User:RD/9k/Against Avakianism (Q618)

Main entry

618. 618Against Avakianism [1]

Motifs or claims

618. freedom (absorption of all necessity applying inside society into theories of society) / The realm of freedom can blossom forth only with necessity as its basis (Marx) -> ah. freedom as the application of "Hyper-Materialism". freedom from Existentialism. sounds pretty good honestly.
618. The resolution of social contradictions is a kind of inevitability; the action of necessity inside contradictions produces particular results under particular conditions unless stopped -> this sounds like a form of determinism to me. I am not sure why this book is against determinism and thinks just bringing up 'determinism' is an insult when necessity and determinism should functionally be the same thing.
618. Whether historical events are ethically justified is irrelevant to the predictive study of what historical events will happen (Ajith) -> so. there are particular reasons these things get smuggled in when talking about the content of non-Marxist movements, and when talking about movement strategy. the purpose of invoking ethics is usually something like, assembling raw crowds of people as the basic material for movements. this comes from the difficulties of getting anyone assembled in First World countries at all when they tend to abolish the proletariat and convert all businesses into as small of units as possible owned in great quantities by the largest remote inaccessible capitalists — a sea of tiny businesses that have all been hollowed out and skilled workers thrown into them in service of the mega-capitalists as capitalism smashes all tiny businesses "inevitably". it's all very colonial in the driest mathematical sense of 'a few people aggressively take over a space either before or while it's inhabited (colonizing: chunk competition) and then try to own and profit off every bit of human activity inside it so that the whole concept of community itself is a cash crop (colonizing: exploitation of a population)'. in that sense, separate from ethics, it is very appealing to try to cast North American society for example as having a 'fundamentally colonial' structure, because on a literal level the existence of the bourgeoisie period rests a lot more on exploiting the existence of towns and social activities and "communities" than exploiting any kind of conventional business territory composed of workers. in this environment anarchist concepts of the bourgeoisie being a totally arbitrary creation that spontaneously took over and started slurping everything up are only so removed from reality, so it's hard to trivially dismiss them when basically, all the people who would be capable of forming a "Left" at all are going to be predisposed toward these concepts, and as J. Moufawad-Paul says, you shouldn't refuse to engage with or analyze concepts just because they belong to another ideology. the actual mass of people that makes up a movement is rarely armed with high-quality Materialist theory. you have to actually look at what theory they're using, such as Menshevism in the Russian Empire, or in this case anarchism, and then bend that popular movement into turning into a Marxist movement.
     the general concept makes a lot of sense to me, I'm just at a bit of a loss as to how to complete that in real life when anarchism is so blatantly anticommunist in a way classical Menshevism wasn't. I mean, I'm doing my best, by trying to lay out violet Marxism and play up its ability to analyze and perfect any ideology or speak in terms of fine-scale structures 'transforming in reactions' instead of speaking of 'republics' or 'dialectics' so people from different anarchisms and Marxisms can believe that the Materialist foundations they each came up with have nothing to do with Stalin even if that isn't actually true and ultimately they're converging to the same place.
618. postist trend (Maoism onto unknown philosophy) [2] -> what is a postist trend???

Motifs or claims (Avakian)

618. absolute determinism / the philosophically unsound conception of 'inevitability' (Avakian) / Stalin's mechanical views (?) (Ajith) -> I think these two authors are just talking past each other, actually. they both seem to have very similar opinions about absolute determinism — inevitability exists in a form that isn't "mechanical" — except that one of them got upset because the other one misread Marx. putting that aside, their interpretations of current happenings are basically the same.
618. freedom (lack of necessity; Avakian) -> so, Maoists think this "definition in Marx" is the wrong definition of Marx. apparently. but they may be right.
     I'll give this.... the strawberry swatch. in substance, it sounds like Yaroshenko trying to say that society is fully, utterly under control of itself just because a Marxist party exists. so, Avakian won back necessity from Yaroshenko, after Marx did not say that and Mao did not have to fix it.
618. user error in Marx / pointing out a thing Marx 'unfortunately missed' because the author missed it and Marx did not / an example of how Avakianism's claim to the new is built on critiquing the creations of its own vulgarisation [3] -> ouch. when I see things like this I can only hope I haven't done them. but, no matter what, I have one remaining trick: flood violet Marxism with violet by inviting the critics in. if meta-Marxism remains meta and retains the ability to look back on itself, it can't go wrong, despite everything.
618. The Kuomintang is okay but you can't align yourself with the First World countries against other imperialists -> well that's a new one on me. I've heard of people trying to claim that a united front inside a country is bad thanks to Trotsky but I'd never heard of this one. this is just strange because yeah, as they point out, it is the same kind of contradiction. in neither case do you have a choice of good 'swatches', so the best outcome is to try to get the bad swatches to defeat each other.

Related

618. Social formations can be classified according to their level of moral-practical consciousness (Habermas) -> rejected by Engels.
618. Within class society, each step forward brings a step back / As long as civilization is founded on the exploitation of one class by another class, each step forward in production and emancipation of one class is a step backwards in the position of an oppressed class (Engels) [4]

Ideologies or fields

• (none)