| ID | 080495 |
| Title Proper | Democracy wall movement, marxist revisionism, and the variations on socialist democracy |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Paltemaa, Lauri |
| Publication | 2007. |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | This article analyses the Beijing Democracy Wall Movement's argumentation on democratic reforms in 1978-1981 from the perspective of the larger genre of international revisionist Marxism critical of Leninist/Stalinist political systems at the time of the movement. The movement's argumentation contained three distinct variations on the same theme of socialist democracy, which the author calls classical Marxist, eclectic Marxist and non-Marxist lines of argument. They differed in the content of proposed institutional reforms and their intellectual sources, but shared the perception of democracy as an institutional solution to the conflict between the people and a bureaucratic class that the Stalinist political system had produced in China. All lines also accepted the socialist economic system. As discussed in the article, these ideas were heavily influenced by the Radical Red Guard criticism against the Maoist New Establishment created and popularized during the Cultural Revolution, and the need to find ideological means to refute the official Maoist ideology of the Party Left at the time through a return to the original sources in Marxism. East-European revisionist Marxism also influenced these arguments directly and indirectly |
| `In' analytical Note | Journal of Contemporary China Vol. 16, No.53; Nov 2007: p601-625 |
| Journal Source | Journal of Contemporary China Vol. 16, No.53; Nov 2007: p601-625 |
| Key Words | Democracy ; China ; Marxist Democracy |