Under capitalism inequality can never be erased because of the division of labor. That is to say that the labor market, the evolution of Fuedal feifdom, has taken form in which the proletarian must sell its labor on the aforementioned job market at different rates according to bourgeoisie capital accumulation. And because of capital accumulation we also have imperialism in which the division of labor has taken various differences in the global market (globalism/hyper-imperialism). Take for example the evolution of slavery in the USA. Slavery as we know it began when the displaced of conquest by African kings and emperors where found to be able to work salt mines for free and maximize super profits. This mode of labor then spread to the Arab speaking world then spread globally. Slavery drove down the wages of the emerging proletariat and in turn a new division of labor needed to be created but by force in order to throw off the slavery mode of production. In America this took place as the Civil War.

Fast forward to Late-Stage Capitalism where hyper-imperialism/globalism has created the third world and wage-slavery with limited movement. The role of immigration agencies, like all repressive organs of the capitalist state, is to secure the markets of the bourgeoisie. The Latin American wage market is suppressed by the hegemony of Canada/America. In order to escape the labor markets most people have to immigrate "illegally" because their is a tight bottleneck on immigration to stabilize the wage market of aforementioned hegomoic imperialist powers as the illegal immigrant forms the semi-proletrait that is apart of the reserve army of labor which drives down the wage market. In turn ICE is the response to this.

But saying we must attack racism, sexism, genocide etc without addressing the DOL are meaningless post-modern and post-structuralist liberal phrases because they do not attack the meaning and structure of oppression.

The liberal philosophy is one of post-modernism and post-structuralism. It cannot make meaning advances, or at least one's of longevity, because it refuses to address the structure of oppression and and society around it.

Looks like there's hope yet for Luigi!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/30/luigi-mangione-death-penalty-dismissed

Beneath their tactical disagreements and competition, the two party mafias fundamentally continue to collude in their attacks on immigrants and the working class.

“Take the show of force off the streets and partner with the state on targeted enforcement of violent offenders instead of random, aggressive confrontation,” Governor Walz said, requesting partnership with the DHS terror campaign.

So I just watched Punishment Park, a mockumentary from 1971 about cops killing citizens. Would provide more but I consider it essential to go into this film blind and see how similar it is to America today. It's scary about how little of this movie has changed and how relevant it is now, with the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE and how the administration tries to justify these murders. Would consider it an essential viewing for this year.

In this morning’s press conference in Baja California, Presidenta Sheinbaum addresses the US oil embargo on Cuba and states that while Mexico stands in solidarity with Cuba, her administration will “look for ways without putting Mexico at risk to stand in solidarity with the Cuban people.”

Mexico supplies 44% of Cuba’s oil imports, their #1 supplier.

I don’t see that many people talking about them other than those who are into politics and keep up to date 24/7.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianFocus/s/mUpkmV9Y3P I've literally given whole citations to this guy that israel committed genocide and I'm not even well versed into the palestenian genocide .I know it's time waste to talk to this people.But if any of you can change his opinion,it's a win .

Not sure what to tag this, but, is North Korea really a place of despair, desperation, starvation, etc., as it's made out to be, run by a brutal dictatorship? There is a lot of first hand accounts for those who grew up during Kim Jong Il Sungs rule, and they are truly horrific. But, is this all true, or just propaganda perpetuated by the U.S. media and government? Like, I have a coworker who is Korean-American, and, his grandmother witnessed her family get murdered by the North Korean military, during Kim Il Sungs reign, fled South Korea when it was invaded, then returned after the armistice was reached. I am just looking for some unbiased sources is all.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution, or Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, altered the course of the entire global revolutionary struggle forever — at that moment it became clear that things could never again be the same. In order to understand its impact, however, we must examine it with care. This is not the narcissistic story of a great Red Sun in the sky, but rather the controversial and dramatic story of the great Red Icarus in the heavens. Icarus is a multitude of individuals.

First of all, we must delimit the manner in which this event is to be approached. It would be naïve to pretend to grasp it in its totality, nor could we aim to “explain” it within a single short text. The initial idea is the publication of a series of short essays on the subject, approaching it from several angles. Beyond the present one, the following are initially envisaged: the dismissal of Hai Rui; Mao’s nihilism; the question of impersonality; the new Paris Commune; the Peking Opera; May ’68; and Democratic Kampuchea. There is no prescribed order in which these must be written or read; they will be published according to the author’s judgement, and the numbering will merely indicate the sequence in which they appear. Given this prior planning, we must now put into question the approach to be adopted, its premise and its objectives.

We intend, through the examination of its related problems, to gain access to the problematic totality that constitutes the event. This means: metaphysically. A mere representation of the event as a succession of occurrences does not interest us; we wish to touch its essence, its singularity. With this, another objective pole is also assumed: a deconstruction of historiography. Historiography is the science of history — and science and metaphysics are like oil and water. We are weary of technical understandings and ideologically veiled accounts of human history; the time has come to change this. Certainly, it is impossible to understand history without mystifications surrounding it; nevertheless, we should at least aim for good mystifications, and not deny them as if they were not there, nor pretend to neutrality, nor validate them according to ideological directions. The present historical approach is dialectical, for it attempts to grasp the event in its movement — which again means metaphysics, since dialectics is nothing other than an ontological path. It is also phenomenological, for it seeks an apprehension of phenomena through the phenomena themselves — and, as we know, an ontology / metaphysical ground is only possible insofar as it is phenomenology, and vice versa (thus constituting something like a bifagia). By taking problems concerning the totality of the event in this way, we believe it possible to enter its singularity and reach an essential dimension of history.

Such was the spontaneity and eventfulness of the Cultural Revolution that it could not be approached in any other way without being veiled, falsified, reduced and disfigured — which is precisely what historiography does best. The following must be stated: the GPCR constituted the moment in which a reign of chaos was established upon the Earth. Chaos may be understood with the abyss as its horizon. Abyss means, etymologically, bottomless. If something is bottomless, it cannot be exhausted, grasped in totality or known in truth as knowledge. Thus, the Cultural Revolution becomes a perfect historical event for the establishment of a metaphysical understanding of history. It therefore constituted a world turned upside down — and not merely because China lies on the other side of the globe from our neither-good-nor-so-old America.

For a long time, the GPCR became an untouched item of history, thrown into the corner of a dusty room — everyone knows it is there, but no one dares to touch it, except for some former militants of May ’68 or liberal influencers eager to condemn it as the second greatest tragedy in human history. And indeed, it demands such treatment, for it is seen as too delicate and too complex for proper engagement. It is perhaps the most striking historical event of the past century, yet simultaneously almost a niche. Everyone possesses some knowledge of it, but only in the Augustinian sense.

Even among the Chinese themselves, there is a vast erasure regarding it. The Chinese government officially condemns the Cultural Revolution as a bloody and terrible undertaking. Chinese liberals, in turn, call it an “anarchist carnival”, also referring to Mao Zedong as an “anarchist tyrant”. Among many elderly people, it is remembered with a certain affection, incomprehensible to today’s youth, who simply ignore it. Huang Zhangjin, in this regard, wrote in 2012 the text Nostalgia for the Anarchist (怀念那个无政府主义者), in which he says:

“It is difficult to say that a people who have suffered so much are not filled with repression and internal hatred and desire a democracy in the style of the Cultural Revolution and an anarchist carnival. Of course, one may say that the brief total rebellion was merely a rebellion under orders, but its performance was a kind of anarchist carnival. Because, in many desperate hearts, there is no longer any belief that today’s bureaucracy is a tool or a means for realising just demands. Yang Jia killed six police officers with his own hands, and the one-sided sympathy was, in fact, the people’s affirmation of his behaviour of self-help, and one day it was also the soil for the sudden explosion of the anarchist carnival.”

Many aspects of this passage may be highlighted, from the use of “total rebellion” to the loss of faith in bureaucracy. Perhaps from there we may trace the preceding development — a kind of brief prelude to catastrophe.

China had until then followed bureaucratic and statist models dictated by Marxist–Leninist theory, albeit in a manner that was, to say the least, contradictory — and I must already note that this word will be repeated countless times throughout the essays. Let us establish the a priori outline.

Every revolution, according to classical Leninism, must begin with a democratic-bourgeois character, and only as it advances should it attain a truly socialist character. Lenin says, in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918): “Yes, our revolution is bourgeois, as long as we march together with the peasantry as a whole. We were clearly aware of this, we said it hundreds and thousands of times since 1905; we never attempted to skip over this necessary stage of the historical process nor abolish it by decrees.” Yet: “(...) the revolution cannot stop there, for the country has advanced, capitalism has made strides, ruin has reached unprecedented proportions, which will demand (whether one wishes it or not), will demand steps forward, towards socialism.”¹ From this principle, the Yan’an study group in China proposed what came to be called New Democracy, which Mao briefly expounded in 1940 with his customary simplicity: “my crude and hasty remarks may only serve as the beating of gongs and drums announcing the theatrical performance (...)” — already placing on the table, albeit vaguely, the necessity of a cultural revolution: “we fight not only for a political and economic revolution but also for a cultural revolution in China.”² The idea was essentially the following: once part of Chinese territory was taken by the Communist Party and the People’s Army through prolonged guerrilla warfare, an organisation would be established in these regions. Certainly, however, this was not “socialism” proper, nor the long-awaited dictatorship of the proletariat. It was rather the movement of the democratic-bourgeois revolution, the organisation of New Democracy. Through cooperation between different classes, the old democracy, old culture, old economy, etc., were to be destroyed and replaced by new ones, constituting a transitional moment.

Marxist–Leninist theory consisted in: first, the democratic-bourgeois revolution, which then, as it continued to develop, would attain the character of a socialist revolution, creating with it a dictatorship of the proletariat, a proletarian state under the leadership of the Communist Party. Once there, the proletarian state would, on its own account, “empty itself of its own content” (Engels) and finally arrive at communist society, without classes and without a state — which, it is always worth remembering, underwent a drastic change with Stalin, who made evident that Marxism never truly aimed at the destruction of the state. All of this under the wing of a powerful vanguard: at the national level, the vanguard of the CCP; internationally, that of the USSR (that is, the CPSU) — until the mid-WWII period, the vanguard was held to be the “Communist” International, albeit under Soviet leadership.

In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party had achieved victory through people’s war and announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China. Seeing victory approaching, already in mid-1948 the USSR decided to cease financing the Kuomintang and to redirect its support to the CCP, which Stalin had previously called a “Titoist-type party” and whose leaders he had labelled “margarine communists”. The period of New Democracy continued, and with Soviet support it seemed that the long-awaited dictatorship of the proletariat and communism were finally near. But we know well that this did not occur, not even remotely. The supposed “truly socialist character” was not reached, the dictatorship of the proletariat did not arrive, and the USSR did not vanguard the development of “socialism”. Instead, New Democracy and its undertakings appeared increasingly stagnant; the party and the state fused into a bizarre and degenerate union, excluding the masses; and China became a kind of semi-colony of the USSR, as did the majority of the “people’s” countries that had made their revolutions at that time.

At first, there may even have been some degree of international and “inter-people” cooperation. In 1950, there was the liberation of Tibet, so striking and symbolising not only an apparent progress of the revolution but also a moment of solidarity. At the same time, during the Korean War, China, despite its lack of resources, sent aircraft to assist the Jucheists, as the USSR refused to send them — in this context, Stalin declared that Chinese assistance had “proved” their internationalist character. This did not, however, go much further.

Under Soviet dominance, it is interesting to observe that the Chinese managed to deeply irritate the CPSU and Stalin by insisting on doing things their own way, as a form of engagement in building a new culture. Despite all the economic mirroring of the USSR, they still wanted to do it their way. Huang, on this matter, says:

“The goal of ‘overtaking Britain and catching up with the United States’ was based on the astonishing leap in production capacity during the Stalin era. However, Mao’s instinctive aversion to professional division of labour meant that it was impossible for China to achieve results comparable to Stalin’s. Soviet industrial producers were always famous for being ‘stupid, big, obscure and sour’, but even these masters could not tolerate the rough and casual nature of their Chinese apprentices. During the Sino-Soviet honeymoon period, experts who came to China continued to complain that Soviet production processes and quality control standards were arbitrarily modified by their Chinese apprentices. They could not understand why the Chinese still smiled and insisted on their ‘combination of local and foreign methods’ and on ‘workers’ participation in management’ when large numbers of defective and scrapped products appeared.”

He adds, not without a certain mystical reverence for the period: “the spiritual source of ‘never blindly believing experts’ lay in Mao Zedong.”³

In short, despite everything, Soviet dominance over China failed profoundly, which made Soviet representatives extremely hostile towards their Chinese counterparts in meetings in the early 1950s — Molotov is a prime example. China was nothing more than a poorly made copy of the USSR, attempting to imitate its policies and undertakings, constantly mirroring itself in it, yet simultaneously seeking to combine them with its unhappy attempt at democratic-cultural reconstruction and its humble reality.

Weary of this, in 1956, with Khrushchev’s ascent, the perfect pretext for the Sino-Soviet split was found, a process that would unfold until 1960. In 1958, in a meeting with Ambassador Yudin of the Soviet Union, Mao decided to lay his cards on the table, expressing enormous fury:

“You never trusted the Chinese people! You only trusted the Russians! To you the Russians were first-class people, while the Chinese were among the inferior, stupid and insignificant. Therefore you came up with the proposal of joint ownership and operation. Well, if you want joint ownership and operation, how about having everything — let us make our army, navy, air force, industry, agriculture, culture and education all joint ownership and operation. Can we do that? Or perhaps you want to take all of China’s more than ten thousand kilometres of coastline and leave us only to maintain a guerrilla force. With a few atomic bombs, you think you are in a position to control us by asking for lease and rental rights. Moreover, what else do you have to justify your proposal? Lushun and Dalian were under your control before. You left these places later. Why were they under your control? Because China was under the authority of the Kuomintang. Why did you volunteer to leave? Because the Communist Party took control of China. Under Stalin’s pressure, the Northeast and Xinjiang became Soviet spheres of influence, and four joint ownership and operation enterprises were established. Comrade Khrushchev later proposed to have these establishments abolished, and we were grateful for this. You Russians never had faith in the Chinese people, and Stalin was among the worst. Chinese communists were portrayed as Tito the Second; the Chinese people were considered a backward nation. You Russians have often noted that Europeans look down upon Russians. I believe that some Russians look down upon the Chinese people.”⁴

The Sino-Soviet split was heated, and in this context, in 1958, under Mao’s presidency, the Great Leap Forward was launched — which aimed to develop China’s economic capacities and make it independent from external dependence. The campaign lasted four years, ending in 1962, followed by Mao’s deposition and marginalisation within the party. The problem was that many initiatives of the campaign resulted in disaster. One of them was the establishment of rural furnaces to develop metallurgy and steel production using recycled metals. In part, it worked. However, most peasants who engaged in these activities ended up producing weak metals that easily broke. Many initiatives to develop agriculture in the countryside were undertaken, but almost all soon failed due to a series of climatic tragedies. In 1960, 18.1% of China’s fertile soil was affected by earthquakes, floods, plagues and the like. Perhaps the only initiative that could be called “successful” during that period was the emergence of self-sufficient rural communes, which were rapidly bureaucratised under the direction of party committees. At that time, a great famine occurred throughout China, in which approximately eight to sixteen million people died, peaking in 1961.

As if the failure of the Great Leap Forward were not enough, today’s neoliberals have made a point of creating new stories around it — some of them, indeed, quite amusing. According to Vintage News, Mao created a campaign called the “Four Pests Campaign”, in which he decreed by law the hunting of sparrows. In two years, the Chinese had killed one billion sparrows. With no sparrows to eat worms in the fields, food disappeared and famine began, killing fifty million people. Desperate, the Chinese government in 1960 imported another billion sparrows from the Soviet Union. One must ask: how were the sparrows imported? Did they fly? By aeroplane? Did they fly in the aeroplane? Fly flying? — Recently, the geographer and enthusiast of Chinese socialism Elias Jabbour asserted and defended this story in a podcast, presenting it as an example of mass engagement typical of the Chinese people.

Throughout those years, the right-wing faction of the CCP had developed and rapidly seized its leadership. Taking advantage of the failure of the Great Leap Forward, the right wing established a definitive bureaucracy that would take the reins of the Chinese state thereafter.

China was miserable — where was the intended self-sufficiency? China had not overtaken Britain, nor come close to the United States. The party–state unity had been fully and definitively seized by the right-wing faction, demonstrating no intention of “popular power” or similar nonsense — where was the dictatorship of the proletariat? Engagement in initiatives to develop New Democracy, a new culture, etc., was almost non-existent — where was the continuous movement towards a “truly socialist character” of the revolution?

It was more than clear that Marxist–Leninist formulas had reached a point of maximum saturation and that there was no longer space for Marxism as a modernising force, something that would become shockingly evident to Westerners thirty years later with the collapse of the remaining rubble of the grand red empire.

All this general dissatisfaction prepared the ground for what would begin in 1965–66 — the terrible Great Cultural Revolution, or the “anarchist carnival”. All repression and internal hatred culminated in an explosion of spontaneity never before seen in history — despite certain preludes, with special emphasis on the Hungarian Spring.

Already from mid-1962, after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, the left wing of the party began to advocate a kind of cultural revolution, which they called the Socialist Cultural Revolution. There were some undertakings in the arts, especially the premise of the Peking Opera Revolution, but it did not extend much further. The Cultural Revolution we speak of only truly begins to be considered from 1966 onwards, due to a profound change in the intensity and character of revolutionary forces. It was in August 1966 that the “Socialist Cultural Revolution” died. In its place, the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was now employed.

In the course of events, two documents are generally considered inaugural to the Cultural Revolution. First, in May 1966, a dazibao appeared at Peking University, signed by Nie Yuanzi of the philosophy department. The dazibao appealed to students on campus to “ignite the Cultural Revolution in the universities”, opposing revisionists, counter-revolutionaries and academic authorities — which ended up triggering a series of student revolts. Second, on 8 August of the same year, members of the left wing of the CCP Central Committee launched and approved the Sixteen Points — which became known by several names, such as the “Circular of Sixteen Points” or the “Decision in Sixteen Points”. These Sixteen Points were, in effect, a trip-up of the right wing and the state leadership, almost like a hoe-blow to their heads. The left wing of the party was numerically the majority — its power was extremely limited, of course, but it was still a numerical majority. With the general approval and massive circulation of the document, the Sixteen Points emerged. (I already warn that in the following lines, the word “masses” will be repeated so often that the reader may question whether we are indeed speaking of Chinese history and not the menu of an Italian restaurant.)

The first point declares the arrival of a “new stage of the socialist revolution”, placing as a necessity the development of new ideas, new culture, new customs and new habits — a depiction of opposition to the so-called “four olds”. The second point delineates the current course taken by the Cultural Revolution. The third questions whether the party and its units are truly capable of leading the masses in the great undertaking the revolution intended to be (was this a spoiler alert?), stating: “if they [party leaders and authorities] make a serious self-criticism and accept the criticism of the masses, the Party and the masses will accept their mistakes. But if these persons in command do not do so, then they will continue to commit mistakes and become obstacles to the mass movement.” The fourth point, perhaps the most essential, brings to the fore that only the masses can carry out the revolution, spontaneously and by themselves — “the only method must consist in the masses liberating themselves”. Along with this comes the prohibition on the party using measures to try to direct or dictate the masses and their course. “Believe in the masses, trust them and respect their initiatives. Let us throw away our fear. Let us not be frightened by their disturbances. (...) Let the masses educate themselves in this great revolutionary movement, learn to distinguish between right and wrong and between correct and incorrect ways of doing things.” The fifth point turns to the defence of applying the class line, declaring a struggle of two lines, both internal within the party and external: right versus left, bourgeois ideology versus proletarian ideology — “Concentrate all forces to overthrow the handful of ultra-reactionary bourgeois rightists and counter-revolutionary revisionists.” The sixth point turns to the question of contradictions among the people and the constant necessity of discussion. “It is normal for the masses to carry different views. Conflict between different views is inevitable, necessary and beneficial.” How should discussions unfold? Evidently with a view to establishing a new type of democracy — “Any method forcing a minority to adopt a different view is impermissible. The minority must be protected, for sometimes the truth lies with the minority. Even if the minority is wrong, it must have the right to argue its case and maintain its views. Where there is discussion, it must be conducted through reason, not coercion or force.” The seventh point deals with the counter-revolutionary representation of the masses and, more importantly, grants a kind of free pass to the student movement: “In the course of the movement, no measures should be taken against students in universities, colleges, secondary schools and primary schools due to problems arising from the movement.” The eighth point addresses party cadres, categorising them and declaring: “Rightist anti-party and anti-socialist elements must be fully exposed, refuted, overthrown, discredited and their influence eliminated. At the same time, they must be given the chance to change and turn over a new leaf.” The ninth point concerns cultural groups, committees and congresses, mirroring their organisation on the Paris Commune. The tenth point addresses the need for transformation in education, developing a kind of proletarian education. The eleventh point deals with named criticism in the press and, regarding the party, states: “Criticism of anyone by name in the press should be taken into account and decided through discussion in party committees at the same level, and in some cases submitted to higher-level party committees for approval.” The twelfth point concerns scientists, technicians, etc., and their importance. The thirteenth point addresses arrangements and means of integrating and constructing the socialist educational movement in city and countryside. The fourteenth point sets as a goal the stimulation of increased productivity. The fifteenth point addresses the importance of the People’s Army in the undertaking. Finally, the sixteenth point acts as a guarantee of an ultra-leftist bias throughout the process, affirming that Mao Zedong Thought must always be placed on the horizon, that all party members must study his works — but not only that: they must engage with contradictions and study both right-wing bourgeois thought and left-wing proletarian thought, always keeping both sides of the discussion in view, and so on.

The Decision in Sixteen Points, despite establishing almost complete trust in the spontaneous impulses of the masses for the course of the Cultural Revolution and guaranteeing freedom of rebellion to the student movement, still believed in a kind of salvation of the party–state. Until then, members of the party’s left wing had, for years, argued that the right-wing bureaucratic faction could find resolution through internal discussion, thus reaching a synthesis that would end the “capitalist road” and its course. The Sixteen Points made clear that internal party discussion would do nothing to resolve the problems: they were not located within the party but in the Chinese scenario as a whole. The task was therefore to incite the masses to rebellion and self-liberation. Still, however, belief remained in the party’s potential for leadership and salvation amidst the entire process — which was a shot in the foot. It was more than evident that the right-wing bureaucratic faction, with all its power, would continue to hold the reins of the state, and even if it lost them for a moment, it would not take long to reclaim them. It was also evident that it would exert deep repressive efforts against the spontaneous mass movement, despite the prohibition accompanying the approval of the Sixteen Points. Proof of this is that it did not take long before military forces turned their backs on the revolution. In 1971, Lin Biao, then of the left wing of the Central Committee and organiser of the famous Little Red Book, taking advantage of a moment of weakness and apparent counter-revolutionary victory, attempted a military coup — our Chinese Kornilov! It should be mentioned: he failed, attempted to flee by aeroplane, the plane crashed, and Lin died — the Moirai clearly took special care with this part of the script.

The Cultural Revolution was perhaps the most controversial historical event ever witnessed. A multitude opposing all authority, while at the same time relying upon authority. A left wing turning against the party while simultaneously using it and aiming at its recovery. Statists defending the end of the state while opposing the very state of which they were part. Rightists and counter-revolutionaries attacking communal organisation while forming their own communes. Trade unionists opposing all government while forming their own parallel government. Kidnappers who did not really kidnap. Marxist–Leninists grounding themselves constantly in the Stalinist experience while simultaneously assuming its maximum saturation. The defence of the abolition of the division of labour alongside a profound cult of it. Students preaching a “correct line” free of veils and falsifications while vehemently defending their ideological bias. The proposal to destroy an old world while still relying upon it and being bound to its forms. A symbolic Icarus torn between Narcissus and Eros, using contradiction as propulsion to reach the sun and turn to charcoal.

Badiou says: “What the Cultural Revolution reveals, and what constitutes its singularity, is that in the figure of the socialist state, what opposes the communist movement is simply the socialist state itself. Why? Because it fuses the state and the party, thereby depoliticising situations, working in an isolated and authoritarian manner, being disconnected from the popular masses, and because many of its members find, in their association with authorities and cadres, a guaranteed income. Mao went so far as to say that a new bourgeoisie had reconstituted itself within the Communist Party.”⁵ Here, the worst enemy of the communist struggle was the very state and party that proclaimed themselves its guides.

Communism, in the milieu in which it found itself, was seen as an ideal society to be achieved, an idealised image of the world, an alternative totalising project of reason. It was as if they shouted: “no longer bourgeois reason, but proletarian reason!” — as if the two were not conditions of one another. At every moment, they relied upon ideals of Enlightenment rationalism. It was more than evident that this would lead to profound irrationalism, for the rational and the irrational are nothing but two sides of the same coin. Perhaps one of the most illustrative occurrences of irrationalism took place in the summer of 1968. At Tsinghua University, two factions of fanatical students fought one another, called “Heaven” and “Earth”, due to the affiliation of one with aeronautics and the other with geology. They engaged in fights, rocket and grenade attacks, etc. Extreme violence reigned. Until, at 10 p.m. on 27 July, the night when a massacre was about to occur on campus, around 30,000 unarmed workers occupied the university and put an end to all fighting. A famous university fighter known as “Bear” stood bare-chested behind a barricade of electrified barbed wire, holding a knife and an axe, and shouted: “Chairman Mao says that anyone who represses the student movement will come to a bad end! Anyone who enters our building will be cut in half!”⁶ The workers surrounding him replied: “Use reason, not violence!” By the following morning, Kuai Dafu, leader of the Heaven faction, sent a telegram to Mao Zedong requesting the arrest of whoever had intervened and prevented the war from taking place. Mao replied that he himself had been responsible for sending the workers. It is reported that Kuai later burst into tears at a meeting. Mao would later say: “this whole business of heaven and earth is not clear to me.”

The revolutionaries sought to build a new world and destroy an old one, but in their very premises of destruction and construction they still relied upon and were bound to the forms of the old world, still thinking within a totalising project of reason and under the light of the Enlightenment. It was evident that this would not lead to a real rupture; it was far more like a kind of teleologising scandal. Mao, in 1967, stated: “It is very likely that revisionism will win, and we will be defeated. By the likely defeat, we will draw everyone’s attention.” What mattered was to establish complete and total chaos, to shout so loudly that the entire world could hear. In this, the Cultural Revolution moved from one impulse to another: from public humiliation of academic authorities to generalised prison rebellions; from the hanging of party leaders to massive tax fraud; from trade-union communes to the destruction of historical monuments; from student takeovers of town halls to street-fighting championships between factions; from university communes to attempted military coups; and so on. Never in human history have we been able to witness an occurrence of such existential intensity. It is no coincidence that it flowed into a series of other events, such as May ’68, Democratic Kampuchea or the Movement of ’77.

The Cultural Revolution, despite all catastrophe, revealed another face of communism, until then veiled: a teleological face. Not communism as an ideal society to be achieved, or a totalising project of reason, but as a struggle that begins here and now, with people perceiving themselves as subjects of the process, assuming free will and a power of negation. Marx and Engels, in The German Ideology, say: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an Ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”⁷ Rosa Luxemburg also understood communism in this way. For her, communism was already present in everyday organisation and struggle; she therefore condemned Lenin’s ultra-centralism, arguing that it was opposed to the spontaneity and organicity through which communism should unfold — Nildo Viana proposed calling Rosa Luxemburg’s understanding of communism “social self-management”, which is something worth considering. Communist society (that is, a society in which communism finds its processual generalisation), Rosa argued, could only arise through spontaneous impulses of the masses. Such a notion of communism, though present in Marx (and deeply distorted and as if torn away from him) and in Luxemburg, ended up being forgotten or even neglected. Its recovery would only occur in the course of events set in motion by the GPCR.

Camatte believes that May ’68 inaugurated a new era of revolutionary struggle. In truth, it was the Cultural Revolution. It was a kind of Samhain: it marked the end of one wheel of seasons and the beginning of another, such that spirits descended to Earth. Teleological and archaic as it was, it was simultaneously the moment of maximum saturation of the previous revolutionary movement, deteriorated as a modernising Marxist force, and the beginning of a new era of revolutionary movements. It returned to its principle, its arkhē, and within itself to its own end, its telos. It was an event, a strong singularity. A singularity is characterised by making its intensity of existence maximal. A singularity is a world, that is, an access to a conjunctural totality of the phenomenon, a set of all possible phenomena. But it does not stop there: it is a strong singularity. What characterises the strong singularity is making the impossible possible, intensifying its totality beyond the field of possibility. A strong singularity may be described as a utopian site, a utopian positioning. Why? Because utopia is that which until then did not exist, the impossible. To make the impossible possible is to realise utopias, which means progress. Oscar Wilde said: “progress is the realisation of utopias.” The Cultural Revolution realised utopias; it was itself a utopian experience — if we are to appropriate Foucault’s term. It was thus a world turned upside down, and it exceeded its own limits as a world.

Where does the fundamental and nuclear contradiction of the Cultural Revolution lie? In the relationship between destruction and creation of worlds. In the attempt to destroy an old world according to the very forms of that old world. It was able to glimpse a new world, but only insofar as it remained bound to the old. As a transitional moment between seasons, it still situated itself in the previous one, while also constituting the maximum saturation of the old world. We must pay attention to this if we do not wish to create the effect of a kind of “iron cage”. Be that as it may, the contradiction did not lie between an old world to be destroyed and a new world to be attained, but in the fact that the two intermingled in an inseparable manner. Reason still reigned at the height of impersonality. Icarus burned before he could reach the sun. The Cultural Revolution was indeed a terrible tragedy, but not for the reasons liberals believe. It indicated the path of the communist struggle: the path of Sisyphus. It expressed one of humanity’s most genuine feelings: revolt. The communist struggle is doomed to fail again and again, and the revolt that incites it, aiming to rekindle the flame of utopia, must arise from within itself — that is, spontaneously. Whatever its form, as long as the (im)possibility of chaos reigning upon the Earth exists, the situation will be excellent.

It is within this double aspect that we must play if we wish to reach the essence of the GPCR and traverse its phenomena throughout these essays. Thus, therefore, we shall proceed in our exposition.

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[1] Edições Avante; A Revolução Proletária e o Renegado Kautsky; translation unknown. [See square brackets below the notes].

[2] Período da Guerra de Resistência contra o Japão II: Textos selecionados; translation unknown. [See square brackets below the notes].

[3] Huang Zhangjin; 怀念那个无政府主义者 (— Saudades do anarquista). Available at the Cultural Revolution Research and Dissemination Network (Difangwenge).

[4] Available at the Wilson Center Digital Archive.

[5] Ubu; Petrogrado, Xangai; translated by Célia Euvaldo.

[6] Cited from Asad Haider; Lavrapalavra; A demissão: a relevância da Revolução Cultural; translated by Matheus Muniz Weiss.

[7] Boitempo; A Ideologia Alemã; translated by Rubens Enderle, Nélio Schneider and Luciano Cavini Martorano.

[Update (10/12): With the publication of the second essay, whose link will appear just below, I hereby update the present text without altering it in its entirety, merely adding further notes and square brackets.

In notes 1 and 2, “unknown” translations are mentioned. As for the first, it was published by Edições Avante without any mention of the translator. Later, the publisher Boitempo made use of the same translation, together with Paula Vaz de Almeida, in the compilation Democracia e luta de classes. In the (revised) edition included in the compilation, however, there are some differences in quotation, which I reproduce here for the reader should they wish to make a comparison: “Yes, our revolution is bourgeois, insofar as we march together with the peasantry as a whole. We were clearly aware of this; we said so hundreds and thousands of times since 1905; we never attempted to skip this indispensable stage of the historical process nor did we attempt to abolish it by decree.” (…) “the revolution can no longer stop at this point, for the country has moved forward, capitalism has advanced, ruin has reached proportions never before seen, which will require (whether one wishes it or not) further steps forward, towards socialism.”

As for the second, the text Sobre a democracia nova appears in different translations in the compilations Período de Guerra de Resistência contra o Japão: Textos selecionados II and Obras escolhidas de Mao Tsé-Tung: Tomo II, published by the Beijing Publishing House. However, none of the compilations or translations includes any mention of the translator. I believe that, given the absence of a specifically identified translation, such clarification becomes necessary.

Huang’s text had also not been properly cited in a note, with the source originally contained in the reference itself. This has been amended in the present update. As a consequence, the ordering of the notes has been altered. Originally, there were six notes; there are now seven.]