Brooklyn Rail & Chuang on Social Contagion
In this month's edition of the Brooklyn Rail, Aminda Smith and Fabio Lanza interviewed the anonymous collective Chuang whose first book, Social Contagion and Other Material on Microbiological Class War in China, is forthcoming in October from us.
"Chuang: … As we noted in our last journal issue, social unrest by homeowners seems to have outnumbered labor protests in the late 2010s. Now in the pandemic and post-pandemic world, class politics are likely to take on other unexpected forms based on such underlying social tensions. It is this reality—rather than shoddy historical analogy—that ought to serve as the starting point for anyone attempting to speculate on the future of class conflict in China.
Rail: At the end of the book, you make quite an interesting, and one could say speculative, argument about the future of the Chinese state, the pandemic having made clear the need to rebuild it. You argue that while it will continue in its primary function in the service of capitalism, the state is being restructured into something unlike the Western states or its imperial and socialist precedents, while recycling elements from all these models. For what specific new needs and new challenges is this new state being restructured and on what ideological tenets is it based?
Chuang: Basically, the central idea here is twofold: first, we’re arguing that China is still in the process of constructing a properly capitalist state. There’s nothing really new about this, of course, and the core imperatives of the capitalist state are more or less universal, meaning that many aspects of this process are very similar to the state-building projects that accompanied capitalist development elsewhere. But, secondly, it’s also wrong to assume that this means that the state being built in China today will necessarily resemble any of the preceding capitalist states that arose in places like the US, Europe, or the colonies in its details." . . . it’s not just about the fact that more expansive states are now required to guarantee the baseline conditions of accumulation. It also addresses the question of how this process is perceived by those involved in it and what sort of ideological form it takes..."
Preorder Social Contagion from AK press at https://www.akpress.org/social-contagion.html.
Read more from Chuang on their website, https://chuangcn.org/.