This book offers a new interpretation of socialism and its failure in the last century, and takes on the conventional view that socialist China and other Soviet-type societies represented the domination of bureaucracy. Using a wealth of original archival sources, interview data, and comparative material, Eddy U argues that these societies were not bureaucratic enough. The ruling regimes established a form of workplace administration that is the antithesis of modern bureaucratic organization. Because the workplace lacked rational rules and practices, Soviet-type societies were marred by technical inefficiency, political resentment, and social friction. But U does not merely expose workplace disorganization in Soviet-type societies; his theoretically and empirically grounded research raises questions about the contention that socialism has been proven unworkable. He concludes that strengthening the rational capacity of the state may still be the key to improving social and economic justice.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)-a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries-and the generous support of the University of California, Davis. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. Creating the Intellectual redefines how we understand relations between intellectuals and the Chinese socialist revolution of the last century. Under the Chinese Communist Party, "the intellectual" was first and foremost a widening classification of individuals based on Marxist thought. The party turned revolutionaries and otherwise ordinary people into subjects identified as usable but untrustworthy intellectuals, an identification that profoundly affected patterns of domination, interaction, and rupture within the revolutionary enterprise. Drawing on a wide range of data, Eddy U takes the reader on a journey that examines political discourses, revolutionary strategies, rural activities, urban registrations, workplace arrangements, organized protests, and theater productions. He lays out in colorful detail the formation of new identities, forms of organization, and associations in Chinese society. The outcome is a compelling picture of the mutual constitution of the intellectual and the Chinese socialist revolution, the legacy of which still affects ways of seeing, thinking, acting, and feeling in what is now a globalized China.