Marx’s Pedagogies, the Party, and China: The Open Dialectic of Research and Presentation in Theory and Historical Praxis

Abstract

While pedagogies emanating from the Marxist tradition have been proposed and debated, this essay argues that Marx had clear pedagogical logics of his own that he laid out by articulating the differences between inquiry and presentation or, said differently, between studying and learning. This essay presents these logics as they play out in Marx’s writing and research, focusing particularly on the Grundrisse notebooks and the first volume of Capital, each of which accord different primacy to inquiry and presentation. To show the political logics of Marx’s pedagogies in practice, the essay draws from Lenin’s conception of the Communist Party as an educational form tasked precisely with navigating between Marx’s pedagogies. A case study follows, of the historical and contemporary experiences of the Chinese Communist Party as it has directed and yielded to Marx’s pedagogies.

Key Words:

• China
• Communist Education
• Marxism
• Party
• Pedagogy

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to give many thanks to Ken Hammond, who closely read a previous draft and offered helpful and insightful comments.

Notes

1 For more, see the introduction to Ford (2019b).

2 In the essay “Marx’s Coat,” Peter Stallybrass (1997, 187) posits that the reason Marx spent so much time on linen and coats in the beginning of Capital was that his own “overcoat was at the pawnshop throughout the 1850s and early 1860s. And his overcoat directly determined what work he could or could not do. If his overcoat was at the pawnshop during the winter, he could not go to the British Museum” and study. Without his overcoat, he wouldn’t gain admission to the museum and couldn’t access the newspapers and archives.

3 Heilmann and Perry (2011, 11) interestingly point to a “guerilla policy style” that continues to exist in the CPC, a style that can be understood and seen as a sort of continuing spontaneity and study within the postreform era. “Guerilla policy style” is deployed by the CPC to circumvent “existing rules” and “overcome constraints.” It plays “a vital role in dealing with crucial policy tasks, from mobilization in times of perceived crisis to managing central-local interactions to facilitating economic policy innovation and reorganizing public health care.” But this is the important point: “Although ideologically inspired mass mobilizations no longer play the same role in routine policy-making and administration these days,” mobilizing the masses still exists in postreform China. As Heilmann and Perry point out, however, “The goal has changed from mobilizing the masses for political action and personal sacrifice to promoting passive compliance and commercial consumerism” (21). Despite the qualitative differences in the pedagogical logics of contemporary mass mobilizations in China, the capacity and infrastructure still exist to see revolutionary mass mobilizations once again in China because the CPC is still in control of the Chinese state apparatus. This possibility seems increasingly possible the further we go into the twenty-first century.

4 Not all of mainland China is “opened up” to foreign direct investment. This only occurs in the “special economic zones” on China’s eastern coast. Western capitalists and their states constantly complain about how China steals technological knowledge, but technology transfers are required if Western capital wants access to China’s massive labor market. These are the material bases for the constant anti-China, anti-CPC propaganda that exists in both academic and popular spheres in the United States.