By Panagiotis Sotiris

Although ‘historical bloc’ is one of the most-well known concepts associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci, at the same time not enough attention has been paid to its strategic theoretical significance. In most cases, ‘historical block’ has been taken to refer to alliances. This is most obvious in various texts from the PCI tradition.[1] Of course the identification of the concept of ‘historical bloc’ simply with social alliances can also be attributed to a surface reading of some of Gramsci’s pre-Prison writings, such as the famous text on the Southern Question where one can find Gramsci’s elaborations on the question of how to dismantle the Southern agrarian bloc and its particular intellectual bloc in order to advance the alliance of between proletariat and southern masses.[2] However, a look at Gramsci’s references to the historical bloc in the Prison Notebooks provides evidence that the concept has a broader significance for Gramsci in prison than simply a reference to social alliances.

The first reference to the historical bloc can be found in Notebook 4, in a reference to the importance of superstructures, as the terrain where people become conscious of their condition, and to the necessary relation between base and superstructure. It is there that Gramsci refers to “Sorel’s concept of the “historical bloc”.[3] It is interesting that in Sorel’s work there is no reference to the concept of ‘historical bloc’. Valentino Gerratana has suggested that Gramsci, who did not have the possibility to reread Sorel’s Reflection on Violence when in prison, had in mind Sorel’s well known references to myths, and in particular Sorel’s insistence that these images should be taken as a whole (in Italian “prenderli in blocco”), as historical forces. [4]

In Notebook 7, the concept of the historical bloc returns in Gramsci’s criticism of Croce’s philosophy. For Gramsci the concept of the historical bloc is the equivalent of ‘spirit’ in Croce’s idealist conception and it also refers to a dialectical activity and a process of distinction that does not negate its real unity.[5] In the second version of this passage in Notebook 10 the concept of historical bloc (again attributed to Sorel) is linked to the unity of the process of reality, conceived as ‘active reaction by humanity on the structure’.[6] In another passage from Notebook 7 Gramsci links the historical bloc to the force of ideology and also of the relation ideologies and material forces and insists that in reality it is a relation of organic dialectical unity, distinctions being made only for ‘didactic’ reasons.

Another proposition of Marx is that a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force or something of the kind, which is extremely significant. The analysis of these propositions tends, I think, to reinforce the conception of historical bloc in which precisely material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces.[7]

In Notebook 8 the concept of historic bloc returns and we have Gramsci’s insistence on the identity of history and politics, the identity between ‘nature and spirit’, in an attempt towards a dialectic of distinct moments (a unity of the opposites and the distincts).[8] In the second version of this passage, in Notebook 13, the reference is on the identity between ‘structures and superstructures’.[9] This conception of the historical bloc as referring to the (dialectical) unity of the social whole and in particular to the relation between material tendencies and ideological representations and the importance of such a relation between material conditions and ideologies as a condition for revolutionary praxis, also emerges in the following extract from Notebook 8. It is important to note the way this passage maintains a close dialectical relation between the social relations of production and the ‘complex, contradictory ensemble of the superstructures’ as the basis for a strategic revolutionary political orientation that is conceived in terms of ideology but also maintains the dialectical relation with social relations of production.

Structures and superstructures form an “historical bloc”. That is to say the complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production. From this, one can conclude: that only an all-encompassing (totalitario) system of ideologies gives a rational refection of the contradiction of the structure and represents the existence of the objective conditions for the revolutionising of praxis.  If a social group is formed which is one hundred per cent homogeneous on the level of ideology, this means that the premises exist one hundred per cent for this revolutionising : that is that the “rational” is actively and actually real. This reasoning is based on the necessary reciprocity between structure and superstructure, a reciprocity which is nothing other than the real dialectical process.[10]

Later in a note that first appeared in Notebook 8 but also, slightly expanded in Notebook 10 Gramsci used the concept of historical bloc as part of his criticism of Croce’s conception of the ethico-political history. In particular, for Gramsci it is exactly the conception of historical bloc as the relation of social and economic relation with ideological–political forms that enables a theoretical relevance for the concept of ethico-political history. “Ethico-political history, in so far as it is divorced from the concept of historical bloc, in which there is a concrete correspondence of socio-economic content to ethico-political form in the reconstruction of the various historical periods, is nothing more  than a polemical presentation of more or less interesting philosophical propositions, but its is not history”[11]. In a similar tone, in the summary first note of Notebook 10, Gramsci treats the concept of the historical bloc as a crucial aspect of his attempt towards a philosophy of praxis that could answer the questions that Croce’s conception of ethico-political history brought forward. Moreover, hegemony and historical bloc are theoretically linked in the most emphatic way in this passage.

Credit must therefore be given to Croce’s thought for its instrumental value and in this respect it may be said that it has forcefully drawn attention to the study of the factors of culture and ideas as elements of political domination, to the function of the great intellectuals in state life, to the moment of hegemony and consent as the necessary form of the concrete historical bloc. Ethico-political history is therefore one of the canons of historical interpretation that must be always be borne in mind in the study and detailed analysis of history as it unfolds if the intention is to construct an integral history rather than partial or extrinsic histories.[12]

The concept of historical bloc constantly returns in Gramsci’s confrontation with Crocean concepts. For Gramsci the historical bloc can offer a historical and not speculative solution to the question of the relation between the different moments of the social whole.

The question is this: given the Crocean principle of the dialectic of the distincts (which is to be criticised as the merely verbal solution to a real methodological exigency, in so far as it is true that there exist not only opposites but also distincts), what relationship, which is not that of ‘implication in the unity of the spirit’, will there exist between the politico-economic moment and other historical activities? Is a speculative solution of these problems possible, or only a historical one, given the concept of ‘historical bloc’ presupposed by Sorel?[13]

The concept of historical bloc also appears in the fragment on the relation of forces in Notebook 9 but also in the well known fragment on the structure of parties during a period of organic crisis in Notebook 13. There the main point Gramsci wanted to make was on the importance of political initiatives in order to liberate the economic and political potential of a new historical bloc, including the used of force.

An appropriate political initiative is always necessary to liberate the economic thrust from the dead weight of traditional policies – i.e. to change the political direction of certain forces which have to be absorbed if a new, homogeneous politico-economic historical bloc, without internal contradictions, is to be successfully formed. And, since two “similar” forces can only be welded into a new organism either through a series of compromises or by force of arms, either by binding them to each other as allies or by forcibly subordinating one to the other, the question is whether one has the necessary force, and whether it is “productive” to use it.[14]

The strategic character of the concept of historical bloc and its relation to accomplished hegemony can be found the famous fragment on the Passage from Knowing to Understanding and to Feeling and vice versa from Feeling to Understanding and to Knowing, from Notebook 4 and reproduced in Notebook 11. Here the emphasis is on the particular relation between intellectuals and the people-nation, but also between leaders and the led, and on the need for intellectuals not only to interpret the conjuncture in an abstract way but also to understand the ‘passions’ of the subaltern classes and dialectically transform them into a ‘superior conception of the world’. This for Gramsci is exactly the creation of an ‘historical bloc. It is exactly here that one might see the analogy between the concept of the historical bloc and a condition of hegemony. The following passage exemplifies this point.

If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation, between the leaders and the led, the rulers and the ruled, is provided by an organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and hence knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive) , then and only then is the relationship one of representation. Only then can there take place an exchange of individual elements between the rulers and ruled, leaders [dirigenti] and led, and can the shared life be realised which alone is a social force with the creation of the “historical bloc”.[15]

Jacques Texier was one of the theorists that have insisted on the strategic theoretical importance of the concept of the historical bloc, within Gramsci’s theoretical elaboration. For Texier the concept of the historical bloc is exactly the concept that enables us think of the unity and interrelation between economics, politics and ideology, within Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and the integral State. “Without the theory of the ‘historical bloc’ and the unity of economy and culture and culture and politics which results from it, the Gramscian theory of superstructures would not be Marxist. His ‘historicism’ would go no further than the historicism of Croce.”[16] Based upon this conception, Texier treats the concept of the historical block as a theoretical node in Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.

The point of departure must be the concept of the’ historical bloc’ Gramsci stipulates. What does this mean? To think the unity of the distinct aspects or moments of superstructural activity, the moment of force and consent, of dictatorship and hegemony and the economico-political and ethico-politicaJ moment one must begin from the basis of the organic unity of the superstructures and infrastructure in the historical bloc and recognise the ultimately determinant character of economic conditions.[17]

For Texier it is important to follow carefully Gramsci’s novel redefinition of ‘civil society’ and how this encompasses a whole series of political and ideological practices, relations, beliefs conditioned by determinate social relations of production.

In other words, what does civil society represent for Gramsci? It is the complex of practical and ideological social relations (the whole infinitely varied social fabric, the whole human content of a given society) which is established and grows lip on the base of determined relations of production. It includes the types of behaviour of homo oeconomicus as well as of homo ethiico-politicus. It is therefore the object, the subject and the locality of the superstructural activities which are carried out in ways which differ according to the levels and moments by means of the ‘hegemonic apparatuses’ on the one hand and of the ‘coercive apparatuses’ on the other.[18]

Therefore, the construction of a new historical bloc, a new articulation of economic, politics and ideology, is for Texier what is the stake in a struggle for hegemony: “the winning of hegemony is a social struggle which aims to transform the relation of forces in a given situation. A historico-political bloc has to be dismantled and a new one constructed so as to permit the transformation of the relations of production.”[19]

Also of particular importance is Texier’s insistence[20] that in Gramsci the concept of the historical bloc implies an ‘organic unity’ between the State and the economy, in sharp contrast to every form of economism. In particular, Texier has offered a forceful reading of the concept civil society, which also points towards this particular dialectic of economics and politics within the historical bloc. For Texier the concept of civil society does not refer simply to the field of political and cultural hegemony, but also to economic activities. Although Texier distinguishes the economic structure and civil society, at the same time he provides textual evidence of Gramsci’s inclusion of the crucial aspects of economic activity and behaviour within the field of civil society, especially around the crucial Gramscian notions of “homo oeconomicus” and “determinate market”. In this sense we can say that a crucial aspect of the emergence of a new historical bloc is exactly the emergence not only of a new economic structure but also of a new “homo oeconomicus” and a new configuration of civil society.[21]

Christine Buci-Glucksmann has also offered an important reading of the theoretical centrality of the concept of historical materialism. For Buci-Glucksmann Gramsci’s reference to structure and superstructure forming an historical bloc is the point to begin. The first error is the “simple identification between historical bloc and class alliances … or even the fusion … that embraces workers and intellectuals”.[22] For Buci-Glucksmann historical bloc goes beyond social alliances since it implies both a specific form of hegemonic leadership but also the development of the superstructures, “an ‘integral state’ rooted in an organic relationship between leaders and masses”.[23] Moreover, the concept of historical bloc is for Buci-Glucksmann not s a materialist position and anti-economistic answer to the relation between the different instances of the social whole; it is mainly an attempt to rethink a revolutionary strategy within the transition period.

Compared with Bukharin’s worker-peasant bloc of 1925-26, the Gramscian historic bloc demonstrates major new feature. This bloc is cultural and political as much as economic, and requires an organic relationship between people and intellectuals, governors and governed, leaders and led. The cultural revolution, as an on-going process of adequation between culture and practice, is neither luxury nor a simple guarantee, but rather an actual dimension of the self-government of the masses and of democracy.[24]

For Buci-Glucksmann Gramsci’s conception of revolutionary strategy as construction of a new historical bloc[25] leads to a “reformulation of the entire Marxist problematic of the withering away of the State as a passage to a regulated society, where political society is reabsorbed by civil society”.[26] Therefore, it is much more than a simple reference to a social alliance that manages to capture political power, since it entails the construction of new hegemonic apparatuses, new social, political, ideological and economic forms                                           . In opposition to a simple ‘bloc in power’, the historical bloc “presupposes the historical construction of long duration of new hegemonic system, without which classes become only a mechanical aggregate, managed by the State or a bureaucracy”.[27]

From the above elaboration it is obvious that historical bloc is a strategic not a descriptive or an analytical concept. It defines not an actual social alliance, but a social and political condition to be achieved. Historical bloc does not refer to the formation of an electoral alliance or to various social strata and movements fighting side by side. It refers to the emergence of a different configuration within civil society, namely to the emergence, on a broad scale, of different forms of politics, different forms of organization, alternative discourses and narratives, that materialize the ability for society to be organized and administrated in a different way. At the same time it refers to a specific relation between politics and economics, namely to the articulation not simply of demands and aspirations but of an alternative social and economic paradigm. Therefore, a new historical bloc defines that specific historical condition when not only a new social alliance demands power but is also in a position to impose its own particular economic form and social strategy and lead society. It also includes a particular relation between the broad masses of the subaltern classes and new intellectual practices, along with the emergence of new forms of mass critical and antagonistic political intellectuality, exactly that passage from knowledge to understanding and passion. Regarding political organizations, it refers to that particular condition of leadership, in the form of actual rooting, participation, and mass mobilization that defines an ‘organic relation’ between leaders and led, which when we refer to the politics of proletarian hegemony implies a condition of mass politicization and collective elaboration. It also implies the actuality of the new political and economic forms, and the full elaboration of what can be defined as a ‘dual power’ strategy conceived in the broadest sense of the term.

In this sense, it is obvious that the concept of the historical bloc, when used in relation to the politics of the subaltern classes, refers to a strategy of (counter)hegemony. A potential hegemony of the forces of labour, namely their ability to become actually leading in a broader front, that would make possible a process of social transformation, means exactly creating the conditions for a new historical bloc. This means a new articulation between social forces, alternative economic form[28]s in rupture with capitalist social relations of productions, new political forms of organization and participatory democratic decision-making. The struggle for hegemony means a struggle for the formation of a new historic bloc.

That is why the concept of the historical bloc is more than ever pertinent to contemporary discussions within the Left. The reasons for this are above all political and have to do with the dynamics of the conjuncture. The long retreat of the Left through as the combined result of the triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of “actually existing socialism” for a long time seemed to make questions of strategy unimportant. What seemed to be necessary was the unity around basic struggles and movements of resistance. Strategic discussion was left either to theoretical elaborations or was postponed for a better day. Even after the return of mass protest movements after Seattle 1999, the return of the strategic questions Daniel Bensaïd talked about in 2006,[29] has yet to produce some specific strategic recommendations.

However, recent developments have made us all realize the urgency of these questions. The developments include the global economic crisis of the end of the 2000s, the crisis of neoliberalism, the impressive return of mass protest politics, from 2011 until now, and the evidences of an open hegemonic crisis in various “weak links” of the imperialist chain, a crisis that can be described in Gramscian terms.

And the content is the crisis of the ruling class’s hegemony, which occurs either because the ruling class has failed in some major political undertaking for which it has requested, or forcibly extracted, the consent of the broad masses (war, for example) , or because huge masses (especially of peasants and petit-bourgeois intellectuals) have passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically formulated, add up to a revolution. A “crisis of authority” is spoken of: this is precisely the crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the State.[30]

At the same time, we have the possibility that the Left can lead an impressive reversal in the political balance of forces in countries such as Greece, and face the possibility of arriving at governmental power.

I would like to insist that the debate is more urgent than before. Recent developments, such as the Gezi Park protests in Turkey have shown that what would be called the new age of insurrections is far from over. However, especially the developments regarding the developments within what has been termed the ‘Arab Spring’ has shown that when mass popular insurrections cannot be ‘translated’ politically into autonomously defined democratic and emancipator political projects, then the results can be tragic. At same time, regarding the crisis of neoliberalism and the current authoritarian, disciplinary turn of neoliberal governance, the only contribution the dominant elites can make is to only prolong the crisis. This situation is similar to one described by Gramsci.

What makes things worse, is that it is about a crisis for which the elements of its resolution are prevented from being developed with the necessary speed; those that are dominant can no longer resolve the crisis but have the power (to impede) others from resolving it, namely they have the power only to prolong the crisis.[31]

This means the need to think in terms of the necessary renewal of a revolutionary strategy. The fact that there are perhaps no ‘ideal types’ for revolution, does not mean that we do not need revolutionary changes. A new historical bloc refers exactly such a revolutionary process.

In light of the above, a strategy for a new ‘historical bloc’ suggests that we must elaborate upon an alternative productive paradigm, in a non market and non profit-oriented direction, an alternative non capitalist developmental path (as an aspect of the dialectics of economy and politics within the historical bloc). We refer to a developmental paradigm neither in the sense of quantitative growth, nor in the sense of an alternative capitalist development, but in the sense of a new conception of how to make good use of collective social productive capabilities and resources. This could include new forms of democratic social planning along with a new emphasis on self-management, reclaiming currently idle productive facilities, creating non commercial networks of distribution, regaining the public character of goods and service that are currently under the threat of the tendency for ‘new enclosures’.  It could also include a new emphasis on self-reliance and decreased dependence upon international flows of commodities and resources, along with a break with consumerist conceptions of well-being.

Such a thinking of the ‘economic program’ of process of transformation, as part of a strategy for a new historic bloc, should not be seen as an attempt to simply devise or think of alternative economic forms. In reality, it is a process of collective experimentation based upon the emergence of alternative economic forms within movements, collective struggles and resistances to the commercialization of social goods. From the defence of public services and the new forms of solidary economy, to the new forms of self-management and worker’s control (from occupied factories in Argentina to Public Television in Greece), we have many important experiences. These have not been simply “resistances” but also collective experimenting sites that can help us understand how things can be organized in a different non-capitalist way. In a way, it means taking hold of the ‘traces of communism’ in actual movements and social resistances to the violence of capital and the markets. The Left should not consider these experiences to be simply “movements” and think of economic policy only in terms of non-austerity macroeconomics, however important these are.

Moreover, thinking in terms of a new “historical bloc”, means that the Left attempts to elaborate on the possibility of an alternative narrative for society, in an attempt exactly for the forces of labour to be leading (dirigente). And in this we must also think how the very experience of today’s’ forces of labour, despite their fragmentation into multifarious employment situation and prospects, with their unity undermined by precariousness, offers the basis for such a (counter)hegemony. Today’s collective labour force is not only more fragmented, it is also more educated, with more access to knowledge and communication recourse, and in an ability to voice its grievances in a more articulate way. Moreover, all over the advanced capitalist societies, those social strata that traditional sociology describes as middle class, in reality segments of intellectual labour or what Poulantzas described as the salaried new petite-bourgeoisie,[32] are under attack by stagnant wages, increased barriers to ‘upward social mobility’, private debt burden, workplace precariousness. Consequently, they have seen the class divide with various segments of the capitalist class grow, and have moved closer to working class demands and aspirations. All these developments are also reflected in the mass unemployment (and precariousness) of youth an element that has produced social explosions, and probably will in the future. This brings together, in mass collective practises, all those social forces that, one way or the other, depend upon selling their labour power to make ends meet. This offers not the only the material ground for social alliances, exemplified in the co-presence of all these strata in contemporary protests from the Indignados to the Syntagma to Occupy!, but also of collective experiences, aspirations and demands. New forms of “public spheres’ emerge that enable not simply tactical cooperation within protest movements, but the potential of collectively elaborating a new vision and perspective beyond “actually existing neoliberalism”.

This means that today rethinking socialist and revolutionary politics is not only about ‘injecting’ socialist consciousness into the movement – however necessary the defence of the socialist and communist tradition might be in a period of ideological erasure. It is also about elaborating upon collective aspirations, demands and ideological representations that emerge from the very materiality of today’s condition and struggles of the forces of labour. Creating conditions for a new historical bloc is not only about articulating a political project; it is about working upon actual social and historical tendencies and dynamics, in order to create new political forms that would enable a new dialectical relation between ‘structure’ and ‘superstructures’.

This gives a new importance to the question of the program. Contrary to the tendency to ignore the program in the name of a simple unity around the negation of austerity, it is important to insist that a strategy for a new historical bloc requires articulating an alternative narrative for society, not just a sum of grievances and demands. Such a program should not restrict itself to income redistribution, increased public spending and nationalization. It should also include experiments with new productive forms and relations based upon self-management, new forms of workers’ control, and alternative forms of economic coordination and planning, in sum a collective to move beyond the capitalist logic.  This is in contrast to the ‘pragmatist turn’ of some parties of the European Left that make a distinction between an anti-austerity politics aiming at ‘saving society from austerity’ and social transformation. On the contrary, it is now time to think of the transition program as offering at the same time an exit from austerity and the beginning of a process of transformation in sharp break not only with neo-liberalism but also with aspects of capitalist relations. This is today one of the most crucial aspects of a potential revolutionary strategy today.

In an era of increased forms of capitalist internationalization, this also means taking a stand regarding a country’s place in the international plane. In this sense, recent debates within the European Left, such as the ones pertaining to the relation to the Eurozone and the European Union should be read in a strategic manner. Breaking away from the Eurozone and the European Union, for the peripheral countries of the European South, such as Greece, is not simply about monetary sovereignty (which per se is a necessary aspect of regaining democratic control of economic policy). It is about the forces of labour offering an alternative orientation for society, especially since in countries such as Greece, the bourgeois ‘historical bloc, based both its strategy and its legitimacy, upon the ‘European Road’ as a road to capitalist modernization.

Moreover, a politics of a potential new ‘historical bloc’ means exactly aiming at political power, both in the sense of a left wing government but also and mainly in the sense of a change in actual social power configuration. If we are fully aware that it will be part of a long and contradictory process of transition and transformation and struggle ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, then a ‘government of the Left’ can be indeed be part of a modern revolutionary strategy. This would require making use of both governmental power (the radicalization of current institutional and constitutional framework) and forms of ‘popular power’ from below, without underestimating the constant confrontation with the forces of capital. This has been an open question in the communist movement, from the ‘Workers’ Government’ described in the 4^th Congress of the Communist International,[33] to Gramsci’s proposal for a ‘Constituent Assembly’ of the anti-fascist forces,[34] to Poulantzas’ confrontation with a possible ‘democratic road to socialism’,[35] to the contradictions of contemporary experiments in left governance such as the one in Bolivia. However, without a strong labour movement, without radical social movements, without the full development of all forms of people’s power and self-organization, any government of the Left will not manage to stand up to the immense pressure it will get from the forces of capital, the EU and the IMF. That is why it is necessary to experiment with new forms of social and political power from below and to create new forms of social practice and interaction based on solidarity and common work, new forms of direct democracy.

In this sense, a strategy for a new historical bloc also requires a new practice of politics, new social and political forms of organization beyond the traditional Party-form, beyond traditional trade unionism and beyond the limits of traditional parliamentary bourgeois politics. This corresponds exactly to the need for new forms of civil society organizations, in the broad sense that Gramsci gave to this notion. In a way, Louis Althusser pointed to this direction of the political forms associated with a potential historical bloc in his intervention in the debates of the 22^nd Congress of the French Communist Party.

In the best of cases, it is conceivable that the union of the people of France may become something quite different from the means to a new electoral balance, but is rather aimed, over and above the organizations of the Left, at the popular masses themselves. Why address the popular masses in this way? To tell them, even if still only as a hint, that they will have to organize themselves autonomously, in original forms, in firms, urban districts and villages, around the questions of labour and living conditions, the questions of housing, education, health, transport, the environment, etc.; in order to define and defend their demands, first to prepare for the establishment of a revolutionary state, then to maintain it, stimulate it and at the same time force it to ‘wither away’. Such mass organizations, which no one can define in advance and on behalf of the masses, already exist or are being sought in Italy, Spain and Portugal, where they play an important part, despite all difficulties. If the masses seize on the slogan of the union of the people of France and interpret it in this mass sense, they will be re-establishing connections with a living tradition of popular struggle in our country and will be able to help give a new content to the political forms by which the power of the working people will be exercised under socialism.[36]

Moreover, it is exactly this combination of popular power from below and new forms of self-management, workers’ control and alternative forms of economic coordination that can create the conditions for a modern form of ‘dual power’, namely the actual emergence of new, non capitalist social and political forms. Both Lenin and Gramsci thought that there can be no process of social transformation without a vast social and political experimentation, both before and after the revolution, which will guaranty that within the struggles we can already witness the emergence of new social forms and new ways to organize production and social life.

It is not going to be an ‘easy road’. It would require a struggling society actually changing values, priorities, narratives. It would also require a new ethics of collective participation and responsibility, of struggle and commitment to change, a transformed and educated common sense. In this sense, the promise of Left-wing politics cannot be a simple return to 2009, not least because it is materially impossible, but because we want to go beyond confidence to the markers and debt-ridden consumerism. In such a ‘world-view’ public education, public health, public transport, environmental protection, non market collective determination of priorities, and quality of everyday sociality, are more important than imported consumer goods and cheap credit.

At the same time, a strategy for a new historical block also implies an attempt towards a re-appropriation and redefinition of the very notion of the people. This refers to the complex process, political, ideological and social, through which the people can re-emerge in a situation of struggle, neither as the abstract subject of the bourgeois polity, nor as the ‘imagined community’ of the ‘nation’, but as a potentially anti-capitalist alliance of all those social strata that one way or the other depend upon their labour power in order to make ends meet. This also means a new form of people’s unity, especially against the dividing results of racism and the varieties of neofascism.[37]

Such a process can (and should…) also be a knowledge process, both in the sense of using the knowledge accumulated by people in social movements (who can run better a hospital or a school? Appointed technocrats or the people actually working and struggling there) and also in the sense of struggle, solidarity and common practices being forms that help people acquire knowledge, learn how to do things differently and collectively re-invent new forms of mass intellectuality and a new cultural hegemony. Moreover, if political organizations cannot learn from actual experiences, if they are not themselves collective processes of learning and transforming the experiences from the struggles into political strategy, then they cannot contribute to a process of social transformation.

Such a strategy (and dialectic of strategy and tactics) can transform current emerging alliances, changes to the relations of representation, struggles, resistances and proposals for ‘concrete utopias’, into a new and highly original ‘historical block’, the necessary condition for an open-ended process of social transformation. It is an attempt to actually rethink revolutionary strategy, not as phantasy but as an open – ended sequence of transformation and experimentation. Talking today about socialism cannot be simply about “catch phrases” on worker’s power and worker’s control or worker’s democracy, however necessary it is to revisit in a self-critical manner the socialist experiences of the 20^th century. Talking about socialism today means building upon the dynamics of struggles, upon the new forms of democracy and popular sovereignty from below emerging within struggles, upon the attempt at re-appropriating public space and creating new public spheres, upon what Althusser described as ‘virtual forms of communism in contemporary movements and aspirations.[38]

Finally, all these also require a fresh thinking of the collective political subject. All recent developments have shown the importance of front politics. Contrary to the metaphysics of the Party as a guarantor of truth and the correct line, we need a more broad conception of the left political front that is not only unity but also dialectical process, a terrain of struggle itself, a collective democratic process, and a laboratory of ideas, projects and sensitivities.

One should stress the importance and significance which, in the modern world, political parties have in the elaboration and diffusion of conceptions of the world, because essentially what they do is to work out the ethics and the politics corresponding to these conceptions and act as it were as their  historical ‘laboratory’. [...] The relation of theory and practice becomes even closer the more the conception is vitally and radically innovatory and opposed to old ways of thinking. For this reason one can say that the parties are the elaborators of new integral and all-encompassing intellectualities and the crucibles where the unification of theory and practice, understood as a real historical process, takes place. ^[39]

Contrary to a traditional instrumentalist conception of the political organization based on a distinction between ends and means, a revolutionary strategy must be based on the identity of means and ends, and this means that the democratic form of this front must also reflect the social relations of an emancipated society.

To conclude recent developments have shown the potential for political change and breaks with “actually existing neoliberalism”. For the first time after a long time the forces of the Left are facing the challenge of political power and hegemony. We do not have the luxury of avoiding the discussion on a revolutionary strategy and a socialist perspective for the 21^st century. Concepts such as Gramsci’s historical bloc offer us the possibility to rethink politics in a strategic way.

References

Althusser, Louis 1977, “On the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party”, www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1977/22nd-congress.htm (Accessed 30 October 2013).

Althusser, Louis 1998, Solitude de Machiavel, Paris: Actuel Marx / PUF.

Bensaïd, Daniel 2006, “On the return of the politico-strategic question”, http://www.marxists.org/archive/bensaid/2006/08/polstrat.htm#p5 (Accessed 30 October 2013).

Berlinguer, Enrico 1977, Historical Compromise, (In Greek). Athens: Themelio.

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 1980, Gramsci and the State, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Comintern 1922, “Theses on Comintern Tactics” (Fourth Congress). http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/4th-congress/tactics.htm (Accessed 30 October 2013).

Gramsci, Antonio 1971, Selections from Prison Writings, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, Antonio 1978, Selections from Political Writings 1921-1926, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, Antonio 1978-1994, Cahiers de Prison. 5 vols. Paris : Gallimard.

Gramsci, Antonio 1995, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, Antonio ²1977, Quaderni di Carcere. Edited by Valention Gerratana, Rome: Einauidi.

Lisa, Athos 1933, Discusion political con Gramsci en la carcel, http://www.gramsci.org.ar/8/53.htm (Accesses 30 October 2013.)

Poulantzas, Nicos, 1975, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, London: NLB.

Poulantzas, Nicos 1980, State, Power, Socialism, London: Verso.

Sorel, Georges 1999, Reflections on Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sotiris, Panagiotis 2013, “The Dark of Greek Neo-fascism”, Overland 210.

Texier, Jacques 1979, “Gramsci, theoretician of the superstructures”. In Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Gramsci and Marxist Theory, London: Routledge, pp. 48-79.

Texier, Jacques 1989, “Sur le sense de “societé civile” chez Gramsci”. In Actuel Marx 5, pp. 0-68.

[40]

By Alain Badiou
24 January 2023
via Verso Blog

This article was originally published by L’Obs on 2 September 2022.

Limitations and Problems of the Western Doctrine

By Ai Silin & Qu Weijie
Marxism and Reality, No 3, 2020

Abstract: The slogan “human rights are superior to national sovereignty” put forward by Western liberal scholars contradicts the principle of non-interference as stipulated in the Charter of the United Nations. The Western conception of human rights includes two main justification methods—naturalism and bottom-lineism, but neither of them can substantively justify the universality of human rights going beyond reality. This also determines that the relationship between sovereignty and human rights is not an “either-or” one, but a dialectical and mutually reinforcing one. Human rights cannot be fundamentally guaranteed without the support of national sovereignty. The culture-centric mentality implied by the doctrine that human rights are superior to national sovereignty is not conducive to international cooperation. Only by engaging in dialogue in a non-coercive, inclusive, and equitable manner would it be possible to reach a bottom-line consensus that would be widely accepted by the international community.

Since the late 20th century, and particularly since the Kosovo War in 1999 and Iraq War in 2003, Western powers have advocated the theory that “human rights are superior to national sovereignty” to legitimize starting a series of regional wars. However, the concept which lies behind this theory conflicts with a series of principles of international law as stipulated in the Charter of the United Nations, such as the principles of the sovereign equality of states and non-interference in internal affairs. According to Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher, “This prohibition of intervention is indeed reaffirmed by the UN Charter; but from the beginning it stood in tension with the development of the international protection of human rights.”[1] This paper attempts to review the relationship between national sovereignty and human rights based on a critical reflection on the Western concept of human rights.

I. Two Ways to Justify the Western Concept of Human Rights: Naturalism and Minimalism

It is generally believed that the universalist concept of human rights has its origins rooted in the modern Western concept of natural rights. It must first be clarified, however, that no consensus has thus far been reached in Western political academia about how the concept of “right” first came into being. Probing into the evolution of the concept of “right”, Richard Dagger wrote that the English word “right” comes from the Latin word “rectus” (meaning “straight”), which in turn can be traced to “orek-tos” (“straight, upright”) in Greek.[2] At the beginning, therefore, the word “right” presumably did not indicate “a justified claim or entitlement, or the freedom to do something” in its modern sense, and the concept of right in a political sense did not emerge in the West until the late Middle Ages as the idea of “natural rights” took shape. Western political scholars such as Charles Beitz and James Griffin who were committed to studying human rights believed that despite the differences in connotation between the concepts of human rights and natural rights, from a historical perspective, the origin of the modern Western concept of human rights is closely linked with the theory of natural rights, which in turn is directly related to the natural law theory established by Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. The influence of modern natural science and the Enlightenment Movement, however, led the natural law theory to gradually give way to Enlightenment rationalism, thus divorcing the theological elements from the concept of natural rights. From this point, the individual awareness in line with the nature secured its fundamental status in practical philosophy, and the secular concept of “human rights” emerged in the late 18th century. According to Beitz, “the most broadly influential contribution of the natural rights tradition to contemporary thought about human rights is the idea that human rights belong to persons ‘as such’ or ‘simply in virtue of their humanity’.”[3] Such justification for human rights is referred by Beitz as “naturalist” view on human rights, which is one of the most common ways to justify human rights. Its core argument is that the concept of human nature is regarded as evidence of the universality of human rights, while human nature is in itself in conformity with the nature. “Not as something evolving in the course of history, but posited by nature, because for them this individual was the natural individual, according to their idea of human nature.”[4] In the modern Western tradition of metaphysics, such an individual in conformity with the nature may either be presumed as a Kantian rational being or an experimentalist aggregate of feelings. Whichever presumption is made, the “demystified” concept of human rights attempts to justify its universalist appeal by naturalist theories.

However, the biggest weakness of the naturalist theory is that it neglects the historical aspect of mankind. To ensure the prioritization of individual rights, an individual is ridded of his social identity such as roles and status, and is translated into a moral agent in a metaphysical sense. Marx made the lucid statement that the concept of moral agent as constructed by modern Western philosophers was but a product of disintegration of feudal society and maturity of the civil society. Elaborating human rights from the perspective of an abstract and naturalist human nature has abducted human rights evolution from its historical dimension, and the understanding of rights thereof is non-historical. In fact, the emergence and application of the concept of human rights are inevitably based on certain social practices and historical conditions, and shall undergo changes correspondingly with changes in such social practice and historical conditions. The connotation and denotation of this concept remains in dynamic evolution, in which sense the naturalist view will inevitably be challenged by historicism. From a historicist perspective, political or moral concepts are neither inherent nor created at the discretion of any person; instead, any concept is a product of history and depends on certain social practice and objective historical conditions as a foundation. So is the case with the concept of human rights, which has evolved over a long history rather than remaining unchanged, As early as during the Enlightenment Movement, certain Western thinkers and statesmen made the statement that “all men are born equal”. However, this slogan is just a promissory note that cannot be cashed immediately as U.S. sociologist Robert N. Bellah argued.[5] Women were not granted the right to vote or to stand in elections until the 1920s, and the rights of African Americans were not sufficiently protected until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Even today, various social classes and groups in the West remain troubled by identity and economic gaps.

The naturalist concept of human rights can be viewed as a “top-down”[6] approach according to Griffin, i.e. deduction of human rights based on one or multiple abstract principles, and it is exclusively built on the metaphysical concept of “man himself” or “human nature”. In fact, the evolution of human rights indicates that human nature, whether deemed a factual or normative being, is not a sufficient condition of human rights. The factual concept of human nature of the normative concept of personality itself does not naturally and logically lead to the deduction of a set of concepts of plural rights. Instead, our understanding of modern concept of human rights depends more on a “bottom-up” approach: approaching the human rights theory from widely used concept of human rights in actual social interactions. Through investigation into various types of human rights, political theorists attempt to find a consensus from all known concepts of human rights that is universally accepted by all nations. The bottom-up approach differs from the top-down approach in that the former acknowledges in the first place that different lists of rights may be categorized as human rights by different thinkers, who may interpret and understand the same right in different ways. Charles Taylor believed that human rights consist of norms of conduct and underlying justification, the former referring to various rights stipulated in national laws and international conventions, and the latter referring to philosophical views on human nature and society from a metaphysical perspective that constitute the philosophical basis of the norms of conduct related to human rights. For Taylor, people with different cultural backgrounds may vary in the deep underlying justification of human rights, which, however, does not impede us from seeking consensus on the level of norms of conduct through dialogues and communication. Such consensus, similar with “overlapping consensus” suggested by John Rawls, is a minimum consensus acceptable by all parties. Taylor further pointed out that “one can presumably find in all cultures condemnations of genocide, murder, torture, and slavery”[7]. According to Taylor, such norms of conduct are deemed overlapping consensus in a culturally diversified world. This concept of human rights can be defined as minimalism. In the West, Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian scholar of political science, is one of the first advocates of the minimalist theory of human rights, which he believes is tantamount to the “negative freedom” defined by Isaiah Berlin that protects individuals from physical harm.[8] Likewise, Western political scholars such as Michael Walzer, David Miller and Joshua Cohen all advocate minimalism of human rights, albeit to various degrees. Walzer proposes a set of “negative injunctions” that rules against murder, deceit, torture, oppression, etc.[9] as minimal morality for all societies.

A Kantian question is: how does the consensus in minimalism become possible? Is it possible to reach some degree of consensus in a non-coercive approach and come up with a list of human rights universally acknowledged by all countries? Many western scholars on human rights are optimistic, such as Griffin emphasizing that “We now, in these cosmopolitan times, tend to exaggerate the differences between societies.”[10] Empirical observations show that people in different countries may differ in religions, world outlooks, set of values and lifestyles, yet certain fundamental preconditions apply to all humans, as no one would deny the value of food, health and security in life, which may be translated into corresponding appeals for rights and summarize a minimalist list of human rights. Borrowing Walzer’s theory, this would be a “thin” list of human rights whose underlying justification does not build on “thick” and profound metaphysical or religious resources; instead, it proceeds from indisputable human needs or interests. In a world of complexity and diversity, many Western philosophers have come to realize that a “thick” list of human rights would unlikely be universally accepted unless by means of coercion or even violence. Yet obtaining a list of human rights by such means is in itself a violation and disrespect of human rights. It is therefore obvious that the minimalism of human rights with empiricism as the basic methodology conforms to our empirical observation. Problems arise, however, from empirical induction, and disputes over the contents of such a minimalist list of human rights have never ceased between countries and regions. Besides, the multitude of political, economic and social rights stipulated by various conventions on human rights are absent from the “thin” list of human rights as many of these economic and social rights rely on enormous public spending, and cashing these “checks” of pledged rights may incur an unaffordable cost on some developing countries.

The viewpoint that “human rights are superior to national sovereignty” is unlikely to constitute a minimal consensus among all countries on the human rights issue since minimalism requires overlapping consensus based on equal dialogue. As behind the theory that “human rights are superior to national sovereignty” lurks a unilateralist and interventionist approach in international affairs, which is unacceptable for other countries advocating equality of national sovereignty.

II. Boundaries of Humanitarian Intervention and Its Subsequent Problems

It was not until after WWII that a modern and secularized concept of human rights became globally influential. Traumatized by the unprecedented calamity of Fascism preying on all nations, and in particular the holocaust by Nazi Germany, many argued that a prospective international political theory shall be advocated to safeguard human rights. In 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which sought to provide a generic and normative foundation to safeguard human rights worldwide by listing a series of rights that all shall be entitled to. It was in this very context that “human rights diplomacy” practiced by Western countries started to gain momentum across the world, and wars were started in the name of “humanitarian intervention”, which consisted a major challenge to the concept of human rights in classical international law. So, does safeguarding human rights necessarily require a thorough abolishment of non-intervention principle within international law?

To answer this question, Western political philosophers advocating minimalist human rights argue that approving humanitarian intervention does not mean abandoning the non-intervention principle in international relations, but rather “becoming aware of particular exceptional situations” which constitute the scope and boundaries of humanitarian intervention. Walzer was one of the first Western political philosophers that expounded on humanitarian intervention whose basic viewpoint grounded upon “the norm is not to intervene in other people’s countries; the norm is self-determination”.[11] In normal situations, the principle of non-intervention shall apply in international affairs; however, humanitarian intervention is justified when it is response to acts “that shock the moral conscience of mankind”[12] and no local political organization possess the means to end the status quo. Therefore, failure in exercising sovereignty is an essential condition for the deposal of a sovereign state; while a second essential condition is the occurrence of “exceptional situation” that shock the moral conscience of mankind. Therefore, justified humanitarian intervention is essentially negative with a very narrow scope of applicability. According to David Miller, the non-intervention principle would be set aside provided that the international community reaches a universal consensus on whether the human rights violation has gone beyond the boundary of tolerance. At present, “such agreement exists in the case of genocide”[13] where the victims are deprived of all means of resistance without foreign aid. In such a case, the non-intervention principle of the international law is temporarily disabled and the boundary of national sovereignty broken, and intervention by other countries is justified. This indicates that a rather high threshold for the execution of humanitarian intervention is defined by minimalist human rights theory.

Another crucial question is: is “regime transformation” included in the “exceptional cases” where humanitarian intervention applies? Some advocates of “human rights first” argue that in order to prevent or avoid humanitarian disasters, it is necessary to transform the regime of certain countries by military means into a regime in conformity with Western liberalist democratic institutions. For them, humanitarian intervention is of a hysteretic nature and represents a negative and passive response; to eradicate the possibility of humanitarian disasters, regime transformation must be executed in countries where such disasters are possible to mold them with Western democracy. In other words, do political and military actions aiming at regime transformation deserve the name of humanitarian intervention or constitute a legitimate reason of humanitarian intervention? Walzer emphasized that democracy and rule of law of a country does not provide a legitimate ground for intervening with its internal affairs, nor is democracy of the political system a precondition for intervention; the key, instead, is whether the sovereignty is in severely conflict with human rights, and the only purpose of such intervention should be putting an end to violence. Therefore, “humanitarian interventions are not justified for the sake of democracy or free enterprise or economic justice or voluntary association or any other of the social practices and arrangements that we might hope for or even call for in other people’s countries”.[14] Every country has its own historical traditions, values and cultural beliefs, and one cannot truly understand the emergence, evolution and operation of political systems without being personally immersed in these specific cultural tradition resources. Regime transformation in the name of humanitarian intervention reflects a cultural centralism, which, in any form or type, would be refuted by cultural pluralism from a theoretical perspective in a world highlighting cultural diversity. In its very essence, an institutional and cultural superiority lurks behind cultural centralism in violation of the liberalist morality of equality and mutual respect. The theory that “human rights are superior to national sovereignty” constitutes a violation of basic liberalist moral principles such as equality, respect and pluralism, and is, therefore, a self-negation of the theory.

The minimalist theory of human rights is only in favor of humanitarian intervention under exceptional circumstances; however, as Walzer put it, since the Spanish conquest of Mexico with the pretext of putting an end to Aztec human sacrifices, the so-called humanitarian intervention in most cases has been risible. Even in a morally justifiable intervention, the country initiating such intervention might have a political agenda in mind apart from humanitarian aid, for example, seeking regional political hegemony in the name of humanitarian intervention. The absence of pure humanitarian intervention in reality is the essential theoretical dilemma of humanitarian intervention. Walzer distinguished between two types of humanitarian interventions: pure humanitarian intervention and humanitarian intervention with mixed motives, the former purely aiming at saving lives, while the latter referring to mixed cases where the humanitarian motive, among other considerations of political and economic interests, is one among several reasons for military intervention. There are few genuine cases of military intervention in which their purpose was purely humanitarian; although military powers play a crucial role in international political arena, states do not send their soldiers into other states, it seems, only in order to save lives. As Jürgen Habermas noted, “the program of human rights consists in its imperialist misuse”[15] when human rights politics is reduced to an ideological tool manipulated by major powers to cover up their political interests. Therefore, entering a country by military means always sounds an alarm, and reality has sufficiently proved that interventionism tends to end up in failure. Both the Iraq War in 2003 and Libyan War in 2011 started in the ideological frame of unilateralism and interventionism deviated from the tracks presumed by Western countries, as neither country has an effective human rights protection mechanism put in place, or achieved post-war reconstruction for a thriving economy and stable society; on the contrary, both countries are plunged into prolonged turmoil. Interventionism has produced large number of refugees in West Asia and North Africa, who are deprived of both human rights and national sovereignty by the intervention of external forces.

III. Re-examination of the Relationship Between Human Rights and National Sovereignty

The theory that “human rights are superior to national sovereignty” reflects the belief that individual rights and freedom are of a higher priority than national sovereignty, and that the respect and protection of human rights constitutes the moral foundation of legitimacy of national sovereignty. Again, “individual” here is a metaphysical presupposition, where individuals are viewed as atomic, independent moral agents entitled to the identical plural rights regardless of all identity markers such as nationality, ethnic background, culture and faith, as well as all social relations. Therefore from the perspective of philosophical foundation, the theory that “human rights are superior to national sovereignty” relies on ontology where “the individual comes first, and society comes second”, on which critical reflections can be initiated in the following three aspects.

First is the Marxist rebuttal of the metaphysical presupposition of the individual. Marx criticized such an atomic individual as “an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community”[16]. Human rights are thus established on the isolation rather than coalition of individuals. Isolation here refers to clear boundaries between one another that distinguish “me” from “him”. Taking property rights as an example, private property rights are defined as the possession and use of one’s own property without intervention from others, hence the existence of others is regarded as a restriction on individual rights rather than an essential element of materializing one’s individual rights. For Marx, human beings are a species being rather than enclosed and estranged “monad”. For an individual, society is a constitutive being—constituting the identity and main source of social relations of an individual—rather than a dissident being, The notion that an individual is an atomized being free of all historical traditions and social relations is but a philosophical fiction which in reality is untenable. An individual is an individual in reality, and the question of individual identity will not dispel by itself; therefore the “cosmopolitan citizen” imagined by liberalists is but a castle in the air. When one claims to be a “cosmopolitan citizen”, he/she would inevitably be questioned on his/her nationality, ethnic background, faith, etc., therefore voiding the claim of being cosmopolitan citizen. The existence of community (Gemeinschaft) makes identity possible for an individual, and all individuals in turn find themselves in existing political and cultural communities.

Second, the theory that “human rights are superior to national sovereignty” fails to dialectically acknowledge the mutual complementarity between individual rights and national sovereignty. In fact, human rights and national sovereignty are in a dialectic and mutually complementary relationship rather than a dualistic one, and there would be no guarantee of human rights without national sovereignty. A review of the theoretical origins of Western political philosophy shows that despite the differences in their philosophical origins, the thriving development of both notions is closely related to the theory of social contract. The purpose of reaching a social contract is to ensure effective fulfillment of individual rights, which in turn relies on the sovereign authority constituted through social contract signed by the people. The principle of people’s sovereignty reveals that sovereignty is essentially constituted by the common will of all people in a political community and has, therefore, a view to safeguard public interests that are relevant to all people. Thomas Hobbes made it clear that the purpose of sovereignty is not only procuration of the safety of the people, but also guarantee that every individual subject to the sovereign be granted “all other Contentments of life, which every man by lawfull Industry, without danger, or hurt to the Common-wealth, shall acquire to himselfe”.[17] In other words, the theoretical constitution of the social contract reminds us that national sovereignty should not be severed from human rights. Should no guarantee be needed for the fulfillment of rights, the purpose of the constitution of social contract would be somewhat suspicious: since an individual has already possessed and fulfilled his/her rights, what is meaningful about sovereignty authority? Subjecting an individual under the sovereignty through social contract itself indicates that the fulfillment of human rights require a corresponding institution that materializes and safeguards human rights.

A functionalist opinion holds it that sovereignty authority will be weakened as globalization deepens. Globalization has given rise to massive flows of commodities, services, capital and workforce, delivering a heavy impact on the established lifestyles and ideologies of various countries; meanwhile, human beings are facing mounting global challenges from tackling the climate change to anti-terrorism and addressing regional security concerns, which is beyond the means of any single country. Common interests and community of destiny are therefore constructed for all countries by such reality. According to Jürgen Habermas, “this conception encounters difficulties in a highly interdependent global society.”[18] Such a functionalist view is undoubtedly based on the reality of economic globalization yet its conclusion is open to debate. In reality, from a realistic perspective, there is no global political institution whose legitimacy is universally acknowledged that is able to practically defend all rights, and nation states remain the dominant institution to safeguard human rights. Overriding the boundaries of sovereign states would likely fail to secure human rights and even cause greater harm to the human rights of other nations. Furthermore, as the US President Donald Trump openly declared “make America great again” as the guiding program of his administration, this slogan in itself indicates bitter controversies over the theory that “human rights are superior to national sovereignty” within the Western society itself. Opposite to what liberalist philosophers advocating universalism of human rights have presumed, localizationist and nationalist narratives are still exerting their far-reaching influence on the Western society.

Lastly, the theory that “human rights are superior to national sovereignty” ensconces the hypothesis that the contemporary Western political and legal systems are more effective in defending human rights, and that the institutional pattern of developed countries in the Western hemisphere is the only right option for the development model of modern countries, behind which lies, undoubtedly, the mindset of Euro-American cultural centrism, which is powerfully challenged by the rise of cultural pluralism that calls for inclusiveness and mutual respect in addressing cultural differences, and pursues diversity rather than singularity. Confronting Euro-American cultural centrism, S.N. Eisenstadt and Taylor both advocated the concept of “pluralistic modernity”, emphasizing that various modern cultural patterns exist among different countries, that the Western culture is merely one component of the world’s pluralistic cultural system and that Europe is but a “provincializing Europe”[19]. As mentioned above, the modern concept of human rights in the West is a universalist value proposition based on so-called universal human nature or humanity. Yet, Alasdair MacIntyre was precise to the point as he commented on David Hume’s moral philosophy that “the appeal to a universal verdict by mankind turns out to be the mask worn by an appeal to those who physiologically and socially share Hume’s attitudes and Weltanschauung.”[20] To say the least, the fact that universalist value appeal is a typical feature of the Western culture does not necessarily eclipse the cultures of other countries or regions which are also entitled to appeal for universalization, as universality is not exclusively reserved for the Western cultural pattern. In summary, based on the normative requirements for inclusiveness and equality, Western cultural values cannot be taken indiscriminately as the standard against which value appeals in other cultures are measured. The theory that “human rights are superior to national sovereignty” is detrimental for international cooperation on an equal footing, as the cultural centrism behind it jeopardizes, rather than facilitates, the consensus on human rights. Only through joint participation in dialogues with a non-coercive, open and inclusive attitude will a minimal consensus acceptable to all stakeholders be possible.

(Ai Silin: Professor; Dean of School of Marxism, Tsinghua University; Changjiang distinguished professor, Ministry of Education.

Qu Weijie: Associate Professor, School of Marxism, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.)

This paper was first published in Marxism and Reality, No 3, 2020 in Beijing, China.

* This paper was first published in Marxism and Reality, No 3, 2020 in Beijing, China.

[1] Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, edited by Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff. The MIT Press, 1998, p. 147.

[2] Terence Ball et. al. (ed.) Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 293.

[3] Charles R. Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights, Oxford University Press, 2009, p.59.

[4] Karl Marx, Economic Manuscripts of 1857-58, “Introduction”, Marx & Engels Collected Works. Vol. 28, Lawrence & Wishart , 1986, p. 18.

[5] Robert Bellah, What Changes Very Fast and What Doesn’t Change: Explosive Modernity and Abiding Truth, Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Sciences, 2012 Vol. 1.

[6] James Griffin, On Human Rights, Oxford University Press, 2008, p.29.

[7] Charles Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011, p. 106.

[8] Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 173.

[9] Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, University of Notre Dame, 1994, p. 10.

[10] James Griffin, On Human Rights, Oxford University Press, 2008, p.138.

[11] Michael Walzer, Arguing About War, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 81.

[12] Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, Basic Books, 2006, p. 107.

[13] Lukas H. Meyer (ed.) Legitimacy, Justice and Public International Law, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 249.

[14] Michael Walzer, Arguing About War, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 69.

[15] Jürgen Habermas, The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights, Metaphilosophy, Vol. 41, No. 4, July 2010, p. 477.

[16] Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question,1844, Marx & Engels Collected Works. Vol. 3, Lawrence & Wishart , 1975, p. 164.

[17] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 258.

[18] Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, Translated by Ciaran Cronin, Polity Press, 2008, p. 320.

[19] Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Duke University Press, 2004. p. 196.

[20] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007, p. 231.

Fromm was famous for this critique of consumer capitalism as well as for his penetrating studies of authoritarianism. He was a significantly influential figure on U.S. radical thought during the second half of the 20th Century.

By Kieran Durkin
Marxist Sociology Blog

April 15, 2020 – Erich Fromm (1900-1980), who passed forty years ago March of this year, was a leading Marxian sociologist who made considerable contributions to U.S. sociology and to U.S. Marxism. Best known for books such as Escape from Freedom, The Sane Society, and The Art of Loving, Fromm’s account of authoritarianism and critique of mid-twentieth century “consumer capitalism” influenced millions both inside and outside of academia.

Prior to arriving in the U.S. in the early 1930s, amidst the rise of Nazism in Germany, Fromm, who was raised in an orthodox Jewish family, was a central member of the early Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. There he worked alongside Max Horkheimer on an interdisciplinary project that sought to mix social philosophy with the empirical social sciences. Having studied sociology under Alfred Weber (Max Weber’s less famous brother) at Ruprecht-Karls-University in Heidelberg, followed by training at the famous Berlin Psychoanalytical Institute, Fromm was given central responsibility for the Frankfurt institute’s attempts at synthesizing sociology and psychoanalysis.

One of the first manifestations of this synthesis was an innovative study of manual and white-collar German workers, which was led by Fromm along with Hilde Weiss. Through use of an interpretative questionnaire, Fromm and Weiss were able to reveal that while the majority of respondents identified with the left-wing slogans of their party their radicalism was considerably reduced in more subtle and seemingly unpolitical questions – pointing to what Fromm argued was evidence of an “authoritarian” character.

Although the study itself wasn’t published until the 1980s, under the title The Working Class in Weimar Germany – this was at least partly due to the breakdown in Fromm’s relationship with Horkheimer – it is clear that it shed considerable light on what transpired in Nazi Germany, as well as telling us something about the nature of the left-wing authoritarianism.

Escape from Freedom, Fromm’s most famous work, was published in 1941, after he had left the Institute (Fromm was effectively pushed out to make way for Theodor Adorno in 1939). The central theme of Escape from Freedom was that Europe, which had hitherto been marching towards greater and greater forms of political freedom, and even towards socialism, over the course of the preceding centuries, had capitulated to fascism. Fromm wanted to try to understand this process in order to explain how and why it was that Nazism had taken hold in Germany, and why so many individuals came to support Hitler.

Like most Marxist analyses at the time, Fromm focused on the role of the lower-middle classes. He argued that the decline of their socio-economic status in the face of monopoly capitalism and hyperinflation alongside the defeat Germany suffered in the First World War and ensuing Treaty of Versailles had a deep psychological effect, removing traditional psychological supports and mechanisms of self-esteem.

In an expanded Marxian account, in which ideas and emotions played an important mediating role, Fromm identified deep feelings of anxiety and powerlessness in this class, which Hitler was able to capitalize on, with his sadomasochistic messages of love for the strong and hate for the weak (not to mention a racial program that raises “true-born” Germans to the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder), which provided the means of escape from intolerable psychological burdens experienced on a mass basis.

Fromm’s next engagement with Marxism came in the form of his The Sane Society (1955). The book is notable for its criticism of Marx, particularly of his account of revolution. Fromm argued that the famous statement that concludes The Communist Manifesto, that the workers “have nothing to lose but their chains,” contains a profound psychological error. With their chains they have also to lose all those irrational needs and satisfactions which developed because these chains were worn. Because of this, Fromm argued that we need a concept of “revolutionary humanism,” of revolution not only in terms of external barriers, but internal ones too, one that deals with the roots of sadomasochistic passions, sexism, racism, and other forms of character that aren’t necessarily going disappear immediately in a new society.

The Sane Society also contained an extended critique of mid-twentieth century U.S. capitalism, which for Fromm was an essentially bureaucratic form of mass-consumer capitalism. As part of this critique, Fromm put forward the notion of the “marketing orientation” to describe what he saw as the newly dominant form of personality that was associated with this stage of capitalism. A social psychological refraction of the Marxian notion of alienation, the marketing orientation for Fromm was one in which people experience themselves and others as commodities, literally as something to be marketed.

Fromm’s critique of contemporary capitalism continued a year later in The Art of Loving, perhaps his best-known work. Not the most obviously socialist or Marxist book (in fact, Herbert Marcuse criticized Fromm for supposedly betraying radical thought, and becoming a “sermonistic social worker”) Fromm was nevertheless adamant that “[t]he principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible,” and thus that the criticism of love (which, as he understood it, referred to the antithesis of narcissistic, racist, sexist and other forms of interpersonal relations) was also a criticism of capitalism and the ways in which it mitigated against genuine forms of love that would manifest in a more human society. Fromm believed that we must analyze the conditions for the possibility of realizing love and integrity in the present society and seek to strengthen them.

It is also during the 1950s that Fromm joins American Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation and seeks to rewrite its program. The resulting document, although rejected for this purpose, was published as Let Man Prevail (1958). It marks out Fromm’s distinctive form of Marxism, which he here calls “radical humanism” and characterizes as a democratic, humanist form of socialism. This analysis is deepened in 1960, in May Man Prevail?, an analysis of Soviet Communism that was intended to influence the move to unilateral disarmament during the Cold War.

Fromm’s most significant contribution to U.S. Marxism, however, was Marx’s Concept of Man (1961). Containing the first full English translation of Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, prefaced by a few short essays by Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man helped to popularize Marx in the U.S., as well as counteract some of the more common misinterpretations of Marx.

Fromm’s contribution to Marxism continued during the 1960s, with the publication of Beyond the Chains of Illusion (1962), in which Fromm developed his Freudo-Marxism social psychological theory of social character. Fromm was also responsible for the publication of Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium (1965), an impressive global collection of humanist Marxists and socialists, largely from Eastern Europe (including many from the Yugoslav Praxis school) but also from Africa and India.

In the years that followed, Fromm was a prominent figure in the anti-War left, influencing Martin Luther King Jr. and writing The Revolution of Hope, an attempt to influence the 1968 Presidential election. Aware of criticisms of such apparent social democratic reformism, Fromm protested that “if one is not concerned with the steps between the present and the future, one does not deal with politics, radical or otherwise.” He also wrote, Social Character in a Mexican Village (1970), The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), and To Have or To Be? (1976), all of which further developed his distinctive Freudo-Marxian inspired humanist sociology.

Looking back on Fromm’s legacy today, at a point where sociologists and Marxists are increasingly returning to his work, it is clear that what Fromm left us is a nuanced form of Marxian sociology that can help account for the relations between economic life, political movements, and inner emotional dynamism that underpin many of the changes that we are witness to in the current world situation. In a situation that is rapidly moving into dangerous territory, in what promises to be a recession as deep as 1929, we could do worse today than to look to Fromm for assistance.

Kieran Durkin is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow at University of York, and Visiting Scholar at University of California Santa Barbara, where he is conducting the first dedicated study of the Humanist Marxist tradition. He is author of The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm, and editor with Joan Braune of Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory: Hope, Humanism, and the Future.

Qing Dynasty painting depicting Confucius presenting Buddha to Laozi

By Shaun Tan

China-US Focus

Many people are familiar with the Western canon, those core works of literature, history, and philosophy that are considered essential to the study of the subject. In the West, students of literature read Shakespeare and Cervantes, students of history read Herodotus and Thucydides, and students of philosophy read Plato and Aristotle. This canon is considered an integral part of Western civilization, and has shaped thinkers, artists, and statesmen for generations.

Yet few outside China know much about the Chinese canon, a canon that is as rich and valuable as its Western counterpart, that has been revered and reviled at different points in Chinese history, and which may be the key to consolidating the Chinese Communist Party’s authority – or destroying it.

In the field of literature, it includes what’s known as “the four great books,” The Water Margin, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Journey to the West, and Dream of the Red Chamber.

The Water Margin features 108 heroes who, renouncing a corrupt and unjust Song Dynasty, form a band of outlaws and live, Robin Hood-style, in a marsh, righting wrongs and defending the weak in accordance with their own (extremely violent) code of honor. It explores the theme of a just insurgency, with the heroes choosing to serve “the will of heaven” over the Song rule of law.

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a historical novel, and follows the breakup of the Han Dynasty into three warring kingdoms. It relates the battles and the intrigues as the three kingdoms vie for supremacy. Its characters show strategic brilliance, nobility, and valor, but also hubris, stupidity, and self-destructive envy, in short, the full spectrum of human nature amidst triumph and disaster.

The Journey to the West is a fantastical account of the monk Tripitaka’s journey to bring Buddhism from India to China, in the company of an anarchic fighting monkey, a lustful pig demon, and a fearsome sand demon, and the adventures they have on the way. The central theme of the comic novel is the tension between temptation and virtue, between passion and discipline, as the heroes strive (or fail) to live up to Buddhist ideals.

The greatest of the four is Dream of the Red Chamber. This novel follows the doomed romance of the protagonist Baoyu with his cousin Daiyu amidst the decline and revival of the illustrious Jia family. Its excellence lies in its execution, in its witty and spirited characters, in its colorful depiction of life inside a great house peopled by relatives and servants and the complex, shifting relations between them. It is a meditation on the meaning of life, as Baoyu is caught between his natural romanticism, the stern Confucianism of his father, and the Buddhist detachment born of suffering and enlightenment. Blurring the lines between reality and illusion, it is a bittersweet tribute to youth and youth’s end.

In the field of history, the Records of the Grand Historian are widely regarded as the greatest classical work of history. Written by Sima Qian, the Records cover over two thousand years of Chinese history. Depicting rulers with all their virtues and vices, it’s the primary means by which we know of many of them today.

The Chinese philosophical canon begins with Confucius. Far from the patron saint of Asian authoritarianism, as he is so often made out to be by opportunistic Asian dictators and clueless Western commentators, Confucius actually counseled balance, reciprocal obligations between ruler and ruled, and integrity in the face of unjust authority.

Other canonical Chinese philosophers range from Mencius, who expanded on Confucius’ teachings, to the Hobbesian Han Feizi of the Legalist tradition, to the metaphysical Zhuangzi.

Perceptions of this canon changed through Chinese history. Novels were traditionally viewed with disdain, and deemed unworthy of serious study, but they were beloved by the general public, who often passed them on orally. From the time of the Tang Dynasty, scholars wrote commentaries on Sima Qian’s Records. Most of all, the Confucian texts were placed at the center of an education, as ambitious Chinese boys had to write essays on them in the all-important civil service examinations, and Confucian philosophy spread through the masses orally.

The fall of the last dynasty in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and the New Culture Movement after changed all that, though. The Chinese canon fell into disfavor, as it was associated with the “weak and backward past” that had left China at the mercy of Western powers.

The Communist takeover in 1949 saw this canon excised from public life. The tales of cavorting maidens were deemed decadent, the accounts of emperors were deemed counterrevolutionary, and Confucius was deemed the philosopher of reactionary feudalism. No longer were these things taught in schools or reenacted on the stage (although many parents continued to teach them to their children in private). Instead, Mao Zedong substituted his Little Red Book and revolutionary works like Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, along with the philosophy of Marx and Lenin. This came to a head with the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when Red Guards declared war on “old ideas,” burned books en masse— many of them Chinese classics— and even desecrated Confucius’ tomb. Whilst the canon continued to be taught in schools in Taiwan and Hong Kong, for many years it seemed to vanish from the land of its birth.

The irony was that Mao himself had a great appreciation for the canon. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who visited Mao in Beijing in 1972, described the chairman’s study thus: “Manuscripts lined bookshelves along every wall; books covered the table and the floor; it looked more like the retreat of a scholar than the audience room of the all-powerful leader of the world’s most populous nation.” Mao’s collection included classical Chinese poetry, The Water Margin, and even Dream of the Red Chamber, which he boasted of having read five times. What he enjoyed privately, he denied to everyone else.

After the death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution, however, the canon was slowly revived, and it began to be taught in schools again. Today, students in China learn the Chinese classics from early years all the way to university. President Xi Jinping laces his speeches with quotes by Mencius, and in 2014 he made a pilgrimage to Confucius’ hometown in Qufu. “The classics should be set in students’ minds,” he said, “so they become the genes of Chinese national culture.”

Why this renewed enthusiasm for the canon?

Many point to the enormous changes in Chinese society since Deng Xiaoping began opening and reforming the country in 1978. As fortunes rose with the embrace of capitalism, commitment to Communist values dwindled, such that few Chinese today take them seriously. Chinese policymakers worry about a populace driven only by materialism and without a moral compass.

“As communism gradually [loses] its luster, China finds herself trapped in a moral vacuum,” says Kwok Ching Chow, Professor of Chinese at Hong Kong Baptist University. “It is only logical that the Chinese government would turn back to traditional culture, which is rich in morals and ethics.”

The absence of any genuine loyalty to Chinese Communism also leaves many people without a strong sense of national identity. Restoring the canon, therefore, also serves a unifying function, explains Bryan Van Norden, head of philosophy at Yale-NUS College, and author of Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto. “Xi is trying to reintroduce the traditional canon…to give people a group identity as ‘Chinese,’” he says.

It’s a logical decision, and Chinese should certainly cheer the return of their canon to its proper place, but this move presents risks of its own for the CCP. The Party, after all, is the definitive authority on Chinese Communist doctrine, but the same cannot be said of Chinese canonical works, which can be interpreted in different ways by different people.

A parallel here is the Reformation. For centuries, the Pope, seen as God’s representative on Earth, was the ultimate authority on Christianity, and salvation could only be obtained through the priests and churches he sanctioned. When Martin Luther began preaching that the last word on Christianity was not the Pope, but the Bible, which could be read and interpreted by anyone, he caused a revolt against the Vatican and a schism within the faith. Similarly, if the source of values in China is no longer the CCP, but the Chinese canon, which anyone can read and interpret for himself, what might this mean for the Party’s authority?

And how might Chinese people interpret these canonical works? Will they see the revolutionary CCP as the virtuous rebels in The Water Margin, or more like the corrupt and unjust Song Dynasty they resisted? Will they see Xi Jinping as one of the benevolent emperors in Sima Qian’s histories, or more like the tyrant Qin Shi Huang? Will they see him as the kind of worthy ruler Confucius counseled serving, or an unworthy one who should be shunned?

“Xi hopes [to revive the canon] so that he and the Communist Party can maintain strict control over the Chinese people,” says Van Norden. “The danger, though, is that generations of intellectuals have found in these same texts the resources to challenge the status quo. Confucius and Mencius were both insistent critics of the governments of their eras. Perhaps Xi is unleashing forces he may not be able to control?”

Perhaps that’s what Chinese authorities feared when in 2011 they surreptitiously removed the 31-foot statue of Confucius from near Tiananmen Square – just four months after they had unveiled it there.
A loose canon like China’s is an uncertain tool for social control.

Shaun Tan is a writer based in Hong Kong. His writing has appeared in Quartz, The Diplomat, and the Malay Mail Online. He enjoys reading, playing tennis, and talking about himself in the third-person.

The Chinese Canon

A totally non-exhaustive list of Chinese canonical works is provided below.

Literature

Novels

The Four Great Books:
Shi Naian, The Water Margin
Luo Guanzhong, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Journey to the West
Cao Xueqin and Gao E, Dream of the Red Chamber
The Golden Lotus
Wu Jingzi, The Scholars
 
Plays

Wang Shifu, The Story of the Western Wing
Tang Xianzu, The Peony Pavillion
Hong Sheng, The Palace of Eternal Life
Kong Shangren, The Peach Blossom Fan
 
Poems

Li Bai
Du Fu
The Songs of the South
Wen Xuan
For an introduction, see:
C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction
Anthology of Chinese Literature, Volumes I and II, edited by Cyril Birch
 
History

Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian
 
Philosophy

Confucian

Confucius, The Analects, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean
Mencius
The Five Classics:
The Classic of Poetry
The Book of Documents
The Book of Rites
The I Ching
The Spring and Autumn Annals
 
Legalist

Han Feizi
 
Buddhist

Huineng, The Platform Sutra
 
Daoist

Laozi, Daodejing
Zhuangzi

When Cold War philosophy tied rational choice theory to scientific method, it embedded the free-market mindset in US society

By John McCumber

Aeon Magazine

McCumber is professor of Germanic Languages at the University of California, Los Angeles. His latest book is The Philosophy Scare: The Politics of Reason in the Early Cold War (2016).

The chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) was worried. It was May 1954, and UCLA had been independent of Berkeley for just two years. Now its Office of Public Information had learned that the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Examiner was preparing one or more articles on communist infiltration at the university. The news was hardly surprising. UCLA, sometimes called the ‘little Red schoolhouse in Westwood’, was considered to be a prime example of communist infiltration of universities in the United States; an article in The Saturday Evening Post in October 1950 had identified it as providing ‘a case history of what has been done at many schools’.

The chancellor, Raymond B Allen, scheduled an interview with a ‘Mr Carrington’ – apparently Richard A Carrington, the paper’s publisher – and solicited some talking points from Andrew Hamilton of the Information Office. They included the following: ‘Through the cooperation of our police department, our faculty and our student body, we have always defeated such [subversive] attempts. We have done this quietly and without fanfare – but most effectively.’ Whether Allen actually used these words or not, his strategy worked. Scribbled on Hamilton’s talking points, in Allen’s handwriting, are the jubilant words ‘All is OK – will tell you.’

Allen’s victory ultimately did him little good. Unlike other UCLA administrators, he is nowhere commemorated on the Westwood campus, having suddenly left office in 1959, after seven years in his post, just ahead of a football scandal. The fact remains that he was UCLA’s first chancellor, the premier academic Red hunter of the Joseph McCarthy era – and one of the most important US philosophers of the mid-20th century.

This is hard to see today, when philosophy is considered one of academia’s more remote backwaters. But as the country emerged from the Second World War, things were different. John Dewey and other pragmatists were still central figures in US intellectual life, attempting to summon the better angels of American nature in the service, as one of Dewey’s most influential titles had it, of ‘democracy and education’. In this they were continuing one of US philosophy’s oldest traditions, that of educating students and the general public to appreciate their place in a larger order of values. But they had reconceived the nature of that order: where previous generations of US philosophers had understood it as divinely ordained, the pragmatists had come to see it as a social order. This attracted suspicion from conservative religious groups, who kept sharp eyes on philosophy departments on the grounds that they were the only place in the universities where atheism might be taught (Dewey’s associate Max Otto resigned a visiting chair at UCLA after being outed as an atheist by the Examiner). As communism began its postwar spread across eastern Europe, this scrutiny intensified into a nationwide crusade against communism and, as the UCLA campus paper The Daily Bruin put it, ‘anything which might faintly resemble it’.

And that was not the only political pressure on philosophy at the time. Another, more intellectual, came from the philosophical attractiveness of Marxism, which was rapidly winning converts not only in Europe but in Africa and Asia as well. The view that class struggle in Western countries would inevitably lead, via the pseudoscientific ‘iron laws’ of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, to worldwide communist domination was foreign to Marx himself. But it provided a ‘scientific’ veneer for Soviet great-power interests, and people all over the world were accepting it as a coherent explanation for the Depression, the Second World War and ongoing poverty. As the political philosopher S M Amadae has shown in Rationalising Capitalist Democracy (2003), many Western intellectuals at the time did not think that capitalism had anything to compete with this. A new philosophy was needed, one that provided what the nuanced approaches of pragmatism could not: an uncompromising vindication of free markets and contested elections.

The McCarthyite pressure, at first, was the stronger. To fight the witch-hunters, universities needed to do exactly what Allen told the Examiner that UCLA was doing: quickly and quietly identify communists on campus and remove them from teaching positions. There was, however, a problem with this: wasn’t it censorship? And wasn’t censorship what we were supposed to be fighting against?

It was Allen himself who solved this problem when, as president of the University of Washington in 1948-49, he had to fire two communists who had done nothing wrong except join the Communist Party. Joseph Butterworth, whose field was medieval literature, was not considered particularly subversive. But Herbert Phillips was a philosophy professor. He not only taught the work of Karl Marx, but began every course by informing the students that he was a committed Marxist, and inviting them to judge his teaching in light of that fact. This meant that he could not be ‘subverting’ his students – they knew exactly what they were getting. Allen nevertheless came under heavy pressure to fire him.

Allen’s justification for doing this became known across the country as the ‘Allen Formula’. The core of it ran like this: members of the Communist Party have abandoned reason, the impartial search for truth, and merely parrot the Moscow line. They should not be allowed to teach, not because they are Marxists – that would indeed be censorship – but because they are incompetent. The Formula did not end there, however. It had to be thoroughly argued and rigorously pervasive, because it had to appeal to a highly informed and critical audience: university professors, whose cooperation was essential to rooting out the subversives in their midst. Ad hoc invocations of the ‘search for truth’ would not suffice. It had to be shown what the search for truth – reason itself – really was. Allen’s ‘formula’ thus became philosophical in nature.

Conveniently, rationality was now a matter of following clear rules that went beyond individual disciplines

Like the logical positivists of his day, Allen identified reason with science, which he defined in terms of a narrow version of the ‘scientific method’, according to which it consists in formulating and testing hypotheses. This applied, he claimed in a 1953 interview with The Daily Bruin, even in ‘the realm of the moral and spiritual life’: Buddha under the banyan tree, Moses on Sinai, and Jesus in the desert were all, it appears, formulating hypotheses and designing experiments to test them.

The Allen Formula gave universities two things they desperately needed: a quick-and-dirty way to identify ‘incompetents’, and a rationale for their speedy exclusion from academia. Since rationality applies to all human activities, the Formula could be used against professors who, like Butterworth, were competent in their own disciplines, but whose views in other fields (such as politics) had not been formulated ‘scientifically’. Moreover, and conveniently, rationality was now a matter of following clear rules that went beyond individual disciplines. This meant that whether someone was ‘competent’ or not could be handed over to what Allen called members of ‘the tough, hard-headed world of affairs’ – in practice, administrators and trustees – rather than left to professors actually conversant with the suspect’s field. Professors thus found themselves freed from having to deal with cases of suspected subversion. Small wonder that, according to the historian Ellen Schrecker, Allen’s actions, and his rationale for them, set a precedent for universities across the country, and catapulted Allen himself to national fame – and to a new job at UCLA.

The Allen Formula was administered, at UCLA and elsewhere in California, through something called the California Plan. Imitated to varying degrees in other states, the Plan required the head of every institution of higher education in California, public and private, to send the name of every job candidate at their institution for vetting by the state senate’s committee on un-American activities. The committee would then consult its database of subversives and inform the university whether the candidate was in it. What to do next was, officially, up to the university; but the committee’s policy was that if an identified subversive was actually hired, it would go public, issuing subpoenas and holding hearings. As Schrecker notes in No Ivory Tower (1986), no college could hope to deal with such publicity, so the Plan effectively gave the committee ‘a veto over every single academic appointment in the state of California’.

The California Plan was supplemented at the University of California by a memo in April 1952 from President Robert G Sproul to department chairs and other administrative officers, directing departments to canvass the publications of job candidates to make sure that they ‘prohibited the employment of persons whose commitments or obligations to any organisation, communist or other, prejudiced impartial scholarship and teaching and the free pursuit of truth’. As the language here makes clear, it is not merely communists who are the problem, but anyone who is not ‘impartial’. Sproul, like other academics, followed the Allen Formula.

This official emphasis on scientific impartiality excluded adherents of a number of influential philosophical approaches from employment in California. Non-communist Marxists whose beliefs reposed on readings of history rather than on logic and mathematics were said to have abandoned what was rapidly defined as philosophy’s ancient concern with strict objectivity in favour of what Allen called ‘leading parades’. Existentialists and phenomenologists did not follow the experimental method (and the former tended to be atheists as well). Many pragmatists did not even believe that there was a single scientific method: true to their name, they believed that scientific enquiry should be free to apply whatever procedures worked. Moreover, whether a method ‘worked’ or not in a given case should be a matter of its social benefit, a dangerously collectivist standard in those difficult days. It was far safer to see the scientific enterprise as what Allen called it in Communism and Academic Freedom (1949): a ‘timeless, selfless quest of truth’.

We will never know the number of job candidates who lost their careers before they even started

The California Plan operated in the greatest secrecy. Ending someone’s career in public required extensive justification, multiple hearings, and due process, all of which could provoke damaging public outcries. The need for secrecy also explains why the Plan emphasised preventing hires rather than rooting out subversives already in teaching positions. As the committee noted in its annual report for 1953, professors already on campus had networks of friends and supporters. Efforts to remove them often produced loud backlashes which, in the committee’s view, invariably benefitted the Communist Party.

According to its advocates, the Plan was a great success. In March 1952, 10 months after it was implemented, the committee’s staffer, Richard Combs, estimated that it had prevented about one academic hire per day in the state. The next year, Allen himself declared that ‘so far, the arrangement is working to mutual advantage’.

As long as Allen remained chancellor, the Plan’s secrecy was successfully maintained at UCLA. Two years after he left, however, attacks resumed: the anthropologist John Greenway was fired in 1961 for suggesting that the Roman Catholic Mass exhibited traces of cannibalism. Three years after that, the philosopher Patrick Wilson was denounced by leading Los Angeles clergymen for the way he taught philosophy of religion. The seven years of silence while Allen served as chancellor at UCLA are testimony to his, and the Plan’s, success at tamping down controversy. We will never know, of course, the number of job candidates who lost their careers before they even started.

Things took a different turn at the university’s other campus, Berkeley. Unlike Allen, Berkeley’s chancellor, Clark Kerr, refused to cooperate with the Plan – with the result that, unbeknown to Kerr, a university security officer named William Wadman took it over. Wadman’s view of his job went well beyond merely forwarding the names of job candidates. It amounted to a general political policing of the faculty, and this attracted national attention. In March 1954, after Wadman’s activities became public, an article in the far-off Harvard Crimson quoted Richard Combs: ‘If, after looking over charges against a professor and investigating them, Wadman thinks the man should be removed, he goes to the state committee and discusses the case. If the … committee agrees with him, the information is passed on to the president of the university [Sproul], who calls for the professor’s resignation.’

The initiative in this arrangement clearly belonged to Wadman. The committee itself was known to be rabidly anti-communist and eager to justify its existence by capturing ‘subversives’, while Sproul’s assent to its findings is portrayed as virtually automatic. The Crimson article goes on to summarise Combs as saying that ‘any professor in the college – not merely those in classified research – can be dealt with in this manner’. Which means, if true, that every professor in the college – not just those in classified research – owed his job to the benign disregard, at least, of Wadman.

As all this was happening, US academics also faced the task of coming up with a philosophical antidote to Marxism. Rational choice theory, developed at the RAND Corporation in the late 1940s, was a plausible candidate. It holds that people make (or should make) choices rationally by ranking the alternatives presented to them with regard to the mathematical properties of transitivity and completeness. They then choose the alternative that maximises their utility, advancing their relevant goals at minimal cost. Each individual is solely responsible for her preferences and goals, so rational choice theory takes a strongly individualistic view of human life. The ‘iron laws of history’ have no place here, and large-scale historical forces, such as social classes and revolutions, do not really exist except as shorthand for lots of people making up their minds. To patriotic US intellectuals, rational choice theory thus held great promise as a weapon in the Cold War of ideas.

But it needed work. Its formulation at RAND had been keyed to the empirical contexts of market choice and voting behaviour, but the kind of Marxism it was supposed to fight – basically, Stalinism – did not accept either free markets or contested elections as core components of human society. Rational choice theory therefore had to be elevated from an empirical theory covering certain empirical contexts into a normative theory of the proper operation of the human mind itself. It had to become a universal philosophy. Only then could it justify the US’ self-assumed global mission of bringing free elections and free markets to the entire world.

Scientific method was already installed as coextensive with reason itself – philosophically by the logical positivists, and politically by the Allen Formula. All that was needed was to tie rational choice to the scientific method. This was accomplished paradigmatically by the UCLA philosopher Hans Reichenbach’s book The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951). In a crucial paragraph, Reichenbach wrote:

a set of observational facts will always fit more than one theory … The inductive inference is used to confer upon each of these theories a degree of probability, and the most probable theory is then accepted.

Facts always underdetermine theories, and this requires scientists to choose from an array of alternative theories, under a preference for highest probability. Science thus becomes a series of rational choices. Which meant that by 1951 there was a unified intellectual response to the two pressures: appeals to science fought the domestic subversives, and when science was integrated with rational choice theory it entered the global conflict. The battle was on, and what I call Cold War philosophy began its career, not only in fighting the Cold War of ideas, but in structuring US universities – and US society.

To be sure, interest in the California Plan seems to have petered out well before California’s anti-communist senate committee was disbanded in 1971. Even before then, the Plan was not entirely successful, as witnessed by the hiring in 1964 of the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse to the philosophy department at the University of California, San Diego. That hiring was not without problems, however; public outcries against Marcuse culminated, in 1968, in armed guards, organised by his graduate students, spending the night in his living room.

Many countries, of course have meritocracies – but few pin them as tightly to rational choice as the US does

But to say that with the waning of McCarthyism Cold War philosophy itself vanished from the scene is far too simplistic. The Cold War lasted until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and Cold War philosophy is still with us today. Thus, humanists long ago abandoned McCarthy-era attempts to subject their work to scientific method (as New Criticism was held to do). But in universities at large, intellectual respectability still tends to follow the sciences.

Cold War philosophy also continues to structure US society at large. Consider the widespread use of multiple-choice tests for tracking students. Whether one takes an ACT or a SAT, one is basically being tested on one’s ability to choose, quickly and accurately, from a presented array of alternative answers – under a preference, of course, for agreement with the test designers. Rational choice thus became the key to one’s placement in the national meritocracy, as illustrated by what I call the ‘40’s test’: if you know that someone has got 440, 540, 640 or 740 on the SATs (under the scoring system in effect until March 2016), you usually know a lot about their subsequent life. Someone who scored a 440, for example, likely attended a community college or no college, and worked at a relatively humble job. Someone with a 740 was usually accepted into an elite university and had much grander opportunities. Many countries, of course have meritocracies – but few pin them as tightly to rational choice as the US does.

Cold War philosophy also influences US society through its ethics. Its main ethical implication is somewhat hidden, because Cold War philosophy inherits from rational choice theory a proclamation of ethical neutrality: a person’s preferences and goals are not subjected to moral evaluation. As far as rational choice theory is concerned, it doesn’t matter if I want to end world hunger, pass the bar, or buy myself a nice private jet; I make my choices the same way. Similarly for Cold War philosophy – but it also has an ethical imperative that concerns not ends but means. However laudable or nefarious my goals might be, I will be better able to achieve them if I have two things: wealth and power. We therefore derive an ‘ethical’ imperative: whatever else you want to do, increase your wealth and power!

Results of this are easily seen in today’s universities. Academic units that enable individuals to become wealthy and powerful (business schools, law schools) or stay that way (medical schools) are extravagantly funded; units that do not (humanities departments) are on tight rations. Also on tight rations nationwide are facilities that help individuals become wealthy and powerful but do not convey competitive advantage on them because they are open to all or most: highways, bridges, dams, airports, and so on.

Seventy years after the Cold War began, and almost 30 after it ended, Cold War philosophy also continues to affect US politics. The Right holds that if reason itself is rooted in market choice, then business skills must transfer smoothly into all other domains, including governance – an explicit principle of the Trump administration. On the Left, meritocracy rules: all three of Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees attended law school at either Harvard (as Obama himself did) or Yale (as Hillary Clinton did). The view that choice solves all problems is evident in the White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s presentation of the Republican vision for US health care, at his press briefing last March 23: ‘We’ve lost consumer choice … The idea is to instil choice back into the market.’

Part of the reason for Cold War philosophy’s continuing dominance is that though it is really a philosophy, proffering a normative and universal theory of correct reasoning, it has never been directly confronted on a philosophical level. Its concern with promulgating free markets and contested elections gave it homes in departments of economics and political science, where it thrives today. Philosophers, for their part, have until recently occupied themselves mainly with apolitical fields such as logic, metaphysics and epistemology.

On a philosophical level, however, Cold War philosophy has some obvious problems. Its ‘ethics’, for example, is not a traditional philosophical ethics at all. From Plato to the pragmatists, philosophical ethics has concerned the integration of the individual into a wider moral universe, whether divine (as in Platonic ethics) or social (as in the pragmatists). This is explicitly rejected by Cold War philosophy’s individualism and moral neutrality as regards to ends. Where Adam Smith had all sorts of arguments as to why greed was socially beneficial, Cold War ethics dispenses with them in favour of Gordon Gekko’s simple ‘Greed is good.’

Another problem with Cold War philosophy’s ethics concerns what I will call ‘disidentification’. Whatever I choose has at least one alternative; otherwise there would be no choice. But if I identify myself at the outset with any of my plurality of alternatives, I cannot choose any alternative to it; doing that would end my identity and be suicidal, physically or morally. Therefore, any alternative I consider in the course of making a rational decision is something I can walk away from and still be me. This is not an issue for rational choice theory, which concerns cases where my identity is not at stake, such as choosing which brand of toothpaste to buy, or (usually) which candidate to vote for. But when rational choice theory becomes Cold War philosophy, it applies to everything, and everything about me becomes a matter of choice.

Free markets are wonderful tools for enhancing human life; so are MRIs: but both need proper installation and tending

This in turn leads me to abandon my own identity, in the following way: suppose that what I am choosing is my religion, and that my alternatives are Catholicism and Hinduism. If I am already a Catholic, however, Hinduism cannot be a serious alternative, because one’s religion is (usually) part of one’s identity. If I am to choose between Catholicism and Hinduism, I must put both at a distance. I must ‘disidentify’ with them. And since Cold War philosophy bids us to take this stance on all things, at the limit the moral agent must be disidentified from everything, and can have no other fundamental identity than being a rational chooser, ie someone who first orders her preferences according to transitivity and completeness, and then opts for the highest utility. That is a pretty thin identity. Everyone has certain characteristics that they simply cannot or will not relinquish under any circumstances. What else is there to live for?

The widespread success of rational choice theory, coupled with the problems of Cold War philosophy, suggests that the problem lies in what differentiates the two: Cold War philosophy’s claim, inherited from Allen, to universal, and indeed sole, validity as an account of human reason. If we look at the history of philosophy, reason has been many things. For the Greeks, it was basically the capacity to grasp universals – to see present givens as instantiations of underlying structures. For René Descartes, it was the ability to provide an a priori and so ‘unshakable’ foundation for beliefs. For Immanuel Kant, it was the ability to generalise conceptions to the maximum, which provided the foundation for the absoluteness of the moral law. Similarly, freedom has not always been merely a matter of choice. For Aristotle, you act freely, are responsible for an action, when you desire to perform that action and your reason tells you it is the correct action in the circumstances. To act freely is thus to act from your entire moral being. This idea, that freedom is really the capacity for complete self-expression, is summed up in Hegel’s pithy remark that true freedom is the apprehension of necessity: it is to understand, in a particular situation, what it is that you have to do in order to be you.

None of this suggests that we should stop valuing freedom of choice. But we should stop assuming that making choices amounts to freedom itself, or that making them rationally is the whole job of human reason. Freedom of choice, like free markets and contested elections, is valuable only when situated within wider horizons of value. Divorced from them, it becomes first absolute and then disastrous. Free markets, for example, are wonderful tools for enhancing human life. So are MRIs; but you can’t just drop an MRI on a street corner and expect it to function. Both kinds of device require proper installation and constant tending. The penalties for ignoring this became evident in the financial crisis of 2008.

The absolutising of things such as freedom of choice – the view that free markets and contested elections suffice for a good society – is a view that came into prominence with the early Cold War, when the proliferation of choices was our main contrast with Soviet Marxism. In reality, there is much more to a good society than the affordance of maximum choice to its citizens. With market fundamentalism dominating the US government, and with phantasms being paraded in the media under the sobriquet of ‘alternative facts’ that you can choose or reject, forgetfulness of the McCarthy era and the Cold War philosophy it spawned is no longer a rational option.

By Robert Ware
Philosophy Dept
University of Calgary

Posted on April 5, 2014
Socialism and Democracy Online / sdonline.org   

Few outside China would think of China as a socialist, or Marxist, society. Inside China the views vary widely, but few would say, without qualifiers, as the Constitution does, that China is socialist. No one – anywhere – now sees China as a model for socialism. Nevertheless, socialism is a strong force in China and Marxism a subject of continuing investigation. Just how significant a role socialism and Marxism play is not easily determined, but the importance of that role and some of its complexity is well worth considering.

Recently I have taught Marxism in Beijing and have had occasion to see some of the strengths and weaknesses of the theory and its application. After some remarks on my experiences there, I will discuss my observations about the nature of Marxism in China in theory and practice. Whatever one says about China’s problems and about how Marxism is discussed there, a large role for studying, developing, and applying Marxism in China remains.

I argue here that the significance of Marxism in China can be compared to that of democracy in the west, especially in North America. In both settings, the relevant practices are dysfunctional in significant ways, but both Marxism and democracy give a rationale and a tissue of support – and, consequently, a locus of struggle – for efforts to improve life for the majority. Their actual influence can be depressingly weak, but both are worthy of investigation, for political as well as intellectual reasons. I will consider some questions about the kinds of socialism and Marxism that prevail in China, but also, importantly, what topics are rejected or simply ignored.

Visits, courses, and socialists

Teaching Marxism in China is fascinating, although the same can probably be said for teaching most other subjects there, primarily because of China’s great development and energy, as well as its complexity and chaos. My observations here come largely from recent visits to China, including three weeks in the fall of 2007 (accompanied by my wife, Dr. Diana Hodson), a month at Renmin University in Beijing in July 2010, and two months at Peking University (again with my wife) in September-November 2011. I have also learned much from many helpful correspondents and subsequent contacts, both inside China and out.

In 2007, I visited five academic institutions in Beijing and Shanghai, lecturing on analytical Marxism and libertarian socialism and discussing Marxism and democratic theory, in China and abroad. (I was revisiting universities, where I had taught analytical philosophy in 1984-85 [Fudan University in Shanghai] and 1986-87 [Peking University and the Institute of Philosophy in Beijing]. In the 1980s, I also lectured on analytical Marxism at a variety of universities and institutes throughout the country.) I also participated in a conference in 2007, at a Communist Party university in Shanghai, celebrating the 140th anniversary of Marx’s Capital with over a hundred economists, mostly Chinese, and a few theorists from other disciplines. In 2010, I taught a summer course at Renmin University of China (RUC) in Beijing and served as a commentator at a conference at the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau (CCTB) celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Grundrisse.1

At Peking University in the fall of 2011, I taught a small undergraduate philosophy course on analytical Marxism and a graduate philosophy seminar on Marxism and radical politics. G.A. Cohen’s philosophically acute and influential studies were the central texts for the seminar. We looked at new approaches to historical materialism, the core of Marxist studies in China, and at equality and freedom, which are generally not discussed as Marxist topics.

The first reading assignment I gave for my summer course in 2010 on analytical Marxism at RUC2 was Albert Einstein’s “Why I am a Socialist” and two introductions to analytical Marxism. The first short writing assignment was to answer the question “Why I am a socialist,” or alternatively “Why I am not a socialist.”3 From the start, I had a good opportunity to learn about young people’s views in contemporary China through this small group of university students in Beijing. Of the thirty students, twenty gave reasons for why they were socialists and ten gave reasons for why they were not. In the twenty, I include one who became socialist later, after reading the Communist Manifesto (I assume again) in English. I also include two who said they were not socialists because they were communists.

Given what I had heard previously in China, I was surprised that two-thirds of my students were socialist, but of course I could not conclude anything in general about young people from that exercise. Certainly, that the course was on Marxism would be a factor, although there were students in the course who were there for the credits, out of curiosity, and for the opportunity to develop their English. After the assignment was handed in, we talked about what young people in universities and in the country generally think about socialism. Before telling them the results, I asked them to guess the division of the class in the exercise. There was a fair amount of variation about the class and greater variation for figures about the views of other groups. Afterwards, I learned, through quizzing many friends and contacts, that there is little idea of how many people, young or old, are socialists.

I know of no good studies of the number of Chinese who are socialists, but it is also difficult to know what a good study would be. Much depends on how the question is asked and what the meaning of socialism is in the relevant context. The same is true for understanding what significance to give to the 2009 Rasmussen poll that ‘found’ that one third of US young people under 30 believe that socialism is superior to capitalism. What do the people polled think socialism is? In the case of the Chinese, young people would naturally think of Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought or socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The reasons that people give, however, tell something about what they mean when they think of socialism. Quite a few of my students explained their allegiance in terms of their beliefs about human nature. Several said that they were socialists because it is human nature to be altruistic or collectivist, and a similar number were not socialists because, they said, people are self-interested by nature. Of course, this was a good topic for discussion in the class on a topic that is usually given short shrift in Chinese Marxist studies.

Many students were socialists because of parents or grandparents who were members of the Communist Party or had fought in Korea or the War of Liberation. And there were a variety of personal reasons, including moral reasons. An interesting rhetorical question was: if not a socialist, what would you be? The suggestion was that capitalism is not a viable alternative. The dominant question is what kind of socialism should there be.

With even cursory contact, it is obvious that there are millions of socialists in China. There were twenty in my class, and if two thirds of the adult population were socialists, China would have about 500 million socialists. That surely wildly overestimates the numbers, even for a country with a constitution that proclaims its socialism. For a more plausible estimate, consider first that the Communist Party of China has about 80 million members. There is certainly a lot of opportunism and cynicism amongst them, but on the basis of my private queries of many members, I cannot imagine that more than a quarter of them would actually reject socialism, even in their hearts.4 That leaves at least 60 million socialists in the Party.

Then there are surely several million socialists outside the Party. Many people are principled Maoists – some who see positive aspects of the Cultural Revolution – for example those involved with the Utopian Bookstore in Beijing, which has a wide variety of socialist and anarchist books in translation, where lectures are given, and with a widely followed Chinese website – until early 2012 when it was closed down after the detention of Bo Xilai. Bo, the former mayor of the megacity, Chongqing, is thought to have had millions of socialist followers because of popular social policies with Maoist trappings. These days there are also many “Marxologists” and other socialist theorists who do not want to be Party members. Some committed Marxists reject membership for principled reasons. Some socialists prefer not to undergo the strictures and discipline of the Party. Many lack the enthusiasm and happily go on with their own private lives. I would add another 10 million socialists outside the Party.

Thus, my very rough guess is that there are at least 70 million socialists in China. This should not come as a surprise to anyone who observes the intellectual scene in universities, institutes, and the media. Socialism is a known ideology that many take seriously and many more are curious about. (I also heard of many who scoffed at fellow students studying Marxism and socialism.5 There is a lively diversity of opinion.)

This is not to deny that there is also strong interest in capitalism and ideas of neoliberalism in some circles, although there are ways in which such interests are against the grain, historically and politically. Economic decisions might favor private ownership and individual entrepreneurs, but rarely would they be justified on the basis of capitalist ideology or neoliberal theory. Occasionally, ideas are drawn from western “capitalist” thinkers, but almost always in support of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

Most people are embarrassed by and skeptical about ideas of neoliberalism, and private entrepreneurs are largely supporters of the Communist Party, which after all has facilitated their rise to wealth and power. Many would find this claim about support counterintuitive, but in a careful comprehensive study, Chen and Dickson draw their “main conclusion … that China’s capitalists are unlikely to be agents of change because their support for the current regime is stronger than their support for an alternative democratic political system.”6 Neoliberal ideology does not necessarily lead to western forms of democracy.

This only makes the question more urgent: what kind of socialism do the millions of Chinese socialists espouse and follow? There is little doubt that most Chinese socialists would consider Marxism the foundation of their socialism, as inscribed in the constitutions of both the Party and the country. However, for the great majority of socialists, there is little doubt that the details of theory – and knowledge of Marx – are pretty sketchy. And vagueness allows a diversity of opinions and leanings. Moreover, the Communist Party does not give, if it ever has, clear substantive principles to follow.

All school children get a smattering of socialist thought with emphasis on history, productive development, and socialist superiority. Examples of good behavior take the place of clear moral principles. Patriotism is promoted and Chinese values extolled, all in relation to socialism, as it has come down from Marx. I think there are a lot of parallels to social studies courses in Canada and the US, except that in China socialism rather than capitalism is the accepted model. The ideological forms are similar, but the government institutions and economic structures are significantly different.

University students have more comprehensive courses on dialectics and historical materialism. The curriculum also contains praise of social development in China, which is contrasted with capitalist poverty and corporate malfeasance in the West. Most universities have a separate department of Marxism that offers undergraduate introductions with staid old textbooks on Marxism-Leninism. (I also assigned my summer students a question about something they would change in their textbooks about socialism. There were many criticisms of the rigidity of the historical materialism and the lack of attention to social issues and ethical principles.) Some of the people in departments of Marxism research and teach beyond the textbooks, as is often done in western courses on economics and politics. The better students see through the weaknesses and appreciate the strengths of classes on Marxism.

The founding texts are, of course, those of Marx and Engels, which have appeared in Chinese translations over the years, with new ones coming out of the ongoing comprehensive MEGA (Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe) project. There are also translations of the works of many other figures in the history of Marxism, and socialism more generally. Contemporary Marxism and socialism throughout the world are studied widely and in depth as well. All of my students, and others, showed great curiosity about views and theories of socialism beyond what they had been taught. The curiosity is partly driven by the challenges that the Chinese confront.

The context and challenges

China officially, and quite widely unofficially, regards itself as socialist, but it has gone through enormous changes since the time of liberation in 1949. Besides the changes, there is a great diversity, from one district and province to another, marked in language, culture, traditions, food, and productivity and wealth, which makes it difficult to generalize about what is happening. Still, much can be said about the country as a whole.

The country draws on a large population, a long history, a mature civilization, a vast geography, a committed citizenry, a hard-working labor force, an entrepreneurial economy, and governance with strong appeals to four cardinal principles and human rights (even though without strict adherence).7 It is also characterized by chaos, corruption, capitalist fervor, oppressive poverty in the midst of exorbitant wealth, weak social benefits, and heavy pollution.

China has developed economically in dramatic ways since 1949, and since my first visit in 1975. Economic development along the eastern coast during the last two decades has been phenomenal. The infrastructure and architecture is especially spectacular. Shanghai and Beijing have the largest and tallest buildings, but also some of the most avant-garde designs and structures by world-renowned architects. Moreover, the technology is advanced down to some of the smallest details, from hotels to public toilets in city parks.

One also sees the rise of consumerism. There are billboards, signs, and lights everywhere. And people are out shopping like I have never seen before anywhere, certainly not in China in the 1980s. At the extreme, there are many pristine malls with exclusive shops for the fabulously wealthy. But there is also middle-class consumption at a feverish rate in crowded department stores. And locally there are still many street sellers in neighborhoods. One also sees a full range of bakeries, cafes, eateries, restaurants, and boutiques of all kinds. Throughout Beijing, one finds heritage buildings, temples, courtyards, and hutongs,8 although I often heard complaints about too many being destroyed to make way for office towers, luxury apartment buildings, and other modern structures, which seem to be everywhere.

Poverty and inequality in China has been of utmost concern, as seen in the state-directed English language Chinese TV channel and the newspaper China Daily. In 2007, I saw explicit statistics in the China Daily, and the news from the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party was about a focus on poverty. The concern seemed just as great in 2010 and still today. On 12 May 2010, China Daily reported a continuing rise of the Gini coefficient, indicating an alarming rate of inequality. According to Li Shi at Beijing Normal University, “the income of the top 10 percent of the richest Chinese was 23 times that of the bottom 10 percent in the country in 2007, as compared with 1998, when the gap was only 7.3 times.”9 Bo Xilai is said to have criticized China for having a level of inequality similar to that of the US.10 There is much discussion about attempts to improve the conditions of the least well off in order to achieve social harmony. Unfortunately, the changes seem to be slow and small.

At the conference that I attended on Marx’s Capital in 2007, I heard one of the most impassioned criticisms that I have heard anywhere, in this case of people being paid far less than according to their labor.11 The speaker spoke of his shame as a Chinese person. His presentation appeared to be received positively by the large audience of Chinese economists. The problem of poverty is disturbing given the enormous wealth of some, although the advances in China for the most impoverished are impressive – especially when compared to other parts of the world. Current studies distinguish between absolute poverty (for those who get barely over a dollar a day in purchasing-power parity) and poverty (for those getting a little over two dollars per day).12 Between 1981 and 2004, absolute poverty, excluding China, was disturbingly constant – about 840 million people. In China, the numbers decreased by about 80% – from 634 million to 128 million (from just over 63% of the population to just under 10%). Those living in poverty increased by a third in the rest of the world, while the numbers halved in China.13

Some people gain vast wealth from the rapid national development, but there is also a significant trickle-down effect to the most impoverished as well as to masses of middle-class consumers. (My observations of very little extreme poverty in Shanghai and Beijing, including in areas of migrant housing, are confirmed by the statistics that a very small percentage of the poverty is in the urban areas.) The growth of infrastructure in China, like water, electricity, and roads, is also impressive.

It is unclear how Marx would analyze these conditions. The question of what Marx would think about the application of his ideas to China in the 21st century is complicated there by old-style thinking about historical materialism as a general principle for all times and places.14 Unfortunately, this core of Marxism is also taught to the neglect of other issues, such as social relations and morality

Because of this narrow and rigid focus in China (and elsewhere), I thought it was important to begin my courses (in 2012) with Marx and Engels’ claim, in an 1850 review, that the English bourgeoisie had brought China to “the eve of a social upheaval” which might well bear the socialist banner reading: “République Chinoise: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.”15 In one short passage of this review, we get Marx’s (and Engels’) application of the materialist conception of history to the real structures and conditions of China as they appeared in the mid-19th century.16

Two important positions, contrary to most Chinese thinking (and that of many outside China), are clear. First, Marx did not simply apply European historical stages to China, and he could imagine, already in 1850, a socialist China. Second, socialist morality follows naturally, for Marx, from such a social upheaval. The place of morality in Marx’s thinking is much debated, but it is obvious that he made moral critiques of capitalism and that he was here attaching moral value to an imagined socialist society. My graduate seminar at Peking University was basically a philosophical discussion of these ideas and values, with attention to the work of G.A. Cohen. Cohen’s work is especially important because of his careful attention to a modern interpretation of Marx’s historical materialism and his attempt to provide a clarification of and a foundation for Marxian ideas of justice, freedom, and equality.17

In the same 1850 review, Marx and Engels surmise that “Chinese socialism may admittedly be the same in relation to European socialism as Chinese philosophy in relation to Hegelian philosophy,” in other words, equally different. As I suggested, a “Chinese Ideology,” along the lines of Marx and Engels’ “German Ideology” needs to be written. I leave this task to Chinese philosophers. As Marx would say, we have to act – and think – in the conditions that we are given. It is of course unclear what the lessons of history should be now. Marxist tracts and books in China talk about modern scientific socialist development in the primary stage of socialism, with Chinese characteristics. These stages of the Chinese economy, however characterized, vary from what can be attributed to Marx and anything that Marx’s subtlety would suggest.

For those who might think that China used to be a Marxist country and now has abandoned all that, what I have witnessed of China’s complex history tells otherwise. Marxism continues to be a strong force, though in changing ways. The Constitution still says that China is guided by Marxism-Leninism, albeit with various tags that keep getting added on: “Mao Zedong Thought,” “Deng Xiaoping Theory,” and “The Three Represents.” I will not try to summarize the bits of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution that I knew in order to extract the Marxism from those years. Opinions vary, but few would think that it exhibited classical Marxism.18 I will stick to the post-Mao period and what has happened since the early 1980s when I lived and taught in China.

Centers of Marxism and socialist activity everywhere

In the 1980s, people quite generally claimed to be Marxists, but it was difficult to find Marxist ideas in the writings of political leaders. I did not think there was a socialist bone in Hu Yaobang (the Party General Secretary when I lived in China), whose memory the students on Tian’anmen Square in 1989 were honoring. Nor was there much Marxism in the thought of Deng Xiaoping, especially in his slogan that some should get rich first. Marxism was taught, in those years, throughout the school and university systems, although I was told that I sounded more Marxist than the Chinese in my public lectures in 1985 on analytical Marxism. Marx’s historical materialism, nevertheless, was widely accepted as a theory to be applied to China in a primary stage of socialism.

Other parts of Marx’s writings were less accepted or completely unacceptable. In 1984, I was surreptitiously taken to meet a scholar who had been isolated for writing about alienation and other topics in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts. This was despite the fact that Chinese translations of the relevant works on alienation had long been available. Few were familiar with the ethical and ‘human’ aspects in Marx’s writings. In the late 1980s, there was much more openness about topics in Marx beyond those in official writings, even when they applied adversely to modern socialist China. In 1986, I used Wang Ruoshui’s In Defense of Humanism, and a criticism of it, in one of my courses. In 1987, we had brief discussions of Paul Feyerabend’s anarchism in science, and more generally.

Still Chinese Marxism in those days was principally historical (and dialectical) materialism and some of the basics of the theory of surplus value and the critique of capitalism. Their Marxism was a form of economic determinism that ranged from simplistic to Soviet-style ideas. In the mid-1980s, practically everyone knew some Marxism and mostly believed it. There were suspicions, among many professors but not most students, of aspects of Marx and of foreign, especially Western, forms of Marxism.

Nevertheless, at that time there was an opening and theoretical renaissance that applied broadly to social theory, including Marxism. The mid-1980s was a time of fervent discussion and questioning. Socialism was central to a lot of thinking, but little was established about it. Certainly, the writings of Marx were not subjected to detailed scrutiny; nor was the new phrase “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Since then, there has been more focus on the details in Marx, but there has also been more resistance. Much of the resistance is to the prevailing understandings of Marxism and socialism, but some reject it altogether. I heard much about doctrinaire thinking and rigid interpretations. The strongest complaints were about the lack of attention to matters of justice, usually without a clear understanding of the place of justice in Marx’s theory. Some have abandoned the theory, many search for applications, and many more investigate new developments. Of course, many go about their lives without consideration of the political culture and prevailing ideology, despite its being taught throughout the country.

There are all sorts of universities and institutes in all middle to large cities. Beijing and Shanghai also have large Party schools and universities. Sun Yatsen University in Guangzhou has an Institute of Marxist Philosophy and Chinese Modernization. Practically all of these centers have departments or faculties of Marxism, while the separate disciplines such as philosophy, economics, etc. have sections specializing in Marxist topics. In Beijing, there is the enormous Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), with an important Academy of Marxism-Leninism and numerous institutes in separate disciplines, each with a section on Marxism in the discipline. The Institute of Philosophy has about 300 researchers in 11 sections, including one on Marxism. Renmin University has a faculty of philosophy with about 75 faculty members, of whom more than a fifth are in the division of Marxist philosophy. Renmin University also has a Faculty of Marxist Studies with over 40 professors. Peking University has a large philosophy department and a school of Marxism as well. In Beijing, there is also the Party university, Qinghua University, Beijing Normal University, Foreign Studies University, and many others.

The Central Compilation and Translation Bureau (CCTB) has published various collections and selections of the work of Marx and Engels and of Lenin. The first Chinese edition of the collected works of Marx and Engels was completed in 50 volumes in 1985. The second edition began in 1995 with major additions and revisions, following the ongoing international MEGA project.19 Besides the complete works of the founding authors, the CCTB translates many other classical writers and contemporary socialist authors from around the world, sometimes with the help of foreign scholars. There are also many people at CCTB researching Marxist and socialist texts widely and in depth. In 2004, the CCTB began the Marxist Theoretical Research and Development Project with financing from the State Social Sciences Fund. Under the direction of the CCTB, there are over 200 researchers from a variety of institutes and organizations divided into project teams on 18 important topics.

As Prof. Yang Jinhai, Deputy Secretary General, says about recent studies, “Particular attention was paid to studying theoretical viewpoints that were neglected in the past but are especially enlightening today. As a result, the research of today is far better than the research of the past in terms of methodology, areas, results and social impact.”20 Moreover, the studies are not just of classical or orthodox texts or theories. Sections and whole institutes are set up to study new developments outside China and beyond the Marxist-Leninist canon. Beijing Normal University has a series Translations of Marxology Abroad with over five books published annually.

Fudan University in Shanghai has a large Center for Contemporary Marxism Abroad, set up with state funding. CCTB has sections devoted to foreign theorists. Both centers have many visitors from around the world. Fudan has hosted Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Bidet, Bertell Ollman, and many others. Agnes Heller and Ken Megill have been invited to CCTB to discuss Lukács and their own ideas about socialism. Noam Chomsky spoke to thousands at Peking University in August 2010 when he received an honorary doctorate there. Renmin University has an International Summer School with foreign teachers. Most large universities have many visiting and some permanent foreign teachers in the more important departments.

I often heard people say that they should learn from foreign Marxists and socialists. This view is not found only in the Utopia Bookstore run by young people in Beijing. It is prevalent in all the established centers, and it was heard at the 2007 conference on Marx’s Capital and the 2010 conference on the Grundrisse, both of which had strong foreign representation. It accounts for the many conferences held in China with foreign specialists. Attendance by Chinese scholars at international conferences, such as the Left Forum, also indicates the interest in studies of Marxism abroad. The interest includes questions about how to confront the market approach of some of their more western-oriented colleagues. But they also have their own questions about Marxism. Chinese socialist scholars deliberate, discuss, and argue, sometimes vehemently, about texts, interpretations, and theories. The city of Beijing is undoubtedly the most active center for Marxist studies in the world, although much work is going on in centers elsewhere in China.

Actually existing Marxism in China: Changes and concerns

Of course there is much to be said about the nature of these Marxist and socialist studies, again with great diversity and frequent changes. First, there is the question of what the principal topics of these studies are. What are the main themes and directions? Second, how are the socialist theorists trying to develop a socialist society? What concerns are there about socialist society, and what policies are proposed for promoting and developing socialism, with or without Chinese characteristics?

Before touching on some relevant answers, it is important to note that most Marxist studies in China today do not rise out of Party dogma or current orthodoxy. There is little that could even be called Party dogma or orthodoxy. Moreover, the Party does not try to secure doctrinal discipline. I have heard Party members express doubts and make strong criticisms of Party policies, including dislike of Deng, support for Tibetan independence, criticism of Party literature, questioning of private enterprise, and even support for multi-party democracy.

There are still some who are pursuing Marxism as a form of propaganda, but I did not hear people who seemed to toe a line out of obligation. There is now even more openness of thinking than in the mid-1980s. This is thought to be true despite the crackdown on dissenters who gain notoriety. The current work on Marxism in China is much less reflective of Communist Party directives and pressures, and much more independently pursued. Marxism may now be less dominant, but it is certainly less dominated. There is a sense of theoretical liberation.

I had already heard quite a bit from researchers, friends, and the media on the first question about the important topics of Marxism. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a strong interest in Marxism and culture, especially Chinese culture. This continues with much attention now to Chinese identity and Chinese characteristics of socialism with a lot of focus on values and ethics, which many Chinese philosophers are taking up.

There is also great interest in Marxist studies outside China, both classical and contemporary. Besides the authors mentioned above, Gramsci and Luxemburg have been studied and translated. Unfortunately, much of the attention is in the form of reporting on the ideas rather than engaging critically with them. My discussions of libertarian socialism and anarchism were new material for most, but clearly of interest. I got the impression that people had heard of Bakunin but only as the enemy, yet one who could now be discussed. (I think there is still something to John Dewey’s observation, during his visit to China in the 1920s, that the Chinese were ripe for anarchism.)

More than ever before, people are exploring new ideas. New works are quickly taken up and translations published. Environmental issues are of widespread interest, especially among young people, so there is strong interest in ecological Marxism.21 Analytical Marxism is also part of the wide-ranging investigations.22 I consider analytical Marxism an opportunity to develop careful interpretation and theoretical attitudes rather than passing on particular ideas merely to be applied. The graduate students at Peking University were particularly adept at pursuing fresh criticism and new theoretical paths.

In my summer course in 2010, I did not pass up the opportunity to find out about my students’ views. In their final paper they were asked to discuss a topic in Marxism that might be reconsidered in 21st-century society or, alternatively, in a Confucian society. About half took the former topic and the other half the latter topic. The answers about both topics were diverse.

On Marx in the 21st century, a few followed standard Marxist lines about not being able to jump historical epochs or about raising class consciousness. Many wrote about changes necessary for modern globalization and pluralism of cultures in a modern world. Some wrote about individual rights with collective interests and about going beyond class struggle. There were also discussions of the labor theory of value and the market.

Students writing on Marxism in a Confucian society were more generally focused on finding Confucian values for Marxism (in a harmonious society) and on the importance of a plurality of systems. There were a couple of criticisms of Confucianism and one on developing a mixed economy.

In other words, there were few surprises. The interest in questions of Marxist morality – especially justice and equality – is widespread. The lively debate that has occurred on these questions in the West is now of great interest in China, along with the project of introducing Chinese characteristics, particularly Confucian ideas, to a contemporary Marxist morality. This is not new, although it was surprising to me when I first heard it in 1987, after having heard strong criticism of Confucianism in the 1970s. I had a much anticipated private dinner with theorists from the central Party school at which I expected to hear interesting deliberations about Marxism. Instead, I could not get my hosts to stray from their topic of the importance of Confucianism to Chinese Marxism.23

This is consistent with Marx’s observation, “We know that the institutions, customs and traditions in the different countries must be taken into account.”24 He also said that people “make their own history … under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past,” but he cautioned that the socialist revolution “cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future.”25 It is impossible to know what Marx would say about Confucian Marxism and how different he would regard it, for example, from Catholic liberation Marxism. Confucianism has strong influences, but it may also be restrictive. Baogang Guo is not alone in having serious questions about Confucian humanism, which according to him “does not embrace individual freedom and equality.”26

Many see promise in the idea of a “socialist harmonious society” as expounded by Hu Jintao, the General Secretary of the Party and President of China, retiring in 2012. This gives hope to some of overcoming contradictions of inequality and other problems of reconciling Confucian ideas with Marxism.27 But there are many Chinese Marxists who think there is enough in Marx’s own work for developing a substantive socialist morality. This will be a focus of much continuing debate. But there will also be continuing debate on issues of scientific development, social structure, globalization, democracy and political reform, and many other topics. Marx’s writings and socialist literature are being scoured for perspectives and answers.28

These theoretical investigations are relevant to our second question, about what policies there should be to promote and develop a socialist society in China. For most Marxists – to different degrees – an important project in China today is to eliminate extreme inequality and to fight injustice. Surprisingly, little attention has been devoted to social benefits and public goods (an important part of any socialist society), even though public goods such as education and public health care were widely available, although often underdeveloped, through agricultural communes and state owned enterprises before the reforms of the 1980s. The alarm about inequality has focused attention on individual distribution often to the neglect of collective goods.

Special attention is given to migrant workers from the countryside, who are mostly poor and have few rights, varying from one jurisdiction to another. In the large cities their treatment varies from strong restrictions in Beijing, to greater laxity in Shanghai, to a humanistic provision in Chongqing (until now) for an improved quality of life including residency rights. Some of the concern about inequality, moreover, goes beyond distribution to look at its roots in widespread corruption. All these issues are obvious concerns for Marxists, but for many others as well.

There are different social principles in China that are all alive in the ideological debates and that will continue to contend for primacy. Mao Zedong said “serve the people”; Deng Xiaoping said “let some get rich first”; Hu Jintao says “develop a harmonious society,” and Marx said “people should receive according to their labor.”29 Many current labor struggles are being fought out on the basis of such principles about what a fair and just distribution is. Social policies are often said to be closely connected to the scientific development of socialism in China, but the precise links are not always clear. There are many variations of what even Marxist foundations will support. More generally, there is a lot of disagreement and much vagueness about the structure of the Chinese economy. One view that I heard from several sources is that China has a capitalist economy and socialist politics. This does not sound like good Marxism and in any case is too simplistic – a view on which many students and scholars agree.

I got widely varying answers about how much of the Chinese economy is socialist because of regional variations, with a variety of (sometimes hidden) government roles, and vague and conflicting conceptions of what socialism is, all in the context of constant experimentation and change. There are wholly state-owned enterprises, but there is also a wide variety of private and mixed enterprises with state investments and regulations, as well as joint-stock enterprises and various forms of cooperatives.30 The role of the state goes far beyond the state-owned enterprises. It also has powers, resources, and influences in the various forms of private enterprise.

As Bruce Dickson has said, “[p]recise and accurate definitions are essential for empirical research, but the rapidly changing Chinese context often makes such precision and accuracy hard to come by.”31 There is a complex variety of policies for better development and new forms of industry, some introduced regionally on an experimental basis. In many cases, the economic laws are still being developed, and sometimes yet to be written. This is one more area where we can see the socialist nature of China being fought out, and about which there are diverse views, even amongst committed Marxists.

In another area of concern, it is easy for socialists to appeal to Marx’s emphasis on worker participation and proletarian democracy, as seen in his debates with Bakunin. Chinese socialists are continually testing the limits of discussion and the possibilities of independent candidates in elections. This is happening in factories, villages, and local elections. All of these struggles are framed by competing ideas, making it urgent to develop clear concepts and good arguments in Marxist theory.

Some roles for socialism in Chinese society

Given that there are so many socialists with Marxist views and committed to socialist policies, what do they do? What are the influences and effects of active Marxist and socialist studies? What pressures can be applied for the development of socialist policies and practices?

Granted, as Marxism gains social and political independence in China, it is in danger of becoming marginalized and irrelevant. As the ties to power loosen, intellectuals escape certain restraints, but their influence on institutions and people of power is often diminished. Given the influences of capital and the rigidities of the Party, one might be tempted to argue that socialist and Marxist thinking has no influence in China. This would, however, be wrong. There has not been a simple reversal of 1980s attitudes, (when support for capitalism was considered weird or suspect). Now, although ideas of capitalism, competitive markets, and deregulation are frequently heard, one can still easily interject and promote ideas of Marxism. One can ask for books on Marxism at a bookstore without embarrassment. One can still have serious discussions with taxi drivers about socialism.

Before investigating the influence further, however, an obvious dissonance needs to be acknowledged and considered. Despite the richness of debate about socialism and Marxism, even the most sympathetic observer has to be concerned about the distance between the socialist thinking and ideals on the one hand and the social reality of poverty and control on the other. Premier Wen Jiabao reportedly “thinks that equality and justice are the first virtues of the state system of a socialist country,”32 which may be right, but, when applied to China, some might be tempted to think that “virtues” might better be read as “victims.” Marxism in China has moved from intellectual and doctrinal propaganda, with its own dissonance, to independent theoretical dissonance. The principles and ideals that most of us consider central to Marxism seem weak or even foreign as characteristics of Chinese society.

This kind of a dissonance is not especially unusual, however, when one looks to theory and reality in other societies. The situation of Marxists in China is not unlike that of democratic theorists in Canada researching ideals that are barely recognizable in Canadian life. Any democratic idea of the power of the people is a joke in Canada (and elsewhere in the English-speaking world) if taken literally. Some even say that Canada is not a democratic society, but this does not stop them from talking about and promoting democracy, sometimes with some small effect.

Similarly, socialism as a form of society in which people are rewarded in accordance with their labor time is still a fantasy in China. Many Chinese would say that China is a form of socialist society, but there are also Chinese Marxists who say that it is not at all socialist. For them, this is all the more reason to talk and write about socialism and Marxism. We have already seen some of the strengths that Marxism and socialism have in China today.

First, there is the obvious strength in numbers. Any country with tens of millions of socialists and at least, I estimate, hundreds of thousands of Marxist scholars and intellectuals, will certainly have important and influential debates about policy. These debates are carried on from classrooms to popular media and from informal conversations to public assemblies and government meetings. The debates reach to the country’s political leaders, who organize regular seminars on social issues led by prominent university professors, which surely include a lot of socialist content.

Second, there are institutional structures that secure a place for socialist ideas, with Marxist (and Leninist and Maoist) underpinnings. The Constitution of China proclaims in Article 1 that “the People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship” and later that “socialist public ownership is the basis.” And the Constitution of the Communist Party of China declares that it “upholds the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism” and “promotes socialism with Chinese characteristics.” As Fewsmith says, those who promote Marxism “still have an impact because the Party cannot abandon Marxism without giving up all claims to legitimacy.”33 There is also the large Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) composed of parallel democratic parties, in turn made up of interest groups with expertise, that initiate and promote policies for the National People’s Congress to finalize.34 In addition, there are many local, and some national, social organizations that play a role in pressuring state organizations and influencing social policy. Many of these have socialist perspectives and values.35

A third role and strength of socialism is found in the culture of consultation and serving the people. The socialist perspectives and values have, of course, a long history, especially solidified since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The importance of socialist and populist ideas goes back to the May 4th Movement of 1919. This was an occasion for advocating the independence and modernization of China under the banners of science and democracy. Confucian tradition, as well, has always encouraged leaders to promote the well-being of people through understanding their needs and finding ways to satisfy them. It was natural to set up the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and on many occasions to call for consultations with the public. The boundaries in which consultations are carried out are limited and changing, but they still cover an area where a kind of ‘democracy’ operates. My students expressed strong support for the government, and there are other indications of such support. A Pew survey in 2008 found that “over 80 percent of Chinese respondents believed that the country was on the right track … compared with only 20 percent in the United States.”36

A fourth role and strength of socialism and Marxism is in connection with the long- held interest, among Chinese, in identifying objective needs scientifically. Science is still regarded as important in leading society. This in itself has an interesting synergy with Marxism as it is advocated in China. Marx is almost universally thought in China to have developed dialectical materialism as a scientific socialism. Marxism is widely propagated and strongly promoted as a science, and as such can be influential.

One can see an appeal to a kind of social science in the experimental nature of many aspects of Chinese policy. Special economic zones have been an experiment to access foreign technology without distorting the whole economy, and policies of market socialism have been tried in isolated regions and compared to practices elsewhere. China has always had a large amount of decentralization, which allows experimental policies to be accepted, sometimes copied, but sometimes limited. As I write, the rather different policies of Bo Xilai in Chongqing have been challenged and the directions there and elsewhere in China are in question.37

The irony is that Marxism as it is usually taught and promoted in China is not the kind of science that most people, even Marxists, accept these days. Much of the teaching about dialectical materialism is still too limited, too restricted, and too tainted with old Soviet catechisms. There are plenty of questions anyway about what kind of science Marxism was, could be, and should be. Many think, however, that Marxism, especially in China, can be developed as a more reasonable and acceptable science.

There is another irony in thinking of Marxism as a science in the traditional and classical way. When historical materialism becomes not only the core but the whole of Marxism, the science becomes independent of social values and social policies. Science and values are separated, draining much of the politics and motivation out of the social science while leaving values to manipulation and political choice. These complex issues are as interesting as they are important among Marxists everywhere, but especially in China today where they are beginning to be contested.

In my view, Marx’s scientific socialism was the grounding for his socialist values. Socialist values cannot be picked out of another context to tack on to his historical materialism. This can be seen, I think, in the way his discussion of a possible socialist China flowed directly into the idea of a Chinese banner with the values of equality, liberty, and solidarity. Marx was an enlightenment thinker who saw science as a way of liberating people from economic and political oppression. His moral concerns and search to improve human social relations were strongly connected with his investigations of alienation. As noted above, Chinese studies of alienation were blocked until the late 1980s. Now it is no longer a forbidden subject, but although it is recognized it seems to be neglected, by students and scholars alike. This neglect does seem to me to constrict discussion of socialist values.

Nevertheless, there is great interest in values, both among intellectuals and in the populace at large. Here again, G.A. Cohen’s work is especially important in trying to rescue justice and equality from what he saw as long-standing Marxist misconceptions. Cohen’s investigations give substance to Marx’s socialist values. Chinese Marxologists are receptive to such investigations, but Marx’s values are also important since they resonate with the concerns of the poor and the oppressed. There is a natural support for such values by those stuck in poverty or facing layoffs, and more recently workers who seek more workplace control. As Fewsmith writes, the left, with Marxist ideas, have a mass base and “can extend that mass base to certain sectors of the population.”38 The synchrony of socialist values and worker interests is no doubt partly responsible for the recent increased strike activity. In turn, these values pressure the All China Federation of Trade Unions to better support workers in their local organizing. Marxism is thus relevant to recent waves of protests and struggles for democratic participation.

Concluding remarks

There was a time when China was a revolutionary socialist model for many throughout the world. Now, after both China and the world socialist movements have changed dramatically, China certainly can no longer be seen as a socialist model of any kind. These days, the leaders even caution against taking China as an economic model, despite its economic successes. Notwithstanding all of that, there is no doubt that China is a site for socialist challenges and struggles. This is the way that I think China should now be important to socialists, Marxists, and Marxologists throughout the world. I do not want to claim that socialism is dominant in China. It is enough that it plays some important roles.

This is not to deny that there are global forces that press for what in the West are considered neoliberal economic policies. The Chinese Party and government are still charting a course of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and the leaders see themselves as pragmatists. Neoliberal ideas are certainly promoted by outside and sometimes by inside forces, but neoliberalism is neither ideologically established nor broadly accepted as a theory in China. Because of the development and influx of new ideas, and the return to interest in history and traditions, there is now a more serious ideological struggle than when socialism was pre-eminent and virtually uncontested. Some of this struggle will turn on the associated values.

The developments in Marxology are surely important. It is an affirmation of independence, but also a sign of seriousness, that many, especially young people, see themselves as doing Marxology. The texts are now available and the commitment to detail is there to allow a rich development of this field. Also noteworthy is the lively interest in other Marxists and socialists, both past and present. A climate open to socialism has now been developing for decades. As a young researcher in Chongqing told me, China is a socialist country and Marxism is the leading thought. Wang Chaohua could say already in 1999 what is even more the case now: “China today still contains fertile soil for the reception of socialist ideas.”39

The writings of Marx have important lessons for China, and can be influential in moving, changing, and guiding social policy. For a society that acknowledges the importance of Marxism, for example, the demand that people be paid according to their labor time is a powerful one. Such an idea is often enough resisted in contemporary China (with intellectual dissonance), but in Canada the idea would be a complete mystery (a case of intellectual dissociation).

But would even Marx know what to do in China in the 21st century? What would he say if he landed in Soho in Beijing (an enormous luxury shopping area) today? In developing a socialist society – especially with Chinese characteristics – China has gone far beyond anything Marx would speculate about, and in a global environment and a cultural context unknown to him. Chinese Marxists are charting new territory, to the dissatisfaction of some of them who might want to invoke, in this context, Marx’s celebrated statement, “I am not a Marxist.”40 Nevertheless, there is opportunity for growing global cross-fertilization, especially with analytical Marxists and others who seek to be faithful to Marx without being dogmatic, doctrinaire, or sectarian. Chinese Marxists are looking for international cooperation in Marxist and socialist thought so that ideas can mature and be shown to be practical. A good example of this cooperation is the journal International Critical Thought.41

It is time for the Chinese, and their friends, to go beyond applying borrowed ideas to China. Just as Marx said you cannot understand a “people’s state” merely by combining those two words, we cannot understand a “free society” by combining the latter two. In my graduate seminar at Peking University, we critically assessed Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of liberty and looked at new ideas about freedom. I saw young philosophers going forward with fresh conceptual investigations of the nature of freedom for China. They are preparing the way for a deeper understanding of freedom and giving it a socialist foundation.

Intellectual communities can never be equal to the challenges they face, but Chinese Marxists are working hard to make China to live up to its self-description as a socialist society. Chinese Marxists will continue to look at developments elsewhere, but they have their own strong core of Marxist thought on which to draw.

Notes

1. This 2-day conference was jointly organized by Marcello Musto and CCTB with an equal number of papers from Chinese and foreign theorists from different disciplines. Musto, together with Terrell Carver, George Comninel, Norman Levine, and Kenji Mori, spoke in three other cities as well. In Beijing there were about 50 in attendance. The CCTB was founded in 1953 and is attached to the Communist Party of China.

2. My course was on analytical Marxism, the subject of a book (“Analyzing Marxism”) edited by Kai Nielsen and myself and translated into Chinese. The 30 students, mostly undergraduates, were from many different departments. They were also from a full range of social strata, including rural and industrial workers. The course was completely in English, including readings from Marx, although translations were compared. RUC is known for its work in the social sciences and humanities as a preparatory university for civil servants, but it also has strong faculties in professional areas such as law and business.

3. I assured them of confidentiality and that I would not tell their teachers (or parents or friends), but it was soon clear that I need not have worried about any concerns on their part. The discussion afterwards was open and freewheeling. In the month of daily classes and many informal meetings, I got to know the students quite well. Private discussions with them assured me that their comments were generally direct and honest, as much so as comments from my students in Canada.

4. A careful study of private entrepreneurs in China “revealed that a clear majority of our respondents strongly supported … the fundamental values and key political institutions of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] regime.” Jie Chen and Bruce Dickson, Allies of the State: China’s Private Entrepreneurs and Democratic Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2010), 151f. This result reinforces my estimate of support for socialism within the CCP.

5. In 2011, a sales clerk, learning about my teaching, declared his Christian faith and his conviction that Marxism is “bullshit.” It did not help that I was teaching about a Marxist, Cohen, who is known for attacking “bullshit Marxism.”

6. See Chen and Dickson, Allies of the State, 158. They note that “most other scholars have reached the same conclusion” to which they have added many details and new patterns. See also Bruce Dickson, Wealth into Power: The Communist Party’s Embrace of China’s Private Sector (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008). For a similar view, see Teresa Wright, Accepting Authoritarianism: State-Society Relations in China’s Reform Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2010), esp. ch. 2. She writes, “it is not just that these sectors [private entrepreneurs, professionals, and intellectuals] have had material incentives to support the status quo; their ideal desires for social respect and approbation have been addressed by the central regime as well” (34).

7. This is very much like a government that appeals to its bill of rights while whittling away at their substance and reach. China’s constitution has a long list of rights (and duties) in a framework of four cardinal principles: upholding the socialist path, upholding the people’s democratic dictatorship, upholding the leadership of the Communist Party of China, and upholding Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong thought.

8. The hutongs are the back alleys of neighborhoods in central Beijing with a range of buildings from unserviced hovels to upgraded courtyards of shops and restaurants.

9. China Daily, 12 May 2010.

10. The Guardian Weekly, 16 March 2012, 2.

11. This, of course, would be understood by all at the conference as an allusion to Marx’s principle of distribution for the first phase of communism (also known as socialism).

12. Note, however, that such determinations do not take account of the additional negative effects, including cultural and political, of relative poverty in a community or society.

13. Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion, “Absolute poverty measures for the developing world, 1981-2004” (Development Research Group, World Bank). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol. 104, 43 (Oct. 23, 2007), published online, 17 Oct. 2007.

14. This despite the fact that the Chinese translation of Marx’s canonical statement in his famous 1859 Preface accurately calls it a guiding thread – not, misleadingly, a guiding principle, as in the English.

15. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Review” (January 31, 1850), Collected Works, vol. 10, 267.

16. To the extent that this remark by Marx clashes with an interpretation of his materialist conception of history, there is reason to doubt the interpretation rather than to think that Marx has misapplied his own theory.

17. The principal texts by G.A. Cohen are Karl Marx’s Historical Materialism: A Defence, expanded ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000) and Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2008).

18. There is a lot of literature, of course, on the Cultural Revolution, including ‘wound’ literature from urban intellectuals and the misleading diatribe by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday on Mao. For a couple of refreshing contributions to the period from other perspectives, I recommend Mobo Gao, The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2008) and Dongping Han, The Unknown Cultural Revolution (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000). For recent studies of Mao, see Timothy Cheek, ed. A Critical Introduction to Mao (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010).

19. For more on publishing Marx’s work in China, see Zhongpu Zhang, “China” in Marcello Musto, ed. Karl Marx’s Grundrisse (London: Routledge, 2008), 219-222. Zhang ends by noting “the great influence of Marxist theory in China.”

20. I draw on a very useful manuscript given to me by the author: Prof. Yang Jinhai, “Introduction to Marxism Research in China,” 18 August 2006, 8pp. I have also benefited from Lu Kejian’s “Chinese Marxology Study: Its History, Present Status and Future Trend,” which was the basis for his presentation at the Left Forum, New York, April 2008.

21. See Zhihe Wang, “Ecological Marxism in China,” Monthly Review, 63, 9 (February 2012).

22. On analytical Marxism in China, see the article by Zhongqiao Duan (author of Marx’s Theory of Social Formation, Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1995) and Li Yang: “G.A. Cohen’s Influence on Chinese Academia,” Socialist Studies/Etudes Socialistes (Canada), vol. 8, no. 1, 57-67.

23. On the turn to Confucianism and its growth, see Anne-Marie Brady, “State Confucianism, Chineseness, and tradition in CCP propaganda” in her edited book China’s Thought Management (London: Routledge, 2012), 57-75.

24. Report of Marx’s speech in Amsterdam, September 8, 1872 in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 23 (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 255. On this occasion, Marx applied this general principle to the question of whether a nonviolent revolution might be possible. An important Chinese question is about the sinicization of Marxism. Xu Changfu notes that in the last 20 years 357 books and 3,814 articles have been written on the topic. (Xu, “The Incomplete Transformation of Sinicized Marxism,” Socialism and Democracy, 26, 1 (2012), 1-17.

25. Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Collected Works, vol. 11, 103.

26. Baogang Guo, China’s Quest for Political Legitimacy: The New Equity-Enhancing Politics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2010), 34.

27. For an interesting study of this, see Josef Gregory Mahoney, “On the Way to Harmony: Marxism, Confucianism, and Hu Jintao’s Hexie Concept” in Baogang Guo and Sujian Guo, eds., China in Search of a Harmonious Society (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 99-128. Brady (see note 23) discusses some of the ways in which Confucian ideas are being added, “mix[ing] traditional Chinese value systems with Chinese socialist terminology (“State Confucianism … ,” 66). The question is whether these additions are integrated and grounded. For a good contemporary discussion of Confucius and other Chinese philosophers, see Puqun Li, A Guide to Asian Philosophy Classics (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2012), esp. ch. 4, “The Analects.”

28. Guo, China’s Quest for Political Legitimacy, studies the discussions, including by Marxists, of many of these topics. Yang Xuegong (Philosophy, Peking University) has written on globalization, as have many others. For a discussion of some of this work, which shows “the persistence of Marxist ideas and discourse” within the Party (33), see Nick Knight, “Contemporary Chinese Marxism and the Marxist Tradition: Globalisation, Socialism and the Search for Ideological Coherence,” Asian Studies Review, 30, 1 (March 2006), 19–39.

29. Marx applied his principle to the first phase of communism (often known as socialism) in his “Critique of the Gotha Program.” That, like the other principles, is just a slogan. I discuss Marx’s view in greater detail in “Marx on Some Phases of Communism” in Rodger Beehler et al., eds., On the Track of Reason: Essays in Honor of Kai Nielsen (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 135-153.

30. I discuss the Gung Ho association that promotes cooperatives in Robert Ware, “Gung Ho and Cooperatives in China,” Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) Newsletter, vol. II, issue 7, www.geo/coop/node/603.

31. Bruce J. Dickson, “Surveying Prospects for Political Change: Capturing Political and Economic Variation in Empirical Research in China” in Allen Carlson et al., eds., Contemporary Chinese Politics: New Sources, Methods, and Field Strategies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 210n.

32. Cheng Meidong’s words in “Gradual Development of Chinese Politics in the Past 30 years,” Studies on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, vol. 1, no. 1 (May 2010), 32.

33. Joseph Fewsmith, China Since Tiananmen: From Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 182.

34. I discuss their role in developing a law of cooperatives in Ware, “Gung Ho and Cooperatives in China.”

35. For a good discussion of these, see Tony Saich, “Negotiating the State: The Development of Social Organizations in China” in Lowell Dittmer and Guoli Liu, eds., China’s Deep Reform: Domestic Politics in Transition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 285-301. According to Saich, in 2002 there were 133,357 registered social organizations in China. These negotiate with the state in “a complex interaction of institutional, economic, and individual factors” (297).

36. Chen and Dickson, Allies of the State, 160.

37. In late 2011, informants told me that the future of China was often regarded as a choice between the (left?) policies of Bo Xilai in Chongqing and the (entrepreneurial, market) policies of Wang Yang of Guangdong Province. No doubt the two paths will continue to contend, but in a more subterranean fashion now that Bo has been removed from the Party and brought to trial and Wang has not been promoted.

38. Fewsmith, China Since Tiananmen, 183.

39. Chaohua Wang, ed. One China, Many Paths (London: Verso, 2003), 323.

40. For a good discussion of this famously misused claim by Marx about some exasperating French Marxists, see Hal Draper, “‘I am not a Marxist,’ Said He,” Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. II, The Politics of Social Classes (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 5-11.

41. Published by Routledge under the editorship of Cheng Enfu (of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), David Schweickart and Tony Andreani.

Youth rebellion in the ‘banlieues’ of Paris

Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative

Interview by Filippo Del Lucchese and Jason Smith

FILIPPO DEL LUCCHESE and JASON SMITH: We would like to begin by asking you to clarify the relation between philosophy and politics. What do you mean when you speak, for example, of a militant philosophy?

ALAIN BADIOU: Since its beginnings, philosophy’s relationship to the political has been fundamental. It’s not something invented by modernity. Plato’s central work is called The Republic, and it is entirely devoted to questions of the city or polis. This link has remained fundamental throughout the history of philosophy. But I think there are two basic ways of structuring this relationship.

The first way assigns philosophy the responsibility for finding a foundation for the political. Philosophy is called upon to reconstruct the political on the basis of this foundation. This current argues that it is possible to locate, for every politics, an ethical norm and that philosophy should first have the task of reconstructing or naming this norm and then of judging the relation between this norm and the multiplicity of political practices. In this sense, then, what opens the relation between philosophy and politics is the idea of a foundation as well as an ethical conception of the political. But there is a second orientation that is completely different. This current maintains that in a certain sense politics is primary and that the political exists without, before, and differently from philosophy. The political would be what I call a condition of philosophy. In this case, the relation between philosophy and politics would be, in a certain sense, retroactive. That is, it would be a relation in which philosophy would situate itself within political conflicts in order to clarify them. Today, in the extremely obscure situation that is the general system of contemporary politics, philosophy can attempt to clarify the situation without having any pretense to creating it. Philosophy has as its condition and horizon the concrete situation of different political practices, and it will try, within these conditions, to find instruments of clarification, legitimation, and so on. This current takes seriously the idea that politics is itself an autonomy of thought, that it is a collective practice with an intelligence all its own.

It is quite clear that today the question is particularly difficult because we are no longer in a situation in which there is a clear distinction between two opposed political orientations—as was the case in the twentieth century. Not everyone agreed on what the exact nature of these opposed politics was, but everyone agreed there was an opposition between a classical democratic bourgeois politics and another, revolutionary, option. Among the revolutionaries, we debated spiritedly and even violently what, exactly, the true way was but not the existence itself of this global opposition. Today there is no agreement concerning the existence of a fundamental opposition of this sort, and as a result the link between philosophy and politics has become more complex and more obscure. But, fundamentally, it’s the same task. Philosophy tries to clarify what I call the multiple situation of concrete politics and to legitimate the choices made in this space.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: So you see your own philosophical interventions as taking place within this new situation that you describe as “more complex and more obscure” than the classical confrontation between two opposed political orientations?

BADIOU: Definitely. As a result, I see my philosophy as an inheritor of the great contestatory movements of the sixties. In fact, my philosophy emerged out of these movements. It is a philosophy of commitment, of engagement, with a certain fidelity to Sartre, if you like, or to Marxism.

What counts is that the intellectual is engaged in politics and commits to or takes the side of the people and the workers. I move in that tradition. My philosophy tries to keep alive, as best it can (it is not always easy), the idea that there is a real alternative to the dominant politics and that we are not obliged to rally around the consensus that ultimately consists in the unity of global capitalism and the representative, democratic state. I would say, then, that I work under the condition of the situation of political actuality, with the goal of keeping alive, philosophically, the idea of the possibility or opening of a politics I would call a politics of emancipation—but that could also be called a radical or revolutionary politics, terms that today are debatable but that represent all the same a possibility other than the dominant one.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: You mention Sartre in this context where the name Althusser might have been expected. What is your relation to the Althusserian tradition?

BADIOU: The Althusserian tradition is extremely important, and I’ve devoted several texts to Althusser. If I mention Sartre it is simply because my philosophical youth was Sartrean before my encounter with Althusser. I think the Althusserian current was a particularly important one because it gave a new life and force to the link between philosophy and politics and in a less idealist mode—that is, a relation that no longer passed through the form of consciousness. In Sartre, of course, we still find the classical model of the intellectual understood primarily in terms of consciousness—an intellectual must make contact with the struggle and the workers’ organizations, be they the unions or the communist parties. Althusser’s greatness is found in the fact that he proposed a new schema in which the relation between philosophy and politics no longer passed through the psychology of the form of consciousness as it still did with Sartre. Althusser begins with the conviction that philosophy intervenes in the intellectual space of politics. When he proposes the formula “philosophy is the organization of class struggle in theory,” what does he mean? That class struggle exists and that philosophy certainly didn’t invent it. It exists and cuts across intellectual choices. Within the struggle between these choices, philosophy has a special role. It is to intervene and therefore to name, norm, classify, and finally choose in the field of intellectual or theoretical class struggle. Sartre and Althusser are very different, even opposed. But you can reconcile them on one point, namely, that philosophy is nothing if it is not linked to political commitment.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: You have called yourself a “communist in the generic sense.” But you have also constantly underlined the inability of classical Marxist theory to produce a truly communist politics. How can “communism” today be the “common name” that opens the future?

BADIOU: I think it is necessary to distinguish Marxism from communism. I don’t think it is absolutely necessary to keep the word communism. But I like this word a lot. I like it because it designates the general idea of a society and of a world in which the principle of equality is dominant, a world no longer structured by classical social relations—those of wealth, the division of labor, segregation, persecution by the state, sexual difference, and so on. That is, for me, what communism is. Communism in the generic sense simply means that everyone is equal to everyone else within the multiplicity and diversity of social functions. I am still absolutely convinced of the necessity of a radical critique of the division of labor. I believe this is what is rational and what is just. There is no reason why a street sweeper should be hounded by the state and poorly paid while intellectuals in their libraries are honored and at peace—and generally well paid. It’s absurd. What I call communism is the end of this absurdity. It’s the idea of a society that will find a principle of existence that would be entirely “subtracted” from the crushing weight of the relations of power and wealth and therefore another distribution of human activity. It’s in this sense that I am a communist. And I struggle against all those who tell me this is impossible, that inequality is the nature of things and men as well. Sartre says somewhere that if this communist idea did not exist, humanity would not be much better than apes, not much better than a pile of ants.

Marxism, however, is something else—above all when it is a question of the Marxist practices of organization and concrete politics. These practices have given us astounding results, like the possibility of a victorious popular insurrection in 1917 or the possibility of an entirely new organization of workers and peasants in the form of the Chinese popular army. But if we take what Lenin called the “ABCs of Communism,” namely, that the masses are divided into classes, the classes are represented by parties, and the parties directed by leaders—well, this is still a great idea, but today it is not useful at all. The organization of the masses is still the fundamental issue. But if you take the disorganized masses of global capitalism as a starting point, you cannot assume that the masses are divided into classes.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: You argue for a “politics without party” and a new model of “organization.” How do you distinguish them, and why? And what is the relation between politics and the state today?

BADIOU: The question of organization is still a question of fundamental importance, even for those who maintain that politics shouldn’t be organized at all, as is the case for the great anarchist tradition. The name organization designates the collective dimension of political action. We know that organization can take the form of a movement, party, union, or what have you. It’s a great tradition. Today, however, we’re in a situation in which the long-dominant model of the class party, of the Leninist avant-garde party (in an aesthetic sense as well), is saturated. It’s exhausted. My evaluation of the Leninist party is that it was a model whose function was to make a victorious insurrection possible. Lenin was obsessed by the bloody failures of the worker insurrections of the nineteenth century—especially the Paris Commune. This was the first experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to use Lenin’s language, and it was a bloody failure. It failed because the movement was undisciplined, divided, and powerless. Lenin therefore advised that there be a high degree of centralization of worker power in a party that would be able to lead and organize the class. And he proved, on the question of organization at least, that it was a good idea. The revolution of 1917 was the first victorious insurrection in the history of humanity. This is why it has such an enormous historical importance—a step had been taken. After the many worker revolts of the previous century, all of which had been crushed with an extraordinary and bloody brutality, the Leninist model finally made possible a victorious revolution.

This model, however, didn’t offer much more. With regard to the question of the state and power, of the duration of the power of the state, the model of the party-state ended up showing serious limitations, whether it be what the Trotskyists called the tendency to bureaucratization, what the anarchists identified with state terrorism, or the Maoists with revisionism. None of that is important here. It’s clear that the party-state was a failure. From the point of view of taking power, the party was victorious. But not from the perspective of exercising power. So we are in a phase that is or should be beyond the question of the party as a model of organization. That model solved the problems of the nineteenth century, but we have to solve those of the twenty-first.

The form of organization today should be, in my opinion, less directly articulated with or by the question of the state and power. The model of the centralized party made possible a new form of power that was nothing less than the power of the party itself. We are now at what I call a distance from the state. This is first of all because the question of power is no longer immediate; nowhere does a “taking power” in the insurrectional sense seem possible today. We should search for a new form. My friends and I in L’Organisation politique call this a politics without party. This is a completely descriptive, negative, characterization of the situation. It simply means that we do not want to enter into a form of organization that is entirely articulated with the state. Both the insurrectional form of the party and today’s electoral form are articulations by state power. In both cases, the party is subordinated to the question of power and the state. I think we have to break with this subordination and, ultimately, engage political organization (whatever form it may take) in political processes that are independent of—“subtracted” from—the power of the state. Unlike the insurrectional form of the party, this politics of subtraction is no longer immediately destructive, antagonistic, or militarized.

I think the Leninist party was at bottom a military model. And for good reason. This is not a criticism. Lenin was obsessed with one question: how does one win the war? The question of discipline is therefore fundamental, just as it is for an army. You cannot win the war if people do whatever they like, if there is no unity and so on. The problem for emancipatory politics today, however, is to invent a nonmilitary model of discipline. We need a popular discipline. I would even say, as I have many times, that “those who have nothing have only their discipline.” The poor, those with no financial or military means, those with no power—all they have is their discipline, their capacity to act together. This discipline is already a form of organization. The question is whether all discipline can be reduced to a military model, the model that dominated the first part of the twentieth century. How can we find, invent, exercise, or experiment with—today, after all, is an age of experimentation—a nonmilitary discipline?

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: Can you explain a bit more what you mean by “distance from the state”?

BADIOU: “At a distance from the state” signifies that a politics is not structured or polarized along the agenda and timelines fixed by the state. Those dates, for example, when the state decides to call an election, or to intervene in some conflict, declare war on another state. Or when the state claims that an economic crisis makes this or that course of action impossible. These are all examples of what I call convocations by the state, where the state sets the agenda and controls the timing of political events. Distance from the state means you act with a sufficient independence from the state and what it deems to be important or not, who it decides should or should not be addressed. This distance protects political practices from being oriented, structured, and polarized by the state. This is why, moreover, I do not think it is particularly important to participate in the electoral process. It has nothing to do with what Lenin called left-wing communism. This process is simply not interesting. First of all because it represents, for now at least, no veritable perspective on the future—there is no way, in this framework and by these means, that fundamental orientations can be modified. But, more importantly, this process organizes a reorientation toward the state and its decisions. It restricts political independence. Distance from the state therefore means that the political process and its decisions should be undertaken in full independence from the state and what it deems important, what it decides to impose as the framework of the political. I understand state here in the large sense, including the government, the media, and even those who make economic decisions. When you allow the political process to be dominated by the state, you’ve already lost the game because you’ve abdicated in advance your own political independence.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: The electoral timeline seems, nevertheless, to play a certain role in your conception of politics. After all, you wrote a text specifically addressing the recent French referendum on the proposed European constitution.

BADIOU: You’re right. My position is not a dogmatic one. But, in general, the electoral horizon has no real interest. The example you mention is particularly striking. The No to the referendum, in fact, had no importance at all. The majority of the French declared themselves to be against the constitution. What happened? The government didn’t fall, the president didn’t resign, the socialists ended up nominating a candidate who was in favor of the Yes, and so on. Little by little, the influence of the French No vote, seemingly so spectacular, was next to nothing. And the reason is that the referendum was called for by the state; the voters were convoked by the state. The politicians on both the Left and the Right had already, and for various reasons, agreed on the Yes, despite the opposition of the majority (this opposition, in turn, had multiple reasons and brought together the extreme Left and the extreme Right). This is a good example, in fact, of what I would call not so much the inexistent but rather the inactive nature of this type of political intervention. That said, nonparticipation in elections is not an important political principle for me. More important is succeeding in creating an organization independent of the state.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: In your recent book, Le Siècle, you seem to indicate the necessity to make a transition from what you call a politics of “destruction” (which you identify with “fraternal violence” and “terrorist nihilism”) to a politics of “subtraction.” Can you explain the nature of this distinction in your work?

BADIOU: Here, again, the question is at once philosophical and political, strictly linked to the problem of critique and negation. From a philosophical point of view, the symbol for all this was for a long time the relation between Hegel and Marx. For Marx, the dialectical conception of negation defined the relation between philosophy and politics—what used to be called the problem of dialectical materialism. Just as the party, which was once the victorious form of insurrection, is today outdated, so too is the dialectical theory of negation. It can no longer articulate a living link between philosophy and politics. In trying to clarify the political situation, we also need to search for a new formulation of the problem of critique and negation. I think that it is necessary, above all in the field of political action, to go beyond the concept of a negation taken solely in its destructive and properly negative aspect. Contrary to Hegel, for whom the negation of the negation produces a new affirmation, I think we must assert that today negativity, properly speaking, does not create anything new. It destroys the old, of course, but does not give rise to a new creation.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: It seems, though, the “big Other” of Hegelian dialectics is Spinoza’s ontology. How do you use Spinoza in the context of this critique of Hegelian dialectical logic?

BADIOU: The distinction between negation and affirmation in my discourse can, in a certain sense, be traced back to Spinoza. The encounter with Spinoza takes place because of our contemporary need to produce a non-Hegelian category of negation. But my problem with Spinoza is with the ontological foundation of his thought, in which there is still an excessive potency of the One. He is an author whose magnificent propositions I often cite: for example, that a free man thinks of nothing less than death or that the wisest man is the one most recognizant of others. These are magnificent formulations. But at the ontological level—Spinoza’s ontology is one of the great non-Hegelian constructions—I think the play between the multiple and the One leans a bit too much to the side of the One. The schema of the infinite plurality of attributes and the expressivity of the multiplicity of modes is, as far as I am concerned, not enough to account for contemporary multiplicity.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: You’ve spoken about the philosophical implications of this distinction between destruction and subtraction. But how do these articulations function at the political level, in terms of political practice?

BADIOU: On the political side, every revolutionary or emancipatory politics will have to be a certain adjustment or calibration between the properly negative part of negation and the part I call subtractive. A subtraction that is no longer dependent on the dominant laws of the political reality of a situation. It is irreducible, however, to the destruction of these laws as well. A subtraction might well leave the laws of the situation intact. What subtraction does is bring about a point of autonomy. It’s a negation, but it cannot be identified with the properly destructive part of negation. Throughout the Marxist and Leninist revolutionary tradition of the twentieth century, the prevailing idea was that destruction alone was capable of opening a new history, founding a new man, and so on. Mao himself said: “No construction without destruction.” Our problem today is that the destructive part of negation is no longer, in and of itself, capable of producing the new. We need an originary subtraction capable of creating a new space of independence and autonomy from the dominant laws of the situation. A subtraction, therefore, is neither derived from nor a consequence of destruction as such. If we are to propose a new articulation between destruction and subtraction, we have to develop a new type of negation or critique, one that differs from the dialectical model of class struggle in its historical signification.

I think it is possible to observe important symptoms of this crisis of negation today. What I call a weak negation, the reduction of politics to democratic opposition, can be understood as a subtraction that has become so detached from destructive negation that it can no longer be distinguished from what Habermas calls consensus. On the other hand, we are also witnessing a desperate attempt to maintain destruction as a pure figure of creation and the new. This symptom often has a religious and nihilistic dimension. In fact, the internal disjunction of negation—the severing of destruction from subtraction—has resulted in a war that in the West is referred to as the war on terrorism and, on the side of the terrorists themselves, a war on the West, the infidels, and so on.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: If today you disqualify any emancipatory dimension for a politics of destruction, what then is the place reserved for violence in politics?

BADIOU: Here, again, we touch upon the link between philosophy and politics. I maintain that today it is a question of creating independent spaces in such a way that the question of violence takes a defensive turn. In this sense, all the possible forms and experiences become interesting. The first phase of the Zapatista movement is a concrete example of this defensive dimension of violence. But there are many other examples. Perhaps the first figure of this type is found in the initial sequence of the anti-Soviet movement in Poland, at the beginning of the 1980s. It was a workers’ movement, and it was not, in fact, nonviolent; they used the strike, for example, as a weapon to pressure the government in negotiations. This was a situation in which the workers had complete control of the factories. This phase didn’t last very long, in part due to external factors, like the influence of the church and Jaruzelski’s coup d’e´tat. But this was a moment in which it was possible to glimpse, however briefly, a new dialectic between the means of actions that were classically understood to be negative—the strike, demonstrations, and so on—and something like the creation of a space of autonomy in the factories. The objective was not to take power, to replace an existing power, but to force the state to invent a new relation with the workers. However brief it may have been, this experiment was very interesting. Interesting because it did not follow the classical model of a brutal confrontation between the movement and the state. It was the organization of a differentiated space—immanent, but differentiated—in view of constituting a political site whose collective rule was one of political debate rather than subordination to the questions and agenda of state power.

It is impossible, then, to say that we can exclude all recourse to violence. Take, for example, the phenomenon of Hezbollah and the July 2006 war in Lebanon. The pretextual nature of Israel’s aggression was clear; they set out to destroy an entire country because one soldier was taken prisoner. Without wanting a frontal war, Hezbollah was fortunately able to exercise an effective, consistent resistance that turned the Israeli aggression into a fiasco. What is striking about this movement, however, is its difficult relation with the state. Here, we come back to the question of organization. Hezbollah is competing for state power, while nevertheless not reproducing an insurrectional model. They remain in a state of semidissidence and conflictual alliance with the state. In any case, it is clear that every form of negation, including its most extreme, violent forms, can be mobilized in the defense or protection of a new singularity. It is necessary, then, to have a new articulation of the destructive and subtractive parts of negation so that destruction or violence appears in the form of a protective force, capable of defending something created through a movement of subtraction. This idea was probably already present in the figure of the revolutionary base during the Chinese revolution. Mao wrote things like this concerning the role of the army, even if he also developed a strategy that was still oriented toward the seizure of state power. But the relation between armed force—the force of destruction—and popular organization was already complex at this moment, where the role of the army was assigned political tasks in addition to its task of protecting the popular organization.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: In your recent Logiques des mondes, you speak of political Islamism in terms that associate it with the category of fascism. This formulation is classical enough and can be found as often on the Right as on the Left. But is it possible to understand the successes of Hezbollah and the Iraqi armed resistance in terms of a merely local dispute? In the case of Hezbollah in particular, is it possible to see a novel form of political organization taking place under the sign of—but not reducible to—a theological articulation of the political?

BADIOU:: When I speak of Islamism, Islamist terrorism, fascist groups of a religious character, and so on, I am not referring to large popular organizations like Hezbollah or Hamas or even the many groups that support the current Iranian state. We are speaking of an extremely complex world, composed of figures that are at the same time national and popular. This is not the case with al-Qaeda, which is partially a production of the West itself. The groups I am referring to represent a pure and separate figure of destruction and practice a terrorism that is nonsituated, in which there is absolutely no possibility of glimpsing any constructive figure. The attacks of September 11, for example, were not accompanied by any political discourse addressed to the entire world or with any declaration of war; such declarations are the condition for politics. What we have instead is a violent destabilization whose concept is ungraspable. The only declarations that followed the event were completely rooted in a religious particularism that I read as exclusively negative. I won’t have anything to do with this type of practice.

I don’t confuse this phenomenon with the theological character of certain mass organizations like Hezbollah in the Middle East. But I do think that the fact that the organizations that are the most active and most rooted in the “people” are of this type is part of what I have been calling the contemporary crisis of negation. In this case, religion presents itself as the surrogate for something else that has not been found, something that should be universalizable, should be able to uproot itself from the particularity of the religious. It is for this reason, I think, that Marx still seems so current. Communism, according to Marx, is essentially internationalist in character. With religious dogmatism, in this case with Shia Islam, we are confronted with a collective messianism that I know and recognize is quite powerful but that is, finally, intrinsically limited. We need to consider these phenomena on their own terms but also understand their limitations. I think these movements represent a passage that bears witness, in a very vivid way, to the limits of our thought on the problems of the negative, critique, and political organization. We have to assume this passage, saluting its vigor (I am quite happy that the organized and popular force of Hezbollah was able to successfully block the Israeli aggression) as well as understanding that, if these “solutions” function within local contexts, there are fundamental limitations with respect to the possibility of universalizing these experiences. This is difficult, but necessary. And I maintain that the current situation is a result of the interruption or breaking down of the revolutionary movement in general in the 1980s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the absence of any renewal of Marxism. The examples of popular organization we know today are, therefore, either extremely experimental and localized (like the Zapatista movement) or theologico-political (like Hezbollah). The contemporary diversity of orientations, with all their sectarianism and particularism, was already present in Marx’s time as well, in the least revolutionary periods of the first half of the nineteenth century. And it is probably typical of periods in which it becomes necessary to open a new history, as is our own situation. All these experiences and experiments, then, including those that might seem a little strange or foreign, strong but limited as they are, must be taken into consideration.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: Unlike many of your colleagues, you felt it necessary to make an intervention in Le Monde on the subject of the revolt of the French banlieues. Your verdict: “You have the riots you deserve.” What, today, on the eve of the presidential election, is the “postcolonial” situation of the French banlieues? More generally, how do you see the relationship between politics and violence in the “banlieue-monde—what Mike Davis has recently called a “planet of slums”—that is in the process of globalizing itself in the twenty-first century?

BADIOU: Here we encounter a problem that we might call, in the Leninist tradition, the problem of the masses. That is, how can the political come to really organize or be present among the great masses of the planet? The fundamental problem is how we might enter into relations with this gigantic mass, with a population that is disorganized and chaotic, poor and deprived of everything, and often prey to criminal organizations, religious messianisms, and unchecked destructive violence. This is the calling and task of every contemporary emancipatory politics. After all, we are speaking of billions of people; address this problem or our horizon will remain too narrow. In the nineteenth century, the problem was the arrival of the new proletarian masses on the political scene; in the twentieth century, it was the political emancipation of colonized peoples. In the first case we have the workers’ movement, the Paris Commune, and, finally, the revolution of 1917; in the second, the wars of national liberation, Algeria, Vietnam, and the Chinese popular war. But today we can no longer speak either of the working masses, forged in the discipline of the factory, or of the peasant masses, localized and organized on the basis of agrarian relations. The masses we speak of are profoundly atomized by capitalism. They are, for the most part, delivered over to conditions of existence that are precarious and chaotic. They are a collective figure that still has no name. The category of the subproletariat doesn’t work in this case, since that category still presupposes the existence of an organized proletariat—which, in this case, does not exist. These masses are not organized according to the traditional categories of class, and so for the moment they are more or less entirely abandoned to the nihilism of capitalism.

Here the link with the French banlieues becomes clear. The distinction between the Third World and the developed countries is increasingly less important. We have our Third World within the developed states. This is why the so-called question of immigration has become so important for us. The United States, for example, this nation of immigrants, is today constructing a wall and reinforcing its border security system against immigration, an action largely agreed upon by the Democrats—not necessarily concerning the wall but the need for a substantial increase in the border patrol. In France, this rhetoric has poisoned political life for some time now. It feeds the extreme Right, but, ultimately, the Left always aligns itself with this rhetoric. It’s a very interesting phenomenon because it shows that these destructured masses, poor and deprived of everything, situated in a nonproletarianized urban environment, constitute one of the principal horizons of the politics to come. These masses, therefore, are an important factor in the phenomenon of globalization. The true globalization, today, would be found in the organization of these masses—on a worldwide scale, if possible—whose conditions of existence are essentially the same. Whoever lives in the banlieues of Bamako or Shanghai is not essentially different from someone who lives in the banlieues of Paris or the ghettos of Chicago. They might be poorer and in worse conditions, but they are not essentially different. Their political existence is characterized by a distance from the state—from the state and its clients, the dominant classes but also the middle classes, all of whom strive to maintain this distance. On this political problem, I have only fragmentary ideas. It’s a question that is as difficult as the problem of organizing workers in the nineteenth century. I am convinced it is the fundamental problem today.

There have been important political experiments in this field—with the sans-papiers in France, for example. But this is only one part of a problem that is extremely vast. We have no relations with the young people in revolt in the banlieues. It is once again a dimension of the crisis of negation. We should absolutely be able to think a subtractive form, however minimal, for this type of population. The sans-papiers, for example, should have some form of minimal workers’ organization, since they often work in restaurants or in construction. This is why it is possible to make some progress in their struggle. Another path that is open and important is the problem of gender, with the women of the banlieues, who have very specific responsibilities in the social structures of these neighborhoods. Some progress has been made there. But for the most part the problem is still extremely difficult. The efforts of the “altermondialiste” movement, for example, have been undertaken on an extremely narrow social base; they never touched upon the broad, popular masses of the entire world. It is, really, a petit-bourgeois movement, even if I salute them in their activity. But its organizational capacity at the most fundamental level of the global situation is extremely limited.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: Staying with the idea of subtraction and the global character of the situation it represents, is it possible to conceive of the gesture of migration itself as a subtractive or political one, insofar as it implies putting one’s own life at risk in order to imagine and construct a new possibility of life?

BADIOU: Yes, without a doubt a subtractive gesture. But I would define it as prepolitical. This is made clear by the difficulty immigrants have articulating a political voice in the countries to which they immigrate. The gesture no doubt implies a predisposition to politics; it has elements of risk, displacement, and departure. It’s a gesture similar to that of the workers of the twentieth century who came to the North and its factories from the countryside, though today it is from Africa rather than the south of Italy. It is, therefore, a gesture of subtraction from conditions of poverty, local but diffused on a planetary scale. Those who take this kind of risk can be politicized. What’s different and even more complicated is the case of the young people who are born in the country their parents immigrated to, for example in France. They have a divided subjectivity. On the one hand, these people are excluded from political life. But, on the other hand, they themselves have not made this gesture, with all the risks it implies. A part of the population is ready to do what it takes to remain there, even if this means exposing themselves to submission, corruption, and so on. The revolts of November 2005, therefore, are very significant, but nothing came from them. They remain a bitter and negative experience, an experience of abandon; the young people of the banlieues were left to themselves, with no opening to anyone else. This cannot be political. To return to Spinoza, the situation is no doubt one in which the masses have sunken into what he calls sadness, in which the negative aspect prevails. The political, instead, is always a trajectory toward someone different. And it is an essential condition. In both directions at once. After May ’68, I myself set out to engage workers in an exchange that required both of us to assume this type of trajectory toward someone else. This is missing with the youths of the banlieues, shut up in a collective isolation. Things will probably change, but for the moment this is the reason why nothing came of these revolts. And, for the moment, all they can do is revolt. The repetition of these revolts—as was the case in the large cities of the U.S. in the 1960s—cannot be creative of any politics.

DEL LUCCHESE and SMITH: You mentioned the banlieues of Bamako, Shanghai, and Paris. But there are two other banlieues that, for various reasons and with specific characteristics, are today in flames: Hezbollah’s southern suburbs of Beirut and the Sadr movement’s in east Baghdad. In both cases, we find a massive Shiite population, often having arrived through a process of internal migration from the south of Lebanon or Iraq, that is experimenting with new forms of social and political organization as well as a specifically armed dimension. Is it possible to include these two suburbs in the global phenomenon you’ve been discussing?

BADIOU: Absolutely. It’s even possible to say that the young people living in these banlieues have worked out a solution for themselves. But these are not young people that have been abandoned to themselves. They have leaders. And they have found, in a certain sense, one form of solution to the problems we have been discussing, namely, how can the young and the poor, those who live in the suburbs and ghettos of large cities, become politically organized? To do that, they had to open a dialogue and accept the organization of certain intellectuals, certain “wise” men; the Shiite leaders, after all, are a bit like philosophers who have become activists. But there is an internal limitation to these movements, bound as they are to religious particularity. It is not even a matter of religion in general, since Robespierre, after all, was the proponent of an abstract god. The problem is particularity. To return to your question, then, I would say that across the globe we can recognize a common situation in which gigantic masses of humans are abandoned to the banlieues and ghettos of large cities, and where the old principles of proletarian organization are no longer effective. All the experiments must be examined close-up, including those practiced by Hezbollah in the south of Beirut or by Moktada al-Sadr in east Baghdad. The problem, in each case, is this: what will their relation to the state be? We don’t yet know what decisions they will make.

—Los Angeles, 7 Feb. 2007

Published in Critical Inquiry / Summer 2008

On the 100th anniversary of the birth of the famed novelist, our reporter searches the north African nation for signs of his legacy

• By Joshua Hammer
• Smithsonian magazine, October 2013,

The Hotel El-Djazair, formerly known as the Hotel Saint-George, is an oasis of calm in the tense city of Algiers. A labyrinth of paved pathways winds through beds of hibiscus, cactuses and roses, shaded by palm and banana trees. In the lobby, bellhops in white tunics and red fezzes escort guests past Persian carpets and walls inlaid with mosaics. Beneath the opulence, violence lurks. During the week I was there, diplomats descended on the El-Djazair to repatriate the bodies of dozens of hostages killed in a shootout at a Sahara natural-gas plant between Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and the Algerian Army.

Violence was in the air as well in January 1956, when the celebrated writer Albert Camus checked into the Hotel Saint-George. The struggle against French colonialism was escalating, with civilians becoming the primary victims. Camus was a pied-noir—a term meaning “black foot,” perhaps derived from the coal-stained feet of Mediterranean sailors, or the black boots of French soldiers, and used to refer to the one million colonists of European origin living in Algeria during French rule. He had returned after 14 years in France to try to stop his homeland from sliding deeper into war. It was a perilous mission. Right-wing French settlers plotted to assassinate him. Algerian revolutionaries watched over him without his knowledge.

The Casablanca-style intrigue—freedom fighters, spies and an exotic North African setting—seemed appropriate. Camus, after all, was often thought of as a literary Humphrey Bogart—dashing, irresistible to women, a coolly heroic figure in a dangerous world.

Camus is regarded as a giant of French literature, but it was his North African birthplace that most shaped his life and his art. In a 1936 essay, composed during a bout of homesickness in Prague, he wrote of pining for “my own town on the shores of the Mediterranean…the summer evenings that I love so much, so gentle in the green light and full of young and beautiful women.” Camus set his two most famous works, the novels The Stranger and The Plague, in Algeria, and his perception of existence, a joyful sensuality combined with a recognition of man’s loneliness in an indifferent universe, was formed here.

In 1957, Anders Österling, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, acknowledged the importance of Camus’ Algerian upbringing when he presented him with the Nobel Prize in Literature, a towering achievement, won when he was only 43. Österling attributed Camus’ view of the world in part to a “Mediterranean fatalism whose origin is the certainty that the sunny splendor of the world is only a fugitive moment bound to be blotted out by the shades.”

Camus is “the single reason people outside Algeria know about this country,” says Yazid Ait Mahieddine, a documentary filmmaker and Camus expert in Algiers, as we sit beneath a photograph of the writer in the El- Djazair bar, alongside images of other celebrities who have passed through here, from Dwight Eisenhower to Simone de Beauvoir. “He is our only ambassador.”

***

Yet despite Camus’ monumental achievements and deep attachment to his native land, Algeria has never reciprocated that love. Camus is not part of the school curriculum; his books can’t be found in libraries or bookshops. Few plaques or memorials commemorate him. “Algeria has erased him,” says Hamid Grine, an Algerian novelist whose 2011 Camus dans le Narguilé (Camus in the Hookah) imagines a young Algerian who discovers that he is Camus’ illegitimate son, and embarks on a quest to learn about his real father.

In 2010, the 50th anniversary of Camus’ death in a car accident in France, a committee of intellectuals organized an event they called a “Camus Caravan”—readings in seven Algerian cities. But “the authorities refused to allow it,” I was told by one of the organizers, Fatima Bakhai, a lawyer in Oran, Algeria’s second-largest city. When Camus turns 100 this year, not a single official commemoration is planned. The neglect reflects, in part, the scars of the civil war that tore apart Algeria in the 1990s, leaving 100,000—mainly civilians—dead in fighting between Islamic militants and the military regime. Most Algerians “were too busy trying to survive to worry about our literary heritage,” say Mahieddine.

But it is also a product of Camus’ complex political views. Despite his revulsion toward French colonial prejudices and his sympathy toward Arabs, Camus believed until the end of his life that Algeria must remain part of France. Five decades later, as I discovered during a weeklong trip through Algeria on the eve of Camus’ centennial, memorials to the independence struggle are ubiquitous, resentment toward France remains strong and the Algerian government, largely made up of former freedom fighters, has willed a national forgetting of its country’s greatest writer. “Camus is regarded as a colonialist, and that’s taught in the schools,” says Catherine Camus, the author’s daughter, who lives in France and last visited Algeria in 1960, six months after her father’s death when she was 14, and who now manages his literary estate. But she insists that although her father spent his last decades in France, “he was entirely Algerian.”

“It is true that Camus positioned himself with his own little family of colonists,” says Mahieddine, who fought the resistance of superiors to make a documentary for state television about Camus’ life in Algeria. “But that should not deny his talent, his greatness as a writer, his Nobel Prize and his contribution to presenting the image of Algeria to the world.”

***

Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondovi, now Dréan, a town near Algeria’s northeast coast, 30 miles from the Tunisian border. His father, Lucien Auguste Camus, the grandson of poor immigrants from the Bordeaux region, worked in a wine cellar at a vineyard. In the opening weeks of World War I, at the Battle of the Marne, he was struck in the head by shrapnel, and died in a field hospital a few weeks later. Albert and his older brother, Lucien, were raised by their mother, Catherine Hélène Sintès-Camus, a deaf illiterate of Spanish origin. “Although she was able to read lips, some people thought her mute, or mentally retarded,” writes Olivier Todd in his authoritative biography Albert Camus: A Life. According to Camus, her vocabulary consisted of only 400 words.

When Albert was a boy, the family moved to an apartment at 93 rue de Lyon, in Algiers’ Belcourt neighborhood, a working-class district. Here Arabs and pieds-noirs lived side by side, but seldom intermingled. Albert shared three rooms with Lucien, their uncle Étienne, their maternal grandmother, and Catherine Hélène, who toiled as a cleaning woman. Camus admired her gentle stoicism, and she shaped his empathy for the poor and oppressed. “Camus always wanted to speak for those who had no voice,” says Catherine Camus. In addition, says Todd, “He was extraordinarily devoted to her.”

Camus’ boyhood home still stands: a two-story building with a wedding-dress shop on the ground floor. Out front, I meet the owner, Hamid Hadj Amar, a wary octogenarian who eventually leads my translator and me up a drab spiral staircase. The Camus place, in the rear, seems impossibly small: a tiny kitchen and three cramped bedrooms off a dark corridor. The room shared by Lucien and Albert is a 10- by 10-foot chamber with French windows opening onto a filigreed balcony. I stand on the tiny terrace and take in Camus’ view: a busy street, shade trees obscuring a block of three- and four-story buildings with deteriorating white facades, orange-tile roofs and balconies draped in drying laundry.

My translator-guide, Said, and I walk to the other landmarks of Camus’ Belcourt years, passing cafés filled with elderly Arab men playing dominoes and sipping mint tea. The streets present a microcosm of Algeria’s mixed society: fashionably dressed, Westernized women carrying baguettes home from French bakeries; a couple from the Salafist Islamic movement, the man with a long beard and white robe, the woman’s face concealed behind a black niqab.

A few blocks north, I can just make out Les Sablettes, the popular beach where Camus spent many a summer day. “I lived in destitution but also in a kind of sensual delight,” Camus once wrote, conjuring up a childhood of swimming, sunshine and soccer.

Down the block from 93 rue de Lyon, I come across the École Communale, Camus’ primary school. I push open the heavy metal gate and approach the late 19th-century Beaux-Arts relic, with curving, filigreed outdoor staircases. The stucco facade is peeling away. It was here that Camus met a compassionate teacher, Louis Germain, who “saw a bright young boy,” says Todd, tutored him after-hours, helped him obtain a high-school scholarship and introduced him to a “world of words.”

Two days after my visit to Belcourt, I’m hiking along the coast 40 miles west of Algiers. An intermittent drizzle washes over acres of Roman ruins that extend to the edges of the cliffs.

Tipasa, originally a Phoenician settlement, was captured by the Romans and developed into an important port nearly 2,000 years ago. It was one of Camus’ most beloved destinations. In his teens and 20s he and his friends would travel here by bus from Algiers and picnic among first-century temples and villas, and a fourth-century Christian basilica. “For me there is not a single one of those sixty-nine kilometers that is not filled with memories and sensations,” he wrote of his regular trip to Tipasa from Algiers in “Return to Tipasa,” a 1952 essay. “Turbulent childhood, adolescent daydreams in the drone of the bus’s motor, mornings, unspoiled girls, beaches, young muscles always at the peak of their effort, evening’s slight anxiety in a sixteen-year-old heart.”

Camus’ years of teenage exuberance were cut short when, at the age of 17, doctors diagnosed tuberculosis. Constantly short of breath, he was forced to abandon a promising soccer career, and would suffer relapses throughout his life. Despite the often-debilitating illness, he graduated in 1936 from the University of Algiers with a philosophy degree. After a stint of uninspiring office work, Camus was hired in 1938 as a reporter for a new daily newspaper, the Alger Républicain, covering everything from murder trials to a famine in the mountain region of Kabylia, 50 miles east of Algiers. That exposé of government neglect infuriated colonial authorities. They shut down the paper and blacklisted Camus, making him unemployable as a journalist.

Said and I follow a trail along the cliffs, past grazing goats and gnarled olive trees. We thread through a field of truncated columns and tread gingerly across the disintegrating mosaic floor of a ruined villa. In “Nuptials at Tipasa,” one of four rapturous essays about his homeland published in 1938, Camus celebrated a world of sunshine and sensual pleasure. “In springtime, gods dwell in Tipasa,” he wrote, “speaking through the sun and wormwood perfume, the sea in its silver armor, and great bubbles of light in piles of rocks.”

***

One summer afternoon in 1939, on Bouisseville Beach, just west of Oran, an acquaintance of Camus’, Raoul Bensoussan, had a run-in with two Arabs who, he believed, had insulted his girlfriend. “Raoul returned with his brother to argue with the Arabs, and after a brawl he was injured by one of them, who had a knife,” Todd writes in his biography. Raoul came back armed with a small-caliber pistol, but the Arabs were arrested before he could pull the trigger.

From this encounter, Camus fashioned the novel that has come to define him. In the opening pages of The Stranger, his anthem of existentialism and alienation, Meursault, Camus’ strangely detached antihero, joins his mother’s funeral procession in the Algerian countryside. “The glare from the sky was unbearable,” he writes. “I could feel the blood pounding in my temples.” The sun of Tipasa has morphed into a sinister force in Meursault’s world—a catalyst for violence and symbol of a universe bleached of significance. Later, on a beach much like Bouisseville, Meursault encounters an Arab with a knife and shoots him to death for no other apparent reason than the unnerving brightness and heat. “It was the same sun as on the day I buried Maman and, like then,” he writes, “my forehead especially was hurting me, all of the veins pulsating together beneath the skin.”

Today the once-pristine beach that inspired Camus’ absurdist drama is barely recognizable. The sun that drove Meursault to distraction, then murder, is today buried behind a heavy cloud cover, typical of the Mediterranean winter. Trash covers the curving sweep of sand, a faint odor of urine is in the air and the beachfront is lined with dilapidated French villas, many abandoned. “My father used to see Camus and his wife here all the time,” a grizzled man who rents out sun umbrellas tells us. He directs us down the beach toward a trickle of raw sewage flowing into the sea. Seventy years ago, this stream might have been “the little spring, running down through the sand” where Meursault encountered the doomed Arab and his friends.

The Stranger concludes with Meursault in his cell, preparing for his execution, following a trial in which his lack of emotion at his mother’s funeral is cited as proof of his depravity. Facing imminent death on the guillotine, Camus’ protagonist acknowledges that existence is meaningless, yet he now rejoices in the sheer sensation of being alive. “For the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the benign indifference of the world,” he declares in the last lines of the book, a cry of defiance and a joyful assertion of his humanity.

The Stranger was published in 1942, to ecstatic reviews. It earned the respect of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Left Bank philosopher with whom Camus soon formed a tempestuous friendship. Thanks in part to Sartre’s attention, Camus found himself transformed almost overnight from an obscure pied-noir journalist into a literary lion. In 1944, fifteen-year-old Olivier Todd found a dog-eared copy in the cupboard of a Jewish woman who had lent Todd and his mother her apartment in occupied Paris after she had fled the Nazis. “I went to the Luxembourg Garden, and read the novel there, 200 yards away from German sentries,” remembers Camus’ future biographer. He was taken, he says, by the “double-faced” nature of Camus, who found darkness and horror in the Algerian sunshine. “He will be remembered as a formidable prose writer, who was capable of dreaming up extraordinary stories,” Todd says.

***

In March 1940, unemployed in Algeria, Camus had gone into exile in France, arriving on the eve of the Nazi invasion. He found a job as a reporter for a newspaper in Lyon, a city under control of the collaborationist Vichy government. In January 1941, he married Francine Faure, a beautiful pianist and math teacher from Oran. But the same month, facing wartime privation, censorship and the threat of losing his job, Camus returned with his wife to Oran.

Late on a January afternoon, after a six-hour drive from Algiers, I arrive in Oran, a city of one and a half million near the Moroccan border. The narrow street where Camus and Francine lived during his Algerian interlude is lined in faded-white buildings. Camus often whiled away the hours at the nearby Brasserie la Cintra on an avenue flanked by date palms. High above the city looms the Murjajo, a stone fortress constructed by Oran’s Spanish conquerors, who ruled here between 1509 and 1708, when the city fell to the Ottomans.

Despite the city’s history and vibrant multi-ethnicity, Camus disparaged Oran as “the capital of boredom” and disliked the seedy dockyards and industrial works that separated the city from the Mediterranean. Camus was unemployed, debilitated by tuberculosis and appalled by the surge of anti-Semitism under the Vichy regime. More than 110,000 Algerian Jews lost their French citizenship. A close friend of Camus’ was fired from his job as a high-school teacher, the words “French citizen” replaced by “native Jew” in his passport. “The return to Oran, considering the conditions of my life here, is not a step forward,” he wrote a friend in 1941. But, says Todd, Camus also found much to love about the city. “The Spanish character of Oran meant a lot to him,” he says. “The Spanish architecture, the way people ate, the way they lived, reminded him of the part of him that was Spanish.” “He loved and hated the city at the same time,” Todd says.

Camus lived with Francine in Oran for 18 months. In August 1942, they traveled back to France, where Camus recuperated in the mountains from a relapse of tuberculosis. Francine returned to Algeria and Camus planned to join her. But in November, the Allies invaded North Africa; Camus was stranded in France.

Outraged by the Nazi occupation, he became editor in chief of the resistance newspaper Combat. He and the other editors—including Sartre, André Malraux and Raymond Aron—produced articles denouncing the Nazis, and secretly printed 185,000 weekly copies on clandestine presses in Paris. It was dangerous work: Camus had one close call in 1943, when he was stopped by the Gestapo and managed to dispose of a layout copy of the paper before being searched.

During the war, Camus also began working on what many regard as his masterpiece, the allegorical novel The Plague, a meditation on exile, occupation and resistance. Set in Oran, the fable unfolds with an outbreak of bubonic plague that kills hundreds of people a day and forces authorities to seal the gates to prevent the pestilence from spreading. The contagion, like the Nazi occupation of France, brings out both venal and noble qualities in Oran’s populace. One character profiteers by selling contraband cigarettes and low-quality liquor. Camus’ heroes, the physician Bernard Rieux and the journalist Raymond Rambert, courageously tend the sick and dying. Both are cut off from the women they love, but place a sense of moral responsibility over happiness. “In its calm and exact objectivity, this convincingly realistic narrative reflects experiences of life during the Resistance,” declared his 1957 Nobel Prize testimonial, “and Camus extols the revolt which the conquering evil arouses in the heart of the intensely resigned and disillusioned man.”

Camus, too, was afflicted by, as his character Rieux describes it, “those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire.” But he was serially unfaithful to his wife during their long period of separation. Francine reunited with her husband in Paris after the German defeat. The Plague was published, to great acclaim, in 1947, two years after the birth of the Camus twins, Jean and Catherine, in Paris. Camus’ relationship with Francine remained rocky, but he developed a close bond with his children. “He was full of life, he laughed a lot, he was down-to-earth, he was a real father,” says Catherine, who recalls with deep affection her trips back to Algeria in the 1950s with her father. Catherine says that her father “didn’t communicate any idea of his importance,” even after winning the Nobel Prize. It was only after his death that she began to understand his significance to the world.

***

After my return to Algiers, I make my way to a hilltop overlooking the bay, crossing a plaza to the Martyrs’ Monument: three concrete palm fronds that soar to 300 feet, encasing an eternal flame. The bronze statue of an Algerian freedom fighter stands at the base of each giant frond. This colossus commemorates the conflict that erupted here on November 1, 1954, when National Liberation Front (FLN) guerrillas carried out attacks on gendarmeries. Nearby I visit the Military Museum, which traces the conflict through blood-curdling dioramas of ambushes by mujahedin and torture chambers run by the French military.

Camus had often demonstrated his opposition to the abuses of the colonial system, from his exposé of the famine in Kabylia to his May 1945 investigative trip for Combat to Setif, site of an anti-French protest by Algerian veterans that had triggered a massacre by French forces. As the war escalated, he looked on with horror at attacks against civilians by French ultranationalists and the army. But while he was sympathetic to the idea of greater autonomy for Algeria, he was also disgusted by FLN bombings of cafés and buses and rejected demands for independence. In 1956 he arrived in Algiers with the hope of arranging a truce between the FLN and French forces. “Camus came as a figure of great moral authority, granted to him by his status as a writer, his role in the Resistance and his editorials in Combat. But the idea that he could alone effect change is exaggerated,” says Alice Kaplan, a Camus scholar at Yale University who edited a new anthology of Camus’ Algeria-related writing, Algerian Chronicles.

The visit was a humiliating failure. The two sides had passed the point of reconciliation, and even supposedly neutral Algerian leaders who escorted Camus to meetings were working secretly for the FLN. Besieged by shouts of “death to Camus” from right-wing French zealots in an Algiers meeting hall, Camus returned to France, shaken.

Camus continued to seek a middle path. He intervened with French authorities to save the lives of dozens of condemned mujahedin, but refused to support the armed struggle. “People are now planting bombs on the tramways of Algiers,” he famously told an FLN sympathizer following his acceptance of the 1957 Nobel. “My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.” The FLN never forgave him for rejecting its cause. Eventually, Camus stopped commenting altogether on the war, a retreat that some equated with cowardice, but that Camus justified, saying that any comment he made would inflame one side or the other.

In Camus’ “Letter to an Algerian Militant,” published in Kaplan’s Algerian Chronicles, he equates the pain he felt about the Algerian War with the “hurt in his lungs.” By the time the war ended in March 1962, anywhere from a half-million to more than one million Arab civilians and freedom fighters were dead, along with nearly 40,000 French soldiers and pieds-noirs. A million pieds-noirs fled to France; others were massacred in Oran and other Algerian cities, while still others disappeared. (Camus’ mother died of natural causes in Algiers in September 1960.) Outside the former Barberousse prison, next to the Casbah, I studied a stone tablet that listed, in Arabic, the names of hundreds of fighters executed on the guillotine by the French occupiers.

Camus’ equivocating role during the Algerian War has never stopped igniting controversy. Columbia University historian Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, berated Camus for having an “incapacitated colonial sensibility.” Particularly damning for Camus’ critics is the absence of developed Arab characters in the author’s body of fiction, a telling indication, they say, that while Camus sympathized with Arabs in general, he cared little about them as individuals. Kaplan says that Camus was simply a product of his time, and the deeply segregated society from which he came. “He knew the settler population, their poverty and their issues,” she says. Even so, many Algerian Arab writers “are deeply engaged with Camus.”

For Olivier Todd, the quality that resonates for him is Camus’ “honesty,” his refusal to insist on absolute truth. “He is constantly doubting. He has doubts about the Communists, about the future of Algeria, even about himself,” Todd says. Yet it took Todd decades to warm up to him. Todd met Camus twice, once in a Paris café in 1948, when the writer sat down at the counter with a newspaper and ogled Todd’s young wife. “I was furious,” says Todd. “I said aloud, ‘Who is this asshole? Who does he think he is?’” A decade later he was introduced to Camus on the Boulevard St. Germain and “disliked him intensely. His clothes were much too loud, and he was aggressive with me. He defended the pieds-noirs too much.” But after five years immersed in his life and literature, after hundreds of interviews and repeated trips to Algeria, “My feelings about him have changed completely,” Todd says. “I ended up liking him immensely.”

For Kaplan and other admirers, Camus was, above all, a humanist, who believed in the sanctity of life, the folly of killing for an ideology and the urgency of peaceful coexistence. “There is a Camus for every stage of life,” says Kaplan, trying to explain Camus’ staying power and relevance today. “Adolescents can identify with the alienation of Meursault. The Plague is for when you’re in college, politically engaged and sympathetic with resistance.” The Fall, Camus’ 1956 novel about the crisis of conscience of a successful Parisian lawyer, “is for 50-year-olds. It is angry, acrimonious, confronting the worst things you know about yourself.” And The First Man, a beautifully rendered, unfinished autobiographical novel published posthumously in 1994, “is Camus’ Proustian moment, his looking back on his life. You can spend your whole life with Camus.”

In a field near the sea at Tipasa stands one of Algeria’s only monuments to the writer, a headstone erected by his friends after he died in January 1960, at the age of 46, in a car crash with his publisher, Michel Gallimard, near the French town of Sens. At the time he was living in Lourmarin, a village in the Vaucluse, where his daughter lives today. (According to Todd, Camus said that the hills near his home “always remind me of Algeria.”) Weathered by the wind, the French inscription is barely legible, and the name “Albert Camus” has been defaced with a knife by someone with a grudge. The inscription is a quote from the 1938 essay “Nuptials at Tipasa,” written before the horrors of war and the personal struggles that would shadow his rise to greatness. “Here I understand what they call glory,” it reads, in homage to the seaside ruins where he spent some of his most joyful moments. “The right to love without limits.”

Legal Orientalism: China, the US and Modern Law

By Teemu Ruskola

Reviewed By Dinesh Sharma
Asia Times

Sept 27, 2013 – What is international law and who owns it? Why has China become the symbol of a lawless nation after the Cold War? Why is the US seen as the law-enforcer-in-chief while China as the law-breaker? Historically, how is it that the US is invariably seen as the chief exporter of law to the emerging BRICS economies by the international business and legal community?

In an era of globalization, we are all asking these questions. Teemu Ruskola, Professor of Law at Emory University, reveals in Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law that this association of China with lawlessness has a long historical trail. He defines "Legal Orientalism" as consisting of political and cultural narratives about the law, which invariably associate the law with Western institutions (the European Union, the United States) and lawlessness with the non-Western societies (Asia, Africa and the rest). Analyzing the history and global impact of these cultural narratives, Ruskola demonstrates how legal Orientalism continues to shape the law and politics in remarkable ways – in China, in the US, and globally.

Ruskola claims that China has a history of corporation law by reinterpreting Confucian family law as a kind of corporate law. He asserts that the rise of extraterritorial jurisdiction in the nineteenth-century by the US into Asia-Pacific region was a form of legal imperialism. He traces its culmination in the establishment of a "US Court for China," an all-but-lawless tribunal where the constitution held no sway. The present-day reforms of Chinese law, Ruskola claims, are a kind of self-Orientalism. These and other fascinating exegeses help the reader understand the history and consequences of legal Orientalism, and to envision a new conception of global justice.

When I asked Ruskola why he relied on Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism to interpret international law, he said, "The literary scholar Edward Said used the term ‘Orientalism’ to describe the way in which Europe has historically defined itself against Oriental ‘Others’ – so while Europeans are free individuals, Orientals are enslaved masses; the West is dynamic, the East stagnant; etc. I use the term ‘legal Orientalism’ to refer to the narratives we tell about what is and isn’t law, and who has it and who doesn’t."

China, he argued, historically has been seen as the home of Oriental despotism and, thus recently, it has been seen as the chief human-rights violator.

Ruskola’s book might also help explain, partly, why China is always cast as the defendant and the West as the judge and the jury – not to mention the law enforcer. How did US law assume the role of promoter of freedom, democracy, and market economies? At least in part, we can see that the Orientalist discourses have been binary East-West divides: free versus despotic, modern versus primitive, dynamic versus stagnant, individualist versus collectivist, etc.

However, these dialectical pairs have never been symmetrical and getting more complex by the day. While the Western terminology may always seem superior, this may be changing ever so gradually. Orientalism was a story told by the West about the Orientals, not by the East. More than a story, it was a worldview that has been backed by power and prestige, a Western desire to expand economically and militarily. The so-called Orient has surely had its own views about the West, but either it has not been interested or unable to project those views globally, the way the West has – led by the United States in the twentieth century.

Here, one must ask the anti-relativistic or universalistic question: Are the ideals or rules of law upheld by the West indeed superior or just an attitudinal belief or deeply rooted cultural practices with perplexing idiosyncrasies. There are no easy answers, but with the spread of globalization these difficult questions are in search of a cogent answer.

Ruskola suggests that every society finds a unique way to balance the interests of persons as individuals and social obligations of communities in which they live. "However, in the West, we start with the idea of sacrosanct individual rights. In fact those rights aren’t absolute but have numerous limits: your right to free speech doesn’t allow you to shout ‘Fire!’ in a theater, nor does your right to own property include the right to own an atomic bomb."

In China, the political tradition begins with the collective: it emphasizes a person’s duties to act in the collective interest. In fact, those duties also have to be calibrated and adjusted from context to context, so they’re not absolute either. "But if you start from the ideological position that the individual is prior to society, rather than vice-versa, then the entire Chinese legal tradition does become basically an on-going human rights violation", says the author.

Historically, Ruskola reports that the first images of China in early modern Europe were quite positive, transmitted by Jesuits and missionaries. They represented Confucius as a kind of secular sage, "basically as a smart old white guy".

 
However, "with the explosion of European and US demand for Chinese good, traders, sailors and Protestant missionaries become the main source of information about China, and the European attitudes change from Sinophilia to Sinophobia and, ultimately, anti-Chinese racism. Merchants complain that Chinese law is ‘arbitrary’ and Protestant missionaries condemn Confucian ancestor worship as heathenism," concludes Ruskola.

If the West’s economic and military superiority led to the universalization of Western law in the 19th and 20th centuries, how will China’s ascendancy on the global stage in the 21st century likely to reverse that notion and instead introduce a more Chinese concept of law and legal institutions throughout the world? On this point, Ruskola is circumspect. He states that the story is still unfolding.

"Thus far, China’s higher profile in those fields of power has not been matched by a similar rise in the global estimation of Chinese law and legal institutions," according to Ruskola. But this is the key question and we can anticipate the emergence of new formations of Chinese law in the future. "Although in its basic structure the PRC legal order is a replica of Western-style institutions;" a kind of "Self-Orientalization" is happening in China right now.

Legal structures with a specifically Chinese characteristic will take time to evolve, but it’s certainly worth paying attention to. In this respect, this important book within the "Critical Legal Studies" genre will continue to guide comparative legal research on China and other Asian economies. In this respect, this important book within the comparative and critical legal studies tradition will continue to guide legal research on China and other Asian economies.

Legal Orientalism: China, the US and Modern Law by Teemu Ruskola. Harvard University Press (7 Jun 2013). ISBN-10: 0674073061. Price $35.96. Hardcover: 352 pages

Dinesh Sharma is the author of Barack Obama in Hawaii and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President, which was rated in the Top 10 Black History Books for 2012. His next book The Global Obama: Crossroads of Leadership in 21st Century will be published in December 2013 with Routledge Press.