Chapter 1 :
Introduction: Anarchism and Revolutionary Discourse
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Author : Arif Dirlik
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Chapter One
Introduction:
Anarchism and Revolutionary Discourse
Anarchism is not the easiest subject to think, speak, or write about within
a cultural context that takes hegemony for granted as a principle of social
and political integration. The most consistent and thoroughgoing of all
modern radical social philosophies in its repudiation of this principle,
anarchism has also for that reason suffered the greatest marginalization.
Other radicalisms, too, have invoked fear and ridicule, but they have
acquired respectability to the extent that they have come to share in the
premises of organized power. The fear of anarchism, in contrast, is built
into the word itself, whose meaning (no rule) has been suppressed in
everyday language by its identification with disorder. To take a pertinent
recent example, in the television coverage of the tragic events in China in
1989, what Chinese leaders spoke of as great disorder (daluan) was
consistently rendered in the reporting as anarchy. (This is not to suggest
that Chinese leaders themselves are incapable of the identification.) But
fear may not be as effective as ridicule in the marginalization and
distortion of anarchism; to dismiss anarchism as irrelevant works better,
since it is thus removed from the domain of serious political dialogue and
historical attention.
This study deals with a historical occasion when anarchism fared better,
indeed was central to speculation on politics: China in the early part of
the century, when anarchism held a place in the center of revolutionary
thought. I argue not only that the revolutionary situation created by
China’s confrontation with the modern world gave birth to a radical
culture that provided fecund grounds for anarchism, but also that
anarchists played an important part in the fashioning of this radical
culture. The significance of anarchism, however, went beyond the roughly
two decades (1905–1930) when anarchism was a highly visible current in
the revolutionary movement. At a time when a revolutionary discourse was
taking shape, anarchist ideas played a crucial part in injecting into it
concerns that would leave a lasting imprint on the Chinese revolution,
reaching beyond the relatively small group of anarchists into the
ideologies of other revolutionaries. For the same reason, the history of
anarchism offers a perspective from which to view the subsequent unfolding
of the revolution and the ways in which the revolution, in order to achieve
success, was to suppress the very social ideals that initially gave it
meaning.
With the success of the October Revolution in Russia and the consequent
diffusion of Leninist Marxism worldwide, Eric Hobsbawm has written,
It became hard to recall that in 1905–14, the marxist left had in most
countries been on the fringe of the revolutionary movement, the main body
of marxists had been identified with a de facto non-revolutionary social
democracy, while the bulk of the revolutionary left was
anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much closer to the ideas and the mood of
anarcho-syndicalism than to that of classical marxism. Marxism was
henceforth identified with actively revolutionary movements. Anarchism and
anarcho-syndicalism entered upon a dramatic and uninterrupted decline.[1]
This could serve equally well as a description of the situation of Chinese
radicalism in the early part of the century, with two qualifications. There
was no marxist left to speak of in China until 192021; non-Marxist social
democratic currents that appeared in Chinese radical thought early on were
not necessarily inimical to anarchism but, on the contrary, willing to
recognize it as a common, if remote, ideal. While in China, too, anarchism
fell into decline with the appearance of Leninist Marxism in 192021, and
was repudiated by the revolutionary Left, which thereafter identified with
Marxism, the relationship of Marxism to anarchism retained some ambiguity.
I have argued elsewhere that most of those who were to emerge as leaders of
the Communist movement in China went through an anarchist phase before they
became Marxists.[2] I will endeavor to show here that these anarchist
origins may be important to an understanding of how they became Marxists,
and also of some features of Chinese Marxism (especially in its Maoist
version) that diverged from the Leninist interpretation of Marxism that
they espoused formally.
That anarchist ideas may have survived the decline of anarchism suggests,
in turn, that anarchism had a different relationship to revolutionary
discourse in China than in Europe. The fortunes of anarchism in China
paralleled (indeed, were part of) the situation that Hobsbawm describes.
But Chinese anarchism was bound up from the beginning with an incipient
revolutionary discourse that was ultimately the product of China’s
confrontation with the modern world, and anarchists were to play some part
in the formulation of that discourse. While anarchism in China was also the
ideology of the revolutionary Left, which identified itself with what it
took to be the most advanced radical ideology of the contemporary world, it
was phrased (especially initially) within the language of this discourse.
For the same reason, anarchist ideas entered this discourse as its
constituent elements. I will argue that anarchism derives its significance
in Chinese radicalism, at least in part, from the diffusion of anarchist
ideas across the ideological boundaries that divided radicals.
Nevertheless, the anarchist origin of these ideas was forgotten as
anarchism gradually retreated before Leninist Marxism in the 1920s. It is
important to recall these origins (the subject of this study), for both
historical and political reasons. Anarchism was important historically in a
contextual sense: as the ideology of the radical Left in China for more
than two decades at the beginning of the century. Because this was also the
period when a revolutionary discourse emerged that was to shape Chinese
radicalism in ensuing years, the anarchist contribution to the formulation
of this discourse must be part of any account that seeks a comprehensive
grasp of Chinese radicalism.
The recalling of anarchism also has obvious political implications for our
understanding of the past and present of socialism in China. The
repudiation of anarchism with the ascendancy of Leninist Marxism also meant
the suppression of certain questions crucial to socialism as a political
ideologyin particular the question of democracy. The Communist regime in
China is in a crisis today, which not only has thrown into question the
continued viability of socialism, but has shaken the credibility of the
socialist revolution. Although the crisis is ideological, part of it lies
unquestionably in the failure of the regime to deliver the democratic
promise of socialism, a failure that has caused a new generation of
radicals to look outside of socialism for alternatives in the creation of a
democratic society.
I would suggest here that to recall anarchism, which Leninist Marx ism
suppressed, is to recall the democratic ideals for which anarchism, among
all the competing socialisms in China’s revolutionary history, served as
the repository. It is a reminder that the socialist tradition in China,
released from the ideological boundaries within which it has been confined,
may serve as a source of democratic inspiration and social imagination.
Whether the kind of democracy anarchists envisioned is feasible is beside
the point; what is important is that it affords a critical perspective upon
the claims to democracy of competing socialist and bourgeois alternatives
of the present and makes it possible to imagine the future in new ways. The
challenge of the anarchist notion of democracy has been swept under the rug
both by capitalism and by socialism as it exists: how to be both ethical
(and therefore deeply mindful of social relationships) and rational (and
therefore able to overcome the hierarchical bind of conventional social
relationships). This was ultimately the challenge that anarchists
introduced into revolutionary discourse in China, even if none stated it
with the directness with which I have expressed it here. At a time of
social breakdown and individual alienation, anarchists imagined a society
where individual freedom could be fulfilled only through social
responsibility, but without being sacrificed to it, which is the essence of
socialist democracy and may be central to any conception of democracy. The
challenge was to resonate with key questions of Chinese politics, which may
account for the refusal of anarchism to disappear, even when it has had
little to say about practical politics.
Over the past decade there has been a surge of interest in China in the
history of Chinese anarchism. Scholarly journals regularly publish
discussions of the place of anarchism in the Chinese revolution. Two major
(and thorough) compilations of anarchist writings from the first three
decades of the century were published in 1984, which have made available to
contemporary readers scattered (and rare) documentation on Chinese
anarchist thinking and provided direct encounter with a long-forgotten
phase in a (still) unfolding revolutionary discourse. Even a biography of
M. Bakunin and a translation of P. Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread appeared
at about the same time. As if in answer, a voluminous collection appeared
and made available extensive Marxist criticisms of anarchism. A history
published in 1989 has provided a detailed coverage of the unfolding of
anarchism, and other works are in preparation.[3]
What this activity adds up to is difficult to say. Especially problematic
is the question of whether interest in the history of anarchism in China is
a sign of interest in anarchism itself. We can only safely deduce that
interest in the history of anarchism is part of a surge of interest in the
history of socialism in China. Anarchism is not the only socialism to enjoy
renewed attention in contemporary China among historians, political
ideologues, and the general reading public alike, but it does appear as one
prominent crest in a broad wave of interest in the past of Chinese
socialism, which includes, among other things, an interest in
long-forgotten aspects of the history of the Communist party itself.
Anarchism has a contemporary relevance to the extent that it is implicated
in the current crisis of Chinese socialism and of the historical
consciousness of socialism. I refer here to the crisis created by the
repudiation of Mao Zedong and of Maoist communism, which has created a
profound uncertainty in Chinese consciousness concerning not only the
future but the past of socialism in China. For the past four decades, the
history of socialism in China has been thought and written around the
paradigm of Mao’s personal biography in China and abroad. The Cultural
Revolution in particular was responsible for elevating Mao’s biography to
paradigmatic status in the conceptualization of Chinese socialism, although
the process was already under way in the 1940s, even before the victory of
the Communist Party in 1949. The repudiation of the Cultural Revolution
following Mao’s death in 1976 was rapidly to call into question Maoist
historiography of the socialist revolution as well. The crisis in the
historical consciousness of socialism that has ensued presents a
predicament as well as novel opportunities. Predicament because the history
of socialism has been deprived of its reference in Mao’s biography and
needs to be relocated in time (the Communist party does not provide a ready
substitute, because in repudiating Mao it has also deprived itself of the
claim to historical infallibility). Opportunity because the repudiation of
Mao has burst open the ideological closure in which socialism had long been
restricted, which has made possible new ways of seeing its history.
Anarchism has had a significant part to play in this crisis. In the
immediate if brief atmosphere of ideological freedom that followed upon the
official repudiation of the Cultural Revolution, critics of Maoism from the
Left in the ill-fated Democracy Movement of 19781980 called for a more
democratic socialism, on the model of the Paris Commune of 1871.[4] The
Paris Commune is not to be claimed for anarchism, of course, because it
holds an equally venerable place in both anarchist and Marxist
revolutionary traditions. But I suggest that as an instance of a democratic
and self-governing social organization, the Commune stands at the
intersection of anarchist and Marxist revolutionary ideals, where the
historical opposition between anarchism and Marxism is blurred into an
authentic social revolution in which the opposition is dissolved in the
common vision of which they are alternative products. Although, as far as I
am aware, the leftist socialists of the Democracy Movement did not use the
word anarchism in their discourse, the use of the Commune as a model
recalled anarchism, or if not anarchism, then that area of Marxism which
overlaps with anarchism and is especially problematic from the perspective
of Leninist Marxism.
To make matters worse, the Paris Commune had also provided a model for the
Cultural Revolution at its more radical moments.[5] It is not surprising,
therefore, that when the first writings on anarchism began to appear in
Chinese publications in the early 1980s, they cast anarchism in a negative,
pejorative mold to attack bourgeois individualism, often confounding the
anti-Cultural Revolution demands of the Democracy Movement with the
Cultural Revolution perversion of correct Marxism. It was ostensibly the
urge to find the key to this perversion, ultimately, that was to sustain
the surge of interest in anarchism. Some have argued that the Cultural
Revolution was a product of the persistence of anarchist influences that
had entered the Communist party at its very origins through the founding
fathers of the party, many of whom had gone through an anarchist phase
before they became Marxists, and stubbornly survived the party’s repeated
efforts to purge itself of its anarchist beginnings.[6] While the use of
anarchism in such writings is often vulgarly simplistic, equated with a
petit bourgeois propensity to mindless individualism and disorder, it has
nevertheless provoked a search for anarchism at the origins of Chinese
communism and, by extension, in the early part of the century. The result
has been the rediscovery of the crucial part anarchism played in the
Chinese revolutionary movement in the first three decades of the century.
On the surface, this rediscovery has merely confirmed the superiority of
Marxian communism (or Bolshevism) to anarchism. As the editors of the
compilation of anarchist writings conclude from the decline of anarchism in
the late twenties: No bourgeois or petit-bourgeois thinking or theory can
carry the Chinese revolution to victory; only Marxism-Leninism can save
China. Marxism-Leninism has uninterruptedly gained in power in its
struggles with bourgeois and petit-bourgeois thinking.[7] There is in this
statement, however, a sense of unease, as if it were addressing unnamed
antagonists who might think that a petit-bourgeois ideology such as
anarchism might provide an alternative to Marxism-Leninism. And while it
would be an exaggeration to suggest that there are those in China today who
promote anarchism as an integral social philosophy, it is possible to read
in the advocacy for a democratic socialism, such as during the Democracy
Movement, the persistence of anarchist influences. It is also difficult to
avoid the impression that the interest in anarchism, even in this
particular compilation, has gone beyond the urge to discover the sources of
Marxism’s perversion during the Cultural Revolution, in order to find out
more about this early alternative to Marxism.
The intellectual context for the surge of interest in the history of
anarchism is, ultimately, not just the repudiation of the Cultural
Revolution but the disillusionment with Marxism-Leninism that it has
brought in its wake. In this sense, the revival of interest in anarchism
may be compared to a similar revival in Europe following the events of May
1968 in France and the consequent repudiation of Stalinist communism. There
may also be a comparison in the ideological content of the interest, which
rests on anarchism, not so much as a self-contained substitute for Marxism,
but as a source of inspiration for a democratic socialism and of insights
with which to complement a Marxism that has become insufficient to explain
the world and to correct for its ills. Anarchism, in other words, must be
reintroduced into revolutionary discourse if it is to be released from the
ideological closure imposed by Marxism, especially Marxism-Leninism, and
redirected toward a democratic socialism better able to account for the
problems of the contemporary world.[8]
The contemporary Chinese interest in anarchism points, therefore, in two
directions. In a negative sense, it points to anarchism as an explanation
of the perversion of Marxism whose ultimate manifestation was the Cultural
Revolution, and it seeks in recalling anarchism a means to put Marxism back
on the right track. In a positive sense, it points to anarchism as a means
of breaking out of the ideological closure imposed by a Marxist-Leninist
past, which views anarchism not as a source of perversion of
Marxism-Leninism but as a corrective to the antidemocratic tendencies that
are implicit in the latter. The one sense is reconstructive, the other
deconstructive. The one seeks to restore authoritarian politics; the other
points toward a more democratic socialism.
It is the deconstructive sense that guides the perspective I bring to this
discussion of the history of anarchism. My evaluation here is the opposite
of those Chinese writers on anarchism who present a negative portrayal of
the part anarchism played in revolutionary discourse. No matter what we may
think of individual anarchists, anarchism was a source of democratic ideals
in the socialist revolutionary discourse, and if anarchist influences did
indeed survive to lead to negative consequences during an event such as the
Cultural Revolution, it may be because they were put to uses unintended by
the anarchists and within a political context of the kind that anarchists
rejected. Whatever may be the shortcomings of anarchism as a social
philosophy, the unconditional repudiation of anarchism by a
Marxist-Leninist Communist party was to deprive it of an important source
of democratic ideals.
Recognition of the significance of anarchism in the Chinese revolutionary
movement has two broad consequences, at least so long as we recognize a
positive function to anarchism in the socialist movement. First, we are
compelled to rewrite the history of socialism in China, which may no longer
be conceived simply as a progressive evolution of a correct socialism under
the guidance of Mao Zedong or the Communist party, as Chinese historians
would have it; it must be seen also as a series of suppressions: not simply
as the evolution of a strategy and a set of policies that brought socialism
to power, but also in the course of those very formulations a suppression
of the ideals and the democratic vision that had initially motivated the
revolution. Political victory may be important, but it is not proof of the
correctness of the strategy that made victory possible not in terms of the
ideological premises of the revolution. There was also a price to be paid
for victory in the attenuation of the revolutionary vision in whose name
the revolution was conducted. Recognition of a historical presence to
anarchism brings into full relief what the price would be.
Second, the history of anarchism in China, no less than elsewhere, draws
our attention to the problematic relationship between Marxism and
anarchism. An important anarchist criticism of Marxism in the twenties was
that in its urge to establish a center to history, either in the
proletariat or in its representative, the Communist party, Marxism
reproduced the very power structures that in theory it rejected. As I view
it, this urge to decenter power does not necessarily call for a repudiation
of Marxism but is, rather, a reminder to Marxists of their own
revolutionary premises. It certainly is a crucial issue of the day not just
in China but worldwide, where voices other than that of the proletariat are
calling upon Marxism to recognize forms of oppression that are not
restricted to the oppression of the working class by the
bourgeoisie—oppression by the bureaucratic state, and gender, racial, and
national oppression immediately come to mind. A single-minded preoccupation
with class and capitalism inevitably results in total or partial blindness
to these other forms of oppression. Similarly, an unwavering commitment to
modernism (a unilinear view of history and its material basis in industrial
and technological progress), which is characteristic of mainstream Marxism
and most certainly of existing socialist states, makes for a blindness to
contemporary questions related to ecology, community, and alienation, which
may no longer be blamed simply on capitalism, but are products of a modern
culture of which Marxism partakes. Anarchism, in surprising ways, may have
a decentering effect on Marxist modernism (which does take capitalism as
the central datum of modern history) and thus may enable us to think about
socialism in new ways without necessarily abandoning Marxism, which stands
to this day as the most thorough critique of capitalism while sharing its
modernist premises. As recognition of the history of anarchism in China may
have a deconstructive consequence in our appreciation of Chinese socialism
by decentering Marxism-Leninism and releasing us from the ideological
closure imposed upon history by the Communist victory in China, so may the
anarchist critique of Marxist-Leninist efforts to establish a new center to
history, as one episode in the global history of socialism, bring that
history closer to the present in the contemporary effort to release
socialism from the ideological closure that its history has imposed on it
globally.
I will now elaborate on the significance of anarchism to an understanding
of the revolutionary discourse in twentieth-century China and draw out
further its historiographical as well as its political implications.
The Anarchist Presence in the Chinese Revolutionary Movement
The heyday of anarchism in China were the years between 1905 and 1930.
Expressions of interest in anarchism were heard first in 19034. And
anarchists would remain active after 1930. But it was in 1906 that the
first anarchist association came into existence, and concentrated anarchist
activity for all practical purposes would cease after 1930. During these
two-and-a-half decades, however, anarchism was to play a central part in
articulating an emerging social radicalism in the Chinese revolution.
What Hobsbawm has observed of anarchism worldwide is also applicable, I
think, to the case of anarchism in China. Hobsbawm suggests that anarchism
has enjoyed the greatest popularity at moments of spontaneous revolutionary
mobilization when revolutionaries, rather than making revolution or
preparing the conditions for it, have been able to share in the
possibilities offered by a revolutionary situation. He distinguishes
between revolution as a happening and revolution as a product of
revolutionary activity:
The test of greatness in revolutionaries has always been their capacity to
discover the new and unexpected characteristics of revolutionary situations
and to adapt their tactics to them. Like the surfer, the revolutionary does
not create the waves on which he rides, but balances on them. Unlike the
surfer and here serious revolutionary theory diverges from anarchist
practice sooner or later he stops riding the wave and must control its
direction and movement.[9]
The distinguishing feature of the Chinese revolutionary movement during
these years, especially during 1915–1925, was a mass mobilization to
which political (if not social) organization was largely irrelevant and
which brought into the radical movement entire social groups (students,
women, laborers) in pursuit of a new place for themselves in the
revolutionary reorganization of Chinese society. In contrast, when the
Guomindang restored political order after 1927, however superficially, and
turned its back on its own revolutionary legacy in its suppression of mass
movements, revolutionaries would depend for their success (and survival) on
their ability to organize a social basis for revolution. The difference was
between revolution as a happening and revolution as made by
revolutionaries. Anarchists, we shall see, benefited from the former
situation, but were unable—because of their own self-limitation—to cope
with the latter.
This distinction is necessary, I think, to draw attention to the changing
problematic of the revolutionary movement in China; but it needs some
qualification if we are to overcome stereotyped notions of anarchism.
Ultimately, the distinction is not between spontaneity and organization,
but between different kinds of organization. What anarchists rejected was
not organization per se but political organization, and if they appear to
have insisted on a spontaneous social revolution, they conceived of
spontaneity as social self-activity that would produce a new social
organization in the course of revolutionary activity. The revolutionary
movement during the earlier period was not spontaneous, it was also
made—though in a radically different sense than after 1927—and
anarchists played an important part in making it. The qualification enables
us to see anarchist activity as something other than the haphazard activity
of individuals, or as a diffuse radicalism without coherence.
Is it possible to speak of an anarchist movement in China? I think so, so
long as the word movement is not understood just as activities whose
motions are determined from an identifiable center—a restrictive
stipulation that was the object of the anarchist challenge to the other
social revolutionary movements of the time. In the ideological topography
of Chinese radicalism in the first three decades of the century, anarchism
was a pervasive presence without a center, concentrated around nodes of
ideological dissemination and social activity whose location changed with
changes in the fortunes of the revolutionary movement. Although it was a
liability from the perspective of political effectiveness, this diffuseness
of anarchism was an advantage in the dissemination of anarchist ideas. A
revolutionary discourse on society that explicitly rejected politics,
anarchism did not call for allegiance to an ideology or an organization as
a condition of allegiance to its principles. Receptivity to anarchist ideas
was most conspicuously a feature of Chinese radicalism when questions of
social and cultural revolution were its foremost concerns; but anarchism
could also infuse the thinking of those whose ideological convictions lay
elsewhere, because it did not challenge them at the level of ideology. It
was in this sense a revolutionary discourse that cut across ideological
divides in the revolutionary movement.
The ideological diffuseness and organizational decenteredness of anarchism
(the two were different sides of the same coin) make it difficult to
identify anarchists or to define the contours of anarchism as a movement.
The appeals of anarchism in China were varied. While all anarchists shared
a common social idealism that expressed itself in the repudiation of
authority, especially of the state and the family, what they found in
anarchism is another matter. For different anarchists, anarchism expressed
everything from trivial acts of antiauthoritarianism to rebellion against
the suffocating authority of the family, of the oppression of women by men
and of youth by their elders, to an esthetic promise of individual
liberation, all the way to the pursuit of a social and economic equality
that was barely distinguishable from that of the Communists. Even among the
social anarchists, the main concern here, anarchism provided a refuge for
modernists who identified it with the truth of modern science and
uncompromisingly rejected a prescientific past, as well as for
antimodernists who, in their frustration with modern society, sought in the
past the promise of a good society. In the early twenties, anarchist ideals
were diffused broadly in radical thinking; even those who in 1921 would
establish the Communist party of China shared the outlook of anarchism
before that time, if they did not actually identify themselves as
anarchists, and would retain anarchist affinities after their conversion to
Bolshevism. Some of the most distinguished anarchists were also members of
the Guomindang, even though in theory they rejected politics, and would
play an important part in the Guomindang suppression of Communists (and of
anarchists) in the late twenties. Anarchist commitments had such an
evanescent quality that even anarchists were on occasion unsure of the
seriousness of commitment, not just of rank-and-file, fly-by-night
anarchists, but of those with leadership roles in the movement.
Anarchist attitudes toward organization compounded (we might even say were
responsible for) the problem. Strict organizational affiliation, which
quickly disciplined a comparable ideological diffuseness among Marxists in
the early 1920s, is of no help in delineating the anarchist movement
because anarchists repudiated the subjection of the individual to the
organization and of the peripheries of the movement to a center; jealous of
local autonomy (localized ultimately at the individual level), anarchists
were at one in rejecting centralized regulation of their thinking and
activities. Anarchist organizational rules, rather than requiring members
to subscribe to a well-defined set of rules, often stipulated only that
they do not oppose the revolutionary goals of anarchism, which were often
very vaguely stated.[10] According to one writer, there were in the early
twenties several thousand anarchists in China (an estimate that probably
included fly-by-night anarchists).[11] These anarchists had their own local
organizations and pursued their own localized activities, which not only
differed from one another but were, in some cases, antithetical. Between
1919 and 1925, ninety-two anarchist organizations came into existence in
China (some only short-lived).[12] Evidence of the widespread popularity of
anarchism, the proliferation of anarchist organizations is indicative also
of the absence of a center to anarchist activity. In the absence of
organized direction, individual loyalty and seriousness had to assume the
burden for ideological integrity and consistency of purpose. Not only was
anarchism individualized, it also made great demands upon individuals,
which in the end only a few were able to meet.
It does not follow, however, that there was no logic or pattern to
anarchist activity. Though the movement lacked a center, it is possible to
identify a number of nodes of ideological and social activity that were
more central than the others (this was especially the case for the social
anarchists under discussion). These nodes, and the individuals active in
them, provided the anarchist movement with continuity over the years, as
well as with some measure of ideological coherence and an identifiable
pattern of activity. They were crucial in the dissemination of anarchist
ideology. And they served both in organization and in activity as models
for anarchists all over China. Certain individuals appear with regularity
in anarchist publications and social activity and were given recognition in
the movement as its leaders, not by organizational regulation but by the
acclaim of their fellow anarchists.
The centers of Chinese anarchism in its origins lay outside of the physical
boundaries of China, in overseas Chinese communities in Paris and Tokyo.
One center was the Society for the Study of Socialism (Shehuizhuyi jiangxi
hui), which was established in Tokyo in 1907 by the classical scholar Liu
Shipei and his wife, He Zhen. The antimodernist, agrarian-oriented
anarchism the Tokyo anarchists promoted in the two journals they published
would have a lasting effect on the thinking of Chinese anarchists, but this
society was in existence for only a brief period, and its impact on the
anarchist movement per se was limited.
More important in this regard was the World Society (Shijie she), which was
established in Paris in 1906 and would serve for decades as a conduit
between European and Chinese anarchism. Its founders and leaders, Li
Shizeng and Wu Zhihui, were among the doyens of Chinese anarchism. They
were also close associates of Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan) and were
important members of the Guomindang, in which capacity they would play
important roles in the 1920s in anarchist anticommunism, as well as in the
problematic relationship the anarchists would enter into with the
Guomindang after 1927. The modernist, even scientistic, anarchism they
promoted (inspired by Kropotkin) would fashion the thinking over the years
of most Chinese anarchists. The diligent-work frugal—study program they
initiated after 1912 to educate Chinese students in Europe was to serve as
a recruiting ground for anarchists (though, ironically, among its graduates
were some of China’s most prominent Communists, including Zhou Enlai and
Deng Xiaoping). This program, which not only sought to bring to Chinese
intellectuals a consciousness of labor but also brought them together with
Chinese laborers abroad (who were brought to Europe during World War I to
work in European armies and factories, also through the intermediacy of Li
and Wu) was to have a far-reaching impact on the Chinese revolution.
If anarchism in China appears at first sight to be primarily a southern
Chinese, specifically Guangzhou (Canton), phenomenon, this impression,
which is at least partially valid, is a product of the important role
Guangzhou anarchists were to play for two decades, not just in the south
but all over China, as well as in Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and
as far away as San Francisco and Vancouver (Canada). The founding father of
Guangzhou anarchism was Liu Sifu, better known under his adopted name,
Shifu, who at his death in 1915 was to leave behind an image as the
paradigmatic anarchist, as well as a devoted following determined to
complete the task he had initiated. While there may have been anarchists in
Guangzhou before 1911, the origins of Guangzhou anarchism go back to the
Conscience Society (Xinshe), which Shifu had established soon after his
conversion to anarchism. In 1914 he and his followers moved to Shanghai to
escape government persecution. There he established, shortly before his
death, the Society of Anarcho-Communist Comrades (Wuzhengfu gongchan zhuyi
tongzhi hui). This society served as a model for similar societies
established shortly thereafter in Guangzhou (led by Shifu’s brother, Liu
Shixin) and Nanjing; Liu Shixin’s group included Ou Shengbai, Liang
Bingxian, Huang Lingshuang, and Huang Zunsheng, all of whom were to achieve
prominence as leaders in the anarchist movement in the May Fourth period.
The Society’s journal, People’s Voice (Minsheng), published until 1922
(irregularly after Shifu’s death), was to provide much-needed continuity
in the anarchist movement. Members or associates of Shifu’s group were
also responsible for initiating a syndicalist movement in China; in 1917
they were able to organize barbers and tea-house clerks in Guangzhou into
China’s first modern labor unions, and in 1918 they led the way in
China’s first May Day celebration in Guangzhou. According to one account,
an associate of Shifu’s group, Liang Bingxian, was the editor of the
first labor journal to be published in China, Labor (Laodong), published in
Shanghai in 1918. By 1921 anarchists had organized at least forty unions in
Guangzhou.[13]
After Shifu’s death there was no single figure to match him in stature in
the anarchist movement. But Guangzhou anarchists continued to play
leadership roles in the movement, both in Guangzhou and in other parts of
China to which the student ferment of the late 1910s took them. In
Guangzhou, Shifu’s brother, Liu Shixin, and other members of the group,
such as Huang Zunsheng, emerged as labor leaders. Anarchists from
Guangzhou, most prominent among them Huang Lingshuang, Zheng Peigang, Yuan
Zhenying, and Hua Lin, were to found the first anarchist group in Beijing,
where they had congregated in 1917 as students and teachers at Beijing
University. The society they established, Truth Society (Shishe), played an
important part in infusing anarchist ideas into the New Culture Movement
led by Beijing University professors and students. In early 1919 Truth
Society merged with other anarchist societies in Guangzhou and Nanjing to
establish an umbrella organization, Evolution Society (Jinhua she). The
society’s journal of the same name was edited by Chen Yannian, who wrote
under a pseudonym articles critical of his famous father, Chen Duxiu,
leader of the New Culture Movement and later the first secretary-general of
the Communist party, who had little patience for anarchists (Chen Yannian
would not convert to Marxism until 1923). In early 1920 we find Guangzhou
anarchists in Zhangzhou in Fujian province, which thereafter served as a
center for the dissemination of anarchism in its own right. Liang Bingxian
was the editor of Fujian Star (Minxing), which the anarchists published in
Fujian.
According to Liu Shixin, during these years anarchist ranks were swelled by
splinter groups from the Chinese Socialist party (Zhongguo shehui zhuyi
dang, established 1911 by Jiang Kanghu), who were inclined to anarchism and
complemented the activities of the Guangzhou anarchists with anarchist
associations of their own (such as the Masses Society, Qunshe, in
Nanjing).[14]
The year following the May Fourth Movement of 1919 was a turning point in
Chinese radicalism, as well as in the fortunes of anarchism. Though the
movement was a product of patriotic resentment against the Versailles
Treaty, the mass mobilization that accompanied it, especially the political
emergence of Chinese labor, made socialism an immediate issue in Chinese
politics. In an immediate sense, anarchists were beneficiaries of this turn
in Chinese radicalism. Anarchism was the most popular and pervasive of all
socialisms in China in 1919, as was evidenced by the rapid proliferation of
anarchist societies all over China, and also by the diffusion of anarchist
ideas in the thinking even of those who were not anarchists. Over the year
following the May Fourth Movement of 1919, anarchist ideas became prevalent
in the culture of radicalism, which among youth displayed itself in a
flourishing communal movement, the so-called New Life Movement (Xin
shenghuo yundong). In this communal movement, anarchist ideas appeared not
so much as components of a formal ideology but as principles of everyday
life. The effects on the consciousness of youth, I suggest, were all the
more profound, for the new generation of youth assimilated anarchism, not
as a set of fleeting ideas, but as part of quotidian culture. Among those
engaged in the communal movement were those who within the year would
participate in the establishment of the Communist party. The communal
movement was to have a long-lasting effect on revolutionary consciousness,
transcending questions of anarchist influence.
Also at this time Chinese intellectuals began to show a genuine interest in
Marxism as an ideology of revolution. Comintern initiatives to promote
communism in China, starting in 1919, turned radicals to consideration of a
political organization to guide the growing mass movement. This development
would present the anarchists, with their opposition to politics, with an
unprecedented challenge from the left.
To appreciate the significance for anarchists of these new developments, we
must remember that there were no committed Marxists or Marxian Communists
in China in 1919. A Communist political identity would not assume
recognizable form among Chinese radicals until after the establishment of a
Communist political organization in late 1920. As of 1919, Chinese
radicals, including the later founders of the Communist party (with the
sole exception of Chen Duxiu), displayed a diffuse radicalism in which
anarchist ideas were most prominent; communism was still understood by most
as anarcho-communism. Also, anarchists were still the most readily
identifiable group on the social revolutionary Left, which may account for
the eagerness of the Comintern to include anarchists in the political
organization it sought to establish in China.
According to the anarchist Zheng Peigang, initial Comintern overtures bore
fruit in late summer 1919 in the establishment of socialist alliances
(shehui zhuyizhe tongmeng) in major cities.[15] In Beijing, Huang
Lingshuang cooperated with his colleagues at Beida (and later leaders of
the Communist party), Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, to establish the first of
these alliances. Radicals in other parts of China followed suit. These
alliances were to serve as the basis in 1920 for the Marxist study
societies that sprouted in Chinese cities following the arrival in March of
the Comintern representative Gregory Voitinsky, which initiated the
founding of the Communist party. Anarchists were prominent in these
societies; they constituted the majority in the Beijing Society for the
Study of Marxist Theory. In Guangzhou, the Marxist group initially
consisted entirely of anarchists and two Comintern advisers. Anarchists
also assumed the responsibility in these groups for the crucial task of
editing the labor journals which the groups started.
These societies were to provide the building blocks for the Communist party
of China. During the fall of 1920, starting in Shanghai, Marxist study
societies began their conversion into Communist cells. Although the
Communist party was not founded officially until July 1921, by November
1920 an embryonic party organization had come into existence. The new
organization adopted Bolshevik rules for its operation, and a Bolshevik
program whose cornerstone was the creation of a dictatorship of the
proletariat. Anarchists, who were opposed both to hierarchical organization
and to proletarian dictatorship, abruptly left the organization. At the
same time, the organization of the party gave rise to the first polemics
between Communists and anarchists, with the basic goal of drawing a clear
distinction between the two philosophies of social revolution.
The organization of the Communist party, with its demand for exclusive
loyalty to the party and its ideology, inevitably split the social
revolutionary alliance of the previous year. Nevertheless, the split was
not final until sometime in the spring of 1922; even then, efforts to
overcome differences between Communists and anarchists were not completely
abandoned. Anarchists were among those invited to attend the Congress of
the Toilers of the East in Moscow in spring 1922, and according to Huang
Lingshuang, Chen Duxiu told him in the summer of 1922 that anarchists and
communists are the leaders of reforming society; they can only advance in
unity, and should not divide to oppose one another.[16]
His invitation was probably not made out of open-mindedness. Anarchist
popularity was still on the rise in 1922 (it would peak in 192223), and the
first National Labor Congress, recently convened in Guangzhou, had just
revealed the extent of anarchist influence in labor organizations in the
South. Some among the anarchists continued to hope that Communists could be
brought around to the anarchist cause, or at least persuaded to cooperate
with anarchists. Anarchists who felt close to the Communist cause refused
to abandon hopes of anarchist-Bolshevik cooperation (anbu hezuo or anbu
xishou, literally, hand-in-hand), and as late as 1923, in the last
installment of his polemics with Chen Duxiu, which had gotten under way in
1920, Ou Shengbai wrote: Under the evil circumstances of present-day
Chinese society, Marxists and Kropotkinists will both do. Let each seek in
its own way to overthrow the forces of old society. We can resolve the
question of social organization in practice when the time comes.[17]
Anarchists could see the writing on the wall, but they were reluctant to
read it. Chinese anarchists were not much different in this regard from
anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who continued to
hope, against all available evidence (which they witnessed at first hand),
that the Bolshevik leadership would come around to the original promise of
a popular social revolution once the crisis of the new Soviet state had
been averted; anarchists, like other socialists, had invested a great deal
in the October Revolution as the beginning of a new age in history and were
unwilling to abandon hopes in its promise. Indeed, the final repudiation of
Bolshevism by Goldman and Berkman had much to do with Chinese anarchists’
loss of hope for an alliance with the Communist party in 1922. In the
polemics against the Soviet Union and Bolshevism that Chinese anarchists
launched after 1922, their writings were to play a crucial part. For their
part, the Communists and their Comintern advisers would seem to have
dropped their quest for converting anarchists once they had found more
powerful allies in the Guomindang. The effort to convert individual
anarchists never stopped, but anarchists were only a barely visible
Communist concern after the party embarked on establishing a united front
with the Guomindang in late 1922.
In early 1922 anarchists once again turned their attention to organizing an
independent anarchist movement. With the rise in popularity of anarchism
during the May Fourth Movement, anarchist societies had proliferated all
across China. While Guangzhou anarchists retained a leading role in the
anarchist movement, moreover, anarchists from other parts of China,
especially from Hunan and Sichuan, increasingly distinguished themselves as
leading voices.
The nationwide diffusion of anarchism even further decentralized the
anarchist movement and made it more difficult for the historian to identify
a center to Chinese anarchism. It is possible, nevertheless, to point to a
number of anarchist societies at this time, if not as leaders, at least as
clearinghouses in the propagation of anarchist ideology, and for the part
they played in setting the tone for anarchist activity. These societies
were distinguished for their longevity (and, therefore, the part they
played in sustaining anarchist activity), the originality and intensity of
their activities, and the general esteem in which anarchists across the
country held the individuals who played leading roles in them.
In spring 1922 more than fifty anarchists met in Guangzhou to establish an
Anarchist Federation (described simply as AF). Earlier prominent Guangzhou
anarchists had met with Chen Duxiu and other Communist leaders in Guangzhou
to discuss the possibility of cooperation; the federation may have been
founded in response to the hopelessness of compromise between the two
groups. The leadership of the federation included Ou Shengbai, Liang
Bingxian, and Huang Lingshuang, the most prominent Guangzhou anarchists. A
key role was played in the organization by a certain Russian who had
recently appeared in Guangzhou, Dikebuo (Dikebov?), who apparently
suggested the founding of a federation. The federation was organized as a
secret conspiracy, complete with code names and passwords.[18] The
federation did not last very long. The barbaric behavior of Dikebuo, who
sought to assume dictatorial powers, and the fickleness of other members
(by 1923 Ou Shengbai was in Paris and Huang Lingshuang at Clark University
in Massachusetts) brought it to a quick end by fall 1922.
Anarchists, however, did not give up. By August 1923 they had established a
new federation, based on the Reality Society (Zhenshe).[19] Founded by the
anarchists Wang Siweng, Li Shaoling, Zheng Zhenheng, and Xie Juexian,
Reality Society began publication in October 1923 of a new journal, Spring
Thunder (Chunlei), which with some metamorphoses would serve for two years
as an important organ of Chinese anarchism. The new federation had two
important sections, general and propaganda. The latter was subdivided into
three areas that reflected the concerns of federation work: peasant,
worker, and education bureaus.
Closely associated with these activities was another Guangdong anarchist
society that had come into existence in 1922, the People’s Tocsin Society
(Mingzhong she), led by Li Shaoling and Li Jianmin. At first a local
society, this society had expanded its scope in response to the founding of
the first federation in 1922. The journal that the society began to publish
in July 1922, People’s Tocsin, would be the longest-lived (uninterrupted)
journal in the history of Chinese anarchism. It was published for five
years to the month, mostly in Guangdong until it was moved to Shanghai in
the spring of 1927. In later years, Bi Xiushao, Fan Tianjun, and Li Taiyi
played important parts in both the society and the journal. The
contributors to the journal included the most important of Chinese
anarchists in the 1920s: Ou Shengbai, Huang Lingshuang, Liang Bingxian, Li
Feigan (Bajin), Qin Baopu, Jing Meijiu, Wei Huilin, and others, whose names
appeared frequently in anarchist publications but are not identifiable
beyond the pseudonyms they employed (Kuli and Zhiping). Its special issues
on Kropotkin in 1923 and Shifu in 1927 were landmark events for anarchists
and drew contributions not only from those listed above but from the doyens
of anarchism, Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui. It was not only an important organ
for the anarchist criticism of communism, it was also at that time the
foremost source for the writings of European anarchists such as Proudhon,
Bakunin, Kropotkin, Jean Grave, and Varlaam Cherkezov.[20]
When the Anarchist Federation was established in 1922, it sent Huang
Lingshuang to Shanghai to bring anarchists there into the federation. The
group in Shanghai (which was involved mainly in the teaching of Esperanto)
included two Guangzhou anarchists, Zheng Peigang and Liu Wudeng (Shifu’s
sister and Zheng’s lover), as well as Deng Mengxian and a woman anarchist
from Hunan, Zhou Dunhu, a labor organizer and associate of Huang Ai and
Peng Renquan, who had recently been murdered for their labor activities. In
1923 this group started publishing its own journal, the short-lived Mutual
Aid (Huzhu), edited by Deng Mengxian, as part of federation activity. They
also participated in the revival of Freedom (Ziyou), edited by Jing Meijiu,
which had been suspended by the authorities in 1922. Freedom Society would
also serve in ensuing years as a source of anarchist literature.[21]
The Anarchist Federation also corresponded with the Paris anarchist
journal, After Work (Gongyu), which between 1922 and 1925 was an important
anarchist organ in the polemics against the Communists in France. It was
edited at first by Chen Duxiu’s sons, who, until their conversion to
communism in 1923, led the polemics against their father’s party
(represented in Paris by Youth [Shaonian], in which Zhou Enlai defended
Bolshevism against the anarchists). After 1923 Li Zhuo and Bi Xiushao
played an important part in this journal. In 1925, when Bi returned to
China, After Work was merged with Free People (Ziyouren), edited by Shen
Zhongjiu, who, like Bi, was from Zhejiang province.[22] (Bi also became the
editor, briefly, of People’s Tocsin when it was moved to Shanghai.)
Three other societies, which were at best loosely connected with Guangzhou
anarchists and the federation, were to play important roles in the
anarchist movement, either as disseminators of anarchism or as nodes of
anarchist activity. First was the Free People Society founded in Shanghai
in 1924, led by the Zhejiang anarchist Shen Zhongjiu and one Chinu (a
pseudonym). The importance of this society derived above all from its
involvement in the syndicalist movement in Shanghai. Members of the society
were active in the syndicates and in labor education. They were involved
in, if they did not initiate, a syndicate periodical, Labor Tendaily
(Laodong xunkan). Shen worked closely with Hunanese anarchists, who were an
important force in the Shanghai Federation of Syndicates (Shanghai gongtuan
lianhe hui). He was also a teacher at the experimental Lida School,
established in Shanghai at this time by the Hunanese anarchist Kuang
Husheng. It was possibly out of this association that a plan emerged at
this time to establish a Labor University (Laodong daxue), which was
realized three years later. The Free People Society corresponded with
Spring Thunder in Guangzhou and would, in 1925, merge with After Work (of
these activities, more below).[23]
A second important society in Shanghai was the People’s Vanguard
(Minfeng) Society, in which the Sichuan anarchists Lu Jianbo and Mao Yibo
played leading roles. The society was established in Nanjing in 1923 and
published there a journal of the same name before moving to Shanghai in
1925. Lu had earlier been active in anarchist activities in Sichuan and had
some association in Shanghai with his more famous fellow provincial, Bajin,
who also had moved to Shanghai in the mid-twenties. Lu was responsible for
founding two societies in 1927 that played some part in anarchist activity
in Shanghai, the Society for the Study of Syndicalism (Gongtuan zhuyi
yanjiu hui) and the Federation of Young Chinese Anarcho-communists
(Zhongguo shaonian wuzhengfu gongchan zhuyizhe lianmeng). He had to leave
Shanghai in 1928 to escape persecution by the Guomindang because of his
criticism of anarchist-Guomindang cooperation (he was accused by
Guomindang-related anarchists of being a Bolshevized-anarchist). In the
late thirties he was back in Sichuan, publishing another anarchist
periodical.[24]
Finally, the most active anarchist society in northern China was the Sea of
Learning Society (Xuehui she), which published a supplement of the same
name to the National Customs Daily (Guofeng ribao), edited by the Shanxi
anarchist Jing Meijiu. One of the elders of Chinese anarchism at the time,
Jing had converted to anarchism in Tokyo in the days before the 1911
Revolution. Jing possibly had been influenced by the agrarian anarchism
that the Tokyo anarchists had propagated. In addition to disseminating
anarchism in the North, members of the Sea of Learning Society were also
active in the promotion of anarchism in rural areas.[25]
Further research may reveal that other anarchist societies played equally,
possibly more, important roles in the anarchist movement in the 1920s.
Anarchists were active everywhere, involved in their own organizations as
well as organizations of others, who nevertheless gave the anarchists room
in their own publications (such as the supplement to the Current Affairs
Daily [Shishi xinbao] of the antirevolutionary Research Clique, Light of
Learning [Xuedeng], an important forum for anarchist writings on the Soviet
Union). Their activities ranged from the distribution of anarchist
pamphlets to more sustained ideological activity as well as organizational
activities among labor and the agrarian population.[26]
The dispersed nature of these activities makes risky any generalizations
about these societies or their relationship to one another. The societies
were distinguished by the sustained nature of their activities, which made
them somewhat more visible as centers of activity. In spite of their
assumption of such appellations as federation, these societies were largely
independent of one another in their activities. What gave them some
semblance of unity was the correspondence in which they engaged and the
relatively frequent contact between those who played leadership roles
within them. In the end, for these societies, as well as for numerous
others in both rural and urban China, anarchism became a movement through
the motion of individual anarchists, often but not always along the same
general direction.
One thing that unified the anarchists in the 1920s was their opposition to
Bolshevism. The question of anarchists’ relationship to the Guomindang,
however, was a divisive issue. The doyens of Chinese anarchism, such as Li
Shizeng and Wu Zhihui, had also been members of the Guomindang since its
establishment, and with the party reorganization of 1924 (whereby
Communists were allowed to become members of the Guomindang), they assumed
powerful albeit unofficial roles in the party. The younger, more radical
among anarchist activists were initially opposed to any involvement with
the Guomindang. Nevertheless, with the Guomindang suppression of Communists
in 1927, the latter suspended their opposition to the Guomindang and
followed the lead of Li and Wu to enter the party, hoping thereby to
recapture mass movements—in particular labor—for anarchism.
The result was a short-lived but significant anarchist alliance with the
Guomindang. Most important in the alliance were the Guomindang anarchists
and radical activists from Sichuan and Zhejiang who had been active during
preceding years in the syndicalist movement in Shanghai. The alliance was
not restricted to them, however. In other parts of China, such as
Guangzhou, anarchists made an attempt to recapture the labor movement under
Guomindang auspices; even the brother of the venerable Shifu, Liu Shixin,
was willing to collaborate with the Guomindang in the late twenties.
The institutional centers of anarchist collaboration with the Guomindang
were the Labor University (Laodong daxue) established in Shanghai in the
fall of 1927, and a journal the anarchists published weekly in conjunction
with the university, Geming zhoubao (Revolution, hereafter, simply Geming).
Labor University, which was to last for nearly five years, was intended to
fulfill the long-standing anarchist dream of creating a new kind of
Chinese, whole persons equally adept at mental and manual labor, upon whom
anarchists continued to rest their hopes for the solution of the most
profound cultural and social problems (which they took to be identical)
facing China. The immediate purpose was to train a new kind of labor leader
in China, who would be able to guide labor movements without subjection to
political parties. Revolution, which was to be the last important anarchist
journal in China, publicized these goals of Labor University.
The collaboration lasted only about a year. By 1928 the Guomindang had
completed its task of unifying the country once again and was no longer
interested in the continuation of mass movements, in which it perceived a
challenge to its new status quo. Mass movements were suspended in the
spring of 1928. For the activist anarchists, this was a major blow, and
even as they continued to collaborate with the Guomindang, they now turned
their criticisms from the Communists to the Guomindang leadership,
including their anarchist leaders in the party. In response, the Guomindang
curtailed anarchist activity within Labor University and in fall 1929
proscribed Revolution.
The proscription effectively brought to an end the anarchist movement in
China. Individual anarchists continued to be active in the thirties, but
after this proscription it becomes difficult to speak of anarchism in China
as a movement, or even as an effective voice in the Chinese revolution.
Anarchism had flourished during the previous two decades under
circumstances of political disintegration and mass mobilization. The
establishment of a new political order, ironically under a revolutionary
party, was to deprive anarchists of space for activity. After 1927 the
revolutionary movement in China was to pass into the hands of those who
were willing to make revolution, if necessary by armed force, which
required the kind of organization that anarchists were unwilling to condone
and unable to put together. The days of anarchism as a force in the Chinese
revolutionary movement were over.
During these years Chinese anarchists viewed themselves as part of a
worldwide anarchist movement. The first Chinese anarchists owed their
conversion to anarchism to contact with foreign anarchists. Li Shizeng,
founder of the World Society in Paris, converted to anarchism as a
consequence of his close relationship with the family of the famous French
anarchist Élisée Reclus; the Reclus family would in ensuing years retain
a close association with the anarchist movement in China. A similar part
was played in Tokyo by the Japanese anarchist Kotoku Shusui, who was the
keynote speaker at the first meeting of the Society for the Study of
Socialism. In the mid-teens, the anarchist Hua Lin even called upon
Kropotkin himself in London.[27] The socialist alliances founded in 1919
were products of a conference of Far Eastern socialists held in Shanghai,
in which the Japanese anarchist Osugi Sakae was a participant (a police
report even reported erroneously that Emma Goldman was in Shanghai).[28]
Chinese anarchists in the Soviet Union in the early twenties established
contact not only with Russian anarchists, but also with foreign anarchists
in Russia, such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman; out of these
contacts would emerge the lifelong association between Goldman and the
anarchist writer Bajin. Osugi Sakae, just before his murder in Japan in
1923, briefly visited China again on his way to an international anarchist
conference in Europe.[29] Meanwhile, anarchists in France retained their
relationship with leaders of the European anarchist movement, such as Jean
Grave; and when Mme Kropotkin met European anarchists in Paris after
leaving the Soviet Union in 1923, Chinese anarchists were among them. In
the late twenties, as anarchists in Fujian prepared for a rural
insurrection, they were joined by anarchists from Japan and Korea who
believed that Fujian could serve as the base for an East Asian anarchist
insurrection.[30]
These contacts suggest that the fortunes of anarchism in China were tied
in, not only with the particular conditions of Chinese society and
politics, but with the fortunes of anarchism as a global movement.
Anarchism flourished in China when it was also the foremost ideology of
social revolution globally. Anarchists in China drew both their vitality
and much of their intellectual inspiration from anarchism as a global
movement. Likewise, the decline of anarchism in China in the late twenties
corresponded to a worldwide recession of anarchism as Marxism, now in a
Leninist guise, once again took over from anarchism as the foremost
ideology of social revolution in the aftermath of the October Revolution.
These intimate ties with the fortunes of global anarchism were also
reflected in subtle shifts in the anarchist argument for revolution.
Throughout, the anarchism of P. Kropotkin, as refracted through the
interpretations of Reclus and Grave, was the foremost source for Chinese
anarchism. But a Tolstoyan anarchism also found its way into Chinese
anarchism through the agency of the Tokyo anarchists. In the 1920s Russian
anarchists’ writings provided much of the basis for anarchist criticism
of Marxism. In the late twenties P-J. Proudhon’s ideas briefly acquired
prominence in the anarchist collaboration with the Guomindang. In the late
thirties, long after the heyday of anarchism, Spanish anarchism provided
some inspiration before the Spanish revolution was extinguished by the
forces of fascism. Whereas Chinese anarchism was largely derivative of
these foreign sources, the ideas that gained currency in China were closely
bound up with the particular concerns of the Chinese revolution.
The Anarchist Contribution to Radical Ideology
During the period 1905–1930 anarchism served as a source of revolutionary
ideas that placed anarchists in the forefront of the revolutionary movement
or reinforced important elements in revolutionary thinking, which were not
necessarily of anarchist origin but in their coincidence with basic
anarchist ideas enabled the anarchists to play a central part in mainstream
radical activity. From 1907 until well into the twenties, of all the
competing radical philosophies imported into Chinese thinking, only
anarchism was available in any comprehensive coverage and enjoyed
widespread distribution among the reading public. Most of the classics of
anarchism were already available in Chinese translation by the early 1910s
(which could not be said of any important Marxist work until 1920), and
some made their way beyond radical periodicals to mainstream journals and
newspapers. These translations served as the medium through which central
concerns of European radical thinking were transmitted to China, including
problems of political and economic democracy, economic equality and
justice, the relationship of the individual and society, the place of the
family in society, the place of women in society, the relationship between
education and democracy, science and social thought, and so forth.
Anarchists were in the vanguard of the calls for a universal education, for
the transformation of the family and the culture that sustained the old
family, and for the emancipation of women and the liberation of the
individual, which by the mid-1910s were commonplaces of radical thinking in
China. They could also claim a few important firsts of their own, which
prefigured the turn the revolutionary movement would take as it assumed a
social character in the 1920s. Anarchists were the founders of the first
modern labor unions in China (in 1917). They also spearheaded the
transmission of the revolutionary movement to rural areas. They were the
first to experiment with new forms of education as well as new forms in the
organization of production. Finally, whether with these experiments or with
organizational activities in the city or the countryside, they established
patterns of activity that would in the long run provide models for other
revolutionaries: the creation of an educational and institutional context
whereby individuals and social groups (students, women, workers, or
peasants) could engage in social activity.
Both anarchist activity and the patterns that it followed were direct
offshoots of the anarchist conception of revolution and the philosophical
outlook that underlay it. To clear up two basic misconceptions concerning
the anarchist outlook: anarchists did not elevate the individual above
society—they only repudiated social arrangements that ignored the
individual; they did not reject all social institutions—they rejected
only those that were coercive. They believed that coercive institutions
distorted the essential sociability of human beings, set them against one
another in the pursuit of individual or group interests, turned society
from a realm of authentically social existence into a realm of conflict
between partial interests, which then could be overcome only through the
further use of coercion. The goal of revolution was to break into this
vicious cycle. The liberation of the individual was intended to free the
individual, not from any social restraint, but from this particular social
condition, which rendered impossible a truly social existence by alienating
both the rights and the obligations of individuals to coercive
institutions—which converted individuals into individualists and then
called upon coercion to contain their activities. The elimination of
coercion was, therefore, a precondition for the assumption by individuals
of their social birthright as well as of their social obligations; the goal
of individual liberation, in other words, was the restoration to the
individual of his or her essential sociability. This meant the
reorganization of society on the basis of voluntary association. Only free
people could establish authentically social institutions; and only those
institutions founded on freedom could nurture authentically sociable
individuals. The anarchist repudiation of politics, the state, and other
institutions of authority was intended to remove the structures that
intermediated in the relationships between individuals so as to give free
play to the dialectic between the individual and society.
This required a two-pronged revolutionary strategy: a social revolution to
remove authoritarian structures, and a cultural revolution to purge
individuals of habits of authority and submission which had become second
nature in a long history of living under coercion. The two were not
separate operations but part of the same revolutionary process; for
authoritarian structures could not be abolished so long as habits of
authority and submission persisted, and those habits would be perpetuated
so long as authoritarian structures lasted.
This insistence on the inseparability of the social and the cultural was
the distinguishing feature of the anarchist idea of social revolution.
Anarchists could justifiably claim, I think, that they were the first
within the revolutionary discourse in China to raise the issue of cultural
revolution, with far-reaching implications in the unfolding of that
discourse. Those implications are not clear, however, unless we look more
closely at the consequences for revolutionary thinking of the relationship
they established between the social and the cultural.
The relationship, in the first place, made for an acute consciousness of
the relationship between the ends and means of revolution. Since the goal
of revolution was not just to substitute new institutions for old, but to
change the cultural habits that informed all institutional
structures—which ultimately meant changing the language in which people
spoke and thought about society—those institutions that perpetuated old
habits could not serve as a proper means to achieve revolutionary goals:
revolution could not be achieved through methods that contravened its
goals. The question was not simply a moral one (that is, the rejection of
immoral means to achieve moral ends), or even a matter of revolutionary
authenticity—though both were present in anarchist thinking. More
important are its implications for revolution as a process of change. The
urge to make revolutionary methods consistent with revolutionary goals
brought those goals into the very process of revolution. The anarchist
utopia was not somewhere out there in the future, it was an informing
principle of the revolutionary process—a different way of saying that
anarchists utopianized the revolutionary process itself. This is not to
suggest that anarchists at all times lived up to their own premises, for
they did not. But the utopianization of revolution (a faith in the ability
of revolution to create revolutionary institutions in its very processes)
was to be a dynamic element of revolution in China.
Second, and even more basic, the relationship anarchists established
between the social and the cultural presupposed a perception of the problem
of revolution as a discursive problem: meaningful revolution implied the
transformation of the social discourses—ways of thinking and talking
about society—that constituted society. Anarchists were the first in
China to call for a cultural revolution; more important, they conceived
culture socially, as quotidian culture that constituted social relations at
the level of everyday interactions and was itself reproduced daily.
It is not surprising then that anarchists took education to be the
cornerstone of revolution—education not in a formal sense but as a
process of transformation of everyday habits. Whether in the educational
experiments they initiated, or in labor and peasant organization, the
guiding principle of anarchist revolutionary activity was to create spaces
wherein people could think differently about society by living differently.
The dialectic between the individual and society, the fundamental premise
of the anarchist conception of revolution, was articulated at the level of
revolutionary practice in two ideas that anarchists introduced into Chinese
education, which may also be the most important anarchist contributions to
revolutionary discourse. One was the creation of whole individuals, which
concretely meant the combination of labor and learning in the education
process. Anarchists perceived in the separation of mental and manual labor
not only a cause of the impoverishment of the individual but the
fundamental basis of social inequality as well; overcoming the distinction
was, therefore, the key to the creation of a different way of life—and a
different way of thinking about society. The second idea was the creation
of social spaces in which this basic division of labor could be overcome,
and the individual in voluntary participation in the group could realize
his or her social potential. Anarchists were the first advocates in China
of communal organization that would abolish the division between city and
country, industry and agriculture, manual and mental labor. The abolition
of the distinction between manual and mental labor at the level of the
individual had its counterpart at the social level in the organization of
student communes, village associations, and labor syndicates; change at the
one level was the condition of change at the other.
These are ideas that are familiar to students of China as key elements in
Mao’s Marxism that became particularly prominent during the period of the
Cultural Revolution.[31] In pointing to their anarchist origin, I do not
suggest that Mao or anyone else who upholds these ideas is, therefore, an
anarchist, or that anarchism has an exclusive claim upon them. Similar
ideas are to be found in the works of Marx, and it is arguable that Marxism
(at least the Marxism of Marx) is quite cognizant of their basic premise:
that social revolution ultimately entails a transformation of consciousness
because the structures that give form to society are reproduced at the
level of everyday social interactions—and even within language, which
Marx referred to on one occasion as practical consciousness.[32]
While it is important to recognize the overlap between anarchism and
Marxism where these ideas are concerned, it is also necessary to
distinguish them on both historical and theoretical grounds. Historically,
it was through the agency of anarchism that these ideas entered the
revolutionary discourse in China, and, at least initially, they were
identified with anarchism. When a Marxian communism entered the
revolutionary movement, it established its identity by repudiating these
ideas for being irrelevant to immediate problems of revolution.
Furthermore, during the ideological struggles that accompanied the
political conflicts of the twenties, these same ideas provided intellectual
ammunition for the opponents of Marxism. That these ideas should survive
the anarchist movement to be lodged in locations as diverse in
revolutionary consciousness as Mao’s Marxism and the Guomindang shows
that they had become significant components of a revolutionary discourse
that cut across party or ideological boundaries; but their origin
historically is traceable to the anarchists.
More important, that the same ideas are to be found in both anarchism and
Marxism does not imply that they carried the same meaning within the two
ideological contexts; it only points to the area of Marxism that overlapped
with anarchism, with disruptive consequences for its theoretical structure.
Whatever the resemblance between anarchist and Marxist ideas of social
revolution, the two ideas arranged the priorities of revolutionary practice
differently. While education and cultural transformation held a place of
primary significance in the anarchist conception of social revolution,
Marxists gave priority to the transformation of structural relations in
society. The difference may be illustrated by reference to another concept
that was central to both ideas of social revolution: the concept of class.
While Marxists perceived the nurturing of class consciousness as the key to
revolution, anarchists believed that only the abolition of consciousness of
class could yield to genuinely revolutionary change in society. Whether the
Marxist idea of ideology may be reduced to an endowment of class will be
discussed later; I suggest here that while Marxism, too, recognizes culture
and consciousness as a problem of quotidian life, this recognition is
shaped by another conception of culture as a function of social structure
to which class is central—which possibly accounts for the theoretical
richness of Marxism against the theoretical primitivism (in Hobsbawm’s
words) of anarchism. I suggest, nevertheless, that the theoretical
complexity of Marxism (often to the point of forgetting the revolutionary
goals of theoretical activity) has also blinded Marxists to the rich
insights contained in the seemingly simple anarchist premise that
revolution must take as its ultimate goal the transformation of social
discourses—of the very language of thinking about society. If anarchism
has not paid sufficient attention to structural transformation, the Marxist
preoccupation with structural transformation has diverted Marxism from the
equally crucial task of transforming social discourses—indeed has
obstructed the latter by erecting further structures inimical to this goal.
Hobsbawm, for instance, misses the point about this problem when he states
that Marxists may have something to learn from anarchist spontaneity: The
very organizational feebleness of anarchist and anarchizing movements has
forced them to explore the means of discovering or securing that
spontaneous consensus among militants and masses which produces action.[33]
This is to miss what the anarchists clearly recognized: that there is
nothing spontaneous about the masses. There is, rather, a different
discourse about society, which radicals must assimilate in their very
efforts to transform the masses. It is not accidental that anarchists were
the first to compile a dictionary of popular language, which they believed
might enable them to communicate with the masses more effectively. And
anarchists did not turn to this endeavor because their activities were
organizationally feeble; on the contrary, they believed that organization
was undesirable to the extent that it created an obstacle to such
communication (or, more precisely, because it turned communication, which
must be two-way if it is to be genuinely revolutionary, into the imposition
of the will of the revolutionaries upon the masses, which from the
beginning doomed revolution to a betrayal of its own premises).
Before Chinese revolutionaries, faced this problem of two-way communication
as a practical task, which they would in the 1930s when the revolution was
forced to move to the countryside, anarchists had introduced it into the
revolutionary discourse as a central problem of revolution. This awareness
brought anarchists considerable success in revolutionary activity—but
only at the local level. It was at the level of more comprehensive
political organization that anarchists failed as revolutionaries. On the
other hand, the success of other revolutionaries at this other level would
in its consequences bear out anarchist fears of the fate of revolution that
subjected the crucial task of discursive transformation to goals formulated
at the level of politics.
Anarchism and Revolutionary Discourse
Whether we recognize in anarchism a lasting significance in the Chinese
revolution depends largely upon whether we recognize the importance of the
idea of the social in revolutionary discourse. The significance of
anarchism rests ultimately upon its insistence on the priority of the
social in the revolutionary discourse that took shape during the years when
anarchism enjoyed its greatest popularity in Chinese thinking on
revolution. Anarchists were not the first in China to raise the question of
the social, nor were they the only ones in ensuing years to insist on the
essentialness of a social component to revolution. The question was a
product of an emerging nationalist consciousness, which at the turn of the
century first raised the question of the relationship between state and
society, pointing to social transformation as the essential moment of
building a nation-state that, unlike the monarchy it was to replace, could
claim no transcendental or transhistorical moral sanction but depended for
its legitimacy on its ties to the society it claimed to represent. Calling
society into the service of the state as its legitimating principle
revealed not only a new problematic of politics, but problematized the
notion of society as well. While this was to become, and has remained, the
essential question of Chinese politics, it was through socialism—which
over the years was identified with social revolution—that the problem was
articulated with the greatest explicitness and consistency. The insistence
on a social revolution was a common feature of all socialist discourse and
spilled over to nonsocialist advocacies of change as well. Different groups
meant different things by social revolution, depending on the sources for
the idea but more importantly on their conception of the social. By the
early twenties most prominent in addition to anarchist ideas of the social
were Communist and Guomindang ideas of social revolution.
It is precisely this pervasiveness of the idea of the social that endows
with historical significance the anarchist advocacy of social revolution,
which otherwise would have been condemned to a quaint marginality. I mean
this in two senses. First, the discourse on the social in its unfolding
nourished off a number of competing (and conflicting) ideologies of social
revolution, which, nevertheless, intersected on the terrain of the
discourse, with considerable interchange among them. Hence we find that in
spite of significant differences in the social revolution they advocated,
there was also significant overlap among anarchist, Communist, and
Guomindang notions of the social. That the discourse drew on European
socialism in its language guaranteed such overlap because, in spite of its
disintegration into numerous factions by the turn of the century, socialism
in Europe retained the common language of its origins and was even blurred
at its edges into liberal or bourgeois ideas of social change.[34] Within
the Chinese context, moreover, discursive conflicts were contained within a
national revolutionary movement which, especially in the first three
decades of the century, rendered heterogeneous ideas of the social into
different aspects of a common revolutionary project; hence discursive
overlap expressed a revolutionary situation in which different
revolutionary groups were participants in the same revolutionary movement:
not only ideas were interchange—able—so was actual membership in
different revolutionary groups. As a constituent of this discourse,
anarchist ideas acquired a wide currency beyond the relatively small number
of radicals committed to anarchism as an integral ideology.
Second, given the pervasiveness of the concern with the social within the
revolutionary discourse, the particular anarchist conception of the social
that unequivocally asserted the claims of society against the state (and
politics in general) drew its significance from its implications for the
revolutionary discourse as a whole. Among all the advocates of social
revolution, anarchists were distinguished by their uncompromising (and
exclusive) insistence on the social: a true revolution could be nothing but
social; a revolution that was not social could not qualify as a revolution;
and a revolution that compromised the social by subjecting it to political
considerations compromised itself as a revolution. In an immediate sense,
within the historical context in which the revolutionary discourse took
shape, this uncompromising insistence on the social disrupted the
boundaries of political debate by underlining the limitationsindeed, the
ideological oppressivenessof politics against the horizon of the social;
against the prospect of total social transformation politics, any politics,
appeared as so much ideological closure to contain the social. The result
was to force the discourse on revolution out of its political boundaries
onto the uncertain terrain of the social. Whether they subscribed to
anarchist ideas, or even found anything of worth in the anarchist idea of
social revolution, all advocates of social revolution in China had to come
to terms with this idea of the social. That many also internalized
anarchist ideas of the social or social revolution in the process may not
be as important as their implicit or explicit admission that these ideas
pointed to an irreducible horizon of revolutionary discourse, which could
be denied only by resorting to an argument based on necessity: that
revolution could succeed historically only by suppressing its historical
origins, by containing within politically acceptable limits the vision that
was its motivating intention in the first place. The Communists admitted to
this restriction of vision when they argued against the anarchists that
before the social revolutionary ideal could be realized, which was the
common goal of both anarchism and Marxism, a political dictatorship of the
proletariat must be interposed in the history of revolution, even if it
meant a temporary suspension or even betrayal of revolutionary aspirations.
So did Sun Yat-sen, who was no anarchist, when he declaimed in 1924 that
the ultimate goal of his Principle of People’s Livelihood was communism,
and anarchism, although he insisted that people’s livelihood must serve
as the means to fulfill the goals of revolution. The relegation of
anarchism to a distant future rationalized the reassertion of the primacy
of politics in the immediate historical context, but not without an
acknowledgment that the revolution thus achieved would be an incomplete
revolution so long as it did not keep its sight fixed on that future. In a
crucial sense, then, anarchism extended the frontiers of revolutionary
discourse by pointing to a social project that negated the boundaries
established by a political conception of society; and its very presence in
the revolutionary discourse rendered problematic any effort toward an
ideological closure of the social by the political. Similarly, in
historical perspective, recognition of the anarchist presence in
revolutionary discourse is a reminder of the ideological appropriation of
the discourse on the social as social revolution was harnessed in the
service of political goals. This perspective calls into question the claims
on history of successful revolutionaries—whose success, therefore, may
not be viewed simply as a fulfillment of the social aspirations of the
revolution but must be understood simultaneously as the suppression (if not
the total elimination) of the social imagination that motivated its
history.
This evaluation of anarchism’s significance presupposes a certain
conception of the problem of ideology—in this case a specifically
socialist ideology—that needs to be spelled out briefly before we discuss
the concrete contributions of anarchism to revolutionary discourse in
China. Of special importance is a distinction I should like to draw between
ideology and discourse, a certain way of talking about a specific set of
objects.[35]
The central problem concerns the relationship of ideology to its broader
social and intellectual context. The distinction between ideology and
discourse is intended to overcome the dilemma presented by a reductionist
conception of ideology, which reduces ideas to expressions of class or
other group interests and is the point of departure for most post-Marxist
discussion of ideology. If ideas or sentiments are expressions of class or
other interests, how do we account for the fact that they are shared widely
by those outside of the class or group whose interests they are purported
to express? While the debate touched off by this question is too complex
for summary here, I think that the answers have unfolded in two broad
directions. First is the substitution of a totalistic for a reductionist
conception of ideology; the seminal example is to be found in the work of
Clifford Geertz, who stresses the integrative function of ideology as a set
of symbolic formulations that are shared commonly in a cultural system
across class and other partial interests.[36] Second are those attempts to
reintroduce into this integrative conception of ideology a critical Marxist
perspective by uncovering within the symbolic forms of ideology as a
cultural system the patterns of authority and domination that characterize
most known social systems, which constitute the ideology. As Paul Ricoeur
puts it in a recent work, While ideology serves—as the code of
interpretation that secures integration, it does so by justifying the
present system of authority.[37] This post-Marxist debate has also brought
ideology much closer to problems of everyday life and culture by
repudiating the reflective notion of ideology implicit in the reductionist
base—structure model of ideology that renders ideology epiphenomenal to
material existence. Ideology is to be sought not in abstract, formally
articulated ideas, but in everyday speech and activity. While the debate
has repudiated a reductionist Marxist notion of ideology, in other words,
it also represents a return to an alternative conception of ideology in the
work of Marx implicit in Marx’s description of language as practical
consciousness.
The problem, then, is twofold: (1) how to reconcile the two notions of
ideology—the integrative notion that renders ideology as a commonly
shared set of symbols and ideas, and the dissimulative notion in which
these commonly shared symbols and ideas conceal relationships of power and
domination—both of which have compelling plausibility; and, (2) where to
look for ideology. An additional problem is that of class (or other social
interests). John Thompson has argued that to achieve a genuinely critical
conception of ideology, it is necessary to reintroduce class into the
discussion.[38] It is fair to say, I think, that Ricoeur, for example,
while he restores the relationship between ideology and power in pointing
out that ideology as a cultural system also justifies the present system of
authority, does not make the issue of class or social interest a central
concern of his analysis. This not only ignores how the structure of social
interests in different contexts impinges upon the particular forms assumed
by the structure of authority and, therefore, of ideology, but, even more
serious, renders ideology into a seamless entity against a conception of it
as an arena of conflict between social interests who share in the ideology
and also seek to interpret (or appropriate) it in accordance with their own
interests. It is curious that Ricoeur’s discussion of ideology, while
comprehensive, ignores the work of the one Marxist thinker whose work not
only foreshadowed many of these problems but also has had enormous
influence in shaping recent conceptualizations of ideology, Antonio
Gramsci, whose concept of hegemony sought to account for ideology not only
in its double sense of integration and dissimulation, but also as conflict
between different social interests, whereby these interests (primarily
classes in his presentation) sought to appropriate a common ideology. The
Gramscian notion of hegemony, while it points to conflict as a permanent
condition of all class society, is particularly important for dealing with
revolutionary situations when conflict (including the conflict over
language) assumes an acute form, when the challenge to the existing system
of authority presupposes for its success the appropriation of hegemony by
revolutionaries, whereby they assimilate to their own ideology the
interests of classes and groups outside of their own class.[39]
From this brief discussion we may infer that in confronting the problem of
ideology, we need to account for two questions: (1) ideology as the
articulation of class or other social interests; (2) ideology as the
articulation of a broader system of authority structured by the interaction
of these more narrow interests from which ideology as an integrative
cultural system derives its form.
Because of the confusion created by the application of the term ideology to
both these articulations, which are related and yet distinct, I would
describe the latter as discourse and reserve ideology for the former.
Discourse, a way of thinking and talking about things, common to society as
a whole and evident at the most basic level in everyday speech and culture,
is integrative because of a common language and also dissimulative because
embedded in the common language are relationships of power and domination,
as Michel Foucault and Raymond Williams have reminded us; it is also,
therefore, the arena for ideological conflict whereby different social
groups seek to assimilate the discourse to their own way of life and
interests.[40] This appropriation of discourse is where ideology becomes
manifest as a social and historical phenomenon. As Harry Harootunian has
put it, in reference to the unfolding of nativism in Japan, when the
interaction of knowledge and interest displaced base/superstructure, form
and content, knowledge, or discourse—a certain way of talking about a
specific set of objects became ideological.[41] The procedure is one that
Fredric Jameson has described as a strategy of containment, which he
perceives as the goal of ideological activity.[42] In other words, the
ideological appropriation of discourse appears as a containment of the
discourse in accordance with specific social interests or outlooks.
Containment is also primarily a procedure of exclusion, a silencing of
those elements of the discourse that are inimical to the interests of the
group. But it may also mean, I suggest, a rearrangement of the terms of the
discourse so as to define its priorities in keeping with such interests.
The critical conception of ideology, which has evolved out of analysis of
the use of ideology within the context of established systems (capitalism
in particular) to perpetuate the system, is equally applicable, I think, to
the problem of ideology in socialism as a radical movement, as intimated in
the distinction I have drawn with reference to the socialist movement in
China between revolutionary discourse and ideology. The discourse is what
socialist revolutionaries (and not just socialist revolutionaries) shared
in common. The discourse on the social, as I have already observed, drew on
disparate ideological sources in European socialism (even on liberal
ideologies that sought to come to terms with the socialist challenge, from
which China’s first socialists drew their inspiration). Nevertheless,
within the revolutionary movement in China, these ideological sources were
integrated, however uneasily, into the language of a common discourse on
revolution, and this explains the overlap between otherwise conflicting
notions of the social. For the same reason, we may also view the efforts of
different groups of revolutionaries—anarchists Bolsheviks, Guomindang
socialists, among others to appropriate the discourse, a way of talking
about social revolution, as alternative strategies of containment as
different ways of interpreting the discourse by rearranging its terms,
through which they sought to constitute the problem of social revolution in
accordance with their political and organizational interests, which in turn
were conceived in relationship to broader national and social interests.
The process of ideological appropriation ultimately involved the question
of hegemony over the revolutionary movement.
While the importance of revolutionary hegemony for revolutionary success is
self-evident, the critical question for the future of revolution is whether
hegemony is more desirable because it is revolutionary—especially since
revolution, if successful, establishes itself as a new order. Is it not
likely that a revolution that takes as its premise the hegemony of
revolutionaries will result in a new structure of authority, reproducing in
its very hegemony that hidden relationship between ideology and power to
overthrow which was the goal of revolution in the first place, against
which the only guarantee is the good will of the revolutionaries or their
claim to a scientific discovery of the path to liberation? Is this not the
point in revolutionary discourse at which revolution, which seeks to
dispose of ideology, itself becomes ideological because it dissimulates in
its discourse its relationship to power?
At its most basic, anarchism in China derived its significance from the
fact that anarchists were the only ones among social revolutionaries to
raise these questions consistently. Their insistence that revolution could
not achieve its goals through methods contrary to its aspirations was a
constant reminder of this basic problem of revolutionary discourse. The
questions offer a critical perspective on the course the revolutionary
movement would eventually take in China. They also remind us of the links
between the Chinese revolutionary movement and the most fundamental
problems of revolutionary discourse in general.
In one sense, anarchists were as ideological as any of their social
revolutionary competitors. They not only sought to adjust their conception
of social revolution to the exigencies of power in China, with a consequent
suspension of their own revolutionary premises, but in some cases displayed
considerable ideological opportunism in doing so. Some of the major figures
in Chinese anarchism were also members of political parties, in particular
the Guomindang, betraying in practice their formal repudiation of politics;
worse, they were willing to instrumentalize anarchism in the service of
political power. More fundamentally, in claiming for anarchism the status
of scientific truth (following Kropotkin), anarchists, like their
counterparts in the social revolutionary movement, sought to appropriate
the discourse on the social for anarchism, thereby excluding from
consideration crucial issues of social revolution. If they were not
successful in doing so, it was because their organizational diffuseness
undercut their efforts to formulate a coherent strategy of containment,
which ideological appropriation of the discourse presupposed.
And yet this inability to appropriate the discourse by containing it was
not accidental, or the product of intellectual failure, but the result of a
conscious refusal to do so, which was bound up with the most fundamental
premises of anarchism, which were deconstructive rather than
reconstructive. It is this other, deconstructive, aspect of anarchism,
which has been suppressed in historical memory, that points to its
significance in the discourse on revolution. My concern here is not to
chronicle what the anarchists achieved or did not achieve, or to evaluate
their sincerity in upholding the ideas they professed, but to recall from
the history of anarchism the anarchist critique of ideology and its
implications for revolutionary discourse. Although of considerable
significance both in its immediate context and in the themes it contributed
to the Chinese revolution, anarchism from a political perspective was in
the long run irrelevant, and it can be dismissed as a transient
intellectual fad that owed its passing popularity to a naive utopianism
that prevailed for a brief revolutionary period. It is precisely this issue
of the sufficiency of a political perspective on revolution that anarchism
raised, however, by uncompromisingly repudiating politics and pointing to
the realm of the social as the only proper object of revolutionary
discourse. In doing so, anarchists opened up a perspective on revolution
that was foreclosed by the political and suppressed even in the thinking of
revolutionaries, who insisted on a social revolution but could not conceive
of the social apart from the political tasks of revolution. To affirm the
fundamental significance of anarchism in revolutionary discourse is not to
privilege anarchism per se, but to reaffirm the indispensability of an
antipolitical conception of society in raising fundamental questions about
the nature of domination and oppression, which are otherwise excluded from
both the analysis of ideology and historical analysis in general. In
declaring politics—all politics, including revolutionary politics—to be
inimical to the cause of an authentic social revolution, anarchists pointed
to the politicization of the social as an ideological closure that not only
disguised the fact that revolutionary hegemony itself presupposed a
structure of authority that contradicted its own goals, but also covered up
areas of social oppression that were not immediately visible in the realm
of politics (the family and gender oppression were their primary concerns).
More fundamental anarchists explained that the revolutionary urge to
restore political order was a consequence of the naturalization of
politics—the inability, therefore, to imagine society without
politics—as one of the most deeply ingrained ideological habits that
perpetuated relations of domination in society. The explanation moved them
past the realm of ideology to the realm of social discourses as the
location for habits of authority and submission that sustained both
political and social oppression. Hence in the anarchist argument the
project of social revolution was inextricably bound up with cultural
revolution (rather than a political revolution, as with their competitors):
the goal of revolution was, at its most fundamental, to transform the
social discourses that constituted society on a daily basis.[43] The
eradication of habits of authority and submission from social discourses
was the key to achieving the liberating promise of the revolutionary
project. The way anarchists conceived it, the goal of revolution was not to
create a new hegemony, which implied the continuation of social division
and conflict, but to abolish altogether the notion of hegemony. They saw
social division as the consequence of structures of authority that
distorted the natural propensity of human beings to cooperation and
sociability; the elimination of authority would, therefore, eradicate
social division as well. Revolution was not just a liberating project; in
eliminating ideology from social discourse, it would also create the
conditions for human integration on a new basis of equality.
The affinity of the anarchist perspective on the social with that
underlying post-Marxist criticism of ideology implies only equivalence, not
sameness; to suggest otherwise would be not only reductionist but also
circular. Each nevertheless has something to tell us about the other. So
long as Marxism is bound to premises of economic determination or to a
political project that makes class the central datum of history, it views
anarchism as a vacuous utopianism that has little to say about the
processes of revolution. Utopianism is not to be dismissed so cavalierly,
for it may have something essential to say about revolution. Reflecting on
the meaning of the term nowhere, Ricoeur has observed recently that perhaps
a fundamental structure of the reflexivity we may apply to our social roles
is the ability to conceive of an empty place from which to look at
ourselves.[44] To conceive the possibility of a nowhere implies an ability
to free social imagination; and does not revolution negate its own
undertaking when it denies this freedom?
But anarchism was not merely utopian and appears so only because it is
weakly theorized. Anarchists rested their case on the assumption of the
natural sociability of human beings; therefore, they took social division
and conflict to be a consequence of the distortion of humanity by
structures of authority. The task of social (and therefore cultural)
revolution was to peel off layers of accumulated oppression to reveal the
human core within, and to create the social conditions that would enable
humanity to realize its natural propensity to cooperation. Cultural
revolution was the key to restoring to humanity consciousness of its
essential nature. The anarchist argument proceeded less by social analysis
than by analogy between nature and society, which obviated the need for
extensive theorization. Nevertheless, because anarchists took nature rather
than society as the point of departure for their criticism of power and
authority, they had a more comprehensive grasp than their Marxist
competitors of the problem of oppression; for rather than seek out key
social relationships or institutions as explanations for power, they
focused on the social totality as the realm of oppression: all social
relationships were artifices of power and, therefore, equally complicit in
oppression, even though the state as the embodiment of the social totality
had a particularly important role to play in perpetuating the structure(s)
of authority. Hence their appreciation of social discourses as the ultimate
realm of authority because the social totality drew its plausibility from
the reproduction of structures of authority and submission in quotidian
encounters. The apparently metaphysical juxtaposition of nature and society
became in the process the source of a comprehensive social criticism,
including the criticism of society for its antagonism to its natural roots.
It is also true, however, that this criticism was buried within moralistic
protests against society for its deviation from nature, and in the absence
of a rigorous theoretical elaboration of their insights, anarchists
suffered from a social ambiguity that in practice frustrated their efforts
to agree upon procedures of revolutionary activity and made anarchism a
gathering place for the socially disaffected, ranging from the most serious
advocates of radical change to atavistic nihilists in personal rebellion
against society.
Ironically, it is the highly rigorous and complex theoretical procedures of
post-Marxist criticism of ideology, much of which draws upon Marxism, that
enables us to grasp the theoretical import of the anarchist argument.
Anarchism in turn may help us grasp the social and political conditions
that have made this criticism possible. From an anarchist perspective,
Marxism in its political guises appears as another form of ideological
closure on the social, not only incapable of grasping the anarchist
argument but inimical to it. The very affinity of post-Marxist criticism of
ideology with the anarchist perspective (which enables it to grasp the
significance of the latter) may suggest that it has brought Marxism closer
to anarchism, not in a formal sense—for it draws on diverse intellectual
sources and is informed by the history of Marxism since Marx—but in
prying open this ideological closure that long has cut off the Marxist idea
of the social from that of anarchism. Two developments in particular have
been of the utmost importance. First is the reopening of the question of
the relationship between politics and society in response to the political
experiences of Marxist-led revolutions, which have not fulfilled their
liberating promise. The second is the intrusion upon the consciousness of
oppression of a whole set of problems that are not readily reducible to
class oppression; the increasing importance, in other words, of forms of
oppression that have come to overshadow class oppression. That these
developments have revived interest in anarchism is not to be disputed, as
the following statement by a contemporary ecofeminist illustrates: Many of
us who began the ecofeminist movement were strongly influenced by
anarchism, and accepted the anarchist critique of Marxism, for its
economism, opportunism, anti-ecological viewpoints, and a radical
separation of means and ends.[45] The question is whether the
reintroduction of anarchism offers anything in the way of a better grasp of
the post-Marxist criticism of ideology and power.
This question may be answered in the negative; for it is possible to argue
that the Marxist tradition contains within it all that is necessary for a
critique of the historical unfolding of Marxism, to pry open the
ideological closure that historical Marxism has imposed upon the discourse
in Marx’s texts. It is arguable that Marx himself did not hold a
reductionist concept of ideology that reduced ideology to class interest,
but rather perceived it in its discursive guise (for example, language as
practical consciousness) in everyday relations of domination that took a
different form within the context of different social relationships. It is
also arguable that Marxism itself is a discourse on the social, which not
only gave priority to the social over the political but also shared with
anarchism the common goal of abolishing politics. Certainly in the
revolutionary discourse in China there were broad areas of overlap between
anarchist and Marxist conceptions of the social and social revolution that
make it difficult to identify some ideas as Marxist or anarchist.
This strategy of privileging text over history, and certain parts of the
text over others, however, disguises in its references to the text its own
interpretive undertaking, which is informed by its own historical
situation. While it is indeed necessary to separate Marx from subsequent
Marxist traditions (which is but a recognition of their historical
situations), to portray the latter as denials of Marx or deviations from an
authentic Marxism is to deny the multiplicity of interpretations that
Marx’s texts offer. Leninism may not be a necessary product of Marxism,
but as Lenin himself understood, it is one possible product. Likewise, to
suggest that Marx had anticipated in his texts the discursive assumptions
of post-Marxist criticism of ideology is to draw attention to those aspects
of his texts against others that yield different conclusions.
If we examine the relationship between anarchism and Marxism from this
perspective, it is possible to argue that while Marxism and anarchism may
coincide on certain basic issues, Marxism calls for a different arrangement
of the elements of the discourse on social revolution than does anarchism,
that even as Marx recognized the multifaceted character of domination he
assigned the strategic priorities of revolution differently (with a primary
emphasis on class) and assigned to politics a central part in revolution,
which together endow Marxism with an ideological visage different from
anarchism. The same Marx who recognized language as practical
consciousness, who found in the Paris Commune a paradigm of democratic
revolution (as did the anarchists), and who looked to the abolition of the
state as the ultimate goal of revolution could say of Bakunin that this ass
cannot even understand that any class movement, as such, is necessarily—a
political movement.[46] Even more fundamental, it is necessary to remember
that whereas Kropotkin—the major source of anarchist theoretical
discourse—composed his Mutual Aid to disprove Darwinian notions about
nature and society, Marx found in Darwin a confirmation of the
scientificity of his social theory. Unlike the anarchist repudiation of
social division and conflict, the point of departure for Marxism is the
social system as a realm of conflict, which is to be comprehended not in
contrasts with nature but by reference to its own history. Power, instead
of being an unnatural intrusion upon society of something that is extrinsic
to it, is an instrument of social conflict that may be understood only
historically, in the different forms it assumes in different historical
contexts. To moralize against it, or even to speak of it, is meaningless,
therefore, except in relation to its social context. Until conflict has
been eliminated from the social system (which requires abolition of social
interests embedded in economic organization, whose agent is to be the
proletariat), power may have an integrative role to play in society, which
may otherwise break apart under the pressure of conflicting social
interests. Unlike the anarchist argument where liberation (the abolition of
power) and integration appear as parts of the same process, Marxist
revolutionary strategy sets them apart in the immediate future of
revolution in antagonism to one another: power is necessary to secure the
integration that liberation threatens. The immediate problem, therefore, is
not to abolish power but to reorganize it in order to achieve its ultimate
abolition.
Hence, whereas the anarchist problematic of social revolution was shaped by
the problem of cultural revolution—the transformation of social
discourses—Marxism has placed the primary emphasis on the restructuring
of power, to which the transformation of class relationships is essential.
The need to restructure power, as the point of departure for theoretical
activity, accounts for the complexity of Marxist and post-Marxist criticism
of ideology, which has a much more sophisticated appreciation of the
relationship between power and ideology than the anarchists had, with their
propensity to dismiss the problems it presents because they were interested
mainly in abolishing power, not restructuring it, which they thought could
be achieved through cultural revolution. Ironically, as Marxism has gained
in complexity with the problematization of politics and a consequent
recognition of power as a problem not merely of politics or class but
rather of culture (in the sense of culture as social discourse), it has
moved once again closer to the anarchist criticism of power as an endowment
of the structure of authority of the social totality. Anarchism helps us
understand why. The ideological closure implicit in a political or
class-based notion of social revolution also implied, as anarchists
insisted, a reproduction in different guise of the structures of authority
that the revolution sought to abolish. The decentering of these conceptions
in post-Marxist criticism of ideology has opened up this closure and turned
attention to the social totality as the realm of authority. The
deconstructive consequences of this decentering recalls the deconstructive
implications of the anarchist insistence on the social against the
political. This does not mean that anarchism and Marxism have become one;
but it is not incidental that the deconstruction has returned Marxism to
those texts of Marx that have the most in common with anarchism.
My reading of Chinese anarchism in the following pages then is guided by
two considerations beyond the historical. Within the specifically Chinese
context, anarchists demand our attention, not for who they were or what
they accomplished, but because against revolutionary strategies that
presupposed a necessary compromise of revolutionary goals in order to
confront the exigencies of immediate necessity they reaffirmed a
revolutionary consciousness (or should we say, conscience) that provides an
indispensable critical perspective from the Left on the unfolding of the
Chinese revolution. Second, though the Chinese anarchists are remote in
time or space (although not so remote as they once seemed), what they had
to say about revolution in one of the most important revolutionary
historical contexts of the twentieth century may have much to tell us about
revolution at a time when the crisis of socialism (and society) is deeper
than ever—or at least as deep as it has ever been.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org
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Chapter 1 -- Added : January 04, 2021
Chapter 1 -- Updated : January 16, 2022
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