China: 3000 Years of History, 50 Years of Revolution. Robert Louzon 1998
If books were graded in importance by the time spent in producing them, this one would be a classic of world literature. It first appeared as the third in the series ‘Collection de la Révolution Prolétarienne’ in the year after Mao’s proclamation of the Chinese People’s Republic, and the permission to publish it in English was given by Robert Louzon to his old friend Frank Ridley. A preliminary draft translation was completed for him by FJ O'Dempsey in 1959, and Ridley handed on the manuscript for Socialist Platform to get ready for the printer a few years before his death in 1994.
We had the sheets bound up not long after receiving them, but when we came to compare the text with the original French, we found that there were numerous examples of mistranslation, and that sections of the text and footnotes had been omitted. There were also large numbers of literary and historical allusions that were quite unfamiliar to English readers. Louzon had in addition cited a number of books without indicating the precise pages he had in mind, not only from French sources, but from some that were in English to begin with, or had been translated subsequently into that language from French. On top of this the new Pinyin mode of transliterating Chinese names had now become widespread, so an entire reworking on a considerable scale had to be undertaken before the book was in a fit state to be issued to the public. Many of these difficulties have taken some time to iron out, and the text now in the reader’s hands has been carefully checked against the original. Ian Birchall was kind enough to remove the final batch of errors, and an equal courtesy by Greg Benton has allowed us to use the Pinyin spellings throughout. Readers unfamiliar with these should check the index carefully for the old Wade-Giles equivalents, though in a few cases we have left the names of important ports and cities in their familiar garb. [1] We have been careful to distinguish between Louzon’s footnotes and our own.
But why should such a book be published, so long after the circumstances that gave rise to it?
The personality of its author is sufficient justification, if any more were needed. For nearly a century Robert Louzon, along with Pierre Monatte and Alfred Rosmer, dominated the proud tradition of French Anarcho-Syndicalism. Born in 1882, he studied mining engineering, and joined the Parti ouvrier socialiste révolutionnaire in 1900, and the SFIO in 1905. He helped Monatte found and edit La Vie ouvrière, for which he wrote his first article in December 1909. Four years later, he went off to farm in Tunisia, and when the SFIO split at the Congress of Tours, he became a founder member of the French Communist Party, and Secretary of its Tunisian federation. In 1922, he was jailed for six months in Algiers for supporting the cause of Arab nationalism, and was then expelled from the colony. On his return to France, he rejoined Monatte and the group around La Vie ouvrière, and began to write articles on economics for L'Humanité. He supported the struggle of the Left Opposition in the Soviet Union, and left the Communist Party when Monatte and Rosmer were expelled in 1924. But he remained a revolutionary Syndicalist rather than a Trotskyist, and subsequently developed differences with Trotsky over the attitude to be taken towards the continued Soviet control of the Chinese East Asian Railway.
From 1925 onwards, he edited La Révolution prolétarienne, and in 1936 went to Morocco on behalf of the CNT to impede Franco’s recruitment among the Rif. A year later, at the age of 55, he joined the CNT militia at the front, and his reports in La Révolution prolétarienne give a valuable insider’s view of the problems of the Spanish revolution and Civil War. He was again condemned to 15 months in prison in absentia in France in July 1939 for supporting the independence of Tunisia, and was once more arrested in May 1940 for his opposition to the war. He was released from a detention camp in Algeria in August 1941. He resumed publication of La Révolution prolétarienne in 1947, and he died in 1976.
This is the last of his major works, and we believe that it retains a considerable amount of its original value. To begin with, it is extraordinarily prophetic. Readers of Louzon’s final section will be struck straight away by his prediction of the Sino-Soviet split nearly a decade before it became public. He clearly demonstrates that the Third Chinese Revolution, in no way proletarian, is the logical conclusion of a long tradition of peasant-based insurrection organised by secret societies based upon clear dogmatic principles, drawing its inspiration to begin with from native culture (Daoism and Buddhism) and later from the West (the Taipings, nationalism and Stalinism). He sketches out China’s future industrialisation by the methods of what he calls ‘state capitalism’, and its rise to superpower status, drawing our attention both to its imitation of the Russian model and its rejection of Russian tutelage. Its development in the direction of the more familiar economic forms of capitalism in the last two decades would not have surprised him.
Moreover, this is very much a treatment of Chinese history using the methods of Marxist analysis, in ways that do not appear in the regime’s official historiography, based as they are upon dogmatic and Europe-based schemas inherited from the fourth chapter of Stalin’s notorious History of the CPSU (Short Course). Although Louzon describes the period of the Eastern Zhou and Warring States in terms of ‘feudalism’, and points to parallels with the Roman, Dark Ages and Medieval periods in Europe, he refuses to be drawn into the Byzantine discussions of modern official Chinese historiography as to exactly when China became a slave, a feudal or a capitalist state, discussions that have led to such widely divergent results in periodisation. [2] He wisely limits himself to the remark that ‘China was to experience all the property forms; feudal, capitalist and peasant. A complete system of individual property was to be found there, as well as that of simple right of use, with all the forms of ownership in between.’
His refusal to become bogged down in such definitions frees him to use dialectical forms of analysis in much more varied and subtle ways. He shows an extraordinary awareness of what is unique and what is general in Chinese society and civilisation, and how these are reflected in politics, philosophy, literature and even the visual arts. He explores, for example, the interaction between barbarian cattle herder and settled Chinese agriculturalist; between internally divided kingdoms and the great empire state; between expansion and isolationism, and between agriculture and commerce. He identifies and explains the lack of religious feeling in its purest form, while analysing the interplay between state ideology and high philosophy and peasant consciousness. He highlights and explains the steady shift in the focus of Chinese history from north to south, a shift that is gaining in momentum at the present day. He uncovers the relationship between peasant revolt and barbarian invasion, and how it is that the most conservative and stable state in world history has so often been wracked by revolutionary disturbances. He shows how the development of China becomes more constricted from Song times onwards, only to receive an immense boost and a new direction through contact with Western industrialised civilisation during the nineteenth century. He explains how the seemingly inexhaustible capacity of China to absorb its invaders began to break down at that time. Finally, he draws attention to the overall rhythms of Chinese history, of major dynasties uniting the country and dominating the area around, alternating with what he calls ‘Middle Ages’, in which it is regionally divided, accompanied by large-scale internal discontent and foreign invasion. Within this pattern he identifies a phase of overall ascent up to Tang times, and of overall decline since. This is a very significant observation, since the same schema can be applied to other pre-classical civilisations, such as ancient Egypt.
Obviously, we cannot claim that where the great classics of world history have failed to provide a synthesis, of these and similar questions, Louzon has succeeded. The sources he indicates in his footnotes are generally works of popularisation, he lacks the full battery of modern scholarship as applied to Chinese history, and obviously does not set out to compete with it. Some of the facts he states, and some of the conclusions he draws, are clearly invalid, and a few of the more striking of these have been indicated in our footnotes. But we do think that the book deserves careful study for at least trying to follow Engels’ example in attempting a general historical treatment. For if such general sketches from a left point of view are never made, Marxists must restrict themselves to the minutiae, and leave the official historiography of the bourgeois world unchallenged on all the important questions. So whilst finally fulfilling our promise to Frank Ridley, we at Socialist Platform are pleased to bring out Louzon’s book as one of our ‘histories from below’.
It only remains for me to put on record our thanks to Ian Birchall and Greg Benton, who bear no further responsibility for the book or its mistakes, and to Paul Flewers for his usual exacting standards of presentation.
Al Richardson
1. The list is given at the end of the text.
2. For example, Kouo Mo-Jo, ‘La société esclaviste chinoise’, in État et classes dans l'Antiquité esclaviste, Cahier no 2 of Recherches internationales à la lumière du marxisme (Paris, May-June 1957), pp 30-51, describes the Shang-Yin, Zhou and Qin dynasties as slave societies, but not the following Han dynasty; whereas Bao Shouyi, in An Outline History of China (Beijing, 1982), regards the Qin and all successive dynasties as feudal until the nineteenth century. All Stalinist and Stalinist-influenced writers, as well as Perry Anderson (see his appendix to Lineages of the Absolutist State, London, 1974) are agreed, for obvious political reasons, that Marx’s concept of the Asiatic mode is inapplicable, either in general or to Chinese history in particular (see Revolutionary History, Volume 2, no 4, Spring 1990, pp 47-48). The only fresh and illuminating attempt to apply Marx’s theory coming from inside China is Wu Dakun’s essay, ‘The Asiatic Mode of Production in History as Viewed by Political Economy in Its Broad Sense’, in Marxism in China (Nottingham, 1983), pp 53-77. A true appreciation of the whole problem can only be gained from Umberto Melotti’s Marx and the Third World (London, 1977), updated by Stephen Dunne’s The Fall and Rise of the Asiatic Mode of Production (London, 1982).