Cages and Class Struggle: A Leninist Inquiry into the Caricature of Marxism in Fenggang Yang’s ‘Soul Searching’

Introduction

Since the late 1990s with the publication of his book Chinese Christians in America (1999), Fenggang Yang has steadily emerged in the world capitalist social structure of ‘globalization’ as one of the leading sociological theorists of what could be called the ‘religious turn’ (Lim, 2010; Yang, 2015) among China’s citizens. Yang, of course, is originally from mainland China and is a professor in the US. ² At the same time, the Chinese writer Mo Yan (Guan Moye) has become one of the most high-profile fiction writers on the scene of world literature, being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012 for what was then termed the ‘hallucinatory realism’ of Mo’s continually expanding works of ‘storytelling’, as he likes to say, from Red Sorghum (1993) to The Garlic Ballads (1995), The Republic of Wine (2000), Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh (2001), Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2008), Change (2012), Pow! (2012), Sandalwood Death (2013), and most recently Frog (2015). His tales have been described as displaying an ‘unbridled imagination’ (Chi-ying Wang, 2014: 124) that ‘merges folk tales, history and the contemporary’ (Peter Englund quoted in Fang, 2012) to convey a ‘nebulous terrain exist[ing] in the hearts and minds of every person’ (Mo quoted in Knight, 2014: 99; Mo, 2012b: 8) and ‘will point us to the source of light’ (Huang and Duran, 2014: 163). More storytelling in hallucinatory realism is certainly expected to follow from China’s celebrated ‘subversive’ literary star, as the literary critic Shelley Chan reads Mo’s writing in her book, A Subversive Voice in China (2011). What do Fenggang Yang and Mo Yan have in common? According to Yang, they share a concern with what he calls ‘soul searching’.

Yang is one of the key contributors to Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang’s interdisciplinary anthology, Mo Yan in Context (2014). In this book, published by Purdue University Press, where Yang is a professor of sociology and founding director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society, ³ a significant number of scholars explore the contextual (inter)relation between religious thinking and ‘literary’ imagination. Following the recurrent religious and spiritual-oriented contextualizations of Mo’s writings as discussed in essays by Lanlan Du (2014: 63–75), Chi-ying Alice Wang (2014: 123–135), Jinghui Wang (2014: 139–151), and Donald Mitchell and Angelica Duran (2014: 195–210), Mo Yan in Context concludes with Yang’s epilogue entitled ‘Soul Searching in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Society’. In this text he attempts to relate Mo’s ‘contemporary’ vivifying tales of ‘some beleaguered souls’ (Yang, 2014: 219) within the framework of ‘the question of soul searching’ (2014: 215). He contends that this soul searching is central to ‘the quiet spiritual revolution that is like wildfire sweeping a vast land’ as ‘the spirit of the era’ (2014: 215). Yang refers to ‘Mo Yan’s work as a key example’ (2014: 215).

However, on careful examination of his discussion, one gets the impression that he seems to have little interest in Mo’s actual texts, or perhaps as if, in a ‘nebulous’ way, Mo’s stories serve as convenient pretexts for Yang’s sociological reflections. I say this because in the course of his five pages of metanarrative in the spirit of ‘“sociological imagination”’ (2014: 215, quoting C. Wright Mills), Yang never bothers to even refer to, much less quote from or analyze, any real ‘key example’ from any of Mo’s writings or talks. But in light of Yang’s worldwide scholarly ‘notoriety’ (2014: 218), as he helps us to recognize, what we read here is supposedly the ‘sociologist’s reflection’ (2014: 215) as reading Mo Yan ‘in context’. ⁴

Yang the sociologist is most concerned with what he calls the ‘caged’ soul of soul searching. The problem I take up in this essay is to understand the (ideo)logic of Yang’s ‘cage’ theory. In order to do this in the way that Yang’s theory itself makes necessary – as will become clear, I believe, for critical readers and scholars in such fields as sociology, social philosophy, cultural critique, religious studies, world literature, and so forth – I do not provide here a conventional exegesis on Yang’s books or numerous articles, although I do point out what I consider to be the fundamental premises of his thinking. Instead, what I try to do here is to take Yang’s speculative thinking to task by carefully examining and demystifying the bourgeois ideological traces of ‘global’ capitalist common sense that invisibly and silently structure his discourse on soul searching. This mode of analysis is aimed at sparking and enabling the revolutionary-minded initiative of other engaged readers to produce and expound more radical-critical critiques of Yang’s or Mo’s writings. Counter-conventional interventions of this kind are necessary, I believe, for contributing to the socialist and communist transformation of existing world capitalist society. Anything less than taking the dominant bourgeois intelligentsia to task is missing the point. As Mao argued in 1962, the point is that ‘at no time must we forget class struggle’ (Mao quoted in Hinton, 1984: 314).

Cages and Class Struggle

As I said, Yang is most interested in theorizing the ‘soul searching’ of the ‘caged’ soul. His thinking mirrors his grandly glossy treatment of what I call Mo Yan Thought, which is, in Mo’s own words, a ‘nebulous terrain’ of self-conscious ‘gaps’, ‘flows’, ‘all this jabbering’, ‘bad luck’, ‘flux’, and ‘happy fate’ (Mo, 2012a: 18–19, 25, 60, 89). Yang’s theory, in other words, is an exercise in obscurantism which, as Engels described Herr Dühring’s ‘axiomatic’ and ‘system-creating’ logic, ‘trickles out in a meaningless subtilising’ (Engels, 1972: 48, 52). Interestingly, Dühring likewise invoked the dilemma of the ‘cage’ of thinking. He promised that he was ‘“not philosophis[ing] out of a cage”’ (1972: 53, quoting Dühring, emphasis in original). Engels reads Dühring’s ‘complexity’ of thought as ‘apparently mean[ing] that he philosophises in a cage’ (1972: 53, emphasis in original; Wang, 1972), namely, the cage of Hegelian idealism. I find a similarly convoluted logic of ‘cage’ theory in Yang’s discourse on soul searching.

Is Yang’s sociology of religious thinking a sociological reflection ‘out of a cage’ or ‘in a cage’? In order to theorize a ‘cage’, of course, the theorist need not necessarily be ‘in’ the cage in question – although it might help to have some actual ‘experience’ of being (and thinking) in the cage (Wang, 1970). ⁵ Yet at the same time, if the theorist is indeed thinking ‘out’ of the cage, his or her outsidedness may still be positioned within some larger cage. Is it possible for theory to think or grasp the ‘cage’ while also being caged, and yet also be able to theorize a way ‘out’ of the cage – in short, to revolutionize the caged situation? Let us turn to see how Yang deals with the problem.

In his epilogue to Mo Yan in Context, Yang states that his main point is that ‘Chinese souls have been caged by traditionalism, modernism, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist atheism, and totalitarianism, and so are the souls of Chinese novelists’ (2014: 215). What is striking at first glance is Yang’s sophistic rhetoric of vaguely amorphous generalities. If you want to challenge ‘traditionalism’, what kind of traditionalism, but then what precisely is the problem with ‘modernism’? Is modernism also a traditionalism? If you want to contest Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism, do you contest them on the basis of their atheism? Doesn’t everyone oppose totalitarianism? But how is ‘totalitarianism’ (inter)related with traditionalism, modernism, and the atheism of Marxism? As Mas’ud Zavarzadeh argues, the notion of the ‘totalitarian’ and ‘its derivations … have always been used by liberals to guarantee “liberal-democratic hegemony, dismissing the leftist critique of liberal [capitalist] democracy as … the ‘twin’ of the Right Fascist dictatorship”’ (2003: 6, quoting Slavoj Zizek, 2001, emphasis added).

Yang’s theory of caged souls is based on an eclectically updated idealist ‘belief system’ (Yang, 1998: 241; 2012: 34) framework according to which people’s ‘souls’ or inner-spiritual lives have been suppressed, repressed, oppressed, or otherwise dominated by external socio-cultural forces and movements. Religious believers like himself, he says, ‘seek alternate meaning systems’ (Yang, 1998: 251; 1999: 93). Describing his own ‘conversion’-experience in which he became ‘a believer’, he says: ‘I was looking for something’, and ‘[w]hen I looked for the different religious traditions, Christianity made the best sense to me, so I converted’ (Young and Yang, 2012, emphasis added).

His ‘cage’ concept suggests the fairly common idea of a contradiction between freedom and conformity, or liberation and domination. Its political reading is organized around the liberal model of oppression-domination, not the Marxist materialist model of exploitation. But since all socio-cultural formations always produce and engender ‘systems’ of beliefs, modes of thinking, and boundaries of legitimate behavior and social intercourse, the important question raised is: what kind of social order and system of thought would be most conducive to the development of ‘free’ consciousness for all? After all, who would want to live a ‘caged’ existence?

In this sense it is certainly hard to disagree with the liberationist or emancipatory implications of Yang’s underlying paradigm, setting aside the validity of his more specific (though still extremely vague) series of claims against ‘traditionalism’, ‘modernism’, and so on. In other words, my reading of Yang’s central claim reveals that his cage conception itself is premised upon a systemic mode of inquiry into the politics and ideology of social and cultural ‘systems’ that impact human ‘souls’. What he means by ‘souls’, of course, at least in my understanding – which might arguably be ‘caged’, according to Yang – is a spiritual code word for human consciousness, modes of thinking and belief, or the ‘subject’ of society in critical theory.

Since Yang’s cage conception involves contradiction and a certain recognition of the subjection of the subject (‘souls’) in the oppression-domination model, it should not be surprising that he postulates the possibility of strivings in ‘resistance’. It is in this light that Yang goes on to say that, despite the general problem of the caging of Chinese souls and the souls of Chinese novelists, ‘we have seen some souls slip out of the cage and wander, a bit in the dark but wander nonetheless’ (2014: 215–216, emphasis added). Here he seems to imply that there is just one cage – ‘the cage’. Earlier in this same sentence is where he refers to ‘Mo Yan’s work as a key example’ (2014: 215). But as I pointed out, Yang does not find it necessary to refer to nor even suggest any analysis of any ‘key example’. I find this problematic for a book that stresses ‘contextual’ thought and analysis; yet on the contrary, Duran and Huang assure us that Yang’s sociological reflections are ‘not an afterthought but [are] in many ways the flowering of the explicit and implicit sociological and literary arguments that precede’ (Duran and Huang, 2014: 14) his text. Yang is thus saved by what Hegel calls a ‘state of innocence’ (1967: § 775; Ebert, 2014: 16).

While my main purpose here is to examine Yang’s ‘soul searching’ epi(ideo)logue, I want to briefly turn to one specific ‘key example’ from Mo Yan’s narratives. This example appears in Shelley Chan’s discussion of Mo’s novel Red Sorghum in Chan’s book, A Subversive Voice in China. The narrator in Red Sorghum considers his Grandma (Dai Fenglian) to be a hero. Referring to her paper-cuttings (jianzhi), he says: ‘She [Grandma] said a katydid perched on top of its cage, and that’s what it did’ (Mo, 1994: 132; quoted in Chan, 2011: Ch. 1). Chan reads Grandma (or the narrator’s construction of his memory of her) as ‘a woman defiant of traditional moral values, one who is determined to decide her own fate’ (2011: Ch. 1). However, Chan does not analyze the narrator nor Grandma in terms of the ‘cage’. Instead, she employs a similar notion of people being ‘trapped’ in a ‘regressive’ ‘degeneration of humankind’ (2011: Ch. 1). According to Chan, ‘Mo Yan’s notion of the degeneration of humankind … not only challenges the progressive conception of history since the turn of the twentieth century but also subverts the historical materialism of Communist ideology’ (2011: Ch. 1).

Later in this same chapter she discusses Mo’s novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out also as an ‘historical novel’ that mixes ‘the real and the surreal by means of postmodern playfulness’ in order to ‘laugh at the absurdity and ridiculousness of history’ (2011: Ch. 1). It is here that she calls up the ‘trap’ image-conception, as in ‘the system of Buddhist cosmology, [where] all creatures are trapped and suffer within the wheel of life due to their sinful actions’, symbolizing ‘the suffering of people who are trapped in man-made adversities with no escape’ (2011: Ch. 1, emphasis added).

Nonetheless, Chan is highly enthusiastic about Mo’s ‘subversive’ and ‘postmodern’ worldview articulated in his fiction, and at the same time she calls him ‘our pessimistic novelist’ (2011: Ch. 3). But not unlike Yang, Chan’s ‘subversive’ theory of Moism (Mo-ism) ignores Lenin’s brilliant dialectical materialist critique of Tolstoy as a literary ideologist of the ‘[d]espair [that] is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle’ (Lenin, 1967: 332). Despite her interpretive baptism in the playfulness of (poststructuralist) postmodernist historiography – along with a mixed congregation of ‘modernist’ and ‘traditional’ intellectuals in her book – she seems to accept Moism’s ‘pessimism’ as the true and holy (de)construction of all historical moments. ⁶ By contrast, for Lenin the ‘pessimistic’ attitude of ‘despair’ (masked by ludic postmodern ‘play’ interwoven with melancholy) is underwritten by a class attitude: ‘Despair is typical of the classes which are perishing’ (Lenin, 1967: 332).

Returning to Yang, what he proposes is that the subject is capable of ‘slipping out’ of cages and ‘wandering’. The question then is: what kind of ‘resistance’ is ultimately at stake here? Is it sufficient to ‘slip out’ and ‘wander’ while still leaving the ‘cage’ intact? This again is a question of the systematicity of the ‘cage’ paradigm. In his oppression-domination model, is the system of ‘cages’ actually called into question? Marx, for example, theorizes the ‘social totality’ of the mode of production and its contradictory system of social relations along with their contested articulations in the realm of the superstructure (Marx, 1986b: 161; Lenin, 1970a: 15–16; Lenin, 1970b: 81; Mao, 1967b: 298, 302–03; Mao, 1967a: 322–24; Williams, 2011). But Yang has already contended that Marxism’s atheism is one of the cages.

In his final paragraph, Yang repeats the ‘cage’ idea ten times (2014: 219). What is presented in the form of an epilogue as a ‘biographical account’, a ‘personal observation’, and also a ‘sociologist’s reflection’ (2014: 215), becomes what is, in effect, a manifesto on behalf of the ‘searching souls in literature’ as the ‘quiet spiritual revolution that is sweeping the vast lands of China like wildfire’ (2014: 219). He says that ‘all kinds of religions are surviving and thriving in China’, manifesting ‘a great awakening with various spiritual movements’ (2014: 219). However, here Yang summons his literary knowledge in order to propose a sharp contrast between ‘the modern West’ (2014: 219) and contemporary China. In Europe and the US he finds that ‘dramatic social changes have generated some great novels that are both reflective of the era and inspirational in some eternally relevant spiritual dimensions’ (2014: 219); but in China, he says, ‘so far I have not seen an outpouring of Chinese novels like those in the modern West’ (2014: 219).

Yang’s notion of ‘great novels’ ⁷ seems to be highly inclusive. Not unlike his vaguely knowledgeable gesture toward Mo’s fiction as a ‘key example’ without any real example, the only actual novel from the ‘modern West’ that he ever specifically refers to is Harry Potter. He tells us that he was ‘happy and envious’ to see his own US-born children ‘enjoying’ the Harry Potter novels and films ‘because when I was a child this was impossible for me to experience’ (2014: 216). This is a telling moment in Yang’s autobiographical narrative: it marks both the intellectual and ideological limits of his approach to the sociology of religion when applied to the goals of reading practices in the study of literary texts. Despite his posturing against ‘traditionalism’, when it comes to the ‘newness’ of Harry Potter – which a number of critics have identified as a ‘popular’ rearticulation of bourgeois gothic romanticism centered around the adventures of the youthful Individual as ‘hero’ against the dark forces of Evil and the looming threat of apocalyptic doom (Brunson, 2010; Nikolajeva, 2008; Stein, 2002) – Yang finds deep consolation in returning to the very traditional model of reading literary works for the ‘experience’ of ‘enjoying’ them.

This ‘sociological’ appeal to ‘some eternally relevant spiritual dimensions’ subtly works to divert the ‘experience’ of reading away from the critical practice of problematizing the social dimensions (the ‘cage’) – as Marx and Engels put it, the ‘material surroundings’ (1989: 41) of economic practices and relationships that form the ‘social totality’ shaping historical consciousness – that this readerly enjoyment is conditioned by without becoming self-reflexively knowledgeable of its own position and role in the prevailing structure of social relations. Marx argues that the ‘true reality’ of the social subject of imaginings, experiences, and enjoyments is not subjectivity as ‘an abstract being, squatting outside the world’ but rather is the subject of/in the ‘human world’, which is ‘[t]his state, this society, produc[ing] religion which is an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world’ (Marx, 1986c: 45–46, emphasis in original; McKinnon, 2005: 23–29; Ebert, 2014: 18, 28–29).

Importantly, Marx contends that the workers ‘must seek [their] true reality’ (1986c: 45) if they are to become ‘radical’ with ‘the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being’ (1986c: 47–48, emphasis in original). ‘To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself’ (1986c: 47; Zavarzadeh and Morton, 1991: 189–230; Gimenez, 2001). In other words, the working class must learn to become active in the critical practices of inquiry that ‘seek’ to invert the inverted world of consciousness and invert the inverted world of the capitalist ruling class itself. As Lenin puts it, the task is to ‘[learn] to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises’ in order ‘to find, in the very society that surrounds us, the forces which can – and, owing to their social position, must – constitute the power of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle’ (Lenin, 1977a: 28, emphasis in original).

To ‘seek out’ in this context means, among other things, to open up the question of why Harry Potter is so popular and indeed so extraordinarily profitable, not only in the US (and not just for children) but also in China since 2000, where all the novels, films, and related merchandise (spectacles, clothing, bookbags, etc.) have catapulted ‘children’s literature’ into a major economic enterprise (China Daily, 1 August 2015). ⁸ Yang clouds this issue through the sentimental rhetoric of being the ‘happy’ onlooker. In doing so, his ‘sociologist’s reflection’ obscures the ideological and dialectical relation between subjective experiential ‘enjoyment’ and the objectively ‘surrounding’ structures of the capitalist mode of production. To put it a different way, the social ‘cage’ of capitalist exploitation needs (future) workers whose ‘experience’ of reading is both contained and stimulated by the pleasures of ‘enjoyment’ without being taught to inquire deeper into the complex of causes and effects between pleasure and profitability. Again as Marx writes, ‘[w]e have to be concerned’ with ‘the theoretical life [existence] of man’ and, in doing so, ‘make religion, science, etc., the object of our criticism’ (1986a: 42).

But from the perspective of Yang’s so-called ‘markets of religion’ or ‘economy of religion’ (2014: 218; 2012: 85–158), which heralds ‘the spirit of the era’ (2014: 215), Marx’s materialist dialectics of the ‘theoretical life of man’ is ‘(mis)read’ (Gimenez, 2001) as an unjust ‘atheism’ that has conspired in the caging of souls. This is an ideological (mis)reading that distracts attention away from the Marxist revolutionary project as the articulation of class struggle in the theoretical critique of the ‘social principles of Christianity [that] preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and all they have for the latter is the pious wish [that] the former will be charitable’ (Marx, 1989: 268). ‘Happy people!’ (1989: 276) exclaims Marx with biting sarcasm.

In his vague rehearsal of ‘post’-Marxist common sense, Yang suggests that the Marxist theory of religion ⁹ may be ambiguously dismissed as what he calls ‘the Marxist adage’ (2014: 216), cynically referring to the argument that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ (2014: 216). On the contrary for Yang, religious soul searching is not an opium but rather a ‘quiet spiritual revolution’ (2014: 215) to ‘slip out of the cage and wander’ (2014: 216). Just as in his vague reference to ‘the fact’ of Mo Yan’s ‘prolific novels’ (2014: 219) and the experiential joy of Harry Potter, Yang’s basic attitude toward the ‘Marxist adage’ is nebulously conveyed by a wandering non-argument rather than any kind of substantive critique. As Zavarzadeh puts it, Yang’s authoritative ‘thought’ is fundamentally characterized by a ‘vacant’ (2003: 34) anti-theoretical posturing that is ‘critically hollow’ in its ‘thoughtless thoughtfulness’ (Ebert and Zavarzadeh, 2008: xix).

As Martha Gimenez argues in the context of the ‘social determinants’ of the ‘silent classroom’, Yang’s ambiguously superficial tactics of double-reduction – on the one hand, reducing the Marxist world outlook to ‘atheism’, and on the other, reducing Marxism’s political conception of religion to an ‘adage’ – enact a ‘quiet’ indication that his ‘theory’ conceals ‘enormous difficulties in dealing with abstractions’ (Gimenez, 1989). When one carefully reads Yang’s ‘sociologist’s reflection’ side-by-side with such engaged and critical intellectual studies as those offered by Andrew McKinnon (2005), John Molyneux (2008), and Teresa Ebert (2014), it becomes quite difficult to take his ‘adage’ (anti)theory of Marxism very seriously.

But here is also the silent problem of taking Yang’s ideological discourse to task, as I said earlier. It is precisely this conscious reflection of contradiction (‘difficulties’) that points to the work of critique as a means of intervening in and changing the ruling class modes and structures of (un)thought that attempt to obliterate the revolutionary thinking of Marxist dialectical materialism: in Marx’s words, ‘philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat’ while ‘the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy’ (1986c: 51, emphasis in original). If Yang’s sheer rhetoric of the ‘Marxist adage’ is not seriously engaged, the result is, ironically, that it merely continues to be taken ‘seriously’ in the ideological terrain of capitalist common sense while ‘silently’ retaining what Lenin calls ‘inner falsity’ (1977b: 353).

I say ‘capitalist’ common sense here because the capitalist system is the quietly obscured deep structure that Yang’s ‘economy of religion’ attempts to normalize – and eternalize – by simultaneously fusing and confusing the complex dialectical relationship between the capitalist mode of production and religious thinking. For example, he suggests at one point – in a typically vague construction – that the ‘ocean of market economy’ in China is the social space in which more and more people have become ‘devoted to materialism, consumerism, and capitalism, which may be taken as substitutes of religion’ (2014: 218), then referring to one of his own articles entitled ‘Lost in the Market, Saved at McDonald’s’ (2005). Notice, according to Yang, ‘capitalism’ may be taken to signify a ‘substitute of religion’. Nebulously, the capitalist ‘ocean of market economy’ is not to be comprehended – as it is in Marxism’s ‘atheism’ – as the ‘material surroundings’ of class antagonisms that produce alienated (‘lost’) social relations, which give rise to religious modes of intelligibility, which in turn (perhaps unintentionally) serve as theologico-ideological supports for capitalism because religious ‘soul searching’, by itself and for itself, is by no means identical with Marxist materialist dialectics. The theoretical practice of taking seriously Yang’s ‘difficulties … with abstractions’ is necessary, as Lenin constantly undertakes in his polemical writings, especially those in which he develops an ideological critique of ‘caricatures’ of Marxist thought (Lenin, 1963b, 1964). As he wrote in 1916 contra Y.L. Pyatakov (P. Kievsky), ‘it requires roughly ten pages of print to untangle and popularly explain ten lines of confusion’ (1964: 48, emphasis added). Such is the case today with Yang’s ‘notoriety’ and ‘flowering’.

As McKinnon explains (although he does not discuss Yang), Yang’s idea of ‘markets of religion’ articulates one strand of thought within the wider paradigm of so-called ‘Rational Choice’ theory in the sociology of religion, which views religion as a ‘marketplace of beliefs’ (McKinnon, 2005: 33); but because they ‘fail to adequately historicize their problematic’, rational choice theorists tend toward ‘reifying certain dynamics of capitalist societies’ (2005: 33) and thereby contribute to the mystification of ‘the machinations of the capitalist machine itself’ (2005: 32; see also McKinnon, 2012: 2–3). While Ebert’s line of inquiry is critically distinguishable from McKinnon’s – for example, her opposition to Fredric Jameson’s ‘non-dialectical’ (Ebert, 2014: 17) reading of Hegel – she also argues that ‘[u]nder capitalism – with its mode of commodity production – the daily life of appearances … at the level of the market’ engenders and reinforces capitalist ideology as ‘“the reverse of the inner reality of the productive process”’ (2014: 18, quoting Jorge Larrain, 1983: 126). The ‘material logic’ (Ebert, 2014: 19) that organizes this ‘inner reality’ has far less to do with ‘rational choice’ or ‘substitutes of religion’ than with the compulsory economic system of exploitation of one class by another: in Marx’s words, the ‘dull compulsion of economic relations [that] completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist’ and ‘breaks down all resistance’ (1987: 689), insuring that ‘the workers must not be allowed to come to any understanding about their own interests, nor to act in common’ (1987: 693).

Yang’s ‘economy of religion’ involves an ‘inner falsity’ (Lenin, 1977b: 353) that dissolves religion into capitalism and capitalism into religion. In effect, he constructs a ‘saved’ sociology of religion that is, as Marx says, imbued with the ‘spiritual aroma’ of religion (Marx, 1986c: 46, emphasis in original; Ebert, 2014: 29; McKinnon, 2005: 23). In order to (re)understand and critique this ‘inner falsity’, Lenin argues, it becomes necessary to ‘work against it both from without and within’ and ‘untiringly expose this deception’ (1974: 268) that subtly undermines ‘the unity of the workers’ class struggle for communism throughout the world’ (1974: 269, emphasis added).

Jettisoning the analytics of class struggle, Yang’s alternative theory, of course, centers on the ‘cage’. He is supposedly moving the sociological study of religion – and ‘soul searching’ in literary studies – far beyond the ‘adage’ of Marxist atheism in which, as Marx writes:

Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (1986c: 46, emphasis in original)

McKinnon’s examination of Marx’s theory places considerable stress on the need to grasp the ‘metaphorical’ (2005: 16–21) dynamics of ‘the opium of the people’ as the articulation of an ‘unstable, fluid, and polysemic’ (2005: 17) site of contradictory social meanings. This is a totally different approach to Marx’s theory than that proposed by Yang’s simplistic (mis)reading of the ‘Marxist adage’. Yang’s (mis)reading deliberately reduces Marxist thinking to a ‘caricature’ in order to construct the ideological pretext for dismissing Marxism’s dialectical materialist project of revolutionary class struggle. If we were to conceive ‘the opium of the people’ as a point of contestation in a ‘trial’ of critical theory, what McKinnon’s study does is to prove that Yang’s (mis)reading of the ‘Marxist adage’ is utterly groundless and banal. And yet at the same time, dialectically, Yang’s caricaturization of Marxism has to be (re)read back to its material grounding in the bourgeois class politics of his ‘theory’.

Following Ebert’s study of Marx’s materialist (re)understanding of religious thinking through his critique of Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Yang’s caricaturization of Marxism as well as his own alternative imagism of ‘cages’ constitute exemplary texts of religious ‘picture-thinking’ (Vorstellung). This ‘picture-thinking’ diverts Marxist conceptual thinking from its historical and social task of proletarian revolution for socialism and communism. As Ebert argues, ‘picture-thinking – whether in religion or popular narratives, … reifies appearances, obscures the underlying social relations, obstructs critical self-consciousness and blocks “knowing” the social totality’ (2014: 16). Yang’s ‘difficulties … with abstractions’ carry over into his own alternative theory of ‘cages’. What becomes especially clear in the final paragraph of Yang’s epilogue is that the ‘metaphorical’ imagery of his theory devolves into an empty abstraction that reproduces the commonsensical notion of humankind’s ‘eternal’ spiritual quest to ‘slip out’ of ‘cages’ and find redemption beyond worldly persecution.

As I mentioned earlier, he repeats the ‘cage’ idea-image here no less than ten times. It is somewhat ironic: while Yang attempts to dismiss Marx’s theory of religion as merely an ‘adage’, his own alternative theory itself becomes a kind of insistent ‘saying’ of itself over and over again; but still each time he repeats it, the ‘theory’ acquires no more conceptual depth nor explanatory power. In this final paragraph, Yang sets up his speculative sociology of caged souls by saying that he ‘wonder[s] why’ he has not yet ‘seen an outpouring of Chinese novels like those in the modern West’ (2014: 219). His answer to the problem is:

I think it is because Chinese souls are in cages. There is the cage of modernism, the cage of Marxist-Maoist atheism, the cage of totalitarianism, and the cage of traditionalism. Chinese souls were caged especially during the Cultural Revolution. The forming of the modernist cage can be traced back to the May Fourth and New Cultural Movements about a century ago. These two cages are still in place today. In or through literature, we have seen some souls slip out of the cage and wander in the dark, as noted. Of particular interest here is the fact that Mo Yan’s prolific novels have vividly portrayed some beleaguered souls as a result of the social and political struggles. … What will emancipate the souls in bondage? Will the thriving religions in China emancipate the souls or enforce the cages? We have seen only a few glimpses of the searching souls in literature, but sociologists have observed and study the quiet spiritual revolution that is sweeping the vast lands of China like wildfire. (2014: 219, emphasis added)

In short, it seems that in Yang’s view the only ‘ism’ or movement or struggle that has not constituted cages of souls is the ‘quiet spiritual revolution’ of ‘thriving religions’ in the ‘markets of religion’ or the ‘economy of religion’ (2014: 218). But the question that is begged ‘in or through’ this narrative of cages is: exactly how and why is it that the so-called ‘quiet spiritual revolution’ of religious thinking does not itself reproduce the ideological forms of ‘cages’ that are historically necessary for the perpetuation of the capitalist social totality, which is founded on the ‘material logic’ of exploitation, private property, and class antagonism?

It is interesting that Yang himself ends up (re)posing the very questions that underlie his ‘sociologist’s reflection’: ‘What will emancipate the souls in bondage? Will the thriving religions in China emancipate the souls or enforce the cages?’ As I said earlier, what emerges in Yang’s driving insistence to ‘think’ of ‘soul searching’ in terms of ‘cages’ is a subnarrative of empty abstraction and vaguely uniform, declassed blocs (traditionalism, modernism, etc.) that serve as ‘substitutes’ ¹⁰ for and diversions from a materialist and dialectical inquiry into the economic substratum that makes ‘man’, in Marx’s words, ‘not an abstract being, squatting outside the world’ but rather ‘man’ as ‘the human world’ situated and conditioned by the contradictions of ‘[t]his state, this society’, which ‘produce religion … [as] an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world’ (Marx, 1986c: 46, emphasis in original).

To put this a different way, what Yang proves himself unable and unwilling to ‘think’, as Lenin argues in the text from which the present essay’s epigraph is taken – concerning the very question of ‘free literature’ based on the revolutionary struggle for socialist society and culture – is that ‘bourgeois individualists’ who ‘talk about absolute freedom’ are in fact talking in ‘sheer hypocrisy’ (Lenin, 1972a: 48). This is because

[t]here can be no real and effective ‘freedom’ in a society based on the power of money, in a society in which the masses of working people live in poverty and the handful of rich live like parasites. Are you free in relation to your bourgeois publisher, Mr. Writer[?] … One cannot live in society and be free from society. The freedom of the bourgeois writer, artist or actress is simply masked (or hypocritically masked) dependence on the money-bag, on corruption, on prostitution.

And we socialists expose this hypocrisy and rip off the false labels, not in order to arrive at a non-class literature and art (that will be possible only in a socialist extra-class society), but to contrast this hypocritically free literature, which is in reality linked to the bourgeoisie, with a really free one that will be openly linked to the proletariat. (1972a: 48, emphasis added)

Lenin’s core thesis here is that ‘[o]ne cannot live in society and be free from society’. Since literature is a human expression and reflection of life ‘in society’ and is produced ‘in society’, the historical marks of ‘freedom’ in literature are always either ‘linked to the bourgeoisie’ or ‘linked to the proletariat’. Yang’s ‘theory’ of cages is nothing more (or nothing other) than a confused inversion of this dialectical materialist and class struggle theory, since his demand is that ‘souls’ (the subjects of society) ought to live and ‘search’ for their lives ‘in society’ yet also be ‘free from society’: to ‘slip out of the cage and wander’. This is ‘inner falsity’ masked as a sociology of religion in the sphere of literature studies, and its caricature of ‘thinking’ is ‘in reality linked to the bourgeoisie’.

Conclusion

As McKinnon, Molyneux, and Ebert all suggest, Marxists in the transdisciplinary class struggle for the revolutionary socialist world outlook should not allow our Mr. Writer with his sociologist’s reflections to ‘slip out’ of our grasp, for we do not want him to feel that he is alone (‘free from society’) in the theorization and practices of ‘soul searching’. ¹¹ With this in mind I will conclude here by pointing once again to Lenin’s dialectical materialist argument for ‘soul searching’ from 1913. He contends emphatically that the ‘genius of Marx’ lies in ‘the doctrine of class struggle’ (Lenin, 1977a: 27, emphasis in original). People have ‘always been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics’, Lenin continues,

and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution … is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can – and, owing to their social position, must – constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle. (1977a: 28, emphasis added)

Seek out the class struggle. This is Lenin’s revolutionary framework. Marxism is the ‘atheism’ of materialist dialectics that makes ‘soul searching’ a ‘material force’ (Marx, 1986c: 47) with ‘radical chains’ (1986c: 50, emphasis in original; Tumino, 2014) for understanding that ‘the root evil is capitalism’ (Lenin, 1964: 73). But no, for Yang this is a ‘cage’! Mr. Writer becomes Herr Dühring: trickling out in a meaningless subtilizing.