Marxism in Asia - Japan, China, Vietnam And Southeast Asia, India, Conclusion, Bibliography
capitalism imperialism production modern
The writings of Karl Marx offer both a critique and a celebration of modern capitalism. On the one hand, Marx presented a devastating moral indictment of the capitalist exploitation of labor and the drowning of all human relationships in "the icy waters of egotistical calculation." On the other, Marx saw capitalism as a necessary and progressive phase of historical development, yielding the essential material and social prerequisites for socialism—modern industry and the proletariat.
The proposition that socialism presupposes capitalism was seen as universally valid. "The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production," Marx wrote in The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), "batters down all Chinese walls.… It compels all nations on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production. In one word, it creates a world after its own image."
In this mid-nineteenth-century anticipation of the late-twentieth-century phenomenon of "globalization," Marx assumed that the precapitalist countries of Asia were destined to follow the Western capitalist path of development. They would do so under the universalistic pressure of Western imperialism. While imperialism was morally detestable, it was historically progressive, breaking apart stagnant "Asiatic" societies unable to move into modern history on their own. In universalizing capitalism, imperialism was laying the basis for an international socialist future.
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It was entirely logical that Japan should have been the first Asian country where Marxism took root. Japan was the earliest Asian land to embark on a program of capitalist development. In the 1890s, in response to the social tensions of Meiji modernization, Japanese intellectuals imported Marxism along with a variety of other proscribed Western socialist theories. By the time of the Russo-Japanese…
It was primarily in Japan that Chinese students and political exiles learned about Western socialism. In the first decade of the twentieth century, young Chinese intellectuals were attracted to a wide range of socialist ideologies, especially to the anarchist ideas of Pyotr Kropotkin (1842–1921) and Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), but also to various forms of "utopian socialism.&…
In Southeast Asia, Marxism found its main political expression in Vietnam and, abortively, in Indonesia. Vietnamese Marxism was bound up with nationalism from the outset. In the early post–World War I years, Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), the preeminent figure in the history of the movement who was initially attracted by the nationalist appeals of the Leninist theory of imperialism, became…
The diverse political implications of Marxism in Asia are suggested by comparing India with China. The two are countries of similar size and population, and both were impoverished agrarian lands in the mid-twentieth century. Yet while a Marxian-based political movement came to power in China and carried out the most massive of modern social revolutions, Marxian-oriented parties have been of margin…
It would be futile to generalize about the role of Marxism in the several dozen historically and culturally distinct countries of Asia. However, two brief observations might be ventured. First, Marxian-inspired movements in Asia have been politically successful only where they have come to express popular nationalist feelings and aspirations, as has been the case in China and Vietnam. This does no…
Bernstein, Gail Lee. Japanese Marxist: A Portrait of Kawakami Hajime, 1876–1946. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. Carrère d'Encausse, Hèléne, and Stuart R. Schram. Marxism and Asia: An Introduction with Readings. London: Allen Lane, 1969. Duus, Peter, and Irwin Scheiner. "Socialism, Liberalism, and Marxism, 1901–31." Vol. 6, chap. …
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