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Hegel and Chinese Marxism DOI: 10.4312/as.2019.7.1.55-73 55 Hegel and Chinese Marxism Tom ROCKMORE*1 Abstract China is presently embarking on the huge task of realizing what President Xi Jinping recently called the Chinese Dream. China is officially Marxist, and Marx thus inspires this dream in his assigned status as the “official guide” to the ongoing Chinese Revolution. This paper will focus on the crucial relation between Hegel and Chinese Marxism. Marx is a key Hegelian, critical of, but strongly dependent on, Hegel. Since the Chinese Dream is not Hegelian, but rather anti-Hegelian, it is unlikely, as I will be arguing, to be realized in a recognizably Marxian form. Keywords: Hegel, China, Marxism, Marx, Engels Hegel in kitajski marksizem Izvleček Kitajska se podaja na pot uresničitve projekta, ki ga je predsednik Xi Jinping pred kratkim imenoval »kitajske sanje«. Kitajska je uradno marksistična in Marx zaradi statusa »urad- nega vodiča« sedanje kitajske revolucije, ki so mu ga pripisali, navdihuje te sanje. Članek se bo osredotočil na ključno razmerje med Heglom in kitajskim marksizmom. Marx je ključni hegelianec, ki do Hegla ni le kritičen, ampak je tudi odvisen od njega. »Kitajske sanje« pa niso hegelianske, temveč prej antihegelianske, zato je, kot bo razloženo, malo verjetno, da se bodo uresničile v prepoznavno marksistični obliki. Ključne besede: Hegel, Kitajska, Marxism, Marx, Engels * Tom ROCKMORE, Department of Philosophy, Peking University, China. Email address: rockmore[at]duq.edu AS_2019_1_FINAL.indd 55 31.1.2019 10:48:34 56 Tom ROCKMORE: Hegel and Chinese Marxism On the Relation of Marx and Hegel Marx’s followers as well as his critics tend to approach him through Marxism. Classical Marxism, often called simply Marxism, is the theory invented by En- gels and further developed by his followers. Engels, who has positivist tendencies, substitutes science for philosophy in his reading of Marx. His study of Feuerbach presents an influential view later restated by him and others. Engels often suggests, incorrectly in my view, that Marx is responsible for the ex- tra-philosophical, scientific component of Marxism. One of the more important passages occurs in his speech at Marx’s graveside. In the eulogy, Engels generously compares Marx to Darwin. He claims that Marx “discovered the law of develop- ment of human history,” which, if this is a reference to political economy, presum- ably means that economics is prior to every other explanatory factor, specifically in its capacity as “the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production and bourgeois society that this mode of production has created.” (En- gels 1989, 468) Other observers reject this interpretation of Marx. According to Ernest Mandel, a Trotskyist theoretician, “He [i. e. Marx] was not seeking universal laws of economic organization. Indeed, one of the essential theses of Capital is that no such laws exist.” (Mandel 1982, 11) Similarly, in his recent biography of Marx, G. S. Jones calls attention to the difference between Engels’ favourable comparison of Marx’s view, which he describes as the establishment of the law of historical de- velopment, and Darwin’s theory of natural selection that, Jones points out, is not and should not be interpreted as deterministic. (see Stedman Jones 2016, 566) Despite its limits, Engels’ anti-Hegelian interpretation of Marx quickly became canonical. His anti-Hegelian approach to Marx has long influenced Russian Marxism and continues to influence Chinese Marxism. In broad terms Chinese Marxism is dependent on two main sources: Russian Marxism and the Chinese intellectual tradition. The shared Russian and Chinese anti-Hegelian interpreta- tion of Marx was called into question in the middle of the last century through the relatively late publication of crucial Marxian texts, that is texts prepared by Marx and that are crucial for understanding his position. Russian Marxism is strongly influenced by Lenin, who was active early in the twentieth century. When he was active, a number of important writings, crucial for understanding Marx’s position, were still unpublished. They include the Paris Manuscripts, the Grundrisse, the manuscripts routinely known as Theories of Surplus Value, the German Ideology, and so on. Lenin’s political credentials exceed either his philosophical training or his philo- sophical competence. Lenin was interested in and, unlike Engels, partly trained AS_2019_1_FINAL.indd 56 31.1.2019 10:48:34 Asian Studies VII (XXIII), 1 (2019), pp. 55–73 57 in philosophy. But he was understandably more concerned with bringing about a successful revolution than in winning a philosophical debate. His understanding of both Marx and Marxism is almost wholly based on Engels rather than on Marx. In his most important philosophical foray, Materialism and Empiriocriti- cism, he cites Engels more than three hundred times but Marx only once. Lenin’s interest in Hegel was stimulated by his teacher, Plekhanov, a Hegelian Marxist. Lenin was initially concerned with Hegel at the very end of the nine- teenth century. He later returned to Hegel after he wrote Materialism and Em- piriocriticism (1909), particularly several years later when he was writing his “Phil- osophical Notebooks” (1914). This unfinished text reflects his effort to master Aristotle, Feuerbach, Marx and Deborin, but above all Hegel.1 Due to his early death, Lenin did not live to develop his understanding of He- gel. Stalin, Lenin’s political heir, later codified the Marxist account of Marx. In “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” he notes, in silently conflating Marx and Engels and in paraphrasing the former’s remarks on dialectic in the Afterword to the second edition of Capital vol. 1, that Marx and Engels took from the Hege- lian dialectics only its “rational kernel” while casting aside its idealistic shell. Ac- cording to Stalin, Marx provided dialectic with a modern scientific form. Though there were Hegelian Marxists such as Ewald Ilyenkov in the Soviet Union, in part because of the enduring influence of Engels, Russian Marxism has always been basically anti-Hegelian, and if Marx is a Hegelian, anti-Marxian. On the Soviet Background of Chinese Marxism Individual Chinese thinkers, perhaps foremost among them Zhang Shiying (see Wang 2014, 90–96), are centrally interested in Hegel. Yet Chinese Marxism mainly follows the anti-Hegelian lead of Engels, traditional Marxism, and Rus- sian Marxism for two reasons. On the one hand, there is the political pressure to maintain the Marxist vision of Marx. On the other, there is the fact that Chinese Marxism, like Russian Marxism, arose before the publication in the middle of the last century of crucial Marxian texts pointing to Hegel’s central role in the formulation of Marx’s position. The discovery of Hegelian Marxism by Lukàcs and Korsch in the early 1920s had a powerful and enduring impact. With exceptions, it is at least plausible that Western Marxism as a whole can be described as broadly Hegelian. (see Anderson 1976) In the absence of statistics, it is difficult to be precise about the importance 1 See, for a sympathetic reading of Lenin’s efforts to master Hegel, Anderson 1995. AS_2019_1_FINAL.indd 57 31.1.2019 10:48:34 58 Tom ROCKMORE: Hegel and Chinese Marxism of Hegel in the Chinese Marxist debate. The Hegel debate in China, though per- haps large––though how large is unclear––if for no other reason than the large number of Chinese Marxists, is comparatively small. In any case it is not large in comparison to the discussion of Chinese Marxism. The debate on Chinese Marx- ism is omnipresent, though mainly on the ideological level. Anyone who has spent time in China is aware that ideological, forced-feeding of the Chinese version of Marxism is obligatory fare for all Chinese students. To the best of my knowledge no Chinese university lacks a Marxist school. These, however, routinely dispense a form of Marxist propaganda that differs in kind from philosophical Marxism that is studied in some but not all departments of philosophy. It is important to distinguish between those who inculcate Marx and Marxism as a form of propaganda and those who study it seriously, as one would study other forms of philosophy. The subjective impression of the present writer is that Chinese students of Marx and Marxism are often less aware of Marxism outside China than their Western counterparts. For obvious reasons, given such factors as the important language barrier, Hegel’s criticism of Chinese philosophy, and the strong official Chinese identification with Marxist ideology, Chinese Marxist students often have a relatively weak grasp of Western Marxism. Other reasons include the fact that Chinese scholars tend not to know German, or at least not to know it well, not to be more than distantly aware of the Western Hegelian Marxist discussion, nor to be more than vaguely familiar with recent Western Marxist publications, and so on. Though there are exceptions, above all Li Zehou, in comparison to Western Marxists the Chinese show relatively less interest in or awareness of Hegelian Marxism. Li’s anthropological ontology, the basis of his approach to modernity, underlies his effort to transform Kant’s dualistic theory of subjectivity into a monistic, materialist theory of subjectivity. His theory is both original and atypical of the Chinese Marx- ist debate. 2 It is thus not surprising if a recent study of Chinese Marxism has noth- ing specific to say about the role of Hegel in Chinese Marxism. (see Chan 2003) Chinese Marxism arose in stages, initially through translations from German, Russian and Japanese sources early in the twentieth century. It later developed through the importation into China of the influential Russian debate between the mechanists and the dialecticians (or so-called Deborinists) concerning Marxist materialism. This debate, which is sometimes cast as the first great debate of Sovi- et philosophy, interested Nikolai Bukharin, a tragic political figure later liquidated by Stalin, and as well as Stalin himself, who favoured the mechanists.
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