Philosophical Research:MDem/5.1r/1999 ScheiderTowns
from particle elements to population-societies to democracy[edit]
------ [cr. 2024-04-05T23:54:07Z] how did the United States end up in a tension between capitalism and the Distributist Material System? it's like people tear large connected economies reasonably capable of transition off into an archipelago of little shard businesses to have any hope of fixing this, we basically have to take all the little shard businesses and snap them together into a population, before we can get any of them to pay taxes for a population or create public facilities for a population. the tearing off into archipelagos is one example of a destructive process that kills the chance to even have Liberal social-democracy. social-democracy requires a coherent population-society and the archipelago process /destroys population-societies/. [*ps] not all of this is pure stubbornness by uncooperative small owners. when tiny shard businesses are separate from each other, they are under a lot of strain to both stay in business and individually generate enough to pay for government programs. they are not /physically able/ to help society even if they really wanted to, as much as they all rush to take on huge responsibilities they can't possibly deliver just to receive the smallest taste of "freedom". [*d] we also can't just try to eliminate the archipelagos and throw them back into the economic structures of cities as fast as possible. archipelagos form when cities fill up and chunk competition tosses them out. each part of a city only has so many slots in it for territories and workers, especially if the parts of a city are not working together and any individual attempts at large structures of cooperation by individual territory owners are falling apart. going from archipelagos to coherent population-societies requires a sophisticated theory of graph populations, how graph populations fit into a larger population, and ruling populations. [*rp] is a ruling population sufficient to make a little archipelago of shard businesses behave? what kinds of intermediate structures could make the archipelago of shard businesses physically capable of consistently paying taxes and able to vote for social programs? ------ [cr. 2024-04-05T23:54:07Z] ## "Scheider Towns" let's imagine a scenario a country becomes a workers' state based on a ruling population of Marxists and social-democrats somewhat like in China, rather than based on workers overcoming every capitalist as in the early Soviet Union. disconnected business territories still exist. the central party is discussing how they can ever be put together into a society. the ruling population is doing reasonably well on a particular plan, getting a number of core cities to function together. but it soon becomes apparent the country has a Trotskyist leader — we will call this person "Scheider" — who is getting all the skilled workers to tear out into new towns purely to escape the grasp of "the bureaucracy". "Scheider" believes that all the problems of the emerging workers' state have to do with the exact social network of people that exists in the cities and ruling population. the wrong people are in the central party and ministries, and "Scheider" and her allies cannot possibly make change and help the workers' state along in the direction they think it should go when according to them the structure is all wrong and there is no place for them to even fit in and exist within it. whether this claim is true or not, the Trotskyites have gotten themselves into a mess because they did not think about the processes by which classes and class territories are created. if they pull out miscellaneous people who are dissatisfied with "Stalinist" Marxisms and throw them all into a new settlement, the whole process of identifying and solving problems that ends in creating the proletariat starts over. when people first get there there /is/ no proletariat until the Trotskyites come up with some Material System to structure their economy and create a proletariat. if the Trotskyites do not design a Material System quickly enough, their settlement will be full of generalized-Artisans that slowly evolve into small businesses. none of the people that live in their settlement will be able to congregate together as a swath of the world proletariat, much less form any kind of resistance against the central "bureaucracy" as the world proletariat. everyone in the settlement will simply be struggling to find and sustain incoming and outgoing links from their business individually as the only way forward for building society and eventually getting back to creating a proletariat, and whenever any of the stochastically-moving individuals makes a wrong guess about the others society crumbles. the core group of cities can be conceptualized as a kind of Social-Philosophical System, a population connected into the ruling population and sharing a particular working plan for a Material System. when "Scheider" tries to unite a bunch of people against "the bureaucracy", she shatters the Social System and generates a new Social-Philosophical-Material System in the form of the new settlements. however, without the existing structure of the original Social-Philosophical-Material System, the new population is little more than a bare Social System. specifically in the act of separating itself, it becomes a "younger" population with more archaic characteristics. when these two hypothetical populations were unified, they were unified around a particular Philosophical System and particular particle theories — whether they properly understood these particle theories or not. in Liberal countries, many people believe that the Philosophical Systems and particle theories agreed on by a population are totally arbitrary and anyone could be told to adopt a different Philosophical System or particle theory and accept it the next morning. but this is not the way things work within the real material world. what is closer to the truth is if a bunch of people are arguing over a Philosophical System or particle theory, this will cause people's social bonds to change according to which Social-Philosophical System of linked people best fits the Philosophical Systems and particle theories they personally accept or trust in. the argument will push people fully into each side that may exist and create a contest between the two Social-Philosophical Systems to generate a ruling population which will govern and command the other populations. the reason there must be a contest between the two Social-Philosophical Systems boils down to the leaping-State process. if a single individual from one of the core cities goes to one of the "Scheider" towns, these towns will have naturally developed their own local rules, conventions, and forms of authority by virtue of being coherent populations that aim to remain coherent populations. the mere act of assembling a bunch of Trotskyites in their own town with the aim that they will not all begin attacking each other will result in the generation of Trotskyite laws and enforcers, as well as possibly local traditions and concepts of etiquette. as soon as a single individual from outside the town arrives in the town, the Social-Philosophical System inside the foreign individual comes into conflict with the Social-Philosophical-Material system of the town. the town must enforce all its local rules and laws onto all people inside it including foreign individuals in order to remain a coherent population that does not fall into internal fractures or internal violence. at the same time, this enforcement causes the internal rules of one population to leap onto an outside person who does not actually belong to that population. this leap can come across as jarring or oppressive to a foreign individual completely unfamiliar with the local rules or who does not understand the reason they exist. this effect is blatantly obvious if one of the individual Trotskyites dares cross back into the core cities — they may feel like when certain rules of the core cities leap back onto them, some restrictions on their expressions and actions are completely senseless and should not exist. whenever two individuals from different Social-Philosophical Systems come into contact, they slowly drift toward linking into coherent populations capable of creating Material Systems and enforcing rules on anything that touches them, and the leaping-State process slowly begins. the process is more or less unavoidable, although it can become less painful the more people cooperate and do not form clashing sets of rules. if our hypothetical Trotskyite civilization has a lot of interactions with the core cities, a serious question will open of whether one town is soon to attack the other city for having the wrong rules. there is a risk the Trotskyites will accomplish nothing but attacking the core cities and tearing their Material System apart out of spite. on the other hand, the core cities might decide to try to prevent trouble before it starts by absorbing the Trotskyite towns under the ruling population and telling them they have no choice but to cooperate with the ruling population. the third less-obvious option for what could happen is the "Scheider" towns mostly leave the core cities alone for a while, and instead develop internally and create their own Material System. if this happened, the "Scheider" towns would be required to put together a Social-Philosophical System capable of internally connecting all the members of their movement and keeping them connected. the completion of this Philosophical System and particle theory would be the condition of them being able to sustain a coherent movement separate from the Material System they had problems with. it is fair to say in this particular hypothetical scenario that if a bunch of Trotskyites tried to create a new Material System across only a few towns or cities they might have a difficult time completing it. specifically at this tiny scale, the old objection that socialist transition cannot happen in a small area might almost seem to be the truth. however, if we investigate this old claim any closer, we may find the actual physical reasons behind it surprising. it would be one thing if a Trotskyist civilization was the size of a few towns or cities, but what if it was the size of Germany? it only takes a country the size of Japan to be capable of great feats of industry, depending on various conditions that exist within and around the specific region. even if the whole area of Japan is three times the area of Germany, it is still orders of magnitude smaller than the minimum area Trotskyists usually imply by invoking large fractions of the earth. if any country about the size of Japan can be by some particular arbitrary standard "successful", the minimum size of a Trotskyist civilization should be about two European countries — for instance, an area about as big as Germany and France. so, let us say that we hypothetically live in the reality where Trotskyists control an area 1 million square kilometers wide — slightly greater than the area of Japan. we check in on this country, and we find it is a mess. the Trotskyist government is still complaining about the surrounding countries and thinking they had something to do with this. why would this still be a problem? why would this problem seem to persist no matter how big the Trotskyist civilization gets? every population of people has a Social-to-Philosophical-to-Material realization process, and this process always threatens to leap onto other populations whenever two populations come into contact. this remains equally true if the populations are the size of towns or if the populations are the size of European countries. while we cannot entirely know what a real-world Trotskyist civilization would look like, one thing is clear. when a Trotskyist civilization meets with a Liberal country or a Communist International, there is going to be some kind of contest of leaping States. the problem of leaping States is already fairly well understood with Liberal countries. a Liberal country has much of its structure determined by the bourgeoisie, who form into a ruling population through mechanisms such as Liberal parties of the bourgeoisie and their allies, and exert power over the proletariat once in daily life and a second time by pushing for policies and candidates that benefit them. whenever a Liberal country comes into contact with any other kind of civilization, it aims to create and enforce Liberalism in that civilization, as a matter of integrating the two countries' Social-Philosophical-Material Systems together into one, but also as a necessary condition of performing that act if the Liberal country is to have any part in it. in one sense, this was the same thing that happened in the United States Civil War. the United States North had one Material System and the United States South had another Material System, neither of which fit together well, but the world as a whole had little understanding of the concepts of Social-to-Philosophical-to-Material realization and leaping States, so the only clear way to solve the problem was for the United States to coerce all the states to one Material System without thinking about why any of these events happened. in one sense, the US Civil War was won on a basis of imperialism, and not on any basis of philosophically solving the problems of racism, justice, or human rights. much as a Liberal country aims to enforce Liberalism and the rule of the bourgeoisie onto other civilizations, a Trotskyist civilization would also experience some kind of leaping-State process. what the details of this process would be or what exact rules would be "leaping" is somewhat unclear. compared with Liberal civilizations, there is not as much recorded history or information for workers' states in general, and as far as real-world Trotskyist civilizations, there is none. all we can confidently know about a Trotskyist civilization are the things that logically /must/ be true about it. one thing that is necessarily true about a Trotskyist civilization is that it aims to transition all Liberal countries to its Material System of Trotskyism. this is a safe prediction when historically every Trotskyist party has generally looked at Liberal countries such as the countries of Europe as merely awaiting an internationally-oriented workers' movement and membership in a Fourth International. another thing that is /likely/ true but not certain about a Trotskyist civilization is that it aims to transition /mainstream Marxist-Leninist/ countries to its Material System of Trotskyism. historically, some Trotskyist parties have attempted to attack workers' states outside the area they are currently active in, although some have advocated forming alliances with workers' states against Liberal countries. what this may actually point to is a complicated patchwork of factions in which Trotskyist civilizations with different Material Systems would eventually form themselves into blocs that attack /each other/, or alternatively, a more coordinated bloc that floats slogans of alliance and harmony while actually creating "alliances" with itself through taking over other countries and overwriting their Material Systems. when Marxists mainly analyzed Liberalism and feudalism, the process of leaping States seemed simple because the reasons for leaping States could be traced back to individuals and small groups within the upper classes. within a feudal system, kings and princes had considerable power to try to find justifications for taking over other territories. the leaping State was very simple because naturally a king or even a noble in an isolated territory wants to put other territories under the same rule, thus expanding a feudal Material System. within Liberalism, the territories of the bourgeoisie are often smaller than principalities, yet they would still rather have the benefit of ruling large numbers of people through a ruling population even if they have to share that power with competitors or overarching owners. [assuming that there exist any Trotskyists who would accept Trotskyism in one country, but would still be against mainstream Marxism-Leninism,] what incentive would Trotskyists have to try to jump a Trotskyist State over the boundary of other territories, especially if they are also workers' states? [*ts] when a Trotskyist State is in opposition to Liberalism, this makes some amount of sense, because they can attempt to argue that they are carrying over a proletarian State onto a bourgeois territory and vying for the dictatorship of the proletariat. but the same cannot necessarily be said toward workers' states. this is the point where the traditional model of the "ruling class" and "ruling class culture" breaks down. in their decision to oppose workers' states Trotskyists are not necessarily corrupted by "ruling classes". as much as a Trotskyist party may contain bourgeois or Artisan types, they do not tend to be unified in the sense of how they operate together in Liberal parties, and instead tend to blatantly divide parties to the point they can hardly function. neither are Trotskyist parties always misinformed by Liberal government conspiracies. as much as historically many Trotskyist parties have founded themselves on lies they uncritically accepted from figures such as Trotsky himself, no deliberate lies or secret government plots are /required/ to convince people to create Trotskyist parties. the minimum scenario that would prompt somebody to create a Trotskyist party is one like the "Scheider" scenario above, where two populations of people simply become unable to operate together and divide apart. a country population comes to exist which is ready to become a workers' state, and then that population divides into multiple populations. the creation of multiple populations interacts badly with the formation of a ruling population, and the would-be dictatorship of the proletariat is broken. when a prospective workers' state is "mostly" converted to the proletariat and is not for instance clearly forming a localized ruling population of bourgeoisie, the top tier of the society is a ruling population consisting of the proletariat. this is not as intuitive as before — before, ruling classes functioned as divisions of society structuring groups of people into one unit, but if people have been converted to the proletariat, what happens is the actual shape of ruling populations becomes important in shaping society. if the ruling population is shaped "incorrectly" in some sense, the society might not function properly. the ruling population can seem invisible and not like something which is easy to point to, and yet it shapes the fate of the overall population. in the "Scheider" scenario of a partially-structured workers' state that depends greatly on its ruling population, the ruling population gives structure to the overall population. it mediates the process of taking the general population in its fragmented state and weaving the fragments together so that the proletariat can consolidate into one entity that is able to regenerate the ruling population without specialized help, regardless of what forms it may take in the future. when the Trotskyites break out from underneath the ruling population and create a new population, they have broken away from the structuring role of the ruling population. this by itself should not necessarily be a disaster, considering that Marxists generally acknowledge that separate countries can each form workers' states and thus separately form ruling populations. the new population of Trotskyites forms its own local ruling population. it is /possible/ that the new population has an archaic class structure and this has created a corrupted ruling population of Artisan types and bourgeoisie, although this event is not /necessary/ for a Trotskyist civilization to come into conflict with other civilizations. even if the Trotskyist civilization is 1 million square kilometers and the ruling population represents workers, it is possible it will come into conflict with the ruling populations of other countries. the ruling population of the Trotskyist civilization is what leaps onto other countries. ruling populations of the proletariat add complexity at first, but once multiple ruling populations of the proletariat interact things become simpler than before the ruling population of the Trotskyist civilization is, in concept, something of a democratically nominated layer of representation for the general population, but it is shaped by the actual structure of the general population itself, which brings complications as to how it will behave and what it will want from other countries. the ruling populations of other workers' states will be shaped by fragmentation and level of development inside the workers' states. the more fragmented or undeveloped they are the more "objectionable" features they may end up with, such as the existence of the bourgeoisie, New Democracy, "shepherd" ruling populations, a unification between community and leadership, and so forth. it is shocking how many common Trotskyist objections are directly connected to countries in early stages of development and not to anything the ruling population actually had the power to keep out of itself. aside from objections to the Third World, there are still other possible kinds of objections. one objection that comes up occasionally is that state businesses are supposedly incorrect. another that is hardly ever articulated clearly though often present is that an overall ruling population is still too disorganized, bloated, or confusing to properly unify the people — that the structure of the ruling population is so bad the entire country should have been arranged differently. when the ruling population of a Trotskyist civilization leaps over, the complaint is likely to boil down to that the logic that creates the other ruling population and gives it structure is incomprehensible to the Trotskyist ruling population and that means it is unfixable. for the other ruling population to fixed, the Trotskyist civilization will have no choice but to install one that is comprehensible or simply break up the basic structures that generate it and attempt to generate a new one. this outcome is frustrating because in general, the logic that creates ruling populations is not a matter of "cultural" factors in the manner of the creation of language or traditions or regionally-relevant factual knowledge. the logic that creates ruling populations is essentially mathematical, tied to the mathematical structure of the general population as it forms patterns like graphs and sets. it is hardly necessary to tell Trotskyists they are guilty of hidden biases against other countries, as much as simply failing to think deeply enough about mathematics. meanwhile, if the ruling population of another workers' state is faced with a Trotskyist ruling population, it will be tempted to regulate the Trotskyist ruling population on protecting Third-World countries from neocolonialism or general "bourgeois feudalism" of turning the entire world into a spatial hierarchy of dominating and subordinate bourgeoisie. alternatively, the two ruling populations may run into some kind of dispute about the internal Material Systems of the two countries, either claiming that the Trotskyist Material System has some problem like being too fragmented or that the other workers' state has a problem like having state businesses that supposedly led to a bloated and disorganized ruling population. it is not unlikely that whatever the Trotskyist Material System turns out to be, the other country will end up disliking it, although this would largely be due to its effect on creating a ruling population which is hostile to other workers' states. the friction between the two ruling populations would have a lot to do with differences between the Material Systems that generate the ruling populations. many of the possible problems would come down to either real incompatibility between the structures of the countries or failure to properly analyze and model these structures and apply that knowledge. solving these problems in order to create cooperation between countries would also become drastically different from times before proletarian ruling populations. before, it was simple to blame problems with a ruling population on upper classes. after, in the age of ruling populations "proper", peace between countries begins to look more like getting both countries to end up with matching answers to each other's math problems. the Communist International comes back together when the Trotskyists finally stop solving the math problem wrong. the leaping-State process is the real reason that Trotskyists, and /specifically/ Trotskyists, cannot create socialist transition in the area of one country. ------ [cr. 2024-04-07T07:50:44Z, ed. 2025-04-20T02:39:51Z] how does the "Scheider towns" scenario apply back to the United States local populations get stuck in a loop they falsely believe businesses are a different thing from populations and social graphs, and create new populations full of small shard businesses the new populations are stuck forming a ~~Social System~~ Social-Graph System using the people that exist there, even if the "people" are shard businesses. this creates a vicious cycle where only the kinds of Philosophical Systems that shard businesses would create are successfully created, and the area simply becomes a cesspool of shard businesses repeatedly starting up and dying. the workers that exist in the area become segregated from the shard business cesspool, working at different businesses. the area easily becomes patchified such that certain Social-Philosophical Systems are impenetrable.
[*rp] where did I first define ruling population / shepherd sheet
[*ps] Here, a population-society refers to a society which is defined in a molecularized way: the society consists of a socially-linked population of individuals. A population-society is _not_ a land area owned by a government which then contains individuals. A population-society is the actual local population of connected people independent of a particular land area. Within fiction, ThunderClan (_Warriors_) and the MudWing tribe (_Wings of Fire_) would be examples of population-societies; tribal societies are one category of society which is particularly easy to conceptualize as a population-society. North Korea is an example of an entity which can only _contain_ a population-society, as it is largely defined by its border and the defense of that border, although much of the population may in fact form a continuous population-society.
[*ts] This passage was making the assumption that there exist more than zero Trotskyists who would accept the concept of Trotskyism in one country as anything more than an oxymoron. Usually, this is not what you typically see — often the "discrepancy between mainstream and Trotskyist Material Systems of Bolshevism" can more or less be explained by "the Trotskyists believe in a world civilization and think that a nation-state is in conflict with that". I still think this was a very important exercise, because of the existence of the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy which was predicated on the notion that merely converting the Soviet Union to Trotskyism in one supranational federation would be progress in and of itself. Trotskyism in one supranational federation is not precisely the same thing as Trotskyism in one country, and yet, it goes quite underappreciated that one of Trotskyists' main pieces of evidence that there is such a thing as a Trotskyist revolution is much more similar in its hypothetical result to the concept of Trotskyism in one country than they would ever like to admit. If there exists any such thing as a Trotskyist revolution which simultaneously breaks open "Stalinist" workers' states and Liberal capitalism to then create Leninism, it must begin at small scales and then make it to the country or supranational-federation level. If Trotskyism ever has any possibility of existing, then it must have an internal structure and it must have a ruling population. The question of the internal structure of a realized Trotskyism is critical regardless of how big the Trotskyism is. This is the critical insight that buries Trotskyism as it has existed and analyzed the world so far and leads to meta-Marxist analysis of all named Marxisms.
[*] this entry "ScheiderTowns" was not initially supposed to end up being about the leaping-State process in general as much as the repair of shattered fragments of society. but as 5.1 has become an archival version, it's too late to fix it.