Research:MDem/5.2r/0999 findings

Potential findings of violet Marxism / meta-Marxism

• With very few exceptions, nearly everything that Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin say about classes and class struggle is fine as it is. (As long as you make sure to take the final things that Lenin said on each issue and not the first things he said. Trotskyists haven't learned this lesson.)
• Many of the findings of violet Marxism are going to be the same things Marx, Lenin, or Stalin found but arrived at from a different angle. This is by no means a bad thing, because it means the different methods of violet Marxism and other Marxisms can be used to check each other.
• There is one major problem with class analysis: up to now everyone has treated classes in an atomic way where "the bourgeoisie" and "the proletariat" are just a collection of disconnected similar things without any particular structure. This is like referring to a tree as a cloud of carbon atoms and a cloud of water, or referring to DNA as a bunch of A bases and a bunch of G bases in no particular order. In the real world, the functional purpose of classes is to form larger structures that stack up to form nation-states or subpopulations, and the effectiveness of this internal structure leads to a stable or unstable workers' state. Whether people are ready to form a stable workers' state afterward correlates with whether they carry out an effective revolution.
  • There is a small but material difference between "the proletariat" in a worker's state which is trying to fully abolish capitalists and "the proletariat" in Liberal-republicanism. The dynamic of having all people belong to the same thing instead of to any of a number of small things that are scarce and that individuals are effectively always fighting each other for in an arms race is different. Liberal-republicanism naturally has various numbers of _plural proletariats_ while Bolshevism naturally has a _singular proletariat_. Deng Xiaoping Thought _may_ have plural proletariats due to the existence of free-floating corporations but the overall body of workers is far less split apart than in Liberal-republicanism.
  • The longer Liberal-republicanism goes on, the more it will become that a country actually has two countable bourgeoisies. The physical separations between corporations perpetuated by law and the physical separations between political parties perpetuated by convention start to merge (or stop re-separating) so that there is one loosely continuous sea of corporations that all mostly generate one political party and another sea of corporations that all mostly generate the other political party. These are effectively separate countries with their own internal bourgeoisie and attached proletariat that are pretending to be one country.
  • Although classes can exist in _plural subpopulations_ as two bourgeoisies or ten proletariats, classes still have class-associated philosophies. These class-associated philosophies help bind the people within any particular class subpopulation together into that particular subpopulation. The combination of a particular class-associated philosophy or at least a philosophy with some politically-charged element to it ("Philosophical System") strongly saturated throughout a particular free-floating separate socially-linked population ("Social-Graph System") is called a "Social-Philosophical System" or _sociophilosophy_. At different times, it may seem like the existence of a Social-Graph System leads to it getting saturated with a Philosophical System, or like people joining together around a Philosophical System first forms the Social-Graph System. Either way, a social graph and political philosophy are neatly joined into a single countable object almost like spacetime.
  • The Philosophical System inside a social group can contain a full material model of a society, whether people are fully aware of that or not. When two countably separate Social-Graph Systems exist in the same area, and the Philosophical Systems inside them describe different physical structure for society, the two groups of people will compete over the area in order to be the one to build their particular kind of society with a particular structure ("Material System" or "Social-Philosophical-Material System"). This is why sociophilosophies existing is important. A "red" Social-Philosophical System could consist primarily of workers and peasants and be vying to realize the Material System of Bolshevism, or a "sky blue" Social-Philosophical System could consist of various capitalists and attempt to realize the Material System of Liberal-republican capitalism. In addition to this, there are other kinds of Social-Philosophical-Material Systems possible, including a "brown" Social-Philosophical System filled with nazi-leaning Tories (largely similar to a blue one yet incompatible with it), or a "strawberry-red" Social-Philosophical System consisting of the central party of China or Vietnam and all the people who support it, while the same country also contains other smaller Social-Philosophical Systems of other factional "colors".
  • Philosophies, ontologies, ideologies, theories of society, and economic models are indistinguishable categories in practice. The only true difference between the four categories is that some of them may be more correct about the development of societies and some of them may be more incorrect. There is a more substantial difference between _different kinds_ of sociophilosophies associated with different classes than there is between "ideology", "philosophy", and "ontology" inside them. Hence, in all violet-Marxist writings, all of these things are referred to as "ideologies" or "sociophilosophies" and all these terms are used somewhat interchangeably. An "ideology" is a philosophy with politically-charged content; mainstream Marxism-Leninism and Maoism are considered ideologies inasmuch as they are countable sociophilosophies practiced by a particular party and which contain particular material models of how to put together a movement or of the development of a society. Two Marxist parties or bodies of Marxist theory which contain different material models and would theoretically create different-looking workers' states or movements may be referred to as "named Marxisms".
  • The purpose of violet Marxism (meta-Marxism) is to attempt to get different named Marxisms to model _each other's_ workers' states correctly even though their own physical content and models of themselves are different from each other, so that two different named Marxisms don't start mistaking actual country characteristics for revisionism or fall into competition when they can no longer correctly model and predict each other. This requires a somewhat more complicated version of Marxism that is able to cover things like the daily operation of different kinds of workers' states during a long transition, and why various groups of people will be part of a national population or will become their own independent population.
• Trotskyism is, in short, a philosophy for cowards. People become Trotskyists because they are afraid of what will happen to them if they are loyal to a particular workers' state, and they want to believe that if they formed a workers' state out of only people like them then whatever they are afraid of wouldn't happen. But if you were to point out to them that the day they successfully form a Trotskyist workers' state where they're safe there would still be a mainstream Marxist-Leninist workers' state and they would have created socialism in one country, they wouldn't be brave enough to turn around and realize that the theory they claim to be putting into practice is not an accurate model of what they're actually practicing. If they'd simply come to the realization they created a theory about splitting large countries into smaller countries rather than a theory about uniting people across the world, there is some vanishingly small chance they could finally create a workers' state with "orange" Trotskyist content inside and see how hard defending a workers' state actually is. This return to Materialism would bring a lot of controversy and division, probably de-stabilizing parties that already have trouble with stability, and I'm sure that's why they're afraid to do it. At times it seems like they believe that unity of a movement happens just for the sake of unity of a movement and division happens because individual people didn't choose to be abstractly connected by friendship and loyalty to 'The Revolution'. They seem to leave the entire concept of the proletariat behind as far as why people are united or whether parties serve people.
  • One of the most telling events in the entire timeline of Trotskyism is Trotsky writing _The Revolution Betrayed_. The entire thing reads as just a bunch of complaints that the Soviet Union wasn't developing fast enough at a pace that was totally impossible and vaguely implies that Trotsky believed the era of socialism doesn't actually exist and you're supposed to transition directly to upper-phase communism. Combined with other events, this text suggests that Trotsky did not actually like living in the Soviet Union at all and would rather have lived in the United States or Europe, so he abandoned the Soviet Union in hopes he would be able to go to a "respectable" country that would actually build the "better" version of Leninism. There are two ways to take this: A) Trotskyism is about building a second kind of Leninism, which necessarily cannot cover the whole world at the moment it first appears B) Trotsky was afraid to take the material world as it was and accept that his best shot was to support the Soviet Union or at least not turn against it. A is rather hypothetical but either way I know B is true.
  • Trotskyism ("orange" Marxism) strongly appears to have a different desired internal structure from mainstream Marxism-Leninism ("crimson" Marxism). Despite sifting through entirely too much Trotskyism I still do not know what that internal structure actually is. Two of the only concrete things I've been able to find are that Trotskyists don't like the era of socialism taking very many decades and they seem to dislike control in the Soviet Union passing from local soviets to government ministries; it's common to see a ton of claims that the Soviet Union "lost democracy" just because Stalin's government filled it with ministries. If I remember correctly there was an incident where it was clear local people had actually voted to create the ministries but Trotsky still didn't like it because in effect he didn't like what the local people actually chose. Trotskyism is very opinionated about exactly how the people inside a country _must_ arrange themselves, and yet it will never quite explain what that is.
  • Trotskyists blame external problems imposed onto workers' states on the workers' state's internal structure. A great number of complaints they had about the Soviet Union or that they have about China up to today are actually because the country is under siege from external countries. Like clockwork, Trotskyists will show up and blame North Korea for problems that were caused by embargoes, then blame Cuba and China for problems that were caused by being ready for embargoes. Trotskyists love to blame and basically punish Third-World countries, and yet at the same time they never come to comprehend the material possibility of Third World countries having to respond to punishment although from their own actions they should know what that is. For some reason they are afraid of staying in a country and weathering external punishment as opposed to ducking out of it and adding some of their own.
  • Early Trotskyism (c.1906-1940) appears to have been composed of a tiny number of Leninists and a lot of anarchists. There appear to be one or two categories of anarchism — "orange anarchism" and "brown anarchism" — which are primarily concerned with deciding a country has created an unsatisfactory "experience" or "culture" and people sawing themselves out of that countable culture entirely either as individuals or small groups to somehow form a new countable culture. These days, you periodically see people who are not aligned with Communists saying a lot of things against capitalism that they should have no real incentive to say. For instance, a 2015 article I saw titled "Copyright is Communism". A Marxist would laugh at this and say "wow, so when there's copyright countries are defended from external attack and everyone is employed?" But that's obviously not what it means. This kind of anarchist likes to make claims that some mysterious "They" decided to create capitalist modernity and make culture bad, and in this case decided to invent the concept of capitalists regulating other capitalists through a State, which is forbidden in their minds because they believe that societies are composed of individuals free-associating into social linkages while any class of people trying to create a State to control this free-association is simply the malicious and Dominating removal of Freedom. (See "Existentialist-(Post)Structuralist tradition" about three sections below for more about that.) Into the later Soviet Union this concept came around to bite everybody as individual people started thinking about leaving and sometimes tried their best to associate with the people who could get them rare foreign goods the fastest (mediated by a kind of tribute called "blat") and leave everybody who didn't help them to get ahead behind. Today, the Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek seems to be more of a Trotskyite than a Marxist as he makes "Communism" all about simply rejecting the "trash culture" "They" decided to leave everyone with — not really seeming to care whether "They" are Stalin's government or the bourgeoisie, he just wants to make sure all of "Them" who can be distinguished by Their bad decisions are defeated.
• There are two major categories of Western Marxism: "Gramscianism" and "Fisherism".
  • Fisherism (Mark Fisher's "Marxism") is an almost wholly Idealist form of analysis which seems to believe that media products are capable of programming people with particular beliefs and actions while their individual responses to media are not as important. There is a decent but not rock-solid argument that it isn't even a form of Marxism and is actually an anarchism. When people are Fisherists, they are obsessed with the external Dominating influence of surrounding culture making people's lives worse — a description that can also apply equally well to some kinds of anarchists. If you read enough Fisherism, it starts to blend into "orange anarchism" and Žižek.
  • Gramscianism is a Materialist form of analysis roughly equivalent to what Antonio Gramsci actually practiced in 1920s Italy. In Gramscianism, the basic idea is to chart out all the possible slots people can occupy in society either in careers or in politics, and get as many Communist allies or proletarian allies into all of those physical slots as possible. (I call this "hegemony politics" or, if it's a moment where I want to be dryly funny, a "musical chairs attack".) The basic premises of Gramscianism are not actually all that bad. In principle, if a country had Gramscian allies everywhere and they all stayed consistently connected without ever breaking up, only adding more proletarian allies to the network every day, it might have some chance of forming a social-democratic movement and a workers' state.
  • East Germany may have been a successful instance of Gramscianism. I am not sure on this. The argument for that rests on similarities between the history of Germany and the United States, where the United States has been getting increasingly divided in two, it's had a lot of good usages and bad usages of Gramsci going around, and when Germany was finally free it got literally divided in two (overseeing Soviet army notwithstanding, because it did leave). United States movements in general tend to be heavily dominated by skilled experts of some kind that attempt to take up all the leadership positions in their own movements and in government overall, like Gramscian recommendations for hegemony politics. The problem with this is that the experts or bourgeoisie always form just a thin crust around the movement which could be said to be "progressive" while nobody else has any knowledge of much of anything, almost a little like the Trotskyite conspiracy in that sense; whenever the United States attempts to fill up all of society with progressives it just kind of gets a really thin "Berlin wall" of bourgeoisie vaguely trying to plug up society in the middle and keep "fascism" from rushing through them.
  • Gramscianism _per se_ and Deng Xiaoping Thought are basically the same thing on a very small scale and a very large scale respectively. Both of them involve something I've dubbed a "herd-of-cats effect" where collections of workers that should not have anything in common with the bourgeoisie all line up behind the bourgeoisie and make them secure a populational border around the overall collection of people they hope will protect them from the outside. It isn't always clear why this is the process happening to a country instead of something else happening, especially when the country is relatively large and not very fragmented. One of the simplest explanations might be that the overall population just has nobody with a good theory of how to actually transition to Bolshevism. External pressures may also partly account for it — see section below.
  • It appears that socialist transition does not consist of two phases, and genuinely consists of at least three phases: pre-Bolshevism, Bolshevism, and post-Bolshevism.
  • Many Marxists have argued about whether Deng Xiaoping Thought "is socialism", which is to say, whether a Deng Xiaoping state has entered _the era of socialism_. From everything I have learned, this question is irrelevant. Underneath the surface wording, people are actually using this question to decide whether they should be an ally of China instead of advocating for overthrowing the government. The answer to that question is a resounding yes! Since 1991, the practical function of workers' states has been almost solely to protect countries from turning into neocolonies and having the United States destroy and replace their governments just to have more leverage to make the world's ethnic groups do whatever it wants in its service so they can get out of the problems the United States created. What the United States did to the Soviet Union region was to dominate the area's nationalities and make them all rebuild their ethnic groups in the United States' preferred image or agree not to be that ethnicity. When the Soviet governments were dissolved a significant number of people had to leave and move to First-World countries while they waited for an under-developed country to build up enough wealth to connect into a world where every country at wildly different development levels is competing at once. This is horrifying. It's partially comparable to capturing slaves, though not entirely comparable, because obviously the people aren't slaves and have some more privileged position as skilled workers or bourgeoisie. At the same time, this is the United States assigning a whole country of individuals a ranking lower than all the individuals in its country and forcing them to come to its country and enter its own system of competition if they don't want to be treated as subhuman. This is not acceptable. But, it appears the only way to prevent this is to create a workers' state that is powerful enough as a material object and in particular powerful enough at growing and exponentially reproducing itself to _resist_ being taken over by any external force that would try to come in and slurp up its land or get every outside country to cut off trade to it.
  • At various times, Trotskyism, Maoism, and mainstream Marxism-Leninism have all recently been mischaracterizing Deng Xiaoping Thought as a theoretical choice. It isn't. It's a Materialist response to material conditions — it's just the case that the material conditions are abysmal. This is the same mischaracterization of Third World countries made by the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy to disastrous results.
  • I used to get upset that everyone — and this is in the United States, not in Africa — was bringing up Frantz Fanon as supposedly the only theory of Third World countries, when if you take even a cursory look at what he says it's completely mismatched with everything else the people who are citing him always say and implictly suggest he also intends. Fanon says that revolutions are a special activity on a particular day when violence draws people together, while absolutely all of United States progressivism believes the opposite of that, that some metaphysically-delineated activity of "nonviolence" on a particular day (near-synonyms: "pacifism", "Kropotkinism") brings everyone together and is the only way to resist violence and Domination. By now, Fanon upsets me less in that he did correctly identify that national independence is the most pressing issue for the bulk of all non-First-World countries and whenever a Third World country becomes independent it's usually surrounded by a wall of bourgeoisie who do not really care about improving conditions for the rest of the people although in practice they _also_ defend those people from the hold of foreign empire or neocolonialism which would unquestionably be worse. I now think that one of the biggest open conundrums historical materialism faces at the moment is that recently no individual person has been able to think on a large enough scale to actually think of the development of countries as very large material objects instead of a bunch of individuals. It could be that creating an independent country surrounded by national bourgeoisie is just always the first step before you get to Bolshevism no matter what, whether that wall of bourgeoisie actually helps anybody with anything or not.
  • By now, every workers' state that is still standing always turns into Deng Xiaoping Thought, where the country is united by a central party but about half the country is free-floating private businesses. What appears to be true from outward observations of China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea is that the next stage after capitalism is simply forming a united country that isn't divided into chunks of people strongly competing for mutually-exclusive existence. People used to believe that the purpose of creating a central party was to immediately put the proletariat in power, but it appears its real purpose is just to keep a country from dividing into two separate plural capitalisms or separate plural proletariats that all hate each other and want to destroy each other ("multicapitalism", like what the United States has). The everyday people who actually remain loyal to Marxist states over decades and don't simply immediately try to destroy them and defect to anticommunism aren't so much people who talk about "the proletariat" as they are people who talk about all the individuals in a country coming together and being loyal to each other rather than leaving each other behind. Much like Liberal-republicanism, everyday culture in Marxist states takes on a seemingly classless character despite the existence of classes, and people start spouting something which while it is not actually Marxism nor economics nor class analysis but is no longer "capitalist ideology" and can only be described as "socialist ideology" or "pre-Bolshevism's ideology".
  • I have no concrete _proof_ that Deng Xiaoping states can transition into Bolshevism. However, the structural differences between Liberal-republicanism and Bolshevism are enough to make me think that may actually be possible. The actual inner structure of capitalism is constant fragmentation, disorder, chunks replacing each other, chunks butting each other out and pushing each other back and forth, things being purposefully divided like Liberal-republicanism making sure there are at least two countable bourgeoisies ruling it and sometimes but not always enforcing antitrust laws. The separably plural chunks of proletariat are in a disorderly soup. But by the time you get to Bolshevism _per se_ as in the Soviet Union in about 1930 the whole country becomes unified. And in Deng Xiaoping Thought there is a strong emphasis on everything being unified. There are reasons to think it really is in a transitional state that in some sense is actually in between the two.
    • A Marxist-Leninist movement changes the physical entropy of a society. When a Leninist party is formed in a country like the Soviet Union, China, or Cuba, the country starts ordering itself and connecting everyone at some particular point to a central party-nation, which in turn can make said emerging Marxist state more effective at defending itself. When the central party-nation secures the country area for itself and starts fully realizing its Social-Philosophical System into a Social-Philosophical-Material System, what actually happens is the central party basically takes all the remaining floating chunks and puts the whole country together into a single mono-structure, driving out or locking up the few reactionaries who still attack it.
    • Lenin says something very telling in _State and Revolution_, echoed by Mao, which is that when an era of socialism is created they think that means that individuals will still be partly in competition in a way, each one having to train and climb up in social status and make money according to their work but in the era of socialism do all this in order to build public facilities and consistent industrial structures and things which are made to last. One of the things this means practically is that market processes have not fully disappeared from the society; market processes have changed from individuals accumulating wealth through artisanal skill and individually trading goods to a process of regions and structures trading people who will have to learn to correctly put themselves in the correct place in the country in order to build up society efficiently and allow every individual to work less hard to achieve the same large-scale aims. The other thing this means practically is that the moment a Marxist state is created there is not guaranteed to be much industry or really a national proletariat _per se_. This creates a problem that _should_ be a tiny problem versus how big of a problem it's actually been, where to develop the country the central party or _somebody_ will need to seed the country with a bunch of corporations, all geographically and temporally unique and identifiable by the unique individual people inside them, and all of those unique entities have to grow large enough to be able to hold a lot of workers so they can "actually" create the proletariat. Again, there's nothing truly preventing a central party from keeping all the corporations connected to it and accomplishing that. But historically China ran into a problem that when it tried to enter Bolshevism too early the country became stagnant and it just wasn't creating enough new corporations to fill out the structure of the country and accommodate for how many people it had; it was as if Bolshevism wanted to be static with a particular number of corporations and didn't want to grow any bigger even if the population grew. So China created Deng Xiaoping Thought so there would be more corporations and they would grow faster. Looking at the big picture, this is not actually a backwards development but a horizontal one. If the United States tried to enter Bolshevism, it would start out with a lot of scattered fragments. If China tried to enter Bolshevism it would start with a lot of divided though oddly centralized fragments. The first transition out of capitalism is basically always going to be that you have a fragmented society and have to put stuff together, and it appears that there is a vaguely quantifiable nature to this process where things can be highly disordered and fragmented but then through people's efforts the society can order itself and take its entropy lower and lower until it reaches the end of whatever this de-fragmenting, entropy-lowering process is called. I choose to guess that it's called pre-Bolshevism and when you reach minimum entropy you can enter Bolshevism.
    • As for there being a stage after Bolshevism, I see that as entirely speculative, but based on the way observations of different countries and the preliminary hypotheses by Marx and Lenin all line up, I think it may be reasonable to guess there is pre-Bolshevism where the country has to join up its fragments, there is Bolshevism, where all the evidence of there having been fragments would go away and perhaps other things would happen, and there could be another phase of post-Bolshevism afterwards given how Marx and Lenin each described an "upper-phase communism" and how adamantly Trotskyists and anarchists got dissatisfied with even the best moments of the earliest era of Bolshevism in the Soviet Union, pointing to all the grievances people would still always have in Bolshevism proper.
  • When Marx described "further transitions" way off at the end of his timeline, I think that was a very wise inclusion. I think what he meant by this was that history is always producing new changes and can never be fully reduced to a closed "to-do list", and as such, at every point in the future there will always be _small_ transitions occurring to every society and especially between societies.
    • One thing that stands out to me is that country borders are never truly completed. There is always another country dividing itself or redrawing its borders or rarely joining up with another one. All the way inside the United States Illinois has been trying to split itself or join to Indiana. I also think the entire discussion about gerrymandering or redistricting is not what Liberal-republicans think it is — this is a fundamental instability of Liberal-republicanism, that whenever you think people belong to a particular group of people and it's possible to "collect the will of that group of people", what you really find is that whenever people change their opinions they actually want to change their identity and move over into a different group of people with opinions like theirs. This wouldn't be at all surprising if you modeled society through a theory of Social-Philosophical Systems. Through that lens you see that depending on the context there hypothetically might be cases where "redistricting" doesn't stem from corruption and it actually stems from people hating the concept of political parties and mandatory division and wanting to redraw the republic itself into a more stable structure so that people aren't structured by arbitrary geographical boundaries and are actually structured by some kind of concentric shared community. "Democracy" is always this weird moving target where people fundamentally want a government that represents people like them but whenever the government actually does something, suddenly they try to bail on it and say, oh, wait, the people we elected actually belong to another group of people, not us, quick, redraw the lines! The structure of the Soviet Union where people were sorted into nationalities and autonomous republics seems like it was a better idea. Even though it emerged in specific historical conditions of an empire containing actual border colonies, it really would seem that even when you put people in what should be a homogeneous population they eventually divide themselves up into localized countable cultures that they would prefer to be separate republics.
    • A second kind of "further transition" is things we currently consider identity politics. In Marx's time, the idea of there being a gay movement or a transgender movement would have seemed a bit unheard-of and futuristic, so he probably would have considered that a further transition that was more likely to happen as society became better and better developed and less likely to happen when a nation was first becoming independent or a country was first entering Bolshevism. In the Soviet Union, there were varying opinions on homosexuality across the republics but officially the central party did not want to acknowledge the possibility a gay rights movement could happen purely for its own sake independent of anything happening in the rest of the society, because it tended to assume that movements that cropped up which weren't explicitly aligned with the overall country and the central party were reactionary movements and movements which were explicitly aligned with the country and the party were generated by the working classes. However, the reality of actual gay and transgender movements has been messier than that; real-world LGBT+ people have behaved more like tiny nationalities that can easily get angry at other nationalities for treating them poorly and act to divide and fracture a country simply to materially protect their own existence, without any ill intent 'to destroy the (Russian) proletariat because they are the (Gay-National) bourgeoisie'. This has led to a lot of nonsensical backlash against Marxism because it is "reducing" social conflicts to class when somehow "there are other issues". This is wrong. The history of classes is actually the history of competing populational chunks, and all large and small nationalities are just more chunks. What these analyses are actually demanding is for Marxism to have a serious theory of the entire development of nationalities and internal identity-subpopulations and when national populations or subpopulations form and when these things should be joined to other things or be separate; up to now a lot of Marxism has just stopped at "nations should be independent when they want to be" without really exploring that. In a better world with a more developed Marxism, a country would be able to acknowledge a movement for gay rights as a further transition, understanding the way the process really happens in material reality rather than trying to bend it into the shape of the most important transitions that are going on in the country at that time.
    • The strangest thing to realize about further transitions is that the United States always seems to try to rush way to the end of the timeline and pick out the "furthest" transitions it possibly can while for as long as possible ignoring capitalism. It's like it's trying to save even pre-Bolshevism for last and do the entire thing backwards.
• The broadest and perhaps most popular philosophical tradition in the United States currently has no name. I have tentatively been calling it the "Existentialist-Structuralist tradition" (or "capital-E" Existentialism for short) based on a pile of recurring keywords and connected themes I kept finding in what I now call Existentialist texts that all seemed to point to a shared underlying model of society. This tradition is the philosophy generated out of _capitalism itself_ as it exists below and apart from Liberal-republicanism but while it is not speaking about capital and "economics" and pretends to be talking about topics such as the humanities and social sciences.
  • The following philosophies are contained in or overlap with the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition: existentialism (Sartre etc), phenomenology (Husserl, but not so much Kant), parts of structuralist linguistics, post-structuralist philosophies, postmodern philosophies, narrative therapy, critical theory, Foucaldianism, post-Marxism (Laclau etc), queer theory or gender theories, Judith Butler, psychoanalysis (Jungian or Lacanian psychoanalysis especially), schizoanalysis, Fisherism as distinct from Marxism (debatably), Kantian ethics (only a prior inspiration and not part of the tradition itself), Niklas Luhmann social systems theory, cybernetics, positivism (referring to all knowledge about reality or society being trapped in lived experiences), "lifeworlds" (Husserl), Henri Bergson. This is absolutely not a complete list. The complete list with every sub-division would probably be absurdly long.
    • Some of the only things that are definitely excluded are theories that clearly pre-suppose a Liberal republic has to be created before Liberal philosophy can exist — these kinds of texts I consider "Liberal-republicanism _per se_". Kant seems to sit almost exactly on the borderline between Liberal-republicanism and Existentialism, giving "transitional" theories that offer a neat bridge from one to the other.
  • The Existentialist-Structuralist tradition is basically a subcategory of anarchism; I call this category "blue anarchisms" due to their loose affiliation with Liberal capitalism (a "blue" republic) while not being exactly the same thing as Liberal-republicanism and its "statist" political theories.
  • Blue anarchisms broadly believe that human existence is simply unrelated to the existence of economic processes and nation-states, and if these existing systems need to be removed at all, there is no element of urgency or necessity in dislodging existing systems because the human individual always has "the choice" to withdraw and disassociate from anything happening and everyone can supposedly use this ability to dismantle every bad thing that has ever happened. It is a common assertion in the United States that everything reactionaries are doing will just stop happening if everyone simultaneously does enough to ignore them and deny that what they are doing is real. More broadly, Existentialism or blue anarchism seems to frequently characterize all social phenomena like some sort of tinker-toy set with the wooden circles and dowels where the circles are people and the dowels are organizations, groups, products, or ideas, and every form of structure in society will supposedly fix itself if enough of the circles disconnect from their dowels and choose some other dowel that is presumed (usually falsely) to suit them better individually. This all appears to stem from the physical phenomenon of capitalism tearing apart societies and turning almost every interaction or connection between people into a purchase, from ideas being sold in media products, to political news selling division into emerging nationalities to help people feel like they're part of a country, to academics having to sell books of ridiculously-specific philosophies that people then pick and choose, to 1930s Trotskyites getting to "choose" to depopulate their country and try to move to the First World. This is why I half think that Fisherism isn't even Marxism and might simply be a form of Existentialism — it's trying to operate on the connection between consumers and products, which is part of Existentialism's general domain.
  • The word "Existentialism" here refers to the motif of texts being obsessed with studying human individuals as "the subject" and trying to characterize time or surrounding reality as being primarily affected by The Subjects' own individual choices. "Structuralism" refers to the motif of abusing language (which outside the "Existentialist-Structuralist tradition" takes the form of _structuralist linguistics_) as a way of studying reality, often to argue that history and reality are totally arbitrary just because all ontological models can be expressed as linguistic statements and humans can redefine words. I could have just as easily called it the "Existentialist-Poststructuralist tradition", because the notion of breaking and forming links and of society having no actual definable shape or structure is a very common theme (which shows up because Existentialists conflate the concept of society itself with the concept of capitalism, they somewhat literally think global capitalism _is_ society and nothing else is).
  • Reading Existentialism honestly makes you go a bit crazy the more you become aware of the sheer _diversity_ of incomprehensible theories there are inside it and the more you try to synthesize any of them together. After the amount of it I've read, the insane thought that's entered my mind is that maybe Liberalism has never existed at all and actually all Liberal-republicanism has been generated out of Existentialism and Liberal-republicanism has actually been a form of anarchism this entire time.
    • That may sound like I'm splitting hairs trying to figure out the difference between bourgeois ideology and bourgeois ideology, but there actually is a difference. If Liberal-republicanism isn't an anarchism, then people who got confused by living in Liberal republics or monarchies made up anarchism to try to find a false solution to how to get out of Liberal capitalism. If Liberal-republicanism is an anarchism, then it is the real-world consequence of anarchism, and anarchism has a transitional statist republic almost exactly the way Marxism does. If Liberal-republicanism is actually some kind of 'Kropotkinism-Jeffersonism', then it's impossible to stop Liberal-republicanism from constantly generating anarchists and heaps of anarchist theories every day, because generating anarchists who keep thinking it can be transitioned or transformed into its final form through realizing anarchism is actually Liberal-republicanism's _stated purpose_. Anarchism would be upper-phase Liberalism. That would be why after years and years there keep being more anarchists and people never want to give up on it.
• Liberal-republicanism should be taken more literally than a lot of Marxists tend to teach it. In particular, the Liberal-republican value variously called "(power) competition", "non-totalization", or "countervailing power" is something people really, genuinely believe and perpetuate for the reasons stated on the tin. Liberal-republicanism doesn't divide people simply to keep workers from breaking out of it. The bourgeoisie genuinely divide themselves into two or more plural bourgeoisies because they are afraid of a society being unified and believe that social unity itself is dangerous and oppressive.
  • Almost everything Liberal-republicans say about "democracy" or "our democracy" or "radical democracy" is bogus, and almost entirely safe to ignore. This sounds harsh, but genuinely, I have never read a Liberal-republican or Existentialist work that ever _made sense_ and didn't leave me questioning the meaning of every word and phrase in the English language and where exactly all of these phrases had ever been defined. The closer Existentialism leans to traditional Liberal-republican sources the more it becomes indecipherable whether you've read the original sources or not.
  • Existentialist-Structuralist works are, funny enough, a more accurate description of the daily operation of Liberal-republican societies than any work about "democracy". Especially when they falsely claim to be describing "social change" or "movements"; every Existentialist work supposedly about a movement is just describing the daily operation of Liberal-republicanism without any change. This shouldn't really be surprising when these works are ultimately based on capitalism itself and Liberal-republicanism is also ultimately based on capitalism.
  • The only thing Liberal-republicans say that is vaguely correct is that "fascism" (Toryism) is a different problem from capitalism. This is technically true in that Toryism is half of the process of dividing a Liberal republic into two separate incompatible bourgeoisies attempting to form separate nationalities. Capitalism only takes place inside these two separating nationalities but the gap between them is more of a question of national self-determination and how various subunits of countries should be joined, separated, or arranged within other subunits. Never listen to anyone who tries to silence Communism by pairing the word "democracy" with "our", because that person is unaware of the real problem of "democracies" fully separating into plural democracies and becoming impossible to hold together ever again.
• Most "conservatism" in the United States, Britain, and Australia is more or less continuous with the original effort in 1600s Britain to prevent democratic republics from ever being created in the first place — Toryism. The purpose of the original Toryism was to prevent Protestants and Catholics from having to actually fight each other over the ability to make policies affecting the other group. The purpose of "conservative" parties by now has slowly become almost exactly the same as this. Despite the prominence of religion in the original event, religion was never the actual issue, and the actual issue the entire time has been society splitting from one majority ethnic group into two majority ethnic groups that do not want to live in a world where the other ethnic group takes up all the highest ranks in society and ends up running the whole society as the sole possession of that ethnic group regardless of every single rule and constitutional article that says they aren't supposed to do that. To a small extent this is a reasonable worry, because that basically is how majority ethnic groups behave in Liberal-republicanism and historical monarchies. The problem with this thinking is that the ideal way to fix the problem is simply perpetuating the process further and filling up all the highest ranks in society with your own ethnic group.
  • In the same way that Catholic and Protestant or Irish Catholic and British Protestant were primarily ethnic groups, "Republican" and "Democrat" have been slowly turning first into nationalities and then into ethnic groups. Everyday people are terrible at understanding the concept of politics or political policies or even the actual reasons that one religion would theoretically be more likely to be true than others. However, the two things ordinary people actually understand are that people who are immediately socially-linked to them by shared activities and culture are not their enemies, and that they need to do everything in their power to protect people who are currently their friends from people who are not their friends. The Liberal-republican Ideal of countervailing power interacts horrifically with this actual on-the-ground folk understanding of politics to produce a world where it is mandatory for part of the population to have people it outright hates and is bigoted against just so it can "know" those people aren't abusing it and that it has the right to throw anyone it believes is abusing it into the sea of incomprehensible, un-patriotic, destroyable people it hates.
  • In some ways the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy is very similar to United States Toryism. The inner ideologies of each faction are clearly not what is the same, but as for the outer shapes, you have one faction that believes in unifying society and through obligation between people creating a democratic republic, and you have one faction that believes that if you entirely unify society that must be oppressive and people can only be free by dividing a bunch of people out of society that then try to rule the other group of people. The US Republican party has its roots in the Confederate States of America once being a separate country and the resentment that the Union should have the right to conquer that separate country and exert government over it. The Trotskyite conspiracy, in theory, is the ideology of a small group of theorists who want to form a Leninist party but do not want to be part of the existing Communist Party of the Soviet Union and thus conceptually want to form a second central party-nation that somehow realizes into a second nation-state containing no "Stalinists". This is why conservatism and Trotskyism are inherently tied to national self-determination problems.
  • Beneath all this, of course, is the elephant in the room that it often takes a specific layer of people to carry out the task of separating countries, or at least there is only a particular layer of people that gets to make the final decisions on it. When Trotskyists successfully produce Leninist theorists, these people belong to a particular class, and when Confederate supporters send representatives to try to dismantle Liberal-republicanism as-such, these people belong to a particular class. Representative democracies as we know them thrive on a class division in which the people who actually form political parties and represent people always belong to their own class versus the people they represent. This enables the representative layer selected from particular graphs of people with particular borders and extents to make use of its expertise but also its privilege to try to argue that it shouldn't have to be part of any larger political entity and it should get to form its own republic.
  • Trotskyism is one of the most ironic ideologies ever because Trotskyists keep asserting that the problem with the Soviet Union was that its layer of elite, experienced Stalin-following theorists or layer of bureaucrats improperly formed a border around the country with their presence and prevented it from transitioning to an era of world socialism where Stalin would not have so much control just because the whole Eurasian continent would be a political entity or something, but in practice, whenever Trotskyists produce Leninist theorists they do the same thing. They break apart from other groups of Leninists and effectively function more like an attempt at socialism-in-one-country except orange rather than red.
    • One of the only pieces of evidence that _maybe_ supports what Trotskyists say is that if a country is allowed to transition to a Deng Xiaoping state like China, Cuba, Vietnam, or North Korea, the country as a whole becomes physically defined by how well the population can out-chunk-compete other populations for its borders and separate existence through its enclosed bourgeoisie.
• There is an ongoing question to be asked of exactly how many intermediate classes there actually are between the owner of 5 retail stores and a factory worker. This does not seem to be a simple question. The existence of a layer of people who specifically function as central party theorists in China but are not necessarily reverting the country from an enclosed bourgeoisie to Liberal-republicanism calls into question whether there is actually just a single thing called "the petty bourgeoisie" with a single factional color. It would seem like at a minimum it is possible for there to be _plural_ bodies of petty bourgeoisie which are part of separate sociophilosophies — the strawberry petty bourgeoisie, the orange petty bourgeoisie, the brown petty bourgeoisie, the blue petty bourgeoisie — each of them genuinely operating toward a different goal.
  • Here, the blue and brown petty bourgeoisie would usually have an objective of uniting with larger capitalists to protect themselves, if they exist in a context like the United States; the strawberry petty bourgeoisie in a context like China would actually be united with only themselves and the workers to defend the rest of the country; the orange petty bourgeoisie would be doing... whatever the inside of a Trotskyist country is supposed to be doing. The factional colors here represent individuals of a class by themselves (the "water" and "carbon dioxide" level of classes) being transformed into people of a particular class physically arranged into some specific larger shape with a specific functional purpose, possibly along with other classes (the "tree trunk containing bark and xylem cells and then water" model of classes).
• I have only so much to say about anarchism. Most of the time, anarchist theory comes across as possible to parse into comprehensible sentences, and even logically coherent a lot of the time, but like none of the words or phrases actually refer to anything real. It's a tiny bit like reading a fantasy book in that the book will give a very coherent definition of what goblins are but if you think about it for a second you'll go "but that doesn't resemble anything I've seen in the real universe".
  • One of the most significant concepts in anarchism that keeps coming up, and seems to keep bleeding into other things anarchists attempt to infiltrate, is "domination". This sounds like it should mean something. But the more times you see them say it the less meaning it has. Anarchists are convinced that society should contain no Domination. But they nearly refuse to ever explain it in material terms to the point you could actually start to predict where else it could exist or what other kinds could exist. They don't like the concept of Domination being a summarizable, diagrammable process. You're just supposed to memorize the concept that Domination is bad and you can identify it when people are trying to be part of society and they feel bad. If you ask any further questions you must be denying Lived Experiences.
    • As I tried to read about critical theory I felt like I was gazing deeper into the essence of anarchism than I would have if I was reading anarchism itself; it was like anarchism had rounded up its most talented experts to try to really actually explain what it was about but they were still sputtering and totally unable to explain it.
  • Another thing anarchists are really obsessed with is "freedom"; it's a sad and funny fact that you can basically sum up almost all anarchist claims with "freedom will destroy domination". Every time anarchists identify a form of Domination they call the thing that happens in its absence Freedom, and then they often try to take the leap that one kind of Freedom is interchangeable with another and because any kind of Freedom can defeat any kind of Domination surely any two kinds of Freedom will inherently want to link together to defeat Domination. From a far distance it almost looks a little like a very warped counterpart of class analysis where they're trying to say the majority of people in society are Freedoms and they're ruled by a minority of people called Dominations. It makes sense logically: society is often ordered into chunks where a few people initially put down the chunk and decided everything about it (the bourgeoisie, or to anarchists, the mysterious "Them") and then a lot of people come in and inhabit that chunk of using-a-product or social-structure who had no real say in how it was designed. But the model doesn't make any sense materially because there is no real explanation for how society can stay standing when there are so many deliberately-sabotaged bad things about it or what any of it could be expected to change into.
  • The third thing anarchists commonly talk about is "community". In a way, this is the only anarchist value that makes any sense, because it's talking about a material thing that can be observed. But anarchists even have a weird way of thinking about community. They like to think that community inherently contains this Ideal of being "natural" and "untouched", and that whenever a community forms successfully it is a window into logical truth about the universe. Anarchists don't like the idea that physical objects and processes are true statements or that scientists use known models of reality to judge what's accurate about reality. Anarchists like the idea that statements are true only at the moment community forms or regenerates, and if that statement contributes to the social stability and Non-Dominating Freedom of community. This is basically the same as the Kantian concept of "reason" where because logic can be used to describe morality, having positions that are moral is inherently logical in and of itself regardless of whether the way you arrived at it was unconscious or intuitive. Habermas formalized this concept in the theory of communicative rationality, where he tried to state that when two people come to an agreement from a place of empathy, "statement supports Freedom or Emancipation and getting rid of Domination" can be a truth value in a system of logic, and perhaps belongs to the _only_ reasonable system of truth values.
    • There is a gaping problem in this: this model essentially says that when a Social-Philosophical System forms, anything that promotes the stability or growth of that Social-Philosophical System is good. If a group of Trotskyists and some people they sold newspapers to are especially nice to each other, then Trotskyism is true. But if a bunch of particularly bigoted Southern Baptist Christians are all especially nice to each other even as they aren't nice to gay people, then homophobia is true as long as it brings them together. This form of reasoning is fundamentally unable to predict what will actually hurt people in advance, or comprehend the fact that multiple groups of people will form that all believe and want separate things and could violently collide over that. This general kind of problem was a big influence toward me realizing the need for a "meta-Marxism" that would require people to recognize things happening outside their own social group as benchmarks of what is true or false but would allow people to actually predict how other social groups are going to behave and how to make them happy or unify with them if those things are applicable.
  • From everything I have read in both Existentialism and anarchism my working theory of how the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition came to be in modern times is that anarchists quietly slipped into academia and tried to use it to disseminate anarchism in hopes of gradually loosening Liberal-republicanism's grip on society, but every single time they did that their theories got coopted back into Liberal-republicanism and turned from "charcoal-black" to "blue". This doesn't rule out the possibility that Existentialism always existed as soon as modern capitalism did. The alternative theory is that Existentialist theories were primarily based on color revolutions and the belief that they were actually a form of forward progress that could be applied to any republic.
  • I think that in the end, most people who claim to be uninterested in politics or who know nothing about politics are actually anarchists, especially if Existentialism counts as an anarchism. The way Liberal-republicanism really works is that there is only a small slice of society that is actually participating in Liberal-republicanism while most of society just sort of doesn't experience a republic or government or democracy at all. So it naturally generates a lot of people who are forced to believe that the only reasonable theory of politics is one that doesn't even describe politics. This is, of course, how it works in First-World countries. What scares me a little is the thought that maybe the same thing also happens in workers' states — that a few people participate in government but then all the rest of the people don't actually have a good understanding of how Marxism or class processes or anything works and just sort of side with whatever is the most tolerable to exist within, and their day-to-day model of society is something decidedly other than and in contradiction to Marxism. Would that be bad? Would that be good, in that people's judgement of what is actually a good system isn't clouded by the arcane theoretical biases of some particular intra-party faction? Can there be an anarchism of every factional color a republic is? Could there be a crimson anarchism which consists of people living their lives in Bolshevism and seeing the tiniest glimpse into upper-phase communism / post-Bolshevism?
• Einstein's theory of special relativity is useful for understanding almost everything which ever mentions history or time. It would be a surefire way to break people out of mechanical-materialist thinking if they actually understood or cared what it meant.
  • Mathematics in general is taught the wrong way. Most math classes generally try to tell you that equations can only come in the form of a time axis or single dependent variable that leads to everything that happens. However, Einstein was able to show that this is not how time actually works and almost gets things backwards. Einstein showed that all solid objects can be reference frames, and all events simply happen between them, with no particular object or point in space being able to claim it has the canonical account of time. With the discovery of quantum mechanics, it was possible to show that time can be represented as bosons (particles that pass through each other) traveling between fermions (solid particles), such as quarks inside a proton or neutron all interacting together in a circle by constantly exchanging gluons. A single proton upended every scientist's view of time. Every proton or neutron means that time is not a linear process, and every second that happens comes from several physical things interacting together in space to produce a result — which will then be observed by other objects, but only through those other objects bouncing a photon between it and them that not only happens in time but _is_ time. Every real physical process that happens in time is not a function of time `f(t) = a + b`, but some function of multiple things interacting `f(x,y) = z` or `f(x,y,z) = x + yz` where time belongs on the results side.
    • This may sound like splitting hairs if you have never tried to explain what happens to time in a black hole, but it really matters because if you don't understand mathematical equations you don't understand the concept of determinism. Philosophers have talked about "determinism" for a long time, and they still present the same arguments today, but all of them are based on a false concept of what determinism would look like in real life. Real-life determinism is nearly synonymous with the concept of physics equations. When a real-life process is deterministic, it simply means that the way that process operates is known and given an initial condition _which is used to align a mathematical model with the material world_, the particular repeated pattern of objects interacting to create the process can be approximately predicted. The objects are not put into their path by "fate", but by the fact that a particular physical interaction _is what it is_ and _isn't what it isn't_; in a lot of cases, the violation of determinism would literally be magic or the supernatural, it would somewhat literally be Superman spinning the earth and running time backwards because he decided physics doesn't work that way right now and he's going to completely suspend reality. And yet, you'll still have people arguing that "determinism can't predict free will" (not widely accepted now, thankfully) or "we can overcome fascist narratives" (now highly common), although many of these "deterministic narratives" about people's societal rank or power relative to each other contain or are coupled to reasonable Materialist statements people also want to reject. It's less common these days to see people argue "free will" itself than it is to see people argue that all historical accounts and historical events are arbitrary and individuals willing hard enough is enough to change the future.
  • It is possible but not certain that in order to form a theory of quantum gravity scientists will first need to become comfortable with conceptualizing every form of math ever applied to the material world in terms of separate factors interacting through relativity to produce time, or said another way, through _non-linear_ or _relativistic determinism_ rather than through _linear determinism_.
    • The main problem is figuring out at what scale of reality gravity actually happens. Gravity appears to be a distortion of spacetime, distorting the rate at which things interact and evolve. But according to special relativity, spacetime itself shouldn't be a thing that passes or forms constantly anyway because different objects and forces should be interacting at different rates; spacetime should be nonlinear to begin with. Any particular chunk of atoms in a star interacts with other chunks of atoms through gravity, making a star or planet spherical. As fusion and gravity keep going the center of the star gets denser and denser, and sometimes it breaks ordinary spacetime and becomes a black hole. If we throw out linear determinism, that isn't scary, because if we know time is nonlinear then we already know that groups of objects interacting in space can break time making it go too fast or too slow or hardly at all. There doesn't have to be a "moment in time" that time broke and created a black hole. But, did the mass in the center of the star cause gravity in some neat quantum-style packet exchange of mass to gravity to mass? Did gravity form and pull all the mass together because when masses are in a gravitational field they are sent down a certain path toward massive objects? Did a bunch of "gravities" come together and form the event horizon? Is gravity between physical objects somehow _the cause of time happening_? What is the actual relationship between gravity and time? On an ordinary day we know that lunar "time" happens because of gravity; the moon orbits around the earth and it goes through different visual phases as the sun passes across it at different angles, but all of that happens because gravity sent the moon around the earth, leading to that series of events on the moon. It would be ridiculous to suggest that gravity is creating social interactions between people, but where does it stop? Gravity affects big objects leading to time. Gravity might affect very small solid objects like quarks leading to time. When does gravity influence objects and when do interacting objects create gravity? Knowing that basically the whole universe operates on relativity there is likely going to be some point where answer is "yes", "gravity influences objects and objects generate gravity". But what scale does that actually happen at?
  • Dialectical materialism is characterized by the framing that time is not individuals putting in a single dependent variable of their own choices or actions and watching the whole world change around them, but instead, time is the interactiona of several material pieces and their outward shapes or current physical condition. Free will is irrelevant not because it does or doesn't exist, but because the inner thoughts of any particular material object are almost wholly irrelevant when talking about the way time forms from the actual results of a particular object's external behavior when interacted with another object. Dialectical materialism is the description of reality as a series of slices of time in which many things run into each other all at once and generally none of them goes first, but every time a bunch of things run into each other they all change and then the cycle starts over again.
• Whereas dialectical materialism emerges out of the general need to describe what time really is, and historical materialism is a description of the material processes inside historical periods, the behavior of human beings at small scales can be described by a third kind of model called _existential materialism_. Existential materialism is the grounding for a lot of meta-Marxist models.
  • I discovered the concept of existential materialism after reading an Existentialist book (a Lacanian one) that drove me so far up the wall with how disconnected from reality it was that I started saying to myself, _I can definitely disprove so many of the things in this book but I'm going to need a new tool to disprove it_. This book was called _The Excessive Subject_ (Rothenberg 2010), and the entire thing was centered around The Subject and how supposedly the inaccessible and unpredictable nature of individual people was the key to any effort to change society despite the fact it was inherently uncontrollable and the book itself implied it made all political theories and theories of society invalid. This was the first Existentialist book I read and yet it was enough for me to say, _okay, I'm done with this. You can't just go making everything about existences and existentialist individual choices. I'm going to show you how The Subject is an entirely material process. Even when it's choosing things and especially when it's forming a larger society._
  • Existential materialism borrows conceptual vocabulary from quantum mechanics and relativity in order to deal with the problem of no human individual being perfectly predictable by any other. I argue that this is not any special consequence of "subjectivity" or "consciousness" and is actually just a result of special relativity. All objects in the universe can only be perceived by interacting with them, such as through bouncing a photon between two solid objects in time. A photon is not all that different from a ping-pong ball; either one only observes a bit of an object at a time as that object was fractions of a second ago, and you never actually know what the object is like at the exact moment the photon comes back. It's usually something of a deepity to dwell on this very much, because despite the tiny gap in time between the physical noumenon and the optical phenomenon any particular image that our eyes transmit of everyday objects will still be highly accurate to whatever the object is "really" doing. But, this gap can become interesting for large distances like a star that is light-years away where there could effectively be hidden historical events going on that we will never see until years later, or over very small distances below the radius of an atom where the events going on are simply so small that without a bunch of them stacking up they may not interact with enough things to ever be observed; part of the weirdness of quantum particles is actually relativity. Similarly, human beings are mysterious mostly when they don't communicate. Any act of communication makes it clearer what a particular person was doing minutes or days ago even if they continue to act and change immediately after communicating. Every time people communicate or interact it's impossible to observe them without changing them. There is a level on which this is literally the same for people and photons or quarks; this phenomenon of being unable to interact with the universe without changing it is simply because every measurement happens through interactions that happen in time, and also because time is nonlinear and in a way time itself is the act of different things that are all non-canonical reference frames simultaneously taking measurements.
  • Above the level of individuals, existential materialism deals with the "chemistry" of individuals that may belong to particular classes forming into various kinds of Social-Philosophical Systems and how these Social-Philosophical Systems interact or evolve. Each kind of Social-Philosophical System generates different ideology by virtue of its current shape and position within the larger world, sometimes matching its real development into the future and sometimes not matching it.
  • Existential materialism and meta-Marxism in general are intended to be like the leap from classical Newtonian physics down to quantum mechanics — like the crude approximations of the Marxist method are being removed, and historical materialism is being quantized.
  • I hope that one day existential materialism can graduate from philosophy to straight mathematics such that even if it's not quite complete or perfectly accurate it might still be remembered as fondly as maybe the early mathematical models of atoms that we don't use any more.
• So. One of my favorite console-style video games is _Deltarune_. I promise this is relevant. Deltarune is broadly a game about video game characters realizing they are in a fabricated world ruled by a prophecy — a linear train of events that are going to happen, including one that is very bad. In Deltarune chapter 4, a character called Gerson who is a historian (!) suggests that in the end all the heroes need to do to overcome "the final tragedy" is to have enough hope. Of course, the thing he doesn't address is that one of the major themes of the game so far is the conflict between the characters in the game world and the player, who is framed as a kind of all-powerful entity that has the potential to bring the characters a lot of pain and is frightening enough they will eventually have to "banish the Angel's heaven". Gerson has given the heroes terrible advice because no matter how much they "reject narratives", with just that much they can't simply will away the all-powerful entity that is still materially there and its ability to make its own decisions and attack the people that are important to them. This is about where we are in the United States right now — or were in 2015 when the game started development up to now when it's half released. All our movements for anything seem to be based on wishful thinking and _hoping_ that material forces with the power to destroy us will go away.
• Settler-colonialism is a real phenomenon and a genuine problem but is really badly named. The original problem underlying all discussions of colonialism — stick with me here, this paragraph isn't going where you might think it's going despite what it will sound like at first — is that human beings are not static things and are always in contradiction, always eating and occupying space. There is a very naïve view of the world that circulates within blue and black anarchisms that basically human populations do not actually reproduce and multiply or experience history at unequal rates and whenever something like gentrification or Wal-Mart choking out a section of stores happens it must be because some specific individual deliberately decided to depart from cosmic fairness and be unfair. All of real-world human society, fair and unfair, sits on top of a process of chunk competition where every individual exists and multiplies in mutual exclusion to every other individual. Sometimes this process is approximately benign, like when thousands of people apply for a job and only one gets it so the other thousand have to go compete for another job. Sometimes this process becomes malignant, like when there is a population of early United States colonists and a tribal population. Neither population is static; they are always changing at every moment. Both populations reproduce, make use of land, have philosophies, and practice them to realize a particular populational structure. But one of the major differences between them is the United States colony reproduces rather aggressively. Plot of land, house of colonists, offspring, second plot of land, new house of colonists, offspring. Why exactly the population dynamics work like that would be a very long discussion into existential materialism and historical materialism and existing Marxist-Leninist theory on modes of production. But anyway, all the colonists expand out to fill large areas of land as they turn over new generations and expand to fill even more land as they want to build industries like mines. The process of a population reproducing itself and the process of a population realizing its preferred sociophilosophy and internal structure are tightly connected; realizing agrarian society or realizing slavery or realizing capitalism happen during populational reproduction as much as they happen at any other time. What this ultimately means is that when the population as a whole crosses over into attacking the tribal population to take additional land, no particular individual necessarily made that decision and caused the rest of the population to do it. All the individuals took actions that added up into that event but they took them individually and separately. So, what is the actual significance of all that for movements? _The basic expansion of a population over another population is something that can only be controlled if people understand the reproduction and historical development of the population and exactly how that otherwise uncontained process can be altered and controlled._ United States people famously have no understanding of historical materialism, and these days keep acting like there is such a thing as "historical existentialism" where tomorrow is whatever an isolated individual spontaneously decides it is. They also are increasingly averse to the entire concept of government. The more Existentialist books get written the more it feels like everyone is trying really hard to call any method of society being unified or under any kind of unified plan "totalitarianism". So, the defeat of the Soviet Union and all Marxisms that don't collapse into Deng Xiaoping Thought is part of the problem that stands between empire and defeating "settler-colonialism" whatever word it is going to be called. Israel's unnecessary aggression and destruction of Palestinian settlements is real but almost everyone in North America who is currently trying to stop it is woefully unprepared to actually understand the causal mechanisms of imperialism and exactly how imperialism exponentially multiplies and connects itself faster than anything that is not imperialism and easily becomes too powerful to stop. Every Existentialist always arrives several steps too late and attacks the symptoms rather than cutting off the actual root processes.
  • The history of the United States is rather different from the history of Israel. Israel was actively laid out and conceptualized in a way that the United States wasn't; it's nearly fair to call Israel a conspiracy. People did not get to Israel by accident, whether two towns inside Spain "accidentally" collide or not. The relationship between United States frontier wars and Israel is that _the United States' failure to understand empire inside itself feeds into its failure to understand empire in Israel_.
  • I spent most of that first bullet simply explaining chunk competition. Here's what that has to do with the concept of "settler-colonialism". Settler-colonialism is when a pre-existing locus of empire plants a chunk of people into an area in hopes their presence will cause them to realize a State over the top of themselves, put a border around themselves, and create a stable territory which can be added to or linked to the empire. The empire weaponizes existence; it uses the mere existence of human beings and their tendency to chunk-compete with populations around them in order to exist as its weapon. That's the key. Since about 1700 we live in an age where empires exist on so many levels above normal human existence it's crazy and a great number of people aren't aware of the actual power empires wield. If capitalists are tiny empires they literally create human settlements and socially-linked cultural communities out of nothing while softly banning anybody else from creating communities in any way that aren't owned by specific people to make money on their existence, and asserting they did humanity a service because they are the only people who can create communities. Capitalists occupy the position of building all towns and physical buildings and cultural activities and defining what culture is, and once they've driven out anybody else who could create towns or create culture they weaponize that position to try to degrade everyone else for 'not being able to build society without them', and attempt to exact loyalty from the people that live in their micro-colonies to support causes the capitalist personally wants them to such as crushing the proletariat and supporting wars against countries the capitalist personally doesn't like. If people rebel against that they can pull out capital entirely and take away all a town's jobs like they did to Detroit. In some senses, though only very vague ones, Israel is a macrocosm of what capitalists do every day. Capitalists put down a chunk of people and try to force whole cities or countries to obey them like imperial weapons for crushing other countries. So... settler-colonialism is misnamed because both words are literally just describing the default background structure of modern capitalism and of all modern industrial societies at every moment including the un-transitioned half of China and North Korea, instead of being just a unique event that happens one day where Zionists attack Palestine for the hell of it. To be clear, _it is bad and frightening_ that societies are structured that way, and the problem is that not enough people are aware they are.
    • In general, the basic reason a lot of people believe in Idealism is that when a ring of bourgeoisie takes over Kansas or Russia or some empty area and decides it will own all the future communities of people that are created there for profit, the Ideals of that ring of bourgeoisie become mandatory to believe or an entire physical community and lineage dies. This observation has a powerful hold on people, and they start to subconsciously believe that if only they could be in the designated class of founders then they would be able to dictate everything that was real instead. Idealism itself is colonial, and so many anarchists, Gramscians, and "narrative rejectors" absolutely do not understand this nor the consequences of it.
    • To be perfectly honest a lot of Gramscianism itself is unknowingly colonial even when it's "the good stuff", just as a consequence of this. This is connected to it emerging in the United States or Europe, and it probably would not be _as bad_ in somewhere like Algeria. Anyone who thinks filling up bourgeois slots can "save democracy" is The Farmer that thinks human beings exist to be bred in chunks by The Farmers and consumed, and _Animal Farm_ is backhandedly accurate to exactly why workers' states _are_ a good idea.
  • The power of Bolshevism to unite chunks of people into a single country is related to the power of Marxism to stop a population's uncontrolled expansion.

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[*SR] 'Lenin says something very tellng in _State and Revolution_, echoed by Mao, which is that when an era of socialism is created they think that means that individuals will still be partly in competition in a way'  - check Lenin, retrieve Mao

[*LV] retrieve Trotsky ministries incident

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