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.
