Revision as of 08:27, 2 January 2025

Pie recipes never work!

One day, Ariana arrives at her friend Beth's house for a visit. Beth and Ariana chat for a bit about everything that has happened since they last saw each other, including the activities of their friends, relatives, friends and relatives' children, and friends and relatives' pets. Ariana shows some pictures of her recent trip to the next city. Beth points out the progress of her various ornamental yard plants. Finally, Ariana asks one seemingly ordinary and innocuous question:
"So, did you make my pie recipe?"
At this seemingly normal and everyday question, Beth looks glum.
"No... I'm becoming increasingly convinced that no matter how many times we try, pie recipes are never going to work."
Ariana looks surprised, first of all at the entire thing that has been said, but her attention especially fixing onto one particular word. "'We'?"
"Yes, we. I told our other friends about your recipe, and they all tried it, but every single time something went wrong. Chris tried your recipe and the dough came apart into a gooey mess. Then she told Dana about it, but when Dana tried the pie exploded. Then Ed heard Dana was baking a pie and wanted to try it. He actually had reasonable success with your recipe... at least for a while. But then Greg tried and it shattered into a bunch of burnt pieces in the oven. He was certain he knew how to tell everybody else how to bake a pie, though. And that's not even getting into the argument between Greg and Felix about what Ed started doing wrong."
Ariana smiles wryly. "Well this has been something of a disaster, hasn't it?"
"Hannah gave it a try too. When she tried the crust wildly bubbled, but she seems to be convinced it's an adequate fruit soufflé."
"Oh boy." Ariana puts her hand to her forehead, amazed. "How is it possible for everybody to get the simple concept of baking a pie so wrong?"
"You tell me. All the ingredients are on the sheet. It's beyond me why nobody around here can put them together."
"So what happened when you tried the recipe? You say you didn't make it, but by that do you mean you failed?"
"Oh, no, I didn't even get that far. I've been thinking about baking a pie for a while, but I have to confess, it's been more of a dream."
After all the strange things that have been said today, this is the moment where Ariana has simply heard enough. She looks at Beth in complete disbelief, throwing out her hands to either side.
"Come on, Beth. We're talking about pies here. You know a pie is made of nothing more than ingredients and a baking process. Is there any reason you can't bake a pie? What exactly is stopping you?"
Knowing she lacks any good excuses, Beth now looks vaguely ashamed.
"Well... to be honest, it was the day my uncle was here. He's never baked a pie. He only makes cakes. But every time we see each other he always tells me that all pies taste bad and pies will never work."
"Ah, so just like Felix."
"Felix isn't actually opposed to pies. He just has a lot of opinions about what constitutes a vegan ingredient."
"...Ah. It all makes more sense now."
Ariana furrows her brow and studies the floor, beginning to ponder and concentrate on the strange situation they all find themselves in.
"There has to be some way we can solve this. Maybe we can all meet up some time soon and take a look at each other's recipes."
Beth looks doubtful. "We could try that. If everyone doesn't just cling to their own notion of what a pie should be and dismiss everyone else."
"What reason would anyone have to do that? We'll figure out the basic way to bake one kind of pie, and then we can go back to every other kind of pie to fix the others."
"You make it sound so easy."
"Well, it shouldn't be difficult. We look back at all our mistakes, and every time we uncover the reason for one of them, we see if we can apply it to all the other pie recipes."
"All right, but who are we going to invite to this thing?" Beth asks. "Are we going to invite Greg?"
"Of course."
"Ed would never invite Greg."
"Right, but we're already to the point where even Ed can't bake a pie. Things can't get any worse than they already are."
"All right, if you really think so."
A few days later, the eight friends meet to discuss their different recipes. There are arguments. There are missteps. There are misconceptions. There are moments where somebody blames somebody else for a third person's failure. There are moments when the entire meeting seems to go in circles.
"You have to bake the pie for 400 minutes," Greg insists.
"It's _40_ minutes," Ariana corrects. "We fixed this in a very early version of the recipe before it got to Hannah."
"But, it's 400 minutes. That's what it says in the first version of the recipe Ed gave me."
Ed looks exasperated. "I never said you had to use that version of the recipe. What is it with you and always trying to find the 'original versions' of things?"
"I don't like when people change them. You don't fix what's not broken."
"Really?" Felix chimes in. "Like Greg's recipe was totally necessary to fix any of the recipes that came before it."
"It was," Ed confidently affirms. "Once I fixed it, we had a perfectly good pie to eat. All we really have to do is fix my recipe again."
"Does it really matter whether we use Ed's recipe or Felix's?" Hannah asks. "When I went to the animal shelter, I didn't exactly ask them if they had a black cat or a white cat. I just wanted a cat."
"Well, it does matter somewhat," Ariana clarifies. "A pie recipe isn't like a cat. Some pie recipes successfully create pies and some don't. It would be like if somebody showed up at the animal shelter with two doodles of a black cat and a green cat. You can lay out all the steps to draw a green cat, but there has never been a real one. Meanwhile the kid with the accurate drawing will go home with the black cat. The kid who drew the green cat will go home with a black cat or a white cat but not a green one."
Felix side-eyes his rival mischievously. "—Greg."
"I don't care any more," Ed admits bluntly. "Greg didn't do anything. You seem to be trying to undermine both of us just to shore up your own solution to the recipe."
"Okay," admits Felix. "I do like my version, and I might very well be doing that."
Ariana takes a moment to collect herself, hiding her head in her hands in embarrassment.
"Greg. Felix. If we don't come out of here with a working recipe, people like Beth and her uncle are going to keep believing that pies are nothing more than a dream. Half of us are going to give up on baking pies and there simply aren't going to be any pies made."
Chris, after staying silent for a long while, finally offers her opinion.
"Well, that may be true, but currently there's an argument going between all three of you. I think the first thing we all need to learn about baking pies is that nobody works well when other people are shouting at them."
"Right," Felix argues. "If each of us is trying to bake our own unique flavor of pie, how do we even know that any of the rest of us actually knows how to complete that recipe?"
"Exactly," says Dana. "We should just let each one of us start from the first recipe they got and find the solution themself. It will probably turn out to be the same set of basic steps anyway, but that way we all respect each other as people and our right to carry out that correct set of steps uninterrupted."
Ed stops and looks at the three people who have just spoken with incredulous suspicion.
"Why is it that when we get to a critical moment these three are all the same?"
Ariana stands up, leans against the table, and puts her hands down.
"Chris. Dana. Felix. That's what we've already been doing. It hasn't been working, and that's why we came together in this meeting."
Despite all the fractures and differences, the eight friends remain in the room and the meeting goes on. There are many frustrations. There are many questions of basic meeting procedure. There are many moments at which one bloc of friends is frustrated at what seems obvious to them but which the other bloc can't see. Nevertheless, they press on through all the theoretical wrinkles, and eventually they begin to arrive at a single understanding of the parts of a pie recipe.
"If you really look at it closely Felix isn't actually wrong," Beth observes. "The 'granular' parts of the pie as he calls them, like the flour and the salt, really are the foundation of the pie crust."
"But a pie also isn't just made with flour and salt," Chris notes. "The butter, or the vegetable oil, binds the granular parts together. Forget the binder, and the pie explodes."
"Whenever you add the filling, different pies are different. But at the same time every pie has crust and every pie has filling. This is what Greg was failing to see," Ariana summarizes, "that the last steps of an apple pie are a separate thing from all the first steps."
"Maybe it's not 400 minutes," Greg allows. "But I am not going to put margarine in my pie."
"Okay Greg," Ed says in apathy. "At least we're in agreement that the point of pies is to bake an edible pie."
After the meeting, the eight friends return home, and each give another try at baking pies. Not all the attempts are successful. And yet, each time someone's attempt fails, the group becomes better at taking one successful pie and one failed pie and extracting successful ingredients and procedures to create a successful pie out of the failure. Ed's pie becomes better for the lessons of Hannah's. Ariana takes lessons from the failed pies of both Greg and Felix. Felix boasts that he has learned valuable lessons from everyone else's pies to soon enough create the single best pie, although in reality it is more all the other pies he has improved.
In the end, after some amount of time has passed, almost everyone has produced some different flavor of successful pie. None are exactly the same, yet none of them are fundamentally different. There does, however, happen to be one exception, who shows up at Ariana's door holding up an angry-looking newspaper with an expression of bitterness and spite.
"I'm now a member of the anti-pie club," Greg declares, pointing to his angry news article with its ardent cake-supporting headline. "And it's time you became one too. Pie recipes never work."
Ariana gives Greg an uninterested look, and steps back into her house to look around. Soon enough, she emerges with a printed pie recipe stapled into a packet, and gently but dismissively tosses her tested packet of wisdom into Greg's shins.
"Greg, follow the instructions!"

The philosophy of pies

The above story about pies is a metaphor for the history of scientific socialism and the Communist Internationals.
In every First World country, the standard story about Marxism is that Marxism "doesn't work", with the implied subtext that Liberalism is the default way of understanding human populations that is immediately intuitive to all "normal people" and Marxism is nothing but some crazy experiment put together in some particular nerdy theorist's garage, doomed to never see popular relevance in the greater world population. Another way we can state this same narrative is that Marxism _will never_ work. The deceptively-simple phrase "does not" actually conceals a much greater statement about a vast array of geographical locations, every one of these locations' possible choices, and every conceivable possible future that may happen as a consequence of these actions, not to mention how these choices and consequences are mediated by the interactions between a particular location and other locations. ...
If we had the same attitude toward technology and inventions that we had toward workers' states, who can say how many things humanity would not have successfully invented that it in fact has? would we have given up on inventing airplanes? Would we have never invented color video recordings? Would we have set aside the effort to explain all subatomic and macroscopic phenomena in terms of quantum field theory, or the ongoing effort to unify the three known fundamental interactions and gravity? Would we still live in a world without light bulbs, a technology only one century ago termed a "conspicuous failure"?
In our daily lives we rarely hear about how pies never work, even though it is fully possible to fail to bake a pie. We seldom hear about books never work, even as hundreds of thousands of people have failed to write a book. We hardly ever hear about how pianos never work, even as millions of people have failed to learn to play the piano. Yet we tend to hear a lot about how Marxism "never works". What is the difference?
arguably, the difference is that most people have never properly conceptualized Marxism as a physical innovation consisting of material parts. ...
[unfinished]

Marxism beyond Marxism

as much as conceptualizing Socialist thought as a single tradition has usually brought great problems... what if there actually existed a way to do it properly? what if there really was a way to conceptualize every separate progressive tradition, and even the contributions of all the traditions that came before, as ultimately leading to one grand unified political theory?
That new philosophical method is _meta-Marxism_, and the rest of this text will be devoted to explaining it.
meta-Marxism is the dialectical-materialist analysis of political theories and their realization into political entities. Whereas "Marxism" has up to now mostly been the study of single countries and the act of assembling people into a single new working-class population, meta-Marxism aims to go much further. meta-Marxism can give us the tools to analyze demographic subpopulations, political factions, competing progressive movements with different theories, interactions between separately-functioning workers' states, Communist internationals, the active process of recruiting non-Marxists to a party, the material causes of individual education and biases, the seemingly-difficult interaction between political theories and "The Subject", the structure and development of classless societies, the potential future structure and function of ideologies which have not yet become countries at the point they hypothetically do, how to navigate a world covered in competing plural versions of Marxism, and even how we might prevent scenarios like the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy.
What has become apparent over the past two centuries is that scientific socialism, and the landscape of progressive movements in general, is many times more complicated than anyone previously could have dreamed. But this does not in any way make the problem "unsolvable". All we need to do is to look higher and lower toward the largest and smallest scales of society. Physical science was not complete without discoveries such as general relativity and quantum mechanics, unable to explain such phenomena as the nature of time or the physical composition of light. A similar situation currently exists for Marxism. When we create a Marxism which is _beyond_ Marxism, which is able to fill in its own gaps that exist above and below it, we will finally produce a scientific socialism that is ready for the complicated fractures and contradictions within and outside it that form when trying to construct ideologies in the real world.
Pies are ultimately possible, and so is Marxism.

:: cr.: 2024-05-21T05:18:09Z
:: t.: PiesNeverWork
:: t.: v5-1_1001_PiesNeverWork
;: v5.2 chapters/ Pie recipes never work!