Two responses on Occupy Central posted in the anthropologist circle. Now share them with the wider world. The following is the first; the second follows in a later post. Thank you, Magnus, for sharing this, and thank everyone for the wonderful discussion. I have been following this movement quite closely and a friend of mine is one of the few journalists that have been able to garner voices from across the political spectrum. She keeps close -- even intimate -- relationship with some of the student leaders and is well informed about the voices within the police and the HK government. So, to provide you with more information and to facilitate the discussion and elicit more responses, I would like to add a few comments. Hopefully this would not get too tedious. 1. I agree with Dr. Kipnis on the incoherence of the official CCP discourse and the often authoritarian manipulation that tries constantly to bring everything in line, though the line itself is fractured. I want to add a remark as a supplement: within the old CCP discourse, the vanguard role of the party itself is internally split. On the one hand, it claims to represent the interest of the proletariats embodied by the mass. On the other, the party is nonetheless the vanguard and proposes to educate the supposedly ignorant mass into their revolutionary role. In other words, the party both is and is not part of the mass. It represents them yet is not subsumed under them and constantly distinguishes itself from them, as the enlightened fraction that should lead the rest. This Leninist view gradually mutated into a different form in the past two decades, and it comes even close to a certain misplaced republicanism relocated within an oligarchic regime. The view that the mass need to be enlightened is transformed into a distrust of populism, something that can be taken as a particular form of contempt of the poor, as Magnus put it. In other words, it is still a question of an enlightened few ruling an unenlightened population, but this apparent similarity merely disguises a fundamental transformation. Which is why, I think, one always gets a strange sense that certain voices (surely not all) that materialize in Peoples Daily and Global Times have a peculiar elite sensibility, a certain aspiration to nobility, an effort to distance the elite from the general population, and an insistence that the state should stay above society and direct it from top down. One only needs to recall Hannah Arendts discussion of French republicanism to find an uncanny correspondence. I think this is not unrelated to the spread in recent years among some Chinese intellectuals the pursuit of Great Book education that emulates what was proposed by Leo Strauss and his students in the American academy. American conservatism moves into Chinas intellectual scene and its strange bedfellow is the CCP who now begins to worship Confucius. Somewhat comically (Id rather think of it as a farce) the old vanguard of the proletariats is now busy remaking itself into a philosopher-king. I think we need to place CY Leungs words within this context as well, though surely HK has its own context. But I do think the fact that he can say this with the support of the CCP does mean that we need to contextualize this absurd remark within the general Chinese context. 2. I engaged in a heated debate with some leftist intellectuals (leftist as it is understood in the West) in Hong Kong during the early phase of the movement, and a common view in this circle is that the movement is completely and entirely of a bourgeois nature, though certain of its marginalized fractions might bear a different goal in mind. This is partially justified, as one irony of the current movement is that it took its name from the previous Occupy Central movement (the one that pit its tents on the ground floor of HSBC headquarter in HK) yet had almost completely sidestepped the issue of class and capitalism. But there is also an interesting point that I think we need to insist upon so as not to hasten to a conclusion about the current Occupy. The nature of a social movement -- whether it is merely a bourgeois political reform or a more radical social revolution in the Marxist sense -- is not determined by the intention of its major leaders, nor by the will of the collectivity whose passion and power it has elicited. Rather, a social movement does not and will not have an inside to it; it is always and will always be socially mediated and overdetermined from the outside. Its nature cannot be reduced to any individual or collective will, but must be analyzed on a strictly social basis -- which is why I disagree with the Left (I think they are merely old Left) in their judgment that the current movement is completely of a bourgeois nature. I do think the remark of CY Leung has shown that the current Occupy does bear the potential of functioning as a catalyst for social revolution whose radical consequence might not have been anticipated by anyone. We need to understand the particular social formation in which it broke out in order to decide the specific nature of the movement itself. This is not a time to celebrate yet another manifestation of direct democratic expression; this is a time for the reiteration and development of first-rate social theory in the tradition of Marxism and the Frankfurt school. 3. There is a small detail which was prominent for a brief moment at the beginning of the current Occupy yet got lost as the movement advances. The initial Chinese translation for Umbrella Revolution is taiyangsan yundong -- “sunshade umbrella movement,” a direct homage to taiyanghua xueyun (sunflower student movement) in Taiwan, and a gesture to show the attempt to link Hong Kong to Taiwan in this democratic movement. We all know that the sunflower movement is explicitly against the alliance of Chinese transnational capitalism and political authoritarianism (both in China and in Taiwan), and for a brief moment, the homage to Taiwan did bear the potential of more directly engaging the issue of class and capitalism. But as the name changed into yusan yundong, this link is lost and the movement becomes increasingly localized within Hong Kong, though there continue to be efforts to link Hong Kong to other parts of the world. But these acts are largely confined within a metaphorical and imitative relation -- a wall of posts outside the HK government at Admiralty, for instance, is named the Lennon Wall after the wall with the same name in Prague. The mode of relation is comparison and emulation instead of articulation, the latter, I think, being a critical way of conceptualizing the current configuration of global capital. Hope this is not too much, and if these comments are at all helpful, I will be most glad. all the best,
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 10:27:44 +0000
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