Abstract
The article explores the tangled relationship between activism and state power in China, post-1917, exploring how it sheds light on a perennial problem in radical thought: namely, how universal prescriptions and structures of power relate to localized instances of activism. Grassroots mobilization and community-building has been held up as a solution that keeps revolution “revolutionary” by reforming social relations and personal conduct. By making all politics mass-politics, Chinese Maoists hoped to prevent a slide into a repressive social order. However, the “mass-line” achieved the opposite end and created a hollowed-out politics through reactionary violence. In the post-1989 era, new articulations of state power and activism encourage reflection on changing material conditions and how they affect the possibility of mass-politics and class consciousness.
Highlights
This article takes the Chinese revolutionary tradition, post-1917, to be exemplary of a dialectical tension between revolutionary politics and state power, with mass-action frequently complicit in the perpetuation of autocratic rule
I am not trying to draw out direct causal links here between 1917 and its precursors in Russian and European social stratification, elite rule and productive forces vis-à-vis the present state of politics in China or elsewhere
The settlement of the Cultural Revolution was in favor of state power, and activism was instrumentalized towards that end
Summary
This article takes the Chinese revolutionary tradition, post-1917, to be exemplary of a dialectical tension between revolutionary politics and state power, with mass-action frequently complicit in the perpetuation of autocratic rule. The majority of those who would go on to form the Chinese Comintern cadres were university educated, in what was to become a peasant-led movement, fostering the perception of a class-based schism within the CCP at an early stage (Huber, 2008: 74) Both China and the Soviet Union had been predominantly agrarian societies prior to the advent of a communist revolutionary movement, but it was more pronounced in the Chinese case. The settlement of the Cultural Revolution was in favor of state power, and activism was instrumentalized towards that end To cite another example, workers’ propaganda teams were despatched to universities to attempt to reform the education system, resulting in a series of radical experiments over the following years to curb the power of “bourgeois intellectuals.”. This may have contributed to an acceleration of the power of technocrats in the post-Cultural Revolution years, as academic study became less “abstract” and more concerned with economic development (Andreas, 2009)
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