It’s a standard assumption in the West: As a society progresses, it eventually becomes a capitalist, multi-party democracy. Right? Eric X. Li, a Chinese investor and political scientist, begs to differ. In this provocative, boundary-pushing talk, he asks his audience to consider that there’s more than one way to run a successful modern nation. A rising public intellectual, Eric X Li argues that the universality claim of Western democratic systems is going to be “morally challenged” by China.

Bob Simpson looks at how the ability for arts and culture to thrive relies upon working people’s fight for a space of their own.

“The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” — David Harvey , The Right to the City

By Bob Simpson

Red Wedge

June 17, 2013 – The 1968 French student-worker uprising popularized the phrase “The Right to the City” from philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s book Le Droit à la ville. According to Lefebvre the right to transform the urban environment cannot be restricted to people who own substantial property, hold citizenship papers or are otherwise deemed to have a higher social status. It means all of us, regardless of race, gender, age, economic status or any narrowly defined category. The city is a place of possibilities and we have a basic human right to make those possibilities realities.

Lefebrve’s subsequent book, The Urban Revolution helped to expand on his Right to the City ideas. Written in 1970, the book speculates rather accurately how urban society would evolve. There is a now a World Charter for the Right to the City which came out of the Social Forum of the Americas held in Ecuador during July 2004. The Right to the City is a global movement as the urban dispossessed around the planet struggle to humanize their own cities.

I was reading Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution while riding the CTA Red Line on an April morning earlier this year. I was headed to Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. The economically and racially diverse Uptown community was fighting school closings and the forced exile of working class people to benefit wealthy real estate interests and corporate school privatizers.

View of Uptown from the Wilson CTA stop.

Led by a new organization called Uptown Uprising, Uptown’s embattled residents had called for a rally and march to show how the power of concentrated wealth was destroying a community. With blue skies overhead, I arrived at the Stewart Elementary School playground where Uptown Uprising was gathering. Stewart Elementary, along with Stockton Elementary in Uptown, was scheduled for closing. In Chicago, school closings are often closely linked with financial speculation and gentrification.
Reggie Spears, the Stewart music teacher, was leading his band students in a lively display of musical talent, while parents and students were making colorful signs on the playground’s artificial turf — for the city is a place of creation.

continue

Vietnamese Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong (right) with his Cuban counterpart Raul Castro.

PART 1, THE VIETNAM CASE

By Harry Targ

Diary of a Heartland Radical

Introduction

The weight of history bears down on humankind such that, paraphrasing Marx, people make history but not precisely as to their own choosing. The rise of capitalism out of feudalism in Northern Europe spread over the centuries to Africa, Asia, and Latin America ripping asunder traditional patterns of economic, social, and cultural relations. A new political economy dynamic, now called “neoliberal globalization,” spread across the face of the earth extracting natural resources, enslaving and exploiting human labor power, and expanding production and distribution such that by the twentieth century the whole world was touched. The impact of capitalist globalization included enormous scientific and technological advances, significant increases in the capacity to sustain life, coupled with the capacity to exploit, destroy, kill, uproot traditional cultures and communities, and defile the human landscape.

Capitalism created a global empire. It also created global resistance. The drive to construct empires and to build economic, political, and cultural hegemony stimulated revolution, non-violent resistance, and desperate efforts to create new forms of social and economic being. During the period since World War 11, socialist regimes and radical nationalist movements have challenged the hegemony of U.S., European and Japanese capitalism. The twentieth century socialist project disintegrated for a variety of reasons but its loss spurred new and diverse forms of resistance that complicated the rule of “victorious” empires. The economic, political, and military crises of the early 21^st century, coupled with renewed resistance raised the specter of new “21^st century socialist” visions. These visions became concrete programs, again paraphrasing Marx, that were not precisely of peoples’ choosing but necessary transitional steps to socialism nonetheless.

Vietnamese History

Southeast Asia, a diverse space geographically, culturally, politically, and economically, has experienced many kinds of imperial rule and resistance. Vietnamese national identity emerged about 100 BC as a result of Chinese expansion and resistance to it among indigenous kingdoms. But China established its hegemony over Vietnam from 200-900 AD. After that time Vietnam consolidated its independence.

During the 1850s Vietnam came under the domination of the French. Occupied by France, Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) became a classic colony. The Japanese military conquered Indochina during World War II. The Japanese had collaborated with the old French colonial administrators and land owners to control the Vietnamese people. After the Japanese were defeated, the Vietnamese people rose up to challenge the French effort to reestablish their old colony.

From 1946 to 1954, revolutionary forces led by Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh fought and won a victory against the French. At the Geneva Conference, 1954, the war was settled. The United States, however, in violation of the main agreements reached, established a puppet regime in South Vietnam that became the basis for continuing war on the Vietnamese people. The Vietnam War, with the U.S. replacing the French, continued until 1975, when the Saigon military collapsed. Finally, after short and brutal battles with hostile forces in neighboring Cambodia and a short war initiated by China in 1979, violence ended. Now the Vietnamese had to rebuild their country and begin constructing the socialist society they had struggled for since the end of World War II.

Post-war reconstruction was initiated after “the U.S. military and their allies dropped four times the tonnage of bombs used in World War II in Vietnam, which is equivalent to 725 nuclear bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than 3 million Vietnamese were killed and 4 million were wounded. At the same time, the U.S. military used up to 80 million liters of chemicals to ‘clear’ the land.” (Tran Dac Loi). Agent Orange sprayed liberally over the entirety of Vietnam from 1961 and 1971 affected millions of Vietnamese and U.S. soldiers and poisoned the land. Unexploded ordinance and descendants of Vietnamese exposed to Agent Orange/Dioxin remain part of the Vietnamese experience today. The devastation of land and people was reinforced by a U.S. initiated economic blockade of Vietnam that lasted from 1975 until 1994.

From a Socialist Command Economy to Doi Moi (a socialist-oriented market economy)

Tran Dac Loi, Vice-President of the Vietnam Peace and Development Foundation, wrote about post-war economic policies in Vietnam in an essay in Vietnam: From National Liberation to Socialism (Changemaker, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, forthcoming). Loi explained that after the war against the United States ended the newly united Vietnamese nation adopted a centrally-planned socialist economy.

continue

By Linda Gordon

28 May 2013

[This article can be downloaded as a pdf HERE]

The Occupy movement thrilled many who long for stronger progressive movements, and then its wane reminded us of the lack of continuity in the American left. That discontinuity produces a damaging social amnesia about what can be learned from past movements, and none of that memory loss is greater than that surrounding the socialist feminism that formed a particularly transformative part of the New Left. What follows is a brief attempt to rectify that amnesia.

“Second wave” feminism was the largest social movement in US history—at its peak, polls reported that a majority of US women identified with it.[1] From the mid-1960s through its decline in momentum in the 1980s, it was also unusually long as social movements go. A movement of that size naturally encompassed diverse strands, so, unsurprisingly, many scholars and journalists saw only parts of it, like the blind men feeling the elephant.

What’s more surprising is that leftists, mainstream scholars and journalists, and even right-wing adversaries have shared similar misconceptions. One of these is missing the strong socialist feminist stream within women’s liberation. This mistake is symbolized by the anointing of the protest at the Miss America beauty contest in 1969 as the founding moment of the movement. The canonization of that event derives from taking two particular parts of the elephant as the whole: feminism’s struggle against the sexual objectification of women in mass culture, and the particular forms of New York City feminism. The two are related, because New York City’s feminist leadership was long dominated by journalists and others in the media business, so they were especially irritated by media sexism and particularly well positioned to challenge it.

The unremembered socialist feminist stream, like the rest of the Left in the US, has been strong in its episodic power and weak in continuity. It has flowed and ebbed within larger socialist and feminist movements: from the earliest communitarian socialism through 19^th-century women’s-rights through the early 20^th-century Socialist Party feminists through Communist Party theorists such as Mary Inman. When it re-emerged in the late 1960s, its early members had little knowledge of their ideological ancestors; this history was never taught to us, its writings buried in a few archives. Instead the 1960s socialist feminists began from their experience in the civil rights movement, the mother of the whole American New Left.

In this reinvention, American socialist feminism was distinct from Marxist feminism, and involved no loyalty to any of the regimes that called themselves socialist. Marxist feminism in the US was the ideology of several sectarian Marxist-Leninist groups (such as the IS and SWP) that saw the women’s movement as fertile ground for recruitment into their parties.[2] These groups tended to retain the orthodox faith that Marxism contained a theory adequate to understand male dominance (and all forms of domination), and they focused pretty exclusively on anti-capitalist strategies. Socialist feminists, by contrast, had concluded that capitalism was by no means the root of male dominance and that new theory was needed to understand its structures and continued reproduction. Socialist feminists rejected Leninism and Maoism and, like the rest of the New Left, understood the allegedly socialist regimes as corrupt, brutal, and undemocratic.

The distinctive mark of socialist feminism was its view that autonomous structures of gender, race and class all participated in constructing inequality and exploitation. Socialist feminists expanded the Marxist notion of exploitation to include other relations in which some benefited from the labor of others, as, for example, in household and child-raising labor. They argued that militarism and conquest, as well as environmental destruction, were propelled by masculinist drives as well as by the search for profit. From conceiving the structures of male domination as somewhat autonomous it followed that, in any given situation, none of them was always the key factor, which in turn meant that gender issues would not always be foremost, nor should they always be a priority. As the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union wrote,

there is a fundamental interconnection between women’s struggle and what is traditionally conceived as class struggle. Not all women’s struggles have an inherently anti-capitalist direction … but all those which build collectivity and collective confidence among women are vitally important to the building of class consciousness. Conversely, not all class struggles have an inherently anti-sexist thrust (especially not those that cling to pre-industrial patriarchal values) but all those which seek to build the social and cultural autonomy of the working class are necessarily linked to the struggle for women’s liberation.[3]

Socialist feminists were as anti-capitalist as any other socialists in the New Left, but never conceived capitalism as the sole or always the primary adversary. They offered no design for a socialist economy and thought it unnecessary and un-useful to do that; generally favorable toward public ownership, and especially cooperatives, they believed that a just economy—one that guaranteed equality and wellbeing to all–would have to emerge from a democratic process.

The socialism imagined by the socialist feminists returned them in some ways to what Engels had called "utopian" to distinguish it from "scientific" socialism. Suspicious of vanguardism, socialist feminism rested on a commitment to democracy and an opposition to Leninism. Its activists emphasized direct democracy and often rejected hierarchical leadership ladders. Socialist feminists equally rejected American-style democracy, with its passive and substantively disfranchised electorate. The socialist feminist vision called for participatory democracy, a system that required of its citizens active participation in discourse and policy formation. It is closely connected to the principle of prefigurative politics– the notion that a democratic end goal cannot justify undemocratic means, because the end would be corrupted by undemocratic means. Economic democracy and working-class power– socialism’s previously dominant ideas—could only be achieved through political democracy and active participation of the citizenry.

This political culture extended beyond those who explicitly called themselves socialist feminists. Many avoided the term because they abhored the regimes labeled socialist, others because of the continuing impact of red-baiting. By the early 1970s, many activists and several significant organizations did claim that label, but did not always foreground it in their organizing, because their strategies involved building broad, participatory progressive action around women’s needs.

The stream called socialist feminism arose, like the rest of the New Left, from the civil rights and student movements of the 1955-65 period. Less well known were the socialist or social-democratic perspectives of some of the female labor leaders who worked for labor organizing and welfare provision from the 1930s on, and later helped create NOW. The Leftist women of the New Deal, such as Mary Dublin Keyserling of the Department of Labor Women’s Bureau; labor feminists such as Addie Wyatt of the UPWA, Caroline Davis and Dorothy Haener of the UAW; and former Communists such as Myra Wolfgang, Betty Friedan and Gerda Lerner were as important in establishing NOW as were liberal women. Moreover, NOW continued the labor and social-democratic feminists’ focus on workplace organizing of working-class women, pushing unions to the left, constructing support for women’s unpaid labor, and—particularly among CP members– fighting racism.[4]

Closely related to the historical blotting out of socialist feminism is the common myth that the women’s liberation movement “broke off” from the New Left. This myth developed, I suspect, out of the reaction against feminism, expressing an inability to conceive of women’s demands as part of a basic social justice movement. Along with historian Van Gosse, I have argued that we need to conceive of a “long New Left” that began with civil rights and proceeded through the student movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, women’s and gay liberation.[5] None of these were simply “identity politics,” although all—including even students—were fighting for rights and recognition that had been denied them. All were connecting their own experience with global injustices. Feminists were examining the gendered roots of violence, poverty, and inequality, from Mississippi to China. All the socialist feminists, and a large proportion of all “women’s libbers,” continued active in the anti-war movement, in support for civil rights, welfare rights, civil liberties, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, the Brown Berets, the UFW and the grape boycott, the miners’ strike, DRUM and ELRUM, community control of schools, and against police brutality, university complicity in the war machine, corporate mistreatment of workers … the list could be much longer. Socialist feminists organized the 1971 meeting of a thousand North American women with women leaders from Vietnam’s National Liberation Front in Vancouver, Canada.

The women’s liberation movement

To understand socialist feminism we need to consider what it shared with the whole women’s liberation movement. The younger stream of socialist feminism developed independently of the NOW women, and that failure of historical continuity produced both losses and gains: The younger feminists had the freedom to invent new ways of organizing and to explore modes of domination previously regarded as “natural” or even “trivial; but they lost the opportunity to learn from their elders about how to operate in the American political structure. The New Left feminists differed from labor and social-democratic feminists both theoretically and strategically. They understood sexism much as the civil rights movement had taught them to understand racism: not as epiphenomena of capitalism but as autonomous economic and cultural structures. These structures–or cultures–pervaded every aspect of life, and thus had to be confronted in every aspect of life. While centuries of racism had invaded the consciousness of many black people, centuries of a male-dominant gender system had been more internalized, imbedding in many women (and men) the assumption that their subordination was natural. Rejecting that assumption through the concept of gender was the most important theoretical contribution of the women’s liberation movement; this insight into the social, historical construction of gender denied the naturalness of male dominance, just as anti-racist activists denied biological racism. This theoretical move then required a strategic move, also derived from–and expanded beyond–civil rights: that the primary task was to unlearn gender. This was accomplished through a new method of organizing that came to be called consciousness raising

Some have conceived of consciousness raising as a means of preparing people for activism, but that is a misunderstanding. Consciousness raising was activism. Feminist organizing had to differ from that of the civil rights and labor movements, whose members usually knew that they were disadvantaged. The predominantly white, predominantly middle-class women who began women’s liberation had typically been unconscious of their own oppression and limited opportunities because they had accepted the gender system as a “natural” and inevitable outgrowth of their sex. They had to unlearn what Marxists would call a false consciousness.

By changing women, consciousness raising changed all sorts of relations, often without conscious plan. Women’s changed consciousness changed relations with fathers, mothers, siblings, boyfriends, husbands, children, bosses, supervisors, teachers, auto mechanics, shop clerks … Of course these changes were neither complete nor easy, and backsliding has proven far too easy. My point is, however, that the women’s liberation movement grasped and exposed the ubiquitousness of the relationships, formal and informal, that structure domination and inequality.

Exploring the hidden injuries of gender was commonly accomplished in small and women-only groups. The groups provided permission to complain and vent anger without fear of consequences, and freedom to explore the intimate. They also provided comparisons that gave rise to analyses. Women were learning by interrogating the conventions of gender and male dominance. It was as if they became anthropologists, studying themselves and their communities, unearthing the processes of gender and male dominance.[6] Their meetings were not therapy, although they were supportive; they were not bitch sessions, although plenty of anger and pain was let loose. Paradoxically, consciousness raising attracted women because they were socialized toward intimate talk with other women, but now that intimate talk was undermining their socialization. When consciousness raising worked well, it gave rise to the slogan “the personal is political,” because it created the discovery that sexism—another word created by the movement and now universally understood—operated in every sphere, including kitchen and bedroom. The process was, ideally, one of group discovery, of shared empirical learning that led to generalization and theory.

The women’s liberation movement was constituted overwhelmingly by young, white, middle-class, college-educated women. This class and racial basis replicated that of the student New Left, and there were reasons for it. Working-class and nonwhite women faced class and race discrimination daily, and feared the fragmentation that might have resulted from a public embrace of feminism; many women of color faced anti-feminist pressure from men that was worse than that experienced by white women. But separate streams of black, Latina, Asian and American Indian feminisms arose and almost always shared the base socialist-feminist perspectives. The most influential was African American feminism, which appeared in 1968 in the Third World Women’s Alliance, started by Fran Beal.[7] The TWWA’s core analysis–that women of color had to struggle against race, class and gender domination at the same time—was common among all feminists of color. But there was no more homogeneity among them than among white women. In 1975 Boston’s Combahee River collective produced the most influential statement of black socialist feminism, expressing its core premise thus:

We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. [8]

Combahee was responding, like many feminists of color, to forms of nationalism that defined and promoted women’s second-place, supporting-the-men position as part of their racial/ethnic identity and charged that feminism was a white ideology. Many white feminists also bent under these pressures–for example, most socialist feminists supported uncritically the Black Panthers’ armed posturing.

Many feminists of color also accused white feminists of racism. There can be no doubt that many middle-class white feminists were oblivious to the depth and strength of racism to the daily lives of working-class and poor women. The very energy of self-discovery only fed this oblivion. Some accused white feminists of excluding women of color, an exaggerated accusation, given that women’s liberationists were eager to reach women of color and developed many projects focused on anti-racism and the needs of working-class women. (In fact, middle-class white feminists, feeling guilty about their privileges, made many of these accusations.) But the experiences and priorities of middle-class whites were at times so privileged, and their conversations so insular, that their groups felt exclusionary to many women of color.

Organizationally, socialist feminism was never able to create cross-class and interracial organizations. But that should not be our only criterion for evaluating its successes and failures. Far from weakening the overall women’s movement, the presence of racially separate feminist groups strengthened the impact of the women’s movement.[9]

Socialist feminism in action

One reason for the eclipse that has obscured socialist feminism is that this sector of the movement produced less writing than others. New York City’s “radical feminists” were often writers by vocation, and they turned out numerous manifestos. University-based feminist groups often started small underground newspapers. The socialist feminist groups tended to focus on activism at the expense of theorizing. As the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU) wrote, “We do not find helpful the constant cry that before we organize, we need to develop a complete theory of the nature of our oppression or find the prime contradiction of our oppression (as if there is just one). Some analyses, in fact, have led us only to further inaction …”[10]

The socialist feminist organizations often spawned workplace organizing. The CWLU gave birth to Women Employed, a group that lobbied for decent wages and working conditions. Another group, DARE (Direct Action for Rights in Employment), conducted a campaign for women janitors that forced the Chicago City Council to hold hearings at which these workers testified about unfair labor practices and unequal pay. Boston’s Bread and Roses women started organizing waitresses and clerical workers and ultimately gave birth to the organization, then union, 9 to 5. When an anti-war moratorium on university activities was being planned for October 1970 (the “Moratorium”), one B & R consciousness-raising group realized that the male organizers had, unsurprisingly, reached out to students and faculty but not clerical workers, so the group quickly produced a leaflet inviting office staff at universities to come to a lunchtime discussion about the action.[11] Agitating for affordable child care was a priority of many women’s liberation groups. One important study showed that women’s movements have had a greater progressive impact on pro-labor policy at the state level than did labor unions.[12]

Equally important, the reproductive rights and anti-violence work of these groups was of fundamental importance to poor women and women of color. Among the CWLU’s projects was the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse. For decades poor women, and particularly people of color, had been sometimes subjected to involuntary sterilization. State authorities could threaten to cut women off welfare if they did not agree to be sterilized, or get them to sign consent forms at moments of painful labor and delivery.[13] Chicago activists joined socialist feminists across the country in campaigns based on the principle that reproductive “choice” required the right to bear children as well as not to, and economic and social as well as legal rights—including economic help for raising children when necessary and for accessing contraception and abortion. This campaign was able to get the federal government to issue stringent regulations designed to prevent involuntary sterilization in 1978 (but not to repeal the federal ban on Medicaid funding for abortion). Activists frequently tried to establish free or low-cost health clinics for women—something Black Panther women also worked for–though they usually foundered for lack of funding. The most lasting and influential health project was the book Our Bodies Ourselves. Originally a 190-page stapled booklet, printed on cheap, newsprint paper, sold for 75 cents, and distributed by a New Left underground press; banned by schools and public libraries and denounced as obscene trash” by conservatives;[14] it became a commercial-press bestseller 10 years later—with all profits going into the women’s health movement. It offered information on alcohol and other drugs, occupational health and safety, birth control, violence, childbirth and parenting, and critiques of corporate medical insurance and big pharmaceuticals. Tens of millions of women of all social classes first got honest information and radical analyses of power structures from these books.

In organizational matters he younger feminists differed sharply from the older NOW feminists. Like much of the New Left, socialist feminists were committed to participatory democracy, a demanding and somewhat utopian organizing approach. (It corresponds to what Occupy came to call horizontalism, while NOW was vertical.) As modeled primarily by SNCC, it meant active participation of all participants in developing strategy and goals. No one should be a silent member merely casting a vote. From this followed a notion of leadership quite different from that of, say, Lenin or Alinsky: the duty of leadership, as promulgated by civil rights intellectual Ella Baker, was to create new leaders, to erase as much as possible the distinction between leaders and followers. Organizations should exemplify in their daily practice the egalitarian democratic society they wanted for the future. Although this ideal may be practicable only in small organizations, it is valuable as a goal even in large ones, because it insists on listening and accountability to non-leaders, that is, with followers. In the interest of participatory democracy, women’s liberation groups rejected both bigness and centralization, and their decentralized organizational structures made possible creative tactical experimentation. Even in large citywide socialist feminist organizations such as those in Chicago and Boston, small project groups could produce quick actions without having to wait for approval from central leaders, and could explore new ventures. They taught courses ranging from auto mechanics to Marxist economics, set up consciousness raising groups with working class teenagers, produced silk-screen posters, created women’s liberation rock bands, and—in the closest the movement came to “violence”—planted stink bombs at Dow Chemical headquarters.

The whole New Left exaggerated its participatory-democratic principle, but no group did so as intensely as the young feminists. Women had had extensive experience with being disregarded, disrespected, and shunted into clerical and janitorial work in male-dominated environments. Precisely because of their socialist politics, they did not assume that women were necessarily free of egotism or power hunger. So they sometimes brought into their feminist organizing an excessive suspicion of strong leaders and insistence on radically democratic practices. In Bread and Roses, some of those who displayed the greatest capacity for leadership were maligned and undercut in an intemperate demand for formal egalitarianism, a kind of leveling that failed to recognize the need for order, efficiency and continuity. But this also resulted from an organizational insistence on direct instead of representative democracy, and failure to institute formal programs for training leadership and holding it accountable. The results was at times organizational disorder: meetings lasted too long, discussions wandered, chairs were unpracticed; and these problems led smaller project groups to greater autonomy from their parent organization. By contrast, the CWLU handled well the inevitable tensions between effectiveness and democracy, and it lasted for eight years—a remarkably long period for a social movement organization that made heavy demands on its members.[15]

No social movements last long. By definition, they require intensive mass activism, and few participants can sustain those commitments over the long term. So it is a mistake to measure the success or failure of social movements by their persistence. We need instead to consider the enduring changes effected by social movements –in consciousness, practices, and institutions; and to remember that the size of the backlash is often proportional to those changes. Second-wave feminism radically transformed medical research and services, sports, education, family life, the professions, law, popular culture, literature and the performing arts, social work, international development thinking, and even religion, and made possible the gay liberation movement.

It is difficult to distinguish the contribution of socialist feminism from that of the whole women’s movement, but one indication can be found in opinion polls. While left political preferences are of course stronger among lower-income people, women of all classes are more progressive across the board than men. Today’s sex difference in opinion on the Iraq war, gun control, torture, death penalty, drones, homeland security, civil liberties, welfare, poverty, economic policy, education, policing, global warming, etc.—often a 20 point difference between women and men– shows women further left on all issues, not just those labeled “women’s issues.” In fact, women are eight points more positive toward “socialism” and more negative toward “capitalism” than men.[16] Women don’t often call themselves socialist, and few of us even think we know what socialism could be, but there are many who try to move our capitalism in the direction of social justice.

Meanwhile, the astronomic rise in economic and political inequality has hurt women most. So today women and men with socialist feminist politics are most often fighting defensive battles, not in broad feminist organizations but in single-issue groups—campaigning to hang on to civil liberties, abortion rights, labor unions, health care, and to stop privatization, drones, stop-and-frisk policing, the growth of surveillance and carceral policies and the global rule of corporations. These are where socialist feminists can be found in 2013.

[1] A 1986 Gallup poll found that 56% of women, and 2 of every 3 “nonwhite” women identified as feminists. Reported in Newsweek 3/31/86, p. 51.

[2] For an example of the SWP’s attempt to take over the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, see Margaret Strobel, “Organizational Learning in the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, in Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women’s Movement, ed. Mary Marx Ferree and Patricia Yancey Martin (Phila: Temple University Press, 1995), pp. 145-164.

[3] Barbara Ehrenreich, “What is Socialist Feminism,” 1976, at http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/CWLUArchive/socialfem.html

[4] Landon Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 2004).

[5] Van Gosse, The Movements of the New Left (NY: Bedford/St. Martins, 2004); Linda Gordon, “Participatory Democracy From SNCC through Port Huron to the Women’s Liberation Movement: The Strengthsa Problems of Prefigurative Politics,” in Tom Hayden, Inspiring Participatory Democracy: Student Movements from Port Huron to Today (Paradigm Publishers, 2012).

[6] Some locate the origin of the term in Mao’s “speak bitterness” campaigns, ironically, since the women’s liberation movement version could not have been more anti-Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. But the term had also been used in the "Old Left," in speaking of raising the consciousness of workers who did not know they were oppressed.

[7] The third-worldist analysis, which grew also from civil rights, considered people of color in the US as structurally part of a global Third World, the regions condemned by poverty by the influence of US and European imperialism.

[8] Available at http://circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html

[9] S. Laurel Weldon, When Protest Makes Policy: How Socialist Movements Represent Disadvantaged Groups (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), pp. 120-121.

[10] CWLU, Hyde Park chapter, “Socialist Feminism—A Strategy for the Women’s Liberation Movement,” 1972.

[11] Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon, eds., Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement , p. 273.

[12] Weldon, p. 100.

[13] One egregious case brought the widespread practice into view in 1973: Alabama authorities had African Americans Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, aged 14 and 12, sterilized without even their or their mother’s knowledge, let alone consent, on the grounds that they were “at risk” of early sexual activity, the National Welfare Rights Organization protested loudly enough to get a federal investigation into what were widely known as “Mississippi appendectomies.”

[14] http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/about/timeline.asp

[15] The CWLU required its members to participate both in a chapter and a work project.

[16] Pew Research Center, release of 5/4/2010, at http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/610.pdf, accessed 5/6/2013

For Benjamin, religion was a vessel that contained within its authoritarian history and structures the spark of liberation

Walter Benjamin: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule" Photograph: EPA

By Peter Thompson

The Guardian, UK April, 22, 2013

Quoting Hegel, Walter Benjamin reminds us that before all philosophy comes the struggle for material existence: "Secure at first food and clothing, and the kingdom of God will come to you of itself – Hegel, 1807", or as Brecht – Benjamin’s greatest and closest friend – put it "first bread, then morality". But this precisely did not mean that abstraction, speculation and thought per se had to be rejected in favour of an entirely mechanistic historical materialism. What sets all of the thinkers in this series apart from many of their more orthodox Marxist contemporaries is precisely their concern with those issues which cannot be measured, tested and decided upon but which remain undecided and undecidable.

As Benjamin puts it in his On the Concept of History: "The class struggle, which always remains in view for a historian schooled in Marx, is a struggle for the rough and material things, without which there is nothing fine and spiritual. Nevertheless these latter are present in the class struggle as something other than mere booty, which falls to the victor. They are present as confidence, as courage, as humour, as cunning, as steadfastness in this struggle, and they reach far back into the mists of time. They will, ever and anon, call every victory which has ever been won by the rulers into question. Just as flowers turn their heads towards the sun, so too does that which has been turned, by virtue of a secret kind of heliotropism, towards the sun which is dawning in the sky of history. To this most inconspicuous of all transformations the historical materialist must pay heed."

On this reading, history escapes a linear or teleological path around a fixed point and becomes a mixture of points at which possibilities are either realised or rejected but never disappear completely. Again, this continues the theme that Marx took up in his 1844 letter to Ruge, which I have quoted before, about the realisation of a long-held human dream. Benjamin calls this "messianic time" in which historical possibility is resurrected over and over again in order to inform our choices at specific historical junctures. For this reason his historical materialism called upon the services of theology, which, however, had to be kept well-hidden from public view even though it was often pulling the strings. To those who criticise communism and Marxism as "merely" a new form of religious belief, Benjamin’s position – as with Ernst Bloch, whom I shall look at next week – was that religion was actually a vessel that contained within its authoritarian history and structures the spark of liberation which could only be fully realised through historical materialist transformation. In that sense religion is "merely" an old form of a future and as yet unrealisable dream.

Until this unrealisable future becomes realisable its traces have to be read into the symbolic forms of human expression in various different historical epochs. To return to Adorno’s take on history in Negative Dialectics, Benjamin’s position is that we find the solution to the apparent non-identity of the material and the transcendental within the symbolic. We can see here quite clearly another point of contact between Marx and Freud where transcendental thoughts exist not as something separate from material reality but as something both produced by and also affecting and influencing that material reality. In Marx this is the interpenetrating relationship between base and superstructure, to put it at its simplest, and in Freud it exists in the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious realms. In Freud the symbolic plays the role of expression of that which is unknown to us but which we secretly know; namely, the unconscious. In Marx this symbolic expression is present in ideology, which, far from being a straightforward linear relationship between base and superstructure is constantly in flux and which can be captured and changed by the attempted realisations of human possibility. Ideas change as society changes but ideas also create social change.

For Benjamin the role of the symbolic in art thus takes on a transitional historical role. His work on the Baroque, for example, posits it as the turning point between medieval religiosity and renaissance secularisation and the Trauerspiel (Mourning-Play) of that period, with its obsession with violence and death, reflects the growing yet still largely unconscious realisation that there is no happy end in heaven and that – as Bloch puts it – death becomes the harshest of all anti-utopias. Art and culture in his era though, in the era of what he hoped was the transition from capitalism to socialism, had to grasp the dual possibilities of technology so that it could be harnessed not to master nature but to master the relationship between humanity and nature.

This means that art had to take on a political role in increasing the awareness of what was at long last the real human potential for the realisation of the old dreams. It could go either way though; down the Adornian route from the slingshot to the megaton bomb or onwards and upwards to the sunlit uplands of social liberation. Art and technology therefore become interlinked and politicised, predominantly in film. The "aura" of traditional art may have been destroyed by modernity but the future "aura" of liberated humanity as a living work of art had to take its place. If fascism represented the aestheticisation of politics then the fight against fascism had to involve the politicisation of aesthetics and the active creation of the aura of potential.

This is why Benjamin states that "the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realise that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism." In other words, all class society is a permanent state of emergency in which the rulers are always under threat. Fascism is thus not some sort of breakdown of tradition but a continuation of traditional class rule by other means. Overcoming it thus requires not just anti-fascist attitudes but also a destruction of its roots in class oppression. Or, as Horkheimer put it in 1939: "If you don’t want to talk about capitalism then you had better keep quiet about fascism." 

By Prabhat Patnaik

At first sight no two persons could have been more dissimilar.  One was a Cambridge don, with more than one foot in the British government; a supporter of the Liberal Party, staunchly opposed to the Bolshevik Revolution; an aesthete and a member of the Bloomsbury Group; a life peer in imperial Britain, and a solid, if sensitive, member of the British establishment.  The other was a Russian revolutionary, spending years in exile in acute penury, immersed in bitter conflicts among the émigrés, until suddenly confronted with a revolutionary uprising whose strivings and possibilities he comprehended with such clarity that he came to lead it, facing a civil war, a typhus epidemic, and an assassination attempt that ultimately claimed his life.

The secure tranquillity of the life of the one contrasted sharply with the tempestuous violence that continuously haunted the life of the other.  What could these two have in common?

For a start each felt a deep intellectual respect for the other, despite their political differences.  In his report to the second congress of the Communist International, having called John Maynard Keynes “a British bourgeois pacifist”, “a petit bourgeois philistine” and “an implacable enemy of Bolshevism”, V.I. Lenin went on to base his entire thesis about why conditions were ripe for a world revolution on Keynes’s analysis in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.  He even paid Keynes the compliment that “nobody had written about the condition of capitalism better than Keynes”.  Keynes, on his part, not only referred in several places to Lenin’s “brilliance”, but, in this same book, said apropos of inflation: “Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency; . . . Lenin was certainly right.”

But mutual intellectual respect among bitter adversaries is neither unusual nor particularly remarkable.  What is really common to both these thinkers is their belief that the hegemony of finance in the period of maturity of capitalism had brought about a denouement where it became impossible for the system to go on as before.  Of course each had his own understanding of why finance had made capitalism impossible, and each had his own reading of where to go from there.  But the belief that a sheer continuity of the existing order was no longer possible was common to both.

Keynes saw the hegemony of finance as saddling capitalism with such extraordinarily high levels of unemployment that people, he feared, would not for long tolerate such an inhumane system.  Under this hegemony, speculation was no longer a mere bubble on a steady stream of enterprise, but became a torrent that buffeted enterprise around. 

continue

Posted on March 12, 2011 by Socialism and Democracy Online

There are many points of interest pertaining to the development of Marxist philosophy in contemporary China. This paper will focus on the following areas and problems: the debate about the criterion of truth; Marxist philosophical textbook reform; the inquiry into the human agent and subjectivity; Marxism and Confucianism; Deng Xiaoping’s theory; and the socialist market economic system. Let’s start with the debate about the criterion of truth, for this is the historical starting-point of contemporary Marxist philosophy in China.

1. The Debate about the Criterion of Truth

Academically, the real development of Marxist philosophy in contemporary China started in 1978. In that year, China’s intellectual life witnessed a great event. People in every walk of life were engaged in a debate: What is the criterion of truth?

Initially, the debate was related to the political struggle and the ideological debates within the Chinese Communist Party. Chairman Mao Zedong died in 1976, and the Cultural Revolution was officially declared to be ended. However, in ideology nothing seems to change much. The Chair of the Communist Party at that time was handpicked by Mao. As a way to maintain his position, he insisted on the doctrine of the “two whatevers”: (1) whatever policy decisions Mao had made must be firmly upheld; (2) whatever instructions Mao had given must be followed unswervingly. Hence, for the opposite faction, led by Deng Xiaoping (who was purged by Mao in 1975) to come back to power, it was necessary to break these “two whatevers.”

On May 11, 1978, a prominent Chinese newspaper, the Guangming Daily, published an article entitled “Practice Is the Only Criterion for Judging the Truth,” signed by “the Special Commentator.” The article argued that for all forms of knowledge, including Marxism, the nature of their truth must be judged and proved by practice. All scientific knowledge, including Marxism, should be amenable to revision, supplementation, and development in practice, in accordance with the specific conditions under which it is to be applied. This paper was widely echoed and provoked lively discussions throughout China. These led to a consensus that it is practice, not Mao’s words, that can tell us what is right and what is wrong. The immediate consequence of this great debate was that the advocates of the “two whatevers” lost their power, and Deng Xiaoping regained his power and started the Chinese economic reform. In contrast to the “two whatevers,” Deng’s motto is, “It does not matter whether a cat is black or white; as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat.”

However, the debate has had a far-reaching influence on Chinese social science, in particular, on the study of Marxism itself. Since the Communist party came to power in 1949, Marxism, and its Chinese representative, Mao Zedong’s thought, has been regarded as the absolute and as a completed truth system. The only role philosophers could play¾and were required to play¾was to prove the rightness or truth of Marxism and Mao’s theory. Only political leaders, actually only Mao himself, could establish new truth and develop Marxism. Just as philosophy was the handmaiden of theology in the medieval West, so in China philosophy became the servant of Mao’s politics. Any question or criticism put to Marxism and Mao’s theory was regarded as a political challenge. For Mao, the most important thing that Marxist philosophy can teach is its theory of class struggle and the theory of proletarian dictatorship. Mao’s philosophy actually became a kind of “Struggle Philosophy.”

Now the debate about the criterion of truth and the establishment of practice as that criterion broke this myth of Marxism and of Mao’s theory. Marxism became a subject that could be reflected upon, examined, renewed, and developed. The truth-criterion discussion of 1978 was indeed a movement of enlightenment, a movement of thought liberation. It paved the way for contemporary China’s economic development, and it also paved the way for any possible new contributions to Marxism. It used to be the case that one could only “insist” on Marxism; now we could “develop” Marxism, and many now believed that only by developing Marxist philosophy could one really insist on it. It used to be the case that academic philosophy was always subordinate to the leaders’ thought and did not have any independent status. Since 1978, however, philosophical research has won a relatively independent academic position.

2. Reform of the Philosophical Textbook

The immediate effect of these developments for Chinese Marxism was the publication of new editions of the Marxist textbook. One would think that a new edition of a textbook is a matter of pedagogy, of the teaching of philosophy, rather than a matter of philosophical development, or development in philosophical thought. This is not the case in China, however.  For, generally speaking, it is only the Marxism embodied in the textbook that is regarded as the orthodox Marxism, the “true” Marxism that should be learned. A change in the textbook means therefore a change of attitude towards Marxism. To a great extent, the changes of the textbook mirror the situation of Marxist philosophical research.  To get a new edition of the Marxist textbook published, what is essential is not the approval of the referees, but that of the government. Now the situation has changed significantly, yet the reform and reconstruction of the official textbook is still regarded as an important aspect of the progress of Marxist philosophy.

Until 1978, the main textbook of Marxist philosophy in China was Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism (edited by Ai Siqi, the former leader of the Party School of the Communist Party). Its contents and structure were basically transplanted and transferred from the textbook of Marxist philosophy in the former Soviet Union, and it was deeply influenced by Stalinist dogmatism. Though political relations between the Soviet Union and China were broken in the early 1960s, this type of official philosophical textbook had remained unchanged.

Since 1978, Chinese philosophers have introduced important modifications or re-formulations to different aspects and levels of Marxist philosophy.

First, breaking away from the constraint of the traditional textbook, they returned to the original works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Many concepts have been redefined, such as matter, consciousness, existence, spirit, static, motion, ideals, struggle, social existence, social consciousness, knowledge, truth, practice. Various basic views and positions were re-evaluated, such as, “the basic problem of philosophy,”  “the challenge of epistemological skepticism,” “the relationship between dialectics and metaphysics,” “the relationship between materialism and idealism,” “the basic contradictions in human society,” “epistemological methods,” and so on. Some Marxist theories were abandoned, whereas others were re-formulated.

Second, many new concepts and views, mainly derived from Western philosophy and/or sciences, were introduced into the Marxist philosophic textbook, including concepts such as: subject and subjectivity, object and objectivity, medium, element, structure, function, information, feedback, control, social system, social organism, purpose, emotion, will, cognitive model, thinking world, value, evaluation, and so on; and views such as:  “the idealist way and the practical way of human understanding of the World”; “the interactive law between subject and object”; “the farsightedness, selection, and creativity of human cognition”; “subjective principle and the system principle in cognition”; “the unity of truth and value”, “the concrete and historical unity among Truth, Good, and Beauty.” Some new research methods were transplanted, and applied to Marxist philosophical research, for example, the methods of genetic theory, atomic analysis, constructive explanation, and functional analysis.

Third, many new domains have been explored, and many new branches have been introduced and developed, for example, axiology, theory of practice, philosophical methodology, philosophical anthropology, the theory of social organisms, the theory of social control, the genetic theory of cognition, the theory of cognitive evolution, philosophy of man, philosophy of science, philosophy of humanities and social science, scientific epistemology, social epistemology, philosophy of daily life, feminist philosophy, philosophy of environment and ecology, and so on.

These philosophical achievements provided the new foundation to the textbook reform and reconstruction of Marxism in China. There are many textbooks with different outlooks. I would like to mention briefly the following four that are the most influential.

a. Dialectic Materialism and Historical Materialism, editor-in-chief, Xiao Qian, a professor at the People’s University of China. The book maintains the main structure of Ai Siqi’s textbook but thoroughly absorbs the new achievements of the sciences. It includes sub-divisions such as materialism, dialectics, and epistemology, theory of society and history, and methodology. It is the most influential textbook of Marxist philosophy in China. The problem of this book is that some of the new contents of the philosophy could not find their suitable place in the old system.

b. The Basic Principles of Marxist Philosophy, chief editor, Gao Qinghai, a professor at Jilin University. It is based on the historical development of Western philosophy and of Marxist philosophy. The major strength of the book lies in its attempt to locate the historical sources of the main philosophical concepts and its emphasis on understanding Marxist philosophy historically. The problem of this book is its difficulty in distinguishing the content of Marxist philosophy from that of Western philosophy. The other problem is that it is too historical, and somewhat weak in the construction of philosophical arguments.

c. Professor Huang Danshen, of Beijing University, tries to compile a system of Marxist philosophy according to his understanding of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks. The structure of his textbook system is based on 36 pairs of concepts. Since Lenin’s philosophical notebooks are his reading notes on Hegel’s Logic, Huang’s plan carries the obvious influence of Hegel’s philosophy. The other problem of his system is that 36 pairs of concepts are not enough to include all aspects of philosophy.

d. Professor Xia Zhentao of the People’s University of China, and Ouyang Kang [the present author], a professor at Wuhan University, have created another new system of Marxist philosophy according to their understanding to Karl Marx’s “Practical Materialism.” We understand that the major characteristic of Marxist philosophy is its emphasis on “practice.” This is also the basic point of difference between Marxist and non-Marxist philosophy. It is a fact that Karl Marx never called his philosophy dialectical materialism or historical materialism; instead he referred to it as “Practical Materialism” in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844). His most famous sentence was the one that appeared on his tombstone: “Philosophers only explain the world, but the problem is to change it.” Based on Marx’s ideas, we developed a comprehensive understanding of the concept of “practice” and redefined the nature of Marxist philosophy as a kind of Dialectical, Historical, Humanistic, and Practical Materialism. Marxist philosophy is a philosophy of the relationship between Man and the World. The highest function of Marxist philosophy is to help people to recognize, to understand, to evaluate, to control, to develop, and to deal with this relationship more rationally and more efficiently. The new outlook of Marxist philosophy will be a kind of new Subjective-Methodological system.

At the present time, the reform and the reconstruction of the textbook of Marxist philosophy is still going on. We believe that further developments of Marxist philosophy in China should be individualized and personalized, rather than following a unified pattern. Different Marxist philosophers should be encouraged to develop their own philosophical systems based on their own understanding of Marxist philosophy, and they should use their special research methodology.          

3. Exploring the Human Agent and Subjectivity

In the past, human beings had little standing in Chinese Marxist philosophy. Even when the notion of man was mentioned occasionally, it mainly referred to the collective, group, class and nation, but not to the individual. This has been criticized as “stressing nature but forgetting man” – i.e., stressing the collective man but forgetting the individual person. Now it is agreed that the individual human being should be the main topic of Marxist philosophy.

With the publication of Marx’s newly discovered  Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,* Chinese philosophers have become more interested in the problems of humanism and alienation. Some claim that the individual human being should be the starting point of Marxist philosophy. Others think that problems of the individual human being should be the highest target, the primary task, the central subject-matter and the final destination of Marxist philosophy. Still others suggest that humanism can be included in Marxism if it is defined as a basis for ethical consideration. The discussion, however, suffered a setback in the anti-liberalism movement of 1984.

Another related topic is subjectivity. Both subject and object are new concepts of Chinese Marxist philosophy that did not appear in the old philosophical textbook. In the 1980s, discussion of this issue was not limited to Marxist philosophy, but was also found in the literatures of critical theory, ethics, aesthetics, and so on. Why were Chinese intellectuals so interested in the problems of subject, subjectivity, and the subjective principle? The answer is that in discussing subjectivity, the central philosophical position of the individual human being could be established. There are many different positions in the inquiry into subjectivity. Some argue against it on the ground that to emphasize subjectivity would lead to the denial of cognitive objectivity. Others, on the other hand, push the subjective principle to the extreme of advocating an absolute free will. My M.A. thesis is entitled “On Subjective Ability,” and I have published many papers on this topic. I believe that the subjective movement in contemporary Chinese philosophy was actually a thought liberation movement.

In May 1997, Professor Huang Danshen of Beijing University organized a National Association of the Philosophy of Man, which held its first conference in Beijing. The Philosophy of Man has become a very hot topic in China today. One strong feature is to connect this topic with the new outlook of Marxist philosophy. Some claim that the Philosophy of Man is the hallmark of contemporary Marxist philosophy. Others think that the Philosophy of Man is only a part of Marxist philosophy. Nevertheless, the efforts to establish the Philosophy of Man have stimulated much philosophical research and have greatly extended the development of Marxist philosophy in China.

4. Marxist Philosophy and Confucianism

How should Marxist philosophy deal with its relationship to the traditional Chinese value system?           

The controversy between traditionalism and anti-traditionalism has been hot in modern China for many decades. Since the New Cultural Movement of May 4, 1919, anti-traditionalism was the main trend. To some, revolution means rejecting traditional Chinese culture, especially Confucianism. Mao Zedong was deeply influenced by traditional Chinese culture in his early years. But one of the most important aims of his Cultural Revolution was to get rid of Confucianism, and even of all traditional Chinese culture. Traditional Chinese culture is regarded as an obstacle to China’s modernization. Others looked down upon Chinese philosophy, and believed that Chinese philosophy was not mature, and that it lacked logic. They admired only Western civilization and philosophy. Meanwhile, the more traditionally-minded scholars insisted that Chinese culture and philosophy should be the mainstream in China. Now the problem is whether it is possible to combine Marxist philosophy with traditional Chinese culture. Can Marxist philosophy be developed without learning from Chinese culture and philosophy? How can Marxist philosophy become intrinsic to contemporary Chinese culture? How can Marxist philosophy find its foundation and roots in Chinese soil?Almost all Chinese philosophers now realize the necessity of combining Marxist philosophy and traditional Chinese philosophy. Integrating Chinese philosophy and culture into Marxist philosophy is the necessary way to develop Marxist philosophy in China. It is also the necessary way to discover and recognize the contemporary meaning of traditional Chinese culture and philosophy.  There are many positive elements in traditional Chinese culture and philosophy that may be profitably absorbed into Marxist philosophy. Here we briefly list some of them:           

The idea of the unity of Man and Heaven (Nature)
Now our entire world is deeply involved in the ecological controversy surrounding the relationship between Man and Nature. The sharp opposition between man and nature has been characteristic of much traditional Western culture and philosophy, and Marxism itself is a product of that tradition. To find possible ways to achieve a harmony of man and nature has from the beginning been a basic theme in traditional Chinese philosophy. Chinese philosophers insisted that nature is to be regarded not as the slave of man but as the equal partner in human life and in the formation of humanity. Man should stay on good terms with nature. Human beings should respect and protect nature. To protect nature is to protect the necessary environment of human life. Traditional Chinese philosophy is full of ecological insights and anticipations.  The same ecological concerns can be found in Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.   
The outlook and method of the Mean (Zhong Yong).
The Mean, also called “the Impartiality” or “the Doctrine of the Mean,” is the Middle Way.  Epistemologically, the method of the Mean seeks to master the object in a complete and rounded way by avoiding any kind of extreme, excess, and partiality. In the context of social life, the Middle Way prescribes that each human being should form his own judgment regardless of the opinions of others. 

Harmony among peoples
Chinese philosophy emphasizes peace and harmony among peoples and condemns irrational and unnecessary conflicts and unjust wars. Chinese philosophers insisted that human beings should respect and help each other. And their harmonious relationship is to be based on the common understanding of virtues. Rulers should treat their people as they treat their children. To show respect to the old and to protect youth were regarded as the basic virtues in ancient China. Traditional Chinese virtues, such as diligence and filial piety, have their contemporary meanings in today’s human life and should become the intrinsic content of Marxist ethics.

Recently there have been heated discussions on Asian Values in the East and also in the West.. It is generally agreed that Confucianism is the main core of Asian values, which include in particular “Family Values.”   Many Chinese philosophers believe that the teachings of traditional Chinese philosophy could still be applicable to human life today.  They retain their relevance in contemporary world culture.
5. Deng Xiaoping Theory

Deng Xiaoping theory is regarded as the new stage and new outlook of Marxist philosophy in contemporary China. It is the guiding ideology in building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Deng’s thought has been intensively studied.

I think that the most important contributions of Deng Xiaoping theory lie in the liberation of the human spirit in contemporary China. The core and key point of Deng’s theory is “emancipating the mind” and “seeking truth from facts.”  Seeking truth from facts is the quintessence of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. Deng emphasized this in 1978 and used it to counter the “two whatevers,” thus opening up a new area for China. It was called the first Spirit Liberation Movement in China.  After the political incidents in 1989, there were some arguments about where China should go, especially whether China should continue its reform and open policy. Deng stressed the emancipation of the mind in his trip to South China in 1992. This affirmation cleared up many important misconceptions about Socialism, and advanced the reform to a new stage. This was called the second Spirit Liberation Movement, which initiated the socialist market system in China. After Deng’s death, there have been some debates regarding his theory and practice. Secretary-General Jiang Zemin and the central committee of CPC stressed these two aspects again in its 15th National Congress in September 1997. This was regarded as the third Spirit Liberation in today’s China.

Deng Xiaoping’s other important contribution to Marxist philosophy is to establish a new criterion for socialist theories. He claimed that the fundamental questions we should ask about socialism are what socialism is and how to build it. He raised three fundamental criteria for judging a proposal or a policy: whether it is favorable for promoting growth of the productive forces in a socialist society, whether it is favorable for increasing the overall strength of the socialist state, and whether it is favorable for raising the people’s living standards. The criteria were called the “three favorables.”  By these three value criteria, people could actually evaluate all social policy and social administration and could judge between right and wrong and between good and bad.

Deng Xiaoping theory is a system with rich contents. He has greatly contributed to the contemporary development of China. His philosophical ideas give us enlightenment although they do not complete the development of Marxist philosophy in China. Deng’s theory itself should be developed in time.

6. Marxism and Chinese Socialist Market System

One special and current problem facing Chinese Marxist philosophers is how Marxist philosophy answers the challenges of constructing a socialist market economic system in China. In the past 20 years, the economic system in China has been changed from the central planning system via planned commercial system to a socialist free market system. The economy has developed rapidly. The new market system has thrown all traditional disciplines, such as philosophy, literature, and history into turmoil. As everyone knows, Marxism in China had a privileged political position in the planning of the social system. Now Marxist philosophical research has become a kind of academic research. The authority of Marxist philosophy can only be based on its content and function, depending on whether it is recognized by society. Marxist philosophers stand on the same level as other scholars. It is not only a kind of challenge but also a fair competition. This situation forces and stimulates Marxist philosophers in China to do their work better than ever. It is the motivating force underlying the development of Marxist philosophy as an academic discipline.

The socialist market economy, as a part of Chinese Marxism, is both a heritage and a development of Marxist economics. In our prior understanding of Marxism, socialism is the opposite of capitalism. The basic nature of capitalism is private ownership, free market economic system, and wealth distribution according to the ownership of capital. As the opposite of capitalism, the basic nature of socialism lies in the public ownership of capital, planned economic system, and wealth distribution according to work. The former Soviet Union, some Eastern European countries, and China had tried for many years to follow these criteria for socialism, and the consequence is not good at all. This situation led the Chinese Communist Party to re-think and re-understand Marx and Engels, especially the ideas of their later years. If one inquires more deeply into why they contrasted socialism with capitalism, one will discover that in their understanding, the highest goal of socialism is to create the higher productive forces, to get rid of social inequality, to destroy poverty, and to make all social groups richer. Socialism is thus a more advanced system than capitalism. But these ideas are not easy to actualize. Each country has to find its own effective and possible way according to its own history and reality. Only when your socialist theory succeeds can it be proved to be true socialism, and only then can your practice be accepted and followed by your people. Otherwise socialism will have no reason and no power to attract the people. Here we should insist that practice is the only criterion to judge the truth of socialism and of Marxism.

The Chinese socialist market economic system is based on following arguments.           

1). Marxist socialism is not a kind of dogma but an active and practical movement. The highest goal of socialism is to develop productive forces in the most effective way. The basic doctrine of socialism is to enrich all members of society. To meet its goals, the development models of socialism in the world are not universal and unique but variable and multiple. In different countries, socialism requires different models and different ways. This is a necessary way to realize and to develop socialist theory.

2). The market, as an economic form, is neutral in relation to political and ideological systems. The market system does not belong only to capitalism but can also be used by socialism. Today’s world is basically a global market economic system. Any individual country should consciously join in the world market system if they want to become a member of international society rather than being isolated. This also applies to China.

3). It is impossible to complete the transition from capitalism to communism in one step. There are some middle stages between them. Socialism is a middle stage in the transitional process. It should contain the characteristics of these two societies.

4). The Socialist free market system with Chinese Characteristics is a new development of Chinese Marxism. On the one hand, it insists that the highest aims of socialism are to develop the productive forces and to enrich people’s lives to the greatest extent. On the other hand, it fits with the down-to-earth situation of contemporary China.

5). It has been proven through many years’ unsuccessful practice in China before 1978 that the pure central planning economic system was a way neither to develop productive forces nor to raise the people’s living standard. The fastest continuous economic development in China since 1978, especially since 1992, has strongly proved the benefits of the socialist market system.

Reference

Ai Siqi ed.: Dialectic Materialism and Historical Materialism, People’s Press, Beijing, 1970.

The Special Commentator: “Practice Is the Only Criterion for Judging the Truth”, Guang-ming Daily, May 11, 1978.

Gao Qinghai: The Basic Principles of Marxist Philosophy, Jilin Press, Changchun 1989.

Xiaoqian etc. ed. The Basic Principles of Marxist Philosophy, The Chinese People’s University Press, Beijing, 1992.
Ouyang Kang: An Introduction to Social Epistemology, China Social Science Press, Beijing, 1990.

Ouyang Kang: The Methodology of Philosophy Research, Wuhan University Press, Wuhan, 1998.

Ouyang Kang: From the Discussion of Truth Criterion to the Construction of the New Morphology of Marxist Philosophy, TIANJING SOCIAL SCIENCES, 1998(6)

The author: Prof. Dr. Ouyang Kang, Dean of the School of Humanities, Head of the Department of Philosophy, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei 430072, P. R. China, Tel/Fax +86-27-87882755 , Email: kouyang@whu.edu.cn.

*[Ed. note: Although Marx’s 1844 manuscripts were first published in 1932 (in Berlin), it was not until 1979 that they were published in China.]