Chinese Hypocrisy, The Definition of Communism, and the Fate of Marxism in a Globalizing World V

5.  The official Chinese Marxism of the CCP constitutes a cynical political argument in favor of "harmonious" economic development on capitalist lines.  If it speaks for itself, then it further demonstrates the need for China to undergo an actual communist revolution. 

This conclusion follows largely from Žižek's comments on the failure of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and its role in facilitating the victory of a capitalist developmental model in China, organized as a hybrid system of reorganized, market-responsive state capitalist enterprises and foreign and domestically-owned private capitalist enterprises (see "Revolutionary Terror from Robespierre to Mao," positions, vol. 19, no. 3, 671-706).  The point is that the CCP has, since the end of the Cultural Revolution, facilitated impressive rates of economic growth (see "GDP Growth in China 1952-2011," on the webpage Chinability, at: http://www.chinability.com/GDP.htm) by ensuring underlying political stability as a prerequisite of private domestic investment and foreign inflow of capital through partnerships with domestic enterprises and outright foreign-ownership of enterprise.  Against this backdrop of private capital investment, the CCP has orchestrated a reorganization of state-owned enterprises, pruning relatively less productive operations, engaging in partial privatizations (largely in a devolved logic through which smaller enterprises were, in the early 1990s, devolved to municipal and rural county governments with a mandate for privatization), reorganizing ownership (partial securitization through publicly traded equities) and governance (professionalization of executives and diversification of boards of directors for state holding companies) of large state enterprises, and partial opening of privileged markets to non-state (usually foreign) competition (On changes in the organization and performance of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), see KPMG, "State-owned entities: From centrally-planned origins to hybrid market competitors," China 360, at: https://www.kpmg.com/ZA/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/China-Business-Desk/Documents/China-360-Issue9-201306-State-owned-entities.pdf).  

Reading these economic reforms through the spectrum of Marxian theory, it seems clear that changes made by the government and CCP have generated positive results in enhancing the productivity of SOEs and in, more generally, expanding broader GDP growth, controlling rising cost structures, and promoting a graduated increase in standards of living.  The Peoples' Republic may, thus, constitute an exemplar in the "trickle-down" theory on expansion of employment, compensation, and living standards.  On the other hand, these changes have taken place in economic contexts dominated by exploitative capitalist practices of suplus value appropriation and distribution (by state-bureaucratic and/or private domestic or foreign capitalist appropriators).  Differences in organization of surplus labor/value are not, however, recognized by the CCP as criteria in the definition of class, and, furthermore, the CCP appears to deny the continued existence of class as an analytical category pertinent in describing social structures in China (On a 2001 evaluation of social structure by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) concluding that, with regard to "class (jie ji)," "some scholars and people are hostile to such a word and tend to reject it,"  see Li Minqi, (2008) The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy, 103-105, London: Pluto Press). 

Notwithstanding clear differences with my perspective evident in the definition of class and, thus, the definitions of class structures like capitalism and communism, the CCP's contemporary appropriations of Marxian theory seem hypocritical in their own terms.  As I have suggested or otherwise implied in the preceding posts, the task of appropriating Marxism with an anti-capitalist, anti-bureaucratic, anti-imperialist Maoist lineage may be impossible for the CCP to manage without recognizing an increasing range of theoretic points and analyses in which Mao was simply wrong (by virtue of his incongruity with current CCP and governmental policies!).  How, in these circumstances, can the CCP "harmonize" warnings from Mao against allowing rural producers to accumulate individual property through recourse to petty market production with contemporary efforts to stimulate small, private capitalist enterpreneurial activity on the residuum of the township and village enterprises?  As Žižek rightly suggests, something radical and revolutionary is being stripped out of the official Chinese Marxism in the name of a pacifying promise that the road through capitalist development somehow leads to a socialist paradise. 

I want to make two separate points in evaluation of these circumstances.  First, acknowledging the continued existence of fissures within the CCP, brought to light again in the prosecution and sentencing of Bo Xilai, who apparently advocated reforms of the CCP along somewhat more thoroughly Maoist lines (however opportunistic such a strategy might have been), the notion of reviving Maoism appears extremely problematic both to China and to the rest of the world that has come to depend on the prospects of continued Chinese economic growth and of active engagement of China in global commodity and capital flows.  If nothing else, the U.S. government has certainly come to depend on Chinese capital to finance public expenditures through the marketing of debt.  Moreover, any effort to transform Maoist rhetoric on socialist transformations, at least with regard to ownership structures and the organization of commodity and capital markets, from mere rhetoric into state policy would endanger foreign investment in Chinese regional economies.  Clearly, there is something meaningful contained in Maoist theorizations and, beyond cynical opportunists on the CCP Central Committee, the ranks of true believers in Mao's version of Marxist-Leninism remaining within the CCP deserve some respect for their honesty and commitment to his vision, however much I would conclude that it was profoundly flawed.  These faithful might be bastions of good governance in a political/governmental system that, if the Western media comes close to approaching the truth, appears famously corrupt! (Especially on the importance of network connections (guanxi), see Zhang, "Author: In China, Everyone is guilty of corruption," on CNN, at: http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/23/opinion/china-corrution-lijia-zhang/index.html?iid=article_sidebar).   That being said, there is nothing remotely honest or committed in official CCP pronouncements alluding to Maoist theoretic ideas or linking the supposed incongruity of Western political or cultural institutions with China's socialist system and its particular understandings of Marxism.   

Second, the larger purpose embodied in Marxian theory is to support the development of communism.  Acknowledging that the definition of the latter is sharply contested within the Marxian tradition, I contend that the sorts of market oriented reforms introduced by the CCP since the Cultural Revolution should have manifest a positive effect on the development of new, entrepreneurial versions of communism, especially in the development and more recent privatizations of rural township and village enterprises (TVEs).  What we have here is the introduction of a class-ambiguous space, open to transformations of class structures in multiple different directions, some exploitative some not.  In this manner, I am not qualified to make any judgments about transformations in the rural industrial economies characterized by the development of TVEs, but these moves seem promising to the nurturing of class structures that I would characterize as communism in China.  As the broader development of Chinese urban economies advances, moreover, similar spaces for communism (e.g. state recognized and/or clandestine workers' cooperative or other productive extended partnership arrangements characterized by the collective appropriation and distribution of surplus value) might be expected to open up. 

Finally, the tenuous and turbulent opening up of the Peoples' Republic to global economic commodity and capital flows might support the expansion of such communist class structured entities by enabling them to articulate supply chain linkages with communist class structured entities outside of China, maybe first within the East Asian Chinese diaspora and increasingly with ethnically non-Chinese communist producers.  Such possibilities demand an ever increasing progress of market liberalization and, more significantly, liberalization of transnational information flow, a  process tightly controlled by the CCP at the present time.  On the other hand, the necessities of global economic integration and maintenance of the competitiveness of Chinese SOEs (state-capitalist enterprises) and domestic private capitalist enterprises may force the CCP and the government to commit to a gradual lifting of restrictions on transnational communications, making the articulation of transnational communist supply chains, emanating from China or otherwise integrating Chinese communist producers in the flow of commodities/use values and, possibly, finance, more likely. 

I would label such developments as consistent with my understanding of communist revolution (i.e. a vast expansion of the prevalence of communist class structured organizations, accompanied by the development of non-class institutions facilitating the reproduction of their non-class (economic, political, cultural, ecological) conditions of existence).  In turn, as democratic/democratizing organizations, such communist enterprises might exert an influence on state political processes, undermining CCP repression or, at least, unveiling its fundamental inconsistency with the very things that Marxism stands for.  In any case, the very existence of such organizations would constitute a cultural argument for the democratization of surplus labor and for non-class manifestations of democracy.  With these thoughts in mind, as a Western Marxist, I think that there is much to be hoped for in the market-oriented liberalization of China, even if these hopes are not shared or even conceived within the upper ranks of CCP policy makers and intellectuals. 

Chinese Hypocrisy, the Definition of Communism, and the Fate of Marxism in a Globalizing World IV

4.  The anti-traditional and anti-bureaucratic impulse of the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution needs to be reappraised as a potential moment for spontaneous democratization, otherwise unprecendented in Chinese history.  Likewise, the Chinese Communist Party's contemporary assertion on the incompatibility of Western modes of civic participation with the political context of the Peoples' Republic needs to be evaluated in reference to the lived experience of the Cultural Revolution and its underlying Maoist theoretic foundations. 

In the spirit of self-critical reflection, I have, elsewhere in this set of posts, referred to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (henceforth "CR") as an effort at "the spontaneous creation of a true workers' democracy."  This assertion far exceeds and, at least in part, distorts both the CR's inciting Maoist theoretic foundations and its lived experience in the political and cultural lives of the Chinese population, as it appears within historical records.  My characterization of the democratic spontaneity of the CR reflects, to a substantial extent, the reverbations of China's anti-bureaucratic/anti-party experiment on Western (especially French) radical movements, particularly among college students and younger workers.  In point of fact, my characterization of the CR is significantly indebted to those of Badiou (see "The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?", in positions, vol. 13, no. 3, 481-514), who, as a self-conscious 1960s French Maoist, interprets the CR as a final attempt at revolution through class struggle against the latent conservative bureaucratism of the party-state. 

On the other hand, we have to understand the immense complexities involved in both Maoist theorizations on the necessity of cultural revolution and the localized organizational structures performing cultural revolution to extract the kernels of a democratizing moment over the period of the CR.  Beyond the identification of a democratizing potential in the CR, we need to situate the CR and the specific ways in which the CR refracts the performance of Chinese Marxism against the contemporary attitudes of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) relative to "civic participation" and activism within "civil society" per se, as Western institutions incompatible with Chinese experience.  Such reflections are highly pertinent to a broader evaluation on cultural, non-class conditions of existence for communism, both in contemporary China and in Western cultural contexts.  Within this spirit, this post will seek to develop a set a critical propositions about the CR and its relationship to the contemporary actions of the CCP and to present-day Marxian conceptions of communism. 

a.  Maoist theorizations, including the "Sixteen Points" on Cultural Revolution issued by the CCP Central Committee in August, 1966, are unclear in their negotiations of the contradiction between the popular assemblage of revolutionary organizations and democratic-centralism, anchored in the supremacy of the CCP and its leadership apparatus as the vanguard of socialist revolution.  

At the outset, theorizations within the Maoist tradition, especially those conveyed by Mao and, in particular, the theoretic work conceived during the Yan'an period (1937-45), reflect a characteristic mix of influences within the larger Marxist tradition and within the broader intellectual stream of revolutionary/republican China (e.g. the May Fourth movement).  In regard to the former, Mao's considerations on culture and the necessity of cultural revolution relect at least some indebtedness to Marx's early writings on ideology and dialectical materialism (e.g. "Theses on Feuerbach" and On the German Ideology) and also on the mix of theorizations and policy criticism offered by Lenin (e.g Materialism and Empirio-Criticsm, "How we should reorganize the workers' and peasants' inspection/Better Fewer, But Better" (1923)).  In particular, Mao grasps an acute awareness of the necessity of cultural transformation in Lenin's post-revolutionary writings.  On the other hand, cultural transformation attains a salience in Mao's writings unprecedented within the Marxist tradition, in my view, because of Chinese revolutionary/republican influences and the lingering imprint of Neo-Confucian epistemological reflection.  If, for Lenin, the education of workers and peasants was necessary to develop a broader socialist consciousness and challenge bourgeois ideologies nurtured in the New Economic Policy (NEP) period (1921-28), then, for Mao, cultural transformation is an overriding imperative sustained by a century of Chinese experience in challenging Western imperialism.  This salience appears most clearly in On New Democracy (1940) (at: http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/ND40.html), where Mao argues, following Marx and Lenin, that the culture of a given social formation reflects its economic and political structures and that any revolution intended to transform such structures must likewise transform culture/ideology.  He, further, recognizes the national specificity of the Chinese context in integrating Marxist ideas into the development of a "new democractic" Chinese culture, not "applied subjectively as a mere formula" but corresponding to "the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution."       

Two contradictory tendencies are key to the underlying theoretic reference points influencing the course of the CR.  Firstly, there is a tendency to prioritize democratization in the notion of "self-learning" (e.g. "Let the masses educate themselves in the movement" (Sixteen Points ("Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" (August 8, 1966)), at: http://www.marxists.org/subject/china/peking-review/1966/PR1966-33g.htm) and the inclusion of workers and peasants into local/localized decision making processes in economic planning by the regime (see "The Situation in the Summer of 1957" at: http://www.marx2mao.com/Mao/SFS57.html).  Second, there is the tendency to emphasize the vanguard role of the Communist Party as the leader and driver of a "democratic," anti-bourgeois, anti-imperialist, anti-feudal proletarian dictatorship, and, by virtue of this role, the Party maintains the prerogative in defining both "right-thinking" and "right-practice" relative to the course of Chinese national economic, political, and cultural development.  In this sense, as executor of socialist transformation, the Party, its Central Committee, and its cadres at various levels maintain, ex ante, correct knowledge at least in macro-level economic developmental questions.  On the other hand, theoretic/ideological prioritization of democratic engagement with workers and peasants introduces a contradictory dynamic that local cadres must negotiate in the implementation of directives from upper-level functionaries in the Party and the government.  From the foundation of the Peoples' Republic through the end of the CR, local CCP cadres wage a schizophrenic struggle to implement changing upper-level Party developmental initiatives while simultaneously engaging with local industrial and agricultural producers.  Periodically, especially in agricultural areas, such engagements involve actual deliberation to establish local production quotas, reorganize production processes, and delineate between collective and individual property with a mind to enhance production through limited private market activity.  In other times, cadres are charged to act, for all intents and purposes, as educators to instruct workers and peasants on the necessity of socialist transformation and clarify why the government and Party's directives to local cooperatives are correct and just. 

The Leninist principle of democratic-centralism constitutes the glue, cementing the diverse moments in this evolving engagement of the Party with peasants, workers, businesspeople, students, and intellectuals up to the time of the CR.  By virtue of this principle, the Party reserves its prerogative as the ultimate driver of economic, political, and cultural development and the arbiter in determining what ideas and practices threaten socialist transformation.  On the other hand, the promise of democracy remains, even insofar as it is reflected only in intra-Party struggles at the level of the Central Committee.  More fundamentally, the theme of democracy and democratization forms a central rhetorical ideal within Mao's writings, especially of the Yan'an period.  However, for Mao, democracy is always tempered by Party centralism.  There is never any inclination that democratization could or should promote the creation of organizational forms challenging the Party for legitimacy as the sole driver of revolutionary socialist transformation.  It is, thus, conceivable to argue that Mao's theorizations present to no inherent internal inconsistencies relative to development of local revolutionary organizations distinct from the CCP - these are never authorized.  Rather, Mao's democratic focus remains on maintenance of accountability to the masses for cadres and the continuity of self-criticism by cadres to enjoin self-interested, bureaucratic, and/or bourgeois tendencies.  That is, the Party must remain the sole, correct vehicle of the revolution, but it can only do so by engaging in continuous self-critical evaluation to maintain its revolutionary focus and avoid tendencies that will encourage and sustain capitalism.   

With these considerations on democratic centralism in mind, the Sixteen Points, and especially the ninth point ("Cultural Revolution Groups, Committees, and Congresses"), raises a potential incongruity and a source for misinterpretation by the Red Guards that began organizing in early 1966.  Far from enjoining the population as a whole from forming revolutionary groups external to the Party, the ninth point both authorizes the formation of groups and provides a method through which such groups should organize themselves, and even recommends that such groups should be "permanent, standing mass organizations," comparing them to the mass organizations developed during the Paris Commune of 1871.  This critical allusion, predating the entire structure of Leninist thought on party organization by almost half a century, apparently enters the ideological battlefield of the CR through comments from Mao himself on the initial stages of organization by Red Guards in and around central Beijing.  Significantly, there can be little question that use of such organizational structures represents an attempt to foment spontaneous local democratic participation to the detriment of control by hierarchically structured Party organizations.  In this manner, by making allusions to the Paris Commune, Mao may have committed a critical miscalculation in rhetorically prosecuting an internal conflict within the CCP against the faction of economic-bureaucratic experts, led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, mobilizing popular forces with recourse to the memory of an historical moment whose reality contradicts Leninist conceptions of socialist transformation and democratic-centralism.  It is, further, relevant that Mao issues an evident retraction in February of 1967, after the seizure of municipal power and declaration of the Shanghai Commune in early January, arguing that new cultural revolution groups should avoid further application of the term "commune" and, instead, identify themselves as "revolutionary committees," perhaps implying that such bodies should be reframed as transitional entities intended to steer local CCP organizations to the left but otherwise devoid of a long run governmental role in independence from the vanguard party.  In any case, I regard it as significant that Mao's left-wing faction of the CCP, taken up in the later stages of the CR by the Gang of Four, laid the ideological groundwork, intentionally or inadvertently, for local organizations that held the potential for spontaneous democratization contravening central control by CCP organs and the government. 

b.  Interpretations of the CR, emphasizing its performance as a "revolution from above," are fallacious.  No revolution can strictly be characterized as a "revolution from above."  Rather, we must comprehend the particular ways in which the diverse, heterogeneous local mobilizations of the CR were overdetermined by Maoist theorizations, political openings introduced by upper level power struggles between CCP, state, and military (PLA) factions, intergenerational conflict, the influence of non-Marxist, youth-centric anti-traditional philosophies of rebellion (e.g. Lu Xun's stories), and myriad other economic, political, and cultural processes.

This proposition necessarily concerns certain ontological questions about revolutionary practice.  No revolution can ever be characterized as a quintessentially grassroots phenomenon, abstracted from the fields of ideological discourse against which human agents are incited to act.  In this sense, it is, of course, important to evaluate the role of Mao Zedong and his left faction within the CCP as the ideologues of cultural revolution in the incitement of the CR.  However, taking a page from Actor Network Theory, it is one thing to argue that we have incitements to action by human agents, but such incitements may not successfully produce the intended actions by the agents.  Moreover, even if we were to concede a unidirectional causal flow in the incitement of agency (rather than mutual constitution of actions by multiple agents), it would be an extreme leap of faith to infer uni-causality in a relationship between agents.  We have to acknowledge that, on the one hand, an agent is something that is made to act by other agents but that, on the other hand, we cannot isolate all of the inciting agents motivating some particular agent to act and we cannot derive indisputable conclusions on the particular effects arising from each individual incitement (i.e. we cannot rigorously determine whether a particular incitement had its desired effect on the agents to which it was addressed). 

As a Marxist committed to a particular, holistic/totalistic ontological frame (i.e. overdetermination), I do not want to take the logic of Actor Network Theory too far in analyzing the CR simply because the latter theory invests too much in the relative autonomy of individual agents in selectively appropriating incitements (mediation).  The divergent student and worker-based Red Guard groups in Shanghai in December 1966 organized themselves and committed to particular ranges of revolutionary activities, including physically violent acts, through heterogeneous, overlapping and non-overlapping inciting ideas and practical experiences.  However we characterized the development of these groups in reference to non-identical influences, we have to recognize that the actions undertaken in Shanghai leading up to the Red Guards' seizure of power and declaration of the Shanghai Peoples' Commune in January 1967 were ontologically necessary - they were constituted as particular loci for overdetermination by a field of inciting agents and by the processes that these agents set in motion, in turn incited by myriad other agents/processes.  As a practical matter, the best that we can do in analyzing the CR and all of its locally diverse, heterogeneous mobilizations is to develop coherent stories, assembling networks of causal processes and/or inciting agents that might usefully convey some insights into how the CR developed, why individual mobilizations took the form they did, and why these mobilizations ultimately failed to realize their democratic potentiality.  Our answers to these questions would, moreover, conform to a particular partisan agenda, against which our analysis would engage performatively in the struggle to make practical sense of reality/history. 

Advancing from this unique, post-modern, post-structuralist ontological position, I want to evaluate the claim that the CR can be viewed as a "revolution from above" and, most specifically, speculate on the partisan agenda that it performs.  Emphatically, I reject the notion that we can write off the CR in unicausal terms as an effect of Maoist ideological pronouncements and of the growth of a cult of personality around Mao.  If this claim indisputably manifests a degree of truth, it nonetheless forecloses against a more indepth analysis into the concrete conditions of existence of particular local mobilizations.  As such, we must ask two critical questions: from whom does the reductionist analysis of the CR, as a Maoist "revolution from above," emanate; and what political benefit obtains from the pronouncement of such an analysis? 

In regard to the first of these questions, the most evident conclusion is that the CCP itself has wedded itself to the conception of the CR as a "revolution from above."  In a resolution at the Sixth Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the CCP, dated June 27, 1981 (see "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China," at: http://www.nohum.k12.ca.us/tah/TAH4Topics/Resolution%20on%20CCP%20History.pdf), the Party argues, emphatically, that the CR "was initiated and led by Comrade Mao Zedong," pursuing a theory that the CCP, government, and military bureaucracies were being infiltrated by bourgeois, counter-revolutionary forces, committed to re-establishing capitalism in China.  The resolution proceeds further to separate Mao's role in the CR from the larger record of his life as one of the most important figures of the founding generation of the Peoples' Republic and as the most important Marxian theorist of his generation in China.  It goes to great lengths in arguing that Mao's pronouncements supporting mass mobilizations against the Party contradict his former theoretic positions supporting the institution of the Party as revolutionary vanguard and executor of democratic proletarian dictatorship.  In all fairness, the Eleventh Central Committee has a point here.  On the other hand, we have to read this document, in tandem with the CCP's current positions on Western ideals (again: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-leadership-takes-hard-line-in-secret-memo.html?src=portal_starbucks3&_r=1), as an effort by the Party to lay claim to Mao's legacy while simultaneously insulating itself against the corrosive impacts of Mao's recurring anti-bureaucratic, mass participatory leanings.  Clearly, the CR was devastating to the CCP - many, many CCP cadres and upper echelon leaders (e.g. Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping) were externally (i.e. at the behest of the Red Guards) purged, and ability of the Party to exercise control over the economy and local politics was compromised. 

In a larger sense, by simply placing the blame for the CR on a few key figures (e.g. Jiang Qing, Lin Biao, etc.), the CCP can afford to ignore problems evident in Mao's larger theoretic and partisan legacy while simultaneously arguing that mass mobilizations associated with the CR were inconsistent with the broader structures of Chinese culture and politics.  In fact, the CCP laid the heavisest blame for the CR on the hands of the Gang of Four (Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen), who it accuses of fomenting anti-Party activities and engaging in vicious persecutions against loyal Party members against whom members of the Gang harbored political grudges.  Again, there is much truth in the CCP's argument here, but it is simply not accurate to say that the cause of all local Red Guard mobilizations can be traced to the political activities of the Gang of Four any more than they can be uniformly traced to the effects of Mao's personality cult, or to the influence of Lin Biao in facilitating the complicity of the Peoples' Liberation Army (PLA) in Red Guard mobilizations (to say nothing of the logistical and transportation support provided by the PLA to student Red Guard contingents).  However much the CCP wants to white wash the actual events of the CR in order to guard its prerogatives as China continues to enjoy a rapidly expanding (though slowing) economy, adequate evidence would seem to suggest that there was a great degree of local variation in goals and methods and more loosely configured connections between upper level cultural revolutionary ideologues (Gang of Four, Mao, and Lin Biao) and local student and worker groups.

If the CR is not strictly a revolution from above, then why does the CCP continue to insist that it was?  I think the answer to this question, most emphatically, must be that, in the aftermath of the CR, the CCP became excessively averse to all movements that enjoyed any potential to undermine the Party's dominance in the name of mass participation.  In view of the distabilizing effects of the CR, can CCP leaders really be blamed for wanting to avoid any new mass campaigns at social reform, especially targeting the legitimacy of the party-state?  In this regard, it should be remembered that Deng Xiaoping, the CCP General Secretary from 1957 to 1969, was purged at the height of the CR and reduced to the status of an assembly line worker in a rural tractor factor, while his eldest son was tortured by Red Guards and rendered a paraplegic in an apparent suicide attempt.  Deng's influence in post-CR China reflects an extreme bias for Party control and restraint against all mass participatory democratic activity.  This influence is, of course, evident in the CCP and government/PLA response to the Beijing/Tiananmen Square pro-democracy mobilization in 1989.  Such attitudes are also evident today when Xi Jinping and others question the cultural congruity of peaceful mass mobilizations with China's larger political heritage. 

c.  The overflow of multi-directional political violence characterizing the CR correlates to the broader denial of individual and collective opportunities for self-realization in the foundational era of the Peoples' Republic, but it also reflects a broader continuity in the production and reproduction of new repressive apparatus, from the closing decades of the imperial period through the early moments of the republic, the national resistance against Japanese imperialism, the victory of the CCP, and the beginning stages of Chinese collectivism.

I have discussed violence elsewhere in this blog (in regard to gun violence and gun control in the U.S.) as an inevitable and often progressive feature in human existence, correlative of political transformation per se - all real political change (good and bad) is violent.  In this sense, we have to distinguish between the non-physical violence of mass movements seeking political transformations through "peaceful" means (e.g. factions of the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Satyagraha-based anti-imperialist movement of M.K. Gandhi in India that inspired King) and mass movements that advocate physical violence against human beings and against property.  Making actual, clear delineations between physical and non-physical transformative violence in regard to particular movements is difficult.  Relative to the CR, I have to confess a certain degree of ignorance in the identification of non-physical ("peaceful") mobilizations, seeking to transform local CCP cadres through persuasion rather than physically violent actions (e.g. seizures of power at the municipal level by Red Guard contingents supported by PLA units, coercive reformation of CCP cadres through self-criticism).  My understanding of the CR is framed by images of CCP cadres paraded through urban streets with placards around their necks describing their crimes against the revolution to jeering and physically abusive crowds waving Little Red Books of Mao's quotations.  It is further shaped by images of proletarian class enemies in interrogation rooms (apparently labeled "cowsheds" in reference to traditional Chinese devilish images of "cow-demons and snake spirits" (nuiguisheshen) leveled at class enemies, see Jian et al.(2009), The A to Z of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 56, New York: Scarewcrow Press) undergoing intensive "criticism" by Red Guards to solicit confessions to rightist bourgeois thinking and outright "capitalist-road" activity.  In no uncertain terms, the CR constitutes a quintessentially violent turn in the history of the Peoples' Republic, whether or not the violence of the CR actually produced any significant political transformations. 

My point in this conclusion is to evaluate the nature of revolutionary violence of the period of the CR.  My initial hypothesis is that such violence reflects a basic human motive of self-realization, against repressive impediments.  On the other hand, such a hypothesis deserves some preemptive critical interrogation.  Notably, what do I mean here by "self-realization" and how does the CR respond to constraints on self-realization in the Peoples' Republic?  My response to these questions seeks to integrate particular elements in my reading of Althusserian overdeterminist ontology.  Specifically, in my view, Althusserian overdetermination bifurcates two distinct fields of ontological speculation.  On the one hand, there is the holistic, objective field constituted by structured totality, by the universal space-time of seamlessly interconnected, mutually constitutive/constituted material processes defining the unapproachable, unknowable real/material reality.  On the other hand, there is the partial, contingent, subjectively assembled field of theory and ideology, through which individuals subjectively appropriate minuscule fragments of the real in order to construct stories that situate them against the real. 

My reading of self-realization follows this ontological dualism.  Self-realization in the field of structured totality is continuous - every human agent is continuously overdetermined by the totality of material processes accumulated through universal space-time and, in these terms, every isolated moment condenses the realization of the self as a conjuncture of material processes (i.e. physical/biological/chemical/ecological and political/economic/cultural) at the level of the individual.  On this field, consciousness constitutes a singular, objective set of material processes at the level of the individual, wholly overdetermined by their particular positionality within space-time - an individual's consciousness is completely shaped and determined by the all of the material processes that have situated them within a given social and physical conjuncture.  Such a conjuncture is irreducibly complex (as a story beginning with the proverbial "Big Bang," culminating at a particular isolated point/moment/locus in space-time, and incorporating, at least potentially, everything in between!).  Indisputably, every life is a destiny in a universe of destinies, but each is a completely unknowable destiny.  In place of this inaccessible, objective account, individuals frame the ideal of self-realization around individually conceived stories (even in circumstances where the story concludes/imagines that the course of life amounts to a pure accident), existing on the field of theory/ideology/culture.  Every consciously lived "self" is a product of assembling pieces from the lived experience of material reality, where some pieces become accentuated, others downplayed, and still others wholly ignored, as the individual frames his/her life against the reality that they conceive and/or live.  It is this latter, subjective sense of self-realization that concerns me, because, in relation to self-consciously constructed life stories, individuals frame understandings of their own potentialities, desires, and needs, and evaluate whether or not they have achieved a realization of their potential as a human being. 

With the latter, subjective understanding of self-realization as my only feasible background, I have to ask in what ways individuals in China on the eve of the CR may have framed their own human potentials, and how social institutions might have operated to impede self-realization.  Again, I have to concede the point that I am generally ignorant of the subjective life expectations of most Chinese on the eve of the CR, but my inclinations, based on the particular historical transformations of economic, political, and cultural processes from the declaration of the Peoples' Republic to 1966 seem to point to significant constitutive influences in the everyday existences of the Chinese.  Emphatically, the lives of young people within this generation must have been shaped, in part, by the continuity of traditional, Neo-Confucian conceptions of filial piety within extended household and village level communities, transitory extensions of intelllectual openness (e.g. "Let a hundred flowers bloom" movement of intellectual criticism on CCP policies in 1956), subsequent repressive moments (e.g. the "anti-rightist" movement in 1957(!)), rapid shifts in the focus of economic between urban and rural regions (the First Five-Year Plan period and the "Great Leap Forward"), and divergent shifts of openness within the general population for CCP membership, as a sine qua non for participation within the policy determination structures locally and at ascending levels of the bureaucracy.  When Mao and the Eighth Central Committee of CCP declared the start of the CR, as an opening for active and aggressive participation by youth in the transformation of the country toward socialism against "capitalist-roaders" and remaining "feudal" elements within the country, it must have contributed greatly, at the local level, to the articulation of personal stories, representing the relationships of tens of millions of young Chinese to their particular local conditions of existence.  In response, they streamed out, seizing power in many of the cities and, then, in 1970, venturing out to the agricultural communes to revolutionize the peasant holdovers to the old order (i.e. peasants with tiny individual farm plots trying to improve an otherwise miserable existence of laboring on large rural communes by selling the meager output of their little gardens in unregulated farmers' markets on roadsides).  In many ways, they must have envisioned their roles as foundational to a broader transformation of Chinese society in the same sense that certain Neo-Confucians, selectively embracing Westernization, had felt one hundred years earlier.  They must have found themselves personally entwined in these political processes, but, at the end of the CR, they must have found themselves profoundly disallusioned with the prospect their efforts should transform the country when significant segements of the upper level bureaucracy continued to stand against them!  They were described as a "lost generation" (and the CR is looked at as a "lost decade") for important reasons, but their moment may still be coming, in the hands of Xi Jinping. 

Functionally, this generation, as Red Guards, discovered its destiny in a brutal violence against its Party elders that left China in political disarray by 1975.  It was only the survival of leaders like Zhou Enlai and the selective rehabilitation of Party members like Deng Xiaoping, against the continued protests of radical factions, that saved China from state-failure.  This violence must be understood, at least in part, as a response against lingering traditional moral repressions of Neo-Confucian society.  On the other hand, it encountered new forms of proletarian moral repression.  I am not entirely clear on how the lost generation responded here beyond its obvious acquiescence in physically revolutionary violence (in part, as a sublimation of human sexual and other emotional needs?).  In my opinion, the development of the Red Guard generation not only suffered from the cessation of many formal educational processes from 1966 to 1975, but also from the direct intervention of Maoist ideologues (Mao and the Gang of Four) in areas of personal emotive and sexual development. 

The beginning of the CR witnessed an accentuation of a rigid moral austerity, configured in class terms an imagery of bourgeois decadence and sexual licentiousness.  In the context of a larger analysis of sexuality and gender development in the Peoples' Republic, Evans notes that media and literary references to sexuality were rigorously suppressed throughout the course of the CR, including allusions to sexuality in theater and drama otherwise consistent with revolutionary proletarian themes (e.g. White-Haired Girl, a revolutionary ballet conceived during the Yan'an period involving, among other things, the rape of a peasant girl, was revised to eliminate its sexual contents).  Conversely, government authorities at various levels apparently suppressed a rampant upsurge in sexual assaults at the height of the CR (see Evans, "The 'Scientific' Construction of Sexuality and Gender in the People's Republic of China," Signs, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter 1995), 357-394).  Among other frameworks approaching the incidence of political violence in the CR, sexuality and the resurgence of moral repression as a 1960s component in doctrinaire Maoism has never, to my knowledge, been fully examined, for example, in the manner that Reich attempted to psychoanalyze fascist ideologies and their effects on political practice in the 1930s.  Such an analysis, tracing the interpersonal development of sexually repressive tendencies from familial institutions through the formation of repressive state apparatus and linking the manipulation of repressed sexual signals to political violence, is overdue.  It seems indisputable to me that sexuality must be acknowledged as a critical component in self-realization being actively blocked over the period of the CR. 

Approaching self-realization and violence in the CR from yet another dimension, Žižek (see "Revolutionary Terror from Robespierre to Mao," positions, vol. 19, no. 3, 671-706) has offered that we should view the violence of the CR, in tandem with that of the French revolutionary "reign of terror" (1792-94), as "divine violence," a concept borrowed from Benjamin.  This concept, as I read it from Žižek, appears to imply the full democratization of justice as revenge, abnegating liberal social norms of rule of law (i.e. a rationality of constraint rooted in the depersonalization of  the accused individual relative to the sovereign polity through the prism of legal procedure) in favor of the direct personal embodiment of sovereignty in the hands of individuals as revolutionaries in a collective practice of democratization (i.e. the assumption of a sovereign right to punish by individuals in the name of the democratic collectivity, in whose hands the individual assumes the capacity to act as a member).  In these terms, individual motives for violence are transmuted into sovereign extractions of justice by virtue of the individual's embodiment within an unmediated democratic sovereign. 

By this accusatory logic, the CR would appear as a resumption of Chinese revolutionary democracy (seventeen years after the founding of the Peoples' Republic) through the honest and unmitigated assumption by student Red Guards of the sovereign capacity to cleanse the ranks of local CCP cadres and local populations as a whole of reactionary, traditionalist/feudal and bourgeois/capitalist ideologies.  That is to say, individually, the Red Guards conceived their complete and pure embodiment within the revolution to preclude any cynical, opportunistic individual motives for violent acts.  The implication of such a resumption of revolutionary democracy is that self-realization must include a collective dimension, hindered by the growth of the bureaucratic organs of the party-state, through which the revolution subsumes the individual as a member of the democratic sovereign, merging individual and collective self-realization through revolutionary violence (i.e. individual motivations for violence against local cadres, teachers, or even ones parents are transformed into collective, democratized/democratizing instances of proletarian class justice - moments for realization of ones belonging within the struggle for communism). 

Beyond these possible readings of subjective individual and collective self-realization, we have to read the revolutionary practices of the CR into a broader history of the creation of a socially repressive apparatus in China, from the end of the imperial regime to the present.  Attempting to fully articulate the nature of repressive violence in the CR, particularly in relation to the party-state, the actions of the Red Guards must be characterized as acts of non-state repressive violence, partly arising from incitements by elements within the state (Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, the Gang of Four) as a means of resolving intra-state political rivalries (with Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and the economic policy management bureaucrats within the CCP).  Relative to the broader history of socialist revolutions in the Twentieth century, there is something entirely new here that has no equivalent within the Soviet system, where the Stalinist turn at the end of the 1920s precluded the construction of any non-state/non-party repressive apparatus.  As such, the violent resumption of revolutionary democracy evident in the CR simultaneously necessitates and makes possible the production of a new democratic repressive apparatus (a new agency of "democratic proletarian dictatorship" actively cleansing, policing, and/or otherwise competing with the CCP, as the vanguard of democratic proletarian dictatorship).  By this reading, the Red Guard generation attained its collective self-realization as a revolutionary agent by reappropriating and actively reproducing the means to exercise repressive class dictatorship from the Party. 

Reading the CR in this vein, the violence of the Red Guards indisputably represented a revolutionary dead end, emphatically realized at the moment that Mao repudiated allusions to the Paris Commune in his treatment of the Red Guard mobilizations and seizures of power after the declaration of the Shanghai Commune in January 1967.  The CR failed in its effort to fully institutionalize the new (state) repressive apparatus contemplated in the imagery of the Paris Commune simply because, as Žižek argues, its biggest ideological backers within the state were unwilling to take the revolution to its logical conclusion with the death of the CCP and its unique, Leninist manifestations of state repressive apparatus.  In this regard, even to the extent that Lin Biao, as Mao's erstwhile successor in 1966, facilitated PLA support for Red Guard mobilizations, the relationship between the Red Guards and the PLA was never fully harmonized.  At various places, lethal violence was leveled by the PLA against Red Guard entities in efforts to restore public order.  In other places, Red Guard units assaulted PLA installations, appropriating weapons to be employed in battles against municipal authorities and reinforcing PLA units.  As both Žižek and Badiou acknowledge, the implicit or explicit efforts of Mao and others to generate a mass participatory alternative to the democractic proletarian dictatorship at the exclusive hands of the vanguard party was squelched by the same leaders inciting the CR, in turn ensuring the multi-directional character of physical violence (in support of the party-state and against it).  Consequently, as a potential element in the self-realization of the Red Guard generation, this failure represents a critical blockage against which many millions of Chinese Red Guards quite rightly could feel disillusioned - disillusioned enough to readily accept and acquiesce in the reintroduction of market-oriented capitalist institutions in the decades after the CR.

Concluding this reflection on the violence of the CR, a notable, marginalized Marxian theoretic perspective on violence remains to be explored.  Specifically, how might we interpret the CR within a Sorelian framework?  Generalizing on a perspective in which I am inadequately versed, for Sorel, violence manifests the potentiality for a formative/regenerative moral effect, a radical shock against popular acquiescence in the everyday of consumer-oriented liberalism and the peace of class compromise (Sorel explicitly had the French Socialist Party trade-union-oriented accomodationist regime of Jean Jaurès in mind), in favor of vigorous revolutionary creativity.  Violence, as such, lacks a necessary substance except in its capacity to shock, disrupt the everyday, and hurry the proletariat to the barricades to muster for class war.  It is a question of reviving within populations of workers, lulled by a steady progress in living standards, cheap consumables, mind-numbing entertainments, and reliable enhancements to income and benefits sustained by collective bargaining with capital, a lust for the revolutionary transformation of the everyday and for the violent suppression of banal bourgeois cultural ideals. 

At the outset, taking Maoist warnings seriously about the creeping infilitration of feudal/traditionalist and bourgeois/capitalist-roaders in the organs of the CCP, the Sorelian perspective on the formative value of violence seems to fit perfectly against the backdrop of Red Guard mobilizations and local municipal seizures of power.  In some respects, I want to contest this conclusion.  Again, we cannot generalize about individual Red Guard mobilizations, their particular goals, and the particular ways in which the members of Red Guard contingents conceived of the purposes entailed by their organization.  Clearly, there is more heterogeneity here than I would ever be able to encapsulate within a small opinion piece.  By and large, the Sorelian hypothesis interjects itself on an intellectual (or anti-intellectual) plain in which nihilism, articulated within Nietzschean understandings, resides within the banal, decadent complacency of bourgeois consumerism.  It is unclear that nihilistic consumerism ever seriously presented a threat to Chinese cultural contexts in the mid 1960s, although reflections in hindsight might obscure critical observations on the ways that the Chinese economy was changing on the eve of the CR (i.e. if the partial reintroduction of market mechanisms, especially in the countryside, was alleviating the pain inflicted on diverse regions by policies in the Great Leap Forward).  In this manner, the violence of the CR is anticipatory of the growth of bourgeois culture in China and, as such, it seeks to forestall its advance in the name of revolutionary passion, love, hate, and infinitely creative self-organization to craft a new socialist proletarian utopia.  It is a democratized/democratizing violence, configured for a sphere of radically non-liberal democracy (i.e. a majoritarian tyranny in its purest, grassroots sense), with young Red Guards imposing their will to reshape Chinese society on CCP bureaucrats, economic developmental experts, intellectuals, their familial elders, and anyone else getting in the way of a subjectively defined proletarian revolutionary project.

d.  Xi Jinping and his CCP contemporaries face an impossible quandary in deflecting contemporary demands for an enlarged space of democratic political discourse through appropriation of a Maoist legacy that includes the CR.  Invariably, they must, as with previous generations of CCP leadership, disavow certain theoretic inights that nurtured spontaneous experiments with local organization against the Party, existing as a sine qua non of communist revolution. 

In regard to the ideological resuscitation of Marxism over the period since the CR in China, Žižek argues that the meaning of Chinese Marxism has become curiously detached from notions of workers' liberation typically associated with Marxism in the West.  Rather, Marxism, identified by the CCP as the ruling ideology of China, has become synonymous with "harmonious" internal/national economic development, through which the party-state has ensured a rapid and efficient transformation of the forces of production, often suppressing the demands of urban and rural producers in favor of unrestricted productivity enhancement. 

This interpretation of Marxism is unquestionably contained by the larger body of Marxian theory emerging from the Nineteenth century.  If Marx never explicitly approached private capitalist inefficiencies in the development of the forces of production (i.e. technology and technique in the production of use values) beyond cursory references in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, his elaboration of the "general law of capitalist accumulation" in Vol. 1 of Capital emphasizes the contradictory nature of capital investment cycles, leading to valorization, devalorization, and destruction/liquidation of productive capital stock (including human capital stock) rendered superfluous by market dynamics.  Clearly, there is the suggestion that private, market-oriented capitalism must be associated not with perpetual, linear developmental progress of production and consumption possibilities but with perpetual, schizophrenic oscillation between expansion and contraction/recession, with the latter associated with a brutal and senseless waste/idling of the means of production (land, labor, and capital) while societies' needs for growth and development go unsatisfied.  Engels, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, goes further, explicitly arguing that socialism, understood as the seizure of political power by the proletariat and its transformation of the means of production into state property, will lead to the full development of productive forces, hindered by the inefficiencies of capitalism.  Thus, in regard to the socialist abolition of class divisions, Engels argues that "(i)t presupposes ... the development of production carried out to a degree at which the appropriation of the means of production and of the products ... by a particular class of society, has become not only superfluous, but economically, politically, and intellectually a hindrance to development" (see Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Part III, at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm).

From this frame of reference, the CCP, as executor of socialist dictatorship in the name of the Chinese proletariat, can claim to exercise a necessary role in transforming the forces of production in China against the constraints imposed by a private capitalist anarchy of developmental planning.  Such a reading of Chinese Marxism might fit, except for the fact that the CCP and the Chinese government have been engaged, especially over the course of the 1990s, in the partial dismantling/privatization and reorganization of state enterprises in relation to market mechanisms and their imposed discipline - the same discipline that sustains capitalist investment patterns in line with Marx's general law of capitalist accumulation!  The underlying Marxian theories on the development of productive forces in socialism do not apply to the Peoples' Republic in this era of market liberalization.  In these terms, we can only arrive at Žižek's conclusion that the CCP's recourse to Marxism as the ruling ideology in China seeks to deflect demands for a broader political liberalization/electoral and participatory democratization.  Such a liberalization might be expected to damage the harmonizing role of the party-state in relation to the development of productive forces, and release suppressed mass demands for more rapid increases in workers' compensation/living standards that would cripple the Chinese (capitalist) development model in the face of globalizing market competition. 

There is another side to this reassertion of Marxism, however, linked integrally to both the broader Leninist tradition (e.g. the vanguard role of the workers' party, democratic centralism) and to its particular manifestation in the Chinese context through Mao Zedong' s theories.  Indisputably, Mao's cult of personality continues to exert some palpable influence on the political positions of the CCP.  If Xi Jinping repudiates "Mao Zedong thought," he is venturing into uncharted territory, beyond the very limited denunciations of Mao's actions in inciting the CR through the resolution of the Sixth Plenum to the Eleventh Central Committee.  It would undermine certain foundational ideologies of the regime.  On this level, Maoism constitutes an article of (religious) faith for the Chinese party-state.  The political leadership must insist that it maintains a fundamental congruity with the vision of communism embodied by its great leader, and to do otherwise would amount to fostering "'nihilistic' criticism toward the party's traumatic past" (see Buckley, "China Takes Aim at Western Ideas," The New York Times, August 19, 2013, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/world/asia/chinas-new-leadership-takes-hard-line-in-secret-memo.html?src=portal_starbucks3&_r=1).

To some degree, I want to downplay incongruities in what the CCP is doing.  If the party-state executes the vanguard role of the CCP and practices democratic-centralism, then it operates within the general framework of ideas advanced by Mao, following from Lenin.  On the other hand, Mao's theories proceed from a much broader commitment against both market mechanisms/liberalization and managerial bureaucratism/professionalism in planning mechanisms.  Discounting interpretations of the CR and other traumatic moments in the first decades of the Peoples' Republic grounded in factional disputes within the CCP, Mao's thinking is far more focused on democratization than the current CCP leadership, or its practical fore bearer Deng Xiaoping, would ever want to concede.  Not only the CR but also the Great Leap Forward illustrate the seriousness of Mao in advancing a grassroots democratizing agenda, oriented toward "socialist education" of largely rural, peasant populations, as a key factor in bringing about communism.  Any effort to deprive Maoist thought of this democratizing focus would certainly undermine Maoism as a theoretic unity.  Moreover, we need to evaluate where this focus on democratization leads.  That is to say, what practical impact did the emphasis on democratizing spontaneity in the CR have on the political formation of the Red Guard generation and how are the CCP's actions oriented toward stifling these impacts?

One important moment in the post-CR political and cultural development of the Red Guard "lost" generation, the "Democracy Wall" movement of 1978-79, stands out in my mind, largely in reference to separate but like minded characterizations of the movement by Spence (see Spence (1982), The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and their revolution, 1895-1980, 405-412, New York: Penguin Books) and by Goldman (see Goldman, "The Twentieth Anniversary of the Democracy Wall Movement," Harvard Asia Quarterly (Summer 1999),at: http://www.worldlymind.org/demmerl.pdf).  The Democracy Wall movement began with the posting of a series of large character political posters at a busy thoroughfare in downtown Beijing, the Xidan wall, near the imperial Forbidden City in November, 1978.  These postings drew onlookers, spurring conversations and debates over the CR, the role of the CCP in China's post-CR transition, intellectual and artistic cultural freedom, and the potentialities for mass democratic participation in China's political future.  Participants in the movement developed underground newspapers, magazines, and political pamphlets, advancing political arguments and literary works with radical new styles and apolitical or oppositional content. 

In the interest of situating this particular moment in relation to its immediate influences, Goldman, in particular, links the beginnings of the movement to another incident in April, 1976, in which public memorials in Beijing marking the passing of Zhou Enlai resulted in mass demonstrations and localized violence by young people of the Red Guard generation, denouncing the CR, its Maoist theoretic foundations, the Gang of Four, and, implicitly, Mao himself.  Beyond this first precipitating moment, the CCP declaration, in August 1977, of an official ending to the CR and inauguration of Deng's Four Modernizations (in industry, science and technology, agriculture, and military power) collectively signaled to young intellectuals of the Red Guard generation that the moment was arriving to challenge the sterile, austere, anti-intellectual environment nutured over the course of the CR.  In turn, Deng's faction of the CCP leadership, seeking to marginalize Maoist holdovers and advance market-oriented reforms, profited from the development and limited exposition of such an intellectual current, at least for a time (i.e. until Deng himself becomes a target of criticism and demands for greater oppositional political liberties - especially the "Fifth Modernization - Democracy" statement  of December 1978 by Wei Jingsheng).

Critically, intellectuals participating in the Democracy Wall movement, in Beijing and elsewhere, appear to organize in ways that borrowed, at least in part, from the organizational logic of the Red Guard mobilizations.  That is to say, activists built local networks to promulgate political and cultural ideas from the ground up without either the involvement or sanctioning of party organizations.  As with the initial stages of the CR, through the seizures of power and declaration of communes in multiple cities, local Democracy Wall activists manifest a certain degree of democratic spontaneity, characterized by their explicit separation from the official sources of state power.  It is, likewise, noteworthy, that many of the Democracy Wall activists were active as members in Red Guard mobilizations during the CR.

Dependent on official acquiescense by market-oriented reformers in the CCP with whom many activists become increasingly critical by the beginning of 1979, the Democracy Wall movement in Beijing ends in December, 1979, when the Xidan wall is closed as a space for political exposition and public discussion.  Arrests of more radical activists, like Wei Jingsheng, began much earlier in 1979 and continued through 1981, by which time most activists seeking to continue discussions on political liberalization/democratization had been imprisoned.  The main point that I want to emphasize here is that the Democracy Wall activists seemed to have drawn an important kernel out of the malestrom of the CR - that a broadening and deepening of the sphere of personal and collective self-development/self-realization in the Peoples' Republic requires a radical confrontation with constraining traditional institutions, whether those institutions are manifest as philosophical relics of the imperial past or in exclusive, elitist bureaucratizing impulses of the vanguard party-state.  In 1966, they were all too young to articulate serious intellectual formulations challenging such constraining institutions (and, in any case, the Maoist ideologies under which they summoned to be historical actors denigrated independent intellectual speculation outside of official lines of "right-thinking" anyway!).  The most they could do was exercise their frustrations through violence against their elders and against physical symbols reinforcing their constraints.  By 1978, they were turning the corner personally and intellectually, only to see, once again, that their activism constituted a tool to be manipulated to serve the cynical opportunism of particular CCP factions.  Deng was no less willing to allow the Democracy Wall activists to see their revolution through to fruition than Mao was to allow Red Guards throughout the country to declare autonomous municipal communes, freed from dependence on the CCP or PLA.

Still, against the defiant statements of CCP and government leaders, democracy seems to keep creeping back into the conversation in the Peoples' Republic.  The Democracy Wall movement failed and its activists were imprisoned, but, by 1986, the party opens doors allowing conversations on political liberalization to come back, and students rise up in 1989 in the name of democratization only to be violently crushed by the PLA.  So what comes next?  More importantly, for my purposes, where does communism fit into the lingering struggle between supporters of democratization and the party-state, particular when the CCP continues to maintain, as expositors of the official Marxism, that mass participatory democracy and civic participation, in Western veins, are incompatible with China? 
       
e.  Borrowing from Badiou, the CR poses the formative question of whether the vanguard party of the Leninist model is actually capable of transcending its role as the executor of proletarian dictatorship in anticipation of a communist "stage."  The CR teaches us that the Leninist model and the "stages" interpretation of communism itself are faulty, and that Marxism needs to pursue alternative, more robustly spontaneous, participatory, entrepreneurial, and democratic/democratizing versions of communism. 

In evaluating the cult of Mao, in relation to both the incitement and the eventual undermining of the CR, Badiou advances the fecund observation that "'Mao' was the name for the 'construction of socialism' but also for its destruction" (see "The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?", 506, citation above).  The point here is that "socialism," in a doctrinaire Leninist vein, is irretrievably tied to the role of the vanguard party, as executor of the will of the proletariat in establishing a class dictatorship organized to sweep away all elements of bourgeois capitalism in preparation for full communism (i.e. an economic structure facilitating the development of the forces of production to a level at which use values can be produced and distributed, respectively, "from each according to his/her ability, to each according to his/her needs").  Read in this vein, the CR represents Mao's effort to transcend socialism and drive China into full-blown communism. 

On some level, Badiou seems to accept this interpretation.  It reflects an effort to at least grant Mao the benefit of the doubt at being an honest and committed Marxist-Leninist theoretician, pursuing the end goal of economic development by all means necessary, even at the expense of the vanguard party.  If this is true, then Mao must have realized that the CCP wasn't supposed to survive the CR!  The party should have been completely and ruthlessly purged and, ultimately, replaced by classless communal organizations, like that of Shanghai.  On the other hand, it is difficult to comprehend how the Red Guard units of Shanghai could, themselves, be understood as "classless," even by Mao's definition (their existence, after all, did reflect a persistent dichotomy between manual and mental work formative to class divisions).  And, thus, the replacement of the CCP with new bodies for democratic proletarian dictatorship could not have ended socialism to bring about communism.  They would have simply brought socialism into a new stage, beyond formal party organizations.  The dictatorship of the proletariat would have been exercised by a multitude of local, urban/municipal or rural communes, with the continued goal of rooting out feudal-traditionalist and bouregois-capitalist thought and practice to elevate the population to a socialist consciousness.  It would not have been a transcendance of Leninism, but a hierarchical reorganization/devolution of the revolutionary vanguard to induce an ideological deepening of the commitment of the people to the end goal of communism through mass participation. 

I can understand why someone like Badiou, as a faithful French Maoist student of May 1968, might want to discount readings that paint Mao in an opportunistic light relative to the rightist faction of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.  Ultimately, the notion that there was something exceptionally radical and spontaneously democratic going on in the Red Guard mobilizations was extraordinarily formative to student radicals throughout the West, and, if this was the most profound effect that the CR could have had on Marxism outside of China, then it was, perhaps, a meaningful and important moment.  It was meaningful enough to me to prompt me to spend several weeks writing this really, ridiculously long post!  Moreover, in hindsight, Mao's actual motivations for inciting the CR are both unknowable and, for that matter, irrelevant to the present moment.  The ambiguous reading of Mao applied by Badiou is, therefore, a fair appraisal.  In the end, however, it appears that Badiou is trapped, in his analysis of the CR in relation to the continued existence of the party-state, between competing images of Leninist vanguard parties and Western bourgeois liberal democratic, corporate sponsored(!) party politics.  Between these images, the first consistent with the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat and the latter consistent with the liberal dictatorship of the haute bourgeoisie, Badiou seems to posit the ideal of free, participatory, non-party, non-liberal, non-class, perhaps "non-state" (i.e. devoid of the construction of a repressive state apparatus) democracy as the consistent form for communism.  In the name of a different future for Marxism, I think this imagery needs to be rejected, at least in part.

First and foremost, we cannot transcend Leninism, the notion of vanguard parties and party-states, and democratic-centralism unless we simultaneously transcend the foundational conception of communism embodied within Leninism, which is, similarly, the conception of communism embodied within the Marxism of the Second International with which Lenin and the Bolsheviks broke.  That is not to say that contemporary Marxism has to repudiate everything Marxism meant from the 1890s through the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Rather, we need to be serious about seeing different possibilities in our conceptualizations of communism relative to those embodied, especially, within the tradition of Marxist-Leninism.  The imagery advanced here involves a preeminently historical conception of communism, as a stage in a sequence of economic developmental transitions (from feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism).  A first step in transcending the legacy of the party-state as an impediment to a thoroughly democratizing communism must, in some way, involve the rejection of this developmental sequence.

In place of this "stages" interpretation, the reading of Marxian theory from which I have been most influenced (see Resnick and Wolff (2002), Class Theory and History, New York: Routledge) has advanced the proposition that communism, interpreted as the collective appropriation and distribution of surplus labor by its producers, has existed in diverse historical contexts, frequently in combination (competition, collaboration, and/or neutral coexistence) with other exploitative and non-exploitative non-communist class structural forms.  Consistent with my previous posts here, communism, in this framework cannot be viewed as a unique (national) social formation or associated with a particular (national) state political form.  Rather, it has to be considered at a foundational level as a particular class characteristic of organizations where surplus labor/surplus value is collectively appropriated by the same individuals who produce the surplus, and distributed collectively by these individuals to achieve the conditions of existence for the organization.  In these terms, I consistently imagine communisms at a micro-scopic level, configured through the image of workers cooperatives.  On the other hand, not all such organizations may be characterized as communist and there are certainly communist forms (especially in organizations of the contemporary household) that fall outside of the organizational boundaries of worker cooperatives.   

Forms of communism, according to this definition, may have existed both in Russia and China prior to the victory of Marxist-Leninist vanguard parties.  I feel confident that communisms still exist in post-Soviet Russia and post-Maoist China (though not in lingering, restructured state enterprises) today.  Additionally, communism readily exists across diverse geographic and cultural contexts in the U.S. economy and thoroughout other Western economies traditionally identified with the dominance of capitalism.  It certainly also exists in different forms in areas of the "developing" world traditionally associated with more feudal/reciprocally-hierarchical class structures.  Fundamentally, if we grant the consistency of this definition of communism in relation to the terms of Marx's critique of capitalism based on surplus labor/value, then the simultaneous existence of diverse class structural forms within particular, larger (national) social formations reorients the conversation about communism toward the relative frequency of communism in particular social formations and the effects that communism exerts on other, non-class economic, political, and cultural processes and on the persistent existence of non-communist class structures.  It shifts the discussion away from consideration of state forms necessary to effect a historical transition from one economic stage to its successor toward inquiry on how state political processes might support an increasing presence of communism, as one particular class structural form among many existing within a larger economy. 

This alternative grounding of the definition of communism opens the conversation to how divergent non-class structures (e.g. state political practices, distributive structures for use values/commodities, literary/artistic practices, patterns in the handling of ecological wastes,..., etc.) might sustain or hinder the development of communist class structures.  Approaching this question as an economist, a critical matter involves the role of markets and the subsidiary issue of monetary economy.  In this regard, I consider the existence of communism to be wholly consistent with market based systems of use value/commodity distribution and with the presence of unique systemic monetary means of exchange.  The fact that the producers of a good, destined for market exchange, collectively appropriate the surplus value generated in its production, possibly distributing a small share of this surplus value to themselves as an entrepreneurial return/profit, does not, in any palpable way, alter the class structure of their production process - what they are doing is performing communism, whether or not they sell their commodity on the open market for a monetary equivalent value or they distribute it through some other non-commodity/non-market method of distribution. 

In my view, communism, configured in these terms, opens up a range of spontaneous, experimental, and vigorously entrepreneurial possibilities, while remaining a basis for the democratization of surplus labor and, thus, a partial basis for a broader democratization of social forms, including state political forms, per se.  Ideally, communist producers are continuously engaged in a democratic endeavor of their own making and, thus, might be induced by their own productive activity to demand democratization in other areas of their lives.  Most certainly, they might demand to have a practical role in the determination of state policies affecting their individual lives as well as their collective performance of communism.  Maintaining such a role could be key to ensuring the continued existence of their communist enterprise and, further, enable the growth of other communist enterprises with which they might network in order to develop broader communist supply chains, as means of both managing costs and, politically, defending the collective appropriation and distribution of surplus labor as a virtue that all members in each enterprise cherish as an element of their personal liberties.  In these terms, the accentuation of collective appropriation and distribution of surplus by its producers as a (democratic/democratizing) virtue constitutes the basis for communism's proper contribution to cultural revolution, as the perpetuation of the argument for communism against arguments for alternatives, especially capitalism (as a form of exploitative appropriation and distribution of surplus labor by non-producers).   

Concluding this very lengthy post, I clearly think that Mao (and Lenin before him) was on to something when he started calling for a revolution in culture to be enacted through mass participation.  However, the Leninist foundations for an understanding of communism on which the CR was based were faulty, and the faultiness of such understandings promoted, in part, the destructiveness of the CR as a moment in Chinese political, economic, and cultural development.  Marxism, globally, needs to learn from this tragic moment.  To a substantial degree, we need to reexamine the meaning of communism in order to frame a different set of economic, political, and cultural strategies in order to promote, develop, and sustain communist class structures in divergent economic contexts.  Such developments need to prioritize democratization as communism's best argument.

I do not know the extent to which contemporary Chinese economic development, under the aegis of the CCP, mirrors such objectives in the development of communism.  Rather, based on my limited understanding of the course of economic development since the end of the CR, I find the progress of market liberalization in the Peoples' Republic largely positive (as a reflection of my own bias for market mechanisms of distribution).  On the other hand, it seems counterintuitive to me that a social formation associated as strongly with broad manifestations of political repression could ever facilitate the development of democratically-structured economic organizations on any meaningful scale.  Rather, following Žižek's argument, the official Marxism of the CCP constitutes a repressive, "harmonizing" argument, facilitating the expansion of domestic and foreign capitalist projects and stiffling workers' liberation, understood either through the framework of independent trade-union organization or through the organization of alternative non-capitalist and/or non-state class-structured forms.  In these terms, again as Žižek argues, the failure of the CR forecloses, at least partially, the potential for emancipatory projects and simultaneously institutionalizes China's unique form of capitalism through the political dominance of the CCP and its official version of Marxism.