We know well of the disasters of ‘Stalinism’; they need no repeating here. It is testament to a profound poverty of political discourse he is identified with Hitler, even if the polemical value of identification of the two is rather transparent. The figure of Mao, for opponents of revolution, is a fraught one; ambiguous because, for them, he simultaneously repeats all of Stalin’s worst excesses, while any rupture with Stalin is held not as reasoned response but as an excess upon excess. Sure, Mao was just a repeat of Stalin; but if he wasn’t, surely he was something even worse and in fact at the end of the day Stalin would have been preferable. If Stalin killed 20 million, Mao killed 100 million; if Stalin purged his allies Mao’s “improvement” unleashed famine and chaos ten fold.
The most common perception of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Hereafter referred to as the GPCR) which I encounter when speaking with others is that of a violent chaotic disaster; here we know was a time when society simply went mad, and innocents such as intellectuals were made to suffer. Those who bear a more sophisticated understanding know that it was furthermore nothing but a cynical play for power by Mao after his failure in the Great Leap Forward (GLF); a vain attempt to retrieve the reins of power for his disastrous schemes. For this view, Mao wanted absolute power for Utopian nightmare, killed millions in the process and when he lost his standing in the party he masterminded a plot of revenge, which was little more than a glorified purge assisted by mass terror.
If the Stalinist purges and the Gulag system have become bywords for the Soviet Union in the anticommunist (left and right) lexicon, the Great Leap Forward (GLF) and the Cultural Revolution (GPCR) have come to hold analogous place deployed to index the years under the People’s Republic of China (PRC) until Mao’s death in 1976 and Deng Xiaopeng’s market reforms thereafter. All these events are deployed in the anti-communist discourse as unmitigated disasters caused by a paradoxical mixture of Utopian idealism and cynical power mongering; whatever the source they undoubtedly condemn the communist idea as nothing more than a criminal enterprise. There are many reasons why these events have been used to “collapse” the 20th Century communist experience into murder and famine, but this tactic of “collapsing” has made its way into leftist discourse itself. Even Zizek, an otherwise critical thinker, in an essay identifies Mao as the “Marxist Lord of Misrule”. I have found that for many fellow leftists I have known, the prevailing Marxist impressions can come to mirror the anti-communist “collapsing” mentioned here. There are many reasons why this procedure is intellectually dishonest, politically motivated and bordering on outright revisionist propaganda. I will address these concerns elsewhere, but I believe Jodi Dean, despite my disagreements with her politics, makes a good case against this phenomena in her work “The Communist Horizon.”
What first and foremost strikes me of this couple of proper names – Stalin & Mao, and their associated political quadruplet (the Great Purge, The Gulag, The GLF and the GPCR) is the profound heterogeneity of its elements – they are radically different historical sequences in radically different conjunctures and must be treated as such. Furthermore, in dominant discourse (a la someone like Jordan Peterson) these events are homogeneous in their origin as well as their ethical implications. They are the bloody results of an idea as violent as it is foolish. I do not need to point out to my likely readers that this reduction is hardly scientific, let alone historically materialist. But, assuming that they all partake, in some sense, in the “Communist Idea”, however defined, it is complete folly to suggest all are the same in import, or to think that we have had the last word and consigned their lessons to the dustbin of history. One of these events stands out in particular – one that does not confirm to the famine/purge pair which has by now been so thoroughly sutured to the historical identity of Communism – this event is none other than the GPCR, or, more simply, the Cultural Revolution.
Of the Quadruplet there are two implicit categories which are, for the anti-communist, paradigmatic of communism – the famine and the purge. To throw the GPCR into the set “famine” is obviously incorrect, but critics, however, see the sequence, especially in light of the Capitalist restoration which followed as an economic disaster so commonly portrayed as classically communist. But Richard Curt Kraus, in his introduction to the GPCR, refutes this image with hard data demonstrating that the crisis characterization is misleading, if not incorrect entirely. Dongping Han’s the “Unknown Cultural revolution” also gives a brilliant counter-narrative to this perception, demonstrating gains made for the least of Chinese Society, the peasants. The second set, “Purge”, is a more serious charge, and therefore requires more attention, as this is the typical characterization of the Cultural Revolution for Rightists, Leftists and Liberals alike. An untrained eye may very well take the presence of purges for incontrovertible proof that this characterization is correct. While purges were a nasty feature of the GPCR, they were not, as we know, the sole property of this period, and I will argue below that the word “purge”, while designating an empirical reality, does not conform to the “meaning” of the GPCR which can be extracted from a holistic analysis of those ten years, and especially the early years of the Mass mobilization phase from 1966-1968. Even given the presence of purges, such label can at best only refer to a sliver of the overall phenomena and completely obscures the unlimited, though brief, pluralization which makes this episode so important.
So, the GPCR is neither famine nor purge. Even if we found the common denominator to be death count, the GPCR would struggle to compete with the other events of the quadruplet, as it affected a much less significant proportion of the population and compared ranks behind most major disasters of the 20th century in terms of death toll. This comparison is provided by Andrew Walder in his recent work “Agents of Disorder”, and while it does not exonerate this period, it places the violence in context to give a composite image of a generally violent century, for which communism bears no special blame. Indeed, I believe the violence had very little to do with the idea of human emancipation at all. The real memory of violence is used as a means to suppress any positive lessons which this period might have had, lessons that I hope to demonstrate amply in the pursuit of this project.
How then would we characterize the Cultural Revolution, which shook the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Communist world as a whole, while inspiring socialists the world over and reminding the ever fearful Bourgeois with colorful but classic terrors of mass rule; a terrifying mixture of the yellow peril and the mob armed with guillotine? First, we must start with a truism, which nonetheless is still a useful truth: the era known as the GPCR was itself a multiplicity which can be decomposed into further multiplicities, ad infinitum; it was a heterogeneous sequence composed of diverging and converging forces, with active and passive phases, with many parties often at odds with one another and sometimes themselves. In other words, when we speak of the Cultural Revolution, as when we speak of any historical phenomenon, we are speaking of many different things. It must also be taken into account that much of our conventional narrative of the Cultural Revolution is a narrative given post facto to provide coherence which did not really exist at the time; much of this, interestingly, was in part manufactured by the same CCP that held the the 9th Party Congress in 1969.
Discussing the Cultural Revolution, one instantly notices that it is divided into two; this period is best understood as being composed of an “active” period and an “inactive” coda or tail. While the former, which stretches from roughly 1966-1968, was a hotbed of unlimited pluralization, political struggle and eventually factional violence, the latter, from 1969-76, composed of military repression, subsequent purges, the restoration of party rule and the depoliticization of the masses.
But even within the two, there are yet divisions. The active phase must be understood as a series of movements and counter movements, from different social forces and levels of Chinese society, often directly contradicting one another. The Red Guards’ militancy shifted from elite organizations the control of party work-teams to unrestrained organizations open to virtually all Chinese students, who, after the work-teams were withdrawn, began attacking individuals in ever higher seats of authority. The Red Guards, in turn, catalyzed worker activism that would propel “power seizures” and factionalism throughout the country, causing the collapse of much of the Chinese government by mid 1967. Then there is the long protracted period of factionalism which eventually results from the pluralization of the movement, and this is only brought under control by a brutal military crackdown which begins by 1968. By 1969, the mass mobilization phase, for all intents and purposes, is dead.
The “inactive” phase (and this name is perhaps a misnomer, but I will keep it for now) begins with the elimination of the Red Guards, the repression of the mass movement by the military and is inaugurated by the 9th Party Congress in 1969, which declares the GPCR a victory. From here on out the Cultural Revolution becomes largely confined to the cultural sphere, where the “Gang of Four”, as remnant of the leftist radicals, still holds sway. After a brief struggle between the civilian leadership (lead by Mao) & the military, (lead by Lin Biao the head of the Peoples’ Liberation Army PLA), Lin is eliminated in 1971 under circumstances which are still not clear to this day – the official version being that he had attempted a coup against Mao and subsequently fled. This causes a significant deflation of morale for the GPCR in Chinese Society; factions internal to the party bureaucracy jockey for power, Mao reinstates the targets of the GPCR, including Deng Xiaopeng. China’s foreign policy turns sharply right, with a detente with the US under Richard Nixon. Mao is infirmed, the government largely stalls. After Mao’s death in 1976 the ‘Gang of Four’ is arrested a month after.
We must also consider the conjuncture in which the GPCR occurred, realizing it not as the teleological unfolding of a singular idea, the vision of a particular leader (though Mao was in many ways a crucial catalyst), but a heterogeneous and contingent process birthed, and overdetermined by its historical context. The 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Union, the Sino-Soviet Split, the failure of the GLF and fallout from 1958-1962, the history of the modernization of the USSR and the entire thrust by the CCP to seek a form of modernization alternative to both the Soviet model and the Western Capitalist one, the conflicts against imperial powers in Korea, Vietnam, Formosa, Indonesia, etc. – all these things profoundly shaped, but also gave birth to the shifting and evolving phenomena that would became the GPCR. Not only were the causes of the GPCR multifaceted and complex, the unfolding of those tumultuous years were shaped by the kaleidoscopic contingencies pressed by the deepening Sino-Soviet conflict (including a brief border conflict in 1969), as well as the escalation in the war in Vietnam and the sudden pivot to the USA in the late years (Nixon’s visit was in 1972), so it is impossible to reduce this era as the machinations of one man, and this is also true for the communist idea in general. I can not reiterate my point here enough; it is precisely the heterogeneity of the Cultural Revolution; it is not a singular campaign which can be characterized with the conscious intentions of an individual or a faction. The analytical divisions do not stop at this “two” (of the active and inactive phases), but these suffice here to make the point. The Cultural Revolution, is then, radically overdetermined in principle, if, so to speak, it even exists. I hope that, as historians and communists, we will be able to liberate the GPCR from the shackles of the “purge/famine” couplet to which it is constrained. This can only be achieved through a thouroughgoing analysis which grasps the episode in its complexity; simple moral judgments and conventional categories will not do.
Toward Recomposition 