Ontology:Q28,90

1. [MX] (pronounced MX; S2:)Society are not singular1:-1:-1

Exact claim

Society is not an uncountable abstract quality, nor defined by an uncountable abstract quality of culture or history or ideals, and instead is divided into countable society-objects (populations) at gaps containing no permanent social ties which then act as populations' material borders; separate countable countries exist due to the need to defend one countable population-object from attack by a separate external population-object which is uncontrollable and not wholly predictable by the defending population; this would imply that the problem of global empire is partly a matter of population-objects that otherwise would be separate countable objects being joined into one object forcefully and made into one very large society with all its real or figurative slave labor off in a different corner of the world; this would also imply that if global civilization is possible then it must result from a physical sort of merging of many countable society-objects into one or more new countable objects before a single global society-object can exist

Core characteristics

item type

S2 (C (pronounced Category))1:-1:-1

[P] (pronounced P:) label (en) [string] (L)

[MX] (pronounced MX; S2:)Society are not singular1:-1:-1

E:Society are not singular

[P] (pronounced P:) alias (en) [string]

Society cannot be uncountable

population-society conjecture (meta-Marxism)

(... more aliases)

QID (pronounced Q.I.D.) references [Item]1:-1:-1

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case of [Item]

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consists of components [Item]

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Wavebuilder combinations

[P] (pronounced P:) Wavebuilder (pronounced Wave-builder): forms result [Item]

anarchy (meta-Marxism) (proposed; MX)1:-1:-1

along with [Item]

[MX] (pronounced MX; S2:)Society are not singular1:-1:-1

forming from [Item]

[MX] (pronounced MX; S2:)Society are not singular1:-1:-1

S–618 (pronounced 618. (S))[DG] [S] (pronounced (D.G.) (S):)Rhizome (schizoanalysis) (proposed; DG)1:-1:-1

anarchy (meta-Marxism) (proposed; MX)1:-1:-1

Wavebuilder characterizations

Wavebuilder (pronounced Wave-builder): route [Item]

[MX] (pronounced MX; S2:)Society are not singular1:-1:-1

along with [Item]

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forming from [Item]

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[MX] (pronounced MX; S2:)Society are not singular1:-1:-1

Background

Within various philosophical traditions that include Liberal-republican theory, the Enlightenment, and anarchism, it is common to encounter writers speaking of "society" as if it is totally uncountable and there have not generally been separate populations of human beings bounded by separate kingdoms, tribes, or nation-states. Kant for instance and the monarchist Hobbes before him each tended to explain the formation of individual nation-states as if the only factors affecting them were everything inside them and they were never affected by outside factors.

Into the time of Lenin, this way of viewing countries has proved to be a problem. Although most successful attempts to realize workers' states have had to start inside particular countries and focus on their internal elements such as unions and allied movements, the history of Third World countries is also drastically shaped by interactions with outside countries in a way that the history of First World countries may not be. First World countries can attack at basically any time, undermining the stability of other countries in any number of creative ways, so throughout its entire era of socialism and its general existence every Third World country always has to put extra effort just into remaining independent and remaining a country instead of losing its government to outside forces and being converted into a colony. In this situation the kinds of "voluntary" social theories advanced by Kant at times and Rousseau simply do not apply, although Hobbesian theories more or less still hold up. The tangible threat of external attack and the impossibility of truly creating international law and prohibiting such attacks make active membership in a Third World country more inherently mandatory, such that people are not as able to choose to be "on the fence" or conflicted about whether their government is good and are pushed more into either being totally loyal to the majority political faction of the country or simply leaving the country. In the Third World, borders are very real because they are the boundary between the enslavement of a particular ethnic group by a separate external ethnic group and the ability to have a functional society. Nonetheless, even after 1970, many people continue to use theories of society in which they act like borders were strictly invented by the bourgeoisie, or some abstract anarchist enemy such as "the colonizer attitude", "the construction of Western identity", or "the genesis of domination" unnecessarily imposed borders on the world's single gigantic human population. These models attempt to offer all human beings freedom, but regardless of how they are intended, they are strictly speaking historically inaccurate, and when followed they ultimately offer First World populations much greater freedom to be racist.

Keeping that in mind, this is the claim that it is not possible for "society" to be an uncountable phenomenon or abstract quality, nor processes such as "class struggle", "revolution", or "socialism", and instead every country is a countable material object composed internally of countable material objects that make it physically finite (people, corporations, etc). This model still implies that it is possible for any particular countable society to assemble together with other countable societies to build a larger object — for ideologies such as anarchism and Trotskyism, the main change is that it cannot be assumed that just any two countable societies will merge together at any arbitrary time, and if and when societies merging together and abandoning borders is possible, only particular countable societies can merge together at particular times. Each country is countable, each overall collection of people belonging to a class per country is countable, and each process of transitioning to a workers' state is effectively countable, although in some cases two countries' revolutions will line up and happen approximately around the same time, as in China and North Korea. The possibility of two countable societies going through transition at the same time or affecting each other is not ruled out; they are simply treated as independent events unless there is good evidence they are not independent. Internationalism is not ruled out either, although it has to take into account the fundamentally countable character of socialist transitions, and in turn the possibility that systems such as Deng Xiaoping states are better than what would exist without them and part of the world's overall transition process.

This model, overall, is more or less the model used by mainstream Marxism-Leninism going into 1950. Other ideologies may struggle with successfully adopting it. Trotskyists and anarchists are both generally missing a solid abstract concept of a national population appropriate to the conditions of their own ideological faction. For Trotskyists, the answer should be relatively straightforward: molecularize the overall era of world socialist transition and accept the possibility of Trotskyism in one country, specifically so that several of these countries can actually each get through transition into Bolshevism and then join together. For anarchists, one possible path that may apply to some clusters of anarchisms is to decide that the concept of a stationary combination of heterogeneous elements is specifically a description of the structure of a national population, and the purpose of national populations is to coordinate the "rhizomatic" combination of scattered and heterogeneous subpopulations whereas otherwise the lack of a countable unit for them to assemble into might make the task difficult. To this end, particular abstract national populations could be divided out into smaller abstract nations to make uniting their heterogeneous elements easier, before uniting them back into larger abstract national populations. For one large-scale example, consider how the Soviet Union divided the larger Russian empire into 14 populations, and by dividing them out into countable units was able to unite all of them back together. A similar process could be drawn out in the abstract using whatever divisions of populations are appealing to anarchists, and then realized according to everyone's knowledge of what countable elements actually have a chance of going together and what countable elements would rather remain apart.

Usage notes

Translation notes

The grammar used in the main Item label is an intentional joke. When translating it to other languages, it should intentionally be written using incorrect or unusual grammar.

The framing of the proposition may differ somewhat for different languages. The English label "Society are not singular" refers to the consequence of the proposition itself that an uncountable society would necessarily manifest into reality as a single countable society-object perhaps covering the world; "are not singular" then acts to refute the notion that societies are already a single global population, countable or uncountable. The Japanese label takes a different angle, simply starting with the word "society" which is already fully presumed to be uncountable and then stating that any "society" we experience has at least a count of one.

Aliases and labels

English (en)

• Society are not singular
• Society cannot be uncountable
• The division between societies occurs at gaps containing no social ties, not at territorial borders
• population-society conjecture

日本語 (ja)

• 「社会」は社会一個
• みんなが毎日体験する社会は社会一個（メタマルクス主義）
• みんなが毎日体験する社会は社会は一ヶ国（メタマルクス主義）

Labels

[P] (pronounced P:) alias (en) [string]

[MX] (pronounced MX; S2:)Society are not singular1:-1:-1

[P] (pronounced P:) alias (ja) [string]

[MX] (pronounced MX; S2:)「社会」は社会一個1:-1:-1