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.




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