Date: Tue, 31 Dec 96 13:55:24 CST
From: "Daniel A. Foss" <U17043@UICVM.UIC.EDU>
Subject: sheer dumb luck and nonlinear time
To: World Systems Network <wsn@CSF.COLORADO.EDU>
The emergence of capitalism in Europe was made possible by a great
deal of sheer dumb luck. There were three aspects to the critical
conjuncture, the second third of the fourteenth century (and a little
after that):
1. Differential effects of the Bubonic Plague, reflecting the initial
lesser sophistication and urbanization of Europe. This was, in terms of
social theory, as I have said, something like an asteroid hitting Earth
from outer space.
2. Greater susceptibility of the Chinese state to fall before peasant
war and social revolution, as had happened many times already in China,
if almost never in Europe.
3. The impact of the unique personality of Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of
the Ming dynasty, who created an economic and political regime, by
legislation and by massive use of political terror, which condemned
China to economic strangulation, cultural suffocation, and political
isolation for two hundred years. This is not how he saw it, of course.
It's the way a historian such as Ray Huang sees it in retrospect.
People do not make history in linear time. They have utopias,
retrospective and prospective. They imagine Golden Ages, Good Old Days,
Second Comings of Christ, the Hidden Imam, the Maitreya Buddha, the Mahdi,
the Jewish Messiah, the Prince of Radiance, the Higher Stage of Socialism
some indefinite time after the Advent of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
This is all to help make history in a heavily imaginary present. Other
aspects of the past are dis-imagined, obliterated. The future is erased
from the political imagination as mysteriously as it appeared in the
first place.
How recently was it that we were prepared to accord a major place in
world history to Mao Zedong, who himself was avowedly role-modelling on
Zhu Yuanzhang, the previous peasant who came to power in China six hundred
years earlier. It was Zhu Yuanzhang, for example, who had instituted "the
public reprimanding of individuals who had committed misdeeds in the village"
(Huang, 1587: A Year Of No Consequence, p. 142), perhaps the original for
"struggle sessions." It was Zhu Yuanzhang who had had his Six Maxims carved
in giant characters on mountainsides. Yet to this very day, we focus on the
impact of the copy, for good or ill, and ignore the original, whose impact
was the more important, as it did not prove immediately reversible at his
death.
For both Mao and Wu Han, biographer of Zhu Yuanzhang, it was an important
question whether the Ming founder ever actually believed in the White Lotus
religion of the Red Turbans. To Communists, this was religious claptrap,
redolent of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, in the same Yanzi Valley region
five hundred years later. Yet it is certain that the Red Turbans, including
the unit joined by Zhu Yuanzhang, copied the military organization of the
Mongols, with units of half the size (where a Mongol division of 10,000 men
became a brigade of 4,500, and a regiment of 1,000 became a battalion of
500), these in turn being copied in turn into the *wei-so* system of the
Ming army (Charles O. Hucker (Ed.), Six Ming Studies, Columbia, 1967).
The Taipings were part of modern Chinese history, and the fact that
they were losers was consequential.
Similarly, it is puzzling that Mao defended Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-Shek)
when Wu Han compared Zhu Yuanzhang to the latter. (See citation from Dr Li
Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, yesterday.) Clearly, in retrospect,
it was on the fact that Zhu Yuanzhang, like Chiang Kai-Shek, had been a
sonofabitch, not that he had been a reactionary (which is an anachronistic
question) that Mao defended them both. Zhu Yuanzhang's destruction of Prime
Minister Hu Weiyang, in 1380, and tens of thousands of people along with
him, may have been the prototype for the entire Cultural Revolution itself.
The office of Prime Minister, which had existed for hundreds of years, was
not only abolished; advocacy of its restoration was made punishable by death.
Daniel A. Foss