9k:RD/ antiwar movements & Idealism (Q61,20)
Main entry
- Undertale mirrors U.S. antiwar movements
Vietnam War
Undertale mirrors U.S. antiwar movements
/ Undertale is the way it is because of the shape of United States antiwar movements -> so, I have a weird history with movements and being on the total fringes of them for most of my life when they would ripple out and hit me but I would only really get them secondhand. around 2014-2015 I got hit by the ripples of BLM. morality was everywhere. Existentialism was everywhere, and this concept that people will automatically flip over and change their minds if you only shout individuals individuals human rights identities individuals that is an individual you are an individual identity identity people like each other because they are different enough. in the beginning when I was literally a right-Libertarian that made some kind of sense to me, but as soon as I started actually not being a conservative all of it increasingly made less and less sense until I was like, where did any of this even come from and how does anyone even think it's correct? I read non-Marxist texts like I was supposed to and none of them made any sense, so I just kept digging and digging and digging on every single lead I could find anywhere to try to figure out where any of this philosophy coherently originated from whether people were creating it consciously or not. most of my research focused only on the past decade and how people could derive ideologies from scratch.
most recently, I realized that past United States antiwar movements had already been this. past large-scale movements in the United States had had the shape of anarchist Idealism, and not at all the shape of Marxism. finally, the outpouring of works like Undertale and Steven Universe started to make sense. the exact way they were portraying the notion of breaking up war was based on things like the Vietnam War period, in which despite the war being against Communism it wasn't actually Communists trying to stop it. and I'm not just saying the obvious fact of "a Marxist movement isn't mostly made of Marxist theorists", what I'm saying is, "it's as if the whole entire movement was thoroughly not Marxist and anarchists were forming the theorist layer and trying to form the party-nation". nobody will ever be able to do historical materialism again if we don't understand workers' movements as plural bodies of people with different colors of theorists on top that realize different kinds of countries. incidentally yeah I think Trotsky accidentally set the whole world back purely by claiming workers didn't really belong to plural countries or plural workers' states. come on, Trotsky, every object is plural.
U.S. antiwar movements have always been Idealist
/ United States antiwar movements have historically always been Idealist / Marxist Jake believes Leninism is forming a Materialist social-democratic party, filtering it into a party-nation, and somehow filling it with workers. By Jake's definition, no anti-war movement in the United States has ever been a Marxist movement -> this really struck me when reading a book that was accidentally about the Vietnam War. the entire framing of the thing for normal people (and by that I do mean the bourgeoisie that represent them) was morality and basically the notion of war being a social construct and a thing that every individual has to choose to drop or sustain some kind of attack. there's not really any Marxism in there; that could quite easily devolve into a nationality of anarchists attacking a nationality of Liberal-republicans just for being part of the wrong nationality and not immediately assimilating into anarchism. and when you think of things this way, that previous antiwar movements in the United States are United States antiwar movements, you start to really see how "the left we have" being "non-Marxist" is a lot more than a color swatch, and in practice means that when United States people practice "revolutionary defeatism" the population is pursuing a totally different transition out of capitalism than what any Marxist strategy looks like assuming it pursues one at all. if you want people to work with "the left we have" you have to get comfortable with the concept of a charcoal transition and that you might have to toss every bit of your Marxist theory out the window and learn a big stack of anarchist or Existentialist theory, that the United States might get all the way through transition to a new system before Marxism ever begins to apply.
would I do that? well. I hate it. I have no other choice. I am incapable of doing it practically. that question is one big contradiction. so my answer is, I will analyze every single other ideology through Marxism, but as itself rather than a confused Marxism that explains itself wrong. Trotskyism isn't secretly mainstream Marxism-Leninism, it's Trotskyism. anarchism isn't secretly Bolshevism, it's anarchism. and a Marxist analysis of anarchism is something very different than a Marxist analysis of Marxism pretending to be anarchism. I am a meta-Marxist. if I have to use Marxism to explain how to succeed at totally non-Marxist ideologies that never turn into Marxism then I will. but I won't lie to you that Western Marxism or anarchism "must" be effective just because everyone's doing them and an ideology that's popular "must" be a winning one. I will judge the effectiveness of ideologies based on history. currently it's looking pretty bad for anarchism and bizarrely good for Deng Xiaoping Thought. I have been wracking my brain as to why that latter trend exists, and I think I half have an answer? but the answer only makes the outlook even worse for anarchism. anarchism is going to have to molecularize or it will never win.
Michael Harrington founded the DSA
/ Michael Harrington founded the Democratic Socialists of America to try to get the United States and Vietnam to negotiate an end to the war and prevent an anti-war movement from seriously disrupting the United States [1]
Idealism
Bobbie makes wars stop
/ War stops because Bobbie said so / International war stops because Bob Stills alone decided who would become president in the election and the president decided millions of people would stop contributing to and earning money from industries that support imperialist war / International war stops because Elijah alone decided what the overall culture and behavior of an entire early-United-States colony would be, overwriting the individual behavior of thousands of other settlers
Horton Hears a Who + Undertale = Bobbie makes wars stop
- How can Elijah stop colonialism? / Elijah was born on the early United States frontier, and has somehow realized that what the United States is doing is morally wrong. How can Elijah, or whatever group of people he can realistically manage to assemble as his allies, stop colonialism? / (9k)
- Marxism is not practical in the United States because it is not a viable way to solve the United States' most pressing problem of Native American tribes defeating the United States colonies and winning self-determination 150-200 years ago; Marxism is not well suited to tribal populations because it speaks of transitions in production structures and collecting new emerging classes to carry a revolution and tribal populations do not undergo these kinds of changes nor, depending, begin with the kinds of material resources which would carry an operation like the Soviet Union defending itself against Europe with a modern military in World War II / (9k)
moral vanguard
(critical theory) -> the motif of a collection of people, probably not very big, that is specifically the collection of the most moral individuals in the region who are claimed to move history and carry out transitions because they are the most moral.
this motif.... it should make me mad but it's actually very funny to me. it is highly nonsensical on the inside, but the outward shape of it is so bizarrely similar to statements in Marxism-Leninism that I am possessed to imagine it as if it was some weird alternate-dimension parallel to Communism which outright spawns vanguard parties and workers' states all based in moral consciousness as opposed to class consciousness
Undertale as Marxist narrative
- Undertale and North Korea / the Underground is basically North Korea / Communist phoenixes (
RedactedTale AU) -> the motif of comparing the Undertale setting to honest models of North Korea (not the pro-capitalist or pro-Tory ones) and pointing out that in some ways making this game was the only way to make United States people understand Third-World countries. - Undertale is evidence people wish Bolshevism was possible / The great popularity of Undertale is evidence First-World people wish Bolshevism was possible although nobody has any idea how or if it is -> there's no contradiction in saying both the statements "Undertale is based on Idealist movements" and "you write something like Undertale when people wish Bolshevism was possible but nobody has any idea if it is".
this one eats at me. it's so hard to not just shout from the rooftops "Undertale is a narrative about forming a society that holds all people instead of an empire and the material conditions resemble North Korea and that logically leads to Bolshevism". but I know people will think I'm weird. so... when I get "Auldernet" finished in some capacity. only then. - "the underground" as Communist party (Undertale-Deltarune) / "the underground" as Bolshevik party (Undertale) / Dess's allies as underground Communist organization (Deltarune) / the underground was to be a mere skeleton apparatus (Martov, Menshevik ally) [2] / the striving to break with the old underground and embark upon open and public ... activity (Bogdanov, Bolshevik ally) -> god, after spending a day thinking hard about Undertale and Deltarune worldbuilding these sentences read so weirdly. I am 97% sure this was not intentional symbolism within Undertale, and yet once you see it you can't unsee it. Undertale and Deltarune accidentally copying Communist imagery from Umineko is the gift that keeps on giving.
Deltarune is a pro-Trotskyist narrative
/ (9k) -> I know this sounds completely off the wall but I can explain.
Deltarune expands on the concepts in Undertale of staying inside the barrier or breaking the barrier. each of the Dark Worlds presents a false choice that you should stay inside them instead of breaking out and thus destroying them, and in Chapter 5, there is an interesting new theme brought up that Dark Worlds are in competition with each other for existence because a limited number can exist. and, well... I discovered that if you drop "Stalin" and "Trotsky" into Undertale's narrative of a society of monsters sealed inside a barrier that it is hilarious how well that reading actually fits across both Undertale and Deltarune, especially as Deltarune goes on and develops everything more and more. realistically Dark Worlds loosely represent the way capitalism has trapped everyone in competing islands that perceive reality separately and the solution — delivered by Ralsei at the beginning, not something I made up — is to close all the Dark Worlds and get rid of that competition between different distorted fantasies because reality (the world, the universe) is the only thing shared by everybody without inherent competition.
I had this AU where 'Undertale is an unrealistic fantasy because feudalism ended and there's Communism in real life over only half the world', and I thought it was a funny little twisting of the narratives that subjectively improved them. I thought saying there was Marxism in Deltarune was only a funny joke. But then... like, all the imagery from Deltarune I was using to make that 'point' weirdly turned out to be used in a way actually not too different from what I was doing, I just made all the patterns a bit more explicit through a 'historical example' while Deltarune chose to be more vague and poetic. and then I was like. hey wait. is Deltarune actually Trotskyist. what the. the only situation in which you'd expect this to be true is if Trotskyism is correct. there's like no other way. Toby is exactly from the group of people that would come up with all the most boring bourgeois interpretations of stories (not that he's bad at conveying or illustrating those interpretations in a way interesting enough to hide that fact) so there's no way he'd think of it if it wasn't true. a "perfect" Marxism will be reached by everybody that cares about reality. there are only certain groups of people that think of imperfect Marxisms, while everyone else blocks Marxism out of their mind. ('Stalinism is a distortion of reality, but it's my distortion,!') and I mean. my research dragged me into Trotskyism with all its might the day before, so I'm not surprised, but I am very not ready for this.
Deltarune and meta-Marxism
- Sociality is but a dream / The Roaring is comparable to how all relationships seem terribly fragile and temporary while isolation seems more likely or eternal
Deltarune and anticommunism
machine heart
(Daoism) [3] -> this is some prime pre-capitalist BS that, without much exaggeration, illustrates what's wrong with the world. (the original story, not so much the video.)
the gardener rejects an early capitalist's fancy irrigation equipment.
(I imagined a sprinkler, but at that time I'm guessing it was a bit more like an irrigation canal? anyway it's a machine that can be installed over a farm field by a few people, I'm not sure by one person but I'm guessing by less than 50.)he treats this like it's really profound. then Confucius says that if his ideas can't be applied to the real world to change it they aren't achieving anything. which is a much better lesson. this makes me seriously wonder if this fable was actually being spread around by the early CPC. I need to investigate that.
so, the video I found takes in that story and then it concludes... it was good for the man to reject early capitalism coming to China and drive the capitalists out. no, that's not good. as for that particular man who knows — maybe he'd be fine — but this story is spread around like a general pattern applying to a lot of people. and like, if everybody does this you get a China where everybody hates cities, and when people hate cities they turn into nazis. Heidegger — ranted about modern technology making the world worse, nazi ally, Nazi party shortly showed up to defend all the people who existed before capitalism and say those people should keep ruling it. Dugin — turned against Stalin and the pain of industrialization in Russia, ranted about technology-adjacent things, became a nazi, urged Russia toward invading Ukraine. United States — has farm capitalists rather than peasants, they rant about cities, they've been turning into nazis. do you see the problem now?
if you click up any video commenting on Deltarune it's so frustrating. Deltarune has this wonderful pile of Materialist themes and accidentally-Communist images, but everyone always pulls the worst interpretations out of them and gets these like very specifically, unnecessarily specific bourgeois narratives out of it and I'm like, no!! hitting my fist on the table, why is this always the way people read it where is your imagination
like I'm going to be honest, I don't need everyone reading Deltarune as Communism. that's my thing, and I used to believe it was impossible to get a Marxist reading out of Deltarune back when Chapter 2 released. so. I'd take a weirdly elaborate theory about how Rudy is the Knight and what somebody suddenly became convinced one day the real-life symbolism of that was. I'd take a reading of Deltarune purely as metafiction where games are like an elaborate chess match between the player and Gaster or Noelle and Gaster or whoever. I'd take anything that somehow wasn't... this.
that said. the end of the video where the musician found a way to "glitch" or "corrupt" an erhu was wonderful. it had basically nothing to do with the Daoist parable, and that made it actually fine- machine heart (Daoism) -> it's not an irrigation canal, it's a well pump! that makes the story even funnier. like, gosh, even some wealthier peasants had well pumps I think. not even having a water pump would be rather unusual. although if I remember right it seems like some villages in Africa didn't have them into the 2000s. I think it's an urbanization thing that happens as you go toward the very first cities or large towns. a large enough village will have a water pump, but maybe some of the most basic peasants that exist first won't have one. gosh I never thought I would get deeply fascinated by the historical materialism of well pumps. here we are.
Related
Susie's dialectic
(Deltarune) / Edgeworth's dialectic / White Diamond's dialectic (Steven Universe) / (9k)
Ideologies or fields
- Fy / fantasy
- Fy / anti-imperialist fables
- UTDR / Undertale
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[9k] antiwar movements & Idealism - Q61,20;6120 ; Undertale mirrors U.S. antiwar , US anti-war movements , ... have always been Idealist ; undertale as Marxist , Communist , Trotskyist narrative