Dirlik - Marxism in the Chinese Revolution

Arif Dirlik is Knight Professor of Social Science at the University of Oregon. His many publications include Revolution and History: Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919-1937; The Origins of Chinese Communism;Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution; and the edited volume, Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedongs Thought. His most recent book is Kuaguo ziben shidaide houzhimin piping(Postcolonial Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism). A Chinese translation of Revolution and History was released in February 2005. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution is due to appear in Chinese in 2005.

T he author gratefully acknowledges the following publications for permission to reprint the essays below:

Socialism and Capitalism in Chinese Socialist Thinking: The Origins, Studies in Comparative Communism 21, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 13152.

National Development and Social Revolution in Early Chinese Marxist Thought, China Quarterly 58 (April/June 1974): 286309. Reprinted with permission.

Mao Zedong and Chinese Marxism, in Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy, ed. Indira Mahalingam and Brian Carr, 593619 (London: Rout-ledge, 1997).

Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Mao Zedongs Marxism, in Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong's Thought, ed. Arif Dirlik, Paul Healy, and Nick Knight, 5983 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997).

The Predicament of Revolutionary Consciousness: Mao Zedong, Antonio Gramsci, and the Reformulation of Marxist Revolutionary Theory, Modern China 9, no. 2 (April 1983): 182211.

Revolutionary Hegemony and the Language of Revolution: Chinese Socialism between Present and Future, in Marxism and the Chinese Experience, ed. Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner, 2739 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989). Copyright 1989 by M. E. Sharpe, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

The Two Cultural Revolutions: The Chinese Cultural Revolution in the Perspective of Global Capitalism, Ershiyi shiji [Twentieth century], no. 37 (October 1996): 415.

Post-Socialism? Reflections on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, in Marxism and the Chinese Experience, ed. Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meis-ner, 36284 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989). Copyright 1989 by M. E. Sharpe, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

Looking Backward in the Age of Global Capital: Thoughts on History in Third World Cultural Criticism, in Contemporary Cultural Politics in East Asia, ed. Xiaobing Tang and Stephen Snyder, 183215 (Boulder, CO: West-view Press, 1996).

Markets, Power, Culture: The Making of a Second Cultural Revolution in China, Asian Studies Review 25, no. 1 (March 2001): 133.

T he essays included in this collection were published over three decades, in publications that range widely over the globe, from the United Kingdom to the United States, Hong Kong, and Australia. The very first essay that I ever wrote on socialism in China was published in 1974, in the China Quarterly in the United Kingdom. It appears here as chapter 3. The last one, which appears here as the final chapter, was published only last year, in the Asian Studies Review in Australia. I underline the publication history of the chapters in this collection because it suggests an explanationif not any self-evident justificationfor the republication of the essays in a collection such as this one. Unpacking this explanation is the task I undertake in the introduction.

The essays are drawn from publications that are scattered over a broad temporal and spatial range, and bringing them together between the two covers of a book makes them available to a readership that may not have access to those publications. While this is quite gratifying for the author, however, it is not sufficient for the reader who might wonder why this particular set of essays might deserve republication; especially on a subjectChinese socialism which, to be blunt, is history. Even historians have to account for what they choose to deal with in the past, and how they do so.

I would like to think that there are three good reasons for republishing the essays. The fact that socialism in China is history is not the least aspect of the matter, as it is relevant to all three reasons I will take up here; namely, forgetfulness not only in the reading but also the writing of the past, the importance of comprehensiveness in historical explanations, even when comprehensiveness consists of contradictory fractures rather than organic wholes, and the issue of socialism itself, both in history and in politicswhich, to this author at least, are not easily distinguishable. In the final analysis, it is up to the readers to decide whether these chapters in any way contribute to the achievement of the goals which, at any rate, have been the intended goals in the mind of this author. But it seems important to spell out the intentions anyway.

The issue of forgetfulness is almost of necessity the point of departure here. Professors of history frequently complain about the forgetfulness of their students, but rarely do they examine (or so it seems) their own forgetfulness either as teachers or as historians. The problem struck me forcefully for the first time nearly fifteen years ago, in the comments of a reviewer on a manuscript of mine. This reader complained that I made too much of the historical problematic offered by a book (by Joseph Levenson) that had been published quite some time agotwo decades earlier! It seemed that even for historians (which I took this person to be), two decades marked the difference between history and prehistory. The comment could be attributed to the shallowness of this particular individual, but by the 1980s, forgetfulness had become pervasive in the China field, as in Chinese society itself. With the opening of China to capitalism, the revolutionary past became increasingly questionable. Many a scholar of China who had once been sympathetic to the Chinese Revolutionespecially those whose sympathies had been marked by a singular absence of critical judgmentrushed to erase memories of their sympathies by taking the revolution out of history, more often than not by degrading what it had been about. Two decades later, the revolutionary past, and socialism in its various guises that it empowered, have all but disappeared from the scholarship.

Forgetting the losers in history is an almost inevitable concomitant of a progressivist and teleological historiography, which has little regard for what is cast by the wayside as the past marches on toward the present, and its future. It also guarantees the ideological assumption that what has come to pass had to come to pass; a naturalized history, sort of to speak, that is shared in common by modern progressivist ideologies regardless of political preference. It may also show up in more mundane forms, as in the case of revolutionary histories such as the Chinese, where historians (Chinese and foreign) have over and over again proven to be captives at the mercy of twists and turns of the revolution, to turn against it once and for all once the Communist leadership turned their backs on their own revolutionary legacy. Politics here shows up in the most vulgar (and opportunistic) form, but its plausibility rests ultimately in the teleology of a naturalized history, bolstered by the hegemonic power of a global status quo.

The kind of forgetfulness to which I am referring here is intentional forgetting (premeditated amnesia, as Alexander Woodside, with his inimitable wit, once put it), for whatever reason. Forgetting is not always bad, as being mired in the past is not a virtue in itself. It is in some ways built into the scholarly enterprise, demanded by the very economy of research, writing, teaching, and the marketplace. Intentionally forgetting itself, in other words, may be due to reasons of professional progress. But all this should not lead us to overlook the strong ideological element in forgetting, whether it is political ideology in evaluating the relative merit of historical events, etc., or the hubris of progress in the understanding of learning, which in some perceptions relegates to oblivion what appears to be superseded in terms of prevailing standards of scholarship. It is inevitably in the present that all this happens, and when forgetfulness becomes an accepted standard of an ideologically dominated professional and public domain, the present dominates the past, as the future no longer is of much concern, and we are left with an ongoing rewriting of the past in accordance with the interests of whoever would claim it. The only cure to the manipulation of the past, for whatever reason, all along has been to reclaim the past, to assure the continued appearance in history of pasts that are forgotten. Forgetting and memory go hand in hand, but also against one another. In remembering what is forgotten, we also recognize the past not just as the teleological source of the present, as in its ideological manipulations, but also as a source of critical insights in its very grounding of issues of memory and forgetting.