Editing Ontology:Q21,51 (section)

== Usage notes ==

This claim follows from various vague recurring motifs in [[E:Western Marxism|Western Marxism]] and [[E:anarchism|anarchism]] known informally in <cite>MDem</cite> 4.4 drafts as "[[E:The Spanishness Office|The Spanishness Office]]". A Spanishness Office is a hypothetical, imagined structure in which all the people of a population would come together to determine what its inherent essence would be — a central or prominent bureau which rules every week on what Spanish people will and won't be and what is and isn't Spanish. The corollary to the hypothetical existence of a Spanishness Office is the hypothetical process of the people of a population <em>taking over</em> the Spanishness Office to force the entire cultural population of people linked by Spanishness to not do atrocious things and halt the invasion of the Spanishness Office by fascist concepts or factions — a situation which might be termed "Franco's Spanishness Office". 

This is the general claim that nothing similar to a Spanishness Office exists in real life. There may be several different reasonings given for why <i>there is no Spanishness Office</i>, including:

* Culture cannot be changed through any deliberate effort to force a population of people to be or not be a particular concept of culture, although it can conceivably be changed by changing the underlying layer of social or economic structures including proletarian organizations, layouts of businesses, and gaps between groups of socially-linked people in general (the [[E:shovel dream|basic]] layer of society below emergent cultural processes)
* Versus the [[:Category:Existentialist-Structuralist tradition ontology|typical]] approach of assuming "subjectivity" ([[E:free will|free will]]) supposedly somehow makes the difference between having people control of culture and not having control, a science of society and the deterministic processes inside it is more effective at comprehending how [[Term:reterminism|groups of people change through interactions between individuals]]

Taking these two possible arguments as examples, neither of them actually rules out the possibility that Spanishness Offices actually exist. If culture is usually an emergent process, it is still possible that it emerges from people being arranged into Spanishness Offices. Likewise, if [[E:ReTerminismProposition|relativistic determinism]] proves to be better for modeling sections of society changing than theories of individual [[E:free will|free will]], that does not necessarily mean that these repeated material processes are not taking place through the medium of Spanishness Offices.

One of the major reasons that the possibility of Spanishness Offices was turned away in <cite>MDem</cite> versions 4.4-5.1 was the simple fact that Western Marxism "simply did not make sense" and did not appear to have any continuity with mainstream Marxism-Leninism. Around 2015 in the United States, absolutely everything had become about subpopulations purely defined by culture having a [[E:graph struggle|back-and-forth sumo match]] over oddly-specific social structures and center-Liberals pushing specific Tories out of them. In some senses it could have been compared to incidents such as [[E:Terrorism and Communism chapter 8|the Russian empire and the Bolsheviks fighting back and forth over the Russian Empire region]], but in other senses, it was clear that neither of the sides was the proletariat — the supposed division between Western Marxism and the enemy was identical with the Republican-Democrat division. The simplest answer seemed to be that when Western Marxists and anarchists talked about "taking control of the popular mentality" it simply was not a real thing and the United States dividing into two countably separate, internally-coherent nations fighting over territory <em>was</em> the process. At the same time, this failed to explain where people had come up with the motif of the Spanishness Office in the first place, or why exactly the Democratic-party subpopulation was having such successes converting Western Marxism into a playbook solely usable by itself — why was Western Marxism devolving into a wall to keep out [[E:mainstream Marxism-Leninism|Marxists]]?

Beginning with the observation that the Republican party and Democratic party seem to be separate nationalities of people socially linked together by culture, it should hypothetically be possible for everyone in the Democratic-party subpopulation to separate out into a local proletariat and [[E:Lattice model|begin joining together in the gaps between Republican-party members]]. If this structure were to keep coalescing and eventually picking up fringes of right-Liberal workers, it could both isolate Democratic-party owners from it and guard itself against external threat. The existence of "institutions" should only be an overlay over the top of this hypothetical movement, given the real-world observation that factions of people are enduring objects that merely pass through social structures anyway. Yet, in real-world populations, both Democratic-party members and significant numbers of self-labeled anarchists remain consistently stuck to the bourgeoisie. The common line among most non-anarchist "social-democrats" seems to be that billionaires are bad but artists are always invariably good and [[E:small and local|small businesses]], [[E:Steam platform|large platforms that sell wide ranges of small-business products]], and every business and traditional institution which is not considered "greedy" or "colonial" is good, even though the existence of a United States is considered good, regardless of whether its existence obligates Native American populations to exist in specific parts of it and vote in its processes in order to exist, or obligates people to hate Third World countries such as the former Soviet Union and China for having independence from the United States. There must be particular material reasons the United States always seems to regenerate itself as a country of significant swaths of bourgeoisie linked only into countable political cultures, rather than over decades increasingly turning into a country of the proletariat. What seems to provide the most damning insight is the contrast between [[E:world of Alert|how adversely people reacted to the Cold War]] as a conflict between two large countable cultures versus how quickly inside the bounds of their own country they simply grew to live with even <em>increasingly aggressive</em>, <em>sometimes violent</em> conflicts between countable cultures of the bourgeoisie. If people linked together by culture will separate according to culture in either case, why bother specifically heading those countable cultures with the bourgeoisie? The surprising answer may be that <em>it is inevitable</em>. Whenever a population separates into subpopulations, they generally contain a proletariat and bourgeoisie inside them, so they will generally be headed by the bourgeoisie. The population separates, the bourgeoisie are regenerated. The existence of subunits of a population with the bourgeoisie at the top of every one is directly connected to the existence of subpopulations or corporations as countable objects. The only kinds of objects that have Free Will are countable objects. This is to say that whenever somebody complains about the Cold War being [[E:State businesses only hand free will to Stalin|one big excuse to join "undemocratic" corporations into a bigger "undemocratic" government-owned ministry or "undemocratic" nation of "slaves to Stalin"]], the chief complaint is precisely about <em>the number of countable objects and whether human beings have free will</em>.

All this is to say, the discourse in Western Marxism over whether there are Spanishness Offices probably boils down to a question of how free will applies to corporations and institutions or the individuals inside them. Institutional culture is not a tangible thing aside from the countable cultures occupying institutions, and yet, every institution is made of individuals who very commonly believe they have free will.<ref name="yes" /> The entire issue is that people are struggling to explain how individual wills stack up to produce institutional wills. It may be the case that people are trying to cling to separated businesses and institutional free wills because they are the bourgeoisie, but that does not mean that there is not a phenomenon of businesses separated from each other being directly connected to free will, acting as centers of control for fractured and identity-charged bourgeoisie. There <em>are</em> Spanishness Offices. The problem is that Spanishness Offices don't actually perform the function that Western Marxists think.

=== Swatch color ===

This Item was assigned the orange {{TTS|html=code|IV|title=four}} swatch because it resembles one particular Trotskyist error. Trotskyists can sometimes be observed not noticing or understanding that Tories and anti-racist factions compete over institutions in order to have presence in society, and acting baffled at the existence of anti-racist movements. Said another way, they fail to understand the concept that the bourgeoisie might not all be equally effective and in practice there are locations where the bourgeoisie compete to control the real "power" of the bourgeoisie. In this Trotskyist case, the error would seem to function in reverse: Trotskyists might uphold the concept that the bourgeoisie have decision-making power that proletarians would not (the "offices"), but fail to realize that [[E:plurality|plural nationalities]] (the "Spains") can fight over this same locus of decision-making power resulting in serious social issues. In the meta-Marxist case, the error goes in the direction of not integrating the model of free-floating class-containing subpopulations into the model of a larger corporation-containing population (the offices). For Trotskyists, there is an office, but no Spanishness; for meta-Marxists, there are two Spains, but no office.