Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q92/violet-for-bot
Below are summaries that R.D. entered into "Socialism AI" to try to define violet Marxism for the purpose of asking other questions.
(All the text on this page is human-generated. As well as on about 99% of this wiki, except for the pages archiving LLM prompts and human summaries of chat threads. Those may accidentally contain AI quotes about 3-4 words long. And the spambot user pages that got in... unfortunately.)
At various times I have been trying to explain violet Marxism (meta-Marxism). This is a form of Marxist analysis that views all Marxist movements that come into conflict with each other as being in contradiction with each other and models each movement as its own material object in order to better understand how movements develop against each other. Violet Marxism begins by assuming all political factions are in some ways materially similar in that all bourgeois parties are similar to each other, all Communist parties are similar to each other, and all parties that successfully found republics (whether George Washington's allies or Lenin's party) are similar but only in very limited ways; all parties that found republics have their own particular model of society before they take power which keeps their members internally connected but divides them from parties with other models. Put another way, every party that founds a republic has a particular contrasting "swatch color" (philosophy), but that swatch color always originates out of the faction's class composition. So, center-Liberal parties (blue) and Tory parties (brown) inside Liberal-republicanism may or may not be two separable instances of capitalism within a naturally-divided system which is better called "multicapitalism", bringing unique challenges of having to destroy the overall shapes of both artificial bourgeois "nationalities" in order to unite workers. Deng Xiaoping states (strawberry) like China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea contain an instance of capitalism inside, but only one instance, suggesting that they may be more amenable to uniting several strawberry countries that would all fuse into a proletarian civilization. As well, Stalin's close allies and the Trotskyist organizations that formed between about 1904 and 1940 each had the shape of 'a party that founds a republic', because in a sense both Stalin's Marxism (red) and Trotskyism (orange) wanted to create a "Communist party of the Soviet Union" to defend the country from outside imperialism, but they were united around different conceptions of how to create a workers' state.
Violet Marxism does not value neutrality over material accuracy. Although a violet swatch is used to represent meta-Marxist analysis, it is understood that everyone who does violet analysis will belong to some faction with some class interest, and thus, that there are not actually any "violet parties", and instead parties of various other swatches will use meta-Marxism to learn to properly model each other's internal operation instead of simply using their own biases to create false models of each other and talking past each other. This might or might not allow parties that seem very different on the surface to unite into a single Communist International. Of course, it could also mean that parties become more aware of the need for contradictions between each other and the need to struggle against each other and prevent some types of parties from having any real power internationally; even if a red party and an orange party begin by judging red parties according to the most rigorous red parties and orange parties by the most rigorous orange parties, if they ever combine back into a single International they will inevitably have to select the single best version of "vermilion" Marxism and hold all the parties to it as it develops, leading either the red or orange method for building Communist Internationals to be eliminated (as well as perhaps the red or orange method for building individual workers' states, as a result of being realistic about interactions between workers' states and the International). The purpose of violet Marxism, then, is to aid all Marxists in finding the best versions of Marxism across tendencies and ultimately get rid of obstacles to creating a worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat. ...
Marxism has, in a nutshell, traditionally looked at the world through a perspective that everything that grows and develops enters into antagonisms at least on some scale. ...
In principle, sideways antagonisms also apply to all Marxist movements. If one country or region is forming socialism in one country and contains a Stalinist party (a "crimson" or "red" Communist party) but another geographical region close by is forming a Trotskyist party (an "orange" Communist party), these separate movements each grow outward into the general sphere of workers and allies that surround them. Because they are initially separated thanks to different immediate goals and different theoretical models overall, the two separate parties can enter into an antagonism against each other as whole movements. This is not necessarily good for a world workers' movement, because an international movement benefits from as great an area of workers functioning together to defend against capitalist restoration as possible. But the two separate parties, as material objects, seek to grow into and over each other's paths as they expand, and to eliminate each other inasmuch as they stand in the way of achieving each other's goals. ...
Violet Marxism (also called "meta-Marxism"; this usage not related to other usages of that term) is the study of Marxist movements or workers' states as countable material objects that may be in conflict. According to violet Marxism, the formation of a Stalinist party and "red" workers' state is an entirely separate physical phenomenon from the formation of a Trotskyist party and the "orange" era of socialism it may ultimately form; both movements happening to contain workers and proletarian structures is almost a coincidence, except for the fact both countable processes are forms of Marxism and have each "decided" as a movement to apply Marxism, act in service of the working class, and be workers' movements. As such, the antagonism between the crimson party and the orange party is both inevitable, inasmuch as the two physical objects operate in a way that brings them into antagonism, and unnecessary, in that neither party actually decides or intends to create it.
... The purpose of "isolating" Trotskyism from Stalinists or "isolating" crimson parties from a Trotskyist international within a theory would be to try to get each of the two movements to stop seeing the whole of the other movement as an obstacle and instead to try to understand how it behaves and plan around it leaving most of the structure of the other movement intact while only demanding the kinds of change to the other movement which would truly bring the two movements closer to operating together or joining together as a single world movement. Violet Marxism does not claim that a party cannot be termed revisionist or "incorrect". However, it asks every Marxist theorist or organizer to judge whether parties in a particular tendency are revisionist not relative to all Marxist tendencies period, but relative to the versions of that Marxist tendency that have been the most effective in the real world and gotten the closest to creating a dictatorship-of-the-proletariat on a large scale. This effectively means that Stalinist parties are asked to judge Trotskyist parties relative to all Trotskyist parties and the most effective Trotskyist international, while Trotskyist parties are asked to judge Stalinist parties relative to all Stalinist parties (including Maoism and Hoxhaism inasmuch as they have ever been effective) and the most effective international Stalinist organization. Stalinist parties are asked to stop representing early Trotskyist groups as merely "wreckers" or "treasonists" and to treat Trotskyist parties more like they would treat other Stalinist parties, but Trotskyist parties are also asked to stop representing Stalinist parties as "corrupt bureaucracies" or "inhibiting the formation of the Fourth International" simply because they aren't Trotskyism. ...
... Whether Stalin made a mistake regarding Trotskyists and whether Stalin was a Marxist are not the same question. It could be the case that Stalin was a Marxist who made errors about Trotskyism, and at the same time Trotsky was a Marxist who made errors about Stalin. So, can Trotskyists really reasonably claim to have a sound epistemology based on only their own understanding of Marxism when deciding that Stalin has not correctly modeled the overall contradiction between Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism as both movements try to control the region, that Stalin has boxed his model of Marxism into the scope of his own group of followers instead of the world, and 'Stalin's obviously wrong model' is the only issue to be resolved? Could it not be the case that Trotskyists have also failed to understand the way Stalin's formulation of Marxism operated materially and the way the overall contradiction was unfolding? Wouldn't it actually be necessary to create a descriptive model of how each of the two Marxist movements physically behaves "for its own sake" — meaning, understanding Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism as amoral material objects that function based on their own internal material processes and motivations as well as according to back-and-forth dialectical interactions where they change and define each other — to truly understand what the big contradiction between the two parties over the region is doing and what the best outcome is? What if the real problem was that both Stalin and Trotsky had failed to create a violet Marxist / meta-Marxist model which described history as the interaction of not just bourgeois factions versus Marxism but also multiple countable Marxisms that would have to successfully sublate the correct parts of each other to join into a single Communist International? ...
... Why isn't Stalinism its own Marxist tendency? Even if Stalin's allies were not correct about the future of the Soviet Union that would not necessarily mean they weren't Marxists at all. In practice, being "a Marxist" may be something of a spectrum that you attain to different levels where some people are "somewhat" Marxists but are not respectable Leninists (including Stalin), while other people are "definitely" Marxists in that they are Leninists; the ability to recognize attempts at Marxism may seem to needlessly legitimize Menshevism and such, but in the end, it also allows for clearly criticizing each time a writer or movement claims to understand part of Marxism but has blatantly changed the meaning of it. In my mind, the early Communist Party of China is evidence for "Stalin's Marxism" existing as a Marxist tendency because the CPC did create a new republic out of a feudal order, and the Kuomintang mainly existed in opposition to it. Maoism may have unique content of its own, but inasmuch as it is weak to being taken over by people who will simply restore capitalism, it seems to me like it is a form of Stalinism, which would mean that Stalinism as a whole is a unique form of revisionist Marxism and not purely a distortion of Lenin and Trotsky's Marxism. ...