Research:MDem/5.4r/0999 north-letter
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, 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. [DFR] 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, to bring this back on track and give a short answer, 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 that 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, 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 Dengism 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 appear 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. Because every population is made of heterogeneous parts. 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, it's only when they actually draw the other one that there will appear to finally be a chance. And apparently, this was Trotsky and Cannon, while Grant, Cliff, and even Luxemburg were not quite as close to 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 to two other places outlining violet Marxism 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.)
Throughout history, there has been a tendency to try to characterize national or international historical events in terms of morality. Christianity and its siblings are some of the most infamous for these characterizations: 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. These kinds of characterizations of royal armies as "good" or "evil" have been wildly secularized and spread 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. At the same time, these simplistic conceptions of history are almost wholly incapable of understanding 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, first in a sincere capacity and then 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.
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. Each of them will have particular definitions of which kingdoms they think are Good or Evil, but in the end, all of that is each body of clergy protecting its own interests — associated with its class position, but also with its own specific kingdom it has control over. It is often not advantageous to them to acknowledge anything but their own body of clergy as Good or "human", so sometimes they simply uphold the "reality" that other kingdoms are not to be trusted.
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, 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 equally as arbitrary in their meanings as "Good" and "Evil". We mostly have Liberal-republicanism to blame for this, but at this point it's unfortunately true. Most people within Liberal-republicanism use the concept of Progress completely arbitrarily 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.
A great number of people can read a fictional book and tell that when a book proceeds from a framing that a particular imagined empire is Evil, this is actually somewhat arbitrary. Some people even read the Harry Potter books and begin questioning whether they actually make sense and whether the Slytherin wizards as a whole are truly Evil or perhaps, if Hogwarts school continued to allow itself to contain an entire quadrant of them, whether this problem might only apply to a particular fraction of them. But... what about Stalin and Trotsky? What is people's general understanding of that historical series of events in the First World?
When you truly test people by giving them a historical situation in another country seemingly nothing like their own that they should have no personal stake in, you really start to see how people actually construct morality and the concept of "correct" or "incorrect" historical events. In practice, how people respond to the Moscow Trials era 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 but 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 the 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, religion began trying a new tactic of simply _giving up_, and conceptualizing what might be called Good and Evil as simple opposing parts of a greater whole, always in competition, but inevitably present. To philosophers, a turn like this can seem unbelievably profound, but in its proper context it is easy to recognize as an adaptation to existing historical circumstances more than it means anything else. The telltale sign of this is that after 200 years of Liberal-republican parties increasingly stagnating in the United States, anarchists and various others have been increasingly turning to Buddhist "Light and Dark" 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 each of its forcibly divided halves?
Could it be that United States capitalists and all the world's Marxisms are divided for the same reason?
The answer to that is complicated and I will definitely end up in irrelevant places if I go into it too deeply. So what I will say is this. 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. Likewise, 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 also produced different conceptions of what a desirable outcome is. 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_ containing different collections of facts and 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, 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 the 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 pattern of soft division and error-correction has been steadily piling up.
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- survey questions [not actually used... yet]