Ontology:P208

1. [P] (pronounced [P]) "Althusser test" [rating]

[P] (pronounced [P]) "Althusser test" [rating]

field value

test passed

"Althusser" [pass]

test failed

"Althusser" [fail]

Core characteristics

item type

P

[P] (pronounced [P]) label [string] (L)

[P] (pronounced [P]) "Althusser test" [rating]

[P] (pronounced [P]) alias (mis) [string]

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QID references [Item] 1:(-)1:(-)1

[P] (pronounced [P]) rating [rating]

color swatch references [Item]

historical materialism

Property data type

item

instance of

communication rating level

Usage notes

• The Althusser test is aimed at the kind of opinion pieces that do nothing but talk about how prevalent a problem is and how bad it is in the tone and guise of attempting to solve it but practically speaking never accomplish anything and only really take time and energy away from anything that might actually somehow map out the solution to the problem. This test is named in reference to Louis Althusser's writings (Western Marxism), which on occasion tended to fixate on the problems of "messed-up culture" and "ideologically-charged structures" more than on what in general should ultimately be done to solve these problems.
• A work fails this test if it spends the bulk of its length blaming the victims or targets of social issues for the inability to solve their issues.
• A work fails this test if it spends most of its length describing ongoing issues that readers should already know about in the guise of saying something profound, but never genuinely explains why the problems have happened.
• A work fails this test if it insinuates anticommunism and then proceeds to act like it is far more profound to say it has no answers to questions that Marxists would definitely have provisional answers to.
• A work passes this test if it abruptly stops its descent into the kind of lengthy "doom-rehashing" that would fail the test and instead says something insightful.
• In order to pass this test, a work does not necessarily need to provide a perfectly-correct solution to the problem it presents. It only needs to show some minimal amount of thought in which the speaker learns from past experiences and proposes a new or clearer way of thinking about the problem which shows some amount of outward progress from the conceptual box said speaker had previously been in.
  • If the solution provided is clearly wrong some of the time, but sometimes be correct under specific conditions, give the speaker the benefit of the doubt and call it progress.

Example failures

• "No matter what we do, the United States keeps getting more divided" [the talk keeps going on for an hour about this. there are ten other videos with comparable content]
• "Every day corporations keep getting more greedy" [the talk keeps going on for an hour about how telling corporations to be really nice didn't work]
• "Social media is terrible for creativity and big corporate owners are constantly trying to glue us to our screens ..." [tens or hundreds of these videos are all ironically vying for people's attention on social media platforms while containing the same complaints stretched out to much too long a runtime]
• "Every Marxist party keeps getting hijacked by Stalinism. It is a bloated bureaucratic system created by corrupt people that want to suppress the real Leninism ..." [the talk keeps going on and on about how much Marxist parties have oppressed Trotskyists without ever having any self-awareness of why that historical process happened or how to make the same interaction of countable things go differently]

Example successes

• "The United States keeps getting more divided. I don't think we have a practical solution right this minute, but maybe we need to realistically consider the possibility that the United States population has already become two nations of people and this needs to be treated as a problem of international diplomacy."
• "Every day corporations keep getting more greedy. If we aren't prepared to stand together against them as a class even on the day they refuse to follow the law, they will surely destroy us, but if we have properly organized we will remain."
• "Social media is terrible for creativity and business owners are constantly trying to glue us to our screens. That's why as a business owner I've chosen to stand against copyright and the YouTube monetization system and let all fan artists post stories and music instead of constantly trying to overwrite their existence with my own."
• "Every Marxist party keeps getting hijacked by Stalinism. This is a very strange phenomenon, that we never actually see Trotskyist workers' states even at the fractured scale of one country. Maybe we need to re-evaluate our theory of historical processes to consider the possibility that there is more than one Marxism and we need to coexist with other Marxisms."