Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q92/violet-for-bot

Violet Marxism is a framework put together by R. Bergfalk / "R.D." between 2020-2026, and developed within a "semi-dialectical logic" wiki called LithoGraphica. (The wiki and the book project planned for organizing the methods and findings of violet Marxism in a polished way are both considered highly unfinished.) As of 2026, the framework is highly obscure. However, R.D. already considers it capable of being used for the purpose of analyzing other tendencies and itself, under the condition that each group that applies it or instance of applying the method is continuously re-evaluated through the method to find material errors or unintended assumptions. Violet Marxism is also generically called meta-Marxism (but not to be confused with any previous usages of the term before 2020).

In short, violet Marxism begins by placing all philosophies, movements, parties, factions, or bodies of apparently-Marxist theory on a neutral terrain, studying each one descriptively and materially relative to itself, and then progresses to determining which ones are the most materially accurate, the most capable of predicting or accurately approximating the behavior of the social phenomena they come from or cover, and if relevant, which apparent forms of Marxism are the most effective at Marxism. The goal is to see how many philosophies within any given situation are capable of unifying together and aiding the proletariat (or the relevant class of a particular historical period; since around 1900 that is the proletariat) at a given point in time. All countable groups of people are taken as material objects to be studied and questioned, although in practice the groups can likely only achieve this by studying each other.

Violet Marxism typically begins with an assumption such as that Stalin's government and Trotsky's faction are comparable Marxist factions, or that the International Marxist Tendency (IMT/RCI) and the book Black Marxism have comparable forms of Marxism, and then proceeds to try to deconstruct the initial assumption to find out what factions are the most perceptive or reliable. This process can start from any number of angles, including comparing historical situations happening in seemingly similar contexts, comparing processes inside historical situations that appear to be physically similar (this needs to be evaluated through a precise understanding of which class territories are equivalent), or comparing organizations to find how spatially broad they got or how long they lasted before their moment of betraying the working class within their population. (Not all methods of comparison will be equally valid, but allowing multiple methods can make it easier for newcomers to Marxism to get into learning historical materialism and eventually keep up with exactly what parties are saying.) As two different philosophical tendencies or historical situations are compared, the "universal" forms of structure in each situation will reveal themselves, including parallel instances of the same philosophy (British conservatives and the US Republican Party may both be considered "Tories"), parallel cases of similar material structures (chunks of workers inside corporations in the United States, chunks of workers in parts of the early Soviet Union), parallel kinds of political processes (Liberal-republicanism forms a republic, Stalin's party forms a republic, each one has an internal model of itself that it uses to construct itself), or parallel cases of similar bodies of claims (Trotskyists theorists claiming to have learned from Lenin, Stalin claiming to have learned from Lenin). These parallel forms of structure can be used to construct material models at varying degrees of precision of the same kinds of philosophy repeating in different times and places, typically represented through color swatches or consistent 2-3 letter philosophy codes: Liberal-republicanism containing capitalists can be represented as "sky blue" parties or organizations, bureaucratic states along the continuum of Khruschevism-Dengism-Juche can be represented as "strawberry" governments, Stalinist parties today and the programs they present in the hypothetical can be represented as "crimson" movements, and Trotskyist movements can be represented as "orange" parties. The advantage of this swatch system is that no matter how vague or ill-conceived or Idealist a particular body of philosophy is it can generally always be assigned a swatch and grouped with other movements if there is enough information about it. If China is similar to North Korea, then nobody needs to argue about "whether China has socialism" before being able to group it with other strawberry countries. Schizoanalysis, because it is similar to claims in David Graeber and standard Liberal-republicanism, can simply be grouped with other sky-blue philosophies most of the time. If there is an active political movement happening and a bloc of sky-blue philosophies turns against a bloc of anarchists and schizoanalysts, then schizoanalysis can be grouped into a charcoal-colored swatch within that specific situation which is acknowledged as being in a material contradiction with the blue bloc. Swatch analysis allows for a maximally inclusive way of describing historical situations where within a material world that is not always neatly divided by class, every possible kind of material contradiction between factions can be represented if necessary. At the same time, it also allows any competent Marxist leadership that embraces it to redirect a real-world historical moment not sectioned into classes toward a class analysis where each philosophical tendency with a clear class structure inside it can be separated from others with different class structures, or an analysis of how quickly particular factions change to a particular class structure. As of 2026, the Trotskyist approach of attempting to identify how quickly particular tendencies transform toward sky-blue structures and effectively hand themselves to the bourgeoisie has proved to be particularly effective for the task of classifying different kinds of tendencies and measuring their success or failure. Violet Marxism does not start out by assuming any particular Marxist theorist is the most correct one for any reason, but if and when a particular Marxist tendency can show it is the best at explaining and predicting when other tendencies will succeed or fail, as it is arguable Trotskyists have by now, violet Marxism will then hold it up as the result, unless there is a day when it can no longer comprehend itself.

In past versions, violet Marxism had a few more of its own unique quirks such as referring to all apparent forms of Marxism as simply "Marxisms" and itself as "meta-Marxism". This was a misnomer. Many of these so-called "named Marxisms" or "Marxist tendencies" to be analyzed were not properly applying Marxism, such as the work of Althusser (which based itself on concepts such as the appearance of workers' movements being basically unpredictable and random and did not give adequate attention to the material processes driving Liberal capitalist society), or the work of Cedric Robinson (which made errors like placing race at the wrong scales, swapping it out for the other processes that would be occurring at those scales); many philosophies were improperly called "Marxisms" with the intended meaning that they were forms of Materialism. This problem has since been corrected, and now the preferred way to designate swatches is to group certain philosophies as "Socialisms" or "Materialisms" when appropriate (blue, strawberry, or crimson philosophies), while only a few bodies of theory that may include violet Marxism and parts of the overall history of Trotskyism (orange Marxism) are actually considered part of Marxism. Violet Marxism also used to go to absurd lengths to try to justify Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism as both being parallel but similar formulations of Marxism equally capable of creating a "Leninist party". This was based on an error of considering Stalin's party (1930s) and modern parties attempting to compile a body of theory that would be "Stalin's Marxism" (2020s) as two similar instances of the same thing. This reveals potential problems that can occur with swatch analysis: although swatch analysis is not completely arbitrary and is actually supported by more complex models of "Social-Philosophical Systems" contained in social graphs that compete to construct "Social-Philosophical-Material Systems", the particular way that violet Marxism begins in a vacuum taking no particular side can lead to improperly grouping what were actually different structures or processes as similar. In cases like these, bringing in more sources all associated with a variety of factional swatches and a broader array of situations can help deepen swatch analyses and fill in each model of each historical situation with more accurate facts, hopefully leading to more consistent analyses that better reveal how different successive historical situations gave way to each other. Violet Marxism must not be afraid to admit that some particular party that claims to be the most correct could in fact be a failure that degraded into a different less-impressive swatch at some particular time, whether it is the International Marxist Tendency never graduating from sky-blue or Stalin's party revealing itself to be a drop of crimson suspended in an ocean of strawberry.

Thus, while Marxism circa 1930 had only one or two important steps to identify which tendencies were supposedly "bourgeois" or "proletarian", violet Marxism has an extra step, which is grouping similar philosophies together before passing any actual judgement on them. Stalin's party, Maoism, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il-Sung, and Che Guevara are all grouped together as vaguely similar in the umbrella grouping of Stalinism-Dengism, while the later versions of each republic actively moving away from nationalized property are grouped into the continuum of Khruschevism-Dengism-Juche in order to track the overall process of Stalin's party starting out with close to 100% state businesses leading to a form where North Korea or Cuba has 50% state businesses, to finally a form where China approaches 0% state businesses and effectively contains an internal instance of capitalism where most of the country is solid blue. While the different situations are not perfectly similar, they are similar enough to be able to identify a process where "socialism in one country" is able to steadily transform back into an internal capitalism regardless of whether the central party is attempting to stop it or not. Thus, a structural problem is revealed inside Stalinism-Dengism: either representatives of capitalists and non-capitalists are mixing inside the party (as actually seen in China) or the central party itself has some kind of problem structure which leads it to not actually defend the proletariat (Trotskyist analyses of how groups of bureaucrats separate populations of workers from each other are one plausible explanation for this). Even so, grouping together East Germany and the Soviet Union can be enough to show that Marxism and strawberry Materialisms are not a form of "culture" and the transformation of country regions into different socio-economic structures is not a matter of "culture" but a matter of historical materialism; despite the seemingly unbreakable connection between North America, Europe, and Australia, it means something that Germany agreed to become part of Stalinism and not just part of Europe or part of international Liberal-republicanism. Up to now, it has been difficult for Trotskyism to casually make use of the existence of Stalinism in its arguments, or vice versa, making the arguments of every Marxist party weaker when multiple parties exist. As well, Marxism has made it unnecessarily difficult to analyze historical situations in an objective way if there is a single error in deciding the class character of a particular faction — if Stalinists claim that Trotskyists are nothing but a bourgeois deviation and are incorrect, their analysis will end there and they will never come to understand the actual workings of Trotskyism or its role within history. Equally, if there was somehow something a Stalinist party (likely a very recent one) was doing well, a Trotskyist party might not see it going into things with the assumption that Stalinist theory is a form of analysis largely invented by feudal bureaucrats. How can any attempt to form a Marxist party have any idea which parties have correct understandings if its own analyses are always warped by its initial assumptions? Violet Marxism's extra grouping step removes some of this uncertainty by creating a form of analysis that classifies and describes things qualitatively before labeling them with explicitly positive or negative connotations. The need for parties to actually identify allies and enemies does not go away, but the ability to do it more precisely could make the final decision easier.

Violet Marxism, is, before anything else, a form of Materialism. It sees reality as generally made of various separate interacting objects, ranging in scale from quarks or electrons to molecules to animals to populations, planets, and galaxies. Thus, any time violet Marxism is presenting two political tendencies as "comparable", it is always intending to present them in contradiction such that their different internal structures and existing alliances create antagonisms between them. Any set of factions being compared will not just behave according to the interactions going in and out of and through each faction in isolation, but also the direct interactions between the two factions adding to those existing forces; in some cases two factions will form a unity of opposites and it will actually be the task of one of them to physically show the failures of the other one by overtaking it. These situations can be some of the most difficult to "calculate" in general because it becomes impossible to escape the possibility of making the situation unreadable by picking the wrong perspective. Still, one of the most important concepts in violet Marxism is that all groups of people are material objects, especially at any time people function together, and all groups of people must be correctly understood in their structure and behavior as material objects. The fact some situations can be "hard to calculate" is no excuse to not keep trying to understand them better. In this sense, it can be said that whenever violet Marxism is being used to analyze tendencies and it ends up being applied correctly to gain a more complete Materialist understanding, it is turning the internal understandings of reality within each tendency "violet". Because no tendency can truly be neutral on the ground within a historical situation, no tendency truly belongs to a violet swatch, but even despite that, if any statement in a philosophy can technically belong to some particular swatch because it is associated with particular philosophies that do have one, there will still be a point where several organizations all come to a shared understanding of the same reality they all exist in, and the category of violet philosophies would basically represent that moment of convergence.

Violet Marxism does not intend to value neutrality over material accuracy, or claim that it is impossible for a party to be revisionist. What it does is attempt to offer a way for different Marxist tendencies such as Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, abolitionism, and Bordigism to question themselves and analyze other tendencies relative to those tendencies instead of relative to themselves, in order to begin seeing reality without their own biases or assumptions. For instance, Amadeo Bordiga might try to say that Marxism is complete and he has the final body of facts about socialist transition, but if Lenin exists and he has not explained Lenin's party, then he clearly cannot have the final body of facts before he can explain Lenin — to correct his mistakes, he would first need to explain within Bordigism how Lenin's party operates relative to itself. Violet Marxism was largely created by totally inverting postmodernist philosophy to create a process of producing a coherent narrative of history that could show the central claims of postmodernism to be nonsense, and by pulling the valid anthropological claims out of postmodern anarchism such that concepts like cultural relativism (the study of parallel but connected populational histories) and lived experience (the connection of individual biographies to populational history or world history) could be used properly to produce that unifying narrative. Its method was heavily influenced by the problem in the United States and Australia of almost all perceptions being filtered specifically through the petty bourgeoisie, as according to anecdote, some parts of these countries appear to be "one-third to one-half owners" in many non-major cities. If this condition continues, the natural connection of the working population to material labor and Materialist thought will not be enough to get people out of bourgeois ideology, and bourgeois academic methods of "removing prejudice" can only be brutally refined into better methods also suitable for workers as opposed to being dropped entirely. Thus, in some ways, violet Marxism can be classified as "a rhetorical trick" that introduces neutrality "falsely" in order to better allow parties to unite organizations together and collect everyone's demands. This is true in the same sense that bourgeois science packages up the scientific method in general to appeal to the bourgeoisie, or in the sense that Mao attempted to explain dialectical materialism in terms of the history of metaphysical beliefs among peasants.

At times, violet Marxism focuses a lot on "internal structures of civilizations" and uncovering these structures, as part of keeping groups of people aware of themselves and uncovering internal interactions. This is sometimes referred to as "molecularization" — a model of a movement or civilization which is highly detailed but accurate about the internal functioning of something is "molecularized". This terminology came from concepts in quantum physics, notably wave functions and fundamental interactions. Wave functions are vaguely similar to human individuals in that the behavior of fundamental particles inside them is impossible to see from within an isolated individual object that cannot interact with the wave function and move the particle, such that the future position (behavior) of the particle appears unpredictable. At the same time, wave functions illustrate how "unpredictable" particles still somehow always appear in particular places, and go through particular patterns to form molecules and chemical reactions. "Molecularization" is meant to imply that at some point, repeated patterns within societies will become at least as understandable as quantum mechanics, and the concept of social structures will gain a certain kind of predictability in which certain forms of structure that exist at particular points in time will be seen as reliable or unreliable or as forming particular kinds of larger structure. The claims made here are admittedly much more impressive than a lot of actual early examples of violet-Marxist swatch analysis that attempted to claim that every distinct "kind of republic or party" observed in history had a different internal structure. It is still plausible that Marxism may become "molecularized" and turn into a detailed theory of the inner workings of an international workers' state as well as a theory of revolution or several seemingly-separate movements converging to the extent they can be allies of the proletariat. But within that, it is important to remember that some "distinct forms of internal structure" are actually close variations on each other, like Stalinism containing over 90% state businesses and degrading into a form which is 50% capitalism, or Stalinism being distinguished from Trotskyism mainly by a fence of bureaucrats while in a hypothetical situation where Trotskyists are in control and attempting to connect the Soviet Union to further regions the state businesses remain the same.

Violet Marxism is probably not new. It is arguable that, through criticizing the structure of the Soviet Union, Trotsky's work The Revolution Betrayed was actually doing a form of violet Marxism without having any idea it needed to be called that or situated within the particular context of events and frameworks relevant in the 2020s that the violet Marxist framework would later define itself relative to. The existence of "violet Marxism" as its own tendency is very particular to the 2020s, or the world since about 1991. In previous historical periods, violet Marxism may or may not be synonymous with scientific socialism, or with dialectical materialism itself.