Sorghum & Steel

by Chuang Collective

Genres: China, History

Unknown Binding

Reviews

[Fei · Rating 3 out of 5]

Academic style writing on pre and post communist revolution China, with some first person narratives/interviews of workers. some interesting insights on how and why organized movements came to be and what is on the horizon for workers.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm sympathetic to their political orientation, but often found myself annoyed at their methodological stances, eg. non-mode of production thesis, China was not a nation, identification of the Chinese proletariat under socialism solely with "proto-proletarian temporaries, rusticates, apprentices and worker-peasants," and some other things that seemed straight out of the Endnotes Collective. These might be bold and useful, but often felt half-baked.

I also thought that they emphasized economic aspects too much — I'd have preferred more political history. They tended towards a vulgar materialism that viewed all political struggle within the party as a mere "epiphenomenon" to the economic developments. These economic developments then were viewed as both contingent (not following necessarily from any teleology) but also deterministic, not influenced by party ideology.

I do think that the heavy description of economic stratification, rural/urban divides, gender & seniority-based privileges, informal vs formal labor recruitment, is very valuable, although almost more as a suggestion for what we ought to be investigating about the present-day than for what it says about China. Pretty hard to use their writing-style for the present, though, since it relied on so much retrospective economic data not available to actors at the time.