RCCHC "China and the World: Historical Interactions" Talk Series 20 - Reading Modern Chinese Political Economy with Roberto Schwarz

What is enabled by reading problems in political economy of mid-20th century China through the Brazilian theorist Roberto Schwarz’s concept of “misplacement” or “misplaced ideas”? My ongoing work on Wang Yanan, whose writings in the 1930s-1950s were central to a certain (non-Communist) Marxist specification of political economics in China, will engage this question as a theoretical-historical problematic. Wang’s imminent critique of “capitalism in China/ Chinese capitalism” proceeded by problematizing the rampant reifications of the categories of capitalism in academic economics and social scientific work in China in the 1930s and 1940s. Reading Wang’s critique through and with Schwarz can benefit from theoretical engagements with the latter’s concerns over colonized knowledges, production of incommensurate temporalities through narrativity, and the ideological embodiments of capital in the commodity form of labor. This talk is an historical-theoretical excavation as well as a critique of the present.