Rong Jian, "What Does Wang Hui Mean?"

Rong Jian, “What Does the ‘Philosophy of Victory’ of the Revolutionary Mean?  Criticizing Wang Hui’s ‘Revolutionary Personality’ and ‘Philosophy of Victory’”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Rong Jian (b. 1957) was a rising star in China’s academic world whose career was cut short by the reaction to the Tian’anmen demonstrations in 1989.  In the years immediately preceding the demonstrations, Rong, who earned his M.A. degree in 1986 from China Renmin University’s Institute of Marxism-Leninism Developmental History 中国人民大学马列发展史研究所 had published essays such as “On Democracy 民主论,” “Can the New Authoritarianism Work in China? 新权威主义在中国是否可行？” and “Opening up the Ownership System 论所有制的开放.” 

These writings, which had a considerable impact on China’s thought world, made Rong a target in the clampdown that followed Tian’anmen, and he abandoned his doctoral studies.  He subsequently went into real estate, and later into the art business, becoming a successful entrepreneur.  He began writing again some ten years ago, his wealth and independent status according him a freedom which most Chinese intellectuals can hardly dream of.  For a representative example of Rong’s work, see Gloria Davies’s translation of Rong’s “A China Bereft of Thought.”
 
The text translated here, a response to Wang Hui’s proposal in late April, 2020, to revive charismatic revolutionaries like Lenin in response to the death of the 20th century revolutionary impulse, speaks for itself.  Rong attempts neither a “fair” nor an “objective” reading of Wang’s text, which he attacks in terms of style, content, and and personal motivation.  To Wang’s suggestion that we remember and celebrate Lenin, Rong’s riposte is:  “And what about Stalin?”—a topic Wang studiously avoids as he preaches solely to the converted. 

Rong explains Wang’s intellectual incoherence by reference to his moral vacuity:  under the pretext of “rethinking the revolution,” Wang is in fact offering a plan for a prince that will sell other intellectuals (as well as China’s people in general) down the river as power is concentrated in a great leader with a “revolutionary personality” and a “philosophy of victory.”  Rong makes the same point even more aggressively in a separate text published a few days later entitled “Wang Hui’s ‘Heidegger Moment?” where he compares Wang Hui’s relationship to the Chinese Communist Party to Heidegger’s relationship to the Nazis. 

Thanks to Geremie Barmé for sending me this text just hours after it appeared (and then disappeared).

N.B. When the word leader appears in bold type in this translation, it is to signal that the author has used the Chinese word lingxiu 领袖, which often has a particular meaning.  See the introduction to Wang Hui's text for more information. 
 
Translation
 
Who is Commemorating Lenin’s Birthday?
 
This year is the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, a moment worth commemorating for those who still believe in communism, and especially for Russian communists.  A memorial event was to have brought together once again the old and young fogeys 遗老遗少 of world communism under Lenin’s banner, awakening their historical memory of the October Revolution.  A year ago, Gennady Zyuganov (b. 1944), the General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party, in a speech delivered at a meeting that was to prepare the event, linked Lenin’s name to the great October Revolution, to Soviet industrial success, to the victory in the great war of national salvation, to Soviet achievements in space, and even to the theory of mutually assured mutual nuclear destruction, arguing that Russia during the Soviet era “made the greatest achievements, had the strongest state power, had the fairest social and political environment, and achieved the greatest victory in world history.”  He added finally that “those who today attempt to belittle the era of Lenin and Stalin will suffer a crushing defeat.” 

Based on his belief in the victory of Lenin’s communist cause, Zyuganov proclaimed that on the occasion of the commemoration of Lenin’s 150th birth, “We will come to the [international labor day] parade in May under the banner of victory, which is the banner of October, the banner of Lenin.  This is sacred to us.  Any attempt to silence the people and to rewrite history is futile.” 
 
Sadly enough, as the date for the event approached, the coronavirus pandemic inopportunely put an end to what was to be a splendid ceremony.  Apparently, Communist representatives from more than 140 countries had planned to attend, an indication that the Leninist cause remains broadly international in the contemporary world.  Of course, cynics suspect that the coronavirus problem was perhaps a lucky accident, because in past years, activities commemorating Lenin, the Russian Communists’ mobilization efforts did not generate much excitement, and the parades looked more like a collection of nostalgic senior citizens strolling around Red Square, and it is unlikely that the fact that this year was the 150th anniversary would have changed things much. 
 
At least one dilemma that the Russian Communists would have faced is that, when Zyuganov proclaimed, on behalf of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, that "Lenin is our strength, our knowledge, our banner," and when he singled out for particular praise Lenin’s contribution to Russian state institutions, he neglected to raise the factual question as to whether the institutions of the current Russian state represent a continuation of Lenin, or rather his betrayal. 

In April of 2015, a public opinion poll carried out by the Russian Levada Public Opinion Research Center on "Lenin’s role" revealed that nearly one-third (31%) of those interviewed believed that Lenin’s memory should be honored, but almost no one was nostalgic for the Leninist system itself.  What does this statistic tell us?  To my mind, it tells us that Lenin cannot be forgotten as a great figure in Russian history, and his successes and failures remain food for thought, but also that the Soviet path that he charted has long since turned into a dead end.
 
For the Chinese Communists, the importance of Lenin likely surpassed that in Russia long ago, because while he has been gradually forgotten in his homeland, Lenin’s portrait still hangs high in Tian’anmen Square, and Leninism, together with Marxism, remains even today the leading ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, included not only in the Party Constitution, but in the constitution of the Chinese state.  The Leninist cause suffered a major setback in Russia, but still prevails in China.  From this perspective, the Chinese Communists look to be the true inheritors of Leninist thought and the Leninist cause, and the great celebration of Lenin’s 150th birthday should thus have taken place in China. 
 
The paradox is that the CCP has no plans for such a commemoration, and no official texts on the affair have as yet appeared in official media.  Xinhua made a mere passing mention of commemoration activities in Russia.  This vaguely abnormal situation can surely be overlooked by the great masses of Chinese people, but for China’s Maoists, this is unbearable.  On April 23, the [Maoist] Utopia website 乌有之乡 [http://m.wyzxwk.com/] published the following:  “Today is the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth. However, apart from the few remaining leftist websites in the country that have published articles to commemorate the event, we have found no reports of genuine memorial activities in mainstream media reports.  Exceptions include the Shanghai Public Transportation Card Center in Huangpu district, Jiujiang road, which issued a Lenin memorial traffic card, and Beijing University, which held an online ‘Academic Forum Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of Lenin’s Birthday.’ While the impact of the coronavirus epidemic of course has made large gatherings difficult, the number and scale of events, on a huge occasion like that of the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, is inconsistent with Lenin’s consecrated status as a ‘patriarch.’”  The editors of Utopia concluded that “it is high time to take up Lenin's dagger once again, to puncture the pipe-dream of modern revisionism, and to rend asunder the various iron curtains of the imperialist clique.” 
 
Reading something like this, one wonders if normal people feel sad.  When the knife of Leninism, for which the people have long waited, is finally rescued from the dusty warehouse of history to take up its role once again as a sacred weapon, only to be treated by officials with disdain, is this Lenin’s sorrow?  Or is it instead the sorrow of Lenin’s Chinese disciples and followers?

So, the question is, who is commemorating Lenin? For those Maoists who continue to maintain their pure class spirit, building a new macro-theoretical narrative—as Lenin did with his endless speeches during the October Revolution—has always been a difficult undertaking.  Given their pathetic theoretical abilities and knowledge level, shaped by forty-year old Marxist-Leninist textbooks, they cannot possibly confer on Leninist thought the power to beguile the people under 21st century conditions.  They cannot find a way to bring Lenin’s soul back to life in today’s reality, and when they brandish Lenin’s banner, calling for the people to follow along, they immediately run into a situation like that in Marx’s Communist Manifesto, where he ridiculed “feudal socialism:”  “But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.”[2] 

The conundrum faced by today’s Maoists is not much better; they would like to bring back Lenin’s ideas by commemorating the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, but are prisoners of their poor imagination, crude language, and outdated notions, and are hence unable to reshape “Comrade Lenin” into a modern Internet celebrity.
 
Yet just when people started to think that prospects for a memorial activity were bleak, Professor Wang Hui’s essay made its grand entry.  Entitled “The Revolutionary Personality and the Philosophy of Victory—Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of Lenin’s Birth” (first published on the Beijing Cultural Review website on April 22), this clearly was an essay that had been prepared beforehand, and both the writer and the editor had great expectations for the piece, which raised the question: “Why Commemorate Lenin?” 

The introduction to the text puts it this way:  “April 22, 2020 is the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth.  Remembering Lenin as the coronavirus spreads throughout the world has a particular significance for our era and our current situation.”  Wang Hui, with his typical grand narrative style, may well by the sole person who can pull off such a lofty theoretical feat; looking at the entire roster of the Chinese left wing, including the Old Left, the Maoist Left, and the New Left, only Wang Hui may be up to the task of bringing “Comrade Lenin’s” soul back to life in the Chinese context.  This task, to put it frankly, consists of nothing less than recasting the revolutionary narrative in terms of China’s current political needs, calling new revolutionaries to the front lines, and reimagining a new era of revolutionary leadership.  In essence, it is exactly like a line from a poem of the Russian poet Maximilian Voloshin (1877-1932):  “The former slaves tired of their freedoms, and filled the streets with their complaints, demanding their chains.”
 
What is the “Revolutionary Personality?” 
 
Reading Wang Hui is not a walk in the park.  The logic of his prose, together with his word choice and style, always seek to bury the main point he is attempting to make in an obscure word salad, which appears to attempt either a Hegelian dialectic, or an imitation of Žižek’s style, a favorite pose of many Chinese New Left writers.  I can’t help but wonder if this is an expression of deep thought, or rather a narrative strategy of “demanding chains,” in which the more you hide, the more you expose.  In any event, the first task in criticizing Wang Hui is to remove his core ideas from those word salads, including getting rid of the decorative "redundancies" found in his extensive quotations, so that we can take a look at what his “revolutionary personality” means in the context of reshaping Lenin or the image of other Lenin-like revolutionaries.
 
Wang Hui starts his essay by invoking a pronouncement by the French philosopher Alain Badiou (b. 1937), to the effect that the major constituents of the second sequence of the communist order following the Paris Commune, which lasted from the 1917 October Revolution through the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, (and which included, basically, Marxism, the worker’s movement, Leninism, vanguard parties, and socialist countries) are no longer effective, and that attempting to revive them is useless.  Looking solely at Badiou’s pronouncement, he is completely correct.  The Russian October Revolution and the Chinese Cultural Revolution have both entered the historical archives of revolutionary experience as failures. 
 
But the reason Wang Hui invokes Badiou, an extreme Maoist, is not to prove once again that “the political portrait of the contemporary world has yet to shake off the shadow of the failure of the 20th century socialist experiment.”  Instead, Wang wants to argue that after the retreat of vanguard parties and large-scale class movements,  we must probe and continue the 20th century political heritage, which he characterizes as “achieving hegemony despite unfavorable conditions.” His goal is to overcome the weakness of leadership, the lack of left-wing theoretical strategic discussion, and the absence of debate about the correct “line” to follow in terms of future development. 
 
What does this opening statement mean?  Clearly, that while Badiou admits that the second sequence of Communism is over, Wang Hui still wants to argue that studying—and building on­—Lenin’s historical experience of seizing Party and state hegemony under adverse conditions will make it possible to revive the socialist cause on the world stage, a possibility rooted in the “revolutionary personality.”
 
What is the “revolutionary personality?”  Wang Hui invokes a good number of revolutionaries—Gramsci, Vera Zasulich, Trotsky, Li Dazao, Lu Xun—and, basing himself of their understanding of the revolution and of themselves, makes the following generalization:  “The revolutionary personality has a unique power, which he can employ to propel the revolution forward even when social and political conditions are not ripe.”  In other words, revolution is created by revolutionaries, and even if a revolution fails, as long as revolutionary personalities continue to exist, revolutions can still be created and achieve success even under “adverse conditions.”  Would not this mean that Badiou’s arguments about the failure of revolution are a serious rightist error?
 
How can the “revolutionary personality” attain such superhuman power?  One of Wang Hui’s chief sources of inspiration is the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937).  In Gramsci’s view, the leader imagined in Machiavelli’s The Prince constitutes a new national prince, something that had not existed in history but was instead a pure theoretical abstraction, the symbol of a leader 领袖 or an ideal commander.  The reason for this is that the strength of the “modern prince,” or the “myth-prince,” comes not from his person, but instead from a “political party.”  “The political party is the soul of modern politics,” and it is only by employing the strength of a political party that “those historico-political actions which are immediate and imminent, characterized by the necessity for lightning speed, can be incarnated mythically by a concrete individual.”[3] 
 
As convoluted as this already seems, Wang Hui goes further.  He does not follow Gramsci’s logic to the conclusion that, constrained by party politics, the “revolutionary personality” cannot be a heavenly steed, soaring at will across the skies 天马行空.  Instead, Wang Hui highlights a difference between himself and Gramsci:  for Wang, the revolutionary personality has a character that transcends party politics, a judgement we have often seen over the years in Wang’s repeated criticisms of the “nationalization of political parties 政党国家化,” the “bureaucratization of political parties,” the “depoliticization of political parties,” and the “opportunism of political parties 政党机会主义.” 

In Wang Hui’s view, the preconditions for the existence of genuine political parties no longer exist, which he proves by reference to the Russian and the Chinese revolutions:  “Those individuals who mythically fulfilled their missions at critical moments were both leaders of political parties and yet cannot be equated with those political parties; in many critical historical moments, Lenin, Mao Zedong, and other revolutionary leaders found themselves opposed to this political party and its guiding line, and only achieved hegemony after protracted and sometimes bitter theoretical and political struggles.” 
 
To further examine the close, yet distant, relationship between a political party and its leader, Wang Hui draws a comparison between the politics of Nepal and Venezuela, two countries led by left-wing political parties, arguing that the former has a fairly mature political party but lacks a strong leader, while the latter had a strong leader (Chavez) but lacks a mature political party.  In Wang Hui’s view, these two different political relationships between political parties and leaders suggest the lack of an organic association among the leader, the political party, and the people, a relationship lacking necessary tension and interaction.  The same situation also appeared in China under Mao Zedong when Mao, in his latter years, saw the entire political party system as his enemy, “illustrating that in particular periods or moments, there can be deep tensions and even antagonism or separation between revolutionaries—even revolutionary leaders—and their party systems.”
 
Given the existence of deep tensions, antagonisms, and even conflicts between political parties and revolutionaries, the superhuman strength displayed by the revolutionary personality cannot be fully explained by the logic of political parties, and the revolutionary personality has its own particular logic which develops a mythic power.  We can sum up Wang’s argument as follows:  
 
First, a revolutionary is simply a revolutionary, a statement Wang borrows from Trotsky’s appraisal of the Russian poet Vera Zasulich (1849-1919).  Trotsky argued that the notion of “revolutionary,” when applied to Zasulich, possessed an independent meaning that transcended concepts of class, because she was neither a proletarian revolutionary, nor a bourgeois revolutionary, but simply a revolutionary.  Wang Hui also cities Li Dazhao’s remarks concerning similarities between Lenin and Sun Yat-sen:  that their revolutionary personalities had the capacity to transcend class interest.
 
Second, a revolutionary struggles constantly, or this is how I would summarize Wang’s argument.  Wang argues that Lenin’s leadership style was embodied in continual theoretical struggles and struggles over the proper line.  He cites Lenin:  “Internal party struggle gives the party strength and vitality, and when a party is unclear about itself and its boundaries, this is the clearest sign of the weakness of a party; parties consolidate themselves by purging themselves.”  He also provides a long list of Lenin’s enemies within the Party:  Bernstein, Plekhanov, Alexander, Potresov, Maslov, Zinoviev, Kautsky, Luxembourg, Trotsky, Bukharin, Stalin.
 
Third, revolutionary hegemony is embodied in both “[political] domination 统治” and in “spiritual and moral leadership,” which is how Wang Hui sums up Gramsci’s views of the relationship between hegemony and thought.  The point here is to stress that the hegemony of the party is not embodied solely in the seizure of political power, but also in the process by which an “advanced political party” establishes “spiritual and moral leadership,” as well as cultural hegemony.  Wang insists that “revolutionary leadership also emerges in the course of this process, serving the political purpose of remodeling the political party.”  To put it bluntly, revolutionaries must be both political leaders and ideological leaders, joining together moral orthodoxy 道统, political orthodoxy 政统, and intellectual orthodoxy 学统.
 
Fourth is the revolutionary personality’s “second nature第二天性,” which Wang Hui borrows from one of Trotsky’s appraisals of Lenin.  In Trotsky’s view, the reason Lenin was able to become history’s greatest revolutionary was ultimately because Lenin always saw the link between a particular situation and the larger strategic picture.  In other words, Lenin displayed the “historical judgement” of a revolutionary who can transcend the capacity of ordinary people, sensing for example which class is key at what moment, the key point of a specific decision, the direction in which history is moving.  It was precisely because he possessed this “sense of history” that Lenin was able to achieve the breakthrough of  “first establishing socialism in one country” by exploiting a “weak link” in an era of international imperialism. 
 
Applying this to Mao, the victory of China’s revolution also depended on Mao’s first exploiting China’s “weak link”—establishing separate armed communities [i.e., rural soviets] in poor marginal areas.  This leads Wang Hui to add that the “second nature” of a revolutionary personality is not an abstract internationalism, but is instead rooted in a “deep nationalism,” allowing Wang to defend the Russian and Chinese revolutions against the internationalism advocated by Marx. 
 
Fifth, a revolutionary is always a revolutionary, and a revolutionary never shrinks before failure, an argument Wang Hui takes from Lu Xun and Li Dazhao.  Lu Xun saw Sun Yat-sen as an “everlasting revolutionary:”  “When he stepped out into the world, it was for the revolution, and when he failed, it was still for the revolution.”  “He was a complete, eternal revolutionary.  No matter what he was working on, everything was about the revolution.  No matter how in the future people seek fault, or ignore him, he was finally completely about the revolution.”  Li Dazhao was of the same opinion, arguing that both Sun Yat-sen and Lenin were revolutionaries who did not fear failure.  Revolution, failure, revolution again, failure again, until at last victory is achieved.  Is this Wang Hui using the revolutionary lives of other people to paint a moral picture, or is it instead Wang’s own utopian imagination?
 
Using Gramsci, Zasulich, Trotsky, Li Dazhao and Lu Xun, Wang Hui gathers together comments about revolutionaries scattered in the writings of these historical figures, and carefully weaves them into a grand narrative about the revolutionary personality.  This is a kind of 21st century worship of a revolutionary, of those leaders with revolutionary personalities, who possess extraordinary strength, who throw off the constraints of classes and parties, and who establish their hegemony through long-term, unremitting intra-party struggle, a leadership that includes both political rule as well as spiritual and moral leadership. 

Such leaders have a keen and accurate "sense of the era", and are good at unleashing their "imminent 间不容发 [from Gramsci]" creativity and initiative in critical moments of history, exploiting the weakest links of the world system. They can achieve new revolutionary mobilization even when the revolution itself is at low ebb.  After a complete failure, they launch a new revolutionary project. The revolution has become the revolutionary’s everlasting mission, and the revolutionary always pursues it. 
 
Surely Wang’s fabrication of something very much like a revolutionary myth is not meant solely to defend those successful or failed revolutionaries of the past.  At a time when the heritage of revolution has been erased by virtually every civilized country in the world, even in Russia, the home of Lenin and the cradle of the October Revolution, do Communist Party members such as those as represented by Gennady Zyuganov continue to play the role of revolutionaries?  Under 21st century conditions, in whose body will the revolutionary soul finally alight?
 
 What is a “Philosophy of Victory?”
 
What kind of philosophy provides the basis for the extraordinary abilities and spiritual capacities of the revolutionary personality?  For Wang Hui, it is a “philosophy of victory,”  which he explains as follows:  “’A philosophy of victory’ is a kind of historical reflection produced by integrating the self completely into the collective struggle, combined with the strategic reflection of the revolutionary agent.  Sacrifice and tragedy are subsumed into a successful program of action, which thoroughly dispenses with the feelings of loneliness, boredom, dejection, and hopeless exhaustion found in literature and thought since the May Fourth era. 

A ‘philosophy of victory’ is born out of the cruel and tragic history of collective struggle, and takes the form of strategic reasoning, in the face of failure, which finds the road to victory.  Failure is not only the mother of success, but also the logical starting point of a ‘philosophy of victory.’  Starting from failure means finding new ‘weak links’ from a position of difficulty, seeking out strategies to defeat the enemy, and, in the process of creating this new situation, remaking the relationship between the self and the enemy.  In fact, the entire process is one of reconstructing the self and reconstructing agency.”
 
Taken on its own, Wang Hui’s explanation of his “philosophy of victory” looks to be nothing more than a motivational description of the adage that “failure is the mother of success,” and while the description is gussied up in seemingly profound language, one suspects that in fact he is simply moving from the “Russian context” to the “Chinese context,” from Lenin to Mao, and ultimately to the context of contemporary China, because, as he notes, “the real reason to commemorate Lenin is obviously not to engage in intellectual nostalgia, but rather to attempt, as we formulate a redefinition and explanation of a revolutionary view of history, to explore in concrete terms the ‘new political, economic, and social possibilities’ brought forth by the revolutionary personality, new possibilities which urgently need a new philosophy, which in fact will be a ‘philosophy of victory.’” 

The first question that a “philosophy of victory” must face is that of the historical failures of revolutionaries, especially those irredeemable failures, a historical fact that Wang Hui acknowledges:  “As a revolutionary actor, Lenin’s policy changes also occurred in the context of a series of successes and failures, and particularly failures.” 
 
But what is interesting is that Wang Hui has no interest in exploring the true reasons for the failure of the Leninist cause, and seeks only to provide a new explanation of the meaning of “failure” from the logic of his supposed “philosophy of victory.”  In Wang’s own words:  “While historians, philosophers, and grieving observers look back on the 20th century from the perspective of failure, should we not also think about the completely new understandings of failure and victory that were born out of, developed with, and transformed the consciousness of the century?”  Let us take a look at Wang Hui’s completely new explanations of failure and victory.
 
In developing his “philosophy of victory,” Wang Hui shifts, in the historical facts his explanation relies on, from Russia to China, perhaps because he has no choice but to look squarely at the failure of the Soviet and East European systems, the most important historical event of the twentieth century.  The collapse of the Soviet Union clearly illustrates the total failure of the Soviet cause launched by Lenin, and recasting this failure in the light of Wang’s “philosophy of victory” and presenting it as the starting point for an eventual victory, is hardly an easy theoretical task.  

As an inheritor of the Russian revolution, China has continued to follow the revolutionary path, and thus can play an exemplary role in providing a factual basis for Wang’s "philosophy of victory."  Consequently, Wang Hui argues that “the Chinese revolution has developed a rich body of thought about failure and victory,” the principle embodiments of which are found in Lu Xun’s “literature of resisting despair 反抗绝望的文学,” and Mao Zedong’s “philosophy of going from victory to victory 从胜利走向胜利的哲学.”  In Wang’s view, these are two literary/philosophical explanations of the “philosophy of victory” that grow out of the Chinese revolutionary process’s experience of hope and despair, failure and victory.
 
Why is Lu Xun’s “literature against despair” the literary version of Wang’s “philosophy of victory?”  Wang Hui explains that Lu Xun rejected a literature of optimism, whose error was in abandoning the analysis of the causes of failure, and pinning its hope on "the inevitability of victory or on an abstract future.”  "By burying ‘hope’ under ‘falseness’ and confirming the reality of ‘despair,’ a literature of optimism blocks the future dimension contained in a ‘rebellion against despair.’”

“A ‘literature of hope’ or of  ‘optimism’ is a mere fantasy, while a literature that resists despair or a “philosophy of victory” takes action.”  This is rather difficult to understand, and if we translate the metaphors into plain language, it probably means:  a “literature that resists despair” looks at hope from the standpoint of despair, and a “philosophy of victory” looks at victory from the standpoint of failure.  Despair is more important than hope, and failure is more important than victory.
 
In Wang Hui’s view, the Chinese revolution is the most compelling proof of the “philosophy of victory” and its most successful example in practice.  The birth of this philosophy can be traced to texts that Mao Zedong wrote during the war:  “Why is it that Red Political Power Can Exist in China?” “The Struggle in the Jinggang Mountains,” “A Single Spark Can Light a Prairie Fire.”  After the success of the revolution there appeared two logics, “imperialist logic” and the “people’s logic.”  Imperialist logic was “make trouble, fail, make trouble again, fail again,” and the people’s logic was “struggle, fail, struggle again, fail again, struggle again, until victory.” 

From this Wang Hui argues that “the true measure of failure is not failure itself, but instead whether the logic of struggle continues to exist.”  “’Victory’ is not an end in itself, but rather the fact of not being crushed by failure, the process itself of continuing to struggle.”  “A ‘philosophy of victory’ is optimistic because it is always in a dialectical relationship with the hardships it faces, it is always in a dialectical relationship with the strategic actions rooted in this understanding.”
 
It is precisely because of its grounding in a “philosophy of victory" that every failure, setback, and upset in the revolutionary process is nothing but a momentary downturn in a process that will inevitably lead to the final victory.  Wang Hui also emphasizes that eternal revolutionaries are also revolutionaries defined by constant failure.  Does this then mean that the revolutionary’s “philosophy of victory” is a philosophy that cannot fail?  If this kind of victorious logic can be made to work, this would mean that the collapse of the Soviet and East European systems was not necessarily the failure of the Leninist cause, because in the longue durée of communism that Wang Hui imagines, not only can new interpretations be made of the failure of the 20th century socialist experiment—i.e., that this was not a failure, but a failure leading to victory—which will only strengthen our belief in China’s inevitable victory in reviving the socialist cause of the 21st century. 
 
Hence, when Wang Hui borrows Lu Xun’s critical assessment of “optimistic literature” or “hopeful literature,” he does not follow the principle of logical self-consistency, and remove all “hope” and “optimism” from his “philosophy of victory.” Quite the opposite, he clings throughout to an optimistic viewpoint of “from one victory to another” or “the future is glorious, while the path is torturous.”  The question is:  how real is this optimism?
 
Who can realize the “philosophy of victory?”  Sure enough, this is the mission of the revolutionary, or in Wang Hui’s words, “revolutionaries embody the personalization of the themes of ‘resisting despair’ and ‘onward toward victory.’”  He even approves of Gramsci’s appraisal of revolutionaries:  they are indeed near “mythic characters,” who, with their mythic ways can accomplish great historical changes, because they are eternal revolutionaries, revolutionaries who do not fear failure.  Their endless fighting spirit endows them with tremendous energy,  they unremittingly discover the future, and constantly reshape history as they hang between the state of failure and enemy forces. 

Hence Wang Hui’s final explanation is not hard to understand, and the reason why he comes back to the question of the revolutionary personality, one of the political heritages of the 20th century, is by no means to promote the worship or the role of the individual, but instead because in the era of "post-revolution" and "post-party," the political system built around party politics has fallen into a general crisis. When faced with the problem of  "what to do?" Wang’s choice is to call for the rebirth of a "mythic figure" imbued with a revolutionary personality.
 
Even as he repeatedly returns to the mythic function of the revolutionary personality, Wang Hui does not forget “the people,” and movingly argues that “the overall goal of a ‘philosophy of victory’ is to satisfy the people and exercise their will.”   At the same time, he does not really address the questions of the form of the relationship between the revolutionary and the people, or whether the mythic function of the revolutionary requires the people’s special investment or permission, and whether the revolutionary’s unstinting struggle will necessarily create a fair and rational world for the people. 

This is because Wang Hui believes that the revolutionary and the people share a natural unity, and the reason that a political leader with a fully revolutionary personality can go to war with his own political party is because the leader and the people constitute a community.  When Mao challenged the entire political party system during the Cultural Revolution and called for unity with the people, Wang Hui sees this as having symbolic significance, illustrating that “those leaders (and others) with revolutionary personalities are precisely those that facilitate the self-renewal of political parties, and rebuild the political power of the relationship between political parties and the people.” 
 
From this perspective, the mythic character of the revolutionary and of the people are part of the same myth, and when a revolutionary appears as the leader of a political party or the ruler of a country, the mythic character of the “people” becomes an abstract symbol enclosed in quotation marks, or in other words, the myth of the people serves only to complement the myth of the revolutionary.  In fact, when Wang Hui talks about “bringing the leader, the political party and the people to form a close relationship and promote a dynamic relationship with each other,”  he is talking about something that has never happened in the history of international communism, because the people have never had the wherewithal to sign off on the "revolutionary personality" or "the philosophy of victory."
  
What Does the “Victory of a Revolutionary” Mean?
 
The era of the 20th century revolutions was, to put it more precisely, the era of socialist revolutions.  In the half-century following the victory of Lenin’s October Revolution, socialist revolution spread throughout the world, not only producing the post-war Soviet-East European camp, but also becoming the imposing socialist revolutionary movement embraced by China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and many countries in Africa and Latin America, at the same time giving birth to a large number of professional revolutionaries working for the socialist revolution.  This genealogy of revolutionaries includes Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Tito, Walter Ulbricht, Ho Chi minh, Kim Il Song, and Castro, as well as the many other socialist leaders who appeared throughout the Third World. 

As Gramsci suggested, the “hegemony” they achieved in seizing parties and states illustrates that they were victorious revolutionaries, who led the progress of the revolution in their countries and built their countries’ institutions after the success of the revolution.  As for their personal gifts, they fit Wang Hui’s generalizations in the sense that they possessed a strong revolutionary spirit and “revolutionary personalities,” as well a kind of determination and almost mythical energy that surpasses those of most people, and it does not seem to be an exaggeration to praise them as eternal revolutionaries who were not afraid to fail. 
 
However, those who lived in the 20th century also witnessed the end of the process of socialist revolution led by revolutionaries of all stripes and sizes, as well as the demise of revolutionary myths, including revolutionaries that the people had always looked up to but who were also pulled down from the altar.  In the face of this immense historical change—from the flourishing of socialism to its demise—Wang Hui is attempting to build a "philosophy of victory" to transcend the sense of defeatism that permeates the left-wing world of Europe, and is using the concept of the "revolutionary personality" to summon new revolutionaries to save revolutionary party politics, which is on its deathbed.  We can understand his motive.  The question is:  can such a new revolutionary narrative offer a redefinition or a new explanation of the history of 20th century socialism? 
 
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, no one could have foreseen that such a huge Red empire and its constituent pieces would fall apart overnight, and faced with such an unprecedented historical occurrence, any serious historian would ask:  what were the reasons that brought about the self-destruction of what appeared to be an incomparably powerful state machine?  The first question he would want to discuss is “why did this system fail?” 
 
For Wang Hui, however, the question of “why did it fail?” becomes instead “did it really fail?”  According to his “philosophy of victory” the failure of the 20th century socialist experiment does not mean the failure of the Leninist cause launched in the October Revolution, because even if the Soviet system has completely disappeared in Russia, in the longue durée of communism, the Chinese version continues to move forward.   Or, as in local opera, “only socialism can save China” becomes “only China can save socialism.”  This is why, from Wang Hui’s perspective, the heritage of the 20th century socialist revolution is worth saving, and this heritage cannot be defined as one of defeat.  On the contrary, it should be seen as the starting point from which the revolutionary moves forward to achieve final victory.
 
To read failure as victory and as a new strategy of theoretical mobilization is of course possible, but what is the relationship of this to serious historical research?  Could it be that, following the logic of the "philosophy of victory," the many undoubted failures that occurred throughout history can be erased in one stroke?  In fact, regarding the lessons of the history of the October Revolution, reflection and research on the failure of the systems in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe not only started long before the collapse of the USSR, but began within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.  In his essay, Wang Hui repeatedly cites Trotsky to prove his points about Lenin’s revolutionary personality, but why doesn’t he cite Trotsky’s 1936 volume on The Revolution Betrayed? 
 
As Lenin’s fellow comrade-in-arms and creator of the Red Army, Trotsky was without a doubt a thorough-going revolutionary, and his revolutionary personality was much like Lenin’s.  Lenin even considered naming Trotsky as his successor, but in the course of a bitter inner-Party struggle—something that Wang Hui sees as a vital part of forging a revolutionary personality—Trotsky was defeated by Stalin and forced into foreign exile, and ultimately died a violent death.  Based on his relationship with Lenin and his historical position within the party, Trotsky had personal experience with and profound reflections on the transformation and degeneration of the Bolshevik Party. 

In his book, he stated clearly:  “The Bolshevik party prepared and insured the October victory.  It also created the Soviet state, supplying it with a sturdy skeleton.  The degeneration of the Party became both cause and consequence of the bureaucratization of the state.”[4]  Nicolai Bukharin (1888-1938), another of Lenin’s comrades-in-arms and a determined revolutionary, also wrote feelingly as he faced of the "axe of the proletariat:"  “There are no people anywhere, and no class (if ever there was one) whose lives are more difficult than those living in the Soviet paradise.”[5] 
 
It was not only Party leaders who began to think about the serious flaws in the Soviet system; famous scientists and writers like Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) and Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) also stood up to express their serious dissatisfaction.  In a 1936 letter to the Soviet government, Pavlov wrote:  “You believe in world revolution, but this is futile.  What you are spreading in the civilized world is not revolution, but rather fascism, and you are spreading it effectively.  Before the existence of your government, there was no such thing as fascism.”[6]  At the moment of the October Revolution, Gorky, concerned about the Soviet government’s serious violations of freedom of speech, published an article in the review For the Motherland in which he noted that:  “The Soviet regime has replaced freedom of expression and freedom of the press with the most presumptuous and shameless mockery freedom of publication and expression.”[7] 
 
What was supposed to be a worker’s nation and a proletarian regime established by the October Revolution quickly transformed into an authoritarian machine and a bureaucratic structure, completely changing the basic notion of what the revolutionaries, first among whom was Lenin, thought that Soviet power would be.  Alexander Yakovlev (1923-2005), who served as the propaganda minister of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, wrote in his book, Time of Darkness--A Century of Worry in Russia:  “From this day forward, the song of hatred and vengeance will become an ode to the working class.”[8] 

The Bolshevik revolutionary Felix Dzerzhinsky (1877-1926) argued that the Bolsheviks’ historical mission was guided by hatred and revenge.  Under the guidance of such thought, Red Russia kicked off an era of struggle and terror, announcing the authorities’ three major strategic programs in the first three days of the revolution:  the "hate program", the "revenge program" and the "People's Public Enemy Program," and the Constitutional Democratic Party was immediately identified as a public enemy by the Soviet regime.  Dzerzhinsky published an open letter to the "working class" in August 1918, in which he said:  “Let the working class defeat the evil counter-revolutionary forces with mass terror!  Let the enemies of the working class know that anyone who dares to speak out against the Soviet regime will be immediately arrested and put into a concentration camp.”[9] 

The Bolshevik revolutionary Grigory Zinoviev (1883-1936) called the Soviet regime’s state terrorism, which was vigorously and publicly carried out in the name of “working class socialist humanism.”  In September of 1918 he pointed out that:  “In order to successfully fight our enemies, we should have our own socialist humanism. We should win over 90 million of the 100 million Russian residents ruled by the Soviet regime. As for the rest of them, we have nothing to say to them, and we should simply get rid of them.”[10]  In fact, Lenin proposed the same thing, clearly stating in an essay on “How to Organize Competition,” published in January of 1918:  “There are many ways to implement the ‘socialist golden rule’—one of which he called ‘executing the ten percent of those who are idle.’”[11] 
 
Looking at the history of the October Revolution from the time it was launched until it seized state power, the Bolshevik revolutionaries were indeed as Wang Hui described them, full of "revolutionary personality" and high revolutionary passion.  The Russian writer Roman Guli罗曼古利 [?] observed that the brutality, ruthlessness, and resolve of the Bolshevik revolutionaries in the struggle against the enemy far exceeded the terror unleashed against the reactionary by the Jacobins in the French Revolution, or the church authorities during the Spanish Inquisition.  For this reason, he called these “unprecedented revolutionaries" in Russia the Joseph Fouchés (1759-1820)[12] of the October Revolution.”[13] 
 
The reason why the Bolshevik revolutionaries could exert such a huge revolutionary energy once again accords with another of Wang Hui’s generalizations:  the association among the leaders, the political parties and people forged a close, dynamic relationship of mutuality, and those revolutionaries, from Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, down to Stalin, carried out their revolutionary will through the Bolshevik Party and even transformed the revolutionary will into a series of revolutionary actions.  At the same time, they inspired powerful populist forces from the bottom of the society through the mobilization, organization, participation, and particular actions of the party.

Following the call of the leaders and the integration of political parties, the "disorganized masses" ultimately came to play the historically creative role of what they call the “people.”  For this reason, in the heritage of the 20th century social revolution that Wang Hui is trying preserve, revolutionaries truly did play a decisive role, and in the absence of Lenin and other revolutionaries, in the absence of the Bolshevik Party that they founded, there clearly would have been neither the October Revolution in which millions participated, nor the Soviet regime that they subsequently established together.

Had the close association and the mutually supportive relationship among the leaders, the party, and the people continued, becoming a bottom-up relationship in terms of bestowing and surveying power, meaning that the people granted and supervised the power of the political party, and the political party elected and produced the leadership of the party, then the October Revolution and its Soviet regime perhaps would not have ended in failure.  In reflecting on the decline of the Bolshevik Party, Trotsky put it clearly:  “The prohibition of oppositional parties brought after it the prohibition of factions. The prohibition of factions ended in a prohibition to think otherwise than the infallible leaders. The police-manufactured monolithism of the party resulted in a bureaucratic impunity which has become the sources of all kinds of wantonness and corruption.”[14]

Therefore, in the actual relationship linking the leader, the party, and the people, the leader was not subject to any power constraints because he overrode the political party, and without exception evolved into a dictator or even a tyrant; and the party, because it overrode the people, without exception descended into corruption and bureaucratism; and the people existed only as an abstraction, rulers of their country only in name.
 
When Wang Hui mythologizes the “revolutionary personality,” he also mythologizes the struggles in which revolutionaries engage.  He argues that revolutionaries achieve hegemony within the Party through “cruel theoretical and political struggles,” which lends revolutionaries the legitimacy of a “philosophy of struggle,” or even an “aesthetics of struggle”—they experience an extraordinary pleasure and beauty in the struggle.  But Wang Hui is surely not unaware of the history of the Great Purge in the Soviet Union? 

This history was written in the blood and the lives of millions of people, including of course Lenin’s revolutionary comrades.  By 1936, Stalin was the only remaining member of the Politburo formed at the time of the October Revolution.  With the exception of Stalin, all of the executors of "Lenin's Will"--Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Pidarkov—had either been executed after three major show trials, or were assassinated.  Sergei Kirov (1886-1934), Stalin's close political ally, could not avoid his fated assassination by Stalin as his reputation in the party continued to rise. 

A large number of Red Army generals, including the famous Marshal Tukhachevsky (1893-1937), were shot on charges of treason after secret interrogations.  Of the 139 central members of the 17th National Congress of the CPSU in 1934, 89 were arrested and executed, and 1108 of the 1966 party representatives were "disappeared."  According to incomplete statistics, millions of workers, peasants, soldiers, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and writers died horrible deaths during the Great Purge.  In a letter addressed to the leaders of the next generation of the party before he was sent to death, Bukharin wrote:  “I am going to die.  I do not bow my head before the axe of the proletariat.  The axe of the proletariat should be without feeling, but it should also be pure.  There is nothing I can do before this evil machine, which functions like something out of medieval times, and employs its incredible power to concoct something out of lies and rumors.  Their actions are extremely arbitrary and arrogant.” 

Bukharin argued that: "These ‘all-powerful organs’ can turn any central committee member or party member into a traitor, terrorist, assassin, or spy.  If Stalin came to suspect himself, these organs would immediately find the evidence to prove his suspicions.”  To this end, he called on future party leaders:  “The mission entrusted to you by history is to unravel this mass of horrendous crimes, and in these terrible days, this mass is growing bigger and bigger, like a fire growing out of control, making it impossible for our Party to breathe.”[15]  Seventy years after the Great Purge, Bukharin’s appeal was finally answered.  On October 30, 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the "Butovo Killing Field," a memorial to the victims of the Great Purge located in the southern suburb of Moscow.  Putin said:  "Now it is finally time for everyone to realize that this is was national tragedy. We should always remember this historical lesson and not allow it to repeat itself. This is everyone’s responsibility.” 
 
The fratricidal killings within the ranks of the revolutionaries and the brutal and ruthless struggle within the Bolshevik Party constitute arguably the bloodiest page in the history the of international communist movement, but such tragedies have occurred in all countries bearing the name of socialism.  Is this what Wang Hui means when he talks about the “continual theoretical struggles and line struggles” that define a revolutionary’s leadership style?  To put it another way, is this the only manner in which a revolutionary can facilitate a political party’s self-renewal and build a flesh and blood relationship between the party and the people? 

Trotsky once said:  “Theory is not a check that can be cashed at any point in time.  If theory is proven wrong, then we have to correct it and repair its errors.”[16]  Wang Hui’s “philosophy of victory” is clearly one of these “theoretical checks,” which completely ignores the huge historical price that has already been paid, and asks that it be cashed again.  At a moment when the people are universally demanding a thorough reckoning of the histories of struggles between revolutionaries and between revolutions and the people, Wang Hui argues that this is a historical heritage of the 20th century socialist revolutionary experience that can be preserved.
 
What does the victory of a revolutionary mean?  Is it a leader with a revolutionary personality who achieves absolute hegemony over his political party?  Is it a revolutionary who strengthens his own hegemony through constant theoretical struggles within the party and through political struggles?  Is it a revolutionary who never fears failure and who dares to achieve the final victory on the basis of past failures?  Or is it a revolutionary who has indomitable strength because he has the support of the “people?”  Wang Hui seeks to provide an affirmative answer to these questions, and his comprehensive exposition of the “revolutionary personality” and the “philosophy of victory” hopes to arrive at a political decision in the current moment when we all are wondering “what is to be done.”  Will calling for the return of the revolutionary personality mean the return of the people’s savior?
 
For Wang Hui, history can be completely rewritten.  From a postmodern perspective, history as a field of study has no universally recognized methodology, no shared language of exchange, no techniques for verifying the truths and generalizations a historian may arrive at.  Consequently, Wang Hui has every right to use his “philosophy of victory” to recast the history of the failure of 20th century socialist as a step toward the history of 21st century victory.  It is equally Wang’s right as an historian to wash clean those chapters tainted by the blood of the revolutionaries and the people in the course of this history.  But the “truths” of history greatly outnumber the “truths” found in historians’ texts, and the facts of history will forever shape the field of historical study. 

As for Wang Hui and his efforts to graft Lenin’s soul onto the body of today’s politics, perhaps he can redefine and reexplain the October Revolution and Soviet history, perhaps he can reimagine the unity of the leader and the people, but he should also understand that the people will not forever remain an abstraction that proves the messianic nature of the revolutionary personality.  The people will finally take the stage at some “imminent” historical moment.  Why is it that no real man steps up when a great cause, claiming thousands participants, disintegrates in an instant? This is really a question of history, and I look forward to Wang Hui’s answer. 
 
Notes
 
[1] 荣剑, “革命者的胜利意味着什么？评汪晖的“革命者人格”和“胜利的哲学,” originally posted online on May 29, 2020.  The text has since been removed from the internet, but a pdf of the original Chinese text is available here.
 
[2] Translator’s note:  English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf  p. 28.
 
[3] Translator’s note:  English translation taken from http://abahlali.org/files/gramsci.pdf .
 
[4] Translator’s note:  Leon Trotsky, “The Revolution Betrayed,” English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ .
 
[5] Translator’s note:  quote taken from the Chinese translation of A. N. Yakovlev, Сумерки (Time of Darkness), 2003.
 
[6] Ibid.
 
[7] Ibid.
 
[8] Ibid.
 
[9] Ibid.
 
[10] Ibid.
 
[11] Ibid.
 
[12] Translator’s note:  Fouchet was known for the zeal displayed in executing the “enemies” of the French revolution.
 
[13] Translator’s note:  quote taken from the Chinese translation of A. N. Yakovlev, Сумерки (Time of Darkness), 2003.
 
[14] Translator’s note:  English translation taken from Trotsky, “The Revolution Betrayed,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/revbetray.pdf p. 58.
 
[15] Translator’s note:  Citations taken from the Chinese translation of Bukharin’s “Letter to a Future Generation of Party Leaders.”
 
[16] Translator’s note:  Leon Trotsky, “The Revolution Betrayed,” English translation taken from https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ .