Chinese Communist Party propaganda update, March 2020:

Viruses of the world, unite …

A coronavirus irony

Maybe a billion people in China are wearing protective masks – certainly more than ever in the history of the planet – at a time when air pollution in the country is in steep decline …

Milton to Xi Jinping (a tweet)

Give me Liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to Conscience, above all Liberties.

John Milton, Areopagitica (1644)[1]

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[1] John Milton, Milton’s Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, ed., Thomas Osborn (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1873), p. 64.

Karl Marx on religion – and the French Revolution: President Xi’s source on ‘cultural genocide’

Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in China’s western province of Xinjiang are being detained in huge internment camps.  Estimates range from the hundreds of thousands to 3 million, the latter figure coming from the U.S. State Department.[1]  More recently, the BBC reports (with the aid of satellite images) that numbers of mosques are being demolished, and that children are being separated from their parents en masse in an effort to re-educate them (thereby re-engineering humanity apart from the family unit) by means of giant boarding schools.  There are no other words for this than cultural genocide.

For China and the Communist Party, which is officially atheist, this is part of (as Marx would have it, see below) the “permanent revolution” since revived following Xi’s ascension to uninterrupted power.  We see it in Xi’s other activities vis-à-vis China’s Extradition Treaty with Hong Kong and in the not infrequent threats to Taiwan, considered a rogue province representing the ‘unfinished revolution’.  The persecution of Christians in China following Mao’s victory in 1949 has also been a core interest as the Communist Party asserted its totalitarian power over “western influence” in the forms of freedom of conscience and the closely-linked (but insidious) freedom of association.[2]

Below are several selections from Marx’s “On the Jewish Question”.  Ethnically Jewish, Marx is famous for his depiction of religion as “the opium of the people”.[3]  Historically, he derived much inspiration from the example of Jacobin dechristianization during of the French Revolution when an atheist “Cult of Reason” replaced Catholicism, and when – among other things - the 12-month calendar was abolished, only to be replaced by a more ‘rational’ system.  This all ended with Robespierre himself at the guillotine on the Ninth of Thermidor (27 July 1794).  The paratotalitarianism of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, as discussed here by Marx, still serves as a model for Xi and the Communist Party of China, particularly in regards to religion – and today’s Uyghurs.[4]

The decomposition of man into Jew, protestant and citizen, religious man and citizen, this decomposition is no trick played upon political citizenship, no avoidance of political emancipation.  It is political emancipation itself, the political manner of emancipating oneself from religion  Of course, in times when the political state is born violently as such out of civil society, when man’s self-liberation tries to complete itself in the form of political self-liberation, the state must go as far as abolishing, destroying religion, but only in the same way as it goes as far as abolishing private property, at the most, by declaring a maximum, by confiscation or a progressive tax, or in the same way as it abolishes life, by the guillotine.  In moments of particular self-consciousness political life tries to suppress its man.  However, this is only possible through violent opposition to its own contradictions, by declaring the revolution to be permanent.  The political drama therefore ends necessarily with the restoration of religion, private property, and all the elements of civil society, just as war ends with peace.[5] ….

The abstraction of the political man is thus correctly described by Rousseau: ‘He who dares to undertake the making of a people’s institutions ought to feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual, who is by himself a complete and solitary whole, into part of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives his life and being; of altering man’s constitution for the purpose of strengthening it; and of substituting a partial and moral existence of the physical and independent existence nature has conferred on us all.  He must, in a word, take away from man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him, and incapable of being made use of without the help of other men.’[6] ….

The actual individual man must take the abstract citizen back into himself and, as an individual man in his empirical life, in his individual work and individual relationships become a species being, man must recognize his own forces as social forces, organize them, and thus no longer separate social forces from himself in the form of political forces.  Only when this has been achieved will human nature be complete.[7] ….

…. And the question is no longer: which gives freedom, Judaism or Christianity?  It is rather the reverse: which gives more freedom: the negation of Judaism or the negation of Christianity.[8]

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[1] See Charles Burton, “How Xi trumped Trump at the G20 summit,” The Globe and Mail, Monday July 1, 2019, p. A11.

[2] See the fascinating accounts by exiled dissident Liao Yiwu, God is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China (New York: HarperCollins, 2011).

[3] Karl Marx, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed., David McClellan (Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 64.

[4] See Pierre Manent’s philosophical discussion of Jacobinism and Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” in Pierre Manent, Modern Liberty and Its Discontents, ed. and tr. Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Sexton (Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), pp. 129-133.

[5] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” in Selected Writings, p. 47.  Note: this work was printed in Hong Kong.

[6] Ibid., pp. 56,57. See “The Legislator” in Rousseau’s The Social Contract, Book 2, Chapter 7.  The original translation is by G.D.H.Cole.  Cf. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, tr. G.D.H. Cole, revised J.H. Brumfitt and John G. Hall (New York: Dutton/Everyman’s Library, 1973), p. 194.

[7] Karl Marx, Selected Writings, p. 57.

[8] Karl Marx, “The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to become Free” in Selected Writings, p. 57.

Why the Chinese Communist Party leadership succeeds in holding power: A Toquevillean view

… the anti-hierarchical sentiment has always existed and the chief social contradiction is precisely the contrast between the necessity for hierarchy and the sentiment for equality.  Men then experience the need, not to destroy government – man is naturally an archic animal – but to destroy and weaken, as far as lies in their power, all the deputy governments, all the authorities, castes, classes, corporations, which come in layers between them and the central government.  What they commonly call Liberty is no other than this thing. The subject in the Oriental empire thinks he is free; the Roman people hailed Caesar as a liberator.  It is noticeable that people never, or very slightly, lavish a religious respect upon a caste, but very often and very easily do so upon a single master, an Oriental despot, a Roman Caesar, a French Napoleon.  He represents the popular force incarnate in one man.  In what way does he then represent it?  By suppressing hierarchy, which popular force always wants to suppress. In this way he represents not, it is true, the people itself, but one of the people’s instincts, and the keenest of them, in a state of victory.  Therefore the people is not entirely mistaken in seeing itself represented by him.[1]

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[1] See Emile Faguet, “Tocqueville” in Politicians and Moralists of the Nineteenth Century, tr. Dorothy Galton (London: Ernest Benn, 1928), pp. 81,82.  This English translation of Volume 3 of Faguet’s, Politiques et moralists du dix-neuvième siècle (originally published in 1899) appears in the Library of European Political Thought series edited by Harold J. Laski.