荒诞者共和

Market Reforms, A Passive Strategy of the Ruling Class?

I would contend that the key point here is not only about the evolutionary or self-reform possibilities among such transitional societies—Maoist or post-Mao China can serve as a clear example of how vibrant such self-critical energies can be—but also about their political limits. What are the possibilities and limits of re-revolutionizing post-revolutionary societies through a process of radical reforms? What is the likelihood that radical changes in pursuit of genuine democratic and egalitarian aims can proceed within the existing framework of class relations? These are difficult questions, but also very important ones.

I submit that Marxists should have the least difficulty acknowledging this key proposition—that under no ordinary circumstances should the ruling classes be expected to abdicate their ruling power and prerogatives, unless they are compelled by extraordinary forces. Applying this to a post-revolutionary society wherein the bureaucracy monopolizes political and economic power, the question arises: What is the likelihood that internally generated reforms might promote unity between direct producers and the social means of production through democratic self-management? In other words, what likelihood is there that such reforms can be used to implement the central premise of the socialist project?

Instead of democratically mobilizing and reorganizing society, a depoliticizing, reformist program is much more likely to emerge as the political necessity of the existing class structure and relation of political forces. Such a program becomes necessary precisely because the ruling elite will not voluntarily adopt a course of fundamental reforms that would undermine its own power. A passive strategy of gradual and partial adjustments that aims at preserving the ruling-class position is also likely to succeed, due to the fundamental political weakness of the subordinated classes. A social form, Antonio Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebooks, “‘always’ has marginal possibilities for further development and organizational improvement, and in particular can count on the relative weakness of the rival progressive force as a result of its specific character and way of life. It is necessary for the dominant social form to preserve this weakness.”22 The popular working classes, whose political mobilization was vital to the success of the Chinese Revolution, were indeed severely weakened and disorganized as an outcome of decades of repression and control.23 Fragmented, dependent, and demoralized, the Chinese working people were left with few alternative ideological and organizational resources for active resistance and self-development, thereby unable to press for more deep-seated changes with respect to the reorganization of state power. “In the absence of effective counter-forces,” noted Sweezy, “conditions favoring the development of a class system...will bear their natural fruit. And by effective counter-forces we do not mean ideological doctrines or statements of good intentions but organized political struggle.”24

Relying largely on market discipline, profit incentive, and private consumption, a market-based reform program has a discernible political logic: first, it poses much less of a threat to the ruling class; second, it preempts popular upheavals that threaten from below. This is the line of least resistance, so to speak.25 Thus in the absence of vigorous popular pressure from below, a typical ruling-class strategy for addressing society’s woes is first of all firmly to consolidate its monopoly on power (e.g., national integration, political stability, governing capacity).26 Market mechanisms are introduced to bring about some controlled (and controllable) openings in social life, to shield the ruling elite from the popular dissatisfaction by depoliticizing socioeconomic decision-making through commodification of large areas of social life, and to buy time in relation to both global capitalist competition and growing domestic discontent.

Such a path of “revolution from above” offers favorable prospects insofar as the ruling-class position is concerned. As noted earlier, market liberalization gives rise to massive opportunities for the ruling elite to convert the public power they are entrusted with into private economic gains. The creation of such a milieu, I shall add, tends to be the unintended consequence of initial reforms, when this particular abuse of power arises more from individual opportunism. However, the expansion of the money-power nexus and entrenchment of the bureaucratic-capitalist class have emboldened the ruling elite, enabling them to employ the expedient instrument of state policy to facilitate their ends more efficiently and systematically—i.e., to alter existing institutional arrangements or simply create new regulatory apparatuses and the like ex nihilo for the sake of enhancing their particularistic interests and positions. As Wang Hui—the leading critic of the emerging Chinese intellectual left—has observed, what is referred to as “neoliberalism” in the Chinese context in fact enjoys a special relationship “with the proliferation of interest groups within the state itself”:
The ideology of...“neoliberalism” had already begun to germinate [in the late 1980s], with its core content being the intensification of reforms calling for greater devolution of political and economic power...the furtherance of a comprehensive course of spontaneous privatization under the guiding premise of a lack of democratic guarantees, and the legitimization through legislative means of the polarization of classes and interests created by these individual efforts. Because of this, the principal embodiment of neoliberalism lay in the benefits accruing to social groups [formed] through the process of the creation of interest groups within the state structure.27

Therefore it has become clear, as Hart-Landsberg and Burkett argued perceptively in China and Socialism, that market imperatives “generated new tensions...that were resolved only through a further expansion of market power.”28 But this is only part of the story. Market reforms are in a fundamental way mediated by political-structural factors, and marketization derives its significance from historically existing class relations. Market expansion is unquestionably driven by the structural logic of capitalist relations of production, yet it also has its distinct political momentum. Market mechanisms, initially introduced by the ruling stratum for its defensive self-preservation, have since been seized upon by the ruling elite as an instrument that not only changes the basic contours of society, but also actively transforms and expands itself into a more self-conscious, full-blown ruling class, in the processes of which money and the power to rule are inseparably amalgamated, and society’s class antagonisms are ever more sharply felt. This is no small leap forward, to say the very least.

Maoism, An Incomplete Project

Up until now I have deliberately avoided the issue of Maoism. The historical complexity of Chinese socialism is more than ever relevant to our present concerns. However, I think that any serious inquiry into the general problem of the possibilities and limits of socialist reforms must examine the Chinese experience, especially the role of Maoism as it culminated in the political practices of the Cultural Revolution.

There is little doubt that late Maoism and the Cultural Revolution are an aberration in the history of world socialism. But let me begin by saying that it would be politically shortsighted if we limited our view of reforms only to the post-Mao era. What is unique about the historical experience of Chinese socialism is precisely its incessant dynamism and energy for self-reformation. Instead of moving down the market path, which would have been much easier insofar as preserving ruling-class positions was concerned, Maoist China took an uncharted course of reform that was far more challenging and could rely on no blueprints whatsoever.

Late Maoism developed a highly dynamic view of the process of post-revolutionary class formation and bourgeois restoration, integrating the reciprocal interactions among ideological, political, and economic levels in a single analytical framework. It is Maoism’s distinctive emphasis that class struggle persists even after the exploiting classes have been overthrown. Thus the degeneration of socialism, in Mao’s view, does not necessarily occur through the violent overthrow of the socialist state, but more probably through peaceful evolution from both inside the ruling party and its surrounding environment, under the corrosive influence of the still existing overthrown classes. The restorative process begins with the acceptance of bourgeois ideas by a degenerate clique of leaders. The usurped party leadership then sets about the transformation of the class character of state power, dismantling the socialist economy and creating a new dominant, exploiting class. This, in turn, demands the development of a more thoroughly bourgeois political system so as to consolidate the ruling-class position.

As an active attempt to revitalize socialism, the Cultural Revolution was deeply rooted in the collective history and popular traditions of the revolution. But despite its high aspirations, I would like to argue that late Maoism was seriously flawed, and in the end ineffectual. Very briefly, I would argue that Maoism lacked a clear class focus as defined in structural terms. The Maoist politics of class was simultaneously too broad and too narrow, a contradiction merely in appearance. Its political targets were often personalized and therefore too diffuse. In the most fiercely iconoclastic days of the Cultural Revolution, it struggled against everything and anything—from tradition, inner consciousness, remnants of former propertied classes, capitalist roaders, and bureaucratic privilege to arts and literature, sexual behavior, dress styles, shoe heels, and so on. The notion of “class” was spectacularly vulgarized and stretched to the point of near-lunacy, where it became a confused hodgepodge that was totally pointless and toothless.29

Yet the political myopia of late Maoism is equally striking. This is most visible in its inherent inability to be self-critical—that is, to face up to its own historical situatedness, as well as to acknowledge the prevalent class relations and the corresponding institutional structures in which it was entrapped. This rather paradoxical appearance of Maoism may be understood, at least in part, as the ideological effect of the aforementioned unevenness of post-revolutionary class structure, particularly with respect to the greater or lesser amorphousness of the ruling class. Yet on a more fundamental level this myopia about the most basic structure of class rule is also suggestive of Maoism’s essential political limits.

In spite of its extreme vigilance against regressive tendencies, late Maoism thus failed successfully to address the fundamental structure of class domination in the post-revolutionary state. By focusing on bureaucratism, revisionist line, and distributional privileges, the Cultural Revolution attacked the bureaucrats, their ideological affiliations, and the remnant classes much more than the system of bureaucratic domination. Maoist politics was indeed successful in temporarily interrupting the closure and consolidation of the incipient ruling class—a major achievement by itself—by attempting to revolutionize culture, to promote a proletarian consciousness, to combat bourgeois selfishness, and to exhort the cadre-bureaucrats (and everyone else) to serve the people rather than serving themselves. Hence it was no accident that the Cultural Revolution was cultural, and that such “revolution through culture” ipso facto represents Maoism’s highest development, and its political limit as well.

The more radical political implications of Maoism, I should briefly note, were pressed further by a number of young critics, who audaciously questioned the official Cultural Revolution’s inherently conservative, reformist proclivity for attacking individual power-holders and remnant ideologies instead of searching for the class-structural roots of China’s social and political problems. Their radically anti-bureaucratic and democratic impulses were accompanied by a general concern with the nature and organization of state power in the post-revolutionary era and a deep anxiety that a new bureaucratic class could rise to dominate society.30 Invoking the historical example of the Paris Commune, they claimed that China’s “new bureaucratic bourgeoisie” and their monopoly of the state machine would have to be destroyed in order to establish a genuine egalitarian and socialist society, in which people could truly participate and self-govern.

During the later months of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, in the midst of mass movements from below, a different political logic and a different ideological trend—however primitive—began to emerge and became operative, with the potential of breaking out of the dogmatic constraints of official Maoism. Not surprisingly, the political views of these young activists, whose usefulness for Maoist mass mobilization was very short-lived, were nonetheless denounced as too radical, as ultrademocratic, bourgeois-anarchic, anti-Party, or simply counterrevolutionary. Their theoretical and political activities were without exception suppressed ruthlessly, very often under direct instructions from the “established left” of the Maoist Cultural Revolution leadership, and all of them vanished in the demobilization of mass movements and purges of the so-called ultra-left that began as early as 1967.31

Cannibalizing its own rebellious children, Maoism quickly exhausted its political energy and was in the end unable to transcend its essential historical limits by fundamentally transforming state power. Thus despite its appearance of extreme vibrancy and radicalism, the Cultural Revolution was a rather predictable, if dramatic, mass mobilization that was ostensibly participatory but nevertheless hierarchically divided, wherein the intermediary governing structures were weakened, and the bureaucratic staff were ritualistically humiliated. Here lies the fundamental contradiction in which Mao was caught during the Cultural Revolution. As critic Richard Kraus aptly characterized it: he was the “chief cadre” of the bureaucratic regime which he personally embodied, and simultaneously its “leading rebel.”32 As a result, the Cultural Revolution failed as a bold experiment in post-revolutionary and socialist reforms. It left virtually untouched the basic structural and functional distinction between rulers and ruled. If the social reforms that resulted from the Cultural Revolution mitigated some of the more glaring manifestations of bureaucratic elitism, they did not fundamentally alter the relationships between the political elite and subordinated popular classes.

Bourgeois Restoration: The Cunning of History?

The Cultural Revolution was conceived as an active attempt to deter regressive tendencies in a post-revolutionary society. With some trepidation, I would posit that “capitalist restoration” was mainly a myth, serving an important ideological function. The Maoist claim that without further revolutionary agitation China would inevitably gravitate back toward capitalism was a misleading one at best. Revolution in permanence is indeed the essence of socialism. However, China’s post-socialist history has shown that the perils of subversion should have been thought of as part of a broader, more complex historical problematic—backward or forward, or even sideways. Yet the origin of the greatest peril was stubbornly beclouded by all the thunder and fury on the “bourgeois restoration.”

Invoking the historical experience of the Chinese Revolution, William Hinton conveyed the Maoist thesis of “bourgeois restoration” in the vivid metaphor of revolutionary prairie fire:
A single spark can start a prairie fire. And so it...ignited a prairie fire that carried all before it, bringing more change to China in a few decades than two millennia had previously brought forth. But now the fire has burned itself out, and, as the flames die down, it becomes apparent that change has not been deep. Fire burned the foliage off, but the roots of the old civilization survived and are now sending up vigorous sprouts that push aside and overwhelm, in one sphere after another, all revolutionary innovations.33

Hinton’s colorful metaphor, however, is premised on a problematic conception of historical determination, namely, the determination of the present by the residual forces of the past. Revolutions certainly do not eliminate the past, they write on top of it. Yet the revolution also produces its own contradictions. Socialism is not just built on top of the surviving deposits of capitalism, feudalism, or whatever. The remnants of the past enter into the new society and are necessarily conditioned by its newly created antagonisms and contradictions. The dead weight of past history cannot be easily restored backwards. Or it will perhaps take much longer—certainly longer than the two or so decades taken by the very speedy “restoration” in China. The extraordinary development of capitalism in China today is fueled by a more powerful logic of social recomposition—it has been aided by far more efficient and expeditious means, driven by class forces that operate more from above than from below, more within than without. The ideological significance of bourgeois restoration—and the Maoist theory of class struggle that formed its nucleus—lay in their function of diversion and mystification. By concentrating on remnants from past traditions, spontaneous petty tendencies from below, and insidious capitalist roaders and their line from within, the Maoist discourse of capitalist restoration distorted and obscured the central contradiction of post-revolutionary Chinese society.

What are the important historical lessons to be learned from China’s transition toward capitalism? Setting aside the theoretical question whether socialism without market mechanisms is viable or desirable, at least one lesson seems particularly compelling: socialism without meaningful democracy is unfeasible. The problem of socialism and democracy is not at all merely a philosophical task of defining utopia, but pertains more fundamentally to the ineluctable logic of history and politics. A genuine democracy is not just what defines the ethical telos of socialism, it also serves as its effective safeguard.

Revolutions to accomplish socialist aims, as Rosa Luxemburg admonished shortly after the success of the Russian Revolution, cannot rely on some ready-made formula that “lies completely in the pocket of the revolutionary party.” Rather, socialism can only prosper through a mass political process in which genuine democracy holds the key. In her simple words:
The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot. New Territory. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and opening up new ways. Only unobstructed, effervescing life falls into a thousand new forms and improvisations, brings to light creative force, itself corrects all mistaken attempts. The public life of countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress.34

Far from the ultimate solution, the conquest of state power can poison or even destroy a socialist movement, unless alternative forms of democratic organization can be developed to replace the alienated form of state power. The central political problem is therefore how to ensure that revolutions do not transmute into their opposite and become the basis for a new kind of oppression and exploitation. In the ultimate sense, socialism and democracy must be envisioned as one and the same project. Genuine revolutions should not, and must not, become merely half-way houses.

In China and elsewhere in the world, post-socialist transformations offer a valuable opportunity for reflecting on these important issues. The Chinese Revolution has produced historic achievements to its credit as well as failures. My main purpose to stress the lack of democracy is not just to lament the revolution’s past disappointments, but rather to seek a point of view from which the long-term historical effects of such limitations can be comprehended. It is the aim of this essay to demonstrate that a coherent dual criticism—a critique of both capital and state, of economic accumulation and bureaucratic power, and a fuller understanding of their structural and historical connections—is not only imperative but also possible. Our critique of neoliberal-capitalist development in post-socialist contexts calls for a much more developed criticism of actually existing socialism—a relentless self-critique so to speak—for the sole purpose of advancing egalitarian and democratic objectives.

Socialism emerged as a political and ethical ideal that offered a potent alternative to capitalism. Yet actually existing socialism produced very powerful states which, while non-capitalist or even decisively anti-capitalist, concentrated and monopolized social and political resources, all in the name of socialism. Nationalized means of production and distribution without the concurrent socialization of political power only creates a legal fiction. For Marx, the abolition of private property was not the end in itself, but only a means toward the ultimate abolition of relations of alienated labor.

However, the continued predominance of alienated labor and its political form was to have fateful consequences. With the benefits of hindsight, it can be demonstrated that actually existing socialism ironically prepared some of the key ingredients responsible for its own eventual mutation into capitalism. That is to say, it achieved certain crucial yet incomplete functions of original or primitive accumulation needed for the later “restoration” of capitalism: first by reproducing the dominated and appropriated status of the working population, and second, by vesting a powerful state that was not democratically accountable with control of the social means of production. The final flowering of this evolutionary process has to await some specific conjuncture of auspicious global and domestic social conditions. With the systematic enclosure of public assets and their conversion en masse into private capital by those who control political power, the immense wealth appropriated and accumulated during the previous decades is being drawn into the circuit of capitalist production and distribution. The path of marketization begins as the passive strategy of the ruling class for self-preservation and political appeasement, yet eventually it turns into their end-game or exit strategy—their massive self-transformation from power-holders to capital owners.

History, Lenin once wrote, knows all sorts of metamorphoses. In light of the transformations now under way, was “actually existing socialism” ever a stop on the shining road to genuine socialism? Would it be entirely preposterous to suggest that socialism as such might indeed have been something else—i.e., a detour or a transitional phase in capitalism’s long history through all its variety and metamorphoses? Should we not ask whether instead of being the heroic gravedigger, actually existing socialism might not have served as the midwife of capitalism, or even of an especially unruly kind of capitalism? That would be a huge historical irony, and a colossal tragedy. But history is very cunning indeed in suggesting such questions. And its cunning lies in the fact that nothing is ever finally determinant or determined—precisely because of the possibility of human action.

Notes

22.Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), Quentin Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds. and trans., 222.

23.For an excellent study that chronicles the post-revolutionary remaking and “unmaking” of the urban working class, see Andrew Walder, “The Remaking of the Chinese Working Class, 1949–1981,” Modern China 10, no. 1 (January 1984), 3–48; also see Walder’s Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) for a well-documented study of the socioeconomic dependence of the Chinese working class.

24.Sweezy, On the Transition to Socialism, 88, italics added.

25.This political logic is certainly not lost on the advocates of market liberalization. In the not-so-subtle words of Wu Jinglian (nicknamed “Mr. Market Wu”), a senior advisor to the State Council and one of the chief strategists of China’s market reforms, “the political will of the leadership for economic reform is based on the following central proposition: economic reform is good for economic development, which in turn is good for maintaining the Party’s power.” See Qian Yingyi and Wu Jinglian, “China’s Transition to a Market Economy: How Far across the River?” Working Paper, Center for Research on Economic Development and Policy Reform, Stanford University, 2000, 8.

26.“Governing capacity” (zhizheng nengli) is China’s new political buzz phrase. First written into the CCP Constitution in 2002, the issue of “strengthening the Party’s ‘governing capacity’” was elevated to “the most important task among all tasks” in the most recent Party Central Plenum in September 2004.

27.Wang Hui, China’s New Order (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), Theodore Huters, ed. and trans., 58–59, italics added. The rise of a Chinese intellectual left (xin zuopai, or the “new left”) in the late 1990s is a very important development, which would warrant a separate study. For two collections that provide useful information on the Chinese “new left,” see Wang Chaohua, One China, Many Paths; Zhang Xudong, Whither China (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).

28.Hart-Landsberg & Burkett, China, 40.

29.This “hyper-politicization” of social life, which generated much wanton violence and targeted mostly people in relatively subordinate positions, also contributed to the pervasive demoralization with the socialist project in general, and to at least the early popular receptiveness to the Dengist “reforms.”

30.Understandably, such a “heterodox” strand to radicalize Maoism has received little attention in the political milieu of post-Mao China, and in the Western sinological academy as well. The best-known example—the Sheng-wu-lian pamphlet Whither China? was collected in Klaus Mehnert, Peking and the New Left (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, China Research Monograph No. 4, 1969). For the few surviving cases, see Gregor Benton & Alan Hunter, eds. Wild Lily, Prairie Fire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 104–156; Jonathan Unger, “Whither China—Yang Xiguang, Red Capitalists, and the Social Turmoil of the Cultural Revolution,” Modern China 17, no. 1 (January 1991), 3–37; Anita Chan, Stanley Rosen, & Jonathan Unger, eds. On Socialist Democracy and the Chinese Legal System (Armond, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1985). Written in the mid-1970s, Chen Erjin’s extraordinary manuscript “On the Proletarian Democratic Revolution” is probably the most articulate and best developed statement within this critical tradition. The English translation appeared as China: Crossroads Socialism, An Unofficial Manifesto for Proletarian Democracy (London: Verso, 1984).

31.For a perceptive study of such radical, anti-bureaucratic currents during the Cultural Revolution, see Wang Shaoguang, “‘New Trends of Thought’ during the Cultural Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary China 8, no. 21 (1999), 197–217.

32.Kraus, Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism, 181.

33.William Hinton, “What Went Wrong?,” Monthly Review 43 (May 1991), 16, italics added. The metaphor itself was derived from Mao’s early writings during the 1930s.

34.Peter Hudis & Kevin A. Anderson, eds. The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 305–6.