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Marx and Modernity: Rethinking Labour, Capital, and Capitalism
Stacie Hanneman
Front Hist Chin. 2012, 7 (3): 344-375.
https://doi.org/10.3868/s020-001-012-0019-4
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.
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Imagining a Different Future—Anarchist Equality and the Form of Labour in the Journal of Natural Justice
Zhihang Qiao
Front Hist Chin. 2012, 7 (3): 376-403.
https://doi.org/10.3868/s020-001-012-0020-8
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.
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The Strange Fate of Marxist Civil Society Discourse in Japan and China
Viren Murthy
Front Hist Chin. 2012, 7 (3): 442-472.
https://doi.org/10.3868/s020-001-012-0023-9
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.
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