Marxism and the Chinese experience

JOURNAL

OF COMPARATIVE

ARIF DIRLIK

ECONOMICS

AND MAURICE

15, 5

18-52 1 ( 199 1)

Eds., Marxism and theChineseExpeM. E. Sharpe, 1989. xii + 384 pp., no in-

MEISNER,

rience.Arrnonk, NY/London:

dex, $45.00. The other day a cartoon appeared in a Soviet magazine showing three beggars, Marx, Engels, and Lenin, squatting on the books they had written, a shabby hat in front of them on the sidewalk. The caption says: “But the theory was right.” The trouble, of course, is that the theory was wrong, too. This is understood by millions of people who for 72 years had been on the road to nowhere, as a banner at a protest rally in Moscow’s Red Square phrased it-41 years in China. Such understanding, however, comes with the greatest of difficulties to Kathedersozialisten and faculty club radicals in capitalist countries who, with the Sidewalk Three, thought the theory was right and that the people must have had problems with metahistorical cognition, that is, with “spatially and temporally (not to say ideologically) limited interpretive tropisms” (Dirlik and Meisner). Nevertheless, albeit well behind popular consciousness, the idea that something is rotten in the system of actually existing socialism and, indeed, with the socialist revolutionary vision does insinuate itself into the Discourse and postdiscursive struggles of the Western academic left. Now, then, is a time of profound disjunctures and dialectical angst in base and superstructure. Self-images and social imaginaries have to be refurbished, new phenomenologies, epistemes, and complex models of causality explored, diversified sensitivities raised to new heights, and new oppressions and hegemonistic structures found outside the received Marxist class paradigms. For one thing, “the household has become objectified in discourse in ways that, in the very process of individuating it, compromise its seeming autonomy.” But it is more serious than that. For “if indeed the activity of this moral discourse should prove to be only a transitional phenomenon, then its significance will lie precisely in its character of renegotiating the boundary between the proper and the heterodox in economic practice” (Anagost). But what if “one school of thought on the praxis question [says] that teleological concerns may not be the starting point in evaluating the success of practice because they are subjective”? (Brugger). What then? Several deconstructionist steps can be and, indeed, have been taken in this troublesome matter of the socialist rot. The first and simplest, that taken by 0147-5967191 $3.00 Copyright 0 1991 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

518

BOOK REVIEWS

519

Lenin, Stalin, and their lineal successors, is to lay it down that if there is contradiction between real socialism and its utopian ideal, as, say, when the state is exponentially expanding whereas the doctrine says it should wither away, or when, as in the Cultural Revolution, “the liberation of labor . . . end[s] up in the conversion of labor to forced labor” (Dirlik), it is just that, a dialectical contradiction, nonantagonistic under conditions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Anyone who has doubts suffers from cognitive tropisms that can be cured by heart-to-heart chats with the cadres or the Cheka. This step is no longer as fashionable as it once was, except in China. Blecher, in his essay on the political articulation of social interest, sees such “political solicitation” early in China’s socialist revolution as a brand of emergent participatory grass-roots politics through persuasion-really! Old peasant Ma Chiu-tze had 23 formal talks with the village cadres besides numerous evening talks, before “an epistemological change involving a new understanding of rent as exploitation” took shape in his head. And now all these hard-won entries by the Mas into the new popular politics are being depoliticized again and deradicalized, and all the socially necessary labor time put in by the chatty cadres turns into its dialectical opposite. The second step is to argue that what goes by the name of real socialism, the experienced world of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Deng, Ceausescu, and everyone else in a position of power, the system, for short, is not real socialism at all, but a spatial and temporal accumulation of mistakes, misconstructions, misinterpretations, aberrations, incongruities, deviations, and errors of work, style, and empowerment, and other social pathologies too numerous to mention. Such a system, it is argued, contains two profound disjunctures: between official claims and experienced reality and between experienced reality and promised vision. “While socialists have been able to postpone recognition of this problem [of socialism in power] by shifting hopes from one socialist experiment to another [most recently to Nicaragua], it has become apparent over the years that the socialist vision in reality has given rise to structures of power that are not only inconsistent with idealistic anticipations, but have utilized the promise of ultimate socialism to legitimize political systems that themselves would have to undergo revolutionary transformation in order to move once again toward the socialist promise” (Dirlik). This, of course, immediately raises the problematic, as they say, of the validity and utility of the socialist revolution as a whole, system, vision, and all, in China as elsewhere. That is all right because “if there was indeed tragedy for the Chinese people in the consequences of China’s socialist revolution, we must seek to understand that tragedy as one act in the broader tragedy of a history that called forth that revolution as historical necessity, rather than obscure the historical issues it raises by denying its historicity” (Dirlik and Meisner). History has these laws, you see. But denying the socialist essence of

520

BOOK REVIEWS

real life systems, whether in China or Russia, or changing the system’s name or the grammar of its political Discourse, as the outer Mongols have recently done, will not do. It disvalues everything around and fosters incredulity toward metanarratives. So comes the third step: dumping the old immanent vision. The old immanent vision is too bound up with modes of production and property-determined classes-too unitary and deterministic. It ignores, as we have seen, other oppressions and hegemonies in a world where the dominant Discourse remains capitalist and to which localized (national) socialisms must perforce adapt “unless some drastic change occurs within the world system.” “Socialism can no longer claim to possess a coherent alternative to capitalism, but only a residual political identity that seeks to realize development goals imposed by the capitalist world system through ‘noncapitalist development’ ” (Dirlik). Some, like the East German postcommunists, tried to find that accommodation in the concept of “market socialism,” and lost the election. Others prefer “social capitalism,” another nonstarter. The new socialist social vision, Dirlik suggests, is best articulated as “postsocialism,” “Rather than signaling the end of socialism, [it] offers the possibility in the midst of crisis in socialism of rethinking socialism in new, more creative ways. I think it is no longer possible to think of socialism as the inevitable destiny of humankind to follow upon capitalism.” Postsocialism derives its inspiration not from “a congealed utopia that postpones to the future problems that await resolution today, but from impulses to liberation that represent present responses to problems of oppression and inequality” (Dirlik). Such as what? Oppression among nations (China-Tibet?), state oppression of society, races, genders (essays by Young, Rofel, and Prazniak), ecology, militarism, technology-generated inequalities, and the “culture of consumption” (to which, it would seem, ordinary people aspire after wandering for more than 70 years in the socialist desert). Ernest0 Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, (not included, but approvingly cited in this community of essays) put it with exemplary clarity: socialism has to be rethought in terms of the “infinite intertextuality of emancipatory discourses in which the plurality of the social takes shape.” Until such social plurality materializes in the emancipatory intertextuality, socialism will keep going down the tubes as both an unworkable system and a bizarre idea, and very likely afterward too. Postsocialism, as Inspector Clouseau would say, “can mean only one thing, and I don’t know what it is.” Actually, it can mean two things, and we know what they are. First, it could mean the abandonment of Marxism. Such a possibility can be read into the revelation that “the concept of socialism essentially grounded in consciousness of class as the central datum of social oppression, is no longer sufficient to contain the question of social and political oppression the multidimensionality of which has impinged on our consciousness with compelling power” (Dirlik). This would mean a whole-

521

BOOK REVIEWS

sale unloading of material productive forces and social relations of production, surplus value, immiseration of the proletariat, base, superstructure, historical-dialectical Stufenlehre,and other alchemical alembics-the lot. But throwing numerologies overboard, which numerous Marxists are doing these days, is easier than getting rid of the Marxist mind-set. As the saying goes, you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy. The second thing postsocialism might mean is united front tactics in modern dress. Since consciousness of class cannot be used as the central datum of oppression, why not plug into other people’s concerns and co-opt the agendas of the Greens, the blacks, the feminists, the alternative life stylists, and many others, for there is room to spare in this imperfect world where poverty, injustice, unfairness, bad luck, bad judgment, and oppression are concerned. The problem, however, is that the now garment-rending socialists have a very poor track record in all these fields, and extreme caution has to be exercised in entering into alliances with them even in their declared popsocialist transmogrification. Marxism and the ChineseExperienceis the product of a symposium held at Duke University in the fall of 1986. It is made up of four parts: introduction; political economy; social relations, political power, culture; and conclusions. Of the six economic essays, the one by Schran is informative. The critique of the Leninist state by Friedman in Part III, which discovers the truth known to many for quite some time past, that “Marx himself must be challenged or passed over if political democracy is to be institutionalized in an economic world never envisioned by Marx,” is worth reading. Last and least there is an exegesis of astrophysicist Fang Lizhi’s speeches to student audiences, which questions Merle Goldman’s plea to Western intellectuals to speak up when their colleagues in communist countries are persecuted. One wonders, but not for long, how the book would have looked had the killings of Tiananmen Square happened before the volume went to press. Not very different, one imagines, from what it looks like now. For in the metahistorical perspective, one-act tragedies count for little. JANFRYBYLA

The Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pennsylvania 16802