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9k:RD/ Marxism already is meta-Leninism (Q41,17)

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Revision as of 12:19, 29 August 2026 by Reversedragon (talk | contribs) (a very French justification / Errors)

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  1. Marxism already is meta-Leninism (Stalin 1910) / Dialectical materialism is not only a theory of Stalinism (era of socialism, sense Stalin; socialist transition, Stalin; Material System of Bolshevism, Stalin; crimson socialism; apparent era of socialism) / (9k)
  2. Marxism already is meta-Leninism (Althusser 1978) / Marxism is not an "ideology" with a dialectic between Marxist ideology and Marxist science / Marxism (all Marxist or Leninist theory) is not defined by practical Communist struggle, but by the theory that studies how to keep it from disintegrating / (9k)
  3. Marx was actually a meta-Marxist / Marx believed in meta-Marxism, not in Marxism or Leninism / Engels was actually a meta-Marxist / (9k)
  4. Marxism must become meta-Leninism (Althusser 1965)

Was Stalin doing meta-Marxism?

  1. Marxism already is meta-Leninism (Stalin 1910) / Dialectical materialism is not only a theory of Stalinism (era of socialism, sense Stalin; socialist transition, Stalin; Material System of Bolshevism, Stalin; crimson socialism; apparent era of socialism) / (9k) ->
    Stalin says dialectical materialism 'is not only the theory of socialism'. by socialism he almost certainly means the realization of Bolshevism, because that's what they did post-1910, and he brings up the dictatorship-of-the-proletariat multiple times, suggesting this is the only real way forward. but you can already see the contradiction here. he says dialectical materialism isn't only a theory of how to realize Bolshevism, but he dismantles any possibility of realizing anarchism (at length, granted. not saying he did a bad job) and gives what sounds like a dismissal of Deng Xiaoping Thought being socialism, as well as strongly implying that if you aren't realizing Bolshevism you aren't a revolutionary. doesn't that mean dialectical materialism is only the theory of socialism? he seems to be saying that you're only allowed to realize mainstream Marxism-Leninism or you're a risk to the Soviet Union, possibly but not certainly an enemy.
    I'm not really trying to defend early Trotskyism here because in practice they did nothing but crush socialism[error 1], but as for anarchism and Deng Xiaoping Thought, those are basically the only progressive movements still alive today. one of them trying to act like reformism is the best thing since sliced bread and everything gets better as long as everybody does it, one of them becoming the only form of workers' state that survives for a whole century and the only real way to have a Second World[error 2] that chains multiple countries together like you really need if you want to defend an era of socialism[error 2]. the power of First World countries to all chain together and crush a specific country was greatly underestimated, and these strawberry compromises basically became mandatory just to try to buy enough time to chain countries together without getting pulverized first. it's like.... in the 1920s they thought the proletariat exists but in reality you have to successfully join populations together as nationalities before you have a proletariat and don't have to rely on hiding a herd of cats behind the bourgeoisie. or something.
    it's false when Marx says it because he couldn't predict Trotskyism[error 3] and it's false when Stalin says it because he couldn't predict Deng Xiaoping Thought. but both of these Marxisms exist and attempt to organize workers or integrated Third World populations. you need violet Marxism to properly understand that multiple countable instances of Marxism with different inner workings exist and they develop in different ways but you still need them to work together[error 4] because them getting divided from each other while groups of Liberal-republican countries or mountains of capital can still unite is fatal.
  2. Marxism already is meta-Leninism (Althusser 1978) / Marxism is not an "ideology" with a dialectic between Marxist ideology and Marxist science / Marxism (all Marxist or Leninist theory) is not defined by practical Communist struggle, but by the theory that studies how to keep it from disintegrating / (9k) ->
    see, when I first found out about Marxism this is what I believed. then I learned that Trotskyism existed, and read in depth about why people believed it and clung to it, and I was like. huh. I guess what people always assumed about Marxism-Leninism itself being a science just isn't correct, given that individual parties and rival Marxist factions inevitably contain their own party programs which are ideology. at a certain point Leninism stood up and took the place of Marxism, and it undermined anyone doing Marxism as a science[error 5] that would be able to see outside all ideologies including potential Marxist errors solely to material processes governing movements, transitions, and so forth. so we really have to start over and separate meta-Marxism (violet Marxism) from Leninism (crimson Marxism, orange Marxism, mauve Marxism if that's its own thing) so we can examine the material processes of country development inside each Leninism/Bolshevism.
    as for Althusser.... I think what he's trying to do is fold Marxism inside Leninism?? he's saying that Marxism is the simulation of real movements acting on the ground ("practical theory"), but that would be Leninism. then he says that analysis and party programs are separate things ("science versus ideology and philosophy") so that Marxist theory can take the simulated Leninism and correct the real Leninism. but he says a couple of things that make me think he doesn't separate Marxism and Leninism. which logically should make any party he's part of vulnerable to sectarian fracturing, because thinking that simulations of Leninism can go back and correct Leninism without the Leninism on the ground just one day saying "yeah, no, I'm going to go get my own separate simulations, bye" is what Trotskyism does, and it keeps pointlessly[error 6] attacking other Marxisms and splitting.
  3. What I did was put together a little justification, very French, in a good little rationalism ... to the rights of Marxism to present itself as a science (Althusser, 1978) / Je vois clair comme le jour que ce que j'ai fait voilà quinze ans, c'a été de fabriquer une petite justification bien française, dans un bon petit rationalisme nourri de quelque références [...] à la prétention du marxisme (le matérialisme historique) à se donner comme science (Althusser) [1] ->
    I don't speak French but I've got a translation box and a dictionary, lol. what this quote sounds like to me is Althusser is noticing that traditional French rationalism by itself is not an appropriate method for examining Leninist parties? Bien française seems to suggest "very French", "these are almost uniquely French errors". [2] I genuinely don't know enough French to tell whether this is the adjective "good" or the adverb "very" but honestly... neither one would change the meaning of the sentence much, because even putting the word "French" in there really suggests that it is identifying types of errors and all the modifiers to that word are about the same idea. currently, I would find this believable as the intended meaning because other Western-Marxists like Lukács will sometimes eventually realize that there's some kind of important difference between mechanical materialism and dialectical materialism.
  4. Marx was actually a meta-Marxist / Marx believed in meta-Marxism, not in Marxism or Leninism / Engels was actually a meta-Marxist / (9k) -> I floated this one once not necessarily standing by it; Althusser also effectively said it. I'm pinning the blame on Althusser because he actually believed it somewhat seriously despite not having a very good formulation of what meta-Marxism is.
  5. Marx was actually a meta-Marxist / (9k) -> this.... may be technically true?? it's definitely a superficial artifact of word definitions in the 2020s more than a real historical event that happened back when in which, say, there was a real group of meta-socialists and then Lenin somehow corrupted what they were trying to communicate to create Marxism. no, the continuity between Marx and Lenin is fairly clear, as well as between Marx and Trotsky circa 1925 (though not in 1900). it should be logically apparent that if Marx has meta-Marxism then Trotsky has meta-Marxism.
    it seems like what really happened is dialectical materialism is supposed to contain meta-Marxism as I defined it, but Stalin was not properly using dialectical materialism, so he created a crimson Materialism that was not really Marxism and tried to redefine it as Marxism. so the weird result is that I had to define meta-Marxism because a great number of Marxists today are not using Marxism, and Marx became a meta-Marxist. is that the truth? well, I think there is a false proposition buried somewhere in there but in the end, that way of thinking is minimally harmful if you actually recognize that meta-Marxism is part of Marxism itself and is just a very important part that Stalin forgot. I think I will continue to loosely separate meta-Marxism and Marxism/Leninism just to make it totally inescapable which socialisms are actually Marxism. but Marxism really is meta-Stalinism if and only if you've done it correctly and not completely forgotten part of it.
  6. Marxism requires dialectical materialism / Marxism as a mere set of claims without its method of dialectical materialism is not Marxism / (9k) -> ... Marxism has to produce actual change to be meaningful, or to put it another way it should produce a living, effective party when that is historically appropriate. and to do that the party needs dialectical materialism. ...
  7. Dialectical materialism always evolves / Dialectical materialism cannot produce a single, final set of invariant conclusions to memorize; this is not to imply that the visible universe as a whole has parts that can never be understood, but it is to imply that as all material objects interact and change, new additional or updated facts are always being added / (9k)
  8. Marxism already is meta-Leninism (Stalin 1910) / Stalin can show anarchism to be incoherent because when he applies dialectical materialism, it is not only a theory of Stalinist states -> this one has a weirdly complicated truth value. it's false because Stalin claims to be applying dialectical materialism and then he isn't, but if he was, it would be true. it's backhandedly true, but it's also somehow one level worse than that, reaching some third level of irony.
    backhandedly true: is true as written on the other half of a contradiction although the person doesn't want it to be true. statements by capitalists about workers often end up true in this kind of way.
    this: could be true on the other half of a contradiction (Trotskyism) although the person doesn't want it to be true, because the other half of the contradiction has more information and isn't applying a method wrong. what do you even call that? rubber-and-glue true? it bounces off Trotsky and sticks to Stalin? going to have to think about this one for a while.
  9. Marxism already is meta-Leninism (Althusser 1978) / Marxism (all Marxist or Leninist theory) is not an "ideology" defined by practical Communist struggle with a dialectic between Marxist ideology and Marxist science, but is more defined by the theory that studies how to keep it from disintegrating -> this is actually true. Stalin messed everything up but this one was true until he tried to demonstrate it.

Related

  1. Anarchism or Socialism? (Stalin 1906) / (9k) -> book in which Stalin attempts to explain dialectical materialism.
  2. France and Germany together (1847) / The workers' revolutions in France and Germany will not be independent, but will build off each other (Marx 1847) / (9k)

Ideologies or fields

  1. pronounced Stem / natural philosophy
  2. pronounced M.N. / natural philosophy of societies
  3. pronounced M-L / Stalinism as meta-Marxism
  4. pronounced Fourth / Trotskyism
  5. pronounced West / Althusser [revisionism color]
  6. pronounced West / Althusser [precision color]

Errors

  1. ↑ "Trotskyists did nothing but crush socialism": this is highly debatable. The worst accusation you can make about early Trotskyism was that it was indeed trying to realize its own orange socialism over the top of red socialism with no regard to whether red socialism was valuable or worth preserving. The Left Opposition was highly dedicated to organizing people together to defend orange socialism and preventing Stalin, the bureaucrats, or any national bourgeoisie that might exist from destroying it, as well as to maintaining a Communist International until the defeat of capitalism — exactly as Stalin did not do.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 By all reasonable definitions, if a country has Khruschevism-Dengism-Juche or any other part of that continuum of strawberry socialisms it is not a part of the "Second World". Dengism is a stationary system that gates Third-World populations away from a wider global capitalism but does not contribute to creating or further transforming nationalized property and offers no protection to socialist transition.
  3. ↑ "Marx did not predict Trotskyism": Trotskyists will really fight you on this one. Their argument is that while Marx didn't necessarily foresee the clash between Stalin and Trotsky's factions as two different apparent forms of Marxism, Marx actually did foresee the Fourth International and orange socialism themselves, and present a goal that highly resembled them: a deep-cutting process of permanent revolution that goes all the way through a country's upper classes and through to other countries at least until multiple countries as separate as France and Germany are safe from reversion. (While it's worth noting the 'nations' of the USSR were already tangled together and were not really as separate as France and Germany.) There's an argument to be made that the entire process of cutting through First World capitalism or global capitalism being a single large revolution is implicit in this.
  4. ↑ "You need them to work together": no you don't. You need multiple instances of Trotskyism to join back together but you don't need parties that refuse to stop being captured by "friendly negotiators" that actually want to reinstate initial class rule. Sometimes it's hard to properly pull those people away from the workers but Marx gives some choice quotes on how important that is. He basically says that if you get the workers' state set down you fight them all.
  5. ↑ "It undermined anyone doing Marxism as a science": it undermined anyone except Trotsky. No, seriously. This is a real problem with Stalin's Marxism, or more accurately, Stalin's crimson Materialism. But it was not an actual problem with early Trotskyism. I was so close to seeing this but then I got confused and thought Trotskyism was also just a flat Materialism because the IMT kept trying to turn it into one.
  6. ↑ "Pointlessly": a surprising amount of the time Trotskyism "attacks other parties" it is not pointless. This can get confusing when every single Trotskyist party tries to claim it's the real Leninism. But the reality is that after they all struggle against each other long enough they end up sorting out a central functioning Fourth International versus a lot of crumbling peripheral groups that are expelled by the functional ones. Impossible as it seems, this central Fourth International is then able to productively criticize all other failed "Marxisms" outside Trotskyism.

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