Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q92

Main entries

92. meta-Marxism (Materialist analysis of contradicting or competing Leninisms, their component parts at various large and tiny scales, and their iterative development as interacting factions or countries; R. Bergfalk, R.D.) / violet Marxism

Violet Marxism and ideologies

618. Marxism is merely Leninism / Marxist theory cannot be a coherent and consistent science informing political struggles from without (Western Marxism; Althusser?) / (9k) -> not with that attitude it can't.
     ... there's always another country looking at any particular country and criticizing it, which would never be able to tell if another country's actions were correct or incorrect if this was true. like, the mere fact people actually can understand historical events from Third-World perspectives and Soviet history keeps creating Communists on other continents should hint to you this is false. this is nonsense. this is anti-internationalist nonsense.
618. Marx's writings contain ideology because they are political (Althusser; Western-Marxism) / (9k)
618. Marx's writings contain ideology when they are political / Trotsky's writings contain ideology when they are politically charged / Deng Xiaoping's statements contain ideology when they are politically charged / All sociophilosophies are ideologies, but some of them are materially accurate (generic; violet Marxism) / (9k)

618. Ideology is Idealism unexamined

     / Ideology ­— a distorted model of reality usually for the benefit of a particular class — comes out of conceptual models of the world ("concept-material", ontologies) specifically when considered in isolation from the world, according to processes not obvious to the people creating ideology (Engels) / (9k) ->
     

     it should be noted that Marx and Engels have a specific definition of ideology while the way I use "ideology" is slightly different, but I have no problems with their concept they call ideology in the sense that it describes capitalism or beliefs in medieval times. to me, an ideology is any ontology, and could conceivably be a correct one, but whether it's correct isn't obvious to people of other ideologies, who will see the correct ontology as ideology exactly in the sense Engels says. to me, this definition is easier to apply in a real world where you might have a group of bourgeoisie and a group of proletarians, or some other messier but distinguishable division of demographics, and the populations will have to interact and maybe even work together at times, but due to the different material content of the populations they will find it hard to see each other's observations or findings as real. how do you apply Engels' definition to a Deng Xiaoping state, where all the bourgeoisie and proletarians have to work together against the outside the whole time even though they will eventually have to separate? the only sensible way, to me, is to label one population crimson and one population blue or strawberry and model them both according to their own class composition and chosen ideology so that you put them both in the right place but they don't have to get confused about who's doing what. it might be easier said than done to get that class consciousness actually into the populations, but at the very least you can use the model to advise workers on what concrete things they should do to avoid the influence of the blue/strawberry populations and reclaim power.

2109. Q2109/Q21,09

      shovel (meta-Marxism)

      / (9k) -> a metaphorical shovel is specifically a kind of object with a particular size and shape which if it were capable of taking a picture of the world and writing a description of it without deep deliberation over the meaning of what it saw would have its intuitive, unfiltered perceptions skewed a certain way by virtue of its shape, size, and composition. a literal shovel is smaller than a car or city block. a literal shovel cannot see anything materially speaking, but a camera can inasmuch as it can take a picture. ... from the vantage point of science, the form the shovel dream inside the book takes is ontology: the creation of a graph of points connected by arrows where the definition of any of the points is largely defined by their relationship to other points. some people get lost in the fact that the book's shovel dream is recorded in "language", and unnecessarily start trying to assign all the qualities of ontology to language. this doesn't really make a lot of sense when large language models can reduce any language down to a mathematical graph devoid of words or phrases where, for instance, it might not be easy to tell English from Japanese at a glance. ... ontology can also shape itself to become abstract art which does not actually refer to the real world even through metaphor, but which is simply a constructed world of its own that people can perceive through a writer's fabricated shovel dream. ...
2110. Q2110/Q21,10

      shovel dream

      / object or formation ideology / ideology or consciousness associated with a specific repeatable kind of population which is countable and separable and has a particular kind of internal structure / ideology or consciousness associated with a particular kind of materially-definable Social-Philosophical System / embodied cognition (model of objects that perform cognition doing it through studying the relationship of their physical object toward the world, here also applied to groups of people instead of just individuals) / (9k) -> Hyper-Materialist concept. the motif of a particular kind of object having a particular kind of model of the world and ideology because it is a particular kind of object. almost always the object is a countable, separable population of people, but it's funny to figuratively refer to other kinds of objects to get across a concept that somehow absolutely nobody seems to understand. Hyper-Materialism is when all similar shovels have a similar shovel dream, and all similar rakes have a similar rake dream. a collection of rakes may have its own unique collection-of-rakes dream, but in principle it can be calculated by modeling the interaction of the individual rake dreams. individual people, not being shovels or rakes, can change their shovel dream at will, but changing the shovel dream of one individual may not have much effect on a large group. Marcuse thinks it's as simple as changing all the individuals one by one but that doesn't necessarily go fast enough. you have to understand the existing layout of various kinds of material objects producing shovel dreams and think about what changes in the layout of shovels could produce the right ones faster. the terrible thing is there are no shortcuts here. you can't just go "here are the bourgeoisie, here are the proletariat, they only need to become aware of the possibly-wrong model in this text". with the United States objectively not having the class structure described in Leninist texts, organizers really do need to understand the basic concept of shovel dreams and how to identify them and categorize them in the field.

618. Violet Marxism contains ideology

     / Even violet Marxism cannot purge itself of ideology / (9k) -> I think [Althusser's] article has been basically correct in saying that Marxism is inseparable from ideology and basically inseparable from being situated in a particular place in the material world as it learns ...
     

     this is probably one of the reasons why I was weirdly keen on describing violet Marxism as an actual hypothetical Leninism early on. I knew that was a silly thing to even say when like, I wasn't building a violet Leninism so I took a risk of describing Leninisms in the abstract being an insult to Leninisms that had actually realized themselves. but I think part of the logic of that was I was basically trying to get across the point that ... if a hypothetical violet Leninism existed then the thing figuring itself out would go a lot faster than trying to make abstract guesses about it beforehand would. I wasn't actually trying to skip steps, I was just trying very hard to make a point about Materialism and what Materialism is by showing that philosophy doesn't have to be clouds of Ideals and it can instead be simulations of material objects; I was meaning to communicate, hey, what if instead of starting with "it would be good if people embraced Morality and rejected Greed" we started with "this is the overall structure of a new society and this is how people get into position to realize it". hence a lot of talk about "what a Molecular Marxism (violet Leninism) looks like".
     after a while I decided the better way to do things was to move from arbitrarily describing new hypothetical Leninisms to focusing on old hypothetical Leninisms, because that got the same point across, but given there were more known facts about them, would do it more clearly. you can't really insult a movement that actually happened by making it itself hypothetical and getting to see it run in a wider range of conditions; that's just contributing useful criticism if you do it well. thus "Molecular Marxism" evolved into "meta-Marxism" and generalized itself from being 'a Leninism that would be more flexible' to 'a Marxism with utterly variable content that's actually for structurally analyzing various countable variations of Marxism-Leninism'.
     that said. I think it's fair to say that all Marxisms have a tint. whether they are realizable Leninisms per se or just confused clouds of philosophy like a lot of Western-Marxism is they are always countable and they always contain ideology inasmuch as they must contain a few prescriptive statements applicable to specific periods of history. that means that any time anyone tries to create a violet Marxist movement on the ground it will always be countable. there will always be a risk of rifts in meta-Marxism just like there are rifts between different Leninisms if you aren't careful. there is a particular way you fix that. you just have to get multiple theorists or instances of violet Marxism criticizing each other. it almost sounds too simple to possibly work, but really, the secret to making violet Marxism consistent and singular is just to know that any particular instance of it will never magically guess what other instances are doing in isolation and it will always have to interact with them to be able to work through errors or discrepancies. if you don't get every violet theorist in one place, fine, you just have to get enough different perspectives that they start taking real differences and unifying them all into a single model of differing plural movement-objects evolving in parallel or in interaction, then you hope that whoever didn't make it sees the new developments and it's enough to correct everybody else. the key to violet Marxism is it always assumes it's studying how to fit the material elements of plural ideologies together. so it won't really matter if violet theorists show up from countries in wildly different stages, or the violet theorists meet but they only figure out an issue for a particular point in time and then they have to do it again. violet theorists would basically assume there are plural violet Marxisms that are slowly de-synchronizing and need to come back and synchronize periodically, while the notion that there's only one meta-Marxism is something of an approximation to keep everybody sane and keep introductory explanations of the difference between meta-Marxism and named Leninisms relatively short. the simple explanation is the Leninisms diverge, and because they always have to analyze from inside themselves they potentially make errors on the global meta-Marxism that describes all Leninisms. the reality is the violet Marxism that analyzes the Leninisms is probably a bit plural too, it just tries much harder to bridge the plurality so it's more something that constructs or superimposes on itself than tears itself apart and whatever point in it you start from you can end up anywhere else. like, "intersectionality" and "Rhizome" would have nothing on this, every problem of intersectionality from small scales up to the global scale would more or less melt away by the time you're done.

618. It is unavoidable for philosophy to have a short-term goal / Philosophy needing a goal in order to exist has nothing to do with whether the material processes of history "intend" to reach a goal / (9k) -> I think it's important to remember: philosophy having a goal because it's philosophy and must have a goal by its nature isn't to say history has a goal. I think that's tripped up some people when interpreting Marx. they see that Marx is writing philosophy and laying out goals because philosophy requires goals, and they falsely think that presenting a goal is actually part of Marx's scientific model of history when at most it's part of Marx's vision of current politics, which requires philosophy, which requires goals.
     it's possible to present Marxism without accidentally implying that history has or "desires" a goal yet with everything otherwise exactly the same. I call it meta-Marxism. in meta-Marxism you step outside Marx or Stalin or Mao's movement and you detail what that group of people is doing purely descriptively rather than describing the movement's current objectives as an ethical imperative that somehow cosmically needs to happen more than another group of people's objectives. the funny thing is that if you're smart and you understand historical facts this doesn't take away from any of the claims made by Marxism whatsoever; the more you analyze Marxist movements in the third person the more various Marxisms hold up. when you zoom out on Marxism and "remove teleology" all it does is make it easier to objectively analyze mainstream Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism and Deng Xiaoping Thought in parallel to each other without anybody getting caught up in the vortex of Trotskyist rhetoric (for example) and feeling like they are cosmically obligated to take the side of Trotskyism over Maoism. which makes things much clearer and less muddy and debatable than they'd be otherwise. taking away so-called "teleology" does wonders for Marxism, actually.
     meta-Marxism: I don't believe Marxism has teleology in it but for some reason Karl Popper did so I'm going to jump a few steps ahead of him and tear out all the remaining "teleology" from Marxism so he has nothing to complain about.
618. If one population's moral priorities are taken as standard, other populations' can end up looking irrational, underdeveloped, or morally confused because they have been strained through a non-neutral lens rather than first looking at the internal history and elements of each culture individually (ethics) -> you know what? this comes at the topic with different priorities than me but I want to mark it violet.
618. Marxism is not the first time ideologies have been dialectical, but it does embody the moment the Hegelian dialectic became truly crammed inside one ideology (sociophilosophy, faction, class assemblage) instead of multiple separate interacting ideologies with no control over each other / In its own time, Hegelianism "were not singular", but the day Marxism emerged was the day plural Hegelianisms were squashed together and made violet

Violet Marxism and wavemachine logic (dialectics)

618. general-sense Idealist dialectic -> a general-sense Idealist dialectic is a process or operator by which two things in conceptual contradiction interact.
     Rhizome and 'molecular Idealism' vaguely fall into either the category of this or the vicinity of this.
618. general-sense materialist dialectic / naïve dialectical materialism (generic) -> a general-sense materialist dialectic is a process or operator by which two things in material contradiction interact.
618. Ideology is Idealism unexamined / Ideology is any shovel dream unexamined (counter-claim) / (9k) -> part of the reason I choose to frame things this way is that in the past year I've noticed something fundamental about all philosophy, logic, and language. absolutely all logic and all language starts out Idealist, and it's only out of Idealism that you get Materialism, through the bridge of 'pataphysics in the middle; the two aren't separate.
     you really have to understand this in order to build up a convincing case for naïve dialectical materialism, which is just about the only dialectical materialism anarchists will ever want to understand. if you can get anarchists to realize that the interaction of any two objects isn't based on abstract concepts but is based in the objects interacting and changing each other, through 'pata-reducing Idealist models of how things are already said to interact, you have a chance to get anarchists to realize that the universe doesn't revolve around what they want and even Idealism is only a descriptive model of how other objects bump into each other without their interference. anarchists are so bad about not understanding the sheer concept that a cue ball can hit a pool ball without the universe factoring in their internal will and desires that you really have to stop and account for it before you'll get any further. it's not even religion that did this to people, contrary to what Feuerbach proposed, people are just predisposed to attributing a Shenlong effect to the universe and improperly imbuing it with morality regardless of their level of supernatural belief.
618. 'pataphysical reduction / 'pata-reducing (by analogy to beta-reducing) -> the motif of taking something expressed wholly in abstract Ideals and reducing it down to material models based on the way Ideals already interact with each other, or explaining something material to someone starting at the level of abstract Ideals. the term "reduction" is used in the sense of evaluating a function call down to a computation, as is done in lambda calculus; it is not used in the sense of the popular misconception about science that scientists want to eliminate sideways relationships from models. they don't, if you've ever heard of special relativity.
     this is the real power of wave-machine logic like the logic system used on this wiki; it can start at totally phenomenological models and dig down to find material models.
618. All life is semiotic (Eduardo Kohn) / (9k) -> ... this is so frustrating, because it's like the relationship between Marx and Hegel. ... anarchists are convinced that the universe and nature evolve through language and arbitrary linguistic assignments of things to other things. ... things have physical structure that is contained in them as unique separable identifiable countable objects or repetitions of the same identifiable countable object, and the contents of that repeated pattern evolve through the interaction of two or more repeated patterns (objects or processes) to produce one or two further repeated patterns. naïve dialectical materialism; one-step dialectical materialism; wave-machine logic.
     ... the position of each die and the side it's currently on changes in response to the current position, velocity, and rotation of the other die about to hit it. for any given state vector of each rolled die, die-vector "x" and die-vector "y", f(x,y) = z. that's it. two objects, the dice or state vectors, are separate, and then you put them together, and you calculate what happens. ... it's all about countably separate objects being able to interact because they are separate. you don't even really have to make reference to the content within the interacting objects. it's there, it interacts by default, but in some cases it doesn't produce anything new or interesting. ...
     the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition — where causation is described by structuralist linguistics, a.k.a. the existence of two opposed words that "mean" different evolving things, and causality inside causation is described by existentialism.

Unique hypotheses

1484. Q1484/Q14,84

      chunk competition

      (motif; meta-Marxism) / all-directional contradiction between individuals / chunk competition across the spatial slot hierarchy / (9k/Q14,84) / (Q21,94) / (Q14,80) ->
      

      ... "chunk competition" ... today what I think I'm referring to is the way that population growth is shaped by relativity, how everything in the universe has its own little timeline of what it's doing and then they collide, and this happens with population growth, such that when two populations grow into and over each other it leads to a spatial slot hierarchy — a situation of populational slots where people are forced to compete over particular unique slots in space or in structures to exist. ... the spatial slot hierarchy is mistaken by Liberal-republicans to be a necessary reality that they just call "economics". to Marxists, the spatial slot hierarchy is undesirable and they want to relax the competition for houses and jobs so that if subpopulations clash over the right to live in a city it at least will be for some cultural reason and won't have come from the spatial slot hierarchy; if Marxists succeed people gain the ability to plan out the broad shapes civilization will form into in advance and allow individuals to choose where they want to live and where they want to contribute for money within certain limits. ... Marxists work with the reality that populations have no space to expand into and try to basically expand the surface area of society by using its space more efficiently, as with the shape of a brain or a walnut. ... chunk competition isn't a trivial thing to solve, but the more you can stop individuals from running into each other through knowing what shapes are available to prevent that, the closer you get to making it totally irrelevant and going back to the tiny amount of populational conflict seen in tribal societies. ...

1481. Q1481/Q14,81

      Class is a single substrate

      / The substance dualism advanced by early Marxism is not fully accurate because its dual substances, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, operate under substance monism internally / (9k) -> this one is quite down in the weeds if you've only just learned about meta-Marxism. so I'm going to try to keep this simple. scientists have described nearly everything in the known universe as being made of one thing: fundamental particles. most matter and energy you see is made of the same simple palette of objects and known processes: photons, electrons, quarks, color force or strong interaction, and a few other things. string theorists almost explained fundamental particles as coming from a single substance, but didn't quite succeed, then quantum field theory showed up and again, the process behind fundamental particles proved to be the same kind of thing repeated again and again still making all fundamental particles basically similar. in this sense, everything bigger than spacetime itself (and excluding "dark matter") appears monistic — it's all one kind of thing called fundamental particles.
      

      this is the claim that class relations are similarly monistic, in that everything inside a class territory appears to be indistinguishable from everything else inside until you look at a bigger scale and actually see the wadded-up class territories as the only real point of distinction separating off the homogeneous soup inside. if class monism were not the case, it would be easy to look inside a class territory and distinguish proletarians from non-proletarians once you were educated enough about the world in general, whether you had the correct words Marxists use for things or not. but in the First World there seems to be a terrible problem where skilled workers that are blatantly not proletarians are convinced they are, and unskilled workers look at them and can't tell the difference either. co-ops are convinced they're workers despite creating new business territories, and workers regularly lump tiny businesses, tradespeople, several-year degrees like teachers and doctors, employees, and managers together as "Jobs" as if that is a single thing. this claim hypothesizes that this isn't just a bourgeois distortion (even though a few upper-class people may indeed be trying to hide what's actually going on) but that in the end it actually reflects material reality, and is the description of a world where class is first of all defined by individuals competing with each other across a spatial slot hierarchy and is not first of all defined by differentiation into dissimilar roles within structures. First World capitalism, especially in the United States, really is a nightmare world where everyone physically functions like the bourgeoisie even though some "bourgeoisie" are employed in structures and some formally own structures. this behavior seems to mirror earlier historical periods in Europe where Artisan types functioned within small workshops or guilds or royal courts before the advent of large business territories, and seems to reflect a form of "capitalism" that has not properly differentiated and become capitalism yet. it is possible — and implied in this proposition — that various versions of this same process are simply the inner structure of any typical instance of capitalism as it is first forming and developing, period. that more or less, the petty bourgeoisie generate capitalism, and it regenerates them, the petty bourgeoisie the larva and the cluster of petty bourgeoisie only distinguished by business territories the queen ant. it may be that capitalism loathes forming consistent businesses at all much less state businesses, and big businesses have actually almost ceased to be capitalism. or it may not, and it may be most appropriate to call China's mode of production capitalism and give this monistic system a different name, such as "Careerism".
      if you look at the other page you might notice that what I said is a little contradictory with this. this is mainly because I was attaching different words to different definitions (mostly "state business"), not because the models were different.

Prior usages of "meta-Marxism" before violet Marxism

618. unpacking the meta-Marxism of the woke narrative [1] -> oh my god you're telling me that critical theory secretly knows everything about modeling the historical development of different Marxisms?? and it knows exactly how to get China and Cuba to cooperate so they can both get back to Bolshevism?? I had no idea
     found this when I tried to use Google to search YouTube for "meta-Marxism". it was the only result.
2129. Q2129/Q21,29 Rethinking Althusser's Meta-Marxism (Andreas Beck Holm 2024) [2] / (9k) -> so, "meta-Marxism" has rarely been used for describing Western-Marxism for some reason. rest assured, this is not at all what "meta-Marxism" is referring to on any other page on this site. ...

Ideology codes

• MX / meta-Marxism
• W / Western Marxism
• UM / unknown Marxism