China and the West

Li, Dazhao. Wo de Makesi zhu yi guan [ID D19714].
Quellen : Kawakami, Hajime. Marukusu no shakaishugi no rironteki taikei (1919). Fukuda, Tokuzô. Zoku keizaigaku kôgi (1913).
Li Dazhao schreibt : Seit der russischen Revolution breitete sich der Marxismus in der ganzen Welt aus. Soziale Revolutionen brachen nacheinander in Deutschland, Österreich und Ungarn aus. Sie alle hatten den Marxismus als Leitidee.

Maurice Meisner : Li Dazhao looked at Marxist doctrine with considerably less enthusiasm than he had displayed in greeting the Bolshevik revolution, he was convinced of the necessity of propagating 'the orthodox teaching' accompanying the great transformation of the world. His article ist a summary of some of the main concepts of orthodox Marxist theory, which he drew from Japanese translations of Marx. it was the most systematic and serious treatment of Marxism to be published in Chinese. In general Li accept the elements of Marxism that emphasize the importance of political activity and the consciousness of men, that ist, those elements that promise a relatively rapid revolutionary transformation. He was critical of the deterministic aspects of Marxist doctrine, which seemed to him to encourage passivity or imply the necessity for a long period of economic development as a prerequisite for revolutionary political change. Li was immediately receptive to the theory of class struggle, which, if separated from the economic precondistion underlying it, places heavy emphasis upon the role of conscious political activity in the making of history. He viewed the phenomenon of class struggle in relatively simple terms ; it was the eternal conflict between the propertied and the unpropertied, between the oppressors and the exploited. The theory of class struggle, more-over, was an inevitable manifestation of the universal drive toward progressive self-expansion in both biological and social phenomena. Li therefore implied that Marx's concept of class struggle was not really alien to the Chinese intellectual milieu since it was supported by evolutionary theory in general and the writings of Spencer in particular. However Li was aware of certain ambiguities in Marx's treatment of class struggle. He noted that whereas Marx denied that class activity determines the movement of economic forces, Marx also declared that all history has been the history of class struggle and affirmed that the activities of social classes can influence the whole direction of the social process.