This article argues that China’s modern historical development and, more generally, modern global developments can be illuminated by a renewed encounter with Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism. This renewed encounter entails a fundamental critique of traditional Marxism’s understanding of capitalism and of socialism. It seeks to explain the historically dynamic character of capitalist society as a system of ongoing constraints. This central feature of the contemporary world cannot be grasped adequately by intellectual paradigms, such as theories of identity or of politics, which have been dominant in recent decades. The approach outlined here analyzes capitalist modernity as structured by a historically unique social function of labour, and is based on a fundamental reevaluation of the meaning of labour in Marx’s analysis as the object, rather than the standpoint of his critique. The focus on the historical specificity of Marx’s analytic categories also calls into question any conception of a transhistorically valid social science.
The bilateral treaties between the Qing, the United States and other European countries, suggested a new order for commerce and diplomacy in China, often referred to as the “treaty system.” This paper reevaluates the treaty system using a critical theory of capital influenced by the work of Moishe Postone. While most histories of Qing-British relations have understood capitalism as a motivating force for British commercial expansion into China, they have only attempted to instrumentally connect capitalist interests to the ways in which that expansion took place. This analysis, by contrast, approaches capitalism as a historically specific social formation with determining social forms. These forms—commodity, labor, and value produce specific structures of social organization with an immanent historical dynamic. By relating these forms and their dynamic to treaty relations and the creative destruction they enacted over time, this paper grounds Qing-British relations in capitalism, understood not at the level of profit-seeking, but at the level of its essential social forms, their forms of appearance and self-grounded and self-reflexive evolution.
In the late Qing, China entered the capitalist world-system and this brought about a structural change in society. In this context, late Qing intellectuals felt a double imperative: they had to combat imperialist invasion and economic plunder and therefore they had to establish a nation-state, which presupposed capitalist development. However, on the other hand, they saw the various problems associated with capitalism, and as they were developing their narratives of identity, they needed to find conceptual resources to counter Eurocentric narratives of history. Consequently, these intellectuals harbored a desire to overcome capitalism. This desire produced various post-capitalist utopias, which we can see in Kang Youwei, Tan Sitong and Zhang Taiyan. These utopias are especially meaningful today, in an age where capitalist domination is heightened, but hope for a post-capitalist future has greatly diminished. “Equality” is a keyword with which late Qing intellectuals mapped out the future. Moreover, “equality” expresses precisely the above doubled movement: on the one hand, it constitutes the condition for the nation state, but on the other hand, it is also a concept that late Qing intellectuals used to imagine a different future. Discussions of equality directly dealt with issues of labour, women, and so on. This essay takes as its focus the Journal of Natural Justice, which was organized by the Society for the Restoration of Women’s rights organized by He Zhen, Liu Shipei and others. This journal published for less than one year, but it was one of the main journals promoting socialism and anarchism. It was also the first to directly discuss “labour,” and it proposed an ideal of equality in which “everyone has work and everyone labours.” Throughout the rest of China’s twentieth century, leftist and Marxist intellectuals continued this emphasis on labour. But capitalism presupposes that everyone is equal as a free-labourer. In this case, what is the relationship between the utopia proposed by the Journal of Natural Justice, which entails a world in which all people have work, and capitalism? This essay examines this question in hopes of shedding light on the larger trajectory of Chinese history.
This paper compares the initial efforts at military reform in China and Japan in the late nineteenth century. Changes in military organization and training are situated within a global process of military transformation represented by changes in the structure of the Prussian army. The Prussian staff system and planning program were imported into both Japan and China, but with quite different results. The paper contrasts centralization and standardization as typified by the new Japanese army with the decentered approaches in China. The paper argues that although there was substantive change in China, the Qing state was unable to impose a uniform plan for military Westernization. As a result, the new armies were never integrated into a common organization capable of defending the state from external aggression.
This article highlights the striking similarity of underlying social forms on both sides of the 1950s Cold War divide. Urban China in the early People’s Republic is interpreted as a variant of Fordism, a coherent social system that assumed hegemony across the globe in the postwar period. Under Fordism, bureaucratic mediation of a rationalized production process was brought together with a new regime of inclusive and homogeneous work and culture, all of which supported a vision of national unity and industrial development. Such an understanding may prove useful in working through difficulties in theorizing this period and in pursuing new directions for research.
Since the fall of the Soviet bloc and the various transformations in China since the late 1980s and early 1990s, scholars in both China and other regions have begun to use the term “civil society” to denote a realm of political practice separate from the state. Even today, the Chinese philosophy professor Han Lixin uses the term to denote future possibilities for China. However, unlike earlier works on civil society that attempt to guide China through Western liberal theory, Han explicitly draws on the Japanese “civil society Marxists,” such as Hirata Kiyoaki and Mochizuki Seiji. This essay in some ways mimics Han’s attempt to bring together Japanese Marxist theory and contemporary Chinese reality, but claims that reexamining theories of civil society in Japan should lead us to emphasize the logic of capital in understanding Chinese society and envisioning a future for socialism. The essay introduces the complex theorization of civil society by an often overlooked Marxist, Kakehashi Akihide. Kakehashi explicitly grasps civil society in relation to more fundamental categories in Marx’s work, such as the commodity form. In this way, he points the way to a deeper understanding of the dynamic of capitalism and by extension the history of particular regions of the world, such as China. However, in the 1960s and early 1970s when the “civil society Marxists” Hirata Kiyoaki and Mochizuki Seiji popularized their reading of Marx, they focused on civil society as a moment of liberation without stressing the totalizing dynamic of capitalism. The essay discusses Han’s use of Hirata and Mochizuki, before returning to the problem of how thinking of capitalism as a totalizing dynamic could further illuminate issues of post-1949 and contemporary China. In short, I argue that civil society is always already imbricated in a more fundamental logic of producing surplus value, which serves to undermine the freedom that civil society is supposed to realize. Hence a true theory of human emancipation must focus on the totalizing logic of capitalism and how to overcome it.