China and Marxist Political Economy Confronting World Capitalism: Revisiting the ‘Social Nature’ Debate of the 1930s–1940s

Marxist political economy in the 20th century had to confront the historic task of theorizing capitalism on the world scale. What was at stake was not just the theoretical construct about the capitalist mode of production, or the historical developments in the core capitalist regions of Western Europe and North America, but rather the entire world transformed and reigned by the system of capitalism. An essential constituent of this task concerns the nature of the peripheral societies of the system, and China was at the heart of it. In relation to the twists and turns of anti-capitalist revolutions that overwhelmed the country in the first-half of the century, a range of important theories were developed in Chinese Marxism in the 1930s and 1940s. These theories turned out to be necessary for guiding the revolutions that successfully led to the founding of the People's Republic. They also appeared to be of general importance for Marxist political economy. The exposition on issues of imperialism, compradorization of capital, super-exploitation of labour, the state and modernization, etc., has had far-reaching implications for subsequent theoretical developments. Discernibly, these contributions from China were a precursor of relevant post-war developments in Marxist political economy including those on the world system, dependency, the articulations of modes of production, and uneven development.