Chinese Marxist philosophy

Chinese Marxist philosophy is the philosophy of dialectical materialism that was introduced into China in the early 1900s and continues in the Chinese academia to the current day.

Marxist philosophy was initially imported into China between 1900 and 1930, in translations from German, Russian and Japanese. The Chinese translator of the Origin of Species, Ma Junwu, was also the first one who introduced Marxism into China. For Ma, evolutionism and Marxism are the secrets of social development. This was before the formal dialectical materialism of the Chinese Communist Party, in which many independent radical intellectuals embraced Marxism. Many of them would later join the Party. Chinese Dialectical Materialism began to be formalized during the 1930s, under the influence of Mitin's New Philosophy. In the late 1930s, Chairman Mao Zedong would begin to develop his own sinified version of Dialectical Materialism that was independent of the Soviet Philosophy. Maoist Dialectics remained the dominant paradigm into the 1970s, and most debates were on technical questions of dialectical ontology. In the 1980s the Dengist reforms led to a large-scale translation and influence of works of Western Marxism and Marxist Humanism.

Development of the concept

Li Da (1890–1966) translated many of the early works of German social democracy and Soviet Marxism into Chinese. He Sinified the New Philosophy of Mark Borisovich Mitin in his ''Elements of Sociology''. Ai Siqi translated many of Mitin's works and helped introduce the New Philosophy to China. Early Chinese Marxism borrowed heavily from Soviet textbooks. Following Mitin, Ai Siqi attacked the idea of equality of contradictions between two unequal things. The Chinese Philosophers would strongly take the side of Mitin against Deborin. They were particularly influenced by his unity of theory and praxis. Mao Zedong would be influenced by these works in authoring his Lectures on Dialectical Materialism.

Mao Zedong was critical of the dialectical materialism of Stalin and notably never cited his Dialectical and Historical Materialism which was considered the foundational text of philosophical orthodoxy within the ComIntern. Mao criticized Stalin for dropping the Negation of the Negation from the laws of dialectics and for not recognizing that opposites are interconnected.

In the late 1930s, a series of debates were held on the extent to which Dialectical Logic was a supplement to or replacement for Formal Logic. A major controversy that would continue into the 1960s, was whether a dialectical contradiction was the same thing as a logical contradiction.

Mao later moved away from replicating the New Philosophy, and attempted to develop his own form of Marxism that heavily emphasized the centrality of On Contradiction and On Practice. Mao saw the struggle between opposites as the key to dialectics, and this would play a major role in the One Divides Into Two controversy of the 1960s. In Mao's 1964 Talk On Questions Of Philosophy he rejected any possibility of synthesizing divided opposites. Negations was absolute and alternated in a bad infinity with affirmation.

Wang Ruoshui was initially a major advocate of the Maoist One Divides into Two line during the Cultural Revolution. But would later advocate Marxist humanism.

In 1973 Foreign Languages Press published Three Major Struggles on China's Philosophical Front
(1949–64). The three main philosophical debates revolved around The Theory of "Synthesized Economic Base", the Question of the Identity Between Thinking and Being and the Theory of "Combine Two into One".

In 1974, during the Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius there were major historiographical debates about the relative merits of the Confucian and Legalist schools. Legalism was interpreted as the progressive feudal ideology of the rising Qin against the decaying slave-holder ideology of Confucius.

In the post-Mao era there were major debates on the role that contradictions and alienation played within a Socialist society. Deng Xiaoping personally intervened against the Marxist humanist trend in insisting that alienation was solely based on private property, and had no place in a socialist China.

In his 1983 speech The Party's urgent tasks on the organizational and ideological fronts Deng said that

As to alienation, after Marx discovered the law of surplus value, he used that term only to describe wage labour in capitalist society, meaning that such labour was alien to the workers themselves and was performed against their will, so that the capitalist might profit at their expense. Yet in discussing alienation some of our comrades go beyond capitalism; some even ignore the remaining alienation of labour under capitalism and its consequences. Rather, they allege that alienation exists under socialism and can be found in the economic, political and ideological realms, that in the course of its development socialism constantly gives rise to a force of alienation, as a result of the activities of the main body of the society. Moreover, they try to explain our reform from the point of view of overcoming this alienation. Thus they cannot help people to correctly understand and solve the problems that have arisen in socialist society today, or to correctly understand and carry out the continual reform that is essential for our technological and social advance. On the contrary, their position will only lead people to criticize, doubt and negate socialism, to consider it as hopeless as capitalism and to renounce their confidence in the future of socialism and communism. "So what's the point of building socialism?" they say.

Despite Deng's condemnation, High Culture Fever continued to rise in China, with the work of Fredric Jameson being particularly popular.

Marxist philosophy in modern China

In modern China, Marxism is modified as the political ideology by the Chinese Communist Party to govern the party and the nation. The important concepts of Marxism, such as the ruling class and the ruling ideas, the material labor and the mental labor, superstructure and economic base, and the ideological state apparatuses, are used by the paramount leaders of People's Republic of China to create guiding socio-political theories which make up the Chinese Marxist Philosophy. Two of the most important theories created by the leaders of China are: the Three Represents coined by the former leader of China, Jiang Zemin; and the Chinese Dream coined by Xi Jinping, the current General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

These theories are sometimes mocked as "Lurxism" by Chinese netizens. The mockery is based on the historical idiom "Calling a deer a horse" that is from the story of the infamous Qin dynasty's bureaucrat Zhao Gao, as 'Ma' means a horse and 'Lu' means a deer.

How Marxism was applied to the Three Represents Theory

The formal statements of the Three Represents Theory are: Our party must always represent the requirements of China's advanced productive forces, represents the orientation of China's advanced culture, and represents the fundamental interests of the majority of the Chinese people. The Three Represents are in light of the ideas proposed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

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