Research:MDem/5.4r/0999 north-letter - Revision history

Reversedragon: consolidate sections

2026-07-17T13:36:52Z

consolidate sections

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Reversedragon: Reclaiming the narrative / postmodernism

2026-07-17T13:20:56Z

Reclaiming the narrative / postmodernism

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Reversedragon: The nature of time

2026-07-16T01:42:59Z

The nature of time

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-<div class="bop bottom"><h3><time datetime="2026-07-09T07:32:47H">Networkism, capitalism, Stalinism, and socialism</time></h3>
+<div class="bop top"><h3><time datetime="2026-07-16T07:02:36H">The nature of time</time></h3>
 Marxism is more of a top-down movement than anybody would like to believe<br/>
 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.

Reversedragon: Lattice model

2026-07-15T11:53:34Z

Lattice model

← Older revision		Revision as of 11:53, 15 July 2026
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	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.		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 ~~{{dfn\|Lattice model}}~~.		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 ~~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 ~~create 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 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.

	~~Six years ago~~, I ~~did~~ not understand ~~Trotskyism~~ at ~~all~~. But I think the ~~prospect~~ of having a ~~coherent~~ model of ~~Trotskyist revolution~~ within the next ~~ten years (~~the model, ~~not~~ the ~~revolution~~) ~~which~~ is as ~~easily comprehensible~~ as ~~Stalinist texts~~ is on the ~~horizon now~~. ~~That~~ is ~~huge news~~.		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.
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	~~[...]~~

	<div class="bop bottom"><h3><time datetime="2026-07-09T07:32:47H">Networkism, capitalism, Stalinism, and socialism</time></h3>		<div class="bop bottom"><h3><time datetime="2026-07-09T07:32:47H">Networkism, capitalism, Stalinism, and socialism</time></h3>

Reversedragon: Existential materialism

2026-07-15T11:30:21Z

Existential materialism

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Reversedragon: Swatch analysis / slice analysis

2026-07-15T08:22:35Z

Swatch analysis / slice analysis

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Reversedragon: book of Revelation

2026-07-15T05:11:35Z

book of Revelation

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Reversedragon: re-sort

2026-07-15T05:06:45Z

re-sort

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Reversedragon: LGBT subpopulation

2026-07-15T05:04:09Z

LGBT subpopulation

← Older revision		Revision as of 05:04, 15 July 2026
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	<div class="bop"><h3><time datetime="2026-07-01T15:37:42H">Trotskyism and {{game\|Deltarune}}</time></h3>		<div class="bop"><h3><time datetime="2026-07-01T15:37:42H">Trotskyism and {{game\|Deltarune}}</time></h3>
	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 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 ~~_imagery_~~ of objects interacting materially.		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 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 ~~_The~~ Chronicles of ~~Narnia_~~ and ~~_Toy Story_~~ had absolutely nothing to do with either gay people or Marxism, something seems to have happened by the time LGBT people found ~~_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 ~~_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 ~~_Undertale_~~ and ~~_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, ~~_Deltarune_~~ is adapting "Theses on Feuerbach" — or at least Feuerbach's ~~_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 ~~_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 ~~_state_~~ "on a planetary scale" but within the specific narrative context of everything it is so close to saying it that I don't think that matters. ~~_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 ~~_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 ~~what~~ produced that.		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.
	~~</div>~~

	~~<div class="bop"><h3><time datetime="2026-07-03T04:14:31H">7-03</time></h3>~~		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.
	~~within countries that~~ have ~~not been forcibly closed off~~, ~~you often see countries dividing themselves because~~ of ~~their relationships with other parts~~ of ~~the world~~. ~~Confederate types~~ in the ~~United States~~ will ~~link up with Afrikaners who~~ are ~~pro- plantations and not in favor~~ of ~~the government handing over plantations to Black people,~~ or ~~with former plantation owners in Cuba, a country that once again used~~ to ~~contain African slaves~~. ~~"ordinary" Tories will scan the world for~~ other ~~Tory parties and when they're winning and losing in order to sound the alarm when "The Left" is "destroying" other countries~~. ~~on the somewhat brighter side of things, countries~~ that develop First World capitalisms tend to eventually develop LGBT+ movements or subcultures, and each time they ~~appear these movements~~ begin to link together across the world and share the same experiences back and forth and ~~become~~ confused on why there isn't an equal amount of progress on their issues in all countries.

	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 ~~_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.)		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.)
	</div>		</div>

Reversedragon: A flat world seeking to become round / Networkism, capitalism, Stalinism, and socialism

2026-07-15T03:56:57Z

A flat world seeking to become round / Networkism, capitalism, Stalinism, and socialism

← Older revision		Revision as of 03:56, 15 July 2026
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	<div class="bop bottom"><h3><time datetime="2026-07-09T07:32:47H">~~Capitalism: a flattened world seeking to become round~~</time></h3>		<div class="bop bottom"><h3><time datetime="2026-07-09T07:32:47H">Networkism, capitalism, Stalinism, and socialism</time></h3>
			Marxism is more of a top-down movement than anybody would like to believe<br/>
			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.		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.