Research:MDem/5.2r/0999 cosm-letter2
But, under the assumption this actually is the right address for J. Moufawad-Paul, I have been working on a philosophical framework called "violet Marxism" or alternatively "meta-Marxism", and was wondering if you would be interested in reviewing it.
I will first clarify up front that this is a strictly Materialist framework which does not attempt to redo Marx's understanding of the connection between parties, theory, and practice, and if you have ever seen the term "meta-Marxism" used before this was not influenced by nor has anything to do with any of those other "meta-Marxisms". (Thanks to Althusser using "meta-Marxism" to suggest that "science" and Marxism needed to be separated, I have to clarify that what I am talking about is violet Marxism and not that.) Second, what I'm attaching is not an exhaustive explanation of violet Marxism. I have an absurd number of book-related drafts and now a large number of early, "prototype" wiki pages about it covering a lot of different thematic areas, but what I've attached here is relatively short — which may be for the best when I know anyone who teaches classes will be busy. (In 2024 I tried several times to type out a long letter attempting to give an outline of all the basic concepts, but I never finished that one, so this is my last try to get something out.)
The other thing I should probably say is, I am not a professor or any kind of university faculty, I am just someone who started wildly writing a giant book one day about how everyone in the United States gets Marxism and philosophy wrong because since 2016 it's been basically impossible to actually live and exist in the United States and I was tired of that. I have never actually been able to be employed or be part of society due to disabilities and it never seems to get easier. So, I have never actually been involved in movements for P########. I just do a lot of reading about science and history from about either the 1600s or 1900s to today and contemporary news events and trying to characterize what dialectical materialism is and isn't and what is a reasonable Materialist theory based on that. The Communist Necessity was a big influence on me. But when looking through articles on "M-L-M Mayhem" on a web archive, I thought those articles had a good perspective. In my mind, violet Marxism is a very versatile thing and it could be used to criticize Marxist theories or organizations that are failing to break away from I##### and probe the material reasons why; I just had not been actively putting it toward that use because the kinds of people who cared about P######## where I was were so anticommunist and utterly anti-materialist they almost weren't going to let me be part of anything if I believed in Materialism, and thus I'd gotten it into my head I'd never be good at it, and I was busy studying other historical events that I felt like I was doing a better job understanding. (Here's hoping nobody snatches this message in transit based on it containing certain words. It's getting bad over here.)
Violet Marxism is the Marxist study of countably separate Marxisms as material objects in development and motion, in the midst of a dialectical universe built on special relativity.
Attached files:
- "cosmonaut-letter" — basic overview of what violet Marxism is; short. (3600 words)
- "comments" — miscellaneous thoughts/notes I actually scrawled in long YouTube comments but which are somewhat representative of what my book chapter drafts talk about in a much shorter format; each one is basically just an attempt to do violet Marxism on some particular ideology. (7000 words)
- "9k/Q21,29" — example page from the wiki that is 'a companion to my unfinished book introducing violet Marxism'; relatively informal-tone page taking notes to analyze an article, not to be taken too seriously as something "complete". This page is mostly just here to visually demonstrate the concept of ideology swatches or symbols, and pairing particular propositions and comments on propositions to particular ideology colors they either embody or analyze. But, the page is about Althusser's "meta-Marxism" versus violet Marxism. (3900 words)
- This is a saved HTML page. I checked it over a couple times to make sure there were no serious glitches. The page contains live links to the wiki I didn't remove. These live pages may contain problems like broken swatches, unfinished explanations, etc.
- "socialism" — observations on what an era of socialism actually looks like most of the times it's happened in reality. This is an excerpt taken out of an unfinished article (an 'actually-serious Cosmonaut letter') I was writing to vaguely try to persuade Trotskyists that other Marxisms are valid while arguing that there are also conditions where if they fixed up their theories other Marxisms would finally accept them. This general idea of, "do you want world socialism or not?" (3500 words)
- "findings" — my attempt to summarize various working conclusions I've come to since starting the wiki; the results of applying meta-Marxism to characterize various things. (14,600 words)
- In this file I stopped censoring 'those countries' because I simply got tired of it. Hopefully when it's buried far enough into this message that won't practically matter.
Out of these five files, the first and the last ("cosmonaut-letter" and "findings") are the most important ones. The others provide a lot of helpful context though.
— R. Bergfalk / "R.D."