Editing Ontology:Q65,49 (section)

== Criteria for proof or falsification ==

To falsify this claim, you can't simply recite the basic tenets and adages of Marxism as if you expect everyone to believe them; the strongest refutation will use concepts and vocabulary that anarchists would already be deeply familiar with. There are also a few premises that for this particular scenario you must treat in particular ways if you wish to support the proposition from an anarchist point of view:

* As an anarchist you are arguing {{em|for}} the continued existence of the Soviet Union using Idealism, not {{em|against it}}.
* You are allowed to deconstruct class analysis and major bodies of Marxist theory such as mainstream Marxism-Leninism and Trotskyism, but you are only allowed to do this on condition that you can find replacement theories that explain how the observed structure of the Soviet Union would come to be. One example of a permitted alternative is schizoanalysis and its definition of societies as linkages of free-floating countable cultures or socially-linked communities.
* You are not allowed to question the premise that the Soviet Union is made of 14 nationalities in order to chop it up into smaller pieces. Although it is historically accurate to point out that the Soviet Union tore apart into multiple countries, this particular claim is not to be based on [[E:historical materialism|historical reasoning]], and is to be based on tearing apart the premises established by known historical events, meaning that from the perspective of 1950 you are not to treat "the Soviet Union tore apart in 1991" as an admissible fact, and instead are to treat "the Soviet Union could have chosen not to tear apart" as an admissible possibility.
** ("14" national populations is meant to extend to the existence of small ethnic minorities or tribal populations. These existing minorities are the only "pieces" you are permitted to remove to create new structures if necessary.) <ref name="r" group="n"/>
* You are not allowed to question the premise that being prejudiced against Communism is bad. You may choose to defend Trotskyists against mainstream Marxist-Leninists and deconstruct prejudice against Trotskyism at the same time you deconstruct prejudice against all forms of Bolshevism, but if you defend Trotskyists then you must defend Trotskyists actually building Bolshevism and never building anarchism.
* You are allowed to question the premise that the United States "hated" the Soviet Union and argue against having a Cold War based on evidence it did not.
* You are not allowed to question basic material observations at the time of the question such as that a Cold War is imminent unless you stop it, that the United States exists or the Soviet Union exists (they are to be defined as collections of physical people), that wars exist, that nation-sized conflicts exist, that properties exist (they are to be defined as areas defended with weapons), that the earth exists, or that the world exists instead of only your mind.
** (You are allowed to make new proposition Items based on this one where this set of material observations does not apply and is replaced with new ones, but you may not treat those as this proposition.)

For the purposes of <strong>refuting</strong> the proposition from a Marxist vantage point, some possible routes of argument that might be acceptable include:

* Showing that the Cold War was a material phenomenon not based in ideas without using Marxism
* Showing that the United States did not [[E:free will|Freely Choose]] to hate the Soviet Union and the majority of the United States population was obligated to hate it through forces beyond its immediate control
* Showing that the population of the Soviet Union and the population of the United States were not automatically predisposed to like each other until governments force them not to, but, for instance, entirely neutral to each other
* Showing that if there were no capitalists <i>per se</i> at any greater scale than co-ops, countries could still end up in a period of tensions very much like the Cold War, and wouldn't simply enter a period of international anarchism as much as an attempt to, warheads or no warheads, "nonviolently" starve each other and tear each other apart
* Using class traitors like Trotsky to demonstrate specifically why the deconstruction of physical country-objects is separate from class, but also that leaving a country-object is not something people can spontaneously choose as much as something people are forced into
* Using dialectical materialism without talking about classes or invoking any detailed knowledge about historical necessity or [[E:Q84|historical materialism]] that Marxists are usually expected to know