why anarchists shouldn’t dismiss the cultural revolution
I’m still not ready to start posting regularly on this blog – it probably won’t be until next spring – but i just felt the need to address this question in an email to a friend, & i figured i’d share w/ others in case anyone else is thinking about this. Below are some excerpts from the email message, w/ personal details removed.
As for [China's so-called "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," henceforth CR], that’s something we might talk about in person some time. For now let me try to briefly summarize the way a few friends and i think about the relevance of the CR to anarchist intervention in China today.
Historically speaking, during the early, more open-ended and chaotic phase of the CR (1966-1968), certain parts of China (Shanghai, Wuhan, Changsha) came the closest China has ever come to destruction of the state & the creation of alternative grassroots institutions for running society more democratically. Of course this was not exactly Mao’s intention (i follow Arif Dirlik’s “Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution” in seeing Mao as self-contradictory – on the one hand deeply shaped by Chinese anarcho-communism, but on the other a Stalinist bureaucrat, so he could unleash these popular movements against the state & then suppress them or try to funnel them into exploitative statist projects when they got out of hand). Nor was it the intention of most of the other people who started the CR and ultimately controlled it – the Gang of Four, etc. So whenever popular rebellion got to the point of threatening the social structure itself (instead of just a few leaders & their “bureaucratic work-style” as Mao & his comrades intended), Mao & his comrades ordered the police & military to suppress the most radical elements & redirect the popular movement & experimentation into less threatening forms – such as the Revolutionary Committees, which forced the new popular, independent organizations to share power with representatives from the party & the military, and to limit their activities to supervision of the regular party & government institutions, rather than replacing them.
I don’t know how much you know about all this or how interested you are, so i’ll leave off there as far as the history goes. Practically speaking, the main reason i think we can’t simply dismiss the CR is that some of the most active & radical agitators in China today are former CR rebels, and their experiences during that period provide important inspiration & lessons for their agitation & organizing work today. Among the ones i’ve met & know of, to the extent that i understand their political orientation, i disagree w/ it to varying degrees. All seem hindered by the need to ground their views in Mao, despite the fact that some of their views are completely the opposite of Mao’s! For example, one thinks that the fundamental lesson of the CR is that parties & states cannot achieve communism, that only “mass organizations” can, & that they should immediately replace the party & the state, abolishing prisons, the police, and the military. Similarly, you can look up an article on the web, “我们不要一个警察世界“, that argues that Mao supported some CR rebels’ releasing of prisoners and calls to abolish prisons and labor camps. The argument has been subject to a lot of debate because of conflicting evidence. To us, it seems silly to try to put such words into Mao’s mouth – why not just say “abolish prisons!” and get on with it? But from this you can see why i think it’s important engage w/ these people, especially in the scarcity of closer allies in China. By debating with them, we may not change their views, but at least we put some stimulating discussions into circulation that may be of use to presently non-aligned rebellious spirits.
If you want to learn more about the anti-state tendencies that emerged during the CR, you can see this. The author obviously left off halfway through, and i disagree with some of it, but it’s the only short introduction i know of online, & has links to other resources about it.
Like i said, hopefully we can talk about this in person some time, but until then, i just wanted to explain that it’s possible to be pro-(certain tendencies w/in the)-CR without being pro-Mao or pro-state.
coming soon
This blog will probably start becoming active some time in the spring of 2009. Below is our description:
“The investigation is… that which enables any given militant process to continue moving along in the spiral between the various political experiences and their effective theoretical concentration.”
- Bruno Bosteels, “Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics,” positions: east asia cultures critique, 13(3), 2005, p. 579.
To name our project after a term linked to Mao Zedong could easily be misconstrued, so let us start by clarifying something: We’re not Maoists, or even Marxists, inasmuch as these terms refer to ideologies of state-led modernization, rather than theoretical reflection on the working class’s day-to-day struggles against what has become the chief legacy of such modernization – the global system of capitalist exploitation, with all its accompanying mechanisms of social control. Our struggles against capital, we believe, ultimately tend not toward achieving or improving modernity, but toward abolishing all forms of property and state power, and liberating the earth and human creativity into their cooperative coordination for the good of all. For this movement we reserve the term “communist,” and the theoretical reflection on this movement is only ever partial and experimental. We do no justice to the movement by identifying rigidly with one faction of dead revolutionaries and rejecting all the others as merely “the left wing of capital” and so on. Our task in the present moment is not so much to figure out who among previous theorists was right or wrong, but to draw critically on past theory in analyzing today’s struggles and sharing their lessons among the global working class – employed and unemployed, urban and rural. And these struggles – even those we may be involved with directly – can only be understood through systematic investigation guided by past experience and theory, and motivated by a steadfast commitment to the communist project.
At the time of writing (June 2008), we have mixed feelings about Badiou’s highly abstract theory and its social implications, but we like what we know so far about Colectivo Situaciones, an Argentinian group that has incorporated some of Badiou’s concepts into their practical interventions, and we like the way Shukaitis and Graeber, among others, have also used the term ”militant investigation” in their Constituent Imagination project. Of course many others – including any communists worthy of the name – have done this sort of thing without using this term, for example Kolinko, recently, with their project on call centers, Engels long ago with The Condition of the Working Class in England, and Mao with his numerous rural investigations. If there’s one area where we agree with Mao, it’s in the principle that “people engaged in practical work must at all times keep abreast of changing conditions,” and that ”investigation is especially necessary for those who know theory but do not know the actual conditions, for otherwise they will not be able to link theory with practice” (Rural Surveys, 1941). This blog will be part of a project to help accelerate the spiral between communist theory and practice through investigations into the conditions of ongoing anti-capitalist struggles – especially those in the Chinese-speaking world. As such, this project will also aim to accelerate the spiral between anti-capitalist currents in the Chinese and English-speaking worlds. This is our English blog, aimed at a non-Chinese audience, for reporting and reflecting on the results of such investigations, including onsite observations and interviews as well as reflections on second-hand accounts, overviews of Chinese writings, and criticism of other analyses. In addition to the blog, we also plan a similar Chinese blog; a web archive of relevant writings and other resources in Chinese and English, including pamphlets; a translation and writing project to produce original Chinese pamphlets and possibly a newletter; and eventually, a community center somewhere in mainland China with lectures, workshops, film screenings, and so on. If you’d like to help out with any of these projects, contact us at milivest@hush.com. We are currently based in several locations in the US and mainland China, and we have friends in Taiwan and HK.
