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Crisis Culture and the Waning of Revolutionary Politics* Karl Marx's call for a "ruthless criticism of everything existing" has never been more . of the gravest and most fundamental problems today is a crisis of the political imagination.
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- Class consciousness | sociology | Britannica
- Chapter One: The Early Years
Mark Selden is an American, a distinguished historian of China, best known for his work on the Com nist movement during the wartime years.
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The golume shows that in the 's and 's the Chinese leadership emphasized social reorganization in both industry and agriculture, but that capital investment for technological improvement went almost entirely to industry. Selden says that two competing schools of thought structured China's approach to its agricultural problems. One stressed that produc. In fact, of course, except from an ideological point of view, there was no reason for an exclusive choice.
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Selden and the translations make clear, was the model of the Soviet Union, which dominated Chinese thinking in those years and which gave disproportionate weight to industry. Another source, which Mr. Selden does not sufficiently emphasize, was a general Marxist and Western bias that obscured the high technological level Chinese farmers achieved before the revolution.
They were, in all likelihood, the most efficient agricultural producers in the world working without modern scientific means. There was simply no way Chinese agriculture could achieve a qualitative breakthrough in production simply through peace and socialism, as important as these were. By the late 's, as Mr. Selden shows, agriculture's slow growth became an alarming problem, especially as it began to hurt industrial development. It proved to be an economic disaster, though Mr.
Selden, emphasizing organizational creativity, gives it higher marks than is now usual. Finally, in the early 's came widespread collec organization. There have been debates on policy si then, all of which are well documented in this col tion, but the basic decision for balanced growtl agriculture and industry has remained constant, e through the Cultural Revolution. Nigel Harris is English, a former editor of the magazine International Socialism. It represents the entire process as the work of handful of party leaders - most notably Mao Zedong - interested only in personal powei and national defense.
According to Mr.
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Harris, there has been absolutely. Harris's analysis makes him sensitive both to china's problems with authoritarianism and to the cant through which party and personal dictatorship have, by various metaphysical rationalizations, all too often been equated with popular rule. For Mr. He even cites Marx, with sp. Nothing says more about the prevailing attitudes in 19th-century Europe than that unfortunate statement. To repeat it today, in the light of Chinese experience, is dogmatic and unimaginative. By the 20th century, Chinese farmers had long since been rescued from whatever infirmities feudalism may have imposed on them, and, more important, there is little or no evidence, except from the aristocratic warriors at the top, that feudalism makes peasants duller than their masters.
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They are known for two earlier eyewitness accounts of life in Ten Mile Inn village. Here is a third, covering the early months of What is most striking in their account is the sophistication of the farmers, especially in political affairs. They have a bonedeep belief that people are inherently equal and a frank and tolerant attitude toward those with whom they disagree. They readily understand elections, and much of the maneuvering at meetings comes from campaigning for various positions of village leadership. Their aptitude for democracy reminds one of the American farmers that de Tocqueville wrote about.
The Crooks appear to be openminded, and so do the Comm- nist Party members whom they describe. It is all the more interesting, then, that the usual biases crop up. One poor farmer appreciates the problem when he is discussing the difficulty of determining a person's class background. Of course, tracing back three generations was all wrong, because few families have been poor for that long at a stretch.
If a man's parents are poor, he usually can't afford to marry and so has no children. The book also displays a slightly manipulative approach toward the farmers, and the farmers respond in kind. Today the chief issues in China are economic development in a society still desperately poor, and political liberalization in a system with powerful vested interests.
Lurking in the wings, one suspects, is a reevaluation of the Western impact on the revolution, and of its Marxist heritage. Some in the West, and perhaps in China, will find such a development a symptom that the Chinese revolution is slowing down, is entering its thermidor, that conservative time when national traditions take precedence over the ideology that spurred the revolution onward.
Yet, in the Chinese case, there is a good argument to be made that the national traditions are, in many ways, more progressive than the ideology. The future should be interesting. WHAT are we to think of the Chinese? We must think something about them, fit them into our inner pictures, not only of space and time, but of a moral order.
Ideas of national character, whether crude or subtle, have flourished since there first were nations, answering a need of the mind to sort and summarize experience. We suppose that we know a nation's fixed essence, but nations change, and so do our reasons for seeing them as heroes or villains. By the 18th century, Western views of Cathay had changed drastically, no doubt because the Chinese under Manchu discipline were cutting a smarter figure, and because philosophers such as Voltaire and Francois Quesnay, imagining the conditions of the day to be permanent, presented China as a model for Europe of rational, polite, nonfanatical and enduring order.
Jesuit scholars had been talking up Confucianism, with which they had compromised in order gain converts of the educated class. The serious painting and poetry of China were unknown, but her decorative arts were fashionable, and her technology respected - between and Europeans had repeatedly tried, and failed, to duplicate the manufacture of porcelain. China's tranquillity was thought have fostered an industrious ingenuity, but not the ardors of art.
China was now a backward learner of international truths. Lacking internal standards, they are as they were for Shakespeare deceitful, or at least insincere. The absence of intense internal life, already felt by Voltaire, now becomes a lack that the more spiritual occident can make good by schooling the Chinese faith, family affection, patriotism, truthfulness in sci- ence and trade. Some of Smith's vision of China has survived, but with complications.
Chinese reformers themselves turned to Western ideas of freedom, patriotism, romantic love; their advocacy of patriotism, at least, succeeded.
Class consciousness | sociology | Britannica
Some of us sometimes believed in an exemplary Chinese order, like the 18th century, that sprang from the Yenan period. But the Hundred Flowers and Great. Leap, the Cultural Revolution and Gang of Four, surprised and confused us. Trampling the best and worst of her people and traditions, radical China enchanted Richard M. Nixon and wearied civil libertarians. Smith, like other astute if prejudiced observers of his time, confessed that China was complex and contradictory. She stiil is; ad We still seek interpreters.
Writing about China goes out of. But its editor and his 15 contributors are scholars and journalists of scholarly training, who have pondered their subjects and are versed in Chinese. Circumstances have not allowed them to live for decades in Peking, as the Jesuits did, or in Chinese villages, as A. Smith did. But their individual trips to China in the years since the Nixon opening of totaled 25 or more.
The authors range from John K. The various writers represent differences but not extremes of opinion. Her classmates in were mostly workers and peasants, not necessarily high school graduates. They did not desire to rise into the managerial class through their university training, even for the idealistic purpose of proletarianizing it. Rather, they hoped to return to their old jobs, serving the country as better peasants, better workers. We might doubt whether improving the work skills of a few laborers represented the best use of China's foremost academic faculty, or was in China's national interest.
But Miss Jen does not consider this point.
Chapter One: The Early Years
While, therefore, the crises first produce revolutions on the Continent, the foundation for these is, nevertheless, always laid in England. Violent outbreaks must naturally occur rather in the extremities of the bourgeois body than in its heart, since the possibility of adjustment is greater here [ie London] than there. On the other hand, the degree to which Continental revolutions react on England is at the same time the barometer which indicates how far these revolutions really call in question the bourgeois conditions of life, or how far they only hit their political formations.
With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in the periods when both these factors , the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of production , come in collision with each other… A new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis. It is, however, just as certain as this crisis MECW The First International, the writing of Capital and the struggle against racism and imperialism.
He wrote to Engels on 11 February :. I am greatly pleased by the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles. MECW Thus Marx wrote to the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath nearly a decade later 29 February :. Whereas you are a poet , I am a critic and for me the experiences of were quite enough.
When the next crisis came in , both were initially optimistic about its political impact. And his correspondence with Engels shows them closely following the political events of the day, accompanied by continuous acerbic commentary on both established political leaders and their revolutionary opponents. Occasionally they were dragged back into polemic, most notably in when Marx had to interrupt the Critique to respond in a book-length polemic to the zoologist Karl Vogt, one of the leaders of the Frankfurt Parliament—and an agent of the Emperor Napoleon III, who had accused Marx of being a police spy and gangster boss.
According to Gareth Stedman Jones:. The first was the popular response to republican transnationalism in the form of identification with the stirring and heroic national struggles in Italy, Bourbon and Russian autocracies. The second and equally important development was the growth in popular support for the abolition of slavery and the cause of the North in the American Civil War… But none of these campaigns would have made such an impact without a third and fundamental development, the transformation in the capability and political presence of trade unions. But Marx was the dominant figure in the General Council of this politically heterogeneous coalition.
This latter principle would be strongly contested by the Proudhonists and Bakuninists. So at the peak of his intellectual creativity he was leading one of the most important movements in the history of the organised working class.