The Making of Homo Socialist: The Discursive Analysis of the Ideological Production of Class in China, 1949–1976

Based on a critique of the history project titled “Oral History of Peasants’ Ordinary Life in the Revolutionary Era of China,” this article provides an analysis of class ideology production from Land Reform Movement to the Cultural Revolution in China. Thirty years of socialist construction in China was based on the craft of making the Homo Socialist. The focus here is on how personal experiences were transformed into state-endorsed conduct via the discourse of class and class struggle. Over the course of the sociopolitical transformations leading to the Cultural Revolution, “class” changed from a socioeconomic designation to a political behavioral metaphor, and in the end a purely symbolic gesture; personal experiences were transformed from hallmarks of class privilege to virtual identification with imagined class struggle. And the peasants went from being “owners of bitterness” to “debtors of bitterness” on the way to becoming “sinners of the revolution”—who gradually submitted themselves to the regime in the name of revolution, liberation, and redemption. These transformations were realized through discursive practices connecting personally embodied experiences with the abstract Marxist theory of class and class struggle. Examining the shifting nature of class ideology production helps to explain how the Chinese Communist Party understood the effects of its governance and how people found class ideology meaningful to them, even when it reached the point of absurdity.

The Ideological Ranting in the Debut Novels of the Contemporary Pakistani Writers

People believe that ideologies work for their betterment by showing them a path of prosperity. However, they fail to understand the consequences of blindly following a specific ideology. In their debut novels, the contemporary writers of Pakistan depict the working of one of these ideologies: religion. The present study aims to analyze the projection and exploitation of power in the name of religion: how people suffer for the sake of faith, and the manipulation that follows it in these selected novels: The Prisoner, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, How it Happened, and Agency Rules. The study also highlights the link between religious ideology and the conditioning of the minds of people. The analysis takes place in the light of Marxist theory. The study discovers the role of religious ideology in overpowering helpless people with the belief that following a certain path will reward them in life after death.

A Modern Domestic View of the “Black Death” and Major Epidemic Outbreaks of the Plague in the Historical Past

Research objectives: To analyze the main research trends of the last thirty years in the national historiography on the topic of the Black Death and major epidemic outbreaks of plague in the historical past. Research materials: The historiographic analysis was conducted based on both original domestic studies of the topic and those written in co-authorship with Western colleagues. To outline the main theoretical base of the topic, the author used major works on the historical theory, demography, climatology, paleogenetics, and phylogenetics of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis. Results and novelty of the research: The analysis showed that until the 1980s, the views of Russian historians on the epidemics of the historical past were based on the study of a major German epidemiologist in the second half of nineteenth century, H. Häser. At the same time, the main directions in the research of domestic historians on the topic were developed within the framework of an order from domestic biologists and epidemiologists. This situation began to change when, in the 1980s, Russian historical research took a course towards geographical determinism. From the second half of the 1990s to the 2000s, in connection with the publications of the American Turkologist U. Schamiloglu and French historians, new topics in the field of anthropology, cultural studies, and historical demography began to be addressed in the research of domestic authors. At the same time, all theoretical considerations continued to be formed within the framework of the Marxist theory of the “crisis of the Middle Ages”. Therefore, the “Black Death” was considered exclusively as a concomitant theme attached to the main events. Only in the 2010s, in the light of the growth of joint research with Western specialists in the field of archaeology, paleogenetics, and climatology was it possible to start moving towards the development of a new theoretical and methodological basis for research on the topic in Russian historiography. The result of this process was the publication of new studies which are likely to determine the predominant course of scientific research in the field of historical epidemiology in Russia in the coming years.

Functions of Literature

Literature is an open concept and a creative art which expresses human history, experiences, imagination, observations, predictions and suggestions at a particular time in a given society. Either as fiction or non-fiction, literature can be rendered in both spoken and written words. It is often argued whether literature is for itself or the development of the society that produces it. This study, therefore, interrogates how the selected Francophone African novels, namely Sembène Ousmane’s Les bouts de bois de Dieu, Mariama Bâ’s Une si longue lettre, Ferdinand Oyono’s Le vieux nègre et la médaille, Aminata Sow Fall’s La grève des bàttu, Patrick Ilboudo’s Les vertiges du trône and Fatou Keïta’s Rebelle, depict the function of literature. The novelists are selected because of their inclination towards the social transformation paradigm. The purpose of this paper is to raise people’s awareness and mobilize them towards positive change. Based on close reading, the paper is built around Marxist theory which is interested in the class struggle as demonstrated in a literary text, with a view to deconstructing the existing capitalist tendencies in a given society. The findings reveal that the selected novels are focused on the poor conditions socio-politically, economically, culturally and psychologically that exist both during and after the colonial era. The paper concludes that literature helps readers to cope with the socio-cultural, political, economic, religious and other challenges of their immediate as well as remote environments through the process of self-discovery. As such, positive social change is possible through literature.

Notes For a Discussion on Unequal Exchange and the Marxist Theory of Dependency

The debate on the decline of the terms of trade in dependent countries was never fully integrated into the Marxist theory of dependency. The attempt to articulate it through the category of unequal exchange was not particularly systematic. This paper seeks to recover those debates and will attempt to account for the relevant articulations in the light of a present revitalisation of studies in the field of Marxist dependency theory. To this end, we will recover the classical discussions around unequal exchange in order to discuss their points of contact with the Marxist theory of dependency and some contemporary debates around the transfer of value and the super-exploitation of labour and nature.

Historical Sociology in Poland: Transformations of the Uses of the Past

The development of Polish institutional sociology since the 1920s reflects the combined effects of domestic political and cultural factors, along with international interdependencies. Historical sociology shares in the vicissitudes of the whole discipline. Although historical sociology was only weakly institutionalized before 1989, some of the best sociological studies produced in Poland under socialism display the keen use of historical imagination, inspired both by the pre-1939 domestic tradition and by Marxist theory. This article examines the path of historical sociology in Poland after 1989 and the connection between the sociological uses of history and the experience of post-communist transformation. We posit that the social transformation experience and how it was addressed by social science directly translate into the use of history in Polish sociology after 1989. We argue that the role of historical sociology in Poland since the end of the 1990s was a function of the potential of the past as a symbolic resource in the growing interdependence between Poland and Western Europe. However, the post-1989 research agendas of historical sociology were forged according to the mode of responsiveness to political agendas predating 1989. An overview of the development of Polish historical sociology demonstrates that the ahistorical transitological thinking after 1989 has been challenged by critical agendas in historical sociology, but it was, in the first place, a reaction to the increased potential of the past as a symbolic resource in political debates. Thus, the rationale for the passage to the third wave of historical sociology was primarily political.

Not Yet Uhuru: Aspects of Social Realism in Vonani Bila’s Selected Poetry

This article analyses Vonani Bila’s selected poetry for its ability to produce an ‘air of reality’. The central argument of the article is that Bila embraces an aesthetic of realism, which essentially values unsparing, accurate and sordid representations of the psychological, social and material realities of postcolonial (and democratic) South Africa. Undergirded by the Marxist theory of Social Realism, the qualitative approach and descriptive design, this article purposively selected ten poems from some of the anthologies in which Bila published his poetry, namely; Magicstan Fires, Handsome Jita and Sweep of the Violin. Bila’s poetry can best be situated within the historical contexts that shape his texts, namely; the apartheid era, ideas about capitalism in newly democratic South Africa, the emergence of a vibrant immigrant community in South Africa and idealised notions of achieving equality and prosperity through education in South Africa. This article is mainly a critical analysis, and not a historical account of the apartheid era and democratic dispensation of South Africa. In the analysis, it was noted that Bila’s poetry generally manifests the literary categories of social and psychological realism, respectively. As a social realist, Bila explores the problems of economic inequality and captures the experience of both rural and urban life in a post- and neo-colonial context of South Africa. As a psychological realist, on the other extreme, Bila is concerned with delving beneath the surface of social life to probe the complex motivations and (un)conscious desires that shape his literary personae’s perceptions. The article concludes with the notion that, in his commitment to document the realities of everyday life in South Africa, both at social and psychological dimensions, Bila offers a penetrating insight into the repression, alienation, marginalisation, instabilities, and inequalities that structure post- and neo-colonial South Africa.

Fascism and Dependency in Latin America in the Thinking of Theotônio dos Santos

The analysis of Theotônio dos Santos, a central reference of the Marxist theory of dependency, of the counterrevolutionary political processes in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, reflecting what he observes as an advance of fascistization, proposes the concept of a dependent fascism to characterize some of the military governments that materialized in the region. His writings on the subject are part of a wide range of debates that took place in Latin America during the 1970s, which focused on the context of political radicalization between revolution and counterrevolution, a tug-of-war that led to a consolidation of military coups. These writings express his position on both the political crisis that took place in Latin American countries at that time and the transformations of the political regime and the state itself. Efforts to renew these debates are anchored in the expectation that they may shed light on recent Latin American history. A análise de Theotônio dos Santos, referência central da teoria Marxista da dependência, sobre os processos políticos contrarrevolucionários na América Latina nas décadas de 1960 e 1970, ao observar um avanço da fascistização, propõe o conceito de fascismo dependente para caracterizar alguns dos governos militares que se concretizaram na região. Seus escritos sobre o tema se inscrevem em um amplo campo de debates que tiveram lugar na América Latina durante a década de 1970, os quais se debruçavam sobre o contexto de radicalização política entre revolução e contrarrevolução, no qual a consolidação de golpes militares estava imersa, e expressam o posicionamento do autor em relação tanto à crise política que teve lugar nos países latino-americanos naquele então, quanto às transformações do próprio regime político e do Estado. O esforço de recuperar tal debate está ancorado na expectativa de que tais reflexões possam lançar luz sobre a história recente latino-americana.

The Pattern of Capital Reproduction in Dependent and Financialized Capitalism

Financialization is the result of the development of social forces and relations of production translated into legal and institutional changes including the increasing importance of the financial sphere of capital and international financial circuits compared with the rest of the economy. An analysis from a lower level of abstraction, as proposed by the Marxist theory of dependency and Jaime Osorio’s work on the pattern of capital reproduction, must consider the differentiated incorporation of the periphery into financialized capitalism and its effects. A proposal that encompasses the cycles of capital and its reproduction in specific geo-historical contexts and establishes a dialogue between the pattern of capital reproduction and the changes in contemporary capitalism serves to extend Osorio’s ideas, including the identification of financialization as a new coil of the spiral of dependency. A financeirização é o resultado do desenvolvimento das forças sociais e das relações de produção traduzidas em mudanças jurídicas e institucionais, incluindo a crescente importância da esfera financeira do capital e dos circuitos financeiros internacionais em comparação com o resto da economia. Uma análise de um nível inferior de abstração, como proposto pela teoria marxista da dependência e o trabalho de Jaime Osorio sobre o padrão de reprodução do capital, deve considerar a incorporação diferenciada da periferia no capitalismo financeirizado e seus efeitos. Uma proposta que englobe os ciclos do capital e sua reprodução em contextos geo-históricos específicos e que estabeleça um diálogo entre o padrão de reprodução do capital e as mudanças no capitalismo contemporâneo serve para estender as ideias de Osório, incluindo a identificação da financeirização como uma nova bobina do espiral de dependência.