Sinicized marxism as a symptom of the postcolonial condition: Arif Dirlik, Mao Zedong, Xu Guangwei, and the modern regime of translation

Abstract

Interrogating Chinese Marxism’s encounter with the approach and translation of Das Kapital and Marx, this essay aims to construct a genealogy of Sinification in relation to the concept of postcolonial condition. The condition that we have in mind is precisely the link between the process of valorization and the index of anthropological difference, in which two parallel operations of translation (our word for context-specific ontogenesis) occur: The first is the translation from use value and social value to exchange value, while the second is the translation of social difference, always in a process of becoming, into taxonomies of specific (or species) difference. Our goal is to understand the postcolonial condition in light of the modern regime of translation and to understand how the regimes of accumulation are related to the apparatus of area and anthropological difference that characterizes the postcolonial world, while at the same time accounting for and learning from the extraordinary forms of experimentation occurring in Chinese Marxism today, as in the past.