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Why discuss the 'Cultural Revolution', the official name for a long period of serious disturbances in Communist China between 1965 and 1976? For at least three reasons:
1. The Cultural Revolution has been a constant and lively point of reference for militant activity throughout the world, and particularly in France, at least between 1967 and 1976. It is part of our political history and the basis for the existence of the Maoist current, the only true political creation of the sixties and seventies. I can say 'our', for I was part of it, and in a certain sense, to quote Rimbaud, 'I am there, I am still there.' In the untiring inventiveness of the Chinese revolutionaries, all sorts of subjective and practical trajectories have found their justification — to change subjectivity, to live otherwise, to think otherwise: the Chinese — and then we — called that 'revolutionization'. Their aim: 'To change the human being in what is most profound.' They taught that in political practice, we must be both 'the arrow and the bull's eye', because the old worldview is also still present within us. By the end of the sixties, we were present everywhere: in the factories, in the suburbs, in the countryside. Tens of thousands of students became proletarian or went to live among the workers. For this too we had the phrases of the Cultural Revolution: the 'great exchanges of experience', 'to serve the people', and, always the essential slogan: the 'mass alliance'. We fought against the brutal inertia of the PCF (Parti Communiste Français), against its violent conservatism. In China too the party bureaucracy was attacked; that was called 'the struggle against revisionism'. Even the splits, the confrontations between revolutionaries from different orientations, were referred to in the Chinese manner: 'to hunt down the black gangsters', ending with those who are 'leftist in appearance and rightist in reality'. When we came across a popular political situation, a factory strike or a confrontation with the fascistic landlords, we knew that we had 'to excel in the discovery of the proletarian left, to rally the centre, to isolate and crush the right'. Mao's Little Red Book has been our guide, not, as fools say, in the service of a dogmatic catechism, but on the contrary so that we can clarify and invent new behaviours in all sorts of disparate situations that were unfamiliar to us. With regard to all this, since I am not one of those who justify their abandonment and their rallying to the established reaction with references to the psychology of illusions or to blind morality, we can only quote our sources, and pay homage to the Chinese revolutionaries.
2. The Cultural Revolution is the typical example (yet another notion from Maoism, the typical example: a revolutionary discovery that must be generalized) of a political experience that saturates the form of the party-state. I use the term 'saturation' in the sense given to it by Sylvain Lazarus; I will attempt to show that the Cultural Revolution is the last significant political sequence that is still internal to the party-state (in this case, the Chinese Communist Party), and fails as such.
But May 1968 and its aftermath, that is slightly different. The Polish movement or Chiapas, that is very different. The Organisation Politique, that is absolutely different. But without the saturation of the sixties and seventies, nothing would as yet be thinkable, outside the spectre of the party-state, or the parties-state.
3. The Cultural Revolution is a great lesson in history and politics, in history as thought from within politics (and not the other way around). Indeed, depending on whether we examine this 'revolution' (the word itself lies at the heart of the saturation) according to the dominant historiography or according to a real political question, we arrive at striking disagreements. What matters is for us to see clearly that the nature of this discord is not of the order of empirical or positivist precision or lack thereof. We can be in agreement as to the facts, and end up with judgements that are perfectly opposed to one another. It is precisely this paradox that will serve as our point of entry into the subject matter.
The dominant historiographical version was compiled by various specialists, especially by Sinologists, as early as 1968, and it has not changed since then. It was consolidated by the fact that covertly it became the official version of a Chinese state dominated after 1976 by people who escaped from and sought revenge for the Cultural Revolution, headed by Deng Xiaoping.
What does this version say?
It says that, in terms of revolution, it was a matter of a power struggle at the top echelons of the bureaucracy of the party-state. That Mao's economic voluntarism, incarnated in the call for 'the Great Leap Forward', was a complete failure, leading to the return of famine to the countryside. That following this failure, Mao finds himself in the minority among the leading party authorities, and that a 'pragmatic' group imposes its law, the dominant personalities of which are Liu Shaoqi (then named president of the Republic), Deng Xiaoping (general secretary of the Party) and Peng Zhen (mayor of Beijing). That, as early as 1963, Mao attempted to lead some counter-attacks, but that he failed among the regular party authorities. That he then had recourse to forces foreign to the party, whether external (the student Red Guards) or external/internal, particularly the army, over which he took control again after the elimination of Peng Dehuai and his replacement by Lin Biao.
That then, solely because of Mao's will to regain power, there ensued a bloody and chaotic situation, which persisted until the death of the culprit (in 1976).
It is totally feasible to accept that nothing in this version is properly speaking incorrect. But its real meaning can emerge only from a political understanding of the events, that is, their concentration in a form of thinking still active today.
1. No stabilization? True. But that is because it turned out to be impossible to develop the political innovation within the framework of the party-state. Neither the most extensive creative freedom of the student and working masses (between 1966 and 1968) nor the ideological and state control of the army (between 1968 and 1971), nor the ad hoc solutions to the problems isssued in a Politburo dominated by the confrontation among antagonistic tendencies (between 1972 and 1976) allowed the revolutionary ideas to take root so that an entirely new political situation, completely detached from the Soviet model, could finally see the light of day on the scale of society as a whole.
2. Recourse to external forces? True. But this was intended, and it actually had the effect, both on a short-term and on a long-term basis, perhaps even until today, of partly disentangling party and state. It was a matter of destroying bureaucratic formalism, at least for the duration of a massive movement. The fact that this provoked the anarchy of factions at the same time signals an essential political question for times to come: what gives unity to a politics, if it is not directly guaranteed by the formal unity of the state?
3. A struggle for power? Of course. It is rather ridiculous to oppose 'power struggle' and 'revolution' since by 'revolution' we can only understand the articulation of antagonistic political forces over the question of power. Besides, the Maoists constantly quoted Lenin, for whom the question of the revolution in the final instance is explicitly that of power. Rather, the real problem, which is very complex, would be to know whether the Cultural Revolution does not in fact put an end to the revolutionary conception of the articulation between politics and the state. Indeed, this was its great question, its central and violent debate.
4. The 'Great Leap Forward' — a cruel failure? Yes, in many respects. But this failure is the result of a critical examination of Stalin's economic doctrine. It can certainly not be attributed to a uniform treatment of questions related to the development of the countryside by 'totalitarianism'. Mao severely examined (as witnessed by numerous written notes) the Stalinist conception of collectivization and its absolute disdain for the peasants. His idea was certainly not to collectivize through force and violence in order to ensure accumulation at all costs in the cities. It was, quite the contrary, to industrialize the countryside locally, to give it a relative economic autonomy, in order to avoid the savage proletarianization and urbanization that had taken a catastrophic shape in the USSR. In truth, Mao followed the communist idea of an effective resolution of the contradiction between city and countryside, and not that of a violent destruction of the countryside in favour of the cities. If there is a failure, it is of a political nature, and it is a completely different failure from Stalin's. Ultimately, we should affirm that the same abstract description of facts by no means leads to the same mode of thinking when it operates under different political axioms.
The quarrel is equally clear when it comes to dates. The dominant point of view, which is also that of the Chinese State, is that the Cultural Revolution lasted for ten years, from 1966 to 1976, from the Red Guards to Mao's death. Ten years of troubles, ten years lost for a rational development.
In fact, this dating can be defended, if one reasons from the strict point of view of the history of the Chinese State, with the following criteria: civil stability, production, a certain unity at the head of the administration, cohesion in the army, etc. But this is not my axiom and these are not my criteria. If one examines the question of dates from the point of view of politics, of political invention, the principal criteria become the following: when can we say that there is a situation of collective creations of thought of the political type? When does practice with its directives stand in a verifiable excess over the tradition and function of the Chinese party-state? When do statements of universal value emerge? Then, we proceed in a completely different way to determine the boundaries of the process named the 'Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution', which we among ourselves called 'the GPCR'.
As far as I am concerned, I propose that the Cultural Revolution, in this conception, forms a sequence that runs from November 1965 to July 1968. I can even accept (this is a matter of political technique) a drastic reduction, which would situate the revolutionary moment properly speaking between May 1966 and September 1967. The criterion is the existence of a political activity of the masses, its slogans, its new organizations, its own places. Through all of this an ambivalent but undeniable reference is constituted for all contemporary political thought worthy of the name. In this sense, there is 'revolution' because there are the Red Guards, the revolutionary rebel workers, innumerable organizations and 'general headquarters', totally unpredictable situations, new political statements, texts without precedent, etc.
How to proceed so that this gigantic upheaval is exposed to thought and makes sense today? I will formulate a hypothesis and experiment on several levels, both factual and textual, of the sequence I am referring to (that is, China between November 1965 and July 1968).
The hypothesis is the following: We are in the conditions of an essential division of the party-state (the Chinese Communist Party, in power since 1949). This division is essential in that it entails crucial questions regarding the future of the country: the economy and the relation between city and countryside; the eventual transformation of the army; the assessment of the Korean War; the intellectuals, universities, art and literature; and, finally, the value of the Soviet, or Stalinist, model. But it is also and above all essential because the minority trend among the party cadres is at the same time led, or represented, by the person whose historical and popular legitimacy is the greatest, that is, Mao Zedong. There is a formidable phenomenon of non-coincidence between the historicity of the party (the long period of the popular war, first against the Japanese, then against Chiang Kai-shek) and the present state of its activity as the framework of state power. Moreover, the Yanan period will be constantly invoked during the Cultural Revolution, particularly in the army, as a model of communist political subjectivity.
This phenomenon has the following consequences: the confrontation between positions cannot be ruled by bureaucratic formalism, but neither can it be ruled by the methods of terrorist purging that Stalin used in the thirties. In the space of the party-state, though, there is only formalism or terror. Mao and his group will have to invent a third recourse, a recourse to political mass mobilization, to try to break with the representatives of the majority trend and, in particular, their leaders at the upper echelons of the party and the state. This recourse assumes that one admit uncontrolled forms of revolt and organization. Mao's group, after a great deal of hesitation, will in fact impose that these be admitted, first in the universities and then in the factories. But, in a contradictory move, it will also try to bring together all organizational innovations of the revolution in the general space of the party-state.
Here we are at the heart of the hypothesis: the Cultural Revolution is the historical development of a contradiction. On one hand, the issue is to arouse mass revolutionary action in the margins of the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or to acknowledge, in the theoretical jargon of the time, that even though the state is formally a 'proletarian' state, the class struggle continues, including forms of mass revolt. Mao and his followers will go so far as to say that under socialism, the bourgeoisie reconstitutes itself and organizes itself *within the Communist Party itself*. On the other hand, with actual civil war still being excluded, the general form of the relation between the party and the state, in particular concerning the use of repressive forces, must remain unchanged at least in so far as it is not really a question of *destroying* the party. Mao will make this known by noting that 'the overwhelming majority of cadres are good'.
This contradiction will at the same time produce a succession of instances of local revolt that exceed the party's authority, the violent anarchy of these excesses, the inevitability of a call to order of extraordinary brutality, and, in the end, the decisive entrance on to the stage of the people's army.
These successive excesses establish the chronology (the stages) of the Cultural Revolution. The leading revolutionary group will first try to keep the revolt within the context of the educational institutions. This attempt began to fail in August 1966, when the Red Guards spread throughout the cities. Afterwards, it will be a question of containing the revolt within the framework of youth in school and university. But from the end of 1966 and particularly from January 1967 onward, workers become the principal force of the movement. Then the quest is on to keep the party and state administrations at a distance, but they will be in the midst of the turmoil starting in 1967 through a series of power struggles. Finally, the aim will be to keep the army in check at any cost as a power in reserve, a last resource. But this will turn out to be almost impossible with the unleashing of violence in August 1967 in Wuhan and Canton. It is precisely with an eye on the real risk of a schism among the armed forces that the slow movement of repressive inversion will set in, beginning in September 1967.
Let us put it like this: the political innovations which gave the sequence its unquestionable revolutionary appeal could not be deployed except in so far as they exceeded the aim assigned to them by those whom the actors of the revolution themselves (the youth and its innumerable groups, the rebel workers…) considered to be their natural leaders: Mao and his minority group. By the same token, these innovations have always been localized and particular; they could not really turn into strategic and reproducible propositions. In the end, the strategic meaning (or the universal range) of these innovations was negative. Because what they themselves meant, and what they strongly impressed upon the militant minds of the entire world, was nothing but the end of the party-state as the central product of revolutionary political activity. More generally, the Cultural Revolution showed that it was no longer possible to submit either the revolutionary mass actions or the organizational phenomena to the strict logic of class representation. That is why it remains a political episode of the highest importance.
I would like to experiment with the above hypothesis by testing it according to seven referents, taken in chronological order:
1. The 'Sixteen Points' decision of August 1966, which is probably for the most part from the hand of Mao himself, and which in any case is the most innovative central document, the one that breaks most abruptly with the bureaucratic formalism of parties-state.
2. The Red Guards and Chinese society (in the period from August 1966 to at least August 1967). Without a doubt, this involves an exploration of the limits of the political capacity of high-school and university students left more or less to themselves, whatever the circumstances.
3. The 'revolutionary rebel workers' and the Shanghai Commune (January/February 1967), a major and unfinished episode, because it proposes an alternative form of power to the centralism of the party.
4. The power seizures: the 'great alliance', 'triple combination' and 'revolutionary committees', from January 1967 to the spring of 1968. Here the question is whether the movement really creates new organizations, or whether it amounts only to a regeneration of the party.
5. The Wuhan incident (July 1967). Here we are at the peak of the movement: the army risks division, and the far left pushes its advantage, but only to succumb.
6. The workers' entry into the universities (end of July 1968), which is in reality the final episode of the existence of independent student organizations.
7. Mao's cult of personality. This feature has so often been the object of sarcasm in the West that in the end we have forgotten to ask ourselves what meaning it might well have had, and in particular, what its meaning is within the Cultural Revolution, where the 'cult' functioned as a flag, not for the party conservatives, but for worker and student rebels.
This text was adopted at a session of the Central Committee on 8 August 1966. With a certain genius it presents the fundamental contradiction of the endeavour called the 'Cultural Revolution'. One sign of this presentation is of course the fact that the text does not explain, or barely explains, the name ('cultural') relating to the ongoing political sequence, except for the enigmatic and metaphysical first sentence: 'The Cultural Revolution seeks to change people in what is most profound.'
Here, 'cultural' is equivalent to 'ideological', in a particularly radical sense.
A whole portion of the text is a pure and simple call for free revolt, in the great tradition of revolutionary legitimizations.
The text is quite probably illegal, as the composition of the Central Committee was 'corrected' by Mao's group with the support of the army (or certain units loyal to Lin Biao). Revolutionary militants from the university are present, while conservative bureaucrats have been prevented from taking part. In reality, and this is very important, this decision begins a long period of non-existence both of the Central Committee and of the party's secretariat. The important central texts from now on will be signed conjointly by four institutions: the Central Committee, certainly, but which is now only a phantom; the 'Cultural Revolution Group', a highly restricted ad hoc group, which nonetheless dispenses of the real political power properly speaking in so far as it is recognized by the rebels; the State Council, presided over by Zhou Enlai; and, finally, as the guarantee of a minimum of administrative continuity, the formidable Military Commission of the Central Committee, restructured by Lin Biao.
Certain passages of the circular are particularly virulent, concerning both the immediate revolutionary requirement and the need to oppose the party with new forms of organization.
Concerning popular mobilization, we will cite in particular points 3 and 4, entitled 'Put Daring Above Everything Else and Boldly Arouse the Masses' and 'Let the Masses Educate Themselves in the Movement'. For example:
> What the Central Committee of the Party demands of the Party committees at all levels is that they persevere in giving correct leadership, put daring above everything else, boldly arouse the masses, change the state of weakness and incompetence where it exists, encourage those comrades who have made mistakes but are willing to correct them to cast off their mental burdens and join in the struggle, and dismiss from their leading posts all those in authority who are taking the capitalist road and so make possible the recapture of the leadership for the proletarian revolutionaries.
Or, again:
> Trust the masses, rely on them and respect their initiative. Cast out fear. Don't be afraid of disturbances. Chairman Mao has often told us that revolution cannot be so very refined, so gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. Let the masses educate themselves in this great revolutionary movement and learn to distinguish between right and wrong and between correct and incorrect ways of doing things.
One detail of point 7 is particularly important and will have immense practical consequences. Here it is:
> no measure should be taken against students at universities, colleges, middle schools, and primary schools because of problems that arise in the movement.
Everybody in China understands that, at least for the period that is now beginning, the revolutionary youth in the cities is guaranteed a form of impunity. It is evident that this is what will allow the youth to spread through the country, parading the revolutionary spirit, in any case until September 1967.
Concerning the forms of organization, point 9, entitled 'Cultural Revolutionary Groups, Committees, and Congresses', sanctions the invention, within and by the movement, of multiple political regroupings outside the party:
> Many new things have begun to emerge in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The cultural revolutionary groups, committees, and other organizational forms created by the masses in many schools and units are something new and of great historic importance.
These new organizations are not considered temporary, which proves that the Maoist group, in August of 1966, envisions the destruction of the political monopoly of the party:
> Therefore, the cultural revolutionary groups, committees and congresses should not be temporary organizations but permanent, standing mass organizations.
In the end, we are clearly dealing with organizations that are subject to mass democracy, and not to party authority, as shown by the reference to the Paris Commune, that is, to a proletarian situation previous to the Leninist theory of the party:
> It is necessary to institute a system of general elections, like that of the Paris Commune, for electing the members to the cultural revolutionary groups and committees and delegates to the cultural revolutionary congresses. The lists of candidates should be put forward by the revolutionary masses after full discussion, and the elections should be held after the masses have discussed the lists over and over again.
> If these members or delegates prove incompetent, they can be replaced through election or recalled by the masses after discussion.
However, if we read the text carefully, knowing what it means 'to read a text' when it comes from the leadership of a communist party, we observe that, through crucial restrictions on the freedom of criticism, some kind of lock is put on the revolutionary impulse to which the text constantly appeals.
First of all, it is held, as if axiomatically, that in essence the party is good. Point 8 ('The Question of Cadres') distinguishes four types of cadres, as put to the test of the Cultural Revolution (let us remember that in China, a 'cadre' is anyone who dispenses authority, even if minimal): good, comparatively good, those who have made serious mistakes that can be fixed, and lastly 'the small number of anti-Party and anti-socialist Rightists'. The thesis is then that 'the first two categories (good and comparatively good) are the great majority'. That is, the state apparatus and its internal leadership (the party) are essentially in good hands, which renders paradoxical the recourse to such large-scale revolutionary methods.
Secondly, even if it is said that the masses must take the initiative, the explicit criticism by name of those responsible for the state or the party is in fact severely controlled 'from above'. On this point, the hierarchical structure of the party makes a sudden comeback (point 11, 'The Question of Criticizing by Name in the Press'):
> Criticism of anyone by name in the press should be decided after discussion by the Party committee at the same level, and in some cases submitted to the Party committee at a higher level for approval.
The result of this directive will be that innumerable cadres of the party, to begin with the president of the Republic, Liu Shaoqi, will be violently criticized for months, even years, by mass revolutionary organizations in the 'small journals', cartoons, mural posters, before their name appears in the central press. But, at the same time, these criticisms will keep a local character, or be open to annulment. They will leave in the air what *decisions* correspond to them.
Point 15, 'The Armed Forces', finally, which is extremely succinct, raises a decisive question as if in a void: Who has authority over the repressive apparatus? Classically, Marxism indicates that a revolution must break down the repressive apparatus of the state it aims to transform from top to bottom. That is certainly not what is understood in this case:
> In the armed forces, the Cultural Revolution and the socialist education movement should be carried out in accordance with the instructions of the Military Commission of the Central Committee of the Party and the General Political Department of the People's Liberation Army.
Here again, we come back to the centralized authority of the party.
Ultimately, the Decision in Sixteen Points combines approaches that are still heterogeneous, and, because of its war-like appeal, it prepares the successive impasses of the movement in its relation to the party-state. Of course, there is always the question of how to define, on the basis of the mass movement, a political path that would be different from the one imposed during previous years by the principal current among the party leadership. But two essential questions remain unsolved: who designates the enemies, who sets the targets of revolutionary criticism? And what is, in this sombre afair, the role of the considerable repressive apparatus: public security, militias and army?
Following on the heels of the August circular, the phenomenon of the 'Red Guards', organizations of high-school students, will take on extraordinary significance. We know of the gigantic meetings at Tiananmen, which carry on until the end of 1966, where Mao shows himself, mute, to hundreds of thousands of young men and women. But the most important point is that revolutionary organizations storm the cities, using trucks lent by the army, and then the rest of the country, taking advantage of the free train transportation according to the programme of 'exchange of experiences'.
It is clear that what we have here is the strike force behind the movement's extension to the whole of China. Within this movement an absolutely amazing freedom reigns; groups openly confront each other, the journals, tracts, banners and never-ending mural posters reproduce revelations of all kinds along with the political declarations. Fierce caricatures spare almost no one (in August of 1967, the questioning of Zhou Enlai in one of the great mural posters put up overnight will be one of the reasons for the fall of the so-called 'ultra-leftist' tendency). Processions with gongs, drums and loud proclamations take place until late at night.
On the other hand, the tendency towards militarization and uncontrolled action by shock groups soon makes its appearance. The general slogan speaks of a revolutionary struggle against old ideas and old customs (that is what gives content to the adjective 'cultural', which in Chinese means rather 'civilizational' and, in old Marxist jargon, 'superstructural'. Many groups gave this slogan a destructive and violent, even persecutory, interpretation. The hunting-down of women wearing braids, of formally educated intellectuals, of hesitant professors, of all the 'cadres' who do not use the same phraseology as such-and-such a splinter group, the raiding of libraries or museums, the unbearable arrogance of small revolutionary chiefs with regard to the mass of the undecided — all that will soon provoke a genuine revulsion among ordinary people against the extremist wing of the Red Guards.
At bottom, the problem had already been raised in the communiqué of 16 May 1966, Mao's first public act of rebellion against the majority of the Central Committee. This communiqué bluntly declares the need to contend that 'without destruction, there is no construction'. It stigmatizes the conservatives, who preach the 'constructive' spirit to oppose any destruction of the basis of their power. But the balance is hard to find between the evidence of destruction and the slow and tortuous character of construction.
The truth is that, armed only with the slogan of 'the fight of the new against the old', many Red Guards gave in to a well-known (negative) tendency in revolutions: iconoclasm, the persecution of people for futile motives, a sort of assumed barbarism. This is also an inclination of youth left to its own devices. From this we will draw the conclusion that every political organization must be transgenerational, and that it is a bad idea to organize the political separation of youth.
For sure, the Red Guards in no way invent the anti-intellectual radicalism of the revolutionary spirit. At the moment of pronouncing the death sentence of the chemist Lavoisier during the French Revolution, the public accuser Fouquier-Tinville offered this remarkable statement: 'The Republic has no need for scientists.' What happens is that a true revolution considers that it has itself created everything it needs, and we should respect this creative absolutism. In this regard the Cultural Revolution was a true revolution. On the question of science and technology, the fundamental slogan was that what matters is to be 'red', not to be an 'expert'. Or, in the 'moderate' version, which would become the official one: one must be 'red and expert', but red above all.
However, what made the barbarism of certain revolutionary shock groups considerably worse was the fact that there was never, in the sphere of youth action, a global political space for political affirmation, for the positive creation of the new. The tasks of criticism and of destruction had a self-evidence to them that was lacking in the tasks of invention, and all the more so as the latter remained tied to the relentless struggles going on at the top levels of the state.
The end of 1966 and the beginning of 1967 represent an important moment of the Cultural Revolution with the massive and decisive appearance on the scene by the factory workers. Shanghai plays a pilot role during this important time.
We should consider the paradox inherent in this appearance on the scene of those who officially constitute the 'leading class' of the Chinese State. This comes about, if I may say so, from the Right. In December 1966, indeed, it is the local bureaucrats, the conservative leadership of the party and the municipality who use a working-class contingent — most notably the trade unionists — against the Maoist movement of the Red Guards. Not unlike the way, I might add, in which in France, in May 1968 and the years to follow, the PCF attempted to use the old guard of the CGT (Conseil Générale du Travail) against the revolutionary students who were allied with young workers. Taking advantage of a changing situation, the bosses of the party and municipality of Shanghai launch the workers on the path of all kinds of sectoral demands of a purely economic nature, and in so doing set them up against any intervention coming from the young revolutionaries in the factories and in the administrations (just as in May 1968, the PCF put up a barricade around the factories with picket-lines drawn from its employees, and everywhere hunted down the 'leftists'). Using violent tactics, these unionized movements become quite sizeable, especially the strikes of the transportation and energy sectors, which seek to foster an atmosphere of chaos so that the party bosses can present themselves as the saviours of order. For all these reasons, the revolutionary minority will be forced to intervene against the bureaucratized strikes and to oppose the 'economism' and the demand for 'material incentives' with an austere campaign in favour of communist work and, above all, for the primacy of global political consciousness over and above particular demands. This will be the backdrop for the great slogan supported in particular by Lin Biao: 'Fight against egoism and criticize revisionism' (we know that 'revisionist' for the Maoists designates abandoning all revolutionary dynamics followed by the USSR, by the communist parties that depend on it, and by a large number of cadres from the Chinese Party).
In the beginning, the Maoist workers' group is rather weak. There is talk of 4,000 workers by the end of 1966. It is true that this group will link itself to the Red Guards and constitute an activist minority. But this does not take away the fact that its field of action in the factories properly speaking is not very large, except in certain machine-tool factories. That was their great claim to fame, and their example would be invoked by revolutionaries for several years to come.
In my opinion, it is indeed because the direct action of the workers in the factories comes up against very lively resistance (the bureaucracy has its stronghold there) that the Maoist activists will begin to deploy themselves on the scale of an urban power. With aid from a segment of the cadres who have been loyal to Mao for a long time, as well as from a fraction of the army, they will purge the municipality and the local party committee. Hence what will be called the 'seizure of power', which under the name of the 'Shanghai Commune' will mark a turning point in the Cultural Revolution.
This seizure of power is immediately paradoxical. On the one hand, like the Decision in Sixteen Points above, it finds inspiration in a complete counter-model of the party-state: the coalition of the most disparate organizations that constituted the Paris Commune and whose ineffective anarchy had already been criticized by Marx. On the other hand, this counter-model has no possibility of national development in so far as on the national level the figure of the party remains the only one allowed, even if a number of its traditional elements are in crisis. Throughout the tumultuous episodes of the revolution, Zhou Enlai has remained the guarantee of the unity of the state and of a minimal level of functionality of the administration. As far as we know, he was never disavowed by Mao in this task, which forced him to navigate as closely as possible, including as closely as possible to the right-wing elements (it is he who will put Deng Xiaoping back in the saddle, 'the second highest in power of those who, despite being in the party, are taking the capitalist road' to use the revolutionary phrase, and this from the middle of the 1970s onwards). Zhou Enlai, however, made it very clear to the Red Guards that if the 'exchanges of experience' in the entire country were admissible, no revolutionary organization of national importance could be allowed.
Thus the Shanghai Commune, drawn after endless discussions from local student and worker organizations, can attain only a fragile unity. Here again, if the gesture is fundamental (the 'seizure of power' by the revolutionaries), its political space is too narrow. As a result, the workers' entry on to the scene marks both and at the same time a spectacular broadening of the revolutionary mass base, a gigantic and sometimes violent test of bureaucratized forms of power, and the short-lived outline of a new articulation between the popular political initiative and the power of the state.
During the first months of 1967, following the lesson of the events in Shanghai where the revolutionaries have overthrown the anti-Maoist municipality, we will see 'seizures of power' proliferate throughout the country. There is a striking material aspect to this movement: the revolutionaries, organized in small splinter and battle groups essentially made up of students and workers, invade all kinds of administrative offices, including those of the municipalities or the party, and, generally in a Dionysian confusion that is not without violence and destruction, they install a new 'power' in them. Frequently, the old guards who resist are 'shown to the masses', which is not a peaceful ceremony. The bureaucrat, or the presumed bureaucrat, carries a dunce's cap and a sign describing his crimes; he must lower his head, and receive some kicks, or worse. These exorcisms are otherwise well-known revolutionary practices. It is a matter of letting the gathering of ordinary people know that the old untouchables, those whose insolence was silently accepted, are themselves from now on given over to public humiliation. After their victory in 1949, the Chinese communists organized ceremonies of this kind everywhere in the countryside, in order morally to criticize the old large landowners, the 'local despots and evil tyrants', making it known to the smallest Chinese peasants, who for centuries counted for nothing, that the world had, 'risen on new foundations' and that from now on they were to be the true masters of the country.
However, we should note that, from February onwards, the 'commune' disappears as the term by which to designate the new local powers, only to be replaced by the expression 'revolutionary committee'. This change is by no means insignificant, because 'committee' has always been the name for the provincial or municipal party organs. We will thus see a vast movement to install new 'revolutionary committees' in all the provinces. And it is not at all clear if these reduplicate, or purely and simply replace, the old and dreaded 'party committees'.
In fact, the ambiguity of the name designates the committee as the impure product of the political conflict. For the local revolutionaries, it is a matter of substituting a different political power for the party, after the nearly complete elimination of the old leading cadres. For the conservatives, who defend themselves at every step, it is a matter of putting back in place the local cadres after the mere fiction of a critique. They are encouraged along this path by the repeated declarations from the Central Committee about the good nature of the vast majority of party cadres. For the Maoist national leadership, concentrated in the very small 'Central Committee's Cultural Revolution Group', a dozen persons, it is a matter of defining the stakes for the revolutionary organizations (the 'seizing of power') and of inspiring a lasting fear in their adversaries, all the while preserving the general framework for the exercise of power, which remains in their eyes the party and the party alone.
The formulas that are gradually put forward will privilege unity. There will be talk of a 'triple combination', which means: to unify in the committees one-third of newly arrived revolutionaries, one-third of old cadres having accomplished their self-criticism, and one-third of military personnel. There will be talk of a 'great alliance', meaning that locally the revolutionary organizations are asked to unite among themselves and to stop the confrontations (sometimes armed ones). This unity in fact implies a growing amount of coercion, including with regard to the content of the discussions, as well as an increasingly severe limitation of the right to organize freely around one initiative or conviction or another. But how could it be otherwise, except by letting the situation drift into civil war, and by leaving the outcome in the hands of the repressive apparatus? This debate will occupy almost the entire year of 1967, which in all regards is clearly a decisive year.
This episode from the summer of 1967 is particularly interesting, because it presents all the contradictions of a revolutionary situation at its culminating point, which of course coincides with the moment that announces its involution.
In July 1967, with the support of the conservative military, the counter-revolution of the bureaucrats dominates the enormous industrial city of Wuhan, numbering no less than 500,000 workers. The effective power is held by an army officer, Chen Zaidao. True, there are still two workers' organizations, which confront each other, causing dozens of casualties during the months of May and June. The first organization, with de facto support from the army, is called the 'One Million Heroes' and is linked to the local cadres and to the old unionists. The second, a tiny minority, is called 'Steel', and embodies the line of Maoism.
The central leadership, worried about the reactionary control over the city, sends its minister for Public Security to go on site together with a very famous member of the 'Central Committee's Cultural Revolution Group', named Wang Li. The latter is extremely popular among the Red Guards, because he is known for his outspoken 'leftist' tendencies. He has already claimed that there was a need to purge the army. The envoy carries a message from Zhou Enlai, ordering the support for the 'Steel' rebel group, in conformity with the directive addressed to the cadres in general and to the military in particular: 'Excel in identifying and supporting the proletarian left within the movement.' Let us add in passing that Zhou Enlai has taken upon himself the excruciating task of serving as arbiter between the factions, between the rivalling revolutionary organizations, and that, in order to do so, he receives day and night visits from delegates from the province. He is thus largely responsible for the progress made by the 'great alliance', for the unification of the 'revolutionary committees', as well as for the discernment of what constitutes 'the proletarian left' in these concrete situations, which are becoming more and more confused and violent.
The day of their arrival, the delegates from the Centre hold a big meeting with the rebel organizations in a city stadium. The revolutionary exaltation is reaching its high point.
We can see how all the actors from the active stage of the Revolution are well in place: the conservative cadres and their capacity for mobilization which is not to be underestimated, first in the countryside (the militias coming from the rural suburbs will participate in the repression against the Red Guards and the rebels after the turning point of 1968), but also among the workers, and of course within the administration; the rebel organizations, formed by students and workers, who count on their activism, their courage, and the support of the central Maoist group in order to gain the upper hand, even though they are often in the minority; the army, forced to choose sides; and the central power, trying hard to adjust its politics to the situation at hand.
In some cities, the situation that binds these actors together is extremely violent. In Canton, in particular, no day goes by without confrontations between the armed shock groups from rival organizations. The army decides locally to wash its hands of the affair. Hiding behind the pretext that the Decision in Sixteen Points says that one should not intervene in problems that come up during the course of the movement, the local military chief merely demands that before engaging in a street battle, one signs before him a 'declaration of revolutionary brawl'. Only the use of backup troops is prohibited. The result is that, in Canton as well, there are dozens of deaths every day throughout the summer.
In this context, the situation is about to turn sour in Wuhan. On the morning of 20 July, the shock troops of 'One Million Heroes', supported by units from the army, occupy the strategic points and launch a witch hunt for the rebels throughout the city. An attack hits the hotel where the delegates from the central power reside. One group of military catches hold of Wang Li together with a few Red Guards and brutally beats them up. The irony of the situation: now it is the turn of the 'leftist' to be 'shown to the masses', with a sign around his neck stigmatizing him as 'revisionist', he who had seen revisionists everywhere! The minister for Public Security is locked up in his room. The university and the steel foundries, which had been the epicentre of the rebellious tendency, are taken by force by armed groups protected with tanks. However, when the news begins to spread, other units of the army take sides against the conservatives and their leader, Chen Zaidao. The 'Steel' organization mounts a counter-attack. The revolutionary committee is put under arrest. A few military manage to free Wang Li, who will leave the city by running through the woods and wastelands.
We are clearly on the verge of civil war. It will take the cold-bloodedness of the central power, as well as the firm declarations coming from numerous army units in all the provinces, to change the course of the events.
What lessons for the future can we draw from this kind of episode? In a first moment, Wang Li, his face all swollen up, is welcomed as a hero in Beijing. Jiang Qing, Mao's wife and a great rebel leader, greets him with warm accolades. On 25 July, one million people show him their support in the presence of Lin Biao. The ultra-left tendency, which believes in its good fortune, demands a radical purging of the army. This is also the moment when, in August, posters everywhere denounce Zhou Enlai as rightist.
But all this has only the appearance of an instant. True, in Wuhan, support for the rebel groups becomes mandatory, and Chen Zaidao will be replaced. But, two months later, it is Wang Li who will be brutally eliminated from the leaders' group, there will be no significant purging of the army, the importance of Zhou Enlai will only continue to grow, and the return to order will begin to make itself felt against the Red Guards and certain rebellious worker organizations.
What now becomes evident is the fundamental role of the popular army as a pillar in the Chinese party-state. The army has been given a stabilizing role in the Revolution, having been asked to support the rebel left, but there is no expectation or any tolerance for its division, which would set the scene for civil war on a large scale. Those who desire to go to such lengths will all, little by little, be eliminated. And the fact of having made a pact with these elements will cast a stubborn suspicion upon Jiang Qing herself, including, it seems, on the part of Mao.
What happens is that, at this stage of the Cultural Revolution, Mao wishes that unity should prevail among the ranks of the rebels, particularly among the workers, and he begins to fear the enormous damage done by the spirit of factionalism and arrogance among the Red Guards. In September of 1967, after a tour in the province, he launches the slogan 'nothing essential divides the working class', which, for those who know how to read, means first of all that there are violent troubles between the rebellious and conservative organizations, and, secondly, that it is imperative to put an end to these disturbances, to disarm the organizations, and to return the legal monopoly of violence, as well as its political stability, to the repressive apparatus. Starting in July, all the while giving proof of his usual fighter's spirit and rebelliousness (he still says, with visible delight, that 'the whole country is up in riots' and that 'to fight, even violently, is a good thing; once the contradictions appear in plain daylight, it is easier to solve them'), Mao worries about the war of factions, and declares that 'when the revolutionary committees are formed, the petty bourgeois revolutionaries must be given the correct leadership', he stigmatizes leftism, which 'in fact is a form of rightism', and above all, he shows his impatience with the fact that, since January with the takeover of power in Shanghai 'the bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology that was rampant among the intellectuals and the young students has ruined the situation'.
By February 1968, after the movement's involution at the end of the summer of 1967, the conservatives think that their time for revenge has come. Mao and his group, however, are still on the alert. They launch a campaign stigmatizing the 'February counter-current' and they renew their support for the revolutionary groups and the construction of new organs of power.
In the meantime, the universities can no longer be kept under the yoke of rivalling splinter groups, given the general logic of a return to order and the perspective of an upcoming party congress charged with drawing up a balance sheet of the revolution (in fact, this congress will be held at the beginning of 1969, confirming the power of Lin Biao and the military). An example must be set, all the while avoiding the crushing pure and simple of the last Red Guards, concentrated in the buildings of the University of Beijing. The adopted solution is totally extraordinary: thousands of organized workers are called upon, without any weapons, to occupy the university, to disarm the factions and directly to ensure their authority. As the leaders' group would say later on: 'The working class must lead in every aspect', and 'the workers will stay for a long time, and even forever, in the universities'. This episode is one of the most astonishing ones of the entire period, because it renders visible the need for the violent and anarchic youth force to recognize a 'mass-based' authority higher than itself, and not only, nor even principally, the institutional authority of the recognized leaders. The moment is all the more surprising and dramatic in that certain students open against the workers, there will be deaths, and in the end Mao and all the leaders of the Maoist group will gather with the best-known student leaders, most notably Kuai Dafu, the venerated head of the Red Guards in the university of Beijing, and renowned nationwide. There exists a retranscription of this head-to-head meeting between the stubborn revolutionary youths and the old guard.
We can see Mao expressing his profound disappointment caused by the spirit of factionalism among the youth, together with a remnant of political friendship for them, and the will to find a way out. We can clearly see that Mao, by bringing in the workers, wanted to prevent the situation from turning into one of 'military control'. He wanted to protect those who had been his initial allies and had been the bearers of enthusiasm and political innovation. But Mao is also a man of the party-state. He wants its renovation, even a violent one, but not its destruction. In the end he knows full well that by subjugating the last outpost of young rebellious 'leftists', he eliminates the last margin left to anything that is not in line (in 1968) with the recognized leadership of the Cultural Revolution: the line of party reconstruction. He knows it, but he is resigned. Because he holds no alternative hypothesis — nobody does — as to the existence of the state, and because the large majority of people, after two exalted but very trying years, want the state to exist and to make its existence known, if necessary with brute force.
We know that the cult of Mao has taken truly extraordinary forms during the Cultural Revolution. There were not only the giant statues, the Little Red Book, the constant invocation, in any circumstances, of the Chairman, the hymns for the 'Great Helmsman', but there was also a widespread and unprecedented one-sidedness to the references, as though Mao's writings and speeches could suffice for all occasions, even when it is a question of growing tomatoes or deciding on the use (or not) of the piano in symphonic orchestras.
It is striking to see that the most violent rebel groups, those who break most decisively with the bureaucratic order, are also those who push this aspect of the situation the furthest. In particular, they are the ones who launched the formula of 'the absolute authority of Mao-Zedong Thought', and who declare the need to submit oneself to this thought even without understanding it. Such statements, we must confess, are purely and simply obscurantist.
We should add that, since all the factions and organizations that are at loggerheads with each other claim Mao's thought for their own, the expression, which is capable of designating orientations that are completely contradictory, ends up losing all meaning, except for an overly abundant use of citations whose interpretation is in a state of constant flux.
I would nonetheless like to make a few remarks in passing. On the one hand, this kind of devotion, as well as the conflict of interpretations, is totally commonplace in established religions, and among us, without being considered a pathology. Quite the contrary — the great monotheisms remain sacred cows in this regard. In comparison with the services rendered to our countries by any of the characters, whether fictive or ecclesiastical, in the recent history of these monotheisms, however, Mao has certainly been of an infinitely greater service to his people, whom he liberated simultaneously from the Japanese invasion, from the rampant colonialism of 'Western' powers, from the feudalism in the countryside and from precapitalist looting. On the other hand, the sacralization, even in terms of the biography, of great artists is also a recurring feature of our 'cultural' practice. We give importance to the dry-cleaning bills of this or that poet. If politics is, as I think, a procedure of truth, just as poetry indeed can be, then it is neither more nor less inappropriate to sacralize political creators than it is to sacralize artistic creators. Perhaps less so, all things considered, because political creation is probably rarer, certainly more risky, and it is more immediately addressed to all, and in a singular way to all those — like the Chinese peasants and workers before 1949 — whom the powers-that-be generally consider to be inexistent.
All this by no means frees us from the obligation to illuminate the peculiar phenomenon of the political cult, which is an invariant feature of communist states and parties, brought to the point of paroxysm in the Cultural Revolution.
From a general point of view, the 'cult of personality' is tied to the thesis according to which the party, as representative of the working class, is the hegemonic source of politics, the mandatory guardian of the correct line. As was said in the thirties, 'the Party is always right'. The problem is that nothing can guarantee such a representation, nor such a hyperbolic certainty as to the source of rationality. By way of a substitute for such a guarantee, it thus becomes crucial for there to be a *representation of the representation*, one that would be a singularity, legitimated precisely by its singularity alone. Finally, one person, a single body, comes to stand for this superior guarantee, in the classical aesthetic form of genius. It is also curious, by the way, to see that, trained as we are in the theory of genius in the realm of art, we should take such strong offence to it when it emerges in the order of politics. For the communist parties, between the twenties and sixties, personal genius is only the incarnation, the fixed point, of the doubtful representative capacity of the party; it is easier to believe in the rectitude and the intellectual force of a distant and solitary man than in the truth and purity of an apparatus whose local petty chiefs are well known.
In China, the question is even more complicated. Indeed, during the Cultural Revolution, Mao incarnates not so much the party's representative capacity so much as that which discerns and struggles against the threatening 'revisionism' within the party itself. He is the one who says, or lets it be said in his name, that the bourgeoisie is politically active within the Communist Party. He is also the one who encourages the rebels, who spreads the slogan 'it is right to revolt', and encourages troubles, at the very moment when he is being canonized as the party's chairman. In this regard, there are moments when for the revolutionary masses he is less the guarantee of the really existing party than the incarnation, all by himself, of a proletarian party that is still to come. He is somewhat like a revenge of singularity upon representation.
Ultimately, we should maintain that 'Mao' is a name that is intrinsically contradictory in the field of revolutionary politics. On the one hand, it is the supreme name of the party-state, its undeniable chairman, he who, as military leader and founder of the regime, holds the historical legitimacy of the Communist Party. On the other hand, 'Mao' is the name of that which, in the party, cannot be reduced to the state's bureaucracy. This is obviously the case in tenns of the calls to revolt sent out to youth and the workers. But it is also true within the structure of legitimacy of the party itself. Indeed, it is often by way of decisions that are temporarily minoritarian, or even dissident, that Mao has ensured the continuation of this utterly unique political experience of the Chinese Communists between 1920 and the moment of victory in the forties (suspicion with regard to the Soviet counsellors, abandonment of the model of insurrection, 'surrounding of the cities by countryside', absolute priority to the mass line, etc.). In all aspects, 'Mao' is the name of a paradox: the rebel in power, the dialectician put to the test by the continuing needs of 'development', the emblem of the party-state in search of its overcoming, the military chief preaching disobedience to the authorities….
This is what has given to his 'cult' a frenetic appearance, because subjectively he accumulated the accord given to the stately pomp of the Stalinist type, together with the enthusiasm of the entire revolutionary youth for the old rebel who cannot be satisfied with the existing state of affairs, and who wants to move on in the march to real communism. 'Mao' was the name for the 'construction of socialism', but also for its destruction.
★★★
In the end, the Cultural Revolution, even in its very impasse, bears witness to the impossibility truly and globally to free politics from the framework of the party-state that imprisons it. It marks an irreplaceable experience of saturation, because a violent will to find a new political path, to relaunch the revolution, and to find new forms of the workers' struggle under the formal conditions of socialism ended up in failure when confronted with the necessary maintenance, for reasons of public order and the refusal of civil war, of the general frame of the party-state.
We know today that all emancipatory politics must put an end to the model of the party, or of multiple parties, in order to affirm a politics 'without party', and yet at the same time without lapsing into the figure of anarchism, which has never been anything else than the vain critique, or the double, or the shadow, of the communist parties, just as the black flag is only the double or the shadow of the red flag.
However, our debt towards the Cultural Revolution remains enormous. Because, tied to this grandiose and courageous saturation of the motif of the party, as the contemporary of what clearly appears today as the last revolution that was still attached to the motif of classes and of the class struggle, our Maoism will have been the experience and the name of a capital transition. And without this transition, whenever there isn't anybody loyal to it, there is nothing.
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