Marxism and the Chinese Experience by Arif Dirlik & Maurice Meisner

Author:Arif Dirlik & Maurice Meisner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Roulledge

IV

Explanation of this break demands a complex model of causality. For change took place at many levels, each of which served both as “cause” and “effect.”21 The development of a conception, a language, a set of institutions, and a repertoire of practices of local participatory, public politics in postrevolutionary rural China was inextricably linked with transformations of the mode of production, class relations, and popular epistemology, consciousness, and ideology. The sea-changes wrought by the Chinese revolution were, in a word, overdetermined.22 They illustrate the massive scope, the complexity, and, as will be seen in the next section, ultimately the difficulties and contradictions of a transition to socialism.

The development of a popular politics in rural China was grounded in the move toward a socialist mode of production. It began in the struggles for reduced rent and interest and eventually for land reform. Later it came to revolve around the management of collective economic affairs in the agricultural cooperatives and then the communes. Economic life provided much of the substance of local participatory politics during the Maoist period: debates about workpoints, production planning and management, collective accumulation and investment, and so forth. But the mode of production was no mere “base” or “cause” in the story. Changes in the mode of production did not by themselves bring about political change in any direct or simple way. The emergence of a new kind of local politics was a process both tortuous and inextricably bound up with the struggles over new modes of production. Land reform, cooperativization, and even the creation of the people’s communes (and most certainly their reorganization in the early 1960s) were products of participatory local politics (which, to be sure, had grown up around economic issues). In turn, changes in the mode of production reshaped local politics. For example, the great equalizations of income and wealth within production teams provided a context in which the pattern of political participation was not skewed by the uneven distribution of economic resources.

Likewise with social class. The preexisting class structure was simultaneously an object of and an obstacle to the rise of popular politics during the revolution. In Stone Wall and Long Bow villages, so long as the landlords dominated the villages, peasants were reluctant to enter into the uncharted and indeed unconceived realm of political struggle against them. But a dialectic of victimization operated too: it was the exploitation and depredations of that domination that provided the impulse—however trammeled—to do so. After the land reform, the struggle against rich peasants provided much of the text and subtext of the local politics and institution-building involved in cooperativization.23 The continued use of former landlords as whipping-boys and political scapegoats through the 1960s and 1970s, however inappropriate and hurtful it might have been, should be seen as a product of their centrality in the process by which China’s peasants began to develop and flex political muscles for the very first time. From the peasants’ and local leaders’ point of view, continued exorcism of the landlords was

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