East-Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories 9781138919846, 9781315687582

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East-Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories

In this volume, leading scholars from around the world suggest that radical ideologies have shaped complex historical processes in East Asia by examining how intellectuals and activists interpreted, rethought and criticized Marxism in East Asia. The contributors to this volume ask how we can use Marxism to understand East Asia in a global capitalist world, and where the problems that Marxism highlighted, including imperialism, domination and inequality, are increasingly prevalent. The volume draws on various disciplines to reinterpret Marx, and shed light on the complex dynamics of global capitalism in various historical/national contexts. The distinguished contributors illuminate, rethink and make accessible highly complex Marxist concepts, such as the question of class contradiction, the temporalities of capitalism, real and formal subsumption, relative surplus value and the commodity form, the question of class and the proletariat. At a time when people around the world are struggling to cope with the crises of global capitalism, this volume on regional responses to capitalism is especially welcome. It will be of interest to students and scholars of East Asian studies, social and political theory, sociology and globalization studies. Joyce C.H. Liu is Professor of Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Viren Murthy teaches Transnational Asian History at the University of WisconsinMadison, USA and researches Chinese and Japanese Intellectual History.

Interventions Edited by Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University and Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Warwick

The Series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages with alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and cultural approaches to international relations and global politics. In our first five years we have published 60 volumes. We aim to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-structural traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics. Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics. We are very happy to discuss your ideas at any stage of the project: just contact us for advice or proposal guidelines. Proposals should be submitted directly to the Series Editors: • •

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“As Michel Foucault has famously stated, ‘knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.’ In this spirit the Edkins–Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to contribute post disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affirm the world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary.” Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA For a full list of available titles, please visit www.routledge.com/series/INT The most recent titles in this series are: China’s International Relations and Harmonious World Time, space and multiplicity in world politics Astrid Nordin Narrative Global Politics Theory, history and the personal in International Relations Edited by Naeem Inayatullah and Elizabeth Dauphinee

On the Greek Origins of Biopolitics A reinterpretation of the history of biopower Mika Ojakangas Insuring Life Value, security and risk Luis Lobo-Guerrero The Global Making of Policing Postcolonial perspectives Jana Hönke and Markus-Michael Müller Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing On drones, counter-insurgency, and violence Kyle Grayson Europe Anti-Power Ressentiment and exceptionalism in EU debate Michael Loriaux Refugees in Extended Exile Living on the edge Jennifer Hyndman and Wenona Giles Security Without Weapons Rethinking violence, nonviolent Actions, and civilian protection M.S. Wallace Disorienting Democracy Politics of emancipation Clare Woodford Democracy Promotion as Foreign Policy Temporal othering in International Relations Cathy Elliott Asylum Seekers, Sovereignty, and the Senses of the International A politico-corporeal struggle Eeva Puumala Global Powers of Horror Security, politics, and the body in pieces François Debrix East-Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories Edited by Joyce C.H. Liu and Viren Murthy

East-Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories Edited by Joyce C.H. Liu and Viren Murthy

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial material, Joyce C.H. Liu and Viren Murthy; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Joyce C.H. Liu and Viren Murthy to be identified as authors of the editorial material, and of the individual authors as authors of their contributions, has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-91984-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-68758-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

Contents

Notes on contributors Acknowledgments

Introduction: Marxism, space, time and East Asia

ix xii 1

VIREN MURTHY AND JOYCE C.H. LIU

PART I

Perspectives of capital: universality, particularity and temporality 11   1 Deprovincializing Marx: reflections on a cultural dominant 13 HARRY HAROOTUNIAN

  2 Marx, temporality and modernity 29 MOISHE POSTONE

  3 Two kinds of new poor and their future: the decline and reconfiguration of class politics and the politics of the new poor 49 WANG HUI TRANSLATED BY SAUL THOMAS

  4 On the simultaneous world revolution 71 KOJIN KARATANI

PART II

Trajectories of Marxisms in Japan, China and Korea 85   5 Historical difference and the question of East-Asian Marxism 87 MAX WARD

viii Contents   6 Value without fetish: problematizing Uno Kōzō’s reading of the value form 103 ELENA LOUISA LANGE

  7 Compradors: the mediating middle of capitalism in twentieth-century China and the world 119 REBECCA E. KARL

  8 “A vast crucible of electric flame”: Shanghai and the emergence of Chinese Marxism 137 JAKE WERNER

  9 Paradoxical routes of the sinification of Marxism: materialist dialectic and immanent critique 157 JOYCE C.H. LIU

10 The formation and the limits of the People’s Democracy: a critical history of contemporary South Korean Marxism 175 SEUNG-WOOK BAEK

11 Imagining Asia and the Chinese Revolution: Takeuchi Yoshimi and his transnational afterlives 193 VIREN MURTHY

Bibliography Index

215 235

Contributors

Seung-Wook Baek is Professor of the Department of Sociology at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, South Korea. He got his PhD and BA degrees from Seoul National University. His main research concerns are social changes in contemporary Chinese society, contemporary Critical social theory and Marxist theories. He has published many books in Korea including Chinese Workers and Chinese Labour Politics; Lectures on Capitalist History; China on the Boundary of Globalization; and Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Aporia of Politics. He tries to interpret contemporary history from world-systems approaches and has translated major books on world-system analysis into Korean, including Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, Immanuel Wallerstein’s The End of the World As We Know It and Beverly Silver’s Forces of Labour. He was former Visiting Research Associate at Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical System and Civilization of Binghamton University, former Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Global Political Economy of Sussex University and former Editor of New Left Review Korean Edition. He is now doing research on the Chinese labor dispatch system, the global economic crisis and the social in Marx’s Idea. Harry Harootunian is the Max Palevsky Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Chicago and currently Adjunct Senior Research Scholar, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University, where he regularly teaches graduate courses. He recently published Marx After Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism (November 2015) and is now writing a book on the relationship of archaism and fascism in Japan and its contemporary recurrence. Wang Hui is Professor of Literature and History and Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His major research areas include Chinese intellectual history and modern Chinese literature. His major works in English include China’s Twentieth Century (2016), China from Empire to Nation-State (2014), The Politics of Imagining Asia (2011), The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (2011) and China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition (2006).

x  Notes on contributors Kojin Karatani is one of the most influential contemporary Japanese intellectuals. After obtaining a BA in economics from the University of Tokyo, he made a sensational debut as a literary critic. He has published dozens of books since then, covering a variety of fields, providing most original and synthetic theories. Among them the following are translated into English: Origins of Japanese Literature (Duke University Press), Architecture as Metaphor (MIT Press), Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (MIT Press), History and Repetition (Columbia University Press) and Structure of World History (Duke University Press). Origins of Philosophy (Duke University Press) and Nation and Aesthetics: Kant and Freud (Oxford University Press) are scheduled for publication. He was a Visiting Professor at Yale, Columbia, Cornell and UCLA. In 2016 he published Unconsciousness of the Constitution (Iwanami, Tokyo), where he elucidates how Article 9 of Japanese constitution, which renounces war and all forces, was formed and survived many years, despite all the efforts of the ruling party to discard it. Rebecca E. Karl teaches History at NYU-NY. She is the author, most recently, of The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China (Duke University Press, forthcoming, 2017) and the co-translator/co-editor (with Xueping Zhong) of Cai Xiang, Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries: 1949–1966 (Duke University Press, 2016). Her previous books include The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (with Dorothy Ko and Lydia Liu; Columbia University Press, 2013); Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (Duke University Press, 2010). Elena Louisa Lange is Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Zurich where she received her PhD in 2011 with a critical analysis of the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945). Since 2009, Lange has been teaching classes on intellectual history, Japanese philosophy, Marxism and anarchism, and eminent Japanese intellectuals such as Tosaka Jun, Umemoto Katsumi and Uno Kōzō. She has co-edited a book on modern Japanese philosophy (Begriff und Bild der modernen japanischen Philosophie, frommann-holzboog verlag, 2014), is currently co-editing an anthology on philosophy in Asia (What is Philosophy?, Brill, forthcoming, 2017) and is co-editor of a Reader in Japanese Critical Thought, a project to translate texts from the Japanese tradition that critically deal with capitalist modernity (forthcoming). She is currently working on her second book, Value without Fetish: Uno Kōzō’s Theory of Pure Capitalism in Light of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, which will be published with the Historical Materialism Book Series/Brill. She regularly gives lectures and conducts workshops on Marx’s Capital at international universities. Joyce C.H. Liu received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1984, and is Professor of Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature in the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. She is currently the Chair of the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies that she founded in 2002.

Notes on contributors  xi She is also the director of the International Institute for Cultural Studies of the University System of Taiwan, a network system connecting four distinguished research-oriented universities in Taiwan, including National Chiao Tung University, National Tsing-Hua University, National Central University and National Yang Ming University. She has served as the chief editor of the only journal of cultural studies in Taiwan, Routers: A Journal of Cultural Studies, since 2011. Dr Liu’s work is concentrated in the field of aesthetics, ethics, political philosophy, from Marx, Freud, Lacan to contemporary critical theories. She has been a critic of East-Asian modernity, particularly through re-reading the Chinese intellectual history of the twentieth century. She has published five books, edited 13 books, translated two theoretical books, and more than 70 journal and book articles. Her representative works include The Topology of Psyche: The Post-1895 Reconfiguration of Ethics (2011), The Perverted Heart: The Psychic Forms of Modernity (2004), as well as Orphan, Goddess, and the Writing of the Negative: The Performance of Our Symptoms (2000), that composed a trilogy on China–Taiwan modernity. Viren Murthy teaches transnational Asian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and researches Chinese and Japanese intellectual history. He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Brill, 2011), co-editor with Axel Schneider of The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia (Brill, 2013), and co-editor with Prasenjit Duara and Andrew Sartori of A Companion to Global Historical Thought (Blackwell, 2014). He has published articles in Modern Intellectual History, Modern China, Frontiers of History in China and Positions: Asia Critique and is currently working on a project tentatively entitled “Pan-Asianism and the Conundrums of Post-colonial Modernity.” Moishe Postone is Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Modern History and the College and a member of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago, as well as Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. He is the author of Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, and has written extensively on Marx, Critical Theory, antisemitism and issues of contemporary critiques of capitalist modernity. Max Ward is Assistant Professor of Japanese History at Middlebury College in Vermont. His research interests include theories of state power, Japanese fascism, postcolonial theory, and Japanese film. Jake Werner is a Harper-Schmidt Postdoctoral Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. His research explores how China’s articulation within global modernity conditioned the restructuring of urban space, culture, and political economy in the twentieth century. He is currently working on a book manuscript examining the masses as both concept and practice in Shanghai from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Acknowledgments

This volume first originated in the “International Workshop on Marxisms in East Asia” hosted jointly by the International Institute of Cultural Studies (IICS), University System of Taiwan, and the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies (SRCS), National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Hsin Chu, Taiwan, June 6-9, 2012. The editors would like to thank the Ministry of Science and Technology of ROC (Taiwan), National Chiao Tung University, the Institute of Social Research and Cultural, and the University System of Taiwan for their generous support of the workshop and the publication of this volume. The editors would also like to thank Jenny Edkins, Nick Vaughan-Williams and three anonymous reviewers for their critical yet supportive feedback on the initial proposal for the book; Nicola Parkin and Lydia de Cruz at Routledge for their patience throughout the publication process; Neil Sentance and Adam Bell for their professional copy-editing; Kathleen League for putting the Index together; and Hui-Yu Tang who acted with admirable precision as Editorial Assistant in the final preparation of the manuscript. In addition to the above, the editors would like to acknowledge the support of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the Instut des Études Avancées de Nantes, France and the Berggruen Philosophy and Culture Center, New York. Finally, the editors would like to express their appreciation for the contributors’ unfailing efforts in perfecting this joint project. It has been a pleasure to work with them. Joyce C. H. Liu, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan Viren Murthy, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA December, 2016

Introduction Marxism, space, time and East Asia Viren Murthy and Joyce C.H. Liu

When we think of the theme “Marxism in East Asia,” we might conceive of the simple transfer of a theory from Europe to the non-West. East-Asian intellectuals from the early twentieth century read and disseminated Marx’s works through various translations. In the past couple of decades, a number of theorists have problematized the process of translation and underscored the slippage of meaning that occurs as texts are translated in new regions. One theorist stresses the material conditions of meaning transfer and contends that rather than being transferred, local translators find hypothetical equivalents, which would amount to a reinvention of meaning (see Liu, 1995). The emphasis on the politics of translation has made an important impact in the study of intellectual history and by extension, the problem of translation would appear to be an essential method to problematize the writing of production of Marxist ideas in East Asia. The implication of such a deconstruction of meaning would imply the potential fracturing of Marxism, which as a signifier standing in for a body of thought would not be able to withstand the splintering of meaning as practices of translation took place. So we have an antinomy between, on the one hand, the idea of a simple transfer, without any explanation of how this is possible, and on the other, theories of how meaning is radically re-invented, such that the continuity is broken and the unity of a body of thought is placed under erasure. The above antinomy poses a question concerning how to be reflexive about discussing Marxism in East Asia and prompts us to ask how such a theme of inquiry becomes possible. The question of language mentioned above entails with it a larger question of how to understand the universal and the particular. Marxism, which is an ostensibly universal theory, is here being received in a particular region, namely East Asia. This volume is concerned with this problematic from various interdisciplinary perspectives and in the following pages we introduce ways to think about Marxism and East Asia by drawing on the work of the various authors. This volume grew out of a conference, organized by Joyce C.H. Liu and Viren Murthy, held at the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan that brought together two major Marxist theorists, Moishe Postone and Harry Harootunian, specifically to engage with the seminal debate between their different readings of Marx’s Capital, especially the problem of temporality, universality and particularity in Marxism. Postone, in his book Time, Labor

2  Viren Murthy and Joyce C.H. Liu and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (1993), expounded a Hegelian reading of Marx, which contends that with the advent of global capitalism, there is one contradictory logic that envelopes the world and consequently one dominant temporality in the world. Against this Postonian challenge, numerous articles appeared, including Harootunian’s recent book Marx after Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism (2015). In this book, Harootunian rereads Marx, highlighting concepts of multiple temporality, unevenness and the formal subsumption of labor under capitalism. In the first section of this volume, we have included the conflicting standpoints of Postone and Harootunian, as well as those of two renowned East-Asian Marxist-inspired intellectuals, Wang Hui and Karatani Kojin, who we believe each speak in different ways to the above problematics of capitalism, universality, particularity and temporality. After engaging this major theoretical debate, we will discuss how the more empirical chapters, which attempt to bring Marxist theory and history together, articulate with the above opposition between different types of Marxism and present for us the diverse trajectories of the reception of Marxism in East Asia.

Perspectives of capital: universality, particularity and temporality Moishe Postone’s book Time, Labor and Social Domination was a major event in Marxist theory and presented to the Anglophone world a radically new Hegelian reading of Marx. The importance of this reading of Marx for Asian studies has only been uncovered in the past decade or so, initially by works in India and more recently by essays and dissertations on East Asia (Sartori, 2009; Werner, in this volume). In some ways, this reading of Marx goes directly against a dominant mode of doing Asian studies that stresses the particularity of various cultures, be they Chinese, Japanese or Korean. In the case of Chinese history, the particularist position underscores that there was something specific about Chinese culture that made it different from the Western world even during the modern period. Notice that this perspective, represented in Chinese intellectual history by people as diverse as Thomas Metzger (1986) and Chang Hao (1987), was itself a response to an earlier thesis by Joseph Levenson (2016 [1968]) which stressed the incorporation of modern China into a larger global problematic. The implication of Postone’s thesis would be a return to Levenson, but with a Marxist twist. Postone’s Marxist twist is indeed complex, because he rethinks both Marxism and the global problematic. In particular, Postone contends that most Marxists have missed the real crux of Marxist thought because they operate with a transhistorical conception of labor. In other words, they have a vision of labor that was there from the beginning and gradually comes to its own through capitalism and is finally liberated in socialism. Against this, Postone argues that rather than criticizing capitalism from the standpoint of labor, Marx articulated a critique of labor in capitalism. Consequently, in Postone’s view, labor is not a transhistorical category and, perhaps more importantly, abolishing capitalism implies not realizing

Introduction  3 labor but abolishing it. There is an important political corollary to Postone’s point. He claims that in general, workers’ struggles in capitalist society are movements within capitalist society and do not point beyond. At this point, some of the implications for East Asian studies are clear, especially given Mao’s emphasis on labor; however, to grasp the full challenge of Postone’s work, we need to delve further into the concept of totality that he develops through the work of Georg Lukács (1972). In short, Postone contends that what makes capitalism unique is the universal mediation by labor. In precapitalist societies, labor was governed by overt relations of domination, such as the relationship between lord and serf. But in capitalist society, the proletariat is not directly dominated by the capitalist; rather they enter into a relationship of equals. In capitalist society, we labor in order to buy commodities that contain the congealed labor time of other human beings. In this way, capitalism is a society in which both the commodity form and a particular form of labor are universalized and this universalization itself contains a more totalizing and yet more subtle form of domination. Postone makes an original analogy between Hegel’s Spirit and Marx’s concept of capital. He contends that in capitalist society, capital operates similar to Hegel’s notion of Spirit, which becomes a self-moving subject and includes not only economic relations, but cultural, political and intellectual aspects of life as well. In Postone’s view, capital grounds the contradictions of the modern world, be they cultural, economic, intellectual or political. As capitalism becomes global, these contradictions also become global. Moreover, capital has an uncanny ability to incorporate all types of resistance. For example, following Postone’s logic, one could say that throughout the twentieth century various attempts to affirm national particularity have ended up reproducing the universal and particular dimensions of capital, because the nation-state is itself an expression of the commodity form. One might conclude that Postone has produced a Marxist night in which all cows are capitalist and consequently does not allow for difference. However, we must realize that his argument works at an extremely high level of abstraction and consequently allows for enormous variety. In short, all countries in the global capitalist world will not look the same. In fact, given that levels of productivity would be different in various parts of the world, there would be necessarily unevenness on Postone’s view and the nature of this unevenness would change through time. For example, China and India’s respective positions in relation to the uneven world of global capitalism are radically different at the turn of the twentieth century and at the turn of the twenty-first century. One could perhaps say that this is because the entire structure of global capitalism has changed, even while the basic dynamic propelling it has remained constant. Although Postone’s perspective focuses almost exclusively on capitalism and therefore does away with any simple modernization theory, the consequences of his theory of Third World Marxism are devastating. In particular, similar to more orthodox views of Marxism, Postone contends that socialism is only possible in a society or a world with massive increases in productivity and technology. In Postone’s

4  Viren Murthy and Joyce C.H. Liu view, socialism becomes possible when and where increasing mechanization has made proletarian labor obsolete with respect to the production of material wealth. The increase in mechanization allows for the possibility of abolishing proletarian labor and consequently of ending capitalism. Given that such mechanization did not take place in countries on the periphery of global capitalism, socialism was not possible there. Instead, what such countries needed to do was to find a means to create capitalism in those regions. Thus in Postone’s view, despite all the ideology about constructing socialism, Mao’s China actually successfully created capitalism–state-capitalism. Harry Harootunian presents a different approach to global capitalism, which stems from some concerns with the above Hegelian Marxist line and also from an interest in the role of Asia and the Third World within such a paradigm. Harootunian affirms Postone’s perspective with respect to the importance of global capitalism but contends that capitalism operates differently. He would claim that Postone’s picture represents capital’s own self-image of its penetration throughout the world, but the actual reality is different. Indeed, in Harootunian’s view, capitalism presents this image of itself as all-pervasive in order to make resistance look impossible. However, he contends that although capitalism appears to have really subsumed all areas of the world and all things in it, in actuality such subsumption is never complete. Harootunian’s work and his essay in this volume begins with an intuition that brings us back to a number of texts to which Marxists have recently turned their attention. In particular, he attempts to see whether there is room in Marxist theory to allow more room for possibilities of resistance from countries on the periphery of global capitalism, the former “Third World,” or the global South. To use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s words, Harootunian’s question is: does Marxism imply relegating these countries to the “waiting room of history,” where they must learn to become capitalist before they can create a vision of a socialist future (Chakrabarty, 2000)? This question should of course recall to us the famous letter that Marx wrote to the Russian revolutionary, Vera Zasulich. Put simply, Zasulich asked whether given that Russia had not fully developed capitalism, whether following the theory outlined in Marx’s Capital, Russian socialists would have to first promote capitalism before turning to struggle for socialism. So while Russians would not quite be in a waiting room, they would have to catch up before they could go beyond. Marx wrote many drafts of this letter and sent a brief response that did not really answer the question definitively. However, in one of the drafts, he affirmed that since Russia is in the global capitalist world-system, it would not have to merely follow the path of other capitalist countries. Rather, Russian socialists could draw on earlier communal forms of life, which persist despite the introduction of capitalist forms of production. To address such issues, Harootunian innovatively invokes the terms real and formal subsumption in Marxist theory. Normally, Marxists associate formal subsumption with an initial stage of capitalist production, when capitalists make use of earlier forms of production in order to produce profit. In Capital, Marx sometimes connects this early form of capitalism to the production of absolute surplus value. In other words, at this point, capitalists do not increase surplus value by

Introduction  5 mechanizing the process of production, but rather by lengthening the working day. However, with the real subsumption of labor under capital, capitalists can increase surplus value even after the working day is fixed at eight hours. They now increase surplus value by increasing the amount that one produces in one hour. This can be done by changing the structure of production, for example through cooperation, technological innovation and other means. The real subsumption of labor under capital could be used to explain the radical technological changes that have occurred throughout the last hundred years. However, Harootunian here makes two points, one explicit and the other implicit. First, he contends that if the transition from formal to real subsumption is taken to be a general rule, the effect is similar to modernization theory. Areas where formal subsumption predominates are in a waiting room or need to catch up to those where real subsumption has been achieved. Against this narrative, Harootunian contends that the transition to real subsumption is never complete. Indeed, in his view, we should not think of formal and real subsumption as stages. Capital constantly reconstitutes something that it cannot completely absorb and this vague outside could be a point of potential resistance. With this last formulation, we come to the second implicit point that Harootunian makes, namely that of expanding the scope of the terms real and formal subsumption. In Harootunian’s view, we should not narrowly understand formal and real subsumption in terms of absolute and relative surplus value; rather, the terms encompass more than this. Harootunian uses these terms to refer to a much larger problem in Marxist theory, namely the role of vestiges or remnants in the Marxist theory. The idea that real subsumption is never complete implies for Harootunian that the remnant never goes away or that capitalism can never completely incorporate its outside. On this view, there will be large areas of the world where formal subsumption is predominant and where earlier forms of life and practice persist, despite being in a context of capitalist production. With the concept of formal subsumption, Harootunian grounds Dipesh Chakrabarty’s category of History 2 in a theory of capitalism. Recall that for Chakrabarty, History 2 referred precisely to those forms of life that were antecedent to capital and that capital could not quite incorporate into its logic (Chakrabarty, 2000). With such theoretical issues in sight, Harootunian returns to numerous Third World Marxists who all stressed this persistent unevenness and contended that unevenness could be mobilized positively. In some sense, he is saying that we should not throw Third World Marxism into the dustbin, just because the so-called Third World no longer exists. Rather, the world of unevenness that they described continues and can be described in huge areas in the world, in places such as China, India and Africa, where real subsumption is only one form among many modes of subsumption. In Harootunian’s view, we still need to think about the political possibilities of such unevenness, and areas where people appear superfluous and are only formally subsumed under capitalism. From Harootunian’s perspective, the inability of complete subsumption is not merely the result of the greater productivity of labor and is especially acute where capitalism entered through imperialism and could never absorb all the labor that existed there.

6  Viren Murthy and Joyce C.H. Liu Although Wang Hui does not directly deal with Postone or Harootunian’s respective works, his history of the Chinese present and his analysis of the “new poor” in China allows readers to reflect on their respective theories in relation to a Marxist attempt to make sense of contemporary China. As we recall, Postone’s theory encourages us to think of East-Asian history within the context of a global capitalism within a single contradictory logic. Moreover, from his perspective, Mao’s attempt to create socialism ended up creating state-capitalism, which dovetailed with the general tendency of the world in which Fordism was the dominant mode of production. Note that this also follows from Postone’s claim that socialism could not emerge in a country that had yet to make great technological advances. Consequently, all such countries would have to engage in the state-led development of capital. Harootunian’s framework, on the other hand, and his theory of formal subsumption in particular, allow for different paths in Third World countries, where capital had not subsumed all of life and labor under its logic. In general, we could say that Wang Hui follows Harootunian in affirming the possibility of socialism in nonindustrialized regions, but Wang’s narrative affirms working-class struggles and at times comes close to affirming Postone’s position, especially when it comes to the present. In particular, he repeatedly emphasizes that workers’ struggles in contemporary China are struggles in capitalism rather than pointing beyond capitalism. However, while Postone saw this is as being the case even for worker struggles in the early twentieth century, on this point Wang radically disagrees. Indeed, the major point of his chapter rests on a contrast between the status of workers during the Maoist period and the present. He contends that old workers had successfully turned their struggle for economic interests into a political movement and eventually helped to create a workers’ state. By making this comment, Wang has brought up the issue of the state, which has been a hurdle for Marxist theory. In Wang’s view, we cannot conclude that because the world is capitalist, that every state within that world is capitalist. Rather one would need to examine the various mediations that make up each particular state. According to Wang, the Chinese state during the Mao period was not capitalist because, among other things, it had eliminated the market. Here again the contrast with Postone is clear, since on his reading the market is merely one possible way of organizing capitalism. We cannot fully go into this issue here, but should highlight what is at stake here. In Wang’s view, without the market, the nature of competition between various firms becomes extremely different because socially necessary labor time is politically mediated. Proponents of the state-capitalist thesis could of course point out that China was competing in the global arena and Mao famously said that he would surpass the United States. However, readers will have to judge whether Chinese competition in the global arena could be understood as the type of competition that occurs between two capitalist enterprises. Again here, the question of how one understands the state in relation to capital becomes crucial. At this juncture, the Japanese Marxist Karatani Kojin’s work is important because he is particularly concerned with the state’s relation to capital (Karatani, 2003).

Introduction  7 Although Karatani would agree with Postone about his judgment about Mao’s China being a form of state-capitalism, Karatani insists on analytically separating the logic of the state from that of capital. Moreover, in his chapter in this volume, he asks how we can rethink world revolution for the present day. His thinking moves him from Marx to Hegel to Kant, who dreamed of an idea of perpetual peace. In Karatani’s view, following Kant, such a world requires thinking globally and Karatani places his hopes on the potential in transnational organizations such as the United Nations.

Trajectories of Marxisms in Japan, China and Korea The four chapters that open this volume set the theoretical stage for the rest of the chapters in this book, which are more specific to Japan, China and Korea. In the four opening chapters of the book, the issue of difference in a global capitalist world is key. Consequently, it is fitting to begin the more historical section of the book with an essay by Max Ward, who explicitly attempts to make sense of the problem of difference with respect to Japanese studies. Ward picks a topic especially germane to this volume, namely the study of Japanese Marxism. He shows how studies of Japanese Marxism and non-Western Marxism more generally have been stuck in an antinomy between stressing Asian particularity, thus making non-Western Marxism irrelevant or eliminating particularity, consequently negating the historical specificity of the non-West. To help us think our way out of this conundrum, Ward reads Dipesh Chakrabarty and Harry Harootunian’s respective works and shows how a theory of capital that allows for difference could point a way out of the above impasse. Elena Louise Lange’s contribution continues the volume by turning to an important Japanese Marxist, Uno Kōzō. Uno was a Marxist in postwar Japan with a considerable amount of followers. Indeed, even today, we speak of an Uno-school of Marxism. A chapter on Uno fits perfectly into our volume for a number of reasons. In particular, he began a revisionist interpretation of Marx and emphasized circulation at least as much as production, which influenced a whole generation of Japanese intellectuals, including Karatani Kojin. Moreover, he provides an excellent case for the problematic that Ward poses in his essay, namely how to treat Japanese Marxists without provincializing them. Lange consequently provides a rigorous critique of Uno’s interpretation of Marx’s theory of value. In short, Lange contends that Uno fails to understand the importance of production and fetishism in Marx’s labor theory of value. Lange also shows that although he has received less attention than Uno, the Japanese Marxist Kuruma Samezo debated Uno and anticipated many of the points that Lange makes in this essay. Moreover, Lange shows that the debate between Uno and Kuruma, which she continues on the side of Kuruma, has extremely significant consequences for thinking of politics. To bring these political consequences out, Lange draws on Postone’s idea of how the working class is constituted by capital and that we should be attuned to how capitalism itself produces the possibility of its negation.

8  Viren Murthy and Joyce C.H. Liu Lange however adds that such a possibility can be seized only by bringing back working-class politics of a different type. On this point, she gestures again in the direction of Wang Hui, who laments the de-politicization of working-class movements in China. Moving to China, Rebecca E. Karl’s essay echoes some of Harootunian’s concerns about global unevenness and shows the ways in which many of these ideas were anticipated by Chinese economist Wang Yanan, who wrote during both the prewar and postwar periods. Karl explains how Wang theorized the comprador in relation to the unevenness produced by global capitalism and the international system of nation-states. Karl’s analysis also leads her to rethink the relationship between capital, unevenness and temporality. In particular, she affirms that when thinking of global capitalism, we should be alert not only to geographical unevenness, but also multiple temporalities, which pervade the everyday. Moreover, Karl explores how Wang analyzed the manner in which bureaucratic capitalism, far from being something culturally specific to China, had to be understood in relation to global unevenness. Following Karl’s essay, Jake Werner takes another perspective on China, this time drawing on Postone’s Marxism in order to rethink early twentiethcentury Chinese history. In particular, Werner attempts to read this period of history in relation to the global transformation from liberal to Fordist capitalism more globally. Such a project is essential to the Postonian standpoint, since if we can talk about one global dynamic of capitalism, we should be able to locate similar transformations in various parts of the world. Werner consequently argues that Shanghai is a microcosm of the global system. Werner follows Postone in contending that, according to Marx, the market is not an essential part of capitalism and that capitalism is based on a unique form of labor. He suggests that the Chinese Revolution of 1949 was not a break from capitalism, but rather meshed with the larger global shift from liberalism to Fordism. Werner’s chapter presents a world in which global capitalism structures all differences, so that they must be conceived as of secondary importance. Joyce C.H. Liu continues the volume by focusing on two famous, but as yet understudied, philosophical events in Mao’s time, that is, “one divides into two” and “the struggle between Confucianism and Legalism.” Through a reading of these two instances, along with other works by Mao and other Chinese Marxists, she enquires about the history of Chinese socialism in the twentieth century. In particular, she asks why the promises of the socialist revolution turned into their opposite; in her words, struggles against inequality were paradoxically reified into a socialist state bureaucratic system. Indeed, in making such a remark, she echoes Postone and Werner in claiming that what Mao created was not just a socialism, but a mixture of socialist practices following USSR’s model with a form of state-capitalism. In the rest of her inquiry, she draws on a series of intellectuals, including those whom she terms as early socialists in pre-modern China, and pre- and post-1949 China, such as the Chinese Marxist economist Yang Xianzhen, the Marxist Confucian scholar Zhou Yutong, as well as

Introduction  9 the Chinese-Uyghur Marxist historian Jian Bozan, to seek the possibilities of socialism in the non-institutionalized history of People’s Republic of China. With Seung-wook Baek’s chapter, we move from Marxists in China and Japan to Marxist movements in Korea. Baek introduces us to Marxist politics in 1980s Korea and places this in the context of global neo-liberalism. He examines the politics of People’s Democracy (PD), which emerged in the 1980s and experienced a number of setbacks throughout the next decades. Baek points out that the failures of PD should not be understood merely in the context of local Korean politics, but in relation to larger global crises, such as the financial crises of the 1990s. Using the term PD, he attempts to theorize a huge range of movements connected to Marxism and the struggles of labor to the larger category of democracy. Echoing Wang Hui, Baek attempts to search for the political in relation to movements related to workers. Finally, Viren Murthy brings the volume to a close by taking a number of theories of Marxism into the context of intellectuals, not usually associated with Marxism, such as Takeuchi Yoshimi, Kuan-hsing Chen and Wang Hui. Murthy examines each of these intellectual’s views about Asian identity and attempts to place them within a Marxist analysis of history, drawing on both Postone and Harootunian, while dealing explicitly with Wang Hui. Takeuchi wrote in early postwar Japan, while Chen and Wang write in contemporary Taiwan and mainland China respectively. Consequently, analyzing their works enables Murthy to examine how ideas of Asian identity are reconstituted across both time and space, during a period when unevenness is also globally reconstituted. While none of the above thinkers are Marxists in the traditional sense, each of them are interested in Marxist issues of social transformation. Takeuchi was writing in Japan during the period that Wang Hui in his contribution to this volume characterizes as the period of the workers’ state in China, when workers were able to translate their movements into political results. Chen is very interested in Takeuchi’s critique of modernization theory and his affirmation of Asian identity, but pushes Takeuchi into a space bereft of the Chinese Revolution. Murthy compares Chen’s discussion of Takeuchi’s legacy with Wang Hui’s recent discussion of Asia and revolution. In this context, again the legacy of the Third World and the possibility of radical social transformation in places that have not been really subsumed by capital return. The volume as a whole poses different perspectives on the problem of universality and particularity in global capitalism and the problem of real and formal subsumption. Where we position ourselves with respect to this debate will influence how we think of not only East-Asian Marxism, but more generally Marxisms outside of Europe. If Harootunian is correct and real subsumption in various senses of the word is never complete, then the questions of Third World Marxism are not passé. But how do we rethink this legacy in the present moment? Following Postone, we should conclude that today the nature of inequalities in the world has changed. As a result of technological changes, the problem of superfluous people, especially in the global South, has become increasingly severe. This surplus might become a political force in a future politics of unevenness. For this to happen,

10  Viren Murthy and Joyce C.H. Liu we would need to return to Wang Hui’s problematic of repoliticization within a deeper understanding of global capitalism. Following Karatani, we should affirm that such repoliticization would have to envision transforming capitalism through transnational institutional change. In their different ways, these various chapters attempt to deal with responses to problems generated by global capitalism. We hope that this volume will help the reader in thinking through these issues with us.

Part I

Perspectives of capital Universality, particularity and temporality

1 Deprovincializing Marx Reflections on a cultural dominant Harry Harootunian

The shadow of history The aim of this essay is to put into question the category of “Western Marxism.” My purpose will be to examine and reflect on how its particular hegemony during the Cold War conjuncture eclipsed both the claims associated with its long history in Russia and the Soviet Union but also excluded Marxian readings that occurred in the colonial and semi-colonial world of Euro-America’s periphery before World War II and throughout what came to be named as the Third World in the postwar years. Lack of expertise prevents me from providing a detailed account of the former, while time constraints limits what I can say about the latter. Marxian thinking in the interwar period in the Soviet Union was largely subsumed under Stalinist modernization, whereas the world on the periphery beyond EuroAmerica—the colonial world—was consigned to the classification of backwardness and underdevelopment—temporally retrograde—that could be overcome through modernization makeovers enlisting Western developmentalist assistance. While the Marxism in the industrial periphery during the interwar period was momentarily yoked to the Comintern and its internationalist aspiration, this putative unity quickly splintered into fragmentary constituencies primarily because of the war. During the Cold War interim, Western Marxism itself, according to Perry Anderson, sacrificed a rich and heterogeneous genealogy for the figure of a homogenous interpretative strategy, founded on the presupposition of unity based on geographical contiguity that had long given up on the anticipated “withering of the state” or indeed the prospect of an imminent social revolution for the vocation of performing a critical cultural analysis of capitalism’s domination of the social formation. In time, this inflection moved increasingly to emphasizing the importance of value over production and history and the capacity of the former—value theory—to bracket the latter—production and labor (history). Much of this narrowing of Marxism was undoubtedly a response to the perception, made explicit by Walter Benjamin, that historical materialism itself was literally infected by the idea of progressive developmentalism introduced by the Second and Third Internationalist revisions (even though he showed little interest in the world outside Europe apart from the Soviet Union). This meant taking on board comparative trajectories that classified societies according to a ranking

14  Harry Harootunian system that situated them along a developmental arc from advanced to backward. Benjamin’s powerful intervention sought to rescue historical materialism from this fatal affliction, which had transmuted Marxian historical practice to resemble bourgeois historiography, joining both at the hip of social history. It is important to recall that the term “Western Marxism” was used in the early postwar period by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to differentiate Georg Lukács’s earlier intervention (History and Class Consciousness) from the Soviet readings of Marx, beginning with Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-criticism. According to Karl Korsch, Lukács’s Soviet critics described his now classic text as “Western Marxism” (Merleau-Ponty, 1973: 59–61). For Merleau-Ponty, the postwar moment and the violence he identified with Soviet Communism and the Party, in his description as hiding in the “shadow of Marx,” provided the occasion to retread the Marxian path to determine where the immense departures and distortions took place. In a sense, this return to Marx in the postwar era, which is usually identified with Louis Althusser, was in effect inaugurated by Merleau-Ponty a decade earlier, despite its chosen path to resuscitate a more humanistic vision. With this tendency toward constructing cultural critique, rather than concentrating on the making and movement of history, the inadvertent effect of promoting the figure of “Western Marxism” resulted in reinforcing the realization of capitalism’s claim to “real subsumption” and the completion of the commodity relation. In fact, this presumption accompanied a turn to the sovereign status of the commodity form as an all-encompassing structuring force of the social formation. This image of an achieved capitalist society in the West dramatized further the contrast between advanced development—modernization, as it was named—and backwardness, resulting in a further abandonment of a meticulous historical materialism founded on a close investigation of specific and often singular contexts sensitive to identifying real differences. Provincializing Marx meant adhering to a rigid conception of a Marxian historical trajectory constrained to upholding a particular progressive narrative all societies must pass through, on the template of a geographically (and culturally) specific location exemplified by Britain as Marx “sketched” its genesis of capitalism in volume one of Capital. This scenario, a shadow of Marx’s history, derived from the Second and Third Internationals, was subsequently reproduced in the imaginary of the nation-form to become its principal historical vocation. It is ironic that the proponents of “Western Marxism” in the Cold War struggled to win the hearts and minds of newly decolonized unaligned new nations, which were more preoccupied with philosophy, as such, than history, whose movement remained bonded to the promise of development leading to capitalism’s present or to the time-lag—a discordant temporality announcing its difference from normative time—that nations beyond Euro-America had yet to cover in their effort to “catch up.” What apparently had been forfeited was a perspective capable of recognizing the very unevenness lived by all societies, both the putatively advanced and the backward, as a condition of fulfilling capital’s law of accumulation. Yet, in the new Cold War alignment, “Western Marxism’s” progressive distancing from the economic for the cultural, especially in the domain of aesthetic production, art and literature, which contributed to valorizing

Deprovincializing Marx  15 the values of a specific (and provincial) cultural endowment as unique, superior and universal, regardless of its critical intent, constituted a modality of thinking more redolent of Max Weber’s comparative sociology than a critical undermining of capitalism’s “superstructural” strongholds. Specifically, the principal casualty resulting from the preoccupation with a mature capitalism (real subsumption)— the relations of the immediate process of production—risked sacrificing historical capitalism as a subject of inquiry. The consequence of this neglect meant overlooking both the depth and complexity of its multiple pre-capitalist formations, what Marx called “historical presuppositions.” But it also signaled a failure to take notice of the “distinct configurations, forms of the accumulation process, implying other combinations” for a commitment to one “unique configuration” (Banaji, 2010: 9). What this closing down of such historical complexity demanded is an evolutionary pathway based on a universal model requiring replication everywhere. An example of this compulsion traditionally articulated in Marxian historiography is the insistence on identifying and accounting for the figure of the classic transition from feudalism to capitalism, when no such agenda ever appeared in mature texts like the Grundrisse (feudalism is rarely mentioned and only to explain how the archaic Germanic communities evolved into this form), while in Capital Marx appeared more concerned with primitive or original accumulation and feudalism is mentioned for illustrative purposes to explain the process in Britain, the West and in an often observed footnote referring to Japan’s feudalism. (I will show later that the figure of such a transition was even inappropriate in Japan.) The paradox of this presumption is the consensus that has persistently overlooked Marx’s own observation concerning the process of original accumulation: “The history of this expropriation (in original accumulation) assumes different aspects in different countries, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different historical epochs. Only in England, which we therefore take as our example, has it the classic form” (Marx, 1990: 876). Marx altered the wording of this passage in the French edition to underscore the particular modality of original accumulation he was portraying was limited to Western Europe: but the basis of the whole development is the expropriation of the cultivators. So far, it has been carried out in a radical manner only in England: therefore this country will necessarily play the leading role in our sketch. But all the countries of Western Europe are going through the same development, although in accordance with the particular environment it changes its local color, or confines itself to a narrower sphere, or shows a less pronounced character, or follows a different order of success. (Cited in Anderson, 2010: 179) With this widening of perspective, the way was opened to envisioning other forms of expropriation outside of Europe. If Marx envisaged history as embodying distinct and multiple economic forms, especially in Western Europe, and instantiating the heterogeneity of such forms, modes of production which differed from each other, it is also true that when

16  Harry Harootunian he referred to the example of England he denies that his “historical sketch” of the origins of capitalism is anything more than a description that applies to Western Europe and not “a historico-philosophical theory of a general course fatally imposed on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed . . .” (Shanin, 1983: 136). “Success,” he concluded in his letter to a Russian journal, “will never come with the master-key of a general historico-philosophical theory, whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical” (ibid.). By contrast, the economic emergence characterizing Western Europe overshadowed the “monotony” and static histories of Asia, which became another way of speaking of “non-development” (Banaji, 2010: 349). The Asia figured in the Asiatic mode of production included a vast region from the Middle East to China, as well as Russia (which Lenin called an “Asiatic State”), apparently based on the absence of private property and where the ruling class was subsumed in a State dominating a population inhabiting a large number of stagnant and isolated village communities. But Banaji has rightly called this mode a “default-category.” Yet, we know that in the Grundrisse Marx showed a particular interest in the global prevalence of communities founded on the recognition of communally held property, where proprietors also worked the land as cultivators. In this text, Marx distinguished these archaic settlements as “natural communities” and “agricultural communities,” a later development, which varied from time and place but eventually signified a persisting tributary system as the preeminent pre-capitalist form. By the time he got around to reading M.M. Kovalesky’s close account of India (1870s), his notes disclose he had abandoned any fidelity to earlier ideas of an all-encompassing Asiatic mode of production, especially the absence of private property and classes between the sovereign and the isolated village communities (Banaji, 2010: 20). According to his notes, he was specifically opposed to Kovalesky’s categorization of pre-capitalist India as feudal, in view of his (Marx) observation of the absence of serfs.

Time and history Even before Marx turned to these ethnographies, he had already reformulated his views concerning the “labor process” or “organization of labor” shaped by the received circumstances of certain kinds of production in industry and agriculture (Banaji, 2010: 350). It is with the introduction of the category of formal subsumption (and its corollary real subsumption), appearing in the “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” which had not been available to earlier generations (and is now an Appendix to the English translation of Capital I) that provided the analytic optic through which to grasp the refractions of specific forms (not stages) informing the “restructuring of the labour processes to generate surplus value” (ibid.).1 In Grundrisse, Marx defined formal subsumption simply in the following way: “Capital proper does nothing but bring together the mass of hands and instruments which it finds on hand. It agglomerates under its command” (Marx, 1993: 508; italics in original). The completed process was called real subsumption, which Marx related to the realization of “relative surplus” value and the role played by

Deprovincializing Marx  17 the introduction of technology and the factory system. But this is not to suggest that forms of subsumption, and especially the vastly overlooked idea of hybrid forms of subsumption Marx mentioned in the chapter on absolute and relative surplus value, are simply substitutes for the overstated category of transition nor is it to gesture toward some form of historicist stagism in disguise. In fact, subsequent Marxian analysts simply assumed the pairing constituted succeeding and progressive stages of historical development ratifying the template of linear temporality guiding history. Rather, I am suggesting it is a way to reinvest the historical text with the figure of contingency and the unanticipated appearance of conjunctural or aleatory moments and a heterogeneous history of unevenness filled with mixed temporalities. Marx referred to such specific processes in several texts (apparently first in his notebooks and in Grundrisse; ibid.: 853) and emphasized the co-existence of different economic practices in certain moments and the continuing persistence of remnants from earlier modes in new historical environments subordinated to the pursuit of surplus value. It should be recognized that this identification of subsumption was first and foremost expressed as form, with diverse manifestations, which often prefigured a specific content and invariably outlasted it. Moreover, this reformulation of the labor process was consistent with views that disavowed a unitary model and welcomed the prospect of different routes to national economic development. More importantly, an accounting of the specific ways labor has been subsumed in a formal modality opens the way to considering both the historical or epochal dimensions of the mode of production as it restructured the labor process, as well as its contingent direction, but also widens the angle of vision to include the world beyond Western Europe. This was especially true of how formal subsumption behaved in its inaugural moment, in societies where there was no clear differentiation between the domains of economic practice, culture, politics and even religion, which often were seen as integral to work in these persisting modes of production. Yet, it is possible to acknowledge how practices from the non-economic realm have continued to be pressed into service of capitalist production in societies in Asia and Africa and are frequently seen as indistinguishable from the performance of work. If Marx showed less interest in the putative “historicity” of precapitalist formations than the immediacy of the capitalist present, he nevertheless recognized in contemporary instantiations of persisting communal societies recalling the form of archaic society he had outlined in the Grundrisse and that were capable of supplying political and economic resources for later development. In this broadened scheme of possibilities, the most appropriate figure for development was unevenness and the temporal disorder it is capable of producing. Each present, then, supplies a multiplicity of possible lines of development, as Marx proposed in his draft letters to Vera Zasulich, when he envisioned the promise of the Russian commune freeing itself gradually from the fetters of primitiveness to promote production on a national scale. Yet, “precisely because it is contemporaneous with capitalist production, the rural commune may appropriate all its positive achievements without undergoing its (terrible) frightful vicissitudes” (Shanin, 1983: 106). Hence, “everyone would see the commune as the element in the regeneration of Russian society, and an element of superiority over countries enslaved by the capitalist regime” (ibid.). For Marx, the

18  Harry Harootunian Russian commune confronted a crisis that will end only “when the social system is eliminated through the return of the modern societies to the ‘archaic’ type of communal property. . . We should not, then, be too frightened of the word ‘archaic’” (ibid.: 107). What appeared important for Marx was the status of the contemporaneous co-existence of archaic and modern forms of economic production and the realization that the relocation of an archaic silhouette in the present redefined the remnant by stripping it of cultural and economic associations belonging to the mode of production in which it had originally functioned. In this regard, slavery, an ancient mode of production, surely was utilized in a number of societies to serve capital, principally in the American South and its plantation economy which, as Marx and later Luxemburg noted, was deeply implicated in the capitalist world marked in the nineteenth century and continues to function globally side by side with more technological forms of production down to our present. Unlike Marx’s glimpse of the shadow of the archaic commune in nineteenth-century Russian village life, Southern slaveholding society yielded no possibility for communalism and cooperation because both workers and land were reified and privately owned. I should also suggest the possibility that because subsumption was a form, it could embrace coexisting cultural, religious, political and social contents, no longer part of systems in which they originated and functioned and set loose from purposes they once might have performed, to now play new roles in a different configuration. (Again, one thinks of Southern plantation life and culture before the American Civil War and its exaggerated representations.) Finally, we must also take into account the different temporal associations represented by the remnant2 and the new mode of production. Here, Marx was moving towards envisioning plural possibilities for transformation among societies beyond Europe. In this scenario, such societies no longer needed to depend upon the pathway marking the moments of capital’s ascent in the West, especially the overdetermined category of transition. The category of transition, it should be noted, provided this narrative in Europe with a bridge for maintaining a continuous linear development from past to present—a narrative situated at the center of national history to explain the evolution of its modern society, and thereby supplying a historical deus ex machina, so to speak, to explain a continuity from origins to completion, past to present. One of its principal problems was the indeterminacy raised by how feudalism dissolved and capitalism emerged, whether certain agents like monarchical and aristocratic ambition worked directly to bring down feudalism in order to secure what actually replaced it, instead of supposing that feudalism collapsed of its own accord and the pieces were figured into a new constellation. There seems to be evidence available to suggest that in England the Tudor state supplied more than a “helping hand” in bringing feudalism down. As far as the specific controversy is concerned, its most important function has been to keep alive the transition yet to come from capitalism to socialism. In any event, the excluded societies on the periphery were no longer required to replicate the European mode promoted by the colonial experience, as thinkers from the margins of the capitalist world such as Rosa Luxemburg recognized in Africa (and Eastern Europe, no doubt) and Jose Carlos Mariategui observed of Peru in the 1920s, and could draw upon surviving residues from prior modes of production to

Deprovincializing Marx  19 create a new register of either “formal” or “hybrid” subsumption or bypass capitalism altogether. In one of his earliest essays, “The British Rule in India” (1853), Marx already raised the question of whether mankind could fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia. If not, he replied, whatever may have been the crimes the British committed, the nation was the unwitting tool of history in bringing about the revolution, but only if Asia fails to do so on its own and from its resources (Marx, 2007: 218–219). In this regard, the Grundrisse was more hopeful and geographically expansive when Marx remarked that “when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc. created through universal exchange?. . . The absolute working out of . . . creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historical development,” whereby mankind “strives not to remain something . . . [it] has become, but in the absolute movement of becoming” (Marx, 1993: 488). The chronicler of Western Marxism Perry Anderson proposed dating a defining “scission” between socialist theory and working-class practice after World War I and the “inherent structural divorce” among communist parties of the interwar era that would undermine any prospect for “unifying political and intellectual work” (Anderson, 1987: 92). The separation led to a division of economy and politics and philosophical reflection, principally expressed in a preoccupation with epistemology and “methodological impotence” and the “consolations” of art (ibid.: 94). Whatever the case, there was a widened distancing from the masses and a lessening of emphasis of importance placed on the level of international communication. Despite Marxian socialism’s initial commitment to internationalism it is evident that the movement, apart from the involvement of a bureaucratized Comintern, was always focused on the working class in Europe, not the peripheral world of colonial and semi-colonial regions. Anderson concludes that the division resulted in a disappearance of the “confidence” and “optimism” of the founders of historical materialism, suggesting both a weariness compounded by an acknowledgment of a diminution of the universalist aspirations of Marxism and a recognition that its geographic dependence had narrowed its reach. Ironically, Anderson’s text offers only a momentary glimpse of how Western Marxism might undertake an imminent criticism of its own historicity, unfortunately encouraging an end to such a necessary impulse rather than its beginning. “Historical materialism can exercise its full powers only when it is free from parochialism of any kind. It has yet to recover them” (ibid.). But this recovery was always available in Marx and all those who lived the different temporalities of their history on the periphery and sought to make sense of their place through the optic already provided in Marx’s texts.

Toward world history An unstated presumption of the category of “Western Marxism” has thus been its principle of exclusion while simultaneously embracing a claim to universality. Paradoxically, it shouted its own specificity in a geopolitical location— the West—and made its particularity a condition for the excluded Rest. In this

20  Harry Harootunian maneuver, there appeared to be little difference between earlier proponents of a universalist and cultural Western unity like Max Weber and Erich Auerbach from those postwar Marxists who gathered together in the uncertain precinct of a Western Marxism dedicated to serving the Cold War struggle to preserve “freedom” (the free market) against the challenge posed by the Soviet Union, now the embodiment of non-Western Marxism. Yet, it is well known that that even before the war, Edmund Husserl had already anticipated this conceit when he declared that only the West knew philosophy—a legacy willingly continued by “Western Marxism” down to the present. In this connection, we must thus recall the paradoxical effort of societies flanking the capitalist periphery to appeal to either literary form (especially novelization) or philosophy, which offered them no place to explain to themselves their entry into an experience of capitalist modernization. This quixotic search for meaning in a philosophy that provided them no explanatory place was led by Japan, owing to the good fortune of geography and a history that allowed the country to avoid colonization and to become a contender in the imperial contest leading to World War II. But even colonized regions drawn into the capitalist desiring machine through involuntary submission and coercion turned to philosophy to grasp their contemporaneous circumstances, usually some form of Neo-Kantianism, phenomenological existentialism (notably Heidegger) and Marxism as the privileged lens through which to refract the meaning of their capitalist existence, which signified for them the transit to “modernity” and the regime of the new, accelerated tempos of change for societies which only recently obeyed different temporal rhythms. While we must note conjunctural differences between the 1930s and the postwar era, it is still curious that the articulation of a Marxism belonging exclusively to the West actively resituated prewar European Marxian thinkers in the environment of the Cold War, turning to cultural analyses once the transfer was made and they recognized the futility of wishing the state away. This abandonment of the revolutionary impulse was consistent with Cold War polarized politics that saw the West as a cultural unity signaling “freedom” and actually constituted an inversion of a prior intention associated with Marxism. Moreover, the particular disposition of Western Marxism, safely insulated from colonization camouflaged by putatively developmentalist and growth theories like modernization theory, and the disarray of decolonization, was made to resemble the cultural turn of the 1970s that sought to privilege representation and the centrality of cultural-textual production. This moment recalls for us a particular historical conjuncture that would willingly supply the demand for new ways to look at history, culture and politics outside explicit political arenas and offer new theoretical agendas capable of fulfilling this mission. Yet we must understand this turn—apotheosized in the formation of cultural studies as compensatory for a revolution that never happened—in the wake of the Vietnam War, mass political mobilization everywhere (symbolized by Paris 1968) and the brief spectacle of the Third World “triumphalism” and the struggle against colonialism and Western developmentalist interference. It seems natural, then, that in order to escape the exceptionalism now associated with “Western Marxism,” and to provide it with a critique it foreclosed, and

Deprovincializing Marx  21 thus imagining the possible silhouette of a world history Marx believed had yet to be written, we must turn to precisely those Marxists on the periphery who were not conscripted by a subsequent provincialization but convinced they were involved in an undivided global effort in confronting the contemporary conjuncture. There are a number of choices before us, beginning with Lenin, especially his The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Rosa Luxemburg’s powerful meditations on expanded reproduction, Antonio Gramsci and his authoritative theorization of the “Southern Question,” Jose Carlos Mariategui, Wang Yanan, Uno Kōzō and others who sought to address the question of late development and development of capitalism in their own societies and disclose the specific relationships between the particular historical circumstances capitalism encountered. As I earlier suggested, time and a lack of expertise limits my example to Japan in the interwar period and brief accounts of interventions of the philosopher Tosaka Jun and economist Uno Kōzō. With Tōsaka Jun (1900–1945) and the group around the “Society for the Study of Materialism” in the 1930s, we have a powerful instance of how Marxism in Japan which, far from being an exclusive “club” valorizing cultural exegetics, saw itself as an inflection of a worldwide expression exceeding national and cultural borders that faced the challenge of fascism and imperialism. For Tōsaka and his generation, and even those Europeans subsequently segregated and baptized as “Western Marxists,” the solution to the contemporary problem they encountered was not culture, but capitalism manifest in crisis, fascism at home and imperialism abroad, and how ideological critique might yield a new way of articulating a relationship between politics and culture. Tōsaka was educated in the famous Kyoto School of Philosophy in the 1920s by luminaries like Nishida Kitarō and Tanabe Hajime, principally in the philosophy of science from Neo-Kantianism toward Marxism and especially the problem of envisaging a “scientific critique.” Once committed to a dialectical itinerary he embraced a full-blown materialism that persuaded him that the dialectical structure of “historical and social existence,” founded on the predominance of the “problem” over positionality, “content” over “form,” is grasped best through the “theoretical structure of the characteristic logic” (Yoshida, 2001: 302). Without benefit of having available Marxʼs Grundrisse, Tōsaka closely approximated Marxʼs conception of a methodological procedure “arising from the abstract to the concrete” by showing how ideology reversed the order from the concrete back to the abstract motivating it. What he wished to elucidate was the ideological character informing theory and logic. After the Japanese Communist Party was abolished early in the 1930s he became active in establishing and implementing The Society for the Study of Materialism (1932), which lasted until 1938, when it was finally shut down by the state. Tōsaka was at the center of an intellectual vortex that directed attention to envisioning a comprehensive theory of science on the one hand and on the other to mounting a powerful assault on liberalism, its abdication of political and economic freedom for “cultural freedom” and its inevitable complicity with fascism and capitalist cultural ideology, called Japanism (1935). His work was less concerned with meditating on culture, as such, than showing how a dissembling of its claims leads to a proper “actualization” of politics. At the same time, he opened

22  Harry Harootunian up a critical front against fascism as it had permeated everyday life in the 1930s that demonstrated how conditions of contemporary Japan simply inflected broader, global circumstances. The form of Japanist ideology was expressed in promoting the figure of archaism, instilling into everyday life transhistorical practices and modes of social organization that would anchor a modernizing society by mapping its past on the present. What Marxists like the economist Yamada Moritarō identified as feudal remnants residing at the heart of contemporary economic life, a history not yet past signaling temporal unevenness, Japanism aimed to implant invented and fictional markers, what might be called an “archaism of kinship” designed to uphold a patriarchal order by “primitivizing the present,” presumably derived from an indeterminate antique past as frozen emanations securing the countenance of an unchanging everyday (Tōsaka, 1970: 340–348, 328–340). In Tōsaka’s reckoning, cultural ideology elevated the ideal of “restoration” or archaism (fukko), and thus recalled the incomplete Restoration of 1867 and more recently Yamada Moritarō’s powerful analysis of a Japanese-style capitalism that continued to embody “feudal residues” as detours preventing the full development of completion of a capitalist social order. It should be noted that Yamada’s insistence on feudal remnants constituted a misrecognition, inasmuch as what he was describing was evidence of what Marx had called formal subsumption, how capitalism appropriated what was near at hand for utilization in its own production process. Tōsaka recognized that the intention of the ideology of archaism was to summon ancient values to anchor the new folk community in an unchanging historical identity. In this sense, fascism, which is always concerned with values, sought to substitute one system of accumulated value—abstract labor—for another based on cultural form that sought to replace abstraction with a putative cultural concreteness by integrating labor into a folk body. The result of this inversion exchanged materiality (economics) for ideality (culture). Even though Tōsaka acknowledged the persistence of real feudal residues in Japanese society, he saw how they supplied the occasion to reinsert archaic social and moral relationships as non-synchronisms made to superscript an everyday already rooted in lived mixed temporalities. Here, Tōsaka was able to perceive a maximum ideological effort to resituate everyday life in an atemporal, ahistorical zone of a timeless everyday. For him, the Japanese were no longer living in real historical time, but in the cyclic temporality of an ethnic-cosmic recurrence and/or interiorized psychological and phenomenological time (what he called “borrowed time”), both of which enclosed subjectivity from the external, objective world and its political and economic structures, distancing and shielding the subject from the outside and inducing acceptance of it. Clearly, this was not the archaism Marx had envisaged in Russia but closer to what he described in The German Ideology, thought that descended from heaven. The clue to Tōsaka’s critique lay in the status he attributed to “custom,” which, like the commodity, announced its eternality but concealed what lurked behind it. Custom was the “skin of society,” surface “social phenomena” that appear as concrete manifestations but are driven by “thought” (abstraction) that lay beneath it. In this regard, thought attains “bodily reality in society through the form of

Deprovincializing Marx  23 custom” (Tōsaka, 1972: 271). Tōsaka demonstrated this classic conversion in his reflections on academic philosophy and journalism, between a practice dedicated to the eventful immediacy of the everyday and transcendental thought—hermeneutic philosophy—that underlay it. In other words, the abstracted presence of custom led Tōsaka to the present, in fact the past in the present, and thus to everyday life and what he called the mystery of history and its temporality. In The Japanese Ideology, Tōsakaʼs critique moved from the material manifestation back to the (bourgeois) idealist philosophy it embodied as a reversal of the real materialist method, from “custom” and claim to moral force to its “philosophic character,” that is, the “content of a relatively unified world view” (Yoshida, 2001: 302). Whereas journalism was bonded to the “daily” and contributed to the formation of an ideological basis of the “everyday life of humans,” academic philosophy ignored everydayness altogether in its aspiration to transcend both the movement of the “real” and contemporary events. If the true calling of journalism was to report on “real movements” and “contemporary events,” disclosing its faithfulness to practical and political purpose, academic philosophy committed its energies to the culture of diverse disciplinary and specialized sciences, enabling it to act as a meta-discipline charged with the responsibility of integrating knowledge according to a unified world view. Yet, Tōsaka observed, both had failed to realize their respective vocations under contemporary capitalism: philosophy forfeited its basic function as a meta-discipline and journalism foreswore its obligation to public opinion and submitted to the lure of commercialization. As a result, journalism deserted its own ideological purpose to supply daily criticism of the events it reported and philosophy fell short of providing positive proof and verification. Moreover, a philosophy dedicated to the timeless and extramundane world of metaphysics ended up endowing a temporal and mundane everyday with the interpretative means for grasping meaning based neither on history (time) or social specificity—social relations and productive processes (space) but drawn from the nation’s frozen horizon of cultural heritage. At the core of this embourgeoisement of the philosophical formation was Nishida Kitarōʼs “logic of nothingness.” Tōsaka perceived in Nishidaʼs logic the quintessence of bourgeois philosophy and disputed usual accounts explaining that its method rested on the standpoint of nothingness rather than on being. Instead, it was a philosophy preoccupied with “self-awareness” or self-consciousness. For him, Nishida represented a completion of a “romantic” philosophical tableau stretching back to eighteenth-century German thinkers. What troubled him was how a “dialectical” philosophical method founded on the logic of nothingness resulted in clarifying only the meaning of that which had become dialectical. Dialectics, he proposed, was absent in Nishidaʼs philosophy that appeared driven by a logic concerned solely with “interpreting how to consider the meaning of dialectics [itself].” Hence, the logic of nothingness was a falsification, a “camouflage,” which exchanged the examination of things for the meaning elicited by the facts (Tōsaka, 1970: 340–348, 328–340). The real question raised by Nishidaʼs method related to how meaning is constituted separately from the facts, directed to deciding not what things are in “actuality,” but in determining how what conveys

24  Harry Harootunian meaning is “valued in the name of these things.” Convinced that Nishida had failed to recognize the separation of “existence” from the meaning assigned to it, Tōsaka concluded that his philosophy had no capacity to think through existence, as such. Ultimately, it was a philosophy of self-awareness that supplied a habitat for the homeless and culturally free consciousness of the bourgeois self. The economist Uno Kōzō (1897–1977) operated within the same historical climate and was able to survive the fascist regime that first silenced Tōsaka and then murdered him. His writings from the late 1930s prefigure a more ambitious intention to rethink Marx’s Capital, especially in view of accounting for the route of “late developers” like Japan, which had not been envisaged in the analysis of original accumulation, even though Marx acknowledged the possibility of different trajectories. It should be said, in this connection, that the category of “late developers” in Uno’s thinking implied no qualitative judgment but only a chronological fact. His specific concern was to explain Marxism in an age of imperialism and understand how the production of the nation-form—called the national question—was essential to Marxian theory. By this measure, he was convinced that Japan could not necessarily explain its national economic development according to the templates used to grasp the Third World, especially those regions that had become colonized. In a text on the agrarian problem, Uno gestured toward Lenin’s earlier analysis of Russian capitalist development by calling attention to the agrarian question at the hub of capitalism and its relationship to politics in countries like Japan that “capitalized after England” (Uno, 1974: 16, 26).3 It was the purpose of this particular text to show how capital logic was invariably blemished by historical contingency. Marx had, I believe, already foreseen the possibility of such an interruption of history in the separation of capital’s operations that linked the various categories of capitalism according to a sequence based on its logic rather than on the historical order of the emergence of the categories, that is, when they had entered into historical existence. Separation risked collisions between capital’s requirements and historical uncertainty. To this end he proposed the utilization of various forms of subsumption, even though he never actually used the concept that resembled Marx’s description of hybrid forms that would not follow the order of stages but rather synchronize the co-presence of different forms in any present. This was particularly true of the process of forms of “original accumulation” and its continuing co-existence with later industrial capital, where they are still produced and reproduced, according to Massimiliano Tomba, thus resulting in the “contemporaneity of anachronistic forms like slavery . . . in the background of the current modes of production” (Tomba, 2009: 63). With Uno, who had recognized the separation of capital logic and history, the strategy was to approach capital as pure theory, free from the contamination of history and politics, to show that feudal residues in Japan, however distorted, are still part of the capitalist present and working itself through it. Even though these survivors from prior systems of production appear as remnants, they now inhabit a different mode of production that expresses capitalism in a distorted form. Economists like Yamada Moritarō, by contrast, had proposed that Japan’s capitalist development had been marred by the presence of these feudal remnants that existed alongside

Deprovincializing Marx  25 newer economic practices to undermine the achievement of full development by situating immense contradictions at its center. For people like Yamada, the production of these contradictions possessed immense political consequences and were homologous to Japan’s abortive revolution of 1867, which transformed the political order into an absolute emperor-based despotism at the price of neglecting a necessary revolution of social relations. Instead of development of free workers, he charged, Japanese capitalism resorted to employing agricultural “semi-serfs” and transforming them into “semi-slave-workers.” Uno believed he had found a way to avoid the stagism implied in the subsumption process by recognizing in the figure of state intervention—especially in the instrument of state violence—the capacity to either accelerate development of a certain kind or delay it by freezing historically residual practices signifying original accumulation, as was the case of Okinawa in the 1880s or Gramsci’s plan to unify the Italian south and north. But Uno was also persuaded that the agrarian problem he had identified in Japan’s developmental itinerary was a problem of global capital. But rather than exceptionalize the Japanese case, like Yamada, he argued against the privilege of its “particularity” and proposed that it—Japan’s agricultural problem—reflected a larger global phenomenon inflected in local conditions. Here, he followed Marx’s own advice that while Britain’s development represented the earliest and most mature form of capitalism, it was not a model that could or should be followed by countries which came later to capitalization but still had the English example before them. Uno perceived that by the time countries like Japan (and Germany) encountered capitalism, it was through contact with Britain and industrial capitalism, which meant they could bypass earlier moments like merchant capital England experienced in the seventeenth century. Hence, late developing countries like Japan and Germany inaugurated the process of original accumulation through mechanized large-scale industrialism, which meant that capitalist production could be imported without forcibly dissolving the “medieval” agrarian village and thus separating large numbers of peasants from their means of subsistence. This did not mean that commodity production failed to penetrate the countryside, which it did to undermine the management of small cultivators (shono), but that the process of original accumulation was less wrenching and its powers of dissolution more slowly paced. Yet what Uno wanted recognized for late developing countries is how the process of dissolution was mediated by economically and historically different circumstances. Once Japan committed itself to importing capitalism from Britain, there was no apparent necessity to create a foundation accountable for consequences of the forcible separation of the direct producer from the land or the need to prepare for a surplus population in the cities capable of meeting the necessities of large-scale industry. In Uno’s view, the agrarian village assumed the responsibility for both, which meant that it continued as the place where small-scale agricultural management and even commodity production were carried out and provided, when necessary, its young men and children as workers when capital required it. While the capitalization process gradually undermined the feudalistic system of land ownership, communal lands were either privatized or nationalized. Moreover, in this unfolding narrative the

26  Harry Harootunian agrarian village gradually lost its household industries to large-scale industries in the cities. Yet at the same time that the countryside was being drawn into the capitalist vortex, Uno observed that relics of feudalism—Tokugawa-era social life—still persisted to exist in abundance even as the system in which they were formed was abolished. If this retention of remnants characterized all capitalist countries, as he believed, in Japan feudal thought, sentiment and customs, what he called “feudality,” and I would rename as the feudal unconscious, have continued to exist because they were preserved and even protected. While Uno wanted to relieve the state of responsibility of actually promoting the preservation of feudal remnants—overlooking its intervention in Okinawa—he was convinced that the real reason stemmed from the fact that the development of capitalism occurred without permeating the agrarian village, even though he acknowledged the partial presence of commodity production in the countryside. But the unfolding process of buying of labor power did not take place as it did in Britain. Despite their remote location on the industrial periphery, Tōsaka and Uno envisioned their respective tasks in the interwar period as consistent with, not apart from, the global struggle at hand to instantiate the singular and undivided vocation of Marx’s philosophy. With others who sought to explain specific historical and social circumstances in the process of capitalization in Asia and Latin America they provided further empirical reinforcement to Marx’s long-term historical vision that upheld the invitation of multiple and different routes to development. Their reflections based on local knowledge bespoke a commonality among Marxists outside of Europe sealed by the shared recognition of the necessity to explain the particularities of their own historical existence as it confronted the demands of capitalism, without resorting either to a simple replication of the “classic” model or the routes provided by colonialism. The contrasts between a putative Western Marxism and its deprovincializing other were reflected in different accounts of historical temporality and the status of the present. With Western Marxism, the observed turn to philosophy and epistemology, which, for many reasons too complex to deal with here, has resulted in a departure from considerations of the past and history for the present, implying the completion of the commodity relation and what might be described as a realization of a kind of transhistorical claim of real subsumption. Philosophy took Tōsaka both to the logic of scientific critique that permitted him to sort out the historical misrecognitions masked by “archaisms” and ultimately to the everyday—the now—wherein he situated the sources of history and its time, set against the internalized psychological time of phenomenological philosophy, the subjective domain of experiencing time that supplemented capital’s objective and externalized accountancy of time. Tōsaka projected a material and singular everyday as a way of overcoming the dualism and division between consciousness (idealism) and the material realm, the former represented by subjective time and the latter by the objective world of capital logic. Clearly, his decision to locate history’s time in everyday life, and especially the nowness of work, after unmasking the ideological historical distortions of archaism, constituted an effort to resolve the question of Japan’s past in the present. Here, he proposed that history and temporality belong to the everyday, embodying a heterogeneous and never

Deprovincializing Marx  27 completed historical present, where the made and making, production—work and politics—is carried out daily. Uno, too, sought to resolve questions specific to Japan’s past in light of the country’s late encounter with capitalism by showing why the residues—“feudality”—had become part of a new mode of production rather than fetters necessarily marring and undermining development. Owing to a philosophic penchant for bracketing out the historical and sociological dimensions of contemporary life, Western Marxism seemed to imply that the problem of the past had already been resolved, even though the persistent reminders of unevenness everywhere testified it had not disappeared. In its place it was preoccupied with the interrogation and critique of cultural forms in the capitalist present and the repetitions of the new, Benjamin’s “new as the ever-selfsame” and Adorno’s atemporal regime of “repress(ed) duration,” in short the absolutization of the now of modern life and the domination of capital’s accountancy of time.

Notes 1 It should be pointed out here that Marx referred to the conception of formal subsumption in earlier versions of Capital I in his discussions concerning absolute and surplus value. Moreover, much of the account on formal and real subsumpton that appears as the appendix “The Results of the Immediate Process of Production” was developed in vol. 34, “Economic Works, 1861–1864,” Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1994). 2 I’ve dealt with the problem of the remnant in a different essay (still in manuscript form) but should say here that perhaps it’s the wrong word to use to describe those older practices of labor and institutions capital appropriates for its own production process. The remnant usually implies inutility rather utility, a practice or institution that ceases to become a remnant when it is put to use in the capitalist production process. In this regard, the meaning of useless remnants resembles Georg Simmel’s description of the “ruin,” now consigned to a background where it is allowed to languish and open the way for its gradual subsumption into nature. The identity of a remnant signals an incomplete “transition” to capitalism, that is, the continuing persistence of formal subsumption and thus the failure to achieve completion. Capital’s favorite fable of itself. The identity of the remnant as a now useless residue in a present different from its own becomes the basis to consigning it to the realm of anachrony and with a lasting definition, presumably an offense to chronology as it expresses the historian’s “sin of sins.” 3 Uno Kōzō, “Nōgyō no mondai,” in Uno Kōzō, Uno Kōzō Chosakushū, vol. 8 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1974). I have also used the translation by Gavin Walker which appears in a forthcoming volume of Uno’s works in translation.

2 Marx, temporality and modernity Moishe Postone

Toward a renewed encounter with Marx Although I am by no means an expert on East Asia, I would maintain that an adequate understanding of its modern historical development—and, indeed, that of any country or region in the world today—cannot be based on considerations of local, national or regional conditions alone.1 Rather, such considerations must themselves be framed with reference to the global historical developments that mark the modern world. These developments, I suggest, can best be illuminated by a theory of capitalism, understood as a temporally and spatially dynamic form of social life that arose contingently in Western Europe, which it fundamentally transformed even as it also proceeded to constitute and reshape the globe. That is, contrary to some widespread assumptions, this form of life is not intrinsically Western, but has itself reshaped the West. It cannot, therefore, be adequately grasped in culturalist terms. Rather, I suggest, an adequate theory of capitalism—of this dynamic form of social life—can best be developed on the basis of a renewed encounter with Marx’s mature works. Why should we seek to reappropriate Marx’s analysis of capitalism? For many, the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s transformation marked the final end of socialism and of the theoretical relevance of Marx. This demise was also expressed, on another level, by the emergence of other kinds of critical theoretical approaches, such as poststructuralism and deconstruction, which seemed to provide critiques of domination that avoided the deeply negative consequences of what, for some, were grand programs of human emancipation. The current global crisis, however, has dramatically revealed the fundamental limitations of such newer conceptual approaches as attempts to grasp the contemporary world, and has exposed the onesidedness of what had been termed the “cultural turn” in the humanities and the social sciences. The continued existence of severe economic crises as a feature of capitalist modernity, as well as the growth of inequality, the prevalence of mass poverty, structural exploitation on a global scale and—above all—the dual crisis of environmental degradation and the hollowing out of working society, call into question the triumphalism both of neo-liberalism and post-Marxism. More generally, the far-reaching transformations of the world in recent decades have implicitly indicated that contemporary critical theory must be centrally

30  Moishe Postone concerned with questions of historical dynamics and large-scale structural changes if it is to be adequate to our social world. A focus on such transformations ultimately points to a basic rethinking of what is meant by history and temporality, a rethinking that can best be effected, I would argue, on the basis of a fundamentally reinterpreted critical theory of capitalism. Rather than considering temporality as a pre-given, unmoving frame within which all forms of social life move, such a theory grasps capitalism as a very peculiar organization of social life that constitutes its own, historically specific, temporality inasmuch as it is structured by historically unique forms of social mediation that are intrinsically temporal. These forms underlie a peculiar historical dynamic that is both historically specific and global. The temporalities of capitalism, then, are not extrinsic to it, but are intrinsic to its structuring social forms. The idea that the temporal dimension of capitalist modernity is historically specific implies that the framing conditions for historical investigations of the modern world are also historically specific. This, in turn, suggests that historical investigation must seek to be adequate to the temporality of its object of inquiry, rather than considering all human societies in terms of the same conception of temporal processes. Nevertheless, the approach I will elaborate also calls into question the notion that, in capitalism, a focus on temporal multiplicity marks a critical approach, as opposed to one that emphasizes an overarching temporal frame. A renewed encounter with Marx’s critical theory, I suggest, could provide the basis for rethinking capitalist modernity’s dynamics, its history and temporalities. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think that one simply can return to Marx as his theory was understood during much of the twentieth century. Both the decline of traditional Marxism and the increasingly manifest inadequacies of much postMarxism are rooted in historical developments that suggest the need to rethink, as well as reappropriate, Marx. I will attempt to indicate that, contrary to traditional Marxist interpretations, Marx’s critical theory is not, on its most basic level, a critique of a mode of class exploitation, undertaken from the standpoint of labor. Rather, more basically, it uncovers and analyzes a unique, abstract, temporal form of social domination ultimately rooted in a historically specific form of social mediation. This form of mediation, according to Marx’s analysis, structures modernity itself as a determinate form of social life. As I will elaborate, it is constituted socially by a historically specific function of labor and manifests itself in peculiar, quasi-objective, temporal forms of domination that underlie the historical dynamic at the very heart of capitalist modernity. Such temporal forms of domination, grasped by categories such as commodity and capital, cannot sufficiently be understood in terms of class domination or, indeed, of the domination of any concrete social and/or political entity. Within the framework of this approach, Marx’s critical analysis is not an affirmation of the central role played by labor in all human societies. Rather it is a critique of labor’s historically specific centrality to capitalist society and of the historical dynamic it generates. This reading of Marx’s analysis provides the basis, in my view, for a critical approach that could point beyond the increasingly manifest inadequacies

Marx, temporality and modernity  31 of poststructuralist and deconstructionist, as well as of traditional Marxist approaches. At the same time, it strongly suggests that a critical theory of capitalism is indispensable for understanding the contemporary world.

Theoretical implications of global transformations My emphasis on temporality, on the historically dynamic character of capitalist society, attempts to lay the groundwork for a theoretical response to the massive global transformations of the past four decades. This period has been characterized by the unraveling of the post-World War II Keynesian–Fordist synthesis in the West, the collapse or fundamental transformation of party-states and their command economies in the East, and the emergence of a neo-liberal capitalist global order, which might, in turn, be undone by the development of huge competing economic blocs. These developments, in turn, have thrown into relief an antecedent overarching historical trajectory—that of state-centric capitalism—which structured much of the twentieth century, beginning with World War I and the Russian Revolution, through the period of its most successful configurations in the decades following World War II, and its decline after the early 1970s. This overarching pattern has become increasingly evident historically. Significantly, it has been global in character, encompassing Western capitalist countries and the Soviet Union, as well as colonized lands and decolonized countries. Differences in historical development occurred, of course. However, from the vantage point of the early twentyfirst century, they appear more as different inflections of a common pattern than as fundamentally different developments. For example, the welfare state was expanded in all Western industrial countries in the 25 years after the end of World War II and then limited or partially dismantled, beginning in the early 1970s. These developments—paralleled by the postwar success and subsequent rapid decline of the Soviet Union—occurred regardless of which parties were in power. Consideration of such general developments has important theoretical implications. They cannot, for example, be explained in terms of contingent, local decisions. They also cannot adequately be grasped by the politics of identity or by theories of politics. Rather, they imply the existence of a historical dynamic in both the East and the West that is not fully subject to political control and that expresses general systemic constraints on political, social and economic decisions. This, in turn, suggests that the theoretical focus on agency and contingency in recent decades has weakened theory’s ability to elucidate our world. That focus now appears to have been as one-sided as the structural-functionalism it superseded. If the latter was widespread during the high tide of state-centric capitalism, the former has been so during the neo-liberal epoch. Neither general approach, however, has considered their relation to their historical context. This suggests that, unlike those approaches and, more generally, unlike any positive science, an adequate critical theory should be reflexive: it should be able to problematize its relation to its own historical context. Consideration of the overarching global transformations of the past century, then, calls into question a variety of theoretical approaches to society and history. It also

32  Moishe Postone suggests the importance of a renewed engagement with Marx’s critique of political economy, for the problematic of historical dynamics and global structural change is at the very heart of that critique, as are questions of historical reflexivity and issues of the relation of action and structure. Nevertheless, consideration of those overarching transformations also suggests that an adequate critical theory must differ in important and basic ways from traditional Marxist critiques of capitalism. I am using the term “traditional Marxism” to refer to a general interpretative framework in which capitalism is analyzed essentially with reference to class relations rooted in private property and mediated by the market. Social domination is understood primarily in terms of class domination and exploitation. According to this general interpretation, capitalism is characterized by a structural contradiction between its basic social relations (understood in terms of private property and the market), and the forces of production (interpreted in terms of labor, especially as organized industrially). The unfolding of this contradiction gives rise to the possibility of a new form of society, characterized by collective ownership of the means of production and economic planning in an industrialized context. Such a critique of capitalism is undertaken from the standpoint of labor. Hence, socialism would entail the historical coming to itself of labor, understood in social terms as the self-realization of the proletariat. There has been a broad range of very different theoretical, methodological and political approaches within the basic framework of what I have termed “traditional Marxism,” many of which have generated powerful economic, political, social, historical, and cultural analyses.2 Nevertheless, the limitations of that general framework itself have become increasingly evident in light of twentieth-century historical developments. These include the historical trajectory of the rise and decline of “actually existing socialism,” which paralleled that of state-interventionist capitalism (suggesting they were similarly located historically), the non-emancipatory character of such “socialism,” the growing importance of scientific knowledge and advanced technology in production (which seemed to call into question Marx’s so-called labor theory of value), growing criticisms of technological progress and growth (which opposed the productivism of much traditional Marxism), and the increased importance of non-class-based social identities. Together, these developments suggest that the traditional framework no longer can serve as the basis for an adequate critical theory. Consideration of the general historical patterns that have structured the past century, then, calls into question the adequacy both of traditional Marxism, with its affirmation of labor and history, as well as of poststructuralist understandings of history as essentially contingent. At the same time, such consideration does not necessarily negate the critical insight underlying attempts to deal with history contingently—namely, that if history entails the unfolding of an immanent necessity, it constitutes a form of unfreedom. This form of unfreedom is the object of Marx’s critique of political economy. In the Grundrisse, Marx characterizes capitalism as a society in which individuals have much more freedom from relations of personal domination then in earlier forms of society. However, this personal independence, according to Marx, is

Marx, temporality and modernity  33 situated within the framework of a system of “objective dependence” (Marx, 1973: 158). In Capital, he proceeds to ground that system in a form of social mediation that imposes quasi-objective constraints on human action. This is most tellingly manifested in the historical logic of capitalism, for the very existence of a historical logic indicates that human action is constrained in determinate ways. A central aspect of Marx’s analysis, I argue, is an attempt to delineate this form of unfreedom, that is, to grasp the imperatives and constraints that underlie the historical dynamics and structural changes of the modern world. His critique, then, is not undertaken from the standpoint of history and of labor, as in traditional Marxism. On the contrary, the historical dynamic of capitalism and the seemingly ontological centrality of labor have become the objects of Marx’s critique. In his mature theory, then, History, understood as an immanently driven directional dynamic, is not a universal category of human social life; neither, however, is historical contingency. Rather, an intrinsic historical dynamic is a historically specific feature of capitalist society (that can be and has been projected onto human social life in general). Far from viewing history affirmatively, Marx grounds this directional dynamic in the category of capital, thereby grasping it as a historically specific form of heteronomy. By the same token, Marx’s mature theory does not purport to be a transhistorically valid theory of history and social life. On the contrary, it is emphatically and reflexively historically specific. Indeed, it calls into question any approach that claims for itself universal, transhistorical validity. It should be evident that the critical thrust of Marx’s analysis, according to this reading, is similar in some respects to poststructuralist approaches inasmuch as it entails a critique of totality and of a dialectical logic of history. However, whereas Marx seeks to uncover the basis of these concepts in the peculiar structuring and historical logic of capitalist modernity while elucidating the possibility of their overcoming, poststructuralist approaches deny their existence by insisting on the ontological primacy of contingency. Seeking to expand the realm of freedom, such approaches obscure the dynamic form of domination that Marx elucidates with the category of capital. Consequently, such approaches are, ironically, profoundly disempowering.

Temporality and labor These assertions are based on an interpretation of Marx’s mature critical theory that focuses on reconstructing its most fundamental categories as the constitutive elements of that theory, rather than on statements made by Marx, frequently read out of context. As I shall attempt to indicate, these categories—such as commodity, value, capital and surplus value—grasp the underlying social forms generative of the heteronomous dynamic that characterizes capitalism. Traditionally, Marx’s category of value generally has been regarded as an attempt to show that direct human labor always and everywhere creates social wealth, which in capitalism is mediated by the market. His category of surplus value, according to such views, shows that, in spite of appearances, the surplus product in capitalism is not generated by a number of factors of production, but by labor alone, and is appropriated by the capitalist

34  Moishe Postone class. Surplus value, within this traditional framework, is a category that purports to demonstrate class-based exploitation (Cohen, 1988: 209–238; Dobb, 1940: 70–78; Elster, 1985: 127; Meeks, 1973; Roemer, 1981: 158–159; Steedman, 1981: 11–19; Sweezy, 1968: 52–53). This interpretation is, at best, one-sided. It is based on a transhistorical understanding of labor as an activity mediating humans and nature that transforms matter in a goal-directed manner and is a condition of social life. Labor, so understood, is posited as the source of wealth in all societies and as that which constitutes what is universal and truly social. This interpretation, then, is based on an ontology of labor. Within this framework, labor is hindered by particularistic and fragmenting relations in capitalism from fully realizing itself. Emancipation, then, is conceived of in terms of a society in which transhistorical labor, freed from the distortions of the market and private property, has emerged openly as the constituting principle of society. This understanding is related to that of socialism as the “self-realization” of the proletariat. The category of labor here constitutes the standpoint of the critique of capitalism. As suggested above, however, a close re-reading of Marx’s mature critique calls into question central presuppositions of the traditional interpretation. In the Grundrisse, Marx characterizes his fundamental categories as Daseinsformen, Existenzbestimmungen (Marx, 1973: 106)—forms of social being that are at once objective and subjective, social and cultural. They are not to be understood in narrow economic terms. Moreover—and this is crucial—those categories are not transhistorical, but are historically specific to modern, or capitalist, society (Marx, 1973: 100–108). Even categories such as money and labor only appear transhistorical because of their abstract and general character. This abstract generality, however, is the case only in capitalist society, according to Marx (Marx, 1973: 103). It is because of their peculiarly abstract and general character, that categories historically specific to capitalism can appear to be valid for all societies.3 (Note that by treating determinate forms of thought as forms of misrecognition, and grounding the latter in the forms of appearance of the underlying social forms of capitalist modernity, Marx is developing a social-historical epistemology that cannot adequately be grasped in terms of class interests.)4 This analysis also applies to the category of value. In the Grundrisse, Marx explicitly refers to value as the “foundation” of bourgeois production, as a form of wealth historically specific to capitalism, which he distinguishes from “real wealth” (Marx, 1973: 704–705). Whereas the former is constituted by direct human labor time expenditure, the latter is a function of a variety of natural and social factors, including knowledge (Marx, 1973: 702–703). Value underlies a dynamic system of production—capitalism—that generates huge increases in productivity, giving rise to the historical possibility that value itself could be abolished and that production could be organized on a new basis, one not dependent on the expenditure of direct human labor in production. In other words, the historical possibility emerges that what Marx termed “real wealth” could become the dominant form of social wealth. At the same time, however, value remains the necessary condition of capitalism. This contradiction between the potential

Marx, temporality and modernity  35 generated by the system based on value and its actuality indicates that, for Marx, the abolition of capitalism entails the abolition of value and value-creating labor (Marx, 1973: 704–706). This implies that the abolition of capitalism would entail the self-abolition of the proletariat, not its self-realization. In Volume I of Capital, Marx rigorously elaborates this analysis. Because of its immanent mode of presentation, however, his analysis has often been misread. By treating the fundamental categories of his mature critical theory as historically specific, Marx was reflexively treating his theory itself as historically specific. This meant that its form of presentation had to be consistent with the historically determinate character of the analysis. It should not, for example, proceed from a purported transhistorically valid point of departure. Rather, the point of departure had to be adequate to the historical specificity of its object and, reflexively, of the theory itself (Marx, 1973: 100–108). The point of departure Marx chose is the commodity (Marx, 1973: 881; 1996: 48). It is clear, in light of Marx’s considerations in the Grundrisse on the nature of an adequate point of departure, that the category “commodity” does not refer here to commodities, as they might exist in many societies. Rather, the commodity is treated by Marx as a historically specific social form of capitalist modernity, its defining core. As a structured form of social practice, it is also a structuring principle of the actions, worldviews and dispositions of people. That is, the category of the commodity, as used by Marx, is a form both of social subjectivity and objectivity.5 From this point of departure, Marx sought, in Capital, to analytically elucidate the nature and dynamic character of capitalist modernity. Because of the historical specificity of the object of Marx’s analysis as well as of his analysis itself, his exposition has an unusual reflexive form. Inasmuch as the point of departure of this critical theory cannot be grounded transhistorically, it could only be grounded immanently in the course of its unfolding. This is how Capital is structured. The categories of the beginning such as commodity, value, usevalue, abstract labor, and concrete labor are only substantiated retroactively, by the subsequent unfolding of the analysis (Postone, 1993: 128–132). The commodity, as a form of social relations, is peculiar, in Marx’s analysis— it is constituted by labor. Yet labor here is not—and could not be—transhistorical. Rather, labor in capitalism, according to Marx, is marked by a historically specific “double character;” it is both “concrete labor” and “abstract labor” (Marx, 1996: 48, 51–58). “Concrete labor” refers to any form of laboring activity that mediates the interactions of humans with nature. It is transhistorical, a condition of life in all societies. “Abstract labor” is a peculiar, historically specific category; it does not simply refer to “concrete labor” in general. Rather, as Marx indicated toward the end of the first chapter of Capital, labor acquires a unique social function when the commodity form is universalized (i.e. in capitalism), a function that is not intrinsic to laboring activity as such: it mediates a new form of social interdependence (Marx, 1996: 179–181). In a society structured by the commodity form, labor and its products are not socially distributed by traditional norms or overt relations of power and domination, as is the case in other societies. Instead, labor itself constitutes a new form of interdependence, where people do not consume

36  Moishe Postone what they produce, but where, nevertheless, their labor or labor products function as quasi-objective means of obtaining the products of others (Marx, 1996: 179–181).6 In serving as such a means, labor and its products pre-empt that function on the part of manifest social relations; they mediate a new form of social interrelatedness. Marx’s category of abstract labor refers to this historically specific mediating quality of labor. The unique centrality of labor to social life in Marx’s mature works is not, then, a transhistorical proposition. It does not simply mean that material production is the most essential dimension of social life. Rather, it refers to the historically specific constitution by labor in capitalism of a form of social mediation that fundamentally characterizes that society. Labor in capitalism, then, is not only labor as it appears—labor as we transhistorically and commonsensically understand it, according to Marx. It is also a historically specific socially mediating activity. Consequently, its objectifications are also dual: they are both concrete labor products and objectified forms of social mediation. This is at the heart of Marx’s analysis of commodity and capital. Within the framework of this analysis, then, the social relations that most basically characterize capitalist society do not appear to be social in any immediate sense. They are not like the qualitatively specific, overt social relations, such as kinship relations or relations of personal direct domination that characterize noncapitalist societies. The latter kind of social relations may continue to exist in capitalism. But what ultimately structures that society are historically new forms of social relations, constituted by labor, that have a peculiar quasi-objective character, and are dualistic: they are characterized by the opposition of an abstract, general, homogeneous dimension, and a concrete particular material dimension, both of which appear to be natural rather than social (and condition social conceptions of natural reality). The abstract character of capitalism’s fundamental form of social mediation is also expressed by its dominant form of wealth: value. As noted above, Marx’s “labor theory of value” frequently has been misunderstood as a labor theory of wealth, one that claims that labor, at all times and in all places, is the only social source of wealth. Marx’s analysis, however, is not one of wealth in general any more than it is of labor in general. He treats value as a historically specific form of wealth that is bound to the historically unique role of labor in capitalism. Similar to the distinction he makes in Grundrisse, Marx explicitly distinguishes value from material wealth in Capital, and relates these two distinct forms of wealth to the duality of labor in capitalism (Marx, 1996: 51–54). Material wealth, which expresses the use-value dimension of labor in capitalism, is measured by the amount produced and is a function of a number of factors in addition to labor, such as knowledge, social organization and natural conditions (Marx, 1996: 50). Value, the dominant form of wealth in capitalism, is an expression of abstract labor; it is constituted solely by the expenditure of socially necessary labor time (Marx, 1996: 49, 50, 55). Material wealth, when it is the dominant form of wealth, is mediated by overt social relations. Value, however, is both a form of wealth and a form of social mediation; it is a self-mediating form of wealth.

Marx, temporality and modernity  37 As a social form, then, the commodity is both abstract and concrete. These two dimensions constitute two different forms of generality. On the one hand, the combined labors of all commodity producers form an aggregate of various concrete labors; each is a particular part of a whole. On the other hand, all of these individual labors function in the same socially mediating way. Hence, taken together, they constitute a general social mediation, which has the same general quality on the individual level as on the level of society as a whole. Whereas individual labor, as concrete labor, is particular and is part of a qualitatively heterogeneous whole, as abstract labor it is an individuated moment of a qualitatively homogeneous social mediation that constitutes a social totality. Marx’s critical analysis of the historical specificity of value and of the emergence of the historical possibility that it be overcome is, at the same time, a critical analysis of the historical specificity of the social totality and of the emergent possibility of its overcoming. The double character of the commodity form does not only delineate a difference, within the framework of Marx’s analysis. The simultaneity within the same form of two opposed dimensions also grounds a dynamic; the value and use-value dimensions interact dialectically in ways that generate a complex temporal pattern. Marx begins to develop this basic characteristic of the fundamental social forms of capitalism when he initially determines the magnitude of value in terms of socially necessary labor time (Marx, 1996: 49). As a measure, socially necessary labor time is not simply descriptive. Rather it constitutes a norm that is socially general and compelling. Production must conform to this abstract, overarching norm if it is to generate the full value of its products. Note that the amount of value produced per unit time is a function of the time unit alone; it remains the same regardless of individual variations or the level of productivity. That is, the time frame (e.g. an hour) becomes constituted as an independent variable. Consequently—and this is a peculiarity of value as a temporal form of wealth—although increased productivity increases the amount of use-values produced per unit time, it results only in short-term increases in the magnitude of value created per unit time. Once increases in productivity become generalized, socially necessary labor time is re-determined and the magnitude of value per unit time falls back to its base level (Marx, 1996: 49). The result is a sort of a treadmill effect whereby higher levels of productivity generate great increases in use-values, in material wealth, but not proportional long-term increases in value per unit time. This, in turn, induces still further increases in productivity. (Note that this peculiar treadmill dynamic is rooted in value’s temporal dimension. It cannot be fully explained by the way this pattern is generalized, for example through market competition.) This treadmill effect is the first determination of the non-linear dynamic of capitalism. It expresses a historically specific abstract form of social domination intrinsic to capitalism’s underlying forms of social mediation: the domination of people by time, by a historically specific form of temporality—abstract Newtonian time—which is constituted historically with the commodity form (Postone, 1993: 200–216).

38  Moishe Postone One should not, however, consider temporality in capitalism only in terms of Newtonian time, that is, as empty homogenous time (Benjamin, 1977: 257, 260– 262), for that form of social life is also characterized by another temporal dimension. Capitalism, when fully developed, tends to generate ongoing increases in productivity. As we have seen, however, these increases do not change the amount of value produced per unit time. The same unit of time results in the same amount of value. In this sense, the unit of (abstract) time remains constant. Nevertheless, socially general increases in productivity do re-determine what counts as a given unit of time. They push the unit of (abstract) time forward, as it were. This movement is of time. Hence, it cannot be apprehended, within the frame of Newtonian time, but constitutes a superordinate frame of reference within which the frame of Newtonian time moves. What appears as an independent variable within the one frame is a dependent variable within the other. This movement of time can be conceptualized as historical time. By re-determining the abstract, constant time unit, this movement re-determines the compulsion associated with that unit. In this way, the movement of time becomes associated with a form of necessity. According to this approach, then, historical time does not represent the opposite of abstract time, much less its negation (as Lukács, for example, would have it). Rather, abstract time and historical time are dialectically interrelated. Both are constituted with the historical emergence and constitution of the commodity- and capital-forms as structures of domination (Postone, 1993: 287–298). What fundamentally characterizes capitalism, within the framework of this interpretation, then, is a historically specific, quasi-objective, temporal form of social mediation that is constituted by labor, that is, by determinate forms of social practice. Yet it becomes quasi-independent of the people engaged in such practices. (Practice here is not simply the opposite of structure, but constitutes it.) As we have begun to see, the result is a historically new form of social domination that subjects people to increasingly rationalized and impersonal imperatives and constraints that cannot adequately be grasped in terms of class domination or, more generally, in terms of the concrete domination of social groupings or institutional agencies of the state and/or of the economy. Although constituted by determinate forms of social practice, it has no determinate locus and, appears not to be social at all. So considered, Marx’s analysis of abstract domination, I suggest, is a more rigorous analysis of what Foucault tried to grasp with his notion of power in the modern world. Moreover, Marx’s analysis reveals the one-sidedness of Foucault’s notion of such power as capillary (Foucault, 1995). The form of domination Marx analyzes is not only cellular and spatial, but also processual. It is, at one and the same time, capillary and dynamic. The dynamic character of domination in capitalism can be grasped, as we have seen, in terms of a dialectic of abstract time and historical time, a dialectic that ultimately is rooted in the double character of capitalism’s fundamental social forms. This dynamic is grasped by the category of capital, which Marx initially introduces as self-valorizing value (Marx, 1996: 164–166).7 Capital, for Marx, then, is value in motion; it is a category of pure movement. It has no fixed material embodiment, no fixed form, but appears at different moments of its spiral of expansion in the

Marx, temporality and modernity  39 form of money and of commodities.8 Capital, then, is a ceaseless process of value’s self-expansion, an ongoing flux behind the phenomenal realm. It is a directional movement with no external telos that generates large-scale cycles of production and consumption, creation and destruction.9 As an aside, it should be noted that, when Marx introduces the category of capital, he describes it in the same terms that Hegel used in the Phenomenology with reference to Geist—the self-moving substance that is the subject of its own process (Marx, 1996: 164–166). Marx thereby suggests that Hegel’s notion that history has a logic—that it entails the dialectical unfolding of a historical Subject—is indeed valid. However, it is so only for capitalist modernity. Moreover—and this is crucially important—Marx does not identify that Subject with the proletariat (as does Lukács) or even with humanity. Instead he identifies it with capital, a temporally dynamic structure of abstract domination that is constituted by humans and, yet, becomes independent of their wills.10 Marx’s mature works, then, entail a critique of Hegel that represents a final break with his early “materialist” (anthropological) inversion of the latter’s idealistic dialectic. He now implicitly provides that dialectic’s materialist (social and historical) “justification.” In Capital, Marx implicitly suggests that the “rational core” of Hegel’s dialectic is precisely its idealist character. It is an expression of a mode of domination constituted by forms of social relations that acquire a quasiindependent existence, exert an abstract form of compulsion on people and, that, because of their peculiar dualistic nature, are dialectical in character.11 In his mature theory, then, Marx does not posit an anthropological meta-subject of history, such as the proletariat, which will realize itself in a future socialist society. Rather, he provides the basis for a critique of such a notion. This implies a position very different from that of theorists like Lukács, for whom the social totality, constituted by labor, provides the standpoint of the critique of capitalism, and is to be realized in socialism (Lukács, 1971; Horkheimer, 2002). In Capital, the totality and the labor constituting it have become the objects of critique. At the same time, unlike many poststructuralist thinkers, Marx does not simply deny the existence of the Hegelian Subject of history. Rather, he justifies the idea of that Subject as expressing the alienated structure of social mediation at the heart of the capitalism’s historical dynamic. Within this framework, the contradictions of capital point to the abolition, not the realization of the Subject. In Capital, then, Marx roots capitalism’s historical dynamic ultimately in the double character of the commodity and, hence, capital, as a dialectical dynamic of value and use-value. This dialectical dynamic, as we have seen, is logically implied by Marx’s treatment of socially necessary labor time in his preliminary analysis of the commodity form. It emerges more explicitly when he begins elaborating his concepts of surplus value and capital. This dialectic cannot be grasped adequately if the category of surplus value is understood only as a category of exploitation, as surplus value and not also as surplus value—that is, as a surplus of a temporal form of wealth. The category of surplus value, so understood, helps account for the nature of the capitalist process of production. Marx distinguishes two aspects of that process,

40  Moishe Postone which he grounds in the double character of the commodity form: it is both a process for the production of use values (labor process) and a process of generating (surplus-) value (valorization process) (Marx, 1996: 196–197, 207). Marx proceeds to show that the dynamic development of the valorization process molds the labor process. He does so by distinguishing between the production of absolute surplusvalue (where increases in surplus-value are generated by increasing total labor time and, hence, directly increasing the amount of surplus labor time) and relative surplus-value (where increases in surplus-value are effected by increasing socially general productivity, which indirectly increases surplus labor time by lowering the labor time necessary for workers’ reproduction) (Marx, 1996: 239ff., 319–325). The latter entails ongoing changes in the labor process. With the category of relative surplus value, the logic of Marx’s exposition, as outlined in the early chapters of Capital, becomes a historical logic, one that comes to characterize, and impart its “Hegelian” features to, capitalism. One aspect of this logic is a tendency toward temporal acceleration. Relative surplus value, according to Marx’s analysis, not only induces ongoing increases in productivity, but their acceleration: the higher the socially general level of productivity, the more productivity must be still further increased in order to generate a determinate increase in surplus value (Marx, 1996: 521–522). This intrinsic drive for ever-increasing levels of productivity entails ongoing transformations in the labor process itself involving, increasingly, the use of science and technology. It also results in ongoing increases in the masses of goods produced and material consumed. Yet the ever-increasing amount of material wealth produced does not represent correspondingly high levels of social wealth in the form of value. This suggests that a perplexing feature of modern capitalism—the absence of general prosperity in the face of enormous increases in productivity and, hence, in material plenty—is not a matter of unequal distribution alone, but is also a function of the value form of wealth that, according to Marx, is at the core of capitalism. The temporal dialectic I have briefly outlined also indicates that since higher socially general levels of productivity do not change the amount of value produced per unit time, they do not proportionately diminish the socially general necessity for labor time expenditure (which would be the case if material wealth were the dominant form of wealth). Instead that necessity is constantly reconstituted. Consequently, labor remains the necessary means of individual reproduction and labor-time expenditure remains fundamental to the process of production (on the level of society as a whole) regardless of the level of productivity. What is entailed, then, is a very complex, non-linear, historical dynamic of transformation and reconstitution. On the one hand, this dynamic generates ongoing transformations of production, of the division of labor and, more generally, of social life. On the other hand, this historical dynamic entails the ongoing reconstitution of its own fundamental condition as an unchanging feature of social life—that social mediation ultimately is effected by labor and that living labor remains integral to the process of production (considered in terms of society as a whole) regardless of the level of productivity. The historical dynamic of capitalism, then, is not linear. It ceaselessly generates what is new while regenerating what is the same. It increasingly points

Marx, temporality and modernity  41 beyond the necessity of proletarian labor while reconstituting that very necessity. More generally, this dynamic both generates the possibility of another organization of social life and yet hinders that possibility from being realized. This understanding of capitalism’s complex dynamic is, of course, only a very abstract initial determination. Capital’s drive for expansion, for example, need not always entail increasing productivity. It can also be effected by lowering wages, for example, or lengthening the working day. Nevertheless, what I have outlined delineates an overarching logic of capital’s development. The understanding of capitalism’s complex dynamic I have outlined can help illuminate two fundamental crises of the contemporary world: environmental degradation and the tendential demise of laboring society, that is, the interrelated crises of nature and labor. The approach outlined here allows for a critical social, rather than technological, analysis of the trajectory of growth and the structure of production in modern society. Within the framework of value theory, the temporal dimension of value underlies a determinate pattern of “growth,” which gives rise to increases in material wealth greater than those in surplus value (which remains the relevant form of the surplus in capitalism). This results in an accelerating demand for energy and raw materials as well as in the generation of everincreasing amounts of waste products that contribute centrally to the accelerating destruction of the natural environment. Within this framework, then, the problem with economic growth in capitalism is not only that it is crisis-ridden, as has been emphasized frequently by traditional Marxist approaches. Rather, the form of growth itself is problematic. The trajectory of growth, according to this analysis, would be different if the ultimate goal of production were increased amount of goods, rather than of surplus value. The distinction between material wealth and value, then, allows for a critique of the negative environmental consequences of modern capitalist production within the framework of a critical theory of capitalism. It allows for a position that points beyond the opposition between runaway, ecologically destructive growth as a condition of social wealth, and austerity as a condition of an ecologically sound organization of social life. The approach outlined here also provides the basis for a critical analysis of the structure of social labor and production in capitalism. It neither affirms the process of production in capitalism, nor treats it as a technical process that is used by private capitalists for their own narrow ends. Instead it provides a critique of that process on the basis of Marx’s analysis of its two dimensions—the labor process and the valorization process. As capitalism develops, according to Marx, the valorization process initially remains extrinsic to the labor process. The mode of laboring remains unchanged, although it now is used to generate surplus value (Marx terms this the “formal subsumption of labor under capital”) (Marx, 1996: 510–511). At this point, the relation of capital to production seems to be only a matter of ownership and control. Later, however, the valorization process begins to mold the nature of the labor process itself (the “real subsumption of labor under capital”) (Marx, 1996: 511). Far from being a technical process that is capitalist only because it is owned by capitalists, production now has become intrinsically capitalist (Marx, 1996: 364–370, 374ff.). This implies that production in a post-capitalist social

42  Moishe Postone order should not be conceived of as the same process as in capitalism under new auspices. Rather, it would entail a different mode of producing. As I shall elaborate, the possibility of such a new mode of producing is grounded in the real subsumption of labor itself. Real subsumption, in other words, does not mean that all possibilities of emancipation have been blocked—a view that presupposes that capital as a totality is a unitary whole. Such an understanding of capital as one-dimensional entails a basic misunderstanding of the categories and is related to an affirmation of labor as outside of and opposed to capital. Capital, according to Marx, however, is not unitary but contradictory; it points beyond labor and production as they exist in capitalism. This conclusion is reinforced when we examine Marx’s account of the transformation in the nature of capital and its relation to the immediate producers that occurs with the real subsumption of labor. As we have seen, Marx first introduces the category of capital in terms of the value dimension of labor alone, as self-valorizing value. In the course of his presentation in Capital, however, Marx indicates that the use-value dimension of labor historically becomes an attribute of capital as it develops historically. Initially, this appropriation of concrete labor’s productive powers by capital seems to be simply a matter of private ownership inasmuch the productivity of the whole still remains a function of the labor directly involved in the process of production, even if the labor of each worker becomes stunted (Marx, 1996: 326–370). One could still conceive of the social powers of capital as no more than a mystified expression of powers that “actually” are those of the combined workers. With the real subsumption of labor under capital, that is, once large-scale industry is developed, however, this is no longer the case. As a result of capital’s ongoing drive toward increasing productivity, production becomes based more and more on science and technology, which Marx treats in terms of the use-value dimension of labor, as socially general forms of knowledge, socially general productive powers. In such a situation, capital is less and less the mystified form of powers that “actually” are those of the workers. Instead, it increasingly becomes the real form of existence of “species capacities” that are called into being in the course of capital’s development. These capacities, then, are constituted historically in alienated form— that is, at the cost of the immediate producers (Marx, 1996: 326–370, 372–389). Nevertheless, this historical process opens up an emancipatory possibility. The development of capital renders the production of material wealth increasingly independent of direct human labor time expenditure. That is, it renders proletarian labor increasingly anachronistic. Yet because the dialectic of value and use-value reconstitutes the necessity of proletarian labor, this possibility is not realized in capitalism. The development of capital points to the possibility of the abolition of proletarian labor, according to this analysis, which contravenes the notion that overcoming capitalism entails the self-realization of the proletariat. This argument is developed further when Marx discusses the accumulation of capital. He argues that capital’s drive for increasing productivity gives rise to a long-term tendency toward increasing the amount of “constant capital,” of machinery, that is, of objectified science, relative to “variable capital,” that is,

Marx, temporality and modernity  43 living labor. Higher levels of productivity are developed that require less and less labor. This tendency gives rise to a relatively superfluous working population— the “industrial reserve army” of labor. Traditionally, this analysis has been read as an account of how capitalism exerts downward pressure on wages and as a critique of capitalism’s inability to provide full employment. This interpretation, however, is incomplete; it misses a central thrust of Marx’s argument—that capitalism’s drive for ongoing increases in productivity gives rise, in the long term, to a technologically sophisticated apparatus of production that renders the creation of material wealth more and more independent of direct human labor-time expenditure and, hence, of value. At the same time, value is reconstituted as the basis of the system. Hence, the real subsumption of labor under capital gives rise to the possibility of socially general reductions in labor time and basic changes in the nature and organization of labor. At the same time, the capital form constrains the realization of that possibility. Consequently, the development of technologically sophisticated production does not in and of itself liberate people from fragmented and repetitive labor on a socially general level. Similarly, labor-time is not reduced generally, but is distributed unequally, even increasing for many. This understanding of capitalism’s possibilities and constraints reconceptualizes its historical overcoming in terms of the self-abolition of the proletariat and the labor it does, as well as the elimination of the dynamic system of abstract compulsion constituted by labor as a socially mediating activity. By pointing toward the possibility of a transformation of the general structure of labor and of time, it provides the basis for a critique of both the traditional Marxist notion of the self-realization of the proletariat, as well as the capitalist mode of “abolishing” working classes by creating an underclass within the framework of the unequal distribution of labor and of time, nationally and globally. Note that the emergent possibility of a future, one in which surplus production no longer must be based on the labor of an oppressed class, is a double-sided one. It is, at the same time, the possibility of a disastrous development, one of environmental collapse coupled with a situation in which the growing superfluousness of labor is expressed as the growing superfluousness of people. The possibility of historical emancipation emerges historically in an inverted form such that the category of human appears as a problem.12 This suggests that the realization of the possibility that proletarian labor be abolished is not only desirable, but also— increasingly—a necessary response to a deep structural crisis of capitalism.

Contradiction and totality It should be noted that, by grounding the contradictory character of the social formation in historically specific dualistic forms (commodity and capital), Marx implies that structurally based social contradiction is specific to capitalism. In light of this analysis, the notion that reality or social relations in general are essentially contradictory and dialectical can only be assumed metaphysically, not explained. This also suggests that any theory that posits an intrinsic developmental logic to

44  Moishe Postone history as such—whether dialectical or evolutionary—projects what is the case for capitalism onto human history in general. Among the implications of this analysis, then, is that capital is a totality, but that “totality” is contradictory, not unitary. The Marxian notion of the dialectical contradiction between the forces and relations of production does not refer to a contradiction between relations that supposedly are extrinsic to production (for example, the market and private property) and productive forces that purportedly are extrinsic to capital (for example, labor). Rather, the dialectical contradiction is one between the two dimensions of capital itself. Capital, then, is a contradictory totality. It is generative of a complex historical dynamic that points to the possibility of its own overcoming by a social order based on material wealth. It points beyond itself even while constraining the realization of that possibility. This approach to capital—that it is not a one-dimensional, purely destructive, force—means that the possibilities of overcoming capital do not have to be found in that which is outside of, or not yet subsumed by, it. Rather, it is the emergence of a possible future that provides the standpoint of the critique—a possibility both generated and constrained by capital itself. This allows one to distinguish critiques of capitalism that are adequate to its constraints and the possibilities it generates, and those that are not—for opposition to capitalism does not necessarily point beyond it. Historically, much opposition can be, and often has been, subsumed by capital itself or swept aside as inadequate to the exigencies of the larger historical context. In other words, the critique of capital outlined here implies a notion of opposition that points toward determinate historical transformation, as opposed to opposition understood as “resistance”—a notion that is politically and historically indeterminate. The contradiction opening the possibility of another form of social life also grounds the historical possibility of conceiving of such a form. That is, by grasping the present form of society in terms of a contradictory dynamic, the theory grounds its own condition of possibility by means of the same categories with which it grasps its object. That is, it becomes self-reflexive. As such, it implicitly demands of any attempt at fundamental social theory that it be capable of accounting for itself as a historical possibility. Although the logically abstract level of analysis outlined here does not immediately address the issue of the specific factors underlying the structural transformations of the past 30 years, it can provide a framework within which those transformations can be grounded socially and understood historically. It provides the basis for an understanding of the uniquely dynamic character of modern society, and does so in a way that could elucidate the gap between the actual organization of social life and the way it could be organized, especially given the increasing importance of science and technology. This gap has been growing for decades. It has become expressed socially in the division of the population into a global post-industrial sector and one of increasing social, economic and political marginalization. This approach could also provide the basis for a critical theory of “actually existing socialist” countries as alternative forms of capitalist accumulation, rather than as social modes that represented the historical negation of capital, in however

Marx, temporality and modernity  45 imperfect a form. More generally, it separates the critical theory of capitalism from the affirmation of statist forms of development with which it had been associated for much of the twentieth century. Inasmuch as it seeks to ground socially, and is critical of, the abstract quasi-objective social relations and the nature of production, work and the imperatives of growth in capitalism, this approach could also begin to address many contemporary concerns, dissatisfactions and aspirations, expressed variously by a range of movements—often characterized by the politics of identity, including movements of social politics, nationalist movements and various forms of religious “fundamentalism”—in ways that could relate them to the development of capital, even if not in traditional class terms.

Social form and subjectivity I cannot here elaborate the notion that the categories should be interpreted not merely as economic, but as Daseinsformen, Existenzbestimmungen—categories that are both social and cultural, entailing determinate views of the world and concepts of personhood (although this theme was implied in the discussion above of Marx’s mature critique of Hegel). Let me touch upon the issue, however, by briefly sketching some aspects of the problem of equality. It could be argued that the historical emergence of the idea of abstract equality is very much tied to the historical emergence of the commodity form as the structuring principle of society. Formal equality is an implicit characteristic of the sort of relations constituted by the ongoing interactions of commodity owners. This ongoing form of everyday practices arguably molds more general conceptions of social life and human subjects (Marx, 1996: 65–69, 94–102, 186). Commodity owners, relating to each other reciprocally as formal equals, could appear to be simply “human,” separate from formal status hierarchies. Such an analysis might also help explain why, when the idea of general human equality was spreading, members of certain groups—women, the lower classes and slaves—were not deemed equal. They were not commodity owners, as that had become non-consciously coded. I am suggesting that, in such a historical context, where formal social and juridical hierarchies are no longer considered legitimate, equality could be culturally coded as ontologically human, and social inequality naturalized, for example, in the form of biologistic theories of gender and race. The historical intertwining of the ideas of general human equality, the acting subject, and the commodity form can also be illuminated with reference to Marx’s treatment in Capital of workers’ collective action. It is telling in this regard that his discussion does not simply support the common idea that collective action is socialist (or proto-socialist) because it is opposed to bourgeois individualism. Rather, collective action can render workers equal, that is, bourgeois, subjects. Let me elaborate: the labor contract in capitalism is a contract between commodity owners, between equals (Marx, 1996: 242). Yet, as Marx notes, once the worker enters the sphere of production, the relation becomes unequal (Marx, 1996: 177–186). Many have taken Marx’s analysis as indicating that the truth beneath the appearance of equality is inequality, that equality is merely a sham. This understanding, however,

46  Moishe Postone is one-sided and obscures an important historical dimension of labor contracts—that they are contracts between commodity owners. Within this framework, workers also begin to see themselves as rights-bearing subjects. The only way, however, that workers can actually realize their status as commodity owners is through collective action, which allows them to bargain over the condition of sale of their labor power, their commodity (Marx, 1996: 239–306). In other words, through collective action workers become manifestly what they had been only latently: equal to others, that is, (collective) bourgeois, rights-bearing subjects. This sort of collective action, based on a determinate sense of self, is rooted in the social form of the commodity as a form of subjectivity as well as of objectivity and contravenes common understandings of the Marxian project as based on a functionalist conception of subjectivity. The consciousness of workers as rights-bearing subjects does not, in and of itself, point beyond the limits of capital. However, it is a very different kind of consciousness than, for example, that of peasants rising up against feudal lords in pre-capitalist contexts. The subjectivities involved are fundamentally different. The workers, as rights-bearing subjects, develop a self-conception as agents. (One could argue that the very conception of agency is rooted in the forms of ongoing everyday practice structured as the commodity form.) Classical socialist movements affirmed collective action by workers and the expanded boundaries of equality associated with it. In a sense, their understanding of capitalism and socialism was such that they became movements for the democratization of capitalism.13

Concluding considerations Viewed retrospectively from the early twenty-first century, it has become increasingly clear that the structural configurations of capital—social, political, economic and cultural—have changed historically, from mercantilism, through nineteenthcentury liberal capitalism and twentieth-century state-centric Fordist capitalism, to contemporary neo-liberal global capitalism. Each configuration has been subjected to a number of penetrating critiques—for example, of class exploitation and inequality, of uneven growth globally, or of bureaucratic and technocratic modes of domination. As we now see, however, capitalism cannot be identified fully with any of its historical configurations. Hence, each of these critiques is incomplete. I have sought to differentiate between an approach that allows for an understanding of capital as the core of the social formation, separable from its various surface configurations, and critiques that, however sophisticated, ultimately are critiques of one historical configuration of capital. Only the former allows for an analysis of the underlying historical dynamic of capital and its secular tendencies—that is, for an analysis that points toward the possibility of a post-capitalist future. Conflating capital as the core of the social formation and historically specific configurations of capitalism has resulted in significant misrecognitions. Marx asserted that the coming social revolution must be oriented toward the future, and was critical of earlier revolutions that, focused on the past, misrecognized their own historical context. In that light, rather than facing a possible post-capitalist

Marx, temporality and modernity  47 future, traditional Marxism backed into a newer configuration it did not grasp. Informed by a misrecognition that focused on private ownership and the market in ways that conflated capital and its nineteenth-century configuration, it implicitly affirmed the new state-centric configuration that emerged out of the crisis of liberal capitalism. The unintended affirmation of a still newer configuration of capitalism can be seen more recently in the avowedly anti-Hegelian turn to Nietzsche that has characterized much poststructuralist thought since the early 1970s. Such thought, arguably, also backed into a future it did not adequately grasp. It focused its critique on the sort of state-centric order traditional Marxism implicitly affirmed in a manner that could not critically grasp the neo-liberal global order that has superseded state-centric capitalism in both East and West. The historical transformations of the past century, then, have revealed the weaknesses of much traditional Marxism as well as of various forms of critical post-Marxism. However, they also suggest the central significance of a critique of capitalism for an adequate critical theory today. By attempting to rethink Marx’s conception of capital as the essential core of the social formation, the analysis presented here seeks to contribute to the reconstitution of a robust critique of capitalism today that, freed from the conceptual shackles of approaches that identify capitalism with one of its historical configurations, could potentially be adequate to our social universe.

Notes   1 I would like to thank Fabian Arzuaga for valuable critical feedback. An earlier version of some arguments presented in this article were made in “The Task of Critical Theory Today: Rethinking the Critique of Capitalism and its Futures,” in Harry Dahms (ed.) “Globalization, Critique and Social Theory: Diagnoses and Challenges,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 33, 2015.   2 This would even include structuralism and Critical Theory, two dominant strands of critical Marx interpretations that sought to get beyond the traditional paradigm. Although Althusser, for example, developed a sophisticated critique of the “idealism of labour,” his focus on the question of the surplus in terms of exploitation, as well as on the physical dimension of production abstract from the temporal dimension of Marx’s categories and are related to what ultimately is a traditional understanding of capitalism (Althusser and Balibar, 1970: 145–154, 165–182). Responding theoretically to the historical transformation of capitalism from a market-centered form to a bureaucratic statist form, Lukács and members of the Frankfurt School implicitly recognized the inadequacies of a critical theory of capitalist modernity that defined capitalism solely in terms of the market and private ownership of the means of production. Nevertheless, as I have elaborated elsewhere, they remained bound to some of the assumptions of that very sort of theory (Postone, 1993: 71–120).   3 It should be noted that, more generally, Marx attempted to ground transhistorical projections of social forms specific to capitalism—even by thinkers such as Adam Smith and Hegel—with reference to the peculiarities of those forms rather than simply as the willful imposition of something “European” on the rest of the world. (The latter position tends to ignore the degree to which capitalism fundamentally transformed Europe as well, and deeply informed European expansionism as well as responses to it.)

48  Moishe Postone   4 Lukács understood Marx’s categories as social forms that are, at once, subjective and objective. However, his understanding of the categories remained based upon a transhistorical understanding of labor. See Lukács (1971).   5 This understanding of the categories suggests a powerful approach to culture and society, variously elaborated by Lukács, Sohn-Rethel and Adorno, which is quite different from the base/superstructure model.   6 It is the case that, earlier in the chapter, Marx presents “abstract labor” as transhistorical, as labor in general, as the expenditure of brain, muscle, nerve, etc. (Marx, 1996: 54–55). His explicit account toward the end of the chapter plus the logic of his argument make clear, however, that his transhistorical description is immanent—it expresses that the manifest form of labor functioning as a historically specific socially mediating activity that is not intrinsic to laboring activity as such is simply the expenditure of labor. As a result, what is unique to capitalist society appears as transhistorical, as physiological expenditure. In this way, Marx seeks to account for the category of labor in classical political economy, relating it to everyday understandings that themselves are molded by the social forms that uniquely characterize capitalism. Unfortunately, most Marxist discourses—as well as most critiques of those discourses—adopted classical political economy’s conception of labor. They took as transhistorical and affirmative a category that, for Marx, is historically specific and critical. It goes without saying that the ongoing implicit analysis of forms of consciousness in Capital, as a feature of its immanent critique, has been largely overlooked by such approaches.   7 We shall see that, as Marx determines further the category of capital, he indicates that like the commodity form, it has a double character; it encompasses both dimensions of labor in capitalism.   8 This retrospectively illuminates Marx’s analysis in the first two chapters of Capital of the commodity’s two-fold character and its externalization in the form of money and commodities.   9 This could be seen as the social/historical context for the notion of an underlying blind life force so widespread in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 10 Note the fundamental difference between this analysis and the structuralist assumption that social logic is synchronous and that history (mistakenly characterized as “diachrony”) is contingent. Here the only socially constituted logic is the historically specific logic of a historical dynamic—as a form of heteronomy. 11 In so arguing, Marx implicitly seeks to overcome the opposition of materialism and idealism. He does so by moving beyond the physicalism and philosophical anthropology of earlier materialism and recasting materialism as a theory of a historically specific form of social mediation. 12 Such sentiments have become expressed in some recent academic writings on “the Anthropocene.” 13 Many newer movements of the late 1960s and 1970s became critical of this form of equality. Although some sought to get beyond the opposition, endemic to capitalist modernity, of abstract equality and concrete particularity, many moved in the direction of particularism. Rather than getting beyond the oppositions generated by capital, they moved from one pole of the opposition to the other. As such, they failed to generate an adequate critique that pointed behind capital. Conservative anti-modernism also reject equality, but on different grounds. Nevertheless, there are some unfortunate convergences between the two, especially in the cases of more Romantic forms of anti-globalization and of anti-imperialism.

3 Two kinds of new poor and their future The decline and reconfiguration of class politics and the politics of the new poor Wang Hui Translated by Saul Thomas The new poor and the birth of the new workers Polarization between the rich and poor, between urban and rural areas, and between regions are normal conditions in the age of capitalism. Under these normal conditions, there is no question as to who is poor: relative to capitalists, workers are poor; relative to city dwellers, peasants are poor; relative to developed regions or the First World, underdeveloped areas or the Third World is poor. Marx explained the relationship between class exploitation and poverty as inherent to the relationship between labor and capital in his analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Theodore Shultz in The Economics of Being Poor centered his analysis of the poor on rural people. His concept of human capital was aimed at addressing the problem of rural development in the context of industrialization, but in fact it used the standpoint of development to ultimately negate the question of class. Dependency theory argues that capitalism continuously reproduces relationships between the metropole and the periphery, such that the Third World becomes a region dependent on the First, incapable of its own sovereign development and remaining mired in lasting poverty. This argument has been the theoretical conclusion of the application of class analysis to global relations since Lenin. Bankrupt and nearly bankrupt farmers, workers in the process of proletarianization and the masses of poor and hungry spread throughout the villages and urban slums of the Third World provide footnotes to this notion of the poor. After the Cold War, a change occurred in this idea of the poor. The most important factors propelling this change are those taking place under the direction of financial globalization: the new processes of industrialization and the development of information technology influencing the entire world, and the collapse of workers’ states and the concurrent and related development of a new international division of labor. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, newly rising economies produced outstanding achievements in manufacturing: China has been behind most of the changes. In 2000, China was responsible for 7 percent of world manufacturing output. By 2005 this had risen to 9.8 percent. Over the six years to 2011, China’s share doubled again to 19.8

50  Wang Hui percent. That put China above the US in terms of share of factory production. It was a historic change: 2011 was the first year for more than a century in which the US was anything other than the world’s top dog in factory output. (Marsh, 2012) As the new industrial revolution taking place under the conditions of economic globalization has changed the relationships between and positions of the advanced and developing countries, it has also created a new model of the poor. According to The Blue Book of Social Administration: Report on the Innovation of China’s Social Administration, China’s Gini coefficient in 1980 was 0.275, while by 2010 it had reached 0.438 (Lian, 2012). The largest portion of the new poor is made up of the so-called migrant workers—that is, those on whom urban and coastal industries and services now rely. This “floating population” has departed from agricultural production, yet to a certain extent preserves links to the land that was apportioned to them in the rural areas. This differentiates them from traditional farmers or rural people who have lost their land, such as hired agricultural laborers, transients or the type of poor now living in slums in Latin America or South Asia. At the beginning of the reform period, rural reform was aimed at reducing the urban–rural gap. Since the initiation of the urban reforms of the mid-1980s, however, this gap has continuously increased. By the end of the 1990s, the “three rural crises” (sannong weiji)—that “rural peoples’ lives are really bitter, the countryside is really poor, and agriculture is in crisis”—came to occupy the center of public discussion, and the relationship between poverty and the status of the rural areas in the context of urbanization and industrial reform became increasingly apparent. The bankruptcy of the rural areas, the impoverishment of rural people and the crisis of agriculture created a limitless supply of labor for the ever-expanding “factory of the world.” Discussion of the “three rural issues” opening up after 1999 and the subsequent attempts at new rural reconstruction pushed forth by the government were directed at this situation. The elimination of the agricultural tax and the expansion of the medical insurance system in the countryside produced significant achievements, and partially improved conditions in rural areas. But the “three rural crises” were not fundamentally solved. The vast rural areas still face the predicament of young people leaving, the old staying behind to till the land and the countryside emptying out. According to residential statistics, 240 million people in China had by 2008 migrated from the rural areas to the cities to look for work, over 60 percent of whom made up a new generation of “rural migrants” who had never participated in agricultural production and had no plans to return to the countryside. With the implementation of the new land transfer policy, this group of workers is transitioning from rural migrant workers with definite land rights into urban workers whose lives are in the cities and who cannot return to the countryside, but who are also barred from enjoying equal status with urban residents. They are also distinct from the classical proletariat—they are not farmers who were forced into the cities and the system of industrial production after losing their land. They are inheritors of land relations established in the socialist period, entering a new market society. The vast majority of them own a piece of land, and thus they are not “proletarians” (wuchanzhe: literally, people without

Two kinds of new poor and their future  51 property). After entering the cities this status did not change, but even under the conditions of the economic crisis, the many who returned to the countryside and neighboring rural areas did not necessarily return to agricultural production. Huang Zongzhi has shown in his new research that the traditional categories of “worker” and “farmer” are not adequate to describe the reality of contemporary Chinese society. Labor regulations established on the basis of these old categories are out of sync with the realities of laboring people, and to a large extent have become regulations which protect a minority of privileged blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, public functionaries and employees of medium- and largescale enterprises. He further argues that today the vast majority of laboring people in China are neither industrial workers in the traditional sense nor farmers in the traditional sense, but half-worker, half-farmers, people with rural residence permits who are both workers and farmers. Most of them exist outside of the protections of the labor laws. They are thought to provide temporary “labor services,” thus falling under the rubric of “labor service relations” rather than “labor relations.” Their living conditions fall far short of those of the actual middle class. Statistics show that the “formal economy,” in which workers (including those of the middle class) enjoy the protection of labor laws, accounts for 16.8 percent of employed people, and the “informal economy,” which employs the half-worker, half-farmer laboring people without the protection of labor laws, accounts for 83.2 percent (Huang, 2003: 69). This group of new workers is the product of shifts in the relations between classes and the growing opposition and polarization between the cities and the rural areas during China’s transformation into capitalism’s world factory. According to calculations in the 2013 Migrant Workers Monitor Survey Report issued by the National Bureau of Statistics of China, 27.5 percent of migrant workers are employed in the manufacturing sector, 20 percent in construction, and the remaining portion in the service sector (Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Guojia Tongjiju, 2013). Because the construction industry to a large extent relies on outside contractors and subcontractors, only a small minority of construction workers sign labor contracts, and the vast majority have no means of enjoying the protections of labor contract law. According to the “Plan for Paying Attention to the New Generation of Migrant Workers,” a large-scale research survey investigating the recruitment and employment of construction workers throughout the country and led by teachers and students from Qinghua University, Beijing University and Hong Kong Polytechnic University, in 2011 75.6 percent of migrant workers in the construction industry had not signed labor contracts, and of those who had signed contracts, 63.6 percent had not been given copies (Beijing xing zai renjian wenhua fazhan zhongxin, 2011). In reality, such contracts exist in name only. In 2013, 82.6 percent of migrant workers in the construction industry had not signed contracts. In the cities of Chengdu, Wuhan and Zhengzhou, where the number of new construction sites has increased rapidly, the percentage of workers who had not signed labor contracts in 2013 reached 85.5 percent, 87.9 percent and 93.2 percent (Pan and Wu, 2014: 57). While the situation is dire within the construction industry, it is even more difficult for workers in the service industry to obtain the protection of labor laws. In fact, to this day only migrant workers in the manufacturing industry have been able to express a meaningful degree of dissent and protest.

52  Wang Hui Shining light upon and integrally linked with the situation of new workers described above is the decline of the socialist-era working class. In the reform period, this group’s status quickly slid from that of an urban class with a relatively high degree of social influence into urban poor or unemployed. The profound nature of this transformation is little understood by most people today. Perhaps it will take another generation before we can fully understand its historical implications. The new workers far exceed China’s twentieth-century working class in number and scale, yet as a group they have almost no position within the realm of politics or culture. Even the question of whether they make up a “class” or a “stratum” is still debated by scholars. A separate group, different from both the traditional working class and the new workers, is far more active within the realm of politics and culture: those who can be called the “new poor.” This group, too, is the product of the industrialization, urbanization and spread of information technology brought about by globalization, but unlike the rural migrant workers, they are victims of a consumer society lacking in “internal demand.” They have often received higher education, work in various fields and live on the outskirts of the large cities. Their income, though similar to that of blue-collar workers, is insufficient to meet the consumptive demands stimulated by consumer culture. Aside from their material poverty, scholars often describe this group as “spiritually impoverished” and having “lost their social values” (even though those using these concepts have spiritual lives no more rich than those they describe). This type of poverty cannot be eliminated by an improvement in the economy. These are the new poor of consumer society, who, as described by Zygmunt Bauman in Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, are consumers without the ability to consume (Bauman, 1998). If the classical idea of the poor is that they are produced by capitalist processes, then the “new poor” are by-products of consumer society and consumer culture. At the same time, they are products of a capitalist economy’s move from manufacturing toward finance capital, from a real economy to a virtual economy. The new workers and the new poor together constitute the two sides of contemporary China’s concept of “poor people.” But discussing the new poor only from the standpoint of consumption risks overlooking the political capacity of this group. Due to the fact that the “new poor” often have relatively advanced cultural, educational and technological backgrounds, their understanding of the world is closely connected with developments within consumer society. In the realm of politics, it is not difficult to see their likeness in the protest movements of Egypt and Tunisia, the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, the various other “Occupy” movements that drew inspiration from it as well as the street demonstrations in Moscow. In contrast to the new poor born of the process of de-industrialization in Europe and the United States, China’s new poor sprout from the transition from a socialist to a post-socialist system. Their fate is intimately bound up with the change in the status of labor from being the central source of values to the means through which the value of capital is increased. But, similar to the situation in Europe and the United States, this group actively participates in new forms of media, and displays a much stronger consciousness regarding political participation and

Two kinds of new poor and their future  53 ability to mobilize its members than the new workers. From the micro-blogging platform Weibo to every other form of Internet media, the “new poor” are exceedingly active, and whatever topics they discuss reach all levels of society. But until today, the mobilizing ability and political demands of this group have had little to do with the newly ascendant working class or the fate of rural migrant workers. This is a stratum which lacks a long-term social goal. Its typical members are those who have extricated themselves from poverty, are active in consumer media and frequently reference global political and cultural discourses. But regardless of the particular rhetoric, these global political discourses use every means available to promote the idea that “history has ended.” The political potential of the “new poor” has yet to be explored: they are discontented and restless, but they cannot put forth a new political imagination. Their inability to satisfy their material desires disillusions them, yet they constantly reproduce a logic of action which exactly fits with consumer society. They care about social reform, and promote all manner of differing and sometimes mutually contradictory values such as democracy and freedom, equality and pluralism and nationalism and globalization, but they have given very little consideration to the connections between their own fate and that of the other stratum of new poor. Why, when discussing the new workers, must we raise the role and fate of the “new poor”? I offer this as an explanation: whether in traditional agricultural society or after the appearance of industrial society, the power behind great political and social changes has not come solely from the productive laborers—traditional peasants or productive workers in the modern era—but rather has been produced by the mutual interpenetration and stimulation of the “lower strata” of two or more social realms. Modern class politics in fact arose at the boundaries between classes where they overlapped; or, one might say, it was the product of crossing the boundaries between classes. After the 1911 Revolution, the commentator Du Yaquan claimed that, in spite of the fact that the revolution had been deeply influenced by political revolutions in Europe, “most of” the Chinese bourgeoisie did not understand what a constitutional republic was, and at the beginning had not necessarily even heard of such a thing. The revolution’s promoters were part of the surplus of the intellectual class, and those who joined were an army composed of the surplus from the laboring class. In fact, it differed little from overthrowing the emperor in the past. It took European revolutionaries as models, but the name “Republic of China” amounted to little more than a few ephemeral articles in the constitution. After the revolution, though it was claimed that an aristocratic politics could not be established, in fact the officials and military men who took power were for the most part vagabond (youmin) leaders transformed into new aristocrats. I cannot refrain from speaking of the lack of achievements of this political revolution. (Cang, 1919) This analysis was rooted in observations concerning peasant rebellions in traditional China—that is, that peasant uprisings were often the products of collaboration between “vagabonds” coming out of the peasant class and the fallen from the

54  Wang Hui ranks of the scholar-gentry. Following this logic, Du suggested that the path to transform China and realize positive political and social change should begin with eliminating the troublesome excess strata produced by these two classes as well as their cultures. In fact, this counterrevolutionary conclusion has many points in common with the view of the 1911 Revolution given in Lu Xun’s “True Story of Ah Q.” It differs, however, in that the former promoted civilizational remedies as a solution to China’s political problems, while the latter implied that political revolution could not be avoided. If we compare this analysis of vagabonds with Marx’s description of the formation of vagabondage and the proletariat, we can perceive two distinct yet related groups which come together to form the proletariat in the process of industrialization. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx states that “entire sections of the ruling classes are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress” (Marx, 1976b: 493–494). Groups which have lost their social position exist in every era, but only in the era of industrial capitalism did there exist the phenomenon of the vagabonds as a group becoming proletarians. In fact, even before the Communist Manifesto was published, Marx in The German Ideology had already given a clear account of the emergence of the proletariat: The entire proletariat consists of ruined bourgeois and ruined proletarians, of a collection of ragamuffins [Lumpen], who have existed in every epoch and whose existence on a mass scale after the decline of the Middle Ages preceded the mass formation of the ordinary proletariat, as Saint Max can ascertain by a perusal of English and French legislation and literature. Our Saint has exactly the same notion of the proletariat as the “good comfortable burghers” and, particularly, the “loyal officials.” He is consistent also in identifying the proletariat with pauperism, whereas pauperism is the position only of the ruined proletariat, the lowest level to which the proletarian sinks who has become incapable of resisting the pressure of the bourgeoisie, and it is only the proletarian whose whole energy has been sapped who becomes a pauper. (Marx, 1976c: 202) Thus, to Marx, the proletariat included vagabonds, but vagabonds were impoverished proletarians who had lost the power to resist. Class revolution arises from internal contradictions within the system of production, not merely from the phenomenon of impoverishment. Conservative commentators have attributed modern revolutions to the phenomenon of vagabondage, and in doing so have attempted to find ways to circumvent revolution and find a path to reform. However, the international division of labor and national oppression that arose during the age of imperialism caused members of every stratum within the oppressed nations—aside from the comprador stratum—to constantly face the prospect of bankruptcy. This new vulnerability and precariousness was initially understood by many in terms of the imminent danger of national enslavement or

Two kinds of new poor and their future  55 extinction. But over the next several generations, many activists made the transition from national salvation to class politics, or sought national salvation through class politics. Yet the fact of imperialism made class mobilization within the modern Chinese revolution different from Marx’s description of the interaction between classes during the European revolutions, and also different from the intersection of classes during the peasant rebellions of traditional China. Under the conditions of imperialism and colonialism, not only those from the ruling strata who had become newly destitute, but many from of the upper strata and the elite as well transcended the boundaries of class identity as determined by their property rights and social position and joined the tide of class and national liberation. Many pioneers of the 1911 Revolution era—such as Sun Yat-sen, Zhang Taiyan, Xu Xilin, Qiu Jin, Zou Rong and Cai Yuanpei—did not come from the lower ranks of society. Such figures of the New Fourth era as Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, as well as later revolutionary leaders such as Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, were likewise not from working-class or poor peasant families. The advent of the December 9th Movement in 1935 spurred a great number of progressive students to devote themselves to the cause of national salvation, many of them hastening to Yan’an to take up the banner of the Communist Party amid the extremely arduous conditions of revolution and war. It would be difficult to categorize these several generations of revolutionaries as “bankrupted members of the bourgeoisie.” On the contrary, at the time that they joined the revolutionary movement, they themselves or their families belonged to the middle or upper classes or the educated elite. The new workers and the “new poor” of contemporary China have characteristics different from the vagabonds of traditional agrarian society or the proletarians of the era of industrialization. The new workers still maintain a connection to the countryside through the land system, due to the historical legacy of the workers’ state. They are participants in the urban economy, yet retain specific rights to land in the villages. As to the “new poor,” they are not the products of the collapse of the traditional system, but rather a group with a certain level of education, dreams of advancement and unfulfilled consumer desires. Their concern for individual rights and related political reforms does not fundamentally conflict with the system of values of the newly emergent socioeconomic system. Even as new forms of media flourish and the division between classes widens, it is difficult for the new workers and the “new poor” to achieve genuine social unity and political cooperation. Thus there seems to be little prospect of their social unity and cooperation producing a new politics. Also clear is the degree to which contemporary Chinese intellectuals have been constrained by the forces of professionalization and social stratification. This situation contrasts sharply with the mutual interaction and cooperation between members of different social classes achieved during the general social mobilization of the twentieth century, which produced a social subject completely different from any of the old society—the aforementioned and formerly extremely active, but today utterly crushed, working class.

56  Wang Hui

An indeterminate subject: migrant workers, the working class or new workers? As discussed above, the new workers compose a group that many have become accustomed to calling the “rural migrant workers” (nongmin gong: literally, peasant-workers). Regardless of the fact that the new workers differ widely in their occupations, geographical locations and wages, they constitute an objective social group—that is, the group of dagongzhe (informally employed wage laborers working in the private sector) working and living in the cities but possessing rural household registration (Lü, 2013: 11). This group is the product of the reform and opening-up process initiated by the state. It is the product of the new policies, laws, standards of ethics, urban–rural relations and social model created in the process of China’s development into the world’s factory. This group resides, works and lives in the cities, but looks to the rural areas as “home”—the site not only of their hometowns, parents and children, but also of a portion of property given to them by the land policy left over from socialism. But the concept of “rural migrant worker” must be reevaluated. First, the mass media, government documents and some scholars use “rural migrant worker” to define newcomers from the standpoint of urban identity, particularly that of urban consumers. But with the passing of time the membership structure of the group has changed—for the new dagongzhe, the home in the village has become more and more a symbol of something to which they cannot return, while the cities have become their real homes. Hanging on the wall of the Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Laborers in Beijing is a chart titled “Informal Labor (dagong)—Thirty Years—The History of Migration.” The chart clearly outlines the historical formation of the group. From 1978 to 1988, rural migrants entered the cities under controlled conditions; due to an earlier concern about rural people “blindly flowing” from the villages to the cities, rural migrants during this period were referred to as the “blind flow.” By 1988 their number had grown to 20 million. The period from 1989 to 2002 can be called the “rural migrant worker” stage, during which their numbers reached 120 million. In this period, the government no longer limited the movement of the population, but prejudicial policies toward outsiders were commonplace in the cities—migrants were given only temporary residence permits and constantly threatened with deportation to their home counties. From 2003 until today is the era of “Dagongzhe Becoming New Workers and New Urban Residents” (ibid.: 8–9). By this time their number has reached 240 million or more. During this period, the policy of returning people to their home counties has been repealed and the Labor Contract Law has been enacted. Today dagongzhe squeeze into tiny rooms in the cities; trading their labor and sweat for wages which they often send to build houses in “villages to which they cannot return.” Observations of new changes in this group indicate that we should reject the term “rural migrant workers”—that the idea that the rural migrant workers will eventually return to their villages is likely illusory. The system of collective ownership of land ensures that, with rural residence permits, those taking up informal

Two kinds of new poor and their future  57 work outside of their native places at least in theory own specific parcels of land; they could, therefore, return to the villages when urban–rural income disparity decreases or when an economic downturn occurs. But this prospect has become increasingly uncertain with the implementation of the land transfer policy (allowing for the first time the contractual transfer of land in the countryside) and movement toward the outright privatization of land. Migrants work, reside and live their lives in the cities, but the village “home” in their hearts (or at least its symbol) cannot support their actual existence or provide their children with a future. Held at both the periphery of the cities and the periphery of the villages, migrants are “lost between the cities and the countryside”; from the perspective of the basic reality of production, labor and existence, calling them rural migrant workers is not as accurate as calling them new workers. The basic fact is that they should receive the exact same treatment as urban residents. The reality is that, in contrast with the first generation of migrants born in the 1970s, the second generation of migrants born in the 1980s has no history of supporting itself by farming. The third generation of migrants, born in the 1990s, was born and has grown up in the cities; the majority of these migrants have never engaged in farming at all. Because they have never lived in the villages or engaged in agricultural production, many local governments have stopped giving them any land allocation; they no longer own any land. Replacing the concept of “rural migrant workers” with “dagongzhe” is not pedantry but the manifestation of an accurate understanding of this enormous social group. While contemporary Chinese debates on the land system generally center on private versus collective property rights as well as commercial versus agricultural use of land, we must raise an additional question: will China’s transformation treat urbanization and rural construction as equally important, or will it focus on urbanization above all else? The answer to this question will have tremendous implications for the fate of the new workers. In this sense, they are an indeterminate subject. If the new workers have come to constitute a stable group rooted in a specific system of production, why not refer to them as the “working class” rather than the “new workers” or the “group of new workers”? We live in a class society in which the discourse of class has almost disappeared. In the vast majority of research on the new workers, we see descriptions of social stratification, but not analysis of class differentiation. In avoiding use of the concept of the “new working class,” I am not following this model of “de-classing” social science. On the contrary, the concept of the “new workers” was produced in the process of rethinking the question of class. From the perspective of the changing mode of production, the new workers make up that group of “newly arising industrial workers” brought into being by the processes of industrialization and urbanization taking place under the conditions of China’s reform and opening-up. Because they have left the villages and the land, they are gradually becoming wage laborers separated from the means of production (land). Even though a portion of them own definite parcels of land, the group completely relies on production, or increasing capital by selling their labor in order to survive; they are not a group which relies on the profits from any

58  Wang Hui type of capital to obtain their means of livelihood. Yet a large part of the group has difficulty obtaining the protection of labor regulations, and their fortunes and survival depend on the market’s demand for labor. From this description, they strongly resemble the classical proletariat, though certain aspects distinguish them. Looking through the published research on the Chinese working class, we can quickly find the following definition: “The working class is the product of China’s industrialization in the modern era. China’s working class was produced and developed along with the modern industries established by foreign capital, early Chinese bureaucratic capital and national capital.” The earliest industrial workers “were produced by foreign capital’s enterprises operated in China” (Liu and Tang, 2002: 1). Following this definition, we can say that the group of new workers is the product of China turning itself into the “world’s factory,” and it was produced and developed along with the wave of manufacturing and service industries following the entrance of transnational capital, the transformation of China’s state-owned enterprises and the rise of private capital. While the vast majority of workers in the period of China’s early industrialization were bankrupted farmers, the industrial workers of China today come from the vast countryside in an era in which the disparity between the rural and urban areas grows by the day. As an objectively existing social group, in terms of their role as a product of the process of industrialization and economic development, the new workers and the working class of the twentieth century are extremely similar. From the perspective of politics, we can see in their intermittent discontent and protests the beginnings of an increasingly active collective consciousness. The new workers have not yet formed into a class in the political sense, however. In China’s twentieth-century revolution, class consciousness and class politics were extremely active, and they permeated various aspects of parties, the state and social organizations. This lays bare the multifaceted nature of the concept of class—it is objective and subjective, structural as well as political. In the reform era, the construction of the “world’s factory” not only calls forth capital, but also calls forth labor as a commodity. Another expression of marketization and the new phase of industrialization is the restructuring of class relations. But precisely during this large-scale restructuring, the discourse of class has disappeared from China and many other formerly socialist states. The concept of a “post-class society” does not point to the disappearance of the phenomenon of class or class stratification, but rather the weakening of class politics. For contemporary Chinese social research, the perspective of class is crucial to understanding the political, economic and social condition of Chinese workers. The following assessment rings true: In the period before the reforms, the combination of Marxist discourse and the experience of capitalist productive relations produced elements of a strong and sophisticated class consciousness among China’s workers. The urgent necessity to “bring class back in” to transition studies not only holds for China, but for other pre-capitalist countries as well, and not just for analyzing the working class, but also the capitalist class. (Li, 2006: 57)

Two kinds of new poor and their future  59 However, research into the process of “bringing class back in” makes clear that in the context of actual worker resistance, aside from a small number of cases, efforts to appeal to class consciousness to call forth a new type of politics have not met with success. Here my use of the term “worker resistance,” rather than the previously ubiquitous concept of class struggle, implies an assessment of the political character of the labor movement as it currently stands. For example, to what extent does prominent movement centered on preserving legal rights (weiquan) amount to “class struggle,” and to what extent does it amount to no more than a struggle to preserve the interests of urban residents? While class struggle is a movement that transforms society and the system of production, the weiquan movement is a struggle which uses the legal framework of this system to defend individual rights. Consequently, it fights for incremental improvement within the transitional system rather than overturning it entirely. Aside from this, attempts to preserve legal rights have been ineffective or largely ineffective for those workers who have not received the protection of labor laws. Thus, within the process of “bringing class back in” there is a need to analyze anew the concept of class itself, otherwise we will not be able to comprehend the weakening or disappearance of class politics. First, in the process of production and life, the new workers have gradually developed a certain simple collective consciousness; both in terms of its depth and its prevalence, however, it differs greatly from the “class consciousness” of the twentieth century. We have no way of judging whether this simple collective consciousness will, as the classical theorists suggested, rise from a condition of “in itself” to “for itself”—that is, rise from the condition of being a stratum controlled by the division of labor to a political force or political class which has its own social goals and can make efforts to realize these goals. Marx states in Capital: Being independent of each other, the labourers are isolated persons, who enter into relations with the same capital, but not with one another. This cooperation begins only with the labour process, but they have then ceased to belong to themselves. On entering that process, they become incorporated with capital. (Marx, 1996: 338) Laborers who have become incorporated into capital are only a form of capital; this in itself does not and cannot produce any kind of self-consciousness. Thus the objective existence of the workers as a group does not mean that a working class in a political sense already exists. In his study on the formation of the English working class, Thompson distinguished his view from an overly rigid, dogmatic view of class: By class I understand an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness . . . I do not see class as a “structure,” nor even as a “category,” but as something which in fact happens (and can be

60  Wang Hui shown to have happened) in human relationships . . . I am convinced that we cannot understand class unless we see it as a social and cultural formation, arising from processes which can only be studied as they work themselves out over a considerable historical period. (Thompson, 1966: 9, 11) But in the large coastal industries in the present period, with the assembly-line model of production, the model of housing segregated from urban society, the condition of existence in which one merely moves back and forth between the dormitory and the workshop, “human relationships” have been reduced to a minimum. In factories like Foxconn’s, even relations between the workers have disintegrated. Only in venues outside of the factory grounds is there some limited space for socialization. Every worker as an isolated worker forms individual relations with the same capital. Under these conditions, it is more difficult in this period than in any other for class culture to develop. Here it is useful to compare the circumstances facing the new workers with those of workers in the state-owned enterprises of the previous era. Not only in terms of material well-being and moral symbolism, but also with regard to their legal status and political position, the situations of the new workers and the old working class are poles apart. One of the clearest differences between the new and old workers is that of their remuneration and treatment. Despite the fact that the new workers and the old working class are both workers, workers at the state-owned and collective enterprises of the past had positions and salaries that were centrally mandated and protected, while new workers do not. Within many fields, new workers do not even receive the protection of contract law. The difference between new workers and old workers is in part rooted in the difference in status between the city and the countryside from the socialist era—that is, new workers do not receive the benefits of urban residence enjoyed by workers in the state-owned enterprises of the past. Here I emphasize workers in the “state-owned enterprises of the past” in order to draw attention to the fact that the difference in status between these workers is not a product of the type of entity that owns the factory, but a result of a transformation in the social system. Within the contemporary context, the status of workers is not fundamentally determined by whether an enterprise is state-owned or privately owned. Under the conditions of the market, the recruitment of workers by state-owned enterprises differs little from that by private enterprises and multinational corporations. Regardless of whether the new workers are employed by state-owned, privately owned or multinational corporations, their status and position are completely different from those of the working class in the socialist period. Thus, the difference in the remuneration of old and new workers only touches on one aspect of the issue. Yet even this aspect is a result of the change in the social system. The life and work of the old working class was tied to the work unit, which was a society in microcosm. The space in which the new workers exist today is by contrast a productive facility which exists solely to increase the value of and to reproduce capital. Within the work unit, people did not form relations with each other merely as producers; they formed persisting political,

Two kinds of new poor and their future  61 cultural, economic and familial ties, and would engage in all manner of diverse activities. During the past 20 years, the work unit system of the socialist period has been subject to an increasing amount of criticism, the chief of which is that it gradually turned into an instrument of political control such that it no longer acted as a space for community social life. This criticism fails to acknowledge that the perfection of the work unit system into an instrument of control was inextricably linked with its increasing transformation into a space solely focused on production. The decline and disappearance of participation in decisions about production was one sign that the “people’s democracy” promoted by the Chinese Revolution was being undermined. This was a prelude to the transition from a socialist system of production to a “market society” system of production. In addition, aside from the reduction in “human relationships” among the workers due to changes in the production process and living conditions, we rarely discover political cooperation between the new workers and any other social stratum. The production and development of twentieth-century working-class culture was not the spontaneous product of the working class alone. Rather, it was the result of a complicated historical process brought about by the entrance and engagement in politics of many outside elements. The early political representatives of the working class did not emerge from among the workers themselves, but rather were intellectuals who cast their lot with the proletariat, “betraying their own class” to take up politics. Aside from those who directly entered the party that presented itself as the vanguard of the proletariat, countless intellectuals, artists, cultural figures, lawyers and others joined with the workers’ movement, and together they contributed to the formation of a highly politicized working-class culture. Contrast this with the “new poor of consumer society”: unlike the intellectuals who joined ranks with the proletariat in the past, it is unclear with whom the “new poor” identify; furthermore, their political demands vary. Their capacity for political mobilization greatly exceeds that of the new workers, but their consumerist political language—including their anti-state discourse—connects insufficiently with the workers’ experience. Thus, on the one hand, though the new workers have vast numbers and are largely responsible for China’s position as “factory of the world,” they are unable to match the ability of the “new poor” to utilize the media for social mobilization. On the other hand, because of the lack of mutual interaction between classes and relative indifference among the “educated stratum” within the “new poor” toward politics, the question of the “fate of their class” never rises to the status of a political issue. The kind of political movement characterized by the “class treason” of revolutionary intellectuals joining with the proletariat in the twentieth century (the political process by which they betrayed their own class to throw in with the liberation of the proletariat) is almost completely absent among the “new poor” and other social strata. Enveloped by the pervasive culture of consumerism, many new workers share the same dreams as the “new poor”; in the dreams of the “new poor,” however, and even in their political demands, there is almost no sign of the “new workers.” We can find nothing like the “class treason” that appeared in twentieth-century political culture, and in these circumstances it is difficult to

62  Wang Hui imagine the rise of a revolutionary movement or one intended to recreate society toward a universalist goal. All of this reveals the political ruptures between social groups within the new social system, and the chasm between the “new workers” and the “new poor”—these are two connected yet mutually alienated strata produced by the same process. Within the public realm, a small number of researchers committed to studying worker issues do frequently make policy suggestions and appeals to protect their rights, but in most situations, these appeals and suggestions invariably take “non-political” forms—that is, technical solutions. The transformation of the working class would not only involve material and legal processes, but also moral and political processes. In contrast to the lively state of the “new poor” within the new media, the new workers are almost entirely without a voice in the political realm. This is not only due to differences in the culture, education and technological backgrounds of the two groups, it is also a product of the political process entailed in the restructuring of class relations. The absence of the new workers from the realm of politics is a sign of the defeat of the workers’ state that appeared during the twentieth century. From the perspective of politics, the defeat of the workers’ state and the transformation of the working class’s political party—I have also referred to this as the political party of the working class’s “breakdown of representation”—are two sides of the same process. The complete hollowing out of the constitutional principle that the working class is the leading class within the state is the necessary outcome of this process. In the National People’s Congress, the National People’s Political Consultative Conference and the representative institutions of the Chinese Communist Party at every level, one can find scarcely any sign of the new workers (or of course the farmers), nor can one hear their collective voice. The new workers and capital are conjoined twins, and they can only be represented by capital. The monopolization of China’s basic political structure by capital and power is not at all a coincidence. The fall of the workers’ state and the legal and political changes produced by China’s adaptation to market economics are inextricably intertwined.

Decreasing employment time, protecting legal rights and political justice Under these new historical conditions, it is claimed by some that the interests of workers can no longer be defended through the constitution or politics, but must instead be protected through delineating their legal rights. Until today, however, the weiquan efforts to protect legal rights have not altered the silence of the new workers within the political realm. Writing, music and other forms of new art coming from the new workers (on display at the Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Laborers, among other places) are providing the workers with some measure of cultural support, but there is still nothing resembling the active participation in politics which characterized the workers of the twentieth century. Here I analyze the three major forms of struggle undertaken by the workers’ movement today in order to reveal the nature of the depoliticization characterizing it as well as the possibility of repoliticization.

Two kinds of new poor and their future  63 The first form of struggle is reducing the duration of employment. The new workers eagerly seek higher wages, their own houses and social insurance, the ability to keep their families together and treatment equal to that enjoyed by urban residents. To contend with their employers, they rely not only on such traditional methods as protests and strikes, but also on the method of “firing the boss.” According to sociologist Lü Tu’s survey research, the main reason workers change jobs is not that they have been fired by their employers, but rather because they find their conditions and protections poor and their work boring, and they seek better treatment or to improve their own technical skills (Lü, 2013: 225–247). There is also a minority of workers who leave because their factories are producing counterfeit or inferior goods. Workers can use “labor shortages” to their advantage as a “weapon of the weak” with which to contend with enterprises and local governments, and this has helped alter the relations between labor and capital. Reducing the duration of their employment has both benefits and drawbacks from the perspective of organizing potential. On the one hand, such methods of passive resistance undertaken by individual workers can hasten the formation of self-consciousness by workers as a group. On the other hand, the high turnover rate this produces makes it more difficult for workers to form ties with each other. Furthermore, adopting the practice of “leaving early” violates preexisting agreements with employers, leaving workers without the protection of the Labor Contract Law. Factory owners can then “legally” employ exploitative measures, such as withholding back wages. There are two forms of struggle available to workers seeking to reduce the economic losses incurred when they walk off the job. The first is to pursue legal help to win back part of their losses. This usually means relying on the “foreman system” (linggong zhi)—that is, using a labor contractor who can mediate between workers and owners. This system was used in Europe during the early stage of capitalism. It ensures that the owners’ demand for labor will be met, and provides a representative to the workers. While this arrangement can reduce some of the workers’ economic losses, the contractors in fact subject workers to yet another layer of exploitation, and make it more difficult for workers’ economic struggles to move in the direction of class struggle. The reduction of employment duration destabilizes the relationships between workers, and in truth, this is not a voluntary choice of the workers, but a result of the new forms of production and circulation that have emerged in China under the conditions of globalization. The second form of struggle is attempting to safeguard their rights (weiquan) through the legal system. The commodification of labor did not naturally arise from the development of the capitalist market in itself—without corresponding participation of the state in the development of the market economy (including the establishment of laws, the appearance of new policies and various other government activities), it would be impossible to understand the development of wage labor (Somers, 1996: 194). Because today there is no longer any goal or even idea of establishing a new socialist state, the struggle over wage labor takes place within a market versus state framework using the weiquan strategy of attempting to protect workers’ legal rights. Li Jingjun makes a point of emphasizing the relationship between the establishment of new laws and the condition of the workers in the reform period, explaining:

64  Wang Hui aside from serving the needs of the economic reforms (protecting private property, contracts, operating licenses), the new regulations also govern the interests of different social groups, institutionalize the regulation of social conflicts, and as a by-product expand the parameters of citizens’ legal rights. The Labor Union Law, the Labor Law, and the Law to Protect the Rights of Women passed in the 1990s have had a great impact on the working class. Aside from these, a series of other management regulations and social policies which touch on every aspect of workers’ lives were also promulgated, including the arbitration of labor disputes, social insurance, the minimum living standard, and unemployment insurance . . . Today class struggle not only exists between capitalists (both foreign and Chinese) and rural migrant workers in privately owned enterprises, but also between managers and older workers in state-owned enterprises which have undergone management reform. Labor conflicts have greatly increased under the market economy, but they are no longer handled by individual leaders from the enterprises’ local Party organizations. Instead they rely on an external generalized (legal) system. Although the capacity of the state to enforce its laws is still far from ideal, it has at least begun to bring class conflict into a new expanded legal realm in which the rights of workers can be legally established and they can be provided with new avenues for legal appeals to make use of in their struggles. (Li, 2006: 61) Aside from the laws mentioned above, conflicts between labor and capital are now unfolding around particular articles within the Labor Contract Law and Property Law. Struggles to protect legal rights—an important aspect of the working-class movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—have had a positive effect on the development of self-consciousness among the new workers. However, safeguarding legal rights can hardly give full protection to the workers. First, as the earlier quotation from Huang Zongzhi explains, the vast majority of the working population works without contracts; their rights and interests cannot be implemented by preserving their legal rights. Furthermore, efforts to protect legal rights are chiefly concentrated on protecting the rights of individuals. It is true that struggles centering on legal justice can under certain conditions change into broader struggles concerning political justice—the 2003 case of Sun Zhigang, for example, precipitated a struggle to end the detention system and the division between urban and rural household registration.1 In other words, there is an intersection between legal justice and political justice, and they overlap in many areas. But in most disputes between labor and capital, efforts to protect legal rights do not touch on the question of whether or not the current state of society is just. Thus, even though efforts to protect legal rights can expand the interests of the working class, the defeat of the workers’ state precludes these efforts from addressing the loss of rights by workers. If we compare the new workers and their struggles with those of the old workers, we see that the social standing of the latter was the product of a political process— that is, the old working class fought to link its fate to that of the new social system.

Two kinds of new poor and their future  65 It did not limit its struggle to maintaining individual rights or protecting the interests of the class as a whole. In my research on the strike and legal struggle which erupted during the restructuring of a state-owned textile factory in Yangzhou, I discovered that, although the efforts of these older workers were originally motivated by selfinterest, their struggle appealed to a set of common, general values. For example, was the working class the master of the factory? What does it mean for state property to belong to the entire people? Although the workers’ lawsuit was categorized as a civil case, it unfolded more like a political debate centering on the constitution (Wang, 2008). Article One of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China declares that “the People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants”; Article Two of the constitution declares that “all power in the People’s Republic of China belongs to the people” (Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, 1982). To understand the leadership of the working class, we must at the same time understand the constitutional principle that “all powers belong to the people”—that is, the role of the working class is intimately connected with a type of general interest. It does not represent the interest of a minority or the working class itself. In the socialist period, the position of the working class was intimately connected with this constitutional right, and more specifically, the political process which generated this constitutional right. Without an understanding of the political processes of the twentieth century and the political culture they produced, it is impossible to understand the emergence of this political principle. The old workers in Yangzhou attempted to use a legal struggle to reaffirm the constitutional position of the working class, seeking to oppose the local government’s effort to assert its claim to ownership of the factory and invite in outside investors. The factory was public property, and the working class should, according to the articles of the constitution, be counted among its owners with all the decision-making rights granted to owners concerning its use. In the struggles of the new workers to protect their rights, we rarely see such attempts to use legal rights to open up political struggle. What makes the situation even more complex is that while efforts to protect legal rights arise from disputes between labor and capital, workers’ struggles often involve protests against the state, and workers’ conflicts are frequently intertwined with other types of social conflicts.2 When economic questions are elevated to the political realm, protest movements are often directed at local governments. To some, this appears to demonstrate that these new contradictions and conflicts are nothing more than the ill effects of the “socialist system,” rather than a process engendered by the defeat of the workers’ state and the globalization of capitalism (in some narratives and media accounts, all of these protests are interpreted as reactions to an “authoritarian government” which routinely violates human rights). According to the logic of this ideology, the conflicts between the workers and the state could be solved by consolidating the market order. But without a reappraisal of the state’s role in standardizing, managing, regulating and shaping the relations between labor and capital, it is impossible to correctly grasp the relationship between preserving legal rights and the political process. In the

66  Wang Hui nineteenth and twentieth centuries, capital always relied on every manner of state power, and this is particularly true with respect to states with colonial operations and highly bureaucratic systems. The contradiction between labor and capital was most clearly expressed in the direct confrontation between labor and capital, when the workers’ movement realized that the state was a “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” the struggle against the factory owners changed from an economic struggle to a political struggle. With the shift toward a market society, what was formerly a workers’ state began to play the role of dual representative of both labor and capital. The leadership of the state produced significant trends, among them, an army of free labor formed as rural people poured into the cities after the relaxation of the residence permit system and changes in urban–rural relations, the policy to attract outside investment, the shaping and limiting of workers’ organizations and the standardization of the financial system. The increasingly close alliance between capital and power has made the state’s representation of the rights and interests of labor increasingly hollow, but its formal role as the representative of labor has not undergone a fundamental change. With the tremendous transformation of the workers’ state, the state which claimed to represent the interests of the workers has developed a rupture with the working class; as a consequence, opposition between capital and labor often takes the form of a contradiction between labor and the state. However, unlike the class struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the direct conflict between the workers and the state is not developing toward the formation of a workers’ state, but toward the formation of a nineteenth- or early twentieth-century economic system—that is, utterly abandoning its character as a workers’ state, and instituting legal rights based on the right to own property. Within the realm of legal rights, there is one area, concerning collective rights, which can provide a political space between individual interests and the interests of the workers: the sphere of influence of labor unions. In the first half of the nineteenth century, before working-class political parties appeared, unions led workers to strike. They organized the workers and helped them protect their interests in their struggles with capitalists. The development of guilds, professional associations and unions was the major form in which the workers’ movement first appeared, and the union movement today is still the major organizational form of the workers’ movement in Europe. From nineteenth-century through early twentieth-century European society, labor unions were the basis on which working-class parties were formed. Put another way, working-class parties were outgrowths of unions. The working class movement was not the creation of political parties; on the contrary, class-based parties were born from the working class on the foundation of the workers’ movement.3 In China and many other agricultural societies which have undergone revolutions in the modern era, however, labor and peasant unions were tools with which political parties organized laborers and promoted class movements. Within the workers’ state, the union mediates between the masses on one hand and the party and state on the other, its function being to “bring conviction to the

Two kinds of new poor and their future  67 masses,” or to play the role of what Lenin called the “‘reservoir’ of state power” (Lenin, 1965a). However, with the transformation of the workers’ state and the “statification of the Party” during the Reform Era, the labor union has changed from an instrument aimed at “bringing conviction to the masses” to strive toward socialism or communism to one which “brings conviction to the masses” to transition toward a market society. Because the unions are conjoined with the state, with the restructuring of the state-owned enterprises the unions have almost completely lost the function of protecting the interests of the workers, and have instead become organs which assist local governments and capitalists in the restructuring of enterprises and deprive the workers of their rights. Because of this, workers need to “reorganize the unions.” Reorganizing does not merely imply changing their membership and especially leadership through elections, but also changing the role of the unions: with the loss of the workers’ state and the stratification of the Party, unions no longer mediate between the workers’ state and the masses as “persuading instruments,” nor are they the workers’ state’s “reservoir.” Unions should constitute a self-empowering network which protects the rights and interests of the workers, promotes their unity and develops a new egalitarian politics. Today capital permeates the state as never before. In the process of the restructuring of state-owned enterprises, the creation of capital within China seems to resemble the account of the nineteenth-century anarchist Bakunin: the “state has created capital . . . The capitalist has his capital only by the grace of the state” (Engels, 1989: 306–307). But this is merely the appearance. In reality both the state and capital have been restructured under the conditions of globalization. Capital’s creation in China through the “grace of the state” is only another expression of the “retreat of the state.” We would have no way of understanding the behavior of either “transitional” or neo-liberal states without an analysis of the underlying forces driving marketization. The problem facing workers today thus on some level repeats a nineteenth-century debate within the workers’ movement: should the target of workers’ struggles be the state or capital, and should the workers’ movement change from an economic struggle to a political struggle? During the nineteenth century, anarchists argued that revolution should first and foremost do away with the state as a political organization, thus declaring the state as the target of the workers’ movement. Communists argued, on the contrary, that capital was the source of the workers’ predicament, and that “class antagonism between capitalists and wage workers . . . has arisen through the development of society” (ibid.: 306). Bourgeois theorists and liberals, for their part, made great efforts to divert the workers’ movement from economic struggles toward independent struggles divorced from politics which could be addressed by various legal reforms. Within the contemporary context, the three choices described above have all failed. First, the political goal of the nineteenth-century communist movement— that the working class propel the transition to socialism by taking control of the state—has, with the defeat of the workers’ states, already vanished. Workers’ struggles against capital can no longer take revolution aimed at seizing state

68  Wang Hui power as their goal. Labor unions can no longer, as Lenin and others hoped, act as “political organs” for the transition toward a seizure of political power.4 Second, within the highly financialized global capitalist system of today, focusing on the state as the target of struggle overlooks the relationship between the condition of the new workers and capitalism’s systems of production and circulation. The high frequency with which workers change employers mirrors the extraordinarily high degree of capital mobility, the general crisis of the rural areas is linked with the new relation between the cities and the countryside emerging under economically driven urbanization, and the dehumanization of the new workers linked with a mode of production which makes increasing productivity to achieve high profits its only goal. The state and its policies are no more than political institutions which have adapted to this enormous transformation. On the one hand, the new workers face low wages, few protections and thorough dehumanization in the production process. On the other hand, the new workers still endure the burden of an unequal social identity and the emotional trauma caused by the disintegration and transformation of their homes in the vast Chinese countryside. This predicament cannot be solved through a mere redistribution process—rather, the worsening relations between the cities and the countryside brought about by the process of urbanization must be transformed. Moreover, the growing dominance of finance and capital over production affects other areas outside of the direct relations between labor and capital, such as the relations between the cities and the rural areas, the educational system, inequality between regions, interstate relations and the relations between development and environmental protection. Therefore, demanding only that the “market system” be perfected while following the advice of the liberals in refusing to alter the basic relations of production or the development model while confining the struggles of the workers to the sphere of legal rights cannot possibly change the current situation of the workers on a fundamental level. Under the present conditions, not even labor unions of the nineteenth-century model could meet the demands of today’s challenges on their own. The questions of today are more similar to those of the nineteenth-century than those of the twentieth-century labor movement. The workers must reorganize themselves to construct a political force, but they will not be able to use the framework of the workers’ state to realize their own “leadership” function. This is not to say that the socialist tradition no longer has any meaning. On the contrary, the workers’ political demands require that they reaffirm the basic principles of the workers’ state in order to mobilize themselves. Within the new context, attempting to pursue political justice while at the same time avoiding the question of the workers’ collective economic struggle, as does the weiquan movement to protect legal rights, is an empty, unrealistic dream. If we cannot expand the search for legal justice into an effort to fundamentally change this model of development— that is, if we cannot seriously discuss the relationship between legal justice and political justice—then we cannot fundamentally change the predicament of the workers.

Two kinds of new poor and their future  69 But reaffirming and defending the rights and interests outlined in the constitution of the socialist state may be an effective path toward linking legal justice and political justice. Compared with nineteenth-century Europe or China in the early twentieth century, the political realm of today has already undergone a profound change: the ability of existing political processes to drive the formation of classes has already vanished. The revolutionary institution which drove class politics, that is, the working-class political party, has already transformed into a part of a state structure which takes as its key mission the development and management of the economy. Precisely because this political force is absent, today—even as China is now generating a group of workers larger than any other in the world— the concept of class has lost efficacy in the political realm. “Repoliticizing” is thus a necessary choice, but how and on what foundation? The liberal category of the “end of history” and the radicals’ “empire” and “multitude,” in spite of clearly opposing each other on the dividing line of left versus right, share in their negation of class as a possible foundation for a new politics. Thus the question of today is different from that of the past: in this age of flourishing new social movements, can a new politics be built on the category of class? Here the real challenge is not that of simply replacing the struggle for legal justice with one for political justice or dogmatically reaffirming the leading position of the working class, nor of finding a way to link legal justice and political justice, but of redefining the concept of political justice. For this process to begin, the new workers can only look to and evaluate their own life experiences and their relations with others to discover new motivations and hopes. Within the broader struggles of workers, we can hear the voice of this group’s desires and demands in the silent struggle of the Foxconn workers, in the strike at the Yue Yuan shoe factory and in every minor and miniscule effort of the new workers to improve their material and cultural fate. But how can this group elevate its desires and demands to the level of a political force, and lend impetus to a general politics of dignity? How can the efforts of this group transcend its boundaries to become a part of the general politics of the Chinese masses? In what sense must Chinese society, in its struggle for equality, defend and extend the socialist constitution and its system of rights?

Notes 1 In 2003, the 23-year-old university graduate Sun Zhigang was mistaken by local police in Guangzhou for a rural migrant worker and, upon his failure to produce an identification card, was arrested, detained and beaten to death. The case sparked widespread outrage and resulted in the abrogation of local authorities’ power to detain migrants for lacking identification or a residence permit. 2 The 2009 Tonggang incident in Jilin and the Han-Uyghur conflict in Shaoguan, Guangdong, which sparked off at least 75 further incidents in Xinjiang, are examples of this. The nature of the 2003 “Baoma case” in Harbin, the 2008 “Weng’an Incident” in Guizhou and the “Menglian” incident in Yunnan, the 2009 “Deng Yujiao Incident” in Hubei and the “Shishou Incident” is somewhat different. But the forms are similar in that they all began as concrete disputes over wages or conflicts between local workers and migrants and developed into protests against the government or the police.

70  Wang Hui 3 “The trade unions arose out of capitalism as a means of developing the new class. Class is a concept which is evolved in struggle and development. There is no wall dividing one class from another. The workers and peasants are not separated by a Chinese Wall. How did man learn to form associations? First through the guild, and then according to different trades. Having become a class, the proletariat grew so strong that it took over the whole state machine, proclaimed war on the whole world and emerged victorious. The guilds and craft unions have now become backward institutions” (Lenin, 1965a: 512). 4 See Lenin (1966: 418).

4 On the simultaneous world revolution Kojin Karatani

Counter-movements against the state The capitalist economy is formed primarily through overseas trade, just as the economy of any given country exists within a world economy. For this reason, the socialist revolution cannot succeed if it is limited to a single country. If by chance it should occur in one country, it would immediately encounter interference and sanctions from other countries. Any socialism that did not elicit this sort of interference would be closer to welfare-state capitalism than to actual socialism: it would present no threat to either State or Capital. On the other hand, a socialist revolution that really aimed to abolish Capital and State would inevitably face interference and sanctions. If it wants to preserve the revolution, however, the only option would be to transform itself into a powerful state. In other words, it is impossible to abolish the state from within a single country. The state can only be abolished from within, and yet at the same time it cannot be abolished from within. Marx was not troubled by this antinomy, because it was self-evident to him that the socialist revolution was “only possible as the act of the dominant peoples ‘all at once’ and simultaneously” (Marx, 1976: 49). The 1848 “world revolution” had shown this. Bakunin held the same view: “an isolated workers’ association, local or national, even in one of the greatest European nations, can never triumph, and [. . .] victory can only be achieved by a union of all the national and international associations into a single universal association” (Bakunin, 2002: 162). How then will the next simultaneous world revolution be possible? It is not something that will simply break out one day, simultaneously in all parts of the world, without our having to do anything. Without an alliance among revolutionary movements around the world established beforehand, simultaneous world revolution is impossible. This is why Marx and Bakunin, among others, organized the First International in 1863: it was supposed to provide the foundation for a simultaneous world revolution. It is difficult, though, to unite movements from various countries whose industrial capitalism and the modern state exist at different stages of development. The First International included a mixture of activists, some from regions where the immediate goal was socialism, and others from places like Italy where the primary

72  Kojin Karatani task was national unification. Moreover, it included a split between the Marx and Bakunin factions, one that went beyond a simple opposition between authoritarianism and anarchism, because behind it lurked the different social realities faced by the various countries. For example, workers from Switzerland were anarchists and supported Bakunin. These were, however, mostly watchmakers, craftsmen whose position derived in part from the pressure they felt from mechanized high-volume production in Germany and the US. In Germany, on the other hand, industrial workers favored organizational movements, which were anathema to anarchists. For these reasons, the split between the Marx and Bakunin factions was linked to nationalist conflicts. Bakunin, for example, accused Marx of being a Pan-Germanist Prussian spy, while Marx responded by linking Bakunin to the Pan-Slavism of the Russian Empire. This split between the Marx and Bakunin factions led to the dissolution of the First International in 1876. But clearly this should not be understood simply as a result of a split between Marxism and anarchism. The Second International, established in 1889, comprised primarily German Marxists. But it too was undermined by enormous differences among the various countries and increasingly bitter internal conflicts based on nationalism. As a result, when World War I broke out in 1914, the socialist parties in each country switched over to supporting national participation in the war. This demonstrates that even when socialist movements from various nations are united in an association, as soon as the state actually launches into war, they are unable to resist the pressures of nationalism. Mussolini, the leader of the Italian Socialist Party, for example, turned to fascism at this time. In February 1917, in the midst of World War I, the Russian Revolution broke out. After it, a dual power system was set up including a parliament and workerfarmer councils (soviets). The Bolsheviks were a minority faction in both levels. In October, Lenin and Trotsky brushed aside the opposition of the Bolshevik party leadership to shut down parliament through a military coup d’état, gradually excluding opposing factions from the soviets as well to monopolize power. At this point, they are said to have anticipated a “world revolution,” starting with a revolution in Germany. But this was an unlikely prospect. The failure of a German revolution to follow in succession after Russia was entirely predictable: the forceful implementation of the October Revolution radically intensified the vigilance and resistance toward socialist revolution in other countries, above all Germany. Moreover, the October Revolution was— for example, in the aid given to help Lenin return home from exile—in important ways supported by the German state, which hoped for a revolution that would cause the Russian Empire to drop out of the war. The October Revolution actually aided German imperialism and set back the possibility of a socialist revolution. Under such conditions, it was foolish to hope for a “simultaneous world revolution.” With the intention of fostering “world revolution,” Lenin and Trotsky established the Third International (Comintern) in 1919. But this bore only a superficial resemblance to “simultaneous world revolution.” In the previous Internationals,

On the simultaneous world revolution  73 despite differences in relative influence due to differences in the scale of their movements and in their theoretical positions, the revolutionary movements of various countries met as equals. But in the Third International, as the only member to have seized state power, the Soviet Communist Party enjoyed a position of overwhelming dominance. The movements from other countries followed the directives of the Soviet Communist Party and lent their support to the Soviet state. As a result, the international communist movement acquired a degree of real power hitherto unseen. This was because Soviet support made it possible for socialist revolutions around the world to avoid direct interference from the capitalist powers. But this also meant that they were subordinated to the Soviet Union, subsumed into its world empire-like system. But the idea of a simultaneous world revolution did not end there. For example, Trotsky organized the Fourth International in an attempt to organize a movement that was both anti-capitalist and anti-Stalinist. But this was never able to achieve effectiveness. Subsequently, Mao Zedong can be said to have proposed a simultaneous revolution of the “Third World” against the so-called First World (capitalism) and Second World (Soviet bloc). This too, however, was short lived. In 1990 the Soviet bloc—in other words, the Second World—collapsed, and this meant also the collapse of the Third World. Its sense of a shared identity was lost, and it fragmented into a number of supranational states (empires): the Islamic world, China, India, etc. Did the vision of a “simultaneous world revolution” disappear with this? Certainly not. In a sense, 1968 was a simultaneous world revolution. It arose unexpectedly and, seen from the perspective of political power, ended in failure, yet seen from the perspective of what Wallerstein calls “antisystemic movements” it had a tremendous impact. On this point, it resembles the revolution of 1848. In fact, 1968 was in many ways a reawakening of the outcome of the 1848 European revolution. For example, it saw the rehabilitation of the early Marx, Proudhon, Stirner and Fourier. What was the fate of the vision of “simultaneous world revolution” after this? Since 1990, it has served as a summons to reawaken the world revolution of 1968—really, of 1848—as seen, for example, in Negri and Hardt’s notion of a simultaneous worldwide revolt by the “Multitude,” a “Multitude” that is equivalent to the “Proletariat” of 1848. To wit, the people who were called the proletariat in the 1848 uprisings shouldn’t be thought of as industrial workers: they were in fact the Multitude. In that sense, the notion of a “simultaneous world revolution” still persists today. But it is never clearly analyzed, which is precisely why it functions as a myth. If we want to avoid repeating the failures of the past, we need to subject it to a detailed analysis. To reiterate, “simultaneous world revolution” is sought by movements that seek to abolish the state from within. But the movements in different countries are characterized by large disparities in terms of their interests and goals. In particular, the deep fissure between North and South lingers—now taking on the guise of a religious conflict. A transnational movement will always fall prey to internal splits arising due to conflicts between states, no matter how closely its members band together. The emergence of a socialist government in

74  Kojin Karatani one or more countries may make it possible to avoid this kind of schism, but would only lead to a different kind of schism—that between movements that hold state power and those that don’t. For this reason, any attempt to build a global union of counter-movements that arise within separate countries is destined to end in failure.

Kant’s “Eternal Peace” When we think about simultaneous world revolution, Kant is our best resource. Of course, Kant was not thinking in terms of a socialist revolution: what he had in mind was a Rousseauian bourgeois revolution. He also realized the difficulties inherent in it. If a bourgeois revolution aims not just at political liberty but also economic equality, it will invite interference not only from within its own country, but from surrounding absolutist monarchies. Accordingly, the bourgeois revolution could not be a revolution confined to a single country. Kant writes: The problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is dependent upon the problem of a law-governed external relation between states and cannot be solved without having first solved the latter. What good does it do to work on establishing a law-governed civil constitution among individuals, that is, to organize a commonwealth? The same unsociability that had compelled human beings to pursue this commonwealth also is the reason that every commonwealth, in its external relations, that is, as a state among states, exists in unrestricted freedom and consequently that states must expect the same ills from other states that threatened individuals and compelled them to enter into a law-governed civil condition. (Kant, 2006a: 9–10, emphasis in original) “A perfect civil constitution” here refers to the state as an association formed through a Rousseauian social contract. Its establishment depends on relations with other states—specifically, with surrounding absolutist monarchies. Without somehow preventing armed intervention by other states, a bourgeois revolution in a single state is impossible. For this reason, Kant added that such states must reach the point “where, on the one hand internally, through an optimal organization of the civil constitution, and on the other hand externally, through a common agreement and legislation, a condition is established that, similar to a civil commonwealth, can maintain itself automatically” (Kant, 2006a: 11, emphasis in original). In sum, the idea of a federation of nations was originally conceived precisely for the sake of realizing a true bourgeois revolution. In fact, the French Revolution produced a “civil constitution,” but it immediately was subjected to interference and obstruction at the hands of the surrounding absolute monarchies. This led to a distortion of the democratic revolution. Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror” was in large measure amplified by this terror from outside. In 1792, the Legislative Assembly launched a war to defend the revolution. But at the same moment, the state as association was transformed

On the simultaneous world revolution  75 into an authoritarian state. As a result, the distinction between the war to defend the revolution and the war to export the revolution became hazy—which is to say, it became difficult to distinguish the war to export the revolution from a conventional war of conquest. Kant published his “Toward a Perpetual Peace” in the period when Napoleon had begun to make a name for himself in the wars to defend the revolution. After this, the world war now known as the Napoleonic Wars broke out across Europe. But if we look again at the passages quoted above, it is clear that Kant had already to a certain extent anticipated this situation. The frustration of the bourgeois revolution in a single country resulted in world war. It was at this point that Kant published “Toward a Perpetual Peace.” For this reason, Kant’s notion of a federation of nations has been read somewhat simplistically as a proposal for the sake of peace—it has been read, that is, primarily within the lineage of pacifism that begins from Saint-Pierre’s “perpetual peace.” But Kant’s “perpetual peace” does not mean simply peace as the absence of war; it means peace as “the end to all hostilities” (Kant, 2006b: 68). This can only mean that the state no longer exists: in other words, it signifies the abolition of the state. This is clear when we look back at the proposal he made prior to the French Revolution for a federation of nations for the sake of the coming bourgeois revolution. Kant’s refusal to admit the possibility of revolution in a single country was not simply due to the way that it invited interference from other countries. Kant from the start gave the name “Kingdom of Ends” to the society that had realized the moral law of always treating others not solely as means, but also always also as ends. This necessarily refers to a situation in which capitalism has been abolished. Yet this “Kingdom of Ends” could never exist within a single country. Even if one country should manage to realize a “perfect civil constitution” within, it would still be based on treating other countries solely as means (i.e. exploitation) and therefore could not qualify as the “Kingdom of Ends.” The “Kingdom of Ends” cannot be thought of in terms of a single country; it can only be realized as a “World Republic.” Kant argues that the World Republic was the Idea toward which human history should strive. “A philosophical attempt to describe the universal history of the world according to a plan of nature that aims at the perfect civil union of the human species must be considered to be possible and even to promote this intention of nature” (Kant, 2006: 14). Kant’s “Toward a Perpetual Peace” has generally been regarded as proposing a practical plan for realizing this Idea of a World Republic. In that sense, some have said that it represents Kant taking a step back from the ideal, making a compromise with reality. For example, Kant writes: As concerns the relations among states, according to reason there can be no other way for them to emerge from the lawless condition, which contains only war, than for them to relinquish, just as do individual human beings, their wild (lawless) freedom, to accustom themselves to public binding laws, and to thereby form a state of peoples (civitas gentium), which, continually expanding, would ultimately comprise all of the peoples of the world. But

76  Kojin Karatani since they do not, according to their conception of international right, want the positive idea of a world republic at all (thus rejecting in hypothesi what is right in thesi), only the negative surrogate of a lasting and continually expanding federation that prevents war can curb the inclination to hostility and defiance of the law, though there is the constant threat of its breaking loose again. (Kant, 2006b: 81, emphasis in original) But Kant called for a federation of nations not simply because it was a realistic, “negative surrogate.” From the start, he believed that the road to a World Republic lay not with a “state of peoples,” but rather with a federation of nations. Here, we find something fundamentally different from Hobbes and from the line of thought that developed from him. Kant, of course, begins from the same premise as Hobbes, namely the “state of nature.” “The state of nature (status naturalis) is not a state of peace among human beings who live next to one another but a state of war, that is, if not always an outbreak of hostilities, then at least the constant threat of such hostilities. Hence the state of peace must be established” (Kant, 2006b: 72–73, emphasis in original). He differs from Hobbes in how he proposes to establish this state of peace. For Hobbes, the existence of the sovereign (i.e. the state) who monopolizes violence signifies the establishment of the state of peace. In the relations between states, however, a state of nature continues. For Hobbes, the existence of the state was in itself sufficient, and he never considered its abolition. If, however, we attempt in the same manner to overcome the state of nature existing between states, it is self-evident that we would need to propose a new sovereign, a world state. What Kant calls “a state of peoples” refers to this. But Kant opposed this. It could certainly lead to peace as the absence of war, but it could never lead to “perpetual peace.” For Kant, a state of peace could only be established through the abolition of the state. A “state of peoples” or a world state, after all, would still be a state.

Kant and Hegel We need to think about how it might be possible to create a federation of nations, one without a world state (empire) acting as ultimate sovereign, that would obey “international law” or the “Law of Peoples.” From a Hobbesean perspective, this is impossible: just as was the case domestically, a state of peace becomes possible only when the various countries enter into a “social contract” under a sovereign who monopolizes power. Without this, a federation of nations would lack the means to punish violations of international law. Hegel also took this view, criticizing Kant on this point: Kant’s idea was that eternal peace should be secured by an alliance of states. This alliance should settle every dispute, make impossible the resort to arms for a decision, and be recognized by every state. This idea assumes that states

On the simultaneous world revolution  77 are in accord, an agreement which, strengthened though it might be by moral, religious, and other considerations, nevertheless always rested on the private sovereign will, and was therefore liable to be disturbed by the element of contingency. (Hegel, 1896: 338) In Hegel’s view, the functioning of international law requires a state with the power to punish countries that commit violations, meaning that there cannot be peace in the absence of a hegemonic state. Moreover, Hegel does not see war itself as something automatically to be rejected. In his view, world history is a courtroom in which states pursue disputes with one another. The World Historical Idea is realized through this process. As we see with Napoleon, for example, it is realized through the will to power of a single sovereign or state. This is what Hegel called the “cunning of reason.” But Kant’s idealism did not, as Hegel claimed, arise from a naïve point of view. Albeit in a different sense from Hegel, Kant held the same view as Hobbes: the essence of humanity (human nature) lay in unsociable sociability, which he believed could not be eliminated. Common wisdom pits Kant in contrast to Hobbes on this point, but this is a shallow understanding. Kant’s proposal for a federation of nations as the basis for perpetual peace arose from his clear recognition of the difficulty of doing away with the fundamentally violent nature of the state. He did not think that this meant we should abandon the regulative idea of a world republic, but rather that we should try to approach it gradually. The federation of nations was to be the first step in this process. Moreover, while Kant proposed a federation of states, he never believed that this would be realized through human reason or morality. Instead, he believed it would be brought about by human unsociable sociability—that is, by war. In contrast to Hegel’s “cunning of reason,” this is sometimes called the “cunning of nature”: what Kant described here was to be realized precisely through the cunning of nature. At the end of the nineteenth century, the age of imperialism was dominated by Hegelian-style thought: the struggle for hegemony among the great powers was interpreted as signifying a struggle to become the “World Historical State.” The result was World War I. On the other hand, together with the rise of imperialism the end of the nineteenth century also saw a revival of Kant’s theory of a federation of nations. This was actually realized to a limited extent with the establishment of the League of Nations after World War I. This came about as an expression not so much of Kantian ideals as of what he called humanity’s unsociable sociability, demonstrated on an unprecedented scale in World War I. The League of Nations remained ineffective due to the failure of the United States, its original sponsor, to ratify its charter, and it was ultimately unable to prevent World War II. But that second world war resulted in the creation of the United Nations. In other words, Kant’s proposal was realized through two world wars—through, that is, the “cunning of nature.” The United Nations was established after World War II with due reflection on the failings of the

78  Kojin Karatani League of Nations, yet it too remained ineffective. The UN has been criticized as being nothing more than a means by which powerful states pursue their own ends; since it lacks an independent military, it has no choice but to rely on powerful states and their militaries. Criticisms of the UN always come back in the end to Hegel’s criticism of Kant: the attempt to resolve international disputes through the UN is dismissed as “Kantian idealism.” Of course, the United Nations really is weak—but if we simply jeer at it and dismiss it, what will the result be? Another world war. And this will in turn result in the formation of yet another international federation. Kant’s thought conceals a realism much crueler than even Hegel’s. A federation of nations is unable to suppress conflicts or wars between states, because it will not grant recognition to a state capable of mobilizing sufficient force. But according to Kant, the wars that will arise as a result will only strengthen the federation. The suppression of war will come about not because one state has surpassed all others to become hegemonic. Only a federation of nations established as a result of wars can accomplish this. On this point, the thought of the late Freud is suggestive. The early Freud sought the superego in prohibitions “from above” issued by parent or society, but after he encountered cases of combat fatigue and war neurosis in World War I, he revised his position. He now saw the superego as externally directed aggressiveness redirected inward toward the self. For example, those raised by easygoing parents often become the bearers of a strong sense of morality. What Kant called humanity’s unsociable sociability is similar to what Freud called aggressiveness. Seen in this way, we can understand how outbursts of aggressiveness can transform into a force for restraining aggression.1 This discussion of Kant and Hegel may sound dated, but in fact it touches directly on present-day actualities. We see this, for example, in the conflict between unilateralism and multilateralism surrounding the 2003 Iraq War, a conflict between the US, acting independently of the UN, and Europe, which stressed the need to act with UN authorization. In the midst of this, Robert Kagan, a representative intellectual of the neoconservative school, argued that whereas the US with its military might was grounded in a Hobbesean worldview of a war of all against all, the militarily inferior Europe stressed economic power and nonmilitary means (soft power), basing itself on Kant’s worldview and its pursuit of the ideal of “perpetual peace.” But according to Kagan, the state of perpetual peace ala Kant that Europe desired could only be realized after security had been secured through military force (hard power) based on the US’s Hobbesean worldview (Kagan, 2004: 3, 37, 57–58, 73). But the theoretical grounding of US unilateralism comes less from Hobbes than Hegel: its advocates believed the war would lead to the realization of a World Historical Idea. That Idea was liberal democracy, according to the neoconservative ideologue Frances Fukuyama, who in fact quoted Hegel directly. To argue that the US took a unilateralist line only because it was pursuing its own interests and hegemony does not change matters: under Hegelian logic, it is America’s pursuit of its own particular will that will lead finally to the realization of the universal

On the simultaneous world revolution  79 Idea. This is precisely what Hegel called the “cunning of reason.” In that sense, the US is the “World Historical State.” By contrast, Hardt and Negri describe this conflict in the following terms: “Most of the contemporary discussions about geopolitics pose a choice between two strategies for maintaining global order: unilateralism or multilateralism” (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 312). Here unilateralism means, of course, the position of the United States, which “began to redefine the boundaries of the former enemy and organize a single network of control over the world” (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 316). In contrast, multilateralism refers to the position of the UN or of Europe, which criticized America. Hardt and Negri reject both positions. “The multitude will have to rise to the challenge and develop a new framework for the democratic constitution of the world” (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 324). “When the multitude is finally able to rule itself, democracy becomes possible” (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 340). If Europe’s position was Kantian and America’s Hegelian, then Hardt and Negri’s position would have to be called Marxist (albeit, that of the 1848 Marx). Their position that because the various states represent the self-alienation of the multitude, they will be abolished when the multitude is able to rule itself clearly derives from the early Marx—more precisely, from the anarchism of Proudhon. In this light, their “new framework for the democratic constitution of the world” is akin to the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International), formed jointly by the Proudhon and Marx factions. But Hardt and Negri never consider why “simultaneous world revolutions” since the nineteenth century have all ended in failure. In the preceding pages, we have seen how the historical situation that has emerged since 1990 has involved a repetition of the classical philosophy of Kant, Hegel and Marx. Accordingly, to rethink these figures is to touch on problems integral to the reality of today’s world. But we have to reject the common view that believes that Kant was superseded by Hegel, and Hegel in turn by Marx. We need instead to reread Kant from the perspective of understanding how local communes and counter-movements against Capital and the State can avoid splintering and falling into mutual conflict. A federation of nations: this is where Kant saw the possibility for “a new framework for the democratic constitution of the world.”

The gift and perpetual peace Kant located the way to perpetual peace not in a world state, but in a federation of nations. As I have argued here, this means that Kant rejected Hobbes’s view, which sought to create a state of peace through a transcendent, Leviathan-like power. This is not how Kant is generally understood, though—he has been criticized, for example, on the grounds that a powerful world state could emerge out of this federation of nations. The origins of this lie in Kant’s failure to demonstrate clearly the possibility of creating peace without relying on Hobbesean principles. Accordingly, our task here is to clarify this from the perspective of modes of exchange.

80  Kojin Karatani According to Hobbes, a state of peace was established through a covenant with the sovereign “extorted by fear”—in other words, through mode of exchange B. What was Kant’s position? In “Toward Perpetual Peace,” for example, Kant sees the development of commerce as a condition for peace: the development of dense relations of trade between states will render war impossible. This is partially true. But mode of exchange C is dependent on state regulation—in other words, on mode of exchange B. For this reason, mode C can never bring about the complete abolition of mode of exchange B. In reality, the development of mode of exchange C—that is, the development of industrial capitalism—gave rise to a new kind of conflict and war, of a different nature than those that had previously existed: the imperialistic world war. At present, war between the developed countries is generally avoided, probably for the reasons that Kant spelled out. Yet a crisis situation involving deep hostility and warfare still exists between the developed countries, on the one hand, and the developing countries economically subordinated to the developed countries and the late-developing countries now in a position to compete with the developed countries—in other words, between North and South. Even as this takes the guise of a religious conflict, it is fundamentally economic and political in nature. This antagonism cannot be subdued through military pressure. A true resolution of this hostility is only possible through the elimination of economic disparities between states—and of the capitalist formation that reproduces such disparities. Any number of efforts have been made to eliminate economic disparities between countries. For example, advanced countries provide economic aid to developing countries. This is regarded as a kind of “redistributive justice.” But in reality, this aid serves to generate further accumulation of capital in the advanced countries. In this, it resembles the case of domestic social welfare policies within those countries: in both cases, redistribution functions simply as a regular link in the process of capitalist accumulation. Far from eliminating inequality, “redistributive justice” actually proliferates inequality. It also has the result of legitimating and strengthening the state power responsible for carrying out this redistribution. Ultimately, it perpetuates the “state of war” between North and South. In his last major work, The Law of Peoples, John Rawls located justice between states in the realization of economic equality. He described this as a self-critical development of the notion of “justice” in a single country that he had written about in such earlier essays as “Justice as Fairness.” Yet Rawls here continues to consider justice only in terms of “redistributive justice.” For that reason, just as “distributive justice” within a single country always ends up in a kind of welfarestate capitalism, “distributive justice” between states requires a push to strengthen the entities that would carry out redistribution. In the end, this means redistribution carried out by economically powerful countries, meaning in practice either world empire or imperialism. Kant’s “justice,” however, was not distributive justice: it was justice based in exchange. It did not mean the amelioration of economic disparity through

On the simultaneous world revolution  81 redistribution; it was to be realized through the abolition of the system of exchange that gave birth to those disparities in the first place. Of course, it had to exist not only domestically within countries but also between nations as well. In sum, it could only be achieved through a new world system. How could this be realized? So long as we think of “power” only in terms of military or economic power, we will end up taking the same road as Hobbes. There is an important hint to be had from the example of the tribal confederations that existed before the rise of the state. Confederations of tribes were headed by neither a king nor an all-powerful chief. Previously, I discussed these “societies against the state.” Here, though, I would like to reconsider them for what they might tell us about how to overcome the state of war between nations without resorting to a sovereign that stands above the various states. Tribal confederations were sustained by mode of exchange A—by the principle of reciprocity. They were sustained, in other words, not by military or economic power, but by the “power” of the gift. This likewise served as the guarantor of the equality and mutual autonomy of the member tribes. A federation of nations in the sense that Kant intended is of course different from a tribal confederation. The base for the former lies in a world economy developed on a global scale—on, that is, the generalization of mode of exchange C. A federation of nations represents the restoration of mode of exchange A on top of this. We have up until now thought about this primarily at the level of a single country. But as I have repeatedly stressed, this cannot be realized within a single country. It can only be realized at the level of relations between states—in other words, through the creation of a new world-system. This would be something that goes beyond the previously existing world systems—the “world empire” or the “world economy” (the modern world-system). It can only be a “World Republic.” It marks the return of the “mini-world system” in a higher dimension. We have already looked at the return in a higher dimension of the principle of reciprocity in terms of consumer-producer cooperatives. Now we need to consider this in terms of relations between states. The only principle that can ground the establishment of a federation of nations as a new world system is the reciprocity of the gift. Any resemblance between this and today’s “overseas aid” is only apparent. For example, what would be given under this are not products, but the technical knowledge (intellectual property) needed to carry out production. Voluntary disarmament to abolish weapons that pose a threat to others would be another kind of gift here. These kinds of gifts would undermine the real bases of both Capital and State in the developed countries. We should not assume that this would lead to disorder. The gift operates as a “power” stronger even than military or economic power. The universal “rule of law” is sustained not by violence but by the power of the gift. The World Republic will be established in this way. Those who would dismiss this as a kind of unrealistic dream are the ones who are being foolish. Even Carl Schmitt, a consistent advocate of the most severe form of a Hobbesean worldview, saw the sole possibility for the extinction of the state in the spread of consumer–producer cooperatives:

82  Kojin Karatani Were a world state to embrace the entire globe and humanity, then it would be no political entity and could only loosely be called a state. If, in fact, all humanity and the entire world were to become a unified entity [. . . and should] that interest group also want to become cultural, ideological, or otherwise more ambitious, and yet remain strictly nonpolitical, then it would be a neutral consumer or producer co-operative moving between the poles of ethics and economics. It would know neither state nor kingdom nor empire, neither republic nor monarchy, neither aristocracy nor democracy, neither protection nor obedience, and would altogether lose its political character. (Schmitt, 1996: 57) What Schmitt here calls a “world state” is identical to what Kant called a World Republic. In Schmitt’s thinking, if we follow Hobbes’s view the abolition of the state is impossible. This does not mean, however, that the state cannot be abolished. It suggests rather that it is possible only through a principle of exchange different from that which formed the basis of Hobbes’s understanding.

The federation of nations as world-system Just as Kant predicted, the United Nations was born as the result of two world wars. But today’s UN is far from being a new world-system: it is merely a venue where states vie for hegemony. Yet the UN is also a system established on the basis of enormous human sacrifice. For all its inadequacies, the future of the human species is unthinkable without it. Most criticism aimed at the UN relates to the Security Council, the World Bank, and the IMF. But today’s UN is not limited to these entities. It is in fact an enormous, complex federation that might best be called the “UN system.” Its activities cover three primary domains: 1) military affairs, 2) economic affairs and 3) medical, cultural and environmental issues. Unlike the first two domains, the third domain has many historical precedents that date back to before the League of Nations or UN. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) is an international organization dating back to the nineteenth century that has linked up with the UN. In other words, leaving aside the first and second domains, the “UN system” was not deliberately planned, but rather took shape as entities that arose initially as separate international associations and then later merged with the UN. These will continue to appear with the expansion of world intercourse. Moreover, in the third domain, there is no rigid distinction between national (state-based) and non-national entities. As can be seen, for example, in the way NGOs participate as delegates alongside nations at world environmental meetings, these already transcend Nation. In that sense, the “UN system” is already something more than a simple “United Nations.” Of course, the situation is different in the first and second domains, because they are closely related to State and Capital. They have a determinative impact

On the simultaneous world revolution  83 on today’s UN. In other words, modes of exchange B and C continue to determine today’s UN. If the same sort of characteristics found in the third domain were to be realized in the first and second domains, we would in effect have a new world-system. But this will not simply happen as a kind of natural outgrowth of the expansion of world intercourse: it will no doubt face resistance from State and Capital. Transforming the UN into a new world-system will require a countermovement against the State and Capital arising in each country. Only changes at the level of individual countries can lead to a transformation of the UN. At the same time, the opposite is also true: only a reform of the UN can make possible an effective union of national counter-movements around the world. Counter-movements based in individual countries are always in danger of being fragmented by the State and Capital. There is no reason to expect that they will somehow naturally link together across national borders, that a “simultaneous world revolution” will somehow spontaneously be generated. Even if a global alliance (a new International) is created, it will not have the power to counter the various states: there is, after all, no reason to expect that what hitherto has been impossible will become possible to achieve. Usually, a simultaneous world revolution is narrated through the image of simultaneous uprisings carried out by local national resistance movements in their own home countries. But this could never happen, nor is it necessary. Suppose, for example, one country has a revolution that ends up with it making a “gift” of its military sovereignty to the UN. This would of course be a revolution in a single nation.2 But it wouldn’t necessarily result in external interference or international isolation. No weapon can resist the “power of the gift.” It has the power to attract the support of many states and to change fundamentally the structure of the UN. For these reasons, such a “revolution in one country” could in fact lead to “simultaneous world revolution.” This kind of revolution may seem an unrealistic possibility. But without a global movement for such a revolution, we are almost certainly headed for world war. In fact, that still remains the likeliest outcome. But this doesn’t demand pessimism: as Kant believed, a world war will only lead to the implementation of a more effective federation of nations. This will not happen automatically, however: it will only come about if there are local counter-movements against the State and Capital in all the countries of the world. The realization of a world-system grounded in the principle of reciprocity—a world republic—will not be easy. Modes of exchange A, B and C will remain stubborn presences. In other words, Nation, State and Capital will all persist. No matter how highly developed the forces of production (the relation of humans and nature) become, it will be impossible to eliminate completely the forms of existence produced by these modes of exchange—in other words, by relations between humans.3 Yet so long as they exist, so too will mode of exchange D. No matter how it is denied or repressed, it will always return. That is the very nature of what Kant called a “regulative Idea.”

84  Kojin Karatani

Notes 1 On this point, please refer to my essay “Shi to nashonarizumu” [Death and Nationalism], in Kōjin Karatani, Teihon Karatani Kōjin shū 4: Nēshon to bigaku (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2004). 2 For example, Japan’s postwar constitution includes Article 9, which renounces the right to engage in warfare. Accordingly, all that is needed is to actually put this into practice. In reality, however, while the article remains in place, it has been reinterpreted as permitting the present situation in which Japan possesses a large military and vast stockpiles of armaments. Actually putting Article 9 into practice would therefore require a “revolution.” 3 World history will not “end” with the rise of a world republic. There could, for example, be reversions to the forms of society in which modes of exchange B or C are dominant. Even under these, however, the impulse toward mode of exchange D will never disappear.

Part II

Trajectories of Marxisms in Japan, China and Korea

5 Historical difference and the question of East-Asian Marxism Max Ward

The question of “East-Asian Marxism” To pose the question of East-Asian Marxism(s) requires that we first recognize the subtle but important difference between identifying our object of discussion as say, for example, “Japanese Marxism” or “Marxism in Japan.” Whereas the latter designates theoretical and/or political practices in Japan that engage with and contribute to Marxism, “Japanese Marxism” usually implies that these practices are determined by a unique cultural inheritance, producing a culturally specific breed of Marxism. Moreover, this breed has often been understood as the product of an unresolvable tension between Marxism—figured as an inherently Western intellectual import—and the enduring cultural traditions that purportedly continue to determine non-European societies. In this way, the diverse history of Marxism outside of Europe is reduced to a simple juxtaposition of different cultures. The aim of this essay is to point to the endurance of this analytical assumption in more recent theories of capitalist modernity, and the continuing dismissal of Marxism’s historical, intellectual and political significance outside of Europe. The essay begins with a brief analysis of how area studies had approached Marxist praxis in Japan as a vexed process of intellectual “adaptation” taking place during rapid modernization. The area studies approach is the most explicit example of how assumptions of reified cultural difference leads to dismissals of Marxian praxis in non-European societies. This initial discussion of area studies serves to introduce the second and more substantial portion of this essay that analyzes Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2007). Critiquing the convergence model that underwrote area studies, Chakrabarty develops a sophisticated theory of modernity as a disjunctural historical formation, co-determined by the global logic of capitalism—analyzed by Marx—and the cultural life-worlds of non-European societies—revealed through Heideggerian notions of “worlding” (weltenden Verbleib) and “dwelling” (bauen).1 The objective of Chakrabarty’s theoretical pairing of Marx and Heidegger is to locate cultural difference along with a critique of the global logic of capitalist reproduction, one where difference is not outside of capitalist logic, subsumed within in it, nor generated by it. I will argue that, although informing a very different politics, Chakrabarty’s reading paradoxically reproduces many of the claims about Marxism that we find

88  Max Ward in the area studies paradigm; most importantly that, in the last instance, Marxism remains alien to the cultural life-worlds outside of Europe.2 Specifically, I will argue that beyond “provincializing” Europe, Chakrabarty effectively “provincializes” Marx, since Marx serves for him as a kind of metonym for an assumedly single European tradition against which to identify cultural difference in the periphery. In both area studies and Chakrabarty’s contribution to postcolonial theory, Marxism functions as a foil against which to locate their respective objects of analysis.3 This similarity has the same effect of denying Marxism’s purchase outside of Europe, as non-European Marxists are characterized as performing a kind of “comical misrecognition” (Chakrabarty, 2007: x) by using Marxian categories to understand their societies. For this reason, it is important for us to consider Chakrabarty’s nuanced theory of modernity when we are considering the topic of East-Asian Marxism. In solidarity with Chakrabarty’s commitment to close reading, my analysis will remain within the terms of Chakrabarty’s own argument, showing how an unresolvable contradiction emerges immanent to his theory of global capitalism and historical difference. In the conclusion, I will return to the question of EastAsian Marxism(s) and will consider different ways in which we can understand the rich history of Marxism in Japan that do not reproduce the dismissals that we find in either the area studies paradigm or Chakrabarty’s theory of modernity. The task is to both restore the integrity of those thinkers and activists outside of Europe who contributed to Marxism as a global project, while also recognizing the different conditions they found themselves in as well as the different intellectual and cultural forms that they drew upon to construct their critical analyses.

“Uneasy coexistence”: Japanese studies and the trope of adaptation Japanese Marxism has proved an extremely hardy plant. Its failure to correspond to the facts of twentieth-century history, even as these unfold within Japan itself, has not blighted it. . .  Marxism has flourished even despite a most infertile emotional soil. Grassroots Japan remains basically conservative in disposition, and the Japanese as a whole are an extremely pragmatic people. . .  Yet despite all this and despite Japan’s enormous economic success, large sectors of the Japanese public still debate with all seriousness whether it is ‘Japanese monopoly capitalism’ or ‘American imperialism’ that is the chief enemy of the Japanese people. (Edwin O. Reischauer, 1964: 255–256)4 The relationship between area studies and Cold War politics is well known,5 and is clearly expressed in the kind of argument put forth by Harvard Professor and then Ambassador to Japan Edwin Reischauer cited above. Although Reischauer dismissed the validity of Marxism in toto—as out-of-sync with “the facts of twentieth-century history”—for him this issue was thrown into sharp relief by

Historical difference and East-Asian Marxism  89 the case of Japan. Interestingly, Reischauer blamed the flourishing of Marxism in postwar Japan on the Allied occupation’s “inability to see this situation and remedy it by adequate intellectual antidotes” (Reischauer, 1964: 254). The implication here was that postwar area studies’ task was to provide such an ideological remedy, if only by revealing how “infertile” Japan’s “emotional soil” actually was. In other words, Reischauer’s dismissal functions to reveal the cultural differences that constitute Japan as an analytical object for postwar area studies. Unlike Reischauer’s cursory dismissal, later area studies scholars recognized the importance and diversity of Marxism in modern Japanese intellectual and social history. However, in many ways, these later area studies retained the culturalist assumptions seen in Reischauer’s position, explaining the diverse history of Marxism in Japan as a tortured process of “adapting” a Western import into an antithetical cultural milieu. For example, Gail Bernstein narrates the economist Kawakami Hajime’s (1879–1946) intellectual trajectory—from an early interest in Christian morality through to Kawakami’s sustained engagement with Marx’s writings and his later decision to join the Japanese Communist Party (JCP)—as one in which each intellectual moment “echoed” and “mirrored” Japan’s traditional ethos, as Kawakami attempted to “redirect. . .  Confucian altruistic ethics” into a variety of Western ideologies (Bernstein, 1976: 63). For example, Bernstein explains that Kawakami’s initial interest in Christian social activism emerged because Kawakami understood it as “resonant with the ethos of the shishi [activist samurai]” and “modeled on the samurai’s traditional role as a moral exemplar” (1976: 30). When Kawakami became interested in socialism, Bernstein argues that he was “drawn to those aspects of socialism which mirrored the Confucian version of the good society” but “repelled. . .  at those points where its modern individualism conflicted with his own more traditionalist ethics of self-denial” (1976: 69). This assumption of a cultural opposition—here between an enduring Japanese ethos of self-denial and Western individualism—informs Bernstein’s interpretation of all of Kawakami’s intellectual transformations, whereby an irresolvable tension accumulated as Kawakami moved towards Marxism. As Kawakami engaged with Marx’s theory in the 1920s, Bernstein explains that: the differences between Kawakami and Marx reflect the philosophical traditions which nurtured them. Marx’s spirit of individualism betrays the influence of the French Enlightenment; Kawakami’s altruism demonstrates the powerful grip on him of Japanese morality. (1976: 116)6 Interestingly, when Bernstein analyzes Kawakami’s refusal to disavow Marxism (tenkō) after his arrest in 1933 (in contrast to the hundreds of other incarcerated Japanese communists who did recant), she explains this as indicative of Kawakami’s abiding Japanese ethos, rather than to Kawakami’s commitment to Marxism.7 In another version, Germaine Hoston analyzes Japanese Marxism based on the assumption that “[i]ntellectuals in non-Western societies import Marxism-Leninism and other Western political thought in a nationalistic desire to ‘modernize’ so as

90  Max Ward to [be] able to resist the perceived encroachments of more advanced societies” (Hoston, 1983: 96–97). This importation is only partially successful however since “political theory in general, is transformed as it moves from one milieu to another” producing different versions in the periphery where the original Western concepts “float about without roots, in an uneasy coexistence with indigenous modes of political thought” (Hoston, 1983: 112). Echoing Bernstein, Hoston argues that, at least initially, this “coexistence” in Japan was between the imperative for rapid modernization and the hope to “reinstate” a traditional ethos: [T]he radical revolutionism of Marxism in Japan represented an effort to reinstate more traditional values like collectivism through further progress along the ‘Western’ path through capitalism and on toward socialism. . .  Marxism offered a way to pursue these traditional values without calling for a return to the past. (Hoston, 1986: xiv–xv) However, in this effort Japanese intellectuals struggled to resolve the “national question” in Marxist theory, particularly since, according to Hoston, Marx’s social theory articulated a European individualism that contrasted with Japanese national values.8 In other words, in Hoston’s study, the “national question” is not contextualized as the pressing issue concerning the nation-form that plagued communist parties throughout the world (Connor, 1984), but rather is portrayed as a predicament when a Western-derived and individualistic theory is applied to traditional, non-Western societies. Ultimately, Hoston renders a theoretical-political question as an ontological-cultural condition. We are told that Japan was unique in this regard, since the problem posed by the national-question “was not merely nationalism versus internationalism, but Marxism versus national identity, Marxism versus Japaneseness itself” (Hoston, 1983: 118). The resolution of the “national question” in Japan thus required transforming Western Marxism into a theory of development that would accord with Japanese uniqueness. This, it was hoped, would realign the imperative to modernize with Japan’s unique cultural identity.9 As we saw with Bernstein, this comes to a head in the recantations (tenkō) of incarcerated JCP members in 1933–1934, which led to a critique of Marxist theory from explicitly nationalist lines. Addressing both sides of the tenkō phenomenon in the 1930s, if for Bernstein Kawakami’s resilient “Japanese Marxism” echoed an earlier Neo-Confucian morality, for Hoston the inherent contradictions of “Japanese Marxism” were only resolved once it was recanted and displaced by a developmental national-socialism.10 Unlike Reischauer, Bernstein and Hoston at the very least attempt to account for the extensive history of Marxism in modern Japan. However, both Hoston and Bernstein figure Marxism as an inherently Western thought system juxtaposed against the enduring cultural traditions that define Japan. In this way, the rich debates in Marxist theory in Japan are divested of any analytical significance in their own right and simply reduced to the torturous struggle to adapt a Western import to an “infertile” and alien culture.

Historical difference and East-Asian Marxism  91 Postcolonial theory emerged in the 1980s as a counterpoint to the underlying assumptions of the area studies paradigm, emphasizing unevenness, colonial violence, political struggle and cultural hegemony, not as anomalies to modernity, but as revealing modernity’s constitutive dynamics. Furthermore, these insights were often drawn from an engagement with Marxist theory. However, in his 2000 book, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Dipesh Chakrabarty calls this Marxist influence into question by portraying Marxism as an expression of the hegemonic universalism of European Enlightenment thought. With this move, there is a curious echo with area studies’ dismissal of Marxism outside of Europe.

Chakrabarty and the politics of “provincialization” To provincialize Europe was precisely to find out how and in what sense European ideas that were universal were also, at one and the same time, drawn from very particular intellectual and historical traditions that could not claim any universal validity. It was to ask a question about how thought was related to place. Can thought transcend places of their origin? Or do places leave their imprint on thought in such a way as to call into question the idea of purely abstract categories? (Chakrabarty, 2007: xiii) In his 2000 book, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Dipesh Chakrabarty mounts a powerful critique of the type of developmentalism underlying the studies reviewed above, seeing it as an expression of an underlying “historicism” at the core of all social-scientific thought, including, in Chakrabarty’s view, Marx’s own critique of capitalism. In contrast to this historicism, Chakrabarty invests the principle of disjuncture with a critical and political potential, one that reveals not only the heterogeneity of capitalist modernity, but also an open-endedness towards the future, from which a plurality of possibilities can be imagined beyond the hegemonic narrative of unilinear capitalist development.11 Chakrabarty posits that the historical formation of modernity is constituted by two temporalities, (1) the temporal logic of capitalist reproduction that Marx had analyzed, and (2) inherited sensibilities and cultural practices that Chakrabarty understands to be, following Heidegger, “modes of worlding” (Heidegger, 2008: 63–112). These latter practices cannot be subsumed within capitalism’s logic and thus serve to disrupt capitalism’s drive to totalize the present. And it is this temporal heterogeneity that, for Chakrabarty, presents the possibility to “provincialize Europe” and think a new critical politics that does not negate difference and dwelling. As a close reader of Marx, Chakrabarty develops his theory of modernity from a distinction he finds between Marx’s concepts of “living labor” (lebendige Arbeit) and “unproductive labor” (unproduktive Arbeit), the latter of which provides a theoretical departure from Marx to Heideggerian notions of “worlding” and “dwelling.” Following Chakrabarty’s commitment to close reading, in this section

92  Max Ward I re-appropriate the theme of disjuncture as an interpretive strategy to critically read Provincializing Europe, focusing on how Chakrabarty’s theory of modernity ultimately derives from his imputation of a categorical disjuncture in Marx (between “living” and “unproductive” labor), and how this then is expanded into a theoretical disjuncture between Marx (the first half of Provincializing Europe) and Heidegger (the theoretical basis for the second half of the book). Finally, I will conclude this section by demonstrating that, when taken as an elaborated system, there is a disjuncture, if not a logical contradiction, between Chakrabarty’s desire to “provincialize” Europe and his turn away from Marx to Heidegger in order to think cultural-temporal heterogeneity on the periphery. The unintended consequence is that Chakrabarty does not “provincialize” Europe per se but Marx specifically, leaving the periphery as a uniquely Heideggerian realm of cultural dwelling. In this way, Chakrabarty’s desire to provincialize Marx may paradoxically serve the same function as area studies’ earlier dismissal of Marxism: that is, as a foil against which to figure an elusive cultural object. The hegemony of the Enlightenment: universalism and historicism Chakrabarty’s reading of Marx rests on the assumption that Marx’s critique of capitalism inherited two key components of European Enlightenment thought: universalism and historicism, ostensibly found in how Marx understands the universal abstraction of living labor under capitalism and how he unfolds a teleology of development and the transformative potential that accrues in the process of capital accumulation. Chakrabarty assails the assumption of teleological, unilinear political-economic development in time—what he labels historicism12—and the spatial identification of normative development with Western Europe from which all other geographically specific rates of development are then measured. Chakrabarty sees this as the ultimate inheritance of the European Enlightenment, a legacy that both authorized colonial power and which continues to underlie critical assessments of the postcolonial present. Chakrabarty explains: Historicism enabled European domination of the world in the nineteenth century. Crudely, one might say that it was one important form that the ideology of progress or ‘development’ took from the nineteenth century on. Historicism is what made modernity or capitalism look not simply global but rather as something that became global over time, by originating in one place (Europe) and then spreading outside of it. This ‘first in Europe, then elsewhere’ structure of global historical time was historicist; different non-Western nationalisms would later produce local versions of the same narrative, replacing ‘Europe’ by some locally constructed center. (2007: 7) Chakrabarty does not deny the “indispensability” of social-scientific theory for non-Western countries, but argues that a conceit continues in contemporary historical thought where “‘Europe’ remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all

Historical difference and East-Asian Marxism  93 histories” (2007: 27). This “Europe”—not an empirically defined “Europe” of any geographic or historical specificity, but what Chakrabarty calls, borrowing from Jean Baudrillard, a “hyperreality”—serves as the master narrative through which all particular histories of China, India, Japan, etc. (similarly hyperreal as subtexts) can be told (2007: 27, 265 fn. 2). This theoretical bifurcation between European modernity and peripheral late-development is then inflected in studies of postcolonial societies, in which they are characterized as comprising “a modernizing elite and a yet-to-be modernized peasantry” (2007: 40). The effect is that to think, for example, Indian history is always already caught in a double-bind: between Europe and India, and within itself, between the modern bourgeoisie and agrarian subaltern. And this is because Indian history “speaks from within a metanarrative that celebrates the nation-state; and of this metanarrative the theoretical subject can only be a hyperreal ‘Europe’, a Europe constructed by the tales that both imperialism and nationalism have told the colonized” (2007: 40). At the very outset then, Chakrabarty is hoping to point to the specific origins of the categories that social scientists have used to understand their respective societies in order to return them to their historical specificity—in effect, to “provincialize” these categories back to their European origins. Chakrabarty’s project to de-familiarize and historically re-situate conventional social categories is an extension of the Subaltern Studies project to recuperate the political subjectivity of subaltern practices from earlier social histories that, informed by a variant of Marxian developmentalism, relegated peasant insurgency to the “prepolitical,” and thus outside of “modern” time (modernity).13 Moreover, this relegation was understood geographically, wherein the European bourgeoisie and/or industrial working class were identified as the archetypes of the modern political subject against which all peripheral and colonial populations were measured. Chakrabarty extends his analysis, however, beyond conventional Subaltern Studies and identifies the source of this developmentalism, as well as the assumptions underlying Subaltern Studies itself, as secondary effects of a much deeper conceit at the heart of Marx’s critique of capitalism: namely, the universality of “abstract labor” and, at times, Marx’s investment of political possibility to this universality—both of which for him reveal the inheritance of the European Enlightenment in Marx’s thought. Chakrabarty does not deny the value of Marx’s analysis of capitalism. Rather, in Chakrabarty’s theory of modernity Marx takes on a dual significance: Marx is both an indispensable source for understanding capitalist modernity across the globe, as well as an example of the cultural hegemony of the Enlightenment that inheres in capitalism. Chakrabarty elaborates this doubled significance as he extrapolates a unique postcolonial theory of historical time through a close reading of Marx. The historical times of “living” and “unproductive” labor Chakrabarty recognizes that Marx’s critique of capitalism is indispensable, as it “decodes abstract labor as a key to the hermeneutic grid through which capital requires us to read the world”—a “reading” moreover, where the question

94  Max Ward of history is of the upmost importance. Here, capitalism understands forms that appear, from within its own logic, as “antecedents” to itself—retrospectively positing an encounter when “living labor” was subsumed into “abstract labor” (i.e. the commodification of labor).14 Chakrabarty names this history “History 1,” a history posited by capital of its own “becoming” and thus generating a retroactive narrative of “transition” from “pre-capitalism” to “capitalism.”15 Chakrabarty rejects the Marxian categories of formal and real subsumption, since this pairing, in his reading, already presumes that there is a historical process—a transition— wherein various productive processes are being subsumed within the logic of capital.16 “Transition” is thus not an empirical process taking place in empty time, but is a temporal logic generated retroactively from within capitalist reproduction. And this, Chakrabarty notes, reflects the historicism that underlies social scientific thought. Interestingly, Chakrabarty develops his notion of History 1 from a reading of Marx’s concept of “living labor,” arguing (2007: 60) that it is central to Marx’s critique to understand that “the labor that is being abstracted in the capitalist’s search for a common measure of human activity is living.”17 He reads “life” as the influence of nineteenth-century vitalist discourse on Marx’s thought, where the “sum of muscles, nerves, and consciousness/will” serves as the “excess” of capital (2007: 63). Chakrabarty focuses on passages from Marx’s Grundrisse (1857–1858) and Theories of Surplus Value (1862–1863) in order to emphasize the importance of “living labor” as both the “contradictory starting point” that Marx recognizes for capitalist reproduction (i.e. that which is abstracted) as well as something that for Marx will serve as the “ground of constant resistance to capital” (2007: 60). Chakrabarty writes that: Marx’s critique of capital begins at the same point where capital begins its own life process: the abstraction of labor. Yet this labor, although abstract, is always living labor to begin with. The ‘living’ quality of the labor ensures that the capitalist has not bought a fixed quantum of labor but rather a variable ‘capacity for labor’ [Marx], and being ‘living’ is what makes this labor a source of resistance to capitalist abstraction. (2007: 61) Echoing Foucauldian readings of Marx, Chakrabarty emphasizes (2007: 60) that the “disciplinary procedures” that capitalism uses to subject labor derives from labor’s “living” quality, noting labor’s “biological/conscious capacity for willful activity.”18 Because of this, capital is always seeking to reduce the ratio of (living) labor to dead labor (means of production), thus indicating the irreducible contradiction of capitalism since “it needs abstract but living labor as the starting point in its cycle of self-reproduction, but it also wants to reduce to a minimum the quantum of living labor it needs” (2007: 61). As technology is developed in order to reduce the amount of (living) labor, a contradiction emerges which creates “the conditions necessary for the emancipation of labor and for the eventual abolition of the category ‘labor’ altogether”; in other words,

Historical difference and East-Asian Marxism  95 the conditions for the “the dissolution of capital.” From this reading of Marx’s category of living labor, then, Chakrabarty finds both universalism (labor) and historicism (teleology) at the center of Marx’s thought.19 Although Chakrabarty does not dismiss Marx’s understanding of the logic and history generated by capital, this constitutes only one side—one temporal register—of what Chakrabarty sees as the disjunctive dynamic of modernity. Here, as capital tends towards universality, it is always interrupted by other modes of being that Chakrabarty argues (2007: 63–64) do “not contribute to the self-reproduction of capitalist relationships.” In other words, there are two “modes of being” that constitute any present—one determined by the logic of capitalist reproduction and another that cannot be subsumed to serve capitalist reproduction. Chakrabarty calls the historical temporality of these latter ways of being “History 2s” (a plurality) which unlike the hegemonic transition narrative of History 1, authorizes a hermeneutics of translation, which would produce the possibility for a different type of historical narrative altogether, what Chakrabarty calls “affective narratives of human belongings” (2007: 71). Chakrabarty urges us to recognize that what has been narrated solely as a “transition to capitalism” was “also a process of translation”—always an incomplete process—between the categories that inhere in capitalism and the heterogeneous life-worlds that capitalism abstracts from (2007: 71). Here Chakrabarty makes a fundamental, though somewhat understated, equation between the logic of capitalism and European Enlightenment thought, whereby the “diverse life-worlds and conceptual horizons about being human” are translated “into the categories of Enlightenment thought that inhere in the logic of capital” (2007: 71). Marx stands in for both elements: that is, Marx (1) provides the analytical categories through which to understand capitalism, but also (2) expresses the hegemonic universalism and historicism of Enlightenment thought. Interestingly, by claiming that Enlightenment thought “inheres” in capital, Chakrabarty is implying that the universalism and teleology that he ascribes to Marxism are constitutive of capitalism itself, and thus that Marxism is an adequate, although, partial critique of this experience. I will discuss the important implications of this claim below. Here it is still necessary to explore how Chakrabarty extrapolates his idea of History 2s from Marx. Similar to how Chakrabarty developed his theory of History 1 from Marx’s category of “living labor,” Chakrabarty develops his notion of History 2s from Marx’s distinction between “productive” and “unproductive” labor. However, whereas “living labor” was explored within Marx’s critique of political economy, Chakrabarty sees “unproductive” labor as pointing beyond the horizon of Marx’s critique, and with important consequences. Specifically, Chakrabarty turns to a note in the Grundrisse where Marx (1973: 305), addressing a debate between Adam Smith and Nassau William Senior, distinguishes between the labor performed by a piano maker and that performed by a piano player.20 Siding with Smith, Marx argues that while the piano maker’s labor produces surplus value for capital and thus is “productive labour in the economic sense,” the piano player “only exchanges his labour for revenue” (Marx, 1973: 305, cited in Chakrabarty, 2007: 68). For Chakrabarty, Marx’s dismissal of the latter form of

96  Max Ward labor—the unproductive—indicates a major “blind spot” in Marx’s writings.21 Chakrabarty’s desire to explore this question ultimately leads outside of Marx. Chakrabarty draws upon Heidegger in order to emphasize the “preanalytical, unobjectifying” relationships that humans have with tools (here, the piano), a relationship that, for Chakrabarty (2007: 68), indicates how humans make “a world out of this earth.”22 In fact, this other register provides capitalism a “world” to unfold within; it is, in effect, the phenomenological fabric from which capitalism abstracts. These pre-analytical, everyday practices of “worlding” constitute History 2s, which cannot be (completely) sublated into the logic of capital (History 1), and which, apparently, require Heideggerian categories to understand. Chakrabarty’s idea of History 2s is the other temporality of modernity, a domain of heterogeneity that comprises different cultural practices, unconscious sensibilities and archaic beliefs, which Chakrabarty believes have the potential to interrupt the totalizing impulse of capitalism’s logic in any given present.23 Chakrabarty is adamant that the pasts of History 2s are “not pasts separate from capital,” nor should History 1 and History 2s be read as a “topological distinction” constituting the “inside” and “outside” of capital respectively (2007: 64 and 65). What Chakrabarty calls “History 2s” are those hints in Marx of practices that do not lend themselves to the reproduction of capitalism and thus indicate an untheorized recognition of “difference” in Marx’s writings. Chakrabarty argues that History 2s live “in intimate and plural relationships to capital, ranging from opposition to neutrality” (2007: 66).24 Although the practices that comprise History 2s may be under the “institutional domination of the logic of capital” they “also do not belong to the ‘life process’ of capital” either (2007: 66). For Chakrabarty, “unproductive labor” thus points to the possibility of a politics of “human belonging and diversity” within “Marx’s own analytical of capital” (2007: 67). Against the teleology of capital’s “becoming” leading to what “will be” (the temporality of History 1), Chakrabarty contends (2007: 251) that the pasts of History 2s contain a futurity that “already are” in the heterogeneous present, always-already disrupting the future of History 1. Chakrabarty argues that, while for Marx, History 1 “has to subjugate or destroy the multiple possibilities that belong to History 2,” there “is nothing, however, to guarantee that the subordination of History 2s to the logic of capital would ever be complete” (2007: 65). Chakrabarty elaborates on the pasts and futures of History 2s: The futures that ‘are’ are plural, do not lend themselves to being represented by a totalizing principle, and are not even always amenable to the objectifying procedures of history writing. For my ‘I am as having been’ [Heidegger] includes pasts that exist in ways that I cannot see or figure out—or can do so sometimes only retrospectively. Pasts are there in taste, in practices of embodiment, in the cultural training the senses have received over generations. They are there in practices I sometimes do not even know I engage in. This is how the archaic comes into the modern, not as a remnant of another time but as something constitutive of the present. (2007: 251)

Historical difference and East-Asian Marxism  97 In this way, Chakrabarty not only identifies an operative disjuncture in the present between the continuing, though never universal, process of capitalist abstraction (History 1) and its interruption by the various modes of cultural being (History 2s), but also that this heterogeneous and never totalized present remains open to the future—and thus open to political possibility. Consequently, Chakrabarty (2007: 61) rejects the premise that the condition for resistance emerges from the contradictory ground that Marx invested in “labor” and History 1. Rather, Chakrabarty locates the potential for resistance in the “unproductive” cultural practices of History 2s, which always safeguard the present from ever fully being totalized in the temporal logic of History 1. Demarcating the disjuncture Following its publication in 2000, Provincializing Europe sparked a number of debates, most of which revolved around the implications of Chakrabarty’s thesis regarding historicism and the universality of reason (see Chakrabarty, 2008; Dietze, 2008; Pouchepadass, 2002). However, all of these critiques belie a certain agreement that Chakrabarty had successfully discharged with Marxism as an expression of provincial Euro-centrism, although Chakrabarty himself understands Provincializing Europe otherwise.25 Furthermore, many of these engagements overlook that Chakrabarty seriously engages with capitalism and Marx’s critique of political economy. However, here I will argue that rather than “provincializing Europe,” the ultimate consequence of Chakrabarty’s project is to “provincialize” Marxism—largely by relying on the help of Heidegger in order to theorize cultural heterogeneity outside of Europe. This heterogeneity escapes capitalist abstraction and thus provides a space from which to critique the violence of this abstraction—both of capital and more importantly, Marx’s analysis of capital.26 This is where Chakrabarty’s reading of Marx splits into two directions: on the one hand, he finds that Marx’s critique is indispensable because it provides a critical optic through which to understand the global (though not universal) process of capitalist abstraction. On the other hand, he consigns Marx’s critique and its categories to a uniquely European tradition, rendering Marxian social science outside of Europe a performance of “comical misrecognition.”27 Heidegger, in Chakrabarty’s reading, does not produce the same comical effect. The tension between Marx and Heidegger cuts across the multiple disjunctures that make Provincializing Europe such a demanding text: beginning with a disjuncture imputed between Marx’s categories “living labor” and “unproductive labor,” its expansion to a disjuncture between an analytical Marx and a hermeneutic Heidegger, then between global capitalism and the particular lifeworlds that it never fully subsumes into its logic, to finally between Europe and the periphery. This doubled significance of Marx points to a more fundamental contradiction that underlies Chakrabarty’s project to provincialize Europe. What Chakrabarty does not explicitly address but which his “provincialization” seems to imply is

98  Max Ward that, to a certain degree, Marxism corresponds to the European experience; in that Marxism was born from the intellectual and cultural traditions of Europe and that the disjuncture he identifies between History 1 and History 2s would thus occur differently in Europe. In fact, it is unclear if Europe is constituted by the same disjuncture between History 1 and History 2s that Chakrabarty finds in the periphery. This has important consequences for his attempt to elaborate a global theory of capitalist modernity, for it implies that the disjuncture is not between History 1 and History 2s in the periphery per se, but is perhaps between Europe—where capitalism has successfully abstracted from cultural practices thus allowing for analytical categories to apply to both spheres—and the periphery—where the cultural practices of History 2s remain “neutral” or in “opposition” to capitalist abstraction (History 1). In this regard, we may say that the “real” Europe paradoxically haunts Chakrabarty’s theory of the “hyperreal” Europe and its peripheral subtexts.28 Where does this leave us in regard to researching East-Asian Marxisms within the extended reproduction of capitalism on a global scale? An alternative reading of Provincializing Europe would require that we isolate Chakrabarty’s engagement with Marx conducted in chapter 2 from the rest of the text, and then emphasize those sections where Chakrabarty seems to suggest that universalism and historicism—which he critiques in other parts of the book as a uniquely European intellectual inheritance—are actually the effects of capitalism’s own reproductive logic. This reading would approximate Moishe Postone’s emphasis on Marx’s reflexive categorical exposition of capitalism. In his contribution to this volume, Postone argues that the key categories of Marx’s analysis—for example, abstract labor, labor time, the commodity form, value, etc.—are not just abstract concepts used to analyze the objective processes of capitalism, but are themselves the quasi-objective forms that mediate the social practices constitutive of capitalism.29 Thus in contrast to Chakrabarty’s tendency to see these abstractions as a European intellectual inheritance claiming a hegemonic universalism, Postone would define these as the particular form of “abstract domination” in global capitalism. Furthermore, Postone argues that this form of abstract domination is “fundamentally temporal.” Postone uses the metaphor of the “treadmill”—in which capitalism’s “non-linear dynamic. . .  of ongoing change and ongoing reproduction” is experienced as if running on a treadmill. This temporality would thus give the impression of linear development, and helps explain why historicism has been the predominant narrative form of social scientific thought. In this alternative reading, abstraction and teleology are understood as emerging from the dynamic of capitalist reproduction, rather than from a specifically European cultural tradition. However, reading Chakrabarty in this way would erase the necessary foil against which History 2s could be figured, thus undermining his theory of difference as well as the larger project to “provincialize Europe.” With this in mind, I would like to conclude by reflecting on the possibilities and enduring challenges for studying East-Asian Marxism(s).

Historical difference and East-Asian Marxism  99

Historical difference and the question of East-Asian Marxism(s) As I have argued in this essay, the tendency to deny Marxism’s analytical purchase outside of Europe has often functioned to locate a realm of cultural difference in the periphery. For area studies, this was to delineate an enduring Neo-Confucian echo in Japanese Marxism (Bernstein) or how Japan’s communal ethos would not accept the purported Western individualism of Marxism (Hoston). In the case of Chakrabarty, although Marx decoded the temporal logic of History 1, this was significant only because it revealed how capitalist reproduction is purportedly interrupted by modes of cultural-being that constitute History 2s. Although these modes can never be fully elaborated, they were the basis from which to provincialize Marx back to his European origins and to begin writing affective histories of cultural-dwelling of peripheral societies with Heidegger’s assistance. The question remains, however, how might we study the rich history of Marxism in East Asia without reproducing the cultural reductions explored above, nor denying the real differences that constitute this diverse history? Most importantly, how can we honor the theoretical contributions and political commitments of those Marxists outside of Europe, who saw in Marx’s writings the possibility to confront their particular historical conditions, and who thus simultaneously contributed to Marxism as a global project? Here I would like to conclude by drawing upon Harry Harootunian’s emphasis on Marx’s theory of hybrid forms of capitalist subsumption and how this may provide a framework for reinterpreting the case studies reviewed at the beginning of this essay. In his contribution to this volume, Harootunian argues that Marx’s later theorization of formal and real subsumption “reinvests the historical text with the figure of contingency and the unanticipated appearance of conjunctural or aleatory moments.”30 In “Results of the Direct Production Process” (1863), Marx develops his theory of formal and real subsumption; the former designates a form in which capitalism has subsumed pre-existing labor processes—for example, handicraft production or small-scale agricultural production.31 Although the labor process remains technically the same, this labor now functions to create (absolute) surplus value in the reproduction of capitalism. However, over time, the component parts of this pre-existing labor process are themselves restructured and the process becomes directly determined by capitalist logic, producing relative surplus value.32 It is important to note that both of these forms produce surplus value for capital’s reproduction and are thus already constitutive of capitalist reproduction. Against the type of interpretation we saw in Chakrabarty, Harootunian argues that formal and real subsumption are not “simply substitutes for the overstated category of transition nor is it to gesture toward some form of historicist stagism in disguise.”33 Rather, these categories help us recognize the necessary unevenness of capitalist reproduction, both historically and geographically. Furthermore, Harootunian argues that with this theory, Marx recognized the “hybrid forms” that capitalist subsumption could take, and that “remnants from earlier modes” could continue in the capitalist mode of production, precisely because “subsumption was

100  Max Ward a form” that “could embrace coexisting cultural, political and social contents.” Recall that Chakrabarty argued (2007: 251) that the multiple pasts constitutive of History 2s “are there in taste, in practices of embodiment, in the cultural training the senses have received over generations. [. . . ] This is how the archaic comes into the modern, not as a remnant of another time but as something constitutive of the present.” In contrast to Chakrabarty’s emphasis on unconscious sensibilities, Harootunian finds in Marx’s “hybrid forms of subsumption” the recognition of the “contemporaneous co-existence of archaic and modern forms of economic production,” and thus the ability to “draw upon surviving residues from prior modes of production to create a new register of either ‘formal’ or ‘hybrid’ subsumption or bypass capitalism altogether.”34 Consequently, Harootunian finds in Marx’s theory the basis in which to think historical—not just cultural—difference as well as nonteleological political possibility. From this perspective, how might we reconsider the studies of Japanese Marxism reviewed above? First, this reinterpretation does not reduce Marxism to another theory of modernization nor define “late-development” as an anomalous condition plaguing non-Western societies. Of course, many Marxists in Japan, as elsewhere, did read Marx as providing an outline of the universal stages of historical development. However, this then becomes an intellectual/theoretical question to investigate, not the theoretical premise of one’s own analysis.35 This also requires that we approach the “national question” in interwar Japan, not as a unique cultural condition of Japanese identity, but as a particular articulation of an enduring question in Marxist theory concerning the relationship between the nation-state and capitalism, and importantly why capitalism’s unevenness is largely measured within and between nation-states.36 Second, from this emphasis on the hybrid forms of subsumption we are able to explain the tendency for many Marxists to turn to received ideas or archaic forms in order to conceptualize an anti-capitalist politics. Recall that Germaine Hoston argued (1986: xiv–xv) that the initial appeal of revolutionary Marxism was that it “offered a way to pursue. . .  traditional values without calling for a return to the past.” Similarly, Gail Bernstein emphasized how Kawakami Hajime’s initial reading of Marx was through the lens of an enduring ethics. Freed from the normative assumptions about late-development and traditional values that informed Bernstein and Hoston’s studies, we could read these more “traditional” articulations of Marxian anti-capitalism as drawing upon the received ideas and mores that continued into the modern. Rather than the grip of the cultural past, these articulations can be understood as how the unevenness of capitalism produced conditions in which received forms could be harnessed to an anti-capitalist critical politics. These are the kinds of possibilities and continuing challenges that we must keep in mind as we pursue the question of East-Asian Marxisms. This is important so that we do not inadvertently construct a culturally reified notion of “Asia” from our study of the various Marxist thinkers and movements in the region. If anything, it is our responsibility to restore the integrity of these thinkers and activists who understood themselves as engaged in a wider Marxist project. This is not only important for restoring their integrity, but then reveals

Historical difference and East-Asian Marxism  101 the history of Marxist praxis to be a diverse, global project freed from the many attempts to provincialize it as a purely Western enterprise.

Notes   1 For another theory of disjuncture in postcolonial thought, see Appadurai (1990).   2 I delivered an earlier version of this paper in 2012, before the publication of Vivek Chibber’s extensive critique of Chakrabarty and the Subaltern Studies group in his Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013). While I agree with Chibber on many points, I believe his critique ultimately fails to address the animating question of postcolonial theory, namely theorizing historical difference. Consequently, I have tempered my critique of Chakrabarty after reading Chibber’s book.   3 Here I am drawing upon Harry Harootunian’s essay “Postcoloniality’s Unconscious/ Area Studies’ Desire” (2002) in which he argues that both area studies and postcolonialism presume a “substanceless something”—for instance, Asia— as their guiding objects of analysis. This is not a debilitating contradiction but the very condition for their respective forms of knowledge production. In the case of area studies, this animated a plethora of educational and policy institutes committed “to disseminating a knowledge even as the object vanished once it seemed we had a grip on it” (Harootunian, 2002: 151). Harootunian argues that postcolonialism is similarly predicated on a “substanceless something,” although figured very differently: whereas area studies presumed its object as a functional totality (national units) that could be revealed through social scientific analysis, postcolonialism assumes a cultural subject constituted through heterogeneous identities, accessible through semiotic and/or literary forms of analysis. Although different in their methodologies and informing very different politics, Harootunian concludes that “it is surprising that the two strategies are as closely related to each other in their produced effects”: namely, the displacement of history and politics by a shared emphasis on culture (2002: 155). Extending Harootunian’s thesis, this essay will show that both area studies and Chakrabarty have attempted to locate their substanceless something by figuring it against a purportedly Western-derived Marxism.   4 A shorter portion of this statement is cited in Morris-Suzuki (1989: 62).   5 For instance, see John Dower’s introduction to Norman (1975) and the essays collected in Miyoshi and Harootunian (2002).   6 See also Bernstein (1976: 63). Bernstein cites Robert Tucker who interprets Marx’s early thought as expressive of a European individualism. See Bernstein (1976: 115) and Tucker (1961).   7 Bernstein concludes her study by claiming that: “. . .  more than a Marxist, Kawakami was a modern-day samurai in search of a principle to which he could dedicate his life. His loyalty to a cause, or to the truth, like loyalty to a lord, had to be unconditional, absolute, thorough. Anything less would have been selfish. And un-Japanese” (1976: 173).   8 Similar to Bernstein, Hoston relies on a specific interpretation of Marx’s political theory as an expression of individualism: John Maguire’s Marx’s Theory of Politics (1978). See Hoston (1990: 175).   9 See Hoston (1994: 359). 10 In many ways, the Japanese Studies explanation concerning the suppression and facilitated recantations of Japanese communists in the 1930s replicates the very same logic that the imperial state used to explain this suppression; that is, that Marxism was antithetical to the harmonious traditions of Japanese culture. See Ward (2011), particularly chapters 1 and 2. 11 John Kraniauskas (2001) identifies disjuncture as the underlying principle at work in Provincializing Europe.

102  Max Ward 12 See Carola Dietze’s (2008) attempt to rescue Ranke, Herder, and other theorists of history from Chakrabarty’s critique of historicism. 13 See Chakrabarty (2007: 14–16). “Prepolitical” is Eric Hobsbawm’s term. See Ranajit Guha’s critique of Hobsbawm (Guha, 1983). 14 In a subtle spin on Marx, Chakrabarty argues (2007: 53–54) that commodity exchange— and thus, the abstraction of labor that it requires—never forms a “continuous and infinite series”; exchange rather constitutes a performative “act as if  labor could indeed be abstracted from all the social tissues in which it is always embedded and which make any particular labor—even the labor of abstracting—concrete.” 15 In Chakrabarty’s reading, Marx becomes a kind of hermeneuticist: “Marx. . .  does not so much provide us with a teleology of history as with a perspectival point from which to read the archives” (2007: 63). 16 I explore this question further in the conclusion. For a theory of formal/real subsumption that is not reduced to simply “transition,” see Banaji (2010, chapter 10). 17 The following section is a close reading of “Abstract Labor as Critique” in Chakrabarty (2007, chapter 2). 18 For a consideration of Marx through Foucault, see Read (2003). 19 It is important to emphasize that the universal abstraction that Chakrabarty faults Marx for is not necessarily the “abstract labor” of capital, but the logically anterior abstraction of “living labor” that capitalism requires. 20 See also chapter 4 of Marx (2000); Book Two, chapter 3 of Smith (2003); and on the Third Elementary Proposition in Senior (1850). 21 The term “blind spot” comes from Chakrabarty (1989: xii). 22 This is the Heideggerian distinction between “the ready to hand” and “present-at-hand.” See Heidegger’s chapter “The Worldhood of the World” in Heidegger (2008: 91–148). 23 See Chakrabarty (2007: 251). 24 Chakrabarty only hints at the possibilities of History 2s. On this point, see chapter 9 of Chibber (2013) and Murthy (2015). 25 Chakrabarty argues (2007: 255) that we need to hold in tension the two tendencies that Marx and Heidegger represent: Marx allows for abstraction and universals from which to critique social injustices, while Heidegger returns place and dwelling to this critical enterprise. 26 In an early formulation of his argument, Chakrabarty (1994) left open the possibility of thinking this problem through a reinterpretation of Marx’s categories. However, by the time of Provincializing Europe in 2000, this possibility was displaced by a move to Heidegger. 27 See Chakrabarty (2007: x). 28 As noted above, Chakrabarty argues (2008: 86–87) that this “hyperreal” Europe functions as “an imaginary entity that has some relation to the real but is also at the time phantasmal and that. . .  is part of everyday representations in a place like India.” 29. See Moishe Postone’s “Marx, Temporality and Modernity,” Chapter 2 in this volume. 30 Harry Harootunian, “Deprovincializing Marx,” Chapter 1 in this volume. 31 Karl Marx, “Chapter Six: Results of the Direct Production Process,” in Marx and Engels (1994: 355–466). 32 See Marx and Engels (1994: 438–442 and 429). 33 Harry Harootunian, “Deprovincializing Marx,” Chapter 1 in this volume. 34 The latter point is most explicitly formulated in Marx’s draft letters (Shanin, 1983) to the Russian activist Vera Zasulich. 35 For a critical assessment of the 1930s debates on Japanese capitalism, see Endo (2004) and Walker (2016). 36 See Harootunian’s analysis of Uno Kōzō, Chapter 1 in this volume.

6 Value without fetish Problematizing Uno Kōzō’s reading of the value form1 Elena Louisa Lange

What’s labor got to do with it? In a letter to his friend Ludwig Kugelmann about a reviewer of Capital, vol. 1 (which had been published the previous year), Marx wrote in July 1868: As for the Centralblatt, the man is making the greatest concession possible by admitting that, if value means anything at all, then my conclusions must be conceded. The unfortunate fellow does not see that, even if there were no chapter on “value” at all in my book, the analysis I give of the real relations would contain the proof and demonstration of the real value relation. The chatter about the need to prove the concept of value arises only from complete ignorance both of the subject under discussion and of the method of science. Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish . . . Where science comes in is to show how the law of value asserts itself. (Marx and Engels, 1988: 68) In my view, it is crucial to understand why Marx introduces the labor theory of value (LTV) in Capital right at the beginning of the first chapter (“The Commodity”) of the first volume on the “Production Process of Capital” in order to grasp the heuristic power of the value form. I will argue that this methodological setting was carefully deliberated by Marx. In contrast, Uno argues that only after the concept of capital has been introduced into the analysis and the presentation can “rightfully” start with the determination of value as the expenditure of human labor that the LTV should be presented.2 In this chapter, I will show that Uno’s view is mistaken, for structural, object-related, and, last but not least, methodological reasons. I will argue that Marx’s methodological framework of putting the LTV right at the beginning for his enormous inquiry sets the tone for the research plan he is undertaking in his three-volume main work: how all products of labor in societies “in which the capitalist mode of production prevails” (Marx, 1976a: 125) take on the form of value. For Marx, value is not something that emerges when two commodity owners meet and exchange their respective commodities, but the socially necessary form in which labor in capitalist societies expresses itself. Value as socially necessary labor time emerges prior to exchange, even if in exchange it is concretely realized in particular prices.3

104  Elena Louisa Lange The aim of this chapter is not to recapitulate Marx’s value form analysis presented at the beginning of Capital. For clarity, however, and to mediate between the more general topic that is value form analysis and the specific form it takes in the debate between Japanese Marxian economists Uno Kōzō and Kuruma Samezō which I present in this chapter, I want to draw attention to the specifically Marxian agenda and the at first sight counter-intuitional, “unproven” introduction of the relation between (abstract) labor and value with which Marx opens his opus magnum. This interpretation of the project of Capital and the specifically Marxian Critique of Political Economy as a whole will help to understand in which ways Uno significantly departs from Marx’s intention and where he falls short of its critical impetus.

The method and the object of the Critique of Political Economy What Marx sets out to do with value form analysis is to answer the riddle of money: why do all products of labor in societies where the capitalist mode of production prevails necessarily express themselves in money form, a very specific commodity? Money, according to Marx, exerts a particular “magic” which consists in the strange fact that commodities find their own value form, “in the form of a physical commodity existing outside, but also alongside them” (Marx, 1976a: 187). In other words, what exactly makes all other commodities—the world of commodities—relate themselves to money as their universal equivalent? The key to the riddle of money Marx sees in the fact that gold and silver “as soon as they emerge from the bowels of the earth” become “the direct incarnation of all human labor” (ibid.). Consequentially, and even before Marx traces the developed form of value in money back to their logical nucleus in the simple value expression “x commodity A = y commodity B,” his inquiry centers around the specificity of labor required to produce a commodity in order to represent value. It is true that although every single commodity is the product of a specific kind of concrete and useful labor (tailoring, weaving, software-programming or tea picking), the social general exchange of commodities in the capitalist mode of production exclusively measures with measurables, which requires that exchange focuses on value, as represented in money, not on use value. The kind of labor appropriate to the capitalist production form is therefore not the kind of labor that is required to accommodate to human needs, but the kind of labor that will produce value.4 Marx’s task especially in volume one of Capital consists in showing how this social relation—abstract labor—is organized in order to be productive of value. Consequently, abstract human labor is also productive of the fetish-characteristic forms that value takes: starting with the commodity and money, value goes on to take the fetish-characteristic form of capital and its various forms (e.g. bank capital, credit and commercial capital), of profit, interest, “surplus profit” and rent. In this sense, the famous chapter of the “Fetish Character of the Commodity and its Secret” at the beginning of Capital is only a very diluted, preliminary sketch of what we can expect in the following three volumes of Marx’s main work. However, it is precisely the critique of fetishism as a method that gives us a heuristic tool by

Value without fetish  105 which to decipher the growing mystification of abstract living labor in not only the categories of money and capital, but—probably more importantly—the central themes of Volume 3 in which surplus value find its most superficial expression: competition, the emergence of a general rate of profit, and with it, of prices of production, surplus profit as “natural” profit, and the “Trinity Formula” that, as an economic doctrine, had been informing classical political economic until far into the nineteenth century, and some neoclassical streams until today. One of the paradigmatic false appearances that the value-fetish generates, extensively addressed by Marx, is that capital itself is generative of (surplus) value. Here, the relation between capital and the exploitation of human living labor is completely obfuscated: In surplus-value, the relationship between capital and value is laid bare. In the relationship between capital and profit, i.e. between capital and surplusvalue as it appears on the one hand as an excess over the cost price of the commodity realized in the circulation process and on the hand as an excess determined more precisely by its relationship to the total capital, capital appears as a relationship to itself, a relationship in which it is distinguished, as an original sum of value, from another new value that it posits. It appears to consciousness as of capital creates this new value in the course of its movement through the production and circulation processes. But how this happens is now [with the category of profit, EL] mystified, and appears to derive from hidden qualities that are inherent in capital itself. (Marx, 1981: 139)5 I argue here against Uno’s reading of the value form that Marx’s specific Problemstellung of value form analysis and endowing the LTV with the leading heuristic and structuring role of the whole exposition of Capital is the key to “unravel the fetish” of the development of the increasingly obfuscated forms of labor and its reified expressions in the forms of value. Therefore, unlike Uno believes, the critique of the fetish-characteristic forms of value or “fetishism” stands at the core of Marx’s project. Furthermore, the deliberate setting of the LTV at the beginning allows for answering a question central to the problem of presentation: the nexus between method and object. I argue that the LTV is conceptualized as the crucial link between both in Marx’s presentation. The method of the Critique of Political Economy is organized around its object, and the object—or rather, the question leading Marx’s intervention as formulated above—simultaneously determines its own exposition. This serves to show how the whole exposition of the CoPE as exemplified in Capital consists in showing how the determination of value by the exploitation of labor is in effect in the production, circulation and the entire social process of capital—and how this interconnection is increasingly obfuscated by the fetish-characteristic forms that value generates. In this sense, I will argue that Uno’s theory of value is a theory of value without fetish. His grave misrecognition of the overall intention of Marx’s project in Capital in my view also informs the truncated view of value-form analysis as will be seen in the debate with Kuruma.

106  Elena Louisa Lange For reasons of space, this essay must abstain from a complete presentation of the debate on the value form between the Marxian economists Kuruma Samezō (1893– 1982) and Uno Kōzō (1897–1977) that took place in 1940s and 1950s Japan, and in which Uno first openly debated his interpretation. I will merely concentrate on Uno’s interpretation of the value form and show why and how it is lacking a fundamental insight into the methodological and object-related abstraction the value form requires. To demonstrate this, Kuruma’s reply to Uno will be helpful. Hereby I also argue that Uno overlooks the significance of value which corresponds to the daily performance of abstraction in the production process that only manifests itself in the various acts of purchase and sale. In other words, Uno overlooks the significance of fetishism. My general claim is consequently that value as fetish bears the paradox of an objective and logical existence that is simultaneously socially constructed, and by which the capitalist mode of production is able to take an autonomous form independent of the agents within the process.6 My specific claim regarding value form analysis (or “theory”)7 is that it explains the logical genesis of money, the very form in which value manifests itself and which operates independently of the thoughts, actions and wants of the commodity owners. However, I abstain from a discussion of Uno’s later theorems such as the theory of crisis, or the problem of the commodification of labor power since they have not been addressed or problematized within the value form debate with Kuruma that Uno refers to in his 1948 book Studies in Capital (Shihonron kenkyū), and which he subsequently elaborated on in his seminal work Principles of Political Theory (Keizai genron) (1964 [1950–1952]). A publication by Gavin Walker (2012: 15–37) has already stressed the relevance of the commodification of labor power within Uno theory in general, which is however not the subject of this chapter.

Uno’s understanding of the value form and Kuruma’s reply Though the scope of chapter, as mentioned earlier, will not allow for an indepth study of the theoretical and methodological suppositions of Uno’s later work, his reconstruction of Marxist theory undertaken in this work can be seen as a critique of the LTV from the standpoint of exchange motivated by use value. The seed of this criticism was however already planted in the debate with Kuruma. Accordingly, Uno’s insistence on the want of the commodity owner for understanding Marx’s theory of the value form and consequentially how value is possible, could be seen as the miniature form of this criticism. It will soon be clear that the standpoint of exchange or circulation for the sake of exchanging use values that Uno takes disregards a fundamental feature of Marx’s criticism of the form of labor in capitalist societies: the feature of fetishistic reification already at work in the exchange process. I will come back to this point later. First, let me present how Uno reads value form theory within the problematic of commodity exchange. Uno’s main three arguments in support of his view that the want of the commodity owner cannot be abstracted from if we want to understand the simple

Value without fetish  107 value expression x commodity A = y commodity B (which can be also expressed as: x commodity A is worth y commodity B), or 20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat, where the linen is in the relative form of value and the coat is in the equivalent value form, could be summarized as follows: 1

2

3

In the simple form of value, the question why a particular commodity is in the equivalent form cannot be understood without taking into account the want of the owner of the commodity in the relative form. It is thus mistaken to think that the role played by the want of the commodity owner is abstracted from in the theory of the value form (Kuruma, 2008: 73).8 Without considering the commodity owner, it is not possible to understand why the commodity in the relative form of value and the commodity in the equivalent form are each in their respective forms. The demand for the active expression of value is the demand of the commodity owner, and a certain commodity is in the relative form of value because of the existence of the commodity owner. “If there were no owner of the linen, for example, there would also not be any desire for the use-value of the commodity in the equivalent form, which is the coat” (Uno and Sakisaka, 1948: 166). “Even in the case of the simple value-form, the commodity in the relative value-form and the commodity in the equivalent form are not in a relation of simple equality” (Uno and Sakisaka, 1948: 233–234), but mediated through the want of the owner of the commodity in the relative form of value (linen) for the commodity in the equivalent form of value (coat) (Kuruma, 2008: 95). The essential difference between the general equivalent form (form C) and the money form (form D) first becomes clear when we consider the want of the commodity owner. That is, when the general equivalent becomes money it is no longer limited to the relation where it is desired for its original usevalue, and thus it expresses the value of a commodity. Only if we “suppose the existence of the owner of the commodity in the relative value-form, we can understand that in the case of the money form a change occurs so that the liberation from its use-value is completed, whereas this has still only been latent in the case of the general value-form.”9

Kuruma replies to and probably also successfully refutes all three arguments individually. However, instead of simply repeating Kuruma’s counter-arguments, I want to draw attention to the wider intention of what in Kuruma’s reading Marx actually tried to explain with value form theory and what methodological presuppositions are required to understand it. By doing this, Kuruma’s position can be rightly assessed as a methodological intervention and Uno’s failed abstraction more precisely be understood. That Uno insists on the want of the commodity owner as a heuristic tool to understand value form theory in Kuruma’s view concerns a methodological problem. It must therefore be asked why Marx indeed analyzes value form independently of the wants and actions of the agents in the exchange process. Commodity owners are first considered in the second chapter of Capital, vol. 1,

108  Elena Louisa Lange “The Exchange Process,” whereas the genesis of money is already completely deduced in chapter 1, “The Commodity.” According to Marx, money makes the products of private labour socially commensurable. It therefore does not solve the contradiction between use-value and value, but merely sublates it. Money can therefore rightfully be called the “transcendental synthesis” of a commodity producing society. In his contribution, Kuruma emphasizes the specific methodological questions that led to this insight. The specific questions that led the analysis in the first and second chapters are indispensable for a correct understanding of the relation between the specific acts of the commodity owners and the specific preconditions that make their acts possible. Kuruma’s view is that, paradoxically, it is not the act of exchange that determines the theory of value, but on the contrary, the theory of value determines the act of exchange (Kuruma, 1957: 24–25). What could Kuruma possibly mean by this? To put his counter-argument in the wider setting of the methodological structure of Capital, Kuruma strongly emphasizes the method of the first three chapters. According to Marx’s claim that “the difficulty lies not in comprehending that money is a commodity, but in discovering how, why and by what means a commodity becomes money” (Marx, 1976a: 186), Kuruma sees a division at work in the systematic structure of the first two chapters: value form analysis in section 3 of the first chapter of Capital, “The Commodity,” looks at the how (ika ni shite) of money, section 4, “The Fetish Character of the Commodity and its Secret” examines the why (naze ni) of money, and in the second chapter on “The Exchange Process,” Marx looks at the through what (nani ni yotte) of money (Kuruma, 1957: 40). Whereas value form analysis, as Kuruma says, “answers the question how gold as a specific commodity can become the general equivalent, so that its natural form counts as value in the whole world of commodities” (Kuruma, 1957: 20–21), the question is here not through what this takes place. The “practical side” of money is shown in the exchange process. However, to Kuruma the differentiation between the function of value form analysis and the practical act of putting commodities into relation is vital for clarifying the overall basic intention of Marx’s value theory. This is how Kuruma arrives at the conclusion that, although in the theory of the exchange process the necessity of the mediating “nature” of money is practically reproduced, the mediation of the two different commodities has already taken place: through abstraction from the specific form of labor that was necessary to produce different use-values. Money is the magical substance in which this abstraction gains “phantom-like objectivity” (gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit). Kuruma therefore maintains that the confrontation of commodities and their owners for the purpose of exchange in a general social, and not only coincidental manner, is only possible on the basis of the general equivalent of money, so that money is not generated by exchange. Rather, money in capitalist societies serves as the first fetishistic expression of social relations based on the expenditure and exploitation of human labor. General social exchange is only possible on the basis of money as the reified product of abstraction.10

Value without fetish  109 In developing his argument, Marx is well aware of the curiosity of a mediation that already has taken place (money as the immediate incarnation of abstract human labor) which is simultaneously the precondition for a performative act (commodity exchange): In their difficulties our commodity owners think like Faust: “In the beginning was the deed.” They have therefore already acted before thinking. The natural laws of the commodity have manifested themselves in the natural instinct of the owners of commodities. They can only bring their commodities into relation as values, and therefore as commodities, by bringing them into an opposing relation with some other commodity, which serves as the universal equivalent. We have already reached that result by our analysis of the commodity. But only the action of society can turn a particular commodity into the universal equivalent. (Marx, 1976a: 180)11 In short, value form analysis has already proven the necessity of money as the universal equivalent (the how of money), whereas only the social deed endows the gold commodity with these properties (the through what of money). Uno’s interpretation that sees not the logic of value, but the individual need of the commodity owner as the driving force behind the genesis of money, overlooks this fine methodological nuance, which is in turn crucial to understand the fetishism of allegedly autonomous and independent forms of commodity exchange. Uno is simultaneously very outspoken about his claim to reconstruct value form theory by replacing it with the analysis of the exchange process. Like the other circulation theorists in the debate, as Kuruma informs us, Uno maintained that Marx has declared his “theoretical bankruptcy” (rironteki hasan), since value form analysis could not solve the contradiction between use-value and value. That is why Marx was allegedly forced to use the stopgap of introducing the practice of commodity owners within the theory of value. Kuruma resolutely repudiates this reading: It is in no way true that Marx maintains that a “theoretically unsolvable problem” is solved through a particular kind of action (commodity exchange). Quite to the contrary: commodity owners act according to theory. “The laws of commodity nature act upon the natural instinct of the commodity owners.” It is a matter of fact that the contradiction of use-value and value must be confronted, before money is there to solve it. But that is just why the commodity owners unwillingly act according to what theory has already demonstrated [riron ga kakusureba kakunaru to oshieru toori ni kōdō shite]: by generating money indispensable for exchange. Why does Marx also claim that they “have acted before thinking”? This is a cunning way to say that money like all other relation in commodity production emerges spontaneously, not as a “product of reflection” or as a “discovery” like the bourgeois economists declare. (Kuruma, 1957: 24–25)

110  Elena Louisa Lange Here, the “automatic subject”12 of value is precisely the infinite expansion of itself for its own sake, regardless of the needs and desires of individuals: The process [by which the use-value of the commodity in the equivalent form takes on the form of value in the relative form of value] is taking place independently of the consciousness of the commodity owners. Instead of a human being, the commodity becomes the subject (shutai), and instead of human language, in this fetishistic world the language of commodities (shōhingo) is spoken. (Kuruma, 1957: 82)13 Uno’s negligence of the complex of the fetish as early as in his debate with Kuruma has led to a truncated interpretation of the value form in his own later works as well as those of the Uno School.

Recapitulating value abstraction as fetish Let us summarize the logical genesis of money in Marx’s words: “What appears to happen is not that a particular commodity becomes money because all other commodities express their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in a particular commodity because it is money. The movement through which this process has been mediated vanishes in its own result, leaving no trace behind” (Marx, 1976a: 187). Indeed, money does not leave a trace of its own genesis—and therein consists its magic. However, if we want to understand the magical character of money and value as the concealment of the social character of labor in capitalist societies, we have to take a short look at how exactly a commodity becomes money. In other words, we have to recapitulate the emergence of value abstraction as a fetish. By equating the coat to itself as value, the linen assumes an object-like value form which presents itself as the natural form of the coat. The linen thus becomes the commodity form that has the value form of a coat. Exchange reveals its “un-natural,” its fetishistic character at this point: it becomes the “form of appearance of its opposite, value” (Marx, 1976a: 148). The fact that one commodity assumes the value of another completely overrides the logic of any person’s interests, desires, or wants for the specific use-value of one commodity. Quite to the contrary, the fact that use-value becomes the expression of value—its only way of expression—precisely shows that not the aspect of being use-value instantiates the fetishism at work, but its function as value. Uno fails to see that the coat is not desired as a use value, but as the value expression of the linen. Chris Arthur correctly points out that “Marx abstracts from use value entirely, and derives money purely from the need to find a unique expression of value that ensures the actuality of value” (Arthur, 2006: 29).14 But Uno’s misrepresentation of Marx’s value form analysis reaches further. He disregards the complete mechanism by which a social, and therefore, a class relation, assumes fetishistic character already present in the equivalent form.

Value without fetish  111 In the equivalent form of value (= 1 coat) a threefold inversion takes place that consolidates the appearance of the commodity or fetishism of value, hiding its social essence: in the equivalent commodity form a) use value assumes the form of appearance of value, b) concrete labor assumes the form of abstract labor and c) immediate private labor assumes the inverted form of general social labor. The fetish-characteristic forms that evolve from the negligence of these three inverted relations are subdued in Uno’s discussion of the value form. In sum, Uno’s failure to distinguish between concrete and abstract labor—a distinction which Marx called “crucial to an understanding of political economy” (Marx, 1976a: 132)15— can be identified as the fundamental error in Uno’s presentation of the value form. We can see here that Uno underestimates the significance of the fetishistic inversion already at work in the commodity and value form of commodity exchange. This autonomization of value and capital which also allows for the acts, wants, interests of individuals themselves to be fetishized as “free” and “rational,” has been prominently discussed in the works of Helmut Reichelt, among others, who also sees the emphasis on the acts of agents in the circulation process as an ideological symptom of bourgeois economics and itself as fetishized. One cannot help but notice argumentative remnants of the standpoint of classical political economy in the position Uno takes in his discussion with Kuruma. With Reichelt, I think we can see why: To Marx, the whole process [of exchange] presents itself in a form in which bourgeois cognition is sublated (aufgehoben) in the actual Hegelian sense: whereas the bourgeois theorists take their theoretical point of origin from the form of single individuals’ [acts] as something that cannot be further derived, Marx shows that this form itself is mediated, that it itself is a result of capital. (Reichelt, 1997: 144) The corresponding passage in Marx can be found in the Urtext (original version) of the Critique of Political Economy (1858): An analysis of the specific form of the division of labor, of the conditions of production on which it rests, of the economic relations of the members of society within which these relations are dissolved, would show that the whole system of bourgeois production is implied, so that exchange value can appear as the simple point of departure on the surface, and the exchange process, as it presents itself in simple circulation, can appear as the simple social metabolism, which nevertheless encompasses the whole of production as well as consumption. It would then result from this that other entangled relations of production which more or less collide with the freedom and independence of the individuals and the economic relations of those, are implied, so that they can appear as free private producers in the simple relation of buyers and sellers within the circulation process. On the standpoint of circulation, however, these relations are obliterated. (Marx, 1987: 466, italics in original)16

112  Elena Louisa Lange This is because, in Reichelt’s words, “all bourgeois theorists yield to the illusion of commodity circulation” (Reichelt, 1997: 143) as the starting point of the science of economy, not seeing that this very relation is already inferred from value creation in production. One of the most prominent later criticisms of by Uno School and Uno himself—that the beginning of Capital with the LTV, where labor is determined as the substance of value17 and is a simple “external” assertion without an “internal logical deduction,” has to be dispelled and substituted for a value theory within the exchange process—is symptomatic for this fundamental misunderstanding. In what could be a direct response to Uno, Marx claims that the circulation process is the result of a fetishistic inversion that takes the mediating function of exchange to be the “immediate being” of an economic law. This is why for him, in an often used idiom, circulation is “the phenomenon of a process taking place behind its back” (Marx, 1974: 920),18 the production process. Value as an immaterial and objective being—a contradictio in adiecto—conceals this nexus, as the chapter on the “Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret” is trying to elucidate. Interestingly, many critics of the LTV tend to overlook that this chapter speaks of the secret of the fetishism, and not just the fetishism of the commodity. So, what is the secret of the commodity form? Marx may have felt that, notwithstanding his lengthy analysis of the commodity form and its relation to abstract labor, some people may not have understood the gist of the analysis of the value form. He therefore makes very clear that the LTV—the fact that the value of a commodity consists in socially necessary labor time in the social average needed to produce it—has nothing to do with the “scientific conviction” that, in exchange, commodities are reduced “to the quantitative proportions in which society requires them” (Marx, 1976a: 168). However, this reduction is not false in the strict sense—it is, rather, itself derived from the “law” of labor time socially necessary to produce the commodity: The reason for this reduction [to the commodities’ quantitative proportions] is that in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labor-time socially necessary to produce them asserts itself as a regulative law of nature. In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him. The determination of the magnitude of value by labor-time is therefore a secret hidden under the apparent movements in the relative values of commodities. (Ibid.)19 Moishe Postone in his chapter in this volume has pointed to an interesting dialectics in this regard. While it may be true that in the mode of simple exchange, commodity owners as owners of “things” are always-already embedded into the logic of capital, the “free laborer in the double sense” as the owner of nothing but his labor power is in a different kind of historic situation. With the emergence of capitalism, the notion of equality, or to be more precise, formal equality arises. If we want to understand the transformation of capitalism, we have to gain insight

Value without fetish  113 into the fact that “[w]orkers begin to see themselves as rights-bearing subjects,” that is, as bourgeois subjects (Postone, in this volume), and that even more, with collective action, they “develop a self-conception as agents” (Postone, in this volume). Yet, and that is the crucial point he makes in this regard, even this kind of self-conception or “consciousness” cannot be understood without taking into consideration the structure of the commodity form itself that guarantees formal equality in the labor contract. Only the historically specific ideological constellation of capital and its “rules of discourse” allows for a transformation of the formality of its own ideals into a Realverhältnis that is subjective and objective likewise. Postone emphasizes here that rather than resistance, we have to look at the mechanisms of (self-)transformation that capital itself undertakes: “Capital itself is generative of the possibility of its own negation” (Postone, in this volume). That however implies that workers correctly understand their own site of resistance not in the sphere of circulation, but in production with the form of general strike as the only effectual means to implode the logic of surplus value generation and exploitation. Whereas Uno would not disagree—he clearly sees exploitation in the production process as the central feature of capitalist reality, while the concept of value transcends capitalist relations and therefore the specificity of capitalist production—one of Uno’s former students, and probably the internationally best known Japanese intellectuals of our time, Karatani Kōjin, places his emphasis against the struggle within the sphere of production onto the sphere or exchange.

Final prospects: Karatani Kōjin as an heir to Uno’s emphasis on exchange If we take a short detour to look at the development and legacy of Uno theory today, we can see that Karatani Kōjin has adopted from Uno the idea that the circulation of use-value rather than value motivates exchange relations in capitalist societies. He also accepts Uno’s fundamental downgrading of the role of production to serve as the vantage point from which to analyze capitalist relations by prioritizing circulation or exchange.20 But unlike Uno who understands that capital is a social relation that can only be reproduced by the exploitation of labor power so that capitalists can appropriate all the surplus and generate profit which “is the sole purpose of capital” (Uno, 1980: 73),21 in Karatani we find quite a different idea of social reproduction: in industrial capital surplus value is generated by wage laborers who buy back the items for everyday consumption they produce. It is therefore the circulation process of consumer commodities produced and then consumed by the wage laborer that creates surplus value. Indeed, “. . .  seen as a whole, the self-reproduction of capital consists of employing workers and then having them buy back the things they have produced” (Karatani, 2014: 190). In other words, the uniqueness of the labor power commodity in industrial capitalism—in contrast to merchant capitalism—consists in reproducing itself by purchasing the goods it produces. It is discussed abstracted from the uniqueness

114  Elena Louisa Lange in the production and labor process, and therefore in abstraction from the process of exploitation. At first, the claim that the goal of capitalist production is the realization of surplus value through the sale of commodities is difficult to reject. What is less plausible however, is the claim that it is the workers in the production of articles of consumption (and it is only those Karatani addresses) who, by “buying back what they produce,” generate surplus value. The reason is simple—workers can only spend what they earn: Let the sum total of the variable capital be x times -£100, i.e., the sum total of the variable capital employed, not advanced, during the year. . .  (t)his amount of x times £100, therefore, can never enable the working class to buy the part of the product which represents the constant capital, not to mention the part which represents the surplus value of the capitalist class. With these x times £100 the labourers can never buy more than a part of the value of the social product equal to that part of the value which represents the value of the advanced variable capital. (Marx, 1997: 346)22 But the problematic logic of worker’s “consumption power” aside: with the argument that the site of political struggle should move away from the “traditional” sphere of production by, for example, strikes towards circulation via, for example, boycotts, completely misjudges the spirit and purpose of capitalist production and reproduction as such. The purpose of capital consists not in satisfying consumer needs, but in generating surplus value, regardless of the wants, needs and desires of people. Even just a passing look at the growth of an overall precarious populace, of poverty and a rising surplus population in the world economical scale will show that securing the reproduction of labor power is not tantamount to the reproduction of capital: rather, this “contradiction-in-progress” (Marx, 1987: 91) of reducing the value of labor power while labor power remains the sole source of profit, manifests capital’s crisis.23 If we summarize the above analysis, we can say that in the capitalist mode of production, commodities are produced for no other reason than to represent (surplus) value. Consequentially, value assumes the active and structuring role of the exchange process. It is not the meaningful organization of social life meeting the demands of the people that regulates the social process, but a law inscribed into the rationality of exchange which, as an “automatic subject” (Marx, 1976a: 255), dominates the social relations between people. Value here becomes an endin-itself. This is why Marx is not concerned with what the “people in commodity exchange think or which interests they pursue,” he is concerned with how “labor is socially structured so that the individual cannot do otherwise than exchange its commodities,” as Michael Heinrich puts it (1999: 206). The impersonal domination of value—and further developed, of money, capital, profit and rent—has created a seemingly meaningful social coherence before individual human subjects enter into the exchange process as rational agents.24 With his interpretation, Uno misconceives of the centrality of Marx’s critique of fetishism as the critique

Value without fetish  115 of the reified forms that abstract labor takes, and thereby also invites a reductionist reading of the interconnection between abstract labor, value, the commodity and the money form. Political intervention like that of Karatani that draws on Uno’s methodological assumptions to bracket exploitation in the production process from the analysis of value and the commodity consequently can only address the surface of capitalist relations.25 A politics that stops before the “hidden abode of production on whose threshold there hangs the notice ‘No admittance except on business’” (Marx, 1976a: 279–280) makes itself an unwilling accomplice to the very logic it tries to supersede.

Notes   1 This chapter is based on the article “Failed Abstraction: The Problem of Uno Kōzō’s Reading of Marx’s Theory of the Value Form,’ which has been published in Historical Materialism 22.1 (2014), Brill/Leiden, pp. 3–33. I hereby wish to thank the publishers of Historical Materialism for permitting its use in the present form. Compared to the original article however, which was originally written in 2012, the present essay contains major shifts and reformulations, additions and amendments. The main argument of the present essay has benefited from many insights into Marxian theory I have gained over the past years, mostly through discussions with colleagues, which have helped to shape and give point to the original argument.   2 “Marx begins the first chapter of Capital, vol. 1, by pointing out the importance of the commodity-form that products assume. But . . . he immediately attributes the substance of value to labour that is required to produce the commodity. But the production-process of a commodity is not yet analysed at this stage . . .  Commodity production must assume the form of capital rather than of commodity. This means that commodity production or the production-process of capital can be introduced only after the conceptual development of the form of commodity into that of capital” (Uno, 1980: xxvii–xxviii).   3 The “illusion” (Marx, 1981: 128) that value and surplus-value (expressed in particular prices) “derive(s) from the sale” (ibid.) of commodities, their exchange, can be said to represent the most basic target of Marx’s criticism against so-called “vulgar economy,” in contrast to bourgeois (classical) political economy. For the locus classicus of that criticism, see vol. 1, chapter 5 (Marx, 1976a: 258–269). There are however also passages where that accusation is targeted at classical political economy. See vol. II, chapter 10 where Marx targets Adam Smith: “What lies at the bottom of this everyday idea that, because surplus-value is only realized by the sale of the product, by its circulation, it therefore arises simply from sale, from circulation” (Marx, 1978: 277). Further discussion of this can be found in vol. III, chapter 1 (Marx, 1981: 128–192), chapters 48 and 49 (Marx, 1981: 953–991) and passim.   4 Abstract labor is not to be confused with “uniform” or “homogeneous” labor, as some postcolonial theorists would have us believe. For a critique of the understanding of abstract labor in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lisa Lowe and David R. Roediger, see Chibber (2013: 130–151).   5 Emphasis in the original.   6 In this sense, Marx has coined the influential and much discussed term of “forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective” (objektive Gedankenformen) (Marx, 1976a: 169).   7 The concept of theory is not favored by me, since Marx in my view does not deduce value form from a specific ready-made theory that has to correspond to the “facts” in a positivist sense. Marx’s critique of the bourgeois economic conceptualizations instead allows him to analyze what is already “at work” in our thinking of the production

116  Elena Louisa Lange process and makes us confront its inadequacies. The Japanese term however explicitly says “value form theory” (kachikeitairon), which is why in English I sometimes also speak of theory instead of analysis.   8 Original references: Uno and Sakisaka (1948: 142, 157, 159, 160).   9 Uno and Sakisaka (1948: 164). See also Kuruma (2008: 113). Uno’s overall rejection of the “substance” or LTV—and consequentially his somehow twisted understanding of Marx’s radical break with classical political economy—is probably best reflected in the following excerpt from the same book: “The abstraction of value from the exchange relation between two commodities discarding their owners is similar to the abstraction of fruit from pear and apple [. . . ] We must comprehend the relation between two commodities subjectively from the viewpoint of the linen owner, not objectively apart from both owners. If we start with such a formalistic abstraction as commodity linen and commodity coat to have something in common (a third which is neither linen nor coat), it is difficult to understand the true meaning that the linen is in the relative from with the coat in the equivalent form” (Uno and Sakisaka, 1948: 178, emphasis added). 10 Engels’s view of value form analysis as a historical development of money starting from “simple commodity production/exchange” in primitive societies, which came to be known as the “logical-historical” method of orthodox Marxism has been by and large refuted in the research literature in the meantime. Reichelt (1997), Heinrich (1999) and Backhaus (1997) have contributed to a critique of the standard interpretation, and Rakowitz (2000) has devoted the better part of her research to a critique of the Engelsian view. The logical reconstruction of the money form in the third chapter of Capital shows how the gold commodity is itself the incarnation of human labor which in its essence hides its relation to labor. According to Rakowitz, the sphere of circulation falls victim to this relation and becomes itself reified and ideological. On the matter of the transhistoricity of the law of value, Uno is quite outspoken. In one later writing from 1958, Uno clearly dismisses the theory of a transhistorical law of value as seen by Stalin (see Barshay, 2004: 122; Uno, 1974 [1958]: 119). In Uno’s view, value will disappear with the disappearance of a capitalist commodity economy. Jacques Bidet’s critical view of the Uno School however discusses the Uno theory’s potential regression towards the Engelsian view. According to Bidet, Uno, though rejecting the idea of a “‘historical’ era of simple commodity production,” “falls back into a different type of historico-logical approach which leads ‘dialectically’ from commodity to money, to money hoarding, to commercial capital, and to industrial capital” (Bidet, 2008: 738). 11 Emphasis added. 12 Marx (1976a: 255): “. . .  in the circulation M-C-M both the money and the commodity function only as different modes of existence of value itself, the money as its general existence, the commodity as its particular or, so to speak, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject.” 13 The corresponding passage in Marx is the following: “We see, then, that everything our analysis of the value of commodities previously told us is repeated by the linen itself, as soon as it enters into association with another commodity, the coat. Only it reveals its thoughts in a language with which alone it is familiar, the language of commodities. In order to tell us that labor creates its own value in its abstract quality of being human labor, it says that the coat, in so far as it counts as its equal, i.e. its value, consists of the same labor as it does itself. In order to inform us that its sublime objectivity [sublime Wertgegenständlichkeit] as a value differs from its stiff and starchy existence as a body, it says that value has the appearance of a coat, and therefore that in so far as the linen itself is an object of value [Wertding] it and the coat are as like as two peas” (Marx, 1976a: 143). 14 Like the present essay, Arthur’s paper presents a different interpretation of value form analysis than given by the Uno School. Methodologically, he follows the Uno School’s

Value without fetish  117 hypothesis of a non-monetary exchange between commodity owners’ needs or wants to show that this approach is unconvincing: in Arthur’s view, the “desire” or want of the commodity owners to acquire use-values cannot generate money, so that the role of the commodity owner is typically non-essential for understanding value form analysis as a systematic (non-historical) analysis of the genesis of money. While I agree with Arthur that “Marx abstracts from use value entirely” (p. 29), I don’t agree with Arthur’s own abstraction from labor in his interpretation of the value form. Instead, his—correct— criticism of Uno becomes itself tautological when he only addresses value as “the more abstract form that makes a commodity substitutable as such with others of equal value” (p. 24) and defines money as being “derived as a concretisation of value” (ibid.). None of this explains what value is. For Marx, value and, consequently, money as the general representation of value, is the “direct incarnation of all human labor” (Marx, 1976a: 187). The distinction between concrete and abstract labor that Marx right before the analysis of the value form in section 3, is not merely ornamental or unnecessary for the analysis of value, like the Uno School, as well as Arthur, would have us believe. It is essential for understanding what is hidden behind the notion of value or even money and of which it leaves “no trace behind” (Marx, 1976a: 187). Indeed, money “does not reveal what has been transformed into it” (ibid.: 229). We cannot discard the notion of abstract labor if we want to talk about value in a meaningful way, that is, without begging the question or remaining tautological. 15 In the German original, the utmost importance of this distinction is more drastically formulated by calling it “der Springpunkt” (the punctum saliens) “um den sich das Verständnis der politischen Ökonomie dreht” (Marx, 2008: MEW 23: 56). 16 Emphasis added. 17 I agree with M. Heinrich who stresses that giving a “proof” for labor as the substance of value is not at all what Marx’s analysis is about. Instead Marx is trying to reconstruct “from this social form of the product of labor the specific social character of labor” itself (Heinrich, 1999: 203). To Marx, in Heinrich’s view, the whole project of Capital consists in the critical reproduction of the particular form of labor that manifests itself in the value of commodities (ibid.). 18 Translation my own. 19 Emphasis added. 20 It should be added that Uno and, following him, Karatani, interpret the priority of circulation as a feature of Marx’s own exposition: “When capital takes possession of the process of production. . .  products do not fail to be produced as commodities. Thus the primary concept in political economy is neither a product nor production; it is the form of commodity. Marx’s Capital, for the first time in the history of political economy, consciously begins its theoretical exposition with the concept of commodities” (Uno, 1980: 3). This is only true insofar as the form of the commodity is the result of a labor-and-production-process which in its totality is organized in such a way to be productive of value: and hence, of the commodity form. In this sense, Marx speaks of the fact that “the whole system of bourgeois production is implied, so that exchange value can appear as the simple point of departure on the surface” (Marx, 1987: 466). 21 This is why the role of labor power moves to the fore in Uno’s discussion of the “Doctrine of Production” in the second part of Keizai Genron. 22 See also the reproduction schemas in volume II, especially the “Accumulation and Reproduction on an Expanded Scale” (Marx, 1978: 565–600) that played a formidable role also in Uno’s theory in Keizai Genron and in which he saw the “absolute foundation of the law of value” (see Uno, 1980: 55–70). 23 For a closer discussion of Karatani’s position, see Lange (2015). 24 “The creation of this coherence, though the result of the actions of individuals, is not a conscious result which is transparent to the individuals as such. . . . Insofar Marx speaks of ‘fetishism’” (Heinrich, 2009: 207).

118  Elena Louisa Lange 25 We should not forget that the capitalistically produced commodity does not only contain value, it contains surplus value. Uno’s value-theoretical framework does not allow to conceptualize the commodity as containing surplus value respectively a production price as the result of the distribution of surplus value produced in the economy as a whole. For a “macro-monetary” interpretation of value and price, see Moseley (2016).

7 Compradors The mediating middle of capitalism in twentieth-century China and the world1 Rebecca E. Karl

One has to think philosophically to write an economic text. (Mao Zedong, Reading Notes)

In his 1942 essay entitled “Economics and Philosophy” (Wang, 1981a), Wang Yanan, a sociologist and translator of Marx (among others), comments that, while economics and philosophy are two ways of apprehending the world often considered separate and separable, in fact they should be considered as linked social consciousnesses. In Wang’s telling, philosophy increasingly had tended towards abstruseness with the development of social complexity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even as, for its part and at the same time, economics had tended towards abstraction “under the contagion of bourgeois philosophy.”2 Linked in their development, they had become by the twentieth century practically disconnected from one another and from the practices of everyday life. Yet, in Wang’s estimation, for these modes of inquiry once more to become meaningful in a socially transformative and historically generative sense, they had to be brought back together and into the world of practice, into contact with and as explanatory of the everyday historicity of human life. Philosophy and economics were to be thought of as connected material practices whose epistemological organizations of the world, while different, could be delinked neither from one another nor from the particular material (that is, historical) world in which they were embedded and to which they needed to respond. For Wang, there could be neither an artificial bourgeois separation between domains of knowledge, nor, by the same token, a rigid base/superstructure dichotomy between realms of historical experience: philosophy and economics, to be true to their epistemologies and potentials, had to pertain and answer to a unity of theory and practice, of abstraction and materiality. In his efforts through the 1930s and 1940s to specify philosophically and economically the nature of China’s present social structure and condition—the particular material historicity of China’s current situation as part of the 1930s and 1940s uneven capitalist world—the figure of the comprador [maiban买办] appeared repeatedly in Wang’s work. This figure functioned for Wang as a powerful analytic through which China’s specific social (trans)formation could be linked to the universalizing tendencies of global capital. More than an accidental

120  Rebecca E. Karl domestic figure of abjection and self-interest, the comprador for Wang was a necessary figure in and of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century global capital itself. In his evocation of the comprador, Wang was of course not alone. As is well-known, a major premise of pre- and post-1949 Chinese—and global— revolutionary Marxist social class analysis often focused on the “traitorous” comprador-bourgeoisie in its many dimensions, but most identifiably and memorably through its negative juxtaposition to the potentially revolutionary and thus patriotic national bourgeoisie. An early and very influential locus classicus for this analytic in Chinese terms can be found in Mao Zedong’s thorough excoriation of the comprador-bourgeoisie in his 1925 essay, “Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society.” Mao’s and cognate understandings of the traitorous compradors in relation to anti-colonial, anti-imperialist revolutionary movements whose historical function was to unite nascent radical (Communist) parties with national bourgeoisies, came directly or indirectly from the debates between V.I. Lenin and M.N. Roy and the resultant Comintern resolution to this question at the Third International in 1921. Yet, to whatever degree Wang Yanan, as a Marxist, was heir to these discussions and determinations, his comprador analytic reached into and was derived from a slightly different concern than Mao’s or Lenin’s. For Wang’s articulation of the problem of the comprador was not reducible to a concern with national or socialist revolution, thus he did not subordinate his theory of the comprador and capitalism to an instrumentality designed for the pursuit of state power. His was a concern that was at once both unconstrained by considerations of strategies for state seizure and, as a consequence, also more productive for and open to social theory and analysis.3 On the one hand, Wang Yanan used the comprador as a figural metaphor to point to the consistently colonized minds of his fellow social scientists in China in the 1930s and 1940s. In this idiom, comprador connoted the hegemonized ideological consciousness of mainstream (bourgeois) social scientists, who could or would not declare independence from the capitalist teleological premises and presumptions of bourgeois Euro-American social sciences. As he wrote, “with ‘comprador’ imported political economy providing the lens through which many Chinese economists see, it is not surprising that that the future of political economy blazes ‘gloriously.’ This man-made refraction has finally launched the conclusion that we need fear nothing about capitalism” (Wang, 1981b: 61). Throughout the 1930s and 1940s and even into the 1950s, one of Wang’s main plaintive refrains about social scientists in China (either returnees from abroad or those educated in China itself) was based on what he would call their ideological compradorism, their comprador mentality, what those cultural figures such as Lu Xun in the 1930s literary sphere already had called “slavishness,” although in Wang’s understanding, compradorism was not produced through social custom and habit but through an unimaginative practiced fawning on the fetish of capitalist knowledge as adequate to an analysis of all historical situations equally, including that of China.4 On the other hand, and more important for me here (although these two hands are two angles on the same problem, of course), in Wang Yanan’s dialectical

Compradors  121 philosophic and material global perspective, the comprador was not uniquely a figure of Chinese society, and nor solely a figure in and of colonized peoples. That is, the comprador could not be contained to a purely national-level sociological stratum consisting of a pre-defined commercially oriented class or pre-existing trading group among a (semi-)colonized people, whose exchange and circulatory links to foreign capital indicated a politics of national betrayal and an economics of dependent development. While the comprador was most definitely a category born of modern imperialism understood as the extension of capitalist relations globally, this category was not limited to the exchange and circulatory transformation of structures of trade in (semi-)colonial societies alone.5 Hence, the comprador could not be defined in a narrowly historicist understanding—as with Mao’s version, that, for example, posited the growth of the class out of China’s unique historical co-hong system of trade.6 While for Wang, the comprador only became a relevant historical form (historically significant for an analysis of social transformation) from the Opium Wars onward, nevertheless this category was not an exclusive sociological feature of China’s semi-colonized historical passage. Rather, it was a feature of the imperialist capitalist world, tout court. That is, the specific historical form of the comprador in any given place and modern time of course would be contingently related to that specific social formation and the history of its incorporation into global capital; however, the comprador as such was a figure demanded in and of capitalism as a global expansionary structure of social and productive relations. Most important, the comprador is a figure of global primitive accumulation, not merely of circulation and exchange. For Wang, then, the comprador—as a historical concept of and in the social analysis of the modern world of global capital in its imperialist and colonial instantiations—had to be understood as the theoretical and historical mediator between the abstractions of global capital as a deterritorializing and tendentially totalizing system of social and economic (re)production on a world scale and the concreteness of life in particular places in the world. As Wang’s specific focus was on China, his concern was with the concreteness of life in China-in-the-world and the world-in-China of the 1840–1949 period. As I will explore below, Wang Yanan’s philosophical and economic consideration of the comprador bourgeoisie [maiban zichan jieji 买办资产阶级] in pre-revolutionary China hence can be seen both as a methodological intervention into the 1930s and 1940s debates about China’s social structure and class formations, and also importantly and enduringly, as a conceptual-empirical intervention into the analysis of the locally instantiated global socio-historical transformations of the preceding century. Wang’s particular consideration was on these transformations and their connection to the invasive and coercive incorporation of China into the structures of global capital. In these processes, the comprador as mediator was a key figure for the establishment of uneven equivalence in pursuit of primitive global capital accumulation. Below, I seek to explicate in a preliminary way the substance of Wang’s analysis of global capital’s social structure as manifested in China—in particular his theory of bureaucratic capitalism under imperialism, to which his historical analytic category of the comprador corresponds. My analysis hopes to bring to bear

122  Rebecca E. Karl a consideration of how one might conceptualize therefrom the category of the global bourgeoisie—although this is not a category Wang used—as essentially a comprador formation. In this sense, the global bourgeoisie is not the aggregate of national middle classes, rather, it is a structural feature of capitalism as a global formation in a variety of local forms. Before I go further with Wang, we first must take a brief detour through a few paradigms of comprador theorizations.

The comprador in theory The bourgeoisie as a social category is all but fatally tied to the historical category of the nation-state; it is connected by theoretical convention, historicist understanding and sociological—even commonsensical—disposition. Before the nation-state, there is no bourgeoisie as such, as it is the bourgeoisie as a classin-formation who (try to) call the nation into being either out of the supposed universality of their emergent social-economic interests and/or out of their seizures of the state from other (soon to be historically obsolete or at least newly subordinated) elites in order to impose their supposed universality in ultimately hegemonic fashion.7 The bourgeoisie, tied as it is to the nation-state category, is also fatally tied to capitalism, which itself is tied to the nation-state, although never contained by or to it. Why and how the bourgeoisie is usually treated as a national category of analysis even while capitalism is always already a tendentially global category of material practice is a theoretical problem that cannot detain me here. Theorists such as Nicos Poulantzas (1973: 1456–1500, 1975) and Bob Jessop (2002), among many others, have undertaken in various places to explicate the issue. Suffice it to say that this problem often is posed as a false opposition, in a form that philosophers might call a disjunctive synthesis. Precisely because it is a real historical problematique, the simultaneity of capitalism as global and national is a historical problem worthy of exposition; however, it is not a contradiction requiring an either/or answer, but a temporal problem of unevenness, of formal subsumption that operates through historical processes of separation and synthesis.8 However, by extension of the connection made between the bourgeoisie and the nation in historical and revolutionary terms, the conventional view of the comprador, or comprador bourgeoisie, holds that this category or class, in the words of political scientist Robert Vitalis, is “a theoretical problem of the peripheral political economy: [the comprador engages in] economic activity oriented primarily for the benefit of the other.. . .  [I]n the theoretical context of assessing the possibilities for local industrial development, compradors represent forces that hinder change” (Vitalis, 1990: 291). In this conventional view, not only is the comprador a non-revolutionary non-national quasi-traditional figure who represents the interests of foreign capital’s intrusion into local (peripheral, non-capitalist) society, but he (and it is always a he) is also a figure of exchange, circulation and consumption—thus essentially parasitic, like the usurer—and not a modern heroic character of production or manufacture or revolution. Thus, on the one hand, the comprador is a figure of what are often called the remnants of

Compradors  123 a pre-existing pre-capitalist economy; and, on the other hand, in a colonial situation supposedly demanding a national revolutionary movement and hence unlike the national bourgeoisie—whose allegiances may oscillate but who are generally considered to be patriotic (that is, always dependent upon a national state for legal and other protections and thus to some degree usually supportive of a sympathetic national state)—the comprador is always and forever a traitorous class, with loyalties to no one and nothing other than himself and accumulative processes. In a different, less Bolshevist-Leninist theorization, 1970s dependency theorists, primarily here Samir Amin, took up the problem of unequal exchange as a major basis for the structuring of the uneven capitalist world system and the various local social formations that emerged therefrom. In this theorization, the comprador as the figure of uneven capitalist exchange was a key component. In Amin’s theory, unequal exchange is the main way in which capitalist social relations create and reproduce global inequality. The comprador is a local representative of this creation and its reproduction, functioning as the social mediator and economic mode through which global power remains geographically uneven and structurally exploitative. Local political power and economic strength flows from and to the comprador, who ensures, via access to global capital, that the structural inequalities of global space are reproduced in and through local spaces of exchange. Compradors need not work nationally; in fact, often they do not. They are usually quite local and link local spaces directly to global ones, bypassing the national unit altogether (which is in part why they tend to be “traitorous” in a nation-state analysis). They do need to have access to bureaucratic privilege and to local social formations, the better to freeze into place the very “pre-capitalist” productive relations upon which unequal global exchange depends. Thus, the comprador arises out of the commercial nature of global capital and its reliance upon already-existing labor and exchange practices locally. In this sense, for Amin, the comprador is at one and the same time a figure of pre-capitalist productive remnants, of commercial exchange on a global scale, and of uneven capitalist social relations.9 In yet a different vein, in the 1950s Frantz Fanon named the national bourgeoisie in a colonized society a comprador class by definition, always already representing a global formation and thus inseparable from the global conditions of its birth. As he says quite pointedly: Because it [the bourgeoisie] is bereft of ideas, because it lives to itself and cuts itself off from the people. . .  the national middle class [the bourgeoisie] will have nothing better to do than to take on the role of manager for Western enterprise, and it will in practice set up its country as the brothel of Europe. (Fanon, 1968: 154) Fanon’s perspective, derived from historical experience, approaches the heart of the problem of the bourgeoisie as such: that is, in colonial and colonized societies, albeit in different ways, class relations emerge from heterogenetic processes. They do not emerge from only internalist teleological genealogies, such as those

124  Rebecca E. Karl posited in analyses inherited from a certain form of classical Marxism; nor do they emerge from purely externalist logics, such as those posited by “impact” theorists or theorists of the centrality of exchange and commerce to social transformation. Rather, on the Fanonian view that puts colonialism at the center of understandings of the emergence of all class relations in capitalism—so-called metropolitan as well as colonial ones—then what Fanon calls the perverse dialectic of class produces antagonisms that are structured not by positing an “outside” to a putative or potential organic national solidarity but rather by corresponding experientially to the particular ways in which elites accumulate globally through variable concrete forms of local relations10 (Sekyi-Otu, 1996). Here then, it is the process of accumulation in its capitalist commodity forms not the process of exchange that de-particularizes various bourgeoisies, rendering them something not only sui generis to each particular location but also variously formed agents-in-common of capital and primitive accumulation on a global and local scale simultaneously. On the one hand, the point for Fanon is to repudiate some primordial ontological status of the European bourgeoisie, to which the colonial variety can only correspond as a derivative or incomplete version. (Even though, of course, Fanon also maintained that the bourgeoisie in Algeria, for example, was distorted and thus unreliable as agents of a new national state.) On the other hand, then, his point is also to refuse isolate particulars so as to arrive at what theorist Sekyi-Otu calls an achieved essence “distilled from time” (1996: 127). As a result of this dual perspective—a refusal of ontological incompletion at the same time as an insistence on particulars-as-universals—the national bourgeoisie is as indistinguishable from the comprador bourgeoisie as it is from the global bourgeoisie; all of these categories are bourgeois and thus beholden in their very historical nature and various local manifestations to the processes of capital accumulation on a global scale and not to a nation, state, or (revolutionary) people (Fanon, 1968: 150). The bourgeoisie—national, comprador, global—is always a potentially traitorous class: because it is a pure figure of capital, it is loyal to nothing and nobody but its own economic-cultural-hegemonic interests. By liberating ourselves from the historicist and thus the nationalist understandings of the bourgeoisie, its global and potentially unreliable nature becomes evident, and the distinctions among and between its fractions in the advancing age of imperialist-colonial capitalism become less possible to maintain, particularly as these manifest in non-metropolitan spaces.

Wang Yanan’s theory of bureaucratic capitalism and the comprador in 1930s and 1940s China Wang Yanan’s theory of the comprador—never fully articulated in any one place, to be sure—derives from a global view and its relation to and manifestation in local bureaucracy, capitalist accumulation and finance capital in China in the modern period (post-Opium War). There are several sources for his discussions. Below, I will deal primarily with the considerations that form an extensive and crucial part of his late 1940s book-length study of China’s so-called “bureaucratic polity” [所谓官僚政治]. As a whole, in the book Wang is at pains to refute Hegel and

Compradors  125 Weber as well as Chinese acolytes thereof, so as to demonstrate that bureaucracy is not an ahistorical cultural attribute of China, but rather an historical form that combines and recombines over time with different socio-economic elements and political considerations to produce different historical significances through time. Indeed, as he notes, from a perspective of mere structural formalism (Hegelian or Weberian), it appears as if China’s bureaucracy remained the same for 2,000 years, mired in cyclical and timeless stagnation; however, from an historical materialist perspective, it becomes clear that every dynasty and dynastic fraction had to re-inscribe and re-formulate a bureaucracy, not just reproductively but creatively and deliberately (Wang, 1981b). This materialist view allows Wang, the historian, to have a more nuanced and more properly historical understanding of the sociopolitical roles of bureaucracy in Chinese history than is permitted by the structural thesis of stagnant reproductive culturalism. Indeed, for advocating the Hegelian/ Weberian view (as well as the derivative one widely translated into Chinese at the time and offered by Japanese Marxist Akizawa Shūji), Wang castigates the historian Qian Mu for splitting bureaucracy from tyranny in the contemporary period so as to conclude thereby that China’s bureaucracy was still unrealized in its potentially most perfected fashion. Qian’s argument thus maintained that, if properly developed by the Nationalist State (the GMD), such a perfected bureaucracy would be the best possible form suited to the Chinese cultural character. In Wang’s critique— aside from his usual target of Qian’s ahistorical culturalism11—the splitting of bureaucracy from tyranny allowed Qian to relegate the GMD’s propensity towards tyranny to the sideline while elevating to an ideal the metaphysics of a potentially perfect Chinese bureaucratic and state form unmoored from actual historicity. By contrast with such pseudo-history, Wang proposed that not only were bureaucracy and tyranny often tightly linked in China’s past at particular moments—moments that could be understood in materialist historical terms as being formed and re-formed by attaching differently to social formations—but that the contemporary manifestation of this linkage (under the GMD) would lead only to socio-economic and political disaster rather than postwar recovery and political stability.12 The bulk of Wang’s Research on Bureaucratic Politics in China is taken up with an historical traversing of the forms of bureaucracy and polity exhibited in global and Chinese histories since the dawn of bureaucratic and political time, as it were. At times mechanical in its narrative and argumentation, the book had been written quickly during the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937–1945) at the behest of the British Sinologist, Joseph Needham (whom Wang had met in Guangzhou in 1942), and was intended as a corrective to those studies that assigned to China the “wrong”—irrational, culturally stagnant—sort of bureaucracy that could never lead to properly productive modernization after the rational European model and rather could only lead to social stagnation and cultural involution. While important, those arguments will not detain me here. What is interesting for my argument is that by the end of the book, Wang’s pointed dialectical historicization of bureaucracy, political form and historical significance allows him to observe that to comprehend contemporary bureaucracy “it is insufficient to look only at the behaviors, methods and organizations of bureaucracy,. . .  rather, it is

126  Rebecca E. Karl necessary to look at the reasons for its emergence and the means of its sustenance in particular social and economic foundations” (Wang, 1981b: 172). That is, reiterating a point made above, superficial similarities in bureaucratic appearance are historically unremarkable (he mentions repeatedly throughout the book that many polities, peoples, societies have had bureaucracy: while many look similar, they all mean something different socially and historically and thus signify differently at each time and place); what is significant is not the superficial form but the historically rooted specificity of the bureaucracy in its relation to the social formations that give rise to and sustain it. In the modern world (that is, in his contemporary moment), the GMD bureaucracy was inextricably linked to financial and banking capital (金融; 174). This made it entirely different than any previous bureaucratic formation. In Wang’s words, while the new political forces [政治实力] in indirect ways are still apparently parasitic upon the exploitation of feudal land taxes, [yet] because they are mutually linked to comprador finance [买办金融], they also easily can give people the impression that they are a “regime of capital” [资产政权]; in any case the feudal aspects now have been considerably diluted. (1981b: 175)13 On this view, Wang writes, the new political forces are similar to an old bureaucratic form only in metaphysical (superficial) perspective, as their linkage to finance capital in its comprador form signifies historically very differently and gives bureaucracy, the state, and its social-cultural environment a different cast to that of the past. Indeed, it indelibly links the contemporary bureaucratic politics of China to the world of global capitalism and financialization. Meanwhile, in the realm of ideology, he writes, “as the national revolutionary movement [of the GMD] weakened,” its erstwhile forces had to find a way to transform their rhetoric so as to retain resolutely revolutionary types in their fold. This rhetorical-ideological transformation had been fashioned by “comprador and allied scholars” and had resulted in substituting for an actual revolutionary movement a “reliable and resounding sounding so-called national economic construction movement [国民经济建设运动]” (Wang, 1981b: 175). His tone dripping with sarcasm, Wang proceeds to demonstrate how this product of comprador scholars is a GMD ideological strategy to eviscerate revolution as a practice and to implement a blueprint for the development of urban industrialization and agribusiness, whose socio-economic justifications were nowhere to be found in China’s actual conditions, but rather were derived from foreign models and designed to deliver social-cultural hegemony and economic profits to global and local capitalists and landlords while creating political sinecures and thus the “patterns of a new bureaucracy” (Wang, 1981b: 176). In order to do this, the GMD had to enforce the institutions and ideology of popular (anti-democratic) tutelage while reinventing apparently traditional modes of rule in the rebellious villages, whose clan and other social constraints derived from the past had been fatally loosened by decades of war and mass dislocation (as well as, we might

Compradors  127 add, by carpet-bagging postwar profiteering by the GMD themselves!). This reinvention looked like the revival of an older form, but actually was new, in large part because its bureaucratic-economic task was now to tie the villages tightly to comprador finance and global spaces of commodification, surplus value creation, and exchange flows. As Wang concludes, new bureaucracy is unlike [the old type], in particular because it has been the product of returnees from abroad with their foreign educations, whose brains are filled with other types of ideas and whose life pleasures are gapingly different from those of the poor peasantry; whose corporate social class consciousness is relatively keen and whose spirit of self-profiteering is very strong. If the old bureaucracy had no idea how to do “revolution,” they [the new class] in fact know how to avoid revolution altogether. Thus, the legacy of “revolution for construction” has been “intentionally translated [意译]” into “construction instead of revolution.” This is not just the product of a few people; rather it is the synthesized expression and the entire ideology of sordid merchants [市侩], egoists, hedonists, and structural formalists. (1981b: 178) Putting aside the note of disapproving asceticism, Wang is quite clear here that the formation of a bureaucratic capitalism in postwar China under the GMD had more to do with comprador thinking and the self-dealing profiteering of comprador finance/banking capital in cahoots with the state than it did with anything relevant to China’s political past, actually-existing social structure or contemporary conditions. For Wang, then, the relationship between bureaucratic capital [官僚资本] and comprador finance/banking capital [买办金融资本] was a relation that needed to be rooted analytically in the contemporary global historical social formation. As he notes in this regard (Wang, 1981b: 184), at every moment in China that bureaucratic capitalism had moved forward to consolidate itself, it had availed itself of the opportunity to “expand and swallow” whole new arenas of economic productive activity, to bring them into the realm of formal subsumption. This had brought China’s rural sectors unevenly into the hegemonic sway of global capital, even as landlords and social productive relations appeared to have remained the same as before. By far the clearest form of this expansion had been into the new political class of what he calls comprador bureaucrats. And thus, taking on the “endless discussions” in China at the time about the new (postwar) bureaucratic capitalism in its relation to the persisting comprador finance/banking class, Wang makes the following several remarks: The first special characteristic [of the new form] is the fact that current bureaucratic capitalism has not in any way diluted the comprador character of the previous and persisting comprador financial capitalism; it has merely aggravated its bureaucratic nature. And it has not in any way decreased the usefulness of bureaucracy to finance, but rather has expanded the reach of finance deeper into politics. (1981b: 184)

128  Rebecca E. Karl Its second characteristic, Wang notes, is the convergence of bankers, financiers and bureaucrats into one and the same political class, thus rendering any distinction between the public and private good impossible to maintain and any strict demarcation between potentially competitive fractions of capital less important. In an eerie echo of the entwining of the CCP with capitalist enterprises in China today, Wang notes that the lists of managers and directors of the now-hegemonic banks and financial concerns are densely populated by the names of “wives, mistresses, and young masters [少爷]” in order to conceal political ties and beneficiaries of profit. Finally, The third characteristic resides in the fact that in the previous historical moment [in the prewar period], comprador finance capital maintained little to no relation to productive entrepreneurial activity, while bureaucratic capital has extended its feelers [Wang uses the biological term] into any enterprise of any size whatsoever. . .  (Wang, 1981b: 184) To properly appreciate Wang’s point here, we need to understand the usage for “bureaucratic capitalism” then ongoing in China. While a detailed review is not possible within the scope of this chapter, the major contours can be elucidated as follows. Far from only a Marxist jargon or terminology, “bureaucratic capitalism” was used by many Marxists and non-Marxists in the 1940s to designate negatively the GMD state’s self-dealing, particularly in the postwar and civil war period (1945–1949) (Wong, 1993). The connotation for some (critical liberal) uses of the term was that, if only the GMD could rein in corruption and could carry out its plans better, the defects could be rectified and GMD-led-capitalism could demonstrate itself to be an appropriate way to develop China’s economy and society. This could be considered a friendly critique (although the GMD was so thin-skinned after the war that even such critiques were punishable by extra-judicial executions and jailings). “Bureaucratic capitalism” was also considered by some as a form of behavior by people who happened to be bureaucrats. This behavioral theory derived in part from a traditional social duality between officials and the people [guan/min 官/民] as adduced to a new structural sociology; it was a theory in vogue for some time in modern China, although in the pre-1949 period, it soon got folded into the critique noted above.14 By contrast, Mao Zedong’s usage of the term, for example in his wartime (1942) text about postwar recovery, “On New Democracy,” posits that bureaucratic capitalism has a status at least equivalent to “feudalism” and other social formations. Indeed, for Mao and others in the Chinese Communist Party, bureaucratic capitalism was one among other socio-political formations that needed to be transcended in order for new democracy—a posited transitional united front of classes under Communist leadership that was to take China from wartime into postwar socialist construction—to be transformed into a fully socialist proletarian democracy (a goal for a later historical moment). In Mao’s understanding, bureaucratic capitalism was a superstructural political form imposed upon a semi-feudal China and derived from the bureaucratic stagnations of China’s past.

Compradors  129 The difference between these two positions is clear: for the non-Communist, bureaucratic capitalism was a deleterious behavior, an aberrant corruption of a well-intentioned state-dominated capitalist path; for the Maoist-Communist, bureaucratic capitalism was a state form particular to the Chinese semi-feudal condition, co-extensive with negative resonances from the past that had to be revolutionarily transcended in order for new democracy/socialism to become possible. Wang Yanan’s usage departs from both of these.15 On the one hand, for Wang, there was no way to fix bureaucratic capitalism by making it work better. It worked just the way it was supposed to: for those—bureaucrats in charge—whom it was intended to benefit. This was not because the GMD was uniquely corrupt (although Wang believed they were very corrupt indeed); nor was it because the bureaucratic capitalists were Chinese and thus culturally predisposed towards a bureaucratic version of political rule (as Orientalist scholars from Europe, America, Japan and even China would claim).16 Rather, it was because at the current world historical juncture, bureaucratic capitalism was firmly wedded to the global trend towards the financialization of capital, and thus manifested three major historically specific characteristics that China shared with others. First among them was a tendency towards the monopolization of capitalization [垄断/独占资本化, 1981b; p. 185], a tendency that was exacerbated as the holders of state power attempted to retain their grip on the state by joining strong capitalist forces from abroad so as to receive their assistance and succor. This situation led inexorably to what Wang calls the “colonization of the state” [国家殖民地化, 1981b; p. 186], which then is the second historical characteristic of bureaucratic capitalism in the contemporary moment. This colonization was not to be understood merely as the effect of the rise of wartime and postwar mercenaries, whose accumulation of riches relied primarily on the manipulation of unequal exchange between foreign abundance and domestic scarcity. Rather, this state colonization was the handiwork of a newly risen class, who “use strategies of commodity dumping, the buying and selling of gold and foreign currency, hoarding and speculation, the power to levy taxes, and every manner of managerial interference in productive enterprises for the purpose of defrauding and the seizure of property.” As Wang further summarizes: They have become fantastically wealthy not from the accumulations derived from new-style productive enterprises, but rather mostly from the sacrifices and expropriations that depend upon various forms of primitive exploitative methods that expand the poverty, destitution, starvation, and death of productive peasant workers. (1981b: 186) That is, bureaucratic capitalism was not only about manipulation of exchange— although that played its role—but more important, it was about the process of primitive accumulation premised in large part upon the confiscations of rural property and the pauperization of peasants, which turned rural populations into endlessly exploitable and expendable wage labor. Hence, it was about the formal subsumption of the rural population and of agricultural producers into circuits of capital.

130  Rebecca E. Karl And third, this accumulative and parasitic activity (parasitic upon rural society) had resulted in an unprecedented situation: the total convergence of bureaucracy with the economy, a convergence that had to be understood now as potentially limitless in space and time because of the vast global resources at hand (Wang, 1981b: 187). Two phenomena that could have cancelled each other out (bureaucratic political and capitalist interests) had dialectically in this global moment become a unity of opposites; that is, they had joined together into one formation united against the revolutionary transformation of social relations. This had not been inevitable; it was a contingent outcome of the conjoining of a particular pre- and postwar situation in China with global financial capitalist interests in the context of total capitalist crisis and then total global war. Any analysis of this situation with regard to China, as Wang narrates (pp. 175ff), had to account for the fact that the GMD by the mid-1930s had already welded itself to finance capital in the process of rooting its rule in Jiangsu/Zhejiang society (the Yangzi Delta region, with Shanghai as the center of manufacture as well as of modern Chinese and foreign banking and finance in China). That is, as the GMD became a Chinese state based not in the north but in the south, where the south had now become completely incorporated into global capitalist circuits of finance and banking, the character of the Chinese state had changed: As a direct result of Jiangsu/Zhejiang’s financial bolstering and funding of the GMD’s Northern Expedition [1924–1927, to seize territory back from warlords], these sources of financial support naturally more and more clearly emerged as the mountains upon which new political forces relied and became dependent. Because of the chaos in the villages and the capitalist crisis that tended to focus in the cities, a huge portion of the savings of the nation was concentrated in various Chinese financial institutions. By 1934, well over one half of these savings were being used to buy up China’s national debt. The government needed the banks to rescue them; the banks needed the government to enrich themselves.17 As the GMD seized control of private banks, and private banks gained control over the Chinese state, the laundering of the globally financed national debt of China, upon which the profitability and viability of these seizures were in large part dependent, got caught up in the concurrent chaos in global financial markets that spilled into currency regimes, with the UK going onto the gold standard in 1931 and the US remonetizing in silver in 1934. In an immediate sense, this led in China to the siphoning of silver from the countryside—where silver had long been the ultimate denominator of the value of popularly used copper coins—now destined for the urban banking and financial institutions centered in and near Shanghai that would help speculatively and materially feed the flow of expensive silver onto the foreign market, quickly being cornered by the US state. Price deflation in China ensued, leading to rural chaos and widespread pauperization, particularly in the Yangzi Delta region, where financial interests became even more tightly welded to landlords and land seizures. The GMD also was induced

Compradors  131 finally to take China off the silver standard (1935) and to float a fiat currency (the fabi) issued exclusively by the GMD-controlled Central Bank of China. With currency being printed at a fantastic rate, yet with little confidence evinced in this paper money in the countryside (accustomed to dealing in copper and silver), and with currencies issued from Chinese- or Hong Kong-based foreign banks competing with the fabi for stability and convertibility in China, inflation went wild and monetary disaster spread through the rural agrarian and urban manufacturing sectors just ahead of the Japanese invasion and the re-location of the GMD inland to Chongqing (in 1938). Wang does not narrate the specific links I have just filled in. Yet, this would have been the common background information for anyone who was concerned, as he was, with the financial, political and social destabilizations of the hyperinflation of the late 1940s, which seemed to be recapitulating in even more violent form the hyper-inflation of the immediate prewar period. Thus, even while Wang is most assuredly theorizing China and his concern for China-the-nation is quite clear, nevertheless his focus on the convergence of a political form (the GMD bureaucratic state) with the real and speculative local and global economies (finance capitalism in its various infiltrations and manifestations) transcends the particular Chinese case. As he notes, a similar convergence between states and capital was happening all over the world, albeit in ways specific to each place. In pre- and postwar China and other historically agrarian societies, bureaucratic politics, bureaucratic capitalism and comprador finance preyed primarily upon the peasant economy—draining resources, dispossessing and pauperizing primary producers so as to exploit their labor; in other places, these forces might attach to other economic sectors to implement and achieve their monopolizing primitive accumulative goals. In sum, as we have seen in Wang Yanan’s theorization the figure of the comprador is linked thoroughly with the bureaucratic state form in its connection to the structures of global finance capital, as those structures manifest in China’s local (Yangzi Delta) social formation. Through this linkage, the process of primitive accumulation—not circulation and exchange—marks the comprador as a form of mediator at the local and global levels simultaneously (not just between local and global, but within those levels as well). Because of the comprador’s deep imbrication in this historical process—a process we can perceive once we free ourselves from revolutionary historicist or nationalist necessity (where the comprador is always merely a parasitic traitorous figure of exchange and circulation)—it is possible to see from this theory for China, or by extension for any imperializedcolonized society, that there is little point in distinguishing which concrete social fractions (urban merchants, landlords, etc.) represent which abstract capitalist fractions (finance capital, commercial capital, etc.), since ultimately the systematicity of the connections through an emphasis on primitive accumulation preclude such mechanistic pairings and surefooted sociological placings. Thus, as a methodological issue, starting from a posited social stratum to extrapolate the capitalist function just as starting from the function to extrapolate the stratum is a formal mechanistic method that does not engage with an analysis

132  Rebecca E. Karl of practiced local social relations or actual global conditions. As a historical issue, then, it becomes clear that “mediation” is about more than brokering unequal exchange (even though it is about that, too). For, any notion of compradors as mediators must also include a theoretical and material account of how conditions for primitive accumulation at local and global scales were created, conditions that might freeze social relations into what appear to be pre-existing forms (feudal remnants, so called), even while rendering those relations functional to an entirely different system altogether.

The comprador as mediating middle of global capitalism By way of conclusion to this chapter, it seems important to think through the relevance of Wang’s historical theorization for today’s China and world. Here, I skip over the Maoist period, not because it is irrelevant to the contemporary situation, but because global capitalism was not locally instantiated at that time; indeed, the Maoist period precisely uprooted those connections, substituting for them different forms of mediation altogether. The return of those connections is what links the 1930s to the 1990s. Indeed, there are many areas in which Wang’s conceptualizations appear to describe or depict exactly today’s situation, making it look like that superficial repetition without difference, that recapitulation of cyclical ageold Chinese culturalism that so mesmerizes scholars and journalists the world over (including Chinese!), even as China leaps into uncharted and historically unprecedented territories of economic growth and national expansion. Rather than fall into the cyclical trap, we should recognize that China’s bureaucratic-technocratic revival, the bourgeoisie to which it has given rise and social-political protection, and their combined tight linkages to local and global finance capital are connected not so much to the cultural-bureaucratic past (ancient or Maoist) but to the global neo-liberal turn towards total managerialism as a form of domestic social surveillance and global primitive accumulation through extensive and intensive labor control. While it surely appears that neo-liberal managerialism dovetails nicely in many regards with Communist central state power—an appearance whose practical effects are differentially manifested daily in the lives of workers, dissidents and capitalists—it is not at all obvious that these necessarily (that is, inevitably) would have converged at the demise of the Maoist socialist experiments. In this sense, the choice for technocratic managerialism, social inequality at the sure expense of labor, and the resource and wealth accumulations and extractions of an emergent and coalescent bureaucratic capitalist elite in conjunction with the accelerated global capitalist financializations of the 1990s and 2000s, must be seen as a contingent (albeit not accidental) outcome of an historical conjoining, rather than a teleological result of a futurity always already foretold. I can only suggest the outlines of this turn here. The theorization of an emergent global bourgeoisie from post-colonial or postsocialist countries has taken several paths. For post-socialist states—such as those of Eastern Europe, for example—the concept of the comprador bourgeoisie has made a certain comeback among critical scholars and commentators as a way to

Compradors  133 make sense of a growing but proportionately small elite class tied to global capital and indifferent to national-level development. This comprador bourgeoisie, so called, is a major component part of a global bourgeoisie, whose loyalties and luxuries are more in tune with one another than with co-nationals. One such seemingly representative treatment proclaims: Comprador bourgeoisie. . .  is a tycoon group ruthlessly led by its interests. It posits its own interests over general social ones. It is not national in character. . .  It is a blind servant of foreign capital, ruthless in the exploitation of the domestic workforce and dictatorial in relation to its fellow countrymen. Its homeland is where its interests are. It is the agent of megacapital in the function of the global economy. (Mitrović, 2010: 5) With obvious roots in an older historicist theorization of the comprador as a traitorous class within a national-state analysis, this version of the conjoining of a local elite with a global class posits that the newly arisen “amalgam” (in Serbia, as in other places of what is called “peripheral capitalism”) “recruits its members from the various groups involved in the neo-bourgeois ways of production, from the nomenclature bourgeoisie, lumpen-bourgeoisie and partly from the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie” (p. 7). Some of these fractions have antecedents in the socialist era (the nomenklatura, for example) and their post-socialist transformation into parts of a transnational elite—a global bourgeoisie—is the product of how global capital unevenly incorporated into its own logics the spaces, labor times and value-productions over which these locals had or gained access with the demise of planned economies and centralized states. A cognate type of theorization presents an analysis that posits the rise of postcolonial middle classes in what commonly used to be called the Third World (India, Brazil, African nations) as a product of the previous era’s colonial comprador bourgeoisie, the mediating class of exchange and circulatory processes (Gladstone, 2015). A variant of this theorization identifies the roots of today’s global bourgeoisie in a “derivative middle class,” whose historical foundations can be located in the technocratic requirements for educated and quasi-cosmopolitan professionals emerging from the indigenizing needs of colonial bureaucracies (Subramaniam, 1990). Such theorizations rely upon a concept of an original type of bourgeoisie (“European” or “Western”) and a type that can only ever be a derivative copy (“non-European” or “non-Western” or formerly colonized), where the former is a product of internal social processes and the latter is a product of external imposition.18 Again, from the nationalist historicist perspective of the bourgeoisie as a class destined to seize the independent post-colonial state, this may appear to be accurate to some degree. However, once we shift our perspective, the internality of the “European” bourgeoisie itself comes under question. The argument here is not that there is equivalence between a colonial and a colonized elite and thus that there is any posited historical equality—it is obvious that colonized peoples were a product of

134  Rebecca E. Karl a systematic subordination to colonial power at every level of the social, political and economic spectrum. The point, rather, is that bourgeoisies, whether European or not, are always already products of a globalizing tendency in capital and thus can never be absolutely tied to the nation-state as a narrow set of internal relations as such. This is as true of the supposed original national bourgeoisies of the European enlightenments and of Euro-American industrializations as it is of colonized bourgeoisies, upon their emergence a century later (Johnson, 2013).19 The task then is not to theorize an internal/external problem alone, but to theorize how each and both contribute to the processes not only of exchange and circulation, but of primitive accumulation as such. Modern bureaucracies, by the same token, have been both national-state oriented and colonially transnational at the same time. These bureaucracies were never merely just conduits for greasing the wheels of trade and exchange internationally; they were importantly also always about inaugurating and facilitating primitive accumulations the world over (whether through Enclosure in England; the rendering of land into territory into private property in the US; or through colonial expropriations, among others). This could be argued for European state bureaucracies as well as for, for example, the Qing dynastic one, which has often been claimed in the new Qing historical tradition to be an imperial bureaucratic state par excellence. Whether or not state bureaucrats—metropolitan, colonial, colonized—are or were a class unto themselves is of course a fraught issue among Marxists (most would disavow such a social analysis); yet it seems increasingly clear for contemporary neo-liberal capitalism that transnational (global) managers in production, in processes of exchange and circulation, and, most important, in processes of primitive accumulation are key components in the last few decades’ new intensities of labor exploitation, financialization, property transformations, land expropriations, wealth accruals, and capital flights and flows. In analysis of China’s post-socialist transformation (perhaps difficult to name as such, since the Chinese Communist Party continues to proclaim China’s essentially socialist path, so let us set that aside and acknowledge that China’s transformation from Maoism to today has shared many albeit not all features with more properly identified post-socialist states), it is entirely the norm in certain scholarly quarters to define post-Mao State-owned enterprises (SOEs) as “comprador-type trading organizations,” with the sons and daughters of well-connected Party-bureaucratic elites the new managerial capitalist class— bureaucratic capitalists—whose privileged access to power facilitated their rise to unprecedented heights of economic wealth and political domination (Ho, 2013: 812–827, 815). Often treated as the product of corruption [guandao官倒] or princeling [高干子弟] privilege, these analyses of wealth accrual on the one hand focus on the “increasing financial marketization of bureaucratic corporations on foreign and local stock exchanges . . .  [which] rapidly multiplied the size of assets controlled by the bureaucratic bourgeoisie” (Ho, 2013: 821), and on the other hand, they focus on the legal ramifications of the relation between SOEs and their private management: that is, whose “property” are these entities? While these foci are not wrong, they do not go far enough.

Compradors  135 For what is quite clear, if we take Wang Yanan’s theorization seriously, is that the new post-Mao bureaucratic capitalist class is not only about management but far more important and enduringly, it is about the plunder of the (socialist) public for private (capitalist) gain. That is, it is about primitive accumulation through privatization (whether or not the actual land or property is legally considered private property, the extraction of surplus value and the productive resources are transformed into private wealth, profit and benefit). In other words, this is not about bad behavior as such (although there is certainly plenty of that!), it is about how the neo-liberal historical merging of bureaucracy with domestic/global finance capital produces something entirely new, even if it looks like the same Chinese bureaucracy of old. On this view, it is primitive accumulation that emerges as the primary local and global capitalist function of a comprador bourgeoisie; and it is that function that defines the global bourgeoisie as not only a consuming class, but as a parasitically producing class: parasitic upon the privatizations of public resources the world over, producing immiseration and hardship wheresoever they sprout and flourish.

Notes   1 I would like to thank the organizers of the August 2015 conference on the “Global Bourgeoisie” at Cambridge University for asking me to think about the issues discussed in this chapter, a preliminary version of which was written for that occasion. Isabella Weber, Viren Murthy and Joyce C.H. Liu provided comments that helped guide my revisions.   2 “Economics and Philosophy,” 66. I translate shimin zhexue [市民哲学] as “bourgeois philosophy.” It could also be rendered “philosophy of civil society” which for Wang the Marxist is a bourgeois category.   3 This is within the Marxist understanding that the analysis of a problem—the very naming of it—is critical to any form of material activity intended to transform it.   4 Mao and his allies in the CCP also had increasingly come to designate the Moscowtrained Party ideologues as infected with comprador mentality. In this usage, the metaphor of the comprador was not about links to capitalism but more about links to Soviet-Marxist textual dogma.   5 Thus, unlike for China historians Marie-Claire Bergère or Parks Coble, for example, who dispute the existence of the comprador bourgeoisie while also disputing the existence of the national bourgeoisie in the first half of the twentieth century in China, for Wang, the comprador was a figure in and of global capitalism, not exclusively in and of China. Hence, while Bergère and Coble would agree with Wang that there is no distinct division between comprador and national bourgeoisies, they not only would depart strongly from Wang’s global theorization, they see the lack of a national bourgeoisie as forming China’s difference from Europe. This point seems unworthy of further comment. (That is, why should Chinese history be European?!)   6 “Comprador” is originally a Portuguese word and was widely used (non-pejoratively) to designate those Chinese merchants in the co-hong system (the system for handling international trade set up by the dynastic authorities in the Qing period at the port of Canton) who dealt with merchants from the “western seas” [西洋]. By the 1920s and into the 1930s, it became an epithet designating those who betrayed their nation for material gain from global trade.   7 The question of whether bourgeois revolutions were indeed bourgeois or even revolutionary has been exhaustively discussed by Neil Davidson (2012). This is a different question from the one I am pursuing here.

136  Rebecca E. Karl   8 See Harry Harootunian’s contribution to this volume on the problem of formal and real subsumption, to which this is intended as amplification. The category of disjunctive synthesis has been in dispute between Deleuze and Badiou for years (before and after Deleuze’s death). My evocation of it is meant to signal the ways in which a historical problematic can be formulated through a history of universalizing concepts and localizing materialities; while such problematics are often posed as a zero-sum contradiction, my point is that they can be posed as a productive way to think local histories in global terms (Badiou and Žižek, 2009).   9 For the basic contours of this argument, see Amin (1976). Andre Gunder Frank in his dependency theory phase (1970s) differed from Amin insofar as Frank’s global structural view precluded any substantive focus on local social formations (Baran, 1957). 10 This reading of Fanon is indebted to Ato Sekyi-Otu. 11 Wang had written an earlier extended essay devoted to debunking Qian Mu’s entire culturalist project (Karl, forthcoming 2017). 12 For the critique of Qian Mu, see Wang (1981b: 44–45). Further page citations to this book are in the text. 13 As he did in this and other works, Wang carefully avoided designating China “capitalist” or otherwise; he did not wade into the politics of definition that had plagued and preoccupied previous and ongoing debates on social history between and among Marxists, Trotskyists, GMD liberals, non-sectarians, etc. For those debates, see Dirlik (1978). 14 For example, Sun Yuesheng’s The Origins of Bureaucratism and its Original Models [官僚主义的起源和元模式] could be cited as one such work. 15 It is also not Trotskyist, among whom the term “bureaucratic collectivism” was used to condemn Soviet society under Stalin and after. 16 This might remind us of Raya Dunayevskaya’s point: “The bureaucratisation that is the concomitant of total planning, reaching into the daily life of every single life with its terror, forced labour camps, political tyranny, had taken the shape of Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, not because these characters were Italian, Russian, German, but because such was the nature of total bureaucratic state capitalistic planning” (1960). 17 From the mid-Ming dynasty onwards, the dynastic centers of power had been located in the north, in Beijing; the GMD’s decision to locate its capital in Nanjing (the south) was in part symbolic (a revival of the Han-nativist Ming Dynasty) and in part a product of its base of support (in Jiangsu/Zhejiang) and its lack of grip over territories to the north. 18 Subramaniam (1990: 404) writes, “The rise of the capitalist, middle, and working classes in Europe was a natural process in the sense that it did not happen under external compulsion of conquest or occupation. It was the result of internal factors generally understood and partly controlled by local groups in power.” 19 Johnson’s analysis of the ways in which the early nineteenth-century Mississippi Valley became part of a global empire of cotton through its slave-labor regimes and primitive accumulation of land at the expense of Native Americans is an important indicator of how thinking through and beyond the national frame in US and other histories can yield entirely new insights.

8 “A vast crucible of electric f lame” Shanghai and the emergence of Chinese Marxism Jake Werner

In the first volume of Capital, Marx pours scorn upon the capitalist factory. While he also criticizes the irrationality of the market system and the inequities of private property, he reserves the largest part of the book for the abuses that take place within the factory. In keeping with his emphasis on the sphere of production as the most fundamental aspect of capitalism, out of which every other facet grows, he goes beyond a critique of low wages or sweatshop conditions in factories. He emphasizes that there is something about proletarian labor itself that mutilates the worker’s humanity, and which no improvement in conditions or compensation could mitigate, showing: that within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labour are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; that all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment; they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. (Marx, 1976a [1867]): 799) There is no small irony, then, that the Marxists of the Chinese Communist Party should have sought to organize the entire nation into a single enormous factory after taking power in 1949. Although the material welfare of the workers indisputably improved in this period, the nature of their work itself remained fundamentally unchanged because of the workers’ continuing subordination within a technical division of labor. In some ways the burden actually intensified as the new state deployed an array of techniques to wring greater production out of the workforce. These ranged from ratcheting up production norms to the use of “socialist” competitions; from strictly defining work responsibilities to centralizing factory

138  Jake Werner administration through the “one-man management” system (Schurmann, 1968 [1966]: 220–308). New organs of worker participation emerged from the same logic, aiming to internalize among the workers the imperative of “fulfilling and overfulfilling the plan” (Werner, 2015: 122–204). The application of industrial rationality was not only intensive, it was extensive as well. Prior to 1949, most lower-class urban residents had made their living haphazardly in market-driven sectors that the Party called “disorganized” (sanman 散漫), working as peddlers, rickshaw pullers, prostitutes, trash pickers, beggars, thieves or gangsters. In huge numbers they were now drawn into the increasingly centralized and regimented industrial economy. At the same time, techniques of factory administration were increasingly applied to endeavors that had previously followed different social logics. From the farm to the movie theater to the university, all were now integrated into the plan and submitted to a process of bureaucratic rationalization. Just as the Chinese Communist Party’s first decade in power was defined by proletarianization in the economic realm, so it was marked by “massification” (dazhonghua 大眾化) in the realm of culture. This entailed transforming cultural output not only so that it would be accessible to the masses, but so that it would cultivate a proletarian identity as well. The leader of the cultural bureaucracy, Zhou Yang 周揚, spoke of culture as a “weapon,” saying, “Our Party must make use of this instrument to influence the spiritual life of the people, to improve their spiritual life, to cultivate a new moral character among them and establish a new social environment by transforming traditions” (Zhou, 1985 [1954]: 283–284). The specific aim of this cultural transformation, he said, was “to serve economic construction”—a point reiterated countless times in the internal directives that propagandists and other cultural workers received. In other words, the purpose of culture in the People’s Republic was to transform the people spiritually and morally so that they embraced their own articulation in the production process. This was a truly proletarian culture, in the sense that it sought to standardize and discipline the people within the nation, as the worker is standardized and disciplined within the factory (Werner, 2012, 2015). Though these developments stood in direct conflict with Marx’s ideals, the Party’s invocation of Marxism was not merely a cynical effort to establish legitimacy. Rather, the policies and techniques of the Party emerged from an understanding of labor and socialism that had been developing for decades in China and around the world. This approach drew, in a one-sided way, on Marx’s thinking. But the course of its development was driven not so much by a deep engagement with Marx’s texts as by the general experience of life in liberal society and the particular political exigencies of the struggle to gain social representation for the excluded. For this reason, Chinese Marxism developed in a direction that eventually brought it into contradiction with the whole of Marx’s thinking. For many years, academic debates about Chinese Marxism have focused on ideological and factional divides within the Party. From the dispute between the “Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks” and the supporters of Mao Zedong 毛澤東 in the 1930s, to the struggle between Mao’s group and Shanghai cultural intellectuals

Shanghai and Chinese Marxism  139 such as Ding Ling 丁玲 and Hu Feng 胡風 during the 1940s and 1950s, to the “two-line struggle” between Mao and those he targeted in the Cultural Revolution, these conflicts were numerous and contentious. However, as the political urgency of intra-Party conflict receded in the era of reform and opening, and as Marxist thought lost its attraction around the world, scholars abandoned inquiry into the intellectual aspects of the Chinese Revolution. Today, as the inequities and instabilities of life in neoliberal society gnaw at social cohesion, China is seeing a revival of interest in certain ideals from the Party’s revolutionary past. Given this political conjuncture, and with the advantage of historical distance now available to us, this is an opportune moment to inquire broadly into the nature of revolutionary ideology. Here I will take a step back from internecine conflict within the Party and attempt to apprehend Chinese Marxism as a whole. Despite their many disputes, key assumptions united Marxists as disparate as Wang Ming 王明 and Mao Zedong, Zhou Yang and Hu Feng, Bo Yibo 薄一波 and Zhang Chunqiao 張春橋. Fundamental to this politics was the positing of a dialectical relationship between the oppressed masses and the vanguard party that would lead the masses in their struggle for liberation. This social ontology, which provided a framework for organizing the Party, was connected to a stage concept of history rooted in the mode of production, in which capitalist society would be superseded by socialist society (understood as state ownership and planning of the economy), which would in turn develop in a linear manner toward communist society. However, undergirding the Leninist blueprint for the Party and the Stalinist schema of historical development—logically prior to them and dialectically implicated in their historical emergence—was a deeper sensibility that shaped every choice in the revolution. Ultimate authority was invested not in Marx or Lenin but in the social collective. Born of the explosive tensions that arose as the ideals and anticipations of industrial society ran up against the systematic frustration of those dreams under liberal conditions, the collective became the figure around which a resolution to this contradiction was elaborated. Its positive form was constituted out of a structurally related set of ethical and aesthetic values privileging one side of the central antinomies produced within modernity: public rather than private, planned and ordered rather than spontaneous and varied, united rather than fractured, homogeneous rather than heterogeneous, cooperative rather than competitive, large in scale rather than small, heroic rather than quotidian. The nature of the collective and the regime of social judgment it generated was rarely a topic for reflection among Chinese Marxists during the revolutionary era. Yet it informed every ideological declaration and every unconscious preference, from the collectivization of agriculture to the architecture of public housing, and from investment priorities to the design of movie posters. The collective—“the masses”—was the real abstraction that structured the political critique and critical practice of the 1930s in China and around the world. By reversing the antinomies of modernity, the politics that took shape around it and acquired legitimacy from it overcame the crisis of liberal social life and revived industrial society on a new

140  Jake Werner foundation, producing the social regime of the postwar world. The aim of this chapter is to provide a historical account of the conditions of possibility for this abstraction.

The question of Soviet influence Early in the Cold War, a common explanation in the West for the Chinese Communist Party’s idea of socialism was that its leaders were merely puppets of the Soviet Union. They were blindly following its orders on everything from the correct ideology to the design of domestic institutions to foreign policy. However, even before China broke decisively with Soviet practice in the Great Leap Forward, scholars had begun to question the idea of China as a Soviet satellite. Benjamin Schwartz, for example, emphasized that Mao Zedong came to power with a rural and military power base that was completely independent of Moscow (Schwartz, 1951). The Sino-Soviet split and China’s realignment with the United States against the Soviet Union following Nixon’s 1972 visit conclusively discredited the idea of a monolithic Communist bloc. Mao came to be seen as a Marxist thinker in his own right (Wakeman, 1973; Schram, 1989). Yet recent research has raised questions about this narrative. As archival studies of the cultural and institutional history of the early 1950s accumulate, a common theme has been the apparently uncritical implementation of Soviet forms in China. At every level and in every realm of life, the new authorities aimed to implement “advanced techniques,” organizational arrangements, and cultural practices borrowed directly from the Soviet Union (Shen, 2003; Bernstein and Li, 2010; Pepper, 1996: 155–216). This included the notion of socialism and Marxism current within the Party. Despite claims that Mao Zedong had “sinified” Marxism, theoretical differences between Stalin’s Marxism-Leninism and that of the Chinese Communist Party were few and far between prior to the Hundred Flowers Campaign. The intellectual framework of Chinese Marxism, founded in the 1920s by theorists like Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白 and filled out in the 1930s by intellectuals like Li Da 李達 and Ai Siqi 艾思奇, had drawn heavily on Stalinist orthodoxy (Fogel, 1987). The broad strategy of social reorganization and economic development of the 1950s was frequently guided by the Soviet experience (Li, 2010). Some aspects of political practice, such as the rectification techniques developed in Yan’an, differed from Soviet norms and would subsequently be drawn upon to reorient Chinese Marxism. In the first half of the 1950s, however, these differences were in eclipse. Perhaps the Soviet imprint was the result of direct experience. In the 1920s and 1930s, many promising young Chinese Communists went to Moscow to study Soviet techniques of revolution. Among the Party’s top leaders during the 1950s—Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi 劉少奇, Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun 陳雲— only Liu had formative experience in the Soviet Union. However, important Party theorists like Zhang Wentian 張聞天, Wang Jiaxiang 王稼祥, and Chen Boda 陳 伯達, as well as other significant figures like Kang Sheng 康生, Ke Qingshi 柯 慶施 and Li Fuchun 李富春, had all spent significant time living and studying in

Shanghai and Chinese Marxism  141 the Soviet Union during the Stalin years. Prior to Mao’s rise to preeminence in the mid-1930s, the prevalence of Soviet-educated leaders had been even stronger. Central early figures in the Party like Qu Qiubai and Wang Ming had learned their Marxism in the Soviet Union. Yet any simple notion of young Chinese imbibing Soviet thought and bringing it back to the homeland can hardly account for the embrace of Soviet practice. After all, many Communist leaders also lived and studied in France or Japan in their youth and returned harshly critical of life in those countries. Many more were exposed to a wide range of other foreign influences that they ultimately rejected, whether through treaty-port life in Shanghai, by reading the translations of foreign writers that were proliferating in the 1910s and 1920s, or by engaging in the heated cultural and political debates over Western ideas. The Soviet Union may have provided young Chinese Communists an answer, but the problem before us is, rather, how did life in China pose the question? In other words, the inquiry must focus on how the experiences leading up to the victory of the revolution structured Party members’ ideology, common sense and social aesthetics so that the particular project of modernity represented by the Soviet Union seemed a plausible and compelling solution to the problems China faced in 1949. An answer to this question would not only help resolve the mystery of the Chinese Communist Party’s initially uncritical implementation of Soviet social forms, but would address as well why Chinese Marxists latched on to certain facets of Marx’s intellectual project while excluding others, ultimately arriving at a social vision he would have found alien. Instead of looking beyond China, then, we must look within. The affective and intellectual structure that oriented Chinese Communist analysis—the concept of “the masses”—can be grounded in the experience of late liberal social life in Shanghai.1

Shanghai: the face of the “old society” By the late nineteenth century, Shanghai was the primary nexus of commercial energy in China and one of the most important trading and financial centers in Asia. It brought together the products of the Qing Empire to be transshipped to other locations in China or to enter the circuits of global capital, and it was the primary port of entry for the increasingly significant flow of manufactured imports from abroad (Murphey, 1953). The signs of Shanghai’s integration into global capitalism were everywhere, from foreign architecture to the widespread use of “European” notions of time. As early as the 1870s the rhythms of capitalist labor—12-hour workdays, six days a week, and a day off defined as leisure—had already been fully established not only within European businesses in Shanghai but within indigenous Chinese institutions like the Jiangnan Arsenal as well (Wagner, 2003: 123–127). These trends progressed until the 1920s, by which time Shanghai was one of the world’s principal centers of finance and industry, a great trading hub, a city of immigrants and entrepreneurialism, of inequality and exploitation. Among the largest cities in the world, it shared with the other global metropolises a striking

142  Jake Werner similarity in the forms of everyday life and identity. It represented a peninsula of liberal society on Chinese soil, emplotted within liberal structures, subordinate to its imperatives and shaped by its forms of social practice. The “Roaring Twenties” came somewhat late to Shanghai, but the concluding years of the decade saw the full flowering of an urban culture that would have been easily recognized by contemporaries in New York, Berlin or Tōkyō. All the distinctive Jazz Age forms of urban consumption, leisure and entertainment thrived in Shanghai. Coffeeshops, dancehalls, cabarets, restaurants, department stores and bars upon the roofs of the city’s towering buildings defined the urban landscape (Lee, 1999; Cochran, 1999a; Yeh, 2007; Field, 2010). A guidebook summarized Shanghai’s nightlife: Shanghai flames with millions of flashing jewels at midnight. The centre of night life is a vast crucible of electric flame. The throb of the jungle tom-tom; the symphony of lust; the music of a hundred orchestras; the shuffling of feet; the swaying of bodies; the rhythm of abandon; the hot smoke of desire. (All about Shanghai, 1934: 76) As one journalist noted of the city, “The same blood flows through its veins as in those of the famous cities of the world. The fashions of Paris, after one month, are popular in Shanghai society” (Hong, 2012: 12). Modern consumerism had emerged in China. In contrast to the inward orientation of the nineteenth-century private life of the treaty-port bourgeoisie, the consumerism of the Jazz Age was directed relentlessly outward (Field, 2010; Lien, 2009). Its flashing neon signs beckoned to the crowds, its advertising suffused the modern media, the merchandise in its display windows beckoned to all passersby, and it barred no one at the door. Like the accelerating movement of speculative capital that also defined the age, it encouraged not prudence and restraint but a headlong rush forward without concern for the consequences. It required not decorum or cultivated taste, only the desire to indulge in pleasure—the more reckless the better. The indiscriminant impulse of the Jazz Age exerted increasing pressure on the old racial exclusions that had once defined foreign-dominated treaty-port Shanghai. Although the Communist-led anti-imperialist May Thirty Movement (Wu sa yundong 五卅運動) of 1925 and the demands of the new Guomindang government starting in 1927 were the principal factors impelling change, there was also a growing feeling among foreigners that racial exclusion was no longer appropriate to treaty-port governance. Even such a pillar of the establishment as Major General J. Duncan, the commander of the British Shanghai Defence Force from 1927 to 1928, could write, “Such things as forbidding the good class Chinese from entering the Jessfield Park, when any Japanese or fifth class Portuguese halfcaste is allowed to do so, strikes me as an intolerable insult and one that does much harm” (Bickers and Wasserstrom, 1995: 463). The new climate led to the addition of Chinese judges to the International Settlement’s court system starting in January 1928 and an end to the ban on

Shanghai and Chinese Marxism  143 Chinese entering the Settlement’s parks in June 1928 (Bickers and Wasserstrom, 1995: 446). At the same time, the audience for Jazz Age entertainment and consumption was increasingly Chinese as well. As British reporter John Pal recalls, The pace of the city’s world-famed night-life was stepped up out of recognition [in the late 1920s] and the responsibility for this rested almost solely upon Chinese shoulders—youthful ones, for their owners were drawn mainly from the student classes. It wasn’t long before they were crowding foreigners off their own dance-floors, and they were big spenders, too. Then came the biggest of all changes. As Chinese, they wanted Chinese dancing-partners and that was something Confucius had not provided for. However, a group of smart operators from Canton speedily filled the gap and plastered Shanghai with a rash of new night-spots providing pretty little Chinese hostesses for the big-spending night owls with itchy feet; and keeping up with the current trend Chinese dancing academies sprang up all over the place, converting sing-song girls into taxi-dancers and lazy old opium-smokers into spry jazz maniacs rarin’ to go. (Pal, 1963: 112) The declining strength of racial exclusion was increasingly replaced by— perhaps even premised upon—an exclusion based on class. If the growing participation of the “good class Chinese” in government, in elite business and in modern entertainment made broad racial judgments increasingly implausible, the old contempt and repugnance were merely redirected against the huge underclass of the city. Regarding the end of racial discrimination in the city’s public parks, John Pal notes: “[I]n order to prevent these little oases of pleasure and fresh air from being swamped by the city’s coolies, turnstiles were installed at the gates and a fee—calculated to be beyond the reach of any coolie—charged for admission” (Pal, 1963: 99). Despite its democratic pretensions, then, Shanghai’s Jazz Age consumerism— like that around the world at the time—could not escape its context of extreme inequality. In a vignette of a foreign sailor absconding without paying his rickshaw puller, modernist writer Mu Shiying 穆時英 captured both the cosmopolitan mingling of peoples in the city and the division of labor they were bound within, which structured the deep inequalities that inflected their every interaction: The rickshaw puller’s face, sweat oozing; his mind, foreign gold coins spinning, flying and spinning. The sailor abruptly jumps off, stumbles behind revolving doors. Hullo, master, master! Shouting, the rickshaw puller runs up to the doors. An Indian policeman waves him away with a club, laughter squeezes through the door crack, the smell of booze squeezes through the door crack, jazz squeezes through the door crack . . . the rickshaw puller picks up the rickshaw poles, a December

144  Jake Werner river wind swaying before him, a cold moon, a dark alley between towering buildings. Excluded from such celebration, the thought of suicide doesn’t even occur to him, he just lets out a curse, “Your mother’s,” and walks on into life. (Mu, 2004 [1932]: 805, translation amended)2 Jazz Age Shanghai did not discriminate on the basis of nationality, but it did celebrate the material inequality of the society that produced it. Everyday entertainment for the elite was far beyond the reach of the large underclass and even many low-level professionals. To enjoy “a lofty and magnificently appointed dining room, opening on to spacious terraces facing south, and having a specially strung wire spring dancing floor” at the landmark Cathay Hotel, a well-off couple would spend in one evening as much as a rickshaw puller earned in a month (North-China Daily News, 1929a, 1929b; Lu, 1999: 76).3 Life in Shanghai’s large underclass of sweatshop workers, rickshaw pullers, peddlers and beggars was arduous and chronically unstable. The lowest ranks in the city faced not only poverty and unemployment, but people on all sides looking to exploit or cheat them. Police patrolmen regularly extorted small bribes from rickshaw pullers, who were among the poorest people in the city (Pal, 1963: 170). Residents of the slums were often victimized by local toughs monopolizing key infrastructure. In the slum of Yaoshui long 藥水弄, for example, the more than 10,000 residents faced a gang that controlled the only two water spigots and charged rates several times higher than the market price (Lu, 1999: 121). Shanghai’s most impoverished residents also suffered the scorn of their fellow citizens. The lowest-skilled jobs in the city were primarily filled by abject refugees from northern Jiangsu province (Subei 苏北) fleeing flooding, famine or rural violence. They arrived in the city with nothing to their name and no marketable skills. Over time, the association between Subei people and degradation hardened into a quasi-ethnic prejudice, and even those who managed to escape the slums suffered professional and personal discrimination if they spoke Subei dialect (Honig, 1992). The large majority of those fortunate enough to be employed found work in low-paying, insecure jobs and relied on the good graces of a patron to keep those jobs. The most significant of these groups were unskilled factory workers and apprentices in petty retail and non-mechanized workshops. Unskilled factory workers found their jobs by securing the patronage of an established overseer in the factory, called the “Number One” (namowen 那摩温), who was largely in control of labor management on the factory floor and profited handsomely from the tribute offered by his or her charges and the routine garnishing of their wages (Honig, 1986; Perry, 1993). Most Number Ones were closely connected to Shanghai’s huge criminal underworld and sometimes involved themselves in human trafficking for prostitution or indentured labor. They were feared figures that few workers defied. Though the patron–client ties that organized the factories were often highly exploitative, cases of open rebellion against the arrangement were relatively

Shanghai and Chinese Marxism  145 rare—and not simply because of the dire consequences should a challenge fail. For most people living in Shanghai, the patron they secured, no matter how degrading the relationship, was the only thing standing between them and the terrifying prospect of trying to survive alone in the big city. The patron provided protection from other, more threatening figures like the factory owner, the police or a rival gang. Of even greater significance, the patron provided a livelihood, which marked the difference between some minimal security and abject penury. Whatever the costs, the resources of the patron and solidarity within the patronage group were often the only form of security that members of the Shanghai underclass could establish (Honig, 1986; Perry, 1993). Such absolute dependence on a patron also defined the lives of Shanghai’s dockworkers, most of its prostitutes, its night soil collectors, low-level gangsters, newspaper boys and beggars, among others. One step above such an existence was the still-precarious but significantly less desperate lives of the xiaoshimin 小市民, or petty urbanites. Wen-hsin Yeh describes the xiaoshimin as “literate clerks and apprentices in trade, manufacturing, the professions, and public and private service sectors, who were members of the ‘old’ as well as the ‘new’ middle classes” (Yeh, 1992: 191). They were inseparable from the lilong 里弄, the crowded residential alleyways that housed most of Shanghai’s population. In these low-rise apartment buildings, shop clerks mixed with middle-income prostitutes, petty merchants lived alongside the minority of skilled factory workers and young intellectuals eked out a living writing for newspapers or pulp magazines (Lu, 1999: 138–293). Perhaps the largest part the xiaoshimin was composed of young apprentices in the small stores and workshops. Though their lives were somewhat less regimented than those of sweatshop laborers, they were just as dependent upon their masters’ goodwill for continued employment and forced to endure his endless demands and abuses. In one sympathetic portrayal of the apprentice’s plight, this powerlessness is clear: Endlessly from morning till afternoon, the apprentice runs east to fetch liquor and juice, and west to buy vegetables and bean curd; he waits at the table three meals a day; he serves the tea when visitors come; he rolls the tobacco when the master needs a break. By the front door he responds to the summons of the customers. By the back door he washes the pots and urns! Without a moment’s rest he is hurried around from sunrise to sunset. (Yeh, 1992: 199) In contrast, other sections of the xiaoshimin, such as small proprietors or clerks working in modern bureaucratic enterprises, had considerably more control over their lives. By including all these groups, “xiaoshimin” not only effaces different experiences of freedom and opportunity, it also suppresses the relations of exploitation and victimization within the category, such as the relationship between landlords and tenants. Nonetheless, the idea of xiaoshimin was frequently invoked in 1930s Shanghai, indicating its relevance to some aspect of city life. The category tells us

146  Jake Werner little about the members of the group itself, but it throws into relief another set of social distinctions that so dominated the social imaginary as to make the internal diversity of the xiaoshimin recede into insignificance. “Xiaoshimin” was a strictly negative concept—the petty urbanites defined themselves by the groups they did not occupy: the impoverished and the elite. On one side, the xiaoshimin stood outside the absolute degradation of the slums. Though most of them would have never set foot in the slums, the daily appearance of slum-dwellers within the lilong was a constant reminder of the underclass’s peripheral existence. The xiaoshimin could see the trash pickers, roaming peddlers and night soil collectors who moved among the alleyways, and they could read in the newspapers about the gang feuds and labor conflicts that were a constant feature of life in Shanghai (Lu, 1999: 189–217). In the context of deep insecurity occupied by the xiaoshimin, the possibility of losing one’s job and descending into the underclass was an ever-present danger hanging over one’s hopes for the future. The horror with which the xiaoshimin regarded such a development was not merely due to the threat of material deprivation. It also presented the specter of individual failure and the revulsion against joining the despised Others of the xiaoshimin: the dirty and ill-mannered, the uneducated, the “Subei swine,” the guileless hick, the ruthless charlatan. In 1935, a year of rapid economic deterioration, there were several cases of professional families who chose to kill themselves and their children rather than face the fate of entering the underclass (Yeh, 2007: 131–133). These stories resonated widely in Shanghai because they spoke to universal anxieties. The xiaoshimin were not only outside the slums, they were also outside the elite. Members of the elite—whether of foreign or Chinese origin—lived their lives completely within the realm of modern consumerism, moving among offices in the business towers, fashionable cafés in the French Concession, highend department stores, restaurants in the luxury hotels, expensive movie theaters showing the latest Hollywood imports, dancehalls filled with jazz, and modern apartments or countryside villas. They were ferried between each destination by new automobiles and attended at each venue by servants, drivers, office assistants, waiters, ushers, shopgirls or dancing girls. They thereby remained completely outside the overlapping worlds of the xiaoshimin and the slum-dweller, isolated by their privileged surroundings and the trappings of modern life from the debased reality of the rest of the city (Dong, 2006; Lee, 1999; Waara, 1999). The wealthy and powerful were more comfortable within the cosmopolitan culture of the transnational elite than among their fellow Shanghai residents. The xiaoshimin, in turn, regarded the elite as alien to their own modest existence. Having been taught the virtues of self-denial by force of circumstance, they looked upon the extremes of modern consumerism as extravagance and decadence. Such judgments were frequently articulated through a language of national essence. The “truly Chinese” identity of the xiaoshimin—often hailing from the parochial inland cities or the countryside, rooted in the local neighborhood, drawn to middle-brow literary genres that claimed a traditionalist pedigree—was set against the “Westernized” sensibilities and vices of the wealthy (Pickowicz, 1991; Link, 1981).

Shanghai and Chinese Marxism  147 Yet the rarefied world of the elite attracted the xiaoshimin as much as it repelled. On the one hand, the xiaoshimin hungered for the security that life among the wealthy seemed to offer—for the control over one’s fate that the prosperous businessman seemed to enjoy, for the mastery over self and others wielded by the political class. On the other hand, the realm of consumer pleasure offered the exhilarating possibility of transgressing the boundaries that both secured and confined the xiaoshimin. The petty urbanite was enjoined to moderation of both consumption and desire in all things (Yeh, 1992). Yet in the democratic marketplace of the Jazz Age, only a lack of money stood in the way of bursting through all those restrictions. The temptations were amplified by the growth of modern advertising techniques that could reach every corner of the petty urbanite’s world (Cochran, 1999b; Waara, 1999). The xiaoshimin became an important part of the audience for consumer-oriented magazines of the time, though owning the full array of products promoted in them was far beyond their means (Waara, 1999). Many instead purchased selectively to give an impression of prosperity. As one of Shanghai’s tabloids wrote, “[Shanghai people] put on a façade, even if their family lives in an attic. In public one must not fail to wear silk, one must not fail to eat well” (Hong, 2012: 14). The pressures impinging on every facet of xiaoshimin life combined with the fantasy of escape presented by modern advertising and the other portrayals of elite life in the media to produce a cascading proliferation of desire in late liberal Shanghai. These forces—drawing individuals from the restraints of xiaoshimin conservatism into the fluid world of modern consumerism—generated tensions that suffused Shanghai. The pressures were often expressed at the juncture of gender and class, as seen in the 1933 film Zhifen shichang 脂粉市場 (Cosmetics Market). The protagonist, a young woman forced out of the lilong and into the modern realm of the department store by the desperate need to find employment, quickly draws the sexual attention of the store’s manager, followed by that of the owner’s son. Suddenly the possibility of entering the forbidden life of the elite by becoming mistress to one of its denizens opens up before her, and the frivolous and decadent pursuits of the wealthy fill the screen. Ultimately the woman rejects the rich men’s advances, expressing her insistent xiaoshimin identity as a “pure woman from a good family” (qingqing-baibai de liangjia nüzi 清清白白的良 家女子). Yet a secondary character is also portrayed who makes the opposite choice without compunction. No matter how often the woman social climber was condemned as immoral, there was no shortage of women looking to play the role. For men, the path into the elite required a successful career. An ethos of hard work and individual effort was relentlessly promoted by magazines like Shenghuo zhoukan 生活周刊 (Life Weekly), which topped the circulation lists because it fed the fantasies of the xiaoshimin (Yeh, 1992). The desire to join the elite was nourished with the hope of success through greater commitment at work, more insistent self-abnegation, or the recognition of one’s talents by a superior. This was the secret of xiaoshimin conservatism: it was not the opposite of elite, “Western” extravagance at all, but its putative temporal complement—the

148  Jake Werner endurance of hardship that would lead ultimately to the desired reward. The fantasies of overcoming offered by the prospect of respectable security for one’s family or endless gratification of one’s desire served to contain the quiet anxiety of xiaoshimin life. At any given time, however, those on each side of the dichotomy could take satisfaction in denouncing the other. The conservative petty urbanite disdained the moral incontinence of the libertine; the pleasure-seeker pitied the stultifying self-denial of the modest xiaoshimin. Perhaps the only thing on which they could agree was a shared abhorrence of the underclass. No matter their troubles, they could always take comfort from the fact that their society spared them the horrors of the slums (e.g. Link, 1981: 11). With their critical energies directed against the other social groups thrown forward by late liberal society—dwelling moralistically on behaviors that were structurally motivated—the question of why these particular lifestyles were so widespread was never raised. It was the petty urbanites’ fraught relationship with modern consumer culture, then, that integrated them into late liberal society. Through the consumption of newspapers and magazines, they entered the public sphere from which the illiterate underclass was excluded.4 The details of their dreamt-of future were provided by media representations of modern upper-class lifestyle, whether those of a respectable home life or of hedonistic excess. Their leisure time was increasingly drawn into the “culture industry” of mass-market film, radio, fiction or entertainment in the cheap amusement centers like the Great World (Da shijie 大世界). Though most of the xiaoshimin occupied a structural position in Shanghai society closer to the underclass than to the elite—suffering from low pay with little security, dependent upon the goodwill of a patron, and with few prospects of escaping this condition—their access to the nascent consumer culture of Shanghai allowed them to believe otherwise. So long as these boundaries remained porous, the fantasy could continue. Yet this form of integration contained a menacing antithetical potential within itself. If the dreams of security and freedom lost their plausibility, the illusion would vanish. By exposing the exclusion of the xiaoshimin from modern consumer society, such a development threatened to crystallize into outright conflict the already uneasy relations between the petty urbanites and the elite. As long as it sustained growth, late liberal society generated forms of integration that reproduced its conditions of existence. Yet it also produced structural effects that could provide a total social alternative should that growth cease. Forsaking their conflicted embrace of the elite, the xiaoshimin might increasingly identify with the underclass. The old division, drawn along lines of literacy, income, and cultural differences structured by class, might be replaced with a new one around questions of national identity and economic exploitation. Here were the social foundations for a politics of “the people” against the elite, aligned with a politics of the nation against the foreign Other. In this politics, the pleasureseeking individual, whatever his class background, would be lodged among the parasitic, debauched elite; the responsible family man or woman, whether hailing from the slums or the lilong, would become one among the collective. Thus the

Shanghai and Chinese Marxism  149 old society itself generated a transcendent vision of the social totality cleansed of “parasitic” elements and personalized forms of domination and extraction, a vision of a fundamentally productive society of equality and real democracy: the society of the masses.

The advent of the masses The theory and practice of the Communist Party emerged from these powerful social tensions. The Communist Party’s involvement in Shanghai prior to the Japanese invasion in 1937 can be divided into two broad periods. From its founding in the city’s French Concession in 1921 to the Communist-supported Guomindang conquest of the city in 1927, the Party was mainly involved in organizing factory workers in the city that contained, by a wide margin, the largest concentration of modern industry in China (Smith, 2000). The second period took shape after 1927, when the Guomindang betrayed the Communist Party, employed organized criminal gangs to kill hundreds of Party members and labor organizers, and subsequently worked with authorities in the two foreign enclaves to arrest and often execute Party members. In this period, the Party worked underground in Shanghai while the city’s large contingent of progressive writers and artists, organized by the Party through front groups, supported the cause through polemical debates, revolutionary literature, translations and Marxist scholarship (Stranahan, 1998; Xu, 1990; Wong, 1991). Shanghai in these decades was the formative political terrain for many of the most important Communist Party leaders of the early People’s Republic. Chen Yun, who was the principal architect of the Chinese economy from 1949 to 1957, had his early political experience as a worker and strike-leader at the Commercial Press (Shangwu yinshuguan 商務印書館) in the mid-1920s. Zhou Enlai, who oversaw Chen Yun’s work in the 1950s, headed underground activity in Shanghai in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s second-in-command responsible for the state bureaucracy in the 1950s, served as the head of Shanghai’s General Labor Union (Shanghai zonggonghui 上海總工會) during the burst of labor militancy surrounding the May Thirty Movement of 1925. The Communist state’s cultural leadership was even more heavily drawn from the Shanghai intellectual world. Zhou Yang, the most important cultural bureaucrat from the founding of People’s Republic to the Cultural Revolution, led the Party’s literary work in Shanghai during the 1930s. Lu Dingyi 陸定一, Minister of Propaganda in the early People’s Republic, first worked in Shanghai’s political media during the mid-1920s. Guo Moruo 郭沫若, who oversaw the literary world in the 1950s, was a prominent Shanghai writer radicalized by the May Thirty Movement. The most powerful figure in philosophy during the 1950s, Ai Siqi, honed his ideas as a popular Shanghai columnist in the mid-1930s. In addition to these top leaders, dozens of secondary cadres and important intellectuals had lived and worked in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s. Those who survived and persisted as Party activists were driven out of the city by 1935, moving to rural areas where they faced a very different set of problems. In 1949,

150  Jake Werner when they returned to the cities and began a new phase in their revolution, they carried with them the memory of Shanghai as the defining example of imperialist penetration and capitalist development in China. What they had experienced in those earlier decades was the stark contradictions of modernity in its liberal moment: the collapse of status distinctions before the leveling power of commercialization, alongside a seemingly arbitrary distribution of inequality on the basis of money; the desperate scramble for resources pitting different patronage networks in the underclass against each other and leading to extremes of servility and violence; low-level white-collar workers caught up in dreams of individual advancement rather than collective transformation; a highly fragmented cultural landscape in which incommensurable identities prevented the sort of national unity that might repel imperialist aggression; an elite preoccupied with its own hedonistic pursuits rather than the welfare of the people. In strictly practical terms, activists regarding this social landscape would have found Soviet innovations attractive. Soviet discourse accorded dignity to workers rather than disdaining them. It promised a stable and secure life for the common people. It cultivated an egalitarian culture that focused energies on solving national problems rather than wasting them in dissipation. And it offered the rational, planned development of the economy rather than the competition, struggle and waste that typified Shanghai. Yet Marxism-Leninism as a philosophy and a practice was not simply an instrumental solution to social problems. It generated intense feelings of allegiance that indicate something deeper at work as well. This can be seen, for instance, in the figure of Liu Hua 劉華, the vice-chair of the Shanghai General Labor Union. In 1925, as the May Thirty Movement was underway, his family in Sichuan was attacked by bandits. His brother was killed, his father captured and his mother wounded. Yet Liu rejected his family’s telegraphed plea for help, writing, “Sacred labor is like meat on a chopping board. I am an activist for the nation. I am an activist for labor. My responsibilities are heavy. How can I be of use to my family? You must know that the nation too is my family” (Smith, 2000: 105). It was this devotion to the collective—whose different facets were called the proletariat, the nation, the people and the masses—that drew activists to the Communist Party and inspired feats of great courage and self-sacrifice. (Liu’s activities led to his execution by the warlord Sun Chuanfang 孫傳芳 just months after writing this response to his family.) Yet in the 1920s and 1930s, the collective was in some ways a fantastical chimera, requiring an imaginative leap to even be posited. Party members were constantly lamenting the “low level of consciousness” among the actually existing individuals said to make up the masses—people prone to thinking more in terms of native place affinities or individual interests than in the abstractions of “class” and “nation.” Such difficulties have been emphasized in revisionist studies of Republican China that attack the Communist Party’s historiographical myth of the masses (Honig, 1986; Perry, 1993; Lu, 1999). Part of the global reconsideration of traditional Marxism’s critical framework, this work has critiqued the revolutionary vision as not simply empirically ungrounded but oppressive in its own right

Shanghai and Chinese Marxism  151 because of its totalizing scope and intolerance for social diversity (Friedman et al., 1991; Li, 2015). Indeed, some have argued that it was the conceptual violence that the Party did to society in its theory that permitted or even compelled the Party’s real violence against society after it took power (Apter and Saich, 1994; Wang, 2000). This scholarship has greatly enriched our understanding of the social terrain prior to 1949, revealing the high levels of social differentiation within “the masses” (though it often naturalizes that diversity rather than critically interrogating it). Its critical thrust also contains many insights, such as grasping the new forms of domination already present in the very concept of the homogeneous, productive and patriotic “people.” However, by taking the Party’s ideology as its target of critique, the literature has failed to confront the question of why traditional Marxism—and more broadly, a range of views that posited the reified national collective as a political subject—became a compelling critical position around the world at this time. The fact that Party activists were deeply immersed in the social complexity of Republican China is reason to be skeptical of the idea that they were simply blinded by dogmatism. In their everyday work, members of the Party constantly confronted the difficulties presented by the failure of popular subjectivity to live up to ideological prescriptions. At times they even manipulated for their own ends divisions that did not map cleanly onto categories like “class,” as when Shanghai labor organizers became sworn members of underworld secret societies (Smith, 2002: 135–138). Moreover, the concept of the masses found resonance well beyond the ideological crucible of the Communist Party. Guomindang leader Jiang Jieshi 蔣介石 invoked it in his New Life Movement (Xin shenghuo yundong 新生活運動) (Eastman, 1972: 18–22). It circulated widely in the literature of the 1930s (Xiao, 2011; Rodekohr, 2012). A publishing luminary like Zou Taofen 鄒 韜奮 could transform himself from a late 1920s confidante of the xiaoshimin, counseling personal effort and individual merit, into a tribune of “the people” by the mid-1930s (Yeh, 1992). Why, then, did the discourse of the masses gain such wide support when it rested on such tenuous empirical foundations? Pointing to “metaphysical thinking,” “discursive practices” and “cultural politics” simply raises the question over again (Yeh, 2000b: 17). If the concept of the masses was not simply an Idea that, Geist-like, imposed itself on the minds of Party members, then we must ground the possibility of thinking it and founding a politics upon it in the experience of social form that prevailed in the 1920s and 1930s. The masses may have been multifarious and incommensurable in concrete terms, but late liberal society had rendered them homogeneous abstractly. This was a dual operation that contained both a negative and a positive moment. The negative aspect apprehended the masses through that which they were all denied: dignity, security, social recognition, basic material welfare. Whatever their diversity, they were all excluded; what made them the same was a common deprivation. Marston Anderson argues that left-wing fiction in the 1930s locates the possibility of the masses in “an extreme trial of physical degradation and

152  Jake Werner suffering [that] serves to negate the ordinary social distinctions that separate individuals” (Anderson, 1990: 186). In one short story, for example, Ding Ling writes of a group of peasants: “Even in their suffering and starvation, they were together, a great crowd; they understood each other, there was an intimacy among them” (Anderson, 1990: 186). In such portrayals, progressive intellectuals projected the abstract homogeneity of exclusion into the concrete psychology of the masses. At the same time, the progress of commodification seen in the consumer culture of Jazz Age Shanghai rendered plausible to an expanding group of people the idea of abstract human equality that had first leapt to prominence among May Fourth radicals.5 As consumerism destabilized those forms of discrimination founded in ascribed identity, such as the racial distinction between Chinese and European, the basis for social exclusion was increasingly revealed to be nothing more than a lack of access to money. The intense capriciousness of Shanghai’s speculative economy alongside deteriorating conditions for the laboring majority convinced a growing number of people that those who prospered did so through sheer luck or by taking advantage of those who were excluded. As a guidebook to the city put it in 1934, “in Shanghai, sudden and unearned wealth, like prosperity, is just ‘around the corner’—for the lucky ones” (All about Shanghai, 1934: 79). Yet the masses did not exist solely as an absence or exclusion; there was also a positive, creative side to the concept that not only structured the imagination of a new society but defined a political program to achieve it. The masses were a potentiality—a social group posited by late liberal society, but one whose promise could only ever be partially realized under liberal conditions. This potential, expressed but also frustrated by a society founded upon inequality and instability, was proletarian labor.6 The masses were equal and homogeneous by virtue of their capacity for productive labor, yet they were all denied both dignity in their labor and the fruits of their labor. Many were even prevented from participating in labor, forced to subsist off the refuse of society. The hundreds of thousands of people living on the margins of city life were denied not only a minimally acceptable standard of living but the opportunity to contribute to building the nation as well. Who was responsible for blocking the potential of the masses? Radical intellectuals did not need to look far to locate the obvious candidates: factory owners, labor bosses, brothel madams, gangsters, neighborhood toughs, landlords and all the other groups that lived by squeezing “the people” on all sides. Such a critique of personal domination was authorized by the ideology of liberalism itself, which championed a society of formal equality premised on the free exchange of value for like value. Where Marxists took the critique further was in arguing that it was systemic features of liberal society—private ownership, distributional inequality and the free market—that made impossible the realization of liberal ideals. The Communist Party’s alternative aimed for a reversal of each of the hegemonic forms of late liberal society. Against the exclusion of the masses it demanded their integration; against the chronic instability of livelihood it called for secure jobs with good pay and benefits; against the fragmentation, disorder and competition of the market it imagined unity and cooperation through bureaucratic planning and state-organized regimentation. Against the rootless

Shanghai and Chinese Marxism  153 cosmopolitanism of global capital, ranging beyond the control of “the people” and culturally alien to them, it asserted the bounded particularity of the nation; against the highly personalized forms of loyalty and submission to individual patrons it offered allegiance to the abstractions of the state, the Party, the correct ideology and the future. The foundational reversal of this politics was to establish the primacy of the collective and the subordination of the individual. This reworked the old opposition between an individualistic hedonism and an individualistic work ethic so that the spectacle of luxury and decadence would come to define the individualism of the “old society” while thrift, hard work and self-sacrifice on behalf of the collective would become the defining virtues of “New China.” The Communist Party’s Marxism arose from the identification of late liberal social forms as “capitalism.” Only the negation of capitalism and the realization of its antithesis, proletarian labor, could liberate the people. Thus the ideal that shaped the Communist Party’s politics was that of the factory. In the factory, the individual is subsumed within the collective laborer, becoming simply another standardized cog in the well-ordered machine—disciplined, productive, fully integrated into a total mechanism. The suffering of the worker within the sweatshops of the 1920s and 1930s was understood to emerge not from this subsumption within the collective, but from the parasitic bourgeoisie operating society’s productive power for private gain. It was the greed of the owner, the exactions of the labor boss, and the irrational competition of the fragmented market that oppressed the workers and prevented the liberatory power of labor from being realized. By removing these excrescences, the workers would come into their own: they would be laboring for the collective good rather than to support the decadent lifestyles of their employers, they would be recognized by society rather than despised by it, they would enjoy security and a basic standard of living. The state, cast as the representative of the collective, would take the place of the capitalist, and the nation would be reconstituted as a single, unified, planned workhouse. In this conceptualization, proletarian labor represented the progressive potential of the new society. As a pamphlet from 1952 put it: The working class is the class that is intrinsically collective and disciplined. Workers carry out labor in large-scale production, and large-scale production organizes them. In a modern factory, a hundred thousand workers are assembled. Unified productive activities require everyone to unify their working time, that they begin and end work on time. Unified production plans require that everyone works hard together and that they all complement each other. The unified structure of large machinery requires everyone to be closely connected and to move in unison. (Wu, 1952: 5) This apprehension of proletarian labor expresses precisely the unfreedom that Marx analyzed in his critique of labor as the fundamental constitutive element of capitalist society. For Marx, it was not the capitalist or the market but alienated labor itself

154  Jake Werner that was the source of the abstract compulsions subordinating, dispossessing and deforming the worker: The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. . . . The direct relationship of labor to its products is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production. The relationship of the man of means to the objects of production and to production itself is only a consequence of this first relationship—and confirms it. (Marx, 1964 [1844]: 108–110, italics in original) Where the Communist Party defined the opposition between market and factory as that between capitalism and socialism, for Marx this antinomy was internal to capitalism itself: “anarchy in the social division of labour and despotism in the manufacturing division of labour mutually condition each other” (Marx, 1976a [1867]: 477). Likewise, Marx did not affirm the proletarian masses against the bourgeois individual. In his work, capitalism is not one side of this dichotomy but the force that generates both the concrete individual (defined by his or her agency in the marketplace of commodities—or of ideas) and the individual abstracted of his or her qualities, become merely a number within the faceless masses. As Moishe Postone argues, Marx “analyzes capitalist society in terms of an opposition between the isolated individuals and the social collectivity. The critique is of both terms; it maintains that they are structurally related and that they form an opposition specific to capitalism” (Postone, 1993: 48). Over a century before the Chinese Communist Party took power, Marx had already condemned a political approach similar to that of the Party as a “completely crude and thoughtless communism,” in which “[t]he community is only a community of labor, and of equality of wages paid out by communal capital— the community as the universal capitalist” (Marx, 1964 [1844]: 133–134). Chinese Marxists, in contrast, celebrated the “community of labor” in order to critique the other side of the dichotomy: the fragmented and chaotic spectacle of individuals struggling each against all in pursuit of selfish interests. By reversing the defining antinomies of liberal society, however, the Party remained firmly within an intrinsically dual modernity. It had located not a path to overcome the dynamic of capital but the means to revive it through a different mode of social organization.

Notes 1 A complete account would also require a thorough examination of how military regimentation, rural mobilization and the experience of repression and war in the 1930s and 1940s shaped subjectivity within the Party. However, the success of the Party in surviving and ultimately triumphing in armed conflict was itself built on the conceptual foundation of “the masses,” while the trials of those years, in turn, brought to full realization the possibilities latent within mass politics as a framework of subjectivity.

Shanghai and Chinese Marxism  155 2 Words in italics were in English in the original. 3 Dinner was 5 yuan per diner and entrance to the ballroom after dinner 2 yuan. The average monthly income of a rickshaw puller in 1934 was 9 yuan. 4 In 1934, in addition to China’s major newspapers, at least 212 periodicals were published in Shanghai. The Shanghai press ranged from general interest magazines to gossip sheets to highly specialized publications catering to groups like movie fans, sports enthusiasts, or those interested in science or politics (Lin, 1936: 152–157). 5 For an explication of the connection between commodification and abstract equality in the context of ancien régime France, see Sewell (2014). 6 The following discussion draws on Moishe Postone’s concept of proletarian labor and its place in Marx’s work, developed in Postone (1993).

9 Paradoxical routes of the sinification of Marxism Materialist dialectic and immanent critique Joyce C.H. Liu The question of the sinification of Marxism The question behind this chapter is first why and how did “sinification of Marxism” (馬克思主義中國化) go wrong, and second, what does this failure indicate in a larger context? The sinification of Marxism in the very beginning, proposed by Mao Zedong 毛澤東 in 1938, was an attempt to decolonize and provincialize Marxism, to resist being dictated by abstract dogmatism (教條主義) and foreign stereotypes (洋八股) imported from the West, and to exercise the dialectic logic of Marxism based on the historical and material conditions in China. According to Mao, “sinification of Marxism” meant to practice Marxism in the concrete struggles within the concrete situations (具體環境的具體鬥爭). Furthermore, Mao insisted that Marxism should be applied through national forms (通過民族形式的馬克思主義) and with Chinese characteristics (中國的特色). He wanted to make Marxism fresh and lively (新鮮活潑), appealing to the taste of Chinese people (喜聞樂見) (Mao, 1971 [1938]: 241–263). In 1956, Mao again reminded the Chinese Communist Party members that theory and practice have to be unified, and Marxist truth has to be united with the concrete practice of Chinese revolution. Mao explained that, according to dialectic materialism, thought has to reflect objective reality and truth has to be verified through objective practice (Mao, 1999 [1956]: 86–99). The route of the sinification of Marxism, however, paradoxically moved away from its original agenda and its realization ended up in the opposite direction. Though Mao considered revolution as a permanent materialist dialectic process, and the sinification of Marxism in China was a necessary method of praxis, the interplay between the objective reality and objective practice according to the local conditions, highly dialectic in its nature, ironically prefigured the path of the internal power struggles and highlighted the primacy of the demands of the time. The operations of discursive and semiotic syncretism effected in the spheres of signs and instituted in the material reality in such a dialectic way that it turned out to be the tool for internal colonization and the game of the alternating seizure of power. I shall take the philosophical events in socialist China yifenweier (一分為二 one-divides-into-two) in 1963–1964, and rufadouzheng (儒法鬥爭 the struggle between Confucianism and Legalism) in 1973–1974, as two exemplary instances in history to illustrate the paradox of the sinification of Marxism. The reasons that I pick up these two philosophical incidents are because, first, these philosophical

158  Joyce C.H. Liu debates had long-lasting and widespread influence on mass psychology in the PRC. Not only factory workers, but children in elementary schools, could recite and debate among one another the use of these philosophical phrases. Second, “one-divides-into-two” is a typical Marxist dialectic concept that had been translated and reinterpreted in the Chinese contexts, while “the struggle between Confucianism and Legalism,” on the other hand, illustrates the symbiotic tension of Chinese political philosophy of governmentality between Confucianism and Legalism, but was coated in this event as the dialectic struggle between idealism and materialism. Finally, the debate of “one-divides-into-two” is known as the precursor to the Cultural Revolution beginning in 1966, and the “the struggle between Confucianism and Legalism,” along with the campaign of “Criticize Lin & Criticize Confucius” [pilin pikong 批林批孔], is known as the last instance of the continuous revolution launched by Mao Zedong. The centralization of the bureaucratic state power is even more stabilized after this event. Alain Badiou once pointed out that “one divides into two” is the core of dialectics, and the true division of Hegelian dialectics is the opposition of idealism and materialism, that is to say, the opposition of the effects of the system built upon idealist construction and materialism as the rational kernel (Badiou, 2011: 81, 96). What Badiou meant was that all dialectic movements were initiated on the basis of the materialist ground through ideas and thoughts. This concept of materialist dialectic is also the method of his study of the twentieth century, that is, through the study of how the thoughts of the twentieth century thought itself; through the bifurcations and ramifications of ideas and their institutionalizations, we can understand the “maximal interiority” and its “immanent prescription” (Badiou, 2007: 3–6). I must say that I agree with Badiou concerning his comments on “one divides into two” and the question of the ramification of ideas and their institutionalizations. The sinification of Marxism, however, is a much more complex case. The philosophical event “one-divides-into-two” not only exemplified the dialectic movement of ideas and their institutionalization in itself, but also explained the morphology of “the struggle between Confucianism and Legalism.” Both events are symptomatic signatures of the reification of Marxist ideas in the particular historical conjunctures and are exemplary of the pathological route of the sinification of Marxism in socialist China. Marxist ideas such as materialist dialectics and class contradiction were objectified and transformed into hypostasized and institutionalized power struggles, abandoning the materialist dialectic practice to analyze class difference according to different forms of inequality in local conditions and historical contexts. These cases of power struggles, I shall also argue, were not merely determined locally, but were also triggered, implicated and displaced by global conditions, combining diverse systems of subsumptions and co-figured the path of historical development both locally and globally in the Cold War Era in East Asia in a mode of discursive and semiotic syncretism. To point out the paradoxical and pathological route of the sinification of Marxism does not mean to indicate that there is a normal route or intact norm of the practice of Marxism in China that should be followed or restored. I do not think there is any normal route of the translation of Marxism into China. These paths of course were

The sinif ication of Marxism  159 diverse and even singular in many cases. The question for me therefore is not what the norm should be, but why and how there were proclaimed normative constructive and reconstructive paths, why and how these exercises were affected by the demands of the time, and why and how did they turned to its negative and pathological side and the excuse for legitimation to secure the power position and hence for internal colonization. Pathological route here means the path that is affected by the pathos and sentiments of the time and therefore is related to the affective regime that is operative both as an epistemic apparatus and a consensus of shared sensibility.

A project of decolonization or a paradoxical-pathological turn? When Jürgen Habermas discussed the concept of social pathologies and internal colonization in The Theory of Communicative Action, he pointed out the overdeveloped societal rationalization and its bureaucratic administration that caused the reification of the life-world and the systemic imperatives that created critical disequilibria and called forth social pathologies and internal colonization. The implementation of institutional subsystems and bureaucratic controls augmented the internal expropriations and conflicts to the extent that some parts of the people in the same society were exploited, excluded and cannot enjoy equal opportunities to actualize their capacities. For Habermas, this paradox points to the question of capitalist modernity. Habermas suggested that the critical question should be to inquire why the rationalization of the life-world and its various subsystems developed “irresistible inner dynamics” that brought about both the “colonization of the life-world and its segmentation” (Habermas, 1987: 305, 327–331, 367, 385). To me, the paradox of the societal rationalization exists not only in the societies of capitalist modernity but also in those of socialist modernity. It is crucial for us to note that the modernity of socialist states in the twentieth century such as China actually follows the same capitalist logic of accumulation, expansion and competition of capital, though in the form of state-centric totalized project (see the chapters by Postone and Werner in this volume). It is also crucial for us to note that the sinification of Marxism, though an attempt to decolonize and provincialize Marxism imported from the West, paradoxically aggravated the mechanism of the internal colonization based on the overdeveloped societal rationalization and its ideocratic and bureaucratic administration in the socialist state. The shared pathos of the time constituted the affective as well as epistemological imperatives. The pathological development through the process of the sinification of Marxism, as what we are about to discuss, was not caused by the deficient rationality, but by the overdeveloped socialist rationality of progress, military competition and formal equality in the context of global politico-economic conditions in the Cold War era. The practice of liquidating enemies during resurrections was retained in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as continuous internal partitions, separating and cleansing the parts labeled as bad. The ideocratic and bureaucratic cadre system as well as local ideological subsystems, undergirded with the popular consensus shared by society, further automatically reproduced the mechanism of internal partitions and detected certain parts of the people as a potential threat to

160  Joyce C.H. Liu the total system. The core of the paradox of the socialist-communist regime lies in the fact that, in pursuing and upholding equality for all people, the regime turns out to go against itself dialectically in a spiral route as an automatic monstrous engine that generates fundamental contradictions and inequality in society. The concept of provincialization was proposed by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his project on the decolonization of knowledge. To Chakrabarty, to provincialize Europe was to reject the assumption that European ideas are universal and to find out how and in what sense European ideas were drawn from “very particular intellectual and historical traditions,” and to ask the question about “how thought was related to place.” Chakrabarty wrote, “can thought transcend places of their origin? Or do places leave their imprint on thought in such a way as to call into question the idea of purely abstract categories?” (Chakrabarty, 2007: xiii). The travel of European ideas and capitalist modernity, Chakrabarty insisted, was not merely a question of historical transition, but a question of translation, and the translation on the local and subaltern level is “more like barter than a process of generalized exchange,” and the local and subaltern practice of everyday life has the capacity to disrupt the totalizing project of universal history of capitalist modernity (ibid.: 16, 71). Looking at the process of the sinification of Marxism in China, we shall see that thought is indeed inevitably deeply related to its place and that the translation of Marxism to China signifies a larger semiotic exchange. Mao’s effort in decolonizing and provincializing Marxism indeed brought the Marxist practice back to the geopolitical and historical conditions in which China was situated. But, we also observed the fact that the demands of the time were so powerful that the local and the subaltern history of everyday life does not necessarily have the capacity to disrupt the totalizing project of either capitalist modernity or socialist modernity. On the contrary, the local power structure and the subaltern consensus oftentimes carried out complicit collaborations with the concurrent political tendencies and profitable investment in whatever forms of capital. The project of critical analysis, for me, should start from within the local context of contradictions through historicizing the trajectories of crucial representative events so that we can carry out a form of immanent critique as an exercise of decoloniality. This chapter therefore attempts to re-read the representative historical discourses related to the sinification of Marxism and to examine how and why the discourse and the institutional practices of the sinification of Marxism moved toward the perverse turn. To assume a position of immanent critique is not to suggest a clear cut of the inside from the outside, but to recognize the fact that the colonizer–colonized dichotomy or the West–East distinction is false and superficial, and acknowledge the fact that the coloniality of the power structure is both implicated globally but is always rooted and instituted from within through a topological collaborative apparatus. A quick look at the discursive trajectories of the sinification of Marxism itself in the history of the PRC is already informative in its pathological and spiral route. Mao’s “sinification of Marxism” was denounced by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as “nationalist” (搞民族主義) and was not openly used in the official documents during the 1960s. After the age of the Cultural Revolution,

The sinif ication of Marxism  161 however, a second wave of “sinification” of “Marxist-Leninism” was proposed by Deng Xiaoping in 1980s, followed by Jiang Zeming and Hu Jintao, with the objective to “establish the socialism with Chinese characteristics” (中國特色社 會主義). Jiang Zeming stated in 1997, “only Deng Xiaoping’s theory, and no other theory, that bridged Marxism with contemporary Chinese practice and the characteristics of the time, could solve the problem of the future and the fate of socialism. Deng Xiaoping Theory is Contemporary Chinese Marxism” (Jiang, 2007 [1997]: 1413). In 2008, Hu Jintao once again stressed the objective to “unite the basic principles of Marxism with the Sinification of Marxism,” and the guiding principle of “Reform and Opening-up” (改革開放) is “to emancipate thought, to be practical and realistic, to keep abreast with time, and to innovate theory on the bases of practice” (Hu, 2009 [2008]: 796). The practice of the “sinification of Marxism” now ironically turned out to be the rationalization and justification for the economic reform and the developmentalism that China has followed in the post-1989 and post-socialist stage. It is clear to us in retrospect that the project of the sinification of Marxism confronted double stakes. On the one hand, it claimed to resist the domination of a universal and homogeneous historical process suggested by the Eurocentric view of Marxism and to situate the praxis of Marxism in the materialist conditions and the historical moments pertaining to the Chinese context, while this project was in fact subsumed under a larger historico-political context, particularly the domination of the Comintern with the dictate of Stalin. On the other hand, by refusing to take Marxism in its abstract form and insisting on applying Marxism in concrete struggles in the concrete environment in China through “national forms,” Mao nevertheless had subsumed the praxis under the domination of local power structures and the manipulation of nationalist sentiments. For me, the central problem, in that we want to make a preliminary speculation before we move into detailed analysis, lies in the fact that Mao’s theory of the “sinification of Marxism” and constant revolution with the concept of “one divides into two,” though highly mobile and complex, nevertheless led to the hypostatization of Marx’s method of analytical dialectics by making the concept of the nation, the people and the proletariat into substantialized categories, based on Mao and his followers’ strategic targets of the time. The question presented itself most obviously when Mao insisted in his talk on the united front against the Japanese invasion that internationalism should be closely combined with national form. The concept of nation, state and people are conflated in the term minzu (民族the nation) and guojia (國家 sovereign state). The idea of the “national form” (民族 形式), Mao emphasized, linked the importance both of the local/vernacular culture and the survival of the nation-state with the tinge of nationalist sentiments. In the same talk in 1938 in which he discussed about the sinification of Marxism and the question of national form, he also stressed that it was the time that people should join and fight in order to show their patriotic passion (愛國) and to save the country (救國). Those people who were mobilized by Maoist ideas would be at the same time self-posited in a nationalist context as national subjects. The objectives for the internationalist movement to resist the concentration of power

162  Joyce C.H. Liu and capital controlled by the state then lost its effect in the Chinese context. This form of total mobilization turned out to be the most successful mechanism whenever the danger of war and the threat from outside were discursively or rhetorically conjured. The Sino-Japan War in 1930s and 1940s, the Korean War and the Taiwan Strait Crises in 1950s, and the incident of Zehnbao Island 珍寶島 (Damansky Island) in late 1960s, all triggered strong passion from the people to serve and even sacrifice for the nation. Along with the various movements of mobilization, the internalized oppositions among the people were also repeatedly called forth in order to differentiate “the people” and “the enemy of the people,” such as the pro-West members, the pro-capitalist “rightists” or the Five Black Categories. Just as Harry Harootunian had succinctly analyzed, provincializing Marx was to adhere to a “rigid conception of a Marxian historical trajectory,” a scenario derived from the Second and Third Internationals and subsequently reproduced in the imaginary of the nation-form, to uphold “a particular progressive narrative all societies must pass through, on the template of a geographically (and culturally) specific location exemplified by Britain as Marx ‘sketched’ its genesis of capitalism in volume one of Capital” (Harootunian, this volume). The sinification of Marxism, to put the practice of Marxism in the Chinese historical and contextual circumstances, ironically demonstrated for us a different form of provincializing Marxism and the paradox of the effort to decolonize Eurocentric Marxism, not only with the attempt to catch up with the pace of modernity heralded both by the West and by the Communist International led by the USSR, but also processes of the actualization of systemic reification of Marxian ideas dominated by local power structures and subaltern desires in China. “Sinification of Marxism,” therefore, not only served as a strategy to alter the path of revolution according to the analysis of the changed situation, but in fact also functioned as a reflection of the trajectories in the course of history according to the changed local as well as global conditions. Looking into the complex historical and materialist conditions in which Mao and his followers made their strategic decisions and adaptions, we would soon find the act of “sinification” in fact connotes the ever-changing material and political conditions, and the routes and the effects of its bifurcations need to be examined. In the following sections, I shall look into the two philosophical events: yifenweier (one divides into two) in 1963–1964 and rufadouzheng (the struggle between Confucianism and Legalism) in 1973–1974, and discuss how and why Marxist ideas of materialist dialectics and class contradictions were reified and transformed into institutionalized local power struggles that were over-determined by complex local and global conditions and co-figured the long arc of Cold War history.

One divides into two and Mao’s theory of contradiction The phrase “one divides into two” (一分為二) was first brought up by Mao in a speech he delivered at the Moscow Meeting of Representatives of the Communist and Workers’ Parties on November 18, 1957. Mao stated that contradictions exist

The sinif ication of Marxism  163 everywhere in the world, and every object and person can be analyzed according to this principle of contradiction. “One divides into two” is both a general phenomenon and the “method of dialectic” to be used in the scientific analysis of all situation. One would fall into metaphysics if he refused to admit that everyone is analyzable according to this principle (Mao, 1999 [1957]: 332). The talk on “one divides into two” in 1957 is emblematic in many ways. In this talk, Mao presented his analysis of the changing global situations in the mid1950s and announced that it was the time for the East Wind to gain the upper hand over the West Wind (東風壓倒西風) (ibid.). This remark informed the turnover of the greater power in the Middle East after the Suez Crisis in 1956. The former colonial empires had encountered setbacks, and the socialist countries, including those in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, were on the rise through the alliance of the Third World countries since the Bandung Conference in 1955. This remark also indicated that China had successfully achieved its strategy to gain more support from the Arabic nations and had gained the recognition of seven countries, including Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria and Sudan, and consequently alleviated from the international total isolation of PRC since its establishment in 1950 (Shichor, 1979: 89–96). Moreover, Mao announced in this talk that China was going to catch up with the UK in 15 years with its massive production of steel. The resolution to overtake the UK was again reconfirmed in the New Year’s talk in 1958 in which Mao proposed to move his “continuous revolution” to a new stage: a technological revolution.1 This new revolution led to the Great Leap Forward (dayuejin 大躍進) launched in 1958, the main task of which was to be discussed in the extended meeting of CPC Political Bureau at Beidaihe starting from August 17, 1958.2 It was also in the same talk concerning “one divides into two” that Mao openly denounced people such as Trotsky, Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀, Zhang Guotao 張國燾, Gao Gang 高崗, and Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石, as “incorrigible” and “absolutely exclusive to the socialist party.” In this sense, there is “only one aspect to their nature, not two.” The absolute antagonistic dichotomy therefore is set up by Mao through “one divides into two,” differentiating between the colonial and the colonized, the capitalist and the socialist, the right and the left and even within the Chinese Communist Party itself. This antagonistic denouncement explained the underlying logic of the national large-scale anti-right movement in 1957 against the Democratic League and the intellectuals, that would recur repeatedly through the purge of the “five black categories,” that is, landlords, rich farmers, anti-revolutionists, bad-elements, and right-wingers, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s concept of dialectics was first developed in his essay “On the Question of Contradiction” (矛盾論) that he lectured in Yan’an in 1937, basing on his readings of Lenin’s comments on Marx’s Capital as well as Hegel’s dialectics in his Philosophical Notebooks written in 1915 and other Marx–Lenin textbooks available in the 1930s. In his theory of contradiction, Mao elaborated his view of the materialist dialectics of the infinite splitting of all matters, and constant movement of differentiation and integration, action and reaction, positive and negative electricity, combination and dissociation of atoms, and class struggle.3

164  Joyce C.H. Liu Mao’s theory of contradiction echoed Lenin’s reading of Marx’s Capital as well as Hegel’s dialectics. In Capital, Marx took the commodity as the “cell” of the economic life, the “germs” of all the contradictions, and analyzed the scission within the object between the labor force and the value form (Marx, 1867: 6–7). The operative logic of the scission between the labor force and the value form needs to be analyzed in its historical and material conditions. Lenin pointed out in his Philosophical Notebooks that the Hegelian logic (dialectics) is essential in order to account for Marx’s practice of dialectics in his writing of Capital. Lenin (1976: 357)4 stated straightforwardly in the beginning of his essay that “the splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts” was the “essence” of dialectics. If we look into Hegel’s method of dialectic in his Phenomenon of the Spirit, we would also notice that, to him, the dialectic movement always involves the selfmovement of all living matters in the process of “the bifurcation of the simple,” the “doubling,” “self-othering” and “becoming-other” through pure negativity. The living matters constitute the process of the doubling and self-othering movement of the ideas. For Hegel, the negative is the potential that refutes and transforms the temporary positing of the “one,” and the constant splitting of the “one” would materialize into “another” while this “other” will constitute the formation of the self. The actual here then means the movement itself, and then is also the Subject and the Essence of the living being (Hegel, 1977 [1807]: 10–14). This concept of “one constantly splitting into two” and the permanent movement of materialist dialectic were reverberated by Mao in his essay on contradiction in 1937 and elaborated by the Chinese Marxist philosopher Yang Xianzhen 楊獻珍 in 1963 through his reading of classical Chinese dialectic thought. But, the case of Yang Xianzhen in 1963–1964 in relation to the debate of “one-divides-into-two” demonstrated one of the crudest examples of irony in the hypostatization of the dialectic movement into fixated oppositional political persecution in the name of class struggle. Yang Xianzhen had long criticized the dominant discourse of the Chinese Communist Party’s practice of the USSR’s model of “single economic basis” (danyi jingji jichu單一經濟基礎) which was especially advocated by another Marxist philosopher, Ai Siqi 艾思奇. Following Stalin’s policy, Ai Siqi’s theoretical formulation of the “single economic basis” specified that the political regime belongs to the dictatorship of the working class, and the economic base for the state can only be the working class. It is also the guiding principle for the people’s commune. Ai Siqi insisted that it is unacceptable to have both the working class and its opponents serve as the colligated economic bases. According to Ai and other CCP cadres, the PRC had come to the stage that there should not be the co-existence of different economic forms at the same time, and all the economic forms such as the capitalist, the individual farmers, land owners, and petit bourgeoisies should be obliterated. For Ai Siqi, it is a struggle between the rising socialist classes against the declining capitalist economic structure and this struggle is a matter of life and death (Ai, 1983 [1955]: 295–305). Yang Xianzhen, however, objected to Ai’s and party cadres’ totalizing project. He proposed the theory of “colligated economic basis” (zonghe jingji jichu

The sinif ication of Marxism  165 綜合經濟基礎) in 1953–1955 and argued that there are necessarily diverse economic components in contemporary society with different economic forms co-existing in society that were developed through the gradual processes of history. He insisted that it is not right to eliminate or even to erase the other forms of production because the concrete conditions of contemporary society do not present themselves in this way (Xiao, 2006: 21–38). Yang’s criticism of the “Great Leap Forward” in 1958 also voiced his disagreement with the CCP’s unconditional acceptance of the USSR economic policies of nationwide rapid communalization and the prioritization of heavy industry. Based on his investigation of contemporary social conditions of production systems, he questioned the party’s ideational decision to switch from one economic stage to a different economic stage without concretely consulting local conditions. Yang visited several rural villages and observed the party cadre’s ignorance of the practical reality that the damage the Great Leap Forward had brought to the farmland, and the false information about food production that were prevailing throughout the country. Yang also severely criticized the practice of formal equality, depriving private properties of all members and mistaking “equalization” (pinjunzhuyi 平均主義) as communism, as “idealist” (weixinzhuyi 唯心主義) and a “violent fantasy” as suggested by Engels.5 Though in the beginning Mao and many other party members shared Yang’s views and agreed that the Great Leap Forward was too drastic and rash and had to be modified, after the dramatic event of the meeting at Lushan Conference (Lushan huiyi 廬山會議) in 1959, however, the situation turned to far-left politics and revisionist views were denounced (see Li, 1993). Furthermore, around the same time in 1959, the frictions between China and the USSR started to increase. Nikita Khrushchev openly chastised CCP’s People’s Commune during his visit to Poznan in Poland in July 1958. In the meeting on October 2, 1959, severe disputes were aroused between CCP and USSR representatives on issues related to the military tension that PRC caused respectively with Taiwan and with India at the Sino-Indian border. In the following year, Khrushchev withdrew around 1,400 Soviet experts and technicians from China, and more than 200 scientific projects were forced to be cancelled. Adding up the USSR’s siding with India and Tibetan rebels against China in the Sino-Indian War, and the USSR’s signing the Limited Test Ban Treaty with Britain and the United States, the PRC and USSR officially broke relations, and Mao organized a series of nine letters of criticism, from September 1963 to July 1964, to criticize every aspect of Khrushchev’s leadership (Pantsov and Levine, 2015 [2007]: 493–495, 500–513). Yang Xianzhen’s idea of “two fusing into one” (合二而一), a notion he appropriated from a traditional Chinese philosopher Fang Yizhi方以智 (1611–1671), together with ideas by Lao Zi 老子, to elaborate Mao’s dialectic theory of “one divides into two,” was utilized in this particular historical moment as a tool for the open debates against Soviet revisionism.6 Yang’s usage of Fang Yizhi’s phrase was an attempt to sinicize the Marxist concept of materialist dialectics through traditional Chinese dialectic thought. He suggested that Fang’s notion of “two fusing into one” and “one divides into two” indicate the constant movement of continual

166  Joyce C.H. Liu change and can explain exactly what Mao meant as materialist dialectics. For Yang, this typically Chinese dialectic notion of revolution explains the moments of revolving and transformation of all living matters explicated by Mao. Yang believed that the synthesis of the opposites is necessarily a moment in the dialectic, a moment between movement and stillness, and the moment to begin again, just as what Lenin and Mao had said about dialectics (Xiao, 2006: 9). Yang’s resort to the classical Chinese dialectic notion turned out to be the object of plotted debates during 1964 and 1965, with Yang’s discourse as a public bait that paved the way to the anti-revisionist political campaign and was identified as the precursor of the Cultural Revolution. Yang’s article on the “colligated economic basis” was also brought up again as the proof of his revisionist position (see Wang, 1999: 43–68; Jin, 2009: 26–28; Xiao, 2006; Yang, 1981; Hu, 2009: 56–86). He was crudely criticized, deposed from his position as the principal in the Communist Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, and more than 150 intellectuals was involved in the case. Two years later, during the Cultural Revolution, all those who had written to support the concept of “two fuse into one” were labeled as rightist and revisionists, with a bourgeois mentality attempting to reconcile class contradictions and were brutally persecuted. Many people who were persecuted in the event committed suicide at the beginning of Cultural Revolution. Others were put into jail or exiled to remote farms for labor reform for many years. Yang was kept in jail for eight years. At the closure of the Cultural Revolution, in 1976, he was again sent for labor reform in Shaanxi for three more years because of his former association with Liu Shaoqi 劉少奇 (see Sun, 1997; Zuo, 2005). “One divides into two” was transformed discursively from “the bifurcation of the simple” and the constant process of “becoming-other” to the antagonism against the external and internal enemies, particularly as an act of open confrontation against the USSR, and coincidentally materialized as an act of local liquidation and power reinforcement. The contemporaneous external as well as internal political power relations co-figured the logic of separation and exclusion. The education of the purgation theory of “one divides into two” was so successful and widespread that, even 10 years later, Li Changmao 李長茂, a factory worker in Tianjin, wrote an article in 1974, still vehemently professing to obey the instruction of “one divides into two” taught by Chairman Mao, urging people to use the weapon of “one divides into two” to fiercely attack “the reactionary discourse of ‘two fusing into one.’” For him, and most his contemporaries who were taught in schools how to think according to this logic from their childhood, the notion of “one divides into two” indicates the action to dig out the bourgeois class “hidden within the proletariat class,” and to continuously exclude “the handful of class enemies” (一小撮階級敵人) in order to make the proletarian class “clean” and “solidified” and to strengthen the proletarian dictatorship (Li, 1971 [1970]: 29–33). The randomly chosen example of this Tianjing worker’s article on “one divides into two” served as the index of the affective effectivity of the hypostatization of the dialectic movement of ideological revolution and the philosophical debates

The sinif ication of Marxism  167 consequently turned out to be class struggle on reified ideological grounds. The production of a new social body, or the national body, is enacted through cleansing and digging out one part from the whole, through naming the people and the enemy of the people within the people. Physical humiliations and assaults were carried out in the name of the people. The partition between the left and the right, however, is literally the projection of the Cold War divide, the greater forces of opposite camps that tended to control and to stabilize the global situation. The internalized border and the duplication of the hypostatized opposition, “one divides into two”, is practiced as the policy for the statist stabilization. The formulation of the “sinification of Marxism” fused nation-state-party into one concept and made it even more difficult to detect the unevenness of social relations in the statist order.

The struggle between Confucianism and Legalism and its return The movement of Examining Legalist Theories and Censuring Confucianism (pinfapiru 評法批儒) that mobilized sustained philosophical debates on the Struggle between Confucianism and Legalism (rufadouzheng 儒法鬥爭) in 1973–1974 was another exemplary incident of the pathological development of the sinification of Marxism. This philosophical debate was heralded by the movement of Criticize Lin & Criticize Confucius (pilinpikong 批林批孔) in which Lin Biao 林彪 was the real object of the purgation. Lin Biao’s winning of support within the Chinese Communist Party and his control of military leadership, especially Lin’s aggressive military move during the Damansky Island Incident (Zhenbao Island) in March 1969, irritated Mao. Lin’s criticizing the Cultural Revolution in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in 1970 further offended Mao. The failure of Project 571, an armed uprising devised by Lin’s son Lin Liguo 林立果, intending to assassinate Mao, forced Lin’s family to flee China for the Soviet Union. Lin and his family died when their plane crashed over Mongolia on September 13, 1971. In 1973, Jiang Qing 江青 and the Gang of Four initiated the movement of Criticize Lin & Criticize Confucius, using the proof of the Confucius’s texts found in Lin’s house to confirm the rumor of Lin’s secret association with the Kuomintang, intending to extend the accusation of all Confucian bureaucrats, especially targeting Zhou Enlai 周恩來 as a “modern Confucian prime minister.” At this point, the philosophical debates turned out to be a historiography of allusions used to hunt down internal enemies (MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, 2009: 314–341; Pantsov and Levine, 2015 [2007]: 576–583; Torrill, 2011: 473–497). The above scenario shows only the symptom of this event on the surface. What is more significant here is the paradoxical and complex reversal of the sinification of Marxism that we have witnessed in this case. The critique of the tradition of Confucian ideology was the position Chinese Marxists had held since the beginning of the Republic of China in the twentieth century because the political rulers after the fall of the imperial regime all were inclined to employ the discourse of reviving Confucianism through fugu (復古 returning to the past), zunkong (尊孔 worshiping Confucius) and dujing (讀經 reading classics) in order to justify their

168  Joyce C.H. Liu legitimacy in their autocratic rules. Obvious examples include Yuan Shikai 袁世 凱 who proclaimed himself the Emperor of the Chinese Empire of the Republic era and restored the monarchy in 1914; the warlords who occupied different provinces through military forces during the period of the Northern Government (Beiyang Government 北洋政府) from 1912 to 1928; Chiang Kai-shek of the Nanjing Government who launched total militarization through the New Life Movement in 1934, and again started the Chinese Cultural Renaissance in the 1960s in Taiwan during the martial law period. Even the Japanese colonial rulers in the Manchuria government and in Taiwan also practiced the policies of fugu, zunkong and dujing. All these strategies of governmentality attested to the political function Confucian ideology held for the centralization and militarization of the ruling government to rationalize its legitimacy and its concentration of power.7 The discourse of the revival of Confucianism was actually started in the late Qing period, especially by Kang Youwei 康有為, when China was moving on the path toward building a new nation-state. Kang Youwei’s advocacy of making Confucianism the national religion for the new China, eradicating all local temples, and building Confucius temples in every province and city so that people could worship Confucius as the sage king, was based on what he had learned from Western politics, that religion is essential for the governance of the state. Kang took up the interpretation of Confucius by Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (179–104 bc), a Confucian scholar in the Han Dynasty, in his interpretations of the Gongyang Commentary of the Spring and Autumn Annals (春秋公羊傳), and stressed that the newly founded Republic should establish a well-ordered hierarchical regime, a strong and centralized political authority, and a benevolent ruler whose legitimacy is ordained by the Mandate of Heaven (tianming 天命). He also suggested that the Republic should follow the teachings in the Spring and Autumn Annals to reinforce the proper dutiful relations between the monarch and his subjects, to achieve reconciliation between past and present sources of political legitimacy (tongsantong 通三統) in order to enhance the unity of cosmological and political order (dayitong 大一統). He even suggested that the way to reform China also should be modeled after ancient kings (先王), and that the Republic should take Spring and Autumn Annals as sacred scriptures and as the basis for the national constitution. Dong Zhongshu’s theories based on the Gongyang Commentary of the Spring and Autumn Annals prospered only briefly in the Han Dynasty and then was revived in late Qing Dynasty. Dong integrated the mystic cosmology, that is, the correspondence between heaven and mankind (tianrenganying 天人感應), into a Confucian ethical framework and emphasized the political implication in Spring and Autumn Annals so as to lay down rules for deciding the legitimacy of a monarch as well as the hierarchical subordination of the political system. The concepts of filial piety and loyalty were particularly emphasized, and a general norm of submissiveness in terms of adequate social order was also established. Dong also implemented a complicated penal system, appropriating Confucius’ classics, to the effect that so-called Confucianism was actually a mixture of the school of Legalism at its core, Confucianism as the appearance and Legalism as the practice (waire-neifa外儒內法).

The sinif ication of Marxism  169 The amalgamation of the Legalist practice with the Confucian ethical discourse, together with the patriarchal clan system, the imperial examination and the tribute system with neighboring countries, turned out to be the stabilizing technique of governmentality for the autocratic concentration of power and the smooth turnover of the Chinese dynasties. Such autocratic concentration of power and rigid hierarchical control exercised by the governments in the Republic of China in the name of the revival of Confucianism was severely criticized by Marxist thinkers of the time. Two examples will suffice. Zhou Yutong (周予同 1898–1981) (2010 [1929]: 413–421), an important scholar of classical Confucian texts who was familiar with the Marxist method of historical analysis, insisted on differentiating the historical Confucius from the false image of the ideological Confucianism, and criticized the practice of fugu and dujing in the 1910s and 1920s as “zombie rising” (jiangshi de chusui 殭屍 的出祟). Zhou (2010 [1934]: 227) insisted that the real Confucius was dead, but the false Confucius would reappear in accordance with the historical changes of Chinese economic institutions, political conditions and intellectual vicissitudes. Zhou spent 50 years researching Chinese classics. His major contribution was to historicize various texts of Confucianism in different dynasties and to analyze the economic and political contexts in order to explain the modes of discourse and their political implications. He pointed out that the Book of Filial Piety (xiaojing 孝經) was not written by Confucius, but composed by the scholars in the Han Dynasty 漢朝 (206 bc–ad 220) in order to promote obedience and loyalty for the sake of the unified empire. The concept of filial piety was in fact a technique, Zhou suggested, together with the feudal system and the patriarchal clan system in China, to govern and stabilize society (Zhou, 2010 [1936]: 338–340, 342– 343). Zhou also teased out the controversies over Confucian classics in different versions in the ancient school and the modern school, as well as the political contestations between the Confucianism of the Song school and of the Han school. He explained that Dong Zhongshu’s Gongyang Commentary of the Spring and Autumn Annals was in fact a text of mysticism in the service of the authoritarian regime in Chinese history (Zhou, 2010 [1933]: 216–226; 2010 [1937]: 351; 2010 [1936]: 338–340, 342–343; Zhu, 1996 [1994]: 335). Zhou’s scholastic analysis of the political economics of various discursive modes in Chinese history was based on the influence of socialist thoughts, Tolstoy, anarcho-syndicalism and Marxist writings that he encountered in the 1920s and 1930s. He joined the movement of Work-Study Mutual Aidism (工讀互助會), and was acquainted with other Chinese communist thinkers such as Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀, Li Dazhao 李大釗, Lu Xun 魯迅 and Mao Zedong. Jian Bozan 翦伯贊 (1898–1968), a renowned Marxist historian, whose ancestors were of the Uighur tribe, was another example. In an article that he wrote in 1936 on the development of the idea of fa (law 法) in the early Qin Dynasty (秦朝 221–206 bc), Jian contended that the political agenda of the scholars of the Legalist, such as Yang Zhu 楊朱, Shen Buhai 申不害, Shen Dao 慎到, Shang Yang 商鞅 and Han Fei 韓非, were to reject the rule of man and to promote the rule of law. The primacy of the concept of law is equality. Even the emperor himself should follow the law

170  Joyce C.H. Liu too. Only law could emancipate the plebeians from the hierarchical system. Jian also acknowledged the fact that law should be revised along the change of time in order to fit contemporary social structure and material conditions. No ancient law could be applied to modern time without revision. The law of the early Qin Dynasty was to assure the concept of gong (公), the common, and to prevent any form of privatization, that is, si (私 privatization) (Jian, 2008 [1936]: 426–448). Jian also published an article in 1959, a survey of the history of land reform in Chinese history, and explained that Qin Shi Huang’s 秦始皇 policy of ceasing the succession of inherited aristocratic titles and salaries was to stop the centralization of land and property so that the plebeians could farm their own land. The Wellfield system (jintianzhi 井田制) realized by Wang Mang 王莽 (45 bc–ad 23) is another case of land reform based on the method of equal distribution. Likewise, Xun Yue 荀悅 (ad 148–209) in the Dong Han Dynasty proposed the policy to farm and not to possess the land (Jian, 2008 [1948]: 25–28). In a series of writings that he wrote during 1950–1951, Jian (2008 [1950], 2008 [1951]) explored the question of the countless farmer uprisings in Chinese history and analyzed the causes of these uprisings to be the continual processes of land appropriation and concentration to the extent that the poor had no place to live at all. Jian’s historical studies demonstrated a Marxian method of historical and materialist analysis. Through his works, we could see how the thinkers and plebeians in Chinese history carried out different models of political reforms in order to resist the authoritarian appropriation and concentration of power and land. Following the route of Zhou’s and Jian’s sinification of Marxist theories in their historical studies, we can also find numerous volumes of publications, textbooks and even cartoons published during the movement of Examining the School of Law and Censoring Confucianism, targeting the critique against Confucianism and advocating the tradition of the school of Legalism. From the long list of examples which were included as the school of Legalism in the articles published during this period, we can easily see that these thinkers are the early socialists who proposed socialist visions and equalitarian policies in different historical and social conditions. Shang Yang 商鞅 of the fourth century bc, for example, insisted on the rule by law and the equality of everyone under the law (一刑無等級). Wang Mang 王莽, another excellent example in the first century bc, banned the slavery system and instituted the system of ownership of farmland according to the field-well-system, that is, if a family had fewer than eight members but had one well or larger property, it was required to distribute the excess to fellow clan members, neighbors or other members of the same village (男不盈八, 田不得過一井). Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 (773–819), a member of the Yongzhen reformist movement (永貞革新) in the ninth century that proposed to reduce heavy taxation and to stop privatization of military powers, criticized the discourse of the Heavenly Mandate (天說), and promoted the selfgovernance of local government (郡縣論). Wang Anshi 王安石 (1021–1086), a socio-economic reformer in the eleventh century, opposed the concentration of land and broke up private monopolies and introduced some forms of government regulation and social welfare.

The sinif ication of Marxism  171 This long list of socialist thinkers could serve as a critical counter-discourse against the authoritarian ideology of Confucianism, or the autocratic practice of governmentality through the fusion of overt Confucianism and covert Legalism, in Chinese history. This list also points to a history of political reforms (bianfa 變法, literally, changing the law) against the authoritarian concentration of power. Such immanent political critiques were activated based on the idea of equality against the domineering hierarchical ideology of the ruling regimes. The studies of the struggle between Confucianism and Legalism in the 1970s, therefore, served as an index and pointed to a significant genealogy of the intellectual politics fighting for equality against the authoritarian domination and centralized power in different dynasties of Chinese history. This counter-discourse could offer us a different perspective on Chinese intellectual history other than the hierarchical and centralizing autocracy practiced in the history of China. It is ironic, however, to see that Chinese communist tradition that picked up the genealogy of the critique against the authoritarian and hierarchical regime in the name of Confucianism made its perverse turn in the Cultural Revolution not only through destroying all Confucius temples, classical texts and monuments, but also by assuming an autocratic control that penetrated all levels of Chinese society. The dichotomization between Confucianism and Legalism is in fact a disavowal of the co-existence of Confucianism and Legalism in the technique of governmentality throughout Chinese history while at the same time assuming the autocratic position legitimated by the Legalist theories. The movement of pilinpikong in 1973–1974 itself was a reified power struggle and involved the purging of more than 1,000 high officials close to Lin Biao, and even more persecutions of the scholars who refused to criticize Confucius. Zhou Yutong who criticized the fugu and zunkong practices of the Japanese colonial government and the Chinese republican government in the early twentieth century was cruelly persecuted in the case of Wu Han 吳晗 when Zhou refused to join the critique against Wu and was forced to dig Confucius’s grave with his bare hands in Shandong 山東 in 1966. Zhou was tortured to blindness and paralysis and laid in bed for 13 years till his death in 1981. The Marxist historian Jian Bozan, like Yang Xianzhen and Zhou Yutong, was also persecuted during the cultural revolution and committed suicide with his wife in 1968. Contemporary revivals of Confucianism in the last two decades in China is of course a reaction against the campaign in the Cultural Revolution which destroyed the Confucian tradition. But, this recurring discourse of Confucianism in China, reverberating the rationale used in several restorations of conservative political power in the twentieth century and resonating with the discourse of politico-economic expansion in the twenty-first century, appears to be a more paradoxical turn regarding the Chinese Marxists’ socialist ideas of equality. Gan Yang’s 甘陽 book Tong San Tong (Bridging Three Traditions 通三統) is a typical case of the contemporary attempt of the sinification of Marxism. Gan advocates the political order of the Grand Unification (dayitong 大一統) and the reconciliation between the past and present by “bridging the three traditions” (通三統) that he learned from Dong Zhongshu’s discussion of Gongyang Zhuan. To Gan, the unification of the traditions of Confucianism, Mao Zedong and Deng

172  Joyce C.H. Liu Xiaoping is the perfect solution to achieve the Grand Unification (Gan, 2007: 1–3). Following the same logic of Confucian political order as elaborated by Jiang and Gan, Jiang Shigong 強世功 explains in his book China Hong Kong (《中國 香港》) that Hong Kong naturally and necessarily should be a tributary of China, which means that the central government should take up the responsibility to take care of the security and stability of Hong Kong, and Hong Kong should follow the dictate of the central government and offer its tribute in the form of obedience. In this way, there is no chance for Hong Kong to establish autonomously its own legislative procedure for the governance of its own local affairs (Jiang, 2010: 228). In Gan’s agenda, we see clearly that it is based on the Confucian rhetoric of the Mandate of Heaven and the operation of the Grand Unification in the Confucian political ethics that a new model of the Chinese empire and a new politico-economic tribute system is discursively formulated. The center–periphery economic attachment system in the regional entrepreneurial partnership speaks just the same logic as that of the pre-modern Chinese tributary system. The pathological and paradoxical route of the sinification of Marxism, in its attempt to reject the colonial domination from the West and to develop Marxism with Chinese characteristics, in the spirit of economic development, has reached its pinnacle point.

Conclusion: materialist dialectic as immanent critique In Grundrisse, Marx differentiated objectified labor from living labor. Living labor exists in time, alive, present only as the living subject, in which it exists as capacity, as possibility and creates values, whereas objectified labor is present in space as past labor, first as use-values and then exchange values. Objectified labor would then be incorporated into capital, and exchanged, invested and purchased as commodities (Marx, 1973: 271–272, 304–305). Based on this distinction of labor, Chakrabarty proposed the concept of two temporal processes to modify Marx’s analysis of the logic of capital: History 1 as the universal and necessary movement of capital, a past “posited by capital” that lends itself to the reproduction of capitalist relationships, and History 2 as the histories that belong to capital’s “life process,” affective histories of cultural-dwelling of peripheral societies, a history that continually erupts within capitalist history and interrupts the totalizing project of History 1. Chakrabarty especially focused on the daily life histories of the workers in India as his version of History 2 and argued that this local history is heterogeneous and could resist the overarching movement of capital (Chakrabarty, 2007: 64–66; see Max Ward’s chapter in this volume). From the processes of the sinification of Marxism in socialist China, however, we’ve seen how Marxist ideas were not only popularized but also objectified and reified as “use-value” and “exchange value” to trade in power as capital in the communist cadre ideocratic and bureaucratic system. The question here then is not only the fact that socialist China followed the logic of state-centric capitalism after the founding of the state in 1949, but how Marxist ideas were transformed into marketable commodities in socialist China (see the chapters by Postone and Harootunian in this volume).

The sinif ication of Marxism  173 The process of realization and even institutionalization of the objectified and reified Marxist ideas is what I’ve discussed in this chapter. The sinification of Marxism was in the beginning an act of living labor by many Chinese intellectuals in accordance with contemporary circumstances in order to engage with the present of the historical moment. But these Marxist ideas soon turned into exchangeable and purchasable commodities, fetishized and sanctified, circulated in society as in the market. Not only all students and their parents knew it, but also the workers in the factories and the farmers in the fields, all sharing the same value framework and helping stabilize the totalizing project of the centralized and hierarchical state. Textbooks for all levels of schools, popularized versions in the fashion of serial educational cartoons, pictorial illustrations for the editorial forum in the centralized newspapers, and projects of publications all demonstrated the successful realization of the total mobilization of the people through these “philosophical” ideas. In our discussions of the two philosophical events of the sinification of Marxism in socialist China during the Cold War era, “one-divides-into-two” in 1963–1964 and “the struggle between Confucianism and Legalism” in 1973–1974, we see how Marxist “ideas” were invested and materialized through institutional subsystems and mechanisms of partitions, that is, disseminations among the people as well as the practice of liquidation of the enemies of the people. Mao’s conceptualization of contradiction in 1937 presented dialectic subtleties, including the concept of the infinite splitting of all matters and constant movement of differentiation and integration, but his comment on “one divides into two” in 1957 was clearly fixated in the Cold War situation, finding clear antagonistic targets, displaceable according to different situations. The examples discussed in this chapter, such as Yang Xianzhen, Zhou Yutong and Jian Bozan, were Marxist scholars in Chinese history of the twentieth century, and could be viewed as real practices, with living labors, of the sinification of Marxism in local contexts. The fact that they were all persecuted to death before or during the Cultural Revolution, over-determined by and co-figured the path of historical development both locally and globally in the Cold War era, served as a witness of the pathological and paradoxical route of the sinification of Marxism that turned out to be the technique of border politics and internal suppression and exclusion. Through looking into these two philosophical events as the anchorage points or markers of the time, we could see more clearly how these events converged complex political and discursive forces, both locally and globally, and moved on its dialectic and spiral turn. These local and subaltern histories in our studies, following the original efforts to decolonize and to provincialize Marxism, paradoxically served as a testimony for the dialectic and perverted route of internal colonization. The logic of “one divides into two” was extended to the effect that the symbiotic co-existence of Confucianism and Legalism in the technique of governmentality in Chinese history was dichotomized as two warring camps, utilizing the Legalist ideas in attacking the Confucian ideas, and erasing the real social traditions in pre-modern China. This dialectic turn from “one divides into two” to the “struggle between Confucianism and Legalism” informed us of the

174  Joyce C.H. Liu real tricky contradictions of the sinification of Marxist ideas in the context of socialist China.

Notes 1 Mao explained that the Chinese socialist revolution had gone through different stages from anti-feudal land reform, the agricultural co-operation and socialist reconstruction of private industries, commerce and handicrafts, and the revolution on the ideological and political front in 1957: “The twenty-first article” of his “Sixty Points On Working Methods—A Draft Resolution from the Office of the Centre of the CPC” (Mao, 1999 [1958]: 349–351). 2 In May 1958, at the Second Session of the Eighth National Congress, the CPC initiated the “Great Leap Forward” movement. High targets were set for agricultural production. In August 1958, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee convened an enlarged meeting at Beidaihe and decided that in 1958 the output of steel should reach 10.7 million tons, double the output in 1957. Also, a movement to mobilize the people’s commune spread throughout the entire country in the same year. 3 Mao’s essay (1966 [1937]: 274–312) “On the Question of Contradiction” was originally delivered as lectures at the Anti-Japanese Military and Political College in Yan’an in 1937. In recent years, long debates among Chinese scholarship have been devoted to the question whether Mao’s essay “On Contradiction” was actually a plagiarism of Ai Siqi or other Chinese Marxist intellectuals. Concerning this controversy, Nick Knight (2002: 419–445) accurately points out that whether the source of the idea is from Ai Siqi or Mao Zedong, they were all inspired by the translations of Marx and Lenin and the Marxist-Leninist textbooks that were abundant at that time. See also Pantsov and Levine (2015 [2007]). 4 From Marx to Mao (2008). Online at: www.marx2mao.com/> (accessed April 22, 2016). 5 Yang (1986 [1958]: 126–152, 1986 [1959a]: 184–195, 1986 [1959b]: 196–209, 1986 [1959c]: 210–214, 1986 [1959d]: 215–230, 1986 [1959e]: 231–253, 1986 [1961a]: 254–258, 1986 [1961b]: 259–327) criticized the drawbacks of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, including the general tendency of coxcombry (fukua 浮誇), blind leadership (xiazhihui 瞎指揮) and idealist subjective dynamism (huguan nengdong 主觀能動). His article was the first one to criticize the Great Leap Forward. 6 Fang wrote in 1652 in his book Dongxi Jun (東西均) that “two moving into one and one moving into two. Separating and rejoining. Joining and departing. It is the moment of encounter and revolution at the same time.” For Fang, “Two fusing into one” is the same dialectic movement of “one divides into two,” intersected at the moment of “encounter” (交) and “revolution” (輪), the transitory moment between movement and stillness, tension and relaxation, masculinity and femininity (Fang, 2001 [1652]: 40, 57, 198). 7 The publication of xiaojing, The Book of Filial Piety (孝經), together with the propaganda of the Kominka Movement as Huangmin fenggong jing fu xiaojing 皇民奉公經 附孝經by the Japanese colonial government in Taiwan, encouraging the subject of the emperor to serve in the battlefield as fulfilling his duty of filial piety to the state, further exemplified how the concept of loyalty and filial piety could be merged in the disciplinary governance of the subjects of the modern state.

10 The formation and the limits of the People’s Democracy A critical history of contemporary South Korean Marxism Seung-Wook Baek Actuality of Marxism in the here and now In the eighteenth South Korean presidential election in December 2012, the conservative ruling party candidate Park Geunhye, daughter of the 1960s and 1970s dictator Park Junghee, was elected as the new President of South Korea with a 51.6 percent majority, while the liberal opposition party candidate, Moon Jaeyin, was defeated with a close 48.0 percent. In this election, progressive groups were divided, fielding four different candidates, two of whom withdrew just before the official registration to support the liberal opposition party candidate. The other two candidates went through to the final process, but with a disappointing and negligible polling of 0.2 percent. These results demonstrate a startling decrease in the support for progressive parties compared to earlier presidential elections, in which progressive candidates achieved from 1.3 percent (1997, the first time a progressive candidate had run, after a long period of authoritarian regime) to 3.9 percent (the high point in 2002). In parliamentary elections, the Democratic Labor Party, the first established progressive party, had received much more support, culminating in 2004 with 13.5 percent of the proportional representation (PR) in the first election ever using the PR system. The double shock of the election of the conservative Park Geunhye and the plunge in the support for progressive parties casts a gloom over left movements in South Korea. Under Park’s presidency, attacks on progressive groups and social movements have accelerated, accompanied by weakened and divided social movements. The attacks culminated in the dissolution of the United Progressive Party by the Constitutional Court in December 2014. The legacy of two decades of progressive social movements in South Korea is at present experiencing a terrible ordeal. To make matters worse, mass movements in South Korea have been weakened and divided by feeble organizational power (showing a typically low organization rate of trade unions of 10.1 percent in 2011, with most irregular workers being excluded from trade union organizations) and the harsh aggression of neo-liberal restructuring.1 In Korea, where significant accomplishments of recent social movements have been matched by relatively weak diffusion of Marxist social forces, critical investigation of the past decades of Marxist intervention are important for its feasible revitalization. The heyday of Korean social movements in the late 1980s and the 1990s was at the same period of a global neo-liberal turn accompanied by the

176  Seung-Wook Baek collapse of “existing socialist countries.” Exceptional favorable conditions for the uprising of Korean labor momements in the late 1980s was largely provided by advantageous positon of the Korean economy for the short periods given by the Plaza Accord in 1985, but immediately followed by harsh neo-liberal restructuring in the 1990s. Divergent evaluations around contemporary Korean economy within the world were paralleled by divergent and opposing positions within the various radical groups of social movements, including Marxist groups. In this context, the “PD” (People’s Democracy: hereafter the PD) is an interesting object for the investigation of the past experiences of social movements in Korea because it embodies the efforts and difficulties of combining renovation of Marxism with the broadening of mass bases during the heyday of Korean social movements.2 As a group with Marxist orientation, its aim was supposed to overcome or supersede capitalism. In many cases, however, it is not easy to find an appropriate answer to the question of what anti-capitalist politics truly means in reality. The efforts of the PD shows the difficulties and possibilities of “anti-capitalist” politics in an East-Asian capitalist society.

PD as a critical Marxist tradition in Korea The crisis of South Korean social movements is notably determined by its particular historical legacy and regional background as well as global changes. Like many other countries, South Korea also faces the troublesome impasse of social movements, which have become much weaker and more helpless under the aggressive and blatant domination of neo-liberalism. Mass movements have become fragmented and internally divided.3 There are particular aspects of the historical and social background that have given rise to the difficulties of Korean left mass movements. 1

Huge external shock from the global crisis, which has been exerting its influence since the early 1990s (Seo, 2013; Ji, 2011; Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, 2001). 2 Weakened foundations of social movements caused by bureaucratization, NGO-style mutation, collapse of mass bases, difficulties in the reproduction of activists and recruitment of rank-and-file members, etc. (Shin, 2010; Noh, 2008, part 2; Kim, 2007). 3 The sustained strong influence of liberal-nationalist political currents, mainly gathering around the so-called National Liberation (hereafter NL) groups (Gray, 2008a: 114; Yoo, 2005: 172–177, 408–410). 4 Geographical semi-isolation and semi-seclusion within the region owing to the national division. Such geographical background partially accounts for the lasting influence of evolutionist stage theories and the long-term obsession with liberal compromising in mass politics.4 5 Difficulties in the expansion of radical social currents (restricted and suppressed by so-called red-phobia).5 6 Difficulties for Marxism in penetrating institutional areas in academic fields and the life of the masses.

Contemporary South Korean Marxism  177 The emergence of the PD groups could not be separated from the revival of Marxism in South Korea in the 1980s since these groups emerged with the aim of creating a fusion between the renovation of Marxism and the growth of mass movements. The emergence of the PD and the revival of Marxism had as its background the Korean social formation polemics (including the stage and type of Korean capitalism, interpretation of contemporary imperialism and tasks of social transformation), the re-interpretation of historical Marxism, the re-interpretation of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, and the critical introduction of Western Marxism such as the Althusserian legacy (Park and Cho, 1989–1991). Also, the formation of the PD cannot be explained without considering its opposition to nationalist groups and the particular historical background of the North–South division. Political opposition between the PD and the NL groups has been a wellknown phenomenon in the Korean political terrain for more than two decades. This opposition is symptomatic for understanding the Korean context of Marxist re-emergence and its early plights. Opposition has been reproduced in various ways and in different fields; the question still remains of how these two currents should respond to neo-liberalism and its crisis. When we write a history of contemporary Korean Marxism from the viewpoint of the PD, an immediate basic question would be: who or what is the PD? It is not an entity comprising coherent political groups or organizations. Rather, for the last two decades, it has been differentiated and also divided internally over many political and theoretical issues, and it is undeniable that the PD title is an obscure one. Sometimes it designates the overall currents of different political and theoretical organizations of the left that show critical viewpoints against liberalnationalist groups. Sometimes the name is narrowly restricted and caricatured to denote the category of militant workers’ groups such as the equality faction (pyongdeungpa) or the even narrower workshop faction (hyeonjangpa) within labor movements, which even combines an orthodox political position with theoretical/practical pragmatism. The PD also refers to different political groups in different political and organizational conditions: groups that have an influential base at the workshop level with a wide range of Marxist orientations; the Labor Party (the former New Progressive Party) as a whole, which adheres to some anticapitalist principles but with insufficient political power; minority groups within the (divided and recently forcefully dissolved nationalist) United Progressive Party, which was later divided into the UPP and the Progressive Justice Party (then changed again to the Justice Party in 2013); other radical groups that aim to establish a vanguard party and small groups of theoretical leftists. Last but not least, “the Movement Left” that shows an orientation toward renovated Marxism which cannot be ignored but is sometimes underestimated, for example, People’s Solidarity for Social Progress (PSSP), National Students’ March, Humanity Rather Than Profit and the Cyber University of Workers.6 In this chapter, the PD does not necessarily denote a specific set of organizations or groups that share a coherent theoretical and political program. Since the PD has not always been succeeded by the same groups or members, it rather designates a political and theoretical position (or tendency) with a Marxist orientation,

178  Seung-Wook Baek and at the same time aims at a transformed type of Marxism that combines the task of transforming the capitalist system with the task of achieving a people’s democracy. The aim of this essay is not to sketch the whole history of the PD, but to re-evaluate the significance of its emergence, its aporia and difficulties, both past and present.

The origin of the PD: the 1987 conjuncture The emergence of the PD: critique of the 1987 conjuncture The 1987 political crisis was the most important moment for the rise of the PD groups. The PD began as a significant set of theoretical and political currents through its critique of the 1987 conjuncture that finally led to liberal co-optation. The 1987 conjuncture was dominated by the demand for democracy against the authoritarian military regime (Shin, 2012: 296). However, the meaning of democracy was neither clear nor evident. Neither were the answers to the questions related to it clear: what was the main obstacle against it, by whom could it be accomplished, and how can the relationship between the demand for democracy and capitalist contradictions be understood. The PD emerged as a significant political force to face the 1987 political crisis. It did not represent the so-called “1987 regime,”7 but rather it was formed as a result of the contradictory “liberal co-optation of the 1987 conjuncture and its protracted failure.” Before this conjuncture, several cornerstones were laid for the polemical emergence of the PD: 1

Underground student movements and vanguard social movements, especially influenced by the Gwnagju democratic movement in May 1980 (Koo, 2001: 100–125; Cho, 1990; KDF, 2010; Eun, 2003; Go, 2013: 265–279). 2 Student activists who discarded their careers and rushed into labor movements (hakchul) to organize democratic trade unions and to exert influential power among them (Koo, 2001: 105–106; Yoo, 2012). 3 Lots of legal and illegal publications and translations of books related to Marxissm since the 1980s, including critical social sciences, revolutionary history and Western Marxism. 4 Korean social nature polemics since 1985 (led by Park Hyeonchae and Yoon Soyeong in the PD, among others)8 that dealt with the issue of social nature as well as revolutionary programs (Park and Cho, 1989–1991). These phenomena in the early 1980s were formed against an extremely complicated background: Jeon Taeil’s self-immolation in 1970; the Gwangju democratic movement; Chun Doo-hwan’s dictatorship; the massive increase in university enrollment since 1980 and the organization of many university students into study-cum-practice teams for critical activities since the mid1980s; and finally, American political intervention under the territorial division between the North and the South. Different responses to and interpretations of

Contemporary South Korean Marxism  179 these circumstances gave rise to different theoretical and political positions, the divergence and opposition of which culminated in the 1987 conjuncture. Since the 1987 conjuncture and its aftermath, the PD’s position has been designated and developed by its trifold opposition: to liberalists, to nationalists and to some leftists. Among them, the most serious opposition was exerted to the emerging and dominant NL, which was divided between groups of banal arguments that have affinity with the North Korean party line on the one hand, and more flexible liberal groups on the other hand.9 The former regarded Korean society of the time as colonial and semi-feudal, whereas the latter regarded it as non-democratic and more dependent. Both suggested a political position based on the stagist theory, arguing that a more autonomous and liberal government should be established with a wider popular support, so as to advance social transformation. Other social contradictions, including class antagonism, were underestimated or set aside as less important, immature or as issues for future consideration. National autonomy, democracy and reunification were the triad set for the NL. The PD has been critical of these three aims, athough not always denying them in principle, provided that they were set within the dialectics of revolution and transition and were led by the masses as they underwent transformation into political subjects (Hyunsilgwagwahak vols 2, 3, 4, 1989, 1990; Lee, 1991; Lee et al., 1991; Park and Cho, 1989–1991, vol. 2). For example, for the PD, democracy had more radical implications combining autonomous masses with the possible transformation of structures. National autonomy and reunification were internally subordinated to this logic of democracy and transformation. Transitional programs, which were interpreted not as stagist, in accordance with the Trotskyist approach, but as a bridge to connect mass subject-formation to capitalist transformation, were always emphasized and combined with the issue of democracy and transformation. However, this political and semantic innovation was not fully elaborated, even by the PD activists themselves. The PD also faced opposition from two poles within Marxist groups: by those who clung to an orthodox program and criticized the PD as “reformist” or even “post-Stalinist” because of their perceived typical stagist theory,10 and by those who clung to a moderate program and avoided posing questions about capitalist contradictions, on the pretext of the consequences of fast economic growth and lack of organizations (groups that pursue the mass party line). For the former, the importance of democracy and rights might vanish with revolution, whereas for the latter those issues were only considered pragmatically. As there was no mediation of ideological and political intervention concerning democracy (and no idea of a transitional program), neither of them paid enough attention to the mediation of democracy so as to change mass conditions and to form political subjects. The differentiation of the PD groups and the myth of party In the emerging period of the PD in the 1980s, as most members of different PD groups (as well as those of other left groups) found difficulties in expanding their influence on mass movements, they tried to overcome these difficulties

180  Seung-Wook Baek by building closer relationships between mass organizations and more centrally organized political organizations. At first, they tried to penetrate into grassrootslevel trade unions by distributing PD activists from student movements to the organizational activities of union establishment. At the same time, they tried to form political organizations composed of advanced workers and radical students who had already plunged into the labor movement field (even though they had not yet oriented themselves towards political parties, they in fact had the aim of forming vanguard parties in the long run). In this context, they usually distinguished political mass organizations from political organizations. Each political group prepared its own program with its own future organizational plan. After the 1987 conjuncture many PD organizations felt their influence on the contemporary political conjuncture was weak, and began changing their organizational frame. As each PD group developed unevenly in terms of intellectual and organizational influences, not a single one among them was able to lead the conjucture or establish the hegemony among PD groups. Harsh oppression by the authoritarian government and the changing situation of “existing socialism” were other important factors pushing for change, as each important political group within the PD met with serious government attacks, arrests and prosecutions around 1991. The government that had pursued mutation of the ruling bloc by the partial co-optation of liberal groups from the opposition party also engaged in very repressive policies to agressively enforce the National Security Law and prosecute members accused of forming anti-State organizations.11 Facing this situation, Inminnoryeon (Incheon Confederation of Democratic Workers, the ICDW), which was the most notable political organization of the labor movement in the wider Seoul–Incheon metropolitan industrial belt, with many members from the student movement, led the turning process. In 1991, it led to the unification of three major PD groups with a mass base around metropolitan Seoul. These were the ICDW itself, Sammin Dongmaeng (Three min Alliance) and Nodong Gyegeup (Labor Classes, LC) (Yoo, 2012: 356).12 The aim of this unification was to set up a new mass progressive party, so they formed a foundation committee for the Korean Socialist Labor Party (KSLP: Hanguk-sahoejuuinondongjadang: Hansanodang), largely at the expense of the liquidation of their mass bases in the labor movement. This unification was a very symbolic moment in the development of the PD in that it showed PD’s typically biased responses to the given political conjuncture. It has had great impact on their continuing development. The negative aspect of this unification was that it showed the separation of the political party movement from grassroots mass movements including trade union movements. The PD’s foundation within the labor movment had not been strong to begin with; this unification precipitated further weakening of this already meager influence on them. The establishment of the foundation committee for the KSLP and the move of the center of gravity to the political party was also opposed by another important PD group that had had some influential power within the labor movement since the early 1980s, the so-called Jepa-PD (an anti-imperialist and anti-fascist PD group). This group exerted opposition not merely to the ICDW’s line that departed from

Contemporary South Korean Marxism  181 the mass bases, but also to the reformist party line (Yoo, 2012: 356–360). The Jepa-PD group, however, also faced the half-collapse of its organization after a series of stringent arrests and prosecutions, and later formed another current to support a more class-based vanguard party, following a more Trotskyist political line. At this time, the liquidation of the labor movement base was not merely pursued by the united PD groups. An influential NL labor movement group, the Seoktap (Stone Tower), which had influence on a much wider base among newly formed trade unions in the large-scale heavy industries, moved its center of activities from trade unions to political activities to support the liberal opposition party in the 1992 presidential election, and later moved to critical journalism.13 The conjuncture around 1991 and 1992 was predominately determined by two factors: the changed ruling strategy brought about by the merger of the ruling party with an important part of the opposition liberal party on the one hand, and on the other, by the active intervention of the Agency for National Security Planning (NSP) in mass movements. The collapse of the former Soviet Bloc created favorable conditions for manipulation on the part of ruling groups against mass movements. Top leaders of mass movements could not find a way out of embarrassment although rank-and-file activists were not yet very seriously influenced by the government policies or the collapse of Soviet socialism. What was worse, a symptomatic episode was reported that even a group of ICDW members had submitted to the NSP a letter announcing their abandonment of socialism (Yoo, 2012: 359). Despite the PD’s critical intervention in social movements, the unification of the three PD groups and the weakening of labor movement bases made the myth of party loom large, and made PD’s other important characteristics hazy and set aside. Although the establishment of a vanguard party (or, at least, a legal mass party) could not be regarded as an ultimate solution for many problems of the movements, the myth of party was so strong that other social issues became of minor importance and were treated instrumentally during the process of party formation. After 1991, the weakening or liquidation of the mass base by many PD groups became real problems that remained with them for more than two decades.14 The theoretical and practical innovations of the PD First of all, the discussion of the problematic nature of capitalism was the most important theoretical issue for the PD. There emerged disputes around the nature, level and particularity of capitalism in Korea. Does capitalist growth mean the development of a country or an increase in exploitation? Will the path of capitalist development in late developing countries follow the same trajectory of that in Western developed countries? What kind of implications do we have from the impact of colonial and neo-colonial relationships? With the irreversible tide of workers’ strikes in the 1980s, a consensus was formed that capitalist contradiction could not be neglected as a critical element in the analysis of any conjuncture. In spite of this consensus, the definition of capitalism varied depending on respective theoretical and political background. For the PD, capitalism could not have

182  Seung-Wook Baek a pure and simple form, but is rather complex in structure not because of its delayed development but because of the nature of capitalist social formation itself. Capitalism should be explained by its concrete complexity, overdetermined by historical conjuncture. Likewise, its contradictions and the specific nature of a given conjuncture could no longer be explained by its retarded development in Korea, but by the principal contradiction of a given conjuncture and articulation of contradictions. With this unique theoretical position, the PD did not separate revolution from democracy, revolution from transition, social classes from the masses, local setting from global arrangement, history from principles, and so on. The time for pure capitalist contradiction will never arrive.15 That’s why several PD intellectuals later accepted the ideas of World-Systems Analysis, such as “historical capitalism” (Immanueal Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi) and Gerard Dumenil’s analysis of capitalist crises and finacialization, since it was complexity and unevenness that made the main pillars of capitalist development, not its underdevelopment (Yoon, 1998, 2008; Baek, 2006). This interpretation of capitalism and revolution in developing countries inherits Lenin’s innovative interpretation of the Russian Revolution (from the April Theses to his late works) and some of the basic arguments of bureaucratic capitalism as proposed by Mao Zedong and Chen Boda in China in the 1940s (Hyunsilgwagwahak vols 4 and 5, 1989, 1990; Park, 1989; Yoon, 1988). The formulation of the neocolonial state-monopoly capitalism theory was a consequence of the above conjuncture in the late 1980s. As it took the position of “internal critique of the main currents of Marxism,” it accepted a “dogmatic” frame of state-monopoly capitalism, but in a different way. As Park Hyunchae argued, this formulation combined a development stage (state-monopoly capitalism) with a typology (colonial-dependent type) of capitalism. As Yoon Soyeong and Hyunsilgwagwahak group argued, state-monopoly capitalism was not interpreted as a high stage of Western capitalism, but the nature and particularity of late development against colonial background, as defined by Mao Zedong as “comprador-feudal state-monopoly capitalism.”16 Following this explanation, neocolonial state-monopoly capitalism cannot be understood as a foundation for reformist strategy in the sense of the stagist theory of Western capitalism, but rather as a reason for the impossibility of reformism due to the lack of a material base for it. Although from the late 1980s and to the early 1990s the formulation of neocolonial state-monopoly capitalism had certain critical influences on the viewpoints of various PD groups, the formulation faced many problems interpreting and responding to global and domestic crises with the new changes of accumulation regime, class structure, global impacts, social movements and labor control. Since the 1990s, PD groups became less reliant on this formulation and began using “neo-liberalism” and “alter-globalization” in its stead to analyze contemporary global and domestic conjunctures and responses. Critical explanation of Korean and world capitalism has been accompanied by critical re-interpretation of the dialectics of revolution and transition. One of the important contributions of the PD was its interpretation of the relationship between revolution and transition. The PD argues that direct socialist revolution

Contemporary South Korean Marxism  183 is impossible and can only begin as a people’s democratic revolution (PDR). Socialism cannot be a legal promulgation or collective deeds, rather it encompasses structural transformation by collective mass subjects. This entails a further argument that socialism or communism itself accompanies democracy as an organic element since it poses the problem of new politics by the masses under socialism to transform existing social relations (including social relations of production as well as social relations of the imaginary). The argument began by ananlysing Lenin’s late ideas that make a distinction between real socialization and formal socialization.17 Socialist transformation can only be possible and successful by inventing a new path for political subjects to intervene in the transformation. This idea also leads to a bridging of the gap between the idea of politics as organized actions restricted to a separate field and the idea of economy as an automaton or a thing. The dialectics of revolution and transition also poses questions about the relationship between the formation of an autonomous mass movement and the possible transformation of the structure, about the capitalist nature of productive forces and their possible transformation, about over- and under-determination of capital–labor contradictions and about the dialectic relationship between classes and the masses. It was possible to imagine concrete strategies only with this problematic, based on the combination of mid-term and long-term temporalities and transitional programs. It is, however, dubious to suggest that all the PD groups shared an essential idea of the PD in terms of the relationship between revolution and transition. As we will see later, this issue became much more critical in terms of the interpretation of anti-capitalist politics. It was also related to the problem of the relation between classes and the masses. The issue of PD’s democracy was also an issue of its connection to the mass movement. Much focus was put on organizations centering on workers’ movements, but within PD groups there was a disagreement on the issue of labor movement centrality. For the PD, workers’ movements were chosen not because they represented fundamental contradiction and were the only important center of all movements, but because without movements by workers, the capitalist structure could not be transformed and also because it was one of the most important mass movements that offered actual and potential to the masses to transform themselves. For this reason, workers’ movement cannot be equal to labor movement in their typical historical forms. Labor movement is interpreted as a movement concerned with labor issues, while workers’ movement is interpreted as a movement initiated by workers themselves that includes labor issues. Labor issues are not necessarily given priority over other issues in all cases and should be evaluated based on concrete analysis of contemporary capitalism and concrete conjunctures. Principle disagreement on the relationship between the party and trade unions already reflected implicit divergence on this issue.18 In order to transform the masses themselves into political subjects, the PD emphasized and concentrated its energy on the intellectual enhancement of the masses by self-education and self-organization, and therefore it started a legacy that emphasized two fields: the first was to organize the masses of workers and students into a movement characterized by organization-cum-study teams, and the

184  Seung-Wook Baek second, happening simultaneously, was to develop art and literature movements, as was the case with the People’s Association of Art and Literature Movement (Minmoonyeon) in the late 1980s and the early 1990s (Park, 1990: 319–339). This consideration for the close internal relations between theory, mass ideology, selftransformation of the masses and political intervention in the life of the masses was one of the most precious experiences for the PD. However, this heritage has neither been explored further nor passed on significantly. Finally, the most significant issue distinguishing the PD from the NL was the national division and reunification. The PD argued that it was not preferential for the reunification to happen in stages, but that it should rather be regarded as a structural issue accompanying the parallel transformation of two regions through different processes. This issue was the starting point for refuting all theoretical and political responses that implied evolutionist gradualism by stages. The PD also explained the problem of North Korea not as a breakaway from socialism but as an extreme case of nationalist Stalinism, which is just a stage in the history of socialism/Marxism (Park and Cho, 1989–1991: vol. 2, ch. 11).

Issues around the differentiation of the PD: heterogeneous coalition and accompanying mutual deficiency Among the various PD groups, none encompasses all of the following three elements: coherent analysis by Marxist intellectuals, utilization of and intervention in political institutions, and organization of the masses. This mutual deficiency urged the three main PD currents to form a unitary political organization in the early 1990s. Their mutual deficiency stimulated both a merger and conflict between PD groups. The groups were split on the form that this coalition should take, particularly whether it should be a unitary organization, united front, council or another form. As the PD was not a coherent and unitary organization, its positions on concrete issues diverged internally, which sometimes led to conflicts between different groups. First of all, the interpretation of capitalism was not wholly agreed upon. Specifically, the disagreement among them stemmed from the basic issue of whether capitalism could be interpreted as having different stages, and if so, which were applicable. There may have also been a disagreement on the interpretation of principal contradiction. Divergent viewpoints on capitalism resulted in divergent interpretations of the contemporary direction of global change. Could this be interpreted as a long history of growth and development or as a deepening contradiction of the system? How could the history of capitalism be interpreted as a succession of surmounting crises and transformation? How could local changes be combined with much wider global changes (Park and Cho, 1989–1991: vol. 1, parts 6 and 7)? Disagreement on the nature of Korean capitalism entailed and precipitated bifurcation in the arguments against neo-liberalism. Polemics on neo-liberalism within PD groups since the 1990s have displayed both convergent and divergent positions on contemporary capitalism, and were accelerated by the financial crisis of the late 1990s. In Korea, the rise of neo-liberalism had already become a problem in the 1980s (as had been manifested by Chun Doo-hwan’s austerity policy)

Contemporary South Korean Marxism  185 even though the word itself became popular only after the 1997 financial crisis. However, after 1985 the exceptional conditions of the Korean economy, created by the three-lows boom, brought confusion and misconception in regards to the growing contradictions of contemporary capitalism. On the one hand, some looked toward the potentiality of the Korean economy to join the advanced countries’ club and tried to find a new space within institutionalized politics. They misunderstood the global trend of neo-liberalism and the accumulated contradictions of capitalism and transformed themselves to move in an institutionalized social-democratic direction.19 Others interpreted the contemporary conjuncture since the 1980s as exhibiting a deepening neo-liberal restructuring of the Korean economy and as a transformation of Korea under neo-liberal financial globalization. They elaborated on the implications of the exceptional economic situation under the three-lows after 1985 (SISS, 1991b), later self-criticizing the limitations of their former definition of Korean capitalism as simply having been neocolonial state-monopoly capitalism. This theorization and its implications for revolution theory were reformulated in favor of the formulations of neo-liberal financial globalization and alter-globalization.20 Indeed, different interpretations of contemporary capitalism underlay the background for the subsequent differentiations in left attitudes toward the financial crisis of the late 1990s and evaluations of the liberal regimes under Kim Daejung and Roh Moohyun.21 The issue of the masses could be both a strong and weak point for the PD, which did not accept the existing conditions of the masses as a given and tried to transform them into political subjects capable of changing the system. The PD was supposed to be the bridge between the gap. However, it faced two core problems in this area. The first was maintaining a myth of the masses as given revolutionary forces (on the flip side of the coin, it also revealed an instrumental viewpoint on the masses). The second problem was new generational responses that exhibited unsupported findings on various vital aspects of the masses and tried to find the possibility of political activity in all aspects of life. The former maintains an enlightened attitude towards the masses and has little knowledge of the ideological contradictions in the life of masses,22 whereas the latter displays less understanding of the mutual relationships between the critiques of ideology and the critiques of political economy.23 The former tended to show a certain reductionism of infrastructure and under-estimation of the complexity of mass ideology while the latter did not pay much attention to the dynamics of capitalism and the contradictions of the masses. During the 1990s, the PD faced important changes in its identity and orientation. First, mergers among the PD groups in the early 1990s resulted in the concentration of their activities around party formation and set themselves apart from the grassroots workers’ movement. The increase of their influence on political society was proportionate to the decrease of their influences on the masses. This change happened at the same time as the bureacratization of the trade union movement and mass parties. Second, the 1990s were also an embarrassing period for student movements. The PD adherents within student movments suffered due to changing trends: on the one

186  Seung-Wook Baek hand, they lost important links with the mass movement as former PD organizations retreated from the space of labor movements; on the other hand, they lagged behind the NL in their influence on the fast-growing masses of university students. Some of them found a way out by joining the field of party building or the so-called “civil movements,” such as NGOs, which did not necessarily result in good consequences for mass movements. Moreover, just before the 1997 financial cirisis, many of them had no idea about the emerging neo-liberal changes. Student movements that had been influenced by the former PD, such as the so-called broad AMC (Anti-Monopoly Capitalism) groups that were later succeeded by the National Students’ March, the Red Flag and Solidarity of Progressive Students, muddled through the 1990s by accepting a theoretical legacy from the past PDs and opening up a new space for the movement, which was struggling against the dominant NL currents in student movements.24 The situation was not any different for the labor movement. As student movements became concerned with party-based movements, campus-related struggles, movements for Korea’s re-unification, and the so-called civil movements since the early 1990s, the labor movement became much more focused on the workers themselves. The labor movement became much more helpless against the emerging civil movements as it was trapped (and split) within the technical division of labor between two currents, one connected to the strengthening enterprise unionism through the process from National Conference of Trade Union Representatives (NCTUR: Jeonnodae) to the KCTU (Korean Confederation of Trade Unions: Minjunochong), and the other connected to political party lines from the formation of the United People’s Party in 1992 to the formation of the Democratic Labor Party in 2000. On different levels trade unions lost important links of solidarity with other movements (as well as within the movement itself) and for the politicization and radicalization of the masses, becoming gradually isolated. The space in politics for the labor movement was actually caught and occupied by party movements and civil movements, and a delegated form of movement became dominant. A symbolic turn was the introduction of a tripartite scheme in the late 1990s for labor issues, immediately after the heroic general strikes in 1998 followed by the defeat of the KCTU against the new Labor Law, which was intended to accelerate employment flexibility. As the 1997 financial crisis delivered a huge shock to mass movements, social movements and the PD were in a disarray during the crisis although it was not the first time that neo-liberal changes had taken place in Korea. The crisis was a strong blow to the movement, making a rupture bigger than before. Nevertheless, a desperate search for a new direction within the PD and protests against neoliberalism started immediately after the crisis. New organizations of the PD were formed and activated just after the crisis (e.g. PSSP in 1998, the Worker’s Power in 1999, Cultural Action in 1999).

Internal weakness of the PD and repeated pragmatic coalitions In terms of mass organization and movement activities, the NL tended to be much more influential than the PD, although the NL did not give much attention to the

Contemporary South Korean Marxism  187 transformation of the ideological conditions of the masses and usually tended to accept their state as a given. On the other hand, although the PD was very critical toward the NL’s attitude to the masses, they themselves did not have enough influence on mass activities. The PD was not successful in transforming mass conditions and widening their influence among the masses by intervening in their life experiences. A short history of the progressive political parties reveals basic difficulties in the strengthening of its mass foundations. Around the issue of the party itself, there had not been a unification of the two poles: the theoretical vanguard groups (although these are not party-based organizations) and the pragmatic movement organizations. The PD itself has the internal dilemma of being “theoretically correct, but practically lacking in influence.” It had tended to diverge between two paths: one following a group of radical intellectuals who provide a coherent theoretical analysis but with little understanding on mass ideological conditions, and the other following some groups that had a relatively wide base of mass organizations that tended to sink into a pragmatic position in terms of theory and practice, simply following mass ideological conditions and paying little attention to the effect of torsions and chasms of ideological contradictions. The latter group easily maintained their organizational integrity by enforcing some Marxist principles and basic ideas about socialism, but this was at the expense of simplifying contradictions rather than making them more complex, and disseminating the myth of the purification of social relations and contradictions among the masses. When the theory (or rather organizational ideology) and practice (or reality) diverge, people may leave the movement, and its alliance or coalition with other movements would face great difficulties. Counterpoising the weakness in mass bases, the problem of the political party haunted the history of the PD. While some have strongly focused on the role of a political party and regarded it as a superior form of political development by the masses, be it a mass party or a vanguard party, others have regarded the party as a secondary tactical tool and have looked to mass organizations as principle setting. The myth of party blocked further development of the unique characteristics of the PD. Even though different PD groups in the early 1990s shared basic orientations, their internal differences and even contradictions among different organizations were oppressed by the myth of party as an ultimate solution. After the upheaval of the workers’ movement from 1987 to the early 1990s, left movements set the path for the establishment of a political party to consolidate the accomplishments of the movements (the political empowerment of the labor classes). Even though the path diverged between the mass party line and the vanguard party line, a very typical sort of division of labor between the political party and mass organizations remained a solution to the difficulties of social movements. Fierce debate provoked by the dissolution of the NCTU (Jeonnohyup) and the preparation of the KCTU included optimistic arguments that opened the path for the Democratic Labor Party. When the KCTU was established, many associations and organization for workers’ movements and local federations of trade unions were excluded, and these were supposed to be absorbed by the party. Paradoxically, official exclusion of political organizations during the building of the KCTU opened the road to informal and sectarian interventions by various

188  Seung-Wook Baek political organizations. One of the important legacies of the NCTU was weakened during the process, that is, the Local Confederation of Trade Unions (among which the most famous was Masan-changwon LCTU). As the tradition of local confederations of trade unions was weakened and liquidated, it became difficult to form any locally based solidarity struggles for a specific issue as the local headquarters of the KCTU became a bureaucratic sub-organization of the central KCTU (Kim, 2007: 186–194). A political movement that focused on party formation had been gradually isolated from external relationships with the labor movement, even though the voice of the KCTU became important within the party line. Since the early 1990s, moves to form a mass party have begun among PD groups.25 The PD has been haunted by the critique of its weak mass foundation, especially after the early 1990s when there was strong orientation toward party formation. Some PD groups that still have relatively good mass foundations have argued that retaining a foundation of advanced workers would be important for gaining influential power, but even those groups could not overcome the problem that they could not lead the political conjuncture of that time. On the other hand, some other groups have been critical about the legal mass party line of other PD groups. Some were trying to form a more class-based party, but were not successful in getting to the level at which they had hoped to arrive. Even though some successors of the former Jepa-PD combined a mass foundation and the radical class party line, they could not solve these basic problems. Since the early 1990s, temporal and pragmatic coalitions have been formed between the NL and the PD, though these have failed repeatedly. Many former PD groups around the party line have been trying to find roads pragmatically. Recurrent pragmatic coalitions between the PD and the NL have been formed historically since the PD has always felt its weaker mass base, while the NL has always felt its weaker theoretical capability to analyze a given conjuncture and to have influences among the left masses. Yet these pragmatic coalitions have frequently resulted in mutual conflicts and subsequent divorces of the two tendencies. The history of the last two decades shows a recurrent impasse for PD groups that have a strong orientation toward party formation. This gives a significant lesson to other groups that pursue more movement-based activities. Other left factions that do not have an orientation toward party-centered movements are trying to widen their influence among mass bases. They are trying to revive the legacy of the mass movement era and widen their scope of influence in organizations of irregular workers, local organizations, feminist transformation of the mass movement and organizations of the coalition among left factions.26 However, these groups of “movement left” still have some problems in terms of retaining their political and organizational coherence and making significant political influences on the conjuncture without maintaining a party form. Active PD groups still exist in different areas. Party activists devote their energy to several parties, mainly in the Justice Party and to some extent in the Labor Party, but their influence has hugely decreased. Some persistent activists who are preparing the foundation of a class party (semi-vanguard party) gathered around the

Contemporary South Korean Marxism  189 Grounding Committee for the Socialist Labor Party (Sanowi), which later founded Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party (SRWP) in 2016. Third, “Movement Left” does their best in solidarity organizations like the PSSP. Student organizations, like the National Student March, which may be the only remaining left student organization beside the NL student organizations, have a close relationship with the PSSP. Each group has their activists within or in a close relationship with the KCTU.

Is anti-capitalist politics possible? Aporia and actuality of the PD The ups and downs of Korean Marxism have also been accompanied by sociopolitical fluctuations. In addition, the situation of Korean Marxism and social movements is not set apart from the global context. The world is experiencing a paradoxical period: a serious global and structural crisis of capitalism is in progress, while Marxism, which can provide a coherent critique of this crisis, has not yet appeared to recover its vitality. This situation of double-crisis suggests divergent possibilities for Marxism: either its possible demise as a significant emancipatory theory and practice, or its possible revival and transformation through facing the crisis. Marxists always face a very fundamental question. Even though they aim to overcome or supersede capitalism, in many cases it is very difficult to find an appropriate answer to the question of what anti-capitalist politics truly means. PD in Korea was no exception. PD’s experiences consolidate the lesson that anticapitalist politics is an aporia for social movements, and the party form cannot be a marvelous solution for the aporia. There may be five different aspects related to anti-capitalist politics: slogans, demands, organizations, programs and mass politics. Each one of these presupposes the others, but there are no guaranteed internal relations. In aims or slogans, it is easy to discern an anti-capitalist orientation. In terms of their effects, however, it is not easy to find an appropriate and effective way of defining anti-capitalist politics. For the PD, its relative strength lies in the fact that it looks at many of the basic contradictions of capitalism and its effects in specific conjunctures on principal contradiction and over-determination. If PD’s theoretical critique does not find an appropriate ideological form to realize its “truth,” the theoretical anti-capitalist analysis does not necessarily guarantee the practice of anti-capitalist effects. In the history of mass movements, transformation of the structure and the formation of autonomous political mass subjects became an antinomy. Without autonomous mass subjects, the transformation of structures would not be durable and consolidated. Without the transformation of structures, the masses would not be formed as autonomous subjects. Each pole supposes the other pole as its ultimate solution, but the solution is not guaranteed in advance or in principle.27 Anti-capitalist politics can easily be lost, substituting imaginary targets for its original aim. Looking back upon the history of Marxism, the most useful, albeit illusionary, solution to bridging the gap was taking a party form. Party has been supposed to combine the autonomy of mass subjects with

190  Seung-Wook Baek the transformation of structures. It has programs and organizations, so it can be imagined to pursue the transitional process successfully with its bureaucratic organization according to its theory and programs. If there happen to be serious troubles, these can be regarded not as the result of contradictions within the party itself, but due to personal faults or erroneous political lines. A possible solution to this would be to purify the party, after which all problems will be solved. If there are ideological problems among the masses, the party can solve these problems with its “truth.” If the party encounters internal problems, the masses may intervene in the party and purify it. As such, the party form has been a marvelous answer to solve the aporia between revolution and transition or between autonomous mass subjects and the transformation of structures. Socialism has been understood under the unitary package of party, program and transition. Certain structures are supposed to be transformed gradually (or radically) by certain organization of the party form with the orientation of its program. As already manifested in many historical moments (one of the most dramatic being the Chinese Cultural Revolution), the aporia between revolution and transition and between the autonomous masses and the transformation of structures is very intense and is not easily soluble (Baek, 2012). The problem is a very fundamental political aporia for modern politics. Clear distinction but mutual connection between revolution and transition is the PD’s strong point, but its implication and aporia have not yet been fully investigated and practiced. We can still imagine revolution and transition existing together, because this political intervention between revolution and transition is able to bring about a new field or space for the masses by twisting and making a crack in the existing structure that has been closed or cut off from them, resulting in an increasing possibility of a new politics and pushing accumulated effects toward the direction of transforming the structure, ultimately toward the desired dimension. To achieve this change, more open and sensitive eyes to ideological conditions of the masses are inevitably needed. Even though the PD’s weakeness and shortcomings are not the only and direct causes for the present crisis of Korean social movements, challenging efforts to face its own history and heritage are needed more than ever to rediscover its own useful and valuable starting point and to overcome the present deadlock.

Notes   1 On more concrete explanation of the recent situation in Korea, see Gray (2013) and Shin (2012). With growing mass complaints and protests, President Park Geunhye was impeached by the National Assembly on 9 December 2016, even with half majority votes by the ruling party. However, this impeachment was not initiated by social movement, but by internal conflict within the ruling group.   2 The title “PD stems from the 1980s polemics on tasks of immediate revolution in Korea. Certain groups of Marxist intellectuals and activists argued that the immediate task of the revoluion was not a direct socialist revolution but a “People’s Democratic Revolution” (PDR) by re-interpreting the history of the Russian and the Chinese Revolutions, East European Road and Latin American polemics on revolutions. See the journal Hyeonsilgwa Gwahak [Reality and Science], Lee (1991), Lee et al. (1991),

Contemporary South Korean Marxism  191 Yoon (1988), Park (1989), Inminnoryeon (1989) and Yoo (2005: 172–177). See also Gray (2008a: 113–117; in his article, PD—political democracy—should be corrected to PD (People’s Democracy)).   3 On the recent situation and impasse of social movements in Korea, see Shin (2010, 2012), Song (2013), Glassman et al. (2008), Gray (2008b, 2013), Seo (2013) and HartLandsberg and Burkett (2001).   4 That is the background for the emergence of the nationalist “division system theory” by Paik Nakcheong. See Paik (1998). For its critique, see Son (2011: 840–866).   5 Conservatives recently utilized the term “North Korea Followers” to vilify all the opposing forces.   6 There are Trotskyist groups as well that are not always defined as the PD although they are regarded as Marxist groups (examples include All Together, among others; for its background, see Jeong, 2005).   7 The argument of the “1987 regime” has been a typically liberal interpretation of the 1987 political events and their implications. See Kim (2009). The distinction between formal democratization and substantial democratization by Choi Jangjip could be included within the same logic (Choi, 2005).   8 They proposed the formulation of “neocolonial state-monopoly capitalism” as the nature of Korean society, and this formulation has been widely accepted by most PD groups as well as other left groups since 1985–1986 (Park, 1989; Yoon, 1988).   9 See Lee (2013) and Bang (2009) on the rise of NL groups. 10 Many Trotskyist activists shared this position. For example, see Jeong (2005, 2006). 11 On the embarrassment of social movements in the early 1990s, see Yoo (2005: 284–294). 12 On the political postions of each group, see Lee et al. (1991), Yoo (2012: 262–270). 13 Interview with a former core member of the Seoktap (November 2013) 14 After 1991, on the impasse of Korean social movements, see Shin (2010) and Gray (2008a, 2008b). 15 That is why the PD showed much more affinity with the ND’s (National Democratic Revolution) position rather than the PD’s in preceding C-N-P (CD-ND-PD) polemics where the PD was interpreted as representing a position closer to a simple “proletarian revolution.” See table 4-3 in Yoo (2005: 173). 16 In this context, Yoon suggested the thesis “the higher the monopoly is, the deeper the denpendency is” (Yoon, 1988). 17 The PD re-interpreted Lenin’s later works, mediated in Balibar’s work (Balibar, 1977) and Soviet polemics dealing with socialist revolutions and capitalism. See SISS (1991a) and Hyunsilgwagwahak vol. 5 (1990). 18 Part of the PD emphasized the importance of ideological analysis, and introduced Athusser’s thesis on “the crisis of Marxism” and Balibar’s re-interpretation of Marxist history to reformulate the aporia of political subject formation. See Seo (1993) and Yoon (1992, 1993b). 19 It is interesting to find that Ahn Byeongjik’s “middle advanced capitalism” theory, which later became the foundation for conservative interpretation of modern Korean history, and ICDW’s reformist position, which became the foundation for mass party line, shared similar theoretical background on the issue of Korean capitalism. 20 This elaboration was mediated by the debate on “the crisis of Marxism” in Korea in the 1990s, mainly suggested by Gwacheon Research Centre led by the former theorist of the “neocolonial state-monopoly theory,” Yoon Soyeong and the PSSP. See Yoon (1993a, 2008). 21 On different responses to the contemporary neo-liberal changes in Korea, see PSSP (2006), Jinbojeongchiyeonguso (2007) and Jeong (2005). 22 For example, former Jepa-PD, the Workers’ Power and the Preparing Committee for Socialist Labor Party. 23 For example, the Cultural Action and youth group wihin the New Progressive Party. 24 See Lee et al. (1998) and Go (2013: 279–286) about the overall review of the situation of student movements in the 1990s.

192  Seung-Wook Baek 25 On the general picture of the differentiation among left groups from 1980s to the 1990s, see Yoo (2012: 356, table 13). 26 Among these, the most outstanding is the PSSP (People’s Solidarity for Social Progress) that has led the united protest against neo-liberalism during the 2000s with strong influences among the KoPA (Korean People’s Action Against the FTA and WTO). For details about the activities of the PSSP, see Kim (2011). 27 Étienne Balibar (2002) supposes different concepts of politics to understand this difference and aporia.

11 Imagining Asia and the Chinese Revolution Takeuchi Yoshimi and his transnational afterlives Viren Murthy In the past few decades, as scholars have criticized Eurocentrism and searched for Asian identity, they have rediscovered the work of Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910– 1977). Takeuchi was of course a major public intellectual in postwar Japan, but his most salient work revolves around a theory of Asia in relation to decolonization and a critique of Eurocentric hegemony. Combating Eurocentrism inevitably entails grappling with issues many intellectuals from various disciplines confront today; in particular, critics of Eurocentricism confront a specific reading of the relationship between unevenness and time. As people perceive unevenness around the world, they imagine the historical trajectories of regions around the world travelling to the same path. In short, the unevenness of capitalist modernity is grasped in terms of speed, which refers to a movement in time—different regions and nations appear to move to the same destination at different velocities. Pan-Asianists and other critics of Eurocentrism attack precisely this picture of the world. Marxists have at times reproduced the above spatio-temporal complex through positing a sequence of modes of production and Takeuchi’s confrontation with the above model involves problems concerning the intersection of Marxism, Third-Worldism and postcolonialism, since he asks how resistance on the peripheries of global capitalist is possible. Despite the extremely important work concerning Takeuchi in recent years, there has been an insufficient engagement with Takeuchi’s relation to Marxism and how his work could be further illuminated by bringing his work in dialogue with Marxist theory. At the heart of the confrontation between Takeuchi and Marxism is the question of how one thinks of the Marxist project in relation to critiques of modernization theory. Proponents of modernization theory often translated geographical unevenness into temporal backwardness and concluded that Asian regions needed eventually to catch up with the West. Using Johannes Fabian’s famous concept, we could say that modernization theorists and many Japanese Marxists denied coevalness to Asia (Fabian, 1983, passim). However, as we shall see, Takeuchi and more recent proponents of Asia, such as Kuan-Hsing Chen and Wang Hui, use Asia to overcome such progressivist visions of history and propose a counter-narrative. In this counter-discourse, Asia functions as an ideal, which involves an alternative to a world dominated by Euro-America and capitalism. In the cases of Takeuchi and Wang Hui, this critique of modernization

194  Viren Murthy theory and by extension orthodox Marxism is connected to a re-evaluation of the Chinese Revolution, which serves to inspire thinking about alternative futures. Obviously, in different periods and places, the attempt to revive the Chinese Revolution would have varying implications. During the early postwar period in Japan, the Chinese Revolution and the idea of Asia were intimately connected with the possibility of a different future viewed in Marxist terms, namely a socialist future. While Marxists proposed more evolutionary visions towards socialism, proponents of pan-Asianism saw in uneven development possibilities for a postcapitalist future. Perhaps one was able to compare speeds precisely because one posited a common destination and this assumption concealed the potentially different trajectories of peripheral regions. In other words, being on the margins of the global capitalist system was now seen as a curse that harbored within it the blessing of human emancipation. However, since the 1990s, this socialist future seems to be receding into the past as we transition to a neo-liberal world and with this loss, the discourses surrounding Asia have also changed. In our present neo-liberal context, scholars tend to provincialize Marxism, by claiming that it is merely European. One might say that Takeuchi already begins this process by phrasing global problems in terms of Asia and the West. Indeed, most readings of Takeuchi that are prevalent today continue this provincialization by bracketing the issue of Marxism from Takeuchi’s oeuvre. Although Takeuchi was no Marxist, he does not completely provincialize Marxism as he continues adhere to the goal of Marxism. In the context of Takeuchi’s work, “Asia” does not just refer to a region opposed to the West; it is also a marker of uneven development, which harbors within it hopes for a global socialism. This essay studies Takeuchi, Chen and Wang to rescue the ideal of a socialist future through rethinking the relationship between pan-Asianism, capitalism and Marxism. Given this problematic, I will conclude my essay with a discussion of how Marx’s distinction between real and formal subsumption, which Harootunian has mentioned in his chapter for this volume, could shed light on Takeuchi and his legacy. Despite the different contexts of the various pan-Asianists discussed in this chapter, to the extent that they are interested in a post-capitalist society, they seek to mobilize elements that are not completely or only formally subsumed by capital. Consequently, through varying tropes, pan-Asianist discourse constantly grapples with the problems and possibilities of formal subsumption.

Takeuchi Yoshimi: nothingness, modernity and primordial Maoism Takeuch Yoshimi is famous for combining his understanding of Chinese literature, in particular Lu Xun, with a critique of progressive history. We should understand this critique of modernization theory in relation to the opposite tendency by Japanese Marxists, especially the Japanese Communist Party, to stress that Japan needed to complete its modernization project. Although this debate concerns East Asia and in particular Japan, the positions in this discursive conflict are part of a larger global problematic represented by an ideology of modernization

Imagining Asia and the Chinese Revolution   195 and visions of resistance. The former emphasizes the convergence of the whole world towards real subsumption and modernity, while the latter underscores possibilities of resistance in spaces not completely subsumed by capital. China was often conceived of as a space that began to realize the dream of resistance. In postwar Japan, there was a radical change in images about China, especially after 1949, but as early as 1946 there were new perceptions of China, since Communist leaders such as Nosaka Sanzō returned from Yanan and wrote about the Communist movement there. Japanese intellectuals began to imagine China as a force resisting the global capitalist system. In the postwar context of anti-colonial and post-colonial nationalism, there was a split between the official Japanese governments’ policy and the representation of Asia among intellectuals, but both would involve drawing on the legacies of pan-Asianism. With respect to the official policy, Japan was allied with the United States, which was fundamentally oriented by the Cold War division between free nations and communist nations, along with non-aligned nations. In order to support the “free nations,” the United States hoped to influence Asia through Japan. From this perspective, the United States promoted regionalism for its economic ends. The issue here is not just Asia, but what kind of Asia and towards what purpose? The various leaders of Japan, especially Kishi Nobusuke, actively attempted to implement such a policy of regionalism in the service of American capital. Modernization theory would serve as the ideology behind this vision of Asia. However, many in the media and some intellectuals took the opposite position and largely supported various movements for independence, China’s role in the Korean War and the non-aligned movement. There was a proliferation of essays on New China in journals and newspapers, which were on the whole positive (Baba, 2010, passim). In this context, Takeuchi continued his earlier discussion of Asia focusing explicitly on the role of China, within the narrative of Third World nationalist liberation, which he connected to a critique of modernity. He constructs this critique in his famous essay, “What is Modernity?” written in 1948, where he describes the possibility of an alternative Asia or Orient. The basic idea of this essay concerns the distinction between Chinese, Japanese and Western responses to Modernity. He argues that Chinese resisted while the Japanese did not and thus the Japanese reproduced Western modernity and imperialism. He grounds Chinese and Japanese politics in their respective approaches to history, which are in turn expressed in their respective literatures. Japanese literature does not enter history in this way [the way Chinese literature does]; it looks from outside at race horses running the course of history. . . . The Chinese horse is lagging behind while the Japanese horse quickly pulls ahead. Such is how things appear, and this view is an accurate one. It is accurate because one is not running. (Takeuchi, 2005: 73) Takeuchi describes a relationship between action and time. Because the Japanese do not enter history, they merely reify time and look at nations as if

196  Viren Murthy they are racehorses running towards a common goal. He distinguishes between seeing and acting. The Japanese are equated with the Western world of science and objectivity, while the Chinese are connected with possibility of action and making history. Takeuchi makes a Hegelian gesture here. Japanese literature, like natural science, attempts to grasp the object without taking into account its own role in creating the world. The world appears in such a way that hides the role of the subject in creating the object. In Marx’s version of this story of reification, people in a market-oriented society focus on the relationship between things, rather than the people and processes that create the things we see and buy. This is why relationships between people appear like relationships between things. In Takeuchi’s case described above, Japanese literature deals with nations and trajectories as given without thinking about the processes that produce the appearance of such trajectories. The image of Asia and China as lagging behind is produced by imperialism and the struggle against it. One’s view of behind and ahead is intimately connected to the grid of the world that imperialism produces. Takeuchi himself discusses how time-consciousness concerning Europe and the Orient (Asia) is produced: In order for Europe to be Europe, it was forced to invade the Orient. . . . Europe’s invasion of the Orient resulted in the phenomenon of Oriental capitalism, and this signified the equivalence between European self-preservation and self-expansion. For Europe this was accordingly conceptualized as the progress of world history and the triumph of reason. (Takeuchi, 2005: 54) Europe is forced to invade the Orient because of a self-expansionary logic, which Takeuchi at times connects to capitalism, and this expansion produced both the self-consciousness of the Orient and its initial feeling of being backward. Such a feeling emerges because the lens of Europe is seen as universal, the triumph of Europe appears as the triumph of world history. This appearance becomes reified precisely because one does not enter history and views it as a spectator, taking what is presented as reality. Takeuchi associates reification and the idea of a neutral perspective with Europe. “But even apart from this, our very supposition of a third vantage point [separate from Europe and the Orient] represents a European form of thought” (Takeuchi, 2005: 58). Although probably not familiar with Georg Lukács’s work, Takeuchi adds a spatial dimension to the critique of reification. In Lukács’s view, the proletariat, which has no nation, serves as the fulcrum of resistance to capitalism. Resistance in this case takes the form of a defying all types of reification. Takeuchi follows this view and writes: “Not only does Europe become possible in Europe, the Orient also becomes possible there. If Europe is represented by the notion of reason, then both reason and unreason (i.e., nature) would be European. Everything belongs to Europe” (Takeuchi, 2005: 59). Given this notion of Europe as encompassing all of existence, China’s resistance emerges from nothingness, which we

Imagining Asia and the Chinese Revolution   197 saw in Takeuchi’s earlier essay. Resistance emerges from the nothingness of subjectivity, which deconstructs temporal notions of advance and retreat. Takeuchi connects this to the problem of time and the instant. The instant (shunkan) is a limit, a point within history that lacks extension, or rather it represents the place (which is not an expanse) from which history emerges. Hence it is in fact wrong to describe the instant in terms of that movement in which advance equals retreat. (Takeuchi, 2005: 58; cf. 1993: 21) In Takeuchi’s view, it is Lu Xun and later Mao, who embodied this different type of temporality that subverted the logic of advance and retreat. Such resistance first appears as a refusal to be reified—the attempt to move forward where all roads are blocked. However, Takeuchi rethinks resistance in relation to imperialism more concretely and contends that, China, and by extension Asia, have been overcoming the reified visual structures of imperialism and resisting. Some Japanese intellectuals continued to adhere to the idea of Asian unity after the Chinese Revolution and into the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1950s, the concept of the Third World, was slowly gaining prominence due to a number of global events. For example, after the outbreak of the Korean War, Japanese intellectuals such as Takeuchi would see clearly the difference between Japan and China’s respective roles in Korea. During this period, Takeuchi wrote numerous essays about the significance of the Chinese Revolution for rethinking the potential of Asia. In 1951, he published one of his most well-known of these essays, “Hyōden mōtakutō” [A Critical Biography of Mao Zedong] in a popular intellectual journal, Chūō kōron. In this text, we see how Takeuchi echoes his wartime call to create history: [Mao] compressed reality through an intense will and from this he induced a principle. . .  his subjectivity was nothingness and he transcendentally united with the object in its totality. According to Mao Zedong’s vision of history, history is not given, it is something that needs to be directed by the will in the present. (Takeuchi, 1981a: 290; cf. 304) To contemporary readers, Takeuchi’s reading of Mao might appear to anticipate Frederick Wakeman’s interpretation of Mao as a voluntarist (Wakeman, 1973). However, in the context of postwar Japan, Takeuchi attempted to construct a nonmodernization-oriented understanding of Mao, which also went beyond empiricist interpretations of Mao Zedong thought. During the early postwar period, Marxists associated with the Japanese Communist Party such as Matsumura Kazuto would read Mao as an orthodox Marxist, stressing objective laws (Matsumura, 1962, passim). Takeuchi was involved in a struggle not only over how to comprehend Mao, but also about how to interpret Marx. He attempts to outline a process that goes from subjective nothingness to various levels of organization through practice and

198  Viren Murthy experience. Takeuchi explains that Mao’s revolutionary practice led to a series of setbacks which eventually left him with nothingness. Then out of this nothingness, he would recreate himself and history. In other words, through nothingness, subject and object would unite. [Mao] returned everything from inside and outside to nothingness. When he let go of everything that needed to be lost, when he obtained everything that was possible, he formed his archetype. All the external knowledge and experience that he had up to now was transformed from centrifugal force to a centripetal force—everything was congealed within him. Through this, Mao went from being a part of the party to being the party itself. The party was not only a part of the Chinese Revolution; it was the whole of the revolution. The world had changed its form. Mao had changed his form. Subject and object had united and from here they would split in a new way. Mao was reborn. He was a Marxist. Now Marxism had united with him. Marxism and Maoism became synonymous and he himself was the root of creativity. This is pure Mao Zedong or the primordial Mao Zedong. (Takeuchi, 1981a: 305) In such passages, one can see the influence of Japanese romantics such as Yasuda Yojūrō and Kyoto school philosophers such as Nishida Kitarō, since all of these thinkers attempt to overcome the distinction between the subject and object. Moreover, each of these theorists overcomes the duality between subject and object by turning inward to a subjective/transcendental source. However, by connecting interiority with Mao’s practice, Takeuchi changes the political valence of subjectivity. The nothingness in question is now not ontological as in the Kyoto school, but existential, practical and political. We see how the nothingness of subjectivity becomes the party and even China, but only to fragment again. Subjective nothingness constantly negates what is given and consequently is at root a continuous revolution. This subjective nothingness is primordial Mao, which posits a different world, towards which we must continually struggle. However, this politics of nothingness cannot be thought without considering the global context and the problems and possibilities of nationalism. Already in “What is Modernity?,” Takeuchi places Chinese political development in the context of global unevenness. After Bandung in 1955, he would focus more specifically on Chinese and Asian nationalism in the context of global imperialism. Almost immediately after Bandung, Takeuchi published an essay called “On Asian Nationalism” [Ajia no nashonarizumu] (Takeuchi, 1981b: 6–7) in which he noted that a number of scholars, such as Maruyama Masao had already distinguished between Asian and Western nationalism. Takeuchi further elaborated on this distinction by explicitly highlighting the problem of capitalism. Takeuchi distinguishes between Asian and Western nationalism in a manner that follows Sun Yat-sen’s distinction between Western and Asian politics. Already in 1925, Sun had connected Asian politics with socialism by saying the Russia was joining with Asia after 1917 (Sun, 2011: 84). Takeuchi continues this

Imagining Asia and the Chinese Revolution   199 train of thought and associates Western nationalism with a Darwinist worldview and the promotion of capitalism. Takeuchi’s point seems to go against conventional wisdom today, especially given works, such as those of Étienne Balibar, which connect nationalism to a general logic of exclusion. Balibar points out that although we cannot equate the nationalism of the dominating with that of the dominated, there is still a common “logic of situation” or “structure of inscription in the modern world.” Takeuchi would agree, but he would perhaps have stressed another side to Balibar’s argument. Nationalism “is always part of a chain in which it is both the central and the weak link” (Balibar, 1991: 46). If we place emphasis on this chain, one could argue that nationalism is always over-determined and various other factors, such as populism, anti-colonialism, imperialism or jingoism would inflect nationalism differently. Takeuchi hopes that Asian nationalism will be inflected differently through popular struggle and consequently be part of a project to build a different future. Asian nationalism involves an attempt to break free from the force of imperialism (Takeuchi, 1981b: 7). Recall that Asian nations were created through the invasion of the West and so they were nations born under attack and hence had to choose a path of resistance. These two paths were outlined by China and Japan, the former resisting and the latter following the pattern of Western imperialism. By making this distinction, Takeuchi criticizes his former support for Japanese imperialism as pan-Asianist resistance to modernity. In short, he was not able to recognize politics in wartime Japan as imperialism in pan-Asianist clothing. Now he realizes that pan-Asianism is not just about the unity of various nations, but a unity of weak nations, which echoes support for the Third World. In this his sense, his nationalism is fundamentally transnational, anti-colonial and revolutionary. Takeuchi specifically alludes to aspects of Mao’s Yenan period, which he connects to a vision of anti-colonial nationalism. The center of Mao Zedong Thought is perhaps the “Revolutionary Base Area.” This is a type of Ancient utopianism. It is a unity that represents a lived community, which is self-sufficient. The earlier liberated areas were like this. (Takeuchi, 1981b: 8) Using Mao’s idea of the Revolutionary Base Area, Takeuchi brings together ideas of the local and the global. From the local side, we could suggest that Takeuchi’s understanding of the base areas resembles what Partha Chatterjee calls political society, especially since Chatterjee also tries to think beyond Western categories. Chatterjee defines civil society as institutions of associated living governed by Enlightenment ideals such as equality, autonomy and contract. Against this, he describes political society as other institutions mediating between state and the people, which stand parallel to civil society. In Chatterjee’s view, political society refers to those people who cannot quite fit into the capitalist market and other formal institutions. These people need to be governed in a different way through the state and often form informal economies that run parallel to the capitalist market (Chatterjee, 2011: 213–214). Takeuchi

200  Viren Murthy makes a similar distinction with respect to Mao’s base areas, but given that he is dealing with a different historical context, we need to specify what kind of political society the base areas were. Like in Chatterjee’s account, the base areas formed an economy separate from the official political economy of the Nationalists and Jiang Jieshi’s government. However, they were able to do this partly because, in Jiang’s China, capital and governmentality could not subsume all of the Chinese population. Under neo-liberalism as well, complete subsumption proves impossible, but the relation between capital and governmentality is different. In Chatterjee’s case, political society refers to an economy governed directly by the state and one that is a by-product of the market. Chatterjee’s political society also makes claims on the state, rather than plotting its overthrow. Moreover, unlike in Chatterjee’s description of contemporary political society in India, in the case of Mao’s base areas, whether they succeeded or not, there was a clear political agenda to create an alternative to the present system. Takeuchi sees this space outside of capital as providing the possibility of an alternative politics. This ideal is of a lived community as opposed to one dominated through representation by an alienated state. The communities are self-sufficient, which implies that China could delink from the capitalist system of the West and consequently begin a different future for the world. The above citation suggests that Takeuchi posed Asia against the Western Enlightenment, which was associated with colonialism, but if he ended here, his goal would have been indeterminate. In fact, he also saw Asia’s goal as achieving a socialism that would radicalize core Western values. In Takeuchi’s view, something would sublate the ideals of civil society to a higher level where civil society as we know it would cease to exist. Writing in 1960, Takeuchi expresses his vision in the following manner: the Orient must re-embrace the West, it must change the West itself in order to realize the latter’s outstanding cultural values on a greater scale. Such a rollback of culture or values would create universality. The Orient must change the West in order to further elevate those universal values that the West itself produced. (Takeuchi, 2005: 165; 1981c: 114–115, translation amended) Notice that here the goal is to take the ideals of the West to a higher level and create a new type of universality. This would be a universality that goes beyond the abstract equality and freedom expressed in civil society. Because the Orient or Asia contains a number of spaces that are not subsumed under capital and the state, such as the base areas, Takeuchi believes that it could form the starting point for a radical transformation. This represents a movement that goes beyond merely the nation; it is simultaneously global, aiming to overcome imperialism. However, the Orient cannot just act on itself; movements in Asia must transform the Other—the West—and consequently create a new world. This type of ideal would recede with the emergence of neo-liberal capitalism. The discourse of Asia and Takeuchi’s legacy would face new challenges.

Imagining Asia and the Chinese Revolution   201

Kuan-Hsing Chen: antinomies of base entities and civil society Kuan-Hsing Chen is an intellectual educated in the United States and based in Taiwan. He is especially worthy of note because he has been actively promoting the work of Takeuchi and pan-Asianism in ways that express contemporary ideological trends. He has clearly made a contribution to pan-Asianism in the past decade or so by bringing intellectuals from all over Asia to discuss the possibility of creating alternatives to Western hegemony. Moreover, he is well known in Taiwan as a leftist and claims to inherit critically the Marxist project by calling for a “geo-colonial historical materialism.” Chen’s recent book, Asia as Method has the same title as Takeuchi’s famous 1960s essay, and has been published in Chinese, Japanese and English. Like Takeuchi, Chen connects the histories of decolonization and socialism. However, as the book progresses, the emphasis on decolonization begins to trump the Marxist analyses of capital and the problem of alternatives to the present mode of production. Moreover, Chen invokes standard criticisms of Marx with phrases such as “On a theoretical level, the Marxism of the nineteenth century was never able to rid itself of its Eurocentrism. . . ” (Chen, 2010: 70). While Chen does not want to abandon the “analytical language of Marxism” (ibid.: 71) because his understanding of Marxism remains traditional, it is unclear what remains of Marxism after he has removed “class determinism” and a “teleology of historical imagination” (ibid.: 72). Chen believes that Marxism “continues to survive precisely because of its heterogeneity and its articulation in local intellectual histories” (ibid.: 70).1 With this statement, Chen attempts to deprovincialize Marxism, but by highlighting heterogeneity, Marxism risks losing its integrity as a theory. There is no doubt that we need to examine how Marxists in various peripheral regions dealt with Marx’s work, but if the results focus merely on the local and heterogeneity, Marxism might only end up being provincialized or marginalized. Despite the various insights of his book, by marginalizing Marx, Chen fails to provide a framework to understand structural domination. Unable to think structure and agency together, his work is characterized by an antinomy between radical indeterminacy and an emphasis on enduring basic cultural forms or “base entities.” He begins his gesture towards indeterminacy by critically engaging various postcolonial theorists, including Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Ashis Nandy. The goal of such an engagement is to criticize nationalism, nativism and civilization. Against this, he formulates his own brand of “critical syncretism.” He concludes we should be able to “become others.” He writes: Becoming others is to become female, aboriginal, homosexual, transsexual, working class, and poor; it is to become animal, third world, and African. Critical syncretism is a cultural strategy of identification for subaltern groups. Here “others” refers not just to racial, ethnic and national categories but also includes class, sex and gender, and geographical positions. (Chen, 2010: 99)

202  Viren Murthy Chen’s impulse stems from the failure of Marxism to deal forms of domination other than class. Indeed, we can see in Takeuchi and Chen an attempt to criticize and perhaps complete the Marxist project. However, in Takeuchi’s case, partly because of a context in which Marxism was extremely dominant, his work served to open ways of thinking Marxism in non-linear ways and to rethink revolutionary movements in the Third World. In Chen’s case, the critique of Marxism emerges at a time when Marxism both in politics and in academia has been marginalized. Moreover, since the 1980s, there have been numerous non-reductive readings of Marx, which make criticisms of class-based determinism redundant. Although Chen’s book cites some neo-Marxists, his theoretical alternative fails to take into consideration Marxist conceptions of structure. Put simply, in his response to the crises in Marxism, Chen has denuded class and structure of their determinacy. We see this clearly in the following statement. “The homologous relation between colonial identification and other structural identities can be heuristically charted. Table 1 shows that the structure or regime produces identity and subject positions, not the reverse” (Chen, 2010: 95). In his table he has four relations of domination: 1. colonial regime—where there is the opposition between colonizer and colonized; 2. capitalism—where capitalists oppose workers; 3. patriarchy, where males oppose females; and 4. a heterosexual regime, where heterosexuals are against homosexuals, bisexuals and transgendered people. The goal of this exercise is of course to move beyond a narrow identification with class-based movements or gender-based movements. One could read Chen’s gesture as attempting to realize Takeuchi’s goal sublating Western values. Critical syncretism has much to offer in terms of a politics of identification. However, there are two theoretical issues that Chen fails to address with respect to his table. First, the colonizer–colonized relation along with the capitalist–worker relation operates differently than the male–female distinction. In the former two relations oppression is built into the concept. One cannot imagine a possible world in which colonizers do not oppress the colonized or a world where capitalists do not exploit workers. In other words, there is a structural domination within the very concept of capital and colonialism. Indeed, a large part of Marx’s theory of capital was precisely to show how the unfolding of the categories of capital entail exploitation and domination, which both entails class and goes beyond it. It might be possible to make similar arguments with respect to the distinction between male and female, such that one can derive domination from the concept of man itself or claim that the distinction between man and women itself entails domination. Marxists hope for a world where capitalist production ends and there will be no more capitalists or workers or proletariat—overcoming the domination of the capitalist implies radical structural transformation. Would feminists hope for a day where there are no men or women? This might be the case, but one would need more of an argument. The same is true with the case of the heterosexual– homosexual distinction. Second, a more serious problem with the above taxonomy is that it does not have a concept of stratified structures and so it becomes impossible to understand the relation between the various oppressions or the way in which capitalism has

Imagining Asia and the Chinese Revolution   203 shaped modern colonialism or how capitalism has radically changed the nature of patriarchy and understandings of sex. In other words, Chen’s framework lacks a concept of structures having different depth and from this perspective, for all of his emphasis on Asia, he affirms a position held in common by proponents of civil society, in which everyone is a citizen, who is potentially interchangeable with everyone else. We can get a sense of Chen’s argument by examining his critique of Partha Chatterjee’s discussion of civil society. In a number of essays, Partha Chatterjee developed a distinction between civil society and political society. In short, civil society refers to a society of citizens governed by a formal legal apparatus. To some extent, civil society translates Hegel and Marx’s bürgerliche Gesellschaft or bourgeois society, where rights-bearing people come to exchange goods in the market. Both Marx and Hegel were critical of this realm. Chatterjee continues this critique by discovering a growing realm of illegal or semi-legal interaction between various subaltern classes, which he calls political society. Chatterjee asks to what extent political society could be mobilized against civil society to create a radical transformation in Asian and Third World societies. Chen draws on his own experience with the popular democracy movement in Taiwan in order to argue against a clear distinction between civil society and political society. He claims that civil society can either support subaltern subjects or attack them (Chen, 2010: 233). A key issue that emerges here is how the concept of civil society and political society are connected to capital, which is a huge theme. But there is also a historico-philological dimension to Chen’s argument. Chen attempts to complicate Chatterjee’s reading of political society by claiming at type of East-Asian exceptionalism. Chen contends that in Taiwan, South Korea and other regions, there is something like the Mandarin “minjian shehui” or folk society, which is the common translation of civil society in Taiwan. This supposedly is different from civil society in the Western sense, since minjian is always of the people cannot become part of the state. There are obvious problems with using the concept of “minjian shehui” to stand in for East Asia, since Japanese and mainland Chinese used other terms for civil society, such as shimin shehui, which is much closer to the idea of bourgeois society that we see in Hegel and Marx. However, more importantly, we see in Chen a radical shift away from Takeuchi’s more revolutionary politics of mass action inspired by the Chinese Revolution. In Chen’s work, Asian resistance ends up producing a civil society with Asian characteristics, which is minjian shehui. One wonders whether diluting the critique of civil society does not amount to a failure to de-imperialize. Above we have seen the voluntarist and abstract side of Chen’s argument and from this perspective, although he begins with scholars writing about Third World nationalism, major parts of his argument overlap with liberalism. There is, however, another side of Chen’s argument, which gestures in another direction; he argues for basic Asian entities that work at different regional and national levels. We have already glimpsed this in his argument for East-Asian exceptionalism with respect to civil society, but he eventually constructs a theoretical

204  Viren Murthy framework for his work. At this point, Chen moves to de-imperialize at a conceptual level, which implies something similar to Paul Cohen’s call to focus less on imperialism and more on the internal trajectory of Chinese history (Cohen, 1984, chapter 3). Cohen’s book came out in 1984 and a couple of years before this, the Japanese sinologist Mizoguchi Yūzō constructed a similar position through a fundamental rethinking of premodern Chinese thought (Mizoguchi, 1980, passim). Chen draws heavily on Mizoguchi to construct his concept of Asian “base entities” and so it is worth dwelling on Mizoguchi’s response to Takeuchi. Mizoguchi criticizes Takeuchi and other Japanese sinologists emphasis on imperialism because he claimed, like Cohen after him, that such a focus blinded them to the internal logics of Chinese society, thought and politics. He claimed that these sinologists already had a standard, namely the world, which was their method and then applied it to their target or goal, namely China. Against this, Mizoguchi, turning a phrase from Takeuchi, calls for China as method. Chen cites the following passage, from Mizoguchi’s essay “China as Method,” which gives a sense of what is at stake in this move: The world that conceives of China as method is a multiplied world, in that China is an element of its composition. In other words, Europe is also an element. (Chen, 2010: 252) The above passage is clearly a call to, to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase, “provincialize Europe”2 and now this call stresses plurality rather than universal goals such as socialism. Chen following Mizoguchi contends that there is no overarching world or framework, which subsumes all the particulars. This was also Takeuchi’s criticism of Japanese Marxism that puts all societies into an evolutionary framework. However, we quickly see that Chen/Mizoguchi replaces one assumption about the world with another; in other words, he contends that the world is made up of a number of base-entities, which are geographical regions of indefinite area. With this assumption, each geographical space—be it village, city, region, country, or continent—has its own base entity and local history, with different depths, forms and shapes. The methodological questions are: How can these base entities be analyzed in terms of their internal characteristics? How can we best identify and analyze the interactions between and among different base entities. It is in light of these questions that Asia as method can advance its inquiry. (Chen, 2010: 251) This method is against evolutionary visions of history that suppress particularity and differences. Chen follows Mizoguchi’s critique of Takeuchi’s position and affirms a fragmentary vision of the world, without totalizing dynamics or structures. Such structures, in Chen’s writings appear to be problems of subjectivity;

Imagining Asia and the Chinese Revolution   205 we graft such structures on the world and should stop doing so. Instead, we should focus on base-entities. We are now within the world of Mizoguchi, whose emphasis on historical particularity has without a doubt produced excellent work on internal dynamics of Chinese intellectual history in the late imperial period (Mizoguchi, 1980, passim). However, Chen transforms what might have been a legitimate strategy for doing Chinese intellectual history into a broader theoretical project in the present, in a world dominated by various transnational structural dynamics. In this context, Chen replaces Mizoguchi’s China with Asia, so we once again have “Asia as Method,” but not Takeuchi’s idea of Asia as method. As we have seen above, Takeuchi emphasized realizing the goals of the West at a higher level, while Mizoguchi aimed delink from the West to discover overlooked trajectories in the Chinese history. Chen would now like to reconstruct Asia out of multiple historical trajectories, which might be termed a second-order base-entity. He explains the importance of his base-entity theory by returning to his dialogue with Partha Chatterjee: In dialogue with Partha Chatterjee, we have discovered not only the importance of political society as a driving force for social transformation in postcolonial spaces, we have also rediscovered minjian as a zone indispensible to our own social formation. To bring these discoveries into dialogue with Mizoguchi’s theory of the base entity, we must return both political society and minjian to their historical base-entities in Asia. (Chen, 2010: 255) It is not clear what returning political society and minjian to their base-entities will do, but it appears to underplay the critical force that was in Chatterjee’s political society and Marx’s critique of civil society. We must ask to what extent political society, minjian, and other aspects of modern society in Asia must be understood in relation to the structures of capitalism and imperialism. Takeuchi has not provided us the tools to understand political society from the perspective capitalism, but his emphasis on the global constitution of Europe and the Orient points us in a fruitful direction. The Chinese New Leftist Wang Hui continues to invoke such a global perspective as he rethinks the legacy of the Chinese Revolution to construct possibilities for Asia.

Wang Hui: Maoism as method To understand Wang Hui’s work, in addition to the difference in historical context between Takeuchi’s postwar and the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, we must of course take into consideration that Wang Hui is writing from China, where a revolution actually took place. For Wang Hui, the revolution was not an event that took place somewhere else; rather understanding the Chinese Revolution was a way of coming to grips with the possibilities of his own history. However, this difference might not be as great as it first sounds, if we follow L.P. Hartley’s famous line,

206  Viren Murthy “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” (Hartley, 2002: 16).3 Indeed, by the mid-1990s, the so-called New Left in China were beginning to see that Revolutionary China was increasingly looking like another country, where people were definitely doing things differently. Like Takeuchi, in Wang’s case, the gap between revolutionary China and his present entailed both problems and opportunities. On the one hand, the distance from the present allowed Wang and others to draw on what had now become a revolutionary tradition to attack the market-oriented practices of this present. In spite of this, even today Wang’s critics often berate him for supporting the existing government by extolling revolutionary China. In this context, to defend Wang Hui, one must stress the differences between contemporary and revolutionary China. However, on the other hand, if one separates revolutionary China completely from contemporary China, one might conclude that the revolutionary tradition has no relation to the present and that we should look for inspiration elsewhere. Hence, Wang Hui and other Chinese new leftists are caught in the difficult situation of both affirming the revolutionary past as different, but simultaneously assuming some type of connection between the revolutionary past and the post-Mao present. Takeuchi made a similar move by contending that Japan and China were both Asian nations that struggled against capitalist imperialism and this situational analogy made it possible for Japan to correct itself by looking at the Chinese mirror. In Wang Hui’s case, the problem is more like a politics of the revolutionary remnant. His hope is to rethink these remnants and use them to struggle against the complete privatization that is taking over China. Such privatization is connected to the complex political changes of the 1990s, which form the context for the various strands of Wang’s thought. By the mid1990s as the problems associated with marketization in China were apparent, there were numerous debates between the New Left and the Neo-liberals. The Neoliberals argue that the ideals of freedom would be realized in an ideal capitalist society. In many cases, Neo-liberals would advocate a break from both the Chinese Confucian past and the revolutionary past, since both were opposed to the development of liberalism, freedom and democracy. By the mid-1990s Wang emerged as one of the leading intellectuals of the New Left in China and he attempted to rethink the legitimacy of the Chinese Revolution in relation to the tradition and in this context, Wang would combine Mizoguchi’s ideas about early Chinese modernity with a conception of Maoism as a socialist alternative.4 In short, Wang would become something like the dialectical opposite of the neo-liberals, by affirming their two nemeses, traditional Chinese Confucianism and Mao’s revolution. At the same time, he would radically rethink both of these traditions and bring these remnants together in order to question linear visions of history and modernity. In 2002, in an essay entitled “The Politics of Imagining Asia,” Wang underscores a spatial dimension to his argument against linear time and formulates an ideal of Asia, which entails socialism. After the Cold War, when there was a global rejection of the category of socialism, Wang continued to promote a discourse reminiscent of Takeuchi. In particular, the hidden possibility behind Maoism concerned the renewed possibility of a revolutionary nationalism on the

Imagining Asia and the Chinese Revolution   207 periphery of global capitalism that would go against the evolutionary progression of Marxist stages. Wang Hui constructs his critique of progressive history through rereading Lenin’s writings on the 1911 Revolution. Specifically, in 1912, Lenin compared proponents of the 1911 Revolution in China to the Narodniks and claimed that both of them would eventually create capitalism, despite their original intentions. Wang explains that Lenin argued that: Sun Yat-sen’s land reform program was “reactionary” because it went against or beyond the present historical stage. He also pointed out that because of the “Asian” character of Chinese society, it was just this “reactionary program” that would complete the task of capitalism in China.” In Lenin’s words, populism, “under the disguise of ‘combating capitalism’ in agriculture, champions an agrarian program that, if fully carried out, would mean the most rapid development of capitalism in agriculture.” (Wang Hui, 2011: 24)5 As in the case of Takeuchi, in Wang’s view as well, Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution become keys to thinking socialism. But by invoking Lenin, Wang shows the complex nature of the 1911 Revolution, which must be understood at two levels. First, although the revolution aimed at socialism, it eventually created something like capitalism. Lenin called an “Asian character”, which implies that Asia is connected to this dialectical movement related to desire and reality, the desire for socialism ends up creating the reality of capitalism. Wang and Lenin both suggest that Asian countries that are forcefully incorporated within the system of the global capitalist world begin by resisting, but eventually become part of this global dynamic. To some extent, this adumbrates Jake Werner’s argument about China eventually becoming a Fordist state during the Mao period (Werner, 2012, passim). But neither Lenin nor Wang see this as the whole story. Rather, on a second level, they contend that the Chinese Revolution harbored the possibility of socialism. Wang explains: since the Chinese Revolution represented the most progressive force in world history, it clearly indicated to socialists a point of rupture in the imperialist world system. In the protracted debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers among Russian intellectuals and revolutionaries, Lenin, as a “Westernizer,” via a dialectical comparison between “progressive Asia” and “backward Europe,” developed a new sort of logic that could be called “shedding Europe—an imperialist Europe—and joining Asia—a progressive revolution in a backward region.” It was within this logic that the Chinese Revolution provided a unique path combining national liberation with socialism—and it was this unique path that provided the premise for a new kind of revolutionary subject: the alliance between workers and peasants with the Chinese peasant as the principal component. (Wang, 2011: 29)

208  Viren Murthy The above citation presents us a transition from Leninism to Maoism. Wang contends that in Lenin’s view, although Asia needed to be awakened, once awakened it became the most progressive of places. Note that “progressive” makes sense in this context precisely because of the goal of socialism. Europe is backward because it remains capitalist but people in Asia have the possibility of turning global unevenness into hope, by combining national liberation and socialism. The above passage has a Maoist slant because of the emphasis on the peasant and in particular the mention of the Chinese peasant, which along with an inflection of populism becomes the fulcrum of socialism. Here the key point, which echoes Takeuchi’s, is precisely that Wang sees in Asia and China a nationalism that breaks free from imperialism. The above narrative fell into crises in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when people began to doubt the ideal of socialism. From this perspective, Wang goes against the grain by attempting to bring back the Maoist discourse, at a time when history appears to have left it behind. Towards the end of his essay Wang makes the following remarks about the potential anachronism of his interest in twentiethcentury revolutions. If it can be said that the socialist and national liberation movements of the twentieth century have drawn to a close, their fragmentary remains can still be a vital source for stimulating new ways of imagining Asia. . .  Reconsidering “Asian history” at once represents an effort to rethink nineteenth-century European “world-history,” as well as an effort to break free of the twentyfirst century “new imperial” order and its associated logic. (Wang, 2011: 62) Wang acknowledges that the socialist and national liberation movements have drawn to a close. This is precisely why he identifies a break between the short twentieth century and the twenty-first century. The former refers to the period when the experiment with socialism still had meaning and the latter when all that remains are fragments. Wang hopes that the fragments of the Chinese Revolution, which are potentially significant for all Asian countries, might inspire movements in the future. However, he does not specify how one breaks free from the associated logic of the new imperial order. Clearly this logic is connected to the logic of capitalism, and as Wang makes clear in his contribution to this volume, a key aspect of breaking free concerns politics. Indeed, in Wang Hui’s contribution to this volume, when he examines the “workers’ state,” he underscores the problem of depoliticization outlined in his essay “Depoliticized Politics.” The latter essay is particularly relevant in the context of Takeuchi’s project, since it looks at Maoism as a missed opportunity. [A]s China’s wholly new form of party-state was being established, the corrosion of depoliticization was already beginning to set in. Its most important manifestations were bureaucratization and internal power struggles within the party-state, which in turn led to the suppression of discursive freedom.

Imagining Asia and the Chinese Revolution   209 In the Cultural Revolution, Mao and others sought a range of tactics to combat these tendencies, yet the end result was always that these struggles became implicated in the very processes of depoliticizing faction fights and bureaucratization. . .  (Wang, 2009: 4) To some extent, here Wang continues more critically Takeuchi’s affirmation of Mao by showing the gap between the ideal of an active citizenry beyond the distinctions between state and civil society and the reality of a society of governmental control, factional fighting and depoliticization. The positing of the Maoist utopia makes up what we can call Maoism as method. In other words, Maoism as method constructs a regulative ideal that calls for constant revolution and could become a benchmark to re-examine sympathetically and critically the history of the Chinese Revolution. But constant revolution by itself would remain indeterminate. What makes Wang’s perspective and Maoism as method unique is the commitment to the socialist project and the aim to transform our contemporary capitalist mode of development. In this context, the Chinese revolutionary model of participatory politics might still inspire models for Asia and the world. However, it will not be able to do this without a larger theory of capital.

Conclusion: rethinking the possibility of a post-capitalist future We have seen that early in its history pan-Asianism has had as its target or nemesis both the West and, especially after the Second World War, capitalism. Pan-Asianism has been both shaped by capitalism and eventually aimed to imagine a world beyond it. However, in many theories of pan-Asianism, the concept of capitalism is left un-theorized or at least under-theorized. This has led to the latest wave of Asianism popularized by Kuan-Hsing Chen and others, where capitalism, while not totally absent from discussion, fails to be organically integrated into basic concepts and goals. To some extent, this maps on to a recent trend in postcolonial thought against radical revolutionary thought. For example, David Scott has recently claimed that the problem with early anti-colonial thought is precisely that it envisaged a total revolutionary transformation of society, which he would like to urge us away from (Scott, 2004: 6–7). Scott theorizes this shift in theory in terms of different problem spaces. We inhabit a different problem space today and this shift in problem spaces is intimately connected to transformations of capitalism. Wang Hui represents a clear counter-current to this trend and we should attempt to contextualize his revolutionary impulse in relation to larger shifts in global capitalism. Put simply, the shift away from a state-centered mode of capitalism, along with the demise of actually existing socialism and the unraveling of movements associated with the Third World made a simple return to earlier modes of revolution difficult. From this perspective, Chen’s response is unsurprising. However,

210  Viren Murthy one might say that he gestures towards Wang’s ideal of re-politicization through his political activism and his grappling with Chatterjee’s concept of political society. We could push this process further by relocating Chatterjee’s discourse in relation to Marxism. To some extent, the postcolonial and subaltern projects, which inspire Chatterjee, also bring us back to Maoism and the attempt to rethink the agency of the marginalized in relation to capitalism. Chen’s analysis of Chatterjee might have been different had he noted Chatterjee’s debt to the work of the economist Kalyan Sanyal. In the foreword to Sanyal’s 2007 book, Rethinking Capitalist Development, Chatterjee wrote that Sanyal was making a fundamental claim namely that “contemporary postcolonial capitalism. . .  is not revolutionary, it does not transform pre-capitalism in its own image; in contrast, it often preserves and sometimes creates forms of labor and production that do not belong to the domain of capital” (Chatterjee, 2007: x). Through Sanyal, Chatterjee grounds his concept of political society not primarily in the cultural heritage of base-entities, but rather in the logic of capital and primitive accumulation. It is precisely the logic of capital and the nation-state that allows Chatterjee to make the distinction between civil society and political society. In Chatterjee’s Lineages of Political Society, he underscores that he would like to “hold on to the sense of civil society used in Hegel and Marx as bourgeois society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft)” (Chatterjee, 2011: 83). Recall that for both Hegel and Marx, civil society was a realm of the capitalist market and consequently refers to a realm of legally sanctioned exchange. In both Marx and Hegel’s view, civil society is not, strictly speaking, a political sphere because it is the locus of exchange between private persons. People bring sell their labor power in civil society. Chatterjee also adds that these people are citizens and so civil society refers to citizenship and the capitalist market or the capitalism-nation-state complex. Sanyal shows the limits of the above conception of civil society especially in non-Western regions because capital is not able to absorb labor power and huge parts of the population must live on the fringes of the capitalist market. It is precisely these superfluous people who make up what Chatterjee calls political society. To some extent, the phenomenon described above overlaps with what Marx calls the reserve army of labor that is waiting to be employed and consequently lowers wages. Such a reserve army of workers are trained and should be hirable; indeed, there are many of workers making up this army. However, the people making up political society are different, they are redundant with respect to capital and many are not even potentially hirable (Chatterjee, 2007: x). One might ask why such a society is political and here Sanyal and Chatterjee’s respective uses of the concept of governmentality is crucial. Because these people are not incorporated within capital, they must be administered by the governmental operations of the state. They might eventually receive welfare from the state and may develop a parallel economy of smaller subsistence style production. By subsistence production, Sanyal has in mind various family shops and other odd jobs that people on the margins do to make a living. Governmentality at this level implies a form of depoliticization. People at this level are “population” rather than “citizens.”

Imagining Asia and the Chinese Revolution   211 The above topics of political society and superfluous people brings together two concepts that have been expounded in this volume, each of them connected to politics: Harry Harootunian’s emphasis on the incompleteness of subsumption under capitalism and Moishe Postone’s outline of the contradiction between wealth and value. To some extent, these are two deeper structural logics that run throughout the history of capitalism and allow different types of political possibilities. We have already suggested how Takeuchi’s reading of Mao’s base areas referred to the incomplete subsumption of labor and life under capital during 1940s China. Harootunian’s point is that incomplete or formal subsumption is not a phase, but something that constantly returns and this has important consequences with respect to how one thinks of modernity in relation to remnants of the past and the constant instability of capitalism. In short, capitalism never gets rid of its remnants and constantly must deal with a conjuncture of structures, even if there is one dynamic that is dominant. This insight is crucial for understanding the continued significance of moral structures from the past, which might form a certain amount of resistance to capital. Marx himself opens the way to thinking such remnants in a number of passages without expanding on the possibility. Take for example this text concerning money: Thus the social power becomes the private power of private persons. Ancient society denounced it [money] as tending to destroy the economic and moral order (sittlichen Ordnung). Modern society, which already in its infancy pulled Pluto by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of its innermost principle of life. (Marx, 1990: 230)6 At one level, Marx is obviously pointing out the difference in attitudes towards money in ancient society and modern society. In ancient society, the economic and moral order is threatened by the logic of money, which turns social power into private power. Modern society, by contrast, takes the power of money for granted and it becomes an innermost principle of life and the holy grail. However, the older moral forms do not always go away and might continue to resist the logic of money. Indeed, Marx’s use of the term “sittlichen Ordnung” and his footnote to Sophocles recall the role of Antigone in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The problem of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) leads to tragic consequences in the Greek world, but returns in a different form in the modern world. This would be one of the senses in which complete subsumption is not possible, the past does not disappear and is constantly reconstituted (Hegel, 1986b: 327–355).7 But without a robust theory of how a socialist world is possible, such moral remnants in capitalism will remain indeterminate. At this point, Kalyan Sanyal and Moishe Postone in their own ways help us to think of both the historical specificity of our present moment and its socio-political possibilities. Our present is constituted by the shift in the 1970s that we mentioned above and the advent of a global neo-liberal order. In the scenario that Takeuchi described, capital had not yet spread to all parts of China. After the 1970s and 1980s, a market

212  Viren Murthy capitalist system pervades China, but it still cannot absorb all of China’s labor power, which in turn leads to a growing surplus population and unemployment. Moishe Postone’s contribution to this volume allows us to understand how in a capitalist society, because firms constantly seek to replace living labor by machines in order to increase profits, living labor is constantly thrust back onto the market and becomes surplus population. Although in regions on the periphery of the global capitalist system one might find spaces that are not penetrated by capitalism, the globally dominant form of surplus population comes from the inability of capital to absorb labor because of increasing technological mediation. Moreover, as Postone shows, such technological advances could pave the way for a society not based on the exploitation of proletarian labor. The question is how to turn this surplus population into an active political movement. As Wang Hui points out in his contribution to this volume, the memory of the communist worker state could be an important resource. While no one would today advocate simply returning to the Maoist state, the triumphs and tragedies of the Maoist experiment represent one of the few Third World attempts to create an alternative to capitalism. The question for the future is precisely how and whether movements on the peripheries by those who have been rejected by capital could become a force that eventually transforms the fundamental structures of domination both in Asia and in the world. Such a project would require us to think about how a politics based on surplus population could relate to other class-based movements with the goal of creating a world where people are not labeled superfluous because they do not produce value for capitalists. The legacy of Maoism might lie precisely in creating a political subject out of those who are usually denied subjectivity. As the Maoist regime becomes a remnant or even a ghost, its method might still have a penumbral significance for the future.

Notes 1 There are a number of similar passages that one could analyze that I do not have time to get into here. For example, Chen writes: The real question is to what extent an open-ended Marxism can set aside historical baggage such as class determinism and the teleological historical imagination. To what extent can it accept that social formation are made up of multiple, coexisting structures, which makes it necessary to analyze different structural axes together, and to embrace new forms of subjects of struggle? For our purpose, which is revitalize historical materialism, we will have to recognize the immanent complexity of colonialism. Its larger historical effects cannot be understood in relation to the capitalist system only, as if the colonial question were simple an extension of classstruggle. (Chen, 2010: 72) Notice that Marxism is criticized as reflecting merely class struggle without understanding the core concepts of Marx’s Capital, such as the commodity and so on. 2 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000, passim). See also Max Ward’s essay in this volume for a discussion of Chakrabarty’s work in relation to Japanese studies. 3 First published in 1953.

Imagining Asia and the Chinese Revolution   213 4 I will not discuss Wang Hui’s treatment of Japanese sinologists in this essay. I have however dealt with this subject in more detail in Murthy (2006, passim). 5 Wang Hui is citing from Lenin’s essay (1963). 6 For a Marxist elaboration of the point made in this passage, see Dufour (2015, passim). 7 I am here referring to Hegel’s discussion of ethical life. The difference between my position and that of Hegel is that in Hegel’s position complete reconciliation is possible, while I am pointing to the remnant constantly returning in capitalism without being reconciled. There is of course the question as to whether such remnants would occur in a socialist society, which I will not address here.

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Index

abolishing of state, through principle of exchange 82 Adorno, Theodor 27 Ai Siqi 140, 149, 164 Akizana Shūji 125 All about Shanghai (1934 guidebook) 142, 152 Althusser, Louis 14, 47n2 Amin, Samir 123 Anderson, Marston 151 Anderson, Perry 19 anti-capitalist politics 189 Antigone 211 area studies 87–89, 91, 99 Arrighi, Giovanni 182 Arthur, Chris 110, 116–17n14 Auerbach, Erich 20 Badiou, Alain 158 Baek, Seung-wook 9 Bakunin, Mikhail 67, 71, 72 Balibar, Étienne 199 Banaji, J. 16 Baudrillard, Jean 93 Bauman, Zygmunt: Work, Consumerism and the New Poor 52 Benjamin, Walter 27; on historical materialism 13–14 Bernstein, Gail 89–90, 99–100 Bidet, Jacques 116n10 Bolsheviks 72 Book of Filial Piety 169 bourgeoisie: and global capital accumulation 124; and nation-state 122 bourgeois revolution, as federation of nations 74

Bo Yibo 139 Bozan, Jian 9 Cai Yuanpei 55 capital: as contradictory totality 44; as core of social formation 46; historical changes in 46–7; and state power 66; and structural domination 202 capitalism: absence of general prosperity in 407; agrarian problem 24–5; commodity form 35; dependency theory of 49; domination in 38; economic disparity between countries 80; environmental destruction in 41; and global inequality 123; and historical contingency 24; historical logic of 40–1, 94; hybrid forms in 99–100; labor in 35–6, 38, 41; and modern/backward narrative 14; and nation-state 100, 122; overarching patterns 31; and real subsumption 5, 14; redistribution and accumulation in 80; remnants in 27n2, 211; as reshaping the globe 29–31; superfluous people in 9, 210–1; temporalities of 30–1, 37–8, 40; transformation of labor in 40; unevenness in 9, 17, 27, 98–9, 193; value in 36–8 capitalist economy, as overseas trade 71 capitalist modernity, unevenness of 193–4 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 4, 5, 7, 87–8, 160, 204; on capitalism’s historicism 94; on cultural difference 87–8; on European domination 92–3; on historicism 92; ‘History 1’ 94–9, 172; ‘History 2’ 95–100; on Marx 87–8, 91–5, 172; on Marxism, as hegemonic 91, 93; on

236 Index modernity 91–2; principle of disjuncture 91–2, 95; Provincializing Europe 87, 91–2, 97–8; on unproductive labor 96 Chang Hao 2 Chatterjee, Partha 205; on civil society 199, 203; Lineages of Political Society 210; on political society 199–200, 210 Chen Boda 140, 182 Chen Duxiu 55, 163, 169 Chen, Kuan-hsing 9, 193, 204–5, 209–10; Asia as Method 201; on “becoming others” 201; on civil and political society 203; critical syncretism of 201; on East Asian exceptionalism 203; on Marxism 201–2; and pan-Asianism 201 Chen Yun 140, 149 Chiang Kai-shek 163, 168 China: bureaucratic capitalism in 134–5; class politics disappearing in 57–9, 62, 69; Constitution of 65; consumerism in 61; defeat of workers’ state 62, 65–6; early socialist thinkers 170; field-well system 170; and global capitalism 130–2; informal labor (dagong) 51; labor conflicts in, and legal system 64–5, 69n2; labor law inadequacy 51; labor unions 66–8; masses, discourse on 151–2; neoliberals in 206; New Left 206; new poor 50, 52–3, 55, 61–2; new workers 55–8, 60–3, 65, 68; old working class 60–1, 65; peasant/farmer rebellions 53, 170; political ruptures in,62; post-socialist transformation 134–5; postwar Japanese views of 195; Reform Era 67; revolutionary intellectuals of 61; rural reform 50; shift to market society 66–7; social collective in 139; socialist-era working class, decline of 52; and state-capitalism 4, 6, 8; “three rural crises” 50; urban reforms 50; urban-rural gap 50, 58; and USSR, breaking of relations 165; weiquan movement 59, 62–3, 68; worker/farmer categories as inadequate 51; as “world’s factory” 58, 61 Chinese Cultural Renaissance 168 Chinese Marxism, 138; and antinomies of modernism 139; and dual modernity 154; and social collective 139 Chinese Revolution 55, 194, 205, 207–8

Chun Doo-hwan 178, 184 civil society, limits of 210 “class consciousness” 59 class relations, emergence of 123–4 class revolution, source of 54 Cohen, Paul 204 commodity: double character of 37; and equality 45–6; see also Marx, Karl: on commodity commodity owners 45, 107–9 communist movement, failure of 67 comprador bourgeoisie 122–4, 132–3, 135nn5–6; see also Wang Yanan: on compradors Confucian texts, historical contexts of 169 Confucius 167, 169, 171 Confucianism 167–8, 171–2 Constitution of the People’s Republic of China 65 Cosmetics Market (Zhifen shichang) (1933 film) 147 critical syncretism 201–2 Critical Theory 47n2 “Criticize Lin and Criticize Confucius” 158, 167 Cultural Revolution 139, 158, 163, 166–7, 171, 173, 190, 209; “five black categories” 163 Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Laborers (Beijing) 56 dagongzhe 56–7 Democratic Labor Party (South Korea) 175 Deng Xiaoping 55, 161, 72 Ding Ling 139, 152 Dong Zhongshu 168–9, 171 dujing 169 Dumenil, Gerard 182 Duncan, J. Mayor General 142 Du Yaquan 53–4 1848 world revolution 73 Engels, Friedrich 165; on value form analysis 116n10 Examining Legalist Theories and Censuring Confucianism 167, 170 Fabian, Johannes 193 Fairbank, John K. 2

Index  237 Fang Yizhi 165 Fanon, Frantz 123–4, 201 federation of nations 76, 78–9; and reciprocity of the gift 81 fetishism: Marx on 104–5; and value 110 feudalism, dissolving of 18 financial globalization, and new divisions of labor 49 First International 71, 79; dissolution of 72 Fourier, Charles 73 Fourth International 73 Foxconn 60, 69 Frankfurt School 47n2 French Revolution 74 Freud, Sigmund 78 fugu 167–9 Fukuyama, Francis 78 Gang of Four 167 Gan Yang 171–2; Bridging Three Traditions 171 Gao Gang 163 gift, power of 81, 83 global bourgeoisie, roots of 133–4 global double-crisis, 189 Gramsci, Antonio 21, 25 Great Leap Forward 140, 163, 165 guojia (sovereign state) 161 Guo Moruo 149 Habermas, Jürgen: The Theory of Communicative Action 159 Han Fei 169 Hardt, Michael 73, 79 Harootunian, Harry 1–2, 7–9, 162, 211; on global capitalism 4; Marx after Marx 2; on possibilities of resistance 4,5; on subsumption, 4–5, 99–100; on unevenness under capitalism 5 Hegel, G. W. F. 7, 45, 76–8, 124, 163–4, 203; on civil society 210; “cunning of reason” 77, 79; Phenomenology of Spirit 39, 164, 211; Spirit 3; subject of history 39 Hegelian dialectics 158 Heidegger, Martin 87, 91–2, 96–7, 99 Heinrich, Michael 114 historical materialism 13–5 Hobbes, Thomas 76–82 Hoston, Germaine 89–90, 99, 100

Huang Zongzhi 51, 64 Hu Feng 139 Hu Jintao 161 Hundred Flowers Campaign 140 Husserl, Edmund 20 “hyperreality” (Baudrillard) 93 imperialism, and class politics 54–5 Incheon Confederation of Democratic Workers (ICDW) 180 Iraq War 78 Japan: agrarian villages 25–6; archaism in 22; feudal residues in 22, 24–7; Marxism in 21–2; national question 90; tenkō phenomenon 90 Japanese Communist Party (JCP) 21, 89, 194 Japanese Marxism 7, 87–9, 99–100, 204 Japanism 21–2 Jeon Taeil 178 Jian Bozan 169–71, 173 Jiang Jieshi 151, 200 Jiang Qing 167 Jiang Shigong: China Hong Kong 172 Jiang Zeming 161 Kagan, Robert 78 Kang Sheng 140 Kang Youwei 168 Kant, Immanuel 7, 12; and abolition of capitalism, 75; abolition of state in 76; on civil constitution 74; on commerce and peace 80–1; on federation of nations 75–9, 81; on human nature 77; “Kingdom of Ends” 95; on perpetual peace 79; on regulative Idea 83; on state of nature 76; “Toward Perpetual Peace” 75, 80; on “unsociable sociability” 77–8; on World Republic, 75–7, 81–2 Karatani Kōjin 2, 6–7, 10, 115; on capital and state 6–7; on Kant 7; on surplus value 113–14 Karl, Rebecca E. 8 Kawakami Hajime 89, 100 Ke Qingshi 140 Khrushchev, Nikita 165 Kim Daejung 185 “Kingdom of Ends” (Kant) 75 Kishi Nobusuke 195

238 Index Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) 186–89 Korean Marxism 189 Korean Socialist Labor Party (KSLP) 180 Korsch, Karl 14 Kovalevsky, M. M. 16 Kugelmann, Ludwig 103 Kurama Samezō 7, 105–7; on commodity owners 109–10; on money 108; on theory of value and act of exchange 108; on value form analysis 108 Kyoto School of Philosophy 21, 198 labor 35; see also Marx, Karl: on labor labor unions 66, 70n3; in China, 66–8; in Europe 66 Lange, Elena Louise 7–8 Lao Zi 165 League of Nations 77–8, 82 Legalism 168–71 Lenin, V. I. 24, 49, 67–8, 70n3, 72, 100, 163–64, 166, 182–3, 207–8; on “Asiatic State” 16; The Development of Capitalism in Russia 21; on dialectics, 164; Materialism and Empirio-criticism 14; on 1911 Revolution; Philosophical Notebooks 163 Levenson, Joseph 2 Li Changmao 166 Li Da 140 Li Dazhao 55, 169 Life Weekly (Shenghuo zhoukan) (magazine) 147 Li Fuchun 140 Li Jingjun 63 Lin Biao 167, 171 Lin Liguo 167 Liu Hua 150 Liu, Joyce C. H.: on Chinese socialism 8 Liu Shaoqi 140, 149, 166 Liu Zongyuan 170 Lu Dingyi 149 Lukács, Georg 3, 39, 47n2, 196 History and Class Consciousness 14 Lushan Conference 165 Lü Tu 63 Luxemburg, Rosa 18, 21 Lu Xun 120, 169, 194, 197; “True Story of Ah Q” 54

Maoism 209, 212 Mao Zedong 3, 4, 6, 8, 55, 73, 119, 121, 138–41, 149, 160, 165–6, 169, 172, 182, 197–8, 200, 206, 209, 211; “Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society” 120; antagonistic dichotomies in 163; on bureaucratic capitalism 128–9; on “national form” 161; “one divides into two” 162–3, 173; “On New Democracy” 128; “On the Question of Contradiction” 163–4 Mariategui, Jose Carlos 18, 21 Maruyama Masao 198 Marx, Karl 3, 26, 45, 72–3, 79, 87, 92, 141, 201, 203; on abolition of capitalism 35; on bourgeois system of production 111; “The British Rule in India” 19; Capital 4, 14–6, 24, 27n1, 33, 35, 39–40, 42, 45, 59, 103–5, 107–8, 112, 115n2, 117n20, 137, 162–4; on capital 38–9; categories in 33–4; on civil society 210; on class exploitation 49; on class revolution 54; on collective action 45–6; on “commodity” 35, 39–40, 115n2, 116nn12–3; on commodity owners 107–9; Communist Manifesto 54; continued relevance of 29; Critique of Political Economy 105, 111; and cultural particularity 2; on economic history, multiple forms of 15–16; and Enlightenment 89, 92–3, 95; on the factory 137; on fetishism 104–5, 112; The German Ideology 22; and global capitalism 2; Grundrisse 15–16, 19, 21, 32, 34–6, 94–5, 172; on Hegel 39; historical specificity of 34–5; on history 33; on labor 30, 35–6, 48n6, 91–2, 94–5, 111, 137, 153–4, 172; labor theory of value (LTV) 103–6, 112, 115n2; on money 104, 108 110, 211; as not transhistorical 35; and plural possibilities for transformation 18–19; on proletariat 53, 137, 153–4; reappropriating 29; on reification 196; on reserve army of labor 210; “Results of the Direct Production Process” (1863) 16, 99; on revolution 71; on Russian communes 17–18; Subject of history 39; on subsumption 16–17, 27n1, 41–2,

Index  239 99–100, 194; on surplus value 4–5, 114; and temporality 1–2; Theories of Surplus Value 94; on unfreedom 32–3; on vagabonds 54; on value 33, 36, 39–40, 107, 115n3, 116nn12–3; value/ real wealth distinction 34, 36–7 Marx/Bakunin factions, and nationalist conflicts 72 Marxian internationalism, as European 19 Marxism: in Asian translation, problems of 1; as European 99, 194; as hegemonic 91, 93, 95; in Japan 87–90; on labor 33–4; non-Western, 20; in peripheral societies 20–1; sinification of 157–59; 161–2, 167, 172–3; as Western 87, 90; see also Western Marxism materialist dialectic 158 Matsumura Kazuto 197 May Thirty Movement 142, 149–50 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 14 Memmi, Albert 201 Metzger, Thomas 2 migrant workers 50 minzu (people) 161 Mizoguchi, Yūzō 204–6; “China as Method” 204 modern bureaucracies 134 modern class politics, and overlapping class boundaries 53 modernization theory 193, 195; critiques of 193–4 modern society, gap in 44 money, magical character of 110; see also Marx, Karl: on money Moon Jaeyin 175 multilateralism 79 “multitude” (Negri and Hardt) 73, 79 Murthy, Viren 9 Mu Shiying 143 Mussolini, Benito 72 Nandy, Ashis 201 Napoleon Bonaparte 75, 77 Napoleonic Wars 75 Needham, Joseph 125 Negri, Antonio 73, 79 New Life Movement 151, 68 new poor, in economic globalization 50, 52; see also China: new poor

new world system 81, 83 Nietzsche, Friedrich 47 1911 Revolution 53, 55, 207 1968, impact of 73 Nishida Kitarō 21, 198; as bourgeois philosopher 23 Nixon, Richard 140 Nosaka Sanzō 195 October Revolution 72 “one divides into two” 157–8, 162–3, 166, 173 Pal, John 143 pan-Asianism 209 Park Geunhye 175 Park Hyeonchae 178, 182 Park Junghee 175 People’s Democracy (PD) of South Korea 9, 176–7; and collapse of Soviet bloc 181; different groups in 177, 179–81, 184–86, 188; emergence of 178; and labor movement 183, 186; Marxist orientation of 177–8; on the masses 183–5, 187; and neoliberalism 185–6; oppositions to 179; oppression of 180; on party formation 187–8; and student movements 185–6; theoretical issues of 181–4 politics of nothingness 198 politics of unevenness 9 post-capitalism, different mode of process in 41–2 postcolonial theory 91 principle of reciprocity 81, 83 proletariat: formation of 54, 70n3; as multitude 73; self-abolition of 35, 42–3; see also Marx: on proletariat Qian Mu 125 Qin Shi Huang 170 Qiu Jin 55 Qu Qiubai 140–1 Rawls, John: “Justice as Fairness” 80; The Law of Peoples 80 ”redistributive justice” (Rawls) 80 Reichelt, Helmut 111–2 Reischauer, Edwin O. 2, 88–90

240 Index revolutionary impulse, abandoning of, in Cold War 20 Robespierre, Maximilien 74 Roh Moohyun 185 Rousseauian bourgeois revolution 74 Roy, M. N. 120 rufadouzheng (struggle between Confucianism and Legalism) 157–8, 162, 167 Russian Revolution 72 Saint-Pierre 75 Sanyal, Kalyan 211; on civic society 210; Rethinking Capitalist Development 210 Schmitt, Carl 81–2 Schwartz, Benjamin 140 Scott, David 209 Second International, and national conflicts 72, 162 Sekyi-Otu, Ato 124 Senior, Nassau William 95 Shanghai: class exclusion in 143–4; consumerism and abstract equality in 152; factories, and patron-client ties 144–5; and global capitalism 130; Jazz Age 142–4, 146–8, 152; late 19th century 141; masses as potentiality in 152; racial exclusion in 142; xiaoshimin in 145–8 Shang Yang 169–70 Shen Buhai 169 Shen Dao 169 Shultz, Theodore: The Economics of Being Poor 49 Simmel, Georg 27n2 simultaneous revolution 83; efforts and difficulties of 71–4; failure of 79 Smith, Adam 95 socialism, interference to 71 socialist revolution, as simultaneous 71 societal rationalization, paradox of 159 Society for the Study of Materialism 21 Sophocles 211 Southern slaveholding society 18 South Korea: crisis of social movements in 176; Democratic Labor party 175; Jepa-PD 180–1, 188; Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU)

186–8; Korean Socialist Labor Party (KSLP) 180; National Liberation (NL) groups 176–7, 179, 181, 186–8; and neoliberalism 184–5; 1987 political crisis 178; People’s Democracy (PD) 176–8, 181–84, 186; progressive parties, decreasing support for 175 Soviet bloc, collapse of 73 Soviet Communist Party 73 Spring and Autumn Annals 168 Stalin, Joseph 140, 161, 164 Stirner, Max 73 “Struggle between Confucianism and Legalism” 157–8, 162, 167, 173 Subaltern Studies 93 subsumption: formal 4, 16, 41, 99, 122, 129, 211; hybrid 17, 19, 24, 99, 100; real 5, 9, 14, 16, 41–2, 99 Sun Chuanfang 150 Sun Yat-sen 55, 198, 207 Sun Zhigang 64, 69n1 superfluous people, in capitalism 9, 43, 210–12 surplus value, as purpose of capital 114; see also Marx, Karl: on surplus value Takeuchi Yoshimi 9, 193–200, 202–6, 208–9, 211; “A Critical Biography of Mao Zedong” 197; on Chinese resistance 197; on Europe 196; on the instant 197; on Mao 198–200; on nothingness 197–8; “On Asian Nationalism” 198–9; on universality 200; on Western nationalism 198–9; “What Is Modernity?” 195–6 Tanabe Hajime 21 tenkō 89–90 Third International 72–3, 120, 162 Third World 49, 197; collapse of 73 Thompson, E. P. 59 Tolstoy, Leo 169 Tomba, Massimiliano 24 Tōsaka Jun 21–2, 24; ‘everyday life’ focus in 26; The Japanese Ideology 23; on role of custom in Japan 22–3 “traditional Marxism” 32; on labor 33–4 transition, linear narrative of 18 translation, problem of 1 tribal confederations 81

Index  241

unilateralism 79 United Nations (UN) 77–8, 82–3 Uno Kōzō 7, 21, 24–7, 103–5, 112–5; on agrarian problem in capitalism 24–5; on commodity owners 107; as overlooking fetishism 106, 109–11; Principles of Political Theory 106; Studies in Capital 106; on value form 106–7, 109–10, 116nn9–10 Uno school 110, 112, 116n14 “unsociable sociability” (Kant), 77–8

weiquan 59, 62–3, 68 Werner, Jake 8, 207 Western Marxism 13–14, 19–20, 26–7; Cold War period 13; homogenizing of 13; interwar period 13; progressive narrative in 14; rigid trajectory in 14 Work-Study Mutual Aidism 169 World Health Organization (WHO) 82 World Historical Idea 78 “World Historical State” 77–8 “worlding” (Heidegger), 91 World Republic (Kant) 75–6, 81–2 “world state” (Schmitt) 82 Wu Han 171

vagabondage 54 value form analysis 106, 108–9, 116n7 Vitalis, Robert 122

xiaoshimin (petty urbanites) 145, 151 Xun Yue, 170 Xu Xilin 55

Wakeman, Frederick 197 Walker, Gavin 106 Wallerstein, Immanuel 73, 182 Wang Hui 2, 8–10, 193, 205, 209, 212; on Chinese state during Mao period 6; “Depoliticized Politics” 208; on Maoism 208–9; on “new poor” in China 6; “The Politics of Imagining Asia” 206; on revolutionary China, and present 206; on working-class struggle in China 6 Wang Jiaxiang 140 Wang Mang 170 Wang Ming 139, 141 Wang Yanan 8, 21; on bureaucracy in China 125–8; on bureaucratic capitalism 129–31; on compradors 119–21, 124, 126–8, 131; “Economics and Philosophy” 119; Research on Bureaucratic Politics in China 125 Ward, Max 7 Weber, Max 15, 20, 125

Yamada Moritarō 24–5 Yang Xianzhen 8, 164–5, 171, 173 Yang Zhu 169 Yasuda Yojūrō 198 Yeh, Wen-hsin 145 yifenweier (one-divides-into) 157–8, 162 Yongzhen reformist movement 170 Yoon Soyeong 178, 182 Yuan Shikai 168

Trotsky, Leon 72–3, 163 “Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks” 138

Zasulich, Vera 4, 17 Zhang Chunqiao 139 Zhang Guotao 163 Zhang Taiyan 55 Zhang Wentian 140 Zhou Enlai 55, 140, 149, 167 Zhou Yang 138–9, 149 Zhou Yutong 8, 169, 171, 173 Zou Rong 55 Zou Taofen 151 zunkong 167–8