Class, Direct Producers, and the Impasse of Modernization

Abstract

I have been using generic terms such as “the people” and “social,” which are at the same time candid class terms in Chinese political discourse for a threefold reason. First, their actual referents and symbolic signification are historically derived from the Chinese revolution, which was both national and class liberating in nature. Second, while creating a common constituency, the revolution was predominantly based on and powered by the laboring classes with an elaborated selfidentity of “worker-peasant alliance.” Third, due to uneven development conditioned by global capitalism, oppressed and especially revolutionary nations necessarily acquire a “class” position. In formulating the revolutionary strategy, the opening passage of a 1927 article by Mao is classic: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is the foremost question of the revolution.” Mao went on to delineate class identifications and relations of Chinese society in the immediate context of China’s great revolutionary mobilization of 1924–27.¹ This primacy of the friend-enemy antithesis is a political sine qua non in the concept of an oppressed people in uprising, typified by “we the people” declared in the wars and struggles for democracy.²