Abolishing Boundaries: Global Utopias in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 1880–1940 by Peter Zarrow

Author:Peter Zarrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2021-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

The Trotskyist Zheng Chaolin remarked that Chen “had a wealth of political experience and acute political antennae, but he was short of the skills in basic and systematic theoretical analysis.”122 I would rather say Chen was an enthusiastic but unskilled politician while he was an insightful if unsystematic political theorist. He came of political age at a time when Chinese thinkers were snatching at Western ideas in translation and incorporating them into programs of change. The translations may have been imperfect and subject to misunderstanding even when accurate, and the approach to Western ideas may have been decontextualized and so subject to misunderstanding—but so what? It was the creative appropriation of a mix of ideas used to wage “brush-wars,” build solidarity, and seek truth that mattered. Chen’s obvious use of Dewey, Marx/Lenin, and Trotsky was central to his evolving views; perhaps as important but less obvious are the roles of Mencius, Bergson, and even Kant. Even that old feudal, Kang Youwei.

In the end, Chen developed a theory of Marxist revolutionary democracy that was simultaneously rooted in class struggle and the long historical development of democracy—popular power—over centuries. Chen never said that “class struggle is the motor of democracy” but, at the end of his life, he might have. Disillusioned by real existing Marxism both in China and in Russia, but maintaining the understanding of historical materialism he had gained in the 1920s, Chen finally synthesized the concepts of class struggle and democracy.123 Indeed, by the end of his life, Chen was ready to criticize even Lenin and Trotsky on the grounds that they were insufficiently committed to democratic principles.

Chen also had a deep understanding of the complex relationship between Chinese nationalism and class struggle. He early on noted that the Guomindang was less a representative of the bourgeois class than a military organization, and he feared the CCP was becoming another one. The conclusion Chen drew was that while all Chinese should unite against the Japanese, the intellectual vanguard should still work to prepare the proletariat for its moment. Chen essentially remained attached to the Trotskyist understanding that China was not a truly “feudal” society, because the rural economy was thoroughly dominated by urban capitalism: “feudal exploitation” there was, but it benefited no landed manorial class. In this view, capitalist relations were dominant in China: the backward rural economy was in thrall to urban capitalism and the urban bourgeoisie benefited from what were at ground level feudal structures of exploitation. Chinese Trotskyists, including Chen, did not, as is sometimes charged, ignore the countryside, but they did conclude that China was ready for a workers’ revolution.

At the same time that Chen maintained this view of the Chinese social structure, he was treating democracy as both a product of historical forces and also as a “motive force” of history. He believed that democracy could only be practiced through historically determined institutions, and he remained a historical materialist in that sense. He foresaw that through class struggle the proletariat would rise to form a more perfect set of democratic institutions than had ever existed before.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.