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.
If Marxism is to be distinguishable from ideology it must be distinguishable from day-to-day political struggles where correct answers are not obvious and it's trivial to make errors -> thank you.
A Leninist party allows Marxism to break from ideology (Lukács) / A Leninist party separates Marxism from non-Marxist ideology, Social-Philosophical Systems, or Ideals -> that's... not guaranteed, but true.
truth value: true in mainstream Marxism-Leninism, false in Trotskyism. in early Maoism, truth value unknown.
Khruschev's speech was good evidence of whether Stalin made good decisions -> Althusser, no!
I can't believe the article hid what year and what event this was in the phrase "twentieth party congress" in hopes I wouldn't catch it. unfortunate for him that I have search engines.
Marx's writings contain ideology when they are political / Marx's writings contain ideology because they are political (Althusser) / Trotsky's writings contain ideology when they are politically charged / Deng's statements contain ideology when they are politically charged -> shaky at first, because there are some charged statements Marx or Lenin says that are just empirically true, but when you dig into this concept further you see that any argument that's political has the opportunity to accidentally turn partisan and create unhelpful pluralities of factions. that's one of the major differences between science and ideology per se. science seeks for everyone to come to a consensus about true facts that affect everyone even if the content of the facts concerns only some people; ideology picks some starting objective and always defends it even if that leads to conflicts between what different people believe to be true facts. so... yeah. when something contains a politically-charged argument, that pretty much means it's a countable sociophilosophy and you need the ability to step partially outside it in order to know whether it's true. that doesn't mean you should assume it isn't true though.
When Marxist theorists slip into simplified political rhetoric they are engaged in practice instead of theory (Althusser) -> hmm. that's an interesting way to put it. I don't know if it's actually true. I think it's simpler to say that Marxism and Leninism are two different layers of a movement and Leninism inevitably contains ideology simply because it's a simulated model of direct political practice and you have to make actual prescriptive decisions in that process of creating a party program of what strategies are better than other ones, but prescriptions always have the potential for error. they're both theory though, unless a Leninism has actually realized a workers' state and made itself into a physical object. having a potential for error doesn't mean something isn't theory, or you could say all kinds of funny things like that writing neopronouns is an inherently political act that applies political theory just because of the fact that other people could decide not to adopt them into language and it would become an erroneous prediction about the development of language. and I mean, that is a thought-provoking example, because it makes you ask, is the category of political theories a real category or are political theories indistinguishable from theories about the daily operation and development of society — does applying dialectical materialism make society and history and politics indistinguishable? but that's not really a necessary discussion when you're talking about how to separate Leninism from critiques of Leninism and actually apply the critiques. which should be a simple enough thing, it just comes down to realizing that Leninisms are particular historical periods if you do them correctly and realize them, so Marxism studies individual countable Leninisms because it studies periods of history as material objects. there is still a back-and-forth connection between Marxism and Leninisms because the Leninisms bring in new empirical observations of conditions and results as well as hypotheses and it's then a matter of tabulating all those observations and results from each Leninism and applying them to all the Leninisms. the central violet Marxism can never have full control over the Leninisms even if it wanted to, so the best thing to do is to learn how they each operate and try to make the most of how each one already operates and steer them to be the best they can be.
Althusser's attempt to create a strawberry-tinted "light violet" meta-Marxism was defeated when it was demonstrated that Marx's writings constituted a named or countable Marxism rather than a non-ideological, uncountable violet Marxism which would be easily separable from a Leninism, due to the fact Althusser did not make a distinction between Marxism and Leninism — only between science (cyan), theory (red), and practice (red), which meant within his formulation that violet Marxism did not exist or had not existed yet because he could not prove with his given evidence that Marx made theory and practice two partially-separated layers of the same process -> that's the article in a nutshell, I think. it should be noted this article didn't prove there is no violet Marxism, only that you can't say Marx's or Engels' overall body of writings is violet Marxism because they are closely tied to crimson Leninisms, making them a crimson Marxism. this is very good because I would sometimes twist my brain in knots wondering if Marx and Engels should actually be marked violet. I guess not. I guess there are at most a few moments where they go violet. violet Marxism is a very new thing.
Marxism is merely Leninism / Marxist theory cannot be a coherent and consistent science informing political struggles from without -> not with that attitude it can't.
the real question is this: what does "without" mean? there's always a without. 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.
Marxism always exists inside a historical period, Social-Philosophical System (e.g. party, faction, socially-linked class of people, ideologically-charged population), or in any event inside a material object, but never outside these kinds of specific arrangements of material objects / For Marx there is no retreat from the political realities into an original position under a veil of ignorance (Rawls 1999) -> I think I can mark this red when Marx and Engels were always talking about 'definite men in definite conditions', so it applies to literally any group of Marxist theorists in their time. except for maybe the very isolated Mark Fishers that do almost nothing, but those people aren't in the crimson swatch.
Some parts of early Marxism are responses to changing historical conditions rather than inconsistencies in the same ideology; early Marxism slowly renders itself into a gradient of different ideologies through its dialectical development -> gosh there's one to lob at Trotskyism. they really should have been smart enough to figure out the concept that there could be different stages of developing Leninist theory that they arbitrarily picked the earliest version of.
Early Marxism and violet Marxism are more strategic, Leninisms are more tactical / Early Marxism ties itself into practice in both its scientific and rhetorical arenas, meaning that Marxism-Leninism, the continuum of mainstream crimson Marxisms, is only divided into strategic forms containing observations for partisan purposes ("Marxism") and tactical forms containing descriptions of partisan practice ("Leninism"), namely recommendations for the proletariat or capable subpopulation; as they position themselves inside situations of learning from the real world the two kinds of theory in mainstream Marxism-Leninism (and presumably in violet Marxism) are both actively contained inside practice in different ways -> these last three propositions have really mostly just been defining what Materialism is, but it is a very important thing to understand properly if you want to understand any form of Marxism.
Althusser tried to separate Marxist science from practical politics to avoid dividing Communist parties; this is to imply that he separated theory and practice to avoid criticism while the party process would otherwise tear apart his theory within the limits of its own understanding of the world -> this is really beginning to sound like Western-Marxism was just dysfunctional. it wasn't doing the 'violet roundtable' thing where the various parts of it try to synchronize, it was just, hiding errors off in the corner. in a way, that explains a lot in terms of why Western-Marxist texts are "like that". they aren't even engaging with parties although the parties are there.
it's like... the Soviet Union pushing out the Trotskyites only with zero instances of Trotskyites threatening to kill people. Leninism may be a little broken all the way around. we should be all thinking more about the concept of feedback in all directions|.
If you can't really separate out Marxist science nor Marxist ideology from Marxist practice, then Marxism is not that different from Lacanianism -> oh no. no no no. I was wondering what swatch to give this article but oh boy this is a strawberry article you can't just say something like that. if you read just one Lacanian book you'll see the approach is drastically different from Marxism from top to bottom, this is like saying Marxism and anarchism aren't different. which is a quintessential Western-Marxist error.

Subjective

Violet Marxism contains ideology / Even violet Marxism cannot purge itself of ideology -> I think this 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, so effectively Marxism can't become disembodied and uncountable in the same sense Leninism can't.
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 it was a silly thing to even say when like, I wasn't building one so I risked this notion of describing Leninisms in the abstract being an insult to Leninisms that actually realized themselves. but I think part of the logic of that was I was basically trying to get across the point that when Marxisms develop themselves they usually do it within countable movements in the material world so hypothetically if a hypothetical violet Leninism existed then the thing figuring itself out would go a lot faster than trying to guess things 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" turned 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 Marxisms or Leninisms'.
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 Marxism 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, 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 meta-Marxism. the reality is the violet Marxism that analyzes the Leninisms is probably a bit plural too, it just tries harder to bridge the plurality so it's more something that constructs 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 would more or less melt away by the time you're done.

Ideology codes

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

Main entry

Motifs or claims

Subjective

Related

Ideology codes