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. 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 a goal but 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.

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.

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