This is a necessary book. It is neither an “objective” academic work nor an anodyne journalistic one. Instead, and vitally, it is the product of the author's many years of activist engagement with “the left” in China and elsewhere, and thus of his profound personal and intellectual commitment to justice and democracy as modes of life and politics the world over. Ralf Ruckus, whose previous book The Communist Road to Capitalism is also a work of engaged scholarship, may seem a throwback to a different era of partisan political writing; but perhaps that kind of writing should make a comeback. In any case, Ruckus is serious, seriously concerned, and his inquiry is deeply embedded in some of the most important social questions of our times as those are raised from and in China.
The book presents its topic in a series of overlapping and chronologically organized chapters, each taking up some incidence of “left” politics and organizing in China after 1949. The periodizing, then, gives an indication of what concerns Ruckus most: these are anti-systemic organized social movements that are neither Communist Party-led nor Communist Party-inspired, but rather that attempt to force the Party to live up to its proclaimed socialist pursuits. Meanwhile, the “left” label describes those who struggle for egalitarian, non-exploitative social relations in a “non-hierarchical society in which people control and share power” (p. 10). To be sure, this definition is somewhat amorphous and historically vague, but Ruckus relies on the idea that “the left” is readily recognizable when you see it. He is mostly correct. Refusing to cover already well-trodden ground, Ruckus does not focus on the intellectual or intra-/inter-Party debates on policy and theory, or on the factionalisms that often have pre-occupied scholars. Instead, he homes in on the practices of social struggle as these erupt in various times and places over the course of the Maoist and post-Maoist period. Herein described are workers’ movements emanating from inside the factory labour-life system (the danwei) that critique the excessive demands for surplus extraction in the late-1950s and into the 1960s; we find serial socially organized movements protesting leftist or rightist austerity in the 1960s; we read of students in the early 1960s and onwards who are disappointed in the high rates of youth unemployment and who demand more full integration into the productive life of “socialist construction.” And, arriving at the Cultural Revolution, we learn of the ways in which the more well-known theorizations – Shengwulian, the Li Yizhe Manifesto, the Shanghai Commune and others – were taken up from below to push for better wages, fuller democratic participation in factory management, and enhanced living conditions. Most of the book's focus is on the urban areas. The only time this focus expands outward is in the 1980s and beyond, when village social life became thoroughly corrupted by land grabs, village taxation schemes and the over-burdening of peasants in the drive to accumulate surplus from rural production. It is of course at this point that migrant workers and their struggles also enter the picture.
The lead-up to 1989 and the aftermath of the Tiananmen movement occupy a good deal of Ruckus's attention towards the last chapters of the book. Here, in particular, he points to how feminist (or what he calls women*'s) struggles have remained at the forefront of social movements to this day. As Ruckus is clear, vast mobilizations of women* into productive life never actually touched the bases of the patriarchal organization of China's social formation. The post-1978 reforms freed some women* for more economic and political participation, even while tying most women* more firmly to the family form. While the ostensible retreat of the state from everyday life was celebrated as a great Dengist achievement, the irony is that women*'s bodies were more regulated than ever through this period with the burden of sustaining the one-child policy falling almost exclusively on women*'s reproductive organs. Some retreat! Nevertheless, as he documents, urban feminists have been the most consistent social organizers to this day, provoking endless backlashes and suppressions and yet popping up in continuously re-imagined forms.
The Left in China will not be news for specialists in contemporary China studies. Yet even someone like myself, relatively well informed and engaged in similar kinds of inquiries, can learn a lot. One certainly comes away with a cartographic sense of the lay of the leftist land in China. Naturally, things have changed some since the book was written and published, as the COVID-19 pandemic emergency was declared over after the brief “white paper movement” seemed to force the cessation of the arbitrary lockdown regime.
Do leftist social struggles in China play the same role as they have in Western Europe and the United States? That is, if we understand that whatever progressive policies and measures actually do exist in Europe and the US are the consequence of sustained struggles from below, then what is the relation between leftist social struggle and politics in China? Are these social struggles cumulative or just contingently additive? Ruckus doesn't have a clear answer to any of this, even while he does seem to assume that leftist social struggles play a role similar in China as they do in Euro-America, a premise about which I am considerably less convinced than he is. But pointing out the lack of a clear answer is not necessarily a fatal critique. For, just by raising such questions at this point, Ruckus has given us a map with enough places marked out for others to start their inquiries, should they so wish. The importance of taking on the systems in China and globally that produce stunning privatized wealth along with abject poverty, environmental degradation, patriarchal repression, international antagonisms and militarisms, as well as highly exploitative social relations, cannot be overstated. Ruckus should be congratulated for insisting on staging the conversation.
