Speech upon Receiving the World Marxian Economic Award (I)

Abstract

I am very grateful to WAPE for awarding me the World Marxian Economics Award 2013. I am unable to attend the Brazil conference due to my age. So I will have to rely on this unorthodox way to share with you some of the experiences and reflections concerning my life as a Marxist economist.I was born in October 1925 in a poor village of Wutai county, Shanxi province. I did farm work with my parents when I was young, and was very familiar with peasants' poverty and suffering. The Japanese army occupied my hometown in 1938 when I was in the primary school, which stopped my schooling for four years. I witnessed the Japanese army's violence of rape, plunder and murder. During that time, I did cleaning work at a drug store and worked as a coolie in Taiyuan to make a living, and felt the humiliation and sorrow of an underclass labor. This goaded me to two future ambitions: first, to gain know-how, to change my own fate, and to help the poor be heard; and second, to fight against invasion and create a strong nation of China. For these reasons, I changed my given name Xiangui (rich and famous), given by my primary school teacher, to Xinghua (prosperity of China).Then I went to Jinshan middle school in the second military area of west Shanxi province. The headmaster, Zhao Zongfu was a secret member of the CCP (his father was the governor of Shanxi province). I started a mimeographed newspaper to propagate progressive and anti-Japanese-invasion ideas. This impressed Zhao, who gave me a lot of support and help, as well as influencing me in terms of political views. The school went back to Taiyuan after the victory against Japan. I became involved in secret revolutionary work and decided to devote myself to ending the old system and establishing a new one. I was put in jail for that, but kept the Party's secrets. Before the liberation of Taiyuan, more than ten of my comrades were arrested and killed. I escaped the tragedy due to my early return to the liberated area via Beijing.I am relating this experience to indicate the link between my economic, social and political history as well as my ambitions and belief on the one hand, and on the other, my persistence in upholding the Marxist standpoint and method as well as socialist theory and practices during my teaching and research for more than 60 years, during which I have publicly defended and developed Marxist and socialism. Marx called his economics as opposed to capital economics. The former is the for the liberation and benefits of laborers while the latter is the one supporting capitalism. I naturally chose and believed in the former.In 1948, I entered Huabei University, which became Renmin University after the establishment of the People's Republic of China. As the first graduate majoring in political in New China, I systematically studied Das Kapital and other works of Marx and Engels. I tried my best to use the Marxist standpoint and method to analyse economic society and judge theories and practices. Before the opening and reform, I failed to follow the ultra-left tide and was treated as a right-wing figure, so that I suffered a lot in all political movements. For my Marxist belief and research responsibility, I wrote some economic articles under pressure. To avoid the ultra-leftist attacks, I selected Das Kapital and other classic works as my research targets, since no one at the time would question, criticize and deny Marx's, Engels', and Lenin's theories but there existed misunder- standings and distortions of their views. So I focused my research on the labor theory of value, law of value, distribution according to labor, land rent theory, commodity economy, and so on. I loved independent thinking and exploration, so I often presented unique views very different from prevailing opinions. For example, in the 1950s, I questioned the view in textbooks that abstract labor belonged to commodity economy and currency had class nature, and believed that this view accorded neither with Marxist economics, nor economic practices. …