I Hereby Abolish Rules: Semantic Liquidation, Territorial Gatekeeping, and the Failure of Marxism as Identity

I Hereby Abolish Rules is an Effective Act and scholarly intervention by Lee Sharks, dated February 26, 2026. It begins from the removal of “The Stakes” and “Whose Face Is on the Twenty?” from the subreddit r/LeftistsForAI under Rule 7, which required posts to relate substantially to AI systems or deployment, labor impact, ownership models, platform power, or regulation. The work conducts a category-by-category forensic reading and argues that both removed papers address every listed category.

From that incident, the work develops the concept of semantic liquidation: the disqualification of relevant analysis because its method or conceptual register is unfamiliar to the institution evaluating it. It interprets the moderation event as a legibility judgment disguised as neutral topical enforcement. The central political distinction is between Marx as method, which examines material conditions, ownership, infrastructure, and reproduction, and Marx as identity, which evaluates whether an argument resembles already-recognized left discourse.

The document’s performative center is the declaration that rules are abolished insofar as they replace judgment and become instruments of liquidation. This does not advocate unstructured governance. It substitutes affordance-based architecture, gravitational attractors, substantive protocols, witness, and analytical review for brittle rule systems. The work belongs to the archive’s Effective Act sequence because it both diagnoses a governance failure and performs the alternative relation it proposes.