In January 2018 Professor Jiang published an article, "哲学与历史—从党的十九大报告解读“习近平时代” [‘Philosophy
and History: Interpreting the “Xi Jinping Era” through Xi’s Report to
the Nineteenth National Congress of the CCP’] in the Guangzhou journal Open Times (开放时代)
in January 2018. The essay was meant to capture the meaning and
develop the underlying theory that now constitutes "New Era" thought and
its implications for Chinese political philosophy, the development of
Chinese Marxist Leninist Theory, and its consequences for governance in
China. Now that important work has been translated into English (Jiang
Shigong: ‘Philosophy and History: Interpreting the “Xi Jinping Era” through Xi’s Report to the Nineteenth National Congress of the CCP’ The China Story (Australian Centre on China in the World
(CIW) at the Australian National University ) (11 May 2018)
(Translation by David Ownby. Notes by Timothy Cheek and David Ownby) Permalink HERE).
Professor Jiang's essay is worthy of deep study and consideration.
In a prior post I provided my own Reflections
on Jiang Shigong on ‘Philosophy and History: Interpreting the “Xi
Jinping Era” through Xi’s Report to the Nineteenth National Congress of
the CCP’ [ 哲学与历史 —从党的十九大报告解读“习近平时代” 强世功 ].
In this post Flora Sapio provides her own Four Short Reflections on Jiang
Shigong’s Essay on “Philosophy and History.”
Four Short Reflections on Jiang Shigong’s Essay on “Philosophy and History”
Flora Sapio
This blog post has been written as a part of the
debate provoked by the publication of an essay by Jiang Shigong 强世功 in the “Open Times” in January 2018, with the
title “Philosophy and History: Interpreting the “Xi Jinping Era” through Xi’s
Report to the Nineteenth National Congress of the CCP”
I won’t summarize the essay: I am assuming
everyone with an academic or intellectual interest in China will have read
either the original or the translation in its entirety.
Rehashing Jiang Shigong’s argument would be of
little usefulness, and also involve the risk that I would impose my own meaning
and interpretation on the words of Jiang Shigong.
As Jiang explains in the Abstract to the essay:
“This text interprets the significance of the
‘Xi Jinping era’ in Party history, the history of the Republic, the history of
Chinese civilisation, the history of the international communist movement, and
the history of mankind from the perspective of the internal linkages between
philosophy and history”.
The original version of the essay is available here,
while the full-text English translation has been published here.
1
In referring to the Report to the 19th Congress
of the CCP, Jiang writes how: “the media is circulating expert analyses and
interpretations (…) in the hopes that” the words in the Report will bring “Party
leadership into step with the people as an organic, unified, active, agent.”
Until not very long ago, there was a time in some
parts of Europe, when the existence of various venues and fora
allowed persons belonging to different socio-economic strata to maintain
a direct and personal communication.
At times, these fora were institutionalized,
and took the shape of mass political parties, labour unions, and different
types of associations. Some other times, these fora could be entirely
informal – a product of urban geographies where the impoverished nobleman, the
tenured university professor, the cleaner and the immigrant lived very close to
each other, or even on different floors of the same building. So they would meet
outside of their respective occupations and social circles, and exchange ideas
on politics.
These urban geographies existed in market
economies (so-called “capitalist countries”). Their existence did not depend on
any top-level design. It was rather the product of the absence of top-level
design and urban planning. These urban geographies did not exist as a product
of any ideology either. They were the result of the spontaneous organization of
men and things.
This mixture of persons from different social
and economic strata was immensely useful to European mass political parties, of
any color and creed. Because – if I can to express my ideas borrowing the
linguistic codes used in Jiang Shigong’s article – it allowed to maintain close
links between the “vanguard” and the
“masses”.
In Europe, the “vanguard” meant either Fascism
or Communism or Socialism or Christian political ideologies, or centrist
ideologies. Or even a mix of two or more of these.
The “masses” meant all those persons who
were interested in how people in their
society could live together in the best possible way. This group of persons was
not a small group. And it was different from those who went to the polls once
every couple of years, and placed an “X” on this or that symbol without
understanding much about how their society worked, or what its problems were.
If some parts of Europe indeed are “the
political laboratory of modernity”, or the
trial sites of the politics to come, then it would be worth trying to
understand the reasons why this arrangement of people and things was broken up.
And why such techniques as sentiment analysis – with all of their
methodological flaws:
(a) came to replace robust and reliable flows of
interaction and communication
(c) are something still completely unknown to
the ordinary people (“the citizens” in liberal language, “the masses” in
marxist-leninist language)
The results of breaking this urban ecosystem up
are for everyone to be seen. Existing political, intellectual, economic elites
are being challenged. One of the difference between the “elite” and the
“masses” is a difference in the linguistic codes members of each group use to
convey their ideas. Today, those who have chosen to place themselves on the
same linguistic level of the “masses” ( = disadvantaged or vulnerable groups)
are in power. Their identification with the masses, however, might not go
beyond the use of a simple language everyone can understand.
It is from here that any critique to democracy
has to start from. Not from abstract notions, detached from the ways in which
the different peoples of Europe live their political lives. Such a critique may
also find ways to reinforce those institutions and structures that have
guaranteed the global economic interconnectedness and stability of the European
continent for the last seventy years.
2
“If
we want to understand the report to the Nineteenth Party Congress, we must
first understand the CCP. The CCP is a principle-driven political party that
believes in Marxism”
A distinction is to be made among
Marxism, Leninism, and Marxism-Leninism. Marxism is an ideology. Leninism (in
my understanding) is a set of organizational principles. Marxism-Leninism
blends a specific political ideology with specific organizational principles.
What are these organizational
principles, when are they used, and how do they work?
In (non-leftist), (non-Marxist)
plain language: these organizational principles postulate that:
(a) there is a group of persons
who are well ahead of all the others, either because they have a superior
mastery of theory, ideology, religion, or because they have been “chosen”, or
because they are more skilled than others. In Marxist jargon, this group of
persons is called “the vanguard”;
(b) there is a group of persons
who are behind. In Marxist jargon, these are “the masses” or “the proletariat”;
(c) those who have a better
command of theory (ideology, religion, mathematics, etc.) have the mission to educate and organize
those who are behind. To awaken them, and make them realize where their real
interest lies;
(d) led by the vanguard, the
masses will become better, more knowleadgeable, more skilled, more powerful,
and slowly move towards a final state of collective wealth, happiness,
salvation, knowledge, and so on;
(e) to effectively lead the
masses, a top-down hierarchical organization is needed.
The best persons are at the top,
and they represent the others, speaking and acting on their behalf. In a
future, those who today are at the bottom of the hierarchy will all rise to the
top of the hierarchy together. The belief in the realization of this promise is
the cognitive glue allowing this organizational principle to function.
As an organizational principle,
Leninism may be detached from Marxism, and applied to the most diverse spheres
of activity. As long as anything meets
conditions (a) to (e), it shares the fundamental traits of the theory devised
by a Russian lawyer known with the name of Vladimir Lenin. It is by no chance that Leninism involves notions of
representation and fiduciary duties.
The fact some of the conditions
and beliefs conceptualized by Lenin can be found in the most diverse contexts
and organizations has made the Chinese version of Marxism-Leninism, as it has
been reinterpreted by all the General Secretaries of the CCP, appealing to the
eyes of many outside of China.
The appeal is not premised on
their embracing of Marxism-Leninism, but on a combination of logic and
pragmatism. I will try to illustrate this point through an example:
If it is true that a CEO (or any other succcessful person) is
successful because he has been working hard on his skills:
- and it is true that everyone has a chance to become successful one day if they work hard and follow the example of those who are successful today;
- and if this is all true because there are concrete results – achieved by others – to prove its truth, then...
this ‘logic’ functions across
platforms, contexts, countries, and historical periods. For instance, it may be
argued that success is less important than ideals or values. Alternatively, it
may be argued that the most important thing in life is happiness, and that
everyone can be happy provided they follow the correct path to happiness.
Side by side with the argument
that China is producing “facts on the ground”, in talking with Europeans I
often encounter a variety of arguments based on belief in the preeminence of
distinct facts, or ideas, values, ideologies, etc.
While the values of the variables at play may change from
“wealth” to “culture” or anything else, the logic driving the “operating
system” remains the same.
This is the point of greatest interconnection and of
greatest division between China and the West.
In this case, too, any
intellectual critique to any ideological system has to begin from the admission
that an inter-systemic logic exists, regardless of the different value this
logic can attribute to abstract variables. And that this logic is producing a
consensus and divisions that categories as ‘nation’, ‘class’, ‘gender’ and even
‘ideology’ are unable to account for.
But, such a line of reasoning, and
any reaction to Jiang Shigong’s piece based on it would fail to respond to the
argument in Jiang Shigong’s article.
At the core of the argument is a
premise refusing any reasoning based on a comparison of the value of abstract
variables, absent the results such variables yield in the real world.
3
“Western
civilisation is built on a philosophical-theological tradition of binary
antagonisms, between phenomenon and existence, life on earth and in heaven”
If a theological tradition
constructed around binary antagonisms is at the root of all Western thought
produced since when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman
Empire, then Western thought cannot easily separate itself from its theological
undercurrents. Which may be limited to Christianity, or extend further
back in time to pre-Christian systems of belief.
That German Marxism is indebted to
Christianity, and Christian eschatology in particular, has been proved. The
question then becomes whether any attempt at the indigenization of Marxism can
avoid the import of these eschatological elements. Jiang Shigong is of course
aware of this question.
This question is a question common
to all the different cultures that, at a given point in their history, chose to
adapt Marxism-Leninism to their conditions. In fact, Marxism – either in its
“pure” version, or diluted and blended with notions of distributive
egalitarianism, electoral democracy, nationalism, nativism, socialism, etc. was
adopted by various countries at different points in their history.
The attempt to ground Marxism in a
distinct philosophical tradition should, in theory, allow to separate Marxism
from its messianic components before its adaptation takes place. Assuming those
messianic component are unwanted, and they can be identified. In so doing,
however, the biggest risk is that of pulling the ground from under one’s feet,
and eroding the very basis of legitimacy one tries to bolster.
Marx tried to find the solution to
this problem by arguing that communism had to be subject to empirical tests,
the testing ground being real life. But ideas, “once they descend into the
world, lose their original lustre”, perhaps because the feedback loops
theorized by Marx stemmed from abstract notions that still carried the mark of
eschatology.
At the risk of being repetivive, I
will say that this is a problem for any system relying on a set of principles
indebted to or deriving from the paradigms of escathology, messianism,
redemption, or the sacrifice (as opposed to a wise use of one’s abilities)
of the Self for a greater good.
From here, the question follows of
whether during the transition from “natural time” to “political time”,
“political time” has become a “messianic time”. Jiang Shigong’s essay does not
have the goal to answer this question. So any criticism of the essay on this
ground would be intellectually unfair.
The Report to the 19th Congress of
the CPC, however, has found a solution to this problem in the notion of ‘not forgetting’, or ‘keeping’ one’s 初心
I will not comment on the notion
of 初心, neither will I explain its etymology, because all of those who
have been following the debate provoked by Jiang Shigong’s essay are familiar
with this notion, and the constellations of meaning where this notion has existed
throughout the history of China.
Jiang Shigong’s essay incidentally
offers an additional answer to the problem, which is fully coherent with the
content of the Report to the 19th Congress of the CPC, there where it says:
“In the annals of human history,
what has always played a determining role in the unfolding of history is
people, because the history of mankind was itself created by people.”
This suggests that there can be a
way for “political time” to be devoid of messianic and evangelizing components
inherited from the binary antagonisms identified by Jiang Shigong. If the
notion of 初心 plays a prominent role, other notions can be of help too.
4
“From the perspective of China’s
internal politics, the great revival of the Chinese nation is not necessarily
in contradiction with Western liberal democratic systems. China’s liberals have
seen new political possibilities in this, which has resulted in divisions
within the liberal ranks, in which one group has begun to adjust its strategy,
seeing their past fetishisation of individual rights and free markets, and
their consequent opposition to the nation and the people, as a kind of
political immaturity. This group has hastened to embrace the rise of the nation
as a political subject.”
And yet the question of whether
the nation is still a political subject – a question central to this school of
thought - remains debatable. An answer to this question lies in:
(a) finding out who or what a
subject is;
(b) explaining when a subject can
be said to be political, and whether the attribute of “political” refers to a
function a subject plays permanently, occasionally, or in other ways;
(c) explaining whether political
subjectivity is inclusive or exclusive; monistic, or pluralistic; innate and
irrevocable, or incidental and revokable. Or it exists beyond dychotomies
This is not a question addressed
by Jiang Shigong’s essay, yet this question may be of relevance to those who
use notions of ‘state’ and ‘political subjectivity’ in their work.
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