Ontology:Q65,49
- pronounced [A] The Cold War was a social construct 1-1-1
Core characteristics[edit]
- item type
- S2 (pronounced C) 1-1-1
- pronounced [P] alias (en) [string]
- The opposition of Liberal-republican countries against the Soviet Union was nothing more than a social construct in which Liberal-republican countries made up reasons to hate the 14 nationalities of the Soviet Union for reasons largely unrelated to the class composition of the two countries, and related more to the affinity between the 14 major Soviet ethnic groups and the anomalous, hateful non-affinity between the United States and those ethnic groups
- QID references [Item] 1-1-1
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- field, scope, or group [Item]
- sub-case of [Item]
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- case of [Item]
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- difficulty to refute
- easy (1 day or less)
- difficulty to falsify
- very hard (90 days or more)
Component claims[edit]
Refutation (Marxism)[edit]
Appearances[edit]
Refutations[edit]
Wavebuilder combinations[edit]
- pronounced [P] pronounced Wavebuilder: forms result [Item]
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- along with [Item]
- pronounced [A] The Cold War was a social construct 1-1-1
Wavebuilder characterizations[edit]
- pronounced Wavebuilder: route [Item]
- pronounced [A] The Cold War was a social construct 1-1-1
- along with [Item]
- pronounced [S2] The pronounced USSR functioned as a political faction 1-1-1
- forming from [Item]
- pronounced [S2] The pronounced USSR functioned as a political faction 1-1-1
- Political factions are social constructs (proposed; A) 1-1-1
- pronounced [A] The Cold War was a social construct 1-1-1
Background[edit]
In various philosophies with a vague charcoal tint to them, it has recently become popular to characterize wars and acts of imperialism as cultural fabrications. One of the most well-known manifestations of this in the arts is Undertale — the game presents a path of peace to the player not in a statement that real-world history has multiple repeating patterns that can potentially apply to each situation, but rather in a statement that console RPG worlds are wholly made up and don't require compliance.[n 1] Theories self-labeling as postcolonial theories will claim that acts of empire are a matter of "attitudes" and "cultural conditioning" and that empires are "engineered" by a few people at the top. Theories self-labeling as anarchisms will actually begin to propose some vague model for how the physical layout of empires is anomalous and suggestively present some other kind of layout such as tribal society. Yet other theories will chew up and regurgitate the same themes seen in obvious postcolonial theories and anarchisms, as with schizoanalysis pointing out the concept of empires oppressively hammering individuals into the shape of what they consider normal, and poststructuralism attempting to tear apart the entire concept of language to various degrees to attempt to take away the power of empires to order any particular abstract concept inside society into a particular ontological shape. The common theme that emerges across several supposedly separate philosophies is the concept of Materialism being inapplicable to history because there is no predictive significance to people being arranged into any particular population or configuration of populations.
With that in mind, this is the claim that the Cold War was not a conflict based on classes or the material consequences of population arrangements and instead was somehow based in prejudices, attitudes, and arbitrary teachings of what history was or will be. This claim does not permit any understanding of the Soviet Union as based in class analysis; within this framing, the Soviet Union must be understood as a deliberate joining of 14 major ethnic groups specifically because they are in some sense culturally compatible and wished to join into the same Soviet culture or "community". Likewise, the United States and Europe cannot be understood as based in the material behavior of the bourgeoisie; as any center-Liberal social-democrat would be quick to point out, some bourgeoisie will become class traitors, therefore blue and charcoal theories will quickly argue that people's actual behavior does not come specifically from their class position, so the only theory that explains and predicts everyone's behavior accurately would have to go "deeper" or "smaller" than classes to ask what it is that connects class traitors to other individuals. There are ways to achieve this kind of model which do not actually lean on the concepts of social construction or prejudices and instead lean on Materialism. Within a meta-Marxist framework, a figure such as Trotsky or Che Guevara becomes part of a material "ideology object" combining workers and theorists into one of the possible physical shapes of Leninism instead of that person simply being part of a class-sorted subpopulation; Trotsky physically leaves the object of assembled people called the bourgeoisie and joins the object of assembled people called Leninism or Bolshevism. That said, charcoal-leaning ideologies tend to seriously dislike the concept of any group of people being a single material object, all too keen on branding such an object a "hierarchy" even in the case only tiny fractions of it take the shape of a spatial slot hierarchy. This proposition is meant to be a genuinely charcoal look at Soviet history, and in light of this, this proposition does not permit the meta-Marxist concept of party-nations as necessary objects or layouts. For the purposes of this proposition, the Soviet Union is a social construct, it doesn't have to exist if the individuals in it don't want it to exist, and whatever arrangement of "communities" or new ethnic groups people spontaneously feel like forming into one day at the expense of the arrangements they were already in is the correct arrangement. This is the foundation you must proceed from to build out this proposition and use it to argue that the Cold War was inhumane and unnecessary.
There are a few things this proposition does not explicitly include that thus will not be requirements for arguing its point, although they could easily be helpful as supporting propositions. It does not require presenting a specific method for how charcoal ideologies could have won the Russian Revolution and defeated the Russian empire without Marxism. It does not require presenting a specific material method for winning the Cold War which would be more effective than Stalin's Marxism. The main requirement for arguing this proposition is simply that you must be able to argue that a country full of racist xenophobes and a country with some amount of coexistence and cooperation between people-groups are expected and obligated to be friends, and that the presence of racism and xenophobia will not inherently drive the two populations apart as people attempt to flee racism and sort together with only nice people. You must argue that the separation between United States people and Soviet people is artificial and fabricated rather than protective without accidentally arguing that United States people are entitled to conquer the Soviet Union and turn it into an extension of the United States just because that is the most intuitive image of unifying the two within United States culture and understandings of the world. It is not required to argue exactly how the United States and the Soviet Union were supposed to abolish the separation between them and join into a greater entity, although giving the basic elements of such a hypothetical process might be helpful.
This argument, in all likelihood, verges on impossible to pull off, but anarchists are encouraged to give it their all anyway, in the interest of learning more about all the models Marxists claim to be wrong.
Falsification criteria[edit]
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. Some possible routes of refutation 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 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 per se 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 country-objects is separate from class, but also is not something people can spontaneously choose as much as something people are forced into