Cages and Class Struggle: A Leninist Inquiry into the Caricature of Marxism in Fenggang Yang’s ‘Soul Searching’

Abstract

The sociologist of religion Fenggang Yang has recently extended his ‘markets of religion’ framework to the spiritual ‘soul searching’ in contemporary literature. In his epilogue to Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang’s Mo Yan in Context (2014), an anthology of interdisciplinary interpretations of Mo Yan’s ‘hallucinatory realist’ fiction, Yang claims that ‘Chinese souls’ have been ‘caged’ by, among other things, ‘Marxist-Leninist-Maoist atheism’. He refers to the Marxist theory of religion as merely ‘the Marxist adage’ that religion is ‘the opiate of the people’. This essay analyzes Yang’s ‘cage’ concept, to ‘work against it both from without and within’, as Lenin says. In doing so, I argue that Yang’s ‘soul searching’ epilogue is a highly concentrated text of bourgeois ideological mystification and is, therefore, a productive site for Marxist oppositional pedagogy which contests the imagism of ‘cages’ with the materialist dialectics of class struggle.