100 Years of the Chinese Party and Workers

In the early years of the CCP, when labor and workers were the subjects and objects of revolutionary mobilization, the rhetorics and practices of egalitarianism and factory-floor democracy were actively debated and part of a political discourse of realizing socialism. However, from the 1980s onwards, under the rehabilitation of the commodification of labor, workers have become key in the Party-state’s pursuit of a high growth development strategy. No longer privileged subjects of history, workers have been turned into productive forces to be unleashed in the national pursuit of wealth and power. This paper intends to track this fundamental reconfiguration of socialism and the labor question. We ask: what does focusing on the problem of labor do for an analysis of the centenary anniversary of the founding of the CCP? On the one hand, we can acknowledge that this is an old question – one that was asked at the very inception of communist thinking and organizing in China in the 1910 and 1920s; and yet, on the other hand, because over the past 100 years the problem of labor and the composition of “the working class” has oscillated wildly in the CCP’s ideological universe, it is a question that needs to be asked anew. What, then, does focusing on labor and workers tell us about socialist subject-making and its aftermath, today, in light of the Party-State’s ever-shifting hegemonic project? This collaborative paper proposes to investigate how labor, rhetorically central to the early development of the CCP as a form of horizontal (non-hierarchical) social relations, became part of the Party’s mobilizational structure (in Cai Xiang’s terms) through the years when the Party became inexorably hitched to the State (Maoist years), and, finally has become a disembodied ideological form justifying the exploitation of peasant-workers and the demise of the traditional working class in the Party’s post-Mao era pursuit of economic developmentalism at any and all costs.

The collaborators will divide the labor, as it were, primarily along the lines of their relative expertise: Karl deals with the first half of the 20th century into the 1960s, and Florence deals with the later Mao period, with a stronger focus on the post-Mao era. There will be a high unity of theoretical and conceptual rigor, to ensure that the paper coheres at the level of thought, principle, and articulation. Our working premise is that the shifting Party-State attempts to govern and mobilize labor – contradictory at times of revolutionary upsurge and complementary at times of productivist emphasis – contributed to an unstable ideology of practice. This instability ultimately was short-circuited when China rejoined the global capitalist division of labor in the post-Mao period and soon began to pursue a regime of labor commodification that reconfigured the social relationship of workers to work. We will root ourselves in relevant texts – including the texts of the Party-State (the shifting constitutions, and various plenum documents) – of the 100-year period, focusing on pivotal moments in the processes of making and unmaking workers.