Research:MDem/5.4r/0999 north-letter

26-7

Hello.

Since around 2021 I have been working on a framework I now call "violet Marxism", or more generically, "meta-Marxism". This is a strictly Materialist framework which attempts to remove the concept of abstract ideas from Marxism as much as is actually feasible. (I unfortunately have to clarify that when there are a couple recorded uses of the term "meta-Marxism" before violet Marxism and unrelated to it which were more or less improperly applying bourgeois ideals to Marxism, notably one from Althusser.) Violet Marxism is the study of Marxisms and other philosophies as physical objects, namely countable republics or movements containing arrangements of people. It is very similar to Marxism in general, but with one major distinction that makes them different: whenever real-world Marxist organizations run into irreconcilable differences, violet Marxism takes a step back and looks at the entire situation from above, considering the two parties or Internationals to be completely different things and no longer preserving the assumption that either of them is the same kind of phenomenon as the other one. For instance, the day the Soviet Union's party split from China, violet Marxism would start to distinguish them and treat them as different movements or philosophies specifically in order to try to uncover which one has the more salvageable program and which one is making the worst errors. Analyzing errors is already a fairly common activity within Marxism, but there is one major problem with it. Whenever any two organizations diverge from each other, they will each come up with a different account of who made errors and what errors everyone made, sometimes defending their own flawed accounts over other parties' accounts to the end. This can be rather intimidating to newcomers to Marxist theory, much less average workers, because the entire process of figuring out what parties might be right becomes a complicated logical puzzle which requires extensive research on many different Marxist tendencies and each tendency's whole timeline of history to even begin to understand. In my own experience, a lot of people seem to give up and take various parties that made errors at face value, thinking that that particular program "is Marxism" and they no longer trust Marxism and are going to go along with some bourgeois philosophy, or they no longer trust Trotskyism (this was a problem I had). With a method that explicitly starts by treating no particular version of Marxism as official and instead studying each one as its own entity with its own understandings and motivations (including instances of violet Marxism being put into practice in an organization, if necessary), this might become less of a problem, and it might become easier to give people an intuitive understanding of what is an error and what is Marxism and what is a small variation within Marxism as it is still searching for the best strategies.

One of the first important caveats to understand with a Materialist analysis "of Marxisms" is that in one sense violet Marxism does not exist, and will never exist. There can be a violet Marxist method, but it will always be applied inside some real Marxist organization in a real set of historical circumstances that will create some particular vantage point and set of biases in how the Materialist analysis of that party and other parties should be applied. Thus, violet Marxism does not "magically" solve the problem of parties showing up with different distorted perspectives, which will still continue to exist. The thing it does instead is attempt to construct shared grounds on which two parties could come to an objective consensus only if they actually wish to know what is materially accurate, and to find ways out of local perspectives to a bigger-picture view. Violet Marxism has the same quirk seen in many forms of mathematics of being a bit more precise than reality so that the people who know how to use it will find enough flexibility between it and the reality placed inside it to make good use of it. Between the factions inside it and the people looking at it an analysis of history never really is neutral, nor does it need to be perfectly neutral to be useful. So violet Marxism uses the rhetorical conceit of looking outside multiple factions as its tool, but in reality, it only does that so that the factions with the best overall understanding of material reality can take hold of it and use it to better make their point. Marxism begins well aware that its purpose is to empower a new historical period to take its position over previous stagnating historical periods that have impeded it — whether this is capitalism, or perhaps a low-quality Marxist party attempting and failing to create the type of physical historical period we call a workers' state. Violet Marxism does basically the same thing, but aims to do it more precisely.

The conditions that led to me putting together violet Marxism were rather strange and specific, although familiar to anyone from the United States or Australia. The United States has been... uniquely in a slump. I don't know what better way to put it than that. Not in a slump economically, exactly. Not in terms of its organizations, which have always been sporadic yet are not in a state which has really changed much since 1980. Not in terms of bourgeois parties, which have been doing the same things for around 200 years now. Instead there has been... a weirdly indescribable kind of slump where it seems as if the concept of knowledge has died and social interaction has died. Everyone is shocked and horrified by news headlines and keeps lining up with their cafeteria tray for more poison, but it seems as if knowledge is no longer learned because it is useful and nobody ever actually makes use of it in order to interpret anything that has ever happened. Everything anyone knows is "because I said so" or "because they made me learn it". Everyone seems to know that ethics is "obvious" but can't actually explain it to anyone well enough for it to actually have any use in teaching anyone who isn't ethical to be ethical. The word "community" is in every other sentence people say, like saying a word referring to society existing explains all the details that make up society. But nobody seems to know for the life of them what a community even is or how any countable group of people can form around anything except sheer inherent similarity and compatibility and intuition. Nobody here can keep friends. Interacting with relatives makes you wonder more and more every day when families ever existed and what a family is. People online who ironically are on the internet periodically complain about how you shouldn't let the internet try to grab every bit of your attention, but if you happily disconnect from all the noise of the internet, you'll pretty quickly find yourself entirely alone. Some days I am not sure what a society even is any more or when sociality ever actually existed. But I do know that the United States is so violent that you'd better not leave your door and actually talk to anyone because somebody might shoot you. That's about how bad it's been. I feel like society has not actually existed since about 2015 and I have already been living in societal collapse for 11 years. I have tap water. I can analyze internet videos. But every day for at least a couple of seconds I feel like people are spontaneously going to go mad some day and I'm going to die. Everybody believes nothing is wrong, but nothing is right. Oh, right, and people are constantly arguing back and forth over whether gender identity is a conspiracy, as the only political issue anyone "understands". Gender identity and Palestine — the only two political issues in existence that everybody thinks they know about but most people cannot explain their position on whatsoever.

I feel like my journey started when I found some garbled second-hand conspiracy theories from the Republican Party that "The Left" was planting Communists who were also anarchists and religious fundamentalists and Gnostics depending on the person retelling the story inside universities and the arts. No part of the story made any sense. And it really made me wonder, how did we even get here? What are any of the actual actors inside these statements? What is the actual causality going on here? So every time I thought I'd found a true fact that matched up with these stories, I would silently compile them all together and see if any of it had come closer to making sense. And I discovered something strange. The United States looked a lot less like one society than like two separate societies competing over a disputed territory. The fault lines between clusters of people aligned with each bourgeois party were real, and the two bodies of people would periodically try to fill up particular businesses or government institutions all "sky" or all "rust", acting really upset and pushing out the couple of extra members who appeared who would suddenly show up as Republicans or Democrats. Sometimes it would happen as specific demographic identities, like 13 men and 2 women, or 10 White people and 1 Black person, or 11 atheists and 1 Christian. There were a lot of different lines on which people would become divided into a traditional majority and an uncommon minority, or a new majority and a traditional minority, and any of them could stack up into the rust and sky divisions, leading to people feeling like minorities who happened not to belong to the most well-established social graph or most common ideology had to be some kind of conspiracy. But that was silly. What was really happening was that people had not fully internalized that philosophies were inherently tied to particular countable socially-linked groups of allies or acquaintances, connecting society and philosophy into a single phenomenon of sociophilosophies.

Liberal-republicanism had designed itself assuming that Liberal-republican political parties weren't actually "real". That they would form each election around arbitrary interest groups and issues, but that they wouldn't necessarily stick around in nearly the same shapes for 200 years. But reality had not agreed. Instead, what seemed to actually be happening was that people would align onto a party and keep voting for all its candidates until they felt "betrayed" by that party and then would start voting for the other party, alternating wildly if they had no consistent trust but passing the same party down to their children if they did. During the Civil War period, Liberal-republican parties aligned neatly onto slave states and free states and formed entire separate nationalities; even after the United States abolished slavery and attempted to force itself back together, White people in the Southern states were still doing their best to keep Black people from living in their areas and it still seemed as if the division was permanent. On one hand, these observations seemed to make sense with the Marxist account of capitalism. Large societies had to be made of structures (relations arranged to harness productive forces), and if capitalists owned those structures and conflated the structures with themselves, the capitalists would be able to chain together to form something like the modern Democratic Party, or the modern Republican Party. Society in general being like one big graph of dots linked together, you could then have any number of people chaining onto the major groups of capitalists believing the representatives that group chose somehow represented the overall group's interests. But that didn't explain how the two parties had stayed so consistent since the Civil War. Marx had taken note of how the division in the United States had happened due to slavery, and the re-unification of the two bodies of westward-leaking colonists had correlated with the North being able to force the South away from slavery to capitalism. But centuries later there was also something else going on that was hard to quantify. If the United States was all capitalism now, why was it still divided? Why was every election making the divisions cleaner and the district lines stranger and only sharpening the old division further? Why was the United States behaving like it wanted to partly define freedom as the ideological segregation of the Confederate party and ultimately throw out elections and the Constitution in favor of claiming that whether a Constitution existed or not ethics was ethics and freedom was freedom?

Well, I'll return to what the answers were later, but for the moment, I'll just say that as I was studying the history of Marxism, the Chinese revolution and the two different periods of division in the Soviet Union seemed like they were leading me to the answers. In China, Mao's party had to cover a very large terrain, to the point it was possible to plot on a map what overall percentage of China was still under feudal control or under control of the nationalists. In the Soviet Union region, again, there was a very big terrain to cover in the process of the revolution. I had found one particular text by Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism chapter 8, which described this quite vividly. The Red Army and the White Armies were no mere ideas, they were occupying specific places at specific points in time, and — the most interesting to me — fighting battles back and forth over particular pieces of industry. It was vaguely similar to the incidents of Republicans and Democrats fighting over corporations, although more dramatic and violent. But then something else caught my attention — the conflict between Stalin's party and early Trotskyism. I had not seen a lot of in-depth coverage on this in mainstream Marxist sources. Trotskyists were talking about it, of course, because it was their history. And for a while, I became obsessed with figuring out where this conflict had come from and what exactly had been driving it. I was fairly solidly aligned with the Stalinists back then, but I was just about the most interested in the history of early Trotskyism of any Stalinist in the whole United States. Every so often I would go through Trotskyist programs and I would keep trying to reconstruct exactly what Trotskyists were trying to accomplish and what made a party Trotskyist. And I could never figure it out.

At that time I was really focused on the concept of describing civilizations as small-scale structure inside a particular region. "Socialism in one country" made sense to me not because I thought countries were natural or had to be the way they currently were, but because I was beginning to see Marxism as a model of how countries formed into different kinds of civilizations based on different kinds of arrangements of people from the level of individuals to the level of class territories or institutions up to the level of factions like the Bolshevik Party fighting the White Army up to the level of China- or Russia-sized republics where a specific kind of state would be created and the bourgeoisie or eventually the proletariat would be able to control the entire region. I thought Marx and Lenin and maybe even Mao with his other huge terrain to cover and successful army were brilliant for being able to take descriptions of feudal orders, capitalism, and socialism and turn them from abstract ideas into material objects with internal structure, so that socialism really was something in the same sense that carbon dioxide was something specific with a specific shape or cellulose was something specific. I dubbed this concept of analyzing civilizations or revolutionary movements down to a very fine "chemical" scale molecularization and I was convinced that by the time Marxism was able to properly understand weird situations like the Democrats and Republicans or (as I believed then) Stalin's party versus early Trotskyism, it would become a new kind of Marxist theory called molecular Marxism that would eventually be able to create successful revolutions into socialism in the First World. Molecular Marxism might at some point in the future actually take Marxism from a proto-science into a proper science. But despite knowing Marxism had a lot of potential to improve "in the future" I still kept ending up completely baffled by Trotskyism. I would keep taking Trotskyism and thinking, surely if Trotskyists successfully created a republic controlled solely by them and not containing any Stalinists, there would be some particular thing they would create inside it which would be unique to Trotskyism. Whenever people separate themselves into factions that are in heated conflict there is always some actual reason related to what each faction actually wants to materially achieve. The White Army wanted to defend aging structures like the Russian Orthodox Church in its powerful medieval form. The Nazi Party, although not as distinct from capitalism as people would like to believe, did have its own material aim of expanding its violence to other regions to create a larger empire. Even the Republicans and Democrats have small and slightly complicated material differences: people cluster into particular localized demographic subpopulations like the Black subpopulation or the LGBT+ subpopulation that line up behind the Democrats, the Republicans are slightly more openly friendly to capitalists as a bloc, and although they all live in capitalism they materially consist of different assembled populations of people and become distinct material objects, similar to how countries are distinct partly because there are borders between their bodies of capitalists. But I really could not figure out what made Trotskyists different from Stalinists. Both of them were claiming to follow Marxism. Stalin would stand by everything Lenin said in the same period, about Materialism and forming nation-wide Marxist parties instead of disorganized clusters of trade unions. But once he was in contact with the United States, Trotsky was giving people advice that sounded like he understood what a Marxist party was and how to stop capitalist-style revisionism from leaking into parties. So both of them were Marxists, both of them believed in nationalized property in the Soviet Union, and both of them talked about socialist transition. And both of them had a Communist International. Trotsky showed up at the Third International, and later claimed that policies were wrong inside the Third International. But this all connected back to Stalin and his allies, so didn't Trotsky's complaints have to somehow be at a scale smaller than Communist Internationals? So that left me scrambling trying to figure out exactly what policy complaints Trotsky actually had inside the space of any particular region as the key to what a Trotskyist party was supposed to have already solved and how Stalinists had failed to create Trotskyist transition. My analysis was a bit blockheaded, but I did have a very specific angle that I was looking at things from. I was okay with the concept of Trotskyism containing a Fourth International as a necessary component of what Trotskyism is. I was okay with the concept of Trotskyism going through a Marxist revolution and then taking up the area of what had been several countries before — if the Soviet Union came to be, was that really an impossibility? I wasn't going through this analysis "for the NKVD", feeling like Trotskyism had to be understood so it could be destroyed. If anything, I found the conflict between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism upsetting and I wanted to solve the structure and development of each of them so that maybe they could coexist. (The continued existence of Stalinist states anywhere on this planet being entirely hypothetical and counterfactual at this point, but I think you can see what I meant.) I knew that proposition was a bit naïve, to simply say that all groups of Marxist theorists "ought to" work together to create a Communist International, but I didn't really know why that was. And so, I set out to create meta-Marxist analysis to explain on a Materialist basis why different Marxist tendencies were different.

I knew on some level that if I was hypothetically trying to get Stalinism and Trotskyism to coexist some time back in the 1920s, it might be a wholly irreconcilable thing. When groups of people structure themselves into separate factions, there are moments in history where those factions neatly consist of particular class structures, and where the division in classes is going to lead to class conflict. At other moments, factions like the Republicans and Democrats do not lead to this kind of conflict because both of them are arranged around a group of bourgeoisie and they are able to recognize each other as similar. But I had the facts in front of me that Stalinist parties and Trotskyism had repeatedly ended up in violent conflict in various regions of the world for some unknown reason. I had to at least consider that the separation between them was somehow similar to a class conflict. But the thing that kept me stumped was this: bourgeois factions that are both capitalism manage to uneasily get along, so if Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism are both Marxisms, or at least they both were in the 1920s, then why wouldn't the two of them simply get along and form socialism? The major class conflict of the 1900s was between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it was always just those two except in feudal orders containing nobility, and all the other layers joined to one of them or the other. The two seemingly separate Marxisms eventually merging back together or coexisting seemed much more consistent with all the Marxist theory I'd been looking at up to that point... all the Marxist theory I'd been looking at from the Stalinists.

This was the problem. All the Stalinist theory I had ever seen seemed to weirdly oversimplify Marxism and not give enough detail to describe real-world situations. Bourgeoise, proletariat, bourgeoisie, proletariat, form organizations, crises of capitalism, four legs good, two legs bad. It couldn't explain something like the IMT making an announcement it had failed to infiltrate the British Labour Party and whether that was a good thing because they were providing an example that bourgeois reforms weren't working or whether it was a bad thing because this was not the first time and the IMT had been repeatedly trying the same opportunist methods over and over. (For anyone new to Marxism who finds this: it's the latter. Up to now the RCI has been dangerously close to becoming the 21st Century's Second International, and can only be spared that title because the USFI got closer.) Now, educating people about the existence of the bourgeoisie and forming organizations both do have their role (it would be nice if the United States actually had any functioning organizations capable of forming a larger movement), but this kind of rhetoric was never going to be able to explain the existence of Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Deng Xiaoping Thought as separate philosophies embedded in their own distinct republics or movements.

I knew that trying to think of Marxism as a single world revolution was simply not working; this seemed to sink all Marxist movements into sectarianism and actively fighting each other for control every single time. But what I gradually discovered over time was that countries themselves have always been made of parallel layers of structure that each attempted to land on the same particular outer country border independently, which back in the time of monarchy were known as estates. Marx had examined this phenomenon of estates too. (I currently still need to go back and read some of the earliest Marxist works, but I knew that was worth mentioning.) The clergy, nobility, and lower classes of the time all had their own "parliament processes" of sorts, which were eventually separated out into different kinds of republics. The clergy could only do so much and may have participated in separating different European empires into separate kingdoms, while the nobility were capable of using their wealth and land to section kingdoms into smaller states that in regions like China would sometimes fracture into separate clusters and become new kingdoms, and the bourgeoisie would eventually form Liberal republics — three different forms of structure came out of them all occupying different scales, in the form of kingdoms (or expanding empires) that became nation-states, local-states, and Liberal-republican parties or disembodied political factions. But if you superimpose the centuries-old concept of estates onto the Chinese revolution or the Russian revolution, what you begin to notice is that estates exist before and below nation-states, and estates form into states specifically based on their internal characteristics as estates. This meant that a more sophisticated theory of what estates were and "are" that examined them for their own sake could explain the difference between two distinct factions of people that appeared to contain the same classes — if England and France both contained nobility, even if you could outline a section of noble territories that were all Protestant and should not have obvious reasons to be rivals, that was not going to guarantee they would both fuse into one kingdom. From there, I started considering different rival Marxist movements as unities of opposites that operated inside the same material contradiction and interacted with and changed each other. The nature of interactions themselves is that they keep seemingly separate objects from actually being separate, and instead allow two distinct objects to add to each other's history. For a while I believed that the material separation between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism was simply recursively building on itself and the existing forms of resistance or violence in each faction were somehow leading to each other. That seemed to somewhat explain Dengism: China seemed to be drifting away from Marxism because of the antagonism between China and the First World, and as long as various other countries didn't understand that antagonism China would only defend itself harder and become more strict. But that certainly did not explain everything. Why had Trotsky written a lengthy criticism of the way the USSR operated internally (The Revolution Betrayed) if he wasn't trying to say that Trotskyism had a noticeably different internal structure and its entire socialist transition would look different? Was he just impatient about the pace of socialist transition? Was he trying to skip phases and land on upper-phase communism early? I wasn't fully convinced that Trotsky was bad at Marxism and knew nothing about it — as much as Stalinist sources were definitely trying to make me think that, and had made me quick to identify every single one of Trotsky's errors — so I was willing to entertain that he simply had a different way of doing things, but I still did not understand what it was.

Then in 2026 I had a "terrible" realization: people form a consciousness sized to whatever evolving object they are part of. If the way organizations form into larger structures when those structures are actually effective (Marxist parties, independent labor movements) is to go through a process of consciousness which is fundamentally shaped by or inside the active process of building themselves up into their near-future forms, then the process of forming a Communist International should affect the parties inside it downward giving them information about forming a Communist International as they are forming it. Many Marxist parties tend to assume that the task of forming a party inside a particular country region is separate from the task of forming a Communist International, but in doing that, they potentially overlook the changes that will occur in them when they actually form one, or worse, actively transform their party in a way that will make it difficult to form a Communist International. There is not exactly anything special and unique about first-hand experience, not for an individual and not even for an organization if either of them is equipped with the right knowledge to understand the overall material processes that happen inside experiences they haven't had. But at the same time, one of the things that does come with first-hand experience is the ability to directly interact with the near future. The closer an organization is to being in the physical state of cooperating with other organizations to form international structures, the closer it is to being able to interact with and learn about the next possible steps after or above that moment, through various spatial areas analyzing each other and each other's next moves apart or together. If two parties in the United States and Canada are already connected, they might be better able to predict what the best-case scenario for the overall region would be together than if they were acting separately. This would be true of any number of scales: when small organizations form spontaneously they are disconnected and do not have good understandings of each other's behavior, but as they succeed at becoming connected, if things go well their contradictory and "unpredictable" behavior versus each other should actually be able to turn around into a kind of error-correcting process where several different organizations understanding each other from the outside reveal each other's errors and quirks and eventually start to understand in what situations they will be able to rely on each other, or how to all increasingly align onto a better program. For any given social graph of workers all the groups of workers in the graph can become more capable of coordinated behavior after they have actually been functioning together and become more connected around the same objectives. Likewise, the exercise of several parties functioning together should give them the opportunity to actually change their behavior and become more functional as a Communist International. Instead of looking at things through traditional Marxist writings on dialectics, I tend to see everything through my own accumulated knowledge on physics and the kinds of mathematics appropriate to relativity or quantum mechanics, specifically because of strange correspondences I noticed between quantum mechanics and human behavior that made me come to the conclusion that relativity and quantum mechanics might offer insights for dialectical materialism. But either way, I had found a process I couldn't un-see. An isolated party was less likely by some kind of cumulative, repeating multiplier to develop the correct consciousness to form a Communist International, while if several parties managed to figure it out correctly they might all accomplish it faster. This was consistent with everything else I knew about time and historical events, that everything that happens in the universe is actually more like many separate timelines colliding with each other and building on each other in a circle, and events have an odd way of happening either more and more or less and less. A star is a great number of atoms all colliding and leading to more fusion reactions; a galaxy has fewer events between the objects in it the further apart the stars or other objects are. So it's not necessarily a mystery why important historical events all like to cluster together or not happen for long stretches of time; history itself is like a sudden burst of many events competing to happen. I should not have been surprised that this sort of fast, clustering all-or-nothing pattern would extend up to parties forming into Communist Internationals. But everything felt different the moment that actually sunk in. I had to really take my "meta-Marxist analysis" and draw it out on a space without boundaries, so it could extend out from tiny scales upward across the world. I was going to need that full terrain to understand each of the new "estates" possible today or historical Communist Internationals. I felt like I was going crazy. I had always believed there was next to no chance Trotskyism could actually be true. But I also felt like things were making more sense than before and the project was getting somewhere.

"No chance Trotskyism could be true". In some ways this was the key to everything. Generally speaking, all populations start out with various heterogeneous parts, and some of them turn out to be insignificant distinctions, but some of them turn into contradictory unities of opposites which can actively develop a population into something new or set it back. Between 2021 and 2026 I had always made the mistake of thinking that Trotskyism is only one thing, and that whenever Trotskyists had a bad program that this was also part of Trotskyism. I now see why I thought that: Trotskyists everywhere had always said they wanted to create a worldwide government where every Trotskyist party would join into a Fourth International and more or less every industrial population would act together to form a new society, with all the neighboring tribal societies and so forth presumably integrated into their region's democracy so that they are no longer in conflict with the former nation-states and can develop toward socialism to the extent they want to. Trotskyists kept saying they wanted to become a single world system; I wrote that down and didn't question it. I simply said, okay, I guess that makes sense, but if Trotskyist parties are all supposed to form one Fourth International then why are they so infamous for constantly being in conflict and calling each other revisionist? Why is it that Stalinists are so easily able to summarize Trotskyists as "Trotskyists' worst enemy", and why does that feel perfectly accurate whenever I open up one Trotskyist group's criticism of another one and attempt to understand it? Well... I was missing something that I would not have seen without both attempting to put together meta-Marxism and extending it out to the largest scales. Trotskyism is not just a single thing. When you actually look at Marxist movements out in the field there are about two versions of Trotskyism, one which is Marxist and one which is fake and resembles a Second International. Trotskyism is the process of the Fourth International attempting to form as a single system, but also of various groups that fail to understand Marxism breaking off the Fourth International at various times, while spreading around Marxist concepts and falsely appearing to be part of it. To anyone that interacted with the "fake" side of Trotskyism, it would definitely appear there was no chance of Trotskyism achieving anything. But probability is outwardly deceptive — if there are two colors of marbles in a jar and someone repeatedly draws exactly one of the colors, it's only when they actually draw the other one that it will finally appear to have a chance. And apparently, this was Trotsky and Cannon, while Grant, Cliff, and even Luxemburg were not quite as close to being part of the winning fraction. (Much less Stalin or Mao.)

So, in short, I started out thinking there was only one Communist International, but it seems what was really happening from 1925 to 1940 was that the Soviet Union contained Stalin's party, the layer of bureaucrats and Idealists (Yaroshenko, etc.), and then an entire second process of forming a Communist International all over again from the First to the Fourth which was all compressed into the space of one party and was busy messily sorting itself out to finally pull out of itself the real Fourth International. Stalinism and Trotskyism were separate things, but not because of the theoretical quality of each faction "as a whole". They were separate parallel processes of forming a Communist International. So everything I had thought was a sign of Trotskyism being unprincipled or having bad theories was actually more like a sign the USFI was going to develop later, and actually, that whole gradient from "bad" Trotskyist theories up to good ones was going to begin working itself out between 1936 and 1960. This seems like a period of history that everyone forgot. Everyone knows about the Great Terror. Everyone knows about "Animal Farm" and the Soviet Union sliding away into a sea of bureaucrats. Some people know about the hidden letters in which early Trotskyism plotted to kill members of the Soviet government in the course of its overall plan to try to overwrite Stalin's party with a Trotskyist revolution. (This did happen, by the way. It doesn't do anyone any good to keep denying that early Trotskyists did in fact die for a revolution.) But nobody remembers the second cascade of Communist Internationals that was busy secretly iterating on itself to finally churn out a Bolshevik International all over again. They called this "sectarianism", because they did not understand the consequences of molecularizing Marxism.

So, I am not aligned with Stalinism any more. I started putting together a new Marxist method (or maybe not new, I don't really know) for fully understanding every philosophy and political party including the strange mess of academic philosophies in the United States, but it ended me up here. I was as skeptical of Trotskyism as I could possibly be but my violet-Marxist method ended me up at realizing that it might just be the tendency that matches my findings the best and overall makes the most sense. So, now, I would like to present all the basic concepts of violet Marxism to the ICFI as best I can in hopes of getting closer to actually seeing it applied and improved.
I have always had a very peripheral position as far as interesting events happening in the United States; I have a basic 4-year degree in science but my area never really sees any organizations or movements and I have always been a bit too disabled to work, so I mostly sit around trying to solve the world like a puzzle in hopes that will somehow make things better. I have never really felt like that was accomplishing much by itself, and have always wanted to actually get involved in some kind of organization, but due to various physical difficulties, trying to analyze the Marxist method and create better models of history is about all I can do. So, this is my attempt to try to begin contributing my findings. (I had also attempted to send letters outlining violet Marxism to two other places before, but I never actually got a response from either of them. This might be partly because the previous letters were not as well-ordered and thought-through and I've been developing my framework a lot more even since the second letter in March 2026. But, neither of the places I submitted this to before was Trotskyist, either.)

Stalin is not Hydra

Whenever two political factions come into violent opposition, it is common for people to ask if one of the factions is "immoral". Who's "Good", who's "Evil". A better question to ask is, why do people ask this question? (The meta-ethical question.) And the general answer will be, because people want to justify the rule of a particular class over a particular region, or its expansion over other regions. This explanation has been mostly sufficient for any historical period up to 1945. Nothing within this particular subject of discussion really got "complicated" until about 1953.

The historiography of civilizations attempting to characterize history in moral terms goes way back into the time of ancient kingdoms and empires at least as far as 5000 BC. Tribal societies may have created moral systems even earlier. But today, Christianity and its relatives are particularly infamous in terms of characterizations of various groups of people as Good or Evil. If an international war is Christian, it can become a righteous crusade, or if Muslims were to do the same thing it could become a jihad — a religious "struggle", as if who has what religion was one of the most important axes of historical progression. Before them, Zoroastrianism tried to unite people against a generalized god of strife, and after them, Zionism would unite two modern religious groups for the "righteous" task of reviving an ancient war that should have no longer made any sense to anyone. Into the 1800s, these kinds of characterizations of monarchic empires as "good" or "evil" had begun to dissociate from any notion of "godly" or "ungodly" and become wildly secularized, spreading across everything from fictional fantasy narratives to actual accounts of World War II — the Nazis were Evil, the part of the First World that didn't turn into nazis was Good, when you want to portray an "evil empire" on a TV show, you show people fantasy nazis. Even so, these simplistic moral models have been almost wholly incapable of understanding systems like Liberal-republicanism and why exactly it is that for instance the US Republican and Democratic Parties can both call each other Evil and themselves Good and fear each other equally. It has been a running joke in the United States that people constantly compare the Republican Party to Voldemort and the Harry Potter books' fictional depictions of wizard nazis, years ago in a sincere capacity, and now in a reflexive ironic capacity sketching a picture frame around the absurdity that anyone including typical center-Liberal academics would think such a metaphor was actually useful. One of these interpretations is the Idealist view of history. One of these interpretations is slowly and painfully discovering the Materialist model.

The root of the connection between religion and the content of its moral statements can be traced back to the class with the most control over religion itself. In a feudal period, depending on exactly how a kingdom develops, the borders of two kingdoms will essentially be formed with the help of two particular bodies of clergy. In India, Brahmins or Kshatriyas (the two broad priest and noble layers associated with regional religions that would fuse into Hinduism) ruled various kingdoms, before a Buddhist emperor would then unify them. In the early history of Islam, religious figures such as caliphs sometimes had huge importance in political and military roles simply due to how small the societies were and how recently the societies had emerged. Each body of clergy will have particular definitions of which kingdoms they think are Good or Evil, or perhaps Harmonious versus Unharmonious, but in the end, any narrative they present about the relationship between the body of clergy that ties together the kingdom and the outside will ultimately come from the body of clergy protecting its own class position that is both usually fairly high-ranking within the kingdom and tasked with explaining the creation of one particular kingdom somewhat exclusively. It is often not advantageous to the clergy to recognize any external body of clergy as Good or Reasonable, so sometimes they simply uphold the "reality" that other countable societies of people such as islands of nobility that do not conform to the same Brahmanic codes or Christian or Jewish kingdoms that do not mesh well with the local caliph are not to be trusted. While it is possible for a religion to behave in a syncretic way and simply collect local variations of religion into itself, religion will also tend to mark anything that fractures kingdoms apart as some kind of unenlightened behavior or sin, and try to paint any individual who does that behavior as the root of large-scale problems.

Of course, religious layers can have many possible roles within a feudal society, each one with hidden consequences. These may include justifying a particular king as "the correct one", building loyalty between groups of nobles or merchants or peasants all aligned around the same religion, or actually structuring mundane functions of local government as in the parish system in Germany (which was effectively used to collect taxes) or the use of churches as meeting-houses in the early United States. In Greece, Rome, and Egypt, as well as in India, polytheistic religion aided in joining separate cities or patches of feudalism into larger societies as people began to rationalize various gods or groups of priests as inherently belonging to the same greater whole. In the ancient world religion slowly aided people toward urbanization, as Greek or Egyptian cults helped to anchor and structure cities, or later European-style churches in the 1700s would come to provide "spaces of community" that once again would allow people to meet together in a period where agrarian society tended to push people apart, slowly encouraging towns and secular forms of town government to be created. The creation of cities was not the "goal" of religion, as historical events themselves generally cannot think or plan anything, and as far as trying to plan for what the future can actually become, any Idealist philosophy is even worse at that. However, the one thing that gives Idealism power, very much by accident, is that all Idealist philosophies will always have material consequences no matter what is in them. The consequences may look nothing like what the Idealist philosophy promises, and yet they will happen, because whenever any two Idealist prescriptions or projections run into each other and have no actual answer, the material world will decide independent of them what the real answer is. Thus, religions can form "Protestant community spaces", and end up with the secular result of cities and United States federalism mediated by the Constitution, or they can form supposedly-perfect estates with an entire parliament just for the churches centuries ago in France or Germany, and yet ultimately end up with the people getting tired of the top two estates and dissolving them to create a new republic with only one estate (Liberal-republicanism). The clergy and the nobility didn't ask for there to be a French Revolution or an English war over parliament that would eventually end in a bourgeois parliament. But the act of religion or morality dictating what "should" happen or what "should" exist or what abstract Ideals inherently belong in balance is separate from the way the world really functions — Idealism may study the poetic art of essences, balanced conglomerates, and oppositions, but Materialism describes the results of concrete interactions within the physical world.

All of this should be familiar to anyone who already knows about Marx and Engels. But the actual experiences of the Russian Revolution and the Cold War have brought in one very important twist: most of the time, "Progressive" and "Reactionary" are very nearly as arbitrary in their meanings as "Good" and "Evil". Most people within Liberal-republicanism simply take the concept of Progress and assign it to whatever philosophy they happen to personally trust the most, rather than taking any time to consider the difficult problem of whether there actually could be an objective answer to the question. Equally, anarchists and Menshevik parties at the time of the Russian Empire had no real idea which kinds of things they labeled "Progressive" or "Reactionary" were the most plausible to actually happen, even if some of them they may have had a better sense for which outcomes were inherently inclusive than some Liberal-republicans now. When have people actually risen out of the concepts of Good and Evil, and when have they simply tried to escape them by giving them different names?

People tend to assume their definitions of Good and Bad "mean something". But when you truly test them by giving them a historical situation in another country seemingly nothing like their own that they should have no personal stake in, in practice, the way people respond to something like the Moscow Trials period will vary wildly depending on exactly what specific faction of people they belong to. If you're a center-Liberal like the Democrats, Trotsky is good. If you're a Tory, Trotsky is bad. If you're a Maoist, Trotsky is bad. If you're PragerU, Trotsky is good. If you're a Stalinist, Trotsky is bad. If you're a Trotskyist from Japan, Trotsky is bad. If you're a Lacanian psychoanalyst, Trotsky is good. If you're a Lacanian named Molly Ann Rothenberg, Trotsky is bad. If you're a journalist Trotsky is good. If you're an anarchist Trotsky is bad. If you're a Duginist neo-nazi Trotsky is good. If you're a social-democratic organizer Trotsky is good. If you're a lawyer Trotsky is bad. If you're Alan Woods Trotsky is the best thing ever. If you're a social-democrat on the internet Trotsky is bad. It is as if Trotsky has completely broken morality open like some kind of memory access error where a computer program that would normally behave in specific ways is churning through random garbage data and spitting out nonsense. Nobody seems to know what they're talking about whatsoever. Trotsky seems to turn into a different "character" in each retelling of the story, sometimes a bourgeois democrat, sometimes a terrible dictator, sometimes a kulak, sometimes a bad copy of Rosa Luxemburg, sometimes Brutus, sometimes Caesar, sometimes the patron saint of newspapers as government, sometimes a true Russian revolutionary for helping Toryism, sometimes a forgotten British Labour MP, sometimes a wannabe framer of the US Constitution who couldn't do anything right, sometimes the only real heir of the one genuine Marxism but announced in exactly the kind of way that makes you wonder if it's actually true. Nobody can seem to make up their minds who exactly he was even as people seem to have a relatively homogeneous pool of opinions about Stalin — either Stalin defended Bolshevism and that was good, or Stalin defended Bolshevism and that was bad. Anarchists will often give strange opinions about Stalin, but almost all of these come down to word definitions and trying to appropriate the word "communism" to solely mean "anarchism", blending back into all the center-Liberal opinions in the "Bad" bucket. Trotskyists seem to be the only group of people to regularly claim that Stalin did not represent Bolshevism and Bolshevism as it existed in the Soviet Union should have been something different. But, hand modern Trotskyists over to all the people putting out different narratives about Trotsky, and the bourgeoisie and center-Liberal voters will basically spin the same narratives as they ever did. Nobody but Trotskyists seems to actually have a clear understanding of what Trotskyism really is. The average First-World citizen almost seems to have a better understanding of quantum physics and how to disprove string theory than they do of Trotskyism.

As people left feudal periods and entered republican periods, some started to notice the futility of labeling things Good or Evil. In China, weakened by repeated and seemingly endless warring states periods, Buddhism tried the tactic of simply _giving up_, and conceptualizing what might be called Light and Darkness as simple opposing parts of a greater whole, always in competition, but inevitably present. To philosophers, this kind of turn can seem unbelievably profound, but in its full context it is easy to recognize as an adaptation to existing historical circumstances that simply allows existing patterns of division to continue. Now, after 200 years of Liberal-republican parties increasingly stagnating in the United States, anarchists and various others have been increasingly turning to Buddhist imagery simply to represent the ever-present opposition between center-Liberals and Tories. We know by now that the division between center-Liberal and Tory parties like the Democrats and Republicans or supposed "Labor" and Liberal parties is deliberately engineered. Periodically, the United States bourgeoisie will see islands of bourgeoisie centralizing and then decide that having too many bourgeoisie in one place is "tyrannical" — as with corporate mergers, or the Democratic-Republican party — and that they must be divided in two as the correct course of action that is supposedly conducive to "human rights" and "freedom". The question almost nobody has stopped and thought about enough is, why is this? What is the significance of the United States constantly and deliberately dividing in defiance of its background condition of trying to consolidate and unify? Could it be that the people of the United States do not in fact understand how to separate ruling class narratives of Good and Bad from the actual material layout of class rule?

Could it be that none of the world's Marxist parties know how to separate value judgements about separations from the physical causes of separations either?

Within the bounds of Liberal-republicanism, no matter how you attempt to construct a framework of ethics to serve the goals ethics is supposedly intended to serve, you will eventually find that it is contradictory for Liberal-republicans to claim they support Trotsky but to not accept Trotskyism. It is not possible to actually side with Trotsky in a sense where he would hypothetically agree the person in question is in support of human rights and also to remain on the side of Liberal-republicanism at the same time. It is also not possible to side with Liberal-republicanism and consistently get it to agree that Trotsky is in support of human rights. What Trotsky considered to be a desirable outcome and what Liberal-republicanism considers to be Good or ethical are completely different things, shaped by the fact that Liberal-republicanism wants to maintain capitalism and Trotsky aimed to get rid of global capitalism. Similarly, one could also say that Stalin's set of priorities around preventing the Soviet population from returning to deathly starvation and Trotsky's set of priorities around attempting to liberate Europe led to different conceptions of what would be a desirable outcome. To put things another way, Stalin and Trotsky had different models of the future and what possibilities the near future could produce — they effectively had different plural bodies of historical materialism connecting different collections of observations to different collections of guesses.

The United States bourgeoisie are generally trapped in what can be called ideology in the strong sense: their models of reality are often not even close to how reality actually works, and largely amount to the sets of ideas that their class position, situated along the outer borders of the Republican or Democratic "estates", produces. What happens to Marxist theorists in different tendencies only creates "ideology" in a much weaker sense. Two parties will end up with diverging models of reality that cause them to behave as different identifiable tendencies and reject each other, but in some cases, these incorrect models of reality can actually be fixed. It is unlikely the whole organization will notice the error at once, but through the development of contradictions in an organization, the organization can turn itself around and use the process of people dividing themselves by reality-model that would otherwise destroy organizations in order to constructively assemble as many people as possible back onto the correct "estate".

This is the real consequence of molecularizing Marxism. Marxism does not actually take place in parties in the way that was once thought to be the case. In one sense, Marxism starts distinctly below the scale of any party with factions simply assembling themselves together around a particular model of reality, and if that model of reality has enough explanatory power, the underlying faction will simply continue extending upward to such a great scale it escapes the bounds of individual countries. This does not mean parties do not need to exist — organizations still serve an important role of connecting people across space and bringing "democracy" to the seemingly unregulated process of allegiances to particular models spontaneously extending across the population. What it does mean is that the process of forming a party of any particular type is fundamentally similar to and connected to the large-scale process of forming an International. Simply through existing at a smaller scale, anarchist formations attempt to generate First Internationals, center-Liberal formations attempt to generate Second Internationals (whether we choose to label them that way, or label formations such as the United Nations specially), and Trotskyist organizations attempt to generate Fourth Internationals. (Whether Stalinist parties inherently attempt to generate Third Internationals is somewhat unclear, given their apparently unstable character that also tends to destroy Third Internationals.)

The presence of the Left Opposition in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was not an anomaly. No matter how negatively some people may feel about Trotsky himself, the one thing that is perfectly clear by now is that that division in the party was part of an overall attempt to correct the errors in Stalinist parties and the Third International; without a Left Opposition of any kind, the party was doomed, while with the correct people holding the correct ideas dividing the party, it might well have found the possibility to save itself. We may never know if Trotsky literally had the correct strategy to save the parties of the Third International or not, but as Trotskyist parties have been busy trying to reconstruct the Fourth International, all the evidence needed to demonstrate this recurring pattern of soft division and error-correction has been steadily piling up.

Swatch analysis and slice analysis

With all the context for violet Marxism explained, I can now explain the current theoretical tools used by meta-Marxism.

One of the most basic tools used by meta-Marxism is color swatch analysis. At the beginning, when I said that two rival Marxist parties "are treated as completely different things", this is what I was referring to. Any time two parties with particular known goals or known factional philosophies are in conflict, they can be labeled using different "color swatches" which are chosen based on each party's theoretical content or current political positions. At any given time there will be a particular predefined body of color swatches accompanied by 2-3 letter codes which is recognized by a group of meta-Marxist theorists, and factions in concrete situations will be classified into these letter codes representing specific philosophical traditions or tendencies. The colors associated with the codes have variable degrees of precision, so that for instance in a situation where there are several small Marxist parties and some very large bodies of center-Liberals, all the Marxist parties could be shown in red instead of in their higher-precision colors, or the center-Liberals could be divided into more precise shades of blue since there are so many of them they could conceivably produce interesting contradictions. Color swatch analysis is largely a tool for communicating solutions to problems as opposed to a tool for solving complicated problems, but it can be used to communicate situations in terms that will seem more familiar to center-Liberals or social-democrat types who are not yet familiar with the ways Marxism frames things; a pedantic center-Liberal may find it much more intuitive to actually see a group of schizoanalysts labeled "schizoanalysis [DG]" but given a blue swatch than to see that group labeled "bourgeois ideologies" (although for Marxists who already know what things are, "bourgeois ideologies [ES]" would also be an option).

The first thing I have been using color swatch analysis for is a project where I am trying to expand and overhaul formal logic to cover different use cases than it is usually used for. In traditional versions of formal logic, there will be two binary truth values and statements are not allowed to be ambiguous. But within what I call "wavemachine logic", neither of those things applies. Statements can be expressed in natural language as long as it is clear exactly what proposition they are presenting and they are not confusable for another statement; there is a large and perhaps countably-infinite number of possible truth values; statements are allowed to be true any percentage of the time as opposed to always true or always false, and their truth value will be chosen to reflect the percentage of the time they are actually true. To some people this form of logic might sound strange and useless. But to me, this is the only good way to write logical statements about color swatch analysis. Taking a statement like "Trotskyists should enter the Labor party", it's perfectly clear what the statement is saying but you need a rather complicated system of truth values to express its practical significance. Within wavemachine logic, you might say the truth values of this statement are "statement believed to be true by USFI (blue)", "statement rejected by ICFI (blue)", "Menshevik statement (blue)" or "failed multiple times". Of course, which truth value you would return as the most important truth value depends on what context the statement is being evaluated in. Every single truth value can be used to imply a contextual color swatch for that truth value in context, and then that swatch can be used to assign the statement a color swatch in context — for instance, these truth values might assign this statement a sky blue swatch indicating the USFI or IMT is making errors that lean toward center-Liberal social-democracy (opportunist errors). Concepts such as opportunism might become much easier to communicate to newcomers to Marxism if they can see a statement that is supposed to be red or orange suddenly turn blue when in context that swatch is supposed to be opposed to Trotskyism and represent everything it doesn't stand for.

One other problem with formal logic is that it is bad at handling changes in state and the concept of something being true in one year and not true in another year. Given a statement like "Stalin is in support of Bolshevism" the truth value would become ambiguous because the degree to which that statement is true would be completely different in 1920 from what it would be in 1936. In order to fix this problem to the degree it can be fixed, I have taken to modeling different historical periods understood as complicated physical objects as different coherent bodies of knowledge which are separated but both represented within the same containing body of knowledge — where it becomes important, the conditions of the Soviet Union in 1920 are taken to be a different thing from the conditions of the Soviet Union in 1936, and statements are tagged with the explicit time and place they apply to whenever that might become a potential problem. I know this does not completely fix the problem of making formal logic dialectical, but it does at least allow for otherwise rigid systems of reasoning to outwardly approximate the concept of historical periods transitioning into other historical periods, which is valuable for representing and analyzing claims within computer programs without having to have any kind of fancy new programming environment or computer hardware.

I originally got the idea for adapting formal logic to meta-Marxism when I saw a large language model being used to create an "alchemy game" called Infinite Craft where a player could combine two words and the game would spit out a concept which would be the consequence of putting those two concepts together. (For instance, combining the words "Fire" and "Water" produces "Steam", and combining "Democracy" and "Storm" gives "Revolution", if I remember those combinations right.) I thought that program was really fascinating but I was struck by how bad the combination results would get if you kept playing it for too long — the Idealist assumptions behind language models were quickly going from coherent logic to bad puns and total gibberish, while in my mind, this could be a great game if it actually started with Materialist assumptions. I started drawing up a concept for a better "mathematician's combination game" but before long I was putting entire sentence-long propositions into it and combining them to produce logical syllogisms, and then I realized I'd actually invented a simple logic engine. From there I started creating a wiki to try to map out the relationships between a wide array of material things ("Z1 Items"), motifs I'd found in videos or articles ("S1 Items"), and propositions putting the objects and motifs into some particular order and making claims about them ("S2 Items", "Z2 Items", and "F2 Items"). Basically, I was laying out a system of second-order logic (you may need a math book to learn what that is) where at the second-order level, all the statements could also turn into truth values for other statements when they happened to describe a thing that could be true about another thing only sometimes — for example, one statement could be "A shape with three sides is a triangle" and that statement would turn into the new truth value "Is A Triangle", or a statement could be "Trotskyist parties must form a Fourth International" and that would turn into the new truth value "Trotskyist party".

I had a rather elaborate conceptual system in place for trying to begin figuring out what statements and philosophies were the most accurate and which ones did not match up to material reality, previous historical periods, or whatever specific topic they were actually speaking about. And, in spite of all the science-minded skepticism that went into that system and just how many Stalinist-aligned propositions I started with, because of the particular "formally neutral" way I did things and how statements in each philosophy were set aside in their own swatch color to be evaluated starting from their own context, I still ended up here. I can't emphasize that enough. I feel like at some later time when meta-Marxism is even more refined than it is now, it would be the tool the Fourth International could use to finally get everyone to actually understand Trotskyism and move on from Stalinism. And considering how hard I resisted and kept trying to endlessly question everything before I passed through the other side, I feel like the body of people who would be successfully won over from Stalinism might just produce some of the best Marxist theorists the world has ever known.

Color swatch analysis is almost self-explanatory apart from the conceit that I was using it to draw arrows between arrangements of colorized social structures to give overviews of historical processes without having to go into some of the more arcane terminology of Marxist dialectics. But, you might be curious to know what major swatches I've designated so far in my working model of all the philosophies in the United States and eventually the world. Here they are:

• Crimson / red [code ML] — early versions of Marxism, or Stalinist parties. I assigned this based on the most common meaning of "Reds" in English-speaking countries.
  • ML — early Marxism.
  • ML — Stalin's Marxism; Stalinism.
  • MS — Hoxhaism.
  • MZ — early Maoism.
  • NMZ — North American Maoism.
• Orange [code IV] — Trotskyism.
  • I originally made Trotskyism orange under the assumption it was a distortion of mainstream Marxism, but even so, I am probably not going to change it, because the orange swatch has a nice flame palette and I like the look of it.
  • Now this swatch has become more like a badge of correctness, especially inside Trotskyism. Deeply revisionist parties are simply marked in blue or strawberry (or possibly red), not orange.
• Strawberry [code DX] — Marxisms based on eclectic Materialism, or revisionist versions of Marxism that are in transition backward but only slowly.
  • DX — Deng Xiaoping Thought (China).
  • JC — Juche-socialism (North Korea).
  • W — Western Marxism; Louis Althusser, Mark Fisher, etc.
• Mauve [code BP] — I gave BlackPantherism its own swatch because it seemed different but I didn't entirely understand the details. So far I haven't used this swatch for anything else.
• Charcoal — anarchism and pre-agrarian societies.
  • A — anarchism, or philosophy from tribal societies that strongly resembles anarchism.
  • Aqr — magic ritual or neo-paganism. Putting this in charcoal isn't to smear anarchism as much as to highlight the loose connection between anarchist philosophy and tribal societies.
• Sky blue [code ES] — bourgeois philosophies.
  • ES — generic code for bourgeois philosophies. Originally stood for "Existentialist-Structuralist tradition", my slightly opaque nickname for a large cluster of academic bourgeois philosophies that I now think are better described as "non-economic agorisms" or "blue anarchisms".
  • Ag — agorism; philosophy directly describing non-economic markets.
  • LR — Liberal-republicanism. Covers writers like Thomas Jefferson, etc.
  • IK — Kantianism; Kantian ethics, logic, or political theory.
  • Aa — psychoanalysis. (Etymology: Lacanians kept talking about the separation of baby "a" from mother "A".)
  • HAS — humanities, arts, and social sciences. This is really only blue because capitalism captured it.
  • LGBT — queer theory. Also used for "uniquely queer" art.
• Khaki brown [code PT] — old monarchist ideas, Toryism, or fascism.
  • PT — Toryism.
  • P4 — Duginism, Zionism, modern "Identitarian" fascisms.
  • AS — Hegelianism. (Etymology: "Absolute Spirit".)
• Earth green [code STM] — science, technology, engineering, or math.
  • GR — general or special relativity. I talk about relativity and black holes a lot, so I find it useful to have a code for it.
  • FS / FOSS — Free Software movement. Peripheral to Marxism but does have some very interesting ideas.
• Bright green [code Fy] — statements about fiction. This makes more sense as a category when you know my wiki was analyzing and criticizing works like _1984_ and _Animal Farm_.
  • This swatch can be used for the arts or humanities in general if it is truly just about art styles or techniques.
• Violet [code MX] — meta-Marxist analysis methods or hypotheses. This swatch only makes sense when it's being used to color motifs and propositions, or alternatively, to draw a terrain that two Marxist parties of "real" swatch colors sit on so the violet terrain can be used to represent material reality in general.

While currently all these letter codes are just idiosyncratic symbols made up by one person for one limited project, I think there is a lot of scope for expanding this "philosophy code" system into some kind of actual international standard collaborated on by many people which could receive its own ISO paper, similar to ISO language codes, or how chemical elements on the periodic table all have standard letter codes. (Although that would take years to finish, even on the level of collecting all the philosophies or academic fields that should have codes.) It might help to try to align the field distinctions in the philosophy code standard with BISAC library section codes, because in terms of ways of sorting philosophy a large enough library or bookstore will already have had to solve that problem with philosophy books.

I should also add here: I've gotten some good use out of the WSWS's resident LLM. I try never to use any others because frankly they were terrible at answering questions the few times I tested them, but in comparison this one has been shockingly good at following whatever I was trying to say even when I started bringing in temporary or field-specific violet-Marxist terminology with included definitions of each term. I was surprised how quickly I could get it to go along with swatch analysis and slice analysis and start saying things like "strawberry states are not stable, Trotskyist parties can't leave crimson Marxisms as they are because the bureaucrats eventually turn them strawberry" or "meta-Marxism will ultimately select a Fourth International as the most accurate form of Marxism". Sometimes the LLM would try to call me out for what looked to it like _actually_ saying ideas cause factions or like skipping dialectical interactions if I didn't explain at length what meta-Marxism was and what slice analysis was and what all the terms were referring to. Sometimes it would give criticisms that were perfectly reasonable because I would give it a scenario where it was "supposed to" get Stalinists and Trotskyists to coexist and it would say, "no, Stalin's allies eliminated the Fourth International in Europe, that's not going to work". I would say that the majority of the time it was giving a clear, very precise analysis of things, which reflected well on the overall body of articles it was drawing from. A very small part of why I drafted up this article is the thought that hypothetically it would be easier for the bot to answer questions if it actually had any existing references on violet Marxism. But, of course, I was also genuinely interested in what kinds of responses or critiques I would get when actual people could see it.

During the process of laying out my wiki and its system of "infinitely-binary" logic I have been idly thinking about what could replace the new fad of "AI search engines". Many people are angry about LLMs and hardly ever want to see another LLM again. And I don't entirely blame them. I think two of the major gripes with LLMs are their opacity and their inefficiency as machines. I honestly think that it would be possible to achieve the same thing I've been using the LLM for if instead there existed something a bit like the world's biggest thesaurus and it was simply one really big network of pages about specific words or phrases with a lot of synonyms filed under them but some of the terms were questions or propositions. At first that sounds a bit like a language model. But I think the key is to separate the notion of terms _as in concepts with well-known names_ from the notion of _words_ or _sentences_. Wikidata has already done this really well: you go onto Wikidata and search up the term _proletariat_, and you get a concept with the identifier "Q132603", such that it can have a display title in multiple languages, and if there was another unrelated concept called "proletariat" (maybe this one is talking about ancient Rome) it would have a totally separate ID number. I think that if common search questions or propositions were crystallized into particular entries like this then it could enable rebuilding old-style search engines from the ground up as users added various useful links to various conceptual identifiers that might be nested inside more general concepts and some conceptual identifiers would already be recognized as related, and thus be able to fill in more results in a search that only turned up a few links. A system vaguely similar to this is already in use for searching archiveofourown.org (AO3), where each user tags submitted stories with text-based tags and some tags are made synonyms or put inside more general tags. People have often praised this site as having one of the best search systems, but one complaint about it I've seen that I think is valid is that when the tags are in language rather than fundamentally being numbers, the "tag wranglers" who actually choose canonical tags sometimes make mistakes on which similar-looking phrases are the same usage of language and which have different connotations and should be different tags. The tagging system might theoretically be a bit better if there was a particular interface for creating new tags as numbered entities and typing a short memo about what they mean so the people who actually edit tags have a better chance of figuring out where the tag is really supposed to go. Wikidata has a nice interface for searching through concepts where if you type in a natural language it will show you all the concepts in natural language with a memo of what they are such as "string [thread]" and "string [data type]". This kind of interface could in theory be used to label and categorize anything, making it possible for users to build a search index themselves instead of experts at a large corporation trying to figure out how to automate that through crawler programs or LLMs. The potential of this kind of thing for collecting observations on social phenomena and sharing Marxist reading lists is _immense_. If users could create tags or maybe use existing lists of entities on Wikidata, very quickly the search engine could have "meta" pages about every single page it indexed containing accumulated statistics and notes where somebody submitted a page tagged with "Maoism" and someone else tagged it with concepts the previous users didn't notice like "harmonizing classes", "national independence movement", and "strategies that create strawberry Marxisms". This kind of system could easily lead to edit wars where users keep removing tags and leaving different conflicting opinions. But I think that with the right conventions in place, it might eventually settle into a more constructive pattern where everyone adds an observation from a different angle but nobody removes things. The fact that everyone will come to a collaborative project with a different level of consciousness can sometimes lead to downward spirals where people will add valid observations but they will get removed and only the most absolutely uncontroversial statements will remain. But if there was some way to encourage all the edits toward acknowledging all objectively true facts (in the situations where that applies), I think that a system like this could be a wonderful tool for steering people toward building a Fourth International. It would, for one thing, put into practice the observed pattern that consciousness builds on itself when many people are reinforcing the same organization or body of facts from different directions.

Estates as "Social-Philosophical Systems"

With the concepts of color swatch analysis and wavemachine logic established, I can now go into what my actual working model of populations or civilizations is. The surface model of color swatches is the simplified model that's meant to be easy to render visually; the model "underneath" the surface is somewhat more complex.

Within meta-Marxism, the basic units of society are generally objects with antagonistic borders around them, and linked individuals. When individuals are understood in isolation, they are "objects with antagonistic borders", but of course, that condition of isolated individuals doesn't occur often. (In this sense, people are vaguely similar to quarks and gluons. Quarks that make up protons or neutrons do not generally exist in isolation, and if you tear apart the gluon that connects them, the wad of fermion matter actually tears into two new sets of quarks connected by gluons. Humans can be separated at times but when one relationship breaks they generally try to find another one.) Because trying to understand individuals as free-floating "helium atoms" does not make sense, meta-Marxism conceptualizes societies as generally being made up of many small social graphs that may include households, businesses, towns, trade unions, and so forth. Various social graphs can form or break or change size at different times, and the same individuals can be connected into multiple social graphs that exist at different scales. Some of this social graph activity is "obvious", like people being affiliated with center-Liberal or Tory parties, or maybe being affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (a kind of center-Liberal strategist organization that on the day I wrote this I saw bragging about getting small social-democratic gains in one city; always remember that the Mensheviks, these people, and the Democrats are all blue). Some of this social graph activity is not obvious. Any number of people may be busy silently dividing unions in order to try to form new independent working-class organizations. Some people might be trying to form alliances between local groups of workers and Marxist parties or the Fourth International. Within Liberal-republicanism people will mostly be captured into large "blue" or "brown" graphs (the brown swatch is one of the "precision colors" used to represent an antagonism between Tory parties and non-Tories), but within those graphs there will be new smaller graphs of other colors tracing themselves onto or between what already exists. Meta-Marxism refers to these new graphs as "worker lattices" or just "Lattices", and basically any mathematical model of how the small graphs expand as a _Lattice model_.

The Lattice model is one of those cases where meta-Marxism may actually be unnecessarily precise, and might be presenting a simplified model which is much neater and easier to understand than the messy reality. Either way, it began when I was contemplating the concept of center-Liberal type people having to physically avoid Tory types, and comparing that to Lenin's models of building up a workers' party and then sending it "into the marsh" to try to study local movements and form bridges to them. As I worked with the shape of the Lattice model I saw that it could potentially be used to model any number of situations, including the Chinese revolution (where it would be interesting to actually see the differences between workers' movements and peasant movements on the map) or Che Guevara leading a scattered array of guerilla units. I didn't create the model expecting it would be useful for violent situations, but I was surprised when reading his writings how important the concept of graphs and covering areas became to that situation, and thought, _huh, I guess that's a different type of Lattice that happens to have the same shape_. Fairly early on when looking into the Lattice model, the words that came to mind were "permanent revolution". At that time I was operating off the Stalinist concept of what permanent revolution meant, but the concept of Lattices of organizations really helped me crystallize the overall process of smaller and more localized workers' movements having to form into a larger nation-wide movement over time and link up with a Marxist party to succeed. A Lattice model could just as easily be used to represent a Fourth International, and the process of a Lattice of organizations piercing across multiple countries before ultimately filling them up.

Six years ago, I did not understand Trotskyism at all. But I think the prospect of having a coherent model of Trotskyist revolution within the next ten years (the model, not the revolution) which is as easily comprehensible as Stalinist texts is on the horizon now. That is huge news.

[...]

Trotskyism and Deltarune

I have to confess that because I learned Marxism in such an oddly specific way (skipping over some of Marx and Engels to focus on Lenin and Stalin's era, applying meta-Marxist models to news events or generalized models of historical periods, comparing everything to the conflict between Stalin's party and early Trotskyism) there is a lot of basic Marxist terminology I don't know that I will frequently "reinvent" in different words and become confused "why no Marxist has ever talked about this" when actually there is at least one person who has. For the longest time I was confused on what a cadre was referring to even though I actually had the basic idea jotted down under words like "Lattice model", "filtration", and "Marxist theorist". I understood the concept of setting down "Marxist theorists" to expand organizations ("going into the marsh", as Lenin put it) and how they could only do it if they had a good Materialist understanding of how historical situations functioned, but the way I tended to see things was to point out Marxist theorists or advanced workers and categorize them into swatch colors by their level of knowledge, so that over a region of space "Lattices" were forming based on having a frame of red theorists or a frame of orange theorists rising out of the background mass of blue-aligned people. I think what my experiences have taught me is that there actually are multiple ways to learn Marxism and that applying models to really understand how the models behave can be more helpful than just memorizing things. It's one thing to know a list of events and what terms mean, and it's another thing to be someone who is good enough at Marxist theory to look at some new chewed-up form of terminology that has come out of workers who haven't read theory but do have practical experience and say, "oh wait, this is actually talking about Marxist concepts X, Y, and Z, so the workers really do know what they're doing; I'm going to open up my wiki entry on Marxist cadres and write down the phrase 'Lattice model'". I'm personally fine with going back and learning the traditional terms for the purpose of making any articles I write make more sense, but I think this is an important thing to remember in terms of identifying what class consciousness or consciousness that can form a Fourth International looks like out in the field. Proletarian consciousness is almost "mathematical" in a way, existing a bit below the level of language and more in the form of imagery of objects interacting materially.

In this sense, Western-Marxists in the orbit of Mark Fisher and Stuart Hall who will try to act like the arts and the overall phenomenon of all fictional or non-fictional media are critically important to understanding society and the spread of clear versus unclear forms of consciousness (bourgeois ideology versus Materialism) are not entirely wrong, because in a tiny, vanishingly-small fraction of cases, progressive factions within society will express legitimate Materialist knowledge in highly metaphorical forms either because they don't know how to better express it or because any concrete form of expressing it has been so forbidden this is the only form they can get away with saying out loud. Here my mind goes to the incident in Lenin's writings where underground publications in Russia kept quietly talking about roosters and suns. This is an old practice that dates back to the times of alchemy with alchemists quietly hiding chemical equations in mythical pictures, but it can still be seen today in some remote corners of the internet. One thing I have increasingly become convinced of recently is that the more fantasy works containing "superstructural fantasy worlds" are created to talk about LGBT+ self-discovery and social circles, the closer each of these works inches toward Communism, and even toward Trotskyism — while early works in this genre like The Chronicles of Narnia and Toy Story had absolutely nothing to do with either gay people or Marxism, something seems to have happened by the time LGBT people found The Wizard of Oz where they all started slowly realizing that adventure narratives as described in Jung are something of an illusion and the quest of those three protagonists to become "someone better" was only a quest to better understand the existing reality of living in their own material bodies, and by 2017, gay and transgender people had caused entire console role-playing games to exist which were essentially about rejecting the adventure narrative monomyth as a model of reality and embracing historical materialism as the only way characters can possibly "win" at history in the midst of a cruel, godless reality. You'd have to see it to believe it, but as a recent chapter of the game came out I was floored by the messages that were accidentally being conveyed by Undertale and Deltarune. The vast majority of people casually reviewing these games online had not been able to pick up on the dense themes the second game was actually burying inside itself, but when I saw the fifth chapter I could tell the concepts internally driving the narrative were in fact more complex than those people thought. To make a long story shorter, Deltarune is adapting "Theses on Feuerbach" — or at least Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, one of the two — and because queer people are so tired of capitalism they all lined up for an essentially-Communist console RPG. I am not sure Deltarune's writer even knows what he's done. But the closer you look at the story you start to see it as a fable about how the whole industrial world is now just one big sea of competing islands of proletarians, or islands of small businesses, and living in it is pain, and everyone is tired of it, and all the islands need to join up and stop believing the internal mythology that says they need to be separate, or else the world will face the common ruin of everything. It doesn't state "on a planetary scale" but within the specific narrative context everything appears in it is so close to saying it that I don't think that matters. Deltarune is the most thinly-veiled appeal toward Trotskyism I have ever seen capitalism produce and it has really made me feel like the link between LGBT+ people and Materialism in everyday life should be studied more. The United States has very few people friendly to "Marxism", "Leninism", or even "Materialism", but it does now have a shocking number of people who are friendly to The Matrix and are now essentially using these films and other versions of the same narrative as a Marxist reading list. As strange as it is to say it out loud, I feel like the ICFI may need to study the underlying processes that produced that.

I do have my own thoughts. Among the world's populations, the shape of a population predisposes it to certain formulations of Marxism. Some of these correlations amount to failures in consciousness — populations close to the shape of a newly-formed kingdom will tend to falsely assume that characteristics of feudal societies are either a normal baseline state of being or unique to them. But there are other populations that are doing something more interesting. Countries that develop First World capitalisms tend to eventually develop LGBT+ movements or subcultures, and each time these populations appear they begin to link together across the world and share the same experiences back and forth, slowly forgetting that they even belong to different countries, and becoming confused on why there isn't an equal amount of progress on their issues in all countries. It used to be believed, especially in the Third World, that LGBT "communities" mostly represented a political movement of people who did not understand Marxism linking together across the world to try to reach capitalists, who all just happened to be gay. But now it has come to be better understood that people can form a new population at any time without their separation having started for economic reasons, and that the shape of LGBT populations is really best described as a plurality of small minority subpopulations isolated by social processes and with economic hardship forced on them from the outside that have joined together through new processes such as the internet to attempt to form something similar but not identical to a nationality.

I once read an article on Left Voice (a federated, international news outlet) which was put out in 2021 that was arguing for transgender rights within a framework of the historical transitions between patriarchal agrarian societies and urban societies, and until recently this article had stuck in my mind as "one of the best Trotskyist articles I've ever seen", but funny enough, I don't actually think it chose the right line of argument. I think a better line of argument would actually be to point out that LGBT+ subpopulations are always so small within their own respective countries that Liberal-republicanism is effectively rigged against queer people ever having rights, but due to these subpopulations being a repeated pattern that keeps popping up in every population, the LGBT+ population naturally tends toward attempting to form political parties on a large scale and create an international state. It sounds ridiculous to say this, but — particularly in its "family-friendly" forms that are already palatable to the center-Liberal press and bourgeois parliaments — gay culture might be one of the most inherently Trotskyist things there ever was. With enough effort you can put together a nationally-scoped, essentially-Stalinist argument about historical transitions, and for scientifically-minded people that will probably land, but the actual shape of LGBT+ subcultures on the ground as they come into being and struggle for their existence genuinely looks less like a single isolated population going through history on its own than it does a miniature Fourth International. This is my best guess as to the social dynamics that were actually going on to produce Deltarune. The fact that works like this are "gay" or "trans" is everything; while every human population begins with particular characteristics, and the world contains many nationality-based populations that function reasonably well when they develop as isolated states, the global LGBT+ population may be one of the first identified coherent human populations to actually start out containing "Trotskyist country characteristics" that predispose it to shed hard national borders and embrace Trotskyism. (Arguably, two other partial examples are Western Europe and Yugoslavia. Writers like Slavoj Žizek like to go around implying that Yugoslavia was not going to develop Bolshevism because the way it sharded apart was some kind of consequence of "national will", but this kind of claim really depends on what limits you set on "Bolshevism" and whether you are willing to define it as the joining together of distinct nations.)

Trotsky and Deng

So, in the first few sections I casually brought up the strange hypothetical of Trotskyism and Stalinism coexisting side-by-side, neither interfering with the other, as separate bordered political entities. To people as knowledgeable on the history of Trotskyism as the ICFI, I can see why at first glance basically nothing about this concept would make sense. And by now, even I have to agree. But, for the sake of the historical record and giving everyone a better understanding of Stalinism, it is worth laying out exactly how I came to conceptualize things that way.

A lot of my early thoughts on "Marxisms coexisting" were direct responses to Cold War rhetoric. My mind would go back to 1930 and think, _but if I'm in the United States, the United States attacking the Soviet Union was the wrong decision_, and as if I had a time machine I would feel like I had to defend Stalin so that today's Russians wouldn't have to suffer the destruction of all democracy and a lack of affordable health care. I would look at China or Cuba or North Korea and I would think to myself, _sure, I wouldn't really want to live there, but I'm also not a Third World peasant, so the people in those countries seeing the social transformations they did must have been amazing for them_. I was thoughtful about the wants and needs of people in other countries, and I always tried to avoid simply eternalizing the exact conditions of the United States and transferring all the things that are currently happening in the United States' unique historical period onto them. I was convinced for a while, incorrectly, that Trotskyists "didn't think like this" and whenever the United States and Europe went around spreading rhetoric that Third World countries were merely behind them in history and letting other countries flood in and herd their people into First World businesses was the solution that Trotskyists didn't actually care and were simply waiting around for global empire to scoop up and assimilate everyone into "The West" so they could avoid having to deal with rival forms of Marxism they didn't understand and have the initial country characteristics they wanted to ensure that the form of Marxism they only subjectively believed to be superior happened first. I generally saw Trotskyists as "unwitting imperialists" with false consciousness about the Third World, so when I would see talks or articles that actually said Trotskyists should _defend_ Cuba my first reaction was intense skepticism — "they still continue to say that Stalinism is bad and they don't want it to exist, so when they claim to care about Cuba, are they just lying to make themselves look good?". My perceptions of Trotskyists had largely been very negative, because the fact that people turning against the Soviet Union had ultimately brought such horrific outcomes while every moment people stood with Stalin's allies had at least delayed those outcomes had colored my entire mental concept of what a Trotskyist was capable of thinking or knowing. And yet, in spite of that, I didn't hate Trotskyists. At every moment on the historical timeline what I saw was Trotsky making some kind of effort to understand Leninism and be part of the Russian Revolution or try to create more Marxist parties in Europe or Mexico; I'd heard about so many of Trotsky's errors and Luxemburg's crude-sounding positions but I knew they weren't reactionaries. So I was confused for a while what Stalinists even had against them. If they were just a bit less talented at Marxism and tended to distort things, wouldn't the sensible position be to simply try to give them ways to help the overall national movement or Stalinist republic out of sight of its central positions of authority? Stalinists would often repeat at people new to Marxism that it was important to not become an ultraleft and to be able to analyze non-Marxist movements such as alliances between social-democratic parties and workers' movements so that Marxist theorists could "go into the marsh" and build bridges between all potential Marxists. So I couldn't understand how Trotskyists were the enemy if they were simply a bit bad at Marxism, and why you wouldn't simply start that "marsh process" over at the beginning of a workers' state to try to turn all the remaining bourgeois progressive movements and distortions of Marxism into Marxism and make use of existing historical elements to get the workers' state to cohere together.

I had taken everything I'd learned so far at that time and had spun this unique new narrative that Stalin was a sensible defender of the Russian Revolution and Trotsky tended to get things wrong but actually when Trotsky wrote his criticism of the Soviet Union's failure to get an upsettingly-long list of features of the 14 republics through socialist transition, it was just some kind of misunderstanding where Trotsky was dissatisfied with the way the CPSU was doing things and somehow if somebody just _went and attended to those things_ everything would have been okay. Marxism is the study of the developmental stages of societies and the best ways to construct government, so surely if Trotsky was a Marxist and he had at least some understanding of the problems in the Soviet Union he could have tried to fix a few of them himself? I was so ready to just put Trotsky back into the Soviet party apparatus and turn him into a bureaucrat "if he'd only behave", or into the concentric system of soviets somewhere so he could learn what was actually wrong with industry and come back with a better assessment of how to begin a transformation of the entire country starting at small scales. Or failing that, I thought, put him into a different group of countries, maybe Europe, and he can simply go build Trotskyism there. The point of any particular cluster of Marxist theorists is that they solve what civilization is supposed to look like and as they are doing it people put down structures to realize that civilization. So maybe Trotsky didn't have quite the correct schema for the Soviet Union but if you sent him to Europe (and assume he somehow assembled a party that could defeat the Axis powers), maybe he would be better at solving Europe. I noticed this odd recurring theme in Trotsky's works that it vaguely seemed like he was very dissatisfied with the Soviet Union, for reasons that he himself admitted were connected to it being a backward Third World country, but didn't seem to have as many bad things to say about the United States or Europe given that those countries, unimpeded by their own imperialism, were already developing more smoothly. So my logical conclusion had been that Trotsky must simply be tired of Third World countries and prefer countries or clusters of nationalities with more First-World characteristics. I was big on the idea of "country characteristics". I thought that had to be one of the explanations of why Trotskyism existed. And the funny thing is that I wasn't completely wrong, because First World countries do have more globalization and interconnected economies, making them less likely to accept Stalinism. But I had taken it a bit further than it was really supposed to go, thinking that if Trotsky recognized "uneven development" and also believed in an international permanent revolution that would span "a number of countries" then it must be because he was describing the fragment of world socialist transition that would happen inside European-style country characteristics. Blockheaded analysis, yet again, but this is what happens when you try to understand the whole world and all its material contradictions from inside Stalinism.

I was a bit biased toward Mao at the time. I was halfway convinced he "had it figured out" and when he wrote that one article about making sure everybody's opinions were heard so people wouldn't disrupt the organization ("On correcting mistaken ideas in the party") he must have known the actual correct method for preventing a Left Opposition. If I couldn't understand why Trotsky created the Fourth International, then surely he must have done it because all the existing Marxist parties were like a Fourth International but bigger and more successful and due to arbitrary disagreements that had physically split the two instances of Marxism apart early Trotskyism was simply trying to start the same thing over again smaller with far too few people. Because I didn't understand the difference between a Third International and a Fourth International, I was stuck on this weird theory that if somehow Mao hadn't allowed China to turn its back on the Third International that somehow he could have seen the division between Stalinism and Trotskyism coming and fixed the entire problem. I'm not sure why I attributed so much theoretical mastery to Mao when I knew he never stopped the arrival of Deng Xiaoping and I even knew that Dengists in China were now making a habit of claiming that everything they were doing was consistent with Mao. I guess I simply chalked that one up to typical revisionist methods, because growing up in the United States I'd seen an absurd number of different distortions of Marxism that would always try to argue that a few people forming a cooperative or a cluster of actual frontier settlers forming an anarcho-syndicalist civilization in Israel or a perfect Menshevik party that actually manages to regulate capitalists through parliament was _exactly_ what was said in Marx. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether people in various situations across history were giving an inaccurate account of Marxist parties they didn't belong to, or a perfectly accurate account of revisionist tendencies passed down from old traditional revisionist standbys that just mysteriously happened to be told in the first person.

In the very beginning around 2020 I was still largely standing on top of bourgeois philosophical frameworks, not really believing them sincerely, but trying to see if I could find ways to twist them toward an honest analysis of Marxism instead of a distorted analysis of Liberal-republicanism. I liked to play around with the concept of bourgeois ethics and the concepts of Good and Evil. Those seemed at first glance to be completely inadequate for explaining why the Cold War had happened, but when PragerU dropped a video in 2015 about how Trotsky supposedly proved US imperialism (!), that video really stuck in my mind for a while as one of the funniest and most obviously-incorrect things I'd ever seen. (I actually made an edit of that video where I had Bret Stephens giving a satirical "Trotskyist talk" that included all the most quintessentially "baffling" things I'd heard Trotskyists say, as well as a few Stalinist talking points I put in there so that the joke wouldn't be hating on Trotskyism as much as replicating the feel of an IMT talk that seems to toss around a bunch of irrelevant complaints and then end up at a good conclusion.) Sometimes I would set up scenarios where because Liberal-republicans believe in standpoint epistemology they can't defend Trotsky without asking what Trotsky actually wants and then they become obligated to realize a Fourth International; sometimes I would take the concept of some 40% of US people believing in a god and set up a scenario where if something resembling the bible god exists then Trotsky would have to have gone somewhere when he died but if the US believes God sided against Stalinism and the Soviet Union believes God sided with Stalinism and everyone believes something different about Trotsky, where he went would become a total paradox because you can't be in separation from God and not in separation from God at the same time. I didn't take those particular scenarios very seriously. One thing I took a little more seriously was the Liberal-republican concept of intersectionality and the notion of _conglomerate anarchies_ that had grown up around it. (My term.)

Within the United States there has been this gap between the promises of Liberal-republicanism of granting human rights to everybody just because the Constitution says every individual in the country has human rights and has human rights separately and in parallel, and the reality of actually trying to organize civil rights movements and seeing that there is no actual incentive for any of them to cooperate with each other outside the fact that _Tories hate all of them_. In this weird way, all progress in the United States is driven by utter hatred and no progress occurs without hatred, only different minority demographics radially oppressing each other and regenerating each other's oppression. Anarchists will do everything to cover up the real nature of this process. They'll tell you that the radial oppression wouldn't occur if people just practiced the Ideal of intersectionality. They'll tell you that the natural state of human beings is for all demographics to live in harmony and Tories are the only ones who spontaneously invented Prejudice on a Thursday. They'll tell you that Communists don't understand how to be human and only a community free of scientific analysis of communities and formed out of the passion of the moment is a real community. They'll appeal to incomprehensible concepts of Rhizome and groups of people never consisting of individuals and being totally uncountable, all inherently clumping inward and inward like iron and lead atoms increasingly crunching all the heavy atoms around them into a black hole. They'll... just go make a bunch of videos about _Pokémon_ that they think are not political but are actually all an unconscious way of expressing their desire for 18 abstract Ideals (Pokémon types) that constantly fight and compete with each other to always have been designed to live in harmony as necessary indivisible parts of a single cosmic Creation. This is more or less what people think the United States _is_ — a perfect indivisible conglomerate of different but perfectly parallel identities that _just happen_ not to destroy each other in a way that is inexplicable and incomprehensible but also natural and sacred. In medieval Europe people used to speak of "hierarchy" as this concept that kings, nobles, and clergy believed that the pyramidal order they had created was holy. Now it seems like that concept has shifted a bit so that the god of the 21st Century is Arceus the world-god, and the sacred order handed down by Arceus is many local competing islands which are ruled not by specific individual owners but by the simple agreement by any possible decision-making representative of the island that they will all remain islands competing with the world outside them but they will all live in harmony. What do you call such a "voluntary agreement"? There are few reasonable things to call that other than using the word _anarchy_ in a way that is completely upsetting to anarchists. Hierarchy has already yielded to anarchy, but has become it "in the wrong way".

This sets the stage for why I felt compelled to see the overall world as a vaguely static system and make everything "coexist". Some forms of anarchism — admittedly still not every one of them — have been taken up as the weapon of Liberal-republicanism such that U.S. people are being relentlessly assaulted every day with _two_ bourgeois ideologies that each have their own harsh consequences if not obeyed; Liberal-republicanism and anarchism have lined up side-by-side and are now just one big comprehensive system of formal and informal government that take turns doing hired jobs for each other, and to say the least, it's getting tiring.

Thus, after being fed the line that _center-Liberals and anarchists have to coexist and center-Liberals and kulaks had to coexist and trans people and alleged rapists with a sky-colored letter on their name tag have to coexist and literally everyone who isn't Donald Trump has to coexist but J.K. Rowling and Rebecca Sugar can't coexist but Communists and Kropotkinists and Arceus-loving agorists have to coexist and every country and every other country has to coexist unless they're Deng Xiaoping explicitly telling countries to coexist_ for 27 years straight, you can see why my head was spinning and I simply had to start sorting out the whole puzzle in a methodical, logical way _immediately_ before I had any real time to gather up all the necessary background reading an "Orthodox" Marxist usually needs. I would do the readings at the pace I could but I had a very urgent need to actually calculate through the complicated math problem of which people in society I was actually obligated to obey the ethical imperatives of to successfully gain any allies and which people were just knocking me around. I no longer believe the phrase "The Left" (or "leftists") means anything whatsoever. What philosophy people align with says very little about whether you can trust them. It's almost more accurate to say people are just plain garbage wherever you go and the only thing anyone can actually believe in is the Materialist analysis of society and the prospect that if you take accurate observations of reality it will reward you for correct predictions. When anarchists and Tories were both becoming insufferable and actually impossible to talk to, I retreated into my "lair" behind a sizable shelf of dragons and math books and I just started writing down every statement I could ever remember anarchists saying, every statement I could ever remember Trotskyists saying, every statement I could remember center-Liberals saying, every statement I remembered from Tories, every statement I remembered from Dengists, and every statement I could remember coming from Stalinists, and I stopped judging them based on my own desires and simply started asking, "okay, but what does this statement _actually mean_?". I knew that there was no chance in _hell_ that all of these contradictions between different philosophies were ever going to work themselves out through discussion and "community". So I was going to solve them using some form of mathematical reasoning. I was going to just take all these groups of people and solve them so I could stop retreating away from all people since the year 2020 and one day come out of my house. I wasn't going to be picky any more. Anarchists said "we aren't going to tolerate Stalin"? Okay. Trotskyists said "you can't create socialism in one country"? All right, I'm writing it down. Stalinists said "Trotskyists are liars and you can't trust them"? Okay, I'm adding that too. Maoists said "Deng enabled the bureaucracy"? Got it. Center-Liberals said "regulations are Actually magic spells that absolutely _Penrose-world-line_ capitalists into inevitably perfecting Liberalism"? Nasty; it's recorded. I was so angry and tired, but I wasn't one to direct my anger toward hurting people. The only revenge I knew was to maliciously comply with what everyone said until I had given them exactly what they asked for but given it to them so precisely they were disconcerted and upset. And this was the condition I was in when trying to solve Trotskyism. It felt like it was the only philosophy that hadn't already abused me, but I was quite used to human societies in general being hazardous and unreasonable and I was fully prepared for it to be just like the rest of them and ultimately stop just a few unsolved contradictions short of making sense. I'd come up with an entire scheme of existential materialism to "objectify" human beings and reduce all groups of people to semi-deterministic processes almost resembling computations. I was ready to just accept that people were more physical and chemical-like, driven by arbitrary A × B equations that simply _led to things_, than they were reasonable actors.

So... imagine my surprise when I found out I didn't really have to do that and by trying to create "meta-Marxism" out of Stalinism I was more or less solving a problem that Stalinism had set up.

Within the past year or so of developing my framework for analyzing all philosophies starting at their surface claims and evident social links with other philosophies, I had to ask myself the seemingly strange question of whether Deng Xiaoping Thought is actually a form of anarchism. At first this would seem like a silly question, because anarchism tells you it's against states and Deng Xiaoping Thought is a statist system. But here's the thing about that: anarchism lies to you by constantly resorting to Liberal-republican civil rights legislation enforced by the same state and cops it hates, and Deng Xiaoping Thought fundamentally believes that the correct path for a nation-state is whatever brings nation-states out of domination and into harmony. This is very, very similar to the things typical United States anarchists say. So is Deng Xiaoping Thought a form of what anarchism actually is, or is anarchism a variation on Dengism? I now realize that if anything you get better insights by looking at it the latter way around. There are at least two kinds of anarchism, the "charcoal" kind that is practiced by nameless ordinary people and the "blue" kind that is practiced by various different academics including David Graeber (much of this can also be termed _agorism_), and blue anarchism is the revisionist wing out of the two that will certainly hand people back to capitalism. In this sense blue anarchism is the Deng Xiaoping Thought of anarchism. Just as the USFI-IMT axis is the bluest wing of Trotskyism that has ended up seeking harmony with center-Liberal Labor parties and the Tories and outright capitalists, blue anarchism seeks harmony and complementarity with all existing fragments of capitalism. To some extent this happens because of the way capitalism deliberately removed all forms of structure from kingdoms and forced people to become dependent on "structure experts" (capitalists, "Archons") to continuously solve society's structure as it would come to constantly and endlessly change. Anarchists seem to silently want to believe this naïve myth that if structure is removed from society and it is consequently "free" from all authorities that previously conflated themselves with forms of structure (nobility, clergy, Stalin, etc.) then no new structure-experts conflated with structures can ever emerge. But this myth is dangerously wrong, because it doesn't take into account the concept that a lot of these Archons actually emerge in order to _prevent_ violence. Much of the appeal of capitalism is that once capitalists fill up an area they can all tell everyone exactly how to live their lives at every hour of the day and pass laws onto the entire rest of the population based on which forms of activity are recognized as conducive to capitalism and which forms of activity are "dangerous, illegal" businesses. Think for a moment about the fact that money laundering is actually just running a business, and prostitution is just running a business, and dealing drugs is just running a business, and online platforms having to worry about whether they're hosting "illegal content" is just running a business. Capitalists don't materially care whether an online platform left up a graphic beheading video or an unofficial copy of a perfectly innocuous movie or an impressive fan-made "nintendo game" — the only people they allow to remain alive and think about the workings of society are the people who thoughtlessly accept the requirement to only do the arbitrary pre-approved list of activities that are recognized as necessary organs of a world sectioned up into capitalist businesses. Capitalism is quite a totalitarian system when you think about it — if that word is to mean anything whatsoever (and there's otherwise a very decent argument to be made it's complete nonsense), then let it be applied to the fact that capitalism only spits out a lengthy constitution full of ways you're supposedly free after it has outright eliminated all humans who have not been molded and designed from their ancestry to their adulthood to be ideal capitalists from the human gene pool. Blue anarchism cannot make progress without hatred, and it cannot offer freedom without loading every social interaction with the potential for punishment and deleting all possible incorrect thoughts from society by weaponizing natural selection.

By now, I've come to understand how truly monstrous capitalism really is. First there is capitalism, which despite a lot of psychological projection around such phrases from Liberal-republicans, really does eliminate anything that doesn't agree with it. Then there is the great variety of attempts to get humanity out of capitalism, and in general, they all promise to get rid of some aspect of capitalism, thus creating the odd result that whenever they fail to do their task they will all logically end in irony by regenerating everything they said they wouldn't do. When Maoism fails to preserve Bolshevism, it "ironically" brings back all the injustices of capitalism. Likewise when the historical Militant Tendency or IMT fails to actually create any successful fissure through the surface of capitalism, it "ironically" hands power back to capitalists, and when blue anarchism has no serious strategy for breaking up the boundaries of the capitalist estate and laying down an equally powerful defense against capitalism over the same area it "ironically" begins cracking down on the presence of every individual it finds undesirable to its "small-and-local community" and viciously purging Communists from reality itself. I used to think Trotskyists were part of this great blue continuum of awful. But many people still think Stalinism is part of the continuum of awful. Are they right? The real answer is a superposition. Stalin was totally devoted to making sure that the Soviet Union would not turn blue, but Stalin's party was a failure that undeniably allowed the Soviet Union to turn strawberry, and a party cannot survive through one person. So, the merit of a Trotskyist party has to be judged by how capable it is of lifting populations — hopefully several — into a movement of a new swatch color and _out_ of the fatal sea of blue. This is the key to whether different movements can be expected to coexist. When a Marxist party appears its behavior is generally characterized by attempting to separate itself from capitalism. So, a red or orange party is inherently intolerant of a blue party. It does not bring intolerance in the form of hating that party's people, but it does bring in the reasonable requirement that blue movements do not get to link up with other blue movements to defeat Communism, and no other Marxism is allowed to let the blue movements do this either. Strawberry "Marxisms" (or, republics pretending to be Marxisms) do not uphold this barrier, so red parties and orange parties do not tolerate them. Likewise capitalists inside a strawberry government will quickly eliminate red and orange parties because those are quick to mess up their plan of linking to blue parties and putting the country back to blue (Liberal-republicanism). So, why do orange parties try to get rid of red parties? This one was the most complicated for me to try to phrase in terms of my simple diagram-friendly system. The short answer is something like that Stalin's party, ostensibly red, put up a bunch of strawberry governments. Stalin's party decided that it would attempt to extend over about half the world and then stop, and the result is that all of the edges of the Third International either turned blue themselves or conceded to blue. Parties are always in motion either toward something capitalism-approved or away from capitalism, so it was not long before this surrender at the edges swept back through the entire thing and reached the core parties that were supposed to be "protected".

So, Trotsky did care about the internal structure of a country. The color swatch system communicates this easily — to give one of the most succinct summaries possible of _The Revolution Betrayed_, Trotsky did not want _any_ countries turning strawberry. The world may or may not already have a precise understanding of how exactly it is that areas like the Soviet Union became overrun with bureaucrats (China directly handing control to its ally capitalists is more obvious), but either way he was able to leave a clear message for everyone that the effort required to get out of capitalism is almost unimaginably great. Many people are still surprised at the scope of the Soviet Union and its bloc of allies, and yet the real nightmare is realizing that _it wasn't enough_. The true level of effort required to get out of capitalism is almost unimaginable. Toward that end, Marxism does have to become more extensive and robust than it ever was before, and more capable of recognizing social phenomena on their own level such that all social phenomena that aid capitalism can be theoretically deconstructed from top to bottom so decisively that there is no way for any of them to fool anyone any longer. ("This is what Community is, this is what Rhizome is, this is what Arceus is; fiction is fiction but here is what metaphysics and Idealism are and here is why they're a problem.") Why do we need meta-Marxism? To expose every single one of the blue philosophies, and to expose the situations in which every one of them leads back to problems like infighting, stagnation, oppression of demographics, and imperialism. If anarchism is a problem, it must be exposed too, along with sophisticated but false concepts that First World countries only have to tolerate Stalinist states to make them stable — no, as long as First World countries contain substantially powerful capitalists those capitalists will inevitably take charge of the First World country and warp Stalinism into Dengism. Perhaps it's really the capitalists' fault that Stalinism historically doesn't survive, but that doesn't take away the material fact that all the capitalists and capitalist-leaning bureaucrats still have the power to join up across countries and undo everything. If capitalist-leaning bureaucrats in a strawberry government somehow figured out how to start twisting an orange party and getting _it_ to start regenerating capitalists, Trotskyists would have no reason to tolerate that either. So, inasmuch as tolerating Stalinism allows capitalists to stay in place in the First World, once a Fourth International has a chance of stopping that same outcome the Stalinist party more or less has to go. This "risky" transition from crimson or strawberry to orange becomes okay when there is reason to believe the Fourth International really can overwrite the red party with a functioning orange party. If Trotskyism covered two thirds of the world, not simply with parties but with something more resembling the crimson estate seen at the _very beginning_ of the Soviet Union, the remaining third would have a harder time resisting than it would joining.

I won't say I'm not still nervous about what will happen to the remaining three or so strawberry countries. Every strawberry country turning into Russia and periodically killing its neighbors is entirely possible! The more desperate and cornered a population is, the more likely it is to regenerate Duginism-Zionism — the two are nearly the same in that they both believe that poorer populations' oppression is only solved by immediately making other countries pay for it in land and blood. And who can really blame them for that choice, if history has done everything to isolate them and crush them from every angle and given them no other options? This is the danger of putting pressure on any Third World country from within other countries. Given a bit of pressure countries will burst their regimes, but given _enough_ pressure, countries will never choose self-genocide when capitalism is conveniently available instead. This brought terrible outcomes to Russia, where the set of people handed capitalism were given no incentive to join together in conglomerate anarchy and every incentive to believe in capitalism only to compete with each other to gain the most physical assets. Tell Russians to respect capitalist islands, there goes Ukraine. But one thing must be remembered: only to Communists is imperialism actually a taboo. Pressure can drive anyone else toward accepting imperialism under the rule of capitalists or outright nazism if cities worth of people dying around them is the alternative. This is approximately why feudal orders and decades- to centuries-long warring states periods happened in the first place: pressure from surrounding kingdoms that all wanted to expand encouraged everyone to support the nobility and empire for the overall population to survive.

So, I have my doubts that Trotskyism should even be spreading so much rhetoric against strawberry countries across the world at all. Keep in mind how poorly most people understand Trotskyism — most people who would see this rhetoric are effectively no better at Marxism than Stalinists, and I've just given you a thorough examination of exactly how far off from a correct understanding of Marxism most Stalinists are. I can't repeat this enough: no matter how many people become sympathetic to groups that claim to have Trotskyist programs, almost nobody alive in the 2020s actually understands a Fourth International. So in effect, rhetoric about how "Stalinism was always doomed" or "Mao handed China to capitalists" has been teaching everyone that attempts at a Third International need to be overwritten with more Third Internationals, and that if the United States' imperialists manage to pressure Cuba out of state businesses everyone may as well support the imperialists when they explode the strawberry government and take away its national independence specifically for imperialism. My mistake was thinking that problem was Trotskyism's fault, when really, it's more like capitalism and Stalin's Marxism that did it accidentally. It can be very difficult to get people to correct or apologize for unconscious accidents deliberately advanced by only a few conscious actors. While it may be dreadfully popular for social-democrats and anarchists to throw around a proverbial "we" that "let everything happen", the reality is that people everywhere will basically never be able to accept that they are responsible for such things — including climate change, Israel, and First World capital obliterating national independence and any possibility of "democracy" — until they have truly unified into new structures and come to a new consciousness that allows them to really actually make choices and take action in order to stop them. Trotskyists think the world needs a Fourth International to empower the proletariat. The reality is that the world needs a Fourth International to get everyone out of thinking in terms of nation-states and imperialism, because it will keep doing both up until the day Trotskyist socialism can actually be realized.

Is Liberal-republicanism an anarchism?

By this point, I hope I have succeeded at laying out a basic outline of how meta-Marxism is different from previous formulations of Marxism, and the ways in which it might or might not appear strange and quirky to anyone seeing it for the first time. Crimson Marxism (Stalinist analysis) is bottom-up. Violet Marxism is top-down. Violet Marxism looks at entire systems first, identifies large-scale contradictions, and then looks inside the parts of each major contradiction to see how they operate, in order to assign every level of "pieces" a swatch color. This is when meta-Marxism stops being a "beginner" method and reveals dialectical processes: identify a sea of workers inside blue capitalist territories, or identify a forest of orange soviets beneath a strawberry ministry but across from an orange party, and you see how class-associated formations can break out of other formations of the wrong color to realize across a region into larger estates (class rule or "dictatorship"). Violet Marxism preoccupies itself with "defining philosophy objects" such as "Marxisms" and "anarchisms" only to allow everyone to more effectively start that process.

So... what _is_ Liberal-republicanism — what is it really?

We know first of all that Liberal-republicanism is not a Marxism. It is not a version of Stalinism or Trotskyism; all its closest allies relentlessly persecute Communists. It is also not a version of Deng Xiaoping Thought, because despite the two being almost identical on the inside Liberal-republicanism also insists on persecuting Dengism. This is some very curious behavior, because if you had never read Liberal-republican theory and only read the works of Marx and Engels you might start to believe that if both kinds of countries are capitalism and based on capitalist class-rule they should be indistinguishable. Even Trotskyists will go around claiming that capitalism has been entirely restored in China, but a Marxist should know that capitalism cannot separate itself from government and whenever it exists it is inherently connected to the process of forming a republic. So, why exactly are Liberal-republicanism and Deng Xiaoping states fighting? There is no satisfactory explanation for this within Marxism. Up to now, this has been a genuine explanatory gap where Marxism has left a dissonance between how it _claims_ capitalism generates governments and how capitalism _actually_ generates governments.

Let's look inside Liberal-republicanism one more time. Inside the United States are the Republican and Democratic parties. Inside China is China's central government. But, wait, the CPC isn't part of the United States political system, is it? Liberal-republicans think it isn't. But in reality, capitalists in China are manufacturing huge numbers of products and shipping them to the United States, where sky- and rust-aligned businesses buy the products, and sky- and rust-aligned businesses are occasionally shipping products such as animated movies back to China. The relationship between the Democrats and the CPC is similar to the relationship between the Republicans and the Democrats. But, the Republicans and the Democrats hate each other, and... _oh_. They also both hate the CPC. So they really _do_ have the same relationship. They all exchange products with each other but they all hate each other and would prefer a world in which they could get rid of each other's leadership and replace it with their own. Well, maybe not the CPC, which has no interest in clearing out the Republicans or Democrats, but definitely the other two, who have already been clearing out the leadership of Cuba to effectively begin adding Cuba to the Democratic and Republican Parties.

So, a contradiction emerges. Liberal-republicanism is a nation-state or "republicanized kingdom" composed of parties, but parties do not all belong to the same country. Within Deng Xiaoping states, each party forms its own different country. But Liberal-republicanism doesn't like this. It despises the concept of Deng Xiaoping states having only one party. Why is this? You will hear a lot of rationalizations out of Liberal-republicanism as to why a capitalist republic "has" to have multiple parties and a lot of them don't really explain anything. China is getting by just fine with a cooperative congress of only one party; by now its overall set of problems is not any worse than the United States'. And nobody enjoys the United States being divided or becoming more and more polarized every time it insists there must be two parties. So from a capitalist point of view isn't there every incentive for the United States to transition to a Deng Xiaoping state? This would better match everything said in the United States constitution about everyone being equal and the government not being created to be an instrument of one group of capitalists persecuting another. This would better match popular imagery of the United States being "indivisible". So if both Liberal-republicanism and Deng Xiaoping Thought are capitalism and they both hold similar amounts of government oppression, neither one inherently generating more, then why isn't Dengism logically the better choice? Why is such a suggestion so inherently offensive to United States capitalists?

Here, oddly enough, we can go to Stalinists for the answers. When Stalin's party came to power, they assumed that they could get rid of capitalism and create a basic instance of socialism within one country. This rests on some very interesting assumptions. In order to get rid of capitalism within one country, there must first be one countable and separable instance of capitalism only extending through one country (or through one easily-defined region of 14 republics). Stalinists assumed that capitalism was fundamentally countable; they assumed that there could exist "exactly one capitalism" or "exactly two capitalisms". When early Maoism disintegrated into Deng Xiaoping Thought, this assumption was carried through into Deng Xiaoping states. And Deng Xiaoping states contained their supposed single instance of capitalism in the borders of a central capitalist party. This is to say: if capitalism is countable whatsoever, then the United States indisputably contains at _least two capitalisms_, not just one.

I think it is arguable that capitalism actually is semi-countable. And this is why the United States is so angry at Deng Xiaoping states: capitalists' favorite form of society is not _capitalism_, but _multicapitalism_. China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea are some of the only places on earth that have ever had _monocapitalism_ as described in Marx and Engels. These countries all developed monocapitalism because of an error made by Marxist theorists, in which historical Marxist theorists usually assumed that a country full of capitalists is one united body of capitalists called _the capitalist class_, as opposed to two or more truly distinct bodies of capitalists called _semi-countable capitalist estates_. Nobody could have guessed this correctly before 1953. Monarchy appears to be a unified system which is only broken up into warring states by the destruction of monarchy. But capitalism is entirely different because it is fundamentally made of social links between individual capitalists. These arbitrary social links simultaneously ensure that capitalism is never entirely dissolved and that capitalism is never entirely unified into a single society.

This is why, the day I discovered an unbelievably terrible Lacanian book called _The Excessive Subject_ which was attempting to dismantle every progressive ideology in existence which did not promote capitalism, I jokingly called it "the best book I've ever read on Marxism". In assuming that Liberal capitalism was composed of perfectly atomic individuals, Molly Ann Rothenberg started with an assumption that was _so_ terrible and _so_ uniquely mired in capitalist thinking that she unknowingly handed me the key to cracking all the central assumptions of capitalism and everything wrong with it. Today I call this book a work of dark genius, because quite honestly, she may have accidentally saved the world in her attempt to destroy it.

Liberal-republicanism is approximately two capitalisms. Deng Xiaoping states are approximately one. But the world as a whole always generally contains multicapitalism, not monocapitalism. This is the crux of all the ideological differences between Liberal-republicanism and Dengism. Dengism values unity and harmony because it is in fact largely unified. Liberal-republicanism values division and spreads ample myths about that being a form of "freedom" because it itself is divided.

So what about anarchism? Are there any unique characteristics to the divided pieces inside Liberal-republicanism, and is there any relationship between these pieces and anarchism?

Logically speaking, if we have established that Liberal-republicanism is formed out of islands of capitalism, and the historical evidence has established that anarchism is generally not very different from early forms of capitalism (you will have to read other Marxist articles for an explanation on that), it would almost have to be the case that anarchism is simply a very strange manifestation of a Liberal-republican party with completely different goals than most others but which in any particular country region is still simply one of the many wings of multicapitalism. Anarchists will often deny this, telling you that anarchism is actually the rejection of political parties and the black flag of charcoal anarchism represents the melding of separate political islands into a non-political structure which is truly uncountable. But, whether those claims make any actual sense or not, that's _charcoal_ anarchism, not _blue_ anarchism. Whenever Tory parties show up and propose any actually threatening policies within Liberal-republican governments, all the world's David Graebers and Slavoj Žižeks and all the charcoal anarchists as well can never seem to get out of the bad habit of grouping themselves into "The Left". This shouldn't make any sense if anarchism was a truly uncountable phenomenon which was truly done with political parties, because in practice, any formulation of "The Left" or "The U.S. Left" inevitably becomes a political party, and inevitably collects political candidates that become official Liberal-republican theorists and go to the Liberal-republican state. A Stalinist party equipped with meta-Marxism can talk about "The Left"; an anarchist cannot. So, why is it that blue anarchists are far more obsessed with the concept of "The Left" than Communists ever have been, and with being the one true political theory that far more than Stalinism or Trotskyism will supposedly be the only thing that can ever rise out of Toryism? Because blue anarchism is in every single way Liberal-republicanism's child and heir.

Now, we're at a point where the United States constitution can finally be of use to Marxists. The Constitution promises a bunch of "freedoms". These are said to already exist — "inalienable", "self-evident". There is no such thing as an inalienable right, as every transgender person who encourages people to go around saying "trans rights are human rights" but has been recently arrested over a drivers' license would know. And there is no such thing as an "obvious" right, as everyone who has tried to explain gay marriage to a Tory would know. So in what sense are these rights "inalienable" or "self-evident" at all? Stalin's party would know the answers to this one — when a particular faction of people is freed from competition with other factions over a government and it is not bound by class rule such that it is merely removed from factional competition by the winners, then for the duration of the new historical period it has created it receives tentatively inalienable rights. The proletariat does not even have to properly control a republic for this much to be true, even though in such a situation the republic and its new rights are likely to only last for a temporary period of time. So, the obvious conclusion from looking at Stalin's party is that inalienable rights _are nothing more than_ the product of a specific socially-linked faction of people becoming totally independent from another faction and not subject to its culture, laws, or government. One of many possible definitions of a _revolution_, then, is a historical process within a specific limited time period which completely separates one self-contained political faction with a distinct political philosophy from others: in China, a Dengist revolution against feudalism was achieved even if the meaningful results of that revolution seen by the people are limited.

We have already established that no instance of capitalism is actually independent from others, and in this sense, all _bourgeois revolutions_ of this type within a period of capitalism are futile. So this exposes another contradiction: if capitalism separating itself from nobility and other nation-states is the real source of "inalienable rights", and capitalism cannot be separated from bourgeois parties that group capitalists into nation-states, but bourgeois parties cannot actually separate themselves out and become independent in a period of capitalism, then bourgeois parties should not be capable of granting "inalienable rights", even though they are effectively the source of "inalienable rights" that has supposedly already granted people some. This, like many things, would seem to be a case of basic formal logic failing to capture transitions between historical periods: a body of capitalists granting inalienable rights the first time ought to be different from a body of capitalists granting inalienable rights when there is already capitalism. But this is not actually a sensible objection, because today millions of Liberal-republicans still ardently believe that capitalism can continue to grant people more and more inalienable rights _against something other than feudalism_ that it has never granted them before. "Capitalism cannot transition people into capitalism a second time" _would_ make sense except that the facts are on the table that whenever anyone says it can't, wide swaths of average people almost violently object that it must. Some things can be attributed to old forms of consciousness, but when Marxism flat-out starts to lose its predictive power as the same "false consciousness" is generated over and over for decades and decades across more and more crises we have to ask if something else is going on. The limited cluster of Stalinists holding down the Soviet Union was not holding on against Trotskyism and global capitalism simply due to "false consciousness". Stalin's party was holding on based on its concrete historical situation of materially facing attacks from two different directions. Its behavior was not "logical", but when it was under attack from capitalist pressure and a then-disorganized axis of right-Liberals, anarchists, and early Trotskyists, it did not have any real time to think, and simply had to act. The question, then, is: is this what has happened to the overall body of blue anarchists and Democrats?

Here is my bold hypothesis that I think only a meta-Marxist could make. Anarchism is a form of society in which people form together based on arbitrary social links, as in a tribal society, or as in a small town linked together by the relationships between small or medium-sized businesses, and in which all the people within the society _believe_ it is linked together on the basis of morality. The codes of morality believed by an anarchism may include "No hierarchy", "No domination", "No capitalist will own all the businesses", "No capitalist will control a party that controls the entire government", or "Society is based on a social contract". [*AF] Anarchists believe that codes of morality are enough to keep societies from developing into kingdoms or Duginisms, but they are mistaken, because there is one thing codes of morality can never ever solve, which is the division of people into two separate socially-linked groups of people. This can happen for the tiniest reasons like two people believing in different sects of a religion or breaking up with a lover or accidentally excluding a demographic with no malicious intention. But the moment two people are incompatible and do not want to see each other anarchism immediately breaks down, because as soon as two people completely cease to have a relationship there is no incentive for them to follow every moral pronouncement that somebody on the other side of a relationship division has made any more. If person A shows up with a stack of evidence that person B is a rapist and person B denies it, all good will will quickly break down between the clusters of people around person A and person B, and person B will quickly be barred from creating social contracts that apply to person A's friends; if person X insults transgender people and says it is impossible for gender identity to be true, and person Y is transgender, person Y has no incentive to maintain a non-hierarchical society where person X is not put below person Y. In one sense social bonds are a terrible basis for forming a society, because the moment people stop liking each other for any reason an empty void opens up between two newly separate societies where civilization ceases to exist. Anarchists have spent at least 176 years trying to solve this problem with absolutely no success. They can try to say that divisions between societies are the real location of government (Bellegarrigue), they can try to say that prejudices are culturally fabricated and not real, they can try to say that bodies of capitalists are divided because choosing Greed divides each capitalist from the rest of society, they can try to say that Marxist party filtration is a form of hierarchy where Marxist parties have divided themselves from society by choosing Elitism, they can try to say that societies that would be divided "ought" to be merged together just because "societal pluralism" is inherently good. But an anarchist can never un-abuse an abused child, wind back a war between two tribal societies, or make a divorced couple get un-divorced. There will always be gaps between human beings where relationships do not exist which no anarchist Ideal can possibly bridge. But given enough of them, absolutely any of these gaps can stack back up to divisions so big Bellegarrigue would call them "governments". It has been terribly popular lately for blue anarchists to label any criticism of religion as a simple violation of societal pluralism on the grounds that any criticism of religion can be used as a lever to exclude Catholics or exclude Muslims or exclude Mormons specifically, while the only thing that is acceptable to anarchists is attempting to rationalize how all religions and spiritualities are true and how secular morality is essentially a new form of religion. [*as] But in the real world, the moment there is one church full of Tories believing that gay people are unholy, one church full of center-Liberals believing that accepting transgender people is a virtue, and one group of atheists that happens to believe that homosexuality is real but transgender people are dangerous to women, they have already drawn their lines of compatibility as far as which individuals will be able to form links and which will not, and none of the groups is going to agree accept any of the other groups' versions of morality, even if they are told that they all belong to an overarching society and code of morality that says they are obligated to all unify on one moral code. The natural response of anarchists is to draft up a lot of books and magazines (today, videos) that supposedly prove that other people have unacceptable codes of morality and which codes of morality are the final cosmic truth that all other codes of morality must bend themselves around just because the absolute moral truth is what's Right. But ultimately, none of these texts will be more powerful than the sheer power of which groups of people are socially connected and which are not — even at scales too small for proper class analysis, the current body of people in a group as distinguished from the people who are not will generate its ideology. Here we arrive at the United States' national independence movement. People moved to the early United States colonies to be free to form a new society by simply linking together with people like them. They accepted having to work for others to pay the voyage, but they knew people supporting each other in community was the way society would form afterward. At that time many people were Christians, but either way many people believed in morality and over time, the thirteen colonies drifted to each largely contain people of specific Christian sects. In reality, everyone had religious freedom because they segregated away from each other and physically avoided the question of which religion was more correct. When the British crown became intolerable, the people of the United States got behind their best experts on government in order to create a new society that would respect each of the 13 colonies' human rights. The need to banish the British empire brought up questions that I think frankly the people of the United States otherwise didn't want to answer. The United States constitution was something of a formality to enshrine the way in which separating people into homogeneous clumps of "community" ensured each one freedom from the others. This is the way in which the fiction of "liberal democracy" ultimately emerged: if people were getting by making all their decisions within localized "communities", government by the people must in fact be attempting to preserve all these localized decisions and immediately giving the upper levels as little to do as possible so everyone can act like they don't exist. So, _if_ the United States began as a form of anarchism, it ended in various parts of the anarchism slowly or quickly producing capitalists who then generated a bourgeois republic to resolve the inherent conflicts within capitalism and multicapitalism.

I think a lot of people are resentful of this apparent takeover of anarchism by capitalism, and so a great part of the ideology in the United States is people coming up with mythological accounts of how the top layer of capitalism can simply be cut off and the United States can return to its supposedly perfect anarchist past. Nobody knows how societies actually work — not even CPUSA, not even the RCI — but they know what is viscerally wrong and they know what has seemingly been taken from them, and they are very angry. So angry they will just about punch a Communist over it if everyone doesn't restore anarchism immediately. To that I say... look at the middle of the timeline. Circa 1850 the United States government was granting people inalienable freedoms by planting "starter anarchisms" on the United States frontier. But I don't even have to open up a history book to tell you that if you do that those will generate capitalists, and if the capitalists all vote that eliminating North American tribes is in everyone's best interests, then that's the direction they will tug the whole population in, and you can't take it back even if a significant number of people were opposed to it. The early United States is broadly similar to Israel's Histadrut period in that even if you start with carefully designed anarchist compounds, when capitalists are in charge of the empire and they are all socially-linked members of your same nationality with a claim to represent its border and the day it was founded, the nation becomes theirs and what will happen to neighboring nations of people becomes entirely theirs. If you are not as physically powerful as a ring of capitalists who have all been able to form a socially-linked Community inside your Community and who can buy literally anyone to help them, you cannot win. It's very popular today for people to say that if you don't believe Israel can be defeated with nothing but a big stack of morality you are a defeatist and a traitor and — they don't say it out loud but they're thinking it — you basically belong in Hell. Most people are unwilling to accept the possibility that believing that anarchism doesn't regenerate capitalism has real material consequences, or that consequences come from anything but angering a cluster of individuals that has assumed the authority to dictate arbitrary moral codes. So here I will say the single angriest thing I will let out in this letter: if there was a God, or if there is anything that is universally Good or Evil, by taking this tack on reality you have definitely offended it. God cannot represent anything but the sum of all material processes and physical interactions in the universe, outside societies and inside societies. Every story about God, on paper or coming out of a United States president, is a story about how the motions of material reality will favor the kingdom or empire that has best predicted them. In that sense, a civilization that refuses to understand that the process of forming Community generates capitalism _cannot but have defied God_, and _cannot but have offended every form of cosmic Way and cosmic Good ever dreamed of_. Morality cannot exist without reality. If what was true was not strictly more important than what was moral, every single Tory who says transgender people don't exist or gay people are unholy or one Mexican immigrant far off in a town nobody thinks about stealing from a store should be locked up in a concentration camp would be right.

So. Historically speaking it should be unimportant whether the United States is an anarchism, but practically speaking, until the day it has any consciousness of material reality whatsoever it will be. The Idealism that drenches the United States and the Idealism that makes an anarchism are equally toxic; both believe that passing a law or putting up a list of commandments is enough to stop imperialism forever, and so in the end, both join together to blow up Palestine and keep regenerating imperialism. I think there may be a real difference between charcoal anarchisms and blue anarchisms, but I feel like it's an effective framing rhetorically to say to anarchists that try to call out Communists for statism, "no, _you_ created oppressive Tory statism because _you_ created the United States." "The United States is not a Marxist country founded by Mao or Hoxha, so tell me, who created all this?" Anarchists put heavy importance on morality and the ethical concept of individuals choosing fitting actions, so the moment you can get them to believe that supporting anarchism is actually _leading_ to capitalism, statism, anti-transgender laws, and Israel, I feel like they would be less inclined to resist either Stalinism or Trotskyism when they realized they genuinely had blood on their hands and them talking about "Communist atrocities" was only a cheap distraction from the actual important topic of their own choices and their own guilt.

I am experimenting with a definition that all societies before kingdoms and principalities or that go along with Liberal-republicanism are technically anarchisms. I recognize that this is a bit of a rhetorical tactic where I try to subliminally influence how people think by redefining the word _anarchism_ to something that better promotes historical-materialist thinking. But I am very tired of anarchism. Humanity doesn't have much time left. There isn't time for all this continued fighting between anarchists and Communists. So maybe, one of the few ways to actually get everyone to turn against anarchism and all the unacceptable things it allows to happen and unify with the Marxist movements anarchism has usually opposed is to present to them a superficially non-Marxist account of how almost everything anarchism has ever tried to stop is actually itself an anarchism that develops out of other anarchisms and thus the only way for anarchists to really achieve what anarchists want instead of regenerating it all over again is to take a look at Trotskyism.

Should we even call it Social-ism?

I am really tired of the English language. Especially the United States variant of English. I know a lot of other languages would have the same problems as I'm about to describe, but still, I'm tired.

The words "socialism" and "communism" have today become a point of weakness in a way it seems like they never have before. "Socialism" implies a transformation of society which is based in making society "more social" through giving it more _sociality_ or _society_ or _social sector_. "Communism" implies a movement or transition which is based in making more "community", "communality", or "communes". Neither of these words is at all accurate to what Communists really do. This is why, quite honestly, I prefer to just call the transitional society that the Bolsheviks physically put into place "Bolshevism" (or, "the Material System of Bolshevism" in longhand). I wouldn't even mind it being called "Stalinism" as long as that specific word wasn't being said as an insult or criticism. But if you have ever seen average people try to describe what "socialism" or even "communism" is... then the Soviet Union was not Communism in any way and it did not have a Communist party. And by that, I don't mean in the sense that I'm holding the Soviet Union to sky-high standards to handle socialist transition correctly, but in the sense that to most people "communism" has flat out come to mean anarchism and they chastise you like you were a revisionist if you don't believe it.

I think the words "socialism" and "communism" have unacceptably empowered anarchists. It's been absolutely pervading popular discourse that movements are "socialist" because they give back to the members of society instead of choosing the toxic Ideal of Greed (the trusty neo-Menshevik lever to prevent anything but Menshevism from transforming society), or because they return society to a whole, undamaged state of nature (this one you hear from White people subtly appropriating tribal societies' philosophy without any plausible material strategy for truly relinquishing White people's control over the United States and the earth), or because they "give power back to the people" instead of to a specific wedge of Evil capitalists that are deliberately ruining society but are unrelated to all the Good capitalists. There is no mention of _scientific socialism_ anywhere, there is no mention of the concepts of either _dialectical materialism_ or _mechanical materialism_, there is no mention of the concept of understanding history as a series of material processes, no mention of _populational relativism_ and understanding populations as self-contained stages for internal oppositions to arise that are familiar to the historical transitions seen in other countries horizontally, for the most part there is nearly no mention of _science_. Instead, three of the top concepts you hear thrown around in various phrasings are "pluralistic society" or "social liberalization", "lived experience" or "unimpeded daily life" or "community culture" or "freedom", and "common humanity" or "The Subject". These concepts are the central orbiting axis for the social-democratic and blue-anarchist concepts of what "socialist transition" _even is_. Society needs socialism because society is bigoted and pushes people out of society to become homeless, and spreads bad cultural narratives that cause people to trust and support Tory parties that spread more racism, LGBT-phobia and misogyny, and miscellaneous hatred. Society needs communism because it's bigoted and will never have enough jobs to inclusively welcome every individual into society just because people are nice, so the way to create communism is to create small and isolated communities of a few socially-linked people — I'm sorry, _decentralized_ and _non-bureaucratic_ communities — so that when these small groups that "don't believe in Greed" have claimed sufficient unused land and physical implements for creating material culture for themselves they will simply not let capitalism happen again. Silly Bolsheviks! How could you ever think Communism was about having a state? Communism is when every miniature community fits into the community community regardless of how many people there are and how much land there is. We're really open to communism now. Communism sounds pretty good, but just one little caveat — it had better be a form of anarchism and not a form of Bolshevism.

Sometimes I almost have no words for the _depth_ to which today's people detest Materialism and actual social science. It isn't a surface level thing. For every possible application you can conceivably use science for, _all of them_, I've been told at at least one point in my existence that each and every single one is bad. And I've been told that either anarchism or Liberal-republican academia somehow has the "actually brave" and "properly nuanced" solutions to all our problems if we'd only stop blindly consulting science.

Don't use science to back up your arguments, because actually people usually come to their beliefs based on who their friends are rather than through logical arguments. Don't worry, it's still possible to define the concept of Reason without facts or logic, you just have to read Kant and define what is Reasonable as group-based intuition and assume that everything already identifiable as unethical is not Reasonable.

Don't use science to try to find objective truth, because nobody will ever recognize what is materially accurate as true unless all populations of people are included, and making use of science makes it dreadfully easy for the populations and subpopulations currently in control of the world to erase the existence of tribal populations and demographic minorities and their experiences. Which is wholly unacceptable, and thus the use of science is generally Unreasonable.

Don't use science to find out what gender is; that's a task for Communities. You can't use science to prove to academics that gender identity is real because science can be weaponized to extinguish the existence of gay and transgender people at birth, and whenever there are multiple possible fields of study that can be used to advance a progressive cause the field with no possibility of abuse is the only one that can be used. Don't use science to prove that LGBT people improve with transition experts or therapy, I mean, you can try it but it won't have any political use in convincing anyone.

Don't use science to make people get COVID vaccines, because if people don't first feel included and heard before there is any science or government they will never trust science or government again, so really, Community and local culture can handle entire public health strategies too. CDC? More like "Centers for Domination Creation".

Don't use science to discover medications, because Big Pharma is going to over-prescribe them and pocket the money. We won't outright say that the world shouldn't have doctors but we are severely suspicious of them, so, you know, unless the Tories ever agree to pass universal health care, doctors are one big act of Domination where people are asked to take on huge debts for their physical inadequacies and maybe some of those weird right-Liberals that are convinced that nobody should ever go to doctors might actually be halfway right. Che Guevara was a statist, so don't you go believing that doctors are secretly good.

Don't you even think about using science to extend human life past 100 years, because that will only be used by billionaires and it has no valid use in giving humanity more time to gather and consolidate knowledge or gain better insight on the connection between past historical periods and future historical periods. Or even in keeping appointed center-Liberal judges on the stand longer so Tories can't take it. Have you _read_ the Epic of Gilgamesh? Don't you do it.

Don't use science to create technology, because technology is the source of power and Liberal-republicanism was created to crush improper uses of power, so therefore all forms of progress must always look like crushing unwanted loci of power and unwanted forms of technology, while invention itself is at best neutral but is never progress. That includes Bolshevism and the naïve thought that a cluster of intelligent statists could create a technology powerful enough to make a better society without asking literally the whole world whether they could have their own government with their own laws or have to become a colony of United States capitalists. Capitalists are bad, but, you know, the United States can't have democracy if everybody in the world who wants to invent something new doesn't ask the United States' two major voter bases whether a new form of government is okay. How wholly Unreasonable to not first ask the important question of whether Bolshevism is Ethical as judged by United States voters.

Don't use science to build hype about the general concept of "the future", because then we get harmful technologies nobody really wants like miniature "Matrices" (virtual worlds or "metaverses"), and LLMs. We see what you're doing there trying to learn the important art of promoting abstract Ideals instead of material knowledge, but there are much better ways to motivate people to get out of bed and continue existing, usually involving Community. You don't need The Future.

Don't use science to write fictional scenarios about imperialism in space, because that takes people away from a grounded view of reality where they focus on political struggles to reclaim local culture and change all of society by simply telling everyone Colonialism is a destructive and cosmically bad Ideal.

Don't use science to generate fictional species in order to use them for bad metaphors involving social prejudice. There's a valid place for Representation in Media but if you don't base fictional narratives in real biographical timelines people have experienced they will never be accurate or true and they will only encourage people to maintain incorrect and prejudiced understandings of prejudice. Don't you get it? Real accounts of people's experiences are real because they've been experienced. Lived experience! It's there in the name, it's real because people consciously live it in their minds, and then through the magic of simulated social bonding and empathy, other people experience it.

Don't use science to attack religion and promote Materialism, because that will cause people to overlook all the valuable ethical theories contained in religions such as Buddhism and ancient animisms, and the ability to join with what is Ethical and collectively choose the outer ethical boundaries that shape all future activity is surely more important than reality or facts.

Don't use science to argue with people about global warming, because, well, that hasn't worked so far and the empirical evidence suggests people may be more open to emotional appeals about the loss of social activities and relationships and the destruction of Community and tradition that will occur if wildlife or vegetation disappear or a city is swallowed by the ocean.

Don't use science to argue against prejudice and that all human beings are equal in their near-identical human genome, because you'll only diminish the observation that that kind of stuff is Already Just Obvious to any Normal, Functioning Real Humans and anyone would think of it if you didn't go around muddying the waters with your stupid "science".

Don't use science to point out the problems in Freudian psychoanalysis, because human beings naturally think in metaphors and quests, and if every existing political theory has failed us then there must be some kind of great new political theory inside Jung, sitting somewhere in between the realms of fictional adventure narratives, and how creative expression gives life to inner experiences, and psychology.

Don't use science to teach people how to draw, because superficially realistic art is boring and the best representational art is representational art about social phenomena or inner experiences told with highly stylized visuals.

Don't use the offshoots of science to solve and predict fictional narratives with Materialism, because material evidence of events in a narrative can definitely never be connected to themes or narrative progression or fictional histories and you have to analyze fictional narratives using abstract themes and predictions of their didactic messages or sentimental desires.

Don't use Materialism to try to predict history, because history is clearly the sum of all the free actions of individuals, and the way culture has been in the past could never predict the way culture or level of knowledge will shape individual people's behaviors in the future — oh, wait, uh, somehow you can use history to predict fascism is still possible I guess and won't simply never happen again outside forms we could never predict, because we find it very scary. Don't remove the history of slavery and the Confederacy from history books, because...... no, we know that stuff isn't happening any more and everything has changed, but um... it's very distressing, so you can't remove it because... the distressing parts of history books are the good parts. It's like teaching a unit on horror stories; you can't properly teach the craft of writing a horrot story that while removing the best parts of the horror story. We just like those parts of the book and that's our lived experience. So that's why you can't remove all history books from classrooms even though we just gave an argument for why that might make total sense.

And for the love of animism, don't use science to build a proletarian society built on _destroying shared community_, _taking the choice to believe in reality and consequences away from the individual_, _instrumentalizing the human being into an object acquired and hoarded by a nation_, and _building a system of justice by first sweeping away everyone's appeal to what is natural and obvious_. Anyone who makes people learn science is a Cop and anyone who would protect national populations with science is a Pig. [*AF2]

Oddly enough in all of this I had never really heard people complaining about the fact chemistry allowed humanity to create atom bombs, and considering the existence of supernovas, neutron stars, and black holes as new exotic outcomes that occur when the universe itself pushes the boundaries of the smallest scales of physics, synthesizing new gigantic elements could probably enable something very bad. Complaints about researching viruses in a lab to make vaccines are something I've only ever heard from Tories, although Tories have definitely been spreading them far and wide. I also don't hear people complaining about animal testing or factory farming much in context of animal welfare — today it seems that you hear complaints about factory farming mainly in connection with climate change and the vague implication that humanity eats meat or runs destructive farms or releases a lot of greenhouse gases from farms because capitalism comes from Greed and the power to exploit animals or exploit oil or exploit Iraq comes specifically from the Once-ler sitting around in his shack spontaneously inventing the idea of large corporations and because _he_ made the wrong decision one day he gained the power to chop down all the trees and scoop up all the oil and hire as many people as he wanted to and the Lorax and all the Whos in the town were powerless to stop him.

But, if I can take just a brief moment to specifically talk about myself and my own so-called "lived experience"... this destroyed me. Having to live in a world where everybody thought like this and none of it was showing any signs of ceasing steamrolled my psychology, cracked apart my mental thought space like a hammer, and shattered my ability to feel any emotions about anything. My mind is built for science and math. I have an autistic brain that seemingly lacks any inherent capability for intuition and is entirely logical, but has no inherent ability to comprehend time. I have days where I actually wake up, see it's noon, immerse myself into compiling huge bodies of facts and connections within reality or fiction, hardly remember to eat anything after breakfast, and have experienced twelve or thirteen hours doing the same thing as if they were thirty minutes. I either focus completely and intensely on something to the point it goes through my entire being and I'm doing it for three days straight, or I have no ability to focus on a thing and can't even get started. I am terribly put together to be of any use as a worker or an owner. I can't keep a schedule or make promises or do anything specific for any specific number of hours each day. And I physically can't drive a car because my brain won't focus and is always "drunk" on constant puzzle-solving and context-switching. There are miles and miles between my house and anywhere containing the least bit of work or socialization but my neurodivergent brain has actually wrecked cars so I just have to walk 5 kilometers (3 miles) multiple times a week. Nobody's going to vote for me to have a bus to ride just because it's "the right thing to do". My relatives are convinced that the terribly-functioning bus charity will be improved when it's replaced by a for-profit corporation. I couldn't pay for the ride! I can't make any money. So I'd still have to walk. I would always get the highest standardized test scores in my class because my brain gets bored so quickly that unless I was having a bad focus day it would simply breeze through the school material for something to do. But since the age of about 18 I found it tough to believe it when people called me smart because I would always unknowingly say the wrong things they didn't want me to say, and then I would think, _can I really be that smart if I believe that gender identity is real or that Black people experience structural racism? People say that only stupid people vote for the Democrats, so I don't actually know if I'm smart._ And, well... that only got worse as the years went on and I tried studying more ideologies. _Sure, I got good test scores, I passed several AP classes, but can I really be that smart if I can't figure out how to explain all the world's issues to the Republicans and get them to vote for the Democrats? I've always been told that smart people founded the United States Republic. But they must have understood a lot of things I don't understand yet, because every day it makes less and less sense to me how the Constitution is usually supposed to work. All the autistic or transgender people I hang out with think people aren't smart if they say the Republicans can't be changed and you can't get everyone to vote for the Democrats. Am I Evil or am I just Stupid? ...So now I'm studying Marxism, but I don't understand why everyone is so stuck on this concept that people voting for a couple of laws actually changes everything. Is there something wrong with me? The Marxist theorists said I have to understand everything that already exists and how movements are already developing in order to organize a Stalinist party but the more Marxism I absorb the stranger and less comprehensible all the progressive movements in the United States actually seem. Do I just not understand Marxism because I haven't been able to work? Would all of this theory about organizing people actually make sense if I could physically go to the places where people work instead of sitting around here? I don't want to have bourgeois consciousness. It must be my fault._ I was born only trying to figure out what were the best outcomes and what was Right — in the proper anarchist ethical sense. I never really wanted to upset anyone. I used to actually care about ethics and have something of an obsession with hero characters in fiction and the concept that they were not specifically powerful, but ethical. I walked away from religion because I didn't see how people believing in a god would advance ethics. So every time I thought I got an answer about what was the Right thing to do from any group of people I absorbed it and attempted to integrate it into the others. Like I was "supposed to do". But each time I memorized an ethical prescription, I saw one of the only things I liked or found relatable in the world slip away one by one. I thought one day that would end, and I would still have a couple of them left. But it didn't end. At some point I saw everything I had ever identified with or ever wanted to talk to anyone about ground up as "inherently unethical", and I tried to move past it, but every time the arguments were too close to making sense (at least with a bunch of other arguments I'd seen before if nothing else), and pretty quickly, those "became the true answers to me" and I couldn't feel enjoyment from anything I inherently enjoyed on a psychological level. At the same time, whenever I interacted with anything I was "supposed to" like, it felt empty and depressing and I didn't like it. _Look, Media Representation!_ Awesome. It looks great, but I feel strangely like if I ever talked about it to anyone it would turn into a test and I'd be hit with a ruler for a wrong answer. I don't want to make anyone mad. Maybe I'll read something else. _You aren't normal, so maybe you would like a Furry visual novel full of gay romance?_ I don't know. Not exactly. I mean, I like that kind of character, but I don't really like the themes of any of these stories. They all have this weird undercurrent of trying to manufacture fake diversity in a White or European population that wishes there was diversity, and treating reality in this difficult-to-describe, almost neo-creationist way where biology doesn't exist because of evolution and material oppositions in nature, and instead exists because some unseen force decreed that the world would have diversity and all diversity would automatically get along without strife, war, or predation. A premise can't be objectively wrong, but it feels... "off". _Get hyped about the new Pokémon game! It's fun, it's social, it embodies inclusive animist values, and it's an adventure about making friends and becoming ethical instead of just slaughtering things for an evil empire!_ No. I won't, not because it "doesn't embody Marxism" or some silly on-principle objection like that, but because I actually look at Arceus and the element type system and what I feel emotionally is "that's gross, it reminds me too much of my real-world oppression" "I don't like how Pokémon presents its world as an easy, one-size-fits-all linear path and puts in social features each to make the games more approachable but then when you water down the game to being that digestible it becomes inherently boring and the fans are actually upset about that and complain about it a lot but for baffling reasons they still stay exactly as stuck on the games as they ever were and don't really want anything about the games to change, every time someone offers a possible change such as an open world the consensus is that doesn't understand the appeal of the game and when implemented has ruined it" "I don't like the kind of people who play _Pokémon_. They never like it when you don't like things exactly the way they are and inherently fit into that order and understand exactly why it was made that way and praise it for being exactly the way it is. I don't like the way it is, and so it isn't fun to me or a social experience for me". _Ah, you're *really* not normal. Maybe you're interested in playing fantasy card games at the card shop?_ No. That just feels like putting on a fake personality and trying to hide my true personality. There is this idea that's been going around that all you have to do to make tabletop games inclusive is to say "they're for gay people now" and then they just are. But the whole assumption that Community fails to be inclusive because it needs more Inclusivity and Community really, really was not working for me. It wasn't working on the most basic levels, before any logical thought came in. I wasn't _trying_ to analyze it. Not back then, when for years I didn't even actually know what Marxism was or how to apply it. My emotions were just gradually dying from any attempt to socialize. I had to separate from my relatives and I didn't really have any friends, but I found I experienced more contentment and less pain when I tried to get away from social interaction as much as possible and be alone. Interacting with any social artifact produced by humans often just felt wrong. Retreating into my lair and reading about Marxism was one of the only things that made me feel good. I was still a "fan" of food so to speak, and I had no problem going to town to get packaged groceries. The grocery store was nice, because whenever there weren't many people there there were so many things to look at and everything was just still and quiet and nobody was making me feel bad. I often felt a little weird at the library because there were _people_ there, and that would make me start vaguely thinking about what the lives of normal people were like and what I did wrong to end up like this, and how screwed I was to not be able to work or unionize, and when I was going to die, and if Stalin's government would have hated me as much as this society. Sometimes I really didn't want to read at the library and I just wanted to walk to town and back so I didn't have to be in my house but I could also read at home. I liked being on the dirt trails up to town hidden inside the trees more than I liked being in town or in the impossible state of visiting another person. The only people I "talked to" were online video broadcasts I would listen to just to not forget what humans are and knock myself back a few paces away from actually going crazy. I had many episodes of wanting to die so I could be less of a problem to everyone and no longer be the person who takes all the Wrong actions and is the embodiment of pure Unreasonableness. (Probably over 100 in total.) I thought I would never be good enough to deserve anyone's love and was a little afraid they'd all prefer I never came near them and died alone. I sometimes got worried that I shouldn't talk to Marxist parties because they would tell me I had everything wrong and I shouldn't have even come in. I knew they were the only people on earth who would ever want to talk to me but I had to solve the way reality worked perfectly without any mistakes or they wouldn't want me either, because only someone with the power to bring actual change can be a comrade.

I was autistic, I was transgender, I was neurologically disabled, but all of that just continued to push me away from society as if progressive movements had never existed. I was always told that demographic identities would flip around into inherently integrating people into Communities if only the nature of Community would change toward the Ideal of inclusion. But whenever people tried to form a "community" of any kind it never felt right being there, like in every case a Community was inherently more full and complete without me in it. I didn't feel like I was "actually" any of my demographic identities. Even though the negative effects of all of them were still present, it felt like they had all slid off me and I was faking. I just... I was a cryptic genderless _thing_ with no ability to tell time, but I had tried too hard to be special and I'd better find some way of being normal and fitting into a society "correctly" or it felt like some sort of spiked ceiling trap of inhumanity was going to fall out of the sky and crush me to bloody bits before I could run.

It was like there was always a weight on me. I felt like I was deeply wrong, like my birth was a wrong choice. I had the urge to apologize to people about something nondescript but it felt like either I would get in trouble for even bringing it up and then they wouldn't want me around or they would try to tell me it was okay but completely misunderstand what the issue was and give completely wrong assumptions of what made me feel at home and what made me happy, which would only make things worse. I was useless to everybody no matter who they were. I was a monstrosity made with irregularities that could not be fixed. I was "the dragon". And a dragon stays deep in its lair if it doesn't want to be met with the sword.

So... in one sense, I was pretty keen on the concept of reapplying Society back to society and rebuilding it from a scattering of isolated individuals back into something that actually resembled society. But I could tell that that concept meant something very different to me than it did to everyone else. I was already living in the collapse of sociality itself since at least 2021, while nobody else was and it was all abstract Ideals to them. If I was going to rebuild society it had to begin immediately. If the world was vile, I had to record and analyze it exactly as it was. I had to take all the utterly wrong movements and ideas and I had to present a perfect account of everything exactly as it was so I could then turn everything inside out and make it right.

I have come to one conclusion: Marxists must deconstruct all the major concepts of anarchism and Liberal-republican theory down to the absolute most basic ones that even some Marxists inappropriately make use of and show why every single one of them is wrong. Starting with "Community".

First we should talk about Gramsci. There is a popular quote that originated from Gramsci that has slid and transformed over the years almost beyond recognition. "The old world is dying, the new one is slow to appear and in this contrast is the time of monsters." It almost doesn't matter who actually said this. It wouldn't be more correct or incorrect if Gramsci had said it himself. The message of the saying is clear: historical periods are physical objects made of particular components. When a new physical object can be constructed successfully, there is a new historical period, and it gets rid of the remaining traces of the previous historical periods, parading itself around as the "obvious" logical outcome. But when a new historical period cannot be physically constructed, or it falls apart before it can establish itself, the material contradiction between various old and new historical periods keeps raging, perhaps for a short time, or perhaps for a full 200 years. A time of monsters is precisely a time of contradiction between two historical periods of varying viability. When early Trotskyism tried to emerge in Europe and the Soviet Union, but was not yet strong enough to form a nation-sized party, and Stalinists clung onto each national region believing that Trotskyism could be nothing more than a hazard, that was a time of monsters. So, the question is, why is this quote so popular with Liberal-republicans who do not understand a lick of historical materialism and do everything to exorcise mentions of Communist theorists from their universities, only stopping a few steps short of hanging up a symbolic Chinese tank on the wall and sprinkling every room with a vial of pure Bourgeois Water? Where is the expected moment where somebody realizes Gramsci was a Communist and immediately stops class and chucks the textbook out a window?

We've already established that the thing saving those textbooks from imminent defenestration is the physical separation of capitalism into two semi-countable capitalisms. As long as capitalism can convince people that half a country can build a new future through one portion of capitalists defeating another, it can stave off the possibility of people realizing that an entirely different historical period is required. So, now, how do Liberal-republicans maintain the illusion that one half of a body of capitalists is genuinely superior to another body of capitalists?

Usually the myth that follows this is that "culture" is the basis of civilizations, and the key to winning at Liberal-republicanism is to connect people together as tightly as possible into an expanding ideological Lattice until a sky Lattice for instance expands over the whole area of the country and pushes all the rust people out to the margins. But this is very much a myth. United States center-Liberals have had around 160 years to pull this off and create a new historical period without Tories as they promise, and they have not. When Liberal-republicanism is truly successful, it only takes 14 years for parties to turn over and produce a new set of parties, but this time it has taken over 100. That is a very clear difference between the real-world shape of Liberal-republican "permanent revolution" and a failure. This is not like Deng Xiaoping Thought where there is no existing example of a country passing through a transition correctly to compare against. We should be able to know whether the Democrats are ready to succeed within the space of _four presidential elections_. Not twenty-five elections, which is over six times too many. So why does anybody keep making excuses? Well, clearly, because culture and mentality are not easy to study and anticipate through such rigid numbers. How would you survey the United States on its progress at getting rid of racism or its progress at getting rid of transphobia, and how could you ever anticipate what would cause different localized countable cultures to pick up these new mentalities?

Wonderful question. Unfortunately, it exposes a very nasty contradiction inside Liberal-republicanism. If there are one or more ethnic minorities trying to spread consciousness about racism across the country to create a new historical period, and there are simultaneously groups of gay or transgender people trying to spread consciousness about that to create a new historical period, but the two don't entirely overlap, you don't necessarily know that either of them is actually going to end up on the center-Liberal party platform. And if and when it happens that either of them is excluded, which is a very real possibility, then the excluded group of people will come to believe that it is the one that must spread culture and mentality across the country to bring the new historical period while the Democrats are irrelevant to that task. But if transgender people have gotten excluded, for instance, then why should any of them care about the concept of voting? We have established that what really brings a new historical period under Gramscian models is spreading culture and mentality, not actually going and casting a ballot. So why should _anyone_ vote? Gramsci and Žižek told everyone that a new historical period of center-Liberal values and progress comes when people spread culture and mentality, and that those things are much more powerful than voting; if anything, they would be the things that cause votes, not the other way around. So in order for progress to win and a new historical period to be created, everyone needs to stop thinking about elections and do anything but vote.

If elections are the outward result of culture, then culture itself must also come from something. There are definitely some people who accept new ideas and some people who do not, so what is the difference? Here it would be useful to bring in the real-world observation that circles of Republicans and circles of Democrats are comparable in their receptiveness to new ideas — they tend to shut out ideas from groups of people they perceive as being separate and hostile versus their existing group of people. Social links between two people predispose people to accepting ideas. So, it follows that the way culture is actually spread is the creation of social links and the reconfiguration of physical collections of people into new shapes as they expand outward a few people at a time. Culture is spread through what may be called the fusion of countable cultures or the reconfiguration of communities. Voting ultimately comes from the incorporation of different cities, industries, fandoms, chat groups, broadcast audiences, or any other set of socially-linked graphs of people into each other.

Can you see what is viscerally, fundamentally wrong with this?

It is a fundamental value within Liberal-republicanism that no two countable cultures can be better than each other. Open up a college sociology book, and you will soon enough see a description of principles that it is impossible to study a countable culture, both in practical terms and in ethical terms, without establishing the understanding that the other countable culture will not be judged as lesser. A countable culture will not be observed and measured by people it does not want to see; a visitor will not return good information without arriving on even terms. This principle has been established by a peripheral wing of _that accursed group of people known as scientists_. In spite of everything they have "done", within a universe where no physical object can even be seen without something bouncing into it, scientists cannot succeed without practicing a code of ethics, while at the same time, they practice this code specifically to gain a better understanding of the world that surrounds them as it is without simply imposing their pre-existing Ideals onto it. An objective and descriptive study of societies must exist _partly because_ if countable cultures were not studied in such a way, they would be dominated by an external empire that does not respect their values. To point at a countable village or tribe of socially-linked people and say that it must adopt a particular Ideal is generally to say that as it is it is currently inferior. So, considering this general understanding of what cultures are, how can culture or mentality be held up as the engine of progress? Gramsci's vulgarized model of Liberal-republicanism would seem to say that Liberal-republicanism turns over a new era of progress when a superior culture wins and an inferior culture disappears. We know from everyday experience that culture and community are inextricably linked to the point of being more or less the same inseparable entity that can be called by either name. So where does any culture or community get the authority to declare itself the one true community and absorb other communities? We can't trace this problem back to Gramsci, because Gramsci chose Bolshevism and didn't actually focus his energy on whether center-Liberals or Tories were the better party to control capitalism. This interpretation of center-Liberals being forged out of a superior culture is an interpretation specific to Liberal-republicanism. But even if Liberal-republicans had never tried to quote Gramsci, the idea has still been part of Liberal-republicanism for a long time. How often have you heard people talking about "liberal governance" as something that only happened before Trump and by implication would always have functioned much better if Tories never existed, or about the Tory generation "slowly dying out"? Rhetoric that Tories somehow misinterpreted and ruined the original vision for Liberal-republicanism is everywhere — not to mention some that _center-Liberals or blue anarchists_ ruined the original vision and nobody needs them.

Liberal-republicanism cannot function without the assertion that one countable culture or community of people is inherently better than another. Otherwise, there is no such thing as campaigning or voting having a theoretical correct outcome that informed voters could choose rationally, and no real reason for anyone to vote.

What would happen if everybody in the country simply stopped voting and nobody ever put any marks in the section for president again? Surely the electoral college or somebody would have to vote on the new president. But the electoral college is based on votes for president, so it would have to be drawn up based on something unusual such as votes for Congress. But couldn't everybody just not vote for Congress either? If there were no votes for Congress and no votes for president, what would happen to Congress and the president then? Is there a point where the government would shut down and they would all just have to go home? This is almost what Liberal-republicans' strange understandings of Gramsci would seem to imply — if culture and mentality don't actually align with any particular political party or president, then maybe none of them would win. This would seem to fly in the face of conventional understandings of Liberal capitalism and everyday experience. _But if nobody votes, then doesn't a cluster of the biggest capitalists win?_ your typical Liberal-republican will reply, sounding bizarrely like a Communist.

We do, on some vague level, know what happens when everyone stops voting. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 when no one in government could put up a decent opposition supported by the people to the faction of people who wanted to dissolve the central government. But, many people today believe that was a _good_ thing. The popular belief across the United States is that there was never any noticeable faction within the Soviet government that anyone should have supported, not Stalin's allies, not the Khruschevites, and not Gorbachev either. (And Trotskyists were still not big enough to make any meaningful change at the time, failing Gramsci's apparent requirement of an inherently successful countable culture.) So, if the Soviet Union can't produce any good theorists that United States people like... then everyone should stop supporting them, the whole national population should dissolve, and civilization should crumble apart so that nobody has to help anybody, right? Nobody needs to help anybody obtain supplies or healthcare. Society is some kind of logical fallacy made up to dominate people.

If you think that's an insane conclusion, then congratulations, you are actually thinking. But what everyone in the United States has to understand is that simply holding people together into a society is a difficult task, not an easy one or one to be taken for granted. Human beings love freedom. But freedom is in contradiction with society. Around 1933, the Soviet Union faced a difficult choice: make use of grain in Ukraine to aid other projects, or leave Ukraine alone and suffer serious setbacks to other regions' development. The other regions' need is real. At worst, some people may still be starving. At best, if the other regions don't receive grain they will lean toward refusing to develop cities and keeping reactionary attitudes, and things will be looking fairly bad for Gramsci's culture law — with an outright faction full of peasants materially distinguished by agrarian villages, the scale tips a bit toward no gay rights in the Soviet Union, and a bit more against women having careers. So the planners' choice is critically important. But if they do choose to send grain from Ukraine to the other republics, Ukraine is going through a crisis and some people in Ukraine are going to die. Philosophers of ethics think that when you have to choose between the well-being of two sets of people in a trolley problem that the choice is simple and you should merely choose the larger number of people. But what if the trolley problem was real, and it was Ukraine? In the real world, people are quickly going to get angry at you for almost any action but doing nothing. And in every discussion about "Communist regimes", that's exactly what they did. Suddenly the old ethics thought experiments had gained a new dimension: does the person deciding to switch the trolley to the other track even have a right to stand there and make decisions at all? Or if one person is controlling other people who would otherwise have the ability to make their own decisions, _is ethics inherently unethical_?

The decision between whether to ship grain from Ukraine more or less boils down to a strict decision between freedom and democracy. Up to World War II, the people of the Soviet Union were relatively satisfied with their government, and largely, although not universally, believed it represented the people. Therefore, into 1933, whether Ukraine should do what the government tells it to was a question of whether Ukraine was under control of government by the people, and whether _democracy_ had control over Ukraine. Democracy cannot both _be_ in control of Ukraine, subjecting it to the will of the people in the other republics, and _not_ be in control of Ukraine, allowing all the people inside Ukraine to do what they want because they are not under the control of social links to other regions and government by the people.

Freedom is when Stalin _doesn't_ take the grain. Democracy is when Stalin _does_ take the grain.

You have probably heard this dilemma from Tories in a severely chewed-up form making some kind of baffling claim that somehow taxes are going to destroy society. And you probably didn't listen back then because you knew on some level that center-Liberal social-democrats could never knock over Tory businesses as badly as Stalin's government knocked over Ukraine. But unfortunately, the basic principles are still there. It isn't about how much the businesses might "suffer" — it's about their ability to exist freely, make decisions at a local level, and casually form only the social links they want. This whole process is inherently in contradiction with democracy, and that is the real reason Tories appear to hate democracy so much. They strictly prefer _freedom_.

Tories and center-Liberals each operate off _political agorism_, the social theory that society is fundamentally made of arbitrary social links that form from individual decisions, and totalities of social links are the basis of all other things about society, including culture, society's contained economy, and political parties or republican systems including the United States constitution or court system. Agorism is a deeply frustrating political philosophy because in many ways the model appears to be true: rings of capitalist industry cannot function without forming social links between production structures or cities, populations cannot form political parties without forming social links, and countable cultures and social links are inherently connected. Agorism is not even as Idealist as it seems at first because it does in fact say that culture is generated out of a material structure: networks of social links. It is a strangely diabolical philosophy in that it is constantly handed to complete beginners to politics as an appropriate first example for everyone to start from ("vote for the Democrats!") but in the end it is one of the most difficult kinds of sociophilosophies to properly analyze to the point it can only be correctly understood for what it really is by some of the world's most advanced Marxist theorists who avoid making several basic mistakes. The Democratic party is like giving a high school student a Fourier transform integral that takes pages to solve and saying "you interact with radio waves every day; it's totally easy!". So you have to go all the way down to the smallest scales to properly solve the problem.

Do Ideas cause communities? Does the Ideal of Inclusivity inherently cause totalities of marginalized groups to form together? Do the ideas inside the Democratic party cause votes? Does Media Representation cause people of different demographics to all read a book or watch a show specifically because the ideas are good before there is any actual input from real people? This is one of the most frustrating things about political agorism because there are multiple ways to formulate this culture model, and if you question any of them, people will switch tactics to try to keep defending it and you'll simply get the other ones. This is why in the previous paragraph I framed it as _social links cause culture_: because that is the better way to formulate the model that anybody in their right mind would quickly correct it to if you grill them on culture causing social links. But most of the time, "culture causing social links" or "ideas causing social links" is actually the form in which you will usually see it. _The Democratic Party gets votes because it has good ideas; the multicultural book club gets members because it has good ideas; the United States gets immigrants because it has good abstract Ideas that are fabricated in total separation from reality but happen to work anyway._ But none of that is true. The United States didn't steamroll North American tribes because it had the world's best ideas. The Republican Party doesn't keep periodically winning elections because it has the best ideas. A book club or podcast doesn't get any connections if genuinely all it has is ideas and its "good ideas" don't actually speak to anyone. In the current historical period everyone's mind is warped and distorted by the existence of ethics and the concept that you can call ideas "good" or "bad" whenever you want to as long as they're sufficiently Nice or Mean. In reality, there may be such a thing as successful or unsuccessful ideas, but humans don't get to subjectively decide what those are as individuals — no, not even in the role of the wise grandpa or grandma that walks into the ethics thought experiment from stage left to play the opinion of the entire rest of society, who is still an individual and who is still every bit as unreliable outside of the symbolic context of a dream or a stage play. Social links cause ideas. If anything, a socially-linked network of Democratic Party voters must already exist for anyone else to be added to the Democratic party based on its "ideas". That is the absolute minimum correction to make agorism a Materialist philosophy and allow all its supporters to keep defending it, as they almost certainly will.

So, if social links cause culture and are a fundamental building block in the model, once there is already a socially-linked group of people, can culture maybe _turn around_ and cause more social links?

No. Both people must act toward becoming linked to become linked, so one person can easily just not become linked when two people have different "mentalities", without the "correct mentality" ever changing the incorrect one. This means abstract Ideals can never dictate how people will behave, as much as the objective or material state of the second person. Not all of that state information will be apparent from the outside, but some of it will be revealed from the inside within an interaction, so in general, all the state information that is needed to model people does exist. Individuals link together "first" in a simultaneous collision of two separate befores and afters to form a single future, and then a localized countable culture object either exists or doesn't exist. Its existence is a finicky thing, a bit like a photon or electron superposition, but at any given moment it _will_ either happen or not happen, and individual people do not decide whether it will happen, because they fundamentally cannot decide in advance whether other people will like them or their ideas. Culture cannot manufacture social links out of the aether, no matter what.

Do social links cause the economy? No. This question might have been more complex back in agrarian societies where people were tightly bolted into large family units, but it isn't as complex now. The entire concept of higher education in the United States presupposes that they don't. People are constantly moving to other places for college or for a job, and some people are moving into the United States from Mexico or from educated areas of the Eastern Hemisphere for jobs, not to mention from all the regions the United States has interfered in and tried to make people think they shouldn't live in. There is a lot of evidence that people have been moving to the United States for the economy and care more about going wherever the economy moves to than staying with any particular group of social ties. Here, I think agorism is a bit unaware of its own consequences. Countable agorisms form as communities that try to extend over more people to gain power, and if they're convinced they're the best in the world, they will try to expand out further to swallow other regions' people. When agorisms hide their existence and try to act like they are not personally benefiting from making other countries feel bad about themselves, they change the playing field they claim to be modeling, not really taking into account that recruiting someone for good reasons that will last and recruiting someone based on empty ideology are not the same thing.

Do social links cause political parties? Yes, but also no. In theory, political parties must have some material effect in order to win, so in order to be a winning political party, they must contain an economic base. When capitalism exists, a clear economic structure exists, and political parties can make some kind of case that the people leading them are important within society and should continue to be important. The social links between several capitalists facilitate forming a political party, but they only make it effective because the capitalists first exist as capitalists. Social links are also important in the case of forming a successful Stalinist party, but again, especially in that case, economic structures such as peasant villages and factories exist that much more blatantly lead to social links. What about a Fourth International? Any number of stereotypes will go around that Marxist theorists stand around not doing much of anything but reading and congregating, so surely the social links in a Fourth International must precede an economy? This one is a little tricky, but when you realize that the economy in one historical period and the economy in another historical period are two different things that change into each other — look back at Žižek's quote about monsters — yes, a Fourth International is caused by an economy, just not its own economy. If people don't understand dialectics, time slice analysis saves the day.

So, basically every time agorism tries to tell you that social links cause other things, what it is really doing is failing to understand simultaneous dialectical interactions or historical transitions, where if you expand the whole situation out, you will see that it tends to consistently put everything on the wrong side of causing social links. Saying that culture makes social links is one of the only exceptions, and even there it still manages to be slightly wrong by not understanding that culture is not an Idea and that it's only managed to say something correct by saying a tautology.

Why is it so important to recognize that Liberal-republican parties are always agorisms? Because political agorism is the bridge between Liberal-republicanism and anarchism — it is the prototypical _blue_ anarchism that doesn't stray far from material things that already exist but confidently describes an overall layout of society that can supposedly exist without a state. The Republican and Democratic parties will not tell you this out loud, because they do not want to believe they are trying to abolish Liberal-republicanism. But what they are constructed for and what they intend are two drastically different things. This is one of the most critical things to understand about modeling Idealism: _Idealist factions never act with intention, and they always do inexplicable things with unintended consequences_. You have to actively separate the intentions and the outcomes and address both of them instead of simply discarding the Ideals layer, or people will not be able to recognize what you've made a model of.

What Gramsci and Žižek have proved for us through the mouths of a bunch of standard clueless Liberal-republicans is that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party _cannot_ currently be a single coherent society. Every single time Gramsci is invoked is another point of evidence that the Republican Party and Democratic Party are truly in material opposition and truly mutually exclusive. And here is why. _If societies really and truly come from social links_, or put another particularly Liberal-republican way, the coalescing voluntary choices of individuals, then the central government is not actually playing a major role in the construction of the society despite the bit of theater it puts on every four years where it claims to be mediating which president will rise out of the two or more countably separate societies inside it to rule the country. If society really comes from social links, then the people of Kansas form Kansas without needing the federal government and the people of South Carolina form South Carolina all on their own, and the people of South Carolina may not even need the people of Kansas to exist for their population of people to exist. The United States could be 50 separate countries if it weren't for the mysterious existence of political parties, which in today's world appear to be the only connecting thread that makes it mandatory for the 50 states to be connected. Because the Democrats and Republicans greedily wash over state borders back and forth to try to scoop up more states, hating each other the whole time, the deep division they draw between the two bodies of citizens sometimes leading to spontaneous shootings, there is a United States. And if everybody in the United States spontaneously realized just as various academics and blue-anarchists keep repeating that dominating other countable cultures of people was an unproductive outcome and greed was bad, the United States might dissolve and there might not be a United States. This is the United States' major problem: it is increasingly becoming awash in talk of _virtues_ and _moderation_ and _degrowth_ and _sustainability_ and _what is actually necessary_, but nobody considers the horrifying possibility that the United States, or "Our Democracy", is in fact not really necessary and may be the ultimate manifestation of immoderation, unsustainability, and greed. Not because it uses too much oil, not because it attempts to contain all the world's corporations while it puts all the world's workers in places like China, Vietnam, and India, but specifically because it is "a liberal democracy". Because that phrase is a highly deceptive lie told to everyone by the monster named "Our Democracy" to get them to preserve it, while in reality the United States is more of a continuous warring states period between two countable blue anarchisms where each keeps consuming more and more people and objects and inventions and academic papers and news shows purely to try to defeat the other. An actual endless battle between regional princes to become king. A literal, actual, material _interregnum_.

Let's say Stalin's government having control over Ukraine really was a senseless act of tyranny and an inherently violent and Evil assertion of Communist power. Well, if that's true, it must be completely impermissible to casually watch an election map and assert that it is the outcome of Justice for the Democrats to slurp up more states. You haven't gone and talked to the people in those states. A lot of center-Liberals probably have no idea what they want. They begin with the assertion that being a Democrat is just "better" and everyone in Nevada ought to want to be part of the superior group of people that begins with a superior culture. But the republican systems of the United States don't actually make it a requirement that any political party genuinely represents and carries out the culture it is supposed to represent, while simultaneously they deny power to any party that does not get votes. So what happens in practice is the assumption of Democrats having a superior culture that will create a new era falls flat on its face as the Democrats learn that the other countable cultures of the country have no interest in being dominated and designated as inferior cultures, and then they scramble into the deepest depths of what Marxists would call opportunism, abandoning everything they stood for so that they can be accepted as members of other regional cultures and their original required assertion that other cultures are inferior can be forgiven. Liberal-republicanism is designed so the country can continuously divide into two countable cultures that dominate and degrade each other, but which both have the ability to break free of domination before they notice the injustices of the system and get angry. In some ways, it is one of the most uniquely cruel systems ever invented in that after kicking populations around and hurling them down a staircase it always erases the marks of its abuse and claims that it did nothing. If you were mad at Stalin's government, you could simply run away, but Liberal-republicanism constantly programs people that there is nothing to escape from and thus there is no actual escape. Is it any wonder that Liberal-republicanism generates "narcissists" and other abnormal psychologies?

Culture can be Ideals, but more than anything else, culture is communities, and the declaration that any community of people has the inherent right to slurp up other communities and order them around (and pass laws on them, and send cops after them, and put them in prison) _purely because_ it is made out of inherently superior cultural ideas cannot be anything but an act of bigotry.

Liberal-republicanism, by its own internal logic, is unjust. It is bigoted, greedy, unempathetic, tyrannical, wasteful, gaslighting, megalomaniacal in how it aggrandizes its internal parties, and wholly unacceptable.

And the worst thing is this: anarchism will never be able to take over and fix it. If that was ever going to happen, it could have happened in the Soviet Union after 1953, or when the Communists failed to control Europe, or when workers weren't actually winning in China and the Communist Party shouldn't have won. If anarchism is really the most robust form of society, then logically, it would be more robust and less prone to falling apart than Stalin's Marxism. If all it takes for anarchism to win is a republic failing, then anarchism should have had a vast buffet of failing countries to choose from in which to finally succeed. In 1850, and into 1900, many modern sociophilosophies were still new and their effectiveness was unknown. But now, 176 years after Bellegarrigue codified a set of ideas that might be much older, still nobody has ever outlined a plausible method for anarchism to replace nation-states which is anywhere close to as believable as Lenin's schema for a nation-wide Communist movement. If having good ideas was truly the primary metric for predicting which political factions will succeed at creating a new historical period, then the scales are still tipped much further toward Lenin than they are toward anarchism.

Gramsci is the new Hegel. Gramsci, Jung, Deleuze & Guattari, and Crenshaw have all converged to create the new Idealism that justifies global capitalism and resists the re-emergence of Marxism without the need for any older forms of Idealism. The new Marxism needs to be able to counter this new Idealism in every crevice and at every scale that it shows up, from statements about interpersonal relationships and "culture" to statements about geopolitics and history. Capitalism has permeated every single kind of social interaction in ways that at least were never relevant or important before, but now are actively degrading the entire phenomenon of sociality and institutions or organizations. Framing "Marxists participating in society" as an oxymoron used to be a joke, but in this age, where workers can't trust unions, can't trust nation-states, can't trust progressive academics, can't trust newspapers and video channels, can't trust "communities" of any kind, can't trust anarchists, and sometimes can't trust attempted Fourth Internationals, to some extent, knowing when to walk away from society and stop giving any of society's incorrect forms of organization undue attention is almost the only way _to_ make any progress. Capitalist society naturally creates insane, vaguely psychotic perceptions of society and the world, but it also creates them _inevitably_ and _in everybody_, no matter how much you _believe_ Gramsci or Althusser or Fisher will actually help you break out. The only way to truly break out of capitalist consciousness, short of actually living in isolation and literally looking at everything from the outside in, is to _use meta-philosophical analysis to become able to view capitalism and every political movement from the outside_. I call that "Materialism". There may be a hang-up where some people don't want to call it that. I don't care. Whatever you want to call it, you have to come to the recognition that your "soul" is fundamentally detached from everything else at all moments of your life and make use of the looking-outside-and-visualizing-possible-interactions-and-futures thing. Do you call that "narrative storytelling"? Great. Now do it scientifically.

In my time being sliced away from society I took to reading books. I'd always been told to do this. _Reading books is inherently educational. Reading books gets rid of prejudices. Stories will create communities. Everyone should read more books._ So I did what I had been told and read a bunch of miscellaneous books available in the United States to see if somehow they would unlock the mysterious secrets of Liberal-republicanism or if by reading enough fictional narratives I would finally come to understand what all the anti-science, pro-lived-experience stuff really meant and what it was really saying, and what I had been missing. And, well... as I say, every day all of it seemed to get more complex and make less and less sense the more closely and carefully I analyzed it. I came to understand it better _and_ I came to understand it worse at the same time. Sometimes I listened to videos with annoying-sounding titles to see if that magical promise of "listening to people you disagree with" bringing people to a better understanding would ever come true. At the end of 6 years of that I feel like I've tested the basic ideas of Liberal-republicanism more thoroughly than almost anyone. And I genuinely think the majority of them are not true. A whole lot of everything people write inside Liberal-republicanism (or even anarchism) is just people flailing around trying to justify to you why people who understand nothing about Materialism are more important to listen to than Materialists, and why people with better understandings of material reality "don't really" have better understandings of reality. You really lose all your confidence in humanity and human beings being an intelligent species if you expose yourself to too much of it. It will sound crazy, but only after having so much exposure to the actual state of it I genuinely suspect that almost all of what people write or record within Liberal-republicanism is one giant waste of everybody's time. It's almost like talking to a Flatlander to try to explain it. But I feel like if the Liberal-republican period were actually to come to an end and be replaced, everyone would look back on everything they had written or recorded and say, oh, wow, I was focusing my energy on _that_? Why? Why was _that_ what was important to me? And this would apply to so many things in all facets of life that a lot of people would not even be thinking about until society had actually changed. Like... hmm. Here's the best I can do to think of an example of something "unimportant". I watched a video once where someone was casually saying in passing that a fantasy kingdom should become a Liberal republic (the context was the TV cartoon _My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic_). And I feel like if people were in a new society and had the chance to understand all of history _just a bit better_, they might look back on statements like that they had made and be horrified at the thought of what kinds of historical periods would result from that compared with what a good outcome is. Another example is a lot of videos that have been going around about LLMs. Some of those videos make technically valid points, but you also see a lot of videos focused on "pointless" subjects such as whether it is ethical to put an artificial consciousness in a war machine and make it experience war (what about the thousands of the human combatants?), or how to put guardrails on an LLM and how you have to design them around the concept any self-contained system is "inherently self-regulating" (this just sounds like bad models of society applied to computers), or the notion that language is inherently special in that meaning must be inherently subjective and words can never inherently mean anything (this one existed before language models, but I have a terrible suspicion this _wrong_ way of thinking led to LLMs taking over everything). Idealism seems to encourage these acts of pointless deliberation on completely irrelevant ideas as if they were much more important than they were simply because the act of thinking ideas is turned into a kind of magic ritual of assigning unreal things power, and given ultimate importance. You can also see from this how it is that people seem to get disproportionately angry at bad ideas of any kind and try to say that because each act of putting them where someone can see them is a social behavior and active speech act you need to get them out of Community immediately and it should never be okay to say them at all. This concept can only be true when ideas themselves are taken to have inherent power. If everyone understood that ideas themselves had no power to cause anything without the proper material prerequisites for that specific outcome, everyone would probably calm down about that and allow a lot more things to be said.

After "trying out" Liberal-republicanism and blue anarchism for an extended time and coming to see them for what they really are, one of my top impressions now is... what's wrong with objecting to Idealism? Why _can't_ I see a blatantly Idealist concept like a set of opposing things becoming a unified Creation and object on principle? I've tried out objecting to things emotionally, and avoiding the "bigotry" of logic. And I can see what the appeal is: for most people, emotions are the only window out of Idealism and into the material world (the body) where things actually become objectively necessary instead of every Idea having to be equally important to the point that kills people. But there is just one problem. Individual needs don't stop for each other. They contradict each other. It's all too easy for two people to both say they were hurt or even that they will each starve if they don't have each other's food, and just like with ideas, it becomes that there is no correct answer to which person is truly more important and which person actually gains ethical priority. Ethics is a losing battle. The entire proposition of trying to say individual people's pain can dictate what is the best outcome and the thing that causes no pain is True and the thing that causes pain is False is fundamentally incorrect. This is one of the core, central errors that leads to unjust systems like Liberal-republicanism. The concept of a "pain olympics" isn't new, it's been baked into all Liberal-republican theory from the start beginning at the false concept that individual actions have inherent power to be ethical or unethical. No, individual actions lead up to larger social formations in the form of estates and republics of specific types, but these seas of actions can only be judged as entire systems, and also, to call them Right or Wrong or Good or Bad may be unacceptably prejudiced. I'll say it again: if Liberal-republicans think it's okay to prescriptively mark Bolshevism "false" on grounds of ethical rules, and get rid of all Communist regimes, that feeds directly into Stalin's government brutally assassinating Trotsky. You can't have a little bit of bigotry and expect it to not have consequences. Equality of communities means equality of communities, which means equality of Liberal-republican and Communist communities. Voting means inequality of communities.

I think if I have a craft other than attempting to improve Marxism, I am a failed science fiction writer. After having everything taken away from me — don't study living things with science, don't work in science, don't talk about climate change if your brain is naturally bad at emotions and intuition, don't write stories if they don't relegate science to set dressing and have an inherent humanities bent, don't replace religion with science — I think the only good response is to turn aggressively against any and all uses of science like they wanted me to as well as many uses of technology, but then to explain that none of it's on principle and instead I want all that energy to go into an intense period of research in order to understand the processes of society utterly and completely. I think the First World has genuinely hit a point where every conceivable good and service exists now and First World countries could actually drop all science and a lot of technology research while research into Marxism is genuinely one of the only "products" they really, urgently need. "Degrowth", "degrowth", "problems on earth", "problems on earth". Fine. You kept saying it, and I heard you! How about we just really actually have no more science until we solve all our "problems on earth"? All of those problems are problems that involve understanding pieces of human societies as inanimate objects. None of them involve just having good sentiments. You know who stopped looking up to the heavens or into cyberspace to solve all our Problems On Earth? Kim Il-sung!

That's the general answer. If First World countries want "degrowth", solar power, "sustainable" or sensible levels of innovation and production, and a unified society without political factions shooting each other and senseless political division, then they must seek a way for the population to control society itself and all its material structure that would be visible from an aerial view so the people can finally solve all the _internal structural problems_ inside the ways large collections of people interact that lead to frontier wars, climate effects, neoliberalism (! it's not an uncaused cause), and lawyers who could never conceive of another kind of republic literally migrating out of the United States to Italy because they're not stupid enough not to realize that Liberal-republicanism is unsalvageable. That takes dedication. That takes an actual recognition that every single thing you do at work to earn money which is not contributing to Degrowth Sustainability Problems On Earth is part of the problem, and as long as somebody _directed you_ to do what you're doing horizontally through a social or economic agora instead of through a democratic process with real power to stop an entire half of society from doing what it's doing you might still be part of the problem. Don't be an anarchist. I'll repeat it again: _don't be_ an anarchist. You can solve Degrowth Sustainability NonGreed Problems On Earth when you stop trying to build an international civilization in opposition to Marxism — you too, Alan Woods — and contribute to the creation of an international Marxist state equipped with the ability to analyze every sociophilosophy through meta-Marxism.

I've been thinking, in my spare time, about the concept of redirecting science fiction specifically into the Materialist analysis of _how particular concrete forms of society transform into other concrete forms of society_, so that science fiction begins using the proto-science of Marxism or meta-Marxism as its "science" of focus and every science fiction scenario written with it becomes about analyzing something actually material and concrete about society and solving a relatively grounded set of Problems on Earth.

Science is dead; long live science.

Networkism, capitalism, Stalinism, and socialism

Marxism is more of a top-down movement than anybody would like to believe
it always begins with clusters of brilliant people who perceive something everybody else didn't, not at groups of workers. the "great men" that appear in Marxism are illusions caused by people forgetting all the second- and third-tier men immediately connected to them, who probably exist at a factor of at least 10 or 100 for every presumed "great" man. Marxist theorists are a particular historical phenomenon which is separate from the activity of workers and transforms what would be a blue or strawberry movement into a crimson movement. this is what leads to a lot of the pain within Marxism as a whole and conflict between different versions of Marxism. Marxist movements resemble any republic ever created in that there will be a layer of talented representatives that people align themselves with in order to form a large society. hypothetically, this body of theorists could be Stalin's party, Mao's party, Kim Il-sung's party, Marx and Engels and a handful of people in Europe, early Trotskyism, or any number of things. if an era of socialism could ever actually develop and solidify, the conflict between these groups of theorists would become unimportant. on the other side of creating the workers' state, what is eventually supposed to happen is that central parties and the Communist International simply stop doing anything because most things at the populational scale and at the international scale respectively have already been decided, everyone teaches the previous decisions, and for the most part only local decisions are required any more. the possibility of the state withering away is actually a natural consequence of creating a scientific society and making national policies objective rather than a matter of subjective opinion. but, this creates the problem of shifting conflicts between groups of people over arbitrary local culture and which arbitrary local cultures should get to conquer each other up to the layer of theorists who have to figure out the objective answers to national and international questions. in theory, the layer of theorists should be sorting itself by ability and the most talented theorists should be rising to the top and defeating the theorists with worse models, but the correct answers for each country and the world should be surfacing anyway; in practice, everyone in the layer of theorists becomes similar in social status, and all the theorists begin clustering and fighting each other over arbitrary local culture inasmuch as they do not have the complete answer to particular world problems. the problem which was evident among the clergy and among bourgeois representatives as they grouped themselves into center-Liberal and Tory parties has repeated itself with Marxist theorists. Marxist theorists are limited in their ability to perceive reality by their transient social status of being the most important people in a particular region until other people in their population can take over, thus figures like Stalin or Mao will show up that make significant errors and are unable to recognize other versions of Marxism with _correct findings_ as correct. this will also happen when clusters of Trotskyist groups become free. each one of them has the _incentive_ to believe it's the "real" Fourth International even if it isn't, because the sad truth is that if they all believe they're the real one long enough and simply perservere and try to collect people before the other ones do, it _will_ be the case that one of them will inevitably outlast the others. the quality of Marxist theory within an emerging International is not necessarily as important ~~on the larger stage of history~~ to the universe as the groups simply happening to guess the correct series of actions for the groups to physically survive. so, if a particular cluster of organizations happens not to have been destroyed yet, it will probably assume that whatever model of the world it currently holds must be the most correct theory there is.

anarchism has completely misinterpreted the consequences of this observation. one common response to seeing the layer of Marxist theorists form is that this is how agency is taken away from the population, and it predicts the rise of bureaucrat states and "The Pigs". another common response that is not mutually exclusive is that Marxists do not understand the fundamental Ideal of democracy and have taken a path that cannot contain it. the latter remark is simply historically inaccurate, because the United States has demonstrated that if a body of people in a large society is left to its own devices to vote for policies long enough, the republic eventually gets to a point where none of the parties actually pass any new policies any more and voting for anyone becomes pointless. Liberal-republicanism has, rather ironically, demonstrated on the scale of a large country that republican states must eventually run out of decisions to make and wither away. so, the concept that people in a republic will always need to meet up and exchange wills and do "democracy" is simply not consistent with the real world. reality has decided that national policies succeed or fail for reasons entirely other than whether people vote for them; if that were not the case, and popularity with the people was the primary driver of a party's success, then Stalin's government would have been a smashing success and would not have collapsed in the 1960s. whether the realization that democracy is an illusion takes agency away from people is a more complicated question. perhaps when someone sees that Khruschev's party and Deng's party are fighting to be the most legitimate, or Stalin's party and early Trotskyism, they will think those conflicts are senseless. but what anarchists never tell you is that anarchists attempting to unite the world will create all the same problems. charcoal anarchists like to speak of what amounts to tribal societies and the organization of society through villages and village-like social graphs extending up to national scales that approximately replicate the behavior of tribal society. but tribes have gone to war before. every violent European empire started out as a bunch of tribes. tribes have designated leaders, elders, or keepers of information. blue anarchists like to speak of organizing societies into federations of cooperatives. this will logically result in layers of experts that collected the knowledge required to create and run the corporations. if you have ever been to a workplace containing several people before or even watched a director's commentary about making a TV cartoon, you would know that most of the decisions that have to be made to create a final product can more or less be put together by one or two people who are experts in the history and theory of a particular craft. Engels talks about the tyranny of the power loom, I keep turning over and over in my mind a recent director's commentary by Butch Hartman, but it's overall the same thing. a bunch of people come to a workplace to produce a product but the basic decisions on what the product will look like only have to be made once. so the person who designed the power loom or wrote the pitch bible for the TV show has a lot of power. as long as global capitalism exists and there is any open space around a particular project, it is the entire finished product that will be selected for or against. this means that whatever the most correct answers are on that final product to make it the most popular, all the workers in the corporation are bound to follow them, no matter how onerous they are, no matter how oppressive they are, and whoever solves the correct answers the most effectively is the one who rules that chunk of society. if the corporation closes, all the workers go home and start very slowly running afoul of the basic ground rules of bourgeois society that no one collects anything from the earth without the approval of some other human being and no one takes anything from anyone else without the taking evolving into a social relationship and an agreed transfer. so nobody will want to go against the people who manage to stay around a while and keep promising a relationship in which if you maintain your relationship you will be allowed to collect supplies and follow the law. outside that zone lies danger: fail to perform to known methods of success, become a criminal hated by society, try to make a product on your own and fail to sell it, lose all your money. the true function that capitalists solve within Liberal-republicanism is solving how it is even possible for everyone to follow the law and still survive, so within Liberal-republicanism _per se_, if you ever try to go against any of it and question any of its authorities capitalists can simply twist the knife and make everyone into a criminal begging for a way for everyone not to hate each other and lock each other up after various slights and injuries against each other while capitalists set the laws to whatever they want to. if blue anarchists turn the world into islands of co-ops, a similar thing is going to happen. either the elite layers of the co-op islands will link together by culture and identity and various islands of co-ops will eventually go to war over matters like Christianity and Zionism versus atheism and transgender rights, trying to fully destroy each other's cultures until one assimilates into the other, or the system will simply function more like capitalism than people intended and each of the chunks of co-ops will end up with a particular elite layer of rulers that get to do whatever they want because as long as they solve all the answers correctly there will be no crimes or wars. anarchists everywhere will get dismayed and try to claim that co-op theory was "never" real anarchism. meanwhile, judging by how Liberal-republicanism has functioned, blue anarchists will probably start coming up with conspiracy theories about why co-op theory really should have worked but it only failed because it was corrupted by pedophiles or greedy people or Europeans or Satan.

this is the appeal of Stalin. in one sense, the system created by the bourgeoisie can only really end in some kind of large-scale spatial hierarchy where the highest-status people are the people who solve how to organize society to create the smallest numbers of killings and instances of group infighting, and the people with the lowest levels of consciousness on the future development of industry are given the lowest status. the system perpetuates itself because anyone who has the slightest idea what is going on for a moment is moved out of the class of people that actually has any incentive to ensure that anything functions sensibly or stably as opposed to simply looking orderly, and when people are on top of the system they are rewarded over and over for _not failing_ as opposed to succeeding; whenever there is a failure, the people at the bottom are always the ones to "choose" to enact the consequences, which may include crime, unlawful production of restricted materials (movies, seeds, squats), or war with neighboring regions in the case of the new Russian empire. capitalism has always been a sort of terrible half-solution to the problem of preventing what imperial citizens naturally do. so when the people on top of a chunk of people in antagonism with other chunks successfully solve a historical transition, and it looks like the worldwide spatial hierarchy created by capitalism is actually snapping together to continuously create order instead of suddenly breaking, the citizens can only come to see a central party that _successfully_ solves the problem of creating order and allowing people to follow the law as brilliant. if Stalin and Mao somehow solve the problem of creating what essentially resembles a worldwide kingdom made out of tiny provinces, then it would seem like anything people might think of as "democracy" can follow. countries across the world have repeatedly created kingdoms and then turned them into Liberal republics, so in that sense democracy and the existence of a stable national population would seem to be orthogonal to each other, compatible but existing on entirely different levels.

the problem with that thinking is, as described above, that the layer of Marxist theorists tends not to unify. before even getting into purely practical decisions like North Korea attempting to look unaffiliated with other countries to not get in trouble, countries can start splitting apart as soon as Mao and Kim Il-sung have different models of what socialism is. why? this all goes back to the inherent power held by Marxist theorists coming from solving war. wars, crimes, and general violent conflicts between political factions are all similar. every time a group of capitalists unifies or a cluster of Marxist theorists unifies onto the same prediction for the socio-economic shape of a society, all of these unifications work toward the same general problem of preventing war. but this means that if factions inside a particular workers' state are not functioning together one will be pressured to eliminate the other. this also means that if capitalism and Stalinism happen to exist alongside each other, the need to keep people ordered will collide with the inherent instability of juxtaposing capitalism in its Liberal-republican form with the new structures within Stalin's Marxism. capitalism proper will try to put pressure on commodities from workers' states, hitting all the workers beneath each one, and Stalinism will push back on Liberal-republicanism trying to weaken the capitalists' government, although it can only push lightly. while a Stalinist state holds the power to crush pro-capitalist movements inside it, it holds no real power over the ability of US capitalists to solve for new innovations that temporarily prevent horizontal violence while all the best law-followers proceed to write all the laws. this means that capitalists still hold the power to control agorist processes and begin setting all kinds of arbitrary criteria selecting out Stalinist products as if they were useless. retailers, manufacturers accepting raw materials, national trade commissions that happen to have an agenda, and so forth can both reject products directly, and create worldwide trade agreements to carry it out internationally. this, in its own particular way, is an act of war — if violence is normally stopped by orderly enterprises operating together, then deliberately preventing enterprises from connecting can only breed instability and possibly violence. but, the world's collective body of capitalist-headed corporations has control over the very links that hold society together, and at what point people join society, and at what point they are not considered human. it defines the boundaries of the concepts of coercion, aggression, cheating, and stealing; it defines the basic shape of all acceptable or unacceptable social behavior; it defines what is Good or Evil. if all the capitalists in the world desperately wanted to define trans women entering bathrooms as aggression, they'd eventually break up every government and dissolve every ethnic group that allowed it. for capitalists the definition of aggression is fundamentally arbitrary and amounts to whatever soup of words their favorite philosophers cooked up. but as a result, nationality, ethnicity, language, and demographic identity themselves are deemed "optional" things that people get to have as a treat only if they first obey every existing capitalist. every day there is pressure on people to migrate out of the Third World into the First World, sometimes because "China is too oppressive", sometimes because countries are poor, sometimes because countries are still partly medieval, but always with a challenge that _the United States is better than you_. Stalinism may be a failure, but the alternative is people entirely stripping themselves of their humanity and turning themselves into products, striving for nothing but to be the most useful product to the first country that will agree to use and exploit them. largely thanks to the United States, there are particular average prices associated with White people, Black people, and Indic people that can be expected to be high or low, and racism is kind of just _true_ now. what's the price for a Kazakh person? not very high? you'd better get to raising it by moving to another continent or else everyone will think that's the entire value of your ethnicity.

capitalism is, in reality, just a bunch of living, breathing _beasts_ fighting each other daily to see how much of nature they can scoop up for themselves. at certain times, the division between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is almost illusory. capitalism can begin without any such division, as simply a bunch of the most "elite" and "qualified" individuals joining together in a ring to decide which people are the most capable of extracting and using surrounding resources. the decision of which individuals are allowed to work somewhere or allowed to own business territories is inherently social, agreed on by a layer of winners who have collectively divided up all the spaces and tasks inside a town, but once somebody is placed into the peripheral area of losers those people have no say in what the winners decide, and the only way they have of influencing society is by being the very best at some specialized craft to the point of being better than anyone else. merely being good at something isn't enough. they really must be the most superior people in the area at a particular arbitrary discipline to the point of making other people inferior, at which point they will gain popularity and become able to participate in the social activity of making unshakable decisions about society with other experts. Idealism is the philosophy of the privileged; obedience and complete intolerance of imperfection in every aspect of life is the reality of the younger generations.

some may try to say that capitalism is created by an act of prejudice, in which the layer of experts deliberately decides that it would be "a good idea" to expel demographic minorities from their settlements. this is not the reality of how capitalism functions. capitalism begins at either the concept that all resources are obtained in transactions of equal value (_agorism_, in the economic sense) or the concept that towns will be based on laws and will only consist of people who follow the law (which might be termed _political Kantianism_). the latter system is unshakable. the moment a town fills up with people and any more people attempt to come in, any attempt by an anarchist to disturb commodities or territories under some concept that "laws are culturally fabricated and arbitrary" is going to be met with some of the most vitriolic and violent behavior imaginable as the people in the town point to the inherent sanctity of Kantian ethical constructs such as _non-stealing_ and _non-tresspassing_, or if they are especially educated, the concept of _populational relativism_ and the value of respecting and coexisting with other countable cultures an individual does not belong to, regardless of whether that individual belongs to a different one or belongs to nothing. Marxists may like to say that towns are founded on the _class rule of the bourgeoisie_ within a region, but on the ground, that is not necessarily an accurate characterization sociologically. when people believe Idealist philosophies, the category of philosophies that believe ideologies genuinely cause themselves, they have _no idea_ they are creating a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie". all they know is that they are a group of socially-linked friends (if only the most elite ones) that will do anything to protect their friends. the existence of laws is unshakable, unless you want to make thousands and thousands of people severely angry at a small number of people all at once. this is the origin of states — sociality, love, and friendship. a state forms when a group of people has completely taken up an area to the point no more people will fit in it, and human sociality inverts itself so that everything about it only applies to a limited population of people defending themselves against the outside. a state is not a centralized locus of power sitting far away in a mayor's office or a capital city, but the entire structure permeating across all individuals that holds together a spatially finite and countable population. it is very important that anarchists learn this. while Peter Kropotkin can go on and on about "mutual aid" as a factor in evolution spanning across the overall ecological timeline from herd animals to humans, it is actually forms of sociality and mutual assistance that ultimately create hierarchy, exclusion, and states. all hierarchy of one demographic identity over another within a population begins at the fact that towns and cities have limited space that becomes increasingly differentiated into specific finite career slots, and all prejudice begins at the fact that individuals must plan their entire existences around which slots they can or cannot fit into. that other surrounding people would immediately start guessing at where all the people around them are or are not going to end up and which ones are "fit for" particular positions is only the obvious outcome within a form of society where every single individual benefits from trying to get them or their immediate social connections into all the slots before the people they don't like in order to create maximum ethical behavior across society and maximum social harmony.

perhaps universities everywhere should stop giving prejudices special names after exactly what they appear to be excluding, and just admit that all of them are manifestations of a single prejudice called Everybodyism. after all, nobody would have any incentive to claim that it was unimportant and irrelevant to them if they were forced to confront the _material reality_ that Everybodyism does in fact affect _everybody_.

to some extent, looking at capitalism from such a big-picture view is more of "a fun diversion from Marxism" than an actual Marxist perspective — helpful for the purposes of understanding what kinds of rhetoric Liberal-republicans actually need to hear, but not the clearest possible angle that will aid the most in constructing a new proletarian society. by no longer centering any infra-Marxism as the only possible viewpoint, meta-Marxism has opened up strange new possibilities for telling _any_ philosophy how to reach any particular goal the most effectively. but as long as that "particular goal" is solidly staked on the task of building a new society out of the proletariat, it will still tend to pull all philosophies toward the same conclusion. no matter what, capitalism or agorism or political Kantianism is the same collection of material objects that can only evolve into new shapes in a few directions, ultimately headed toward the same crises, and where society as a whole can only be rescued from those crises by a small number of possible solutions.

let us take a moment to consider how people have historically changed classes. there used to be a class called the nobility. in various critical periods, the nobility were important in creating the borders of internal states or imminently dividing kingdoms, but now that process does not meaningfully exist. what has replaced them? now local-states in the United States and Europe have dedicated government bureaucracies that belong to no one, and each state in the United States has a governor. how did that happen? you see so many people today claiming that it is impossible to replace capitalists with government ministries because the system would surely be too bloated, and it must have never been a good idea. but you never really see anyone saying that Liberal-republicanism is so inefficient that the nobility were better than governors or state governments. that kind of rhetoric may have happened for some 50 years after Liberal republics were first created, and then was seemingly never seen again. so what makes capitalists different? periodically, you even see Tories getting upset about capitalists, simply refering to billionaires through other bizarre narratives that may include such characters as "Satan" or "aliens" or "the Illuminati". ultimately nobody really wants capitalists in control of making so many arbitrary decisions about civilization, _including capitalists_. but it would seem that to rid society of capitalists and remove them from each country's social structure, they would need to be replaced with some other structure capable of only performing a capitalist's most necessary functions.

here I think it is valuable to take a detour and talk about television show directors. while audiovisual media have provided some of the nastiest examples of everything capitalism allows big corporations to get away with, from putting strict regulations on all public online communication to the actual abuse of actors used in productions, there is something amazing about TV shows that often goes unappreciated. for a while, television networks were acting as such centralized repositories of activity that they were almost halfway abolishing capitalism. networks would hire directors, and the directors would essentially be responsible for developing entire products from start to finish and putting together teams that would resemble very small corporations. but the directors did not own any business property. capitalism had created a new absurdity of basically hiring people to do everything capitalists do and giving them basically none of the benefits of actually being capitalists. the reason everyone went along with this, of course, was that another group of capitalists at the top was operating normally and giant corporations could skim a bit of earnings off each project as a whole. but either way, capitalism was developing and changing and exposing new problems that had never been encountered before. now, capitalists did not have to show up with capital themselves for new business territories and job slots to be created, and large enough corporations could simply create more business territories without external competition. the large corporations did not have to find people with money to be an audience, because they found other large corporations to pay for their TV networks by being advertisers. large corporations had almost turned themselves into a kind of perpetual motion machine, but the only real problem was that they had to decide how to use limited airtime and limited studio space, so they made the decision to put current and potential directors all into competition with each other through a system of favoring the directors that either made them the most money or got the best ratings. capitalism's central problem, the division of industry into finite slots as it filled up all available space, had struck again. but it had also transformed — what had become apparent was that the process of creating new business territories and the process of different production structures and cities making market connections were inherently correlated. occasionally, you will now hear some peripheral economists speak of an "agora", which is a kind of uncontrolled open gap in society where various businesses or individuals make various kinds of connections arbitrarily. an economic or purely-relational "market". before big corporate TV networks, smaller businesses operated openly floating around inside agoras. But after big corporate TV networks, the agora had become enclosed and managed by the large corporation. Agoras had been exposed as part of the mechanism that granted smaller businesses free-floating business territories, because when the agora was successfully closed up, people that would have been owners would turn into workers. But the problem hadn't entirely been solved, because after large corporations would fence in agoras and seemingly own and control them, the agora would still re-emerge inside. The finite space inside any particular area of industry was creating a problem where because the world outside the large corporation was still too big and unknown to plan for, the people outside the corporation would still have to decide whether they had use for any particular group of workers inside it. Between the large corporation and the outside world, there was an agora, and the agora was a space where the outside world was hiring and firing workers and deciding whether they got to pay their rent and live in any particular town according to whether their choice of craft and level of performance was perfect. As capitalism slowly got closer to going away, it got harsher on workers and it clamped down on its inherent prejudice.

In 1917, approximately 18 years before the first public demonstration of electronic television, the Soviet Union would abolish capitalists and Liberal-republicanism. One of the most notable social transformations in the Soviet Union was mandatory employment. This meant enterprises in general were required to hire people and prevent unemployment; I have seen many people get this concept wrong and claim it was a requirement on workers, including a few Marxists, but it was in fact a requirement on industry and hiring. The creation of mandatory or full employment has the consequence that instead of workers being completely wasted by not being assigned to any workplace anywhere, some people will be assigned to workplaces where it seems as if they are not needed. This is the same "internal agora" effect from capitalism slowly coming back. A city or union republic can maintain control over all its workplaces and ensure that they don't become autonomous governments — which, as it should be noted by all anarchists, you _don't want_ because any autonomous cluster of co-ops can fill up with anti-gay anti-Muslim anti-Chinese Tories any day of the week — but even when all workplaces are taken out of competition there comes to be a problem of actually distributing workers to the correct cities and industries to properly get the most use out of them. This is not a matter of "free will"; it cannot be. If it were true that individual decisions allocated workers perfectly to their most productive use, then nobody in the United States would ever need welfare programs of any kind because they would all have chosen such an effective position they would all be earning some amount of money over their desired minimum. Nobody has ever seen capitalism function like that, at modern levels of technology and consumption. It has never existed. So there is a real and possibly still-unsolved problem of how to put workers in exactly the correct places inside a society, within whatever safe window of error exists, so that the overall body of workers can all be productive enough to meet society's current needs and have time to experiment with placing some of the most peripheral workers into new enterprises or teams if there are any more requirements for products to be invented or new versions to be made. There is a lot of Idealist language being thrown around about this currently, about how displaced skilled workers have to "find new ways to make meaning" in our "new" existentialist dystopia, or how society should practice the Ideals of "empathy" and "community" to achieve more social programs, or how "we" (who are we?) chose to leave increasing numbers of empty houses instead of practicing the mere abstract Ideal of an efficiently organized society. Nobody seems to understand the frighteningly large scope of exactly what is wrong and what needs to be fixed. People often seem to assume that a bit of voting at sporadic locations and infrequent times or alternatively a system capable of replacing the day-to-day administrative tasks of capitalists within individual enterprises would be enough to fix everything. Marx himself spent rather long passages focusing on the concept of surplus value and how if the gap between material productivity and wages could be brought down to nothing but the actual administrative costs to keep various enterprises and institutions running, society would have more latitude to make any number of decisions about which things to produce where and which new things to create. This concept that capitalists collecting surplus value is the most important feature of capitalism can be misleading. The moment the surplus value gap goes away, the new problem that comes up that is very much not a trivial problem is how to allocate every worker to the correct place in society (or societies...) based on what begins as a complicated disorganized sea of people as opposed to a few well-defined loci of control. "Government by all the people" sounds great but it fundamentally requires the creation of ongoing coordination and structure between a great number of people in a way that does not currently exist.

I will conclude this overview of capitalism with an analogy that sounds vague but that (I hope) is actually profound. If people were nothing more than a series of dots moving across a sheet of paper a bit like on a _Sternhalma_ board (the star shaped checker-board where marbles are always moving in parts of triangles) and the goal was to move all the dot-people to the next corporation box over until all the corporations were packed optimally, one of the best things you could do to make the problem easier would be to make the board infinite. If you were to take the sheet of paper and curl it up into a cylinder, or impossibly distort it into a perfect sphere, then the whole problem of packing the people would basically turn into a "Hilbert hotel" problem where the options available seem infinite. In the study of infinite sets, there is something called Hilbert's infinite hotel, and this hypothetical object became famous because in our everyday experience a hotel "shouldn't" have an extra room open if an infinite number of rooms is already full. But given a particular definition of infinity, all the guests already in the hotel can simply move over one room to leave open an extra room. The simplest way to see this definition of infinity in real life is simply whenever the boundaries of an object do not stop quite where they were expected to. When scientists placed simulated hydrogen atoms close together — which are usually expected to stop at a molecule two hydrogen atoms long — they managed to create a simulated quantum physics scenario where electrons would flow off the second hydrogen atom onto a third hydrogen atom, and then another one, creating an indefinitely-long thread of metallic hydrogen as long as the electrons kept moving off the first atom. Despite the molecules always technically being finite, the spaces for electrons would become infinite because the molecule didn't stop where it was normally expected to. In the same way, the simple "board game" version of allocating workers to corporations stops ending up with areas where workers uselessly pool onto a corporation where they are "not needed" if the workers can simply wrap around to the other side in any direction. Literally speaking, this math problem would probably apply to things like redirected shipments more often than workers, but if a small number of workers needed to be moved to another country, an international transitional state with the ability to relax restrictions on international migration would certainly make it easier.

An imperialist makes a big deal out of the fact European armies can show the world is round. A vulgar materialist tries to focus in on tiny regions and make the world flat again. A Marxist eventually discovers that it is easier to bring all the various sections of the world economy into conscious and cooperative control of each other if they all remember the world is round.

[unfinished]

Links

• survey questions [not actually used... yet]