Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q46,19/critique

revision 1

This is not a fair characterization of the American revolution. [1]
I just watched a bad video about the Red Scare... well, no, it was just mediocre.
most people believe the definition of America itself inherently excludes the existence of Communists. I'm not a Bolshevik, Marx didn't believe in violent revolution, Marx believed in Menshevism, then you're an American.
in this light all the stuff about 'the settler regime' actually makes some kind of sense if you define 'the settlers' not as some kind of ethnic group made of Europeans but specifically as the early bourgeoisie who established things like gold mines or the fur trade.

hypothetical world Stalin's government shooting Trotskyists in the street
would it be fair to call Stalin and Mao both a progressive force because they defended their country against empire?

"never was a democratic revolution in America and that therefore it has no democracy worth defending"
seems upset at the suggestion there is "no American democracy to defend"
Trotskyist makes point against permanent revolution. each time I read an explanation of why Trotsky had an accurate model of the Russian revolution one of the points was always that it was possible to skip over Menshevism and bourgeois class rule in the Third World because the Third World would be starting a worldwide revolution, and as a revolution it had no need to cut itself off by establishing capitalism.
trotsky said you can't support mao when he advances a bourgeois republic if and when the bourgeois republic would kill Communists. if the CPC or KMT suppresses the proletariat Trotskyists stop defending 'their important step forward for Chinese democracy', and defend whatever few proletarians the government suppressed.
reconstruction failed - like Stalin failed

"no entrenched power—monarchies or slaveholders or capitalists—is beyond the reach of revolution" - only one of those was actually dislodged. totally missing Reconstruction era history, which is critical.
"radical, universal egalitarianism born of Enlightenment ideals" - this is okay.
causality missing from book - this is what Liberal-republican ideals do to your brain.
"it is more patriotic than those who are opposed to it"
"promoting division between, or resentment of, a race, sex, religion, creed, nonviolent political affiliation, social class, or class of people"
slavery relic of pre-capitalist, monarchic world - yeah. confederacy was closer to ancient imperialism, although not expanding actively through war

meta-narratives postmodernism actually isn't all bad. it can be turned around. only good thing: it's the claim Liberal-republicanism and Stalinism don't understand each other
"new narratives" - ethics obsession. history is made of ethics. anarchism. or, effect of framers and Liberal-republican Ideals on regular people. "liberal democracy" is a pile of ideals, not a material process as Lenin describes a state to be.
non-racism versus anti-racism
identity politics loses mass appeal - true once, not true any more. identity politics is actually how you get mass appeal now.
attempt to erase maoism? source of many racialized narratives
why personal storytelling / phenomenology? Hegel. that's all. limited value. but the value is there.
"western philosophy inherently white" - certainly not. things which are essentially the same have spread throughout japan without much harm. CRT confuses the harm of physical populations competing against each other, pushing out Black people, with the harm of ideas that come out of the populations
lots of white people killed by police - huh. my only response, this has been a flawed attempt to create social links or organizations, which otherwise erode every day.
Hannah-Jones accidentally says Nazism solved racism [2] - ok. this one is interesting because if you look closely it contradicts everything else Maoists and postmodern identity politics were saying, about how killing minorities entrenches racism rather than getting rid of it. which is approximately true. she didn't learn her own lesson.
antiessentialism - way better than class vs race argument. better argument for lived experience than the ones they use. however, supports materialism.
relationships - product of isolation. actually similar to what Lenin said, but only as a product of anarchists thinking CRT is more revolutionary than it is. [3]
cultural appropriation - phenomenology. demand for anthropological work to be accurate. I find this one pretty annoying but again there's a way to present it correctly. 2008 & obama to now - perhaps CRT was only way to put pressure on Democratic party. there are basically no other ways.
capitalism crushing minorities; few available; uniting is better [4] - CRT misses that some privileged people suffer and have every reason to end capitalism

revision 2

I just read through three articles on this site related to CRT or the 1619 project. And I've come to the tentative conclusion that these articles haven't really understood the relationship of United States independence to worldwide revolution, nor what CRT is trying to accomplish.

I am very much not a fan of postmodern identity politics, nor critical race theory. But, after trying to read Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (I didn't finish it), I realized that everyone including Marxists has been unfair to what it's ultimately studying. CRT and identity politics are often very phenomenological. The point of writing down a bunch of personal anecdotes is to sketch out a situation that happened and then start marking up the actual interesting phenomena that appear across multiple anecdotes to eventually be able to study them in a more scientific way. Many people who actively talk about "Husserl's phenomenology" or "speaking your truth" don't understand this; they don't understand the strengths or contributions of their own discipline. However, somebody with more training in the sciences would realize that a lot of "lived experience" rhetoric actually has the same kind of worth as Hegel. Hegel laid out a lot of Idealist statements from within his own experience and the experience of the Prussian kingdom that looked like nonsense but that Marx discovered were actually describing real phenomena with material behavior. I think this is the real purpose of a lot of texts within identity politics and critical race theory. Marx, Lenin, and Stalin all described at different times how just because somebody's anecdote, perspective, or ideology isn't quite correct (Hegel, bourgeois intellectuals, anarchism, etc.) that doesn't mean you shouldn't seriously analyze it in relation to reality and what real things produced it. So, what is going on with racialized "experience essays" is Black people or Mexican immigrants (etc.) want to sociologically study fairly localized groups of people within a town or such but because they live in an increasingly unscientific society full of a lot of prejudiced people, everywhere they go no individual they ever run into wants to listen to them on anything they say and they get stuck in this harsh situation of having to assemble a group of peers or movement members from the smallest pools of people with the most limited kinds of "expertise". They are not being heard so they get more "extreme" in their insistence on developing and investigating their initial thesis all on their own until they get everything all articulated perfectly and everyone has to hear it, like Amadeo Bordiga standing in the corner insisting people will all flip over and join his Marxist party eventually. What's going on now ties back to an earlier period where North American Maoists and the Black Panthers were each trying to find a way to put together a Communist party, but each time they would try, society would always spring 100+ anticommunists on each Communist and then 100+ White people on each Black person "maybe possibly" affiliated with Communists. Since at least 1940-1950 there was always a weird dynamic where the first people to resist capitalism were always a tiny minority fighting the majority. After 1953, when Dengism and Liberal-republicanism slowly started winning worldwide, this created an ugly interaction with the general dynamic in the United States of people always trying to insist they are "real Americans" that "do actually believe in American ideals" rather than "violent" "terroristic" Bolsheviks. Suddenly, academics had to win the uphill battle against anticommunists and a new layer of virulent anti-Mensheviks without any Marxism at all, fully packed into the standard frameworks of Liberal-republicanism. And they had to do this because if they did anything else people would forcefully snatch any idea of "universal human rights" or "all being Americans" out from under them. Barack Obama didn't have to spread critical race theory to get people angry; they got angry just because of the insinuation he was imperfect and he wasn't utterly excellent. If 1000 White people show up for every Black individual trying to rightfully appropriate the Constitution and say "I saw one Black criminal rob a store once, therefore all these Black candidates are horrible savage beasts never to be trusted", you'll have to do some heavy strategizing to actually keep Black people from immediately being segregated out of society wherever they go.
Malcom X could have solved the "problem" of "lawless" Black people several times over, but Liberal-republicans didn't want that because they could never dream of anything like Third World countries coming up with a new kind of republic that isn't Liberal-republicanism. Lenin and Stalin setting down Bolshevism? Crazy. A Communist party for the Black subpopulation that would then admit the rest of the United States? Unheard of! Dengism? Must be fake, the Chinese are all violent imperialists who would never want to compromise. This whole concept of Communism never actually having existed as if God deleted it off the timeline is deeply baked into almost everything "American" by now.

Each personal anecdote is only of so much use, but either way... I think modern anti-racist movements were a big part of leading me away from Stalin's Marxism to Trotskyism. Before I had any idea what Marxism was I was seeing a lot of proto- Black Lives Matter activity, and as I learned about Stalinism I started incorporating those news events as general patterns that could occur in a republican society without treating Black people as either positively or negatively exceptional. Knowledge about the Black Panthers and BLM led me toward the position that Stalinists would have to stop hunting Trotskyists as their enemies. BLM was speaking out against prisons. I began to think, why were Stalinists killing Trotskyists instead of working on their rehabilitation so different kinds of Marxists can live in the same society or global Communist bloc? The new United States tradition of turning everyone into demographic identities was giving me interesting new ways of thinking about the Cold War. I took the idea of standpoint epistemology, threw out most of it, and kept only the part where you have to listen to a group's anecdotes or perspectives purely so that group's behavior is modeled accurately. And within that lens, there's no incentive to be in support of the Great Terror and every incentive to listen at length to exactly what Trotskyists are claiming to reconstruct a complete account of Trotskyism. This "meta- standpoint epistemology" isn't Marxism in and of itself. But it does reveal how the concept of studying perspectives, anecdotes, and relationships can aid Marxism. Those three things are part of the raw material of history. If people "take firm stances in relationships", but they do it on the basis of forming bonds to people who can form a Communist party or labor movement, well, you get Lenin and Trotsky getting married to fellow comrades, or early Trotskyism attempting to stand up for members of the initial November revolution they thought could defeat Stalin and protect the republic from the bureaucracy. This to me is almost exactly what people like Robin DiAngelo were really talking about, just in a very confused way. Within a highly de-politicized society that tries to reduce everything to either "voluntary agreements" or "merit" and grind every individual down for being a bad worker or a bad business instead of society's best, these people are basically trying to find ways to unite Black people isolated in seas of bourgeois allies and recreate solidarity in a world where it hardly exists. This is, as standpoint epistemologists nearly understand, difficult to explain to people outside it. It's the difference between being inside a movement developing consciousness and being unaffiliated with a movement, only in this case there just isn't any enduring movement that the ideology of the movement supposedly comes from. It's one big failed attempt to create a movement.

So... it's only within this context that I feel like I can boldly say that the WSWS is more or less right about the U.S. Civil War but not right about the American revolution. It is very important to understand history as a kind of punctuated equilibrium of different historical periods with different processes inside rather than a single eternal pool of principles. So, within that method I have to agree that freeing the slaves was a notable material change and Lincoln and the abolitionists were significant within their own time even if people don't trust them now. That alleged change from progress back to racism would be a second event that would have happened in the 1900s, not in the 1800s. But I think that after 1917 the role of White people did actually change into something more like what the 1619 Project is alleging. Here is why: everything they say about "White Americans" doesn't belong to White people or even to Europeans, but to the bourgeoisie. Postmodern identity politics, critical race theory, and also North American Maoism all orbit around a general concept of "resisting colonialism". The most meaningful definition of colonialism in the U.S. is that it began with people like gold mine operators and fur traders, who would have been constrained by European monarchies and their nobility and internal religious conflicts (not to mention actual land wars in places like Ireland), and banded together to take what they knew about small commodity production to secure property in the New World and create a civilization. The North American bourgeoisie was weak at first, so some of the colonists would fall back to medieval methods of conquering land and taking people who resist as slave labor (in Roman times it was whole territories of people, for the Confederacy, they simply pressured Africa into selling slaves). But in one sense the Confederacy was just a failure to properly establish the bourgeoisie. Europe in the 1700s was slowly changing toward Liberal-republicanism, with the Whigs and Tories fighting over English parliament, and the French revolution brewing, but it hadn't gotten all the way through. European monarchy arguably ended as late as 1933 as the Nazis futilely tried to hang onto global empire and the aristocracy. So, one of the most comprehensive characterizations of "White people" (Brits, Germans, Italians, and other Europeans) is that between 1619 and 1900 Europeans tried to create bourgeois civilization across North America and South America and although each European empire believed they were rivals and were not connected, the effort to create early capitalism in North America was already international. This has implications for the relationship between "American democracy" and worldwide revolution. As I say, I used to be a Stalinist. The common line Stalinists still believe today is that Stalin's government was defending the Soviet Union from the First World, and that it had to get rid of Trotskyists to defend the Soviet Union. According to Stalinist parties, the Soviet Union was a democratic republic at the moment Stalin took over the CPSU, and so Stalin was merely recognizing and defending the democracy that was already there or the revolution that created it. Do you see the problem now? The existence of "democracy" and the defense of a particular republic do not always neatly go together, and sometimes the defense of a particular regime change can squash "democracy" rather than support it. This is the theme that I think the 1619 Project was desperately reaching for — the democratic republic that turns to Thermidor. It was quite easy, if you lived in the Soviet Union, to think that because your country went from monarchy to a republic that it had made a step forward, that if the Soviet Union fought off empire and Stalin was there you could simply isolate the period from 1917 to 1930, say it was its own historical period that completed, and call Stalin a progressive force on that day for the rest of time. But then by 1938 the Fourth International had showed up and Trotsky had laid out the process of emerging from monarchy and capitalism as a single worldwide revolution, not a cascade of separate revolutions and transitions. To everyone listening at that moment, Stalin's achievements in "defending democracy in general" or "creating a democracy worth defending" suddenly looked a lot worse.

So, specifically there I see a genuine mistake. The American revolution had its worth in 1776, but it had become irrelevant maybe as soon as the Civil War. At that time capitalism was already slowly developing into global capitalism, and by now, the simple concept of "America" or that anybody is a "real American" has become very toxic and damaging. Look back at the 1950s, and all of that was anchored into the concept of separating Communists from Real Americans who it was alleged could never understand the American Revolution unless they had no understanding of Communism. The more people clung to the concept of "remembering American democracy" the more it became that you couldn't even defend Trotsky from Stalin without claiming Trotsky actually believed in Liberal-republicanism and he would come to Mexico and give up and be a Menshevik. I watched a terrible although technically true video about the Red Scare this week. The whole video, by an anticommunist lawyer, had a strong subtext that everybody will be spared from another Red Scare specifically because Communism has been destroyed and rational people who believe in reason and progress will give up on trying to destroy Our Democracy if only everyone can get it through their heads that in every political movement Black people are just trying to exist as Black people and Mexican immigrants are just trying to exist as Mexican immigrants and trans women are just trying to exist as trans women. In these kinds of arguments, "American democracy" and "The Enlightenment" become twisted around into weapons of the bourgeoisie. Everything from the past that isn't of the era of the proletariat just becomes a way to blackmail Communists and insist that for every achievement humankind has produced Communists exist because they have failed to understand it. I'm done with that. I am absolutely done with Communists and sometimes Black people being wildly abused and gaslighted into thinking that some narrow form of obedience to a specific bloc of bourgeoisie and Israel is itself a form of intelligence. So I understand the impulse to try to delete the American revolution in particular from public discourse, or to try to shred apart toxic "meta-narratives". Postmodernism — bear with me here — is actually not entirely bad. Over 99.9% of it is decidedly pointless and maybe harmful. But there is only one good thing postmodern philosophy has actually contributed. If you look at writers like Fukuyama, and then zoom way out and look carefully at the big picture, what postmodernism is actually saying is that in 1960 Stalinism had failed to understand Liberal-republicanism and Liberal-republicanism had failed to understand Stalinism. And arguably, Liberal-republicanism and Stalinism had both failed to understand Trotskyism. That's just true. Practically nobody who is not a member of Trotskyism has any idea what Trotskyism has actually been saying. The best Marxist theorists who are not Trotskyists are Stalinists, and you know how badly they've misrepresented Trotskyism. So in the end postmodernism is like one big lament that nobody can understand Trotskyism yet, and that Liberal-republicanism will never be complete in and of itself if it can never produce a non-prejudiced, non-anticommunist model of Trotskyism. This statement may be biased and distorted but if you flip it over it is actually the case. Meta-narratives have been one of the world's most enduring problems, but the world's major meta-narratives basically boil down to Liberal-republicanism, the bible or the Abrahamic apocalypse monomyth, Stalinism, and Trotskyism. It is quite reasonable for people to be tired of and want to get rid of the first three of those. So in my mind, it might well be more possible to reappropriate postmodernism than it is to reappropriate the American revolution, such that we get people to understand that most "narratives" people come up with are doomed to be discarded and yet one last "narrative" of world history constructed in a scientific way is necessary. To do that, you'd have to discard every bit of identity politics from postmodernism except for maybe some edge cases like people forming factions and gaining a Trotskyite or Stalinist or national-liberation-movement "identity". Postmodernism in a very general sense is a surprisingly revolutionary concept, but to see that in it whatsoever you have to understand that it has no idea what Communism is and if anything is strictly modeling an anarchist "revolution". But anarchism, of course, is the philosophy of a great number of people who protest against capitalism or attempt anticapitalist actions today. I think that when you take observations of Black Lives Matter and its outwardly anarchist character and combine that with the bizarre willingness in North America to defend Trotsky as long as he "really" was a Menshevik, what is revealed is that the world is slowly attempting to construct a Trotskyist revolution in an unconscious and anarchic manner without any state. You take Lenin's writings about how something like the Paris Commune or Kronstadt can't defend itself against the bourgeoisie and ought to get behind some kind of serious workers' government that can lead it when the peaceful stage of forming a new society through "transformative" relationships enters war, and then imagine that these texts apply to the world as a fragmented world civilization, and I think that might actually explain what the United States has been doing for the past 10 years.

I used to believe that if Stalinism hadn't succeeded yet it was all because the United States or the right-Liberals or anarchists or maybe to a small extent the Trotskyites had pulled it apart. Then as I got deeper into studying it (and developing "violet Marxism" for the task, but that's another story) I started to see the internal contradictions inside it. If Stalin was defending the country whatsoever, the bureaucrats had quickly escaped him and they were not defending anybody. Stalin's implicit claim to be able to control the bureaucrats and protect the soviets was simply wrong. Meanwhile in the United States, people believed that Reconstruction would work and Enlightenment equality would be restored to all U.S. people if they all went along with Reconstruction, but by 1960 it was already clear that Reconstruction was failing. The problem is not the same, but it's more similar than you might think. The Stalinist nation-state promised to protect its people from the bureaucrats. The North, as nation-state, promised to protect its people from White property owners who had once confined the vote to a fraction of people. The power structures in the United States were more diffuse. It was more like one big grid where all the individuals could fight each other for status but people of all demographics at the margins of the grid would have trouble climbing up, as it is today. But both kinds of republics end in a startling conclusion: permanent revolution must tear through them and unite everyone trapped in republics as fast as realistically possible to have the greatest chance of making it through a majority of industrial countries and defeating the bourgeoisie such that they cannot feasibly take back power over the world. There is a reason Marx said "all existing conditions". By now we have learned that republics can become part of those conditions. The point of permanent revolution is that a world republic is the only safe republic.

Postmodern identity politics and critical race theory are designed for a world without history, and trying to use a framework like that to tell history was a big mistake. But at the same time... I feel like these theories can be a big step toward accepting Materialism for some people. Postmodernism and critical race theory aren't even the same thing; in some cases critical race theory attempts to ask questions about the material results of policies. If the American revolution is comparable to the February revolution, postmodernism is sharing February with it, while critical race theory is somewhere in between Menshevism and The Revolution Betrayed. Many good ideas hide behind a veil of Idealism, including Hegel, Mensheviks leading soviets, and possibly, criticizing Reconstruction and examining meta-narratives.

I'll close with this. The Black Panthers were one of the best attempts at a Communist party achieved in the United States (besides the SWP). Now, to make sure they never come back, cops periodically deny court trials to Black people by choking them in the streets. Does it matter if more White people are killed by police than Black people? Imagine a world where it was the 1930s and every time a likely Trotskyite was caught the Soviet police simply knocked the Trotskyite to the ground and killed them. If you ask anybody about the killings, they just say, oh, that was just a Trotskyite, not a real Soviet person. That was just a Ukrainian! You know an eighth of them are kulaks. Early Trotskyists risked their lives and risked cracking open their entire civilization to be harvested by imperialists for less than that. But today, if Black people get tired of cops shooting Black people because "those were merely Black people", a great number of people don't even care. We casually let our government do things that are worse than Stalin did. And then Trotskyists see people making noise and trying to get people organized, and they say, "this is a counterrevolution by First World intellectuals that don't understand Marxism". Maybe racism isn't the exact word for this, but whatever it's really called, what we let the United States do to people is atrocious. [5]

bot's rebuttals

• American revolution was going forward, Stalin was going backward, so American revolution was not really a Thermidor event
  • bot claims only monarchies hold colonies, and capitalist settlements can't be colonies in and of themselves. this seems wrong with respect to things like Israel. to be fair, this was me trying to appropriate popular non-Marxist definitions of "colonialism" back into something coherent and Materialist, not me trying to work with established Marxist definitions.
  • the 1619 Project trying to delete the American revolution is a different thing from the creation of bourgeois democracy and its effects
• Stalin actually changed the USSR while bourgeois democracy remains the same - ok, you got me, I'm predisposed to legitimize Stalinism just a little bit.
• it objected to me calling Khruschevism Dengism because they wouldn't call it that for ~20 years. - this is just it not knowing about color swatches.
• European monarchy ended on several different dates - well that's just pedantic, but sure, it's worth remembering.
  • it reminded me about constitutional monarchies. okay. this is like, an artifact of me grouping Toryism and feudal orders (monarchies) and fascism to reflect fascism futilely trying to restore the "glory" of feudal orders. maybe I should word this clearer.
• the U.S. stopped importing slaves by 1808, long before the Confederacy - oh my god I actually didn't know the date on that. ok that's a real error
• Reconstruction ended in 1877 - I guess I have no excuse for that one other than the 1619 Project melted my brain
• bot assumed when I called the Black Panthers "one of the best" I meant they were Trotskyist. that's kind of hilarious
  • I guess it's implying they weren't one of the best if they didn't have a solid class analysis. I meant as organizers but, okay, I can see that.
• it's really mad about Stalin. I shouldn't be laughing but gosh it always does this if you don't carefully limit the question.
  • let me put it this way: a real Trotskyist article talking about Stalin's government killing a lot of Trotskyites is not funny. those stories can be very tragic. the bot bringing up "Stalin's government killed 100,000 Trotskyites" over and over again each time is very funny. because you immediately get the difficult-to-describe feeling it has no idea what those words mean.
• there was more proletariat in the February revolution than in the American revolution - okay that's fair. February revolution is further along than postmodernism in the color swatches.
  • even Menshevism is better than postmodernism and CRT because in the Soviet Union it was connected to the workers' movement - burn.
    • I guess it didn't like me referring to 'Mensheviks forming soviets' and bourgeois ideologies as similar kinds of Idealism.
• slavery was connected to capital - now you're giving the 1619 Project ammo that I didn't want to give them. but, sure, maybe there's room to distinguish between Roman slavery and Confederate slavery in the swatch system? the swatch system isn't supposed to be anti-Marxist.
  • I'm glad I'm getting to bounce some of this off the bot before I send in my big violet Marxism introduction. it would be a little embarrassing to not have some kind of acknowledgement of things like this.
• when you strip out 99.9% of postmodernism it's not postmodernism any more - good point.
• postmodernism and CRT are not Hegel
  • postmodernism itself is incompatible with historical materialism
  • Hegel had a method; postmodernism doesn't have a method, much less a dialectical method - well, that's not really why I was trying to invert it. I was starting from the simple concept that a great number of philosophies or fictional narratives are based on real things.

revision 3

So... this is only tangentially related to the contents of the 1619 Project itself, but I feel the need to try to explain where all of this is really coming from, because I think it's partly being taken out of context.

Today I stumbled onto an article called "Black livingness and insurgent ecological politics: Thinking across Black geographies / Atlantics / ecologies" (Williams et al. 2025), [6] which I was reading simply to try to find out what on earth "Black livingness" and "Black geographies" were. As for the first one, I still have no idea, but Black geographies actually are something. This article explains that the basic concept of the field is to get information about ancient pre-capitalist "industries" by looking for particular markers of cultural practices that are recorded physically in the ground rather than being formally recorded on paper or clay tablets, etc — basically, the same broad concept as what archaeologists do, looking at physical evidence like buildings or graves to use physical objects as records. The only big difference between archaeological methods and "Black geographies" is that maps are involved. "Geographers of blackness" or "agroecological geographers" study evidence of things like cultivated forests in various locations across the world in order to map the extent of particular populations connected by common cultural practices — again, this is the same concept as archaeologists mapping the extent of a particular kingdom thousands of years ago by looking for particular styles of pottery. Every article about this stuff is a little opaque and full of strange terminology, and at some times they can start to sound a little circular. So... you study the geography of cultivated forests so the totality of cultivated forests can understand the extent of cultivated forests? And then there's the heavy anarchist subtext in a lot of them where they want to frame tribal societies themselves as a sort of technology or library of knowledge that humanity forgot and needs to go back to, all because the ability of humanity to cultivate an entire forest that remains a mildly altered form of the natural environment that always was and casually use it for food (without having to wall off the entire thing as a nature preserve) is amazing. Despite all the weirdness on the surface of these articles, some of them actually do make sense.

Basically there are a few core claims the "Black geography" articles are making.
A) The "colonial" records (what they really mean is the paper record as opposed to the physical ground record) omitted certain traces of Black populations as they really existed. These traces are found in the earth, when geographers confirm the traces of cultivated forests.
B) The physical record contains information about practices that are industrially interesting as well as anthropologically interesting; the old practice of cultivated forests and other forms such as polyculture gardens are to be regarded as an ancient form of industry which may or may not still be useful today.
C) Geographers can study people-groups taking forms such as tribal societies or diasporas by using maps; modern technology since about the 2000s makes it easier to understand the size and extent of populations without hard borders. The article above sees this as a way to conceptualize an international society which may continue to be useful after the age of the nation-state: "the Black Atlantic represents a 'transcultural, international formation' of intellectual production, culture and memory ... a set of practices and collaborations that challenge, rather than reify, notions of race and nationhood".
D) When confronted with books like Black Rice, historians improperly dismissed them by treating known paper records (or whatever the colonists used exactly) as more important than the ground record, despite the fact that the findings may very well be testable and one could probably bring in any number of ordinary archaeologists, paleontologists, experts on ecological succession, etc., to examine the concept of a ground record and help you substantiate or falsify the map of cultivated forests.

Overall, I think one of the biggest problems in that above article and possibly the book, Black Rice, is that they take something that does make coherent sense (archaeological methods) and then present what they did through weird postmodernist language: "worlds", "livingness", "lifeways", "foodways", "Black ecologies", "geographies of the Black Atlantic". As I read that article what I started to see between the lines was that it looked as if various separate populations within "the Black Atlantic" (a loosely connected human population the articles have given a name to) were having trouble getting along and had developed this particular hyper-polite way of communicating where researchers always excessively acknowledge the plurality of populations inside the population to try to keep people from becoming distrustful and breaking bonds. That's only a wild guess. It seems like this whole Black geographies project has been having a lot of trouble getting off the ground over the past 10-15 years or something and a lot of people have been trying to suppress it, so everyone in it might have been getting a bit desperate to keep the whole movement connected and keep it from giving up. Trotskyists attack each other's organizations to keep them from degenerating into Liberal-republican parties, Black geography organizations just keep going trying to stay a connected whole and get hyper-polite to the point of being unreadable, apparently. What I take away from the strange language in these articles is that they are trying to preserve forgotten knowledge, and keeping a large international organization together is hard.

Honestly, I think what geographers are doing now might turn out to be very valuable to a world socialist republic. Human beings will probably have populations with distinguishable edges for some time into the future even if national borders became unimportant, particularly at more local levels the size of Texas or so. And it could be tough to make sure everyone is represented at any particular level of government versus suppressed if there are countable human populations partially diffused across countries but nobody knows where they are. That kind of thinking ultimately led back to structural racism in the United States, as various local White populations ("White geographies", if you will) teamed up to suppress tiny islands of Black people and deny them as many things as possible. Ignoring the real layout of nested or interwoven populations isn't always a good thing. A lot of democratic demands have become all about representing specific demographics, with people so desperate to achieve the simple goal of different identifiable populations living in harmony they stop caring about anything else. And there's always the fact that despite how hard it has been to get to world socialism it would only be the first stage with some people still suffering; similar conflicts for existence could continue to happen to Russians and Ukrainians, or any number of the world's populations. Really, when you think about it, part of what the global bourgeoisie has been doing is trying to allocate every human being on earth into the right country and the right city and all the smaller populations into the exact right arrangement of populations to be a single population. When capitalism is always making everything unstable and mutually-exclusive it's an impossible task. But it might well become easier to end capitalism if humanity had a better science of populations in general and the shapes of them, relationships between them, and dynamics of how nested arrangements of populations form. Every non-Marxist philosophy seems to keep reducing itself into an imprecise study of exactly how populations form into larger groups of populations (critical race theory / Black geographies / Pan-Africanism, LGBTQIA+ studies, postcolonial anarchisms drawing on North American tribal traditions, schizoanalysis, etc); maybe if there was an actually-good study of population-objects-in-general as they relate to class territories and historical processes within Marxism, a lot of those would have no reason to exist.

So, with that said, what does this have to do with the 1619 Project? Well, the two of them have a similar connection to the concept of "history". Both "across Black geographies" and the 1619 Project have an odd insistence on relating themselves to "history" and "narratives" and in particular believing that the only way to give people a more complete anthropological account of minorities is to overwrite the historical record with a new historical record that contains the missing modern-day information when in the former case it's clear there isn't any need to. The Black Atlantic can be seen as having a history, but ultimately it's a population that has existed in multiple time periods, and the findings are the anthropological or industrial study of that population. The authors were coming from a background where people were always told that "Black history was suppressed", so they went in to address the problem they were told about, producing some research that on the surface seems reasonable to me, but finding that the actual problem wasn't exactly a matter of "history" or "telling history". The 1619 Project absolutely took the wrong lessons from all this. The authors of the 1619 Project really leaned into the angle that replacing the existing historical record with a new historical record would itself be powerful for almost no particular reason. In "across Black geographies" there is a clearer conceptual through-line for why the error is there: the authors have collected a record of lost knowledge and want to spread it to the people of the Black Atlantic simply to improve their lives, and for what ironically happen to be historical reasons, the authors erroneously believe that this should be explained in terms of "history" and "replacing a historical narrative with an older and better narrative". So. The problem in "across Black geographies", and maybe also in the 1619 Project, is that people need to stop thinking of anthropology in terms of postmodernist history, and transforming society or the restoration of healthy conditions as a form of historical regression. Postmodernism is nonsense and a bad way to convey cultural/populational relativism (which is otherwise okay). The future is not history outside of a very advanced understanding of Marxism. If every non-Marxist would somehow learn those two things, and simply look at a transformation of North America (etc.) to cultivated forests as its own thing, the problem could maybe be fixed.

I understand the actual intentions that drove this whole "new Black history" thing much better now than I did before. But, there's one last question that still bugs me. If Indian tribes used to cultivate forests (and the Black Atlantic did similar things, as discussed in the article), and it's possible some people will go back to that, what made other tribal societies stop? Europeans did live in tribes a long time ago. A lot of societies started as tribal societies. Some may have lived in the right climate to cultivate food plants in forests. So it seems like there must have been some particular process that drove people out of the conditions to create these cultivated forests that wasn't simply a matter of choice as anarchists would have everyone think. But I don't know what it would be. I don't think war or internal drama driving populations apart would be enough to do it, given that a particular common land can be a bounded territory. Was it winter or natural disasters? I don't believe anarchist explanations that class society came from "greed". So I don't really know what I'd tell people as far as why this whole cultivated forest thing originally stopped. Any idea? Maybe the agroecological geographers can investigate that one at some point.

bot's thoughts

• one reason would be that it was low yield, or people (women were favored or included) were tired of farming without any tools
• the draft animal was one of the first major changes. they were easier to obtain in Europe
  • also — Fertile Crescent, the Nile, the Indus, the Yellow River
• the creation of class society was progress inasmuch as it rode on the back of something that really was an improvement, inescapably
• although women were respected while they did hoe agriculture, fathers were capable of taking control of a shepherd / cow herding society

revision 3B

I sent the second comment through the LLM too. It brought up Engels and said that Europe moved away from "farming inside nature" simply because it didn't have a very high yield and Europe had draft animals and the ability to develop large fields. That seems like a reasonable answer. Even in terms of nature as an obstacle, we all know that in Europe and Russia being able to store grain helped with lasting through winter regardless of if a ruling class would appear and collect some of it. In ancient times people didn't really know what led to good or bad harvests, so people believed in things like harvest gods or astrology, which all helped class society take hold.

When it comes to the whole "Black geographies" / "cultivated forests" thing, I don't really think the purpose of it is to create more food exactly. I think it's more of a matter of leveling out inequality. As class society has been going (indeed, starting at the plow) it's also been deepening inequality and creating things like homeless camps and Third World countries, not to mention scattering entire tribal societies into capitalism (in the best case scenario, where they aren't slaughtered) and gratuitously destroying languages and ethnic groups in the process. Back in the 1900s every country just wanted to increase productive forces because they didn't have enough. But at a certain point, people in the 1990s-2000s onward start to look back at the past century and see how growth itself feeds into war and racism and situations like apartheid or Palestine, and even the Soviet Union developing industry more slowly than the United States instead of as fast as capitalists can possibly think of starts to look good because people say "wait, that's a lot more environmentally friendly" "technically, that's more respectful of everyone's attention than shoving newsfeeds and short videos and ads at them" "maybe the world would be more able to move away from war if we were content with what we have". So as far as what people's demands are in the First World, I think a lot of people are now leaning toward seeing a world civilization as less of an expansion of production and more of an S-curve where everything that had been terribly unstable before simply becomes stable. I mean, look at China. The First World exploited China, it produced like crazy, and now people have more products from China and Vietnam than they could possibly want, but there is still a tension between North America and China just because both are growing and both exist, where business magazines mock China for "not being able to innovate" when what's really happening is the whole task of inventing products at all has been distributed across North America and China and after forcing China to only take the task of producing what's already invented they now pointlessly want inventions specific to China. The International Monetary Fund has been trying to punish China for having an export-heavy economy that was forced on it if it didn't want to have a second Vietnam War in China. It's maddening. United States businesses are still busy creeping across more Third World countries like Thailand and abusing the Third World with conferences of capitalists, when it would seem like we could stop the whole thing if the United States just stopped growing. So... back to cultivated forests. I think the reason there has been so much buzz about those is basically just that it could take struggling groups of people who don't have secure access to either food or land and alleviate the pressure capitalism has been putting on people at the very bottom. "Across Black geographies" brought up the concept of a particular time in history where Black people were displaced and created polycultures on limited areas of land, and rather than being some kind of "alternate" historical narrative, this is simply an example of how a practical problem was solved.

I have been thinking entirely too much about how the longer capitalism goes on, capitalism reduces itself into just a process of chunks of people competing over the same rewards and slots in society for mutually exclusive existence where capitalists claim to be leading the process so the chunks are perfectly organized to exist complementary to each other and don't destroy each other. First World capitalism isn't really producing any great insights or inventions that people don't already have. I've had times in my life where I told people about a new product I heard about, or told them about an art idea I had that would be a small twist on some particular genre, and gotten mocked because it "already existed". People don't even respect the concept of innovation any more! Society almost doesn't need any more products short of a book on how to actually achieve permanent revolution. First World countries could almost shut down university science departments and still have everything they need. So... in light of all that, I can see where the Black geographies project is coming from, trying to say that the most important changes to society might actually be calling a lot of society "finished" and focusing on equality again. The reintroduction of old farming techniques would probably be a small thing that happens in the background of a larger world transformation, like China creating programs to get rid of extreme poverty. The way the articles hide everything between postmodernist or anarchist language is almost certainly hurting the project and its chances of ever being realized; I have no doubt that if a Trotskyist covered Black geographies in light of world revolution / transition and the overall development of science and historical materialism it would make a lot more sense and project a much less negative picture of "the Black Atlantic".

(Yes, if we ever get out of capitalism we can return to science too. The issue, again, is that while capitalism exists almost all scientific research except perhaps some things like research on rare diseases has become far less important than studying the sheer shapes, arrangements, and development of human populations to become conscious of the otherwise uncontrolled flow of human beings and ultimately direct them to form a world population. The entire pseudo-left seems to halfway know this, getting absolutely furious if you talk about any form of science or technology that isn't directly aimed at ending class society; these days you cannot have a single friend if you try to tell people there's anything more to discover instead of bashing sciences that aren't Marxism for contributing to uncontrolled growth and empire. So that's how I roll now. We are bizarrely entering a period where Marxism is the only "science" that matters any more.)