Ontology:Q29,44

1. [S2] (pronounced [S2]) Applying any claim to Trotsky eventually yields the correct answers 1:(-)1:(-)1

Characteristics in draft

Properties

item type

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

label (en)

[S2] (pronounced [S2]) Applying any claim to Trotsky eventually yields the correct answers 1:(-)1:(-)1

alias (en)

Applying any philosophy to Trotsky eventually gets you to the correct answers

Trotsky holds all the answers, though he doesn't know what any of them are

QID references [Item] 1:(-)1:(-)1

4 as Trotskyist number

MDem hypothesis

color swatch references [Item]

meta-Marxism

subset of

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instance of

jamming proposition

MDem hypothesis

superset of

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appears in work

(MDem entry unknown)

duplication hint

copy or update fake Item from [[Special:PermanentLink/4010|Q2944]]

Components

model combines claims

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Wavebuilder combinations

[P] (pronounced [P]) Wavebuilder (pronounced Wavebuilder): forms result [Item]

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along with [Item]

meta-ontology

forming from [Item]

meta-ontology

Z–617 (pronounced Z–617) [MX] [Z] (pronounced [MX] [Z]) meta-Marxism 1:(-)1:(-)1

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Usage notes

The purpose of this proposition is to throw a wrench into any and all philosophies that speak mainly in idealized abstractions. You've doubtlessly seen them before. "The Subject, which is the generic thing we all are". "Democracy, which is the single probably-not-situational way a republic can be". "Freedom, which doesn't refer to ten different incoherent things". "Prejudice, which always invariably refers to demographic identities but otherwise only comes in one form". "Economics". "Authenticity". "Culture and countable cultures". "Diversity of thought". Every philosophy inside either Liberalism or the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition is full of words that really sound like they should mean something but the more you investigate any of them the more you realize that all of them are improper generalizations of some kind that either assert many different things to be the same thing or deny the possibility that different things are different from some arbitrary example. To paraphrase Alfred Jarry, most Liberal and Existentialist philosophy has been the study of the general, instead of the spontaneous study of the particular. As a result, interesting things happen when you study philosophical claims through principles such as coincidences, mutations or mistakes, exceptions, and contradictions. All of these things have the potential to make us ask whether our existing ontologies are complete, or sometimes if they even make sense in the first place. This is where Trotsky comes in: you take a philosophy or proposition which does not expect to have to explain Trotsky, and then you make it do just that.

There are many, many sub-examples of how to use this method of "force other philosophical claims to explain Trotsky" — so many that this one concept alone formed the basis for a great stack of MDem scraps, and became one of the central themes of the text, after the more universal theme of "study all other philosophies and incorporate the correct answers to all their questions". How can you properly comply with Marxism-Leninism while being Trotsky? Would Trotsky truly be able to construct a Trotskyist workers' state over large regions of the world without it falling apart if other Trotskyists think his model is wrong? If half the United States was composed of center-Liberals and the other half was composed of Trotskyists, would Liberalism function the same way it does when half of the population is Tories? If Existentialism thinks The Subject is sacred and everyone must tolerate and appreciate everyone else's ideology and culture, doesn't that mean that by backing Trotsky against the Soviet Union Existentialists are obligated to support people actually trying to build Trotskyist workers' states over part of the world and get rid of Liberalism? If we imagine the afterlife was a real place, what afterlife would Trotsky go to, and by what moral standards would that be determined? If Trotsky is born in the Soviet Union and those are the people who are most like him, but he still doesn't really fit in there and he thinks that the people of the Soviet Union are not doing what's morally right, but the people of the United States don't like Leninists of any kind and largely don't see him as able to do what's morally right, how can he even know how to do the right thing and be a good person without a group of people to fit into? Has everyone been conceptualizing morality and ethics wrong, and should we instead be judging Trotskyites by their ability to fit into the social structure and moral values of a hypothetical Trotskyist workers' state? Is "Trotskyist" actually a nationality or cultural group? If various periods of Existentialism are obsessed with picking apart prejudices but they would never want to construct a Trotskyist workers' state anywhere, can you level a claim of anti-Trotskyist xenophobia against them by their own standards and call them out for not deconstructing all their anti-Trotskyist signs? If Trotsky believes the Soviet Union has been doing everything wrong, but he managed to get a Trotskyist workers' state built somewhere else and he made most of the same mistakes, would he effectively have also been calling out himself? If Trotsky is unsatisfied with the Soviet Union does it imply there is a particular structural composition of things which would actually leave him satisfied, and thus which would logically be the actual definition of Trotskyism? If different Trotskyist parties are secretly imagining different results, is Trotskyism actually multiple things rather than one thing? If Trotskyism is actually multiple ideologies with multiple corresponding results, then could they ever successfully form a Fourth International without first realizing they are entirely different Marxisms? If Stalin and Trotsky will always construct two separate countries even if Trotsky succeeds, then can there ever even be such a thing as a single world proletariat, or are there always multiple proletariats pursuing multiple separate Marxisms that have to form a Communist International around the agreement to tolerate each other as separate unique objects with totally different ideologies?

Ask enough questions about Trotsky, and you ultimately end up with meta-Marxism: the study of ideologies as parallel ontologies that realize themselves into material objects, and of how living individuals stochastically or deliberately assemble themselves into subpopulations and then into bigger populations. In practice every question about Trotsky actually turns out to be a question not just about Trotsky, but about how Trotsky interacts with the other things around him. This is the key. Any question about Trotsky can be used to introduce the notion that reality is actually made up of plural forces in contradiction — something which by now is often bizarrely forgotten even in a lot of Marxist analysis. If you can't imagine a particular Marxist theorist giving even a conceivable answer for how one could get Trotsky or Stalin to integrate into the other's vision of world Bolshevism or work with the other against world capitalism, there are some questions you should be asking that party. If an Existentialist proposition about factions or prejudices or "social balance" sounds like something is off, try replacing the central characters with Trotsky and Stalin, and you might begin to see where the error is.

Finally: hypothetical propositions like these are not meant to be in denial of the real damage caused by the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy, or the statement that it deliberately killed officials and attacked Soviet civilization. The point to be made in thought experiments of this kind is that even groups of people who kill others in wars or conspiracies are still human beings, who still have their own needs and goals they realize by building civilization. Many people in the United States resort to calling Che Guevara "a terrorist" in reference to the fact the Latin America region was experiencing a two-sided conflict between the united Filament-axis of First World armies and a tiny Marxist force that came up with an unlikely method to wage war on them for national independence. History is a two-sided affair where multiple groups of people all have experiences, but sometimes people kill each other over what amounts to the arrangement of graphs. It's never possible to get the full story just by listening to some particular socially-linked group of friends in one country talk about the rest of the world. But, if there happened to be both bourgeois Filaments and nominally Leninist factions people had neglected to form prejudices about within the same geographic and conceptual spheres, such people might find it harder to control the narrative.