From Philosophical Research
Main entry
- culturally-defined Communist / cultural Communist (by analogy to "cultural Christian", etc) / subjectivity-defined Communist (Marcuse) -> this is one step up from "Soviet-Union otaku" — somebody who is actually a low- to medium-tier Marxist theorist or active movement member but was never really tied to the process of forming a national movement specifically by the need to work, unionize, or protest. in my opinion these should be treated like miracles that never should have happened and yet dropped down like gifts, when they are usually treated with a lot of disdain and almost discouraged from trying to help, like it would be better if they were reactionaries than if they tried to ally themselves with workers. of course, if any of them say totally wrong things you don't have to put up with that.
Related[edit]
- If Communist-ally is not an identity, East Germany wouldn't have existed / If Communist-ally is not an identity, there would be no North Korea -> the claim that creating East Germany required the formation of an East-German identity, in the strict mathematical sense of membership in a socially-linked graph of people calling themselves East Germans. no concept of "East-German culture", "East-German traditions", or "East-German ethnic history narratives" is required for this definition; this is strictly conceptualizing the notion of groups of people or identities as raw divisions of people into groups who are connected because they agree to be connected. with that established, the claim is that East Germany formed because a particular subpopulation of workers formed connected to a particular body of theorists and non-proletarian Communist allies, and it was the agreement of all these people to form a group separate from the rest of the country if the people of West Germany did not meet the conditions to be a proletarian ally that allowed it to act as a capable subpopulation that was able to assemble a new country after the Soviet Union (which could also be considered in the category of "Communist allies") removed itself from East Germany. this is the claim that solidarity throughout the capable subpopulation in the sense of firm dedication to not dissolving it is ultimately a more important thing than the proletariat itself even as the capable subpopulation will only develop if the proletariat has a very prominent role in it. you can now see why East Germany not being a win for Trotskyists would be so confusing. a small number of mainstream Marxist-Leninist allies being able to create East Germany should logically entail that a bunch of Trotskyists wanting to wall themselves off from Stalin should be able to do the same thing starting from a relatively tiny number of people. East Germany should actually have showed that Trotskyism is more feasible than people thought because it shows that every country in Europe could go Trotskyist if the requirement is they turn over independently of each other without Stalin's help. the fact Trotskyists did not see things this way is very telling.
- Trotsky syndrome of countable cultures -> the usually-nonfictional motif of someone being able to realize, assuming they're smart, that various people are forming into a countable culture and fighting for their rights against the rest of society legitimately and perhaps effectively, but utterly not being able to fit into that countable culture as a culture and remaining a cultural "foreigner" to countable civil rights movements that they never actually want inside them. you can see this with the Trotskyite conspiracy, which did it with very little wisdom or awareness, and separately with the way modern Trotskyism reacted to BLM / 1619 Project — although they were marginally smarter in that case. though it's hard to pinpoint exactly why it happens, this is a really big problem for progressive theories and movements in general. it has the potential to kill schizoanalysis through the failure of different sorted cultures to "properly" act as a freeform, uncountable unity of opposites that inherently wants to go together, but it can even kill particular Marxisms, as historically it arguably did. any movement or party or cluster of people-groups hit with Trotsky syndrome sees that it can't possibly control the people who don't fit into it and its days are numbered.
- Bolshevik identity politics -> the motif of people hypothetically having identity politics movements for the identity of being Communists. basically every time I bring this up it's as a joke, but sometimes I use it to probe whether identity politics movements are truly effective and if real identity politics movements might run into exactly the same problems.
Ideology codes[edit]
