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"tertiary" [cr. 2026-03-03T06:50:01H]
(on United States mode of production)
The point about China's policies is great, but,
2:30 "tertiary cultural issues" These aren't tertiary. The reason Liberal-republican parties discuss these is that they revolve around creating or destroying the mode of production. When Tory factions win the issues, they gain more power to control exactly who they hire and don't hire at businesses, such that people who would ever unionize or protest don't get hired anywhere and the only option for people to oppose Tories is to move to another part of the country where the businesses are owned by center-Liberals or they have the chance of creating a new business — people are forced to 'level up' into petty bourgeoisie to actually have any input on political issues literally _at all whatsoever_ , while anyone who isn't skilled enough to create new businesses is simply forced to unquestioningly put their labor toward whatever generates money, whether it goes toward war, whether it goes toward getting rid of other industries that are better for society, whether it goes toward attempting to turn other countries into neocolonies. Workers are all effectively turned into soldiers. People who don't agree to sign up at a Tory-controlled business and condone attacks on workers' states, political donations to take away everyone's nominal rights, and police _physically beating up_ minorities without question are tossed out of employment into the street to get physically beaten up by police, often without any actual connected people to organize with to prevent it, so everyone panics because everything is already over the threshold where anyone could have stopped it from building on itself to prevent its own reversal.
The Tory factions typically value making money and accumulating businesses for the sake of it at the expense of everything else in life including their families, thus they slowly take over government and consolidate themselves together while everyone else fails to come together. Then they go around using all their money and connections to promote politics that anyone who tries to do anything to limit the amount of property or earnings they have whatsoever — which in practice pretty much includes passing any political policies whatsoever — is evil and destroying the country. As much as Tories monopolize and become capital you can't just separate "capital" out from "Toryism". The point of Tories accumulating capital _is_ so that they have the power to ban Muslims from living in the country. Often you'll find some loop of beliefs underneath that only Protestant Christianity promotes building up wealth and power and the things the universe inherently reinforces so therefore when they get to the point they're powerful enough to expel Muslims they must be righteous and justified and the triumph of capital must mean that all Muslims will one day burn in hell _on god's orders_ for having the wrong religion and the wrong way of life. They won't accept that they're wrong about that until a group of people really actually becomes better at building civilization and multiplying and out-existing people than them. If the Bolsheviks fail to build a civilization that out-multiplies Tories and colonizes the whole United States Britain-style and bans Toryism, Tories will claim it failed, regardless of what its actual goals are. If China or Vietnam gives up on Bolshevism proper and just builds as many corporations as possible to the detriment of its own people, only then will Tories start sputtering and stumbling on why exactly China isn't better than the United States and why god isn't on the side of China. Ideologies start out very local but they have geopolitical implications. When early Trotskyism exists, a few people start a conspiracy to burn down and rebuild the Soviet Union, and 25 First World countries start believing that no workers' states can ever be righteously justified and it must be good to promote Toryism and drop bombs on Vietnam. The same is true of Toryism itself. When Toryism exists, every workers' state will be forced to halfway regress to capitalism just to defend itself, and effectively, China and Vietnam and Cuba and even tiny parts of North Korea will all be dealing with the United States' "tertiary cultural issues".
Here's how modes of production really work in practice: the purpose of capitalism is to arrange people into one big connected object called a country. By default, a country has no extra space for people to be born, and all the existing people will push new people out, except that capitalism carves out particular places in society for people to be, opening up slots where people can work and thus be allowed to have houses and groceries. As capitalists accumulate more wealth, they can either create new products and industries and open up more slots for people to be born, or try to keep as much wealth for themselves at the cost of cutting the national birth rate and increasing the incidence of potentially-violent conflicts between unemployed or underemployed people and police. At different times, capitalists do either one of the two. Sometimes they try to insist that "competition" is inherently good because the more they create products and services nobody actually wanted the longer they delay the impending collapse in which nobody has a job and everybody becomes bonfire kindling; sometimes they stop even caring because they know they have so much consolidated wealth and connections that literally no human rights exist and they can get away with whatever they want to if they simply pick off small numbers of people at a time and get those people dead before anyone can help instead of fighting large numbers of people.
Tories will do absolutely everything they can to ensure that they get to kill off every member of the population one-by-one, five-by-five until there are only some thousand capitalists standing in the entire country and none of them is a Muslim. That's their endgame. They'll depopulate the earth if they have to, but not in service of preserving any of the natural environment, only in service of ensuring that nobody joins together into a group large enough to resist them and they have control over every individual that could possibly start any kind of resistance, and that they have every individual that remains alive believing that these individuals were nothing but a nuisance to the "real" United States who were defects and anomalies to a normal and healthy society.
Outside Tories everything else is just noise.
You have a few people thinking anti-discrimination laws are going to stop Tories (center-Liberals), when they're not, because the point of Tories is to become powerful enough to destroy everything outside them including laws.
Then you have a number of people who think that 'fortifying culture' is or was going to stop Tories (Gramscians), when it's not, because producing a lot of media about identities and tolerance doesn't really guarantee that anyone will be able to stick together as well as Tories can long enough to resist them, thanks to Tories busily picking the most able-bodied, bigoted, and money-obsessed people to join together into a nearly deterministic loop where only the people capable of making money, holding territory, and defending themselves from capital and the government control capital and the government while only the people least physically capable of resisting are stuck in the body of people resisting.
Then you have the Trotskyists off in one corner convinced that there exists some body of "workers" who could come together to stop Tories, when that isn't true because the United States doesn't really have unskilled workers who remain in towns for any length of time and all the skilled workers are busy being divided into those that get to make money but have to serve Toryism and those that are threatened with death. Nationality is becoming a material object more than "the proletariat" is, and the United States is better described as divided into three nationalities of center-Liberals, Tories, and unaligned.
Finally you have the anarchists, who are a complete mess. They believe overall that being unified into anything is either a painted target on them or a threat to humanity that generates more "Toryisms", so they embrace basically being as incoherent and confusing and hard for any particular person to join as possible. They will wildly spout claims that every other ideology is less good than anarchism and that's why every other system has failed, but in practice they never actually form anything effective which is capable of defending people against Toryism; they're like Trotskyists but ramped up to 100. Also they blather a lot about "greed" like creating Toryism is some kind of arbitrary choice when it's not. The universe selects for it, twisted as that is; it keeps succeeding because it's materially successful, not because people choose to do it.
In short, the proletariat failed in its tasks some time between 1950 and 2000, and then... society just forcibly disbanded it and said, there's not going to be a proletariat any more, you're all going to college and you're all going to compete with each other to be the first one to serve homicidal bigots, and you're going to love it, telling everybody that the real true solution to hating your job is precisely to move to a new region and go to a new job that hates and tries to destroy different people than your old one did — or failing that, you're going to try to accumulate the only people that aren't homicidal bigots together into particular blobs of industry that try to control the government, and having corporations that are both morally righteous and better at out-producing and out-multiplying other races, nationalities, and demographics will be the only way for you to win.
The major contradiction isn't any longer between workers and owners, the divide instead cuts off at the top stratum of people who are the best at out-producing, out-multiplying, displacing, ignoring, dismissing, gaslighting, sabotaging other countries of people, and occupying and taking everything. This is economically quantifiable if you only had the right mathematics; you just have to track the graph of people who are socially linked together into a faction of Tories and how effectively it expands and eliminates other graphs of people.
Bolshevism is the mode of production in which everything is fit together into a coherent object instead of every part of societies dividing up and destroying each other ("chunk competition"). Stopping that latter thing is tightly connected to the transition between modes of production
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[cr. 2026-03-03T07:19:50H]
"meta-Marxism" — basically a new Marxism for modeling all historical variations of Marxism and all other philosophies as they relate to modes of production or divisions between (sub)populations
space+time, objects in space create time : dialectical materialism :: socio-philosophy, factions create history : quantized dialectical materialism / "molecular" dialectical materialism, existential materialism
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"massacre" [cr. 2026-02-04T19:18:46H]
(on Deng Xiaoping Thought)
... I recently watched an online news show talking about China's recent five-year plans (the goals sound more broad than specific) and I think there was value in that kind of show just because it was talking about actual facts and it's rather rare for shows that aren't specifically focused on China or fascinated by it to give accurate or useful facts about China at all. Like, god, before YouTube existed I only ever heard crazily slanted misinformation about China and very few things that were true. Literally everything I read that wasn't portraying China as a medieval kingdom and totally avoiding its industrial age was representing it as the most oppressive place ever where you couldn't say anything and early Maoism never ended, putting corporations in China didn't _really_ change it, and until someone destroys the CPC and tears out Dengism and Maoism in one go and creates Liberal-republicanism nothing will ever be good again. Some people outside the U.S. have no idea how much everyone in the U.S. wants to totally delete both Mao and Deng from history just like in cartoons when Timmy Turner made a wish to go to the past and delete his dad's trophy or something.
... across Britain and Argentina and wherever, [Trotskyists] all hate China and all want to crack it open so in the chaos they can hypothetically then create Trotskyism. But then anarchists will have nearly the same position with a different intended result, and center-Liberals will have the same position, and Tories will have the same position, and like, all of it feeds imperialism, and all of it takes away from the legitimate not-exactly-Marxist social programs China is doing. There's a certain need to protect Deng Xiaoping Thought just so Third World people can have decent quality of life, even if it isn't "real Bolshevism". [Deng Xiaoping Thought = Deng Xiaoping _states_; I know that's a weird usage but sometimes I really go all the way talking about countable realized instances of ideologies as physical objects.]
There's something to be learned from the observation that basically all the real-world workers' states except North Korea turned into Deng Xiaoping states. I'm not sure what the lesson is, but I know it's part of the overall story of world history and country development since 1960. Once you get out of a narrow window of people saying totally slanted things, opinions on China have been all over the place even among people who actually appear to have observed the country and know something. There's the risk that people in other countries will criticize China and it will have the result of empowering anticommunism and capital, and there's the risk that people in other countries will support China improperly and it could hurt the people of China. In a sense there's no winning whatever you say.
So my default is to try to be supportive toward China just because from everything I know it seems like there's a higher probability everyone who isn't living in Deng Xiaoping states doesn't quite understand them and could be bashing a valid Marxism and failing to provide solidarity than there is that China is so bad that people would be supporting conditions China's people are unhappy with. It currently seems like, even despite some cities filling up and the younger generations in them struggling, people in China are largely content with things as they are and okay with their government. So I'm not confident enough to go guessing the majority is actually wrong. Trotsky made that error once and it had disastrous consequences for both his sect of Marxism and the population of his country. So maybe it's time to actively try to avoid making that error again.
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[cr. 2026-01-31T15:26:58H]
(on skewed portrayals of Tiananmen Square incident; on attempts to turn sudden divisions of countries into self-determination questions)
So, I've been informally studying the workings of bourgeois ideologies from the perspective of a dictatorship-of-the-proletariat for the past two years or so*, and I am going to attempt to define how "normal people" classify [dismissing Chinese defectors] as hate speech. (Morally, not legally.) It will never completely make sense but here's the internal logic as I understand it. [... list of nine steps omitted]
... interact with bourgeois-corrupted Marxisms as if they were countries and tell them that the day they present a Marxist theory of movements and workers' states that is actually capable of building countries they'll be treated with respect as nationalities. They won't be able to do it. Just keep grilling the Trotskyists and Western-Marxists and putting them in hypothetical scenarios, throw them into a war game, and ask them how they'll build a country and defend their population of allies against First-World empires or keep either the country they split from or their new country from being scattered across the world when First World empires inevitably invade and try to slurp up all the land. That's the true test of their internationalism: whether when James P. Cannon miraculously creates a workers' state the new nation of "Cannonists" actually helps defend other nations when it's supposed to. Whether a band of Maoists that creates a second China to rebuild Bolshevism will still defend the first China. Certainly none of that is going to help with non-Marxists that don't neatly and helpfully sort themselves into legible Marxist factions. But on the other hand, "Trotskyists don't respect the physical survival of other countries" will never be hate speech.
That said. ""china's big protest"" is a tough topic to cover because it raises questions of what makes any movement legitimate in the first place.
Every protest ever basically aims to "shed protesters' blood" in a way. In particular, every demonstration in the United States is about supposedly 'bringing out empathy' and constructing ideal situations where oppression is especially obvious. But those "deliberately constructed" situations are now being studied and taught by Marxists to define "all social oppressions". So how do we judge the "genuineness" of this one?
I think the key is that Liberal-republicans don't really model it in the Marxist sense of a group of people (workers) making sacrifices _to defend_ that group of people. The conflict leading to violence the protestors will have to defend themselves against isn't the part that matters. It's all about populations. They hate the idea the bloc of people against the Chinese government isn't a nationality, and that keeping it from breaking out of China and forming its own country isn't racist. They think people should be able to arbitrarily form countries whenever they want and break open other countries to create them. And they don't think those new countries allying with First-World countries is a problem. Because they fundamentally have this idea that all nations are equal and have particular rights As Nations regardless of if they're tiny or if they were suddenly made yesterday.
Marxists spend a whole lot of time just saying national independence and national self-determination are good, but they don't spend enough time on the theory of when national independence isn't justified, or particularly _when national independence is and isn't justified within a world still ruled by Liberal-republicanism_. And it's really biting everyone in the butt because capitalists have the power to form people into populations around them and make new nationalities and surround the last few workers in seas of capitalist-nationals whenever they want to. They can make South Korea. They can push out a thousand tiny South Koreas in the middle of China that are part of the capitalist bloc but aren't giving anything to or receiving anything from China, and if China ever hurts those they whine that they're 'free' and 'independent' 'groups of fellow humans' and don't deserve the cruel hand of the Chinese empire.
Kantian ethics is a country-destroying weapon now. And that's why [video I commented on] got censored.
(* I describe this project with the term "meta-Marxism", and the "meta-Marxist" framework is actually for studying _all_ philosophies or ideologies that have a tangible realization in order to understand them all operating in the same world separately, in parallel, and at once.
It all started with:
A) a really confusing Lacanian-psychoanalyst book I couldn't understand the real-world goals of (_The Excessive Subject_),
and B) my curiosity about what could have created the weird situation of Trotsky and modern Trotskyists both believing they're Leninists and yet thinking that dividing the Soviet population and allying with small owners is a good idea. At first you'd think it's as simple as "people believed Trotsky's lies as historical truths", but if you actually listen to Trotskyists that doesn't explain what it is they think the lies being true would enable them to do. So yeah, I started modeling the hypothetical world/future where Trotskyism is possible in order to potentially create the most effective disproof of what they currently describe ever happening. I don't hate them; in my mind they can take whatever correct criticisms I find and go create the first country with uniquely Trotskyist internal structure, as long as they don't attack other workers' states. You get solidarity and national freedom when you give them, the day you give them.)
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[cr. 2026-02-01T19:08:33H]
(on Gramscianism; on the structure of global capitalism as a named ideology)
"Liberal donors ... I#####-supporters donated to MLK"
Yeah. Within all of this that is an especially interesting point
The United States is characterized by this constant bizarre struggle to get the right people standing on top of capital because the people on top of capital always have more power over everything including over the progressive movements. Gramsci's works have been weirdly popular at times as this lever to try to introduce White people to the concept of substituting White-supremacist capitalists with Black capitalists without actually talking about race. But you see people overcomplicate and obfuscate things quickly because there are already three layers there.
When people popularly talk about Gramsci they often talk about "culture", "ideas", and "mentality" (because Gramsci did mention them at least once too). But beneath that, on a layer Gramsci himself might have been able to recognize, all that "culture" really just comes from who is and isn't standing on top of capital in any particular slot and who got kicked out. With the "MLK's donors" situation, the person who gets to determine whether the Black civil rights movement will or won't support imperialism is the first person to satisfactorily fill in the role of capitalist, and the right donor getting into that slot first is almost the simplest way to fix it. But under all that is a third layer, which is: what's the deal with progressive movements running off capital in the first place?
And if you dig down long enough what you realize is that capitalists don't think of what they're doing as capital. They just think they're basically groups of friends helping each other out. It's like there is a secret unnamed form of anarchism that anybody including capitalists can subscribe to, and then a bunch of capitalists inside the United States and a minority group not particularly aligned with Communism will ally together because they're both just groups of friends joining into a bigger group of friends that can go form a bigger snowball with a few external countries to have more money and resources. When they're aligned with minority demographics or earnestly aligned with "human rights" they really don't think of it as capitalism. The way they're looking at it they're just governed by Kantian ethics or something similar, where everyone is handed the categorical imperative to 'not do to others what shouldn't be done to you' and then they all decide that because all humans are equally human and they don't want Bolshevism done to them nobody should do it to anybody. And then they mobilize everything they have into a terrifying empire because they believe that if there's no other way to punish countries deciding to violate global ethics they for some reason have the right to do it. It's a very unique anarchism where for some reason they don't truly dislike The State as long as it only consists of momentary wars and doesn't exist permanently.
We may have to rethink what the actual calculation is for overcoming capital. The problem is basically that while every "group of friends" that comes out of any particular country is less than the population of each country, taking groups of capitalists from several countries at once can sometimes create a mountain of capital that outdoes the population of any one country, notably in relation to smaller countries like East Germany, or the population of Kansas. It's not simply that "you won't get through socialism in one country": workers' states never really form reliably in more than a couple countries at once, while many, many countries' worth of capitalists are always ready to squash them before they even form. Workers' states are better than generic "Socialist" countries that talk about a welfare state or national independence when it comes to actually protecting other countries; the difficulty of creating things or building armies with just the proletariat at a small scale pays off at the national scale. But to achieve that there's the difficulty of getting each country out from under the whole world to begin with. It really almost just starts turning into a math problem with difficulty of arranging people into Bolshevism on one side and payoff toward making it less difficult to create workers' states on the other
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[cr. 2026-02-01T15:04:30H]
(long; on the structure of anarchism; attempted meta-Marxist analysis of anarchism)
... Although it doesn't look like it, the United States is overflowing with anarchists.
How? Basically, anarchism is the easiest ideology to think of and subscribe to, with very little reading or training truly required for most members. Some versions of anarchism are literally just the most intuitive models of things anybody would think of in a vacuum, such that they almost seem like they've existed for thousands of years although the exact context and inner details they'd have in each time period are sure to be different. Christianity and Buddhism each resemble centuries-old prototypes of anarchism, but later on, you get people like Deleuze and Guattari. Today, there is a really big phenomenon of anarchists trying to get anarchism into academia but then their 'anarchist social science' seemingly getting co-opted by the ordinary capitalist processes inside academia and morphing into a strange new form of anarchism that is uniquely trapped inside academia and doesn't actually evolve in conjunction with real on-the-ground movements — even if some movements may still try to use it based on the Idealist principle that 'if all movements are ideas surely any good enough idea can be applied to improve them'. I like to refer to this new kind of anarchism as "blue anarchism" (in contrast with "charcoal anarchism" that attempts to start at on-the-ground social structures) or "the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition" / "capital-E Existentialism".
(A bit of a weird name, but for the longest time I didn't even know what this thing was or how to look it up so to describe it I was just collecting keywords I'd seen used across multiple instances of what seemed to be the same thing: structuralist linguistics being used to justify an obsession with language or narratives and breaking them open, existentialism being used as one core model of "human nature", and various other things it would take too long to list. Critical theory and "post-structuralist" concepts also commonly showed up as keywords though I didn't try to fit those into the name.)
So, if I literally just said blue anarchism is mostly stuck inside academia, what does it have to do with protests? Well, look at the thumbnail. That shows something I've dubbed a "frog protest". There are specific justifications for this inside blue-anarchist theory. Some parts of blue anarchism are really obsessed with "deconstructing narratives" and "not behaving in the way people predict", so they invented frog protests under the logic that if people are acting in a way that is not just opposite of racial stereotypes but totally unrelated to them complete with mascot costumes and street parties, it will be impossible for "fascism" to keep spreading its narratives because no matter how racially segregated and surrounded by reactionaries and fed their own narratives people are they will all be forced to realize that when they step outside none of their models or narratives have anything to do with reality.
Anarchists, "charcoal" or "blue", have a really different way of thinking about everything than Marxists. They don't like aboveground operations. They don't like anything to be comprehensible. They like everything to be either underground within very specific socially-embedded, "community"-embedded processes (yes, even the non-secret stuff is underground), or to be as unpredictable as possible so that if anything ever gets going at all it gets baked into a bunch of separate uncontrollable individuals and gets hard for anybody to control or disrupt. In a sense, anarchism designs itself to be impossible to organize. There are some very bad things about this, but the one flip side to it (it's debatable whether it's good) is that this "movement structure" actually makes Idealism viable for modeling real movements. When a movement is truly made of aggressively bringing up an idea in perpetuity in the middle of chaos, it forces people to understand the movement using Idealism or at least a history or analysis of Idealism if they want to understand it at all.
But I'd guess that if people want to know why the United States is so weird, it isn't frog protests they're asking about. It's the way that before them everybody just kind of stands around and does nothing.
Anarchism feeds into that too. Like I just said, anarchism deliberately makes itself inaccessible and hard to join. It makes people do very specific things in specific places at specific times but it doesn't really have the tools to connect people across a nation-wide area — other than by connecting individuals around ideas, as if ideas could sprout new anarchisms on a delay like plant rhizomes.
This leads to a state of things where a lot of people aren't aligned with "fascism" or capital and its tendency to build up surrounding "WASP swarms" of smaller businesses or hate groups to protect it day-to-day, yet may have no support whatsoever against seas of White supremacist Trump supporters around them and simply have to withdraw from society and hide. Anarchists will just be out on public sites gushing about "community" and how clearly if you don't feel safe meeting your neighbors or Organizing or Practicing Mutual Aid (even if you fundamentally don't have money and everything you have to donate would feel like an insult to homeless people) it must be a problem with you and your own willingness to be fearful and bigoted. It can feel very, very victim-blaming and almost "anarchist supremacist" in its own weird way, vaguely carrying connotations that if you haven't converted to anarchist culture and committed to building a new anarchist race you're an inferior human being and you deserve to be crushed under the boot of "fascism" because "as we all know", all non-anarchists are generalized dictatorial freedom-destroyers of the only undifferentiated kind there is and therefore basically fascists.**
So the country gets locked in a state where large numbers of people are dedicated "WASP-swarmers" who will never leave capital / bigotry and thus if they want to be the best most virtuous people they can be the best thing for them to do is absolutely nothing at all and claim all political parties and elections are "corrupt", and where another significant body of people is just plain unable to participate in anarchism because it's unpredictable and impossible to organize and even on a logical and conceptual level doesn't really make sense. And then you have a relatively small body of 'active' anarchists that's actually doing well, showing up at the frog protests or building community projects with their tightly-knit community they somehow actually have instead of being totally isolated, but there's always too few of them to carry a revolution, or you know, to be extra anarchist-friendly, a "potentially-nonviolent transition to a workers' state".
(** That might seem like a harsh description, but I think it's fair when anarchists utterly refuse to understand divisions like arbitrary physical country borders or countries breaking into class subpopulations. It results in this very strange politics that is all about defining people by some essentialized characteristic that connects them and sort of functions like "micro-scale nationalism", racializing people into being obligated to be "the gay race" or "the LGBT+black&brown race" and pushing them to unite into "a community" but only allowing them to unite around being part of some combination of microscopic races and the defense of that tiny ad-hoc nationality that spontaneously formed yesterday against people being racist against it. Why United States people would hate Deng Xiaoping Thought for having a central party that unites all the subpopulations of China in a cooperative process while they model everything like this I genuinely don't understand. Like isn't it kind of just a big anarchism? By the definitions that blue anarchism uses where Liberal-republicanism is okay? Couldn't the United States just transition to Deng Xiaoping Thought if blue anarchism is true?)
I really thought I had this figured out for a while, that it was just going to go on like that until the day people realized anarchism didn't make sense and got better theories... and then somehow _only many weeks into the ICE incident_ all the garbage that anarchists keep saying, about groups of people automatically coming together in Rhizome and striving to become an uncountable thing greater than individuals or groups just because groups of people are all groups of people and Communities Communities Communities, just kind of _actually happened_ . I still don't understand how it happened. I don't understand how a situation of everyone seemingly just hiding from each other, hoping, and believing that people socially expelling each other is better and safer than national laws spontaneously turned into everybody actually standing together with people that logically they should hate the next week and repelling ICE. You can't thank the proletariat for this one; the United States has been extinguishing the proletariat for decades and decades and turning everybody into unemployed and small businesses and gig workers and strip malls and occasionally emigrants to Europe. Even people who are optimistic about movements remark that "there hasn't been a lot of union activity". The proletariat didn't do this. This was some kind of _other_ weird build-up-and-reverse process involving the actual social-graph structure of Liberal-republican factions, nested groups of demographic identities, the physical layouts of US states or towns, or maybe other things. Some people might say the Epstein files had a big role in it, but right now I genuinely couldn't tell you why what just happened happened instead of nothing continuing to happen.
All I know is this. Pieces of blue and charcoal anarchist theory are being widely taught to people and spread around at about the scale people were supposed to be learning general-sense Socialism where Menshevism and Bolshevism work together to assemble people; that whole notion of a mass Socialist movement is seemingly being taken over by anarchism now.
And because an anarchist transition to an era of socialism looks totally different from a Marxist transition, nobody knows how to model it or make it go faster. (I'm studying anarchism and how its societies develop using "meta-Marxism" as fast as I can, but as far as real world organizing I am definitely not getting this stuff done remotely fast enough.)
One final note: as much as I love explaining where things come from and their internal logic, I have never _liked_ blue anarchism; it's never made any sense to me on basic common-sense summarizing levels, and to me it always feels as if it's gaslighting people to believe things just because peer pressure said so. I wouldn't be offended to learn that blue anarchism as a whole somehow sprouted out of a CIA operation, like how I've heard the CIA funded research into new art styles to stop the spread of foreign Communist art movements into the United States and Europe, though I have no good evidence that's literally where it came from.
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"pokemon-unite" [cr. 2026-03-16T14:07:20H]
(on rejection of Materialism in order to have "freedom"; on bourgeois concepts of freedom and "countervailing power" portrayed in popular culture)
... The Red Scare stoked anti-intellectualism: probably correct. People embraced anti-intellectualism out of fear and prejudice: incorrect.
The reason that connecting anti-intellectualism to anticommunism is correct brings a realization that should not be something that's reassuring because we have the knowledge now, but instead horrifying.
The thing that is very evident looking back at the 1950s and how elements of that era carried through to the present is that people love freedom. You tell people about freedom and they love it more than almost anything else, no matter how good or important the other things are. Whenever you tell people they can build a society on freedom or a theory of parts of human society starting at freedom, or you give them a theory that purports to be even more free than previous theories of freedom, they totally eat it up. But it doesn't matter if the theories are actually correct. People will cling to them even if they're incorrect just because nothing is more utterly delicious than freedom. Talking about freedom makes people feel respected and heard, while telling them that theories about freedom aren't actually accurate to reality makes them feel oppressed because if the theory promised them a lot of freedom and you're criticizing it you must be taking their freedom away.
This is basically how the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States actually led to anti-intellectualism. Liberal-republicanism was created; everyone assumed it was the only possible kind of "democracy" and if anybody made a republic any other way they couldn't possibly be free. Then Marxism showed up, and although it often spoke of freeing people in class structures and particularly freeing countries from the control of other countries, it didn't talk about freedom enough compared to the theories people already knew about, so they assumed it must actually be less capable of leading to freedom. There was a big backlash to the spread of Marxism, not just among the powerful, but eventually among everybody. And as a result, universities wildly started spinning up a bunch of new theories to replace Marxism so Marxism wouldn't make it in, like fifteen countable philosophical frameworks or so, with every one of those theories focusing on attempting to have more freedom. [The "Existentialist-Structuralist tradition" or "blue anarchism".] Critical theory was one of the first of these fields. I do not think critical theory is inherently "oppressive" or "corrupt"; I think whenever people started throwing actual life experiences of specific demographics into it and creating critical race theory, etc., each of those times it got a bit better than it had been. But critical theory and its connected frameworks have one big problem. They're always about questioning things but they never have any way to know if their criticism is true. This leads to a lot of weird circular arguments where one branch off critical theory will argue with another one and they'll each call each other racist for different reasons when ultimately both of them just want to make the world less racist. Neither of them can accept the other one might be right, because their method is based on assuming everything has baked-in biases and in effect is probably wrong. They can't quantify the moment that an argument is partially correct and partially isn't prejudiced any more, which means they can never actually measure incremental progress from bad to good to better. All they can really do is look for each other's weaknesses and think about when is the best, most necessary time to destroy teamwork and solidarity.
Marxism, on the other hand, didn't work that way. Marxist theorists attempted to operate on something resembling a scientific method, and carefully match known facts and patterns to new questions to try to arrive to every situation with more knowledge from the past. If a Marxist had historical data that one demographic had been accepted into another demographic in one country, like trans people being accepted alongside gay people or something, they could begin to guess that the same thing would happen in other countries, and based on previous events, try to figure out under what conditions it would happen.
But this aspect of Marxism scared people. The concept that one group of people could predict another group of people and start telling it what to do, even for benign purposes to improve the health of that society, was terrifying. So people clung to critical theory and started believing that if they armed themselves with the ability to call all Marxists prejudiced for supposedly not being able to know what kinds of events and transformations lead their group to freedom, they would be safe. In real-world workers' states, Stalin had existed, and people like him had been making pronouncements that people ought to stay in crumbling Third-World countries and fix them, and defend them from First World countries with wealth actually slurping up their land and development potential to make more wealth, even though the process of fixing Third-World countries was painful and nobody would have much of anything until quite a ways through it versus if they moved to another country. Stalin and Mao made them actually build a society and they were upset because building a society didn't feel like freedom.
By the time we get to Pokémon, anti-intellectualism comes in something like this.
The series itself tries to be "timeless", and have messages that feel like they would already be obvious to a child — unless you have a very mean one — and equally obvious to an adult. This is not inherently bad in and of itself, until you see Pokémon start to manifest the world's background obsession with having more and more and more freedom. Pokémon's depiction of the United States is visually evocative but somewhat drops the ball. It acts like truth and ideals are equally important, when that is not necessarily accurate — by one definition (a somewhat Marxist one), all truths begin as ideals and truth is what remains when people have gone through a big basket of ideals and tossed out all the bad ones that don't match reality to end up with only the ones that do. Pokémon's conception of truths and ideals feels a bit like critical theory: there are only things, there are only individual dragons or countable identities, and whenever one of those things seems to be making people angry another thing can go attack it to try to restore freedom, although that will just lead to the two dragons fighting each other endlessly. In Hoenn, you have Rayquaza appearing to bring knowledge or sense to the fight between Kyogre and Groudon, but once again, it's easy to conceptualize this fight as just Rayquaza attacking two other legendaries for bad behavior at once to create freedom. Pokémon loves the theme of _balance_ and that supposedly catastrophes can be averted because things are fighting each other back and forth in balance. But that concept doesn't necessarily make sense. Applied to ecosystems, like with several legendary Pokémon that represent natural forces, it's not necessarily wrong enough to be harmful. But Pokémon connects the concept of Pokémon types to its concepts of society. Every region has about eight gyms and it needs all of them. The diversity of types acts to balance out Pokémon battles. And finally, when you ask fans what their favorite Pokémon are they'll internalize the constructed type categories and often try to tell you that criticizing Pokémon designs makes the game less fun, all Pokémon are good Pokémon, Pokémon currently grouped into type X are just as necessary as Pokémon of type Y.
So, Pokémon within its main series is badly designed to be a competitive game, even though there will always be oversights in its design that make some Pokémon better and some worse and accidentally open the possibility for tiers and difficulty. Pokémon is a game about freedom. It's about picking any Pokémon type and almost any Pokémon with this looming baked in abstract idea that if anybody is limiting that freedom somebody will show up and smash the bad guys to return the world to a state of balance where everyone is the same.
(I really like KrillikVA's video "The Divine Truth", because it's wonderful as an illustration of what Pokémon is about even if I do find the actual series writing decisions described in that video a little maddening sometimes.)
Marxism is often caricatured as being about "equality". In actuality, no historical Marxist state has claimed this, and all of them have respected the idea that until society is done being built and things become easier and more routine there will be a certain ranking of people into common people and people in parties with sophisticated theoretical knowledge and generally a good understanding of what's true and what's not accurate to reality.
Critical theory and its connected ideologies are the ones that are obsessed with equality and do not understand skill or expertise. Whenever anyone with skill at something threatens to take away their freedom, allies of these philosophies have had it drilled into them that it's their right and duty to fight back and take their freedom back, before they even have to think. Really, the more they're currently suffering in their lives for any reason, the more they have to assemble people together to bash the Person of Unfreedom who might be causing it as soon as possible.
So here's the problem: until people defend Stalin, nobody will ever trust an intellectual or an expert. Nobody wants to defend Marxism as what it actually is, because it's still very true today that people will get weird images in their heads about "a society crumbling because it didn't respect freedom" or "totalitarian dictators". I've just given the real story in "like I'm 5" fashion, so you'd know that has the causality backwards. Not every expert on something is Stalin, but especially when you consider that the real Stalin _was_ revered as an expert on his country and was not as bad as people think, it's definitely not a difficult thing for people to feel like that is the case and the two _are_ the same.
All experts are Stalin. That's the state of things these days and the experience that everyone lives. That's not something you can turn back. The only thing you can do is try to get people to be okay with that and stop obsessing about pushing away "Stalin" and having more freedom.
Okay this comment is really long for a Pokémon video... I'll tell you something "fun". I tried to design a Pokémon region based on the story of East Germany. I tentatively call it Vechheim (the spelling might be bad, I don't know). It has a regional variant of Liepard, which stubbornly sits down in roads to become the region's Snorlax and is supposed to reference Trotskyite wreckers. It has body horror legendaries loosely representing class struggle. I think there should be more Second-World regions.
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; (the "six line dividers", "section with this name created at this time" stuff is a specific format I created for taking notes that would be wildly split and merged and moved across files. don't worry about it)
