EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an important tentative and pioneering study of socialist theory from a progressively critical perspective based on traditional Chinese philosophical tradition, with a view to improving and perfecting it. Hope it will arouse public interest and lead to warm discussion.
THE TEXT
By “productive-force-centrism” is meant the discourse in socialist political economy on the relationship between productive forces and production relations, relationship between the economic base and superstructure of a given society, and relationship between the development of productivity and that of a human society as a whole. In spite of the “dialectical” rhetoric using the twin terms “action” and ”counter-action”, productive forces are said to ultimately determine production relations and, further through such basic economic relations, determine superstructure (political system and ideology), and, finally through all this, determine the development of a society. In a word, productive force is said to be the central driving force of all. If, however, checked against the traditional Chinese worldview, which is characterized by man-Nature unity based on dynamic balances on and between all levels of existence, this discourse betrays the following three major tendencies:
1) Anthropocentrism, i.e., inverted man-Nature relationship — man confronting, conquering and controlling Nature to extract infinite material wealth from it, instead of observing Nature’s way of balance and harmony.
2) Materialism, i.e., material pursuit determining spiritual quest, or the need for the development of productive forces determining economic-political power structure and the ideology that serves such structure, i.e., spirituality totally at the service of material concerns.
3) Linear conception of history, i.e., rigid, stereotyped, unidimensional interpretation of human history, lacking necessary multiple dimensions in viewing the huge complex system of human history.
These three tendencies share the same ideological origin with capitalistic academic thoughts. That is why Productive-force-centrism has been the theoretical culprit for the degeneration of traditional socialism into capitalism. To revive socialism for the emancipation of the whole mankind, it has to be replaced by a political economy based on a “dynamically-balanced multi-dimensional whole” worldview.
Nature as a Mass of Material Objects:
Targets for Productive Forces
What are “productive forces”? —In the final analysis, they are human capabilities of manipulating Nature for the purpose of extracting material wealth from it. The real motive behind “developing productive forces” is to seek satisfaction of human material desires. Certain desires need to be satisfied for survival and proper enjoyment of life, which is also part of Nature. But in the discourse of traditional political economy, socialistic as well as capitalistic, man’s material desires and social productive forces can be expanded limitlessly. This determines that man’s basic approach towards Nature is antagonistic, overbearing and manipulative, in a word, anthropocentric.
Human society is only a tiny part of Nature in terms of both space and time. How can man expect to control and utilize Nature endlessly without restraint from it? This wishful thinking has its root in an incorrect view of Nature as a mass of fragmentized, purely material objects instead of a dynamically-balanced multi-dimensional whole involving man-Nature and mind-matter unity. According to the latter view, any change worked on any part of Nature would affect the whole of it including human existence itself. Due to the finiteness of human existence, man can never get to know the whole picture of relatedness between his own existence and Nature, not to say to handle it properly all the time. There are always blind spots in dealing with Nature: The larger the scale, or the remoter from direct perception, the greater the blindness. Therefore, Nature cannot be manipulated at our will. We can only try to change it on a very limited scale in compliance with Nature’s way of balance and harmony and should always be on the alert against possible mistakes and unexpected consequential disasters, but can never conquer and control it for inexhaustible material benefits. If we do not mend our way of thinking and behaving, we would not be able to stay safe and happy. As the traditional Chinese saying goes, “Enough is as good as a feast”, or “You may go farther and fare worse” (知足常乐).
Productive-force-centrist Thread of Thoughts
Social production adds value to raw materials, but all utility value is not created by human production but primarily by Nature. Among the resources provided by Nature, there are pretty many things humans can utilize readily without much effort, e.g., air, sunshine, water, fruits, grains, etc. Some other resources may need processing or can be improved by man, but such resources already contain potential and primary utility value because nobody can create value out of nothing, not to say man’s productive capability itself is an endowment from Nature.
As productive-force-centrism fails to see the existence of such values potentially hidden in natural resources, it also fails to see that capital under the capitalist system, especially monopoly capital, has usurped such Nature-endowed “surplus value” pre-existing in the means of production, which should be shared by all human beings. Without seeing fully the usurpatory and unjust nature of the capitalist system, socialist political economy has inevitably failed to present to the full the necessity of reforming capitalist production relations and superstructure along a non-capitalist line or formulate a correct road map for such reforms.
2. Alienating humanity from Nature: Severing the lifeline from the “primary productive force”
Nature as the primary productive force belongs to a higher level than the productive forces of human society, as the latter is only a part of the former. And parallelly, the “primary production relations” between Nature and man is on a higher level than human production relations, the former commanding the latter and all human production activities.
But the man-Nature confrontation approach only sees those natural conditions that are not so favorable for human life, not that Nature on the whole is the ultimate source of support for human survival and development, the ultimate source of man’s own life and intelligence as well. Those who adopt such an approach are not aware that man-Nature relations must be in harmony and, therefore, that our desires must be restrained within a limit lest they should upset such relations and cause harm to ourselves. We can change natural conditions but only locally, limitedly, and tentatively, and Nature as a whole is unconquerable but commands unconditional submission from humanity.
“Conquer Nature” is an attractive anthropocentric catchphrase shared by capitalists and socialists but it betrays human avarice. Though many sincere socialists are not avaricious themselves personally (some of them were or are still very frugal), but this false conviction has been catering to the greediness of too many people. To overcome this tendency, there need be a reform of the social system and a reform of people’s mentality – the two aspects are closely related and should be mutually reinforcing. The debate and discussion about socialism vs. capitalism is mainly related to the system. And the reform of mentality has been much discussed in religious and secular classics of both the East and the West, and much practiced especially in the Eastern tradition. Socialist theoretical discourse should not reject but incorporate what is good from them.
3. Overstating the positive while ignoring the negative: “Counter-productive forces” counted as “productive”
What with the insatiable greediness of those few in control of social economic life and what with, in sharp contrast, the definite limitation of human intelligence, there have been serious blindness in people’s production activities. Especially, since the capitalistic industrial revolution based on science and technology, social production scale has far exceeded that of direct human perception that was characteristic of past natural economy of small-scale farming and handcraft industry, but much fragmentized scientific and technical knowledge is far from adequate for curbing the ever-growing blindness. Hence, quite a large part of social production activities are not constructive, or “productive”, at all, i.e., not realizing, extending, amplifying, or adapting but wasting, sabotaging, and cancelling out the primary productive capacity of Nature and positive productivity of humans, as manifested in the destruction of ecosystem, the production of war machines, the suppression of the majority of people’s creative power by the exploitative and oppressive capitalist system.
Such counter-productive forces supported by the capitalist system tend to go beyond the realm of social production per se and beyond national boundaries and resort to bloody violence through colonialist and imperialist acts against other peoples of the world, not only disrupting their production activities but robbing or destroying their production resources or even mass slaughtering human lives.
Traditional socialist political economy does censure such destructive acts but only in moral terms and ignore their economic consequences when making academic assessments of the general productivity level of the capitalist system, i.e., much overstating its “advanced” productivity without subtracting its “counter-productivity”, thus failing to formulate a sound approach for the step-by-step replacement of capitalism with socialism, or even yielding to capitalism.
4. Disoriented soul crippling productivity: Misapprehension of man’s spiritual need and humanity’s central task
The purpose of social production should be to satisfy the basic needs, material and spiritual, of everyone. There should be no other purpose than this. Human beings are not machines, nor beasts of burden. Besides physical survival, they also need minimum spiritual fulfillment. The two sides should be unified and mutually reinforcing, not pit against each other or one cancelling out the other.
But even communist philosophy that is originally intended for the emancipation of mankind (not to say the capitalist ideology that centers round mammon worship) has actually reduced human beings to slaves of materialism. The human spiritual needs as it presents, such as the aspiration for scientific exploration, yearning for knowledge, all-round development, ethical pursuit, the search for ideal, emotional mutuality, aesthetic appreciation, and the quest for the meaning of life, all sound very “spiritual” and some of them even exceed the limit of self-satisfaction and would involve the well-being of a whole community, but still, what is supposed to be ethical, ideal, humane, beautiful, and meaningful still boils down to and hinges on the historical task of conquering Nature, or developing productivity to the utmost, and extorting as much as possible material wealth from it, with contributions “from each according to his ability”, so as to realize distribution of material benefits “to each according to his need”.
In that philosophy, there is nothing like the quest for spiritual unity with Nature, with fellow human beings, and with oneself (between body and soul) as typical of the Eastern tradition and seen, though imperfectly, in Western religious practice. All that is ethical, ideal, humane, beautiful, and meaningful does not reside in material concerns. Purely spiritual satisfaction independent of such concerns is no less important than material survival and enjoyment to everybody’s well being without exception. It should not have been neglected by a social philosophy meant for human emancipation.
To satisfy the basic material and spiritual needs of every one, social production capability is not the only necessary condition, still less the overriding condition, especially today when such capability, if we count in not only what has been constructively realized but also what has been wasted or destructively applied or suppressed but will be fully and constructively realized under a new social system with dynamically and comprehensively balanced political-economic relations structure — such potentially available production capability is already high enough to meet the basic material needs of all humanity.
Therefore, the central historical task of mankind in general in the 21st century is to gradually restore balance on and across all levels of social relationships, from grassroots capital-labor relations up all the way through that between man and Nature, and the No. one priority is to break up the hegemonic power of global monopoly capital. Though in some parts of the world, production capability still needs to be raised to a certain degree so as for the local population, besides meeting their basic needs, to be able to stand against the suppression and resistance by hegemonic global capital, still, this should be oriented towards the above-said general global historical task. And in view of this global task, raising local production capability is not the only nor the central, if necessary, sub-task, as the morale and unity of people based on balanced social relationships within the ranks of anti-global capital forces is as important as, if not more important than, their material power, not to say that a comprehensively and dynamically balanced system of social relationships is the overriding condition for sustainable and constructive production activities. To ignore this is to help prolong the life of capitalism and postpone the realization of socialism.
5. Exalting science and technology as “No. 1 productive force”: Siding with capital in belittling man’s key role in production
In human society, the “No. 1 productive force” should be working people, not science and technology, because the latter is born of the former. To put science and technology before man is the same as putting the cart before the horse.
Science and technology can benefit people but they can also kill people. To put science and technology above man is the same as the abuse of drugs in disregard of athletes’ health, or as subjecting sports activities in service of big businesses’ interests instead of promoting people’s health. But this kind of fallacy is the logical extension of materialistic “productive-force-centrism”.
Therefore, even though traditional socialist theory did reject such a fallacy as revisionist, still it could not have prevented the latter from becoming rampant again but rather have fostered it.
6. “Not seeing the wood for the trees”: Failing to see capital’s usurpation of the value of human collective wisdom involved in production
Under the condition of a balanced man-Nature and man-man relationship, science and technology could be beneficial to human life. It was wrong for classical socialist theory to pit mental labor against manual labor and play down the positive role of scientists and technicians and it is right for later theories to value positively their contributions to the society and approve their patent right to their innovations for a period of time under certain conditions.
But traditional socialist theory does not see that the progress in science and technology is the result of accumulation of the collective wisdom of the whole humanity for thousands of years, not just the contribution of parts of the humanity or that of a few generations only. Therefore, just as it fails to discern capital’s usurpation of the Nature-endowed potential value in raw materials, it also fails to discern capital’s usurpation of the value of collective human wisdom hidden in equipment and skills for production, thus over-estimating the constructiveness of the capitalist system and underestimating its destructiveness (for a detailed discussion see relevant passages in “Bring Social Science Back onto the Daoist Path”, Part II, Subpart 1).
7. What to compete for with capitalism?
The final goal for socialism is communism. Why is communism superior? In its traditional theory, communism is said to be able to develop productivity to the utmost degree so as to create the material conditions for practicing “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. What, then, is “productivity”? What “ability” is expected from each? What “needs” to meet for each? As said above, none of the answers goes beyond the limit of pure materialism based on inverted man-Nature relationship. That is why some communists easily slip back onto the so-called revisionist, or capitalist, road.
Since in the final analysis it should be the human species who is to comply with Nature, not the vice versa, the general call for conquering Nature, reforming Nature, and developing productivity limitlessly, or claiming that “Developing economy is the overriding principle” (“发展是硬道理”) is a major loophole in socialist theory and inevitably plays into the hands of apologists for capitalism and all opportunistic theories defending unrestrained avarice. They could say: Look, socialism cannot possibly attain such high productivity as capitalism can; Socialist countries are poor and backward and cannot satisfy people’s needs; “Poverty does not lead to socialism (贫穷不是社会主义)”; To develop economy, to get rich, it is necessary to “integrate with the international community (与国际接轨)”, that actually means to integrate with Western capitalist system. All this has resulted, internationally, in reducing a formerly socialist nation to the status of an economic colony of Western capital and, domestically, in tolerating and protecting the comeback of sweat-shops notorious for exploiting cheap labor, tolerating and protecting a new form of Enclosure Movement depriving peasants of their livelihood, and in prevalent corruption, moral decay, cultural barrenness and explosive social and natural crises.
Socialism should have been competing with capitalism for conscientiously and effectively promoting a comprehensive dynamic balance and harmony between all social groups (including classes, political alignments, ethnic groups, and nations) and between human society and the ecosystem. This would have brought about both material and spiritual satisfaction and overall happiness for everyone. It should not have competed with capitalism to see who exploits more from Nature. This is a major mistake with traditional socialism, or rightist revisionism.
While getting prepared materially, spiritually and organizationally against possible provocations from capitalistic imperialism, socialist countries should try to engage the capitalist world in a peaceful competition between different social systems, as it can reduce or avoid major man-made global disasters and at the same time learn from capitalism what is worth to mend inadequacies in their socialist practice, so as to have all people under heaven gradually and finally come to an agreement through peaceful means on a best road map towards the emancipation of the whole mankind. This approach agrees with Nature’s way of dynamic balance. The strength of a social system or of a nation does not lie in material development only, but in the combination of both spiritual and material soundness based on a balanced and harmonious relationship between all social economic and political forces and between man and Nature, as has been testified to again and again by all human history.
From Productive-force-centrism to Linear Conception of History
Like many other vogue theories, productive-force-centrism was also imported from the West; it is not the traditional Chinese way of thinking. The way shared by all traditional Chinese schools of thought was characterized by holism, especially man-Nature oneness, and a sense of balance. The differences among them were not of the same dimension as that between the Eastern and Western ways of thinking. Take Legalism vs. Confucianism for instance. The former’s holistic picture of reality contains a multiplicity of levels and, so, paid due attention to timely regulation of social relationships on the macro-social level, i.e., the level between the highest one of “all-under-heaven” and the lowest one of atomistic individuals and families, while Confucianists were ignorant of and opposed to social management on this level. But both Legalists and Confucianists share the same principle of man-Nature unity.
Since modern times, instead of the family, there has existed the business enterprise on the micro-social level as the basic socio-economic “cell”, but bourgeois scholars have tried to obliterate its existence as an important social level above the individual by dubbing it as “private”, i.e., reducing it to the same level as the individual, just to obscure the hegemonic power of capital over labor. As to the macro society, besides that of the nation, there is also a higher level of “civilization”, i.e., group of nations sharing the same cultural tradition, including a specific pattern of social evolution. And since Western capital began to colonize the world militarily and economically, the whole world has been linked together and formed the highest level of a global society. Hence the contemporary formulation of traditional Chinese worldview as a “dynamically-balanced multi-dimensional whole”, with the word “multi-dimension” implying so much content and much more.
The linear conception of history based on productive-force-centrism, however, lacks the international “cultural difference” dimension on the global level, among others. Take the following important historical phenomena for instance: The Western Christian nations have since modern times been invading and plundering other, non-Christian areas of the world, first mainly by military power and later by military and economic means combined, destroying numerous lives, properties, production resources while bringing home immense amount of spoils, and then using this robbed wealth either as primary capital for their economic modernization or later to maintain and stimulate their domestic productivity. But the productive-force-centrist discourse advertized as socialist theory indiscriminately labels such “productivity” as “advanced”, not counting in the cost of destroyed productivity of other peoples of the world, besides the cost of severe damages it has inflicted on the earth’s ecosphere (just as mainstream economists easily and explicitly brush both aside as “externalities”!). Therefore, by ignoring the cross-civilization, or global, dimension and the man-vs.-Nature dimension, such a theory actually turns out to be whitewashing the criminal Nature of capitalism and prolonging its evil life.
The lack of dimensions inherent in the productive-force-centrist theory does not only lead to a misjudgment of capitalist productivity, but also misapprehension of non-Western civilizations. The Chinese civilization, for instance, has been typically different: Thanks to traditional emphasis on holistic balance of social relations, there has never in Chinese history existed institutional slavery or serfdom, nor, not until the recent Westernization “reform”, Enclosure Movement of any form backed by public power to blaze the path for capitalistic “productivity”. Traditional China was an agrarian society with an owner-farmer and semi-owner-farmer population as the main body of productive force. Especially when Legalist policies were in force, land annexation was checked, business capital regulated, and monopoly interests prevented from easily developing into hegemonic power over social economy and politics. That was why and how China was able to achieve such economic prosperity as unparalleled in pre-18th century world history, scientific accomplishments benefiting the whole world, a political tradition attracting admirers from far and near, and cultural splendor continuing for thousands of years. The core driving force for all this to happen was not productivity per se but the timely and continuous regulation of social relationships by state management and conscientious compliance with the Dao of Nature. Productivity level was doubtlessly high for long, but that was one of the natural outcomes, not the focus target, of Dao-abiding social management.
The Chinese and Western civilizations have come along different courses of development and, so, should not be comprehended in terms of a same pattern (See The Way towards Future: Chinese & Western social evolution patterns compared by the same author). It is an oversimplification or reductionism to look at world history as of one single general pattern and as a unidirectional linear process.
Meanwhile, when coming into close contact with each other, different civilizations would form a human community on the highest level. The status of relations and tendency of interaction between them determines in a great degree the nature and course of development of the human community. What philosophical worldview to adopt in studying and appraising the histories of different civilizations to draw positive and negative lessons from them and in guiding the direction of future relations between them is essentially important to the future fate of mankind. This is where lies the significance of the discussion about the differences between Eastern and Western philosophies and social theories.
In the “dynamically-balanced whole” perspective, the total picture of macro relations (including production relations) involving the human society and Nature is a system with multi-levels on the vertical dimension. Take the contemporary world for instance: The relationship between hegemonic global monopoly capital and all the victimized laboring peoples of the world belongs to the middle level, while on the topmost level is that between humanity, that is exploiting, abusing and devastating the whole natural world under the dominating influence of global monopoly capital, and Nature, that is reacting strongly on the human society to press for a general balance, which is the relationship exerting a determining impact on the whole system of human existence. The unbeatable primary power of Nature is compelling the human species to mend his way and change production relations and other economic and political power relations on the social level to restore a near balance inside the human society and between man and Nature. All the working people (including those small- or medium-capital entrepreneurs who share in technical or management work or even manual labor with their employees) must recognize and follow the way of Nature and join forces to change the present situation in which the despotic power of global monopoly capital is swaying the world, or otherwise will fall victim to it, somewhat like cannon fodder in imperialist wars. Those top rich vultures should not think that they or their offspring could hide themselves in their supposedly indestructible underground shelters and escape the retribution from Nature. |
