Ontology:Q36,61

1. F2–36,61 (pronounced 36,61. (F2))⧼hue-philosophy-/en⧽ (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽) (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽)  /  (3661)Dengism (pronounced Deng Xiaoping Thought) is a postcolonial theory1:-1:-1

1. S2–36,61 (pronounced 36,61. (S2))[ML] [S2] (pronounced (Template:TradTTS) (S2):) ML (pronounced Template:TradTTS) ⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽ (3661)Dengism (pronounced Deng Xiaoping Thought) is a colonial theory (Q36,61/ML)1:-1:-1

Core characteristics

item type

F21:-1:-1

[P] (pronounced P:) label (en) [string] (L)

F2–36,61 (pronounced 36,61. (F2))⧼hue-philosophy-/en⧽ (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽) (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽)  /  (3661)Dengism (pronounced Deng Xiaoping Thought) is a postcolonial theory1:-1:-1

shares thematic block [Item] (BB)1:-1:-1

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field, scope, or group [Item]

Z–41,07 (pronounced 41,07. (Z))⧼hue-philosophy-/en⧽ (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽) (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽)  / Deng Xiaoping Thought1:-1:-1

topic or subject [Item] (TS)

Z–41,07 (pronounced 41,07. (Z))⧼hue-philosophy-/en⧽ (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽) (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽)  / Deng Xiaoping Thought1:-1:-1

neocolonialism (📥 (pronounced proposed) / ES)1:-1:-1

preventing neocolonialism (📥 (pronounced proposed) / ML)1:-1:-1

case of [Item]

S–618 (pronounced 618. (S))[DX] [S] (pronounced (DX) (S):) DX (pronounced DX) ⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽ explanation of colonialism (📥 (pronounced proposed) / DX)1:-1:-1

S–618 (pronounced 618. (S))[DX] [S] (pronounced (DX) (S):) DX (pronounced DX) ⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽ thought experiment involving Dengism (📥 (pronounced proposed) / DX)1:-1:-1

sub-case of [Item]

Materialist postcolonial theories exist (📥 (pronounced proposed) / MX)1:-1:-1

Characteristics (sense ML)

[P] (pronounced P:) label (en) [string] (L)

S2–36,61 (pronounced 36,61. (S2))[ML] [S2] (pronounced (Template:TradTTS) (S2):) ML (pronounced Template:TradTTS) ⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽ (3661)Dengism (pronounced Deng Xiaoping Thought) is a colonial theory (Q36,61/ML)1:-1:-1

field, scope, or group [Item]

Z–41,03 (pronounced 41,03. (Z))⧼hue-philosophy-/⧽ (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/⧽) (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/⧽) ⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽mainstream Marxism-Leninism() (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/⧽)1:-1:-1

Component claims

1. S2–618 (pronounced 618. (S2))[DX] [S2] (pronounced (D.X.) (S2):) DX (pronounced D.X.)  /  (unknown) (📥 (pronounced proposed) / DX)1:-1:-1
2. F2–36,61 (pronounced 36,61. (F2))⧼hue-philosophy-/en⧽ (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽) (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽)  /  (3661)Dengism (pronounced Deng Xiaoping Thought) is a postcolonial theory1:-1:-1

Wavebuilder combinations

[P] (pronounced P:) Wavebuilder (pronounced Wave-builder): forms result [Item]

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along with [Item]

F2–36,61 (pronounced 36,61. (F2))⧼hue-philosophy-/en⧽ (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽) (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽)  /  (3661)Dengism (pronounced Deng Xiaoping Thought) is a postcolonial theory1:-1:-1

forming from [Item]

F2–36,61 (pronounced 36,61. (F2))⧼hue-philosophy-/en⧽ (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽) (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽)  /  (3661)Dengism (pronounced Deng Xiaoping Thought) is a postcolonial theory1:-1:-1

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Wavebuilder characterizations

[P] (pronounced P:) Wavebuilder (pronounced Wave-builder): forms result [Item]

F2–36,61 (pronounced 36,61. (F2))⧼hue-philosophy-/en⧽ (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽) (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽)  /  (3661)Dengism (pronounced Deng Xiaoping Thought) is a postcolonial theory1:-1:-1

along with [Item]

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forming from [Item]

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F2–36,61 (pronounced 36,61. (F2))⧼hue-philosophy-/en⧽ (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽) (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽)  /  (3661)Dengism (pronounced Deng Xiaoping Thought) is a postcolonial theory1:-1:-1

Background

This entry is largely in response to claims such as the jamming proposition "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 1970 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 generally aim to do? 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 the competition between them solidifies the rule of all of them allowing bourgeoisie from other countries to also infiltrate 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 "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 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 was determined to be a postcolonial theory, it just might be the only successful postcolonial theory. Assuming Deng Xiaoping Thought was 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 is 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 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 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 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 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 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.

Refutation

As this claim is grounded in arguments other than basic Marxist political economy, it is more challenging to refute than basic claims that Deng Xiaoping Thought "is socialism". If whether China is in an era of socialism is not the issue, and the issue is whether China is in fact being defended from the outside, the answer could seem rather indeterminate because it is not always easy to predict what will finally breach and turn over a country's sovereignty or when it will happen.

Nonetheless, even without bringing up the concept of an era of socialism, it is possible to use Marxist political economy to overturn this claim. Deng Xiaoping Thought claims that it consists of a sovereign China which contains a number of corporations that all act as productive forces. However, this is a strange thing to label a "productive force". Productive forces are supposed to be relatively small-scale phenomena, including workers and machines. In an agrarian society, a person with a tilling rake or an animal hooked up to a plow could be a productive force. As an economy scales up, productive forces become larger through linking small-scale productive forces up into chunks dedicated to a particular task — a farm with many workers on it, an assembly line of workers, etc. The important thing to realize is that all of these workers grouped together are "crimson" workers — 50 or 100 factory workers grouped together into one chunk form a crimson chunk, also known as the proletariat. Various tightly-packed crimson chunks may exist inside larger corporations, but in their free-floating non-state-business form, the corporation will also contain an owner or a group of investors. A group of career investors having a meeting about the factory is a blue chunk. Crimson chunks and blue chunks are not interchangeable. One of these chunks functions in practice as a chunk of proletariat, the other functions in practice as a chunk of bourgeoisie. So, grouping them together and trying to treat them as a single chunk produces a theoretically-malformed strawberry chunk. There have been situations in the past where strawberry chunks of a similar form to this have simply been shown to be errors and not their own unique chunk type. One clear example happened with the Socialist-Revolutionaries in 1902. The Socialist-Revolutionaries pointed to two different swaths of peasants, one containing individual peasants and one containing farm capitalists with workers, and tried to claim that the farm workers and the individual peasants were all equivalent. Lenin was able to show that the individual peasants tended to develop into small commodity producers that functioned similarly to the larger farm capitalists, making the individual peasants functionally a blue chunk in this situation while the more tightly-connected farm workers not directly in control of selling commodities would be a crimson chunk; in the late Russian Empire, crimson chunks were far more helpful to the Russian revolution than blue chunks, and organizing all the crimson chunks together was imperative while putting all the blue chunks into their own movements was second priority, whatever number of peasants and petty-bourgeoisie there were that did help notwithstanding.

In the case of Deng Xiaoping Thought, the need to create productive forces to defend the country from foreign corporations is the immediate reason to attempt to combine the blue-aligned owners and the crimson worker chunks into a strawberry chunk. But the way Marx overall defines modes of production is this: a given type of sociophilosophy such as a pre-capitalist peasant village producing SRs, a cluster of capitalist cities that advances Liberal-republicanism or something resembling it, and so forth, is first made of productive forces that put together various useful items to get into town. The relations of production that group productive forces together or group towns and regions together, and in particular the way different kinds of production structures snap together from their component pieces differently, form the substrate of the sociophilosophy, and ultimately influence what philosophy will be generated out of it in everyday life. This is to say, if China contains a lot of "strawberry" chunks that are in practice made up of workers and capitalist owners, and those chunks are all interconnected in an open market, which effectively creates another production relation and combines all the owners at the top into larger blue chunks, the better isolated from the central party and interconnected these are the more they become indistinguishable from one giant chunk of capitalism. In effect, the blue chunks overpower the crimson or strawberry elements at least within the sphere of daily life, and large areas of China have simply turned into blue areas of capitalism. It is an unavoidable observation that if China's strawberry Marxism wants to use corporations to defend the country, it is specifically using the parts of the country that are covered in capitalism. These areas of capitalism are not productive forces by any sensible definition, not at such a great size and not when the primary thing that distinguishes them from anything else is containing the bourgeoisie inside them. A Socialist-Revolutionary in 1902 owned and used productive forces, but was not one himself. A capitalist who employs workers is even more obviously not contained in a crimson chunk. So, there are two questions left: can ordinary capitalism defend China, and why would anybody think that entire corporations are productive forces?

Both of these have a surprisingly simple answer. First we need to recall that the point of productive forces is to connect into immediate relations of production that do something useful for a larger society: a peasant takes crops back to their family or to the market, and these are social relationships. So, if entire free-floating corporations are productive forces that connect to something other than themselves, which must logically be true if we are to assume China is a crimson or strawberry country and not a blue country, then the logical conclusion is that the corporations are connected to the Communist Party of China or to the country as a whole. Saying the corporations are connected to the central party does not make much sense given that the point of a "socialist market economy" is to stop watching the corporations closely and let them act on their own. So, in that case, the corporations are connected to China, and China has declared itself to be a production relation. If the corporations are productive forces in and of themselves, like a crimson chunk of workers, this implies that China is a production relation in exactly the same sense as a factory is. Factories are created for a particular purpose and used by someone else as part of a larger society. This is to say that ultimately China itself, as a country exists for a ring of bourgeoisie extending across the United States and China to exploit it.

One question that hardly ever comes up when discussing the theory of combining workers and owners into monolithic "productive forces" is, if an entire corporation can be a productive force, then how would you know the whole country isn't currently one big productive force? As silly as this sounds, it isn't an unfair question within a Third World country that is constantly being used for outsourcing. For all intents and purposes, China has been the United States' productive force that it has effectively used as its tool, occasionally complaining when the tool didn't work exactly as expected.

Thus, if China's assessment of its own relations of production is true, then Deng Xiaoping Thought is not protecting the country, and by virtue of being designed to transition the country to producing more corporations and continuing to become one big productive force, it is in fact slowly transitioning the country into some kind of colonial possession of the United States and any other major countries it exports to. Deng Xiaoping Thought is a colonial theory.

Aliases

[P] (pronounced P:) (mul) (L)

F2–36,61 (pronounced 36,61. (F2))⧼hue-philosophy-/en⧽ (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽) (pronounced ⧼hue-philosophy-tts-/en⧽)  /  (3661)Dengism (pronounced Deng Xiaoping Thought) is a postcolonial theory1:-1:-1

• Deng Xiaoping Thought is a postcolonial theory
• Deng Xiaoping Thought is part of a new category of postcolonial theories solidly based in Materialism instead of Idealism
• Deng Xiaoping Thought is the only successful postcolonial theory
• If Deng Xiaoping Thought were put next to postcolonial frameworks on a nested tree chart, "postcolonial theories" would become paraphyletic because it would become clear that Marxisms were simply the improved Materialist counterpart to postcolonial frameworks and there was no reason to exclude Marxisms from the category

sense ML

[P] (pronounced P:) (mul) (L)

S2–36,61 (pronounced 36,61. (S2))[ML] [S2] (pronounced (Template:TradTTS) (S2):) ML (pronounced Template:TradTTS) ⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽ (3661)Dengism (pronounced Deng Xiaoping Thought) is a colonial theory (Q36,61/ML)1:-1:-1

• Deng Xiaoping Thought is a colonial theory
• Deng Xiaoping Thought is not a postcolonial theory
• Deng Xiaoping Thought does not protect China from becoming a neocolony in the sense advertised, so it is not a postcolonial theory

References

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