Their Lenin,Our Lenin: Proper Names and the Politics of Revolutionary Mourning in Early Chinese Marxism

Abstract

How should revolutionaries mourn the dead? What distinguishes a communist practice of mourning from that oriented toward the preservation of the capitalist state form? This article seeks to answer these questions via an examination of the responses of early members of the Chinese Communist Party to the deaths of major revolutionary figures, above all that of Lenin in 1924. It argues that Lenin’s death became a vital site of cultural politics under the conditions of the First United Front. Chinese communists sought to resist the reduction of Lenin to an individuated, heroic figure whose political work could be limited to the political form of the disciplined party organization and instead situated Lenin on an internationalist horizon, as a figure to be emulated by communists globally, alongside other deceased figures such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.