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ABSTRACT
In his interview on the Cultural Revolution and its significance in world history, Arif Dirlik suggests that it be approached not from the angle of power struggle but from that of social struggle over socialist goal in developmental policies. It was, in other words, a complex and historical event in which the question of development was raised to devise a paradigm for alternative development. While recognizing developmentalism as its limit and the various sufferings and pains that the Chinese people had to go through at the time, which undermined the prestige of Marxism and in the end discredited socialism as a political project, he emphasizes the Cultural Revolution’s contemporary relevance in its idealism and logic to China and the world under globalization. There is a necessity, therefore, according to him to learn from the past and recall revolution in the time when human survival has become an issue today. But what he recalls is not one top-down revolution but many little revolutions where people can take local matters in their own hands with all the social movements going on. This kind of place-based politics, Dirlik explains, will guarantee much-needed grassroots democracy and attention to ecological questions.
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Dongyoun Hwang
Dongyoun Hwang is Professor of Asian Studies at Soka University of America. He is the author of Anarchism in Korea: Independence, Transnationalism, and the Question of Development, and a co-editor and annotator (with George O. Totten III) of a new edition of Song of Arirang: The Life of a Korean Revolutionary in China by Kim San and Nym Wales (forthcoming). He is currently working on two research projects: Zhou Fohai’s wartime diary from 1937 to 1945 and anarchist education in China (Quanzhou) and South Korea (Anui).