LEO LEE
45
Philosophy Institute), and Hu Qiaomu, a member of the Party's
Central Committee and its preeminent theoretician, whose critique
was published in the official
People's Daily
on January 24, 1984. The
orthodox spokesmen charged that this humanistic view of Marxism
neglects the context of the economic "base" from which the concept
derives its meaning- that is, the phenomenon of capitalist exploita–
tion . This in turn questions whether alienation could exist in a
socialist society - where private ownership and capitalist exploita–
tion presumably no longer exist. As Hu Qiaomu stated, the ultimate
issue is whether humanism should be deemed an "ethical principle
and moral norm" (presumably a small part of Marxism, one of the
not-well-thought-out positions of the early Marx) or whether
humanism constitutes nothing less than a "world outlook" and a
theory of history.
If
the implications point toward the latter, then the
consequences would be tantamount to a denial of Marxism.
The theoretical verbosity on both sides, however, does not
disguise the elementary issue: the real target of the proponents of
alienation and humanism is not so much Marx as Mao: their
language is "Marxist," but it is the only way to get at the ultimate
source of the problem, Maoism. It was Mao Zedong who first laid
down the official critique of humanism (the sense of belief in "univer–
sal human nature") in his famous talks at the Yan'an Forum on Lit–
erature and Art in 1942. In his concluding remarks , he flatly
asserted that "human nature in the abstract, going beyond class,
does not exist"; it could be defined only in the concrete, in terms of
"class nature." Mao's opinion became the official canon: literature
had
to
be subjected to rigid class analysis, while humanism was
linked to "subjectivism" and "individualism," as bourgeois or reac–
tionary beliefs , to be purged from the writer's general "outlook."
When during the episode of the first "Hundred Flowers" in
1957 a number of writers, such as Ba Ren and Qian Gurong, began
to discuss humanism, they were castigated as rightists and silenced.
For the next two decades, humanism was almost a taboo subject.
It
is, therefore , no accident that one of the first anti-Maoist manifesta–
tions after his death in 1976 was the resurgence of humanism - with
Wang Ruoshui as its most articulate spokesman . And given this
historical context, it is not difficult to decipher the hidden meaning
in the following sentences from Wang: "For many years there has
been a prevailing notion, namely to reduce the totality of human
nature to class nature and to consider human nature in a class socie–
ty as equivalent to class nature; hence the relations between human
