7.4 MARXISM AND LENINISM
Marxism has obviously been of enormous significance to twentiethcentury China. It is during the period currently under discussion that Marxism takes root and flourishes in China; among other things, as noted earlier, the CCP is founded in 1921 by Chen Duxiu and others.
My goal in this section is to explore to what extent Marxism and its derivatives influence rights discourse in China prior to 1949, and in particular to ask whether these ideologies change the ways that quanli was conceptualized. One answer, offered in a recent book by Robert Weatherley, is that Marxism serves primarily to confirm an already existing way of talking about rights which itself derives primarily from the Confucian tradition [Weatherley 1999]. While I do not deny that there are ways in which Marxism will come to reinforce certain preexisting themes in Chinese rights discourse, I think that saying this misses most of what is interesting about the relation between Marxism and rights discourse prior to 1949. First of all, a number of prominent Marxists launched critiques of those who advocated rights and human rights during the 1920s and 1930s. Second, the version of Marxism which had led to a successful revolution in the neighboring Soviet Union - namely, Leninism - was quite influential in China, not only on the CCP but also on the Nationalist Party (GMD). We will look at the idea that rights belong only to those with proper revolutionary pedigrees, which emerges in both of these groups, and look briefly at the debate that ensues between proponents of this idea and others committed to a broader conception of rights. Both the Marxist critiques and the Leninist innovations will have important consequences for the future of rights discourse in China.Before turning to these specific issues, it will be helpful to review Marx’s somewhat complicated attitudes toward rights.[202] To begin with, he was at best ambivalent about rights in pre-communist societies.
His most famous discussion, in “On the Jewish Question,” criticizes most types of rights for contributing to the atomization of self-centered bourgeois society; this was contrary to Marx’s fundamental belief that humans are “species beings,” flourishing only in society through their relationships with others [Marx 1978a (1843), p. 46]. He saw rights, that is, as reinforcing barriers between individuals: barriers that both protected us from, but also isolated us from, our fellow humans. I think that it is easy to see that Marx is correct, whether or not we share his belief in the fundamental relatedness of all people. Most obviously in contemporary American society, perhaps, the prevalence of rights language both protects individuals and individual behaviors, and reduces the desire or possibility for people to engage in more substantial ways.[203]In other writings Marx did recognize the need for certain types of rights in pre-communist societies, such as the right of each to receive according to his or her labor, but even there he notes that, since individuals’ abilities to labor differ from one another, this right is fundamentally unequal [Marx 1978c (1875), p. 530]. In the “highest phase of communist society,” however,
after the enslaving subordination of the individual life to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banner: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. [1978c, p. 531]
Goods will be plentiful, the needs of each can be satisfied, and none will need to fall back on claims of individual rights. Rights may have useful, if ambivalent, roles in societies that have not yet attained true communism, but Marx suggests that in the long run, any need for rights is a signal of social problems that still need to be overcome.[204]
We have already seen how, as he moved toward Marxism, Chen Duxiu put increasing stress on the need for workers to enjoy the social and economic preconditions necessary for fulfilling their personalities.
By the time he helped to found the CCP in 1921, he had stopped talking of rights altogether. This conclusion is certainly not necessitated by Marx’s teachings, since China was still a long way from a true communist society. A consistent Marxist, that is, could well have demanded economic (and other) rights for all people. We also saw earlier that Gao Yihan, never a member of the CCP but certainly sympathetic to socialism, did in fact press the importance of fundamental economic rights. Tan Mingqian, like Chen an original member of the CCP, went beyond both Chen and Gao by explicitly criticizing the rights granted in the French Revolution - and implicitly criticizing many of the rights proposals made by liberals in his own day. The French Revolution was about the bourgeois wresting privileges from the aristocrats, but it did not institute genuine democracy because it did not realize true equality and freedom. Despite their sacrifices for the Revolution, proletarians gained no political rights; indeed, the rise of capitalism has meant that proletarians have lost any self-sovereignty (zizhu) that they ever had.[205] Tan argues that the real spirit of contemporary democracy lies in two things, equality and freedom. True equality requires giving people equal opportunities, and thus true freedom means allowing for both the satisfaction of one’s own self-regarding desires and the similar satisfactions of others: All people must have equal opportunities, if freedom is to be meaningful [Tan 1920, pp. 588-9]. Like thinkers that we have seen before, in other words, Tan looks to a balanced solution between self and other, and self and group; he never suggests that for some reason the group’s interests must take precedence over those of individuals.A decade later, other members of the CCP raised their voices in criticism of a new round of liberal demands for human rights. Three prominent liberal thinkers wrote a series of articles in the Crescent magazine which criticized the GMD government’s meager efforts to institutionalize protection for human rights.
Since several other scholars have recently written about this “Human Rights movement,” I have chosen not to focus on it in this chapter; suffice it to say that in various ways, these writings continued to exemplify the trends and conceptualizations that I sketched in earlier sections of the chapter.[206] In any event, the criticism leveled against rights in 1931 is important because it makes explicit the idea, implicit in Chen Duxiu’s silence about rights after 1921, that revolution, rather than constitutional revision, is the only route to full equality and freedom for the proletariat.[207]A second feature of the 1931 communist criticism of liberal rights proposals is the idea that the CCP should be struggling for the rights of members of a certain class, rather than for the rights of all. Tan Mingqian’s earlier article had explicitly condemned any hegemony of one class over another, but later critiques move away from this position. In fact, a wide range of articles published starting in the 1920s advocated what came to be called “revolutionary people’s rights (geming minquan),” which were opposed to “human rights (renquan).” In light of the bitter struggles that eventually occurred between the GMD and the CCP, culminating in the civil war of 1945-1949, it may be surprising to learn of the considerable cooperation between the two parties in the early 1920s and of their initial ideological similarities. The eventual differences between them were enormous, certainly, but in the early 1920s both were explicitly revolutionary parties, and both were developed, with advice and financing from the Comintern, along Leninist lines [Spence 1990, pp. 334-41].
“Revolutionary people’s rights” were granted only to those committed to the goals of the revolution. The declaration from the GMD’s first nationwide conference stated that “All individuals and groups that truly fight against imperialism can enjoy all freedoms and rights; whereas all those who betray the nation, deceive the people, and are loyal to the imperialists and warlords, regardless of whether it is as a group or as an individual, may not enjoy these freedoms and rights.”[208] As one theorist who had helped to found the CCP but then switched to the GMD explained, the GMD’s “ideal is surely the realization of political equality, but in order to attain true equality, it is necessary to pass through a period of temporary inequality....
We know that to accomplish true equality, we first have to clear away its obstacles and do away with those who damage equality” [Zhou 1928, p. 13].This same idea, that rights need to be restricted to those with proper revolutionary ideals, can be found in some documents associated with the CCP. It is noteworthy, though, that leaders of the CCP came to be more inclusive during their subsequent struggles against the GMD - an inclusiveness that they explained in terms of the various stages through which the revolution had to pass. We thus find Mao Zedong writing in 1940 that “It should be laid down that all landlords and capitalists not opposed to the War of Resistance shall enjoy the same human rights, property rights, and right to vote, and the same freedoms of speech, assembly, association, thought, and belief, as the workers and peasants” [Mao 1991 (1940), p. 768].There is nothing in particular about Chinese culture and Russian culture that would have led one to predict that their political discourses would converge in the mid-twentieth century. Yet converge they did, which for a time led to considerable engagement among thinkers, authors, artists, and others from the two nations. Like the convergence between Chen and Gao, on the one hand, and Dewey, on the other, this later convergence does not last: As political and other circumstances change in the two nations, they begin to evaluate things increasingly differently. In Chapter 8 I will be looking at some of the ways in which contemporary Western rights theorists might be able to engage with their Chinese counterparts, and I will suggest that we once again see some grounds for convergence. It is worth bearing in mind, therefore, the fragility of such convergences. A convergence is really just the beginning of the process of building and maintaining consensus on key normative matters.