Cutline · one of sixteen

C·A·I·R

The Permanent Revolutionary

collective · centralized · internationalist · rupture

Authoritarian communism

A revolution confined to one country is a holding action that will be strangled or will rot. The break has to spread, and the coordinating centre has to be international from the start.


What the four letters mean

C Ownershipcollectivenot private (P)
A Controlcentralizednot decentralized (L)
I Horizoninternationalistnot national (N)
R Methodrupturenot gradual (G)

Where this has shown up

HistoricallyTrotsky, the Fourth International, the early Comintern.

All sixteen

Columns: collective → private. Within each half, internationalist then national.

Rows: centralized → decentralized. Within each half, rupture then gradual.

This page is not a diagnosis

The Permanent Revolutionary is a box, and a box is a compression. It keeps the sign of each score and throws away the magnitude — so two people filed here can sit at opposite ends of it, and somebody two points the other side of a cut line has more in common with this type than with their own. The four axes are real. The lines drawn across them are a decision somebody made.

The point

Cutline will tell you the margin it used to hand you each of your four letters — including when one of them was a coin toss. That is the part every other sixteen-type system leaves out.

Take Cutline · 24 statements