This is a very important book. Not only because of its content, but especially because of its origins and its authors. The members of the Chuang collective are of Chinese origin, many of them residing in different provinces of China, but they operate at an international level. Moreover, it will be noted that they claim to be part of this internationalism, with the quite obvious aim of going beyond any nationalist posturing and the mental sclerosis that this can only lead to.
Resolutely opposed to the Chinese regime and, more generally, to capitalism, they are part of the re-emergence of a clearly anti-state communist way of thinking that brings them closer in many respects to libertarian thinking. It is also understandable that, in view of the authoritarian and politically hyper-repressive logic that is the rule in China, they must remain anonymous and maintain a high degree of discretion about their methods of action, their places of residence, etc.
To be honest, we have been desperate for some time to see the re-emergence of autonomous critical thinking of this kind in China; the vision of an all-powerful totalitarian regime has led us to believe that there is no longer any room for effective opposition – as if the dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984 had indeed taken hold.
Through its own existence, but also through the description of numerous manifestations of the population’s resistance to the methods of domination, it can be seen that this is still far from being the case. Absolute control is still a fantasy of bureaucratic and police power, which fortunately stumbles over numerous obstacles.
The pretext for this work is a description of the ground situation of the effects of the Covid-19 epidemic in Wuhan and in the rest of China more generally; with the reactions – often contradictory – of the government on the one hand, and of the Chinese population on the other. From this description, we realize that the presentation made by the Western media is quite far from how things really happened. But the most interesting thing about this book is probably not what it reveals about this particular episode, but rather the in-depth analyses of China as a whole and as it exists today – particularly relevant analyses that can be found throughout the book.
Anyone looking for a somewhat global vision of the contemporary political, ecological and social situation on our small planet cannot ignore China and its one and a half billion inhabitants. What happens there will be crucial for the whole world.
Yet some people still believe that China is a communist country.
Far from this ridiculous aberration of knowledge and conscience, Chuang Tzu provides us with some key elements of understanding, which we will outline below:
We strive to understand really existing capitalism, identifying its central contradictions and the struggles arising from them, and at the same time indicating the levers to be activated and the limits to be overcome in order to overthrow this world and build the next. (…)
Any communist critique seeking to grasp the historical flow of events and the current structure of power on a global scale must, as a last resort, adopt a practical orientation – as a set of means to build international links between those engaged in struggles on the ground.
The trajectory and specificities of Chinese capitalism can only be understood in relation to the broader dynamics of capitalism as a global social system, even if these dynamics lead to new destructive heights. (…) The communist method of investigation cannot be reduced to a purely economic critique or even to a form of radical workers’ inquiry, but must instead propose a broader understanding of capitalism as an expanding social system that has transformed even the anthropological coordinates of human life and devastated the substratum of the biosphere, now threatening the entire planet’s climate system. At the same time, and since we insist so much on the inherent tendency of the system towards permanent collapse and restructuring – creating a possible way out through the intensification of class conflicts – subjective experience and the struggles that emerge are of crucial importance. After all, class conflict is not an empty, mute theoretical category in its abstraction. On the contrary, it is an ongoing social war, a cacophony of dissonant voices.
The text also focuses on the nature of the capitalist state and the influence of contemporary Chinese philosophy on the effective exercise of governance. As elsewhere, the results of this survey point, beyond the Chinese case, to the evolution of techniques of class domination in a world increasingly plagued by stagnation and crisis.
The truth, however, is that the very aggressiveness of the repression betrays a profound impotence of the Chinese state. This unprecedented situation (that of the pandemic) offers us a glimpse into the nature of this state, and shows how it develops new techniques of social control and crisis response, which can be employed even where the most rudimentary state apparatus is scarce or non-existent. Such a sequence also offers an even more significant (though more speculative) illustration of the possible reaction of the ruling class of a given country in the face of a generalized crisis or an insurrection that would cause similar breakdowns at the heart of the most solid states. (…) The unleashing of repression thus offers a strange lesson for those with world revolution on their minds, since it is essentially a dress rehearsal of state reaction.
The State acts here as a kind of supreme stage of ideology. It is the ridge line beyond which we have no choice but to face the beast we call capitalism. At this stage, the rule is to talk about contagion without talking about its origins, to talk about society without talking about the social
(…) It is the myth of the State about itself, the ultimate reification that masks the fact that it cannot be understood outside of its function within capitalism – and that States are historically inseparable from questions of class and production. Capitalist imperatives are the foundations of the state, and conflicts arise from the fact that the processes of state constitution and decomposition coexist within a single world economy.
We can therefore see that the market and the state are neither separate nor opposed in capitalist society. (…) During the decades of transition to capitalism, the Chinese state was therefore not replaced by market mechanisms, but rather restructured to support them. The specific contemporary characteristics are, moreover, a particularly striking illustration of this general theory of the state, because, in China, every bureaucrat is at the same time a capitalist, as are almost all the members of the Party who have risen from its lowest ranks. (…)
In other words, the Chinese state presents itself as the direct administration of society by the organized capitalist class. Its task is the general reproduction of society and it acts as a mechanism for resolving internal conflicts between capitalists. This is true of all states, of course, but elsewhere the illusion of separation remains, supported by a very particular fraction of the population, which is responsible for the dirty work of playing the role of political representatives, even when it directly serves the interests of its capitalist patrons. In China, there is no such separation. The state apparatus, supervised by the capitalist class through direct appointments to various government posts and indirect oversight of party posts, is dedicated to maintaining the conditions necessary for capitalist accumulation (…) and preventing any risk of social instability through the weapons of the police and social services.
The urbanization of China has seen the dismemberment of what remained of truly inhabited spaces defined by social relationships of intimacy. They have been destroyed and replaced by the cold space of alienated economic interactions, administered by a sanitized state devoid of any role in satisfying human needs, except in an incidental way, as would an algorithm serving a single master, capital and its inhuman imperatives. This is by no means a process specific to China: it defines capitalist urbanization all over the world.
We hope that this brief presentation of their theses has demonstrated the value of taking an interest in the activities of Chuang, an internationalist collective that seems determined to keep going, with the forthcoming publication of a new work, “La transition de la Chine vers le capitalisme” (Éditions Entremonde), presenting the historical development of this transition.
Social Contagion
Class War and Pandemic in China
Chuang
Rebound:
Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.