The Path Not Taken

Until the late 1920s, anarchism was still a significant presence in Chinese radical thinking and activity, and till the middle of the decade, gave serious competition to the Communists. The essay discusses the nature of the anarchist movement in China, anarchist criticism of Bolshevik Marxism, and anarchist revolutionary strategy and activity during 1921–1927. It argues that while anarchists were quite innovative with regard to revolutionary strategy, their repudiation of organized power deprived them of the ability to coordinate revolutionary activity on a national scale, and what success they achieved remained local and short-lived. Indeed, the Communists were able to make better use of anarchist tactics than were the anarchists themselves. Anarchist critique of power rested on a denial of a center to society (and history). While this undercut the anarchists' ability to organize the revolutionary movement, it is also revealing of a basic problem of socialist revolution: the problem of democracy. In ignoring the anarchist critique of power, the successful revolutionaries deprived themselves of a critical perspective on the problem of socialist revolution, and were left at the mercy of the new structures of power that they brought into existence. Hence the importance of recalling anarchism

China · Communism · Criticism · Democracy · Democratic revolution · Denial · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Socialism · Sociology · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Chinese history and philosophy · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Psychology

• The Revolution That Never Was

  Open Access•Arif Dirlik•Modern China•1989

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• The Origins of Chinese Communism.

  Mary Backus Rankin, Arif Dirlik•The American Historical Review•1990

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• The Chinese Labor Movement, 1919-1927

  Yi C Wang, Jean Chesneaux et al.•The American Historical Review•1969

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