User:RD/9k/Althusser's "meta-Marxism" (Q21,29)

Main entry

Rethinking Althusser's Meta-Marxism (Andreas Beck Holm 2024) [1] -> 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. here meta-Marxism is a particular thing called violet Marxism. if we became successful at what we were doing here you would search meta-Marxism and there would be 100 results about violet Marxism and 5 results about Western-Marxism.
but, I'm interested to see exactly what the word is supposed to mean in Althusser's context and like how arrogant he is to think that Mark Fisher's tools can actually step outside Marxism or what exactly is going on here.

Motifs or claims

inability to maintain the division between science and ideology -> that is... not the problem I had with Althusser. for me it was that he couldn't maintain the difference between ideology and material objects. so the first thing I did was fix his account of capitalism in the article I was reading so he was describing one big material object breaking. and that actually made a lot of sense to me apart from the notion that it removes the concept of predicting and understanding revolution or the ability to steer transitions, and then I was like, but what's the point of aleatory materialism if it doesn't practically tell you anything about how to have a movement; today I'd also accuse that of being anarchism instead of Marxism, because shockingly almost everything that isn't Marxism turns out to be anarchism. psychoanalysis is provably an anarchism; critical theory is provably an anarchism; capitalist ideology itself is arguably-but-not-certainly an anarchism.
Althusser set out to transform Marxism from an ideology into a science -> but I'm pretty sure he did it a different way than I did for some reason.
Ideology does not make us see the world as it is, but connects people to society; this is to imply that Marxist science can break out of "the lived relationship of man to the world" (le rapport vécu des hommes à leur monde; break out of shovel dreams; early Marxism) -> we're violet so far, but I think that's only because Marx said this. he knew what he was talking about.
Marx stopped talking about alienation the moment he started talking about the structure of capitalism -> that's a rather damning find. really doesn't make Mark Fisher look good, or Žižek with his apparent orange anarchism
Marxism already is meta-Leninism / Marxism is not an "ideology" with a dialectic between Marxist ideology and Marxist science / Marxism (all Marxist or Leninist theory) is not defined by practical Communist struggle, but by the theory that studies how to keep it from disintegrating -> see, when I first found out about Marxism this is what I believed. then I learned that Trotskyism existed, and read in depth about why people believed it and clung to it, and I was like. huh. I guess what people always assumed about Marxism-Leninism itself being a science just isn't correct, given that individual parties and rival Marxist factions inevitably contain their own party programs which are ideology. at a certain point Leninism stood up and took the place of Marxism, and it undermined anyone doing Marxism as a science that would be able to see outside all ideologies including potential Marxist errors solely to material processes governing movements, transitions, and so forth. so we really have to start over and separate meta-Marxism (violet Marxism) from Leninism (crimson Marxism, orange Marxism, mauve Marxism if that's its own thing) so we can examine the material processes of country development inside each Leninism/Bolshevism.
as for Althusser.... I think what he's trying to do is fold Marxism inside Leninism?? he's saying that Marxism is the simulation of real movements acting on the ground ("practical theory"), but that would be Leninism. then he says that analysis and party programs are separate things ("science versus ideology and philosophy") so that Marxist theory can take the simulated Leninism and correct the real Leninism. but he says a couple of things that make me think he doesn't separate Marxism and Leninism. which logically should make any party he's part of vulnerable to sectarian fracturing, because thinking that simulations of Leninism can go back and correct Leninism without the Leninism on the ground just one day saying "yeah, no, I'm going to go get my own separate simulations, bye" is what Trotskyism does, and it keeps pointlessly attacking other Marxisms and splitting.
Leninist model (theoretical model of Marxist-Leninist movement; meta-Marxism) / simulated Leninism (meta-Marxism) / simulation of named Marxism (meta-Marxism) / practical theory (Althusser; Western-Marxism) / class struggle in theory (Althusser) -> this is a very important concept for both violet Marxism and crimson Marxism (where it basically is what crimson Marxism does) but I feel like Althusser puts it in the wrong place in the model
Ideology is what we do rather than what we think (Althusser) -> yes and no. it has to be somewhat purposeful, at least on the level of someone deciding they have to align with Tories and support their nation so they stand with capital. in that case Toryism forms a kind of material object composed of everything people are doing, or to put it more clearly, the way individuals graph together into a larger object. but many things people do don't successfully form larger objects, and thus in violet Marxism they don't really qualify as ideologies (sociophilosophies).
To separate Marxist science from "Marxist ideology" is to break the dialectical character of Marxism -> I would really contest this, again because of the existence of Trotskyism and Deng Xiaoping states. each of those parties is learning from immediate practice, but as it does that it isn't really doing so on a greater terrain of all Leninisms being part of one Marxism, it's more like there are plural Leninisms that operate separately and in contradiction and hardly work together or properly learn from each other at each moment they learn something. (I usually say the phrase "plural Marxisms" or "countable Marxisms" but every time I say that what I really mean is there are plural Leninisms that are theories of local movements or workers' states, and ideally just one violet Marxism that is the "Marxist science" that studies all of them.) Leninisms have become weirdly mechanical and un-dialectical themselves so it's like, to allow for a Marxist science that actually goes back and forth you have to separate Marxism out for that purpose and let Leninisms be Leninisms. exactly as Althusser seems to have chickened out of when people were upset he wasn't optimizing his definitions of Marxism for fully participating in specific Leninisms. honestly, bringing up the case of two countries bashing each other and each thinking the other is wrong would put a stop to this. it would make it really evident that Leninism A and Leninism B criticizing each other don't necessarily have Marxist science embedded into them from within their own perspective, and it's really only the combined system of the two Leninisms together in some kind of Communist International or dialogue of some sort that can create a Marxist science which is capable of analyzing both Leninisms without "breaking" the dialectical connection from it to both of them. but the creation of this 'Communist International' creates a new entity beyond the two smaller entities, so the "practical theory" of the Communist International has to be a new distinct thing from the practical theory of the two Leninisms even though if it's functioning well it's connected to them. the separation in scale creates the separation between Marxist science (violet Marxism) and Leninism. it's like. is the central government of the Soviet Union directly part of the regional republican governments? it is but it isn't. in the best scenario there is a dialectical connection between them but they aren't the same thing. I guess then, violet Marxism is something of a "federal" philosophy; it's like the federal philosophy of a whole region or the world, like Liberal-republicanism is the federal philosophy of the United States but small chunks of the United States run on Existentialism and the blobs of capitalism that contain it. you could use violet Marxism to write the constitution of the Eurasian continent or something, and it would contain requirements for the component Leninisms.

Ideology codes

ML / early Marxism
ML / Marx
W / Western Marxism
W / Althusser
MX / meta-Marxism (violet Marxism)
UM / unknown Marxism
W onto ML / Althusser onto Marx; "meta-Marxism" (Althusser)