Liu Jiming | The Last "New Leftist"

— Beginning from Li Tuo's Essay "For a True Socialist, What Is Socialism?"

Published in: Renjing Net, July 9, 2024

Mr. Li Tuo sent me a recent piece of his — a transcript of remarks he delivered at an academic symposium organized by the journal Cultural Longitudinal and Latitudinal, originally titled "Some Reflections on the Complexity of Socialism and Reform," retitled for publication on the public account as "For a True Socialist, What Is Socialism?" — evidently drawing out the central meaning of the piece. I read it almost in one breath; though I skimmed rather than read closely, I felt this was an important essay. I call it important not merely because of its length (twenty thousand characters), but because of the richness and grandeur of its topics, the breadth of the domains it covers, and its complexity — a point the author himself repeatedly emphasizes in the text. I would add one more thing: the contradictions within the essay that are almost impossible to reconcile in a single logical framework also exceed what we have seen in Li Tuo's previous work. As the editorial note on Renjing Net put it: "He situates his thinking about the history of China's socialist revolution, construction, and reform within the horizon of world socialist movement history, raising a number of major theoretical and historical propositions — such as what socialism actually is, the relationship between state capitalism and scientific socialism, Lenin's 'New Economic Policy' and the relationship between Leninism and Stalinism, the relationship between Marxism and neo-Marxism, the similarities and differences between Mao Zedong's five economic components of the 1950s and the 'diversity of ownership' and 'mixed ownership' of the post-Reform era, as well as the overall judgment on Reform and Opening-Up and the social nature of contemporary China — all of which are of the greatest value for discussion and merit deep and careful analysis."

After Mr. Li Tuo's important piece was reprinted by Renjing Net, it provoked fierce controversy among readers. An essay signed "Jingganshan Guanxin" [Observer of Jinggang Mountain], titled "The Essence of the 'Remedial Coursework Theory' Is to Take the Capitalist Road," wrote: "Reading Teacher Li Tuo's essay 'For a True Socialist, What Is Socialism?', the impression it gives this writer is that the central thesis is an admiration for our teacher Lenin's 'New Economic Policy,' and approval of a road based on the 'New Economic Policy' — advocacy for a socialist road modeled on the New Economic Policy (such as Yugoslavia). This is in fact the 'remedial coursework theory' — a variant of productivism [note: 唯生产力论, the view that development of productive forces takes precedence over class struggle and socialist transformation]. All advocates of productivism and the remedial coursework theory are liars; they unanimously maintain that the New Economic Policy would have developed faster. This is the theoretical foundation of the revisionists, and it contains two lies: the first is to substitute the New Economic Policy for socialism — that is, to hang a sheep's head while selling dog meat; the second lie is that the New Economic Policy would have developed faster." The author then draws on a large body of detailed data to refute Li Tuo's account of the great economic achievements of Reform and Opening-Up, and with regard to the so-called "detour" and "retreat" of socialism proposed in Lenin's New Economic Policy — that is, the "remedial coursework theory" — points out: "The New Economic Policy is equivalent to repeating a year of school. Facing the college entrance exam with insufficient scores, you repeat the year. Repeating the year is for the sake of the college entrance exam; once scores improve, you immediately sit the exam — you never just keep repeating the final year of high school indefinitely. Those who deliberately confuse the meaning of the New Economic Policy never tell the world that Lenin, after retreating for only one year, proposed stopping the retreat and 'preparing to go on the offensive against privately managed capital' — that is, ending the repetition year and preparing to sit the exam."

Regarding Li Tuo's reference to Mao Zedong's discussion in 1949 of the five economic components (ownership forms) of the New Democratic period, and his treating these as comparable to the "pluralization of ownership" and "mixed ownership" of the Reform era, the essay's author argues: "He has confused the New Democratic period with the period of socialist construction. For those unfamiliar with history, this confusion is enormously misleading — it makes people think that Chairman Mao wanted to develop the private economy. From what we can see of Teacher Li Tuo's thorough reading of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist classics (the text draws casually on classical Marxist texts and historical events), I must say bluntly: this is a deliberate and tendentious conflation. Chairman Mao's line was perfectly clear: (1) The New Democratic period (what Teacher Li Tuo calls the New Economic Policy period) 'is the phase of transition toward socialism. In this transitional phase, socialist transformation of private industry and commerce, handicrafts, and agriculture is to be carried out.' (2) 'To consolidate the New Democratic order'... I think all of this is wrong. It was precisely on this basis that New China launched the Three Great Transformations [note: the socialist transformation of agriculture, handicrafts, and capitalist industry and commerce], established the General Line for the Transitional Period and enshrined it in the Constitution: '... to struggle, over a fairly long period, for the gradual realization of socialist industrialization of the state and the gradual realization of the state's socialist transformation of agriculture, handicrafts, and capitalist industry and commerce!' The Three Great Transformations meant transforming private ownership into public ownership and collective ownership — progressively eliminating private ownership, not developing it. After the Three Great Transformations were completed, the transitional period of socialism (the New Democratic period) was formally declared over, and the great upsurge of the period of socialist construction began. ... A line this clear and unambiguous — Teacher Li Tuo did not articulate it; he took one part and discarded another. This is a classic instance of quoting out of context — writing in the manner of the Spring and Autumn Annals." [note: a reference to the Confucian classic, famous for its use of subtle wording to make implicit moral judgments]

The author concludes:

Teacher Li Tuo's twenty-thousand-word essay can be measured against Deng Xiaoping's three golden standards: 1. The purpose of socialism is common prosperity for the whole people of the country, not polarization. If our policies lead to polarization, we will have failed; 2. If a new bourgeoisie is produced, then we will have truly taken the wrong road. — Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, Volume III, "It Is Necessary to Rely on Ideals and Discipline to Unite" 3. But if social mores deteriorate, what meaning is there in economic success? This would cause degeneration in another direction, and in turn affect the entire economy — leading eventually to a world in which corruption, theft, and bribery are rampant. — Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, Volume III, "Speech at the Standing Committee of the Politburo" These three standards are universal truths — a demon-revealing mirror for distinguishing true from false socialism, and true from false Communists.

In the Weibo comment section where I reposted Li Tuo's essay and the above response, readers' comments were even sharper.

I once forwarded Li Tuo's essay to Lao Tian [note: a prominent left-wing intellectual], who offered this view: "The essay fails to distinguish between the political and the administrative — and without this distinction it is impossible to clarify the fundamental difference between New Democracy and the taking of a revisionist-capitalist road. Lenin's retreat doctrine should be, as Luxembourg said, a temporary measure — an improvisation based on a premise of a deficit in executive capacity, drawing in multiple forces to fill the gap and allow the economy to run more smoothly. But the relationship between the political and the administrative lacks analysis and development; the essay's imagination of the administrative side is relatively full, but in that direction it is neither able to diagnose the problem nor able to offer answers. The essay is full of sincerity toward historical experience and toward dialogue with Teacher Mao, but also inherits a good deal of official propaganda. Starting from politics, the socialist experiment has boundaries; once those boundaries are crossed, socialism no longer exists. It may be that trying to make peace or compromise with the opposing side has no exploratory value — at best it might win a little space for expression, to make things sound less jarring to the ears of those on the opposing side. This kind of roundabout narrative strategy may have entirely abandoned the substance of socialism itself."

Lao Tian's viewpoint, though not as blunt and unconstrained as the online commenters', and expressed more diplomatically, is broadly close to the assessment in the article above and in the majority of readers' comments.

A comprehensive interpretation of Mr. Li Tuo's important essay is not my intention in writing this piece. What I want to explore is this: why would a scholar long resident abroad choose, in a field he rarely ventures into — namely politics — and at a moment when the atmosphere for intellectual discussion is extremely thin, to discuss questions this complex and even this sensitive?

Like Lao Tian, I too believe in Li Tuo's "sincerity toward historical experience and toward dialogue with Teacher Mao" — otherwise there would be no point, at past seventy years of age, in wading into these "muddy waters," still less any need to do what some online commenters have accused him of, namely currying favor with a system that no longer has any real bearing on his personal interests. The greatest purpose he had in writing this essay was most likely to try to clarify those difficult and doubtful questions that have troubled many Chinese people — himself included — over these past several decades. As a scholar, this is indeed a spirit of doing what cannot be done knowing it cannot be done — but Li Tuo's effort has had the opposite of its intended effect. His observation and analysis of contemporary Chinese problems has become severely disconnected from reality, and he remains entirely unaware of the grave social crisis lurking beneath the surface. I do not know whether this reflects the influence of the domestic mainstream academic world upon him, or is the result of his own autonomous cognition, or whether it is simply that distance from abroad lends a certain enchantment — creating a sense of traveling in the opposite direction from one's destination. For instance, his effort in the essay to answer "what is true socialism" draws on evidence and produces answers that are non-"socialist" or even "anti-socialist": on one hand he claims there is no complete concept of socialism to speak of, and lavishly affirms that China's forty-plus years of Reform and Opening-Up constitute the greatest "experiment" in the history of world socialism; on the other he sets aside the real contradictions and difficulties that exist in China and the characterizations of socialism's basic attributes by the Marxist classics — including Marx, Lenin, and Mao — without analyzing the essential distinctions between the "experiments" of true Marxists and revisionists, such as between Lenin and Bukharin, or between Stalin and Khrushchev. Instead he interprets every anti-Marxist theory and practical proposal as "boundless socialism." And any concept or social experiment, once it loses its boundaries and qualitative specificity — such as the categories of a publicly owned economy, the dictatorship of the proletariat, socialist democracy — is equivalent to the cancellation and negation of that concept and social practice (experiment) itself. It is like setting out for Beijing and ending up in Shanghai — that is not exploration; it is a change of course, a change of banner. As Lao Tian says: "The socialist experiment has boundaries; once those boundaries are crossed, socialism no longer exists."

In my view, the understanding Li Tuo presents in this essay has retreated far back — all the way to the average level of the academic world in the mid-1990s, before the rise of the New Left. This is evidently not merely a limitation of Li Tuo as an individual, but is connected to the influence of social intellectual currents over the past twenty years, and in particular the New Left's "collective turn."

Readers familiar with the intellectual history of contemporary China all know that the New Left was an important cultural current that rose in the late 1990s and was active in Chinese intellectual circles through the early years of the new century. It originated in discussions of humanism and the humanist spirit launched by the journals Reading and Shanghai Literature, and was directed primarily at critique of the poverty-and-wealth polarization, social injustice, and environmental problems caused by China's one-sided pursuit of economic development after the launch of the market economy. Its representative figures included Wang Hui, Wang Xiaoming, Gan Yang, Zhang Chengzhi, Han Shaogong, and a group of writers and scholars born in the 1960s [note: see "People of the 1960s in the New Left Camp"]. Li Tuo was also regarded as one of the New Left's representative figures, owing to his advocacy in an interview titled "Talking Freely about Pure Literature" that literature should attend to social problems and return to reality. The New Left's positions attracted criticism and even attack from the liberal scholars who occupied the mainstream at that time — this was the famous controversy between the New Left and liberalism in the history of contemporary thought. The debate petered out for various reasons, but it opened a convenient door for the subsequent rise of left-wing currents in popular civil society, and its progressive significance goes without saying.

Concerning the process of transformation of the two currents of the New Left and liberalism in China, I have carried out detailed analysis in my essay "A Brief Intellectual History: The Metamorphosis of an Era (2001–2021)" and will not repeat it here. The Jewish-American scholar Michael Walzer once argued that after the Cold War ended and history reached its termination, the left no longer had the support of a total theory comparable to Marxism, and no longer dared lightly to attribute all social problems to a single fundamental great problem. Though still publishing critical views, the left could only engage in piecemeal discussions of specific issues — such as education, health insurance, social security, environmental protection, the labor market, or civil liberties. Left-wing intellectuals had lost a complete set of values and a worldview. In 2006, Kuang Xinnian said to me in a published dialogue: "Not long ago, I was dismayed to discover that some of my left-wing friends had made an abrupt turn toward nationalism and elitism. This nationalist turn was not due to any personal subjective reason, but to the constraints of historical conditions. Many years ago, when a friend in the United States said to me that nationalism was an important starting point for Chinese left-wing thought, I told him of the ultimate life-and-death opposition between nationalism and left-wing thought. Some left-wing friends expressed a desire to hold to the original position. But without forward movement there is retreat, and a non-productive and hollow holding of ground will inevitably cause the intellectual space to collapse. At the same time as right-wing thought began to decline in 2004, left-wing thought equally lost its momentum." [note: from Liu Jiming and Kuang Xinnian, "New Left Literature and the Current Intellectual Situation"]

Whether it is Michael Walzer or Kuang Xinnian, both articulate a reality that must be faced: great social revolutions are always driven by utopian visions of a perfect future social order — but once the revolution is over, these magnificent utopian visions vanish with it. Over more than forty years, almost all Chinese people have borne the bitter fruit left by the disappearance of this "utopia." And so, after statism and nationalism gradually became the mainstream, the New Left — having lost "the support of a total theory and worldview" — naturally and collectively turned toward statism: a logical and practically motivated inevitability.

Against the backdrop of the New Left's successive turns toward state-nationalism, only Zhang Chengzhi has continued to hold, consistently since the 1980s, to the dissenting position of standing with the oppressed peoples and oppressed classes, maintaining a bond of flesh and blood with the people of the grassroots. This is a spiritual temperament unique to the "people of the 1960s" — a temperament that refuses to be co-opted by the system, dares to say no to power through action, and is willing to break with the entire elite class — which is continuous with Mao Zedong's "always stand on the side of the great majority of the laboring people."

Regrettably, within the New Left community, Zhang Chengzhi is nearly an isolated case. And his dissenting position seems limited to the cultural and aesthetic level; he rarely engages in direct confrontation with practical politics, maintaining a certain distance and an elevated idealist posture. This is the greatest distinction between Zhang Chengzhi and another type of left-wing intellectual who takes a posture of fierce critique of and engagement with mainstream ideology and practical politics — figures like Wei Wei and Cao Zhenglu.

It is precisely in this context that we are not surprised by the state-nationalist tendency Li Tuo displays in his new essay. As an important promoter and advocate of avant-garde literature in the New Era, Li Tuo's literary positions and political views are consistent with each other, carrying a strong complex of elite intellectualism — including his critique of "pure literature" in the 1990s, all of which was internal to the entire intellectual structure since the New Era — just as a group of Western Marxists represented by Althusser, though they spent their entire lives critiquing capitalism, devoted their energies to searching for solutions within the capitalist system rather than, like Marx, Lenin, and Mao, seeking solutions from outside in a posture of revolt. To call them Marxists is therefore less accurate than to call them the spiritual heirs of Bernstein.

The New Left is similar. Though they once seemed like fire and water with the liberals, they were in truth fellow travelers of the 1980s. They are people who can never leave the 1980s behind; to say they created the 1980s is less accurate than to say the 1980s "shaped" them — and the intellectual theme of the 1980s was "farewell to revolution." A recent essay by a Shanghai scholar is titled "The 1980s Is Where We Come From" — which neatly captures the fate of that entire generation. In fact, among a good many academic leftists, Marx, Lenin, and Mao have long since been treated as alien species and discarded like worn-out shoes; the names that most frequently appear on their lips are Badiou, Amin, and the like.

And yet, even so, Li Tuo is different from many of those fellow travelers who, having plunged headlong into the embrace of state-nationalism, silently enjoy the dividends of the system, or covet the role of political adviser, having completely lost the intellectual cutting edge that the New Left once possessed as critical intellectuals. He still retains a valuable intellectual candor — and at a time when nearly everyone carefully avoids political topics, he still maintains a near-naive enthusiasm for political debate. After sending me that essay, he said: "It would be best if there were some controversy — problems this complex require more people to express their views." And after seeing people level sharp criticism at the essay, he remarked: "This kind of direct debate is good — only through debate can each side clearly articulate its own views and positions." In an academic world saturated with sycophancy and fandom culture, this elder's open-minded willingness to hear differing opinions is genuinely rare. This is perhaps also the source of Li Tuo's personal appeal.

I have in the past offered a high assessment of the progressive role played by the New Left in the process of contemporary Chinese social development, and have also offered serious criticism of its historical limitations. As an intellectual tendency, the New Left had already exited the public arena and passed into history at the moment, more than a decade ago, when it collectively turned toward statism. In this sense, we might perhaps call Li Tuo the last of the New Leftists.

I offer this essay in commemoration of that generation of New Left intellectuals who have already vanished from the public eye.

July 9, 2024