This post seeks to advance a critique of official Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents, citing the incongruity of certain Western principles with Chinese experience or Marxian ideals (see Buckley, "China Takes Aim at Western Ideas," The New York Times, August 19, 2013, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-leadership-takes-hard-line-in-secret-memo.html?src=portal_starbucks3&_r=1). Among the values the CCP is citing as incompatible with Chinese Marxism are "Western constitutional democracy," "'universal values' of human rights," and "media independence and civic participation." Acknowledging up front my own limitations, drawing my information from a second hand account in a Western news source, I find it necessary, as a Western Marxist committed to envisioning a global future in which communism will have a prominent role, to address the arguments raised by the CCP and to posit the incongruity of Chinese Marxist ideologies with the contemporary realities of communism. More pointedly, statements like these by the CCP political leadership, especially President Xi Jinping, not only convey a certain hypocrisy in the Party's effort to awkwardly mix Maoist ideological principles with the need for liberal, market-oriented reforms. In a world where the Peoples' Republic remains the exemplar of the official, orthodox, Twentieth century version of socialism, statements like those of the CCP imprint a anti-democratic, anti-liberal black mark on communism as an ideal outside of China, hindering the arguments of Western Marxism for a non-capitalist alternative. For these reasons, the CCP's enunciation of opposition to such quintessentially Western ideals must be interrogated in order to situate the position of the CCP against that of Western Marxism.
1. Communism conceptually lacks a unique state-political form.
My conclusion here does not allude to Engels' famous formulation of the "withering away of the state" under communism (see Engels, Anti-Duhring, Part III, Chapter 2, in Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 25, at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm). This formulation, which, in any case, I contest, implies that the lack of class struggle in communist society removes the necessity for a state, existing solely as the means for exercise of repressive violence in the interest of a particular class. On the contrary, the particular understanding of communism to which I adhere recognizes class struggle as a continuous feature of any and every form of society, capitalist, communist, or otherwise, and, thus, recognizes the continuous necessity of an arbiter.
In a larger sense, state political processes are irreducible to their functional roles relative to economic class processes. The state is never just an arbiter between particular economically-defined groups within a society, competing for access to resources, including the means of repression. On some abstract level, the state reflects a moment of common consent to the constitution of a sovereign collective body (a polity) against which the state exists as the embodiment of the sovereign's will to act in its collective interests by means of political processes aimed at continuously defining what these interests are at any moment in time. Such political processes are apt to be highly contentious, producing winners and losers and cumulatively generating uneven distributions of control over institutional sources of political power. This abstract (Rousseauian) understanding of the state lacks an obvious pathway connecting it either to capitalism or communism.
Proceeding from the version of Marxian theory to which I am indebted, capitalism and communism are class structures, defining the production, appropriation, distribution, and receiving of surplus labor/value (see Resnick and Wolff (1987), Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press). State political processes certainly shape the lived experience of class structures and class structures, likewise, shape the performance of state political processes, determining, in part, the course of economic developmental policies. However, the state does not (and, in fact, cannot) rigorously determine the composition of class structures across a polity and, in the same sense, particular class structures cannot uniquely determine the course of state political processes. This is not the same thing as positing the relative autonomy of state political processes from class processes in the manner that Althusser argues (see Althusser, For Marx, p 111, at: http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/FM65i.html#s3). The point is much more complicated because every social process is contained within a larger totality of social processes in which no process can uniquely determine the trajectory of the whole - all of the processes continuously and mutually shape each other, an overdetermination of the whole and all of its parts. That is to say, the character of the state is determined not only by the multifarious class processes performed within a society, but also by the non-class economic processes (e.g. market distribution of commodities) and the whole range of cultural processes (e.g. formal educational processes, family life, religion, mass media production and distribution, popular entertainment, etc.), and it would be impossible to arbitrarily rip class out of its social context to say that either capitalism or communism uniquely determine the processes performed by the state.
So what does all of this mean relative to the denunciations of the CCP against "Western constitutional democracy?" Clearly, Xi Jinping and other upper level Party functionaries and intellectuals make an important point, one that Chinese intellectuals have expressed repeatedly for over one hundred-fifty years, at least since the "Self-Strengthening" movement of the late Qing dynasty - China is culturally unique from the West. The course of development of Chinese state political processes and their relationships to the articulation of the Chinese polity cannot mirror those of the U.S., Britain, or other Western states because the historically accumulated constellation of social processes (over-)determining the development of state political processes in China is different than those of the various Western states. It is possible that Western constitutional democracy (i.e. rule of law, institutionally constrained majority rule, formal enshrinement of basic individual liberties, etc.) is actually incompatible with the particular, historically evolving, constellation of social processes determining the present existence of the state in China.
An arbitrarily large set of explanations could account for this situation. For example, we could appeal to the influence of a wide range of Neo-Confucian ideas about ethics, maintenance of social order, hierarchical social organization, and the role of the state in relation to society as relevant sources for a divergence in the Chinese state political processes relative to those of Western states. Approaching from the opposite direction, it is unclear to me that China has ever experienced a moment as ontologically revolutionary as the Protestant Reformation, with its consequent reconceptualization of man in relation to the universe/God and in relation to other human beings in society (i.e. the ontological bases for methodological individualism as a broad point of departure for much of Western social thought). To some extent, the diverse corpus of Western ideas, especially those associated with the Enlightenment, can trace its roots to the Reformation, against which even critical traditions must acknowledge some debt. By contrast, the integration of Mahayana Buddhist thought into China around the Sixth century, as one of China's most profound philosophically transformative moments, could only reinforce existing indigenous ontological conceptions grounded in holism (e.g. the early Confucian and Taoist traditions) and preclude a more individualistic reading on the relationship of the self to the world at least somewhat characteristic of earlier Indian Buddhist (Theravada) schools.
Truthfully, the ontological sources for an antagonist relationship between traditional Chinese political philosophies and those of the West may run very deep into the history of Chinese philosophical development. Fundamentally, however, I mean to argue that Marxism, as a widely diverse body of thought, cannot be posited as the unique wellspring for this antagonism. Rather, the relatively open and universalistic presumptions of the Marxist tradition (even as a body of thought originating in Western Europe) have been susceptible to reinterpretation based on the unique cultural frameworks within which Marxist theories and partisan political mobilizations have developed and evolved over time. If, in this respect, Marx had intended to formally conceptualize the relationship between capitalism and the state in his larger plan for Capital, this aspect of his magnum opus remains an unfinished piece, about which we can only glean the skeletons of theory in documents like the "Critique of the Gotha Program," with its ambiguous and misleading conception of socialism as the "revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat" (see Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Program," Section IV, in Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 24, at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm). The question of a relationship between the state and communism has always been left to the partisan practitioners of Marxian political practice, and, in this respect, the presumptive solutions inflicted on the world by the Bolsheviks, by Stalin, and, subsequently, by Mao and the first generation of Chinese Communists in power after the foundation of the Peoples' Republic have conveyed to the world inescapable precendents. For this reason, it is difficult for me not to examine the courageous actions of the Bolsheviks in 1917 without concluding that the October Revolution was a wrong turn for Marxism!
More pointedly, the Soviet experience and, later, the Chinese experience of socialism both simultaneously reflect and refract the cultural traditions of the national contexts from which they emerge. In an essentially agrarian country with no meaningful development of an urban propertied, entrepreneurial strata, vast disparities in the ownership of land, and a brutal tradition of monarchical despotism, the Russian Bolsheviks developed a regime that conformed to their expectations for the reorganization of repressive violence into the hands of the workers' vanguard party. Drawing from a theoretic tradition primarily directed at the industrialized states of Western Europe and the U.S., they prioritized industrialization in both manufacturing and in agriculture (collectivization) as a means of advancing to a higher stage within which the workers could produce and consume, respectively, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." That is to say, they did exactly what, in view of their circumstances, they thought the theory had instructed them to do. The same can obviously said of the Chinese Communists' "Great Leap Forward." Like Russia, China emerged from centuries of agrarian "backwardness," monarchical despotism, and state bureaucratic centralization, the last perhaps even more firmly entrenched in the case of the traditional Confucian civil bureaucracies of imperial China than with the state bureaucracies of Tsarist Russia. Moreover, both incipient socialist societies revolted against the antiquated cultural processes of their pre-revolutionary past in the name of a universalistic, atheistic materialism. They suppressed the churches and their transcendental theologies in the name of crude modernist objectivity and ideological commitment to the prospect of a better, communist future, anchored on the sacrifices of the present. To their credit, the Chinese went even further than the Soviets - under Mao's influence, they recognized the anti-democratic faults of their Confucian past and revolted against state bureaucratic centralization in the name of mass participation and the spontaneous creation of a true workers' democracy from the lowest echelons of society. I, of course, refer here to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, about which I will comment further in another part of this post. For now, however, I simply want to argue that there is nothing universal about the experiences of the Russian Soviets or of Chinese Communism - both demonstrate an indebtedness to national contexts, and, this is exactly what Xi Jinping and the present generation of official CCP intellectuals have reinforced in their recent rejection of Western constitutional democracy.
By contrast, Western Marxism, even in its most holistic variations (e.g. rigorously structuralist expositions in the theoretically anti-humanist Althusserian mold), must, in some degree acknowledge their indebtedness to intellectual traditions bearing the imprint of the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. In this manner, Marxian theorizations of the state, in Western cultural traditions nurtured by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and other foundational liberal thinkers, must exist simultaneously as a reflection and refraction of Classical liberal constitutionalist thought. Likewise, the idea of a relationship between the state and communism, within Western Marxism, must simultaneously reflect and refract the cultural traditions of liberalism, while acknowledging that it is presently impossible to perform Marxian theory and political practice to the exclusion of Marxism's Twentieth century history (i.e. the Soviet, Chinese, and other experiences of socialism). That is, as a Western Marxist, I have to come to terms with the Soviet and Chinese experiences as precursors to the Western communist present, to argue, if nothing else, why Soviet socialism was a wrong turn.
My point here is not to denigrate political philosophy in either Western or non-Western contexts, but to acknowledge the incongruities that Chinese thinkers have identified for a very long time and, further, to argue, definitively, that such a divergence only secondarily reflects the particular, unique way in which intellectuals in various traditions have appropriated Marxian theoretic concepts (e.g. the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat) and practiced a politics informed by Marxism. The arguments that I have presented here should suffice to argue that, with regard to cultural divergences, there can be no unique state political form associated with communism within the Marxian tradition. Every Marxist experiment in reconstitution of the state and "civil society" in the quest to build communism takes place within a distinctive cultural tradition that leaves its imprint on Marxism.
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