Both Mao and Gandhi stand in an ancient, Western tradition. Certainly, they also are heirs to more positive ways of thinking about material life in their utopian views of better forms of productivity and exchange that would enable the formation of morally superior social life. Marx and Engels's critique of capitalism was imbued with nostalgia for primitive communism and, as such, inherited by Mao, who extolled the virtues of peasant life. Chinese communists, while having a materialist ideology, rejected capitalist consumer culture as illusiona1y or indeed fetishistic in the Marxian sense. S hanghai's prewar cosmopolitan modernity, for instance, was seen as both not authentically Chinese and immoral. Therefore it was violently repressed after the communist takeover in the 1 950s. Striking in this repression is the extent to which Marxist materialism that understands itself as a rational theory of his tor- Q ical determination is unable to disconnect things from persons, and lends itself to an anthropological analysis as outlined in Marcel Mauss's work on gift exchange. Capitalists and feudal landlords not only play a role in historical processes, but they also are portrayed as morally evil in their very essence to the extent that even their children and grandchildren cannot absolve themselves from this taint and thus are precluded from going to the university and having government jobs. In an inter· es ting twist, therefore, Chinese today often see Maoist materialism as a battle against thf' magical attractions of religion and consumption, but as at the same time full of another kind of enchantment and collective illusion. Leaders like Mao could inspire and mobilize masses for collective, ascetic rej ection of urban and consumerist values by imbuing peasant values with a kind of magical efficacy in creating a Great Leap Forward, and even after the terrible failure of this attempt to increase productivity by educating urban youth in peasant values during the Great Cultural Revolution. 引自 第五章
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