Thomas_More
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F: Hu Feng’s Prison Years, by Mei Zhi.
“China’s first literary dissident’s Kafkaesque journey through the prisons of the Cultural Revolution.Hu Feng, the ‘counterrevolutionary’ leader of a banned literary school, spent twenty-five years in the Chinese Communist Party’s prison system…. ”
Hu Feng, a Marxist who never joined the Communist Party, and who was persecuted by the Mao clique.
Unlike China and the Soviet Union, I see no revolutionary capitalist purpose for the state-capitalist regimes in countries such as Albania, KR Cambodia, Cuba, etc. They just appear to me to be regimes tailored to the whim of tyrants such as Hoxha and Pol Pot, influenced by a personal love affair with Leninism. In what way did their state-capitalism have any revolutionary purpose in the capitalist context?
The same with North Korea. The Kim dynasty’s rule has not furthered capitalist development but hindered it and frozen the north in comparison with the highly developed south.
https://www.wionews.com/world/why-chinas-president-xi-jinping-fears-winnie-the-pooh-313823
Winnie the Pooh banned from China.
Btw, I recommend The Tao of Pooh as a superb book.
Yes Wez, it was Europe which spread capitalism globally.
There is a vast difference between the European travellers of the 13th and 14th centuries in Asia and the conquering Europeans from the 16th c. onwards. The former were humble learners, the latter plunderers and thugs.
As for the Peasant Revolt, it is my understanding that the bourgeoisie was afraid of the peasants and their utopian communism, and pointedly refused to assist them. But this means a new topic.
What if a socialist wants to read a Chinese classic, and wants to understand context etc?
Or are we only to bother with European history, and specifically Britain, industrialism, colonialism, etc?
Are our libraries to only contain the works of Marx and Engels?
Non-Europeans are then to be confirmed in their belief that we’re only interested in the West as the “centre of history” and its history as all that’s important. So you can agree with Marx’s dismissive phrase regarding centuries of Chinese stupidity, from which we saved them!
So entire civilisations are of no importance except to an academic, and have nothing worth our study and reading; nothing to teach us; and we can remain in a reductionist, mechanist materialism, alienating others with our insularism.
And the socialist can agree with Henry Ford that history is bunk.
Alan asked me to summarise the system of Imperial China following the criticism of the Leninist fallacy that the synopsis feudalism begets capitalism is true worldwide, which we know to be false. I have answered his request. If you’re not interested, then don’t read it. Go and read something else.
I shan’t apologise for being a socialist who also has other interests, and whose library is not restricted to Marxism.I always thought what distinguished us from the Leftists, as well as our political differences, was our embracing of humanity and of life as a whole. In other words, we are not politicos, sloganeers, limited people, as Leninists are. They are mere ideologists, but we are universal thinkers, and ought not to be ashamed of our thoughts running freely over all things. Socialism is about freeing us all to be just so, not chaining us to restricted modes of thought approved for relevance by a politburo.
Wez, it doesn’t matter unless one is interested in history. A Leninist, though, might challenge you with “If China wasn’t feudal like Mao says, then what was it?”
What will you say? That you don’t know, so Mao must be right?
Or a neutral member of the public might ask, “What was China before capitalism? Was it feudal, like England?”
4. Viewed by 19th century bourgeois Europeans as a “putrifying corpse”, China was a society which humbly accepted the “impermanence of all things” as taught by Buddhism and saw the rise and fall of its ruling dynasties in this light. Each Chinese epoch contributed to human civilisation and Europe was late on the scene.
5. Chinese society regarded literature, the pursuit of the scholar, as the ultimate value. There was a democratic aspect to this, in that no social position could be inherited. Farmers owned and tilled their own land and every son, regardless of wealth, was permitted to sit the exams which provided entry to the bureaucracy. Of course, the son whose father held a bureaucratic post had a distinct advantage when it came, not only to reading and writing, but being enabled to actually pass the exams. Most farmers had no such time or luxury, and remained farmers. But they were free farmers, and they could find relief from the imperial tax on land by living on and working on estates belonging to scholars who, having risen in the bureaucracy via the exam system, had obtained posts bringing income allowing them to pay the tax on larger estates. So, it was a class society, but operated as a meritocracy. The sons of the officials did not inherit, but had to earn (via the exam system) the position their father had earned, or similar, in the bureaucracy. With all land belonging to the Emperor, there were no “landlords” as the Maoists speak of, but bureaucrats, whose subalterns might well misappropriate taxes and exploit poor farmers – which in fact was a rampant problem that successive emperors attempted to eradicate, never fully succeeding.
6. So, whilst farmers (peasants) tilled the land, or paid of the produce they cultivated on another’s land, so sharing his tax liability (a system nonetheless open to corruption), scholar-bureaucrats received salaries from the throne, higher or lower depending on the post filled.
Which leaves those others, the merchants, traders, craftsmen and artisans, architects and scientists, and doctors. These roles were familial, via apprenticeship from father to son, but also to adopted sons. These lived on salaries paid for their work, and tended to remain in the same families, passing their skills from generation to generation, outside of the scholastic system.I would have to compose it in English. Eye-strain is already a pain.
What I will do is summarise it here.1. For most of my life I accepted the traditional historical view of most Marxists, that Imperial China was a feudal society. That is what the Maoists and the Chinese govt still say. They also say that the system before their hero Chin Shih Huang was a chattel slavery society, which Confucius supported. Both are balderdash.
2. China never had a chattel slavery epoch, although slaves existed (as they existed among the Vikings). During Confucius’ lifetime, only north China existed, and it was split into feudal kingdoms. This was the Chou dynasty, and feudalism is apt to describe it. But it ended in the third century B.C.E., when Chin Shih Huang conquered the petty kings and created Imperial China.
The new imperial system then evolves but isn’t perfected until the anti-scholastic tyrant’s death and the re-introduction of a “scholasticratic” administration by the Han dynasty, (contemporary with ancient Rome).3. I believe Marx in later life had realised, in speaking of an Asian mode of production, that the European saga of social evolution could not be applied everywhere, although I also believe neither can an “Asian mode” be applied across all Asiatic lands. China had its own unique characteristics.
I also hope Marx, had he lived, would have apologised for echoing the bourgeois lauders of “civilising” colonialism, and take back his disgraceful comment that the European exploitation of China was “waking up the Chinese from centuries of stupidity”! How disgustingly eurocentric is that?!4. (Before 4, I must now rest, and will continue later).
