Social Revolution in China
Wittfogel, Karl A.
nominate an aspiring 1976 presidential candidate. Few expected Nixon to listen to the threats of the Democrats. Indeed, when Nixon requested Republican leaders from around the country, as well...
...Among the latter, the concept of an Asiatic restoration is decisive, not because Lenin stressed it, but because it compels us, in the light of the macro-analytical (classical) view of history and society, to determine, first of all, what kind of societal change was involved in the Communist revolution in Russia...
...Harper's Magazine Press published it...
...Marx argued further t h a t the British conquest of India differed from conquests by "the Turk" and "the Persian" (both Turkey and Persia were, of course, Asiatic) and by "the Russian" (in 1853 Russia was still an intact semi-Asiatic country...
...But it so happened that, since the mid-nineteenth century, industrial capitalism became increasingly powerful in Western Europe...
...While the need for attention grew ever more urgent, every effort toward it was foiled...
...Obviously, class struggle is the luxury of multi-centered and open societies...
...What has been gleaned from the records and recollections of his acquaintances is a picture of remarkable loneliness: the only friend of Bremer's that neighbors could recall was Thomas Neuman, who shot and killed himself on May 22, 1971, while playing Russian roulette...
...The pulverization of the mass of the population has not yet reached its saturation point either in the USSR or in Communist China...
...This omission together with Marx's 1859 inclusion of the Asiatic order as one of four "progressive" epochs "in the economic formation of society" have served the cause, not of truth-oriented science, but of poweroriented "orthodox" Marxism...
...In 1852, most of his energies were spent in assisting the defendants in the Cologne Communist trial...
...But there can be no doubt that the Chinese Communists, who at a very early stage of their revolutionary history, instituted atomizing controls in the territories they were occupying, were able, after their seizure of power, to initiate a policy of pulverization, not when they began their collectivization of agriculture in 1954, but as soon as they began their "land reform" in 1946...
...From the later fifties he recognized that the dispersed villages of the Asiatic world were not necessarily based on communal land tenure...
...As a young man, he had already postulated that despotism forces man to live in a political ~animal kingdom...
...The evidence of thousands of years of history confirms the contention that Asiatic society did not develop internal forces strong enough to cause the disintegration of this closed and single-centered society...
...2) Grave military defeats, while not leading to the colonization of the defeated country, might shatter its socio-political structure...
...Lacking the deep penetration which British rule had accomplished in India, and lacking the socioeconomic progress which an accelerated industrialization had accomplished in Russia after the Crimean War, the anti-"Asiatic" revolution in China resembled the western bourgeois revolution even less than did corresponding movements in India and Russia...
...The modern Chinese revolution had its start in the Nationalists' attempt early in the twentieth century to replace China's traditional government and society by a pluralistic institutional structure of the western type...
...However, changes that have been made in the classical substance of original Marxism to serve political purposes are scientifically untenable...
...1929-1949), the Chinese Communists were engaging in the territories they then occupied, in a derivative revolution, the root revolution being the Russian Communist revolution...
...Like other Asiatic societies, China did not possess the internal forces to initiate such a transformation...
...And with respect to Russia, he welcomed the emergence of all social elements so long as they were oriented toward the destruction of Tsarist despotism...
...But what did it accomplish in terms of the criteria of the classical analysts of history and society, criteria that in large part were also upheld by Karl Marx...
...Mao did not betray the principles of socialism, to which he adhered officially, for the simple reason that for him these principles never had any meaning...
...Cynicism Remains Nixon's choice, nonetheless, raises serious questions...
...of social life (elements of self-government in the villages, guilds, and secondary religions), and of ideas (in the core areas of religious doctrine, nonpolitical philosophy, artistic and literary activities...
...In both instances, the European masters planted a "European despotism" upon an "Asiatic despotism...
...Sun's socialism, it could be expected that this variant of an anti-Asiatic bourgeois revolution, like the corresponding Indian and Russian movements, would advance slowly...
...Recognizing that from 1853 this was Marx's and Engels' belief, we are struck by the fact that they did not, in subsequent prefaces of the Communist Manifesto, correct their original thesis regarding the universality of class struggle...
...At times Bremer's frustrated adventures take on the air of sentimental slapstick: he leaves his weapons on an airliner, only to have them returned by a conscientious hostess...
...16 The Alternative December 1973 Recognition of these circumstances is essential for an understanding of PekingMoscow relations yesterday and today-and in a future in which there will be no Mao to hamper Peking's reassociation with Moscow, a policy that seems to have not ~a few supporters even now...
...Unlike the Tito-Stalin rift, the hostility between Peking and Moscow, although grim, has not led to a break in diplomatic relations...
...Unfortunately, these questions are still with us...
...His changing evaluation of the Taiping Rebellion showed him willing to learn, not only about Asia, but also, and quite concretely, about China too...
...Nixon reportedly wanted Ford as his running mate in 1960, but Henry Cabot Lodge with the support of President Eisenhower was able to prevail and get the vicepresidential nomination in that year...
...The student of the history of ideas knows that since the beginning of the Socialist Marxist movement in Russia--that is, since 1883--the adherents of this movement had been made aware by Plekhanov, their top-ranking theoretical leader, that a prematurely forced revolution against the Tsarist autocracy might not promote their historical aim, a democratic and bourgeois development, but rather the restoration of Asiatically despotic conditions such as had existed in Inca Peru and Sung China...
...Bremer was rejected by a sixteen-year-old girl after a date late in 1971...
...The White House is not the most cheerful place in Washington today and Jerry Ford's nomination has done little to change the mood decisively one way or the other...
...and (2) by the fact that the people were "dispersed . . . over the surface of the country and agglomerated in small [village] centers by the domestic union of agricultural and manufacturing pursuits...
...The President's serious consideration of Richardson is also regarded by some GOP officials as indicative of Nixon's continuing insensitivity to the Republican Party's right wing...
...I (1867) shows that his newly acquired insights did not induce him to modify his earlier belief that the dissolution and reforming of states and the dynastic changes occurred in "the political skies" of Asiatic society, that is, in a sphere far above the unchanging and apathetic villages...
...But it hardly needs saying that these freedoms never threatened the monopoly of power enjoyed by the supreme autocrat and his ruling bureaucracy...
...The Communist revolution was expected to advance from a Communist-dominated '%ourgeois-democratic" revolution to a "socialist" revolution as defined by Lenin and his followers...
...In China (type 3), the disintegration of the old economic-political order was proceeding during Marx's time very slowly...
...and Russia's proximity to this area accelerated the internal growth of anti-Asiatic elements which, in Russia as in India, were complex...
...It crucially affected the socio-historical views of Lenin's supposedly orthodox followers...
...Marx found that the atomization in Asiatic society left man no choice but to vegetate...
...To be sure, Dr...
...According to Marx they included discontented peasants and aristocrats who were critical of the regime...
...From the establishment of the Peking regime until 1959/60, the Chinese and Russian Communists formed a totalitarian superaxis in which the Soviet Union was the senior partner and Mao's China the junior partner...
...The revolutionary force t h a t linked the national issue and the struggle for a modern (pluralistic) state and society was at first primarily composed of Dr...
...not as slowly to be sure as the western bourgeois revolution which, according to Marx, took over half a millenium before it was completed, but much more slowly than the advances it made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...
...Different from the speedy colonization of India by a single western nation, China was invaded by several modern western powers...
...The student revolutionaries who at the end of World War I, and then only for a short time, became politically prominent were, in the main, dissident elements of the old bureaucraticgentry class with l i t t l e understanding of the problems of an anti-Asiatic revolution The Alternative December 1973 15 pointed out by Marx with respect to India...
...One Democratic congressional aide gleefully stated that had House Majority Leader Tip O'Neill (D-Mass...
...and Montesquieu elaborated it more than a century before Marx coined the designation "general slavery...
...In his concept of the "Asiatic state" he stressed two crucial "circumstances": that the socio-historical fate of all "Oriental peoples" was determined (1) by the fact that the great public works were handled by "the central government," the public works in question being essentially "canals and waterworks...
...What was the character of the order that had existed at the start of the Chinese Nationalist revolution...
...The concept of political slavery was postulated already in classical Greece...
...Beginning with a semi-managerial control over economic key positions in industry and communication, the Russian Communists established total managerial control first over the bulk of all industry and, less than ten years after the end of "War Communism," over the bulk of agriculture as well...
...The implications of these ideas are frighteningly meaningful...
...The first 148 pages of this unemployed busboy's journal, which he boasted would be read ~as closely as the Dead Sea Scrolls," are buried somewhere in Milwaukee...
...But there is no similar tragedy in a Mao's career, because there is no similar awareness...
...Indeed, when Nixon requested Republican leaders from around the country, as well as the GOP House and Senate members, to submit nominations for potential candidates, few expected this to be more than an exercise in public relations...
...Marx was deeply convinced that this was the case...
...What accounts for the extraordinary staying power of the agro-managerial state...
...Obviously mindful of the social revolutions of the West with their political tasks and slogans, he declared that the Taipings were "unaware of any task except the change of the dynasty...
...It was then that, aided by Engels and generalizing mainly on the basis of his knowledge of India, he rediscovered the world of Asia whose peculiarity he had recognized in 1842/43, but then without concern for its ecological and economic peculiarities...
...This is the first point to be made by the realistic student of social revolution in China...
...3) Military defeats by several modern powers might lead to an inconclusive (semi-) colonization that lacked the strength and the purposefulness of a fullfledged colonization...
...They further doubt that Ford's nomination came in response to congressional pressure and discount the White House line that the President wants to remain neutral in the 1976 GOP presidential nominating process...
...But recognition of these circumstances is not particularly helpful for evaluating Communist China's internal conditions...
...Arthur Bremer is a thoroughbred failure...
...And he certainly cannot be held responsible for the deliberate perversion of his ideas that, in analogy to one of his favorite pejorative designations, "lumpen proletariat," may be called '~lumpen Marxism...
...Ultimately there would be a third wave...
...Despairing of the plot to kill the PresThe Alternative December 1973 17...
...None of these guarantees was fulfilled after the Bolsheviks established their dictatorship in October 1917...
...He swaggers into a Forty-Second Street massage parlor,, laying down a $30 tip, but in his anxiety he walks out after a few minutes...
...he drives for hours in prey of Nixon, only to discover that the President has followed another route...
...Marx and Engels were, of course, not the first to note that "Oriental peoples" exhibited a slave-like submissiveness...
...The Chinese Communist Party was founded in July 1921, four months after the Soviet Communists had crushed the Kronstadt Rebellion and three months after Lenin had, in veiled language, expressed his fear that the Communist-led Russian revolution was moving toward the establishment of a new Asiatically despotic bureaucracy...
...Leaving many aspects of "Asia's" ecelogica] and economic peculiarities unspecified, Marx expressed the conviction that the public-works government he had in mind possessed a despotic power which did not exist in other stratified agrarian societies...
...Not a few macro-analysts who recognized the stationary character of Asiatic society were satisfied with the assertion that the "civilized" (the modern industrial) nations would somehow induce the rest of the world to follow their example...
...What caused its subjects to behave as they did...
...And during Marx's lifetime, these assaults on the Middle Kingdom were indeed inconclusive...
...But he did not consider its significance for China, to which for obvious reasons it applies at least as well...
...It is essential to remember these traditional patterns and accomplishments--and also the intellectual creativity that unfolded during the brief period of the Chinese Republic--if we want to understand what the Communist revolution has done---and undone--in China...
...Envisaging the Taiping Rebellion as capable of such an intent, he expected from it "the most significant results for civilization...
...In the case of Russia, Marx did not stress the class character of the western powers t h a t shook the Tsarist regime during the Crimean War, since these powers did not conquer and "regenerate" Russia...
...The Asiatic argument in the chapter on the division of labor in Das Kapital, vol...
...In 1852, Marx found the proletarian revolutions of the nineteenth century much less brilliant and effective than the (western) bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century, and much more harrassed by "inadequacies, weaknesses, and paltrinesses...
...Today's New Left extremists, who call for the creation of a more just and free society and who in their campaigns invoke Mao Tse-tung, are, of course, even more ignorant than he...
...Another fear expressed (unofficially) was that any person who joined the Nixon team would be irreparably tainted and thus would have election problems in 1976...
...He writes economically and unemotionally as he trails Nixon in New York, Ottawa, and Washington...
...And even in 1912, when he criticized the illusionary quality of Sun Yat-sen's "subjective socialism" he continued to hail the revolution against China's "Asiatic" state as one of the great "bourgeois revolutions in Asia...
...As we all know, the bourgeois-democratic revolution in China was not given a comparable opportunity to grow and mature...
...The list, of course, was endless, and there was also strong support for Governors Reagan and Rockefeller...
...Bremer rented a limousine resembling Nixon's and took a room at the Waldorf-Astoria...
...In 1842/43, and stimulated by his work at the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx became increasingly interested in certain realistic elements of Hegel's philosophy...
...Some of them do reproduce Marx's classical and orthodox views, some do not...
...Under these circumstances, what manner of forces could initiate such a transformation...
...Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered the President to hand over his White House taped telephone conversations (a decision which Nixon will appeal before the Supreme Court...
...Lenin went so far as to say that, if certain guarantees remained unfulfilled, an "Asiatic restoration" would be unavoidable...
...Marx obviously considered the first circumstance decisive for the origin of the Orientally despotic order and the second sufficient for its perpetuation: '~These idyllic village communities . . . have always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism" (New York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853...
...It involved features of national conflict and social diversity different from the western experience...
...From 1845 Marx had been analyzing societal developments from an economic standpoint, but during his parochial period he argued them without being aware of possible diversities: "By the rapid improvement of all means of production, by the infinitely facilitated means of communication, the bourgeoisie pulls all, even the most barbarian nations, into civi14 The Alternative December 1973 lization" (The Communist Manifesto...
...And they are extremely sparse on China...
...Many Republicans have applauded Ford's nomination because they fear that the worst is not yet over for Nixon...
...The Chinese Communists proceeded with their variant of an Asiatic restoration--without having to face a peasantry of the Russian type, which, having been sympathetic to a socialist peasant party, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, wanted a land reform that was very different from the one Lenin had been advocating since 1905 and particularly since April 1917...
...Now he pointed to certain definite ecological peculiarities: "vast sandy tracts of desert" plus a considv~-abi,, supply of water that could be used for irrigation...
...Sun did raise a social mass problem with his plan to give land to the tillers, but the methods he proposed for its implementation--Henry George's methods --did not bring him active and organized mass support...
...Measured by its own criteria, it was eminently successful...
...And in this respect he based himself primarily on Marx, whose ideas, orthodox and classical, he knew extremely well...
...These pursuits resulted in a cultural development that, especially in the fields of literature and historiography, was not equalled in any other sector of the hydraulic world...
...Of the four major levels on which a rift between Communist nations may occur the levels of ideology, party, state, and society---only the first two have been involved...
...That is, the mass of the Oriental toilers did not participate by means of a politically-oriented struggle in the process of historical change...
...The Asiatic countries he observed changed their societal identity only when modern indust r i a l nations cracked down on them violently...
...Marx, who was very patient with the inadequacies of the proletarian revolutions of his time, was patient also with the young social revolutions that were then unfolding in Asiatic and semiAsiatic countries...
...Ford, a somewhat colorless but loyal Party figure, seems to be the best solution to both problems and thus satisfies many Republicans...
...But Marx gave the concept a new quality by stressing the institutional conditions that had produced this type of behavior...
...Hence it would be well to recall Marx's answers to them, answers that are beth timely and less well-known than the much advertised new interest in Marxism would lead us to expect...
...his clearest expression of a motive is a desire to gain attention by publishing his diary...
...Thus it can be said that they advanced from a system of total power (the system of Oriental despotism) to a system of totalitarian power (the system of modern Communism...
...He spoke of the world of China as "completely Oriental" (1853), and he found that China's rural economy was even more resistant to change than was India's (1859...
...he accidentally fires his pistol in a motel room...
...This last idea obviously referred to the sncialist revolution which Marx envisaged as a worldwide process...
...His diary of the six weeks before his attempt to kill Governor George Wallace is a picaresque rendering of the Great American Flop...
...But he did not believe that abandonment of the communal village system destroyed "the economic foundation of Asiatic production" (Das Kapital, vol...
...The rural centers in which "the Oriental peoples" lived were "dispersed," "disconnected atoms" that isolated them physically and intellectually...
...This condition "restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass," depriving it of "all grandeur and historical energies...
...Marx cannot be held responsible for all the ideas that Kautsky, Plekhanov, and Lenin have presented as orthodox...
...As House Minority Leader, Ford had performed remarkably well, considering what a few Republicans have called the "creeping CREEPism" syndrome of the Administration...
...Their knowledge of nonMarxist theories of history and society is close to nil...
...In conformity with this attitude Lenin originally welcomed all revolutionary forces bent on overthrowing the "Asiatic" state...
...However, in time, the industrial capitalists recognized the need to bring about "the transformation of India into a reproductive country...
...According to Engels, who after 1861 acknowledged the increasing contradictions in Tsarist Russia, they included peasants and a quickly expanding bourgeoisie...
...Asiatic society, as Marx saw it, lacked the socio-economic "self-transforming" forces that in the societies of the West were conducive to politically-oriented social (class) struggle and social revolution...
...Recognizing the weaknesses of the Chinese bourgeois revolution which went far beyond the deficiencies of Dr...
...The nonBritish conquests, he held, constituted a type of action that "did not go deeper than its surface," and the first phases of the British conquest did not go beyond the rule of the Dutch in Java...
...He denied it not only in 1853 when he recognized only its overall structure, but also in the sixties when he became aware of important substructural details, among them, the establishment of private landownership in China...
...This question leads us to the second point in our inquiry...
...Acknowledging the grave contradictions in Lenin which many critics have ignored, we find tragedy in the career of a Lenin, whose Aesopian warnings against the neo-"Asiatic" trends in Soviet society reveal a pained awareness of having betrayed the principles of his socialist creed...
...These assaults might have different forms: (1) Crushing military defeats by an industrial power might lead to the colonization of the defeated Asiatic country...
...These same officials discount the White House's targeted "leaks" which seemed to indicate that the President chose Ford so as not to divide the Republican Party (or even the country...
...During the time of their struggle for power (ca...
...Compared with the freedoms enjoyed in complex western feudal societies, the social freedoms enjoyed by members of Oriental villages, guilds, and secondary religions were extremely limited...
...and they were increasingly spread by internal forces t h a t wanted to modernize their country...
...Marx's views on history and society largely continue the classical macro-analytic tradition...
...Stalin accomplished their pulverization through his collectivization of the rural economy...
...And being suspicious of all "ideologies" their knowledge of Marx, the social scientist, and of his socio-historical thought is equally irrelevant, the evoking of Marxist slogans notwithstanding...
...House Minority Leader, Jerry Ford, was the overwhelming favorite (reportedly by a margin of two to one) of congressional Republicans for the vice-presidential nomination...
...Among the technical elements of the first wave, Marx listed "the electric telegraph" and "railways and steam vessels," among the economic elements, the introduction of "two distinct forms of private property in land" (included by Marx, despite its "abominable" forms, among the regenerative elements since private property in land was "the great desideratum of Asiatic society...
...The work of regeneration hardly transpires through a heap of ruins...
...Before the "democratic" revolution could establish a mass basis in China (as it had in Russia), a new radical movement appeared which appealed to discontented elements in the countryside and, to some extent also, in the cities: Communism...
...This pattern of an anti-Asiatic bourgeois revolution was more complex than t h a t of the anti-feudal bourgeois revolution...
...Lacking an elementary knowledge of the lurepen Marxism that Mao had '~creatively developed," they are in all likelihood genuinely unaware that the military-industrial establishment of the Chinese (and Russian) Communists, which excludes any popular control of military and industrial power as we know it, is far less tolerant of socia] and intellectual freedoms than was customary under Oriental despotism...
...Bremer has no particular cause to espouse...
...Hegel's concept of Asiatic despotism, it will be remembered, involved the idea that the huge Asiatic world had not shared in the western development but that, speaking socio-historically, it had stood still...
...Their world condemned them to a plant-like "vegetative" and "passive" existence...
...by Arthur H. Bremer introduction by Harding Lemay Harper's Magazine Press $6.50 Bremer's published entries are the travel notes of a man bent on killing President Nixon...
...In India (type 1), the dominance of industrial capitalism (the "millocracy") eventually gave British rule a progressive quality, accomplishing, in fact, a nonwestern variant of a bourgeois revolution...
...Nixon also withdrew John Connally's name from consideration after the former Texas Governor had pointed to the battle Nixon could expect from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress...
...This attempt was deficient in numerous ways, but it aimed at what the Marxists call a "democratic" revolution...
...Again we will do well to inform ourselves regarding Marx's views on this issue, since his approach to social change led him to pose the question in greater institutional depth than had his predecessors...
...They are less specific, although very consequential, on Russia...
...in India it was interlocked with national liberation, either bestowed on the Indians by the victorious British workers or attained "by the Hindoos themselves" when they "shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether...
...They resulted in nothing more than a ~oeggars' democracy...
...Marx deplored the fragmentation of the toiling population of Asiatic society, a fragmentation that left only the dispersed villages, the rural "atoms," intact...
...To the founders of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao included, the Marxist-Leninist concept of Asiatic society and Lenin's concept of the possibility of an Asiatic restoration had no reality, since, having been vulgar Marxists when they organized their party, they easily accepted the lumpen Marxist interpretation of "Asia" that had been ambivalently initiated by Lenin and ruthlessly consolidated by Stalin...
...Moreover, Marx cannot be held responsible for the crude simplification of his ideas that has often, and properly, been referred to as "vulgar Marxism...
...Ford was first elected to Congress in 1948 and he is considered to be a "close" friend of Nixon's (he has been an unswerving Nixon Loyalist...
...In India he expected the country's full regeneration only "at a more or less remote period...
...Consequently, many GOP officials wanted someone who would receive approval quickly so that in case of presidential impeachment the presidency would not fall by default to Democratic House Speaker Carl Albert...
...Among the elements of the second wave Marx listed the training of Indian engineers and the development of a modern Indian i n d u s t r y - - t h e Indians with their '~excellent" intellects being "well-fitted to accumulate capital" and a modern industry being bound to "dissolve the hereditary division of labor, upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments of Indian progress and power...
...Aware that Marxism is the lingua Franca of most of the intellectuals who today promote societal change I would like to stress the Marxist approach to these problems...
...Marx implies this in arguments that remain valid in substance although they are simplistic in form...
...In the Dutch instance, the European rulers "employed the existing machinery of despotism" to squeeze the native population even more than previously, thus aggravating "the evils of a capricious and semi-barbarous government by working it with all the practical ingenuity of politicians and all the monopolizing selfishness of traders" (Marx, citing Sir Stamford Raffles...
...The following essay is a slightly edited version of a lecture given at the Australian National University in Canberra...
...orchestrated the effort to nominate the Vice-President, the Democrats could not have hoped for a better choice than Jerry Ford...
...In 1850, during the parochial period of his development, Marx welcomed the unfolding Taiping uprising as a movement that might establish a republic with the slogan "Libertd, Egalitd, Fraternitd...
...The Chinese Communists set up a system of total power in a world that, prior to 1911, had had no possibility of transforming their single-centered Asiatic society into a multi-centered non-Asiatic society and that, from 1912 to the thirties, advanced but slowly along this road...
...From Marx's point of view the vision of a huge world that knew neither social revolution nor class struggle has a Dantesque quality...
...He spoke for them in their districts and he helped them raise money...
...These conditions require a variety of micro- and macro-analytical studies that are as realistic as the macro-historical concepts underlying them...
...Implicit in all their presentations is the admission that nothing is more dangerous to the power and prestige of the Communist regime in Russia (and in China) than the application of mature Marxian concepts of Asiatic society and Oriental despotism to their "socialist" societies...
...From 1853, he considered Tsarist Russia (which possessed only the second of the two circumstances) a semi-Asiatic society dominated by a full-fledged Orientally despotic government...
...For reasons of their own, Democrats too are elated...
...From 1853, he recognized the institutional peculiarity of the Orientally despotic order...
...Marx saw the social revolution t h a t was occurring in India as a process initiated by external forces: "The new elements of society were scattered among them [the Indians] by the British bourgeoisie...
...In 1862, at the close of the Taiping Rebellion, he stated that this formidable uprising had occurred in an "Oriental empire" and that it followed a definitely Oriental pattern: "The Oriental empires manifest a permanent immobility in the social infrastructure (Unterbau) and restless change among the persons and tribes that seize the political superstructure (Ueberbau...
...Still, the exasperated assassin writes, "no one looked at me...
...In Russia (type 2), the Crimean War was, according to Marx, the s t a r t i n g point for the disintegration of the old semi-Asiatic order...
...And mindful of the slogans cited by some missionaries as indicative of the aims of the Taipings---slogans which he did not take seriously--Marx asserted that the Taipings "have no slogans . . . . In the face of the conservative marasmus [of the existing regime] their own destiny seems to be destruction in grotesquely abhorrent forms, destruction without the creation of anything new" (D/e Presse, Vienna, July 7, 1862...
...Mao, who had more to destroy agronomically, found it easier to assert total power in the villages in which the Communists had monopolized political and military organization twenty years before they occupied the whole of the Chinese mainland...
...As a retrogressive social revolution that moves toward the total alienation of man, the Chinese Communist revolution is catching up with, and indeed surpassing, the retrogressive social revolution that is occurring in the Soviet Union and in other parts of the "socialist" Communist world...
...It has been only since the close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth t h a t the intensified attacks by modern industrial powers (Japan prominent among them) have shattered China's ~'Asiatic" monarchy--and then quickly and under circumstances t h a t made the ensuing "bourgeois" revolution very nationalist but not very bourgeois...
...Applying Marx's classical view of Asiatic despotism to Russia, the core area of his revolutionary activity, and being as macro-analytically oriented as he was, Lenin quite understandably recognized the relevance of the concept of an Asiatic restoration to what he was doing in Russia...
...The President, however, was apparently confident that he had the votes to get Connally nominated and he is reported to have been more than willing to force a congressional showdown...
...Quite consistently Russian Marxists from Plekhanov to Lenin have designated the anti-Asiatic, anti-autocratic, anti-despotic revolution they wanted as a ~%ourgeois revolution...
...According to Marx the process of regeneration was likely to occur in three waves, the first involving primarily technical, economic, social, and political advances, the second primarily technical, economic, and social advances, and the third, primarily social and political advances...
...Nevertheless they constituted genuine elements of freedom in the social sector of the agredespotic (Oriental) order, and freedoms in the realms of economy and ideas that were by no means irrelevant...
...There is also the question of the $100,000 Howard Hughes contribution to Nixon (through his long-time associate Rebozo) which has yet to be traced and explained, and some suspect it was used for personal benefit...
...AS just shown, Marx's ideas on the Indian variant of this revolution are quite specific...
...Far from eliminating the system of "political" or "general" slavery, the changes that occurred in the substructure of Chinese society only made this system more complex and more flexible...
...and in November of that year he brought about the dissolution of the Marxist branch of the Communist League...
...These Republican officials complain quietly that Nixon could have better satisfied the needs of the country and the Party by appointing someone of Senator Goldwater's stature, even Senator Baker or GOP National Committee Chairman, George Bush...
...They were constantly criticizing themselves, constantly interrupting themselves, and starting all over again until eventually they were able to consolidate their gains (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Section D. This is a third important point concerning social revolution in Asia in general and in China in particular...
...And although Peking and Moscow each claim that the leaders of the other side are no longer Communists and are imposing a non-Communist policy on their respective societies, neither government has claimed that the society of the other is no longer "socialist" as each defines this term...
...And just when the Chinese merchants began organizing themselves on the China mainland and the aroused students endeavored to transform China culturally and politically, the country's radical forces were thrust into an open revolutionary situation with little preparation or experience to meet it...
...The Chinese Communists were Moscow-spawned and their relation to Moscow remained a crucial part of their situation even after the umbilical cord was cut...
...With regard to China, we will recall t h a t Marx, who in 1850 expected the immediate emergence of a revolution similar to the French revolution, in 1862 found nothing there but an Asiatic "marasmus...
...Lenin was a brilliant macro-strategist, but he paid little attention to the ideas of social science except those that were pertinent to his practical aims...
...In 1853, he resumed from a new vantage point his economic and socio-historical studies...
...The crucial IndiaChina passage in the manuscript of the third volume of IMs Kapital (which probably was written in 1864/65) underscores this latter fact...
...He named four guarantees that would prevent this development: one absolute (the proletarian socialist revolution in Western Europe), and three relative (popular control over the new revolutionary power by a government that would have no bureaucracy, no standing army, no police...
...In Marx's opinion, all the just-listed advances would "lay down the material premises" for India's "development of the productive powers" and "their appropriation by the people...
...Sun Yatsen's followers, in large part overseas Chinese businessmen who were not too clear about the issue of democratic pluralism and who could muster only a quite limited political strength...
...The U.S...
...And what was the character of the order that came into being through the Communist revolution...
...Some of the most important features of the resulting orthodox position are due to Marx himself...
...Taking Lenin's comment on Sun Yatsen's subjective socialism together with his ideas on the Asiatic restoration, we may say that, at the time of the emergence of the Chinese Communist Party, the Russian Communist movement from which it derived was subjectively moving toward socialism, but that objectively it was moving toward a system of total power that originally resembled Oriental despotism, but that in its methods of management and repression soon went beyond it...
...Plekhanov reverted to this argument again in 1906 after Lenin had begun to propound a new type of bourgeois democratic '%yorker and peasant" revolution--a type of revolution that, Plekhanov maintained, was fraught with the danger of such a restoration...
...The Chinese Communists also proceeded with their Asiatic restoration against a much less clear radical intellectual opposition than had the Bolsheviks, and they did not suffer internal doctrinal qualms of the kind that plagued Lenin...
...In all likelihood they are genuinely unaware that, under the Chinese (and the Russian) system of total managerial power, man's social and human alienation--which according to Marx decreased qualitatively under the advancing Csocial") capitalism of his last years--is reaching a peak under the "communist" system of totalitarian power...
...Under the influence of the British aristocracy and "moneyocracy" (the commercial capitalists) similar conditions prevailed also in India, and the "millocracy" at first continued to play a purely exploitative role...
...The White House position is being met with such cynicism for the following reasons: Two weeks before Vice-President Agnew resigned, Nixon was already running security checks...
...According to Marx, this reorientation explains why British rule fulfilled "a double mission in India: one destructive, one regenerative--the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of western society in Asia . . . . The historic pages of [British] rule in India reported hardly anything beyond that destruction...
...Even though many congressional Republicans had listed Ford as their first choice, and highly regarded as he might be, many others--perhaps most --would have preferred someone else...
...After a few decades of political supremacy, the Nationalists in the late forties were ousted by the forces of the Communist revolution...
...Since 1959/60 conflicting interests have caused a rift in their relations, and since 1963 this rift has become much deeper, but it has not resulted in a complete break in their relations...
...for his ingenuity at concealing a gun from customs agents, he loses it in the body of his '67 Rambler...
...When the revolution of 1848/1849 failed, the continental period of Marx's activity as The Alternative December 1973 13 a revolutionary thinker and strategist came to an end...
...Thus Marx denied the existence of a politically-oriented social struggle in Asiatic society...
...Nixon chose Gerald Ford only after Attorney General Richardson withdrew himself from consideration (a politically adroit move for a man who probably plans to run for public office in Massachusetts...
...If Lenin had dared to speak as frankly in 1921 as he had done in his debate with Plekhanov in 1906/07, he would have added that, instead of creating a socialist order in the sense of his and Marx's definition, the Bolshevik revolution was evolving into an "Asiatic restoration" (the term is Lenin's)--into a restoration of Russia's old Asiatic despotism...
...and in this respect Marxism proper is more realistic (and classical) than non-Marxist critics tend to recognize...
...In view of the fact t h a t the Marxist image of the bourgeois revolution in the West as drawn in The Communist Manifesto is cited by the Communist Marxists ad nauseum along with other parts of t h a t document although this image has less relevance today than in 1848, it seems imperative here to reproduce Marx's major ideas concerning the bourgeois revolution in Asia, which today are highly relevant and which the Communist Marxists are not a t all eager to cite...
...Among the various reproductions of Marx's concepts of society and history, lumpen Marxism appeared already in the writings of Lenin...
...Sun's "constitutional" aim to destroy the monarchy interlocked with the nationalist aim to get rid of its Manchu masters...
...In imperial China the degree of economic freedom was unusually high, since the possibility of owning land privately encouraged the peasant to employ an unusually intensive system of farming and provided optimal conditions for China's bureaucratic gentry to engage in intellectual pursuits...
...In the case of India, the new social elements included several types of private landowners, free journalists, modern administrators, engineers, and, in time, industrial capitalists...
...This I consider the fourth major point in an evaluation of China's social revolution...
...And he pointed to certain definite economic-politi- ' cal peculiarities that were apt to develop in such an ecological setting: the need for the "economical and common use of water," which under Oriental conditions necessitated "the interference of the centralizing power of government...
...Jerry Ford, like Senator Dole of Kansas had done as Chairman of the Republican National Committee, had worked hard for his fellow Republican colleagues...
...At this time he-indicated his awareness of the fact that in Asia there existed a peculiar type of despotism...
...Marx was motivated by a strong urge for truth which, together with his urge for power, dictated his behavior...
...They either sat by apathetically when military and political turmoil swirled around them, or they evoked "wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction...
...In 1853 he asserted that "the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia" occurred in India when "British interference" broke up the "economic basis" of Asiatic society (New York Daily Tribune, op...
...Total power, as I define it, permitted varying degrees of freedom in the realms of economy (private peasant farming, etc...
...Nevertheless it has begun...
...cir...
...But after taking a new look at Asia, Marx judged the Chinese potential for social revolution very differently...
...But while Marx avoided identifying the lack of social revolution in Asia when he made programmatic political and theoretical statements, he was not equally evasive elsewhere...
...Among the social and political elements he listed the creation of a free press (the English introduced a free press "for the first time into Asiatic society"), and of a modern type of native administrator Ca fresh class endowed with the requirements for government and imbued with European science"), as well as the unification of the country and the creation of a modern "native army" ("organized and trained by the British drill-sergeant, the sine qua non of Indian self-emancipation...
...To the surprise of many (even though Ford had been widely rumored to be the frontrunner and the entire Michigan congressional delegation had been invited to the White House nominating ceremony that night), Nixon did nominate Ford, but it is a choice that is not so surprising...
...Once this was accomplished, the aim to establish genuine endogenous control over Chinese affairs was intertwined with the will to combat the country's most aggressive foreign enemy, Japan...
...Included in the lecture are certain passages from Karl A. Wittfogel's book, Oriental Despotism (Yale, 1957...
Vol. 7 • December 1973 • No. 3
