Reading Modern Chinese Political Economy with Roberto Schwarz

What is enabled by reading debates on the political economy of early twentieth-century ChinaChina through Roberto Schwarz’s concept of “misplacement” or “misplaced ideas”? My ongoing work on Wang YananYanan, Wang, whose writings in the 1930s–1950s were central to a certain (non-Communist). Marxist specification of political economics in ChinaChina will engage this question as a theoretical-historical problematic. Wang, like Schwarz, was consistently concerned with the historicized arrival of certain concepts into Chinese intellectual and political life. His imminent critique of “capitalism in ChinaChina/ Chinese capitalism” proceeded by problematizing the rampant reifications of the categories of capitalismCapitalism in academic economics and social scientific work in China in the 1930s and 1940s. Reading Wang’s critique through and with Schwarz can benefit from theoretical engagements with the latter’s concerns over colonized knowledges, production of incommensurate temporalities through narrativity, and the ideological embodiments of capital in the commodity form of laborLabor. As much an historical-theoretical excavation, this essay will also function as a critique of the present.