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China (Pomo) Link

Their description of China is uniquely ineffective—our materialist framing is critical to understanding Sino-US relations and breaking Eurocentric worldviews

Ebert 5 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “Rematerializing Feminism” http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40404228.pdf)//meb

The Illusions of Modernism/Postmodernism Concepts of modernism/postmodernism and modernity/post- modernity are above all spaces of contradiction: they are concepts that have been used to come to terms with the history and shifts in capitalism. It seems to me that as long as we think about capitalism in these terms, we will continue to substitute what is basically a dis- cursive debate for a materialist analysis. Modernity, in other words, is the ensemble of all the conceptual strategies - from science to painting to music to sociology to psychoanalysis - used by the mod- ernist subject to locate itself in the contradictions between wage-labor and capital. There are no ("modernist") styles in isolation from the historical unfolding of wage-labor and capital - from laissez faire capitalism to monopoly capitalism.

To separate modernism and modernity, or for that matter post- modernism and postmodernity, may give the illusion of conceptual clarification and historical location, but it is eventually a species of what Marx and Engels in the German Ideology called "combating solely the phrases of this world" (1976, 36) - that is, a politics of phrases. Postmodernity's various forms - in Jameson, in Lyotard, in Butler, in Zizek - are all continuations of the attempt to understand capi- talism; all of them are based on what I call the "hearsay" that capi- talism has changed: that there has been a fundamental structural change, a "break" in capitalism demanding a new set of conceptual categories to understand the impact of capitalism on culture and society. This view - that a fundamental structural change in capital- ism requires us to abandon modernism/modernity - is a recurring theme even for writers like Habermas, who puts a second modernity in place of postmodernity. I believe that the question is neither one of style nor of culture, because both style and culture are eventually the outcome of what I have already designated as the primary con- tradiction of capitalism: the conflict of wage-labor and capital. It seems to me that contemporary cultural theory would be able to supercede the well-worn categories of modernity/ postmodernity, modernism/ postmodernism and their rehearsal in Habermas, Eagleton, Jameson, and Butler by returning to the main question. And the main ques- tion is capitalism. In place of positing - on the basis of very superfi- cial evidence, such as changes in management style, or increases in the number of people who speculate on the stock market, or the emergence of cybertechnologies - that capitalism has changed, it is necessary to return to the basic issue: in what way has capitalism changed? Has the capitalism of "modernity" really been transformed into another capitalism (that of postmodernity) ? Or does capitalism remain the same regime of exploitation - in which capitalists ex- tract surplus labor from the wage earner? What has changed is not this fundamental factor of property relations but the way that exploi- tation is articulated. It is not exploitation that has been transformed - and this is the only index of the structure of change - but rather the mode of exploitation has changed. If this simple "fact" is recog- nized, then the whole debate about modernity/ postmodernity, mod- ernism/ postmodernism turns out to be simply a politics of phrases.

Using the paradigms of modernity and postmodernity to come to terms with what is essentially the unfolding history of capitalism is not the most effective conceptualization of the issues. To say, for example, that China is modern or postmodern or on the "margins of modernity and postmodernity" is to translate the emerging history of China - with all its immense complexity as well as its complex relations with Europe and the rest of Asia - into a hegemonic and imperialist paradigm. To define China in terms of modernity/post- modernity is to marginalize the relations within China and between China and the rest of Asia, if not the rest of the world.

In dealing with the question of history and the place of the human in history, the determining factor should not be modernity/ postmodernity but rather what cuts through the modern and post- modern and places the human in its densely layered and complex his- tory. This relationship - of the human and history - is the relation of labor. The question of the situationality of China, to my mind, is much more effectively answered not by reference to modernity/postmodernity, west or east - these are all annotations of history rather than exami- nations of it - but by engaging the modalities of labor in China. China is not marginal but exemplary in its entanglement with the history of labor, and it is only through such an entanglement that one can look at its relation to the West. China's history of labor ob- viously has some resemblance to the history of labor in other parts of the world, including Europe, but at the same time it has its own temporality - its own unevenness. In a sense, I am arguing for delo- calizing current theories of history and for building a global history: a history that is the history of modes of labor (modes of production), and, as such, labor is the global logic of history regardless of the speci- ficity of the site in which this logic unfolds. I take as my text here Marx's writing on India, where he argues for such a global history and refuses the usual liberal pieties about the local and the particu- lar. Liberal pieties mystify the movement of human labor and its for- mation in capitalism by mis-taking capitalism and Eurocentrism. Euroentrism is merely a particular form of capitalist imperialism and should be recognized as such.

To see that socialism supercedes the categories of modernity/ postmodernity, modernism/postmodernism, one has to examine capitalism, in its most sophisticated and layered forms, with the avail- able forms of socialism, which are - given the historicity of their emergence and the conditions of their survival - not very developed and sophisticated forms of socialism. But even a cursory comparison of the basic human institutions (for example, health care, education, workers' safety and child care) in socialist countries, such as Cuba and China, with similar European and American institutions indicates how Cuba and China, even within their meager resources, have put human needs ahead of profit. This fact - that is, the relation between profit and need and which one is given priority in a given society - is what defines a society and all its cultural forms. If we get to this level of human labor and human need, then we see, I propose, how irrelevant the categories of modernity/postmodernity will become in discussing human history.