Editing Ontology:Q36,61 (section)

== Background ==

This entry is largely in response to claims such as the jamming proposition "[[E:East Germany was basically an anarchism|East Germany was basically an anarchism]]". When trying to take anarchism at face value and ask what it feels like to be an anarchist with the level of knowledge and theoretical skill of a mainstream Marxist-Leninist, some questions can become very fuzzy. If an anarchism succeeded, would it look like East Germany? Did East Germany form for the same reasons a successful anarchism would have formed? What does a successful endpoint of a postcolonial theory look like? Could a postcolonial theory end in something that looked like East Germany, North Korea, or the People's Republic of China? Is Deng Xiaoping Thought a postcolonial theory?

In certain senses, there is an argument to be made that the needs of China in ??? and the basic purpose of Deng Xiaoping Thought are "postcolonial" in nature. This requires a rather general-sense use of the term which will not be fitted to any specific academic definition from any specific existing postcolonial framework. For the purposes of answering this question, we should begin back at the basics. What does a postcolonial theory <em>generally aim to do</em>? First of all, it aims to create national independence and remove the control of First-World empires that would own parts of a country, exploit its population, deprive it of an independent government or its traditional methods of structure, and to the extent its people survive, to overwrite their culture with its own. It is not difficult to argue that in its own quiet, oddly-civilized way Deng Xiaoping Thought tackles the same problems. By filling China with businesses, it prevents any inner part of China from being owned by other countries, however much its economy may become defined by exports. By maintaining a central party-nation and keeping the country in one piece it creates a firm structure and border for the country and protects national independence. By not surrendering to Liberal-republicanism it refuses to allow government to fully vulgarize into a contest between clusters of bourgeoisie where [[E:multicapitalism|the competition between them solidifies the rule of all of them]] allowing bourgeoisie from other countries to also infiltrate [[Term:ruling population|the layer that rules China]]. Under Deng Xiaoping Thought China's overall methods of populational structure are protected, and its culture will primarily be defined by at least one of the populations of China rather than another overseas population.

Within this description we can see that there are some problems with Deng Xiaoping Thought. The various populations of China are not protected from control by their own bourgeoisie, and they are not necessarily guaranteed to be protected from control by each other — although it is hardly guaranteed they will all erupt into racist patterns of destroying each other either. The structure of China is overall far less competitive and more built on compromise than the structure of a republic such as the United States, which is to say that the particular patterns of Tory and center-Liberal factions viciously clashing over offices until the people of the two voter bases start shooting each other in racialized group killings are not necessarily expected to happen. However, Deng Xiaoping Thought is hardly worse than postcolonial frameworks, or postcolonial frameworks better than Deng Xiaoping Thought. Postcolonial frameworks appear to often center themselves around concepts of "[[Term:alterity|internalized prejudices]]" or "punishing bad choices". They typically do not center themselves around economic class-territories such as lands specific to peasants or business territories containing workers, making it difficult to propose [[E:Lattice model|materially-defined methods]] of assembling everyone together for a prolonged period of resisting empire. Postcolonial frameworks toss out statements that imperialism is "deliberate", all but claiming that the entire population of Spain signed a petition for Columbus to go to Hispaniola. Deng Xiaoping Thought recognizes a difference between the general population of China, the bourgeoisie, and the central party. Overall, the Materialist basis of Deng Xiaoping Thought is a strong foundation, positioning it such that if Deng Xiaoping Thought <em>was</em> determined to be a postcolonial theory, it just might be <em>the only successful</em> postcolonial theory. Assuming Deng Xiaoping Thought <em>was</em> a postcolonial theory, it would raise interesting questions of whether a country could go through revolution on the basis of Deng Xiaoping Thought rather than Maoism, and whether a Materialist theory of societies can be effective at liberating Third World countries without being a version of Leninism. All of these propositions may be fair to claim, and fair to investigate. There is, overall, a decent argument that Deng Xiaoping Thought <em>is</em> a postcolonial theory in the sense of a theory for liberating Third World countries from empire which isn't a version of Leninism, or is missing one of the two major chapters of Marxism-Leninism.

If Deng Xiaoping Thought really is a kind of postcolonial theory based on Materialism, then there is also an argument that Juche-socialism is a postcolonial theory of the same kind. This would imply that mainstream Marxism-Leninism itself is a postcolonial theory, and there is a greater category of postcolonial theories which contains various Marxisms, Idealist-based postcolonial frameworks, and possibly some anarchisms; in taxonomy terms the current category of "postcolonial theories" would be [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphyly paraphyletic]. This all seems like a relatively reasonable claim. The category of "postcolonial theories" created by academic postcolonial frameworks makes far less coherent sense than the claim that postcolonial theories are simply theories that draw from knowledge about history to help nationalities through the creation of nation-states and liberation from empires.

With regard to [[E:Trotskyism|Trotskyism]], it does not fare well under this set of definitions. If Deng Xiaoping Thought is a postcolonial theory because it protects the national population of China, then Trotskyism — always bent on tearing apart countries like China, Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea for its own ends — simply is not. If Trotskyism actually had any claim to effectiveness, it would be fairer to say that it could be a postcolonial theory "some day" when fifty countries have actually formed into a giant workers' state. Alternatively, if Trotskyists were to finally wise up and focus their efforts on creating the first instance of [[E:Trotskyism in one country|Trotskyism in one country]], which consistently dedicated itself to keeping out empires and not becoming an empire to the same admittedly-imperfect extent that China does, this version of Trotskyism could also be a postcolonial theory. This set of definitions holds that Marxisms are postcolonial theories because they create socialism in one country, but they are allowed to [[:Category:Bauplan ontologies|assemble into larger Marxisms]] if they continue to block all meaningful processes of forming empire and generating offensive wars even as they scale up into larger structures.

=== Falsification criteria ===

This proposition can be considered false when academic postcolonial frameworks provide a reason that a Marxist state such as North Korea which has liberated itself from a period of slavery and domination by First-World empires in order to cultivate its own national culture has not applied a postcolonial theory, and that reasoning is actually more or less coherent with the general accounts of history given by Marxism and Liberal-republican historians. The requirement to be coherent with either Marxism-Leninism or Deng Xiaoping Thought is the most important, although a reasoning which [[Term:meta-ontologically sound|remains internally consistent]] when tested across mainstream Marxism-Leninism, Liberal-republican history, and Deng Xiaoping Thought would be considered an excellent answer. What the postcolonial framework must do to falsify this proposition is provide a coherent account of what a postcolonial theory is that distinguishes a "postcolonial" transition process from a Marxist revolution (Leninism) or the operation of a Marxist state to keep out overseas empires (Deng Xiaoping Thought). If postcolonial frameworks fail at this task so badly all their descriptions describe Marxist revolutions perfectly, this proposition is considered true.


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