Ba Jin - the ex-Maoist Anarchist

[robbo203]

From the money free website http://money-free.ning.com/forum/topics/how-are-we-to-establish-a?xg_source=activity (http://money-free.ning.com/forum/topics/how-are-we-to-establish-a?xg_source=activity)



How are we to establish a truly free and egalitarian society? - Ba Jin (1904-2005)


Posted by michael dickinson (http://money-free.ning.com/profile/michaeldickinson) on February 8, 2010 at 11:12am
Send Message (http://money-free.ning.com/forum/topics/how-are-we-to-establish-a?xg_source=activity#) View Discussions (http://money-free.ning.com/forum/topic/listForContributor?user=346vn1uwhtusj)


http://api.ning.com/files/Wnc4GJdBWAVXqJLcsgnat3adNWDS5rWngcsJ2A0VMFt26aUk3T-P8Nd8rSHiHOZa0luHwmHBMorOn8HrF98gdxq1ha3pdV2M/Bajin.jpg
Ba Jin
These days these words “freedom and equality” are part of the vocabulary of each and every one of us. But make a few inquiries and ask: What is freedom? and you will be told “Freedom means freedom of opinion, freedom of the press, freedom of association and assembly, the freedom of secrecy of correspondence”.

Ask: What is equality? and you will be told: “All citizens are equal before the law, with no difference between the high-born and the yokel.” Now, such narrow definitions have nothing to do with true freedom, true equality. Don't believe me? Then have a read of the following.

The blight upon the people's freedom is the State. Ever since the State came into existence, we have stopped being free. No matter what we do or say, the State sticks its nose in. All we ask is to live in love with our brethren from other nations, but the State would have us patriots at any price, enrols us in its armies and forces us to murder our neighbours. And here in China the situation is even worse: here we have Chinese murdering other Chinese. For a number of years now, in Hunan and Shaanxi and Szechuan, “the tide of blood has been running high and the corpses are piling up”.

What horror! So much for the benefits that the State has brought us. Arrogating to themselves the resources that are the common wealth of our planet, the capitalists grind us into a poverty that denies us the right to live. Not that the State punishes them for it: worse still, it protects them through a battery of laws.

The people has nothing to eat and has no option but to steal its food: it goes naked and has no option but to steal clothes: it has no option but to steal all that it needs. The people is driven to all this by the capitalists. And there goes the State, in its grandeur, dismissing us as brigands and decreeing that we are fit for nothing but the execution picket. We are gunned down merely for recouping - in contravention of the law, to be sure - a fraction of what we had lost, whereas the capitalists who loot the commonwealth of our planet are allowed to live in peace. If we are refused the right to steal, there is nothing left for us but to become beggars. Lo and behold, the capitalists, offended by the spectacle, bestow alms upon the poor and afford them a little of the money that they have stolen from them: and upon this they bestow the fine-sounding name of charity. Some of them even have the effrontery to insult us because we beg for our pittance instead of working for it.

Gentlemen! Can you be so sure that we do not want to work? It is more a case of our being denied work. Yet we are showered with insults. Looking at it from this angle, we can see that the “freedom and equality” of which we have just been speaking are alien to the people! Indeed, can one speak here of “freedom” and “equality”? I refuse to credit that there can be any freedom of that sort! Any equality of that stripe! But what then are real freedom and real equality?

Here comes my answer: Anarchy. That is the real freedom. And communism is the real equality. Only a social revolution can allow us to build a really free and really egalitarian society.

But what is Anarchy?

Anarchy is the placing of the State and its accessory institutions upon the Index and collective ownership of the means of production and goods produced. Every individual contributing in accordance with his ability and receiving in accordance with his needs. And work shared out according to the ability of the individual: whoever has the ability to be a doctor does the doctoring, and whoever has the ability to mine does the mining. More time devoted to straightforward tasks and less time squandered on complicated or tiresome ones. An agency to find you food when you are hungry, clothing to wear and a roof under which to shelter. Everybody in receipt of the same education, with no distinction drawn between the clever and the slow-witted.

Time and again, one French anarchist has reiterated: “Every individual need work only two hours a day if all the needs of society are to be met”. And Kropotkin too has stated: “If everyone works four hours a day, that will be enough - indeed, more than enough - to meet society's needs.”
I imagine that such a proposition, cutting working hours to the bone, could not help but attract universal support. Without the State and its laws, we would have real freedom: without the capitalist class, we would have real equality.

Friends of the world of labour, can you see just how free a society rid of all authoritarian power would be? Can you see how egalitarian it would be? Are you willing to build such a society of freedom and equality? Well then, make the social revolution and have done with these rascally politics.

For the sake of the advent of a society of freedom and equality, let us hope that you and your friends will soon come together as one! As long as you endure it all with resignation, you will be fodder for the capitalists!

If you do not believe me, you will see for yourselves!

Ba Jin

Appeared in Banyue (Fortnight), Chengdu, China, No 17, 1 April 1921, over Ba Jin's real name Li Feigan

Translated by: Paul Sharkey (http://money-free.ning.com/bnzsrh).

[Kléber]

When was he a Maoist? The wikipedia article suggests he may have joined the CCP but wouldn't make him an ex-anarchist?

[Red Commissar]

When was he a Maoist? The wikipedia article suggests he may have joined the CCP but wouldn't make him an ex-anarchist?

That is what I'm wondering too. I would suppose if he joined the CCP it was purely out of convenience or trying to work towards what he thought was a common goal.

He did however live in the PRC until his death and managed to not get killed in the Cultural Revolution, despite being deemed a counter-revolutionary.

[RedStarOverChina]

He's always been an anarchist, though didn't much publicize his views since the CCP came to power.

[syndicat]

Yeah, I don't think he ever became a maoist, tho i could be wrong. He was a novelist, and of course he needed to be able to have his novels published, and not be banned, so he may have laid low.

in the early '20s when the piece above was published, anarchism was a significant influence in the labor movement in Guangzhou (Canton), Hunan and Shanghai. but it's hard to find out information about what happened to that movement.

[Panda Tse Tung]

He did however live in the PRC until his death and managed to not get killed in the Cultural Revolution, despite being deemed a counter-revolutionary.

Cause that happened all the time :rolleyes:.


Also, if he's an ex-Maoist turned Anarchist then why did he write this in 1921? When the term Maoism or Mao tse-Tung thought did not even exist.

[scarletghoul]

Wow, he lived a long time. Seems like a cool person. Has anyone read any of his novels and could recommend any ??

And yeah he doesnt seem to be 'ex-maoist' lol. He was anarchist as a teenager when he wrote that piece, and seems to have been anarchist or at least anti-maoist into old age

[Incendiarism]

Wow, he lived a long time. Seems like a cool person. Has anyone read any of his novels and could recommend any ??

Family is pretty good. A buddy of mine mailed me a copy a while back.

[Kléber]

but it's hard to find out information about what happened to that movement.Many anarchists like Li Dazhao and Mao Zedong joined the CCP and some see this as the origin of the CCP's voluntarist tendency and peasant orientation which became more and more pronounced as Comintern/Soviet influence waned and Mao took control of the party.

[x359594]

...Has anyone read any of his novels and could recommend any ??...

Family and Cold Nights seem to be the novels readily available in English. Both are quite good.

[RedStarOverChina]

Ba Jin, despite being anti-state, was engaged extensively with patriotic anti-Japanese war effort. It was hard NOT to be a patriot back then, with Japan's military invasion and everything.

When Mao first met Ba Jin in 1945, he was amused and fascinated. "How odd. Aren't you an anarchist?" He asked.

"Yes. And so were you, I've heard." Ba Jin replied.

[robbo203]

I have to confess I dont know much about this guy and only came across him recently on the money free website (see OP). However , here is an obit from the Guardian which suggests he did flirt with Maoism for a while before returning to anarchism
Ba Jin

Chinese writer who made the journey from anarchism to Mao and back again



John Gittings (http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/johngittings)
The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian), Tuesday 18 October 2005


Article history (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2005/oct/18/guardianobituaries.china/print#history-byline)http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/authors/2005/10/18/ba1.jpg
Ba Jin, the grand old man of Chinese literature.


Ba Jin, who has died aged 100, was the grand old man of Chinese literature, one of the last survivors from the heady years of the real cultural revolution in the 1920s and 1930s. He is best known abroad - and to young Chinese everywhere - for his early work Family (1931). This novel, based on his childhood in a rich household in Sichuan province, shed light on the dark, repressed cavities of the feudal Chinese extended family.
The purpose of the trilogy Turbulent Stream, of which Family was the first part (Spring and Autumn followed), was to show how traditional families "inevitably go down the road to ruin, how they dig their graves with their own hands". But the message to Chinese youth was more positive; some might suffer destruction, wrote Ba, but a few at least would succeed in flinging open the windows and bringing in fresh air.
More than half a century later, as China emerged from the Maoist era in the 1980s, Ba would again seek to ventilate a China which, beneath the socialist label, still betrayed profound feudal characteristics. He had become a cultural figurehead for the regime, and had only expressed mild criticism in the anti-rightist witchhunt of the late 1950s. He had suffered only moderately in Mao Zedong's cultural revolution (1966-76), having been banned from writing and forced to clean drains.
But when his wife died in 1973 after being denied medical care, he began to reflect more deeply on the "blood and fire" that had been visited on China. When cultural apparatchiks threatened another dogmatic onslaught in the late 1980s, he proposed to establish a cultural revolution museum so that the tragedy would never be repeated.
"It's not that I don't want to forget: it's simply that the gory spectre of the past has me in its grip ... How I let myself be disarmed, how the disaster crept up on me, just how that tragedy unfolded and the hateful role I played in it all." His Random Thoughts (1987) were all the more powerful because he acknowledged a degree of intellectual complicity, shared, but not always admitted, by many others.
Born in the last years of the Manchu dynasty, Ba grew up in Chengdu, the Sichuan capital, in a family of absentee landlords, with about 50 members from four generations and an equal number of servants. After his parents died, family authority passed to his despotic grandfather, though by then the voice of China's "new youth" was beginning to reach Chengdu. Ba read widely and was deeply influenced by Piotr Kropotkin's famous pamphlet, An Appeal to the Young, which "set the heart of a 15-year-old child afire". Family feuds broke out when Ba's grandfather died and authority was transferred to an elder uncle. Finally, in 1923, Ba escaped to continue his studies in Nanking and Shanghai.
Like many young people of the time, Ba made a second escape from the chaos of warlord China, moving to France in 1927. In Paris, he joined a group of young Chinese anarchists - news of the execution of the anarchist workers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the US affected him deeply. His adopted name - chosen in 1929 - reflected his admiration for anarchism: Ba stood for the first syllable in the Chinese transliteration of Mikhail Bakunin, and Jin for the last syllable of Kropotkin.
By now, the second nationalist revolution had succeeded in his homeland, and he returned to discover that little changed under the Kuomintang. His experience abroad fused with the tumult of a new China to inspire his greatest writing. He travelled extensively to understand his country better, and this experience brought a new cast of characters - the peasants of China - into his stories.
Ba now wrote a succession of novels, including Family and the early trilogy, Love. By 1934, the novel Sprouts had been placed on the blacklist, and Ba was forced to move under an assumed name to Japan, where he had friends. Returning to China two years later, he found himself a prominent figure, although he steered clear of the rival literary factions. But he defended the Spanish anarchists against attacks by Chinese communist sympathisers.
After the Japanese declared war on China in 1937, he moved to a succession of wartime capitals, finally returning to Chengdu in 1941 to find that his fifth uncle, a spoilt but charming man, had died in prison. Life had imitated Ba's artistic rendering of feudal decline.
Ba's works were immensely popular among young Chinese during the wartime resistance. A third trilogy, Fire, which began with the battle for Shanghai, told the story of this new, often heroic, generation. In the postwar confusion of civil war, like his contemporary Shen Congwen, Ba wrote less, groping for a way forward. (Ba, Shen and Lu Xun, who had already died, can be regarded as the three greatest 20th-century Chinese writers.)
Ba's writings reflected the desperation of those years: Ward Four (1946) described the hospital stay in miserable conditions of an unemployed bank worker; Cold Nights (1947) gave a gloomy account of a young couple's lost idealism, with the message that "victory is for them, not for us".
It is no wonder then that Ba - and so many other writers - embraced the new communist government and looked determinedly on the bright side. In the two decades before the late 1950s, he wrote nearly 20 novels and translated as many foreign works, while also writing more than 70 short stories. But then his output dwindled sharply and he spent most of his time in his new role as vice-chairman of the official China Writers' Association. In 1958, he declared that there was only one way to be a genuine creative writer: to stand firmly on the proletarian platform.
Ba deleted references to anarchism from his earlier work. He also repudiated the one personal fact about his past which everyone knows: the origin of his adopted name. "Ba", he insisted, did not refer to Bakunin but to a fellow-student in France; "Jin" was based on Kropotkin, but he only adopted it as a joke. He also dismissed his early years: he had merely been "reading behind closed doors" and had "cut himself off from the masses".
No doubt this repudiation formed part of his regrets in Random Thoughts, a collection of 150 essays written between 1978 and 1986, first published in newspapers and then in a five-volume edition. He wrote that the main mistake of his generation was having "said too many empty words" in the Maoist age to please the cultural bureaucrats. Other pieces included memorial essays to his wife and to literary victims of the cultural revolution, including Lao She, the author of Rickshaw Boy, who had committed suicide.
Already suffering from Parkinson's disease, Ba continued to lend his voice to protest. When martial law was declared in May 1989, in the run-up to the Tiananmen Square massacre, he signed an "emergency letter of appeal" by Shanghai writers. Three years later, he joined a petition to liberate art from "pernicious leftism" and criticised the new Mao cult which became briefly voguish among young Chinese in the early 1990s.
Though nominally chairman of the writers' association, Ba became increasingly incapacitated and, from 1998, was confined to Shanghai's Huadong hospital. He often repeated the phrase that "old age is a sort of punishment" and asked to be helped to die. He would have preferred to fall on the battlefield, he said, with his pen in his hand.
In November 2003 (his 100th birthday by the Chinese way of reckoning), the National Museum of Modern Literature, which he had been instrumental in founding, held an exhibition on his life. Cultural policies were now more relaxed and writers in the Chinese press could applaud his rebellious youth, and lament the lost decade after 1949 when he had, for a while, conformed. · Ba Jin (Li Feigan), writer, born November 25 1904; died October 17 2005