From Philosophical Research
Prototype notes
- The System / systemic (qualifier attributing some sort of social problem to The System, or alternatively attempting to explain problems by treating Niklas Luhmann societal (sub)systems as the only structure of society; anarchism, anti-racist movements, etc.) -> the motif of a nebulous social process that anarchists point to when living in society daily is pain and something is wrong. it's often terribly unclear what "the system" actually is or refers to.
this motif is specifically for when texts or various groups simply keep saying "system" "system" "system" over and over again without giving even a brief explanation of what it is. if a Marxist explicitly refers to "capitalism", that should not be considered part of this motif, because they have given The System a name. on the other hand, if someone is talking about "systemic racism", that might or might not qualify as this motif depending on how specific it is; if they have a highly specific account of what material processes are perpetuating racism they're exempt, while if they seem to be suggesting that all the individuals in society simply have the wrong "ideas" or "attitudes" that would count. Idealism versus Materialism is a major distinction here. if something clearly tips over onto the BlackPantherism side of understanding reality as opposed to the anarchist side it probably isn't this motif.
- system / systemic / structural -> almost every time I read a work by "The US Left" I have no idea what this is actually supposed to refer to. it sounds like it makes sense at first, and you think you understand it, but what really is a system? could anybody explain it materially in terms of what parts or ongoing processes distinguish a "system" of oppression from something that is not a system?
- cissexism -> the naturalization of cisgender behavior and "biology"
- heterosexism -> similar
- monosexism -> the counterpart to biphobia. I do prefer these to the individual-action terms on the level that they are attempting to describe the actions of groups of people, although I honestly really doubt that the actions of groups of people can be neatly described as ideas versus literal material objects. my beef with "colonialism" is that colonialism is not an idea, an oppressive colony is a material object
Related
- We went from tribes to suburbs / Human beings went from tribal populations directly to disconnected suburbs / In the year 400, White people were in tribes, in the year 2020 they were in suburbs, and absolutely nothing happened in between / history denial (motif of people acting like suburbs were suddenly made up yesterday rather than coming from particular cumulative sets of events over generations) -> you see this pop up fairly quickly as soon as you let people talk about "the modern period" or "Gen Z". [1] for most people in the United States it didn't go that way. first there were tribal populations, then there was more than one population in plurality, then the populations smashed into each other and started fighting over borders and trying to clear people out of land areas. this is flat-out history denial. it ignores the centuries and centuries of history between the United States hypothetically being a tribal population and all the changes it went through until getting to the state where it starts fighting tribal populations. propositions like these show that a whole lot of people don't like thinking about history as mattering to the current day. it seems evidently harmful when people are claiming slavery is irrelevant and none of the populational transformations inside that period matter, but nobody stops to realize that forming an empire is also a historical process where the content of the process changed current conditions and needs to be understood.
- Why did White people choose to live in The System? / Why did White people choose to live in capitalism? / Why did White people choose to live in colonial society? -> this is usually an anarchist, strictly-non-Marxist idea, so it's most appropriate to put it in weird opaque anarchist language. I may not like the way this idea is worded or expressed when it typically comes up, but taken by itself this is an excellent question. I mean, ask this question correctly and you'd have a highly-informative 600-page history book which introduced all the relevant objects and processes that genuinely suggested the correct strategy to end "The System". so, the usual answers are bad but the question is wired.
...is. hang on. is this what the word "systemic" means. does it just mean that anarchists have no idea what they're fucking analyzing and have just labeled it "The System" to be superficially objective about their lack of knowledge of what it is they're studying. oh boy. if that's it, it makes it severely ironic that many anarchists dislike objectivity, doesn't it. I mean, my Lived Experience is that The System is called capitalism, so you can only invoke objectivity if you want to deny that Lived Experience.
- they killed the buffalo, Josh / White people killed the buffalo, so why do you trust them, Josh? -> [...]
- Tribal populations are not Western -> [...]
- To change The System, you must first learn to love / To become capable of resisting capitalism you must first change yourself / Che Guevara said that revolutionaries must have a love of humanity, therefore everyone has to get rid of all prejudices and inability to love themself or others before there can be a workers' movement -> two words: Malcom X. he hated women. by being open to scientific improvement to his party's policies, he still founded one of the most successful and least stupid North American Marxist movements.
I've heard this a ton of times and the more I hear it the more I feel like... no. the system (capitalism*) changes when there is a capable subpopulation of workers that is good enough at operating together without outside help and is strong enough and patient enough to explode it. as long as people fail to have successful strategies of forming a civilization over the top of capitalism they'll just have failure after failure no matter how nice and compassionate they are.
(* it's capitalism for both Che and Malcom X, so I can say that. if they meant something else, then of course I couldn't.)
- Che Guevara said that revolutionaries must have a love of humanity, therefore everyone has to get rid of all prejudices and inability to love themself or others before there can be a workers' movement -> the person who made me think about this again and write it down was a Marxist, who was saying it to try to get the really crusty Marxist parties to re-examine themselves. and the more I think about the statement in context the wronger it feels. Marxism just isn't about transforming society starting inside the individual. Deleuze says that kind of thing but it's not what Lenin says (unless I just don't remember). back in about 1920, Marxist allies used to believe in this thing called the "new Soviet man" and sometimes think that people's entire concept of what their population was and containing nationality was would slowly change. and in some ways it was a very Trotskyist idea, it was like, you'd unify all of North America and get one population speaking English, French, and Spanish that all belongs to one nationality. that's considered very outdated now — for reasons other than simple anticommunism. people have been slowly starting to comprehend populations as physical objects which behave independently and can be awfully hard to coerce together; aside from many totally misguided attempts to treat national independence as an abstract ideal without simultaneously fitting it into reasonable geographical blocs, one of the only things about the Soviet Union you actually have some chance of getting people to listen to and think about is the sheer preservation of 14 populations in the face of a central population trying to destroy the other 13, which is to say, the "anti-racist" implications of a supranational federation and the conflict between keeping the 14 nationalities together to defend each other versus the 'absolute' importance of the freedom of the 13 peripheral populations As Races to resist the central population and central government. that's a lot of words to say... whenever Marxists start invoking the idea of a "new, transformed man" people are quickly going to read it through the lens of "Whiteness" and "colonial biases" and the moment you start talking about "people changing themselves" start wondering if you're secretly racist against peripheral nationalities. this isn't hypothetical; all the blue-anarchists seem to almost make a hobby out of endlessly criticizing each other's frameworks created for spotting racist biases of being too racist. the primary purpose of Marxism in the United States has been flattened into "being less racist" and yet it's still all too common to hear "Gramsci is White!" (ok) "Mao is the majority!" (no, please stop) "your Marxism entirely about racism is basically racist!" the zeitgeist of the 2020s is really not in asking anyone to transform themselves, it's always in "listening" to the way people already are and assuming it isn't bad. there was even a terrifying moment where because the pandemic and Tories were totally out of control anarchists tried to step up to "understand" and "empathize" with them to get them to stop, although I don't think it did much; the truth is that even though anarchism accomplishes nothing anarchists have inexplicably been winning.
so... I don't really like thinking about Marxism as starting at transforming the self, as opposed to starting at building structures larger than individuals that have the capacity to transform society. I think a tiny part of it is that anarchism scares me; wishing the cat could go back in the bag, I am a bit viscerally against the concept of Marxism accepting anything that anarchism believes, unless it's shown to be materially true.
Ideology codes
