From Philosophical Research
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- Undertale mirrors U.S. antiwar movements / Undertale is the way it is because of the shape of United States antiwar movements -> so, I have a weird history with movements and being on the total fringes of them for most of my life when they would ripple out and hit me but I would only really get them secondhand. around 2014-2015 I got hit by the ripples of BLM. morality was everywhere. Existentialism was everywhere, and this concept that people will automatically flip over and change their minds if you only shout individuals individuals human rights identities individuals that is an individual you are an individual identity identity people like each other because they are different enough. in the beginning when I was literally a right-Libertarian that made some kind of sense to me, but as soon as I started actually not being a conservative all of it increasingly made less and less sense until I was like, where did any of this even come from and how does anyone even think it's correct? I read non-Marxist texts like I was supposed to and none of them made any sense, so I just kept digging and digging and digging on every single lead I could find anywhere to try to figure out where any of this philosophy coherently originated from whether people were creating it consciously or not. most of my research focused only on the past decade and how people could derive ideologies from scratch.
most recently, I realized that past United States antiwar movements had already been this. past large-scale movements in the United States had had the shape of anarchist Idealism, and not at all the shape of Marxism. finally, the outpouring of works like Undertale and Steven Universe started to make sense. the exact way they were portraying the notion of breaking up war was based on things like the Vietnam War period, in which despite the war being against Communism it wasn't actually Communists trying to stop it. and I'm not just saying the obvious fact of "a Marxist movement isn't mostly made of Marxists", what I'm saying is, "it's as if the whole entire movement was not Marxist and anarchists were forming the theorist layer and trying to form the party-nation". nobody will ever be able to do historical materialism again if we don't understand workers' movements as plural bodies of people with different colors of theorists on top that realize different kinds of countries. incidentally yeah I think Trotsky accidentally set the whole world back purely by claiming workers didn't really belong to plural countries or plural workers' states. come on, Trotsky, every object is plural.
- U.S. antiwar movements have always been Idealist / United States antiwar movements have historically always been Idealist / Marxist Jake believes Leninism is forming a Materialist social-democratic party, filtering it into a party-nation, and somehow filling it with workers. By Jake's definition, no anti-war movement in the United States has ever been a Marxist movement -> this really struck me when reading a book that was accidentally about the Vietnam War. the entire framing of the thing for normal people (and by that I do mean the bourgeoisie that represent them) was morality and basically the notion of war being a social construct and a thing that every individual has to choose to drop or sustain some kind of attack. there's not really any Marxism in there; that could quite easily devolve into a nationality of anarchists attacking a nationality of Liberal-republicans just for being part of the wrong nationality and not immediately assimilating into anarchism. and when you think of things this way, that previous antiwar movements in the United States are United States antiwar movements, you start to really see how "the left we have" being "non-Marxist" is a lot more than a color swatch, and in practice means that when United States people practice "revolutionary defeatism" the population is pursuing a totally different transition out of capitalism than what any Marxist strategy looks like assuming it pursues one at all. if you want people to work with "the left we have" you have to get comfortable with the concept of a charcoal transition and that you might have to toss every bit of your Marxist theory out the window and learn a big stack of anarchist or Existentialist theory, that the United States might get all the way through transition to a new system before Marxism ever begins to apply.
would I do that? well. I hate it. I have no other choice. I am incapable of doing it practically. that question is one big contradiction. so my answer is, I will analyze every single other ideology through Marxism, but as itself rather than a confused Marxism that explains itself wrong. Trotskyism isn't secretly mainstream Marxism-Leninism, it's Trotskyism. anarchism isn't secretly Bolshevism, it's anarchism. and a Marxist analysis of anarchism is something very different than a Marxist analysis of Marxism pretending to be anarchism. I am a meta-Marxist. if I have to use Marxism to explain how to succeed at totally non-Marxist ideologies that never turn into Marxism then I will. but I won't lie to you that Western Maxism or anarchism "must" be effective just because everyone's doing them and an ideology that's popular "must" be a winning one. I will judge the effectiveness of ideologies based on history. currently it's looking pretty bad for anarchism and bizarrely good for Deng Xiaoping Thought. I have been wracking my brain as to why that latter trend exists, and I think I half have an answer? but the answer only makes the outlook even worse for anarchism. anarchism is going to have to molecularize or it will never win.
