User:RD/9k/RD's descent into Trotskyism (Q618)

Main entry

618. Q618/Q618Social objects touch the future -> this week, one proposition shook up everything.
     now I apparently have a list of 'dangerous ideas' that make a Fourth International inevitable. but they're not fully collected into one place, so I'm going to have to trace back through what I've been doing to find each of them. it is... amusing to imagine them all collected together concisely into a single object that may be a cognitohazard.
618. The proletariat is set down into place ... by petty-bourgeois territory squabbles ... -> when I fully crystallized this I did not realize what I'd just written and that basically, I just wrote that violet Marxism would vindicate Trotskyism. I was in disbelief for about 2-3 days. then I said, I have to write this process down so I have receipts on myself and I can come back later and figure out if I was just being stupid or if this is actually true. because I don't think I can tell right now.

"Denial"

618. The proletariat is set down into place by either well-conceived large corporate structures (republics of walmart) or petty-bourgeois territory squabbles dominated by vanity and emotionally-explosive subjective flailing over questions with no answer; the proletariat itself will be discovered beneath all the subjective flailing with genuinely no actual stake in any of the squabbles, having been too tired to even give an answer or participate in them, ready to slot into the structure and see the whole thing completed once all the dumb arguments on the upper level have ended just to have the whole thing complete and functioning; the proletariat will be discovered beneath the realization that almost every actual decision made to decide what culture is and how political issues are resolved have been unimportant to the proletariat because for one reason or another they have all been sites of petty-bourgeois division into named factions or unnecessarily-plural named ideologies or movements ... ->
     finally, I have a definition of the proletariat specific to violet Marxism emerging from violet Marxism's general understanding of classes. the proletariat exists as thousands or millions of plural proletariats mainly because the petty bourgeoisie is busy dividing up proletarians and constantly fighting itself. the petty bourgeoisie is one of the most annoying classes in history because it's genuinely capable of having a class rule where within the smallest places it rules it doesn't actually conflate its class territories with one specific person, and it can genuinely rule a territory as a cooperating team of people. ... so when petty bourgeois islands show up, they get super confused and start to think class society has been abolished and they must be the final class, but they're not, because the fact their island is divided from another island and makes decisions separate from others is a class!
     it sounds strange at first but once you've had to live with a world full of newsfeeds where a bunch of independent producers are constantly competing against each other to all make decisions you can't affect and it's easier to come into contact with them than any actual friends or social connections, you start to understand it. ...
618. Q618/Q618Why is the Matrix motif so similar to Marxist descriptions of capitalism? / (9k) -> so, funny story, I didn't go into this show expecting it was primarily a story about gender transition, and so when it got to episode 8 I was like, there is something really weird going on with Caine. Caine controls their reality, he controls a population's perception of reality a lot like Western-Marxists like to claim "the mass media" does, or said another way, he takes a handful of living, breathing material people and makes sure they only experience reality and society through constantly being immersed in the artificial capitalist product he has created ... and they flat out try to banish Caine from their reality. that is hilarious. ... everything about the show is small-scale and symbolic but like they symbolically figured out what a Communist revolution is. so what's up with that? ...
     I don't like to say it but the future is kind of orange. breaking any particular continent out of capitalism involves observing the current structure of societies as small squabbling territories as opposed to big ones and breaking down the walls of those divisions that start at small scales to create bigger things where the hard walls or vast gaps of yesterday are reduced to faint seams. where religions, Liberal-republican parties, different Marxisms, little indie business territories, hostile subsections of fandoms, and various other divisions once divided people into countable populations, we have to get rid of the illusion that squabbling over those divisions is natural. we can't get rid of the divisions themselves because they're necessary to create larger populations where the divisions don't matter, but we have to stop this thing of particular divisions fighting over people (hello Algorithms) or trying to act like they have "the right to" people or land but they both do so there's no correct answer and they both remain angry. we somehow need some "objective" way to just stop that and say, no, these are the people or this is the scope you get and that's that. ...
618. Deltarune is a pro-Trotskyist narrative / (9k) -> ... Deltarune expands on the concepts in Undertale of staying inside the barrier or breaking the barrier. ... in Chapter 5, there is an interesting new theme brought up that Dark Worlds are in competition with each other for existence because a limited number can exist. and, well... I discovered that if you drop "Stalin" and "Trotsky" into Undertale's narrative of a society of monsters sealed inside a barrier that it is hilarious how well that reading actually fits across both Undertale and Deltarune, especially as Deltarune goes on and develops everything more and more. realistically Dark Worlds loosely represent the way capitalism has trapped everyone in competing islands that perceive reality separately and the solution — delivered by Ralsei at the beginning, not something I made up — is to close all the Dark Worlds and get rid of that competition between different distorted fantasies because reality (the world, the universe) is the only thing shared by everybody without inherent competition.
     I had this AU where 'Undertale is an unrealistic fantasy because feudalism ended and there's Communism in real life over only half the world', and I thought it was a funny little twisting of the narratives that subjectively improved them. ... But then... all the imagery from Deltarune I was using to make that 'point' weirdly turned out to be used in a way actually not too different from what I was doing. ... and then I was like. hey wait. is Deltarune actually Trotskyist. what the fuck (pronounced censored). the only situation in which you'd expect this to be true is if Trotskyism is correct. there's like no other way. Toby is exactly from the group of people that would come up with all the most boring bourgeois interpretations of stories so there's no way he'd think of it if it wasn't true. a "perfect" Marxism will be reached by everybody that cares about reality. there are only certain groups of people that think of imperfect Marxisms, while everyone else blocks Marxism out of their mind. ('Stalinism is a distortion of reality, but it's my distortion, dammit (pronounced censored)!') and I mean. my research dragged me into Trotskyism with all its might the day before, so I'm not surprised, but I am very not ready for this.
618. Q618/Q618Machiavellianism is Not Desired / Machiavellianism is an undesirable outcome / (9k) -> ... so, let's say that Liberal-republican parties gerrymandering maps to get votes without anybody voting is an undesirable outcome. nobody really wants this outcome, but how do you stop it? as long as society is a map with islands competing across it or individuals competing across an island in exactly the same way, this is going to keep happening, because whatever your system of ethics even is, competition constantly breaks down control by ethical actors and restores control by unethical actors. individuals want ethical outcomes, but because ethical outcomes can only be put in place by people with the capacity to act, ethical people must exploit the system in order to make decisions and make sure any of those decisions are ethical. so what if that process of taking control is an undesirable outcome or is marked "unethical"? this creates a contradiction. without taking control, an actor cannot make ethical actions and potentially only undesirable outcomes will happen, but if taking control is an undesirable action, then being ethical becomes unethical; Good is Evil and Evil is Good. this brings an absolutely wild implication: the competition between ethical and unethical people for control must be abolished to restore the ability to act ethically. if that contradiction is created by class society, you are ethically obligated to abolish class society and also to figure out exactly what it is and exactly what you're abolishing. ... even small businesses and businesses claiming to be 'communities' must be abolished to become something other than competing islands
     ethics through the point of view of Trotskyism is actually kind of metal if you only take Trotskyism after 1960. "we said all social oppressions"... and they actually meant it
618. Q618/Q618Much of the "hard work" people do is actually the easy way out / (9k) -> every time reactionaries talk of "hard work"... isn't there always something missing there? there'd seem to be a difference between Constructive Hard Work and Destructive Hard Work, where most "hard work" is actually the latter one. people working hard for almost literally no reason but to destroy someone else's hard work while doing the same work over again. I wonder what the world would be like if we literally stopped calling Destructive Hard Work "hard work", and told people, no, all of you are doing busywork, that stuff is already done, you're not doing the actual hard work any more.
     ...that's an orange statement. that's a statement about businesses being a class because they're businesses but only in capitalism.
618. Monocapitalism doesn't physically exist / China is never monocapitalism / China or North Korea is never truly monocapitalism; as long as it is embedded in a global multicapitalism it will always silently be an instance of multicapitalism inasmuch as it is directly part of a larger one -> I feel insane just making orange propositions that are my propositions with no ironic distance in the middle. that doesn't feel right. oh well. I've become convinced that like, capitalism in general is a system of chunk owners, the chunk owners are actually the petty bourgeoisie no matter how big capitalism gets, and all Communist revolutions that happen now will be revolutions against the petty bourgeoisie almost specifically. but that for complicated reasons, China is similar to one big petty-bourgeois chunk even though it isn't precisely the same thing as the small businesses or agoras that characterize the petty bourgeoisie.
     ... the blue swatch is pro- multicapitalism. the strawberry swatch is different from the blue swatch in that it's temporarily holding off the horrors of the multicapitalist system by artificially creating monocapitalism, yet it can't do that forever. can I just boldly say that the orange swatch actually is the proletariat, at least in industrial countries as opposed to tribal societies? is it time for that? it might be time for that. this is a real turning point in the project. we are going to need several propositions tracing this to be able to audit this decision later but maybe it's time to just make those.

"Loss"

618. Q618/Q618As a particular Marxist party-nation (Leninist republic) is forming, local organizations containing advanced workers transfer consciousness up to the larger scale and the central party transfers consciousness from the overall structure back down
618. Q618/Q618Social objects touch the future / Social objects interact with the future / Because of the dialectical interaction between the current shape of an organization and the potential shapes it might become in the near future — the back-and-forth across current state, presumed future state (abstract idea or material idea), pieces interacting to form outcomes according to constraints (physics, principle of least action), and real future state — the current kinds of activity which have created a particular organization of a particular shape limit what its current consciousness can be, but the future kinds of activity that will transform an organization into another potential shape in the near future also give the organization the ability to improve its consciousness as it actively aims to become another shape; this is to imply that trade unions interact with their future position within a national movement to form a national movement; this is to imply that Communist parties gain a broader horizon of possible forms of consciousness as they escape the bounds of being narrow national movements and interact with any number of other possible forms, merging directly with bodies of workers in other countries to become Communist Internationals ->
     this is truly just a meta-Marxist proposition about what consciousness within groups of people / "social objects" is, but it completely changed the way I think about Trotskyism. I discovered this one and I said, wait, no. Trotskyism has fully molecularized at the scale of Communist Internationals, it's a molecular Marxism, it's exactly the thing I want Marxisms to become. but somehow, it's only that way up at the largest scale! that's not the way I tended to think of things before now, but I'm not really going to toss it away and ignore it; a molecular Marxism is a molecular Marxism, at the end of the day.
618. Q618/Q618A body of Marxist knowledge should evolve as an international organization develops, specifically toward the purpose of getting rid of problem tendencies in the organization and improving consciousness in the organization in order to keep as many viable subsections of the organization as possible and many allies as possible who support each correct tendency -> this was given to me as the difference between Trotskyism and Bordigism. I saw no real reason to reject it as much as elaborate on it.
618. Q618/Q618Trotskyists cannot model Stalinism / Pierce Stalinism or bust / Trotskyists are exceptionally bad at envisioning a world where a Fourth International coexists with Stalinist states; most visible or well-known times a supporter of Trotskyism has attempted to come up with a compromise where Stalinist states keep existing it has simply amounted to such things as disappearing into the British Labor Party or letting the Fourth International be destroyed in Europe and then assuming the victory of the Third International meant the Fourth International was a century too soon; this is to imply that Trotskyist organizations in general will not survive attempts to correctly model Stalin's Marxism, and any such attempts may actually lead to their destruction [1] ->
     to be fair both of these incidents were the Menshevik-leaning wings of Trotskyism, but outside them, practically nobody in Trotskyism ever compromises with The Stalinists. historically it's only the really bad parts of Trotskyism that are not even Trotskyists that tend to consider it. I am not sure exactly what that means, whether it's their level of loyalty or their level of understanding, but I do know the ones that don't attempt to compromise with Stalinists don't tend to make this mistake of just obliterating the Fourth International.

Ideologies or fields

• MX / meta-Marxism
• IV / Trotskyism
• IV / "Cannonism"