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.