 Conceptually, how do you do a socialist economics? How do you think and analyze an economics for and of socialism with concepts and categories that have been elaborated out of capitalism? How do you get beyond the price value problem? How do you get through the law of value and out the other side to something that doesn't describe capitalist economics? I'm Rebecca Carl. I teach history at NYU in New York. One of the reference points of my work is this Chinese economic thinker philosopher Wang Yanan. He's not a household name either in this country or in China, really, although in China, if he is known, he is known in one of two ways. He's known as the translator of Marx, Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 2, and 3, co-translator with a colleague of his, or he's known as the former president of Schaumann University in Fujian Province. Wang Yanan was trained in Hubei Province and then went to Japan and then Germany and then England. He became a Marxist in the late 20s and early 30s. He never joined the Communist Party, however, until the late 1950s under the pressure of the anti-rightist campaigns and so on during the Maoist period. The distinction I want to make is that he was an independent Marxist. He was a Marxist who did not have party discipline in mind, and he was a Marxist whose philosophical commitments were not about the seizure of state power and state policy, but about thinking through the problems of how to understand the concepts of economics in the context of Chinese history. He was very different from many of his compatriots at the time who either would say, economics is Western and therefore irrelevant for China, and on the other hand, saying China is backward because it does not measure up to Western economics. He said, that's all nonsense. What we really have to think about is how China, which is part of the capitalist world system, can be thought in the terms of classical economics, not because China is European, but because China is part of the world, his contemporary or his modern world. In the 30s and 40s and through the 50s, his major goal was to think about how concepts of economic practice could be used to think about China's past, present, and future. I wrote a book that uses his term for this conceptual ambiguity, which he called The Magic of Concepts. He didn't mean magic in Chinese, it's 概念的魔朽, and he didn't mean magic in terms of sorcery. He meant magic in terms of how concepts can illumine things that had remained secretive or unrevealed or concealed, and how in that illumination it's possible then to see a path out of the past into the present and into the future. The question about how to apply economic thinking to Chinese reality is a question that in that form Wang rejected. He wasn't asking how to apply, he was asking how to think Chinese reality in the terms of economics that connected China to the world. And so prior to Wang's interventions in the 30s and 40s, there had been a very long debate among leftist economists or leftist party economists and social scientists about what stage of history China was in, whether China was feudal, whether it was slave, whether China had ever had a slave phase, and this was the stagest version, the Stalinist five-stage version of Marxist analysis, that sort of vulgar Marxism of that stage theory where every history has to go through five stages, from primitive communism to slavery to feudal society, capitalism and then communism. And so there had been this huge debate called the Social History Debate in the 20s and 30s that had bled into the 30s into an economic crisis debate about what the state of agrarian crisis was. And these debates had become very, very doctrinaire and very vulgar, trying to specify with this very rigid formula where China was. And so one part of Wang's discussion was really trying to think about what does it mean when we call China feudal? Does it mean anything? And if it means something, what does it mean? And so part of it is very conceptual. He understands that these concepts are highly ideological. They carry with them a historical significance and an ideological valence that isn't value-neutral. And so that his whole quest was to break down the attempt by social scientists to think of concepts or as designations as value-neutral and to acknowledge that they have within them a politics and an ideology and then to reveal what that is, not in order to reject it, but to try to think it thoroughly through. And so while he never rejected the fact that China was feudal, he tried to think the question of feudalism in relation to China's forced entry into the global capitalist system after the 19th century and how the capitalist relations of production, capitalist relations of competition, how capitalist relations of ideology had transformed in part or in whole certain aspects of the Chinese economic reality as well as certain aspects of Chinese economic thought. And so that was one whole wing of his discussion. The other wing was disputing the early marginalists or the early Austrians and the way in which the whole idea that economics was a practice of individual consumption and individual choice-making and that this was adequate to an analysis of Chinese economic backwardness. And so this he rejected outright and he wrote a huge number of essays about the Austrian school and how one had to take it apart for its ideological presuppositions and then reject it in toto. And this was a confrontation he had with economists from the Shanghai School of Economics, which at the time was centered in Fudan University in the 30s. And so through the 30s and 40s he was concerned both with the overtly Marxist types of analyses that were beholden to stage theories and also then was also involved in rejecting the rightist or at least non-Marxist versions of either German historicism or Austrian theory, marginalism. The question of universalism versus exceptionalism was one that again he was very concerned to reject. He never rejected the idea that China had a unique history. Obviously China was Chinese and the uniqueness of that history had to be thought in relation to the universality of concepts that could name that uniqueness. In other words the uniqueness is only unique when put into a universal context, otherwise there's no relationship there. And so he really didn't have anything but pure contempt for economists who said that China was exceptional to the universal laws of economic thinking, economic conceptualization or economic practice. He was mortally humorous about this in fact. I mean he had turns of phrase that are very, very difficult to get at in English because they pun and they poke fun at the conceits of exceptionalism. But so his idea is that because Chinese are human, because Chinese interact in the world, because Chinese have these interactions, forced and otherwise, that they also participate in forms of universal practice. The ways in which those practices are manifested and expressed in China are necessarily Chinese. Not because they are culturally necessarily limited by Chinese-ness, but because they are historically conditioned by Chinese history. None of what Wang Yanan talked about in the 30s and 40s was resolved in that time. And in part that's because the Japanese invaded, the necessities of economic thinking had to turn towards total war and national survival. And then they had to turn towards civil war and the resolution of the political conflict in China in the late 40s. Wang Yanan was very involved through the 50s. These were very vital and important debates in the 50s about what is socialist economics. This wasn't about bean counting, it's not about statistics, it's not about how to grow the economy. As I said, Wang Yanan is not very much interested in policy. He's interested in pedagogy and in thinking. And so through the 50s, he was involved in a number of different debates over the law of value, the utility of law of value and so on. Those got shut down by political fiat in the 60s and they never got restarted. Wang Yanan died in 69 of an illness but also he was under pressure during the Cultural Revolution as the president of a university. In the 1980s and 90s, all in the rethinking of socialist economics in light of the rejoining of the global capitalist system, all of these issues re-emerge. And they re-emerge now with a complete erasure of the apprehension of the fact that any of it had been actually discussed earlier. And so even though some of the folks who were involved in the 80s and 90s debates, people like Shremu Chao and Sun Yefeng and so on, who become big figures in the 80s and 90s, they have repudiated all of the problems of thinking socialism as an antagonistic system to capitalism and are now trying to think socialism in conjunction with capitalism. And Wang Yanan gets rehabilitated. His name had been muddied because he was understood to be a rightist bourgeois economist and that has to do with political issues of the 50s and 60s. But he gets rehabilitated in the 80s only insofar as his reputation, his thinking is absolutely erased and forgotten. And so nobody really pays much attention to what he wrote or what he said. This is exemplified really by the fact that his son, Wang Rodin, is one of the major translators of Frederick Hayek in the after-school of economics. And when I talked to Wang Rodin, he was absolutely, he found it hilarious that I had rediscovered his father, but also that I would think that his father was at all interesting. So the repetitive nature of this is what in my book, Magic of Concepts, that's what fascinated me is that many of these issues had been aired and debated out in the 1930s and 40s and then took a turn in the 50s towards socialism, but by the 80s and 90s come back as a way of thinking about China's rejoining of the capitalist world and the new kinds of capitalism that China is going to elaborate in the post-mal period. And so the repetitive nature of it is not repetition as circular, but it's repetition with difference because obviously in the 80s and 90s, China is no longer in the global subjugated position it had been in in the 30s and 40s. I mean, China now is a fully sovereign nation with a fully capable government centralized and so on. However, much chaos it's in in the 80s trying to move out of the Maoist period, but nevertheless it's a it's a fully sovereign nation with diplomatic relations across across the world. And so the repetition is a repetition with difference.