laughable correctly pointing out that none of it will get better if people do nothing. 
Q51,31 Job sounds like job + Christian devotional about Ted = Job as Communist antihero. 
Job sounds like job + Trotskyists obsessing about crises = Job as Communist antihero.

{{li|I=M3/MX/LR|Q=618}}What action taken by cops would be bad enough to actually get society to abolish them? / cops doing the actions that happen in ElsaGate videos ([[E:12,1,09|generic]]) -> I was thinking about qualified immunity and how absurdly it's been pushed to include cops getting to do anything that has no precedent and then after my brain churned a bit I was like... wait, {{em|anything}}? so if I pointed to a really messed up video of an anthro cat removing somebody's eyeballs, like, is it true that absolute serial killer shit wouldn't get us to abolish the police, and our society really thinks anything you do behind a cop's badge is okay. 
what if people signed up to a police department and became cops and then they burned down a billionaire's building? would they even get fired? what if a cop assassinated the president? would everything still go on the same as it was? what if a cop went to an immigrant prison and busted the place open and let them out? what if a cop distributed a bunch of illegal copies of a movie? what if a cop hid in a mascot costume and killed several kids at a pizza restaurant? what if a cop killed every single other cop in the state? what if a cop lied under oath? what if a cop shredded every single election ballot, and when there was another attempt to have an election, it happened again? what if a cop cut power to a hospital? what if a cop disrupted the mail? what if a cop somehow confiscated people's tax money and spent it so the government couldn't have it? what if a cop made a statement glorifying Vladimir Putin and Russia invading Ukraine? what if a police department went on strike for Palestine? is that literally the only thing a cop can get fired for? if every cop everywhere went on strike for Palestine would the United States have to abolish the police? 
I bet at least half of the weird scenarios I could think of absolutely wouldn't change anything no matter how strange or how horrific the thing that happened actually was. 
I really, genuinely wonder what it would take to end qualified immunity, and how outrageous the action taken by the cop would actually have to be. 
qualified immunity (United States) + ?? = this.

{{li|I=S1/MX/HAS|Q=618}}failed attempt at anti-essentialism / failed attempt to apply anti-essentialism -> I get really tired of the Ideals + anti-essentialism model of reality because I totally know it is not actually modeling what's real and there are going to be a lot of cases where it simply fails that nobody bothers to talk about. 
this + ?? = Not All Men.
{{li|I=S1/LR/ML|Q=618}}successful application of anti-essentialism denied by Liberal-republicans -> there's this category of statements too.

{{li|I=F2/STM|Q=618}}Not every house cat is an obligate carnivore -> example where going against an overgeneralization could be harmful.
{{li|I=S2/STM|Q=618}}Not everyone will learn tolerance from media representation -> sad but probably true.
{{li|I=S2/ML|Q=618}}Not every country should practice Liberal-republicanism -> it'll make everyone mad but that alone doesn't make it false.
{{li|I=F2/STM|Q=618}}Not everyone should vote for Joe Biden (2020) -> hypothetically possible but will make people mad.

{{li|I=F2/HAS|Q=618}}My dog is the only one / My dog is the only dog ever / My dog is the only thing that anyone calls a dog [https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fas/psych/glossary/undergeneralization/] -> example given to illustrate children failing to learn to generalize words beyond specific examples. one attested use of the term "undergeneralization".

{{li|I=S2/HAS|Q=618}}Nothing in life is to be feared, only understood 
When you add "in life" to an overgeneralization ... + ?? = this.

{{li|I=S2/HAS|Q=618}}Superheroes represent international war / Superheroes largely started as a vague depiction of international war -> see: Superman punching Hitler, [https://screenrant.com/superman-first-hero-to-beat-up-hitler-not-captain-america/] Ultraman as representation of Soviet occupations
{{li|I=S2/HAS|Q=618}}Superheroes appear spontaneously and unpredictably because they are a representation of the anhierarchic conditions of large-scale international politics in which war can never truly be regulated and whenever war begins the only thing that can counter it is war completing itself from the other side 
Superheroes represent international war + ?? = this.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}If there are no grand narratives that stretch across the world, then it is impossible to tell Alexander Dugin that Russians can't just go kill Ukrainians because that's what they want to do that week and it makes them happy -> without Marxism, the statement that the world shouldn't have international wars or that countries should be "orderly" is nothing more than a narrative, so everyone is free to reject it. ethics is just a narrative. "international law" is just a narrative. suddenly the notion that narratives can't possibly reach around the world and become universal isn't sounding so good any more, is it?

{{li|I=S2/MZ|Q=618}}In 1949, [[E:the real Chinese people|the real Chinese people]] were the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie, and the national bourgeoisie (Mao) [https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/b/l.htm] 
China's conditions are exceptional + ?? = this.

{{li|I=S2/DX|Q=618}}China's conditions are exceptional / Chinese exceptionalism (history) / China's history is exceptional / China's historical situation is exceptional; it contains unique conditions that have no counterparts in other countries and must be taken at face value -> this proposition has a very interesting relationship with the concept of country characteristics. many people will falsely go claiming that this {{em|is}} what country characteristics are, although in many cases it will simply not be true.

{{li|I=S2/DX|Q=618}}U.S. conditions are exceptional / American exceptionalism (history) / The United States' historical situation is exceptional; it contains unique conditions that have no counterparts in other countries and must be taken at face value

{{li|I=S2/IV|Q=618}}Stalin intentionally created strawberry capitalism in order to get more allies in countries without a fully-developed capitalism [https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/e.htm#peoples-republic] -> so in a way Trotskyists are accusing Stalin of having invented the primary phase of development / primary phase of "socialism". 
you know, having a "socialism" constructed over the top of your country for international geopolitical reasons and then living in that for years having to make sense of it is one of the few reasons it would make logical sense for China to bend over backwards to justify strawberry capitalism as "definitely socialism, actually". 
edit: the bot [[redlink - ICFI prompts|told me]] this theory was bogus. which really makes me wonder which party wrote this glossary, because apparently it was not the ICFI.

{{li|I=S1/MX|Q=618}}bracketing in meta-Marxism / downreductionism in meta-Marxism / reductionism in meta-Marxism (referring to a process that does not remove outgoing interactions and antagonisms) / meta-Marxism and bracketing smaller areas of a larger system of interacting parts to better understand the outgoing interactions and antagonisms of a particular piece
upreductionism in meta-Marxism / meta-Marxism and reconstruction of larger systems or events by combining smaller parts into a whole

{{li|I=S1/W|Q=618}}finding Marxism in {{film|Bee Movie}} {{YouTube|q_agS0hDMvc}} -> yeah, this {{em|is}} inherently funny due to the example fictional work already having meme status. but that doesn't make the concept bad. 
there's nothing wrong with people trying to do Marxist breakdowns of the elements or themes that make up popular media. not even if the popular work is superficial "slop". and you know why? the more popular something is the cheaper it gets to buy after a few years once people start donating it to thrift stores. if you manage to take a really popular work, however bad, and turn it into a teaching tool with a well known meaning, you've created really cheap propaganda that you don't need party organizers to distribute, that will keep getting spread around no matter how many party members get caught, and that will be harder to ban because the bourgeoisie created it and it wasn't created by a group of people easy to strategically label as "an invading foreign country". of all the things Western Marxists do, this is actually one of the smartest ones. because if Gramscians go into academia or movie studios and [[E:|take up job slots]], it doesn't make that big an impact on who can actually make decisions in industries or who can strike, but if you manage to change the use of an existing product then you've somewhat undone the ability of the corporations that made it to make decisions about what will be produced and what everyone is and isn't allowed to think before everybody else can.

{{li|I=S1/MX/ML|Q=618}}revolutionary lattice period / permanent revolution (meta-Marxism onto Stalin's Marxism) -> the motif of a historical era of physical events where people are linking horizontally to get through a battle against an initial bourgeois class rule or at the very least linking into a Lattice to form a nationwide party which will create a workers' state. the revolutionary lattice period ends when a workers' state is created, and it's significant because it allows for a very concrete mathematical definition of "Leninism" using graph theory. approximately synonymous with "permanent revolution", assuming you are not a Trotskyist. Trotskyists could still use this model to describe the creation of an orange party, but for them this is not permanent revolution at all because "[[E:international permanent revolution|permanent revolution]]" is the long setup period for creating a powerful Communist International that would in theory be able to stop imperialism and international wars.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Careers hold no life lessons / {{TTS|Careers*|Careers|title=* Specialized careers involving 4 or more years of prior training}} cannot teach life lessons / Because all specialized careers involving 4 or more years of prior training are incapable of seeing anything outside the system they operate in, no statement about "life in general for the human Subject" which a person put together as a statement as a guide to doing their career in the process of doing their career should be held up as The Truth; this includes the careers of David Graeber, Rebecca Sugar, Slavoj Žižek, Carl Sagan, Dinesh D'Souza, and Donald Trump, and it includes the careers of Stalin and Trotsky -> I don't really have to include Mao in that because he came from the peasantry and had a bunch of statements about not 'worshiping' books or theorists (those seem to multiply every time there's a new Marxist republic although nobody heeds them.) so I think he's in the clear, but Stalin and Trotsky on the other hand had cast all sorts of aspersions on each other about being bureaucrats, leading everybody outside the Soviet Union to believe they both were.

{{li|I=S1/IV/MX|Q=618}}spontaneous explanation for Trotskyism / contingent explanation for Trotskyism / group-psychological explanation for Trotskyism -> a "spontaneous" explanation for Trotskyism is an attempt to explain the history of Trotskyism which focuses on the causes of individual events and why people might have formed into these events on the day they happened, in the moment. 
these might include: Trotskyists getting expelled from the CPSU was psychologically traumatic or at least not predicted by their theoretical models, people continue to found Trotskyist parties because they identify with the psychological trauma of early Trotskyism and pick it up and advocate about it as a sort of generational trauma they feel is unresolved and waiting for justice, incompatibility between Trotskyist factions and mainstream Marxist-Leninist factions for various reasons created and still creates physical antagonisms between the parties leading them to want to form separate "countries" or civilizations (that last one is easily phrased in terms of dialectical materialism and has no need for a single 'inciting incident').

{{li|I=S1/IV/MX|Q=618}}theoretical explanation for Trotskyism / explanation for Trotskyism based on analysis of internal theoretical models used by Trotskyist groups and exactly what historical processes and class interactions or horizontal antagonisms are being claimed inside said theories -> for the longest time I had a hard time finding any of these because of how so much of what Trotskyists say is just lies. I found it a lot easier to analyze their claims once they came out with an LLM and like, I was finally able to make that thing behave like the only Trotskyist that didn't lie for a few minutes at a time (before it started blatantly lying again and going on about 'the Stalinist bureaucracy').

{{li|I=M3/MX|Q=618}}Why invade Cuba? (2026) / If Cuba is not an exclusive republic, why is the United States so dead-set on creating a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over it?

{{li|I=S1/LR|Q=618}}Cuba to Trump: warning, war causes war [https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/cuban-leader-warns-of-potential-bloodbath-if-us-takes-military-action-6027419]

{{li|I=S1/LR|Q=618}}Trump's demands for Cuba (2026) / these included a two-week deadline to release high-profile political prisoners, implement sweeping market reforms, expand the private sector and attract foreign investment [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/04/21/mgaz-a21.html] [https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/cuban-leader-warns-of-potential-bloodbath-if-us-takes-military-action-6027419] -> I'd mark this brown except that these are the most capitalist demands I've seen in a while

{{li|I=S2/LR|Q=618}}Alabama redistricting ruling (2026) [https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/supreme-court-vacates-order-requiring-majority-black-district-in-alabama-6024323] [https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/democrats-ask-us-supreme-court-to-stay-virginia-supreme-court-ruling-invalidating-voter-approved-election-map-6024209]

{{li|I=S2/MX/JC/IV|Q=618|Q2=618}}Kim Il-sung got help from other countries / Kim Il-sung got help from Communist youth organizations in Manchuria and educators in the Soviet Union, as well as the Soviet army [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kim-Il-Sung] -> that is a shocking revelation. if you know much about North Korea and what its values are now you never expect that the story of North Korea would start with this. 
why have I never heard Trotskyists saying this. it's like, the thing they should be pointing out about North Korea. I think it's always the existence of the Soviet army that bothers them. which is so odd and ironic when Trotsky is one of the figureheads of "orange Leninism" and where did he start out? gosh, to live in a world where Trotsky had been every bit as effective at holding down the Second World as Kim Il-sung. with this information that analogy only gets better.

{{li|I=M3/LR|Q=618}}How will the Communist Party prevent {{book|Animal Farm}}? -> a question that's annoying but worth answering.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}You can't both believe in secular animism and think there's a point being made in {{book|Animal Farm}} / You can't both believe in secular animism and think there's a point being made in {{book|Animal Farm}}, because secular animism gives you an imperative to protect the animals from getting eaten, while {{book|Animal Farm}} implies that it doesn't matter what happens to them if they have an inferior culture containing [[E:inherently dominating idea (anarchism)|inherently dominating ideas]] -> there is a particular history of people forgetting {{book|Animal Farm}} had anything to do with Communism and taking it literally because they didn't read the book; in particular, this "interpretation" emerged out of the shadows and became famous when it was used to market capitalist products. {{book|Animal Farm}} being co-opted by vegetarians might seem a little obnoxious at first, but honestly? I think these people could become heroes. and here's why. {{book|Animal Farm}}, being an allegory, was meant to be read as a bit of a metaphor, but vegetarians with no knowledge of Communism took what they knew of the book and interpreted it literally. compared with a lot of methods used in the humanities (in particular in the arts; the situation could be a little better in fields like anthropology), taking things literally is inherently closer to Materialism and thus inherently closer to Marxism. if one were to deliberately analyze {{book|Animal Farm}} as if the animals were literally animals and not the Soviet Union, it would come across as the terribly inhumane and un-humanitarian narrative it really is. I mean, just think about it. if you accused someone of being the kind of person to kill a house cat a lot of people would find that concept disturbing. if you accused someone of being the kind of person to take self-determination away from a group of animals trying to save themselves from quite literally being chopped up and eaten if a population of people had power over them, that concept should be equally disturbing — if somebody wanted to cook and eat Russians just for being Russian almost everybody would consider that a severe human rights violation. and the ending for the Soviet Union was vastly worse than the ending of {{book|Animal Farm}}. the book was way too generous, when the reality was that things went back to the way they were before — if what had been going on before was Russians getting eaten, well, that would be happening again. if that were the universe we lived in you couldn't really blame Russians for going a little crazy and launching wars on neighboring countries; if that is the only way for them to have power and the United States not to have power which is "permitted", of course they're going to take the option where they don't get eaten, no matter how evil that option is. 
Animals kill others to survive. most animals in nature don't experience their survival being threatened constantly; in a normal situation the predator or rival patriarch or matriarch usually walks away at some point if they stand their ground long enough. but nation-states are very different because there's never anywhere to run off to permanently. if a conflict begins and the aggressor has no actual incentive to stop it's going to keep going until somebody starts killing people. it's just going to keep going until wars cull enough people (potentially millions and millions) that "the space to run away in" is at some semblance of being restored. because a society is just a lot of Animals standing together like they were one Animal, and societies threaten each other as wholes, but when a threat refuses to go away, Animals kill. anarchists cannot get away from this. they keep trying to assert that a world with too many people in it having wars "isn't necessary" and "there's no need to apply Malthusianism" but no matter what, their theories cannot [[E:existential materialism|explain what generates]] the actual observed behavior of Russians. the longer anarchists try to assert that indigenous ways of life 'were kinder on the earth' and 'were less violent', the longer real-world populations will attempt to kill millions and millions of people until the world literally has the maximum number of human individuals it did when human populations were mostly tribes. the actual material transition to a world where everyone is predisposed to believe secular animism is utterly horrifying.

{{li|I=S2/PT|Q=618}}It's rational for Russians to start wars and kill people if they will never be granted self-determination on the basis of a system where they try to help every Ukrainian and not start wars -> to correctly parse this proposition you have to understand that what is rational and what is ethical are not the same thing, contrary to what Kant says. 
this also doesn't mean that you can assert that 'getting rid of reason' will solve the problem, given that things that are 'rational' in this sense are rational precisely in the sense that they contain a specific [[E:causal logic (logical model of material causation)|sequence of causations]] and happen whether you want them to or not. 
Imperialism is the actual end of history + ?? = this.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Native Americans are capable of genocide / Inasmuch as indigenous populations are human, they are hypothetically capable of coming up with and practicing [[E:domination (anarchism)|inherently dominating ideologies]] that lead to large populational-scale numbers of people dying because other particular groups of people decide that they should die -> we really need to wake people up to the fact that a genocide can consist of five billion people equally drawn from all ethnic groups as opposed to a billion people of one specific ethnic group or nationality, in terms of whether a particular person's ideology can be ""inherently dominating"" enough to inherently lead to killing ten million people. if anybody in the world gets to keep calling a famine in Ukraine a genocide, then there are scenarios where advocating secular animism could itself be advocating for genocide, because it has the potential to kill orders of magnitude more people than that. if everybody would stop saying that about Ukraine, I might consider dropping this.

{{li|I=S2/A|Q=618}}Stalin's government committed genocide in Ukraine {{em|because}} they killed people using [[E:hierarchy (anarchism)|hierarchy]], and whenever a form of hierarchy is used that leads to a lot of people dying, that form of hierarchy is an [[E:domination (anarchism)|inherently dominating ideology]], and it is morally wrong to allow people to construct that form of hierarchy to any extent and morally right to tear it apart at every scale possible however small as soon as possible -> the best argument I can think of that the famine in Ukraine {{em|was}} a genocide. no, it's {{em|not}} very good. but at least it's logical enough to start analyzing, unlike a lot of things anarchists say. 
this.... is how a lot of people conceptualize the French Revolution, I think. ...oh god, that explains a lot. it even kind of explains where [[E:Menshevism (1900s)|Menshevism]] came from. the logic behind Menshevism is basically one that inherently dominating ideas merely need to be stopped. all Idealism is somewhat similar and there is a big overlap in Idealism between anarchism, Menshevism, Yaroshenkoism, Deng Xiaoping Thought, and Western-Marxism. while mainstream Marxism-Leninism is nearly the only philosophy ever to state that people don't actually decide what ideas to believe, and that they are always simply handed ideas at the populational scale rather than a population actually having a mind of its own and actually being able to think. that's the sense in which BlackPantherism is quite respectable, to say that Black people among other ethnicities get ideas from their current conditions {{em|is}} a Materialist philosophy. one remaining question is whether Trotskyism falls into the trap of Idealist revolution or whether it genuinely is a Materialist revolution. I've always analyzed Trotskyism by taking individual Trotskyists or groups and modeling them through Materialist concepts of revolution, but my conclusions often don't sound much like their conclusions. they always talk like Stalin could have chosen not to do "Stalinism" so I don't know. 
The act of handing money to another individual is in and of itself a hierarchy + Stalin's government killed Ukrainian farmers = this.

{{li|I=S1/A|tradition=A, DX, LR, ES|Q=618}}Idealist revolution / destroy the idea that ... (generic; popular-culture expression of an Idealist campaign to slay [[E:inherently dominating ideology (anarchism)|dominating ideas]]) -> it took me a long time to put this concept into words, but yeah, I think the real problem with anarchism is that it is defining the concept of revolution based on Idealism. there seems to be a whole concept of an Idealist revolution where people think that if you can slay an "inherently dominating idea" that drives a population on a conceptual level, you can change one historical period into another historical period. now, to use some technical language, this is some unscientific SCP-report plotline {{censor|bullshit}}.

{{li|I=S1/A|tradition=|Q=618}}thoughtcrime (anarchism) -> the motif of anarchists banning ideas in order to prevent harmful forms of society from being created whether those forms of society are really actually harmful or not, and punishing people for spreading what are actually neutral ideas. 
you can't deny it, in actually asserting that all bad behavior starts at ideas and all change starts at prohibiting ideas, anarchism comes way closer to doing this than Communism.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}The act of handing money to another individual is in and of itself a hierarchy / The act of handing money to someone is in and of itself a [[E:spatial slot hierarchy (meta-Marxism)|spatial slot hierarchy]] because it is an act of deciding whether someone is good enough to do a task -> this claim would probably sound much stupider if it was coming out of an anarchist, but fortunately "hierarchy" isn't a big hang-up for me as much as a prosaic statement describing what kind of process is happening. 
that said, this is the thing you need to toss at anarchists who claim that hierarchy and expertise are different things. they really aren't. since the start of Liberal-republicanism expertise has generally been the source of almost all hierarchy. 
I feel like anarchists have shifted to saying "domination" largely so that when they mention "hierarchy" they don't sound as stupid. of course, it doesn't really help given that it's become so abstract that it's unclear what on earth it's even referring to.

{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618}}X and X's brother / X and X's sister / Trotsky and Trotsky's brother (Animal Farm) / Rock and Rock's brother (Megaman exe) -> the motif of fictional stories taking a historical figure or previous fictional character in another continuity and creating a narrative parallel to them but then unexpectedly adding a sibling who actually does something and changes the story even if in a small way.

{{li|I=S1/HAS/Fy|Q=618}}gender roles in fairy tales -> I just started thinking about this suddenly today because I was trying to think if the concepts of "brother" and "sister" have different connotations in folklore, and then I started thinking about how weirdly often all the more negative characters in fairy tales are female. the wicked stepmother, the witch, maybe the wicked step{{em|sisters}}. but the male characters are often more neutral. kings and princes and medieval artisan type people all just have kind of a neutral presence or sometimes positive. there are some exceptions like 'the fairy godmother' that will be a positive influence. 
I.... don't know what the scope of this entry is because I'm not an expert in the humanities. I think it covers European fairy tales and probably through Eastern Europe into the rest of Asia but I don't really know what the division between "a fairy tale" and "a folktale" is, to me they're kind of the same thing. some people consider "Aladdin" to be broadly in the scope of fairy tales because there is a magic artifact or magic servant character that isn't so different from the fairy godmother. but that extends the geographical range of fairy tales quite a bit. what's the difference between a fairy tale and just a legend that people don't necessarily think is true? I think there's a clear difference between a fairy tale and a "myth" in that myths are religious stories from an ancient time of local gods, and fairy tales are about 'smaller' magical things that sort of just hide themselves in tiny places and cause mischief — "fae" sums up the concept of where fairy tales get their fantastical elements pretty well, you're thinking of a character that is usually pretty small and missable but can also be very powerful, could be the fairy godmother, could be a leprechaun. but I'm pretty confused on the difference between a fairy tale, a folktale, and a legend, because legends can have dragons in them; they don't have to be "historical".

{{li|I=S1/ML|Q=618}}belief (utilization) / believing in (utilizing) / I believe in solving math problems with lambda calculus / I believe in pomodoro timers -> a definition of "belief" which is one of the very few sensible ways to define the phrase "believing in Marxism". 
I think it's arguable that this definition doesn't apply to ideologies like Christianity, or even to a lot of secular systems of ethics; ethics is a potentially wrong descriptive model of reality pretending to be a technique. but, on the bright side, this motif does provide a lot of context for why people like to claim Communism "doesn't work". you could easily say "pomodoro timers don't work!" but if you aren't versed in how people actually use them and the exact conditions where people claim they do work versus what specific kinds of conditions lead them to fail, then you wouldn't necessarily be making a true accusation. at the same time, if you {{em|did}} claim "Pomodoro timers work!" without knowing how to use them, you also might not be making a true claim. that's why the conflict between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism has been so hard to resolve. out of the very limited number of people in the world who knew how to use Marxism at the time, or that do now, not all of those people genuinely understand how it's currently being used. and it's all downhill from there, because as you get further away from them, ordinary people only know less and less. 
you really do learn a lot more about Marxism itself by examining Trotskyist attacks on Marxism than you do by examining a lot of attacks on Marxism inside Liberal-republicanism. and in that, I think they actually have a counter-intuitive effect on consciousness in the grand scheme of things where depending on the specific issue them making errors may be less harmful than them not being there. not {{em|better}} precisely, yet definitely {{em|less bad}}.

{{li|I=S1/IV|Q=618}}so mr. errors wants me to correct my errors -> what the early history of Trotskyism always feels like 
now to be perfectly fair to them, there are reasons this can {{em|apparently}} happen without being an actual mistake — Marxists speak of new forms of structure coming in and getting rid of old contradictions but bringing in new ones. I think this is how a lot of things they say happen to function.

{{li|I=S1/HAS|Q=618}}tall, dark, and handsome [https://usdictionary.com/idioms/tall-dark-and-handsome/] [https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/3x6bco/in_the_phrase_tall_dark_and_handsome_what_exactly/] / tenebrous (attractive) -> I have seen this explained either as the person literally having dark hair or the person being mysterious (tenebrous). [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ténébreux] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tenebrae#Latin] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tenebrous#English] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tenebrize#English] for the purposes of analyzing the word "dark" I'm going to take the latter 
sidenote: the pictures you get when you search {{i|ténébreux}} are so funny, you get like a dude with a cloak, you get {{censor|fucking}} Ezio or Boromir. fantasy stories are very good at portraying this concept apparently. one of the only "modern" stories I can think of off the top of my head that goes there is when Ace Attorney introduced Godot. whether anyone thinks he's attractive I have no idea but he absolutely is trying way too hard to have a mysterious overcast disposition.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Goku is a bourgeois distortion / Goku is a bourgeois distortion of Buddhism / Goku's character concept is centered around the notion that finding or seeking enlightenment makes you more physically powerful; in the original {{book|Journey to the West}} narrative, this was supposed to be the monkey king's vulgar misunderstanding of Buddhism which ultimately got him sealed under a mountain; within {{book|Dragon Ball}} Goku can be said to represent crude bourgeois materialism as seen in Feuerbach — the major theme quickly established in {{book|Dragon Ball}} is that the world is physical and does what it wants as opposed to what you want it to do, but that this is partly because the world is in some abstract way "modern", and dotted with cities and corporations and most notably the influence of scientific insight and technology; in this sense, Goku is not the {{book|Journey to the West}} character Sun Wukong because while Sun Wukong represents ancient empires, he represents the rise of early capitalism and the ways in which capitalism both correctly and wrongly substituted morality for power going into the hands of those who desire change the hardest and become materially powerful enough to take power and [[E:Edgeworth's dialectic|fight off]] the people they wish would change -> 
this sounds weirdly like I'm on the side of Buddhism over early capitalism. I'm not. I'm just very tired of capitalism acting like it's fully justified to keep power over everything and prevent anything else that would happen after it from forming just because it's better than ancient imperial monarchies. 
if Hegel had known what an "end of history" was, he would have believed that monarchy and feudal orders were the end of history. and now Fukuyama thinks he's not as wrong as Hegel when he does the same thing. honestly... right down to even that thing where you claim a bunch of abstract ideas led to a material system yet were the only possible train of conclusions. capitalist theorists and Kantians are almost exactly just the Hegel of capitalism.

{{li|I=S1/STM|Q=618|submitter=Valenoern}}Daniel Snowberg, the perfect whistleblower [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/12/whistleblowers-dont-need-elite-credentials-help-protect-us-government-overreach] -> so, there had been this other blog where I think someone was calling out Ed Snowden for having 'done things wrong' and made up this fake story about Daniel Snowberg to show how he should have done it correctly. and the EFF wasn't having any of it because they knew the realities of real movements don't necessarily look like what you want them to be. 
also... funny story, when messing around with writing fiction and trying to throw Snowberg into a dystopia this had caused Valenoern to accidentally reinvent Trotskyism. but that takes a while to explain, and is a story for another day. to keep things short, they really did not know anything about the history of socialism or what Menshevism or Bolshevism were, they just sort of, created a character in the vein of "Emmanuel Goldstein" (that's just an example) from abstract concepts but didn't know that in the case of 1984 that was Trotsky, and so they reinvented Trotskyism. we've had a lot of fun with anticommunist fables and finding Trotsky in them since then.

{{li|I=S1/MX/MD|class=field_mdem field_14quarters|Q=618}}vermilion international / scarlet international / vermilion Marxism (as Communist International) -> the motif of a Communist international that combines mainstream Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism to ultimately form some kind of single global era of socialism. Trotskyists think this can't exist, and have said so rather clearly — what they generally want is to smash all crimson Communist parties and replace them with orange ones.

{{li|I=S2/ML|tradition=ML, IV|Q=618}}Videos are the new leaflets (booklets; pamphlets; etc) {{YouTube|bKq-iip4LXs}} / Videos have replaced leaflets -> I remember this coming up in videos on multiple YouTube channels but I don't remember which videos right now 
I wouldn't disagree with this, although... I think there are a few interesting things to note about it. for one, the environment of online videos gives Trotskyists a bizarrely huge advantage because they can all post videos from different countries and make it look like Trotskyism is a lot more omnipresent in any particular country than it really is, as well as like it's a long-standing philosophical tradition (technically not false) which is as rich as mainstream Marxism-Leninism is. online videos make it weirdly easy to "astroturf" the appearance of movements happening more intensely or widely than they actually are.

{{li|I=S2/IV|tradition=IV onto W|Q=618|rem=ai.wsws.org}}Surrounding historical context matters greatly for judging Gramscianism

{{li|I=S2/W|tradition=IV onto W|Q=618|rem=ai.wsws.org subtext}}Gramscianism presupposes Fisherism / The Gramscian formulation of Leninism presupposes that "ideological hegemony" can itself rule society

{{li|I=F2/W|Q=618|rem=ai.wsws.org subtext}}The bourgeoisie does not rule by force in the United States (Gramscianism) -> I think when there is {{em|still}} such a problem of cops shooting Black people that genuinely isn't even true 
"lavender lads out of the state department". [[E:movie theaters more Fisherist than movies|movie theaters more Fisherist than movies]]. I think a lot of the bourgeoisie supposedly "ruling by ideology" is in fact the bourgeoisie ruling by force and ideology forming in the aftermath.

{{li|I=S2/W|Q=618|rem=ai.wsws.org}}Class rule is first created inside civil society (Gramsci)

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Gramscianism mourns nonexistent Rhizome / In concept, Gramscianism requires a healthy [[E:stationary Rhizome (schizoanalysis)|Rhizome process]] in order to function in which various workers, Careerists, or small businesses injected or embedded into the structure of capitalism first consistently solidify together into a "community" and then into a solid social-democratic party, and lastly agree to create a stable population structure that can undergo socialist transition, but this overall transition from tiny adversarial movements to social-democracy has become infeasible and easily thwarted due to the sheer level of [[E:creative destruction|churn]] on business territories and jobs in modern capitalism, which prevents Rhizome, "community", or social-democratic parties from even forming

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Society disconnects human beings from material reality
{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Society disconnects human beings from material reality; news outlets sell the service of empirical encounters with material reality -> this is the only satisfactory explanation I can find for the way United States people will utterly deny things as a possibility {{caps|until}} they show up in a news article and then suddenly they're "real" and omnipresent and worrying and perhaps scary.

{{li|I=S1/LR/PT|Q=618}}Liberal republics reverting to monarchy -> this has happened multiple times in history if I remember right, I want to say that counting attempts at it I can think of at least one success and two attempts. and one of the failures was France! France didn't succeed at the French revolution, it had to try several more times. when this of all things is possible, it seems really weird the Soviet Union would not have been more aware of the possibility of capitalist reversion.

{{li|I=S1/LR/PT|Q=618}}reactionaries (French revolution) -> this is often pointed to as one of the first {{em|documented}} examples of reactionaries where people took the concept, separated it out, and labeled it. that isn't to say it's the first example of there ever being reactionaries in world history, but it {{em|is}} to say it's one of people's favorite examples.

{{li|I=S1/PT|Q=618}}statement considered reactionary in particular population / statement which is considered reactionary in particular country or population in particular historical period -> important for the purposes of constructing an ontology of what is reactionary in what way and why. 
this concept is a little abstract but it's also one where ultimately [[E:'pataphysical reduction (meta-ontology, meta-Marxism)|'pata-reduction]] can be applied to create Materialist models

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Processes unrelated to capital reproduction and inherently related to interpersonal relationships can affect and shape classes / Processes unrelated to [[E:reproduction of capital (Marx)|capital as a process]] and inherently related to interpersonal relationships and physical group-borders between populations or subpopulations ("populational processes", "sociopolitical processes", "cultural processes") can affect and shape classes despite not being from the same scale as class processes and outwardly appearing not to be class processes or related to class processes (existential materialism, meta-Marxism) -> this wouldn't be surprising if you've gone way deep into the weeds of Marx's work and realized how central "relations" or antagonisms between physical objects are in creating classes. but apparently this is a concept a lot of Marxists in Third-World countries don't yet understand. 
United States people are born the petty bourgeoisie + ?? = this.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Disability actively regenerates the petty bourgeoisie in that when people are physically unable to work on existing business territories they are given the tempting offer of creating and owning new business territories instead / Autism regenerates the petty bourgeoisie in that when people are physically unable to work on existing business territories they are given the tempting offer of creating and owning new business territories instead / ADHD regenerates the petty bourgeoisie in that when people are physically unable to work on existing business territories they are given the tempting offer of creating and owning new business territories instead (existential materialism, meta-Marxism) 
United States people are born the petty bourgeoisie + ?? = this.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Racism actively regenerates the petty bourgeoisie in that when people are pushed out of existing business territories they are given the tempting offer of creating and owning new business territories instead / Transphobia regenerates the petty bourgeoisie in that when people are pushed out of existing business territories they are given the tempting offer of creating and owning new business territories instead / Homophobia regenerates the petty bourgeoisie in that when people are pushed out of existing business territories they are given the tempting offer of creating and owning new business territories instead 
United States people are born the petty bourgeoisie + ?? = this.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Anti-colonialism is rooted in colonialism / Postcolonial anarchisms require [[E:endocolonialism (meta-Marxism onto anarchism)|endocolonialism]] to function / The concept of insisting that First World empires can be changed simply by culturally fabricating better culture is dependent on the existence of [[E:bourgeoisie (layer of people that decide everything about culture before culture is widely interacted with; meta-Marxism onto Western-Marxism)|a class of people]] that decides everything about society by claiming territory, determining what will happen within that territory, and tightly controlling social links to that territory, as well as duplicating itself across the land to the point all territory is filled by said people, and it thus becomes that the whole territory of national populations is ruled by "Idealism" or "human will" but only that belonging to a fraction of the human population that is unaccountable to the rest of the population and also perhaps unaccountable to {{em|half of itself}}

{{li|I=S2/LR|Q=618}}Optimism is believing that everybody ("[[E:IBE|I believe that everybody]]" statements; Liberal-republicanism) / Optimism is the same thing as Idealism

{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|submitter=Valenoern}}name associated with pigs (fiction) / Wilbur (generic) / Babe (generic) / Napoleon (generic) / Snowball (generic) -> so for a second I forgot that Babe and Wilbur were different pigs and I was like, which name was the correct name??

{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|submitter=Valenoern}}name associated with cats (fiction) / name associated with domestic cats (house cats; fiction) / Garfield (Teen Titans; generic) / Firestar (generic) -> I've been cursed with the knowledge that Teen Titans used the name "Garfield" to imply the general concept of a cat and now you have to be cursed with it too.

{{li|I=S2/LR|Q=618}}China has been effectively attempting to eradicate Uighur language, culture, and tradition (Mia Hasenson-Gross) [https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/27/holduk-jewish-leaders-use-holocaust-day-to-denounce-uighur-abuses?ref=hir.harvard.edu] [https://hir.harvard.edu/rated-c-for-censored-walt-disney-in-chinas-pocket/] -> 
so... let's keep in mind that out of 12 million Uighurs, at most 1 million are subject to this 'genocide effort'. that {{em|is}} a high number, but it's also a rather small fraction to be a genocide. in order to be "comparable to Nazi Germany", which is what the director says, it would have to be some 70-100% of Uighurs in concentration camps. but it's only 8%. so it's {{em|not}} comparable to Nazi Germany. 
let's put things in perspective: a bit under 1% of the United States Black population is put in prison. [https://theworlddata.com/percentage-of-black-people-in-prison/] many people are (rightfully) upset about this and consider it already a high percentage, whether they're crazy people like Tucker Carlson or they actually want to help do something constructive to solve the problem. but nobody has successfully drawn up a plan for the African-American subpopulation to become independent from the United States... despite most people across the U.S. political spectrum actually agreeing that the United States government is not serving them well and they deserve independence, either in a positive sense of inclusion or a negative sense of exclusion. one of the big reasons is that it could be the case that there is a greater proportion of people who want to kick them out and basically ban them from the country in that negative sense. if these kinds of people get to dictate policy over another population of people, you basically get Israel; you get an empire that rules over a minority through exclusion and an angry population of minority people who will build a second violent empire and possibly go kill people or destroy all their buildings to secure a safe place to be. so, whether people are able to quite articulate that concept or not, they get afraid of Black people {{em|not}} being ruled over by the United States and its stock of "Joe Bidens" or "White settler leaders" and get really insistent that either the Democratic Party will protect minority ethnic subpopulations and they must be loyal to the Democratic Party regime or that if everybody becomes anarchists Rhizome will somehow glue the country's populations together properly and fix everything. even though the Democratic Party lets Israel go on and {{em|isn't doing anything}} to stop racist cops from profiling Black people and putting 1% of them in prison. so, the Democratic Party versus the Black subpopulation and the CPC versus Uighurs is more comparable than you might think. 
10% is a very high percentage of a group of people to be thrown in prison. I won't deny that. but that's assuming the figure is true and not exaggerated, when it's entirely possible the figure is an overestimate that blows the number up more than twice as big as it really is. this is starting to look like the loose alliance between the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy and the Ukrainian SSR. the Trotskyite conspiracy and the Ukrainians each decided for different reasons that if people were suffering while being part of the USSR — despite those two things not even necessarily being related! — then it's good to break a country or political party of people out of the USSR and create something else. this proved to be a really bad decision for both of them. when the USSR was dissolved, as the Trotskyites were unknowingly pushing for, it pretty much liquidated the populations themselves bringing economic destruction and migrations to other countries, not to mention the countries separating and becoming less functional as smaller isolated territories than they were when connected (a point Trotskyists still go on about without realizing their strategies cause it). when Ukraine was made independent, it no longer had any protection from Russia simply deciding to invade it and digest Ukraine and turn it into more Russia. people will complain about "Russification" inside the USSR, but the truth is, the presence of the USSR at least created some possibility for political control over that process and the ability to stop it. if there's no government extending over both Russia and Ukraine, then there's no process capable of telling Russia to stop killing Ukrainians or making those actions illegal; the act of killing Ukrainians becomes more or less just a legal and normal practice. if anyone pretends otherwise, it's all just a smokescreen to hide the possibility that the United States wants to become the unofficial government of Ukraine and effectively turn it into a U.S. territory within a world-sized state, like Greenland is a territory of Denmark despite consisting of 90% Inuit people that should have no interest whatsoever in Danish politics. that's what's being hidden here. the world is still in a warring states period of countries trying to annex other countries to their kingdoms, and nothing has been able to stop it, not the United Nations, not Bolshevism, not people going on and on about anarchism or postcolonial theories. any argument about Xinjiang is one big colonial argument of whether it should be part of China or part of the United States. and let me tell you, the way we treat Muslims in the United States, {{em|you don't want it being part of the United States}}. 
sidenote: the discussion over this kind of stuff changes if you separate "Zinovievists" from "real Trotskyism". if Trotskyists actually created a really big civilization of like 100 countries, it's theoretically {{em|conceivable}} that things like the United States and China fighting over Xinjiang or historically the battle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union over Poland would be over. however, what Trotskyists don't tell you is that that doesn't really create an end to political discourses over "colonialism" and "oppression", because those conflicts are caused by which groups of people are combined together into populations or separated. so if Trotskyism was suddenly created tomorrow, the kinds of arguments that are going on right now about Black people or Xinjiang would still be happening, they would just be happening in a different form in which people had fully come to understand that you can't just 'remove government' or 'separate populations' to fix a problem and you truly have to negotiate the ongoing {{em|relationships}} between populations recognizing those interactions and relationships as inevitable to actually get the state of one ethnic group bossing around another ethnic group "gone".

{{li|I=S1/HAS|Q=618}}bolding for spoken emphasis [https://rtaibah.com/2022/10/03/do-not-use-oblique-fonts-for-emphasis-in-arabic/] -> so, I never knew this before, but the Arabic language never developed a slanted style for emphasis. this is probably one of the reasons the italics tag <code>i</code> was semi-deprecated in favor of <code>em</code>: so it can be shown bold in Arabic. you learn something new every day.

{{li|I=S2/MX|tradition=MX, MZ|Q=618}}Movementism is comparable to a Rubik's cube; many times when a particular identity movement makes progress it inherently sets several other identities back, ordering one side of the "cube" and simultaneously mixing up several other sides -> this to me is one of the biggest problems with Habermas trying to conceptualize social progress as moral evolution. "moral evolution" itself is nearly a zero-sum game, where a lot of people get hurt at every moment

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Fascism is near-synonymous with the bourgeoisie / Fascism is near-synonymous with "the existence of the bourgeoisie"; you can take any statement about "fascism" and simply drop in "the bourgeoisie" to get a hint on how to fix it -> this is awfully revealing when, for instance, people talk about "getting rid of" fascism — you don't say??? 
{{i|14 characteristics of the bourgeoisie}}. yeah, that figures, Marx described 'the ruling ideas' that flood society when a class takes over. {{i|the bourgeoisie can't be reasoned with}}. basically. {{i|if you're not against the bourgeoisie you're with it}}. that one just about flipped from blue to red. {{i|Liberal-republicanism exists to prevent the bourgeoisie}}. wonky, but not wrong, once you've learned about "anarchemistry" and the really weird and contradictory ways Liberal-republicanism tries to make finite things that actually are indefinite. {{i|I'm not a fascist}} = {{i|I'm not the bourgeoisie!!}} honestly, says a lot about why people deny either of these things, it's the same kind of denial because people are so immersed in the water they can't see it. 
you can get pretty far with this. it doesn't tell you everything about each statement but it does help you unpack a whole lot of statements in a horizontal way.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}LLMs are not consumerism / Large language models are, ironically, one of the only things that cannot be termed {{i|consumerism}}, because despite the huge water and land usage on image and video generators, chatbots within the text realm put to use as search engines or "librarians" are one of the only cases within an overall capitalist society where the act of socializing and forming bonds has not been transmogrified into an individual paying a producer or laborer to create a commercial product and then referring to that particular act as "community"; while such things as movie theaters, newly released video games, and animation merchandise are inherently consumerist, large language models ironically are not, due to reasons such as that they involve users interacting with already existing webpages or books which do and are not a social activity in the first place

{{li|I=S1/STM|Q=618}}example of prescriptive rule (truth value) / obeys prescriptive rule (truth value) -> this is to be used with Wavebuilder combinations in order to add qualifiers of what specific rules a particular Item obeys or fits into; these should usually be put in the "redundant combinations" area given that they are not giving you logical results of the components but are strictly working backward from a result. for example: obeys prescriptive rule + Propositions have four words (English) = (particular Item).
{{li|I=S1/MW|Q=618}}example of project policy (truth value) / obeys project policy (truth value)

{{li|I=S2/MW|Q=618}}Propositions have four words / Statements have four words; the specific count of four words only applies to the English language / Propositions in German or Japanese should have some maximum number of characters -> this rule emerged informally as I repeatedly tried to cram really long propositions into a few words that would fit nicely into a data table and be easy to remember. three words was often too few and six was often too many but four was about right most of the time. now that it's been going a while, I like it. it's funny how it happens to mirror the long-standing practice of a lot of Chinese sayings, usually idioms, being expressed in four syllables. I've apparently cracked the problem of four word idioms for English without trying to. 
also... I watched this one video that was purposefully making a constructed language where it was impossible for individual words to hold meaning and only an entire sentence could mean something, because the sentence was a hash of a bunch of numbered concepts lined up or something like that. that's almost a real thing with drastically abbreviated propositions — the four words together mean something and each word may mean something specifically next to one of the others but the individual words cease to mean anything by themselves.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Movie theaters are more Fisherist than movies / Movie theaters cracking down on "cam recordings" is a better example of capitalism programming people with its beliefs than any of the actual content of movies -> we have this incredibly stupid contradiction that people have realized that "cops" are bad, but they also have no idea whatsoever that rules are bad and think that culture products actually program people when all they are is the thoughts that are left over after rules are enforced. oh, yeah, and also we believe Stalin's government was really bad for enforcing tyrannical rules but we still don't have any idea that [[E:steel rule|it's the rules that are bad]]. 
I'm gonna make a bold statement: the cop is just doing their job. "ACAB" is not a historical statement describing centuries of events.

{{li|I=S2/IV|Q=618}}An international Communist program is not a collection of national programs (Bill van Auken) [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/09/le6-all.html] -> he may be at least partly right. I mean, even a meta-Marxist program would contain slightly more than a collection of national programs due to the need to get each national program to understand the other ones.

{{li|I=S2/IV|Q=618|rem=ai.wsws.org}}Stalin claiming the other countries were not subordinate to the Soviet Union is basically an Idealist statement as a miscellaneous collection of individual countries has no protection against having to form a herd-of-cats effect in which particular countries or clusters of competent leaders guard the entire thing against the First World

{{li|I=S2/MX/A|Q=618}}History is the progression of conflicting anarchisms (derived anarchist proposition) / Anarchism is non-dialectical by itself but dialectical when it exists in plurality with itself because multiple anarchisms fighting each other will enact the Hegelian dialectic -> this has to be true for a theory based on "freedom" to actually work in real life. you have to have a bunch of discrete named anarchisms where almost all identify themselves as anarchisms but they each decide to fight each other and explode each other to be born because something about the previous one didn't make them feel "free" and so they tried to destroy it in order to create something else they couldn't describe. 
this proposition is both wonderful and terrible. it's wonderful in that I actually now have a working model of exactly why it is that anarchisms are overall so persistent and refuse to give up: anarchisms are not actually against Hegelianism, but they see {{em|themselves}} as the entire Hegelian dialectic. the concept of Stalin trying to model society as local structures transitioning into other structures? {{em|anarchists believe in that}} but they believe that very process right there must take the form of entire Communities burning each other down to create better Communities. it's terrible in that anarchisms will never realize this. they will never realize what they actually are, and they will always act like "freedom" actually is something rather than just an absence and the (sometimes justified) hatred of things they don't like and want to fight.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}No individual human being can be a worker as an individual; as individuals, all human beings are the petty bourgeoisie; human beings become workers if and when they actively integrated into larger structures and cease to be workers when they are removed from those structures -> this problem is part of what sinks basically all Liberal-republican philosophy and all philosophy inside Liberal-republicanism. Liberal-republican philosophy is hell-bent on the concept that people really can be considered in isolation, which causes all human beings to conceptualize themselves as petty bourgeoisie, or worse, to actively regenerate the petty bourgeoisie. the concept that [[E:tent of freedom poles|people "have human rights" {{em|as individuals}} and then they come together and have individual human rights as individuals {{em|together}}]] is absolutely lethal to a functioning society.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}The Free Software movement needs a theory of state businesses if it is ever to succeed; it needs a theory of how it is that products and production structures become part of public space and become impossible for individuals to control or 'retract' as opposed to saying that individuals just 'ought to' continually choose to put things in the public space within the space of individual choices and interactions 
methodological individualism + ?? = this.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}The "failure" of Wikipedia to provide a reliable source (presumed to be as reliable as grade school texts, not university-level texts) is actually the failure of anarchism, and of a particular kind of named [[E:anarchy (meta-Marxism)|anarchy]] -> I don't know what this particular kind of anarchy is called, but I'll find a name for it eventually. it has something to do with the notion of culture products or information products as open and evolving instead of closed, when their content really should have been closed. (this does not refer to the concept of "open" or "closed" source code, it's a totally different kind of "closed" or "open".) funny enough, the Free Software movement has already figured out how to make Freed things with closed contents — we call them software packages.

{{li|I=S2/Fy/MX|Q=618}}Corporate [[E:art product (economics)|culture products]] are not objects communicated from a director to each audience member, but are in practice generally objects communicated from one fan to another fan; not only is the "artistic vision" of one particular specific individual a ridiculous thing to expect culture products to have, but at the end of the day all corporate culture products are ultimately just pre-made commercial fan fiction -> the way you have to fix the fan fiction problem is so specific. I've had several "solutions" to it that were probably wrong. but I think the crux of it lies here. the most important relationship in the pipeline of culture products is them being passed back and forth between fans. on occasion quite literally when someone hands someone else a Steam code. most of the time a little more figuratively, in the form of let's plays, theory videos, and the construction of alternate timelines. capitalism makes a huge deal out of the sanctity of the corporation for no good reason. ideally what you want is the paid experts completing their task of churning out culture products without a lot of ado about how great or awful the workers are personally for particular actions and decisions, instead they just complete the task quietly and go home, and then you want the fans to be allowed to pass back and forth whatever they want to regardless of whether it has been modified. and you don't want the central party-nation freaking out about the airtight seal between corporation and fans and the fans "wrecking society by doing too much"; that should not be a real offense. instead, if anything, you want the central party simply noticing where the seal is breaking and doing inquiries into whether different kinds of products should be produced. it {{em|might be the case}} hypothetically that the ideal scenario is the seal breaking totally and government not even having to bother re-connecting any of the points of production to formal corporations because there is simply enough stuff that nobody actually has to pay for culture products any more and generally considers them all to cost zero or literally a couple loose coins at a thrift store. 
the last thing you want to see happening (ever) is a "Chinese map fiasco" where people perceive government as a brutal predator that munches on human social activity purely to digest it and start scheming about how to stay out of its mouth because they know everything only gets worse after you fall in. you can never let that happen because the moment it happens the whole of socialist transition will disintegrate. the petty bourgeoisie regenerates in a heartbeat and it happens anywhere and everywhere. you're much more at its mercy than you ever could have realized.

{{li|I=S2/LGBT/PT|Q=618}}Pride is a vice! (Toryism) / LGBT people shouldn't be bold and proud because pride is a sin (is a vice; Christianity) -> this proposition is bullshit but it really is interesting linguistically because it makes you ask how many things "pride" actually refers to. I can think of at least two: A) arrogant overconfidence B) the unwillingness to either trust others or submit to others (the way it was used in Dragon Ball, where I heard it and was just like, is that actually bad though, the kind of people who want you to surrender to them can be cruel and not worth it)

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Deleting Mao is Orientalist / Attributing Buddhism or Taoism specifically to "Eastern culture" is an unnecessary act of essentialism, because it proposes that instead of warring states periods (a repeatable pattern made of predictable processes) giving rise to Taoism and Chinese Buddhism, people chose to create Buddhism and Taoism to solve warring states periods {{em|because}} people were inherently Chinese -> I knew there was something that bothered me about people always referring to "Eastern culture". {{YouTube|SXwfMOAmPkQ}} it's this! it's the Idealist interpretation of history that is implied inside it. 
you know what else Asians created to solve warring states periods? Maoism. that is completely different from either Buddhism or Taoism. so what inherent Asian essence is contained in {{em|that}}? {{a|how do you reconcile|E=Hegelian dialectic}} there being at least two {{em|completely different}} definitions of "Eastern culture"?

{{li|I=F2/Fy|Q=618}}Japan's only philosophy is Japaneseness / Japanese people do not have [[E:material contradiction (Marxism)|plural philosophies]] repeatable across other countries, they only have Japaneseness {{YouTube|SXwfMOAmPkQ}} -> I am so done with the entire concept of "studying Cultures" because I swear this is how most ordinary people interpret it. they throw around the word "collectivism" like it actually means something and refers to a philosophy, but what they really mean when they say it is precisely "Chineseness" or "Japaneseness". they presuppose that Japanese people have Japaneseness and then they look for more descriptions of Japaneseness to explain why Japaneseness leads to Japaneseness in a circular loop.

{{li|I=S1/LR|Q=618}}deleting Mao from Chinese history / deleting Mao (Liberal-republicanism) -> this is a fun one. you'll see why on the next line. 
memory hole ({{cite|1984}}) + the PRC is a bad fake historical period = deleting Mao. memory hole ({{cite|1984}}) + Kuomintang = deleting Mao. deleting Mao + medieval fantasy = China is still a medieval kingdom.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Giving money to businesses doesn't help human beings; it only helps business structures and the owners that are conflated with them / Giving money to businesses doesn't help the proletariat -> I like this framing because I think it's arguable it doesn't even really help small owners.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}The concept of "race traitors" implies races are physical processes producing necessity / The concept of "race traitors" implies that there is an inevitable destiny for a whole population of Black people just because they are Black, which will be realized through an overall Black population interacting all at once with its surroundings only under particular (non-inevitable) conditions, but will not happen through individuals as separated from the Black population as an indivisible object

{{li|I=S2/MX/DG/A|Q=618}}The United States has the most incentive of any country to get rid of capitalism because it has the most minorities; there are so many distinct minorities that politics itself has come to revolve around minorities, but because each of them contains so few people under such isolation, not a single one of them is going to become free of attempts to exterminate it under capitalism or reformism

{{li|I=F2/ES|Q=618}}Mentioning Malthusianism is genocide / Whenever you choose to say a statement in Malthusianism you have chosen to cause other people to be bigoted {{YouTube|gv4R-hix9wM}} -> no... that isn't how it works. as a framework, statements inside Malthusianism could hypothetically be true without all of it being true, so if those are already true and you say them, you didn't cause them to happen. this is like saying that if you predict a box to contain a dead cat when somebody filled it out of sight then you caused it to contain a dead cat, even if the other options are unrelated to cats, like the other option is the box is empty. overpopulation leading to bad outcomes can hypothetically be the case whether you want it to or not, but the important thing to realize is that that doesn't have any bearing on what the actual bad outcomes are. the bad outcomes might not be anything like the simplistic scenarios in Malthus' essays of overcrowding or 'eating babies'. the bad outcomes might look more like an increase in people randomly murdering each other because everyone increasingly feels like everyone else is threatening their existence and they need to protect their existence because 'all individual existences deserve to be respected' {{em|or else}}; despite what everybody wants nobody will yield to anybody else and so people get furious and kill in order to regain control. if everybody's doing that, you don't have control over it; you can't just say "believing in overpopulation is bad" or "if we don't things will get better" to fix it. because when people really truly believe things "Should" work a certain way, especially if that "Should" is an ethical prescription, they won't listen to anything you say until reality magically fixes itself to be that way. people are just going to get angrier and angrier every single day there are too many people and those people are disorganized and attempt with steadily increasing blind rage to punish all the disorganized people that have not been planned or controlled in any way for not being controlled in any way. there's really no "society", "social-ism", "community" -ing out of that situation, because other people's ethical imperatives are not a social construct — you can only obey whatever the {{censor|fuck}} other people tell you to do or risk them doing violence to you... or kill them, I suppose. ethics is an infamously unyielding form of philosophy. if there existed any form of belief where everybody spontaneously giving it up would actually solve all our problems, then everybody giving up the entire concept of ethics would be it. think about it: every right-Liberal who tries to say that accumulating wealth is good relies on property rights, which rely on ethics. every nazi that tries to say trans people are destroying the United States relies on a right to not have this "intrude" on their lives, which relies on ethics. if everyone really actually got rid of ethics, they wouldn't be able to defend bad things either, because the whole concept that individuals can make "correct choices" that are superior to other choices in creating a future they would be satisfied with would be gone. there would be vastly more incentive to question your previous decisions and deconstruct arbitrary beliefs if ethics did not exist at all. "post-structuralist philosophy"? "prejudices" and "biases" that will never make sense as analytical tools once you stop being the person that wrote the paper? how about we just get rid of ethics and accomplish the same thing way better with way fewer problems. 
I think the thing that bothered me the most about this video is.... the Overshoot Theory video I remember from a while back was also leaning on Native Americans. Overshoot man was like, {{i|because Native Americans have lived more sustainably, overpopulation!}} while these people are like, {{i|because Native Americans have lived more sustainably, no overpopulation!}}. it honestly feels like a non sequitur in both cases. I feel like overpopulation genuinely has nothing to do with whether North American tribes 'have lived more sustainably', positively or negatively. the cases where you'd see overpopulation come from a genuinely different kind of society that operates through entirely different material processes. which means you can't analogize a smaller society to it.

{{li|I=F2/ES|Q=618}}I'm not here to educate you / It's not my job to educate you (statement that minority groups do not have to explain oppression) -> I don't think you can treat this statement as generally true. funny story, I've been picking up books on Native American history when I go to used book sales, and like, these claim to be educational, but you open them up, and the last one I was reading was treating the tribe in question as very mystical. it was trying to be positive and imply there was nothing wrong with people having a different culture but it overall still ended up presenting things like Rolling Thunder (he was the main topic of the book) had a fundamentally magical way of thinking, that he's almost some kind of wizard with magic occult powers in the way he thinks as opposed to his culture being something that can ever be "normal". I think the book was from 1976 if I remember right, not recently. 
so like, telling people to go educate themselves and implying they can't talk to actual people to learn what their problems are could be very harmful. I suspect that it's old books like these that a lot of anarchists are learning about other groups of people from and effectively where they're getting their anarchism. or that even if that's not literally the case, that you can still study that example to learn about the problems with the thing anarchists are actually doing. 
I think there is like.... a nuance that's totally lost on anarchists about the interaction of individuals or populations. if there's somebody that goes around talking like Rolling Thunder, you can't really just take what he says and present it to other people as his fundamental way of thinking. people in industrial populations are going to take it negatively. there might be one or two people who literally take it as 'backward' and say mean things, but that's not what you need to watch for, the most likely harm you need to keep an eye out for is people softly deciding that tribal populations can't understand modern science and that the way of thinking they have presented is part of their fundamental essence that 'blocks' them from absorbing the understandings people have in industrial society. this is racist, because it puts you into the same rhetorical position as the people who were recently arguing that Black South Africans 'didn't want the farmland taken by Afrikaners because of their culture' and {{em|therefore}} it was okay for European apartheid states to descend in and take whatever they want. I think there's a decent argument to be made that claiming someone like Rolling Thunder has a fundamentally different way of thinking 'than European science' is flat out supporting colonialism and is The Colonizer Attitude, because, just look at its results. 
this leaves open the rather broad question of how exactly you can merge tribal populations' ways of thinking with modern science and the findings of industrial societies. we know it's not optional to do that. we know it's necessary to do it to not essentialize people and treat indigenous people as stupid. we know that anarchists trying to present older and more mystical ways of thinking as 'the natural way of thinking' is not okay because it what it effectively does is allow White people to appropriate indigenous culture for their own benefit but still deny that culture to the actual indigenous people and hand all the power of people to determine themselves, to be able to talk about all topics intelligently as the adults in the room and make sophisticated decisions on various topics and involving several different philosophies, to Europeans. putting yourself in a position where other people will essentialize you to one particular level of ideological development is dangerous. I think it's the anarchists that need to be told this more than the tribal populations; they've been through a lot and I think to some extent they know this. anarchists, on the other hand... I feel like it's vaguely possible that some day in the future, people will talk about anarchists as inherently mystical people and weirdly racialize all anarchists {{em|exactly}} the way they've done with tribes in North or South America.

{{li|I=S2/ES|Q=618}}North American tribes are not defined by romantic mystical beliefs {{YouTube|gv4R-hix9wM}} / ({{9k|RD/Q53,19}})

{{li|I=S2/A|Q=618}}Every republic is a class society (anarchism) / Every republic is a class society ("hierarchy", spatial class order) because a ruling class must exist to create a republic -> it's this kind of proposition that makes me question if Trotskyism does or doesn't believe in an era of socialism. it really claims to believe in a republic but its insistence on 'getting rid of bureaucracy' and getting rid of borders (which in a roundabout way are one of the reasons an era of socialism exists, because both things exist due to a country being a physical object) makes it bizarrely more similar to the anarchist method of "class analysis" than the Marxist one, and "anarchist class analysis" necessarily leads to trying to do everything Immediately as opposed to on a reasonable time scale

{{li|I=S2/ES/MX|Q=618}}The militant form of Existentialism is when Existentialists kill others that threaten their existence in order to continue existing -> this is one of the many reasons I don't like Existentialism. first, it's thoroughly incoherent. none of its actions are predictable based on combining logical statements or based on anything called "reason". none of its actions are explainable with religious justifications nor morality. it gets super offended when you try to reduce collections of people to inanimate objects but in practice it encourages humans to behave like lions or baboons. we may as well all be inanimate objects for how good this philosophy is. second... it turns brown not even in two seconds, but yesterday.

{{li|I=S2/A|Q=618}}Killing people who would otherwise kill you is self defense / iron rule ... (censored title) / [[E:Do unto others before they do unto you|iron rule]] (generic) -> hmmmmmmm. A) are they Black people the cops are scared of B) are they midwest Indians in the 1800s C) are they Palestinians D) are they a Bolshevik government attempting to prevent the petty bourgeoisie from creating civil war or imperialism? this is bad exmat because I absolutely saw the fourth one casually tossed out in the same comments section. "Hitler, Stalin, or Mao", they said casually [[E:Nazism and Bolshevism have the same cause|as if it made sense]].

{{li|I=S2/HAS|Q=618}}History is the progression of generational subcultures -> this is slightly different from the claim that history is the progression of father to son to son or mother to daughter to son to daughter etc., because it is talking about the progression of whole layers of thousands and thousands of people born in the same 5-10 year period, and is not centering itself around individuals or psychoanalysis. it's not psychoanalysis, and instead, it's shifted its entire focus over to art history, the humanities, or the history of an industry.

{{li|I=S2/HAS/MX|Q=618}}History is the progression of successive semi-countable art markets -> I'm a little astounded to find such an Idealist claim and such a Materialist claim in the same podcast right next to each other a sentence apart, but I'll take it. wow. this one is so telling. it accidentally reveals so much about the connection between capitalist theory, the growth of society, and the outward manifestations seen in culture products. 
let's think about this. a 'console generation' forms in order to raise the prices of the products (largely by producing them new), while decreasing the cost of entry. if the discipline is new, it won't be overrun with expensive equipment, stacks and stacks of money poured into expertise, and the prestige of certain brands creating natural monopolies. after a while, all the corporations in a given market have made their money and the products are everywhere such that neither can new corporations make money nor can old ones earn any more. so then the market resets and an entirely new market is created. a bunch of hype goes around to present the new thing as really great although it was created in order for the new products made for it to not have to be very good at first. and apart from video games, this happens for the general concept of mediums and a lot of physical formats. 
honestly. I trust this more than Habermas' conception of history as some kind of progression of morality where what is progress could become entirely subjective; at least you can measure what a sideways progression from one set of events to another {{em|is}}. 
console wars + History is the progression of generational subcultures = this.

{{li|I=S2/ES|Q=618}}The middle ground between sense and nonsense is still insane / I believe 2+2=4, but in the interest of representing those who believe 2+2=22, my platform is 2+2=11 (counter-claim)

{{li|I=S2/HAS|Q=618}}The majority of Jews support Israel {{YouTube|_Q0TxCCuXyU}} / Some Jews don't support Israel (counter-claim) -> this observation really destroys anti-essentialism as a path to truth, doesn't it. superficially it seems to support it, but when you look at how the counter-claim is actually used... it's used to defend Idealism as "not always" being fatally flawed while most uses of it at best make it wholly irrelevant to explaining anything. anti-essentialism is often just a back-handed statement that Idealism doesn't actually explain real life, not realizing that in saying that it's slamming the Idealist models it's supposed to save.

{{li|I=S2/HAS|Q=618}}Some Jews don't support Israel {{YouTube|_Q0TxCCuXyU}} -> U.S. people don't know anything but Idealism, the treatment of everything as abstract qualities. so they have to take on "Jews" and "anti-semitism" as abstract concepts. when they do that, it predisposes them to racist understandings of what various ethnic groups "are". so then they bring out the point of "but surely one of them doesn't support Israel" (anti-essentialism) to badly try to prove that Idealism isn't racist. 
it doesn't fix anything of course. Defining everything by what it's not leads you to defend anything and everything including the U.S. military.

{{li|I=S2/STM|Q=618}}nucleation site (chemistry) {{YouTube|ksn5yrsC3Wg}} -> a site of crystallization which encourages formation of other crystals. 
has relevance for the concept of modeling social structures changing
{{li|I=S2/STM|Q=618}}substance flipping over from one polymorph to another (chemistry) {{YouTube|ksn5yrsC3Wg}}

{{li|I=S1/ES|Q=618}}anarcho-NATOism
{{li|I=S2/LR|Q=618}}Imperialism is nonviolent / Anarchism definitionally requires violence; this is to imply and nearly to state that a warlike, potentially genocidal empire is perfectly okay and recommended because of the fact only a few people at the edge of an empire have to fight over borders and most people in an empire are nonviolent {{YouTube|Cl04NNVDwD0}} -> you wonder how anybody goes along with "settler-colonialism" and thinks it's a good idea in the first place. this is how. it's actually nonviolence-colonialism. 
Idealism is dangerous to humanity, it really is. 
anarcho-NATO-ism + ?? = Imperialism is nonviolent.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Marxism before the year 2020 has been a theory of ideological segregation more than a theory of social progress -> why is it that walling off whole fortress states has been more effective than trying to spread filaments of radicals inside class societies? I think the example of China and Taiwan {{em|splitting}} and the example of Texas defeating the freethinkers are very instructive on why this happened

{{li|I=S2/A/MX|Q=618}}Despite the observable historical fact that various social structures can transition into other structures, it is generally {{em|easier}} to create any of the later structures humanity invents by starting from scratch rather than from working with structures that already exist, due to the fact that ruling classes are generally the clusters of people that are more inherently powerful and able to conquer and expand than the masses or clusters of people they rule over -> this is one of the best arguments that anarchism and Trotskyism each have going for them. but it's also one of the best arguments for Deng Xiaoping Thought if you don't totally dismiss sublation processes. this gives way to Deng Xiaoping Thought much faster than it justifies anarchism.

{{li|I=S2/LR|Q=618}}Statues and plaques do not actually teach people history

{{li|I=S1/ML|Q=618}}Confederate statue as superstructural artifact -> the motif of Confederate statues being more of a "coincidence" spat out of a Social-Philosophical System that just happens to 'believe' them as opposed to being a good representation of the overall process of history

{{li|I=M3/MX|Q=618}}If the subjective theory of value is true, then why does the value of various cryptocurrencies keep crashing?

{{li|I=S2/LR|Q=618}}"Freethinker" is less technical and more expressive than "atheist" {{YouTube|Cl04NNVDwD0}} -> goes to show that anarchism really is the default mode of thinking rather than a great new invention. and I hate that. because freedom doesn't mean {{censor|fucking}} anything. it's actually rather obvious what an atheist is, but "freedom" actually is a belief in nothing because it really is just the absence of whatever else it was tossed in against.

{{li|I=S2/PT|Q=618}}The United States got away with outsourcing labor because corporations programmed people to want cheap goods {{YouTube|bZG8AQqbkzg}} -> so... how is it they successfully did that if it's possible to simply tell people it was done and break it? if people can really be programmed against their best interests that consistently, then why would they listen to you? 
I think people are making excuses for the fact that owners make these decisions and they fundamentally can't control the owners.

{{li|I=S1/W|tradition=W, PT|Q=618}}corporations programming people / the engineering of consumer behavior {{YouTube|bZG8AQqbkzg}}

{{li|I=S1/Fy/ML|Q=618}}treating the protagonists of anticommunist fables as unreliable narrators

{{li|I=S1/IV|Q=618}}dictatorship of the proletariat (Trotskyism) -> this is apparently its own specific thing. it seems it's typically defined in terms of how well the soviets can defend the overall country and any governing bodies against the re-emergence of capitalism.

{{li|I=S2/IV/MX|Q=618}}Soviet structures are vulnerable to being overcome by petty classes; soviet structures are not guaranteed to remain orange because depending on their class and preferred palette of social structures the individual national-employees inside them can add together to turn the structure charcoal, blue, or strawberry -> Trotskyism is weird. it has moments where it's totally unconvicing, and then it has moments where after you've been listening to the actually-okay theorists you have to go out of your way to find, it almost sounds like it got something right. this week, I saw that Trotskyists seemed to be describing the dictatorship of the proletariat as control by one big sea of soviets that are responsible for operating all the other organs of government — the thinking is that if all the soviets are made of proletarians and the soviets are orange, the soviets will keep all of the other structures from turning strawberry or any other unfavorable ideology. but then I thought about it for a bit, and I realized that this isn't an airtight strategy. in the real world, proletarians can level up into non-proletarians through small-scale processes, and it happens all the time whenever there aren't enough job slots or people simply don't fit into existing business territories' "culture". it's very easy for a country that's full of proletarians one moment to slowly morph into a country of skilled workers that all want their own businesses but will also complain when the reality of running them is much harder than they dreamed. 
this became apparent to me as soon as I saw Gramsci talking about a council for the "self-employed". that isn't a red or orange structure, that's a blue or strawberry structure. and those kinds of structures can undo a revolution. but it's also trivial for more of them to be produced through misapplied education or training. if the soviets have full control, it's easy for petty classes to rebel against all the orange soviets and start taking control of the whole country through whatever limited ability they have to assemble together groups of people that outcompete surrounding workers. 
dictatorship of the proletariat (Trotskyism) + proletarians promoting into Careerists = Soviet structures are vulnerable to being overcome by petty classes.

{{li|I=S1/AS/HM|Q=618}}moral evolution (critical theory) / Hegelian evolution of morality / historical development of societies as conceptualized around morality or ethics [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/04/01/habe-a01.html] / procedural theory of rationality (Liberal-republican ethics; Habermas) -> the concept in Habermas of modeling either large or small changes in societies through changes in morality and the resulting changes in society. I'd hate this except that it gets really funny when you apply it to world civilization and actual changes between historical periods, revealing a lot about how imperialism works; in a way, it's so bad it's good. I guess that's about what you should expect to get when you start with Hegel. Liberal-republicanism is frustrating but Hegel really isn't so bad in the end.

{{li|I=S1/LR|Q=618}}deformed Liberal states / degenerated Liberal states -> the motif of Liberal-republican countries looking at other nation-states and regarding them as deformed versions of themselves that need to be punished until they form correctly. 
deformed Liberal states + moral evolution (Trotskyism) = deformed workers' states.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Morality itself tends to favor a world of "small business hell" simply because the assumptions that lead to people creating morality {{em|happen to lead there}} and all Idealist statements when put together spit out some kind of real-world consequence -> I find it frustrating that people will start from a set of arbitrary Ideals and then just deontologically assume that if those Ideals are good then whatever they produce must also be good. to me Habermas' theory of moral consciousness just doesn't make sense as a material theory of history because in one way all moral or ethical values are always arbitrary; there will always be a point where people assume that what they're currently doing is morally good or superior just because it's the thing a lot of people are doing and none of them want to stop doing it while any other group of people must be morally bad just for doing a different thing that threatens to replace that thing, even before they actually demand other people trade in what they're doing for the new thing.

{{li|I=S2/ML|Q=618}}Idealism produces material outcomes / All Idealist statements or combinations of Idealist statements lead to some kind of real-world consequence -> there are many ways to take this. one of the surface conclusions is that Idealism isn't as explanatory as Materialism. one of the most interesting conclusions is that you can "meta-game" Idealism and figure out the best Ideals to tell people in order to get them to create particular material results. this {{em|is}} essentially lying to people to manipulate their behavior, which if it were up to me I don't really like, but a lot of people believe that most human beings' understanding of the world will never go above that level, which might make it ethical under some theories of ethics.

{{li|I=S2/ES|Q=618}}Prejudice and structural inequality are not the same thing; getting rid of prejudice does not necessarily get rid of structural inequality [https://simplyputpsych.co.uk/psych-101-1/prejudice-reduction-and-the-contact-hypothesis-what-social-psychology-got-right-what-it-missed-and-why-contact-alone-is-not-enough] -> well. I have to agree with this. I'm puzzled why anarchists in general aren't better at understanding this. but the blue anarchists did get something right.

{{li|I=S2/HAS|Q=618}}Contact between populations reduces prejudice when four conditions are met: 1) equal status within the contact situation 2) common goals 3) cooperation 4) support from authorities or social norms (Allport 1954, Pettigrew) [https://simplyputpsych.co.uk/psych-101-1/prejudice-reduction-and-the-contact-hypothesis-what-social-psychology-got-right-what-it-missed-and-why-contact-alone-is-not-enough]

{{li|I=S2/HAS|Q=618}}Negative contact between populations has a greater observed effect than positive contact [https://simplyputpsych.co.uk/psych-101-1/prejudice-reduction-and-the-contact-hypothesis-what-social-psychology-got-right-what-it-missed-and-why-contact-alone-is-not-enough]

{{li|I=S1/HAS|tradition=|Q=618}}analytic thinking as opposed to holistic thinking [https://simplyputpsych.co.uk/psych-101-1/understanding-weird-western-educated-industrialized-rich-and-democratic] -> I always wondered why it was called analytic philosophy. is this why?

{{li|I=S1/ES|tradition=|Q=618}}{{abbr|tts=Weird|WEIRD}} countries [https://simplyputpsych.co.uk/psych-101-1/understanding-weird-western-educated-industrialized-rich-and-democratic] -> I like this acronym in that most of it makes sense except the "Western" part. I have no idea what that means. is Japan Western, or is it not? there are good arguments both ways. this is why I prefer saying "First World countries".

{{li|I=S1/ES|tradition=|Q=618}}peer review auditing -> the motif of sending bogus articles to academic journals in hopes the reviewers will catch the problems
{{li|I=S1/ES|tradition=|Q=618}}peer-review auditing feminist journals [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/13/pers-o13.html] [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/18/inte-o18.html] / peer-review auditing gender studies journals 
peer review auditing + gender studies journal = this.
{{li|I=S1/ES|tradition=IV onto ES|Q=618}}feminist Mein Kampf [https://norskk.is/bytta/menn/our_struggle_is_my_struggle.pdf] [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/13/pers-o13.html] -> wow. they really should have caught that. I.... have to read this at some point because that sounds like the best one. 
...it's online? oh wonderful. this is very opaque and hard to read. I guess that's how they got it through.

{{li|I=S1/IV|Q=618|rem=ai.wsws.org}}SEP's analysis of "Stalinism" -> that's... its own specific thing? okay.

{{li|I=S2/ES/MX|Q=618}}If the value of money is culturally fabricated ("made up"), but anarchism can realize itself through a sea of individuals spontaneously deciding to create a different kind of society, then anarchism is a cultural fabrication and everybody is free to spontaneously decide not to follow anarchism and follow whatever ostensibly more oppressive system they want to (meta-Marxism onto post-structuralism)

{{li|I=S2/Fy|Q=618}}today I was "thinking"... / 'today I was thinking—' 'stop that' / 'today I was thinking—' 'you?! I can't believe it' -> the motif of somebody cutting off a statement where somebody was thinking about some specific thing and focusing on the concept of "thinking".

{{li|I=S1/DFy/PT|Q=618}}Eren Yeager / nazi Eren Yeager (in context of imagining different versions of the story based around different ideologies)

{{li|I=S1/DFy/DX|Q=618}}Dengist Eren Yeager / Eren Yeager if {{book|Attack on Titan}} was Western-Marxist (strawberry Marxist, Gramscian, Dengist / Deng Xiaoping Thought) -> so, {{book|Attack on Titan}} has a dumb premise. it reads like a campfire horror story told by nazis in very little irony. but it {{em|is}} really funny to imagine some of the same central themes being used in an approximately Marxist work. like, instead of it being a nazi campfire story the titans are trying to scale a "Berlin wall", or penetrate China or North Korea to take them back for Liberal-republicanism, the titans are hiding out on Taiwan, the titans are sealing people into Cuba and not letting {{em|them}} leave. there obviously wouldn't be a focus on the concept of the big antagonist monsters being 'impure' or 'diseased', that element of it probably wouldn't exist. it would just be kaiju trying to break into the country and do something horrifying. it's gotta be a little over the top. it's gotta be about turning them all into kaiju for some nefarious but useful purpose, like, I dunno, the kaiju feed off negativity and if they all turn into kaiju and fight each other the whole population of kaiju becomes stronger. everyone is horrified about the invasion and it brings them all together.

{{li|I=S1/Fy/A|Q=618}}anarchist Eren Yeager / Eren Yeager if {{book|Attack on Titan}} was anarchist -> {{em|this}} is why I am having an increasingly hard time telling the difference between Deng Xiaoping Thought and anarchisms. like, once again, anarchism succeeds when you build a wall around it — probably metaphorically — and wait for the outside to tire itself out. I can't tell the difference between Gramscian Eren Yeager and anarchist Eren Yeager. 
oh god when I just go saying ideologies in a sentence of course my brain is going to shout "Trotskyist Eren Yeager". I don't know what that means. I don't know what that means at all. I dunno, like, the enemies are more like Reptilians or Yeerks and they're hiding out in the central government and nobody wants to believe it so the anti-alien squads are like trying to team up across regions? I tried.

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=618}}Sociality distorts human beings' view of material reality -> anarchists are going to get so upset if you try to argue this at them. they'll try to argue that reality is whatever comes naturally to living things, and different states of natural for each living species must naturally want to go together, blah blah blah. [*] but they're all privileged. they haven't experienced a state of truly being fenced out of society by thousands and millions of people that all simultaneously agree they don't like you (probably without having met you or having much of any idea what they're doing). they especially haven't experienced it owing to the existence of anarchism, because anarchism already selected for people like them. but they should wise up to the fact that anarchism doesn't really pass the veil of ignorance with flying colors. it's quite easy to end up on the wrong side of "community" where you simply have nobody and nothing and also everyone assumes you must be a bad person just because you haven't claimed an exclusive spot in Community that supposedly you only have to be nice to people to get and follow morality though in reality it's much more difficult and complicated and trivial to simply be born wrong and fail to survive the ecological parameters of the 'community-icene'. I think that as a period of biological life the Anthropocene truly began at tribal society, not at industrial society. it was the ability to form entire ecosystems made of nothing but humans that changed things, but {{em|if anarchists are correct}} that the natural state of humans and human psychology is in tribes then all the current destruction of the environment ultimately came from the characteristics of tribes. tribal populations are not wholly innocent for all the horrors of global empire and ecological destruction if at the end of the day we're {{em|all}} still tribes and they're the only ones trying to disclaim that there are bad things about that. really, as crazy as it sounds, they might be accidentally benefiting from a corrupt system that has killed great numbers of people. of course, if humans don't have a seemingly eternal resting state of being in tribes that we have no choice but to return to which in turn implies we are currently tribes in denial and will still be tribes for the next hundred thousand years, then tribal populations carry no blame for what industrial societies have done. 
(* why didn't they say that about workers' states and the healthy state of the Soviet Union versus the very disordered states that occurred at every moment after tearing it apart? they have even less excuse than Trotskyists. Trotskyists wilfully wanting to overwrite another Marxism with their own Marxism is at least logical even if it's terrible.)

{{li|I=F2/ES|Q=618}}"Indigenous people" marks a statement as racist / Saying "indigenous people" marks a sentence as containing racial stereotypes {{YouTube|fwecpbB1DPs}}
{{li|I=F2/ES|Q=618}}Mentioning ethnic groups is racist / Mentioning an ethnic group without mentioning a specific individual marks a sentence as containing potentially-harmful racial stereotypes -> this is what you have to believe for the above statement to be true. like, if "indigenous people" marks a racial stereotype, then saying a more specific group of people like "Inuit" should equally mark a racial stereotype — how does the person you're talking to {{em|know}} that you're giving correct information about all Inuit people and not just saying something false? but if this is true, you couldn't go to Congress and say "Black people" or "Mexican immigrants" for any legitimate purpose without mentioning individuals that supposedly make the example truer. does it actually make statements more accurate to include specific individuals? I feel like it adds nothing but also subtracts nothing. 
this is a really weird criterion for judging whether statements are accurate. I know where it comes from, it comes from people trying to judge everything through positivism and claim that Lived Experiences are a pathway to truth while a lack of Lived Experiences is a pathway to falsity. it's still really weird. it doesn't seem to accomplish the thing it sets out to accomplish at all, and just seems to make all statements said about any group of people more worthy of doubting. "White people have the colonizer attitude"? maybe not!! Ben was doing that, but did you ask Carla?? "Black people experience structural racism"? maybe not!! you didn't mention an individual so in theory you might be racist for even saying that. 
Mentioning ethnic groups is racist + Anti-essentialism is a pathway to truth = Pointing out racism is racist.

{{li|I=S2/ES/ML|Q=618}}Referring to Communists without mentioning a specific individual is unacceptably prejudiced / If mentioning ethnic groups without mentioning a specific individual is racist, which is to imply that talking about groups of people in the abstract rather than as a particular countable number of concrete objects is racist, then mentioning "Communists" or "Cubans" or "people who support Stalin" without naming a specific individual for evaluation is equally prejudiced; every time somebody has said "tankies" or "totalitarians" or "Stalinist(s)" outside a particular context has been an unacceptably prejudiced statement -> this is another loophole in this. god I love it when really bad propositions break open so bad they wrap around to supporting Communism

</ol><noinclude>

[[Category:First nine thousand (RD)]]</noinclude>

User:Reversedragon/FirstNineThousand/6000

2026-08-01T11:55:26Z

Reversedragon: meta-Marxism? that's just Stalinism

<h2 id="PPPA">6000 - 8000 [[https://research.moraleconomy.au/index.php?title=User:Reversedragon/FirstNineThousand/6000&action=edit edit]]</h2>

Publishing entities, "Journey to the West" related Signifiers. 
Entries for miscellaneous fictional works allowed. To be included, a work should have interesting literary motifs seen in multiple other works, include references to some kind of philosophical statement within some real-world philosophy, or include consistent fictional ontologies of imagined physics or processes. Fictional physics or processes also allowed.

<noinclude>{{HueCSS}}</noinclude><ol start="6000" class="hue clean reset field_LGBT">

</li><li value="6000" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S0">[[Ontology:Q6000|fictional character]]
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6001" data-dimension="S">first-person narrator
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6002" data-dimension="S">second-person narrator -> see: Homestuck, narrator {{thingamabob|Chara}}
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6003" data-dimension="S">third-person narrator
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6004" data-dimension="S">narrator
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6005" data-dimension="S">point-of-view character
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6006" data-dimension="S">[[E:Q6006|player character]]
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6007" data-dimension="S">non-player character (NPC)

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6008" data-dimension="S">hero
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6009" data-dimension="S">villain
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6010" data-dimension="S">antihero
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6011" data-dimension="S">antivillain
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6012" data-dimension="S">Good-aligned character
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6013" data-dimension="S">Neutral-aligned character
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6014" data-dimension="S">Evil-aligned character
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6015" data-dimension="S">Lawful-aligned character
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6016" data-dimension="S">Chaotic-aligned character
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6017" data-dimension="S">True-Neutral-aligned character
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6018" data-dimension="S">character alignment / moral alignment
</li><li class="field_exstruct" data-tradition="Aa" value="6019" data-dimension="S">I contain multitudes / I am all of me -> I suppose the closest tradition tag is Jungian psychoanalysis, given how it speaks about all the different "sides" of a single personality.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6020" data-dimension="S">alignment axis
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6021" data-dimension="S">Law-Chaos axis / ([[User:RD/9k/Q60,21|9k]])
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6022" data-dimension="S">Good-Evil axis

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6023" data-dimension="S">foreshadowing
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6024" data-dimension="S">grayble -> a specific kind of short story which has a theme in the sense of a writing prompt but is mistaken for having symbolism or lessons when it may not really have those. graybles sound infuriating but in my mind are actually pretty respectable. you'd think, when I get mad at Existentialism so often, that I'd hate the idea. but I don't. the notion of graybles expresses itself as Adventure Time goes on through the art of making a stupid meaningless story and then explicitly being aware of that and pointing it out with unnecessarily thoughtful philosophy. and I actually like that, even as some people seem to have not understood it and hated it. it cements that the "stupid" nature of Adventure Time plots is a stylization and not something the authors do because they're bad at writing actually-good narratives, or because they're useful idiots to Liberalism/capitalism/Existentialism (although there could be a bit to unpack with that last one of the three) and make misinforming narratives because it socially supports them and pays them to.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6025" data-dimension="S">grayble foreshadowing -> when a lot of people in the audience mistake simple foreshadowing of a fictional historical event for meaningful symbolism, either unintentionally or as the author intends. I didn't really get the joke behind the graybles until seasons 8-10 when I fully identified grayble foreshadowing that was very confusable for a message about character development and was like. ah. I see it now. I think there is also a lot of grayble foreshadowing in FNaF. people genuinely take some of the clues as symbolic when they truly only refer to characters or processes or things in a superficial visual kind of way. one thing I think isn't true is that grayble foreshadowing is exactly the same as Chekov's gun, because grayble foreshadowing seems to be a statement about history in the sense of the history of fictional worlds or the history of fictional characters' lives. grayble foreshadowing is a statement that somewhat-arbitrary things drive history within fiction, but it's still history.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6026" data-dimension="S2">A plan the story gives away will fail / Scooby-Doo rule -> if the story details the plan, it will fail, if it doesn't detail the plan it will probably succeed
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6027" data-dimension="S">bookman's bluff / scottcon -> when a story hints something so vaguely you can't solve it and then it solves the same clues in a different way than expected later; when the story is unsolvable because it spontaneously makes up its own solutions rather than having clear processes or events-happening inside it.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6028" data-dimension="Z">"Calvinball"
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6029" data-dimension="S">Calvinball -> like bookman's bluff / scottcon, only it actually succeeds.

</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="6030" data-dimension="S2">All arrangements of things begin as fictions / All arrangements of people begins as ontologies (socially-constructed or imagined orders which might vaguely be possible in reality; chaos magic, Existentialist cybernetics) -> kind of. sort of. if you took this and restricted it a whole lot it would somewhat be true. like, don't connect this to Free Will, don't you dare do that, but if you managed to not go there, then yes, many things about society and even causality inside society are "put together" as a designed or undesigned construct before they are actually realized. I call them Philosophical Systems of ontologies embedded inside groups of people to produce Social-Philosophical Systems. but I am reasonably sure they're real. this + (something bad which is charcoal?) = Culture is just the series of signs people make up
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6031" data-dimension="S">Kirby Does His Taxes / Mario Stands Still -> I forgot about this until somebody brought up "Mario Stands Still" to explain Deltarune. Kirby Does His Taxes will always be the better form though
</li><li class="field_geo" value="6032" data-dimension="S2">Science fiction is just nonsensical physics -> not very controversial. science fiction begins with physics discoveries, hypotheses in various fields of science, and the application of physics or general mathematics to create hypothetical technologies or worlds. warp drives. four-dimensional worlds. it's kind of all just applying advanced mathematics to storytelling.
</li><li class="field_ML" value="6033" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:Q6033|Fantasy is the best history test]] / Fantasy is just nonsensical history -> the more fantasy books I read the more I see this particular hypothesis building up that the impulse behind writing fantasy is to play with the causal mechanisms of history and try to slowly figure out what they are. science fiction can sidestep the actual way anyone gets to the future to focus on hypothetical technologies or forms of physics, but in a weird way, fantasy is almost inherently more progressive than sci-fi if you aren't too stupid to see it. although science fiction often does focus on analyzing civilizations in series such as <cite>Star Trek</cite>, fantasy is inherently more barebones in its palette of concepts in a way that often immediately forces it to reckon with the workings of societies. fantasy grounds itself in things like social structures, wars, [[redlink - fantasy WWI|nationalities]] and identities, whether particular civilizations are good or bad, [[redlink - king of darkness|who should be in power]], and how imagined historical periods give way to other periods containing different civilizations. sometimes it seems like there is no difference between the categories of fantasy and politics, because a great heap of the things that happen in fantasy books are just medieval politics, and existing notions like Law/Chaos axes naturally lend themselves to fantasy stories about such things as characters slipping out of existing structures or patterns to discover LGBT identities. fantasy stories have all the puzzle pieces to turn into a believable imagined account of history where the material processes inside particular kingdoms, populations, or worlds actually unfold in understandable ways into new historical periods for centuries and centuries and you can actually trace through a fictional world's past and possible future(s) without any of it being arbitrary. if you actually understand history, fantasy is wired. I'm convinced that fantasy stories could teach the crustiest White people to actually understand historical materialism, maybe even more effectively than actual history could. in real-life history if somebody asks you to guess what happens next you always have "the answers at the back of the book", while fantasy is genuinely a blank history test you have to fill in. the act of creating fantasy is an act of showing that there really is such a thing as historical materialism and "history in general" without the content of a specific country. if that's not the case, how do people evaluate whether a fantastical history is convincing? why would there be a discussion about that where people have different opinions? I believe it all traces back to fantasy largely being simple representational art with regard to the processes that create real-world history. when people call for Media Representation in fantasy what they mean to say is that, because reality is stranger than fiction, in their attempt to represent the general concept of history current fantasy stories are overlooking a whole bunch of real-world historical events. it's one thing to say a story is technically unrealistic, and another to say it's literally missing information about reality that's making the representational art worse, which in this case is the complaint.

</li><li class="field_ML" value="6034" data-dimension="S">text claims to be bunch of senseless events, becomes discussion on history / work claims to be a bunch of senseless events, ends up a discussion on history -> happened in both Adventure Time and Dragon Ball. it's funny how works that intend to show that history is senseless actually just end up discussing the proposition it can be understood. no matter how much they try to turn around and say the characters' efforts to understand it are in vain. the point of the work is still to say that not being able to understand and steer history is a problem.

</li><li class="field_ML" value="6035" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:Q6035|Unless society is magic, there will be Communism]] / If society does not run on magic, Marxism-Leninism is not ruled out -> follows from: The heart of Marxism is historical materialism / Proposition zero of Marxism is historical materialism

{{li|I=S2/DFy|tradition=MX onto Fy, Fy onto Zv|Q=60,36|Q2=6036}}Villains have moral codes / Villains practice a code of morality -> here's my thinking. villains on TV shows, etc., are often bragging about their plans like they think this is a wonderful thing to do for some reason in particular. they wouldn't go around being so arrogant if they didn't in some ways think the thing they want to accomplish was {{em|the right thing}} to do. so this means villains actually have a code of morality, and the reason they bother to resist heroes is generally that they like the outcomes of their own code of morality better. villains are not "undisciplined" or "without morals". they make use of morality in a way other people consider to be incorrect. 
this is why people were tempted to cast Trump as "the villain" with all the Harry Potter book metaphors. they thought there was a connection between Trump and morality, and that that connection was described in Harry Potter. but they may not have been correct about exactly what the connection was. the actual connection is that Voldemort had a moral code he didn't want to abandon. "There is only power and those who seek it," I think is what he says in the early books. similarly, Trump supporters have their own moral code, which is much more complicated than that, and haven't been willing to drop it partly due to all that complexity that you can't refute in just a few seconds. 
in contrast, it would be hard to be a boastful villain if you were actually amoral. you'd realize before long that any particular warped moral code wasn't really worth defending as it had no real significance behind it. honestly.... I think [[E:Q42|existentialism]] creates villains, and nihilism is genuinely better — if no human individual has the ability to dictate the meaning of anything, then they can't define harmful things as good, but it is not really possible to exist as a living thing without a theory of material consequences, so you will come to understand consequences objectively and qualitatively without labeling them good or bad.

</li><li class="field_ML" value="6037" data-dimension="S2">[[E:MaterialistAnalysesCannotBeOwned|Materialist analyses cannot truly be owned]] / Materialist analyses of fiction are the only ones which cannot be attacked by capitalists / No Alexandria can burn which was not Greek -> a little subjective, but a very interesting argument to step through. information which is empirically observable can never be copyrighted, no matter how bad copyright policies get. you can never truly copyright an observation such as that hydrogen and hydroxide make water, or the earth is round, or religion exists, or countries exist, or science fiction books in general exist. but how far does this go? given a complete enough ontology of every generic thing that exists, could you build a literary analysis of a work of fiction which is totally uncopyrightable to the point it can never be taken down by a copyright claim, as long as it is very clearly an analysis and not a copy of the work? I think there's reason to believe the answer is "yes". and if that's the case. every analysis of art which is based on somebody's academic theory of social construction and utopianism and ideals is vulnerable to being taken away from people when a group of bourgeoisie bands together and decides to make life difficult for people, but comparatively, Materialist analyses are impervious to this. a Third World country or cluster of workers can have all the Materialist analyses it wants to and they can never be taken away. it can build them all from the ground up at any time without needing to access anything or anyone in particular. Materialist analyses are the only thing that perfectly suits this disgusting world of copyright and spatial slot hierarchies and defining people as isolated pockets of wealth with legs and trying to divide concepts up into people and make them totally synonymous with toxic gatekeepers and claiming that China building civilization again in parallel to the United States is "[[E:China having products is stealing|stealing]]" the inherent containment of concepts and culture-simply-existing into toxic individuals; if that's going to continue this is the one thing that can exist alongside all that and survive all that. Materialist analyses are even resilient to Marxisms fracturing into different blocs and denying things from each other. basically, if you want knowledge and palettes of artistic concepts to survive nearly anything, create a Materialist analysis and stay far, far away from artisanal conceptions of anything which even open the door for it to have an official shop or an official inventor. no library of Alexandria can be burned which was never inherently Greek.

</li><li class="field_geo" value="6038" data-dimension="S2">Fiction doesn't teach us anything -> Aron Ra's proposition. I don't think it's true, on a subtle level of failing the question-begging test. it's technically accurate to say fiction doesn't contain any educational information. but that's not what people usually mean by the statement "fiction teaches us". they are referring to a more abstract notion of learning by picking up general patterns and comparing analogies to the real world — a process of building ontological models through true or untrue scenarios using every scenario as a thought experiment. if you do that systematically enough it's essentially similar to applying a scientific method in different environments, although it entails you'll probably stop believing in Christianity after reading a few secular books and the bible and trying to compare all of them to each other and real life.

</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="6039" data-dimension="S2">Fiction is educational -> for a very long time I had a hard time believing this, although I never would have said that fiction doesn't teach people about creating art or about using language — only that there is an open question on whether it teaches people about ""life"". typically when people say this they mean that it teaches about "experiences", and gives people a model of a demographic of people without exclusively boxing them into a stereotype.

</li><li class="field_geo" data-remark="science fiction" value="6040" data-dimension="S2">Narratives exist to portray possible societies or situations -> this answer is fully compatible with historical materialism, or at least existential materialism. it allows weaving ties between the individual and historical period.
</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="6041" data-dimension="S2">Narratives exist to depict each possible kind of individual / Narratives exist to tell us about individuals -> this is the answer I do not like. it's drenched in intentional or unintentional psychoanalysis. and I'd argue it ultimately encourages racism, simply because it encourages treating past hardships as irrelevant to current individual lives while treating the successes of current individuals as un-repeatable flukes. without a causal analysis of history and historical patterns you lose the ability to argue for consistent and cumulative social progress really quickly.
</li><li class="field_mdem" value="6042" data-dimension="M3">Why do narratives exist?

</li><li class="field_mdem" value="6043" data-dimension="S2">Non-fiction doesn't teach us anything -> counter to Aron Ra's proposition. if you actually understand the way people learn, though ontological models and metaphors, it's easy to see how a factual book could fail to teach people anything because they can't understand it through their current models and fail to believe that it looks plausible. in some cases people don't learn well through facts and learn better through questions. but I think the "street epistemology" concept is shortsighted too, because you have to ask what it is about questions that actually makes them work.

</li><li class="field_trotsky" value="6044" data-dimension="S">fake historical period / fake, bad history -> the motif of bad events in history being treated as a detour from "real" history. this motif is orange because, quite honestly, this is exactly what the Trotskyite conspiracy was alleging against Stalin's government, whether you commandeer Zinovievism as supposedly being Liberalism or whether you interpret it as saying Trotskyism is the real history. (my response, always: then why hasn't it happened yet??) famously this motif also comes up in the Christian bible, with the hypothetical reign of the antichrist being a kind of fake historical period, or the reign of the Roman emperors being suggested as one.


{{li|I=F2/ES|Q=60,45|Q2=6045}}The only explanation of history is the defiance of history / The only explanation of historical patterns is the defiance of historical patterns / ({{9k|RD/Q60,69}})
{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=60,46|Q2=6046}}The only explanation of defying history is history / The only explanation of the defiance of historical patterns is historical patterns / ({{9k|RD/Q60,69}})

</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="6047" data-dimension="S2">History is the progression of family units / History is the progression of lines of Lived Experiences -> psychohistory proposition, often casually put forward by many people who have no idea what Lacanianism or psychohistory is, simply because Existentialism Is The Simplest Philosophy Which Everybody Already Believes. recently tossed out as an explanation for how war veterans coming back causes damage to family unit psychology, and presumably to national culture. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvpkfMGgUGI] something is wrong with this logic: okay, but what causes countries to go to war and rack up trauma in the first place? tangent: this came up in <cite>My Pride</cite>, the questionably-written show about the lions. and it caught me off guard because I immediately noticed that choosing to interpret tribal culture as a progression of family units instead of as history is an active choice you make that can editorialize and ideologically frame the events of the story if you're not careful.
</li><li class="field_mdem" value="6048" data-dimension="S2">History is the progression of groups operating -> this claim entails that even if the study of historical materialism up to now is wrong or lacking, Bolshevism could still be correct for reasons other than the reasons it believed to be its explanation. namely, Bolshevism could be correct because it is a sensible method of ordering people into a nation-state and functional nation-states are nearly fundamental.
</li><li class="field_ML" value="6049" data-dimension="S2">History is the progression of class struggles / All history ... is the history of class struggles -> have to get the classic one in there. not really exclusive with "history is the progression of groups operating", as these two things simply happen on different scales. group operating (countable area of capitalism), class struggle, rupture, group operating (named Marxism). the only serious difference is that "groups operating" allows modeling Trotskyism as its own phenomenon in parallel to mainstream Marxism-Leninism, or different anarchisms, an instance of Deng Xiaoping Thought, etc.

{{li|I=F2/ES|Q=60,50|Q2=6050}}Biographies only have one ending -> this is one of the falsest things I have ever heard that people still keep saying. literally using biographies as the example the whole point of reading them is that different things happen in them, meaning they have different endings. this is a very important distinction because this difference in "endings" provides a material difference which can become a pattern that can be studied and in some cases broadly repeated.
{{li|I=F2/ES|Q=60,51|Q2=6051}}Because all biographies have one ending, we can only reinterpret them -> no. is that how people created the underground railroad and slipped out of slavery? reinterpreting how bad they think their situation is and how bad it is or isn't to inevitably die? this is one of the only things worse than saying Free Will explains all history.

{{li|I=S2/ML|Q=60,52|Q2=6052}}Biographies have many different endings / ({{9k|RD/Q60,69}})
{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=60,53|Q2=6053}}[[E:The life of a bisexual has at least two endings|The life of a bisexual has at least two endings]] / ({{9k|RD/Q60,69}})

</li><li class="field_mdem" value="6054" data-dimension="S2">Boring relationships in <cite>Warriors</cite> happen due to psychohistorical biases -> if you think the story of an individual life has only one ending, it's awfully tempting to slot every single individual into the same trite, boring heterosexual romance. diversity of gender and sexuality alone leads to multiple endings.

{{li|I=S2/ES|Q=60,55|Q2=6055}}Fictional futures come from characters' free will / Fictional futures come from the free will of fictional individuals / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6077|9k]])
{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=60,56|Q2=6056}}Fictional futures come from fictional individuals / Twilight Sparkle creates the future because she and her friends are unique material objects / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6077|9k]])

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6057">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6058">??

</li><li class="field_exstruct" data-qid="60,59" value="6059" data-dimension="S2">There is zero difference between good and bad things / ([[User:RD/9k/Q60,59|9k]])

{{li|I=S2/ES|Q=60,60|Q2=6060}}Linear time prevents individuals from realizing fictions / Linear time takes power away from cybernetic assemblages or Group-Subject-organisms and keeps them from determining their own destiny / ([[User:RD/9k/Q60,60|9k]])
{{li|I=S1/ES|Q=60,61|Q2=6061}}non-narrative thinking / ([[User:RD/9k/Q60,61|9k]]) 
non-narrative thinking + street protest = frog protest. non-narrative thinking + RPG progression as horror = Game worlds are cultural fabrications. non-narrative thinking + Careerist class = Being a waiter is a culturally-fabricated Game.

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6062" data-dimension="F2">[[E:BecauseAuthorSaidSo|Fictional events only happen because the author said so]] / Details in fiction only exist because the author said so / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6063|9k]])
</li><li class="field_mdem" value="6063" data-dimension="S2">Treating authors as gods is reductive to art / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6063|9k]])

</li><li class="field_mdem field_idealism" data-tradition="MX" value="6064" data-dimension="S2">Trotskyism lacks historical materialism / Trotskyism is a Marxism lacking historical materialism -> the claim that Trotskyism understands the basic concept of classes, factions, and historical periods, looking for all the world like any named Marxism in its internal content, but it doesn't understand how to check hypotheses about historical processes; it's a Marxism without the ability to evaluate its claims scientifically. this was one of the observations that led to creating meta-Marxism — to force Trotskyists to actually check and re-evaluate their hypotheses by making them step out of Trotskyism for just a second, saying "hey look, here's a Trotskyism, exactly what you're familiar with, but it's a material object, now what's wrong with it? how does this material object actually evolve in time versus how you think it does?"
</li><li class="field_mdem" value="6065" data-dimension="S2">Imperialists believe in a causal study of history / Imperialists believe in a material study of historical events -> the more you think about it, the more it becomes evident just from looking at people insisting we need to learn about the Roman Empire or we need to learn about the founding period of the United States, etc, that all the people saying this believe that studying these things actually aids in building particular kinds of historical processes and particular formations of people. they don't just talk about "Western Civilization" for the hell of it. whatever they say outwardly, they clearly believe this is a thing that can be actively recreated through particular material steps. to imperialists themselves, there is a set of steps for realizing imperialism as a social transition. yet somehow everyone else does not want to believe this and wants to believe that every human behavior is only connected to immediate individual choice and none of the steps of realizing empire actually created any permanent changes. anarchism, Western Marxism, and progressive Existentialism all equally seem to stem from the belief that imperialists do not have an active, cumulative cultural history in the same sense that "Germans" or "Spaniards" do. because imperialists are linked into one or more countable cultures that function as countable physical objects, trying to instantaneously dissolve imperialism is almost as ridiculous as asking everyone to spontaneously stop being Spanish and doing anything Spanish. it would be hard to do that because "Spanish" is a physical entity that keeps existing if you don't destroy all of it. have you ever stopped to think about why it would be the Roman Empire, Jewish legend, Christianity, and "Our Founding Fathers" are even taught together or grouped together when they come from separate places? these are the cumulative cultural history of imperialists. why is it it's okay for every kid to learn about Egypt as well as Greece? because the stationary empire shape of Egypt isn't seen as threatening; it fits into the existing "historical materialism" of imperialists. but at the same time, no book for kids would ever talk about the Soviet Union or Cuba in the same tone as ancient Egypt, simply going through "this is how people lived". it's worth thinking about why that is.

{{li|I=S2/ES|tradition=MX onto ES|Q=60,66|Q2=6066}}The most effective way to ensure the United States doesn't have a bad president is for ten other economically-linked countries to come together and force the United States to get rid of its president or else -> after what's happened with Ecuador, Venezuela, and Cuba, there seems to be a clear pattern: foreign authority is much more capable of determining what a country's president is than democratic processes, so foreign countries had better choose the United States' president correctly.

{{li|I=S2/MX|class=field_mdem field_idealism|Q=60,67|Q2=6067}}Some of Western Marxism isn't Marxism / Most of Western Marxism isn't Marxism -> the claim that adding early-existentialism to Marxism may turn it into not being Marxism because it encourages replacing historical materialism with [[Term:historical existentialism|historical existentialism]]. or similar rather-specific claims involving particular parts of Western "Marxism".

{{li|I=S2/MX|class=field_mdem field_idealism|Q=60,68|Q2=6068}}Lacanianism aims to replace historical materialism with psychohistory / Freudians are trying to create a non-Marxist replacement for historical materialism, and that alternative is psychohistory -> I could really tell something was up with Lacanianism shortly after I heard of it but had so much trouble fully explaining exactly what they were trying to replace Marxism with. I'm more confident now that I found the actual name of the thing. Rothenberg and Žižek's whole weird bridge about Heidegger is this: Marx bad because the development of populations is the physical and intellectual development of a cloud of brains. what they don't realize is that this is equating history with culture. practically speaking, the total or average behavior of a cloud of individuals is that group's culture. so if you think history is most explainable through psychology, you're pretty much necessarily asking how the culture of a group of people develops and why people are Spanish or German — as well as how they could stop being Spanish when they happen to have a definition of what their country means to them which is bad. this is so much more offensive than Marxism, because if Marxism says bad things about "the bourgeoisie" or what should happen to them, it also makes no serious effort to mess with what anybody believes to be Chinese or North Korean, and limits itself to the practical study of how an existing group of people can build a republic, industrial structures, and various possible stages of development. the premise of psychohistory implies there are superior and inferior Cultures and societal transition means transitioning Cultures into a different Culture. the implication of Deleuze & Guattari's concept of "plateaus" next to psychohistory existing unchallenged (though that relationship is only "as far as I can tell") is that separating Germany off into East Germany and West Germany is bad but staying "in-between" by making people not be Germans and making them all be Better Germans is okay. what makes people go for this? what makes us think this kind of framework is acceptable?

{{li|I=S2/ES|tradition=MX onto ES|Q=60,69|Q2=6069}}Deltarune is an example of [[Term:historical existentialism|historical existentialism]] / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6069|9k]])

{{li|I=S1/STM|tradition=Fy|Q=60,70|Q2=6070}}[[Ontology:Q6070|player as relative to game]]
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=60,71|Q2=6071}}>What Would Joel Do? -> the motif of a videogame story railroading the player into the thing the protagonist would do, as one particular definition of "roleplaying". Joel is one of the two playable protagonists of {{game|The Last of Us}}. {{YouTube|5i-w7jebFNM}} {{YouTube|sgUvaiBqmUQ}}
{{li|I=S2/A|Q=60,72|Q2=6072}}[[Ontology:Q60,72|Fan theories should be atomic thoughts]] (atomic propositions; Deltarune fandom) / Fans don't like hour-long theories because they don't have enough spaces for choices and thus they aren't Freedom; single propositions are more agreeable because it is easier to free-associate onto one or the other and take or leave them / ([[User:RD/9k/Q29,20|9k]])

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6073">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6074">??

{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=60,75|Q2=6075}}separable protagonist / diegetic player character (scenario with protagonist separated from player) -> a diegetic player character is a character treated as something physically separated from the player, but in a sense different from the simple division between a literal book or game and its literal audience, where the separation exists specifically inside the narrative (the diegesis). if the player plays as an entity other than the main character but still controls the main character there is a diegetic player character. as well, if the main character is implied to be doing things on a completely separate level than the player is such that the player is immersed in the world but is not being the main character, there is a diegetic player character. this is really easy to define for Deltarune but not as easy to explain for Undertale even though it's clearly there. it would also be in OneShot even though that game doesn't hide it, which could make it less effective to some people.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6076" data-dimension="S">??

{{li|I=S2/ES|Q=60,77|Q2=6077}}Susie being herself can change the Prophecy / Ralsei believes that Susie being herself can change the Prophecy (variation) / ([[User:RD/9k/Q7617|9k]])
{{li|I=F2/ES|Q=60,78|Q2=6078}}Being a waiter is an arbitrary narrative / Being a waiter is a culturally-fabricated Game that prevents an individual having an understanding of self and an ownership of Life (Sartre, <cite>Being and Nothingness</cite>) / ([[User:RD/9k/Q60,61|9k]])

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6079">??

</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="60,80" value="6080" data-dimension="S">anachronistic technology / technological anachronism
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="60,81" value="6081" data-dimension="F2">Technology shows what year a story takes place in / Technology can be used to tell what historical period of the world a story takes place in -> that would be true if you knew exactly what country was the most accurate to compare it to and mapped out all the historical periods of that country. 
as for the whole world... wouldn't you have to factor in global empire, and separate the local creation (enforcement) of colonial periods from before that? technology doesn't seem like as big a change as a whole colonial period falling down on India or Africa. is this why people are so obsessed with the word "colonialism"? because they can't conceptualize history as not being the history of the whole world and are trying to map out the whole world's colonial period? the problem is that's still stupid. Spain can't stop France's colonial period if it wanted to; they're going to be separate colonial periods. there's not really any such thing as a single world colonial period as far as the question of preventing it.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6082" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="60,83" value="6083" data-dimension="F2">80 years before 2003, there were fast cars / 80 years before 2003, there were 60-mile-per-hour cars (96 kilometers per hour; anachronistic device) / 80 years before 2003, there were wrecking balls [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH31FHOu_zw] -> a funny little reasoning error that can be found in books taking place in a particular time period which aren't primarily meant as historical fiction but end up reaching decades into the past. pointed out by many people analyzing <cite>Warriors</cite>.

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6084" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6085" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6086" data-dimension="S">??

{{li|I=S2/Fy|Q=60,87|Q2=6087}}If biologists research biology at universities and then biology is taught in grade school, then academics researching race relations is where anti-racist education in grade schools comes from -> the weird thing about this is like, it's not necessarily wrong, the problem is just that A) it's vastly overplaying the extent of new research; I bet a lot of the stuff people dig up was already in history books B) people were definitely looking into this for the wrong reasons. they almost certainly just started with 'how do we get rid of anti-racist education' and started looking for the source. 
the result, though, is very interesting: one of the few Tory-associated propositions that technically isn't offensive. at least by itself. 
Tories manage to say something that's not racist, and it amounts to 'some facts come from universities.' I guess that's true.

{{li|I=S2/PT|Q=60,88|Q2=6088}}The history of slavery doesn't belong in textbooks -> no need to spend much time on the actual reactionary arguments, none of which are worth anything. I'm much more interested in the potential arguments that teaching about the history of racism is theoretically unnecessary for anti-racists just because most of them reject historical materialism, and if historical materialism is truly unnecessary and you really can fix everything with Free Will and protests and inclusion and Community, the hardships of the past should in theory be less relevant than the study of actively constructing the future. I feel like what I've really uncovered is the potential racism of anarchism, how utopian thinking could potentially crush people of various demographics under the material hardships they currently face which stand in the way of simply moving on.

{{li|I=S2/ML|Q=60,89|Q2=6089}}An ending amid slavery is a different outcome / A book that ends within a time of slavery is a different ending than a book which ends in a time of no slavery / ({{9k|RD/Q60,69}})
{{li|I=S2/A|Q=60,90|Q2=6090}}An ending amid monarchy is a different outcome / ({{9k|RD/Q60,69}})

</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="60,91" value="6091" data-dimension="S">monomyth (generic) / ({{9k|RD/Q60,69}})
{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=60,92|Q2=6092}}A story containing multiple biographies violates monomyths / ({{9k|RD/Q60,69}})

</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="60,93" value="6093" data-dimension="S">knight of justice / archetypical high-fantasy knight / {{TTS|tts=ゆうしゃ|勇者}} / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6093|9k]]) 
knight of justice + crisis = hero's journey. knight of justice + postmodernism = conflicted knight of justice.
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="60,94" value="6094" data-dimension="S">king of injustice / prince of darkness / lord of darkness / {{TTS|tts=まおう|魔王}} / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6093|9k]]) 
king of injustice + Goku = Vegeta
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="60,95" value="6095" data-dimension="S">conflicted knight of justice / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6093|9k]])
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="60,96" value="6096" data-dimension="S">justice knight versus evil king / knight of justice versus maō ({{TTS|tts=まおう|魔王}}) / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6093|9k]]) 
justice knight versus evil king + anticommunist fable = knight of justice versus Mao. 
justice knight versus evil king + Fantasy would be more historically accurate with Leninisms = evil king versus Mao.

</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="60,97" value="6097" data-dimension="S">videogame creepypasta
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="60,98" value="6098" data-dimension="S">speedrun
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="60,99" value="6099" data-dimension="S">challenge run
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6100" data-dimension="S">seemingly-impossible challenge run
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="61,01" value="6101" data-dimension="S">but first we need to talk about parallel universes
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6102" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="61,03" value="6103" data-dimension="S">good ending (interactive media)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="61,04" value="6104" data-dimension="S">neutral ending (interactive media)
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="61,05" value="6105" data-dimension="S">bad ending (interactive media) -> these Items don't refer to a Shakespeare play being a comedy or a tragedy, as much as that is conceptually related.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6106" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="61,07" value="6107" data-dimension="S">violence route of otherwise peaceful narrative
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="61,08" value="6108" data-dimension="S">pacifist route of otherwise violent narrative -> CUT Tree + pacifist route = Sudowoodo
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="61,09" value="6109" data-dimension="S">RPGs as "violent videogames" -> it's hard to make this genuinely funny instead of just ironically funny, but Deltarune chapter 4 managed to pull it off. Kris is playing games in the Dark World and it's very clearly being framed like a person with a sword is {{book|GTA}} and this is a truly horrifying game. I think what makes it work especially well is that it's not meant to be taken literally, it's semi-literally a silly dream the characters are having that also got way too serious. when the characters go back to the normal world they know RPGs are fiction and they don't freak out about them; Rudy for one is fairly positive about them, although it might be a little in question whether Toriel is.

</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="61,10" value="6110" data-dimension="S2">[[E:Ontology:Q61,10|Game worlds are cultural fabrications]] / An RPG world is a cultural fabrication / An RPG world is a social construct or magic circle, or "game" in the Idealist linguistics sense / Given a particular console RPG world such as <cite>Moon</cite> or <cite>Undertale</cite>, an RPG world is a cultural fabrication (idea-based fabrication; Idealism) / An RPG world is a magic circle, and this means all of it is at least somewhat arbitrary
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="61,11" value="6111" data-dimension="S">fantasy war as cultural fabrication / fantasy war as social construct (idea-based fabrication; Idealism) -> this is Q61,10 in reference to books, or anything.
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="61,12" value="6112" data-dimension="S">RPG war as cultural fabrication / RPG war as social construct (idea-based fabrication; Idealism) -> this is Q61,10 in reference to tabletop or video games but not books.
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="61,13" value="6113" data-dimension="S">RPG world as cultural fabrication / RPG universe or cosmos as cultural fabrication -> Q61,10 as a basic assumption of a work.
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="61,14" value="6114" data-dimension="S">shutting down story as horror / shutting down fictional narrative as destroying story characters -> although it's difficult to fully guess where Deltarune is going, this seems to be the major twist versus Undertale, which Ralsei unsubtly hints toward in Chapters 3-4. Undertale presents you with the thesis that the monsters can be freed if you just choose to; Deltarune poses a more difficult question of whether you can ever free the characters the way it appears they are in Undertale if they stop existing when the game shuts off.
</li><li class="field_horror" data-tradition="Fy" data-qid="61,15" value="6115" data-dimension="S">dragonslayer-slayer ({{em|Dungeon Meshi}} volume 11) -> this gets at why people are anticommunist. genuinely. it's more odious to turn on "your own identity-havers" than to have ugly homicidal prejudices against someone else in some other group of people. 
as Jungians might put it, taking the 'desire' (the impulse or process, more accurately) to kill other individuals and simply repressing it doesn't get rid of it and it's still there, directing itself out of the immediate socially-linked group of people instead of into it.
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="61,16" value="6116" data-dimension="S">[[E:Q6317|RPG progression as horror]] / game progression as horror -> Undertale; Deltarune chapter 3; FNaF Security Breach & Gregory destroying not-so-scary artificial beings.
</li><li class="field_ML" data-qid="61,17" value="6117" data-dimension="S2">Game worlds are not cultural fabrications -> a little controversial. this claim is not an absolute one about all situations, and it rests on the concept that recognizing game or book worlds as imagined material systems of parts is actually one of the major things that helps connect them to history and become aware of how they have been influenced by empire, country-internal racism, and populational prejudices that have followed historical events. said another way: coding is to individuals as fictional material-history is to real history. some people still won't like this claim. and to them what I will say is: if Idealism fully explains fiction, then Stalin's government commissioning books full of proletarian values can convince everyone to abandon capitalism forever. do you think such an initiative would work on you? if not, reconsider Idealism.
</li><li class="field_gramsci" data-qid="61,18" value="6118" data-dimension="S2">Novels about Communism can change everyone's minds / If fictional narratives are truly social constructs, and writing a book that rewrites all the social constructs can truly change people's way of thinking about how to regenerate society when it comes to things like empire or prejudices or the environment, then handing everyone a book that accurately represents Bolshevism will make everyone stop regenerating Liberalism and turn people into Communists -> I really don't believe this is true by itself but it's definitely funny.
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="61,19" value="6119" data-dimension="S">built on the ashes of fae bones -> Wings of Fire Pantala arc; SCP-001 The Queen's Gambit; "pignite" tale. I have a lot of scattered thoughts about this but it isn't productive to put them here. I have dumped them on the "4.4/sundew" entry. 
anti-imperialist fable + magical creature = this.

</li><li class="field_gramsci" data-tradition="MX onto W/ES/A" data-qid="61,20" value="6120" data-dimension="S2">Undertale mirrors U.S. antiwar movements / Undertale is the way it is because of the shape of United States antiwar movements -> so, I have a weird history with movements and being on the total fringes of them for most of my life when they would ripple out and hit me but I would only really get them secondhand. around 2014-2015 I got hit by the ripples of BLM. morality was everywhere. [[:Category:Existentialist-Structuralist tradition ontology|Existentialism]] was everywhere, and this concept that people will automatically flip over and change their minds if you only shout individuals individuals human rights identities individuals that is an individual you are an individual identity identity people like each other because they are different enough. in the beginning when I was literally a [[E:right-Liberalism|right-Libertarian]] that made some kind of sense to me, but as soon as I started actually not being a conservative all of it increasingly made less and less sense until I was like, where did any of this even come from and how does anyone even think it's correct? I read non-Marxist texts like I was supposed to and none of them made any sense, so I just kept digging and digging and digging on every single lead I could find anywhere to try to figure out where any of this philosophy coherently originated from whether people were creating it consciously or not. most of my research focused only on the past decade and how people could derive ideologies from scratch. but most recently, [[E:U.S. antiwar movements have always been Idealist|I realized]] that past United States antiwar movements had already been this. past large-scale movements in the United States had had the shape of anarchist Idealism, and not at all the shape of Marxism. finally, the outpouring of works like <cite>Undertale</cite> and <cite>Steven Universe</cite> started to make sense. the exact way they were portraying the notion of breaking up war was based on things like the Vietnam War period, in which despite the war being against Communism it wasn't actually Communists trying to stop it. and I'm not just saying the obvious fact of "a Marxist movement isn't mostly made of Marxists", what I'm saying is, "it's as if the whole entire movement was not Marxist and anarchists were forming the theorist layer and trying to form the party-nation". nobody will ever be able to do historical materialism again if we don't understand workers' movements as plural bodies of people with different colors of theorists on top that realize different kinds of countries. incidentally yeah I think Trotsky accidentally set the whole world back purely by claiming workers didn't really belong to plural countries or plural workers' states. come on, Trotsky, [[E:sea of free-floating entities|every object is plural]].

</li><li class="field_gramsci" data-qid="61,20" value="6120" data-dimension="S2">Undertale mirrors U.S. antiwar movements -> in the Vietnam era there were some number of people who were flipped over against the war [[E:culturally-defined Communist|solely on moral arguments]] but who weren't really in a material position where you'd expect that. W.E.R. LaFarge came from a rich family and after deciding he was really guilty about the war happening his idea of helping people was to donate money to preserve the local environment. 
I feel like when you have a country full of a bunch of people like that, the movement is always going to be shaky and difficult to keep hold of because nobody actually has a stake in it. you can convince them to be allies but when they only have this cultural or moral connection to the movement it's also easy for them to decide that committing to it isn't what's best for them and flake out. 
having a country full of LaFarges probably goes a little of the way to explaining where Western Marxism and all the focus on "media" and "consciousness" came from

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6121">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6122">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6123">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6124">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6125">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6126">??

</li><li class="field_exstruct" data-tradition="HAS, ES" value="6127" data-dimension="S2">Humanity lies in having heart / Humans are better than machines because they have heart / Humans are better than machines because they have soul (abstract quality, not noun; secularized context) -> incoherent. sounds awfully nice, but doesn't actually make any sense. the thing is that people always believe there's some way to go "practice" this, but there never actually is. the more you drill into this concept the more it becomes confusing what anybody is supposed to be doing or whether it's possible. 
this proposition is to be taken as a secularized one which would hold equally as true if no religion was true. the actual existence within the real-world cosmos of a soul object or deities should be discussed in a different proposition. 
tangential thought: I really like Deltarune for how much it is willing to stand atop the old language of Gnosticism to simply suggest that relying on gods is a weak thing to do and if you want a god it can turn back on you and you get what you wish for. the message of Undertale could be spun as pro-Christianity because it's very easy to read Asriel as this familiar parable of "you didn't give me your coat?? I was Jesus the whole time!! you could have had Jesus powers!". but Deltarune recontextualizes everything. it makes you see everything as (potentially) this giant maladaptive haven of one particular child that died. and it's such a tangent to suddenly bring in "gods" while talking about Undertale/Deltarune, but what I'm really thinking here is, these games' idea of Souls feels similar to that. the more I see of Deltarune the more like I feel like the red Soul device is not natural and isn't supposed to be there, and it's sort of this maladaptive coping mechanism for Kris to believe this idealized notion of Souls exists which then has seemingly taken them over. it's not so much a literal cautionary tale about religion as it is a simple bit of imagery being used as a metaphor, but it's still there.

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6128">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6129">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6130">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6131">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6132">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6133">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6134">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6135">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6136">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6137">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6138">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6139">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6140">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6141">??

</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="61,42" value="6142" data-dimension="S2">pataphysics (SCP Foundation) / ([[User:RD/9k/Q61,42|9k]])

</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="61,43" value="6143" data-dimension="S2">{{TTS|tts=SCP 63-O-2|SCP-6302}} -> SCP where you start seeing {{book|Warriors}} in real life. I hope this one doesn't get removed because it would be useful for the Trotsky's letters scenario. I mean, what if the books are just fracturing reality and both realities exist. what if this SCP is part of the Pitch Haven continuity and the staff didn't interpret it right? what would that do for the "narratives" narrative — is the past just whatever people think it is? 
I do know that even if this SCP does get removed I'll keep this Item here either way just for reference.
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="61,44" value="6144" data-dimension="F2">Trotsky wrote in a parallel reality / Trotsky's letters describe an alternate reality / Trotsky's writings describe a parallel universe / Trotsky's writings describe a parallel reality where different things happened (counterfactual statement or thought experiment) -> this was the concept for an SCP report I was trying to create semi-recently. I don't know if I'll finish it. either way, the basic idea is now here in case it proves useful for illustrating something else.

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6145">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6146">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6147">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6148">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6149">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6150">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6151">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6152">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6153">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6154">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6155">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6156">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6157">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6158">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6159">??

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6160">??
</li><li class="field_exstruct" data-qid="61,61" value="6161" data-dimension="S">knight of justice versus Mao / ([[User:RD/9k/Q60,93|9k]]) -> the concept of archetypical heroes fighting to prevent Communism, with the connotation of the heroes maybe being fantastical or medieval.
</li><li class="field_exstruct" data-qid="62,62" value="6162" data-dimension="S">evil king versus Mao / ([[User:RD/9k/Q60,93|9k]])
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6163">??

</li><li class="field_mdem" value="6164" data-dimension="S2"><cite>Warriors</cite> is an allegory for Trotskyism -> troll proposition. the claim would be that because the cats are always divided and fighting each other and have no idea what's going on in the greater world, and on top of that seem to regard the concept of too many cats joining together as a conspiracy ("Stalinism! [[E:world of Alert|this is what the Cold War is]]"), they must be a metaphor for Trotskyism. 
as much as this is a joke it came up, as a joke, in an {{book|MDem}} 5.1 scrap. 
Warrior cats tend to fight each other + Trotskyism tends to fracture = <cite>Warriors</cite> is an allegory for Trotskyism.

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6165" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6166" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6167" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6168" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6169" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6170" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6171" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6172" data-dimension="S">??

</li><li value="6173" class="field_horror" data-dimension="Z">SCP Foundation Wikis
</li><li value="6174" class="field_horror" data-dimension="S">SCP foundation database -> runs narratively parallel to: Pokédex. it killed me when a commenter on an audiobook said "the SCP Foundation is just playing Pokémon on impossible difficulty". yeah, sure, I mean, they both have a serialized index of things

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6175" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6176" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6177" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6178" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6179" data-dimension="S">??

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6180" data-dimension="S">elemental card color (Arcmage)
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6181">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6182">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6183" data-dimension="S0">[[Ontology:Q61,83|Gaian card]] / earth color card (darkmage)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6184" data-dimension="S0">[[Ontology:Q61,84|Red Banner card]] / sun color card (darkmage)
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6185">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6186" data-dimension="S0">[[Ontology:Q61,86|House of Nobles card]] / sea color card (darkmage)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6187" data-dimension="S0">[[Ontology:Q61,87|Empire card]] / steel color card (darkmage)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6188" data-dimension="S0">[[Ontology:Q61,88|Shadow Legion card]] / death color card (darkmage) -> I arranged these in rough order of good to evil because I wasn't sure there was a particular established faction ring for this game. this is/was the order used by [https://codeberg.org/vxsh-suite/darkmage/src/branch/main/card_templates darkmage] prototypes. but you've gotta put Red Banner at 84, come on.
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6189">??

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6190" data-dimension="S">elemental card color (Magic)

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6191" data-dimension="F2">Pokémon Go teams are evil organizations / Pokémon Go teams represent evil organizations -> the devs kind of invited this theory by improperly using the word "Team" when it already had a use in <cite>Pokémon</cite> referring to [[E:Team Rocket|fantasy mafias]]. never a substantial theory but definitely a funny writers' error to point out.
</li><li class="field_mdem" value="6192" data-dimension="F2">Pokémon Go teams represent sectarian Marxisms -> cracktheory / joke interpretation. it's very funny to imagine a world where that was actually the case though. imagine three legendary Pokémon but one is Trotskyism (valor), one is Gramscianism (instinct), and one is... uh. um. MDem? it's purple. it's purple and it's sharp and cutting. I hate that but I almost like that.
</li><li class="field_mdem" value="6193" data-dimension="S2">Pokémon Go teams resemble world wars / Pokémon Go teams represent warring kingdoms -> this is what I've thought there's always been an argument for. graph struggle itself makes its way into games accidentally when they copy earlier games more closely based on history. earlier games are war games with world maps or board game battles; fantasy games mindlessly copy patterns of empire. with Pokémon Go... let's think about it. we begin with Ingress. Ingress is kind of an alien invasion plot. but practically it's a war game, it has a world war structure. so yeah. Pokémon Go copied world wars but with three factions when for various reasons there's usually two.

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6194" data-dimension="S0">[[Ontology:Q61,94|white card]] (<cite>Magic</cite>)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6195" data-dimension="S0">[[Ontology:Q61,95|blue card]] (<cite>Magic</cite>)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6196" data-dimension="S0">[[Ontology:Q61,96|black card]] (<cite>Magic</cite>)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6197" data-dimension="S0">[[Ontology:Q61,97|red card]] (<cite>Magic</cite>)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6198" data-dimension="S0">[[Ontology:Q61,98|green card]] (<cite>Magic</cite>) -> WUBRG; W(bU)(Bl)RG
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6199">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6200" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Magic: the Gathering</cite> (1993 - present)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6300">(62-6300: <cite>Magic: the Gathering</cite> sets, not totally exhaustive. list of sets being compiled [[User:Reversedragon/comm/MTGblocks|here]])

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6301">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6302">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6303">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6304">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6305">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6306">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6307">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6308">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6309">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6310">??

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6311" data-dimension="S2">Mancountry is where humans fled to in Deltarune [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwm_VfV16Jg&lc=UgzHsezBT448H4g01jx4AaABAg] -> cool theory. I don't know if it will ever be addressed, but you know, maybe. seems more likely than "mancountry" actually being in reference to gender. it's more likely going to be either the odd notion in the bible of 666 merely being "a man" who is especially bad or ominous and not necessarily some eldritch entity we like to think of when we think of "the devil", or the concept of humans instead of monsters.
</li><li value="6312" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">twelve as Chinese zodiac / twelve things form a Chinese zodiac / twelve things means Chinese astrology
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6313" data-dimension="S2">Gaster sealed the monsters underground; they remember it wrong / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6317|9k]])
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6314" data-dimension="S2">The Underground is a creation / The Underground is the creation of someone inside the Watsonian cosmos of Undertale or Deltarune / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6317|9k]])

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6315" data-dimension="S">[[E:Q6315|Dark Fountain]]
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6316" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Yume Nikki</cite>

</li><li value="6317" class="field_horror element_empty" data-dimension="S">"fell into his creation" / W.D. Gaster fell into his creation / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6317|9k]])

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6318" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Super Sentai</cite> ([https://powerrangers.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Sentai#Main_series metaseries]) / Super Squad (unofficial name)
</li><li value="6319" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Uchū Sentai Kyuranger</cite> [vol. 41] / Space Squad Kyuranger
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6320" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Power Rangers</cite> (abridged-series)

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6321" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Himitsu Sentai Gorenger</cite> [vol. 1] (1975) / Secret Squad Gorenger
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6322" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>J.A.K.Q. Dengekitai</cite> [vol. 2] (1977) / JAKQ [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Blitzkrieg#German Blitz] Squad
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6323" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Battle Fever J</cite> [vol. 3] (1979)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6324" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Denshi Sentai Denziman</cite> [vol. 4] (1980) / Electric Squad Denziman / Electronic Squad Denziman
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6325" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Taiyo Sentai Sun Vulcan</cite> [vol. 5] (1981) / Solar Squad Sun Vulcan
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6326" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Dai Sentai Goggle-V</cite> [vol. 6] (1982)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6327" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Kagaku Sentai Dynaman</cite> [vol. 7] (1983) / Science Squad Dynaman
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6328" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Chodenshi Bioman</cite> [vol. 8] (1984) / Super Electronic Squad Bioman
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6329" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Dengeki Sentai Changeman</cite> [vol. 9] (1985) / Blitz Squad Changeman

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6330" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Choshinsei Flashman</cite> [vol. 10] (1986)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6331" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Hikari Sentai Maskman</cite> [vol. 11] (1987)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6332" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Choju Sentai Liveman</cite> [vol. 12] (1988) / Super Beast Squad Liveman
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6333" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Kousoku Sentai Turboranger</cite> [vol. 13] (1989) / Lightspeed Squad Turboranger
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6334" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Chikyu Sentai Fiveman</cite> [vol. 14] (1990)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6335" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Chojin Sentai Jetman</cite> [vol. 15] (1991) / Aviator Squad Jetman
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6336" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger</cite> [vol. 16] (1992) / Dino Squad Zyuranger
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6337" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Gosei Sentai Dairanger</cite> [vol. 17] (1993)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6338" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Ninja Sentai Kakuranger</cite> [vol. 18] (1994)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6339" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Choriki Sentai Ohranger</cite> [vol. 19] (1995)

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6340">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6345">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6350">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6355">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6360">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6365">??

{{li|I=S1/UTDR/WD66|Q=63,66|Q2=6366}}Gaster hand holes

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6367" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6368" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6369" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6370" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6371" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6372" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6373" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6374" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6375" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6376" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6377" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6378" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6379" data-dimension="S">??

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6380" data-dimension="S">cutting off arm for weapon ({{film|Adventure Time}}) / cutting off arm for powers ({{film|Fionna and Cake}}) -> comes up twice in Adventure Time. {{em|may}} appear in Deltarune although that's not clear. 
in {{film|Adventure Time}}, Fern is the first to be connected with this motif. Finn accepts the grass sword, and unknowingly "cuts off" his arm. then Fern comes back and is basically made of pain. it's like the grass sword was always some kind of metaphor for suffering being stuck to you over a long period of time 
in {{film|Fionna and Cake}}, Huntress Wizard becomes the focus and we learn she more literally cut off her hand to get powers. but at the same time, she refused to make connections to the order of "[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druid_(Dungeons_%26_Dragons) druids]" or forest wizards, and couldn't commit herself to building a relationship with Finn. 
in Deltarune... maybe this is just me, but I keep looking at the Knight's sword and I think of Huntress Wizard and Fern. it just feels like this weapon gained from an unreasonable sacrifice

{{li|I=S1/UTDR/WD66|Q=63,81|Q2=6381}}drawing sword out of hand (Deltarune) / ({{9k|RD/Q66,90}})

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6382" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6383" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6384" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6385" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6390" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6391" data-dimension="S">??

</li><li class="field_mdem" data-tradition="MX onto Fy, ML onto Fy" data-qid="63,92" value="6392" data-dimension="S2">Berdly demonstrates dialectical materialism / ([[User:RD/9k/Q63,92|9k]])

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6395" data-dimension="S">??

</li><li class="field_mdem" value="6396" data-dimension="S2">Dungeon Meshi is truer to reality than Undertale / Dungeon Meshi is closer to reality than Undertale -> note that this is not an accusation. Undertale is not necessarily meant to be "realistic" in its depiction of history, and its narrative is deliberately stylized. so, if anything, this is kind of just a tautological statement that Undertale is stylized, and that isn't necessarily bad. that said, it is also a statement that 'Delicious in Dungeon' is especially good — Undertale is good, Dungeon Meshi is arguably better. 
Zootopia is a good class metaphor + {{book|Homestuck}} is truer to reality than {{game|Deltarune}} = Dungeon Meshi is truer to reality than Undertale.

{{li|I=S1/DFy|Q=63,97|Q2=6397}}ThornRing
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6398" data-dimension="S">Snowgrave

</li><li class="field_mdem" data-tradition="MX" value="6399" data-dimension="S2">{{book|Homestuck}} is truer to reality than {{game|Deltarune}} / {{book|Homestuck}} is truer to reality than {{caps|Omori}} -> the simple act of portraying alien teenagers getting into a messy bloodbath that makes nothing better when they all face their fears instead of escaping them is terrifyingly true to reality, while psychoanalysis simply is not as credible as a model of society. there is a reason people have fears. facing your fears often does not lead to peace.
</li><li class="field_mdem" data-tradition="MX" value="6400" data-dimension="S2">{{book|Homestuck}} is truer to reality than {{TTS|tts=My Little Pony gen 4|MLP:FiM}} / {{book|Homestuck}} is more accurate to the reality of living in the United States than My Little Pony ({{book|Friendship is Magic}}, gen 4) -> this is a complicated claim that has to be broken down into a few steps. the basic ideas are these. A) these works were created in the United States. B) the homestuck teenagers being thrown into a new world to overcome a bunch of nasty enemies and danger and uncertainty almost in isolation is a loose metaphor for the process of finding a career in the midst of an environment where individuals and chunks of people are constantly fighting each other for the ability to be part of society rather than leave and connecting into little enclaves of allied competitors (corporations, Liberal-republican parties, etc) that fiercely try to keep all outsiders out. C) the genesis frog is a loose metaphor for each individual having to re-create all of reality around them through labor to break away from parents and toxic friends and political enemies and other corporations as other individuals constantly claim it — a task that not everybody succeeds at, hence null sessions. D) the trolls are a metaphor for what it's like to grow up embedded in United States culture before you gain the quest to be able to break out of the bottom layer and reach the top layer. you are alone psychologically, there are constant threats of being culled from a particular town for being Black or being disabled or being fireable, everyone is mean. Alternia is the ordinary world, earth given Sburb is the special world where heroes go. this might sound shocking to someone who lives in California but it's the strong parallels between trolls and Saiyans (and Gems) and the popularity of these recurring narratives about having to break out of a world of aliens where everyone is terrible that finally sealed it for me. E) Twilight Sparkle is the star student who finds it easy to get to the top layer or special world, and does not realize that a bottom layer of fierce competition exists. the show is presented from her perspective. F) Vegeta is the hero of Dragon Ball. the trolls are the heroes of Homestuck. the griffons are the heroes of MLP. it's only when the people who have every incentive to be mean and kill each other can be turned around to connect each other instead that there can be any heroes. G) the point of these "heroes" isn't that they're mean or reactionary or even that they're peasants or poor. the point of them is that they could split society, and turn on any particular establishment and fight it, but they must choose not to. that's why Trotsky is my favorite example of the person you need to cast as the hero. he's not actually malicious (despite the possibility many people in the conspiracy may have been). he is a very smart individual who was only alienated from the society around him and forced into the process of chunks of society competing against each other because he could not be integrated and turned around to recruit others.

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6401" data-dimension="S">Gaster and green / Gaster and the color green (colour; Undertale, Deltarune)
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6402" data-dimension="S2">Ralsei is green because Gaster -> this shouldn't make sense and yet it does.
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6403" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6404" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6405" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6406" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6407" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6408" data-dimension="S">??

{{li|I=S2/Fy|Q=64,09|Q2=6409}}Deltarune's inner narrative contains a retcon / ({{9k|RD/Q76,17}})

</li><li class="field_geo" value="6410" data-dimension="S">twelve or more -> precise order of magnitude
</li><li class="field_geo" value="6411" data-dimension="S">exactly twelve -> precise order of magnitude
</li><li value="6412" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">twelve things as European zodiac / Twelve things form a European zodiac / Twelve things means European astrology

</li><li value="6413" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Homestuck</cite> -> included almost just as a joke, but the number is nice
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6414" data-dimension="S2">Deltarune contains a time loop / Kris has already experienced Deltarune at least once
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6415" data-dimension="S2">Deltarune contains a bootstrap paradox / Deltarune contains a bootstrap paradox connecting it to Undertale -> distinct from the concept of Kris having experienced the game before. I think this is probably true but not true in a way that is actually consequential to the character narratives of Deltarune. it's just going to be one of those "well, technically..." things where the loose ends are tied up a weird way.

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6416" data-dimension="S">Kris resisting player (Deltarune)
</li><li value="6417" class="field_horror" data-dimension="S">secrets (Deltarune) / memories concealed from other people
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6418" data-dimension="S">a nightmare will awaken in your hearts -> could be connected to The Roaring
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6419" data-dimension="S">"stay away from her, you fiend!" -> Tenna's encounter with or without Spamton where he is discovered to have a Pipis. the Pipis is referred to as "a certain person's special ???", which strangely connects to the Shadow Crystal being "like throwing away someone's ???". this scene is making a strange joke out of the Freudian concept of boundaries and suggesting that secrets are the hard line to be crossed that some people want to get into and some people would be really offended to see; the Pipis is found and the audience and Tenna both act like they just discovered pornography or something. this seems to be some kind of hint at what Shadow Crystals ("Glass") and the Black Shard are. this, and the fact that when Susie shattered the glass window its contents was a secret, at least to the Red Soul. we have heavy themes of secrets between two people and breaking the boundaries to obtain secrets in Deltarune.

</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-tradition="UTDR" value="6420" data-dimension="S2">{{TTS|tts=Rules|Rouxls}} did not create the clock puzzle / {{TTS|tts=Rules Card|Rouxls Kaard}} did not create the clock puzzle

{{li|I=S1/UTDR/WD66|Q=64,21|Q2=6421}}only eyes blinded by darkness can see / ({{9k|RD/Q66,90}})
{{li|I=S1/UTDR/DFy|Q=64,22|Q2=6422}}it's better you don't wake up (Deltarune chapter 2) / ({{9k|RD/Q66,90}})
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6423">??

</li><li data-qid="64,24" value="6424" class="field_fantasy" data-tradition="Fy" data-dimension="Z">{{game|Super Smash Bros.}} (Nintendo 64)

</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-tradition="Fy" data-qid="64,25" value="6425" data-dimension="S">it's like {{censor|fucking|tts=[effing]}} Christmas / it's like ... Christmas (censored title) -> a thing Dave Strider says in Homestuck that wasn't funny to me the first time I read it but is now really funny to think of and apply to things out of context 
my thought today: this is how I would feel if [[E:East German Christmas carols|East German Christmas carols]] came up on a show like {{film|Drawn Together}} as a weird historical fact and casual comment they can make about an ethnicity without it being particularly offensive. many times funnier to bring up than the stereotype that 'Japanese people something something honor'. because like, the kind of person that thinks making Ling-Ling out of superficial stereotypes about Japan and China is funny definitely wouldn't know about this one and would be absolutely blindsided if it simply dropped in.

</li><li data-qid="64,26" value="6426" class="field_fantasy" data-tradition="Fy" data-dimension="Z">{{game|Super Smash Bros. Melee}} -> successor to {{game|Super Smash Bros}} on the Nintendo 64; 26 characters in the game.
</li><li data-qid="64,27" value="6427" class="field_fantasy" data-tradition="Fy" data-dimension="S0">Smash Bros character / character that has appeared in a Super Smash Bros. game

{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=64,28|Q2=6428}}Phoenix Wright / ([[EC:9k/RD/Q64,30|9k]])
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=64,29|Q2=6429}}lawyer of justice / ([[EC:9k/RD/Q64,30|9k]])
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=64,30|Q2=6430}}{{game|Ace Attorney}} (metaseries) / ([[EC:9k/RD/Q64,30|9k]])
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=64,31|Q2=6431}}objection! (motif)
{{li|I=S2/DFy/A|Q=64,32|Q2=6432}}Ace Attorney is copaganda / ({{9k|RD/Q64,49}})
</li><li data-qid="64,33" value="6433" class="field_exstruct" data-tradition="Fy / Homestuck, Fy / mythology, HAS / law" data-dimension="S">beam balance of justice / libra (Homestuck) / teal bloods and beam balances (Alternian trolls; Homestuck)
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6434">??
{{li|I=S2/A|Q=64,35|Q2=6435}}Materialism aids the prosecutor / It is impossible for Liberal-republicanism to enforce laws without material models of society / Materialism aids The State against anarchists (sense; false) / Materialism aids The Cops / ({{9k|RD/Q64,49}})
{{li|I=S1/Fy/IV|Q=64,36|Q2=6436}}ominous trial of doom / You are obsolete! (The Twilight Zone) -> it is actually staggering how many motifs you can find in fiction that are probably references to the Moscow Trials. 
lawyer of injustice + Stalinism (corruption) = ominous trial of doom.
{{li|I=S1/DFy|Q=64,37|Q2=6437}}lawyer of injustice / ([[EC:9k/RD/Q64,30|9k]])

{{li|I=S1/DFy|Q=64,38|Q2=6438}}Miles Edgeworth / ([[EC:9k/RD/Q64,30|9k]])
{{li|I=S1/DFy|Q=64,39|Q2=6439}}Franziska von Karma
{{li|I=S1/DFy|Q=64,40|Q2=6440}}prosecutors ({{game|Ace Attorney}})
{{li|I=S1/Fy |Q=64,41|Q2=6441}}{{game|Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney}} (2001)
{{li|I=S1/Fy/ES|Q=64,42|Q2=6442}}what it really means to be a lawyer ({{game|Ace Attorney}})
{{li|I=S1/Fy/Aa|Q=64,43|Q2=6443}}Edgeworth's dialectic

{{li|I=S1/IV|Q=64,44|Q2=6444}}Trotsky counterparts and multiverses / Trotsky counterparts and metaverses / fictional versions of Trotskyism interacting with multiple universes instead of multiple countries or even multiple planets 
Leon Trotsky counterpart + Super Smash Bros. (as metaverse) = Trotsky counterparts and multiverses.

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6445">??
{{li|I=S1/DFy/ML|Q=64,46|Q2=6446}}Communist Franziska von Karma / Franziska von Karma becomes Communist theorist / ({{9k|RD/Q64,49}})
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6447">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6448">??
{{li|I=S1/Fy/A|Q=64,49|Q2=6449}}Ace Attorney without trials / Ace Attorney without lawyers / ({{9k|RD/Q64,49}})

</li><li class="field_mdem cw_theology" data-qid="64,50" value="6450" data-dimension="S2">A correct religion explains all cultures / The correct religion will explain all countries / The correct religion will be a universal morality / The correct religion will unite everyone onto the same morality consisting of the same universal human values of what is right and wrong / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6450|9k]])
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" data-qid="64,51" value="6451" data-dimension="S2">Christianity is not the correct religion / Assuming that there is a religion which is most consistent with reality, it is not Christianity / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6450|9k]])
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" data-qid="64,52" value="6452" data-dimension="S2">Islam is not the correct religion / Assuming that there is a religion which is most consistent with reality, it is not Islam / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6450|9k]])
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" data-qid="64,53" value="6453" data-dimension="S2">Buddhism is not the correct religion / Assuming that there is a religion which is most consistent with reality, it is not Buddhism / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6450|9k]])
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" data-qid="64,54" value="6454" data-dimension="S2">Schizoanalysis is not the correct religion / Schizoanalysis is not the one true morality of the universe / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6450|9k]])
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" data-qid="64,55" value="6455" data-dimension="S2">The correct religion is not existentialism / Early-existentialism is not the correct universal morality / Assuming that there is a religion which is most consistent with reality, it is not early-existentialism / ([[User:RD/9k/Q6450|9k]])

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6456">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6457">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6458">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6459">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6460">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6461">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6462">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6463">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6464">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6465">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6466">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6467">??

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6468" data-dimension="S">this is incredibly silly -> <cite>Problem Sleuth</cite>.
</li><li value="6469" class="field_fantasy">"cancer" refers to crabs

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6470">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6471">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6472">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6473">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6474">??

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=64,75|Q2=6475}}Trump is Žižek / ({{9k|RD/Q64,43}})
{{li|I=S2/LR|Q=64,76|Q2=6476}}Offensive jokes are democracy / ({{9k|RD/Q64,43}})
{{li|I=S2/Aa|Q=64,77|Q2=6477}}Humor is a form of government / Humor is a form of control (sense) / ({{9k|RD/Q64,43}})

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6478">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6479">??

{{li|I=S2/Fy|Q=64,80|Q2=6480}}A world of dragons is a world of adventure / A world of dragons is a world of battles (generic) / A world of dragons is a world full of possibility / A world of dragons is a world of unknowns / A world of dragons is a world of mystery and wonder {{YouTube|pZ4FqWhWjOM}} / here be dragons (generic)
{{li|I=S2/Fy|Q=64,81|Q2=6481}}A world of dragons is a world of battles
{{li|I=S2/Fy|Q=64,82|Q2=6482}}A world of dragons is a world of morality / A world of dragons is a world of clear right and wrong {{YouTube|pZ4FqWhWjOM}} -> this actually isn't true sometimes. Wings of Fire is one of the most compelling and least contrived examples

</li><li value="6483" class="field_horror" data-dimension="S">The Roaring (Deltarune)
</li><li value="6484" data-remark="SCP-ES-084" class="field_horror" data-dimension="S">[[Ontology:Q6484|end-of-the-world scenario]] -> referencing SCP-ES-084, one of them where people think the world is going to end. but highly appropriate to put next to Homestuck, I mean that's exactly how it begins
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6485" data-dimension="S">fantasy environmental catastrophe -> appears in: Icefire, Final Fantasy VII, Pokémon Sword/Shield... Godzilla arguably 
doesn't refer to something like {{book|The Lorax}} where there's an imaginary catastrophe which neatly lines up as a cartoon version of a real one. this refers to fantasy catastrophes that have their own lore and causal reasons for happening even if they resemble real ones. for example, Godzilla is not something where there would be a real-world PSA explaining to you about the history of kaiju and how to prevent kaiju attacks

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6486">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6487">??

{{li|I=S2/PT|Q=64,88|Q2=6488}}If humor is a form of government, then it can outlaw protests / ({{9k|RD/Q64,43}})

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6489" data-dimension="S">rebuilding civilization after apocalyptic war -> this can be used in combinations to get Posadism, Adventure Time, one or more SCP stories, etc.

{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=6500|Q2=6500}}fantasy creature associated with specific view of reality / ([[EC:9k/VGriff/Q618-PhilosophyBlazonCreature|9k/VGriff]])
{{li|I=S2/MX/Fy|Q=65,01|Q2=6501}}Dragons are inherently historical / Because dragons (dragons; RPG monsters; etc) are associated with either battles, adventures, or danger, they are inherently connected to the concept of historical events, in the form of horizontal conflicts between individuals or kingdoms / {{{9k|RD/Q6500}})
{{li|I=S2/MX/Fy|Q=65,02|Q2=6502}}Unicorns are inherently ahistorical / Because unicorns are associated with imagining the unseen in lieu of being able to investigate it, they are inherently connected to the concepts of Idealism and I-believe-that-everybody statements / {{{9k|RD/Q6500}})

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6503">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6504">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6505">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6506">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6507">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6508">??

{{li|I=S2/DFy|tradition=|Q=65,09|Q2=6509}}{{film|The Amazing Digital Circus}} / ({{9k|RD/Q618-DigitalCircus}})

</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" value="6510" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:Q65,10|God wants us to love our neighbor regardless of ideology]] / God wants us to love our neighbor regardless of nationality, political party, or other distinction -> now that is a whopper if I ever saw one. you put together "nationality, political party, or other distinction" and the first thing I think of is a {{censor|fucking}} Trotskyist party. I think there is a really good case to be made that when you've said those three categories it totally counts. but I am pretty sure that most people wouldn't turn around and say "oh, if the United States is slated to be taken over by some kind of Leninist movement they're my neighbors so all of that is totally okay". nobody turns around and says "hey, wait, I don't think the Cold War is very Christian, I think we have to stop it".
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" value="6511" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:Q65,11|God wants us to love social-democrats]] / God wants us to love Mensheviks
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" value="6512" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:Q65,12|God wants us to love anarchists]]
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" value="6513" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:Q65,13|God wants us to welcome gay people]] / God wants us to welcome gay men / God wants us to welcome lesbians
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" value="6514" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:Q65,14|God wants us to welcome trans people]] / God wants us to welcome gender identity
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" value="6515" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:Q65,15|God wants us to welcome Black towns]]
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" value="6516" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:Q65,16|God wants us to love Trotskyists]]
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" value="6517" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:Q65,17|God wants us to love Leninists]] / God wants us to love Marxists / God wants us to love Stalin-followers

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6518" data-dimension="S2">??

{{li|I=S2/HAS/IV|Q=65,19|Q2=6519}}If you believe that what Stalin's government did was morally wrong, then all those claims come from Trotsky and the other figureheads of Trotskyism, so you must be a Trotskyist; this is to imply that Trotsky is the embodiment of anti-Stalinism, thus it could not come from anywhere else -> joke argument which is meant to mirror the way Christianity sounds to people who have never believed it. it points out a bunch of things that are claimed to be good and then claims they came from God and that now you're on God's side you have to help God take over the world. 
Christian devotional about Ted + Things that are good come from God = this.

</li><li class="field_trotsky cw_theology" data-remark="derived proposition" value="6520" data-dimension="S2">If all countries will be one in the end times, the world is our neighbor / If everyone will be one population in the end times, other countries are our neighbor / If everyone will be one population of Christians in the end times, but people everywhere are divided into many levels of plural populations now, then the Soviet Union was our neighbor, and we did not love our neighbor / Vietnam is our neighbor / China is our neighbor

</li><li class="field_anarchy cw_theology" data-tradition="Aqr" value="6521" data-dimension="S2">The world is controlled by corporations, therefore Canada will merge into the United States (conspiracy theory) {{YouTube|8vDqFu_HtpQ}} -> well. that's one way to answer [[E:Q29,13|Q29,13]]. bourgeoisie? check. capitalists in ivory towers of industry dividing countries against each other to distract from them? check. [[E:crisis of capitalism (Trotskyism)|Liberal capitalism is going to collapse]]? check. God? check. world anarchism? check. I don't think their theory is remotely correct but I'm laughing and I'm not upset because at least they tried. they somehow started the "lecture" with material causes and didn't bring in Satan like a handful of books I've seen that sound like this, so it's like, not as bad as it could be. I enjoy this video ironically for how close to low-effort Trotskyist theory it kind of almost got without knowing anything. that's kind of damning for the quality of today's Marxist theorists, I feel like, when conspiracy theorists that know nothing have produced almost the same lecture and it's equally unbelievable in either case.

</li><li class="field_nations cw_theology" data-qid="65,22" value="6522" data-dimension="S2">Canada is a registered corporation -> I don't think this is true but they clearly found some very interesting information to twist this out of and I'd be interested to know what they really did find {{YouTube|8vDqFu_HtpQ}} 
swatch color: these supernatural conspiracy-theorists are on thin ice with how much they condoned Trump; there's something of an anarcho-Toryism going on here. these three propositions could be either charcoal or brown.

</li><li class="field_anarchy field_idealism" data-tradition="A, Aqr" data-qid="65,23" value="6523" data-dimension="S2">Free will is more real than countries / Free will is more real than all nations -> this came from a crazy anarchist religion but you wouldn't know it at first glance because a lot of normal anarchists would probably say this too. {{YouTube|8vDqFu_HtpQ}} 
"when I say God and Christ, I'm not talking about religion, I'm not talking about the bible" literally, pagan bible. this is such {{censor|bullshit}} but at least the tone of it is fun

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6524" data-dimension="S2">??
</li><li data-qid="65,25" value="6525" data-remark="Isaiah 11:6, 65:25" class="field_exstruct cw_theology" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:Q6525|The wolf shall dwell with the lamb]] / The wolf and the lamb shall graze together / lion laying down with the lamb -> seen in many different bible verses, several in the book of Isaiah. perhaps one of the single most interesting things said in the Christian bible because A) it creates logically coherent narratives, even if ecologically inaccurate in the real world and B) it acts as one of the central themes driving many of the books. Q3009 "lion of kindness" should be considered a component of this proposition

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6526" data-dimension="S2">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6527" data-dimension="S2">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6528" data-dimension="S2">??

{{li|I=S2/PT|Q=65,29|Q2=6529}}Epstein was concealed behind Satan / Epstein's secret ranch was insulated by the forces of Satan; this is to imply that there is always a government or agency behind everything instead of things just happening free and unregulated with absolutely nothing behind them {{YouTube|7CqQklFWhEY}} -> it's so much easier to believe that some grand conspiracy is afoot than that just.... nothing is there, there is no government, there's nothing watching over, there is no regulating force, there is no force of justice, there's just a bit of land isolated from everything, and the darkest form of complete and utter Freedom.

{{li|I=F2/ML|Q=65,30|Q2=6530}}Marxism doesn't talk about morality / ({{9k|RD/Q65,30}})

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6531" data-dimension="S2">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6532" data-dimension="S2">??

</li><li class="field_trotsky" data-tradition="MX onto IV" data-qid="65,33" value="6533" data-dimension="S2">Protect theorists from empire, and you won't end up with Stalinism / It's important to save as many Trotskyist theorists as possible from external empires if you don't want to end up with only a few theorists left who stretch over the government and stay there endlessly like Stalin / ([[User:RD/9k/Q65,34|9k]])

</li><li class="field_trotsky" data-tradition="MX onto IV" data-qid="65,34" value="6534" data-dimension="S2">A State is so Trotskyists don't die / The point of a State is so 100,000 Trotskyists don't die / The point of a State is so Trotsky can save himself instead of running over to large external empires for help / ([[User:RD/9k/Q65,34|9k]]) 
The point of a State is so 100,000 Trotskyists don't die + ?? = Trotskyism must be created in one country for poly-Trotskyism to be created 
Pan-Africanism + Trotskyism = The point of a State is so 100,000 Trotskyists don't die.

</li><li class="field_exstruct" data-tradition="DG" data-qid="65,35" value="6535" data-dimension="S2">The politics of desire refuses to deal with the post-revolutionary question of the state (Badiou) [https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/alain-badiou-badiou-deleuze/] / ([[User:RD/9k/Q65,34|9k]])

</li><li class="field_mdem" data-qid="65,36" value="6536" data-dimension="S2">If Idealism is true, Trotskyism is / If Idealism were true, Trotskyism would be the best belief system -> here's the thing. Idealism commonly expresses itself as the concept that the future which is the best one to desire is the one you should believe, because if you don't believe in it it can't be realized, so you are obligated to believe in improbable things for them to be realized. (this is a logical fallacy, because it changes "no belief, no outcome" to "belief, outcome" without evidence that is accurate. but let's not let that bother us, because we're assuming Idealism is true.) Idealism being true means that even if Trotskyism sounds highly improbable it can eventually be realized as long as people believe in it. Idealism does not say that the things you believe in can't frame themselves in practical or material ways. therefore, there's an argument that a slightly flawed Materialist philosophy is the best thing to believe in even if you're an Idealist. 
the real trick to this proposition is that you could insert any number of named Marxisms in here like Juche-socialism or poly-Maoism or whatever. it doesn't really have to be Trotskyism, I just find spuriously arguing for Trotskyism to be very funny.

</li><li class="field_ML" data-tradition="MX onto ES" data-qid="65,37" value="6537" data-dimension="S2">If Stalin winning means that God intended for Communism to prevail, then Stalin doesn't even have to actually win in order to have already won / If Stalin's Marxism winning means that God intended for Communism to prevail, then it doesn't even have to actually win the first time if there is any significant, credible chance that it will ever win, because in the event it understands the processes of the future correctly, on the day it actually wins it will have glimpsed its future victory and rise to legitimacy already / Stalin's wager / holy chicken fallacy (proposition that any correct "lowball egg count" was always correct whether you actually knew it was or not) / ([[User:RD/9k/Q64,50|9k]])
</li><li class="field_ML" data-tradition="MX onto ES" data-qid="65,38" value="6538" data-dimension="S2">If Stalin wins, then God intended for Communism to prevail and Christianity to be abolished / ([[User:RD/9k/Q64,50|9k]])

</li><li class="field_mdem" data-qid="65,39" value="6539" data-dimension="S2">Universal morality means one position on Trotsky / The one true morality that is more accurate than all others and appropriate to the whole world would have a single position on Trotsky, not three or more different positions
</li><li class="field_mdem cw_theology" data-qid="65,40" value="6540" data-dimension="S2">Trotsky's actions were ungodly or weren't / What Trotsky did was either against heaven or not against heaven (Trotsky's actions, Trotskyite conspiracy, Trotskyism; thought experiment around religion) / Trotsky either entered separation from God or did not separate from God / Imagining that there is a Bad Place, Trotsky either went to the Bad Place or did not go to the Bad Place / ([[User:RD/9k/Q64,50|9k]])
</li><li class="field_trotsky cw_theology" data-qid="65,41" value="6541" data-dimension="S2">The correct religion is not anti-Trotsky / Any religion which is the correct religion must entertain that Trotsky is a part of its group of approved people / ([[User:RD/9k/Q64,50|9k]])
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" data-qid="65,42" value="6542" data-dimension="S2">Backing Trotsky against Stalin is godly / When the United States sides with Trotsky against Stalin, this is because Trotsky is not against God / Any correct religion or interpretation of Abrahamic religions would send Trotsky to the Good Place for resisting Stalin / ([[User:RD/9k/Q64,50|9k]])
</li><li class="field_ML cw_theology" data-qid="65,43" value="6543" data-dimension="S2">Backing Stalin against Trotsky is godly / Siding with Stalin against Trotsky is godly / ([[User:RD/9k/Q64,50|9k]])
</li><li class="field_trotsky cw_theology" data-qid="65,44" value="6544" data-dimension="S2">If Trotsky is Good, become a Trotskyist / If oppressing Trotsky is morally wrong then not aiding Trotsky in realizing Trotskyism is morally wrong, because practically speaking, not oppressing Trotsky requires realizing Trotskyism / ([[User:RD/9k/Q64,50|9k]])

</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" data-qid="65,45" value="6545" data-dimension="S2">God can fight against Iraq / God participates in the Iraq war / If the United States prays to God and God helps the United States against Iraq, then the United States is not in separation from God (not against God; thought experiment)
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" data-qid="65,46" value="6546" data-dimension="F2">God helped the United States beat Iraq / God helps the United States beat Iraq / If the United States prays to God for help against Iraq and the United States doesn't lose, then the United States is not in separation from God (not against God; thought experiment) / ([[User:RD/9k/Q64,50|9k]])

</li><li class="field_exstruct field_bauplan" data-tradition="LR, ML" data-qid="65,47" value="6547" data-dimension="S2">[[E:The Soviet Union functioned as a political faction|The Soviet Union functioned as a political faction]] / During the Cold War the Soviet Union functioned as a political faction / During the Cold War the Soviet Union served as one of the world's capable proletarian subpopulations, and thus Soviet politicians in general had a partisan alignment with the proletariat even if not every one of them was perfect

</li><li class="field_mdem cw_theology" data-qid="65,48" value="6548" data-dimension="S2">Universal morality means one position on Stalin / A universal morality will have just one position on Stalin / If everyone is to have the same morality, then they must have the same moral opinions about Bolshevism, and the same moral opinions about Stalin / ([[User:RD/9k/Q64,50|9k]]) 
Applying any philosophy to Trotsky eventually gets you to the correct answers + Historical figures can separate from God = this.

</li><li class="field_anarchy field_idealism" data-qid="65,49" value="6549" data-dimension="S2">[[E:Q65,49|The Cold War was a social construct]] / ([[User:RD/9k/Q65,49|9k]]) / The opposition of Liberal-republican countries against the Soviet Union was nothing more than a social construct in which Liberal-republican countries made up reasons to hate the 14 nationalities of the Soviet Union for reasons largely unrelated to the class composition of the two countries, and related more to the affinity between the 14 major Soviet ethnic groups and the anomalous, hateful non-affinity between the United States and those ethnic groups -> persuade me of this using specifically the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, and I might genuinely consider postcolonial anarchisms. I feel like the difficulty of arguing that verges on impossible, but maybe that's just me. I've made it a little easier by leaving out the requirement that anarchism explains how to defeat the Russian empire or win the Cold War, and only handing you the impossible task of arguing Soviet people and United States racists who to this day can hardly stand the idea of somebody living in another country and being Russian are obligated to be friends. that's what I don't understand. how, when United States people are constantly dismissing the existence of reactionaries in their own country as a totally ignorable non- part of their lives, that anarchisms or postcolonial theories that say every opposition between groups of people is an arbitrary decision each group made are supposed to fix anything.
</li><li class="field_anarchy field_histmat" data-qid="65,50" value="6550" data-dimension="S2">The Cold War could be won by anarchism
</li><li class="field_anarchy field_histmat" data-qid="65,51" value="6551" data-dimension="S2">The Russian Revolution could be won by anarchism
</li><li class="field_anarchy field_bauplan" data-qid="65,52" value="6552" data-dimension="S2">The United States and Soviet Union could abolish their borders to join into a single entity -> if this were true the previous three propositions would become easier to argue.
</li><li class="field_gramsci field_bauplan" data-tradition="MX onto DX" data-qid="65,53" value="6553" data-dimension="S2">The Soviet Union's border was protective / The way populations associated together into the Soviet Union and formed a border around themselves was materially necessary to protecting the populations -> this explains, so very unfortunately, why it would be so important to create a new Russian Empire. no Soviet Union, everyone who hasn't been forced to another country is going to get assimilated into a single gigantic kingdom for the pure purposes of protecting national autonomy. the step of "democracy" can't happen until national autonomy exists.
</li><li class="field_anarchy" data-tradition="MX onto A, MX onto PT" data-qid="65,54" value="6554" data-dimension="S2">The Soviet diaspora is evidence against nationalism / If some people didn't belong in the Soviet Union attempting to put the country back together so it can support them, then the Soviet Union dissolving is evidence against nationalism -> many people (it's the Tories.) want to believe that if Communism "doesn't work" then nationalism still can. but the reasons Communism would dissolve would also dissolve nationalism and keep people from prospering because you bound them into a national empire. 
this isn't very controversial to anarchists, but it may be shocking to center-Liberals when they realize that "Our Democracy" is inevitably a nation and all their rhetoric about "saving Our Democracy" will also crumble into dust if it turns out a particular nation-state isn't the place for people to be and they'd do better scattered to other places, not in your country, not telling people to vote, not voting. people in glass walnut trees should be more careful about cracking open walnuts.

</li><li class="field_exstruct" data-qid="65,55" value="6555" data-dimension="S2">[[E:Q65,55|The best ending is between the normal and weird routes]] (<cite>Deltarune</cite>)
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="65,56" value="6556" data-dimension="S2">Deltarune is one big Angel cage
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="65,57" value="6557" data-dimension="S2">There is one choice: killing The Knight / There is one real decision in Deltarune: killing The Knight / There will be exactly one actual choice to kill or spare in Deltarune, and it will be the reflected memory of December -> it's the Shadow Mantle and the Titan fight that are making me think this. Deltarune is in some ways very similar to {{book|In Stars and Time}}, with this big traumatized boss you fight (the king) while it's really the protagonist's psychological issues that turn out to be the biggest problem in the end. it's also very credible for there to be a game with an overall gloomy atmosphere that ends in exactly one choice if you look at {{book|OneShot}}

</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="65,58" value="6558" data-dimension="S2">Teletubbies is canon to Last Dragon Chronicles -> I didn't think it was possible I'd be saying this last week, but when you look at the internal signifiers, it's funny how well they line up.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="65,59" value="6559" data-remark="moon landing 1969" data-dimension="S2">Teletubbies are cartoon astronauts -> what the creators said. this makes a lot of sense, but it does cast the teletubbies world in a weird sinister light by having a group of people in fantasy "mission control" below an earth-like world and making us ask why this imagined earth is as uninhabitable as the moon. 
you never thought teletubbies lore would be fun to analyze, did you? bad news for you. now we're discussing teletubbies as representational art and what it claims about the real world.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="65,60" value="6560" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Brandish</cite>
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="65,61" value="6561" data-dimension="S2">Little Einsteins are rebuilding the world in Europe's image after mutually-assured destruction -> amusing theory. example of how every work of fiction will get read in relationship to what the motivations of an imaginary thing might be if it existed in real life

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6562">??
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=65,63|Q2=6563}}Orkastle / Orkastle (upcoming console-style RPG by Howard Blast, estimated first chapter release 2028) / ({{9k|RD/Q6563}})
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6564">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6565">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6566">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6567">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6568" data-dimension="M3">Why was Deltarune hard to make before Undertale? -> this could have a simple answer in terms of Deltarune being a longer game and so forth... or it could have a much more specific answer. could it be that Deltarune was genuinely supposed to be based on things {{em|cut from Undertale}} before Undertale was made?

</li><li value="6569" class="field_nations cw_vriska" data-dimension="S">progressive theorists as aliens / progressive theorists are practically aliens (Homestuck) / social justice theorists speak another language -> Kankri Vantas. it's important to note that Homestuck's overall framing of this is a little more neutral than negative. Homestuck can be simultaneously both really negative about its characters at some times and positive about them at other times, in this weird attitude of "they're complete freaks but they're my freaks". so ultimately this motif is treating progressive theorists as weird, bizarre, and alien, but alien in the sense of a sci-fi story where even if people will never understand aliens they still exist out in space doing their own thing and have lives of their own. it's kind of like Undertale/Deltarune, where we accept that queer people are monsters and then we instead reclaim "monster".

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6570" data-dimension="S2">Varik is secretly afraid of monsters / ({{9k|RD/Q65,63}}) -> what seems to have led to the themes of prejudice in Undertale
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6571" data-dimension="S2">Varik is Ness ({{game|Brandish}}) / All console RPG protagonists are basically the same (JRPG protagonists; {{game|Mother}} series, {{game|Brandish}}) -> a silly theory created by young Toby Fox during Earthbound Halloween Hack. there is not a lot of difference between Ares and Ness despite their very different fantasy (?) and suburban-sci-fi settings, leading to the funny theory that one could just have turned into the other at some point. they should be different individuals with different lives, but how would you even know they weren't interchangeable? this seems to have intentionally led to the concept of Frisk getting displaced by Chara, and unintentionally led to "Sans is Ness" when matpat {{em|almost}} correctly saw the pattern but just barely overshot in the wrong direction.

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6572" data-dimension="S2">Undertale is not actually making an "I believe that everybody" statement in regards to Frisk and {{caps|Chara}} -> video creator remarks {{YouTube|P-5lBec9lO4}} that Undertale's endings simply telling you to not do what {{thingamabob|Chara}} did in weaponizing Asriel and Asgore seem shallow, and like basically they have not properly done a historical-materialist analysis of either the player or {{caps|Chara}} — thus, it must actually be the case that there is something missing from the narrative of Undertale that correctly understands the notion of historical materialism. one of the single most accidentally-Marxist things I have ever heard a probably non-Marxist Undertale theorizer say.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6573" data-dimension="S2">{{thingamabob|Chara}} does the same thing to The Underground that The Player does to Kris or Varik {{YouTube|P-5lBec9lO4}} -> very good catch. this is like noticing that Noelle is acting as "the angel" to the Dark World when she is ordered to clear it out; certain elements of Deltarune and maybe Undertale do reflect particular things the player could do to the world in things that the characters do to each other. note Noelle. also note Lancer being "forced to be the bad guy" in the Dark World's narrative when The Knight (Kris?) creates the Dark World. The Knight wields Kris to fight Lancer and Spade King, just like The Player or The Angel wields Kris to fight the fabled Knight, just like {{thingamabob|Chara}} wields Asgore to fight humans. this view of parallels rather implies the view that Deltarune is one big box to trap the player so they can't actually hurt anybody — Kris made up The Knight so the player would chase after this fake enemy and the fake characters in the Dark Worlds but could never target the people of the Light World. that also has disturbing implications for where the weird route is going: maybe the player really can break out of the box and hurt someone in the Light World.

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6574" data-dimension="S2">Golden flowers represent the world outside a console RPG -> this can be used with "{{thingamabob|Chara}} weaponized Asgore" to argue that Flowey metaphorically represents {{thingamabob|Chara}} transforming the innocent people of the RPG world into cynical outside-world style people in a kind of death of what they were. I like that interpretation a lot more than the interpretation that Flowey is only what happens when people exhaust the possibilities in a game. it provides an actual explanation for why Asriel would have died before the player even did anything: Undertale has history whether the player is there or not, and a whole different player "played" (deceived) the Underground in a very negative sense to give the result that "god is dead and {{thingamabob|Chara}} killed him". I also like the way this implies that a "touch grass" message isn't always productive because sometimes it's the real world that makes people terrible and letting them back into the material world to hurt people would actually be worse.

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6575" data-dimension="S2">Ralsei's connection to The Angel parallels Asriel's connection to {{thingamabob|Chara}} -> I don't actually remember what this one meant. it's probably from the same video as these other few
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6576" data-dimension="S2">Undertale is already fiction within fiction -> I didn't believe this at the time I saw it but now that I've actually been through trying to solve what will happen at the end of Deltarune based on who Kris is and who Dess is, I've actually come to feel like this is technically correct, even if maybe for the wrong reasons. Undertale might actually be some kind of flipped-over "escape world" created by Kris even though it's also "real".

</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-remark="fiction and mythologies" value="6577" data-dimension="S2">You can be against Goku or not / You have to be either against Goku or not / You have to be against Harry Potter or not against Harry Potter / For any figure held up as the model of morality, whether god or hero, somebody must be either not against that figure or against that figure -> this is a far cleaner division than "for versus against", because it allows for the existence of multiple "gods", moralities, or cultures.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-remark="fiction and mythologies" value="6578" data-dimension="S2">Attacking anyone pro-Goku is anti-Goku / Attacking any group which is completely for Goku is against Goku / Attacking any group which is directly allied with Harry Potter means you are against Harry Potter / Attacking anyone directly allied with Arceus means you are against Arceus -> this is pretty easy to demonstrate with fiction. when allies of Good characters are attacked whoever does it is usually treated as Evil. if Ron is allied with Harry and the Death Eaters attack Ron, the Death Eaters are Evil, or at the very least anti-Harry. that's the obvious part. what isn't obvious to people is it's very easy to conceptualize religion in these terms. the way Arceus will be treated in a wholly imaginary Pokémon movie is fairly similar to the way people behave in real religions — the reality of the god is not important to people's behavior as much as what faction is seen attacking what faction or figurehead that is considered Good.

</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" value="6579" data-dimension="S2">Actions must be either ungodly or not / Actions must either be ungodly, not ungodly (neutral), or godly -> this seems like a necessary axiom if there is to be a concept of separation from God at all. like, imagine Goku gets to determine everything that's good. you have to at least be either not against Goku or against Goku, even though nobody really has to be directly allied with Goku.
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" value="6580" data-dimension="S2">Historical figures can separate from God / Historical figures can enter separation from God, mostly in respect to the material world and the presence of a god in the material world
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" value="6581" data-dimension="S2">It's ungodly to be Hitler / Hitler went to Hell or entered separation from God in the material world (Christianity) -> fair enough, if religion made any sense whatsoever this would be true.
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" value="6582" data-dimension="S2">It's ungodly to be Mussolini
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" value="6583" data-dimension="S2">It's ungodly to be Tōjō -> logically true if it's ungodly to be Hitler, because they share the political positions of active imperialism and violence against people inside the country.
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" value="6584" data-dimension="S2">It's ungodly to imperialize Ukraine -> logically true if it's ungodly to be Hitler, Mussolini, or Tojo.
</li><li class="field_exstruct cw_theology" value="6585" data-dimension="S2">It's godly to defend Ukraine -> arguably true if it's ungodly to invade Ukraine. I think the leap comes here, because something being not ungodly doesn't fully equal it being godly. which is... really stupid when Christianity often positions itself like there are only things condoned by God and things that are ungodly. in reality it always comes down to Christianity being separate moral systems that effectively serve multiple separate gods.
</li><li class="field_ML cw_theology" value="6586" data-dimension="S2">Defending Ukraine from the Tsar was godly -> logically true if defending Ukraine from the new Russian empire is godly.
</li><li class="field_ML cw_theology" value="6587" data-dimension="S2">Incorporating the Soviet Union was godly / Joining the 14 nationalities of the Soviet Union into a supranational federation was godly -> this logically follows if defending Ukraine from the Tsar was godly, because this achieved defending Ukraine from the Tsar.
</li><li class="field_ML cw_theology" value="6588" data-dimension="S2">Attacking the Soviet Union was ungodly -> logically true if defending Ukraine from empire is godly and defending Ukraine from the Tsar was godly.

</li><li class="field_mdem cw_theology" value="6589" data-dimension="S2">Only a surrounding federation can save Ukraine / Without the Soviet Union nobody can stop Russia from invading Ukraine / Without a larger supranational federation around Ukraine nobody can stop Russians from invading Ukraine -> this is at least arguable. some people will definitely try to argue that having another giant empire squabble with Russia over Ukraine as a buffer state somehow better respects everybody's freedom than having Ukraine be part of something bigger. I feel like the story of Poland and how much everybody hated buffer state wars in Poland counts against that. if you live in Poland it is definitely not a simple matter of having a little war over Poland and then it's over; that {{censor|shitty}} buffer state war becomes your whole life. it doesn't make things better that Poland isn't part of the two empires fighting over it, it just takes all of Poland's local control and populational agency away. that said it would still be sensible under this framework for Ukraine to join Europe or all the Eastern European states to join into one supranational federation that fights against Russia. it's not that the Soviet Union owns Ukraine as much as Ukraine is obligated to be part of some particular bigger thing at its choice. Trotsky supporting an independent Ukraine is such a [[E:backhandedly true|backhandedly correct]] thing, isn't it? the two of them both have the same problem of not wanting to be part of a bigger thing that at the moment is [[E:Q10,000|plural]] when they really ought to.

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6590" data-remark="placed next to alternate worlds. seems fair enough" data-dimension="Z">Last Dragon Chronicles [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Dragon_Chronicles] -> an interpretation of magic ritual in a somewhat modern setting but in a world where there are a small number of fantasy creatures. 
do not read this series for Media Representation of Inuit. it's not necessarily offensive but it isn't stellar either, they're just kind of thrown into the narrative haphazardly as okay set dressing. my rule of thumb has become this: if twenty pages of a biography is blatantly more informative than a particular novel it's not good Representation. many stories I see about Native Americans / indigenous people of North America fail this test. but, for instance, some stories with Black protagonists have succeeded to where a biography and the story are about equally informative or interesting.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6591" data-dimension="Z"><cite>[[E:Q65,91|The Fire Within]]</cite> (D'Lacey ??)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6592" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Icefire</cite> (D'Lacey ??)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6593" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Fire Star</cite> (D'Lacey ??) -> not to be confused with <cite>Warriors: Into the Wild</cite>.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6594" data-dimension="Z"><cite>The Fire Eternal</cite>
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6595" data-dimension="Z"><cite>[[E:Q65,95|Dark Fire]]</cite>
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6596" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Fire World</cite>
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6597" data-dimension="Z"><cite>The Fire Ascending</cite>
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6598" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Rain and Fire</cite>

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6599" data-dimension="S">conscious objects / sentient objects -> super-case of: conscious toys. technically many superstructural fantasy worlds are made of these. narnia is a notable exception

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6600" data-dimension="S">alternate world / isekai -> super-case of: [[Ontology:Q3845|superstructural fantasy world]].
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6601" data-dimension="S">Frisk
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6602" data-dimension="S">Flowey the Flower / Asriel (Undertale)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6603" data-dimension="S">Asriel (Deltarune)
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6604" data-dimension="S">"fallen down"
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6605" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6606" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6607" data-dimension="S">"nothing keeping it at bay but my axe" (Deltarune) -> cf. Varik
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6608" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6609" data-dimension="S">??

</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-tradition="Fy, ES" value="6610" data-dimension="S">logic lag / sputtering and lagging from too many propositions slowing the universe's Platonic computations -> Wings of Fire; also feels like a weirdly good metaphor for Liberal-republicanism 
magic as bending the world to one's will + animus magic created dragonet = logic lag
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6611" data-dimension="S">conscious toys / sentient toys -> {{TTS|tts=this|—}} + "modest" proposal = Poppy Playtime. {{TTS|tts=this|—}} + television = Deltarune. {{TTS|tts=this|—}} + playing card / trump deck = Alice in Wonderland.

</li><li value="6612" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="Z">Homestuck act 5 / Hivebent
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6613" data-dimension="S">The Underground
</li><li class="field_exstruct" data-remark="heavy ES themes in Deltarune" value="6614" data-dimension="S">[[Ontology:Q6614|Light World]]
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6615" data-dimension="S">[[Ontology:Q6615|Dark World]]
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6616" data-dimension="S">The Core
</li><li value="6617" class="field_horror" data-dimension="S">[[Ontology:Q6617|W.D. Gaster]]
</li><li class="field_horror" data-remark="waltz of Seccom Masada" value="6618" data-dimension="S">Man behind the tree (Deltarune) / egg man (Deltarune)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6619" data-dimension="S">eggs of unclear importance
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6620" data-dimension="S">[[Ontology:Q6620|The Angel]] (Deltarune)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6621" data-dimension="S">[[Ontology:Q6621|Kris]]
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6622" data-dimension="S">[[Ontology:Q6622|Susie]]
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6623" data-dimension="S">[[Ontology:Q6623|Noelle]]
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6624" data-dimension="S">[[Ontology:Q6624|Ralsei]]
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6625" data-dimension="S">Shadow Crystals
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6626" data-dimension="S">Seam
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6627" data-dimension="S">Jevil
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6628" data-dimension="S">Spamton
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6629" data-dimension="S">[[Ontology:Q6629|Berdly]]

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6630" data-dimension="F2">The Knight is Kris / Kris was The Knight in Chapter 2 / Kris is The Knight
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6631" data-dimension="F2">The Knight is multiple people / Multiple characters are The Knight
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6632" data-dimension="S2">The player plays as The Angel -> what I thought to be true
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6633" data-dimension="S2">Noelle is The Angel -> I think this is only true in the sense of her being the "other" Angel, but might as well record it
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6634" data-dimension="S2">December Holiday is The Knight -> one line of reasoning is Mother 3 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQXZ2IbbowQ]
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6635" data-dimension="S2">The Knight is a knife which became a Darkner -> supposedly, knives have a "long hand"

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6636" data-dimension="S2">Kris gained the Red Soul after dying / Kris is dead / Kris drowned in a lake (generic)
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6637" data-dimension="S2">Kris fails to play the piano because they're too nervous -> the theory that the player would be able to prompt Kris to play the piano but Kris simply doesn't want to because they can't get into the right mood. [https://youtu.be/dbu5MfJ9V0c?t=7760] very good explanation in my opinion given that Kris always does the things the player selects in some particular way, like a particular tone, not provided by the player. Kris can take out the soul and pick up their knife as a passive-aggressive gesture at The Player. do you think they couldn't play a piano?

</li><li class="field_horror element_empty" value="6638" data-dimension="S">they followed the pointed tail / lost where the forest would grow, the children followed the pointed tail
</li><li class="field_horror element_empty" value="6639" data-dimension="S">entering the Titan (Deltarune chapter 4)
</li><li class="field_horror element_empty" value="6640" data-dimension="S">{{caps|Image_Friend}} / {{caps|Device_Friend}} [https://deltarune.wiki/w/Friend]

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6641" data-dimension="S2">Deltarune is a horror scenario about a world without creativity [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXy7pCeI8u0] / Deltarune is a horror story about [[Philosophical_Research:Preventing_the_robot_takeover|networkism]] -> the claim is that Darkners not being able to create fiction is a relatable narrative for art creators. interesting theory, even if I don't see much evidence right now
</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="6642" data-dimension="S">[[Ontology:Q6642|magic as bending the world to one's individual will]] / magic as the ability to inflict one's Free Will on the world regardless of the consequences -> Wings of Fire series, <cite>Darkstalker</cite>, Deltarune chapter 2 weird route. note very closely that Noelle is called a spellcaster, and her attacks to turn Darkners back into unmoving objects (!) are referred to as magic.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6643" data-dimension="S2">Dark Fountains are created when a Lightner opens a wound in the earth
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6644" data-dimension="S2">Dark Fountains are created when a Lightner cracks open the limited box of reality -> combines claims: blank void outside of reality is fountain of imagination

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6645" data-dimension="S">Asriel and eggs {{YouTube|XSVkRG6V70s}} -> commentator noted that egg decorations were part of Asriel's memories.
</li><li class="field_anarchy field_LGBT" value="6646" data-dimension="S2">Ralsei is a trans girl -> this seems like a Nightheart situation, where all the themes lined up totally accidentally.
</li><li class="field_anarchy field_LGBT" value="6647" data-dimension="S2">The eggs are a metaphor for gender -> a bit of a joke but it's worth bringing up for just a second.
</li><li class="field_anarchy field_LGBT" value="6648" data-dimension="S2">Dess is not female / Dess is not actually female / Dess is actually nonbinary / Dess is actually a trans man

</li><li class="field_horror element_empty" value="6649" data-dimension="S2">The forgotten "man" is Dess -> this is linked to the concept of the Riverperson saying "I'm the riverman... or am I the river-woman? you'll never know!" 
I mean, consider: Dess is a he/him lesbian, they messed with pronouns trying to become more sure of their gender, and then Kris remembers the he/him phase. this is the secret reason the Roaring Knight is referred to as they/them, either this flux between pronouns or "they" being the final pronoun 
low confidence in this but it's an interesting thought. looking at how small-scale Deltarune's events are it makes a little more sense it would be something between Kris, Dess, and Noelle than the forgotten man being an image of some mysterious experimenter in a bunker. Gaster definitely exists somewhere but it's possible there was no Gaster inside Deltarune until Deltarune created Undertale which then created Deltarune. thus... it could be that the forgotten "man" is Kris trying to forget the concept that Dess could still be alive and just move on. but then the shadow of Dess — the second one that's not the Knight — started handing them eggs and made it harder to forget her. don't forget. if you forget her she's with you in the dark. find her, him/her/them. 
it would be very funny if Dess really was nonbinary specifically as a joke on Scott Cawthon making that little typo in the "save him" minigame. I hope that's what it is. I hope that's what the pizza and purple-guy references are actually pointing to. maybe the better ending of Deltarune is that they find Dess but he comes out as a man or nonbinary and they saved him. little did you know Gaster was one big hyperbole about what happens when Dess is not accepted in his gender transition and runs away, maybe out of the universe, when you're a kid you wouldn't know where he went

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6650" data-dimension="S">Ralsei's chapter 3 speech / in the dark things get indistinct ... your eyes can't see the truth any more -> this line is funny because it reminds me of the fnaf 4 remark about shadows

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6651" data-dimension="S">[[Ontology:Q6651|"it might be your imagination"]] -> several lines implying that Berdly has passed from "reality" into imagination, or rather, from the world into Kris' mind.

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6652" data-dimension="S">pacifist route (Undertale)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6653" data-dimension="S">genocide route (Undertale) / no mercy route (Undertale)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6654" data-dimension="S">level (Deltarune)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6655" data-dimension="S">{{caps|LoVE}} (Undertale) / Level of Violence (Undertale)
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6656" data-dimension="Z">Weird Route (Deltarune) / (use sense labels for each chapter) -> dimension Z because it's a narrative
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6657" data-dimension="S">{{thingamabob|Chara}}

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6658" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:InAnyOrderAtAll|Playing out of order gives a new ending]] / Deltarune has a unique ending for playing the chapters out of order / The single ending of Deltarune will come from playing the chapters out of order -> the egg man really focused on the notion of "in any order at all". what if you used the eggs to rearrange the chapters into the order he said instead of from 1 to 7? my prediction is that the single ending of Deltarune happens only when you do this and otherwise the story simply {{em|terminates}} rather than ends. it doesn't take Noelle to creepypasta the story, Kris already creepypasta'd the story before the game booted up by endlessly avoiding the major conflicts of the story. kind of funny how fictional stories totally revolve around single characters for the world to even exist, isn't it? that's what I think is going on. the story revolving around three teenagers is a bit of silliness, a bit of book logic, but if they don't play their part then the story doesn't end and the world tears to pieces before the story actually ends. that makes a lot of sense as a way a dream could end; any number of people have had dreams that ended before the "story" inside ended. it's actually one of the more common ways for things to end — we've all had that one disappointing VHS tape that didn't catch the end of a TV show or movie, or in more recent times, maybe a video that was playing when the phone totally shut off.

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6659" data-dimension="S">living block tree / Darkerner puzzle {{YouTube|nROrGBXD78Q}} -> found in Chapter 1
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6660" data-dimension="S">gray characters / Goners
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6661" data-dimension="S2">"Goners" have been deleted from Undertale's world / Goners are something more than dead
</li><li class="field_horror element_empty" value="6662" data-dimension="S">two red and blue doors, door in between -> seen at least once in both Undertale and Deltarune.
</li><li class="field_horror element_empty" value="6663" data-dimension="S2">The capsule machine is a Gaster door / The Dess gumball machine is just Gaster's door -> wow. I never managed to notice this, despite all the other similarities between Dess and Gaster. that is quite a revelation. like, you only get to the Dess flashback by cutting through a process which is otherwise random — just like entering in fun value 66 to deliberately find Gaster. the gumball door is between red and blue doors, Gaster's door could theoretically be between Sans and Papyrus' doors. that's crazy. we're clearly supposed to associate "the Dess door" that is normally in Deltarune with the Gaster door that is only sometimes in Undertale. 
two red and blue doors, door in between + Dess = this. this + Ralsei is the green crayon = Ralsei is green because Gaster

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6664" data-dimension="S2">The next level below Dark Worlds is the game code -> this doesn't make any sense to me because it breaks the basic/superstructural pattern, especially when Darker-ners have been found
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6665" data-dimension="S2">The level below Dark Worlds is the inanimate objects inside Dark Worlds coming to life -> evidence: tree object coming to life
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6666" data-dimension="S2">{{caps|Image_Friend}} is the darkness outside the game universe come to life -> haven't heard this from anybody but me but it seems quite possible visually. sure looks like nothingness with a face
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6667" data-dimension="S2">{{game|Deltarune}} is the most successful SCP video game -> if you define "SCP" a particular way as a very specific kind of paranormal story and yet not one that has to be in the SCP format, this would become true.
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6668">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6669">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6670" data-dimension="S2">The level above the Light World is earth / The level above the Light World is Toby Fox's world / The level above the Light World is the real world
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6671" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:Q6671|The level above the Light World is The Angel's Heaven]] / The level above the Light World is technically fictional -> narratively parallel to: when you open up a <cite>Digimon</cite> show or game, the Real World and the Digital World are both technically fictional but the Real World is material and the Digital World is intangible relative to it
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6672" data-dimension="S2">??

{{li|I=S2/DFy|Q=66,73|Q2=6673}}Noelle will die and be resurrected / ({{9k|RD/Q66,23}})
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6674" data-dimension="S2">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6675" data-dimension="S2">??
{{li|I=S2/DFy|Q=66,76|Q2=6676}}The girl will die {{caps|This Holiday}} / The missing prophecy panel says "{{caps|The girl will die This Holiday}}" (sense) / ({{9k|RD/Q69,12}})

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6677" data-dimension="S">Susie biting faces off -> you'd be surprised how useful this silly little videogame moment is for philosophy. 
Susie biting faces off + Lacanian discipline prevents violence = Psychology is a form of law 
Psychology is a form of law + All crimes are equally bad = Lacanianism turns bioempire into Toryism
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6678" data-dimension="S2">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6679" data-dimension="S2">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6680" data-dimension="S2">Undertale's secrets hint at how The Underground came to be
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6681" data-dimension="S2">The Forgotten Man increasingly became W.D. Gaster as he got more forgotten -> I really doubt that Gaster was actually Gaster in Deltarune, although I do know he's there in some sense.

</li><li value="6682" class="field_horror" data-dimension="S">[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-682 SCP-682] [[Ontology:Q6682|"Hard-to-destroy reptile"]]

</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-remark="Idealism" value="6683" data-dimension="S2">The final tragedy is something that would prompt Ralsei to be kind to someone in order to prevent it
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6684" data-dimension="S">the final tragedy / last prophecy panel
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6685" data-dimension="S">left home due to happiness

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6686" data-dimension="S">Shadow Mantle boss / Eram / John Mantle

{{li|I=S1/UTDR/DFy|Q=66,87|Q2=6687}}Dark Shard / ({{9k|RD/Q66,90}})
{{li|I=S1/UTDR/DFy|Q=66,88|Q2=6688}}Black Knife / ({{9k|RD/Q66,90}})
{{li|I=S1/UTDR/DFy|Q=66,89|Q2=6689}}Shadow Mantle / ({{9k|RD/Q66,90}})
{{li|I=S1/UTDR/DFy|Q=66,90|Q2=6690}}[[Ontology:Q6690|The Roaring Knight]] (Deltarune) / ({{9k|RD/Q66,90}})
{{li|I=S1/UTDR/DFy|Q=64,91|Q2=6491}}Roaring Knight sphere / ({{9k|RD/Q66,90}})

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6692" data-dimension="S">TV screen glitches (Chapter 3)
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6693" data-dimension="S">say it didn't snow -> appears to be tying snow to the notion of the barrier between mind and reality breaking? shows up in room of TVs in Chapter 3, Noelle says the words in weird route.
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6694" data-dimension="S">"your heartbeat becomes twisted" -> quote that appears in Roaring Knight battle.
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6695" data-dimension="S">guitar phone call -> seems to literally tell us what is happening and what will happen, only very cryptically.
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6696" data-dimension="S">roaring group call / roaring group chat
</li><li class="field_horror element_empty" value="6697" data-dimension="S">getting instructions from a phone / "Mike!" (implied to be but not proved to be connected to phone) / "the phone kept ringing indefinitely" (Deltarune chapter 1) {{YouTube|XSVkRG6V70s}} / Carol and the ominous phone call / Deltarune and Memoryhead

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6698" data-dimension="S2">The Roaring Knight is Kris' repressed memory come to life -> Deltarune chapter 3. we've gotten occasional hints there is psychoanalysis in Deltarune. A) Deltarune has several surface similarities to OMORI, which was about repressed memories; toby even acknowledged this. B) Tenna's Dark World was full of memories. C) the code 1225 is included in the Dark World presumably as a memory. D) Kris opened the fountain, but the Roaring Knight was inside the fountain as what would appear to be a Darkner, and Tenna thinks the Knight opened the fountain. E) Darkners are described as a very serious absence of real-world data, like a hallucination. if this is true, you'd expect that painful thoughts that torment you when you're up at night could bleed into the Dark World or even become entire Darkners.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6699" data-dimension="S">[[Ontology:Q6699|Red Soul]] (<cite>Deltarune</cite>)

</li><li value="6700" class="field_fantasy"><cite>Dragon Ball</cite> pre-reboot era
</li><li value="6701" class="field_fantasy series_dragonball"><cite>Dragon Ball Kai</cite> episode 1
</li><li value="6867" class="field_fantasy">(... [[Philosophical_Research:Ontology/Dragon_Ball|<cite>Dragon Ball Kai</cite>]])

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6868" data-dimension="S2">Madotsuki's shirt symbol shows she is empty -> pattern said to be PNG transparency or censored out shape from Madotsuki's appearance, like a missing piece; evidence through same "missing piece" showing up in Poniko's room
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6869" data-dimension="S"><cite>Dragon Blazers</cite> -> note the dimension. fictional works of fiction may be marked S, though real works of fiction are marked Z.

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6870" data-dimension="S">writing implements (Deltarune) -> white pen of hope, green crayon, pencil swords used by Kris and Noelle
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6871" data-dimension="S2">"The forest" "would grow" before Kris drew over it -> when a Darkner said this line, the possibility it was a simple individual action with an object in the Light World seems very likely. could it be Kris drawing trees? of course. could it be Kris drawing trees [[E:Ralsei is the green crayon|using Ralsei]]? maybe. this would explain why Ralsei has a shadowed face and is associated with "pure darkness".

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6872" data-dimension="S2">Ralsei is the green crayon {{YouTube|LgdrEvYZjm8}}
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6873" data-dimension="S2">Ralsei is a drawing / Ralsei is Asriel's drawing
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6874" data-dimension="S2">Ralsei is Kris' horned headband
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6875" data-dimension="S2">Ralsei is Asriel's dust
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6876" data-dimension="S2">Ralsei is Asriel's shed fur -> an explanation for why Ralsei is able to be everywhere. maybe even an explanation for why Ralsei is affiliated with Gaster — he exists as a bunch of scattered shards, effectively. ...that also describes playing cards and spam emails. oh no.
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6877" data-dimension="S2">Ralsei is Kris' shadow / Ralsei is either Kris' shadow or the concept of shadows -> this has to do with Ralsei being the reflection of Kris, shapeshifting into different forms, and... Jungian psychology, where Ralsei is totally unlike the outward layer of Kris.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-tradition="UTDR" value="6878" data-dimension="S2">Ralsei and Flowey share themes / Ralsei and Flowey parallel each other in thematic concepts (not music tracks; motifs; Deltarune) -> it seems this has led some people to think Ralsei is Asriel. {{YouTube|wpX8zsq2ses}}

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6879" data-dimension="S2">Ralsei is in all fiction {{YouTube|XiExphqxuas}} / Ralsei is technically in all of fiction / Ralsei is an archetype or device on the metanarrative level which in Deltarune personifies something that exists in any work of fiction -> this is so cool but I am a little confused how Ralsei would be able to freak out about the mortality of Deltarune if he is actually everywhere shattered across time and space. it's too metanarrative for Ralsei in particular. Kris? Dess? Gaster? sure, they can all be wonky literary analysis metaphors. I'm just not sure Ralsei has anything to hide compared with them

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6880" data-dimension="Z">Wackytown, or, every kids' movie ever (2017 tumblr video) [https://archive.is/rlF7g]
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6881" data-dimension="Z"><cite>The Angry Birds Movie</cite>

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6882" data-dimension="S">determination (Undertale) / Determination (Undertale) / DT (abbreviation; Undertale) 
Q5091 determination + Undertale = this
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6883" data-dimension="S">fate (Deltarune)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6884" data-dimension="S">power (Deltarune) / Power (Deltarune)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6885" data-dimension="S">standing back up (Dragon Ball)
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6886">??
{{li|start=y|I=S1/Fy|class=field_horror element_empty|Q=68,87|Q2=6887}}Dess and the incident / ([[User:RD/9k/Q68,87|9k]])

</li><li class="field_mdem" value="6888" data-dimension="S2">Columbus Industries conjecture / Spain and Columbus can conquer any nation or land if they spend enough money and try enough times / if Spain and Columbus were a startup, their success is proportional to how much money or how great of assets they start with and how many things they try -> Wackytown fallacy + possible mathematical equation = Columbus Industries conjecture. the sinister framing of this is on purpose. all too many people regard businesses as inherently good as long as they don't contain "bad people", and simply ask, well how do I succeed? and here's your answer. [[E:If you exist at the expense of others, there's always hope|you can succeed at anything]] if you burn enough money, time, linked social graphs of people, useful political connections, goodwill, and collateral damage. all you have to do is have enough money or people to try the thing enough times. 
what really gets me about [[:Category:Existentialist-Structuralist tradition ontology|Existentialism]] is this. for normal people it's overwhelmingly intuitive to believe that [[E:Nothing should be done unless everybody considers it wonderful|Nothing should be done unless everybody considers it wonderful]]. they even apply this to science, arguing to varying degrees of success that animal testing is unnecessary, or more dubiously that there are some things it is inherently unethical to probe and understand with science because science is a tool of domination, and liberation can only be unscientific. but like, once everyone has been arguing this all the time. then Artists show up and are like I surely deserve to succeed just because I'm an Artist, what are ends and means, surely any means can justify my wonderful ends. welcome to Columbus Industries. if you would only burn enough money you can make the world do whatever you want it to.

</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="6889" data-dimension="S2">Trying hard enough enough times always makes money / Individuals having skills or good ideas always leads to making money with enough time and attempts / Wackytown fallacy (specifically in reference to jobs or investments and money) -> the more people are born and compete for jobs as more unique products exist the less true this gets. MDem entry 4.4/2050 baxter

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6890" data-dimension="S2">Many attempts equal success / Wackytown fallacy (children's stories) / whoops there goes another rubbertree plant (song lyric, {{article|High Hopes}}) / 狡兔三窟 (jiǎo tù sān kū, A cunning rabbit has three burrows) [https://www.bluente.com/blog/chinese-workplace-idioms-thatll-take-you-far-in-your-career] / 半途而废 (bàn tú ér fèi, Giving up halfway) [https://www.bluente.com/blog/chinese-workplace-idioms-thatll-take-you-far-in-your-career] / 水滴石穿 (shuǐ dī shí chuān, Dripping water wears through stone) [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/水滴石穿] -> the more general version of the Wacktown fallacy as it actually appears in kids' movies, rather than as it appears among the directors and writers who create them. "Rudolph was useful" is the Wackytown fallacy applied to specific individuals in a "biographical" way. this is the more general notion of it applying widely across a fictional society or multiple works of fiction. 
this feels so omnipresent in Liberal capitalist and Existentialist-Structuralist philosophy that it almost needs to be turned into a proverb, it needs a nice little phrase that's as repeatable as a Chinese 4-character idiom or something. I looked up a couple. I haven't found a totally satisfactory one but I'll think of something eventually. 
"水滴石穿" seems more applicable to quantity transforming into quality actually. some books, in this very Aristotelian tone, use it in the context of tiny wounds to an empire being an offense to justice [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/水滴石穿]

</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="6891" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:Q6891|Diversity should be accepted because it's useful]] / Being different is okay only when you're useful / Red (Angry Birds) is useful to society because he's different in the perfect way -> the proposition people pick out and regard with much confusion when they're actually looking at the Wackytown fallacy. this is more a subjective thing than an error because you probably find this proposition some places too.
</li><li value="6892" data-remark="yaku ni (tatsu)" class="field_exstruct" data-dimension="S">[[Ontology:Q6892|Rudolph was useful]] -> plot motif in Christmas movies or similar fictional works when a character supposedly finds acceptance for being different but it falls flat. "Rudolph was useful" is a local joke in the United States about misunderstandings that happened somewhere between Japanese speakers attempting to translate the Rudolph song and Japanese students trying to make sense of the translation. we think the bigger part of the misunderstanding occurred the second time around, as "役に立つ" can be a perfectly positive and complimentary thing to say in the moment, similar to "a towel comes in handy wherever you go", and not very similar to the flat and uncaring connotation of "was useful".
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6893">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6894">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6895">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6896">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6897">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6898">??
</li><li class="field_exstruct" data-tradition="LR, MX" value="6899" data-dimension="S2">Uniting against the Wackytown fallacy is progress / It is progressive to unite people against the Wackytown fallacy (Liberal-republican framing) / It is the correct direction of history to unite people against the Wackytown fallacy (meta-Marxist framing) -> this is one of the very few things where I genuinely feel like Communists and anarchists can safely come together behind it even if they have totally different justifications for why it's bad. it's just so obvious this thing is bad that there's nearly no way anarchists can complicate it and screw things up.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6900" data-dimension="S">Rankin-Bass reindeer -> you know it: the baby "reindeer" that is so overly stylized it looks like a white-tailed deer. 
to be fair: this is closer to being accurate to European reindeer than North American ones. but the people who made the movies were not from Europe...

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6901" data-dimension="Z">Deltarune Chapter 1
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6902" data-dimension="Z">Deltarune Chapter 2
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6903" data-dimension="Z">Deltarune Chapter 3
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6904" data-dimension="Z">Deltarune Chapter 4
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6905" data-dimension="Z">Deltarune Chapter 5 (unreleased)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6906" data-dimension="Z">Deltarune Chapter 6 (unreleased)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6907" data-dimension="Z">Deltarune Chapter 7 (unreleased)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6908" data-dimension="S">further Deltarune chapters / Deltarune chapter 0 -> Deltarune chapters which are not listed on the chapter select screen. currently hypothetical.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6909" data-dimension="S">Deltarune chapter and save menus -> filling a slot with something slightly important.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6910" data-dimension="S">Deltarune credits sequence -> we can strongly guess there will be one looking at Undertale and the "gallery" window. whether it's at all important is the question. it might not be important at all. or there might be exactly one interesting credits presentation trope that makes it not totally useless to code here.
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6911" data-dimension="S">Spamton sweepstakes / Noelle blog entries -> dark things happen in basically all these blog entries so they get the horror swatch.

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6912" data-dimension="S">December Holiday / Dess Holiday (Deltarune)
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6913" data-dimension="S2">More darkness means more forgotten -> this is likely true. all Darkners including the Titans are the embodiment of something from the Light World. this is a basic rule of [[E:superstructural fantasy world|superstructural fantasy worlds]] in general — even in Toy Story it's trivially true that when the toys come alive all the things alive will have been physical toys. the Titans are not an ordinary object. Image_Friend is nothing but the shadows in a room, or a hallucination when you see nothing at all. presumably Kris, Susie, and Noelle's rooms equally; the character is shown appearing in Susie's room but thematically associated with Noelle, and then appears in a secret game Kris can find. so Image_Friend is very psychological in nature, {{em|sort of}} having a object in the shadows but mostly being this odd artifact of memories Kris and Noelle definitely have that is now causing problems (?? or unease) for other people. Susie might not have known about Image_Friend before, but it's like when she steps into this relationship she has to learn — oh god, I think that's what {{TTS|tts=Rules Card|Rouxls Kaard}} means, that's it.

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6914" data-dimension="S">[https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-914 SCP-914] "The Clockworks"
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6915" data-dimension="S">objectification (Deltarune) -> important theme for Ralsei, Darkners, Noelle.
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6916">??

</li><li class="field_mdem" data-tradition="ES, MX" value="6917" data-dimension="S2">It should never be easy to quit fast / "Never {{censor|f|ucking|tts2=fucking}} quit" -> this is some really interesting advice. hand it to Goku, he'll probably succeed. hand it to a business, it's a real toss-up if will work out. hand it to Deng Xiaoping, he will make China functional for the next century. hand it to Marxist theorists, and if they really truly follow it they'll eventually invent Molecular Marxisms. the question becomes: why is it so acceptable to give up? why do we do that? if we just stopped giving up, and nobody ever "retired" from being a Marxist, where would we be? we have to first declare that making a conscious decision to retreat into your hole and only write books and {{em|never}} come out and do anything else counts as retirement no matter how many books you write. and forming a tiny party whose activities are equivalent to a single individual writing useless books is also retirement. there is at least some teeny tiny step of being proactive above writing books -- I would hypothesize that this minimal step is something like getting all the world's theorists to actually engage in peer review and build up consensuses and start really slamming bogus books that can't somehow be substantiated as a legitimate choice of named Marxism per country characteristics, to the point that "revisionism" is genuinely not a bunch of local opinions and the whole world agrees on a concept of "pseudo-Marxism" in the same sense as "pseudoscience". to the point that Trotskyists recognize revisionism in mainstream Marxism-Leninism, and mainstream Marxist-Leninists recognize revisionism in Trotskyism and they each try to push {{em|each other}} to be better at realizing {{em|each other's}} particular [[redlink|named-Marxism-specific country characteristics]] toward the end of closing the gap between different Marxisms and creating some kind of [[E:international conference structure|singular]] or [[E:anarchy (meta-Marxism)|plural]] unity of Marxisms. 
we have to first acknowledge that under these conditions there are barriers to leaving retirement. society in general is ruled by various Filaments, as unintentionally explained by this book, so it is always hard to pierce through them, because the Filaments will always be like "human human best-human authentic connection community friendship friendship relationship", the only [[E:shovel dream|shovel dream]] they can generate, even as the very same Filaments can easily bake in ignorance and oppression and toxic positivity and these super arbitrary definitions of who is "really" an ideal member of a particular fanbase or workplace or charity to where society becomes divided into a sea of "real humans" who get into Networks specifically by humaning better and a sea of "garbage humans" who are rejected as human for reasons far more arbitrary than any of the Filament wants to admit. the threat of "systemic problems" is always concealed in the state of "fun, happy Community" where they are not yet apparent, which is what truly entrenches all the bad stuff once it turns up; toxic systems emerge directly from sociality itself and people's desire to have friends or very hard-won connections that got them into a position over years and years and years, and their inability to let go of Progress On Building Community. in industrial societies Communism is always stuck fighting against sociality, as people are much more greatly connected by a spiderweb of arbitrary individual relationships than by any actual class subpopulation or even any named oppression. every attempt to organize people tears at the blue spiderweb and even by regular people will sometimes be perceived as an attack. at the same time, sociality leads people to some really dumb things, like thinking that [[E:protest brain|being in a protest]] one day or one month will already have changed the next five to ten years. this is the "opening" or "crisis" that Trotskyists and Western-Marxists keep coveting. it isn't simply the inability to see the power of the bourgeoisie, it's the inability to realize society runs on networkisms and for a movement to truly survive that you have to throw the whole rest of your life and entire existence into each year potentially building some named Marxism of the future, and more than that, you can't just get killed in a conflict and significant numbers of theorists have to actually survive. permanent revolution has become permanent cold-war. we're looking at something more like whole seas of people informally seceding and building central party-nations that actually are forced to exist alongside islands of capitalism in the same country, and their success is truly based on whether they out-survive the blue islands and thus get people kicked out of the blue islands into nothingness to join the red islands. that's looking at it as Marxism-Dengism. some might find Marxism-Trotskyism more fun, because they can build red Lattices around the blue islands joining each region of Lattices across the world at whatever speed and do something more similar to traditional Leninist party activity. the only catch is that they have to be smart enough to realize that socialism in one country is an inevitable stage within Trotskyist transition if only at the level of creating the central party of each country-region and making it truly effective to the point it becomes okay to think bigger. 
notes: A) this motif is for when you actually try the same thing multiple times and refine it, excluding the notion of arbitrarily switching to different things just to succeed. it said that in the book, that even in the context of "networking" it wasn't about "failing faster". B) I wanted to put this on 6N92 but with those taken, 6N17 is the next best thing

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6920">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6925">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6930">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6935">??

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6940">??
</li><li class="field_horror" data-qid="69,41" value="6941" data-dimension="S">the impending horror of history / ([[User:RD/9k/Q7092|9k]])

</li><li class="number_empty" value="6945">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6950">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6955">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6960">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6961">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6962">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6963">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6964">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6965">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6966">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6967">??

{{li|I=S1/ES|Q=69,68|Q2=6968}}other character than Garfield saying "I hate Mondays"

</li><li data-qid="69,69" value="6969" class="field_internal" data-dimension="S">unsuitable Item label -> an Item for softly enforcing the policy that there are certain things that cannot be in outward-facing Item labels. whenever somebody might make a badly-worded Item label like "[[E:Every ideology has a form of direct action|Lynching is a form of direct action]]", you redirect it to this so it can't practically be used to share or link Items.

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6970" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Garfield</cite>
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6971" data-dimension="S">John Arbuckle (character)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6972" data-dimension="S">Garfield (character)
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6973" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Garfield minus Garfield</cite> -> Garfield + absence.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6974" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6975" data-dimension="S"><cite>The Secret of Platform 13</cite> (Ibbotson 1994) -> somebody pointed out that this one came before Harry Potter and I laughed. good catch.

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6976" data-dimension="S">planet drool [https://theadventuresofsharkboyandlavagirl.fandom.com/wiki/Planet_Drool] -> the motif of a planet ruled by children. showed up in <cite>Sharkboy and Lavagirl</cite> before appearing in <cite>Growing Around</cite>
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6977" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Sharkboy and Lavagirl</cite> / <cite>The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl</cite> (2005) -> motifs: superstructural fantasy world
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6978" data-dimension="Z"><cite>We Can Be Heroes</cite> (2020)

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="6979" data-dimension="S">Flip-flopped (Shorty McShort Shorts) -> the precursor to <cite>Growing Around</cite>. not a lot of thought was put into it, it was primarily a visual gag. really, MrEnter did a decent job taking this short specifically and making there actually be a qualitative differerence between children in charge and adults in charge. whether the difference he chose to portray actually makes any sense or not is another question.
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6980" data-dimension="Z"><cite>[[E:Q69,80|Growing Around]]</cite> (unreleased series with ~1 published book)
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6981" data-dimension="Z"><cite>[[E:Q69,81|Growing Around: Party Panic]]</cite> (2016,2018)
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6982" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Growing Around: The Official Comic</cite> [https://www.deviantart.com/nayolfa/art/Growing-around-The-Official-Comic-P1-1005310608] -> team member accuses Tory boss obsessed with 9/11 of catering to "audience of progressives"? what. remove this entry if the comic isn't finished on par with the book. can't check right now
</li><li class="field_ML" value="6983" data-dimension="S2">[[E:Q69,83|In Soviet Russia, adults rule you]] (<cite>Growing Around</cite>) -> the claim that in the <cite>Growing Around</cite> universe, adults invented Communism and had to be defeated specifically on the logic that kids being in charge is Freedom. kids assert that them being in charge of the world is just the "tent of freedom poles" principle and adults wanting to take down their system of creativity and ideals are just tyrannical dictators. adults believe in Materialism, kids believe in Idealism, kids somehow suppress the adults with the power they mysteriously had from the beginning and gloat about how only when people believe in everyone having freedom and having freedom separately in parallel all as individuals can the world function properly, complete with a bunch of dubious or made-up information about their version of the French Revolution. their "history" sounds like one of those very simple nonfiction picture books you find at a library, but maybe phrased a little sillier.
</li><li class="field_horror" value="6984" data-dimension="S2"><cite>Growing Around</cite> is a dystopia
</li><li class="field_anarchy" value="6985" data-dimension="S2"><cite>Growing Around</cite> will end with a defector / <cite>Growing Around</cite> will end with a single pair of adults running away and raising a kid normally -> the one really really good thing about <cite>Growing Around</cite> is that it comes across as so horrifying to adults that it prompts reviewers to imagine societal transitions. I love that. the theories of transition usually aren't high quality, but you know, in a time where Marxism has still never successfully become un-forbidden and nobody ever thinks about transitions in real-world society it still is actually making people think. 
thought 2: this theory sounds almost identical to the ending of <cite>The Giver</cite>. I suppose I will label this anarchism because of that association.
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6986">??
</li><li data-qid="69,87" value="6987" class="field_exstruct" data-tradition="HAS" data-dimension="S">childism (Pierce 1975) -> I didn't know this was an actual motif considered by psychiatrists. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Middlebrook_Pierce] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childism] okay. I guess there's a real set of labels for the movement that happened in Mr Enter's cartoon then. it's a fictional movement against childism. or to put it fully accurately, a utopia that jumps over having to think about one.
</li><li class="number_empty" value="6988">??

</li><li class="field_ML" data-qid="69,89" value="6989" data-dimension="M3">How would Growing Around be affected by 9/11? / ([[User:RD/9k/Q3962|9k]])

</li><li class="field_horror" value="6990" data-dimension="S"><cite>The Hunger Games</cite>
</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="6991" data-dimension="S">Iraq as horror story -> the seeming premise of <cite>The Hunger Games</cite>. author sees war journalism and then reality show. author fails to think about the existence of different countries and realize the programs are taking place in separate countries, and basically imagines them both happening in Iraq. author subconsciously decides to turn United States into Iraq to show how horrifying the existence of Iraq is. outside the author's awareness, it turns out Iraq is horrifyng largely because it has been trying to tear into separate kingdoms sometimes trying to be global empires, and the United States has basically been doing exactly the same thing with a little less violence — but only a little.
</li><li class="field_mdem" value="6992" data-dimension="S2">Yugoslavia was incorrectly divided -> I was going to put "Iraq might be incorrectly divided", but I realized that even with uncertainty in it that might be too strong a statement with too confident a sound to it. so we'll stick to something which is a known fact. 
Slovenia was in this region? this... explains some things. like of course if Slovenia wasn't unified into a single coherent nationality the way the overall Soviet Union temporarily was or any of the union republics were, it would be hard to get Slovenians to believe in Bolshevism because they're preoccupied with the ethnic rifts inside the country that are ultimately going to force it into multiple countries. that is part of the reason you get early-existentialism joined to schizoanalysis and Foucauldianism and all these "freedom" and "The Subject" people seem to so easily attach themselves to theories of people forming into countable cultures that join and separate and burst out of bigger things as countable cultural identities but where people often miscalculate and think particular identities are inherently slated to be friends just because they're identities.
</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="6993" data-dimension="S">{{book|The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes}} (2020)
</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="6994" data-dimension="S">{{book|Sunrise on the Reaping}} (2025)
</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="6995" data-dimension="S">{{book|The Hunger Games}} (2008)
</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="6996" data-dimension="S">{{book|Catching Fire}} (2009)
</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="6997" data-dimension="S">{{book|Mockingjay}} (2010)
</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="6998" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="6999" data-dimension="S">??

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7000" data-dimension="S">mythical ball of crowning / mythical object representing power / Dragon Balls (generic) / big Dragon Ball (generic) / chamber of sealed wishes (<cite>Wish</cite>) -> this is the use of either a particular artifact or the concept of wishes to represent abstract political power in the form of one particular person getting to specifically be the person who exerts Free Will. it's arguable Disney's <cite>Wish</cite> used this same motif in a very slightly different form.

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7001">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7002">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7003">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7004">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7005">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7006">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7007">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7008">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7009">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7010">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7011">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7012">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7013">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7014">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7015">??

</li><li class="field_trotsky" data-remark="site's stated alignment, look closely" value="7016">[[Ontology:Q7016|Marxists Internet Archive]]
</li><li value="7017" class="field_ML">Moscow: Progress Publishers
</li><li value="7018" class="field_ML">Beijing: Foreign Languages Press
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7019">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7020">??
</li><li class="field_ML" value="7021">Kersplebedeb
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7030">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7035">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7040">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7041">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7042">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7043">??

{{li|I=S1/MX/IV|Q=70,43|Q2=7043}}meta-Marxism? that's just Trotskyism / meta-Marxism? but this is just Trotskyism / ({{9k|RD/Q7044}})
{{li|I=S1/MX/ML|Q=70,44|Q2=7044}}meta-Marxism? that's just Stalinism / your meta-Marxism is literally just Stalinism / ({{9k|RD/Q7044}})

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7045">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7046">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7047">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7048">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7049">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7050">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7052">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7055">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7060">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7065">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7070">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7075">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7076">??
</li><li class="field_mdem" data-tradition="MX onto IV" data-qid="70,77" value="7077" data-dimension="M3">Would a Trotskyist United States be aware of the need to create factories, or would it keep insisting that Careerists are "the proletariat" and bashing China and Vietnam for having factories with the typical "Stalinist mono-structures are slavery", "being part of a nationality is slavery" tropes? / ([[User:RD/9k/Q70,80|9k]])
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7078">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7079">??
</li><li class="field_trotsky" data-tradition="MX onto IV" data-qid="70,80" value="7080" data-dimension="S">Trotsky deserting progressive cause (Trotskyist abandoning; forsaking; motif) / ([[User:RD/9k/Q7080|9k]])
</li><li class="field_mdem" data-qid="70,81" value="7081" data-dimension="S2">If Black Panthers succeed Trotsky abandons them / ([[User:RD/9k/Q7080|9k]])
</li><li class="field_mdem" data-qid="70,82" value="7082" data-dimension="S2">If LGBT+ support Stalin, Trotsky abandons them (gay; transgender; hypothetical scenario) / ([[User:RD/9k/Q7080|9k]])

</li><li class="field_trotsky" value="7083" data-dimension="S2">??
</li><li class="field_trotsky" value="7084" data-dimension="S2">??
</li><li class="field_trotsky" value="7085" data-dimension="S2">??
</li><li class="field_trotsky" value="7086" data-dimension="S2">??
</li><li class="field_trotsky" value="7087" data-dimension="S2">??

</li><li class="field_trotsky" data-qid="70,88" value="7088" data-remark="being an anticommunist in Germany is pretty bad so 88 can mean that, why not" data-dimension="S2">Trotsky deserting East Germany / Trotskyist deserting East Germany / ([[User:RD/9k/Q7080|9k]])
</li><li class="field_trotsky" value="7089" data-dimension="S2">??

</li><li class="field_ML" data-qid="70,90" value="7090" data-dimension="S">world where the {{TTS|html=abbr|International|International|title=International Workingmen's Association}} is finished (Communist International; completed; motif) / ([[User:RD/9k/Q7092|9k]])
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7091" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li data-qid="70,92" value="7092" class="field_ML" data-dimension="S">Ironblood setting / ([[User:RD/9k/Q7092|9k]])
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="70,93" value="7093" data-dimension="Z">Aurora system / ([[User:RD/9k/Q7092|9k]])
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7094">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7095">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7096">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7097">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7098">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7099">??

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7100">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7110">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7120">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7138" data-remark="omanyte" data-dimension="Z">[https://helixchamber.com/ Helix Chamber]
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7140">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7150">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7160">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7170">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7180">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7190">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7200">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7210">??

</li><li class="field_ML" data-qid="72,23" value="7223" data-dimension="S">Communist Berdly
</li><li class="field_ML" data-qid="72,24" value="7224" data-dimension="S">Communist Noelle -> due to being really unattested, this is gonna be one of those motifs that has paragraphs and paragraphs on the 9k pages and nothing on the ontology page, like maybe one sentence. I'm fine with that. the rules are that only attested stuff is supposed to remain on ontology pages, but also that if you can write a sentence dryly describing what something is and it makes intuitive sense as a combination of other concepts with clear sources at the bottom, it's fine.

</li><li class="field_ML" data-tradition="ML / Communist aesthetics" data-qid="72,25" value="7225" data-dimension="S">Communist Christmas carols (East Germany) / East German Christmas carols / "The people's flag is deepest red", to the tune of "O Tanenbaum" -> this has been one of my favorite historical facts ever since the moment I learned about it and I just have not been able to forget it. I guess it helps that as a kid I had a year where I hyperfixated on Christmas carols and wanted to know about all of them and was attempting to learn to play them on instruments, and so it's like, I'm a little overjoyed to have a dumb excuse to get obsessed with Christmas carols again, also in a form that's potentially improved. there are so many things I love about this

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7230">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7240">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7250">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7260">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7270">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7271" data-dimension="S2">Vegeta IV is worse than Vegeta III
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7272" data-dimension="S2">Vegeta III is worse than Vegeta IV -> this is the one I think was true, although both become irrelevant when the series reboots into Super
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7273" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7274" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7275" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7276" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7277" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7278" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7279" data-dimension="S">??

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7280" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7281" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7282" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7283" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7284" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7285" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7286" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7287" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7288" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7289" data-dimension="S">??

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7290" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7291" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7292" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7293" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7294" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7295" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7296" data-dimension="S">??

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7297" data-dimension="S">??
{{li|I=S1/DFy|Q=72,98|Q2=7298}}forced Weird Route (Deltarune fanbase) / ({{9k|RD/Q72,98}})
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7299">??

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7300">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7301">Android 1
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7302">Android 2
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7303">Android 3
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7304">Android 4
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7305">Android 5
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7306">Android 6
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7307">Android 7
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7308">Android 8
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7309">Android 9
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7310">Android 10
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7311">Android 11
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7312">Android 12
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7313">Android 13
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7314">Android 14
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7315">Android 15
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7316">Android 16
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7317">Android 17
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7318">Android 18
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7319">Android 19
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7320">Android 20
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7321">Android 21
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7322">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7323">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7324">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7325">Android 25
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7326">Android 26
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7327">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7328">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7329">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7330">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7331">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7332">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7333">Android 33
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7334">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7335" data-dimension="Z"><cite>That time I got reincarnated as Yamcha</cite>
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7336">Future Trunks timeline
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7337">Trunks (<cite>Dragon Ball</cite>)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7338">Trunks' sword -> is it different from Z sword?
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7339">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7340">??

</li><li class="field_horror" value="7341" data-dimension="S">SCP-9341 [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-9341] / D-9341 Benjamin Oliver Walker {{YouTube|qKPFr4ka3Pk}}: runs narratively parallel to - Kris Dreemur - reason - possessed by player in occult ritual

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7342">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7343">??
</li><li class="field_ML" data-tradition="MX onto IV" value="7344" data-dimension="S2">Trotskyism is possible in Dragon Ball -> <cite>MDem</cite> 5.1. still amusing, still very thought-provoking.
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7345">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7346">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7347" data-dimension="S">15-generations-prior god-of-worlds
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7348" data-dimension="S">Z sword (<cite>Dragon Ball</cite>)
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7349">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7350">??

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7400">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7401">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7402">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7403">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7404">Super Saiyan 4 (<cite>GT</cite>)
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7410">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7411">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7412">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7413">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7414">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7415">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7416">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7417">Android 17 (<cite>GT</cite>)
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7418">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7419">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7420">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7421">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7422">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7423">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7424">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7425">??

</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-tradition="Fy" data-qid="74,26" value="7426" data-dimension="Z">{{game|Super Smash Bros.}} (series) 
Super Smash Bros. + Marxism / mainstream Marxism-Leninism / Trotskyism / Juche-socialism = meta-Marxism

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7430">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7440">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7450">??

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7500" data-dimension="S0"><cite>Wings of Fire</cite> prequels
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7501" data-dimension="S">empire plant -> I forget its name but that's what it is
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7502" data-dimension="S">the king I can't remember
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7503" data-dimension="S">Freedom
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7504" data-dimension="S">castle lord guy
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7505" data-dimension="S">Sky the SkyWing
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7506" data-dimension="S">Wren -> until I looked it up I really couldn't remember her name and thought she was named after a plant like several other characters in that book
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7507" data-dimension="S">Darkstalker -> there's a lot to say about Darkstalker and narrative parallels. the funniest one is his parallel to <cite>Death Note</cite>. the most unexpected one is his parallel to the description of LV in Undertale.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7508" data-dimension="S">Clearsight
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7509" data-dimension="S">Book of Clearsight
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7510" data-dimension="Z">[[Ontology:Q7510|<cite>Dragonslayer</cite>]]
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7511" data-dimension="Z">[[Ontology:Q7511|<cite>Darkstalker</cite>]]
</li><li value="7512" data-remark="publication date" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="Z">[[Ontology:Q7512|<cite>Wings of Fire</cite> series]]
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7513" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Warriors</cite> series
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7514" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Guardians of Ga'Hoole</cite> series
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7515" data-dimension="Z"><cite>One for Sorrow, Two for Joy</cite>

</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-qid="75,16" value="7516" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Kimba the White Lion</cite> / <cite>Jungle Emperor Leo</cite> / ([[User:RD/9k/Q75,16|9k]]) -> this show was great for its treatment of animal civilization, but the weird modernist approach to storytelling and portraying other countries was some of the most imperialist {{censor|shit}} I have seen in a cartoon

{{li|I=S1/DFy|class=field_fantasy field_horror element_empty|Q=75,17|Q2=7517}}demiurge as antagonist / demiurge as big bad -> cramming Gaster in here so I don't have to think too hard about what dragons have to do with Communist revolution. arguably, the concept of wishes in Deltarune breaking through reality and 'becoming god' is loosely connected to the concept of wishes in Wings of Fire if not very closely

{{li|I=Z1/DFy|Q=75,18|Q2=7518}}{{book|Dawn of the Dragons}} / ([[EC:9k/RD/Q75,19|9k]])
{{li|I=Z1/DFy|Q=75,19|Q2=7519}}{{book|New Dragon City}} / ([[EC:9k/RD/Q75,19|9k]])

{{li|I=Z1/Fy|Q=75,20|Q2=7520}}{{film|The Lion King}}
{{li|I=Z1/Fy|Q=75,21|Q2=7521}}{{film|The Lion Guard}}
{{li|I=Z1/Fy|Q=75,22|Q2=7522}}{{book|Bravelands}}
{{li|I=Z1/Fy|Q=75,24|Q2=7524}}{{film|My Pride}}
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7524">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7525">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7526">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7527">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7528">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7529">??

</li><li data-qid="75,32" value="7532" data-remark="machiavelli" data-dimension="S">there is only power and those who seek it -> appears in: Harry Potter
</li><li class="number_empty">??

</li><li class="field_horror" value="7599" data-dimension="S">the Raskolnikov -> I've seen three books with a Raskolnikov in them. <cite>Crime and Punishment</cite> itself. <cite>Death Note</cite>. <cite>The 13th Tribe</cite>, which is supposedly about a whole tiny group of Raskolnikovs.

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7600" data-dimension="Z">Epic of Gilgamesh
</li><li class="field_horror" value="7601" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Crime and Punishment</cite> -> the most notable thing about this book to me is that it was loosely adapted to create <cite>Death Note</cite>.
</li><li class="field_horror" value="7602" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Death Note</cite>
</li><li class="field_horror" value="7603" data-dimension="Z">Death Note (artifact)
</li><li class="field_horror" value="7604" data-dimension="Z">animus scroll (Wings of Fire)
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7605">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7606">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7607">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7608">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7609">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7610" data-remark="7700" data-dimension="S">[[Ontology:Q7610|mistaken quest to steal immortality from the gods]]
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7611">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7612">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="7613" data-dimension="S">breaking the third wall / unseen events happening beyond third wall / zooming out a work of fiction to see other things happening 
appears in: SCP-2614, "openheart"
</li><li value="7614" class="field_horror" data-dimension="S">SCP-2614 "seemingly normal copy of The Sopranos" [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2614]
</li><li class="field_horror" value="7615" data-dimension="S">fifth wall [https://medium.com/@thefifthwall2000/will-we-ever-break-the-fifth-wall-9254852683e7] -> this has too many definitions. I wish it had a single definition. 
definition zero: arbitrary distinctions made in theater. definition one: breaking the fourth wall of the audience's reality and suggesting it is created. definition two: really shattering the fourth wall so that fictional entities can perceive reality in the sense that real people do. there are bound to be some more.

</li><li value="7616" class="field_fantasy"><cite>[[Ontology:Q7616|Undertale]]</cite>
</li><li value="7617" class="field_fantasy"><cite>[[Ontology:Q7617|Deltarune]]</cite>

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7618">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7619">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7620">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7625">??

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=76,30|Q2=7630}}??
{{li|I=F2/MX/STM|Q=76,31|Q2=7631}}Trotskyism is a wormhole / ({{9k|RD/Q66}})
{{li|I=S2/MX/IV|Q=76,32|Q2=7632}}Why hasn't time travel ever played a part in politics? / ({{9k|RD/Q66}})

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7633">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7634">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7635">??

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7640">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7645">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7650">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7651">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7652">??

</li><li class="field_ML" value="7653" data-remark="Fennekin" data-dimension="S">Kolchak and Fennekin -> one of those motifs I didn't actually know the definition of at the moment I thought of the phrase and just put down because it was funny. um. this is the motif of Pokémon stories referencing the history of workers' states. something that I would never expect to happen in official {{book|Pokémon}} media but you know, motifs can be whatever even if they're entirely hypothetical. as long as in reference to works and motifs that already exist you can fully imagine what they'd look like if they did exist.

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7654" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7655" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7656" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7657" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7658" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7659" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7660" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7661" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7662" data-dimension="S">SCP-6662 [https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-6662] -> lost cereal mascot seeking "own destination"
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7663" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7664" data-dimension="S">??

</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7665" data-dimension="S">Mx. Satan / Mr. Satan (motif) / White Witch (motif) -> when a character in a story is asserted to be a regular character within a world and not necessarily supernatural in the sense of having anything to do with gods, even the fictional gods of that secular fantasy narrative etc, but is really really clearly paralleling a Satan/antichrist narrative as you would see in the Christian bible. Mr. Satan - trope namer; ice queen (Narnia). really can be any gender.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7666" data-dimension="F2">The enemy of one entity is the enemy of all humankind / The world only has one opposer / Satan fallacy -> fallacy best known in the Christian Bible, but repeated in many fantasy books. this statement fails the [[Ontology:Q2944|Trotsky model]] hard. if you think this statement could ever be true, then it could hypothetically be true that the enemy of Stalin's government is the enemy of all humankind. you've gotta put Trotsky to death to save Soviet civilization. and that's a pretty big contradiction to have in your philosophy for all First World countries. Trotsky is sacred. but if there's any such thing as Bible-style Good and Evil, he's done. which thing is correct? you can't change the Soviet Union to Liberalism to make the problem easier, you have to answer the moral conundrum exactly as it is.

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7667" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7668" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7669" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7670" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7671" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7672" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7673" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7674" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7675" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7676" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7677" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7678" data-dimension="S">??

{{li|I=S2/AS|Q=76,79|Q2=7679}}Russians are an idea / ([[EC:9k/RD/Q7681|9k]])
{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=76,80|Q2=7680}}Russians are a finite resource / ([[EC:9k/RD/Q7681|9k]])
{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=76,81|Q2=7681}}Russians are shovels before dreams / Russians are not an abstract concept ... / ロシア人は夢より{{TTS|銕鍬|tts=てっしょう|E=Q21,09}} / ([[EC:9k/RD/Q7681|9k]])

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7682" data-dimension="S">??

</li><li class="field_mdem" value="7683" data-dimension="M3">Would a Russia made of reactionaries deserve sovereignty? (composed of reactionaries; consisting only or solely of conservative bigots) / If every Russian is reactionary, do they deserve a government? / If every Russian was a reactionary, would it be acceptable for people in another country to assist in a plan to gut Russia of its government, install leaders chosen to interface well with the United States or Europe, and turn it into a client state? (Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, etc; insert Third World nationality which has been "[[E:assigned liberal at birth|assigned conservative at birth]]"; insert country which has literally undergone this) -> this is a question to catch anarchist and center-Liberal Idealists that think they're "postcolonial" but by any reasonable Materialist definition are passively committing [[Term:exocolonialism|exocolonialism]] and are actually colonial. only if you say "no" can you genuinely have a postcolonial theory. if you say "yes", you can be an anarchist, Trotskyist, or Existentialist, but you are an imperialist. it is true that anyone who answers "no" to this question has a new contradiction to answer in what it's acceptable to do to a misbehaving country other than war or client state, but this is still a critical question that separates Marxism from Liberal-republicanism. 
Nazi Germany is a very special edge case which I will arbitrarily say is not part of this question because it's so difficult; it's a little hard to say what other than war is even possible there. I think it's important to have an answer so people don't get cornered back into this Item, but I think it belongs in its own question or proposition.

</li><li class="field_mdem" value="7684" data-dimension="M3">[[Ontology:Q7684|Would you kill a Russian in order to vote?]] / Would you kill a Russian to receive your voter card? -> you live in an alternate world where every individual in the United States is entitled to a voting license the day they kill a Russian. policies are mostly the same. voting brings anti-discrimination laws, healthcare programs, whatever. but you have to kill someone in Eurasia to get to vote, or to get to tell anyone else to vote. want people to vote for gun control? every one of them has to fly over and shoot a Russian, and then you can have it. the central question of this thought experiment is this: how much is voting worth? what lengths is it worth going to just to preserve voting and the "normal" process of getting people to vote? would people chant "vote Democrat" as loudly if every one of them was required to kill a Russian? what about if voting Democrat really does take a little power away from Tories to create more structural racism and kill Black people? should everyone go kill a Russian just to save Black people from fascism? or is preserving the life of Russians more important than that aim? the only thing about this metaphor that's incoherent to me is how you prove anyone actually killed anyone. uh. maybe there are a limited number of voter licenses, and you'd just take one from Russia and hold it up. or maybe everyone has an ID card which clearly has a flag on it and you'd take that. there may or may not be a system where any country can kill people to issue voter licenses but just as in real life most countries are too afraid to attack the United States. also you equally get a point if you kill a United States Communist and it can be proven in court, even though they deliberately don't have different id card flags. in this world people go to court to prove they have done approved heinous things as well as to prove they're innocent.

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7685" data-dimension="S">??

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=76,86|Q2=7686}}Would you be willing to start a state-supported war in Iraq to establish anarchism? -> I've heard people say that it's okay to use the United States military to defend queer people in Palestine. where does it end? would the easiest way to get anarchism be to just start imperialist wars and punish Third-World countries for having governments? because quite honestly, people are always making excuses saying oh, the United States is so unique, it has to do things this way. but in real life one of the primary distinguishing features of the United States is its military and the way it has slowly tried to monopolize violence across the entire world to outlaw wars and become the world's government. no republic or form of society survives without pleasing U.S. shareholders. so.... I bet you could have all the solarpunk utopias you wanted if you were willing to do enough violence to other countries to make them do exactly what you want and not what you don't want, if you were willing to get other countries to cut off all their oil and food and then radio silence until they go 'small and local'. are you going to live up to the anarchist principle of [[NR:5c/YT/CynicalArtKillingHope26|using the power you have wisely no matter what it is]], or not?

</li><li class="field_nations cw_vriska" value="7687" data-dimension="Z">PragerU / Prager University
</li><li class="field_nations cw_vriska" value="7688" data-dimension="Z">Fox News
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7689" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7690" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li value="7691" class="field_exstruct" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:Q76,91|A bunch of people passing a law can stop all bad guys from ever being bad guys]] -> from a video that will not be named to preserve the integrity of the YouTube community guidelines reporting system. I can't believe people actually think this way about AI in an age of federal war against immigrants. this kind of thinking didn't even successfully knock Trump out of office for committing crimes, he just got impeached and nothing happened. I have started reporting videos like this for White supremacy. they refuse to acknowledge the possibility that billionaires will openly attack the population as material people just because the population tries to pass a law against them they sufficiently don't like or will dismantle components of government anti-Third-World style, they get reported. I don't know if my reports will do anything, but I can try.

</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li data-dimension="S">portraying negative phenomenon without recommending it / ironic phenomenon
</li><li class="field_nations" data-dimension="S">unironic misogyny
</li><li data-dimension="S">ironic misogyny -> see: Dragon Ball
</li><li class="field_exstruct" data-dimension="S">heteronormativity
</li><li data-dimension="S">ironic heteronormativity -> see: Amy Rose, DHMIS "Malcom"
</li><li class="field_exstruct" data-dimension="S">normalcy of relationships proved by Lived Experiences / gay relationships are normal
</li><li class="field_exstruct" data-dimension="S">normalcy of gender proved by Lived Experiences / transgender identity is normal

</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li value="7700" class="field_fantasy"><cite>Journey to the West</cite>
</li><li value="7701" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">golden light
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">fictional religious cosmology -> Girl from the other side; Warriors / StarClan
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">evil god takes form as the earth -> Tiamat; hinduism?
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">cosmic graph struggle
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7735" data-remark="lines up with _Reincarnated as_" data-dimension="S">Yamcha (<cite>Dragon Ball</cite>)
</li><li value="7742" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">understanding the universe
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">karma (spatial rank)
</li><li data-dimension="S">bailing someone out of system
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">bailing someone out of supernatural system
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">bailing someone out of karma
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Saiyans losing tails -> lore significance specifically
</li><li value="7747">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li value="7771" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Sonic the Hedgehog
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7772" data-dimension="S">Tails
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7773" data-dimension="S">Knuckles
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7774" data-dimension="S">Amy Rose -> what is misogyny?
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">(sonic character)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">(sonic character)
</li><li value="7777" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Shadow the Hedgehog
</li><li>[S] MarioCube / MarioCube theory
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Black Arms
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">GUN -> planetary police, planetary army
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Sonic × Shadow / Sonadow -> Group Subject containing: Sonic, Shadow

</li><li class="number_empty" value="7782" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7783" data-dimension="Z">VIZ media
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7784" data-dimension="Z">Bird Studio
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7785" data-dimension="Z">Sega
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7786" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="7787" data-dimension="S">Funtime Shenron -> "eternal dragon" or other character/device that claims to grant you a wish but actually just eats you or takes your dead body. perfectly okay to give this a different primary label, I just think "Funtime Shenlong" is a really funny image
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7788" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7789" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7790" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7791" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7792" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="7793" data-dimension="Z">Steel Wool games
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7794" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7795" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7796" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7797" data-dimension="S">??

</li><li class="field_exstruct" value="7798" data-dimension="S2">[[Ontology:Q7798|Children are composed almost entirely of memories]] / Children are a shard off their parents' memories / Children are a fork off their parents' inner timeline of Lived Experiences -> Lacanianism; Charlie (Fourth Closet); Girl from the other side
</li><li value="7799" class="field_horror">[[Ontology:Q7799|<cite>Girl From the Other Side</cite> (all media)]] / Other Side / Girl from the Outside (typo) / The Outsiders (typo)
</li><li class="number_done field_horror" value="7870">(... [[:Category:Girl From the Other Side ontology|Girl From the Other Side]])
</li><li class="number_empty" value="7900" data-dimension="S">??

</li><li class="field_horror" value="7965" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Ultra Q</cite> (1966)
</li><li value="7966" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Ultraman</cite> (1966)
</li><li value="7967" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Ultraseven</cite> (1967)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7968" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>The Return of Ultraman</cite> (1971) / Ultraman Jack (show)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7969" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Ultraman Ace</cite> (1972)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7970" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Ultraman Taro</cite> (1973)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7971" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>The☆Ultraman</cite> (1979) / Ultraman Joneus (show)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7972" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Ultraman 80</cite> (1980)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="7973" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Ultraman Zearth</cite> (1996)
</li><li value="7974" class="field_trotsky" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Ultraman Leo</cite> (1973) -> features signifier: Leon Trotsky counterpart
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="field_nations" value="7990" data-dimension="Z" data-submitter="Valenoern"><cite>Ultraman Geed</cite> (2017) -> this one was so questionable, it was like, nazi-framed Ultraman show
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li value="7999" class="field_horror"><cite>Slay the Princess</cite>
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li value="8151" class="field_fantasy"><cite>Pokémon</cite> (metaseries)
</li><li value="8152" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li value="8160" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li value="8170" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li value="8180" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li value="8189" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li value="8190" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S" data-submitter="Valenoern">virtual pet form / virtual pet stage / evolution stage / Pokémon kind / Pokédex kind
</li><li value="8191" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S" data-submitter="Valenoern">virtual pet form tier / evolution stage -> examples: Basic Pokémon, Adult Digimon, Dark Void Denjuu
</li><li value="8192" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S" data-submitter="Valenoern">virtual pet species / virtual pet strain / virtual pet form chart (internal mechanic)
</li><li value="8193" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S" data-submitter="Valenoern">reused virtual pet form / virtual pet form switching from one series of forms to another / track switch / trackswitch
</li><li value="8194" class="number_empty">??
</li><li value="8195" class="number_empty">??

</li><li value="8196" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Real World (<cite>Digimon</cite>)
</li><li value="8197" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="Z"><cite>Digimon</cite> (metaseries) 
</li><li value="8198" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Digital World (<cite>Digimon</cite>)
</li><li value="8199" class="number_empty">??
</li><li value="8200" class="number_empty">??

</li><li value="8201" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Numemon
</li><li value="8202" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Vegimon
</li><li value="8203" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Scumon
</li><li value="8204" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Nanimon
</li><li value="8205" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Raremon
</li><li value="8206" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Gekomon

</li><li value="8210" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._1 Agumon]
</li><li value="8211" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Botamon
</li><li value="8212" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Koromon
</li><li value="8213" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Betamon
</li><li value="8214" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Greymon
</li><li value="8215" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Tyrannomon
</li><li value="8216" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Devimon
</li><li value="8217" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Meramon
</li><li value="8218" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">Airdramon
</li><li value="8219" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._1 Seadramon]

</li><li value="8220" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._2 Gabumon]
</li><li value="8221" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Punimon
</li><li value="8222" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Tsunomon / Tunomon
</li><li value="8223" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Elecmon
</li><li value="8224" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Kabuterimon
</li><li value="8225" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Garurumon
</li><li value="8226" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Angemon
</li><li value="8227" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Yukidarumon
</li><li value="8228" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Birdramon
</li><li value="8229" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._2 Whamon]

</li><li value="8230" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._3 Patamon]
</li><li value="8231" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Poyomon
</li><li value="8232" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Tokomon
</li><li value="8233" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Kunemon
</li><li value="8234" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Unimon
</li><li value="8235" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Centaurmon / Centalmon
</li><li value="8236" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Ogremon / Orgemon
</li><li value="8237" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Bakemon
</li><li value="8238" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Shellmon
</li><li value="8239" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._3 Drimogemon]

</li><li value="8240" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._4 Piyomon] / Biyomon (typo; dub)
</li><li value="8241" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Yuramon
</li><li value="8242" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Tanemon
</li><li value="8243" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">{{TTS|tts=Palm-On|Palmon}}
</li><li value="8244" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">{{TTS|tts=Monochrome-On|Monochromon}}
</li><li value="8245" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">{{TTS|tts=Cock-A-Trim-On|Cockatrimon}}
</li><li value="8246" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Leomon
</li><li value="8247" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Kuwagamon
</li><li value="8248" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Coelamon
</li><li value="8249" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._4 Mojyamon]

</li><li value="8250" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._5 Gazimon]
</li><li value="8251" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Zurumon
</li><li value="8252" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Pagumon
</li><li value="8253" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Gizamon
</li><li value="8254" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Dark Tyrannomon
</li><li value="8255" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Cyclomon
</li><li value="8256" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Devidramon
</li><li value="8257" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Tuskmon
</li><li value="8258" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Flymon
</li><li value="8259" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._5 Deltamon]

</li><li value="8260" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._6 Tentomon]
</li><li value="8261" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Bubbmon
</li><li value="8262" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Mochimon
</li><li value="8263" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Otamamon
</li><li value="8264" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li value="8265" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Starmon
</li><li value="8266" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">Tortamon
</li><li value="8267" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li value="8268" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">??
</li><li value="8269" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._5 Shell Numemon] / Karatsuki Numemon

</li><li value="8270" class="number_empty">??
</li><li value="8280" class="number_empty">??
</li><li value="8290" class="number_empty">??
</li><li value="8300" class="number_empty">??
</li><li value="8310" class="number_empty">??

</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._1 Metal Greymon] / MetalGreymon
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._1 Mamemon]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._1 Monzaemon]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._2 Skull Greymon]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._2 Metal Mamemon]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._2 Vademon]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._3 Andromon]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._3 Giromon]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._3 Etemon]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._4 Megadramon]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._4 Piccolomon]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._4 Digitamamon]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._5 Metal Tyrannomon]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._5 Nanomon]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._5 Ex-Tyrannomon]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._6 Atlur Kabuterimon (Blue)]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._6 Tekkamon]
</li><li value="618" class="field_fantasy series_digimon-stage" data-dimension="S">[https://wikimon.net/Digital_Monster_Ver._6 Tonosama Gekomon]

</li><li value="8320" class="number_empty">??
</li><li value="8326" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="Z">neopets
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8327" data-remark="asparagus" data-dimension="S">neopet -> toon-style being, LCD-style being, Subject-style being; medium: virtual pet; only really here to demonstrate categories

</li><li class="number_empty" value="8328">??
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">The Mimic was hiding in every game as Jackie
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">The Mimic was hiding inside Shadow Freddy
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S">MCI victim names / Gabriel (??) / Jeremy (??) / Fritz (??) / Susie (??) / Susie (Return to the Pit)

</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Golden Freddy contains "The one you should not have killed"
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Golden Freddy DOES NOT contain "The one you should not have killed"
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Michael became Old Man Consequences
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Henry became Old Man Consequences
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Ralph became Old Man Consequences -> reliving old traumas in cyclic timeline (FNaF)
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Andrew, Jake, and Stitchwraith are in games / StitchlineGames
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2"><cite>Tales from the Pizzaplex</cite> takes place in games setting / TalesGames
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Michael Afton was protagonist of FNaF 1-4 / The Box contains Foxy mask
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Chica was created during Fredbear era
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Toy animatronics originated from Fall Fest / Toy animatronic characters first shown at carnival
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Mangle came from carnival ride / Mangle is not Funtime Foxy / Mangle first shown at Fall Fest
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">The Mimic copied William Afton to create Glitchtrap
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Every instance of The Mimic is networked together
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Carnie was built out of {{TTS|tts=Lefty|LEFTE}}
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Cassidy died in springlock incident -> red lakes and drowning imagery
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Fazbear Enterprises is responsible for bringing back Fall Fest
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Tiger Rock plush is a counterpart to the books
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Scott is desk guy is Henry / Desk guy counts as Henry because he is based on Scott -> FNaF World
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">{{TTS|tts=Lefty|LEFTE}} contains five dead kids / LefteDCI / LeftyDCI -> [https://retrieve 1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9GYP4jiVlU&t=21000s 2]
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Circus Baby is not William's creation but Henry's revenge on William -> Circus Baby - based on - Charlie; "the baby is not mine"
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">There are actually multiple William Aftons from different timelines
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">[[Philosophical Research:Items/S8915 endings|Candy Cadet is contrasting Circus Baby's plan with Henry's plan]] / Candy Cadet is contrasting Sister Location's worst ending with Pizza Simulator's best ending
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Helpy is a Funtime because the Pizza Place is Henry's version of the Funtimes intended to catch Funtimes
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">William based the Funtime animatronics on {{TTS|tts=Lefty|LEFTE}} -> I think this is slightly "anachronistic" because Baby existed at the time of the fire, but it's definitely fun, and it creates a nice transition between FNaF 6 and The Fourth Closet
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Henry and William are in an arms race / Whenever Henry builds something William appropriates it for evil / When William builds something Henry appropriates it for good
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Michael is "The one you should not have killed" and UCN was Michael's revenge -> this implies that "The vengeful spirit" is not "The one you should not have killed" because the ghost voice and Michael would be two different characters - both tormenting William.
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">William Afton deliberately made the Funtimes able to feel pain in order to harvest Agony -> strangely enough, actually becomes more plausible on Jackie's timeline where the Mimics seem to have pre-dated Freddy Fazbear
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Dave Afton longed for Fredbear to protect him and possession granted him his wish -> {{YouTube|auA0qzjMFZY}}
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">Fazbear Frights is an in-universe series created by Fazbear Entertainment -> different from the concept of Security Breach timeline vs classic timeline; some argue Frights is too insulting to Fazbear Entertainment - {{YouTube|x1zt6I4PMUg}}
</li><li class="field_horror" data-dimension="S2">The mound in Midnight Motorist contains a hidden Twisted One waiting to strike -> man I love the creativity. I don't think there is any serious Silver Eyes in the games before Security Breach but the image is hilarious

</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="8400" data-dimension="S">forest beings turning into trees -> QID references: SCP.
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
{{li|I=S1/Fy/ML|tradition=|Q=84,17|Q2=8417}}republic transitioning to Bolshevism (fiction)
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??

{{li|I=S1/Fy/ML|Q=84,43|Q2=8443}}Vladimir Lenin counterpart / ({{9k|RD/Q84,43}})
{{li|I=S1/Fy/IV|Q=84,44|Q2=8444}}Leon Trotsky counterpart / Emmanuel Goldstein (generic) / Snowball (generic) / Ultraman Leo (generic) / ({{9k|RD/Q84,44}})
{{li|I=S1/Fy/IV|Q=84,45|Q2=8445}}Rosa Luxemburg counterpart / ({{9k|RD/Q84,44}})
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
</li><li class="number_empty">??
{{li|I=S1/Fy/ML|Q=84,53|Q2=8453}}Joseph Stalin counterpart / Napoleon (pig) / ({{9k|RD/Q84,53}})
{{li|I=S1/DX|Q=84,54|Q2=8454}}Pigs (<cite>Animal Farm</cite>)

</li><li class="field_anarchy" value="8455" data-dimension="S">Kropotkin counterpart / Peter Kropotkin counterpart
</li><li class="field_anarchy" value="8456" data-dimension="S">Bakunin counterpart / Mikhail Bakunin counterpart
</li><li class="field_anarchy" value="8457" data-dimension="S">Pete Bakunin / Mike Kropotkin -> the motif of a character which is named after multiple anarchist theorists or at least is a clear reference to multiple anarchist theorists.

</li><li class="number_empty" value="8460">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8470">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8480">??

{{li|I=S1/MN|Q=84,90|Q2=8490}}societal transition (fiction) / social transition (fantasy narratives, science fiction, etc.) / realistic transition from one form of society to another ocurring within fantasy narrative -> for instance, {{book|Animal Farm}} contains one, and series like {{book|Wings of Fire}} keep teasing one. actually seeing a genuine one of these in fiction is rare, so if you want to find one, you should probably look for a transition to either Liberal-republicanism or anarchism. 
you know what? in my mind transitions to nonsensical systems count {{em|sometimes}} as long as the system isn't demonized like in dystopian fiction. {{book|Growing Around}} is metatransitional literature, you heard it here first. while things like {{book|Fairly Oddparents}} are not because the whole society doesn't change to the nonsensical system the work showcases and then just live a bunch of future episodes in that. if a work about the afterlife starts having this bizarre tonal feel to where it seems to almost be assuming that people didn't die and instead went through a Communist revolution, there might be some cases where that counts too.

</li><li class="field_exstruct" data-qid="84,91" value="8491" data-dimension="S">capitalist reversion (fantasy) -> appears in: Animal Farm. possibly other things? the concept of 'breaking down a dystopia' is pretty common so there have to be quite a few existing examples that qualify as this
</li><li class="field_ML" data-qid="84,92" value="8492" data-dimension="S">kingdom transitioning to Bolshevism (fantasy) / fantasy medieval kingdom transitioning to Leninist workers' state -> I have hardly ever seen this, but as I say, it should be much more common if fiction were to follow the same broad patterns as real history. 
I think a big part of it may be the prejudice that stories about kingdoms are supposed to be "magic" and because of that you can't have science, while in the real world Laplace and Gallileo lived in feudal orders, not to mention ancient Persian astronomers and alchemists pre- Islam and pre- wars against Islam. 
again.... the more a kingdom tries to deny it can form a republic, and the more unlikely it is a feudal order is going to turn into a Liberal republic, the more likely you are to get Communism. so when writers are actually going on about how fantasy settings "need" to never change as if they were the nobility in that setting or as if they believe everyone there believes it, it ironically makes it super duper likely you'd get Communism in those kingdoms because the peasants would {{censor|fucking}} hate you for that 
fantasy stories are so funny because they often have technology now, so it's like we all want to live in a half-developed Third World country, but we all want to live in exactly the kind of country that would not stay a monarchy and if it were real would absolutely start building a Marxist workers' state. come on, fictional kingdoms aren't oppressed by the United States, they're not going to end up tumbling backward into a confusing jumbled-up warring states period like Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran, these settings have an inherent concept of progress in them, they're going to go forward, so you know where they're going to end up.

</li><li class="field_anarchy" value="8493" data-dimension="S">medieval kingdoms resolving to anarchy / medieval kingdoms resolving into anarchy / fantasy narrative implying that medieval periods are supposed to turn into anarchism and turning into Liberal-republicanism or Bolshevism are equally not allowed -> it is bizarre how common this is. every time I read a modern fantasy book I begin to feel like anarchism is literally nothing more than people not understanding historical materialism or the concept of historical periods at all, or worse, that everyone was taught anarchism by Christian pastors and they don't even know what anarchism is much less history

</li><li class="number_empty" value="8494">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8495">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8496">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8497">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8498">??

</li><li class="field_ML" data-tradition="Fy" data-qid="84,99" value="8499" data-dimension="S2">Queen Ruby should be a Communist -> the characterization of the purpose of money in WoF is really weird.

</li><li class="number_empty" value="8500">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8501" data-dimension="S">Pyrrhia
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8509" data-dimension="S">dragon tribe
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8510" data-dimension="S">dragon (Wings of Fire)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8511" data-dimension="S">MudWing
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8512" data-dimension="S">SeaWing
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8513" data-dimension="S">RainWing
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8514" data-dimension="S">NightWing
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8515" data-dimension="S">SandWing
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8516" data-dimension="S">moon-touched dragon
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8517" data-dimension="S">SkyWing -> giving this the number 17 is part of a little inside joke between me and myself.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8518" data-dimension="S">Icewing
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8519" data-dimension="S">animus magic
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8520" data-dimension="S">dragon created through animus magic -> there are about three in the series: Boa, fake Clearsight, Peacemaker. notably, Darkstalker is responsible for two of them.
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8521" data-dimension="S">SilkWing
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8522" data-dimension="S">Hivewing
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8523" data-dimension="S">LeafWing
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8524" data-dimension="S">flamesilk dragon
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8525" data-dimension="S">Boa / Jerboa (construct)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8526" data-dimension="S">hybrid dragon
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8527" data-dimension="S">animus dragon
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8528" data-dimension="S">firescales
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8529">??

</li><li class="number_empty" value="8530">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8535">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8540">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8544">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8545">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8550">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8555">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8560">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8565">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8570">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8575">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8580">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8584">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8585">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8590">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8591">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8592">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8593">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8594">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8595">??

{{li|I=S1/DFy|Q=8600|Q2=8600}}first rule of fight club (motif; fiction) / ({{9k|RD/Q8600}})

</li><li class="number_empty" value="8610">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8615">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8620">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8625">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8630">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8635">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8640">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8645">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8650">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8655">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8660">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8665">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8670">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8675">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8679">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8680">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8681">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8682">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8683">??
</li><li class="field_horror" data-tradition="Fy" value="8684" data-dimension="Z">{{film|Nightmare on Elm Street}} (1984) -> what a year to publish a horror movie.
</li><li class="field_horror" data-tradition="Fy" value="8685" data-dimension="S">Freddy Krueger -> the knives guy. 
Freddy Krueger + pacifist route = Edward Scissorhands. Freddy Krueger + sentient toys = Freddy Fazbear.

</li><li class="number_empty" value="8690">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8691">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8692">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8693">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8694">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8695">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8696">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8697">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8698">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8699">??

</li><li value="8700" class="field_fantasy"><cite>Dragon Ball</cite> (metaseries)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8701"><cite>Dragon Ball</cite> (first era)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8702"><cite>Dragon Ball</cite> (Z era)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8703"><cite>Dragon Ball Super</cite> (era)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8704">??
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8705"><cite>Dragon Ball</cite> prequels (era)
</li><li value="8706" class="field_fantasy">{{game|Sonic the Hedgehog}} (2006)

</li><li class="number_empty" value="8710">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8715">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8720">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8725">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8730">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8735">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8736">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8740">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8741">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8742">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8743">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8744">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8745">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8750">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8755">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8760">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8761">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8762">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8763">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8764">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8765">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8766">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8767">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8768">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8769">??
</li><li value="8770" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="Z">{{game|Sonic the Hedgehog}} songs -> may be used to either talk about the concept of "buttrock", or actually analyze the songs' lyrics.
</li><li value="8771" class="field_fantasy" data-dimension="Z">{{game|Sonic the Hedgehog}} (metaseries)
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8772">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8773">??
</li><li class="number_empty" value="8774">??
</li><li class="field_horror" value="8775" data-dimension="Z">{{article|I am all of me}} (song)
</li><li class="field_horror" value="8776" data-dimension="Z">{{article|This is who I am}} (song)
</li><li value="8777" class="field_horror" data-dimension="Z">{{game|Shadow the Hedgehog}} (2005)
</li><li class="field_fantasy" value="8778" data-dimension="Z">{{article|Live and Learn}} (song) -> my mind keeps gravitating to this one line in the song, "if you beg or borrow". it is the strangest injection of capitalism or Careerism as a metaphor
</li></ol><noinclude>

[[Category:First nine thousand (RD)]]</noinclude>

Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q7044

2026-08-01T11:53:18Z

Reversedragon: copy markup from Q28,93

{{NextNineThousand|PPPA=but that's just Stalinism|User=RD|E=Q70,44|Contents=y}}
== Main entry ==
{{HueCSS}}<ol class="hue clean">

{{li|start=y|I=S1/MX/ML|Q=70,44|Q2=7044|h4= meta-Marxism? that's just Stalinism }} / meta-Marxism? but this is just Stalinism / your meta-Marxism is literally just Stalinism / {{TTS|lang=ja|菫マク？|きんマク？|title=きんマク？／すみれ色のマルクス主義？}}{{TTS|lang=ja|スターリニズムなんだが⋯}} -> I put some really harsh entries in this range, so... here I give Trotskyists one to balance it out. because a couple of times I really did do this, and now I feel a little silly. that {{em|isn't}} what meta-Marxism is, so I will be switching them to crimson.

{{li|I=S1/MX/IV|Q=70,43|Q2=7043|h4= meta-Marxism? that's just Trotskyism }} / meta-Marxism? but this is just Trotskyism / your meta-Marxism is literally just Trotskyists not believing claims from Stalin's Marxism -> for completeness.

</li></ol>

== Examples (Stalin's Marxism) ==
<ol class="hue clean">

{{li|I=S1/ML|tradition=ML onto IV|Q=28,93|Q2=2893}}the only correct thing Trotsky ever said / ({{9k|RD/Q28,93}}) -> {{i|a dumb joke I keep making in things which is funny because there is always more than one of these. but there's also the question of whether any of the "correct" things Trotsky said are correct in context, or if they all come with a subtext of being completely misapplied to the point that saying "the only correct thing Trotsky ever said" is funny again. that's just the thing, how long it takes to properly unpack a concept like this to the point there could be a whole page about it.}} 
transparent Stalinism italicized

</li></ol>

== Examples (Trotskyism) ==


== Related ==


== Ideology codes ==

* MX / meta-Marxism
* ML / Stalin's Marxism
* IV / Trotskyism
* ML onto IV

[[Category:Next nine thousand (RD)]]

User:RD/Auldernet/MP33/Michael

2026-08-01T11:31:16Z

Reversedragon: abilities

{{ArticleTitle|Michael Prathik (card) - S1 / fantasy / Milarepa bloc / user page Item|NoContents=y}}<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{HueEntity|I=S1/ES|Q=618|sum=1|quilt=1|ply=1 
|swatch={{{class|field_exstruct}}}|class=manual flag|lang={{{lang|en}}}|PPPA2={{{1|}}}|sense={{{2|}}}|field={{{field|}}}|area-free={{{area-free|}}}
|trad={{{trad|Fy}}}|tradTTS={{{tradTTS|Fantasy}}}
| PPPA = {{label|{{{lang|}}}
| en = Michael Prathik }}
| area = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{area|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
| ins = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{ins|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
|numbersign=404|enddfn=1}}{{#switch: {{{C|}}} | Q = [[C:Michael Prathik deck (Aurora System)]] }}</onlyinclude></includeonly>{{HueNumberPreview|U=RD/Auldernet/MP33/Michael|class=field_auldernet}}

== Aurora System card mechanics ==


<dl class="wikitable hue">
{{HueClaim |P=item type| {{Template:S1}} }}
{{HueRoster|EP=PPPA/L|lang=en| {{User:RD/Auldernet/MP33/Michael|C=Q}} }}
{{HueRoster|P=card title| Michael Prathik ({{TTS|tts=Auldernet|🗺}}) }}
{{HueRoster|P=card type| Character | Challenger | Monster Unionist }}
{{HueRoster|P=Bloc| Milarepa bloc (Auldernet) | Element II / Sky bloc similar }} 
{{HueRoster|P=play cost| (unknown) }}
{{HueRoster|P=productivity| 1 }}
{{HueRoster|P=originating region| {{E:Q618/DFy|town of Marsh (Auldernet)}} | {{E:Q618/DX|Far Side (Auldernet)}} }} 
{{HueRoster|P=class| Worker }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| {{strong|Gutless}}: Under normal conditions, I have a 19/20 chance to run away from any task I was Dispatched for apart from the task of growing Firms. If I run from the task, then nothing happens. }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| {{strong|Chase No Sticks}}: I can Dispatch myself at any time. Only while I am Dispatched this way, I gain the Meditating status and I cannot be targeted. }}
{{HueRoster|EP=P34| Aurora card game system | Auldernet (Aurora System scenario) }} 
</dl>

<blockquote class="wikitable poem proposition">{{i|Um... so... I was thinking that we could maybe, form our own union. I know it's not allowed, but... well... if— if you look at the way things have gotten around here... it might be time to try something different. You don't have to if you don't want to!}}</blockquote>


== Wavebuilder combinations ==


== Background ==

== Usage notes ==

This character is not to be confused with any [[E:Mike (Deltarune)|other characters]] named "Mikhail" or "[[User:RD/Auldernet/MS25/Sunderkov|Mike]]".



[[Category:Hue-format research entries]]

User:RD/Auldernet/MP33

2026-08-01T10:47:31Z

Reversedragon: alias

#redirect[[Category:Michael Prathik deck (Aurora System)]]

User:RD/Auldernet/MS25

2026-08-01T10:46:48Z

Reversedragon: alias

#redirect[[Category:Mike Sunderkov deck (Aurora System)]]

Category:Michael Prathik deck (Aurora System)

2026-08-01T10:45:16Z

Reversedragon: description

This is a category for Aurora System cards belonging to the "Michael Prathik" character deck within the "Auldernet" scenario. (Note: in the Aurora System, "deck" doesn't necessarily mean literal balanced theme decks, and refers to something more like sets or expansions.)

== Cards ==

{{HueCSS}}<ol class="hue clean compound">
</ol>

== Category ==

[[Category:Auldernet (RD)]]

User:RD/Auldernet/MP33/Michael

2026-08-01T10:44:25Z

Reversedragon: copy or update fake Item from Auldernet - Sunderkov

{{ArticleTitle|Michael Prathik (card) - S1 / fantasy / Milarepa bloc / user page Item|NoContents=y}}<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{HueEntity|I=S1/ES|Q=618|sum=1|quilt=1|ply=1 
|swatch={{{class|field_exstruct}}}|class=manual flag|lang={{{lang|en}}}|PPPA2={{{1|}}}|sense={{{2|}}}|field={{{field|}}}|area-free={{{area-free|}}}
|trad={{{trad|Fy}}}|tradTTS={{{tradTTS|Fantasy}}}
| PPPA = {{label|{{{lang|}}}
| en = Michael Prathik }}
| area = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{area|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
| ins = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{ins|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
|numbersign=404|enddfn=1}}{{#switch: {{{C|}}} | Q = [[C:Michael Prathik deck (Aurora System)]] }}</onlyinclude></includeonly>{{HueNumberPreview|U=RD/Auldernet/MP33/Michael|class=field_auldernet}}

== Aurora System card mechanics ==


<dl class="wikitable hue">
{{HueClaim |P=item type| {{Template:S1}} }}
{{HueRoster|EP=PPPA/L|lang=en| {{User:RD/Auldernet/MP33/Michael|C=Q}} }}
{{HueRoster|P=card title| Michael Prathik ({{TTS|tts=Auldernet|🗺}}) }}
{{HueRoster|P=card type| Character | Challenger | Monster Unionist }}
{{HueRoster|P=Bloc| Milarepa bloc (Auldernet) | Element II / Sky bloc similar }} 
{{HueRoster|P=play cost| (unknown) }}
{{HueRoster|P=productivity| 1 }}
{{HueRoster|P=originating region| {{E:Q618/DFy|town of Marsh (Auldernet)}} | {{E:Q618/DX|Far Side (Auldernet)}} }} 
{{HueRoster|P=class| Worker }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=Passive Conditions| -- }}
{{HueRoster|EP=P34| Aurora card game system | Auldernet (Aurora System scenario) }} 
</dl>

<blockquote class="wikitable poem proposition">(description)</blockquote>


== Wavebuilder combinations ==


== Background ==

== Usage notes ==

This character is not to be confused with any [[E:Mike (Deltarune)|other characters]] named "Mikhail" or "[[User:RD/Auldernet/MS25/Sunderkov|Mike]]".



[[Category:Hue-format research entries]]

User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya

2026-08-01T10:19:41Z

Reversedragon: card type

{{ArticleTitle|Piatya Holiday (card) - S1 / fantasy / Tundra bloc / user page Item|NoContents=y}}<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{HueEntity|I=S1/IV|Q=618|sum=1|quilt=1|ply=1 
|swatch={{{class|field_trotsky}}}|class=manual flag|lang={{{lang|en}}}|PPPA2={{{1|}}}|sense={{{2|}}}|field={{{field|}}}|area-free={{{area-free|}}}
|trad={{{trad|Fy}}}|tradTTS={{{tradTTS|Fantasy}}}
| PPPA = {{label|{{{lang|}}}
| en = Piatya Holiday }}
| area = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{area|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
| ins = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{ins|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
|numbersign=404|enddfn=1}}{{#switch: {{{C|}}} | Q = [[C:Piatya Holiday deck (Aurora System)]] }}</onlyinclude></includeonly>{{HueNumberPreview|U=RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya|class=field_auldernet}}

== Aurora System card mechanics ==

<blockquote class="wikitable poem proposition">(card effect)</blockquote>


<dl class="wikitable hue">
{{HueClaim |P=item type| {{Template:S1}} }}
{{HueRoster|EP=PPPA/L|lang=en| {{User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya|C=Q}} }}
{{HueRoster|P=card title| Piatya Holiday ({{TTS|tts=Auldernet|🗺}}) }}
{{HueRoster|P=card type| Character | Past Hero | Monster Rogue }}
{{HueRoster|P=Bloc| Tundra bloc (Auldernet) | Blizzard bloc (Auldernet) | Element IV / Fire bloc similar }} 
{{HueRoster|P=play cost| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=productivity| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=originating region| {{E:Q618/DFy|town of November (Auldernet)}} | {{E:Q618/ML|Far Side (Auldernet)}} }} 
{{HueRoster|P=class| Sub-Expert }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=Passive Conditions| Cosmic Rift 1 }}
{{HueRoster|EP=P34| Aurora card game system | Auldernet (Aurora System scenario) }} 
</dl>

<blockquote class="wikitable poem proposition">(description)</blockquote>


== Wavebuilder combinations ==


== Background ==

== Usage notes ==

=== Card mechanics ===

=== Card ability names ===



[[Category:Hue-format research entries]]

User:RD/Auldernet/MS25/Sunderkov

2026-08-01T10:18:44Z

Reversedragon: Phoenix Furnace

{{ArticleTitle|Mike Sunderkov (card) - S1 / fantasy / Iron bloc / user page Item|NoContents=y}}<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{HueEntity|I=S1/ML|Q=618|sum=1|quilt=1|ply=1 
|swatch={{{class|field_ML}}}|class=manual flag|lang={{{lang|en}}}|PPPA2={{{1|}}}|sense={{{2|}}}|field={{{field|}}}|area-free={{{area-free|}}}
|trad={{{trad|Fy}}}|tradTTS={{{tradTTS|Fantasy}}}
| PPPA = {{label|{{{lang|}}}
| en = Mike Sunderkov }}
| area = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{area|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
| ins = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{ins|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
|numbersign=404|enddfn=1}}{{#switch: {{{C|}}} | Q = [[C:Mike Sunderkov deck (Aurora System)]] }}</onlyinclude></includeonly>{{HueNumberPreview|U=RD/Auldernet/MS25/Sunderkov|class=field_auldernet}}

== Aurora System card mechanics ==


<dl class="wikitable hue">
{{HueClaim |P=item type| {{Template:S1}} }}
{{HueRoster|EP=PPPA/L|lang=en| {{User:RD/Auldernet/MS25/Sunderkov|C=Q}} }}
{{HueRoster|P=card title| Mike Sunderkov ({{TTS|tts=Auldernet|🗺}}) }}
{{HueRoster|P=card type| Character | Past Hero | Human Alchemist }}
{{HueRoster|P=Bloc| Iron bloc (Auldernet) | Slag bloc (Auldernet) | Element III / Earth bloc similar }} 
{{HueRoster|P=play cost| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=productivity| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=originating region| {{E:Q618/DFy|town of Gregory (Auldernet)}} | {{E:Q618/ML|Far Side (Auldernet)}} }} 
{{HueRoster|P=class| Sub-Expert }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| {{strong|Their Hearts As One}} ({{abbr|tts=Guide Space|GS}}): Once per turn, I can Dispatch any number of unused Members to Expel Members that are not Earth-bloc-similar and replace them with Element III Members of equal or lesser cost from my Residents Deck. }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| {{strong|Phoenix Furnace}}: Once per turn cycle, I can Dispatch myself to summon a Helper Phoenix from my Constructs Deck. The Helper Phoenix can be any subtype. }}
{{HueRoster|P=Passive Conditions| Cosmic Rift 2 (Alchemist) }}
{{HueRoster|EP=P34| Aurora card game system | Auldernet (Aurora System scenario) }} 
</dl>

<blockquote class="wikitable poem proposition">{{i|It was us that led the Far Side out of unending darkness. I will do anything to ensure our people never sink into that endless darkness again.　— M. Sunderkov}}</blockquote>


== Wavebuilder combinations ==


== Background ==

== Usage notes ==

=== Phoenix Furnace ===

This ability can be used once per turn {{em|on either Side's turn}}. Mark Sunderkov as used ("Dispatch" him), even if he is in the Guide Space, because you can Dispatch characters in the Guide Space. You cannot use this ability if Sunderkov is already Dispatched. This move is considered to come from Sunderkov as its source if any in-play card has pointed that concept out as relevant (by default it is not relevant). When you make this move, you can search your Side's Constructs Deck for a card of the Helper Phoenix archetype. You can choose any card which is part of the Helper Phoenix archetype ("any subtype"), though you can only choose one. Shuffle your Constructs Deck, unless you are using the draw dice system.

=== Their Hearts As One ===

This ability can be used once per turn {{em|on your Side's turn}}. Sunderkov must be in a Guide Space to use this ability. On your turn you can mark as used ("Dispatch") any number of unused Residents (Workers, Peasants, Experts, or Sub-Experts) in Masses or Firms who are of a compatible Bloc to Sunderkov. This Dispatching move is considered to come from Sunderkov as its source ("I can Dispatch") and then from the Characters that were Dispatched if any in-play card has pointed that concept out as relevant. When you make this move, you can take a number of Residents in Masses equal to the number of Residents you Dispatched and send them back ("Expel" them) to their appropriate draw deck. They are not discarded / "Destroyed". The Residents you Expel must not be any Bloc that falls under Element III (Earth bloc). You may search your Residents Deck for a Resident of equal or lesser cost before you put each mismatched Resident back in their appropriate deck. If at any point you cannot find an Element III Resident in the Residents Deck, or you only have high-cost Residents to draw, draw nothing, finish putting the Expelled Residents back, and proceed with the rest of your turn. Shuffle each deck you put Residents back into plus your Residents Deck, unless you are using the draw dice system.

=== Cosmic Rift 2 (Alchemist) ===

This Condition is part of the game whenever any Auldernet cards are in play. If an Equipment card tries to change ("evolve") Sunderkov into a Cosmic Rift afflicted version, he does not gain a status affliction, and does not change to a new state. Instead, you should treat all attempts to evolve Sunderkov to a Cosmic Rift state as combat encounters using the normal combat rules. If Sunderkov is part of a Mass it is possible another Member will absorb the hit, in which case you should apply the Cosmic Rift rule that goes with that particular Member. If Sunderkov is alone or if he gets targeted in the Guide Space he will either survive the hit or go to the Devastation Zone.



[[Category:Hue-format research entries]]

User:RD/Auldernet/MS25/Sunderkov

2026-08-01T08:35:52Z

Reversedragon: copy or update fake Item from Auldernet - Piatya

Category:Mike Sunderkov deck (Aurora System)

2026-08-01T07:33:05Z

Reversedragon: description

This is a category for Aurora System cards belonging to the "Mike Sunderkov" character deck within the "Auldernet" scenario. (Note: in the Aurora System, "deck" doesn't necessarily mean literal balanced theme decks, and refers to something more like sets or expansions.)

== Cards ==

{{HueCSS}}<ol class="hue clean compound">
</ol>

== Category ==

[[Category:Auldernet (RD)]]

Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe

2026-08-01T07:27:11Z

Reversedragon: combination: Cosmic Rift

<noinclude>{{ArticleTitle|[way] Ice Axe (card) / user page Item|h1=Way:Q618 / Ice Axe}}
{{HueCSS}}</noinclude><h2 id="PPPA">Wavebuilder combinations {{editsection|Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}}</h2>

<dl class="wikitable hue data_wavebuild three">
{{WaveBuild| {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} | situation card / permanent card | Cosmic Rift (status affliction) }} 
{{WaveBuild| {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} | situation card / permanent card | send card to Devastation Zone }} 
<includeonly>{{WaveBuildNone| {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} | -- | (... [[Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe|all combinations]]) }} </includeonly>
</dl>

=== {{label|{{{lang|}}}|en = Wavebuilder characterizations}} ===

<dl class="wikitable hue data_wavebuild three">
{{WaveRoute| {{User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya}} | cursed artifact | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }} 
<noinclude>{{WaveRoute| {{User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya}} | Thorn Ring (Deltarune) | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
{{WaveRoute| {{User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya}} | Mane Ax (Deltarune) | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
{{WaveRoute| {{User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya}} | alchemy (Auldernet) | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
</noinclude></dl><noinclude>



[[Category:Text pages containing manual stylesheets]]
</noinclude>

User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe

2026-08-01T07:12:22Z

Reversedragon: deck

{{ArticleTitle|Ice Axe (card) - S1 / fantasy / Blizzard bloc / user page Item|NoContents=y}}<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{HueEntity|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|sum=1|quilt=1|ply=1 
|swatch={{{class|field_fantasy}}}|class=manual flag|lang={{{lang|en}}}|PPPA2={{{1|}}}|sense={{{2|}}}|field={{{field|}}}|area-free={{{area-free|}}}
|trad={{{trad|Fy}}}|tradTTS={{{tradTTS|Fantasy}}}
| PPPA = {{label|{{{lang|}}}
| en = Ice Axe
| ja = アイスアックス }}
| area = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{area|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
| ins = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{area|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
|numbersign=404|enddfn=1}}</onlyinclude></includeonly>{{HueNumberPreview|U=RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe|class=field_auldernet}}

== Aurora System card mechanics ==

<blockquote class="wikitable poem proposition">Equip this to any Tundra-bloc or {{TTS|tts=Element Four|Element IV}} Character, unless Conditions say otherwise. 
This Equipment can be Dispatched to either Destroy a card or evolve it to a Cosmic Rift status affliction. {{i|(A status affliction is possible if there are instructions on the card.)}}</blockquote>

<dl class="wikitable hue">
{{HueClaim |P=item type| {{Template:S1}} }}
{{HueRoster|EP=PPPA/L|lang=en| {{User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
{{HueRoster|P=card title| Ice Axe ({{TTS|tts=Auldernet|🗺}}) }}
{{HueRoster|P=card type| Equipment Condition | Condition }}
{{HueRoster|P=Bloc| Blizzard bloc (Auldernet) | Analog bloc similar (Element {{TTS|tts=Aleph|ℵ}}) }} 
{{HueRoster|P=play cost| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| Cosmic Rift (status affliction) }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| send card to Devastation Zone (Dispatch ability) }}
{{HueRoster|P=deck| {{User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya/CD|C=Q}} }} 
{{HueRoster|EP=P34| Aurora card game system | Auldernet (Aurora System scenario) }} 
</dl>

<blockquote class="wikitable poem proposition">{{i|This legendary blade can split anything, from wood to metal to reality itself to the ties that bind people. But beware its curse — you will never control both edges.}}</blockquote>


{{Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}}

== Background ==

== Usage notes ==

=== Card mechanics ===

The Cosmic Rift status affliction is defined relative to the Auldernet scenario itself and is explained further in Passive Condition cards (rule cards). Cards that can be affected by it will have a special indicator somewhere on them, and if you cannot find one you should just assume the effect of the ability is to Destroy (discard) the card.

=== Card ability names ===



[[Category:Hue-format research entries]]

User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya/CD

2026-08-01T07:07:40Z

Reversedragon: pass category

<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya|C={{{C|}}}
|Piatya Holiday
|ins=Auldernet
|CD}}</onlyinclude></includeonly>{{HueNumberPreview|dl=y|U=RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya/CD}} 

== Usage notes ==

<code>CD</code> stands for "character deck" (set or expansion).

[[Category:Hue-format fake Entity labels]] {{ArticleTitle|NoContents=y}}

User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya/CD

2026-08-01T07:06:25Z

Reversedragon: copy from Q41,03/JS

<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya
|Piatya Holiday
|ins=Auldernet
|CD}}</onlyinclude></includeonly>{{HueNumberPreview|dl=y|U=RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya/CD}} 

== Usage notes ==

<code>CD</code> stands for "character deck" (set or expansion).

[[Category:Hue-format fake Entity labels]] {{ArticleTitle|NoContents=y}}

User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya

2026-08-01T07:01:37Z

Reversedragon: copy or update fake Item from Auldernet - IceAxe

{{ArticleTitle|Piatya Holiday (card) - S1 / fantasy / Tundra bloc / user page Item|NoContents=y}}<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{HueEntity|I=S1/IV|Q=618|sum=1|quilt=1|ply=1 
|swatch={{{class|field_trotsky}}}|class=manual flag|lang={{{lang|en}}}|PPPA2={{{1|}}}|sense={{{2|}}}|field={{{field|}}}|area-free={{{area-free|}}}
|trad={{{trad|Fy}}}|tradTTS={{{tradTTS|Fantasy}}}
| PPPA = {{label|{{{lang|}}}
| en = Piatya Holiday }}
| area = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{area|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
| ins = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{ins|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
|numbersign=404|enddfn=1}}{{#switch: {{{C|}}} | Q = [[C:Piatya Holiday deck (Aurora System)]] }}</onlyinclude></includeonly>{{HueNumberPreview|U=RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya|class=field_auldernet}}

== Aurora System card mechanics ==

<blockquote class="wikitable poem proposition">(card effect)</blockquote>


<dl class="wikitable hue">
{{HueClaim |P=item type| {{Template:S1}} }}
{{HueRoster|EP=PPPA/L|lang=en| {{User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/Piatya|C=Q}} }}
{{HueRoster|P=card title| Piatya Holiday ({{TTS|tts=Auldernet|🗺}}) }}
{{HueRoster|P=card type| Character | Past Hero | Hero }}
{{HueRoster|P=Bloc| Tundra bloc (Auldernet) | Blizzard bloc (Auldernet) | Element IV / Fire bloc similar }} 
{{HueRoster|P=play cost| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=productivity| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=originating region| {{E:Q618/DFy|town of November (Auldernet)}} | {{E:Q618/ML|Far Side (Auldernet)}} }} 
{{HueRoster|P=class| Sub-Expert }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=Passive Conditions| Cosmic Rift 1 }}
{{HueRoster|EP=P34| Aurora card game system | Auldernet (Aurora System scenario) }} 
</dl>

<blockquote class="wikitable poem proposition">(description)</blockquote>


== Wavebuilder combinations ==


== Background ==

== Usage notes ==

=== Card mechanics ===

=== Card ability names ===



[[Category:Hue-format research entries]]

User:RD/Auldernet

2026-08-01T06:36:59Z

Reversedragon: alias

#redirect[[Category:Auldernet (RD)]]

User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5

2026-08-01T06:36:16Z

Reversedragon: alias

#redirect[[Category:Piatya Holiday deck (Aurora System)]]

Category:Piatya Holiday deck (Aurora System)

2026-08-01T06:35:48Z

Reversedragon: description

This is a category for Aurora System cards belonging to the "Piatya Holiday" character deck within the "Auldernet" scenario. (Note: in the Aurora System, "deck" doesn't necessarily mean literal balanced theme decks, and refers to something more like sets or expansions.)

== Cards ==

{{HueCSS}}<ol class="hue clean compound">
</li><li>{{User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}}
</li></ol>

== Category ==

[[Category:Auldernet (RD)]]

Category:Auldernet (RD)

2026-08-01T06:27:15Z

Reversedragon: description

Auldernet is a fan project based on the Deltarune setting (an "alternate universe" or AU). Basically, it's a second version of the Deltarune setting where the overall world is actually the size of a small planet, and where I explored a cracktheory that the Undertale-Deltarune universe is actually a Cold War narrative where {{game|Undertale}} and The Underground symbolically represented something similar to the Soviet Union or North Korea; within Auldernet, Undertale is almost exactly the same as a setting or narrative except that relative to the Light World it functions as if it was [[E:superstructural fantasy world|in-universe fiction about {{em|the Auldernet world}} or a dream somebody had about it]] after living in it, although it is also "real" in its own right. Auldernet combines {{game|Undertale}}'s concept of recruiting 'actual' Monsters and Humans with {{game|Deltarune}}'s ability to have Dark Worlds, although there is also a second type of "special world" that gets more focus — past historical events. The central thread of the story is that the characters have to {{em|resolve the problems created in the past}} to save the world from disintegrating.

You could think of it as "Deltarune on the other side of its world", "Deltarune's earth instead of Deltarune's Alternia", or "Deltarune post-scratch" — although that might be an overcomplicated metaphor because Auldernet is vastly more straightforward than {{book|Homestuck}}.

[[Category:Deltarune theories (RD)]] [[Category:Metatransitional literature thesis portals]]

User:Reversedragon/Aurora

2026-08-01T06:00:51Z

Reversedragon: current status of Aurora system / category

The Aurora System is a currently-hypothetical tabletop-style card game system about [[E:sociophilosophy (meta-Marxism)|would-be civilizations of various ideologies]] attempting to win over a larger population of people. It is intended as a kind of Communist or anarchist counterpart to games like {{game|Arcmage}} and {{game|Magic: the Gathering}}. The Aurora System interprets civilizations and societal transitions through the lens of [[Ontology:Q1086|metatransitional socialist realism]], meaning that a work is open to portraying populations of people transitioning into more than one possible ideology and the overall world as transitioning into multiple different rival ideologies at a time.

As a card game system, Aurora is meant to encourage {{em|telling interesting stories}} more than optimization; the real intent of the game is to feel like a hybrid between a basic tabletop RPG and a card game. Players are asked to score the game by how interesting the narrative was. Mechanics and event cards are supposed to build up into vague narratives, and new cards are to be introduced based on what kinds of un-explored narrative possibilities previous gameplay and combinations of things within previous games have suggested. (I tentatively call this game structure a "role-playing card game", abbreviated as either TTRCG or RCG.) The overall goals of the Aurora system are closely aligned with the goals of Wavebuilder and {{int:sitename}}'s ontology project; {{int:sitename}}  propositions and source text Items can be used to inform new cards.


The Aurora System is still very early in its development, but may be slowly returning to an active development state along with the development of its Auldernet scenario.

== Blocs ==

Blocs are categories separating (or combining) characters of different ideologies into their respective "sides" or "factions". There are a few major Blocs with distinct colors, and then there are minor blocs which share the same color as another Bloc to allow them to be part of it in some cases. 
Every scenario created for the Aurora System has its own set of Blocs, but those Blocs are always grouped back into the six major Blocs with rule text like "Fire-bloc-similar" or "Element IV" to allow some small amount of crossover between cards from different expansions.

* Space bloc / Element I - freedom, anarchism
* Water and Sky blocs / Element II - fluidity / patience, Third World Marxisms, Liberal-republicanism
** Water bloc - Maoism or Dengism
** Cloud bloc - Menshevism
** Rain bloc or Cyber bloc - identity movements, political agorism
** Wind bloc - bravery / ambush tactics, Third World Marxisms
* Earth bloc / Element III - persistence, mainstream Marxism-Leninism
* Fire bloc / Element IV - passion, Trotskyism
** Lightning bloc - revisionist Trotskyism / "Zinovievism"
* Poison bloc / Element 0 - destruction, Toryism, fascism
* Analog bloc / Element {{TTS|tts=Aleph|ℵ}} - high-level meta-analysis, [[E:Q92|meta-Marxism]] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number]

[[Category:Metatransitional literature thesis portals]] [[Category:Ironblood setting scraps]]

Research:MDem/5.4r/0999 north-letter

2026-08-01T05:21:39Z

Reversedragon: typo

<h2 class="toc-only">Introduction</h2>
Hello.

Since around 2021 I have been working on a framework I now call "[[E:Q92|violet Marxism]]", or more generically, "meta-Marxism". This is a strictly Materialist framework which attempts to [[EC:9k/RD/Q697 sublation|remove the concept of abstract ideas]] from Marxism as much as is actually feasible. (I unfortunately have to clarify that when there are a couple recorded uses of the term "meta-Marxism" before violet Marxism and unrelated to it which were more or less improperly applying bourgeois ideals to Marxism, notably [[EC:9k/RD/Q21,29|one from Althusser]].) Violet Marxism is the study {{em|of}} Marxisms and other philosophies as physical objects, namely countable republics or movements containing arrangements of people. It is very similar to [[E:infra-Marxism|Marxism in general]], but with one major distinction that makes them different: whenever real-world Marxist organizations run into irreconcilable differences, violet Marxism takes a step back and looks at the entire situation from above, considering the two parties or Internationals to be completely different things and no longer preserving the assumption that either of them is the same kind of phenomenon as the other one. For instance, the day the Soviet Union's party split from China, violet Marxism would start to distinguish them and treat them as different movements or philosophies specifically in order to try to uncover which one has the more salvageable program and which one is making the worst errors. Analyzing errors is already a fairly common activity within Marxism, but there is one major problem with it. Whenever any two organizations diverge from each other, they will each come up with a different account of who made errors and what errors everyone made, sometimes defending their own flawed accounts over other parties' accounts to the end. This can be rather intimidating to newcomers to Marxist theory, much less average workers, because the entire process of figuring out what parties might be right becomes a complicated logical puzzle which requires extensive research on many different Marxist tendencies and each tendency's whole timeline of history to even begin to understand. In my own experience, a lot of people seem to give up and take various parties that made errors at face value, thinking that that particular program "is Marxism" and they no longer trust Marxism and are going to go along with some bourgeois philosophy, or they no longer trust Trotskyism (this was a problem I had). With a method that explicitly starts by treating no particular version of Marxism as official and instead studying each one as its own entity with its own understandings and motivations (including instances of violet Marxism being put into practice in an organization, if necessary), this might become less of a problem, and it might become easier to give people an intuitive understanding of what is an error and what is Marxism and what is a small variation within Marxism as it is still searching for the best strategies.

One of the first important caveats to understand with a Materialist analysis "of Marxisms" is that in one sense violet Marxism does not exist, and will never exist. There can be a violet Marxist method, but it will always be applied inside some real Marxist organization in a real set of historical circumstances that will create some particular vantage point and set of biases in how the Materialist analysis of that party and other parties should be applied. Thus, violet Marxism does not "magically" solve the problem of parties showing up with different distorted perspectives, which will still continue to exist. The thing it does instead is attempt to construct shared grounds on which two parties could come to an objective consensus only if they actually wish to know what is materially accurate, and to find ways out of local perspectives to a bigger-picture view. Violet Marxism has the same quirk seen in many forms of mathematics of being a bit more precise than reality so that the people who know how to use it will find enough flexibility between it and the reality placed inside it to make good use of it. Between the factions inside it and the people looking at it an analysis of history never really is neutral, nor does it need to be perfectly neutral to be useful. So violet Marxism uses the rhetorical conceit of looking outside multiple factions as its tool, but in reality, it only does that so that the factions with the best overall understanding of material reality can take hold of it and use it to better make their point. Marxism begins well aware that its purpose is to empower a new historical period to take its position over previous stagnating historical periods that have impeded it — whether this is capitalism, or perhaps a low-quality Marxist party attempting and failing to create the type of physical historical period we call a workers' state. Violet Marxism does basically the same thing, but aims to do it more precisely.

The conditions that led to me putting together violet Marxism were rather strange and specific, although familiar to anyone from the United States or Australia. The United States has been... uniquely {{em|in a slump}}. I don't know what better way to put it than that. Not in a slump economically, exactly. Not in terms of its organizations, which have always been sporadic yet are not in a state which has really changed much since 1980. Not in terms of bourgeois parties, which have been doing the same things for around 200 years now. Instead there has been... a weirdly indescribable kind of slump where it seems as if {{em|the concept of knowledge has died}} and social interaction has died. Everyone is shocked and horrified by news headlines and keeps lining up with their cafeteria tray for more poison, but it seems as if knowledge is no longer learned because it is useful and nobody ever actually makes use of it in order to interpret anything that has ever happened. Everything anyone knows is "because I said so" or "because they made me learn it". Everyone seems to know that ethics is "obvious" but can't actually explain it to anyone well enough for it to actually have any use in teaching anyone who isn't ethical to be ethical. The word "community" is in every other sentence people say, like saying a word referring to society existing explains all the details that make up society. But nobody seems to know for the life of them what a community even is or how any countable group of people can form around anything except sheer inherent similarity and compatibility and intuition. Nobody here can keep friends. Interacting with relatives makes you wonder more and more every day when families ever existed and what a family is. People online who ironically are on the internet periodically complain about how you shouldn't let the internet try to grab every bit of your attention, but if you happily disconnect from all the noise of the internet, you'll quickly find yourself entirely alone. Some days I am not sure what a society even is any more or when sociality ever actually existed. But I do know that the United States is so violent that you'd better not leave your door and actually talk to anyone because somebody might shoot you. That's about how bad it's been. I feel like society has not actually existed since about 2015 and I have already been living in societal collapse for 11 years. I have tap water. I can analyze internet videos. But every day for at least a couple of seconds I feel like people are spontaneously going to go mad some day and I'm going to die. Everybody believes nothing is wrong, but nothing is right. Oh, right, and people are constantly arguing back and forth over whether gender identity is a conspiracy, as the only political issue anyone "understands". Gender identity and Palestine — the only two political issues in existence that everybody thinks they know about but most people cannot explain their position on whatsoever.

I feel like my journey started when I found some garbled second-hand conspiracy theories from the Republican Party that "The Left" was planting Communists who were also anarchists and religious fundamentalists and Gnostics depending on the person retelling the story inside universities and the arts. No part of the story made any sense. And it really made me wonder, how did we even get here? What are any of the actual actors inside these statements? What is the actual causality going on here? So every time I thought I'd found a {{em|true}} fact that matched up with these stories, I would silently compile them all together and see if any of it had come closer to making sense. And I discovered something strange. The United States looked a lot less like one society than like two separate societies competing over a disputed territory. The fault lines between clusters of people aligned with each bourgeois party were real, and the two bodies of people would periodically try to fill up particular businesses or government institutions all "sky" or all "rust", acting really upset and pushing out the couple of extra members who appeared who would suddenly show up as Republicans or Democrats. Sometimes it would happen as specific demographic identities, like 13 men and 2 women, or 10 White people and 1 Black person, or 11 atheists and 1 Christian. There were a lot of different lines on which people would become divided into a traditional majority and an uncommon minority, or a new majority and a traditional minority, and any of them could stack together to form the rust and sky divisions of Republican and Democrat, leading to people feeling like minorities who happened not to belong to the most well-established social graph or most common ideology had to be some kind of conspiracy. But that was silly. What was really happening was that people had not fully internalized that philosophies were inherently tied to particular countable socially-linked groups of allies or acquaintances, connecting society and philosophy into a single phenomenon of {{dfn|sociophilosophies}}.

Liberal-republicanism had designed itself assuming that Liberal-republican political parties weren't actually "real". That they would form each election around arbitrary interest groups and issues, but that they wouldn't necessarily stick around in nearly the same shapes for 200 years. But reality had not agreed. Instead, what seemed to actually be happening was that people would align onto a party and keep voting for all its candidates until they felt "betrayed" by that party and then would start voting for the other party, alternating wildly if they had no consistent trust but passing the same party down to their children if they did. <ref name="DFR"/> During the Civil War period, Liberal-republican parties aligned neatly onto slave states and free states and formed entire separate nationalities with separate nation-states; even after the United States abolished slavery and attempted to force itself back together, White people in the Southern states were still doing their best to keep Black people from living in their areas and it still seemed as if the division was permanent. On one hand, these observations seemed to make sense with the Marxist account of capitalism. Large societies had to be made of structures ([[E:relations of production|relations]] arranged to harness productive forces), and if capitalists owned those structures and conflated the structures with themselves, the capitalists would be able to chain together to form something like the modern Democratic Party, or the modern Republican Party. Society in general being like one big graph of dots linked together, you could then have any number of people chaining onto the major groups of capitalists believing the representatives that group chose somehow represented the overall group's interests. But that didn't explain how the two parties had stayed so consistent since the Civil War. Marx had taken note of how the division in the United States had happened due to slavery, and the re-unification of the two bodies of westward-leaking colonists had correlated with the North being able to force the South away from slavery to capitalism. But centuries later there was also something else going on that was hard to quantify. If the United States was all capitalism now, why was it still divided? Why was every election making the divisions cleaner and the district lines stranger and only sharpening the old division further? Why was the United States behaving like it wanted to partly define freedom as the ideological segregation of the Confederate party-nationality and ultimately throw out elections and the Constitution in favor of claiming that whether a Constitution existed or not ethics was ethics and freedom was freedom?

Well, I'll return to what the answers were later, but for the moment, I'll just say that as I was studying the history of Marxism, the Chinese revolution and the two different periods of division in the Soviet Union seemed like they were leading me to the answers. In China, Mao's party had to cover a very large terrain, to the point it was possible to plot on a map what overall percentage of China was still under feudal control or under control of the nationalists. In the Soviet Union region, again, there was a very big terrain to cover in the process of the revolution. I had found one particular text by Trotsky, {{book|Terrorism and Communism}} chapter 8, which described this quite vividly. The Red Army and the White Armies were no mere ideas, they were occupying specific places at specific points in time, and — the most interesting to me — fighting battles back and forth over particular pieces of industry. It was vaguely similar to the incidents of Republicans and Democrats fighting over corporations, although more dramatic and violent. But then something else caught my attention — the conflict between Stalin's party and early Trotskyism. I had not seen a lot of in-depth coverage on this in mainstream Marxist sources. Trotskyists were talking about it, of course, because it was their history. And for a while, I became obsessed with figuring out where this conflict had come from and what exactly had been driving it. I was fairly solidly aligned with the Stalinists back then, but I was just about the most interested in the history of early Trotskyism of any Stalinist in the whole United States. Every so often I would go through Trotskyist talks or party programs and I would keep trying to reconstruct exactly what Trotskyists were trying to accomplish and what made a party Trotskyist. And I could never figure it out.

At that time I was really focused on the concept of describing civilizations as small-scale structure inside a particular region. "Socialism in one country" made sense to me not because I thought countries were natural or had to be the way they currently were, but because I was beginning to see Marxism as a model of how countries formed into different kinds of civilizations based on different kinds of arrangements of people from the level of individuals to the level of class territories or institutions up to the level of factions like the Bolshevik Party fighting the White Army up to the level of China- or Russia-sized republics where a specific kind of state would be created and the bourgeoisie or eventually the proletariat would be able to control the entire region. I thought Marx and Lenin and maybe even Mao with his other huge terrain to cover and successful army were brilliant for being able to take descriptions of feudal orders, capitalism, and socialism and turn them from abstract ideas into material objects with internal structure, so that {{em|socialism really was something}} in the same sense that carbon dioxide was something specific with a specific shape or cellulose was something specific. I dubbed this concept of analyzing civilizations or revolutionary movements down to a very fine "chemical" scale {{dfn|molecularization}} and I was convinced that by the time Marxism was able to properly understand weird situations like the Democrats and Republicans or (as I believed then) Stalin's party versus early Trotskyism, it would become a new kind of Marxist theory called {{dfn|molecular Marxism}} that would eventually be able to create successful revolutions into socialism in the First World. Molecular Marxism might at some point in the future actually take Marxism from a proto-science into a proper science. But despite knowing Marxism had a lot of potential to improve "in the future" I still kept ending up completely baffled by Trotskyism. I would keep taking Trotskyism and thinking, surely if Trotskyists successfully created a republic controlled solely by them and not containing any Stalinists, there would be some particular thing they would create inside it which would be unique to Trotskyism. Whenever people separate themselves into factions that are in heated conflict there is always some actual reason related to what each faction actually wants to materially achieve. The White Army wanted to defend aging structures like the Russian Orthodox Church in its powerful medieval form. The Nazi Party, although not as distinct from capitalism as people would like to believe, did have its own material aim of expanding its violence to other regions to create a larger empire. Even the Republicans and Democrats have small and slightly complicated material differences: people cluster into particular localized demographic subpopulations like the Black subpopulation or the LGBT+ subpopulation that line up behind the Democrats, the Republicans are slightly more openly friendly to capitalists as a bloc, and although they all live in capitalism they materially consist of different assembled populations of people and become distinct material objects, similar to how countries are distinct partly because there are borders between their bodies of capitalists. But I really could not figure out what made Trotskyists different from Stalinists. Both of them were claiming to follow Marxism. Stalin would stand by everything Lenin said in the same period, about Materialism and forming nation-wide Marxist parties instead of disorganized clusters of trade unions. But once he was in contact with the United States, Trotsky was giving people advice that sounded like he understood what a Marxist party was and how to stop capitalist-style revisionism from leaking into parties. So both of them were Marxists, both of them believed in nationalized property in the Soviet Union, and both of them talked about socialist transition. And both of them had a Communist International. Trotsky showed up at the Third International, and later claimed that policies were wrong inside the Third International. But this all connected back to Stalin and his allies, so didn't Trotsky's complaints have to somehow be at a scale smaller than Communist Internationals? So that left me scrambling trying to figure out exactly what policy complaints Trotsky actually had inside the space of any particular region as the key to what a Trotskyist party was supposed to have already solved and how Stalinists had failed to create Trotskyist transition. My analysis was a bit blockheaded, but I did have a very specific angle that I was looking at things from. I was okay with the concept of Trotskyism containing a Fourth International as a necessary component of {{i|what Trotskyism is}}. I was okay with the concept of Trotskyism going through a Marxist revolution and then taking up the area of what had been several countries before — if the Soviet Union came to be, was that really an impossibility? I wasn't going through this analysis "for the NKVD", feeling like Trotskyism had to be understood so it could be destroyed. If anything, I found the conflict between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism upsetting and I wanted to solve the structure and development of each of them so that maybe they could coexist. (The continued existence of Stalinist states anywhere on this planet being entirely hypothetical and counterfactual at this point, but I think you can see what I meant.) I knew that proposition was a bit naïve, to simply say that all groups of Marxist theorists "ought to" work together to create a Communist International, but I didn't really know why that was. And so, I set out to create meta-Marxist analysis to explain on a Materialist basis why different Marxist tendencies were different.

I knew on some level that if I was hypothetically trying to get Stalinism and Trotskyism to coexist some time back in the 1920s, it might be a wholly irreconcilable thing. When groups of people structure themselves into separate factions, there are moments in history where those factions neatly consist of particular class structures, and where the division in classes is going to lead to class conflict. At other moments, factions like the Republicans and Democrats do not lead to this kind of conflict because both of them are arranged around a group of bourgeoisie and they are able to recognize each other as similar. But I had the facts in front of me that Stalinist parties and Trotskyism had repeatedly ended up in violent conflict in various regions of the world for some unknown reason. I had to at least consider that the separation between them was somehow similar to a class conflict. But the thing that kept me stumped was this: bourgeois factions that are both capitalism manage to uneasily get along, so if Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism are both Marxisms, or at least they both were in the 1920s, then why wouldn't the two of them simply get along and form socialism? The major class conflict of the 1900s was between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it was always just those two except in feudal orders containing nobility, and all the other layers joined to one of them or the other. The two seemingly separate Marxisms eventually merging back together or coexisting seemed much more consistent with all the Marxist theory I'd been looking at up to that point... all the Marxist theory I'd been looking at {{em|from the Stalinists}}.

This was the problem. All the Stalinist theory I had ever seen seemed to weirdly oversimplify Marxism and not give enough detail to describe real-world situations. {{i|Bourgeoise, proletariat, bourgeoisie, proletariat, form organizations, crises of capitalism, four legs good, two legs bad.}} It couldn't explain something like the IMT making an announcement it had failed to infiltrate the British Labour Party and whether that was a good thing because they were providing an example that bourgeois reforms weren't working or whether it was a bad thing because this was not the first time and the IMT had been repeatedly trying the same opportunist methods over and over. (For anyone new to Marxism who finds this: it's the latter. Up to now the RCI has been dangerously close to becoming the 21st Century's Second International, and can only be spared that title because the USFI got closer.) Now, educating people about the existence of the bourgeoisie and forming organizations both do have their role (it would be nice if the United States actually had any functioning organizations capable of forming a larger movement), but this kind of rhetoric was never going to be able to explain the existence of Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Deng Xiaoping Thought as separate philosophies embedded in their own distinct republics or movements.

I knew that trying to think of Marxism as a single world revolution was simply not working; this seemed to sink all Marxist movements into sectarianism and actively fighting each other for control every single time. But what I gradually discovered over time was that countries themselves have always been made of parallel layers of structure that each attempted to land on the same particular outer country border independently, which back in the time of monarchy were known as estates. Marx had examined this phenomenon of estates too. (I currently still need to go back and read some of the earliest Marxist works, but I knew that was worth mentioning.) The clergy, nobility, and lower classes of the time all had their own "parliament processes" of sorts, which were eventually separated out into different kinds of republics. The clergy could only do so much and may have participated in separating different European empires into separate kingdoms, while the nobility were capable of using their wealth and land to section kingdoms into smaller states that in regions like China would sometimes fracture into separate clusters and become new kingdoms, and the bourgeoisie would eventually form Liberal republics — three different forms of structure came out of them all occupying different scales, in the form of kingdoms (or expanding empires) that became nation-states, local-states, and Liberal-republican parties or disembodied political factions. But if you superimpose the centuries-old concept of estates onto the Chinese revolution or the Russian revolution, what you begin to notice is that estates exist before and below nation-states, and estates form into states specifically based on their internal characteristics as estates. This meant that a more sophisticated theory of what estates were and "are" that examined them for their own sake could explain the difference between two distinct factions of people that appeared to contain the same classes — if England and France both contained nobility, even if you could outline a section of noble territories that were all Protestant and should not have obvious reasons to be rivals, that was not going to guarantee they would both fuse into one kingdom. From there, I started considering different rival Marxist movements as unities of opposites that operated inside the same material contradiction and interacted with and changed each other. The nature of interactions themselves is that they keep seemingly separate objects from actually being separate, and instead allow two distinct objects to add to each other's history. For a while I believed that the material separation between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism was simply recursively building on itself and the existing forms of resistance or violence in each faction were somehow leading to each other. That seemed to somewhat explain Dengism: China seemed to be drifting away from Marxism because of the antagonism between China and the First World, and as long as various other countries didn't understand that antagonism China would only defend itself harder and become more strict. But that certainly did not explain everything. Why had Trotsky written a lengthy criticism of the way the USSR operated internally ({{book|The Revolution Betrayed}}) if he wasn't trying to say that Trotskyism had a noticeably different internal structure and its entire socialist transition would look different? Was he just impatient about the pace of socialist transition? Was he trying to skip phases and land on upper-phase communism early? I wasn't fully convinced that Trotsky was bad at Marxism and knew nothing about it — as much as Stalinist sources were definitely trying to make me think that, and had made me quick to identify every single one of Trotsky's errors — so I was willing to entertain that he simply had a different way of doing things, but I still did not understand what it was.

Then in 2026 I had a "terrible" realization: people form a consciousness sized to whatever evolving object they are part of. If the way organizations form into larger structures when those structures are actually effective (Marxist parties, independent labor movements) is to go through a process of consciousness which is fundamentally shaped by or inside the active process of building themselves up into their near-future forms, then the process of forming a Communist International should affect the parties inside it downward giving them information about forming a Communist International as they are forming it. Many Marxist parties tend to assume that the task of forming a party inside a particular country region is separate from the task of forming a Communist International, but in doing that, they potentially overlook the changes that will occur in them when they actually form one, or worse, actively transform their party in a way that will make it difficult to form a Communist International. There is not exactly anything special and unique about first-hand experience, not for an individual and not even for an organization if either of them is equipped with the right knowledge to understand the overall material processes that happen inside experiences they haven't had. But at the same time, one of the things that does come with first-hand experience is the ability to directly interact with the near future. The closer an organization is to being in the physical state of cooperating with other organizations to form international structures, the closer it is to being able to interact with and learn about the next possible steps after or above that moment, through various spatial areas analyzing each other and each other's next moves apart or together. If two parties in the United States and Canada are already connected, they might be better able to predict what the best-case scenario for the overall region would be together than if they were acting separately. This would be true of any number of scales: when small organizations form spontaneously they are disconnected and do not have good understandings of each other's behavior, but as they succeed at becoming connected, if things go well their contradictory and "unpredictable" behavior versus each other should actually be able to turn around into a kind of error-correcting process where several different organizations understanding each other from the outside reveal each other's errors and quirks and eventually start to understand in what situations they will be able to rely on each other, or how to all increasingly align onto a better program. For any given social graph of workers all the groups of workers in the graph can become more capable of coordinated behavior after they have actually been functioning together and become more connected around the same objectives. Likewise, the exercise of several parties functioning together should give them the opportunity to actually change their behavior and become more functional as a Communist International. Instead of looking at things through traditional Marxist writings on dialectics, I tend to see everything through my own accumulated knowledge on physics and the kinds of mathematics appropriate to relativity or quantum mechanics, specifically because of strange correspondences I noticed between quantum mechanics and human behavior that made me come to the conclusion that relativity and quantum mechanics might offer insights for dialectical materialism. But either way, I had found a process I couldn't un-see. An isolated party was less likely by some kind of cumulative, repeating multiplier to develop the correct consciousness to form a Communist International, while if several parties managed to figure it out correctly they might all accomplish it faster. This was consistent with everything else I knew about time and historical events, that everything that happens in the universe is actually more like many separate timelines colliding with each other and building on each other in a circle, and events have an odd way of happening either more and more or less and less. A star is a great number of atoms all colliding and leading to more fusion reactions; a galaxy has fewer events between the objects in it the further apart the stars or other objects are. So it's not necessarily a mystery why important historical events all like to cluster together or not happen for long stretches of time; history itself is like a sudden burst of many events competing to happen. I should not have been surprised that this sort of fast, clustering all-or-nothing pattern would extend up to parties forming into Communist Internationals. But everything felt different the moment that actually sunk in. I had to really take my "meta-Marxist analysis" and draw it out on a space without boundaries, so it could extend out from tiny scales upward across the world. I was going to need that full terrain to understand each of the new "estates" possible today or historical Communist Internationals. I felt like I was going crazy. I had always believed there was next to no chance Trotskyism could actually be true. But I also felt like things were making more sense than before and the project was getting somewhere.

"No {{em|chance}} Trotskyism could be true". In some ways this was the key to everything. Generally speaking, all populations start out with various heterogeneous parts, and some of them turn out to be insignificant distinctions, but some of them turn into contradictory unities of opposites which can actively develop a population into something new or set it back. Between 2021 and 2026 I had always made the mistake of thinking that Trotskyism is only one thing, and that whenever Trotskyists had a bad program that this was also part of Trotskyism. I now see why I thought that: Trotskyists everywhere had always said they wanted to create a worldwide government where every Trotskyist party would join into a Fourth International and more or less every industrial population would act together to form a new society, with all the neighboring tribal societies and so forth presumably integrated into their region's democracy so that they are no longer in conflict with the former nation-states and can develop toward socialism to the extent they want to. Trotskyists kept saying they wanted to become a single world system; I wrote that down and didn't question it. I simply said, okay, I guess that makes sense, but if Trotskyist parties are all supposed to form one Fourth International then why are they so infamous for constantly being in conflict and calling each other revisionist? Why is it that Stalinists are so easily able to summarize Trotskyists as "Trotskyists' worst enemy", and why does that feel perfectly accurate whenever I open up one Trotskyist group's criticism of another one and attempt to understand it? Well... I was missing something that I would not have seen without both attempting to put together meta-Marxism and extending it out to the largest scales. Trotskyism is not just a single thing. When you actually look at Marxist movements out in the field there are about two versions of Trotskyism, one which is Marxist and one which is fake and resembles a Second International. Trotskyism is the process of the Fourth International attempting to form as a single system, but also of various groups that fail to understand Marxism breaking off the Fourth International at various times, while spreading around Marxist concepts and falsely appearing to be part of it. To anyone that interacted with the "fake" side of Trotskyism, it would definitely appear there was no chance of Trotskyism achieving anything. But probability is outwardly deceptive — if there are two colors of marbles in a jar and someone repeatedly draws exactly one of the colors, it's only when they actually draw the other one that it will finally appear to have a chance. And apparently, this was Trotsky and Cannon, while Grant, Cliff, and even Luxemburg were not quite as close to being part of the winning fraction. (Much less Stalin or Mao.)

So, in short, I started out thinking there was only one Communist International, but it seems what was really happening from 1925 to 1940 was that the Soviet Union contained Stalin's party, the layer of bureaucrats and Idealists (Yaroshenko, etc.), and then an entire second process of forming a Communist International all over again from the First to the Fourth which was all compressed into the space of one party and was busy messily sorting itself out to finally pull out of itself the real Fourth International. Stalinism and Trotskyism {{em|were}} separate things, but not because of the theoretical quality of each faction "as a whole". They were separate parallel processes of forming a Communist International. So everything I had thought was a sign of Trotskyism being unprincipled or having bad theories was actually more like a sign the USFI was going to develop later, and actually, that whole gradient from "bad" Trotskyist theories up to good ones was going to begin working itself out between 1936 and 1960. This seems like a period of history that everyone forgot. Everyone knows about the Great Terror. Everyone knows about "Animal Farm" and the Soviet Union sliding away into a sea of bureaucrats. Some people know about the hidden letters in which early Trotskyism plotted to kill members of the Soviet government in the course of its overall plan to try to overwrite Stalin's party with a Trotskyist revolution. (This did happen, by the way. It doesn't do anyone any good to keep denying that early Trotskyists did in fact die for a revolution.) But nobody remembers the second cascade of Communist Internationals that was busy secretly iterating on itself to finally churn out a Bolshevik International all over again. They called this "sectarianism", because they did not understand the consequences of molecularizing Marxism.

So, I am not aligned with Stalinism any more. I started putting together a new Marxist method (or maybe not new, I don't really know) for fully understanding every philosophy and political party including the strange mess of academic philosophies in the United States, but it ended me up here. I was as skeptical of Trotskyism as I could possibly be but my violet-Marxist method ended me up at realizing that it might just be the tendency that matches my findings the best and overall makes the most sense. So, now, I would like to present all the basic concepts of violet Marxism to the ICFI as best I can in hopes of getting closer to actually seeing it applied and improved. 
I have always had a very peripheral position as far as interesting events happening in the United States; I have a basic 4-year degree in science but my area never really sees any organizations or movements and I have always been a bit too disabled to work, so I mostly sit around trying to solve the world like a puzzle in hopes that will somehow make things better. I have never really felt like that was accomplishing much by itself, and have always wanted to actually get involved in some kind of organization, but due to various physical difficulties, trying to analyze the Marxist method and create better models of history is about all I can do. So, this is my attempt to try to begin contributing my findings. (I had also attempted to send letters outlining violet Marxism to two other places before, but I never actually got a response from either of them. This might be partly because the previous letters were not as well-ordered and thought-through and I've been developing my framework a lot more even since the second letter in March 2026. But, neither of the places I submitted this to before was Trotskyist, either.)

== Good and Evil: Stalin is not [[E:Hydra (Marvel Comics)|Hydra]] ==

Whenever two political factions come into violent opposition, it is common for people to ask if one of the factions is "immoral". Who's "Good", who's "Evil". A better question to ask is, {{i|why do people ask this question}}? (The meta-ethical question.) And the general answer will be, because people want to justify the rule of a particular class over a particular region, or its expansion over other regions. This explanation has been mostly sufficient for any historical period up to 1945. Nothing within this particular subject of discussion really got "complicated" until about 1953.

The historiography of civilizations attempting to characterize history in moral terms goes way back into the time of ancient kingdoms and empires at least as far as 5000 BC. Tribal societies may have created moral systems even earlier. But today, Christianity and its relatives are particularly infamous in terms of characterizations of various groups of people as Good or Evil. If an international war is Christian, it can become a righteous {{i|lang=en|crusade}}, or if Muslims were to do the same thing it could become a {{i|jihad}} — a religious "struggle", as if who has what religion was one of the most important axes of historical progression. Before them, Zoroastrianism tried to unite people against a generalized god of strife, and after them, Zionism would unite two modern religious groups for the "righteous" task of reviving an ancient war that should have no longer made any sense to anyone. Into the 1800s, these kinds of characterizations of monarchic empires as "good" or "evil" had begun to dissociate from any notion of "godly" or "ungodly" and become wildly secularized, spreading across everything from fictional fantasy narratives to actual accounts of World War II — the Nazis were Evil, the part of the First World that didn't turn into nazis was Good, when you want to portray an "evil empire" on a TV show, you show people fantasy nazis. Even so, these simplistic moral models have been almost wholly incapable of understanding systems like Liberal-republicanism and why exactly it is that for instance the US Republican and Democratic Parties can both call each other Evil and themselves Good and fear each other equally. It has been a running joke in the United States that people constantly compare the Republican Party to Voldemort and the {{book|Harry Potter}} books' fictional depictions of wizard nazis, years ago in a sincere capacity, and now in a reflexive ironic capacity sketching a picture frame around the absurdity that anyone including typical center-Liberal academics would think such a metaphor was actually useful. One of these interpretations is the Idealist view of history. One of these interpretations is slowly and painfully discovering the Materialist model.

The root of the connection between religion and the content of its moral statements can be traced back to the class with the most control over religion itself. In a feudal period, depending on exactly how a kingdom develops, the borders of two kingdoms will essentially be formed with the help of two particular bodies of clergy. In India, Brahmins or Kshatriyas (the two broad priest and noble layers associated with regional religions that would fuse into Hinduism) ruled various kingdoms, before a Buddhist emperor would then unify them. In the early history of Islam, religious figures such as caliphs sometimes had huge importance in political and military roles simply due to how small the societies were and how recently the societies had emerged. Each body of clergy will have particular definitions of which kingdoms they think are Good or Evil, or perhaps Harmonious versus Unharmonious, but in the end, any narrative they present about the relationship between the body of clergy that ties together the kingdom and the outside will ultimately come from the body of clergy protecting its own class position that is both usually fairly high-ranking within the kingdom and tasked with explaining the creation of one particular kingdom somewhat exclusively. It is often not advantageous to the clergy to recognize any external body of clergy as Good or Reasonable, so sometimes they simply uphold the "reality" that other countable societies of people such as islands of nobility that do not conform to the same Brahmanic codes or Christian or Jewish kingdoms that do not mesh well with the local caliph are not to be trusted. While it is possible for a religion to behave in a syncretic way and simply collect local variations of religion into itself, religion will also tend to mark anything that fractures kingdoms apart as some kind of unenlightened behavior or sin, and try to paint any individual who does that behavior as the root of large-scale problems.

Of course, religious layers can have many possible roles within a feudal society, each one with hidden consequences. These may include justifying a particular king as "the correct one", building loyalty between groups of nobles or merchants or peasants all aligned around the same religion, or actually structuring mundane functions of local government as in the parish system in Germany (which was effectively used to collect taxes) or the use of churches as meeting-houses in the early United States. In Greece, Rome, and Egypt, as well as in India, polytheistic religion aided in joining separate cities or patches of feudalism into larger societies as people began to rationalize various gods or groups of priests as inherently belonging to the same greater whole. In the ancient world religion slowly aided people toward urbanization, as Greek or Egyptian cults helped to anchor and structure cities, or later European-style churches in the 1700s would come to provide "spaces of community" that once again would allow people to meet together in a period where agrarian society tended to push people apart, slowly encouraging towns and secular forms of town government to be created. The creation of cities was not the "goal" of religion, as historical events themselves generally cannot think or plan anything, and as far as trying to plan for what the future can actually become, any Idealist philosophy is even worse at that. However, the one thing that gives Idealism power, very much by accident, is that all Idealist philosophies will always have material consequences no matter what is in them. The consequences may look nothing like what the Idealist philosophy promises, and yet they will happen, because whenever any two Idealist prescriptions or projections run into each other and have no actual answer, the material world will decide independent of them what the real answer is. Thus, religions can form "Protestant community spaces", and end up with the secular result of cities and United States federalism mediated by the Constitution, or they can form supposedly-perfect estates with an entire parliament just for the churches centuries ago in France or Germany, and yet ultimately end up with the people getting tired of the top two estates and dissolving them to create a new republic with only one estate (Liberal-republicanism). The clergy and the nobility didn't ask for there to be a French Revolution or an English war over parliament that would eventually end in a bourgeois parliament. But the act of religion or morality dictating what "should" happen or what "should" exist or what abstract Ideals inherently belong in balance is separate from the way the world really functions — Idealism may study the poetic {{em|art}} of essences, balanced conglomerates, and oppositions, but Materialism describes the results of concrete interactions within the physical world.

All of this should be familiar to anyone who already knows about Marx and Engels. But the actual experiences of the Russian Revolution and the Cold War have brought in one very important twist: most of the time, "Progressive" and "Reactionary" are very nearly as arbitrary in their meanings as "Good" and "Evil". Most people within Liberal-republicanism simply take the concept of Progress and assign it to whatever philosophy they happen to personally trust the most, rather than taking any time to consider the difficult problem of whether there actually could be an objective answer to the question. Equally, anarchists and Menshevik parties at the time of the Russian Empire had no real idea which kinds of things they labeled "Progressive" or "Reactionary" were the most plausible to actually happen, even if some of them they may have had a better sense for which outcomes were inherently inclusive than some Liberal-republicans now. When have people actually risen out of the concepts of Good and Evil, and when have they simply tried to escape them [[E:Changing names changes things (Engels)|by giving them different names]]?

People tend to assume their definitions of Good and Bad "mean something". But when you truly test them by giving them a historical situation in another country seemingly nothing like their own that they {{em|should}} have no personal stake in, in practice, the way people respond to something like the Moscow Trials period will vary wildly depending on exactly what specific faction of people they belong to. If you're a center-Liberal like the Democrats, Trotsky is good. If you're a Tory, Trotsky is bad. If you're a Maoist, Trotsky is bad. If you're PragerU, Trotsky is good. If you're a Stalinist, Trotsky is bad. If you're a Trotskyist from Japan, Trotsky is bad. If you're a Lacanian psychoanalyst, Trotsky is good. If you're a Lacanian named Molly Ann Rothenberg, Trotsky is bad. If you're a journalist Trotsky is good. If you're an anarchist Trotsky is bad. If you're a Duginist neo-nazi Trotsky is good. If you're a social-democratic organizer Trotsky is good. If you're a lawyer Trotsky is bad. If you're Alan Woods Trotsky is the best thing ever. If you're a social-democrat on the internet Trotsky is bad. It is as if Trotsky has completely broken morality open like some kind of memory access error where a computer program that would normally behave in specific ways is churning through random garbage data and spitting out nonsense. Nobody seems to know what they're talking about whatsoever. Trotsky seems to turn into a different "character" in each retelling of the story, sometimes a bourgeois democrat, sometimes a terrible dictator, sometimes a kulak, sometimes a bad copy of Rosa Luxemburg, sometimes Brutus, sometimes Caesar, sometimes the patron saint of newspapers as government, sometimes a true Russian revolutionary for helping Toryism, sometimes a forgotten British Labour MP, sometimes a wannabe framer of the US Constitution who couldn't do anything right, sometimes the only real heir of the one genuine Marxism but announced in exactly the kind of way that makes you wonder if it's actually true. Nobody can seem to make up their minds who exactly he was even as people seem to have a relatively homogeneous pool of opinions about Stalin — either Stalin defended Bolshevism and that was good, or Stalin defended Bolshevism and that was bad. Anarchists will often give strange opinions about Stalin, but almost all of these come down to word definitions and trying to appropriate the word "communism" to solely mean "anarchism", blending back into all the center-Liberal opinions in the "Bad" bucket. Trotskyists seem to be the only group of people to regularly claim that Stalin did not represent Bolshevism and {{em|Bolshevism}} as it existed in the Soviet Union should have been something different. But, hand modern Trotskyists over to all the people putting out different narratives about Trotsky, and the bourgeoisie and center-Liberal voters will basically spin the same narratives as they ever did. Nobody but Trotskyists seems to actually have a clear understanding of what Trotskyism really is. The average First-World citizen almost seems to have a better understanding of quantum physics and how to disprove string theory than they do of Trotskyism.

As people left feudal periods and entered republican periods, some started to notice the futility of labeling things Good or Evil. In China, weakened by repeated and seemingly endless warring states periods, Buddhism tried the tactic of simply _giving up_, and conceptualizing what might be called Light and Darkness as simple opposing parts of a greater whole, always in competition, but inevitably present. To philosophers, this kind of turn can seem unbelievably profound, but in its full context it is easy to recognize as an adaptation to existing historical circumstances that simply allows existing patterns of division to continue. Now, after 200 years of Liberal-republican parties increasingly stagnating in the United States, anarchists and various others have been increasingly turning to Buddhist imagery simply to represent the ever-present opposition between center-Liberals and Tories. We know by now that the division between center-Liberal and Tory parties like the Democrats and Republicans or supposed "Labor" and Liberal parties is deliberately engineered. Periodically, the United States bourgeoisie will see islands of bourgeoisie centralizing and then decide that having too many bourgeoisie in one place is "tyrannical" — as with corporate mergers, or the Democratic-Republican party — and that they must be divided in two as the correct course of action that is supposedly conducive to "human rights" and "freedom". The question almost nobody has stopped and thought about enough is, {{em|why is this}}? What is the significance of the United States constantly and deliberately dividing in defiance of its background condition of trying to consolidate and unify? Could it be that the people of the United States {{em|do not in fact understand}} how to separate ruling class narratives of Good and Bad from the actual material layout of class rule?

Could it be that none of the world's Marxist parties know how to separate value judgements about separations from the physical causes of separations either?

Within the bounds of Liberal-republicanism, no matter how you attempt to construct a framework of ethics to serve the goals ethics is supposedly intended to serve, you will eventually find that it is contradictory for Liberal-republicans to claim they support Trotsky but to not accept Trotskyism. It is not possible to actually side with Trotsky in a sense where he would hypothetically agree the person in question is in support of human rights and also to remain on the side of Liberal-republicanism at the same time. It is also not possible to side with Liberal-republicanism and consistently get it to agree that Trotsky is in support of human rights. What Trotsky considered to be a desirable outcome and what Liberal-republicanism considers to be Good or ethical are completely different things, shaped by the fact that Liberal-republicanism wants to maintain capitalism and Trotsky aimed to get rid of global capitalism. Similarly, one could also say that Stalin's set of priorities around preventing the Soviet population from returning to deathly starvation and Trotsky's set of priorities around attempting to liberate Europe led to different conceptions of what would be a desirable outcome. To put things another way, Stalin and Trotsky had different models of the future and what possibilities the near future could produce — they effectively had {{em|different plural bodies of historical materialism}} connecting different collections of observations to different collections of guesses.

The United States bourgeoisie are generally trapped in what can be called {{dfn|ideology}} in the strong sense: their models of reality are often not even close to how reality actually works, and largely amount to the sets of ideas that their class position, situated along the outer borders of the Republican or Democratic "estates", produces. What happens to Marxist theorists in different tendencies only creates "ideology" in a much weaker sense. Two parties will end up with diverging models of reality that cause them to behave as different identifiable tendencies and reject each other, but in some cases, these incorrect models of reality can actually be fixed. It is unlikely the whole organization will notice the error at once, but through the development of contradictions in an organization, the organization can turn itself around and use the process of people dividing themselves by reality-model that would otherwise destroy organizations in order to constructively assemble as many people as possible back onto the correct "estate".

This is the real consequence of {{dfn|molecularizing Marxism}}. Marxism does not actually take place in parties in the way that was once thought to be the case. In one sense, Marxism starts distinctly below the scale of any party with factions simply assembling themselves together around a particular model of reality, and if that model of reality has enough explanatory power, the underlying faction will simply continue extending upward to such a great scale it escapes the bounds of individual countries. This does not mean parties do not need to exist — organizations still serve an important role of connecting people across space and bringing "democracy" to the seemingly unregulated process of allegiances to particular models spontaneously extending across the population. What it does mean is that the process of forming a party of any particular type is fundamentally similar to and connected to the large-scale process of forming an International. Simply through existing at a smaller scale, anarchist formations attempt to generate First Internationals, center-Liberal formations attempt to generate Second Internationals (whether we choose to label them that way, or label formations such as the United Nations specially), and Trotskyist organizations attempt to generate Fourth Internationals. (Whether Stalinist parties inherently attempt to generate Third Internationals is somewhat unclear, given their apparently unstable character that also tends to destroy Third Internationals.)

The presence of the Left Opposition in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was not an anomaly. No matter how negatively some people may feel about Trotsky himself, the one thing that is perfectly clear by now is that that division in the party was part of an overall attempt to correct the errors in Stalinist parties and the Third International; without a Left Opposition of any kind, the party was doomed, while with the correct people holding the correct understandings dividing the party, it might well have found the possibility to save itself. We may never know if Trotsky literally had the correct strategy to save the parties of the Third International or not, but as Trotskyist parties have been busy trying to reconstruct the Fourth International, all the evidence needed to demonstrate this recurring pattern of soft division and error-correction has been steadily piling up.

== Existential materialism ==

=== Swatch analysis and slice analysis ===

I'm sure you're wondering exactly why and when violet Marxism became "violet". With all the context for violet Marxism laid out, I can now explain that.

One of the most basic tools used by meta-Marxism is color swatch analysis. At the beginning, when I said that two rival Marxist parties "are treated as completely different things", this is what I was referring to. Any time two parties with particular known goals or known factional philosophies are in conflict, they can be treated as bordered entities and labeled using different "color swatches" which are chosen based on each party's theoretical content or current political positions. At any given time there will be a particular predefined body of color swatches accompanied by 2-3 letter codes which is recognized by a group of meta-Marxist theorists, and factions in concrete situations will be classified into these letter codes representing specific philosophical traditions or tendencies. The colors associated with the codes have variable degrees of precision, so that for instance in a situation where there are several small Marxist parties and some very large bodies of center-Liberals, all the Marxist parties could be shown in red instead of in their higher-precision colors, or the center-Liberals could be divided into more precise shades of blue since there are so many of them they could conceivably produce interesting contradictions. Color swatch analysis is largely a tool for communicating solutions to problems as opposed to a tool for solving complicated problems, but it can be used to communicate situations in terms that will seem more familiar to center-Liberals or social-democrat types who are not yet familiar with the ways Marxism frames things; a pedantic center-Liberal may find it much more intuitive to actually see a group of schizoanalysts labeled "schizoanalysis [DG]" but given a blue swatch than to see that group labeled "bourgeois ideologies" (although for Marxists who already know what things are, "bourgeois ideologies [ES]" would also be an option).

The basic concept of color swatch analysis is fairly easy to understand. This kind of thing has been done for a while without the concept of consistency and precision; United States people love to talk about standard Liberal-republican parties as "blue" and "red" in order to act like those are the world's most important ideologies, and occasionally, you can even catch Lenin talking about "pale-pink quasi-socialism". So color swatch analysis comes close to being self-explanatory apart from the conceit that I was using it to draw arrows between arrangements of colorized social structures to give overviews of historical processes that would then falsely appear "mechanical" without immediately having to go into some of the more arcane terminology of Marxist dialectics. This is the basic reason for why there are levels of precision and letter codes. Every letter code represents a particular material layout of people and social structures, and from there, structurally similar philosophies are grouped together, and philosophy codes that have turned against each other in a particular situation can be assigned particular colors that are deemed appropriate to them. The use of two distinct colors represents a potential material contradiction; two distinct colors inside a greatly zoomed-in model of a philosophy can be used to represent a class analysis.

As for what major swatches I've designated so far in my working model of the United States and the previous history of Marxism, here they are:

* Crimson / red [code ML] — early versions of Marxism, or Stalinist parties. I assigned this based on the most common meaning of "Reds" in English-speaking countries.
** MN — Marx & Engels; early Marxism.
** ML — Stalin's Marxism; Stalinism.
** MS — Hoxhaism.
** MZ — early Maoism.
** NMZ — North American Maoism.
* Orange [code IV] — Trotskyism.
** I originally made Trotskyism orange under the assumption it was a distortion of mainstream Marxism, but even so, I am probably not going to change it, because the orange swatch has a nice flame palette and I like the look of it.
** Now this swatch has become more like a badge of correctness, especially inside Trotskyism. Deeply revisionist parties are simply marked in blue or strawberry (or possibly red), not orange.
* Strawberry [code DX] — Marxisms based on eclectic Materialism, or revisionist versions of Marxism that are in transition backward but only slowly.
** DX — Deng Xiaoping Thought (China).
** JC — Juche-socialism (North Korea).
** W — Western Marxism; Louis Althusser, Mark Fisher, etc.
* Mauve [code BP] — I gave BlackPantherism its own swatch because it seemed different but I didn't entirely understand the details. So far I haven't used this swatch for anything else.
* Charcoal — anarchism and pre-agrarian societies.
** A — anarchism, or philosophy from tribal societies that strongly resembles anarchism.
** Aqr — magic ritual or neo-paganism. Putting this in charcoal isn't to smear anarchism as much as to highlight the loose connection between anarchist philosophy and tribal societies.
* Sky blue [code ES] — bourgeois philosophies.
** ES — generic code for bourgeois philosophies. Originally stood for "Existentialist-Structuralist tradition", my slightly opaque nickname for a large cluster of academic bourgeois philosophies that I now think are better described as "non-economic agorisms" or "blue anarchisms".
** Ag — agorism; philosophy directly describing non-economic markets.
** LR — Liberal-republicanism. Covers writers like Thomas Jefferson, etc.
** IK — Kantianism; Kantian ethics, logic, or political theory.
** Aa — psychoanalysis. (Etymology: Lacanians kept talking about the separation of baby "a" from mother "A".)
** HAS — humanities, arts, and social sciences. This is really only blue because capitalism captured it. In some contexts, the bright green swatch can be used instead.
*** HAS — religious studies. Christianity, Buddhism, etc.
** LGBT — queer theory. Also used for "uniquely queer" art.
* Khaki brown [code PT] — old monarchist ideas, Toryism, or fascism.
** PT — Toryism, including Republican Party.
** P4 — Duginism, Zionism, modern "Identitarian" fascisms. (Etymology: {{book|The Fourth Political Theory}}, Dugin.)
** AS — Hegelianism. (Etymology: "Absolute Spirit".)
* Earth green [code STM] — science, technology, engineering, or math.
** GR — general or special relativity. I talk about relativity and black holes a lot, so I find it useful to have a code for it.
** FS / FOSS — Free Software movement. Peripheral to Marxism but does have some very interesting ideas.
* Bright green [code Fy] — statements about fiction. This makes more sense as a category when you know my wiki was analyzing and criticizing works like {{book|1984}} and {{book|Animal Farm}}.
** This swatch can be used for the arts or humanities in general if it is truly just about art styles or techniques.
* Violet [code MX] — meta-Marxist analysis methods or hypotheses. This swatch only makes sense when it's being used to color motifs and propositions, or alternatively, to draw a terrain that two Marxist parties of "real" swatch colors sit on so the violet terrain can be used to represent material reality in general.

While currently all these letter codes are just idiosyncratic symbols made up by one person for one limited project, I think there is a lot of scope for expanding this "philosophy code" system into some kind of actual international standard collaborated on by many people which could receive its own ISO paper, similar to ISO language codes, or how chemical elements on the periodic table all have standard letter codes. (Although that would take years to finish, even on the level of collecting all the philosophies or academic fields that should have codes.) It might help to try to align the field distinctions in the philosophy code standard with BISAC library section codes, because in terms of ways of sorting philosophy a large enough library or bookstore will already have had to solve that problem with philosophy books.

=== A logic system for color swatches ===

The first thing I have been using color swatch analysis for is a project where I am trying to expand and overhaul formal logic to cover different use cases than it is usually used for. In traditional versions of formal logic, there will be two binary truth values and statements are not allowed to be ambiguous. But within what I call "wavemachine logic", neither of those things applies. Statements can be expressed in natural language as long as it is clear exactly what proposition they are presenting and they are not confusable for another statement; there is a large and perhaps countably-infinite number of possible truth values; statements are allowed to be true any percentage of the time as opposed to always true or always false, and their truth value will be chosen to reflect the percentage of the time they are actually true. To some people this form of logic might sound strange and useless. But to me, this is the only good way to write logical statements about color swatch analysis. <ref name="wm"/> Taking a statement like "Trotskyists should enter the Labor party", it's perfectly clear what the statement is saying, but you need a rather complicated system of truth values to express its practical significance. Within wavemachine logic, you might say the truth values of this statement are "statement believed to be true by USFI (blue)", "statement rejected by ICFI (blue)", "Menshevik statement (blue)" or "failed multiple times". Of course, which truth value you would return as the most important truth value that subsequent statements would act on depends on what context the statement is being evaluated in. Every single truth value can be used to imply a contextual color swatch for that truth value in context, and then that swatch can be used to assign the {{em|statement}} a color swatch in context that acts like yet another truth value — for instance, the truth values I just gave might assign this statement a sky blue swatch indicating the USFI or IMT is making errors that lean toward center-Liberal social-democracy (opportunist errors). Concepts such as opportunism might become much easier to communicate to newcomers to Marxism if they can see a statement that is supposed to be red or orange suddenly turn blue when in context that swatch is supposed to be opposed to Trotskyism and represent everything it doesn't stand for.

One other problem with formal logic is that it is bad at handling changes in state and the concept of something being true in one year and not true in another year. Given a statement like "Stalin is in support of Bolshevism" the truth value would become ambiguous because the degree to which that statement is true would be completely different in 1910 from what it would be in 1936. In order to fix this problem to the degree it can be fixed, I have taken to representing different historical periods as different coherent bodies of knowledge which are separated but both represented within the same larger containing body of knowledge — here a "historical period" is understood to be a complex physical object with a particular socioeconomic structure, like a national population currently in Liberal capitalism, or in Stalin's Marxism. For example, the conditions of the Soviet Union in 1920 are taken to be a different thing from the conditions of the Soviet Union in 1936, and statements are tagged with the explicit time and place they apply to whenever that might become a potential problem. I know this does not completely fix the problem of making formal logic dialectical, as it can potentially miss divisions between "bodies of knowledge" that somebody assumes to not meaningfully be "dividing" yet. But, despite that limitation, it can go all the way to representing two different historical periods transitioning into each other, or two separate factions such as a Marxist party and an anarchism coming into conflict. If someone goes into the process of constructing a "radically binary" form of logic like this with the intention to use it for violet Marxism and to begin by treating no particular form of "infra-Marxism" as canonical, then it can be used to point out conflicts between different parties claiming to be Marxist and uncover the inner material conflicts between them, which can in turn be used to more concisely present arguments that particular parties are revisionist. I refer to the concept of presenting particular physical models of conflicting parties as they exist in particular slices of time as {{i|time slice analysis}} or just {{dfn|slice analysis}}. I think this has previously been called "bracketing".

The way I see it, slice analysis is not really an advanced tool. It is important to be able to introduce people who are totally new to dialectics to the basic concepts before they actually know any of them, like math classes have to build up to calculus or physics classes have to introduce Newtonian physics before getting to relativistic physics. Most people an organization will attempt to talk to will be thoroughly stuck in the midst of a world where everything is binary or neatly bimodal — you're a United States citizen or a foreigner, you voted Republican or Democrat, a law passes or fails to pass — and so when given dialectics they will look at you funny like they "need answers". Slice analysis could sometimes be a way to get some of those people out of that. _No,_ you tell them, _there aren't two things, there are three. It's not "you have trans rights or you don't". On Monday there were trans rights, on Friday there weren't trans rights, and in between that, two things smashed into each other to produce the outcome of there not being trans rights, so if you predict the thing in the middle wrong in any way, you end up with no trans rights. You can't just choose Monday instead of Friday, or the Monday people instead of the Friday people, because there is no such thing as "the Monday people" that take you straight back to Monday._ I think a great number of people who exist in the 21st century genuinely do not understand what history or time is. I think most people couldn't even give a coherent explanation of how they think free will could exist when supposedly nobody can predict what happens in the future. So, in my mind, people need a really solid education on the basic concepts of _physical time_ and _cause versus effect_, practically something you could show to a grade school student, so they have something to prepare them for both special relativity and dialectics if necessary. The better they understand special and general relativity, the less this would be needed. But these days, people can just barely understand cause and effect well enough to attempt to label individual actions unethical. They stumble through life with the two truth values of "Right" and "Wrong" and struggle to throw them onto actions in order to learn what actions not to do, but they can't even really know what is Good or Bad because they don't really ever know the consequences of their own actions. I recently saw a video where a blue anarchist gave up and tried to claim that "consequentialist ethics is dead" — which shouldn't be possible unless you believe that no choice you are actually likely to act on can ever be Wrong. This is why I've made a point of focusing on the concept of truth values as their own unique mathematical mechanic that guides the process of people of various swatch colors making decisions on which statements are True or False "in general", and why I've tried to take such a high-up view of causality where no statement can be assumed to be accurate simply because it appears to align with the interests of a particular Marxist party. I've been a Stalinist. Back then I believed statements were potentially wrong because they were Trotskyist, but what I did correctly understand was that a Marxist party can very easily take the concept of "being on the side of the proletariat" and twist it to make the arbitrary agenda of just anybody seem critically important when it isn't. If we want to get rid of incorrect versions of Marxism, we really need to abandon simple "four legs" rhetoric, because the moment Stalinists start applying Proletarian and Bourgeois to things as truth values they always get it wrong.

I originally got the idea for adapting formal logic to meta-Marxism when I saw a large language model being used to create an "alchemy game" called {{game|Infinite Craft}} where a player could combine two words and the game would spit out a concept which would be the consequence of putting those two concepts together. (For instance, combining the words "Fire" and "Water" produces "Steam", and combining "Democracy" and "Storm" gives "Revolution", if I remember those combinations right.) I thought that program was really fascinating but I was struck by how bad the combination results would get if you kept playing it for too long — the Idealist assumptions behind language models were quickly going from coherent logic to bad puns and total gibberish, while in my mind, this could be a great game if it actually started with Materialist assumptions. I started drawing up a concept for a better "mathematician's combination game" but before long I was putting entire sentence-long propositions into it and combining them to produce logical syllogisms, and then I realized I'd actually invented a simple logic engine. From there I started creating a wiki to try to map out the relationships between a wide array of material things ("Z1 Items"), motifs I'd found in videos or articles ("S1 Items"), and propositions putting the objects and motifs into some particular order and making claims about them ("S2 Items", "Z2 Items", and "F2 Items"). Basically, I was laying out a system of second-order logic where at the second-order or proposition level, all the statements could also turn into truth values for other statements when they happened to describe a thing that could be true about another thing only sometimes — for example, "A statement that describes material reality is True" becomes "Describes Material Reality", "The entropy of a collection of objects only decreases with added energy" becomes "Obeys Entropy Law", and "Trotskyist parties must form a Fourth International" becomes "(Is) Trotskyist Party" granting an orange swatch.

I had a rather elaborate conceptual system in place for trying to begin figuring out what statements and philosophies were the most accurate and which ones did not match up to material reality, previous historical periods, or whatever specific topic they were actually speaking about. And, in spite of all the science-minded skepticism that went into that system and just how many Stalinist-aligned propositions I started with, because of the particular "formally neutral" way I did things and how statements in each philosophy were set aside in their own swatch color to be evaluated starting from their own context, I still ended up here. I can't emphasize that enough. I feel like at some later time when meta-Marxism as a whole is even more refined than it is now, it would be the tool the Fourth International could use to finally get everyone to actually understand Trotskyism and move on from Stalinism. And considering how hard {{em|I}} resisted and kept trying to endlessly question everything before I passed through the other side, I feel like the body of people who would be successfully won over from Stalinism might just produce some of the best Marxist theorists the world has ever known.

I should also add here: I've gotten some good use out of the WSWS's resident LLM. I try never to use any others because frankly they were terrible at answering questions the few times I tested them, but in comparison this one has been shockingly good at following whatever I was trying to say even when I started bringing in temporary or field-specific violet-Marxist terminology with included definitions of each term. I was surprised how quickly I could get it to go along with swatch analysis and slice analysis and start saying things like "strawberry states are not stable, Trotskyist parties can't leave crimson Marxisms as they are because the bureaucrats eventually turn them strawberry" or "meta-Marxism will ultimately select a Fourth International as the most accurate form of Marxism". Sometimes the LLM would try to call me out for what looked to it like _actually_ saying ideas cause factions or like skipping dialectical interactions if I didn't explain at length what meta-Marxism was and what slice analysis was and what all the terms were referring to. Sometimes it would give criticisms that were perfectly reasonable because I would give it a scenario where it was "supposed to" get Stalinists and Trotskyists to coexist and it would say, "no, Stalin's allies eliminated the Fourth International in Europe, that's not going to work". I would say that the majority of the time it was giving a clear, very precise analysis of things, which reflected well on the overall body of articles it was drawing from. A very small part of why I drafted up this article is the thought that hypothetically it would be easier for the bot to answer questions if it actually had any existing references on violet Marxism. But, of course, I was also genuinely interested in what kinds of responses or critiques I would get when actual people could see it.

During the process of laying out my wiki and its system of "infinitely-binary" logic I have been idly thinking about what could replace the new fad of "AI search engines". Many people are angry about LLMs and hardly ever want to see another LLM again. And I don't entirely blame them. I think two of the major gripes with LLMs are their opacity and their inefficiency as machines. I honestly think that it would be possible to achieve the same thing I've been using the LLM for if instead there existed something a bit like the world's biggest thesaurus and it was simply one really big network of pages about specific words or phrases with a lot of synonyms filed under them but some of the terms were questions or propositions. At first that sounds a bit like a language model. But I think the key is to separate the notion of terms _as in concepts with well-known names_ from the notion of _words_ or _sentences_. Wikidata has already done this really well: you go onto Wikidata and search up the term _proletariat_, and you get a concept with the identifier "Q132603", such that it can have a display title in multiple languages, and if there was another unrelated concept called "proletariat" (maybe this one is talking about ancient Rome) it would have a totally separate ID number. I think that if common search questions or propositions were crystallized into particular entries like this then it could enable rebuilding old-style search engines from the ground up as users added various useful links to various conceptual identifiers that might be nested inside more general concepts and some conceptual identifiers would already be recognized as related, and thus be able to fill in more results in a search that only turned up a few links. A system vaguely similar to this is already in use for searching archiveofourown.org (AO3), where each user tags submitted stories with text-based tags and some tags are made synonyms or put inside more general tags. People have often praised this site as having one of the best search systems, but one complaint about it I've seen that I think is valid is that when the tags are in language rather than fundamentally being numbers, the "tag wranglers" who actually choose canonical tags sometimes make mistakes on which similar-looking phrases are the same usage of language and which have different connotations and should be different tags. The tagging system might theoretically be a bit better if there was a particular interface for creating new tags as numbered entities and typing a short memo about what they mean so the people who actually edit tags have a better chance of figuring out where the tag is really supposed to go. Wikidata has a nice interface for searching through concepts where if you type in a natural language it will show you all the concepts in natural language with a memo of what they are such as "string [thread]" and "string [data type]". This kind of interface could in theory be used to label and categorize anything, making it possible for users to build a search index themselves instead of experts at a large corporation trying to figure out how to automate that through crawler programs or LLMs. The potential of this kind of thing for collecting observations on social phenomena and sharing Marxist reading lists is _immense_. If users could create tags or maybe use existing lists of entities on Wikidata, very quickly the search engine could have "meta" pages about every single page it indexed containing accumulated statistics and notes where somebody submitted a page tagged with "Maoism" and someone else tagged it with concepts the previous users didn't notice like "harmonizing classes", "national independence movement", and "strategies that create strawberry Marxisms". This kind of system could easily lead to edit wars where users keep removing tags and leaving different conflicting opinions. But I think that with the right conventions in place, it might eventually settle into a more constructive pattern where everyone adds an observation from a different angle but nobody removes things. The fact that everyone will come to a collaborative project with a different level of consciousness can sometimes lead to downward spirals where people will add valid observations but they will get removed and only the most absolutely uncontroversial statements will remain. But if there was some way to encourage all the edits toward acknowledging all objectively true facts (in the situations where that applies), I think that a system like this could be a wonderful tool for steering people toward building a Fourth International. It would, for one thing, put into practice the observed pattern that consciousness builds on itself when many people are reinforcing the same organization or body of facts from different directions.

=== Existential materialism ===

Why do people believe in ethics?

You might think the answer is obvious, but the more you look into it, the more you'll realize that this is a deeply complicated question. First you'll think of one answer, like "people construct systems of ethics to avoid harm", and then you'll think about it a little longer and think of another answer, like "people often use ethics to perpetuate capitalism and justify punishing people who defy the bourgeoisie", but then you'll think about it even longer and start coming up with rebuttals to that, like "but believing in ethics doesn't help anyone overcome the bourgeoisie, so ultimately what use is it?". Every single time you think you've found an answer, it only brings up more questions, which then only bring up more questions about why you were asking the previous questions, and very quickly it can feel like you've never understood anything in your life.

Having already explored the concepts of morality and ethics in other sections, I'll get straight to the point. I think ethics as we know it is more or less an illusion. It is a study entirely built on false principles. Ethics is an Idealist study of human behavior that assumes that abstract Ideals held inside people cause behavior, when in reality, human behavior is produced through the interaction of human beings with other objects including human beings and the natural world. This is a very important distinction. If human behavior is caused by abstract Ideals, then it must logically be possible for human beings to be absolutely perfect — if any particular Ideal exists entirely before people interact with each other, then any particular concept anyone is thinking of and wants other people to embody and should simply be able to pop into existence in someone else's mind instantaneously as if beamed across space faster than light. [*se] This is not physically possible, because no arrangement of words or images stored in any physical object can travel faster than light (excluding the case where it really has already been somewhere and would not need to arrive). As much as this might seem self-evident, it has important consequences for social phenomena like education. People will often treat education as if it's magic and does not actually have to travel through time and space to reach people or require actual effort to achieve understanding; ethics-related education in particular is _very often_ treated as if political issues or historical knowledge mystically beam themselves into people's heads, while nobody wants to interact with people long enough to teach them the knowledge they were supposed to learn and everyone simply sits around waiting for everyone to receive their download that apparently only inherently virtuous people actually receive. Real human individuals can never necessarily be expected to know any particular fact, or to follow any particular ethical prescription. [*se] So when it comes to the topic of ethics, the only truly accurate study "of ethics" would also include a descriptive study of every situation in which people _don't_ follow ethical prescriptions and why those happen.

Existential materialism is the philosophical study of human "lives", "biographies", and "existences" through the lens of particular generalized incidents in which two or more people take actions together or in interaction with each other. It is meant to replace the general concepts of "ethics" and "existentialism" at the same time, such that it takes away the need to assign subjective meaning to an individual's choices either from inside or outside the individual. Existential materialism is basically what you get when you take the concept of consequentialist ethics to the next stage by completely removing ethics from it and purely turning it into a study of what sets of actions in small or large groups of people lead to what consequences. It can also be represented in the form of color swatch and time slice analysis so that it is being used to try to predict how different factions of people will behave when interacting with each other, and show which sociophilosophies are incompatible and perhaps which ones are the most principled or the most robust. Basically, you chart out a few different time points like animation frames, and show how each group or faction will behave toward the others as they move through time, understanding that the frames approximate a fuller and more infinitesimal range of movement. This can be done in a casual way without laying out all the steps, or it could conceivably be done in a more detailed mathematical way which would become an actual simple simulation of one or more societies. For Trotskyists, the purpose of using existential materialism on scales greater than the smallest ones is fairly obvious: it would be used for things like exploring dysfunction inside organizations that leads to two ostensibly Trotskyist organizations being incompatible, or trying to successfully grown and maintain an overall Fourth International.

I do not have any comprehensive guide to existential materialism put together right now that would go any deeper than this article (which arguably has been the first guide on it). It is still new despite having been around for a year or two, and I have not really settled onto what some of the most important theoretical tools used with it might be. A few concepts that have come up when trying to explain it in book drafts are wavefunctions as an approximation of behavior or "people as dice", game theory models of two agents behaving against each other, and the Lattice model or Social-Philosophical-System model that gives actual detail to color swatch analysis, as well as color swatch analysis, slice analysis, and wavemachine logic themselves.

Existential materialism is basically {{em|the}} core framework of meta-Marxism that sets "violet" Marxism apart from regular "crimson Marxisms" or "orange infra-Marxisms" and enables it to create "molecular Marxisms" out of existing bodies of Marxist theory, by creating a finer-grained, shorter-time-scale version of historical materialism that can (hopefully) be used to fill in any noticeable gaps that still remain in it and finish "quantizing" Marxism. Like quantum physics added more detail to what Newtonian physics had set down, existential materialism is meant to allow Marxism to address the few remaining questions about cities and individuals and the relationship of one trade union to another and other such things that are just on the edge of being relevant to Marxism to the point that bourgeois philosophies are able to take an "irrelevant" question and use seemingly tiny issues to keep absolutely everyone from achieving clearer consciousness. Not all of the questions existential materialism could be applied to are inherently "Leninist" questions, but some of them are, and the rest of them would still be relevant to the problem of understanding daily life in a workers' state and how to keep one functioning properly after an era of socialism was successfully created.

One last thing I unfortunately have to admit is that it {{em|is}} possible to do existential materialism wrong; this is what I was more or less doing when I was going through those weird exercises at the top of trying to understand Trotskyism as if it was Stalinism. Versus traditional writings on dialectical materialism, existential materialism is a bit easier for beginners to get into when they do not fully understand Marxism, but that can be a double-edged sword in that people can start using it without fully understanding how to get the best results. This overall problem seems to be one that has already existed in Trotskyism for a long time, though, in that Trotskyism has been one of the easiest forms of Marxism to get revisionist groups or wings inside since around 1936. In light of that I am not particularly worried that exmat would create "new" problems, because Marxists in general have had decades now to catalogue many different kinds of errors, and by now, I feel like a lot of the errors that might come from badly applying exmat would already have been named. This might end up allowing the method to correct itself to guard against the most obvious kinds of errors and encourage uses that will lead to accurate understandings. In some ways any Marxist method will always be tied to the organization that uses it, and groups will always have to learn situated in their historical context, but if any particular course on exmat was designed well, it could be a way that more experienced groups tramsitted their experiences to newer groups and attempted to help them prevent errors.

=== Estates as "Social-Philosophical Systems" ===

With the concepts of color swatch analysis and wavemachine logic established, I can now go into what my actual working model of populations or civilizations is. The surface model of color swatches is the simplified model that's meant to be easy to render visually; the model "underneath" the surface is somewhat more complex.

Within meta-Marxism, the basic units of society are generally objects with antagonistic borders around them, and linked individuals. When individuals are understood in isolation, they are "objects with antagonistic borders", but of course, that condition of isolated individuals doesn't occur often. (In this sense, people are vaguely similar to quarks and gluons. Quarks that make up protons or neutrons do not generally exist in isolation, and if you tear apart the gluon that connects them, the wad of fermion matter actually tears into two new sets of quarks connected by gluons. Humans can be separated at times but when one relationship breaks they generally try to find another one.) Because trying to understand individuals as free-floating "helium atoms" does not make sense, meta-Marxism conceptualizes societies as generally being made up of many small social graphs that may include households, businesses, towns, trade unions, and so forth. Various social graphs can form or break or change size at different times, and the same individuals can be connected into multiple social graphs that exist at different scales. Some of this social graph activity is "obvious", like people being affiliated with center-Liberal or Tory parties, or maybe being affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (a kind of center-Liberal strategist organization that on the day I wrote this I saw bragging about getting small social-democratic gains in one city; always remember that the Mensheviks, these people, and the Democrats are all blue). Some of this social graph activity is not obvious. Any number of people may be busy silently dividing unions in order to try to form new independent working-class organizations. Some people might be trying to form alliances between local groups of workers and Marxist parties or the Fourth International. Within Liberal-republicanism people will mostly be captured into large "blue" or "brown" graphs (here the brown swatch is a "precision color" used to represent an antagonism between Tory parties and non-Tories), but within those graphs there will be new smaller graphs of other colors tracing themselves onto or between what already exists. Meta-Marxism refers to these new graphs as "worker lattices" or just "Lattices", and refers to basically any mathematical model of how the small graphs expand as a _Lattice model_.

The Lattice model is one of those cases where meta-Marxism may actually be unnecessarily precise, and might be presenting a simplified model which is much neater and easier to understand than the messy reality. Either way, it began when I was contemplating the concept of center-Liberal type people having to physically avoid Tory types, and comparing that to Lenin's models of building up a workers' party and then sending it "into the marsh" to try to study local movements and form bridges to them. As a Marxist party is first forming you want to weave around the blue people (center-Liberals, or at that time the Mensheviks) so the red people don't get trapped in a blue party, but when you have an established red or orange party you can send those people into blue organizations safely in hopes that maybe if you are very effective at gaining allies you will be able to pierce all the way through the organization to the point that either the two organizations operate together for the moment or at least the blue organization doesn't have any real control and the red or orange portion can regroup somewhere else.

The day I first visualized a Lattice extending through the United States was the day I realized, {{i|no, Marxism makes a lot of sense actually, if you could only get all those graph points to stay in various cities long enough to pick up more points connected to them it would genuinely become harder to break up than the Democrats.}} This predisposed me to sympathizing with Stalin's party because to me the Soviet Union up to 1960 looked like a reasonable result of completely filling up the Lattice and getting all the workers to stay and defend the workers' state. But at the same time, I could also see things other people didn't in the accusations against early Trotskyism — all of it was much too consistent with the process of trying to fill up a country with an actual Marxist party and form an orange Lattice extending across the Soviet government for unknown reasons. I really could not understand at the time why anyone would want to overwrite one Marxist party with another one. But no matter what I heard about those events, it never really made me think that early Trotskyism was some kind of simple case of "organized crime". What I thought was, {{i|this is some attention to detail. These people are trying to repeat the same processes of revolution described in various accounts of Lenin. Why on earth are they doing that?}}

As I worked with the shape of the Lattice model I saw that it could potentially be used to model any number of situations, including the Chinese revolution (where it would be interesting to actually see the differences between crimson worker Lattices and strawberry peasant Lattices on the map) or Che Guevara leading a scattered array of guerilla units. I didn't put together the model expecting it would be useful for violent situations, but I was surprised when reading his writings how important the concept of graphs and covering areas became to that situation, and thought, {{i|huh, I guess that's a different type of Lattice that happens to have the same shape}}. Fairly early on when looking into the Lattice model, the words that came to mind were "permanent revolution". At that time I was operating off the Stalinist concept of what permanent revolution meant, but the concept of Lattices of organizations tied together into a larger fishing-net with multiple levels of structure really helped me crystallize the overall process of smaller and more localized workers' movements having to form into a larger nation-wide movement over time and link up with a Marxist party to succeed. A Lattice model could just as easily be used to represent a Fourth International, and the process of a Lattice of organizations piercing across multiple countries before ultimately filling them up.

The Lattice model only came to me after first noticing the way political factions seemed to form into entirely separate populations of people constituting entirely separate anthropological cultures, but laying it out first does make it easier to explain what I think political factions are. Violet Marxism allows that there are not simply "incorrect" models of reality and the "correct" model, but a plurality of reality models (consciousnesses) across different socially-linked groups of people that are only later shown to be correct or incorrect. Every graph of people links together around certain assumptions about the world, which then feeds into what its internal reality model will be. In Marxist parties this is fairly obvious, because the party contains people who all accept Marxism and a goal of organizing workers, but any other politically-charged faction of people also contains some of its beginning assumptions within its social bonds in the same way. The Democratic Party or Republican Party becomes linked together in a transient way around concepts that people are "Americans covered by the U.S. Constitution" and part of the same national population; a church congregation becomes linked together partly around the awareness that the other people in the church are available. Whenever any individual is added to a graph of people, that bond carries both superficial ideology that aligns itself to some swatch color in a partisan or cultural sense, and material models of the actual physical layout of the organization that are generated in each person or relationship through participating in it. In many graphs of people — including some Marxist parties — the superficial ideology and real layout and capabilities of the organization are wildly misaligned, and the superficial ideology does not predict the behavior of the organization in any realistic way. In effective graphs of people, the surface ideology accurately reflects the physical behavior of the organization and makes it more able to plot its next move. This is to say that an organization can both be put together for a highly malicious goal and have a well aligned consciousness; the effectiveness of the organization at modeling its current layout and the organization creating an outcome desirable to other people are drastically different things. In this sense, organizations actually have the power to collect people for "a red goal" or "a brown goal", but it is not people thinking about ideas that makes it possible to form the organization or achieve the goal. The goal the organization aims for can only be delivered through what kinds of structural elements it arranges people into and what kinds of class territories may or may not be inside those structural elements, which collectively make the organization belong to a particular sociophilosophy of a particular color and give the organization its capabilities to achieve particular goals only if it is fully conscious of its layout and how to achieve them. A graph full of lobbyists trying to cement its power in parliament often knows what it's doing; a graph of workers at several allied corporations has a particular set of capabilities but might not know them. This is to say that, only in a highly specific Marx-onto-Hegel sense, physical organizations in the real world {{em|are}} made of ideas. They are not made of abstract Ideals in the Idealist sense, like "peace" or "justice" or "composed of the Fire and Air elements" or "silver and fuzzy with a floppy tongue", and instead they are made of a wholly different thing I call {{dfn|material ideas}} — a non-fiction model of an actual thing which allows for at least coarsely predicting how the physical thing behaves. From the point of view of some outside organization, an organization is made of physical people and arrangements. From the point of view of the organization itself, trapped inside its own consciousness, it is made of material ideas. <ref name="wm"/> The behavior of the organization as seen from the outside is the main thing that matters as far as its role within creating historical events. But the organization's internal consciousness can still be made to line up with all of that behavior, as well as other behavior that could include the organization expanding out to further Lattice points and changing in shape, or having to anticipate the behavior of other organizations it may have to merge with.

Early into developing meta-Marxism, I described its understanding of base and superstructure as a three-level model where people form into various countably separate social graphs on one layer ("Social-Graph Systems" or subpopulations), the graph contains a particular economic structure and starts transforming toward any other sociophilosophies it could transform into on another layer ("Social-Philosophical-Material System" or republic), and on a third layer the group of people generates ideology in the strong sense and cobbles together its own flawed interpretation of what is happening ("Social-Philosophical System" of faction plus ideology). Over time I realized that needed to be refined, but the pieces were there. The size of the population restricts how big its economy will be and how elaborate or consolidated the economic structures can be within it. The immediate superstructure such as government exists on the same layer as the economy itself and realizes along with it only from the _material_ ideas that already exist; the economy and the government it directly generates are the same swatch color, although if the government was generated some other way it could be a different color swatch. The third layer of ideology is spat out of either the population boundaries, economy, or government, and can be basically anything as long as it gives some benefit to at least one of those things. Does it benefit 50 Tory voters who don't want to talk to Black people in keeping their circle going? They'll probably accept it. Does it benefit 25 allied online streamers who all donate to charity but think Israel needs to be defended from Palestine? Does it benefit all the courts and lawyers in the United States and help them look legitimate? Onto the stack it goes. Whether people will want to change outright bigoted beliefs will depend on things like how much those beliefs function in actually forming the bonds of the group. Some people may be resistant to getting rid of bigotry or challenging any of the people around them on their prejudices if it would cost them a lot of social connections. At other times, a particular prejudice may have been added to the group ideology so accidentally that nobody in the group will really mind changing it. Western-Marxism has made a big mistake in not distinguishing between these cases and trying to treat all cases of prejudice as if televisions have simply been actively programming people's brains and if you tell them about televisions they'll suddenly realize they didn't need to be prejudiced. It is more or less true that the vast majority of people have no need to be prejudiced, but as soon as you realize how tightly tied together social links and beliefs actually are, you'll realize that videos, books, and magazines feeding people the wrong arbitrary abstract Ideals would not be the reason that will become possible.

One final concept I should bring up here to round out the overview of economic existential materialism is {{dfn|chunk competition}}. This is fairly self-explanatory. It is the concept that any particular clump of people thoughtlessly reproduces and expands in order to fulfill the needs of its individuals, but this can cause it to collide with other chunks of people over the material resources they each need. I had to give this a name because anarchists seem to not believe it exists. Anarchists always want to represent humanity like it's always been billions and billions of people and they've always belonged to the same nation that Europe merely destroyed. Meanwhile, I would read about basically any historical event from tribes many thousands of years ago leaving evidence of having war gods to the Chinese revolution where the nationalists killed Communists, and I would think, {{i|why did the nationalist party even need to exist if humanity was already one thing? If an anarchist was writing this as a fictional narrative, wouldn't everybody siding with Mao be tighter writing? Wouldn't the logic of anarchism promote Dengism and Juche-socialism just because they kept everybody unified? But anarchists don't generally like Dengism. Anarchism doesn't make any sense.}}

Chunk competition is not very important for situations like modeling revolutions, and is only important in situations like demonstrating that capitalism exists. Various chunks of people try to enter a place like New York City, only some portions get in, the portions that were the least successful at entering but still got in become the proletariat. Chunk competition is a quick way to explain what classes are and why they exist, but when an era of socialism is functioning well, it will become possible to mitigate chunk competition.

== The nature of time ==

Time is not what a lot of people think it is. Some people want to stumble through existence as if there isn't really any such thing as time, thinking that everything they interact with has always been equally as Good or Bad as it is today. Some people speak of time as if it's a nasty little demon that shakes reality up like a cup of dice to make everything unpredictable. Some people will try to use time to smuggle in the concept of The Subject and claim that human beings making choices causes time even though time also happens for inanimate objects like rocks. And then there is Henri Bergson, who tried to say that linear "x axis" or "yardstick" models of time could not possibly capture the fact people experience time inside infinitesimally-continuous streams of lived experience.

To really understand what time is, you have to have a basic understanding of quantum mechanics. At the quantum scale, everything is a lot like chemical reactions, but the forms of structure are simpler: when a photon runs into an atom, the two particles are knocked off course according to part of the photon's energy, and the photon splits into an electron and a positron. Quantum mechanics is a bit like turning in two quarters and getting four dimes and two nickels; the rules feel a little arbitrary when you first hear them, but every particle is made of particular "numbers" that add up in particular ways. Some physicists have speculatively described these numbers as twists in the material of the universe going different directions. It is also possible but not confirmed that quantum numbers were misinterpreted as extra spatial dimensions in string theory. You can hardly blame string theorists for that mistake, because if space itself were twisted in circles and you had to describe movement {{em|into those twisted swirls of space}} it might start to look like there was a fourth or fifth spatial dimension.

There are a couple reasons I had to introduce quantum mechanics to explain time. One is that photons have a funny way of moving through space. Some fundamental particles like photons have the ability to collide with other particles and disappear into other forms before being regenerated elsewhere in their previous form when a different pair of particles interacts. The quantum scale is full of something called {{dfn|virtual particles}}, which are basically just particles that are being exchanged with others so fast they barely exist and only barely influence anything. I cannot say for sure that this virtual particle "teleportation" contributes to why light crosses through slits in ways physical objects shouldn't be able to and recombines in interference patterns, but either way, both processes are interesting and unlike how larger objects behave and you should keep both of them in mind. Another reason is that quarks are usually bound together in groups of three to create nucleons. The three quarks in a proton or neutron are constantly exchanging material and kneading into different configurations of quarks (as well as entirely too many virtual particles that appear for vanishingly small slices of time). So, this brings up interesting questions. Is it possible on any level to chart the existence of a photon over time? Is it ever possible that one quark within a nucleon forms {{em|first}}?

A little while after the discovery of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein appeared and basically answered those questions "no". One of Einstein's thought experiments involved experiencing time from the point of view of a ray of light. If a photon (or any other boson) travels at the maximum speed anything can go through space, everything else should appear to freeze because the path of the photon would take action first. But, even if a photon could not "see" the rest of the world move, time still happens. As Einstein developed his theory of relativity, he showed that any two moving objects experience time differently because each object more or less exists as its own timeline of events (its {{dfn|reference frame}}), and those timelines can shear past each other in additive or subtractive ways to create shorter or longer experienced intervals of time ({{dfn|time dilation}}). He also showed that space and time are linked together in a single expansible or compressible substance called {{dfn|spacetime}}. This was used to demonstrate how gravity can alter the paths of planets orbiting stars, and how time outwardly appears to slow down to the point nothing happens when approaching a black hole.

The consequence of relativity on quantum mechanics is this: time actually happens as the exchange of energy from one matter object to another matter object. Gluons must be exchanged between quarks {{i|at the speed of time}}, but relativity says that neither quark can be taken as the canonical reference frame for how time unfolds in the universe, so time is actually the reciprocal interaction between two separate timelines to create a new event. Once you understand this, everything makes more sense. Whatever gravity is exactly, it must actually be the result created from two things bumping into each other. The whole conceit of quantum superpositions and drawing electron shells as fuzzy clouds isn't necessarily because electrons are {{em|actually}} weird, but because trying to describe just one atom disconnected from everything else is removing important information given by the other things interacting with it which then leaves the future of individual things inherently fuzzy.

Newtonian mathematics has been accidentally deceiving everyone by making it appear that everything that happens depends on time passing, when actually it appears that the way the world really works is time is never an independent variable and instead {{em|any interactions that are being studied on the graph produce time}}.

This finally explains the old conundrum of "whether human beings have free will". The answer to that depends heavily on what you even think the phrase {{i|lang=en|free will}} means. What can be said is that the actions each person takes produce time, but only in interaction with a surrounding environment and other people taking actions. For some people, the fact that only a crowd of many people can produce a choice does effectively take away free will, because it means that the compatibility of the group of people or how effective its internal factions are at destroying each other are each more important than what anyone personally wants; individual desires and even individual ethical intentions simply do not matter compared with the ability of individuals to form relationships and the ability of those relationships to affect the overall group of people. For other people, the fact that individual actions can produce events as long as time is considered to be a lot of separate individuals or groups all colliding into an outcome at once will be a relief. Understanding the actual shape of time will bring up some troubling questions like whether Stalin's party trying to build up socialism-in-one-country could be a good idea simply because individual people don't have as much ability to steer the future as an overall interacting population does. But it could also be the basis for a more enlightened study of "who is to blame" when multiple parties attempt to form a Fourth International and something causes them to not successfully form together. Within a Lattice model, the edge between two points is not actually caused by either of the points first, but simultaneously tossed together out of both nodes. This ironically will make some individuals or localized groups more obviously responsible for problems — if, for instance, a blue edge collides with an orange edge and smashes to bits in the middle, you know why. But if two organizations attempt to form together and produce a messy soup in which some swatches sift out but the link between two cities remains, then it might not really be anyone's fault in particular.

Recently, it's become popular for some physicists to question the concept of time and whether anything can go through time "backwards". This probably is the case, but only for some very prosaic reasons. Special relativity has established that time is two reference frames exchanging things back and forth. That means that specifically from within either vantage point, whenever you toss something forward something can go back. That isn't to say that the thing that goes "backward in time" has a time machine. It's only to say that when things go backward they do that because we falsely think of time as a linear thing advancing forward when time is actually a nonlinear process of exchanging things that we tend to saw in two. The failure of modern science to examine dialectical materialism has resulted in a lot of strange artifacts where an interaction of two things is sawed in two and made fuzzy when it shouldn't be. So, only from within this improperly sawed view, things can appear to go backwards. When a person makes a decision, the future will appear to affect the past, because the person has to anticipate what will happen to try to choose the best outcome. But in actuality, a "future event" is when a photon successfully crosses from point A in space to point B. So the future the person is trying to predict is actually the actions or behaviors of other people or objects that are currently over at point B once those other objects make it back to point A. If Trotsky is looking at Europe thinking about whether it will have a successful movement, then Europe _is_ the future, quite literally. Whether Communists succeed or fail in Europe, by the time he gets to Europe he will be in the future, and the prediction he makes about what Europe is doing is critically important to determining whether whoever he meets in Europe will make the correct decisions.

This is the answer to the riddle of "proletarian consciousness", and why it seems to be so difficult. Human consciousness itself tends to saw the world in two, containing a limited amount of information about anything beyond a particular individual, but in order for human beings to function together they must successfully predict each other. This leads to all kinds of disasters as isolated clusters of people completely fail to come up with useful predictions that successfully knit them together toward achieving a particular objective and allow them to succeed. Proletarian consciousness is not just developing an overall model of something such as a world republic, but becoming able to actively solve for the unknown behavior of all other human beings at every moment.

Some people still seriously believe it's not possible to predict the future. If that were true, social behavior and society wouldn't even be possible. Every single person you make a choice in front of is the future. _You_ are the future! Even if that's only true in a tautological physics way and not an inspiring way, you still ought to remember it.

== Networkism, capitalism, Stalinism, and socialism ==

Marxism is more of a top-down movement than anybody would like to believe 
it always begins with clusters of brilliant people who perceive something everybody else didn't, not at groups of workers. the "great men" that appear in Marxism are illusions caused by people forgetting all the second- and third-tier men immediately connected to them, who probably exist at a factor of at least 10 or 100 for every presumed "great" man. Marxist theorists are a particular historical phenomenon which is separate from the activity of workers and transforms what would be a blue or strawberry movement into a crimson movement. this is what leads to a lot of the pain within Marxism as a whole and conflict between different versions of Marxism. Marxist movements resemble any republic ever created in that there will be a layer of talented representatives that people align themselves with in order to form a large society. hypothetically, this body of theorists could be Stalin's party, Mao's party, Kim Il-sung's party, Marx and Engels and a handful of people in Europe, early Trotskyism, or any number of things. if an era of socialism could ever actually develop and solidify, the conflict between these groups of theorists would become unimportant. on the other side of creating the workers' state, what is eventually supposed to happen is that central parties and the Communist International simply stop doing anything because most things at the populational scale and at the international scale respectively have already been decided, everyone teaches the previous decisions, and for the most part only local decisions are required any more. the possibility of the state withering away is actually a natural consequence of creating a scientific society and making national policies objective rather than a matter of subjective opinion. but, this creates the problem of shifting conflicts between groups of people over arbitrary local culture and which arbitrary local cultures should get to conquer each other up to the layer of theorists who have to figure out the objective answers to national and international questions. in theory, the layer of theorists should be sorting itself by ability and the most talented theorists should be rising to the top and defeating the theorists with worse models, but the correct answers for each country and the world should be surfacing anyway; in practice, everyone in the layer of theorists becomes similar in social status, and all the theorists begin clustering and fighting each other over arbitrary local culture inasmuch as they do not have the complete answer to particular world problems. the problem which was evident among the clergy and among bourgeois representatives as they grouped themselves into center-Liberal and Tory parties has repeated itself with Marxist theorists. Marxist theorists are limited in their ability to perceive reality by their transient social status of being the most important people in a particular region until other people in their population can take over, thus figures like Stalin or Mao will show up that make significant errors and are unable to recognize other versions of Marxism with _correct findings_ as correct. this will also happen when clusters of Trotskyist groups become free. each one of them has the _incentive_ to believe it's the "real" Fourth International even if it isn't, because the sad truth is that if they all believe they're the real one long enough and simply perservere and try to collect people before the other ones do, it _will_ be the case that one of them will inevitably outlast the others. the quality of Marxist theory within an emerging International is not necessarily as important ~~on the larger stage of history~~ to the universe as the groups simply happening to guess the correct series of actions for the groups to physically survive. so, if a particular cluster of organizations happens not to have been destroyed yet, it will probably assume that whatever model of the world it currently holds must be the most correct theory there is.

anarchism has completely misinterpreted the consequences of this observation. one common response to seeing the layer of Marxist theorists form is that this is how agency is taken away from the population, and it predicts the rise of bureaucrat states and "The Pigs". another common response that is not mutually exclusive is that Marxists do not understand the fundamental Ideal of democracy and have taken a path that cannot contain it. the latter remark is simply historically inaccurate, because the United States has demonstrated that if a body of people in a large society is left to its own devices to vote for policies long enough, the republic eventually gets to a point where none of the parties actually pass any new policies any more and voting for anyone becomes pointless. Liberal-republicanism has, rather ironically, demonstrated on the scale of a large country that republican states must eventually run out of decisions to make and wither away. so, the concept that people in a republic will always need to meet up and exchange wills and do "democracy" is simply not consistent with the real world. reality has decided that national policies succeed or fail for reasons entirely other than whether people vote for them; if that were not the case, and popularity with the people was the primary driver of a party's success, then Stalin's government would have been a smashing success and would not have collapsed in the 1960s. whether the realization that democracy is an illusion takes agency away from people is a more complicated question. perhaps when someone sees that Khruschev's party and Deng's party are fighting to be the most legitimate, or Stalin's party and early Trotskyism, they will think those conflicts are senseless. but what anarchists never tell you is that anarchists attempting to unite the world will create all the same problems. charcoal anarchists like to speak of what amounts to tribal societies and the organization of society through villages and village-like social graphs extending up to national scales that approximately replicate the behavior of tribal society. but tribes have gone to war before. every violent European empire started out as a bunch of tribes. tribes have designated leaders, elders, or keepers of information. blue anarchists like to speak of organizing societies into federations of cooperatives. this will logically result in layers of experts that collected the knowledge required to create and run the corporations. if you have ever been to a workplace containing several people before or even watched a director's commentary about making a TV cartoon, you would know that most of the decisions that have to be made to create a final product can more or less be put together by one or two people who are experts in the history and theory of a particular craft. Engels talks about the tyranny of the power loom, I keep turning over and over in my mind a recent director's commentary by Butch Hartman, but it's overall the same thing. a bunch of people come to a workplace to produce a product but the basic decisions on what the product will look like only have to be made once. so the person who designed the power loom or wrote the pitch bible for the TV show has a lot of power. as long as global capitalism exists and there is any open space around a particular project, it is the entire finished product that will be selected for or against. this means that whatever the most correct answers are on that final product to make it the most popular, all the workers in the corporation are bound to follow them, no matter how onerous they are, no matter how oppressive they are, and whoever solves the correct answers the most effectively is the one who rules that chunk of society. if the corporation closes, all the workers go home and start very slowly running afoul of the basic ground rules of bourgeois society that no one collects anything from the earth without the approval of some other human being and no one takes anything from anyone else without the taking evolving into a social relationship and an agreed transfer. so nobody will want to go against the people who manage to stay around a while and keep promising a relationship in which if you maintain your relationship you will be allowed to collect supplies and follow the law. outside that zone lies danger: fail to perform to known methods of success, become a criminal hated by society, try to make a product on your own and fail to sell it, lose all your money. the true function that capitalists solve within Liberal-republicanism is solving how it is even possible for everyone to follow the law and still survive, so within Liberal-republicanism _per se_, if you ever try to go against any of it and question any of its authorities capitalists can simply twist the knife and make everyone into a criminal begging for a way for everyone not to hate each other and lock each other up after various slights and injuries against each other while capitalists set the laws to whatever they want to. if blue anarchists turn the world into islands of co-ops, a similar thing is going to happen. either the elite layers of the co-op islands will link together by culture and identity and various islands of co-ops will eventually go to war over matters like Christianity and Zionism versus atheism and transgender rights, trying to fully destroy each other's cultures until one assimilates into the other, or the system will simply function more like capitalism than people intended and each of the chunks of co-ops will end up with a particular elite layer of rulers that get to do whatever they want because as long as they solve all the answers correctly there will be no crimes or wars. anarchists everywhere will get dismayed and try to claim that co-op theory was "never" real anarchism. meanwhile, judging by how Liberal-republicanism has functioned, blue anarchists will probably start coming up with conspiracy theories about why co-op theory really should have worked but it only failed because it was corrupted by pedophiles or greedy people or Europeans or Satan.

this is the appeal of Stalin. in one sense, the system created by the bourgeoisie can only really end in some kind of large-scale spatial hierarchy where the highest-status people are the people who solve how to organize society to create the smallest numbers of killings and instances of group infighting, and the people with the lowest levels of consciousness on the future development of industry are given the lowest status. the system perpetuates itself because anyone who has the slightest idea what is going on for a moment is moved out of the class of people that actually has any incentive to ensure that anything functions sensibly or stably as opposed to simply looking orderly, and when people are on top of the system they are rewarded over and over for _not failing_ as opposed to succeeding; whenever there is a failure, the people at the bottom are always the ones to "choose" to enact the consequences, which may include crime, unlawful production of restricted materials (movies, seeds, squats), or war with neighboring regions in the case of the new Russian empire. capitalism has always been a sort of terrible half-solution to the problem of preventing what imperial citizens naturally do. so when the people on top of a chunk of people in antagonism with other chunks successfully solve a historical transition, and it looks like the worldwide spatial hierarchy created by capitalism is actually snapping together to continuously create order instead of suddenly breaking, the citizens can only come to see a central party that _successfully_ solves the problem of creating order and allowing people to follow the law as brilliant. if Stalin and Mao somehow solve the problem of creating what essentially resembles a worldwide kingdom made out of tiny provinces, then it would seem like anything people might think of as "democracy" can follow. countries across the world have repeatedly created kingdoms and then turned them into Liberal republics, so in that sense democracy and the existence of a stable national population would seem to be orthogonal to each other, compatible but existing on entirely different levels.

the problem with that thinking is, as described above, that the layer of Marxist theorists tends not to unify. before even getting into purely practical decisions like North Korea attempting to look unaffiliated with other countries to not get in trouble, countries can start splitting apart as soon as Mao and Kim Il-sung have different models of what socialism is. why? this all goes back to the inherent power held by Marxist theorists coming from solving war. wars, crimes, and general violent conflicts between political factions are all similar. every time a group of capitalists unifies or a cluster of Marxist theorists unifies onto the same prediction for the socio-economic shape of a society, all of these unifications work toward the same general problem of preventing war. but this means that if factions inside a particular workers' state are not functioning together one will be pressured to eliminate the other. this also means that if capitalism and Stalinism happen to exist alongside each other, the need to keep people ordered will collide with the inherent instability of juxtaposing capitalism in its Liberal-republican form with the new structures within Stalin's Marxism. capitalism proper will try to put pressure on commodities from workers' states, hitting all the workers beneath each one, and Stalinism will push back on Liberal-republicanism trying to weaken the capitalists' government, although it can only push lightly. while a Stalinist state holds the power to crush pro-capitalist movements inside it, it holds no real power over the ability of US capitalists to solve for new innovations that temporarily prevent horizontal violence while all the best law-followers proceed to write all the laws. this means that capitalists still hold the power to control agorist processes and begin setting all kinds of arbitrary criteria selecting out Stalinist products as if they were useless. retailers, manufacturers accepting raw materials, national trade commissions that happen to have an agenda, and so forth can both reject products directly, and create worldwide trade agreements to carry it out internationally. this, in its own particular way, is an act of war — if violence is normally stopped by orderly enterprises operating together, then deliberately preventing enterprises from connecting can only breed instability and possibly violence. but, the world's collective body of capitalist-headed corporations has control over the very links that hold society together, and at what point people join society, and at what point they are not considered human. it defines the boundaries of the concepts of coercion, aggression, cheating, and stealing; it defines the basic shape of all acceptable or unacceptable social behavior; it defines what is Good or Evil. if all the capitalists in the world desperately wanted to define trans women entering bathrooms as aggression, they'd eventually break up every government and dissolve every ethnic group that allowed it. for capitalists the definition of aggression is fundamentally arbitrary and amounts to whatever soup of words their favorite philosophers cooked up. but as a result, nationality, ethnicity, language, and demographic identity themselves are deemed "optional" things that people get to have as a treat only if they first obey every existing capitalist. every day there is pressure on people to migrate out of the Third World into the First World, sometimes because "China is too oppressive", sometimes because countries are poor, sometimes because countries are still partly medieval, but always with a challenge that _the United States is better than you_. Stalinism may be a failure, but the alternative is people entirely stripping themselves of their humanity and turning themselves into products, striving for nothing but to be the most useful product to the first country that will agree to use and exploit them. largely thanks to the United States, there are particular average prices associated with White people, Black people, and Indic people that can be expected to be high or low, and racism is kind of just _true_ now. what's the price for a Kazakh person? not very high? you'd better get to raising it by moving to another continent or else everyone will think that's the entire value of your ethnicity.

capitalism is, in reality, just a bunch of living, breathing _beasts_ fighting each other daily to see how much of nature they can scoop up for themselves. at certain times, the division between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is almost illusory. capitalism can begin without any such division, as simply a bunch of the most "elite" and "qualified" individuals joining together in a ring to decide which people are the most capable of extracting and using surrounding resources. the decision of which individuals are allowed to work somewhere or allowed to own business territories is inherently social, agreed on by a layer of winners who have collectively divided up all the spaces and tasks inside a town, but once somebody is placed into the peripheral area of losers those people have no say in what the winners decide, and the only way they have of influencing society is by being the very best at some specialized craft to the point of being better than anyone else. merely being good at something isn't enough. they really must be the most superior people in the area at a particular arbitrary discipline to the point of making other people inferior, at which point they will gain popularity and become able to participate in the social activity of making unshakable decisions about society with other experts. Idealism is the philosophy of the privileged; obedience and complete intolerance of imperfection in every aspect of life is the reality of the younger generations.

some may try to say that capitalism is created by an act of prejudice, in which the layer of experts deliberately decides that it would be "a good idea" to expel demographic minorities from their settlements. this is not the reality of how capitalism functions. capitalism begins at either the concept that all resources are obtained in transactions of equal value (_agorism_, in the economic sense) or the concept that towns will be based on laws and will only consist of people who follow the law (which might be termed _political Kantianism_). the latter system is unshakable. the moment a town fills up with people and any more people attempt to come in, any attempt by an anarchist to disturb commodities or territories under some concept that "laws are culturally fabricated and arbitrary" is going to be met with some of the most vitriolic and violent behavior imaginable as the people in the town point to the inherent sanctity of Kantian ethical constructs such as _non-stealing_ and _non-tresspassing_, or if they are especially educated, the concept of _populational relativism_ and the value of respecting and coexisting with other countable cultures an individual does not belong to, regardless of whether that individual belongs to a different one or belongs to nothing. Marxists may like to say that towns are founded on the _class rule of the bourgeoisie_ within a region, but on the ground, that is not necessarily an accurate characterization sociologically. when people believe Idealist philosophies, the category of philosophies that believe ideologies genuinely cause themselves, they have _no idea_ they are creating a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". all they know is that they are a group of socially-linked friends (if only the most elite ones) that will do anything to protect their friends. the existence of laws is unshakable, unless you want to make thousands and thousands of people severely angry at a small number of people all at once. this is the origin of states — sociality, love, and friendship. a state forms when a group of people has completely taken up an area to the point no more people will fit in it, and human sociality inverts itself so that everything about it only applies to a limited population of people defending themselves against the outside. a state is not a centralized locus of power sitting far away in a mayor's office or a capital city, but the entire structure permeating across all individuals that holds together a spatially finite and countable population. it is very important that anarchists learn this. while Peter Kropotkin can go on and on about "mutual aid" as a factor in evolution spanning across the overall ecological timeline from herd animals to humans, it is actually forms of sociality and mutual assistance that ultimately create hierarchy, exclusion, and states. all hierarchy of one demographic identity over another within a population begins at the fact that towns and cities have limited space that becomes increasingly differentiated into specific finite career slots, and all prejudice begins at the fact that individuals must plan their entire existences around which slots they can or cannot fit into. that other surrounding people would immediately start guessing at where all the people around them are or are not going to end up and which ones are "fit for" particular positions is only the obvious outcome within a form of society where every single individual benefits from trying to get them or their immediate social connections into all the slots before the people they don't like in order to create maximum ethical behavior across society and maximum social harmony.

perhaps universities everywhere should stop giving prejudices special names after exactly what they appear to be excluding, and just admit that all of them are manifestations of a single prejudice called Everybodyism. after all, nobody would have any incentive to claim that it was unimportant and irrelevant to them if they were forced to confront the _material reality_ that Everybodyism does in fact affect _everybody_.

to some extent, looking at capitalism from such a big-picture view is more of "a fun diversion from Marxism" than an actual Marxist perspective — helpful for the purposes of understanding what kinds of rhetoric Liberal-republicans actually need to hear, but not the clearest possible angle that will aid the most in constructing a new proletarian society. by no longer centering any infra-Marxism as the only possible viewpoint, meta-Marxism has opened up strange new possibilities for telling _any_ philosophy how to reach any particular goal the most effectively. but as long as that "particular goal" is solidly staked on the task of building a new society out of the proletariat, it will still tend to pull all philosophies toward the same conclusion. no matter what, capitalism or agorism or political Kantianism is the same collection of material objects that can only evolve into new shapes in a few directions, ultimately headed toward the same crises, and where society as a whole can only be rescued from those crises by a small number of possible solutions.

let us take a moment to consider how people have historically changed classes. there used to be a class called the nobility. in various critical periods, the nobility were important in creating the borders of internal states or imminently dividing kingdoms, but now that process does not meaningfully exist. what has replaced them? now local-states in the United States and Europe have dedicated government bureaucracies that belong to no one, and each state in the United States has a governor. how did that happen? you see so many people today claiming that it is impossible to replace capitalists with government ministries because the system would surely be too bloated, and it must have never been a good idea. but you never really see anyone saying that Liberal-republicanism is so inefficient that the nobility were better than governors or state governments. that kind of rhetoric may have happened for some 50 years after Liberal republics were first created, and then was seemingly never seen again. so what makes capitalists different? periodically, you even see Tories getting upset about capitalists, simply refering to billionaires through other bizarre narratives that may include such characters as "Satan" or "aliens" or "the Illuminati". ultimately nobody really wants capitalists in control of making so many arbitrary decisions about civilization, _including capitalists_. but it would seem that to rid society of capitalists and remove them from each country's social structure, they would need to be replaced with some other structure capable of only performing a capitalist's most necessary functions.

here I think it is valuable to take a detour and talk about television show directors. while audiovisual media have provided some of the nastiest examples of everything capitalism allows big corporations to get away with, from putting strict regulations on all public online communication to the actual abuse of actors used in productions, there is something amazing about TV shows that often goes unappreciated. for a while, television networks were acting as such centralized repositories of activity that they were almost halfway abolishing capitalism. networks would hire directors, and the directors would essentially be responsible for developing entire products from start to finish and putting together teams that would resemble very small corporations. but the directors did not own any business property. capitalism had created a new absurdity of basically hiring people to do everything capitalists do and giving them basically none of the benefits of actually being capitalists. the reason everyone went along with this, of course, was that another group of capitalists at the top was operating normally and giant corporations could skim a bit of earnings off each project as a whole. but either way, capitalism was developing and changing and exposing new problems that had never been encountered before. now, capitalists did not have to show up with capital themselves for new business territories and job slots to be created, and large enough corporations could simply create more business territories without external competition. the large corporations did not have to find people with money to be an audience, because they found other large corporations to pay for their TV networks by being advertisers. large corporations had almost turned themselves into a kind of perpetual motion machine, but the only real problem was that they had to decide how to use limited airtime and limited studio space, so they made the decision to put current and potential directors all into competition with each other through a system of favoring the directors that either made them the most money or got the best ratings. capitalism's central problem, the division of industry into finite slots as it filled up all available space, had struck again. but it had also transformed — what had become apparent was that the process of creating new business territories and the process of different production structures and cities making market connections were inherently correlated. occasionally, you will now hear some peripheral economists speak of an "agora", which is a kind of uncontrolled open gap in society where various businesses or individuals make various kinds of connections arbitrarily. an economic or purely-relational "market". before big corporate TV networks, smaller businesses operated openly floating around inside agoras. But after big corporate TV networks, the agora had become enclosed and managed by the large corporation. Agoras had been exposed as part of the mechanism that granted smaller businesses free-floating business territories, because when the agora was successfully closed up, people that would have been owners would turn into workers. But the problem hadn't entirely been solved, because after large corporations would fence in agoras and seemingly own and control them, the agora would still re-emerge inside. The finite space inside any particular area of industry was creating a problem where because the world outside the large corporation was still too big and unknown to plan for, the people outside the corporation would still have to decide whether they had use for any particular group of workers inside it. Between the large corporation and the outside world, there was an agora, and the agora was a space where the outside world was hiring and firing workers and deciding whether they got to pay their rent and live in any particular town according to whether their choice of craft and level of performance was perfect. As capitalism slowly got closer to going away, it got harsher on workers and it clamped down on its inherent prejudice.

In 1917, approximately 18 years before the first public demonstration of electronic television, the Soviet Union would abolish capitalists and Liberal-republicanism. One of the most notable social transformations in the Soviet Union was mandatory employment. This meant enterprises in general were required to hire people and prevent unemployment; I have seen many people get this concept wrong and claim it was a requirement on workers, including a few Marxists, but it was in fact a requirement on industry and hiring. The creation of mandatory or full employment has the consequence that instead of workers being completely wasted by not being assigned to any workplace anywhere, some people will be assigned to workplaces where it seems as if they are not needed. This is the same "internal agora" effect from capitalism slowly coming back. A city or union republic can maintain control over all its workplaces and ensure that they don't become autonomous governments — which, as it should be noted by all anarchists, you _don't want_ because any autonomous cluster of co-ops can fill up with anti-gay anti-Muslim anti-Chinese Tories any day of the week — but even when all workplaces are taken out of competition there comes to be a problem of actually distributing workers to the correct cities and industries to properly get the most use out of them. This is not a matter of "free will"; it cannot be. If it were true that individual decisions allocated workers perfectly to their most productive use, then nobody in the United States would ever need welfare programs of any kind because they would all have chosen such an effective position they would all be earning some amount of money over their desired minimum. Nobody has ever seen capitalism function like that, at modern levels of technology and consumption. It has never existed. So there is a real and possibly still-unsolved problem of how to put workers in exactly the correct places inside a society, within whatever safe window of error exists, so that the overall body of workers can all be productive enough to meet society's current needs and have time to experiment with placing some of the most peripheral workers into new enterprises or teams if there are any more requirements for products to be invented or new versions to be made. There is a lot of Idealist language being thrown around about this currently, about how displaced skilled workers have to "find new ways to make meaning" in our "new" existentialist dystopia, or how society should practice the Ideals of "empathy" and "community" to achieve more social programs, or how "we" (who are we?) chose to leave increasing numbers of empty houses instead of practicing the mere abstract Ideal of an efficiently organized society. Nobody seems to understand the frighteningly large scope of exactly what is wrong and what needs to be fixed. People often seem to assume that a bit of voting at sporadic locations and infrequent times or alternatively a system capable of replacing the day-to-day administrative tasks of capitalists within individual enterprises would be enough to fix everything. Marx himself spent rather long passages focusing on the concept of surplus value and how if the gap between material productivity and wages could be brought down to nothing but the actual administrative costs to keep various enterprises and institutions running, society would have more latitude to make any number of decisions about which things to produce where and which new things to create. This concept that capitalists collecting surplus value is the most important feature of capitalism can be misleading. The moment the surplus value gap goes away, the new problem that comes up that is very much not a trivial problem is how to allocate every worker to the correct place in society (or societies...) based on what begins as a complicated disorganized sea of people as opposed to a few well-defined loci of control. "Government by all the people" sounds great but it fundamentally requires the creation of ongoing coordination and structure between a great number of people in a way that does not currently exist.

I will conclude this overview of capitalism with an analogy that sounds vague but that (I hope) is actually profound. If people were nothing more than a series of dots moving across a sheet of paper a bit like on a _Sternhalma_ board (the star shaped checker-board where marbles are always moving in parts of triangles) and the goal was to move all the dot-people to the next corporation box over until all the corporations were packed optimally, one of the best things you could do to make the problem easier would be to make the board infinite. If you were to take the sheet of paper and curl it up into a cylinder, or impossibly distort it into a perfect sphere, then the whole problem of packing the people would basically turn into a "Hilbert hotel" problem where the options available seem infinite. In the study of infinite sets, there is something called Hilbert's infinite hotel, and this hypothetical object became famous because in our everyday experience a hotel "shouldn't" have an extra room open if an infinite number of rooms is already full. But given a particular definition of infinity, all the guests already in the hotel can simply move over one room to leave open an extra room. The simplest way to see this definition of infinity in real life is simply whenever the boundaries of an object do not stop quite where they were expected to. When scientists placed simulated hydrogen atoms close together — which are usually expected to stop at a molecule two hydrogen atoms long — they managed to create a simulated quantum physics scenario where electrons would flow off the second hydrogen atom onto a third hydrogen atom, and then another one, creating an indefinitely-long thread of metallic hydrogen as long as the electrons kept moving off the first atom. Despite the molecules always technically being finite, the spaces for electrons would become infinite because the molecule didn't stop where it was normally expected to. In the same way, the simple "board game" version of allocating workers to corporations stops ending up with areas where workers uselessly pool onto a corporation where they are "not needed" if the workers can simply wrap around to the other side in any direction. Literally speaking, this math problem would probably apply to things like redirected shipments more often than workers, but if a small number of workers needed to be moved to another country, an international transitional state with the ability to relax restrictions on international migration would certainly make it easier.

An imperialist makes a big deal out of the fact European armies can show the world is round. A vulgar materialist tries to focus in on tiny regions and make the world flat again. A Marxist eventually discovers that it is easier to bring all the various sections of the world economy into conscious and cooperative control of each other if they all remember the world is round.

== Trotskyism and {{game|Deltarune}} ==

I have to confess that because I learned Marxism in such an oddly specific way — skipping over some of Marx and Engels to focus on Lenin and Stalin's era, applying meta-Marxist models to news events or generalized models of historical periods, comparing everything to the conflict between Stalin's party and early Trotskyism — there is a lot of basic Marxist terminology I don't know that I will frequently "reinvent" in different words and become confused "why no Marxist has ever talked about this" when actually there is at least one person who has. For the longest time I was confused on what a {{dfn|cadre}} was referring to even though I actually had the basic idea jotted down under words like "Lattice model", "filtration", and "Marxist theorist". I understood the concept of setting down "Marxist theorists" to expand organizations ("going into the marsh", as Lenin put it) and how they could only do it if they had a good Materialist understanding of how historical situations functioned, but the way I tended to see things was to point out Marxist theorists or advanced workers and categorize them into swatch colors by their level of knowledge, so that over a region of space "Lattices" were forming based on having a frame of red theorists or a frame of orange theorists rising out of the background mass of blue-aligned people. I think what my experiences have taught me is that there actually are multiple ways to learn Marxism and that applying models to really understand how the models behave can be more helpful than just memorizing things. It's one thing to know a list of events and what terms mean, and it's another thing to be someone who is good enough at Marxist theory to look at some new chewed-up form of terminology that has come out of workers who haven't read theory but do have practical experience and say, "oh wait, this is actually talking about Marxist concepts X, Y, and Z, so the workers really do know what they're doing; I'm going to open up my wiki entry on Marxist cadres and write down the phrase 'Lattice model'". I'm personally fine with going back and learning the traditional terms for the purpose of making any articles I write make more sense, but I think this is an important thing to remember in terms of identifying what class consciousness or consciousness that can form a Fourth International looks like out in the field. Proletarian consciousness is almost "mathematical" in a way, existing a bit below the level of language and more in the form of {{em|imagery}} of objects interacting materially.

In this sense, Western-Marxists in the orbit of Mark Fisher and Stuart Hall who will try to act like the arts and the overall phenomenon of all fictional or non-fictional media are critically important to understanding society and the spread of clear versus unclear forms of consciousness (bourgeois ideology versus Materialism) are not entirely wrong, because in a tiny, vanishingly-small fraction of cases, progressive factions within society will express legitimate Materialist knowledge in highly metaphorical forms either because they don't know how to better express it or because any concrete form of expressing it has been so forbidden this is the only form they can get away with saying out loud. Here my mind goes to the incident in Lenin's writings where underground publications in Russia kept quietly talking about roosters and suns. This is an old practice that dates back to the times of alchemy with alchemists quietly hiding chemical equations in mythical pictures, but it can still be seen today in some remote corners of the internet. One thing I have increasingly become convinced of recently is that the more fantasy works containing "superstructural fantasy worlds" are created to talk about LGBT+ self-discovery and social circles, the closer each of these works inches toward Communism, and even toward Trotskyism — while early works in this genre like {{book|The Chronicles of Narnia}} and {{film|Toy Story}} had absolutely nothing to do with either gay people or Marxism, something seems to have happened by the time LGBT people found {{film|The Wizard of Oz}} where they all started slowly realizing that adventure narratives as described in Jung are something of an illusion and the quest of those three protagonists to become "someone better" was only a quest to better understand the existing reality of living in their own material bodies, and by 2017, gay and transgender people had caused entire console role-playing games to exist which were essentially about rejecting the adventure narrative monomyth as a model of reality and {{em|embracing historical materialism}} as the only way characters can possibly "win" at history in the midst of a cruel, godless reality. You'd have to see it to believe it, but as a recent chapter of the game came out I was floored by the messages that were accidentally being conveyed by {{game|Undertale}} and {{game|Deltarune}}. The vast majority of people casually reviewing these games online had not been able to pick up on the dense themes the second game was actually burying inside itself, but when I saw the fifth chapter I could tell the concepts internally driving the narrative were in fact more complex than those people thought. To make a long story shorter, {{game|Deltarune}} is adapting "Theses on Feuerbach" — or at least Feuerbach's {{book|Essence of Christianity}}, one of the two — and because queer people are so tired of capitalism they all lined up for an essentially-Communist console RPG. I am not sure {{game|Deltarune}}'s writer even knows what he's done. But the closer you look at the story you start to see it as a fable about how the whole industrial world is now just one big sea of competing islands of proletarians, or islands of small businesses, and living in it is pain, and everyone is tired of it, and all the islands need to join up and stop believing the internal mythology that says they need to be separate, or else the world will face the common ruin of everything. It doesn't {{em|state}} "on a planetary scale" but within the specific narrative context everything appears in it is so close to saying it that I don't think that matters. {{game|Deltarune}} is the most thinly-veiled appeal toward Trotskyism I have ever seen capitalism produce and it has really made me feel like the link between LGBT+ people and Materialism in everyday life should be studied more. The United States has very few people friendly to "Marxism", "Leninism", or even "Materialism", but it does now have a shocking number of people who are friendly to {{film|The Matrix}} and are now essentially using these films and other versions of the same narrative as a Marxist reading list. As strange as it is to say it out loud, I feel like the ICFI may need to study the underlying processes that produced that.

I do have my own thoughts. Among the world's populations, the shape of a population predisposes it to certain formulations of Marxism. Some of these correlations amount to failures in consciousness — populations close to the shape of a newly-formed kingdom will tend to falsely assume that characteristics of feudal societies are either a normal baseline state of being or unique to them. But there are other populations that are doing something more interesting. Countries that develop First World capitalisms tend to eventually develop LGBT+ movements or subcultures, and each time these populations appear they begin to link together across the world and share the same experiences back and forth, slowly forgetting that they even belong to different countries, and becoming confused on why there isn't an equal amount of progress on their issues in all countries. It used to be believed, especially in the Third World, that LGBT "communities" mostly represented a political movement of people who did not understand Marxism linking together across the world to try to reach capitalists, who all just happened to be gay. But now it has come to be better understood that people can form a new population at any time without their separation having started for economic reasons, and that the shape of LGBT populations is really best described as a plurality of small minority subpopulations isolated by social processes and with economic hardship forced on them from the outside that have joined together through new processes such as the internet to attempt to form something similar but not identical to a nationality.

I once read an article on Left Voice (a federated, international news outlet) which was put out in 2021 that was arguing for transgender rights within a framework of the historical transitions between patriarchal agrarian societies and urban societies, and until recently this article had stuck in my mind as "one of the best Trotskyist articles I've ever seen", but funny enough, I don't actually think it chose the right line of argument. I think a better line of argument would actually be to point out that LGBT+ subpopulations are always so small within their own respective countries that Liberal-republicanism is effectively rigged against queer people ever having rights, but due to these subpopulations being a repeated pattern that keeps popping up in every population, the LGBT+ population naturally tends toward attempting to form political parties on a large scale and create an international state. It sounds ridiculous to say this, but — particularly in its "family-friendly" forms that are already palatable to the center-Liberal press and bourgeois parliaments — gay culture might be one of the most inherently Trotskyist things there ever was. With enough effort you can put together a nationally-scoped, essentially-Stalinist argument about historical transitions, and for scientifically-minded people that will probably land, but the actual shape of LGBT+ subcultures on the ground as they come into being and struggle for their existence genuinely looks less like a single isolated population going through history on its own than it does a miniature Fourth International. This is my best guess as to the social dynamics that were actually going on to produce {{game|Deltarune}}. The fact that works like this are "gay" or "trans" is everything; while every human population begins with particular characteristics, and the world contains many nationality-based populations that function reasonably well when they develop as isolated states, the global LGBT+ population may be one of the first identified coherent human populations to actually start out containing "Trotskyist country characteristics" that predispose it to shed hard national borders and embrace Trotskyism. (Arguably, two other partial examples are Western Europe and Yugoslavia. Writers like Slavoj Žizek like to go around implying that Yugoslavia was not going to develop Bolshevism because the way it sharded apart was some kind of consequence of "national will", but this kind of claim really depends on what limits you set on "Bolshevism" and whether you are willing to define it as the joining together of distinct nations.)

== Trotsky and Deng ==

So, in the first few sections I casually brought up the strange hypothetical of Trotskyism and Stalinism coexisting side-by-side, neither interfering with the other, as separate bordered political entities. To people as knowledgeable on the history of Trotskyism as the ICFI, I can see why at first glance basically nothing about this concept would make sense. And by now, even I have to agree. But, for the sake of the historical record and giving everyone a better understanding of Stalinism, it is worth laying out exactly how I came to conceptualize things that way.

A lot of my early thoughts on "Marxisms coexisting" were direct responses to Cold War rhetoric. My mind would go back to 1930 and think, _but if I'm in the United States, the United States attacking the Soviet Union was the wrong decision_, and as if I had a time machine I would feel like I had to defend Stalin so that today's Russians wouldn't have to suffer the destruction of all democracy and a lack of affordable health care. I would look at China or Cuba or North Korea and I would think to myself, _sure, I wouldn't really want to live there, but I'm also not a Third World peasant, so the people in those countries seeing the social transformations they did must have been amazing for them_. I was thoughtful about the wants and needs of people in other countries, and I always tried to avoid simply eternalizing the exact conditions of the United States and transferring all the things that are currently happening in the United States' unique historical period onto them. I was convinced for a while, incorrectly, that Trotskyists "didn't think like this" and whenever the United States and Europe went around spreading rhetoric that Third World countries were merely behind them in history and letting other countries flood in and herd their people into First World businesses was the solution that Trotskyists didn't actually care and were simply waiting around for global empire to scoop up and assimilate everyone into "The West" so they could avoid having to deal with rival forms of Marxism they didn't understand and have the initial country characteristics they wanted to ensure that the form of Marxism they only subjectively believed to be superior happened first. I generally saw Trotskyists as "unwitting imperialists" with false consciousness about the Third World, so when I would see talks or articles that actually said Trotskyists should _defend_ Cuba my first reaction was intense skepticism — "they still continue to say that Stalinism is bad and they don't want it to exist, so when they claim to care about Cuba, are they just lying to make themselves look good?". My perceptions of Trotskyists had largely been very negative, because the fact that people turning against the Soviet Union had ultimately brought such horrific outcomes while every moment people stood with Stalin's allies had at least delayed those outcomes had colored my entire mental concept of what a Trotskyist was capable of thinking or knowing. And yet, in spite of that, I didn't hate Trotskyists. At every moment on the historical timeline what I saw was Trotsky making some kind of effort to understand Leninism and be part of the Russian Revolution or try to create more Marxist parties in Europe or Mexico; I'd heard about so many of Trotsky's errors and Luxemburg's crude-sounding positions but I knew they weren't reactionaries. So I was confused for a while what Stalinists even had against them. If they were just a bit less talented at Marxism and tended to distort things, wouldn't the sensible position be to simply try to give them ways to help the overall national movement or Stalinist republic out of sight of its central positions of authority? Stalinists would often repeat at people new to Marxism that it was important to not become an ultraleft and to be able to analyze non-Marxist movements such as alliances between social-democratic parties and workers' movements so that Marxist theorists could "go into the marsh" and build bridges between all potential Marxists. So I couldn't understand how Trotskyists were the enemy if they were simply a bit bad at Marxism, and why you wouldn't simply start that "marsh process" over at the beginning of a workers' state to try to turn all the remaining bourgeois progressive movements and distortions of Marxism into Marxism and make use of existing historical elements to get the workers' state to cohere together.

I had taken everything I'd learned so far at that time and had spun this unique new narrative that Stalin was a sensible defender of the Russian Revolution and Trotsky tended to get things wrong but actually when Trotsky wrote his criticism of the Soviet Union's failure to get an upsettingly-long list of features of the 14 republics through socialist transition, it was just some kind of misunderstanding where Trotsky was dissatisfied with the way the CPSU was doing things and somehow if somebody just _went and attended to those things_ everything would have been okay. Marxism is the study of the developmental stages of societies and the best ways to construct government, so surely if Trotsky was a Marxist and he had at least some understanding of the problems in the Soviet Union he could have tried to fix a few of them himself? I was so ready to just put Trotsky back into the Soviet party apparatus and turn him into a bureaucrat "if he'd only behave", or into the concentric system of soviets somewhere so he could learn what was actually wrong with industry and come back with a better assessment of how to begin a transformation of the entire country starting at small scales. Or failing that, I thought, put him into a different group of countries, maybe Europe, and he can simply go build Trotskyism there. The point of any particular cluster of Marxist theorists is that they solve what civilization is supposed to look like and as they are doing it people put down structures to realize that civilization. So maybe Trotsky didn't have quite the correct schema for the Soviet Union but if you sent him to Europe (and assume he somehow assembled a party that could defeat the Axis powers), maybe he would be better at solving Europe. I noticed this odd recurring theme in Trotsky's works that it vaguely seemed like he was very dissatisfied with the Soviet Union, for reasons that he himself admitted were connected to it being a backward Third World country, but didn't seem to have as many bad things to say about the United States or Europe given that those countries, unimpeded by their own imperialism, were already developing more smoothly. So my logical conclusion had been that Trotsky must simply be tired of Third World countries and prefer countries or clusters of nationalities with more First-World characteristics. I was big on the idea of "country characteristics". I thought that had to be one of the explanations of why Trotskyism existed. And the funny thing is that I wasn't completely wrong, because First World countries do have more globalization and interconnected economies, making them less likely to accept Stalinism. But I had taken it a bit further than it was really supposed to go, thinking that if Trotsky recognized "uneven development" and also believed in an international permanent revolution that would span "a number of countries" then it must be because he was describing the fragment of world socialist transition that would happen inside European-style country characteristics. Blockheaded analysis, yet again, but this is what happens when you try to understand the whole world and all its material contradictions from inside Stalinism.

I was a bit biased toward Mao at the time. I was halfway convinced he "had it figured out" and when he wrote that one article about making sure everybody's opinions were heard so people wouldn't disrupt the organization ("On correcting mistaken ideas in the party") he must have known the actual correct method for preventing a Left Opposition. If I couldn't understand why Trotsky created the Fourth International, then surely he must have done it because all the existing Marxist parties were like a Fourth International but bigger and more successful and due to arbitrary disagreements that had physically split the two instances of Marxism apart early Trotskyism was simply trying to start the same thing over again smaller with far too few people. Because I didn't understand the difference between a Third International and a Fourth International, I was stuck on this weird theory that if somehow Mao hadn't allowed China to turn its back on the Third International that somehow he could have seen the division between Stalinism and Trotskyism coming and fixed the entire problem. I'm not sure why I attributed so much theoretical mastery to Mao when I knew he never stopped the arrival of Deng Xiaoping and I even knew that Dengists in China were now making a habit of claiming that everything they were doing was consistent with Mao. I guess I simply chalked that one up to typical revisionist methods, because growing up in the United States I'd seen an absurd number of different distortions of Marxism that would always try to argue that a few people forming a cooperative or a cluster of actual frontier settlers forming an anarcho-syndicalist civilization in Israel or a perfect Menshevik party that actually manages to regulate capitalists through parliament was _exactly_ what was said in Marx. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether people in various situations across history were giving an inaccurate account of Marxist parties they didn't belong to, or a perfectly accurate account of revisionist tendencies passed down from old traditional revisionist standbys that just mysteriously happened to be told in the first person.

In the very beginning around 2020 I was still largely standing on top of bourgeois philosophical frameworks, not really believing them sincerely, but trying to see if I could find ways to twist them toward an honest analysis of Marxism instead of a distorted analysis of Liberal-republicanism. I liked to play around with the concept of bourgeois ethics and the concepts of Good and Evil. Those seemed at first glance to be completely inadequate for explaining why the Cold War had happened, but when PragerU dropped a video in 2015 about how Trotsky supposedly proved US imperialism (!), that video really stuck in my mind for a while as one of the funniest and most obviously-incorrect things I'd ever seen. (I actually made an edit of that video where I had Bret Stephens giving a satirical "Trotskyist talk" that included all the most quintessentially "baffling" things I'd heard Trotskyists say, as well as a few Stalinist talking points I put in there so that the joke wouldn't be hating on Trotskyism as much as replicating the feel of an IMT talk that seems to toss around a bunch of irrelevant complaints and then end up at a good conclusion.) Sometimes I would set up scenarios where because Liberal-republicans believe in standpoint epistemology they can't defend Trotsky without asking what Trotsky actually wants and then they become obligated to realize a Fourth International; sometimes I would take the concept of some 40% of US people believing in a god and set up a scenario where if something resembling the bible god exists then Trotsky would have to have gone somewhere when he died but if the US believes God sided against Stalinism and the Soviet Union believes God sided with Stalinism and everyone believes something different about Trotsky, where he went would become a total paradox because you can't be in separation from God and not in separation from God at the same time. I didn't take those particular scenarios very seriously. One thing I took a little more seriously was the Liberal-republican concept of intersectionality and the notion of _conglomerate anarchies_ that had grown up around it. (My term.)

Within the United States there has been this gap between the promises of Liberal-republicanism of granting human rights to everybody just because the Constitution says every individual in the country has human rights and has human rights separately and in parallel, and the reality of actually trying to organize civil rights movements and seeing that there is no actual incentive for any of them to cooperate with each other outside the fact that _Tories hate all of them_. In this weird way, all progress in the United States is driven by utter hatred and no progress occurs without hatred, only different minority demographics radially oppressing each other and regenerating each other's oppression. Anarchists will do everything to cover up the real nature of this process. They'll tell you that the radial oppression wouldn't occur if people just practiced the Ideal of intersectionality. They'll tell you that the natural state of human beings is for all demographics to live in harmony and Tories are the only ones who spontaneously invented Prejudice on a Thursday. They'll tell you that Communists don't understand how to be human and only a community free of scientific analysis of communities and formed out of the passion of the moment is a real community. They'll appeal to incomprehensible concepts of Rhizome and groups of people never consisting of individuals and being totally uncountable, all inherently clumping inward and inward like iron and lead atoms increasingly crunching all the heavy atoms around them into a black hole.
They'll... just go make a bunch of videos about _Pokémon_ that they think are not political but are actually all an unconscious way of expressing their desire for 18 abstract Ideals (Pokémon types) that constantly fight and compete with each other to always have been designed to live in harmony as necessary indivisible parts of a single cosmic Creation. This is more or less what people think the United States _is_ — a perfect indivisible conglomerate of different but perfectly parallel identities that _just happen_ not to destroy each other in a way that is inexplicable and incomprehensible but also natural and sacred. In medieval Europe people used to speak of "hierarchy" as this concept that kings, nobles, and clergy believed that the pyramidal order they had created was holy. Now it seems like that concept has shifted a bit so that the god of the 21st Century is Arceus the world-god, and the sacred order handed down by Arceus is many local competing islands which are ruled not by specific individual owners but by the simple agreement by any possible decision-making representative of the island that they will all remain islands competing with the world outside them but they will all live in harmony. What do you call such a "voluntary agreement"? There are few reasonable things to call that other than using the word _anarchy_ in a way that is completely upsetting to anarchists. Hierarchy has already yielded to anarchy, but has become it "in the wrong way".

This sets the stage for why I felt compelled to see the overall world as a vaguely static system and make everything "coexist". Some forms of anarchism — admittedly still not every one of them — have been taken up as the weapon of Liberal-republicanism such that U.S. people are being relentlessly assaulted every day with _two_ bourgeois ideologies that each have their own harsh consequences if not obeyed; Liberal-republicanism and anarchism have lined up side-by-side and are now just one big comprehensive system of formal and informal government that take turns doing hired jobs for each other, and to say the least, it's getting tiring.

Thus, after being fed the line that _center-Liberals and anarchists have to coexist and center-Liberals and kulaks had to coexist and trans people and alleged rapists with a sky-colored letter on their name tag have to coexist and literally everyone who isn't Donald Trump has to coexist but J.K. Rowling and Rebecca Sugar can't coexist but Communists and Kropotkinists and Arceus-loving agorists have to coexist and every country and every other country has to coexist unless they're Deng Xiaoping explicitly telling countries to coexist_ for 27 years straight, you can see why my head was spinning and I simply had to start sorting out the whole puzzle in a methodical, logical way _immediately_ before I had any real time to gather up all the necessary background reading an "Orthodox" Marxist usually needs. I would do the readings at the pace I could but I had a very urgent need to actually calculate through the complicated math problem of which people in society I was actually obligated to obey the ethical imperatives of to successfully gain any allies and which people were just knocking me around. I no longer believe the phrase "The Left" (or "leftists") means anything whatsoever. What philosophy people align with says very little about whether you can trust them. It's almost more accurate to say people are just plain garbage wherever you go and the only thing anyone can actually believe in is the Materialist analysis of society and the prospect that if you take accurate observations of reality it will reward you for correct predictions. When anarchists and Tories were both becoming insufferable and actually impossible to talk to, I retreated into my "lair" behind a sizable shelf of dragons and math books and I just started writing down every statement I could ever remember anarchists saying, every statement I could ever remember Trotskyists saying, every statement I could remember center-Liberals saying, every statement I remembered from Tories, every statement I remembered from Dengists, and every statement I could remember coming from Stalinists, and I stopped judging them based on my own desires and simply started asking, "okay, but what does this statement _actually mean_?". I knew that there was no chance in _hell_ that all of these contradictions between different philosophies were ever going to work themselves out through discussion and "community". So I was going to solve them using some form of mathematical reasoning. I was going to just take all these groups of people and solve them so I could stop retreating away from all people since the year 2020 and one day come out of my house. I wasn't going to be picky any more. Anarchists said "we aren't going to tolerate Stalin"? Okay. Trotskyists said "you can't create socialism in one country"? All right, I'm writing it down. Stalinists said "Trotskyists are liars and you can't trust them"? Okay, I'm adding that too. Maoists said "Deng enabled the bureaucracy"? Got it. Center-Liberals said "regulations are Actually magic spells that absolutely _Penrose-world-line_ capitalists into inevitably perfecting Liberalism"? Nasty; it's recorded. I was so angry and tired, but I wasn't one to direct my anger toward hurting people. The only revenge I knew was to maliciously comply with what everyone said until I had given them exactly what they asked for but given it to them so precisely they were disconcerted and upset. And this was the condition I was in when trying to solve Trotskyism. It felt like it was the only philosophy that hadn't already abused me, but I was quite used to human societies in general being hazardous and unreasonable and I was fully prepared for it to be just like the rest of them and ultimately stop just a few unsolved contradictions short of making sense. I'd come up with an entire scheme of existential materialism to "objectify" human beings and reduce all groups of people to semi-deterministic processes almost resembling computations. I was ready to just accept that people were more physical and chemical-like, driven by arbitrary A × B equations that simply _led to things_, than they were reasonable actors.

So... imagine my surprise when I found out I didn't really have to do that and by trying to create "meta-Marxism" out of Stalinism I was more or less solving a problem that Stalinism had set up.

Within the past year or so of developing my framework for analyzing all philosophies starting at their surface claims and evident social links with other philosophies, I had to ask myself the seemingly strange question of whether Deng Xiaoping Thought is actually a form of anarchism. At first this would seem like a silly question, because anarchism tells you it's against states and Deng Xiaoping Thought is a statist system. But here's the thing about that: anarchism lies to you by constantly resorting to Liberal-republican civil rights legislation enforced by the same state and cops it hates, and Deng Xiaoping Thought fundamentally believes that the correct path for a nation-state is whatever brings nation-states out of domination and into harmony. This is very, very similar to the things typical United States anarchists say. So is Deng Xiaoping Thought a form of what anarchism actually is, or is anarchism a variation on Dengism? I now realize that if anything you get better insights by looking at it the latter way around. There are at least two kinds of anarchism, the "charcoal" kind that is practiced by nameless ordinary people and the "blue" kind that is practiced by various different academics including David Graeber (much of this can also be termed _agorism_), and blue anarchism is the revisionist wing out of the two that will certainly hand people back to capitalism. In this sense blue anarchism is the Deng Xiaoping Thought of anarchism. Just as the USFI-IMT axis is the bluest wing of Trotskyism that has ended up seeking harmony with center-Liberal Labor parties and the Tories and outright capitalists, blue anarchism seeks harmony and complementarity with all existing fragments of capitalism. To some extent this happens because of the way capitalism deliberately removed all forms of structure from kingdoms and forced people to become dependent on "structure experts" (capitalists, "Archons") to continuously solve society's structure as it would come to constantly and endlessly change. Anarchists seem to silently want to believe this naïve myth that if structure is removed from society and it is consequently "free" from all authorities that previously conflated themselves with forms of structure (nobility, clergy, Stalin, etc.) then no new structure-experts conflated with structures can ever emerge. But this myth is dangerously wrong, because it doesn't take into account the concept that a lot of these Archons actually emerge in order to _prevent_ violence. Much of the appeal of capitalism is that once capitalists fill up an area they can all tell everyone exactly how to live their lives at every hour of the day and pass laws onto the entire rest of the population based on which forms of activity are recognized as conducive to capitalism and which forms of activity are "dangerous, illegal" businesses. Think for a moment about the fact that money laundering is actually just running a business, and prostitution is just running a business, and dealing drugs is just running a business, and online platforms having to worry about whether they're hosting "illegal content" is just running a business. Capitalists don't materially care whether an online platform left up a graphic beheading video or an unofficial copy of a perfectly innocuous movie or an impressive fan-made "nintendo game" — the only people they allow to remain alive and think about the workings of society are the people who thoughtlessly accept the requirement to only do the arbitrary pre-approved list of activities that are recognized as necessary organs of a world sectioned up into capitalist businesses. Capitalism is quite a totalitarian system when you think about it — if that word is to mean anything whatsoever (and there's otherwise a very decent argument to be made it's complete nonsense), then let it be applied to the fact that capitalism only spits out a lengthy constitution full of ways you're supposedly free after it has outright eliminated all humans who have not been molded and designed from their ancestry to their adulthood to be ideal capitalists from the human gene pool. Blue anarchism cannot make progress without hatred, and it cannot offer freedom without loading every social interaction with the potential for punishment and deleting all possible incorrect thoughts from society by weaponizing natural selection.

By now, I've come to understand how truly monstrous capitalism really is. First there is capitalism, which despite a lot of psychological projection around such phrases from Liberal-republicans, really does eliminate anything that doesn't agree with it. Then there is the great variety of attempts to get humanity out of capitalism, and in general, they all promise to get rid of some aspect of capitalism, thus creating the odd result that whenever they fail to do their task they will all logically end in irony by regenerating everything they said they wouldn't do. When Maoism fails to preserve Bolshevism, it "ironically" brings back all the injustices of capitalism. Likewise when the historical Militant Tendency or IMT fails to actually create any successful fissure through the surface of capitalism, it "ironically" hands power back to capitalists, and when blue anarchism has no serious strategy for breaking up the boundaries of the capitalist estate and laying down an equally powerful defense against capitalism over the same area it "ironically" begins cracking down on the presence of every individual it finds undesirable to its "small-and-local community" and viciously purging Communists from reality itself. I used to think Trotskyists were part of this great blue continuum of awful. But many people still think Stalinism is part of the continuum of awful. Are they right? The real answer is a superposition. Stalin was totally devoted to making sure that the Soviet Union would not turn blue, but Stalin's party was a failure that undeniably allowed the Soviet Union to turn strawberry, and a party cannot survive through one person. So, the merit of a Trotskyist party has to be judged by how capable it is of lifting populations — hopefully several — into a movement of a new swatch color and _out_ of the fatal sea of blue. This is the key to whether different movements can be expected to coexist. When a Marxist party appears its behavior is generally characterized by attempting to separate itself from capitalism. So, a red or orange party is inherently intolerant of a blue party. It does not bring intolerance in the form of hating that party's people, but it does bring in the reasonable requirement that blue movements do not get to link up with other blue movements to defeat Communism, and no other Marxism is allowed to let the blue movements do this either. Strawberry "Marxisms" (or, republics pretending to be Marxisms) do not uphold this barrier, so red parties and orange parties do not tolerate them. Likewise capitalists inside a strawberry government will quickly eliminate red and orange parties because those are quick to mess up their plan of linking to blue parties and putting the country back to blue (Liberal-republicanism). So, why do orange parties try to get rid of red parties? This one was the most complicated for me to try to phrase in terms of my simple diagram-friendly system. The short answer is something like that Stalin's party, ostensibly red, put up a bunch of strawberry governments. Stalin's party decided that it would attempt to extend over about half the world and then stop, and the result is that all of the edges of the Third International either turned blue themselves or conceded to blue. Parties are always in motion either toward something capitalism-approved or away from capitalism, so it was not long before this surrender at the edges swept back through the entire thing and reached the core parties that were supposed to be "protected".

So, Trotsky did care about the internal structure of a country. The color swatch system communicates this easily — to give one of the most succinct summaries possible of _The Revolution Betrayed_, Trotsky did not want _any_ countries turning strawberry. The world may or may not already have a precise understanding of how exactly it is that areas like the Soviet Union became overrun with bureaucrats (China directly handing control to its ally capitalists is more obvious), but either way he was able to leave a clear message for everyone that the effort required to get out of capitalism is almost unimaginably great. Many people are still surprised at the scope of the Soviet Union and its bloc of allies, and yet the real nightmare is realizing that _it wasn't enough_. The true level of effort required to get out of capitalism is almost unimaginable. Toward that end, Marxism does have to become more extensive and robust than it ever was before, and more capable of recognizing social phenomena on their own level such that all social phenomena that aid capitalism can be theoretically deconstructed from top to bottom so decisively that there is no way for any of them to fool anyone any longer. ("This is what Community is, this is what Rhizome is, this is what Arceus is; fiction is fiction but here is what metaphysics and Idealism are and here is why they're a problem.") Why do we need meta-Marxism? To expose every single one of the blue philosophies, and to expose the situations in which every one of them leads back to problems like infighting, stagnation, oppression of demographics, and imperialism. If anarchism is a problem, it must be exposed too, along with sophisticated but false concepts that First World countries only have to tolerate Stalinist states to make them stable — no, as long as First World countries contain substantially powerful capitalists those capitalists will inevitably take charge of the First World country and warp Stalinism into Dengism. Perhaps it's really the capitalists' fault that Stalinism historically doesn't survive, but that doesn't take away the material fact that all the capitalists and capitalist-leaning bureaucrats still have the power to join up across countries and undo everything. If capitalist-leaning bureaucrats in a strawberry government somehow figured out how to start twisting an orange party and getting _it_ to start regenerating capitalists, Trotskyists would have no reason to tolerate that either. So, inasmuch as tolerating Stalinism allows capitalists to stay in place in the First World, once a Fourth International has a chance of stopping that same outcome the Stalinist party more or less has to go. This "risky" transition from crimson or strawberry to orange becomes okay when there is reason to believe the Fourth International really can overwrite the red party with a functioning orange party. If Trotskyism covered two thirds of the world, not simply with parties but with something more resembling the crimson estate seen at the _very beginning_ of the Soviet Union, the remaining third would have a harder time resisting than it would joining.

I won't say I'm not still nervous about what will happen to the remaining three or so strawberry countries. Every strawberry country turning into Russia and periodically killing its neighbors is entirely possible! The more desperate and cornered a population is, the more likely it is to regenerate Duginism-Zionism — the two are nearly the same in that they both believe that poorer populations' oppression is only solved by immediately making other countries pay for it in land and blood. And who can really blame them for that choice, if history has done everything to isolate them and crush them from every angle and given them no other options? This is the danger of putting pressure on any Third World country from within other countries. Given a bit of pressure countries will burst their regimes, but given _enough_ pressure, countries will never choose self-genocide when capitalism is conveniently available instead. This brought terrible outcomes to Russia, where the set of people handed capitalism were given no incentive to join together in conglomerate anarchy and every incentive to believe in capitalism only to compete with each other to gain the most physical assets. Tell Russians to respect capitalist islands, there goes Ukraine. But one thing must be remembered: only to Communists is imperialism actually a taboo. Pressure can drive anyone else toward accepting imperialism under the rule of capitalists or outright nazism if cities worth of people dying around them is the alternative. This is approximately why feudal orders and decades- to centuries-long warring states periods happened in the first place: pressure from surrounding kingdoms that all wanted to expand encouraged everyone to support the nobility and empire for the overall population to survive.

So, I have my doubts that Trotskyism should even be spreading so much rhetoric against strawberry countries across the world at all. Keep in mind how poorly most people understand Trotskyism — most people who would see this rhetoric are effectively no better at Marxism than Stalinists, and I've just given you a thorough examination of exactly how far off from a correct understanding of Marxism most Stalinists are. I can't repeat this enough: no matter how many people become sympathetic to groups that claim to have Trotskyist programs, almost nobody alive in the 2020s actually understands a Fourth International. So in effect, rhetoric about how "Stalinism was always doomed" or "Mao handed China to capitalists" has been teaching everyone that attempts at a Third International need to be overwritten with more Third Internationals, and that if the United States' imperialists manage to pressure Cuba out of state businesses everyone may as well support the imperialists when they explode the strawberry government and take away its national independence specifically for imperialism. My mistake was thinking that problem was Trotskyism's fault, when really, it's more like capitalism and Stalin's Marxism that did it accidentally. It can be very difficult to get people to correct or apologize for unconscious accidents deliberately advanced by only a few conscious actors. While it may be dreadfully popular for social-democrats and anarchists to throw around a proverbial "we" that "let everything happen", the reality is that people everywhere will basically never be able to accept that they are responsible for such things — including climate change, Israel, and First World capital obliterating national independence and any possibility of "democracy" — until they have truly unified into new structures and come to a new consciousness that allows them to really actually make choices and take action in order to stop them. Trotskyists think the world needs a Fourth International to empower the proletariat. The reality is that the world needs a Fourth International to get everyone out of thinking in terms of nation-states and imperialism, because it will keep doing both up until the day Trotskyist socialism can actually be realized.

== Is Liberal-republicanism an anarchism? ==

By this point, I hope I have succeeded at laying out a basic outline of how meta-Marxism is different from previous formulations of Marxism, and the ways in which it might or might not appear strange and quirky to anyone seeing it for the first time. Crimson Marxism (Stalinist analysis) is bottom-up. Violet Marxism is top-down. Violet Marxism looks at entire systems first, identifies large-scale contradictions, and then looks inside the parts of each major contradiction to see how they operate, in order to assign every level of "pieces" a swatch color. This is when meta-Marxism stops being a "beginner" method and reveals dialectical processes: identify a sea of workers inside blue capitalist territories, or identify a forest of orange soviets beneath a strawberry ministry but across from an orange party, and you see how class-associated formations can break out of other formations of the wrong color to realize across a region into larger estates (class rule or "dictatorship"). Violet Marxism preoccupies itself with "defining philosophy objects" such as "Marxisms" and "anarchisms" only to allow everyone to more effectively start that process.

So... what _is_ Liberal-republicanism — what is it really?

We know first of all that Liberal-republicanism is not a Marxism. It is not a version of Stalinism or Trotskyism; all its closest allies relentlessly persecute Communists. It is also not a version of Deng Xiaoping Thought, because despite the two being almost identical on the inside Liberal-republicanism also insists on persecuting Dengism. This is some very curious behavior, because if you had never read Liberal-republican theory and only read the works of Marx and Engels you might start to believe that if both kinds of countries are capitalism and based on capitalist class-rule they should be indistinguishable. Even Trotskyists will go around claiming that capitalism has been entirely restored in China, but a Marxist should know that capitalism cannot separate itself from government and whenever it exists it is inherently connected to the process of forming a republic. So, why exactly are Liberal-republicanism and Deng Xiaoping states fighting? There is no satisfactory explanation for this within Marxism. Up to now, this has been a genuine explanatory gap where Marxism has left a dissonance between how it _claims_ capitalism generates governments and how capitalism _actually_ generates governments.

Let's look inside Liberal-republicanism one more time. Inside the United States are the Republican and Democratic parties. Inside China is China's central government. But, wait, the CPC isn't part of the United States political system, is it? Liberal-republicans think it isn't. But in reality, capitalists in China are manufacturing huge numbers of products and shipping them to the United States, where sky- and rust-aligned businesses buy the products, and sky- and rust-aligned businesses are occasionally shipping products such as animated movies back to China. The relationship between the Democrats and the CPC is similar to the relationship between the Republicans and the Democrats. But, the Republicans and the Democrats hate each other, and... _oh_. They also both hate the CPC. So they really _do_ have the same relationship. They all exchange products with each other but they all hate each other and would prefer a world in which they could get rid of each other's leadership and replace it with their own. Well, maybe not the CPC, which has no interest in clearing out the Republicans or Democrats, but definitely the other two, who have already been clearing out the leadership of Cuba to effectively begin adding Cuba to the Democratic and Republican Parties.

So, a contradiction emerges. Liberal-republicanism is a nation-state or "republicanized kingdom" composed of parties, but parties do not all belong to the same country. Within Deng Xiaoping states, each party forms its own different country. But Liberal-republicanism doesn't like this. It despises the concept of Deng Xiaoping states having only one party. Why is this? You will hear a lot of rationalizations out of Liberal-republicanism as to why a capitalist republic "has" to have multiple parties and a lot of them don't really explain anything. China is getting by just fine with a cooperative congress of only one party; by now its overall set of problems is not any worse than the United States'. And nobody enjoys the United States being divided or becoming more and more polarized every time it insists there must be two parties. So from a capitalist point of view isn't there every incentive for the United States to transition to a Deng Xiaoping state? This would better match everything said in the United States constitution about everyone being equal and the government not being created to be an instrument of one group of capitalists persecuting another. This would better match popular imagery of the United States being "indivisible". So if both Liberal-republicanism and Deng Xiaoping Thought are capitalism and they both hold similar amounts of government oppression, neither one inherently generating more, then why isn't Dengism logically the better choice? Why is such a suggestion so inherently offensive to United States capitalists?

Here, oddly enough, we can go to Stalinists for the answers. When Stalin's party came to power, they assumed that they could get rid of capitalism and create a basic instance of socialism within one country. This rests on some very interesting assumptions. In order to get rid of capitalism within one country, there must first be one countable and separable instance of capitalism only extending through one country (or through one easily-defined region of 14 republics). Stalinists assumed that capitalism was fundamentally countable; they assumed that there could exist "exactly one capitalism" or "exactly two capitalisms". When early Maoism disintegrated into Deng Xiaoping Thought, this assumption was carried through into Deng Xiaoping states. And Deng Xiaoping states contained their supposed single instance of capitalism in the borders of a central capitalist party. This is to say: if capitalism is countable whatsoever, then the United States indisputably contains at _least two capitalisms_, not just one.

I think it is arguable that capitalism actually is semi-countable. And this is why the United States is so angry at Deng Xiaoping states: capitalists' favorite form of society is not _capitalism_, but _multicapitalism_. China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea are some of the only places on earth that have ever had _monocapitalism_ as described in Marx and Engels. These countries all developed monocapitalism because of an error made by Marxist theorists, in which historical Marxist theorists usually assumed that a country full of capitalists is one united body of capitalists called _the capitalist class_, as opposed to two or more truly distinct bodies of capitalists called _semi-countable capitalist estates_. Nobody could have guessed this correctly before 1953. Monarchy appears to be a unified system which is only broken up into warring states by the destruction of monarchy. But capitalism is entirely different because it is fundamentally made of social links between individual capitalists. These arbitrary social links simultaneously ensure that capitalism is never entirely dissolved and that capitalism is never entirely unified into a single society.

This is why, the day I discovered an unbelievably terrible Lacanian book called _The Excessive Subject_ which was attempting to dismantle every progressive ideology in existence which did not promote capitalism, I jokingly called it "the best book I've ever read on Marxism". In assuming that Liberal capitalism was composed of perfectly atomic individuals, Molly Ann Rothenberg started with an assumption that was _so_ terrible and _so_ uniquely mired in capitalist thinking that she unknowingly handed me the key to cracking all the central assumptions of capitalism and everything wrong with it. Today I call this book a work of dark genius, because quite honestly, she may have accidentally saved the world in her attempt to destroy it.

Liberal-republicanism is approximately two capitalisms. Deng Xiaoping states are approximately one. But the world as a whole always generally contains multicapitalism, not monocapitalism. This is the crux of all the ideological differences between Liberal-republicanism and Dengism. Dengism values unity and harmony because it is in fact largely unified. Liberal-republicanism values division and spreads ample myths about that being a form of "freedom" because it itself is divided.

So what about anarchism? Are there any unique characteristics to the divided pieces inside Liberal-republicanism, and is there any relationship between these pieces and anarchism?

Logically speaking, if we have established that Liberal-republicanism is formed out of islands of capitalism, and the historical evidence has established that anarchism is generally not very different from early forms of capitalism (you will have to read other Marxist articles for an explanation on that), it would almost have to be the case that anarchism is simply a very strange manifestation of a Liberal-republican party with completely different goals than most others but which in any particular country region is still simply one of the many wings of multicapitalism. Anarchists will often deny this, telling you that anarchism is actually the rejection of political parties and the black flag of charcoal anarchism represents the melding of separate political islands into a non-political structure which is truly uncountable. But, whether those claims make any actual sense or not, that's _charcoal_ anarchism, not _blue_ anarchism. Whenever Tory parties show up and propose any actually threatening policies within Liberal-republican governments, all the world's David Graebers and Slavoj Žižeks and all the charcoal anarchists as well can never seem to get out of the bad habit of grouping themselves into "The Left". This shouldn't make any sense if anarchism was a truly uncountable phenomenon which was truly done with political parties, because in practice, any formulation of "The Left" or "The U.S. Left" inevitably becomes a political party, and inevitably collects political candidates that become official Liberal-republican theorists and go to the Liberal-republican state. A Stalinist party equipped with meta-Marxism can talk about "The Left"; an anarchist cannot. So, why is it that blue anarchists are far more obsessed with the concept of "The Left" than Communists ever have been, and with being the one true political theory that far more than Stalinism or Trotskyism will supposedly be the only thing that can ever rise out of Toryism? Because blue anarchism is in every single way Liberal-republicanism's child and heir.

Now, we're at a point where the United States constitution can finally be of use to Marxists. The Constitution promises a bunch of "freedoms". These are said to already exist — "inalienable", "self-evident". There is no such thing as an inalienable right, as every transgender person who encourages people to go around saying "trans rights are human rights" but has been recently arrested over a drivers' license would know. And there is no such thing as an "obvious" right, as everyone who has tried to explain gay marriage to a Tory would know. So in what sense are these rights "inalienable" or "self-evident" at all? Stalin's party would know the answers to this one — when a particular faction of people is freed from competition with other factions over a government and it is not bound by class rule such that it is merely removed from factional competition by the winners, then for the duration of the new historical period it has created it receives tentatively inalienable rights. The proletariat does not even have to properly control a republic for this much to be true, even though in such a situation the republic and its new rights are likely to only last for a temporary period of time. So, the obvious conclusion from looking at Stalin's party is that inalienable rights _are nothing more than_ the product of a specific socially-linked faction of people becoming totally independent from another faction and not subject to its culture, laws, or government. One of many possible definitions of a _revolution_, then, is a historical process within a specific limited time period which completely separates one self-contained political faction with a distinct political philosophy from others: in China, a Dengist revolution against feudalism was achieved even if the meaningful results of that revolution seen by the people are limited.

We have already established that no instance of capitalism is actually independent from others, and in this sense, all _bourgeois revolutions_ of this type within a period of capitalism are futile. So this exposes another contradiction: if capitalism separating itself from nobility and other nation-states is the real source of "inalienable rights", and capitalism cannot be separated from bourgeois parties that group capitalists into nation-states, but bourgeois parties cannot actually separate themselves out and become independent in a period of capitalism, then bourgeois parties should not be capable of granting "inalienable rights", even though they are effectively the source of "inalienable rights" that has supposedly already granted people some. This, like many things, would seem to be a case of basic formal logic failing to capture transitions between historical periods: a body of capitalists granting inalienable rights the first time ought to be different from a body of capitalists granting inalienable rights when there is already capitalism. But this is not actually a sensible objection, because today millions of Liberal-republicans still ardently believe that capitalism can continue to grant people more and more inalienable rights _against something other than feudalism_ that it has never granted them before. "Capitalism cannot transition people into capitalism a second time" _would_ make sense except that the facts are on the table that whenever anyone says it can't, wide swaths of average people almost violently object that it must. Some things can be attributed to old forms of consciousness, but when Marxism flat-out starts to lose its predictive power as the same "false consciousness" is generated over and over for decades and decades across more and more crises we have to ask if something else is going on. The limited cluster of Stalinists holding down the Soviet Union was not holding on against Trotskyism and global capitalism simply due to "false consciousness". Stalin's party was holding on based on its concrete historical situation of materially facing attacks from two different directions. Its behavior was not "logical", but when it was under attack from capitalist pressure and a then-disorganized axis of right-Liberals, anarchists, and early Trotskyists, it did not have any real time to think, and simply had to act. The question, then, is: is this what has happened to the overall body of blue anarchists and Democrats?

Here is my bold hypothesis that I think only a meta-Marxist could make. Anarchism is a form of society in which people form together based on arbitrary social links, as in a tribal society, or as in a small town linked together by the relationships between small or medium-sized businesses, and in which all the people within the society _believe_ it is linked together on the basis of morality. The codes of morality believed by an anarchism may include "No hierarchy", "No domination", "No capitalist will own all the businesses", "No capitalist will control a party that controls the entire government", or "Society is based on a social contract". [*AF] Anarchists believe that codes of morality are enough to keep societies from developing into kingdoms or Duginisms, but they are mistaken, because there is one thing codes of morality can never ever solve, which is the division of people into two separate socially-linked groups of people. This can happen for the tiniest reasons like two people believing in different sects of a religion or breaking up with a lover or accidentally excluding a demographic with no malicious intention. But the moment two people are incompatible and do not want to see each other anarchism immediately breaks down, because as soon as two people completely cease to have a relationship there is no incentive for them to follow every moral pronouncement that somebody on the other side of a relationship division has made any more. If person A shows up with a stack of evidence that person B is a rapist and person B denies it, all good will will quickly break down between the clusters of people around person A and person B, and person B will quickly be barred from creating social contracts that apply to person A's friends; if person X insults transgender people and says it is impossible for gender identity to be true, and person Y is transgender, person Y has no incentive to maintain a non-hierarchical society where person X is not put below person Y. In one sense social bonds are a terrible basis for forming a society, because the moment people stop liking each other for any reason an empty void opens up between two newly separate societies where civilization ceases to exist. Anarchists have spent at least 176 years trying to solve this problem with absolutely no success. They can try to say that divisions between societies are the real location of government (Bellegarrigue), they can try to say that prejudices are culturally fabricated and not real, they can try to say that bodies of capitalists are divided because choosing Greed divides each capitalist from the rest of society, they can try to say that Marxist party filtration is a form of hierarchy where Marxist parties have divided themselves from society by choosing Elitism, they can try to say that societies that would be divided "ought" to be merged together just because "societal pluralism" is inherently good. But an anarchist can never un-abuse an abused child, wind back a war between two tribal societies, or make a divorced couple get un-divorced. There will always be gaps between human beings where relationships do not exist which no anarchist Ideal can possibly bridge. But given enough of them, absolutely any of these gaps can stack back up to divisions so big Bellegarrigue would call them "governments". It has been terribly popular lately for blue anarchists to label any criticism of religion as a simple violation of societal pluralism on the grounds that any criticism of religion can be used as a lever to exclude Catholics or exclude Muslims or exclude Mormons specifically, while the only thing that is acceptable to anarchists is attempting to rationalize how all religions and spiritualities are true and how secular morality is essentially a new form of religion. [*as] But in the real world, the moment there is one church full of Tories believing that gay people are unholy, one church full of center-Liberals believing that accepting transgender people is a virtue, and one group of atheists that happens to believe that homosexuality is real but transgender people are dangerous to women, they have already drawn their lines of compatibility as far as which individuals will be able to form links and which will not, and none of the groups is going to agree accept any of the other groups' versions of morality, even if they are told that they all belong to an overarching society and code of morality that says they are obligated to all unify on one moral code. The natural response of anarchists is to draft up a lot of books and magazines (today, videos) that supposedly prove that other people have unacceptable codes of morality and which codes of morality are the final cosmic truth that all other codes of morality must bend themselves around just because the absolute moral truth is what's Right. But ultimately, none of these texts will be more powerful than the sheer power of which groups of people are socially connected and which are not — even at scales too small for proper class analysis, the current body of people in a group as distinguished from the people who are not will generate its ideology.
Here we arrive at the United States' national independence movement. People moved to the early United States colonies to be free to form a new society by simply linking together with people like them. They accepted having to work for others to pay the voyage, but they knew people supporting each other in community was the way society would form afterward. At that time many people were Christians, but either way many people believed in morality and over time, the thirteen colonies drifted to each largely contain people of specific Christian sects. In reality, everyone had religious freedom because they segregated away from each other and physically avoided the question of which religion was more correct. When the British crown became intolerable, the people of the United States got behind their best experts on government in order to create a new society that would respect each of the 13 colonies' human rights. The need to banish the British empire brought up questions that I think frankly the people of the United States otherwise didn't want to answer. The United States constitution was something of a formality to enshrine the way in which separating people into homogeneous clumps of "community" ensured each one freedom from the others. This is the way in which the fiction of "liberal democracy" ultimately emerged: if people were getting by making all their decisions within localized "communities", government by the people must in fact be attempting to preserve all these localized decisions and immediately giving the upper levels as little to do as possible so everyone can act like they don't exist. So, _if_ the United States began as a form of anarchism, it ended in various parts of the anarchism slowly or quickly producing capitalists who then generated a bourgeois republic to resolve the inherent conflicts within capitalism and multicapitalism.

I think a lot of people are resentful of this apparent takeover of anarchism by capitalism, and so a great part of the ideology in the United States is people coming up with mythological accounts of how the top layer of capitalism can simply be cut off and the United States can return to its supposedly perfect anarchist past. Nobody knows how societies actually work — not even CPUSA, not even the RCI — but they know what is viscerally wrong and they know what has seemingly been taken from them, and they are very angry. So angry they will just about punch a Communist over it if everyone doesn't restore anarchism immediately. To that I say... look at the middle of the timeline. Circa 1850 the United States government was granting people inalienable freedoms by planting "starter anarchisms" on the United States frontier. But I don't even have to open up a history book to tell you that if you do that those will generate capitalists, and if the capitalists all vote that eliminating North American tribes is in everyone's best interests, then that's the direction they will tug the whole population in, and you can't take it back even if a significant number of people were opposed to it. The early United States is broadly similar to Israel's Histadrut period in that even if you start with carefully designed anarchist compounds, when capitalists are in charge of the empire and they are all socially-linked members of your same nationality with a claim to represent its border and the day it was founded, the nation becomes theirs and what will happen to neighboring nations of people becomes entirely theirs. If you are not as physically powerful as a ring of capitalists who have all been able to form a socially-linked Community inside your Community and who can buy literally anyone to help them, you cannot win. It's very popular today for people to say that if you don't believe Israel can be defeated with nothing but a big stack of morality you are a defeatist and a traitor and — they don't say it out loud but they're thinking it — you basically belong in Hell. Most people are unwilling to accept the possibility that believing that anarchism doesn't regenerate capitalism has real material consequences, or that consequences come from anything but angering a cluster of individuals that has assumed the authority to dictate arbitrary moral codes. So here I will say the single angriest thing I will let out in this letter: if there was a God, or if there is anything that is universally Good or Evil, by taking this tack on reality you have definitely offended it. God cannot represent anything but the sum of all material processes and physical interactions in the universe, outside societies and inside societies. Every story about God, on paper or coming out of a United States president, is a story about how the motions of material reality will favor the kingdom or empire that has best predicted them. In that sense, a civilization that refuses to understand that the process of forming Community generates capitalism _cannot but have defied God_, and _cannot but have offended every form of cosmic Way and cosmic Good ever dreamed of_. Morality cannot exist without reality. If what was true was not strictly more important than what was moral, every single Tory who says transgender people don't exist or gay people are unholy or one Mexican immigrant far off in a town nobody thinks about stealing from a store should be locked up in a concentration camp would be right.

So. Historically speaking it should be unimportant whether the United States is an anarchism, but practically speaking, until the day it has any consciousness of material reality whatsoever it will be. The Idealism that drenches the United States and the Idealism that makes an anarchism are equally toxic; both believe that passing a law or putting up a list of commandments is enough to stop imperialism forever, and so in the end, both join together to blow up Palestine and keep regenerating imperialism. I think there may be a real difference between charcoal anarchisms and blue anarchisms, but I feel like it's an effective framing rhetorically to say to anarchists that try to call out Communists for statism, "no, _you_ created oppressive Tory statism because _you_ created the United States." "The United States is not a Marxist country founded by Mao or Hoxha, so tell me, who created all this?" Anarchists put heavy importance on morality and the ethical concept of individuals choosing fitting actions, so the moment you can get them to believe that supporting anarchism is actually _leading_ to capitalism, statism, anti-transgender laws, and Israel, I feel like they would be less inclined to resist either Stalinism or Trotskyism when they realized they genuinely had blood on their hands and them talking about "Communist atrocities" was only a cheap distraction from the actual important topic of their own choices and their own guilt.

I am experimenting with a definition that all societies before kingdoms and principalities or that go along with Liberal-republicanism are technically anarchisms. I recognize that this is a bit of a rhetorical tactic where I try to subliminally influence how people think by redefining the word _anarchism_ to something that better promotes historical-materialist thinking. But I am very tired of anarchism. Humanity doesn't have much time left. There isn't time for all this continued fighting between anarchists and Communists. So maybe, one of the few ways to actually get everyone to turn against anarchism and all the unacceptable things it allows to happen and unify with the Marxist movements anarchism has usually opposed is to present to them a superficially non-Marxist account of how almost everything anarchism has ever tried to stop is actually itself an anarchism that develops out of other anarchisms and thus the only way for anarchists to really achieve what anarchists want instead of regenerating it all over again is to take a look at Trotskyism.

== Historical materialism studies narratives ==

In the overall history of philosophy, there always seems to be this weird "pit" where as soon as early capitalism or widespread artisan production appears everything takes a dip and then nothing was as good afterward. _Some time into capitalism, the New Atheists appeared! Hundreds of years ago, the Old Atheists wrote "good" philosophy. On the cusp of early capitalism, Protestant work ethic and North American colonialism appeared! Back in peasant times, nobody had to work so much and nobody killed North American tribes to build coal mines. When capitalism came to China, the Dengist government ruined everything! Back before Mao, people in China and India believed in Buddhism and Hinduism, which each promoted syncretic coexistence between local religions and harmony with nature, unlike modern China where Beijing is filled with factories._ Sometimes you hear this from anarchists. Sometimes you hear it from Tories. Sometimes the two become concerningly indistinguishable and you begin questioning whether the progressive aspects of anarchism could somehow be some kind of front to smuggle in Third World peasant bigotry, probably on accident.

For a while, there was a particular backlash against European Materialism. Nobody labeled it using those exact terms, but the term "Western" got thrown around a lot, and sometimes the terms "rationalism" or "science". There was a small amount of it within Africa. There was a bizarrely large amount of it in the United States, which only appears to have continued and grown with time. The reasons this happened trace back to capitalism itself. Capitalism needed especially tidy and self-contained forms of philosophy that sawed everything in two. Materialism had to suit the particular activity of running an isolated business and producing a usable product unrelated to and yet perfectly complementary to everything else. Ethics had to be designed around the concept of choices being made within the perspective of an isolated individual with no further information. Philosophies analyzing the concept of a human biography had to assume that based on the contents of one particular biography itself an individual life had its own particular self-contained significance. And so, European Materialism took the world and divided it into little tiny fences and boxed it in. An object knocked into motion by some other object was an individual "object in motion" with kinetic energy and inertia, and the world had to be told that "an object in motion stays in motion". A planet orbiting another planet was "an object experiencing a gravity force". Physicists were excited by the discovery that light could be divided into photons, but they were surprised to find that after they divided light up into neat packets, the packets didn't behave much like ordinary tennis balls or pool balls. _Light is one of the smallest things that's measurable, the same size as the smallest solid thing we could shoot out of a particle accelerator to measure it, but we can't measure its future position without affecting where it will go! This is unprecedented! Our measuring devices create the future when we observe it! If we don't know where photons or electrons are going to go they must be in several places at once! Quantum physics is remarkable, it's like all the future states of something are wrapped up in a box and you can't really see it!_ Nobody understood quantum mechanics, and the first people to slowly begin mystifying it were the physicists themselves. For a brief blip between about 1900 and 1933 dialectical materialism spread around and people considered it, before everyone panicked about Communism destroying Ukraine and everyone more or less tossed dialectics away under accusations of it being "imprecise" or being "religion". Although small margins of discontent were forming around it, European Materialism was restored, and before long the next great thing became bashing Marxism and many other things thought to be bad at predicting reality for their "prejudices" and "assumptions".

The period from 1960 to 1980 in the United States was a unique time for prejudices. In the 1960s the U.S. civil rights movement was beginning and leading everyone away from prejudices. In the 1970s the Vietnam War happened and kicked some prejudices up again, before some people started protesting the war on relatively Idealist grounds, and Deleuze and Guattari would release one of the major works a great number of blue anarchists have been drawing from ever since (_Capitalism and Schizophrenia_). By 1980 a particular pieced-together, chimeric model of world history was steadily being set down: _prejudices and assumptions are bad, and imperialism is bad, but Marxism is definitely wrong, and you can believe absolutely anything else no matter how stupid it is as long as it doesn't contain prejudices._

I would like to argue that that particular juxtaposition of requirements is impossible.

I don't feel like I have enough spare space to go into the entire history of postmodern philosophy, or the knowledge to explain every part of it. But there is exactly one concept within it that I think I can cover — the relationship between prejudices and narratives.

In _Difference and Repetition_, Deleuze tries to set out a new framework for all knowledge. (He admits himself that it is a form of metaphysics, but also makes a claim that metaphysics is what science really needs to ground it.) One of his new beginning assumptions for all science is that differences or separations are a key feature of reality and simply accepting this is the only way for material objects to understand other objects, or particularly other thinking Subjects. Deleuze's actual writing can get rather arcane, but the motivation for this particular concept is very clear. By 1968, the time of this work, it was becoming popular to believe that the very first task of every conceivable movement that could happen in the United States and call itself progressive was to get rid of prejudices — if people could only get rid of prejudices, every other movement would become easier because it wouldn't be rejecting people from membership or allyship due to prejudices. The term _intersectionality_ would only appear in 1989 but the concept was already brewing in the background. People were forming into highly specific movements including racial movements and the LGBT movement and disabled movements. So if they could only stack together those movements for entirely separate things that would often exclude each other from each other, then maybe everybody would be set. Deleuze's work in general would speculate on ways that identity movements formed within the Liberal-republican framework of itemizing highly specific ballot issues and bringing up a representative of the issue's "community" to lead that issue in particular could transmute itself into a pure conglomeration of Communities that would dissolve the boundaries of identity and transform individuals themselves into inherently being a borderless and shapeless drop of an uncontrollable and uncountable totality known as _rhizome_. Here, in _Difference and Repetition_, Deleuze took the real-world observation that a lot of people have prejudices and turned it around into an assumption that the best way to get everyone out of prejudices was to start by assuming that people should get rid of prejudices.

There was at least one obvious problem with this: if people have prejudices that cloud their entire perception of the world, then they might not have any idea they have prejudices because the prejudices make it impossible to see the prejudices. This kind of person would see any book about prejudices, differences, and separations and probably not absorb it because they would immediately assume that the book was only for people worse than them. Or, in the case of a book as involved as Deleuze's writings, they might conceivably assume that it was only for people who were interested in it; "those other people" can read it, but it must only be for people who already aren't prejudiced. If you have ever spent any significant amount of time around racists, you would know that one of the most consistent characteristics of all racists is that they all claim they aren't racist enough to be the _real_ racists, while ironically, only the people who have largely stopped being racist will actually label themselves racist. This was a huge problem with every one of the United States Lefts from about 1960 to 1990. Each version of "The Left" would only be able to gain control of people who already want to be better, and then would proceed to verbally beat up every possible "Good Guy" because the Bad Guys would always be completely calm and unrepentant and would never actually opt to be under their control unless they were willing to cross the point where they had no meaningful social connections to other Bad Guys and were useless for turning any Bad Guys into Good Guys. Somewhere between 1960 and 1990 Liberal-republicanism was already breaking down and the entire assumption of Republicans and Democrats not being two anthropologically separate cultures was already gone. But that state of things wasn't really developing in a way friendly to blue anarchism as envisioned by Deleuze. The slow erosion of the Liberal-republican state wasn't really producing a totally uncountable continuum of individuals as much as it was producing a rather neat division of the United States into two corporation-based states bound together by the total and entire content of local culture including local religion and prejudices.

So, the United States had a considerable problem with whole towns of people being bound together by traditions and models of the world that it would be no real exaggeration to call hateful or bigoted. Various philosophers attacked these models in different ways. North American Maoists awkwardly tried to pin the emergence of prejudices onto global supply chains and construct the concept of a "labor aristocracy", putting moral blame on workers for decisions their bosses made. Gramscians or "Fisherists" who had read Mark Fisher's work _Capitalist Realism_ tried to claim that mass media was programming everyone's brains, leaving the strange implication that they would otherwise be blank slates perfectly open to correct knowledge. More hardcore Gramscians focused on occupying actual slots in industry across the country in order to have the power to create correct media. But, Maoism and Western-Marxism were never the most popular philosophies in the United States. One philosophy which was closer to being part of the "popular" cluster of winning philosophies was poststructuralism. This philosophy came from the overall tradition of assuming that all human knowledge can be encoded in language, and analyzed by analyzing language. Before postructuralism was structuralist linguistics, which was a very successful framework for describing how human beings observe the physical relationships between things and create virtual, projected relationships between words to mirror them. So how did poststructuralists attempt to improve it? More or less, they advanced a number of hypotheses based on the notion that the relationships between concepts described inside language _really are_ arbitrary. Even if language is doing an ontological exercise of diagramming the material behavior of objects and processes in the real world, human beings can shape the real world, so surely if people have the ability to redefine language that must give them some sort of amazing wizard powers to spontaneously redefine half of everything about the real world too.

I have never liked the concept of poststructuralism whatsoever. I have always felt like it was one of the most useless and perhaps one of the most dangerous philosophies, not in the sense of courage and strictly in a destructive sense. I have very specific reasons for that, which will more or less come out across the rest of this letter. For now all I want to say on that is this. If you're an anarchist... I want you to imagine right now you were part of early Trotskyism. _Actually._ Not an anarchist. You have already committed yourself to building a nation-wide underground Communist movement _because you want to be free from the Soviet Union_. There's no turning back. You have to defeat Stalin. The state security forces are everywhere, and you _will_ die if you make any major errors. How does poststructuralism _actually help you understand your oppressors on the field_ and _actually help you win_? I'll even give you two chances. Your other option is to take a pacifist route and use poststructuralism to demonstrate that Stalinists and Trotskyists can coexist despite the best observed outcome being that Stalin's party consistently boots all the Trotskyists out of the party. (This one might be easier given that I've actually specified a seemingly-arbitrary construct that could be broken down: Stalinists versus Trotskyists.) You are still a Communist, and Stalin's allies are still Communists, so you must demonstrate that even though both factions have concrete goals which may include building socialist transition or getting rid of the increasing swarm of bureaucrats, that you can get closer to accomplishing these tangible policy goals that were not historically achieved by simply smashing the definitions of words. Option three: demonstrate that the Cold War was an arbitrary construct in people's heads and Ronald Reagan himself will completely stop attacking the Soviet Union if you could only really actually persuade him of this.

My challenges to poststructuralism are exceedingly tall. But in reality, I mainly pose them because if anyone could meet them, I would actually be impressed. I would rather be impressed by what someone can do with a philosophy than underwhelmed. But as far as I'm currently aware, I have never seen anyone use poststructuralist philosophy on problems anything like those. I have seen it used to pick apart gender, and... apart from that case I do not think it has ever succeeded at anything.

Which brings me to my next topic. Poststructuralists argued against imposing gender onto transgender people through the same general lines of argument used in _The Matrix_: before you become conscious of what your model of the world even is, you do not know how to change it, but if you are aware that mental models of the world are constructed in real time (in the film, represented by a superstructural fantasy world) you can write a new model of reality that is more appropriate to the needs of your actual body, and you are not bound to remain trapped inside the models that everyone tells you to have. _The Matrix_ is a surprisingly Materialist work in the end, which from one angle actually demonstrates that poststructuralism could do something useful by showing that particular abstract Ideals are ineffective _because_ they are abstract Ideals and deconstructing the entire concept of Idealism.

So now I'm going to talk about _The Truman Show_.

I recently saw an atheist video channel make the argument that Christianity was "basically like the Truman Show". Truman lives within a constructed TV studio filming set, if a somewhat large one, and the day he finds out, everybody tells him it's not worth leaving because there could never be anything more interesting on the outside. The argument then went that everything about Christian culture and the act of being part of a group of Christians is an arbitrary construction _in that_ real observations and motivated justifications are all carefully arranged together to create a complete worldview in which all the pieces are arranged to prevent questioning any of it. Now, I am not really a fan of Christianity, or any form of theism, or magic ritual, so I would not stop anyone from tearing apart religion. But I do have problems with this line of argument in particular. This argument is unusually unaware of the concept of culture and countable cultures in the anthropological sense. Truman may exist on a constructed set, and the rules of a TV program are culture, but the set and his connections to all the actors exist as a connected unit; the hypothetical setup in the movie of the TV program reads as a representation of an actual demographic group of people that are bound together by historical circumstance. And if we think about the concept of pointing at any particular tribe or nationality of people and simply telling them their entire culture is made up and not real... I don't think I really need to complete that sentence. Let's just say that Deleuze would not be happy with that. If this approach were aimed at a nationality, or cis people putting all transgender people into The Matrix, this would be almost exactly the kind of thing Deleuze was aiming to stop — a group of people assuming that it lives in a normal and unspecific environment while only other people have ideology and live within a culture.

I make the effort to call out this argument against "religious cults" because I _know_ the same argument has been used against Communists. _Communists have an ideology, but *we* don't have an ideology! They have a leader, but because we keep oscillating between two parties we hate that don't actually accomplish anything *we* don't have a leader! Communists can be born into Stalinism and not get to choose what to think or believe but we get complete choice in what we believe as long as it's never Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Juche-socialism, BlackPantherism, Ho Chi Minh Thought, Deng Xiaoping Thought, Bordigism, ecoterrorism, Islam, actually Adolf Hitler, unofficially distributing movies, or Richard Dawkins! East Germany told people not to leave! The central party constructs your reality! Marxist states have total control over filling every city with the KGB! But we have complete freedom in a reality where whatever piece of civil rights legislation we pass the group of culturally-defined Tories who belong to Toryism anthropologically can spontaneously repeal any and every piece of progressive legislation we pass and we aren't allowed to do anything to get away from them. We just have to remain in that abusive relationship forever because... uh... if we dissolve the United States and there aren't any laws they'll beat us up. So, as you can see, we're totally free to do whatever we want when the Tories physically present in streets and buildings around us all over the country don't catch us doing it because my favorite poststructuralist philosopher wrote a paper about how words don't actually mean anything and we never have to accept the Tories' narratives. Including fists and guns, which are also arbitrary narratives as long as I've found a way to not get shot. Monkey D. Luffy, anarchist hero! He is a hero because he bends reality and Communism bounces off him._

Center-Liberals and Tories really go around believing every day that the act of living in the United States and _in the United States specifically_ is the default condition of human existence while anyone that lives in a nation-state anywhere else is in an altered condition of existence that is potentially inferior. They see another government which is not physically attached to theirs, and if it's bad, they want to destroy it and scatter anyone who liked it. It is as if they want to carry out a French Revolution from solidly outside France, because the first bourgeois revolution ever conceived was simply an act of imperialism and every time one national bourgeoisie helps another one oppress its people it can't help but eternally repay the favor everywhere else.

The general concept of "rejecting narratives" has gotten really popular lately. Anarchists across the United States love saying that the economy is "made up" or racism was "constructed" out of nowhere for everyone by no particular group of people, or disability is "constructed" through a lack of everyone automatically knowing how to build everything for various disabilities before they ever get there, or "colonialism" is a constructed Idea and somehow teaching people what the idea is will get rid of all imperialism. The list goes on and on; for every identity movement in the United States (of which there are a lot) there is probably a theory that it is an arbitrary construct imposed onto people. But, again, nobody ever says that anticommunism is an arbitrary social construct that could simply be gotten rid of forever by everyone learning more about Communism. For some reason, that one is just "the truth".

The impression I got at the end of the "Truman Show" argument was that it fundamentally saw a binary between "narratives" and "freedom". People who live in altered conditions of existence — such as other countries, or Christianity, or the world _outside_ Christianity where people are getting scary transition surgeries that have to be outlawed, or who support a Communist party — are trapped in a fake narrative made up to control them, but anyone who just stops believing in all narratives of the way anything "has to be" and joins the same continuous uncountable blob of society with no particular culture and no particular future is in Freedom.

I have laid out in previous sections what I think is the actual shape of ideology. There is not simply one correct model of reality and a distortion of it called "ideology". The reality of societies is characterized by many separate society-objects (factions or republics; sociophilosophies) that all must become conscious of their own unique layouts and of each other. In the real world every faction or movement is taken by others to be "ideological distortion" whether it is materially correct or incorrect. So, a lot of the time the category of "ideology" or "bourgeois culture", etc., is not actually helpful, while categories like "center-Liberalism", "Toryism", "Kropotkinism", "David Graeber's anarchism", "Stalinism", and "Trotskyism" actually might be. For a lot of people it is much easier to take a philosophy and describe it without judgement and say "this party is crimson" than to accurately set down a conclusion like "this philosophy is incorrect". So, it will be a lot easier to teach people to understand things without prejudices if they truly learn to label every group of people descriptively and try to give an accurate "in-character" prediction of its behavior than if you simply try to crudely teach everyone an abstract set of "Good things" like Tolerance, Intersectionality, and Freedom. Describing the behavior of a group of people accurately is not the same thing as stereotypes. If that were actually the case, there would be no such thing as race coding in media which is not offensive, but the United States is full of all kinds of coded examples of Media Representation that people still consider Media Representation, so there clearly is. If you can figure out how an abstract character on a cartoon that is not drawn like a realistic human and is not stated to come from earth represents a real-world ethnic group, then you can figure out what it means to get rid of prejudices by creating a descriptive model of a group of people. It's very simple. One kind of descriptive model of a group of people is a story.

The general defining axiom of postmodernism in philosophy, or the postmodern period, is that the world has become free of narratives about the significance of history, and that there are no "grand" narratives about the entire existence of a population that where they do not already apply can be extended across multiple groups of people. Postmodern philosophy pretends to be about the concept that neither any particular religion nor European Materialism can successfully explain all poulations (sometimes the notions of "no particular Liberal-republican party" or "no particular philosophical faction" are thrown in), but the actual premise it usually starts from is simply that Liberal-republicanism doesn't "really" work due to Tory bigotry and yet Marxism and Dengism also aren't functional. When postmodernism isn't a thinly veiled act of gloating that the "first" Cold War is over — and we need to keep in mind that that distinction is almost necessary when after the first one Liberal-republicanism will naturally seek to gut all independent countable cultures at the bonds that make them and conquer everybody anyway — it's basically just philosophers totally giving up and labeling themselves useless. I read a real book where in an attempt to describe philosophies as they exist within Liberal-republicanism Molly Ann Rothenberg essentially said that a philosophy describing all other current philosophies is impossible. I had to stop and do a double take at what I'd just read, because if that sentence was actually true then her book really should not have existed and I should not have been holding it in my hands. If postmodernism was true, how could she even know what Communism was well enough to criticize it? Wouldn't it be the case that the predominant philosophy in every country would make it impossible to understand other philosophies, so that if you extended Liberal-republicanism over onto Communism you'd get everything wrong and the Communists would push back? Honestly, when you put it that way, it almost starts to make sense! But it really does look more like a description of how much philosophers don't know and aren't good at describing than an actual law of the world where the world itself resists any unified description. Really, if postmodernism was actually modeling the state of things that neither Liberal-republicanism nor Stalinism has been able to properly understand each other without error, then it would be incomplete by its own definition and _the opposite of all philosophies not being able to describe all philosophies exactly as they are_ would have to be the thing that was true.

Postmodern or anti-narrative philosophies have been quietly spreading everywhere, telling everyone that science has hurt people and religion is all arbitrarily made up but Communities and identities are somehow okay even though all of those identities should logically be narratives that people have to be fed in order to understand them without prejudice but rejecting narratives is Good and prejudice is Bad and every mistake anybody ever made in depicting an ethnic group or demographic was basically a deliberate choice and education is mandatory but governments are bad and lived experience is inherently Correct and people can reject whatever they're told whenever they want to but you can't reject the rules for getting things represented on Liberal-republican ballots and you can't reject people's prejudices if they're prejudices people have prejudices about and you can't reject any group of people laughing at you or calling you names but there's a special exception if you either still support the Confederacy or made a trans woman cry. The Soviet bureaucracy itself could not have invented a more complicated and more difficult-to-follow system of rules than blue anarchism. The only good way to summarize any of the philosophy people typically believe now is: _things naturally go together unless we've observed them killing each other, because They Just Do_.

I have had to sit through this slow deterioration of philosophy for the last 32 years, where all philosophy and all knowledge has gradually been transformed into a simple exercise of "I'm a compatible friend for you so I like what you have to say" versus "I don't personally like the feeling of believing that, so get far away from me until you become very good at something or I never want to see you". Everyone has memorized the statement that theater and literature are important in education because They Just Are, next to "The mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell", but nobody can give a coherent account of _why_ people read literature or the _importance_ of the educational power of narratives.

Well, unfortunately for anarchists, I am well-versed in all manifestations of the concept of storytelling after being fed it all my life as everyone's primary method of socializing and understanding the world and educating people, so I'm going to give every center-Liberal academic and blue anarchist a lesson on exactly what a narrative is. A narrative is a collection of objects and processes that participate in opposition, development, and resolution. Every story you could possibly think of has objects in it, and the objects interact with each other only under particular rules. Harry Potter cannot revive dead people. Pokémon can only have two out of eighteen types. Digimon die and cannot live forever despite being made of intangible data. A story proceeds according to its rules and cannot break its fundamental rules. The legendary Pokémon Giratina can create a reverse world with antigravity, but that's because it has the narrative role of a local god that embodies the universe's rules. A Pokémon cannot actually break the rules of _Pokémon_ through truly unexpected events such as a Legendary Pokémon showing up and suddenly being Aura type rather than one of the 18 established types. Terapagos can momentarily be Stellar type, but that is because Stellar type was actually written into the rules of _Pokémon_ and introduced to the player all throughout the game that contains it. Terapagos is a "real" Pokémon, while an old _Pokémon_ game malfunctioning and generating Missingno is not creating "real" Pokémon, and a nonsense Pokémon with a picture made out of static being Bird type is _not_ following the series rules. The set of rules that defines how objects inside a fictional narrative interact — which is one definition of a particular media series' _canon_ — fundamentally drives what events will and will not happen in the narrative. The reason that stories are taught as having a "five-act structure" or "a conflict" is not that stories are required to contain battles or romantic break-ups or plagues or any particular negative event you can think of, but that every story event is generated through an opposition or juxtaposition of objects, according to established rules. The reasons your ship isn't canon come out of the exact same pool of reasons that take any possible event in a story and write it _into_ canon.

Now, let me ask you, if an electron smashing into a cloud of virtual particles and coming out the other end as a new electron were a _story_, would there or would there not be a story that is happening absolutely everywhere in every country on earth on every day of every year? This may not be a very interesting story to anyone but quantum physicists, but it definitely contains a conflict or opposition, and a beginning, middle, and end. This story is everywhere, it is a true story, and it is inescapable.

That is all a narrative is. A narrative is a story in which two objects start out in one condition, collide, and create or transition into another condition. Narratives are material models of real or fictional realities. They are not arrangements of words and word definitions. If narratives really were nothing more than arbitrary arrangements of word definitions, then a large language model with enough data plus the ability to roll virtual dice to pick abstract Ideals out of a table could be better at creating new narratives than a human writer. You cannot teach anyone not to hate Black people without feeding them a collection of oppositions and changes which is essentially a narrative. If somebody meets a Black person in person and they become friends, that set of events is a narrative too. If people are always free to reject and deconstruct narratives, they can reject any and all model scenarios that tell them not to hate Black people. Or gay people, or trans people, or women, or Muslims, or Mexicans, or Canadians. Every form of prejudice is in fact the rejection of a narrative. So, in effect, to tell people that "deconstructing narratives" is a good idea is basically to allow the population to generate and spread prejudice as fast as possible.

So, is the world free of overarching narratives? Not if you're aware of electrons, not if you're aware of chemical equations, and not if you believe that all instances of racism and getting rid of it are similar to each other.

Postmodernism, in the most generous account, was true for three years. The countries that collided in World War I were a grand narrative, _themselves_, as they participated in the war. The global empires that collided in World War II were a grand narrative. World War II stopped in 1945. Israel was created in 1948. There were no grand narratives active for about three years between 1945 and 1948, and then every single year since then, Israel and all the countries in the world have been menacing Palestine. If one billion lions all fought against one Pokémon, and you wrote it down as a series of events, would that or would that not be a narrative? If practically every country is doing something, and everyone is attacking the same tiny enemy, _you simply cannot say there are no grand narratives active_.

In July I read through the book of Revelation. I wasn't actually doing it because I thought it was profound or any kind of key to real history. I was doing it to solve the story of _Deltarune_, which vaguely admits in its own text that it is a loose adaptation of the Book of Revelation. And what did I find? I found some of the most succinct evidence you'll ever need that the bible is a manual on how to carry out world wars. Taken as one big chunk with the Old Testament and Revelation on each end, the bible forms one big argument that world wars are inherently virtuous and any other form of civilization is not, and that only the act of following the manual on world wars can possibly lead to world peace. Let's retrace what Revelation says.

Revelation 3:5 — _the one who is victorious will be dressed in white_. The victory of the people united around God as an army in a worldwide battle is inherently connected with the rewards of heaven or peace that they will all receive after.

Revelation 1:16 — _coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword_. This is a rather abstract image, but one obvious reading is that global empire has one side of love and friendship and one side of violence and death. The angelic being that appears is one of the seven direct messengers of God and God's aspects, which taken as a whole represent global empire. Jesus was already associated with "a sword" in Matthew 10:34 — _I did not come to bring peace, but a sword_. This statement appears to contradict other popular messages in the bible about love and kindness, but it much more clearly takes its place within the book of Revelation where the messengers of God juxtapose the concept of peace for everyone who is saved with the concept of death, disaster, and suffering for everyone who is not saved.

Revelation 3:8 — _what he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open_. This happens in the middle of God's messengers calling out various regional churches for failing to obey particular moral standards and join up with the army of God. The metaphor of doors being open is portraying the concept of everyone being able to "come into" a particular church or army, and the metaphor of doors being shut represents people stopping the spread of an empire and refusing to join it. God is attempting to keep the membership of Christianity wide open so that everyone has to join it, but regional churches are sinning and resisting being assimilated, so God's messenger calls them out for "shutting doors".

Revelation 3:14~3:17 — _You are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were one or the other! ... You say, "I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing". But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked._ This one made me laugh because it could have been said by either God or Lenin. There is a particular group of rich aristocrats or bourgeoisie who will always try to be neutral to everything and act like participating in historical events is for unenlightened people. Lenin would say that everyone has to either turn over and aid the proletariat and the process of socialist transition or end up in the hopefully small portion of people who actively fight the proletarian army. But what God's messengers are saying in this story is that everyone on earth should join God's empire just because if everyone believes in its success long enough and basically enough people _believe_ in friendship and teamwork, then a giant violent global army is certain to succeed.

Revelation 5:9~12 — _with your blood you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation ... worthy is the Lamb who was slain_. This passage is saying that it is inherently good to submit to global empire and die for it even if you do not get any benefit from it yourself, because while simply standing up for yourself will never be appreciated by everybody, a sacrifice proves that global empire is "protecting the innocent". Individuals taking actions considered ethical (for instance, being a pacifist and refusing violence) is inherently good no matter what horrors those actions ultimately lead to because as long as everybody is forced to participate in the overall project of Being Good it will snowball into the group of people that is bound together having a greater and greater advantage over everyone else and will inevitably wrap around to the army that protects the worldwide body of Nice people winning.

Revelation 1:11~17 — _The second beast ... forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark_. Realistically, this was probably referring to situations similar to the Stamp Act where the British Empire made people in the North American colonies buy stamps to be able to sell things. The text does say "on your forehead", but if the image is that level of absurd versus any historical period's image of daily life, it is probably meant to be examined on a large scale rather than a small one, as representing a concept such as a large empire simply passing a law onto everyone inside it announced by some appointed official ("the beast allowed a second beast to give breath to [the empire's] image"), after which everyone _feels_ like they have been marked with a slave tattoo to ensure they don't break out of slavery. The image of slaves that could be bought and sold was well known to the authors of various bible texts as a fate that was almost unthinkable for them to be in themselves, so it isn't much of a stretch to expect the bible writers would throw slavery around as a metaphor much like people have done in many contexts today up to and including because they don't want to pay taxes. Today this verse is thrown around basically any time a country tries to regulate its economy, including Bolshevism in the Soviet Union but also including Menshevism. The terrible thing is that may not even be an incorrect interpretation of the verse. The verse says that any empire that is not part of God's empire and God's army but passes a law to start controlling its economy as its own sovereign body of things separate from God is part of the worldwide empire of The Opposer, or as we colloquially say now, the devil. So it may as well have said that Stalinism and Trotskyism are both unholy, or that countries having sovereign governments of any kind that have not been conquered by God's army is unholy, because that is what it practically means.

Revelation 16:3, Revelation 22:18 — _The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it turned into blood like that of a dead person, and every living thing in the sea died_ / _I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll_. This statement is clear. All disasters that happen to the enemies of God's army are Justice and are approved by God, because every time the Opposer's armies and the churches that disobey God are defeated, and every time God's churches and subordinate nations out-endure them, it's an inherently good thing. If people starve in 1930s Ukraine, the expected response isn't to be horrified that _people are starving in Ukraine_, but to rejoice about it as long as the government of Ukraine is defying the political faction of people thought to be approved by God.

You can claim all you like that it's "impossible to predict history" or that "there are no overarching narratives", but literally every single second you do either of those things you are advancing Zionism and the destruction of Palestine. Every collection of real or fictional interacting objects is a narrative. So every single person on earth that is currently supporting Israel or has been supporting Israel since 1948 has been participating in the same grand narrative — a global war which is abstractly described in the book of Revelation and across the bible, through stacking together various generalized patterns within the history of tribes or kingdoms conquering each other into the result all of those patterns appear to inevitably lead to circa the middle of the 20th century. The grand narrative does not happen simply because people have read or absorbed the book, any more than people reading _Harry Potter_ books leads to people realizing _Harry Potter_. The grand narrative happens simply because the objects and events described in the book are already happening in the real world, and the book has managed to put together a summary of the shape of the physical grand narrative on the ground that is accurate enough that when people read the book they will see the description of Christianity creating a world government when everyone believes in it hard enough as obvious to the point of being tautological.

Observing this characteristic of the book of Revelation should be lethal to any misconceptions that narratives are somehow cosmically pre-existing Ideas rather than models of material things. You may _think_ you can break "narratives" by forming a Community and thinking positive thoughts. But if so, then why is it that the United States successfully crushed the Soviet Union? The bible said that the Soviet Union would be destroyed if the United States held firm in love and friendship and mercilessly punished it for defying the United States. The Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea were punished with sanctions and bigotry specifically for defying the United States. (Korea and Vietnam were also punished with violent invasions.) And unfortunately for everyone, the strategy laid out in the bible worked. The United States successfully crushed the Soviet Union twice over, and it has recently gotten halfway through crushing Cuba. The holy instruction manual for global bullying was a smashing success, and every time the United States has behaved with jealousy, pettiness, vindictiveness, injustice, bloodlust, bigotry, megalomania, and capricious malevolence, it has been handsomely rewarded with more control.

So, why the "dip"? Why does it seem to everyone far beyond Tories and Duginists in Russia like everything about society was better when it was either small tribes, or kingdoms and empires, or scatterings of peasants? Because the great innovation of capitalism was precisely breaking open and destroying everything resembling a community and replacing the entire concept of communities with open gaps where people constantly form connections for the first time. Suddenly, "running into strangers" became "socializing", travel and marketing became "multiculturalism" or "tolerance", and refusing to let everyone into your town or go to a bunch of other cities became "bigotry". But despite this new openness seeming like it had the power to break down barriers and unite the world, what it ultimately led to was the slow realization that space in towns and national territories was still finite, so as people kept rapidly moving and mixing some locations or social circles would become exclusively filled with rich or talented people and become locations of high status, crowding everyone else out — or alternatively, become filled with all the most low-status people in the entire world. When the world was flooded with agoras, they quickly burst open communities, sometimes deliberately and maliciously. Any coherent group of people with stable social bonds would eventually get termed "primitive", from tribes that caught the eye of Tories to religious groups analyzed with the crude label of "cult" to Third World countries forming close bonds to defend themselves like North Korea. Everyone ate up that ideology no matter what precise swatch color they were. "Surely you need to stop spending time in a closed community and get out," ordinary people will always say now whenever any coherent group of people starts doing anything weird. Then they all act surprised when outside people flood into fandoms and disregard all their previous traditions and practices, or Tories look at an association of gay and transgender people and decide it's a locus of hysteria spreading mental illness that they have to break up. These days, the moment there is anything remotely resembling a community, capitalist allies will break it apart in the name of freedom. And, worse than that, capitalists will then feed you the fiction that a bunch of isolated producers exchanging goods really is a community, and the _actual, real_ definition of a community. Regular people are not permitted to have communities, but high-profile actors and online artisans and business owners in a lobbying group and Liberal-republican parties and academics creating agorist theories and that one congressman hanging off a minority identity group can.

Agorism conquered the world before capitalism did, and after capitalism began to crumble. It championed destruction as progress, infinite possibility as truth, and uncertainty as knowledge, at once bashing ignorance and claiming ignorance is all we can ever know. On one level postmodernism and agorism are the same continuous thing, each one proclaiming that worldwide small capitalism is eternally better than communities or knowledge. Thus the philosophy based specifically around social links and socialization has ironically brought great destruction to the entire concepts of sociality, community, and society. What has become clear is that to invert agorism the entire notion of change, possibility, and uncertainty has to give way to detailed material models of how particular periods and events transition into other periods and events, without appeals to the "mysterious ways" of the universe deciding what happens, and without judgement. Humanity must take control of the overall problem of history, and must not leave anything open enough that even two different versions of Marxism can smash into each other and one can unpredictably come out on top of the other. Predictive knowledge is control; there is no need to steer and dominate what you can predict. But Marxists must become able to describe the behavior of all organizations and movements without "making it about themselves". The day that Trotskyists emerge from the time in which no philosophy could extend itself across others to produce a grand unifying narrative actually is the day that the world will emerge from the postmodern period. The day that Trotskyists produce an overview of the entirety of world history that is better than the bible, the bible god will finally fade into the ranks of other ancient superstitions and the world will move toward forming a global republic and also the irrelevance and dormancy of the global state.

I have been meditating on _Undertale_. I have been idly thinking since 2015 about what exactly this game and its companion game are trying to say. _Undertale_ is a game about getting through a console RPG adventure narrative and coming out the other side without killing monsters. But what does that mean? Does it mean that it's better to love your enemies than to be angry? Does it mean the author hasn't read enough fantasy novels and history books to understand what history is? Does it mean the author is accidentally trying to write a Cold War narrative where the Second World is stuck behind the Iron Curtain and wants to come out but the First World won't let it out and it has to come to a hesitant acceptance of its status as the lesser half of the world whose only solace is to take pride in being monstrous? Does it mean the author was trying to construct a fantastical counterpart of the Christian bible where the Old Testament section where tribes were killing each other turns into the New Testament section where people aren't supposed to kill each other, and I misread the bible itself as a profound Cold War narrative because I didn't fully realize that the bible was a manual about how to carry out global imperialism, and like all Armageddon or Ragnarök narratives the book of Revelation was just another mythical story about global empire? _Undertale_ is based on _Deltarune_, and _Deltarune_ is based on the bible. But _Deltarune_ is all about how the state of corporate art products constantly competing with each other and displacing each other is making everyone tired and how when people are stuck in small-town capitalism in general the totality of that existence is so tiring they look for ways to step out of material reality, and how in a sense there is no way for them to succeed at that without also just coming to understand material reality better and "waking up" from their previous misunderstandings rather than going through the motions of going through it all unconsciously. Is _Deltarune_ actually a pro-Trotskyist narrative or did I just look at a story about characters that exist in a world governed by an apocalyptic prophecy who are doubting the prophecy actually means anything, and then start reading the bible and realize that what the _Deltarune_ characters were saying was stupid because the point of narratives is to predict or generate consequences and the point of the bible narrative the game is based on is to correctly predict success at global empire and the only way to prevent global empire is for everyone to step out of their current limited understandings of the world's progress toward global empire and produce a new much better narrative of global history?

Yeah, I probably did. But it will still be my favorite interpretation of _Deltarune_, because looking back on the process, and in a world where international news is as depressing as it currently is, me catastrophically succeeding at interpreting _Deltarune_ and "solving" global capitalism before I'd managed to fully lay out the plot of the game may be one of the funniest things I've seen all year.

After _contradiction_ and _proletariat_, I think the next great case of Marxism "ruining" a dictionary word with a new meaning might just turn out to be _narrative_. Nobody has been abandoning that word, and its intensity of use only seems to be slowly climbing each decade. I think it's only a matter of time between now and the day Marxists come up with a rock-solid theory of how to break away from the bible narrative process and succeed at creating a new pattern of world history that Marxists start completely abusing the word _narrative_ into their own orange-tinted meaning. Like _contradictions_ came to refer to the physical oppositions that caused ahistorical bodies of logical statements to change and contradict, _narratives_ may start referring to physical processes of assembling courses of history, so that they are now the object historical materialism studies.

Many years before I ever learned any Marxism one of the things that got me away from Liberal-republican thinking about history was just playing or watching way too many simulation games about the Three Kingdoms period and noble characters conquering fiefs. Before long, I started reading about the history of other countries and saw that multiple other countries had had "three kingdoms periods" and was intrigued. I was only about 13-16 years old and I was already finding it impossible to ignore that the same patterns of _warring states period, empire, warring states period, empire_ seemed to pop up in different countries' history again and again. I didn't know what to do with that information. I had absolutely no idea what Communism even was or where it came from. But, once again, while I was still a teenager I found this Wikipedia page talking superficially about how between feudal China and China's republican period Mao had appeared and the Kuomintang had appeared and I filed it away into my mind as an important event in the history of Southeast Asia but I had no idea what was going on. I was like, _What is all this? Where did Mao come from??_ I have to say, I found it very satisfying when primary sources about the Chinese revolution and the Russian revolution eventually filled in the gaps to that story. I used to think the concept of China having a lot of different dynasties was vaguely impressive, but now that I know those were basically failures to ever invent republicanism I find it vaguely tragic taken in context.

So, when I used "Mao and the Kuomintang" as my example for the difference between anarchists' view of reality and historical materialism, I had specific reasons. If you look at all of reality as simply an arbitrary narrative to be subverted, there is really no good explanation for why the history of China would go through so many seemingly pointless cycles of re-division and then suddenly produce Deng Xiaoping Thought and Taiwan. It's one of many cases in world history where if a particular human being had artificially created the story you might ask why the network drew the first series out so many seasons instead of cutting it off, or why the writer wasn't fired. Even if the intentions for making the artificial creation were Evil, you'd still think there would be a greater amount of organization and efficiency. But when you look at things more through the lens of "game mechanics" (physical models), and the concept of a very difficult challenge that simply hadn't been won, then everything starts to make a lot more sense.

At times, when Christians have tried to claim that animal evolution was intelligently designed, biology fans have retorted back by pointing out how many things within animal biology seem to be terribly designed or not make any sense. I think to an extent that same concept applies to narratives. Anarchists and Liberal-republicans will typically try to say that civilizations are intelligently designed by emperors or upper classes "misusing" their power rather than being set down by God. But the effect is eerily similar. If civilization is all just put together to abuse people, then wouldn't it be more effective at its task if it made coherent sense, as with the created world in The Truman Show? But time and time again, it doesn't make any sense. China's historical timeline is a mess. There is no simple logical reason for North Korea to exist when the Korean War also happened but then never completed itself. The parties that are supposed to be working together to rule people in the United States have times of treating each other as necessary equals and times of actually having violent vendettas with guns involved at both local and national levels, leaving Stalinist parties in the United States genuinely confused. I don't think an anarchist could even explain why Trotskyism exists. If Communism is just one big conspiracy to trap people in a police state or in Dengism, then why did the Soviet Union have two Communist parties and why were they fighting each other, if Communism always leads to the same thing? Wouldn't the two of them know that they were working toward the same goal and just stop? Poststructuralism, postmodern philosophy, and even Bellegarrigist styles of charcoal anarchism cannot actually explain where material contradictions originally come from or why it is that people originally create "government". Without a predictive material account of these things that generically explains _how_ they come to exist and when you can expect them to exist, it's impossible to come up with realistic strategies to intervene and stop them. You will also not be able to come up with a plausible "after picture" for what kind of subsequent forms of society will be created after you intervene in what will realistically be formed in the present.

But, I have one other thing to say that anarchists will like considerably more. The exercise of narrative storytelling can be used for education and problem-solving. That much is almost true in the way they already believe it is. But if you are going to use fiction in this way, you must think about Communism and anarchism _exactly_ the same way you think about racism or transphobia. A story which attempts to represent an ethnic group to people but is not realistic is simply offensive. _My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic_ can have an episode which is supposed to be about groups of people of different national origins meeting each other and learning not to be prejudiced, but if the episode brings in Zecora as a thrown-together caricature of the continent of Africa, it will seem to be promoting lazy research on the actual history and conditions of Africa and in its own way still condoning racism. The mere act of creating art has a certain amount of power to be offensive in oppressive and non-constructive ways that will alienate people from each other and from the art. But what might just blow your mind is realizing that almost every single way a work can be non-constructively offensive simply involves people getting upset because the work is not accurate to reality at a time when they required it to be. People often try to make blanket claims that "getting away from realism improves art". But nobody wants to see a work where the concept of being Black in Alabama is invoked and yet made out of a bunch of nonsense lying around in the back of the author's brain. Sure, it's abstract rather than representational, and it's "original" in that it doesn't copy anything the author read. But when people try to be "creative" in their representations of real-world groups of people, it typically devolves into the same general array of uncreative tropes and stereotypes. Why? Because stories have always been models of other things. You'll see people throw around the concept that art is a canvas of infinite possibilities, but it simply isn't correct. Even fantastical stories that do not line up with the real world are simulations in which a particular set of winning rules derived from the needs of readers in the real world interacts with itself to create the simulation. Invention is a boundless canvas of possibilities, but not every invention actually makes sense — we have all seen joke inventions on cartoons which are completely unsuited to be final products. Art is exactly the same way. Judging the success of art is a difficult and messy process, but there are a few cases like representation of demographics and portraying the general concept of diversity where that judging process becomes almost instantaneous. Again, I will ask you, why? Because a simulation of any kind produces higher quality output according to the amount of data it was built on. This is why people plateau in their creativity when they do not have real-world information about other demographics. All stories are merely models, and stories made out of an inadequate pile of simulation rules in respect to a particular thing cannot successfully function as a good simulation.

Now, I want you to stop and think about what a lack of accurate, non-judgemental representation has done to countries like Cuba and North Korea.

Don't laugh at that, anarchists! I mean it very seriously. When the United States goes about its day spreading around only the sparsest details about Black people and leaving people with no good information, people fill in whatever they want to. And when they hear on the news that one Black person ever committed one crime in Detroit, they run with it. Pretty quickly it becomes that Black people "have a culture of crime" where they constantly get arrested more than anyone else because they didn't choose the right abstract Ideals of lawfulness, that Black fathers are abandoning their children to steal money from the welfare system, that the one Black person who believes in stealing products for anarchists is running an actual mafia or Islamic guerrilla army to create a new global empire, and that Barack Obama getting nominated for president is some kind of actual conspiracy by oppressive Dengist bureaucrats that have created a new Leninism out of schizoanalysis or Lacanianism. So if the United States went around telling nobody to learn about Third World countries and to always assume they can't govern themselves, what do you think people would start thinking about the trustworthiness or social competence of those countries' civilians?

When people are faced with fictional narratives that make the nature of narratives as simulations obvious, they don't first seek creativity or novelty, but a work where narratives are used as a representational model of material reality that accurately predicts or follows a generalized set of real-world events that happen in its stated geographical regions. When people don't have real observations of other ethnicities, simulations _become_ the data. When an important repeated pattern in society such as gender identity keeps appearing but is not well explained by science, narrative storytelling takes on rigorous rules and _becomes_ the science. This same concept of meticulously taking down observations of society and digesting them to produce a model of what drives actual observed biographical incidents and news events should be applied to all fictional narratives discussing Communism or anarchism. Any portrayal of Third World countries and their history which is inaccurate more or less causes the United States to descend on those countries and dominate them, taking away from them any chance of having democracy or even the right to exist at home as a resident of that country. So I am begging you, every author that goes on about "Representation in Media" or "using writing to improve our imagination", please represent historical Communist movements and republics accurately. Represent them as realistically as any element of your story which is intended to be realistic, including "lived experience" or gender identity. Represent your own favorite anarchist movements realistically, including every one of their flaws. Accurately represent the conflict between different versions of Marxism such as Stalinism and Trotskyism. Have you ever gotten upset when somebody took one of your favorite fictional characters and flattened that character into a simplified picture that was entirely perfect or entirely bad? Have you ever wanted to shout at somebody for dropping the most interesting parts of a fictional canon? Bring that emotion and the reasons somebody would feel it to representing the concept of "Socialism". Don't flanderize anarchism and make it into the perfect comic book superhero of ideologies. Don't villainize Bolshevism and act like workers' states do nothing but hate anarchists and the world outside. If you wouldn't insist that all stories be about straight able-bodied people, don't do the same thing to sociophilosophies and insist that all stories be about romanticized monarchies or Liberal-republicanism. It is unbelievable that the United States can be so awash in chatter about "representation" and "lived experience" and "community" and "bringing back sincerity" and yet not one bit of that applies to Communists. Historical workers' states get no accurate representation, windows into their own internal perspectives, acceptance by a wider community, hope for a better tomorrow, or sincerity.

Blue anarchism defines freedom as people believing anything and everything that doesn't contain prejudices. But it isn't possible to allow people to believe just anything that doesn't contain prejudices, because prejudices are in fact not the presence of a narrative, but the absence of a narrative that is inevitably filled in with a much more toxic narrative. It takes all the effort to learn correct information and it takes no effort to have prejudices. So literally any time somebody believes something stupid or inaccurate, they have already stepped away from reality, and it's only a matter of time before it turns into a demographic prejudice somehow. Every old racist Disney cartoon is simply an inaccurate model of reality. Every instance of fanfiction writers claiming male-on-male pairings "aren't actually gay" or fiction including nonhuman beings that are not male or female with the implication only aliens can have non-binary gender demonstrates how making any mistake about reality whatsoever can come across as discrimination. But this second category of mistake is much smaller, and the majority of them do not happen intentionally. They happen purely out of the author's current level of knowledge about the entire world. The entire world is something that takes a long time to learn about. So no matter how genuinely hard people try to know about everything, if any particular person releases a work to the entire world, it's likely everyone will accidentally have prejudices. Blue anarchism makes some kind of sense at a town scale but it really makes no sense at a world scale. At the scale of the world, everything including a cluster of blue anarchists is a narrative and the only form of analysis that actually makes sense is the existential-materialist analysis of all those separate interacting narratives.

After 11 years I understand the point of _Undertale_. We all want to think that groups of people coexisting is something you can easily do if only you choose the right Ideals and put your mind to it, but in actuality, the only real way to get to the future you want is to see beyond the barriers between groups of people and know the underlying reality, because if you do not know your opponent, you cannot control it.

== Should we even call it Social-ism? ==

I am really tired of the English language. Especially the United States variant of English.
I know a lot of other languages would have the same problems as I'm about to describe, but still, I'm tired.

The words "socialism" and "communism" have today become a point of weakness in a way it seems like they never have before. "Socialism" implies a transformation of society which is based in making society "more social" through giving it more _sociality_ or _society_ or _social sector_. "Communism" implies a movement or transition which is based in making more "community", "communality", or "communes". Neither of these words is at all accurate to what Communists really do. This is why, quite honestly, I prefer to just call the transitional society that the Bolsheviks physically put into place "Bolshevism" (or, "the Material System of Bolshevism" in longhand). I wouldn't even mind it being called "Stalinism" as long as that specific word wasn't being said as an insult or criticism. But if you have ever seen average people try to describe what "socialism" or even "communism" is... then the Soviet Union was not Communism in any way and it did not have a Communist party. And by that, I don't mean in the sense that I'm holding the Soviet Union to sky-high standards to handle socialist transition correctly, but in the sense that to most people "communism" has flat out come to mean anarchism and they chastise you like you were a revisionist if you don't believe it.

I think the words "socialism" and "communism" have unacceptably empowered anarchists. It's been absolutely pervading popular discourse that movements are "socialist" because they give back to the members of society instead of choosing the toxic Ideal of Greed (the trusty neo-Menshevik lever to prevent anything but Menshevism from transforming society), or because they return society to a whole, undamaged state of nature (this one you hear from White people subtly appropriating tribal societies' philosophy without any plausible material strategy for truly relinquishing White people's control over the United States and the earth), or because they "give power back to the people" instead of to a specific wedge of Evil capitalists that are deliberately ruining society but are unrelated to all the Good capitalists. There is no mention of _scientific socialism_ anywhere, there is no mention of the concepts of either _dialectical materialism_ or _mechanical materialism_, there is no mention of the concept of understanding history as a series of material processes, no mention of _populational relativism_ and understanding populations as self-contained stages for internal oppositions to arise that are familiar to the historical transitions seen in other countries horizontally, for the most part there is nearly no mention of _science_. Instead, three of the top concepts you hear thrown around in various phrasings are "pluralistic society" or "social liberalization", "lived experience" or "unimpeded daily life" or "community culture" or "freedom", and "common humanity" or "The Subject". These concepts are the central orbiting axis for the social-democratic and blue-anarchist concepts of what "socialist transition" _even is_. Society needs socialism because society is bigoted and pushes people out of society to become homeless, and spreads bad cultural narratives that cause people to trust and support Tory parties that spread more racism, LGBT-phobia and misogyny, and miscellaneous hatred. Society needs communism because it's bigoted and will never have enough jobs to inclusively welcome every individual into society just because people are nice, so the way to create communism is to create small and isolated communities of a few socially-linked people — I'm sorry, _decentralized_ and _non-bureaucratic_ communities — so that when these small groups that "don't believe in Greed" have claimed sufficient unused land and physical implements for creating material culture for themselves they will simply not let capitalism happen again. Silly Bolsheviks! How could you ever think Communism was about having a state? Communism is when every miniature community fits into the community community regardless of how many people there are and how much land there is. We're really open to communism now. Communism sounds pretty good, but just one little caveat — it had better be a form of anarchism and not a form of Bolshevism.

Sometimes I almost have no words for the _depth_ to which today's people detest Materialism and actual social science. It isn't a surface level thing. For every possible application you can conceivably use science for, _all of them_, I've been told at at least one point in my existence that each and every single one is bad. And I've been told that either anarchism or Liberal-republican academia somehow has the "actually brave" and "properly nuanced" solutions to all our problems if we'd only stop blindly consulting science.

Don't use science to back up your arguments, because actually people usually come to their beliefs based on who their friends are rather than through logical arguments. Don't worry, it's still possible to define the concept of Reason without facts or logic, you just have to read Kant and define what is Reasonable as group-based intuition and assume that everything already identifiable as unethical is not Reasonable.

Don't use science to try to find objective truth, because nobody will ever recognize what is materially accurate as true unless all populations of people are included, and making use of science makes it dreadfully easy for the populations and subpopulations currently in control of the world to erase the existence of tribal populations and demographic minorities and their experiences. Which is wholly unacceptable, and thus the use of science is generally Unreasonable.

Don't use science to find out what gender is; that's a task for Communities. You can't use science to prove to academics that gender identity is real because science can be weaponized to extinguish the existence of gay and transgender people at birth, and whenever there are multiple possible fields of study that can be used to advance a progressive cause the field with no possibility of abuse is the only one that can be used. Don't use science to prove that LGBT people improve with transition experts or therapy, I mean, you can try it but it won't have any political use in convincing anyone.

Don't use science to make people get COVID vaccines, because if people don't first feel included and heard before there is any science or government they will never trust science or government again, so really, Community and local culture can handle entire public health strategies too. CDC? More like "Centers for Domination Creation".

Don't use science to discover medications, because Big Pharma is going to over-prescribe them and pocket the money. We won't outright say that the world shouldn't have doctors but we are severely suspicious of them, so, you know, unless the Tories ever agree to pass universal health care, doctors are one big act of Domination where people are asked to take on huge debts for their physical inadequacies and maybe some of those weird right-Liberals that are convinced that nobody should ever go to doctors might actually be halfway right. Che Guevara was a statist, so don't you go believing that doctors are secretly good.

Don't you even think about using science to extend human life past 100 years, because that will only be used by billionaires and it has no valid use in giving humanity more time to gather and consolidate knowledge or gain better insight on the connection between past historical periods and future historical periods. Or even in keeping appointed center-Liberal judges on the stand longer so Tories can't take it. Have you _read_ the Epic of Gilgamesh? Don't you do it.

Don't use science to create technology, because technology is the source of power and Liberal-republicanism was created to crush improper uses of power, so therefore all forms of progress must always look like crushing unwanted loci of power and unwanted forms of technology, while invention itself is at best neutral but is never progress. That includes Bolshevism and the naïve thought that a cluster of intelligent statists could create a technology powerful enough to make a better society without asking literally the whole world whether they could have their own government with their own laws or have to become a colony of United States capitalists. Capitalists are bad, but, you know, the United States can't have democracy if everybody in the world who wants to invent something new doesn't ask the United States' two major voter bases whether a new form of government is okay. How wholly Unreasonable to not first ask the important question of whether Bolshevism is Ethical as judged by United States voters.

Don't use science to build hype about the general concept of "the future", because then we get harmful technologies nobody really wants like miniature "Matrices" (virtual worlds or "metaverses"), and LLMs. We see what you're doing there trying to learn the important art of promoting abstract Ideals instead of material knowledge, but there are much better ways to motivate people to get out of bed and continue existing, usually involving Community. You don't need The Future.

Don't use science to write fictional scenarios about imperialism in space, because that takes people away from a grounded view of reality where they focus on political struggles to reclaim local culture and change all of society by simply telling everyone Colonialism is a destructive and cosmically bad Ideal.

Don't use science to generate fictional species in order to use them for bad metaphors involving social prejudice. There's a valid place for Representation in Media but if you don't base fictional narratives in real biographical timelines people have experienced they will never be accurate or true and they will only encourage people to maintain incorrect and prejudiced understandings of prejudice. Don't you get it? Real accounts of people's experiences are real because they've been experienced. Lived experience! It's there in the name, it's real because people consciously live it in their minds, and then through the magic of simulated social bonding and empathy, other people experience it.

Don't use science to attack religion and promote Materialism, because that will cause people to overlook all the valuable ethical theories contained in religions such as Buddhism and ancient animisms, and the ability to join with what is Ethical and collectively choose the outer ethical boundaries that shape all future activity is surely more important than reality or facts.

Don't use science to argue with people about global warming, because, well, that hasn't worked so far and the empirical evidence suggests people may be more open to emotional appeals about the loss of social activities and relationships and the destruction of Community and tradition that will occur if wildlife or vegetation disappear or a city is swallowed by the ocean.

Don't use science to argue against prejudice and that all human beings are equal in their near-identical human genome, because you'll only diminish the observation that that kind of stuff is Already Just Obvious to any Normal, Functioning Real Humans and anyone would think of it if you didn't go around muddying the waters with your stupid "science".

Don't use science to point out the problems in Freudian psychoanalysis, because human beings naturally think in metaphors and quests, and if every existing political theory has failed us then there must be some kind of great new political theory inside Jung, sitting somewhere in between the realms of fictional adventure narratives, and how creative expression gives life to inner experiences, and psychology.

Don't use science to teach people how to draw, because superficially realistic art is boring and the best representational art is representational art about social phenomena or inner experiences told with highly stylized visuals.

Don't use the offshoots of science to solve and predict fictional narratives with Materialism, because material evidence of events in a narrative can definitely never be connected to themes or narrative progression or fictional histories and you have to analyze fictional narratives using abstract themes and predictions of their didactic messages or sentimental desires.

Don't use Materialism to try to predict history, because history is clearly the sum of all the free actions of individuals, and the way culture has been in the past could never predict the way culture or level of knowledge will shape individual people's behaviors in the future — oh, wait, uh, somehow you can use history to predict fascism is still possible I guess and won't simply never happen again outside forms we could never predict, because we find it very scary. Don't remove the history of slavery and the Confederacy from history books, because...... no, we know that stuff isn't happening any more and everything has changed, but um... it's very distressing, so you can't remove it because... the distressing parts of history books are the good parts. It's like teaching a unit on horror stories; you can't properly teach the craft of writing a horrot story that while removing the best parts of the horror story. We just like those parts of the book and that's our lived experience. So that's why you can't remove all history books from classrooms even though we just gave an argument for why that might make total sense.

And for the love of animism, don't use science to build a proletarian society built on _destroying shared community_, _taking the choice to believe in reality and consequences away from the individual_, _instrumentalizing the human being into an object acquired and hoarded by a nation_, and _building a system of justice by first sweeping away everyone's appeal to what is natural and obvious_. Anyone who makes people learn science is a Cop and anyone who would protect national populations with science is a Pig. [*AF2]

Oddly enough in all of this I had never really heard people complaining about the fact chemistry allowed humanity to create atom bombs, and considering the existence of supernovas, neutron stars, and black holes as new exotic outcomes that occur when the universe itself pushes the boundaries of the smallest scales of physics, synthesizing new gigantic elements could probably enable something very bad. Complaints about researching viruses in a lab to make vaccines are something I've only ever heard from Tories, although Tories have definitely been spreading them far and wide. I also don't hear people complaining about animal testing or factory farming much in context of animal welfare — today it seems that you hear complaints about factory farming mainly in connection with climate change and the vague implication that humanity eats meat or runs destructive farms or releases a lot of greenhouse gases from farms because capitalism comes from Greed and the power to exploit animals or exploit oil or exploit Iraq comes specifically from the Once-ler sitting around in his shack spontaneously inventing the idea of large corporations and because _he_ made the wrong decision one day he gained the power to chop down all the trees and scoop up all the oil and hire as many people as he wanted to and the Lorax and all the Whos in the town were powerless to stop him.

But, if I can take just a brief moment to specifically talk about myself and my own so-called "lived experience"... this destroyed me. Having to live in a world where everybody thought like this and none of it was showing any signs of ceasing steamrolled my psychology, cracked apart my mental thought space like a hammer, and shattered my ability to feel any emotions about anything. My mind is built for science and math. I have an autistic brain that seemingly lacks any inherent capability for intuition and is entirely logical, but has no inherent ability to comprehend time. I have days where I actually wake up, see it's noon, immerse myself into compiling huge bodies of facts and connections within reality or fiction, hardly remember to eat anything after breakfast, and have experienced twelve or thirteen hours doing the same thing as if they were thirty minutes. I either focus completely and intensely on something to the point it goes through my entire being and I'm doing it for three days straight, or I have no ability to focus on a thing and can't even get started. I am terribly put together to be of any use as a worker or an owner. I can't keep a schedule or make promises or do anything specific for any specific number of hours each day. And I physically can't drive a car because my brain won't focus and is always "drunk" on constant puzzle-solving and context-switching. There are miles and miles between my house and anywhere containing the least bit of work or socialization but my neurodivergent brain has actually wrecked cars so I just have to walk 5 kilometers (3 miles) multiple times a week. Nobody's going to vote for me to have a bus to ride just because it's "the right thing to do". My relatives are convinced that the terribly-functioning bus charity will be improved when it's replaced by a for-profit corporation. I couldn't pay for the ride! I can't make any money. So I'd still have to walk. I would always get the highest standardized test scores in my class because my brain gets bored so quickly that unless I was having a bad focus day it would simply breeze through the school material for something to do. But since the age of about 18 I found it tough to believe it when people called me smart because I would always unknowingly say the wrong things they didn't want me to say, and then I would think, _can I really be that smart if I believe that gender identity is real or that Black people experience structural racism? People say that only stupid people vote for the Democrats, so I don't actually know if I'm smart._ And, well... that only got worse as the years went on and I tried studying more ideologies. _Sure, I got good test scores, I passed several AP classes, but can I really be that smart if I can't figure out how to explain all the world's issues to the Republicans and get them to vote for the Democrats? I've always been told that smart people founded the United States Republic. But they must have understood a lot of things I don't understand yet, because every day it makes less and less sense to me how the Constitution is usually supposed to work. All the autistic or transgender people I hang out with think people aren't smart if they say the Republicans can't be changed and you can't get everyone to vote for the Democrats. Am I Evil or am I just Stupid? ...So now I'm studying Marxism, but I don't understand why everyone is so stuck on this concept that people voting for a couple of laws actually changes everything. Is there something wrong with me? The Marxist theorists said I have to understand everything that already exists and how movements are already developing in order to organize a Stalinist party but the more Marxism I absorb the stranger and less comprehensible all the progressive movements in the United States actually seem. Do I just not understand Marxism because I haven't been able to work? Would all of this theory about organizing people actually make sense if I could physically go to the places where people work instead of sitting around here? I don't want to have bourgeois consciousness. It must be my fault._ I was born only trying to figure out what were the best outcomes and what was Right — in the proper anarchist ethical sense. I never really wanted to upset anyone. I used to actually care about ethics and have something of an obsession with hero characters in fiction and the concept that they were not specifically powerful, but ethical. I walked away from religion because I didn't see how people believing in a god would advance ethics. So every time I thought I got an answer about what was the Right thing to do from any group of people I absorbed it and attempted to integrate it into the others. Like I was "supposed to do". But each time I memorized an ethical prescription, I saw one of the only things I liked or found relatable in the world slip away one by one. I thought one day that would end, and I would still have a couple of them left. But it didn't end. At some point I saw everything I had ever identified with or ever wanted to talk to anyone about ground up as "inherently unethical", and I tried to move past it, but every time the arguments were too close to making sense (at least with a bunch of other arguments I'd seen before if nothing else), and pretty quickly, those "became the true answers to me" and I couldn't feel enjoyment from anything I inherently enjoyed on a psychological level. At the same time, whenever I interacted with anything I was "supposed to" like, it felt empty and depressing and I didn't like it. _Look, Media Representation!_ Awesome. It looks great, but I feel strangely like if I ever talked about it to anyone it would turn into a test and I'd be hit with a ruler for a wrong answer. I don't want to make anyone mad. Maybe I'll read something else. _You aren't normal, so maybe you would like a Furry visual novel full of gay romance?_ I don't know. Not exactly. I mean, I like that kind of character, but I don't really like the themes of any of these stories. They all have this weird undercurrent of trying to manufacture fake diversity in a White or European population that wishes there was diversity, and treating reality in this difficult-to-describe, almost neo-creationist way where biology doesn't exist because of evolution and material oppositions in nature, and instead exists because some unseen force decreed that the world would have diversity and all diversity would automatically get along without strife, war, or predation. A premise can't be objectively wrong, but it feels... "off". _Get hyped about the new Pokémon game! It's fun, it's social, it embodies inclusive animist values, and it's an adventure about making friends and becoming ethical instead of just slaughtering things for an evil empire!_ No. I won't, not because it "doesn't embody Marxism" or some silly on-principle objection like that, but because I actually look at Arceus and the element type system and what I feel emotionally is "that's gross, it reminds me too much of my real-world oppression" "I don't like how Pokémon presents its world as an easy, one-size-fits-all linear path and puts in social features each to make the games more approachable but then when you water down the game to being that digestible it becomes inherently boring and the fans are actually upset about that and complain about it a lot but for baffling reasons they still stay exactly as stuck on the games as they ever were and don't really want anything about the games to change, every time someone offers a possible change such as an open world the consensus is that doesn't understand the appeal of the game and when implemented has ruined it" "I don't like the kind of people who play _Pokémon_. They never like it when you don't like things exactly the way they are and inherently fit into that order and understand exactly why it was made that way and praise it for being exactly the way it is. I don't like the way it is, and so it isn't fun to me or a social experience for me". _Ah, you're *really* not normal. Maybe you're interested in playing fantasy card games at the card shop?_ No. That just feels like putting on a fake personality and trying to hide my true personality. There is this idea that's been going around that all you have to do to make tabletop games inclusive is to say "they're for gay people now" and then they just are. But the whole assumption that Community fails to be inclusive because it needs more Inclusivity and Community really, really was not working for me. It wasn't working on the most basic levels, before any logical thought came in. I wasn't _trying_ to analyze it. Not back then, when for years I didn't even actually know what Marxism was or how to apply it. My emotions were just gradually dying from any attempt to socialize. I had to separate from my relatives and I didn't really have any friends, but I found I experienced more contentment and less pain when I tried to get away from social interaction as much as possible and be alone. Interacting with any social artifact produced by humans often just felt wrong. Retreating into my lair and reading about Marxism was one of the only things that made me feel good. I was still a "fan" of food so to speak, and I had no problem going to town to get packaged groceries. The grocery store was nice, because whenever there weren't many people there there were so many things to look at and everything was just still and quiet and nobody was making me feel bad. I often felt a little weird at the library because there were _people_ there, and that would make me start vaguely thinking about what the lives of normal people were like and what I did wrong to end up like this, and how screwed I was to not be able to work or unionize, and when I was going to die, and if Stalin's government would have hated me as much as this society. Sometimes I really didn't want to read at the library and I just wanted to walk to town and back so I didn't have to be in my house but I could also read at home. I liked being on the dirt trails up to town hidden inside the trees more than I liked being in town or in the impossible state of visiting another person. The only people I "talked to" were online video broadcasts I would listen to just to not forget what humans are and knock myself back a few paces away from actually going crazy. I had many episodes of wanting to die so I could be less of a problem to everyone and no longer be the person who takes all the Wrong actions and is the embodiment of pure Unreasonableness. (Probably over 100 in total.) I thought I would never be good enough to deserve anyone's love and was a little afraid they'd all prefer I never came near them and died alone. I sometimes got worried that I shouldn't talk to Marxist parties because they would tell me I had everything wrong and I shouldn't have even come in. I knew they were the only people on earth who would ever want to talk to me but I had to solve the way reality worked perfectly without any mistakes or they wouldn't want me either, because only someone with the power to bring actual change can be a comrade.

I was autistic, I was transgender, I was neurologically disabled, but all of that just continued to push me away from society as if progressive movements had never existed. I was always told that demographic identities would flip around into inherently integrating people into Communities if only the nature of Community would change toward the Ideal of inclusion. But whenever people tried to form a "community" of any kind it never felt right being there, like in every case a Community was inherently more full and complete without me in it. I didn't feel like I was "actually" any of my demographic identities. Even though the negative effects of all of them were still present, it felt like they had all slid off me and I was faking. I just... I was a cryptic genderless _thing_ with no ability to tell time, but I had tried too hard to be special and I'd better find some way of being normal and fitting into a society "correctly" or it felt like some sort of spiked ceiling trap of inhumanity was going to fall out of the sky and crush me to bloody bits before I could run.

It was like there was always a weight on me. I felt like I was deeply wrong, like my birth was a wrong choice. I had the urge to apologize to people about something nondescript but it felt like either I would get in trouble for even bringing it up and then they wouldn't want me around or they would try to tell me it was okay but completely misunderstand what the issue was and give completely wrong assumptions of what made me feel at home and what made me happy, which would only make things worse. I was useless to everybody no matter who they were. I was a monstrosity made with irregularities that could not be fixed. I was "the dragon". And a dragon stays deep in its lair if it doesn't want to be met with the sword.

So... in one sense, I was pretty keen on the concept of reapplying Society back to society and rebuilding it from a scattering of isolated individuals back into something that actually resembled society. But I could tell that that concept meant something very different to me than it did to everyone else. I was already living in the collapse of sociality itself since at least 2021, while nobody else was and it was all abstract Ideals to them. If I was going to rebuild society it had to begin immediately. If the world was vile, I had to record and analyze it exactly as it was. I had to take all the utterly wrong movements and ideas and I had to present a perfect account of everything exactly as it was so I could then turn everything inside out and make it right.

I have come to one conclusion: Marxists must deconstruct all the major concepts of anarchism and Liberal-republican theory down to the absolute most basic ones that even some Marxists inappropriately make use of and show why every single one of them is wrong. Starting with "Community".

First we should talk about Gramsci. There is a popular quote that originated from Gramsci that has slid and transformed over the years almost beyond recognition. "The old world is dying, the new one is slow to appear and in this contrast is the time of monsters." It almost doesn't matter who actually said this. It wouldn't be more correct or incorrect if Gramsci had said it himself. The message of the saying is clear: historical periods are physical objects made of particular components. When a new physical object can be constructed successfully, there is a new historical period, and it gets rid of the remaining traces of the previous historical periods, parading itself around as the "obvious" logical outcome. But when a new historical period cannot be physically constructed, or it falls apart before it can establish itself, the material contradiction between various old and new historical periods keeps raging, perhaps for a short time, or perhaps for a full 200 years. A time of monsters is precisely a time of contradiction between two historical periods of varying viability. When early Trotskyism tried to emerge in Europe and the Soviet Union, but was not yet strong enough to form a nation-sized party, and Stalinists clung onto each national region believing that Trotskyism could be nothing more than a hazard, that was a time of monsters. So, the question is, why is this quote so popular with Liberal-republicans who do not understand a lick of historical materialism and do everything to exorcise mentions of Communist theorists from their universities, only stopping a few steps short of hanging up a symbolic Chinese tank on the wall and sprinkling every room with a vial of pure Bourgeois Water? Where is the expected moment where somebody realizes Gramsci was a Communist and immediately stops class and chucks the textbook out a window?

We've already established that the thing saving those textbooks from imminent defenestration is the physical separation of capitalism into two semi-countable capitalisms. As long as capitalism can convince people that half a country can build a new future through one portion of capitalists defeating another, it can stave off the possibility of people realizing that an entirely different historical period is required. So, now, how do Liberal-republicans maintain the illusion that one half of a body of capitalists is genuinely superior to another body of capitalists?

Usually the myth that follows this is that "culture" is the basis of civilizations, and the key to winning at Liberal-republicanism is to connect people together as tightly as possible into an expanding ideological Lattice until a sky Lattice for instance expands over the whole area of the country and pushes all the rust people out to the margins. But this is very much a myth. United States center-Liberals have had around 160 years to pull this off and create a new historical period without Tories as they promise, and they have not. When Liberal-republicanism is truly successful, it only takes 14 years for parties to turn over and produce a new set of parties, but this time it has taken over 100. That is a very clear difference between the real-world shape of Liberal-republican "permanent revolution" and a failure. This is not like Deng Xiaoping Thought where there is no existing example of a country passing through a transition correctly to compare against. We should be able to know whether the Democrats are ready to succeed within the space of _four presidential elections_. Not twenty-five elections, which is over six times too many. So why does anybody keep making excuses? Well, clearly, because culture and mentality are not easy to study and anticipate through such rigid numbers. How would you survey the United States on its progress at getting rid of racism or its progress at getting rid of transphobia, and how could you ever anticipate what would cause different localized countable cultures to pick up these new mentalities?

Wonderful question. Unfortunately, it exposes a very nasty contradiction inside Liberal-republicanism. If there are one or more ethnic minorities trying to spread consciousness about racism across the country to create a new historical period, and there are simultaneously groups of gay or transgender people trying to spread consciousness about that to create a new historical period, but the two don't entirely overlap, you don't necessarily know that either of them is actually going to end up on the center-Liberal party platform. And if and when it happens that either of them is excluded, which is a very real possibility, then the excluded group of people will come to believe that it is the one that must spread culture and mentality across the country to bring the new historical period while the Democrats are irrelevant to that task. But if transgender people have gotten excluded, for instance, then why should any of them care about the concept of voting? We have established that what really brings a new historical period under Gramscian models is spreading culture and mentality, not actually going and casting a ballot. So why should _anyone_ vote? Gramsci and Žižek told everyone that a new historical period of center-Liberal values and progress comes when people spread culture and mentality, and that those things are much more powerful than voting; if anything, they would be the things that cause votes, not the other way around. So in order for progress to win and a new historical period to be created, everyone needs to stop thinking about elections and do anything but vote.

If elections are the outward result of culture, then culture itself must also come from something. There are definitely some people who accept new ideas and some people who do not, so what is the difference? Here it would be useful to bring in the real-world observation that circles of Republicans and circles of Democrats are comparable in their receptiveness to new ideas — they tend to shut out ideas from groups of people they perceive as being separate and hostile versus their existing group of people. Social links between two people predispose people to accepting ideas. So, it follows that the way culture is actually spread is the creation of social links and the reconfiguration of physical collections of people into new shapes as they expand outward a few people at a time. Culture is spread through what may be called the fusion of countable cultures or the reconfiguration of communities. Voting ultimately comes from the incorporation of different cities, industries, fandoms, chat groups, broadcast audiences, or any other set of socially-linked graphs of people into each other.

Can you see what is viscerally, fundamentally wrong with this?

It is a fundamental value within Liberal-republicanism that no two countable cultures can be better than each other. Open up a college sociology book, and you will soon enough see a description of principles that it is impossible to study a countable culture, both in practical terms and in ethical terms, without establishing the understanding that the other countable culture will not be judged as lesser. A countable culture will not be observed and measured by people it does not want to see; a visitor will not return good information without arriving on even terms. This principle has been established by a peripheral wing of _that accursed group of people known as scientists_. In spite of everything they have "done", within a universe where no physical object can even be seen without something bouncing into it, scientists cannot succeed without practicing a code of ethics, while at the same time, they practice this code specifically to gain a better understanding of the world that surrounds them as it is without simply imposing their pre-existing Ideals onto it. An objective and descriptive study of societies must exist _partly because_ if countable cultures were not studied in such a way, they would be dominated by an external empire that does not respect their values. To point at a countable village or tribe of socially-linked people and say that it must adopt a particular Ideal is generally to say that as it is it is currently inferior. So, considering this general understanding of what cultures are, how can culture or mentality be held up as the engine of progress? Gramsci's vulgarized model of Liberal-republicanism would seem to say that Liberal-republicanism turns over a new era of progress when a superior culture wins and an inferior culture disappears. We know from everyday experience that culture and community are inextricably linked to the point of being more or less the same inseparable entity that can be called by either name. So where does any culture or community get the authority to declare itself the one true community and absorb other communities? We can't trace this problem back to Gramsci, because Gramsci chose Bolshevism and didn't actually focus his energy on whether center-Liberals or Tories were the better party to control capitalism. This interpretation of center-Liberals being forged out of a superior culture is an interpretation specific to Liberal-republicanism. But even if Liberal-republicans had never tried to quote Gramsci, the idea has still been part of Liberal-republicanism for a long time. How often have you heard people talking about "liberal governance" as something that only happened before Trump and by implication would always have functioned much better if Tories never existed, or about the Tory generation "slowly dying out"? Rhetoric that Tories somehow misinterpreted and ruined the original vision for Liberal-republicanism is everywhere — not to mention some that _center-Liberals or blue anarchists_ ruined the original vision and nobody needs them.

Liberal-republicanism cannot function without the assertion that one countable culture or community of people is inherently better than another. Otherwise, there is no such thing as campaigning or voting having a theoretical correct outcome that informed voters could choose rationally, and no real reason for anyone to vote.

What would happen if everybody in the country simply stopped voting and nobody ever put any marks in the section for president again? Surely the electoral college or somebody would have to vote on the new president. But the electoral college is based on votes for president, so it would have to be drawn up based on something unusual such as votes for Congress. But couldn't everybody just not vote for Congress either? If there were no votes for Congress and no votes for president, what would happen to Congress and the president then? Is there a point where the government would shut down and they would all just have to go home? This is almost what Liberal-republicans' strange understandings of Gramsci would seem to imply — if culture and mentality don't actually align with any particular political party or president, then maybe none of them would win. This would seem to fly in the face of conventional understandings of Liberal capitalism and everyday experience. _But if nobody votes, then doesn't a cluster of the biggest capitalists win?_ your typical Liberal-republican will reply, sounding bizarrely like a Communist.

We do, on some vague level, know what happens when everyone stops voting. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 when no one in government could put up a decent opposition supported by the people to the faction of people who wanted to dissolve the central government. But, many people today believe that was a _good_ thing. The popular belief across the United States is that there was never any noticeable faction within the Soviet government that anyone should have supported, not Stalin's allies, not the Khruschevites, and not Gorbachev either. (And Trotskyists were still not big enough to make any meaningful change at the time, failing Gramsci's apparent requirement of an inherently successful countable culture.) So, if the Soviet Union can't produce any good theorists that United States people like... then everyone should stop supporting them, the whole national population should dissolve, and civilization should crumble apart so that nobody has to help anybody, right? Nobody needs to help anybody obtain supplies or healthcare. Society is some kind of logical fallacy made up to dominate people.

If you think that's an insane conclusion, then congratulations, you are actually thinking. But what everyone in the United States has to understand is that simply holding people together into a society is a difficult task, not an easy one or one to be taken for granted. Human beings love freedom. But freedom is in contradiction with society. Around 1933, the Soviet Union faced a difficult choice: make use of grain in Ukraine to aid other projects, or leave Ukraine alone and suffer serious setbacks to other regions' development. The other regions' need is real. At worst, some people may still be starving. At best, if the other regions don't receive grain they will lean toward refusing to develop cities and keeping reactionary attitudes, and things will be looking fairly bad for Gramsci's culture law — with an outright faction full of peasants materially distinguished by agrarian villages, the scale tips a bit toward no gay rights in the Soviet Union, and a bit more against women having careers. So the planners' choice is critically important. But if they do choose to send grain from Ukraine to the other republics, Ukraine is going through a crisis and some people in Ukraine are going to die. Philosophers of ethics think that when you have to choose between the well-being of two sets of people in a trolley problem that the choice is simple and you should merely choose the larger number of people. But what if the trolley problem was real, and it was Ukraine? In the real world, people are quickly going to get angry at you for almost any action but doing nothing. And in every discussion about "Communist regimes", that's exactly what they did. Suddenly the old ethics thought experiments had gained a new dimension: does the person deciding to switch the trolley to the other track even have a right to stand there and make decisions at all? Or if one person is controlling other people who would otherwise have the ability to make their own decisions, _is ethics inherently unethical_?

The decision between whether to ship grain from Ukraine more or less boils down to a strict decision between freedom and democracy. Up to World War II, the people of the Soviet Union were relatively satisfied with their government, and largely, although not universally, believed it represented the people. Therefore, into 1933, whether Ukraine should do what the government tells it to was a question of whether Ukraine was under control of government by the people, and whether _democracy_ had control over Ukraine. Democracy cannot both _be_ in control of Ukraine, subjecting it to the will of the people in the other republics, and _not_ be in control of Ukraine, allowing all the people inside Ukraine to do what they want because they are not under the control of social links to other regions and government by the people.

Freedom is when Stalin _doesn't_ take the grain. Democracy is when Stalin _does_ take the grain.

You have probably heard this dilemma from Tories in a severely chewed-up form making some kind of baffling claim that somehow taxes are going to destroy society. And you probably didn't listen back then because you knew on some level that center-Liberal social-democrats could never knock over Tory businesses as badly as Stalin's government knocked over Ukraine. But unfortunately, the basic principles are still there. It isn't about how much the businesses might "suffer" — it's about their ability to exist freely, make decisions at a local level, and casually form only the social links they want. This whole process is inherently in contradiction with democracy, and that is the real reason Tories appear to hate democracy so much. They strictly prefer _freedom_.

Tories and center-Liberals each operate off _political agorism_, the social theory that society is fundamentally made of arbitrary social links that form from individual decisions, and totalities of social links are the basis of all other things about society, including culture, society's contained economy, and political parties or republican systems including the United States constitution or court system. Agorism is a deeply frustrating political philosophy because in many ways the model appears to be true: rings of capitalist industry cannot function without forming social links between production structures or cities, populations cannot form political parties without forming social links, and countable cultures and social links are inherently connected. Agorism is not even as Idealist as it seems at first because it does in fact say that culture is generated out of a material structure: networks of social links. It is a strangely diabolical philosophy in that it is constantly handed to complete beginners to politics as an appropriate first example for everyone to start from ("vote for the Democrats!") but in the end it is one of the most difficult kinds of sociophilosophies to properly analyze to the point it can only be correctly understood for what it really is by some of the world's most advanced Marxist theorists who avoid making several basic mistakes. The Democratic party is like giving a high school student a Fourier transform integral that takes pages to solve and saying "you interact with radio waves every day; it's totally easy!". So you have to go all the way down to the smallest scales to properly solve the problem.

Do Ideas cause communities? Does the Ideal of Inclusivity inherently cause totalities of marginalized groups to form together? Do the ideas inside the Democratic party cause votes? Does Media Representation cause people of different demographics to all read a book or watch a show specifically because the ideas are good before there is any actual input from real people? This is one of the most frustrating things about political agorism because there are multiple ways to formulate this culture model, and if you question any of them, people will switch tactics to try to keep defending it and you'll simply get the other ones. This is why in the previous paragraph I framed it as _social links cause culture_: because that is the better way to formulate the model that anybody in their right mind would quickly correct it to if you grill them on culture causing social links. But most of the time, "culture causing social links" or "ideas causing social links" is actually the form in which you will usually see it. _The Democratic Party gets votes because it has good ideas; the multicultural book club gets members because it has good ideas; the United States gets immigrants because it has good abstract Ideas that are fabricated in total separation from reality but happen to work anyway._ But none of that is true. The United States didn't steamroll North American tribes because it had the world's best ideas. The Republican Party doesn't keep periodically winning elections because it has the best ideas. A book club or podcast doesn't get any connections if genuinely all it has is ideas and its "good ideas" don't actually speak to anyone. In the current historical period everyone's mind is warped and distorted by the existence of ethics and the concept that you can call ideas "good" or "bad" whenever you want to as long as they're sufficiently Nice or Mean. In reality, there may be such a thing as successful or unsuccessful ideas, but humans don't get to subjectively decide what those are as individuals — no, not even in the role of the wise grandpa or grandma that walks into the ethics thought experiment from stage left to play the opinion of the entire rest of society, who is still an individual and who is still every bit as unreliable outside of the symbolic context of a dream or a stage play. Social links cause ideas. If anything, a socially-linked network of Democratic Party voters must already exist for anyone else to be added to the Democratic party based on its "ideas". That is the absolute minimum correction to make agorism a Materialist philosophy and allow all its supporters to keep defending it, as they almost certainly will.

So, if social links cause culture and are a fundamental building block in the model, once there is already a socially-linked group of people, can culture maybe _turn around_ and cause more social links?

No. Both people must act toward becoming linked to become linked, so one person can easily just not become linked when two people have different "mentalities", without the "correct mentality" ever changing the incorrect one. This means abstract Ideals can never dictate how people will behave, as much as the objective or material state of the second person. Not all of that state information will be apparent from the outside, but some of it will be revealed from the inside within an interaction, so in general, all the state information that is needed to model people does exist. Individuals link together "first" in a simultaneous collision of two separate befores and afters to form a single future, and then a localized countable culture object either exists or doesn't exist. Its existence is a finicky thing, a bit like a photon or electron superposition, but at any given moment it _will_ either happen or not happen, and individual people do not decide whether it will happen, because they fundamentally cannot decide in advance whether other people will like them or their ideas. Culture cannot manufacture social links out of the aether, no matter what.

Do social links cause the economy? No. This question might have been more complex back in agrarian societies where people were tightly bolted into large family units, but it isn't as complex now. The entire concept of higher education in the United States presupposes that they don't. People are constantly moving to other places for college or for a job, and some people are moving into the United States from Mexico or from educated areas of the Eastern Hemisphere for jobs, not to mention from all the regions the United States has interfered in and tried to make people think they shouldn't live in. There is a lot of evidence that people have been moving to the United States for the economy and care more about going wherever the economy moves to than staying with any particular group of social ties. Here, I think agorism is a bit unaware of its own consequences. Countable agorisms form as communities that try to extend over more people to gain power, and if they're convinced they're the best in the world, they will try to expand out further to swallow other regions' people. When agorisms hide their existence and try to act like they are not personally benefiting from making other countries feel bad about themselves, they change the playing field they claim to be modeling, not really taking into account that recruiting someone for good reasons that will last and recruiting someone based on empty ideology are not the same thing.

Do social links cause political parties? Yes, but also no. In theory, political parties must have some material effect in order to win, so in order to be a winning political party, they must contain an economic base. When capitalism exists, a clear economic structure exists, and political parties can make some kind of case that the people leading them are important within society and should continue to be important. The social links between several capitalists facilitate forming a political party, but they only make it effective because the capitalists first exist as capitalists. Social links are also important in the case of forming a successful Stalinist party, but again, especially in that case, economic structures such as peasant villages and factories exist that much more blatantly lead to social links. What about a Fourth International? Any number of stereotypes will go around that Marxist theorists stand around not doing much of anything but reading and congregating, so surely the social links in a Fourth International must precede an economy? This one is a little tricky, but when you realize that the economy in one historical period and the economy in another historical period are two different things that change into each other — look back at Žižek's quote about monsters — yes, a Fourth International is caused by an economy, just not its own economy. If people don't understand dialectics, time slice analysis saves the day.

So, basically every time agorism tries to tell you that social links cause other things, what it is really doing is failing to understand simultaneous dialectical interactions or historical transitions, where if you expand the whole situation out, you will see that it tends to consistently put everything on the wrong side of causing social links. Saying that culture makes social links is one of the only exceptions, and even there it still manages to be slightly wrong by not understanding that culture is not an Idea and that it's only managed to say something correct by saying a tautology.

Why is it so important to recognize that Liberal-republican parties are always agorisms? Because political agorism is the bridge between Liberal-republicanism and anarchism — it is the prototypical _blue_ anarchism that doesn't stray far from material things that already exist but confidently describes an overall layout of society that can supposedly exist without a state. The Republican and Democratic parties will not tell you this out loud, because they do not want to believe they are trying to abolish Liberal-republicanism. But what they are constructed for and what they intend are two drastically different things. This is one of the most critical things to understand about modeling Idealism: _Idealist factions never act with intention, and they always do inexplicable things with unintended consequences_. You have to actively separate the intentions and the outcomes and address both of them instead of simply discarding the Ideals layer, or people will not be able to recognize what you've made a model of.

What Gramsci and Žižek have proved for us through the mouths of a bunch of standard clueless Liberal-republicans is that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party _cannot_ currently be a single coherent society. Every single time Gramsci is invoked is another point of evidence that the Republican Party and Democratic Party are truly in material opposition and truly mutually exclusive. And here is why. _If societies really and truly come from social links_, or put another particularly Liberal-republican way, the coalescing voluntary choices of individuals, then the central government is not actually playing a major role in the construction of the society despite the bit of theater it puts on every four years where it claims to be mediating which president will rise out of the two or more countably separate societies inside it to rule the country. If society really comes from social links, then the people of Kansas form Kansas without needing the federal government and the people of South Carolina form South Carolina all on their own, and the people of South Carolina may not even need the people of Kansas to exist for their population of people to exist. The United States could be 50 separate countries if it weren't for the mysterious existence of political parties, which in today's world appear to be the only connecting thread that makes it mandatory for the 50 states to be connected. Because the Democrats and Republicans greedily wash over state borders back and forth to try to scoop up more states, hating each other the whole time, the deep division they draw between the two bodies of citizens sometimes leading to spontaneous shootings, there is a United States. And if everybody in the United States spontaneously realized just as various academics and blue-anarchists keep repeating that dominating other countable cultures of people was an unproductive outcome and greed was bad, the United States might dissolve and there might not be a United States. This is the United States' major problem: it is increasingly becoming awash in talk of _virtues_ and _moderation_ and _degrowth_ and _sustainability_ and _what is actually necessary_, but nobody considers the horrifying possibility that the United States, or "Our Democracy", is in fact not really necessary and may be the ultimate manifestation of immoderation, unsustainability, and greed. Not because it uses too much oil, not because it attempts to contain all the world's corporations while it puts all the world's workers in places like China, Vietnam, and India, but specifically because it is "a liberal democracy". Because that phrase is a highly deceptive lie told to everyone by the monster named "Our Democracy" to get them to preserve it, while in reality the United States is more of a continuous warring states period between two countable blue anarchisms where each keeps consuming more and more people and objects and inventions and academic papers and news shows purely to try to defeat the other. An actual endless battle between regional princes to become king. A literal, actual, material _interregnum_.

Let's say Stalin's government having control over Ukraine really was a senseless act of tyranny and an inherently violent and Evil assertion of Communist power. Well, if that's true, it must be completely impermissible to casually watch an election map and assert that it is the outcome of Justice for the Democrats to slurp up more states. You haven't gone and talked to the people in those states. A lot of center-Liberals probably have no idea what they want. They begin with the assertion that being a Democrat is just "better" and everyone in Nevada ought to want to be part of the superior group of people that begins with a superior culture. But the republican systems of the United States don't actually make it a requirement that any political party genuinely represents and carries out the culture it is supposed to represent, while simultaneously they deny power to any party that does not get votes. So what happens in practice is the assumption of Democrats having a superior culture that will create a new era falls flat on its face as the Democrats learn that the other countable cultures of the country have no interest in being dominated and designated as inferior cultures, and then they scramble into the deepest depths of what Marxists would call opportunism, abandoning everything they stood for so that they can be accepted as members of other regional cultures and their original required assertion that other cultures are inferior can be forgiven. Liberal-republicanism is designed so the country can continuously divide into two countable cultures that dominate and degrade each other, but which both have the ability to break free of domination before they notice the injustices of the system and get angry. In some ways, it is one of the most uniquely cruel systems ever invented in that after kicking populations around and hurling them down a staircase it always erases the marks of its abuse and claims that it did nothing. If you were mad at Stalin's government, you could simply run away, but Liberal-republicanism constantly programs people that there is nothing to escape from and thus there is no actual escape. Is it any wonder that Liberal-republicanism generates "narcissists" and other abnormal psychologies?

Culture can be Ideals, but more than anything else, culture is communities, and the declaration that any community of people has the inherent right to slurp up other communities and order them around (and pass laws on them, and send cops after them, and put them in prison) _purely because_ it is made out of inherently superior cultural ideas cannot be anything but an act of bigotry.

Liberal-republicanism, by its own internal logic, is unjust. It is bigoted, greedy, unempathetic, tyrannical, wasteful, gaslighting, megalomaniacal in how it aggrandizes its internal parties, and wholly unacceptable.

And the worst thing is this: anarchism will never be able to take over and fix it. If that was ever going to happen, it could have happened in the Soviet Union after 1953, or when the Communists failed to control Europe, or when workers weren't actually winning in China and the Communist Party shouldn't have won. If anarchism is really the most robust form of society, then logically, it would be more robust and less prone to falling apart than Stalin's Marxism. If all it takes for anarchism to win is a republic failing, then anarchism should have had a vast buffet of failing countries to choose from in which to finally succeed. In 1850, and into 1900, many modern sociophilosophies were still new and their effectiveness was unknown. But now, 176 years after Bellegarrigue codified a set of ideas that might be much older, still nobody has ever outlined a plausible method for anarchism to replace nation-states which is anywhere close to as believable as Lenin's schema for a nation-wide Communist movement. If having good ideas was truly the primary metric for predicting which political factions will succeed at creating a new historical period, then the scales are still tipped much further toward Lenin than they are toward anarchism.

Gramsci is the new Hegel. Gramsci, Jung, Deleuze & Guattari, and Crenshaw have all converged to create the new Idealism that justifies global capitalism and resists the re-emergence of Marxism without the need for any older forms of Idealism. The new Marxism needs to be able to counter this new Idealism in every crevice and at every scale that it shows up, from statements about interpersonal relationships and "culture" to statements about geopolitics and history. Capitalism has permeated every single kind of social interaction in ways that at least were never relevant or important before, but now are actively degrading the entire phenomenon of sociality and institutions or organizations. Framing "Marxists participating in society" as an oxymoron used to be a joke, but in this age, where workers can't trust unions, can't trust nation-states, can't trust progressive academics, can't trust newspapers and video channels, can't trust "communities" of any kind, can't trust anarchists, and sometimes can't trust attempted Fourth Internationals, to some extent, knowing when to walk away from society and stop giving any of society's incorrect forms of organization undue attention is almost the only way _to_ make any progress. Capitalist society naturally creates insane, vaguely psychotic perceptions of society and the world, but it also creates them _inevitably_ and _in everybody_, no matter how much you _believe_ Gramsci or Althusser or Fisher will actually help you break out. The only way to truly break out of capitalist consciousness, short of actually living in isolation and literally looking at everything from the outside in, is to _use meta-philosophical analysis to become able to view capitalism and every political movement from the outside_. I call that "Materialism". There may be a hang-up where some people don't want to call it that. I don't care. Whatever you want to call it, you have to come to the recognition that your "soul" is fundamentally detached from everything else at all moments of your life and make use of the looking-outside-and-visualizing-possible-interactions-and-futures thing. Do you call that "narrative storytelling"? Great. Now do it scientifically.

In my time being sliced away from society I took to reading books. I'd always been told to do this. _Reading books is inherently educational. Reading books gets rid of prejudices. Stories will create communities. Everyone should read more books._ So I did what I had been told and read a bunch of miscellaneous books available in the United States to see if somehow they would unlock the mysterious secrets of Liberal-republicanism or if by reading enough fictional narratives I would finally come to understand what all the anti-science, pro-lived-experience stuff really meant and what it was really saying, and what I had been missing. And, well... as I say, every day all of it seemed to get more complex and make less and less sense the more closely and carefully I analyzed it. I came to understand it better _and_ I came to understand it worse at the same time. Sometimes I listened to videos with annoying-sounding titles to see if that magical promise of "listening to people you disagree with" bringing people to a better understanding would ever come true. At the end of 6 years of that I feel like I've tested the basic ideas of Liberal-republicanism more thoroughly than almost anyone. And I genuinely think the majority of them are not true. A whole lot of everything people write inside Liberal-republicanism (or even anarchism) is just people flailing around trying to justify to you why people who understand nothing about Materialism are more important to listen to than Materialists, and why people with better understandings of material reality "don't really" have better understandings of reality. You really lose all your confidence in humanity and human beings being an intelligent species if you expose yourself to too much of it. It will sound crazy, but only after having so much exposure to the actual state of it I genuinely suspect that almost all of what people write or record within Liberal-republicanism is one giant waste of everybody's time. It's almost like talking to a Flatlander to try to explain it. But I feel like if the Liberal-republican period were actually to come to an end and be replaced, everyone would look back on everything they had written or recorded and say, oh, wow, I was focusing my energy on _that_? Why? Why was _that_ what was important to me? And this would apply to so many things in all facets of life that a lot of people would not even be thinking about until society had actually changed. Like... hmm. Here's the best I can do to think of an example of something "unimportant". I watched a video once where someone was casually saying in passing that a fantasy kingdom should become a Liberal republic (the context was the TV cartoon _My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic_). And I feel like if people were in a new society and had the chance to understand all of history _just a bit better_, they might look back on statements like that they had made and be horrified at the thought of what kinds of historical periods would result from that compared with what a good outcome is. Another example is a lot of videos that have been going around about LLMs. Some of those videos make technically valid points, but you also see a lot of videos focused on "pointless" subjects such as whether it is ethical to put an artificial consciousness in a war machine and make it experience war (what about the thousands of the human combatants?), or how to put guardrails on an LLM and how you have to design them around the concept any self-contained system is "inherently self-regulating" (this just sounds like bad models of society applied to computers), or the notion that language is inherently special in that meaning must be inherently subjective and words can never inherently mean anything (this one existed before language models, but I have a terrible suspicion this _wrong_ way of thinking led to LLMs taking over everything). Idealism seems to encourage these acts of pointless deliberation on completely irrelevant ideas as if they were much more important than they were simply because the act of thinking ideas is turned into a kind of magic ritual of assigning unreal things power, and given ultimate importance. You can also see from this how it is that people seem to get disproportionately angry at bad ideas of any kind and try to say that because each act of putting them where someone can see them is a social behavior and active speech act you need to get them out of Community immediately and it should never be okay to say them at all. This concept can only be true when ideas themselves are taken to have inherent power. If everyone understood that ideas themselves had no power to cause anything without the proper material prerequisites for that specific outcome, everyone would probably calm down about that and allow a lot more things to be said.

After "trying out" Liberal-republicanism and blue anarchism for an extended time and coming to see them for what they really are, one of my top impressions now is... what's wrong with objecting to Idealism? Why _can't_ I see a blatantly Idealist concept like a set of opposing things becoming a unified Creation and object on principle? I've tried out objecting to things emotionally, and avoiding the "bigotry" of logic. And I can see what the appeal is: for most people, emotions are the only window out of Idealism and into the material world (the body) where things actually become objectively necessary instead of every Idea having to be equally important to the point that kills people. But there is just one problem. Individual needs don't stop for each other. They contradict each other. It's all too easy for two people to both say they were hurt or even that they will each starve if they don't have each other's food, and just like with ideas, it becomes that there is no correct answer to which person is truly more important and which person actually gains ethical priority. Ethics is a losing battle. The entire proposition of trying to say individual people's pain can dictate what is the best outcome and the thing that causes no pain is True and the thing that causes pain is False is fundamentally incorrect. This is one of the core, central errors that leads to unjust systems like Liberal-republicanism. The concept of a "pain olympics" isn't new, it's been baked into all Liberal-republican theory from the start beginning at the false concept that individual actions have inherent power to be ethical or unethical. No, individual actions lead up to larger social formations in the form of estates and republics of specific types, but these seas of actions can only be judged as entire systems, and also, to call them Right or Wrong or Good or Bad may be unacceptably prejudiced. I'll say it again: if Liberal-republicans think it's okay to prescriptively mark Bolshevism "false" on grounds of ethical rules, and get rid of all Communist regimes, that feeds directly into Stalin's government brutally assassinating Trotsky. You can't have a little bit of bigotry and expect it to not have consequences. Equality of communities means equality of communities, which means equality of Liberal-republican and Communist communities. Voting means inequality of communities.

I think if I have a craft other than attempting to improve Marxism, I am a failed science fiction writer. After having everything taken away from me — don't study living things with science, don't work in science, don't talk about climate change if your brain is naturally bad at emotions and intuition, don't write stories if they don't relegate science to set dressing and have an inherent humanities bent, don't replace religion with science — I think the only good response is to turn aggressively against any and all uses of science like they wanted me to as well as many uses of technology, but then to explain that none of it's on principle and instead I want all that energy to go into an intense period of research in order to understand the processes of society utterly and completely. I think the First World has genuinely hit a point where every conceivable good and service exists now and First World countries could actually drop all science and a lot of technology research while research into Marxism is genuinely one of the only "products" they really, urgently need. "Degrowth", "degrowth", "problems on earth", "problems on earth". Fine. You kept saying it, and I heard you! How about we just really actually have no more science until we solve all our "problems on earth"? All of those problems are problems that involve understanding pieces of human societies as inanimate objects. None of them involve just having good sentiments. You know who stopped looking up to the heavens or into cyberspace to solve all our Problems On Earth? Kim Il-sung!

That's the general answer. If First World countries want "degrowth", solar power, "sustainable" or sensible levels of innovation and production, and a unified society without political factions shooting each other and senseless political division, then they must seek a way for the population to control society itself and all its material structure that would be visible from an aerial view so the people can finally solve all the _internal structural problems_ inside the ways large collections of people interact that lead to frontier wars, climate effects, neoliberalism (! it's not an uncaused cause), and lawyers who could never conceive of another kind of republic literally migrating out of the United States to Italy because they're not stupid enough not to realize that Liberal-republicanism is unsalvageable. That takes dedication. That takes an actual recognition that every single thing you do at work to earn money which is not contributing to Degrowth Sustainability Problems On Earth is part of the problem, and as long as somebody _directed you_ to do what you're doing horizontally through a social or economic agora instead of through a democratic process with real power to stop an entire half of society from doing what it's doing you might still be part of the problem. Don't be an anarchist. I'll repeat it again: _don't be_ an anarchist. You can solve Degrowth Sustainability NonGreed Problems On Earth when you stop trying to build an international civilization in opposition to Marxism — you too, Alan Woods — and contribute to the creation of an international Marxist state equipped with the ability to analyze every sociophilosophy through meta-Marxism.

I've been thinking, in my spare time, about the concept of redirecting science fiction specifically into the Materialist analysis of _how particular concrete forms of society transform into other concrete forms of society_, so that science fiction begins using the proto-science of Marxism or meta-Marxism as its "science" of focus and every science fiction scenario written with it becomes about analyzing something actually material and concrete about society and solving a relatively grounded set of Problems on Earth. <ref name="iba"/>

Science is dead; long live science.

[unfinished]

== Footnotes ==
<references>

<ref name="DFR">{{book|Democracy for Realists}}. [retrieve later]</ref>

<ref name="iba">Among other things, I think there are some meta-Marxist concepts that could lead to a great narrative card game. Games like {{game|Magic: the Gathering}} and its "forgotten brother" {{game|Arcmage}} always assume that the civilization or army you set up will be something similar to feudalism, but wouldn't it be more interesting if a game could tell the story of multiple historical periods or systems competing to exist? I think it would. I knew this was far too off-topic to put in the text. But, in case I write any pages on it worth finding later, I call my card simulation concept the "Aurora system".</ref>

<ref name="wm">I gave a rather simplified version of wavemachine logic in the "swatch analysis" section. What it was really designed for is modeling the interactions of material ideas to produce other material ideas, such that you can lay out an interaction between two Ideals that are claimed to model a real situation and then do a materialist inversion on the immaterial ideas to turn them into material ideas. The full version of wavemachine logic is vaguely inspired by how quantum superpositions are used to model fundamental-particle interactions (hence the name "wave machine"), and includes the ability to take two fuzzily defined concepts and lay all their known characteristics out on a grid in order to get clues about what the outcome could be, much like a Punnet square will put two forms of a gene on either side of a grid to generate genotypes that are then calculated into visual traits through observed rules of organism biology. In this way, wavemachine logic can be used either in a more traditional way to combine two second-order propositions to generate syllogisms without necessarily needing the "wave machine" grid, or in its own way of combining two first-order objects that appear inside propositions on a grid to guess what might happen when they interact. I am still working out how to formalize the rules of propositions combining onto each other two or more at a time such that propositions inside one philosophy can uncover obvious points of incoherence inside another philosophy, but there will presumably be specific rules to help with that too.</ref>

</references>

== Links ==
* [[Special:PermanentLink/44389|survey questions]] [not actually used... yet]



[[Category:MDem v5.4 entries]]

Research:MDem/5.4r/0999 north-letter

2026-08-01T05:19:41Z

Reversedragon: wavemachine logic / proofread

<h2 class="toc-only">Introduction</h2>
Hello.

Since around 2021 I have been working on a framework I now call "[[E:Q92|violet Marxism]]", or more generically, "meta-Marxism". This is a strictly Materialist framework which attempts to [[EC:9k/RD/Q697 sublation|remove the concept of abstract ideas]] from Marxism as much as is actually feasible. (I unfortunately have to clarify that when there are a couple recorded uses of the term "meta-Marxism" before violet Marxism and unrelated to it which were more or less improperly applying bourgeois ideals to Marxism, notably [[EC:9k/RD/Q21,29|one from Althusser]].) Violet Marxism is the study {{em|of}} Marxisms and other philosophies as physical objects, namely countable republics or movements containing arrangements of people. It is very similar to [[E:infra-Marxism|Marxism in general]], but with one major distinction that makes them different: whenever real-world Marxist organizations run into irreconcilable differences, violet Marxism takes a step back and looks at the entire situation from above, considering the two parties or Internationals to be completely different things and no longer preserving the assumption that either of them is the same kind of phenomenon as the other one. For instance, the day the Soviet Union's party split from China, violet Marxism would start to distinguish them and treat them as different movements or philosophies specifically in order to try to uncover which one has the more salvageable program and which one is making the worst errors. Analyzing errors is already a fairly common activity within Marxism, but there is one major problem with it. Whenever any two organizations diverge from each other, they will each come up with a different account of who made errors and what errors everyone made, sometimes defending their own flawed accounts over other parties' accounts to the end. This can be rather intimidating to newcomers to Marxist theory, much less average workers, because the entire process of figuring out what parties might be right becomes a complicated logical puzzle which requires extensive research on many different Marxist tendencies and each tendency's whole timeline of history to even begin to understand. In my own experience, a lot of people seem to give up and take various parties that made errors at face value, thinking that that particular program "is Marxism" and they no longer trust Marxism and are going to go along with some bourgeois philosophy, or they no longer trust Trotskyism (this was a problem I had). With a method that explicitly starts by treating no particular version of Marxism as official and instead studying each one as its own entity with its own understandings and motivations (including instances of violet Marxism being put into practice in an organization, if necessary), this might become less of a problem, and it might become easier to give people an intuitive understanding of what is an error and what is Marxism and what is a small variation within Marxism as it is still searching for the best strategies.

One of the first important caveats to understand with a Materialist analysis "of Marxisms" is that in one sense violet Marxism does not exist, and will never exist. There can be a violet Marxist method, but it will always be applied inside some real Marxist organization in a real set of historical circumstances that will create some particular vantage point and set of biases in how the Materialist analysis of that party and other parties should be applied. Thus, violet Marxism does not "magically" solve the problem of parties showing up with different distorted perspectives, which will still continue to exist. The thing it does instead is attempt to construct shared grounds on which two parties could come to an objective consensus only if they actually wish to know what is materially accurate, and to find ways out of local perspectives to a bigger-picture view. Violet Marxism has the same quirk seen in many forms of mathematics of being a bit more precise than reality so that the people who know how to use it will find enough flexibility between it and the reality placed inside it to make good use of it. Between the factions inside it and the people looking at it an analysis of history never really is neutral, nor does it need to be perfectly neutral to be useful. So violet Marxism uses the rhetorical conceit of looking outside multiple factions as its tool, but in reality, it only does that so that the factions with the best overall understanding of material reality can take hold of it and use it to better make their point. Marxism begins well aware that its purpose is to empower a new historical period to take its position over previous stagnating historical periods that have impeded it — whether this is capitalism, or perhaps a low-quality Marxist party attempting and failing to create the type of physical historical period we call a workers' state. Violet Marxism does basically the same thing, but aims to do it more precisely.

The conditions that led to me putting together violet Marxism were rather strange and specific, although familiar to anyone from the United States or Australia. The United States has been... uniquely {{em|in a slump}}. I don't know what better way to put it than that. Not in a slump economically, exactly. Not in terms of its organizations, which have always been sporadic yet are not in a state which has really changed much since 1980. Not in terms of bourgeois parties, which have been doing the same things for around 200 years now. Instead there has been... a weirdly indescribable kind of slump where it seems as if {{em|the concept of knowledge has died}} and social interaction has died. Everyone is shocked and horrified by news headlines and keeps lining up with their cafeteria tray for more poison, but it seems as if knowledge is no longer learned because it is useful and nobody ever actually makes use of it in order to interpret anything that has ever happened. Everything anyone knows is "because I said so" or "because they made me learn it". Everyone seems to know that ethics is "obvious" but can't actually explain it to anyone well enough for it to actually have any use in teaching anyone who isn't ethical to be ethical. The word "community" is in every other sentence people say, like saying a word referring to society existing explains all the details that make up society. But nobody seems to know for the life of them what a community even is or how any countable group of people can form around anything except sheer inherent similarity and compatibility and intuition. Nobody here can keep friends. Interacting with relatives makes you wonder more and more every day when families ever existed and what a family is. People online who ironically are on the internet periodically complain about how you shouldn't let the internet try to grab every bit of your attention, but if you happily disconnect from all the noise of the internet, you'll quickly find yourself entirely alone. Some days I am not sure what a society even is any more or when sociality ever actually existed. But I do know that the United States is so violent that you'd better not leave your door and actually talk to anyone because somebody might shoot you. That's about how bad it's been. I feel like society has not actually existed since about 2015 and I have already been living in societal collapse for 11 years. I have tap water. I can analyze internet videos. But every day for at least a couple of seconds I feel like people are spontaneously going to go mad some day and I'm going to die. Everybody believes nothing is wrong, but nothing is right. Oh, right, and people are constantly arguing back and forth over whether gender identity is a conspiracy, as the only political issue anyone "understands". Gender identity and Palestine — the only two political issues in existence that everybody thinks they know about but most people cannot explain their position on whatsoever.

I feel like my journey started when I found some garbled second-hand conspiracy theories from the Republican Party that "The Left" was planting Communists who were also anarchists and religious fundamentalists and Gnostics depending on the person retelling the story inside universities and the arts. No part of the story made any sense. And it really made me wonder, how did we even get here? What are any of the actual actors inside these statements? What is the actual causality going on here? So every time I thought I'd found a {{em|true}} fact that matched up with these stories, I would silently compile them all together and see if any of it had come closer to making sense. And I discovered something strange. The United States looked a lot less like one society than like two separate societies competing over a disputed territory. The fault lines between clusters of people aligned with each bourgeois party were real, and the two bodies of people would periodically try to fill up particular businesses or government institutions all "sky" or all "rust", acting really upset and pushing out the couple of extra members who appeared who would suddenly show up as Republicans or Democrats. Sometimes it would happen as specific demographic identities, like 13 men and 2 women, or 10 White people and 1 Black person, or 11 atheists and 1 Christian. There were a lot of different lines on which people would become divided into a traditional majority and an uncommon minority, or a new majority and a traditional minority, and any of them could stack together to form the rust and sky divisions of Republican and Democrat, leading to people feeling like minorities who happened not to belong to the most well-established social graph or most common ideology had to be some kind of conspiracy. But that was silly. What was really happening was that people had not fully internalized that philosophies were inherently tied to particular countable socially-linked groups of allies or acquaintances, connecting society and philosophy into a single phenomenon of {{dfn|sociophilosophies}}.

Liberal-republicanism had designed itself assuming that Liberal-republican political parties weren't actually "real". That they would form each election around arbitrary interest groups and issues, but that they wouldn't necessarily stick around in nearly the same shapes for 200 years. But reality had not agreed. Instead, what seemed to actually be happening was that people would align onto a party and keep voting for all its candidates until they felt "betrayed" by that party and then would start voting for the other party, alternating wildly if they had no consistent trust but passing the same party down to their children if they did. <ref name="DFR"/> During the Civil War period, Liberal-republican parties aligned neatly onto slave states and free states and formed entire separate nationalities with separate nation-states; even after the United States abolished slavery and attempted to force itself back together, White people in the Southern states were still doing their best to keep Black people from living in their areas and it still seemed as if the division was permanent. On one hand, these observations seemed to make sense with the Marxist account of capitalism. Large societies had to be made of structures ([[E:relations of production|relations]] arranged to harness productive forces), and if capitalists owned those structures and conflated the structures with themselves, the capitalists would be able to chain together to form something like the modern Democratic Party, or the modern Republican Party. Society in general being like one big graph of dots linked together, you could then have any number of people chaining onto the major groups of capitalists believing the representatives that group chose somehow represented the overall group's interests. But that didn't explain how the two parties had stayed so consistent since the Civil War. Marx had taken note of how the division in the United States had happened due to slavery, and the re-unification of the two bodies of westward-leaking colonists had correlated with the North being able to force the South away from slavery to capitalism. But centuries later there was also something else going on that was hard to quantify. If the United States was all capitalism now, why was it still divided? Why was every election making the divisions cleaner and the district lines stranger and only sharpening the old division further? Why was the United States behaving like it wanted to partly define freedom as the ideological segregation of the Confederate party-nationality and ultimately throw out elections and the Constitution in favor of claiming that whether a Constitution existed or not ethics was ethics and freedom was freedom?

Well, I'll return to what the answers were later, but for the moment, I'll just say that as I was studying the history of Marxism, the Chinese revolution and the two different periods of division in the Soviet Union seemed like they were leading me to the answers. In China, Mao's party had to cover a very large terrain, to the point it was possible to plot on a map what overall percentage of China was still under feudal control or under control of the nationalists. In the Soviet Union region, again, there was a very big terrain to cover in the process of the revolution. I had found one particular text by Trotsky, {{book|Terrorism and Communism}} chapter 8, which described this quite vividly. The Red Army and the White Armies were no mere ideas, they were occupying specific places at specific points in time, and — the most interesting to me — fighting battles back and forth over particular pieces of industry. It was vaguely similar to the incidents of Republicans and Democrats fighting over corporations, although more dramatic and violent. But then something else caught my attention — the conflict between Stalin's party and early Trotskyism. I had not seen a lot of in-depth coverage on this in mainstream Marxist sources. Trotskyists were talking about it, of course, because it was their history. And for a while, I became obsessed with figuring out where this conflict had come from and what exactly had been driving it. I was fairly solidly aligned with the Stalinists back then, but I was just about the most interested in the history of early Trotskyism of any Stalinist in the whole United States. Every so often I would go through Trotskyist talks or party programs and I would keep trying to reconstruct exactly what Trotskyists were trying to accomplish and what made a party Trotskyist. And I could never figure it out.

At that time I was really focused on the concept of describing civilizations as small-scale structure inside a particular region. "Socialism in one country" made sense to me not because I thought countries were natural or had to be the way they currently were, but because I was beginning to see Marxism as a model of how countries formed into different kinds of civilizations based on different kinds of arrangements of people from the level of individuals to the level of class territories or institutions up to the level of factions like the Bolshevik Party fighting the White Army up to the level of China- or Russia-sized republics where a specific kind of state would be created and the bourgeoisie or eventually the proletariat would be able to control the entire region. I thought Marx and Lenin and maybe even Mao with his other huge terrain to cover and successful army were brilliant for being able to take descriptions of feudal orders, capitalism, and socialism and turn them from abstract ideas into material objects with internal structure, so that {{em|socialism really was something}} in the same sense that carbon dioxide was something specific with a specific shape or cellulose was something specific. I dubbed this concept of analyzing civilizations or revolutionary movements down to a very fine "chemical" scale {{dfn|molecularization}} and I was convinced that by the time Marxism was able to properly understand weird situations like the Democrats and Republicans or (as I believed then) Stalin's party versus early Trotskyism, it would become a new kind of Marxist theory called {{dfn|molecular Marxism}} that would eventually be able to create successful revolutions into socialism in the First World. Molecular Marxism might at some point in the future actually take Marxism from a proto-science into a proper science. But despite knowing Marxism had a lot of potential to improve "in the future" I still kept ending up completely baffled by Trotskyism. I would keep taking Trotskyism and thinking, surely if Trotskyists successfully created a republic controlled solely by them and not containing any Stalinists, there would be some particular thing they would create inside it which would be unique to Trotskyism. Whenever people separate themselves into factions that are in heated conflict there is always some actual reason related to what each faction actually wants to materially achieve. The White Army wanted to defend aging structures like the Russian Orthodox Church in its powerful medieval form. The Nazi Party, although not as distinct from capitalism as people would like to believe, did have its own material aim of expanding its violence to other regions to create a larger empire. Even the Republicans and Democrats have small and slightly complicated material differences: people cluster into particular localized demographic subpopulations like the Black subpopulation or the LGBT+ subpopulation that line up behind the Democrats, the Republicans are slightly more openly friendly to capitalists as a bloc, and although they all live in capitalism they materially consist of different assembled populations of people and become distinct material objects, similar to how countries are distinct partly because there are borders between their bodies of capitalists. But I really could not figure out what made Trotskyists different from Stalinists. Both of them were claiming to follow Marxism. Stalin would stand by everything Lenin said in the same period, about Materialism and forming nation-wide Marxist parties instead of disorganized clusters of trade unions. But once he was in contact with the United States, Trotsky was giving people advice that sounded like he understood what a Marxist party was and how to stop capitalist-style revisionism from leaking into parties. So both of them were Marxists, both of them believed in nationalized property in the Soviet Union, and both of them talked about socialist transition. And both of them had a Communist International. Trotsky showed up at the Third International, and later claimed that policies were wrong inside the Third International. But this all connected back to Stalin and his allies, so didn't Trotsky's complaints have to somehow be at a scale smaller than Communist Internationals? So that left me scrambling trying to figure out exactly what policy complaints Trotsky actually had inside the space of any particular region as the key to what a Trotskyist party was supposed to have already solved and how Stalinists had failed to create Trotskyist transition. My analysis was a bit blockheaded, but I did have a very specific angle that I was looking at things from. I was okay with the concept of Trotskyism containing a Fourth International as a necessary component of {{i|what Trotskyism is}}. I was okay with the concept of Trotskyism going through a Marxist revolution and then taking up the area of what had been several countries before — if the Soviet Union came to be, was that really an impossibility? I wasn't going through this analysis "for the NKVD", feeling like Trotskyism had to be understood so it could be destroyed. If anything, I found the conflict between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism upsetting and I wanted to solve the structure and development of each of them so that maybe they could coexist. (The continued existence of Stalinist states anywhere on this planet being entirely hypothetical and counterfactual at this point, but I think you can see what I meant.) I knew that proposition was a bit naïve, to simply say that all groups of Marxist theorists "ought to" work together to create a Communist International, but I didn't really know why that was. And so, I set out to create meta-Marxist analysis to explain on a Materialist basis why different Marxist tendencies were different.

I knew on some level that if I was hypothetically trying to get Stalinism and Trotskyism to coexist some time back in the 1920s, it might be a wholly irreconcilable thing. When groups of people structure themselves into separate factions, there are moments in history where those factions neatly consist of particular class structures, and where the division in classes is going to lead to class conflict. At other moments, factions like the Republicans and Democrats do not lead to this kind of conflict because both of them are arranged around a group of bourgeoisie and they are able to recognize each other as similar. But I had the facts in front of me that Stalinist parties and Trotskyism had repeatedly ended up in violent conflict in various regions of the world for some unknown reason. I had to at least consider that the separation between them was somehow similar to a class conflict. But the thing that kept me stumped was this: bourgeois factions that are both capitalism manage to uneasily get along, so if Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism are both Marxisms, or at least they both were in the 1920s, then why wouldn't the two of them simply get along and form socialism? The major class conflict of the 1900s was between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it was always just those two except in feudal orders containing nobility, and all the other layers joined to one of them or the other. The two seemingly separate Marxisms eventually merging back together or coexisting seemed much more consistent with all the Marxist theory I'd been looking at up to that point... all the Marxist theory I'd been looking at {{em|from the Stalinists}}.

This was the problem. All the Stalinist theory I had ever seen seemed to weirdly oversimplify Marxism and not give enough detail to describe real-world situations. {{i|Bourgeoise, proletariat, bourgeoisie, proletariat, form organizations, crises of capitalism, four legs good, two legs bad.}} It couldn't explain something like the IMT making an announcement it had failed to infiltrate the British Labour Party and whether that was a good thing because they were providing an example that bourgeois reforms weren't working or whether it was a bad thing because this was not the first time and the IMT had been repeatedly trying the same opportunist methods over and over. (For anyone new to Marxism who finds this: it's the latter. Up to now the RCI has been dangerously close to becoming the 21st Century's Second International, and can only be spared that title because the USFI got closer.) Now, educating people about the existence of the bourgeoisie and forming organizations both do have their role (it would be nice if the United States actually had any functioning organizations capable of forming a larger movement), but this kind of rhetoric was never going to be able to explain the existence of Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Deng Xiaoping Thought as separate philosophies embedded in their own distinct republics or movements.

I knew that trying to think of Marxism as a single world revolution was simply not working; this seemed to sink all Marxist movements into sectarianism and actively fighting each other for control every single time. But what I gradually discovered over time was that countries themselves have always been made of parallel layers of structure that each attempted to land on the same particular outer country border independently, which back in the time of monarchy were known as estates. Marx had examined this phenomenon of estates too. (I currently still need to go back and read some of the earliest Marxist works, but I knew that was worth mentioning.) The clergy, nobility, and lower classes of the time all had their own "parliament processes" of sorts, which were eventually separated out into different kinds of republics. The clergy could only do so much and may have participated in separating different European empires into separate kingdoms, while the nobility were capable of using their wealth and land to section kingdoms into smaller states that in regions like China would sometimes fracture into separate clusters and become new kingdoms, and the bourgeoisie would eventually form Liberal republics — three different forms of structure came out of them all occupying different scales, in the form of kingdoms (or expanding empires) that became nation-states, local-states, and Liberal-republican parties or disembodied political factions. But if you superimpose the centuries-old concept of estates onto the Chinese revolution or the Russian revolution, what you begin to notice is that estates exist before and below nation-states, and estates form into states specifically based on their internal characteristics as estates. This meant that a more sophisticated theory of what estates were and "are" that examined them for their own sake could explain the difference between two distinct factions of people that appeared to contain the same classes — if England and France both contained nobility, even if you could outline a section of noble territories that were all Protestant and should not have obvious reasons to be rivals, that was not going to guarantee they would both fuse into one kingdom. From there, I started considering different rival Marxist movements as unities of opposites that operated inside the same material contradiction and interacted with and changed each other. The nature of interactions themselves is that they keep seemingly separate objects from actually being separate, and instead allow two distinct objects to add to each other's history. For a while I believed that the material separation between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism was simply recursively building on itself and the existing forms of resistance or violence in each faction were somehow leading to each other. That seemed to somewhat explain Dengism: China seemed to be drifting away from Marxism because of the antagonism between China and the First World, and as long as various other countries didn't understand that antagonism China would only defend itself harder and become more strict. But that certainly did not explain everything. Why had Trotsky written a lengthy criticism of the way the USSR operated internally ({{book|The Revolution Betrayed}}) if he wasn't trying to say that Trotskyism had a noticeably different internal structure and its entire socialist transition would look different? Was he just impatient about the pace of socialist transition? Was he trying to skip phases and land on upper-phase communism early? I wasn't fully convinced that Trotsky was bad at Marxism and knew nothing about it — as much as Stalinist sources were definitely trying to make me think that, and had made me quick to identify every single one of Trotsky's errors — so I was willing to entertain that he simply had a different way of doing things, but I still did not understand what it was.

Then in 2026 I had a "terrible" realization: people form a consciousness sized to whatever evolving object they are part of. If the way organizations form into larger structures when those structures are actually effective (Marxist parties, independent labor movements) is to go through a process of consciousness which is fundamentally shaped by or inside the active process of building themselves up into their near-future forms, then the process of forming a Communist International should affect the parties inside it downward giving them information about forming a Communist International as they are forming it. Many Marxist parties tend to assume that the task of forming a party inside a particular country region is separate from the task of forming a Communist International, but in doing that, they potentially overlook the changes that will occur in them when they actually form one, or worse, actively transform their party in a way that will make it difficult to form a Communist International. There is not exactly anything special and unique about first-hand experience, not for an individual and not even for an organization if either of them is equipped with the right knowledge to understand the overall material processes that happen inside experiences they haven't had. But at the same time, one of the things that does come with first-hand experience is the ability to directly interact with the near future. The closer an organization is to being in the physical state of cooperating with other organizations to form international structures, the closer it is to being able to interact with and learn about the next possible steps after or above that moment, through various spatial areas analyzing each other and each other's next moves apart or together. If two parties in the United States and Canada are already connected, they might be better able to predict what the best-case scenario for the overall region would be together than if they were acting separately. This would be true of any number of scales: when small organizations form spontaneously they are disconnected and do not have good understandings of each other's behavior, but as they succeed at becoming connected, if things go well their contradictory and "unpredictable" behavior versus each other should actually be able to turn around into a kind of error-correcting process where several different organizations understanding each other from the outside reveal each other's errors and quirks and eventually start to understand in what situations they will be able to rely on each other, or how to all increasingly align onto a better program. For any given social graph of workers all the groups of workers in the graph can become more capable of coordinated behavior after they have actually been functioning together and become more connected around the same objectives. Likewise, the exercise of several parties functioning together should give them the opportunity to actually change their behavior and become more functional as a Communist International. Instead of looking at things through traditional Marxist writings on dialectics, I tend to see everything through my own accumulated knowledge on physics and the kinds of mathematics appropriate to relativity or quantum mechanics, specifically because of strange correspondences I noticed between quantum mechanics and human behavior that made me come to the conclusion that relativity and quantum mechanics might offer insights for dialectical materialism. But either way, I had found a process I couldn't un-see. An isolated party was less likely by some kind of cumulative, repeating multiplier to develop the correct consciousness to form a Communist International, while if several parties managed to figure it out correctly they might all accomplish it faster. This was consistent with everything else I knew about time and historical events, that everything that happens in the universe is actually more like many separate timelines colliding with each other and building on each other in a circle, and events have an odd way of happening either more and more or less and less. A star is a great number of atoms all colliding and leading to more fusion reactions; a galaxy has fewer events between the objects in it the further apart the stars or other objects are. So it's not necessarily a mystery why important historical events all like to cluster together or not happen for long stretches of time; history itself is like a sudden burst of many events competing to happen. I should not have been surprised that this sort of fast, clustering all-or-nothing pattern would extend up to parties forming into Communist Internationals. But everything felt different the moment that actually sunk in. I had to really take my "meta-Marxist analysis" and draw it out on a space without boundaries, so it could extend out from tiny scales upward across the world. I was going to need that full terrain to understand each of the new "estates" possible today or historical Communist Internationals. I felt like I was going crazy. I had always believed there was next to no chance Trotskyism could actually be true. But I also felt like things were making more sense than before and the project was getting somewhere.

"No {{em|chance}} Trotskyism could be true". In some ways this was the key to everything. Generally speaking, all populations start out with various heterogeneous parts, and some of them turn out to be insignificant distinctions, but some of them turn into contradictory unities of opposites which can actively develop a population into something new or set it back. Between 2021 and 2026 I had always made the mistake of thinking that Trotskyism is only one thing, and that whenever Trotskyists had a bad program that this was also part of Trotskyism. I now see why I thought that: Trotskyists everywhere had always said they wanted to create a worldwide government where every Trotskyist party would join into a Fourth International and more or less every industrial population would act together to form a new society, with all the neighboring tribal societies and so forth presumably integrated into their region's democracy so that they are no longer in conflict with the former nation-states and can develop toward socialism to the extent they want to. Trotskyists kept saying they wanted to become a single world system; I wrote that down and didn't question it. I simply said, okay, I guess that makes sense, but if Trotskyist parties are all supposed to form one Fourth International then why are they so infamous for constantly being in conflict and calling each other revisionist? Why is it that Stalinists are so easily able to summarize Trotskyists as "Trotskyists' worst enemy", and why does that feel perfectly accurate whenever I open up one Trotskyist group's criticism of another one and attempt to understand it? Well... I was missing something that I would not have seen without both attempting to put together meta-Marxism and extending it out to the largest scales. Trotskyism is not just a single thing. When you actually look at Marxist movements out in the field there are about two versions of Trotskyism, one which is Marxist and one which is fake and resembles a Second International. Trotskyism is the process of the Fourth International attempting to form as a single system, but also of various groups that fail to understand Marxism breaking off the Fourth International at various times, while spreading around Marxist concepts and falsely appearing to be part of it. To anyone that interacted with the "fake" side of Trotskyism, it would definitely appear there was no chance of Trotskyism achieving anything. But probability is outwardly deceptive — if there are two colors of marbles in a jar and someone repeatedly draws exactly one of the colors, it's only when they actually draw the other one that it will finally appear to have a chance. And apparently, this was Trotsky and Cannon, while Grant, Cliff, and even Luxemburg were not quite as close to being part of the winning fraction. (Much less Stalin or Mao.)

So, in short, I started out thinking there was only one Communist International, but it seems what was really happening from 1925 to 1940 was that the Soviet Union contained Stalin's party, the layer of bureaucrats and Idealists (Yaroshenko, etc.), and then an entire second process of forming a Communist International all over again from the First to the Fourth which was all compressed into the space of one party and was busy messily sorting itself out to finally pull out of itself the real Fourth International. Stalinism and Trotskyism {{em|were}} separate things, but not because of the theoretical quality of each faction "as a whole". They were separate parallel processes of forming a Communist International. So everything I had thought was a sign of Trotskyism being unprincipled or having bad theories was actually more like a sign the USFI was going to develop later, and actually, that whole gradient from "bad" Trotskyist theories up to good ones was going to begin working itself out between 1936 and 1960. This seems like a period of history that everyone forgot. Everyone knows about the Great Terror. Everyone knows about "Animal Farm" and the Soviet Union sliding away into a sea of bureaucrats. Some people know about the hidden letters in which early Trotskyism plotted to kill members of the Soviet government in the course of its overall plan to try to overwrite Stalin's party with a Trotskyist revolution. (This did happen, by the way. It doesn't do anyone any good to keep denying that early Trotskyists did in fact die for a revolution.) But nobody remembers the second cascade of Communist Internationals that was busy secretly iterating on itself to finally churn out a Bolshevik International all over again. They called this "sectarianism", because they did not understand the consequences of molecularizing Marxism.

So, I am not aligned with Stalinism any more. I started putting together a new Marxist method (or maybe not new, I don't really know) for fully understanding every philosophy and political party including the strange mess of academic philosophies in the United States, but it ended me up here. I was as skeptical of Trotskyism as I could possibly be but my violet-Marxist method ended me up at realizing that it might just be the tendency that matches my findings the best and overall makes the most sense. So, now, I would like to present all the basic concepts of violet Marxism to the ICFI as best I can in hopes of getting closer to actually seeing it applied and improved. 
I have always had a very peripheral position as far as interesting events happening in the United States; I have a basic 4-year degree in science but my area never really sees any organizations or movements and I have always been a bit too disabled to work, so I mostly sit around trying to solve the world like a puzzle in hopes that will somehow make things better. I have never really felt like that was accomplishing much by itself, and have always wanted to actually get involved in some kind of organization, but due to various physical difficulties, trying to analyze the Marxist method and create better models of history is about all I can do. So, this is my attempt to try to begin contributing my findings. (I had also attempted to send letters outlining violet Marxism to two other places before, but I never actually got a response from either of them. This might be partly because the previous letters were not as well-ordered and thought-through and I've been developing my framework a lot more even since the second letter in March 2026. But, neither of the places I submitted this to before was Trotskyist, either.)

== Good and Evil: Stalin is not [[E:Hydra (Marvel Comics)|Hydra]] ==

Whenever two political factions come into violent opposition, it is common for people to ask if one of the factions is "immoral". Who's "Good", who's "Evil". A better question to ask is, {{i|why do people ask this question}}? (The meta-ethical question.) And the general answer will be, because people want to justify the rule of a particular class over a particular region, or its expansion over other regions. This explanation has been mostly sufficient for any historical period up to 1945. Nothing within this particular subject of discussion really got "complicated" until about 1953.

The historiography of civilizations attempting to characterize history in moral terms goes way back into the time of ancient kingdoms and empires at least as far as 5000 BC. Tribal societies may have created moral systems even earlier. But today, Christianity and its relatives are particularly infamous in terms of characterizations of various groups of people as Good or Evil. If an international war is Christian, it can become a righteous {{i|lang=en|crusade}}, or if Muslims were to do the same thing it could become a {{i|jihad}} — a religious "struggle", as if who has what religion was one of the most important axes of historical progression. Before them, Zoroastrianism tried to unite people against a generalized god of strife, and after them, Zionism would unite two modern religious groups for the "righteous" task of reviving an ancient war that should have no longer made any sense to anyone. Into the 1800s, these kinds of characterizations of monarchic empires as "good" or "evil" had begun to dissociate from any notion of "godly" or "ungodly" and become wildly secularized, spreading across everything from fictional fantasy narratives to actual accounts of World War II — the Nazis were Evil, the part of the First World that didn't turn into nazis was Good, when you want to portray an "evil empire" on a TV show, you show people fantasy nazis. Even so, these simplistic moral models have been almost wholly incapable of understanding systems like Liberal-republicanism and why exactly it is that for instance the US Republican and Democratic Parties can both call each other Evil and themselves Good and fear each other equally. It has been a running joke in the United States that people constantly compare the Republican Party to Voldemort and the {{book|Harry Potter}} books' fictional depictions of wizard nazis, years ago in a sincere capacity, and now in a reflexive ironic capacity sketching a picture frame around the absurdity that anyone including typical center-Liberal academics would think such a metaphor was actually useful. One of these interpretations is the Idealist view of history. One of these interpretations is slowly and painfully discovering the Materialist model.

The root of the connection between religion and the content of its moral statements can be traced back to the class with the most control over religion itself. In a feudal period, depending on exactly how a kingdom develops, the borders of two kingdoms will essentially be formed with the help of two particular bodies of clergy. In India, Brahmins or Kshatriyas (the two broad priest and noble layers associated with regional religions that would fuse into Hinduism) ruled various kingdoms, before a Buddhist emperor would then unify them. In the early history of Islam, religious figures such as caliphs sometimes had huge importance in political and military roles simply due to how small the societies were and how recently the societies had emerged. Each body of clergy will have particular definitions of which kingdoms they think are Good or Evil, or perhaps Harmonious versus Unharmonious, but in the end, any narrative they present about the relationship between the body of clergy that ties together the kingdom and the outside will ultimately come from the body of clergy protecting its own class position that is both usually fairly high-ranking within the kingdom and tasked with explaining the creation of one particular kingdom somewhat exclusively. It is often not advantageous to the clergy to recognize any external body of clergy as Good or Reasonable, so sometimes they simply uphold the "reality" that other countable societies of people such as islands of nobility that do not conform to the same Brahmanic codes or Christian or Jewish kingdoms that do not mesh well with the local caliph are not to be trusted. While it is possible for a religion to behave in a syncretic way and simply collect local variations of religion into itself, religion will also tend to mark anything that fractures kingdoms apart as some kind of unenlightened behavior or sin, and try to paint any individual who does that behavior as the root of large-scale problems.

Of course, religious layers can have many possible roles within a feudal society, each one with hidden consequences. These may include justifying a particular king as "the correct one", building loyalty between groups of nobles or merchants or peasants all aligned around the same religion, or actually structuring mundane functions of local government as in the parish system in Germany (which was effectively used to collect taxes) or the use of churches as meeting-houses in the early United States. In Greece, Rome, and Egypt, as well as in India, polytheistic religion aided in joining separate cities or patches of feudalism into larger societies as people began to rationalize various gods or groups of priests as inherently belonging to the same greater whole. In the ancient world religion slowly aided people toward urbanization, as Greek or Egyptian cults helped to anchor and structure cities, or later European-style churches in the 1700s would come to provide "spaces of community" that once again would allow people to meet together in a period where agrarian society tended to push people apart, slowly encouraging towns and secular forms of town government to be created. The creation of cities was not the "goal" of religion, as historical events themselves generally cannot think or plan anything, and as far as trying to plan for what the future can actually become, any Idealist philosophy is even worse at that. However, the one thing that gives Idealism power, very much by accident, is that all Idealist philosophies will always have material consequences no matter what is in them. The consequences may look nothing like what the Idealist philosophy promises, and yet they will happen, because whenever any two Idealist prescriptions or projections run into each other and have no actual answer, the material world will decide independent of them what the real answer is. Thus, religions can form "Protestant community spaces", and end up with the secular result of cities and United States federalism mediated by the Constitution, or they can form supposedly-perfect estates with an entire parliament just for the churches centuries ago in France or Germany, and yet ultimately end up with the people getting tired of the top two estates and dissolving them to create a new republic with only one estate (Liberal-republicanism). The clergy and the nobility didn't ask for there to be a French Revolution or an English war over parliament that would eventually end in a bourgeois parliament. But the act of religion or morality dictating what "should" happen or what "should" exist or what abstract Ideals inherently belong in balance is separate from the way the world really functions — Idealism may study the poetic {{em|art}} of essences, balanced conglomerates, and oppositions, but Materialism describes the results of concrete interactions within the physical world.

All of this should be familiar to anyone who already knows about Marx and Engels. But the actual experiences of the Russian Revolution and the Cold War have brought in one very important twist: most of the time, "Progressive" and "Reactionary" are very nearly as arbitrary in their meanings as "Good" and "Evil". Most people within Liberal-republicanism simply take the concept of Progress and assign it to whatever philosophy they happen to personally trust the most, rather than taking any time to consider the difficult problem of whether there actually could be an objective answer to the question. Equally, anarchists and Menshevik parties at the time of the Russian Empire had no real idea which kinds of things they labeled "Progressive" or "Reactionary" were the most plausible to actually happen, even if some of them they may have had a better sense for which outcomes were inherently inclusive than some Liberal-republicans now. When have people actually risen out of the concepts of Good and Evil, and when have they simply tried to escape them [[E:Changing names changes things (Engels)|by giving them different names]]?

People tend to assume their definitions of Good and Bad "mean something". But when you truly test them by giving them a historical situation in another country seemingly nothing like their own that they {{em|should}} have no personal stake in, in practice, the way people respond to something like the Moscow Trials period will vary wildly depending on exactly what specific faction of people they belong to. If you're a center-Liberal like the Democrats, Trotsky is good. If you're a Tory, Trotsky is bad. If you're a Maoist, Trotsky is bad. If you're PragerU, Trotsky is good. If you're a Stalinist, Trotsky is bad. If you're a Trotskyist from Japan, Trotsky is bad. If you're a Lacanian psychoanalyst, Trotsky is good. If you're a Lacanian named Molly Ann Rothenberg, Trotsky is bad. If you're a journalist Trotsky is good. If you're an anarchist Trotsky is bad. If you're a Duginist neo-nazi Trotsky is good. If you're a social-democratic organizer Trotsky is good. If you're a lawyer Trotsky is bad. If you're Alan Woods Trotsky is the best thing ever. If you're a social-democrat on the internet Trotsky is bad. It is as if Trotsky has completely broken morality open like some kind of memory access error where a computer program that would normally behave in specific ways is churning through random garbage data and spitting out nonsense. Nobody seems to know what they're talking about whatsoever. Trotsky seems to turn into a different "character" in each retelling of the story, sometimes a bourgeois democrat, sometimes a terrible dictator, sometimes a kulak, sometimes a bad copy of Rosa Luxemburg, sometimes Brutus, sometimes Caesar, sometimes the patron saint of newspapers as government, sometimes a true Russian revolutionary for helping Toryism, sometimes a forgotten British Labour MP, sometimes a wannabe framer of the US Constitution who couldn't do anything right, sometimes the only real heir of the one genuine Marxism but announced in exactly the kind of way that makes you wonder if it's actually true. Nobody can seem to make up their minds who exactly he was even as people seem to have a relatively homogeneous pool of opinions about Stalin — either Stalin defended Bolshevism and that was good, or Stalin defended Bolshevism and that was bad. Anarchists will often give strange opinions about Stalin, but almost all of these come down to word definitions and trying to appropriate the word "communism" to solely mean "anarchism", blending back into all the center-Liberal opinions in the "Bad" bucket. Trotskyists seem to be the only group of people to regularly claim that Stalin did not represent Bolshevism and {{em|Bolshevism}} as it existed in the Soviet Union should have been something different. But, hand modern Trotskyists over to all the people putting out different narratives about Trotsky, and the bourgeoisie and center-Liberal voters will basically spin the same narratives as they ever did. Nobody but Trotskyists seems to actually have a clear understanding of what Trotskyism really is. The average First-World citizen almost seems to have a better understanding of quantum physics and how to disprove string theory than they do of Trotskyism.

As people left feudal periods and entered republican periods, some started to notice the futility of labeling things Good or Evil. In China, weakened by repeated and seemingly endless warring states periods, Buddhism tried the tactic of simply _giving up_, and conceptualizing what might be called Light and Darkness as simple opposing parts of a greater whole, always in competition, but inevitably present. To philosophers, this kind of turn can seem unbelievably profound, but in its full context it is easy to recognize as an adaptation to existing historical circumstances that simply allows existing patterns of division to continue. Now, after 200 years of Liberal-republican parties increasingly stagnating in the United States, anarchists and various others have been increasingly turning to Buddhist imagery simply to represent the ever-present opposition between center-Liberals and Tories. We know by now that the division between center-Liberal and Tory parties like the Democrats and Republicans or supposed "Labor" and Liberal parties is deliberately engineered. Periodically, the United States bourgeoisie will see islands of bourgeoisie centralizing and then decide that having too many bourgeoisie in one place is "tyrannical" — as with corporate mergers, or the Democratic-Republican party — and that they must be divided in two as the correct course of action that is supposedly conducive to "human rights" and "freedom". The question almost nobody has stopped and thought about enough is, {{em|why is this}}? What is the significance of the United States constantly and deliberately dividing in defiance of its background condition of trying to consolidate and unify? Could it be that the people of the United States {{em|do not in fact understand}} how to separate ruling class narratives of Good and Bad from the actual material layout of class rule?

Could it be that none of the world's Marxist parties know how to separate value judgements about separations from the physical causes of separations either?

Within the bounds of Liberal-republicanism, no matter how you attempt to construct a framework of ethics to serve the goals ethics is supposedly intended to serve, you will eventually find that it is contradictory for Liberal-republicans to claim they support Trotsky but to not accept Trotskyism. It is not possible to actually side with Trotsky in a sense where he would hypothetically agree the person in question is in support of human rights and also to remain on the side of Liberal-republicanism at the same time. It is also not possible to side with Liberal-republicanism and consistently get it to agree that Trotsky is in support of human rights. What Trotsky considered to be a desirable outcome and what Liberal-republicanism considers to be Good or ethical are completely different things, shaped by the fact that Liberal-republicanism wants to maintain capitalism and Trotsky aimed to get rid of global capitalism. Similarly, one could also say that Stalin's set of priorities around preventing the Soviet population from returning to deathly starvation and Trotsky's set of priorities around attempting to liberate Europe led to different conceptions of what would be a desirable outcome. To put things another way, Stalin and Trotsky had different models of the future and what possibilities the near future could produce — they effectively had {{em|different plural bodies of historical materialism}} connecting different collections of observations to different collections of guesses.

The United States bourgeoisie are generally trapped in what can be called {{dfn|ideology}} in the strong sense: their models of reality are often not even close to how reality actually works, and largely amount to the sets of ideas that their class position, situated along the outer borders of the Republican or Democratic "estates", produces. What happens to Marxist theorists in different tendencies only creates "ideology" in a much weaker sense. Two parties will end up with diverging models of reality that cause them to behave as different identifiable tendencies and reject each other, but in some cases, these incorrect models of reality can actually be fixed. It is unlikely the whole organization will notice the error at once, but through the development of contradictions in an organization, the organization can turn itself around and use the process of people dividing themselves by reality-model that would otherwise destroy organizations in order to constructively assemble as many people as possible back onto the correct "estate".

This is the real consequence of {{dfn|molecularizing Marxism}}. Marxism does not actually take place in parties in the way that was once thought to be the case. In one sense, Marxism starts distinctly below the scale of any party with factions simply assembling themselves together around a particular model of reality, and if that model of reality has enough explanatory power, the underlying faction will simply continue extending upward to such a great scale it escapes the bounds of individual countries. This does not mean parties do not need to exist — organizations still serve an important role of connecting people across space and bringing "democracy" to the seemingly unregulated process of allegiances to particular models spontaneously extending across the population. What it does mean is that the process of forming a party of any particular type is fundamentally similar to and connected to the large-scale process of forming an International. Simply through existing at a smaller scale, anarchist formations attempt to generate First Internationals, center-Liberal formations attempt to generate Second Internationals (whether we choose to label them that way, or label formations such as the United Nations specially), and Trotskyist organizations attempt to generate Fourth Internationals. (Whether Stalinist parties inherently attempt to generate Third Internationals is somewhat unclear, given their apparently unstable character that also tends to destroy Third Internationals.)

The presence of the Left Opposition in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was not an anomaly. No matter how negatively some people may feel about Trotsky himself, the one thing that is perfectly clear by now is that that division in the party was part of an overall attempt to correct the errors in Stalinist parties and the Third International; without a Left Opposition of any kind, the party was doomed, while with the correct people holding the correct understandings dividing the party, it might well have found the possibility to save itself. We may never know if Trotsky literally had the correct strategy to save the parties of the Third International or not, but as Trotskyist parties have been busy trying to reconstruct the Fourth International, all the evidence needed to demonstrate this recurring pattern of soft division and error-correction has been steadily piling up.

== Existential materialism ==

=== Swatch analysis and slice analysis ===

I'm sure you're wondering exactly why and when violet Marxism became "violet". With all the context for violet Marxism laid out, I can now explain that.

One of the most basic tools used by meta-Marxism is color swatch analysis. At the beginning, when I said that two rival Marxist parties "are treated as completely different things", this is what I was referring to. Any time two parties with particular known goals or known factional philosophies are in conflict, they can be treated as bordered entities and labeled using different "color swatches" which are chosen based on each party's theoretical content or current political positions. At any given time there will be a particular predefined body of color swatches accompanied by 2-3 letter codes which is recognized by a group of meta-Marxist theorists, and factions in concrete situations will be classified into these letter codes representing specific philosophical traditions or tendencies. The colors associated with the codes have variable degrees of precision, so that for instance in a situation where there are several small Marxist parties and some very large bodies of center-Liberals, all the Marxist parties could be shown in red instead of in their higher-precision colors, or the center-Liberals could be divided into more precise shades of blue since there are so many of them they could conceivably produce interesting contradictions. Color swatch analysis is largely a tool for communicating solutions to problems as opposed to a tool for solving complicated problems, but it can be used to communicate situations in terms that will seem more familiar to center-Liberals or social-democrat types who are not yet familiar with the ways Marxism frames things; a pedantic center-Liberal may find it much more intuitive to actually see a group of schizoanalysts labeled "schizoanalysis [DG]" but given a blue swatch than to see that group labeled "bourgeois ideologies" (although for Marxists who already know what things are, "bourgeois ideologies [ES]" would also be an option).

The basic concept of color swatch analysis is fairly easy to understand. This kind of thing has been done for a while without the concept of consistency and precision; United States people love to talk about standard Liberal-republican parties as "blue" and "red" in order to act like those are the world's most important ideologies, and occasionally, you can even catch Lenin talking about "pale-pink quasi-socialism". So color swatch analysis comes close to being self-explanatory apart from the conceit that I was using it to draw arrows between arrangements of colorized social structures to give overviews of historical processes that would then falsely appear "mechanical" without immediately having to go into some of the more arcane terminology of Marxist dialectics. This is the basic reason for why there are levels of precision and letter codes. Every letter code represents a particular material layout of people and social structures, and from there, structurally similar philosophies are grouped together, and philosophy codes that have turned against each other in a particular situation can be assigned particular colors that are deemed appropriate to them. The use of two distinct colors represents a potential material contradiction; two distinct colors inside a greatly zoomed-in model of a philosophy can be used to represent a class analysis.

As for what major swatches I've designated so far in my working model of the United States and the previous history of Marxism, here they are:

* Crimson / red [code ML] — early versions of Marxism, or Stalinist parties. I assigned this based on the most common meaning of "Reds" in English-speaking countries.
** MN — Marx & Engels; early Marxism.
** ML — Stalin's Marxism; Stalinism.
** MS — Hoxhaism.
** MZ — early Maoism.
** NMZ — North American Maoism.
* Orange [code IV] — Trotskyism.
** I originally made Trotskyism orange under the assumption it was a distortion of mainstream Marxism, but even so, I am probably not going to change it, because the orange swatch has a nice flame palette and I like the look of it.
** Now this swatch has become more like a badge of correctness, especially inside Trotskyism. Deeply revisionist parties are simply marked in blue or strawberry (or possibly red), not orange.
* Strawberry [code DX] — Marxisms based on eclectic Materialism, or revisionist versions of Marxism that are in transition backward but only slowly.
** DX — Deng Xiaoping Thought (China).
** JC — Juche-socialism (North Korea).
** W — Western Marxism; Louis Althusser, Mark Fisher, etc.
* Mauve [code BP] — I gave BlackPantherism its own swatch because it seemed different but I didn't entirely understand the details. So far I haven't used this swatch for anything else.
* Charcoal — anarchism and pre-agrarian societies.
** A — anarchism, or philosophy from tribal societies that strongly resembles anarchism.
** Aqr — magic ritual or neo-paganism. Putting this in charcoal isn't to smear anarchism as much as to highlight the loose connection between anarchist philosophy and tribal societies.
* Sky blue [code ES] — bourgeois philosophies.
** ES — generic code for bourgeois philosophies. Originally stood for "Existentialist-Structuralist tradition", my slightly opaque nickname for a large cluster of academic bourgeois philosophies that I now think are better described as "non-economic agorisms" or "blue anarchisms".
** Ag — agorism; philosophy directly describing non-economic markets.
** LR — Liberal-republicanism. Covers writers like Thomas Jefferson, etc.
** IK — Kantianism; Kantian ethics, logic, or political theory.
** Aa — psychoanalysis. (Etymology: Lacanians kept talking about the separation of baby "a" from mother "A".)
** HAS — humanities, arts, and social sciences. This is really only blue because capitalism captured it. In some contexts, the bright green swatch can be used instead.
*** HAS — religious studies. Christianity, Buddhism, etc.
** LGBT — queer theory. Also used for "uniquely queer" art.
* Khaki brown [code PT] — old monarchist ideas, Toryism, or fascism.
** PT — Toryism, including Republican Party.
** P4 — Duginism, Zionism, modern "Identitarian" fascisms. (Etymology: {{book|The Fourth Political Theory}}, Dugin.)
** AS — Hegelianism. (Etymology: "Absolute Spirit".)
* Earth green [code STM] — science, technology, engineering, or math.
** GR — general or special relativity. I talk about relativity and black holes a lot, so I find it useful to have a code for it.
** FS / FOSS — Free Software movement. Peripheral to Marxism but does have some very interesting ideas.
* Bright green [code Fy] — statements about fiction. This makes more sense as a category when you know my wiki was analyzing and criticizing works like {{book|1984}} and {{book|Animal Farm}}.
** This swatch can be used for the arts or humanities in general if it is truly just about art styles or techniques.
* Violet [code MX] — meta-Marxist analysis methods or hypotheses. This swatch only makes sense when it's being used to color motifs and propositions, or alternatively, to draw a terrain that two Marxist parties of "real" swatch colors sit on so the violet terrain can be used to represent material reality in general.

While currently all these letter codes are just idiosyncratic symbols made up by one person for one limited project, I think there is a lot of scope for expanding this "philosophy code" system into some kind of actual international standard collaborated on by many people which could receive its own ISO paper, similar to ISO language codes, or how chemical elements on the periodic table all have standard letter codes. (Although that would take years to finish, even on the level of collecting all the philosophies or academic fields that should have codes.) It might help to try to align the field distinctions in the philosophy code standard with BISAC library section codes, because in terms of ways of sorting philosophy a large enough library or bookstore will already have had to solve that problem with philosophy books.

=== A logic system for color swatches ===

The first thing I have been using color swatch analysis for is a project where I am trying to expand and overhaul formal logic to cover different use cases than it is usually used for. In traditional versions of formal logic, there will be two binary truth values and statements are not allowed to be ambiguous. But within what I call "wavemachine logic", neither of those things applies. Statements can be expressed in natural language as long as it is clear exactly what proposition they are presenting and they are not confusable for another statement; there is a large and perhaps countably-infinite number of possible truth values; statements are allowed to be true any percentage of the time as opposed to always true or always false, and their truth value will be chosen to reflect the percentage of the time they are actually true. To some people this form of logic might sound strange and useless. But to me, this is the only good way to write logical statements about color swatch analysis. <ref name="wm"/> Taking a statement like "Trotskyists should enter the Labor party", it's perfectly clear what the statement is saying, but you need a rather complicated system of truth values to express its practical significance. Within wavemachine logic, you might say the truth values of this statement are "statement believed to be true by USFI (blue)", "statement rejected by ICFI (blue)", "Menshevik statement (blue)" or "failed multiple times". Of course, which truth value you would return as the most important truth value that subsequent statements would act on depends on what context the statement is being evaluated in. Every single truth value can be used to imply a contextual color swatch for that truth value in context, and then that swatch can be used to assign the {{em|statement}} a color swatch in context that acts like yet another truth value — for instance, the truth values I just gave might assign this statement a sky blue swatch indicating the USFI or IMT is making errors that lean toward center-Liberal social-democracy (opportunist errors). Concepts such as opportunism might become much easier to communicate to newcomers to Marxism if they can see a statement that is supposed to be red or orange suddenly turn blue when in context that swatch is supposed to be opposed to Trotskyism and represent everything it doesn't stand for.

One other problem with formal logic is that it is bad at handling changes in state and the concept of something being true in one year and not true in another year. Given a statement like "Stalin is in support of Bolshevism" the truth value would become ambiguous because the degree to which that statement is true would be completely different in 1910 from what it would be in 1936. In order to fix this problem to the degree it can be fixed, I have taken to representing different historical periods as different coherent bodies of knowledge which are separated but both represented within the same larger containing body of knowledge — here a "historical period" is understood to be a complex physical object with a particular socioeconomic structure, like a national population currently in Liberal capitalism, or in Stalin's Marxism. For example, the conditions of the Soviet Union in 1920 are taken to be a different thing from the conditions of the Soviet Union in 1936, and statements are tagged with the explicit time and place they apply to whenever that might become a potential problem. I know this does not completely fix the problem of making formal logic dialectical, as it can potentially miss divisions between "bodies of knowledge" that somebody assumes to not meaningfully be "dividing" yet. But, despite that limitation, it can go all the way to representing two different historical periods transitioning into each other, or two separate factions such as a Marxist party and an anarchism coming into conflict. If someone goes into the process of constructing a "radically binary" form of logic like this with the intention to use it for violet Marxism and to begin by treating no particular form of "infra-Marxism" as canonical, then it can be used to point out conflicts between different parties claiming to be Marxist and uncover the inner material conflicts between them, which can in turn be used to more concisely present arguments that particular parties are revisionist. I refer to the concept of presenting particular physical models of conflicting parties as they exist in particular slices of time as {{i|time slice analysis}} or just {{dfn|slice analysis}}. I think this has previously been called "bracketing".

The way I see it, slice analysis is not really an advanced tool. It is important to be able to introduce people who are totally new to dialectics to the basic concepts before they actually know any of them, like math classes have to build up to calculus or physics classes have to introduce Newtonian physics before getting to relativistic physics. Most people an organization will attempt to talk to will be thoroughly stuck in the midst of a world where everything is binary or neatly bimodal — you're a United States citizen or a foreigner, you voted Republican or Democrat, a law passes or fails to pass — and so when given dialectics they will look at you funny like they "need answers". Slice analysis could sometimes be a way to get some of those people out of that. _No,_ you tell them, _there aren't two things, there are three. It's not "you have trans rights or you don't". On Monday there were trans rights, on Friday there weren't trans rights, and in between that, two things smashed into each other to produce the outcome of there not being trans rights, so if you predict the thing in the middle wrong in any way, you end up with no trans rights. You can't just choose Monday instead of Friday, or the Monday people instead of the Friday people, because there is no such thing as "the Monday people" that take you straight back to Monday._ I think a great number of people who exist in the 21st century genuinely do not understand what history or time is. I think most people couldn't even give a coherent explanation of how they think free will could exist when supposedly nobody can predict what happens in the future. So, in my mind, people need a really solid education on the basic concepts of _physical time_ and _cause versus effect_, practically something you could show to a grade school student, so they have something to prepare them for both special relativity and dialectics if necessary. The better they understand special and general relativity, the less this would be needed. But these days, people can just barely understand cause and effect well enough to attempt to label individual actions unethical. They stumble through life with the two truth values of "Right" and "Wrong" and struggle to throw them onto actions in order to learn what actions not to do, but they can't even really know what is Good or Bad because they don't really ever know the consequences of their own actions. I recently saw a video where a blue anarchist gave up and tried to claim that "consequentialist ethics is dead" — which shouldn't be possible unless you believe that no choice you are actually likely to act on can ever be Wrong. This is why I've made a point of focusing on the concept of truth values as their own unique mathematical mechanic that guides the process of people of various swatch colors making decisions on which statements are True or False "in general", and why I've tried to take such a high-up view of causality where no statement can be assumed to be accurate simply because it appears to align with the interests of a particular Marxist party. I've been a Stalinist. Back then I believed statements were potentially wrong because they were Trotskyist, but what I did correctly understand was that a Marxist party can very easily take the concept of "being on the side of the proletariat" and twist it to make the arbitrary agenda of just anybody seem critically important when it isn't. If we want to get rid of incorrect versions of Marxism, we really need to abandon simple "four legs" rhetoric, because the moment Stalinists start applying Proletarian and Bourgeois to things as truth values they always get it wrong.

I originally got the idea for adapting formal logic to meta-Marxism when I saw a large language model being used to create an "alchemy game" called {{game|Infinite Craft}} where a player could combine two words and the game would spit out a concept which would be the consequence of putting those two concepts together. (For instance, combining the words "Fire" and "Water" produces "Steam", and combining "Democracy" and "Storm" gives "Revolution", if I remember those combinations right.) I thought that program was really fascinating but I was struck by how bad the combination results would get if you kept playing it for too long — the Idealist assumptions behind language models were quickly going from coherent logic to bad puns and total gibberish, while in my mind, this could be a great game if it actually started with Materialist assumptions. I started drawing up a concept for a better "mathematician's combination game" but before long I was putting entire sentence-long propositions into it and combining them to produce logical syllogisms, and then I realized I'd actually invented a simple logic engine. From there I started creating a wiki to try to map out the relationships between a wide array of material things ("Z1 Items"), motifs I'd found in videos or articles ("S1 Items"), and propositions putting the objects and motifs into some particular order and making claims about them ("S2 Items", "Z2 Items", and "F2 Items"). Basically, I was laying out a system of second-order logic where at the second-order or proposition level, all the statements could also turn into truth values for other statements when they happened to describe a thing that could be true about another thing only sometimes — for example, "A statement that describes material reality is True" becomes "Describes Material Reality", "The entropy of a collection of objects only decreases with added energy" becomes "Obeys Entropy Law", and "Trotskyist parties must form a Fourth International" becomes "(Is) Trotskyist Party" granting an orange swatch.

I had a rather elaborate conceptual system in place for trying to begin figuring out what statements and philosophies were the most accurate and which ones did not match up to material reality, previous historical periods, or whatever specific topic they were actually speaking about. And, in spite of all the science-minded skepticism that went into that system and just how many Stalinist-aligned propositions I started with, because of the particular "formally neutral" way I did things and how statements in each philosophy were set aside in their own swatch color to be evaluated starting from their own context, I still ended up here. I can't emphasize that enough. I feel like at some later time when meta-Marxism as a whole is even more refined than it is now, it would be the tool the Fourth International could use to finally get everyone to actually understand Trotskyism and move on from Stalinism. And considering how hard {{em|I}} resisted and kept trying to endlessly question everything before I passed through the other side, I feel like the body of people who would be successfully won over from Stalinism might just produce some of the best Marxist theorists the world has ever known.

I should also add here: I've gotten some good use out of the WSWS's resident LLM. I try never to use any others because frankly they were terrible at answering questions the few times I tested them, but in comparison this one has been shockingly good at following whatever I was trying to say even when I started bringing in temporary or field-specific violet-Marxist terminology with included definitions of each term. I was surprised how quickly I could get it to go along with swatch analysis and slice analysis and start saying things like "strawberry states are not stable, Trotskyist parties can't leave crimson Marxisms as they are because the bureaucrats eventually turn them strawberry" or "meta-Marxism will ultimately select a Fourth International as the most accurate form of Marxism". Sometimes the LLM would try to call me out for what looked to it like _actually_ saying ideas cause factions or like skipping dialectical interactions if I didn't explain at length what meta-Marxism was and what slice analysis was and what all the terms were referring to. Sometimes it would give criticisms that were perfectly reasonable because I would give it a scenario where it was "supposed to" get Stalinists and Trotskyists to coexist and it would say, "no, Stalin's allies eliminated the Fourth International in Europe, that's not going to work". I would say that the majority of the time it was giving a clear, very precise analysis of things, which reflected well on the overall body of articles it was drawing from. A very small part of why I drafted up this article is the thought that hypothetically it would be easier for the bot to answer questions if it actually had any existing references on violet Marxism. But, of course, I was also genuinely interested in what kinds of responses or critiques I would get when actual people could see it.

During the process of laying out my wiki and its system of "infinitely-binary" logic I have been idly thinking about what could replace the new fad of "AI search engines". Many people are angry about LLMs and hardly ever want to see another LLM again. And I don't entirely blame them. I think two of the major gripes with LLMs are their opacity and their inefficiency as machines. I honestly think that it would be possible to achieve the same thing I've been using the LLM for if instead there existed something a bit like the world's biggest thesaurus and it was simply one really big network of pages about specific words or phrases with a lot of synonyms filed under them but some of the terms were questions or propositions. At first that sounds a bit like a language model. But I think the key is to separate the notion of terms _as in concepts with well-known names_ from the notion of _words_ or _sentences_. Wikidata has already done this really well: you go onto Wikidata and search up the term _proletariat_, and you get a concept with the identifier "Q132603", such that it can have a display title in multiple languages, and if there was another unrelated concept called "proletariat" (maybe this one is talking about ancient Rome) it would have a totally separate ID number. I think that if common search questions or propositions were crystallized into particular entries like this then it could enable rebuilding old-style search engines from the ground up as users added various useful links to various conceptual identifiers that might be nested inside more general concepts and some conceptual identifiers would already be recognized as related, and thus be able to fill in more results in a search that only turned up a few links. A system vaguely similar to this is already in use for searching archiveofourown.org (AO3), where each user tags submitted stories with text-based tags and some tags are made synonyms or put inside more general tags. People have often praised this site as having one of the best search systems, but one complaint about it I've seen that I think is valid is that when the tags are in language rather than fundamentally being numbers, the "tag wranglers" who actually choose canonical tags sometimes make mistakes on which similar-looking phrases are the same usage of language and which have different connotations and should be different tags. The tagging system might theoretically be a bit better if there was a particular interface for creating new tags as numbered entities and typing a short memo about what they mean so the people who actually edit tags have a better chance of figuring out where the tag is really supposed to go. Wikidata has a nice interface for searching through concepts where if you type in a natural language it will show you all the concepts in natural language with a memo of what they are such as "string [thread]" and "string [data type]". This kind of interface could in theory be used to label and categorize anything, making it possible for users to build a search index themselves instead of experts at a large corporation trying to figure out how to automate that through crawler programs or LLMs. The potential of this kind of thing for collecting observations on social phenomena and sharing Marxist reading lists is _immense_. If users could create tags or maybe use existing lists of entities on Wikidata, very quickly the search engine could have "meta" pages about every single page it indexed containing accumulated statistics and notes where somebody submitted a page tagged with "Maoism" and someone else tagged it with concepts the previous users didn't notice like "harmonizing classes", "national independence movement", and "strategies that create strawberry Marxisms". This kind of system could easily lead to edit wars where users keep removing tags and leaving different conflicting opinions. But I think that with the right conventions in place, it might eventually settle into a more constructive pattern where everyone adds an observation from a different angle but nobody removes things. The fact that everyone will come to a collaborative project with a different level of consciousness can sometimes lead to downward spirals where people will add valid observations but they will get removed and only the most absolutely uncontroversial statements will remain. But if there was some way to encourage all the edits toward acknowledging all objectively true facts (in the situations where that applies), I think that a system like this could be a wonderful tool for steering people toward building a Fourth International. It would, for one thing, put into practice the observed pattern that consciousness builds on itself when many people are reinforcing the same organization or body of facts from different directions.

=== Existential materialism ===

Why do people believe in ethics?

You might think the answer is obvious, but the more you look into it, the more you'll realize that this is a deeply complicated question. First you'll think of one answer, like "people construct systems of ethics to avoid harm", and then you'll think about it a little longer and think of another answer, like "people often use ethics to perpetuate capitalism and justify punishing people who defy the bourgeoisie", but then you'll think about it even longer and start coming up with rebuttals to that, like "but believing in ethics doesn't help anyone overcome the bourgeoisie, so ultimately what use is it?". Every single time you think you've found an answer, it only brings up more questions, which then only bring up more questions about why you were asking the previous questions, and very quickly it can feel like you've never understood anything in your life.

Having already explored the concepts of morality and ethics in other sections, I'll get straight to the point. I think ethics as we know it is more or less an illusion. It is a study entirely built on false principles. Ethics is an Idealist study of human behavior that assumes that abstract Ideals held inside people cause behavior, when in reality, human behavior is produced through the interaction of human beings with other objects including human beings and the natural world. This is a very important distinction. If human behavior is caused by abstract Ideals, then it must logically be possible for human beings to be absolutely perfect — if any particular Ideal exists entirely before people interact with each other, then any particular concept anyone is thinking of and wants other people to embody and should simply be able to pop into existence in someone else's mind instantaneously as if beamed across space faster than light. [*se] This is not physically possible, because no arrangement of words or images stored in any physical object can travel faster than light (excluding the case where it really has already been somewhere and would not need to arrive). As much as this might seem self-evident, it has important consequences for social phenomena like education. People will often treat education as if it's magic and does not actually have to travel through time and space to reach people or require actual effort to achieve understanding; ethics-related education in particular is _very often_ treated as if political issues or historical knowledge mystically beam themselves into people's heads, while nobody wants to interact with people long enough to teach them the knowledge they were supposed to learn and everyone simply sits around waiting for everyone to receive their download that apparently only inherently virtuous people actually receive. Real human individuals can never necessarily be expected to know any particular fact, or to follow any particular ethical prescription. [*se] So when it comes to the topic of ethics, the only truly accurate study "of ethics" would also include a descriptive study of every situation in which people _don't_ follow ethical prescriptions and why those happen.

Existential materialism is the philosophical study of human "lives", "biographies", and "existences" through the lens of particular generalized incidents in which two or more people take actions together or in interaction with each other. It is meant to replace the general concepts of "ethics" and "existentialism" at the same time, such that it takes away the need to assign subjective meaning to an individual's choices either from inside or outside the individual. Existential materialism is basically what you get when you take the concept of consequentialist ethics to the next stage by completely removing ethics from it and purely turning it into a study of what sets of actions in small or large groups of people lead to what consequences. It can also be represented in the form of color swatch and time slice analysis so that it is being used to try to predict how different factions of people will behave when interacting with each other, and show which sociophilosophies are incompatible and perhaps which ones are the most principled or the most robust. Basically, you chart out a few different time points like animation frames, and show how each group or faction will behave toward the others as they move through time, understanding that the frames approximate a fuller and more infinitesimal range of movement. This can be done in a casual way without laying out all the steps, or it could conceivably be done in a more detailed mathematical way which would become an actual simple simulation of one or more societies. For Trotskyists, the purpose of using existential materialism on scales greater than the smallest ones is fairly obvious: it would be used for things like exploring dysfunction inside organizations that leads to two ostensibly Trotskyist organizations being incompatible, or trying to successfully grown and maintain an overall Fourth International.

I do not have any comprehensive guide to existential materialism put together right now that would go any deeper than this article (which arguably has been the first guide on it). It is still new despite having been around for a year or two, and I have not really settled onto what some of the most important theoretical tools used with it might be. A few concepts that have come up when trying to explain it in book drafts are wavefunctions as an approximation of behavior or "people as dice", game theory models of two agents behaving against each other, and the Lattice model or Social-Philosophical-System model that gives actual detail to color swatch analysis, as well as color swatch analysis, slice analysis, and wavemachine logic themselves.

Existential materialism is basically {{em|the}} core framework of meta-Marxism that sets "violet" Marxism apart from regular "crimson Marxisms" or "orange infra-Marxisms" and enables it to create "molecular Marxisms" out of existing bodies of Marxist theory, by creating a finer-grained, shorter-time-scale version of historical materialism that can (hopefully) be used to fill in any noticeable gaps that still remain in it and finish "quantizing" Marxism. Like quantum physics added more detail to what Newtonian physics had set down, existential materialism is meant to allow Marxism to address the few remaining questions about cities and individuals and the relationship of one trade union to another and other such things that are just on the edge of being relevant to Marxism to the point that bourgeois philosophies are able to take an "irrelevant" question and use seemingly tiny issues to keep absolutely everyone from achieving clearer consciousness. Not all of the questions existential materialism could be applied to are inherently "Leninist" questions, but some of them are, and the rest of them would still be relevant to the problem of understanding daily life in a workers' state and how to keep one functioning properly after an era of socialism was successfully created.

One last thing I unfortunately have to admit is that it {{em|is}} possible to do existential materialism wrong; this is what I was more or less doing when I was going through those weird exercises at the top of trying to understand Trotskyism as if it was Stalinism. Versus traditional writings on dialectical materialism, existential materialism is a bit easier for beginners to get into when they do not fully understand Marxism, but that can be a double-edged sword in that people can start using it without fully understanding how to get the best results. This overall problem seems to be one that has already existed in Trotskyism for a long time, though, in that Trotskyism has been one of the easiest forms of Marxism to get revisionist groups or wings inside since around 1936. In light of that I am not particularly worried that exmat would create "new" problems, because Marxists in general have had decades now to catalogue many different kinds of errors, and by now, I feel like a lot of the errors that might come from badly applying exmat would already have been named. This might end up allowing the method to correct itself to guard against the most obvious kinds of errors and encourage uses that will lead to accurate understandings. In some ways any Marxist method will always be tied to the organization that uses it, and groups will always have to learn situated in their historical context, but if any particular course on exmat was designed well, it could be a way that more experienced groups tramsitted their experiences to newer groups and attempted to help them prevent errors.

=== Estates as "Social-Philosophical Systems" ===

With the concepts of color swatch analysis and wavemachine logic established, I can now go into what my actual working model of populations or civilizations is. The surface model of color swatches is the simplified model that's meant to be easy to render visually; the model "underneath" the surface is somewhat more complex.

Within meta-Marxism, the basic units of society are generally objects with antagonistic borders around them, and linked individuals. When individuals are understood in isolation, they are "objects with antagonistic borders", but of course, that condition of isolated individuals doesn't occur often. (In this sense, people are vaguely similar to quarks and gluons. Quarks that make up protons or neutrons do not generally exist in isolation, and if you tear apart the gluon that connects them, the wad of fermion matter actually tears into two new sets of quarks connected by gluons. Humans can be separated at times but when one relationship breaks they generally try to find another one.) Because trying to understand individuals as free-floating "helium atoms" does not make sense, meta-Marxism conceptualizes societies as generally being made up of many small social graphs that may include households, businesses, towns, trade unions, and so forth. Various social graphs can form or break or change size at different times, and the same individuals can be connected into multiple social graphs that exist at different scales. Some of this social graph activity is "obvious", like people being affiliated with center-Liberal or Tory parties, or maybe being affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (a kind of center-Liberal strategist organization that on the day I wrote this I saw bragging about getting small social-democratic gains in one city; always remember that the Mensheviks, these people, and the Democrats are all blue). Some of this social graph activity is not obvious. Any number of people may be busy silently dividing unions in order to try to form new independent working-class organizations. Some people might be trying to form alliances between local groups of workers and Marxist parties or the Fourth International. Within Liberal-republicanism people will mostly be captured into large "blue" or "brown" graphs (here the brown swatch is a "precision color" used to represent an antagonism between Tory parties and non-Tories), but within those graphs there will be new smaller graphs of other colors tracing themselves onto or between what already exists. Meta-Marxism refers to these new graphs as "worker lattices" or just "Lattices", and refers to basically any mathematical model of how the small graphs expand as a _Lattice model_.

The Lattice model is one of those cases where meta-Marxism may actually be unnecessarily precise, and might be presenting a simplified model which is much neater and easier to understand than the messy reality. Either way, it began when I was contemplating the concept of center-Liberal type people having to physically avoid Tory types, and comparing that to Lenin's models of building up a workers' party and then sending it "into the marsh" to try to study local movements and form bridges to them. As a Marxist party is first forming you want to weave around the blue people (center-Liberals, or at that time the Mensheviks) so the red people don't get trapped in a blue party, but when you have an established red or orange party you can send those people into blue organizations safely in hopes that maybe if you are very effective at gaining allies you will be able to pierce all the way through the organization to the point that either the two organizations operate together for the moment or at least the blue organization doesn't have any real control and the red or orange portion can regroup somewhere else.

The day I first visualized a Lattice extending through the United States was the day I realized, {{i|no, Marxism makes a lot of sense actually, if you could only get all those graph points to stay in various cities long enough to pick up more points connected to them it would genuinely become harder to break up than the Democrats.}} This predisposed me to sympathizing with Stalin's party because to me the Soviet Union up to 1960 looked like a reasonable result of completely filling up the Lattice and getting all the workers to stay and defend the workers' state. But at the same time, I could also see things other people didn't in the accusations against early Trotskyism — all of it was much too consistent with the process of trying to fill up a country with an actual Marxist party and form an orange Lattice extending across the Soviet government for unknown reasons. I really could not understand at the time why anyone would want to overwrite one Marxist party with another one. But no matter what I heard about those events, it never really made me think that early Trotskyism was some kind of simple case of "organized crime". What I thought was, {{i|this is some attention to detail. These people are trying to repeat the same processes of revolution described in various accounts of Lenin. Why on earth are they doing that?}}

As I worked with the shape of the Lattice model I saw that it could potentially be used to model any number of situations, including the Chinese revolution (where it would be interesting to actually see the differences between crimson worker Lattices and strawberry peasant Lattices on the map) or Che Guevara leading a scattered array of guerilla units. I didn't put together the model expecting it would be useful for violent situations, but I was surprised when reading his writings how important the concept of graphs and covering areas became to that situation, and thought, {{i|huh, I guess that's a different type of Lattice that happens to have the same shape}}. Fairly early on when looking into the Lattice model, the words that came to mind were "permanent revolution". At that time I was operating off the Stalinist concept of what permanent revolution meant, but the concept of Lattices of organizations tied together into a larger fishing-net with multiple levels of structure really helped me crystallize the overall process of smaller and more localized workers' movements having to form into a larger nation-wide movement over time and link up with a Marxist party to succeed. A Lattice model could just as easily be used to represent a Fourth International, and the process of a Lattice of organizations piercing across multiple countries before ultimately filling them up.

The Lattice model only came to me after first noticing the way political factions seemed to form into entirely separate populations of people constituting entirely separate anthropological cultures, but laying it out first does make it easier to explain what I think political factions are. Violet Marxism allows that there are not simply "incorrect" models of reality and the "correct" model, but a plurality of reality models (consciousnesses) across different socially-linked groups of people that are only later shown to be correct or incorrect. Every graph of people links together around certain assumptions about the world, which then feeds into what its internal reality model will be. In Marxist parties this is fairly obvious, because the party contains people who all accept Marxism and a goal of organizing workers, but any other politically-charged faction of people also contains some of its beginning assumptions within its social bonds in the same way. The Democratic Party or Republican Party becomes linked together in a transient way around concepts that people are "Americans covered by the U.S. Constitution" and part of the same national population; a church congregation becomes linked together partly around the awareness that the other people in the church are available. Whenever any individual is added to a graph of people, that bond carries both superficial ideology that aligns itself to some swatch color in a partisan or cultural sense, and material models of the actual physical layout of the organization that are generated in each person or relationship through participating in it. In many graphs of people — including some Marxist parties — the superficial ideology and real layout and capabilities of the organization are wildly misaligned, and the superficial ideology does not predict the behavior of the organization in any realistic way. In effective graphs of people, the surface ideology accurately reflects the physical behavior of the organization and makes it more able to plot its next move. This is to say that an organization can both be put together for a highly malicious goal and have a well aligned consciousness; the effectiveness of the organization at modeling its current layout and the organization creating an outcome desirable to other people are drastically different things. In this sense, organizations actually have the power to collect people for "a red goal" or "a brown goal", but it is not people thinking about ideas that makes it possible to form the organization or achieve the goal. The goal the organization aims for can only be delivered through what kinds of structural elements it arranges people into and what kinds of class territories may or may not be inside those structural elements, which collectively make the organization belong to a particular sociophilosophy of a particular color and give the organization its capabilities to achieve particular goals only if it is fully conscious of its layout and how to achieve them. A graph full of lobbyists trying to cement its power in parliament often knows what it's doing; a graph of workers at several allied corporations has a particular set of capabilities but might not know them. This is to say that, only in a highly specific Marx-onto-Hegel sense, physical organizations in the real world {{em|are}} made of ideas. They are not made of abstract Ideals in the Idealist sense, like "peace" or "justice" or "composed of the Fire and Air elements" or "silver and fuzzy with a floppy tongue", and instead they are made of a wholly different thing I call {{dfn|material ideas}} — a non-fiction model of an actual thing which allows for at least coarsely predicting how the physical thing behaves. From the point of view of some outside organization, an organization is made of physical people and arrangements. From the point of view of the organization itself, trapped inside its own consciousness, it is made of material ideas. <ref name="wm"/> The behavior of the organization as seen from the outside is the main thing that matters as far as its role within creating historical events. But the organization's internal consciousness can still be made to line up with all of that behavior, as well as other behavior that could include the organization expanding out to further Lattice points and changing in shape, or having to anticipate the behavior of other organizations it may have to merge with.

Early into developing meta-Marxism, I described its understanding of base and superstructure as a three-level model where people form into various countably separate social graphs on one layer ("Social-Graph Systems" or subpopulations), the graph contains a particular economic structure and starts transforming toward any other sociophilosophies it could transform into on another layer ("Social-Philosophical-Material System" or republic), and on a third layer the group of people generates ideology in the strong sense and cobbles together its own flawed interpretation of what is happening ("Social-Philosophical System" of faction plus ideology). Over time I realized that needed to be refined, but the pieces were there. The size of the population restricts how big its economy will be and how elaborate or consolidated the economic structures can be within it. The immediate superstructure such as government exists on the same layer as the economy itself and realizes along with it only from the _material_ ideas that already exist; the economy and the government it directly generates are the same swatch color, although if the government was generated some other way it could be a different color swatch. The third layer of ideology is spat out of either the population boundaries, economy, or government, and can be basically anything as long as it gives some benefit to at least one of those things. Does it benefit 50 Tory voters who don't want to talk to Black people in keeping their circle going? They'll probably accept it. Does it benefit 25 allied online streamers who all donate to charity but think Israel needs to be defended from Palestine? Does it benefit all the courts and lawyers in the United States and help them look legitimate? Onto the stack it goes. Whether people will want to change outright bigoted beliefs will depend on things like how much those beliefs function in actually forming the bonds of the group. Some people may be resistant to getting rid of bigotry or challenging any of the people around them on their prejudices if it would cost them a lot of social connections. At other times, a particular prejudice may have been added to the group ideology so accidentally that nobody in the group will really mind changing it. Western-Marxism has made a big mistake in not distinguishing between these cases and trying to treat all cases of prejudice as if televisions have simply been actively programming people's brains and if you tell them about televisions they'll suddenly realize they didn't need to be prejudiced. It is more or less true that the vast majority of people have no need to be prejudiced, but as soon as you realize how tightly tied together social links and beliefs actually are, you'll realize that videos, books, and magazines feeding people the wrong arbitrary abstract Ideals would not be the reason that will become possible.

One final concept I should bring up here to round out the overview of economic existential materialism is {{dfn|chunk competition}}. This is fairly self-explanatory. It is the concept that any particular clump of people thoughtlessly reproduces and expands in order to fulfill the needs of its individuals, but this can cause it to collide with other chunks of people over the material resources they each need. I had to give this a name because anarchists seem to not believe it exists. Anarchists always want to represent humanity like it's always been billions and billions of people and they've always belonged to the same nation that Europe merely destroyed. Meanwhile, I would read about basically any historical event from tribes many thousands of years ago leaving evidence of having war gods to the Chinese revolution where the nationalists killed Communists, and I would think, {{i|why did the nationalist party even need to exist if humanity was already one thing? If an anarchist was writing this as a fictional narrative, wouldn't everybody siding with Mao be tighter writing? Wouldn't the logic of anarchism promote Dengism and Juche-socialism just because they kept everybody unified? But anarchists don't generally like Dengism. Anarchism doesn't make any sense.}}

Chunk competition is not very important for situations like modeling revolutions, and is only important in situations like demonstrating that capitalism exists. Various chunks of people try to enter a place like New York City, only some portions get in, the portions that were the least successful at entering but still got in become the proletariat. Chunk competition is a quick way to explain what classes are and why they exist, but when an era of socialism is functioning well, it will become possible to mitigate chunk competition.

== The nature of time ==

Time is not what a lot of people think it is. Some people want to stumble through existence as if there isn't really any such thing as time, thinking that everything they interact with has always been equally as Good or Bad as it is today. Some people speak of time as if it's a nasty little demon that shakes reality up like a cup of dice to make everything unpredictable. Some people will try to use time to smuggle in the concept of The Subject and claim that human beings making choices causes time even though time also happens for inanimate objects like rocks. And then there is Henri Bergson, who tried to say that linear "x axis" or "yardstick" models of time could not possibly capture the fact people experience time inside infinitesimally-continuous streams of lived experience.

To really understand what time is, you have to have a basic understanding of quantum mechanics. At the quantum scale, everything is a lot like chemical reactions, but the forms of structure are simpler: when a photon runs into an atom, the two particles are knocked off course according to part of the photon's energy, and the photon splits into an electron and a positron. Quantum mechanics is a bit like turning in two quarters and getting four dimes and two nickels; the rules feel a little arbitrary when you first hear them, but every particle is made of particular "numbers" that add up in particular ways. Some physicists have speculatively described these numbers as twists in the material of the universe going different directions. It is also possible but not confirmed that quantum numbers were misinterpreted as extra spatial dimensions in string theory. You can hardly blame string theorists for that mistake, because if space itself were twisted in circles and you had to describe movement {{em|into those twisted swirls of space}} it might start to look like there was a fourth or fifth spatial dimension.

There are a couple reasons I had to introduce quantum mechanics to explain time. One is that photons have a funny way of moving through space. Some fundamental particles like photons have the ability to collide with other particles and disappear into other forms before being regenerated elsewhere in their previous form when a different pair of particles interacts. The quantum scale is full of something called {{dfn|virtual particles}}, which are basically just particles that are being exchanged with others so fast they barely exist and only barely influence anything. I cannot say for sure that this virtual particle "teleportation" contributes to why light crosses through slits in ways physical objects shouldn't be able to and recombines in interference patterns, but either way, both processes are interesting and unlike how larger objects behave and you should keep both of them in mind. Another reason is that quarks are usually bound together in groups of three to create nucleons. The three quarks in a proton or neutron are constantly exchanging material and kneading into different configurations of quarks (as well as entirely too many virtual particles that appear for vanishingly small slices of time). So, this brings up interesting questions. Is it possible on any level to chart the existence of a photon over time? Is it ever possible that one quark within a nucleon forms {{em|first}}?

A little while after the discovery of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein appeared and basically answered those questions "no". One of Einstein's thought experiments involved experiencing time from the point of view of a ray of light. If a photon (or any other boson) travels at the maximum speed anything can go through space, everything else should appear to freeze because the path of the photon would take action first. But, even if a photon could not "see" the rest of the world move, time still happens. As Einstein developed his theory of relativity, he showed that any two moving objects experience time differently because each object more or less exists as its own timeline of events (its {{dfn|reference frame}}), and those timelines can shear past each other in additive or subtractive ways to create shorter or longer experienced intervals of time ({{dfn|time dilation}}). He also showed that space and time are linked together in a single expansible or compressible substance called {{dfn|spacetime}}. This was used to demonstrate how gravity can alter the paths of planets orbiting stars, and how time outwardly appears to slow down to the point nothing happens when approaching a black hole.

The consequence of relativity on quantum mechanics is this: time actually happens as the exchange of energy from one matter object to another matter object. Gluons must be exchanged between quarks {{i|at the speed of time}}, but relativity says that neither quark can be taken as the canonical reference frame for how time unfolds in the universe, so time is actually the reciprocal interaction between two separate timelines to create a new event. Once you understand this, everything makes more sense. Whatever gravity is exactly, it must actually be the result created from two things bumping into each other. The whole conceit of quantum superpositions and drawing electron shells as fuzzy clouds isn't necessarily because electrons are {{em|actually}} weird, but because trying to describe just one atom disconnected from everything else is removing important information given by the other things interacting with it which then leaves the future of individual things inherently fuzzy.

Newtonian mathematics has been accidentally deceiving everyone by making it appear that everything that happens depends on time passing, when actually it appears that the way the world really works is time is never an independent variable and instead {{em|any interactions that are being studied on the graph produce time}}.

This finally explains the old conundrum of "whether human beings have free will". The answer to that depends heavily on what you even think the phrase {{i|lang=en|free will}} means. What can be said is that the actions each person takes produce time, but only in interaction with a surrounding environment and other people taking actions. For some people, the fact that only a crowd of many people can produce a choice does effectively take away free will, because it means that the compatibility of the group of people or how effective its internal factions are at destroying each other are each more important than what anyone personally wants; individual desires and even individual ethical intentions simply do not matter compared with the ability of individuals to form relationships and the ability of those relationships to affect the overall group of people. For other people, the fact that individual actions can produce events as long as time is considered to be a lot of separate individuals or groups all colliding into an outcome at once will be a relief. Understanding the actual shape of time will bring up some troubling questions like whether Stalin's party trying to build up socialism-in-one-country could be a good idea simply because individual people don't have as much ability to steer the future as an overall interacting population does. But it could also be the basis for a more enlightened study of "who is to blame" when multiple parties attempt to form a Fourth International and something causes them to not successfully form together. Within a Lattice model, the edge between two points is not actually caused by either of the points first, but simultaneously tossed together out of both nodes. This ironically will make some individuals or localized groups more obviously responsible for problems — if, for instance, a blue edge collides with an orange edge and smashes to bits in the middle, you know why. But if two organizations attempt to form together and produce a messy soup in which some swatches sift out but the link between two cities remains, then it might not really be anyone's fault in particular.

Recently, it's become popular for some physicists to question the concept of time and whether anything can go through time "backwards". This probably is the case, but only for some very prosaic reasons. Special relativity has established that time is two reference frames exchanging things back and forth. That means that specifically from within either vantage point, whenever you toss something forward something can go back. That isn't to say that the thing that goes "backward in time" has a time machine. It's only to say that when things go backward they do that because we falsely think of time as a linear thing advancing forward when time is actually a nonlinear process of exchanging things that we tend to saw in two. The failure of modern science to examine dialectical materialism has resulted in a lot of strange artifacts where an interaction of two things is sawed in two and made fuzzy when it shouldn't be. So, only from within this improperly sawed view, things can appear to go backwards. When a person makes a decision, the future will appear to affect the past, because the person has to anticipate what will happen to try to choose the best outcome. But in actuality, a "future event" is when a photon successfully crosses from point A in space to point B. So the future the person is trying to predict is actually the actions or behaviors of other people or objects that are currently over at point B once those other objects make it back to point A. If Trotsky is looking at Europe thinking about whether it will have a successful movement, then Europe _is_ the future, quite literally. Whether Communists succeed or fail in Europe, by the time he gets to Europe he will be in the future, and the prediction he makes about what Europe is doing is critically important to determining whether whoever he meets in Europe will make the correct decisions.

This is the answer to the riddle of "proletarian consciousness", and why it seems to be so difficult. Human consciousness itself tends to saw the world in two, containing a limited amount of information about anything beyond a particular individual, but in order for human beings to function together they must successfully predict each other. This leads to all kinds of disasters as isolated clusters of people completely fail to come up with useful predictions that successfully knit them together toward achieving a particular objective and allow them to succeed. Proletarian consciousness is not just developing an overall model of something such as a world republic, but becoming able to actively solve for the unknown behavior of all other human beings at every moment.

Some people still seriously believe it's not possible to predict the future. If that were true, social behavior and society wouldn't even be possible. Every single person you make a choice in front of is the future. _You_ are the future! Even if that's only true in a tautological physics way and not an inspiring way, you still ought to remember it.

== Networkism, capitalism, Stalinism, and socialism ==

Marxism is more of a top-down movement than anybody would like to believe 
it always begins with clusters of brilliant people who perceive something everybody else didn't, not at groups of workers. the "great men" that appear in Marxism are illusions caused by people forgetting all the second- and third-tier men immediately connected to them, who probably exist at a factor of at least 10 or 100 for every presumed "great" man. Marxist theorists are a particular historical phenomenon which is separate from the activity of workers and transforms what would be a blue or strawberry movement into a crimson movement. this is what leads to a lot of the pain within Marxism as a whole and conflict between different versions of Marxism. Marxist movements resemble any republic ever created in that there will be a layer of talented representatives that people align themselves with in order to form a large society. hypothetically, this body of theorists could be Stalin's party, Mao's party, Kim Il-sung's party, Marx and Engels and a handful of people in Europe, early Trotskyism, or any number of things. if an era of socialism could ever actually develop and solidify, the conflict between these groups of theorists would become unimportant. on the other side of creating the workers' state, what is eventually supposed to happen is that central parties and the Communist International simply stop doing anything because most things at the populational scale and at the international scale respectively have already been decided, everyone teaches the previous decisions, and for the most part only local decisions are required any more. the possibility of the state withering away is actually a natural consequence of creating a scientific society and making national policies objective rather than a matter of subjective opinion. but, this creates the problem of shifting conflicts between groups of people over arbitrary local culture and which arbitrary local cultures should get to conquer each other up to the layer of theorists who have to figure out the objective answers to national and international questions. in theory, the layer of theorists should be sorting itself by ability and the most talented theorists should be rising to the top and defeating the theorists with worse models, but the correct answers for each country and the world should be surfacing anyway; in practice, everyone in the layer of theorists becomes similar in social status, and all the theorists begin clustering and fighting each other over arbitrary local culture inasmuch as they do not have the complete answer to particular world problems. the problem which was evident among the clergy and among bourgeois representatives as they grouped themselves into center-Liberal and Tory parties has repeated itself with Marxist theorists. Marxist theorists are limited in their ability to perceive reality by their transient social status of being the most important people in a particular region until other people in their population can take over, thus figures like Stalin or Mao will show up that make significant errors and are unable to recognize other versions of Marxism with _correct findings_ as correct. this will also happen when clusters of Trotskyist groups become free. each one of them has the _incentive_ to believe it's the "real" Fourth International even if it isn't, because the sad truth is that if they all believe they're the real one long enough and simply perservere and try to collect people before the other ones do, it _will_ be the case that one of them will inevitably outlast the others. the quality of Marxist theory within an emerging International is not necessarily as important ~~on the larger stage of history~~ to the universe as the groups simply happening to guess the correct series of actions for the groups to physically survive. so, if a particular cluster of organizations happens not to have been destroyed yet, it will probably assume that whatever model of the world it currently holds must be the most correct theory there is.

anarchism has completely misinterpreted the consequences of this observation. one common response to seeing the layer of Marxist theorists form is that this is how agency is taken away from the population, and it predicts the rise of bureaucrat states and "The Pigs". another common response that is not mutually exclusive is that Marxists do not understand the fundamental Ideal of democracy and have taken a path that cannot contain it. the latter remark is simply historically inaccurate, because the United States has demonstrated that if a body of people in a large society is left to its own devices to vote for policies long enough, the republic eventually gets to a point where none of the parties actually pass any new policies any more and voting for anyone becomes pointless. Liberal-republicanism has, rather ironically, demonstrated on the scale of a large country that republican states must eventually run out of decisions to make and wither away. so, the concept that people in a republic will always need to meet up and exchange wills and do "democracy" is simply not consistent with the real world. reality has decided that national policies succeed or fail for reasons entirely other than whether people vote for them; if that were not the case, and popularity with the people was the primary driver of a party's success, then Stalin's government would have been a smashing success and would not have collapsed in the 1960s. whether the realization that democracy is an illusion takes agency away from people is a more complicated question. perhaps when someone sees that Khruschev's party and Deng's party are fighting to be the most legitimate, or Stalin's party and early Trotskyism, they will think those conflicts are senseless. but what anarchists never tell you is that anarchists attempting to unite the world will create all the same problems. charcoal anarchists like to speak of what amounts to tribal societies and the organization of society through villages and village-like social graphs extending up to national scales that approximately replicate the behavior of tribal society. but tribes have gone to war before. every violent European empire started out as a bunch of tribes. tribes have designated leaders, elders, or keepers of information. blue anarchists like to speak of organizing societies into federations of cooperatives. this will logically result in layers of experts that collected the knowledge required to create and run the corporations. if you have ever been to a workplace containing several people before or even watched a director's commentary about making a TV cartoon, you would know that most of the decisions that have to be made to create a final product can more or less be put together by one or two people who are experts in the history and theory of a particular craft. Engels talks about the tyranny of the power loom, I keep turning over and over in my mind a recent director's commentary by Butch Hartman, but it's overall the same thing. a bunch of people come to a workplace to produce a product but the basic decisions on what the product will look like only have to be made once. so the person who designed the power loom or wrote the pitch bible for the TV show has a lot of power. as long as global capitalism exists and there is any open space around a particular project, it is the entire finished product that will be selected for or against. this means that whatever the most correct answers are on that final product to make it the most popular, all the workers in the corporation are bound to follow them, no matter how onerous they are, no matter how oppressive they are, and whoever solves the correct answers the most effectively is the one who rules that chunk of society. if the corporation closes, all the workers go home and start very slowly running afoul of the basic ground rules of bourgeois society that no one collects anything from the earth without the approval of some other human being and no one takes anything from anyone else without the taking evolving into a social relationship and an agreed transfer. so nobody will want to go against the people who manage to stay around a while and keep promising a relationship in which if you maintain your relationship you will be allowed to collect supplies and follow the law. outside that zone lies danger: fail to perform to known methods of success, become a criminal hated by society, try to make a product on your own and fail to sell it, lose all your money. the true function that capitalists solve within Liberal-republicanism is solving how it is even possible for everyone to follow the law and still survive, so within Liberal-republicanism _per se_, if you ever try to go against any of it and question any of its authorities capitalists can simply twist the knife and make everyone into a criminal begging for a way for everyone not to hate each other and lock each other up after various slights and injuries against each other while capitalists set the laws to whatever they want to. if blue anarchists turn the world into islands of co-ops, a similar thing is going to happen. either the elite layers of the co-op islands will link together by culture and identity and various islands of co-ops will eventually go to war over matters like Christianity and Zionism versus atheism and transgender rights, trying to fully destroy each other's cultures until one assimilates into the other, or the system will simply function more like capitalism than people intended and each of the chunks of co-ops will end up with a particular elite layer of rulers that get to do whatever they want because as long as they solve all the answers correctly there will be no crimes or wars. anarchists everywhere will get dismayed and try to claim that co-op theory was "never" real anarchism. meanwhile, judging by how Liberal-republicanism has functioned, blue anarchists will probably start coming up with conspiracy theories about why co-op theory really should have worked but it only failed because it was corrupted by pedophiles or greedy people or Europeans or Satan.

this is the appeal of Stalin. in one sense, the system created by the bourgeoisie can only really end in some kind of large-scale spatial hierarchy where the highest-status people are the people who solve how to organize society to create the smallest numbers of killings and instances of group infighting, and the people with the lowest levels of consciousness on the future development of industry are given the lowest status. the system perpetuates itself because anyone who has the slightest idea what is going on for a moment is moved out of the class of people that actually has any incentive to ensure that anything functions sensibly or stably as opposed to simply looking orderly, and when people are on top of the system they are rewarded over and over for _not failing_ as opposed to succeeding; whenever there is a failure, the people at the bottom are always the ones to "choose" to enact the consequences, which may include crime, unlawful production of restricted materials (movies, seeds, squats), or war with neighboring regions in the case of the new Russian empire. capitalism has always been a sort of terrible half-solution to the problem of preventing what imperial citizens naturally do. so when the people on top of a chunk of people in antagonism with other chunks successfully solve a historical transition, and it looks like the worldwide spatial hierarchy created by capitalism is actually snapping together to continuously create order instead of suddenly breaking, the citizens can only come to see a central party that _successfully_ solves the problem of creating order and allowing people to follow the law as brilliant. if Stalin and Mao somehow solve the problem of creating what essentially resembles a worldwide kingdom made out of tiny provinces, then it would seem like anything people might think of as "democracy" can follow. countries across the world have repeatedly created kingdoms and then turned them into Liberal republics, so in that sense democracy and the existence of a stable national population would seem to be orthogonal to each other, compatible but existing on entirely different levels.

the problem with that thinking is, as described above, that the layer of Marxist theorists tends not to unify. before even getting into purely practical decisions like North Korea attempting to look unaffiliated with other countries to not get in trouble, countries can start splitting apart as soon as Mao and Kim Il-sung have different models of what socialism is. why? this all goes back to the inherent power held by Marxist theorists coming from solving war. wars, crimes, and general violent conflicts between political factions are all similar. every time a group of capitalists unifies or a cluster of Marxist theorists unifies onto the same prediction for the socio-economic shape of a society, all of these unifications work toward the same general problem of preventing war. but this means that if factions inside a particular workers' state are not functioning together one will be pressured to eliminate the other. this also means that if capitalism and Stalinism happen to exist alongside each other, the need to keep people ordered will collide with the inherent instability of juxtaposing capitalism in its Liberal-republican form with the new structures within Stalin's Marxism. capitalism proper will try to put pressure on commodities from workers' states, hitting all the workers beneath each one, and Stalinism will push back on Liberal-republicanism trying to weaken the capitalists' government, although it can only push lightly. while a Stalinist state holds the power to crush pro-capitalist movements inside it, it holds no real power over the ability of US capitalists to solve for new innovations that temporarily prevent horizontal violence while all the best law-followers proceed to write all the laws. this means that capitalists still hold the power to control agorist processes and begin setting all kinds of arbitrary criteria selecting out Stalinist products as if they were useless. retailers, manufacturers accepting raw materials, national trade commissions that happen to have an agenda, and so forth can both reject products directly, and create worldwide trade agreements to carry it out internationally. this, in its own particular way, is an act of war — if violence is normally stopped by orderly enterprises operating together, then deliberately preventing enterprises from connecting can only breed instability and possibly violence. but, the world's collective body of capitalist-headed corporations has control over the very links that hold society together, and at what point people join society, and at what point they are not considered human. it defines the boundaries of the concepts of coercion, aggression, cheating, and stealing; it defines the basic shape of all acceptable or unacceptable social behavior; it defines what is Good or Evil. if all the capitalists in the world desperately wanted to define trans women entering bathrooms as aggression, they'd eventually break up every government and dissolve every ethnic group that allowed it. for capitalists the definition of aggression is fundamentally arbitrary and amounts to whatever soup of words their favorite philosophers cooked up. but as a result, nationality, ethnicity, language, and demographic identity themselves are deemed "optional" things that people get to have as a treat only if they first obey every existing capitalist. every day there is pressure on people to migrate out of the Third World into the First World, sometimes because "China is too oppressive", sometimes because countries are poor, sometimes because countries are still partly medieval, but always with a challenge that _the United States is better than you_. Stalinism may be a failure, but the alternative is people entirely stripping themselves of their humanity and turning themselves into products, striving for nothing but to be the most useful product to the first country that will agree to use and exploit them. largely thanks to the United States, there are particular average prices associated with White people, Black people, and Indic people that can be expected to be high or low, and racism is kind of just _true_ now. what's the price for a Kazakh person? not very high? you'd better get to raising it by moving to another continent or else everyone will think that's the entire value of your ethnicity.

capitalism is, in reality, just a bunch of living, breathing _beasts_ fighting each other daily to see how much of nature they can scoop up for themselves. at certain times, the division between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is almost illusory. capitalism can begin without any such division, as simply a bunch of the most "elite" and "qualified" individuals joining together in a ring to decide which people are the most capable of extracting and using surrounding resources. the decision of which individuals are allowed to work somewhere or allowed to own business territories is inherently social, agreed on by a layer of winners who have collectively divided up all the spaces and tasks inside a town, but once somebody is placed into the peripheral area of losers those people have no say in what the winners decide, and the only way they have of influencing society is by being the very best at some specialized craft to the point of being better than anyone else. merely being good at something isn't enough. they really must be the most superior people in the area at a particular arbitrary discipline to the point of making other people inferior, at which point they will gain popularity and become able to participate in the social activity of making unshakable decisions about society with other experts. Idealism is the philosophy of the privileged; obedience and complete intolerance of imperfection in every aspect of life is the reality of the younger generations.

some may try to say that capitalism is created by an act of prejudice, in which the layer of experts deliberately decides that it would be "a good idea" to expel demographic minorities from their settlements. this is not the reality of how capitalism functions. capitalism begins at either the concept that all resources are obtained in transactions of equal value (_agorism_, in the economic sense) or the concept that towns will be based on laws and will only consist of people who follow the law (which might be termed _political Kantianism_). the latter system is unshakable. the moment a town fills up with people and any more people attempt to come in, any attempt by an anarchist to disturb commodities or territories under some concept that "laws are culturally fabricated and arbitrary" is going to be met with some of the most vitriolic and violent behavior imaginable as the people in the town point to the inherent sanctity of Kantian ethical constructs such as _non-stealing_ and _non-tresspassing_, or if they are especially educated, the concept of _populational relativism_ and the value of respecting and coexisting with other countable cultures an individual does not belong to, regardless of whether that individual belongs to a different one or belongs to nothing. Marxists may like to say that towns are founded on the _class rule of the bourgeoisie_ within a region, but on the ground, that is not necessarily an accurate characterization sociologically. when people believe Idealist philosophies, the category of philosophies that believe ideologies genuinely cause themselves, they have _no idea_ they are creating a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". all they know is that they are a group of socially-linked friends (if only the most elite ones) that will do anything to protect their friends. the existence of laws is unshakable, unless you want to make thousands and thousands of people severely angry at a small number of people all at once. this is the origin of states — sociality, love, and friendship. a state forms when a group of people has completely taken up an area to the point no more people will fit in it, and human sociality inverts itself so that everything about it only applies to a limited population of people defending themselves against the outside. a state is not a centralized locus of power sitting far away in a mayor's office or a capital city, but the entire structure permeating across all individuals that holds together a spatially finite and countable population. it is very important that anarchists learn this. while Peter Kropotkin can go on and on about "mutual aid" as a factor in evolution spanning across the overall ecological timeline from herd animals to humans, it is actually forms of sociality and mutual assistance that ultimately create hierarchy, exclusion, and states. all hierarchy of one demographic identity over another within a population begins at the fact that towns and cities have limited space that becomes increasingly differentiated into specific finite career slots, and all prejudice begins at the fact that individuals must plan their entire existences around which slots they can or cannot fit into. that other surrounding people would immediately start guessing at where all the people around them are or are not going to end up and which ones are "fit for" particular positions is only the obvious outcome within a form of society where every single individual benefits from trying to get them or their immediate social connections into all the slots before the people they don't like in order to create maximum ethical behavior across society and maximum social harmony.

perhaps universities everywhere should stop giving prejudices special names after exactly what they appear to be excluding, and just admit that all of them are manifestations of a single prejudice called Everybodyism. after all, nobody would have any incentive to claim that it was unimportant and irrelevant to them if they were forced to confront the _material reality_ that Everybodyism does in fact affect _everybody_.

to some extent, looking at capitalism from such a big-picture view is more of "a fun diversion from Marxism" than an actual Marxist perspective — helpful for the purposes of understanding what kinds of rhetoric Liberal-republicans actually need to hear, but not the clearest possible angle that will aid the most in constructing a new proletarian society. by no longer centering any infra-Marxism as the only possible viewpoint, meta-Marxism has opened up strange new possibilities for telling _any_ philosophy how to reach any particular goal the most effectively. but as long as that "particular goal" is solidly staked on the task of building a new society out of the proletariat, it will still tend to pull all philosophies toward the same conclusion. no matter what, capitalism or agorism or political Kantianism is the same collection of material objects that can only evolve into new shapes in a few directions, ultimately headed toward the same crises, and where society as a whole can only be rescued from those crises by a small number of possible solutions.

let us take a moment to consider how people have historically changed classes. there used to be a class called the nobility. in various critical periods, the nobility were important in creating the borders of internal states or imminently dividing kingdoms, but now that process does not meaningfully exist. what has replaced them? now local-states in the United States and Europe have dedicated government bureaucracies that belong to no one, and each state in the United States has a governor. how did that happen? you see so many people today claiming that it is impossible to replace capitalists with government ministries because the system would surely be too bloated, and it must have never been a good idea. but you never really see anyone saying that Liberal-republicanism is so inefficient that the nobility were better than governors or state governments. that kind of rhetoric may have happened for some 50 years after Liberal republics were first created, and then was seemingly never seen again. so what makes capitalists different? periodically, you even see Tories getting upset about capitalists, simply refering to billionaires through other bizarre narratives that may include such characters as "Satan" or "aliens" or "the Illuminati". ultimately nobody really wants capitalists in control of making so many arbitrary decisions about civilization, _including capitalists_. but it would seem that to rid society of capitalists and remove them from each country's social structure, they would need to be replaced with some other structure capable of only performing a capitalist's most necessary functions.

here I think it is valuable to take a detour and talk about television show directors. while audiovisual media have provided some of the nastiest examples of everything capitalism allows big corporations to get away with, from putting strict regulations on all public online communication to the actual abuse of actors used in productions, there is something amazing about TV shows that often goes unappreciated. for a while, television networks were acting as such centralized repositories of activity that they were almost halfway abolishing capitalism. networks would hire directors, and the directors would essentially be responsible for developing entire products from start to finish and putting together teams that would resemble very small corporations. but the directors did not own any business property. capitalism had created a new absurdity of basically hiring people to do everything capitalists do and giving them basically none of the benefits of actually being capitalists. the reason everyone went along with this, of course, was that another group of capitalists at the top was operating normally and giant corporations could skim a bit of earnings off each project as a whole. but either way, capitalism was developing and changing and exposing new problems that had never been encountered before. now, capitalists did not have to show up with capital themselves for new business territories and job slots to be created, and large enough corporations could simply create more business territories without external competition. the large corporations did not have to find people with money to be an audience, because they found other large corporations to pay for their TV networks by being advertisers. large corporations had almost turned themselves into a kind of perpetual motion machine, but the only real problem was that they had to decide how to use limited airtime and limited studio space, so they made the decision to put current and potential directors all into competition with each other through a system of favoring the directors that either made them the most money or got the best ratings. capitalism's central problem, the division of industry into finite slots as it filled up all available space, had struck again. but it had also transformed — what had become apparent was that the process of creating new business territories and the process of different production structures and cities making market connections were inherently correlated. occasionally, you will now hear some peripheral economists speak of an "agora", which is a kind of uncontrolled open gap in society where various businesses or individuals make various kinds of connections arbitrarily. an economic or purely-relational "market". before big corporate TV networks, smaller businesses operated openly floating around inside agoras. But after big corporate TV networks, the agora had become enclosed and managed by the large corporation. Agoras had been exposed as part of the mechanism that granted smaller businesses free-floating business territories, because when the agora was successfully closed up, people that would have been owners would turn into workers. But the problem hadn't entirely been solved, because after large corporations would fence in agoras and seemingly own and control them, the agora would still re-emerge inside. The finite space inside any particular area of industry was creating a problem where because the world outside the large corporation was still too big and unknown to plan for, the people outside the corporation would still have to decide whether they had use for any particular group of workers inside it. Between the large corporation and the outside world, there was an agora, and the agora was a space where the outside world was hiring and firing workers and deciding whether they got to pay their rent and live in any particular town according to whether their choice of craft and level of performance was perfect. As capitalism slowly got closer to going away, it got harsher on workers and it clamped down on its inherent prejudice.

In 1917, approximately 18 years before the first public demonstration of electronic television, the Soviet Union would abolish capitalists and Liberal-republicanism. One of the most notable social transformations in the Soviet Union was mandatory employment. This meant enterprises in general were required to hire people and prevent unemployment; I have seen many people get this concept wrong and claim it was a requirement on workers, including a few Marxists, but it was in fact a requirement on industry and hiring. The creation of mandatory or full employment has the consequence that instead of workers being completely wasted by not being assigned to any workplace anywhere, some people will be assigned to workplaces where it seems as if they are not needed. This is the same "internal agora" effect from capitalism slowly coming back. A city or union republic can maintain control over all its workplaces and ensure that they don't become autonomous governments — which, as it should be noted by all anarchists, you _don't want_ because any autonomous cluster of co-ops can fill up with anti-gay anti-Muslim anti-Chinese Tories any day of the week — but even when all workplaces are taken out of competition there comes to be a problem of actually distributing workers to the correct cities and industries to properly get the most use out of them. This is not a matter of "free will"; it cannot be. If it were true that individual decisions allocated workers perfectly to their most productive use, then nobody in the United States would ever need welfare programs of any kind because they would all have chosen such an effective position they would all be earning some amount of money over their desired minimum. Nobody has ever seen capitalism function like that, at modern levels of technology and consumption. It has never existed. So there is a real and possibly still-unsolved problem of how to put workers in exactly the correct places inside a society, within whatever safe window of error exists, so that the overall body of workers can all be productive enough to meet society's current needs and have time to experiment with placing some of the most peripheral workers into new enterprises or teams if there are any more requirements for products to be invented or new versions to be made. There is a lot of Idealist language being thrown around about this currently, about how displaced skilled workers have to "find new ways to make meaning" in our "new" existentialist dystopia, or how society should practice the Ideals of "empathy" and "community" to achieve more social programs, or how "we" (who are we?) chose to leave increasing numbers of empty houses instead of practicing the mere abstract Ideal of an efficiently organized society. Nobody seems to understand the frighteningly large scope of exactly what is wrong and what needs to be fixed. People often seem to assume that a bit of voting at sporadic locations and infrequent times or alternatively a system capable of replacing the day-to-day administrative tasks of capitalists within individual enterprises would be enough to fix everything. Marx himself spent rather long passages focusing on the concept of surplus value and how if the gap between material productivity and wages could be brought down to nothing but the actual administrative costs to keep various enterprises and institutions running, society would have more latitude to make any number of decisions about which things to produce where and which new things to create. This concept that capitalists collecting surplus value is the most important feature of capitalism can be misleading. The moment the surplus value gap goes away, the new problem that comes up that is very much not a trivial problem is how to allocate every worker to the correct place in society (or societies...) based on what begins as a complicated disorganized sea of people as opposed to a few well-defined loci of control. "Government by all the people" sounds great but it fundamentally requires the creation of ongoing coordination and structure between a great number of people in a way that does not currently exist.

I will conclude this overview of capitalism with an analogy that sounds vague but that (I hope) is actually profound. If people were nothing more than a series of dots moving across a sheet of paper a bit like on a _Sternhalma_ board (the star shaped checker-board where marbles are always moving in parts of triangles) and the goal was to move all the dot-people to the next corporation box over until all the corporations were packed optimally, one of the best things you could do to make the problem easier would be to make the board infinite. If you were to take the sheet of paper and curl it up into a cylinder, or impossibly distort it into a perfect sphere, then the whole problem of packing the people would basically turn into a "Hilbert hotel" problem where the options available seem infinite. In the study of infinite sets, there is something called Hilbert's infinite hotel, and this hypothetical object became famous because in our everyday experience a hotel "shouldn't" have an extra room open if an infinite number of rooms is already full. But given a particular definition of infinity, all the guests already in the hotel can simply move over one room to leave open an extra room. The simplest way to see this definition of infinity in real life is simply whenever the boundaries of an object do not stop quite where they were expected to. When scientists placed simulated hydrogen atoms close together — which are usually expected to stop at a molecule two hydrogen atoms long — they managed to create a simulated quantum physics scenario where electrons would flow off the second hydrogen atom onto a third hydrogen atom, and then another one, creating an indefinitely-long thread of metallic hydrogen as long as the electrons kept moving off the first atom. Despite the molecules always technically being finite, the spaces for electrons would become infinite because the molecule didn't stop where it was normally expected to. In the same way, the simple "board game" version of allocating workers to corporations stops ending up with areas where workers uselessly pool onto a corporation where they are "not needed" if the workers can simply wrap around to the other side in any direction. Literally speaking, this math problem would probably apply to things like redirected shipments more often than workers, but if a small number of workers needed to be moved to another country, an international transitional state with the ability to relax restrictions on international migration would certainly make it easier.

An imperialist makes a big deal out of the fact European armies can show the world is round. A vulgar materialist tries to focus in on tiny regions and make the world flat again. A Marxist eventually discovers that it is easier to bring all the various sections of the world economy into conscious and cooperative control of each other if they all remember the world is round.

== Trotskyism and {{game|Deltarune}} ==

I have to confess that because I learned Marxism in such an oddly specific way — skipping over some of Marx and Engels to focus on Lenin and Stalin's era, applying meta-Marxist models to news events or generalized models of historical periods, comparing everything to the conflict between Stalin's party and early Trotskyism — there is a lot of basic Marxist terminology I don't know that I will frequently "reinvent" in different words and become confused "why no Marxist has ever talked about this" when actually there is at least one person who has. For the longest time I was confused on what a {{dfn|cadre}} was referring to even though I actually had the basic idea jotted down under words like "Lattice model", "filtration", and "Marxist theorist". I understood the concept of setting down "Marxist theorists" to expand organizations ("going into the marsh", as Lenin put it) and how they could only do it if they had a good Materialist understanding of how historical situations functioned, but the way I tended to see things was to point out Marxist theorists or advanced workers and categorize them into swatch colors by their level of knowledge, so that over a region of space "Lattices" were forming based on having a frame of red theorists or a frame of orange theorists rising out of the background mass of blue-aligned people. I think what my experiences have taught me is that there actually are multiple ways to learn Marxism and that applying models to really understand how the models behave can be more helpful than just memorizing things. It's one thing to know a list of events and what terms mean, and it's another thing to be someone who is good enough at Marxist theory to look at some new chewed-up form of terminology that has come out of workers who haven't read theory but do have practical experience and say, "oh wait, this is actually talking about Marxist concepts X, Y, and Z, so the workers really do know what they're doing; I'm going to open up my wiki entry on Marxist cadres and write down the phrase 'Lattice model'". I'm personally fine with going back and learning the traditional terms for the purpose of making any articles I write make more sense, but I think this is an important thing to remember in terms of identifying what class consciousness or consciousness that can form a Fourth International looks like out in the field. Proletarian consciousness is almost "mathematical" in a way, existing a bit below the level of language and more in the form of {{em|imagery}} of objects interacting materially.

In this sense, Western-Marxists in the orbit of Mark Fisher and Stuart Hall who will try to act like the arts and the overall phenomenon of all fictional or non-fictional media are critically important to understanding society and the spread of clear versus unclear forms of consciousness (bourgeois ideology versus Materialism) are not entirely wrong, because in a tiny, vanishingly-small fraction of cases, progressive factions within society will express legitimate Materialist knowledge in highly metaphorical forms either because they don't know how to better express it or because any concrete form of expressing it has been so forbidden this is the only form they can get away with saying out loud. Here my mind goes to the incident in Lenin's writings where underground publications in Russia kept quietly talking about roosters and suns. This is an old practice that dates back to the times of alchemy with alchemists quietly hiding chemical equations in mythical pictures, but it can still be seen today in some remote corners of the internet. One thing I have increasingly become convinced of recently is that the more fantasy works containing "superstructural fantasy worlds" are created to talk about LGBT+ self-discovery and social circles, the closer each of these works inches toward Communism, and even toward Trotskyism — while early works in this genre like {{book|The Chronicles of Narnia}} and {{film|Toy Story}} had absolutely nothing to do with either gay people or Marxism, something seems to have happened by the time LGBT people found {{film|The Wizard of Oz}} where they all started slowly realizing that adventure narratives as described in Jung are something of an illusion and the quest of those three protagonists to become "someone better" was only a quest to better understand the existing reality of living in their own material bodies, and by 2017, gay and transgender people had caused entire console role-playing games to exist which were essentially about rejecting the adventure narrative monomyth as a model of reality and {{em|embracing historical materialism}} as the only way characters can possibly "win" at history in the midst of a cruel, godless reality. You'd have to see it to believe it, but as a recent chapter of the game came out I was floored by the messages that were accidentally being conveyed by {{game|Undertale}} and {{game|Deltarune}}. The vast majority of people casually reviewing these games online had not been able to pick up on the dense themes the second game was actually burying inside itself, but when I saw the fifth chapter I could tell the concepts internally driving the narrative were in fact more complex than those people thought. To make a long story shorter, {{game|Deltarune}} is adapting "Theses on Feuerbach" — or at least Feuerbach's {{book|Essence of Christianity}}, one of the two — and because queer people are so tired of capitalism they all lined up for an essentially-Communist console RPG. I am not sure {{game|Deltarune}}'s writer even knows what he's done. But the closer you look at the story you start to see it as a fable about how the whole industrial world is now just one big sea of competing islands of proletarians, or islands of small businesses, and living in it is pain, and everyone is tired of it, and all the islands need to join up and stop believing the internal mythology that says they need to be separate, or else the world will face the common ruin of everything. It doesn't {{em|state}} "on a planetary scale" but within the specific narrative context everything appears in it is so close to saying it that I don't think that matters. {{game|Deltarune}} is the most thinly-veiled appeal toward Trotskyism I have ever seen capitalism produce and it has really made me feel like the link between LGBT+ people and Materialism in everyday life should be studied more. The United States has very few people friendly to "Marxism", "Leninism", or even "Materialism", but it does now have a shocking number of people who are friendly to {{film|The Matrix}} and are now essentially using these films and other versions of the same narrative as a Marxist reading list. As strange as it is to say it out loud, I feel like the ICFI may need to study the underlying processes that produced that.

I do have my own thoughts. Among the world's populations, the shape of a population predisposes it to certain formulations of Marxism. Some of these correlations amount to failures in consciousness — populations close to the shape of a newly-formed kingdom will tend to falsely assume that characteristics of feudal societies are either a normal baseline state of being or unique to them. But there are other populations that are doing something more interesting. Countries that develop First World capitalisms tend to eventually develop LGBT+ movements or subcultures, and each time these populations appear they begin to link together across the world and share the same experiences back and forth, slowly forgetting that they even belong to different countries, and becoming confused on why there isn't an equal amount of progress on their issues in all countries. It used to be believed, especially in the Third World, that LGBT "communities" mostly represented a political movement of people who did not understand Marxism linking together across the world to try to reach capitalists, who all just happened to be gay. But now it has come to be better understood that people can form a new population at any time without their separation having started for economic reasons, and that the shape of LGBT populations is really best described as a plurality of small minority subpopulations isolated by social processes and with economic hardship forced on them from the outside that have joined together through new processes such as the internet to attempt to form something similar but not identical to a nationality.

I once read an article on Left Voice (a federated, international news outlet) which was put out in 2021 that was arguing for transgender rights within a framework of the historical transitions between patriarchal agrarian societies and urban societies, and until recently this article had stuck in my mind as "one of the best Trotskyist articles I've ever seen", but funny enough, I don't actually think it chose the right line of argument. I think a better line of argument would actually be to point out that LGBT+ subpopulations are always so small within their own respective countries that Liberal-republicanism is effectively rigged against queer people ever having rights, but due to these subpopulations being a repeated pattern that keeps popping up in every population, the LGBT+ population naturally tends toward attempting to form political parties on a large scale and create an international state. It sounds ridiculous to say this, but — particularly in its "family-friendly" forms that are already palatable to the center-Liberal press and bourgeois parliaments — gay culture might be one of the most inherently Trotskyist things there ever was. With enough effort you can put together a nationally-scoped, essentially-Stalinist argument about historical transitions, and for scientifically-minded people that will probably land, but the actual shape of LGBT+ subcultures on the ground as they come into being and struggle for their existence genuinely looks less like a single isolated population going through history on its own than it does a miniature Fourth International. This is my best guess as to the social dynamics that were actually going on to produce {{game|Deltarune}}. The fact that works like this are "gay" or "trans" is everything; while every human population begins with particular characteristics, and the world contains many nationality-based populations that function reasonably well when they develop as isolated states, the global LGBT+ population may be one of the first identified coherent human populations to actually start out containing "Trotskyist country characteristics" that predispose it to shed hard national borders and embrace Trotskyism. (Arguably, two other partial examples are Western Europe and Yugoslavia. Writers like Slavoj Žizek like to go around implying that Yugoslavia was not going to develop Bolshevism because the way it sharded apart was some kind of consequence of "national will", but this kind of claim really depends on what limits you set on "Bolshevism" and whether you are willing to define it as the joining together of distinct nations.)

== Trotsky and Deng ==

So, in the first few sections I casually brought up the strange hypothetical of Trotskyism and Stalinism coexisting side-by-side, neither interfering with the other, as separate bordered political entities. To people as knowledgeable on the history of Trotskyism as the ICFI, I can see why at first glance basically nothing about this concept would make sense. And by now, even I have to agree. But, for the sake of the historical record and giving everyone a better understanding of Stalinism, it is worth laying out exactly how I came to conceptualize things that way.

A lot of my early thoughts on "Marxisms coexisting" were direct responses to Cold War rhetoric. My mind would go back to 1930 and think, _but if I'm in the United States, the United States attacking the Soviet Union was the wrong decision_, and as if I had a time machine I would feel like I had to defend Stalin so that today's Russians wouldn't have to suffer the destruction of all democracy and a lack of affordable health care. I would look at China or Cuba or North Korea and I would think to myself, _sure, I wouldn't really want to live there, but I'm also not a Third World peasant, so the people in those countries seeing the social transformations they did must have been amazing for them_. I was thoughtful about the wants and needs of people in other countries, and I always tried to avoid simply eternalizing the exact conditions of the United States and transferring all the things that are currently happening in the United States' unique historical period onto them. I was convinced for a while, incorrectly, that Trotskyists "didn't think like this" and whenever the United States and Europe went around spreading rhetoric that Third World countries were merely behind them in history and letting other countries flood in and herd their people into First World businesses was the solution that Trotskyists didn't actually care and were simply waiting around for global empire to scoop up and assimilate everyone into "The West" so they could avoid having to deal with rival forms of Marxism they didn't understand and have the initial country characteristics they wanted to ensure that the form of Marxism they only subjectively believed to be superior happened first. I generally saw Trotskyists as "unwitting imperialists" with false consciousness about the Third World, so when I would see talks or articles that actually said Trotskyists should _defend_ Cuba my first reaction was intense skepticism — "they still continue to say that Stalinism is bad and they don't want it to exist, so when they claim to care about Cuba, are they just lying to make themselves look good?". My perceptions of Trotskyists had largely been very negative, because the fact that people turning against the Soviet Union had ultimately brought such horrific outcomes while every moment people stood with Stalin's allies had at least delayed those outcomes had colored my entire mental concept of what a Trotskyist was capable of thinking or knowing. And yet, in spite of that, I didn't hate Trotskyists. At every moment on the historical timeline what I saw was Trotsky making some kind of effort to understand Leninism and be part of the Russian Revolution or try to create more Marxist parties in Europe or Mexico; I'd heard about so many of Trotsky's errors and Luxemburg's crude-sounding positions but I knew they weren't reactionaries. So I was confused for a while what Stalinists even had against them. If they were just a bit less talented at Marxism and tended to distort things, wouldn't the sensible position be to simply try to give them ways to help the overall national movement or Stalinist republic out of sight of its central positions of authority? Stalinists would often repeat at people new to Marxism that it was important to not become an ultraleft and to be able to analyze non-Marxist movements such as alliances between social-democratic parties and workers' movements so that Marxist theorists could "go into the marsh" and build bridges between all potential Marxists. So I couldn't understand how Trotskyists were the enemy if they were simply a bit bad at Marxism, and why you wouldn't simply start that "marsh process" over at the beginning of a workers' state to try to turn all the remaining bourgeois progressive movements and distortions of Marxism into Marxism and make use of existing historical elements to get the workers' state to cohere together.

I had taken everything I'd learned so far at that time and had spun this unique new narrative that Stalin was a sensible defender of the Russian Revolution and Trotsky tended to get things wrong but actually when Trotsky wrote his criticism of the Soviet Union's failure to get an upsettingly-long list of features of the 14 republics through socialist transition, it was just some kind of misunderstanding where Trotsky was dissatisfied with the way the CPSU was doing things and somehow if somebody just _went and attended to those things_ everything would have been okay. Marxism is the study of the developmental stages of societies and the best ways to construct government, so surely if Trotsky was a Marxist and he had at least some understanding of the problems in the Soviet Union he could have tried to fix a few of them himself? I was so ready to just put Trotsky back into the Soviet party apparatus and turn him into a bureaucrat "if he'd only behave", or into the concentric system of soviets somewhere so he could learn what was actually wrong with industry and come back with a better assessment of how to begin a transformation of the entire country starting at small scales. Or failing that, I thought, put him into a different group of countries, maybe Europe, and he can simply go build Trotskyism there. The point of any particular cluster of Marxist theorists is that they solve what civilization is supposed to look like and as they are doing it people put down structures to realize that civilization. So maybe Trotsky didn't have quite the correct schema for the Soviet Union but if you sent him to Europe (and assume he somehow assembled a party that could defeat the Axis powers), maybe he would be better at solving Europe. I noticed this odd recurring theme in Trotsky's works that it vaguely seemed like he was very dissatisfied with the Soviet Union, for reasons that he himself admitted were connected to it being a backward Third World country, but didn't seem to have as many bad things to say about the United States or Europe given that those countries, unimpeded by their own imperialism, were already developing more smoothly. So my logical conclusion had been that Trotsky must simply be tired of Third World countries and prefer countries or clusters of nationalities with more First-World characteristics. I was big on the idea of "country characteristics". I thought that had to be one of the explanations of why Trotskyism existed. And the funny thing is that I wasn't completely wrong, because First World countries do have more globalization and interconnected economies, making them less likely to accept Stalinism. But I had taken it a bit further than it was really supposed to go, thinking that if Trotsky recognized "uneven development" and also believed in an international permanent revolution that would span "a number of countries" then it must be because he was describing the fragment of world socialist transition that would happen inside European-style country characteristics. Blockheaded analysis, yet again, but this is what happens when you try to understand the whole world and all its material contradictions from inside Stalinism.

I was a bit biased toward Mao at the time. I was halfway convinced he "had it figured out" and when he wrote that one article about making sure everybody's opinions were heard so people wouldn't disrupt the organization ("On correcting mistaken ideas in the party") he must have known the actual correct method for preventing a Left Opposition. If I couldn't understand why Trotsky created the Fourth International, then surely he must have done it because all the existing Marxist parties were like a Fourth International but bigger and more successful and due to arbitrary disagreements that had physically split the two instances of Marxism apart early Trotskyism was simply trying to start the same thing over again smaller with far too few people. Because I didn't understand the difference between a Third International and a Fourth International, I was stuck on this weird theory that if somehow Mao hadn't allowed China to turn its back on the Third International that somehow he could have seen the division between Stalinism and Trotskyism coming and fixed the entire problem. I'm not sure why I attributed so much theoretical mastery to Mao when I knew he never stopped the arrival of Deng Xiaoping and I even knew that Dengists in China were now making a habit of claiming that everything they were doing was consistent with Mao. I guess I simply chalked that one up to typical revisionist methods, because growing up in the United States I'd seen an absurd number of different distortions of Marxism that would always try to argue that a few people forming a cooperative or a cluster of actual frontier settlers forming an anarcho-syndicalist civilization in Israel or a perfect Menshevik party that actually manages to regulate capitalists through parliament was _exactly_ what was said in Marx. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether people in various situations across history were giving an inaccurate account of Marxist parties they didn't belong to, or a perfectly accurate account of revisionist tendencies passed down from old traditional revisionist standbys that just mysteriously happened to be told in the first person.

In the very beginning around 2020 I was still largely standing on top of bourgeois philosophical frameworks, not really believing them sincerely, but trying to see if I could find ways to twist them toward an honest analysis of Marxism instead of a distorted analysis of Liberal-republicanism. I liked to play around with the concept of bourgeois ethics and the concepts of Good and Evil. Those seemed at first glance to be completely inadequate for explaining why the Cold War had happened, but when PragerU dropped a video in 2015 about how Trotsky supposedly proved US imperialism (!), that video really stuck in my mind for a while as one of the funniest and most obviously-incorrect things I'd ever seen. (I actually made an edit of that video where I had Bret Stephens giving a satirical "Trotskyist talk" that included all the most quintessentially "baffling" things I'd heard Trotskyists say, as well as a few Stalinist talking points I put in there so that the joke wouldn't be hating on Trotskyism as much as replicating the feel of an IMT talk that seems to toss around a bunch of irrelevant complaints and then end up at a good conclusion.) Sometimes I would set up scenarios where because Liberal-republicans believe in standpoint epistemology they can't defend Trotsky without asking what Trotsky actually wants and then they become obligated to realize a Fourth International; sometimes I would take the concept of some 40% of US people believing in a god and set up a scenario where if something resembling the bible god exists then Trotsky would have to have gone somewhere when he died but if the US believes God sided against Stalinism and the Soviet Union believes God sided with Stalinism and everyone believes something different about Trotsky, where he went would become a total paradox because you can't be in separation from God and not in separation from God at the same time. I didn't take those particular scenarios very seriously. One thing I took a little more seriously was the Liberal-republican concept of intersectionality and the notion of _conglomerate anarchies_ that had grown up around it. (My term.)

Within the United States there has been this gap between the promises of Liberal-republicanism of granting human rights to everybody just because the Constitution says every individual in the country has human rights and has human rights separately and in parallel, and the reality of actually trying to organize civil rights movements and seeing that there is no actual incentive for any of them to cooperate with each other outside the fact that _Tories hate all of them_. In this weird way, all progress in the United States is driven by utter hatred and no progress occurs without hatred, only different minority demographics radially oppressing each other and regenerating each other's oppression. Anarchists will do everything to cover up the real nature of this process. They'll tell you that the radial oppression wouldn't occur if people just practiced the Ideal of intersectionality. They'll tell you that the natural state of human beings is for all demographics to live in harmony and Tories are the only ones who spontaneously invented Prejudice on a Thursday. They'll tell you that Communists don't understand how to be human and only a community free of scientific analysis of communities and formed out of the passion of the moment is a real community. They'll appeal to incomprehensible concepts of Rhizome and groups of people never consisting of individuals and being totally uncountable, all inherently clumping inward and inward like iron and lead atoms increasingly crunching all the heavy atoms around them into a black hole.
They'll... just go make a bunch of videos about _Pokémon_ that they think are not political but are actually all an unconscious way of expressing their desire for 18 abstract Ideals (Pokémon types) that constantly fight and compete with each other to always have been designed to live in harmony as necessary indivisible parts of a single cosmic Creation. This is more or less what people think the United States _is_ — a perfect indivisible conglomerate of different but perfectly parallel identities that _just happen_ not to destroy each other in a way that is inexplicable and incomprehensible but also natural and sacred. In medieval Europe people used to speak of "hierarchy" as this concept that kings, nobles, and clergy believed that the pyramidal order they had created was holy. Now it seems like that concept has shifted a bit so that the god of the 21st Century is Arceus the world-god, and the sacred order handed down by Arceus is many local competing islands which are ruled not by specific individual owners but by the simple agreement by any possible decision-making representative of the island that they will all remain islands competing with the world outside them but they will all live in harmony. What do you call such a "voluntary agreement"? There are few reasonable things to call that other than using the word _anarchy_ in a way that is completely upsetting to anarchists. Hierarchy has already yielded to anarchy, but has become it "in the wrong way".

This sets the stage for why I felt compelled to see the overall world as a vaguely static system and make everything "coexist". Some forms of anarchism — admittedly still not every one of them — have been taken up as the weapon of Liberal-republicanism such that U.S. people are being relentlessly assaulted every day with _two_ bourgeois ideologies that each have their own harsh consequences if not obeyed; Liberal-republicanism and anarchism have lined up side-by-side and are now just one big comprehensive system of formal and informal government that take turns doing hired jobs for each other, and to say the least, it's getting tiring.

Thus, after being fed the line that _center-Liberals and anarchists have to coexist and center-Liberals and kulaks had to coexist and trans people and alleged rapists with a sky-colored letter on their name tag have to coexist and literally everyone who isn't Donald Trump has to coexist but J.K. Rowling and Rebecca Sugar can't coexist but Communists and Kropotkinists and Arceus-loving agorists have to coexist and every country and every other country has to coexist unless they're Deng Xiaoping explicitly telling countries to coexist_ for 27 years straight, you can see why my head was spinning and I simply had to start sorting out the whole puzzle in a methodical, logical way _immediately_ before I had any real time to gather up all the necessary background reading an "Orthodox" Marxist usually needs. I would do the readings at the pace I could but I had a very urgent need to actually calculate through the complicated math problem of which people in society I was actually obligated to obey the ethical imperatives of to successfully gain any allies and which people were just knocking me around. I no longer believe the phrase "The Left" (or "leftists") means anything whatsoever. What philosophy people align with says very little about whether you can trust them. It's almost more accurate to say people are just plain garbage wherever you go and the only thing anyone can actually believe in is the Materialist analysis of society and the prospect that if you take accurate observations of reality it will reward you for correct predictions. When anarchists and Tories were both becoming insufferable and actually impossible to talk to, I retreated into my "lair" behind a sizable shelf of dragons and math books and I just started writing down every statement I could ever remember anarchists saying, every statement I could ever remember Trotskyists saying, every statement I could remember center-Liberals saying, every statement I remembered from Tories, every statement I remembered from Dengists, and every statement I could remember coming from Stalinists, and I stopped judging them based on my own desires and simply started asking, "okay, but what does this statement _actually mean_?". I knew that there was no chance in _hell_ that all of these contradictions between different philosophies were ever going to work themselves out through discussion and "community". So I was going to solve them using some form of mathematical reasoning. I was going to just take all these groups of people and solve them so I could stop retreating away from all people since the year 2020 and one day come out of my house. I wasn't going to be picky any more. Anarchists said "we aren't going to tolerate Stalin"? Okay. Trotskyists said "you can't create socialism in one country"? All right, I'm writing it down. Stalinists said "Trotskyists are liars and you can't trust them"? Okay, I'm adding that too. Maoists said "Deng enabled the bureaucracy"? Got it. Center-Liberals said "regulations are Actually magic spells that absolutely _Penrose-world-line_ capitalists into inevitably perfecting Liberalism"? Nasty; it's recorded. I was so angry and tired, but I wasn't one to direct my anger toward hurting people. The only revenge I knew was to maliciously comply with what everyone said until I had given them exactly what they asked for but given it to them so precisely they were disconcerted and upset. And this was the condition I was in when trying to solve Trotskyism. It felt like it was the only philosophy that hadn't already abused me, but I was quite used to human societies in general being hazardous and unreasonable and I was fully prepared for it to be just like the rest of them and ultimately stop just a few unsolved contradictions short of making sense. I'd come up with an entire scheme of existential materialism to "objectify" human beings and reduce all groups of people to semi-deterministic processes almost resembling computations. I was ready to just accept that people were more physical and chemical-like, driven by arbitrary A × B equations that simply _led to things_, than they were reasonable actors.

So... imagine my surprise when I found out I didn't really have to do that and by trying to create "meta-Marxism" out of Stalinism I was more or less solving a problem that Stalinism had set up.

Within the past year or so of developing my framework for analyzing all philosophies starting at their surface claims and evident social links with other philosophies, I had to ask myself the seemingly strange question of whether Deng Xiaoping Thought is actually a form of anarchism. At first this would seem like a silly question, because anarchism tells you it's against states and Deng Xiaoping Thought is a statist system. But here's the thing about that: anarchism lies to you by constantly resorting to Liberal-republican civil rights legislation enforced by the same state and cops it hates, and Deng Xiaoping Thought fundamentally believes that the correct path for a nation-state is whatever brings nation-states out of domination and into harmony. This is very, very similar to the things typical United States anarchists say. So is Deng Xiaoping Thought a form of what anarchism actually is, or is anarchism a variation on Dengism? I now realize that if anything you get better insights by looking at it the latter way around. There are at least two kinds of anarchism, the "charcoal" kind that is practiced by nameless ordinary people and the "blue" kind that is practiced by various different academics including David Graeber (much of this can also be termed _agorism_), and blue anarchism is the revisionist wing out of the two that will certainly hand people back to capitalism. In this sense blue anarchism is the Deng Xiaoping Thought of anarchism. Just as the USFI-IMT axis is the bluest wing of Trotskyism that has ended up seeking harmony with center-Liberal Labor parties and the Tories and outright capitalists, blue anarchism seeks harmony and complementarity with all existing fragments of capitalism. To some extent this happens because of the way capitalism deliberately removed all forms of structure from kingdoms and forced people to become dependent on "structure experts" (capitalists, "Archons") to continuously solve society's structure as it would come to constantly and endlessly change. Anarchists seem to silently want to believe this naïve myth that if structure is removed from society and it is consequently "free" from all authorities that previously conflated themselves with forms of structure (nobility, clergy, Stalin, etc.) then no new structure-experts conflated with structures can ever emerge. But this myth is dangerously wrong, because it doesn't take into account the concept that a lot of these Archons actually emerge in order to _prevent_ violence. Much of the appeal of capitalism is that once capitalists fill up an area they can all tell everyone exactly how to live their lives at every hour of the day and pass laws onto the entire rest of the population based on which forms of activity are recognized as conducive to capitalism and which forms of activity are "dangerous, illegal" businesses. Think for a moment about the fact that money laundering is actually just running a business, and prostitution is just running a business, and dealing drugs is just running a business, and online platforms having to worry about whether they're hosting "illegal content" is just running a business. Capitalists don't materially care whether an online platform left up a graphic beheading video or an unofficial copy of a perfectly innocuous movie or an impressive fan-made "nintendo game" — the only people they allow to remain alive and think about the workings of society are the people who thoughtlessly accept the requirement to only do the arbitrary pre-approved list of activities that are recognized as necessary organs of a world sectioned up into capitalist businesses. Capitalism is quite a totalitarian system when you think about it — if that word is to mean anything whatsoever (and there's otherwise a very decent argument to be made it's complete nonsense), then let it be applied to the fact that capitalism only spits out a lengthy constitution full of ways you're supposedly free after it has outright eliminated all humans who have not been molded and designed from their ancestry to their adulthood to be ideal capitalists from the human gene pool. Blue anarchism cannot make progress without hatred, and it cannot offer freedom without loading every social interaction with the potential for punishment and deleting all possible incorrect thoughts from society by weaponizing natural selection.

By now, I've come to understand how truly monstrous capitalism really is. First there is capitalism, which despite a lot of psychological projection around such phrases from Liberal-republicans, really does eliminate anything that doesn't agree with it. Then there is the great variety of attempts to get humanity out of capitalism, and in general, they all promise to get rid of some aspect of capitalism, thus creating the odd result that whenever they fail to do their task they will all logically end in irony by regenerating everything they said they wouldn't do. When Maoism fails to preserve Bolshevism, it "ironically" brings back all the injustices of capitalism. Likewise when the historical Militant Tendency or IMT fails to actually create any successful fissure through the surface of capitalism, it "ironically" hands power back to capitalists, and when blue anarchism has no serious strategy for breaking up the boundaries of the capitalist estate and laying down an equally powerful defense against capitalism over the same area it "ironically" begins cracking down on the presence of every individual it finds undesirable to its "small-and-local community" and viciously purging Communists from reality itself. I used to think Trotskyists were part of this great blue continuum of awful. But many people still think Stalinism is part of the continuum of awful. Are they right? The real answer is a superposition. Stalin was totally devoted to making sure that the Soviet Union would not turn blue, but Stalin's party was a failure that undeniably allowed the Soviet Union to turn strawberry, and a party cannot survive through one person. So, the merit of a Trotskyist party has to be judged by how capable it is of lifting populations — hopefully several — into a movement of a new swatch color and _out_ of the fatal sea of blue. This is the key to whether different movements can be expected to coexist. When a Marxist party appears its behavior is generally characterized by attempting to separate itself from capitalism. So, a red or orange party is inherently intolerant of a blue party. It does not bring intolerance in the form of hating that party's people, but it does bring in the reasonable requirement that blue movements do not get to link up with other blue movements to defeat Communism, and no other Marxism is allowed to let the blue movements do this either. Strawberry "Marxisms" (or, republics pretending to be Marxisms) do not uphold this barrier, so red parties and orange parties do not tolerate them. Likewise capitalists inside a strawberry government will quickly eliminate red and orange parties because those are quick to mess up their plan of linking to blue parties and putting the country back to blue (Liberal-republicanism). So, why do orange parties try to get rid of red parties? This one was the most complicated for me to try to phrase in terms of my simple diagram-friendly system. The short answer is something like that Stalin's party, ostensibly red, put up a bunch of strawberry governments. Stalin's party decided that it would attempt to extend over about half the world and then stop, and the result is that all of the edges of the Third International either turned blue themselves or conceded to blue. Parties are always in motion either toward something capitalism-approved or away from capitalism, so it was not long before this surrender at the edges swept back through the entire thing and reached the core parties that were supposed to be "protected".

So, Trotsky did care about the internal structure of a country. The color swatch system communicates this easily — to give one of the most succinct summaries possible of _The Revolution Betrayed_, Trotsky did not want _any_ countries turning strawberry. The world may or may not already have a precise understanding of how exactly it is that areas like the Soviet Union became overrun with bureaucrats (China directly handing control to its ally capitalists is more obvious), but either way he was able to leave a clear message for everyone that the effort required to get out of capitalism is almost unimaginably great. Many people are still surprised at the scope of the Soviet Union and its bloc of allies, and yet the real nightmare is realizing that _it wasn't enough_. The true level of effort required to get out of capitalism is almost unimaginable. Toward that end, Marxism does have to become more extensive and robust than it ever was before, and more capable of recognizing social phenomena on their own level such that all social phenomena that aid capitalism can be theoretically deconstructed from top to bottom so decisively that there is no way for any of them to fool anyone any longer. ("This is what Community is, this is what Rhizome is, this is what Arceus is; fiction is fiction but here is what metaphysics and Idealism are and here is why they're a problem.") Why do we need meta-Marxism? To expose every single one of the blue philosophies, and to expose the situations in which every one of them leads back to problems like infighting, stagnation, oppression of demographics, and imperialism. If anarchism is a problem, it must be exposed too, along with sophisticated but false concepts that First World countries only have to tolerate Stalinist states to make them stable — no, as long as First World countries contain substantially powerful capitalists those capitalists will inevitably take charge of the First World country and warp Stalinism into Dengism. Perhaps it's really the capitalists' fault that Stalinism historically doesn't survive, but that doesn't take away the material fact that all the capitalists and capitalist-leaning bureaucrats still have the power to join up across countries and undo everything. If capitalist-leaning bureaucrats in a strawberry government somehow figured out how to start twisting an orange party and getting _it_ to start regenerating capitalists, Trotskyists would have no reason to tolerate that either. So, inasmuch as tolerating Stalinism allows capitalists to stay in place in the First World, once a Fourth International has a chance of stopping that same outcome the Stalinist party more or less has to go. This "risky" transition from crimson or strawberry to orange becomes okay when there is reason to believe the Fourth International really can overwrite the red party with a functioning orange party. If Trotskyism covered two thirds of the world, not simply with parties but with something more resembling the crimson estate seen at the _very beginning_ of the Soviet Union, the remaining third would have a harder time resisting than it would joining.

I won't say I'm not still nervous about what will happen to the remaining three or so strawberry countries. Every strawberry country turning into Russia and periodically killing its neighbors is entirely possible! The more desperate and cornered a population is, the more likely it is to regenerate Duginism-Zionism — the two are nearly the same in that they both believe that poorer populations' oppression is only solved by immediately making other countries pay for it in land and blood. And who can really blame them for that choice, if history has done everything to isolate them and crush them from every angle and given them no other options? This is the danger of putting pressure on any Third World country from within other countries. Given a bit of pressure countries will burst their regimes, but given _enough_ pressure, countries will never choose self-genocide when capitalism is conveniently available instead. This brought terrible outcomes to Russia, where the set of people handed capitalism were given no incentive to join together in conglomerate anarchy and every incentive to believe in capitalism only to compete with each other to gain the most physical assets. Tell Russians to respect capitalist islands, there goes Ukraine. But one thing must be remembered: only to Communists is imperialism actually a taboo. Pressure can drive anyone else toward accepting imperialism under the rule of capitalists or outright nazism if cities worth of people dying around them is the alternative. This is approximately why feudal orders and decades- to centuries-long warring states periods happened in the first place: pressure from surrounding kingdoms that all wanted to expand encouraged everyone to support the nobility and empire for the overall population to survive.

So, I have my doubts that Trotskyism should even be spreading so much rhetoric against strawberry countries across the world at all. Keep in mind how poorly most people understand Trotskyism — most people who would see this rhetoric are effectively no better at Marxism than Stalinists, and I've just given you a thorough examination of exactly how far off from a correct understanding of Marxism most Stalinists are. I can't repeat this enough: no matter how many people become sympathetic to groups that claim to have Trotskyist programs, almost nobody alive in the 2020s actually understands a Fourth International. So in effect, rhetoric about how "Stalinism was always doomed" or "Mao handed China to capitalists" has been teaching everyone that attempts at a Third International need to be overwritten with more Third Internationals, and that if the United States' imperialists manage to pressure Cuba out of state businesses everyone may as well support the imperialists when they explode the strawberry government and take away its national independence specifically for imperialism. My mistake was thinking that problem was Trotskyism's fault, when really, it's more like capitalism and Stalin's Marxism that did it accidentally. It can be very difficult to get people to correct or apologize for unconscious accidents deliberately advanced by only a few conscious actors. While it may be dreadfully popular for social-democrats and anarchists to throw around a proverbial "we" that "let everything happen", the reality is that people everywhere will basically never be able to accept that they are responsible for such things — including climate change, Israel, and First World capital obliterating national independence and any possibility of "democracy" — until they have truly unified into new structures and come to a new consciousness that allows them to really actually make choices and take action in order to stop them. Trotskyists think the world needs a Fourth International to empower the proletariat. The reality is that the world needs a Fourth International to get everyone out of thinking in terms of nation-states and imperialism, because it will keep doing both up until the day Trotskyist socialism can actually be realized.

== Is Liberal-republicanism an anarchism? ==

By this point, I hope I have succeeded at laying out a basic outline of how meta-Marxism is different from previous formulations of Marxism, and the ways in which it might or might not appear strange and quirky to anyone seeing it for the first time. Crimson Marxism (Stalinist analysis) is bottom-up. Violet Marxism is top-down. Violet Marxism looks at entire systems first, identifies large-scale contradictions, and then looks inside the parts of each major contradiction to see how they operate, in order to assign every level of "pieces" a swatch color. This is when meta-Marxism stops being a "beginner" method and reveals dialectical processes: identify a sea of workers inside blue capitalist territories, or identify a forest of orange soviets beneath a strawberry ministry but across from an orange party, and you see how class-associated formations can break out of other formations of the wrong color to realize across a region into larger estates (class rule or "dictatorship"). Violet Marxism preoccupies itself with "defining philosophy objects" such as "Marxisms" and "anarchisms" only to allow everyone to more effectively start that process.

So... what _is_ Liberal-republicanism — what is it really?

We know first of all that Liberal-republicanism is not a Marxism. It is not a version of Stalinism or Trotskyism; all its closest allies relentlessly persecute Communists. It is also not a version of Deng Xiaoping Thought, because despite the two being almost identical on the inside Liberal-republicanism also insists on persecuting Dengism. This is some very curious behavior, because if you had never read Liberal-republican theory and only read the works of Marx and Engels you might start to believe that if both kinds of countries are capitalism and based on capitalist class-rule they should be indistinguishable. Even Trotskyists will go around claiming that capitalism has been entirely restored in China, but a Marxist should know that capitalism cannot separate itself from government and whenever it exists it is inherently connected to the process of forming a republic. So, why exactly are Liberal-republicanism and Deng Xiaoping states fighting? There is no satisfactory explanation for this within Marxism. Up to now, this has been a genuine explanatory gap where Marxism has left a dissonance between how it _claims_ capitalism generates governments and how capitalism _actually_ generates governments.

Let's look inside Liberal-republicanism one more time. Inside the United States are the Republican and Democratic parties. Inside China is China's central government. But, wait, the CPC isn't part of the United States political system, is it? Liberal-republicans think it isn't. But in reality, capitalists in China are manufacturing huge numbers of products and shipping them to the United States, where sky- and rust-aligned businesses buy the products, and sky- and rust-aligned businesses are occasionally shipping products such as animated movies back to China. The relationship between the Democrats and the CPC is similar to the relationship between the Republicans and the Democrats. But, the Republicans and the Democrats hate each other, and... _oh_. They also both hate the CPC. So they really _do_ have the same relationship. They all exchange products with each other but they all hate each other and would prefer a world in which they could get rid of each other's leadership and replace it with their own. Well, maybe not the CPC, which has no interest in clearing out the Republicans or Democrats, but definitely the other two, who have already been clearing out the leadership of Cuba to effectively begin adding Cuba to the Democratic and Republican Parties.

So, a contradiction emerges. Liberal-republicanism is a nation-state or "republicanized kingdom" composed of parties, but parties do not all belong to the same country. Within Deng Xiaoping states, each party forms its own different country. But Liberal-republicanism doesn't like this. It despises the concept of Deng Xiaoping states having only one party. Why is this? You will hear a lot of rationalizations out of Liberal-republicanism as to why a capitalist republic "has" to have multiple parties and a lot of them don't really explain anything. China is getting by just fine with a cooperative congress of only one party; by now its overall set of problems is not any worse than the United States'. And nobody enjoys the United States being divided or becoming more and more polarized every time it insists there must be two parties. So from a capitalist point of view isn't there every incentive for the United States to transition to a Deng Xiaoping state? This would better match everything said in the United States constitution about everyone being equal and the government not being created to be an instrument of one group of capitalists persecuting another. This would better match popular imagery of the United States being "indivisible". So if both Liberal-republicanism and Deng Xiaoping Thought are capitalism and they both hold similar amounts of government oppression, neither one inherently generating more, then why isn't Dengism logically the better choice? Why is such a suggestion so inherently offensive to United States capitalists?

Here, oddly enough, we can go to Stalinists for the answers. When Stalin's party came to power, they assumed that they could get rid of capitalism and create a basic instance of socialism within one country. This rests on some very interesting assumptions. In order to get rid of capitalism within one country, there must first be one countable and separable instance of capitalism only extending through one country (or through one easily-defined region of 14 republics). Stalinists assumed that capitalism was fundamentally countable; they assumed that there could exist "exactly one capitalism" or "exactly two capitalisms". When early Maoism disintegrated into Deng Xiaoping Thought, this assumption was carried through into Deng Xiaoping states. And Deng Xiaoping states contained their supposed single instance of capitalism in the borders of a central capitalist party. This is to say: if capitalism is countable whatsoever, then the United States indisputably contains at _least two capitalisms_, not just one.

I think it is arguable that capitalism actually is semi-countable. And this is why the United States is so angry at Deng Xiaoping states: capitalists' favorite form of society is not _capitalism_, but _multicapitalism_. China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea are some of the only places on earth that have ever had _monocapitalism_ as described in Marx and Engels. These countries all developed monocapitalism because of an error made by Marxist theorists, in which historical Marxist theorists usually assumed that a country full of capitalists is one united body of capitalists called _the capitalist class_, as opposed to two or more truly distinct bodies of capitalists called _semi-countable capitalist estates_. Nobody could have guessed this correctly before 1953. Monarchy appears to be a unified system which is only broken up into warring states by the destruction of monarchy. But capitalism is entirely different because it is fundamentally made of social links between individual capitalists. These arbitrary social links simultaneously ensure that capitalism is never entirely dissolved and that capitalism is never entirely unified into a single society.

This is why, the day I discovered an unbelievably terrible Lacanian book called _The Excessive Subject_ which was attempting to dismantle every progressive ideology in existence which did not promote capitalism, I jokingly called it "the best book I've ever read on Marxism". In assuming that Liberal capitalism was composed of perfectly atomic individuals, Molly Ann Rothenberg started with an assumption that was _so_ terrible and _so_ uniquely mired in capitalist thinking that she unknowingly handed me the key to cracking all the central assumptions of capitalism and everything wrong with it. Today I call this book a work of dark genius, because quite honestly, she may have accidentally saved the world in her attempt to destroy it.

Liberal-republicanism is approximately two capitalisms. Deng Xiaoping states are approximately one. But the world as a whole always generally contains multicapitalism, not monocapitalism. This is the crux of all the ideological differences between Liberal-republicanism and Dengism. Dengism values unity and harmony because it is in fact largely unified. Liberal-republicanism values division and spreads ample myths about that being a form of "freedom" because it itself is divided.

So what about anarchism? Are there any unique characteristics to the divided pieces inside Liberal-republicanism, and is there any relationship between these pieces and anarchism?

Logically speaking, if we have established that Liberal-republicanism is formed out of islands of capitalism, and the historical evidence has established that anarchism is generally not very different from early forms of capitalism (you will have to read other Marxist articles for an explanation on that), it would almost have to be the case that anarchism is simply a very strange manifestation of a Liberal-republican party with completely different goals than most others but which in any particular country region is still simply one of the many wings of multicapitalism. Anarchists will often deny this, telling you that anarchism is actually the rejection of political parties and the black flag of charcoal anarchism represents the melding of separate political islands into a non-political structure which is truly uncountable. But, whether those claims make any actual sense or not, that's _charcoal_ anarchism, not _blue_ anarchism. Whenever Tory parties show up and propose any actually threatening policies within Liberal-republican governments, all the world's David Graebers and Slavoj Žižeks and all the charcoal anarchists as well can never seem to get out of the bad habit of grouping themselves into "The Left". This shouldn't make any sense if anarchism was a truly uncountable phenomenon which was truly done with political parties, because in practice, any formulation of "The Left" or "The U.S. Left" inevitably becomes a political party, and inevitably collects political candidates that become official Liberal-republican theorists and go to the Liberal-republican state. A Stalinist party equipped with meta-Marxism can talk about "The Left"; an anarchist cannot. So, why is it that blue anarchists are far more obsessed with the concept of "The Left" than Communists ever have been, and with being the one true political theory that far more than Stalinism or Trotskyism will supposedly be the only thing that can ever rise out of Toryism? Because blue anarchism is in every single way Liberal-republicanism's child and heir.

Now, we're at a point where the United States constitution can finally be of use to Marxists. The Constitution promises a bunch of "freedoms". These are said to already exist — "inalienable", "self-evident". There is no such thing as an inalienable right, as every transgender person who encourages people to go around saying "trans rights are human rights" but has been recently arrested over a drivers' license would know. And there is no such thing as an "obvious" right, as everyone who has tried to explain gay marriage to a Tory would know. So in what sense are these rights "inalienable" or "self-evident" at all? Stalin's party would know the answers to this one — when a particular faction of people is freed from competition with other factions over a government and it is not bound by class rule such that it is merely removed from factional competition by the winners, then for the duration of the new historical period it has created it receives tentatively inalienable rights. The proletariat does not even have to properly control a republic for this much to be true, even though in such a situation the republic and its new rights are likely to only last for a temporary period of time. So, the obvious conclusion from looking at Stalin's party is that inalienable rights _are nothing more than_ the product of a specific socially-linked faction of people becoming totally independent from another faction and not subject to its culture, laws, or government. One of many possible definitions of a _revolution_, then, is a historical process within a specific limited time period which completely separates one self-contained political faction with a distinct political philosophy from others: in China, a Dengist revolution against feudalism was achieved even if the meaningful results of that revolution seen by the people are limited.

We have already established that no instance of capitalism is actually independent from others, and in this sense, all _bourgeois revolutions_ of this type within a period of capitalism are futile. So this exposes another contradiction: if capitalism separating itself from nobility and other nation-states is the real source of "inalienable rights", and capitalism cannot be separated from bourgeois parties that group capitalists into nation-states, but bourgeois parties cannot actually separate themselves out and become independent in a period of capitalism, then bourgeois parties should not be capable of granting "inalienable rights", even though they are effectively the source of "inalienable rights" that has supposedly already granted people some. This, like many things, would seem to be a case of basic formal logic failing to capture transitions between historical periods: a body of capitalists granting inalienable rights the first time ought to be different from a body of capitalists granting inalienable rights when there is already capitalism. But this is not actually a sensible objection, because today millions of Liberal-republicans still ardently believe that capitalism can continue to grant people more and more inalienable rights _against something other than feudalism_ that it has never granted them before. "Capitalism cannot transition people into capitalism a second time" _would_ make sense except that the facts are on the table that whenever anyone says it can't, wide swaths of average people almost violently object that it must. Some things can be attributed to old forms of consciousness, but when Marxism flat-out starts to lose its predictive power as the same "false consciousness" is generated over and over for decades and decades across more and more crises we have to ask if something else is going on. The limited cluster of Stalinists holding down the Soviet Union was not holding on against Trotskyism and global capitalism simply due to "false consciousness". Stalin's party was holding on based on its concrete historical situation of materially facing attacks from two different directions. Its behavior was not "logical", but when it was under attack from capitalist pressure and a then-disorganized axis of right-Liberals, anarchists, and early Trotskyists, it did not have any real time to think, and simply had to act. The question, then, is: is this what has happened to the overall body of blue anarchists and Democrats?

Here is my bold hypothesis that I think only a meta-Marxist could make. Anarchism is a form of society in which people form together based on arbitrary social links, as in a tribal society, or as in a small town linked together by the relationships between small or medium-sized businesses, and in which all the people within the society _believe_ it is linked together on the basis of morality. The codes of morality believed by an anarchism may include "No hierarchy", "No domination", "No capitalist will own all the businesses", "No capitalist will control a party that controls the entire government", or "Society is based on a social contract". [*AF] Anarchists believe that codes of morality are enough to keep societies from developing into kingdoms or Duginisms, but they are mistaken, because there is one thing codes of morality can never ever solve, which is the division of people into two separate socially-linked groups of people. This can happen for the tiniest reasons like two people believing in different sects of a religion or breaking up with a lover or accidentally excluding a demographic with no malicious intention. But the moment two people are incompatible and do not want to see each other anarchism immediately breaks down, because as soon as two people completely cease to have a relationship there is no incentive for them to follow every moral pronouncement that somebody on the other side of a relationship division has made any more. If person A shows up with a stack of evidence that person B is a rapist and person B denies it, all good will will quickly break down between the clusters of people around person A and person B, and person B will quickly be barred from creating social contracts that apply to person A's friends; if person X insults transgender people and says it is impossible for gender identity to be true, and person Y is transgender, person Y has no incentive to maintain a non-hierarchical society where person X is not put below person Y. In one sense social bonds are a terrible basis for forming a society, because the moment people stop liking each other for any reason an empty void opens up between two newly separate societies where civilization ceases to exist. Anarchists have spent at least 176 years trying to solve this problem with absolutely no success. They can try to say that divisions between societies are the real location of government (Bellegarrigue), they can try to say that prejudices are culturally fabricated and not real, they can try to say that bodies of capitalists are divided because choosing Greed divides each capitalist from the rest of society, they can try to say that Marxist party filtration is a form of hierarchy where Marxist parties have divided themselves from society by choosing Elitism, they can try to say that societies that would be divided "ought" to be merged together just because "societal pluralism" is inherently good. But an anarchist can never un-abuse an abused child, wind back a war between two tribal societies, or make a divorced couple get un-divorced. There will always be gaps between human beings where relationships do not exist which no anarchist Ideal can possibly bridge. But given enough of them, absolutely any of these gaps can stack back up to divisions so big Bellegarrigue would call them "governments". It has been terribly popular lately for blue anarchists to label any criticism of religion as a simple violation of societal pluralism on the grounds that any criticism of religion can be used as a lever to exclude Catholics or exclude Muslims or exclude Mormons specifically, while the only thing that is acceptable to anarchists is attempting to rationalize how all religions and spiritualities are true and how secular morality is essentially a new form of religion. [*as] But in the real world, the moment there is one church full of Tories believing that gay people are unholy, one church full of center-Liberals believing that accepting transgender people is a virtue, and one group of atheists that happens to believe that homosexuality is real but transgender people are dangerous to women, they have already drawn their lines of compatibility as far as which individuals will be able to form links and which will not, and none of the groups is going to agree accept any of the other groups' versions of morality, even if they are told that they all belong to an overarching society and code of morality that says they are obligated to all unify on one moral code. The natural response of anarchists is to draft up a lot of books and magazines (today, videos) that supposedly prove that other people have unacceptable codes of morality and which codes of morality are the final cosmic truth that all other codes of morality must bend themselves around just because the absolute moral truth is what's Right. But ultimately, none of these texts will be more powerful than the sheer power of which groups of people are socially connected and which are not — even at scales too small for proper class analysis, the current body of people in a group as distinguished from the people who are not will generate its ideology.
Here we arrive at the United States' national independence movement. People moved to the early United States colonies to be free to form a new society by simply linking together with people like them. They accepted having to work for others to pay the voyage, but they knew people supporting each other in community was the way society would form afterward. At that time many people were Christians, but either way many people believed in morality and over time, the thirteen colonies drifted to each largely contain people of specific Christian sects. In reality, everyone had religious freedom because they segregated away from each other and physically avoided the question of which religion was more correct. When the British crown became intolerable, the people of the United States got behind their best experts on government in order to create a new society that would respect each of the 13 colonies' human rights. The need to banish the British empire brought up questions that I think frankly the people of the United States otherwise didn't want to answer. The United States constitution was something of a formality to enshrine the way in which separating people into homogeneous clumps of "community" ensured each one freedom from the others. This is the way in which the fiction of "liberal democracy" ultimately emerged: if people were getting by making all their decisions within localized "communities", government by the people must in fact be attempting to preserve all these localized decisions and immediately giving the upper levels as little to do as possible so everyone can act like they don't exist. So, _if_ the United States began as a form of anarchism, it ended in various parts of the anarchism slowly or quickly producing capitalists who then generated a bourgeois republic to resolve the inherent conflicts within capitalism and multicapitalism.

I think a lot of people are resentful of this apparent takeover of anarchism by capitalism, and so a great part of the ideology in the United States is people coming up with mythological accounts of how the top layer of capitalism can simply be cut off and the United States can return to its supposedly perfect anarchist past. Nobody knows how societies actually work — not even CPUSA, not even the RCI — but they know what is viscerally wrong and they know what has seemingly been taken from them, and they are very angry. So angry they will just about punch a Communist over it if everyone doesn't restore anarchism immediately. To that I say... look at the middle of the timeline. Circa 1850 the United States government was granting people inalienable freedoms by planting "starter anarchisms" on the United States frontier. But I don't even have to open up a history book to tell you that if you do that those will generate capitalists, and if the capitalists all vote that eliminating North American tribes is in everyone's best interests, then that's the direction they will tug the whole population in, and you can't take it back even if a significant number of people were opposed to it. The early United States is broadly similar to Israel's Histadrut period in that even if you start with carefully designed anarchist compounds, when capitalists are in charge of the empire and they are all socially-linked members of your same nationality with a claim to represent its border and the day it was founded, the nation becomes theirs and what will happen to neighboring nations of people becomes entirely theirs. If you are not as physically powerful as a ring of capitalists who have all been able to form a socially-linked Community inside your Community and who can buy literally anyone to help them, you cannot win. It's very popular today for people to say that if you don't believe Israel can be defeated with nothing but a big stack of morality you are a defeatist and a traitor and — they don't say it out loud but they're thinking it — you basically belong in Hell. Most people are unwilling to accept the possibility that believing that anarchism doesn't regenerate capitalism has real material consequences, or that consequences come from anything but angering a cluster of individuals that has assumed the authority to dictate arbitrary moral codes. So here I will say the single angriest thing I will let out in this letter: if there was a God, or if there is anything that is universally Good or Evil, by taking this tack on reality you have definitely offended it. God cannot represent anything but the sum of all material processes and physical interactions in the universe, outside societies and inside societies. Every story about God, on paper or coming out of a United States president, is a story about how the motions of material reality will favor the kingdom or empire that has best predicted them. In that sense, a civilization that refuses to understand that the process of forming Community generates capitalism _cannot but have defied God_, and _cannot but have offended every form of cosmic Way and cosmic Good ever dreamed of_. Morality cannot exist without reality. If what was true was not strictly more important than what was moral, every single Tory who says transgender people don't exist or gay people are unholy or one Mexican immigrant far off in a town nobody thinks about stealing from a store should be locked up in a concentration camp would be right.

So. Historically speaking it should be unimportant whether the United States is an anarchism, but practically speaking, until the day it has any consciousness of material reality whatsoever it will be. The Idealism that drenches the United States and the Idealism that makes an anarchism are equally toxic; both believe that passing a law or putting up a list of commandments is enough to stop imperialism forever, and so in the end, both join together to blow up Palestine and keep regenerating imperialism. I think there may be a real difference between charcoal anarchisms and blue anarchisms, but I feel like it's an effective framing rhetorically to say to anarchists that try to call out Communists for statism, "no, _you_ created oppressive Tory statism because _you_ created the United States." "The United States is not a Marxist country founded by Mao or Hoxha, so tell me, who created all this?" Anarchists put heavy importance on morality and the ethical concept of individuals choosing fitting actions, so the moment you can get them to believe that supporting anarchism is actually _leading_ to capitalism, statism, anti-transgender laws, and Israel, I feel like they would be less inclined to resist either Stalinism or Trotskyism when they realized they genuinely had blood on their hands and them talking about "Communist atrocities" was only a cheap distraction from the actual important topic of their own choices and their own guilt.

I am experimenting with a definition that all societies before kingdoms and principalities or that go along with Liberal-republicanism are technically anarchisms. I recognize that this is a bit of a rhetorical tactic where I try to subliminally influence how people think by redefining the word _anarchism_ to something that better promotes historical-materialist thinking. But I am very tired of anarchism. Humanity doesn't have much time left. There isn't time for all this continued fighting between anarchists and Communists. So maybe, one of the few ways to actually get everyone to turn against anarchism and all the unacceptable things it allows to happen and unify with the Marxist movements anarchism has usually opposed is to present to them a superficially non-Marxist account of how almost everything anarchism has ever tried to stop is actually itself an anarchism that develops out of other anarchisms and thus the only way for anarchists to really achieve what anarchists want instead of regenerating it all over again is to take a look at Trotskyism.

== Historical materialism studies narratives ==

In the overall history of philosophy, there always seems to be this weird "pit" where as soon as early capitalism or widespread artisan production appears everything takes a dip and then nothing was as good afterward. _Some time into capitalism, the New Atheists appeared! Hundreds of years ago, the Old Atheists wrote "good" philosophy. On the cusp of early capitalism, Protestant work ethic and North American colonialism appeared! Back in peasant times, nobody had to work so much and nobody killed North American tribes to build coal mines. When capitalism came to China, the Dengist government ruined everything! Back before Mao, people in China and India believed in Buddhism and Hinduism, which each promoted syncretic coexistence between local religions and harmony with nature, unlike modern China where Beijing is filled with factories._ Sometimes you hear this from anarchists. Sometimes you hear it from Tories. Sometimes the two become concerningly indistinguishable and you begin questioning whether the progressive aspects of anarchism could somehow be some kind of front to smuggle in Third World peasant bigotry, probably on accident.

For a while, there was a particular backlash against European Materialism. Nobody labeled it using those exact terms, but the term "Western" got thrown around a lot, and sometimes the terms "rationalism" or "science". There was a small amount of it within Africa. There was a bizarrely large amount of it in the United States, which only appears to have continued and grown with time. The reasons this happened trace back to capitalism itself. Capitalism needed especially tidy and self-contained forms of philosophy that sawed everything in two. Materialism had to suit the particular activity of running an isolated business and producing a usable product unrelated to and yet perfectly complementary to everything else. Ethics had to be designed around the concept of choices being made within the perspective of an isolated individual with no further information. Philosophies analyzing the concept of a human biography had to assume that based on the contents of one particular biography itself an individual life had its own particular self-contained significance. And so, European Materialism took the world and divided it into little tiny fences and boxed it in. An object knocked into motion by some other object was an individual "object in motion" with kinetic energy and inertia, and the world had to be told that "an object in motion stays in motion". A planet orbiting another planet was "an object experiencing a gravity force". Physicists were excited by the discovery that light could be divided into photons, but they were surprised to find that after they divided light up into neat packets, the packets didn't behave much like ordinary tennis balls or pool balls. _Light is one of the smallest things that's measurable, the same size as the smallest solid thing we could shoot out of a particle accelerator to measure it, but we can't measure its future position without affecting where it will go! This is unprecedented! Our measuring devices create the future when we observe it! If we don't know where photons or electrons are going to go they must be in several places at once! Quantum physics is remarkable, it's like all the future states of something are wrapped up in a box and you can't really see it!_ Nobody understood quantum mechanics, and the first people to slowly begin mystifying it were the physicists themselves. For a brief blip between about 1900 and 1933 dialectical materialism spread around and people considered it, before everyone panicked about Communism destroying Ukraine and everyone more or less tossed dialectics away under accusations of it being "imprecise" or being "religion". Although small margins of discontent were forming around it, European Materialism was restored, and before long the next great thing became bashing Marxism and many other things thought to be bad at predicting reality for their "prejudices" and "assumptions".

The period from 1960 to 1980 in the United States was a unique time for prejudices. In the 1960s the U.S. civil rights movement was beginning and leading everyone away from prejudices. In the 1970s the Vietnam War happened and kicked some prejudices up again, before some people started protesting the war on relatively Idealist grounds, and Deleuze and Guattari would release one of the major works a great number of blue anarchists have been drawing from ever since (_Capitalism and Schizophrenia_). By 1980 a particular pieced-together, chimeric model of world history was steadily being set down: _prejudices and assumptions are bad, and imperialism is bad, but Marxism is definitely wrong, and you can believe absolutely anything else no matter how stupid it is as long as it doesn't contain prejudices._

I would like to argue that that particular juxtaposition of requirements is impossible.

I don't feel like I have enough spare space to go into the entire history of postmodern philosophy, or the knowledge to explain every part of it. But there is exactly one concept within it that I think I can cover — the relationship between prejudices and narratives.

In _Difference and Repetition_, Deleuze tries to set out a new framework for all knowledge. (He admits himself that it is a form of metaphysics, but also makes a claim that metaphysics is what science really needs to ground it.) One of his new beginning assumptions for all science is that differences or separations are a key feature of reality and simply accepting this is the only way for material objects to understand other objects, or particularly other thinking Subjects. Deleuze's actual writing can get rather arcane, but the motivation for this particular concept is very clear. By 1968, the time of this work, it was becoming popular to believe that the very first task of every conceivable movement that could happen in the United States and call itself progressive was to get rid of prejudices — if people could only get rid of prejudices, every other movement would become easier because it wouldn't be rejecting people from membership or allyship due to prejudices. The term _intersectionality_ would only appear in 1989 but the concept was already brewing in the background. People were forming into highly specific movements including racial movements and the LGBT movement and disabled movements. So if they could only stack together those movements for entirely separate things that would often exclude each other from each other, then maybe everybody would be set. Deleuze's work in general would speculate on ways that identity movements formed within the Liberal-republican framework of itemizing highly specific ballot issues and bringing up a representative of the issue's "community" to lead that issue in particular could transmute itself into a pure conglomeration of Communities that would dissolve the boundaries of identity and transform individuals themselves into inherently being a borderless and shapeless drop of an uncontrollable and uncountable totality known as _rhizome_. Here, in _Difference and Repetition_, Deleuze took the real-world observation that a lot of people have prejudices and turned it around into an assumption that the best way to get everyone out of prejudices was to start by assuming that people should get rid of prejudices.

There was at least one obvious problem with this: if people have prejudices that cloud their entire perception of the world, then they might not have any idea they have prejudices because the prejudices make it impossible to see the prejudices. This kind of person would see any book about prejudices, differences, and separations and probably not absorb it because they would immediately assume that the book was only for people worse than them. Or, in the case of a book as involved as Deleuze's writings, they might conceivably assume that it was only for people who were interested in it; "those other people" can read it, but it must only be for people who already aren't prejudiced. If you have ever spent any significant amount of time around racists, you would know that one of the most consistent characteristics of all racists is that they all claim they aren't racist enough to be the _real_ racists, while ironically, only the people who have largely stopped being racist will actually label themselves racist. This was a huge problem with every one of the United States Lefts from about 1960 to 1990. Each version of "The Left" would only be able to gain control of people who already want to be better, and then would proceed to verbally beat up every possible "Good Guy" because the Bad Guys would always be completely calm and unrepentant and would never actually opt to be under their control unless they were willing to cross the point where they had no meaningful social connections to other Bad Guys and were useless for turning any Bad Guys into Good Guys. Somewhere between 1960 and 1990 Liberal-republicanism was already breaking down and the entire assumption of Republicans and Democrats not being two anthropologically separate cultures was already gone. But that state of things wasn't really developing in a way friendly to blue anarchism as envisioned by Deleuze. The slow erosion of the Liberal-republican state wasn't really producing a totally uncountable continuum of individuals as much as it was producing a rather neat division of the United States into two corporation-based states bound together by the total and entire content of local culture including local religion and prejudices.

So, the United States had a considerable problem with whole towns of people being bound together by traditions and models of the world that it would be no real exaggeration to call hateful or bigoted. Various philosophers attacked these models in different ways. North American Maoists awkwardly tried to pin the emergence of prejudices onto global supply chains and construct the concept of a "labor aristocracy", putting moral blame on workers for decisions their bosses made. Gramscians or "Fisherists" who had read Mark Fisher's work _Capitalist Realism_ tried to claim that mass media was programming everyone's brains, leaving the strange implication that they would otherwise be blank slates perfectly open to correct knowledge. More hardcore Gramscians focused on occupying actual slots in industry across the country in order to have the power to create correct media. But, Maoism and Western-Marxism were never the most popular philosophies in the United States. One philosophy which was closer to being part of the "popular" cluster of winning philosophies was poststructuralism. This philosophy came from the overall tradition of assuming that all human knowledge can be encoded in language, and analyzed by analyzing language. Before postructuralism was structuralist linguistics, which was a very successful framework for describing how human beings observe the physical relationships between things and create virtual, projected relationships between words to mirror them. So how did poststructuralists attempt to improve it? More or less, they advanced a number of hypotheses based on the notion that the relationships between concepts described inside language _really are_ arbitrary. Even if language is doing an ontological exercise of diagramming the material behavior of objects and processes in the real world, human beings can shape the real world, so surely if people have the ability to redefine language that must give them some sort of amazing wizard powers to spontaneously redefine half of everything about the real world too.

I have never liked the concept of poststructuralism whatsoever. I have always felt like it was one of the most useless and perhaps one of the most dangerous philosophies, not in the sense of courage and strictly in a destructive sense. I have very specific reasons for that, which will more or less come out across the rest of this letter. For now all I want to say on that is this. If you're an anarchist... I want you to imagine right now you were part of early Trotskyism. _Actually._ Not an anarchist. You have already committed yourself to building a nation-wide underground Communist movement _because you want to be free from the Soviet Union_. There's no turning back. You have to defeat Stalin. The state security forces are everywhere, and you _will_ die if you make any major errors. How does poststructuralism _actually help you understand your oppressors on the field_ and _actually help you win_? I'll even give you two chances. Your other option is to take a pacifist route and use poststructuralism to demonstrate that Stalinists and Trotskyists can coexist despite the best observed outcome being that Stalin's party consistently boots all the Trotskyists out of the party. (This one might be easier given that I've actually specified a seemingly-arbitrary construct that could be broken down: Stalinists versus Trotskyists.) You are still a Communist, and Stalin's allies are still Communists, so you must demonstrate that even though both factions have concrete goals which may include building socialist transition or getting rid of the increasing swarm of bureaucrats, that you can get closer to accomplishing these tangible policy goals that were not historically achieved by simply smashing the definitions of words. Option three: demonstrate that the Cold War was an arbitrary construct in people's heads and Ronald Reagan himself will completely stop attacking the Soviet Union if you could only really actually persuade him of this.

My challenges to poststructuralism are exceedingly tall. But in reality, I mainly pose them because if anyone could meet them, I would actually be impressed. I would rather be impressed by what someone can do with a philosophy than underwhelmed. But as far as I'm currently aware, I have never seen anyone use poststructuralist philosophy on problems anything like those. I have seen it used to pick apart gender, and... apart from that case I do not think it has ever succeeded at anything.

Which brings me to my next topic. Poststructuralists argued against imposing gender onto transgender people through the same general lines of argument used in _The Matrix_: before you become conscious of what your model of the world even is, you do not know how to change it, but if you are aware that mental models of the world are constructed in real time (in the film, represented by a superstructural fantasy world) you can write a new model of reality that is more appropriate to the needs of your actual body, and you are not bound to remain trapped inside the models that everyone tells you to have. _The Matrix_ is a surprisingly Materialist work in the end, which from one angle actually demonstrates that poststructuralism could do something useful by showing that particular abstract Ideals are ineffective _because_ they are abstract Ideals and deconstructing the entire concept of Idealism.

So now I'm going to talk about _The Truman Show_.

I recently saw an atheist video channel make the argument that Christianity was "basically like the Truman Show". Truman lives within a constructed TV studio filming set, if a somewhat large one, and the day he finds out, everybody tells him it's not worth leaving because there could never be anything more interesting on the outside. The argument then went that everything about Christian culture and the act of being part of a group of Christians is an arbitrary construction _in that_ real observations and motivated justifications are all carefully arranged together to create a complete worldview in which all the pieces are arranged to prevent questioning any of it. Now, I am not really a fan of Christianity, or any form of theism, or magic ritual, so I would not stop anyone from tearing apart religion. But I do have problems with this line of argument in particular. This argument is unusually unaware of the concept of culture and countable cultures in the anthropological sense. Truman may exist on a constructed set, and the rules of a TV program are culture, but the set and his connections to all the actors exist as a connected unit; the hypothetical setup in the movie of the TV program reads as a representation of an actual demographic group of people that are bound together by historical circumstance. And if we think about the concept of pointing at any particular tribe or nationality of people and simply telling them their entire culture is made up and not real... I don't think I really need to complete that sentence. Let's just say that Deleuze would not be happy with that. If this approach were aimed at a nationality, or cis people putting all transgender people into The Matrix, this would be almost exactly the kind of thing Deleuze was aiming to stop — a group of people assuming that it lives in a normal and unspecific environment while only other people have ideology and live within a culture.

I make the effort to call out this argument against "religious cults" because I _know_ the same argument has been used against Communists. _Communists have an ideology, but *we* don't have an ideology! They have a leader, but because we keep oscillating between two parties we hate that don't actually accomplish anything *we* don't have a leader! Communists can be born into Stalinism and not get to choose what to think or believe but we get complete choice in what we believe as long as it's never Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Juche-socialism, BlackPantherism, Ho Chi Minh Thought, Deng Xiaoping Thought, Bordigism, ecoterrorism, Islam, actually Adolf Hitler, unofficially distributing movies, or Richard Dawkins! East Germany told people not to leave! The central party constructs your reality! Marxist states have total control over filling every city with the KGB! But we have complete freedom in a reality where whatever piece of civil rights legislation we pass the group of culturally-defined Tories who belong to Toryism anthropologically can spontaneously repeal any and every piece of progressive legislation we pass and we aren't allowed to do anything to get away from them. We just have to remain in that abusive relationship forever because... uh... if we dissolve the United States and there aren't any laws they'll beat us up. So, as you can see, we're totally free to do whatever we want when the Tories physically present in streets and buildings around us all over the country don't catch us doing it because my favorite poststructuralist philosopher wrote a paper about how words don't actually mean anything and we never have to accept the Tories' narratives. Including fists and guns, which are also arbitrary narratives as long as I've found a way to not get shot. Monkey D. Luffy, anarchist hero! He is a hero because he bends reality and Communism bounces off him._

Center-Liberals and Tories really go around believing every day that the act of living in the United States and _in the United States specifically_ is the default condition of human existence while anyone that lives in a nation-state anywhere else is in an altered condition of existence that is potentially inferior. They see another government which is not physically attached to theirs, and if it's bad, they want to destroy it and scatter anyone who liked it. It is as if they want to carry out a French Revolution from solidly outside France, because the first bourgeois revolution ever conceived was simply an act of imperialism and every time one national bourgeoisie helps another one oppress its people it can't help but eternally repay the favor everywhere else.

The general concept of "rejecting narratives" has gotten really popular lately. Anarchists across the United States love saying that the economy is "made up" or racism was "constructed" out of nowhere for everyone by no particular group of people, or disability is "constructed" through a lack of everyone automatically knowing how to build everything for various disabilities before they ever get there, or "colonialism" is a constructed Idea and somehow teaching people what the idea is will get rid of all imperialism. The list goes on and on; for every identity movement in the United States (of which there are a lot) there is probably a theory that it is an arbitrary construct imposed onto people. But, again, nobody ever says that anticommunism is an arbitrary social construct that could simply be gotten rid of forever by everyone learning more about Communism. For some reason, that one is just "the truth".

The impression I got at the end of the "Truman Show" argument was that it fundamentally saw a binary between "narratives" and "freedom". People who live in altered conditions of existence — such as other countries, or Christianity, or the world _outside_ Christianity where people are getting scary transition surgeries that have to be outlawed, or who support a Communist party — are trapped in a fake narrative made up to control them, but anyone who just stops believing in all narratives of the way anything "has to be" and joins the same continuous uncountable blob of society with no particular culture and no particular future is in Freedom.

I have laid out in previous sections what I think is the actual shape of ideology. There is not simply one correct model of reality and a distortion of it called "ideology". The reality of societies is characterized by many separate society-objects (factions or republics; sociophilosophies) that all must become conscious of their own unique layouts and of each other. In the real world every faction or movement is taken by others to be "ideological distortion" whether it is materially correct or incorrect. So, a lot of the time the category of "ideology" or "bourgeois culture", etc., is not actually helpful, while categories like "center-Liberalism", "Toryism", "Kropotkinism", "David Graeber's anarchism", "Stalinism", and "Trotskyism" actually might be. For a lot of people it is much easier to take a philosophy and describe it without judgement and say "this party is crimson" than to accurately set down a conclusion like "this philosophy is incorrect". So, it will be a lot easier to teach people to understand things without prejudices if they truly learn to label every group of people descriptively and try to give an accurate "in-character" prediction of its behavior than if you simply try to crudely teach everyone an abstract set of "Good things" like Tolerance, Intersectionality, and Freedom. Describing the behavior of a group of people accurately is not the same thing as stereotypes. If that were actually the case, there would be no such thing as race coding in media which is not offensive, but the United States is full of all kinds of coded examples of Media Representation that people still consider Media Representation, so there clearly is. If you can figure out how an abstract character on a cartoon that is not drawn like a realistic human and is not stated to come from earth represents a real-world ethnic group, then you can figure out what it means to get rid of prejudices by creating a descriptive model of a group of people. It's very simple. One kind of descriptive model of a group of people is a story.

The general defining axiom of postmodernism in philosophy, or the postmodern period, is that the world has become free of narratives about the significance of history, and that there are no "grand" narratives about the entire existence of a population that where they do not already apply can be extended across multiple groups of people. Postmodern philosophy pretends to be about the concept that neither any particular religion nor European Materialism can successfully explain all poulations (sometimes the notions of "no particular Liberal-republican party" or "no particular philosophical faction" are thrown in), but the actual premise it usually starts from is simply that Liberal-republicanism doesn't "really" work due to Tory bigotry and yet Marxism and Dengism also aren't functional. When postmodernism isn't a thinly veiled act of gloating that the "first" Cold War is over — and we need to keep in mind that that distinction is almost necessary when after the first one Liberal-republicanism will naturally seek to gut all independent countable cultures at the bonds that make them and conquer everybody anyway — it's basically just philosophers totally giving up and labeling themselves useless. I read a real book where in an attempt to describe philosophies as they exist within Liberal-republicanism Molly Ann Rothenberg essentially said that a philosophy describing all other current philosophies is impossible. I had to stop and do a double take at what I'd just read, because if that sentence was actually true then her book really should not have existed and I should not have been holding it in my hands. If postmodernism was true, how could she even know what Communism was well enough to criticize it? Wouldn't it be the case that the predominant philosophy in every country would make it impossible to understand other philosophies, so that if you extended Liberal-republicanism over onto Communism you'd get everything wrong and the Communists would push back? Honestly, when you put it that way, it almost starts to make sense! But it really does look more like a description of how much philosophers don't know and aren't good at describing than an actual law of the world where the world itself resists any unified description. Really, if postmodernism was actually modeling the state of things that neither Liberal-republicanism nor Stalinism has been able to properly understand each other without error, then it would be incomplete by its own definition and _the opposite of all philosophies not being able to describe all philosophies exactly as they are_ would have to be the thing that was true.

Postmodern or anti-narrative philosophies have been quietly spreading everywhere, telling everyone that science has hurt people and religion is all arbitrarily made up but Communities and identities are somehow okay even though all of those identities should logically be narratives that people have to be fed in order to understand them without prejudice but rejecting narratives is Good and prejudice is Bad and every mistake anybody ever made in depicting an ethnic group or demographic was basically a deliberate choice and education is mandatory but governments are bad and lived experience is inherently Correct and people can reject whatever they're told whenever they want to but you can't reject the rules for getting things represented on Liberal-republican ballots and you can't reject people's prejudices if they're prejudices people have prejudices about and you can't reject any group of people laughing at you or calling you names but there's a special exception if you either still support the Confederacy or made a trans woman cry. The Soviet bureaucracy itself could not have invented a more complicated and more difficult-to-follow system of rules than blue anarchism. The only good way to summarize any of the philosophy people typically believe now is: _things naturally go together unless we've observed them killing each other, because They Just Do_.

I have had to sit through this slow deterioration of philosophy for the last 32 years, where all philosophy and all knowledge has gradually been transformed into a simple exercise of "I'm a compatible friend for you so I like what you have to say" versus "I don't personally like the feeling of believing that, so get far away from me until you become very good at something or I never want to see you". Everyone has memorized the statement that theater and literature are important in education because They Just Are, next to "The mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell", but nobody can give a coherent account of _why_ people read literature or the _importance_ of the educational power of narratives.

Well, unfortunately for anarchists, I am well-versed in all manifestations of the concept of storytelling after being fed it all my life as everyone's primary method of socializing and understanding the world and educating people, so I'm going to give every center-Liberal academic and blue anarchist a lesson on exactly what a narrative is. A narrative is a collection of objects and processes that participate in opposition, development, and resolution. Every story you could possibly think of has objects in it, and the objects interact with each other only under particular rules. Harry Potter cannot revive dead people. Pokémon can only have two out of eighteen types. Digimon die and cannot live forever despite being made of intangible data. A story proceeds according to its rules and cannot break its fundamental rules. The legendary Pokémon Giratina can create a reverse world with antigravity, but that's because it has the narrative role of a local god that embodies the universe's rules. A Pokémon cannot actually break the rules of _Pokémon_ through truly unexpected events such as a Legendary Pokémon showing up and suddenly being Aura type rather than one of the 18 established types. Terapagos can momentarily be Stellar type, but that is because Stellar type was actually written into the rules of _Pokémon_ and introduced to the player all throughout the game that contains it. Terapagos is a "real" Pokémon, while an old _Pokémon_ game malfunctioning and generating Missingno is not creating "real" Pokémon, and a nonsense Pokémon with a picture made out of static being Bird type is _not_ following the series rules. The set of rules that defines how objects inside a fictional narrative interact — which is one definition of a particular media series' _canon_ — fundamentally drives what events will and will not happen in the narrative. The reason that stories are taught as having a "five-act structure" or "a conflict" is not that stories are required to contain battles or romantic break-ups or plagues or any particular negative event you can think of, but that every story event is generated through an opposition or juxtaposition of objects, according to established rules. The reasons your ship isn't canon come out of the exact same pool of reasons that take any possible event in a story and write it _into_ canon.

Now, let me ask you, if an electron smashing into a cloud of virtual particles and coming out the other end as a new electron were a _story_, would there or would there not be a story that is happening absolutely everywhere in every country on earth on every day of every year? This may not be a very interesting story to anyone but quantum physicists, but it definitely contains a conflict or opposition, and a beginning, middle, and end. This story is everywhere, it is a true story, and it is inescapable.

That is all a narrative is. A narrative is a story in which two objects start out in one condition, collide, and create or transition into another condition. Narratives are material models of real or fictional realities. They are not arrangements of words and word definitions. If narratives really were nothing more than arbitrary arrangements of word definitions, then a large language model with enough data plus the ability to roll virtual dice to pick abstract Ideals out of a table could be better at creating new narratives than a human writer. You cannot teach anyone not to hate Black people without feeding them a collection of oppositions and changes which is essentially a narrative. If somebody meets a Black person in person and they become friends, that set of events is a narrative too. If people are always free to reject and deconstruct narratives, they can reject any and all model scenarios that tell them not to hate Black people. Or gay people, or trans people, or women, or Muslims, or Mexicans, or Canadians. Every form of prejudice is in fact the rejection of a narrative. So, in effect, to tell people that "deconstructing narratives" is a good idea is basically to allow the population to generate and spread prejudice as fast as possible.

So, is the world free of overarching narratives? Not if you're aware of electrons, not if you're aware of chemical equations, and not if you believe that all instances of racism and getting rid of it are similar to each other.

Postmodernism, in the most generous account, was true for three years. The countries that collided in World War I were a grand narrative, _themselves_, as they participated in the war. The global empires that collided in World War II were a grand narrative. World War II stopped in 1945. Israel was created in 1948. There were no grand narratives active for about three years between 1945 and 1948, and then every single year since then, Israel and all the countries in the world have been menacing Palestine. If one billion lions all fought against one Pokémon, and you wrote it down as a series of events, would that or would that not be a narrative? If practically every country is doing something, and everyone is attacking the same tiny enemy, _you simply cannot say there are no grand narratives active_.

In July I read through the book of Revelation. I wasn't actually doing it because I thought it was profound or any kind of key to real history. I was doing it to solve the story of _Deltarune_, which vaguely admits in its own text that it is a loose adaptation of the Book of Revelation. And what did I find? I found some of the most succinct evidence you'll ever need that the bible is a manual on how to carry out world wars. Taken as one big chunk with the Old Testament and Revelation on each end, the bible forms one big argument that world wars are inherently virtuous and any other form of civilization is not, and that only the act of following the manual on world wars can possibly lead to world peace. Let's retrace what Revelation says.

Revelation 3:5 — _the one who is victorious will be dressed in white_. The victory of the people united around God as an army in a worldwide battle is inherently connected with the rewards of heaven or peace that they will all receive after.

Revelation 1:16 — _coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword_. This is a rather abstract image, but one obvious reading is that global empire has one side of love and friendship and one side of violence and death. The angelic being that appears is one of the seven direct messengers of God and God's aspects, which taken as a whole represent global empire. Jesus was already associated with "a sword" in Matthew 10:34 — _I did not come to bring peace, but a sword_. This statement appears to contradict other popular messages in the bible about love and kindness, but it much more clearly takes its place within the book of Revelation where the messengers of God juxtapose the concept of peace for everyone who is saved with the concept of death, disaster, and suffering for everyone who is not saved.

Revelation 3:8 — _what he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open_. This happens in the middle of God's messengers calling out various regional churches for failing to obey particular moral standards and join up with the army of God. The metaphor of doors being open is portraying the concept of everyone being able to "come into" a particular church or army, and the metaphor of doors being shut represents people stopping the spread of an empire and refusing to join it. God is attempting to keep the membership of Christianity wide open so that everyone has to join it, but regional churches are sinning and resisting being assimilated, so God's messenger calls them out for "shutting doors".

Revelation 3:14~3:17 — _You are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were one or the other! ... You say, "I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing". But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked._ This one made me laugh because it could have been said by either God or Lenin. There is a particular group of rich aristocrats or bourgeoisie who will always try to be neutral to everything and act like participating in historical events is for unenlightened people. Lenin would say that everyone has to either turn over and aid the proletariat and the process of socialist transition or end up in the hopefully small portion of people who actively fight the proletarian army. But what God's messengers are saying in this story is that everyone on earth should join God's empire just because if everyone believes in its success long enough and basically enough people _believe_ in friendship and teamwork, then a giant violent global army is certain to succeed.

Revelation 5:9~12 — _with your blood you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation ... worthy is the Lamb who was slain_. This passage is saying that it is inherently good to submit to global empire and die for it even if you do not get any benefit from it yourself, because while simply standing up for yourself will never be appreciated by everybody, a sacrifice proves that global empire is "protecting the innocent". Individuals taking actions considered ethical (for instance, being a pacifist and refusing violence) is inherently good no matter what horrors those actions ultimately lead to because as long as everybody is forced to participate in the overall project of Being Good it will snowball into the group of people that is bound together having a greater and greater advantage over everyone else and will inevitably wrap around to the army that protects the worldwide body of Nice people winning.

Revelation 1:11~17 — _The second beast ... forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark_. Realistically, this was probably referring to situations similar to the Stamp Act where the British Empire made people in the North American colonies buy stamps to be able to sell things. The text does say "on your forehead", but if the image is that level of absurd versus any historical period's image of daily life, it is probably meant to be examined on a large scale rather than a small one, as representing a concept such as a large empire simply passing a law onto everyone inside it announced by some appointed official ("the beast allowed a second beast to give breath to [the empire's] image"), after which everyone _feels_ like they have been marked with a slave tattoo to ensure they don't break out of slavery. The image of slaves that could be bought and sold was well known to the authors of various bible texts as a fate that was almost unthinkable for them to be in themselves, so it isn't much of a stretch to expect the bible writers would throw slavery around as a metaphor much like people have done in many contexts today up to and including because they don't want to pay taxes. Today this verse is thrown around basically any time a country tries to regulate its economy, including Bolshevism in the Soviet Union but also including Menshevism. The terrible thing is that may not even be an incorrect interpretation of the verse. The verse says that any empire that is not part of God's empire and God's army but passes a law to start controlling its economy as its own sovereign body of things separate from God is part of the worldwide empire of The Opposer, or as we colloquially say now, the devil. So it may as well have said that Stalinism and Trotskyism are both unholy, or that countries having sovereign governments of any kind that have not been conquered by God's army is unholy, because that is what it practically means.

Revelation 16:3, Revelation 22:18 — _The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it turned into blood like that of a dead person, and every living thing in the sea died_ / _I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll_. This statement is clear. All disasters that happen to the enemies of God's army are Justice and are approved by God, because every time the Opposer's armies and the churches that disobey God are defeated, and every time God's churches and subordinate nations out-endure them, it's an inherently good thing. If people starve in 1930s Ukraine, the expected response isn't to be horrified that _people are starving in Ukraine_, but to rejoice about it as long as the government of Ukraine is defying the political faction of people thought to be approved by God.

You can claim all you like that it's "impossible to predict history" or that "there are no overarching narratives", but literally every single second you do either of those things you are advancing Zionism and the destruction of Palestine. Every collection of real or fictional interacting objects is a narrative. So every single person on earth that is currently supporting Israel or has been supporting Israel since 1948 has been participating in the same grand narrative — a global war which is abstractly described in the book of Revelation and across the bible, through stacking together various generalized patterns within the history of tribes or kingdoms conquering each other into the result all of those patterns appear to inevitably lead to circa the middle of the 20th century. The grand narrative does not happen simply because people have read or absorbed the book, any more than people reading _Harry Potter_ books leads to people realizing _Harry Potter_. The grand narrative happens simply because the objects and events described in the book are already happening in the real world, and the book has managed to put together a summary of the shape of the physical grand narrative on the ground that is accurate enough that when people read the book they will see the description of Christianity creating a world government when everyone believes in it hard enough as obvious to the point of being tautological.

Observing this characteristic of the book of Revelation should be lethal to any misconceptions that narratives are somehow cosmically pre-existing Ideas rather than models of material things. You may _think_ you can break "narratives" by forming a Community and thinking positive thoughts. But if so, then why is it that the United States successfully crushed the Soviet Union? The bible said that the Soviet Union would be destroyed if the United States held firm in love and friendship and mercilessly punished it for defying the United States. The Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea were punished with sanctions and bigotry specifically for defying the United States. (Korea and Vietnam were also punished with violent invasions.) And unfortunately for everyone, the strategy laid out in the bible worked. The United States successfully crushed the Soviet Union twice over, and it has recently gotten halfway through crushing Cuba. The holy instruction manual for global bullying was a smashing success, and every time the United States has behaved with jealousy, pettiness, vindictiveness, injustice, bloodlust, bigotry, megalomania, and capricious malevolence, it has been handsomely rewarded with more control.

So, why the "dip"? Why does it seem to everyone far beyond Tories and Duginists in Russia like everything about society was better when it was either small tribes, or kingdoms and empires, or scatterings of peasants? Because the great innovation of capitalism was precisely breaking open and destroying everything resembling a community and replacing the entire concept of communities with open gaps where people constantly form connections for the first time. Suddenly, "running into strangers" became "socializing", travel and marketing became "multiculturalism" or "tolerance", and refusing to let everyone into your town or go to a bunch of other cities became "bigotry". But despite this new openness seeming like it had the power to break down barriers and unite the world, what it ultimately led to was the slow realization that space in towns and national territories was still finite, so as people kept rapidly moving and mixing some locations or social circles would become exclusively filled with rich or talented people and become locations of high status, crowding everyone else out — or alternatively, become filled with all the most low-status people in the entire world. When the world was flooded with agoras, they quickly burst open communities, sometimes deliberately and maliciously. Any coherent group of people with stable social bonds would eventually get termed "primitive", from tribes that caught the eye of Tories to religious groups analyzed with the crude label of "cult" to Third World countries forming close bonds to defend themselves like North Korea. Everyone ate up that ideology no matter what precise swatch color they were. "Surely you need to stop spending time in a closed community and get out," ordinary people will always say now whenever any coherent group of people starts doing anything weird. Then they all act surprised when outside people flood into fandoms and disregard all their previous traditions and practices, or Tories look at an association of gay and transgender people and decide it's a locus of hysteria spreading mental illness that they have to break up. These days, the moment there is anything remotely resembling a community, capitalist allies will break it apart in the name of freedom. And, worse than that, capitalists will then feed you the fiction that a bunch of isolated producers exchanging goods really is a community, and the _actual, real_ definition of a community. Regular people are not permitted to have communities, but high-profile actors and online artisans and business owners in a lobbying group and Liberal-republican parties and academics creating agorist theories and that one congressman hanging off a minority identity group can.

Agorism conquered the world before capitalism did, and after capitalism began to crumble. It championed destruction as progress, infinite possibility as truth, and uncertainty as knowledge, at once bashing ignorance and claiming ignorance is all we can ever know. On one level postmodernism and agorism are the same continuous thing, each one proclaiming that worldwide small capitalism is eternally better than communities or knowledge. Thus the philosophy based specifically around social links and socialization has ironically brought great destruction to the entire concepts of sociality, community, and society. What has become clear is that to invert agorism the entire notion of change, possibility, and uncertainty has to give way to detailed material models of how particular periods and events transition into other periods and events, without appeals to the "mysterious ways" of the universe deciding what happens, and without judgement. Humanity must take control of the overall problem of history, and must not leave anything open enough that even two different versions of Marxism can smash into each other and one can unpredictably come out on top of the other. Predictive knowledge is control; there is no need to steer and dominate what you can predict. But Marxists must become able to describe the behavior of all organizations and movements without "making it about themselves". The day that Trotskyists emerge from the time in which no philosophy could extend itself across others to produce a grand unifying narrative actually is the day that the world will emerge from the postmodern period. The day that Trotskyists produce an overview of the entirety of world history that is better than the bible, the bible god will finally fade into the ranks of other ancient superstitions and the world will move toward forming a global republic and also the irrelevance and dormancy of the global state.

I have been meditating on _Undertale_. I have been idly thinking since 2015 about what exactly this game and its companion game are trying to say. _Undertale_ is a game about getting through a console RPG adventure narrative and coming out the other side without killing monsters. But what does that mean? Does it mean that it's better to love your enemies than to be angry? Does it mean the author hasn't read enough fantasy novels and history books to understand what history is? Does it mean the author is accidentally trying to write a Cold War narrative where the Second World is stuck behind the Iron Curtain and wants to come out but the First World won't let it out and it has to come to a hesitant acceptance of its status as the lesser half of the world whose only solace is to take pride in being monstrous? Does it mean the author was trying to construct a fantastical counterpart of the Christian bible where the Old Testament section where tribes were killing each other turns into the New Testament section where people aren't supposed to kill each other, and I misread the bible itself as a profound Cold War narrative because I didn't fully realize that the bible was a manual about how to carry out global imperialism, and like all Armageddon or Ragnarök narratives the book of Revelation was just another mythical story about global empire? _Undertale_ is based on _Deltarune_, and _Deltarune_ is based on the bible. But _Deltarune_ is all about how the state of corporate art products constantly competing with each other and displacing each other is making everyone tired and how when people are stuck in small-town capitalism in general the totality of that existence is so tiring they look for ways to step out of material reality, and how in a sense there is no way for them to succeed at that without also just coming to understand material reality better and "waking up" from their previous misunderstandings rather than going through the motions of going through it all unconsciously. Is _Deltarune_ actually a pro-Trotskyist narrative or did I just look at a story about characters that exist in a world governed by an apocalyptic prophecy who are doubting the prophecy actually means anything, and then start reading the bible and realize that what the _Deltarune_ characters were saying was stupid because the point of narratives is to predict or generate consequences and the point of the bible narrative the game is based on is to correctly predict success at global empire and the only way to prevent global empire is for everyone to step out of their current limited understandings of the world's progress toward global empire and produce a new much better narrative of global history?

Yeah, I probably did. But it will still be my favorite interpretation of _Deltarune_, because looking back on the process, and in a world where international news is as depressing as it currently is, me catastrophically succeeding at interpreting _Deltarune_ and "solving" global capitalism before I'd managed to fully lay out the plot of the game may be one of the funniest things I've seen all year.

After _contradiction_ and _proletariat_, I think the next great case of Marxism "ruining" a dictionary word with a new meaning might just turn out to be _narrative_. Nobody has been abandoning that word, and its intensity of use only seems to be slowly climbing each decade. I think it's only a matter of time between now and the day Marxists come up with a rock-solid theory of how to break away from the bible narrative process and succeed at creating a new pattern of world history that Marxists start completely abusing the word _narrative_ into their own orange-tinted meaning. Like _contradictions_ came to refer to the physical oppositions that caused ahistorical bodies of logical statements to change and contradict, _narratives_ may start referring to physical processes of assembling courses of history, so that they are now the object historical materialism studies.

Many years before I ever learned any Marxism one of the things that got me away from Liberal-republican thinking about history was just playing or watching way too many simulation games about the Three Kingdoms period and noble characters conquering fiefs. Before long, I started reading about the history of other countries and saw that multiple other countries had had "three kingdoms periods" and was intrigued. I was only about 13-16 years old and I was already finding it impossible to ignore that the same patterns of _warring states period, empire, warring states period, empire_ seemed to pop up in different countries' history again and again. I didn't know what to do with that information. I had absolutely no idea what Communism even was or where it came from. But, once again, while I was still a teenager I found this Wikipedia page talking superficially about how between feudal China and China's republican period Mao had appeared and the Kuomintang had appeared and I filed it away into my mind as an important event in the history of Southeast Asia but I had no idea what was going on. I was like, _What is all this? Where did Mao come from??_ I have to say, I found it very satisfying when primary sources about the Chinese revolution and the Russian revolution eventually filled in the gaps to that story. I used to think the concept of China having a lot of different dynasties was vaguely impressive, but now that I know those were basically failures to ever invent republicanism I find it vaguely tragic taken in context.

So, when I used "Mao and the Kuomintang" as my example for the difference between anarchists' view of reality and historical materialism, I had specific reasons. If you look at all of reality as simply an arbitrary narrative to be subverted, there is really no good explanation for why the history of China would go through so many seemingly pointless cycles of re-division and then suddenly produce Deng Xiaoping Thought and Taiwan. It's one of many cases in world history where if a particular human being had artificially created the story you might ask why the network drew the first series out so many seasons instead of cutting it off, or why the writer wasn't fired. Even if the intentions for making the artificial creation were Evil, you'd still think there would be a greater amount of organization and efficiency. But when you look at things more through the lens of "game mechanics" (physical models), and the concept of a very difficult challenge that simply hadn't been won, then everything starts to make a lot more sense.

At times, when Christians have tried to claim that animal evolution was intelligently designed, biology fans have retorted back by pointing out how many things within animal biology seem to be terribly designed or not make any sense. I think to an extent that same concept applies to narratives. Anarchists and Liberal-republicans will typically try to say that civilizations are intelligently designed by emperors or upper classes "misusing" their power rather than being set down by God. But the effect is eerily similar. If civilization is all just put together to abuse people, then wouldn't it be more effective at its task if it made coherent sense, as with the created world in The Truman Show? But time and time again, it doesn't make any sense. China's historical timeline is a mess. There is no simple logical reason for North Korea to exist when the Korean War also happened but then never completed itself. The parties that are supposed to be working together to rule people in the United States have times of treating each other as necessary equals and times of actually having violent vendettas with guns involved at both local and national levels, leaving Stalinist parties in the United States genuinely confused. I don't think an anarchist could even explain why Trotskyism exists. If Communism is just one big conspiracy to trap people in a police state or in Dengism, then why did the Soviet Union have two Communist parties and why were they fighting each other, if Communism always leads to the same thing? Wouldn't the two of them know that they were working toward the same goal and just stop? Poststructuralism, postmodern philosophy, and even Bellegarrigist styles of charcoal anarchism cannot actually explain where material contradictions originally come from or why it is that people originally create "government". Without a predictive material account of these things that generically explains _how_ they come to exist and when you can expect them to exist, it's impossible to come up with realistic strategies to intervene and stop them. You will also not be able to come up with a plausible "after picture" for what kind of subsequent forms of society will be created after you intervene in what will realistically be formed in the present.

But, I have one other thing to say that anarchists will like considerably more. The exercise of narrative storytelling can be used for education and problem-solving. That much is almost true in the way they already believe it is. But if you are going to use fiction in this way, you must think about Communism and anarchism _exactly_ the same way you think about racism or transphobia. A story which attempts to represent an ethnic group to people but is not realistic is simply offensive. _My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic_ can have an episode which is supposed to be about groups of people of different national origins meeting each other and learning not to be prejudiced, but if the episode brings in Zecora as a thrown-together caricature of the continent of Africa, it will seem to be promoting lazy research on the actual history and conditions of Africa and in its own way still condoning racism. The mere act of creating art has a certain amount of power to be offensive in oppressive and non-constructive ways that will alienate people from each other and from the art. But what might just blow your mind is realizing that almost every single way a work can be non-constructively offensive simply involves people getting upset because the work is not accurate to reality at a time when they required it to be. People often try to make blanket claims that "getting away from realism improves art". But nobody wants to see a work where the concept of being Black in Alabama is invoked and yet made out of a bunch of nonsense lying around in the back of the author's brain. Sure, it's abstract rather than representational, and it's "original" in that it doesn't copy anything the author read. But when people try to be "creative" in their representations of real-world groups of people, it typically devolves into the same general array of uncreative tropes and stereotypes. Why? Because stories have always been models of other things. You'll see people throw around the concept that art is a canvas of infinite possibilities, but it simply isn't correct. Even fantastical stories that do not line up with the real world are simulations in which a particular set of winning rules derived from the needs of readers in the real world interacts with itself to create the simulation. Invention is a boundless canvas of possibilities, but not every invention actually makes sense — we have all seen joke inventions on cartoons which are completely unsuited to be final products. Art is exactly the same way. Judging the success of art is a difficult and messy process, but there are a few cases like representation of demographics and portraying the general concept of diversity where that judging process becomes almost instantaneous. Again, I will ask you, why? Because a simulation of any kind produces higher quality output according to the amount of data it was built on. This is why people plateau in their creativity when they do not have real-world information about other demographics. All stories are merely models, and stories made out of an inadequate pile of simulation rules in respect to a particular thing cannot successfully function as a good simulation.

Now, I want you to stop and think about what a lack of accurate, non-judgemental representation has done to countries like Cuba and North Korea.

Don't laugh at that, anarchists! I mean it very seriously. When the United States goes about its day spreading around only the sparsest details about Black people and leaving people with no good information, people fill in whatever they want to. And when they hear on the news that one Black person ever committed one crime in Detroit, they run with it. Pretty quickly it becomes that Black people "have a culture of crime" where they constantly get arrested more than anyone else because they didn't choose the right abstract Ideals of lawfulness, that Black fathers are abandoning their children to steal money from the welfare system, that the one Black person who believes in stealing products for anarchists is running an actual mafia or Islamic guerrilla army to create a new global empire, and that Barack Obama getting nominated for president is some kind of actual conspiracy by oppressive Dengist bureaucrats that have created a new Leninism out of schizoanalysis or Lacanianism. So if the United States went around telling nobody to learn about Third World countries and to always assume they can't govern themselves, what do you think people would start thinking about the trustworthiness or social competence of those countries' civilians?

When people are faced with fictional narratives that make the nature of narratives as simulations obvious, they don't first seek creativity or novelty, but a work where narratives are used as a representational model of material reality that accurately predicts or follows a generalized set of real-world events that happen in its stated geographical regions. When people don't have real observations of other ethnicities, simulations _become_ the data. When an important repeated pattern in society such as gender identity keeps appearing but is not well explained by science, narrative storytelling takes on rigorous rules and _becomes_ the science. This same concept of meticulously taking down observations of society and digesting them to produce a model of what drives actual observed biographical incidents and news events should be applied to all fictional narratives discussing Communism or anarchism. Any portrayal of Third World countries and their history which is inaccurate more or less causes the United States to descend on those countries and dominate them, taking away from them any chance of having democracy or even the right to exist at home as a resident of that country. So I am begging you, every author that goes on about "Representation in Media" or "using writing to improve our imagination", please represent historical Communist movements and republics accurately. Represent them as realistically as any element of your story which is intended to be realistic, including "lived experience" or gender identity. Represent your own favorite anarchist movements realistically, including every one of their flaws. Accurately represent the conflict between different versions of Marxism such as Stalinism and Trotskyism. Have you ever gotten upset when somebody took one of your favorite fictional characters and flattened that character into a simplified picture that was entirely perfect or entirely bad? Have you ever wanted to shout at somebody for dropping the most interesting parts of a fictional canon? Bring that emotion and the reasons somebody would feel it to representing the concept of "Socialism". Don't flanderize anarchism and make it into the perfect comic book superhero of ideologies. Don't villainize Bolshevism and act like workers' states do nothing but hate anarchists and the world outside. If you wouldn't insist that all stories be about straight able-bodied people, don't do the same thing to sociophilosophies and insist that all stories be about romanticized monarchies or Liberal-republicanism. It is unbelievable that the United States can be so awash in chatter about "representation" and "lived experience" and "community" and "bringing back sincerity" and yet not one bit of that applies to Communists. Historical workers' states get no accurate representation, windows into their own internal perspectives, acceptance by a wider community, hope for a better tomorrow, or sincerity.

Blue anarchism defines freedom as people believing anything and everything that doesn't contain prejudices. But it isn't possible to allow people to believe just anything that doesn't contain prejudices, because prejudices are in fact not the presence of a narrative, but the absence of a narrative that is inevitably filled in with a much more toxic narrative. It takes all the effort to learn correct information and it takes no effort to have prejudices. So literally any time somebody believes something stupid or inaccurate, they have already stepped away from reality, and it's only a matter of time before it turns into a demographic prejudice somehow. Every old racist Disney cartoon is simply an inaccurate model of reality. Every instance of fanfiction writers claiming male-on-male pairings "aren't actually gay" or fiction including nonhuman beings that are not male or female with the implication only aliens can have non-binary gender demonstrates how making any mistake about reality whatsoever can come across as discrimination. But this second category of mistake is much smaller, and the majority of them do not happen intentionally. They happen purely out of the author's current level of knowledge about the entire world. The entire world is something that takes a long time to learn about. So no matter how genuinely hard people try to know about everything, if any particular person releases a work to the entire world, it's likely everyone will accidentally have prejudices. Blue anarchism makes some kind of sense at a town scale but it really makes no sense at a world scale. At the scale of the world, everything including a cluster of blue anarchists is a narrative and the only form of analysis that actually makes sense is the existential-materialist analysis of all those separate interacting narratives.

After 11 years I understand the point of _Undertale_. We all want to think that groups of people coexisting is something you can easily do if only you choose the right Ideals and put your mind to it, but in actuality, the only real way to get to the future you want is to see beyond the barriers between groups of people and know the underlying reality, because if you do not know your opponent, you cannot control it.

== Should we even call it Social-ism? ==

I am really tired of the English language. Especially the United States variant of English.
I know a lot of other languages would have the same problems as I'm about to describe, but still, I'm tired.

The words "socialism" and "communism" have today become a point of weakness in a way it seems like they never have before. "Socialism" implies a transformation of society which is based in making society "more social" through giving it more _sociality_ or _society_ or _social sector_. "Communism" implies a movement or transition which is based in making more "community", "communality", or "communes". Neither of these words is at all accurate to what Communists really do. This is why, quite honestly, I prefer to just call the transitional society that the Bolsheviks physically put into place "Bolshevism" (or, "the Material System of Bolshevism" in longhand). I wouldn't even mind it being called "Stalinism" as long as that specific word wasn't being said as an insult or criticism. But if you have ever seen average people try to describe what "socialism" or even "communism" is... then the Soviet Union was not Communism in any way and it did not have a Communist party. And by that, I don't mean in the sense that I'm holding the Soviet Union to sky-high standards to handle socialist transition correctly, but in the sense that to most people "communism" has flat out come to mean anarchism and they chastise you like you were a revisionist if you don't believe it.

I think the words "socialism" and "communism" have unacceptably empowered anarchists. It's been absolutely pervading popular discourse that movements are "socialist" because they give back to the members of society instead of choosing the toxic Ideal of Greed (the trusty neo-Menshevik lever to prevent anything but Menshevism from transforming society), or because they return society to a whole, undamaged state of nature (this one you hear from White people subtly appropriating tribal societies' philosophy without any plausible material strategy for truly relinquishing White people's control over the United States and the earth), or because they "give power back to the people" instead of to a specific wedge of Evil capitalists that are deliberately ruining society but are unrelated to all the Good capitalists. There is no mention of _scientific socialism_ anywhere, there is no mention of the concepts of either _dialectical materialism_ or _mechanical materialism_, there is no mention of the concept of understanding history as a series of material processes, no mention of _populational relativism_ and understanding populations as self-contained stages for internal oppositions to arise that are familiar to the historical transitions seen in other countries horizontally, for the most part there is nearly no mention of _science_. Instead, three of the top concepts you hear thrown around in various phrasings are "pluralistic society" or "social liberalization", "lived experience" or "unimpeded daily life" or "community culture" or "freedom", and "common humanity" or "The Subject". These concepts are the central orbiting axis for the social-democratic and blue-anarchist concepts of what "socialist transition" _even is_. Society needs socialism because society is bigoted and pushes people out of society to become homeless, and spreads bad cultural narratives that cause people to trust and support Tory parties that spread more racism, LGBT-phobia and misogyny, and miscellaneous hatred. Society needs communism because it's bigoted and will never have enough jobs to inclusively welcome every individual into society just because people are nice, so the way to create communism is to create small and isolated communities of a few socially-linked people — I'm sorry, _decentralized_ and _non-bureaucratic_ communities — so that when these small groups that "don't believe in Greed" have claimed sufficient unused land and physical implements for creating material culture for themselves they will simply not let capitalism happen again. Silly Bolsheviks! How could you ever think Communism was about having a state? Communism is when every miniature community fits into the community community regardless of how many people there are and how much land there is. We're really open to communism now. Communism sounds pretty good, but just one little caveat — it had better be a form of anarchism and not a form of Bolshevism.

Sometimes I almost have no words for the _depth_ to which today's people detest Materialism and actual social science. It isn't a surface level thing. For every possible application you can conceivably use science for, _all of them_, I've been told at at least one point in my existence that each and every single one is bad. And I've been told that either anarchism or Liberal-republican academia somehow has the "actually brave" and "properly nuanced" solutions to all our problems if we'd only stop blindly consulting science.

Don't use science to back up your arguments, because actually people usually come to their beliefs based on who their friends are rather than through logical arguments. Don't worry, it's still possible to define the concept of Reason without facts or logic, you just have to read Kant and define what is Reasonable as group-based intuition and assume that everything already identifiable as unethical is not Reasonable.

Don't use science to try to find objective truth, because nobody will ever recognize what is materially accurate as true unless all populations of people are included, and making use of science makes it dreadfully easy for the populations and subpopulations currently in control of the world to erase the existence of tribal populations and demographic minorities and their experiences. Which is wholly unacceptable, and thus the use of science is generally Unreasonable.

Don't use science to find out what gender is; that's a task for Communities. You can't use science to prove to academics that gender identity is real because science can be weaponized to extinguish the existence of gay and transgender people at birth, and whenever there are multiple possible fields of study that can be used to advance a progressive cause the field with no possibility of abuse is the only one that can be used. Don't use science to prove that LGBT people improve with transition experts or therapy, I mean, you can try it but it won't have any political use in convincing anyone.

Don't use science to make people get COVID vaccines, because if people don't first feel included and heard before there is any science or government they will never trust science or government again, so really, Community and local culture can handle entire public health strategies too. CDC? More like "Centers for Domination Creation".

Don't use science to discover medications, because Big Pharma is going to over-prescribe them and pocket the money. We won't outright say that the world shouldn't have doctors but we are severely suspicious of them, so, you know, unless the Tories ever agree to pass universal health care, doctors are one big act of Domination where people are asked to take on huge debts for their physical inadequacies and maybe some of those weird right-Liberals that are convinced that nobody should ever go to doctors might actually be halfway right. Che Guevara was a statist, so don't you go believing that doctors are secretly good.

Don't you even think about using science to extend human life past 100 years, because that will only be used by billionaires and it has no valid use in giving humanity more time to gather and consolidate knowledge or gain better insight on the connection between past historical periods and future historical periods. Or even in keeping appointed center-Liberal judges on the stand longer so Tories can't take it. Have you _read_ the Epic of Gilgamesh? Don't you do it.

Don't use science to create technology, because technology is the source of power and Liberal-republicanism was created to crush improper uses of power, so therefore all forms of progress must always look like crushing unwanted loci of power and unwanted forms of technology, while invention itself is at best neutral but is never progress. That includes Bolshevism and the naïve thought that a cluster of intelligent statists could create a technology powerful enough to make a better society without asking literally the whole world whether they could have their own government with their own laws or have to become a colony of United States capitalists. Capitalists are bad, but, you know, the United States can't have democracy if everybody in the world who wants to invent something new doesn't ask the United States' two major voter bases whether a new form of government is okay. How wholly Unreasonable to not first ask the important question of whether Bolshevism is Ethical as judged by United States voters.

Don't use science to build hype about the general concept of "the future", because then we get harmful technologies nobody really wants like miniature "Matrices" (virtual worlds or "metaverses"), and LLMs. We see what you're doing there trying to learn the important art of promoting abstract Ideals instead of material knowledge, but there are much better ways to motivate people to get out of bed and continue existing, usually involving Community. You don't need The Future.

Don't use science to write fictional scenarios about imperialism in space, because that takes people away from a grounded view of reality where they focus on political struggles to reclaim local culture and change all of society by simply telling everyone Colonialism is a destructive and cosmically bad Ideal.

Don't use science to generate fictional species in order to use them for bad metaphors involving social prejudice. There's a valid place for Representation in Media but if you don't base fictional narratives in real biographical timelines people have experienced they will never be accurate or true and they will only encourage people to maintain incorrect and prejudiced understandings of prejudice. Don't you get it? Real accounts of people's experiences are real because they've been experienced. Lived experience! It's there in the name, it's real because people consciously live it in their minds, and then through the magic of simulated social bonding and empathy, other people experience it.

Don't use science to attack religion and promote Materialism, because that will cause people to overlook all the valuable ethical theories contained in religions such as Buddhism and ancient animisms, and the ability to join with what is Ethical and collectively choose the outer ethical boundaries that shape all future activity is surely more important than reality or facts.

Don't use science to argue with people about global warming, because, well, that hasn't worked so far and the empirical evidence suggests people may be more open to emotional appeals about the loss of social activities and relationships and the destruction of Community and tradition that will occur if wildlife or vegetation disappear or a city is swallowed by the ocean.

Don't use science to argue against prejudice and that all human beings are equal in their near-identical human genome, because you'll only diminish the observation that that kind of stuff is Already Just Obvious to any Normal, Functioning Real Humans and anyone would think of it if you didn't go around muddying the waters with your stupid "science".

Don't use science to point out the problems in Freudian psychoanalysis, because human beings naturally think in metaphors and quests, and if every existing political theory has failed us then there must be some kind of great new political theory inside Jung, sitting somewhere in between the realms of fictional adventure narratives, and how creative expression gives life to inner experiences, and psychology.

Don't use science to teach people how to draw, because superficially realistic art is boring and the best representational art is representational art about social phenomena or inner experiences told with highly stylized visuals.

Don't use the offshoots of science to solve and predict fictional narratives with Materialism, because material evidence of events in a narrative can definitely never be connected to themes or narrative progression or fictional histories and you have to analyze fictional narratives using abstract themes and predictions of their didactic messages or sentimental desires.

Don't use Materialism to try to predict history, because history is clearly the sum of all the free actions of individuals, and the way culture has been in the past could never predict the way culture or level of knowledge will shape individual people's behaviors in the future — oh, wait, uh, somehow you can use history to predict fascism is still possible I guess and won't simply never happen again outside forms we could never predict, because we find it very scary. Don't remove the history of slavery and the Confederacy from history books, because...... no, we know that stuff isn't happening any more and everything has changed, but um... it's very distressing, so you can't remove it because... the distressing parts of history books are the good parts. It's like teaching a unit on horror stories; you can't properly teach the craft of writing a horrot story that while removing the best parts of the horror story. We just like those parts of the book and that's our lived experience. So that's why you can't remove all history books from classrooms even though we just gave an argument for why that might make total sense.

And for the love of animism, don't use science to build a proletarian society built on _destroying shared community_, _taking the choice to believe in reality and consequences away from the individual_, _instrumentalizing the human being into an object acquired and hoarded by a nation_, and _building a system of justice by first sweeping away everyone's appeal to what is natural and obvious_. Anyone who makes people learn science is a Cop and anyone who would protect national populations with science is a Pig. [*AF2]

Oddly enough in all of this I had never really heard people complaining about the fact chemistry allowed humanity to create atom bombs, and considering the existence of supernovas, neutron stars, and black holes as new exotic outcomes that occur when the universe itself pushes the boundaries of the smallest scales of physics, synthesizing new gigantic elements could probably enable something very bad. Complaints about researching viruses in a lab to make vaccines are something I've only ever heard from Tories, although Tories have definitely been spreading them far and wide. I also don't hear people complaining about animal testing or factory farming much in context of animal welfare — today it seems that you hear complaints about factory farming mainly in connection with climate change and the vague implication that humanity eats meat or runs destructive farms or releases a lot of greenhouse gases from farms because capitalism comes from Greed and the power to exploit animals or exploit oil or exploit Iraq comes specifically from the Once-ler sitting around in his shack spontaneously inventing the idea of large corporations and because _he_ made the wrong decision one day he gained the power to chop down all the trees and scoop up all the oil and hire as many people as he wanted to and the Lorax and all the Whos in the town were powerless to stop him.

But, if I can take just a brief moment to specifically talk about myself and my own so-called "lived experience"... this destroyed me. Having to live in a world where everybody thought like this and none of it was showing any signs of ceasing steamrolled my psychology, cracked apart my mental thought space like a hammer, and shattered my ability to feel any emotions about anything. My mind is built for science and math. I have an autistic brain that seemingly lacks any inherent capability for intuition and is entirely logical, but has no inherent ability to comprehend time. I have days where I actually wake up, see it's noon, immerse myself into compiling huge bodies of facts and connections within reality or fiction, hardly remember to eat anything after breakfast, and have experienced twelve or thirteen hours doing the same thing as if they were thirty minutes. I either focus completely and intensely on something to the point it goes through my entire being and I'm doing it for three days straight, or I have no ability to focus on a thing and can't even get started. I am terribly put together to be of any use as a worker or an owner. I can't keep a schedule or make promises or do anything specific for any specific number of hours each day. And I physically can't drive a car because my brain won't focus and is always "drunk" on constant puzzle-solving and context-switching. There are miles and miles between my house and anywhere containing the least bit of work or socialization but my neurodivergent brain has actually wrecked cars so I just have to walk 5 kilometers (3 miles) multiple times a week. Nobody's going to vote for me to have a bus to ride just because it's "the right thing to do". My relatives are convinced that the terribly-functioning bus charity will be improved when it's replaced by a for-profit corporation. I couldn't pay for the ride! I can't make any money. So I'd still have to walk. I would always get the highest standardized test scores in my class because my brain gets bored so quickly that unless I was having a bad focus day it would simply breeze through the school material for something to do. But since the age of about 18 I found it tough to believe it when people called me smart because I would always unknowingly say the wrong things they didn't want me to say, and then I would think, _can I really be that smart if I believe that gender identity is real or that Black people experience structural racism? People say that only stupid people vote for the Democrats, so I don't actually know if I'm smart._ And, well... that only got worse as the years went on and I tried studying more ideologies. _Sure, I got good test scores, I passed several AP classes, but can I really be that smart if I can't figure out how to explain all the world's issues to the Republicans and get them to vote for the Democrats? I've always been told that smart people founded the United States Republic. But they must have understood a lot of things I don't understand yet, because every day it makes less and less sense to me how the Constitution is usually supposed to work. All the autistic or transgender people I hang out with think people aren't smart if they say the Republicans can't be changed and you can't get everyone to vote for the Democrats. Am I Evil or am I just Stupid? ...So now I'm studying Marxism, but I don't understand why everyone is so stuck on this concept that people voting for a couple of laws actually changes everything. Is there something wrong with me? The Marxist theorists said I have to understand everything that already exists and how movements are already developing in order to organize a Stalinist party but the more Marxism I absorb the stranger and less comprehensible all the progressive movements in the United States actually seem. Do I just not understand Marxism because I haven't been able to work? Would all of this theory about organizing people actually make sense if I could physically go to the places where people work instead of sitting around here? I don't want to have bourgeois consciousness. It must be my fault._ I was born only trying to figure out what were the best outcomes and what was Right — in the proper anarchist ethical sense. I never really wanted to upset anyone. I used to actually care about ethics and have something of an obsession with hero characters in fiction and the concept that they were not specifically powerful, but ethical. I walked away from religion because I didn't see how people believing in a god would advance ethics. So every time I thought I got an answer about what was the Right thing to do from any group of people I absorbed it and attempted to integrate it into the others. Like I was "supposed to do". But each time I memorized an ethical prescription, I saw one of the only things I liked or found relatable in the world slip away one by one. I thought one day that would end, and I would still have a couple of them left. But it didn't end. At some point I saw everything I had ever identified with or ever wanted to talk to anyone about ground up as "inherently unethical", and I tried to move past it, but every time the arguments were too close to making sense (at least with a bunch of other arguments I'd seen before if nothing else), and pretty quickly, those "became the true answers to me" and I couldn't feel enjoyment from anything I inherently enjoyed on a psychological level. At the same time, whenever I interacted with anything I was "supposed to" like, it felt empty and depressing and I didn't like it. _Look, Media Representation!_ Awesome. It looks great, but I feel strangely like if I ever talked about it to anyone it would turn into a test and I'd be hit with a ruler for a wrong answer. I don't want to make anyone mad. Maybe I'll read something else. _You aren't normal, so maybe you would like a Furry visual novel full of gay romance?_ I don't know. Not exactly. I mean, I like that kind of character, but I don't really like the themes of any of these stories. They all have this weird undercurrent of trying to manufacture fake diversity in a White or European population that wishes there was diversity, and treating reality in this difficult-to-describe, almost neo-creationist way where biology doesn't exist because of evolution and material oppositions in nature, and instead exists because some unseen force decreed that the world would have diversity and all diversity would automatically get along without strife, war, or predation. A premise can't be objectively wrong, but it feels... "off". _Get hyped about the new Pokémon game! It's fun, it's social, it embodies inclusive animist values, and it's an adventure about making friends and becoming ethical instead of just slaughtering things for an evil empire!_ No. I won't, not because it "doesn't embody Marxism" or some silly on-principle objection like that, but because I actually look at Arceus and the element type system and what I feel emotionally is "that's gross, it reminds me too much of my real-world oppression" "I don't like how Pokémon presents its world as an easy, one-size-fits-all linear path and puts in social features each to make the games more approachable but then when you water down the game to being that digestible it becomes inherently boring and the fans are actually upset about that and complain about it a lot but for baffling reasons they still stay exactly as stuck on the games as they ever were and don't really want anything about the games to change, every time someone offers a possible change such as an open world the consensus is that doesn't understand the appeal of the game and when implemented has ruined it" "I don't like the kind of people who play _Pokémon_. They never like it when you don't like things exactly the way they are and inherently fit into that order and understand exactly why it was made that way and praise it for being exactly the way it is. I don't like the way it is, and so it isn't fun to me or a social experience for me". _Ah, you're *really* not normal. Maybe you're interested in playing fantasy card games at the card shop?_ No. That just feels like putting on a fake personality and trying to hide my true personality. There is this idea that's been going around that all you have to do to make tabletop games inclusive is to say "they're for gay people now" and then they just are. But the whole assumption that Community fails to be inclusive because it needs more Inclusivity and Community really, really was not working for me. It wasn't working on the most basic levels, before any logical thought came in. I wasn't _trying_ to analyze it. Not back then, when for years I didn't even actually know what Marxism was or how to apply it. My emotions were just gradually dying from any attempt to socialize. I had to separate from my relatives and I didn't really have any friends, but I found I experienced more contentment and less pain when I tried to get away from social interaction as much as possible and be alone. Interacting with any social artifact produced by humans often just felt wrong. Retreating into my lair and reading about Marxism was one of the only things that made me feel good. I was still a "fan" of food so to speak, and I had no problem going to town to get packaged groceries. The grocery store was nice, because whenever there weren't many people there there were so many things to look at and everything was just still and quiet and nobody was making me feel bad. I often felt a little weird at the library because there were _people_ there, and that would make me start vaguely thinking about what the lives of normal people were like and what I did wrong to end up like this, and how screwed I was to not be able to work or unionize, and when I was going to die, and if Stalin's government would have hated me as much as this society. Sometimes I really didn't want to read at the library and I just wanted to walk to town and back so I didn't have to be in my house but I could also read at home. I liked being on the dirt trails up to town hidden inside the trees more than I liked being in town or in the impossible state of visiting another person. The only people I "talked to" were online video broadcasts I would listen to just to not forget what humans are and knock myself back a few paces away from actually going crazy. I had many episodes of wanting to die so I could be less of a problem to everyone and no longer be the person who takes all the Wrong actions and is the embodiment of pure Unreasonableness. (Probably over 100 in total.) I thought I would never be good enough to deserve anyone's love and was a little afraid they'd all prefer I never came near them and died alone. I sometimes got worried that I shouldn't talk to Marxist parties because they would tell me I had everything wrong and I shouldn't have even come in. I knew they were the only people on earth who would ever want to talk to me but I had to solve the way reality worked perfectly without any mistakes or they wouldn't want me either, because only someone with the power to bring actual change can be a comrade.

I was autistic, I was transgender, I was neurologically disabled, but all of that just continued to push me away from society as if progressive movements had never existed. I was always told that demographic identities would flip around into inherently integrating people into Communities if only the nature of Community would change toward the Ideal of inclusion. But whenever people tried to form a "community" of any kind it never felt right being there, like in every case a Community was inherently more full and complete without me in it. I didn't feel like I was "actually" any of my demographic identities. Even though the negative effects of all of them were still present, it felt like they had all slid off me and I was faking. I just... I was a cryptic genderless _thing_ with no ability to tell time, but I had tried too hard to be special and I'd better find some way of being normal and fitting into a society "correctly" or it felt like some sort of spiked ceiling trap of inhumanity was going to fall out of the sky and crush me to bloody bits before I could run.

It was like there was always a weight on me. I felt like I was deeply wrong, like my birth was a wrong choice. I had the urge to apologize to people about something nondescript but it felt like either I would get in trouble for even bringing it up and then they wouldn't want me around or they would try to tell me it was okay but completely misunderstand what the issue was and give completely wrong assumptions of what made me feel at home and what made me happy, which would only make things worse. I was useless to everybody no matter who they were. I was a monstrosity made with irregularities that could not be fixed. I was "the dragon". And a dragon stays deep in its lair if it doesn't want to be met with the sword.

So... in one sense, I was pretty keen on the concept of reapplying Society back to society and rebuilding it from a scattering of isolated individuals back into something that actually resembled society. But I could tell that that concept meant something very different to me than it did to everyone else. I was already living in the collapse of sociality itself since at least 2021, while nobody else was and it was all abstract Ideals to them. If I was going to rebuild society it had to begin immediately. If the world was vile, I had to record and analyze it exactly as it was. I had to take all the utterly wrong movements and ideas and I had to present a perfect account of everything exactly as it was so I could then turn everything inside out and make it right.

I have come to one conclusion: Marxists must deconstruct all the major concepts of anarchism and Liberal-republican theory down to the absolute most basic ones that even some Marxists inappropriately make use of and show why every single one of them is wrong. Starting with "Community".

First we should talk about Gramsci. There is a popular quote that originated from Gramsci that has slid and transformed over the years almost beyond recognition. "The old world is dying, the new one is slow to appear and in this contrast is the time of monsters." It almost doesn't matter who actually said this. It wouldn't be more correct or incorrect if Gramsci had said it himself. The message of the saying is clear: historical periods are physical objects made of particular components. When a new physical object can be constructed successfully, there is a new historical period, and it gets rid of the remaining traces of the previous historical periods, parading itself around as the "obvious" logical outcome. But when a new historical period cannot be physically constructed, or it falls apart before it can establish itself, the material contradiction between various old and new historical periods keeps raging, perhaps for a short time, or perhaps for a full 200 years. A time of monsters is precisely a time of contradiction between two historical periods of varying viability. When early Trotskyism tried to emerge in Europe and the Soviet Union, but was not yet strong enough to form a nation-sized party, and Stalinists clung onto each national region believing that Trotskyism could be nothing more than a hazard, that was a time of monsters. So, the question is, why is this quote so popular with Liberal-republicans who do not understand a lick of historical materialism and do everything to exorcise mentions of Communist theorists from their universities, only stopping a few steps short of hanging up a symbolic Chinese tank on the wall and sprinkling every room with a vial of pure Bourgeois Water? Where is the expected moment where somebody realizes Gramsci was a Communist and immediately stops class and chucks the textbook out a window?

We've already established that the thing saving those textbooks from imminent defenestration is the physical separation of capitalism into two semi-countable capitalisms. As long as capitalism can convince people that half a country can build a new future through one portion of capitalists defeating another, it can stave off the possibility of people realizing that an entirely different historical period is required. So, now, how do Liberal-republicans maintain the illusion that one half of a body of capitalists is genuinely superior to another body of capitalists?

Usually the myth that follows this is that "culture" is the basis of civilizations, and the key to winning at Liberal-republicanism is to connect people together as tightly as possible into an expanding ideological Lattice until a sky Lattice for instance expands over the whole area of the country and pushes all the rust people out to the margins. But this is very much a myth. United States center-Liberals have had around 160 years to pull this off and create a new historical period without Tories as they promise, and they have not. When Liberal-republicanism is truly successful, it only takes 14 years for parties to turn over and produce a new set of parties, but this time it has taken over 100. That is a very clear difference between the real-world shape of Liberal-republican "permanent revolution" and a failure. This is not like Deng Xiaoping Thought where there is no existing example of a country passing through a transition correctly to compare against. We should be able to know whether the Democrats are ready to succeed within the space of _four presidential elections_. Not twenty-five elections, which is over six times too many. So why does anybody keep making excuses? Well, clearly, because culture and mentality are not easy to study and anticipate through such rigid numbers. How would you survey the United States on its progress at getting rid of racism or its progress at getting rid of transphobia, and how could you ever anticipate what would cause different localized countable cultures to pick up these new mentalities?

Wonderful question. Unfortunately, it exposes a very nasty contradiction inside Liberal-republicanism. If there are one or more ethnic minorities trying to spread consciousness about racism across the country to create a new historical period, and there are simultaneously groups of gay or transgender people trying to spread consciousness about that to create a new historical period, but the two don't entirely overlap, you don't necessarily know that either of them is actually going to end up on the center-Liberal party platform. And if and when it happens that either of them is excluded, which is a very real possibility, then the excluded group of people will come to believe that it is the one that must spread culture and mentality across the country to bring the new historical period while the Democrats are irrelevant to that task. But if transgender people have gotten excluded, for instance, then why should any of them care about the concept of voting? We have established that what really brings a new historical period under Gramscian models is spreading culture and mentality, not actually going and casting a ballot. So why should _anyone_ vote? Gramsci and Žižek told everyone that a new historical period of center-Liberal values and progress comes when people spread culture and mentality, and that those things are much more powerful than voting; if anything, they would be the things that cause votes, not the other way around. So in order for progress to win and a new historical period to be created, everyone needs to stop thinking about elections and do anything but vote.

If elections are the outward result of culture, then culture itself must also come from something. There are definitely some people who accept new ideas and some people who do not, so what is the difference? Here it would be useful to bring in the real-world observation that circles of Republicans and circles of Democrats are comparable in their receptiveness to new ideas — they tend to shut out ideas from groups of people they perceive as being separate and hostile versus their existing group of people. Social links between two people predispose people to accepting ideas. So, it follows that the way culture is actually spread is the creation of social links and the reconfiguration of physical collections of people into new shapes as they expand outward a few people at a time. Culture is spread through what may be called the fusion of countable cultures or the reconfiguration of communities. Voting ultimately comes from the incorporation of different cities, industries, fandoms, chat groups, broadcast audiences, or any other set of socially-linked graphs of people into each other.

Can you see what is viscerally, fundamentally wrong with this?

It is a fundamental value within Liberal-republicanism that no two countable cultures can be better than each other. Open up a college sociology book, and you will soon enough see a description of principles that it is impossible to study a countable culture, both in practical terms and in ethical terms, without establishing the understanding that the other countable culture will not be judged as lesser. A countable culture will not be observed and measured by people it does not want to see; a visitor will not return good information without arriving on even terms. This principle has been established by a peripheral wing of _that accursed group of people known as scientists_. In spite of everything they have "done", within a universe where no physical object can even be seen without something bouncing into it, scientists cannot succeed without practicing a code of ethics, while at the same time, they practice this code specifically to gain a better understanding of the world that surrounds them as it is without simply imposing their pre-existing Ideals onto it. An objective and descriptive study of societies must exist _partly because_ if countable cultures were not studied in such a way, they would be dominated by an external empire that does not respect their values. To point at a countable village or tribe of socially-linked people and say that it must adopt a particular Ideal is generally to say that as it is it is currently inferior. So, considering this general understanding of what cultures are, how can culture or mentality be held up as the engine of progress? Gramsci's vulgarized model of Liberal-republicanism would seem to say that Liberal-republicanism turns over a new era of progress when a superior culture wins and an inferior culture disappears. We know from everyday experience that culture and community are inextricably linked to the point of being more or less the same inseparable entity that can be called by either name. So where does any culture or community get the authority to declare itself the one true community and absorb other communities? We can't trace this problem back to Gramsci, because Gramsci chose Bolshevism and didn't actually focus his energy on whether center-Liberals or Tories were the better party to control capitalism. This interpretation of center-Liberals being forged out of a superior culture is an interpretation specific to Liberal-republicanism. But even if Liberal-republicans had never tried to quote Gramsci, the idea has still been part of Liberal-republicanism for a long time. How often have you heard people talking about "liberal governance" as something that only happened before Trump and by implication would always have functioned much better if Tories never existed, or about the Tory generation "slowly dying out"? Rhetoric that Tories somehow misinterpreted and ruined the original vision for Liberal-republicanism is everywhere — not to mention some that _center-Liberals or blue anarchists_ ruined the original vision and nobody needs them.

Liberal-republicanism cannot function without the assertion that one countable culture or community of people is inherently better than another. Otherwise, there is no such thing as campaigning or voting having a theoretical correct outcome that informed voters could choose rationally, and no real reason for anyone to vote.

What would happen if everybody in the country simply stopped voting and nobody ever put any marks in the section for president again? Surely the electoral college or somebody would have to vote on the new president. But the electoral college is based on votes for president, so it would have to be drawn up based on something unusual such as votes for Congress. But couldn't everybody just not vote for Congress either? If there were no votes for Congress and no votes for president, what would happen to Congress and the president then? Is there a point where the government would shut down and they would all just have to go home? This is almost what Liberal-republicans' strange understandings of Gramsci would seem to imply — if culture and mentality don't actually align with any particular political party or president, then maybe none of them would win. This would seem to fly in the face of conventional understandings of Liberal capitalism and everyday experience. _But if nobody votes, then doesn't a cluster of the biggest capitalists win?_ your typical Liberal-republican will reply, sounding bizarrely like a Communist.

We do, on some vague level, know what happens when everyone stops voting. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 when no one in government could put up a decent opposition supported by the people to the faction of people who wanted to dissolve the central government. But, many people today believe that was a _good_ thing. The popular belief across the United States is that there was never any noticeable faction within the Soviet government that anyone should have supported, not Stalin's allies, not the Khruschevites, and not Gorbachev either. (And Trotskyists were still not big enough to make any meaningful change at the time, failing Gramsci's apparent requirement of an inherently successful countable culture.) So, if the Soviet Union can't produce any good theorists that United States people like... then everyone should stop supporting them, the whole national population should dissolve, and civilization should crumble apart so that nobody has to help anybody, right? Nobody needs to help anybody obtain supplies or healthcare. Society is some kind of logical fallacy made up to dominate people.

If you think that's an insane conclusion, then congratulations, you are actually thinking. But what everyone in the United States has to understand is that simply holding people together into a society is a difficult task, not an easy one or one to be taken for granted. Human beings love freedom. But freedom is in contradiction with society. Around 1933, the Soviet Union faced a difficult choice: make use of grain in Ukraine to aid other projects, or leave Ukraine alone and suffer serious setbacks to other regions' development. The other regions' need is real. At worst, some people may still be starving. At best, if the other regions don't receive grain they will lean toward refusing to develop cities and keeping reactionary attitudes, and things will be looking fairly bad for Gramsci's culture law — with an outright faction full of peasants materially distinguished by agrarian villages, the scale tips a bit toward no gay rights in the Soviet Union, and a bit more against women having careers. So the planners' choice is critically important. But if they do choose to send grain from Ukraine to the other republics, Ukraine is going through a crisis and some people in Ukraine are going to die. Philosophers of ethics think that when you have to choose between the well-being of two sets of people in a trolley problem that the choice is simple and you should merely choose the larger number of people. But what if the trolley problem was real, and it was Ukraine? In the real world, people are quickly going to get angry at you for almost any action but doing nothing. And in every discussion about "Communist regimes", that's exactly what they did. Suddenly the old ethics thought experiments had gained a new dimension: does the person deciding to switch the trolley to the other track even have a right to stand there and make decisions at all? Or if one person is controlling other people who would otherwise have the ability to make their own decisions, _is ethics inherently unethical_?

The decision between whether to ship grain from Ukraine more or less boils down to a strict decision between freedom and democracy. Up to World War II, the people of the Soviet Union were relatively satisfied with their government, and largely, although not universally, believed it represented the people. Therefore, into 1933, whether Ukraine should do what the government tells it to was a question of whether Ukraine was under control of government by the people, and whether _democracy_ had control over Ukraine. Democracy cannot both _be_ in control of Ukraine, subjecting it to the will of the people in the other republics, and _not_ be in control of Ukraine, allowing all the people inside Ukraine to do what they want because they are not under the control of social links to other regions and government by the people.

Freedom is when Stalin _doesn't_ take the grain. Democracy is when Stalin _does_ take the grain.

You have probably heard this dilemma from Tories in a severely chewed-up form making some kind of baffling claim that somehow taxes are going to destroy society. And you probably didn't listen back then because you knew on some level that center-Liberal social-democrats could never knock over Tory businesses as badly as Stalin's government knocked over Ukraine. But unfortunately, the basic principles are still there. It isn't about how much the businesses might "suffer" — it's about their ability to exist freely, make decisions at a local level, and casually form only the social links they want. This whole process is inherently in contradiction with democracy, and that is the real reason Tories appear to hate democracy so much. They strictly prefer _freedom_.

Tories and center-Liberals each operate off _political agorism_, the social theory that society is fundamentally made of arbitrary social links that form from individual decisions, and totalities of social links are the basis of all other things about society, including culture, society's contained economy, and political parties or republican systems including the United States constitution or court system. Agorism is a deeply frustrating political philosophy because in many ways the model appears to be true: rings of capitalist industry cannot function without forming social links between production structures or cities, populations cannot form political parties without forming social links, and countable cultures and social links are inherently connected. Agorism is not even as Idealist as it seems at first because it does in fact say that culture is generated out of a material structure: networks of social links. It is a strangely diabolical philosophy in that it is constantly handed to complete beginners to politics as an appropriate first example for everyone to start from ("vote for the Democrats!") but in the end it is one of the most difficult kinds of sociophilosophies to properly analyze to the point it can only be correctly understood for what it really is by some of the world's most advanced Marxist theorists who avoid making several basic mistakes. The Democratic party is like giving a high school student a Fourier transform integral that takes pages to solve and saying "you interact with radio waves every day; it's totally easy!". So you have to go all the way down to the smallest scales to properly solve the problem.

Do Ideas cause communities? Does the Ideal of Inclusivity inherently cause totalities of marginalized groups to form together? Do the ideas inside the Democratic party cause votes? Does Media Representation cause people of different demographics to all read a book or watch a show specifically because the ideas are good before there is any actual input from real people? This is one of the most frustrating things about political agorism because there are multiple ways to formulate this culture model, and if you question any of them, people will switch tactics to try to keep defending it and you'll simply get the other ones. This is why in the previous paragraph I framed it as _social links cause culture_: because that is the better way to formulate the model that anybody in their right mind would quickly correct it to if you grill them on culture causing social links. But most of the time, "culture causing social links" or "ideas causing social links" is actually the form in which you will usually see it. _The Democratic Party gets votes because it has good ideas; the multicultural book club gets members because it has good ideas; the United States gets immigrants because it has good abstract Ideas that are fabricated in total separation from reality but happen to work anyway._ But none of that is true. The United States didn't steamroll North American tribes because it had the world's best ideas. The Republican Party doesn't keep periodically winning elections because it has the best ideas. A book club or podcast doesn't get any connections if genuinely all it has is ideas and its "good ideas" don't actually speak to anyone. In the current historical period everyone's mind is warped and distorted by the existence of ethics and the concept that you can call ideas "good" or "bad" whenever you want to as long as they're sufficiently Nice or Mean. In reality, there may be such a thing as successful or unsuccessful ideas, but humans don't get to subjectively decide what those are as individuals — no, not even in the role of the wise grandpa or grandma that walks into the ethics thought experiment from stage left to play the opinion of the entire rest of society, who is still an individual and who is still every bit as unreliable outside of the symbolic context of a dream or a stage play. Social links cause ideas. If anything, a socially-linked network of Democratic Party voters must already exist for anyone else to be added to the Democratic party based on its "ideas". That is the absolute minimum correction to make agorism a Materialist philosophy and allow all its supporters to keep defending it, as they almost certainly will.

So, if social links cause culture and are a fundamental building block in the model, once there is already a socially-linked group of people, can culture maybe _turn around_ and cause more social links?

No. Both people must act toward becoming linked to become linked, so one person can easily just not become linked when two people have different "mentalities", without the "correct mentality" ever changing the incorrect one. This means abstract Ideals can never dictate how people will behave, as much as the objective or material state of the second person. Not all of that state information will be apparent from the outside, but some of it will be revealed from the inside within an interaction, so in general, all the state information that is needed to model people does exist. Individuals link together "first" in a simultaneous collision of two separate befores and afters to form a single future, and then a localized countable culture object either exists or doesn't exist. Its existence is a finicky thing, a bit like a photon or electron superposition, but at any given moment it _will_ either happen or not happen, and individual people do not decide whether it will happen, because they fundamentally cannot decide in advance whether other people will like them or their ideas. Culture cannot manufacture social links out of the aether, no matter what.

Do social links cause the economy? No. This question might have been more complex back in agrarian societies where people were tightly bolted into large family units, but it isn't as complex now. The entire concept of higher education in the United States presupposes that they don't. People are constantly moving to other places for college or for a job, and some people are moving into the United States from Mexico or from educated areas of the Eastern Hemisphere for jobs, not to mention from all the regions the United States has interfered in and tried to make people think they shouldn't live in. There is a lot of evidence that people have been moving to the United States for the economy and care more about going wherever the economy moves to than staying with any particular group of social ties. Here, I think agorism is a bit unaware of its own consequences. Countable agorisms form as communities that try to extend over more people to gain power, and if they're convinced they're the best in the world, they will try to expand out further to swallow other regions' people. When agorisms hide their existence and try to act like they are not personally benefiting from making other countries feel bad about themselves, they change the playing field they claim to be modeling, not really taking into account that recruiting someone for good reasons that will last and recruiting someone based on empty ideology are not the same thing.

Do social links cause political parties? Yes, but also no. In theory, political parties must have some material effect in order to win, so in order to be a winning political party, they must contain an economic base. When capitalism exists, a clear economic structure exists, and political parties can make some kind of case that the people leading them are important within society and should continue to be important. The social links between several capitalists facilitate forming a political party, but they only make it effective because the capitalists first exist as capitalists. Social links are also important in the case of forming a successful Stalinist party, but again, especially in that case, economic structures such as peasant villages and factories exist that much more blatantly lead to social links. What about a Fourth International? Any number of stereotypes will go around that Marxist theorists stand around not doing much of anything but reading and congregating, so surely the social links in a Fourth International must precede an economy? This one is a little tricky, but when you realize that the economy in one historical period and the economy in another historical period are two different things that change into each other — look back at Žižek's quote about monsters — yes, a Fourth International is caused by an economy, just not its own economy. If people don't understand dialectics, time slice analysis saves the day.

So, basically every time agorism tries to tell you that social links cause other things, what it is really doing is failing to understand simultaneous dialectical interactions or historical transitions, where if you expand the whole situation out, you will see that it tends to consistently put everything on the wrong side of causing social links. Saying that culture makes social links is one of the only exceptions, and even there it still manages to be slightly wrong by not understanding that culture is not an Idea and that it's only managed to say something correct by saying a tautology.

Why is it so important to recognize that Liberal-republican parties are always agorisms? Because political agorism is the bridge between Liberal-republicanism and anarchism — it is the prototypical _blue_ anarchism that doesn't stray far from material things that already exist but confidently describes an overall layout of society that can supposedly exist without a state. The Republican and Democratic parties will not tell you this out loud, because they do not want to believe they are trying to abolish Liberal-republicanism. But what they are constructed for and what they intend are two drastically different things. This is one of the most critical things to understand about modeling Idealism: _Idealist factions never act with intention, and they always do inexplicable things with unintended consequences_. You have to actively separate the intentions and the outcomes and address both of them instead of simply discarding the Ideals layer, or people will not be able to recognize what you've made a model of.

What Gramsci and Žižek have proved for us through the mouths of a bunch of standard clueless Liberal-republicans is that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party _cannot_ currently be a single coherent society. Every single time Gramsci is invoked is another point of evidence that the Republican Party and Democratic Party are truly in material opposition and truly mutually exclusive. And here is why. _If societies really and truly come from social links_, or put another particularly Liberal-republican way, the coalescing voluntary choices of individuals, then the central government is not actually playing a major role in the construction of the society despite the bit of theater it puts on every four years where it claims to be mediating which president will rise out of the two or more countably separate societies inside it to rule the country. If society really comes from social links, then the people of Kansas form Kansas without needing the federal government and the people of South Carolina form South Carolina all on their own, and the people of South Carolina may not even need the people of Kansas to exist for their population of people to exist. The United States could be 50 separate countries if it weren't for the mysterious existence of political parties, which in today's world appear to be the only connecting thread that makes it mandatory for the 50 states to be connected. Because the Democrats and Republicans greedily wash over state borders back and forth to try to scoop up more states, hating each other the whole time, the deep division they draw between the two bodies of citizens sometimes leading to spontaneous shootings, there is a United States. And if everybody in the United States spontaneously realized just as various academics and blue-anarchists keep repeating that dominating other countable cultures of people was an unproductive outcome and greed was bad, the United States might dissolve and there might not be a United States. This is the United States' major problem: it is increasingly becoming awash in talk of _virtues_ and _moderation_ and _degrowth_ and _sustainability_ and _what is actually necessary_, but nobody considers the horrifying possibility that the United States, or "Our Democracy", is in fact not really necessary and may be the ultimate manifestation of immoderation, unsustainability, and greed. Not because it uses too much oil, not because it attempts to contain all the world's corporations while it puts all the world's workers in places like China, Vietnam, and India, but specifically because it is "a liberal democracy". Because that phrase is a highly deceptive lie told to everyone by the monster named "Our Democracy" to get them to preserve it, while in reality the United States is more of a continuous warring states period between two countable blue anarchisms where each keeps consuming more and more people and objects and inventions and academic papers and news shows purely to try to defeat the other. An actual endless battle between regional princes to become king. A literal, actual, material _interregnum_.

Let's say Stalin's government having control over Ukraine really was a senseless act of tyranny and an inherently violent and Evil assertion of Communist power. Well, if that's true, it must be completely impermissible to casually watch an election map and assert that it is the outcome of Justice for the Democrats to slurp up more states. You haven't gone and talked to the people in those states. A lot of center-Liberals probably have no idea what they want. They begin with the assertion that being a Democrat is just "better" and everyone in Nevada ought to want to be part of the superior group of people that begins with a superior culture. But the republican systems of the United States don't actually make it a requirement that any political party genuinely represents and carries out the culture it is supposed to represent, while simultaneously they deny power to any party that does not get votes. So what happens in practice is the assumption of Democrats having a superior culture that will create a new era falls flat on its face as the Democrats learn that the other countable cultures of the country have no interest in being dominated and designated as inferior cultures, and then they scramble into the deepest depths of what Marxists would call opportunism, abandoning everything they stood for so that they can be accepted as members of other regional cultures and their original required assertion that other cultures are inferior can be forgiven. Liberal-republicanism is designed so the country can continuously divide into two countable cultures that dominate and degrade each other, but which both have the ability to break free of domination before they notice the injustices of the system and get angry. In some ways, it is one of the most uniquely cruel systems ever invented in that after kicking populations around and hurling them down a staircase it always erases the marks of its abuse and claims that it did nothing. If you were mad at Stalin's government, you could simply run away, but Liberal-republicanism constantly programs people that there is nothing to escape from and thus there is no actual escape. Is it any wonder that Liberal-republicanism generates "narcissists" and other abnormal psychologies?

Culture can be Ideals, but more than anything else, culture is communities, and the declaration that any community of people has the inherent right to slurp up other communities and order them around (and pass laws on them, and send cops after them, and put them in prison) _purely because_ it is made out of inherently superior cultural ideas cannot be anything but an act of bigotry.

Liberal-republicanism, by its own internal logic, is unjust. It is bigoted, greedy, unempathetic, tyrannical, wasteful, gaslighting, megalomaniacal in how it aggrandizes its internal parties, and wholly unacceptable.

And the worst thing is this: anarchism will never be able to take over and fix it. If that was ever going to happen, it could have happened in the Soviet Union after 1953, or when the Communists failed to control Europe, or when workers weren't actually winning in China and the Communist Party shouldn't have won. If anarchism is really the most robust form of society, then logically, it would be more robust and less prone to falling apart than Stalin's Marxism. If all it takes for anarchism to win is a republic failing, then anarchism should have had a vast buffet of failing countries to choose from in which to finally succeed. In 1850, and into 1900, many modern sociophilosophies were still new and their effectiveness was unknown. But now, 176 years after Bellegarrigue codified a set of ideas that might be much older, still nobody has ever outlined a plausible method for anarchism to replace nation-states which is anywhere close to as believable as Lenin's schema for a nation-wide Communist movement. If having good ideas was truly the primary metric for predicting which political factions will succeed at creating a new historical period, then the scales are still tipped much further toward Lenin than they are toward anarchism.

Gramsci is the new Hegel. Gramsci, Jung, Deleuze & Guattari, and Crenshaw have all converged to create the new Idealism that justifies global capitalism and resists the re-emergence of Marxism without the need for any older forms of Idealism. The new Marxism needs to be able to counter this new Idealism in every crevice and at every scale that it shows up, from statements about interpersonal relationships and "culture" to statements about geopolitics and history. Capitalism has permeated every single kind of social interaction in ways that at least were never relevant or important before, but now are actively degrading the entire phenomenon of sociality and institutions or organizations. Framing "Marxists participating in society" as an oxymoron used to be a joke, but in this age, where workers can't trust unions, can't trust nation-states, can't trust progressive academics, can't trust newspapers and video channels, can't trust "communities" of any kind, can't trust anarchists, and sometimes can't trust attempted Fourth Internationals, to some extent, knowing when to walk away from society and stop giving any of society's incorrect forms of organization undue attention is almost the only way _to_ make any progress. Capitalist society naturally creates insane, vaguely psychotic perceptions of society and the world, but it also creates them _inevitably_ and _in everybody_, no matter how much you _believe_ Gramsci or Althusser or Fisher will actually help you break out. The only way to truly break out of capitalist consciousness, short of actually living in isolation and literally looking at everything from the outside in, is to _use meta-philosophical analysis to become able to view capitalism and every political movement from the outside_. I call that "Materialism". There may be a hang-up where some people don't want to call it that. I don't care. Whatever you want to call it, you have to come to the recognition that your "soul" is fundamentally detached from everything else at all moments of your life and make use of the looking-outside-and-visualizing-possible-interactions-and-futures thing. Do you call that "narrative storytelling"? Great. Now do it scientifically.

In my time being sliced away from society I took to reading books. I'd always been told to do this. _Reading books is inherently educational. Reading books gets rid of prejudices. Stories will create communities. Everyone should read more books._ So I did what I had been told and read a bunch of miscellaneous books available in the United States to see if somehow they would unlock the mysterious secrets of Liberal-republicanism or if by reading enough fictional narratives I would finally come to understand what all the anti-science, pro-lived-experience stuff really meant and what it was really saying, and what I had been missing. And, well... as I say, every day all of it seemed to get more complex and make less and less sense the more closely and carefully I analyzed it. I came to understand it better _and_ I came to understand it worse at the same time. Sometimes I listened to videos with annoying-sounding titles to see if that magical promise of "listening to people you disagree with" bringing people to a better understanding would ever come true. At the end of 6 years of that I feel like I've tested the basic ideas of Liberal-republicanism more thoroughly than almost anyone. And I genuinely think the majority of them are not true. A whole lot of everything people write inside Liberal-republicanism (or even anarchism) is just people flailing around trying to justify to you why people who understand nothing about Materialism are more important to listen to than Materialists, and why people with better understandings of material reality "don't really" have better understandings of reality. You really lose all your confidence in humanity and human beings being an intelligent species if you expose yourself to too much of it. It will sound crazy, but only after having so much exposure to the actual state of it I genuinely suspect that almost all of what people write or record within Liberal-republicanism is one giant waste of everybody's time. It's almost like talking to a Flatlander to try to explain it. But I feel like if the Liberal-republican period were actually to come to an end and be replaced, everyone would look back on everything they had written or recorded and say, oh, wow, I was focusing my energy on _that_? Why? Why was _that_ what was important to me? And this would apply to so many things in all facets of life that a lot of people would not even be thinking about until society had actually changed. Like... hmm. Here's the best I can do to think of an example of something "unimportant". I watched a video once where someone was casually saying in passing that a fantasy kingdom should become a Liberal republic (the context was the TV cartoon _My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic_). And I feel like if people were in a new society and had the chance to understand all of history _just a bit better_, they might look back on statements like that they had made and be horrified at the thought of what kinds of historical periods would result from that compared with what a good outcome is. Another example is a lot of videos that have been going around about LLMs. Some of those videos make technically valid points, but you also see a lot of videos focused on "pointless" subjects such as whether it is ethical to put an artificial consciousness in a war machine and make it experience war (what about the thousands of the human combatants?), or how to put guardrails on an LLM and how you have to design them around the concept any self-contained system is "inherently self-regulating" (this just sounds like bad models of society applied to computers), or the notion that language is inherently special in that meaning must be inherently subjective and words can never inherently mean anything (this one existed before language models, but I have a terrible suspicion this _wrong_ way of thinking led to LLMs taking over everything). Idealism seems to encourage these acts of pointless deliberation on completely irrelevant ideas as if they were much more important than they were simply because the act of thinking ideas is turned into a kind of magic ritual of assigning unreal things power, and given ultimate importance. You can also see from this how it is that people seem to get disproportionately angry at bad ideas of any kind and try to say that because each act of putting them where someone can see them is a social behavior and active speech act you need to get them out of Community immediately and it should never be okay to say them at all. This concept can only be true when ideas themselves are taken to have inherent power. If everyone understood that ideas themselves had no power to cause anything without the proper material prerequisites for that specific outcome, everyone would probably calm down about that and allow a lot more things to be said.

After "trying out" Liberal-republicanism and blue anarchism for an extended time and coming to see them for what they really are, one of my top impressions now is... what's wrong with objecting to Idealism? Why _can't_ I see a blatantly Idealist concept like a set of opposing things becoming a unified Creation and object on principle? I've tried out objecting to things emotionally, and avoiding the "bigotry" of logic. And I can see what the appeal is: for most people, emotions are the only window out of Idealism and into the material world (the body) where things actually become objectively necessary instead of every Idea having to be equally important to the point that kills people. But there is just one problem. Individual needs don't stop for each other. They contradict each other. It's all too easy for two people to both say they were hurt or even that they will each starve if they don't have each other's food, and just like with ideas, it becomes that there is no correct answer to which person is truly more important and which person actually gains ethical priority. Ethics is a losing battle. The entire proposition of trying to say individual people's pain can dictate what is the best outcome and the thing that causes no pain is True and the thing that causes pain is False is fundamentally incorrect. This is one of the core, central errors that leads to unjust systems like Liberal-republicanism. The concept of a "pain olympics" isn't new, it's been baked into all Liberal-republican theory from the start beginning at the false concept that individual actions have inherent power to be ethical or unethical. No, individual actions lead up to larger social formations in the form of estates and republics of specific types, but these seas of actions can only be judged as entire systems, and also, to call them Right or Wrong or Good or Bad may be unacceptably prejudiced. I'll say it again: if Liberal-republicans think it's okay to prescriptively mark Bolshevism "false" on grounds of ethical rules, and get rid of all Communist regimes, that feeds directly into Stalin's government brutally assassinating Trotsky. You can't have a little bit of bigotry and expect it to not have consequences. Equality of communities means equality of communities, which means equality of Liberal-republican and Communist communities. Voting means inequality of communities.

I think if I have a craft other than attempting to improve Marxism, I am a failed science fiction writer. After having everything taken away from me — don't study living things with science, don't work in science, don't talk about climate change if your brain is naturally bad at emotions and intuition, don't write stories if they don't relegate science to set dressing and have an inherent humanities bent, don't replace religion with science — I think the only good response is to turn aggressively against any and all uses of science like they wanted me to as well as many uses of technology, but then to explain that none of it's on principle and instead I want all that energy to go into an intense period of research in order to understand the processes of society utterly and completely. I think the First World has genuinely hit a point where every conceivable good and service exists now and First World countries could actually drop all science and a lot of technology research while research into Marxism is genuinely one of the only "products" they really, urgently need. "Degrowth", "degrowth", "problems on earth", "problems on earth". Fine. You kept saying it, and I heard you! How about we just really actually have no more science until we solve all our "problems on earth"? All of those problems are problems that involve understanding pieces of human societies as inanimate objects. None of them involve just having good sentiments. You know who stopped looking up to the heavens or into cyberspace to solve all our Problems On Earth? Kim Il-sung!

That's the general answer. If First World countries want "degrowth", solar power, "sustainable" or sensible levels of innovation and production, and a unified society without political factions shooting each other and senseless political division, then they must seek a way for the population to control society itself and all its material structure that would be visible from an aerial view so the people can finally solve all the _internal structural problems_ inside the ways large collections of people interact that lead to frontier wars, climate effects, neoliberalism (! it's not an uncaused cause), and lawyers who could never conceive of another kind of republic literally migrating out of the United States to Italy because they're not stupid enough not to realize that Liberal-republicanism is unsalvageable. That takes dedication. That takes an actual recognition that every single thing you do at work to earn money which is not contributing to Degrowth Sustainability Problems On Earth is part of the problem, and as long as somebody _directed you_ to do what you're doing horizontally through a social or economic agora instead of through a democratic process with real power to stop an entire half of society from doing what it's doing you might still be part of the problem. Don't be an anarchist. I'll repeat it again: _don't be_ an anarchist. You can solve Degrowth Sustainability NonGreed Problems On Earth when you stop trying to build an international civilization in opposition to Marxism — you too, Alan Woods — and contribute to the creation of an international Marxist state equipped with the ability to analyze every sociophilosophy through meta-Marxism.

I've been thinking, in my spare time, about the concept of redirecting science fiction specifically into the Materialist analysis of _how particular concrete forms of society transform into other concrete forms of society_, so that science fiction begins using the proto-science of Marxism or meta-Marxism as its "science" of focus and every science fiction scenario written with it becomes about analyzing something actually material and concrete about society and solving a relatively grounded set of Problems on Earth. <ref name="iba"/>

Science is dead; long live science.

[unfinished]

== Footnotes ==
<references>

<ref name="DFR">{{book|Democracy for Realists}}. [retrieve later]</ref>

<ref name="iba">Among other things, I think there are some meta-Marxist concepts that could lead to a great narrative card game. Games like {{game|Magic: the Gathering}} and its "forgotten brother" {{game|Arcmage}} always assume that the civilization or army you set up will be something similar to feudalism, but wouldn't it be more interesting if a game could tell the story of multiple historical periods or systems competing to exist? I think it would. I knew this was far too off-topic to put in the text. But, in case I write any pages on it worth finding later, I call my card simulation concept the "Aurora system".</ref>

<ref name="wm">I gave a rather simplified version of wavemachine logic in the "swatch analysis" section. What it was really designed for is modeling the interactions of material ideas to produce other material ideas, such that you can lay out an interaction between two Ideals that are claimed to model a real situation and then do a materialist inversion on the immaterial ideas to turn them into material ideas. The full version of wavemachine logic is vaguely inspired by how quantum superpositions are used to model fundamental-particle interactions (hence the name "wave machine"), and includes the ability to take two fuzzily defined concepts and lay all their known characteristics out on a grid in order to get clues about what the outcome could be, much like a Punnet square will put two forms of a gene on either side of a grid to generate genotypes that are then calculated into visual traits through observed rules of organism biology. In this way, wavemachine logic can be used either in a more traditional way to combine two second-order propositions to generate syllogisms without necessarily needing the "wave machine" grid, or in its own way of combining two first-order objects that appear inside propositions on a grid to guess what might happen when they interact. I am still working out how to formalize the rules of propositions combining onto each other two or more at a time such that propositions inside one philosophy can uncover obvious points of incoherence inside another philosophy, but there will presumably be specific rules to help with that too.</wm>

</references>

== Links ==
* [[Special:PermanentLink/44389|survey questions]] [not actually used... yet]



[[Category:MDem v5.4 entries]]

User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe

2026-08-01T05:17:18Z

Reversedragon: card effect

{{ArticleTitle|Ice Axe (card) - S1 / fantasy / Blizzard bloc / user page Item|NoContents=y}}<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{HueEntity|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|sum=1|quilt=1|ply=1 
|swatch={{{class|field_fantasy}}}|class=manual flag|lang={{{lang|en}}}|PPPA2={{{1|}}}|sense={{{2|}}}|field={{{field|}}}|area-free={{{area-free|}}}
|trad={{{trad|Fy}}}|tradTTS={{{tradTTS|Fantasy}}}
| PPPA = {{label|{{{lang|}}}
| en = Ice Axe
| ja = アイスアックス }}
| area = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{area|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
| ins = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{area|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
|numbersign=404|enddfn=1}}</onlyinclude></includeonly>{{HueNumberPreview|U=RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe|class=field_auldernet}}

== Aurora System card mechanics ==

<blockquote class="wikitable poem proposition">Equip this to any Tundra-bloc or {{TTS|tts=Element Four|Element IV}} Character, unless Conditions say otherwise. 
This Equipment can be Dispatched to either Destroy a card or evolve it to a Cosmic Rift status affliction. {{i|(A status affliction is possible if there are instructions on the card.)}}</blockquote>

<dl class="wikitable hue">
{{HueClaim |P=item type| {{Template:S1}} }}
{{HueRoster|EP=PPPA/L|lang=en| {{User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
{{HueRoster|P=card title| Ice Axe ({{TTS|tts=Auldernet|🗺}}) }}
{{HueRoster|P=card type| Equipment Condition | Condition }}
{{HueRoster|P=Bloc| Blizzard bloc (Auldernet) | Analog bloc similar }} 
{{HueRoster|P=play cost| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| Cosmic Rift (status affliction) }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| send card to Devastation Zone (Dispatch ability) }}
{{HueRoster|P=deck| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet) }} 
{{HueRoster|EP=P34| Aurora card game system | Auldernet (Aurora System scenario) }} 
</dl>

<blockquote class="wikitable poem proposition">{{i|This legendary blade can split anything, from wood to metal to reality itself to the ties that bind people. But beware its curse — you will never control both edges.}}</blockquote>


{{Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}}

== Background ==

== Usage notes ==

=== Card mechanics ===

The Cosmic Rift status affliction is defined relative to the Auldernet scenario itself and is explained further in Passive Condition cards (rule cards). Cards that can be affected by it will have a special indicator somewhere on them, and if you cannot find one you should just assume the effect of the ability is to Destroy (discard) the card.

=== Card ability names ===



[[Category:Hue-format research entries]]

MediaWiki:Common.css

2026-08-01T05:04:20Z

Reversedragon: fix .tts again

/* CSS placed here will be applied to all skins */

/* for Items, etc */

.tts .help, .tts .bracket, .tts .aural, dl.hue .tts .help, dl.hue .tts .bracket, .toctext span span s { display: none; }
.tok-jelo { font-size: 115%; }

strong.caps, b.caps, em.caps, del.caps, s.caps, span.caps { text-transform: uppercase; font-weight: inherit; }
em.i, b.i, strong.i { font-style: italic; }
cite.article, cite.tale { font-style: normal; }
cite.article:before, cite.tale:before { content: open-quote; } cite.article:after, cite.tale:after { content: close-quote; }
/* emphasis used inside bop entries */
.bop i { font-style: italic; }
.bop i i, i[lang=ja] { font-style: normal; }
h1.bop.subtitle, .bop h1 .subtitle, .bop h2 .subtitle { display: block; font-size: 85%; }
ins.correction { margin-left: 1.5em; }

/* bop-related CSS */
.toc-only, .hue h4.toc-only { border: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; display: none; }
.toc-only + p { margin-top: 0.95em; }
div.bop { padding-top: 0.9em; padding-bottom: 0.9em; }
div.bop.bottom { padding-bottom: 0.2em; }
div.bop div, div.bop.top, div.bop.academic { border: none; }
div.bop.academic { padding-top: 0.2em; padding-bottom: 0; } /* .academic - an article section with a heading, which is at least partly edited */
div.bop > div, .bop-text { white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; } /* pre-formatted text area */
/* reference list templates */
.mw-cite-targeted-backlink .cite-accessibility-label, .reference .spacer { display: inline-block; width: 0; height: 0; overflow: hidden; }

/* removals */
del.dots, .censor, .thingamabob { text-decoration: none; } /* del.dots allows marking semantic omissions in del tags */
/* redaction tape, silly alternate names */
.censor, .thingamabob { white-space: pre-wrap !important; background-color: #D0D0D0; color: transparent; } /* .censor: for swear words in gray-areas, or SCP entries */
.thingamabob, .thingamabob a, span.plainlinks.thingamabob a, .censor a { color: inherit; }
.thingamabob { padding: 0 0.1em 0 0.1em; } /* .thingamabob: for marking up things that are being called by names that are Lewis Carroll level of arbitrary. highly optional. */

/* Hue-specific CSS - for main files, see [[Template:HueCSS]], [[Template:HueDrop]]. these are the rules that are needed even if those don't load */
.hue:not(.data_wavebuild) dfn .wave-score, dl.hue .data-structure, .hue dd dfn .field,
dl.hue dt dfn:before, dl.hue dt dfn .figure, dl.hue dfn.manual:before, dl.hue .string dfn:before,
dl.hue.data_wavebuild dfn .figure .flag
{ content: none; display: none; } /* hide extraneous information on pages without Template:HueCSS */
.mw-body-content p dfn.hue-term ins, .mw-body-content p dfn.hue-term .wave-score { display: none; } /* Items in body text */

/* dialogue - silliness, but do not remove */
.comic-sans { font-family: "Comic Sans Bold", "Comic Sans MS", sans; } .papyrus { font-family: "Papyrus Bold", Papyrus, serif; }
/* these fonts look better in bold, but it also looks worse to put text in bold if you don't have them. so you'll see exactly as much Papyrus as you want to. */
.testimony { color: #15ae15; } .testimony:before, .testimony:after { content: none; }
.verbose .testimony, .testimony.verbose { color: #188a18; }
/* talk page stuff */
s.inverse { text-decoration: none; } /* reverse dinosaur emoji, etc. */
.inverted, .inverse { display: inline-block; transform: rotate(180deg); }

/* to let you see alias tables on Item pages by toggling the right stylesheet */
.aliases-longhand, .aliases-help, dl .row div.aliases-longhand { display: none; }
.aliases-head { text-transform: capitalize; }
.aliases-page div.aliases-longhand { display: block; }
.aliases-page .aliases-help, .aliases-page span.aliases-longhand { display: inline; }
.aliases-page .aliases-head { text-transform: inherit; }
/* hide duplication hint */
.duplication-hint { display: none; }

@media screen {

.skin-vector-legacy #p-logo a { width: 150px; height: 190px; } /* correct position of logo */

/* for Items, etc */
.tts, .tts .visual, .tts .aural, .tts .bracket, dl.hue .tts .aural, .toctext span span i { display: inline-block; }
.tts .help { display: none; } /* hide "help" text except when totally unstyled */
.tts-only, .tts .aural, .tts .bracket,
.toctext span span s, .toctext span span i /* TOC sections are really harsh on HTML, and require different tags */
{ height: 0px; width: 0px; overflow: hidden !important; min-width: 0 !important; max-width: 0 !important; } /* hidden from visual rendering, shown to TTS. this got very buggy in combination with hue.css so it had to be elaborated */
.hue dfn .tts span.visual, .hue dfn .tts i.aural, .hue dfn .tts a { position: static; }
abbr[title] { text-decoration: initial; border-bottom: initial; cursor: help; }
p > .tts[title] { text-decoration: none; }
p > ins .tts[title] { text-decoration: inherit; }

blockquote.poem, blockquote.proposition {
border: 2px solid #d6d2c5; /* originally - #d6d2c5,#f9f4e6 */
background-color: var(--background-color-neutral-subtle,#f8f9fa); color: var(--color-base,#202122); /* from wikitable */
padding: 1em; margin: 0 1em 0 1em;
}
/* proposition box */
blockquote.proposition span { opacity: 0.6; font-style: italic; font-size: 93%; }
blockquote.proposition strong, blockquote.proposition strong .tts { opacity: 1; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 104%; }
h2 + blockquote.proposition { margin-top: 0.3em; } h3 + blockquote.proposition { margin-top: 0.22em; }
blockquote.proposition .tts span { opacity: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: inherit; }

/* removals */
/* redaction tape, silly alternate names */
.censor, .thingamabob.censor { background-color: rgba(0,0,0,0.75); } /* .thingamabob: for marking up things that are being called by names that are Lewis Carroll level of arbitrary. highly optional. */
.thingamabob.censor, .thingamabob.censor a { color: white; }

/* dialogue - silliness, but do not remove */
.wingdings { font-family: Wingdings; }

}

/* [[Category:Fake Item lists]] [[Category:Hue-format fake Items]] */

MediaWiki:Common.css

2026-08-01T05:02:59Z

Reversedragon: fix span inside .tts

/* CSS placed here will be applied to all skins */

/* for Items, etc */

.tts .help, .tts .bracket, .tts .aural, dl.hue .tts .help, dl.hue .tts .bracket, .toctext span span s { display: none; }
.tok-jelo { font-size: 115%; }

strong.caps, b.caps, em.caps, del.caps, s.caps, span.caps { text-transform: uppercase; font-weight: inherit; }
em.i, b.i, strong.i { font-style: italic; }
cite.article, cite.tale { font-style: normal; }
cite.article:before, cite.tale:before { content: open-quote; } cite.article:after, cite.tale:after { content: close-quote; }
/* emphasis used inside bop entries */
.bop i { font-style: italic; }
.bop i i, i[lang=ja] { font-style: normal; }
h1.bop.subtitle, .bop h1 .subtitle, .bop h2 .subtitle { display: block; font-size: 85%; }
ins.correction { margin-left: 1.5em; }

/* bop-related CSS */
.toc-only, .hue h4.toc-only { border: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; display: none; }
.toc-only + p { margin-top: 0.95em; }
div.bop { padding-top: 0.9em; padding-bottom: 0.9em; }
div.bop.bottom { padding-bottom: 0.2em; }
div.bop div, div.bop.top, div.bop.academic { border: none; }
div.bop.academic { padding-top: 0.2em; padding-bottom: 0; } /* .academic - an article section with a heading, which is at least partly edited */
div.bop > div, .bop-text { white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit; } /* pre-formatted text area */
/* reference list templates */
.mw-cite-targeted-backlink .cite-accessibility-label, .reference .spacer { display: inline-block; width: 0; height: 0; overflow: hidden; }

/* removals */
del.dots, .censor, .thingamabob { text-decoration: none; } /* del.dots allows marking semantic omissions in del tags */
/* redaction tape, silly alternate names */
.censor, .thingamabob { white-space: pre-wrap !important; background-color: #D0D0D0; color: transparent; } /* .censor: for swear words in gray-areas, or SCP entries */
.thingamabob, .thingamabob a, span.plainlinks.thingamabob a, .censor a { color: inherit; }
.thingamabob { padding: 0 0.1em 0 0.1em; } /* .thingamabob: for marking up things that are being called by names that are Lewis Carroll level of arbitrary. highly optional. */

/* Hue-specific CSS - for main files, see [[Template:HueCSS]], [[Template:HueDrop]]. these are the rules that are needed even if those don't load */
.hue:not(.data_wavebuild) dfn .wave-score, dl.hue .data-structure, .hue dd dfn .field,
dl.hue dt dfn:before, dl.hue dt dfn .figure, dl.hue dfn.manual:before, dl.hue .string dfn:before,
dl.hue.data_wavebuild dfn .figure .flag
{ content: none; display: none; } /* hide extraneous information on pages without Template:HueCSS */
.mw-body-content p dfn.hue-term ins, .mw-body-content p dfn.hue-term .wave-score { display: none; } /* Items in body text */

/* dialogue - silliness, but do not remove */
.comic-sans { font-family: "Comic Sans Bold", "Comic Sans MS", sans; } .papyrus { font-family: "Papyrus Bold", Papyrus, serif; }
/* these fonts look better in bold, but it also looks worse to put text in bold if you don't have them. so you'll see exactly as much Papyrus as you want to. */
.testimony { color: #15ae15; } .testimony:before, .testimony:after { content: none; }
.verbose .testimony, .testimony.verbose { color: #188a18; }
/* talk page stuff */
s.inverse { text-decoration: none; } /* reverse dinosaur emoji, etc. */
.inverted, .inverse { display: inline-block; transform: rotate(180deg); }

/* to let you see alias tables on Item pages by toggling the right stylesheet */
.aliases-longhand, .aliases-help, dl .row div.aliases-longhand { display: none; }
.aliases-head { text-transform: capitalize; }
.aliases-page div.aliases-longhand { display: block; }
.aliases-page .aliases-help, .aliases-page span.aliases-longhand { display: inline; }
.aliases-page .aliases-head { text-transform: inherit; }
/* hide duplication hint */
.duplication-hint { display: none; }

@media screen {

.skin-vector-legacy #p-logo a { width: 150px; height: 190px; } /* correct position of logo */

/* for Items, etc */
.tts, .tts .visual, .tts .aural, .tts .bracket, dl.hue .tts .aural, .toctext span span i { display: inline-block; }
.tts .help { display: none; } /* hide "help" text except when totally unstyled */
.tts-only, .tts .aural, .tts .bracket,
.toctext span span s, .toctext span span i /* TOC sections are really harsh on HTML, and require different tags */
{ height: 0px; width: 0px; overflow: hidden !important; min-width: 0 !important; max-width: 0 !important; } /* hidden from visual rendering, shown to TTS. this got very buggy in combination with hue.css so it had to be elaborated */
.hue dfn .tts span.visual, .hue dfn .tts i.aural, .hue dfn .tts a { position: static; }
abbr[title] { text-decoration: initial; border-bottom: initial; cursor: help; }
p > .tts[title] { text-decoration: none; }
p > ins .tts[title] { text-decoration: inherit; }

blockquote.poem, blockquote.proposition {
border: 2px solid #d6d2c5; /* originally - #d6d2c5,#f9f4e6 */
background-color: var(--background-color-neutral-subtle,#f8f9fa); color: var(--color-base,#202122); /* from wikitable */
padding: 1em; margin: 0 1em 0 1em;
}
/* proposition box */
blockquote.proposition span { opacity: 0.6; font-style: italic; font-size: 93%; }
blockquote.proposition strong { opacity: 1; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 104%; }
h2 + blockquote.proposition { margin-top: 0.3em; } h3 + blockquote.proposition { margin-top: 0.22em; }
blockquote.proposition .tts span { opacity: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: inherit; }

/* removals */
/* redaction tape, silly alternate names */
.censor, .thingamabob.censor { background-color: rgba(0,0,0,0.75); } /* .thingamabob: for marking up things that are being called by names that are Lewis Carroll level of arbitrary. highly optional. */
.thingamabob.censor, .thingamabob.censor a { color: white; }

/* dialogue - silliness, but do not remove */
.wingdings { font-family: Wingdings; }

}

/* [[Category:Fake Item lists]] [[Category:Hue-format fake Items]] */

User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe

2026-08-01T04:45:34Z

Reversedragon: Card effect

{{ArticleTitle|Ice Axe (card) - S1 / fantasy / Blizzard bloc / user page Item|NoContents=y}}<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{HueEntity|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|sum=1|quilt=1|ply=1 
|swatch={{{class|field_fantasy}}}|class=manual flag|lang={{{lang|en}}}|PPPA2={{{1|}}}|sense={{{2|}}}|field={{{field|}}}|area-free={{{area-free|}}}
|trad={{{trad|Fy}}}|tradTTS={{{tradTTS|Fantasy}}}
| PPPA = {{label|{{{lang|}}}
| en = Ice Axe
| ja = アイスアックス }}
| area = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{area|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
| ins = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{area|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
|numbersign=404|enddfn=1}}</onlyinclude></includeonly>{{HueNumberPreview|U=RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe|class=field_auldernet}}

== Aurora System card mechanics ==

<blockquote class="wikitable poem proposition">Equip this to any Tundra-bloc or Fire-bloc-similar Character. 
This Equipment can be Dispatched to either Destroy a card or evolve it to a Cosmic Rift status affliction if possible. (A status affliction is possible if there are instructions on the card.)</blockquote>

<dl class="wikitable hue">
{{HueClaim |P=item type| {{Template:S1}} }}
{{HueRoster|EP=PPPA/L|lang=en| {{User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
{{HueRoster|P=card title| Ice Axe }}
{{HueRoster|P=card type| Equipment Condition | Condition }}
{{HueRoster|P=Bloc| Blizzard bloc (Auldernet) | Analog bloc similar }} 
{{HueRoster|P=play cost| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| Cosmic Rift (status affliction) }}
{{HueRoster|P=flavor text| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=deck| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet) }} 
{{HueRoster|EP=P34| Aurora card game system | Auldernet (Aurora System scenario) }} 
</dl>

<blockquote class="wikitable poem proposition">{{i|A cursed artifact. Legend has it it can split anything, from wood to metal to reality itself to the ties between people.}}</blockquote>


{{Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}}

== Background ==

== Usage notes ==

=== Card mechanics ===

=== Card ability names ===



[[Category:Hue-format research entries]]

User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe

2026-08-01T04:28:38Z

Reversedragon: fiction swatch / move combinations to Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe

{{ArticleTitle|Ice Axe (card) - S1 / fantasy / Blizzard bloc / user page Item|NoContents=y}}<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{HueEntity|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|sum=1|quilt=1|ply=1 
|swatch={{{class|field_fantasy}}}|class=manual flag|lang={{{lang|en}}}|PPPA2={{{1|}}}|sense={{{2|}}}|field={{{field|}}}|area-free={{{area-free|}}}
|trad={{{trad|Fy}}}|tradTTS={{{tradTTS|Fantasy}}}
| PPPA = {{label|{{{lang|}}}
| en = Ice Axe
| ja = アイスアックス }}
| area = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{area|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
| ins = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{area|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
|numbersign=404|enddfn=1}}</onlyinclude></includeonly>{{HueNumberPreview|U=RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe|class=field_auldernet}}

== Core characteristics ==

<dl class="wikitable hue">
{{HueClaim |P=item type| {{Template:S1}} }}
{{HueRoster|EP=PPPA/L|lang=en| {{User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }} 
{{HueRoster|EP=PPPA|lang=en| -- }}
{{HueRoster|EP=P34| Aurora card game system }} 
{{HueRoster|EP=P4| equipment card (Aurora) }} 
{{HueRoster|P=originating region| {{E:Q618/Fy|The Abyss (Auldernet)}} }} 
</dl>

=== Aurora card mechanics ===
<dl class="wikitable hue">
{{HueRoster|P=card title| Ice Axe }}
{{HueRoster|P=card type| Equipment Condition | Condition }}
{{HueRoster|P=Bloc| Blizzard bloc (Auldernet) | Analog bloc similar }} 
{{HueRoster|P=play cost| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=productivity| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=class| -- }} 
{{HueRoster|P=field| -- }} 
{{HueRoster|P=form| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| Cosmic Rift (status affliction) }}
{{HueRoster|P=flavor text| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=deck| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet) }} 
</dl>


{{Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}}

== Background ==

== Usage notes ==

=== Card mechanics ===

=== Card ability names ===



[[Category:Hue-format research entries]]

Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe

2026-08-01T04:26:54Z

Reversedragon: title

<noinclude>{{ArticleTitle|[way] Ice Axe (card) / user page Item|h1=Way:Q618 / Ice Axe}}
{{HueCSS}}</noinclude><h2 id="PPPA">Wavebuilder combinations {{editsection|Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}}</h2>

<dl class="wikitable hue data_wavebuild three">
{{WaveBuild| {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} | -- | -- }} 
<includeonly>{{WaveBuildNone| {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} | -- | (... [[Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe|all combinations]]) }} </includeonly>
</dl>

=== {{label|{{{lang|}}}|en = Wavebuilder characterizations}} ===

<dl class="wikitable hue data_wavebuild three">
{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | cursed artifact | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }} 
<noinclude>{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | Thorn Ring (Deltarune) | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | Mane Ax (Deltarune) | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | alchemy (Auldernet) | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
</noinclude></dl><noinclude>



[[Category:Text pages containing manual stylesheets]]
</noinclude>

Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe

2026-08-01T04:25:50Z

Reversedragon: omit some combinations

<noinclude>{{ArticleTitle|[way] meta-Marxism / Q92|h1=Way:Q92 / meta-Marxism}}
{{HueCSS}}</noinclude><h2 id="PPPA">Wavebuilder combinations {{editsection|Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}}</h2>

<dl class="wikitable hue data_wavebuild three">
{{WaveBuild| {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} | -- | -- }} 
<includeonly>{{WaveBuildNone| {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} | -- | (... [[Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe|all combinations]]) }} </includeonly>
</dl>

=== {{label|{{{lang|}}}|en = Wavebuilder characterizations}} ===

<dl class="wikitable hue data_wavebuild three">
{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | cursed artifact | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }} 
<noinclude>{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | Thorn Ring (Deltarune) | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | Mane Ax (Deltarune) | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | alchemy (Auldernet) | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
</noinclude></dl><noinclude>



[[Category:Text pages containing manual stylesheets]]
</noinclude>

Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe

2026-08-01T04:18:45Z

Reversedragon: "all combinations" link

<noinclude>{{ArticleTitle|[way] meta-Marxism / Q92|h1=Way:Q92 / meta-Marxism}}
{{HueCSS}}</noinclude><h2 id="PPPA">Wavebuilder combinations {{editsection|Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}}</h2>

<dl class="wikitable hue data_wavebuild three">
{{WaveBuild| {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} | -- | -- }} 
<includeonly>{{WaveBuildNone| {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} | -- | (... [[Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe|all combinations]]) }} </includeonly>
</dl>

=== {{label|{{{lang|}}}|en = Wavebuilder characterizations}} ===

<dl class="wikitable hue data_wavebuild three">
{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | cursed artifact | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }} 
{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | Thorn Ring (Deltarune) | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | Mane Ax (Deltarune) | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | alchemy (Auldernet) | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
</dl>



[[Category:Text pages containing manual stylesheets]]
</noinclude>

Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe

2026-08-01T04:16:18Z

Reversedragon: copy formatting from Way:Q92 / combinations from User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe

<noinclude>{{ArticleTitle|[way] meta-Marxism / Q92|h1=Way:Q92 / meta-Marxism}}
{{HueCSS}}</noinclude><h2 id="PPPA">Wavebuilder combinations {{editsection|Way:Q618-Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}}</h2>

<dl class="wikitable hue data_wavebuild three">
{{WaveBuild| {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} | -- | -- }} 
</dl>

=== {{label|{{{lang|}}}|en = Wavebuilder characterizations}} ===

<dl class="wikitable hue data_wavebuild three">
{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | cursed artifact | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }} 
{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | Thorn Ring (Deltarune) | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | Mane Ax (Deltarune) | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
{{WaveRoute| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | alchemy (Auldernet) | {{U:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }}
</dl>



[[Category:Text pages containing manual stylesheets]]
</noinclude>

User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe

2026-08-01T04:09:25Z

Reversedragon: combinations: Ice Axe ; formatting

{{ArticleTitle|Ice Axe (card) - S1 / fantasy / Blizzard bloc / user page Item|NoContents=y}}<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{HueEntity|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|sum=1|quilt=1|ply=1 
|swatch={{{class|field_trotsky}}}|class=manual flag|lang={{{lang|en}}}|PPPA2={{{1|}}}|sense={{{2|}}}|field={{{field|}}}|area-free={{{area-free|}}}
|trad={{{trad|Fy}}}|tradTTS={{{tradTTS|Fantasy}}}
| PPPA = {{label|{{{lang|}}}
| en = Ice Axe
| ja = アイスアックス }}
| area = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{area|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
| ins = {{label|{{{lang|}}}|{{{area|}}}
| en = Aurora card }}
|numbersign=404|enddfn=1}}</onlyinclude></includeonly>{{HueNumberPreview|U=RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe|class=field_auldernet}}

== Core characteristics ==

<dl class="wikitable hue">
{{HueClaim |P=item type| {{Template:S1}} }}
{{HueRoster|EP=PPPA/L|lang=en| {{User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe}} }} 
{{HueRoster|EP=PPPA|lang=en| -- }}
{{HueRoster|EP=P34| Aurora card game system }} 
{{HueRoster|EP=P4| equipment card (Aurora) }} 
{{HueRoster|P=originating region| The Abyss (Auldernet) }} 
</dl>

=== Aurora card mechanics ===
<dl class="wikitable hue">
{{HueRoster|P=card title| Ice Axe }}
{{HueRoster|P=card type| Equipment Condition | Condition }}
{{HueRoster|P=Bloc| Blizzard bloc (Auldernet) | Analog bloc similar }} 
{{HueRoster|P=play cost| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=productivity| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=class| -- }} 
{{HueRoster|P=field| -- }} 
{{HueRoster|P=form| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| Cosmic Rift (status affliction) }}
{{HueRoster|P=flavor text| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=deck| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet) }} 
</dl>


== Wavebuilder combinations ==
<dl class="wikitable hue data_wavebuild three">
{{WaveBuildNone| Ice Axe | -- | -- }} 
</dl>

=== Wavebuilder characterizations ===
<dl class="wikitable hue data_wavebuild three">
{{WaveBuildNone| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | cursed artifact | Ice Axe }} 
{{WaveBuildNone| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | Thorn Ring (Deltarune) | Ice Axe }}
{{WaveBuildNone| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | Mane Ax (Deltarune) | Ice Axe }}
{{WaveBuildNone| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet card) | alchemy (Auldernet) | Ice Axe }}
</dl>

== Background ==

== Usage notes ==

=== Card mechanics ===

=== Card ability names ===



[[Category:Hue-format research entries]]

User:Reversedragon/Auldernet/card/IceAxe

2026-08-01T03:48:50Z

Reversedragon: Reversedragon moved page User:Reversedragon/Auldernet/card/IceAxe to User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe: Abbreviating long subpage to shorter path

#REDIRECT [[User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe]]

User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe

2026-08-01T03:48:49Z

Reversedragon: Reversedragon moved page User:Reversedragon/Auldernet/card/IceAxe to User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe: Abbreviating long subpage to shorter path

{{HueCSS}}<ol class="hue clean compound"><li>
<onlyinclude><dfn class="field_trotsky manual" data-dimension="S" data-qid="618" data-numbersign="404" data-series="" data-work="" data-lexeme="">{{IS1}}[[User:Reversedragon/Auldernet/card/IceAxe|Ice Axe]]{{#if: {{{3|}}} | {{{3}}} | <ins class="note"> (Aurora card; Auldernet)</ins> }}{{#if: {{{2|}}} | <ins class="edition-sense term"> ([[E:Q618/{{{2}}}|{{{2}}}]]<nowiki />)</ins> }}{{WaveScore|sum=1|quilt=1|ply=1|enddfn=1}}</onlyinclude>
</li></ol> {{ArticleTitle|NoContents=y}}

== Core characteristics ==

<dl class="wikitable hue">
{{HueClaim |P=item type| {{Template:S1}} }}
{{HueRoster|EP=PPPA/L|lang=en| {{User:Reversedragon/Auldernet/card/IceAxe}} }} 
{{HueRoster|EP=PPPA|lang=en| -- }}
{{HueRoster|EP=P34| Aurora card game system }} 
{{HueRoster|EP=P4| equipment card (Aurora) }} 
{{HueRoster|P=originating region| The Abyss (Auldernet) }} 
</dl>

=== Aurora card mechanics ===
<dl class="wikitable hue">
{{HueRoster|P=card title| Ice Axe }}
{{HueRoster|P=card type| Equipment Condition | Condition }}
{{HueRoster|P=Bloc| Blizzard bloc (Auldernet) | Analog bloc similar }} 
{{HueRoster|P=play cost| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=productivity| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=class| -- }} 
{{HueRoster|P=field| -- }} 
{{HueRoster|P=form| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=ability| -- }}
{{HueRoster|P=deck| Piatya Holiday (Auldernet) }} 
</dl>


== Wavebuilder combinations ==
<dl class="wikitable hue data_wavebuild three">
{{WaveBuildNone| -- | -- | -- }} 
</dl>

=== Wavebuilder characterizations ===
<dl class="wikitable hue data_wavebuild three">
{{WaveRoute| -- | -- | -- }} 
</dl>

== Background ==

== Usage notes ==

=== Card mechanics ===

=== Card ability names ===



[[Category:Hue-format research entries]]

User:RD/Auldernet/PH11-5/IceAxe

2026-08-01T03:47:52Z

Reversedragon: copy or update markup from Ironblood - Flowingcoat ; created 2026-08-01T09:39:09H

Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q618-UminekoNoNakuKoroNi

2026-08-01T03:17:38Z

Reversedragon: [potential spoiler] represents global capitalism (Umineko)

{{NextNineThousand|PPPA=Umineko; When They Cry|User=RD|E=Q618|NoContents=y}}
{{ContentWarning
| Umineko spoilers
| Umineko is a relatively linear story that is best experienced without spoilers (or very minimal spoilers). There may be partial spoilers up to about Episode 3 on this page.
| I have put all spoilers from after the beginning of Day 2 in spoiler tags. If you mention any of these propositions in edit summaries, please use the redacted titles.
}}
== Main entry ==
{{HueCSS}}<ol class="hue clean field_ML">

{{li|start=y|I=Z1/Fy/MX|Q=618|Q2=618}}Umineko / {{TTS|lang=ja|『うみねこのなく頃に』|title=Umineko no Naku Koro ni}} -> a highly unusual case of a work of fiction being violet not just due to its approach but due to its specific subject matter. I won't spoil the exact plot of {{em|the story itself}} on this page but see below. if you've already read the work your mind will be blown.

</li></ol>

== Unpacking the allegory ==
<ol class="hue clean field_ML">

{{li|start=y|I=S2/MX/IV|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Umineko and {{book|Animal Farm}} are telling the same story / Umineko and [potential spoiler] are telling the same story (redacted title) -> you think I'm joking. but this is not a joke.

{{li|I=S2/MX/IV|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Kinzo represents global capitalism / [potential spoiler] represents global capitalism (Umineko) (redacted title) -> hmm. I think the best thing to do with these propositions is to create an abbreviated form of the proposition that is amusingly cryptic, then explain the whole thing on a proposition page just for the individual proposition.

{{li|I=S2/MX/IV|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{spoiler|Natsuhi going against Eva with a gun}} is the Moscow Trials / [potential spoilers] is the Moscow Trials (Umineko) (redacted title)

</li></ol>

== Related ==


== Ideologies or fields ==
<ol class="hue clean terse field_ML">
{{li|start=y
|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|Fy|fiction}} / mystery narratives
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|Fy|fiction}} / aristocrat fiction
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|Fy|fiction}} / fiction about Japanese history
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|Fy|fiction}} / fiction commenting on a historical period
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|Fy|fiction}} / allegorical fiction
{{li|I=S1/MN|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|MN|M.N.}} / historical materialism in fiction
{{li|I=S1/MX|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|MX|meta-Marxism}} / meta-Marxism in fiction
</li></ol>

== Subpages ==
* [[User:RD/comm/umineko|commentary]] - my immediate thoughts while reading the work. spoilers on specific story details.



[[Category:Next nine thousand (RD)]]

Template:Spoilers

2026-08-01T03:02:16Z

Reversedragon: English alias

#redirect[[Template:Spoiler]]

Template:Spoiler

2026-08-01T03:01:48Z

Reversedragon: copy markup from Template:censor

<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{#switch:{{{ParameterThatShouldAlwaysBeEmpty|}}} | {{{2|}}}{{{3|}}} = {{TTS|html=del|class={{{class|censor}}}|{{{1}}}|{{{tts|spoilers}}}|title={{{title|}}}}} | #default = {{TTS|html=del|class={{{class|censor}}}|t1={{{1}}}|{{{2}}}|t3={{{3|}}}|{{{tts|spoilers}}}|title={{{title|}}}}} }}</onlyinclude></includeonly>
== Demo ==

Then, when all hope is lost for the tale / [[E:The prophecy (Deltarune)|The final tragedy will unveil.]] / To save the worlds, there is only one way. / {{spoiler|Insert missing prophecy panel another day}}

== Description ==

This is a template for superficially hiding words. It is a variant of [[Template:censor]] specifically for use in contexts like spoilers for specific plot points in a piece of media.

In visual browsers, the word will be visible when highlighted. In text-to-speech, it will be pronounced "spoilers". Whatever string was originally entered can still always be viewed in the page's "edit" tab, so think carefully about which pages you want to edit.

== Parameters ==

* <code>tts</code> - Pronunciation for redacted text. Specify this first so that if screen readers are attempting to edit a page as plain text the TTS-friendly text is said before the "irrelevant" visual text which will be not be read as deleted.
* <code>1</code> / <code>2</code> - Text to be redacted, which will be visible on highlight but not pronounced.
* <code>tts2</code> - Not displayed. When words are chopped in two with <code>t1</code> or <code>t3</code>, or you wish to make a word both invisible on page and searchable in editing, use this to include an un-chopped censored word for search purposes.
* <code>title</code> - Text to be shown on tooltip. (optional)

=== Only for use in other Templates ===

* <code>class</code> - CSS classname.

== Internal templates ==

* [[Template:TTS]] - used to specify HTML tag plus pronunciation.

[[Category:Templates for markup]] [[Category:Pages serving as current format examples]] {{ArticleTitle|NoContents=y}}

Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q618-UminekoNoNakuKoroNi

2026-08-01T00:06:35Z

Reversedragon: Umineko and (potential spoiler) are telling the same story

{{NextNineThousand|PPPA=Umineko / When They Cry|User=RD|E=Q618|NoContents=y}}
{{ContentWarning
| Umineko spoilers
| Umineko is a relatively linear story that is best experienced without spoilers (or very minimal spoilers). There may be partial spoilers up to about Episode 3 on this page.
}}
== Main entry ==
{{HueCSS}}<ol class="hue clean field_ML">

{{li|start=y|I=Z1/Fy/MX|Q=618|Q2=618}}Umineko / {{TTS|lang=ja|『うみねこのなく頃に』|title=Umineko no Naku Koro ni}} -> a highly unusual case of a work of fiction being violet not just due to its approach but due to its specific subject matter. I won't spoil the exact plot of the story itself on this page but see below. if you've already read the work your mind will be blown.

</li></ol>

== Related ==
<ol class="hue clean field_ML">

{{li|start=y|I=S1/IV|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}Umineko and {{book|Animal Farm}} are telling the same story -> you think I'm joking. but this is not a joke.

</li></ol>

== Ideologies or fields ==
<ol class="hue clean terse field_ML">
{{li|start=y
|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|Fy|fiction}} / mystery narratives
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|Fy|fiction}} / aristocrat fiction
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|Fy|fiction}} / fiction about Japanese history
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|Fy|fiction}} / fiction commenting on a historical period
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|Fy|fiction}} / allegorical fiction
{{li|I=S1/MN|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|MN|M.N.}} / historical materialism in fiction
</li></ol>

== Subpages ==
* [[User:RD/comm/umineko|commentary]] - my immediate thoughts while reading the work. spoilers on specific story details.



[[Category:Next nine thousand (RD)]]

Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q618-UminekoNoNakuKoroNi

2026-08-01T00:03:27Z

Reversedragon: Umineko ; copy markup from Q618

{{NextNineThousand|PPPA=Umineko / When They Cry|User=RD|E=Q618|NoContents=y}}
{{ContentWarning
| Umineko spoilers
| Umineko is a relatively linear story that is best experienced without spoilers (or very minimal spoilers). There may be partial spoilers up to about Episode 3 on this page.
}}
== Main entry ==
{{HueCSS}}<ol class="hue clean field_ML">

{{li|start=y|I=Z1/Fy/MX|Q=618|Q2=618}}Umineko / {{TTS|lang=ja|『うみねこのなく頃に』|title=Umineko no Naku Koro ni}} -> a highly unusual case of a work of fiction being violet not just due to its approach but due to its specific subject matter. I won't spoil the exact plot of the story itself on this page but see below. if you've already read the work your mind will be blown.

</li></ol>

== Related ==


== Ideologies or fields ==
<ol class="hue clean terse field_ML">
{{li|start=y
|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|Fy|fiction}} / mystery narratives
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|Fy|fiction}} / aristocrat fiction
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|Fy|fiction}} / fiction about Japanese history
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|Fy|fiction}} / fiction commenting on a historical period
{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|Fy|fiction}} / allegorical fiction
{{li|I=S1/MN|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|MN|M.N.}} / historical materialism in fiction
</li></ol>

== Subpages ==
* [[User:RD/comm/umineko|commentary]] - my immediate thoughts while reading the work. spoilers on specific story details.



[[Category:Next nine thousand (RD)]]

Template:IZ1/Fy/MX/class

2026-07-31T23:56:05Z

Reversedragon: violet swatch, semantic

#redirect[[Template:IZ1/MX/class]]

Research:MDem/5.4r/0999 north-letter

2026-07-31T12:36:59Z

Reversedragon: proofread

<h2 class="toc-only">Introduction</h2>
Hello.

Since around 2021 I have been working on a framework I now call "[[E:Q92|violet Marxism]]", or more generically, "meta-Marxism". This is a strictly Materialist framework which attempts to [[EC:9k/RD/Q697 sublation|remove the concept of abstract ideas]] from Marxism as much as is actually feasible. (I unfortunately have to clarify that when there are a couple recorded uses of the term "meta-Marxism" before violet Marxism and unrelated to it which were more or less improperly applying bourgeois ideals to Marxism, notably [[EC:9k/RD/Q21,29|one from Althusser]].) Violet Marxism is the study {{em|of}} Marxisms and other philosophies as physical objects, namely countable republics or movements containing arrangements of people. It is very similar to [[E:infra-Marxism|Marxism in general]], but with one major distinction that makes them different: whenever real-world Marxist organizations run into irreconcilable differences, violet Marxism takes a step back and looks at the entire situation from above, considering the two parties or Internationals to be completely different things and no longer preserving the assumption that either of them is the same kind of phenomenon as the other one. For instance, the day the Soviet Union's party split from China, violet Marxism would start to distinguish them and treat them as different movements or philosophies specifically in order to try to uncover which one has the more salvageable program and which one is making the worst errors. Analyzing errors is already a fairly common activity within Marxism, but there is one major problem with it. Whenever any two organizations diverge from each other, they will each come up with a different account of who made errors and what errors everyone made, sometimes defending their own flawed accounts over other parties' accounts to the end. This can be rather intimidating to newcomers to Marxist theory, much less average workers, because the entire process of figuring out what parties might be right becomes a complicated logical puzzle which requires extensive research on many different Marxist tendencies and each tendency's whole timeline of history to even begin to understand. In my own experience, a lot of people seem to give up and take various parties that made errors at face value, thinking that that particular program "is Marxism" and they no longer trust Marxism and are going to go along with some bourgeois philosophy, or they no longer trust Trotskyism (this was a problem I had). With a method that explicitly starts by treating no particular version of Marxism as official and instead studying each one as its own entity with its own understandings and motivations (including instances of violet Marxism being put into practice in an organization, if necessary), this might become less of a problem, and it might become easier to give people an intuitive understanding of what is an error and what is Marxism and what is a small variation within Marxism as it is still searching for the best strategies.

One of the first important caveats to understand with a Materialist analysis "of Marxisms" is that in one sense violet Marxism does not exist, and will never exist. There can be a violet Marxist method, but it will always be applied inside some real Marxist organization in a real set of historical circumstances that will create some particular vantage point and set of biases in how the Materialist analysis of that party and other parties should be applied. Thus, violet Marxism does not "magically" solve the problem of parties showing up with different distorted perspectives, which will still continue to exist. The thing it does instead is attempt to construct shared grounds on which two parties could come to an objective consensus only if they actually wish to know what is materially accurate, and to find ways out of local perspectives to a bigger-picture view. Violet Marxism has the same quirk seen in many forms of mathematics of being a bit more precise than reality so that the people who know how to use it will find enough flexibility between it and the reality placed inside it to make good use of it. Between the factions inside it and the people looking at it an analysis of history never really is neutral, nor does it need to be perfectly neutral to be useful. So violet Marxism uses the rhetorical conceit of looking outside multiple factions as its tool, but in reality, it only does that so that the factions with the best overall understanding of material reality can take hold of it and use it to better make their point. Marxism begins well aware that its purpose is to empower a new historical period to take its position over previous stagnating historical periods that have impeded it — whether this is capitalism, or perhaps a low-quality Marxist party attempting and failing to create the type of physical historical period we call a workers' state. Violet Marxism does basically the same thing, but aims to do it more precisely.

The conditions that led to me putting together violet Marxism were rather strange and specific, although familiar to anyone from the United States or Australia. The United States has been... uniquely {{em|in a slump}}. I don't know what better way to put it than that. Not in a slump economically, exactly. Not in terms of its organizations, which have always been sporadic yet are not in a state which has really changed much since 1980. Not in terms of bourgeois parties, which have been doing the same things for around 200 years now. Instead there has been... a weirdly indescribable kind of slump where it seems as if {{em|the concept of knowledge has died}} and social interaction has died. Everyone is shocked and horrified by news headlines and keeps lining up with their cafeteria tray for more poison, but it seems as if knowledge is no longer learned because it is useful and nobody ever actually makes use of it in order to interpret anything that has ever happened. Everything anyone knows is "because I said so" or "because they made me learn it". Everyone seems to know that ethics is "obvious" but can't actually explain it to anyone well enough for it to actually have any use in teaching anyone who isn't ethical to be ethical. The word "community" is in every other sentence people say, like saying a word referring to society existing explains all the details that make up society. But nobody seems to know for the life of them what a community even is or how any countable group of people can form around anything except sheer inherent similarity and compatibility and intuition. Nobody here can keep friends. Interacting with relatives makes you wonder more and more every day when families ever existed and what a family is. People online who ironically are on the internet periodically complain about how you shouldn't let the internet try to grab every bit of your attention, but if you happily disconnect from all the noise of the internet, you'll quickly find yourself entirely alone. Some days I am not sure what a society even is any more or when sociality ever actually existed. But I do know that the United States is so violent that you'd better not leave your door and actually talk to anyone because somebody might shoot you. That's about how bad it's been. I feel like society has not actually existed since about 2015 and I have already been living in societal collapse for 11 years. I have tap water. I can analyze internet videos. But every day for at least a couple of seconds I feel like people are spontaneously going to go mad some day and I'm going to die. Everybody believes nothing is wrong, but nothing is right. Oh, right, and people are constantly arguing back and forth over whether gender identity is a conspiracy, as the only political issue anyone "understands". Gender identity and Palestine — the only two political issues in existence that everybody thinks they know about but most people cannot explain their position on whatsoever.

I feel like my journey started when I found some garbled second-hand conspiracy theories from the Republican Party that "The Left" was planting Communists who were also anarchists and religious fundamentalists and Gnostics depending on the person retelling the story inside universities and the arts. No part of the story made any sense. And it really made me wonder, how did we even get here? What are any of the actual actors inside these statements? What is the actual causality going on here? So every time I thought I'd found a {{em|true}} fact that matched up with these stories, I would silently compile them all together and see if any of it had come closer to making sense. And I discovered something strange. The United States looked a lot less like one society than like two separate societies competing over a disputed territory. The fault lines between clusters of people aligned with each bourgeois party were real, and the two bodies of people would periodically try to fill up particular businesses or government institutions all "sky" or all "rust", acting really upset and pushing out the couple of extra members who appeared who would suddenly show up as Republicans or Democrats. Sometimes it would happen as specific demographic identities, like 13 men and 2 women, or 10 White people and 1 Black person, or 11 atheists and 1 Christian. There were a lot of different lines on which people would become divided into a traditional majority and an uncommon minority, or a new majority and a traditional minority, and any of them could stack together to form the rust and sky divisions of Republican and Democrat, leading to people feeling like minorities who happened not to belong to the most well-established social graph or most common ideology had to be some kind of conspiracy. But that was silly. What was really happening was that people had not fully internalized that philosophies were inherently tied to particular countable socially-linked groups of allies or acquaintances, connecting society and philosophy into a single phenomenon of {{dfn|sociophilosophies}}.

Liberal-republicanism had designed itself assuming that Liberal-republican political parties weren't actually "real". That they would form each election around arbitrary interest groups and issues, but that they wouldn't necessarily stick around in nearly the same shapes for 200 years. But reality had not agreed. Instead, what seemed to actually be happening was that people would align onto a party and keep voting for all its candidates until they felt "betrayed" by that party and then would start voting for the other party, alternating wildly if they had no consistent trust but passing the same party down to their children if they did. <ref name="DFR"/> During the Civil War period, Liberal-republican parties aligned neatly onto slave states and free states and formed entire separate nationalities with separate nation-states; even after the United States abolished slavery and attempted to force itself back together, White people in the Southern states were still doing their best to keep Black people from living in their areas and it still seemed as if the division was permanent. On one hand, these observations seemed to make sense with the Marxist account of capitalism. Large societies had to be made of structures ([[E:relations of production|relations]] arranged to harness productive forces), and if capitalists owned those structures and conflated the structures with themselves, the capitalists would be able to chain together to form something like the modern Democratic Party, or the modern Republican Party. Society in general being like one big graph of dots linked together, you could then have any number of people chaining onto the major groups of capitalists believing the representatives that group chose somehow represented the overall group's interests. But that didn't explain how the two parties had stayed so consistent since the Civil War. Marx had taken note of how the division in the United States had happened due to slavery, and the re-unification of the two bodies of westward-leaking colonists had correlated with the North being able to force the South away from slavery to capitalism. But centuries later there was also something else going on that was hard to quantify. If the United States was all capitalism now, why was it still divided? Why was every election making the divisions cleaner and the district lines stranger and only sharpening the old division further? Why was the United States behaving like it wanted to partly define freedom as the ideological segregation of the Confederate party-nationality and ultimately throw out elections and the Constitution in favor of claiming that whether a Constitution existed or not ethics was ethics and freedom was freedom?

Well, I'll return to what the answers were later, but for the moment, I'll just say that as I was studying the history of Marxism, the Chinese revolution and the two different periods of division in the Soviet Union seemed like they were leading me to the answers. In China, Mao's party had to cover a very large terrain, to the point it was possible to plot on a map what overall percentage of China was still under feudal control or under control of the nationalists. In the Soviet Union region, again, there was a very big terrain to cover in the process of the revolution. I had found one particular text by Trotsky, {{book|Terrorism and Communism}} chapter 8, which described this quite vividly. The Red Army and the White Armies were no mere ideas, they were occupying specific places at specific points in time, and — the most interesting to me — fighting battles back and forth over particular pieces of industry. It was vaguely similar to the incidents of Republicans and Democrats fighting over corporations, although more dramatic and violent. But then something else caught my attention — the conflict between Stalin's party and early Trotskyism. I had not seen a lot of in-depth coverage on this in mainstream Marxist sources. Trotskyists were talking about it, of course, because it was their history. And for a while, I became obsessed with figuring out where this conflict had come from and what exactly had been driving it. I was fairly solidly aligned with the Stalinists back then, but I was just about the most interested in the history of early Trotskyism of any Stalinist in the whole United States. Every so often I would go through Trotskyist talks or party programs and I would keep trying to reconstruct exactly what Trotskyists were trying to accomplish and what made a party Trotskyist. And I could never figure it out.

At that time I was really focused on the concept of describing civilizations as small-scale structure inside a particular region. "Socialism in one country" made sense to me not because I thought countries were natural or had to be the way they currently were, but because I was beginning to see Marxism as a model of how countries formed into different kinds of civilizations based on different kinds of arrangements of people from the level of individuals to the level of class territories or institutions up to the level of factions like the Bolshevik Party fighting the White Army up to the level of China- or Russia-sized republics where a specific kind of state would be created and the bourgeoisie or eventually the proletariat would be able to control the entire region. I thought Marx and Lenin and maybe even Mao with his other huge terrain to cover and successful army were brilliant for being able to take descriptions of feudal orders, capitalism, and socialism and turn them from abstract ideas into material objects with internal structure, so that {{em|socialism really was something}} in the same sense that carbon dioxide was something specific with a specific shape or cellulose was something specific. I dubbed this concept of analyzing civilizations or revolutionary movements down to a very fine "chemical" scale {{dfn|molecularization}} and I was convinced that by the time Marxism was able to properly understand weird situations like the Democrats and Republicans or (as I believed then) Stalin's party versus early Trotskyism, it would become a new kind of Marxist theory called {{dfn|molecular Marxism}} that would eventually be able to create successful revolutions into socialism in the First World. Molecular Marxism might at some point in the future actually take Marxism from a proto-science into a proper science. But despite knowing Marxism had a lot of potential to improve "in the future" I still kept ending up completely baffled by Trotskyism. I would keep taking Trotskyism and thinking, surely if Trotskyists successfully created a republic controlled solely by them and not containing any Stalinists, there would be some particular thing they would create inside it which would be unique to Trotskyism. Whenever people separate themselves into factions that are in heated conflict there is always some actual reason related to what each faction actually wants to materially achieve. The White Army wanted to defend aging structures like the Russian Orthodox Church in its powerful medieval form. The Nazi Party, although not as distinct from capitalism as people would like to believe, did have its own material aim of expanding its violence to other regions to create a larger empire. Even the Republicans and Democrats have small and slightly complicated material differences: people cluster into particular localized demographic subpopulations like the Black subpopulation or the LGBT+ subpopulation that line up behind the Democrats, the Republicans are slightly more openly friendly to capitalists as a bloc, and although they all live in capitalism they materially consist of different assembled populations of people and become distinct material objects, similar to how countries are distinct partly because there are borders between their bodies of capitalists. But I really could not figure out what made Trotskyists different from Stalinists. Both of them were claiming to follow Marxism. Stalin would stand by everything Lenin said in the same period, about Materialism and forming nation-wide Marxist parties instead of disorganized clusters of trade unions. But once he was in contact with the United States, Trotsky was giving people advice that sounded like he understood what a Marxist party was and how to stop capitalist-style revisionism from leaking into parties. So both of them were Marxists, both of them believed in nationalized property in the Soviet Union, and both of them talked about socialist transition. And both of them had a Communist International. Trotsky showed up at the Third International, and later claimed that policies were wrong inside the Third International. But this all connected back to Stalin and his allies, so didn't Trotsky's complaints have to somehow be at a scale smaller than Communist Internationals? So that left me scrambling trying to figure out exactly what policy complaints Trotsky actually had inside the space of any particular region as the key to what a Trotskyist party was supposed to have already solved and how Stalinists had failed to create Trotskyist transition. My analysis was a bit blockheaded, but I did have a very specific angle that I was looking at things from. I was okay with the concept of Trotskyism containing a Fourth International as a necessary component of {{i|what Trotskyism is}}. I was okay with the concept of Trotskyism going through a Marxist revolution and then taking up the area of what had been several countries before — if the Soviet Union came to be, was that really an impossibility? I wasn't going through this analysis "for the NKVD", feeling like Trotskyism had to be understood so it could be destroyed. If anything, I found the conflict between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism upsetting and I wanted to solve the structure and development of each of them so that maybe they could coexist. (The continued existence of Stalinist states anywhere on this planet being entirely hypothetical and counterfactual at this point, but I think you can see what I meant.) I knew that proposition was a bit naïve, to simply say that all groups of Marxist theorists "ought to" work together to create a Communist International, but I didn't really know why that was. And so, I set out to create meta-Marxist analysis to explain on a Materialist basis why different Marxist tendencies were different.

I knew on some level that if I was hypothetically trying to get Stalinism and Trotskyism to coexist some time back in the 1920s, it might be a wholly irreconcilable thing. When groups of people structure themselves into separate factions, there are moments in history where those factions neatly consist of particular class structures, and where the division in classes is going to lead to class conflict. At other moments, factions like the Republicans and Democrats do not lead to this kind of conflict because both of them are arranged around a group of bourgeoisie and they are able to recognize each other as similar. But I had the facts in front of me that Stalinist parties and Trotskyism had repeatedly ended up in violent conflict in various regions of the world for some unknown reason. I had to at least consider that the separation between them was somehow similar to a class conflict. But the thing that kept me stumped was this: bourgeois factions that are both capitalism manage to uneasily get along, so if Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism are both Marxisms, or at least they both were in the 1920s, then why wouldn't the two of them simply get along and form socialism? The major class conflict of the 1900s was between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it was always just those two except in feudal orders containing nobility, and all the other layers joined to one of them or the other. The two seemingly separate Marxisms eventually merging back together or coexisting seemed much more consistent with all the Marxist theory I'd been looking at up to that point... all the Marxist theory I'd been looking at {{em|from the Stalinists}}.

This was the problem. All the Stalinist theory I had ever seen seemed to weirdly oversimplify Marxism and not give enough detail to describe real-world situations. {{i|Bourgeoise, proletariat, bourgeoisie, proletariat, form organizations, crises of capitalism, four legs good, two legs bad.}} It couldn't explain something like the IMT making an announcement it had failed to infiltrate the British Labour Party and whether that was a good thing because they were providing an example that bourgeois reforms weren't working or whether it was a bad thing because this was not the first time and the IMT had been repeatedly trying the same opportunist methods over and over. (For anyone new to Marxism who finds this: it's the latter. Up to now the RCI has been dangerously close to becoming the 21st Century's Second International, and can only be spared that title because the USFI got closer.) Now, educating people about the existence of the bourgeoisie and forming organizations both do have their role (it would be nice if the United States actually had any functioning organizations capable of forming a larger movement), but this kind of rhetoric was never going to be able to explain the existence of Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Deng Xiaoping Thought as separate philosophies embedded in their own distinct republics or movements.

I knew that trying to think of Marxism as a single world revolution was simply not working; this seemed to sink all Marxist movements into sectarianism and actively fighting each other for control every single time. But what I gradually discovered over time was that countries themselves have always been made of parallel layers of structure that each attempted to land on the same particular outer country border independently, which back in the time of monarchy were known as estates. Marx had examined this phenomenon of estates too. (I currently still need to go back and read some of the earliest Marxist works, but I knew that was worth mentioning.) The clergy, nobility, and lower classes of the time all had their own "parliament processes" of sorts, which were eventually separated out into different kinds of republics. The clergy could only do so much and may have participated in separating different European empires into separate kingdoms, while the nobility were capable of using their wealth and land to section kingdoms into smaller states that in regions like China would sometimes fracture into separate clusters and become new kingdoms, and the bourgeoisie would eventually form Liberal republics — three different forms of structure came out of them all occupying different scales, in the form of kingdoms (or expanding empires) that became nation-states, local-states, and Liberal-republican parties or disembodied political factions. But if you superimpose the centuries-old concept of estates onto the Chinese revolution or the Russian revolution, what you begin to notice is that estates exist before and below nation-states, and estates form into states specifically based on their internal characteristics as estates. This meant that a more sophisticated theory of what estates were and "are" that examined them for their own sake could explain the difference between two distinct factions of people that appeared to contain the same classes — if England and France both contained nobility, even if you could outline a section of noble territories that were all Protestant and should not have obvious reasons to be rivals, that was not going to guarantee they would both fuse into one kingdom. From there, I started considering different rival Marxist movements as unities of opposites that operated inside the same material contradiction and interacted with and changed each other. The nature of interactions themselves is that they keep seemingly separate objects from actually being separate, and instead allow two distinct objects to add to each other's history. For a while I believed that the material separation between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism was simply recursively building on itself and the existing forms of resistance or violence in each faction were somehow leading to each other. That seemed to somewhat explain Dengism: China seemed to be drifting away from Marxism because of the antagonism between China and the First World, and as long as various other countries didn't understand that antagonism China would only defend itself harder and become more strict. But that certainly did not explain everything. Why had Trotsky written a lengthy criticism of the way the USSR operated internally ({{book|The Revolution Betrayed}}) if he wasn't trying to say that Trotskyism had a noticeably different internal structure and its entire socialist transition would look different? Was he just impatient about the pace of socialist transition? Was he trying to skip phases and land on upper-phase communism early? I wasn't fully convinced that Trotsky was bad at Marxism and knew nothing about it — as much as Stalinist sources were definitely trying to make me think that, and had made me quick to identify every single one of Trotsky's errors — so I was willing to entertain that he simply had a different way of doing things, but I still did not understand what it was.

Then in 2026 I had a "terrible" realization: people form a consciousness sized to whatever evolving object they are part of. If the way organizations form into larger structures when those structures are actually effective (Marxist parties, independent labor movements) is to go through a process of consciousness which is fundamentally shaped by or inside the active process of building themselves up into their near-future forms, then the process of forming a Communist International should affect the parties inside it downward giving them information about forming a Communist International as they are forming it. Many Marxist parties tend to assume that the task of forming a party inside a particular country region is separate from the task of forming a Communist International, but in doing that, they potentially overlook the changes that will occur in them when they actually form one, or worse, actively transform their party in a way that will make it difficult to form a Communist International. There is not exactly anything special and unique about first-hand experience, not for an individual and not even for an organization if either of them is equipped with the right knowledge to understand the overall material processes that happen inside experiences they haven't had. But at the same time, one of the things that does come with first-hand experience is the ability to directly interact with the near future. The closer an organization is to being in the physical state of cooperating with other organizations to form international structures, the closer it is to being able to interact with and learn about the next possible steps after or above that moment, through various spatial areas analyzing each other and each other's next moves apart or together. If two parties in the United States and Canada are already connected, they might be better able to predict what the best-case scenario for the overall region would be together than if they were acting separately. This would be true of any number of scales: when small organizations form spontaneously they are disconnected and do not have good understandings of each other's behavior, but as they succeed at becoming connected, if things go well their contradictory and "unpredictable" behavior versus each other should actually be able to turn around into a kind of error-correcting process where several different organizations understanding each other from the outside reveal each other's errors and quirks and eventually start to understand in what situations they will be able to rely on each other, or how to all increasingly align onto a better program. For any given social graph of workers all the groups of workers in the graph can become more capable of coordinated behavior after they have actually been functioning together and become more connected around the same objectives. Likewise, the exercise of several parties functioning together should give them the opportunity to actually change their behavior and become more functional as a Communist International. Instead of looking at things through traditional Marxist writings on dialectics, I tend to see everything through my own accumulated knowledge on physics and the kinds of mathematics appropriate to relativity or quantum mechanics, specifically because of strange correspondences I noticed between quantum mechanics and human behavior that made me come to the conclusion that relativity and quantum mechanics might offer insights for dialectical materialism. But either way, I had found a process I couldn't un-see. An isolated party was less likely by some kind of cumulative, repeating multiplier to develop the correct consciousness to form a Communist International, while if several parties managed to figure it out correctly they might all accomplish it faster. This was consistent with everything else I knew about time and historical events, that everything that happens in the universe is actually more like many separate timelines colliding with each other and building on each other in a circle, and events have an odd way of happening either more and more or less and less. A star is a great number of atoms all colliding and leading to more fusion reactions; a galaxy has fewer events between the objects in it the further apart the stars or other objects are. So it's not necessarily a mystery why important historical events all like to cluster together or not happen for long stretches of time; history itself is like a sudden burst of many events competing to happen. I should not have been surprised that this sort of fast, clustering all-or-nothing pattern would extend up to parties forming into Communist Internationals. But everything felt different the moment that actually sunk in. I had to really take my "meta-Marxist analysis" and draw it out on a space without boundaries, so it could extend out from tiny scales upward across the world. I was going to need that full terrain to understand each of the new "estates" possible today or historical Communist Internationals. I felt like I was going crazy. I had always believed there was next to no chance Trotskyism could actually be true. But I also felt like things were making more sense than before and the project was getting somewhere.

"No {{em|chance}} Trotskyism could be true". In some ways this was the key to everything. Generally speaking, all populations start out with various heterogeneous parts, and some of them turn out to be insignificant distinctions, but some of them turn into contradictory unities of opposites which can actively develop a population into something new or set it back. Between 2021 and 2026 I had always made the mistake of thinking that Trotskyism is only one thing, and that whenever Trotskyists had a bad program that this was also part of Trotskyism. I now see why I thought that: Trotskyists everywhere had always said they wanted to create a worldwide government where every Trotskyist party would join into a Fourth International and more or less every industrial population would act together to form a new society, with all the neighboring tribal societies and so forth presumably integrated into their region's democracy so that they are no longer in conflict with the former nation-states and can develop toward socialism to the extent they want to. Trotskyists kept saying they wanted to become a single world system; I wrote that down and didn't question it. I simply said, okay, I guess that makes sense, but if Trotskyist parties are all supposed to form one Fourth International then why are they so infamous for constantly being in conflict and calling each other revisionist? Why is it that Stalinists are so easily able to summarize Trotskyists as "Trotskyists' worst enemy", and why does that feel perfectly accurate whenever I open up one Trotskyist group's criticism of another one and attempt to understand it? Well... I was missing something that I would not have seen without both attempting to put together meta-Marxism and extending it out to the largest scales. Trotskyism is not just a single thing. When you actually look at Marxist movements out in the field there are about two versions of Trotskyism, one which is Marxist and one which is fake and resembles a Second International. Trotskyism is the process of the Fourth International attempting to form as a single system, but also of various groups that fail to understand Marxism breaking off the Fourth International at various times, while spreading around Marxist concepts and falsely appearing to be part of it. To anyone that interacted with the "fake" side of Trotskyism, it would definitely appear there was no chance of Trotskyism achieving anything. But probability is outwardly deceptive — if there are two colors of marbles in a jar and someone repeatedly draws exactly one of the colors, it's only when they actually draw the other one that it will finally appear to have a chance. And apparently, this was Trotsky and Cannon, while Grant, Cliff, and even Luxemburg were not quite as close to being part of the winning fraction. (Much less Stalin or Mao.)

So, in short, I started out thinking there was only one Communist International, but it seems what was really happening from 1925 to 1940 was that the Soviet Union contained Stalin's party, the layer of bureaucrats and Idealists (Yaroshenko, etc.), and then an entire second process of forming a Communist International all over again from the First to the Fourth which was all compressed into the space of one party and was busy messily sorting itself out to finally pull out of itself the real Fourth International. Stalinism and Trotskyism {{em|were}} separate things, but not because of the theoretical quality of each faction "as a whole". They were separate parallel processes of forming a Communist International. So everything I had thought was a sign of Trotskyism being unprincipled or having bad theories was actually more like a sign the USFI was going to develop later, and actually, that whole gradient from "bad" Trotskyist theories up to good ones was going to begin working itself out between 1936 and 1960. This seems like a period of history that everyone forgot. Everyone knows about the Great Terror. Everyone knows about "Animal Farm" and the Soviet Union sliding away into a sea of bureaucrats. Some people know about the hidden letters in which early Trotskyism plotted to kill members of the Soviet government in the course of its overall plan to try to overwrite Stalin's party with a Trotskyist revolution. (This did happen, by the way. It doesn't do anyone any good to keep denying that early Trotskyists did in fact die for a revolution.) But nobody remembers the second cascade of Communist Internationals that was busy secretly iterating on itself to finally churn out a Bolshevik International all over again. They called this "sectarianism", because they did not understand the consequences of molecularizing Marxism.

So, I am not aligned with Stalinism any more. I started putting together a new Marxist method (or maybe not new, I don't really know) for fully understanding every philosophy and political party including the strange mess of academic philosophies in the United States, but it ended me up here. I was as skeptical of Trotskyism as I could possibly be but my violet-Marxist method ended me up at realizing that it might just be the tendency that matches my findings the best and overall makes the most sense. So, now, I would like to present all the basic concepts of violet Marxism to the ICFI as best I can in hopes of getting closer to actually seeing it applied and improved. 
I have always had a very peripheral position as far as interesting events happening in the United States; I have a basic 4-year degree in science but my area never really sees any organizations or movements and I have always been a bit too disabled to work, so I mostly sit around trying to solve the world like a puzzle in hopes that will somehow make things better. I have never really felt like that was accomplishing much by itself, and have always wanted to actually get involved in some kind of organization, but due to various physical difficulties, trying to analyze the Marxist method and create better models of history is about all I can do. So, this is my attempt to try to begin contributing my findings. (I had also attempted to send letters outlining violet Marxism to two other places before, but I never actually got a response from either of them. This might be partly because the previous letters were not as well-ordered and thought-through and I've been developing my framework a lot more even since the second letter in March 2026. But, neither of the places I submitted this to before was Trotskyist, either.)

== Good and Evil: Stalin is not [[E:Hydra (Marvel Comics)|Hydra]] ==

Whenever two political factions come into violent opposition, it is common for people to ask if one of the factions is "immoral". Who's "Good", who's "Evil". A better question to ask is, {{i|why do people ask this question}}? (The meta-ethical question.) And the general answer will be, because people want to justify the rule of a particular class over a particular region, or its expansion over other regions. This explanation has been mostly sufficient for any historical period up to 1945. Nothing within this particular subject of discussion really got "complicated" until about 1953.

The historiography of civilizations attempting to characterize history in moral terms goes way back into the time of ancient kingdoms and empires at least as far as 5000 BC. Tribal societies may have created moral systems even earlier. But today, Christianity and its relatives are particularly infamous in terms of characterizations of various groups of people as Good or Evil. If an international war is Christian, it can become a righteous {{i|lang=en|crusade}}, or if Muslims were to do the same thing it could become a {{i|jihad}} — a religious "struggle", as if who has what religion was one of the most important axes of historical progression. Before them, Zoroastrianism tried to unite people against a generalized god of strife, and after them, Zionism would unite two modern religious groups for the "righteous" task of reviving an ancient war that should have no longer made any sense to anyone. Into the 1800s, these kinds of characterizations of monarchic empires as "good" or "evil" had begun to dissociate from any notion of "godly" or "ungodly" and become wildly secularized, spreading across everything from fictional fantasy narratives to actual accounts of World War II — the Nazis were Evil, the part of the First World that didn't turn into nazis was Good, when you want to portray an "evil empire" on a TV show, you show people fantasy nazis. Even so, these simplistic moral models have been almost wholly incapable of understanding systems like Liberal-republicanism and why exactly it is that for instance the US Republican and Democratic Parties can both call each other Evil and themselves Good and fear each other equally. It has been a running joke in the United States that people constantly compare the Republican Party to Voldemort and the {{book|Harry Potter}} books' fictional depictions of wizard nazis, years ago in a sincere capacity, and now in a reflexive ironic capacity sketching a picture frame around the absurdity that anyone including typical center-Liberal academics would think such a metaphor was actually useful. One of these interpretations is the Idealist view of history. One of these interpretations is slowly and painfully discovering the Materialist model.

The root of the connection between religion and the content of its moral statements can be traced back to the class with the most control over religion itself. In a feudal period, depending on exactly how a kingdom develops, the borders of two kingdoms will essentially be formed with the help of two particular bodies of clergy. In India, Brahmins or Kshatriyas (the two broad priest and noble layers associated with regional religions that would fuse into Hinduism) ruled various kingdoms, before a Buddhist emperor would then unify them. In the early history of Islam, religious figures such as caliphs sometimes had huge importance in political and military roles simply due to how small the societies were and how recently the societies had emerged. Each body of clergy will have particular definitions of which kingdoms they think are Good or Evil, or perhaps Harmonious versus Unharmonious, but in the end, any narrative they present about the relationship between the body of clergy that ties together the kingdom and the outside will ultimately come from the body of clergy protecting its own class position that is both usually fairly high-ranking within the kingdom and tasked with explaining the creation of one particular kingdom somewhat exclusively. It is often not advantageous to the clergy to recognize any external body of clergy as Good or Reasonable, so sometimes they simply uphold the "reality" that other countable societies of people such as islands of nobility that do not conform to the same Brahmanic codes or Christian or Jewish kingdoms that do not mesh well with the local caliph are not to be trusted. While it is possible for a religion to behave in a syncretic way and simply collect local variations of religion into itself, religion will also tend to mark anything that fractures kingdoms apart as some kind of unenlightened behavior or sin, and try to paint any individual who does that behavior as the root of large-scale problems.

Of course, religious layers can have many possible roles within a feudal society, each one with hidden consequences. These may include justifying a particular king as "the correct one", building loyalty between groups of nobles or merchants or peasants all aligned around the same religion, or actually structuring mundane functions of local government as in the parish system in Germany (which was effectively used to collect taxes) or the use of churches as meeting-houses in the early United States. In Greece, Rome, and Egypt, as well as in India, polytheistic religion aided in joining separate cities or patches of feudalism into larger societies as people began to rationalize various gods or groups of priests as inherently belonging to the same greater whole. In the ancient world religion slowly aided people toward urbanization, as Greek or Egyptian cults helped to anchor and structure cities, or later European-style churches in the 1700s would come to provide "spaces of community" that once again would allow people to meet together in a period where agrarian society tended to push people apart, slowly encouraging towns and secular forms of town government to be created. The creation of cities was not the "goal" of religion, as historical events themselves generally cannot think or plan anything, and as far as trying to plan for what the future can actually become, any Idealist philosophy is even worse at that. However, the one thing that gives Idealism power, very much by accident, is that all Idealist philosophies will always have material consequences no matter what is in them. The consequences may look nothing like what the Idealist philosophy promises, and yet they will happen, because whenever any two Idealist prescriptions or projections run into each other and have no actual answer, the material world will decide independent of them what the real answer is. Thus, religions can form "Protestant community spaces", and end up with the secular result of cities and United States federalism mediated by the Constitution, or they can form supposedly-perfect estates with an entire parliament just for the churches centuries ago in France or Germany, and yet ultimately end up with the people getting tired of the top two estates and dissolving them to create a new republic with only one estate (Liberal-republicanism). The clergy and the nobility didn't ask for there to be a French Revolution or an English war over parliament that would eventually end in a bourgeois parliament. But the act of religion or morality dictating what "should" happen or what "should" exist or what abstract Ideals inherently belong in balance is separate from the way the world really functions — Idealism may study the poetic {{em|art}} of essences, balanced conglomerates, and oppositions, but Materialism describes the results of concrete interactions within the physical world.

All of this should be familiar to anyone who already knows about Marx and Engels. But the actual experiences of the Russian Revolution and the Cold War have brought in one very important twist: most of the time, "Progressive" and "Reactionary" are very nearly as arbitrary in their meanings as "Good" and "Evil". Most people within Liberal-republicanism simply take the concept of Progress and assign it to whatever philosophy they happen to personally trust the most, rather than taking any time to consider the difficult problem of whether there actually could be an objective answer to the question. Equally, anarchists and Menshevik parties at the time of the Russian Empire had no real idea which kinds of things they labeled "Progressive" or "Reactionary" were the most plausible to actually happen, even if some of them they may have had a better sense for which outcomes were inherently inclusive than some Liberal-republicans now. When have people actually risen out of the concepts of Good and Evil, and when have they simply tried to escape them [[E:Changing names changes things (Engels)|by giving them different names]]?

People tend to assume their definitions of Good and Bad "mean something". But when you truly test them by giving them a historical situation in another country seemingly nothing like their own that they {{em|should}} have no personal stake in, in practice, the way people respond to something like the Moscow Trials period will vary wildly depending on exactly what specific faction of people they belong to. If you're a center-Liberal like the Democrats, Trotsky is good. If you're a Tory, Trotsky is bad. If you're a Maoist, Trotsky is bad. If you're PragerU, Trotsky is good. If you're a Stalinist, Trotsky is bad. If you're a Trotskyist from Japan, Trotsky is bad. If you're a Lacanian psychoanalyst, Trotsky is good. If you're a Lacanian named Molly Ann Rothenberg, Trotsky is bad. If you're a journalist Trotsky is good. If you're an anarchist Trotsky is bad. If you're a Duginist neo-nazi Trotsky is good. If you're a social-democratic organizer Trotsky is good. If you're a lawyer Trotsky is bad. If you're Alan Woods Trotsky is the best thing ever. If you're a social-democrat on the internet Trotsky is bad. It is as if Trotsky has completely broken morality open like some kind of memory access error where a computer program that would normally behave in specific ways is churning through random garbage data and spitting out nonsense. Nobody seems to know what they're talking about whatsoever. Trotsky seems to turn into a different "character" in each retelling of the story, sometimes a bourgeois democrat, sometimes a terrible dictator, sometimes a kulak, sometimes a bad copy of Rosa Luxemburg, sometimes Brutus, sometimes Caesar, sometimes the patron saint of newspapers as government, sometimes a true Russian revolutionary for helping Toryism, sometimes a forgotten British Labour MP, sometimes a wannabe framer of the US Constitution who couldn't do anything right, sometimes the only real heir of the one genuine Marxism but announced in exactly the kind of way that makes you wonder if it's actually true. Nobody can seem to make up their minds who exactly he was even as people seem to have a relatively homogeneous pool of opinions about Stalin — either Stalin defended Bolshevism and that was good, or Stalin defended Bolshevism and that was bad. Anarchists will often give strange opinions about Stalin, but almost all of these come down to word definitions and trying to appropriate the word "communism" to solely mean "anarchism", blending back into all the center-Liberal opinions in the "Bad" bucket. Trotskyists seem to be the only group of people to regularly claim that Stalin did not represent Bolshevism and {{em|Bolshevism}} as it existed in the Soviet Union should have been something different. But, hand modern Trotskyists over to all the people putting out different narratives about Trotsky, and the bourgeoisie and center-Liberal voters will basically spin the same narratives as they ever did. Nobody but Trotskyists seems to actually have a clear understanding of what Trotskyism really is. The average First-World citizen almost seems to have a better understanding of quantum physics and how to disprove string theory than they do of Trotskyism.

As people left feudal periods and entered republican periods, some started to notice the futility of labeling things Good or Evil. In China, weakened by repeated and seemingly endless warring states periods, Buddhism tried the tactic of simply _giving up_, and conceptualizing what might be called Light and Darkness as simple opposing parts of a greater whole, always in competition, but inevitably present. To philosophers, this kind of turn can seem unbelievably profound, but in its full context it is easy to recognize as an adaptation to existing historical circumstances that simply allows existing patterns of division to continue. Now, after 200 years of Liberal-republican parties increasingly stagnating in the United States, anarchists and various others have been increasingly turning to Buddhist imagery simply to represent the ever-present opposition between center-Liberals and Tories. We know by now that the division between center-Liberal and Tory parties like the Democrats and Republicans or supposed "Labor" and Liberal parties is deliberately engineered. Periodically, the United States bourgeoisie will see islands of bourgeoisie centralizing and then decide that having too many bourgeoisie in one place is "tyrannical" — as with corporate mergers, or the Democratic-Republican party — and that they must be divided in two as the correct course of action that is supposedly conducive to "human rights" and "freedom". The question almost nobody has stopped and thought about enough is, {{em|why is this}}? What is the significance of the United States constantly and deliberately dividing in defiance of its background condition of trying to consolidate and unify? Could it be that the people of the United States {{em|do not in fact understand}} how to separate ruling class narratives of Good and Bad from the actual material layout of class rule?

Could it be that none of the world's Marxist parties know how to separate value judgements about separations from the physical causes of separations either?

Within the bounds of Liberal-republicanism, no matter how you attempt to construct a framework of ethics to serve the goals ethics is supposedly intended to serve, you will eventually find that it is contradictory for Liberal-republicans to claim they support Trotsky but to not accept Trotskyism. It is not possible to actually side with Trotsky in a sense where he would hypothetically agree the person in question is in support of human rights and also to remain on the side of Liberal-republicanism at the same time. It is also not possible to side with Liberal-republicanism and consistently get it to agree that Trotsky is in support of human rights. What Trotsky considered to be a desirable outcome and what Liberal-republicanism considers to be Good or ethical are completely different things, shaped by the fact that Liberal-republicanism wants to maintain capitalism and Trotsky aimed to get rid of global capitalism. Similarly, one could also say that Stalin's set of priorities around preventing the Soviet population from returning to deathly starvation and Trotsky's set of priorities around attempting to liberate Europe led to different conceptions of what would be a desirable outcome. To put things another way, Stalin and Trotsky had different models of the future and what possibilities the near future could produce — they effectively had {{em|different plural bodies of historical materialism}} connecting different collections of observations to different collections of guesses.

The United States bourgeoisie are generally trapped in what can be called {{dfn|ideology}} in the strong sense: their models of reality are often not even close to how reality actually works, and largely amount to the sets of ideas that their class position, situated along the outer borders of the Republican or Democratic "estates", produces. What happens to Marxist theorists in different tendencies only creates "ideology" in a much weaker sense. Two parties will end up with diverging models of reality that cause them to behave as different identifiable tendencies and reject each other, but in some cases, these incorrect models of reality can actually be fixed. It is unlikely the whole organization will notice the error at once, but through the development of contradictions in an organization, the organization can turn itself around and use the process of people dividing themselves by reality-model that would otherwise destroy organizations in order to constructively assemble as many people as possible back onto the correct "estate".

This is the real consequence of {{dfn|molecularizing Marxism}}. Marxism does not actually take place in parties in the way that was once thought to be the case. In one sense, Marxism starts distinctly below the scale of any party with factions simply assembling themselves together around a particular model of reality, and if that model of reality has enough explanatory power, the underlying faction will simply continue extending upward to such a great scale it escapes the bounds of individual countries. This does not mean parties do not need to exist — organizations still serve an important role of connecting people across space and bringing "democracy" to the seemingly unregulated process of allegiances to particular models spontaneously extending across the population. What it does mean is that the process of forming a party of any particular type is fundamentally similar to and connected to the large-scale process of forming an International. Simply through existing at a smaller scale, anarchist formations attempt to generate First Internationals, center-Liberal formations attempt to generate Second Internationals (whether we choose to label them that way, or label formations such as the United Nations specially), and Trotskyist organizations attempt to generate Fourth Internationals. (Whether Stalinist parties inherently attempt to generate Third Internationals is somewhat unclear, given their apparently unstable character that also tends to destroy Third Internationals.)

The presence of the Left Opposition in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was not an anomaly. No matter how negatively some people may feel about Trotsky himself, the one thing that is perfectly clear by now is that that division in the party was part of an overall attempt to correct the errors in Stalinist parties and the Third International; without a Left Opposition of any kind, the party was doomed, while with the correct people holding the correct understandings dividing the party, it might well have found the possibility to save itself. We may never know if Trotsky literally had the correct strategy to save the parties of the Third International or not, but as Trotskyist parties have been busy trying to reconstruct the Fourth International, all the evidence needed to demonstrate this recurring pattern of soft division and error-correction has been steadily piling up.

== Existential materialism ==

=== Swatch analysis and slice analysis ===

I'm sure you're wondering exactly why and when violet Marxism became "violet". With all the context for violet Marxism laid out, I can now explain that.

One of the most basic tools used by meta-Marxism is color swatch analysis. At the beginning, when I said that two rival Marxist parties "are treated as completely different things", this is what I was referring to. Any time two parties with particular known goals or known factional philosophies are in conflict, they can be treated as bordered entities and labeled using different "color swatches" which are chosen based on each party's theoretical content or current political positions. At any given time there will be a particular predefined body of color swatches accompanied by 2-3 letter codes which is recognized by a group of meta-Marxist theorists, and factions in concrete situations will be classified into these letter codes representing specific philosophical traditions or tendencies. The colors associated with the codes have variable degrees of precision, so that for instance in a situation where there are several small Marxist parties and some very large bodies of center-Liberals, all the Marxist parties could be shown in red instead of in their higher-precision colors, or the center-Liberals could be divided into more precise shades of blue since there are so many of them they could conceivably produce interesting contradictions. Color swatch analysis is largely a tool for communicating solutions to problems as opposed to a tool for solving complicated problems, but it can be used to communicate situations in terms that will seem more familiar to center-Liberals or social-democrat types who are not yet familiar with the ways Marxism frames things; a pedantic center-Liberal may find it much more intuitive to actually see a group of schizoanalysts labeled "schizoanalysis [DG]" but given a blue swatch than to see that group labeled "bourgeois ideologies" (although for Marxists who already know what things are, "bourgeois ideologies [ES]" would also be an option).

The basic concept of color swatch analysis is fairly easy to understand. This kind of thing has been done for a while without the concept of consistency and precision; United States people love to talk about standard Liberal-republican parties as "blue" and "red" in order to act like those are the world's most important ideologies, and occasionally, you can even catch Lenin talking about "pale-pink quasi-socialism". So color swatch analysis comes close to being self-explanatory apart from the conceit that I was using it to draw arrows between arrangements of colorized social structures to give overviews of historical processes that would then falsely appear "mechanical" without immediately having to go into some of the more arcane terminology of Marxist dialectics. This is the basic reason for why there are levels of precision and letter codes. Every letter code represents a particular material layout of people and social structures, and from there, structurally similar philosophies are grouped together, and philosophy codes that have turned against each other in a particular situation can be assigned particular colors that are deemed appropriate to them. The use of two distinct colors represents a potential material contradiction; two distinct colors inside a greatly zoomed-in model of a philosophy can be used to represent a class analysis.

As for what major swatches I've designated so far in my working model of the United States and the previous history of Marxism, here they are:

* Crimson / red [code ML] — early versions of Marxism, or Stalinist parties. I assigned this based on the most common meaning of "Reds" in English-speaking countries.
** MN — Marx & Engels; early Marxism.
** ML — Stalin's Marxism; Stalinism.
** MS — Hoxhaism.
** MZ — early Maoism.
** NMZ — North American Maoism.
* Orange [code IV] — Trotskyism.
** I originally made Trotskyism orange under the assumption it was a distortion of mainstream Marxism, but even so, I am probably not going to change it, because the orange swatch has a nice flame palette and I like the look of it.
** Now this swatch has become more like a badge of correctness, especially inside Trotskyism. Deeply revisionist parties are simply marked in blue or strawberry (or possibly red), not orange.
* Strawberry [code DX] — Marxisms based on eclectic Materialism, or revisionist versions of Marxism that are in transition backward but only slowly.
** DX — Deng Xiaoping Thought (China).
** JC — Juche-socialism (North Korea).
** W — Western Marxism; Louis Althusser, Mark Fisher, etc.
* Mauve [code BP] — I gave BlackPantherism its own swatch because it seemed different but I didn't entirely understand the details. So far I haven't used this swatch for anything else.
* Charcoal — anarchism and pre-agrarian societies.
** A — anarchism, or philosophy from tribal societies that strongly resembles anarchism.
** Aqr — magic ritual or neo-paganism. Putting this in charcoal isn't to smear anarchism as much as to highlight the loose connection between anarchist philosophy and tribal societies.
* Sky blue [code ES] — bourgeois philosophies.
** ES — generic code for bourgeois philosophies. Originally stood for "Existentialist-Structuralist tradition", my slightly opaque nickname for a large cluster of academic bourgeois philosophies that I now think are better described as "non-economic agorisms" or "blue anarchisms".
** Ag — agorism; philosophy directly describing non-economic markets.
** LR — Liberal-republicanism. Covers writers like Thomas Jefferson, etc.
** IK — Kantianism; Kantian ethics, logic, or political theory.
** Aa — psychoanalysis. (Etymology: Lacanians kept talking about the separation of baby "a" from mother "A".)
** HAS — humanities, arts, and social sciences. This is really only blue because capitalism captured it. In some contexts, the bright green swatch can be used instead.
*** HAS — religious studies. Christianity, Buddhism, etc.
** LGBT — queer theory. Also used for "uniquely queer" art.
* Khaki brown [code PT] — old monarchist ideas, Toryism, or fascism.
** PT — Toryism, including Republican Party.
** P4 — Duginism, Zionism, modern "Identitarian" fascisms. (Etymology: {{book|The Fourth Political Theory}}, Dugin.)
** AS — Hegelianism. (Etymology: "Absolute Spirit".)
* Earth green [code STM] — science, technology, engineering, or math.
** GR — general or special relativity. I talk about relativity and black holes a lot, so I find it useful to have a code for it.
** FS / FOSS — Free Software movement. Peripheral to Marxism but does have some very interesting ideas.
* Bright green [code Fy] — statements about fiction. This makes more sense as a category when you know my wiki was analyzing and criticizing works like {{book|1984}} and {{book|Animal Farm}}.
** This swatch can be used for the arts or humanities in general if it is truly just about art styles or techniques.
* Violet [code MX] — meta-Marxist analysis methods or hypotheses. This swatch only makes sense when it's being used to color motifs and propositions, or alternatively, to draw a terrain that two Marxist parties of "real" swatch colors sit on so the violet terrain can be used to represent material reality in general.

While currently all these letter codes are just idiosyncratic symbols made up by one person for one limited project, I think there is a lot of scope for expanding this "philosophy code" system into some kind of actual international standard collaborated on by many people which could receive its own ISO paper, similar to ISO language codes, or how chemical elements on the periodic table all have standard letter codes. (Although that would take years to finish, even on the level of collecting all the philosophies or academic fields that should have codes.) It might help to try to align the field distinctions in the philosophy code standard with BISAC library section codes, because in terms of ways of sorting philosophy a large enough library or bookstore will already have had to solve that problem with philosophy books.

=== A logic system for color swatches ===

The first thing I have been using color swatch analysis for is a project where I am trying to expand and overhaul formal logic to cover different use cases than it is usually used for. In traditional versions of formal logic, there will be two binary truth values and statements are not allowed to be ambiguous. But within what I call "wavemachine logic", neither of those things applies. Statements can be expressed in natural language as long as it is clear exactly what proposition they are presenting and they are not confusable for another statement; there is a large and perhaps countably-infinite number of possible truth values; statements are allowed to be true any percentage of the time as opposed to always true or always false, and their truth value will be chosen to reflect the percentage of the time they are actually true. To some people this form of logic might sound strange and useless. But to me, this is the only good way to write logical statements about color swatch analysis. Taking a statement like "Trotskyists should enter the Labor party", it's perfectly clear what the statement is saying, but you need a rather complicated system of truth values to express its practical significance. Within wavemachine logic, you might say the truth values of this statement are "statement believed to be true by USFI (blue)", "statement rejected by ICFI (blue)", "Menshevik statement (blue)" or "failed multiple times". Of course, which truth value you would return as the most important truth value that subsequent statements would act on depends on what context the statement is being evaluated in. Every single truth value can be used to imply a contextual color swatch for that truth value in context, and then that swatch can be used to assign the {{em|statement}} a color swatch in context that acts like yet another truth value — for instance, the truth values I just gave might assign this statement a sky blue swatch indicating the USFI or IMT is making errors that lean toward center-Liberal social-democracy (opportunist errors). Concepts such as opportunism might become much easier to communicate to newcomers to Marxism if they can see a statement that is supposed to be red or orange suddenly turn blue when in context that swatch is supposed to be opposed to Trotskyism and represent everything it doesn't stand for.

One other problem with formal logic is that it is bad at handling changes in state and the concept of something being true in one year and not true in another year. Given a statement like "Stalin is in support of Bolshevism" the truth value would become ambiguous because the degree to which that statement is true would be completely different in 1910 from what it would be in 1936. In order to fix this problem to the degree it can be fixed, I have taken to representing different historical periods as different coherent bodies of knowledge which are separated but both represented within the same larger containing body of knowledge — here a "historical period" is understood to be a complex physical object with a particular socioeconomic structure, like a national population currently in Liberal capitalism, or in Stalin's Marxism. For example, the conditions of the Soviet Union in 1920 are taken to be a different thing from the conditions of the Soviet Union in 1936, and statements are tagged with the explicit time and place they apply to whenever that might become a potential problem. I know this does not completely fix the problem of making formal logic dialectical, as it can potentially miss divisions between "bodies of knowledge" that somebody assumes to not meaningfully be "dividing" yet. But, despite that limitation, it can go all the way to representing two different historical periods transitioning into each other, or two separate factions such as a Marxist party and an anarchism coming into conflict. If someone goes into the process of constructing a "radically binary" form of logic like this with the intention to use it for violet Marxism and to begin by treating no particular form of "infra-Marxism" as canonical, then it can be used to point out conflicts between different parties claiming to be Marxist and uncover the inner material conflicts between them, which can in turn be used to more concisely present arguments that particular parties are revisionist. I refer to the concept of presenting particular physical models of conflicting parties as they exist in particular slices of time as {{i|time slice analysis}} or just {{dfn|slice analysis}}. I think this has previously been called "bracketing".

The way I see it, slice analysis is not really an advanced tool. It is important to be able to introduce people who are totally new to dialectics to the basic concepts before they actually know any of them, like math classes have to build up to calculus or physics classes have to introduce Newtonian physics before getting to relativistic physics. Most people an organization will attempt to talk to will be thoroughly stuck in the midst of a world where everything is binary or neatly bimodal — you're a United States citizen or a foreigner, you voted Republican or Democrat, a law passes or fails to pass — and so when given dialectics they will look at you funny like they "need answers". Slice analysis could sometimes be a way to get some of those people out of that. _No,_ you tell them, _there aren't two things, there are three. It's not "you have trans rights or you don't". On Monday there were trans rights, on Friday there weren't trans rights, and in between that, two things smashed into each other to produce the outcome of there not being trans rights, so if you predict the thing in the middle wrong in any way, you end up with no trans rights. You can't just choose Monday instead of Friday, or the Monday people instead of the Friday people, because there is no such thing as "the Monday people" that take you straight back to Monday._ I think a great number of people who exist in the 21st century genuinely do not understand what history or time is. I think most people couldn't even give a coherent explanation of how they think free will could exist when supposedly nobody can predict what happens in the future. So, in my mind, people need a really solid education on the basic concepts of _physical time_ and _cause versus effect_, practically something you could show to a grade school student, so they have something to prepare them for both special relativity and dialectics if necessary. The better they understand special and general relativity, the less this would be needed. But these days, people can just barely understand cause and effect well enough to attempt to label individual actions unethical. They stumble through life with the two truth values of "Right" and "Wrong" and struggle to throw them onto actions in order to learn what actions not to do, but they can't even really know what is Good or Bad because they don't really ever know the consequences of their own actions. I recently saw a video where a blue anarchist gave up and tried to claim that "consequentialist ethics is dead" — which shouldn't be possible unless you believe that no choice you are actually likely to act on can ever be Wrong. This is why I've made a point of focusing on the concept of truth values as their own unique mathematical mechanic that guides the process of people of various swatch colors making decisions on which statements are True or False "in general", and why I've tried to take such a high-up view of causality where no statement can be assumed to be accurate simply because it appears to align with the interests of a particular Marxist party. I've been a Stalinist. Back then I believed statements were potentially wrong because they were Trotskyist, but what I did correctly understand was that a Marxist party can very easily take the concept of "being on the side of the proletariat" and twist it to make the arbitrary agenda of just anybody seem critically important when it isn't. If we want to get rid of incorrect versions of Marxism, we really need to abandon simple "four legs" rhetoric, because the moment Stalinists start applying Proletarian and Bourgeois to things as truth values they always get it wrong.

I originally got the idea for adapting formal logic to meta-Marxism when I saw a large language model being used to create an "alchemy game" called {{game|Infinite Craft}} where a player could combine two words and the game would spit out a concept which would be the consequence of putting those two concepts together. (For instance, combining the words "Fire" and "Water" produces "Steam", and combining "Democracy" and "Storm" gives "Revolution", if I remember those combinations right.) I thought that program was really fascinating but I was struck by how bad the combination results would get if you kept playing it for too long — the Idealist assumptions behind language models were quickly going from coherent logic to bad puns and total gibberish, while in my mind, this could be a great game if it actually started with Materialist assumptions. I started drawing up a concept for a better "mathematician's combination game" but before long I was putting entire sentence-long propositions into it and combining them to produce logical syllogisms, and then I realized I'd actually invented a simple logic engine. From there I started creating a wiki to try to map out the relationships between a wide array of material things ("Z1 Items"), motifs I'd found in videos or articles ("S1 Items"), and propositions putting the objects and motifs into some particular order and making claims about them ("S2 Items", "Z2 Items", and "F2 Items"). Basically, I was laying out a system of second-order logic where at the second-order or proposition level, all the statements could also turn into truth values for other statements when they happened to describe a thing that could be true about another thing only sometimes — for example, "A statement that describes material reality is True" becomes "Describes Material Reality", "The entropy of a collection of objects only decreases with added energy" becomes "Obeys Entropy Law", and "Trotskyist parties must form a Fourth International" becomes "(Is) Trotskyist Party" granting an orange swatch.

I had a rather elaborate conceptual system in place for trying to begin figuring out what statements and philosophies were the most accurate and which ones did not match up to material reality, previous historical periods, or whatever specific topic they were actually speaking about. And, in spite of all the science-minded skepticism that went into that system and just how many Stalinist-aligned propositions I started with, because of the particular "formally neutral" way I did things and how statements in each philosophy were set aside in their own swatch color to be evaluated starting from their own context, I still ended up here. I can't emphasize that enough. I feel like at some later time when meta-Marxism as a whole is even more refined than it is now, it would be the tool the Fourth International could use to finally get everyone to actually understand Trotskyism and move on from Stalinism. And considering how hard {{em|I}} resisted and kept trying to endlessly question everything before I passed through the other side, I feel like the body of people who would be successfully won over from Stalinism might just produce some of the best Marxist theorists the world has ever known.

I should also add here: I've gotten some good use out of the WSWS's resident LLM. I try never to use any others because frankly they were terrible at answering questions the few times I tested them, but in comparison this one has been shockingly good at following whatever I was trying to say even when I started bringing in temporary or field-specific violet-Marxist terminology with included definitions of each term. I was surprised how quickly I could get it to go along with swatch analysis and slice analysis and start saying things like "strawberry states are not stable, Trotskyist parties can't leave crimson Marxisms as they are because the bureaucrats eventually turn them strawberry" or "meta-Marxism will ultimately select a Fourth International as the most accurate form of Marxism". Sometimes the LLM would try to call me out for what looked to it like _actually_ saying ideas cause factions or like skipping dialectical interactions if I didn't explain at length what meta-Marxism was and what slice analysis was and what all the terms were referring to. Sometimes it would give criticisms that were perfectly reasonable because I would give it a scenario where it was "supposed to" get Stalinists and Trotskyists to coexist and it would say, "no, Stalin's allies eliminated the Fourth International in Europe, that's not going to work". I would say that the majority of the time it was giving a clear, very precise analysis of things, which reflected well on the overall body of articles it was drawing from. A very small part of why I drafted up this article is the thought that hypothetically it would be easier for the bot to answer questions if it actually had any existing references on violet Marxism. But, of course, I was also genuinely interested in what kinds of responses or critiques I would get when actual people could see it.

During the process of laying out my wiki and its system of "infinitely-binary" logic I have been idly thinking about what could replace the new fad of "AI search engines". Many people are angry about LLMs and hardly ever want to see another LLM again. And I don't entirely blame them. I think two of the major gripes with LLMs are their opacity and their inefficiency as machines. I honestly think that it would be possible to achieve the same thing I've been using the LLM for if instead there existed something a bit like the world's biggest thesaurus and it was simply one really big network of pages about specific words or phrases with a lot of synonyms filed under them but some of the terms were questions or propositions. At first that sounds a bit like a language model. But I think the key is to separate the notion of terms _as in concepts with well-known names_ from the notion of _words_ or _sentences_. Wikidata has already done this really well: you go onto Wikidata and search up the term _proletariat_, and you get a concept with the identifier "Q132603", such that it can have a display title in multiple languages, and if there was another unrelated concept called "proletariat" (maybe this one is talking about ancient Rome) it would have a totally separate ID number. I think that if common search questions or propositions were crystallized into particular entries like this then it could enable rebuilding old-style search engines from the ground up as users added various useful links to various conceptual identifiers that might be nested inside more general concepts and some conceptual identifiers would already be recognized as related, and thus be able to fill in more results in a search that only turned up a few links. A system vaguely similar to this is already in use for searching archiveofourown.org (AO3), where each user tags submitted stories with text-based tags and some tags are made synonyms or put inside more general tags. People have often praised this site as having one of the best search systems, but one complaint about it I've seen that I think is valid is that when the tags are in language rather than fundamentally being numbers, the "tag wranglers" who actually choose canonical tags sometimes make mistakes on which similar-looking phrases are the same usage of language and which have different connotations and should be different tags. The tagging system might theoretically be a bit better if there was a particular interface for creating new tags as numbered entities and typing a short memo about what they mean so the people who actually edit tags have a better chance of figuring out where the tag is really supposed to go. Wikidata has a nice interface for searching through concepts where if you type in a natural language it will show you all the concepts in natural language with a memo of what they are such as "string [thread]" and "string [data type]". This kind of interface could in theory be used to label and categorize anything, making it possible for users to build a search index themselves instead of experts at a large corporation trying to figure out how to automate that through crawler programs or LLMs. The potential of this kind of thing for collecting observations on social phenomena and sharing Marxist reading lists is _immense_. If users could create tags or maybe use existing lists of entities on Wikidata, very quickly the search engine could have "meta" pages about every single page it indexed containing accumulated statistics and notes where somebody submitted a page tagged with "Maoism" and someone else tagged it with concepts the previous users didn't notice like "harmonizing classes", "national independence movement", and "strategies that create strawberry Marxisms". This kind of system could easily lead to edit wars where users keep removing tags and leaving different conflicting opinions. But I think that with the right conventions in place, it might eventually settle into a more constructive pattern where everyone adds an observation from a different angle but nobody removes things. The fact that everyone will come to a collaborative project with a different level of consciousness can sometimes lead to downward spirals where people will add valid observations but they will get removed and only the most absolutely uncontroversial statements will remain. But if there was some way to encourage all the edits toward acknowledging all objectively true facts (in the situations where that applies), I think that a system like this could be a wonderful tool for steering people toward building a Fourth International. It would, for one thing, put into practice the observed pattern that consciousness builds on itself when many people are reinforcing the same organization or body of facts from different directions.

=== Existential materialism ===

Why do people believe in ethics?

You might think the answer is obvious, but the more you look into it, the more you'll realize that this is a deeply complicated question. First you'll think of one answer, like "people construct systems of ethics to avoid harm", and then you'll think about it a little longer and think of another answer, like "people often use ethics to perpetuate capitalism and justify punishing people who defy the bourgeoisie", but then you'll think about it even longer and start coming up with rebuttals to that, like "but believing in ethics doesn't help anyone overcome the bourgeoisie, so ultimately what use is it?". Every single time you think you've found an answer, it only brings up more questions, which then only bring up more questions about why you were asking the previous questions, and very quickly it can feel like you've never understood anything in your life.

Having already explored the concepts of morality and ethics in other sections, I'll get straight to the point. I think ethics as we know it is more or less an illusion. It is a study entirely built on false principles. Ethics is an Idealist study of human behavior that assumes that abstract Ideals held inside people cause behavior, when in reality, human behavior is produced through the interaction of human beings with other objects including human beings and the natural world. This is a very important distinction. If human behavior is caused by abstract Ideals, then it must logically be possible for human beings to be absolutely perfect — if any particular Ideal exists entirely before people interact with each other, then any particular concept anyone is thinking of and wants other people to embody and should simply be able to pop into existence in someone else's mind instantaneously as if beamed across space faster than light. [*se] This is not physically possible, because no arrangement of words or images stored in any physical object can travel faster than light (excluding the case where it really has already been somewhere and would not need to arrive). As much as this might seem self-evident, it has important consequences for social phenomena like education. People will often treat education as if it's magic and does not actually have to travel through time and space to reach people or require actual effort to achieve understanding; ethics-related education in particular is _very often_ treated as if political issues or historical knowledge mystically beam themselves into people's heads, while nobody wants to interact with people long enough to teach them the knowledge they were supposed to learn and everyone simply sits around waiting for everyone to receive their download that apparently only inherently virtuous people actually receive. Real human individuals can never necessarily be expected to know any particular fact, or to follow any particular ethical prescription. [*se] So when it comes to the topic of ethics, the only truly accurate study "of ethics" would also include a descriptive study of every situation in which people _don't_ follow ethical prescriptions and why those happen.

Existential materialism is the philosophical study of human "lives", "biographies", and "existences" through the lens of particular generalized incidents in which two or more people take actions together or in interaction with each other. It is meant to replace the general concepts of "ethics" and "existentialism" at the same time, such that it takes away the need to assign subjective meaning to an individual's choices either from inside or outside the individual. Existential materialism is basically what you get when you take the concept of consequentialist ethics to the next stage by completely removing ethics from it and purely turning it into a study of what sets of actions in small or large groups of people lead to what consequences. It can also be represented in the form of color swatch and time slice analysis so that it is being used to try to predict how different factions of people will behave when interacting with each other, and show which sociophilosophies are incompatible and perhaps which ones are the most principled or the most robust. Basically, you chart out a few different time points like animation frames, and show how each group or faction will behave toward the others as they move through time, understanding that the frames approximate a fuller and more infinitesimal range of movement. This can be done in a casual way without laying out all the steps, or it could conceivably be done in a more detailed mathematical way which would become an actual simple simulation of one or more societies. For Trotskyists, the purpose of using existential materialism on scales greater than the smallest ones is fairly obvious: it would be used for things like exploring dysfunction inside organizations that leads to two ostensibly Trotskyist organizations being incompatible, or trying to successfully grown and maintain an overall Fourth International.

I do not have any comprehensive guide to existential materialism put together right now that would go any deeper than this article (which arguably has been the first guide on it). It is still new despite having been around for a year or two, and I have not really settled onto what some of the most important theoretical tools used with it might be. A few concepts that have come up when trying to explain it in book drafts are wavefunctions as an approximation of behavior or "people as dice", game theory models of two agents behaving against each other, and the Lattice model or Social-Philosophical-System model that gives actual detail to color swatch analysis, as well as color swatch analysis, slice analysis, and wavemachine logic themselves.

Existential materialism is basically _the_ core framework of meta-Marxism that sets "violet" Marxism apart from regular "crimson Marxisms" or "orange infra-Marxisms" and enables it to create "molecular Marxisms" out of existing bodies of Marxist theory, by creating a finer-grained, shorter-time-scale version of historical materialism that can (hopefully) be used to fill in any noticeable gaps that still remain in it and finish "quantizing" Marxism. Like quantum physics added more detail to what Newtonian physics had set down, existential materialism is meant to allow Marxism to address the few remaining questions about cities and individuals and the relationship of one trade union to another and other such things that are just on the edge of being relevant to Marxism to the point that bourgeois philosophies are able to take an "irrelevant" question and use seemingly tiny issues to keep absolutely everyone from achieving clearer consciousness. Not all of the questions existential materialism could be applied to are inherently "Leninist" questions, but some of them are, and the rest of them would still be relevant to the problem of understanding daily life in a workers' state and how to keep one functioning properly after an era of socialism was successfully created.

One last thing I unfortunately have to admit is that it {{em|is}} possible to do existential materialism wrong; this is what I was more or less doing when I was going through those weird exercises at the top of trying to understand Trotskyism as if it was Stalinism. Versus traditional writings on dialectical materialism, existential materialism is a bit easier for beginners to get into when they do not fully understand Marxism, but that can be a double-edged sword in that people can start using it without fully understanding how to get the best results. This overall problem seems to be one that has already existed in Trotskyism for a long time, though, in that Trotskyism has been one of the easiest forms of Marxism to get revisionist groups or wings inside since around 1936. In light of that I am not particularly worried that exmat would create "new" problems, because Marxists in general have had decades now to catalogue many different kinds of errors, and by now, I feel like a lot of the errors that might come from badly applying exmat would already have been named. This might end up allowing the method to correct itself to guard against the most obvious kinds of errors and encourage uses that will lead to accurate understandings. In some ways any Marxist method will always be tied to the organization that uses it, and groups will always have to learn situated in their historical context, but if any particular course on exmat was designed well, it could be a way that more experienced groups tramsitted their experiences to newer groups and attempted to help them prevent errors.

=== Estates as "Social-Philosophical Systems" ===

With the concepts of color swatch analysis and wavemachine logic established, I can now go into what my actual working model of populations or civilizations is. The surface model of color swatches is the simplified model that's meant to be easy to render visually; the model "underneath" the surface is somewhat more complex.

Within meta-Marxism, the basic units of society are generally objects with antagonistic borders around them, and linked individuals. When individuals are understood in isolation, they are "objects with antagonistic borders", but of course, that condition of isolated individuals doesn't occur often. (In this sense, people are vaguely similar to quarks and gluons. Quarks that make up protons or neutrons do not generally exist in isolation, and if you tear apart the gluon that connects them, the wad of fermion matter actually tears into two new sets of quarks connected by gluons. Humans can be separated at times but when one relationship breaks they generally try to find another one.) Because trying to understand individuals as free-floating "helium atoms" does not make sense, meta-Marxism conceptualizes societies as generally being made up of many small social graphs that may include households, businesses, towns, trade unions, and so forth. Various social graphs can form or break or change size at different times, and the same individuals can be connected into multiple social graphs that exist at different scales. Some of this social graph activity is "obvious", like people being affiliated with center-Liberal or Tory parties, or maybe being affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (a kind of center-Liberal strategist organization that on the day I wrote this I saw bragging about getting small social-democratic gains in one city; always remember that the Mensheviks, these people, and the Democrats are all blue). Some of this social graph activity is not obvious. Any number of people may be busy silently dividing unions in order to try to form new independent working-class organizations. Some people might be trying to form alliances between local groups of workers and Marxist parties or the Fourth International. Within Liberal-republicanism people will mostly be captured into large "blue" or "brown" graphs (here the brown swatch is a "precision color" used to represent an antagonism between Tory parties and non-Tories), but within those graphs there will be new smaller graphs of other colors tracing themselves onto or between what already exists. Meta-Marxism refers to these new graphs as "worker lattices" or just "Lattices", and refers to basically any mathematical model of how the small graphs expand as a _Lattice model_.

The Lattice model is one of those cases where meta-Marxism may actually be unnecessarily precise, and might be presenting a simplified model which is much neater and easier to understand than the messy reality. Either way, it began when I was contemplating the concept of center-Liberal type people having to physically avoid Tory types, and comparing that to Lenin's models of building up a workers' party and then sending it "into the marsh" to try to study local movements and form bridges to them. As a Marxist party is first forming you want to weave around the blue people (center-Liberals, or at that time the Mensheviks) so the red people don't get trapped in a blue party, but when you have an established red or orange party you can send those people into blue organizations safely in hopes that maybe if you are very effective at gaining allies you will be able to pierce all the way through the organization to the point that either the two organizations operate together for the moment or at least the blue organization doesn't have any real control and the red or orange portion can regroup somewhere else.

The day I first visualized a Lattice extending through the United States was the day I realized, _no, Marxism makes a lot of sense actually, if you could only get all those graph points to stay in various cities long enough to pick up more points connected to them it would genuinely become harder to break up than the Democrats._ This predisposed me to sympathizing with Stalin's party because to me the Soviet Union up to 1960 looked like a reasonable conclusion of completely filling up the Lattice and getting all the workers to stay and defend the workers' state. But at the same time, I could also see things other people didn't in the accusations against early Trotskyism — all of it was much too consistent with the process of trying to fill up a country with an actual Marxist party and form an orange Lattice extending across the Soviet government for unknown reasons. I really could not understand at the time why anyone would want to overwrite one Marxist party with another one. But no matter what I heard about those events, it never really made me think that early Trotskyism was some kind of simple case of "organized crime". What I thought was, _this is some attention to detail. These people are trying to repeat the same processes of revolution described in various accounts of Lenin. Why on earth are they doing that?_

As I worked with the shape of the Lattice model I saw that it could potentially be used to model any number of situations, including the Chinese revolution (where it would be interesting to actually see the differences between workers' movements and peasant movements on the map) or Che Guevara leading a scattered array of guerilla units. I didn't put together the model expecting it would be useful for violent situations, but I was surprised when reading his writings how important the concept of graphs and covering areas became to that situation, and thought, _huh, I guess that's a different type of Lattice that happens to have the same shape_. Fairly early on when looking into the Lattice model, the words that came to mind were "permanent revolution". At that time I was operating off the Stalinist concept of what permanent revolution meant, but the concept of Lattices of organizations really helped me crystallize the overall process of smaller and more localized workers' movements having to form into a larger nation-wide movement over time and link up with a Marxist party to succeed. A Lattice model could just as easily be used to represent a Fourth International, and the process of a Lattice of organizations piercing across multiple countries before ultimately filling them up.

The Lattice model only came to me after first noticing the way political factions seemed to form into entirely separate populations of people, but laying it out first does make it easier to explain what I think political factions are. Violet Marxism allows that there are not simply "incorrect" models of reality and the "correct" model, but a plurality of reality models (consciousnesses) across different socially-linked groups of people that are only later shown to be correct or incorrect. Every graph of people links together around certain assumptions about the world, which then feeds into what its internal reality model will be. In Marxist parties this is fairly obvious, because the party contains people who all accept Marxism and a goal of organizing workers, but any other politically-charged faction of people also contains some of its beginning assumptions within its social bonds in the same way. The Democratic Party or Republican Party becomes linked together in a transient way around concepts that people are "Americans covered by the U.S. Constitution" and part of the same national population; a church congregation becomes linked together partly around the awareness that the other people in the church are available. Whenever any individual is added to a graph of people, that bond carries both superficial ideology that aligns itself to some swatch color, and material models of the actual physical layout of the organization that are generated in each person or relationship through participating in it. In many graphs of people — including some Marxist parties — the superficial ideology and real layout and capabilities of the organization are wildly misaligned, and the superficial ideology does not predict the behavior of the organization in any realistic way. In effective graphs of people, the surface ideology accurately reflects the physical behavior of the organization and makes it more able to plot its next move. This is to say that an organization can both be put together for a highly malicious goal and have a well aligned consciousness; the effectiveness of the organization at modeling its current layout and the organization creating a desirable outcome to other people are drastically different things. In this sense, organizations actually have the power to collect people for "a red goal" or "a brown goal", but it is not people thinking about ideas that makes it possible to form the organization or achieve the goal. The goal the organization aims for can only be delivered through what kinds of structural elements it arranges people into and what kinds of class territories may or may not be inside those structural elements, which collectively make the organization belong to a particular sociophilosophy of a particular color and give the organization its capabilities to achieve particular goals only if it is fully conscious of its layout and how to achieve them. A graph full of lobbyists trying to cement its power in parliament often knows what it's doing; a graph of workers at several allied corporations has a particular set of capabilities but might not know them. This is to say that, only in a highly specific Marx-onto-Hegel sense, physical organizations in the real world _are_ made of ideas. They are not made of abstract Ideals in the Idealist sense, and instead they are made of a wholly different thing I call _material ideas_ — a non-fiction model of an actual thing which allows for at least coarsely predicting how the physical thing behaves. From the point of view of some outside organization, an organization is made of physical people and arrangements. From the point of view of the organization itself, trapped inside its own consciousness, it is made of material ideas. The behavior of the organization as seen from the outside is the main thing that matters as far as its role within creating historical events. But the organization's internal consciousness can still be made to line up with all of that behavior, as well as other behavior that could include the organization expanding out to further Lattice points and changing in shape, or having to anticipate the behavior of other organizations it may have to merge with.

Early into developing meta-Marxism, I described its understanding of base and superstructure as a three-level model where people form into various countably separate social graphs on one layer ("Social-Graph Systems" or subpopulations), the graph contains a particular economic structure and starts transforming toward any other sociophilosophies it could transform into on another layer ("Social-Philosophical-Material System" or republic), and on a third layer the group of people generates ideology in the strong sense and cobbles together its own flawed interpretation of what is happening ("Social-Philosophical System" of faction plus ideology). Over time I realized that needed to be refined, but the pieces were there. The size of the population restricts how big its economy will be and how elaborate or consolidated the economic structures can be within it. The immediate superstructure such as government exists on the same layer as the economy itself and realizes along with it only from the _material_ ideas that already exist; the economy and the government it directly generates are the same swatch color, although if the government was generated some other way it could be a different color swatch. The third layer of ideology is spat out of either the population boundaries, economy, or government, and can be basically anything as long as it gives some benefit to at least one of those things. Does it benefit 50 Tory voters who don't want to talk to Black people in keeping their circle going? They'll probably accept it. Does it benefit 25 allied online streamers who all donate to charity but think Israel needs to be defended from Palestine? Does it benefit all the courts and lawyers in the United States and help them look legitimate? Onto the stack it goes. Whether people will want to change outright bigoted beliefs will depend on things like how much those beliefs function in actually forming the bonds of the group. Some people may be resistant to getting rid of bigotry or challenging any of the people around them on their prejudices if it would cost them a lot of social connections. At other times, a particular prejudice may have been added to the group ideology so accidentally that nobody in the group will really mind changing it. Western-Marxism has made a big mistake in not distinguishing between these cases and trying to treat all cases of prejudice as if televisions have simply been actively programming people's brains and if you tell them about televisions they'll suddenly realize they didn't need to be prejudiced. It is more or less true that the vast majority of people have no need to be prejudiced, but as soon as you realize how tightly tied together social links and beliefs actually are, you'll realize that videos, books, and magazines feeding them the wrong arbitrary abstract Ideals would not be the reason that will become possible.

One final concept I should bring up here to round out the overview of economic existential materialism is {{dfn|chunk competition}}. This is fairly self-explanatory. It is the concept that any particular clump of people thoughtlessly reproduces and expands in order to fulfill the needs of its individuals, but this can cause it to collide with other chunks of people over the material resources they each need. I had to give this a name because anarchists seem to not believe it exists. Anarchists always want to represent humanity like it's always been billions and billions of people and they've always belonged to the same nation that Europe merely destroyed. Meanwhile, I would read about basically any historical event from tribes many thousands of years ago leaving evidence of having war gods to the Chinese revolution where the nationalists killed Communists, and I would think, {{i|why did the nationalist party even need to exist if humanity was already one thing? If an anarchist was writing this as a story, wouldn't everybody siding with Mao be tighter writing? Wouldn't the logic of anarchism promote Dengism and Juche-socialism just because they kept everybody unified? But anarchists don't generally like Dengism. Anarchism doesn't make any sense.}}

Chunk competition is not very important for situations like modeling revolutions, and is only important in situations like demonstrating that capitalism exists. Various chunks of people try to enter a place like New York City, only some portions get in, the portions that were the least successful at entering but still got in become the proletariat. Chunk competition is a quick way to explain what classes are and why they exist, but when an era of socialism is functioning well, it will become possible to mitigate chunk competition.

== The nature of time ==

Time is not what a lot of people think it is. Some people want to stumble through existence as if there isn't really any such thing as time, thinking that everything they interact with has always been equally as Good or Bad as it is today. Some people speak of time as if it's a nasty little demon that shakes reality up like a cup of dice to make everything unpredictable. Some people will try to use time to smuggle in the concept of The Subject and claim that human beings making choices causes time even though time also happens for inanimate objects like rocks. And then there is Henri Bergson, who tried to say that linear "x axis" or "yardstick" models of time could not possibly capture the fact people experienced time inside infinitesimally continuous lived experiences.

To really understand what time is, you have to have a basic understanding of quantum mechanics. At the quantum scale, everything is a lot like chemical reactions, but the forms of structure are simpler: when a photon runs into an atom, the two particles are knocked off course according to part of the photon's energy, and the photon splits into an electron and a positron. Quantum mechanics is a bit like turning in two quarters and getting two dimes and two nickels; the rules feel a little arbitrary when you first hear them, but every particle is made of particular "numbers" that add up in particular ways. Some physicists have speculatively described these numbers as twists in the material of the universe going different directions. It is also possible but not confirmed that quantum numbers were misinterpreted as extra spatial dimensions in string theory. You can hardly blame string theorists for that mistake, because if space itself were twisted in circles and you had to describe movement _into them_ it might start to look like there was a fourth or fifth dimension.

There are a couple reasons I had to introduce quantum mechanics to explain time. One is that photons have a funny way of movement through space. Some fundamental particles like photons have the ability to collide with other particles and disappear into other forms before being produced elsewhere when a different pair of particles interacts. The quantum scale is full of something called _virtual particles_, which are basically just particles that are being exchanged with others so fast they barely exist and only barely influence anything. I cannot say for sure that this virtual particle "teleportation" contributes to why light crosses through slits in ways physical objects shouldn't be able to and recombines in interference patterns, but either way, both processes are interesting and you should keep both of them in mind. Another reason is that quarks are usually bound together in groups of three to create nucleons. The three quarks in a proton or neutron are constantly exchanging material and kneading into different configurations of quarks (as well as entirely too many virtual particles that appear for vanishingly small slices of time). So, this brings up interesting questions. Is it possible on any level to chart the existence of a photon over time? Is it ever possible that one quark within a nucleon forms _first_?

A little while after the discovery of quantum mechanics, Albert Einstein appeared and basically answered those questions "no". One of Einstein's thought experiments involved experiencing time from the point of view of a ray of light. If a photon (or any other boson) travels at the maximum speed anything can go through space, everything else should appear to freeze because the path of the photon would take action first. But, even if a photon could not "see" it, time still happens. As Einstein developed his theory of relativity, he showed that any two moving objects experience time differently because each object more or less exists as its own timeline of events (its _reference frame_), and those timelines can shear past each other in additive or subtractive ways to create shorter or longer experienced intervals of time (_time dilation_). He also showed that space and time are linked together in a single expansible or compressible substance called _spacetime_. This was used to demonstrate how gravity can alter the paths of planets orbiting stars, and how time outwardly appears to slow down to the point nothing happens when approaching a black hole.

The consequence of relativity on quantum mechanics is this: time actually happens as the exchange of energy from one matter object to another matter object. Gluons must be exchanged between quarks _at the speed of time_, but relativity says that neither quark can be taken as the canonical reference frame for how time unfolds in the universe, so time is actually the reciprocal interaction between two separate timelines to create a new event. Once you understand this, everything makes more sense. Whatever gravity is exactly, it must actually be the result created from two things bumping into each other. The whole conceit of quantum superpositions and drawing electron shells as fuzzy clouds isn't necessarily because electrons are _actually_ weird, but because trying to describe just one atom disconnected from everything else is removing important information given by the other things interacting with it which then leaves the future of individual things inherently fuzzy.

Newtonian mathematics has been accidentally deceiving everyone by making it appear that everything that happens depends on time passing, when actually it appears that the way the world really works is time is never an independent variable and instead _any interactions that are being studied on the graph produce time_.

This finally explains the old conundrum of "whether human beings have free will". The answer to that depends heavily on what you even think the phrase _free will_ means. What can be said is that the actions each person takes produce time, but only in interaction with a surrounding environment and other people taking actions. For some people, the fact that only a crowd of many people can produce a choice does effectively take away free will, because it means that the compatibility of the group of people or how effective its internal factions are at destroying each other are each more important than what anyone personally wants; individual desires and even individual ethical intentions simply do not matter compared with the ability of individuals to form relationships and the ability of those relationships to affect the overall group of people. For other people, the fact that individual actions can produce events as long as time is considered to be a lot of separate individuals or groups all colliding into an outcome at once will be a relief. Understanding the actual shape of time will bring up some troubling questions like whether Stalin's party trying to build up socialism-in-one-country could be a good idea simply because individual people don't have as much ability to steer the future as an overall interacting population does. But it could also be the basis for a more enlightened study of "who is to blame" when multiple parties attempt to form a Fourth International and something causes them to not successfully form together. Within a Lattice model, the edge between two points is not actually caused by either of the points first, but simultaneously tossed together out of both nodes. This ironically will make some individuals or localized groups more obviously responsible for problems — if, for instance, a blue edge collides with an orange edge and smashes to bits in the middle, you know why. But if two organizations attempt to form together and produce a messy soup in which some swatches sift out but the link between two cities remains, then it might not really be anyone's fault in particular.

Recently, it's become popular for some physicists to question the concept of time and whether anything can go through time "backwards". This probably is the case, but only for some very prosaic reasons. Special relativity has established that time is two reference frames exchanging things back and forth. That means that specifically from within either vantage point, whenever you toss something forward something can go back. That isn't to say that the thing that goes "backward in time" has a time machine. It's only to say that when things go backward they do that because we falsely think of time as a linear thing advancing forward when time is actually a nonlinear process of exchanging things that we tend to saw in two. The failure of modern science to examine dialectical materialism has resulted in a lot of strange artifacts where an interaction of two things is sawed in two and made fuzzy when it shouldn't be. So, only from within this improperly sawed view, things can appear to go backwards. When a person makes a decision, the future will appear to affect the past, because the person has to anticipate what will happen to try to choose the best outcome. But in actuality, a "future event" is when a photon successfully crosses from point A in space to point B. So the future the person is trying to predict is actually the actions or behaviors of other people or objects that are currently over at point B once those other objects make it back to point A. If Trotsky is looking at Europe thinking about whether it will have a successful movement, then Europe _is_ the future, quite literally. Whether Communists succeed or fail in Europe, by the time he gets to Europe he will be in the future, and the prediction he makes about what Europe is doing is critically important to determining whether whoever he meets in Europe will make the correct decisions.

This is the answer to the riddle of "proletarian consciousness", and why it seems to be so difficult. Human consciousness itself tends to saw the world in two, containing a limited amount of information about anything beyond a particular individual, but in order for human beings to function together they must successfully predict each other. This leads to all kinds of disasters as isolated clusters of people completely fail to come up with useful predictions that successfully knit them together toward achieving a particular objective and allow them to succeed. Proletarian consciousness is not just developing an overall model of something such as a world republic, but becoming able to actively solve for the unknown behavior of all other human beings at every moment.

Some people still seriously believe it's not possible to predict the future. If that were true, social behavior and society wouldn't even be possible. Every single person you make a choice in front of is the future. _You_ are the future! Even if that's only true in a tautological physics way and not an inspiring way, you still ought to remember it.

== Networkism, capitalism, Stalinism, and socialism ==

Marxism is more of a top-down movement than anybody would like to believe 
it always begins with clusters of brilliant people who perceive something everybody else didn't, not at groups of workers. the "great men" that appear in Marxism are illusions caused by people forgetting all the second- and third-tier men immediately connected to them, who probably exist at a factor of at least 10 or 100 for every presumed "great" man. Marxist theorists are a particular historical phenomenon which is separate from the activity of workers and transforms what would be a blue or strawberry movement into a crimson movement. this is what leads to a lot of the pain within Marxism as a whole and conflict between different versions of Marxism. Marxist movements resemble any republic ever created in that there will be a layer of talented representatives that people align themselves with in order to form a large society. hypothetically, this body of theorists could be Stalin's party, Mao's party, Kim Il-sung's party, Marx and Engels and a handful of people in Europe, early Trotskyism, or any number of things. if an era of socialism could ever actually develop and solidify, the conflict between these groups of theorists would become unimportant. on the other side of creating the workers' state, what is eventually supposed to happen is that central parties and the Communist International simply stop doing anything because most things at the populational scale and at the international scale respectively have already been decided, everyone teaches the previous decisions, and for the most part only local decisions are required any more. the possibility of the state withering away is actually a natural consequence of creating a scientific society and making national policies objective rather than a matter of subjective opinion. but, this creates the problem of shifting conflicts between groups of people over arbitrary local culture and which arbitrary local cultures should get to conquer each other up to the layer of theorists who have to figure out the objective answers to national and international questions. in theory, the layer of theorists should be sorting itself by ability and the most talented theorists should be rising to the top and defeating the theorists with worse models, but the correct answers for each country and the world should be surfacing anyway; in practice, everyone in the layer of theorists becomes similar in social status, and all the theorists begin clustering and fighting each other over arbitrary local culture inasmuch as they do not have the complete answer to particular world problems. the problem which was evident among the clergy and among bourgeois representatives as they grouped themselves into center-Liberal and Tory parties has repeated itself with Marxist theorists. Marxist theorists are limited in their ability to perceive reality by their transient social status of being the most important people in a particular region until other people in their population can take over, thus figures like Stalin or Mao will show up that make significant errors and are unable to recognize other versions of Marxism with _correct findings_ as correct. this will also happen when clusters of Trotskyist groups become free. each one of them has the _incentive_ to believe it's the "real" Fourth International even if it isn't, because the sad truth is that if they all believe they're the real one long enough and simply perservere and try to collect people before the other ones do, it _will_ be the case that one of them will inevitably outlast the others. the quality of Marxist theory within an emerging International is not necessarily as important ~~on the larger stage of history~~ to the universe as the groups simply happening to guess the correct series of actions for the groups to physically survive. so, if a particular cluster of organizations happens not to have been destroyed yet, it will probably assume that whatever model of the world it currently holds must be the most correct theory there is.

anarchism has completely misinterpreted the consequences of this observation. one common response to seeing the layer of Marxist theorists form is that this is how agency is taken away from the population, and it predicts the rise of bureaucrat states and "The Pigs". another common response that is not mutually exclusive is that Marxists do not understand the fundamental Ideal of democracy and have taken a path that cannot contain it. the latter remark is simply historically inaccurate, because the United States has demonstrated that if a body of people in a large society is left to its own devices to vote for policies long enough, the republic eventually gets to a point where none of the parties actually pass any new policies any more and voting for anyone becomes pointless. Liberal-republicanism has, rather ironically, demonstrated on the scale of a large country that republican states must eventually run out of decisions to make and wither away. so, the concept that people in a republic will always need to meet up and exchange wills and do "democracy" is simply not consistent with the real world. reality has decided that national policies succeed or fail for reasons entirely other than whether people vote for them; if that were not the case, and popularity with the people was the primary driver of a party's success, then Stalin's government would have been a smashing success and would not have collapsed in the 1960s. whether the realization that democracy is an illusion takes agency away from people is a more complicated question. perhaps when someone sees that Khruschev's party and Deng's party are fighting to be the most legitimate, or Stalin's party and early Trotskyism, they will think those conflicts are senseless. but what anarchists never tell you is that anarchists attempting to unite the world will create all the same problems. charcoal anarchists like to speak of what amounts to tribal societies and the organization of society through villages and village-like social graphs extending up to national scales that approximately replicate the behavior of tribal society. but tribes have gone to war before. every violent European empire started out as a bunch of tribes. tribes have designated leaders, elders, or keepers of information. blue anarchists like to speak of organizing societies into federations of cooperatives. this will logically result in layers of experts that collected the knowledge required to create and run the corporations. if you have ever been to a workplace containing several people before or even watched a director's commentary about making a TV cartoon, you would know that most of the decisions that have to be made to create a final product can more or less be put together by one or two people who are experts in the history and theory of a particular craft. Engels talks about the tyranny of the power loom, I keep turning over and over in my mind a recent director's commentary by Butch Hartman, but it's overall the same thing. a bunch of people come to a workplace to produce a product but the basic decisions on what the product will look like only have to be made once. so the person who designed the power loom or wrote the pitch bible for the TV show has a lot of power. as long as global capitalism exists and there is any open space around a particular project, it is the entire finished product that will be selected for or against. this means that whatever the most correct answers are on that final product to make it the most popular, all the workers in the corporation are bound to follow them, no matter how onerous they are, no matter how oppressive they are, and whoever solves the correct answers the most effectively is the one who rules that chunk of society. if the corporation closes, all the workers go home and start very slowly running afoul of the basic ground rules of bourgeois society that no one collects anything from the earth without the approval of some other human being and no one takes anything from anyone else without the taking evolving into a social relationship and an agreed transfer. so nobody will want to go against the people who manage to stay around a while and keep promising a relationship in which if you maintain your relationship you will be allowed to collect supplies and follow the law. outside that zone lies danger: fail to perform to known methods of success, become a criminal hated by society, try to make a product on your own and fail to sell it, lose all your money. the true function that capitalists solve within Liberal-republicanism is solving how it is even possible for everyone to follow the law and still survive, so within Liberal-republicanism _per se_, if you ever try to go against any of it and question any of its authorities capitalists can simply twist the knife and make everyone into a criminal begging for a way for everyone not to hate each other and lock each other up after various slights and injuries against each other while capitalists set the laws to whatever they want to. if blue anarchists turn the world into islands of co-ops, a similar thing is going to happen. either the elite layers of the co-op islands will link together by culture and identity and various islands of co-ops will eventually go to war over matters like Christianity and Zionism versus atheism and transgender rights, trying to fully destroy each other's cultures until one assimilates into the other, or the system will simply function more like capitalism than people intended and each of the chunks of co-ops will end up with a particular elite layer of rulers that get to do whatever they want because as long as they solve all the answers correctly there will be no crimes or wars. anarchists everywhere will get dismayed and try to claim that co-op theory was "never" real anarchism. meanwhile, judging by how Liberal-republicanism has functioned, blue anarchists will probably start coming up with conspiracy theories about why co-op theory really should have worked but it only failed because it was corrupted by pedophiles or greedy people or Europeans or Satan.

this is the appeal of Stalin. in one sense, the system created by the bourgeoisie can only really end in some kind of large-scale spatial hierarchy where the highest-status people are the people who solve how to organize society to create the smallest numbers of killings and instances of group infighting, and the people with the lowest levels of consciousness on the future development of industry are given the lowest status. the system perpetuates itself because anyone who has the slightest idea what is going on for a moment is moved out of the class of people that actually has any incentive to ensure that anything functions sensibly or stably as opposed to simply looking orderly, and when people are on top of the system they are rewarded over and over for _not failing_ as opposed to succeeding; whenever there is a failure, the people at the bottom are always the ones to "choose" to enact the consequences, which may include crime, unlawful production of restricted materials (movies, seeds, squats), or war with neighboring regions in the case of the new Russian empire. capitalism has always been a sort of terrible half-solution to the problem of preventing what imperial citizens naturally do. so when the people on top of a chunk of people in antagonism with other chunks successfully solve a historical transition, and it looks like the worldwide spatial hierarchy created by capitalism is actually snapping together to continuously create order instead of suddenly breaking, the citizens can only come to see a central party that _successfully_ solves the problem of creating order and allowing people to follow the law as brilliant. if Stalin and Mao somehow solve the problem of creating what essentially resembles a worldwide kingdom made out of tiny provinces, then it would seem like anything people might think of as "democracy" can follow. countries across the world have repeatedly created kingdoms and then turned them into Liberal republics, so in that sense democracy and the existence of a stable national population would seem to be orthogonal to each other, compatible but existing on entirely different levels.

the problem with that thinking is, as described above, that the layer of Marxist theorists tends not to unify. before even getting into purely practical decisions like North Korea attempting to look unaffiliated with other countries to not get in trouble, countries can start splitting apart as soon as Mao and Kim Il-sung have different models of what socialism is. why? this all goes back to the inherent power held by Marxist theorists coming from solving war. wars, crimes, and general violent conflicts between political factions are all similar. every time a group of capitalists unifies or a cluster of Marxist theorists unifies onto the same prediction for the socio-economic shape of a society, all of these unifications work toward the same general problem of preventing war. but this means that if factions inside a particular workers' state are not functioning together one will be pressured to eliminate the other. this also means that if capitalism and Stalinism happen to exist alongside each other, the need to keep people ordered will collide with the inherent instability of juxtaposing capitalism in its Liberal-republican form with the new structures within Stalin's Marxism. capitalism proper will try to put pressure on commodities from workers' states, hitting all the workers beneath each one, and Stalinism will push back on Liberal-republicanism trying to weaken the capitalists' government, although it can only push lightly. while a Stalinist state holds the power to crush pro-capitalist movements inside it, it holds no real power over the ability of US capitalists to solve for new innovations that temporarily prevent horizontal violence while all the best law-followers proceed to write all the laws. this means that capitalists still hold the power to control agorist processes and begin setting all kinds of arbitrary criteria selecting out Stalinist products as if they were useless. retailers, manufacturers accepting raw materials, national trade commissions that happen to have an agenda, and so forth can both reject products directly, and create worldwide trade agreements to carry it out internationally. this, in its own particular way, is an act of war — if violence is normally stopped by orderly enterprises operating together, then deliberately preventing enterprises from connecting can only breed instability and possibly violence. but, the world's collective body of capitalist-headed corporations has control over the very links that hold society together, and at what point people join society, and at what point they are not considered human. it defines the boundaries of the concepts of coercion, aggression, cheating, and stealing; it defines the basic shape of all acceptable or unacceptable social behavior; it defines what is Good or Evil. if all the capitalists in the world desperately wanted to define trans women entering bathrooms as aggression, they'd eventually break up every government and dissolve every ethnic group that allowed it. for capitalists the definition of aggression is fundamentally arbitrary and amounts to whatever soup of words their favorite philosophers cooked up. but as a result, nationality, ethnicity, language, and demographic identity themselves are deemed "optional" things that people get to have as a treat only if they first obey every existing capitalist. every day there is pressure on people to migrate out of the Third World into the First World, sometimes because "China is too oppressive", sometimes because countries are poor, sometimes because countries are still partly medieval, but always with a challenge that _the United States is better than you_. Stalinism may be a failure, but the alternative is people entirely stripping themselves of their humanity and turning themselves into products, striving for nothing but to be the most useful product to the first country that will agree to use and exploit them. largely thanks to the United States, there are particular average prices associated with White people, Black people, and Indic people that can be expected to be high or low, and racism is kind of just _true_ now. what's the price for a Kazakh person? not very high? you'd better get to raising it by moving to another continent or else everyone will think that's the entire value of your ethnicity.

capitalism is, in reality, just a bunch of living, breathing _beasts_ fighting each other daily to see how much of nature they can scoop up for themselves. at certain times, the division between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is almost illusory. capitalism can begin without any such division, as simply a bunch of the most "elite" and "qualified" individuals joining together in a ring to decide which people are the most capable of extracting and using surrounding resources. the decision of which individuals are allowed to work somewhere or allowed to own business territories is inherently social, agreed on by a layer of winners who have collectively divided up all the spaces and tasks inside a town, but once somebody is placed into the peripheral area of losers those people have no say in what the winners decide, and the only way they have of influencing society is by being the very best at some specialized craft to the point of being better than anyone else. merely being good at something isn't enough. they really must be the most superior people in the area at a particular arbitrary discipline to the point of making other people inferior, at which point they will gain popularity and become able to participate in the social activity of making unshakable decisions about society with other experts. Idealism is the philosophy of the privileged; obedience and complete intolerance of imperfection in every aspect of life is the reality of the younger generations.

some may try to say that capitalism is created by an act of prejudice, in which the layer of experts deliberately decides that it would be "a good idea" to expel demographic minorities from their settlements. this is not the reality of how capitalism functions. capitalism begins at either the concept that all resources are obtained in transactions of equal value (_agorism_, in the economic sense) or the concept that towns will be based on laws and will only consist of people who follow the law (which might be termed _political Kantianism_). the latter system is unshakable. the moment a town fills up with people and any more people attempt to come in, any attempt by an anarchist to disturb commodities or territories under some concept that "laws are culturally fabricated and arbitrary" is going to be met with some of the most vitriolic and violent behavior imaginable as the people in the town point to the inherent sanctity of Kantian ethical constructs such as _non-stealing_ and _non-tresspassing_, or if they are especially educated, the concept of _populational relativism_ and the value of respecting and coexisting with other countable cultures an individual does not belong to, regardless of whether that individual belongs to a different one or belongs to nothing. Marxists may like to say that towns are founded on the _class rule of the bourgeoisie_ within a region, but on the ground, that is not necessarily an accurate characterization sociologically. when people believe Idealist philosophies, the category of philosophies that believe ideologies genuinely cause themselves, they have _no idea_ they are creating a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". all they know is that they are a group of socially-linked friends (if only the most elite ones) that will do anything to protect their friends. the existence of laws is unshakable, unless you want to make thousands and thousands of people severely angry at a small number of people all at once. this is the origin of states — sociality, love, and friendship. a state forms when a group of people has completely taken up an area to the point no more people will fit in it, and human sociality inverts itself so that everything about it only applies to a limited population of people defending themselves against the outside. a state is not a centralized locus of power sitting far away in a mayor's office or a capital city, but the entire structure permeating across all individuals that holds together a spatially finite and countable population. it is very important that anarchists learn this. while Peter Kropotkin can go on and on about "mutual aid" as a factor in evolution spanning across the overall ecological timeline from herd animals to humans, it is actually forms of sociality and mutual assistance that ultimately create hierarchy, exclusion, and states. all hierarchy of one demographic identity over another within a population begins at the fact that towns and cities have limited space that becomes increasingly differentiated into specific finite career slots, and all prejudice begins at the fact that individuals must plan their entire existences around which slots they can or cannot fit into. that other surrounding people would immediately start guessing at where all the people around them are or are not going to end up and which ones are "fit for" particular positions is only the obvious outcome within a form of society where every single individual benefits from trying to get them or their immediate social connections into all the slots before the people they don't like in order to create maximum ethical behavior across society and maximum social harmony.

perhaps universities everywhere should stop giving prejudices special names after exactly what they appear to be excluding, and just admit that all of them are manifestations of a single prejudice called Everybodyism. after all, nobody would have any incentive to claim that it was unimportant and irrelevant to them if they were forced to confront the _material reality_ that Everybodyism does in fact affect _everybody_.

to some extent, looking at capitalism from such a big-picture view is more of "a fun diversion from Marxism" than an actual Marxist perspective — helpful for the purposes of understanding what kinds of rhetoric Liberal-republicans actually need to hear, but not the clearest possible angle that will aid the most in constructing a new proletarian society. by no longer centering any infra-Marxism as the only possible viewpoint, meta-Marxism has opened up strange new possibilities for telling _any_ philosophy how to reach any particular goal the most effectively. but as long as that "particular goal" is solidly staked on the task of building a new society out of the proletariat, it will still tend to pull all philosophies toward the same conclusion. no matter what, capitalism or agorism or political Kantianism is the same collection of material objects that can only evolve into new shapes in a few directions, ultimately headed toward the same crises, and where society as a whole can only be rescued from those crises by a small number of possible solutions.

let us take a moment to consider how people have historically changed classes. there used to be a class called the nobility. in various critical periods, the nobility were important in creating the borders of internal states or imminently dividing kingdoms, but now that process does not meaningfully exist. what has replaced them? now local-states in the United States and Europe have dedicated government bureaucracies that belong to no one, and each state in the United States has a governor. how did that happen? you see so many people today claiming that it is impossible to replace capitalists with government ministries because the system would surely be too bloated, and it must have never been a good idea. but you never really see anyone saying that Liberal-republicanism is so inefficient that the nobility were better than governors or state governments. that kind of rhetoric may have happened for some 50 years after Liberal republics were first created, and then was seemingly never seen again. so what makes capitalists different? periodically, you even see Tories getting upset about capitalists, simply refering to billionaires through other bizarre narratives that may include such characters as "Satan" or "aliens" or "the Illuminati". ultimately nobody really wants capitalists in control of making so many arbitrary decisions about civilization, _including capitalists_. but it would seem that to rid society of capitalists and remove them from each country's social structure, they would need to be replaced with some other structure capable of only performing a capitalist's most necessary functions.

here I think it is valuable to take a detour and talk about television show directors. while audiovisual media have provided some of the nastiest examples of everything capitalism allows big corporations to get away with, from putting strict regulations on all public online communication to the actual abuse of actors used in productions, there is something amazing about TV shows that often goes unappreciated. for a while, television networks were acting as such centralized repositories of activity that they were almost halfway abolishing capitalism. networks would hire directors, and the directors would essentially be responsible for developing entire products from start to finish and putting together teams that would resemble very small corporations. but the directors did not own any business property. capitalism had created a new absurdity of basically hiring people to do everything capitalists do and giving them basically none of the benefits of actually being capitalists. the reason everyone went along with this, of course, was that another group of capitalists at the top was operating normally and giant corporations could skim a bit of earnings off each project as a whole. but either way, capitalism was developing and changing and exposing new problems that had never been encountered before. now, capitalists did not have to show up with capital themselves for new business territories and job slots to be created, and large enough corporations could simply create more business territories without external competition. the large corporations did not have to find people with money to be an audience, because they found other large corporations to pay for their TV networks by being advertisers. large corporations had almost turned themselves into a kind of perpetual motion machine, but the only real problem was that they had to decide how to use limited airtime and limited studio space, so they made the decision to put current and potential directors all into competition with each other through a system of favoring the directors that either made them the most money or got the best ratings. capitalism's central problem, the division of industry into finite slots as it filled up all available space, had struck again. but it had also transformed — what had become apparent was that the process of creating new business territories and the process of different production structures and cities making market connections were inherently correlated. occasionally, you will now hear some peripheral economists speak of an "agora", which is a kind of uncontrolled open gap in society where various businesses or individuals make various kinds of connections arbitrarily. an economic or purely-relational "market". before big corporate TV networks, smaller businesses operated openly floating around inside agoras. But after big corporate TV networks, the agora had become enclosed and managed by the large corporation. Agoras had been exposed as part of the mechanism that granted smaller businesses free-floating business territories, because when the agora was successfully closed up, people that would have been owners would turn into workers. But the problem hadn't entirely been solved, because after large corporations would fence in agoras and seemingly own and control them, the agora would still re-emerge inside. The finite space inside any particular area of industry was creating a problem where because the world outside the large corporation was still too big and unknown to plan for, the people outside the corporation would still have to decide whether they had use for any particular group of workers inside it. Between the large corporation and the outside world, there was an agora, and the agora was a space where the outside world was hiring and firing workers and deciding whether they got to pay their rent and live in any particular town according to whether their choice of craft and level of performance was perfect. As capitalism slowly got closer to going away, it got harsher on workers and it clamped down on its inherent prejudice.

In 1917, approximately 18 years before the first public demonstration of electronic television, the Soviet Union would abolish capitalists and Liberal-republicanism. One of the most notable social transformations in the Soviet Union was mandatory employment. This meant enterprises in general were required to hire people and prevent unemployment; I have seen many people get this concept wrong and claim it was a requirement on workers, including a few Marxists, but it was in fact a requirement on industry and hiring. The creation of mandatory or full employment has the consequence that instead of workers being completely wasted by not being assigned to any workplace anywhere, some people will be assigned to workplaces where it seems as if they are not needed. This is the same "internal agora" effect from capitalism slowly coming back. A city or union republic can maintain control over all its workplaces and ensure that they don't become autonomous governments — which, as it should be noted by all anarchists, you _don't want_ because any autonomous cluster of co-ops can fill up with anti-gay anti-Muslim anti-Chinese Tories any day of the week — but even when all workplaces are taken out of competition there comes to be a problem of actually distributing workers to the correct cities and industries to properly get the most use out of them. This is not a matter of "free will"; it cannot be. If it were true that individual decisions allocated workers perfectly to their most productive use, then nobody in the United States would ever need welfare programs of any kind because they would all have chosen such an effective position they would all be earning some amount of money over their desired minimum. Nobody has ever seen capitalism function like that, at modern levels of technology and consumption. It has never existed. So there is a real and possibly still-unsolved problem of how to put workers in exactly the correct places inside a society, within whatever safe window of error exists, so that the overall body of workers can all be productive enough to meet society's current needs and have time to experiment with placing some of the most peripheral workers into new enterprises or teams if there are any more requirements for products to be invented or new versions to be made. There is a lot of Idealist language being thrown around about this currently, about how displaced skilled workers have to "find new ways to make meaning" in our "new" existentialist dystopia, or how society should practice the Ideals of "empathy" and "community" to achieve more social programs, or how "we" (who are we?) chose to leave increasing numbers of empty houses instead of practicing the mere abstract Ideal of an efficiently organized society. Nobody seems to understand the frighteningly large scope of exactly what is wrong and what needs to be fixed. People often seem to assume that a bit of voting at sporadic locations and infrequent times or alternatively a system capable of replacing the day-to-day administrative tasks of capitalists within individual enterprises would be enough to fix everything. Marx himself spent rather long passages focusing on the concept of surplus value and how if the gap between material productivity and wages could be brought down to nothing but the actual administrative costs to keep various enterprises and institutions running, society would have more latitude to make any number of decisions about which things to produce where and which new things to create. This concept that capitalists collecting surplus value is the most important feature of capitalism can be misleading. The moment the surplus value gap goes away, the new problem that comes up that is very much not a trivial problem is how to allocate every worker to the correct place in society (or societies...) based on what begins as a complicated disorganized sea of people as opposed to a few well-defined loci of control. "Government by all the people" sounds great but it fundamentally requires the creation of ongoing coordination and structure between a great number of people in a way that does not currently exist.

I will conclude this overview of capitalism with an analogy that sounds vague but that (I hope) is actually profound. If people were nothing more than a series of dots moving across a sheet of paper a bit like on a _Sternhalma_ board (the star shaped checker-board where marbles are always moving in parts of triangles) and the goal was to move all the dot-people to the next corporation box over until all the corporations were packed optimally, one of the best things you could do to make the problem easier would be to make the board infinite. If you were to take the sheet of paper and curl it up into a cylinder, or impossibly distort it into a perfect sphere, then the whole problem of packing the people would basically turn into a "Hilbert hotel" problem where the options available seem infinite. In the study of infinite sets, there is something called Hilbert's infinite hotel, and this hypothetical object became famous because in our everyday experience a hotel "shouldn't" have an extra room open if an infinite number of rooms is already full. But given a particular definition of infinity, all the guests already in the hotel can simply move over one room to leave open an extra room. The simplest way to see this definition of infinity in real life is simply whenever the boundaries of an object do not stop quite where they were expected to. When scientists placed simulated hydrogen atoms close together — which are usually expected to stop at a molecule two hydrogen atoms long — they managed to create a simulated quantum physics scenario where electrons would flow off the second hydrogen atom onto a third hydrogen atom, and then another one, creating an indefinitely-long thread of metallic hydrogen as long as the electrons kept moving off the first atom. Despite the molecules always technically being finite, the spaces for electrons would become infinite because the molecule didn't stop where it was normally expected to. In the same way, the simple "board game" version of allocating workers to corporations stops ending up with areas where workers uselessly pool onto a corporation where they are "not needed" if the workers can simply wrap around to the other side in any direction. Literally speaking, this math problem would probably apply to things like redirected shipments more often than workers, but if a small number of workers needed to be moved to another country, an international transitional state with the ability to relax restrictions on international migration would certainly make it easier.

An imperialist makes a big deal out of the fact European armies can show the world is round. A vulgar materialist tries to focus in on tiny regions and make the world flat again. A Marxist eventually discovers that it is easier to bring all the various sections of the world economy into conscious and cooperative control of each other if they all remember the world is round.

== Trotskyism and {{game|Deltarune}} ==

I have to confess that because I learned Marxism in such an oddly specific way — skipping over some of Marx and Engels to focus on Lenin and Stalin's era, applying meta-Marxist models to news events or generalized models of historical periods, comparing everything to the conflict between Stalin's party and early Trotskyism — there is a lot of basic Marxist terminology I don't know that I will frequently "reinvent" in different words and become confused "why no Marxist has ever talked about this" when actually there is at least one person who has. For the longest time I was confused on what a {{dfn|cadre}} was referring to even though I actually had the basic idea jotted down under words like "Lattice model", "filtration", and "Marxist theorist". I understood the concept of setting down "Marxist theorists" to expand organizations ("going into the marsh", as Lenin put it) and how they could only do it if they had a good Materialist understanding of how historical situations functioned, but the way I tended to see things was to point out Marxist theorists or advanced workers and categorize them into swatch colors by their level of knowledge, so that over a region of space "Lattices" were forming based on having a frame of red theorists or a frame of orange theorists rising out of the background mass of blue-aligned people. I think what my experiences have taught me is that there actually are multiple ways to learn Marxism and that applying models to really understand how the models behave can be more helpful than just memorizing things. It's one thing to know a list of events and what terms mean, and it's another thing to be someone who is good enough at Marxist theory to look at some new chewed-up form of terminology that has come out of workers who haven't read theory but do have practical experience and say, "oh wait, this is actually talking about Marxist concepts X, Y, and Z, so the workers really do know what they're doing; I'm going to open up my wiki entry on Marxist cadres and write down the phrase 'Lattice model'". I'm personally fine with going back and learning the traditional terms for the purpose of making any articles I write make more sense, but I think this is an important thing to remember in terms of identifying what class consciousness or consciousness that can form a Fourth International looks like out in the field. Proletarian consciousness is almost "mathematical" in a way, existing a bit below the level of language and more in the form of {{em|imagery}} of objects interacting materially.

In this sense, Western-Marxists in the orbit of Mark Fisher and Stuart Hall who will try to act like the arts and the overall phenomenon of all fictional or non-fictional media are critically important to understanding society and the spread of clear versus unclear forms of consciousness (bourgeois ideology versus Materialism) are not entirely wrong, because in a tiny, vanishingly-small fraction of cases, progressive factions within society will express legitimate Materialist knowledge in highly metaphorical forms either because they don't know how to better express it or because any concrete form of expressing it has been so forbidden this is the only form they can get away with saying out loud. Here my mind goes to the incident in Lenin's writings where underground publications in Russia kept quietly talking about roosters and suns. This is an old practice that dates back to the times of alchemy with alchemists quietly hiding chemical equations in mythical pictures, but it can still be seen today in some remote corners of the internet. One thing I have increasingly become convinced of recently is that the more fantasy works containing "superstructural fantasy worlds" are created to talk about LGBT+ self-discovery and social circles, the closer each of these works inches toward Communism, and even toward Trotskyism — while early works in this genre like {{book|The Chronicles of Narnia}} and {{film|Toy Story}} had absolutely nothing to do with either gay people or Marxism, something seems to have happened by the time LGBT people found {{film|The Wizard of Oz}} where they all started slowly realizing that adventure narratives as described in Jung are something of an illusion and the quest of those three protagonists to become "someone better" was only a quest to better understand the existing reality of living in their own material bodies, and by 2017, gay and transgender people had caused entire console role-playing games to exist which were essentially about rejecting the adventure narrative monomyth as a model of reality and {{em|embracing historical materialism}} as the only way characters can possibly "win" at history in the midst of a cruel, godless reality. You'd have to see it to believe it, but as a recent chapter of the game came out I was floored by the messages that were accidentally being conveyed by {{game|Undertale}} and {{game|Deltarune}}. The vast majority of people casually reviewing these games online had not been able to pick up on the dense themes the second game was actually burying inside itself, but when I saw the fifth chapter I could tell the concepts internally driving the narrative were in fact more complex than those people thought. To make a long story shorter, {{game|Deltarune}} is adapting "Theses on Feuerbach" — or at least Feuerbach's {{book|Essence of Christianity}}, one of the two — and because queer people are so tired of capitalism they all lined up for an essentially-Communist console RPG. I am not sure {{game|Deltarune}}'s writer even knows what he's done. But the closer you look at the story you start to see it as a fable about how the whole industrial world is now just one big sea of competing islands of proletarians, or islands of small businesses, and living in it is pain, and everyone is tired of it, and all the islands need to join up and stop believing the internal mythology that says they need to be separate, or else the world will face the common ruin of everything. It doesn't {{em|state}} "on a planetary scale" but within the specific narrative context everything appears in it is so close to saying it that I don't think that matters. {{game|Deltarune}} is the most thinly-veiled appeal toward Trotskyism I have ever seen capitalism produce and it has really made me feel like the link between LGBT+ people and Materialism in everyday life should be studied more. The United States has very few people friendly to "Marxism", "Leninism", or even "Materialism", but it does now have a shocking number of people who are friendly to {{film|The Matrix}} and are now essentially using these films and other versions of the same narrative as a Marxist reading list. As strange as it is to say it out loud, I feel like the ICFI may need to study the underlying processes that produced that.

I do have my own thoughts. Among the world's populations, the shape of a population predisposes it to certain formulations of Marxism. Some of these correlations amount to failures in consciousness — populations close to the shape of a newly-formed kingdom will tend to falsely assume that characteristics of feudal societies are either a normal baseline state of being or unique to them. But there are other populations that are doing something more interesting. Countries that develop First World capitalisms tend to eventually develop LGBT+ movements or subcultures, and each time these populations appear they begin to link together across the world and share the same experiences back and forth, slowly forgetting that they even belong to different countries, and becoming confused on why there isn't an equal amount of progress on their issues in all countries. It used to be believed, especially in the Third World, that LGBT "communities" mostly represented a political movement of people who did not understand Marxism linking together across the world to try to reach capitalists, who all just happened to be gay. But now it has come to be better understood that people can form a new population at any time without their separation having started for economic reasons, and that the shape of LGBT populations is really best described as a plurality of small minority subpopulations isolated by social processes and with economic hardship forced on them from the outside that have joined together through new processes such as the internet to attempt to form something similar but not identical to a nationality.

I once read an article on Left Voice (a federated, international news outlet) which was put out in 2021 that was arguing for transgender rights within a framework of the historical transitions between patriarchal agrarian societies and urban societies, and until recently this article had stuck in my mind as "one of the best Trotskyist articles I've ever seen", but funny enough, I don't actually think it chose the right line of argument. I think a better line of argument would actually be to point out that LGBT+ subpopulations are always so small within their own respective countries that Liberal-republicanism is effectively rigged against queer people ever having rights, but due to these subpopulations being a repeated pattern that keeps popping up in every population, the LGBT+ population naturally tends toward attempting to form political parties on a large scale and create an international state. It sounds ridiculous to say this, but — particularly in its "family-friendly" forms that are already palatable to the center-Liberal press and bourgeois parliaments — gay culture might be one of the most inherently Trotskyist things there ever was. With enough effort you can put together a nationally-scoped, essentially-Stalinist argument about historical transitions, and for scientifically-minded people that will probably land, but the actual shape of LGBT+ subcultures on the ground as they come into being and struggle for their existence genuinely looks less like a single isolated population going through history on its own than it does a miniature Fourth International. This is my best guess as to the social dynamics that were actually going on to produce {{game|Deltarune}}. The fact that works like this are "gay" or "trans" is everything; while every human population begins with particular characteristics, and the world contains many nationality-based populations that function reasonably well when they develop as isolated states, the global LGBT+ population may be one of the first identified coherent human populations to actually start out containing "Trotskyist country characteristics" that predispose it to shed hard national borders and embrace Trotskyism. (Arguably, two other partial examples are Western Europe and Yugoslavia. Writers like Slavoj Žizek like to go around implying that Yugoslavia was not going to develop Bolshevism because the way it sharded apart was some kind of consequence of "national will", but this kind of claim really depends on what limits you set on "Bolshevism" and whether you are willing to define it as the joining together of distinct nations.)

== Trotsky and Deng ==

So, in the first few sections I casually brought up the strange hypothetical of Trotskyism and Stalinism coexisting side-by-side, neither interfering with the other, as separate bordered political entities. To people as knowledgeable on the history of Trotskyism as the ICFI, I can see why at first glance basically nothing about this concept would make sense. And by now, even I have to agree. But, for the sake of the historical record and giving everyone a better understanding of Stalinism, it is worth laying out exactly how I came to conceptualize things that way.

A lot of my early thoughts on "Marxisms coexisting" were direct responses to Cold War rhetoric. My mind would go back to 1930 and think, _but if I'm in the United States, the United States attacking the Soviet Union was the wrong decision_, and as if I had a time machine I would feel like I had to defend Stalin so that today's Russians wouldn't have to suffer the destruction of all democracy and a lack of affordable health care. I would look at China or Cuba or North Korea and I would think to myself, _sure, I wouldn't really want to live there, but I'm also not a Third World peasant, so the people in those countries seeing the social transformations they did must have been amazing for them_. I was thoughtful about the wants and needs of people in other countries, and I always tried to avoid simply eternalizing the exact conditions of the United States and transferring all the things that are currently happening in the United States' unique historical period onto them. I was convinced for a while, incorrectly, that Trotskyists "didn't think like this" and whenever the United States and Europe went around spreading rhetoric that Third World countries were merely behind them in history and letting other countries flood in and herd their people into First World businesses was the solution that Trotskyists didn't actually care and were simply waiting around for global empire to scoop up and assimilate everyone into "The West" so they could avoid having to deal with rival forms of Marxism they didn't understand and have the initial country characteristics they wanted to ensure that the form of Marxism they only subjectively believed to be superior happened first. I generally saw Trotskyists as "unwitting imperialists" with false consciousness about the Third World, so when I would see talks or articles that actually said Trotskyists should _defend_ Cuba my first reaction was intense skepticism — "they still continue to say that Stalinism is bad and they don't want it to exist, so when they claim to care about Cuba, are they just lying to make themselves look good?". My perceptions of Trotskyists had largely been very negative, because the fact that people turning against the Soviet Union had ultimately brought such horrific outcomes while every moment people stood with Stalin's allies had at least delayed those outcomes had colored my entire mental concept of what a Trotskyist was capable of thinking or knowing. And yet, in spite of that, I didn't hate Trotskyists. At every moment on the historical timeline what I saw was Trotsky making some kind of effort to understand Leninism and be part of the Russian Revolution or try to create more Marxist parties in Europe or Mexico; I'd heard about so many of Trotsky's errors and Luxemburg's crude-sounding positions but I knew they weren't reactionaries. So I was confused for a while what Stalinists even had against them. If they were just a bit less talented at Marxism and tended to distort things, wouldn't the sensible position be to simply try to give them ways to help the overall national movement or Stalinist republic out of sight of its central positions of authority? Stalinists would often repeat at people new to Marxism that it was important to not become an ultraleft and to be able to analyze non-Marxist movements such as alliances between social-democratic parties and workers' movements so that Marxist theorists could "go into the marsh" and build bridges between all potential Marxists. So I couldn't understand how Trotskyists were the enemy if they were simply a bit bad at Marxism, and why you wouldn't simply start that "marsh process" over at the beginning of a workers' state to try to turn all the remaining bourgeois progressive movements and distortions of Marxism into Marxism and make use of existing historical elements to get the workers' state to cohere together.

I had taken everything I'd learned so far at that time and had spun this unique new narrative that Stalin was a sensible defender of the Russian Revolution and Trotsky tended to get things wrong but actually when Trotsky wrote his criticism of the Soviet Union's failure to get an upsettingly-long list of features of the 14 republics through socialist transition, it was just some kind of misunderstanding where Trotsky was dissatisfied with the way the CPSU was doing things and somehow if somebody just _went and attended to those things_ everything would have been okay. Marxism is the study of the developmental stages of societies and the best ways to construct government, so surely if Trotsky was a Marxist and he had at least some understanding of the problems in the Soviet Union he could have tried to fix a few of them himself? I was so ready to just put Trotsky back into the Soviet party apparatus and turn him into a bureaucrat "if he'd only behave", or into the concentric system of soviets somewhere so he could learn what was actually wrong with industry and come back with a better assessment of how to begin a transformation of the entire country starting at small scales. Or failing that, I thought, put him into a different group of countries, maybe Europe, and he can simply go build Trotskyism there. The point of any particular cluster of Marxist theorists is that they solve what civilization is supposed to look like and as they are doing it people put down structures to realize that civilization. So maybe Trotsky didn't have quite the correct schema for the Soviet Union but if you sent him to Europe (and assume he somehow assembled a party that could defeat the Axis powers), maybe he would be better at solving Europe. I noticed this odd recurring theme in Trotsky's works that it vaguely seemed like he was very dissatisfied with the Soviet Union, for reasons that he himself admitted were connected to it being a backward Third World country, but didn't seem to have as many bad things to say about the United States or Europe given that those countries, unimpeded by their own imperialism, were already developing more smoothly. So my logical conclusion had been that Trotsky must simply be tired of Third World countries and prefer countries or clusters of nationalities with more First-World characteristics. I was big on the idea of "country characteristics". I thought that had to be one of the explanations of why Trotskyism existed. And the funny thing is that I wasn't completely wrong, because First World countries do have more globalization and interconnected economies, making them less likely to accept Stalinism. But I had taken it a bit further than it was really supposed to go, thinking that if Trotsky recognized "uneven development" and also believed in an international permanent revolution that would span "a number of countries" then it must be because he was describing the fragment of world socialist transition that would happen inside European-style country characteristics. Blockheaded analysis, yet again, but this is what happens when you try to understand the whole world and all its material contradictions from inside Stalinism.

I was a bit biased toward Mao at the time. I was halfway convinced he "had it figured out" and when he wrote that one article about making sure everybody's opinions were heard so people wouldn't disrupt the organization ("On correcting mistaken ideas in the party") he must have known the actual correct method for preventing a Left Opposition. If I couldn't understand why Trotsky created the Fourth International, then surely he must have done it because all the existing Marxist parties were like a Fourth International but bigger and more successful and due to arbitrary disagreements that had physically split the two instances of Marxism apart early Trotskyism was simply trying to start the same thing over again smaller with far too few people. Because I didn't understand the difference between a Third International and a Fourth International, I was stuck on this weird theory that if somehow Mao hadn't allowed China to turn its back on the Third International that somehow he could have seen the division between Stalinism and Trotskyism coming and fixed the entire problem. I'm not sure why I attributed so much theoretical mastery to Mao when I knew he never stopped the arrival of Deng Xiaoping and I even knew that Dengists in China were now making a habit of claiming that everything they were doing was consistent with Mao. I guess I simply chalked that one up to typical revisionist methods, because growing up in the United States I'd seen an absurd number of different distortions of Marxism that would always try to argue that a few people forming a cooperative or a cluster of actual frontier settlers forming an anarcho-syndicalist civilization in Israel or a perfect Menshevik party that actually manages to regulate capitalists through parliament was _exactly_ what was said in Marx. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether people in various situations across history were giving an inaccurate account of Marxist parties they didn't belong to, or a perfectly accurate account of revisionist tendencies passed down from old traditional revisionist standbys that just mysteriously happened to be told in the first person.

In the very beginning around 2020 I was still largely standing on top of bourgeois philosophical frameworks, not really believing them sincerely, but trying to see if I could find ways to twist them toward an honest analysis of Marxism instead of a distorted analysis of Liberal-republicanism. I liked to play around with the concept of bourgeois ethics and the concepts of Good and Evil. Those seemed at first glance to be completely inadequate for explaining why the Cold War had happened, but when PragerU dropped a video in 2015 about how Trotsky supposedly proved US imperialism (!), that video really stuck in my mind for a while as one of the funniest and most obviously-incorrect things I'd ever seen. (I actually made an edit of that video where I had Bret Stephens giving a satirical "Trotskyist talk" that included all the most quintessentially "baffling" things I'd heard Trotskyists say, as well as a few Stalinist talking points I put in there so that the joke wouldn't be hating on Trotskyism as much as replicating the feel of an IMT talk that seems to toss around a bunch of irrelevant complaints and then end up at a good conclusion.) Sometimes I would set up scenarios where because Liberal-republicans believe in standpoint epistemology they can't defend Trotsky without asking what Trotsky actually wants and then they become obligated to realize a Fourth International; sometimes I would take the concept of some 40% of US people believing in a god and set up a scenario where if something resembling the bible god exists then Trotsky would have to have gone somewhere when he died but if the US believes God sided against Stalinism and the Soviet Union believes God sided with Stalinism and everyone believes something different about Trotsky, where he went would become a total paradox because you can't be in separation from God and not in separation from God at the same time. I didn't take those particular scenarios very seriously. One thing I took a little more seriously was the Liberal-republican concept of intersectionality and the notion of _conglomerate anarchies_ that had grown up around it. (My term.)

Within the United States there has been this gap between the promises of Liberal-republicanism of granting human rights to everybody just because the Constitution says every individual in the country has human rights and has human rights separately and in parallel, and the reality of actually trying to organize civil rights movements and seeing that there is no actual incentive for any of them to cooperate with each other outside the fact that _Tories hate all of them_. In this weird way, all progress in the United States is driven by utter hatred and no progress occurs without hatred, only different minority demographics radially oppressing each other and regenerating each other's oppression. Anarchists will do everything to cover up the real nature of this process. They'll tell you that the radial oppression wouldn't occur if people just practiced the Ideal of intersectionality. They'll tell you that the natural state of human beings is for all demographics to live in harmony and Tories are the only ones who spontaneously invented Prejudice on a Thursday. They'll tell you that Communists don't understand how to be human and only a community free of scientific analysis of communities and formed out of the passion of the moment is a real community. They'll appeal to incomprehensible concepts of Rhizome and groups of people never consisting of individuals and being totally uncountable, all inherently clumping inward and inward like iron and lead atoms increasingly crunching all the heavy atoms around them into a black hole.
They'll... just go make a bunch of videos about _Pokémon_ that they think are not political but are actually all an unconscious way of expressing their desire for 18 abstract Ideals (Pokémon types) that constantly fight and compete with each other to always have been designed to live in harmony as necessary indivisible parts of a single cosmic Creation. This is more or less what people think the United States _is_ — a perfect indivisible conglomerate of different but perfectly parallel identities that _just happen_ not to destroy each other in a way that is inexplicable and incomprehensible but also natural and sacred. In medieval Europe people used to speak of "hierarchy" as this concept that kings, nobles, and clergy believed that the pyramidal order they had created was holy. Now it seems like that concept has shifted a bit so that the god of the 21st Century is Arceus the world-god, and the sacred order handed down by Arceus is many local competing islands which are ruled not by specific individual owners but by the simple agreement by any possible decision-making representative of the island that they will all remain islands competing with the world outside them but they will all live in harmony. What do you call such a "voluntary agreement"? There are few reasonable things to call that other than using the word _anarchy_ in a way that is completely upsetting to anarchists. Hierarchy has already yielded to anarchy, but has become it "in the wrong way".

This sets the stage for why I felt compelled to see the overall world as a vaguely static system and make everything "coexist". Some forms of anarchism — admittedly still not every one of them — have been taken up as the weapon of Liberal-republicanism such that U.S. people are being relentlessly assaulted every day with _two_ bourgeois ideologies that each have their own harsh consequences if not obeyed; Liberal-republicanism and anarchism have lined up side-by-side and are now just one big comprehensive system of formal and informal government that take turns doing hired jobs for each other, and to say the least, it's getting tiring.

Thus, after being fed the line that _center-Liberals and anarchists have to coexist and center-Liberals and kulaks had to coexist and trans people and alleged rapists with a sky-colored letter on their name tag have to coexist and literally everyone who isn't Donald Trump has to coexist but J.K. Rowling and Rebecca Sugar can't coexist but Communists and Kropotkinists and Arceus-loving agorists have to coexist and every country and every other country has to coexist unless they're Deng Xiaoping explicitly telling countries to coexist_ for 27 years straight, you can see why my head was spinning and I simply had to start sorting out the whole puzzle in a methodical, logical way _immediately_ before I had any real time to gather up all the necessary background reading an "Orthodox" Marxist usually needs. I would do the readings at the pace I could but I had a very urgent need to actually calculate through the complicated math problem of which people in society I was actually obligated to obey the ethical imperatives of to successfully gain any allies and which people were just knocking me around. I no longer believe the phrase "The Left" (or "leftists") means anything whatsoever. What philosophy people align with says very little about whether you can trust them. It's almost more accurate to say people are just plain garbage wherever you go and the only thing anyone can actually believe in is the Materialist analysis of society and the prospect that if you take accurate observations of reality it will reward you for correct predictions. When anarchists and Tories were both becoming insufferable and actually impossible to talk to, I retreated into my "lair" behind a sizable shelf of dragons and math books and I just started writing down every statement I could ever remember anarchists saying, every statement I could ever remember Trotskyists saying, every statement I could remember center-Liberals saying, every statement I remembered from Tories, every statement I remembered from Dengists, and every statement I could remember coming from Stalinists, and I stopped judging them based on my own desires and simply started asking, "okay, but what does this statement _actually mean_?". I knew that there was no chance in _hell_ that all of these contradictions between different philosophies were ever going to work themselves out through discussion and "community". So I was going to solve them using some form of mathematical reasoning. I was going to just take all these groups of people and solve them so I could stop retreating away from all people since the year 2020 and one day come out of my house. I wasn't going to be picky any more. Anarchists said "we aren't going to tolerate Stalin"? Okay. Trotskyists said "you can't create socialism in one country"? All right, I'm writing it down. Stalinists said "Trotskyists are liars and you can't trust them"? Okay, I'm adding that too. Maoists said "Deng enabled the bureaucracy"? Got it. Center-Liberals said "regulations are Actually magic spells that absolutely _Penrose-world-line_ capitalists into inevitably perfecting Liberalism"? Nasty; it's recorded. I was so angry and tired, but I wasn't one to direct my anger toward hurting people. The only revenge I knew was to maliciously comply with what everyone said until I had given them exactly what they asked for but given it to them so precisely they were disconcerted and upset. And this was the condition I was in when trying to solve Trotskyism. It felt like it was the only philosophy that hadn't already abused me, but I was quite used to human societies in general being hazardous and unreasonable and I was fully prepared for it to be just like the rest of them and ultimately stop just a few unsolved contradictions short of making sense. I'd come up with an entire scheme of existential materialism to "objectify" human beings and reduce all groups of people to semi-deterministic processes almost resembling computations. I was ready to just accept that people were more physical and chemical-like, driven by arbitrary A × B equations that simply _led to things_, than they were reasonable actors.

So... imagine my surprise when I found out I didn't really have to do that and by trying to create "meta-Marxism" out of Stalinism I was more or less solving a problem that Stalinism had set up.

Within the past year or so of developing my framework for analyzing all philosophies starting at their surface claims and evident social links with other philosophies, I had to ask myself the seemingly strange question of whether Deng Xiaoping Thought is actually a form of anarchism. At first this would seem like a silly question, because anarchism tells you it's against states and Deng Xiaoping Thought is a statist system. But here's the thing about that: anarchism lies to you by constantly resorting to Liberal-republican civil rights legislation enforced by the same state and cops it hates, and Deng Xiaoping Thought fundamentally believes that the correct path for a nation-state is whatever brings nation-states out of domination and into harmony. This is very, very similar to the things typical United States anarchists say. So is Deng Xiaoping Thought a form of what anarchism actually is, or is anarchism a variation on Dengism? I now realize that if anything you get better insights by looking at it the latter way around. There are at least two kinds of anarchism, the "charcoal" kind that is practiced by nameless ordinary people and the "blue" kind that is practiced by various different academics including David Graeber (much of this can also be termed _agorism_), and blue anarchism is the revisionist wing out of the two that will certainly hand people back to capitalism. In this sense blue anarchism is the Deng Xiaoping Thought of anarchism. Just as the USFI-IMT axis is the bluest wing of Trotskyism that has ended up seeking harmony with center-Liberal Labor parties and the Tories and outright capitalists, blue anarchism seeks harmony and complementarity with all existing fragments of capitalism. To some extent this happens because of the way capitalism deliberately removed all forms of structure from kingdoms and forced people to become dependent on "structure experts" (capitalists, "Archons") to continuously solve society's structure as it would come to constantly and endlessly change. Anarchists seem to silently want to believe this naïve myth that if structure is removed from society and it is consequently "free" from all authorities that previously conflated themselves with forms of structure (nobility, clergy, Stalin, etc.) then no new structure-experts conflated with structures can ever emerge. But this myth is dangerously wrong, because it doesn't take into account the concept that a lot of these Archons actually emerge in order to _prevent_ violence. Much of the appeal of capitalism is that once capitalists fill up an area they can all tell everyone exactly how to live their lives at every hour of the day and pass laws onto the entire rest of the population based on which forms of activity are recognized as conducive to capitalism and which forms of activity are "dangerous, illegal" businesses. Think for a moment about the fact that money laundering is actually just running a business, and prostitution is just running a business, and dealing drugs is just running a business, and online platforms having to worry about whether they're hosting "illegal content" is just running a business. Capitalists don't materially care whether an online platform left up a graphic beheading video or an unofficial copy of a perfectly innocuous movie or an impressive fan-made "nintendo game" — the only people they allow to remain alive and think about the workings of society are the people who thoughtlessly accept the requirement to only do the arbitrary pre-approved list of activities that are recognized as necessary organs of a world sectioned up into capitalist businesses. Capitalism is quite a totalitarian system when you think about it — if that word is to mean anything whatsoever (and there's otherwise a very decent argument to be made it's complete nonsense), then let it be applied to the fact that capitalism only spits out a lengthy constitution full of ways you're supposedly free after it has outright eliminated all humans who have not been molded and designed from their ancestry to their adulthood to be ideal capitalists from the human gene pool. Blue anarchism cannot make progress without hatred, and it cannot offer freedom without loading every social interaction with the potential for punishment and deleting all possible incorrect thoughts from society by weaponizing natural selection.

By now, I've come to understand how truly monstrous capitalism really is. First there is capitalism, which despite a lot of psychological projection around such phrases from Liberal-republicans, really does eliminate anything that doesn't agree with it. Then there is the great variety of attempts to get humanity out of capitalism, and in general, they all promise to get rid of some aspect of capitalism, thus creating the odd result that whenever they fail to do their task they will all logically end in irony by regenerating everything they said they wouldn't do. When Maoism fails to preserve Bolshevism, it "ironically" brings back all the injustices of capitalism. Likewise when the historical Militant Tendency or IMT fails to actually create any successful fissure through the surface of capitalism, it "ironically" hands power back to capitalists, and when blue anarchism has no serious strategy for breaking up the boundaries of the capitalist estate and laying down an equally powerful defense against capitalism over the same area it "ironically" begins cracking down on the presence of every individual it finds undesirable to its "small-and-local community" and viciously purging Communists from reality itself. I used to think Trotskyists were part of this great blue continuum of awful. But many people still think Stalinism is part of the continuum of awful. Are they right? The real answer is a superposition. Stalin was totally devoted to making sure that the Soviet Union would not turn blue, but Stalin's party was a failure that undeniably allowed the Soviet Union to turn strawberry, and a party cannot survive through one person. So, the merit of a Trotskyist party has to be judged by how capable it is of lifting populations — hopefully several — into a movement of a new swatch color and _out_ of the fatal sea of blue. This is the key to whether different movements can be expected to coexist. When a Marxist party appears its behavior is generally characterized by attempting to separate itself from capitalism. So, a red or orange party is inherently intolerant of a blue party. It does not bring intolerance in the form of hating that party's people, but it does bring in the reasonable requirement that blue movements do not get to link up with other blue movements to defeat Communism, and no other Marxism is allowed to let the blue movements do this either. Strawberry "Marxisms" (or, republics pretending to be Marxisms) do not uphold this barrier, so red parties and orange parties do not tolerate them. Likewise capitalists inside a strawberry government will quickly eliminate red and orange parties because those are quick to mess up their plan of linking to blue parties and putting the country back to blue (Liberal-republicanism). So, why do orange parties try to get rid of red parties? This one was the most complicated for me to try to phrase in terms of my simple diagram-friendly system. The short answer is something like that Stalin's party, ostensibly red, put up a bunch of strawberry governments. Stalin's party decided that it would attempt to extend over about half the world and then stop, and the result is that all of the edges of the Third International either turned blue themselves or conceded to blue. Parties are always in motion either toward something capitalism-approved or away from capitalism, so it was not long before this surrender at the edges swept back through the entire thing and reached the core parties that were supposed to be "protected".

So, Trotsky did care about the internal structure of a country. The color swatch system communicates this easily — to give one of the most succinct summaries possible of _The Revolution Betrayed_, Trotsky did not want _any_ countries turning strawberry. The world may or may not already have a precise understanding of how exactly it is that areas like the Soviet Union became overrun with bureaucrats (China directly handing control to its ally capitalists is more obvious), but either way he was able to leave a clear message for everyone that the effort required to get out of capitalism is almost unimaginably great. Many people are still surprised at the scope of the Soviet Union and its bloc of allies, and yet the real nightmare is realizing that _it wasn't enough_. The true level of effort required to get out of capitalism is almost unimaginable. Toward that end, Marxism does have to become more extensive and robust than it ever was before, and more capable of recognizing social phenomena on their own level such that all social phenomena that aid capitalism can be theoretically deconstructed from top to bottom so decisively that there is no way for any of them to fool anyone any longer. ("This is what Community is, this is what Rhizome is, this is what Arceus is; fiction is fiction but here is what metaphysics and Idealism are and here is why they're a problem.") Why do we need meta-Marxism? To expose every single one of the blue philosophies, and to expose the situations in which every one of them leads back to problems like infighting, stagnation, oppression of demographics, and imperialism. If anarchism is a problem, it must be exposed too, along with sophisticated but false concepts that First World countries only have to tolerate Stalinist states to make them stable — no, as long as First World countries contain substantially powerful capitalists those capitalists will inevitably take charge of the First World country and warp Stalinism into Dengism. Perhaps it's really the capitalists' fault that Stalinism historically doesn't survive, but that doesn't take away the material fact that all the capitalists and capitalist-leaning bureaucrats still have the power to join up across countries and undo everything. If capitalist-leaning bureaucrats in a strawberry government somehow figured out how to start twisting an orange party and getting _it_ to start regenerating capitalists, Trotskyists would have no reason to tolerate that either. So, inasmuch as tolerating Stalinism allows capitalists to stay in place in the First World, once a Fourth International has a chance of stopping that same outcome the Stalinist party more or less has to go. This "risky" transition from crimson or strawberry to orange becomes okay when there is reason to believe the Fourth International really can overwrite the red party with a functioning orange party. If Trotskyism covered two thirds of the world, not simply with parties but with something more resembling the crimson estate seen at the _very beginning_ of the Soviet Union, the remaining third would have a harder time resisting than it would joining.

I won't say I'm not still nervous about what will happen to the remaining three or so strawberry countries. Every strawberry country turning into Russia and periodically killing its neighbors is entirely possible! The more desperate and cornered a population is, the more likely it is to regenerate Duginism-Zionism — the two are nearly the same in that they both believe that poorer populations' oppression is only solved by immediately making other countries pay for it in land and blood. And who can really blame them for that choice, if history has done everything to isolate them and crush them from every angle and given them no other options? This is the danger of putting pressure on any Third World country from within other countries. Given a bit of pressure countries will burst their regimes, but given _enough_ pressure, countries will never choose self-genocide when capitalism is conveniently available instead. This brought terrible outcomes to Russia, where the set of people handed capitalism were given no incentive to join together in conglomerate anarchy and every incentive to believe in capitalism only to compete with each other to gain the most physical assets. Tell Russians to respect capitalist islands, there goes Ukraine. But one thing must be remembered: only to Communists is imperialism actually a taboo. Pressure can drive anyone else toward accepting imperialism under the rule of capitalists or outright nazism if cities worth of people dying around them is the alternative. This is approximately why feudal orders and decades- to centuries-long warring states periods happened in the first place: pressure from surrounding kingdoms that all wanted to expand encouraged everyone to support the nobility and empire for the overall population to survive.

So, I have my doubts that Trotskyism should even be spreading so much rhetoric against strawberry countries across the world at all. Keep in mind how poorly most people understand Trotskyism — most people who would see this rhetoric are effectively no better at Marxism than Stalinists, and I've just given you a thorough examination of exactly how far off from a correct understanding of Marxism most Stalinists are. I can't repeat this enough: no matter how many people become sympathetic to groups that claim to have Trotskyist programs, almost nobody alive in the 2020s actually understands a Fourth International. So in effect, rhetoric about how "Stalinism was always doomed" or "Mao handed China to capitalists" has been teaching everyone that attempts at a Third International need to be overwritten with more Third Internationals, and that if the United States' imperialists manage to pressure Cuba out of state businesses everyone may as well support the imperialists when they explode the strawberry government and take away its national independence specifically for imperialism. My mistake was thinking that problem was Trotskyism's fault, when really, it's more like capitalism and Stalin's Marxism that did it accidentally. It can be very difficult to get people to correct or apologize for unconscious accidents deliberately advanced by only a few conscious actors. While it may be dreadfully popular for social-democrats and anarchists to throw around a proverbial "we" that "let everything happen", the reality is that people everywhere will basically never be able to accept that they are responsible for such things — including climate change, Israel, and First World capital obliterating national independence and any possibility of "democracy" — until they have truly unified into new structures and come to a new consciousness that allows them to really actually make choices and take action in order to stop them. Trotskyists think the world needs a Fourth International to empower the proletariat. The reality is that the world needs a Fourth International to get everyone out of thinking in terms of nation-states and imperialism, because it will keep doing both up until the day Trotskyist socialism can actually be realized.

== Is Liberal-republicanism an anarchism? ==

By this point, I hope I have succeeded at laying out a basic outline of how meta-Marxism is different from previous formulations of Marxism, and the ways in which it might or might not appear strange and quirky to anyone seeing it for the first time. Crimson Marxism (Stalinist analysis) is bottom-up. Violet Marxism is top-down. Violet Marxism looks at entire systems first, identifies large-scale contradictions, and then looks inside the parts of each major contradiction to see how they operate, in order to assign every level of "pieces" a swatch color. This is when meta-Marxism stops being a "beginner" method and reveals dialectical processes: identify a sea of workers inside blue capitalist territories, or identify a forest of orange soviets beneath a strawberry ministry but across from an orange party, and you see how class-associated formations can break out of other formations of the wrong color to realize across a region into larger estates (class rule or "dictatorship"). Violet Marxism preoccupies itself with "defining philosophy objects" such as "Marxisms" and "anarchisms" only to allow everyone to more effectively start that process.

So... what _is_ Liberal-republicanism — what is it really?

We know first of all that Liberal-republicanism is not a Marxism. It is not a version of Stalinism or Trotskyism; all its closest allies relentlessly persecute Communists. It is also not a version of Deng Xiaoping Thought, because despite the two being almost identical on the inside Liberal-republicanism also insists on persecuting Dengism. This is some very curious behavior, because if you had never read Liberal-republican theory and only read the works of Marx and Engels you might start to believe that if both kinds of countries are capitalism and based on capitalist class-rule they should be indistinguishable. Even Trotskyists will go around claiming that capitalism has been entirely restored in China, but a Marxist should know that capitalism cannot separate itself from government and whenever it exists it is inherently connected to the process of forming a republic. So, why exactly are Liberal-republicanism and Deng Xiaoping states fighting? There is no satisfactory explanation for this within Marxism. Up to now, this has been a genuine explanatory gap where Marxism has left a dissonance between how it _claims_ capitalism generates governments and how capitalism _actually_ generates governments.

Let's look inside Liberal-republicanism one more time. Inside the United States are the Republican and Democratic parties. Inside China is China's central government. But, wait, the CPC isn't part of the United States political system, is it? Liberal-republicans think it isn't. But in reality, capitalists in China are manufacturing huge numbers of products and shipping them to the United States, where sky- and rust-aligned businesses buy the products, and sky- and rust-aligned businesses are occasionally shipping products such as animated movies back to China. The relationship between the Democrats and the CPC is similar to the relationship between the Republicans and the Democrats. But, the Republicans and the Democrats hate each other, and... _oh_. They also both hate the CPC. So they really _do_ have the same relationship. They all exchange products with each other but they all hate each other and would prefer a world in which they could get rid of each other's leadership and replace it with their own. Well, maybe not the CPC, which has no interest in clearing out the Republicans or Democrats, but definitely the other two, who have already been clearing out the leadership of Cuba to effectively begin adding Cuba to the Democratic and Republican Parties.

So, a contradiction emerges. Liberal-republicanism is a nation-state or "republicanized kingdom" composed of parties, but parties do not all belong to the same country. Within Deng Xiaoping states, each party forms its own different country. But Liberal-republicanism doesn't like this. It despises the concept of Deng Xiaoping states having only one party. Why is this? You will hear a lot of rationalizations out of Liberal-republicanism as to why a capitalist republic "has" to have multiple parties and a lot of them don't really explain anything. China is getting by just fine with a cooperative congress of only one party; by now its overall set of problems is not any worse than the United States'. And nobody enjoys the United States being divided or becoming more and more polarized every time it insists there must be two parties. So from a capitalist point of view isn't there every incentive for the United States to transition to a Deng Xiaoping state? This would better match everything said in the United States constitution about everyone being equal and the government not being created to be an instrument of one group of capitalists persecuting another. This would better match popular imagery of the United States being "indivisible". So if both Liberal-republicanism and Deng Xiaoping Thought are capitalism and they both hold similar amounts of government oppression, neither one inherently generating more, then why isn't Dengism logically the better choice? Why is such a suggestion so inherently offensive to United States capitalists?

Here, oddly enough, we can go to Stalinists for the answers. When Stalin's party came to power, they assumed that they could get rid of capitalism and create a basic instance of socialism within one country. This rests on some very interesting assumptions. In order to get rid of capitalism within one country, there must first be one countable and separable instance of capitalism only extending through one country (or through one easily-defined region of 14 republics). Stalinists assumed that capitalism was fundamentally countable; they assumed that there could exist "exactly one capitalism" or "exactly two capitalisms". When early Maoism disintegrated into Deng Xiaoping Thought, this assumption was carried through into Deng Xiaoping states. And Deng Xiaoping states contained their supposed single instance of capitalism in the borders of a central capitalist party. This is to say: if capitalism is countable whatsoever, then the United States indisputably contains at _least two capitalisms_, not just one.

I think it is arguable that capitalism actually is semi-countable. And this is why the United States is so angry at Deng Xiaoping states: capitalists' favorite form of society is not _capitalism_, but _multicapitalism_. China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea are some of the only places on earth that have ever had _monocapitalism_ as described in Marx and Engels. These countries all developed monocapitalism because of an error made by Marxist theorists, in which historical Marxist theorists usually assumed that a country full of capitalists is one united body of capitalists called _the capitalist class_, as opposed to two or more truly distinct bodies of capitalists called _semi-countable capitalist estates_. Nobody could have guessed this correctly before 1953. Monarchy appears to be a unified system which is only broken up into warring states by the destruction of monarchy. But capitalism is entirely different because it is fundamentally made of social links between individual capitalists. These arbitrary social links simultaneously ensure that capitalism is never entirely dissolved and that capitalism is never entirely unified into a single society.

This is why, the day I discovered an unbelievably terrible Lacanian book called _The Excessive Subject_ which was attempting to dismantle every progressive ideology in existence which did not promote capitalism, I jokingly called it "the best book I've ever read on Marxism". In assuming that Liberal capitalism was composed of perfectly atomic individuals, Molly Ann Rothenberg started with an assumption that was _so_ terrible and _so_ uniquely mired in capitalist thinking that she unknowingly handed me the key to cracking all the central assumptions of capitalism and everything wrong with it. Today I call this book a work of dark genius, because quite honestly, she may have accidentally saved the world in her attempt to destroy it.

Liberal-republicanism is approximately two capitalisms. Deng Xiaoping states are approximately one. But the world as a whole always generally contains multicapitalism, not monocapitalism. This is the crux of all the ideological differences between Liberal-republicanism and Dengism. Dengism values unity and harmony because it is in fact largely unified. Liberal-republicanism values division and spreads ample myths about that being a form of "freedom" because it itself is divided.

So what about anarchism? Are there any unique characteristics to the divided pieces inside Liberal-republicanism, and is there any relationship between these pieces and anarchism?

Logically speaking, if we have established that Liberal-republicanism is formed out of islands of capitalism, and the historical evidence has established that anarchism is generally not very different from early forms of capitalism (you will have to read other Marxist articles for an explanation on that), it would almost have to be the case that anarchism is simply a very strange manifestation of a Liberal-republican party with completely different goals than most others but which in any particular country region is still simply one of the many wings of multicapitalism. Anarchists will often deny this, telling you that anarchism is actually the rejection of political parties and the black flag of charcoal anarchism represents the melding of separate political islands into a non-political structure which is truly uncountable. But, whether those claims make any actual sense or not, that's _charcoal_ anarchism, not _blue_ anarchism. Whenever Tory parties show up and propose any actually threatening policies within Liberal-republican governments, all the world's David Graebers and Slavoj Žižeks and all the charcoal anarchists as well can never seem to get out of the bad habit of grouping themselves into "The Left". This shouldn't make any sense if anarchism was a truly uncountable phenomenon which was truly done with political parties, because in practice, any formulation of "The Left" or "The U.S. Left" inevitably becomes a political party, and inevitably collects political candidates that become official Liberal-republican theorists and go to the Liberal-republican state. A Stalinist party equipped with meta-Marxism can talk about "The Left"; an anarchist cannot. So, why is it that blue anarchists are far more obsessed with the concept of "The Left" than Communists ever have been, and with being the one true political theory that far more than Stalinism or Trotskyism will supposedly be the only thing that can ever rise out of Toryism? Because blue anarchism is in every single way Liberal-republicanism's child and heir.

Now, we're at a point where the United States constitution can finally be of use to Marxists. The Constitution promises a bunch of "freedoms". These are said to already exist — "inalienable", "self-evident". There is no such thing as an inalienable right, as every transgender person who encourages people to go around saying "trans rights are human rights" but has been recently arrested over a drivers' license would know. And there is no such thing as an "obvious" right, as everyone who has tried to explain gay marriage to a Tory would know. So in what sense are these rights "inalienable" or "self-evident" at all? Stalin's party would know the answers to this one — when a particular faction of people is freed from competition with other factions over a government and it is not bound by class rule such that it is merely removed from factional competition by the winners, then for the duration of the new historical period it has created it receives tentatively inalienable rights. The proletariat does not even have to properly control a republic for this much to be true, even though in such a situation the republic and its new rights are likely to only last for a temporary period of time. So, the obvious conclusion from looking at Stalin's party is that inalienable rights _are nothing more than_ the product of a specific socially-linked faction of people becoming totally independent from another faction and not subject to its culture, laws, or government. One of many possible definitions of a _revolution_, then, is a historical process within a specific limited time period which completely separates one self-contained political faction with a distinct political philosophy from others: in China, a Dengist revolution against feudalism was achieved even if the meaningful results of that revolution seen by the people are limited.

We have already established that no instance of capitalism is actually independent from others, and in this sense, all _bourgeois revolutions_ of this type within a period of capitalism are futile. So this exposes another contradiction: if capitalism separating itself from nobility and other nation-states is the real source of "inalienable rights", and capitalism cannot be separated from bourgeois parties that group capitalists into nation-states, but bourgeois parties cannot actually separate themselves out and become independent in a period of capitalism, then bourgeois parties should not be capable of granting "inalienable rights", even though they are effectively the source of "inalienable rights" that has supposedly already granted people some. This, like many things, would seem to be a case of basic formal logic failing to capture transitions between historical periods: a body of capitalists granting inalienable rights the first time ought to be different from a body of capitalists granting inalienable rights when there is already capitalism. But this is not actually a sensible objection, because today millions of Liberal-republicans still ardently believe that capitalism can continue to grant people more and more inalienable rights _against something other than feudalism_ that it has never granted them before. "Capitalism cannot transition people into capitalism a second time" _would_ make sense except that the facts are on the table that whenever anyone says it can't, wide swaths of average people almost violently object that it must. Some things can be attributed to old forms of consciousness, but when Marxism flat-out starts to lose its predictive power as the same "false consciousness" is generated over and over for decades and decades across more and more crises we have to ask if something else is going on. The limited cluster of Stalinists holding down the Soviet Union was not holding on against Trotskyism and global capitalism simply due to "false consciousness". Stalin's party was holding on based on its concrete historical situation of materially facing attacks from two different directions. Its behavior was not "logical", but when it was under attack from capitalist pressure and a then-disorganized axis of right-Liberals, anarchists, and early Trotskyists, it did not have any real time to think, and simply had to act. The question, then, is: is this what has happened to the overall body of blue anarchists and Democrats?

Here is my bold hypothesis that I think only a meta-Marxist could make. Anarchism is a form of society in which people form together based on arbitrary social links, as in a tribal society, or as in a small town linked together by the relationships between small or medium-sized businesses, and in which all the people within the society _believe_ it is linked together on the basis of morality. The codes of morality believed by an anarchism may include "No hierarchy", "No domination", "No capitalist will own all the businesses", "No capitalist will control a party that controls the entire government", or "Society is based on a social contract". [*AF] Anarchists believe that codes of morality are enough to keep societies from developing into kingdoms or Duginisms, but they are mistaken, because there is one thing codes of morality can never ever solve, which is the division of people into two separate socially-linked groups of people. This can happen for the tiniest reasons like two people believing in different sects of a religion or breaking up with a lover or accidentally excluding a demographic with no malicious intention. But the moment two people are incompatible and do not want to see each other anarchism immediately breaks down, because as soon as two people completely cease to have a relationship there is no incentive for them to follow every moral pronouncement that somebody on the other side of a relationship division has made any more. If person A shows up with a stack of evidence that person B is a rapist and person B denies it, all good will will quickly break down between the clusters of people around person A and person B, and person B will quickly be barred from creating social contracts that apply to person A's friends; if person X insults transgender people and says it is impossible for gender identity to be true, and person Y is transgender, person Y has no incentive to maintain a non-hierarchical society where person X is not put below person Y. In one sense social bonds are a terrible basis for forming a society, because the moment people stop liking each other for any reason an empty void opens up between two newly separate societies where civilization ceases to exist. Anarchists have spent at least 176 years trying to solve this problem with absolutely no success. They can try to say that divisions between societies are the real location of government (Bellegarrigue), they can try to say that prejudices are culturally fabricated and not real, they can try to say that bodies of capitalists are divided because choosing Greed divides each capitalist from the rest of society, they can try to say that Marxist party filtration is a form of hierarchy where Marxist parties have divided themselves from society by choosing Elitism, they can try to say that societies that would be divided "ought" to be merged together just because "societal pluralism" is inherently good. But an anarchist can never un-abuse an abused child, wind back a war between two tribal societies, or make a divorced couple get un-divorced. There will always be gaps between human beings where relationships do not exist which no anarchist Ideal can possibly bridge. But given enough of them, absolutely any of these gaps can stack back up to divisions so big Bellegarrigue would call them "governments". It has been terribly popular lately for blue anarchists to label any criticism of religion as a simple violation of societal pluralism on the grounds that any criticism of religion can be used as a lever to exclude Catholics or exclude Muslims or exclude Mormons specifically, while the only thing that is acceptable to anarchists is attempting to rationalize how all religions and spiritualities are true and how secular morality is essentially a new form of religion. [*as] But in the real world, the moment there is one church full of Tories believing that gay people are unholy, one church full of center-Liberals believing that accepting transgender people is a virtue, and one group of atheists that happens to believe that homosexuality is real but transgender people are dangerous to women, they have already drawn their lines of compatibility as far as which individuals will be able to form links and which will not, and none of the groups is going to agree accept any of the other groups' versions of morality, even if they are told that they all belong to an overarching society and code of morality that says they are obligated to all unify on one moral code. The natural response of anarchists is to draft up a lot of books and magazines (today, videos) that supposedly prove that other people have unacceptable codes of morality and which codes of morality are the final cosmic truth that all other codes of morality must bend themselves around just because the absolute moral truth is what's Right. But ultimately, none of these texts will be more powerful than the sheer power of which groups of people are socially connected and which are not — even at scales too small for proper class analysis, the current body of people in a group as distinguished from the people who are not will generate its ideology.
Here we arrive at the United States' national independence movement. People moved to the early United States colonies to be free to form a new society by simply linking together with people like them. They accepted having to work for others to pay the voyage, but they knew people supporting each other in community was the way society would form afterward. At that time many people were Christians, but either way many people believed in morality and over time, the thirteen colonies drifted to each largely contain people of specific Christian sects. In reality, everyone had religious freedom because they segregated away from each other and physically avoided the question of which religion was more correct. When the British crown became intolerable, the people of the United States got behind their best experts on government in order to create a new society that would respect each of the 13 colonies' human rights. The need to banish the British empire brought up questions that I think frankly the people of the United States otherwise didn't want to answer. The United States constitution was something of a formality to enshrine the way in which separating people into homogeneous clumps of "community" ensured each one freedom from the others. This is the way in which the fiction of "liberal democracy" ultimately emerged: if people were getting by making all their decisions within localized "communities", government by the people must in fact be attempting to preserve all these localized decisions and immediately giving the upper levels as little to do as possible so everyone can act like they don't exist. So, _if_ the United States began as a form of anarchism, it ended in various parts of the anarchism slowly or quickly producing capitalists who then generated a bourgeois republic to resolve the inherent conflicts within capitalism and multicapitalism.

I think a lot of people are resentful of this apparent takeover of anarchism by capitalism, and so a great part of the ideology in the United States is people coming up with mythological accounts of how the top layer of capitalism can simply be cut off and the United States can return to its supposedly perfect anarchist past. Nobody knows how societies actually work — not even CPUSA, not even the RCI — but they know what is viscerally wrong and they know what has seemingly been taken from them, and they are very angry. So angry they will just about punch a Communist over it if everyone doesn't restore anarchism immediately. To that I say... look at the middle of the timeline. Circa 1850 the United States government was granting people inalienable freedoms by planting "starter anarchisms" on the United States frontier. But I don't even have to open up a history book to tell you that if you do that those will generate capitalists, and if the capitalists all vote that eliminating North American tribes is in everyone's best interests, then that's the direction they will tug the whole population in, and you can't take it back even if a significant number of people were opposed to it. The early United States is broadly similar to Israel's Histadrut period in that even if you start with carefully designed anarchist compounds, when capitalists are in charge of the empire and they are all socially-linked members of your same nationality with a claim to represent its border and the day it was founded, the nation becomes theirs and what will happen to neighboring nations of people becomes entirely theirs. If you are not as physically powerful as a ring of capitalists who have all been able to form a socially-linked Community inside your Community and who can buy literally anyone to help them, you cannot win. It's very popular today for people to say that if you don't believe Israel can be defeated with nothing but a big stack of morality you are a defeatist and a traitor and — they don't say it out loud but they're thinking it — you basically belong in Hell. Most people are unwilling to accept the possibility that believing that anarchism doesn't regenerate capitalism has real material consequences, or that consequences come from anything but angering a cluster of individuals that has assumed the authority to dictate arbitrary moral codes. So here I will say the single angriest thing I will let out in this letter: if there was a God, or if there is anything that is universally Good or Evil, by taking this tack on reality you have definitely offended it. God cannot represent anything but the sum of all material processes and physical interactions in the universe, outside societies and inside societies. Every story about God, on paper or coming out of a United States president, is a story about how the motions of material reality will favor the kingdom or empire that has best predicted them. In that sense, a civilization that refuses to understand that the process of forming Community generates capitalism _cannot but have defied God_, and _cannot but have offended every form of cosmic Way and cosmic Good ever dreamed of_. Morality cannot exist without reality. If what was true was not strictly more important than what was moral, every single Tory who says transgender people don't exist or gay people are unholy or one Mexican immigrant far off in a town nobody thinks about stealing from a store should be locked up in a concentration camp would be right.

So. Historically speaking it should be unimportant whether the United States is an anarchism, but practically speaking, until the day it has any consciousness of material reality whatsoever it will be. The Idealism that drenches the United States and the Idealism that makes an anarchism are equally toxic; both believe that passing a law or putting up a list of commandments is enough to stop imperialism forever, and so in the end, both join together to blow up Palestine and keep regenerating imperialism. I think there may be a real difference between charcoal anarchisms and blue anarchisms, but I feel like it's an effective framing rhetorically to say to anarchists that try to call out Communists for statism, "no, _you_ created oppressive Tory statism because _you_ created the United States." "The United States is not a Marxist country founded by Mao or Hoxha, so tell me, who created all this?" Anarchists put heavy importance on morality and the ethical concept of individuals choosing fitting actions, so the moment you can get them to believe that supporting anarchism is actually _leading_ to capitalism, statism, anti-transgender laws, and Israel, I feel like they would be less inclined to resist either Stalinism or Trotskyism when they realized they genuinely had blood on their hands and them talking about "Communist atrocities" was only a cheap distraction from the actual important topic of their own choices and their own guilt.

I am experimenting with a definition that all societies before kingdoms and principalities or that go along with Liberal-republicanism are technically anarchisms. I recognize that this is a bit of a rhetorical tactic where I try to subliminally influence how people think by redefining the word _anarchism_ to something that better promotes historical-materialist thinking. But I am very tired of anarchism. Humanity doesn't have much time left. There isn't time for all this continued fighting between anarchists and Communists. So maybe, one of the few ways to actually get everyone to turn against anarchism and all the unacceptable things it allows to happen and unify with the Marxist movements anarchism has usually opposed is to present to them a superficially non-Marxist account of how almost everything anarchism has ever tried to stop is actually itself an anarchism that develops out of other anarchisms and thus the only way for anarchists to really achieve what anarchists want instead of regenerating it all over again is to take a look at Trotskyism.

== Historical materialism studies narratives ==

In the overall history of philosophy, there always seems to be this weird "pit" where as soon as early capitalism or widespread artisan production appears everything takes a dip and then nothing was as good afterward. _Some time into capitalism, the New Atheists appeared! Hundreds of years ago, the Old Atheists wrote "good" philosophy. On the cusp of early capitalism, Protestant work ethic and North American colonialism appeared! Back in peasant times, nobody had to work so much and nobody killed North American tribes to build coal mines. When capitalism came to China, the Dengist government ruined everything! Back before Mao, people in China and India believed in Buddhism and Hinduism, which each promoted syncretic coexistence between local religions and harmony with nature, unlike modern China where Beijing is filled with factories._ Sometimes you hear this from anarchists. Sometimes you hear it from Tories. Sometimes the two become concerningly indistinguishable and you begin questioning whether the progressive aspects of anarchism could somehow be some kind of front to smuggle in Third World peasant bigotry, probably on accident.

For a while, there was a particular backlash against European Materialism. Nobody labeled it using those exact terms, but the term "Western" got thrown around a lot, and sometimes the terms "rationalism" or "science". There was a small amount of it within Africa. There was a bizarrely large amount of it in the United States, which only appears to have continued and grown with time. The reasons this happened trace back to capitalism itself. Capitalism needed especially tidy and self-contained forms of philosophy that sawed everything in two. Materialism had to suit the particular activity of running an isolated business and producing a usable product unrelated to and yet perfectly complementary to everything else. Ethics had to be designed around the concept of choices being made within the perspective of an isolated individual with no further information. Philosophies analyzing the concept of a human biography had to assume that based on the contents of one particular biography itself an individual life had its own particular self-contained significance. And so, European Materialism took the world and divided it into little tiny fences and boxed it in. An object knocked into motion by some other object was an individual "object in motion" with kinetic energy and inertia, and the world had to be told that "an object in motion stays in motion". A planet orbiting another planet was "an object experiencing a gravity force". Physicists were excited by the discovery that light could be divided into photons, but they were surprised to find that after they divided light up into neat packets, the packets didn't behave much like ordinary tennis balls or pool balls. _Light is one of the smallest things that's measurable, the same size as the smallest solid thing we could shoot out of a particle accelerator to measure it, but we can't measure its future position without affecting where it will go! This is unprecedented! Our measuring devices create the future when we observe it! If we don't know where photons or electrons are going to go they must be in several places at once! Quantum physics is remarkable, it's like all the future states of something are wrapped up in a box and you can't really see it!_ Nobody understood quantum mechanics, and the first people to slowly begin mystifying it were the physicists themselves. For a brief blip between about 1900 and 1933 dialectical materialism spread around and people considered it, before everyone panicked about Communism destroying Ukraine and everyone more or less tossed dialectics away under accusations of it being "imprecise" or being "religion". Although small margins of discontent were forming around it, European Materialism was restored, and before long the next great thing became bashing Marxism and many other things thought to be bad at predicting reality for their "prejudices" and "assumptions".

The period from 1960 to 1980 in the United States was a unique time for prejudices. In the 1960s the U.S. civil rights movement was beginning and leading everyone away from prejudices. In the 1970s the Vietnam War happened and kicked some prejudices up again, before some people started protesting the war on relatively Idealist grounds, and Deleuze and Guattari would release one of the major works a great number of blue anarchists have been drawing from ever since (_Capitalism and Schizophrenia_). By 1980 a particular pieced-together, chimeric model of world history was steadily being set down: _prejudices and assumptions are bad, and imperialism is bad, but Marxism is definitely wrong, and you can believe absolutely anything else no matter how stupid it is as long as it doesn't contain prejudices._

I would like to argue that that particular juxtaposition of requirements is impossible.

I don't feel like I have enough spare space to go into the entire history of postmodern philosophy, or the knowledge to explain every part of it. But there is exactly one concept within it that I think I can cover — the relationship between prejudices and narratives.

In _Difference and Repetition_, Deleuze tries to set out a new framework for all knowledge. (He admits himself that it is a form of metaphysics, but also makes a claim that metaphysics is what science really needs to ground it.) One of his new beginning assumptions for all science is that differences or separations are a key feature of reality and simply accepting this is the only way for material objects to understand other objects, or particularly other thinking Subjects. Deleuze's actual writing can get rather arcane, but the motivation for this particular concept is very clear. By 1968, the time of this work, it was becoming popular to believe that the very first task of every conceivable movement that could happen in the United States and call itself progressive was to get rid of prejudices — if people could only get rid of prejudices, every other movement would become easier because it wouldn't be rejecting people from membership or allyship due to prejudices. The term _intersectionality_ would only appear in 1989 but the concept was already brewing in the background. People were forming into highly specific movements including racial movements and the LGBT movement and disabled movements. So if they could only stack together those movements for entirely separate things that would often exclude each other from each other, then maybe everybody would be set. Deleuze's work in general would speculate on ways that identity movements formed within the Liberal-republican framework of itemizing highly specific ballot issues and bringing up a representative of the issue's "community" to lead that issue in particular could transmute itself into a pure conglomeration of Communities that would dissolve the boundaries of identity and transform individuals themselves into inherently being a borderless and shapeless drop of an uncontrollable and uncountable totality known as _rhizome_. Here, in _Difference and Repetition_, Deleuze took the real-world observation that a lot of people have prejudices and turned it around into an assumption that the best way to get everyone out of prejudices was to start by assuming that people should get rid of prejudices.

There was at least one obvious problem with this: if people have prejudices that cloud their entire perception of the world, then they might not have any idea they have prejudices because the prejudices make it impossible to see the prejudices. This kind of person would see any book about prejudices, differences, and separations and probably not absorb it because they would immediately assume that the book was only for people worse than them. Or, in the case of a book as involved as Deleuze's writings, they might conceivably assume that it was only for people who were interested in it; "those other people" can read it, but it must only be for people who already aren't prejudiced. If you have ever spent any significant amount of time around racists, you would know that one of the most consistent characteristics of all racists is that they all claim they aren't racist enough to be the _real_ racists, while ironically, only the people who have largely stopped being racist will actually label themselves racist. This was a huge problem with every one of the United States Lefts from about 1960 to 1990. Each version of "The Left" would only be able to gain control of people who already want to be better, and then would proceed to verbally beat up every possible "Good Guy" because the Bad Guys would always be completely calm and unrepentant and would never actually opt to be under their control unless they were willing to cross the point where they had no meaningful social connections to other Bad Guys and were useless for turning any Bad Guys into Good Guys. Somewhere between 1960 and 1990 Liberal-republicanism was already breaking down and the entire assumption of Republicans and Democrats not being two anthropologically separate cultures was already gone. But that state of things wasn't really developing in a way friendly to blue anarchism as envisioned by Deleuze. The slow erosion of the Liberal-republican state wasn't really producing a totally uncountable continuum of individuals as much as it was producing a rather neat division of the United States into two corporation-based states bound together by the total and entire content of local culture including local religion and prejudices.

So, the United States had a considerable problem with whole towns of people being bound together by traditions and models of the world that it would be no real exaggeration to call hateful or bigoted. Various philosophers attacked these models in different ways. North American Maoists awkwardly tried to pin the emergence of prejudices onto global supply chains and construct the concept of a "labor aristocracy", putting moral blame on workers for decisions their bosses made. Gramscians or "Fisherists" who had read Mark Fisher's work _Capitalist Realism_ tried to claim that mass media was programming everyone's brains, leaving the strange implication that they would otherwise be blank slates perfectly open to correct knowledge. More hardcore Gramscians focused on occupying actual slots in industry across the country in order to have the power to create correct media. But, Maoism and Western-Marxism were never the most popular philosophies in the United States. One philosophy which was closer to being part of the "popular" cluster of winning philosophies was poststructuralism. This philosophy came from the overall tradition of assuming that all human knowledge can be encoded in language, and analyzed by analyzing language. Before postructuralism was structuralist linguistics, which was a very successful framework for describing how human beings observe the physical relationships between things and create virtual, projected relationships between words to mirror them. So how did poststructuralists attempt to improve it? More or less, they advanced a number of hypotheses based on the notion that the relationships between concepts described inside language _really are_ arbitrary. Even if language is doing an ontological exercise of diagramming the material behavior of objects and processes in the real world, human beings can shape the real world, so surely if people have the ability to redefine language that must give them some sort of amazing wizard powers to spontaneously redefine half of everything about the real world too.

I have never liked the concept of poststructuralism whatsoever. I have always felt like it was one of the most useless and perhaps one of the most dangerous philosophies, not in the sense of courage and strictly in a destructive sense. I have very specific reasons for that, which will more or less come out across the rest of this letter. For now all I want to say on that is this. If you're an anarchist... I want you to imagine right now you were part of early Trotskyism. _Actually._ Not an anarchist. You have already committed yourself to building a nation-wide underground Communist movement _because you want to be free from the Soviet Union_. There's no turning back. You have to defeat Stalin. The state security forces are everywhere, and you _will_ die if you make any major errors. How does poststructuralism _actually help you understand your oppressors on the field_ and _actually help you win_? I'll even give you two chances. Your other option is to take a pacifist route and use poststructuralism to demonstrate that Stalinists and Trotskyists can coexist despite the best observed outcome being that Stalin's party consistently boots all the Trotskyists out of the party. (This one might be easier given that I've actually specified a seemingly-arbitrary construct that could be broken down: Stalinists versus Trotskyists.) You are still a Communist, and Stalin's allies are still Communists, so you must demonstrate that even though both factions have concrete goals which may include building socialist transition or getting rid of the increasing swarm of bureaucrats, that you can get closer to accomplishing these tangible policy goals that were not historically achieved by simply smashing the definitions of words. Option three: demonstrate that the Cold War was an arbitrary construct in people's heads and Ronald Reagan himself will completely stop attacking the Soviet Union if you could only really actually persuade him of this.

My challenges to poststructuralism are exceedingly tall. But in reality, I mainly pose them because if anyone could meet them, I would actually be impressed. I would rather be impressed by what someone can do with a philosophy than underwhelmed. But as far as I'm currently aware, I have never seen anyone use poststructuralist philosophy on problems anything like those. I have seen it used to pick apart gender, and... apart from that case I do not think it has ever succeeded at anything.

Which brings me to my next topic. Poststructuralists argued against imposing gender onto transgender people through the same general lines of argument used in _The Matrix_: before you become conscious of what your model of the world even is, you do not know how to change it, but if you are aware that mental models of the world are constructed in real time (in the film, represented by a superstructural fantasy world) you can write a new model of reality that is more appropriate to the needs of your actual body, and you are not bound to remain trapped inside the models that everyone tells you to have. _The Matrix_ is a surprisingly Materialist work in the end, which from one angle actually demonstrates that poststructuralism could do something useful by showing that particular abstract Ideals are ineffective _because_ they are abstract Ideals and deconstructing the entire concept of Idealism.

So now I'm going to talk about _The Truman Show_.

I recently saw an atheist video channel make the argument that Christianity was "basically like the Truman Show". Truman lives within a constructed TV studio filming set, if a somewhat large one, and the day he finds out, everybody tells him it's not worth leaving because there could never be anything more interesting on the outside. The argument then went that everything about Christian culture and the act of being part of a group of Christians is an arbitrary construction _in that_ real observations and motivated justifications are all carefully arranged together to create a complete worldview in which all the pieces are arranged to prevent questioning any of it. Now, I am not really a fan of Christianity, or any form of theism, or magic ritual, so I would not stop anyone from tearing apart religion. But I do have problems with this line of argument in particular. This argument is unusually unaware of the concept of culture and countable cultures in the anthropological sense. Truman may exist on a constructed set, and the rules of a TV program are culture, but the set and his connections to all the actors exist as a connected unit; the hypothetical setup in the movie of the TV program reads as a representation of an actual demographic group of people that are bound together by historical circumstance. And if we think about the concept of pointing at any particular tribe or nationality of people and simply telling them their entire culture is made up and not real... I don't think I really need to complete that sentence. Let's just say that Deleuze would not be happy with that. If this approach were aimed at a nationality, or cis people putting all transgender people into The Matrix, this would be almost exactly the kind of thing Deleuze was aiming to stop — a group of people assuming that it lives in a normal and unspecific environment while only other people have ideology and live within a culture.

I make the effort to call out this argument against "religious cults" because I _know_ the same argument has been used against Communists. _Communists have an ideology, but *we* don't have an ideology! They have a leader, but because we keep oscillating between two parties we hate that don't actually accomplish anything *we* don't have a leader! Communists can be born into Stalinism and not get to choose what to think or believe but we get complete choice in what we believe as long as it's never Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Juche-socialism, BlackPantherism, Ho Chi Minh Thought, Deng Xiaoping Thought, Bordigism, ecoterrorism, Islam, actually Adolf Hitler, unofficially distributing movies, or Richard Dawkins! East Germany told people not to leave! The central party constructs your reality! Marxist states have total control over filling every city with the KGB! But we have complete freedom in a reality where whatever piece of civil rights legislation we pass the group of culturally-defined Tories who belong to Toryism anthropologically can spontaneously repeal any and every piece of progressive legislation we pass and we aren't allowed to do anything to get away from them. We just have to remain in that abusive relationship forever because... uh... if we dissolve the United States and there aren't any laws they'll beat us up. So, as you can see, we're totally free to do whatever we want when the Tories physically present in streets and buildings around us all over the country don't catch us doing it because my favorite poststructuralist philosopher wrote a paper about how words don't actually mean anything and we never have to accept the Tories' narratives. Including fists and guns, which are also arbitrary narratives as long as I've found a way to not get shot. Monkey D. Luffy, anarchist hero! He is a hero because he bends reality and Communism bounces off him._

Center-Liberals and Tories really go around believing every day that the act of living in the United States and _in the United States specifically_ is the default condition of human existence while anyone that lives in a nation-state anywhere else is in an altered condition of existence that is potentially inferior. They see another government which is not physically attached to theirs, and if it's bad, they want to destroy it and scatter anyone who liked it. It is as if they want to carry out a French Revolution from solidly outside France, because the first bourgeois revolution ever conceived was simply an act of imperialism and every time one national bourgeoisie helps another one oppress its people it can't help but eternally repay the favor everywhere else.

The general concept of "rejecting narratives" has gotten really popular lately. Anarchists across the United States love saying that the economy is "made up" or racism was "constructed" out of nowhere for everyone by no particular group of people, or disability is "constructed" through a lack of everyone automatically knowing how to build everything for various disabilities before they ever get there, or "colonialism" is a constructed Idea and somehow teaching people what the idea is will get rid of all imperialism. The list goes on and on; for every identity movement in the United States (of which there are a lot) there is probably a theory that it is an arbitrary construct imposed onto people. But, again, nobody ever says that anticommunism is an arbitrary social construct that could simply be gotten rid of forever by everyone learning more about Communism. For some reason, that one is just "the truth".

The impression I got at the end of the "Truman Show" argument was that it fundamentally saw a binary between "narratives" and "freedom". People who live in altered conditions of existence — such as other countries, or Christianity, or the world _outside_ Christianity where people are getting scary transition surgeries that have to be outlawed, or who support a Communist party — are trapped in a fake narrative made up to control them, but anyone who just stops believing in all narratives of the way anything "has to be" and joins the same continuous uncountable blob of society with no particular culture and no particular future is in Freedom.

I have laid out in previous sections what I think is the actual shape of ideology. There is not simply one correct model of reality and a distortion of it called "ideology". The reality of societies is characterized by many separate society-objects (factions or republics; sociophilosophies) that all must become conscious of their own unique layouts and of each other. In the real world every faction or movement is taken by others to be "ideological distortion" whether it is materially correct or incorrect. So, a lot of the time the category of "ideology" or "bourgeois culture", etc., is not actually helpful, while categories like "center-Liberalism", "Toryism", "Kropotkinism", "David Graeber's anarchism", "Stalinism", and "Trotskyism" actually might be. For a lot of people it is much easier to take a philosophy and describe it without judgement and say "this party is crimson" than to accurately set down a conclusion like "this philosophy is incorrect". So, it will be a lot easier to teach people to understand things without prejudices if they truly learn to label every group of people descriptively and try to give an accurate "in-character" prediction of its behavior than if you simply try to crudely teach everyone an abstract set of "Good things" like Tolerance, Intersectionality, and Freedom. Describing the behavior of a group of people accurately is not the same thing as stereotypes. If that were actually the case, there would be no such thing as race coding in media which is not offensive, but the United States is full of all kinds of coded examples of Media Representation that people still consider Media Representation, so there clearly is. If you can figure out how an abstract character on a cartoon that is not drawn like a realistic human and is not stated to come from earth represents a real-world ethnic group, then you can figure out what it means to get rid of prejudices by creating a descriptive model of a group of people. It's very simple. One kind of descriptive model of a group of people is a story.

The general defining axiom of postmodernism in philosophy, or the postmodern period, is that the world has become free of narratives about the significance of history, and that there are no "grand" narratives about the entire existence of a population that where they do not already apply can be extended across multiple groups of people. Postmodern philosophy pretends to be about the concept that neither any particular religion nor European Materialism can successfully explain all poulations (sometimes the notions of "no particular Liberal-republican party" or "no particular philosophical faction" are thrown in), but the actual premise it usually starts from is simply that Liberal-republicanism doesn't "really" work due to Tory bigotry and yet Marxism and Dengism also aren't functional. When postmodernism isn't a thinly veiled act of gloating that the "first" Cold War is over — and we need to keep in mind that that distinction is almost necessary when after the first one Liberal-republicanism will naturally seek to gut all independent countable cultures at the bonds that make them and conquer everybody anyway — it's basically just philosophers totally giving up and labeling themselves useless. I read a real book where in an attempt to describe philosophies as they exist within Liberal-republicanism Molly Ann Rothenberg essentially said that a philosophy describing all other current philosophies is impossible. I had to stop and do a double take at what I'd just read, because if that sentence was actually true then her book really should not have existed and I should not have been holding it in my hands. If postmodernism was true, how could she even know what Communism was well enough to criticize it? Wouldn't it be the case that the predominant philosophy in every country would make it impossible to understand other philosophies, so that if you extended Liberal-republicanism over onto Communism you'd get everything wrong and the Communists would push back? Honestly, when you put it that way, it almost starts to make sense! But it really does look more like a description of how much philosophers don't know and aren't good at describing than an actual law of the world where the world itself resists any unified description. Really, if postmodernism was actually modeling the state of things that neither Liberal-republicanism nor Stalinism has been able to properly understand each other without error, then it would be incomplete by its own definition and _the opposite of all philosophies not being able to describe all philosophies exactly as they are_ would have to be the thing that was true.

Postmodern or anti-narrative philosophies have been quietly spreading everywhere, telling everyone that science has hurt people and religion is all arbitrarily made up but Communities and identities are somehow okay even though all of those identities should logically be narratives that people have to be fed in order to understand them without prejudice but rejecting narratives is Good and prejudice is Bad and every mistake anybody ever made in depicting an ethnic group or demographic was basically a deliberate choice and education is mandatory but governments are bad and lived experience is inherently Correct and people can reject whatever they're told whenever they want to but you can't reject the rules for getting things represented on Liberal-republican ballots and you can't reject people's prejudices if they're prejudices people have prejudices about and you can't reject any group of people laughing at you or calling you names but there's a special exception if you either still support the Confederacy or made a trans woman cry. The Soviet bureaucracy itself could not have invented a more complicated and more difficult-to-follow system of rules than blue anarchism. The only good way to summarize any of the philosophy people typically believe now is: _things naturally go together unless we've observed them killing each other, because They Just Do_.

I have had to sit through this slow deterioration of philosophy for the last 32 years, where all philosophy and all knowledge has gradually been transformed into a simple exercise of "I'm a compatible friend for you so I like what you have to say" versus "I don't personally like the feeling of believing that, so get far away from me until you become very good at something or I never want to see you". Everyone has memorized the statement that theater and literature are important in education because They Just Are, next to "The mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell", but nobody can give a coherent account of _why_ people read literature or the _importance_ of the educational power of narratives.

Well, unfortunately for anarchists, I am well-versed in all manifestations of the concept of storytelling after being fed it all my life as everyone's primary method of socializing and understanding the world and educating people, so I'm going to give every center-Liberal academic and blue anarchist a lesson on exactly what a narrative is. A narrative is a collection of objects and processes that participate in opposition, development, and resolution. Every story you could possibly think of has objects in it, and the objects interact with each other only under particular rules. Harry Potter cannot revive dead people. Pokémon can only have two out of eighteen types. Digimon die and cannot live forever despite being made of intangible data. A story proceeds according to its rules and cannot break its fundamental rules. The legendary Pokémon Giratina can create a reverse world with antigravity, but that's because it has the narrative role of a local god that embodies the universe's rules. A Pokémon cannot actually break the rules of _Pokémon_ through truly unexpected events such as a Legendary Pokémon showing up and suddenly being Aura type rather than one of the 18 established types. Terapagos can momentarily be Stellar type, but that is because Stellar type was actually written into the rules of _Pokémon_ and introduced to the player all throughout the game that contains it. Terapagos is a "real" Pokémon, while an old _Pokémon_ game malfunctioning and generating Missingno is not creating "real" Pokémon, and a nonsense Pokémon with a picture made out of static being Bird type is _not_ following the series rules. The set of rules that defines how objects inside a fictional narrative interact — which is one definition of a particular media series' _canon_ — fundamentally drives what events will and will not happen in the narrative. The reason that stories are taught as having a "five-act structure" or "a conflict" is not that stories are required to contain battles or romantic break-ups or plagues or any particular negative event you can think of, but that every story event is generated through an opposition or juxtaposition of objects, according to established rules. The reasons your ship isn't canon come out of the exact same pool of reasons that take any possible event in a story and write it _into_ canon.

Now, let me ask you, if an electron smashing into a cloud of virtual particles and coming out the other end as a new electron were a _story_, would there or would there not be a story that is happening absolutely everywhere in every country on earth on every day of every year? This may not be a very interesting story to anyone but quantum physicists, but it definitely contains a conflict or opposition, and a beginning, middle, and end. This story is everywhere, it is a true story, and it is inescapable.

That is all a narrative is. A narrative is a story in which two objects start out in one condition, collide, and create or transition into another condition. Narratives are material models of real or fictional realities. They are not arrangements of words and word definitions. If narratives really were nothing more than arbitrary arrangements of word definitions, then a large language model with enough data plus the ability to roll virtual dice to pick abstract Ideals out of a table could be better at creating new narratives than a human writer. You cannot teach anyone not to hate Black people without feeding them a collection of oppositions and changes which is essentially a narrative. If somebody meets a Black person in person and they become friends, that set of events is a narrative too. If people are always free to reject and deconstruct narratives, they can reject any and all model scenarios that tell them not to hate Black people. Or gay people, or trans people, or women, or Muslims, or Mexicans, or Canadians. Every form of prejudice is in fact the rejection of a narrative. So, in effect, to tell people that "deconstructing narratives" is a good idea is basically to allow the population to generate and spread prejudice as fast as possible.

So, is the world free of overarching narratives? Not if you're aware of electrons, not if you're aware of chemical equations, and not if you believe that all instances of racism and getting rid of it are similar to each other.

Postmodernism, in the most generous account, was true for three years. The countries that collided in World War I were a grand narrative, _themselves_, as they participated in the war. The global empires that collided in World War II were a grand narrative. World War II stopped in 1945. Israel was created in 1948. There were no grand narratives active for about three years between 1945 and 1948, and then every single year since then, Israel and all the countries in the world have been menacing Palestine. If one billion lions all fought against one Pokémon, and you wrote it down as a series of events, would that or would that not be a narrative? If practically every country is doing something, and everyone is attacking the same tiny enemy, _you simply cannot say there are no grand narratives active_.

In July I read through the book of Revelation. I wasn't actually doing it because I thought it was profound or any kind of key to real history. I was doing it to solve the story of _Deltarune_, which vaguely admits in its own text that it is a loose adaptation of the Book of Revelation. And what did I find? I found some of the most succinct evidence you'll ever need that the bible is a manual on how to carry out world wars. Taken as one big chunk with the Old Testament and Revelation on each end, the bible forms one big argument that world wars are inherently virtuous and any other form of civilization is not, and that only the act of following the manual on world wars can possibly lead to world peace. Let's retrace what Revelation says.

Revelation 3:5 — _the one who is victorious will be dressed in white_. The victory of the people united around God as an army in a worldwide battle is inherently connected with the rewards of heaven or peace that they will all receive after.

Revelation 1:16 — _coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword_. This is a rather abstract image, but one obvious reading is that global empire has one side of love and friendship and one side of violence and death. The angelic being that appears is one of the seven direct messengers of God and God's aspects, which taken as a whole represent global empire. Jesus was already associated with "a sword" in Matthew 10:34 — _I did not come to bring peace, but a sword_. This statement appears to contradict other popular messages in the bible about love and kindness, but it much more clearly takes its place within the book of Revelation where the messengers of God juxtapose the concept of peace for everyone who is saved with the concept of death, disaster, and suffering for everyone who is not saved.

Revelation 3:8 — _what he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open_. This happens in the middle of God's messengers calling out various regional churches for failing to obey particular moral standards and join up with the army of God. The metaphor of doors being open is portraying the concept of everyone being able to "come into" a particular church or army, and the metaphor of doors being shut represents people stopping the spread of an empire and refusing to join it. God is attempting to keep the membership of Christianity wide open so that everyone has to join it, but regional churches are sinning and resisting being assimilated, so God's messenger calls them out for "shutting doors".

Revelation 3:14~3:17 — _You are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were one or the other! ... You say, "I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing". But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked._ This one made me laugh because it could have been said by either God or Lenin. There is a particular group of rich aristocrats or bourgeoisie who will always try to be neutral to everything and act like participating in historical events is for unenlightened people. Lenin would say that everyone has to either turn over and aid the proletariat and the process of socialist transition or end up in the hopefully small portion of people who actively fight the proletarian army. But what God's messengers are saying in this story is that everyone on earth should join God's empire just because if everyone believes in its success long enough and basically enough people _believe_ in friendship and teamwork, then a giant violent global army is certain to succeed.

Revelation 5:9~12 — _with your blood you purchased for God persons from every tribe and language and people and nation ... worthy is the Lamb who was slain_. This passage is saying that it is inherently good to submit to global empire and die for it even if you do not get any benefit from it yourself, because while simply standing up for yourself will never be appreciated by everybody, a sacrifice proves that global empire is "protecting the innocent". Individuals taking actions considered ethical (for instance, being a pacifist and refusing violence) is inherently good no matter what horrors those actions ultimately lead to because as long as everybody is forced to participate in the overall project of Being Good it will snowball into the group of people that is bound together having a greater and greater advantage over everyone else and will inevitably wrap around to the army that protects the worldwide body of Nice people winning.

Revelation 1:11~17 — _The second beast ... forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark_. Realistically, this was probably referring to situations similar to the Stamp Act where the British Empire made people in the North American colonies buy stamps to be able to sell things. The text does say "on your forehead", but if the image is that level of absurd versus any historical period's image of daily life, it is probably meant to be examined on a large scale rather than a small one, as representing a concept such as a large empire simply passing a law onto everyone inside it announced by some appointed official ("the beast allowed a second beast to give breath to [the empire's] image"), after which everyone _feels_ like they have been marked with a slave tattoo to ensure they don't break out of slavery. The image of slaves that could be bought and sold was well known to the authors of various bible texts as a fate that was almost unthinkable for them to be in themselves, so it isn't much of a stretch to expect the bible writers would throw slavery around as a metaphor much like people have done in many contexts today up to and including because they don't want to pay taxes. Today this verse is thrown around basically any time a country tries to regulate its economy, including Bolshevism in the Soviet Union but also including Menshevism. The terrible thing is that may not even be an incorrect interpretation of the verse. The verse says that any empire that is not part of God's empire and God's army but passes a law to start controlling its economy as its own sovereign body of things separate from God is part of the worldwide empire of The Opposer, or as we colloquially say now, the devil. So it may as well have said that Stalinism and Trotskyism are both unholy, or that countries having sovereign governments of any kind that have not been conquered by God's army is unholy, because that is what it practically means.

Revelation 16:3, Revelation 22:18 — _The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it turned into blood like that of a dead person, and every living thing in the sea died_ / _I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll_. This statement is clear. All disasters that happen to the enemies of God's army are Justice and are approved by God, because every time the Opposer's armies and the churches that disobey God are defeated, and every time God's churches and subordinate nations out-endure them, it's an inherently good thing. If people starve in 1930s Ukraine, the expected response isn't to be horrified that _people are starving in Ukraine_, but to rejoice about it as long as the government of Ukraine is defying the political faction of people thought to be approved by God.

You can claim all you like that it's "impossible to predict history" or that "there are no overarching narratives", but literally every single second you do either of those things you are advancing Zionism and the destruction of Palestine. Every collection of real or fictional interacting objects is a narrative. So every single person on earth that is currently supporting Israel or has been supporting Israel since 1948 has been participating in the same grand narrative — a global war which is abstractly described in the book of Revelation and across the bible, through stacking together various generalized patterns within the history of tribes or kingdoms conquering each other into the result all of those patterns appear to inevitably lead to circa the middle of the 20th century. The grand narrative does not happen simply because people have read or absorbed the book, any more than people reading _Harry Potter_ books leads to people realizing _Harry Potter_. The grand narrative happens simply because the objects and events described in the book are already happening in the real world, and the book has managed to put together a summary of the shape of the physical grand narrative on the ground that is accurate enough that when people read the book they will see the description of Christianity creating a world government when everyone believes in it hard enough as obvious to the point of being tautological.

Observing this characteristic of the book of Revelation should be lethal to any misconceptions that narratives are somehow cosmically pre-existing Ideas rather than models of material things. You may _think_ you can break "narratives" by forming a Community and thinking positive thoughts. But if so, then why is it that the United States successfully crushed the Soviet Union? The bible said that the Soviet Union would be destroyed if the United States held firm in love and friendship and mercilessly punished it for defying the United States. The Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea were punished with sanctions and bigotry specifically for defying the United States. (Korea and Vietnam were also punished with violent invasions.) And unfortunately for everyone, the strategy laid out in the bible worked. The United States successfully crushed the Soviet Union twice over, and it has recently gotten halfway through crushing Cuba. The holy instruction manual for global bullying was a smashing success, and every time the United States has behaved with jealousy, pettiness, vindictiveness, injustice, bloodlust, bigotry, megalomania, and capricious malevolence, it has been handsomely rewarded with more control.

So, why the "dip"? Why does it seem to everyone far beyond Tories and Duginists in Russia like everything about society was better when it was either small tribes, or kingdoms and empires, or scatterings of peasants? Because the great innovation of capitalism was precisely breaking open and destroying everything resembling a community and replacing the entire concept of communities with open gaps where people constantly form connections for the first time. Suddenly, "running into strangers" became "socializing", travel and marketing became "multiculturalism" or "tolerance", and refusing to let everyone into your town or go to a bunch of other cities became "bigotry". But despite this new openness seeming like it had the power to break down barriers and unite the world, what it ultimately led to was the slow realization that space in towns and national territories was still finite, so as people kept rapidly moving and mixing some locations or social circles would become exclusively filled with rich or talented people and become locations of high status, crowding everyone else out — or alternatively, become filled with all the most low-status people in the entire world. When the world was flooded with agoras, they quickly burst open communities, sometimes deliberately and maliciously. Any coherent group of people with stable social bonds would eventually get termed "primitive", from tribes that caught the eye of Tories to religious groups analyzed with the crude label of "cult" to Third World countries forming close bonds to defend themselves like North Korea. Everyone ate up that ideology no matter what precise swatch color they were. "Surely you need to stop spending time in a closed community and get out," ordinary people will always say now whenever any coherent group of people starts doing anything weird. Then they all act surprised when outside people flood into fandoms and disregard all their previous traditions and practices, or Tories look at an association of gay and transgender people and decide it's a locus of hysteria spreading mental illness that they have to break up. These days, the moment there is anything remotely resembling a community, capitalist allies will break it apart in the name of freedom. And, worse than that, capitalists will then feed you the fiction that a bunch of isolated producers exchanging goods really is a community, and the _actual, real_ definition of a community. Regular people are not permitted to have communities, but high-profile actors and online artisans and business owners in a lobbying group and Liberal-republican parties and academics creating agorist theories and that one congressman hanging off a minority identity group can.

Agorism conquered the world before capitalism did, and after capitalism began to crumble. It championed destruction as progress, infinite possibility as truth, and uncertainty as knowledge, at once bashing ignorance and claiming ignorance is all we can ever know. On one level postmodernism and agorism are the same continuous thing, each one proclaiming that worldwide small capitalism is eternally better than communities or knowledge. Thus the philosophy based specifically around social links and socialization has ironically brought great destruction to the entire concepts of sociality, community, and society. What has become clear is that to invert agorism the entire notion of change, possibility, and uncertainty has to give way to detailed material models of how particular periods and events transition into other periods and events, without appeals to the "mysterious ways" of the universe deciding what happens, and without judgement. Humanity must take control of the overall problem of history, and must not leave anything open enough that even two different versions of Marxism can smash into each other and one can unpredictably come out on top of the other. Predictive knowledge is control; there is no need to steer and dominate what you can predict. But Marxists must become able to describe the behavior of all organizations and movements without "making it about themselves". The day that Trotskyists emerge from the time in which no philosophy could extend itself across others to produce a grand unifying narrative actually is the day that the world will emerge from the postmodern period. The day that Trotskyists produce an overview of the entirety of world history that is better than the bible, the bible god will finally fade into the ranks of other ancient superstitions and the world will move toward forming a global republic and also the irrelevance and dormancy of the global state.

I have been meditating on _Undertale_. I have been idly thinking since 2015 about what exactly this game and its companion game are trying to say. _Undertale_ is a game about getting through a console RPG adventure narrative and coming out the other side without killing monsters. But what does that mean? Does it mean that it's better to love your enemies than to be angry? Does it mean the author hasn't read enough fantasy novels and history books to understand what history is? Does it mean the author is accidentally trying to write a Cold War narrative where the Second World is stuck behind the Iron Curtain and wants to come out but the First World won't let it out and it has to come to a hesitant acceptance of its status as the lesser half of the world whose only solace is to take pride in being monstrous? Does it mean the author was trying to construct a fantastical counterpart of the Christian bible where the Old Testament section where tribes were killing each other turns into the New Testament section where people aren't supposed to kill each other, and I misread the bible itself as a profound Cold War narrative because I didn't fully realize that the bible was a manual about how to carry out global imperialism, and like all Armageddon or Ragnarök narratives the book of Revelation was just another mythical story about global empire? _Undertale_ is based on _Deltarune_, and _Deltarune_ is based on the bible. But _Deltarune_ is all about how the state of corporate art products constantly competing with each other and displacing each other is making everyone tired and how when people are stuck in small-town capitalism in general the totality of that existence is so tiring they look for ways to step out of material reality, and how in a sense there is no way for them to succeed at that without also just coming to understand material reality better and "waking up" from their previous misunderstandings rather than going through the motions of going through it all unconsciously. Is _Deltarune_ actually a pro-Trotskyist narrative or did I just look at a story about characters that exist in a world governed by an apocalyptic prophecy who are doubting the prophecy actually means anything, and then start reading the bible and realize that what the _Deltarune_ characters were saying was stupid because the point of narratives is to predict or generate consequences and the point of the bible narrative the game is based on is to correctly predict success at global empire and the only way to prevent global empire is for everyone to step out of their current limited understandings of the world's progress toward global empire and produce a new much better narrative of global history?

Yeah, I probably did. But it will still be my favorite interpretation of _Deltarune_, because looking back on the process, and in a world where international news is as depressing as it currently is, me catastrophically succeeding at interpreting _Deltarune_ and "solving" global capitalism before I'd managed to fully lay out the plot of the game may be one of the funniest things I've seen all year.

After _contradiction_ and _proletariat_, I think the next great case of Marxism "ruining" a dictionary word with a new meaning might just turn out to be _narrative_. Nobody has been abandoning that word, and its intensity of use only seems to be slowly climbing each decade. I think it's only a matter of time between now and the day Marxists come up with a rock-solid theory of how to break away from the bible narrative process and succeed at creating a new pattern of world history that Marxists start completely abusing the word _narrative_ into their own orange-tinted meaning. Like _contradictions_ came to refer to the physical oppositions that caused ahistorical bodies of logical statements to change and contradict, _narratives_ may start referring to physical processes of assembling courses of history, so that they are now the object historical materialism studies.

Many years before I ever learned any Marxism one of the things that got me away from Liberal-republican thinking about history was just playing or watching way too many simulation games about the Three Kingdoms period and noble characters conquering fiefs. Before long, I started reading about the history of other countries and saw that multiple other countries had had "three kingdoms periods" and was intrigued. I was only about 13-16 years old and I was already finding it impossible to ignore that the same patterns of _warring states period, empire, warring states period, empire_ seemed to pop up in different countries' history again and again. I didn't know what to do with that information. I had absolutely no idea what Communism even was or where it came from. But, once again, while I was still a teenager I found this Wikipedia page talking superficially about how between feudal China and China's republican period Mao had appeared and the Kuomintang had appeared and I filed it away into my mind as an important event in the history of Southeast Asia but I had no idea what was going on. I was like, _What is all this? Where did Mao come from??_ I have to say, I found it very satisfying when primary sources about the Chinese revolution and the Russian revolution eventually filled in the gaps to that story. I used to think the concept of China having a lot of different dynasties was vaguely impressive, but now that I know those were basically failures to ever invent republicanism I find it vaguely tragic taken in context.

So, when I used "Mao and the Kuomintang" as my example for the difference between anarchists' view of reality and historical materialism, I had specific reasons. If you look at all of reality as simply an arbitrary narrative to be subverted, there is really no good explanation for why the history of China would go through so many seemingly pointless cycles of re-division and then suddenly produce Deng Xiaoping Thought and Taiwan. It's one of many cases in world history where if a particular human being had artificially created the story you might ask why the network drew the first series out so many seasons instead of cutting it off, or why the writer wasn't fired. Even if the intentions for making the artificial creation were Evil, you'd still think there would be a greater amount of organization and efficiency. But when you look at things more through the lens of "game mechanics" (physical models), and the concept of a very difficult challenge that simply hadn't been won, then everything starts to make a lot more sense.

At times, when Christians have tried to claim that animal evolution was intelligently designed, biology fans have retorted back by pointing out how many things within animal biology seem to be terribly designed or not make any sense. I think to an extent that same concept applies to narratives. Anarchists and Liberal-republicans will typically try to say that civilizations are intelligently designed by emperors or upper classes "misusing" their power rather than being set down by God. But the effect is eerily similar. If civilization is all just put together to abuse people, then wouldn't it be more effective at its task if it made coherent sense, as with the created world in The Truman Show? But time and time again, it doesn't make any sense. China's historical timeline is a mess. There is no simple logical reason for North Korea to exist when the Korean War also happened but then never completed itself. The parties that are supposed to be working together to rule people in the United States have times of treating each other as necessary equals and times of actually having violent vendettas with guns involved at both local and national levels, leaving Stalinist parties in the United States genuinely confused. I don't think an anarchist could even explain why Trotskyism exists. If Communism is just one big conspiracy to trap people in a police state or in Dengism, then why did the Soviet Union have two Communist parties and why were they fighting each other, if Communism always leads to the same thing? Wouldn't the two of them know that they were working toward the same goal and just stop? Poststructuralism, postmodern philosophy, and even Bellegarrigist styles of charcoal anarchism cannot actually explain where material contradictions originally come from or why it is that people originally create "government". Without a predictive material account of these things that generically explains _how_ they come to exist and when you can expect them to exist, it's impossible to come up with realistic strategies to intervene and stop them. You will also not be able to come up with a plausible "after picture" for what kind of subsequent forms of society will be created after you intervene in what will realistically be formed in the present.

But, I have one other thing to say that anarchists will like considerably more. The exercise of narrative storytelling can be used for education and problem-solving. That much is almost true in the way they already believe it is. But if you are going to use fiction in this way, you must think about Communism and anarchism _exactly_ the same way you think about racism or transphobia. A story which attempts to represent an ethnic group to people but is not realistic is simply offensive. _My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic_ can have an episode which is supposed to be about groups of people of different national origins meeting each other and learning not to be prejudiced, but if the episode brings in Zecora as a thrown-together caricature of the continent of Africa, it will seem to be promoting lazy research on the actual history and conditions of Africa and in its own way still condoning racism. The mere act of creating art has a certain amount of power to be offensive in oppressive and non-constructive ways that will alienate people from each other and from the art. But what might just blow your mind is realizing that almost every single way a work can be non-constructively offensive simply involves people getting upset because the work is not accurate to reality at a time when they required it to be. People often try to make blanket claims that "getting away from realism improves art". But nobody wants to see a work where the concept of being Black in Alabama is invoked and yet made out of a bunch of nonsense lying around in the back of the author's brain. Sure, it's abstract rather than representational, and it's "original" in that it doesn't copy anything the author read. But when people try to be "creative" in their representations of real-world groups of people, it typically devolves into the same general array of uncreative tropes and stereotypes. Why? Because stories have always been models of other things. You'll see people throw around the concept that art is a canvas of infinite possibilities, but it simply isn't correct. Even fantastical stories that do not line up with the real world are simulations in which a particular set of winning rules derived from the needs of readers in the real world interacts with itself to create the simulation. Invention is a boundless canvas of possibilities, but not every invention actually makes sense — we have all seen joke inventions on cartoons which are completely unsuited to be final products. Art is exactly the same way. Judging the success of art is a difficult and messy process, but there are a few cases like representation of demographics and portraying the general concept of diversity where that judging process becomes almost instantaneous. Again, I will ask you, why? Because a simulation of any kind produces higher quality output according to the amount of data it was built on. This is why people plateau in their creativity when they do not have real-world information about other demographics. All stories are merely models, and stories made out of an inadequate pile of simulation rules in respect to a particular thing cannot successfully function as a good simulation.

Now, I want you to stop and think about what a lack of accurate, non-judgemental representation has done to countries like Cuba and North Korea.

Don't laugh at that, anarchists! I mean it very seriously. When the United States goes about its day spreading around only the sparsest details about Black people and leaving people with no good information, people fill in whatever they want to. And when they hear on the news that one Black person ever committed one crime in Detroit, they run with it. Pretty quickly it becomes that Black people "have a culture of crime" where they constantly get arrested more than anyone else because they didn't choose the right abstract Ideals of lawfulness, that Black fathers are abandoning their children to steal money from the welfare system, that the one Black person who believes in stealing products for anarchists is running an actual mafia or Islamic guerrilla army to create a new global empire, and that Barack Obama getting nominated for president is some kind of actual conspiracy by oppressive Dengist bureaucrats that have created a new Leninism out of schizoanalysis or Lacanianism. So if the United States went around telling nobody to learn about Third World countries and to always assume they can't govern themselves, what do you think people would start thinking about the trustworthiness or social competence of those countries' civilians?

When people are faced with fictional narratives that make the nature of narratives as simulations obvious, they don't first seek creativity or novelty, but a work where narratives are used as a representational model of material reality that accurately predicts or follows a generalized set of real-world events that happen in its stated geographical regions. When people don't have real observations of other ethnicities, simulations _become_ the data. When an important repeated pattern in society such as gender identity keeps appearing but is not well explained by science, narrative storytelling takes on rigorous rules and _becomes_ the science. This same concept of meticulously taking down observations of society and digesting them to produce a model of what drives actual observed biographical incidents and news events should be applied to all fictional narratives discussing Communism or anarchism. Any portrayal of Third World countries and their history which is inaccurate more or less causes the United States to descend on those countries and dominate them, taking away from them any chance of having democracy or even the right to exist at home as a resident of that country. So I am begging you, every author that goes on about "Representation in Media" or "using writing to improve our imagination", please represent historical Communist movements and republics accurately. Represent them as realistically as any element of your story which is intended to be realistic, including "lived experience" or gender identity. Represent your own favorite anarchist movements realistically, including every one of their flaws. Accurately represent the conflict between different versions of Marxism such as Stalinism and Trotskyism. Have you ever gotten upset when somebody took one of your favorite fictional characters and flattened that character into a simplified picture that was entirely perfect or entirely bad? Have you ever wanted to shout at somebody for dropping the most interesting parts of a fictional canon? Bring that emotion and the reasons somebody would feel it to representing the concept of "Socialism". Don't flanderize anarchism and make it into the perfect comic book superhero of ideologies. Don't villainize Bolshevism and act like workers' states do nothing but hate anarchists and the world outside. If you wouldn't insist that all stories be about straight able-bodied people, don't do the same thing to sociophilosophies and insist that all stories be about romanticized monarchies or Liberal-republicanism. It is unbelievable that the United States can be so awash in chatter about "representation" and "lived experience" and "community" and "bringing back sincerity" and yet not one bit of that applies to Communists. Historical workers' states get no accurate representation, windows into their own internal perspectives, acceptance by a wider community, hope for a better tomorrow, or sincerity.

Blue anarchism defines freedom as people believing anything and everything that doesn't contain prejudices. But it isn't possible to allow people to believe just anything that doesn't contain prejudices, because prejudices are in fact not the presence of a narrative, but the absence of a narrative that is inevitably filled in with a much more toxic narrative. It takes all the effort to learn correct information and it takes no effort to have prejudices. So literally any time somebody believes something stupid or inaccurate, they have already stepped away from reality, and it's only a matter of time before it turns into a demographic prejudice somehow. Every old racist Disney cartoon is simply an inaccurate model of reality. Every instance of fanfiction writers claiming male-on-male pairings "aren't actually gay" or fiction including nonhuman beings that are not male or female with the implication only aliens can have non-binary gender demonstrates how making any mistake about reality whatsoever can come across as discrimination. But this second category of mistake is much smaller, and the majority of them do not happen intentionally. They happen purely out of the author's current level of knowledge about the entire world. The entire world is something that takes a long time to learn about. So no matter how genuinely hard people try to know about everything, if any particular person releases a work to the entire world, it's likely everyone will accidentally have prejudices. Blue anarchism makes some kind of sense at a town scale but it really makes no sense at a world scale. At the scale of the world, everything including a cluster of blue anarchists is a narrative and the only form of analysis that actually makes sense is the existential-materialist analysis of all those separate interacting narratives.

After 11 years I understand the point of _Undertale_. We all want to think that groups of people coexisting is something you can easily do if only you choose the right Ideals and put your mind to it, but in actuality, the only real way to get to the future you want is to see beyond the barriers between groups of people and know the underlying reality, because if you do not know your opponent, you cannot control it.

== Should we even call it Social-ism? ==

I am really tired of the English language. Especially the United States variant of English.
I know a lot of other languages would have the same problems as I'm about to describe, but still, I'm tired.

The words "socialism" and "communism" have today become a point of weakness in a way it seems like they never have before. "Socialism" implies a transformation of society which is based in making society "more social" through giving it more _sociality_ or _society_ or _social sector_. "Communism" implies a movement or transition which is based in making more "community", "communality", or "communes". Neither of these words is at all accurate to what Communists really do. This is why, quite honestly, I prefer to just call the transitional society that the Bolsheviks physically put into place "Bolshevism" (or, "the Material System of Bolshevism" in longhand). I wouldn't even mind it being called "Stalinism" as long as that specific word wasn't being said as an insult or criticism. But if you have ever seen average people try to describe what "socialism" or even "communism" is... then the Soviet Union was not Communism in any way and it did not have a Communist party. And by that, I don't mean in the sense that I'm holding the Soviet Union to sky-high standards to handle socialist transition correctly, but in the sense that to most people "communism" has flat out come to mean anarchism and they chastise you like you were a revisionist if you don't believe it.

I think the words "socialism" and "communism" have unacceptably empowered anarchists. It's been absolutely pervading popular discourse that movements are "socialist" because they give back to the members of society instead of choosing the toxic Ideal of Greed (the trusty neo-Menshevik lever to prevent anything but Menshevism from transforming society), or because they return society to a whole, undamaged state of nature (this one you hear from White people subtly appropriating tribal societies' philosophy without any plausible material strategy for truly relinquishing White people's control over the United States and the earth), or because they "give power back to the people" instead of to a specific wedge of Evil capitalists that are deliberately ruining society but are unrelated to all the Good capitalists. There is no mention of _scientific socialism_ anywhere, there is no mention of the concepts of either _dialectical materialism_ or _mechanical materialism_, there is no mention of the concept of understanding history as a series of material processes, no mention of _populational relativism_ and understanding populations as self-contained stages for internal oppositions to arise that are familiar to the historical transitions seen in other countries horizontally, for the most part there is nearly no mention of _science_. Instead, three of the top concepts you hear thrown around in various phrasings are "pluralistic society" or "social liberalization", "lived experience" or "unimpeded daily life" or "community culture" or "freedom", and "common humanity" or "The Subject". These concepts are the central orbiting axis for the social-democratic and blue-anarchist concepts of what "socialist transition" _even is_. Society needs socialism because society is bigoted and pushes people out of society to become homeless, and spreads bad cultural narratives that cause people to trust and support Tory parties that spread more racism, LGBT-phobia and misogyny, and miscellaneous hatred. Society needs communism because it's bigoted and will never have enough jobs to inclusively welcome every individual into society just because people are nice, so the way to create communism is to create small and isolated communities of a few socially-linked people — I'm sorry, _decentralized_ and _non-bureaucratic_ communities — so that when these small groups that "don't believe in Greed" have claimed sufficient unused land and physical implements for creating material culture for themselves they will simply not let capitalism happen again. Silly Bolsheviks! How could you ever think Communism was about having a state? Communism is when every miniature community fits into the community community regardless of how many people there are and how much land there is. We're really open to communism now. Communism sounds pretty good, but just one little caveat — it had better be a form of anarchism and not a form of Bolshevism.

Sometimes I almost have no words for the _depth_ to which today's people detest Materialism and actual social science. It isn't a surface level thing. For every possible application you can conceivably use science for, _all of them_, I've been told at at least one point in my existence that each and every single one is bad. And I've been told that either anarchism or Liberal-republican academia somehow has the "actually brave" and "properly nuanced" solutions to all our problems if we'd only stop blindly consulting science.

Don't use science to back up your arguments, because actually people usually come to their beliefs based on who their friends are rather than through logical arguments. Don't worry, it's still possible to define the concept of Reason without facts or logic, you just have to read Kant and define what is Reasonable as group-based intuition and assume that everything already identifiable as unethical is not Reasonable.

Don't use science to try to find objective truth, because nobody will ever recognize what is materially accurate as true unless all populations of people are included, and making use of science makes it dreadfully easy for the populations and subpopulations currently in control of the world to erase the existence of tribal populations and demographic minorities and their experiences. Which is wholly unacceptable, and thus the use of science is generally Unreasonable.

Don't use science to find out what gender is; that's a task for Communities. You can't use science to prove to academics that gender identity is real because science can be weaponized to extinguish the existence of gay and transgender people at birth, and whenever there are multiple possible fields of study that can be used to advance a progressive cause the field with no possibility of abuse is the only one that can be used. Don't use science to prove that LGBT people improve with transition experts or therapy, I mean, you can try it but it won't have any political use in convincing anyone.

Don't use science to make people get COVID vaccines, because if people don't first feel included and heard before there is any science or government they will never trust science or government again, so really, Community and local culture can handle entire public health strategies too. CDC? More like "Centers for Domination Creation".

Don't use science to discover medications, because Big Pharma is going to over-prescribe them and pocket the money. We won't outright say that the world shouldn't have doctors but we are severely suspicious of them, so, you know, unless the Tories ever agree to pass universal health care, doctors are one big act of Domination where people are asked to take on huge debts for their physical inadequacies and maybe some of those weird right-Liberals that are convinced that nobody should ever go to doctors might actually be halfway right. Che Guevara was a statist, so don't you go believing that doctors are secretly good.

Don't you even think about using science to extend human life past 100 years, because that will only be used by billionaires and it has no valid use in giving humanity more time to gather and consolidate knowledge or gain better insight on the connection between past historical periods and future historical periods. Or even in keeping appointed center-Liberal judges on the stand longer so Tories can't take it. Have you _read_ the Epic of Gilgamesh? Don't you do it.

Don't use science to create technology, because technology is the source of power and Liberal-republicanism was created to crush improper uses of power, so therefore all forms of progress must always look like crushing unwanted loci of power and unwanted forms of technology, while invention itself is at best neutral but is never progress. That includes Bolshevism and the naïve thought that a cluster of intelligent statists could create a technology powerful enough to make a better society without asking literally the whole world whether they could have their own government with their own laws or have to become a colony of United States capitalists. Capitalists are bad, but, you know, the United States can't have democracy if everybody in the world who wants to invent something new doesn't ask the United States' two major voter bases whether a new form of government is okay. How wholly Unreasonable to not first ask the important question of whether Bolshevism is Ethical as judged by United States voters.

Don't use science to build hype about the general concept of "the future", because then we get harmful technologies nobody really wants like miniature "Matrices" (virtual worlds or "metaverses"), and LLMs. We see what you're doing there trying to learn the important art of promoting abstract Ideals instead of material knowledge, but there are much better ways to motivate people to get out of bed and continue existing, usually involving Community. You don't need The Future.

Don't use science to write fictional scenarios about imperialism in space, because that takes people away from a grounded view of reality where they focus on political struggles to reclaim local culture and change all of society by simply telling everyone Colonialism is a destructive and cosmically bad Ideal.

Don't use science to generate fictional species in order to use them for bad metaphors involving social prejudice. There's a valid place for Representation in Media but if you don't base fictional narratives in real biographical timelines people have experienced they will never be accurate or true and they will only encourage people to maintain incorrect and prejudiced understandings of prejudice. Don't you get it? Real accounts of people's experiences are real because they've been experienced. Lived experience! It's there in the name, it's real because people consciously live it in their minds, and then through the magic of simulated social bonding and empathy, other people experience it.

Don't use science to attack religion and promote Materialism, because that will cause people to overlook all the valuable ethical theories contained in religions such as Buddhism and ancient animisms, and the ability to join with what is Ethical and collectively choose the outer ethical boundaries that shape all future activity is surely more important than reality or facts.

Don't use science to argue with people about global warming, because, well, that hasn't worked so far and the empirical evidence suggests people may be more open to emotional appeals about the loss of social activities and relationships and the destruction of Community and tradition that will occur if wildlife or vegetation disappear or a city is swallowed by the ocean.

Don't use science to argue against prejudice and that all human beings are equal in their near-identical human genome, because you'll only diminish the observation that that kind of stuff is Already Just Obvious to any Normal, Functioning Real Humans and anyone would think of it if you didn't go around muddying the waters with your stupid "science".

Don't use science to point out the problems in Freudian psychoanalysis, because human beings naturally think in metaphors and quests, and if every existing political theory has failed us then there must be some kind of great new political theory inside Jung, sitting somewhere in between the realms of fictional adventure narratives, and how creative expression gives life to inner experiences, and psychology.

Don't use science to teach people how to draw, because superficially realistic art is boring and the best representational art is representational art about social phenomena or inner experiences told with highly stylized visuals.

Don't use the offshoots of science to solve and predict fictional narratives with Materialism, because material evidence of events in a narrative can definitely never be connected to themes or narrative progression or fictional histories and you have to analyze fictional narratives using abstract themes and predictions of their didactic messages or sentimental desires.

Don't use Materialism to try to predict history, because history is clearly the sum of all the free actions of individuals, and the way culture has been in the past could never predict the way culture or level of knowledge will shape individual people's behaviors in the future — oh, wait, uh, somehow you can use history to predict fascism is still possible I guess and won't simply never happen again outside forms we could never predict, because we find it very scary. Don't remove the history of slavery and the Confederacy from history books, because...... no, we know that stuff isn't happening any more and everything has changed, but um... it's very distressing, so you can't remove it because... the distressing parts of history books are the good parts. It's like teaching a unit on horror stories; you can't properly teach the craft of writing a horrot story that while removing the best parts of the horror story. We just like those parts of the book and that's our lived experience. So that's why you can't remove all history books from classrooms even though we just gave an argument for why that might make total sense.

And for the love of animism, don't use science to build a proletarian society built on _destroying shared community_, _taking the choice to believe in reality and consequences away from the individual_, _instrumentalizing the human being into an object acquired and hoarded by a nation_, and _building a system of justice by first sweeping away everyone's appeal to what is natural and obvious_. Anyone who makes people learn science is a Cop and anyone who would protect national populations with science is a Pig. [*AF2]

Oddly enough in all of this I had never really heard people complaining about the fact chemistry allowed humanity to create atom bombs, and considering the existence of supernovas, neutron stars, and black holes as new exotic outcomes that occur when the universe itself pushes the boundaries of the smallest scales of physics, synthesizing new gigantic elements could probably enable something very bad. Complaints about researching viruses in a lab to make vaccines are something I've only ever heard from Tories, although Tories have definitely been spreading them far and wide. I also don't hear people complaining about animal testing or factory farming much in context of animal welfare — today it seems that you hear complaints about factory farming mainly in connection with climate change and the vague implication that humanity eats meat or runs destructive farms or releases a lot of greenhouse gases from farms because capitalism comes from Greed and the power to exploit animals or exploit oil or exploit Iraq comes specifically from the Once-ler sitting around in his shack spontaneously inventing the idea of large corporations and because _he_ made the wrong decision one day he gained the power to chop down all the trees and scoop up all the oil and hire as many people as he wanted to and the Lorax and all the Whos in the town were powerless to stop him.

But, if I can take just a brief moment to specifically talk about myself and my own so-called "lived experience"... this destroyed me. Having to live in a world where everybody thought like this and none of it was showing any signs of ceasing steamrolled my psychology, cracked apart my mental thought space like a hammer, and shattered my ability to feel any emotions about anything. My mind is built for science and math. I have an autistic brain that seemingly lacks any inherent capability for intuition and is entirely logical, but has no inherent ability to comprehend time. I have days where I actually wake up, see it's noon, immerse myself into compiling huge bodies of facts and connections within reality or fiction, hardly remember to eat anything after breakfast, and have experienced twelve or thirteen hours doing the same thing as if they were thirty minutes. I either focus completely and intensely on something to the point it goes through my entire being and I'm doing it for three days straight, or I have no ability to focus on a thing and can't even get started. I am terribly put together to be of any use as a worker or an owner. I can't keep a schedule or make promises or do anything specific for any specific number of hours each day. And I physically can't drive a car because my brain won't focus and is always "drunk" on constant puzzle-solving and context-switching. There are miles and miles between my house and anywhere containing the least bit of work or socialization but my neurodivergent brain has actually wrecked cars so I just have to walk 5 kilometers (3 miles) multiple times a week. Nobody's going to vote for me to have a bus to ride just because it's "the right thing to do". My relatives are convinced that the terribly-functioning bus charity will be improved when it's replaced by a for-profit corporation. I couldn't pay for the ride! I can't make any money. So I'd still have to walk. I would always get the highest standardized test scores in my class because my brain gets bored so quickly that unless I was having a bad focus day it would simply breeze through the school material for something to do. But since the age of about 18 I found it tough to believe it when people called me smart because I would always unknowingly say the wrong things they didn't want me to say, and then I would think, _can I really be that smart if I believe that gender identity is real or that Black people experience structural racism? People say that only stupid people vote for the Democrats, so I don't actually know if I'm smart._ And, well... that only got worse as the years went on and I tried studying more ideologies. _Sure, I got good test scores, I passed several AP classes, but can I really be that smart if I can't figure out how to explain all the world's issues to the Republicans and get them to vote for the Democrats? I've always been told that smart people founded the United States Republic. But they must have understood a lot of things I don't understand yet, because every day it makes less and less sense to me how the Constitution is usually supposed to work. All the autistic or transgender people I hang out with think people aren't smart if they say the Republicans can't be changed and you can't get everyone to vote for the Democrats. Am I Evil or am I just Stupid? ...So now I'm studying Marxism, but I don't understand why everyone is so stuck on this concept that people voting for a couple of laws actually changes everything. Is there something wrong with me? The Marxist theorists said I have to understand everything that already exists and how movements are already developing in order to organize a Stalinist party but the more Marxism I absorb the stranger and less comprehensible all the progressive movements in the United States actually seem. Do I just not understand Marxism because I haven't been able to work? Would all of this theory about organizing people actually make sense if I could physically go to the places where people work instead of sitting around here? I don't want to have bourgeois consciousness. It must be my fault._ I was born only trying to figure out what were the best outcomes and what was Right — in the proper anarchist ethical sense. I never really wanted to upset anyone. I used to actually care about ethics and have something of an obsession with hero characters in fiction and the concept that they were not specifically powerful, but ethical. I walked away from religion because I didn't see how people believing in a god would advance ethics. So every time I thought I got an answer about what was the Right thing to do from any group of people I absorbed it and attempted to integrate it into the others. Like I was "supposed to do". But each time I memorized an ethical prescription, I saw one of the only things I liked or found relatable in the world slip away one by one. I thought one day that would end, and I would still have a couple of them left. But it didn't end. At some point I saw everything I had ever identified with or ever wanted to talk to anyone about ground up as "inherently unethical", and I tried to move past it, but every time the arguments were too close to making sense (at least with a bunch of other arguments I'd seen before if nothing else), and pretty quickly, those "became the true answers to me" and I couldn't feel enjoyment from anything I inherently enjoyed on a psychological level. At the same time, whenever I interacted with anything I was "supposed to" like, it felt empty and depressing and I didn't like it. _Look, Media Representation!_ Awesome. It looks great, but I feel strangely like if I ever talked about it to anyone it would turn into a test and I'd be hit with a ruler for a wrong answer. I don't want to make anyone mad. Maybe I'll read something else. _You aren't normal, so maybe you would like a Furry visual novel full of gay romance?_ I don't know. Not exactly. I mean, I like that kind of character, but I don't really like the themes of any of these stories. They all have this weird undercurrent of trying to manufacture fake diversity in a White or European population that wishes there was diversity, and treating reality in this difficult-to-describe, almost neo-creationist way where biology doesn't exist because of evolution and material oppositions in nature, and instead exists because some unseen force decreed that the world would have diversity and all diversity would automatically get along without strife, war, or predation. A premise can't be objectively wrong, but it feels... "off". _Get hyped about the new Pokémon game! It's fun, it's social, it embodies inclusive animist values, and it's an adventure about making friends and becoming ethical instead of just slaughtering things for an evil empire!_ No. I won't, not because it "doesn't embody Marxism" or some silly on-principle objection like that, but because I actually look at Arceus and the element type system and what I feel emotionally is "that's gross, it reminds me too much of my real-world oppression" "I don't like how Pokémon presents its world as an easy, one-size-fits-all linear path and puts in social features each to make the games more approachable but then when you water down the game to being that digestible it becomes inherently boring and the fans are actually upset about that and complain about it a lot but for baffling reasons they still stay exactly as stuck on the games as they ever were and don't really want anything about the games to change, every time someone offers a possible change such as an open world the consensus is that doesn't understand the appeal of the game and when implemented has ruined it" "I don't like the kind of people who play _Pokémon_. They never like it when you don't like things exactly the way they are and inherently fit into that order and understand exactly why it was made that way and praise it for being exactly the way it is. I don't like the way it is, and so it isn't fun to me or a social experience for me". _Ah, you're *really* not normal. Maybe you're interested in playing fantasy card games at the card shop?_ No. That just feels like putting on a fake personality and trying to hide my true personality. There is this idea that's been going around that all you have to do to make tabletop games inclusive is to say "they're for gay people now" and then they just are. But the whole assumption that Community fails to be inclusive because it needs more Inclusivity and Community really, really was not working for me. It wasn't working on the most basic levels, before any logical thought came in. I wasn't _trying_ to analyze it. Not back then, when for years I didn't even actually know what Marxism was or how to apply it. My emotions were just gradually dying from any attempt to socialize. I had to separate from my relatives and I didn't really have any friends, but I found I experienced more contentment and less pain when I tried to get away from social interaction as much as possible and be alone. Interacting with any social artifact produced by humans often just felt wrong. Retreating into my lair and reading about Marxism was one of the only things that made me feel good. I was still a "fan" of food so to speak, and I had no problem going to town to get packaged groceries. The grocery store was nice, because whenever there weren't many people there there were so many things to look at and everything was just still and quiet and nobody was making me feel bad. I often felt a little weird at the library because there were _people_ there, and that would make me start vaguely thinking about what the lives of normal people were like and what I did wrong to end up like this, and how screwed I was to not be able to work or unionize, and when I was going to die, and if Stalin's government would have hated me as much as this society. Sometimes I really didn't want to read at the library and I just wanted to walk to town and back so I didn't have to be in my house but I could also read at home. I liked being on the dirt trails up to town hidden inside the trees more than I liked being in town or in the impossible state of visiting another person. The only people I "talked to" were online video broadcasts I would listen to just to not forget what humans are and knock myself back a few paces away from actually going crazy. I had many episodes of wanting to die so I could be less of a problem to everyone and no longer be the person who takes all the Wrong actions and is the embodiment of pure Unreasonableness. (Probably over 100 in total.) I thought I would never be good enough to deserve anyone's love and was a little afraid they'd all prefer I never came near them and died alone. I sometimes got worried that I shouldn't talk to Marxist parties because they would tell me I had everything wrong and I shouldn't have even come in. I knew they were the only people on earth who would ever want to talk to me but I had to solve the way reality worked perfectly without any mistakes or they wouldn't want me either, because only someone with the power to bring actual change can be a comrade.

I was autistic, I was transgender, I was neurologically disabled, but all of that just continued to push me away from society as if progressive movements had never existed. I was always told that demographic identities would flip around into inherently integrating people into Communities if only the nature of Community would change toward the Ideal of inclusion. But whenever people tried to form a "community" of any kind it never felt right being there, like in every case a Community was inherently more full and complete without me in it. I didn't feel like I was "actually" any of my demographic identities. Even though the negative effects of all of them were still present, it felt like they had all slid off me and I was faking. I just... I was a cryptic genderless _thing_ with no ability to tell time, but I had tried too hard to be special and I'd better find some way of being normal and fitting into a society "correctly" or it felt like some sort of spiked ceiling trap of inhumanity was going to fall out of the sky and crush me to bloody bits before I could run.

It was like there was always a weight on me. I felt like I was deeply wrong, like my birth was a wrong choice. I had the urge to apologize to people about something nondescript but it felt like either I would get in trouble for even bringing it up and then they wouldn't want me around or they would try to tell me it was okay but completely misunderstand what the issue was and give completely wrong assumptions of what made me feel at home and what made me happy, which would only make things worse. I was useless to everybody no matter who they were. I was a monstrosity made with irregularities that could not be fixed. I was "the dragon". And a dragon stays deep in its lair if it doesn't want to be met with the sword.

So... in one sense, I was pretty keen on the concept of reapplying Society back to society and rebuilding it from a scattering of isolated individuals back into something that actually resembled society. But I could tell that that concept meant something very different to me than it did to everyone else. I was already living in the collapse of sociality itself since at least 2021, while nobody else was and it was all abstract Ideals to them. If I was going to rebuild society it had to begin immediately. If the world was vile, I had to record and analyze it exactly as it was. I had to take all the utterly wrong movements and ideas and I had to present a perfect account of everything exactly as it was so I could then turn everything inside out and make it right.

I have come to one conclusion: Marxists must deconstruct all the major concepts of anarchism and Liberal-republican theory down to the absolute most basic ones that even some Marxists inappropriately make use of and show why every single one of them is wrong. Starting with "Community".

First we should talk about Gramsci. There is a popular quote that originated from Gramsci that has slid and transformed over the years almost beyond recognition. "The old world is dying, the new one is slow to appear and in this contrast is the time of monsters." It almost doesn't matter who actually said this. It wouldn't be more correct or incorrect if Gramsci had said it himself. The message of the saying is clear: historical periods are physical objects made of particular components. When a new physical object can be constructed successfully, there is a new historical period, and it gets rid of the remaining traces of the previous historical periods, parading itself around as the "obvious" logical outcome. But when a new historical period cannot be physically constructed, or it falls apart before it can establish itself, the material contradiction between various old and new historical periods keeps raging, perhaps for a short time, or perhaps for a full 200 years. A time of monsters is precisely a time of contradiction between two historical periods of varying viability. When early Trotskyism tried to emerge in Europe and the Soviet Union, but was not yet strong enough to form a nation-sized party, and Stalinists clung onto each national region believing that Trotskyism could be nothing more than a hazard, that was a time of monsters. So, the question is, why is this quote so popular with Liberal-republicans who do not understand a lick of historical materialism and do everything to exorcise mentions of Communist theorists from their universities, only stopping a few steps short of hanging up a symbolic Chinese tank on the wall and sprinkling every room with a vial of pure Bourgeois Water? Where is the expected moment where somebody realizes Gramsci was a Communist and immediately stops class and chucks the textbook out a window?

We've already established that the thing saving those textbooks from imminent defenestration is the physical separation of capitalism into two semi-countable capitalisms. As long as capitalism can convince people that half a country can build a new future through one portion of capitalists defeating another, it can stave off the possibility of people realizing that an entirely different historical period is required. So, now, how do Liberal-republicans maintain the illusion that one half of a body of capitalists is genuinely superior to another body of capitalists?

Usually the myth that follows this is that "culture" is the basis of civilizations, and the key to winning at Liberal-republicanism is to connect people together as tightly as possible into an expanding ideological Lattice until a sky Lattice for instance expands over the whole area of the country and pushes all the rust people out to the margins. But this is very much a myth. United States center-Liberals have had around 160 years to pull this off and create a new historical period without Tories as they promise, and they have not. When Liberal-republicanism is truly successful, it only takes 14 years for parties to turn over and produce a new set of parties, but this time it has taken over 100. That is a very clear difference between the real-world shape of Liberal-republican "permanent revolution" and a failure. This is not like Deng Xiaoping Thought where there is no existing example of a country passing through a transition correctly to compare against. We should be able to know whether the Democrats are ready to succeed within the space of _four presidential elections_. Not twenty-five elections, which is over six times too many. So why does anybody keep making excuses? Well, clearly, because culture and mentality are not easy to study and anticipate through such rigid numbers. How would you survey the United States on its progress at getting rid of racism or its progress at getting rid of transphobia, and how could you ever anticipate what would cause different localized countable cultures to pick up these new mentalities?

Wonderful question. Unfortunately, it exposes a very nasty contradiction inside Liberal-republicanism. If there are one or more ethnic minorities trying to spread consciousness about racism across the country to create a new historical period, and there are simultaneously groups of gay or transgender people trying to spread consciousness about that to create a new historical period, but the two don't entirely overlap, you don't necessarily know that either of them is actually going to end up on the center-Liberal party platform. And if and when it happens that either of them is excluded, which is a very real possibility, then the excluded group of people will come to believe that it is the one that must spread culture and mentality across the country to bring the new historical period while the Democrats are irrelevant to that task. But if transgender people have gotten excluded, for instance, then why should any of them care about the concept of voting? We have established that what really brings a new historical period under Gramscian models is spreading culture and mentality, not actually going and casting a ballot. So why should _anyone_ vote? Gramsci and Žižek told everyone that a new historical period of center-Liberal values and progress comes when people spread culture and mentality, and that those things are much more powerful than voting; if anything, they would be the things that cause votes, not the other way around. So in order for progress to win and a new historical period to be created, everyone needs to stop thinking about elections and do anything but vote.

If elections are the outward result of culture, then culture itself must also come from something. There are definitely some people who accept new ideas and some people who do not, so what is the difference? Here it would be useful to bring in the real-world observation that circles of Republicans and circles of Democrats are comparable in their receptiveness to new ideas — they tend to shut out ideas from groups of people they perceive as being separate and hostile versus their existing group of people. Social links between two people predispose people to accepting ideas. So, it follows that the way culture is actually spread is the creation of social links and the reconfiguration of physical collections of people into new shapes as they expand outward a few people at a time. Culture is spread through what may be called the fusion of countable cultures or the reconfiguration of communities. Voting ultimately comes from the incorporation of different cities, industries, fandoms, chat groups, broadcast audiences, or any other set of socially-linked graphs of people into each other.

Can you see what is viscerally, fundamentally wrong with this?

It is a fundamental value within Liberal-republicanism that no two countable cultures can be better than each other. Open up a college sociology book, and you will soon enough see a description of principles that it is impossible to study a countable culture, both in practical terms and in ethical terms, without establishing the understanding that the other countable culture will not be judged as lesser. A countable culture will not be observed and measured by people it does not want to see; a visitor will not return good information without arriving on even terms. This principle has been established by a peripheral wing of _that accursed group of people known as scientists_. In spite of everything they have "done", within a universe where no physical object can even be seen without something bouncing into it, scientists cannot succeed without practicing a code of ethics, while at the same time, they practice this code specifically to gain a better understanding of the world that surrounds them as it is without simply imposing their pre-existing Ideals onto it. An objective and descriptive study of societies must exist _partly because_ if countable cultures were not studied in such a way, they would be dominated by an external empire that does not respect their values. To point at a countable village or tribe of socially-linked people and say that it must adopt a particular Ideal is generally to say that as it is it is currently inferior. So, considering this general understanding of what cultures are, how can culture or mentality be held up as the engine of progress? Gramsci's vulgarized model of Liberal-republicanism would seem to say that Liberal-republicanism turns over a new era of progress when a superior culture wins and an inferior culture disappears. We know from everyday experience that culture and community are inextricably linked to the point of being more or less the same inseparable entity that can be called by either name. So where does any culture or community get the authority to declare itself the one true community and absorb other communities? We can't trace this problem back to Gramsci, because Gramsci chose Bolshevism and didn't actually focus his energy on whether center-Liberals or Tories were the better party to control capitalism. This interpretation of center-Liberals being forged out of a superior culture is an interpretation specific to Liberal-republicanism. But even if Liberal-republicans had never tried to quote Gramsci, the idea has still been part of Liberal-republicanism for a long time. How often have you heard people talking about "liberal governance" as something that only happened before Trump and by implication would always have functioned much better if Tories never existed, or about the Tory generation "slowly dying out"? Rhetoric that Tories somehow misinterpreted and ruined the original vision for Liberal-republicanism is everywhere — not to mention some that _center-Liberals or blue anarchists_ ruined the original vision and nobody needs them.

Liberal-republicanism cannot function without the assertion that one countable culture or community of people is inherently better than another. Otherwise, there is no such thing as campaigning or voting having a theoretical correct outcome that informed voters could choose rationally, and no real reason for anyone to vote.

What would happen if everybody in the country simply stopped voting and nobody ever put any marks in the section for president again? Surely the electoral college or somebody would have to vote on the new president. But the electoral college is based on votes for president, so it would have to be drawn up based on something unusual such as votes for Congress. But couldn't everybody just not vote for Congress either? If there were no votes for Congress and no votes for president, what would happen to Congress and the president then? Is there a point where the government would shut down and they would all just have to go home? This is almost what Liberal-republicans' strange understandings of Gramsci would seem to imply — if culture and mentality don't actually align with any particular political party or president, then maybe none of them would win. This would seem to fly in the face of conventional understandings of Liberal capitalism and everyday experience. _But if nobody votes, then doesn't a cluster of the biggest capitalists win?_ your typical Liberal-republican will reply, sounding bizarrely like a Communist.

We do, on some vague level, know what happens when everyone stops voting. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 when no one in government could put up a decent opposition supported by the people to the faction of people who wanted to dissolve the central government. But, many people today believe that was a _good_ thing. The popular belief across the United States is that there was never any noticeable faction within the Soviet government that anyone should have supported, not Stalin's allies, not the Khruschevites, and not Gorbachev either. (And Trotskyists were still not big enough to make any meaningful change at the time, failing Gramsci's apparent requirement of an inherently successful countable culture.) So, if the Soviet Union can't produce any good theorists that United States people like... then everyone should stop supporting them, the whole national population should dissolve, and civilization should crumble apart so that nobody has to help anybody, right? Nobody needs to help anybody obtain supplies or healthcare. Society is some kind of logical fallacy made up to dominate people.

If you think that's an insane conclusion, then congratulations, you are actually thinking. But what everyone in the United States has to understand is that simply holding people together into a society is a difficult task, not an easy one or one to be taken for granted. Human beings love freedom. But freedom is in contradiction with society. Around 1933, the Soviet Union faced a difficult choice: make use of grain in Ukraine to aid other projects, or leave Ukraine alone and suffer serious setbacks to other regions' development. The other regions' need is real. At worst, some people may still be starving. At best, if the other regions don't receive grain they will lean toward refusing to develop cities and keeping reactionary attitudes, and things will be looking fairly bad for Gramsci's culture law — with an outright faction full of peasants materially distinguished by agrarian villages, the scale tips a bit toward no gay rights in the Soviet Union, and a bit more against women having careers. So the planners' choice is critically important. But if they do choose to send grain from Ukraine to the other republics, Ukraine is going through a crisis and some people in Ukraine are going to die. Philosophers of ethics think that when you have to choose between the well-being of two sets of people in a trolley problem that the choice is simple and you should merely choose the larger number of people. But what if the trolley problem was real, and it was Ukraine? In the real world, people are quickly going to get angry at you for almost any action but doing nothing. And in every discussion about "Communist regimes", that's exactly what they did. Suddenly the old ethics thought experiments had gained a new dimension: does the person deciding to switch the trolley to the other track even have a right to stand there and make decisions at all? Or if one person is controlling other people who would otherwise have the ability to make their own decisions, _is ethics inherently unethical_?

The decision between whether to ship grain from Ukraine more or less boils down to a strict decision between freedom and democracy. Up to World War II, the people of the Soviet Union were relatively satisfied with their government, and largely, although not universally, believed it represented the people. Therefore, into 1933, whether Ukraine should do what the government tells it to was a question of whether Ukraine was under control of government by the people, and whether _democracy_ had control over Ukraine. Democracy cannot both _be_ in control of Ukraine, subjecting it to the will of the people in the other republics, and _not_ be in control of Ukraine, allowing all the people inside Ukraine to do what they want because they are not under the control of social links to other regions and government by the people.

Freedom is when Stalin _doesn't_ take the grain. Democracy is when Stalin _does_ take the grain.

You have probably heard this dilemma from Tories in a severely chewed-up form making some kind of baffling claim that somehow taxes are going to destroy society. And you probably didn't listen back then because you knew on some level that center-Liberal social-democrats could never knock over Tory businesses as badly as Stalin's government knocked over Ukraine. But unfortunately, the basic principles are still there. It isn't about how much the businesses might "suffer" — it's about their ability to exist freely, make decisions at a local level, and casually form only the social links they want. This whole process is inherently in contradiction with democracy, and that is the real reason Tories appear to hate democracy so much. They strictly prefer _freedom_.

Tories and center-Liberals each operate off _political agorism_, the social theory that society is fundamentally made of arbitrary social links that form from individual decisions, and totalities of social links are the basis of all other things about society, including culture, society's contained economy, and political parties or republican systems including the United States constitution or court system. Agorism is a deeply frustrating political philosophy because in many ways the model appears to be true: rings of capitalist industry cannot function without forming social links between production structures or cities, populations cannot form political parties without forming social links, and countable cultures and social links are inherently connected. Agorism is not even as Idealist as it seems at first because it does in fact say that culture is generated out of a material structure: networks of social links. It is a strangely diabolical philosophy in that it is constantly handed to complete beginners to politics as an appropriate first example for everyone to start from ("vote for the Democrats!") but in the end it is one of the most difficult kinds of sociophilosophies to properly analyze to the point it can only be correctly understood for what it really is by some of the world's most advanced Marxist theorists who avoid making several basic mistakes. The Democratic party is like giving a high school student a Fourier transform integral that takes pages to solve and saying "you interact with radio waves every day; it's totally easy!". So you have to go all the way down to the smallest scales to properly solve the problem.

Do Ideas cause communities? Does the Ideal of Inclusivity inherently cause totalities of marginalized groups to form together? Do the ideas inside the Democratic party cause votes? Does Media Representation cause people of different demographics to all read a book or watch a show specifically because the ideas are good before there is any actual input from real people? This is one of the most frustrating things about political agorism because there are multiple ways to formulate this culture model, and if you question any of them, people will switch tactics to try to keep defending it and you'll simply get the other ones. This is why in the previous paragraph I framed it as _social links cause culture_: because that is the better way to formulate the model that anybody in their right mind would quickly correct it to if you grill them on culture causing social links. But most of the time, "culture causing social links" or "ideas causing social links" is actually the form in which you will usually see it. _The Democratic Party gets votes because it has good ideas; the multicultural book club gets members because it has good ideas; the United States gets immigrants because it has good abstract Ideas that are fabricated in total separation from reality but happen to work anyway._ But none of that is true. The United States didn't steamroll North American tribes because it had the world's best ideas. The Republican Party doesn't keep periodically winning elections because it has the best ideas. A book club or podcast doesn't get any connections if genuinely all it has is ideas and its "good ideas" don't actually speak to anyone. In the current historical period everyone's mind is warped and distorted by the existence of ethics and the concept that you can call ideas "good" or "bad" whenever you want to as long as they're sufficiently Nice or Mean. In reality, there may be such a thing as successful or unsuccessful ideas, but humans don't get to subjectively decide what those are as individuals — no, not even in the role of the wise grandpa or grandma that walks into the ethics thought experiment from stage left to play the opinion of the entire rest of society, who is still an individual and who is still every bit as unreliable outside of the symbolic context of a dream or a stage play. Social links cause ideas. If anything, a socially-linked network of Democratic Party voters must already exist for anyone else to be added to the Democratic party based on its "ideas". That is the absolute minimum correction to make agorism a Materialist philosophy and allow all its supporters to keep defending it, as they almost certainly will.

So, if social links cause culture and are a fundamental building block in the model, once there is already a socially-linked group of people, can culture maybe _turn around_ and cause more social links?

No. Both people must act toward becoming linked to become linked, so one person can easily just not become linked when two people have different "mentalities", without the "correct mentality" ever changing the incorrect one. This means abstract Ideals can never dictate how people will behave, as much as the objective or material state of the second person. Not all of that state information will be apparent from the outside, but some of it will be revealed from the inside within an interaction, so in general, all the state information that is needed to model people does exist. Individuals link together "first" in a simultaneous collision of two separate befores and afters to form a single future, and then a localized countable culture object either exists or doesn't exist. Its existence is a finicky thing, a bit like a photon or electron superposition, but at any given moment it _will_ either happen or not happen, and individual people do not decide whether it will happen, because they fundamentally cannot decide in advance whether other people will like them or their ideas. Culture cannot manufacture social links out of the aether, no matter what.

Do social links cause the economy? No. This question might have been more complex back in agrarian societies where people were tightly bolted into large family units, but it isn't as complex now. The entire concept of higher education in the United States presupposes that they don't. People are constantly moving to other places for college or for a job, and some people are moving into the United States from Mexico or from educated areas of the Eastern Hemisphere for jobs, not to mention from all the regions the United States has interfered in and tried to make people think they shouldn't live in. There is a lot of evidence that people have been moving to the United States for the economy and care more about going wherever the economy moves to than staying with any particular group of social ties. Here, I think agorism is a bit unaware of its own consequences. Countable agorisms form as communities that try to extend over more people to gain power, and if they're convinced they're the best in the world, they will try to expand out further to swallow other regions' people. When agorisms hide their existence and try to act like they are not personally benefiting from making other countries feel bad about themselves, they change the playing field they claim to be modeling, not really taking into account that recruiting someone for good reasons that will last and recruiting someone based on empty ideology are not the same thing.

Do social links cause political parties? Yes, but also no. In theory, political parties must have some material effect in order to win, so in order to be a winning political party, they must contain an economic base. When capitalism exists, a clear economic structure exists, and political parties can make some kind of case that the people leading them are important within society and should continue to be important. The social links between several capitalists facilitate forming a political party, but they only make it effective because the capitalists first exist as capitalists. Social links are also important in the case of forming a successful Stalinist party, but again, especially in that case, economic structures such as peasant villages and factories exist that much more blatantly lead to social links. What about a Fourth International? Any number of stereotypes will go around that Marxist theorists stand around not doing much of anything but reading and congregating, so surely the social links in a Fourth International must precede an economy? This one is a little tricky, but when you realize that the economy in one historical period and the economy in another historical period are two different things that change into each other — look back at Žižek's quote about monsters — yes, a Fourth International is caused by an economy, just not its own economy. If people don't understand dialectics, time slice analysis saves the day.

So, basically every time agorism tries to tell you that social links cause other things, what it is really doing is failing to understand simultaneous dialectical interactions or historical transitions, where if you expand the whole situation out, you will see that it tends to consistently put everything on the wrong side of causing social links. Saying that culture makes social links is one of the only exceptions, and even there it still manages to be slightly wrong by not understanding that culture is not an Idea and that it's only managed to say something correct by saying a tautology.

Why is it so important to recognize that Liberal-republican parties are always agorisms? Because political agorism is the bridge between Liberal-republicanism and anarchism — it is the prototypical _blue_ anarchism that doesn't stray far from material things that already exist but confidently describes an overall layout of society that can supposedly exist without a state. The Republican and Democratic parties will not tell you this out loud, because they do not want to believe they are trying to abolish Liberal-republicanism. But what they are constructed for and what they intend are two drastically different things. This is one of the most critical things to understand about modeling Idealism: _Idealist factions never act with intention, and they always do inexplicable things with unintended consequences_. You have to actively separate the intentions and the outcomes and address both of them instead of simply discarding the Ideals layer, or people will not be able to recognize what you've made a model of.

What Gramsci and Žižek have proved for us through the mouths of a bunch of standard clueless Liberal-republicans is that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party _cannot_ currently be a single coherent society. Every single time Gramsci is invoked is another point of evidence that the Republican Party and Democratic Party are truly in material opposition and truly mutually exclusive. And here is why. _If societies really and truly come from social links_, or put another particularly Liberal-republican way, the coalescing voluntary choices of individuals, then the central government is not actually playing a major role in the construction of the society despite the bit of theater it puts on every four years where it claims to be mediating which president will rise out of the two or more countably separate societies inside it to rule the country. If society really comes from social links, then the people of Kansas form Kansas without needing the federal government and the people of South Carolina form South Carolina all on their own, and the people of South Carolina may not even need the people of Kansas to exist for their population of people to exist. The United States could be 50 separate countries if it weren't for the mysterious existence of political parties, which in today's world appear to be the only connecting thread that makes it mandatory for the 50 states to be connected. Because the Democrats and Republicans greedily wash over state borders back and forth to try to scoop up more states, hating each other the whole time, the deep division they draw between the two bodies of citizens sometimes leading to spontaneous shootings, there is a United States. And if everybody in the United States spontaneously realized just as various academics and blue-anarchists keep repeating that dominating other countable cultures of people was an unproductive outcome and greed was bad, the United States might dissolve and there might not be a United States. This is the United States' major problem: it is increasingly becoming awash in talk of _virtues_ and _moderation_ and _degrowth_ and _sustainability_ and _what is actually necessary_, but nobody considers the horrifying possibility that the United States, or "Our Democracy", is in fact not really necessary and may be the ultimate manifestation of immoderation, unsustainability, and greed. Not because it uses too much oil, not because it attempts to contain all the world's corporations while it puts all the world's workers in places like China, Vietnam, and India, but specifically because it is "a liberal democracy". Because that phrase is a highly deceptive lie told to everyone by the monster named "Our Democracy" to get them to preserve it, while in reality the United States is more of a continuous warring states period between two countable blue anarchisms where each keeps consuming more and more people and objects and inventions and academic papers and news shows purely to try to defeat the other. An actual endless battle between regional princes to become king. A literal, actual, material _interregnum_.

Let's say Stalin's government having control over Ukraine really was a senseless act of tyranny and an inherently violent and Evil assertion of Communist power. Well, if that's true, it must be completely impermissible to casually watch an election map and assert that it is the outcome of Justice for the Democrats to slurp up more states. You haven't gone and talked to the people in those states. A lot of center-Liberals probably have no idea what they want. They begin with the assertion that being a Democrat is just "better" and everyone in Nevada ought to want to be part of the superior group of people that begins with a superior culture. But the republican systems of the United States don't actually make it a requirement that any political party genuinely represents and carries out the culture it is supposed to represent, while simultaneously they deny power to any party that does not get votes. So what happens in practice is the assumption of Democrats having a superior culture that will create a new era falls flat on its face as the Democrats learn that the other countable cultures of the country have no interest in being dominated and designated as inferior cultures, and then they scramble into the deepest depths of what Marxists would call opportunism, abandoning everything they stood for so that they can be accepted as members of other regional cultures and their original required assertion that other cultures are inferior can be forgiven. Liberal-republicanism is designed so the country can continuously divide into two countable cultures that dominate and degrade each other, but which both have the ability to break free of domination before they notice the injustices of the system and get angry. In some ways, it is one of the most uniquely cruel systems ever invented in that after kicking populations around and hurling them down a staircase it always erases the marks of its abuse and claims that it did nothing. If you were mad at Stalin's government, you could simply run away, but Liberal-republicanism constantly programs people that there is nothing to escape from and thus there is no actual escape. Is it any wonder that Liberal-republicanism generates "narcissists" and other abnormal psychologies?

Culture can be Ideals, but more than anything else, culture is communities, and the declaration that any community of people has the inherent right to slurp up other communities and order them around (and pass laws on them, and send cops after them, and put them in prison) _purely because_ it is made out of inherently superior cultural ideas cannot be anything but an act of bigotry.

Liberal-republicanism, by its own internal logic, is unjust. It is bigoted, greedy, unempathetic, tyrannical, wasteful, gaslighting, megalomaniacal in how it aggrandizes its internal parties, and wholly unacceptable.

And the worst thing is this: anarchism will never be able to take over and fix it. If that was ever going to happen, it could have happened in the Soviet Union after 1953, or when the Communists failed to control Europe, or when workers weren't actually winning in China and the Communist Party shouldn't have won. If anarchism is really the most robust form of society, then logically, it would be more robust and less prone to falling apart than Stalin's Marxism. If all it takes for anarchism to win is a republic failing, then anarchism should have had a vast buffet of failing countries to choose from in which to finally succeed. In 1850, and into 1900, many modern sociophilosophies were still new and their effectiveness was unknown. But now, 176 years after Bellegarrigue codified a set of ideas that might be much older, still nobody has ever outlined a plausible method for anarchism to replace nation-states which is anywhere close to as believable as Lenin's schema for a nation-wide Communist movement. If having good ideas was truly the primary metric for predicting which political factions will succeed at creating a new historical period, then the scales are still tipped much further toward Lenin than they are toward anarchism.

Gramsci is the new Hegel. Gramsci, Jung, Deleuze & Guattari, and Crenshaw have all converged to create the new Idealism that justifies global capitalism and resists the re-emergence of Marxism without the need for any older forms of Idealism. The new Marxism needs to be able to counter this new Idealism in every crevice and at every scale that it shows up, from statements about interpersonal relationships and "culture" to statements about geopolitics and history. Capitalism has permeated every single kind of social interaction in ways that at least were never relevant or important before, but now are actively degrading the entire phenomenon of sociality and institutions or organizations. Framing "Marxists participating in society" as an oxymoron used to be a joke, but in this age, where workers can't trust unions, can't trust nation-states, can't trust progressive academics, can't trust newspapers and video channels, can't trust "communities" of any kind, can't trust anarchists, and sometimes can't trust attempted Fourth Internationals, to some extent, knowing when to walk away from society and stop giving any of society's incorrect forms of organization undue attention is almost the only way _to_ make any progress. Capitalist society naturally creates insane, vaguely psychotic perceptions of society and the world, but it also creates them _inevitably_ and _in everybody_, no matter how much you _believe_ Gramsci or Althusser or Fisher will actually help you break out. The only way to truly break out of capitalist consciousness, short of actually living in isolation and literally looking at everything from the outside in, is to _use meta-philosophical analysis to become able to view capitalism and every political movement from the outside_. I call that "Materialism". There may be a hang-up where some people don't want to call it that. I don't care. Whatever you want to call it, you have to come to the recognition that your "soul" is fundamentally detached from everything else at all moments of your life and make use of the looking-outside-and-visualizing-possible-interactions-and-futures thing. Do you call that "narrative storytelling"? Great. Now do it scientifically.

In my time being sliced away from society I took to reading books. I'd always been told to do this. _Reading books is inherently educational. Reading books gets rid of prejudices. Stories will create communities. Everyone should read more books._ So I did what I had been told and read a bunch of miscellaneous books available in the United States to see if somehow they would unlock the mysterious secrets of Liberal-republicanism or if by reading enough fictional narratives I would finally come to understand what all the anti-science, pro-lived-experience stuff really meant and what it was really saying, and what I had been missing. And, well... as I say, every day all of it seemed to get more complex and make less and less sense the more closely and carefully I analyzed it. I came to understand it better _and_ I came to understand it worse at the same time. Sometimes I listened to videos with annoying-sounding titles to see if that magical promise of "listening to people you disagree with" bringing people to a better understanding would ever come true. At the end of 6 years of that I feel like I've tested the basic ideas of Liberal-republicanism more thoroughly than almost anyone. And I genuinely think the majority of them are not true. A whole lot of everything people write inside Liberal-republicanism (or even anarchism) is just people flailing around trying to justify to you why people who understand nothing about Materialism are more important to listen to than Materialists, and why people with better understandings of material reality "don't really" have better understandings of reality. You really lose all your confidence in humanity and human beings being an intelligent species if you expose yourself to too much of it. It will sound crazy, but only after having so much exposure to the actual state of it I genuinely suspect that almost all of what people write or record within Liberal-republicanism is one giant waste of everybody's time. It's almost like talking to a Flatlander to try to explain it. But I feel like if the Liberal-republican period were actually to come to an end and be replaced, everyone would look back on everything they had written or recorded and say, oh, wow, I was focusing my energy on _that_? Why? Why was _that_ what was important to me? And this would apply to so many things in all facets of life that a lot of people would not even be thinking about until society had actually changed. Like... hmm. Here's the best I can do to think of an example of something "unimportant". I watched a video once where someone was casually saying in passing that a fantasy kingdom should become a Liberal republic (the context was the TV cartoon _My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic_). And I feel like if people were in a new society and had the chance to understand all of history _just a bit better_, they might look back on statements like that they had made and be horrified at the thought of what kinds of historical periods would result from that compared with what a good outcome is. Another example is a lot of videos that have been going around about LLMs. Some of those videos make technically valid points, but you also see a lot of videos focused on "pointless" subjects such as whether it is ethical to put an artificial consciousness in a war machine and make it experience war (what about the thousands of the human combatants?), or how to put guardrails on an LLM and how you have to design them around the concept any self-contained system is "inherently self-regulating" (this just sounds like bad models of society applied to computers), or the notion that language is inherently special in that meaning must be inherently subjective and words can never inherently mean anything (this one existed before language models, but I have a terrible suspicion this _wrong_ way of thinking led to LLMs taking over everything). Idealism seems to encourage these acts of pointless deliberation on completely irrelevant ideas as if they were much more important than they were simply because the act of thinking ideas is turned into a kind of magic ritual of assigning unreal things power, and given ultimate importance. You can also see from this how it is that people seem to get disproportionately angry at bad ideas of any kind and try to say that because each act of putting them where someone can see them is a social behavior and active speech act you need to get them out of Community immediately and it should never be okay to say them at all. This concept can only be true when ideas themselves are taken to have inherent power. If everyone understood that ideas themselves had no power to cause anything without the proper material prerequisites for that specific outcome, everyone would probably calm down about that and allow a lot more things to be said.

After "trying out" Liberal-republicanism and blue anarchism for an extended time and coming to see them for what they really are, one of my top impressions now is... what's wrong with objecting to Idealism? Why _can't_ I see a blatantly Idealist concept like a set of opposing things becoming a unified Creation and object on principle? I've tried out objecting to things emotionally, and avoiding the "bigotry" of logic. And I can see what the appeal is: for most people, emotions are the only window out of Idealism and into the material world (the body) where things actually become objectively necessary instead of every Idea having to be equally important to the point that kills people. But there is just one problem. Individual needs don't stop for each other. They contradict each other. It's all too easy for two people to both say they were hurt or even that they will each starve if they don't have each other's food, and just like with ideas, it becomes that there is no correct answer to which person is truly more important and which person actually gains ethical priority. Ethics is a losing battle. The entire proposition of trying to say individual people's pain can dictate what is the best outcome and the thing that causes no pain is True and the thing that causes pain is False is fundamentally incorrect. This is one of the core, central errors that leads to unjust systems like Liberal-republicanism. The concept of a "pain olympics" isn't new, it's been baked into all Liberal-republican theory from the start beginning at the false concept that individual actions have inherent power to be ethical or unethical. No, individual actions lead up to larger social formations in the form of estates and republics of specific types, but these seas of actions can only be judged as entire systems, and also, to call them Right or Wrong or Good or Bad may be unacceptably prejudiced. I'll say it again: if Liberal-republicans think it's okay to prescriptively mark Bolshevism "false" on grounds of ethical rules, and get rid of all Communist regimes, that feeds directly into Stalin's government brutally assassinating Trotsky. You can't have a little bit of bigotry and expect it to not have consequences. Equality of communities means equality of communities, which means equality of Liberal-republican and Communist communities. Voting means inequality of communities.

I think if I have a craft other than attempting to improve Marxism, I am a failed science fiction writer. After having everything taken away from me — don't study living things with science, don't work in science, don't talk about climate change if your brain is naturally bad at emotions and intuition, don't write stories if they don't relegate science to set dressing and have an inherent humanities bent, don't replace religion with science — I think the only good response is to turn aggressively against any and all uses of science like they wanted me to as well as many uses of technology, but then to explain that none of it's on principle and instead I want all that energy to go into an intense period of research in order to understand the processes of society utterly and completely. I think the First World has genuinely hit a point where every conceivable good and service exists now and First World countries could actually drop all science and a lot of technology research while research into Marxism is genuinely one of the only "products" they really, urgently need. "Degrowth", "degrowth", "problems on earth", "problems on earth". Fine. You kept saying it, and I heard you! How about we just really actually have no more science until we solve all our "problems on earth"? All of those problems are problems that involve understanding pieces of human societies as inanimate objects. None of them involve just having good sentiments. You know who stopped looking up to the heavens or into cyberspace to solve all our Problems On Earth? Kim Il-sung!

That's the general answer. If First World countries want "degrowth", solar power, "sustainable" or sensible levels of innovation and production, and a unified society without political factions shooting each other and senseless political division, then they must seek a way for the population to control society itself and all its material structure that would be visible from an aerial view so the people can finally solve all the _internal structural problems_ inside the ways large collections of people interact that lead to frontier wars, climate effects, neoliberalism (! it's not an uncaused cause), and lawyers who could never conceive of another kind of republic literally migrating out of the United States to Italy because they're not stupid enough not to realize that Liberal-republicanism is unsalvageable. That takes dedication. That takes an actual recognition that every single thing you do at work to earn money which is not contributing to Degrowth Sustainability Problems On Earth is part of the problem, and as long as somebody _directed you_ to do what you're doing horizontally through a social or economic agora instead of through a democratic process with real power to stop an entire half of society from doing what it's doing you might still be part of the problem. Don't be an anarchist. I'll repeat it again: _don't be_ an anarchist. You can solve Degrowth Sustainability NonGreed Problems On Earth when you stop trying to build an international civilization in opposition to Marxism — you too, Alan Woods — and contribute to the creation of an international Marxist state equipped with the ability to analyze every sociophilosophy through meta-Marxism.

I've been thinking, in my spare time, about the concept of redirecting science fiction specifically into the Materialist analysis of _how particular concrete forms of society transform into other concrete forms of society_, so that science fiction begins using the proto-science of Marxism or meta-Marxism as its "science" of focus and every science fiction scenario written with it becomes about analyzing something actually material and concrete about society and solving a relatively grounded set of Problems on Earth. <ref name="iba"/>

Science is dead; long live science.

[unfinished]

== Footnotes ==
<references>

<ref name="DFR">{{book|Democracy for Realists}}. [retrieve later]</ref>

<ref name="iba">Among other things, I think there are some meta-Marxist concepts that could lead to a great narrative card game. Games like {{game|Magic: the Gathering}} and its "forgotten brother" {{game|Arcmage}} always assume that the civilization or army you set up will be something similar to feudalism, but wouldn't it be more interesting if a game could tell the story of multiple historical periods or systems competing to exist? I think it would. I knew this was far too off-topic to put in the text. But, in case I write any pages on it worth finding later, I call my card simulation concept the "Aurora system".</ref>

</references>

== Links ==
* [[Special:PermanentLink/44389|survey questions]] [not actually used... yet]



[[Category:MDem v5.4 entries]]

User:RD/comm/umineko

2026-07-31T11:25:15Z

Reversedragon: Sunday, October 5

{{ArticleTitle|h1=RD commentary: うみねこのなく頃に (Q618)|NoContents=y}}
{{ContentWarning
| Umineko spoilers
| Umineko is a relatively linear story that is best experienced without spoilers (or very minimal spoilers). There may be full spoilers on this page.
| Once I'm done with this page, I'll hide its contents in a revision link so it isn't as easy to accidentally see spoilers. }}

<div style="line-height: 190%;">
I have been told that spoilers matter for this thing. I'm taking that semi-seriously; I saw a couple things about it in a review, but I do not know much right now. 
don't read this file unless you have at least watched a video playlist of the game.

hmm... the kanji are way too hard to read on this screen. and none of this line is being read. I think I am looking at the english playlist first and coming back to the Japanese text for reference. the Japanese voice acting may be enough to put things into context.

we've got. a mansion. 
the house doctor? 
this conversation about Ushiromiya dying from alcohol feels... irrelevant. it's here to be interrupted isn't it 
or maybe we're setting up a theme of denial. 
> as though it melted the soul 
they're playing a chess game each time. so, the theme is that this man's life is an antagonism? between the two players? but what are the sides?
Ushiromiya is gross about his control over the mansion. that's pretty funny. so... what does he want to do instead of write a will? 
　　oh man he's pulling a Dinesh D'Souza. yeah, the mood is set here 
not one thing to tell people or leave behind! - oh really. that must be the big thing he's wrong about 
"I created everything" - this means something else. like... the entire world he lives in? who knows. 
- no tomb, no coffin! those were the witch's terms! 
Ushiromiya is annoyed at the butler for not understanding that the contract is actually contradictory with the concept of a will, entirely

it's possible I can guess some of this story having seen Touhou stuff and Deltarune but, no, there's definitely a lot of uncertainty left here, there are definitely going to be things for me to find that haven't been spoiled. I'm excited.

- show yourself to me, Beatrice, before I disappear to the demons 
　　is Beatrice... the witch? 
- Beatrice is hidden watching everything. wow, that's familiar

=== October 4th, 1986 - the first day ===

another ushiromiya bragging about starting from nothing 
and a consistent pattern of them having odd names. 
　　- Grandfather's own name is perfectly normal 
- keep her away from the head household 
- I have no dreams for the future 
why is Maria's name spelled like it refers to reality somehow. the other names are kind of normal, spelled in arbitrary kanji. but this one is not.

== Episode 1: Legend of the Golden Witch ==

- the island wasn't on any map. only the Ushiromiya family came here 
- maria frightened by missing torii and cloudy sky 
- missing seagulls. 

- the plane will fall over, the boat will fall over. 
- the wheelbarrow fell over. 
　　it took me a bit to fully catch this. this is a weird word. it can mean to fall off or to crumble inward depending on what it's used for. I guess you could compare it to the English phrase "fall in": you'd say that at the railing of a boat, although you'd say it about the ocean rather than the boat.

Battler picks up the bags before the servant, wanting to be normal. or at least as normal as capitalists are, anyway — there has been ample setup here that George's uncle building up a corporation is what the main characters consider normal. there is some very evident subtext in this first stretch of the story that it might be based on the concept of the aristocracy vanishing or fading into obscurity and giving way to capitalism, but making that weirdly literal. which I love; fiction is great for its ability to create surreal scenarios.

- grandpa still has three months.

- shattered glass moment.

ok I really do not understand the Battler and breasts thing. it doesn't even really make sense as a character trait. when the characters were going on saying dumb things about men and women at the beginning... okay. it's like, you have to set up what the characters think is normal, even if it's a little concerning, even if it's one of those moments of 'are straight people okay?'. when the characters establish that that's what their normal is like, the character designs being rather stylized and having these conspicuous breast shapes to where the silhouettes look a bit weird just feels like it embodies the setting's culture, even if that culture is tacky. if there's the tiniest bit of irony in it, it flies. I really could have overlooked all of it until this moment where it didn't even make sense. that said... 
> we are furniture 
- Battler questions the deep subservience of the servants and implicitly raises question of whether they're real or actually fabricated 
is... ralsei a maid joke, like, actually?

> haven't these people ever heard of a kotatsu? 
second big subtext: when everything is 'European-style' including people's names it makes everything seem inherently more fake when you're from Japan and you put yourself in these characters' places for a second. there is this inherent bias for native Japanese speakers to think for a second that a 'Western-style' building "isn't real" and "was suddenly made up" even though they'll quickly realize that isn't literally true and those kinds of things can exist in Japan. 
Toby Fox managed to get across the same feeling with Flowery by making this character that because he first reads as a contrived character and then is inappropriately Japanese it makes him feel more fake. oddly, I wouldn't say the same thing applies to the summer festival / castle world, that feels pretty like a pretty "authentic" depiction of Deltarune's version of Japan in comparison to the flower people.

- Beatrice, the witch hidden in the darkness of the forest 
- Grandfather ordered a painting of the witch 
- Jessica: that portrait is the symptom of his delusions

- Grandfather (Kinzo) is deep into divination through oldtimey drinks.v
absinthe? if I don't have the wrong noun in mind I watched a video where somebody tried to make that with alchemy equipment. it was a rare and expensive thing at the time, and maybe even a bit in the 1980s, no wonder this man is giving it a try 
<nowiki>*</nowiki> what you first see in this room is 'alchemy'. what you see second is 'occult' and demons. what you see third is that all of it is European at the same time as being those things.

Grandfather says a bunch of {{em|stuff}} about the family members. I see why there had to be such a long section introducing them, so it could actually be established that everything he says is questionable. 
- nobody is fit to succeed me!!

- Grandfather: a risky situation generates the greatest magical power, risk is given to those with power

- Ushiromiya family used to own spinning mills. in 1923 it lost its wealth. Kinzo entrusted to rebuild it 
- Kinzo took a big bet, but it is believed the United States occupiers protected him 
- during the Korean War he carefully profited from the emergency measures 
- he marked out the island under a government program but refused to give it back, and got to keep it 
wow. there is a weird amount of history in this 
- once he had restored the family's wealth he started the phase of investing in businesses and getting more

- George thinks there is a family legend where the epitaph on Beatrice's portrait leads to buried treasure 
I'm laughing. this is a misdirect, isn't it??

- Grandfather did a demon-summoning ceremony, and Beatrice appeared. not ominous at all. 
- he said he got the money for his bet in exchange for his soul, though nobody believed him 
okay. so like, the reason the Ushiromiya family had to keep earning more money was the starter pile of gold wasn't quite "real". then they rationalize what happened as being all about their own abilities, because from what we're told it wasn't not. so... did Kinzo slowly defraud those people? like, the gold behaves like it's real but it's still going to disappear as far as I know. it's just very advanced counterfeiting in a way 
- we thought Grandfather challenged us to a battle of wits 
here we go, this is the chessboard. it's Grandfather trying to get more (the witch) without giving anything away, while the family looks for the witch too to try to find the gold

characters discuss the utility of gold bars versus storing wealth in stocks (corporations) or bonds (the government) for an amusingly long time. this is so not what I expected this story to be about before I started reading it but okay. this is fine. 
- the rich family's old wrinkled wife? 
- beatrice doesn't exist outside this picture

- Rudolf: the president of Marusō corporation brought one of the gold ingots to be examined, and it was 99.99% pure. 
- Krauss: it was just an illusion of money 
　　- Rosa, don't tell me you believe this man's lies 
- Krauss how are you getting money if you haven't found the gold bars

- fourth condition: sell the gold and distribute the money 
well that's impossible

- [S] dark silver rule: if you have not done right unto others I will not do right unto you 
- Hideyoshi's company, an owner of restaurants, went public, and its rivals are trying to take it over from the inside 
　　implication: companies are {{TTS|tts=Wasp Swarms|WASP swarms}} from the beginning with an alliance between "founding" owners and swarms of shareholders that construct together into a stable, expanding pool of wealth 
like many things in here the characters' view may be a little optimistic or simplistic. but, if they are even partially right... wow, that's disgusting. it starts to show you how co-op theory is outright connected to existing forms of class society which have an imperialist shape to them, however accidentally. a neocolonial or "micro-" imperialist shape. it's common for people to now act like a network of co-ops is safe or a network of donations going to some particular trunk is safe, but it all resembles a prototypical corporation, it all resembles the East India Company that expanded over India to loot everything in it, and then set up an army and a government. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company] 
so this is why I sometimes feel as if teaching people narratives is more effective than teaching them philosophy. the East India Company was a complicated period of history and you need a superficially-neutral narrative to delve into it and see what's going on. likewise, a superficially-neutral narrative like Umineko can give a very lucid picture of what a corporation is

- danger will bring out great magical power. including the danger of "greedy fools"
- so, "the miracle" may just happen instead. and it {{em|is}} Beatrice.
- why did I put that puzzle out in the open? to power up my miracle, that's why
this concept confused me earlier but, I like it. the weird logic of this island is amazing actually.

- at the moment the fools solve my puzzle
oh gosh this is Dess right here isn't it
but the big difference is that we simply get to see what "Dess" (Grandfather) is planning in a very general way so we can more clearly see the antagonisms between him and the family.
> smile
we are definitely seeing a theme of lost dreams here already. of Kinzo's lost dream that he hopes he {{em|hasn't}} lost and can make into "a miracle".

- you never know who will be born and survive until you've already won
- you don't win the game inside the game, a game is a contest where you win with magic
well this is a bunch of Idealist nonsense. now keep going with it, game, and never change
sure. Kinzo is disgusting in several small ways. but you've really made me wonder where this is going to go

- solve the seed and summon the miracle
this sounds to me like even Kinzo doesn't actually know how to solve his own alchemical riddle to get to the secrets of creating wealth/corporations and he might be leaching clues off the family.
it's... it's almost like looking for the Dragon Balls. gosh
I'd thought of the idea that the Dragon Balls are inherently tied to wielding power and what having or achieving power means but not that they're alchemical in nature and they could be about creating wealth.
what is it with religion and the secret to creation turning into the secret to wealth. you see it with the Buddhist scrolls / Dragon Balls and you see it with alchemy having this dual nature of understanding the universe for either big-picture or 'holy' metaphysical knowledge and of understanding a narrow task of creating objects that are useful or valuable.

- Kinzo's door is so important we have to recap it. the door is sealed because the alchemical knowledge inside is way too important to leak and he needs to keep some of it to gain power.

> Behold the sweetfish river running through my beloved hometown. You who seek the Golden Land, follow its path downstream in search of the key... 
> 鮎／阿諛⋯貫く⋯下りて（？） 
okay there is a pun in here involving servants and flattery. I don't fully understand what it is. but "くだりて" may be an archaism for humbling yourself to the master of the mansion. (they said "でございます", nothing is off the table here.) it could also mean literally going downward. the spiraling staircases from the beginning come to mind. 
the road of 'flattery' that pierces through the hometown of old. 
I can definitely sense that if you can't read the original sentence at all you'll be at a disadvantage solving this. the translation I have in front of me has been reasonably easy to follow so it still might have left enough details that were already there in various background things. 
> As you travel down it, you will see a village 
> In that village, look for the shore the two will tell you of 
are... any of the characters named "mura"? ok, now these dialogue boxes that kept giving all the kanji in people's names are really suspicious

> On the first twilight offer the six chosen by the key as sacrifices. 
oh no. those are almost certainly people. 
for Kinzo this is about what you'd expect, he actually said he'd sacrifice everybody. he might very well mean people. but then again it could be a misdirect that refers to six of something else? 
> On the second twilight, those who remain shall tear apart the two who are close 
hmm. now that line sounds a little more like trees casting shadows or something. 
I can see where Toby got the idea of a slightly ambiguous prophecy now 
> On the third twilight, those who remain shall praise my noble name. 
> On the fourth twilight, gouge the head and kill. 
oh god. that's making me think of other things. I have the worst urge to somehow reference this line in Auldernet because really how can I not 
this... makes me think that "those who remain" and "twilight" are figurative somehow. because they're kind of showing up too much to be literal. 
it's hilarious how every time I get stumped it's {{em|always}} throwing Trotsky at things that helps me figure them out, occasionally even with fiction. 
though why do 2nd, 3rd, and 4th line up so well. who the hell wrote this story?? 
> On the fifth twilight, gouge the chest and kill. 
> On the sixth twilight, gouge the stomach and kill. 
> On the seventh twilight, gouge the knee and kill. 
> On the eighth twilight, gouge the leg and kill. [foot?] 
"kill" must be figurative. there has to be a specific word that only sounds like that but has another specific meaning. the only other option there is that like they find the skeleton of Grandmother or something and the distances between the bones maybe lead to places; Kinzo is spiteful enough maybe he would make a dark joke about "killing" his wife after the time she's already died of natural causes and couldn't say anything about it. I doubt this is going to actually be a bone puzzle though. it seems a little more likely these are puns.

> On the ninth twilight, the witch shall revive, and none shall be left alive. 
> On the tenth twilight, at journey's end, you shall attain the power of the Golden Land's treasures, once and for the last time. 
that part is going to be more literal. the concept of "killing" may refer to destroying parts of the island or something, but maybe if they do it the witch will appear and the island and all of them will {{em|actually}} be gone. I know something crazy happens in the later episodes of this, though I don't know what it is. 
oh yeah an "unrelated" quote comes to mind here. 
> Nothing remains but our regrets

> The witch shall praise the wise and bestow four treasures. 
> One shall be all the gold from the Golden Land. 
> One shall be the resurrection of all the dead souls. 
literally? 
> One shall be the resurrection of the love that was lost. 
> One shall be to put the witch to sleep for all time. 
hmm 
first: this makes universe-rift Dess more likely 
second. within the context of Umineko, it kind of sounds like Kinzo is trying to get more than he can possibly get from the universe and he will tear the witch apart into nothing trying to get to the source of the witch's power. this prophecy sounds like it will end tragically for Kinzo. I can see why he's okay with taking the risk because he has nothing right now (nothing which is real), but yeah.

- good job writing this down, Maria! 
all right, gotta love that unsubtle hint.

* characters are on the beach, so they maybe already went through "mura" and the two? 
- Shannon thinks the river is the actual Hayakawa that leads to the ocean 
- George says at the mouth of the river is Odawara castle 
which he also says was once wealthy. of course. that's the kind of place that would stick in the old Ushiromiya family's mind. so it could be the place. 
- Shannon found Sogakishi

- Battler: it's always possible to bust through a door 
- George thinks the six are people.

hang on what is Golden Land, that phrase sounds really fishy 
oh no. I looked it up and "Golden Land" could be obliquely referring to an afterlife that exists in Hinduism. this is not looking good. 
> a celestial realm filled with desirable objects attainable by those who remember Prayaga 
> Remembering Prayaga in Hinduism signifies mental acknowledgment that leads to sin dissolution, recalling the holy site for liberation, and fostering mindfulness that enhances spiritual reflection and connection to divine purity. [https://www.wisdomlib.org/concept/remembering-prayaga] 
so... it's an alchemy-like idea. I find it a little weird Hinduism would be the reference when Kinzo was all about Europe, but it's whatever. you have a very familiar concept of having to purify everything you know of which may be your own understandings of the universe or may be literal substances to get to the prima materia. 
the implication is, the philosopher's stone or the witch is not from Kinzo's plane of existence. you cannot get there. you may only be able to get there when you die, if it exists at all. 
when this is fiction and all I think the witch exists. but that witch is going to be standing in heaven (or hell) judging people from outside the universe. she is almost completely unreachable. which makes me a little confused in that, if the witch is a supernatural entity, how is it possible to 'put her to sleep for the last time'? aren't supernatural entities that live beyond the material universe usually defined as immortal?

we have an idea of animism here. when an area doesn't have a benign local-god (kami, numen, etc.), it has fae, or a witch. in some ways it's like animism becomes religion in order to tame experiences that appear to be hostile mythical creatures. it may be difficult to domesticate a fox so Japan's fox shrine is a symbolic way of taming foxes. and everything less evidently real goes through the same process. 
- edit: Inari mentioned later

- Maria clung to the idea of witches in order to not lose her childhood dreams 
- witches are fickle. they forgive when they want to and not when they don't 
oh gosh. it's like the wizard of oz (ounces of gold), but if he was an unforgiving god. this is a mood. nobody {{em|literally}} believes the economy is a god all by itself but so many people have dumb superstitions of some kind about it that circle back to this idea.

- Maria hands Battler and Jessica two cheap bracelets presented as 'magic artifacts' 
those might be The Two, not two people.

- this island has been cut off from the world

- maria can't find the rose, and wails after nobody believes her. her mother hits her a few too many times. it gets ugly. 
it's ambiguous at this point whether the cook picked the rose (my first thought earlier), the weather destroyed it, or it disappeared. 
- maria's honesty 
so that's what her name means. I see 
> 'Who brought you the umbrella?' 'Beatrice!' 
of course 
Maria took an unnecessary risk, while danger {{em|happens to be}} the only way to see a miracle

- the key

== second day ==

- the phone breaks down. although it's an internal phone line

- Natsuhi wants to stay locked up in her room 
does it have anything to do with the presence of the charm on her door?

- the mirror was believed to deflect evil spirits. it looked more authentic than the plastic charm 
has the author making a commodity fetishism joke or is it just me. if it is, it's definitely a joke rather than a real point. this is turning products into magic objects, but very very literally 
note: this motif is very familiar to Japan what with all the tokusatsu shows. it wouldn't have been hard to think of 
the real genius of Umineko has apparently been making me see Marxism in it and wonder how much of it is intentional

- two people are missing.

- Natsuhi receives an actual key. 
locked rooms are almost vaguely important to magic here in their own way, aren't they? the locked room is part of how the riddle is so effective. Natsuhi locking her room means something too. 
* door opening animation that the animation in Undertale for walking into the barrier suspiciously resembles

- Natsuhi: they weren't inside the study 
did Kinzo flat out ask the witch to make them disappear? this is looking so suspicious. he doesn't respect any of them except maybe Natsuhi 
although making Shannon disappear is a strange choice. all she did was think about retiring; she didn't even ask for any of the gold.

- there is something wrong with the storehouse 
- dripping magic circle found on storehouse 
ok wait. did these three disappear because they went looking for the gold? it was Shannon, Krauss, and Rosa

- I'd seen this many times before on TV 
that's just a room full of blood with no bodies in it. three... lacks of bodies? 
everyone is screaming and trying to get away. to be fair what's going on is at least really weird. but there is a hint that maybe the concept of visually censoring events is being used strategically here and being messed with 
I kind of 'cheated' here. I have a tiny spoiler I got a while back to thank for being able to read this scene so well (?). but the whole concept of objects on the island being fake was already set up at the very beginning on the boat and when Kinzo is first introduced, so I feel like this was guessable anyway 
speaking of islands... when was this released relative to The Truman Show? 
I have a lot of connections to make on motifs that appear in Umineko but it's going to be challenging to organize everything so any spoilers past Episode 1 are semi-contained just enough you will never see the end of the story before things from Episode 1. I think partitioning off motifs as their Umineko incarnation and making sense labels for them could help a bit on things like Wavebuilder combination pages. like, if the motif says 'redacted motif' or 'Umineko spoiler (Ep. 3)' and you only see the Item number when you hover over it, you wouldn't have memorized what the number "is" if you haven't already been to that page.

- the doctor believes those are real bodies? 
- there is a high probability they were damaged after their deaths 
so the prophecy may be fairly literal. okay. 
um. I cannot believe I'm asking this. which character gets the pick. we've only seen three of them die, right? 
#2 is Shannon. #3 is Krauss. so who the hell is #4. is that Rosa. don't tell me it's Rosa. 
additional: Rudolf. Kyrie. Gohda. six sacrifices? 
we've still got chest, stomach, and knee to go if the people are getting numbers. but after that there are only three more that die, at least. and then on the ninth death or event the witch appears and things turn around. 
so... are the sacrifices actually going to go somewhere to meet the witch? Krauss was told to find the gold, then he died. so is his soul going to go see the gold somehow? an odd thought.

- Hideyoshi: this is devil's work! 
no kidding. must mean the witch did it, look at her position in all this

- tool house contains gardening tools usable as weapons, including hammer and sickle 
this work is trying to say something but I have no idea what it's trying to say 
- is Shannon the same as the others? 
it sure seems like she drew the same kind of spite to her.

- blood in the dining hall? 
Jessica's reality is broken

- Battler: it's not just us, the killer is confined to this island 
- Maria: the killer isn't human ... sacrifices chosen by the key 
what is actually the key here. I want to say the choosing happened when the family was alone arguing. but I'm not entirely sure what the key is. 
that's probably important because the key is going to determine the next three sacrifices. 
oh... is it... is the letter actually a key to unlock Maria and turn her into the killer or something? it has to be something weird like that. she showed her allegiance to the witch.

we're retracing where Shannon was to vaguely get toward what happened

- George: if I hadn't given Shannon the ring... 
- Battler: that's where you're wrong 
this work is trying to say something.

- Eva and Battler discuss whether there is a 19th person. 
implication: as there are fewer people, it becomes more obvious who could be the killer. 12/18 left. 
gosh there are so many elements apparently copied out of Umineko into Deltarune that make almost no sense because of how they've been taken out of context. in theory giving them new context would be a good idea, but it feels like Toby half botched that actually.

- Eva: think about what "servant" sounds like. arms and legs. 
that's some imagery right there.

- [S] flipping the chess board / spinning the chessboard around 
- the culprit is too obvious for this to make any sense 
- eliminate the beginning of the story and you have the perfect crime 
one of the only times horror-adjacent fiction has talked about in-universe fiction as a plot device and it hasn't felt cheap but at most a little awkward.

- Battler suspects Eva of trying to turn others against the servants 
ah, this here might be the hidden theme the work is 'trying to say'. 
<nowiki>*</nowiki> {{i|[S] Stalin is Monokuma}} — but backwards, so Monokuma is Stalin. and that is not actually thematically relevant to the story for some reason, it's just mysteriously in there.

- Maria brags about knowledge of magic circles 
- freedom is not limited to the body; it can refer to the bonds of fate, or spiritual bonds 
> obligations 
> It's a magic circle to borrow the power of the sun. He who wears it as a talisman drawn in gold shall be able to break free from the bonds of any prison and receive the power to gain freedom 
I think, I remember... the sun is gold. but the sigil wasn't drawn in gold. this is a very polarizing sigil that seems to make some people free and other people dead. 
> Psalm 17 
> I have planned no evil ... eyes on me ... my enemies crouching like lions 
the author must have thought this psalm was really funny. for reasons that are obvious to me but probably not to anybody else. 
this is drawn on the circle. this is a spell of like, +3 protection from Trotskyites. 
but the spell wasn't drawn in gold like it was supposed to be, so like, was it turned into an offensive spell for the same purposes? 
> they will break from their fetters 
oh yeah the author is messing with me. this is {{censor|fucking}} saying something 
although it's perfectly ambiguous. I feel as if I'm watching {{film|Inception}} right now and I can't tell whether it's Communists or anticommunists planting the message in the guy's head, good grief. 
> Psalm 116, 16 and 17 
> The lord has freed me from my chains 
oh she gave the wrong psalm. god that is on the level of Sans asking you where you could have seen him before. this little demon may be the one "injecting" these weird messages into the narrative herself.

- Hideyoshi: they weren't freed by being killed, were they?

- Battler: since we got that invitation, we've been locked inside some kind of bizarre world. 
- us daytime inhabitants had been invited into the night 
hmmm. what do day and night mean here. there are two opposing things the sun could mean. unless the joke is that the witch has snatched away the sun to create night and that's what borrowing the power of the sun is. which would make some kind of sense actually.

- Rudolf (past): why do you think they go to so much trouble making movies about demons? because they don't exist.

- Kan'on: why did Shannon have to die? 
- Genji: it was nothing more than bad luck 
ok but is that a lie? the witch benefits from lies. that is one of the top themes here 
* is Kan'on another reference or not? he seems to have been spared because he nominally sided with The West despite its corruption.

- If you doubt her you will meet with disaster 
thought A) Beatrice is a capricious local-god. fits with the themes 
thought B) this is a lesson {{em|everyone}} in the fight with H.B. needs to learn, including H.B. none of them can see "Beatrice" is there, and the inability to see the people who worship her is leading to disaster.

- it is abundantly obvious now where Beatrice is. she explains that Battler can't see her 
- Beatrice: she's right here 
- Battler, because all the servants are looking that way, looks behind him

- they would eventually return to the parlor 
> I guess it's like "The North Wind and the Sun". 
> If you force someone to stay shut in, they'll resist, but if you tell them to do whatever they want, they'll come back obediently

something occurs to me. in Deltarune there is a prophecy about how anybody can be the hero. there's also the evident mystery of how any of a few people can be the antagonist. that second thing is a lot clearer here.

> an impulse to break away from your life as a kid, like a chick trying to crack the shell of their egg 
> adults think kids know nothing about the real world 
> because people hate being like everyone else, they try to learn skills other people don't know 
> studying is annoying. but these delusions are convenient for bragging about having a skill 
this is so funny when you actually know what it means. 
> if they know something no one else knows, it becomes part of their identity 
but, this one. is this swatch analysis??

- Rosa slapped her for doing it before 
I can't believe that after seeing into the symbolism I'm now laughing at this.

- Battler: they're trying to make us think a 19th person did it. I don't like it. 
<nowiki>*</nowiki> he says this like three times.

- these murders are just Beatrice legitimately collecting interest

> only the power of imagination can pull clues out from the darkness

- what do you think you're saying to the wife who will act in the dead man's place?? 
Leo Leo {{TTS|moeru|title=燃える}} Leo 
god, if you look closely enough at this thing. 
- you only think it's Aunt Natsuhi because you're looking at the case from a single angle 
god we're to the moscow trials part of the story. this is not just me. this is actually for real 
...this. this is why the eagle has one side. that took me so long to get. I was like, is it facing West...? no. 
umineko is violet holy {{censor|shit}} 
I guess that's not {{em|too}} remarkable when I have already labeled a few works of fiction like 'pataphysics violet but it is very rare. it's rare enough to get a Trotsky counterpart story that is sincere and it's almost nonexistent for it to be violet

- when those lively seagulls return to the harbor everything will settle itself 
they're never coming back
</div>

== Legend ==
* <code>></code>: direct quote
* <code>-</code>: statement directly in text
* <code>*</code>: comment
* <code>[S]</code>: abstract theme directly in text
* <code>(no mark)</code>: comment

[[Category:RD commentary]]

User:RD/9k/Q31,30

2026-07-30T13:16:50Z

Reversedragon: Reversedragon moved page User:RD/9k/Q31,30 to Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q31,30: Moving 9k pages to EC: or nickels/5c to R: talk for search purposes

#REDIRECT [[Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q31,30]]

Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q31,30

2026-07-30T13:16:50Z

Reversedragon: Reversedragon moved page User:RD/9k/Q31,30 to Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q31,30: Moving 9k pages to EC: or nickels/5c to R: talk for search purposes

{{NextNineThousand|PPPA=Media Representation|User=RD|E=Q31,30|Contents=y}}
== Main entry ==
{{HueCSS}}<ol class="hue clean">

{{li|I=S1/ES|tradition=ES, W|Q=31,30|Q2=3130}}representation in media / rep (abbreviation; Existentialist philosophies, anarchism, civil rights movements) / Representation in Media (Signifier Case; meta-Marxism) / Media Representation (Signifier Case; meta-Marxism)

{{li|I=S1/Fy|Q=31,30|Q2=3130}}representation in media / coding (metaphorical representation of a real phenomenon in the arts) / queercoding (generic) / autistic coding (generic) / neurodivergent coding (generic)

{{li|I=S1/ES|class=field_exstruct field_LGBT|Q=31,30|Q2=3130}}representation in media / queercoding (generic)

{{li|I=S1/PT|Q=31,30|Q2=3130}}representation in media / tokenization (arts; generic) -> this would be a separate sense label, it is absolutely not the main meaning of this Item

{{li|I=S1/W|Q=31,30|Q2=3130}}representation in media (Western Marxism; Gramscianism)

</li></ol>

== Coding ==
<ol class="hue clean">

{{li|I=S1/Fy|class=field_fantasy field_LGBT|Q=39,70|Q2=3970}}male rivalries and gay subtext (fiction) / two male rival characters fixating on each other has gay subtext -> one of those things that's often not intended to be true but then based on evidence that piles up becomes confusing and hard to ignore. it's one of those cases of accidental representation, where the author doesn't think something is possible and then accidentally depicts it.

</li></ol>

== Is it effective? ==
<ol class="hue clean">

{{li|start=y|I=S1/ES/PT|Q=31,38|Q2=3138}}Media Representation on Sky News / hello Sky News, I'm so glad I got my colostomy bag [https://news.sky.com/story/i-would-rather-have-died-how-getting-a-stoma-bag-changed-my-life-and-broke-the-stigma-12080366] -> I just found an article on notorious Tory news outlet Sky News that was exactly in the shape of an Existentialist or Gramscian call for Media Representation. obviously there's nothing wrong with a visibility effort for stoma bags. a little unusual, but sure, getting unusual problems out there is the point isn't it. the one thing that baffles me is seeing this kind of thing on Sky News. I'm guessing it got there because it sounds like an old people problem?? it's often old people watching these things, so maybe they think any medical problem sounds enough like their own problems to not be upsetting to them. that isn't a joke; I just genuinely don't know what's a good guess.

{{li|I=F2/ES|Q=30,59|Q2=3059}}Art is a substitute for world history textbooks / Only the arts can teach us about lived experiences, so only the arts can teach us about demographic identities -> incredibly common claim I even found in a Liberal-republican economics text, but seems to fail a whole lot in practice. Undertale and Deltarune caused people to misgender nonbinary people, Warriors caused people to bash Native Americans for "bad worldbuilding". people think Media Representation will teach people empathy, but in practice you have to hand them a textbook on the demographic identity to get them to understand what they're doing wrong. this + Warriors = medicine men don't exist. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LqRxcu4nbM] this + Deltarune = misgendering Kris. this + Pokémon = never heard of France before. this + Kirby = Spongebob is sexless

{{li|I=S2/MX|Q=31,39|Q2=3139}}Printing books won't educate people / Production won't educate people / Producing more books cannot educate people (implied "usually"; comics, shows, games, etc; discrete product available for price or advertisement revenue; anti-Gramscian proposition) -> the claim that in every case, people receive better education if you can get something out of existing resources made as many as ten years ago than if you require new resources to be made. "we have wealth, the big problem is we haven't distributed it" correct. and one thing that means is that people need to be taught to use old books rather than buy new ones. printing more books just to put minority representation in them is meaningless, depending on the subject of the books and whether they deal with very serious non-fictional history or plans to create movements. 
I allow that this proposition could be false. there is some potential that, say, if there were [[E:United Socialist States|the five Communist parties of the USS]] and they actually decided to defund Media Representation produced in their parties versus distributing books and teaching people to use them it would deal a heavy enough blow to the process of assembling marginalized workers together into their own movements that join into the big movement that it wouldn't be worth it. there could be a real contradiction there that could falsify this proposition depending on exactly what we specify the proposition to apply to. to me, when I'm typing this, I think it applies to areas of the US that aren't major cities. I am not sure what times it does and doesn't apply to the Third World. I think the times it applies are rather structural, it applies to specific kinds of towns more than broad historical periods of a whole country.

</li></ol>

== Related ==


== Ideologies ==

* HAS / arts
* ES / Existentialist-Structuralist tradition
* HM / critical theory
* W / Western Marxism
* W / Gramscianism
* LGBT / LGBT+ history

== Full title for bookmarks (optional) ==

<pre>Media Representation - 9k/Q31,30 - next nine thousand ; coding, tokenization</pre>

[[Category:Next nine thousand (RD)]]

Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q31,30

2026-07-30T13:16:21Z

Reversedragon: Media Representation on Sky News

Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q618-ProletariatNotJustDemographic

2026-07-30T13:14:33Z

Reversedragon: Gay President (hypothetical president of all gay or lesbian people inside a particular country)

{{NextNineThousand|PPPA=The proletariat is not a constituency|User=RD|E=Q618|Contents=y}}
== Main entry ==
{{HueCSS}}<ol class="hue clean">

{{li|start=y|I=S2/HM/IV|tradition=IV onto LR, IV onto HM|Q=618}}The proletariat is not a constituency / The working class is not merely one constituency among many in the struggle against capitalism (David North; Trotskyism onto [[EC:9k/RD/Q79|post-Marxism]]) [https://www.wsws.org/en/special/library/frankfurt-school-postmodernism-politics-pseudoleft/05.html]

</li></ol>

== Related ==
<ol class="hue clean">

{{li|start=y|I=S1/LR/ES|tradition=Ag onto LR, ES onto LR|Q=34,67|Q2=3467}}community senators / ({{9k|RD/Q34,67}}) -> the motif of "[[E:the gay community (motif)|organic communities]]" of people planning their entire culture and identity around whether they will be able to [[E:stereotype threat|justify themselves]] through the process of sending expert delegates to a capitalist or Liberal-republican congress of experts where experts will "rationally" argue points at each other and [[E:Vegeta effect (existential materialism)|anyone can reject those points for any reason]]. 
this concept is really relevant when talking about exactly what a "constituency" is. how do you define it from the bottom up instead of from the very top and the capital city of the United States down to the local? you can't start with the United States constitution because that did not emerge at the local level. the U.S. constitution was not written by gay or transgender people. so if new demographics are to be represented they simply cannot be covered by the logic of the existing constitution. they have to emerge through some other process that comes into conflict with the U.S. constitution can only be subsumed afterward. what are the {{em|low-level}} or {{em|organic}} processes that generate 'the legal expert for all gay people' or 'the legal expert for all women'? 
I would argue that the lowest-level economic base of the United States is actually [[EC:9k/RD/Q618-SquareOfNonAggressiveActivities|agorism]], not capitalism. agorism consists of people forming into multiple socially-linked populations which are the minimum fabric to constitute a society, and only within and on top of that, people fight over each node in the graph and its access to other nodes to be the best at generating society and "community" while the worst "societors" who are the least good at "societying" are increasingly shoved to menial tasks and finally to homelessness or other countries. the distinction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is a quantity distinction, although that quantity isn't money, it's more like skill and number-of-hours-training-that-only-count-once-a-product-is-produced-and-sold. "rationality" and "reasonableness" are both things that only accumulate proportional to individual ability to make money and provoke consumerist behavior that has been re-labeled as "social" or "pro-social" behavior. so, ability to be a capitalist and ability to be a "democratic representative" are just two faces of the exact same thing built on a foundation of physical ability and anti-disability.

{{li|I=S1/ES/LGBT|tradition=MX onto LR|Q=34,60|Q2=3460}}president of all gay people / Gay President (hypothetical president of all gay or lesbian people inside a particular country) / ({{9k|RD/Q34,60}}) -> a very silly thought experiment I came up with one day. if "democracy" truly comes from the individual citizens of a country and its national culture and not the Liberal-republican state, then why are gay people a subpopulation, instead of spontaneously forming into their own gay republic complete with a gay president? LGBT+ people have their own distinct culture, especially in the case they're [[E:furry fandom|furry-fans]]. as well, LGBT+ people have to come up with theories of LGBT+ human rights and LGBT+ freedom among themselves rather than going to anyone else, so their "constitutional rights" come from entirely within their own demographic population of people and not from the United States constitution or any of the demographics of people that originally wrote it. so if countries were really made out of {{em|culture}}, you'd expect gay culture to have formed its own country, and if democracies were made out of human rights, you'd equally expect gay civil rights to have formed their own republic. how is it, then, that this hasn't happened, and all political movements for gay rights have been within the framework of how to improve a country mostly made of straight White people?

{{li|I=S2/ML|tradition=|Q=53,83|Q2=5383|h4= Gay movements are against the proletariat }} ({{TTS|tts=Soviet Union|USSR}}) / ({{9k|RD/Q53,83}})

{{li|I=S2/MX/IV|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}The problems of women cannot be addressed without an overall party structure changing comprehensively (JRCL 2021) / {{TTS|lang=ja|全体的計画がないと、組織全体に女性の問題を提起することができない}} [https://www.jrcl.jp/assertion/112/] / Without a party structure that is equipped to handle misogyny in an underlying feudal order or capitalist population, structural patterns of misogyny within the economic base will seep into the party and slowly expel all the women as their "unrelated" issues (possibly left over from feudal times) are dismissed -> this article from the JRCL really brings into perspective how Communist parties and movements for demographic identities form almost separately and in parallel to each other. 
can we actually say the proletariat isn't just a demographic? or is that a formalism? is the reality that all national populations are made up of countably plural demographics, and demographics are basically what corporations and capitalists cage? the history of Third World women's movements and of gay movements and transgender movements would really seem to bring that into question.

</li></ol>

== Ideologies or fields ==

* IV onto LR
* IV onto HM

[[Category:Next nine thousand (RD)]]

Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q30,68

2026-07-30T13:07:23Z

Reversedragon: wealth brain; Communities are cash wads

{{NextNineThousand|PPPA=wealth brain|User=RD|E=Q30,68|NoContents=y}}
== Main entry ==
{{HueCSS}}<ol class="hue clean field_ML">

{{li|start=y|I=F2/ES|Q=30,68|Q2=3068|h4= Communities are cash wads }} / Groups of people containing a stack of gold are nothing more than a stack of gold that does stuff / human beings as wads of money with legs / wealth brain (motif) / reification (mentally converting groups of people into piles of money)  -> the motif of people acting like cash or houses or donations are a genuine element of population dynamics or populational culture. exemplified by things like the Wings of Fire book where characters acted like a hunk of gold in and of itself produces basic needs and could in and of itself actually improve characters' lives if only the evil queen would let the hunk of gold be Free. it takes an expert to do any of those things, and the expert has to accept gold in the first place. the notion that gold is a badge for achieving high rank is what even makes it valuable.

</li></ol>

== Related ==
<ol class="hue clean field_ML">

{{li|start=y|I=S1/ML|tradition=|Q=618|Q2=618}}reification (mentally converting groups of people into products they produce)

{{li|I=Z1/ML|tradition=|Q=18,67|Q2=1867}}{{book|Capital}} volume I (Marx 1863/1867) / ({{9k|RD/Q1867}})

</li></ol>

== Ideologies or fields ==
<ol class="hue clean terse field_ML">
{{li|start=y
|I=S1/MN|Q=618|Q2=618}}{{TTS|MN|M.N.}} / early Marxism
</li></ol>



[[Category:Next nine thousand (RD)]]