On The Possibility Of Collective Reconstruction

The world is mostly made up of common people.In other words,compared to some elites at the middle and top of the pyramid,the majority of people are at the bottom of society.When the elites become elites,they will choose to break away from the original group.However,to the people at the bottom,the collective is their weapon and the source of the meaning of life.In the early 1980 s,along with the establishment of the family contract responsibility system and the collapse of the People's Commune system,China's rural people began the process of individualization.The subsequent marketization reforms and the rise of migrant workers aggravated the individualization.There was no collective organizing of peasants,and peasants could not organize themselves.Collective culture and public life disappeared,and the meaning of people's lives has suffered problems.In the period of the increasingly indestructible division between the elite and the lower strata,Chinese peasants are obviously in a more difficult situation in term of culture and rights,and they suffer a more profound psychological pain.What kinds of arrangements should the general culture make for peasants? Or,how should the peasants live? That is why I want to discuss peasants and the reconstruction of collectives.The research object of this dissertation is a small mountain village called Longkou.Under the guidance of Zhu Qingyuan,a returning migrant worker,the villagers reorganized,joined the household plots,and carried out the construction of the country together.But the process is full of hardship,and villagers have faced many obstacles in the legal system and management system.With the spirit of Yu Gong who wanted to remove mountains,Longkou's people have pushed the construction forward step by step.Although the practice of Longkou is in an unfinished state,and its future may not be good,it has been a useful exploration of the possibility of reconstructing the rural collective,and has supplied important methodological significance,social significance,political significance and cultural significance.In the introduction,I recorded three observations of my hometown(which is not the main research object Longkou,discussed above)from 2012 to 2018.The purpose of the introduction is to draw out the questions via the way of description: when did the collective disappear? How did it disappear? Why does it grow and disappear occasionally in rural life? Do we need the collective today? Is it possible to become reality?...The first chapter mainly combs through the changes of the overall characteristics of Chinese social culture: the traditional Chinese society is a group culture,the Mao Zedong era is collectivism,and the Chinese rural society from 1980 s is increasingly individualized.On the basis of the above,the paper discusses the reasons for individualization and its crises,and puts forward that we need to reconstruct the collective in order to overcome deep cultural crises.The second chapter mainly records Longkou's history,the land and population,culture,and the social situation after dividing the fields into household plots in order to provide a material and cultural background for the description of Longkou practice in the following chapters.The third chapter focuses on the difficult process of building a road,environmental improvements,and briefly records the construction of Longkou hotel.At the same time,the chapter outlines two other practices in rural areas as a comparation.On the base of the third chapter,the fourth chapter compares the three different modes of reconstructing the collective,which are the villagers organizing themselves,a retired official leading villagers to reconstruct their hometown,and relying on capital to organize people.Then,the paper discusses the villagers' participation,containing two forms: the one is direct participation,and the other is participation in a virtual space which has great importance in the present.Village authorities' leadership and the people's participation are the basis for the reconstruction of the new rural collective.How to deal with their relationship is the issue of "democracy",which is a key factor to ensure the long-term healthy operation of a group.The fifth chapter demonstrates that collective reconstruction cannot be separated from two ideas: one is to reconstruct a new rural culture by creating a positive cultural feeling,and the other is to support the collective organization by reconstructing the collective economy.These two ideas boil down to one point: the goal is to achieve collective reproduction.The sixth chapter first describes how the construction of Longkou Hotel encounters institutional obstacles and the suppression of powerful departments,and then explores the reasons.The “ collective ” of “collective ownership of land”,“collective economic organization”is an empty signifier.Thus,officials do not care about the people and do not protect the creativity of the people's self-reliance.In addition to the wavering of people's faith caused by institutional barriers and pressure of the powerful departments,another crisis faced by Longkou's "collective" lies in the fact that it has not done anything in system building since 2014.The seventh chapter uses a methodological analysis from the aspects of theoretical enlightenment and operable traditions to discuss "how to imagine the new rural collective".But in the author's opinion,the most important thing is achieving human change by creating a new culture and emotional politics.In terms of the overall structure,except the Introduction,the paper is composed of three parts: the first chapter puts forward the proposition of rural collective reconstruction,the second to the sixth chapters demonstrate the possibility of collective reconstruction through the description and analysis of Longkou practice,and the last chapter discusses the methodology of how to imagine the collective.The author thinks that imagining a new collective is to imagine a new mode of organizing a new society.It is not only a political and economic practice,but also an emotional and cultural turn.Maintaining this organizational mode is a shared culture made of new interpersonal relationships and caring emotions.Commonality is the foundation of the collective and embodied in all kinds of entities.We cannot regard one specific type of collective as all collective types.Commonality needs to be characterized by a systematic description.Commonality of collective needs to be narrated by a systematic description.The more the commonality is narrated,the stronger the collective foundation becomes.If the commonality is not narrated,the foundation will be weak,and the collective form will be unstable.The process of describing commonality is the process of collective culture growth.