User:RD/9k/anti-Jake theory (Q618)
Main entry
anti-Jake theory
-> a model or organization that has been rebuked by "Jake", the Marxist theorist who was once a real person, but in order to protect the guilty and keep from stirring up back-and-forth arguments that could cloud an objective analysis of what he is saying, is now a hypothetical archetype. this shouldn't be an Item, but Jake's positions have been so bizarrely inconsistent that it's impossible to tell whether these positions are accurate or informative or anything just by what things they go against.- anti-Jake theory -> not to be confused with Jake (Fazbear Frights), Jake (Animorphs), or Jake the dog (Adventure Time). "Jake" was literally the first name that popped into my head when I had to think of an alternate name.
it is kind of conceptually funny to imagine him depicted as Jake the dog though, as if Rainicorns are somehow actually an interesting allegory for the conflict between North Korean Marxism and other Marxisms. their personalities are not very similar but I'm a sucker for unnecessarily complicated allegories like that
Pro-Jake theories
Capitalism is like a battery
/ Capitalism is like a battery — when the reaction runs long enough and the battery runs out, it will be stuck at the other end ->
I really do not think this is true with respect to individual countries. capitalism in the United States may run like a battery sometimes but the place the battery runs out is China while the batteries in the United States stay perfectly charged because nobody ever has to run them.
so, why is this? . [unfinished]- The United States is almost entirely composed of proletariat -> false. utterly not true. liar liar pants on fire.
Maoism is closer to accurate on this, though not entirely accurate because it doesn't address the correct reasons for why or rather how the world has divided into half a world of solely bourgeoisie and half a world of solely proletariat.
oh gosh do you know what's a good piece of anecdotal evidence on this. the Reddit (?) thread where people couldn't believe the number of U.S. people that were "CEOs" and thought they were lying. the commenters seemed to really expect that businesses would be bigger and it would be impossible for so many people to own them, but in reality the U.S. is one big small-business hell world that's just crawling with the things and a surprising amount of the United States is filled up with CEOs and stabilized with private equity. that's the reality. a world where a bunch of "Socialist videos" are complaining about "private equity" is not a world full of proletariat. that's your first warning sign. - Because the United States is mostly composed of proletariat, people only need to become aware that they're the proletariat -> this is a little anecdotal again, but I feel like I have seen a much greater prevalence of tiny businesses falsely thinking they're workers than I've seen of workers not knowing what workers are. have you seen the number of people trying to spread Kantianism and psychoanalysis because supposedly "independent artists are workers" and "everyone suffers equally"? by telling everyone the United States is full of workers we could well be giving everyone false consciousness and doing more to prevent movements than help them.
Transgender issues are not tertiary
/ Transgender issues are not "tertiary cultural issues" -> because of the contributions of "Jake" and whatseirname at Left Voice to the peripheries of Marxist theory it might be just fine to mark this part of mainstream Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism as well as violet Marxism. it's still pretty widely believed in places like China and Iraq that they are tertiary, but I think this is in error. [1] this discrepancy in what people think is true about the whole world within different countries is part of the entire reason there's a need for violet Marxism.- Minorities represent the interests of the proletarian masses -> this would be true in the historical Soviet Union, or if Mao is talking about minority Chinese cultures and languages, but if nearly nobody is the proletariat then it can't be true.
Having a movement at all is half the battle
/ Having a movement is step zero / United States people need to form a mass movement before anything else / First there needs to be A Left (mainstream Marxism-Leninism, Gramscianism, anarchism) / It's more important to get into organizations than for the organizations to be good, with some exceptions for organizations that are truly terrible / (9k)- The United States can bring together a competent Left by campaigning for Social-Democracy -> I think there is a bit of evidence this is false, because all our "mass movements" we're supposed to enter are anarchism, and because of how everyone is currently complaining that Social-Democratic programs are actually much too little to become a suitable "high bar that won't be met". in terms of high bars that would push the country forward what everyone truly wants looks more like,
, putting Black people in charge of Louisiana and Alabama or 2 to 4 specific states administered as their own separate union-republic and driving out all White people who are determined to be racist cops (not the rest, just the 'racist cops') from the union republic so only a party Black people initially created to run the union republic can appoint cops. or something. a Black union republic defined solely through lack of White supremacists. I'm spitballing. "abolish the police" has been a big talking point while "Medicare for all" has been too depressing for anyone to get behind in a world where there's nothing to unite people strongly enough to successfully defend social housing or trans health care or access to abortion. it'd take something a little crazy like re-dividing the United States to create a progressive nation to actually get people fired up. There is no Overton window
/ The concept of the Overton window does not describe anything in material reality -> I had to think about this a while. but after thinking about it, I think this is not just false, but dangerously false. here's the thing. when you're a Materialist, the specific words and clusters of terms people use to describe things don't matter; finding an ontology which models reality is what matters. so when people talk about "the Overton window", if the statements they're saying are statements about a real thing after all, then the statements will be true regardless of whether they said "Overton window". so, can that happen? yes. it is fully possible for physical people to file into an area, push out other physical people who don't fit or are not allowed, and totally change the observed culture of the group based on the people who are still there. this process can happen for a bunch of white supremacists taking over an area and pushing out everyone else. this process can happen with the population of North Korea pushing out Japanese and European empire and creating a North Korean republic. this process can happen with the Soviet Union forming a Leninist party and making sure only things that are broadly compatible with Marxism and not allowing anyone in the country to connect into big blocs of external empires are allowed at the moments that it truly matters. in my mind, this is the cause of people talking about "the Overton window". but it's very real. the existence of a mainstream Marxist-Leninist workers' state forming and pushing out the staunch bourgeois allies or the Trotskyists is a real thing. the existence of Liberal republics forming and pushing out all the monarchists and Communists is real. so if you tell your would-be Communist allies that Overton windows don't exist, you risk totally blinding them to the actual processes of history that create things like clusters of White supremacists. and then everyone is stuck arguing about "culture" and whether Gramscianism is valid or real and getting absolutely nowhere. in the end I think it's more accurate to say that Overton windows technically do exist, and people are just wrong about why they exist.- There is no Overton window / The Overton Window doesn't exist -> it exists in that Hegelian processes exist where ideas contained in groups of people defeat each other as the groups of people do. and that's how Communism was so thoroughly destroyed, by brutally eradicating the people that supported it. important detail lost.
- It is okay to teach conspiracy theories such as alternative hypotheses about 9/11 to advance distrust of Liberal-republicanism, even if they are unfalsifiable -> this was a very bad strategy for Jake to use when he also wanted people to believe the CDC. conspiracy theories about "Big Pharma" or mask mandates being a vector for Totalitarianism work about the same way as conspiracy theories about anything else. if people don't stick to what is provable, they quickly start believing whatever feels like it grants them the most freedom. which is often not what is sensible. often there is a weirdly specific pattern to these things, where people build in their mind an abstract concept of "Non-Totalitarianism" and then they immediately run from whatever violates it. religious cult starting to look like Totalitarianism? run. Communist party starting to look like Totalitarianism? run, and boycott all Cubans. president starting to look like Totalitarianism? run, and start spinning a narrative that nobody should vote for him ever. even if he's Obama. Gramscians who are trying to extend over society and make pronouns mandatory starting to look like Totalitarianism? run. mask mandates starting to look like Totalitarianism? run. atheism starting to look like Totalitarianism? run, and start promoting peaceful coexistence with religion. this is how people think. they don't have actual values. their only value is Non-Totalitarianism and they will eventually accept literally anything that doesn't violate it no matter how much they claim to hate that thing. you can get people to love and accept homophobes and transphobes and racists and misogynists and whoever you want as long as you can make a sufficient case they're Non-Totalitarians who are appropriate people to run to when people are running from other things. everyone's baseline belief is that every problem in society will automatically be fixed the moment you forcefully expel the people who are the very worst problems and if things aren't getting better you just need to exercise prejudice against more and more individuals. letting anyone build a conspiracy theory off just 'questioning authority' is bad news.
- Telling people about the current prevalence of Covid will empower institutions to implement disease prevention measures -> Jake proved this one false on his own channel. he was super angry about it initially and kept aggressively trying to get people to care about it but then he eventually "stopped thinking about it" because in practice not only were none of the people he was trying to reach able to do anything but he wasn't able to organize anyone either.
this is not something I can just "let go". Marxism is the study of predicting real-world movements, and speaking quite literally, Jake did not successfully predict how to stop institutions from pulling out disease prevention measures. I am not aware of any time at which he admitted he was wrong or tried to propose a new model of what happened. - Israel-Palestine is the only issue people actually organize over (circa 2022) -> on one hand this might be superficially true, it might well be what everyone is observing. on the other hand, this should not logically be true if "everyone is the proletariat" and only some tiny 5% of people are bourgeoisie. you'd think the proletariat would have more to demonstrate over!
- I'm a Marxist-Leninist but China needs to be Zinovievized
- Trotskyism in the historical Soviet Union is obviously incorrect because of what classes it came from -> again, true in the Soviet Union, but not an easy thing to say in the United States because the whole 'Left' is going to be bourgeoisie if the whole country is; it's more possible Trotskyists are flat out your allies in that environment and you'll face huge consequences for treating them with prejudice as opposed to, say, genuinely exposing them as liars on history or proving that their model of Leninism is unworkable. I know how Trotskyists roll, they believe they're the only legitimate Communist party of the United States and every anticommunist faction also kind of believes it, to the comical result of the whole of anticommunism kind of being right sometimes about putting Trotsky on a pedestal when CPUSA and Gramscians and anarchists put out really terrible models of things and the Trotskyists put out analyses on race and gender etc that are actually not crazy. I think what I'm saying is that although Trotskyism is one of the worse versions of Marxism, anarchism and critical-theory are doing a phenomenal job at being so wrong they make Trotskyism look good.
- Trotskyism in the historical Soviet Union is obviously incorrect because of what classes it came from -> even within the context of the Soviet Union this feels like a logical fallacy because the movement started with class traitors. Lenin and Che Guevara were class traitors from the Careerist or bourgeois layers; Mao is one of the only exceptions in coming from the peasants. Stalin dragged the Soviet Union along by being an expert at observing structures full of workers rather than a representative of a body of average workers. so calling out Trotsky for coming from the bourgeoisie just.... doesn't make any sense in his historical context. the best Marxist theorists from the Soviet Union were not representatives of the people. this has made anarchists super upset about the Soviet Union because they hate the idea of one person slurping up all the expertise and ordering everyone else around instead of everybody somehow being equally educated and them all being interchangeable. but unfortunately for them Stalin showed it was totally possible. Marxism isn't a matter of naïve democracy like that where representatives are a dumb conduit for a group of people's Lived Experiences, it's a process of making a whole model of a country where everyone consents to the model and participates and the model is what rules people; representatives can demand tweaks to the model, but aside from that the model rules people rather than representatives or even experts.
Anti-Jake theories
anti-Jake theory
/ -> Jake's words on "Red Spectre" were that its criticism of Hoxha was comparable to Maoist infighting with other Marxisms. to me this is an especially confusing 'Jakeism' because it feels like in the end Jake and Bolshevik Organization are kind of just saying the same thing about each other's version of Marxism, that each of them has become overly inflexible and incapable of recognizing other parties that could be valid mainstream Marxism-Leninism as Marxism-Leninism. but Jake is still convinced there's such a thing as him being right and the other organization being bad. there isn't at this point, arguably. it seems to me more like every version of mainstream Marxism-Leninism is a little wrong and it all needs correction for parties across the world to actually become able to cooperate but prior to violet Marxism nobody knows how to correct it.U.S. antiwar movements have 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 / (9k)- The Israel-Palestine conflict will tie together United States people into a mass movement potentially capable of revolution for reasons that have almost nothing to do with traditional Marxist theories of class, purely because people join together around individual people about to get fired, support each other, and refuse to give up (Gramscianism, anarchism) -> he talked about Israel as "the only issue anyone can participate in", and would repeatedly talk about the importance of "just creating a mass movement", but he seemingly never stopped to consider the concept of Palestine being the single mass movement that is to unite everybody into a Left. as far as I can tell, people getting fired for speaking against Israel is just about the only thing there is that a wide swath of people all recognize as a threat to them, that could bring people together who weren't previously involved into a movement, and absolutely everyone could strike over. "Rhizome" and people joining together around trans women isn't really working out. but somehow, there seem to be more people capable of getting fired over Palestine than there are trans people or Black people, and for reasons I don't understand, "censorship" seems to be a much hotter, more 'buzzing' issue than trying to join up specific demographic identities because identities must be inherently drawn to other identities.
Positions not from Jake, but possibly eventuated by mainstream Marxism-Leninism / Hoxhaism
- BadEmpanada is preventing Menshevism / The reason good options don't exist in North America must be that all the BadEmpanadas are not promoting North America's Mamdanis across South America; the BadEmpanadas are purity testing either because failing to assemble people is purity testing or because not letting anarchists perform anarchist filtration as opposed to Marxist filtration is purity testing; this is to imply but not state that imperialism brutally eliminating every Communist party was not the root of the problem, and to imply that any time people fly to the side of a somewhat non-reactionary candidate is a step forward -> this actually might be a schizoanalyst proposition, looking at that last implication. either way it's very blue. it looks a lot like standard Liberal-republicanism, but it might technically be anarchism due to its leaning toward "communities" as political units as well as toward heterogeneous things coming together just because that's thought to be inherently good.
Related
stay with the program
(Marxism) / we believe we've found the correct program, and that's the program we have to stick with / (9k)- Trotskyism: Counter-revolution in Disguise (Olgin 1935) / (9k)
Ideologies or fields
-
⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽ML / mainstream Marxism-Leninism
1-1-1
- ES / blue anarchism
- DG / schizoanalysis
Subpages
- AntiJakeTheory/method423 - attempt to quickly summarize all of Jake's positions.