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UnderstandingSociety: Theories of the Chinese Revolution
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The success of the revolution, therefore, depended on successful mobilization of the peasantry in the 1930s and 1940s. How are we to account for its success?
This question has naturally loomed large in Western discussions of the Chinese Revolution since 1949. Two influential theories offer political culture and class conflict as causes of revolution, and neither of these high-level theories appears to be altogether satisfactory. A more plausible analysis refers to the local politics of class. Rather than postulating a single large causal factor, it is more plausible to understand CCP success as a concatenation of a number of small causes and advantages, deployed with skill and luck to a successful national victory.
Trust Theory | n+1
The premise of "On the Idea of Communism," which was hosted March 13-15 by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, was to explore the possible positive meanings of the word "communism" for philosophical thinking.
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I had always dismissed Hardt, with the kind of macho
contempt that comes from reading too much Žižek, as a crypto-liberal
who was too politically weak, too theoretically softheaded, and just
too American to be a genuine radical. And in person he proved to be
every bit the doe-eyed naïf he seemed on the page. It is an index of
the just how strong a disillusioning effect the conference had on me
and my enthrallment with the Badiou-Žižek complex that, by the end of
the three-day event, I had completely reversed my attitude towards
Hardt. What I used to see as weakness in Hardt, by the end I saw as an
unpretentious generosity which was sorely lacking in the general vibe.
More so than any shortcoming in the philosophical ideas presented at
the conference, this lack in the performative mode of the event was its
most serious failure. -
This conference was essentially the first step of a small but powerful—or at least respected—intellectual
vanguard to reclaim "communism," to purify it, so that in time the word
could only "legitimately" bring to mind the Jacobean-Marxist lineage of
radicalism. - 1 more annotations...
OnTheCommons.org » Still Spooked by Communism
This is just stupid. As a matter of intellectual history and politics, the emerging online collectivism has nothing to do with communist revolutions or state socialism. So why even locate online media in that tradition? One suspects that Kelly or some shallow editor thought that “the new socialism” would be a catchy, provocative hook. Sigh. The silly conventions of mass-market journalism.
infinite thØught: power to the people?
Power to the People? Conference notes, Birkbeck College, 9th May 2009
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