Javanese Mystical and Marxist Dialectics - Paul Stange

History is seen as a dual process of emerging repression and self-consciousness, ofMind. According to this image, freedom is not the permission to remain subject toforces beyond the self, but the negation of apparent reality and the return to innocentself-consciousness and true harmony with the external processes of the natural order.3 Complete freedom then comes through the denial of man's alienation from himself.In trying to bring Hegel down to earth, Marx focused on the labor process as thebasic mechanism of alienation. To him, the essential contradiction of capitalisticsociety, and the ultimate source of its projected historical negation, lay in theoppression of the workers by management and machines. Oppression resulted fromthe fact that workers dedicate the whole of their being to a productive process whichthey neither controlled, owned, nor gained from. While workers earned onlyaccording to the needs of subsistence, capitalists gained from the exchange value ofthe products and thus expanded profits continuously. 4 As Marx saw it, the verythoroughness of capitalistic oppression would be the source of its demise. Theproletariat became the first historical agent having nothing to lose and everything togain through the transformation of the productive system by subordinating it to theneeds of general rather than individual welfare - it seemed to him to be the first classwhich had no selfish interests and thus its development became a measure ofprogress toward socialism. 5 The peasantry played a marginal role and necessarilyfollowed the lead of either the bourgeoisie or proletariat. 6 The marginal role of thepeasants in Europe helps explain this conclusion, but at the same time his argumentwas that there was no natural cohesion among peasants, no cohesion such as theindustrial process imposed on workers. Thus the peasantry would remain isolatedand reactionary; the workers could become organized and revolutionary.While Hegel and Marx provided an analysis, Lenin and Mao began its translationinto practice. In primarily agrarian Russia, the revolution remained an urbanphenomenon, but Lenin had a long standing concern with the development of aworker-peasant alliance. Then while Marx had felt that revolutions in backwardnations would have to progress through a bourgeois phase, Lenin argued that theycould progress directly to socialism. 8 Both Marx and Lenin believed that thepeasantry would play a greater role in backward than in advanced nations, butneither thought that role would be active.In China the focus on peasantry was some time in emerging, but the shift in focuswas pronounced when it came. Li Ta-chao, one of the founders of Chinese