------
[cr. 2025-09-19T08:21:55Z]
I have been working on a project for about 2 years and 10 months to try to outline something I call "meta-Marxism" and how it can be used to compare all variants of Marxism and comparatively analyze all ideologies to figure out what statements are accurate or inaccurate to reality. There is a very unfinished book with an almost ludicrous number of drafts taking up 10 megabytes, and a companion wiki which I am still working out all the basic formatting and editing protocols for but which would be something of a database of every major ideology and every interesting proposition in each of them as well as an investigation of how propositions interact with others and show each other to be likely or unlikely — a sort of miniature "lab" for testing Marxisms in a very preliminary, virtual way.
The project does have a small problem of me getting lost deep in details and philosophical problems, constantly trying and failing to write the book, but there is a highly specific reason for that: I am trying to tackle some really difficult tasks in this book of teasing out precisely where parties trying to build nationwide movements should even be starting on educating people and why exactly it is that ordinary people fail to understand Marxism and even the simplest precursors to Marxism and why they keep falling into Western Marxism and anarchism, when the more I learn about world history the fewer and fewer excuses there seem to be. I saw these phrases on your about page on academic Western-Marxism, and I thought, this is just it. What I'm doing is solving why people don't study Marxism as non-academics and why it isn't trivial or simple to just create a popular-level Marxist text that explains why it itself did not exist and people did not want to understand it until it itself explained it — not to say there is anything special about texts or they are more important than organizations. My ideal outcome is that after people have read my book other people might not even need to read it because they would just be troubleshooting organizations with what would have become "obvious" knowledge, but the book wouldn't be difficult for regular people to read if they wanted to. What I would like is for Marxist books to one day simply turn into mainstream science books where the point really is the science.
So, that is the background on "who" writes about meta-Marxism and how. Now on to the actual question. [of what meta-Marxism is and what counts as it] [...]
It takes a bit of explaining to pin down what it really is and separate it from people's understandings of other concepts, but I will do my best.
Meta-Marxism is the study of Marxisms as material objects. Say that Marx or Lenin is studying individual people as material objects — they each pick out religion or Idealist philosophy as a thing that takes place inside a physical human individual but does not necessarily describe the actual day-to-day process of human individuals functioning together in reality as a small-scale class formation or a population. They pick out the study of the actual human individuals, the living breathing physical objects, as Materialism and the content of religious theology or Idealism as something other than Materialism. (_The German Ideology_, _Materialism and empirio-criticism_)
The concept of physical objects is very important. A shovel is a physical object which does certain things regardless of whether it perceives them at all; the sun and the earth are physical objects that are even able to influence each other at all largely through processes such as one physical object physically sending a photon to another, or gravity, however it is that gravity actually works on levels science can only somewhat understand right now. (For a book about society it's a little funny how much my drafts go on and on about the act of studying black holes.)
The critical thing about physical objects is that it would strongly appear societies are made of them, and not just at the scale of individual people. First of all, there is the separation between historical workers' states and the populations outside them: the Soviet Union, North Korea, or China behaves like its own physical object, seemingly able to have its own thoughts in a very general sense similar but not identical to the way a human individual can. A central party contains particular thoughts and models even if it contains two or three contradictory sets of models, vaguely like a populational brain. But a Communist Party is not the single precise source of all thoughts in a population; even if it exists, it's still the whole population that "thinks" and the central party only centrally gathers and attempts to take last-minute agency over those "thoughts". Hundreds of years ago, and even today, people organized into religious formations such as Protestant and Catholic factions, or Sunni and Shi'ite factions, etc., and kings or presidents they trusted to represent a whole localized subpopulation of Protestants or Catholics believing a particular population-ideology who they would often believe need to be protected from the whole population of people believing the other population-ideology. (In this sense of "Protestant presidents" and conspiracy theories that Catholicism would destroy the United States, Liberal "democracy" only institutionalized some of the problems of feudal orders and monarchy rather than solving them.) This appears to be the same thing that ultimately happened to Marxism: despite the creation of the Soviet Union and a central party people appear to have clumped up into socially-linked groups of people believing population-ideologies, with some people clustering together alongside Stalin's Marxism and some people clustering together alongside a vague Trotskyism or anarchism or another specific ideology, not even to mention the people in the Soviet Union region or much more in Eastern Europe who simply clustered together around creating independent nations. China's people mostly came together, but they clustered around Deng Xiaoping Thought. North Korea's people came together specifically around Juche-socialism. Everywhere there was a clear phenomenon of Marxisms turning into separate physical objects with a specific shape and content much like a pile of grass versus a rake versus a stone.
It's my hypothesis, not certain and maybe a bit bold, that in many cases the internal content of these different country-objects actually caused them to separate. That country-objects or ideology-populations actually contain a weird sort of social, economic, political, and historical "chemistry", and this "chemistry" is the reality behind country characteristics — that Deng Xiaoping Thought being one object and Juche-socialism being another object and each of them operating almost too differently to go together really is how the concept of "country characteristics" manifests in reality. To be clear, Marxism is one of the only kinds of population-ideologies that is easy to break down and study this way. A conflict like the one between Protestantism and Catholicism isn't necessarily caused by exact internal content of each ideology as much as the simple division between populations as material objects that eat and occupy space and for arbitrary reasons haven't linked together causing them to expand onto each other. However, once a population creates and develops Marxism, this changes. Each time some population exits the realm of non-Marxist ideologies and comes together around a particular named Marxism such as Stalin's Marxism, Maoism, Deng Xiaoping Thought, or Juche-socialism, the population comes much closer to being aware of its own internal structure than it was before, and the purpose of ideology changes such that ideology comes closer to if not totally and precisely on the mark of the ideology being a simple blueprint for how to physically build and structure the country out of specific smaller physical subunits; the definition of some specific named Marxism such as Stalin's Marxism will start to consist of highly specific structures such as collective farms, state businesses, and union republics, and when it iterates on itself for the purpose of transitioning the population to new historical periods, it will simply be a new map of different specific structures and arrangements of structures. When a Marxism is fully and utterly aware of its status as a map of social structures to regenerate and improve, I term it a "molecular Marxism" or "MDem". A Marxism being defined by an accurate map of social structures does not necessarily mean it is not defined by classes; in a case such as a molecular Marxism identifying two of the major social structures in a specific society as large and small businesses, it would fully make sense to try to unite people in a particular kind of structure as a class subpopulation to effect society changing to a new set of structures. I doubt that any Marxisms which have existed so far have quite become "molecular Marxisms", although I do think some have gotten close. Deng Xiaoping Thought, for one, is surprisingly self-aware of how bad it is currently and how much more it has to do to create a better arrangement of social structures, although it is still far from the goal of harnessing the actual internal chemistry of society to fix this.
So, Marxisms or "named Marxisms" are plural objects with unique chemistry, and molecular Marxisms are the hypothetical state of a Marxism fully understanding its current and future internal chemistry which makes it function and makes it different from other Marxisms. But there is one serious problem with making molecular Marxisms a reality.
Physical objects, in general, have to exist in a world of other physical objects. But every physical object always has the most information about itself and very little information about other physical objects. A cat brain has access to all parts of the body of the cat but only an exchange of photons or sound waves between objects can actually directly give the cat-object any information about the position or momentum of a sparrow. In a way every object is isolated and every object behaves similar to a quantum-scale particle. If the cat so much as moves one step, and the sparrow hears and moves in response, the position of the sparrow changes, and the cat can only collect position or momentum but not both. Every time an object tries to observe another object, both objects undergo something at once and spacetime advances and evolves. This seems like a tangent from talking about Marxism, but it's very important, because the reality is that many anticommunist philosophies fail to understand special or general relativity and it utterly impairs their ability to understand what history is. Henri Bergson once claimed that science couldn't understand reality "through linear time" because he didn't understand that physicists don't even see time as linear, and based on this, he tried to claim that "the indivisible multiplicity of seconds" could only be understood as a lived experience — "the experience of a worm", as Lenin put it. And basically, most of traditional and modern philosophy only gets worse from there. Liberal-republicanism has no ability to even properly comprehend the existence of other countries. Western Marxism and Lacanianism know what it's like in a university but have no idea what it's like to actually live in a town of bigoted White people where "culture" or "incorrect Fantasies" are supposedly causing all the problems. Early Trotskyism became absorbed in itself to the point it could comprehend the existence of a hypothetical Trotskyist workers' state that had never existed but could not comprehend Stalin's Marxism even when actually living inside it, and thus started bashing the thing open. ~~North Korea, ironically, may have done some of the least damage to the world despite how much various people hate it, and yet it too was seemingly absorbed in itself even as it aimed to understand itself.~~ ~~Something was very wrong with almost every ideology. They were all turning into crabs~~
As I first got into learning about Marxism and detaching from Liberal-republicanism, I spent a lot of time thinking about the 1930s Trotskyite conspiracy and what history would look like from the Trotskyist perspective if the Soviet Union had not been two overlapping "single" populations and was somehow able to perceive itself as the two or more conflicting populations it actually was. What if the Trotskyites actually realized they were a tiny population of people that had no chance of seizing the whole supranational federation? What if the central government had realized two Marxisms existed that had to be reconciled? Could Trotskyists have become a 15th union republic? Could Stalin's Marxism and Trotskyism have both had representation in a single International that comprehended them as two separate ideologies instead of splitting into two Internationals? If Trotskyism had wised up in China, would it have been integrated into New Democracy? Why didn't different groups of Trotskyists realize they were part of different Marxisms instead of all part of one? If every single person in the United States was so weirdly unified around the concept that Trotsky was less bad than Stalin, why didn't the United States transition to Trotskyism? Why did Trotskyists never invent Trotskyism in one country? Why did they never realize that Trotskyism in one country could have joined back up into Trotskyism in more than one country? Why did Trotskyism even exist? What made people convinced that a Trotskyist workers' state was different enough from a "Stalinist" workers' state to the point they'd kill somebody over it? Nobody was answering these questions. I had never seen anyone actually take Trotskyism and, from Stalin's point of view, answer the question of how Trotskyists are supposed to realize a Leninism without the analyst also attempting to destroy it. Nor had I seen the reverse scenario where Trotskyists detailed the parameters for "Stalinist" countries to be allowed to keep existing as long as they didn't make errors relative to their own plans. And this seemed like one big hole in Marxism: that Marxism had never actually set itself up to tolerate itself and had only configured itself to divide in two and produce its own enemies. No matter how much every Marxism claimed to be "international" and "greater than borders", what it always seemed more like was that Marxists and their attached proletariats were totally intolerant of any other group of Marxists in much the same way Liberal-republicanism or even anarchism had always been and country borders were the only thing keeping them safe from each other.
It was like Marxism needed something else to actually function: a new Marxism for studying Marxisms.
Mainstream Marxist-Leninists using Stalin's Marxism could understand themselves, Trotskyists could understand themselves, Maoists and Deng Xiaoping theorists could understand themselves, Bordigists could understand themselves (even though so far I can't understand what they're talking about), but they did not have a Marxism for descriptively diagramming and predicting other Marxisms. Much less did any non-Marxist philosophy, which might benefit from this even more.
So, based on this I started hashing out a deeply promising if nightmarishly-vast project of characterizing all ideologies by their internal content, either physical structure or philosophical propositions, and basically trying to take all propositions with any political or historical character and make it possible to identify each proposition by the specific ideologies they belong to and which kinds of propositions "structurally compose" each ideology. I started without a lot of precision to it, and allowed it to refine itself organically with each broad category producing more specific categories as distinctions emerged or grouping related categories together. I felt like concepts like the "political compass" were quite metaphysical and inaccurate, squashing actual geography of unique continents and countries onto a weird continuum of cities arranged on arbitrary axes. I wanted there to one day be something more like a periodic table of ideologies, where they were distinguished and named based on objective criteria and ordered by scientific models of their internal structure.
As of right now, the wiki ("LithoGRAPHica") already has a number of different "philosophy tags" for various ideologies. Mainstream Marxism-Leninism has the code "ML" which is color-coded in crimson, Trotskyism has the code "IV" which is orange, Western Marxism and Deng Xiaoping Thought are "W" and "DX" and are both strawberry (there's a complex reasoning behind that linkage having to do with population-ideologies and population-objects), anarchism is "A" and charcoal, psychoanalysis is "Aa" and blue, neo-pagan rituals and similar supernatural conspiracy theories are "Aqr" and charcoal, "Tory" conservatisms and fascisms are both "PT" and khaki brown, fantasy and science fiction tropes are "Fy" and green (these come up when analyzing some social issues or the comparisons between fantasy histories and real history), meta-Marxism itself is "MX" and violet, "LGBT" is its own occasionally-used code that overlaps with "A", "HAS" and "STM" are for general humanities and science propositions, and then there's this one other blue philosophy tag "ES" which may seem a little enigmatic at first but generally contains one big cluster of academic bourgeois philosophies which I grouped together based on a bunch of consistent recurring themes creating continuity between all of them and which I unofficially refer to as "the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition". "Aa" (psychoanalysis), "DG" (schizoanalysis), "LR" (Liberal-republicanism), social-democracy and Menshevism (no code yet), existentialism (ES), structuralist linguistics (ES), poststructuralism (ES), Foucauldianism (ES), and several other things all fall inside "ES". I don't believe these codes to be a science yet in and of themselves, but I think they are a good start toward mapping out what major ideologies exist in a kind of observational study and actually creating a credible science eventually.
Basically, on LithoGRAPHica there are thousands of propositions and declarative concepts, and each of them has one of these color-coded philosophy tags (they have an outer abbreviated form with just one tag, but may be marked as appearing in multiple philosophies inside on their own article).
Ideally, propositions would be fairly precise ontological statements of structure like "sign COMPRISES signifier, signified" or "ministry of agriculture (1930) COMPRISES collective farm effort ...", but of course, in the beginning of the project only a few of thousands contain these more precise translations, and a lot of stuff is being done abstractly or intuitively tempered by known historical facts.
Once propositions have all been numbered and sorted by ideology, the idea is to start devising ways of applying propositions in one ideology to another mathematically as a way of systematically uncovering contradictions between ideologies and exposing propositions that are most likely incorrect, whether the correct statement is currently known or not. Anarchism and center-Liberalism can be used to disprove each other if there is a more reasonable end of the same contradiction over in Trotskyism or Western Marxism. Mainstream Marxism-Leninism or Maoism can be applied onto Trotskyism showing problems with either of the three. Meta-Marxism can have its own propositions that typically involve a hypothesis about how another ideology works from outside that ideology, or a hypothesis about whether two ideologies are related or different; any of these statements can be disproved using statements from inside other ideologies which do not match a given meta-Marxist model.
Proposition interactions are not considered ultimate truths, or "better than" texts. A number of source texts from Marxism or other ideologies have their own numbered Item pages, although these are generally used to list each text's most important propositions in terms of hypotheses or observed facts. The strength of this is that every text and favorite theorist ends up alongside the challenge to start disproving what they said.
So, that is the basic idea of what meta-Marxism is. It's a little complicated. It really does take a few minutes to properly explain.
Basically, meta-Marxism is the process of studying Marxisms from the outside in, in the sense of all material objects being objects and not just subjects, in the sense of a living animal being able to understand its own material body from the outside as well as the inside, and in the sense that any object can be studied from the outside even as special relativity exists and the thing studying it is generally another separate physical object — meta-Marxism is in part the statement that it is not inherently "hypocritical" or "insensitively" "biased" to attempt to study objects from the outside while also being an object, because every entity that has had empathy was first an object. (The amount of times you will hear the claim it is across various non-Marxist ideologies is dizzying.) But meta-Marxism is also the act of constructive criticism, explicitly excluding things like Trotskyists attempting to "Zinovievize" other ideologies into nothing for not being Trotskyism, and not even letting Stalin's Marxism get away with it. Meta-Marxism is the collection of methods for stopping Marxism from getting in the way of Marxism through the application of Marxism to Marxisms.
So, my question is, do you think by this definition your magazine is meta-Marxist, or would you say that by the definitions I've given it is actually aligned into a named Marxism with "characteristics"?
[At the time of writing I meant "your magazine" literally, but as of right now you can take it figuratively to refer to any periodical or thing which is being tested against the definition of meta-Marxism — take this as a rhetorical question where some things do and some things don't.]
(Remember that Trotskyism and Bordigism are examples of named Marxisms, and the hypothetical world where all countries spontaneously form into an anarchism next year is also most likely a "named" anarchism assuming all the geographical regions of the anarchism draw from the same pool of characteristics and structures in their internal construction.) ...
=> cosmonautmag.com/articles/ *c
== research.moraleconomy.au/entry/Philosophical_Research:MDem/5.2r/0999_rake-grass
:: cr. 2025-09-19T08:21:55Z
; 1758270115
:: t. v5-2_0999_rake-grass
; v5.1-5.3 scraps/ letter to cosmonaut magazine
; v5.2x^/ cosmonaut letter - what is meta-Marxism?
; @@ 1758780216 ; 5.3/0992 entries r = scraps, rN = revision scraps, V = revisions, x = archived, ^ = posted to lithoGRAPHica thesis portal
