caa a22 4500 386373094 CHVBK 20180307112005.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198904 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0020859000009020 doi S0020859000009020 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0020859000009020 Dirlik Arif The Path Not Taken: The Anarchist Alternative in Chinese Socialism, 1921-1927 [Elektronische Daten] [Arif Dirlik] Until the late 1920s, anarchism was still a significant presence in Chinese radical thinking and activity, and till the middle of the decade, gave serious competition to the Communists. The essay discusses the nature of the anarchist movement in China, anarchist criticism of Bolshevik Marxism, and anarchist revolutionary strategy and activity during 1921-1927. It argues that while anarchists were quite innovative with regard to revolutionary strategy, their repudiation of organized power deprived them of the ability to coordinate revolutionary activity on a national scale, and what success they achieved remained local and short-lived. Indeed, the Communists were able to make better use of anarchist tactics than were the anarchists themselves. Anarchist critique of power rested on a denial of a center to society (and history). While this undercut the anarchists' ability to organize the revolutionary movement, it is also revealing of a basic problem of socialist revolution: the problem of democracy. In ignoring the anarchist critique of power, the successful revolutionaries deprived themselves of a critical perspective on the problem of socialist revolution, and were left at the mercy of the new structures of power that they brought into existence. Hence the importance of recalling anarchism. Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1989 International Review of Social History Cambridge University Press 34/1(1989-04), 1-41 0020-8590 34:1<1 1989 34 ISH https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000009020 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000009020 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Dirlik Arif NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- International Review of Social History Cambridge University Press 34/1(1989-04), 1-41 0020-8590 34:1<1 1989 34 ISH CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge