7—
Revolution, Marxism, and Chinese History
In spite of stubborn conviction and nearly two decades of effort, Marxist historians failed to discover an all-embracing model with which to explain China's historical development without distorting the data of Chinese history, the concepts of historical materialism, or, more commonly, both. Those who transferred Marxian models directly from European to Chinese history did so at the cost of reducing Marxist socioeconomic concepts to nominal categories that did not bear an organic relationship to the substance of Chinese history, or ended up with generalities that glossed over the most obvious peculiarities of China's social development. Historians who were more sensitive to the intricacies of Chinese history, on the other hand, stretched Marxist models out of shape, raising serious doubts among fellow Marxists about the faithfulness of their analyses to the basic principles of historical materialism.
By the late 1930's there were signs that a consensus was emerging among Marxist historians over the model most consistent both with Chinese history and historical materialism. In subsequent years, the interpretation of the past prescribed by this model achieved the status of orthodoxy in Chinese Marxist historiography. This was, however, a consensus by default, due to the disappearance of dissenting views, and did not imply the resolution of the problems created by the incongruence between the formal demands of Marxist historical theory and the evolution of Chinese history. If anything, it served only to conceal the problems which had been apparent in the conflict-
ing applications of historical materialism to Chinese history in the thirties.
Critics, both Chinese and Western, have pointed to Marxist historians' preoccupation with universal models to discredit Marxist historiography.[1] It is evident from the discussions in the thirties that the use of models was not in itself inimical to historical understanding and inquiry. Marxist historians produced a substantial amount of original research from the new perspective on Chinese history provided by Marxist models. The existence of alternative models, on the surface a source of futile conflict, instigated in-depth research into aspects of Chinese society whose importance had gone unnoticed previously. To return to the analogy with the concept of paradigms, the new paradigm of history stimulated inquiry which, by the mid-thirties, had considerable impact on "normal" historical research.
Nevertheless, Marxist historians' inability to agree on the basics of a Marxist framework for Chinese history detracted considerably from their claim that they possessed an infallible scientific theory of history. Their endless argumentation over formal models disguised their more significant contribution to history in China. More seriously, their rigid adherence to models restricted their ability to deal creatively with the data they uncovered.
The intellectual failures of the Marxist historians as individuals are not sufficient to account for the shortcomings of Chinese Marxist historiography. Though there were indeed Marxists who wrote history with only a minimal appreciation of theory and/ or Chinese history, even those historians who were fully versed in theory and meticulous in research failed to overcome the obstacles to analysis their own assumptions placed in their path. Chinese Marxists, as have Marxists elsewhere, resorted to the convenient but obscurantist expedient of blaming the existence of such problems on the failure of fellow Marxists to understand Chinese history or Marxist theory, dogmatism or revisionism, or even ideological dishonesty arising from insidious politi-
[1] Feuerwerker, History in Communist China , pp. 9–10.
cal motivations, while all the time reserving for their own version of Marxism or Chinese history the status of ultimate truth. Such explanations, however, only blinded them to the issues their historiographical difficulties raised concerning the applicability of historical materialism to Chinese history. In the final analysis, the problems that plagued Marxist historiography resulted from the Marxist historians' efforts to remain loyal both to the letter of Marxist historical explanations and the empirical demands of Chinese history. The alternative interpretations of the past they offered were legitimately justifiable in terms of theory, and yield clues to the ambiguities built into Marxist historical theory as well as the problems that arise inevitably when it is applied to non-European societies.
Ultimately, what vitiated the effort to rewrite Chinese history from a Marxist perspective was the evolutionist assumption that historical materialism provided a universally applicable model of progress, "a single ladder which all human societies climb rung by rung, but at different speeds, so that all eventually arrive at the top."[2] This is an assumption that has been widely held by Marxists and has been endorsed by "official Marxism" both in the Soviet Union (until recently) and in the People's Republic of China in spite of the failure of attempts to vindicate it through historical investigation. The conflicts in Marxist historiography in the thirties bear witness to the Chinese efforts to deal with the problems created by this assumption. The majority of the Marxist historians, rather than questioning the validity of the assumption, preferred to adjust historical data to satisfy its demands. The very existence of dissenting views of one kind or another, however, reveals that they were aware of the problems involved, whether or not they were willing to recognize them as such. This is a phenomenon commonly encountered in Marxist historiography, except where there is political authority empowered to abolish historiographical problems by political fiat. The considerations that led Chinese Marxists to decide in favor of the universality of Marxist patterns of historical development, or made them disinclined to
[2] Hobsbawm (ed.), Pre-capitatist Economic Formations , p. 60.
stress its problematic consequences, shed valuable light on this intriguing, and fundamental, problem that has had a crucial influence on the evolution of historical materialism as historical theory and methodology.
Why did Chinese Marxists insist on a formulaic interpretation of historical materialism, when even the most ardently "orthodox" among them were aware of the dissimilarities between European and Chinese history and cognizant of the inability of the formula to account for important aspects of Chinese history? One possible answer, which opponents of Marxism have been all too ready to provide, is that this tendency was a natural consequence of their commitment to Marxism.[3] This answer begs the question, however, of whether or not Marxism indeed demands this approach of its followers or, phrased somewhat differently, whether we should take as genuine Marxists, as some Chinese Marxists proposed, only those who subscribed to this "stereotyped" notion of historical materialism.[4] The question is all the more pertinent in light of the fact that some Marxists in the thirties argued that it was possible to interpret historical materialism in a different way.
The question of whether or not it was Marx's intention to formulate a universal "law" of historical development that anticipated the evolution of societies everywhere is one that has divided Marxists and Marxologists since the original formulation of the theory. Thoughtful commentators on historical materialism have argued that Marx did indeed perceive his scheme of development for Europe as universally valid.[5] Following the controversy on Asiatic society occasioned by the Chinese revolution, "official Marxism" has sanctioned the view that Marx postulated a unitary, universal pattern of development for all societies; opponents of Marxism eager to discredit Marxist the-
[3] The various available studies of Marxist historiography in China and the Soviet Union have adopted this attitude in differing degrees. See C. Black (ed.), Rewriting Russian History , 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), and Shteppa, Russian Historians, for Soviet historiography. For Chinese historiography, see Feuerwerker, History in Communist China , especially p. 6.
[4] B. Schwartz, "Some Stereotypes in the Periodization of Chinese History," Philosophical Forum , 1.2 (winter 1968): 219–230.
[5] M. Bober, Karl Marx's Interpretation of History , (New York: Norton, 1965; first published in 1927). See chap. 3.
ory have, ironically, endorsed this view. Anti-Communist theoreticians like K. Wittfogel, as well as Marxists of a more liberal bent, on the other hand, have rejected this view in favor of a multilinear view of historical development, pointing to the concept of Asiatic society as proof that Marx, and other major Marxists such as Lenin and Plekhanov, saw social development in Asia as having been fundamentally different from that in Europe.[6]
Marx's own writings on history contain enough ambiguity to leave room for these interpretative differences. There is much in both the substance and the style of Marx's historical discussions to encourage the notion that his formulations were meant to be universal in scope. In the first place, he rarely discussed the nature and dynamics of change in precapitalist societies, more often than not referring to them incidentally in his discussions of capitalism.[7] Most Marxist analyses of historical development before the age of modern capitalism, therefore, have tended to extrapolate the dynamics of history from Marx's views on the origins and development of capitalism. Such extrapolation creates two problems. First it is uncertain that the dynamics of precapitalist societies can be approached in the same terms as the dynamics of capitalism. Capitalism as the economic system par excellence , with economic (market) relations dominating all aspects of existence, even to the value of human labor, needs to be differentiated from precapitalism, where economic relations were not readily distinguishable from kinship, social, and political relations.[8] Second, and more relevant, Marx did generalize
[6] G. Lichtheim, "Oriental Despotism," in The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays , (New York: Random House, 1967), and S. Avineri (ed.), Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1969), introduction.
[7] See footnote 13 for the exception to this statement. Marxist writers have recently confronted this deficiency in the materialist conception of history and undertaken serious attempts to alleviate it. See E. Terray, Marxism and "Primitive" Societies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972) and B. Hindess and P. Q. Hirst, Pre-capitalist Modes of Production (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).
[8] G, Lukacs, "The Changing Function of Historical Materialism," in History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1972), pp. 230–242. Also G. Dalton (ed.), Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). See introduction, pp. xii–xvii . Marx himself suggested that his analysis was applicable only to capitalist society in his afterword to the second edition of Capital (1873), where he quoted with approval from a Russian discussionof his method: "But, it will be said, the general laws of economic life are one and the same, no matter whether they are applied to the present or the past. This Marx directly denies. According to him, such abstract laws do not exist. On the contrary, in his opinion, every historical period has laws of its own." Capital , vol. 1, p. 18.
about the historical phenomena capitalism gave birth to all over the world because he believed that capitalism was for the first time universalizing history, overthrowing all obstacles in its path to draw diverse societies into one genuine world history. It does not follow, however, that such universality applied to societies in the precapitalist period, when different historical environments spawned different historical results. Marx's failure to clarify whether his observations on the period of capitalism also applied to precapitalist societies (even on the central issue of classes) has been the source of much confusion in the interpretation of his historical theory.
Second, Marx's style in presenting his ideas and his claims for his theory have done even more to invite belief in the universal applicability of his views. His views on history were scattered unsystematically throughout his voluminous work with little regard for distinctions among polemical hyperbole, philosophical generalization, theoretical formulation, or historical explanation. His style of exposition tended toward generalization even when his subject matter was specific and empirical; as Lichtheim observes, he posed "historical problems(s) philosphically" and did not make "a clear distinction between sociological statements relative to particular situations and philosophical generalizations pertaining to history as a whole."[9] More serious was his claim of scientific validity for his findings with all its suggestion of universality. Marx did not specify whether this claim pertained to his method of analyzing the elements that entered the dynamics of history or whether it also included the conclusions he drew from his analysis, especially with respect to the social formations which appeared successively in history as those elements interacted to generate social progress. Rightly or wrongly, but with a good deal of textual legitimacy, many Marxists have concluded that the denial of universality to the social formations Marx identified in European history would
[9] Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology , pp. 67, 21.
also lead to the denial of universality to the mechanism of historical change, with grave implications not only for theory but also for the political ideals that inform historical materialism.
The preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which is Marx's most cogent statement on the fundamentals of historical materialism, has, more than any other of Marx's writings, impressed on its readers the belief that Marx held historical development to be uniform everywhere.[10] As this text is central to historical materialism and occupied a crucial place in Chinese Marxist historiography, it is worth quoting at some length:
In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relationships that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of the relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. . . . At a certain stage of their development, the material forces of production in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression of the same thing — with the property relations within which they had been at work before. From forms of development of the forces of production these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. . . . No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society. . . . In broad outlines we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal and the modern bourgeois methods of production as so many epochs in the progress of the economic formation of society.[11]
It is undeniable, whether it was Marx's intention or not, that this passage implies both the necessity and the universality of historical development. The whole tone of the passage, starting with the opening sentence, suggests that the statements therein
[10] Bober based his conclusions on the preface.
[11] Marx, Critique , pp. 12–13.
are pertinent to all human society. "To invoke 'mankind' is to make an assertion about the totality of history, however empirical and non-metaphysical the writer's intention."[12] And this is what Marx does from the beginning. Furthermore, the passage clearly states that there is an inner necessity to history which drives it forward according to a certain order based on the dynamic interaction between the forces and the relations of production. The sentence "new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of old society" unequivocally states that one social formation is born out of another and that the dynamics of transformation lie in the dialectical interplay of forces immanent in the socioeconomic foundation. The juxtaposition of this statement with the list of socioeconomic formations which Marx enumerates "as so many epochs in the progress of the economic formation of society" clearly suggests that the four modes of production represent successive and necessary stages in the evolution of society. In the light of the universalistic context of the passage, moreover, they also would seem to define historical development everywhere.
On the other hand, it is almost certain that Marx did not intend this pattern of development as a formula that represented the universal evolution of history. This has become evident since the German publication in 1952 of a previously obscure study which he composed in preparation for the Critique and Capital .[13] In a section of that study where Marx examined precapitalist societies in greater detail than in any other place in his work, he presented an unmistakably multi-linear view of historical development. He described the Asiatic, slave, and feudal modes of production not as stages in a single scheme of progress but as alternative paths of development out of primitive society, with only the last one leading to the evolution of modern capitalist society.[14] Even without this
[12] Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology , p. 20.
[13] Hobsbawm, Pre-capitalist Economic Formations , p. 9. The text referred to is Grundisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie . The section on precapitalist economic formation will be referred to hereafter as the Formen .
[14] Hobsbawm, ibid. See Marx's essay.
essay, which was not available to Chinese historians, Marx's work contains sufficient evidence to indicate that he favored a multilinear view of historical development. When confronted directly with the question, he denied that his "sketch of the origins of capitalism in Western Europe" constituted "a historical-philosophical theory of a universal movement unnecessarily imposed upon all peoples, no matter what the historical circumstances in which they are placed."[15] There is little question, moreover, in spite of the problematic nature of the concept, that he used the Asiatic mode of production to describe a historical development that needed to be differentiated from the development of Europe.[16] Finally, even his research on European history did not lead him to definitive conclusions; he not only provided different schemes of development for Europe in different parts of his work, but it is not even certain, in spite of the preface, that he regarded the various social formations he identified in European history as consecutive stages in a necessary course of development — which, incidentally, led to some confusion in China and lay at the basis of much of the conflict over patterns of development, especially over the question of slavery, among those who agreed otherwise that historical development was unilinear.[17]
The point here is not to engage in exegetical hairsplitting but to point out that while Marxism contains ambiguities which justify the view that historical materialism prescribes a unilinear pattern of historical development, it does not, by virtue of the same ambiguities, demand it. It is more fruitful to look for the causes of such interpretation in the intentions that guide the interpreters than to search for it in Marx's writings. Chinese Marxists were quite aware that Marxism was open to more than one interpretation and yet they opted for unilinearity. I shall attempt here to identify the considerations that guided their choice.
[15] Marx, reply to Mikhailovsky. Quoted in T. B. Bottomore, Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 22.
[16] Avineri, Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization , pp. 5–6.
[17] For these varying schemes of development, see Hobsbawm's discussion in Pre-capitalist Economic Formations , introduction.
Historians of China usually have ascribed the Chinese attraction to the universalistic thrust of historical materialism to the predisposition caused by national self-consciousness. Joseph Levenson saw in the Marxist periodization of Chinese history the means whereby Chinese intellectuals resolved the conflict between the intellectual attraction to the West and the emotional commitment to China's past that had plagued them since the Western onslaught on Chinese tradition in the nineteenth century. Marxism, on the one hand, satisfied the "passion for equating Chinese history with the West's" by showing that "Chinese history on its own developed in a way not just its own."[18] On the other hand, the Marxist historicization of the past enabled Chinese intellectuals to come to terms with Chinese tradition without being bound to its demands in the present. Another, more down to earth, explanation of the Chinese reaction to Marxism has also stressed national self-consciousness as a determinant element. In his 1954 study of the social history controversy, Benjamin Schwartz explained the Chinese rejection of the concept of Asiatic society in terms of the offensiveness of this concept to national pride.[19]
While these views have some validity, they are insufficient to explain the complexity of the Chinese response to Marxism. Levenson in particular approaches the subject in abstract psychological terms with little regard for the historical circumstances which first rendered Marxist theory meaningful to Chinese intellectuals. For the same reason, his interpretation ignores the appeal to Chinese intellectuals of the substance of historical materialism, stressing instead its function as a salve to injured national pride. His thesis is difficult to prove or to disprove, but it is worth pointing out that those Marxists who were most preoccupied with China's identity as a national entity in the thirties, such as T'ao, were also the most vehement opponents of the conversion of Chinese history into a replica of Western history. More to the point, the first Marxist to apply a Marxist scheme of history to China was not a Chinese but the
[18] Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate , vol. 3 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, combined ed., 1968), pp. 48, 49.
[19] Schwartz, "A Marxist Controversy in China," p. 150.
Comintern theoretician Karl Radek, who had a great deal more in mind that salvaging the psychological distress of Chinese intellectuals. Schwartz's explanation is more plausible, though still incomplete. The notion of Asiatic society has carried derogatory implications of cultural inferiority and social and political primitiveness, starting with Marx himself, so that Chinese Marxists had cause enough to resent it. One contributor to the social history controversy, Hu Ch'iu-Yuan, indeed objected to the concept because of its geographic associations. It is noteworthy, however, that another, Li Chi, pointed out in response that Asiatic was just a word and should not be taken too seriously.[20] A highly sensitive author such as Kuo Mo-jo had no compunctions about the term, provided it was used in the sense of a stage in early history; there were also Chinese who used it in reference to imperial China. Finally, it should be remembered that Soviet historians also rejected the concept, not merely because of the implications of the concept for the Stalinist regime, as Shteppa explains, but within the context of the discussions over the fate of the Chinese revolution.[21]
In his 1937 study of Marxist historiography, Ho Kan-chih expressed gratitude to those who had refuted the notion of China being a special society and thereby salvaged the revolution.[22] There is little question, as Ho's statement hints that the problem of revolutionary strategy which arose in 1926–1927 provided the starting point of the debate over whether or not Chinese history constituted an exception to the universal laws of historical development. And there was an unmistakable correspondence throughout the controversy between revolutionary radicalism and the affirmation of the universality of Marxist "laws" of development. Those who opposed class struggle, such as T'ao Hsi-sheng and other historians of the Hsin
[20] Li Chi, Chung-kuo she-hui shih lun-chan p'i-p'an, p. 491; Hu, "Ya-hsi-ya sheng-ch'an fang-shih yu chuan-chih chu-i," p. 6.
[21] Shteppa recognizes that the discussion was occasioned by the Chinese revolution but then goes on to ignore this point and to explain the rejection of Asiatic society exclusively in terms of its unpleasant connotations for the Stalinist regime. See Russian Historians , pp. 74–77.
[22] Ho, Chung-kuo she-hui shih wen-t'i lun-chan , preface, p. 4.
sheng-ming group, or thought it misguided, such as Comintern advocates of Asiatic society, pleaded for the complexity of Chinese social structure or argued that the major contradiction in Chinese history, in contrast to European, had been between state and society. As many Marxists observed at the time, there was considerable affinity between the positions that China was an Asiatic or a transitional society because both downplayed the idea that class conflict had provided the motive force of Chinese history.
The issue of classes divided even those who agreed that China was a transitional society and held remarkably similar views on the nature of imperial society, comparing it to the period of transition between the demise of feudalism and the full emergence of capitalism in Europe. While some emphasized the power of remnant feudal forces or of the state, others more favorable to revolution in the present, such as Radek and Li Chi, argued that in spite of ambiguities in imperial social structure some classes were nevertheless able to dominate the others; Chinese society, therefore, had a definite class character. But the most adamant on the issue of class were members of the CCP and writers such as Chu P'ei-wo, Kuo Mo-jo, Ho Kan-chih, and the academic Marxists mentioned in the last chapter. These authors rejected the idea that there was any ambiguity in Chinese social structure and, therefore, any variation between Chinese and Western histories — as is evident in their uncompromising stand that Chinese society, now on the eve of capitalism, was a feudal society in accordance with the Marxist scheme of development. In spite of important differences in the level of sophistication of their historical analyses and in the schemes of development they opted for, they agreed that class analysis was applicable in China from the present back to the beginnings of Chinese civilization, reaffirmed that class conflict provided the motive force of Chinese history throughout, and therefore denied the existence of prolonged periods of transition with complex class configurations.
The internal differences of this group of writers derived from the interplay between their understanding of European develop-
ment, for which Marx had offered variant explanations in different contexts of his work, and their attentiveness to Chinese history: They did not disagree on the universal identity of historical development but over the scheme that was universally applicable. Some, like Chu P'ei-wo and the Trotskyites discussed in Chapter 3, had only a marginal interest in history and simply projected upon the past their conclusions with regard to contemporary society. Chu reduced a historical category such as feudalism to a residual category wherein he placed all phenomena that did not fit within the rubric of capitalism; hence his conclusion that between the primitive and the capitalist periods China had been a feudal society for three thousand years. Others, such as Kuo, Lu Chen-yu, and Chien Po-tsan, with greater consideration for the evidence of history, stressed the significance of the changes at the beginning of the imperial period. Whether out of textual faithfulness to Marxist classics — in this case Engels's Origin and the preface to the Critique — or out of necessity, since their description of imperial China as a feudal society left them little choice outside of slavery and primitive society, they assigned the Chou period to the slavery stage in Marxist periodization. How far they extended the boundaries of slavery depended in turn on their estimation of the level of progress in different phases of early Chinese history. In spite of all these differences in periodization, nevertheless, those who viewed contemporary China as a feudal society were one in rejecting any hint that China had departed from the universal norm of class conflict as the motive force of history and, consequently, from the pattern of development of European society.
While the correspondence between revolutionary radicalism and the affirmation of the universal identity of historical development is easily observed, it is somewhat more difficult to explain. In a sense, it is even contrary to the commonly held notion of a contradiction between voluntarism and determinism in Marxism since it was the revolutionary Marxists in this case that defended necessity in history. Nevertheless, why Chinese Marxists should have tied the two together is explainable in the
light of the relationship between revolution and history in Marxism. Their commitment to class struggle in a revolutionary context sensitized them to the negative implications of rejecting universality of historical development for the role of classes in Marxist historical and political theory, and predisposed them to accept that interpretation of historical materialism which, by asserting the universality of the laws of development, also guaranteed class conflict a central role in history.
While it is not necessary, on Marx's own authority, to regard historical development as following a necessary pattern universally, it is difficult to abandon it without also opening the way to abandoning the theoretical necessity of revolutionary class struggle in historical change. As argued here, when Marx juxtaposed in the preface the view that forces internal to the socioeconomic foundation generate historical development with the social formations he listed, he suggested that historical development follows a necessary pattern universally. His discussions of social formations elsewhere, in particular the Formen , however, indicate that he assumed neither necessity nor universality for these formations but rather regarded them as historical "types." As Hobsbawm concluded on the basis of the Formen ; "The statement that the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and bourgeois formations are 'progressive' does not, therefore, imply any simple unilinear view that all history is progress. It merely states that each of these systems is in crucial respects further removed from the primitive state of man."[23] In fact it is possible to argue, as T'ao Hsi-sheng did in China, that Marx's claim of scientificity and, therefore, universality extended only to the mechanism of historical progress and not to any particular set of social formations: If forces within the social structure provide the motive force of change, societies should develop differently unless they have identical starting points and their productive forces develop in the same fashion.[24]
[23] Hobsbawm, Pre-capitalist Economic Formations , p. 38.
[24] T'ao compared the method of historical materialism to the methods of chemistry: Just as one derived different results from applying chemical analysis to water and salt, he argued, one should get different results from applying historical materialism to different societies, if it was indeed scientific. See "She-hui k'o-hsueh chiang-tso" (Symposium on Social Science) in HSM , 2.5 (May 1929): 1.
While these observations have validity and point the way to the use of historical materialism as an effective tool of historical analysis, they cannot be sustained without raising questions about the basic premises of Marxist theory. In the first place, the mechanism and the formations are juxtaposed in the preface and, within that context, the necessity and universality of one implies the necessity and the universality of the other. The necessity to the order of development described in the preface, moreover, is not simply a matter of textual orthodoxy. As it happens, the ancient, the feudal, and the bourgeois modes were successive phases in the evolution of European society. If they do not represent a necessary order, as Hobsbawm suggests, it must be concluded either that these social formations did not encompass all phases of European development or, if they did, that social formations do not grow out of one another under the propulsion of immanent forces of change. In the latter case, the explanation of historical development has to take into account the role of forces outside the sphere of the mode and relations of production, be they internal or external to the total social structure. This indeed is Hobsbawm's position and it is supportable by Marx's own authority. But Hobsbawm ignores, like Marx did, the problems this position creates for the Marxist theory of change.
Marx and Engels, as far as can be told from their writings, did not suggest that the number of social formations should be expanded to accommodate the many phases of European history (though later Marxists such as Bogdanov and Dubrovsky did, thereby incurring the disdain of fellow Marxists!). On the contrary, Marx spent a great deal of effort demonstrating the evolution of capitalism out of feudalism, while Engels elaborated on how the contradictions of the ancient (slave) mode had prepared the ground for, if not given birth to, feudalism, indicating that they did not conceive these formations to be unconnected types thrown together accidentally within the crucible of European history. Even the Asiatic mode, which is more problematic since the concept was designed to explain historical development in a non-European context, fits into this scheme. Indeed, Marx remarked in another place that "the Asian or
Indian forms of property constitute the initial ones everywhere in Europe."[25]
If these modes of production were successive stages which did encompass the evolution of European society, there is reason to believe that Marx himself regarded the succession as historical, rather than as the consequence of the internal necessity of society. In his analysis of the evolution of capitalism, Marx endowed international trade with a crucial significance in stimulating capitalism. Similarly, in Engels's analysis of feudalism, it was clearly the Germanic invasion of former Roman lands that led to the growth of feudalism, even if the prior decline of the slave economy into small-scale agriculture had prepared the ground for feudalism. In either of these cases, external (and contingent) factors would seem to have provided the sufficient conditions to propel European society from one social formation to another.
This problem, when recognized, reveals a significant gap in Marxism between theory and history. While Marx's formulation of historical theory proposed the immanence of historical development, Marx was obviously quite cognizant of the fact that historically the transition from one social formation to another was intermediated by many factors not all of which could be accounted for in terms of the inner necessity of socioeconomic relations. The gap, moreover, is of such a nature as to have serious consequences not only for Marxist historical theory but also for revolutionary theory. To acknowledge that European society did not evolve through its various stages out of necessity is to challenge the immanence of social development and, therefore, the role of class struggle as the central datum of historical change. Although Marx's statement on the dynamics of historical development in the preface does not mention classes, as Raymond Aron points out, "we need merely suppose that in revolutionary periods — that is, periods of contradiction between the forces and relations of production — one class is attached to the old relations of production which are becoming an obstacle to the development of the forces of production, and
[25] Marx to Engels, March 14, 1868. Printed in Hobsbawm, Pre-capitalist Economic Formations , p. 139.
another class, on the contrary is progressive and represents new relations of production which, instead of being an obstacle in the way of the development of the forces of production, will favor the maximum growth of those forces."[26] Few would deny that class relations are the essential content of the relations of production. To deny the central role to the contradiction between the forces and relations of production in historical development would, by implication, also demand serious qualification of Marx's premise that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle."
For a Marxist, therefore, necessity in history is not to be denied lightheartedly, for to deny necessity is to open the way to questioning the basic premises of Marxist revolutionary theory. Marxists have recognized this danger, as was illustrated in a controversy in the early fifties over the origins of capitalism in Europe occasioned by Paul Sweezy's critique of Maurice Dobb's explanation of the genesis of capitalism in his Studies in the Development of Capitalism . Sweezy criticized Dobb for down-playing the role of external causes (international trade) in the genesis of capitalism. Sweezy doubted that the transition from feudalism to capitalism could be explained solely in terms of the internal contradictions of feudalism (which to Dobb provided the motivation for trade). To back up his case, he pointed to the two centuries (fifteenth and sixteenth) between the decline of feudalism to the origins of capitalism to show that capitalism did not grow directly out of feudalism but developed gradually during a transitional period. During this period, a complex class structure that was neither feudal nor capitalistic dominated Western Europe.[27]
The controversy evoked by this criticism involved a great deal of theorizing and historical argumentation, but what is of interest here is the way some of the Marxists involved responded to Sweezy's objections. In the words of Dobb;
In the final picture, therefore, these two centuries are apparently left suspended uncomfortably in the firmament between heaven and earth. In
[26] R. Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought , vol. 1, (New York: Anchor Books, 1968), p. 157.
[27] P. Sweezy, "A Critique," in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism: A Symposium (New York: Science and Society, 1954), pp. 1–20.
the process of historical development they have to be classified as homeless hybrids. While this sort of answer might be adequate enough in a purely evolutionary view of historical development through successive systems or stages, I surest that it will not do for a revolutionary view of historical development — a view of history as a succession of class systems, with social revolution (in the sense of a transfer of power from one class to another) as the crucial mechanism of historical transformation [emphasis mine].[28]
Another of Sweezy's opponents, Rodney Hilton, was even more explicit in describing the implications of Sweezy's objections: The suggestion that "feudalism had no 'prime mover', that is, no internal dialectic, is in fact non-Marxist."[29]
If the denial of necessity to historical development through a succession of "class systems" leads to the subversion of the Marxist revolutionary outlook, the same danger exists when those systems are denied universality. This was precisely the problem created by the concept of Asiatic mode of production. Marx, and later Plekhanov, explained the Asiatic mode of production in terms of geographic environment which once again negated the significance of the internal dynamics of society. In this case, external forces determined the historical evolution of society by necessitating the creation of forms of political power and social organization (despotism and the communal organization of society, or the absence of private property) which rendered classes and class contradictions irrelevant. The main contradiction was between the state and society. Marx and Engels both referred to a "ruling class" in Asiatic society, but this was a political class that derived its power from performing essential social and economic functions, and did not represent an economic class.[30] It made as much sense in such a society to deal with the "external" causes that lay at the basis of socioeconomic stagnation, or to direct the struggle against oppression not at any one class but at those in control of state power, which was in fact the thrust of the political recommendations
[28] Dobb, "A Reply," in ibid., p. 25.
[29] Hilton, "Comment," in ibid., p. 65.
[30] Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology , pp. 90–93.
of the proponents of Asiatic society in China. This definition of the objective of revolution, however, was as unacceptable to revolutionaries as was the gentry "class" of T'ao Hsi-sheng's transitional society since, in either case, the effect was to obviate the need for struggle among economic classes.
The question of historical universality or historical particularity in Chinese Marxist historiography, therefore, cannot be isolated from the political implications of each view. Revolutionaries, or those bound to a revolutionary outlook, insisted on the centrality of class struggle and, therefore, the necessity and universality of historical development in the Marxist view of history. This, as the example here shows, has presented Marxists elsewhere with similar problems. It is also true that those who have opted for an interpretation of historical materialism which allows for multilinearity and contingency, in China or Europe, have also tended to deprive class contradictions of their central status in the dynamics of history, stressing instead the necessity of viewing societies as total structures, with classes constituting a basic, but not the central, datum of history.[31]
The intrusion of political considerations upon the interpretation of historical materialism raises the question of whether such intrusion was beneficial to Marxist historiography, no matter how justifiable it was in terms of theory and revolution. The answer must be in the negative. To the extent that considerations of revolution attracted Chinese Marxists to the imposition of "universal" schemes upon Chinese history, the result was the simplification both of theoretical concepts and of the interpretation of Chinese history.
First preoccupation with politics prevented Marxists from evaluating the relative virtues of the various interpretations of the past, which might have led to a more thorough understanding of Chinese history and enabled them to improve their explanations. As it was, there was a tendency to judge an interpretation's validity by political criteria rather than on its merits as a historical explanation. "Where praxis is the criterion,
[31] Hobsbawm, "Karl Marx's Contribution to History," in R. Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in Social Science , (New York: Random House Vintage, 1973), pp. 278–279.
as it was for Marx," Left has noted, "there is room only for the truth."[32] Evidently, Chinese Marxists spent more time quarrelling about truth — or revolutionary purity — than about the issues raised by the encounter between Chinese history and Marxist theory. For the same reason, rather than evaluate the sufficiency of theory to account for Chinese history, they imposed stereotyped notions on history, or at best simplified the concepts provided by theory to the point where they lost much of their usefulness in explaining history.
Second, to the extent that Marxist historians saw in Chinese history only another manifestation of a universal historical process, their historical interpretations remained limited in their capability to account for the complexity of China's social development. The specific virtues or weaknesses of the various interpretations already have been discussed at length; here it is necessary only to note the general thrust of the various interpretations. It is clear that the interpretations that simplified historical concepts the least and, conversely, provided the most thorough account of historical phenomena in China were those which used class analysis for heuristic purposes or made room for their modification within the total structure of Chinese history. Historians such as Chou Ku-ch'eng or T'ao Hsi-sheng, by assigning classes only a limited role in explaining Chinese history, were able to take account in their explanations of the role played by the "superstructural" elements of Chinese society such as political power and ideology, as well as external forces such as Chinese relations with foreign peoples. It was, ironically, the "counterrevolutionary" intention of a historian such as T'ao Hsi-sheng that made him aware of the complexity of Chinese history.
Revolutionary historians, who believed that the "class systems" of Europe had been replicated in China, on the other hand, ended up simplifying both Marxist concepts and Chinese history. Even the best among the historians who believed universal schemes to be applicable to Chinese history could defend this thesis only at the cost of reducing historical concepts such
[32] Leff, Tyranny of Concepts (University: University of Alabama Press, 1969), p. 12.
as slavery and feudalism to their bare essentials (self-sufficiency or a high rate of exploitation), which minimized the ability of those concepts to distinguish one precapitalist social formation from another.[33] Unable to discover sufficient evidence to show that China had indeed gone through these social formations, they ended up imposing tendentious interpretations on the data they uncovered, ignored or explained away the significance of crucial data from the past such as the power of the Chinese state, and minimized the significance of even basic economic phenomena such as trade and the private ownership (in contrast to feudal possession) of land in imperial Chinese society. This is not to say that they did not make important contributions to Chinese historiography, Marxist or otherwise.
The contributions of a historian like Kuo Mo-jo have been generally recognized by specialists in early Chinese history. These contributions, moreover, were not in spite of but due to his perception of Chinese history in terms of Marxist stages. The Marxist periodization of history, it has been observed, requires the historian to dig deep into the most fundamental levels of society because it regards historical periodization not just as a convenient way of organizing the data of history but as an expression of basic socioeconomic processes.[34] The best Chinese Marxist historians, no matter how mechanical their approach to Marxist periodization, were driven by their assumptions to search for the socioeconomic dividing lines along the course of Chinese history. In the process they illuminated the significance of important aspects of history that had been ignored or regarded as marginal by earlier historians. Still, their interpretations of the data they uncovered suffered from their prejudiced notions of how history was supposed to proceed and, in the end, obstructed the further development of the Marxist study of Chinese history.
[33] In this kind of definitional reductionism, there was little difference between Chu P'ei-wo or party spokesmen and the academic Marxists. See Chien Po-tsan, "Kuan-yu 'feng-chien chu-i p'o-mieh lun' chih p'i-p'an" (Critique of 'Theories that Abolish the Feudal System'), Chung-shan wen-hua chiao-yu kuan chi-k'an , 4.1 (spring 1937): 130, and Lu Chen-yu, Shih-ch'ien ch'i Chung-kuo she-hui yen-chiu (Research in Prehistorical Chinese Society) (Peking, 1934), pp. 19, 51–52.
[34] E. Balibar, "On the Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism," in L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital (London: NLB, 1970), pp. 205–206.
The division between Chinese historians corresponds to what T. Shanin, in a discussion of recent trends in Marxist historical analysis, has identified as two types of analysis permissible within Marxism, "systematic analysis" and "class analysis." Systematic analysis, according to Shanin, "focuses on the work and working out of specific political economies, modes of production and societal structures." Class analysis, on the other hand, "directs its main attention to political economy and conflict of interests expressed in historical group confrontations and the dynamics of group consciousness."[35] As Shanin observes, these two types of analyses yield different conclusions on history as they "look at different things for they look for different things."[36] The last statement is probably true of all historical work, but it is more problematic for Marxist historiography because of the tendency of many Marxists to insist on a monistic interpretation of history.
Nevertheless, Shanin's distinction points to two models of society that inform Marxist historical analyses, both of which were employed by Marx as his attention oscillated between revolution and history: a bipolar model where class opposition determines the alignment of all components of society and provides the ultimate motive force of historical change, and a structural model which depicts society as a complex system constituted of dynamically interrelated components. The bipolar model is obviously most appropriate for the revolutionary situation when the basic (and until that moment abstract) class cleavage in society emerges out into the open to force the articulation of loyalties in society, in the social as well as the political and ideological spheres. The structural model, on the other hand, is better able to take account of the "normal" historical situation when not only the political and ideological but even the social and economic relations are marked by greater complexity. Marx himself, it has been observed, utilized the structural model in his more "purely" social-historical anal-
[35] T. Shanin, "The Third Stage: Marxist Social Theory and the Origins of Our Time," Journal of Contemporary Asia , 6.3 (1976):305.
[36] Ibid.
yses, in particular Capital ,[37] and stressed class confrontation when observing the past from the perspective of impending revolution, when the complex system, under its internal contradictions (aided by revolutionary practice), seemed ready to resolve itself into two hostile camps in a moment of revolutionary transformation. The classic expression of this attitude is, of course, the discourse on history incorporated into the Communist Manifesto .
In general, Marxists who are uncompromising on the issue of class conflict as the motive force of history have perceived history in terms of the paradigm of the revolutionary situation, and have preferred the bipolar to the structural model of society. This was certainly the case with those Chinese Marxists who believed that social bifurcation had determined the nature and course of Chinese history, and insisted that class division was the "essential" datum of Chinese history. These historians were interested mainly in exposing class oppression in Chinese history. While there was nothing reprehensible about this goal, it led to a rather simplified (and simplistic) view of Chinese history when they attempted to explain all aspects of the past from the single fact of social and economic oppression. Their view justified their claim that they had the genuine revolutionary stance toward the past; it also led them to deny the significance of all elements, outside the sphere of class relations, that had gone into the making of Chinese history.
This conclusion is not very surprising. Recent Marxist studies demonstrate that Marxist historical analysis is most effective when it approaches societies not as rigid systems determined by economic relations but as structures built up of constituent parts that stand in problematic relationships to one another as well as to the whole. To deny the problematic nature of these relationships by arguing that the mode of production in a society creates certain production (class) relations which in turn shape the whole social structure, thereby reducing historical
[37] B. Oilman, "Marxism and Political Science: Prolegomenon to a Debate on Marx's Method," Politics and Society , summer 1973, pp. 491–510.
materialism to a set of universal social forms, is to deprive Marxist historical theory of its vitality and to simplify it to such an elementary level that it becomes useless as a historical method. If the form and the course of any society can be predicted from Marx's observations on social formations in Europe, furthermore, there is little point to historical analysis except, perhaps, to supply these forms with some kind of time frame. This indeed was the major task most Chinese Marxist historians set themselves.
Marx's most important contribution to history was not to discover classes, as he himself conceded,[38] but to place classes within the context of dynamic social structures which owed their defining characteristics to the particular class relations they contained but which in turn conditioned those relations and their operation in history. Marxist sociohistorical analysis
implies the recognition of societies as systems of relations between human beings, of which the relations entered into for the purpose of production and reproduction are primary for Marx. It also implies the analysis of the structure and functioning of these systems as entities maintaining themselves, in their relations both with the outside environment — non-human and human— and in their internal relationships. Marxism is far from the only structural-functionalist theory of society, though it has good claims to be the first of them, but it differs from most others in two respects. First, it insists on a hierarchy of social phenomena (e.g., "basis" and "super-structure"), and second, on the existence within any society of internal tensions ("contradictions") which counteract the tendency of the system to maintain itself as a going concern.
The importance of these peculiarities of Marxism is in the field of history, for it is they which allow it to explain — unlike other structuralfunctional models of society — why and how societies change and transform themselves; in other words, the facts of social evolution. The immense strength of Marx has always lain in his insistence on both the existence of social structure and its historicity, or in other words its internal dynamic of change. Today, when the existence of social systems is generally accepted, but at the cost of their a-historical, if not antihistorical analysis, Marx's emphasis on history as a necessary dimension is perhaps more essential than ever.[39]
[38] Marx to J. Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852. In K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works , vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), p. 528.
[39] Hobsbawm, "Karl Marx's Contribution to History," pp. 273–274.
This statement by Hobsbawm, who is without doubt one of the ablest practitioners of Marxist history, has been quoted at length because it touches on a number of essential points concerning the Marxist theory of history. Central is his emphasis on societies "as systems of relations between human beings." One of the most revolutionary aspects of Marx's views on history, which he articulated in his critique of the Hegelian view of history, was his insistence that history does not stand above and outside humanity: "History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends."[40] The Hegelian hypostatization of history, according to Marx, reflected the implicit premise that "Man exists so that history shall exist, and history exists so that truth can be revealed."[41] In the same way, one might add, Marxists, in their subordination of history to ideological ends, have also hypostatized history to deprive it once again of vitality. Marx himself was not always true to his premise that living people should be the subject of history, but his philosophical vision demanded a great deal more than the formulation of "the natural history" of society. For a truly revolutionary approach to history, the positivist tendency in Marxism "to assimilate the study of the social sciences to that of the natural ones, or the human to the non-human" must be resisted.[42]
Second, Hobsbawm's emphasis on the structural-functionalist nature of Marxist theory points to an interpretation of Marxism often ignored by Marxists, possibly for fear that to stress this point would lead to depriving Marxism of its identity as well as its revolutionary power. There is no reason to belabor this point since Hobsbawm offers cogent distinctions between Marxism and the structural-functionalist theories of social science which owe so much to Marxism in inspiration as well as in theory.[43] It is true that in this interpretation classes lose some of their centrality (though not primacy) in history, but this too is not
[40] Marx, The Holy Family . Quoted in Bottomore, Karl Marx , p. 63.
[41] Ibid., pp. 57–58.
[42] Hobsbawm, "Karl Marx's Contribution to History," p. 273.
[43] Marx's relationship to modern social science is, of course, a hotly debated point. For an extensive discussion that makes a convincing case for Marx's influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century sociology, see the introduction tO Bottomore, Karl Marx .
inconsistent with Marx's views and points the way to a more effective use of the concept in historical analysis. Marx explained that his conception of history rested "on the exposition of the real process of production, starting out from the simple material production of life, and on the comprehension of the form of intercourse connected with and created by this mode of production. . . . From this starting point, it explains all the different theoretical productions and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc., and traces their origins and growth, by which means the matter can of course be displayed as a whole (and consequently, also the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another) [emphasis mine].[44]
The view of Marxism which ignores the significance for social dynamics of all but the mode of production and classes, regarding the rest as merely a passive "superstructure", represents an enormous simplification of Marx's views.[45] Class itself, as E. P. Thompson has pointed out, "is a relationship and not a thing."[46] As class relations help shape many aspects of society, those relations themselves are conditioned by the total structure of the society within which they exist. In fact, a careful reading of Marx indicates that the distinctions among the various levels of society (economic, social, political-legal, ideological) are not real but analytical distinctions, for in actual historical circumstances each level expresses in its constitution the characteristics of the other levels.[47] To place classes in the structure of society, therefore, is not to deny their existence or importance, as many social scientists are inclined to do, but to recognize their complexity. If classes ever exist in pure form, it is either in the abstract or under ideal revolutionary conditions, which is but another way of phrasing the same idea. In history, as Marx
[44] Marx, The German Ideology , quoted in Bottomore, ibid., p. 54.
[45] See Engels's letter to J. Bloch (September 21, 1890). In Marx and Engels, Selected Works , vol. 3, p. 487.
[46] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House Vintage, 1963), p. 11.
[47] See H. Lefebvre, The Sociology of Marx (New York: Random House Vintage, 1969), chap. 4, for an extensive discussion of this problem. See also Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital , pp. 99–105, and Hobsbawm, "Karl Marx's Contribution to History," for kindred views.
himself admitted in his historical analyses,[48] it is impossible to find pure classes or pure class relations, where society is divided into two class camps as required by the particular mode of production. In fact, since, in Marx's view, new forms of production, and therefore productive relations, come into existence in the "womb" of the previous ones, all history is complex and all history is transitional. It is in the political-legal sphere, if any place, that change from one type of dominant social-economic relationship to another is most readily observable.
Historical materialism is not a replica of historical reality but an abstraction from it. Like any other theory, it must, therefore, be "disciplined" by empirical investigation without which it easily degenerates into a speculative abstraction without much relevance to history, as in the case of those Chinese Marxists whose discussions of Chinese history were theoretical to the extent that a few changes in proper names would have sufficed to render their analyses relevant to any other society in the world. In their disdain for empiricism, which indeed ignores anything that cannot be demonstrated empirically, no matter how crucial to understanding, many Marxists themselves have tended to assign to historical data a secondary place in their analyses. "The study of history," however, "must be a dialectic between universal and particular, between the ideas and images that scholars create so as to order discrete facts, and the particulars that a scholar knows through immersion in specific historical circumstances."[49] Marxists can afford to ignore the evidence of history, in China or elsewhere, only at the risk of reducing theory to ideology, and rendering it useless to understanding history and society.
It might be objected that the reduction of Marxism to a scholarly theory abandons the revolutionary intention underlying Marx's formulation of historical materialism. It is evident, however, that the use of theory as "an instrument of war," as Lukacs advocated, also deprives the theory of its potential for
[48] See Marx's discussion of the complexity of classes in France in The 18th. Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1967).
[49] Levenson, China: An Interpretive History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), p. 37.
contribution to the revolutionary goals of Marxists. When revolution becomes the criterion of historical validity, the relationship between history and revolution is inevitably reduced to a tautology, with particular revolutionary goals determining the interpretation of history and history in turn legitimizing the particular course of revolutionary action implicit in those goals. The tautology may not be apparent in a revolutionary situation when the anticipations of theory appear simultaneously as historical reality, as it was not apparent to Marx, who expected the revolution of the proletariat to be imminent.[50] But when a revolutionary situation does not exist, the dialectical relationship between revolution and history degenerates readily into a tautology. Revolutionary Marxists have, with Marx, regarded revolutionary practice "both as a tool for changing history and a criterion for historical evaluation."[51] They have, however, usually overlooked the other aspect of Marx's view on the relevance of history to revolutionary action. In Avineri's words; "Revolutionizing the world depends on an adequate understanding of it. This was, after all, the raison d'être for spending a lifetime on Das Kapital ."[52]
Chinese Marxists faced with the failure to revolution in 1927 turned to history to justify the correctness of their various revolutionary standpoints. As it turned out, history proved capable of justifying all the revolutionary alternatives. In hindsight, it is clear that they fell into a tautological trap of their own with detrimental consequences for historical analysis and little aid to revolution. The devising of a successful revolutionary strategy demanded a much more precise understanding of social and political relations in Chinese society than was permitted by abstract concepts such as feudal and capitalist, especially in the simplified form in which the Marxist historians employed them. In the end, revolutionaries like Mao, impervious to the blinding influence of hypostatized concepts and schemes of history, proved more capable of grasping the intricacies of
[50] S. Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1971), p. 144.
[51] Ibid., p. 138.
[52] Ibid., p. 137.
Chinese society and basing on them a revolutionary strategy which, with little aid from history, carried them to victory.[53]
Marxists can insist on the exclusive validity of class analysis only at the risk of rendering Marxist theory irrelevant to historical understanding,[54] as has been the case with Marxist historiography in China since 1949. In the last three decades, Chinese historians have added little of significance to the interpretations that were offered in the thirties but have been bogged down within the confines of a schematic view of history. One reason may be that the association of the structural model with opposition to class struggle in the early thirties compromised it in Chinese eyes as a paradigm of historical interpretation. There is evidence, however, that even after 1949, when the five-stage view of history was adopted as official orthodoxy, Chinese historians who formally adhered to that model were not altogether satisfied with its restrictions on interpretation. The controversies in the fifties over incipient capitalism in China testified to the continuing search for an interpretation that could account for the complexity of Chinese history. Some historians went so far as to express admiration for a complex, pluralistic interpretation of the past.[55] These tendencies were cut short in the years after 1958 when revolution once again became an issue in Chinese society. It was not fortuitous that the views of early Marxists such as T'ao were revived for attack during those years, this time presumably as a proxy for those historians who advocated a more complex appreciation of Chinese history and, therefore, "obscured" the need for class consciousness.[56]
[53] Some Marxists have gone so far as to reject the relevance of history to practical revolutionary analysis which, they rightly observe, addresses mainly the configuration of forces within the immediate context of revolution. Hirst and Hindess, "Conclusion."
[54] See my discussion of this point in "The Problem of Class Viewpoint versus Historicism in Chinese Historiography," Modern China , 3.3 (October 1977).
[55] Chien Po-tsan. Quoted in Cliff Edmunds, "Politics and Historiography after the Great Leap: The Case of Chien Po-tsan" (paper prepared for the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies, Fifth Annual Meeting, October 30–51, 1976), p. 8. Cited with the author's permission.
[56] See Lu Chen-yu, "The Struggle between Marxism and Pseudo-Marxism on History and Philosophy during the Time of the Second Revolutionary Civil War," in Chinese Studies in History and Philosophy , 1.2 (winter 1967–1968):46–80. Also, Sun Chia-hsiang et al., "P'i-p'an T'ao Hsi-sheng 'ch'ien-tzu-pen chu-i she-hui lun' tifan-tung kuan-tien" (Critique of the Reactionary Viewpoint of T'ao Hsi-sheng's "Precapitalist Society Theory"), Li-shih yen-chiu (Historical Studies), 12 (1958): 63–72.
Complexity was rejected in the sixties with the revolutionization of Chinese society by the Cultural Revolution. It is interesting that in the seventies, with Chinese society once again turning away from revolutionary struggle, there are already hints that the views of the sixties will be renounced, although it is too early to say what this might mean for the future of Marxist historiography in China.[57]
[57] See Wu Chiang, "Fa-chia hsueh-shuo ti li-shih yen-pien" (Historical Development of Legalist Theory), Li-shih yen-chiu , 6 (1976):50–71.