Musings on Gemeanship, Dogmatism, Education (Plus Vanguardism and Liberalism)

11 March 2026.

Comrades, chronicling the history of Thoughts of a Comrade for its five-year anniversary, along with reading the timeless wisdom of Comrade Mao and Comrade Kalinin, has given me the inspiration to compose another musings article. These ones require a certain state of mind to write, I have found.

The topics will be four: gemeanship, dogmatism, political education, and the Three Toos, each topic being somewhat connected to the next.

What sets us, as a political movement and social entity, from the cosmopolitan democrat? Well, what is such an ideology? Cosmopolitan democracy is the ideology of the artificial, or 'consumer' community. Cosmopolitan democrats are thus liberal, but not democratic in the sense of serving and supporting the Folk, far less the Workfolk, who impede the cosmopolitan democrat's imposition of socialitive-, or values-democracy. The ability to mix and match ways and mores, so to speak: that is the liberal ,,democracy'' championed by the cosmopolitan democrat. It is a very confused philosophy, an ahistorical (as in an intellectual and social genealogy's continuity) division of the immortal whole through time.

This phenomenon— I feel the term ideology to not be the proper category —has been erroneously criticised with a variety of terms. Those exemplifying it have been granted the titles of savant, dilettante, seeker, and most famously within our tradition, champagne socialist. As any multitude of identifiers, these are all one-sided, pointing to but one trait or another of the cosmopolitan democrat in stereotype.

If there is an artificial community, then there must be an opposite or challenge to this, and indeed there is. Gemeanship, the (Modern-ised) English cognate to Comrade Marx's and Comrade Engels' preferred term for communist social organisation, Gemeinschaft, is that opposite. Gemeanship is not strictly a synonym for community, for community is usually assumed to be some urban or sub-urban arrangement of citizens, born from social contracts and living proximity. This is a conception of cosmopolitan democracy, of pluralism in everything, convened in a social organisation the few times it is absolutely unavoidable to.

But then, what is this opposition in method, what is gemeanship? Gemeanship, to give the immediate definition, is a non-pluralist dictatorship of self-sustained being, or 'focus', in a certain sense. For instance, the till-town, unlike the urban steads above, is a dictatorship of the Workfolk, the essential strata of craftsmen and tillermen. Once a till-town transfigures into a burgh-town, the middling form betwixt the till-town and the cosmopolitan urban stead arises, eventually turning into outright cities. Sub-urbanity is a late process of its own, which we do not need to detail here. Where there is a burgh-town, there will be the burgher class, and where there is the burgher class (and the smallburghers), there will be its ideology, liberal capitalism and cosmopolitan democracy.

However, there is also the soulful gemeanship, the dictatorship of purpose. The soulful gemeanship is not just non-pluralist, it is positively anti-pluralist. Monasteries under differing 'internal denominations' (Franciscan, Benedictine, et cetera) are a good example of this dogmatic, stringent, yet intellectual and historical-preservationist orthodoxy, as are most vanguard parties once they have gone through the destabilising experience of a civil war or hostile foreign invasion. Counter-revolution itself seems to increase dogmatism, a natural condition of revolutionary anxiety? In contrast to the above form of gemeanship, this form is much more resilient against abolition through developing material conditions. During the French Revolution, to shew, the till-towns generally submitted to burgher rule in Paris, but the monasteries and churches had to be violently expropriated to the cause of cosmopolitan pluralism.

As we have stated in other places, the cosmopolitan democrat does not even have the intellectual capacity, nor the respect for such conservative elements as history, tradition, and exegesis, to begin formulating the rudiments of a dogma. Hence so, cosmopolitan democrats, whilst certainly capable of staples such as ideological education and repression, are not at all able to focus these tools in the articulation of a dogmatic world-view— a groundrising for sustaining itself, as such, as organic, expanding ideology.

Holding dogmatism to be exclusively a negative and unhelpful system of knowledge is to view it incorrectly from one side. The side of the reformer can be noble, yet in many cases, the dogmatists are rather in the right. For dogmatism is the preservation of a deep learning through orthodoxy. This is why most serious, studious reformers tend to be prior dogmatists, who have learned this orthodoxy, including its sacred history and traditions. The dogmatists are the sage wizards that preserve teaching and history, thus are they to be accredited some respect and say in the discourse of reform.

Why does the cosmopolitan democrat not qualify for such respect and right to speak? It is because the cosmopolitan democrat is missing the fundamental methods of real, rather than unrooted investigation. Anyone may open a library encyclopædia, as the urban professionals do, and whilst that impetus to educate oneself against an otherwise impoverished environment's corrupted institutions may be commendable, it cannot be the basis upon which one is entitled to seriously enter a discourse.

This is not to suggest that the right to discussion generally ought to be barred, for a cosmopolitan democrat is very much able to make the sudden qualitative leap into a dialectically grounded and traditioned intellectual in a given area of passion, if he only ends up studying it deeply enough. Indeed, this has been the very source of many a fine cadre in every century. This natural development makes many good intellectuals and masters, just as dogmatists make many good reformers. Comrade Mao famously said that peasants are intellectual advantaged in being blank papers, to wit:

'On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written; the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted'.

—Quotations from Mao; Socialism and Communism

It might similarly be applied in that cosmopolitan democrats are rootless papers, and orthodox dogmatists are bound tomes. One may lead to the other in time, and each still serves some purpose respectively. We shall see, at any rate.

We have gone through two problems whose solutions are pre-requisites for true learning, leading to the question of how to attain such a form of education. I have a potential thesis to which I have been building, though I am as yet unsure of its accuracy.

Firstly, ought the cosmopolitan democrats to be allowed in serious discourses or communist parties? I should suggest only as fellow-traveller observers, with limited rights of participation in either. Any thing more should risk an up-rooting of these serious endeavours, and any thing less should preclude the possibility for these men's growth out of their cosmopolitan democratic contradictions, to leave behind their erroneous outlook as members of the professional intellectual managerial patrons (PIMPs) of burgher ideology, and the society which enforces it, now joining the ranks of the gemeanship intelligentsia.

And what of the initial discussion on gemeanship? How does this alternative to artificial urban community fit into this question of education? Simply thus: in order to develop (we can not 'create') an organic, practical intelligentsia of the Folk and its revolutionary organisations, the cosmopolitan democrats must not only learn, truly learn, from the dogmatic wizards and masters, but learn within the context of a material or soulful gemeanship. It does not matter which it is at this very early stage, though it must inevitably become the latter, or it will face extinction via transition due to material conditions as previously outlined.

I suspect that all this is not news to our Asian comrades. This may be such common knowledge that the present proposition seems like an incompetent public plagiarism, a ridiculous repackaging of erstwhile wisdom. Indeed, the West has a unique problem in relation to the debasing of the natural, organic gemeanship intelligentsia, replaced or imprisoned as it is was by soulless cosmopolitan bureaucratic machinery-systems. A monster with a face of pipes and cogs stares down blankly at us from a haughty height. Shall it reign over us?

How else might we do battle against this stultus machine? It is not enough to publish articles. This by itself merely helps to increase the potential rate and yield of learning, but is not learning, by definition. As Comrade Kalinin and countless others have rightly advised, one must read theory and history to understand a single thing which is transpiring. But more than this, one must, like the dogmatic masters, learn deeply in whatever tradition. Only when anchored by the study of a tradition may one view an accurate assessment of the landscape. Otherwise, one shall follow the cosmopolitan democrat down-stream into the melting-pot, having a confused, aimless pluralism to make farcical sense of. Always have a purpose; always have a plan; always have a starting place.

Do not rush into reform or into debate. Feeble minds believe themselves well fancy enough to pontificate upon any matter. It is not so, comrades. What is the point of speaking politically if one must rely on propaganda (the news of others) to have any hope of producing the shallowest conclusion? There is of course 'nay investigation, nay right to speak', but there is also nay reason to. Comrades, I mean this with compassion, if you have not read theory of late, you have not something new to add. There are exceptions, but this is a rule of good measure.

So these musing on gemeanship and education come to a close.

Secondary Musings on Vanguardism, Liberalism,

Renewed Socialist Legality, and the Three Toos.

Work in Progress Come back Later.