2. Neither communism nor capitalism uniquely determines a characteristic social formation.
Extending from my argument in the previous post, communism not only lacks a unique state-political form, but it also lacks a larger characteristic form of society. By this I mean that, on the one hand, communisms may exist in almost any form of society and, on the other hand, that the mere existence of communisms within a society does not uniquely determine the larger organization of the society, including its state-political forms (e.g. liberal constitutional democracy, partisan totalitarian autocracy, etc.), its mechanisms for the production and distribution of goods and services (markets, centralized non-market distributions by proportional right, etc.), its media for the diffusion of information (diverse technologically organized free corporate press, state media with strict controls on dissemination of information, etc.), its religious rituals (free private ecclesiastical services, obligatory public rituals), or its diverse forms of entertainment (dancing, music, movies, etc). In the same way that neither communism nor capitalism constitutes a form of government, neither communism nor capitalism nor any other class structural form constitutes a form of society.
Rather, all class structural forms shape and define every other social process performed within any given form of society without uniquely determining every other social process. This is a basic ontological foundation for Marxian theory as I understand it. The point is that the existence of communism within any particular society has particular social consequences, manifest as the effects of communism on every other social process. On the other hand, every other social process, likewise, shapes and defines the performance of communism in any given society where communisms exist. In this manner, the differences between state political processes, distribution of goods and services, diffusion of information, religious practices, and forms of entertainment between Chinese and American societies would necessarily produce different performances of communism (and, also, different understandings of what communism even means!). Conversely, the existence of dissimilar forms of communism in American and Chinese societies implies that the performance of communism within each of these societies will impose dissimilar effects on state-political processes, the distribution of goods and services, diffusion of information, religious practices, forms of entertainment, familial organization, and every other social process.
Four logical conclusions emerge from this understanding of the effects of class on other processes and of the effects of other processes on class. First, the idea that social processes, like those involving class, are continuously shaping and reshaping each other by means of their interactions over time implies that all societies are dynamical/continuously changing. This form of social dynamism through the interactions of the social processes internally constituting a society defines the particular dialectical character of Marxian thinking. A dialectical understanding of society of this kind precludes looking at a society as a static thing, as something objectively given beyond a particular abstract moment in time. Rather, in place of the concept "society," Marxism has traditionally employed the concept of social formation, implying that the formation of any society is continuous, that it is the product emerging at any given moment in time from particular overdetermined assemblages of political, economic, and cultural processes, and that any effort to arbitrarily isolate a particular human population at a particular place and a particular moment in time and label it a society without regard to the social processes that define the inclusive collectivity of its members would artificially solidify/ossify something that is permanently in flux.
Second, following from the previous conclusion, the social formation concept refers precisely to the associations that individual agents create with other agents when they perform particular economic, political, cultural, or physical (biological, chemical, etc.) processes. That is to say, a social formation exists when a set of individual agents jointly perform a given economic process (e.g. manufacturing a car). Such an aggregate of individual agents are temporarily congealed for the purpose of performing the process, and we can look at them as an inclusive collectivity. On the other hand, the same individuals might be simultaneously congealed by other processes (e.g. the political processes of national citizenship), and these processes might have a different temporal duration and a different spatiality than the economic process that brings them together. Such alternative processes produce alternative social formations that may exert different intensities of collective belonging at different moments in time (i.e. citizens feel more unified as citizens when they are performing the political process of democratic participation in elections than when they are simply passing each other on the street, in the workplace, or in a marketplace). In my reading of Marxian theory, we cannot privilege any one of the myriad alternative spatio-temporal scales and processually defined types of social formations. The only thing we can do is describe their spatio-temporal overlaps, examine their continuous or discontinuous networked (piece-wise) characteristics, and theorize the ways in which they interact. Ultimately, the most basic of all processually defined social formation may be homo sapien, a biologically defined collectivity unifying agents through biological reproduction (species-existence as a continuously changing relationship with the environment encapsulated, in part, by the theory of natural selection). Beyond this uni-dimensional biological basis for human collectivity, however, myriad economic, political, and cultural processes, each defining their own collectivities, make the world an interesting place and a subject for infinitely complex studies.
Third, again in conformity with the position asserted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the incongruity of Western ideas with Chinese political processes, the particular social formations produced in China must be unique for their complex constitution by ranges of economic, political, and cultural processes performed in Chinese spatial contexts. The same can be said for social formations within the spatial contexts in the U.S. On the other hand, it would be a mistake, especially in the current age of globalization, to infer that China's difference relative to Western contexts is incommensurable and permanent/permanently defensible by the CCP and its ideologues. Making any such assertion would contradict a Marxist political argument as old as the Manifesto of the Communist Party, that modernity, encapsulating the geographic expansiveness of both capitalist and communist class structures, breaks down all "(n)ational one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness," rendering "a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country" (Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter 1, Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 6, at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm). Globalization, in all of its economic, political, and cultural manifestations, is breaking down the very things that make Chinese social formations unique relative to Western social formations.
To adopt a more contemporary conceptualization of what is taking place, the economic, political, and cultural processes constituting both Chinese and Western social formations are becoming multi-nationally networked. In the Self-Strengthening period of the late Qing, Chinese scholars like Feng Guifen theorized the possibility of resurrecting Chinese dominance within the world by appropriating Western military technology and selectively adding such technologies to an essentially unchanged/unreformed national economy, politics, and culture. It was not enough. In its ongoing confrontation with the outside world, China had to revolutionize its state-political processes (overthrow the dynastic imperial regime and its Neo-Confucian bureaucracy and replace it with a republic), its distributive economic structures (progressively integrate regionally structured market economies into national economy, initially through state centralized distributions and more recently through market liberalization), and its modes of integrating non-Chinese ideas into Chinese intellectual milieux (selective rejection of ossified Confucian modes of understanding the world in favor of Western science and technologies). For all that the CCP can continue to claim a particular cultural uniqueness for Chinese social formations, the Chinese context has been flooded for almost two hundred years by non-Chinese add-ons, in the same way that Western contexts have selectively appropriated Chinese ideas and Chinese technologies (e.g. gun powder, printing) for at least eight centuries. Globalization is a continuum, constituted by the establishment of piece-wise, network connections transcending national boundaries, something that has characterized humanity maybe from the dawn of sedentary civilization.
In this manner, when Xi Jinping and upper level CCP intellectuals posit, as a conservative partisan political position, the incongruity of Western ideas with Chinese politics, they undertake, in my view, profoundly un-Marxian thinking, theorizing the timeless permanence of Chinese political and cultural uniqueness in relation to the West, forgetting how both China and the West have been mutually transformed by their historical interactions, ossifying Chinese social formations in theory that, in reality, exist in a constant state of transformation, and pretending that China is somehow impervious to the global extension of economic, political, and cultural networks that are, at this time, dramatically, if highly unevenly, changing lived experiences of material existence within the Chinese population.
Finally, returning to class structures, for Marxian theory, there is something idiosyncratic in labeling a particular, politically defined national collectivity a "capitalist society" or a "communist society." Proceeding from the above conclusions, such a labeling would awkwardly mix a social formation defined by political processes with an identification referring to underlying economically defined social formations (e.g. capitalist firms, communist workers' cooperatives, etc.). Approaching from the opposite direction, such designations deprive class of its unique specificity as a set of processes defining the production, appropriation, distribution, and receiving of surplus labor/value. If Marxian theory has anything really interesting to contribute to an understanding of how economic processes shape non-economic processes (even as they are simultaneously shaped by non-economic processes), then it requires the analytical specificity of class as its entry point (see Resnick and Wolff (1987), Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy, pp 25-30, University of Chicago Press). As distinct class structures, communism and capitalism generate different effects on political, cultural, and other economic processes within larger, overlapping social formations. Marxian theory seeks, in part, to describe such differences and, consequently, to promote the social benefits arising from communist class structures relative to the costs and benefits of capitalism. If both class structures exist simultaneously within larger social formations, then Marxian theory, as I understand it, constitutes itself, in part, as a body of partisan argument in the competition between these two class structures.
Recognizing, moreover, the overdetermination of class structures in unique spatio-temporal contexts, like those of the new urban special economic zones of Guangdong province or those of the mixed urban, suburban, and rural communities of the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, both in the early Twenty-first century, it is highly conceivable that both capitalism and communism in China look very different from communism and capitalism, as each is practiced in Massachusetts. In this manner, the different practices of capitalism and communism in Guangdong and Western Massachusetts must constitute a basis for the divergence of Marxian thought between Chinese Marxist thinkers in Guangzhou and Western Marxists like myself in Northampton, as our ideas are shaped by our diverse experiences with capitalism and communism. Again, Xi Jinping and the CCP intellectuals are quite correct in positing differences between Chinese and Western thought, but we cannot infer that these differences are timeless, rather than transitory. At this point in the historical trajectories of social processes characterized by globalization, we cannot comprehend how capitalism and communism, as class structures, will evolve in diverse spatial contexts, nor can we comprehend how such evolutions will reshape Marxian theory to bring Chinese and American thinkers closer together or farther apart.
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