Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T01:44:34.839Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Marxist Controversy on China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Benjamin Schwartz
Benjamin Schwartz
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Get access

Extract

Karl Marx is responsible for the famous if inaccurate dictum that while previous philosophers had been interested in explaining the world, he was interested in changing it. Yet the fact remains that Marx was passionately interested in explaining the world. The drive to explain is presumably intimately bound up with the drive to change and yet one cannot help but feel that as Marx becomes involved in some of the more complex problems of social history the desire to explain often becomes for a time at least the overriding end.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , February 1954 , pp. 143 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1954

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The controversy rages in a whole series of books and periodical articles. Among the periodicals involved are the Hsin sheng-ming (New Life), Hsin ssu-ch'ao (New Tide of Thought), Tung-li (The Moving Force), and Tu-shu ts'a-chih (Reader's Miscellany). The latter review is one of the most important sources. It devotes a whole series of special numbers to this subject and opens its pages to all schools of thought.

2 Chung-kuo she-hui-shih lun-cheng .

3 Actually this does not make as much difference as one might suspect. Lenin's unprofessed revisions in Marxism lie largely in the area of the relations of politics to economics, of the “superstructure” to the “substructure.” In this controversy we are concerned, however, mainly with definitions of various “modes of production,” of various “substructures” considered as static categories—a field in which Lenin contributed little that was new.

4 The Communist, of course, represents the proletariat—that class destined by history to confront absolute truth.

5 The group represented by the Hsin sheng-ming review, including such people as T'ao Hsi-sheng Chou Ku-ch'eng is actually affiliated politically with the Kuomiotang.

6 Among the more famous participants were Varga, Safarov, Radek, Dubrovsky, Kokin, Papayan, Madyar, Wittfogel, Godes and Kovalev.

7 International Library Edition (1904) p. 13.

8 Among the more prominent are Jen Shu Yen Lin-feng Li Chi , and Wang I-ch'ang .

9 That is on political, military or customary sanctions. Liu Ching-yūan , Sun Cho-chang Wang Ya-nan and others.

10 The infant bourgeoisie in China is part and parcel of world bourgeoisie.

11 Among the numerous adherents of the feudal theory are Chu Ch'i-hua , Liu Meng-yūn , P'an Tung-chou , Chung Kung , Po Ying . The whole Hsin ssu-ch'ao group and official theorists of the communist party line such as Li Li-san , Po Ku and others.

12 In the Kerr edition (1909), pp. 382–396, also Chapter XXXVI.

13 Ibid., p. 385.

14 Ibid., p. 390.

15 In the Modern Library edition, p. 367.

16 Op. cit., pp. 918–919.

17 Capital. Vol. I (Modern Library Ed.) p. 794. He remains a landlord, however, and is not a capitalist farmer, since he still extracts surplus not from agricultural laborers but from tenants working their plots of land.

18 Capital. (Kerr ed.) Vol. III, p. 733.

19 The Asiatic society people do insist of course, that the ultimate source of most landed property is “extra-economic” since it derives from state power. The “feudalists,” insofar as they insist on the importance of the individual landlord must emphasize the primacy of the landlord and insist that the bureaucratic state is simply a derivative feature of the “superstructure.” There are feudalists however, who do emphasize the importance of the “despotic state” which, however, they then proceed to call “feudal” on the basis of the passage in vol. Ill of “Capital” referred to above.

20 Vol. I (Modern Library Ed.) pp. 788–796; Vol. III (Kerr ed.) p. 737.

21 Vol. I (Modern Library Ed.), pp. 838–848.

22 Vol. III (Kerr Ed.) p. 938.

23 It is regarded as essential by most latter day advocates of Asiatic society for it provides the state with an “economic basis.” Since the despotic state exploits the masses through “extra-economic” methods, to admit that the state may not even have an economic origin—is to open the door to the possibility that in some societies the ruling class may have no “basis in the mode of production” whatsoever. To make such an assumption, however, is to step out of the limits of Marxism itself.

24 Marx saves the pre-capitalist ruling classes for the mode of production by asserting—but not proving—that whatever may be their method of exploitation the origins of their power “grow up out of the conditions of production itself.”

25 Since completing this article, the writer has had occasion to read Mr. Eberhard's “Conquerors and Rulers” which also touches upon this controversy. In elaborating his own thesis of “Gentry Society,” Eberhard does not hesitate to go beyond the strictures of Marxist premises. In developing his concept of the “gentry class” he maintains that its power is “extra-economic” both in origin (which he tends to find in the sphere of military power) and in the on-going bases of its power (which, he feels, rests ultimately on family prestige.)