Editing Philosophical Research:MDem/5.1r/1999 no-freud

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(response)  [cr. 2025-09-07T05:18Z]

... Lenin trying to get everyone to stop thinking about sex because all he ever does is theory and organizing is dumb. But on the other hand, I do not like the way events are being framed in this video.  [*rth]  Marx and Freud do not belong anywhere near each other. The moment you start making revolution about psychological repression and cultural conditioning, it's super easy to start saying things like that telling Trotsky he can't split the Communist Party in two and try to link up a bunch of totally hypothetical Trotskyist parties to conquer the International is morally wrong because it would make him repress Trotskyism and it would destroy him.
Factually speaking, it's not hard to argue that was what was happening. Trotsky did not understand what was going on in the USSR and how its ministries worked or how they connected to unions or soviets and it caused him a lot of distress. Watching him go on and on about how slow and inadequate everything was, and sometimes confront Lenin, it's easy to get the impression that being within this overall process of transformation was increasingly overwhelming, leading him to "transform" from eager ally to someone who had more and more trouble even pretending to be part of it to fool people. This is the breaking point that signaled the start of the world turning away from Bolshevism. If Trotsky was repressing an alternate Leninism the Third International wouldn't let him build, how could anyone know the kulaks weren't repressing things? How could anyone know the people who fled the Soviet Union eagerly weren't repressing things? Is revolution any time a bunch of people get angry at something and try to smash it? Could a bourgeois counter-revolution be a revolution in its own right? Does it get better if they're queer? Does it get better if they're Muslims and the surrounding population isn't Muslims? What if the population is bourgeoisie but a bunch of minority bourgeoisie break off from the regular bourgeoisie? People in First World universities repeatedly pondered these questions and, seemingly, came to the conclusion that all revolutions are about identities and the notion of the proletariat is just a mirage when the breaks between identities that turn people against an enemy are much better at uniting people than the actual structure of populations. They made ten or fifteen of these philosophies all competing against each other and frequently accusing each other of being too prejudiced in their attempt to focus on nothing but prejudice, yet all part of one weird tradition. I like to call it the "Existentialist-Structuralist tradition". In my mind, it belongs nowhere near Marxism. If anybody brings up Freud, Deleuze, or Foucault I think Marxists should just start saying that revolution is not about repression and revolution is not about freedom. Marxist revolution is the mere causal result of building a better society which is functional but which somebody doesn't want to exist, which the people then defend. Trotskyism would be valid if it actually worked. Mainstream Marxism-Leninism is valid because it does work. Not because people wanted freedom, not because they were oppressed, not because they were a minority, and not because oppressed minorities line up next to other oppressed minorities. All of these points are standard center-Liberal-approved discourse, not even things that are forbidden by The Hierarchies or The Patriarchy.   [*ssr]
The missing piece is this: spatial hierarchies have always been plural. Where there's a British kingdom there's a French kingdom. Saying "I don't like the British hierarchy" isn't any more meaningful than "I like the French one better". And that is exactly how First World countries have co-opted every single thought about freedom or repression, very much including Trotsky and early Trotskyism, including the Uyghur conflict with China, anything and everything, to serve the interests of perpetuating the politics of ancient kingdoms and capitalism forever. Practically the only way to stop it is to take some kind of principled stance that groups of people are simply not allowed to break apart and they have to find some way of resolving their differences and standing together without bringing in outside help.
The world is so big. There are so many people, but there's nowhere for them to flee to. I think in one sense, if we want to be able to stop global problems like climate change, we all need to get over ourselves and realize there's something bigger than cultures or communities and we just have to make the rest of history go right. It feels like freedom was the perfect thing to talk about a century ago but by letting the world get so out of control we're far beyond that point now.   [*w]

The terribly ironic thing about Freud is that by now a lot of people use Freud and Lacan to argue for purposeful repression — that capitalism is natural because tormenting individuals into behaving in ways that don't cause trouble and don't make people around them mad is natural, therefore when it creates capitalism and Liberal-republicanism those must be normal, and Bolshevism occurs when part of a population refuses to be tamed and told off by the other parts of a population back and forth through conflict and thus smashes them under its own desires. [*ES] Freud can be used to argue basically whatever the author wants to argue without actually demonstrating the point. In light of this, it's easy to see how if the Soviet Union had been created by Freudians rather than Communists, all of them could simply align onto crushing homosexuality being good simply because liberating the Soviet peoples requires people devoting themselves to the cause for the well-being of society and not causing other people trouble just because they have the desire to. (I have big problems with the word "desire" precisely because it gets twisted this way into referring to suppressing biology or needs, but that's the word they always use even when they do this.) A whole lot of the use of Freud has hinged on the false assumption that "desire" is somehow separate from government or separate from capital and there is some missing theory of freedom that neither Marx or Lenin could have dreamed of but will almost certainly vindicate capitalism.
The deep irony of it: the supposed conflict between Lenin and Freud is really a conflict between Freud and Freud. Using Freud to argue against the Soviet Union isn't necessarily even engaging with Marxism.

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(response)  [cr. 2025-09-07T06:31Z]

For any ideology, you have to duplex it. You have to imagine that multiple groups of people are using it. If an indigenous group uses Jungian psychoanalysis, it might not be harmful. But the problem is that France will be using it at the same time. And maybe Spain, and Germany, and the Netherlands, and the United States and Canada and Australia, depending on time period. If France and Germany and Britain are all using psychoanalysis at once, it's dreadfully easy for them to look at each other and say, wow, here is the collective unconscious that applies to all of us, and totally ignore the indigenous population as even existing. It's easy for countries to gather around psychoanalysis and form a First World axis, and then all go pick on another country at once, knowing that if they don't know about psychoanalysis, they must not be normal and including them in the collective unconscious model isn't necessary. Marxism stands up to duplexing much better than this, which should lead you to ask what is fundamentally different about the two things.

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(response)  [cr. 2025-09-11T01:08:30Z]

Philosophical thought exercise: You are technically arguing Trotskyism

0A. Dialectical materialism is when two objects interact together to change each other and also produce a bigger object or process at the same time   [*d]
0B. Socialism in one country is when two or more objects inside a country interact to produce a country.
0C. International permanent revolution is when two or more objects inside multiple countries interact to produce a single global civilization — a dictatorship of the proletariat at least the size of North America or bigger.
0D. Any republic, Liberal-republican or Marxist, partly consists of a bigger object that records the interactions and contributions of smaller objects; this may be a constitution or a central party.

1. A bigger object somewhere recorded the knowledge that gay rights belong immortally enshrined in a constitution before countries or movements can even exist.
2. The bigger object in question is the world
3. You are arguing for dialectical materialism taking place over the world where gay people in the United States and Europe interact with proletarians in the Soviet Union region to produce permanent revolution or socialist transition. This is international permanent revolution.

This is not an argument that the Soviet Union didn't need gay people or that gay people are bad, or are counterrevolutionary by being gay, or that Lenin gets to say that sex is bad.

This is at most an argument that you didn't give a material process by which people could discover gay rights _inside_ a single country without resorting to other countries or the concept of a world constitution.
This is a thought experiment about multiple different incompatible Marxisms existing in different countries at the same time and having to do historical materialism on all of that, not an accusation or an insult — I don't even think "Trotskyist" is an insult outside of one particular historical context.

Also, I'm actually not entirely sure of point 2.


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[*ssr] Union republics are the only exception.
[*ES] _The Excessive Subject_ (Molly Ann Rothenberg, 2010)

=> youtube.com/watch?v=BE7UPO6GGK4  *rth. Why did the USSR (re-)criminalize homosexuality? ;
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=> 1755818383  *w. v5.1-5.3 scraps/ a world with way too many wolves       ; 2001 wolves
=> 1746934894  *d. v5.1-5.3 scraps/ differential equations and relativity  ; 1101 differentiate
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== https://research.moraleconomy.au/index.php/entry/Philosophical_Research:MDem/5.1r/1999_no-freud
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[[Category:MDem v5.1 entries]]