In the mid-1950s in China, a few years after the Communist Party seized state power through decades of war and revolutionary mobilization, a serious discussion began over the process and philosophies of “socialist transition.” Carried out in the Marxist idioms of the day, these discussions were launched to contest the party-state orthodoxy of the time, which held that China could only realize socialism by ruthlessly subordinating transformations in social relations of production to the enhancement of the forces of production—that is, by subordinating revolution in social class power to a brutal economistic logic. This inherited Stalinist orthodoxy—implacably stage-ist and narrowly focused on measurable/countable growth parameters—had been implemented through the First Five-Year Plan, after land reforms ended in 1952. A few short years later, by the mid-1950s, this Stalinist dogma was being subjected to critique not only by Mao Zedong himself (at first mildly and then boldly), but notably also by intellectuals who often operated, at that time, outside the confines of Party orthodoxy. Some of these intellectuals subsequently moved to the center of Party policy, but only once they had succeeded in helping change the Party’s own direction in the 1960s. Some, therefore, participated in the Cultural Revolution period (1966–1976), which was still a decade away from the time of the debates around “socialist transition” that we take up in the following special section.

In the 1961 essay “On Beauty and Ugliness in Life,” the literary critic Yao Wenyuan takes up the task of articulating a positive vision of proletarian aesthetics. This translation and commentary aim to illuminate the historical context and intellectual traditions within which Yao’s essay found purchase. Published in the aftermath of the multiple failures of the Great Leap Forward, the question of the aesthetic was particularly fraught in the People’s Republic of China at the time. Cadres in the cultural sphere seriously questioned the Maoist embrace of mass participation as a driving force of cultural production. Yet Yao insisted on a full rejection of subjective standards for beauty and on immersing aesthetics within social relations, offering a vision of the aesthetic that came to characterize the most prominent art and culture produced in the PRC, especially during the Cultural Revolution.

Class contradiction and class struggle are the driving forces of history. When writing history, ignoring this point means committing an error of principle.

Studying the classics of Marxism–Leninism, researching the internal contradictions of China’s socialist economic system, and exploring general laws for the transition from socialism to communism, I have increasingly come to understand that labor power, like the means of production, is a thing borne by social relations of production. And then there is also the matter of labor power’s form of ownership, with its private ownership having a historical, provisional, and transitional character. Socialist revolution has settled the matter of ownership over the means of production, but it has maintained the private ownership of labor power. Only by combining the private self-ownership of labor power with the socialist, public ownership of the means of production can we comprise the base of the socialist mode of production. And the contradiction between these two forms of ownership constitutes the primary contradiction within the socialist mode of production. I find that the socialist principle of distribution according to labor is rooted exclusively in the private self-ownership of labor power. In addition, there is an essential relation between the private self-ownership of labor power and the commodity character of socialism. Finally, I believe that, just as the core question for socialist revolution is the change from private to public ownership of the means of production, the central question in the transition from socialism to communism is the transformation from private to common ownership of labor power. My views may include elements of bias or even fallacy, but I believe that, for our socialist country, relations of production in which privately owned labor power continues to exist will determine many aspects of people’s economic life. For this reason, I hope this article will draw more comrades to consider, study, and discuss this matter.

The human can, as an object of research, be approached from any number of perspectives. In actual fact, varied fields of scholarship and learning have already posed the human as an object of research and study. The human has been categorized according to a range of specific characteristics and traits across the fields of anthropology, biology, different forms of science, as well as philosophy and theology. Yet, across all these varied fields, research concerning and approaches to the figure of the human only relate to a partial aspect of the totality of human life; even while the scientific character of the discipline in question is directly proportional to the fragmentary character of human life described by said discipline. If, in the pursuit of research on the organization of human physiology, we were to amalgamate the different conceptions that the fields of politics, ethics, and even theology have to offer with respect to the problem of the human, we would, as a result, have no means of discerning the biological functions and specific characteristics that belong to the human by virtue of his physiological organization; nor, consequently, would we be able to constitute modern physiology as a field of learning. The same is true of each of the other sciences.